Mod parent up. There is more to life than games. Blizzard is doing a favor to the world by making their latest crack less accessible.

Actually, the WoW server emulators are near flawless at this point for the 3.x series. 4.x support is shaky due to better obfuscation of opcodes on Blizzard's part, but you can play on an emulated Wrath server at this point and not know it's not legit. Diablo III presumably will follow WoW 4.x lead in making this less easy for the emu crowd.

Fortunately, the odds are that you'll still be able to play single-player without a net connection, by applying a 25K patch made by some kid in Brazil the day after the game comes out.

Or, you could check out the excellent Torchlight series instead for much the same gameplay and no always-connected requirement.

e.g. they do have customer service, for their customers: their advertisers.

you're the product, you can be serviced by robots.

I can confirm that Namecoin is highly relevant to both this thread, and to the interests of Slashdotters in general. Anyone who is serious about decentralization of DNS should familiarize themselves with the project.

As an added bonus, it's a generalized namespace - so domains are just one possible application.

Actually, they only ban account holders from posting on the forums, for cases of forum rule infractions. Account bans do carry through to the forums, but it's perfectly possible to be banned from the WoW forums while playing the game.

As one example, there have been numerous stories of additional large oil/gas plumes forming underwater near the ruptured well. However, it seems that getting near enough to these plumes to figure out what's going on will be difficult when there is an Exclusion Zone set up for a large distance around them.

The cynic in me notes that proper estimates of the leakage into these plumes could increase the official tally of the amount of oil/gas escaping into the Gulf and thereby increase BP's financial liability.

mod parent funny

Prison labor is already huge in the USA and elsewhere, I think we have workhouses by another name.

The versioning is anything but random. It corresponds directly to the year (2009) and the month (October, the 10th month). Every single Ubuntu release follows this convention. Releases are on a six month cycle. Thus 10.04 is the April 2010 release.

It's easier than that, just select the brown theme in Appearance. Don't have to download any extras.

On the topic of default themes: I find it highly interesting to see what people choose in terms of leaving the default, or perhaps going to an earlier appearance (this was common when WinXP came out).

The desire to change the window decor is not correlated directly to technical ability; rather, it's something about certain people being distracted/displeased by certain window decorations, and feeling the need to change them, period. What is that in people? Why can't we leave well enough alone?

I've been using win7 fairly heavily for half a year with zero crash problems. At this point, any fatal crashes are unacceptable for a primary desktop machine. The bar is much, much higher than it was back in the bad old days of Win98 and MacOS 9.

I feel obliged to add that the best way to have a stable experience with Ubuntu (or Linux in general) is to match the hardware to it, and ensure proper support before buying/building your system. A little homework goes a long way.

If true, this puts a Very Bad Taste in my mouth. I expected better from KDE (and open source in general).

Plus Europeans and other Mediterranean types who can pass for US native.

You weren't allowed to wait in the house for an extra 30 minutes?