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Sexist and implicitly homophobic. This community really depresses me sometimes.

Really? Is there some army of women out there extorting money out of men somehow by accusing them of being creepy and I've somehow missed it? Because it seems like that would be big news.

Generally the only "demand" I ever see follow accusations of creepiness online is "please stop".

It seems like every other issue of Private Eye has something almost exactly like this in their Ad Nauseum column. A lot of marketing companies are stealing ideas from old viral videos and art projects.

As someone who probably would identify as a skeptic, I agree with some of the premises here but certainly not his conclusion. He makes some good points about the skeptic community and the serious issues it has, as well as the issues with some of its figureheads. I've never been a big fan of Dawkins but his response to Rebecca Watson over the elevator story was downright hateful. I've always seen Dawkins as part of the militant atheist crowd more than a skeptic but there's a lot more crossover there than perhaps there should be. Phil Plait laid out a lot of this stuff in his "Don't Be A Dick" talk at TAM 8 (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrFRbGjUtJk), which I'd highly recommend.

Fair enough, I can see all that as a reason to distance yourself from the skeptical community. There are a lot of communities I should, in theory, have something in common with (gamer culture, for instance, or his own example of /r/atheism) that I reject because I can't stand much of their behaviour.

However, the author goes too far in outright rejecting skepticism and dismissing its value. I think it is important that there's a group of people protesting homeopathy's use in hospitals and disproving the claims of anti-vaccers and blocking creationist teaching laws. You think psychics provide a little bit of entertainment or false hope? Just a few weeks ago, Amanda Berry was found alive, years after Sylvia Browne had bluntly told her mother that she was dead. Berry's mother died in the interim, thinking her daughter had been murdered.

And the rant on Reagan and bankers comes out of nowhere and commits much the same fallacy as Dawkins "Muslima" comment (minus the Islamaphobia). The idea that, just because there are bigger problems out there, no one should deal with the smaller ones. If someone chooses to devote their time to exposing alt. med. con artists, should we really be mad that they're not curing cancer or investigating financial fraud? It's absurd.

There are several factual errors as well. Right after his complaint that skeptics simply take the word of big pharma, he mentions Ben Goldacre but he doesn't mention that Goldacre is a prominent opponent of big pharma research practices, as are many skeptics, and he's the author of an entire book about them, Bad Pharma. He greatly overstates the use of alternative medicine and seems to have the common misunderstanding that the placebo effect is something you only get from treatments that do nothing. A scam artist treating you nicely gives the same benefit as a doctor treating you nicely, but the doctor will also provide some actual working medicine while he's at it.

I've never quite understood this. There are so many simpler and more effective ways of copying DVDs than using screen capture software (let alone taking a single screenshot) that it doesn't seem worth the effort to deliberately block.

Sonic: Lost World looks interesting but a lot of previous Sonic games have looked interesting without actually being very fun.

Honestly, I think part of the problem with the Sonic franchise since it went 3D is that there's been too much innovation. Every game has to have some "revolutionary" new feature without the basic gameplay being polished - three characters at once in Heroes, cars and guns in Shadow the Hedgehog, the mach speed zones, vehicles, and telekinesis in Sonic 2006, the swordplay in Black Knight, the list goes on. I've always thought they would've been much better off going back to the style of the Sonic levels from the Adventure series, perfecting that, and then building on it with new features.

That's more the approach Nintendo took. Super Mario 64 laid the solid groundwork for all the 3D Mario games since and Sunshine and the Galaxy games were able to play with the formula a bit.

A steady diet of McDonald's (or any equivalent fast food) isn't nearly as inherently dangerous as things like "Super Size Me" would have you believe. Morgan Spurlock was eating 5000 calories of McDonald's a day, with most of it coming from the milkshakes, not the solid food. If you force-feed yourself 5000 calories of anything every day for a month, you're going to have health problems.

It's worth noting that "processed" is a very loosely-defined term when it comes to food. At it's broadest, even peeling a banana could count as processing.

Another interesting fact is that the NES was deliberately designed with the horizontal loading rather than the vertical one (as in the original Famicom) so it looked less like a videogame console, helping to dodge the stigma that consoles had after the Great Crash of 1983.

Because you're legitimately afraid that your assaulter could seriously injure you in a fight?

Because you just want to get out of there as fast as possible and escalating into violence is likely just going to draw it out?

Because you're afraid bystanders will take his side and you'll be seen as the aggressor?

Because there's a lot of cultural pressure for women to ignore sexual harassment and you don't want to "rock the boat" that badly?

Or how about because these are grown men and women in an at least semi-professional environment and the idea that they should have to resort to violence to solve their problems is completely fucking absurd?

Even so, it still reflects badly on the EFF. It might not have been their idea originally but they accepted the suggestion and gave it their approval.

Discovering something completely new still is a big deal - do a search for "new species" and then any recent year and you'll find numerous articles (usually written around December) about all the weird and wonderful creatures discovered that year.

But this was a lacewing with an unusual colouration and thousands of new insect species are discovered every year. If biologists and museums got all worked up and dropped everything they were doing over each one, they'd never have the time or money to do anything else.

For me, Let's Plays fall into two categories. Some are like audio commentary tracks on DVDs - they can be entertaining and informative but you'd never listen to it without watching the film alone first. Others are more like MST3K/RiffTrax, where it's a particularly bad game that I wouldn't have played anyway made funny by the audio commentary. Some good examples of the latter are the famous Let's Play of Sonic the Hedgehog 2006 [0] or the Retsupurae guys doing Dark Seed [1].

Basically, I've never watched an LP instead of actually playing a game and I've actually avoided watching LPs of games I intend to play at some point, just to avoid spoilers. There might be a few people who have but, overall, the marketing benefit outweighs the downsides (unless, of course, you release an awful game that gets famously ripped apart).

Interestingly, Michael "slowbeef" Sawyer, the Something Awful goon who's credited with creating Let's Plays, can't stand a lot of YouTube Let's Players. He and diabetus do Retsupurae [2], which is basically them commenting over other people's commentary tracks and mocking them.

[0] http://lparchive.org/Sonic-The-Hedgehog-2006/

[1] http://blip.tv/slowbeef/real-estate-headaches-5568062

[2] http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Retsupurae

Well, World War I was referred to as "the first world war" as early as 1914 [1] and the term was fairly popular even before World War II, so there is some precedent.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I#Names

Yeah, that's the one that seems to be a tabloid scare. All the stories are from a few days in August '09 and all cite a single Daily/Sunday Express article (apart from the Wired one, which has some later corrections). And the Daily Express... isn't the most reliable of news sources. They've got a reputation for scare stories and, weirdly, conspiracy theories about Princess Diana. Russell Howard sums them up quite well - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hq5_joo5l5I.

I just did the same thing on Google and got different results, probably because Google adjusts results and auto-completion based on previous search history. Using Chrome and incognito mode, "uk to install" without quotes got me suggestions for the UK installing wind and solar power. With quotes, I got two suggestions for installing programs (iTunes and Skype) and two about installing cameras in private homes.

The latter seem to be referencing a tabloid scare from two or three years ago about supervised housing for families of repeat offenders (which wouldn't necessarily have involved cameras, according to the top result). There are also some results about the legality of installing cameras in private homes in the UK, which makes sense as a search.

Anyway, you would never really talk about "installing" roads, daycares, or homeless shelters. Traffic lights and dictators, maybe, but Google's auto-suggest is not an objective measure of anything.

Some of the very few GameCube games that took advantage of the GBA link-up cables made good use of player-specific screens. Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles used it for individual inventory management and Four Swords switched play to the GBA screens when players entered buildings/caves.

I don't see Nintendo fading after just this generation. They've got significant reserves of cash, the Wii's still selling strong, and even with the rise of phones and tablets, they still have a massive chunk of the portable market. It's always been their strategy to take risks, even if that causes the occasional Virtual Boy.

Sega also made a series of big hardware blunders before they bowed out - the Game Gear (not a disaster, but hardily the Game Boy-killing Holy Grail they needed), squeezing life out of the Mega Drive with the Mega CD and the 32X, the various design and marketing blunders that scuppered the Saturn, and then the failure of the Dreamcast (which wasn't actually a bad device, it just had the misfortune of going up against the PS2).

But Apple's page doesn't give nearly as much focus to the tech specs as Google's does. Most of the page "above the fold" is given over to a description of what it can do and the details they do give are more about relative improvements (2x faster, etc.) than raw numbers. The specs are available and it's clear where to see them but they're not the first thing the eye is drawn to.

I've lost count of the number of times I've gone to click play on the new OSX version of VLC and accidentally clicked forward or backward, completely losing my place in the video I was watching as it skips to another. Horrible UI.

Any time I see a headline ending in a question mark, I always think of this SMBC comic - http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2075.

I've recently noticed a lot of self-published books on Amazon that just pull their text straight from Wikipedia articles, like this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...) or this (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Articles-Nintendo-Including-Pictocha...). Most of them have little disclaimers that presumably get them past Amazon's rules but they're still cluttering up a lot of search results and doubtless tricking a few people.

It's a good assumption to make if someone points out a random person on the street and asks you to guess their sexual orientation.

But in an article about male and female relationships and sexual attraction? It's a pretty bad sign that the author just assumes heterosexuality for everyone, especially when anything else would defeat (or at least greatly complicate) their argument.

Even though I think this is great, it still kind of annoys me that they keep calling it a NES when they're clearly using a Famicom. I suspect that's actually going to confuse a lot of people.

It is steadily becoming a lot more open - Jeb's the lead developer now and a big focus has been put on adding mod support. They've hired the guys behind Bukkit (a popular third-party mod manager for servers) to help with that, I believe.

Clones have also started to appear but it's still small indie companies making them, meaning it'll take time before many are at the same level as Minecraft.

However, the bigger companies do seem to be paying attention (an EA bigwig spoke about Minecraft in a Gamasutra piece the other day [1], though he was saying fairly obvious things), so it'll be interesting to see what the genre's like in 5-10 years' time.

[1] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/167137/Minecrafts_future_...

I'm a student at the University of Edinburgh and Mandelbrot Maps on Android is my undergraduate dissertation project. I've spent a big chunk of the last few months porting the original Mandelbrot Maps web applet [1] (created by a previous student a few years ago) to Android phones and tablets.

The app is a (rather good, if I do say so myself) fractal generator for the Mandelbrot and Julia sets but its main innovative feature is letting users see the relationship between the two. There's a unique Julia set fractal for each point in the Mandelbrot set and Mandelbrot Maps lets you see them change in real-time by dragging a pin around the latter. If you zoom in, you can see similarities between a Julia fractal and the area in the Mandelbrot fractal that parametrises it, particularly along the edge of the Mandelbrot.

There are also interesting relationships between positions in the Mandelbrot's bulbs and the overall shape of the Julia fractals, as demonstrated in [2].

The code is open-source and can be found at the GitHub page linked from the Store page above, as the developer's website. It's in a bit of a state right now as my deadline is approaching rapidly, and I'm sure there are things in there that are hardly best practice for Android, but I'm intending to tidy it up after the end of the semester.

If you liked using the app (or didn't like it, or even just thought it was mediocre), please leave a rating or a review on the Google Play Store page. There's also a survey linked in the app's description that would give me even more useful feedback. It would all be extremely helpful for my dissertation (as well as for anyone working on the project next year).

If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them.

[1] http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/mandelbrot-maps/mmaps.h...

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1eeINusNbUs

I've never really played a lot of MMOs (though I had friends who were very into SWG and still lament its changes and eventual demise) but the crazy stuff that goes on in virtual economies like this has always interested me.

Reminds me of Julian Dibbell's "Play Money" [1], where he spends a year trying to make Ultima Online his main source of income.

[1]http://www.amazon.co.uk/Play-Money-Millions-Trading-Virtual/...

Weren't there some issues with GPL'd code being on the App Store? If I remember correctly, one developer complaining about the license was all it took for Apple to pull VLC.

Still, it hopefully won't be an issue here, and this is still a really awesome thing to do.

They've apparently recently automated a big chunk of their customer support [1], which (along with the decrease in WoW subscribers) would probably explain big cuts to the customer service department.

[1] http://www.theverge.com/gaming/2012/2/29/2833313/blizzard-la...

They showed a lot of them grouped together into a sheet towards the end of the video, so I assume the hexagon was just a prototype or made specifically for demonstration. Although if you're talking about margins between them on the sheet, I'm not sure.