Hey, let's forget about unfunded goverment mandates, senators busy playing blame games, clueless SEC employees, greedy intermediaries, lopsided compensation practices, and market participants that do not understand instruments that they are trading.

What we really miss is python interface to EDGAR. Some guy say so, it must be true.

Sometimes you just have too many flags to really want to be hammering things haphazardly into a single line. In that case guided scripts seem like a fine solution, too. Any simple frameworks out there to save reinventing the wheel?

A video game unplayed is, to the player, all unrealized potential. When you play the game, a set of experiences emerge from those interactive sessions. Perhaps you forge a narrative in a game like Dragon Age or Mass Effect. Perhaps it's some form of finessed performance art in a game like Flower. Whatever it is, the art is there once the game has been played from its beginning to its completion. A unique advantage of the medium is the freedom to create new or different art on subsequent traversals of the game.

Interestingly, this is not fundamentally different from any other art. Would a painting or a book or any other recognized piece of art be art if there was no human to experience it? I think not. A painting is an unremarkable thing until a human being looks upon it and interacts with it emotionally. Perhaps the interaction is limited to your imagination, but there definitely is interaction.

And finally, as to the argument that you can't win art, I wholeheartedly disagree. The creator of the art has a definite sense of whether he won or lost based on how happy he is with the finished product. A game player is a co-creator in the art, since it is emergent from the playing experience, and, similarly, winning and losing is about perception.... the game just tends to make it a bit more clear whether or not you should be happy with a given outcome... but with many games it's more nebulous. Not everyone survived my first playthrough of Mass Effect 2, and yet I felt more satisfied with that result than if there had been a perfectly happy ending free of consequences.

Not as good, but just as free. That's the point.

I don't think hotmail is as good as gmail either, but it's just as free.

The browser is exactly the same - you might like chrome better (I do), but IE is just as free as Chrome.

It's not fair to intentionally misinterpret someone's point to make a different point of your own. When someone says "X is true", you aren't disagreeing when you say "No, Y is definitely not true" even when you pretend X and Y are the same thing. Now, to refute your Y argument:

Chrome is the property of a monopoly trying to squash the only other search engine in use. What's the difference? It's a competitive market, and Google is doing the exact same thing to Bing that Microsoft is trying to do to Chrome. It's competition, and its healthiest when you have three or more competitors. The search market really only has two, and one of those is far more dominant than the other.

Again I say, what's the difference between the two? Both give away tons of free tools (though targeted to different markets), both give away their most visible services for free or virtually for free, both charge significant premiums for their high-end services, and both have a near monopoly in their primary market.

The only real difference between the two, is Google is newer, smaller, and hasn't tried nearly as many dirty tricks as Microsoft has. That's it. Whether Google will grow up to be as bad as Microsoft, time will tell. But I'll tell you this much - the bigger they get, the more likely it is they will become another Microsoft. Principles become harder and harder to stick to when you have more and more people who need to follow them. Google in China is a perfect example of that - it took China fucking with their servers before they decided to actually follow their "Do no evil" pledge in China. The Google of 8 years ago would have stood on that pledge to begin with and refused to do business in China if it meant censoring their searches.

but as the horrible control mechanisms of Mass Effect 2 and others showed

We learned this long ago about the time Deus Ex:Invisible War came out. Dumbing that game down for consoles just about killed the franchise.

Hell, dumping Mechwarrior 5 for MechInsult and MechInsult 2 DID kill the Mechwarrior franchise, and Crimson Skies: MechInsult In Biplanes did the same for that franchise. Someone at Microsoft needs a beating with a cluestick.

I disagree with the idea of "a few truly great games" however. The problem for PC games is that they have to play to a "lowest common denominator." You can release something with major graphical ability, BUT it has to be able to scale back to a PC at least 4 years old to have a decent purchasing market while still looking good on those PCs. And you have to contend with the army of Dell/HP/etc users who bought a PC with an Intel "Extreme Shittiness" on-motherboard graphics card that can't even run games that were 7 years old when the PC was bought, too.

If real businesses like Walmart can track all of their data in SQL databases that scale just fine, Dziuba argues, surely your company can, too.

Oddly enough I'm trying to get to walmart.ca right now, and it's down....