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The music for the video game "ballblazer" from 1984 was algorithmically generated, according to http://www.langston.com/Papers....

You also need to study the follow up rulings. Chaplinksky has been narrowed so much over the years as to be essentially repudiated.
http://www.langston.com/Fun_Pe...

In the US at least, the 'Fighting Words' doctrine has essentially been entirely repudiated by the Supreme Court.
http://www.langston.com/Fun_Pe...

The so-called "fighting words' doctrine has essentially been repudiated by the Supreme court, without being explicitly overruled.

For-real-and-for-true, the cases involved are now called "The motherfucker trilogy". Seriously.
http://www.langston.com/Fun_Pe...

The 'Fighting words' doctrine has essentially been repudiated by the Supreme Court:
http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1999/1999ATX.html

Its worse then that ...

RSA patent filed on December 14, 1977, approved as #4,405,829 titled "Cryptographic Communications System and Method" to MIT, Rivest, Shamir, and Adelman. However, since it was published before the patent application, it could not be patented under European and Japanese law.

Seriously, how the fuck do you patent a NUMBER ???

http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1995/1995AYU.html

• http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1999/1999ALL.html
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=858I61zKkLQ
• http://www.davehitt.com/jan02/tmmmda.html

I suppose at some point this will become an arms race - that is, telemarketers will be openly hostile and completely annoy every single person they call. I'll enjoy it!

This reminds me of an amusing text I read a while back, Academic Programmers - A Spotter's Guide, particularly the Unix Macro Magician. That being said, I think far too many people are far too willing to reinvent the wheel and wallow in complexity. It's as if some people think they won't be taken seriously or not be considered valuable if they create simple systems from pre-existing components. I always like to point out that Physicists get paid to make models as simple as possible; that's why they make some of the best coders.

http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1994/1994AXP.html

Excerpt:

And the war continued, with progressively more redundant copies using
progressively more of the disk farm, and the encryption methods evolving
under the selection pressure of the system administrators' decryption
efforts.

I first encountered Empire on VAX machines, but I believe it was originally written for 16 bit machines in 1972. Home machines? - I guess not. http://www.langston.com/#OlderP

Reality's an untamed beast
That's difficult to master,
But models are quite docile
And give you answer faster.

From a pome I saw in a computer book from the 70's, can be found online here http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1993/1993AFE.html

Your post reminded me of this classic column by Dave Barry.

no country would want our classified technology. All M$ all the time. i would hate to be in a nuclear sub and get a blue screen of death. http://www.langston.com/Fun_People/1998/1998APK.ht ml

...chomping at the bit...

Of course you can be clueless and successful at the same time, as long as you have POWER. Case in point: George W Bush.

Those cluless straight white males who are running the giant corporations pumping out aisles of pink barbie dolls are EFFECTING the desires of the kids that are addicted to their bullshit. Some of them may not be straight, white or male, but they're ALL clueless. And they have an enormous advertising budget and can push through anything they want, directly into the hearts and minds of your kids.

To illustrate what I mean about the cluelessness of the people running the Barbie franchise: A few years ago, they decided that they wanted to update Ken so he was more hip, so they sent out a research team to find out what kids were into these days. Their corporate research team came back with the fact that lots of hip cool guys are wearing these little metal rings around their neck on a string, so they gave Ken one of those to make him more hip. Well guess what: it was a COCK RING!

"We're not in the business of putting cock rings into the hands of little girls." - Lisa McKendall, Manager of Marketing and Communications, Mattel Toys.

Mattel's new Ken doll is on the market. New Ken is getting almost as much press as New Coke did. Since his introduction at a toy convention in New York City in February, Ken's been everywhere, including the front page of the New York Times Arts and Leisure section. Why the hoopla? Ken's first piercing (his left ear) and his two-tone "greased lightning" hair-do. But an important part of Earring Magic Ken's new wardrobe has been overlooked by the straight media - Ken's cock ring. Hanging around Ken's neck, on a metallic silver thread, is what ten out of ten fags at a glance will tell you is a cock ring.

-Don

I'm glad that the lesbian Sims got you to play for at least a few hours! The fact that some guys just love to watch lesbian couples was an unintented benefit of a larger goal. If that side-effect annoys any women, then they can get even by making gay guys and watching them too.

The actual intention was that The Sims might prevent at least one person from committing suicide because they were gay and their parents and community couldn't accept it, by providing an idealistic place where nobody makes a big deal or treats you differently because of your sexual orientation, and you can have a relationship with anyone you want without being persecuted.

I came up with the idea of making all Sims characters potentially bisexual. Here are some comments I wrote on the design document, in which I threw down the gauntlet about gay sims.

The whole relationship design and implementation (I've looked at the tree code) is Heterosexist and Monosexist. We are going to be expected to do better than that after the SimCopter fiasco and the lip service that Maxis publically gave in response about not being anti-gay.

The code tests to see if the sex of the people trying to romantically interact is the same, and if so, the result is a somewhat violent negative interaction, clearly homophobic. We are definitly going to get flack for that.

It would be much more realistic to model it by two numbers from 0 to 100 for each person, which was the likelyhood of that person being interested in a romantic interaction with each sex. So you can simply model monosexual heterosexual (which is all we have now), monosexual homosexual (like the guys in SimCopter), bisexual, nonsexual (mother theresa, presumably), and all shades in between (most of the rest of the world's population).

It would make for a much more interesting and realistic game, partially influenced by random factors, and anyone offended by that needs to grow up and get a life, and hopefully our game will help them in that quest.

Anyone who is afraid that it might offend the sensibilities of other people (but of course not themselves) is clearly homophobic by proxy but doesn't realize it since they're projecting their homophobia onto other people.

There's a wikipedia article about Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender characters in video and computer games, which says:

The video and computer gaming industry has been slow to grab the pink dollar, with Maxis being the first to enter into this new market. It is generally felt that young white males (most of whom are heterosexual) are the force driving the industry forward. Hence any effort to market games to anyone else is tied to an industry question, "Will heterosexual men want to buy this game?" In the 1990s the industry began to make some efforts to market games to women by creating software titles with strong and independent female characters as seen in Tomb Raider and Resident Evil. The commercial success of both games (and their numerous sequels) does suggest that male gamers are willing to play a female character. Yet, it remains to be seen if a straight male would be willing to play an openly gay or transgender character, as they generally are willing to play sexy and powerful female characters.

The Sims

In 2001, Maxis broke new ground with a new television commcerial for its computer game The Sims. Highlighting the ability of the characters to date, the commercial featured an attractive twenty-something man in a nightclub flirting with a woman, until he is suddenly drawn to an attractive man in the club and after a brief pause agrees to date him. The games have become very popular as they allow

I know it is incredibly common mis-usage at this point but the expression is 'champing at the bit' not chomping. Referece

1. The link in your comment notes that the transitive form of "champ" is "chomp"...
2. whet your appetite.

Appears to be a riff on this anecdote: David Korn embarrasses Microsoft.

-Stephen

Perhaps you should read this.

I've been told by Microsoft people that they are working on a complete new CLI.

They are, it has a bizarre working-name like Monox which'll probably turn into cli.net or something equally obtuse prior to release. There's a humerous anecdote about it here.

Reminds one of this anecdote.

to make Japan more attractive to foreign tourists, who are often put off by the country's language barrier

However, the correct phrase is not "chomping at the bit." I believe it is "champing at the bit."

I do realize it's not your error, but rather it's the editors' error. Perhaps next time.