Research on behavior modification shows that punishment (like, say, spanking) results in escape and avoidance behaviors and usually results in people reverting to the unwanted behavior once the source/threat of punishment is taken away. Positive reinforcement for wanted behaviors (and removing the reinforcement in response to unwanted behaviors) is more effective, longer lasting, and generally results in a more psychologically healthy individual.

And, just for some anecdotal evidence, I worked for 3 years in a group home for abused and emotionally disturbed children. The ones who were physically beaten seemed to have learned from their parents not how to behave properly, but that anger and violence are the way to respond to someone who does something you don't like.

There's certainly potential for misunderstanding, but the phrase is perfectly sensible considering it's referring to a game being released for a FOSS OS.

Yeah, it's not news for FOSS to be used in the development of a game, but I'd say it's news (on a site like Slashdot, at least) for a game that gets reviews as good as WoG's to be released natively for Linux.

Great party guys! I'll see you all 2361 to celebrate 12345678900!

I'm pretty happy with my Centro.

I tried a Blackberry first and it died within a week. I switched it for a Centro, which does more, cost less, and (best of all) didn't croak.

Okay, fair enough.

Regarding Opera, I think it is a combination of being proprietary and, as the AC said, many of us remember Opera as being the browser with ads built in.

Regarding OS X, personally I've never cared for Apple, myself. I like my hardware cheap and my software as Free (in both meanings of the term) as possible, and I feel like they get away with high prices by making their products into fashion statements. I guess it's good to keep in mind that Slashdot is more than one person; the people writing pro-OSX stuff aren't necessarily the pro-open-source people.

Why would you say "for some reason" when you admit, in the very next sentence, that you know precisely what the reason is (in regards to Opera)?

I otherwise agree with your post. Kind of sad to see users of an OS that started as a young hacker's hobby ridiculing others for... working on an OS as a hobby.

Sure, of course we don't need BeOS. Just like Minix users didn't need Linux.

Seriously, I'm guessing none of the Haiku developers are looking at it as "going to war against Microsoft". I don't know any of the developers, but I'm going to take a wild guess and say they probably look at it as a fun project to work on in their spare time, and probably find something about BeOS to be philosophically or pragmatically preferable to other alternatives (like Linux).

Yeah, voters can take the job away from party A and give it to party B, which is just as corrupt.

Oh, you wanted to try party C? In the U.S.? Good luck--maybe if you try hard enough, party C can take 1 or 2% of the vote away from A and B..

Easy: wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/gnuwin32/wget-1.11.4-1-setup.exe

Yeah, seriously. I want the big feature of the next version of Firefox to be "no longer randomly eats up 99% of CPU power".

Thanks for bringing that up; I've been trying to understand that for a long time (long before the current crisis)

I'm no economics or financial expert, but I've always found it strange that our society looks at houses like some kind of magic money machines--as if they can repeatedly be bought and sold with the prices growing far faster than the salaries of the people purchasing them. How could that possibly NOT lead to a situation where no one can afford houses anymore (or, more likely, everyone buys houses with loans they can't afford to pay back)?

And yet our politicians talk about it as if we just need to fix up the economy with some stimulus and once it's all over we can go back to things the way they were. WTF?! I just want to hear Obama or one prominent senator stand up and say, "Look, houses can no longer be, and can never again be, treated as magic money machines."

That's "biracial overlords", you insensitive clod!

(Though I also would have accepted "secret Muslim overlords.")

According to Circuit City's new homepage, CC's Canadian operations "will continue" and "are not affected by the liquidation of Circuit City's U.S. operations."

Suddenly I'm glad that my wife didn't argue with me when I said "no thanks" to the $200 "extended warranty" Circuit City offered us when we bought a flat screen TV there last week.

I'm not a Steam basher, but it occurs to me that most of the games I've been enjoying lately are almost 20 years old and developed by companies that either don't exist anymore or are shadows of their former selves that don't support their old products.

I'm very glad the ability to play those games does not in any way depend on the continued success of a particular publisher.

I guess the typical gamer who doesn't play anything older than a year or two has little reason not to use Steam, though.