Interesting, thanks for sharing.

If you happen to know, I noticed in the picture of the sheet of dies that there are a fair number of gaps. Are these failures in the die manufacturing process, or something else?

Descent was the first game that really blew my mind when it came to graphics and gameplay together. The difficulty curve was perfect, and the continued addition of new game elements made it stay fresh (and Descent II was even better at this than the first game).

It's also the reason I bought (or more acurrately, convinced my father to buy) a very nice joystick. There's a reason fighter pilots don't control their planes with WASD.

And who can forget the 3D wireframe maps which, towards the end of the game, got insanely complicated? I can't begin to guess how much time I spent trying to figure out just where the hell I was, where the hell I was trying to go, and how the hell to get there :D

That's a fantastic point. Fixing your link: Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc. In the same way that Game Genie didn't infringe on Nintendo's copyright, the court should rule that this game modification does not infringe on Blizzard's.

I like to think of it as a variation of Plato's Forms -- the copyrighted product "Starcraft II" exists only as what is on-disk -- a fixed collection of code, art, and everything else that makes up the game. However, once this "ideal" form of the product is loaded into the computer's memory, it becomes a separate and mutable thing. The game itself has become a different and derivative thing simply by executing it, and any number of things can cause that state to be changed. This one single participant of the "Starcraft II" form is ephemeral and isn't being distributed (redistribution being the one reason their suit might be reasonable).

Trust me, I hate people who cheat against others as much as anyone, but this is a much larger issue with far-reaching consequences. Restricting what someone can do with code running on their own computer is a slippery slope, and we have already had enough ignorant court rulings (such as Blizzard v. bnetd). There's also the question of single-player cheating -- should it be illegal for someone to mod their single-player game, to give themselves infinite health, for example?

Blizzard is attempting to rectify a relatively simple technical flaw through the court system, and that's just sad. I hope you're right, AC, that the Game Genie precedent will be upheld.

Exactly this. UX as a whole is a cancer on modern computing -- nothing more than a combination of follow-the-leader and a circle-jerk. All it takes is for someone presents a (completely wrong) idea and, as long as they are authoritative about it, the other UX sheep will view that opinion as gospel, not to be questioned but only blindly followed. This might be a teacher at a school or a company like Google.

A perfect recent example is this Stack Exchange question regarding traffic signals. An ignorant (but inquisitive) person asks why traffic signals are always three vertical lights instead of some cool new UX-y system of LEDs and poor contrast. An answer posted which sounded very authoritative (but included no references) and had a few pretty pictures was immediately up-voted by the other UX sheep, even though the answer is completely wrong. The author eventually went and made some edits to claim his view was "just historical" to cover up the fact that he was glaringly wrong about the issue of color blindness.

You can see this behavior everywhere. Microsoft following Apple, Mozilla following Google. It has nothing to do with something being empiraclly or evidently better -- it's simply everyone following the hipster cool kid in class around because, well, he wouldn't be popular if he wasn't right!

We've had computer usability studies for decades now which have provided some keen insights into how people intuit the function of computer (some very interesting ones from the original Mac and Windows 95 timeframes). UX, however, has nothing to do with research or study -- it's little more than populist bullshit.

FTFY.

The simple fact is that Do-Not-Track was a damned bogus idea from the outset. Saying to the massive web of advertising conglamorates and third parties -- all of which make more money the more they can identify you down to an individual -- "Won't you kindly not track me? That would just be great, thanks" is akin to asking the mob nicely not to burn your place down when you refuse to pay protection money, or calling up the NSA and asking them nicely to stop spying on your personal affairs.

If you don't want to be tracked, you need to take steps to make it happen yourself. The tools are there -- use them. If enough people start blocking all forms of advertising, perhaps the intrusiveness and privacy violation will recede. Or maybe the entire advertising industry will collapse (one can always dream).

Interesting. It looks like a ripoff^Wcopy of I Wanna Be The Guy (which is free and completely awesome, btw), but with slower gameplay and looser controls.

For those not interested in helping useless middle-man ad farms, here's the original source on the National Archives website (including the YouTube video):

How Computers Changed the Tax Game

Oh, derp. Make that 1000 Gbit per square inch. Worst part of no edit on Slashdot is all the simple math mistakes irrevocably left for posterity :)

That caught my eye as well. Assuming 1000 bits per square inch, we're talking about:

6 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 1000 * 8 / 1000 = 48,000,000,000 square inches to store 6TB at 1000 bits per in^2.

1 Mbit per square inch makes a lot more sense, putting it at 48 square inches, or about 8 square inches per platter.

No-IP is dishonest and doesn't deserve your support.

Way back in mid 2004 I spent about $20 to buy No-IP's "Lifetime" dynamic DNS service which gave me (IIRC) 5 of their "enhanced" subdomains which would never expire and never cost me additional money. I was very happy with them and recommended them to several people.

Then suddenly in 2008 I got an email saying my service was about to expire. When I emailed them about it, they said:

Date: Mar 10, 2008 (1:18am PDT)
From: No-IP Support

3 months after you had completed this purchase, this service was changed to a yearly service. As a courtesy to existing users, we provided them with 3 years of service. I'm sorry for any confusion this caused with the renewal of your service.

I don't really care what sneaky leagalese was in their TOS that justifies them legally. They explicitly sold this service as "lifetime", and I feel this was a completely underhanded move. I've had nothing to do with No-IP ever since and I discourage everyone else from supporting that kind of dishonestly.

Are you on Windows 7 with IE 10 installed? Or Windows 8.1?

It boggles my mind that they released the browser with this bug unresolved. Almost 500 comments on the Bugzilla entry and the end result was "ship it!" I mean, look at some of these screenshots:

https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=682682
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=735090
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=797936
https://bug812695.bugzilla.mozilla.org/attachment.cgi?id=720401

Who gives a damn if a large number of users can't even read the text on a page because, OMG!, we've just gotta have an HTML5 volume control! Someone probably should mention to Mozilla that just ripping off Chrome's look and release cycle doesn't really work if you don't also have Google's engineering and QA teams.

I don't think we need any more evidence that nobody is left steering the Firefox ship these days besides the cabin boy "designers".