It really depends on that person's specific circumstance. If a person plays excessively and flunks out of school, loses their job, and/or develops health problems -- it still doesn't answer the question of WHY do they do it? That question needs to be asked whether its a WoW addiction or alcoholism.

I'm not a very social person in the first place. Social anxiety, I guess. FWIW, I don't consider posting on slashdot to be the same thing -- I don't have to look you in the eye or talk to you live :-)

My main WoW character has something like 65 days of play time logged in the last 2 years. That works out to about 2 hours a day. I know people who watch more TV than that, but I digress. If I didn't play WoW, I'd be doing something else alone, like hacking perl or C# code, like I did before I discovered WoW. I'm not trying to justify my behavior, but WoW or perl or whatever is not the cause of issue, only a symptom.

But hey, I am gainfully employed and my behavior doesn't negatively impact anyone else, so everything's cool right?

at best buy a couple weeks ago... too bad the box was supposed to contain a Nvidia 260... s3, 3dfx, all kinds of old ass graphics boards in the box.. but no 260...

Cake rocks, and that's no lie. XD

Eh, I am pretty sure its just the same export to PDF functionality that OO.org has had for years. FWIW, I was trying to do just this with Office 2007 vanilla the other day, and was pleasantly surprised to see that though it doesn't export out of the box, a quick add-in download supplied the functionality and it worked like a charm. I believe they also had an ODF add-in as well. I am not sure how long this has been supported, but it looks to me like the service pack just rolls in some of these add-ins into the base installation. Nice to see this from MS, but as I said, its not exactly earth-shattering since OO.org has done this for quite a while :-)

Hmm yeah, Model T's are fun to ride in, but I wouldn't go so far as to call it comfortable. I think the same applies here, playing old games is fun, but they were ugly then and this filter makes them the same king of ugly. It really gives you the true experience I suppose. It is true that a lot of old games look arguably worse on a nice new LCD.

/shrug

I've played with the NTSC filter in an NES emulator before, and yes it really does look like the real deal, but its ugly to me so I have to turn it off :-)

You're foreign, you don't get to check a box at all :-)

I wouldn't be surprised if Google dumps YouTube and starts charging for GMail.

Its possible, but I think its unlikely. Think of the sort of user profiling data they can get from services like GMail, which can be used to deliver better-targeted ads to users. Thats got to make GMail an asset for Google even if it doesn't generate revenue directly.

Is there probable cause? Maybe not.

http://www.eff.org/files/filenode/inresearchBC/CalixteMemSupport.pdf

If those are really the annual net gains then it boggles my mind why they wouldn't start upgrading and building out infrastructure and taking more tax writeoffs. They would simply have to pay for their own network, write off the costs, and reap the long-term benefits of their shiny new network. Hell, they might even reduce the average customer bill and still make more money by gaining more customers. I am missing something here-- is this a simplistic view, or are ISPs simply too greedy to bother investing in their own future?

You know, I have noticed this with my laptop in my house. Under windows xp I get one bar of connection and its flaky at best. Granted this is on the other side of the house from the router and also on a different floor, so I am not surprised by that. But in the same location on the same laptop running an Ubuntu liveCD gets better signal and a much more reliable connection.

My guess is that the linux driver allows for a higher power setting, though over the years I've come to think that the Linux TCP/IP stack seems a little speedier than Windows... I dunno if that is really the case, but I like to think so :-)

Not true. Unless Lars is the only copyright holder (what about the other band members?) AND solely has retained ALL distribution rights (haven't seen the contract w/record label, but I doubt it), downloading a copy of the CD is just as legally in question as pretty much any RIAA lawsuit. If Lars already owns a copy of the CD, his action constitutes fair-use and is 100% legal. Unless, of course, he used a downloading program which also _uploads_ media. If any uploading took place, he is in violation of copyright by unauthorized distribution -- unless he is the sole copyright holder and retains all distribution rights (very doubtful).

Hope that clears things up.

I suppose its possible that immature eggs can still be affected by the mother's body chemistry prior to and/or at fertilization. The question is what is the mechanism in which body chemistry can influence gene expression? My guess is that the particular chemistry of the ova (and likewise sperm) may impact which sections of DNA are "flagged" as active or not (junk DNA). It makes sense that cellular chemical composition would play heavily into the development of a fertilized egg the same way a pregnant mother's chemistry can dramatically affect the baby's development (e.g. crack babies). DNA itself is not solely responsible for making us who and what we are, but it would be worthwhile to know in what ways (if at all) we could pass on positive traits to our offspring aside from gene manipulation.

FWIW, I like Linux and FOSS, but I don't totally hate Microsoft or Windows as a rule.

Have you personally gone through the millions of lines of code in the Linux kernel to make sure that there isn't a backdoor? No? Then you're just taking someones word for it.

True in theory, I guess, but the difference is that I -- or anyone I hire -- could audit the Linux kernel code at any time. The same simply isn't true for Windows. Even if it were possible to get access to the Windows kernel code, it sure wouldn't be free. With Windows, I have to take someone else's word for it. With FOSS, I have options to independently verify any such claims.