I love the fact that at any time of any day I can find hundreds or thousands of people to play games with. What I strongly dislike, and what keeps me from playing games online that often, is that enough gamers are jerks to ruin the experience for the rest of us. Maybe it's Penny Arcade's GIF Theory, or maybe it's the fact that there are no real-world reprocussions to namecalling, swearing, ragequitting, or otherwise rude and unsportsmanlike behavior. It is, however, those who in real life would receive a smack upside the head followed by a discussion with their mommy and daddy about how they are failures as parents, it is these people who ruin the online gaming experience for me.

On occasion, I get matched with people who are polite, good team players, and who are just there to have fun, learn from each other, or genuinely cooperate to make the whole team better. In the Texas Hold'Em game I wrote, it's tournament style, so the obnoxious guy will often bet out early. But more than half the time, I have people screaming that I and everyone else on the team suck, or clogging up the chatlogs with obscenities, or otherwise behaving in ways that no person would act if they were in physical proximity to the people they were insulting. And in lieu of a good, consistant way to select out those people (Gamer Zones on XBox Live is a good start), I play far less online gaming than I would otherwise.

The great personal irony is that I got into the game development industry as a network programmer.

At least now he won't be... buried alive!

Wait, Congress causes abortions?

Back in college, when I was still super driven to be the best at everything, I used to down several cups of coffee and tea at night in order to remain awake and focused while doing my homework. It got to the point where after drinking the tea, I would suck on the teabag (keep your wiseass comments to yourself, thanks) because I'd read that saliva could extract even more caffiene.

This all ended one night when I woke up at about 3AM (after staying up until 1 doing some Physics III homework) with what sounded like a couple of dozen people having a rally in my head. I couldn't make out individual voices, words, or sentences, but the sound was distinct: lots of people were talking over one another, LOUDLY, and there was no way to get away from it or make it quieter. It was, frankly, extremely frightening, even though it only took a minute to realize what was going on and why. I wound up lying on a couch in the common area with a pillow over my head for about an hour, wishing the noise would stop so I could actually get some sleep. Eventually, it quieted enough that I could crawl back into bed and catch another four or so hours before needing to get up for class.

Anyway, caffiene: it's a drug, and now I limit myself to one cup in the AM and occasionally another in the afternoon, or a very small cup with dessert. Auditory hallucinations are no fun, and I found that I value the quality of a healthy life much more than the rewards of intense focused work these days.

Because their Tesla boards post nearly a TFLOP of performance for single precision computing, but only 78 MFLOPS for double precision.

although behind the NSA as no one's ever sure about those guys

The real secret of the NSA is that they've got a zombie Alan Turing kept functioning on a combination of nutrient bath and Jeff Stryker porn.

See, the problem with responses like this is that they ignore the request of the original poster, and, while being valid instructions for a home-built, it is only a good solution if the time of the OP has zero value. Your instructions involve eight steps: Order (multiple) parts, wait for delivery, assemble, learn how and then install OS, learn now and install three other packages. The OP is looking for three steps: Order one thing, wait for delivery, plug in and use.

Your post has value to the DIY crowd, certainly. But for someone looking for a product recommendation, it totally missed the boat.