As for the ill-mannered heathens, I wait until a movie has been out for 2+ weeks, then go on an off night. I occasionally get surprised (~100 people at Sherlock last night), but usually there are only 5-10 people present, no cut-ups or screaming babies.

Ultima 7 was developed on something like a 386-33, but the target platform was a 386sx-16, if I remember the Ultima Dragons newsgroup correctly. The big problem they had was that the program was 16-bit, but needed to be able to access far more than the usual 640k in order to work correctly. After an enormous amount of optimisation, they got about 1 fps if they used swap, 4fps if they used XMS, 6fps via EMS and a whopping 16fps by using the flat-realmode hack on the 386. It was only that which allowed the game to ship, and it made the game pretty much impossible to run under Windows 95 and later until DOSbox came along.

Never heard of this before. I hate you right now. My childhood is flooding back into my head.

I'm inclined to agree. The limitations of his style of software development are quite apparent. I think Minecraft is a great game with a concept behind it that hasn't been fully exploited yet, and I would agree that there are mods doing things the core game should be doing. Minecraft itself is a catalog of half-baked ideas. The core of the game--exploring, mining, crafting, and building--is very strong. Many of the other elements, however, feel half-finished.

So ... choosing not to participate in something, without trying to stop anyone who wants to from participating in it ... and wanting basic property rights to be respected in the form of being left alone by vandals, trespassers, and other criminals ... that makes someone a jerk? What a freedom-loving people we have become.

Neighbors, I'm sitting here at my house on Halloween night, disappointed about the lack of participation in our neighborhood. Standing on the corner of XXX Court and XXX Drive, I could count 11 houses without their lights on. The younger children in our neighborhood very much look forward to this day and to have only a few homes join in the festivities is a major disappointment.