This is no doubt true in some cases, but a LOT of people play EVE for the PvP, which is expensive (particularly if you're flying in big ships). You have 2 options:

* grind for hours to get the ISK you need to buy the ship
* sell PLEX/buy ISK from farmers

Since ship loss is permanent and EVERYONE loses in EVE eventually, you need some source of cash to keep PvPing. People play games to have fun, and if your time is more valuable than your money, why would you do all that grinding? It doesn't actually make you better at the game.

Why you'd go to farmers instead of using PLEX is very much an open question, though I imagine that the exchange rate is better for the buyer to offset the risk of black-market trading.

While I think it's clear that Google's search results are factoring into Bing's *somehow*, I fail to see any indication of exactly how much their results really matter. In this experiment the keywords used were highly obscure, and had no other (or no interesting) search results, so it's only natural that Bing would throw Google's pick in at the top if they're grabbing data from Google.

Not only that, but what if Intel tries to leverage their monopoly to get Nvidia out of their graphics offerings, and instead tries to bundle their processors with their own integrated graphics chipsets? One of the FTC's complaints was that Intel was doing something pretty close to this on their netbook/atom platform. If they tried it on the higher end, I could see that backfiring for them.

A good Nvidia or AMD offering combined with Intel's abuse of their monopoly could lead to their own demise...

While I don't deny that there are a *lot* of people who are probably doing exactly this, I think this has become a bit of a stereotype for the average twitter user. I have quite a few friends who will tweet when they find a new/interesting app or article online, or if they're looking for suggestions for a place to eat/an application/whatever else pops into their head. I don't care who watched what on TV last night either, but if one of my friends finds a cool iPod/iPhone app or some interesting bit of news online, Twitter is a good way to share that info.

I don't use twitter myself, but I do visit occasionally and don't think it's exclusively used to the entirely pointless ends that are constantly suggested here.

Yes, and I think this is strange, because this exact feature is how I introduced my friends to the original Starcraft. More than half the fun of an RTS for me is playing it on a LAN with a few of my friends. Some of them even went out and bought the game afterward. If an RTS doesn't let me have a lag-free LAN experience, why should I buy it? How should I convince others to buy it?

Forcing everyone to have a unique key for Starcraft seems like a good idea for Blizzard on the surface, but I think that, in the end, it will hurt them more than it will help them.

But aren't uneducated parents less likely to see the value of education? The only way to get parents who understand the value and importance of education is to... educate them.

If we can't educate parents (because they're already out of school), we need to instead teach their children that education is important, so that they can in turn pass that onto their children. To do that, we need to put more resources into our schools. Except that if parents don't see the value of education, they're not going to be willing to put more money/resources into the system to fix it.

The education system needs to be reformed BOTH from the top down AND from the bottom up at the same time. Schools need more resources to teach students, and parents need to see that education is worth putting additional resources toward. Furthermore, there is no 'quick fix' to the problem... any changes made now would likely not be seen for another 10-20 years. That's why reforming it is such an enormous challenge.