in the "professional gaming" circuit, they supposedly consider you over the hill if you're old enough to drink.

Rubbish. The vast majority of "professional gamers" (i.e. CS 1.6, CSS, Starcraft 1 & 2, etc) are in the 20-25 age range.

My point was that a non-English speaker has far more to gain from learning English than I do from learning for example, Spanish, French, Swedish, etc.

I think it truly is that the majority of English speakers are quite ignorant of the rest of the world. I live in the UK and would love to learn another language, it's just that none of them would really open up anything useful to me.

Talking as someone who has been running half a dozen or so Minecraft servers for a few months, I've only seen more and more features added. If you think about it from a logical point of view, its quite easy to see why its causing so many problems. Aside from breaking server-side plugins every update (which is hardly unique to minecraft), there haven't been any major issues.

The whole point of anonymous is that there is nobody in charge. People post a lot of ideas on the *chan sites and certain IRC channels. The better or more entertaining ideas generate interest and end up actually happening. For every DDoS ever carried out by anonymous, there was a thousand other suggestions that got shot down.

The main is sitting in custody with a crime he probably didn't commit as an excuse, I'd say that any paranoia he has is pretty darn well justified.

In general, I think this is pretty true of web apps and business applications, but when its things that will generally push a system to its limits performance wise (in particular, games, 3D rendering, Compositing, etc), people do tend to notice. For example pretty much anyone who regularly plays Team Fortress 2 can quite easily tell that its an incredibly badly optimised game (written an already badly optimised engine), simply due to the fact that if they load up Call of Duty 4/5/6/7 with the same graphics settings, they will get literally twice the frame rate, or even Left 4 Dead which is the same engine.

Also my point with compositing, the built in lens blur effects in Adobe After Effects take exponentially longer to render than a number of better third party plugins.

This isn't directly at the parent post, but more in general at the people who are disagreeing with my post.
I'm not saying that a 4 year old couldn't use Blender, my point is, how is that in any way helpful to their development? Children at that age need physical things that they can play with and understand like silly putty, paint, crayons, lego, etc. If you do want to get a little more technical then sure, some Mechano wouldn't be a bad idea, but how on earth do you expect them how to understand fairly complex abstract concepts in a virtual world that most grown adults struggle with when they haven't even had a chance to see how the real world thing they are re-creating works?

Well ye if they were 10 years old or so, sure. But at the moment, the kid will only just barely understand how to use a mouse and keyboard and navigate the machine at all. So why not just get him real silly putty instead?

Blender? for a 4 year old? are you actually serious?

The thread below this pretty much sums up my feelings here.

AFAIK, a quick browse on wikipedia shows that they discover the control room on E07.

I'm currently attending college in the UK, and planning to go to University next year to do CompSci. The course I am currently sitting involves such difficult assessments as: Installing Windows XP, Installing Windows 2000, writing a basic C++ application that barely breaks 300 lines of code, and formatting an Excel Spreadsheet.

This qualification (along with Higher Maths) is enough to get into a fairly large number of British universities, a significant percentage of which are not degree mills.

Where did we go so wrong?

oooops

I think you missed the "Post Anonymously" box there mate

In a word, no.

Yup, my laptop running 10.04 with an Nvidia GeForce 8400M has no issues what so ever with fullscreen flash.