Fair enough. But if you cut the Bonding plant instead of digging it up, well, don't say I didn't warn you. :)

Return to Zork is hardly a venerable game. It was a rather poor adventure game for the era, with at least one extremely counter-intuitive puzzle, as well as a error you can make very early in the game that renders it unbeatable, and gives you no clue that you've made an error when you make the mistake.

Zork: Grand Inquisitor, the third of Activision's 90s Zork games, was the lone one of that set that can be fairly called Venerable.

The highlight of the article is really where he says that being difficult to program for just means that the system offers more opportunities.

I mean, if that was their goal, they should have required coding in INTERCAL.

Maybe the helicopter he has isn't adequate after all.

Eh. I think that puts too high a bar. Generally speaking, if someone is slandering me, I'd rather just find a way to stop the slander than to have an obligation to seek damages. Which is, to my mind, the major advantage of something like the DMCA. Frankly, DMCA takedown notices are vastly superior to actually having lawsuits for damages at every single case of infringement. Now I'm all for reform and a system whereby spurious notices can be treated as the harassment they are. But on the other hand, a system in place that facilitates merely stopping the activity rather than seeking damages and punishment seems to me desirable.

As it stands, Section 230 of the CDA offers a more or less complete safe harbor immunity to any "provider of an interactive service" for law-infringing content, with copyright currently being the only exception.

I could care less about making it easier to out anonymous commentators, and in fact oppose any effort to make that easier. But on the other hand, illegal content is illegal content, and once a provider is notified that they are hosting illegal content, I have no objection with a requirement to take it down or assume liability for it.

But for anyone still reading this (and reading at the 1 level, since one assumes this comment ain't going anywhere in moderation), if you want a sane take on naked short selling that isn't from someone with fingers all over the pie, NPR did a piece on naked short selling recently as part of their regular podcast/blog called Planet Money (which is a fantastic primer on the financial crisis in general).

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2008/09/listen_up_naked_short_selling.html is the link for the piece on naked short selling, and it's absolutely worth a listen.