How serious is this lockdown thing? Well, I've won all 1600 boards on Mah Jong Titan. That includes all available premium board packs. If there were more I'd buy them. There aren't. That doesn't surprise me, given the work it must take to produce another 300 boards that only the occasional crazy like me will ever play.

I've played Mah Jong for ( Read more... )

(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13, 2007 entry.) A gratifying number of people who wrote to me indicated that they would fund research, in a lot of different areas. I'm for that; research is much less political than education, and much more can be done with less money. (Even a billion ( Read more... )

(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13, 2007 entry.) It's interesting to tote up the responses I've gotten to my challenge of playing the "If I had a billion..." game. Basically, if you had a huge lump of money and all the material goods you wanted (and many of us seem to be either close ( Read more... )

(Continuing a thread I began in my July 13, 2007 entry.) One of the unspoken rules of the "If I Had a Billion..." game is that whatever you propose be at least possible. The game is about money, not magic. Sure, I'm for world peace and universal brotherhood too-but in proposing ( Read more... )

So why a billion? (See the series I began with my July 13, 2007 entry.) Simple: I had to push the discussion beyond the how-many-of-my-cousins-can-I-buy-cars-for territory. Most of the time I've played the Game, it came up as we were driving with family or friends, and saw one of those ( Read more... )

There's a verbal entertainment that I call "If I had a billion..." though it sometimes comes up as "If I won the lottery..." You've probably played it here and there; it's easy and more fun than telling ghost stories, though ghost stories have their moments. The idea: Suppose a whole great ( Read more... )

• Sony just announced its own entry in the ultra-mobile PC arena, and it's an interesting one. The unit weighs only 1.2 pounds, with a 3.5" 1024 X 600 color display, built-in wireless a/b/g, and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard that may or may be especially useful, except for the thumb-and-peck school of typing. There's 512MB of RAM, 30 GB of hard drive ( Read more... )