OMG, it's ported to Android. I guess I should have googled before posting.

Does anybody else remember Koules? It's sort of a breakout game, but your market get moved around by the ball and you can get bumped off the screen. It's hard to describe, but I want it back. The Home Page for Koules indicates that it's for X and for OS/2. I remember having difficulty building it for 'modern Linux' with sound support about ten years ago.

It's really good and I've never seen another game like it. It was a binary package, I think, on Slackware in the 90's, I believe that was where I first encountered it.

whoops. I didn't mean xboing. I meant koules. Which is an awesome game, and deserves a top level post, not just a buried reply so I am going to do that now.

About ten years ago I tried building it and couldn't. It was already quite old. It's almost good enough to be worth putting together an old Slackware box ( say, 1.2.18 kernel or so, with sb16- some of us DO have hardware like that still in piles) Hmm, that's a worthwhile project, actually...

Keyword is 'plan.' I like having zero commitment.

I take weeks at a time off from having a smartphone. My 30 days starts up again as soon as I plop down another $35. If you don't renew, you've still got a good wifi pocket computer, far cheaper than an iPod touch, and with an sd slot.

But anyways, all cheap mobile data options rock, it's great that they exist.

You can shop around and find a Virgin Mobile smartphone for $40 too. Even an Android 4 one. Then the voice/data plan is $35/mo with no contract.

Similar reasoning can help along the process of mandating all sorts of stuff.

OnStar is not a mandated feature in all vehicles.

No. Perhaps data should be recorded to write-only tape. That the defendant's legal representative and the DA have the ability to rewind and view. 'Data stores' are trivial to edit. Linear tapes are impossible to edit.

They are more likely to feel like they have to. Someone else is watching, after all, and it will come back on them if they don't strictly follow the rules.

Or, we could eliminate the DOE, FDA, EPA, any number of other TLA's. But that's not going to happen, is it?

Actually, they made substantial updates to Windows Paint just one major version ago with Windows 7. It's a pretty nice, usable program now, with most of the features a light user would want for editing, reshaping and prepping bitmaps. It works with all the important formats. It's one of the gem applets of Windows 7.

Supercell is eating Zynga's lunch. With a business plan so different that it's staggering. No, Zynga isn't long for this world. When they die, nobody will fucking care, either.

Edison/Tesla rants are so boring.

Edison was a very successful businessman. His greatest invention was the Research and Development Lab (you hire a bunch of people who work for you inventing stuff that you own the patents for) Probably his second greatest invention was whatever he did to win the PR battle so well that people consider him as an individual a 'great inventor.'

Tesla was a different matter. He was an Edison employee, one among many. It's sad that he went stark raving batshit mad in his later years, but things like that happen. Books with his design drawings from his later years sell well in coffee-table books in the same section of the bookstore as the Allister Crowley books.

Well, Harvest Moon is rather different from the three other games you mention. Your success is based on your interaction with the NPCs in the game. Your character can get married and have a kid with the NPC you select in some of the HM games. The farming and crops are important, but definitely secondary.

The more extreme extension of Harvest Moon is Rune Factory, which is awesome but even more complicated because dungeon crawling and fighting monsters is added in. Figuring out who to befriend in the village and where during the timeline to do so is also important.

No, it's nothing like FarmVille.