Well, one nice thing they are doing is making mounts available at level 20 (and epic mounts at level 40 if I recall), and the whole start-at-level-55 thing for Death Knights is pretty cool.

That's like saying an Art MFA shouldn't teach any actual art in any particular medium, just hypothetical art.

There IS a distinction between the "craft" of programming in any particular language and software engineering, but in order to become a software engineer, you need to work through the medium of the language. That's the only way to access it. Knowing how to paint in oils doesn't make you a good artist, but you do have to start making art in some manner in order to get there.

Naah. They'll keep coming out with new content as long as it's profitable for them to do so.

The only foreseeable problem is that, with the expansion packs, they're slowly going through every big bad they established in Warcraft 3, which makes it difficult to pull the story back together if they ever decide to do another game in the Warcraft world.

Well then, allow me to expand my reasoning. First, there tends to be a glut of players at the level cap, since hitting the cap is pretty easy in WoW. It requires no great effort and there are rarely any setbacks. However, once you have one character at the level cap, it is disruptive to raise another character, or another, to that cap for several reasons: A. The probability that your friends will be at the same level as your leveling characters is lower; B. Playing at any normal level at endgame, even if you're just running dungeons, requires a significant additional time investment beyond the running of dungeons; and, C. The natural tendency is for players to continue running endgame content.

The network effect brought by having many friends at the level cap cannot be ignored. When you have those friends - and often it's difficult to avoid making them as you play the game - you all naturally want to do something you can all participate in, and that is endgame dungeon running and raids. From an individual's perspective, this can manifest as peer pressure, which can be quite compelling.

The additional time comes in the form of "grinding" for supplies (repair gold, respec gold, potions) as well as side activities to fill gear holes. Perhaps it's just because I played a good tank, I was constantly in demand, and ergo I was constantly getting my expensive plate ground to powder that I had to grind a lot on the side, but nonetheless, the point stands.

Finally, most of the game is an upward progression in excitement, grandeur and gameplay. The level cap represents a discontinuity in that progression - suddenly the rewards are very few and far between. The natural tendency is to attempt to continue that progression, but this requires more and more time and dedication. Additionally, players become personally attached to their characters, and want to see them not neglected.

Furthermore, I think the role of community is greater than you describe. If you mean you are always nearly anonymous in the sense that no one will ever know who your character is, I think that that is incorrect, at least having never played on one of the top-population servers. You meet people. If you have good experiences with them, you tend to play with them more. Eventually, while there are a lot of people you don't know and will never know, people's reputations get around. And because one noob is all it takes to make the game less fun, you tend to form communities. And there are other systems in place which tend to reinforce communities, such as long, progression-blocking dungeons with raid lockout timers. As the game's difficulty intensifies, these factors become more evident.

In summary, I think that it is perfectly possible and obviously healthier to play the game as you describe, but the forces of the game tend to direct players towards endgame content and the raid treadmill in most cases, and it requires actual effort to play the game in a somewhat healthy way without being tempted to excessively indulge.

The USPTO should start denying patent applications that contain this kind of deliberately obfuscative gobbledegook. This is like describing cup of coffee as a "insulating ceramic material vessel for the transportation of central nervous system-stimulant-laden liquids of temperatures approaching gradual evaporation adapted to both manipulation and imbibation for the purposes of maximum early-hours alertness and/or circadian rhythm modulation." It's like reading Foucault.

A lot of WoW players eventually lose sight of the fact that the whole game, end-to-end, is a rewarding and fun experience to be savored. This is a consequence of the game's design to some degree.

When you start out, you play around a lot and have lots of fun. You make mistakes, and you see sights, you make some friends about the same level. You level together and experience progressively bigger and cooler dungeons together.

But then you get to the level cap, and all your friends are at the level cap. So you want to do things with them. But end-game content requires such a time commitment - raiding, grinding for gold and items - that there's no reason to ever go back and experience the rest of the game in the same way. If you DO level another character, it's to fill a hole in your guild's roster (leveling a healer or tank, for example), and you tend to blaze through content because you already know the ropes and there's no reason to go back and make friends all over again.

Another thing which WoW does is play off of your sense of community and obligation, even if that community is dysfunctional. The difference between a good player and a noobtard is not something you can easily tell, even based on what they've accomplished. So you tend to stick with people that you know, and you come to rely on each other. Not to toot my own horn, but I was a pretty good raid leader and an awesome tank back in my day, so when I didn't participate, 39 other people had less fun as a result. It's probably a peculiar case, but this was more what kept me coming back than the reward treadmill.

Words, words, words. Did you know that civil war-era bureaucrats argued vehemently against the introduction of repeating rifles? I bet they used language just as histrionic as the article. "If we start using repeating rifles, Johnny could be so busy shooting Billy, he doesn't hear a critical order, and is killed! Do you want to be the one explaining that to his family?" "The armories will be in a panic, and critical supplies will not be delivered! Is that worth the lives of those boys?" etc.

People always resist change when they can't imagine or understand anything better. Their imaginations are too limited to see how things would be better, and they wail and sob over every potential or realized fault. Therefore, these narrow people lack a big-picture view of the situation.

Here's an anecdote for you: I would've rather swiped a card that had my info on it and been admitted to the hospital rather than have to explain to an incompetent nurse that I couldn't fill out her forms because I had second degree burns on my right arm from the knuckles to the elbow.

Because there are people out there collecting sizable salaries for doing menial work - work that could be done an order of magnitude faster, cheaper, more reliably and more maintainably. Geeks find the very concept of doing something the hard, stupid way out of incuriousness or incompetence offensive. Even more vexing is the fact that a lot of managers can't tell the difference between a web ape and a real web designer - even though one is ten times as efficient as the other.

Most homebrewers and some microbrewers carbonate the beer by bottling it with whatever yeast remains and some cane or corn sugar. Of course, cane sugar is a tool of third world oppression, and corn syrup is the most heavily subsidized, unnatural food on the planet. Pick your poison!

Funny and insightful are not mutually exclusive. Clearly those mods were awarded by someone who found resonance with the truth illucidated therein. Even if they don't outright want to mess around, certainly it now strikes them as incredibly naive that someone would think a married father unlikely to see a whore or cheat.

Too complicated. Just make em both hermaphrodites and call it a day.

It really depends on what your software is going to do. If you're writing desktop business apps, performance is definitely not a concern. Most of their processing power is lost as waste heat anyway, so play it fast and loose. However, I think you can get pretty damn fast by avoiding silly mistakes that betray a general ignorance of the way computers actually work, and that is valuable in most settings - especially if you're going to be reusing that code, right?

Also, do the naysayers not get that it's about FRINGE SCIENCE? You know: wacky, experimental science performed by drugged-out pervs [Walter] that the mainstream doesn't take seriously. Could it be intentional that the show is a bit off?

I love Fringe. It's like the science fiction equivalent of junk food - horrible for you, and DELICIOUS.

Also, I know they're made by the same people, but people have been trying to get me to watch Lost for years, and I absolutely can't stand that obtuse, schizophrenic rudderless speedboat. Already, I am happy to point out that Fringe has more cohesion than that drivel:)

Before you get too excited, there are some screen tearing issues with the 9400M. They're very sporadic, and it's not really certain whether it's dodgy chips, dodgy drivers, or an interaction of the two. Fortunately, Apple is not being tight-fisted about servicing them. Just make sure you get that extended warranty.