It's crazy how many of us Americans experienced things that happened in America. You're right, we should really open our eyes and experience things that happened on the other sides of the oceans which separate us from most of the rest of the world.

I feel like the odd man out here. Maybe the rest of you are lucky enough that all your friends are reasonably tech-savvy, but I find that we're rather the rare breed in the southern part of the United States. In the '90s AOL was one of the largest service providers in the US. If you were on AOL, you had a screen name. Nearly all my classmates and a large portion of my relatives had AOL (and so did my household). I added my friends and family to my buddy list so I could chat with them. The small handful of people in my age group that didn't have AOL downloaded the AIM client so they could still chat with the rest of us. It really didn't seem practical to ask all my friends to find an IRC client, learn how to use it, decide on a server where we would chat and hope that they could get their nick registered there when I could instead ask simply, "What's your screen name?" and be able to chat with them whenever they were online.

So far as presence goes, they're talking about away messages. When you put an away message up on IRC, it doesn't broadcast it to the entire channel (thankfully), people have to go slightly out of their way to retrieve it. With AIM, you might send someone an IM while they were away and were answered with a little blurb that would (sometimes) let you know what they were up to. As we gained the ability to set not just away messages, but status messages, people typically kept them more relevant to what they were doing. Mousing over a friend's name to see what they're doing is certainly more straightforward for the typical PC user than anything on IRC.

What's killing me is that my friends are now scattered all over the place. I used to be able to talk to almost everyone I knew on AIM. Now, a lot of them don't run a chat client anymore and I only see them (online) when they log into Facebook. Those that do run a chat client have largely moved to Skype because web-cams are just the coolest. I'm by no means an AOL/AIM fanboy, but those of you protesting so vehemently were apparently just not in the right place (the US) at the right time (the '90s) to know just how ubiquitous it really was in the general populous.

I think another key issue is that StarCraft is one of the more frustrating games to lose for some people. When I play a game of Ultimate and my team loses, I can usually understand what mistakes we made, what plays we let go that we should have stopped and where we were outplayed. It's still disappointing to lose, but it's readily understood when it happens.

SC2, in particular, has a lot of information asymmetry between the individual players, not just the spectators and players. When I lose a match in SC2 I feel dumb. I still know there's something I should have scouted, a change I should have made in my build order, somewhere I could have had some better micro, or even when I fell behind on my macro, etc, but I don't really know what, at the moment of my defeat, I should have done differently. So I go back, and I watch, and I see all my mistakes, and I see my opponent's mistakes, and I think, "Why didn't I push then? Why did I leave this point undefended for so long? Why did I make unit x instead of unit y?"

One figures out why one lost, but one has to go through the process of watching it all over again, and watching all one's chances to win just stroll on by.

What would they do with all those iPads?

Blinded and forced to watch?

And how many times do you think their family can be killed?

I'm all for elaborate torture scenarios, but you're just being impractical.

Having just spent a dismal semester at a technical college, I have to disagree with you about schools educating rather than training. Really, there's just a distinction to be made: Good schools educate students, bad schools train them - and there's an upsetting number of bad schools.

I'm sorry your memory sucks and all, but having a really unique or unusual word to add to a search is amazing. If you search for the name of your distro, an application name, and a version number you'll get decent results. If you search for your distro, an application title, and a unique identifier that tons of people have thankfully adopted and put in their articles and posts, you get much improved search results. You need to learn/remember one new adjective every six months, and it will always start with the next letter in the English alphabet relative to the last one.