There are a ton of studies and literature that will tell you that violence in video games is bad for children.  There is very little proposing the opposite.  As a life long game player with zero violent tendencies, I have always found this confusing.  This is the best article I've ever read about why violence in video games is not the end of the world:

Reality Bytes: Eight Myths About Video Games Debunked

The website that's hosting it is PBS and the author is a professor at MIT, which is a nice bonus.

Thanks to The Inquirer for the link.

Most of the top 10 requires a greater than average understanding of AMD's and Intel's current offerings and the competitive landscape.  That being said, I "got" and at least smiled at every one.  Disclosure: I am an AMD shareholder.

Top 10 Reasons Intel will not Participate in the Dual-Core Duel

Sweet!

http://dilbertblog.typepad.com/

http://dwl.xbox-scene.com/video/xbox360-ad.wmv

[Thanks to Peter Vader for the URL.]

http://www.agileprogrammer.com/dotnetguy/archive/2005/11/12/9474.aspx

I don't own an Xbox, but I've always intended to buy an Xbox 360 for a client to my Media Center PC if nothing else.  I'm very pleased that Microsoft allowed the Xbox 360 to play many of the Xbox games.

Dan Tull has created a wonderful Sudoku tool that makes Hard Sudoku puzzles less tedious, and Tough Sudoku puzzles possible!

You need to provide your own puzzle values, which is just takes a few double clicks and then you are off.  It basically does the grunt work of eliminating the obvious impossible values for you.

It could take hours of tedious re-evaluation to solve a tough puzzle manually and tough puzzles seem to require some guess and check as well.  With the tool, the re-evaluation is mostly free and guess is check is made much easier with the "Copy Puzzle" feature.

The tool is a Javascript application supported on IE, Firefox, and Safari.  The Copy Puzzle feature doesn't currently work in IE however.

Excellent work all around Dan, Thanks!  I'm still addicted, but at least I waste less time per day doing the harder puzzles.  :)

My step-father-in-law introduced me to Sudoku logic puzzles last weekend and I've been compulsively obsessed ever since.   Here's the URL:

http://www.sudoku.com.au/

There are 3 new puzzles every day, one easy, one medium, and one hard.  The easy ones I can do in less than 5 minutes.  The hard ones I try to finish in less than 20 minutes, but I've spent over an hour on them before.

These puzzles have everything about logic puzzles that I loved as a kid without most of the bad parts.  There is no math to do, yet it's number oriented.  Most of the work is "process of elimination" oriented.  It's very visually stimulating.

The biggest downside I've noticed so far is the first ~10 minutes of grunt work that goes into a hard puzzle.  Being a programmer, I'd love to just code up an algorithm to do a first pass analysis for me which would save a ton of time, and eliminate the normal human mistakes.  I'm not sure how that would affect the "fun factor" though.

I saw the announcement on The Inquirer.  I was a huge fan of the first version (I liked it much more than Diablo II, which was an excellent game in its own right), so I assume I'll buy this one even if I don't have much time to play it.

Microsoft is listing the release date for the game as August 16th.  W00t!