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Indeed, and I have had more or less that reaction in the past - "Why is it all in Latin? I don't like that..."

Then use the English translation, like I do.

Babby is formed through software exchange.

If the comparison between MPAA and organized crime weren't so accurate, then why haven't even the MPAA-owned news media run a story debunking the connection?

Both major U.S. political parties support expansion of the scope of copyright. They have to, or they won't gain the support of the Hollywood-controlled TV news outlets.

There are many types of queries (typically those that go beyond CRUD operations or are a little meta) that cannot be parameterized.

Please provide an example. Because I don't believe you.

Few SQL client libraries support passing a 1-column table as a parameter, yet that's exactly what you need to do when using SQL's operator IN . So instead, I made a function that escapes such 1-column tables using the quoting rules of SQL, and I tested it thoroughly.

99.9% of the time if you cannot parameterized a query, you're doing wrong.

In that case, all the 0.1% of the queries appeared to fall on me. Try using operator IN with parameters, and then see why it doesn't always work.

There's nothing stopping you from building a dynamic SQL string with parameters

That doesn't work if the parameter interface in your database's client API expects there to be a constant number of parameters in each statement. For example, how does one pass a variable number of parameters to mysqli_stmt_bind_param() in PHP?

When the Xbox 1 came along, I finally had a system that could deliver a comparable experience without having to constantly be upgrading (or worrying about the latest pain-in-the-ass DRM) to keep up. Ditto for the 360 and PS3.

You might be right about major-label games. But I don't see how the original Xbox or any PlayStation console has a selection of independent games comparable to the PC. Due to console development overhead, games from small studios always come to the PC first if they ever come to the consoles. And some kinds of games will never come to Xbox Live Indie Games on Xbox 360 due to XNA limitations.

A small federal government making sure that state laws agree with the US constitution, and a few other duties expressed in the constitution.

One of these powers reserved to Congress is the power to create copyrights and patents.

I have the power to A) Sue (remember, the government still exists to prevent force and fraud)

A company engaged in nationwide interstate commerce has far more money for legal representation than you will ever have.

B) Not choose to use the corporation

Sure, you could choose not to use the local electric power company, but then you would have to join the Plain People. How does libertarianism handle the natural monopoly characteristic of a public utility?

C) Form my own company (remember, with reductions in government powers comes the reduction of Copyright/Patents)

Which is why the MPAA-owned television news media support only middle-of-the-road candidates in the Republicratic parties. Any Republican bringing libertarian ideas to the table, such as Ron Paul, gets buried. That's also why crap like the Copyright Term Extension Act and Digital Millennium Copyright Act pass with unanimous bipartisan support.

We simply believe, like many of the founding fathers, that the government has two and only two roles, protect their citizens from force (things like murder, rape, invasion, theft, etc) and fraud (food poisoning, unsafe drugs, misleading contracts, etc).

Can you give examples of programs under the current Republicratic U.S. government that do not have at least a side effect of protecting citizens from force and fraud?

the war in Iraq

...protects us from force against our energy supply.

On the other hand, if I don't like a certain company, say I don't like Apple, I choose not to buy [its products]

That works for companies that don't hold a monopoly on a product considered to form part of the essential standard of living in an industrialized country. Say I want telephone service, but I don't like Verizon or Comcast. Third parties can't enter the market because the government is protecting the public from force (invasion of non-subscribers' land to pull cable to reach subscribers' land).

[An electronics company] can't borrow money infinitely or create money out of nothing like the US government believes they can.

Do you know who creates the money supply in the United States? The government has (in a libertarian fashion) outsourced this function to a consortium of twelve private banks called Federal Reserve, which is as federal as FedEx.

Desktop and server Linux depends on GNU. Embedded Linux does not to nearly the same extent. I tend to use the term GNU/Linux to distinguish desktop-style Linux from the sort of Linux you see on a router appliance.

GTA: Chinatown Wars

That one was on DS and iPhone too.

Lumines

Also on GBA.

I can go into more details [about templates for portability between standard C++ and C++/CLI] if the above isn't quite clear.

I sort of understand now, but have you written an article about this? If so, I'd like to link to it from my essay about XNA. If not, I can give you an account on my wiki where you can work on such an article.

Users will switch to other browsers if the use case is compelling enough.

Not if they're at work or at the library, therefore not an administrator, and thus can't install another browser. As I wrote in my essay about HTML5 vs. SWF:

A lot of PCs come with Flash Player preinstalled but no HTML5 player. Organizations' IT departments are likely to lock down installation of plug-ins. There is a plug-in called Google Chrome Frame that adds HTML5 support to Internet Explorer versions 6 through 8, but as long as far more sites use SWF than HTML5, IT departments are more likely to authorize the deployment of Flash Player than Chrome Frame.

And I've done my own write-up about these multiple fronts. I've listed three advantages for HTML5 and six for SWF.

How can a minor party rise to national power without the support of the movie-industry-owned mainstream news media?

C++ can be very lean and mean indeed.

Can be != is. A statically linked C++ hello world program using <iostream> is still on the order of a quarter megabyte even on recent versions of g++ and libstdc++. This hurts when you want to use C++ features on a memory-constrained embedded system. Consider a handheld computer with 288 KiB of RAM that sold tens of millions of units between 2001 and 2006. If the libraries needed to run hello world eat up all the RAM, how are you going to fit the application?

At concern are violations for trademark (characters/personalities/names)

Tetris has no "characters" as such (well Tetris Worlds has the block creatures, but clones do not copy those), and the names are usually different. The Tetris Company has in the past made specious claims about trademarks on gameplay mechanics, possibly unaware of the functionality doctrine.

copyright (art likeness, inability to prove non-blatant-copy)

Art is one of the easiest things to change in a Tetris clone. What did you mean by "non-blatant-copy", other than a game where the code itself was copied?

patents (for gameplay mechanics).

USPTO.gov says no US patents have been assigned to Elorg or Tetris.

Few do it who are keenly aware of the danger.

I guess I am one of the few, as are GamePoint who undoubtedly have lawyers. I'll consider pulling Lockjaw once Blockbox gets pulled.

Actually, the generic randomizer could do that as well, and in some cases can be abused.

Luck manipulation works in tool-assisted speedruns of Tetris for NES because the game mixes keypresses into the PRNG's entropy pool. Some other games seed the PRNG only once; the entire piece sequence is predetermined from READY GO.

It also prevents complaints about games having a rigged random number generator if the pieces aren't distributed evenly.

True, luck based cop-outs are harder on bag than on the original randomizer. But apparently, BPS chose bag over the history based randomizer used by TGM designed to choose one of the least recently used pieces. The advantage of LRU over the bag randomizer is that an LRU randomizer 1. won't generate the sort of SZSZ clumps at the "seams" between bags, and 2. doesn't have the "Playing forever" pattern. That's part of why I chose an LRU randomizer for my own Tetris clone for NES. LRU doesn't guarantee strictly even distribution, but it is still far more even than the original memoryless algorithm. I can think of a few other compromise algorithms, such as keeping a bag of 14 pieces, drawing seven out, and adding all seven pieces once seven are left in the bag.

If they had managed to persuade a few developers to take the risk and write something - even a simple puzzle game or a port of an existing title - this would have a lot more hope of taking off.

If you want a port of an existing simple puzzle game, I've got just the ticket: install an NES emulator and LJ65, then install a GBA emulator and TOD and Luminesweeper.

If they had managed to persuade a few developers to take the risk and write something - even a simple puzzle game or a port of an existing title - this would have a lot more hope of taking off.

If you want a port of an existing simple puzzle game, I've got just the ticket: install an NES emulator and LJ65, then install a GBA emulator and TOD and Luminesweeper.

as long as you have access to the proper equipment (CD burner + blank discs) there is nothing that stops you from creating usable 'custom' copies. I'd think the same applies to code in ROM, it's just that the necessary equipment is not typically found on your average home computer.

Some video game consoles use custom cartridge bus protocols, some of which are encrypted and/or patented. Before the NoPass crack led to SLOT-1 cards, there wasn't any published way to make your own Nintendo DS-compatible ROM chip that wasn't just shellcode to get the DS executing code from the GBA slot. But if the ROM is in a user-removable cartridge, as in the case of almost every game console since the Atari VCS, the licensee under the GPL would still have to provide Installation Information because the licensee "retains the ability to install modified object code on the User Product" through a cartridge.

Thus "Europe" is not to blame but instead "some organizations"

The mainstream news media control what the electorate thinks, and these "some organizations" control the mainstream news media. So how do we get a Congress that's not captured by "some organizations"?

There's this concept called a spine

It's not that I lack a spine. It's not that 10,000 of us lack a spine. It's the other 306,990,000 of us that either lack a spine or even benefit from the status quo. For example, I've discovered that the movie studios decide who gets elected in two ways. I wanted to vote for Ron Paul in 2008, but because the MPAA-puppet cable news networks gave the other Republicans so much more time, he was eliminated before the primary even came to my state.

If I make a tool that takes my game written in whatever language and spits out C# that targets the XNA APIs, Microsoft has no problem with it.

Oh yes it does, for at least these three reasons: no procedural audio, no conlangs, and no ports. I've written about these XNA deficiencies in another article.

would WEP or WPA-TSK count as "adequately secured to the danger of unauthorized third parties abusing it to commit copyright violation,'?

There's a reason why they call it "wired equivalent privacy". It's supposed to be as hard to break as entering the premises and using a wired Ethernet port.

People ignorant about upholding their rights will lose them.

Worse yet, it is in the interest of the mass media to keep the populace ignorant of their rights. Here's why.

There are constucts like prepared statements in all web programming languages

Prepared statements have their limitations, especially in cases where the number of placeholders varies from run to run.

I think php is rather an interesting case. Looking at SQL injection: the language is strong enough and easy enough to protect against attack.

Not necessarily. PHP database interfaces are capable of escaping scalars like numbers and strings. But they generally leave a couple major features (operator IN and query by example) unimplemented, and in these cases, the programmer has to resort to manually escaping each parameter. I've written more about it here.

Not to mention the core Java language has things like easy to use prepared statements for when you realize you do need to worry about SQL injection

But can Java use table-valued parameters in a prepared statement? For example, SQL's operator IN takes a single-column table as its second argument. if I am writing a SELECT query that uses WHERE username IN ('alice', 'bob', 'charlie'), the existing database interfaces for PHP and Python don't let me do WHERE username IN ? and pass in an array. Instead, I have to either A. write a function to escape the list myself and use that throughout my program, or B. write a function to make an appropriately long list of ?s and then append the list of arguments, which doesn't work if the database interface expects there to be a fixed number of ?s in a given statement *cough*PHP mysqli_bind_param()*cough*.

If your console's cartridges don't have those idiotic tiny plastic teeth *cough*DS*cough*, use rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab instead.

Have an even better/fun way to do this. I use "Everclear" grain alcohol to clean any parts. Once I clean the parts...I'm next with a few swallows. Of course...my liver hates me...but may as well clean me as well as my electronics.

$$ for advertising

It's not just the advertising but also the content. Five MPAA studios own all TV news outlets except PBS, and they decide which stories to run or not to run.

A memory card that's the size of a postage stamp is a far cry from something like an NES cartridge.

The actual ICs aren't much bigger than an original Game Boy cartridge. I'll admit the packaging got smaller, in part because Nintendo switched from word-addressed ROM to block devices.

But when a memory card can hold dozens, if not hundreds of games, the idea of having a piece of media that holds just one title is really the part that should be going out the door.

Hundreds of games on one memory card? I liked WarioWare too, but selling copies of individual games at retail isn't going away until broadband becomes cheap even out in the sticks.

Blowing is a horribly inefficient way to clean cartridges. It's not much better than just pulling out the cartridge and reseating it, and over time, the humidity in your breath can make the problem worse by attracting more dust. If your console's cartridges don't have those idiotic tiny plastic teeth *cough*DS*cough*, use rubbing alcohol on a cotton swab instead. It's fairly close to the method used in the official NES cleaning kit.

Presumably you have the benchmarks to validate your claims?

In fact I do. I've linked to a benchmark at the bottom of my own working draft of an HTML5 vs. SWF article, and my result was that Flash draws a scene full of particles 2.5 times as fast as Canvas.

ca65, and FCE Ultra.

Ahh, so you are playing PIRATED game ROMs in FCE Ultra.

I guess you missed the "ca65" part. It's a Free assembler targeting MOS Technology 6502, the CPU architecture used in the Nintendo Entertainment System. I use it to make my own ROMs for other people to play. (GIMP is for editing the 128x128 pixel sprite sheets that the NES uses.) Or are you calling Concentration Room and LJ65 pirated?

The 3 major news networks are a fucking wasteland of information.

What did you expect from MPAA News?

How big is Windows' marketshare for, say, couch multiplayer games? Apart from a few exceptions, multiplayer on PC games tends to be LAN or online, which shuts out single-PC families.

I'd like to see the full development tools opened up for some of the older consoles

The NES has been blown wide open. I've made a few games for it such as Concentration Room, and I'm not the only one. And some people are working on mastering the Super NES.

That might produce a few more titles like this, but targeted to a hardware platform. The Genesis or Super Nintendo would probably be the most attractive to potential developers, because there are scads of them worldwide (not least in the umpteen-in-one units at the flea market)

Cartridge connector repair might pose a problem.

and because they use tractable Motorola processors.

True, the Genesis used a Freescale processor (MC68000), but the Super NES's 65C816 was a Ricoh second-source version of a WDC part.

G1

I commend T-Mobile for taking the lead in offering Android OS phones, but T-Mobile's signal coverage is even worse than the AT&T coverage about which iPhone critics like to complain. And what Android-based alternative to an iPod Touch do you recommend for someone who doesn't want another phone bill?\

Put another way, if you are purchasing a phone with the expectation that it doesn't meet your needs, how much can you really complain afterward?

My needs expanded, and my phone failed to expand with them.

Most of the genres that are more highly represented on console than PC that I can think of involve the kinds of game best played on a couch with others (party games, etc).

Exactly those. I'm trying to compile a list of substitutes for titles on closed platforms, and I need more native couch multiplayer games for a home theater PC. Sure, there's Sonic Kart to replace Mario Kart, and Street Fighter IV is a decent traditional fighting game. But what platform fighting game (like Power Stone or Smash Bros.) do you recommend? Or anything like Mario Party?

So the question is which is more important to you: the openness of the platform, or the number of applications (games) available?

That choice shouldn't have to be taken. Why should I have to have one box exclusively for major-label video games and a separate box exclusively for independent video games?

Obama will replace him with someone anti "fair use". He was put on the throne by the media

How can one get elected to the office of President without support of the major TV news networks, all of which are in the MPAA?

Does it count as a crack if you play the game and then program your own original game with the same rules? The Tetris Company seems to think it does. In that case, here are the download links: Lockjaw and Luminesweeper.

Does it count as a crack if you play the game and then program your own original game with the same rules? The Tetris Company seems to think it does. In that case, here are the download links: Lockjaw and Luminesweeper.

some songs today, it's really hard for me too tell which song it is for 30 seconds and even when it starts being different, it still sounds the same.

Damn straight. I'm compiling a list of similar-sounding songs.

Indeed, to me Minesweeper quickly becomes boring, since most of the clicking obeys pretty simple rules ("2-3-2 along an edge - that's clear-3mines-clear"); then at the end it often becomes undecidable and it's eeny-meeny-clicky-boom.

That's when you start playing games that slowly solve the boring stuff for you. My own Luminesweeper is one of them: a line periodically sweeps across the screen and solves squares using the single-point method. So it almost feels like you're playing co-op, and the goal is to do as much as you can to promote a healthy alternation between the hard stuff (your task) and the easy stuff (the CPU's task).

My last two laptops have had these.

Because you chose them with this feature in mind. I was talking about "as a standard feature", meaning that every unit that belongs to the platform has the feature. I checked an Office Depot, and zero desktop PCs came with S-Video out. One has to learn about and then buy an obscure $40 adapter online to get that. But I'll admit that SDTV output isn't as important now that most TVs sold in the past 3 years are HDTVs with PC inputs.

Likewise with 3D performance. The high market share of the Voodoo3-class Intel GMA is still a problem plaguing the PC as a video gaming platform. A lot of people who own a Word-and-Facebook PC would need to buy a second PC for any sort of gaming more complex than Tetris and Farmville, either because it's a laptop that can't have its video card replaced or because they don't know how to open the desktop PC's case. That's why I back Acer Aspire Revo, which has an NVIDIA GPU (like the PS3) and is priced at $200 (like the Wii), as a baseline platform.

I can think of a large number of console games that only support one player per console

My point is that because HDTVs are a fairly recent development, PC games are even less likely to support multiple players. Compare PC games to Wii games, for instance: some multiplayer-heavy genres are severely underrepresented on PC. What PC game do you recommend for fans of platform fighters like Power Stone or Super Smash Bros.? And why is the latest Bomberman game for PC 13 years old?

since the PS/3 shipped with firmware that allowed installing another OS, it doesn't seem like the PS/3 is a console either.

True. The fat PS3 was a "computer entertainment system" with both console and computer modes until 3.21, when it became a game console.

Does XNA mean that the XBox isn't either?

XNA is more like the App Store on an iPhone: development is open to the general public, but XNA games can't do things that Microsoft's own software can do. Limitations of the XNA environment include an annual fee, a general orientation toward games (and not applications for creating things), no procedural audio, no conlangs, and no ports.

I used to [put down C++] until I was forced to write C++ code. Now that I understand the language it appears downright elegant. Sure there are features that I will never ever use

But if you don't use all the language features, you start having to deal with lamers who repeat a no true Scotsman fallacy. For example, I've seen people claim that a C++ program that uses <cstdio> instead of <iostream> isn't really written in C++ but in "an odd Frankensteinian mix of C and C++". This despite the fact that statically linked C++ programs using <iostream> start at a quarter megabyte for Hello World, which is a lot on a handheld platform with less than half a megabyte of RAM.

Most gamers are switching to PSN, where there are no subscription costs, better exclusives and less jerks.

And no indie games. Nintendo requires a stable business with a dedicated office and prior commercial titles; I haven't read anything stating otherwise for Sony. So if a team of developers that work from home want their game on a console, the only way is through Microsoft's XNA environment, and if this were real, I'd bet XNA is why the developers would have chosen Xbox 360. In fact, one of the drawbacks of XNA can be turned into a positive: it forces a rewrite that solves the issue of copyright on a forked work.

you can overcome unfavorable item distribution with skillful play.

Not when the item is Smash Ball, and some characters' Final Smashes are overpowered. As "Brawl Taunts" put it, "I'm too cheap!"

you can overcome unfavorable item distribution with skillful play.

Beat a tournament-level player while allowing the other player to get all the items, including all the Starman and Smash Ball power-ups, and I'll believe you. It's not like Tetris, where since 2001, all players are guaranteed to get an even distribution of pieces over the short run.

XNA

It's far from perfect, but it might do.

Lately I've been watching everything directly on my computer

Which works while you're alone. If you want to watch with visiting friends or family, then as you mentioned, you need the HDMI out to put video on a bigger screen. And if you are visiting someone who has only an SDTV, you may need an even more obscure piece of hardware to turn VGA signals into composite or S-Video signals.

because I got tired of the broadcast/cable schedule

For sports, broadcast and cable schedules are tied to the schedule of the actual contest: they show the action 15 seconds after it happens. Any later and you're watching "edited for highlight reel" footage.

• All indie games must be developed for the Xbox 360 and only the Xbox 360.
• No indie game shall take place in a fantasy world with fleshed out fictional languages.
• No indie game shall use speech synthesis to voice the game characters.

Or were you not aware of the drawbacks of XNA?