Super Mario Brothers was improved by its release as part of Super Mario All Stars.

No it wasn't. The graphics were better, I'll admit that, but the control system was also tweaked, resulting in lower inertia for Mario and making a lot of the fluid gameplay either less challenging or too difficult to replicate from the original. Changing direction in mid-jump was less challenging, giving greater options to avoid enemies. But the timings of jumps and turns relied on the higher-inertia Mario, and changing this made the classic tactics obsolete.

Even the improved graphics affected gameplay. The parallax introduced between the foreground and background may have been a cosmetic improvement, but it inadvertently revealed blocks in the later worlds that were originally hidden by the similar-looking background palette. Those hidden blocks could foil jumps if you didn't know they were there, but by being obvious in the remake they were made redundant.

Super Mario All-stars was a good idea, but it shows that making a prettier game doesn't translate in to a better game, nor indeed a faithful reproduction of the earlier game. I'll always return to the original for my SMB fix.

Here's proof: I was correcting my teacher's spelling in fourth grade.

It's not "sloppy spelling". It's wilful ignorance. You do not need to be well educated to know the difference between "to" and 2, "the" and "da" etc.

The simple fact is, they don't give a shit and their educators have nurtured that attitude by not giving a shit either.

That needs qualifying as #1 in the HOME market. There are many more servers running various brands of Unix and Linux out there than there are running IIS or Apache on a Windows box (though not an insignificant ammount).

Servers are naturally harder to get viruses or trojans onto them as they're generally not used to surf the web, and the only applications executed on them should be done by a responsible sysadmin - who should know better.

Windows is targeted as it is the #1 Home and Business OS, and as most people are clueless about how the technology actually works (running with admin privileges, surfing dodgy sites, falling for phishing scams, opening spam emails). A street magician or scam artist will only target those people who they see as a patsy. The obvious idiot. The lazy fool. Windows and IE attract them both, and they get burned for it.

Yes, but at the top is some form of directory service. If you compromise the majority of those servers you can create a new network consensus, and direct everyone to route through tor1,tor2...torX.nsa.gov. Or some suitable set of apparently random international network of nodes set up for the purpose. The layers don't work if the entire onion is rotten.

I'm not so sure that the new *nix geek and "switcher" Mac users won't jump ship if Apple ever tries to pull something like that, and it seems a lot of Mac users these days are either people who migrated from IRIX/Solaris/AIX/HP-UX (possibly via Linux) or people who switched from Windows because they desperately wanted to get away from it, sticking these users with Windows is likely to drive them to some other *nix OS...

/Mikael

Good ol' islamophobia, here we go again.

That stupid lie, "the islamists will be in charge in 30 years" gets rolled again and again; that doesn't make it more true. It's no more valid than "the commies are out to get us" or "the Catholics breed like rats and will be in charge in, what was it - 30 years". To hell with that.

America plays by the rules, mostly, although there have been some serious breaches of trust from time to time, not least over the Iraq war. China is playing by the rules too and we have no reason to expect that they won't keep doing it; none except that "they are yellow", or are they "red"? Perhaps that makes them orange, then, but whichever colour, they seem to be no worse than the rest of the world.

Does that really make any difference at all in programming? I doubt it; understanding source code does not hinge on how fast you could read the text, in my experience. What really helps is something else:

- Good indentation that follows the block structure of the code
- Good symbol names that are neither too simple nor too rich in information
- Good comments that explain why one has chosen an unusual algorithm and that sort of thing

I think when you read code, you don't read through each letter, you perceive each keyword as a whole. This process gets easier when you always use the same font in your editor, because the keywords then always have the same "shape". Personally I find the "grid-structure" of fixed-width font helpful when writing code, because I can relatively easily format the layout of things, which I occasionally do - eg. when I set up data in an array or table form.

No toy company wants to deal with the shit that medical device regulating agencies (not the plural) can and will send their way. Not for any amount of money.

(Medical device engineer here, with a crapload of shit from $THREE_LETTER_AGENCY coming his way.)

So in your world, telling someone about a company's products is the same as murder?

Such as?

Last time I checked, telling people about a company's product isn't illegal.

Now, they may *possibly* be asking people to break and NDA, but that would be a civil matter, not a criminal one, and therefore it wouldn't be illegal.

Most likely, Warner Bros sent Linden Labs a DMCA take-down notice asking for the removal of Avatar content, just like Warner and others do for all kinds of content all over the internet.
Just because its in Second Life doesn't magically mean the take-down process doesn't apply.

Show me that exception in the constitution. Courts have upheld the right to travel, don't see what a border has to do with this.