I've read the first chapter of the book (as of last night) and she specifically makes the point that there are divisions and differences within hacker culture. Also that there are geographical differences and how it's changed over time. The book rings true so far. Sounds to me like she knows what she's doing.

We no longer need to develop the not-quite-impossible-anymore warp drive. Just wait to buy jump gate technology from our good and dear friends.

Which for my purposes was the early 90s. DMA Design (the developer of Lemmings, Hired Guns) had a not always amiable relationship with Psygnosis, who was our publisher at the start. I visited it only a couple of times, but it always felt like an important place, like going to visit the emperor. Best memories were of the largest, tastiest pizza I'd ever had and of being crammed into the back of Ian Hetherington's Porche as a bunch of us were taken out for a meal. So, sad day.

Pretty certain there was a "slide to unlock screen" motion in a few episodes of Babylon 5; I'm thinking of the communication terminal in Londo's quarters. That would be in 1993 or so.

Only if they deal in footling small change.

I think he's misunderstood the meaning of "symbol", which is after all not a literal representation of what it's depicting. If you have a problem with a Floppy Disk symbol because the current generation hasn't seen one (did the past suddenly disappear? Did we collectively stop recording history?) then what about the letter "A"? Originally it represented the Head of an Ox. I'm guessing that more people reading this have seen a floppy disk than have seen an ox.

In which case maybe they'd like to compensate me for a photo of mine, which they used on their site without permission or attribution.

I can't speak for everyone, but I hadn't heard anyone mention it. I'm pretty sure that the graphics engine (Mike's "Legovision" as we called it) predated any idea as to what we'd use it for.

I guess it's predicable that some people are focused on the whole "murder simulator" thing, which can't seemingly be separated from GTA. Since I was at DMA at the time (I'm mentioned in the first paragraph on pg 4), I can tell you that nothing like that was in our minds. What no-one seems to get - or remember - is that GTA was in large part a pisstake. We deliberately made the graphics bright and garish. We deliberately added humour. We didn't take it too seriously. If anyone still has the paper map that came with it (you didn't all pirate it surely?) just take a look at the adverts around the side. (I'm paraphrasing but... "Enjoy a meal while our technicians accelerate particles to the speed of light." - An advert for a combined cafe and particle accelerator!) GTA was a cartoon.

But if we need atoms to encode the addresses, and each of those atoms has an address which needs to be encoded...

In the aerospace industry, even satellites are referred to as a spacecraft.

He may have been speaking Scots, not English. For the most part is is very much like English - both having descended from a common language - but has a vast array of its own words. Some are wonderfully expressive. A gray, overcast, drizzly day (and we have a fair few of them) is described as "dreich" and we Scot know exactly what it means.

Of course he may have just had an especially heavy accent!

Sorry to rant a bit but why the hell would a civilization sent out a radio signal from their planet?

Doesn't even need to be a civilisation. There are commercial services available for individuals or organisations to broadcast whatever the hell they feel like into space for whatever reason. IIRC SFX magazine used to broadcast a .pdf of the current issue each month. Reasons don't have to be rational.

There's a difference between being inspired or borrowing ideas and wholesale copying. And I agree that Sony hold the copyrights.

My admitted tangent is that it's a sign of respect, giving a nod of the head or a tip of the hat to the original developers. Because although it's very tempting to "stick it to the Man" as some say, The Man in this case was just a handful of guys. We aren't/weren't just some anonymous faceless corporate drones without feelings. I'm delighted when people remember stuff I've worked twenty years later.

No, there's isn't a black and white viewpoint here. The port to iPhone doesn't materially affect me at all, but I still care about it.

As I posted yesterday, I was part of the team who created Lemmings in the first place. A minor member, to be sure, but I was there. What bothers me most about these efforts to convert games is not so much the use of the original graphics and certainly not the fact that it's been ported, but the respect that we don't seem to get. I didn't see any mention of credit for Mike Dailly, who invented the idea, or Russel Kaye who wrote the PC version from which you took the EGA graphics, or Dave Jones who coded the Amiga original, or Gary Timmons who animated the characters, or Scott Johnson who drew background graphics or... well you get the idea. Intellectual property be damned; did you get in touch with anyone to ask if they were cool with it? (I once had the experience of reading a rip of the Hired Guns manual which I wrote, with a huge list of credits to all the guy's cracker buddies, but not one mention of anyone who'd spent two years of their lives on the game itself.) The sad thing is, if you'd asked, I know they'd have been cool with it. (And if you had, then I apologise)