...but only the Church of Scientology has forced comments out of existence.

I could have sworn that several years back some comments were removed because they contained a threat to the US president?

Best part of a decade ago there was a Windows email virus (forget which one, sorry) that did rather well for itself. In order to avoid detection, it spread by email in a password protected zip file. In order to become infected, the user had to open the zip by typing in the randomly generated password given in the email, extract the executable within, then run it.

It was then that I realised there will never be a technical solution that makes more than a dent in malware infections.

That jumped out at me as well. And I'm not sure that it is just ambiguity over the meaning of 'several': The way he mentions it right after infants adapting to the different conditions, I think...I think he's actually implying Lamarckian evolution is the driving force.

I don't think that's right. With millisecond resolution (which is the resolution of the clock, but the input event loop will be much slower no doubt) you could pick any one second, and then have 3^1000 combinations of either moving left, moving right, or doing nothing for each tick in that second. As I say, the actual input response will be far slower, but even if it's 1/10th of a second, you only need a few seconds to get an astronomical number. Playing every possible game is entirely unfeasible. You could try to prune it, but even that is non-trivial. A left or right move can affect the behaviour of any barrel on a higher level, for example.

Oh God, you're right. That makes it even harder to calculate an optimum strategy. Maybe you're better off pausing for a fraction of a second and getting 300 for one fireball, so that you get higher points for that 8 barrel sequence that will reach you a few levels later (for those who don't know, the PRNG in dkong is really just the system clock). So there is still a theoretical highest-possible score (obviously, as you can't achieve an infinite score), but you'd have to be insane to figure out what it was.

I've partly answered this in a previous comment, but as an illustration of how much higher the score can go, take a look at level 1-1 (the first barrel round). In Wiebe's highest scoring game, he scored ~8000 points on that level. Twingalaxies opened a track for who could get the highest score on that level, and although the site is slashdotted, from memory it was well in excess of 12000. The barrel rounds are by far the most common in the game so that suggests a huge margin for improvement.

Of course, the 1-1 barrel round is quite different from the 5-1 barrel round. In the latter the timer counts down far faster, so there's less time to points press. On the other hand, you have far more control over the barrels, which makes higher scoring easier (if you ignore that whole 'death' thing).

If I had to make a guess, I'd say there's theoretically hundreds of thousands more points to score. Maybe even break 2 million if the game cooperates?

Well there is a theoretical limit because of the time limit per board and the kill screen, but figuring it out would be very hard (and achieving it practically impossible). It would first involve figuring out the optimum strategy assuming that the various enemies behaved in certain ways - e.g. the fireballs on the pie factory all respawning and immediately heading towards you while you have the mallet, the fireballs and blue barrels all being worth 800 points, etc, etc.

But the odds of this happening are probably on a par with winning the lottery many times over. If the PRNG decides a blue barrel is worth 300 then that's 500 points lost and nothing the player can do about it. And the optimum strategy for a theoretical perfect game is probably very different to the optimum strategy for a typical game.

My thoughts are: just because what you wrote exceeds Twitter's 140 char limit doesn't mean you should post it to Slashdot's front page intead.

...and why exactly would they want to use Google's private key instead of, say, the one they just created a signed certificate with?

You've been taken in by Slashdot's trademark selective quoting. What was actually written was:

The team is manifestly out of their depth with regards to web application security, and it is almost certainly impossible for them to gather the required expertise and still hit their timetable for public release in a month. You might believe in the powers of OSS to gather experts (or at least folks who have shipped a Rails app, like myself) to Diaspora's banner and ferret out all the issues. You might also believe in magic code-fixing fairies. Personally, I'd be praying for the fairies because if Diaspora is dependent on the OSS community their users are screwed.

(my bold) So he's not actually saying anything bad at all about OSS; he's just saying that being OSS doesn't mean that they can magically gain experience (or experienced developers) and fix their entire codebase in a month. The notion that OSS development is to blame was purely down to Slashdot (or the submitter).