I'm seeing a lot of comments here about how the most revolutionary part of Myst was the graphics, and I'm actually surprised. That's not why I like Myst at all (and I still think Myst and Riven are fantastic games). To me, it's about the style of gameplay. There are puzzles, hard puzzles and a story that you're trying to piece together with very little exposition. It was great to just explore without worrying about time limits or things trying to kill you. Every time you discovered something new and progressed, that discovery was its own exciting reward.

I do agree that "doom happened" is the answer to what happened to Myst-style games, and the adventure genre period. I forever curse the rise of FPS games for that reason. I know adventure games are still made, but 3D killed them, for the same reason Myst III isn't as good as Myst or Riven. I don't want a 3D environment. I want the static adventures of old.

Speaking of old, that's what I am. Get off my lawn and whatnot.

Can I get called in for jury duty? Then I'm the arbiter of the law.

The entire point of our system of justice that involves a jury trial is that every citizen becomes the arbiter of the spirit of the law.

I can blame him. Because he uses excuses like these:

There's a difference between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law. Assholes like this guy who are more interested in the letter of the law are the reasons why laws get so complicated you need lawyers to interpret them. You can't just write a law that says, "it's illegal to text and drive." You have to define what constitutes driving, and then write an exception for being stopped at a light. Having every law consist of 30 pages of legalize is not in the best interests of society.

Why is texting and driving dangerous? Because every moment you're not looking in front of you, your car is covering a rather large distance. Unexpected things happen in the blink of an eye. If you're not moving, that's not an issue. His actions are not consistent with the spirit of the law. It's very reasonable to blame him.

Agreed. But since this isn't 2005, and no modern Linux distro ever requires you to see a CLI, much less use one, that's not really an issue.

It's still there, it's still useful as hell to do things quickly and efficiently, but you don't HAVE to use it. It's like popping the windows powershell open. If you're a power user, you want to have that option. My parents have been running Linux (Ubuntu) for years, without problems. They only stumbled when gnome 2 got replaced by Unity and they had to learn something new. But as much as I hate the damn thing, they were fine with it after 2 weeks or so.

The United States isn't subject to the Brazilian constitution any more than the Brazil is subject to the US one. Which is my point.

Well, that's the thing. Mars does have methane, we've detected it before. So the mystery is, what happened to the previously detected methane plumes? Why did they disappear?

So now not only do we not know what produced the methane in mars, we additionally don't know why it's no longer doing so. Mystery deepened.

Under which criminal code? Trespassing only exists because there's a law in the books that define it. Now name the law book that nations have to abide.

Unless the US signed a treaty with Brazil that say they can't spy on them, it's fair game. I say this is a Brazilian.

Anonymous Coward is a libeler! I'm taking you to court.

Damn. That's like one of those weasel ways of getting away with libel, like adding, "in my opinion" to a sentence, isn't it. All right, you win this round.

There is no such thing as a joke that is not OK. People like you get offended, but that's because you don't understand the power of a joke. You're not going to change the mind of actual misogynists by telling them you're offended about their beliefs. But when society makes fun of their beliefs by making a joke like that, and everyone laughs instead of seriously agreeing, that means we're moving past it. We're showing those people their arguments have been shot down so many times they're not even worth it debating anymore. We can just voice what they're parroting and everyone understand it to be a joke, because that's the only thing that opinion makes sense as.

When you take it seriously and get offended, you actually legitimize their position. Stop it.

That is actually still true.

Well, as someone pointed out before, the last time everyone went paranoid on the whole, "the NSA is purposefully weakening encryption" is when they provided S-boxes values for DES before anyone else knew about differential cryptanalysis. Turns out they were actually strengthening the algorithm. It's possible they're doing the same thing again. After all, if they're deliberately adding weaknesses, they risk foreign entities discovering those weaknesses and intercepting traffic from american companies, which I doubt is something they want.

Now, since 9/11 our government has gone batshit insane and has made incredibly poor decisions that violate our rights and offer no additional safety. So I'm not saying they haven't added those backdoors. I'm saying the wording in the memo doesn't really confirm they have. It's still possible they want to influence international standards to increase security, not insert weaknesses.

On the contrary, that would make things unequal. Do you honestly think we'd be hearing about this if it were a group of women coders talking about an app to check out male butts? Everyone would have laughed it off, and it wouldn't have been an issue. Nor should it be an issue, there's no problem with it.

Objectifying the opposite sex is part of being human. Pretending it's not is puritanical. It's only sexist if that's all you think of women. If you're unwilling to hire women to work on your team, that's sexist. If you think they should only be secretaries or housewives, that's sexist. If you're hiring them because of their looks instead of their skills, that's sexist. If you engage in sexual harassment by targeting a particular woman who has already made clear she's uncomfortable with your behavior, that's sexist (and illegal, and rightfully punished). If you're making random jokes about sex, they're jokes. If you're offended and can't take it, leave.

Mixed audience? What is this, the 1950's?

Part of the whole thing about treating women equally is giving up on the ridiculous concept that women aren't interested in sex and that, as a result, sex jokes are only appropriate around males. Women have tits, men sometimes stare at them, pictures that catch them in the act is funny. There's no reason women shouldn't hear this joke, or feel threatened by it.

The problem isn't that these people weren't "acting as adults." The problem is that a society that freaks out when a boob is shown for half a second in the middle of the superbowl aren't acting like adults. It's a fucking body part. It's not going to scar children for life. They've all seen it before and sucked upon it.

We share about 98% of our genes with chimpanzees, dude. It's not like any one of our many genes can be different, the vast majority are exactly the same. By contrast, the current theory that the homo sapiens first evolved in Africa is based on a study that looked at 1327 DNA markers. Are you going to claim that study is also flawed?

I'm not sure what you mean by strong background checks (the government does some background checks for security clearances that requires interviewing friends and acquaintances. Not only are they expensive as hell, which makes them impractical, but they're also overly intrusive for the purpose at hand). I would support checking for a criminal record. I would also agree with requiring such a check on private sales if it was easy and cheap for any private citizen to request this information prior to a sale.

I understand your argument emotionally, which is why I don't hunt. I couldn't really go through with killing an animal and seeing it die. That said, there are two things which I understand: first, hunting is a more humane way of acquiring meat than supermarket shopping. At least the animals you hunt had a free life until you decided you were hungry. Animals raised to be slaughtered are raised in horrible conditions with no space to even walk. Second, in certain areas where certain animals have no natural predators, their numbers must be controlled. So I consider regulated seasonable hunting to be actually quite good and in some cases necessary.

I think that's a parenting decision, not a government one. I do, however, support prosecuting the parents for negligence in cases of accidents caused by children with guns due to either insufficient supervision (if you're going to teach your child to shoot a gun, you better be watching them very closely) or no supervision (you should be responsible for locking your guns away where children can't get to them).

No argument from me. If the ACLU didn't completely ignore gun rights, I could stop supporting the NRA and their more extreme segment.

Well, the complete quote is "A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.".

How I personally interpret this, and I'm fully aware it's a controversial issue and my interpretation isn't the only one, is that it's a two-part statement. The first one is the justification, that a well-regulated militia is necessary. The second is the restriction upon the government: "the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed." It doesn't say, "the right of the militia," it says the "the right of the people." The way I see it, the reasoning was that the more people we have with guns, and trained to use them, the easiest it is to just draft people to form said well-regulated militia in a hurry if it becomes necessary to defend your country from an invasion.

Not that I personally see the reasoning as important. I don't think the founding fathers were some type of gods who were always right about everything. I do think it should be difficult to change the law of the land. If as a people we decide that the second amendment is no longer relevant in today's world, and government should have the right to to restrict the right of people to bear arms after all, then pass an amendment nullifying it. There's a process in place to do that. If there's not enough support to do it, then it shouldn't be changed.

What I do believe in is statistics. Gun deaths aren't really happening in large numbers in the United States. Last I checked, pools were far more dangerous (not that they're particularly dangerous either). Car accidents rule. Other large killers in the country include heart disease, diabetes, and cancers. I'm a programmer, and when I'm trying to make my code faster, I use a profiler, figure out where the hot path is, and concentrate on those before I start trying to parallelize that small for loop that iterates 10 times. That strategy tells me we should concentrate on better educating the public regarding safe driving, the value of maintaining a healthy weight, and the dangers of cigarettes, We should also invest money in R&D to help find cures for the diseases killing us. Gun owners? Most of them are like yourself, people who don't want to hurt anyone. Why waste resources making their lives difficult?