Though I'm nowhere near the Middle East or Europe (I'm from Singapore), I find that the American presumption that war is a good way to get rid of a tyrant somewhat misinformed.

While I agree that Saddam is completely unreliable and has a thousand and one nasty ideas up in his mind, I think that a war would probably result in serious side-effects that were not intended to begin with.

Personally, I'd like to believe that Bush is really out there for the oil, but I can't bring myself to cos it's oil and a myriad of other factors, making this war equation very complicated. The main problem I see in this case is that anti-American sentiment is rising throughout the world, and if we do really need to take out Saddam, the last country we would like to invite to take him out would be the US.

I think the US has a reasonable track record when it comes to peacekeeping and related military and political operations, yet invading Iraq at this time would stir up a great deal of extremist Muslim sentiment. It'll likely lead to a rise in terrorism, which would be targetted at the US. It's not exactly the wisest things to do IMO.

Since the Middle East is such an unstable region it's anybody's guess what'll come out of a war - Which is why I think it's not a good idea for the US to think it can go in guns blazing and assume that just because they can get rid of Saddam that their problems won't be compounded in future.

Moral principles do differ greatly from country to country, and I personally find American democracy a bit too righteous for my liking. It's too idealistic and doesn't seem to solve real world problems. Democracy may be good, but applying American democracy to any nation doesn't necessarily result in getting the desired outcome. Not everybody is American.

I downloaded the v0.12 for Windows and the game hardly crashed thereafter.

Noticed that when I warp out of a battle and I get fired upon at the same time that the sound does it terminate properly and continues to play in a loop for the rest of the game. Read that this occurs at the following pt as well.

- If you win a Melee, and then are blown up yourself, the sound loops
 until the game is quit. It still functions, it just has the last 3-or-so
 seconds after the melee ended repeating over and over in the background.
 - Probably happens in some other situations too

Perhaps it's a matter of terminating all sounds whenever combat ceases.

I've had my server slashdotted before and have a rough idea of the "MANY" people that can be flooding your site. All my site was really serving was a 25KB .jpg that was updated 2-3 times a minute and the server crawled with default apache settings... up to 7000 visitors in 1 hour, dropping by a few hundred every subsequent hour.

You can imagine how the SC2 .exe servers must have felt considering they were holding a 100+MB executable and from the sourceforge page more than 70000 downloads have been recorded thus far... Man.

Still, I think having SC2 on slashdot would definitely have got the project some much-needed publicity. That's how I found out of the port, and that's the reason I've spent a good deal of hours on the alpha version so far. It's amazing!