Heh X hours later, I did manage to beat it! (I won't say how, in case other gamers out there want to still try it.)

But having spent a nice weekend getting through nearly all the game, what is your opinion on a level index? I wouldn't want to go through the whole level set just to try out one level!

And in fact that level turned out to be the hardest one of all for me. It stumped me all last night! For the rest, a few good patterns seemed to work, and I only lost he 2nd to last level by what feels like a lack of finesse - by that time I began to lose interest.

I found the arrows useless by the way - the power curve feels wrong because they're too weak on lower levels and it takes too long to get to level 5. Then one good wave of legionaries and you're sunk. Same with the bomb - cute idea, but it seemed rather slow and expensive to both build and operate.

I'll third the Neat Game comment!

The first x levels are easy. The first hard one is the one with the racing skeletons.

AC asked, "Finding my mother's maiden name is easier than using a phone book?"

About twelve seconds on Facebook?

Slashdot moderating is roughly the Fibonacci sequence of the number of sentences with a bound of 8, so it usually takes 5-8 sentences to score a +5. Two sentences only scores a 2.

One flaw of "OMG" news reporting without context is that subtle points risk getting washed over by more juicy yellow journalism. Remember a few weeks back when "the jury was told it should take for granted that the structure, sequence and organization of the 37 API packages as a whole was copyrightable"? We were all jitter-bugging about. However, come on, a *programmer judge* can't be *that* stupid to have sunk the case that early. Turns out, there was a technical point of law at work, encapsulated by the expanded phrase "This, however, was not a final definitive legal ruling.". It was a technical point of law administration aimed at the complete rulings and appeals process. See the full quote below. Also see the last sentence: "Counsel were so informed but not the jury."

For their task of determining infringement and fair use, the jury was told it should take for granted that the structure, sequence and organization of the 37 API packages as a whole was copyrightable. This, however, was not a final definitive legal ruling. One reason for this instruction was so that if the judge ultimately ruled, after hearing the phase one evidence, that the structure, sequence and organization in question was not protectable but was later reversed in this regard, the court of appeals might simply reinstate the jury verdict. In this way, the court of appeals would have a wider range of alternatives without having to worry about an expensive retrial. Counsel were so informed but not the jury.

So what if Oracle spent 50 Million on this trial - that's peanuts. But is the bigger cost that Oracle bought Sun specifically for this lawsuit?

In a sane world you're right, "How could you possibly call an API if the argument structure was copyrightable?", but never underestimate pure bluster and colossal FUD-Pricing. (Total Mini-Me moment here... "let's sue for 100 Beeelion Dollars!".

But notice there's no penalty for a "frivolous" lawsuit. For a "measly" 50 Million, you can just drag any big corp into court and play around for a while. Even one minor claim win would pay for it.

Except somewhere along the way, near-Pixel-Perfect became a standard to be judged against, maybe with the help of Apple.

Now if you have any flaws, people who would otherwise use your site just fine go "bleh, looks like $hit, they must suk, I won't bother using their service."

Something like not visiting Groklaw because a column was mis-formatted. Sorry, Groklaw is a solid starting point for a few important cases, so dissing them forever if one week they happen to have a bad page update is silly.

"The Perter Principal Lives!"
You have risen to your level of spelling incompetence.

This gets into those famous slippery SciFi - philosophy questions about "what is thinking?". Let's do a basic thought. "I like milk". Normally I don't have to keep "re-working from basic principles" to decide every day if I like milk. I figured that out last time, and stored the preference like an .ini file.

In my opinion, I'll side with the poster above to mentioned the latent fear of AI's ramifications. In many ways, thinking is "not very difficult". It's a deep version of the True Scotsman problem. We start with the Hypothesis that Thinking is Hard. Then computers (aided by the programmers!) master some section of thinking. Then we say "oh, that's not *really* thinking" and we feel better again.

But let's say 50% of life is "modular expert systems". Each person has to sacrifice parts of their time learning stuff. But get a good AI "module" and ship it out to every robot and then you can have 40,000 workers trained in a week. (Logistics, software loading, etc.)

Even emotions aren't all that hard to program.

IMO everyone should be allowed to puplish in the language of their choice, so long as they do it in the privacy of their own home.