I tried out Gnome 3 and while it has potential and good ideas it's lacking the flexibility of "classic" desktop environment like XFCE or even Gnome 2. Looking forward to things from it influencing more conservative DEs though.

This. I don't want any source code for the game (although it would be nice) but not getting anything but the right to play a game on a souped-up terminal server for the full price? No thanks. It's bad enough when companies decide to turn off the multiplayer servers for console titles while people still play the game online. All Onlive does is taking away your power in exchange for slightly better prices, worse image quality, higher latency and the need for a high-speed Internet connection.

What about not using greek letters in math at all? If a programmer would try to pull off that kind of stuff he'd be fired.

Graphics are fine, we're slowly getting to a point where screaming "OMG LOOK AT TEH PRETTY PICTSHURS" isn't enough to sell a game anymore. Please keep it that way.

A DE-Mail costs about 25 Cent.
Yes, the German postal service is in on this.

That is actually pretty cool, as far as sidewalks go. The ants are just being lazy with their sneakernet and so are we :>

Yep. But you still get a fair amount of renegade points for choosing the middle option. For some reason.

How is this news?

Not on my play through, no. My character never said anything like that and openly told some of the racist to shut their traps. Bioware should've made ME more aware of my previous actions or allowed me to explain myself instead of just whacking me over the head with renegade points. It basically went like this:
Council ship: OMG we're getting shot at, protect us while we flee!
Shepard: Nope, we need every ship to defeat Sovereign and I'm not going to sacrifice the life of civilians on the Citadel and soldiers on out ships just so you are guaranteed to get out of here in one piece. Sorry, you're on your own.
Council ship: FUUUUUuuuu*explodes*

At the end of the first game I let the council die. It was for all the right reasons, there was a giant spaceship Cthulu about to destroy all life as we knew it and I didn't want to lose vital military assets and threaten the survival of the Galaxy for some symbolic gesture. Turned out to be the 'wrong decision' in the overall theme of being the good guy and uniting all races in mass Effect 2 but I stuck with it because I would always have made that decision with the knowledge I had to hand and it also made the storyline and reactions to you on the citadel more interesting in the 2nd game

Yeah, it's stupid that not saving the fleeing council but instead focusing on the dreadnought that's ripping apart the citadel where millions of people might die is a "renegade" action. It's a friggin' elected council, those guys aren't "worth" more than any other person. Just elect a new representative and carry on, geez.

I wonder if he lost some of the major NPCs by assigning them the wrong tasks and/or the crew of the ship.

Spoilers ahead!
On my first play through I messed around for a bit before starting the final mission and lost the entire Normandy II crew in a horrible, graphic way. I really didn't expect it and actually felt bad for them. Second time playing only Thane bit the dust because I don't want to see him in ME3 :>

It doesn't have to, North Korea will just scout rush it until it's out of ammo (or reached its kill limit).

I'm more familiar with Haskell than I'd like to be, thank you. What I meant is that programmers shouldn't use the horrible syntax you use in math for programming, e.G. no "funny" characters, descriptive names and all that.

Haskell supports various unicode characters as operators and it makes me wanna to puke. http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/haskell-prime/wiki/UnicodeInHaskellSource IMO one of the great things about programming nowadays is that you can use descriptive names without feeling bad. Single character identifiers from different alphabets are something that rub me the wrong way in mathematics. Keep 'em out of my programming languages!

Bullshit from the article:

Unicode has the entire gamut of Greek letters, mathematical and technical symbols, brackets, brockets, sprockets, and weird and wonderful glyphs such as "Dentistry symbol light down and horizontal with wave" (0x23c7). Why do we still have to name variables OmegaZero when our computers now know how to render 0x03a9+0x2080 properly?

OmegaZero is at least something everybody will recognize. And why would you name a variable like that anyway? It's programming, not math, use descriptive names.

But programs are still decisively vertical, to the point of being horizontally challenged. Why can't we pull minor scopes and subroutines out in that right-hand space and thus make them supportive to the understanding of the main body of code?

Because we're not using the same IDE?

And need I remind anybody that you cannot buy a monochrome screen anymore? Syntax-coloring editors are the default. Why not make color part of the syntax? Why not tell the compiler about protected code regions by putting them on a framed light gray background? Or provide hints about likely and unlikely code paths with a green or red background tint?

... what?

For some reason computer people are so conservative that we still find it more uncompromisingly important for our source code to be compatible with a Teletype ASR-33 terminal and its 1963-vintage ASCII table than it is for us to be able to express our intentions clearly.

... WHAT? If you don't express your intentions clearly in a program it won't work!

And, yes, me too: I wrote this in vi(1), which is why the article does not have all the fancy Unicode glyphs in the first place.

vim does Unicode just fine. And from the Wikipedia entry on the author (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poul-Henning_Kamp):

A post by Poul-Henning is responsible for the widespread use of the term bikeshed colour to describe contentious but otherwise meaningless technical debates over trivialities in open source projects.

Irony? Why does this guy come off as an idiot who got annoyed by VB in this article when he clearly should know better?