I've actually played Pandemic a few times.

And it's in a class of games which are either best played cooperatively, or which completely make the game mechanics drive the play.

Some co-workers used to play games at lunch -- in fact, they probably still do.

And the appeal of these games isn't "ha ha, I beat you". It's more like "Doh, Bob got eaten by a weasel, causing Sally to fall down the stairs, and when the flower pot landed on Steve's head he won." The victory/conclusion conditions change the dynamic of the play a lot -- to the extent that sometimes it's hilarious to be the one who "loses" or triggers the end of the game.

For many of us, we prefer it when the game mechanics preclude personal scores, or when one person gets to play king maker.

The games are much more social that way, and for many of us, that is a very big plus in games.

In fact, for many of us, games like Monopoly suck, because it's all about beating your opponents into the ground, or other things which suck the fun out of the game. And games which eliminate players means for the remainder of the game everyone is just sort of going "well, that wasn't really fun, and it's over, but they'll be at it a while".

It's a completely different style of play, and it is much more focused on play and having fun, than winning at all costs. And it means one person doesn't always win the game, and everyone else decides they have better things to do.

You know how you deal with a playground bully? You stand up to his crap, get people behind you, and call his bluff.

Which works really well right up until you discover the schoolyard bully is a little unhinged, and is playing out of his own book because he believes his own story.

And then you discover it's not a bluff, and then things get really hairy.

Chairman Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Hitler, not so much with the bluffing.

And I'm not so sure about Putin either.

Old Skool: The Mario Bros and Donkey Kong games are where my heart lies. 2D side scrollers.

Tabletop: I've always loved the German style board/card games -- fun for the whole family, the outcome is pretty much random, and someone doesn't get ganged up on or eliminated early in play. The goofier the premise the better, it's the mechanics which makes them enjoyable to play in groups, and sometimes strategy is pointless or impossible.

New Skool: I'm afraid I'm pretty much eternally hooked on Skyrim. I like not being constrained to a linear plot or where I can go.

My wife and some of our friends are also huge fans of the Kinect games, because drunk people dancing is hilarious. Also good for a girls exercise night, while the guys play a golf video game.

I also miss my copies of Rock Band/Guitar Hero ... because I learned to appreciate a vast amount of music and greatly expanded my music collection as a result of it. The sheer amount of punk rock I now own is directly attributable to those games.

For those of us who are old and creaky, and grew up where video games took quarters, and had a joystick and two buttons ... many modern games left us in the dust years ago, and simply stopped being fun. I doubt I could beat a 6 year old at a first person shooter.

.... the Sudeten Crisis Version 2.0.

TFA says she called the police. They don't take too kindly to people filing false reports. So my first instinct is to believe that she feels threatened.

It may turn out to be some neck-beard gamer who will never leave his parents' basement to carry out said threats. Or it could be another Elliot Rodger. That's for the cops to settle. What would be really bad: Rodger didn't necessarily go after the objects of his rage. He killed the most convenient people. So the next time you are sitting in the food court of the local mall next to the loser section, take a look around and see if one of them is giving you a wierd look.

From their own page, right now:

Linux Mint recommends the following search engines:
Engine Preserves your privacy Funds Linux Mint Description
        Yahoo The 2nd largest search engine on the Web, full of features.
        DuckDuckGo A safe and secure engine providing augmented Yahoo results.
        Ixquick A safe and secure engine gathering results from multiple search engines.
        Startpage A safe and secure engine providing augmented Google results.
        Amazon The largest online store.
        Wikipedia The largest online encyclopedia.

Why aren't some search engines included in Linux Mint?

Engines are included based on the following criteria:

        Funding: Whether using the engine funds Linux Mint
        Privacy: Whether the engine provides users with best-in-class privacy/security features
        Non-commercial: Whether the engine is popular and non-commercial

So, sorry, but for whatever reason in the version I had Google wasn't an option -- and figuring out what was required to change it wasn't worth it for me.

I was shopping for a distribution, not an ideology.

And all that long pipeline takes power to run (recently this argument comes up in discussions of mobile devices more than in the server room, because battery life is hugely important, and ARM in the serverroom is still a joke). ARM chips sometimes don't even have cache, let alone reorder buffers, and branch prediction. When you remove all that stuff, the ISA becomes more important in terms of power consumption.

Of course, as someone else pointed out, they were comparing 90nm chips to 32nm and 45nm. Why that is a problem will be left as an exercise for the reader.

If the App store doesn't have Angry Birds a search for it may mean Disgruntled birds will show up.

I'm holding out for Mildly Irked in an Ironic Post-Modern-Sort-of-Way Birds.

That would be cool. ;-)

I completely fail to comprehend why most Slashdotters seem to push everyone towards DRM'ed iPads and Chromebooks that put Palladium to shame instead of more open Windows PCs.

I guess it's more about Microsoft hate and the desire to bring them down than software freedom.

You know, it's as much about giving our friends and family a user experience which a) won't drive them insane, and b) won't make them come to us for tech support.

And, really, for many of us this whole "software freedom" thing is a little overplayed.

I've always found Stallman to be a bit of a crank, and the vast majority of people hear this stuff, and they think of teenagers spouting Marxist theory because the school cafeteria switched from Coke to Pepsi ... it becomes a little tired and melodramatic.

I'd wager that 99% of all people will never audit their IP stack, recompile their browser, or otherwise want any involvement in this stuff. They want the latest cool thing, and not some near approximation of it which comes in a kit.

What they want is a tool to get the stuff done they need/want to, and they want it with as little hair pulling as possible.

And, really, let's be honest here ... Windows is no more (or less) open than Apple, and in the places where they're more open, they're trying to be less, just like Apple. Everybody wants their own walled garden.

Hell, I installed a Linux Mint VM image a while back, and it wasn't even possible to set the search provider to Google, apparently because it's not ideologically pure enough or something.

So, if my Mom was looking for a tablet ... I'm going to find her one which suits her needs and will work for her, and I am never going to say "ZOMG, but this software is teh free".

Because my Mom already rolls her eyes at the rest of my loony rants, and doesn't give a damn about software freedom.

So, if you want to know why people aren't doing this, it's because when someone starts screaming "viva la revolucion" over software freedom, people roll their eyes and try to get distance from you.

Don't get me wrong, I likes me some Open Source software. But, have I built an entire ideology around it? Hell no.

Nah, the wars will come when resources get short and nations go to war to control what remains. When people get hungry and cold they become very dangerous.

Its not just a matter of trusting/not trusting cops. Cops deal with lying scumbags almost as often as I deal with PHBs. So when it comes to their word against the suspect's, I'd think cops would love to have an unbiased record of each encounter to back up their story.

Worse than that, there is nothing worse than having every twitch misrepresented by a bunch of political dirtbags in the press.

Shut up and take my money!

Or, well... it "could be considered" exactly what it is: retaining an existing theory and all of its basic assumptions, while tacking on modifications or qualifiers to make it better fit the data. That's not "disproving" anything. That's improving an existing theory, and that's what the vast majority of everyday science is about. Most active scientists are working within existing paradigms and working out the details of theories by starting with all the assumed knowledge of their fields.

No actual scientist is walking around questioning every scientific "fact" on a daily basis. "Oh, you know what, I really don't believe that whole 'water is made up of hydrogen and oxygen' thing. That whole 'atomic elements build compounds' thing sounds potentially bogus and 'unproven,' so let's have my lab spend the next six months retesting that and finding out what water really is made of!"

No sane scientist thinks like that, and scientific progress would be practically impossible if we went out actually worrying about potentially falsifying everything.

Instead -- we accept much of scientific knowledge as "proven" (not in a formal logical/mathematical sense, but the normal everyday sense of "well-tested"), and we go on with our lives filling out the "edge cases" as you put it. Only if some major discrepancies arise repeatedly do we begin to wonder whether underlying assumptions may be at fault... and even then it would take a heck of a lot to overturn the idea that water is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, for example.

That is a completely and utterly BS definition of "proof" that no one EVER uses except in discussions like this. Seriously. It's not what the math or formal logic people mean by "proof," because actual math and formal logic people generally recognize that their claims are not directly relatable to the real world, let alone "any conceivable universe." Math and formal logic are abstract symbolic systems. While they may at times be very good models for talking about the real world, they do NOT have any exact correspondence with the real world.

Find me an exact "triangle," for example, in the real world. Not something that looks vaguely like a triangle -- something that fits the mathematical definition of one, with three exact points, precisely straight line segments, etc. Even if you came close, to create something that on a microscopic level still seemed to be a triangle, on the individual atomic level there would be irregularities -- and even if that were somehow "perfect," we could keep moving down until we got to the "quantum foam" level... a real EXACT triangle in the mathematical sense doesn't exist in the real world.

Does that mean all of Euclid and geometry and all the formal "proofs" are wrong or irrelevant? Of course not. But they are working with certain kinds of abstract assumptions that have no exact correspondence with the real world. They are a MODEL. So, when you try to apply that standard of "proof" to "this or any conceivable universe," you're doing something completely illogical. No one ever actually does that -- and if they claim they are doing that, they are being disingenuous. The logic of abstract models is simply that -- the logic of abstract models. Standards of proof there are simply not applicable to the real world.

Sorry, but that's just NOT TRUE. In normal, everyday English, according to Merriam-Webster, "to prove" is "to test the truth, validity, or genuineness of" or "to test the worth or quality of." Note the emphasis on the word "to TEST." In normal language (i.e., >99% of the time "prove" is actually used in English), it means to TEST something to determine how good it is. If something passes a test, it has met some sort of standard -- that doesn't necessarily mean it can never be questioned again, or we should stop thinking about the subject forever, or that it's true in "any conceivable universe." Something that is "proved" has passed some standard test for quality, or, as another definition in Merriam-Webster puts it: "to establish the existence, truth, or validity of" or "to demonstrate as having a particular quality or worth." The normal way of doing these things in the real world (as opposed to some sort of abstract formal logic exercise) is through empirical testing.

Once again -- this is NOT what the word means in real life. Say Person A claims, "I claim water will flow uphill and gravity doesn't exist." Person B says: "Prove it." Person A: "Uh... I can't. But can you PROVE that it flows downhill?" Person B: "Sure, watch. [Pours water on a slope -- it flows downhill.] See!" Person A: "Yeah, I guess you're right."

That's what "proof" actually means in English when referring to the real world, including empirical science. You subject a claim to a test, and you take the results of the test as some sort of "proof." Depending on the quality of the test, you may draw various conclusions about the quality of "proof" obtained -- in cases where the truth is really important, you may insist on more tests or more rigorous ones, or, as we say in English, "a higher standard of proof." See -- proof has degrees depending on the kind of tests you use and the standards that are upheld by those tests. It's why in a courtroom we can have a standard that says "proof beyond a reasonable doubt." If "proof" only meant what you think it means, then such a definition would be redundant and misleading -- if "proof" means something is true in "any conceivable universe" for all time, then what would it possibly mean to be "proving beyond a reasonable doubt"? What would that qualifier add? Well, obviously it sets the standard for the test -- a "reasonable person" [legal term] would have no doubt of the guilt in that situation.

There's a difference between being "pedantic" and being WRONG. Let's subject your hypothesis about the use of the word "proof" to some empirical testing, shall we?

You claim that actual expert empirical scientists don't use the word "proof" in this loose way -- that they always mean this very abstract version of formal logic "proof" where something would be true in "any conceivable universe."

Well, let's look at the abstract of TFA, linked to in TFS. What do we see?

Not only does this scientific abstract include the word "proving" regarding previous research, but they characterize their own research in TFA as "demonstrating" that something "IS generated" -- that's language of formal logic or math proofs (e.g., "quod erat demonstratum"). They didn't say they were "theorizing" what something "might be" or that something merely "provided some evidence" of what "could be." They said that previous scientists had evidence "proving" something, now they had "demonstrated" what something truly "is."

So, let's see, I could either believe some random guy's definition of "proof" on Slashdot that never seems to apply to the real world. OR, I could look at the actual empirical usage of the term "proof" by actual leading scientists, which has been published in one of the top journals of the entire scientific field, with language that has been peer-reviewed and checked by editors of the highest scientific caliber.

Well, my empirical evidence suggests your definition of "proof" is wrong. QED. :)

Editors can't spell (or read), that gross poop eating guy, Time Cube guy, Cowboy Neil, dupes.

I'm sure there's plenty more.

I, for one, welcome our new meme-studying overlords.