What you describe is a satire of the current state of IP enforcement and while the satirical elements (subtitles) would be original, that would not be the case for the Hitler video/audio.

Never have been particularly bright, hence I relish my moment of utter brilliance when deciding for Android. And I'll soon be able to flash too!

I wouldn't be so sure about this. A majority of my users are really "casuals", not HoMM nerds. There's a group of about 60 of those, with 20-30 visiting on any given day, and the rest are mostly kids who just bought HoMM5 at an electronics store because the box was shiny enough, or adults with jobs and families who fire up the good, ol' HoMM I, II or III once a month or so for an hour to bring back the memories of college all-nighters.

A news site would probably be better for a non-biased sample, but I consider my statistics good enough, especially with such a huge difference.

Thanks for this response. To add another data point: In high school, I drove an automatic. One day, when pulling onto the highway, the valve that controls gas-flow got stuck in the fully open position. Prying up on the accelerator did nothing because the problem was not the pedal. Pressing the brake to the floor kept my top speed below 80 mph or so, but I was still hurtling down the road. The only solution was to pop the car into neutral and to turn off the key. (Of course, I lost power steering at that point, but I was able to drift into a parking lot.) So, long story short, the brakes could not overcome the engine.

This has been going on for a long time. If one stretched things, they could say that World of Warcraft is a FPS with an extreme number of powerups. However, FPS is a concept is a known quantity. You put out something in this type of genre, and you will almost certainly break even at the minimum.

Finding new ways to do a RPG combat system is hard. There are not that many ways to do combat, so FPS mechanics is one of the most used. Turn by turn combat used to be the RPG mainstay, but for many people, it is too slow a method of resolving conflict. There are other combat systems, but if a game relies too much on arcade reflexes, it might turn people away.

For single player, most likely the best bet for a modern RPG these days would be a system used by NWN and NWN2, where people can pause the action before making their next decision, but if they know what exactly is going on, can still do an almost real-time battle.

What I've not seen that much of are RPGs with RTS mechanics. Picture having your group of people that you start out with at a beginning of the game, and each of them has some ability and weakness. There would have to be more plot and character development for an RPG to separate it from Warcraft 1-3 (adding multiple endings, having side quests), but it could be done.

One scenario using these type of mechanics could be pushing back some orcs [1] who are pillaging some nearby villages. You send in some scouts to see what exactly their weaknesses are (one village has an orc wizard fireballing buildings. Another has an orc chieftain who keeps his band up with heals. Still another has a warrior chieftain.) Then you send whatever guys you have that would be the best against the type of enemy at hand. With different playstyles, one could have a lot of grunt troops and just swarm the villages, send in ranged troops (with some melee in front as a distraction), or perhaps even find a way to use some type of negotiating skill to get the orc tribal leaders to accept a keg of ogre swill as treasure enough so they stop their invasion.

Another scenario could be a castle siege. You have your forces and need to punch a hole in the castle walls, while fending off forces coming from other sides. Part of the RPG would be doing side quests. One side quest earns you better siege engines. Another gets enemy troops to not join in on the fight. Still another side quest just might allow the player to earn such a famous/infamous reputation that they can just bypass the siege altogether and have the opposing side open the doors and surrender.

This isn't to say this has not been done before, but RPG/RTS mechanics are not something seen often in modern games. What sets RPGs apart from "plain old" RTS/FPS games is having multiple endings, multiple side quests, and different consequences for player actions. For example, if a PC is an extremely good diplomat, it may allow for some battles to be skipped or handled in a different way. Similar if a PC does side quests for a reputation. Throwing in some mini-games [2] may be the answer here as a way to help (perhaps use the RTS engine so the player can work as a mercenary general in order to help your side get land or resources in between plot advances.)

[1]: Classic AD&D/LoTR orcs which would be more than happy to stuff any intelligent race in a stewpot. Except dwarves. They are just too hard to clean.

[2]: One recent mini-game I liked was the Risk-like one in James Cameron's "Avatar". It was fairly tough because you had very little territory at the start, so you could either play your chances slowly, or start the mini game every so often, because you got more money as the main game progressed. Mini games have to be done right though. For example, the card one in FF8 a lot of players just skipped for the most part.

Just a comment about the sitting.

I have a sitting job similar to yours (sitting form 9 to 2 and then from 3 to 6).

My job also requires me to fly a bit. Almost every year I make 12 hour flights. Last year I bought one of those "compression socks" at Charles de Gaulle Airport (15 Euro IIRC) before my long flight.

The compression socks did provide a nice relief during the flight, and according to a bit I have been reading they are good for circulation.

After my flight I thought that they may be useful for my everyday office work. I have been using them since the beginning of the year and they seem nice.

It efficiently removes dangerous electrical energy from your outlet.

Ever been to the post office in Princeton, NJ, or the Southeastern Pennsylvania mail facility, which has an address of Valley Forge (even though it's in King of Prussia)? They have a ridiculous number of PO boxes - people want those addresses, they just sound so much better than Cranbury or Freehold or Conshohoken.

With email addresses, there is a difference - a vanity PO box tells me that the person may be willing to waste time and money to use that address, with an email address it's different, and depends on the address. With AOL, it tells me that you (someone) decided a long time ago that you needed some sort of net presence, had a CD that AOL had sent you and put in the computer, and since it worked, never looked back. It tells me that at least you don't put much effort into your net presence, and probably don't use it very effectively. That wouldn't be a problem for me if you were running a car repair shop, it would if you were selling me anything that had some direct relationship to communications.

Other addresses provoke different, mostly negative, reactions. pigsticker72@earthlink.net doesn't make me any more comfortable than RushDittoHead@hotmail.com - both make me want to run the other way.

It's become so easy to have your web address and mailbox have the same domain, one has to wonder about people who don't bother - is the rest of the office a mess? And domains are cheap, and easy to register. Not having time or claiming not enough savvy makes you look lazy and dumb.

Sorry. That's what I see

Leaving the author's lack of social skills aside, the powers-that-be in computer science education agree with him, at least for now. The Computer Science Accreditation Board lists a course in probability and statistics among its criteria (sorry, I couldn't find an online link to the latest criteria) and has for at least 20 years. I don't know how influential those criteria are outside the US (though I'd be curious, if any slashdotters can help me out), but here they are pretty important, especially for the vast majority of programs that are not at the top schools, and need the credibility that accreditation can bring them.

Not everyone is happy, though. At the 2005 OOPSLA there was a panel discussion where one thing they all could agree on was that the CS curriculum was way too mathematical. They favored something more like a software apprenticeship where "projects" where replaced with "products". That point of view does not appear to be in the ascendant in computer science yet, but it might catch on in the information science departments that are often found in business colleges.

Personally, I don't think the CS departments are likely to get less mathematical as long as there is strong demand for their graduates. There are certainly a lot of students who don't major in computer science because it is too mathematical for them, and I'm sure some of them wind up as programmers through some other route, and others find some other career. Moreover, I'd say that with one probability and statistics course that follows calculus, the students do get enough to "know what they don't know", which was what the author wanted.

Actually, in the US, this is illegal, and it does get enforced. No one but the US Government is allowed to put something inside your mailbox, and you will probably find out if you try distributing leaflets for a commercial enterprise or political campaign. It may be illegal to forge an email, but that's different from delivering it.

Wang was really one of the great one-product companies, and it wasn't the product most people associate them with, word processors. An Wang invented the core memory, independently from IBM, who also invented it, but after Wang. Wang had taken the precaution of getting his notes notarized so he could prove he was first, and won a lawsuit and received huge royalties not only from IBM but everyone else, until integrated circuit RAM took over.

Wang invested that money into other projects including calculators (desktop, programmable machines, some with integrated printers and tape drives - really small computers) and word processors, and did achieve some success with those lines in the 70's, but never established the kind of critical mass that could keep up with all the fast changes in those markets. They also never really got their minds around the real problem, which was to come up with the best software for their niche markets. Wang was always a hardware company at heart, and getting the ideal look and feel for a word processor was simply out of their league.

Wang came up with some good OEM hardware, but really never established themselves as a company who understood the end user. In that sense I don't think they fell so much as they got passed by by the companies that understood software and their customers better.

All logic can do is determine whether a collection of axioms and rules of inference is consistent, and if it is, what the consequences are. It can't tell you what axioms and rules of inference to adopt in order to develop a "correct" system of ethics. A classic example would be excluded middle - p|~p (p or not p). Although this is standard in mathematics, it is not absolutely necessary, and lots of mathematics can be done without it. You could argue for an eternity whether it should be part of you logical system for ethics or not, but logic alone will not tell you.

Oh come on - they showed something you could actually do with an iPhone, just not in the 23 seconds it took in the video. Adds where the phones literally pick the sun out of the sky are however accepted as okay, just like that spot where the train station is quickly filled with people just because somebody uses this rad new phone - because the whole idea is stupid to begin with, nobody cares that you couldn't gather a crowd in 30 seconds.

It's not nice because it hurts his parents and they might take my questions as intrusions in their lives. I know for a fact that this kid has problems, knowing the exact name of the condition (if it has one) won't make them happier, won't make the kid healthier and definitely won't make me smarter. So what's the point to ask? To me, the obvious is enough, I need not name it :)