Not panicking per se, but having it loom is something that comes with age. I always was a "living the moment" guy, enjoying it to the fullest. Now i am pushing 40 and death comes to my thoughts every now and then (for the last year or so). I don't know if it's "just the mid life crisis" or if those thoughts will stay/intensify, but it really can inhibit life a small, but measurable bit.

Did your mom try other tablets, too? I can see someone liking ANY tablet if it's the first one ever (i liked my first ipad despite not liking apple stuff) just because tablets mean "easy digital for the masses", but compared to the other offerings?

I am in the minority of people who actually really enjoys working on win 8.1 ON THE DESKTOP. Weirdly enough, in the tablet world, i still prefer Android tablets, because they are lightweight and hassle free (for me, at least)...

"Microsoft needs to spend its resources building something cool (that isn't a phone) and a separate brand for it. "

IMHO they did exactly that with xbox.

But they still managed to mess it up in the long run.

I don't think that Hipster Joe and Facebook Sue can comprehend source code

They blocked Gangnam Style for some amount of time, which didn't even originate in Germany.

Also an EU player (Austria), and i started playing it on 0.5.x. There were serious problems as soon as you hit the 22 player mark - although i mostly saw problems in missile hit detection, not so much in warping around... But they changed around quite a bit in how the missiles and bullets are handled in the netcode, so it got better.

Below 22 players, it always was very playable for me. And yes, this is a game for LAN parties also, as they provide a dedicated server for it with the MOD. The community even created a complete installer for it using the crysis wars demo.

If you like big stompy robots, you should seriously consider looking at it again - the last three versions of the mod improved on a lot of things. (It's still a mod though, so some things are expected to be not as perfectly polished)

I would not disregard the last deus ex.
Sure, it's got a more linear structure to it, but it presents a very cool story and still offers the 3 ways to solve stuff - violence, sneaking and hacking.

Yeah, Hawken is good fun. The ambience is right, the mechs are fun to steer and the fighting can get pretty intense.

Only thing i despise is the weird mouse deceleration they use to mimic the mass of the mech - this is especially pronounced for a former Q3 twitch shooter guy like me....

I also was disappointed by MWO, but mostly because i came directly from the Crysis War Mod Living Legends. The mod itself is dead (as in no more development due to rights), but it still has a small devoted community playing it. It's got way more mechs and other vehicles but instead of a mechlab preconfigured mechs. Also a round tends to go towards one hour and the size of the maps allow for more tactics (also due to the possibility of buying resupplies and repair the mech)

It takes way more time to get into it than MWO, due to the heavy reliance on teamplay and resourcemanagement, but i found it to be way more satisfying than MWO (especially with their very stupid radar system).

yatse solves this elegantly via swipe gestures for those "level 1" functions like volume, skipping and the like.

i would love to live in a country where iphone users just use their iphones. Where i live, they cant stop droning about how awesome iphones are (and per weird proxy how awesome they as users are because they use it).

Is the performance of the UI as smooth when you use "heavy" skins? Aeon MQ5 for instance, filled with HD background slideshows, movie metadata and so on... Just curious, as i am always interested in lowering my energy footprint....

Hm....
I must be doing something wrong. I use Yatse in tablet mode to control my media on xbmc, and i would never ever use a different interface again. Just the sliders for volume and time position and the browsing of the library are enough to never look back to remotes, pads or keyboards again (for me).

Also, the GF LOVES it as a second screen device when watching movies.

I do video editing and 3D modeling, and i benefit GREATLY from having more stuff on the screen. I don't have to scroll around in the timeline as much and the toolbars don't take as much space, thus giving me more viewport estate.

Because then nobody would do the OCR work for them.