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Any language where whitespace has meaning... I still can't believe such a thing actually caught on.

I don't know how English caught on with things like "experts exchange" vs. "expert sex change" or "mole station nursery" vs. "molestation nursery" or "who represents" vs. "whore presents" or "pen island" vs., you know...

"Are you older than 49 or younger".

There really is no wrong answer here...

Unless the question is multiple choice, the form offers no "yes" option, and the "older" option is believed to send your application to the circular file.

Bad patents prevent you from innovating on your own ideas - that, yes, have some basis in what came before (what doesn't?). Copyrights just prevent you from 'free as in beer' access to something that we all agree isn't ours.

"We all agree"? Not everyone agreed about the ruling in Gaye v. Thicke to apply exclusive rights to the overall feel of a musical composition. Not everyone agreed about the ruling in Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music to penalize someone for having copied a melody completely by accident. What steps should a songwriter take to keep from infringing (and remain a songwriter) in this sort of legal landscape? At least expiry keeps, say, the Shakespeare estate from claiming that the entire world is guilty or liable of "nonliteral similarity". It acts as one of the checks on "stupid cases".

I find that an implant that allows me to securely store data too sensitive for regular computer networks is the way to go.

https://allthetropes.orain.org...

You're assuming that he's alluding to the fifth amendment, the Miranda warning is just a notification of it

Exactly. Each country phrases its notification of rights of the accused differently. For example, the police caution in Great Britain begins "You do not have to say anything." Use of a particular country's wording alludes to the statutory and case law regarding the rights of the accused in that country. For example, the police caution used in England and Wales since 1994 includes "it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court", a concept of guilt by omission that doesn't apply in the States. This difference was a plot point in an episode of the first season of Life on Mars, if the trope page about the British caution is to be believed.

Anonymous Coward attempted sarcasm:

This is an excellent analogy because movies today are still limited to 15 seconds of runtime.

They are when the trailer shows the good parts.

[Someone who needs a PC to game on while another family member is using another PC] can use a $199 PC, which together with the $99 streaming box is going to be no more expensive than the fancy console - and provide more versatility.

Just to be sure: You mean keep the gaming PC and run the non-gaming stuff on the $199 PC, right? Then the question for households that currently have a $199 PC becomes whether to buy the expensive gaming PC or to buy one of the consoles.

I hate to come on like one of those "PC Master Race" dicks

Don't worry; I agree that PC users are masters of their own respective experiences.

but the consoles are either especially gutless (like Nintendo's) or spectacularly curated.

Some other Slashdot users would argue that this curation serves a purpose, namely saving people's time from having to wade through the crappiest of the crap, which is 90% according to Theodore Sturgeon, and that the profitable majority of people have been Stockholmed into not "feel[ing] hampered by that. Have you looked into what caused the North American video game recession of 1983-1984?

So, does the money actually go to the artists, or just to the publishing companies?

Yes.

Then which?

(And expect this follow-up question to cryptically unhelpful mathematician's answers to "or" questions more often.)

So, does the money actually go to the artists, or just to the publishing companies?

Yes.

Then which?

(And expect this follow-up question to cryptically unhelpful mathematician's answers to "or" questions more often.)

You can do anything with Beethoven's music, for instance, that you want.

That's the option I took for the music in Thwaite . Half of it is remixes of Beethoven's "Pathetique" Sonata. I just wondered if there were another way, because an all-PD soundtrack makes a production feel trite. And the situation makes copyright look like it's doing the exact opposite of the purpose stated in the preamble to the copyright clause of the US Constitution, namely "to promote the progress of science and useful arts".

The past is like a foreign country, and often, a foreign country is like the past.

ass shit. Fuck

runs his potty mouth

Potty mouth?

Three slang words in a row referring to sexual contact, excretion of body waste, or body parts primarily associated therewith sounds "potty mouth" to me.

pretends that using profanity is somehow wrong

An occasional swear is a valuable rhetorical tool. But overuse of "potty mouth" words distracts from the point of the post and makes the speaker sound so uneducated that he can't express a point without bringing up sex or excretion.

Hasn't "Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm" already been displaced in cultural consciousness by "Weird Al" Yankovic's parody "Headline News"? "Then there was this guy who made his wife so mad one night that she cut off his wiener..."

Tumblewhat?

How will SUSE keep users from thinking "Tumbleweed" means "nobody here to maintain it"?

Arkanoid is about global warming. It'd never get Republican butts in seats. At least Tetris Worlds tried to add a plot of opening stargates by playing Tetris.

You could start at All The Tropes: "World of Cardboard Speech", which has the Justice League Unlimited quote at the top. And then waste a couple more hours clicking through all the links.

Crappy ones: GIMP, Tahoe-LAFS, Ubuntu, Kdenlive, XFCE...

As a user of Xubuntu who brings out the GIMP at least twice a week, I'm interested in how you'd name them better.

• What better name would you suggest for the GNU Image Manipulation Program? It "at least tries to vaguely describe the function of the program".
• How is Blender (English for "food processor", referring to a 3D modeling app) any better than Ubuntu (Zulu for "humankind", referring to a Linux distribution)? Is it just that English is historically more prestigious than Zulu as a naming language?
• Xfce (XForms Common Environment) used to be descriptive back when it used XForms, but it became an artifact title once Xfce switched to GTK+. The X part can be reinterpreted to refer to the X Window System, but then the F needs a meaning, a problem that it shares with FVWM (Something Virtual Window Manager).

Do you time travel to 1995 to visit your parents?

There's a reason that the trope page for Decade Dissonance has a real life section.

In the strict sense, hosts is not the same thing as a transparent proxy, which is what MITM originally meant. But hosts, software firewalls, dedicated firewalls, and transparent proxies have similar effects on an Internet connection. It appears we're missing a good name for the larger category.

A female canine player character might be an audience-alienating premise. Furry characters (as seen in Robin Hood and Star Fox) tend to be associated with E and E10+ ratings, while first person shooters tend toward M.

Harry Potter isn't the only novel describing consistent magical phenomena that can be sufficiently analyzed to become indistinguishable from science. When this science is applied, it produces Magitek. (Don't click unless you have an hour to spend learning about other works that will tickle you the way you say Harry Potter did.)

Harry Potter isn't the only novel describing consistent magical phenomena that can be sufficiently analyzed to become indistinguishable from science. When this science is applied, it produces Magitek. (Don't click unless you have an hour to spend learning about other works that will tickle you the way you say Harry Potter did.)

Harry Potter isn't the only novel describing consistent magical phenomena that can be sufficiently analyzed to become indistinguishable from science. When this science is applied, it produces Magitek. (Don't click unless you have an hour to spend learning about other works that will tickle you the way you say Harry Potter did.)

You don't need to buy anything to get golden cookies in Cookie Clicker. You get one for free every 6 to 10 minutes, which gets cut down to every 2 over the course of the game (Lucky day + Serendipity upgrades).

Or maybe I'm missing the point...

It's well-known that humans have an innate attraction for the general proportions of children: small, with big eyes and a large head.

That explains the popularity of Precious Moments and other super-deformed franchises. The problem with that in real life, of course, is that it's harder for a big head to fit out mama's birthin' hole. Bulldogs already have big enough heads to run a serious risk of cephalopelvic disproportion.

It's well-known that humans have an innate attraction for the general proportions of children: small, with big eyes and a large head.

That explains the popularity of Precious Moments and other super-deformed franchises. The problem with that in real life, of course, is that it's harder for a big head to fit out mama's birthin' hole. Bulldogs already have big enough heads to run a serious risk of cephalopelvic disproportion.

"Cat-holic" sounds like it'd mean someone addicted to cats the way an alcoholic is addicted to alcohol, possibly as a side effect of toxoplasmosis.

Who gets to decide what week is what?

Part of that is the job of Nielsen Media Research, which designates a few specific weeks per year as sweeps weeks. In particular, Shark Week is the name used by Discovery for an annual week-long programming block. And lately it has had splash-over synergy with another network's Sharknado .

Be careful that you don't pick up values dissonance from the opinions expressed in your 19th century reads.

But why does every pro football player have to play ticket-selling (i.e. commercial) matches under the umbrella of the NFL?

It doesn't. The United States Football League, a new minor league of professional American football, is scheduled to kick off in 2015. Ability to start your own league is a big difference between football and so-called e-sports, as unlike a video game publisher, the NFL lacks legal power to shut down a competing league.

You asked how video games were different from baseball. I gave one way in which video games were different from baseball: video game exhibitions have more potential copyright problems.

Now after rereading, it appears you were asking about how video games were different from baseball specifically in the sense of whether skills would transfer to activities that aren't "games" (competitions organized for spectators' entertainment). In this case, skills learned by swinging a golf club or a baseball bat transfer to defense of self and property.

In this case, however, one athlete had an technological benefit that others could not easily obtain.

If disability has become a superpower, then how can others "not easily obtain" this benefit, other than surgeons covering their own behinds by refusing to amputate an otherwise healthy limb?

I can think of only 1 movie that saves the Precision F-strike for the end of the movie (ST: Generations).

add the axiom "Humankind ought to continue to exist."

Why? what justification do you have for this?

Seriously? Don't tell me you're one of those VHEMT guys. Perhaps the goal of preventing human extinction is the one arbitrary priority, the one "unicorn in the garden", as a starting point to make atheism practical.

It's even worse with video games. In a traditional sport, if players or clubs grow tired of one league, they can start their own league to play the same game, and no publisher has veto power over anyone forming a new league with the proverbial blackjack and sex therapists. This is why college has both NCAA and NAIA, why pro baseball had both NL and AL, why pro American football had both NFL and AFL before they merged soon after what is now known as the first Super Bowl, and why pro basketball had the NBL, the BAA, and the ABA. It's also why the ruling in favor of The Tetris Company in Tetris v. Xio is so detrimental to Tetris creator and The Tetris Company co-founder Alexey Pajitnov's dream of seeing Tetris become an internationally competitive sport.

Ever notice how the [LGBTs] who [allegedly] own Hollywood always sneak in pro-homo garbage in their movies?

Don't worry; they squeeze in plenty of anti-Homo sentiment as well.

I'm told that Chinese manufacturers make things exactly as flimsy as their client wants them. Pay more, get more. Did Nintendo consoles lose their Tonka Tough reputation when Nintendo moved manufacturing to PRC?

I don't think a lot of people would agree with you. People don't want 3-second beats inserted into their video calls.

Either that or the Native American nation that used to call itself Inde and now shares a name with a widely used open-source web server.

(Obvious CMTP-bait.)

If bugs are detected earlier, they can be fixed earlier. Randomizing can turn a latent bug into an incredibly obvious bug.

You can already essentially do this by compiling the source yourself instead of "installing" it. The drawback is that each install will then be unique, and thus "fingerprintable", making it far easier to find ways to identify/track usage.

If bugs are detected earlier, they can be fixed earlier. Randomizing can turn a latent bug into an incredibly obvious bug.

So next time you compile it and it's fixed, you don't know if it's because you fixed it, or the compiler randomised differently. Sounds like shooting yourself in the foot to me.

If bugs are detected earlier, they can be fixed earlier. Randomizing can turn a latent bug into an incredibly obvious bug.