I praise EU for strengthening consumer laws, but I think this could be difficult to implement, depending on how strict it will be. Surely account information is often backed up by companies. Does this imply that they are forced by law to delete my accounts from backups as well? It sounds like a huge challenge. What if companies restore an old backup, including deleted account information? I'm all for consumer protection, but let's file this together with "company liability for computer software". Both are well meaning, and maybe even "right" in principle, but would have bad effects in practice.

Movie censorship in the US of A is bad enough as it is.
Skipping all the issues with the actual censorship process, movie companies effectively sensor themselves, which gives us a clusterfuck of PG-13 rated movies, just so they can cash in more on the extra audience/target group. I'm not saying all PG-13 movies are bad, but I'm personally left with a feeling that such movies don't show their true potential; especially when the story/theme inherently targets adults. I feel I was robbed for a better experience, just so some children's feelings won't get hurt. $deity forbid if they were to see a boob.
I like games and movies that push the limits of what's considered 'proper' (by the US moralists and people in general), and I also enjoy my slasher/grindhouse/exploitation movies occasionally (Incidentally they're all made in the 70's). There is no reason to believe that game censorship won't have a similar side-effect. This could be remedied by stretching the limits of what is considered appropriate for teenagers, so most games could be made for this age demographic without having to butcher their expressiveness in the process. Be it scary scenes, violence, cussing, drug use or sex. But since the moral values of whomever makes these censorship laws are warped compared to most people who actually *watch* movies and *play* games, I don't see this happening anytime soon.

If the score and rankings don't match up properly because of cheaters, what's the point with scoring in the first place? Just local scores to beat your own personal records? In Starcraft 2? Give me a break. And "It's a game, so why take it so seriously" is a stupid fallacy. Just because something is for fun and recreation doesn't mean it can't or should not be taken seriously. In games with other players, people expect fairness for all players. It's a basic principle.

False. It is a criminal case, not a civil case. It was not the owner of the robot (Timber Hills) who took the case to court. It's the local court in Oslo, Oslo Tingrett who took the case from the finance police, who got tipped off by the Oslo stock exchange. Both men appealed, so this case will go to the Supreme Court (hoeyesterett).

The infection statistics are against you. 58% of all the infections are inside Iran. Clearly the worm was first released there. Read the report from Symantec. The top infected countries are: Iran 58%, Indonesia 17%, and India: 9%
The fact that the worm spread to other countries is just collateral damage. It's a balancing game. If you don't infect enough, you won't infect your intended target. If you infect too much, you get collateral damage and potentially expose the worm to the public eye.

If you cared to read the report from Symantec, you would see that there are other indicators as well. For example, 58% of the infections were in Iran, beating the second place country 3 to 1. Obviously because the virus was originally seeded there, but perhaps you have a better explanation? There is nothing that indicates that Israel or any specific country is behind Stuxnet, but there are really good indications that Iran infrastructure was the target. Unless machines in Iran somehow are much more vulnerable to attack compared to machines in the other 100+ countries. What can be said about the attacks though, is that this was *not* in any way coded by a bedroom coder. It utilized four 0-day vulnerabilities, and compromised two digital certificates. On of them from Realtek and the other from JMicron. The worm's goal was to sabotage PLCs, and very specific one at that. It doesn't target any PLC. To be able to target the hardware Stuxnet does would require information from an insider. It's like ripped out from a Tom Clancy novel.

Not to mention the handling of proprietary drivers, like certain Wireless-cards and nVidia display drivers. They are kind of a mixed bag I think. It's not entirely obvious how to override it, but it's possible. Either you love it, or you hate it.

Hahahaha.. this really made my day!

You're kidding, but I wouldn't be so sure. Intellectual property is the only remaining goods the U.S exports. If anything could make the U.S start a nuclear war, it would be something that threatens its economy.

I live in Trondheim, Norway. The City area (downtown) is very small compared to *real* cities like Berlin, London, Stockholm, Copenhagen, etc, but the population is above 200,000 now. So I'll settle for "ordinary city". So the city heart is more like a towns, but the population count is more of a city. Same applies to Bergen, I think.

But low latency is just as important. Why is it always the bandwidth which is advertised in big numbers and not the latency?

I abstain from buying because I don't think I can pay enough for so many games in good conscience. The games are decent, and the 20 USD I can afford now wouldn't do the games justice.
The whole "experiment" is useless without this option, in my opinion. They're going to see a bunch of people paying 1 cent going to EFF and conclude "what a bunch of cheapskates", when there is a good amount of people who either could buy later (after the offer limit), or refuse to buy that many games hands-down, because they actually *value* those games at 70-80 USD and think it's too much money to spend.

These kind of people won't show up in the statistics.

How do you programmatically calculate a number or scale of the perceived entertainment value of a Mario level? Beside being able to complete the level and the difficulty, is there something objective one can measure, or does it boil down to simple taste?

If not, then the competition is kind of pointless, since the winner would be arbitrary.

Also, just because you can code, doesn't mean you know how to create the necessary artwork. In my experience, good artists who want to contribute to open source software in general are a rare breed. And even less artists want to help out open source games.

If you don't understand the difference between a O(n) sorting algorithm and a O(n!) one, you're pretty much screwed as a programmer. If you don't know much math in general, *at least* learn time complexity for different algorithm operations. Perhaps this is why software is so slow nowadays? ;-)