There are mature bitcoin exchanges like Mt Gox where other users can't scam you.

Teachers that associate at all with students should be fired on the spot? In high school, a friend of mine's mom was one of my teachers, and most of my friends were friends with her family (including the teacher). Several other teachers of mine ran school clubs and were friendly with students, including on Facebook at the insistence of the students. Everyone was more than happy with this. The idea that this shouldn't be allowed and should have laws against it is fucking absurd.

Minecraft is a sandbox game. It doesn't need NPCs to give the player quests. When NPC villagers are added, I'm hoping they just meander mysteriously and keep to themselves for the most part.

>Halo is an FPS. It has a "story," meaning we tell you something for 5 minutes and say "GO KILLING. BY THE WAY, GRAPHICS!!!" ... that's all; most of the story is imaginary, and the game really has just about no plot

I don't see how these things really connect. Of course what the player does is killing. Just because the player is doing things besides exclusively pondering the story just make the story imaginary and make the game have no plot. The main Halo trilogy games are intensely story-driven.

>The books for many, many sci-fi games like Doom/Doom3, Myst, Halo, and Starcraft are epic. They actually weave a story, and the story's usually written by someone not involved with the games: they find a scifi writer, say "this game has this little framework so have fun,"

Bungie worked closely with the writers of the different Halo novels to flesh out the path that the novels should take, and made sure that they matched up well with and continued the Halo canon.

The Spartan 1 program is rarely mentioned at all in the Halo stories (unless it's in the last two books).

Spartan 2s were kidnapped children who were trained and then augmented to be stronger. The Spartan 3s were similar, but their training and augmentations were quicker and a bit shoddier than that of the Spartan 2's. They also aged at an accelerated rate IIRC.

I didn't see much in Halo Reach that went against what happened in Fall of Reach - there were plenty of Spartans in Fall of Reach - just Master Chief was the only surviving one up for fighting left on the Pillar of Autumn. Though Halo Reach may have changed some details about where the Pillar of Autumn and Cortana were at some parts of Fall of Reach but I can't really remember too much of Fall of Reach.

So clients have something like a sharing folder, and connect to a hub to see the other clients' sharing folders? Guess it's closer to a limited Gnutella network than a simple ftp file server.

>Wow, a filesharing protocol I hadn't stumbled across! Thanks Slashdot!

My same first reaction too!

Though what would the difference be between a DC hub and an (s)ftp server? From only reading about it, the main thing seems to be that hubs can redirect to each other, which doesn't seem too much more useful than a text file on an (s)ftp server listing other servers to check out too.

>we should really implement some kind of a universal public key system to take care of this problem. Instead of trying to keep a different password for every service you use, you would only have 1 private key to manage.

OpenID?

If you had a phone that did magical things, why would your first response be to get rid of it?

JFDuke has been out of development for a long time. The most active and advanced (more features for mods) source port now is Eduke32, which has taken a lot of code from JFDuke.