As World of Warcraft prepares for the launch of its third expansion, Cataclysm, on December 7th, the design team is busily trying to finish all the new high level content, the destruction and rebuilding of Azeroth, and major changes to many of the game's systems and classes. At Blizzcon we spoke with Greg Street (a.k.a. Ghostcrawler), Lead Systems Designer for WoW, about Blizzard's goals for this expansion, the problems they're trying to solve, reasoning for the creation of a few new features, and why they aren't willing to simply throw more people at complicated projects. Read on for our discussion about World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

The StarCraft 2 team spent most of Blizzcon talking about the map editor and custom games. We spoke with Alan Dabiri, a Lead Software Engineer for Wings of Liberty who worked on the user interface and helped out on the game's integration with Battle.net. He provided some more details about plans for making the map editor more approachable, the coming updates for Battle.net (including chat channels), and a bit about the development of Heart of the Swarm, the Zerg-themed expansion being worked on now. Read on for our conversation about StarCraft 2.

At Blizzcon this past weekend, we got a chance to speak with Julian Love, lead technical artist for Diablo 3. We discussed skill runes — items that modify the form and function of your character's spells and abilities — as well as the newly announced PvP Battle Arenas, the Demon Hunter class (and why it took so long to create), the future beta test and the importance of getting the game in front of players to collect feedback. Read on for our discussion about Diablo 3.

VJ42 writes "With the 2010 UK general election fast approaching, the Pirate Party of the United Kingdom will be fielding elections for the first time. The Digital Economy bill and ACTA are hot topics for UK geeks, and the Pirate Party is looking to pick up some votes. Their leader, Andrew Robinson, has agreed to answer your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply."

A couple of weeks ago you posed some questions for Matt Asay, who recently moved into the COO role at Canonical. Click below to read his answers.

A week after the announcement that open source advocate and blogger Matt Asay is leaving Alfresco for Canonical, in the role of COO, Matt has agreed to answer your questions about his role at Canonical, his vision for the future of Ubuntu, or the prospects for open source as we begin to emerge from recession. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. (Disclaimer: Matt is on the board of advisors for Slashdot's parent company, Geeknet.)

Widgett writes "After hearing about the ATMs in Antarctica, I got curious. So I pinged Wells Fargo and got an interview with one of their VPs. The end result is a story about how one services machines at the end of the world, plus — and most importantly — what are the service fees like?"

A couple weeks back you asked some questions of new CodePlex Foundation President Sam Ramji. He has responded and expressed interest in participating in the discussion at some point. If you have follow up questions feel free to drop them in the discussion so he can address them as he has time.

This week the Codeplex Foundation announced its first project, the ASP.NET Ajax Library Project, as part of its first sponsored gallery, the ASP.NET Gallery. The CodePlex Foundation is now two months old, and Foundation President Sam Ramji has agreed to answer questions about the Foundation, its first project, and overall progress to date. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.

As IBM continues to build out Jazz, their community-oriented development site, technical lead Dr. Erich Gamma has offered to answer questions about Jazz or anything else in his realm of expertise. Among his many accomplishments, Erich worked with Kent Beck on the Java unit testing framework, JUnit, and was actively involved until JUnit 4. Dr. Gamma was also one of the fathers of Eclipse and the original lead on the Eclipse Java development tools. Feel free to fire away on Eclipse, Java, JUnit, the Rational suite, the Jazz site, or anything else you think Erich might be able to answer. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply. Update 19:05 GMT by SM: As pointed out by user Hop-Frog, Dr. Gamma is also co-author of the influential computer science textbook Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

US Representative Jim Langevin (D-RI) is one of the chairs of the CSIS Cybersecurity Commission that released a comprehensive 96-page report on Dec. 8 under the title, Securing Cyberspace for the 44th Presidency. The aim of the Commission is to help the incoming administration balance "cyberspace" security needs with civil liberties. We'd like to thank Rep. Langevin and his staff (some of whom are ardent Slashdot readers) for taking time to answer your (hopefully) cogent questions. Usual Slashdot interview rules apply, and — also as usual — we'll post Rep. Langevin's answers as soon as he gets them back to us.

In just a few days, some of us will be making the trek to this year's Blizzcon event in Anaheim, CA. In addition to the interesting announcements, sneak peeks, and other distractions, we will be sitting down with several Blizzard employees to answer any questions you might have. So far we have scheduled some time with Chris Sigaty, lead producer on StarCraft II; Jeffrey Kaplan (aka Tigole), game director for World of Warcraft; Leonard Boyarsky, lead world designer on Diablo III; and Paul Sams, Blizzard COO. Please address your questions to one (or several) of these candidates and try to keep them civil and on topic. Questions about Diablo III's art style will most likely be omitted since we have limited time and that dead horse has already been beaten into submission. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply, but beyond that, the sky is the limit.

Earlier this month you asked Harald about VIA's open source strategy and his work with gpl-violations.org. Here are his well-thought-out, informative answers.

In this recent Slashdot post kernel hacker Harald Welte was characterized as "VIA's open source representative," but that is just one of many irons he has in the fire, as a glance at his Wikipedia bio will show. You can obviously ask Harald about many interesting things besides VIA's open source strategy — and before you ask about VIA, you ought to read the last few entries on his blog, at least one of which mentions VIA questions he can't answer. But VIA aside, there's plenty to ask Harald about. For example, he won an award from the FSF earlier this year for his work on gpl-violations.org. In any case, Harald is a powerful force for GNU/Linux and Free Software, and we appreciate him taking time out of his undoubtedly hectic schedule to answer your questions. (Usual Slashdot interview rules apply.)

SlappingOysters writes "In the lead up to the World Cyber Games finals in Germany, Gameplayer has an incredible interview with Tournament Director Alex Walker in which he freely admits knowledge of participants taking illegal drugs to enhance their performance. The interview came in response to a previous article by the site in which they examined whether there was a need to bring drug testing into professional gaming events to ensure a level playing field. Walker said, 'I've seen a number of players at national tournaments who came in "baked" (that's stoned for the uninformed) purely so they could play better. In most cases they did, although obviously they couldn't just pull out another joint midway through. In one WCG, a player I knew took amphetamines an hour before his match to boost his reflexes.'"

On August 18 and 19, you submitted questions for NewsTrust founder Fabrice Florin about his (non-profit) site's ability to live up to its claim, "Your guide to good journalism." We sent selected questions to Fabrice on August 19. Here are his answers.

You asked Cliff Schmidt, founder and executive director of Literacy Bridge, about charity, education, and the "talking book", and he has answered your questions with a fair amount of detail. Cliff asks that if you are interested in getting involved please don't hesitate to donate either your time or your hard earned cash.

Literacy Bridge is a public charity working towards the goal of creating tools for knowledge sharing and literacy learning. More specifically, they have been working on producing a $5 "talking book" device that can both help improve literacy and provide a steady flow of important information while the education is taking place. Unlike many in the "wouldn't-it-be-nice" category, Literacy Bridge already has working silicon, shaped plastic, and actual presence in their target country, Ghana. Literacy Bridge has no paid employees, but several who volunteer their time to make this idea a reality. Cliff Schmidt, founder and executive director of Literacy Bridge, would like to answer any questions you have about the charity, the mission, or the technology. Prior to Literacy Bridge, 'Cliff ran a successful open source software consulting business for clients throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North America, specializing in intellectual property issues, nonprofit governance, privacy policies, and community development. He also served many nonprofit organizations, such as The Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, the OpenSEA Alliance, and the Free Software Foundation' in addition to working as a industry standards rep for Microsoft. Click through to see the Google TechTalk given by Cliff earlier this year. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply — so ask all the questions you'd like, but please confine yourself to one per post.

There may be such a thing as a conventional scientist -- but Aubrey de Grey is not one. Instead, biogerontologist de Grey has spent much of the last 20 years investigating the science of aging by considering the aging process as a multifaceted disease whose manifestations can be mitigated, rather than an inevitability to merely accept. That might not be unusual in itself, but de Grey believes that by addressing the causes and symptoms of aging, human life can be extended to at least 1000 years — a stance has earned him accolades and contempt in various degrees. (He might not especially mind being called names like "rogue" and "maverick," though.) De Grey is also chairman and chief science officer of The Methuselah Foundation, whose M-Prize for extending the lifespan of mice has been mentioned on Slashdot before. Ask de Grey about his research below; he'll answer the top-rated questions, and we'll publish them in this space. The usual Slashdot interview rules apply — so ask all the questions you'd like, but please confine yourself to one per post.

An anonymous reader brings us Computerworld's interview with Don Woods, one of the creators of Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym (INTERCAL). INTERCAL and its documentation were created in 1972 as a parody of that era's languages and instruction manuals. Among other things, Woods had this to say: "We designed the language without too much trouble. Writing the manual took a while, especially for things like the circuit diagrams we included as nonsensical illustrations. The compiler itself actually wasn't too much trouble, given that we weren't at all concerned with optimising the performance of either the compiler or the compiled code. I admit I'm surprised at its longevity. Some of the jokes in the original work feel rather dated at this point. It helps that the language provides a place where people can discuss oddball features missing from other languages, such as the 'COME FROM' statement and operators that work in base 3."