Honestly, I hope they find some better way for teens (or anyone, really) to send small bits of text to others with mobile devices in the near future. Text messaging with tiny numberpads/keyboards is a royal pain in the ass. I know that people like the portability of smart phones and the like, but at the same time, I really do feel privileged to have stuck by my desktop for as long as I have given the comparative robustness of communications options it has offered over the years.

I'm thinking we need some kind of stripped-down EEG device for mobile phones, because it's obvious that increasing the size of the interface/keypad isn't going to work out terribly well (unless they use something like a virtual keyboard that projects onto common surfaces and uses a scanner/camera to record keystrokes).

Kinda had this thought some time ago . . . plus, locally, we have numerous "brown fields" that are so loaded down with industrial waste from the 19th and 20th century that they aren't entirely safe for humans and certainly can't grow much of anything, outside of maybe, oh I don't know, gypsum weed. Or maybe jatropha curcas, I hear that stuff is pretty hardy.

I don't know what plants like gypsum and/or jatropha would actually pull out of soil like that, aside from water and some other nutrients, but if they could be used to leech toxins/industrial waste out of the soil, they could then be "piled high" to create a combination CO2 heap and toxic waste dump. Of course, you'd just be moving some of the nasty crap that made "brown fields" possible from one "brown field" to the next, and I would expect the NIMBYs to be rather upset about that. Still, seems like an okay idea. Let's face it, if you've got an area cordoned off to be your CO2 dump, it's not like you want anything disturbing it anyway, so may as well infuse it with horrible toxic waste that would cost a fortune to dump elsewhere.

$12/hour for a fast food employee? Are you out of your gourd? In a place like South Carolina (or where I live: Tennessee), most fast food employees will make $8/hr or less (down to the federal minimum). VW is setting up shop to manufacture mid-sized sedans here in Chattanooga, and their wages start at $14.50/hr + benefits (and, admittedly, the benefits look pretty nice) for production workers, with the wages scaling up to $19.50/hr or so if production goals are met after something like 12-18 months.

VW is going to hire around 2k production workers once production is in full swing, and they currently have over 65k applications on file for those jobs. I'm hoping to be one of the lucky few . . .

Probably a multi-billion dollar study on three-legged dogs. If the EU can do it, so can we! And, yes, I know the EU study isn't actually a multi-billion dollar study (but rather a small part of a multi-billion dollar fund allocation), but in the US of A, we do things bigger.

AMD has no problems with reliability. Performance? Sure. Reliability? No.

If you have suicidal K8s in your department, I wouldn't be pointing the finger at AMD (or you either, I'm thinking OEM or vendor). They don't have a reputation for dieing at stock clocks after years of use. Sounds like someone, somewhere, cheaped out on the PSU or mobo.

And how you intend to draw any meaningful conclusion about AMD when basing your assumptions on the heat output of k5s or k6s is anyone's guess. Have you examined the thermals from any processor AMD released in the last, oh I don't know, two years?

And do you even know WHY AMD releases CPUs with disabled cores? Here's a hint: it has nothing to do with their products exhibiting poor reliability.

I want you to go to AMDzone and post this somewhere, anywhere, on their board, just to stir them up. That would be hilarious. Seriously, AMD has historically produced processors that run hot? What? There was the T-bird but other than that . . . are you sure you aren't confusing them with Cyrix? . . . and you're STILL spreading the FUD from the Tom's Hardware video in which an Athlon XP burned out when the HSF was disabled? Do you have any idea how long it has been since AMD produced processors that can die like that, much less take a board with them in the process? . . . and your employer is complaining about failure rates among x86-64 capable processors from AMD after 4 years of usage? I have a fairly early processor from that generation (Sempron 2800+, s754 . . . yes I know x86-64 was superficially disabled on that chip, but it was the same uarch as the 130nm Hammers on the then-new 90nm process and minus some L2 cache) that I put into a system in 2005 and IT STILL RUNs. I ran it overclocked to 2.32 ghz for years, using the stock HSF. Unreliable my ass. Athlon 64s, X2s, and the like do not have a rep for high failure rates. Who was the vendor or OEM who supplied you with your systems? Furthermore, most - if not all - of those AMD processors about which your employer is complaining should be able to underclock themselves. It's called Cool n' Quiet. The competing processors Intel sold from those days were based on Netburst, and when it came to Prescotts and Smithfields, PLENTY of them either failed or just throttled like hell at stock because OEMs had problems keeping them cool. FYI, the unlock rate on Phenom II X2s and X3s to quad-core processors has been calculated to be around %72.9, possibly by less-than-scientific methods, but that's the number that's bandied about in circles where people care about such things.

That's what collector's editions and in-box premiums are for. People who bought Ultima IV got a nifty little ankh in the box to keep with them while playing the game. Ultima V had awesome box cover art (Denis Loubet rocks) and a coin with the symbol of the Codex of Ultimate Wisdom on it.

Also, in a more sane universe, legally-owned copies of software are generally more convenient and easy-to-use than pirated copies. Someone pass that memo along the Ubisoft, please.

Infinite fireball was the best trick ever (though it didn't work in every patch . . . I forget which patch broke it and if it worked in the final official patch).

Anyway, neat trick:

Go to the spellmaker thingy and create a targeted AoE spell that has the Calm effect. Make the duration however long you want since it doesn't matter (I don't remember of Calm effects had a duration anyway).

Go to whatever dungeon and use it on enemies, repeatedly, while playing a character with the magic absorption in darkness advantage (which operates at 100% success rate when you're exposed to your own ranged AoE spells). You never run out of mana unless you really screw up, and after being tossed around by AoE Calm (yes, enemies hit by non-damaging AoE still get thrown around by the "blast") enough times, they will inexplicably die from . . . overexposure I guess. Feed someone enough magical valium and I guess it's fatal.

It's an excruciatingly slow way to kill enemies, but it does work.

Unless, of course, you join a 25-man raid. Then you're still stuck with the "server community" feeling whether you want it or not. If you join Wintergrasp, then things get even more "massive".

You also wheel and deal with your server's population in trade chat and/or on the auction house, so it's not like the entire game has been whittled away to random heroics.