For comparison, North America is 5% is the ncsoft's market for *all* their games (lineage, city of heroes/villains, aion, guild wars). They are not going to base any decision on releasing code on how the game is doing on the North American market.

Lineage (I) was 29% of ncsoft sales in Q4 2010 according to their financial report.

Diablo was inspired by nethack, a roguelike.

The boundaries of the genre are not well defined, but turn-based would usually be considered one of the defining characteristics.

I know it is a joke, but the connection is there. The original rogue is vi-like, adopting the cursor keys of vi.

> Joking aside, I am kind of curious what thuis "as microsoft would have you beiieve" comment is coming from.

This blog post, which was linked to in the article. Especially the last section ("Full Hardware Acceleration is the Difference") would lead the reader to believe that the difference was architectural.

The wording would include all strong or weak copyleft licenses, like GPL, LGPL, MPL, and QPL, but not permissive licenses like the MIT, BSD, or Apache licenses.

The actual test explicitly specified "(dry biomass, after removing the water)".

[ Using "mass" as an informal shorthand for dry mass is common in plant science. Wet weight is used to indicate that water is included. ]

Claim 1-3 cover all client server games with persistent data.

The oldest such game I know of is from 1971, but I'm sure there are examples predates that.

Claim 4-5 adds payment to that. That was not common on the early internet, but common on the for payment BBS's of the 80's.

Claim 6-7 adds "prizes" to the first claim, without defining the term. It would seem to cover any client-server game with a high-score

Claim 8-10 add a physical computer to the above claims: "No sir, this is not a software patent, it is a patent on software running on a computer. Totally different. Down with software patents!".

Jeff Strain formulated it like this: "the team that is best poised to deliver a successful game that is an evolution of WoW is... well, the WoW team".

Here is the EU data on the pesticide.

Some highlights: It is an insecticide, so it should not really surprise that it kills bees. The toxitity to honey bees is well known (LD50 = 0.004 ug/bee, which the document interpret as "high" risk). And it is approved for use in most EU countries, including Italy and Germany.

> Why do you hate the USA?

Because at the time you can make use of malls and navy seals, the game tend to be decided anyway.

> Why would you want to use No Script?

To make web sites readable. I can't read text when there is stuff moving around the screen screaming for my attention.
AdBlock would do 95% of the same, but the ads pay for the content, so I don't like to block them.

> In fact a lot of sites would be crippled by it.

Permanently deblocking a trusted site is a one mouse click-and-drag operation. You can also temporarily deblock a site, or a single object.

> Really there's no benefit here besides feeding one's paranoia.

That's not my main reason, but I admit that it makes me feel safer clicking links on sites like reddit (/. has a better, if slower, screening process).

If they worked for IBM or SGI, two large contributers to the Linux kernel, they could. SGI at one point contributed UNIX derived code.

The "serial" you lived through is likely RS-232-C, defined in 1969, and not exactly hard to find support for today.

The parallel interface is likely IEEE 1284 from 1994, but backward compatible with the Centronics interface introduced sometime in the 70s. You won't have to look far to find a IEEE 1284 connector either, even if it is slightly less common.

USB 1.0 is from 1996. Finding a PC that doesn't support it will be more difficult than either of the above challenges.

General purpose data connectors seem to be long lived.

Storage media less so, finding a reader for 8" floppy disk (the standard of the 70s) is much more difficult.

Noscript doesn't turn off Javascript. Most browsers already have an option for that. What Noscript does is to make the control of Javascript (and Flash) much more fine grained and convenient.

Some typical case:

1. Scripts on poor web sites just serve to detract from the content. Those you simply never turn on.

2. Scripts on good web sites improve access to content. Those sites you enable permanently first time you visit (press no Noscript button in the lower right corner, and select "enable permanently") and forget about it.

3. Some web sites contain a mix of the two. Here you can either explicitly enable a specific object (by clicking on a placeholder, like with flashblock), or temporarily enable scripts for that site.

Basically, Noscript makes more, not less, of the web accessible. The good web sites you use normally will not be affected (as they all will be allowed to run scripts). But following links from social web sites like /. become a much more pleasant experience.

Of course, most of the noise scripts distacting from content are ads, so AdBlock gives you much of the same benefit. But I don't want to hide ads, as that is how the sites pay their bills.