Nah, watching a bot you wrote operate is pretty damn fun. I'd like to see more bot vs bot tournaments in all kinds of games.

The readers never got over it.

That's what really disappointed me--I was hoping for different AIs as well. I never got into core wars but always wanted to, and I love games that pit different bot implementations of normally-human players against each other.

There's definitely a time investment and the frustration level can be really high. It can be several aggravating hours to do some complicated things, like "intercept an asteroid that's not passing particularly close, point it back at your home planet and put it in a stable orbit". But there's always easier ways to do things and tricks that make complicated things easier, even without mods. Of course sometimes the answer is to just give up and redesign your ship, or send two ships instead of one.

Tearing your hair our and then finally succeeding is a pretty nice feeling but it's definitely one that I have less time for with a fulltime job, and I can't imagine playing KSP once I have kids (until they're old enough to start learning orbital mechanics...so like, 6).

All that said...some parts of the game are still relatively easy. You can have a hell of a lot of fun with strapping a lot of boosters on and hoping for the best, and you can land on the Mun without a full, deep understanding of what you're doing. Kind of like how you can play adventure games/RPGs without going for 100% completion, I think you can probably get your money's worth without blowing a bunch of time and anger on the hard parts of Kerbal, and without even touching the (excellent) mod scene.

KSP has had this unique property among the early access games I own, that the early game feels like the most fun part. I'm sure opinions differ but hey, it's fun to see how fast I can get a space program off the ground with whatever new features there are.

So add a few mods that put more displays and controls inside the IVA screen (sitting in the cockpit), tack some unreliable cameras to the outside of your craft, and feel the joy of flying a ship by squinting at computer monitors inside your computer monitor. Docking maneuvers are even hairier than normal, though if you manage to shear off a camera somehow, I guess you always have the old fallback of "send someone outside on EVA and have them radio you that you need to shift left a couple of centimeters". Reentry is exciting because all you have is flames visible through your window (if you have a window), your altitude and descent gauge, and a little icon of your ship over a topo map.

I could say the same thing about your post, but that's really going nowhere.

We get a lot of articles here that people say don't belong on Slashdot, but I usually side with them being good articles. "Stuff that matters" and all that, personal freedoms, general interest to nerds, etc. But this one...no, I'm just not seeing it. Nothing to do with personal freedoms, nothing to do with computers, nothing to do with public policy, absolutely zero effect on any of us, even those of us in the USA. It's just political celebrity news.

The summary made it sound like "wow, if a program runs arbitrary code, then arbitrary code might run" which is kind of...tautological. But the article has other goodies, like "the security check to keep dangerous code out of the kernel...runs with user permissions", and "code signing only rejects an app if it has an untrusted signature, but lets it through if it has no signature".

There was always something fishy about those ruins.

The common thread I'm seeing in all of these stories is that SOMEthing crumpled.

I'd give the van's occupants better odds than I'd give you against a brick wall, though.

This is less "Eagle has landed" and more "First stage of Falcon 9 has...landed".

Okay, yeah, this guy is definitely a tool with a massive ego trip. He already seemed like a dick from the way he phrased his press releases, but insisting he's too important to use the bug tracker and instead he needs to talk to the devs personally? No.

Hm. That actually was my problem with Angband. Too easy, too farmable. I'll have to give that a shot...though I suspect it's going to be a lot of long, boring running around in circles trying to get that ring of fire resistance before I hit whatever depth will kill me without it. And you thought stair scumming was boring...