Which can be rewritten as 'Microsoft specified it would only be free for the first year, which I interpret to mean that there will then be a yearly fee.'

The other, more logical, interpretation is 'After a year, even if running windows 7, 8 or 8.1, you'll need to purchase an upgrade at standard retail.'

Those are examples where the game sets a 'do not sleep controller' flag. Or a 'do not pause on controller disconnect.' Or something similar.

As I said, good points and bad points. A single platform can be good, because every program can leverage all features of that platform. Counterpoint: maybe there's no incentive to develop new and interesting features in future versions of the platform.

Multiplatform is good, because they're all competing. Counterpoint: no point in using feature of platform X if it locks you out of all other platforms, or you're coding lots and lots of platform specific code paths. Remember when games, say, would have the software renderer, the directX 9 renderer, the 10 renderer, the NVidia openGL renderer, the ATI openGL renderer, and maybe a vanilla openGL renderer?

May I once again posit that war is not a natural result of being human, but rather one put upon mankind by strong, selfish, sociopaths that profit from it?

It's a natural result of life, apparently. Go look at some pictures of floppy-eared puppies, or fluffy kittens or fish or trees or algae or fungus: awwww, what cute warlike sociopaths. "You're eating my food, competing for my mate, or claiming my turf? Fuck you. DIE!!" Humanity is the only thing I ever heard of, who sometimes isn't sociopathic.

One can hypothesize a space empire without war, but it would require some extreme creativity. If you have an idea for a warless game, that's awesome, but do you really think war is a far-fetched assumption on someone else's part? I know what planet you grew up on, earthling, so quite pretending you're from some other alien background.

Never?! Get used to it! :)

as someone who saw Carcass and Obituary in Nov, and who is about to see Napalm Death (and Voivod, and Black Crown Initiate, and Ringworm, and ...)... WTF does your post have to do with anything?

OH!

You're saying that these intense, but short, broadcasts are examples of interstellar speed metal; a-la Napalm Death's sub-second song "You Suffer" ... ?

then say so!

don't be a hater; it's a solid "B" effort from the parent-post. You can argue it down to a "C", but that's as far as you'll get. Lulling the reader into submission (your complaint about it taking too long) is an actual STRATEGY. Are you familiar with how certain readers can gloss over typos? That's what our beheaderaswp is using as a trapping action. Now you can also argue that the barb "never going to give" isn't worth burying with the lead-up, but while humor bursts from the unexpected there is also a joy in the familiar. I'm sorry if this attempt isn't up to your standards, but it hits the standard.

Which also meant you had to code to the lowest possible denominator.

Solaris has a kick-ass new feature in it's shell? Too bad; can't touch it. IRIX has a neat library to do something? Too bad, can't touch it. You can code to C-89, maybe POSIX, and that's that.

Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages.

The other day, I booted up a new-in-the-box Acer laptop (or Asus, maybe) and was pleasantly surprised that it was already set to boot to desktop.

There's a fuckton of good stuff under the hood of Win8; the start menu just went fullscreen.

So, basically you're saying that you Love the Power Glove?

It's so bad.

... round up women at gunpoint and MAKE them enter under represented fields.

I mean, Equality is ore important than Liberty, right?

Oh, you're right. What could possibly be less predictive than "climate science?"

Aha! So I just need to start a new FUSE project which presents the binary logs as text. :-)

Sounds like I should change my business cards to: "Den Mother of Infantile Cretins."

Through means of what was, essentially, boot-sector malware, if I recall correctly.