It's more than just the graphics. Engineers who can repair items, plant sentry turrets, or the ability to launch flying sentries. Medics who can heal/revive teammates or drain energy from the enemy. The ability to plant spawn points can really make a difference in the game balance too. Saboteurs and cloaked snipers, while not that unique, rounds out the player balance...

Well, how do you think you would feel if you were dumped after 10 years?

You have some mobile providers listed there - they're not broadband

Taking just Vodafone out of the list they do a full set of both mobile and home broadband in Ireland.

Mobile providers are almost all offering bundled broadband deals these days and of course you can get the mobile version is you want to move around more and don't mind coping with only a few GB of bandwidth.

there are plenty of alternatives to Eircom in Ireland, BT, Smart Telecom, Perlico, UPC, Meteor, O2, Vodafone to name but a few

    I started off in the PC world with a 486DX/33, with 256K or RAM and a 20Mb hard drive. Did it work? Sure. Did it work well? Sure. I upgraded to 1Mb RAM and a 40Mb hard drive (which was ungodly expensive) to run my 3 line BBS. Why? Because I could. :)

Just out of curiosity, what do you really need out of a Creative sound card that you can't get out of the resident sound on a PC? I would think a quadcore PC these days could mix a mountain of channels in software...

You can always tar/configure/make in Debian just like you can in Slackware.

I'd rather they stick with feature-based releases which focus on the quality of features rather than trying to force feature development into a specific duration.