http://www.baekdal.com/insights/password-security-usability back in 2007. I don't deny that Randall Munroe has summarized the method very, very well however. I also wouldn't be surprised if he was familiar with Baekdal's article. So of course it's not just length alone, it's 3 or 4 common or uncommon words, with spaces acting as special characters. Please, read it. I think Baekdal understands this very well, both user-side and server-side. It may not be watered down enough for the non-tech layman to understand, but I think it's very well-written for anyone tech-savvy. And yes, he basically agrees server admins have a responsibility, too-- good password user policy, salt and hash on password databases, etc.

The funny thing is Myspace is getting a reboot to where it at least looks clean and far from the HTML-cut-n-paste abomination it was. I agree with a publisher friend that Justin Timberlake is shrewder than many give him credit for; Myspace might actually bounce back. Meanwhile (after I left, thankfully) Facebook started Timelines, which looks almost equally horrid from a web design perspective. I mean, really, I do recall when users touted Facebook over MySpace (yes, the capital S was intentional there) for a clean interface. I don't think the same folks can say so now.

This should absolutely be NO surprise whatsoever based on what Mark Zuckerberg has said about Facebook's privacy on and off-record. Off-record, he said he didn't believe in privacy (according to an employee). On-record, he talked about "granular control", and said other things to the effect that he would erode privacy as much as he can get away with. In my mind, he's absolutely admitted that he is enthralled to the advertisers-- who should rightly be understood to be THE primary Facebook customers, NOT users. Admittedly I'm being sloppy here and not linking to sources, but it's really not hard to do the research, and it's been discussed for quite a while.

Tell them from what they already know. There are board games with campaigns and boxed sets that set up like much the same. D&D in fact is known for this, and such resources are still available for purchase last I checked. Introduce it do them from a card game version. Explain it from the video game angle-- World of Warcraft is one, but many computer RPGs owe their roots to the old dice-rolling versions. And so on. There's always a good possibility that the SO/spouse/GF plays a game of some sort. Take some time, be informed of that interest. *shrug* I dunno. Maybe she won't share the interest. Take Wil Wheaton; he's written a fair bit this situation. Apparently his wife Anne will play arcade games with him but just isn't that jazzed about playing tabletop RPGs. He's fine with that. I happened to marry a woman who was rolling the dice longer than me AND with her parents (mine never did). I didn't have to explain it to her. My sister picked things up years ago sitting in on games with my friends and now plays all sorts of stuff-- with the zeal of the converted-- far more than I ever did. You may win some, you may lose some. All depends on how well you've been training the social skills and what you want and the end of the day, y'know?

Not winning any points with the female gamer set. Prose-based RP is legitimate. It's usually treated as "soft RP" when it meets with the old wargame tradition, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have its place. Besides... it's pissing into the wind to be a fanboy whining about fangirl stuff. Yes, those writing circles brought us the wonderful worlds of slash, yaoi, and the like from which we cannot bleach our brains enough, but there it is.

Eh. What about Japanese yaoi, and fangirls writing slash? Plenty of explicit sex in that.

Quite simply, circadian rhythms are a biological reality. I know the business world has this imperative of being always available at any hour, but until cybergenetics catches up to fictional imagination, many of us will remain bound to solar light-- vitamin D and serotonin produced by the body when it shines on the skin, and secretions of melatonin in its absence, the two regulating our waking and sleeping states, respectively. Humankind has attempted to ignore this imperative and science has shown we do so at our peril, at the risk of our health. The tragedy of Chernobyl is but one example.

As atomicxblue pointed out, these Humble Indie Bundles allow Linux users to vote with their dollars, and yes, most of us are willing to pay more to have our vote be noticed. These indie developers are coding games we can play natively right out of the box. Typically, our other options are to wait for a company to release the code, use emulators for very old systems. stuff it through the Wine API (which has problems) or run a Windows virtual machine (which still has problems).