This always happens to me when I'm typing on a phone -- the autocorrect will correct away properly spelled but obscure words into pretty much randomness.

But it's still quite funny :-)

If this is upheld and catches on, it could have pretty horrid implications world-wide, especially with how willing people are to litigate against companies (such as Google) that are actually based in a different country but have presense in the litigator's country by virtue of internet access....

I've always used AOL mail-floppies (with some tape for writability!) or floppies that came with drivers for electronics, after I no longer needed the drivers.

Probably.

Having a weak password is more like having a dinky combination lock on your front door, not like leaving it open. If someone comes up to your house and cracks your $2.98 Walmart combo lock, they're still robbing you.

Also, how can you call someone who's ID is well over 600,000 lower than yours a junior? It defies all reason! By common sense, DerekLyons is 3 times your age.

Unless I totally misunderstood your post, Fedora Core *is* a free distro.... If I totally misunderstood your post, it's *still* a free distro, but then that information is irrelevant.

It's in part that exact attitude that allowed somewhere between 3 and 60 million (citation: Wikipedia article for "Joseph Stalin") people to die under the Soviet regime. How exactly do you expect an unarmed, suppressed peoples to take over an armed, trained, and extremely well-funded government? Sure, it happens sometimes, but rarely does it happen without external support or out-of-the-ordinary circumstances (say, like the bad government being based halfway around the world in the case of the US revolution, not to mention the French support).

From personal experience, the people in those oppressive regimes oftentimes root for the enemy. At least, I know this was the case in the Soviet Union and is the case in Iran.

So it's quite easy to say "It's not our culture, why do we have the right to fault them for silencing and killing their citizens," but in the end that's just a really lame way to avoid the reality: you're sitting by and doing nothing while people are being oppressed and killed. It doesn't necessarily make you evil, as there's nothing that necessarily obligates you to care, but it does make you less good than the people that are at least trying to do something about it. And in this case, in some tiny little way, Google is at least trying to do something.

Double-braided beard indeed.

Personally, I love the ASCII. I do have plenty of friends who refuse to give the ASCII a try, though. I liken this with insane statements such as "I really like Halo 3, but I just refuse to have to learn how to use a remote control to turn on the TV."

It's how the game is; it's part of its charm. They're not THAT scary, jeez! Think of it as a very stylized look: most people aren't deathly scared of cell shading, why are you so scared of some extra stylization?

Heck yeah! I would say that, compensating for nostalgia, Dwarf Fortress is probably the best game ever created, on any platform. It's also the most ambitious. Seriously, anyone that hasn't played it yet needs to do so immediately.

It's finite partially because it forces itself to be finite. I personally stopped contributing because my "pet" articles got deleted for strained (IMO) reasoning of non-notability. So that was essentially Wikipedia's cost to keep me "employed": two articles. They blew those away, actively limiting their editor resources in the process. Plus, they also severely curtailed my donations, because I didn't feel nearly as vested in the project anymore.

As for storage and bandwidth, storage is probably the cheapest thing in computing at this point, and bandwidth wouldn't increase that much for the articles that are in question anyways (considering most of them are deleted for supposed non-notability), not to mention people like me that would donate more (although I honestly have no idea how big that group would be...)

Sorry if this post is nonsensical or pointless; I'm running purely on caffeine right now :-)

YouTube's in-video ads are really, really annoying. Having to grab the mouse to close the ad after sitting back to watch the video really interferes with the whole experience :-(

That's pretty cool. Did you get those 45ms with a Wii or with a 360? My Wii had higher lag than my 360 because the Wii's signal had to be upscaled before displaying, whereas the 360 outputted in 1080p already.

I guess it's also possible that I just noticed it more on the Wii. I didn't have anything as fast-paced as Smash on the 360. I didn't have rock band on the Wii to test it out, so it's pretty much anecdotal evidence for me.

I hear sentiments like this quite a lot, but the fact is that you're wrong.

Smash Bros is a game that exhibits a very strong "best-in-my-school" syndrome. That is, lots of people you meet are either the best in their school, the best in their group of friends, best in their town, etc. All those people might claim to be 'competitive' in the game, and they generally all suck pretty bad.

The real skill comes from the top players of the greater community, the ones that aren't just the best in their school or something retarded like that, but are actually good. We hold a few tournaments every month, for money and prestige, and I can guarantee that memorization alone isn't going to get you anywhere. You need to know the game and the moves and the meta-game of the characters involved, sure, but the match comes down to being able to read your opponent and devise successful strategies against them. The memorization level is what I call the "sub-competitive" level. Autopilot-based players might win the first match (if that) from the momentum of a novel and well-memorized strategy, but after that, against a good player, they're done. They'll never win again.

As for the stupid rules, there are three real rules that influence actually playing the game: banned stages, banned infinites, and no items.

Banned stages are something that's very necessary. For example, no matter how good you are, with most characters if Dedede grabs you on Shadow Moses Island or Bridge of Eldin, that's a stock. For that reason, those stages are banned. I play Bridge of Eldin a lot with my friends, sure, cause it's a fun stage, but if one of them went Dedede all the time and chain grabbed me off the edge over and over, I would certainly consider banning it. With money and status on the line, the competitive community has decided to ban that stage in standard tournaments. Other stages are banned for other reasons -- WarioWare has no place in a Smash match. People want to actually play, not jump around popping party hats or stand around doing nothing.

Even then, it's far from only Final Destination. Off the top of my head, here are the stages that generally be played in tournaments: FD, Battlefield, Smashville, Brinstar, Green Greens (in doubles), Pokemon Stadium, Rainbow Cruise, Pictochat, Yoshi's Island, Lylat Cruise, Castle Siege, Halberd, Frigate Orpheon, Jungle Japes, Luigi's Mansion, and Isle Delphino. That's 16 stages, a far cry from just FD. The people that play FD-only are generally the best-in-my-school smashers, and they'd get destroyed, and horribly so, in actual competitive play. Even those stages offer certain characters great advantages. You don't want to fight Falco on Jungle Japes, for example; that's his house and he doesn't want you in there.

There are a (very) few banned infinites, as well. Most stalling tactics, like Sonic hiding under FD or Metaknight's infinite cape glitch is out, and with good reason. Likewise, the crazy Ice Climbers grab-fly-kill off the top glitch is either going to be or already is banned. Banning those moves is an obvious decision and I'm not sure what reasonable arguments you could make against it...

The no items rule is a bit more controversial. The vast majority of competitive players will agree that they add an unwanted randomness variable, but I personally like playing with items. However, certain new items like the Final Smash ball and some of the trophies are ridiculous. The final smash ball stops play every freaking minute and the players spend like 20 second chasing the stupid thing. It's retarded. Some of the trophies are just too powerful. A lot of the time when I play with my friends, we'll turn just those two off. They also hate food and hearts and tomatoes for some reason, though I like those.

However, you could argue that items give faster characters an advantage because those characters can get to the items faster, for example. You could argue that bombs spawning on top of you (which happens surprisingly often) is too random and not skill-determined, and for those reasons items are turned off in play. In a recent tournament match, though, a Peach pulled a sword out of her skirt (random chance instead of a turnip) and won the round, heavily influencing the results of the tournament and actually moving the player up in the competitive rankings in Arizona. Things like that aren't forbidden.

All the other tournament rules have to do with the protocol for choosing where to play, who to play as, etc. They don't influence actual gameplay once the start button is pressed.

As for the HDTV lag, it cripples people's play. Metaknight's downsmash comes out in like five frames (~160ms). To have even a minute chance of power-shielding it, you need to do so immediately. If there's even a two-frame (60ms) lag before you see the start of the move, plus whatever response delay you suffer actually pressing the key, it's basically impossible. Even the best HDTVs suffer at least a 60ms lag, and they're expensive. If you could tell me where I can go and get 10 of them for a tournament without going bankrupt and to *still* get a subpar solution, please say so. As for Wavebirds, I haven't heard much complaining about it lately. I do think they have trouble hitting many buttons in rapid succession, and I don't use them for Smash, but I've seen people bring them to tournaments sometimes.

Anyways, we get the FD-only people in decent numbers in our events. Once they get over the fact that they're losing constantly, and deprogram themselves from autopilot-based gameplay, they can get fairly good. Less can be done to change the minds of "Smash should be a happy-feely game" people such as you appear to be. I will say that playing a game with something on the line, even when it's just pride, makes it a lot funner for a lot of people. Playing competitively, and I mean truly competitively, not best-in-my-school style is the difference between tossing a ball around and playing an actual game.

Oh, come on. You can make a case that almost any holiday is derived from either some Christian or some other religious-specific or culture-specific rite. Until this bullshit got going, I never really thought that it had anything to do with God at all, just about thankfulness. Yet now it's somehow a Christian offensive event. This insanity is exactly what I'm talking about. Another purely-secular holiday, Columbus Day, has also been annihilated completely due to political correctness. Columbus might have been a jerk, but that holiday had no religious basis. There's another part of our culture gone, leaving the US just that much sorrier that it exists.

Wasting resources on this, because of some crazy adherence to political correctness (despite you saying otherwise, this is the cause) is retarded. Hypersensitivity, whether to a word, someone's hypothetical feelings, or pretty much anything except actual, tangible harm, is stupid.