I love that (currently, at least) the parent is modded Informative.

Seems to be slashdotted, cached version: http://www.skytopia.com.nyud.net:8090/project/fractal/mandelbulb.html

Lack of direction is exactly the issue - I have actually gone back to previous towns to get quests despite what the AC is suggesting. This happened by chance however, happened to be travelling through a village on my way to something else and saw there were new quests, so I've made it a habit since then. And the quests still dry up.

Not sure what the AC is thinking since this is not a unique opinion that I've shared.

This is exactly what Aion did.

It's all fun until around level 17, then the game becomes a grind fest. I'm not at all surprised that their queue issues are going away.. I haven't bothered to log in for a week and I wont be renewing my account. (And yes, I realize the game is already successful in Korea etc. - but they are now selling it to western ex-WoW players and they have screwed up the balance and don't understand their new target audience, imo of course.)

For clarity, by "grind fest", I mean - quests dry up.. even quests like "collect/kill X for [decent amount of XP]" become scarce.

It's amazing to me that all these MMOs that get released have failed so badly. So many WoW players want to leave that game for something different - doesn't even have to be better, but it can't be a steaming pile of shit either. So far WoW is still the only real option for those people. Of course, if I'm wrong feel free to point me at the appropriate game.

I love how the American government seems dead-set and determined to find the most inefficient crops to create bio-fuel (usable energy per square meter of crop sort of thing).

No, more likely they don't want kids learning combat tactics and techniques from video games, so they won't be effective in the coming revolution.

For an out-of-the-box MythTV product, check out this company: http://mythic.tv/index.php/dragon-v2-0.html. They essentially make a MythTV appliance. Even still, a lot of the MythTV focused linux distros are making a MythTV build more of an appliance experience. KnoppMyth, MythDora, and MythBuntu are all good options that allow you to get a MythTV system up and running in very little time. Personally, I use MythDora, and it has really made upgrading my MythTV system much easier. I used first install Fedora, and then install all of the packages on top, and then configure everything. Early on it was full day affair. Now you can go from a blank hard drive to watching tv in less than an hour. You don't really have to "roll your own" with MythTV anymore. You might also have luck with some of the other DIY DVR/Media Center solutinos like Windows Media Center, SageTV, ReplayTV, etc. Not familiar with those too much so can't comment on how they compare to MythTV.

Honestly, though, I am having a harder time justifying spending the time and money on my MythTV system from a DVR standpoint. As I see it, the DVR is really just a short term way of "hacking" live tv until we can we have a good on-demand solution. Every day we seem to get closer and closer to not needing live tv at all. Between Netflix Instant Watch, Hulu, all of the TV network's own sites, and more and more Internet only content, why pay for live tv anymore if you have a decent internet connection. But I'm not about to throw out my hardware just yet. I see my MythTV system slowly migrating to something more like Boxee. Where instead of recording shows, I stream TV from multiple internet sources through a common interface that can be controlled easily from my couch.

When I first looked at the headline I thought it said "Archon". Then I wanted to go back in time so I could play it in my mom's basement again. Ah, those were the days.

Actually, looking at the Wikipedia entry posted further down, it appears to me that the study found that depressed people believed that they had no control in certain situations where in fact they had no control, whereas the non-depressed persons in the study felt that they had some control. The problem with the conclusion that the depressed people had a clearer view of reality comes from the fact that they, also, believed they had no control in situations where in fact they had some level of control.

You have higher cognitive ability, you realize how the world runs, you get depressed. Not the other way 'round.

Maybe that's part of the reason for the push to medicate - dumb, happy people tend not to revolt. Especially if they have food on the table and blather on the telescreen. (Slashdot works well too.)

None of the advances made by Chrome matter to me until it has Adblock or something as capable (and which doesn't require more effort to set up than firefox+adblock). It looks very interesting and when I tried it, seemed to be a nice browser, but as soon as I noticed all the ads again I closed it and went back to firefox.

And yes I realize Google are an ad company - but no amount of shiny features will make me browse the web without an ad blocker.