Actually memorizing joseki isn't really as important as understanding them. If you blindly use a memorized joseki and don't take into consideration how it effects other parts of the board, you'll put yourself in a disadvantage. Just using standard joseki's in each corner can be bad if they don't work with each other. One of the things I like about Go is that it has both local and whole board thinking to take into consideration. There becomes a sort of intuition of game flow for local battles based on the positions of everything else.

Also, making mistakes in the early part of Go is more correctable than in Chess. Granted in very high level games this becomes less the case, but often in Go even a failed battle will leave some usable aja for later that can be exploited.

Besides memorizing joseki and maybe practicing life and death problems, the middle game and strategy of dividing up territory, performing invasions, chasing your opponent for profit, all are things that aren't really easily memorized. Those are often the things that end up winning games.

As a side note, there are some players who play more moya games that focus less on corners. I heard from someone recently that Takemiya Masaki once said that he would never play the 3-3 position because it felt like the stone was so close to just falling off the board, and his games styled more towards controlling the center. It's a more recent development but one that is still played out and used in professional games. You have to remember that even if you lose territory for 3 of the 4 corners, you very well may also have center influence from those same 3 corners which is also worth something.

As many people have pointed out, you just described the digital equivalent of a library. But furthermore, your later statement about the video game industry is being tried with services like goozex. Granted it's a company that makes $1 per trade (and you have to pay for mailing), but it's the general idea of a video game library where you put your games up for credit to get other games.

The fact that digital libraries are restricted by DRM is so ridiculous. It's sad though that people think about lending ebooks and are conditioned by big business to think about how copyright laws make such a thing wrong completely forget that we've had that ability for centuries with physical books.

I have netflix for movies, but I recently ditched Cable since the service was shoddy anyway.

Now I'm using a pcHDTV HD-5500 capture card in a home-made mythtv box running mythbuntu capturing over the air HD TV from local broadcast. Granted I only get the basic networks like ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox, PBS, and a bunch of channels in Korean and Spanish, but I found that most of what I watch is on the basic channels anyway.

Myth will automatically cut out commercials (partly based on the volume level that those ads run at), so I get free shows with no ads and it's all legal. Plus I'm saving $60 a month now.

Perhaps that's not the best use case for your argument since Doom and Quake were both made by ID software, just like Wolfenstein 3D was. It's not like ID is going to sue itself for making a clone of its own game.

I would like to second this. I picked up Make: Electronics as I am a programmer who's played with robots but never the physical design of circuits and such and I've found the book to be a wonderful introduction.

Going along with it, Make Magazine itself is a neat resource. A subscription gives you digital access to all past issues and there are some neat projects and ideas in it.

Of course just searching the internet for things you want to know more about helps, but the electronics book gives you a good start to get to the point of knowing enough to be able to ask further questions.

There's a followup book called Making Things Talk: http://www.makershed.com/ProductDetails.asp?ProductCode=0596510519 which deals with wireless communication and microcontrollers. A bit thicker than the electronics book and probably the area that you'll be the most interested in.

(I work for Yahoo!, but my opinions are of course not Yahoo's)

Part of the contract with Bing deals with the relevancy of results. Basically Yahoo will only start using Bing's results if they are at least as relevant as Yahoo's current results. After a set time, if Bing does not meet the relevancy requirements then Microsoft has to pay Yahoo for the maintenance of Yahoo's current search infrastructure while Bing improves. The idea I think is that it will give MS a financial incentive to improve relevancy quickly as they'll be losing money on the deal.

So I expect that the results from Bing should improve quite a bit before Yahoo starts using it.

I'm going to say the exact opposite.

Start out working with just a regular programmer's text editor. Vim, EMACS, textedit... something that gives you some syntax highlighting and some basic features but not a full blown IDE.

If you start relying on an IDE from the start, you won't really understand your own code. If you use a wizard to generate code that you work with without knowing what that code does, that's not overly helpful. Also, jumping straight into a debugger as soon as you have a problem is a horrible practice to get into. What if something goes wrong on a production box that you can't easily replicate on your local machine? You can't hook a production machine into a debugger, you have to learn to read the code and trace it yourself. And if you practice Test Driven Development, your unit tests will show you were your bugs are rather than something like System.out.println() everywhere (of which, use a logger).

IDEs are really great, don't get me wrong. I personally use IDEA and coding is much faster than in a plain editor. But be careful of giving yourself some really bad habits by relying on the IDE rather than your own noggin. It should act as a helper, not a substitute for the programmer.

Yes: http://www.wacom.com/cintiq/cintiq-21ux.php

They're a bit expensive, but wacom does have drawing screens with pressure sensitivity, and have for a while now.