If you activate skills the moment they cooldown, you will fail hard in this game. If anything, the cooldown system in GW2 actually requires more resource management to know when to best activate skills. Of all the RPGs I've played, I think GW2's skill system might be one of the easier ones to begin learning, but one of the hardest to master. In other words, it manages to appeal to both casual and hardcore gamers, which is no small feat.

Also, each class plays distinctly differently. Abilities and play styles are very different between them. The fact each one has a heal skill doesn't alter this. Most heal skills have long cool downs, so you need to really stay alert and use them when you need them the most.

As for the original GW's skill system, GW2's version is significantly different. You can still respec your character in GW2, but there are some costs to do certain kinds of changes.

A 4-year-old gaming rig should be able to handle it, but maybe not on the highest graphical settings. It plays pretty well on my 5-year-old laptop with the graphics set on low to medium.

This is the first game I've ever played where I've actually enjoyed the resource gathering and crafting. The resource gathering also encourages exploration.

You should try it before judging.

From a game design stand-point, a mana system is fundamentally a way to prevent players from activating too many skills too quickly...which is the same thing that cooldown timers do. However, cooldown timers don't force players to channel funds into a gold sink like mana potions, or waste inventory slots to carry them. Having played many games with mana pools, I find the cooldown system in GW2 to be vastly superior.

Obviously, those players that really enjoy buying, carrying and quaffing mana potions may disagree.

After Guild Wars 2 releases, the fun and addictive gameplay will lead people to quit working, eating and sleeping in order to play it.

At least we'll die having fun.

- Insurance companies sometimes hire them for statistical analysis of cost/benefits
- Larger hospitals that do research sometimes hire them for statistical analysis of medicines and treatments
- Manufacturing companies sometimes hire them to do statistical analysis of product failures

If she doesn't mind focusing on the statistics branch of math, there are jobs out there.

Feb 29th is the hardest day to complete on the day filler calendar grid. Glad to finally have it checked off.

If the hardware came with Vista (as opposed to being upgraded to it from something else), consider trying Vista first before removing it. I know a lot of people love to hate Vista, but personally I've found it to be extremely reliable - far more reliable than WinXP ever was. I've had zero crashes or other problems with Vista in over 2 years of using it on two PCs which are up 24/7 and see some rather heavy use at times. From reading lots of Vista horror stories, I think my main keys to success were to start with Vista rather than trying to upgrade to it, and to build PCs with enough horsepower to handle it. Depending on the hardware, it's possible that your church's machines might run just fine with Vista.

It's not that suprising when considering how many companies still have WinXP as their main OS. For example, the company I work for has about 20K employees worldwide, and WinXP remains our OS platform. Thus, the people that your or I know who aren't using WinXP are probably a tiny fraction when compared to these large corporate install bases.

I have some flying experience, but understanding a stall or how to recover from one is more about understanding the physics of flight. In a stall, the aircraft wings reach point where they are no longer able to produce lift at the current flying speed. At this point, the plane will begin to drop, losing altitude until this condition is corrected. Additional forward thrust from increasing the throttle doesn't necessarily help. Since the aircraft is dropping at this point, it is likely already gaining speed, albeit in a downward direction. To break out of the stall, it is necessary to correct the wings angle of attack so that they are able to again provide lift. To do this, the nose of the plane must be dropped, which requires moving the yoke forward. Once the angle of attack is corrected, and the wings are again able to provide lift, the plane can then be brought back under control, and the pilot can begin to pull the aircraft back toward level flight, etc.

Over my last 3 computers, the only things to fail have been the fans.

In the early-to-mid-90's, I puchased several hundred 3.5 floppies for the purpose of archiving files and back-ups (which were a pain). Those were the last floppies I ever purchased.

Soon after they came out in the mid-90's, I switched to Zip disks. I used those for a few years and never once suffered the dreaded click-of-death. Whenever I needed a floppy disk (usually for a driver install or boot disk), I simply re-used one of those old disks.

After that I moved to using CD-burners, DVD-burners and more recently flash or external HDs. At this point, I'm not even sure what to do with my box full of hundreds of old floppies. The last few computers I built don't even have a floppy drive. I keep saying I'll get around to re-archiving them on a newer format someday, but I've been saying that for well over a decade...

will that count as fraud, waste, or just business-as-usual?

(for more info see http://investigativereportingworkshop.org/investigations/wind-energy-funds-going-overseas/)

I grew up in Mankato, and I first used that MECC system discussed in the article around 1977 when I was in 4th grade. We didn't get Apples in our district until around 1978 or 1979, so for most of us, the MECC terminal was our first exposure to a computer. Our MECC sessions would continually print out on a large roll of yellow paper, and eventually it would run out and we'd need to get a teacher to help us reload it. Of course, it shouldn't be too surprising that most of us just used it for playing games. Among the games available on the MECC were Oregon Trail, a subhunt game (Seawolf?), and a dungeon game (Sceptre?). After a certain time of day (8am?), the access to some of the games was turned off, so some kids actually would arrive early just to play those games.

I greatly enjoyed the dungeon game, but never managed to get very far on it. Much later on, I learned about MUDs, and realized that I'd actually been playing one all those years ago. Nowadays, I suppose that many kids don't even know what MUDs are.

is how much gameplay each system actually gets in any given home. The gaming platforms in my home include multiple PCs, a 360 and a Wii. In a typical week, the gameplay (of my wife and me) breaks down to this:

PC: 12 to 20 hours
360: 12 to 20 hours
Wii: 0 to 2 hours at most, often going up to a month between power-ups

While our home is technically counted among those with a Wii, from our avg use numbers it looks like we barely qualify being called a Wii household. I suspect there are other Wii's out there in a similar situation. If a game that we wanted did come out that is truly multi-platform (Wii, 360, pc, etc), we'd most likely get the PC or 360 version instead.