These are adults. If they can't figure out when to not be obnoxious, ask them to leave.

Actually, AC, they did NOT state that they would be bringing it back. That's inferred. Quoting from the site, "We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await." That's pretty plain and up-front, despite your polemic against the editors.

There is a good amount of information suggesting that this may in fact be a marketing stunt; have a read of Kotaku's write-up: http://kotaku.com/5642141/what-happened-to-good-old-games. Personally, if this is in fact a marketing stunt, I will -never- purchase from GOG again. Lying to your customers doesn't make them want to spend their money on your products.

Pay Rusty a visit at www.kuro5hin.org. Then you'll really pine for the old days.

X3 is great, but the best modern space sim I've played is an indie title (albeit, a very serious one by a dude who's been making space sims for over 10 years): Evochron Legends.

You actually didn't need to physically mod the XBox -- a copy of Splinter cell, a third-party memory card, and some software from the net were all you needed to "soft-mod" it. Same effect as a hardware mod, no need to open the case.

Well, that's it for me. I just cancelled Facebook; I think there's a deeply frightening assumption being made by Zuckerberg, and the candy of Facebook is not worth the marketing nonsense that it will likely bring, or the endorsement of the generally poor behavior of the CEO. At least from where I'm sitting, the only option anyone has to disagree is to deactivate their account, citing privacy concerns.

At 12, I think you want to impart a good foundation, not expertise in a specific language. I learned BASIC on a C64 back when I was 5-8, and followed it by learning C and C++ in my early teens. I think BASIC remains a reasonably decent starting point, in that you'll be teaching the rudiments of loops and program flow without the complexities of pointers, but depending upon the learner you may want to dive into C immediately after walking through the basics of BASIC. C# would arguably be the logical replacement for C++ in a new programmer, these days. If he's like most kids, you could even teach both C# and XNA, and work with him on learning to write code via a small video game project; if he has a Windows PC or an XBox, he can even show it off to his friends.

Seriously, this.

Perhaps you should stop being a jerk to the people who go out and do things you can't do, like build relationships to clients, convince them to spend their money to buy the product you make, and ultimately to funnel money into your paycheck?

Quoting from the article, "You have to make a game of a certain size and certain type. It's got to be simple but also rewarding within the first 60 seconds." What's with this idea? I've written about the problem of conceptualizing "casual gaming" as being different from "hardcore" gaming before; I think that the medium of downloadable games lends itself well to properly executed game design, because you can't lean on graphics or massive worlds, but even so there's no reason to say that a small game has to pander to impatience.