i love to play GTA 5 on my PS3, but i know if i tried to do that sort of thing in the real world i would be either killed by the police or put in prison for the rest of my life, it is just an amusing game for entertainment and stress relief (i get to do stuff in that game i could never get away with in the real world)

If fear of being caught and the idea that you wouldn't get away with it are what stops you stealing cars, mowing down pedestrians and beating up hookers, we have a problem.

Doing those things because you know they aren't real, there are no real consequences, and you wouldn't *want* to treat actual people in the same way, that seems more like reasonable escapism.

This. I know it's one we've almost certainly lost, like "hacker" meaning anything other than "cracker" or "computer criminal", but "trolling" was a fine distinction of taking a deliberately inflammatory position (whether you actually held it or not) in an attempt to goad others into taking completely unreasonably positions on the other extreme in response, and laughing at the nonsense that ensued.

Degrading and broadening it to a simple "someone who's mean on the Internet" is another little piece of our culture slipping away...

I know, kids on my lawn and all that.

Only to someone not stupid enough to already know the answer - because it's still selling in significant numbers.

OK, sloppy on my part. More accurately, "why are people still buying this?".

Exaggeration, hyperbole, and confusing a personal opinion with a law of nature... Man, you hit the trifecta there.

No exaggeration. Are you aware how many modern board games there are in existence? BoardGameGeek have just over 88,000 games in their database. I will positively assert that pretty much any of the top 1000 ranked on that site are both objectively (for reasons other posters have covered such as player elimination, rich-get-richer, king-making, duration, shortage of meaningful decision points) and for the vast majority of people who've played them subjectively (more fun) better games than Monopoly.

That said, not all of them will be suitable to sit down and play with a family who have only ever played Monopoly, hence my suggestion for just a handful that are readily available in mainstream shops and are distinctly family / non-hobbyist friendly.

"Why are they changing the pieces?" is not the issue. "Why are they still producing this?" is the more pressing question. Are there not already more copies of the damn game available in charity shops (thrift stores for left-pondians) than there are ET cartridges excavated from the desert? Who keeps on and on buying new copies?

Played by the rules as written, it's a mediocre game at best. Played how most people want to play it from sketchy childhood memories, it's fairly dire. Either way, if you want to play boardgames with your family, pick one of the many thousands of titles available that are better than Monopoly. Even in mass-market stores, you can probably find half a dozen better than this. (Ticket to Ride, Scotland Yard, Pandemic, Dixit, Perudo, for common examples).

At least in my view.

What he's talking about seems to be what's already happening with TV, where the marketing people are all about the "second screen" effect, getting people to do social media things and otherwise interact with other aspects of the programme at the same time as watching the programme. This annoys the living shit out of me. I hate background TV, I hate channel-surfing in the hope that something's on, I hate doing something else or being interrupted while I'm watching TV - if I've chosen to watch something, I want to sit down and watch it, in the same way that I go to the cinema.

I used to be very much the same with music, especially as a teenager, but that's slipped somewhat - it's fairly rare now that I would choose at home to sit down and just listen to some music. I do still try to while I'm travelling, but obviously the quality is not the same.

For gaming, even more so - it's something I'm not just consciously and actively consuming, but I'm participating in it. I'm either doing it, and doing it fully, or I'm not doing it. Vaguely-related check-in type activities are just going to result in me not buying or playing games.

Why would you forward rather than just pick up the email for multiple accounts in the same mail client? This seems to be incredibly trivial to set up in any modern mail client, with an "integrated inbox" view if you want it or distinct accounts if you don't.

If you've received mails on secondary accounts that you want to keep, you can even file them in a folder on the primary account, thanks to the wonders of IMAP.

TTL is a hop count "time", not a clock time. A packet can't have its TTL expire in a buffer, the TTL is only decremented when it traverses a new layer-3 hop.

This. I currently have Amazon Prime and not Netflix largely for this reason. There are shows on Netflix I want to watch, but much of my media time is on my commute, where I don't have reliable bandwidth.

I wonder as well how they're splitting the plan between game servers and content servers.

I don't give two hoots about online multiplayer, it just doesn't interest me, but I'd like to still be able to download patches and DLC. There are games I'd like to play that I either haven't bought yet, or have bought but haven't yet got around to playing...

What are you talking about? App development occurs at Layer 5 and above, Transport happens at layer 4 and below. An App developer never needs to know what is going on at layer 3.

Nonsense. If I'm developing an app that wants to communicate between two end users, both of whom are behind NAT, of course I have to be aware of that. I either need to provide a server in the middle that relays packets between them, or I need to start being aware of STUN, wide-cone NAT, UPnP, giving users instructions for setting up port-forwarding, or any of the other additional work that's necessary to get around NAT.

Ok you sound like a developer. My advice is get a network guy to explain it to you because NAT is level 1 stuff for most network engineers.

That's funny. I was a developer, for a couple of years (credit-card processing on VAXen, DECNet, no IP at all!), a long time ago, now just a hobbyist / dabbler on that front.

I have, however, designed, built, and operated service provider networks up to a global scale in some form or another (ATM, MPLS, Internet, IPSec overlays) for around 20 years. In that time, I'd say the worst mistake we've collectively made as an industry is to put our heads in the sand, keep pushing NAT on end-users, and only build out IPv6 a decade or so late.

I understand NAT perfectly well, and I've worked with it in far more complex scenarios than the common end-user single address NAT overload / PAT. I know it's been going on for long enough that it seems to be how a lot of people expect the Internet to look. Neither of those means I have to like it.

NAT doesn't work for you? Since this is how the Internet has worked since forever, I can only assume the problem isn't with NAT.

I'm not sure if you're being ignorant or "forever" is exaggeration for effect.

The Internet was built with real end-to-end connectivity. From a connected host, I could (subject to local security policies at both ends) make a connection to any other host. It worked nicely for (depending on how you want to measure), anything of the order of 20 or 30 years, ,much of that before the web.

NAT broke that, making innovation harder, as now every developer has to jump through a bunch of hoops to find tricks for two hosts to communicate with each other, typically with additional infrastructure in the middle. At the same time, it made it harder for people behind NAT to run services other people could connect to, effectively creating a two-tier Internet of "producers" and "consumers". Of course, this makes a lot of ISPs who are also content providers very happy, as the Internet just turns into next-gen-TV, only with more funny cats.

IPv6 fixes the Internet by removing NAT and restoring the original end-to-end design. Bring it on.

If there was an alternative UI that made content+semantic markup smooth and easy with formatting by specifying tag meaning done later, there would be something to sell to businesses: improved worker productivity.

Except that any productivity gains for this quarter would be more than offset by the need to retrain people to work in this way - and as we know, nothing exists in business any more beyond this quarter.

Even leaving short-term financial thinking aside, businesses will resist training people to use a word processor, because "everyone can use Word", and people will resist the training if its given, because the majority don't want to think about document structure or semantics, they just want to spew their brain to the page and make it look "pretty".

The number of people for whom inserting page break rather than pressing return until the cursor is on the next page falls into "power user" territory is frankly terrifying.

I first wrote 6502 assembler by writing the whole thing out on paper, looking up the opcodes and working out the offsets for branches by hand, then feeding the result into the in-ROM BASIC interpreter with a READ / DATA / POKE loop to load into RAM.

Then I saved up my paper-round money and bought an assembler. Revelation :)

For me, it's neither more nor less boring than "real" sport, in that I have absolutely zero interest in watching either.

I don't care how much of a star you are, if you assault a colleague in the workplace, you *should* be fired, unless there are far, far, stronger mitigating circumstances than "my dinner was cold".

No previous straw required.