I had an old bundle of mac educationware when I was young. It was loads of fun. Super Muncher, Math Blaster, Where in Time is Carmen Sandiego, even Klick & Play was educational.

I mean, it was no replacement for a classroom but it was fun and more educational than the alternative.

I thought that nuclear power was limited mainly by fuel. That is, there simply isn't enough uranium to power the US. At the very least, uranium isn't exactly renewable, is it?

Am I wrong?

I think they can pull it off with WoW, because while the *game* moves on, various subplots don't. They could totally make a movie about Onyxia or C'thun getting pwnzored, because they can choose from any subplot they darn well please. They could even do the origin of Deathwing and the creation of the demon soul, events which have never taken place in WoW the game but are an important part of the lore.

The thing with DnD is not just that it, as a game, has no definite ending. It just doesn't have the same lore structure to back it up. DnD (from an outsider's perspective, at least) lacks NPCs with names who run around doing important stuff. WoW doesn't lack any of that because of its RTS storylines, which since day 1 have guided the path of stories that WoW has told.

Onyxia was killed, C'thun lies dead, Kiljaden was defeated, and now the Lich King has the Alliance and Horde knocking on his front door crying for blood. Stories in WoW end, even if the game itself doesn't.

The first thing that most people will think of when prompted to picture a tool is a hammer. Does that mean that someone who thinks of a chainsaw or a kitchen knife is a nutcase? Those are tools too!

Again, just because the answer is abnormal doesn't mean that you know what causes it or if it's something to worry about. And just because someone thinks of a hammer doesn't mean that they're stable.

Granted, with a sufficiently large sample size you could perhaps figure out the odds of a hammer person being a psychopath vs a chainsaw person. But this just isn't how the test is used, from what I've read, and the subjectivity involved in it invites trouble in a way a stethoscope never could. If you are an expert or know one that can correct me on this, please be my guest.

I've heard of at least one game which did this until they realized that it wasn't fun to run around crippled.

That's why it was a game, I guess.

They are missing one of the most hilarious and convoluted glitches of all time.

Super Smash Bros Melee: The Black Hole Glitch

2:10 is when it starts to get interesting in the video.

Kicking people for not being good is just bad. Yeah, noobs are a pain when they're on your team, especially in Tremulous where feeding is a problem. But for most cases, at least when I've played, you can votekick people who are really feeding or newbies who won't listen to reason.

But I really don't like automatic newb kicking, a.k.a. "winner stays on". If you're a really competitive player, than sure, having a newbie on your team sucks. Ideally you shouldn't have one and there are so many players that there's some kind of matchmaking system, or ranked/unranked servers. But the instant you start alienating new players who are trying out the game that you're playing is the instant you start strangling your game to death.

New players are, in a sense, the next generation. When you're small community you can't afford to give up your ability to grow. Can you imagine if that newbie rule was in place, 1.2 was released, and a bunch of newbies joined, but were subsequently kicked out of every other round? Most would just stop playing then and there. They don't want to be second class citizens, then ones you want just want to suck at the game in peace.

Maybe I'm conjecturing too much. I honestly don't think that being nice can actually save Tremulous, or any other game, by itself: the developers are the natural leaders who make stuff happen, and it is hard to do anything without your leaders.

Also, "loser stays on" is also kind of a bad idea, as it's really easy to fake being worse than you actually are just so that you can stay on. It wouldn't be as great in Tremulous as you'd be directly making the other team stronger, but I can still imagine people who would rather lose than be forced to not play because they're too good. The point of people playing your game is so that they can play your game! Not sit out...

The thing is that, as some studies have found, happiness isn't correlated to wealth at all once you get past feeding yourself (and your family if you're married or whatnot). Even if you don't believe the studies, understand that this is the perspective which all anti-money people come from: as long as people can eat, money simply doesn't make them much happier.

It's true, you get to do interesting things with money. But the point is more that money doesn't benefit people nearly as much as we think it does, and you can live a good and happy life without using tons of money to do "interesting" things. Though you're right in that hobbies help (at least the studies say so), the cost of your hobby also isn't proportional to how much you enjoy it, and there are a million different hobbies to choose from, from sailing on yachts to planting tomatoes.

With this kind of mindset then, what is the point of having all that extra money? The point of doing these more expensive interesting things is to be happier. At least, I think, for most people.

The article mentions that US/UK computers are more expensive and that they used a "low value" botnet. So it's possible that they simply used computers from elsewhere in the world, where they don't have that type of law that could be applied internationally.

YES. One time a friend brought over Tekken 2 to my house. Fighting games aren't my favorite, and I sucked too much to even be able to do one special move, but nonetheless after 15 minutes I had to stop playing because of weird cramps in my forearm. It happened again every time I played after that.

That said, I have played just about every *other* video game I've ever liked for more than 4 hours at a time, and have used computers for so long that my eyes ache. That's probably why I'm wearing glasses now. Seriously, moderation is important...