I bought in to the alpha version and haven't regretted a single penny of it. I've played and enjoyed Minecraft more over the past three months than any other game I've bought in the last decade. It hits the same sweet-spot of freedom, struggle and reward that Elite managed to nail in the '80s. And, coincidentally, Minecraft Alpha cost about the same as Elite did on the Spectrum all those years ago!

I really don't mind paying for alpha software that is this much fun, and 850k other people seem to feel the same

My gaming days go back to the Atari console, but for years now I've spent more time reading about games than actually playing them. Minecraft grabbed my attention recently, however, and I've played it more than any other game in the last decade. The appeal lies in its open-ended nature (it's the first game to bring back the feeling I had whilst playing Elite as a teenager) and in the beauty of the landscapes it can create. It also scratches the same itch that Lego does, by giving you a few basic blocks with which to build whatever your imagination can conjure up (castles in the air quite often). It's only in alpha now, but multiplayer support is beginning to take real shape and every update brings new goodies.

A woman could use an 'underwear insert' in the shape of a humongous cock and balls. Question is, would that mean she is more or less likely to get groped? And would she be groped by a male agent or a female one?

I've been using my PS3 and a Keysonic wireless keyboard for TV browsing for a couple of years now. Most of the navigation is done with the dualshock, with the keyboard used only for text entry. Once you get used to the dualshock controls, it's very easy to navigate around pages and quickly zoom in and out to make text readable. Flash video works pretty well, and a big plus is that (as far as I know) there aren't any PS3 viruses, trojans or botnets to worry about.

I bought my parents an Asus eee Box to do the same thing, and that works really well too.

I had exactly the same issue with two different family members. Endless viruses and trojans that no commercial package seemed to be able to avoid or remove properly.

For my parents, I bought an eee box. They only surf the net using the Splashtop interface, which runs outside of XP (I presume it uses Linux instead). They haven't suffered a single infection or one bit of slowdown in the past eight months and are absolutely delighted. The eee box fits nicely to the Vesa bracket on the back of their TV too!

For my sister and her family, I replaced XP on their PC with Ubuntu 9.0.4 (now 9.0.10). Again, no infections or slowdowns since. They now have enough confidence in the PC to actually buy stuff online, and like the fact that Open Office is so much better than MS Works.