All of you people are delusional. I have weird friends in tech, definitely, but then I have to admit most of my friends are in tech, and this is a tech forum. All of this "I am a bigger geek than you" is a pissing contest without any merit.

To illustrate this, I had a girlfriend once. Lived together with her for three years. She was a delightful woman whom I met in her dad's little Classical Music and Jazz CD store. She was completely non-technical and functioned relatively normally in most settings, but by god was she a geek. A classical music geek with a penchant for literature and some other culturally tinged stuff. Spoke Czech, Swedish and English, was highly intelligent and had a shitty job for a while. Now she works at a law firm that deals with patents and patent law (Patentbyrå), as an assistant to patent lawyers. She was so goddamn geeky at heart she would put most of us on /. to shame. It's just a kind of weirdness and geekiness most of "us" here on /. won't recognize if it kicked us in the arse, that is.

Maybe your average software developer can do magic under the hood, but he's not motivated to. Maybe (s)he can do magic under the hood in bed, in a kitchen, on a squash court, with a chemistry lab or with a bass, but you'll never know it. On the other hand, one of the most common beliefs amongst humans is that one is different or not normal. Superior, even.

This planet is filled with weird fuckers. The trick is figuring out what's weird about whom.

It's simple, Stross is just annoyed that his talk at Mountain View about his book "Halting State" has received a mere 6,200 views while Leonard Nimoy's toe tapping dance number "Bilbo Baggins" has garnered more than a million views and taken the country by storm.

A post below this one complains about Need for Speed, as an example of this adaptation done poorly. I'd agree, because it's so obvious, it's kind of insulting to the player. It cheapens the experience if you're trying to best to get through a game, and you obviously see the rest of the game "slow down" to accommodate a big mistake you make.

Ideally, I'd like to see games strike a balance where as you get better, they keep "pushing" you a little bit harder, but do it in such a gradual and unobtrusive way that you never even realize it's happening. (I think many games already do this in a non-intelligent fashion. They purposely increase the level of difficulty of little things as you progress through levels, making an assumption that the player has "mastered" certain techniques by the time they succeeded in beating certain puzzles or "bosses" placed as obstacles to advancing. The problem is, sometimes people just "brute force" defeat a level boss or lucky-guess their way past a tough spot without really learning the technique the game author assumed they learned. Then the levels that come next get frustrating for the player, and the person tends to just quit playing instead of trying to finish the game.)

I'd have to say though, in general, I think racing games are the most frustrating to play. If they're realistic, they're pretty much a case of "one false move and you lose", because you're racing against a number of other "contestants". What are the chances that ALL of them will make a mistake that puts each and every one of them further behind you after a slip-up you make? When they're setting up a "fun scenario" where you're this "larger than life" racing character (a la recent Need for Speed games), they tend to fall into the opposite trap. They can't maintain any respectability in the gameplay because you see obviously "worthy opponents" suddenly do nonsensical things, repeatedly, any time you screw up, just to justify how your car has a second chance at overtaking them a little further down the road.

I think they almost need to continuously analyze your driving style and skill level, and mimic it with the other cars you're racing against, to ensure you're all so closely matched that it really does seem accurate that your cars are all racing pretty close to each other through most of the course.