Humodour

So what? The issue is that they shipped a ****ing rootkit in the first place.

Gaming is full of some really horrible people. Then again, so are YouTube, Facebook, and 4chan. Unfortunately the public in general are just uncouth, horrible people when given a free expression medium and anonymity (and sometimes even anonymity isn't required - e.g. the Cronulla race riots). It's sad, and we'll probably evolve away from that as civilisation starts to fully wrap its head around the concept of the Internet (for example, once all generations alive were born after Facebook was invented humanity will obviously have a radically different social perspective to the people alive today).

Yes.

World of Goo Osmos Plants vs Zombies Spacechem if it's a tablet

And where would I "grab" myself a key by chance? Still waiting on an invitation. http://www.dota2.com/survey/experience/?l=english It's already the most played game on Steam, above Team Fortress, and it's still in closed beta. Haha. I got an invite very easily so sign up at that link.

Huge improvement on the original in terms of ease of use and keeping and helping new players. None of that horrible "you suck go kill yourself" atmosphere on HoN (and even DotA 1). I love it. Go grab yourself a beta key.

I didn't enjoy this latest Batman movie. I'm not alone here - I know of at least 12 other people who felt the same way.

http://www.smh.com.a...0724-22nob.html Now that is scary. You can imagine that any information Russia has, China and Iran will soon have, too. Like World War 2.

Reluctantly agree with Nepenthe, critical thinking is something better learn with real life experience rather than on the classroom. Then you're not agreeing with Nepenthe. He stated critical thinking skills can't be taught. But if you can learn them through life experience (which I agree with you is the primary means of learning them) then you can learn them. Bit of a tautology, but eh. The classroom (or any teacher including one's parents) are still a powerful force for teaching the basics of critical thinking. The one important thing I came away from my English literature class with from high school was the ability and confidence to absolutely dissect advertisements and recognise power plays and manipulation attempts (which are skills that extend far beyond just the thousands of advertisements we are bombarded with daily), for example. These are critical thinking skills that were developing, slowly, on my own, but which were given a significant boost from this 1 year of English class. Similarly the classes at school which encouraged me to apply systems thinking to looking at and solving problems have further nurtured an important critical thinking skill which everybody has intuitively but which few practice properly. The classroom is a place to seed the concepts of critical thinking and allow them to develop properly over one's lifetime.

How much is it?

Vehemently disagree with Nepenthe that critical thinking can't be taught and hence vehemently agree with Hurlshot. Yeah, it's pretty disgusting. I read it on Slashdot. Slashdot is a tech website run by Americans. But from time to time they comment on things like religious extremism and the damage it is causing to America's education system and scientific institutions, such as the banning of teaching evolution, and the teaching of creationism in science. http://news.slashdot.org/story/12/06/28/2059203/texas-gop-educational-platform-opposes-teaching-critical-thinking-skills With that in mind, will you retract your crude attack on my intelligence, or are attacks on people's character your preferred mode of operation? I'm definitely starting to believe that, since in another thread you were ranting about me being a Marxist socialist and other weird things which I can only assume are meant to be dread insults in the USA.

You have a lot of questions. The digital store Green Man Gaming which allows digitally purchased game reselling answers these questions for you. Just for future reference, being able to raise a lot of questions about something does not say anything about how difficult that thing is to implement - merely that you can think of a lot of details that need to be clarified. Green Man Gaming posted a blog entry about their thoughts on this EU ruling 7 hours ago. Green Man Gaming's game reselling system works similarly to that described by the OP - where the publisher gets a cut each time a game is resold. But the law does not require that stores implement Green Man Gaming's method of paying publishers multiple times for the purchase of a single game. http://blog.greenmangaming.com/2012/07/eu-rules-publishers-cant-stop-you-reselling-digital-games/

Doesn't an artsy MMORPG violate the laws of physics?

To quote directly from the 2012 Texas GOP policy platform:

Fair enough for the fanciest manoeuvres, but at time 12:00 he does demonstrate the robot manoeuvring the real world with a camera and a laser rangefinder. I guess your point was that currently the robots can't perform the fanciest manoeuvres outside a motion capture system. Fair enough.

A great collection of info about SpaceChem can be found here: http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=422393 The game also has a free demo which should get you hooked.

That's not correct. The drones do NOT know where everything is via GPS. That makes no sense - they can only know where THEY are via GPS. The drones have sensors (I'd guess ultrasonic rangefinders and EMR sensors such as cameras and lasers + laser detectors) which they use to map out their environment. They do not use GPS to map out their environment. Be careful what you claim about modern computing power, too. It's is trivially easy to cheaply supply gigahertz of computing power with low current draw and on a low voltage these days - I know, as I make hobby projects with some ARM chips. I doubt it would take too much processing power at all to loop through a small function which performs collision detection and avoidance 100 times per second (remember that 100 times per second is glacially slow to a processor that can execute hundreds of millions of instructions per second). To reiterate: the fancy manoeuvring (such as flying through hoops) did NOT use GPS. It used cameras (light sensors). GPS cannot help you with collision avoidance. In fact if you skip to time 12:15, he specifically states that the robots are capable of navigating through unknown terrain in real-time without GPS access, and he shows you footage of them doing just that.

http://www.sfgate.co...ant-3655704.php I think what someone said previously (Rosjberg?) must be correct: Elop, as a supposedly ex-Microsoft employee, is working to grind Nokia into the ground so that Microsoft can purchase it on the cheap. 6 months of stagnant Windows Phone sales might not be much by itself, but it comes at a time when Nokia is literally teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. This is the push. And Microsoft? Well, they're not making many friends these days, between screwing over OEMs, screwing over Nokia, screwing over existing customers with their stupid new UI for Windows 8, preventing Firefox and Chrome from being installed in the ARM version of Windows 8, and preventing customers from installing Linux on future Windows 8 PCs via the moronic "SecureBoot" feature of UEFI they're cramming down manufacturers's throats. Tell me, when was the last time you suffered from a rootkit attack?

I heartily recommend you play SpaceChem. It's worth the cost and is available on every major OS (Linux, Android, iOS, OSX, Windows). Don't quite know how to describe the game. The premise is "fake chemistry" (and to be fair it actually does teach some basic chemistry concepts). But the game seems more like a computing machine running concurrent threads. I've just taken a subject on concurrent programming, and all the concepts important in that such as race conditions and mutual exclusion can be (or must be) considered when solving each map. Which, frankly, is amazing. These guys have managed to package a concurrency simulator as a game, add in some beautiful music and neat sci-fi setting and then make millions (AFAIK) selling it to willing consumers! I'm impressed. And if you enjoy programming, I think you will be too. Someone has even claimed to have proven that SpaceChem is turing complete (which seems reasonable) by constructing a Brain**** interpreter within it (which does not): http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2012/01/24/smashing-atoms-in-spacechems-sandbox/

I will buy it.

http://www.ted.com/t..._cooperate.html Fun. There's no way to do justice to this accomplishment with just words. The video covers so many amazing achievements at once I'm left stunned.

Flat taxes (as opposed to progressive graduated taxes) hit the poor the hardest and the rich the least. I will never endorse them, and that holds true for the existing flat taxes of GST/VAT. For instance, who is more able to afford a flat tax of 20% attached to their purchases of bread and veggies? A struggling low-income single mother, or a rich businessman continuously looking for loopholes to pay 0% tax, like Australia's greatest ****ups Rupert Murdoch, Clive Palmer, or Gina Rinehart? Screw Ayn Randian corporatism. I reject it. Capitalism is a means to an end: universal human elevation. It is NOT NOT NOT the end itself, and Ayn Randian corporatism doesn't achieve the desired end (it achieves a different end: class warfare and an ultra-rich elite).

LIMBO is okay. I've seen enough people list LIMBO alone as the reason they purchased the Bundle to respect it. I'm currently playing through it on Ubuntu and I'm enjoying it.

This Humble Bundle just became even more awesome. They've just added Braid to it. They've also added Super Meat Boy, and Lone Survivor. Whatever they are. But Braid! For those who have already bought it - you get Braid free now. Braid, Bastion, Psychonauts, Amnesia, LIMBO. What's not to love? http://www.humblebundle.com/ Note: you have to pay more than the current average (around $8 ) to unlock Braid and Bastion. If you didn't pay that, you can increase your payment above the average after-the-fact to unlock them.

Damn. Fahrenheit 451 was good.