Wait, what? I had gnuplot and octave on my N900. Two years ago. Gees, bit slow there android.

You should check out my epic mount.

Is she that good?

But how can you have more depth in an MMO? In single player the game developer can develop deep stories and constrain you somewhat, perhaps via sub-quests, so that you actually experience the storyline. In an MMO you could go to do sub-quest X and discover somebody else has already done that. So you wait for the BadGuy(tm) to respawn and sub-quest to re-initialize. It just isn't the same. "Please stand in the queue to have your unique experience."

I came to TES via Oblivion, which I loved, such a free and open world. I could join the story or not. Skyrim, even better. It would be fun with a couple of friends but not with hundreds of othes.

Yes, I agree. I find this "number line is not intuitive" a very curious thing. For one, who cares if it isn't intuitive? It is easy enough to pick up, kids do it every day. As for intuitive, why not? I mean if I hold out my hand and start counting then I have a graduated number line right there. If I string beads on a string I have an analog of a number line. Not exactly hard is it?

But surely everyone in SA likes a bit of mayhem ... isn't serial murder a state sport?

Probably a red dwarf. They can fuse hydrogen for ages ... many billions of years. If I recall correctly the luminosity, and hence the lifetime, of a star is proportional to roughly M^3.5 (M is mass) so small mass stars will glow with much greater reduced luminosity and correspondingly much greater lifetime. Just so long as it is hot and dense enough in the core to keep fusion ticking over. This is pretty cool, wonder where the metals came for the planets to form? Is it a freak that picked up stuff from a nearby supernova during formation or what? Wonder if any life arose in that system, would have had a long time to advance by now. Just thinking.

... games are typically $100 or even $110. I see ME3 for PC is going for just $88 ... a bargain :-/ What's that in US currency .... $93. Yeah.

Chthon and also Macroscope are still books I enjoy. Excellent.

... in which France was founded by Kiss after they'd defeated the Samoans by destroying their Deathstar.

If you get around to making that into a movie I'll want to see it.

Antibiotics are very slow when treating sinus infections. Three days is not enough for a serious infection. I've had infections that have gone on for weeks until I have taken a course of antibiotics and then require two prescriptions going for maybe 3-4 weeks. Ugh. Sometimes it doesn't work because the bugs are immune. For those that don't know, sinus infections are extremely painful. The best thing to do is to prevent it. If you have allergic rhinitis consider a nasal spray, they work wonders, even the saline-only ones.