I'm guessing it's normally shipped as wheels, with the skin keeping the cheese 'fresh'. The broken wheels means the cheese will turn faster and probably go moldy.

SCSI was from Hell, printers are merely from Limbo.

If you like Jarre you might like Phillip Glass - though possibly not - it's not to everyone's taste.

Where I work currently, my desk is situated in the middle of the helpdesk staff (I'm in service management currently). All day I am surrounded by people talking on phones while I'm trying to work, mostly doing data analysis activities. I find it incredibly distracting.

On days that I have a lot of work to get through in a short period of time, I tend to wear headphones and listen to a playlist of mostly world music style instrumental music. It buffers me against the noise around me while not being particularly intrusive in it's own right.

Consider this, how do you get advanced technology and innovation without education?

If you deprive an entire segment of your society of the right to an education, you deprive yourself of any innovations those people may have discovered.

The only rational reason to suppress education is to suppress progress.

I've been an Apple user since '87. I'm a former Certified Apple Engineer. I used to be an authorised warranty repairer and could strip and rebuild a PowerBook in roughly 15 minutes. I could list the default contents of a system folder from memory and knew all the quirks of memory allocation for smooth running. ResEdit was one of my favourite tools. Don't get me started on the black art that was SCSI (was trying to explain it to a colleague earlier today).

I don't do all that any more. And I think that's a GOOD thing.

I'm not a car geek. Rotating my tires does require a trip to the dealer AFAIK (or a type store). My car gets me from A to B quite happily and I have clocked up about 150,000 kms on it in the last 8 years. I don't need to know how to service my car to benefit from it's primary function.

Why do people persist in the myth that you can't benefit from a computer unless you can build either the hardware or OS from scratch? The VAST majority of computer users use their computers like I use my car. To get from a digital point A to a digital point B.

I used to make a point of buying a new set of dice every con I went to. Each character I play has their own die that are colour coded based on the class.

What. So I'm a little OCD, get over it.

I have a d30 kicking around in my backup dice bag that's a hang over from playing Tales of the Floating Vagabond years ago.

Obviously they were playing 2e and using "Complete Guide to Unlawful Carnal Knowledge".

I've been using minis for D&D since 3e and have found it speeds up combat hugely and reduces the amount of time people bicker about whether they can hit or be hit in a given combat.

The amount you ROLEplay will depend on your group and your GM more than your rules set. I've run systemless games than where all combat and system heavy games that were all characterisation. It's entirely up to the group how it will play out.

In the Australian convention RPG gaming scene there were rumours that SMOGs[1] existed in the background pulling strings. It sounds like you have also glimpsed their presence.

[1] Secret Masters Of Gaming.

Having played every edition since AD&D (1st ed), I actually quite enjoy the way 4e works. It's generally reasonably smooth, you get a sense of progression in the amount of damage you deal and receive, without the sill number of attacks you used to roll in 2e (for example).

I don't miss THAC0, adding up 1d4+14+2d8 is enough math for me on the average afternoon (yes that is a rogue with a dagger and combat advantage - add a couple of d12s if I crit).

I know it uses the same launcher and agent platform as the WoW:MoP beta based on blue posts in the tech forums.

If you think about the size of the game world, comparing D3 to WoW (for example), even with random generation of some terrains, D3 is probably smaller than a single continent in WoW with less mob types. It operates in isometric view. WoW currently clocks in around 25Gb I think for the Beta folder (there was a 17Gb download on top of my previous 17Gb directory, but it overwrote a heap of stuff - say a max of 34Gb if it was all new content).

I've actually worked somewhere where facilities put a ban on any more security passes being issued because we were so far in excess of the permissible density. The limits were based on a combination of ability to evacuate (multistory office tower) and the number of toilets per floor.