This post is the utmost of absurdity. You create a strawman that is an awful piece of code, and then talk about why it sucks -- well, yeah it sucks, you deliberately crafted it to be so. I suggest you take a look at a decent program written in python or ruby. You will find that code is easy and straight forward, that no more comments are required than in other languages, and the code is quite maintainable. Seriously. Browse some high profile Ruby projects on Github and look at the code. I think you'll be surprised.

Yessir, the next frontier in human evolution is our own self-guided evolution. Soon (cosmologically speaking) we will have the ability and no qualms what-so-ever about tweaking the genetic makeup of our species. Also, I suspect that our purely biological parts will merely be a framework for something far more grand, something of our own design. We almost have the ability to do this sort of thing now, and in the long term, it'd be an absolute waste not to use such technology to improve our species.

I find that Reddit has successfully integrated ads into their site in such a way that they're even valuable. They screen their advertisers so only items of interest to the user base are advertised. Their main advertising panel advertises vendors as well as site content. I have Adblock off there because the ads are frequently interesting and worth clicking on, and never intrusive or annoying (none are animated, for example).

For sure, if you want to organize it ;) Send me an email @ btthalion at gmail.

DotA wins or losses don't show up anywhere within battle.net, being a 'custom' game. It's all about having a 'good game', and unfortunately, a new person on a team can quickly turn it into something else.

Adding to what I said above, consider that when a team loses, it can take 45 minutes to an hour. If the game is just one team dominating and the other (with the novice player) just waiting for defeat, it's not all that fun. That's a lot of time wasted, which adds to the hostility you see. This can probably be considered a chief flaw in DotA's gameplay, but it may just be a consequence of a very desirable trait - that of being highly team based.

This was true in the 5.84 days, I remember it well. Back when it was RoC DotA or Allstars, I was on the side of the old DotA because Allstars was rife with abilities like Slayer's Laguna Blade that would kill most heroes in a single shot. Now, though, heroes are far more balanced, and insta-kill abilities are non-existent, assuming the hero in question is not fed. There are also a lot more items now, so it's easier to tailor your build for the heroes you're up against using items that still make sense for your hero.

Demigod does not have a Linux client and will not run on Wine for various reasons, making it far less attractive to me when regular old DotA is lots of fun and runs with Wine mostly without issue.

I have certainly experienced this. The problem is, in general, that just one missing link on the team becomes a major handicap for the 4 other players. All it takes is for one player to give opponents a few easy kills for the opponents to gain enough experience and equipment to become more or less unstoppable. This, combined with the fact that DotA is played on chiefly on Battle.net where the average age is seemingly mid-teens and you've got a recipe for problems.

My advice, if you want to get in to it, is to first play with AI players (you can download a map with AI players at getdota.com). This will get you acquainted with how to control your hero, what items there are, figure out how to stay alive in your lane, and some other fundamentals. Then, when joining a game, participate in the team chat. DotA is very much a team game. Ask for help, and in my experience, you'll get it. Pick a hero that sounds fun (maybe one you practiced with using the AI), and ask for advice on item builds and for a player to team up with in a lane. If people know you're new, and that you're trying to learn, they'll cut you some slack.

DotA is not a tower defense game at all. It's more akin to Diablo where you control a single character and attempt to kill enemy characters. You also must destroy the enemy towers and, finally, their main structure, however towers are never built by players; they are present at the beginning of the game as an obstacle for players to overcome.

For those unaware of what DotA is, it's a team based strategy game where you control a single character (called your hero) with varied abilities. The goal is simply to destroy the enemy team's main structure, which is protected by multiple towers of progressive difficulty and, of course, enemy heroes.

During the course of the game, you attempt to kill as many neutral computer units as possible in order to collect money, buy items to improve your character, gain experience and skills, and kill enemy heroes. When you get into the strategy a bit more, there are far more goals to attend to, such as harassing enemy heroes and denying them of experience and money, 'ganking' enemies with your teammates, and etc. There is a lot of depth in the game play and lots of general strategies to pick from.

As the subject says, DotA is really the only game I play these days, and I've been playing it for years. There are around 100 heroes, each with their own set of unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses. The game is intuitive to play and always interesting. It also runs on old hardware, being based on a blizzard game, although it can take a while to load.

If this game is even a fraction as fun as DotA, and has a native Linux client, it's a must buy from me.

Errors put the browser in "dumb rendering" mode. Rather than a "best effort" approach, browsers should, upon detecting a serious error in the input, drop to "dumb mode" - default font, default colors, etc., after displaying an error message. Much of the incompatibility between browsers comes from inconsistent handling of bad HTML. So there should be a penalty, but not a fatal one, for bad code.

You're arguing that the browser should harm consumer's experience of the web in an attempt to get web authors to fix their stuff. In reality, it will simply cause consumers to blame their browser (assuming it works somewhere but not others). Nay, dealing with bad markup is a browser feature. Sad, but true.

Downloadable fonts. Netscape used to have downloadable fonts. The font makers bitched. Bring that feature back, despite the whining. No more having to express fonts as images.

This is accomplished with CSS's @font-face declaration. Firefox 3.5 supports it, possibly others do as well. HTML should not concern itself with fonts.

2D layout The "div"/"clear" model of layout was a flop. Horrors of Javascript are needed just to make columns balance. Absolute positioning is overused as a workaround for the limits of "div"/"clear". (Text on top of text happens all too often.) Tables were actually a better layout tool, because they're a 2D system. HTML needs a 2D layout model that can't accidentally result in overlaps. There are plenty of those around; most window managers have one. There's been a quiet move back to tables for layout, but people are embarrassed to admit it.

While your claims of a resurgence of tables-for-layouts and failure of float/clear is debatable and definitely deserving of a citation, this problem is again already addressed by CSS via the display property, with values like "inline-block", "table-cell", "table-row", etc. IE support is finally here in IE8, so all vendors' latest browsers support this.

No one said Google hates video. Google is not happy with the quality of Theora (they find it to be unacceptable to use for, say, YouTube). Google is definitely on board with HTML 5 and the video tag -- they've already implemented it in Chrome with Theora support AFAIK.

The real question is: What's the point of a spec that major vendors will not implement? The true purpose of a spec is to have a common set of conventions that all vendors can agree upon. Having Theora in the spec cannot be agreed upon by vendors, and thus, it should not be a part of the spec.

It's not just Apple, though. MS will probably not implement Theora either. Google will not be using it for anything substantial because of substandard quality per bit. The fact is that nothing is gained by making it a spec requirement. Either vendors will implement Theora or they won't, having it in the spec won't change anything. So why even have it, if that's the case?

Apple also doesn't want to support anything doesn't have off-the-shelf hardware acceleration. Until Apple can buy chips to decode Theora that will work in the iPhone, Theora is a no go for them.