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Fuck you and your apple fucker!

Be careful shopping though ;) http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/10 userfriendly.org also has a funny series about buying a missile silo, but the site isn't responding atm.

(and I don't know if I buy that a MS employee of any kind is allowed to read Slashdot)

Yeah, here are some reasons this law won't work:
1. This theory holds quite true. The fact of the matter is the internet is full of idiots and assholes (as is the rest of the world).
2. There was this old saying we knew as kids, "Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words will never hurt me." (Or some variation thereof.) The fact is that she reacted to words. To a person she didn't really know and never interacted with outside of myspace.
3. Someone please show me a case where someone using words or pranks to "bully" someone not online resulted in a tragedy like this occurring and the "bullier" being tried for any crime. I think you'll be hard pressed to find one that isn't a fringe example.

Now to your points:
1. I know people who are "emotional basket cases" well into their 20s. Ignoring this though, how many of those "emotional basket case" girls kill themselves when they are dumped, either in reality or virtually? One girl killing herself does not a trend make.
2. Hang out with a lot of teenagers? I could've cared less about "social standing". I know others who had this same mentality. While it might seem "cruel" and this is probably in a realm where adults should stay out of influence, what she did is not illegal and should not be illegal. Jokes, pranks, name-calling happen every day. Thousand of kids live to tell about. Only a few kill themselves and/or others.
3. This is an issue with the parents and it largely centers around the view that they are unapproachable. I have known teenagers who were willing to discuss issues with their parents, including things that were bothering them. Parents should be somewhat involved in their children's lives, including having discussions with them if they feel something is not right.
4. This relates to a parenting issue again and again is related to item #3.

If a community decides to ostracize an individual over an incident like this, then it is well within their right; however, I do believe it shows some lack of thought behind their actions. I think our society is increasingly becoming one where we find other people to blame for our troubles. This woman's actions may have had some indirect influence on the child's death; however, the child obviously had some other issues to be dealt with if the "solution" she came up with was suicide. I refuse to place all the blame on this one individual.

While this event may have ended in tragedy, I do not believe we should be legislating against this sort of behavior; especially with laws that will invariably be poorly worded and will only result in hampering discussion online. I would like to think we don't want to live in a "nanny state".

Children? I think it's even worse. Influent geeks are contaminated too.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/21

Yeah, pretty much confirmed at this point. The article says it's more or less ready to ship, they're just ironing out a few bugs and adding a bit of polish at this point. Of course, that whole exporting and importing of other creatures thing I think will either make or break this game. Personally I bet that within a month of the release there are already at least 6 races designed to look like genitalia due primarily to the greater internet fuckwad theory.

Will Wright! Please pee on us!

Oh yeah, if want to be honest, you can sit in every game but then you are not experiencing the Wiimote at all. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13

1. Bought a new PC from $BIG_BOX_RETAILER, took it home and plugged it in.
2. Turned it on.
3. Clicked the "Okay" button until I got to the screen where I had to read a novel-length license agreement through a 3-by-4 inch scroll window.
4. Said "bugger this for a lark" in my best fake British accent, inserted my freshly-burned Fedora 8 DVD and power-cycled the machine.
5. Gleefully formatted the entire disk as ext3 (plus a swap partition, natch) and imagined Vista screaming as I plowed its broken bits under my mighty array of disk heads.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2008/02/06

I hope the fat baby in your sig turns out to be left handed. Oh snap!

As the comments from the article pointed out, why isn't Will Wright on this list? With Spore topping over 1000 Wikipedia edits, this game is clearly hot! If you've watched any of the talks Wright gives, it's really impressive how his goal is to teach the player through failure. We all love what we build. Geeze I can't wait for Spore. It's probably going to be like my wait for Black and White... totally worth it! Your creature needs to poo! Notice Peter Molyneux isn't on that list for a reason :-)

I mean come on, the Portal guys? I have to turn off head bobbing and I really doubt this would look great from a 1st person perspective. I'd get so dizzy... http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/10/12

Anomity and virtual worlds (a.k.a. the internet as I understand it) only breed this!

...namely the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory...

Posted anonymously, of course...

I've got a P4 1.8, 512MB RAM, and a Radeon9200. That card was what did me in. I got hosed by the marketing department fucking with the numbers, just like when I bought my old Geforce2...MX. See, MX was ATI's "awesome" line, but NVidia's "crappy" line.

Anyway, my system is enough for NWN, GTA:VC / SA, and others. So yeah, I do play some PC games, but it's going to end once I get antiquated.

Like the Penny Arcade comic says - the consoles are just easier.

The league bans public exhibitions of its games on TV sets or screens larger than 55 inches because smaller sets limit the audience size.

Solution: borrow a few 42" sets! I'm sure some of the dozes of parishioners they were expecting have got some good sets.

PS: No one fucks with the Jesus.

You're right. Jesus is f'in metal.

Haven't we dealt with this before?

I totally agree. http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/03

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/07/16

I can't read that, it's all in Hollish!

But it's in the first article, not the second.

ZOMG, people are specifying XP instead of Vista! Sure, but they're still buying Microsoft. Apple is topping out its niche appeal, and corporations are run by lawyers who hate and fear Google Docs with a cold reptilian passion.

Wise up, nerds. Major purchasing decisions are not taken by people live with their parents in Wyoming. They are taken by grown ups who have mortgages and orthodentist bills to pay, and those people recommend, and will continue to recommend, Microsoft because nobody ever got sacked for doing so.

The upcoming recession may see a few smaller outfits switch to freeware in the hope of chiselling a few dollars off the budget, but that's probably a sign that they're doomed, and so wouldn't have been buying M$ one way or the other.

Still, I'm swimming against the tide of opinion here, if not of history, so feel free to get excited about the prospect of the Evil Empire toppling any day now. Let's compare notes in 5 years and we can spot where you went wrong.

...are there any theories as to why people bother with stuff like that on a site like Slashdot?

I think this sums up micro payments nicely: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/05/11

Appears to be as follows: http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/12/28/

They are coming out with an equivalent cockroach version in a couple of months. The next generation "fruit fly" model is expected to be available in late 2010.

You can see the initial prototype here.

For some reason, head-chopping, gore and Apple reminds me of this comic.

Not sure why....

What does that mean? For an English newspaper, this seems a remarkably odd way to say "Warning: Do Not Use On Mac" or similar. I read that and recognised there was something about Apples, but it's not clear. What's an Apple slot? Is there one in my drive? Like Alice in Wonderland, we know all the words but don't understand the sentence.

I had to re-read it to get the right meaning. It's like one of those pictures - is it a vase or two women's faces? Or is it too early for me and my brain is just not working yet? I'm starting to lean towards that one.

There was another little picture with the words "tray drive (tick)" so I guess any slot-in drive is bad because only tray drives get the tick. It's still not as clear as it should be.

In addition to the poor wording, PC users need to recognise that Mac users have often been warned in the past about things that were perfectly harmless. "This website does not support Macs" usually means "change your browser agent to IE because we detected Safari." Lots of those interactive DVDs said the extra features were PC-only, but the film itself played just fine. We learn to ignore most warnings given by media outlets, because they're often just covering themselves.

It's not *quite* as simple as saying Mac users are illiterate. We're elitist assholes, but not illiterate.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2003/08/25

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/08/22

You've got filter power! Use it!

Hey, don't count Photoshop Hero out.

...really nailed this one: comic.

For your well reasoned & thought out responses.

Why not?

Click here

PBF has been a favorite of mine for a while, now. Here's some others(wiki pages. Paper comic sites(read: syndicate sites) suck more often than not):

Zits
Get Fuzzy
Pearls Before Swine
Lio

Schlock Mercenary
Something Positive
Erfworld
Penny Arcade
Irregular Webcomic!
There's a few others, but that's most of them.

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2002/03/04 Those who failure to learn from the past are doomed to repeat it. Brendan

Obligatory

Penny Arcade

Good comics, but their website rarely matches up with their rss feeds among other problems.

1. Many people like to get excited about things. I've also heard that people let their emotions run more freely online, because the feedback that they would get IRL is missing.

Can any mods give that sentence +5 insightful? The rest of the post is great as well, but that sentence shows insight.

It also neatly encapsulates one of the major theorems about Internet social behaviour.

Nah, it's actually Gabe himself, posting as Misfit.

I've got karma to burn here, so I'm going to go against all odds and agree with the above troll post on several notes:

Tycho was wrong on several important issues that he raised:

In the original post, he says "Indeed, gamers lured by the promise of the $400 forty gig machine (or those who purchased the twenty-gig, as I did) don't even have the slots to use mods built in."

This is absolutely not the entire truth, if even really capable of being considered the truth at all. All models of the PS3 do come equipped with USB ports which can be used to transfer the mods. The only difference is that the >20GB models include 3 card readers; MemoryStick, SD, and CompactFlash, whereas the 20GB model does not. While it can lightly be argued that this makes it more of a hassle to users of the 20GB PS3, USB drives are ultimately more common than MemorySticks, SD cards, and CF media. Not to all people, but to most. Even still, with USB ports on all PS3 consoles, his statement that some users may not have the slots built in was incorrect.

Not content with just that mistake, he continues further by misconstruing a reply available here by Epic's Mark Rein:"One of our guys even used an iPod to transfer the files on to his PS3."

Rather than assuming (as I did) that Mark Rein's comment was meant to illustrate the wide range of storage media that the PS3 was capable of copying content from, Tycho assumes that Mark was making a comment about the ease of copying the files USING the iPod itself. While I am not Mark Rein and I cannot speak for him and my words are only my interpretation -- it sounds to me like Tycho misunderstood what Mark was saying by making that assumption. We all understand that installing Linux on an iPod is not easy -- not the task for every user. I don't think that was the point. The point was that a lot of storage options are available -- and all PS3 units have the ability to use mods.

Tycho is granted reprieve when he comes back with a carefully re-crafted main point of "The fact of the matter is that you can't play mods without additional hardware, or media, or both."
I overwhelmingly agree. While I did not expect Sony to put UT3 mods on their download site, I did expect Epic to pony up the servers to add an in-game downloader. I also am unsure as to why I can't use the Sony WWW browser to download the mods. Either of these would be preferable to the current method, however, Tycho didn't mention either. Matter of fact, Tycho provided very little in the way of constructive criticism. Maybe that's why I feel so compelled to point out his errors.

Lastly, Tycho has no reason to overreact about the licensing issues that Epic is facing by attempting to allow users to post their own created content out to the network. No one wants to do anything that will cause either the instability of the console or the instability of any servers. For the initial release, I'm sure Sony wants to make entirely sure that the so-called "cooking" aspect of the editor is checked from top to bottom. The last thing that Sony wants is a UT3 exploit that allows full kernel access and full RSX access to homebrew developers.

While Epic should have done their homework sooner, the fact that it is alleged to be a simple downloadable update to the editor is a stupid point to fixate on. Every program gets updates. Yes, Epic did say that end-users would be able to create mods for the PS3 version immediately upon its release and for that bold and outright misstatement they deserve a fairly decent amount of shame. That said, the fact that they're apparently working very diligently on releasing these tools to the public is commendable.

I, for one, am glad that they spent the last months leading to the PS3 release play-testing it as opposed to shuffling through licensing difficulties with the corporate a

I've got karma to burn here, so I'm going to go against all odds and agree with the above troll post on several notes:

Tycho was wrong on several important issues that he raised:

In the original post, he says "Indeed, gamers lured by the promise of the $400 forty gig machine (or those who purchased the twenty-gig, as I did) don't even have the slots to use mods built in."

This is absolutely not the entire truth, if even really capable of being considered the truth at all. All models of the PS3 do come equipped with USB ports which can be used to transfer the mods. The only difference is that the >20GB models include 3 card readers; MemoryStick, SD, and CompactFlash, whereas the 20GB model does not. While it can lightly be argued that this makes it more of a hassle to users of the 20GB PS3, USB drives are ultimately more common than MemorySticks, SD cards, and CF media. Not to all people, but to most. Even still, with USB ports on all PS3 consoles, his statement that some users may not have the slots built in was incorrect.

Not content with just that mistake, he continues further by misconstruing a reply available here by Epic's Mark Rein:"One of our guys even used an iPod to transfer the files on to his PS3."

Rather than assuming (as I did) that Mark Rein's comment was meant to illustrate the wide range of storage media that the PS3 was capable of copying content from, Tycho assumes that Mark was making a comment about the ease of copying the files USING the iPod itself. While I am not Mark Rein and I cannot speak for him and my words are only my interpretation -- it sounds to me like Tycho misunderstood what Mark was saying by making that assumption. We all understand that installing Linux on an iPod is not easy -- not the task for every user. I don't think that was the point. The point was that a lot of storage options are available -- and all PS3 units have the ability to use mods.

Tycho is granted reprieve when he comes back with a carefully re-crafted main point of "The fact of the matter is that you can't play mods without additional hardware, or media, or both."
I overwhelmingly agree. While I did not expect Sony to put UT3 mods on their download site, I did expect Epic to pony up the servers to add an in-game downloader. I also am unsure as to why I can't use the Sony WWW browser to download the mods. Either of these would be preferable to the current method, however, Tycho didn't mention either. Matter of fact, Tycho provided very little in the way of constructive criticism. Maybe that's why I feel so compelled to point out his errors.

Lastly, Tycho has no reason to overreact about the licensing issues that Epic is facing by attempting to allow users to post their own created content out to the network. No one wants to do anything that will cause either the instability of the console or the instability of any servers. For the initial release, I'm sure Sony wants to make entirely sure that the so-called "cooking" aspect of the editor is checked from top to bottom. The last thing that Sony wants is a UT3 exploit that allows full kernel access and full RSX access to homebrew developers.

While Epic should have done their homework sooner, the fact that it is alleged to be a simple downloadable update to the editor is a stupid point to fixate on. Every program gets updates. Yes, Epic did say that end-users would be able to create mods for the PS3 version immediately upon its release and for that bold and outright misstatement they deserve a fairly decent amount of shame. That said, the fact that they're apparently working very diligently on releasing these tools to the public is commendable.

I, for one, am glad that they spent the last months leading to the PS3 release play-testing it as opposed to shuffling through licensing difficulties with the corporate a

It's a bit frightening how big in the online ad market Google is becoming.

There are two ways to play the Wii, especially Wii sports: You can really get into it, swinging yours arms and making big motions and make it exercise (while having more fun in my opinion).
Or you can play it like a video game, and just twitch the controller around. Of course, as Tycho and Gabe put it so eloquently, that makes you a toolbox:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/11/13

In reaching the conclusion that Wii is only a 2% increase in calorie burning over 360 games, I'm sure the kids were only moving their wrists. Then, the difference breaks down to 360 = twitching thumbs, Wii = twitching wrists. I could believe that twitching wrists instead of just thumbs is a 2% increase in calories burnt over the 360.

I know that when playing Wii boxing and making real punching motions, my arms get physically tired and I can work up a sweat after long enough. I am sure if someone wanted to, they could run another study and grab another headline by stating something like Wii Burns As Many Calories as Real Workout.

Just found this, seemed appropriate.

Shitcock

Despite rampant pirating of comics, somehow new models are successfully created and used. Excuse me if I don't cry into my soup for the old fuddy duddies that refuse to adapt.

This guy

No idea what parent is talking about?

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2007/11/29

That's what parent is talking about.

And I agree. Mod parent up!

Daikatana.