DLWormwood

Or just a few turns, depending on your difficulty setting. (-;

Especially interesting since it is technically the "intro" or "B plot." (Most of the series is a mini-version of The Right Stuff.) But the first third of the series is an oddball fusion of an office sitcom with a "dirty jobs" style documentary. (That is, JANITORS IN SPAAAAAAACE!)

The sender was not the person being punk'd; it was the recipient. The person who would have seen that confirmation dialog would have been in on the joke...

I remember seeing an arcade redemption machine that worked on the same principle. It had a database of hundreds of screenshots from soccer/footy games and the player had to guess where the ball should be. The more accurate the guess; the more tickets the machine dispensed.

Actually, the fact that young Spock was an outcast was already established by the early '70's thanks to the animated series’ episode “Yesteryear”, written by D. C. Fontana. For the most part, this was only episode of that series that was considered canon until ST: Enterprise incorporated more of that series into official lore.

Where’s cost of living in the metrics? Without that, unemployment and median income paint a very incomplete picture.

It’s one thing to edit Wikipedia; it’s another thing altogether to make that edit stick. Now that Will Wright has been cited in an article published by a third party, an editor has already started the process of changing it via the article’s talk page. Creatives have had a very big problem self-correcting the site, since the official editors have a distrust of uncited sources.

As well written as this article is, I do have a problem with its tone. The writer seems willing ignorant of why the Internet “sucks” for gaming; it was not designed for real time small packet transmission. Most of TCP’s design, in particular, was intended to facilitate the transmission of comparatively sizable files over FTP, NNTP, and SMTP. Even stuff like IRC was designed not to be so concerned about timeliness that the chatlog on each end would match up exactly.

> If the music tugged at all the right heartstrings, but you knew it wasn't made by a human, could you feel that depth of connection?

I do think this is a false dichotomy of sorts. (Right turn of phrase?) The music may have been made by a machine, but humans made the machine. What ultimately is the difference between music “made” by a violin being directly played, verses a synthesizer reconstructing songs based on what a programmer did beforehand? It’s just a matter of degree. It might be more productive in discussions to look at the “artist” verses “committee” angle instead.

Telltale Games has been carrying the torch for these kinds of games for the last decade. Beside resurrecting old LucasArt staples like Monkey Island and Sam & Max, they’ve launched other franchises to the format: Bone, Homestar Runner, and The Walking Dead come to mind. They also occasionally score a big license, like Back to the Future and Jurassic Park.

As much as I agree btilly might have crossed a line, “hating an idea” would be considered a fatal flaw by many, including myself, depending on the social context and idea itself. Maybe “disapproval” would be a better word in this situation; “hatred” has too much emotional and social baggage that its use even in hyperbole may have to go away if we can ever hope to regain any notion of sensible discussion.

> My question then is why I can't get a wine glass today made this way? :-)

Likely for a similar reason that glass was mostly forgotten by the West during the early Middle Age and we completely lost how to make Damascus steel. Information was not preserved in a permanent multigenerational manner, either by intent or oversight, that we can still access today.

> chemistry was alchemically transformed into nanotechnology under the Clinton administration

Clever way to put it… although how much was the president’s doing directly, or the consequences of trends within one of the various government agencies that he just rode the wake of, might not be clear without some citation.

That language is math. Which, due to historical accident, was inspired by Arabic writing, rather than the Latin variety.

> The natural question I asked is "Why are you having kids you can't afford?" The question wasn't asked during the piece and it's something that isn't asked worldwide.

You are misusing the word “natural” there…

It could be from no access to contraception or abortion, either due to lack of wealth or social precepts? Social mores that disparage men who don’t have kids? Lack of biological and statistical understanding of how sex and procreation are related?

Even in the West, it was only until recently (the Enlightenment, maybe?) that the notion of “choosing to have children” even existed. It was either considered an uncontrollable instinct or something influenced by divine providence, with the actual question of sexual behavior being dodged outright.

"Last Updated 12-22-10"

Wow. I guess the income from the swag (and their 15 minutes) ran out.

I believe that is part of what his definition of “ingoing and outgoing entropy” is refering to. That said, it does seem weird to heavily bias for the 2-3 letter and 7-8 cases. I would think the moderate length words should not get such short shrift, since these words tend to be the ones used to determine when the various letter and words value tiles get hit in any given game. (Full disclosure: not a regular Scrabble player.)

Actually, it’s “Extra Credits” summary. PATV just hosts them now after they had a falling out with The Escapist involving a fundraiser for covering medical bills.

</pendant>

I don’t think that word is pronounced the way the blogger thinks it is…

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/ume

America Online began as “AppleLink Personal Edition” before the company struck out on its own, Apple tried a service called “eWorld,” and the replacement for MobileMe, iCloud, scaled back the scope of online services. I think Apple has learned by now that even they don’t have the resources to compete with the Internet at large.

More like evil genius… Variations of this trick are a common optimization in embedded systems for years. (Stuff like this is why “premature optimization” is considered such a bad thing.)

On that note, I find it interesting that the article writer wanted to see more languages support pointer arithmetic. Language mechanics like that have developed a reputation of being “unsafe” due to they enabling common programming errors like buffer overflows and the like. Depending on the level of abstraction between the language and underlying iron, it might not even be possible to do stuff like this anymore. (Some modern languages/VMs/compilers use the more abstract concept of “references” over “pointers.” Even Apple’s flavor of Objective C, which AFAICT is still using pointers as an implementation detail, prefers to couch documentation and API conventions in the more abstract convention to deter some of the direct memory access abuses that were discovered during the Classic-to-Carbon Mac migration way back when…)

I came here to post this same thing… Except for a couple of holdouts like Square Enix, the notion of paying more for something non-consumable vs. consumable seems to be at an end in the software space.

And only current Macs to boot... it doesn't work under Snow Leopard.

EDIT: Looking at his home page, it’s pretty clear he is designing towards tablets first, and other machine types second…

I mostly depends on how much resources you can provide to your legal team verses what your opponent can. The vast majority of the time, it boils down to who has more money. The exceptions are usually due to public agencies or organizations with a “dog in the fight” that would benefit in the long term if the underdog wins.

ClearChannel/Ticketmaster is huge and it would probably take the backing of a corporation the size of Time Warner or Apple to challenge them. Issues like this aren’t usually “sexy” enough for PR focused firms like the ACLU or FSF or whatever would be apropos here to get involved with, at least initially.

This encoding system kind of reminds me of how the Nintendo eReader worked... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nintendo_e-Reader

This is the same old “correlation is not causation” thing that the press never seems to understand.

Move along; nothing to see here…

> When did we all start pining for everything to be the same forever?

Since time immemorial... it’s one of the few constants of human nature that does stay the same.

The first thing I thought when I saw is image was that I would love to see an animation of the sphere collapsing and refilling the oceans, etc. Assuming the animation simulated actual gravity and water fluid dynamics, I wonder how long it would take and what it would look like? (That is, the initial reflooding, reforming of rivers, clouds and ice caps, and so on.)

> It's time to declare war on middlemen, period.

Got a "B Ark" handy?

No, AT&T is in the business of selling phone contracts. The actual bits themselves are loss leaders to help sell those subscriptions.