Often, yes. Is that just me?

Listened to your links. Frankly, I've heard church music with more dissonance. There was nary a minor 9th, major 7th, or minor 2nd to be found. Some major 2nds in the first link were about as dissonant as it got. I don't know what it is about metal that makes people think the harmonies are more complex than they are, but it's something I hear pretty often. Maybe the harsh timbres of the guitar effects and vocals make people think "this doesn't sound pretty; it must be dissonant."

I agree it's not really accurate to call it "The World's Ugliest Piece of Music." That would imply that the beauty of music is solely a function of how repetitive it is, which is obviously false because a single note repeated at regular intervals (or maybe a square wave held indefinitely on a single pitch) would certainly not qualify as "The World's Most Beautiful Piece of Music."

However, I don't mind this as a bit of marketing. There's really no denying that this piece is intended to be listened to after a brief explanation of the mathematics behind it, and "Mathematically Ugliest Music" is a more intriguing hook than the more descriptive "equally-tempered 88-tone row without repeated pitch or interval classes, played so that no two notes are rhythmically separated by the same rhythmic distance, on the premise that repetition is necessary for beauty in music."

While this piece does minimize a positive aspect of music, it does nothing to maximize negative aspects. Dissonance counterpoint comes to mind as a better example of actually trying to write unpleasing music. Basically, it takes the rules of counterpoint theorists have used to describe the music of Palestrina or Bach, then slavishly follows the opposite of those rules.

Well, different branches of mathematics have different notions of randomness. Your post makes sense assuming a statistician's concept of randomness. Your parent post almost makes sense assuming an information theorist's concept of random. (I say almost because actually proving a sequence to be Kolmogorov random is an incomputable problem.)

I would say that Half-life 2, Picross 3D, Starcraft 2, Super Mario World or Madden NFL '11 would be good adventure games to start with.

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So in decimal that's $448. Honestly, I expected better.

I think it's more a matter of not making a GUI instead of a command line interface. Making both is, of course, perfectly fine, so long as the CLI is fully-featured and reasonably usable.

"Apple's nVidia drivers are about 3 billion times more reliable than anything nVidia itself has ever produced."
FYI, NVIDIA produces Apple's NVIDIA drivers. Sounds like you may have hardware problems on your Win7 box.

I agree with you that it's polite to ask nicely for someone to do what they're paid for. I also agree with your parent post that it's not necessary. It's not like the waitress is justified in not bringing you your dinner because you didn't say please when you ordered.

... just change the grading scale from 90% A, 80% B, 70% C, 60% D, 50% F to 95% A, 90% B, 85% C, 80% D, 75% F.