Huh? I maintain code written by others, and unless you have a particularly incompetent developer, more LOC is almost always less complex. You may be able to condense 100 lines of java into 3 lines of perl, but I can both write and debug those 100 lines a lot faster than those 3 lines.

Exactly. And try to get your game reviewed by some people. Then they can tell others how much it reminds them of that oldie that you got your inspiration from. Much classier than just making a game called "Pocman" or "Super Vittorio Bros."

Take a page from Trine. It's obviously inspired by Lost Vikings, but it's not a straight ripoff, and they don't (need to) market themselves as such. In the meantime, every other review of the game mentions Lost Vikings, and I'm sure that's how they get many of their sales. It's how how they got mine, in any case.

the acreage covered by Himalayan glaciers

"Acreage"? Really? What's wrong with "surface area"? Should we now call length "footage", and volume "gallonage"?

At the very least use SI square meterage. ;-)

LaTeX is usually the right tool for the job if that job happens to involve writing a lot of equations, but the learning curve makes grown men (MSc students) weep.

It's called "not having copyright," and it was good enough to give us Shakespeare and Milton.

I'm not sure we'd have had a Shakespeare if he had lived in an age in which anyone could record and distribute plays at near-zero cost. You don't need so much copy protection if it's already hard to copy your work.

Too true, sadly. To be fair, most programming languages make this much harder than it should be. Even in a relatively modern language like java, which by default uses unicode for strings, you have a "char" datatype that can't actually completely represent all unicode characters. As a result, you have all kinds of libraries that assume that one char = one character, while this is not true. But you'll never find out until you have people using your application with, say, Han characters outside the BMP.

And I shudder to think how few applications can probably handle different writing directions, like the right-to-left of Hebrew.

Don't get me started. It's ridiculous how even big multinationals (emphasis on multi and national) can't get such a simple thing right.

Itunes on Windows is another good example. Originally it used Windows' "Location" setting, which is braindead, as location does not imply language. After much complaining about this on the Apple forums, they decided to fix it by having the user choose a language during installation. This is an improvement, but still idiotic, as they should have used Windows' "Language used in menus and dialogs" setting.

What's worst though, is that despite setting the language in iTunes, every feature that uses the iTunes Store still uses geo-ip to determine the language! So even though I've explicitly told iTunes that I want to use English, I still get Dutch in various places!

Researchers at the University of Rochester believe that a 35-mile rift in the desert of Ethiopia will likely become a new ocean in a million years or so, connecting the Red Sea with the Gulf of Aden.

Wow! This is a revolution!

That's just completely, utterly, false. Why don't you also claim you need to buy the official WotC dice? It's about as true as the rest you're saying.

As a group, the only WotC products you need are the original 3 core books, same as with 3E. You'd think this would be obvious from the fact that thousands were playing the game before all the other products you mention were even released.

Yes, if you specifically want to play a class from PHB2, then you need PHB2, duh. If you specifically wanted to play a warlock in 3E, you needed Complete Arcane. This is no different.

There's no reason to buy the "Power" books, unless you'd like more options for your characters. Same as with the "Complete" books in 3.5, and the spatbooks in 3.0. And Complete Martial is not at all a Paladin Supplement. It doesn't have any significant content for paladins, and it's explicitly not marketed as a paladin supplement.

As to the official mini's: these are not at all required, and I've never before heard anyone claim that they were. The same is true for a D&D Insider subscription. That's basically a subscription to Dungeon and Dragon magazines plus some online tools. Do you feel Dungeon and Dragon magazines were required to play 3E? I should hope not.

And what's that nonsense about 4E being a complete surprise? WotC announced 4E 10 months in advance. They even published preview books! And anyone paying attention had noticed that Wizards had been experimenting with radically new mechanics for D&D for at least a year before that, so it was only an open secret that WotC was working on a new edition.

All in all, your post is nothing more than a troll.

Ouch. I feel for you. SS1 really is a brilliant game, but I'm not sure I could stand the interface again either.

Do give X-Com a try. It's a lot of fun, and the interface (IMO) is not too awful. If it does turn out that the interface is too big an obstacle, you could still try X-COM: Apocalypse, which uses a newer engine.

I prefer just simple "Easy", "Normal", "Hard", "Very Hard" settings. Ideally with "Normal" being a little easy, so I get to feel good about myself when I choose "Hard" :-). (Only half joking here. The psychology really does matter.)

The problem with letting the computer decide what the challenge level is, is that it doesn't have a clue about my preferences. It only knows how well I'm doing, not whether or not I enjoy being challenged. This is not enough information to determine if I'm having fun or not. Doubly so if the system is flawed. For instance, Oblivion takes only your level into account, not your skill, or even your character's skills. This means that if you level up by, for instance, trading, you are constantly hounded by all kinds of nasty critters that you have no hope of defeating with your puny combat stats. Obviously, that's no fun at all.

Also, in some games it's really inappropriate to change the world for no apparent reason, other than that the player is doing well or poorly. Morrowind (sans expansions) was a remarkable consistent world, and that helped to make it incredibly engrossing. In Oblivion, where you were effectively never getting ahead, and where eventually even the highway robbers were equiped with a king's random in magic items in order to challenge you, I never felt close to having the same level of immersion.

Agreed. The common opinion that games only improve on the audiovisuals is simply untrue. It's amazing how limited or downright crappy the interfaces of many older games are compared to those of more recent titles.

Still useful (if it really works) for protecting fruit though. Once the blossom is gone and the fruit starts to develop, pollination is no longer an issue.