Is Copyright out of control in this country, and frequently abused? Yes. Does it need to be toned way the hell down and reformed? Yes. Does that excuse this game? No.

Wanting to duplicate the style and basic gameplay of a game is fine. Game genres exist for a reason, and many a solid game has been made on the concept of "hey, we liked this game, but we have our own story and characters, and we're going to change gameplay elements x and y to keep it fresh". Starcraft didn't do anything especially amazing in the RTS genre, but it paired solid, well-balanced gameplay with a couple of new elements with a good story-based campaign.

Really, even a clone that doesn't really change gameplay is generally fine as long as you at least have your own story, characters, and level design. These tend to be mediocre games that few care about, but occasionally one will succeed on its story as a "meh, this is worth playing through once" kinda thing. Even if you've got nothing going for you though, your game will simply suck. It won't violate copyright.

This, however, is very much not that kind of thing. You copied the characters. You copied the exact level design. Your scoring system is identical. Your powerup works the same way, and is in the same place. You copied the gameplay down to the point that no one would know it wasn't Pacman if they didn't see the title. Well, actually, you even used "Pac" in the title, so even THAT'S not guarenteed.

That's not merely creating in a genre, nor is it even a clone. It's a flat out copy of the game. This IS exactly what copyright is meant to prevent - you profiting from someone else's exact work. Indy means nothing here. I don't care if you're 1 guy coding in his dorm room or a megacorp, you're flat out ripping off someone else's game for your own profit, and no one is going to support that.

You clearly know how to program... apply that skill to your own idea and you'll do just fine as an indy developer. You can probably even reuse a lot of that code you just wrote on a game of your own design. Alternatively, if you have no creativity, team up with someone who's great at game design and story, but fails at code, and make it a 2 man project.

The actual point of the colors were to make sure that the lowest 2 would never be used. It was basically a constant "Everyone, live in fear!" sign. It was ignored and/or mocked by the public because pretty much everyone realized this. I can't find the graph, but someone charted the 8 years of Bush's approval rating, with the color chart on the background of graph, and it matches up almost perfectly, to the surprise of basically no one.

I'd be great if this were a 1-party thing, since then we could simply vote for the other guys, but that simply isn't the case. The Patriot Act passed with nearly unanimous approval, and while many predicted a gradual dropping of its measures under Obama, that simply hasn't happened... indeed, it's only gotten worse.

Unfortunately, while I'd love to say them finally axing this system is a sign that they realize a rational response instead of a fear-based one is what we need, I think they've simply decided that the TSA does a far more effective job of keeping everyone in fear that a silly color chart ever could. I don't know a single person that stopped flying due to terrorism. People recognized that while odds of dying to terrorists have gone up *slightly*, it's a trivial risk, much like swimming in the ocean may get you attacked by a shark, but almost certainly won't.

On the other hand, quite a few people have stopped flying because they don't want the choice of unnecessary radiation exposure or sexual assault to get on a plane. The TSA has accomplished what the terrorists only wish they could.

That's not to say we shouldn't be keeping an eye on terrorist organizations, and disrupting them when we can, but that requires actual intelligence work. The TSA is pure security theater.

Err, I linked the same statistic twice. Here's the other one:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_pri_per_cap-crime-prisoners-per-capita

While the extra tax revenue doesn't hurt, that isn't where most of the money is gained on this.

Consider the ridiculously huge number of people in prison for a harmless crime, and the fact that many of them get longer sentences than rapists. Now figure out what it costs to incarcerate them at taxpayer expense. (Hint: we have 106% of Canada's crime per capita, but 616% of their prison population per capita.*) Now calculate the lost labor from having them rot in prison instead of doing something productive. Now add in the cost of paying all of those cops who do pretty much nothing but go after potheads. Now add in the huge amount of Mexican border security needed vs. drug gangs with the power of small armies, which get all their money from... yep, pot. This goes way, way, into the billions. Not throwing all that money away would make a huge difference. Any tax revenue gained from selling it legally is just a bonus.

* - Here's my sources on those 2 statistics I quoted:
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita
http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/cri_tot_cri_percap-crime-total-crimes-per-capita

As for the dealers selling it tax free? The dealers are out of the picture. They can't keep up with the prices a large-scale commercial operation is going to be able to sell it at. When's the last time you purchased alcohol from a dealer on the street, vs. one of the 97 gazillion liquor stores? If you're most people, the answer is "never." Now sure, some set up their own mini-distillery (or get some from a neighbor who does), and they obviously aren't paying tax on it, but that's such a ridiculously small minority that it's statistically insignificant - and even most of the ones who do that don't use it as their sole supply due to the sheer impracticality of producing large amounts of beer with something you made in your basement.

Last but not least, in additional to the many billions we wouldn't be throwing away, we'd be some lives by weakening the gangs up here, and a LOT of lives in Mexico, where the drug lords pretty much own the country thanks to the virtually limitless income they're making from US pot users.

I don't smoke pot... it simply doesn't appeal to me. However, it's actually *less* harmful than alcohol, in that it's quite possible to OD on alcohol (although you generally have to be pretty stupid to manage that), while it's physically impossible to OD on pot. As for the short-term impairment of being under the influence of either, I don't really see one being significantly worse than the other. The only issue I'd have is people driving while high, and we already have DUI laws to cover that. Just add an "or pot" everywhere those laws mention alcohol.

Actually, the same applies. The reason Google utterly dominated the search engine market is that they were able to find relevant results to your searches in a sea of crap, while pretty much everything that came before could not. Remember the days of using "meta-search" sites, in the hopes that by querying a dozen or so engines at once, one of them would finally return a useful page?

Imagine if this exact same article were written, but instead of "torrent-only", it said "Youtube-only". Are there Youtube-only full-length movies of good quality that probably should be listed in major movie DB sites? Yes. For every one of those, however, there's thousands upon thousands that really shouldn't. A database of everything ever filmed with a camera would be utterly useless, because all of your searches would return mountains of crap you don't care about.

The question then is, "what standardized set of rules gets as many real movies as possible, while including as few videos as possible that really aren't production-quality, full-length movies?" IMDBs answer is "must have been shown in a theater, either the normal kind or the film festival kind". This is obviously a flawed model, since as others have pointed out already, there's 5 minute Funny or Die shorts in there, and there's many full-length movies of at least B movie quality that aren't.

Many are saying someone should make a better site than IMDB, and it's not a bad idea. If you're thinking of actually doing it though, you need to answer that question in a way that works. I personally can't think of a standard, but there likely IS a much better one than what IMDB uses. The challenge of course, more so than actually making a better site, is to come up with that standard.

Chrome is faster because it massively favors speed over customization and features. FF is slower because it favors customization, and assumes, correctly, that no one actually actually gives a flying fark if it needs slightly more than a 1/50th of a second to render a page that Chrome can do in 1/100th of a second. This isn't a problem, nor is it news. Now of course, you may do the occasional task where those milliseconds actually matter because your browser is processing something enormous, but then just install both browsers, use Chrome in those rare instances, and use FF for a primary browser.

Frame rate isn't really an issue either. You can point out that the human eye sees at roughly 60 FPS, so going under 60 is undesired, but let's be realistic. Those Flash games are usually built at 20-25 FPS, because running at 60 would make them freaking huge. Video on the web likewise runs at 60 FPS roughly never, because it needs to stream. Downloaded video WILL run at 60, but your browser isn't playing that.

This doesn't mean there isn't a couple of very specific tasks that FF is abnormally slow at and could use a code cleanup on, but for the most part, FF's speed difference vs. Chrome is utterly negligible in actual use.

If the inability to play Flash games would be the deciding factor in not buying an iProduct, then the huge number of valid apps that get rejected from the store would have the exact same effect. I would say not only would it not spell death for the device if Flash lives on, I would go so far as to say that at MOST, they'll lose a handful of customers to it.

Got an alternative to Flash games? No? Then it's not going anywhere, period.
Got an alternative to Flash animations (not using it as a video player - actually animating with it). No? Then it's not going anywhere, period.

Yes, Flash-based layouts suck. Yes, using Flash as a video player is lame. Yes, HTML5 should eliminate any reason to do so, and yes, I hope HTML5 kills Flash as a design tool completely. However, unless someone has a viable alternative for flash animations and games - and no, no one takes Silverlight seriously - it will remain a major platform.

I'd say Jobs is shooting himself in the foot by banning all Flash games from his devices, but then the iStore is already incredibly restrictive, so those wanting actual choice are already on the competition anyway.

The ATI video card I have fails hard on XP64, so I got a driver some random guy that has nothing to do with ATI made instead, and it works great. If I were stuck using only drivers that were ATI-approved, I'd be majorly SoL.

I'm all for having the hardware verify that the driver actually is a valid driver for the hardware in question, just make sure that's ALL it does, or we'll lose the ability to use someone's hack to force a piece of hardware to work.

Most sites are running off of crappy shared hosting services, and the guy actually running the site has no idea how the server was configured, and whether current (or any!) security patches have been applied. He can do things like call phpinfo() to make sure that's at least current and intelligently configured, but he has no idea if the server itself is set up well, and more importantly, no way to fix it if it isn't.

This creates a huge problem if the server is pulled. Suddenly, all the shared hosting accounts go dark, and no one can even retrieve their site. Even assuming the site owner has a reasonably current backup, things like forum posts get lost, and the site operator is forced to send off a mass email explaining the problem (if he even knows what happened!) and then frantically try to rebuild the site elsewhere. Oh, and the hosting company usually owns the domain, so when it does come back up, he's still missing a huge chunk of his userbase.

I don't think it's an exaggeration to estimate that 90% of websites are on shared hosting accounts. Granted, it's the 90% that don't get much traffic, but every site has to start somewhere, and many simply aren't intended to be for more than a handful of users.

I was pretty sure you were trolling, but that confirms it. See ya.

So you reply to an article about an innocent man being executed by saying I don't have a single name. I believe that man has a name.

Here's 138 people that were on death row while innocent, and later exonerated.
http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/innocence-and-death-penalty

There's of course no similar list of innocent people that were actually executed, because once they die, it's very rare for people to continue to defend them, given how little that can accomplish. Pair that list with the article I previously posted though, and I think we can safely say there's been at least a few dozen... and one is too many.

It's obviously impossible to know how many there were, but read this article for an example of how it happens:
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/09/07/090907fa_fact_grann

Multiple gunshot wounds to the heart generally cause death (or at least unconsciousness that will lead to death) in a matter of seconds.

Lethal injections take several minutes to kill, and that's if they do them correctly. Remember - no actual doctor will do it as you can't violate the Hippocratic Oath much worse than that. There's been horror stories of paralyzed victims slowly losing the ability to breathe over 30-45 minutes, conscious, but unable to speak or move.

The only reason lethal injection became popular is that it makes the death LOOK painless due to the paralysis drug preventing the victim from expressing pain.

Given a choice, I can't imagine anyone choosing the needle.