I don't know about mice, but I can easily picture my cats learning to do that. Scary, psychotic animals...

Yes. The problem that ST:TNG (and probably the others; I kinda quite watching Star Trek after that ended) ran into was when episode plots were resolved with bad, techy science. When a Star Trek writer could write the climax of an episode as "[tech] the [tech]. Geordi does the [tech] and saves the day" that's a BAD episode. Episodes that were about people and their interactions ("there are FOUR lights!") could be (and sometimes were) really good episodes.

And this, along with price, is the reason that I'm not even thinking about buying a big, fancy ebook reader. I played with an ebook reader at Target one day and the black then white screen flash annoyed me so much that I immediately decided that I would not be giving up my beloved dead tree books.

I've read a few books using MobiPocket on my smartphone, but even that doesn't compare to actual books. Although having my book in my pocket at all times sure is nice.

I'm a huge WoT fan, started reading them right before the 6th book came out. And I've noticed something really weird. I agree with most of the negative things people say about it. The books are too long. There's too much description of scenery (although even Tolkien seemed to think that everyone wants to know what kind of trees were in every forest in Middle Earth). Lots of the characters (women, in particular) are kind of 1-dimensional. All true. But here's the thing: to me, anyway, the story is just so freaking cool that all the negative stuff no longer matters. After reading a page/scene/book/etc I don't think about the writing. I remember what happened. There's most of a very long, very cool movie in my head. And I am thrilled to have Sanderson giving me the ending that Jordan intending to that movie.

Anyone that's a fan of fantasy books at all should read Mistborn (and Sanderson's other books). It's not quite like any other fantasy I've ever read. There's a good amount of action. A good amount of character development. Some people are there for the action, some are there for the motivations. Sanderson is amazingly good at writing both. I gave a copy of the series to my dad who read them and then told me: "The last 10 pages make the whole series worth reading." Man, those books were fun.

There's one thing about Star Wars that has bothered me since I was about 8. If C3-PO is supposed to be fluent in 6 million forms of communication, why is sign language not one of them? I assume there are deaf people in the Star Wars universe. I would assume that they have created their own sign language of some sort. Maybe 3PO can understand them, but he can't talk back to them. Seems like a pretty big flaw in a protocol droid that is supposed to be able to work as a translator.

Thank you! I always appreciate it when someone can appropriately quote Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett (or, in your case, both).
Where are my mod points when I need them?

Nethack's description of their achievements (actually called "conduct") is what makes them worthwhile. From the Nethack Guidebook: "certain players seek to challenge themselves by imposing restrictions on the way they play the game". When I play games that have achievements, I typically play pretty much all the way through once, the way the game is designed to be played. Then I go back (replay value? in a modern game? unheard of!) and start playing for achievements that seem like they could be fun. To use a slightly older game for example: Portal takes almost no time to beat. And in the process you get 3 out of about 20 achievements. So trying to get the others gave me something to do in a game that I had already "completed". That was fun and made it more worth the money I paid for it.

There are a lot of things in recent games that I don't like (unlockables, downloadable content, and pay-to-play come quickly to mind) but achievements are actually pretty cool.

Abso-freaking-lutely. ABC's client drives me completely insane. For whatever reason it just doesn't work well on my laptop. Maybe it's my wireless network. Maybe it's the time of day that I'm trying to watch their shows. I don't know. All I know is that HULU gives me no trouble at all and ABC only occasionally works. Please, Disney/ABC, move your shows (at least "Lost", "Life on Mars" and "Private Practice") over to HULU. Or at least get something that works as well. (But moving to a proven, reliable system is better than starting from scratch or using a less-capable alternative.)

I had the same problem with GIMP at first. Then I realized that by using the "Paint along Path" or "Stroke Selection" options you can draw your ellipse (or rectangle or whatever) with _any_ of the available painting tools and brushes. You're not limited to just a simple colored shape, like you are if you use something like MS Paint. In typical GIMP fashion, it's a couple of non-intuitive steps that give you a great amount of flexibility.

One day?!?!?! Holy crap. That one took me nearly 4 months! But reading it that fast had to be fun. It's got a really good, tight plot with details that were easy to miss or forget when it took me so long to read it.