WoW is like nuclear war - the only way to win is to not play.

I have been really enjoying a real world social life now, plus found time to pick up a few real world skills like playing a few tunes on the piano. I rid myself of the compulsion to keep trying to maintain 3 level 85 toons and grinding for gear, some time around the first Darkmoon fair for the cataclysm expansion. It was grinding for all the damned herbs for darkmoon cards that finally broke the WoW experience for me. Wish I'd quit way earlier - haven't missed it at all.

I disagree - if more corporations were playing the game honestly, and actually shouldering their share of the tax burden, the overall tax rates could be lower, and regular citizens who can't escape tax as easily, could pay less. Therefore, with lower tax rates, there would be a lower marginal reward per tax payer for dodging the system.

The problem is, right now, the biggest and richest corporations and individuals can escape a large chunk of the tax that they are supposed to be paying, so more has to be paid by middle and lower level tax payers to make up the shortfall.

After having experienced my chef girlfriend's cooking in a somewhat under - equipped kitchen while living on a tropical island, I can assure you that all the gadgets in the world have nothing to do with the quality of the fare that comes from the kitchen - it's all down to timing, heat, and good ingredients - and having a clue on how best to combine these elements - usually with a lot of multitasking. The rest can be improvised.
Eg. Impossible to bu castor sugar on the island? no worries - blend regular sugar till it's the consistency you want. Lacking a toaster? a grill will do just fine - only you better be able to track several things at once, or you end up with carbon. She manages it with ease. I struggle to make bacon & eggs without stuffing something. for a couple with no kids, by the time you have rinsed the dishes, loaded and unloaded the dishwasher, you might as well have just washed them by hand anyway - can preparation implements and stuff as you are cooking and finish with things, leaving hardly anything left to wash anyway by the time you eat.
Keep it simple!

For a robot call to be effictive, it must be trying to promote something (say, some kind of interest group) or or sell some product or service on behalf of some company or person - Just fine the hell out of the entity that is being promoted.

Problem solved.
Where's my 50k please?

Hydrocarbons are a crap way to store energy if using that energy means burning it in a heat engine with typical efficiencies of 25 to 30%
If they were synthesising alcohol out of pure air, at least then
a) you could drink it
b) you could use it in a fuel cell at higher efficiencies to recover the energy, prefferably not after having done too much of a).
This would at best be a Rube Goldberg like effort at storing and using energy.

I started with programmg in Applesoft Basic on an Apple ][, and mostly doing stuff like drawing lines and figuring out how to make it draw a circle. (trigonometry was a lot more interesting when I found how you needed to know about sine and/or cos to do that) . If it had existed at the time, I wish I had started programming in c++ instead of having to struggle with those concepts later. Set up a basic graphic framework, give him the tools to draw dots, lines and circles and get him started in writing programs to draw stuff. Just because you are using a C++ compiler doesn't mean you have to know how to write object oriented programs to start with - he could start off with writing pure functional programs, but it will be a lot better to start with a full fledged programming language that will be capable of anything he cares to write, and will be a solid choice for any project.
The synax is easy - the biggest difficulty will be in learning what the various errors mean, but he'll get the hang of that pretty fast.
I'd suggest mabey QT if you want to do windows & widgets stuff.

Don't waste time mucking around with a toy language.

See how Prohibition worked out for a good reason why trying to protext people from themselves by banning addictive products is a stupid idea.
All that would happen is it would become yet another drug that is peddled by your local corner guy - at great profit to them and great cost to the community in trying to enforce the laws and lock up nicotine drug users.

It's bad enough when the waste pump on a boat toilet needs fixing - at least that thing's mostly a small sealed unit with just a couple of hoses clamped on. That's one conveyor belt that you'd want to make sure was damned reliable and never ever needed repairs rr maintenance on - it's going to be one hell of a nasty job if it gets so crusted up it can't move or the bearings go or something like that.

Road wear goes up to the 4th power of axle load, ie. (Wx / Wref) ^ 4.
Anempty semi trailer weighs around 20000 kg spread over 5 axles, ie. 4000 kg per axle. compared to a small car which weighs say, 2000 kg. on 2 axles - 1000 kg/axle. The truck is causing 4^4 times the road wear per axle.
A creally really fat cyclist on a heavy mountain bike might weigh in at 200 kg on 2 axles, weighing 1/10 of a car, and causing about as much wear as a butterfly landing on a rock by comparison.
If you really want to go after free-loading road users, go after the trucking industry, which causes disproportionate weight on roads compared to the registration efes they pay, effectively with roads being subsidised by regular car drivers to pay for wear and tear caused by big trucks.

If only cycle ways were needed, the'd be built at a fraction of the cost of what it costs to build roads.

I don't get what the big deal is with having to wear a bike helmet.
I hear others cite about having to carry their helmet everywhere too - I just leave mine on my bike, with the bike lock going though the straps. Sure, someone might cut the straps or something if they were really nasty, but so far I have never had a problem - and a helmet's worth what, about $40 for a half decent one, and $15 for a kmart one.

I think the real problem is for some reason people have got it into their heads that helmets might get the fashion police onto them or something - that it's not as cool looking or something than not wearing one.
Certainly having to "carry a helmet around" is the lamest excuse for not riding a bike.

I haven't had a static address ever in my life - yet never have problems connecting from wherever I am to my home machines, thanks to DynDns.
I don't fully get what the big deal is about having a static address.

I have 12G of ram too - the thing is, I bought that 12G so I could run a few VM's for testing app installs and do other useful stuff - not to feed a ravenously hungry bloated piece of crappy eye candy. I hate the attitude that "oh users have heaps of memory now, so it doesn't matter if we write really ludicrously inefficient code and bloaty software".

I'm not saying you should have to hand optimize everything in assembler, but there definitely should be more attention paid to keeping on top of bloat - or we will never reap the benefits of faster and more power efficient CPU's - we will just be using a lot more machine cycles and ram do do stuff in the same time and using the same amount of power.

Call me a cynic, but I think everyone wised up to the fact that they weren't really buying solid gold toilet seats, so they had to find something else in the budget to fund all that black ops stuff...

One of the most memorable games from my youth was an RPG called Ultima IV. In the previous games in the series, you just stole all the gold and levelled entire friendly towns for profit, once you got strong enough - no consequences.

In Ultima IV however all of a sudden there were consequences for mis-deeds. you could still lie, cheat, steal, and lay waste to the friendly citizens, but there were in-game consequences that cost you. Of course a central theme to the game was to become virtuous, but I think more games could do with some of these mechanisms - allow free action still, but make it have consequences.

Actually I think if they just got laid once in a while it'd reduce their effectiveness. Unfortunately for them their belief system makes them think the only way it's going to happen is to get married or get martyred.
Given their apparently poor respect of women, the former isn't likely without some kind of arranged marriage.