As of this writing, $40k has been surpassed.

I think you misunderstand. A brute-force attack on a password is "just" a dictionary attack using letters and symbols as your dictionary instead of English words. There's realistically 26 lower case letters, 26 upper case letters, 10 digits, around 32 symbols, and space (just looking at my keyboard), giving us a set of about 95 to compose our passwords from. According to Oxford Dictionaries there's around 171,476 words in current usage. Even if you constrain to what the average person knows, you've got anywhere from 12,000 to 60,000 words depending on who you trust for those kinds of statistics. Want to include your below average person? If XKCD is to be judged, you can still communicate somewhat by limiting yourself to the 1000 most used words. That ignores capitalization variations, so it assumes the attacker knows you only capitalize the first word of the sentence (or whatever your personal rule is). That actually puts a six word passphrase using a vocabulary of 1000 words as harder to brute force than an eight character password.

Passphrases of equivalent length are easier to remember because we're trained to think in sentences, not letters. You can also use visualization techniques, as XKCD suggests, because we associate images with many words, not so much with letters. The biggest problem with passphrases are sites that put an upper limit on passwords, so we're forced to come up with pass phrases that operate as mnemonics for passwords, but then that limits our pool of characters in our password (unless you know a word that begins with the letter %).

Ok, I know we're not originally talking game servers here, but your comments about the world we live in brings up a point. We need to work more on peer-to-peer tech. Not to pirate these always-online games, but to push the cost of running a game server onto the users. If each player pays a little bit in CPU, disk space, and bandwidth, a currency they're already willing to expend just playing the game in the first place, then as long as there are people playing, there will be servers. Of course this won't happen from big studios, it removes their control. But littler studios can do it, particularly indies, because what indy can afford to maintain a huge server farm?

I've used it - it's installed on my TV room computer (can't really call it an HTPC). As a developer, I don't like it as a desktop, but I could possibly grow to like it for the usecase I have it in once native apps start becoming available. But I'm not so sure about the de-factor Windows gaming iteration, what with them throwing away XNA for native apps. Gotta go to Monogame if you want a native XNA game. With all the big-name studios turning out clones of each other and turning on draconian DRM, XNA is actually a decent part of the games that are actually worth playing.

J-walking is a crime. Just because it's illegal doesn't mean you will be prosecuted for it.

And one of those actors was Patrick Stewart, whose character died in the intro, only leaving 2 actors for the whole rest of the game...

Yeah, and while they're at it they should roll back the c++98 standard too, since a previous employer was stuck with a pre-standards compliant C++ compiler and couldn't use such useless features as the STL. Personally, I think you write code to your requirements. No need to hold the industry back because your system only understands COBOL 74. C++ desperately needed an update. Unfortunately it still needs it, but at least it's incrementally better.

Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! It's java! Java is teh suxors! It would get a bajillion frames per microsecond if they just wrote in pure machine code!

Sorry, the Java is slow meme has gotten way too old and posts like yours shouldn't be necessary. Voxels are not as simple as people think they are. There's way more vertices, surfaces, and triangles in a simple voxel landscape than in a typical mesh landscape, primarily because voxels also have depth while a mesh is just just the surface. You basically take the amount of data a "traditional" game is trying to shove down the video card's throat and raise it by a couple of factors then desperately try to reduce that number by employing clever hacks. So, yeah, someone can try to look smart and compare Minecraft to Crysis (really? We're still on the Crysis standard?), but all they're really showing is their ignorance of how complex voxels really are.

Actually, this may be an apt analogy. You get the item to review in advance with the understanding that it's exactly what the purchaser will see. You find out later you've been had, you don't just lower the score to what is appropriate (oh, it was 9, but since there's a few login problems it's a 7), you slam them for violating the agreement. Because, as a reviewer, that is your leverage against the publisher making a special build just for you that hides all the flaws. I could see this with a car review as much as a video game review.

Judging by how every major alternative effectively got ddos'd last nite when Google announced this, I can't imagine the number of users is insignificant. Google is most likely not canceling this because it's not popular, they're canceling it because it loses too much money.

I'm in a similar boat, but my tipping point for moving to a block list was malware. Even the mighty double-click, who should have been big enough to actually screen their ads, has served up malware on more than one occasion. I'm all for a simple way for sites to make money, but if they're asking me to do the equivalent of walking through a dark alley filled with shady characters, I'll pass.

I'd wager to say, you haven't met homeschooled kids who were "normal" either. Ahead of their peers, writing over 50k words in a month voluntarily, playing instruments... They're outliers, above, but outside, the range that is considered "normal."

You're never going to meet one. By definition, to be "normal" means you do things "normal" people do, which includes going to public school. You're going to find the religious nut, the over-protective nut, the expelled kids, the kids that have health problems the school can't deal with, or the kids with the intelligent, geeky parents. None of those are "normal."

I was homeschooled and I plan to homeschool my kids. I've interacted with quite a few homeschooled kids because of this. I can say that a lot of kids are homeschooled for religious reasons - the parents want a religious education but can't send them off to a religious school. There's also a decent share of chronic-troublemakers and a few that have health problems the schools are ill-equipped to handle. I'm sure there were more than a few parents that were in it because they wanted a better education, but they weren't very vocal about it....