I know parent is joking, but according to the leaked TSA screening guidelines from last year, passengers do have the choice of a male or female screener for the pat-down, regardless of sexual orientation.

The article definitely says the other tire is "newer," not "new." But that's still fun to imagine.

That's just silly. No one controls the mighty Megalosaurus!

One big reason for all the attention is that Valve has released the full source and SDK alongside it. Mods haven't started rolling in yet, but there are sure to be quite a few.

I'm sure SC2's editor is great, though.

Whew! I guess we don't need the Supreme Court anymore.

Article is referring to this tool: disk2vhd

I have a friends list called "Restricted" which is specifically blocked from seeing anything other than what they would already have seen on the search results. When I approve a friend request, I first add them to the Restricted list and check to make sure they are who they say they are. Then they get moved to the general friend population.

It does take a little time to set it up in the privacy controls (you have to go to each and every item, drop the list box, click "custom," and type "Restricted" under "hide this from"), but you may find it worthwhile.

I believe I read somewhere that if someone pokes you, you’re given access to their limited profile for 30 days (or something like that). Can anyone verify?

Although I guess it would be a little odd to respond to a friend request with “poke me so I can see your profile, I’m not sure I know you”.

Did we not establish a while back that "abstinence only" doesn't work ?

so you can't hide your city anymore...carmen sandiego is FUCKED

You are a cruel, cruel man, Bill McGonicle, misusing your low user ID to spread that sort of deception.

I'm sure that that's what Facebook is doing, but this move doesn't really help with that. If they want to sell your information, wouldn't it make more sense to offer a service that allows you to see any profile regardless of privacy settings (especially if you don't make knowledge of this service widely available to the general public)? Allowing anyone to see more information about everyone else doesn't exactly advance this goal.

Most everyone keeps bringing up legalities like theft, copyright, trademark, plagiarism, etc.but not really evaluating the ethical issues for why these laws exist. I think what is important to look at here is intent. Is the intent to make an homage to a pre-existing work or to simply steal all the hard work and pass it off as your own? Is the intent to improve on the work already done or to simply copy it? D&D ripped off a lot of Tolkein, but it created a new universe and placed it in a new environment (the RPG). Paladium Fantasy rips off a lot of D&D, but puts it in Paladium's own universe with their own RPG system. Warcraft rips off D&D as well, but again, new universe, new environment (video games). I don't consider these "clones." The intent of these games were to take pre-existing content and improve upon it and creatively make it their own.

It's an entirely different story when we're looking back at the old days of Atari / NES. How many Gradius clones were there, for instance? Did these games really improve upon the content of Gradius, or simply take the same gameplay the same concepts and simply change how a few things functioned to make a "different" game? Castlevania clones, SMB clones, Defender clones, they all abounded in the land of 8-bit, because it was easy to do it. We don't see as many clones these days unless we're looking at the mod community, and the majority of those modders are attempting to make an homage to their favorite games within another of their favorite games, with no intent of ever making money off it.

I think modding should be encouraged, as it leads to new and better games. I think using inspired content to branch out into new universes and new genres should also be encouraged. It is the actual lazy turn-a-buck copypasta clone games which should be despised --

-- but without them, we wouldn't have many games on our cell phones...

Guild Wars does this. All max weapons of the same type (swords, axes, hammers, bows,etc...) have the same damage level, as all max armor for every class all have the same armor rating. You can change your skills for free as long as you're in an outpost, you can change your secondary class at will (for PvP characters. For PvE characters, you have to pass a certain point in the story line first). You can get to max potential (max level, all attribute points) in 4 hours depending on which campaign you start in (Prophesies is the slowest but has no exclusive classes), or start there on a pvp-only character.