Making of the mentally ill is short-hand for COOL!!

Can we *please* get the OP to fix the title of this post??? This is highly misleading and frankly offense. Not all brown-skinned slanty-eyed folks are Chinese. As other have said, this photo was taken in *Indonesia*.

I have to agree with #12 on this. Psts lk ths mk Dmcrts nd Lbrls lk bd. That's right, just because you squinted at a low-res photo printed in the NYT for 30 seconds you, too, are now an aerial photography analyst qualified to work in the CIA. There's no way the CIA/Military could have had better resolution pictures, or anything like infrared scans, or anything like a series of them to corroborate departure/arrival patterns. And oh yeah, it's like totally 100% true that if you can't find something, it must have never been there in the first place.

Practically speaking, this knife would be a last ditch effort for anyone actually attempting to fend off a large predator, where the last thing you'd want to do was to be in knifing range of (say) a bear. Knives in general are a very valuable thing to have for survival as you can use to them to cut bandages from your clothes, construct shelter, signal for help, obtain food, etc. Personally, I'd much rather have a hollow-handle knife containing matches, tinder, some nylon string, and a compass. There's also the worry about the knife handle possibly breaking (say from repeated use) and causing injury to the user.

@Takuan, the trick-way is to cut the watermelon about 2/3 of the way and then twist the blade slightly to break the watermelon completely in two. To the un-educated or faraway observer it will look like you actually sliced the watermelon completely in half. It also helps a bit if you keep the blade on the blunt side, as the human skin has a bit of resistance, while a ripe melon skin will simply break if enough pressure is applied. The real-way is to feel the watermelon as you're cutting it and stop the blade as you feel the resistance decrease from the curvature of the bottom of the melon. The former would, of course, require lots of practice on countless innocent watermelons. You can tell a real cut by examining the subject watermelons, as the slices will be clean through-out instead of broken or jagged.

I agree with Iscah. I used to work in the game industry, and I was always puzzled by the need for every female game character to either be Lara Croft (i.e. basically a traditional male character with a female model) or the Princess Peach (NPC damsel in distress). It's as if the game industry as a whole is stuck in a junior high locker room, and this is coming from a male who used to play D&D on the weekends. Bouncing breast physics and unlocking pixelated boobs might have been worth a few giggles at 14 (okay maybe 23), but isn't there more than that? The only exception I can think of is Half-Life 2's Alyx Vance, as an actual positive and realistic portrayal of a woman.

One more thing: I think it's a mistake to compare video games to movies too much. This is natural of course, just like when film and television were first created, they were compared to radio or theater because that's what people were familiar with. However, the medium is different, and the same formulas will not work. Video games don't need more writers; they need world-creators, biologists, architects, psychologists, economists, mathematicians, and professions that probably haven't really been invented yet. Video games need their own vocabulary, their equivalent of the close-up and the long-pan.

As for the nay-sayers, it doesn't really matter. Just like the old critics who claimed film/television/photography could never be an art form, the Roger Ebert's of the world will soon either die and/or become irrelevant.

@Mindpowered: In a sense, such a virtual arms race already exists in most MMO's. Currently, it's determined by how many hours you are willing to devote to playing the game, to a serious raiding (which at certain levels can rival that of a part-time job), and otherwise grinding for the best gear. Given how many gold-selling companies there are, I don't think it would be that much of a stretch to actually allow people to pay directly for items.

I suspect that part of the reason why the game uses such a business model is because of the rampart software piracy that still exists in China, as well as the lack of easy accessibility to credit cards for most players, many of whom don't own their own personal computers (they use e-bars). In this environment, the traditional sales-by-game-unit or pay-by-subscription models can be difficult to enforce.

1) RMB = Renminbi (i.e. the chinese currency)
2) Many of you don't seem to understand that you pay for these treasure chests with real-world money. It's like if you fired up WoW, and instead of spending months gearing up and working together with 25 other people, you just paypal'ed Blizzard $5 and got a roll at Illidan's loot.
3) It's not exactly like casino gambling because the game doesn't official provide a way to exchange in-game money back into real-world money, although it surely happens.