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console controllers, for example, are actually better for some games, such as platformers or racers, though not for FPS or RTS games

As I tried to type a long post on my Nexus 7 tablet a few days ago, I realized something. Pressing buttons on a keyboard or a gamepad is like touch typing, as the player memorizes where the buttons are relative to his thumbs' resting positions and uses the feel of the edges of the buttons to adjust his hand positioning. Using a mouse or touch screen, on the other hand, is like hunt and peck: see something on the screen, move your mouse, and click. Aiming in FPS and selecting units in RTS are nearly ideal hunt and peck tasks; platformers and fighting games need touch typing because movement is relative to the player's current position.

I've written more about this.

I agree with you that noncommercial copying of a whole work and noncommercial copying of nonliteral elements are different things, and the fact that they're banned to the same degree hurts the public. But any change that diminishes the scope of copyright owners' exclusive rights would require somehow going around the copyright industry's stranglehold on the mainstream media through which the the majority of the public get their information on candidates' positions, which ends up amounting to politainment more than anything else.

There are things that an application that always uses MySQLi prepared statements cannot do. One of them is anything involving SQL operator IN. But in such cases (hopefully rare), there are still ways to reduce the attack surface.

In particular, exceptions and RTTI are absolutely verboten. [...] Any templates outside of STL are also forbidden

What implementation of STL do you recommend for low-memory systems that have a heap, albeit not a very big one, where you don't want to crash upon running out of memory?

Even iostreams are being frowned on

In my experience (quarter megabyte static hello world), <iostream> would be the first to go, in favor of <cstdio>. See what else I've written about the pitfalls of C++ on small systems.

Other than voting for one MPAA-approved candidate or the other MPAA-approved candidate, what do you expect people to do?

The majority of U.S. voters have chosen to trust MPAA-owned television news sources as their source for information about the issues and the candidates. This puts the MPAA in a unique position to frame the debate.

Except this still gets voted on by the people you elected.

Who have pledged to support what the movie studios push. Otherwise, they wouldn't have even won the primaries because the movie studios control the news media that help candidates get elected to the U.S. Senate.

We have representatives to filter out the derp.

But the realities of campaign finance ensure that any meaningful enhancement of the rights of users of copyrighted works is considered "derp".

You could use them to run a political party designed to more directly represent the people.

But how would such a political party get elected in the first place without support from the mainstream media?

I'm having trouble thinking of a proprietary piece of software I need... depends on your hobbies I suppose.

Apart from games, a lot of people need proprietary video player software to stream rented non-free films and non-free TV shows. The software is non-free due to compliance and robustness rules imposed by the movie studios. And a lot of people need proprietary tax preparation wizard software to prepare income tax returns. This software is non-free because tax software publishers treat their machine-readable interpretations of annual tax law amendments as a valuable trade secret.

Its at the point where I assume if there is no Debian package of a cool piece of software its because its not DFSG free

There is a DFSG-free (zlib license) 6502 assembly language development toolchain called ca65, but it's not in Debian (and thus not in Ubuntu) because it's bundled with a non-free C compiler called cc65. I filed a needs-packaging request for ca65 years ago.

You can change it to say anything you want.

No, only elected legislators can do that, and guess who controls who gets to run for office.

isn't HDMI a standard connector for monitors/TVs/displays of all sorts?

It is, and anything with an HDMI or DVI output will connect easily. I lay out all the combinations in my how-to page on the topic. But that's useless if end users don't know about it.

"New gaming PC! Plug in a monitor or a TV! Play all games!" or something.

Yet for some reason, the major PC makers haven't tried this angle in their advertising. This is just a guess, but perhaps Microsoft discourages OEM Windows licensees from promoting properly configured PCs as set-top gaming devices so as not to compete with Microsoft's own Xbox 360 console. And part of it is chicken and egg: there aren't a lot of set-top PC sales because there aren't a lot of games optimized for set-top PCs, which in turn is because there aren't a lot of set-top PC sales.

Plus there's flexibility in controller compatibility as well

But how would a game know what button does what from the moment the game is turned on? Say a game has buttons to attack in particular directions. Examples include Lode Runner (dig left and dig right), Missile Command (fire from left, fire from center, fire from right), and Robotron and Smash TV (shoot north, south, west, and east). How would the game know which button on the controller fires in which direction before the player explicitly configures the controls? How would the game even know which button is the Start button? The advantage of a console is that the developer already knows the buttons' relative positions on all models of controller certified for use with a particular game.

isn't HDMI a standard connector for monitors/TVs/displays of all sorts?

It is, and anything with an HDMI or DVI output will connect easily. I lay out all the combinations in my how-to page on the topic. But that's useless if end users don't know about it.

"New gaming PC! Plug in a monitor or a TV! Play all games!" or something.

Yet for some reason, the major PC makers haven't tried this angle in their advertising. This is just a guess, but perhaps Microsoft discourages OEM Windows licensees from promoting properly configured PCs as set-top gaming devices so as not to compete with Microsoft's own Xbox 360 console. And part of it is chicken and egg: there aren't a lot of set-top PC sales because there aren't a lot of games optimized for set-top PCs, which in turn is because there aren't a lot of set-top PC sales.

Plus there's flexibility in controller compatibility as well

But how would a game know what button does what from the moment the game is turned on? Say a game has buttons to attack in particular directions. Examples include Lode Runner (dig left and dig right), Missile Command (fire from left, fire from center, fire from right), and Robotron and Smash TV (shoot north, south, west, and east). How would the game know which button on the controller fires in which direction before the player explicitly configures the controls? How would the game even know which button is the Start button? The advantage of a console is that the developer already knows the buttons' relative positions on all models of controller certified for use with a particular game.

Between the sheer smoothness and beauty of XBMC, it's ability to launch NES, SNES, Sega and other emulators

Sure, you can buy a standard PC DVD-ROM drive to read your PS1 and PS2 discs as marcansoft pointed out, and you can buy a Retrode adapter to read your Super NES and Sega Genesis cartridges. But what do you use to dump your NES cartridges? Or do you just play homebrew NES games like Super Bat Puncher, Thwaite, and Zooming Secretary?

Emulation has never been popular.

Would PowerPC Macs have sold well if they couldn't run any 68K applications? Would Intel Macs have sold well if they couldn't run any PowerPC applications?

Lots of free software becomes available and for all but the most demanding tasks they switch.

In practice, some of these "demanding tasks" aren't demanding on the CPU as much as on artists and on lawyers. Examples include video games, software to play back rented films, and software to prepare tax returns.

Ah. I thought I still had subscriber credit. I got one of those 'as thanks for...you can now use Slashdot without ads' emails.

I get "Disable Ads" too. Perhaps it comes if someone subscribed in the past and then consistently keeps his account's karma Excellent for months, or possibly if someone has configured his browser's Flash Player in click-to-play mode.

Beyond captchas?

After trying for months to keep ahead of spam using a regex extension called AbuseFilter, I ended up realizing that Google's ReCAPTCHA was broken. I switched my MediaWiki to QuestyCaptcha. Each of about a half dozen questions about classic literature links to a Wikipedia article that contains the answer. Successful spammer registrations dropped to zero. Someone using a wiki farm wouldn't have this sort of story to tell to an interviewer.

If you're merely showcasing a web application, you don't need SSL.

In other words, the "warn" method.

It's possible to connect a laptop to a television. But statistically nobody does this outside the geek demographic of sites like Slashdot. The advantages of Ouya are that 1. it's promoted by its manufacturer as designed for connection to a TV and 2. it includes a controller at no additional charge.

most PC games don't support multiple gamepads

I have a device, made by Microsoft no less, that allows me to connect 4 wireless Xbox 360 controllers to my PC.

I too own a USB hub allowing connection of four wired game controllers. It's just that the big-name PC games tend not to support multiple gamepads plugged into such an adapter for $ome rea$on. Quoting David Wong:

Sorry, you know damned well that technical limitations aren't the reason everyone is dropping split screen. [...] You're dropping it because four players on a split screen are playing off one $60 copy of the game. Four players playing online need four copies ($240).

Have you any suggestion for good PC games to use with multiple Xbox 360 controllers, apart from those listed here?

Developers have been shifting heavily back to the PC the last two years.

Even things like fighting games? Mortal Kombat 2011 was not ported to the PC. In fact, the only recent fighting game I can think of that was ported to the PC was Street Fighter IV. As for Smash Bros. and other Nintendo first-party franchises, those will still be console-exclusive for a long time.

The second is more because they simply don't know, but that's because idiots in the stores telling them don't know.

It's a catch-22. One Best Buy sales associate was aware that TVs take VGA and HDMI in, but he encouraged me to buy a console instead of a media PC because the games that work well in the console environment aren't ported to the PC. (See above.) And games aren't ported to the PC because statistically nobody already owns a media PC. See previous comments by FunkSoulBrother and CronoCloud. People like hawguy, Endo13, and ratbag symbolize what I perceive to be the general public's attitude toward media PCs: "No PC in my living room, thanks". So it appears HTPCs are only for diehard geeks.

Then again, most video cards that have been in the "already built" PC's haven't had HDMI out until the last couple of years.

There are often really easy workarounds involving appropriate cables. If they have DVI-D out, there's a cable from that to HDMI, and one of the HDMI ports on my TV has audio inputs next to it. If they have VGA out, a lot of TVs take that too, at least here in the United States. I'm told VGA input is less popular on European TVs because they have to make room for the SCART input.

Developers have been shifting heavily back to the PC the last two years.

Even things like fighting games? Mortal Kombat 2011 was not ported to the PC. In fact, the only recent fighting game I can think of that was ported to the PC was Street Fighter IV. As for Smash Bros. and other Nintendo first-party franchises, those will still be console-exclusive for a long time.

The second is more because they simply don't know, but that's because idiots in the stores telling them don't know.

It's a catch-22. One Best Buy sales associate was aware that TVs take VGA and HDMI in, but he encouraged me to buy a console instead of a media PC because the games that work well in the console environment aren't ported to the PC. (See above.) And games aren't ported to the PC because statistically nobody already owns a media PC. See previous comments by FunkSoulBrother and CronoCloud. People like hawguy, Endo13, and ratbag symbolize what I perceive to be the general public's attitude toward media PCs: "No PC in my living room, thanks". So it appears HTPCs are only for diehard geeks.

Then again, most video cards that have been in the "already built" PC's haven't had HDMI out until the last couple of years.

There are often really easy workarounds involving appropriate cables. If they have DVI-D out, there's a cable from that to HDMI, and one of the HDMI ports on my TV has audio inputs next to it. If they have VGA out, a lot of TVs take that too, at least here in the United States. I'm told VGA input is less popular on European TVs because they have to make room for the SCART input.

For comparison I made up a pair of Hello World programs, one in C and one in C++. The C version compiled down to 3220 bytes (still outrageous), but the c++ version came in at a whopping 4876 bytes

That's nothing. I saw a quarter megabyte difference between Hello World using <cstdio> and Hello World using <iostream> (and static GNU libstdc++) after stripping. But then the C++/<cstdio> and C/<stdio.h> versions had the same size in bytes.

*The iostream libraries.

Well, I like the type safety of the C++ library.

But are you willing to spend a quarter megabyte on type safety? I tried making hello world with <cstdio> and hello world with <iostream> with statically linked GNU libstdc++. The <iostream> versions were about a quarter megabyte bigger on both i686 and ARM-Thumb. And no, you can't use a dynamically linked C++ standard library on an embedded system that doesn't already have such a library in ROM (such as a handheld video game system) or on a compiler whose C++ calling convention doesn't match that of the operating system vendor's own C++ standard library (such as MinGW).

In reality, your logic and communication bits should be abstracted anyway - isn't that the hallmark of good programming practice?

I agree in principle. However, sharing components among versions of an application for different platforms works only if all the platforms can run programs written in the same language, and in practice, there are a lot of platform pairs that lack a shared language. For example, how do you share a component between an application for Windows Phone 7, which runs only C# and other languages that compile to verifiably type-safe CIL and do not use the DLR, and the corresponding component for iOS, which runs Objective-C++? Xamarin's answer is to let the Windows Phone 7 port dictate the choice of implementation language for all platforms. This way, components shared with an application for WP7 run in Xamarin's CLR reimplementation for non-WP7 platforms, which Facebook can afford but many individual developers cannot.

I agree in broad principle with your vision of an entrepreneurial utopia. But I don't think it'll work out in practice for two reasons. For one thing, incumbent owners of exclusive rights are powerful enough to manipulate voters into not letting it happen. But at least as importantly, it appears that not everybody has entrepreneurial aptitude. Some people have general learning disabilities, and others (like myself) have disabilities specific to the social skills that are vital to marketing a business.

the government [...] seems to be heavily controlled by the copyright cartels. How the hell did we let these people get this much money and power?

Getting elected to U.S. federal office requires the cooperation of the national news media. The national news media have become co-owned by the movie studios. Therefore, the movie studios get to frame the discussion any way they want.

I recommend replacing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" which can be interpreted either as an FPS supporting realistic guns, an FPS with good graphics, a generic FPS, or a rehashed FPS.

I was using it as an example of a first-person shooter with 1. realistic guns, 2. good graphics, and 3. compatibility with a computing device already connected to the user's living-room TV monitor. Apart from hardcore geeks and trailer trash, nobody wants to connect a gaming PC to a TV. Any replacement of console games with freely licensed games would have to include replacement of the console with a device capable of running freely licensed games.

Wow, did someone use the "you write them" argument?

The anon who posted in the thread from two years ago isn't the only one to use that argument. Mr. Stallman is using that argument too, promoting free vaporware over non-free releases. From the article: "If you want to promote freedom, please take care not to talk about the availability of these games on GNU/Linux as support for our cause. Instead you could tell people about the Liberated Pixel Cup free game contest" (that is, claim that a freely licensed game that doesn't exist yet is a substitute for the thousands of non-free games that do exist) "and the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective free gaming night" (whose playlist consists of one game).

And also ignoring that he mentioned it to someone who already released open source software?

Yes, I have released a few free NES games, including competent alternatives to Tetris and Missile Command, which run in the free emulator FCEUX. Some Slashdot users (especially CronoCloud) claim that they're a net negative on my CV because they're close substitutes for commercial games.

I recommend replacing "Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2" which can be interpreted either as an FPS supporting realistic guns, an FPS with good graphics, a generic FPS, or a rehashed FPS.

I was using it as an example of a first-person shooter with 1. realistic guns, 2. good graphics, and 3. compatibility with a computing device already connected to the user's living-room TV monitor. Apart from hardcore geeks and trailer trash, nobody wants to connect a gaming PC to a TV. Any replacement of console games with freely licensed games would have to include replacement of the console with a device capable of running freely licensed games.

Wow, did someone use the "you write them" argument?

The anon who posted in the thread from two years ago isn't the only one to use that argument. Mr. Stallman is using that argument too, promoting free vaporware over non-free releases. From the article: "If you want to promote freedom, please take care not to talk about the availability of these games on GNU/Linux as support for our cause. Instead you could tell people about the Liberated Pixel Cup free game contest" (that is, claim that a freely licensed game that doesn't exist yet is a substitute for the thousands of non-free games that do exist) "and the LibrePlanet Gaming Collective free gaming night" (whose playlist consists of one game).

And also ignoring that he mentioned it to someone who already released open source software?

Yes, I have released a few free NES games, including competent alternatives to Tetris and Missile Command, which run in the free emulator FCEUX. Some Slashdot users (especially CronoCloud) claim that they're a net negative on my CV because they're close substitutes for commercial games.

There are more than 25,000 packages in Debian.

And among these packages, several kinds of software are underrepresented in main.

True, users are making the decision to run non-free software. But in making this decision, users are not considering whether the software is free or non-free. They're just choosing "software" or "no software", and in some categories, all "software" happens to be non-free. For example, users are making the decision that they want to run high-production-value video games or video games designed for platforms with physical buttons. These happen to be non-free because I still see no way to fund the production of high-production-value video games as 100 percent free software and free cultural works.

You're forgetting that having no system at all is an option

You appear not to appreciate how deeply the copyright status quo has entrenched itself. Having no system at all "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts" is an option that is unacceptable to the five movie studios that effectively control U.S. elections through their co-owned TV news outlets. Anything unacceptable to Disney, Last Century Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. can be spun so hard that it becomes unacceptable to the median voter. If you were running Fox News Channel, MSNBC, or CNN with a movie studio breathing down your neck, how would you spin the Pirate Party?

There's simply no way that abuse of the DMCA can be fought without fighting the DMCA itself

I agree with you. It's just that due to the movie industry's control of the news media, nobody can get elected on a platform of pro-commons copyright reform.

You know, I've heard that argument before. The premise being that god placed all this evidence here to test our faith. And you know what? It's a load of crap.

I agree with you. I agree with you that a loving God would not plant a false fossil record to test us. In fact, the fossil record is entirely consistent with a day-age interpretation of Genesis 1. I was referring to temptation in the sense of the opportunity to choose to sin, that is, to choose to be inconsiderate to each other.

Why would he build this entire universe just for us when we probably have no hope of ever reaching even the nearest star? It makes no sense!

Yeah, it would be an awful waste of space, like in the film Contact. I haven't seen anything in the Bible that rules out God creating man on multiple class M planets but spacing them far enough apart that they couldn't reach another civilization's space. I wrote more about that hypothesis here.

Why would he need to constantly test our faith?

Why would automated test suites need to constantly test code that we know works?

Well you could try lobbying them and read their responses.

I already have. It's a form letter that shows how bought the candidate already is by the MAFIAA.

The GP's point was that if you elect politicians with integrity who are willing to open their books to auditers with teeth, then the only weapon a lobbyist has is reason.

No movie studio will allow its affiliated television news outlet to give enough exposure to "politicians with integrity who are willing to open their books to auditers with teeth".

Do Rupert Murdoch and the rest of big media have the same power over who gets elected in Australia that they have in the USA?

That's because most people just plug in their old laptop instead of buying an HTPC. [...] It's just a VGA cable and a sound cable.

Except I'm told that a lot of people either A. have a desktop and no laptop, B. have an SDTV and no HDTV, C. have an HDTV with only HDMI input and no VGA and an old laptop with only VGA output and no HDMI, or D. don't know what that blue D-shaped port on the back of the TV is useful for. I've tried to address D on my page, but how can the others be addressed?

We just watched it on my wife's laptop, but I definitely would have preferred the TV.

Does your laptop have HDMI, DVI, or VGA out? If so, use the TV as an external monitor for your laptop.

Gnome actually enforces this out of the box, if I remember correctly

How do GTK and GNOME enforce resolution independence when image editing controls (e.g. in GIMP) aren't forced to be "not dot-for-dot"?

though of course that requires that it can obtain the real DPI value from the monitor.

Even if a widget toolkit can obtain the real DPI by querying the monitor's firmware, that won't help it query the distance to the eye, which is the other side of DPI. An "inch" when setting effective DPI for window systems isn't 0.0254 m; it's 1/28 of the viewing distance. This reference inch can be larger for a device placed far away from the eye (such as a TV) or smaller for one held closer to the eye (such as a tablet or phone). See the "nominal arm's length" in the definition of the CSS reference pixel.

Sure, you can get a USB to RS232 converter. How many non-geeks have one?

Probably few, but they're easy to find online or in stores. Start by searching for usb rs232 adapter on Google Product Search. I used to work at a warehouse that used Windows Mobile PDAs with a built-in laser barcode scanner to run an internal warehouse automation app. Initial loading of the early versions of the app happened over an RS232 connection to the scanner's dock. Is your worry that non-geeks won't know what to tell the salesperson even if an online guide refers to a "USB to RS232 adapter with a DE9 plug" and has a picture of the plugs to expect, like this PC to TV hookup guide?

Would the drivers for your RS-232 drive (probably made for DOS or Amiga or Apple II) still be available and work on today's hardware/software?

People are still making drivers to access the SOS file system used by Apple II ProDOS. So as long as adapters for the physical layer remain available (e.g. USB to RS232 converters), and the wire protocol is documented, some Linux geek is likely to have written a tool that makes mounting such a drive as easy as mounting any other storage.

Three problems:

First, unlocked phones don't really exist for CDMA2000, only for GSM/UMTS, because CDMA2000 doesn't require carriers to use removable CSIM cards. Instead, the carrier programs the subscriber's identity directly into the handset and can refuse to perform such activation for any reason, such as if the handset wasn't sold by that carrier. Two of the top three carriers in the United States (Verizon and Sprint) use CDMA2000 without CSIM cards, and the third (AT&T) is despised for other reasons.

Second, even among GSM carriers, unlocked phones aren't widely available in brick-and-mortar stores in the United States. If you're considering buying one sight unseen through mail order, what do you plan to do should you find its display or touch screen unusably unergonomic?

Third, even for GSM phones purchased through mail order, some carriers have been known to "slam" a subscriber to a more expensive plan should the carrier detect that the subscriber is using the SIM for a dumbphone plan in a smartphone.

And you're not going to avoid escaping problems in any language that does what you're doing in PHP.

Say you have an SQL statement that takes a varying number of parameters. This could be a statement generated by a query-by-example engine or a statement using operator IN . The MySQLi module makes it very hard to use a prepared statement with ? placeholders for all user-supplied pieces of data: the program has to keep three different lists in sync and use call_user_func_array(), whose semantics vary from PHP version to PHP version. Python's database API, which always uses an array of arguments, makes this somewhat less of a chore.

And I don't know what version of the bible you're reading

New World Translation, similar methodology to the English Standard Version.

but "without disability" isn't in the King James version.

It was a paraphrase; hence the lack of quote marks. I was expressing my own understanding of what it means when God, the very personification of perfection, calls something "very good". But the KJV does mention "without blemish" several times. Would not low-functioning autism be considered a "blemish" on man?

Are you reading that (very bad) edition that says "do not lie"

My Bible has "You must not testify falsely as a witness against your fellowman." (Exodus 20:16) Among these translations of the same verse, are you referring to the "GOD'S WORD(R) Translation"?

Oh, and imperfection isn't what the bible says Adam and Eve brought about, it was SIN.

Same diff. Sin led to a population bottleneck in AM 1656, and this population bottleneck led to an even more thorough corruption of the genome.

You can't do gaming on a TV? Which universe is this again?

The universe where PC game developers don't take into account a home theater PC. The universe where publishers prefer selling two to four copies of a game over one copy that can be played by two to four players holding gamepads. The universe where very few people even own a home theater PC, at least according to FunkSoulBrother, CronoCloud, Endo13, and hawguy. The universe where PCs are for desks, not living rooms.

Everything else can be done off-display by a more upgradable device.

The problem is that a lot of people aren't going to be aware of the most upgradable device that they can connect to an HDTV monitor. How should PC makers market HTPCs better?

Don't you know that higher resolution means smaller text?

Only if your applications are hardcoded to display fixed pixel sizes. For example, Windows can be set to a different DPI, which well-behaved applications will respect. I've written instructions on how to set DPI when using a TV as a PC monitor. Even CSS doesn't actually use pixel distances anymore; instead, it uses "reference pixels" (abbreviated px) of 1/2688 of the distance from the viewer to the document's plane, based on a nominal 96 dpi and 28 inch viewing distance for a desktop PC monitor.

Is there a best practice for storing sensitive data associated with a session using PHP and MySQL which is compatible with small-scale (that is, shared) web hosting? The first solution I think of, a table with storage engine MEMORY, can still get dumped with a properly done SQL injection attack performed against one of the few parts of the application that can't be parameterized due to MySQLi limitations.

But if YOU continue to elect the same worthless meatsacks every 2, 4 and 6 years (or even worse, don't even bother to vote), then you have only yourself to blame.

The problem is that no matter which meatsack I pick, the news media still control who gets name recognition. And the major news media are owned by movie studios, no matter which meatsack I pick, I'll still be voting for a party that supported the Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998 and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998.

So how does one convince enough others to do the same to make a statistically significant dent in sales figures, especially when the major television news outlets are owned by the MPAA?

A wifi, touchscreen, internet browsing, easy to install apps, no monthly contract required handheld?

Close. I was referring to an easy to install apps, no monthly contract required handheld that's marketed to the general public in the United States. Otherwise, one might include GP2X Wiz, Dingoo, and Caanoo, which almost nobody in the United States has ever heard of.

Just one example is the Archos 5, an Android handheld from 2009.

I'm aware of Archos 5, and I own an Archos 43, but as I understand it, things like ArcTools were always in danger of a possible Google cease-and-desist the way Google cease-and-desisted Cyanogen when he used to provide the Gapps along with CyanogenMod. Nor have I ever seen an Archos 43 in Best Buy, Walmart, RadioShack, or any other major electronics chain; I had to mail order mine, and mail order has its own set of problems.

Or if you expand your horizons a little, how about the Nokia N770 from 2005

Was this sold in stores in the United States? About two years ago, I walked into a Best Buy store, a T-Mobile store, and a RadioShack store in Fort Wayne, Indiana. In each, I asked to try a different Nokia product (the N900 phone), and in each, I was disappointed.

[Something else] came out in 1998

And how many of those were still in use, as opposed to having been discarded, by the time the iPod touch was available?

So the lesson is... people with birthdays are assholes?

As RussR42 pointed out, a birthday is like an anus in that everybody has one. But also like one's anus, not everybody needs to be excessive in exhibiting one's birthday. Instead of holding back generosity until one day a year, it's better to be generous in smaller portions throughout the year so that someone can give when someone else really needs it. See more of my thoughts on birthdays.

It makes more sense for all of us to jump of the sinking ship [of Adobe Flash].

In this analogy, what do lifeboats represent?

Some games solve [the completely flat touch screen on an iPhone or iPad] by (eg - Age of Zombies) making the left and right controls appear wherever you place your thumbs

So the movement gesture is done by placing the left thumb at a "neutral" position and then rolling it in a direction rather than sliding. I can see how this would work, but I can foresee problems in platformers and other games where the player is expected to hold a direction for a long time, and not having an iPhone or iPad with which to test it myself, I can't see how the games end up solving them. (My current Android device is an Archos 43 that doesn't support multitouch.) And what about the other thumb? How would it work with more than one button, such as a jump and fire button, or punch and kick, or punch and magic? Or are practical on-screen gamepads limited to one button like an Atari game?

And obviously it doesn't really apply to the massively popular puzzle games that are hugely successful (eg - Cut the Rope, Draw Something!, etc).

There are two different kinds of block puzzle games: those that work by manipulating objects already in the field (e.g. Bejeweled), and those that work by guiding objects into a field (e.g. Tetris). I tried Tetris on a relative's iPhone and could never get nearly as fast as I routinely do on a DS, though Klax might work with downward and upward flick actions. So are falling block games worthless? And even in games with touch, there's the problem of seeing around the finger, though I admit that's more of a problem with the iPhone, where the finger is larger relative to the display.