Maybe, but that's not going to stop me from paying $10 for my upgrade right now.

The only feature of Snow Leopard that looks at all interesting is the hanzi/kanji input on the trackpad. Probably hard to draw the twenty-stroke characters, unlike the five-stroke example screenshots. But since I rarely use my laptop OPEN (I run in clamshell mode to an external monitor most of the time), even that is not particularly useful to me.

Yes. Historically, there have been issues with each major upgrade of Mac OS X. I had kernel panics on a regular basis when I upgraded to 10.5 but now it seems fairly solid. I'm hoping that since the focus for 10.6 was speed and stability that it won't have these issues but I'm not holding my breath.

Actually it was possible before. That's what the 'Spawn an Instance' function was. One person with a legit copy and someone else without a copy could do a LAN against one another.

And, it's still possible now for 2 people to use the same game copy at different times. You just have to share an account.

If you're never going to be playing at the same time, and are in the same house, one would surmise that neither player is hard core, and sharing an account really shouldn't be a factor.

If the value of the reputation on that account is so personal to you that you don't think it appropriate to share, perhaps you might consider investing in something that obvious has such personal value to you.

Picked up a mini first of the year. This will be my very first upgrade.

As I understand it, the version numbers here are pretty much on par with a Microsoft OS version number so 10.5 to 10.6 will be like going from 98 to Win2k and should be handled the same way, upgrading will make for an unstable system so I should backup everything and do a fresh install. Is this conventional wisdom still correct?

It's a chicken and egg problem. I know a lot of people who would jump ship to Linux if their favorite 5 or so games had a native Linux port.

This was not the first observation of spin-charge separation: Lawrence Berkeley Labs, 2006.

Also, the spinon and holon are not particles, but quasiparticles (like holes - the absence of an electron in a semiconductor). The difference is important.

Paper ballots are not sufficient to prevent fraud. But with the proper procedures in place they can make it really really hard. Some of the points that are missing in the US (and many other places) are:

1. Transparent ballot boxes
2. Counting done right away in the very room used as the polling place
3. Counting done by volunteers selected randomly throughout election day (note that it scales with the number of voters)
4. Representatives from all parties watching all the proceedings (again it scales with the number of voters)

That's not all there is to it, but these are the key points that everyone seems to be missing.

Hey, it worked for the Hindenburg.