...after all, they did release their own 3D remake of Chrono Trigger after they shut down Chrono Ressurection.... right?

Oh, yeah, they didn't.

And we probably won't see a Chrono sequel either. Ever since they simply gave up on the "Chrono Break" trademark, I'm pretty much convinced that the franchise does not interest them anymore. Not enough to work on it beyond releasing ports.

Yeah, doesn't make sense, I know. Clicked on the submit button instead of the edit one.

Was. At least for nowadays it is now the thing that is blocked by NoScript on a lot of web pages.

Not only it does, it comes installed out of the box.

(by installed I mean as an option available, not as the default theme)

1. Wrong. I never participated in those contests myself, but I know a lot of people who love them, and they are clear about it: russian and chinese programmers are very good. If you want proof, some contests allow non-participating watchers to peek at the code development in real time. Furthermore, in harder competitions, some of the problems are so hard people can spend days trying to figure out how to solve them in theory. Knowing the problems and the input data in advance sometimes doesn't mean shit.

2. Wrong. The problems are simple, but they allow uncountable small variations that could change the required approach completely. The competition rewards people with enough experience and instinct to know which approach, dynamic programming, greedy programming, brute-force with prunning, etc, will work best. Memorizing a book on calculus won't make you able to solve quickly any problem that only requires knowledge from this book. It's the same case here.

3. I didn't understand this point very well, care to clarify? They do solve the problem. The solution they have came from a fully functional executable solution to the problem.

4. Most of this is not on purpose. It's just that they judge is automatic, there's a limit on what an automatic response can say.

As for your conclusion, read my response to point 1 again. Without thinking, you don't go very far.

Please be more specific on your lawyer jokes because if you're not you're hitting Ray too. :)

I understand your point, but please never make an analogy between something involving Stephen Hawking and something involving Jane Goody again.

It simply sounds wrong.

I played a little with Groovy some time ago to see what the fuss was all about. Comparing it to Ruby is better than comparing it to Python because Groovy relies on closures in a way very similar to the way Ruby relies on code blocks. The syntax is also closer to Ruby with respect to the "everything is an object" philosophy (numbers have callable methods, etc.)

The main problem I had during my small test drive is that Groovy has a lot of subtleties involving variable scoping that take a while to get used to and it's very, very slow. But the whole concept of using a dynamic language while having all the resources of Java available is quite nice.

I'll stick to my original theory: Google wants to support Chrome and Firefox. They want the market evenly shared between WebKit, Gecko and Trident (or whatever replaces Trident in the future) because that would make standards support more important (no more of the "if it works in IE, it works for 90% of the public" argument).

Not for altruism, not to make the Internet a better place. Simply because a major part of their business is web applications, which are much easier to develop with standards.

To scare the hell out of me, I absolutely love the Fatal Frame series. Some people say its strong point is having a camera instead of some powerful gun and some people say its strong point is having to look at the ghosts face-to-face and very close to effectively defeat them.

Though I kinda agree with those two theories, I think its "scare power" comes from something else: the fact that the ghosts are "innocent". In FF, like in some Japanese horror movies, the concept is that the spirits are not aware that they are dead, how scary they look and that they can hurt people: they just want to make contact.

For the sake of comparison, consider F.E.A.R.: Alma surely is scary, but there's little doubt she's one fucked up girl trying to kill you. In FF3, however, you have to deal with the ghost of a 5-year-old girl who keeps screaming "daddy, where are you" and whose attack is pulling your arm to call your attention and look at you pleading. That attitude, plus the realisation she's dead, creeps the hell out of me.

I'm surprised no one so far mentioned Aptana Studio. It provides decent syntax highlighting, autocomplete, has support for a dozen popular libraries and a very good debugger that integrates Firebug with the Eclipse debugging framework. Plus, it has some neat features for web development such as the CSS autocomplete that indicates for which browsers each property is available.

Refrigerators?

There. Fixed it for myself.

I agree with that. While I don't agree with is saying that this "when" is "always", which is what most eye candy detractors do.

That 1/2 second never bothered me, never got in the way and I move and open windows a lot. Does this mean you are wrong in feeling bothered by it? No. My point is simply: different people, different tastes, different impressions.

Furthermore, the animation time is completely configurable.