Your comment intrigued me and I decided to see for myself how Mortal Kombat has progressed since I last paid it any mind many years ago. So I watched a few gameplay trailers and I do not agree that MK has gotten any less silly or more gruesome, relatively speaking.

Yeah, there are more pixels on the screen now, but, importantly, the characters don't really seem to suffer. They don't realistically shriek or cower. They more or less shrug off being stabbed through the chest with a giant icicle, or having their bones beaten into dust. It may not be cel-shaded, but it's cartoon violence in capitals. Like Wile E. Coyote being flattened under a boulder. In reality, any one of the fighting moves in MK would absolutely lay an opponent out. Most would never fight again, IF they didn't die from their injuries.

I think what bothers people about these sorts of things is what they themselves imagine that other people get out of them. I don't really care for fighting games, but if I did, I might play Mortal Kombat for the reason that, like the late George Carlin, I like excess in my entertainment. I don't want to hurt people. I won't even squish a bug. But ripping someone's entire skeleton out through their butthole? What a delightfully absurd idea. But the busybodies worry about sickos using MK for porn. Or children being - wait, Mortal Kombat is in no way a children's game, so what the fuck?

Today's MK is no worse than yesterday's Doom. Some people will wring their hands, and 10 years from now we'll all shake our heads in wonder at how naive and prudish we were.

For the record, Google's very first claim (about copying variables doubling memory consumption) is dubious. Although the language itself passes most variable types by value, the PHP interpreter copies variables lazily using copy-on-write. So in general, "aliasing" variables for readability should be OK. However, I'm not sure whether the interpreter copies individual array elements lazily...

Uhh, just because I choose to undercut my competitors (other sellers) doesn't mean I don't know what my loot is "worth". I hardly feel taken advantage of when the gold's rolling in faster than I can run to the mail box - gold I can put to work immediately, while my higher-priced competitors twiddle their thumbs.

God, yes. Thanks for the laugh.

One thing I cannot understand: How programmers continue to fail to encode data in a context-appropriate way before operating on it. When I code, I don't even think about it - I just do it. The brain cycles I save, I spend on higher-level problems.

If I need to output some data in the context of an XML document, I entity encode the data. Bam! - done. I don't stop to think about how likely it is the data will contain control information; whether it'd be worth the extra 1.5 seconds (of typing) to encode it; that the data provider (a user, say) ought to know better than to include "funny" characters...

I agree with you that the price of perfection is too high for most applications, but come on. Failing to sanitize data moving across major boundaries (the client/server boundary, for example) is like failing to check whether the garage door is open before attempting to drive through it. Don't excuse that crap.