Emphasis mine. You've conveniently split your peers up into 3 categories - two 'bad' categories, complete with cutting descriptions, and a third that you happen to belong to. It's human nature to value your own worldview above other peoples, but I think it's worth pointing out what we're all reading here.

You go on to say that those other people are binging you down and making education worse for you. But I say those other points of view are quite valid, and the world doesn't revolve around your needs and desires. We need to come to terms as a society that formal education is just for getting letters in front of your name, and to stop expecting so much from it.

Here is my personal philosophy: the best we can hope for is to introduce someone to a topic that sparks their interest. The best work will come from personal study, no professors or classmates required. And if someone wants to have a beer and watch football instead, there is nothing wrong with that either.

Indeed. If you look at the World of Goo post you just mentioned, they reference a previous study on Gamasutra of an indie title that also estimated their piracy rate to be about 90%. Considering 2D Boys rationale seems fairly rushed and decidedly innacurate, isn't it surprising that they came up with the exact same 90% figure? For a game with a totally different copy protection structure, in a totally different genre, calculated 9 months apart? How much do you want to bet that they knew about that article before they calculated that figure.

So now this Machinarium article appears for a game released 2 years later, in yet another totally different genre, and they find an estimated piracy rate of 85% to 95%. You can bet they were aware to the 2D-Boy 90% figure, since it was well publicised on /. and in the gaming media. Do we think this figure we have an existing bias to might have some relation? Hello, this is just the same 90% figure with a 5% error rate on either side!

The problem here is that, without any competent statistics having been done, the popular media are giving people the impression that a 90% piracy figure has been established, with numbers people have pulled out of their rear ends. Piracy issues aside, one thing that gets on my nerves is bad statistics. It's basically the same as lying to people.

Absolutely, the last thing you want as a military commander is the troops thinking for themselves and questioning the absolute intellectual and moral superiority of their leaders. The next think you know, they'll be refusing orders to pointlessly march to their deaths! Luckily, we can order them to remain ignorant and only receive information from proper government channels, assembled by men of intellect who have done all the thinking that ever needs to be done. It's a good thing these people have sifted through the bullshit and are now able to tell us the truth: everything is fine, we're winning, good job team!

Fuck the power brick, those are easily and cheaply replaced and rarely ware out. Laptop batteries are constantly needed for the machine to function away from a desk, and lose their capacity very quickly. How about a common housing and voltage for those? You could have like 5 standard shapes and sizes, ranging from small to large for different sized laptops. Every dell 15 inch is about the same size, shape, and colour (black) as a toshiba 15 inch, an asus 15 inch etc.

Basically, if you have a wordpress/blogspot, a flickr/picassa, an email address/home page, you should be able to "plugin" to something that gives all the functionality of facebook. Yet you would be free to expire/migrate/manage your data as you see fit.

How does the first sentence guarantee the second? The first thing an internet marketing company would do with such a system is spider all available information to their own private databases. All information that you've published there, even if you later deleted it, would be available for purchase. These people, who try to fill my personal inbox with 500 pieces of marketing spam per month, will not respect the privacy settings of your robots.txt file.

And besides that, how would you prevent people on your private friends-only area from accidentally republishing private bits of your web space to their own public space by 'liking' or writing comments on your updates or photos? There would have to be a mechanism to stop that, which everyone on your friends list has to adhere to. That would be even more difficult outside of a centrally controlled company like facebook.

While the invasion of privacy is conveniently forgotten about. If someone sees you naked then jokes at your expense, is it your really insecurity if you get upset?

Yes, that is a very strong indicator of insecurity.

And ego (or maybe it's just me).

A couple of years ago, IIRC, /. had an article on an Australian bank that required their users to login with Knoppix that they distributed on a CD-ROM. If you weren't using their version of Knoppix and their recommended web browser, you didn't get on-line access to your account. I tend not to be a terribly egotistic person, but despite that, my first thought was, "I'm a SYS ADMIN, and I know MY PC isn't infected. Where do they get off thinking that I'm not competent enough to keep my PC secure?!?!?" Then I realized that most home users are going to think pretty much the same thing...

How about going after tail gators and other aggressive driving habits?

And also go after the left lane hogs? Here in GA (I-75N) we get a lot of the *snow birds who insist on staying in the left lane as they go through GA and folks who want to speed are dashing around them. The old people in the land yachts are usually pretty courteous and stay to the right with their other car in tow. And then you get the idiots who are on their cell phone who are traveling at 50, then 75, then 60, then 70 - and it's worse when their in the left hand lane.

* Snow birds: retired people (mostly old) who travel to Florida during the Winter and then move back to their homes in the North during the Summer.

Last I heard Nintendo hadn't actually announced a Wii 2 yet. How can something that hasn't been announced be delayed? Wouldn't that be somewhat similar to saying that flying cars are delayed?

It means an Ubuntu PC will work with the majority of sites on the Internet while yours won't. Now you can moan about that as much as you like, but 99% of people just don't care - they just want their PC to work.

Shouldn't Canonical port Internet Explorer 6 to Linux then?

They have a lot of influence in those fields though, and it's growing by the day. Smartphones / netbooks are markets which are just starting to hit the mainstream, and Apple is disproportionately able to influence the direction of their growth.

Even if what they're doing isn't illegal it is still a Bad Thing, and GP's arguments still hold precisely because they appear to be well on their way to securing a monopoly in one or both areas. Regardless of whether they've reached the magic monopoly marketshare number or not, I think now is an excellent time to stand up and let them know we think they're behaving unethically.

Hope you've got a solid chair budget laid out for the next 10 years.

That's not even the first graphical MMO. Neverwinter Nights was released in 1991, which is the earliest i've heard of.

Quick question if you are still reading responses to this topic - where is Luke Leighton's constituency? It says 'south west surrey' on your website. I live in Kingston, which is in south west surrey, but i'm not sure if that means he'll be on my ballot or not since it is usually referred to as it's own location. Cheers.

Greenhouse Games is the indie distribution website set up by the Penny Arcade team. There are more games for windows and mac than linux, but you will find a few titles that run natively, most notable the Penny Arcade itself, On the Rain Slick Precipice of Darkness (pt1 and 2).

Demos are available, so feel free to try before you slap down 10 quid or so.