As I said,

Disclaimer: I haven't done the research to be 100% sure the story is true, but all the elements make sense. Wikipedia mentions it but seems doubtful.

Please finish reading my post before arguing with it.

In most of Europe, the new year once began on April 1, at the beginning of spring--a time of rebirth and renewal. But as Christianity took over the continent, the Church decreed that it should be January 1, right after Christmas. The last few holdouts to continue celebrating in the spring were derided as April Fools, and it became fashionable to play pranks on them. This is the origin of April Fools Day.

Like everyone else in the world, I date.year++ on January 1, but don't do much in the way of celebrating--generally I watch football all day. But on April 1, I go around wishing everybody a happy new year and telling the April Fools story.

Disclaimer: I haven't done the research to be 100% sure the story is true, but all the elements make sense. Wikipedia mentions it but seems doubtful.

I believe you misspelled "k1dd13z."

"Selling you ROMs" and "a license to use them" are mutually exclusive. You don't need a license to use your own property. You're either being sold a ROM that becomes your property (in which case you can use it however you like) OR you're being sold a license to access a ROM that remains the licensor's property (in which case you can use it in the ways permitted by the terms of the license).

I hereby present you with the Best Thing Said On The Internet Today award for 8-25-2011.

Yes, very very rarely. Just like today.

Just as it's always been--we only remember the occasional exceptions because they're the only things worth remembering.

Andrew Jackson. Aaron Burr. Adolph Hitler. Eisenhower-Stephenson. McCarthy. As bad as it is now--and it is pretty bad--it was ten times worse in antebellum America, and even that was a dramatic improvement over any previous civilization in the history of the world.

Regarding nostalgia, don't forget the test-of-time effect. We think Victorian literature, 1930s movies, Ancient Greek philosophy, etc. are superior to today's because only the worthwhile stuff stuck around. There was a Michael Bay in early Hollywood. There was a Danielle Steele in 1880s London. There was a Glenn Beck in 1790s Philadelphia. We just don't republish them any more.

Normally, I would ignore anyone who didn't realize that a comment modded +5 Funny was in fact a joke, not intended as a literally true statement. But first, you're wrong in interesting ways. I mean that as a compliment--people who are right or wrong in uninteresting ways are so boring as to be de facto nonentities, and people who are right in interesting ways are exceedingly rare. Second, you express yourself coherently. I therefore deem you to be worth talking to.

Let's deconstruct my joke. In actual fact, France's influence is larger but declining, while Twitbook's is smaller but increasing. Claiming, facetiously, that those trends have gone so far that the situation has reversed emphasizes the trends themselves. It's a statement which is literally false, but in a way that highlights something true. That's something I (and apparently several people with mod points) find funny.

But we do actually disagree--you think I was overstating the influence of social networking, but I was actually understating the influence of France. Social networking, especially Facebook and Twitter, are a much bigger deal than you claim they are. Point by point:

It doesn't really alter people's values

There has been much discussion, including here on Slashdot, about the effect cable television and the internet are having on people's political views. We can, more and more easily, choose to avoid exposure to differing viewpoints. This positive feedback loop seems to be leading us to hold more and more strongly to more and more extreme positions. I'd call that an alteration of our values. Social networking is not the driving force of that change, but it's certainly a factor.

Just as widely discussed is the rapid, universal devaluation of privacy--primarily and directly due to social networking. Whether that's a good or bad thing is far from clear, but it's definitely a big thing.

it doesn't lead people to do anything new ... it's a different way of doing the same thing

The big new thing that Facebook does is that we no longer have to consciously choose to keep in touch with casual friends--we have to consciously choose not to. I'm Facebook-friends with dozens of people I went to high school or college with but haven't seen since graduation, former coworkers, siblings of friends, etc. These continuing relationships are not a big part of my day to day life, but any of them could be rekindled--if we move to the same city, or one of us posts about a common interest we didn't know we shared. That's something that was never possible before, even with earlier social networking sites. Nothing before Facebook had a large enough userbase to have that effect.

You can break all forms of communication down into four categories: one-to-one, one-to-many, many-to-one, and many-to-many. A conversation in person, or a personal letter, is one-to-one. The written (published) word (or television or pretty much any form of artistic expression) is one-to-many. Democracy is a kind of many-to-one communication, as is survey-based research. But many-to-many communication never existed before the internet, and you could almost use it as the primary distinguishing characteristic of social networking. Social networking is the subset of internet activity that is not just a faster version of traditional one-to-one or one-to-many communication. The major breakthroughs of the other three categories are language, democracy, and the printing press--it's an understatement to call them world-changers. We may not know yet HOW many-to-many communication will change the world, but there's no doubt that it's going to. Check out the last three paragraphs of this speech by Douglas Adams for a somewhat more in-depth discussion of this idea.

Twitter is drastically different from anything else that exists on- or offline, including other social networks. All other forms of socialization can be modeled by simple graphs--individuals are vertices, with an edge between people who know each other. Twitter is a directed graph--Alice can follow Bob, Bob can follow Alice, or Alice and Bob can mutually follow each other. This is a radically new idea.

it has influence only on individual small groups ... I realize there are a hundred million of such small groups, but they don't represent one gigantic culture

Yes, they do. By definition. The thing you're missing is that those groups overlap--you can play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon to connect any two people. Alice knows Bob, Bob knows Carol, Carol knows Dave, Dave knows Elizabeth, and Elizabeth knows Frank. Even though Alice has never even heard of Frank, they're part of the same culture because of that chain of connections. There's nothing more to culture than the cumulative behavior and communication of an interconnected web of individuals. You basically just said "(definition of term), but that's not (term)."

...that Twitter and Facebook have more influence on global culture than it does.

I'm in one of the missing ranges. We got a modem when I was 12.5, and I'm 31.5 now. 19/31.5 = 60.3%. I picked the 61-80 range, on the assumption that it really meant 60 < x <= 80.

Embiggen is a perfectly cromulent word!

"Meanwhile, the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation."

Wow, that was hilarious, thanks for posting it. I feel for the guy--orchestral trombone parts (I'm a trombonist) are all like that.

Yes, Heeding The Call takes its entire melody, and even most of its chord progression, directly from Canon in D--and yet they sound so different that a non-musician wouldn't notice that they had anything in common at all. That's how small a part melody plays in music. And that tiny fragment of common ground--melody--is the ONLY part of the chess music that is generated algorithmically from the game descriptions. The rest--the vast majority--comes from Stokes' imagination.

There's certainly nothing wrong with seeding the creative process with outside information, as I described it. Bach himself used to ask people to hit a few random keys on his harpsichord, then improvise fugues based on the themes they came up with. Whole subgenres of mid-20th century experimental music are built on similar ideas. But that's all this is, just another particular source of outside inspiration, not a new development in (or even an example of!) algorithmic composition.

It sounds like you know more about chess than I do, so I'll take your word for it that more than 10% of the game is represented. But speaking as both a mathematician and a musician, I was being generous in describing melody alone as 20% of musical content. Listen to a piano arrangement of Pachelbel's canon, then a song called Heeding The Call by power-metal band Hammerfall and tell me I'm wrong. The non-deterministic additions Stokes is making to the deterministic chess output match, or arguably slightly exceed, the differences between Pachelbel's and Hammerfall's interpretations of the same melody.