I second that. My brother was an extremely introvert kid, after his 16th or so he changed into a highly social extrovert. For me it was the other way around, I was an extrovert kid until my 12th or so and became much more introvert. It's maybe interesting to note that we both went through several personality changes after / during specific events, going to high school, university, moving abroad, getting married, having kids... I'm not sure if our perceived personality changes are real changes or it's just a shiny accumulation of self-awareness, social skills, confidence (and whatever else we pick up as we grow up) over a set of core traits

The Dutch do relatively well without being too worried about helmets... bet this will be ground for a heart attack or overblown reaction or two ...

At my first job we had a project that required overtime. We had two managers. One was an ex coder, who taught himself the basics of the then novel language we were working in (Java). He help with deployment and his database skills were as good as ever. The other one was of the kind that you can manage anything by just dealing with the processes. One stuck with the team until there was a stable build, helping with database issues, deployments and helping make thorny decisions based on arguments. The other was out at 1700 because he had to pick up his girlfriend from horse riding. Now 12 years later, I found that the latter seems to be the norm, worrying over generally trivial processes and their usefulness defined by how well they can keep upper management away from production. A project's success generally won't be determined by their contributions (a project's failure is another story). The former I remember as the best manager I've had up to date, leading by example without using useless one-liners that apply to only others not himself, capable of communicating (and getting) our needs to the upper levels and sticking with the team. To me a manager that sticks around with the team and manages to make himself useful is a valuable asset. A manager that sticks around and provides nothing but a sign - off is replaceable by any from the large pool of line managers.

Not going to help me much with one pc, two xbox dev kits, a ps3 dev kit and a wii dev kit, two monitors and one tv. Luckily this means I can go without any additional heating devices in the winter.

If you'd like to visit Washington state and don't want to be harassed that much you may want to consider booking a flight to Vancouver. The border procedures of getting into Canada are generally much better here as long as you speak English and don't start throwing chairs around. Hang out for a bit, then rent a car and go South along the coast. I've heard some bad stories about the Peace Arch / Pacific Crossing borders here too, but in general the officers are much nicer than the porkers you find at the airport. I'd highly recommend doing a road trip from Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, something in between Portland and SF, SF, LA and finally to San Diego.

This practice has been extensively covered by some excellent research a couple of years from now

Standard practice in the games industry ?

I have only read about half of them but what Discworld book had terror as a secondary genre ?

I wonder how and if it relates to priming ...

Any psychologists around ?

A friend of mine used to ask counter questions whenever his kid asked a question he couldn't / didn't want to answer. It didn't help the kid learn new facts, but it did build up his reasoning and imagination. I remember a conversation that went something like:

"Daddy how do planes fly?"
"Well what else should they do ?"
"They could swim"
"How would they do that?"
"Like duckies"
"But planes are big, where would the duckies go?"
"They could live in our bath with my duckies"

I'll put my money on the swarm .

For what it's worth the book makes a nice read while hanging out on the beach ...

EA employees read slashdot as well... ;)

It's far from perfect but there are several leagues out there that track stats and have leaderboards. People in those leagues tend to be slightly better behaved because being a total asshat may result in a ban. However, new players will still be... "asked"... to go play "pubs" first before playing another "pro" league game.