John Hummel

As with all things - age appropriate, ensuring time for school/outdoor play/time away from computer/etc, I'd have to say it depends on what your definition of MMO is.

I probably wouldn't have a problem if my daughter played "Animal Crossing" on the Wii - she's 10, and there's plenty of structure that makes sure that she can only play with people she already knows somehow (aka - sharing Wii codes and the like).

When she was 7, she liked to "play" Warcraft with me (back when I had time to play it and an account), but that was highly supervised - basically, her sitting in my lap beating up creatures and designing her avatar (which for her was 90% of the fun - making up her virtual personas and finding different outfits).

I probably wouldn't mind playing MMO's as a family - if there was a family account you could use so instead of paying for 4 or 5 individual accounts, you could pay a group monthly fee (unless you went the Guild Wars route). But if I were to play, say, Warcraft with my kids, have a "family" account to save $$$ so the kids could only log on when I provide my password (so I wouldn't worry about them getting involved while I was at work or something), then I could encourage it. At that point, it's no different than playing any other family game together, or going to an amusement park: you keep your eyes on the kids, encourage them to have fun and not talk to strangers.

August 2008? Well, then I guess I'll finally get around to buying a 360 on September 2008, then. Yay!

You know who I'd really hate to fight in this game? Any one of the grunts. Those little guys would make me crack up, and I'd feel bad about shooting them.

I'd hate to fight Cortana - she'd probably delete all of the Sailor Moon songs off of my iPod. And then I'd cry.

Dang it - wrong response! X3F is full of very pretty, pretty men who do a great job reporting our 360 news. Yay!

I'd hate to fight Cortana, because I'd be afraid she'd delete my Sailor Moon songs off of my iPod. And then I'd cry.

I'm just looking forward to the google maps feature - I'm always driving about, and unless I go for an actual GPS device, this would be nice (more multifunctional).

There is another method - such as how the PSP does it. When you insert a game with a higher firmware requirement level (such as, say, "DJ Max Portable", which requires 2.0), then you can not play the game until you have updated your firmware.

The HD-DVD players could follow such a route. Upon sticking in a new movie, if you don't update the firmware on your HD-DVD player (which is on the HD-DVD disk itself, so you don't have to upgrade), then you can't watch the movie.

Which is one of the reasons why I am staying far, far away from HD-DVD and Blue-Ray. I don't want people mucking around with the stuff I bought just because they feel they still have some ownership on it.

Sweet - count me in :).

Maybe someone can help me with something. I want something like this - but also want it to be on the network. I've seen NAS devices that let me put them on the network, but the USB/eSATA on them is just to expand them.

I want to be able to have it on the network so I can access it without having to perform a PC share, *and* be able to plug a local machine (like a laptop) into it via USB so I can just zap things on/off of it without having to put the laptop/other device on the network.

Is there a device that can do both, or am I stuck with having a dedicated share machine for this? Thanks!