I use my mp3 player only for audio books. If it could receive AM signal, I'd also listen to sports and talk radio shows. Believe it or not, but AM stations are still very popular.

You know, I never really measured my mileage. I drive to and from work, and I'm more interested whether my weekly gas bill is under $30 or over $30. When it creeps close to $30, I start driving a little slower and less aggressively, and then over time I get back to my old habits.

Same at my company. Given that we use largely Web-based applications, there is no cost for porting apps to Win7 (if necessary at all); the only external cost would be to retire a few older printer that we tested as not working with Win7. However, with the few Win7 machines we have, we experienced two problems:

• Retraining for Win7 is prohibitive, from a production perspective. We can't afford people to be idle for a day or two. (This also assumes converting from Office 2003 to Office 2007, which eats up most of the retraining costs
• Anti-piracy controls on Win7 are far from perfect. We have only three machines with Win7, and yet we experienced a total of four times so far a black background and a screen that our product key was invalid. A call to Microsoft has always solved the issue, but it's still a hassle.

Electronic cigarettes: Not that bad. I personally don't smoke, but a coworker who is a heavy smoker got adjusted to the electronic version quite well. It also makes the air around the office better (even though he smokes outside, he used to reek of cigarette smoke before he switched).

Vibrating earbuds: I didn't try the insertable version, but I used to have a Panasonic walkman with large headphones that did just that. I quickly got addicted to them; without them even the same music sounded somewhat "flat". The in-ear version may itch a little, but I wouldn't dismiss it until I tried.

I think the grandparent post author and you simply have a different definition of gaming. For the grandparent, gaming is an activity, which should be made as enjoyable for the gamer as possible. Just like reading a book: read what you like, where you like and when you like. For you, gaming seems to be work. You use terms like "investing time" into a game or analogies like writing a term paper. Following my book analogy, for you gaming seems to be reading a boring book because everyone else is reading it.

I don't play MMOs, so I can't really say who's right or wrong (if it's even possible to say), but from what it's worth, I prefer the grandparent poster's view. In my single player experience, when I encounter a showstopper or a long, tedious task (the former in adventures, the latter in RPGs or RTSs), I go consult a walkthrough or employ a cheat. I prefer relaxing with games.

I use Win98SE at home, with older applications (don't need anything better right now). If I remember correctly, the OS came with MSIE 5. So upgrading to 6 would be about as easy as downloading and installing Opera. I did the latter and haven't had any problems. Not even Win98 is a good excuse to keep on using MSIE 6.

Not all that ironic; he was in the best position to see where Britain was heading. Since then, many other British writers described the future Britain as fascist. All these people simply observed certain trends and extended them to their logical conclusion.

Surely it must cost the ISPs money to comply with such requests, no matter how official the quest.

It does. And don't call me Shirley.

Ouch, got me there... My fault; thanks for the correction. I put in the current year, not realizing that's already two years later :P

1234567890 seconds of Unix epoch. Those who still count their datetime by what some bishop said would also say that it's 1234567890 seconds from 1/1/2007, 00:00:00 GMT.

I've worked with people who moved the mouse while carefully holding it with their thumb and index finger and pressed mouse buttons only while they were holding the mouse that way, with their other hand. You'd be surprised how common this is among people who didn't use a mouse for the first fifty years of their life...