Knives are freely and readily available in China. Why did none of the victims fight back and stab the perp?

Temperature, pressure, humidity, all under exquisite control and all potentially extreme.

Reading comments by internet posters about a story discussing bad grammar on the internet is truly delightful, from a certain point of view!

I'm a reasonably savvy internet shopper, capable of looking at newegg, tigerdirect, searching with google, browsing "hot deals" fora at e.g. anandtech, etc... I don't buy a whole lot, but I've found hard drives several times, a video card (Radeon 4890), and a flatscreen TV for less at my local Best Buy than I could anywhere mail-order. Not trying to say they're universally awesome or anything, just saying personally, I've had no reason to complain, and in a non-trivial number of cases they've been the best option (though in all fairness, if I *did* need a cheap keyboard or something, I'd probably rather spend $20 and six minutes going to Best Buy---it's pretty much on my way home from work---rather than $10 and four days and the environmental impact of a personalized shipment to my door from NewEgg)

I guess I'm in the minority, but I've actually got a pretty positive outlook on them. Most of the time, I can find what I'm looking for there, and it's often at a price competitive with the best I can find online. I've had employees range from friendly-but-incompetent to moderately helpful, and never overly pushy. They've always been extremely accommodating about returns, or about refunding me money when they drop the price on something shortly after I buy it. Maybe my local store is an exception, but if they were gone I would occasionally miss them.

Things like alcohol, tobacco, addictive drugs in general, gambling, sex, shopping, and video games - all these things *DO* chemically alter your brain! Not because they add external chemicals to your brain (though some of them obviously do) but because they stimulate the release of neurotransmitters. All the activities I mentioned (and, as far as I know, anything that can be addictive) can activate reward centers in the brain. This can lead to addiction - your brain grows used to the release of these neurotransmitters, in their absence you crave their presence, etc... While video games obviously don't inject chemicals into the body, they can stimulate the release of, for example, dopamine in the ventral tegmental area. Just because it comes from within your body doesn't mean it can't get you addicted. Yes, I play video games. Yes, I'm a neuroscientist. No, this isn't my specific field, so don't take anything I say as particularly authoritative - I may well have gotten some things wrong.