Old Skool: The Mario Bros and Donkey Kong games are where my heart lies. 2D side scrollers.

Tabletop: I've always loved the German style board/card games -- fun for the whole family, the outcome is pretty much random, and someone doesn't get ganged up on or eliminated early in play. The goofier the premise the better, it's the mechanics which makes them enjoyable to play in groups, and sometimes strategy is pointless or impossible.

New Skool: I'm afraid I'm pretty much eternally hooked on Skyrim. I like not being constrained to a linear plot or where I can go.

My wife and some of our friends are also huge fans of the Kinect games, because drunk people dancing is hilarious. Also good for a girls exercise night, while the guys play a golf video game.

I also miss my copies of Rock Band/Guitar Hero ... because I learned to appreciate a vast amount of music and greatly expanded my music collection as a result of it. The sheer amount of punk rock I now own is directly attributable to those games.

For those of us who are old and creaky, and grew up where video games took quarters, and had a joystick and two buttons ... many modern games left us in the dust years ago, and simply stopped being fun. I doubt I could beat a 6 year old at a first person shooter.

From their own page, right now:

Linux Mint recommends the following search engines:
Engine Preserves your privacy Funds Linux Mint Description
        Yahoo The 2nd largest search engine on the Web, full of features.
        DuckDuckGo A safe and secure engine providing augmented Yahoo results.
        Ixquick A safe and secure engine gathering results from multiple search engines.
        Startpage A safe and secure engine providing augmented Google results.
        Amazon The largest online store.
        Wikipedia The largest online encyclopedia.

Why aren't some search engines included in Linux Mint?

Engines are included based on the following criteria:

        Funding: Whether using the engine funds Linux Mint
        Privacy: Whether the engine provides users with best-in-class privacy/security features
        Non-commercial: Whether the engine is popular and non-commercial

So, sorry, but for whatever reason in the version I had Google wasn't an option -- and figuring out what was required to change it wasn't worth it for me.

I was shopping for a distribution, not an ideology.

If the App store doesn't have Angry Birds a search for it may mean Disgruntled birds will show up.

I'm holding out for Mildly Irked in an Ironic Post-Modern-Sort-of-Way Birds.

That would be cool. ;-)

I completely fail to comprehend why most Slashdotters seem to push everyone towards DRM'ed iPads and Chromebooks that put Palladium to shame instead of more open Windows PCs.

I guess it's more about Microsoft hate and the desire to bring them down than software freedom.

You know, it's as much about giving our friends and family a user experience which a) won't drive them insane, and b) won't make them come to us for tech support.

And, really, for many of us this whole "software freedom" thing is a little overplayed.

I've always found Stallman to be a bit of a crank, and the vast majority of people hear this stuff, and they think of teenagers spouting Marxist theory because the school cafeteria switched from Coke to Pepsi ... it becomes a little tired and melodramatic.

I'd wager that 99% of all people will never audit their IP stack, recompile their browser, or otherwise want any involvement in this stuff. They want the latest cool thing, and not some near approximation of it which comes in a kit.

What they want is a tool to get the stuff done they need/want to, and they want it with as little hair pulling as possible.

And, really, let's be honest here ... Windows is no more (or less) open than Apple, and in the places where they're more open, they're trying to be less, just like Apple. Everybody wants their own walled garden.

Hell, I installed a Linux Mint VM image a while back, and it wasn't even possible to set the search provider to Google, apparently because it's not ideologically pure enough or something.

So, if my Mom was looking for a tablet ... I'm going to find her one which suits her needs and will work for her, and I am never going to say "ZOMG, but this software is teh free".

Because my Mom already rolls her eyes at the rest of my loony rants, and doesn't give a damn about software freedom.

So, if you want to know why people aren't doing this, it's because when someone starts screaming "viva la revolucion" over software freedom, people roll their eyes and try to get distance from you.

Don't get me wrong, I likes me some Open Source software. But, have I built an entire ideology around it? Hell no.

Editors can't spell (or read), that gross poop eating guy, Time Cube guy, Cowboy Neil, dupes.

I'm sure there's plenty more.

I, for one, welcome our new meme-studying overlords.

If you tell me that the Earth is going to change for the worse, and there's nothing we can do to stop it, then my response is we shouldn't try. We should instead work on how to survive the change. No reason to waste resources trying to stop something that can't be, spend them on dealing with it instead.

Likewise if you tell me Earth is doomed, and there's nothing we can do to stop it, then my response is that we should just not worry about the future at all, and enjoy what time we have left because there isn't anything else to do.

However if you tell me that we are creating a problem, but we can fix that problem by changing what we are doing, then I'm interested in hearing what you propose we do, what it would cost, how it would mitigate the problem, etc, etc.

If a problem is solvable then it makes sense to talk about what it would take to solve it. If a problem is just something we can't do anything about then we shouldn't worry about trying.

Yes, wireless network security, network service security, and wireless data coverage are all solid enough that this is a great idea and definitely could not be easily hacked.

Humor has nothing to do with the incorrect definition of the number of dimensions of an object.

Which is why I mentioned your pedantry.

Let me draw you a diagram _________________

That is a two dimensional non-solid object since is has a height, one pixel, and a width, more than one pixel.

In fact, since it's drawn with electrons, it's got depth too. Actually, since it's drawn as pixels on your screen, which by now are probably discrete LED components, it's much more than that.

It's a signal which causes a series of diodes to emit a color which your eyes perceive as a straight black line -- in reality, it's none of those things either.

Look, you can be as pedantic, reductionist, and anal retentive about this as you like .. it's not contributing anything to this.

For purpose of explaining this and discussing it, they defined a plane in terms of this sheet of atoms with this particular layout.

That's it. There's no mathematical chicanery going on, and everybody knows it's not, strictly speaking, either a plane or a 2D structure. But it's got some characteristics of a plane, and, for purposes of discussion, is being treated as a 2D structure.

Because, if they had to say this 3-atom thick sheet of interlocking atoms which demonstrates some characteristics of planarity, and allow us to connect them together while maintaining the same type of planarity it would get awfully tedious.

In reality, it's probably not much different than LEGO.

Seriously, get over it. It's almost impossible to discuss this kind of thing without it turning into a tongue twister unless you come up with some form of metaphor.

The rest of this ... it's purely bullshit and pedantry by anal retentive people who need to demonstrate they remember something from math class.

Yes, excellent, from a mathematical perspective it's not 2D. But, for purposes of discussion of these material properties, they're calling it a plane.

You would think that scientists would be more accurate with their articulation of complex concepts.

Well, apparently they've defined a plane to be 3 atoms thick, and have grossly understimated the collective anal retentiveness of the people reading the article.

Dude, seriously, it's a dumbed down metaphor written for a press release.

From the parts of the paper which are available without subscription:

The junctions, grown by lateral heteroepitaxy using physical vapour transport7, are visible in an optical microscope and show enhanced photoluminescence. Atomically resolved transmission electron microscopy reveals that their structure is an undistorted honeycomb lattice in which substitution of one transition metal by another occurs across the interface.

I'm quite sure they're not idiots who really think this is a freakin' 2D plane.

TFA isn't the actual scientific paper, it's the press release intended for the public.

Now, unclench a little, you're gonna hurt yourself. :-P

While your pedantry skills are excellent, and your mathematical skills are pretty good ... I think you need to have your humor unit recalibrated, you seem to be a little out of phase.

I am perfectly aware of the fact that it isn't really a line on a plane in a strict mathematical sense ... heck, I even referenced the thickness of the ink and the fact that the paper has a surface.

Let me draw you a diagram _________________ ;-)

Now, what is the depth (stated in microns / femptofortnight) of the above line?

After about 15 minutes of this I couldn't take it anymore and I looked at the girl and said "Go ahead and punch this guy in the nose, and then ask him whether he still wonders whether you're a figment of your imagination."

LOL ... how do you know it actually happened, and you didn't just imagine it?

Which is precisely the problem with these kinds of postulates, they're completely unknowable, and pretty much stand on their own absurdity.

Because, I could have just imagined typing this, for instance. In which case I'm imagining me imagining you imagining what you did on the bus with the guy I'm imagining you imagining, when I should be trying to imagine the college girl.

And then it just becomes stupid, or, at least, I imagine it does. :-P

Metaphysics has to stop somewhere, otherwise it becomes drivel, which as far as I recall, most metaphysics is.

IF this is a simulated world, there is no reason to assume the rules in the simulation are the same as the ones of the world in which the simulation is running.

You know (and I mean no disrespect here), some of these topics become completely indistinguishable from college nights with way too many bong hits.

Sometimes these things become quite meta.

But what if the simulation is running inside of a simulation? You'd be all like "woah" and shit. And if that was inside of a simulation ... I think it would become Horton Hears a Who.

Yo, Dawg, I hear you like simulations ...

For sufficiently small values of 3 dimensions, it effectively becomes 2 dimensions. ;-)

So, when you draw a line on paper, it's a line on a plane, even though the ink has some depth to it and the paper has a surface which isn't completely flat under a microscope.

Or, something like that.

Can someone explain this to me with a car analogy?

Imagine your car is exactly as tall as your trailer hitch and your trailer, and once connected it's indistinguishable where your car ends and the trailer begins.