Tuesday, the day before yesterday, when the World of Warcraft patch came out, I bought a half dozen of the newlly introduced level 30 mounts.

Ever since I started playing World of Warcraft over a year ago, buying a mount required your character be level 40 or above.

Reaching level 40 takes a long time. It reqiures patience and a lot of effort.

One reason it requires patience is that it takes a lot of time to get from one place to another and you have to do a lot of running about in many zones once your level gets to be up around 30.

Getting from once point to another can also be trickier when you are on foot as opposed to riding something. Creatures seem less likely to attack you when you are riding than when you are walking. Plus, you can more easily get away from them if you are traveling at mount speed rather than running speed. So getting thru crowds of outdoor monsters just became a lot easier for every 30 something WoW character with some money to spend!

A lot of my characters, almost half, had been stuck at level 30-something for ages.

In general, a character in its upper thirities is pretty nice. I operate my characters in teams. Their professions support each other's activities by supplying them what they need to craft items or do their adventuring.

Characters ability to progress upward in their profession is stopped at skill level 225 until they reach level 35. This prevents alternate characters from being transformed into uber twinks simply by getting them to a profession skill level of 375 poiints while they are still level 19 or 29. That would make battlegrounds unplayable by main characters.

Consequently, wanted to get that one character to level 35 ASAP. When the patch came out, I gained a couple levels for him over the next couple of days. I noticed it is far easier and less time consuming now. In other words, it is a lot more fun!

My 30-something characters with mining and herbalism professions are going to be a lot more productive now. This in turn contributes an ability to progress faster and produce more with their crafting professions. I use crafterd items a lot when playing. So this will be a huge boost to my game play for a lot of my characters, even some above level 40.

One thing that was really strange was doing a level 30-39 battle ground this week, following the 2.4.3 patch's release. Most of the characters in there already had mounts. Players wasted no time in buying their new mounts, juding from the battleground!

I already had one druid voice to me disappointment that players could buy mounts 10 levels sooner. He, like I, has a druid in its thirties. He had twinked it at level 39 - as I had been planing to do wth my druid.

Druids werre kings of Arathi Basin and especially Waroong Gulch battlerground. They could change into their Travel form and run faster than anything else in the battleground. They made excellent flag carriers. They could also speed to the defense of a flag or flag carrieir faster than anyone else.

At level 40, that advantage would disappear.

Now , it has disappeared at level 30.

I guess I am a little bit sad about that. However, in giving up one small advantage in just one aspect of the game - I have gained a big advantage in so many others.

On the Balance, if you will forgive the pun, I am very happy.

I looked at the mailbox that holds the recent spam in my email program. It shows I received about six hundred spam messages to my Yahoo email account.

I think I am going to have to retire from using that as my main email address anymore.

It is one of the oldest email addresses I have and I used it quite a bit. Back when I started using it, spam was quite unusual. Now I receive a couple dozen spams a day on this address.

I trusted companies, organizations, and maybe even the Internet community with that address. Obviously, that trust has been egregiously violated.

Yahoo seems to be struggling to find its way. Though it is not highly likely at this point, they could go down the road someday to bankruptcy or being acquired by another company - one like Microsoft, maybe.

In any case, looks like I will have a lot of work cut out for me. Once I pick a new address, I will have to configure various web sites I use to start using the new email address. I will have to send the new address to friends and relatives - and tell them to stop using the old one.

I have not gone through this before. Looks like I have no chioce now.

It is too bad the CAN-SPAM law was so ineffective. I saw the amount of SPAM I received double immediately after that law went into effect. The level of spam hsa remained high. The law did more to protect spammers than to protect email consumers.

I hope things get better in the future. The horrible sitation with Internet email needs to be turned around.

Do TV police shows exaggerate subjects' abilities to detriment of society? In the news, the prowess & evenhandedness of certain law enforcement entities has been greatly overstated. Growing up, i used to watch cop show Adam-12 regularly, as well as Dragnet. These were great shows. The were fictionalized accounts of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)

If you have ever seen these 2 programs then you know the lead characters were unwaveringly good, principled, and reliable. I also watched a number of TV shows as a child which featured FBI agents as lead or guest characters. In almost all cases, these characters were almost perfect at doing their jobs - catching bad guys, saving good guys, and contributing to the Bureau's perfect record

A decade or so ago I watched a television program titled The Profiler. It was a good show from an entertainment standpoint. A "profiler" with the FBI would use statistics, psychology, and sociology to determine who the person responsible for a crime was and help catch them.

Here is where all this stuff blows up: reality. The first shock was that LAPD & FBI were not the squeaky clean perfectionists that had been portrayed on TV. And this had a major impact on criminal cases. The case where all this came to a head involved a major sports & Hollywood celebrity.

After a solid-looking start, the OJ Simpson trial found up a fiasco on the part of the prosecution. Not the prosecutors themselves but law enforcement. The case depended on forensic evidence collected at the crime scene by LAPD's Mark Fuhrman and tested by the FBI's crime lab.

During the course of the trial, Furman was accused of being racist and playing tricks with evidence. When asked if he had every tampered with evidence, he took the Fifth Amendment - meaning he reused to answer on the grounds it might incriminate him. The credibility of the lead officer shot ,the case was mortally wounded at that point.

The other thing that came up in the news around that time was the FBI crime lab. They had been found to be faking evidence. A crime lab is supposed to be completely driven by facts.

They use science to analyze evidence and give their solid, objective conclusions based on results of experiments and research to a court. Well, technically to the prosecution - but the prosecution is obligated to disclose exculpatory evidence to the defense.

What had happened in real life, according to the news, was that the FBI crime lab was not doing those experiments in some cases. In other cases, the administrator was asking law enforcement who submitted the evidence what results they wanted.

The ethics of crime labs and the integrity of their results & findings was thrown into question at that point. This too probably hurt the prosecution case against OJ Simpson a lot. The jury in a criminal trial is supposed to convict a defendant as guilty if they are guilty beyond a shadow of a doubt. If there is doubt then they are supposed to acquit him. "Yeah, he probably did it" or "gee, I don't know who else could have done it" are not supposed to be what a guilty verdict boils down to. OJ had been reported to have beaten his wife a number of times and she was separated from him, dating another guy. There was evidence in the hands of prosecution. However, the credibility of the evidence was so undermined that the jury was in effect robbed of the ability to trust it when choosing a verdict.

This would not have happened on Adam-12 or Dragnet but it did happen in real life. Prior to the OJ case, the reputation of FBI agents though not the institution itself was harmed by famed Watergate bug-planter G. Gordon Liddy.

Liddy was a retired FBI agent (employed there 1957-1962). While his criminal actions took place after his employment, they were certainly illegal and truly harmed the nation. His actions trampled privacy rights, used crime to tilt the control of government against one party in favor of another, and showed a high degree of contempt for democracy & rule of law. He could have done something better with his retirement.

What probably did even more damage was that Liddy was not contrite. He did not seem to care about the law. He did not seem like a guardian of truth, justice, and the American way at all.

Next, let us look at so-called profilers. On the TV show, they were always right. However, I cannot recall a single time they were right when their statements were made - or leaked - to the press. Here are a few notable cases:

1. Richard Jewell, heroic security guard who saved countless people from a bomb planted by a lunatic serial bomber - was accused in media of planting the bomb by an Atlanta FBI employee. FBI had no leads at the time and never did catch the bomber. A small town sheriff eventually caught the guy responsible many, many years later. The press was told he fit the profile of someone who tried to create a circumstance where he could do something heroic - when the reality was that he was heroic.
2. Infamous DC Snipers were profiled as being disaffected white adult males. In reality, every single victim was shot by Jamaican-born illegal immigrant at the behest of the man who corrupted him, ex US soldier John Allen Muhammad (né John Allen Williams). Neither of the pair was white - both were black. The killer, Malvo, was not an adult but a 16 year old teenager. Once again, the profile was spectacularly wrong.
3. Former US Army scientist, Dr. Steven J. Hatfill, unjustly accused at the peak of his career of involvement in the post September 11 Anthrax mail scare has settled with the FBI & DOJ for $5.82 million. Though he was never charged, he was named as a "person of interest" by then Bush Attorney General John Ashcroft despite what US District Court Judge Walton described as "not a scintilla of evidence". Yet another case where the profilers decide the good guy is the bad guy.

It is certainly the right for any agency, organization, company, or individual to be imperfect. They are - and we have to expect that. Just as we have to expect that their job is difficult to do and that they have to struggle to do it well.

However, in promoting - actually hyping a product - and creating a strong, engaging fictional entertainment - Hollywood TV shows and movies warp our sense of reality with respect to these institutions.

Then we get lazy asking the questions we should ask. Maybe even they get lazy asking the questions they should ask themselves.

The truth is that we are part of a democracy and a civil society as well. We have to develop our beliefs not on the basis of how things are "supposed to be" but based on reality.

TV crime and cop shows are no more true than any other fiction series on television. We know the stories are false. However, do we swallow the introductory narrative statement at the beginning of these shows hook, line, and sinker?

Maybe we should put no more weight in them than "These are the voyages... of the USS Enterprise, whose five year mission....".

If we want to know how things really are, we should watch and read the news. Not remember the gist of a drama we saw last night. Those characters have very little to do with the character of real people. Real people are the ones we need to pay attention to.

Mozilla released a new version of their incredibly popular free web browser: Firefox 3.0

Over 8 million copies of the web browser were downloaded from people all over the world in its first 24 hours .

The number of new Firefox features is huge. Just looking at the major list of features is impressive. When you sit down and try them out yourself is when you really get bowled over.

Firefox addons really change the game too. Not only does your browser become more powerful and more efficient to use - it lets you personalize it in such a way that you get the most out of it for you. Progrrammers do not always nkow what features you want more than others - but you do.

None of this you will get to experience unless you lift a finger. A few mouse clicks later and you can have what is almost certainly the most advanced, easy to use web browser on the planet.

You can compare it against Apple's free Safari 3 web browser whether you use a Macintosh or an MS-Windows PC. If you run MS-Windows (XP or later) you can compare them both against IE7 as well.

If you spend an hour or two using a different browsre than you usually do - you just might change which one has that distinction in the future. You can like more than one thing.

The thing you think you ilke the most today might not still be the same tomorrow - if you just try something new.

World of WarCraft is a very rich, sophisticated computer game.

One of the things that players tend to learn gradually, if at all, is how various statistics (agility, strength, intelligence, etc.) affect their character in combat.

Here are some simple and very general explanations about the most common statistics.

Agility - increases armor, dodge, and crit chance (so good for both defense and offense)

Armor - reduces physical damage, obviously

Intellect - increases max Mana and spell crit chance

Spirit - increases health and, if applicable, mana regeneration rate - plus, some classes (e.g. Discipline spec Priest) can translate Spirit into increased spell damage

Stamina - increases max Health

Strength - increases melee damage and for some classes can increase how much damage gets blocked

Attack Power - increases melee and possibly ranged damage

Crit Chance - how likely you are on a given hit to cause double the usual damage (there is a spell crit chance stat too)

Block - how likely you are to completely or partially block a physical attack at you

Dodge - how likely you are to dodge at attack (hunters also get a special attack action enabled upon successfully dodging)

Parry - how likely you are to parry a thrust at you

The most convenient way to be sure what these stats do for your particular character is login to WoW, sign on as that character, and type 'C' to bring up your character profile pane.

Then hover your mouse over each statistic name. A hot tip will appear that will explain just what that particular statistic is doing.

To form a fuller picture in your mind about how these statistics work together to contribute to your success in battle, you need to look at the Formulas and Game Mechanics page in WoWWiki.

If you have more than one character, then there is no convenient way to look at the current stats and gear for all of them at once so far as I know. Perhaps someone has created an addon for that.

That is probably moot though. Because Blizzard has created a wonderful web site called WoWarmory.com - and you can find all of your characters profiles on there. Just viisit each one's home page and bookmark it. Then you are all set.

It works very much like the character profile pane in-game does. However, it has even more enhancements. So you should check the web site out.

Another feature of WoWarmory.com is that it can recommend armor upgrades for each item you have in an equipment slot. Make some use of that and you will undoubtedly find an item or two that you would like as your next gear.