I understand the original gripe about not allowing punctuation in a name. However, the author of the linked article goes overboard.

Everything relies on assumptions, especially computer systems. The blog author assumed I could read English and had a browser that could navigate hyperlinks (to anyone who wants to respond "well you didn't have to read it" - well, no one has to do anything. The author of the original linked article didn't have to use the system that wouldn't take his name.). It's only an assumption that my telephone has digits 0-9 on the keypad. It's only an assumption that my computer monitor is rectangular. It's only an assumption that I live on Earth.

Any design of any system relies on assumptions. We try to pick good ones. "Names don't have any punctuation" is probably a bad assumption, but "People have names" is probably OK. Of course, it's all a value judgement, but if you find that "people have names" to be too broad of an assumption, have fun designing the rest of your system. I hope the author hasn't designed any systems that assume I use base-10 numerals, or that I don't use script that flows from the bottom to the top of a page on oddly-numbered dates.

Funny, coming from a cop. A camera's "chilling effect on proceedings" pales in comparison to a police officer's.

This just in... stupid people aren't happy when they realize they're stupid. Full story at 11.

The simple explanation to the ending is, in my mind, the right one. "Sideways" was the afterlife - there's no sense of time, and the characters all eventually "awaken," remember their real lives, and reunite to take the final journey. Everything that happened on the island was science-fictiony, but it was real. The bomb didn't trigger the flash-sideways, it was always there and we just hadn't seen it yet. The bomb didn't even explode in the traditional sense, it just triggered a time-travelling incident (which, again, really happened - it's a sci-fi show).

The ending hit an emotional high note - if you had anything invested in the human drama of the characters at all, you're lying if you say that wasn't cathartic to see them all reunite in the afterlife, dressed to the nines, rejoicing and ready to take the final step. However, the good-vs-evil storyline, even though it only really appeared this season, ended up living fully on the island, and so we got a lame little tussle and an ignominious kick-off-the-cliff of the unnamed and unexplained "bad guy." With a few tweaks throughout the season and a rewrite of the last half of the finale, it could have been epic.

When not-Locke said "you're too late" before being killed, and then Locke woke up in the hospital after surgery and said "... it worked," I thought "Oh hell yes, this is it. He never had to *physically* escape - he's transplanted his malevolence into John's body in the other reality." If they had put a little more writing into the purpose of the island and making Mr. Black the devil/evil incarnate, they could have moved the "this is the afterlife" reveal and a few other events to the middle of the finale, and we would have had a hell of a final hour with the special-effects-laden showdown the fans were denied: the devil has escaped his prison and is just this side of breaking into heaven, and Jack, who could have retained his protectorship into the afterlife to chase him, has to stop him. We get to see Mr. Black shape-shift and retake his original body, see John re-inherit his body, Mr. Black becomes the smoke on-camera, big battle with Jack, the other characters still have their emotional reuniting and then are there with dear old dad and even Jacob to cheer Jack on. Jack wins and is horribly wounded, but hey, it's the afterlife, and they still all get to go to heaven.

It's not about striking it rich, it's about making the companies who have struck it rich with less good-natured business models consider this method of distribution, or something like it, as an option.

I may be generalizing a bit much, but it appears that the "pay what you want" model has engendered a lot of goodwill. People like it, and want more game producers to use it. We're lamenting the fact that that's not going to happen when it's celebrating $1 million as a milestone when that's what the big publishers make in a fraction of the time.

He should sue the music industry for distributing the music in the first place. After all, if they hadn't sold it, it wouldn't be available to steal.

Then, the industry can turn around and sue the musician for the same thing.

Let's see... as of right now, the total contributed is $1,030,536, and the total number of contributions is 113,838, making the average contribution $9.05 for a bundle of four games (5 if the people who purchased the bundle before Penumbra was added still get it).

An executive at EA just blew his nose on $1,030,536. They are not interested.

Actually, this is a great idea. Let's make every YouTube user responsible for policing themselves. If they upload infringing material, they can issue themselves a takedown request, respond to themselves with a fair use claim, and then sue themselves for copyright infringement. Look how streamlined this makes the process: The publishers won't have to lift a finger! They should be paying me for coming up with such great ideas.

If the games are too expensive and don't offer enough replayability, rental is a good option. Try Gamefly.

As for a console that could download $10-$15 games: XBox Live Arcade is fantastic.

That's one reason digital distribution makes sense: it pushes the value of a copy close to zero (as opposed to now, where you have to pay for packaging, shipping and shelf space), and makes payment truly represent a *license*, not a *copy*. Are licenses meaningless too? If so, how do you suggest that the people who spent time making the software be compensated?

Well, of course it's stupid to pay if that's the case, but it's not really the case for Nintendo. I'm assuming that "better alternative" refers to free software, as opposed to piracy of software that is not free.

Mod parent up.

"Hardcore" gamers bitching about shovelware and casual games should realize that rampant piracy makes developing a multimillion dollar blockbuster look a lot less attractive. It's a much better financial proposition to create low-budget games that cater to people who are less likely to pirate them.

Yeah, but that image doesn't show the part where you have to figure out what BitTorrent is, what a client is, figure out how to get, install, configure and run a client, reliably find what you want, extract and decompress it, find software that can burn it to a disc and then get it to actually do that - and then find out if what you got was actually a copy of the movie you wanted to see.

To an average consumer, buying a physical disc is easy. It's at the store, just like everything else, and doesn't require you to do anything you don't know how to do. Same goes for iTunes: click here, get iTunes, and searching in the search bar returns big friendly splash screens with listings, not screens full of XxX- WarezDePoT Avatar XviD Scnr RIP multisub FULL -XxX.rar.

The "money paid" was paid to enter into an expiring contract for provision of a service - a service that Microsoft is free to terminate. Now that the service is being terminated, people using Xbox Live solely to play OXbox games like Halo 2 no longer need to pay for it.

Halo 2 still works just fine, and no one is taking away the ability to use it.

Except it *doesn't* resolve the issue, because lots and lots of other people buy into it every day. As more people do, it becomes more OK for companies to pull this kind of crap. It's a tyranny-of-the-majority problem - competitors will look at the walled garden model, see that its working (obviously the people want it, right? Look at iPhone sales!), and emulate it. Quality and integration on the platform goes up (as well as sales), and freedom goes down.

Look, I'm not RMS, parading for information to be free in every situation, nor can I say I wage war every day against the erosion of privacy. I don't want to make it sound like the apocalypse is coming. All I'm saying is that if people continue to buy into this model and make it successful, other major corporations that can throw their weight around will make their own walled gardens, with their own subjective moral rules and guidelines. Steve says go to Android if you want porn... what if Google sets up their own app store and review process? Yeah, I know they can do no wrong, but neither could Apple in the eyes of Apple developers just a few years ago, and now those developers are screaming about the fact that it's Apple's way or the highway - and Apple did it because it's so clearly what consumers wanted, otherwise they wouldn't be buying into it.

There may be an app for everything, but if we're not careful, there may not be any platform that lets many of those apps into their walled gardens, if we keep supporting this model.