As you said,

I liked the Watchmen, so I probably won't be listening to your advice on games or movies.

Maybe you just have very different tastes from everybody else in this community. I usually like movies that are recommended to me by my friends, and often movies that other people on Slashdot like.

Yeah, it is the same situation. I was responding to the parent poster who said that this system will create a resurgence of indie developers taking risks and it will do no such thing. It will just be more of the same but on a different medium.

Yep, that's where a lot of money is at... and that's who iPhone games will be targeting. The grandparent poster was claiming that this would be a resurgence of indie, risk taking content and it's no such thing. It's just the creation of it's own mobile genre of games with their pros and cons.

I don't know if you've seen what's on the app store, but it's not games which take risks. There's a 1000 variations on Angry Birds, Doodle Jump and Bejeweled. I wouldn't call something like Fruit Ninja a risky proposition in terms of game design. Fact is, you need a fairly decent budget in order to make some really compelling content. iPhone games are fun for anywhere from a few minutes to a couple hours, but I've played a lot of iPhone games and none have come close to being a truly great gaming experience. Low budgets and really low priced games just mean that people will be making short arcade games that can be played for 30 seconds at a time and will have a limited number of characters, backgrounds and animations because that looks to be the golden ratio of where it's worth it for a developer to make a $.99 game and for it to sell enough copies to people who want a game to play on the toilet.

I completely agree with you. I went to decent public schools in NY and I still didn't understand evolution until I took it upon myself to read more about it after college. The only thing that the teachers mentioned about evolution being true was the fossil record but that's only 1 of the many pieces of evidence that we have supporting evolutionary theory. They didn't teach us about the predictive nature of evolutionary theory or about many of the defects in existing animal species that are remnants of our biological history - such as the circuitous route that the laryngeal nerve takes in humans and especially so in giraffes. To hear it taught in school, you'd think only paleontologists are responsible for evolutionary theory.

I'm sure they could come up with better patents than some humans have.

There are people nostalgic about anything, but this is a very good move. Who knows how much paper and other resources is wasted printing those damn things every year.

They probably used aggregate data from the relationship status as opposed to wall status. You can't really misconstrue the message between "Joe is in a relationship with Jane" to "Joe set his relationship status to single"

Just to make it clear, do you mean "ugly" as in "movie ugly" or "ugly ugly?"

if robots are doing everything, then why are we important?

Cause we built the fucking robots, that's why! What's so grand about humanity at the moment? We eat, shit, and sleep just like every other animal. We've constructed amazing cities and technologies, mostly for the primal purposes of advancing individual stature in society or getting laid, and all of which will be gone and forgotten in a 100 million years - if I were to be optimistic. The only way that humans will achieve immortality among the cosmos is if we create lifeforms that will aid us in that task, and if we succeed in building these robots to the level that we require of them, then they will join our society as equals.

you're getting this stuff for free. You watch YouTube videos for free. This stuff costs Google money to provide you this free service and it has been subsidizing it for you with it's vast amounts of money for years. Is it really that much to ask for you to either watch the commercial that it plays or if you don't want to then pay a couple bucks to continue watching it for free? Online consumers are some seriously spoiled people.

Exactly right. I'm currently learning linear algebra from Khan Academy because I never needed to take the classes in school, and the instruction and explanation is a lot better than in 95% of my high school and college courses. For one guy to go to the trouble of making hundreds of videos to teach people this stuff for free is incredible and people should be throwing more than 2 million bucks at him.

Your analogy isn't the same because poker is a game you're playing against other players, whereas most of the free-to-play games like farmville and over MMORPGs don't require you to compete directly with others for enjoyment in the game. Even so, pretty much every game has a system where you could buy better stuff to get ahead of the competition. With basketball, you couple spend a couple hundred bucks on shoes to gain some advantage. In paintball, billiards, golf, tennis, bowling, skateboarding, etc, you could spend hundreds or thousands of dollars on premium equipment that is a lot better than the stuff you rent if you're just a weekend player instead of having a serious hobby or playing professionally. Same goes with farmville. If you want to just play for fun, go for it... if you want to take it seriously (although I don't know why you would), you could pay a bit more money.

I click on a lot of shortened links and I've never had it redirect to goatse.cx or worse, so I don't know what type of internet sites you're hanging around on.