I realize most of the/. readers are far, if not radical left, wingers, but when Hillary is in the White House, I expect not to see word one going against her. You know it, I know it.
If you think/. is far left that probably means you're so far out in right field you can't see the game anymore. Let go of the partisan outlook a little bit, eh?
Slashdot has a heavy libertarian bias, particularly on social issues, and isn't particularly well represented by either mainstream party. The wannabe-fascist trend in the Republican party lately has made them particularly reviled here, but there's little love for the Democrats, especially their ties to the entertainment industry. If we have a Democrat president, expect/. bitching about the RIAA and MPAA to increase even beyond its already prodigious levels. On the other hand, the fact that Hillary is actually a viable presidential candidate is probably Bush's fault, too.;)
Besides, honestly now. Slashdot? Not complaining about politics? Madness!
You can try to make excuses or cloud the issue in ambiguity, but there is one unquestionable fact: abortion kills babies. It is a willful act of cruel, inhumane brutality against an innocent life. Just as we denounce the slaughter of innocent civilians and genocide, so we should denounce this reprehensible act. We condemn slavery, but we actively slaughter our own children. We are upset about invading Iraq, but we invade the bodies of little babies and destroy them in the womb. Think about that.
Abortion, in most cases, kills a largely undeveloped fetus that is incapable of surviving outside of the mother's body. This lump of tissue is not a baby, it is not a sentient human being. It is a parasite within the mother's body and allowed to exist only by her whim.
Most people regularly eat animals with more intelligence than a fetus. Eating pork is more morally questionable than abortion.
No one claims abortion is a GOOD thing. But as far as bad things go, it ranks somewhere below eating meat and a bit above jaywalking.
A bicycle shouldn't be ON the same road as cars. They can't go fast enough....and it is speed differences that cause most accidents (not to mention you can't see them very well).
Legally speaking, a bicycle is a vehicle and thus belongs in the road, and for safety reasons should actually ride in the center of the lane like any other vehicle. In many locations it is, in fact, illegal to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk (which is reserved for pedestrians, not vehicles). Again, as far as the law is concerned, motorists can suck it up and deal. Just pass the bike like you would a slow-moving car, when traffic allows.
What causes accidents isn't speed differences, it's incompetent motorists.
WTF? When are they going to support Firefox, Opera, and Safari?
The ActiveX, required for all downloads (to "optimize" downloads), is particularly evil. That only runs on Windows. When are they going to switch to something sane, like pure Java?
Really, they ought to just throw everything on an FTP site. They could use Bittorrent for the big ISO images. It works for Fedora.
Not to mention, have you seen how useless the MSDN developer library site's search feature is? I don't know why they don't just use an embedded Google search or something like a lot of other sites do.
IBM - a much larger corporation than Microsoft and with a similarly larger patent portfolio - is certainly taking some productive steps, especially regarding 'gifting' patents to open source projects and clearing projects using open-standards from IBM patent threat. Companies like Adobe and Apple however are still very pro software patents, unfashionable as that is to say.
IBM is currently centering its business model around selling hardware, support services, and consulting. From that perspective, proprietary software ranges from an inconvenience to a substantial threat (i.e., MS). Perhaps IBM actually agrees with/. that software patents are toxic to software innovation and is supporting them in hopes of undermining the entire proprietary software market?;)
After all, IBM's own influence can insure the safety of the open-source software that their business model can more easily take advantage of.
/. has always been safe for work. Unless you work someplace retarded.
There, fixed that for you.;)
Of course, that only applies to/. itself. Following unknown links in comments, especially from ACs, is probably unwise in a working environment. (Actually, nevemind "work safe", goatse isn't "mind safe")
Did I miss the link to the ancient thread where UbuntuDupe originally asked for help? It seems like a lot of people are unduly familiar with it.
Maybe it's one of those semi-famous Internet memes, like that cat that plays the piano.
I read it months ago during a/. thread when someone else called him on his trolling, there was probably a link posted then. The thread in question was on an Ubuntu help forum, don't recall where, and can probably be turned up on Google. The gist of it was something went wrong with his Ubuntu installation and hosed his bootloader, leaving him with a nonfunctional computer. The thread was then a classic example of uncooperative troubleshooting as he refused to do things that were more effort than "complain on the internet", refused to give information he didn't think was relevant, claimed that he knew what the problem was and why wouldn't people just tell him how to fix it, etc. Pretty typical example of "this is why customer support is no fun" stuff except for the part where he's still trolling slashdot because of it, over a year later.:D
If Ubuntu should have been written in a way that allowed a much easier fix for the problem, and the problem is common enough to warrant attention, then it's certainly an Ubuntu problem. But I would first want to know how you actually know it's a simple and common problem. It sounds like you never actually diagnosed the root of the problem, so your insistence that it should have been easily diagnosable and fixable is just bluster.
This is actually the original issue; the serious problem he experienced Never Should Have Happened, because it rendered his computer inoperable for the duration of the problem. Even being a very uncommon issue, it's unacceptable that it happened.
The side issue is that, faced with an unusual problem that had already happened and couldn't be simply undone, rather than cooperate with troubleshooting and let people help him fix it, he decided he would rather complain and be uncooperative. People tried to help him despite his poor attitude, and yet over a year later he still takes opportunity to badmouth Ubuntu and its users. Ironically, he likes to say that OTHER people have bad attitudes about problems with Linux!
This is purely a case of someone who enjoys complaining more than they enjoy fixing problems.
I think the patent system is terribly abused these days, but getting rid of altogether would only make the whole thing worse.
I do agree that patents are not an inherently bad idea. My disagreement is only that I think "no patents at all" would not be appreciably worse than the current mess and might be a bit better.
Some would say the $225 dollars are your earnings. If you have $225 worth of idealogical reasons, then buy the Ubuntu preinstalled computer. Or, you know, take the $225 you saved and give it to the FSF or Canonical or something. Possibly with a note attached saying "this donation is being made in the name of Windows crapware vendors".
Are you still bitter over that one Ubuntu support thread where you acted like a jerk and people didn't magically fix your problem? Holding a grudge for over a year doesn't exactly give you the moral high ground here, you realize.
So your argument against this scenario is "big companies aren't good at making money on new gadgets, are too slow to steal inventions, and upstarts just replace the big slow companies anyways until they become big slow companies" Have you not been paying attention in the last, say, 10 years? Microsoft's entire business is built around stealing other peoples inventions. You seem to equate morally bankrupt corporate behavior with ineffective behavior, and that absolutely is not the case. That has got to be the most insane argument against patents I have ever heard.
Microsoft's business centers around maintaining a monopoly through network effects and muscling other people around with anticompetitive practices. Their "stealing other people's inventions" is, exactly as I said previously, typically done a day late and a dollar short. How long did it take them to realize the internet wasn't a passing fad? Microsoft's abusive (and successful) behaviors would change very little regardless of how many patents exist. I wish Microsoft WOULD steal other people's inventions more, maybe then their software wouldn't suck so much.
In regard to the other point, you're leaving out the costs of actually promoting and distributing a new product, as well as the issue of customer relationship and support costs. Additionally, trademarked design elements and copyright on things like embedded software would prevent lazy duplication. It's still a nontrivial amount of effort that you often won't see out of large corporations until someone else has already proven an idea is viable.
So...you develop some fancy wizbang gadget, brand new, totally innovative, breaking new barriors. The moment you sell the first one, MegaTechCorp will purchase one, use its highly paid engineers to disassemble it, maybe make a few 'enhancements', bundle it back up, mass market it, and totally screw you out of business. You will have sold 1 at incredible personal cost in R&D and MFG, MegaTechCorp will have bought 1, mass produced them, mass marketed them, and made millions. You on the other hand are left wimpering about how the rich have an unfair advantage because they can just snatch up the little guys inventions and call them their own and push the little guy out of business. Which ironically is what the primary complaint about patents is now...except if they go away the problem gets worse and becomes 100% legal. At least with the undestanding that patents are imporant there is some hope of fixing the patent system to allow fewer abuses.
Since when is MegaTechCorp that observant and efficient? The more likely scenario goes like this:
You develop something new and innovative. You put it together, get some made, start selling them. MegaTechCorp doesn't even notice your puny business. You sell some more. MegaTechCorp notices now, but is heavily invested in their own solution and, given the massive inertia of large corporations, does nothing but spew marketing spin that your clever little gadget is lame (maybe it lacks wireless and has less space than a Nomad, who'd go for that?).
Two years later you've carved out a modest chunk of the market before MegaTechCorp realizes they missed the boat and suddenly scrambles to get their lazy, overpaid corporate engineers to throw together a knockoff of yours. Their market dominance lets them force their way into the market, but your first mover advantage and higher quality from two years of experience lets you hold onto your share. Meanwhile ten KiloTechCorps churn out cheap imitations of the products from you and MegaTechCorp.
Eventually you either grow bloated and bureaucratic yourself and lose to some new upstart, entrench yourself in a submarket and specialize heavily, become another MegaTechCorp yourself, or get bought out by GigaOverlordCorp who decided to buy their way into the market they just noticed exists (five years late).
Note that nowhere in that scenario do patents come into play. Frankly, even without patents, if MegaTechCorp can out-innovate the upstart inventor chances are the idea wasn't really all that innovative in the first place.
Close - it's sex on the internet with puppets. It's the same thing as a routine for lambada in 2Life. Of course, I can't see it being protected except by copyright. I know. To be honest, I was just fishing for someone to start singing "The Internet Is For Porn". A quick musical interlude never hurts!
You're right, it's far more legitimate to sell non-sexual simulations (e.g. typical video games) than to sell sexual simulations. There is clearly something this guy should be ashamed of in the fact that his video games involve sex, whereas Epic's and Id's games don't.
To be fair, from what I've heard most regular game programmers don't have much in the way of a life, either...:) (especially ones working for EA)
Besides, it's more likely this guy's CUSTOMERS that need a first life.
Don't be dense. Perpetual motion usually (as it does in this case) refers to a device that produces more energy than it consumes. Well, really it just refers to a machine that runs forever without energy input, which implies either nonconservation of energy, or some sort of process with no losses to friction or other effects that runs forever on inertia. The latter would be just as interesting in many ways, and certainly also violates the laws of physics, but it's not really the same thing.
I'm not an astrophysicist, but my understanding is that time also began in the big bang. It's not like one moment there was lots of mass and energy when there was none the previous moment. There was no previous moment. The usual analogy is "what's north of the north pole?" Not only time itself but all the laws of physics "began" at the big bang, so forget causality and conservation of energy as well.
Correction: you're not an intentional troll. No, actually, I'm pretty sure he was being 100% intentional there.
Sounds like he is complaining about that people create animations that are "like" his, not merely his. But that basically means that he claims a copyright on the missionary position and that's not right. Copyright doesn't protect ideas, it only protects specific expressions of those ideas. And generic, common expressions aren't copyrightable either, and it seems like the missionary position is pretty generic and common.
Yes, but this is sex... on the INTERNET. That makes it novel and original, right? I bet he could get a patent on the idea. I'm sure some people would make noises about "prior art", and say it's "obvious" but let's be reasonable, if "sex on the internet" was that obvious why isn't everyone else doing it?
I wish there was a way to buy anti-stock in such ideas. In other words, make money off of its loss. Somebody told me there is something known as "puts", but they are generally configured for experienced career investors.
That said, the risk profile for such "investments" are usually... awkward. And, as the saying goes, the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
"I should be able to drive drunk on my private property if I want, if I get injured it's my fault and if other people don't like it they should stay off my private road."
There, I fixed that for you. Your analogies are terrible. I'm not endangering anybody against their will. Actually, you want to endanger me against my will. People do get severely injured and even killed by vaccine reactions.
It really doesn't hurt you if I get the disease, as long as you are protected by your vaccine. Maybe I just want to prevent the extinction of yet another species, offering myself to protect it.:-) Whatever, it's none of your business.
That logic only works if I trust you to stay on your own property. Now, I don't specifically distrust you (in fact chances are that you are trustworthy) but experience shows that if given the freedom to endanger others, a small but substantial portion of people will abuse that freedom. Since there's no good way to tell ahead of time who will be responsible and who won't, and because vaccines are reasonably cheap and safe, from the view point of society as a whole it makes the most sense to make sure everyone is vaccinated.
And frankly, unless you're a survivalist living off the grid in a secluded mountain cabin somewhere you're a part of society, and when something impacts the safety of others in society, sorry, but it IS other people's business. Of course, if you are living off the grid I apologize fully and commend you for your principled stand.:)
By the way, the health risks of vaccines do exist, but are severely overhyped.
No vaccine: passive, death unlikely, no harm at all if I'm uninfected, no harm at all if I don't have sex WITH UNVACCINATED PEOPLE, any potential sex partner can choose the vaccine for themselves...
I mean gee, if it is so great, why don't my sex partners just get the vaccine? That'd work way better than me getting the vaccine, because they might have sex with other people too!
You're missing the point. Diseases aren't independently chosen risks, they have to be transmitted. Vaccinations don't just keep one person safe, they stop the propagation of the disease, and it is beneficial to society as a whole to enforce broad vaccination. With enough people immune, the disease becomes less common or can even be wiped out.
Your argument is about like saying "I should be able to drive drunk if I want, if I get injured it's my fault and if other people don't like it they should stay off the road." Selfish little freeloaders who whine about their "freedom" to endanger everyone else's health ought to be dragged kicking and screaming if necessary to get their vaccines.
That said, my earlier post was more directed at "moral" busybodies who think letting kids die is fine because immunizing them MIGHT look SORT OF like encouraging them to have sex, which is quite possibly one of the most reprehensible and disgusting things I have ever heard of, and probably a new moral low even for that crowd. Your attitude is merely childish, not evil.
In other news: if you care about your daughter, get her vaccinated for HPV.
If you care about other people's daughters, get your son vaccinated for HPV too. Or, if you DON'T care about other people's daughters, campaign against the vaccine for political reasons. Because nothing says "moral principles" like wanting kids to die from a preventable disease!
That covers the interaction part of the interface, but you are correct that I feel they 'aren't pretty enough.' By far.
That's fair enough, and I can't argue the point. They're very good for what they are (fun, minimalist reasoning puzzles) but they don't and probably were never intended to have mass-market appeal. And no, I don't have the graphics skills to do it either (otherwise I would).
However I have been tempted to make a Flash or Javascript reimplementation... wouldn't be able to use his backends that way, unfortunately, but I'd love to be able to play those truly anywhere, even when I can't download his (such as on my Wii, hahaha).
I think some of them could convey the information better (black box!) and someone could be easier to tell when the puzzle is complete (pattern, net, etc) and some could be easier to read. And Sudoku could have a better input mechanism altogether, perhaps offering choices for those who can type and those who would rather click. There have been many interfaces invented for it, but very few that I enjoy using. Simon's is not one of them.
Well... many of the games--black box, pattern, tents, others--sometimes lack good error displays. For instance, pattern should highlight filled-in row/columns that do not match the numbers, and black box would benefit greatly from showing trajectories automatically somehow, perhaps as lines crossing the grid that bend and warp as you place guesses.
A few other minor things too; it'd be nice to be able to move groups of points in untangle, it'd be nice if lines were multi-colored in slant to make loops easier to spot by something besides trial and error, etc.
I've not played computer sudoku other than his. How else do people do it?
Again, the puzzles and their code are very very well done, it's just the interface that I don't like. And as I stated before, that, more than anything, is the difference between a game and a hit game.
But it's worth noting that interface means more than just glitz and pretty pictures. I've played many games arguably better looking than Simon's puzzles that were no fun because the controls were unresponsive, the display was confusing, etc. Pretty pictures can improve a good interface but make a bad one worse...
So all Zelda does is provide the same kind of game without "the grind". And does it all within a total playtime equivalent to maybe two months of MMO subscription. That does not encourage a continuous revenue stream.
I haven't played any MMORPGs, but what about them makes them so "open ended"? "the grind".
But your entire argument hinges on one simple fact, that the player owns the character. They do not, Blizzard does.
Many, many players see it differently, and it would be rash to assume the government will never agree with them--especially when acknowledging the commonly held attitude (that players DO own their virtual stuff in some sense) helps open the door to taxation for large transactions of virtual goods.
Slashdot Mirror
If you think /. is far left that probably means you're so far out in right field you can't see the game anymore. Let go of the partisan outlook a little bit, eh?
Slashdot has a heavy libertarian bias, particularly on social issues, and isn't particularly well represented by either mainstream party. The wannabe-fascist trend in the Republican party lately has made them particularly reviled here, but there's little love for the Democrats, especially their ties to the entertainment industry. If we have a Democrat president, expect /. bitching about the RIAA and MPAA to increase even beyond its already prodigious levels. On the other hand, the fact that Hillary is actually a viable presidential candidate is probably Bush's fault, too. ;)
Besides, honestly now. Slashdot? Not complaining about politics? Madness!
You can try to make excuses or cloud the issue in ambiguity, but there is one unquestionable fact: abortion kills babies. It is a willful act of cruel, inhumane brutality against an innocent life. Just as we denounce the slaughter of innocent civilians and genocide, so we should denounce this reprehensible act. We condemn slavery, but we actively slaughter our own children. We are upset about invading Iraq, but we invade the bodies of little babies and destroy them in the womb. Think about that.
Abortion, in most cases, kills a largely undeveloped fetus that is incapable of surviving outside of the mother's body. This lump of tissue is not a baby, it is not a sentient human being. It is a parasite within the mother's body and allowed to exist only by her whim.
Most people regularly eat animals with more intelligence than a fetus. Eating pork is more morally questionable than abortion.
No one claims abortion is a GOOD thing. But as far as bad things go, it ranks somewhere below eating meat and a bit above jaywalking.
Legally speaking, a bicycle is a vehicle and thus belongs in the road, and for safety reasons should actually ride in the center of the lane like any other vehicle. In many locations it is, in fact, illegal to ride a bicycle on the sidewalk (which is reserved for pedestrians, not vehicles). Again, as far as the law is concerned, motorists can suck it up and deal. Just pass the bike like you would a slow-moving car, when traffic allows.
What causes accidents isn't speed differences, it's incompetent motorists.
The ActiveX, required for all downloads (to "optimize" downloads), is particularly evil. That only runs on Windows. When are they going to switch to something sane, like pure Java?
Really, they ought to just throw everything on an FTP site. They could use Bittorrent for the big ISO images. It works for Fedora.
Not to mention, have you seen how useless the MSDN developer library site's search feature is? I don't know why they don't just use an embedded Google search or something like a lot of other sites do.
IBM is currently centering its business model around selling hardware, support services, and consulting. From that perspective, proprietary software ranges from an inconvenience to a substantial threat (i.e., MS). Perhaps IBM actually agrees with /. that software patents are toxic to software innovation and is supporting them in hopes of undermining the entire proprietary software market? ;)
After all, IBM's own influence can insure the safety of the open-source software that their business model can more easily take advantage of.
/. has always been safe for work. Unless you work someplace retarded.There, fixed that for you. ;)
Of course, that only applies to /. itself. Following unknown links in comments, especially from ACs, is probably unwise in a working environment. (Actually, nevemind "work safe", goatse isn't "mind safe")
Maybe it's one of those semi-famous Internet memes, like that cat that plays the piano.
I read it months ago during a /. thread when someone else called him on his trolling, there was probably a link posted then. The thread in question was on an Ubuntu help forum, don't recall where, and can probably be turned up on Google. The gist of it was something went wrong with his Ubuntu installation and hosed his bootloader, leaving him with a nonfunctional computer. The thread was then a classic example of uncooperative troubleshooting as he refused to do things that were more effort than "complain on the internet", refused to give information he didn't think was relevant, claimed that he knew what the problem was and why wouldn't people just tell him how to fix it, etc. Pretty typical example of "this is why customer support is no fun" stuff except for the part where he's still trolling slashdot because of it, over a year later. :D
Untrue. I'm worried about the computer if it doesn't.
Needless to say I'm worried about computers a lot. :(
But it would be nice if computers were, in fact, reliable and comprehensible enough that only a true incompetent WOULD have problems.
This is actually the original issue; the serious problem he experienced Never Should Have Happened, because it rendered his computer inoperable for the duration of the problem. Even being a very uncommon issue, it's unacceptable that it happened.
The side issue is that, faced with an unusual problem that had already happened and couldn't be simply undone, rather than cooperate with troubleshooting and let people help him fix it, he decided he would rather complain and be uncooperative. People tried to help him despite his poor attitude, and yet over a year later he still takes opportunity to badmouth Ubuntu and its users. Ironically, he likes to say that OTHER people have bad attitudes about problems with Linux!
This is purely a case of someone who enjoys complaining more than they enjoy fixing problems.
I do agree that patents are not an inherently bad idea. My disagreement is only that I think "no patents at all" would not be appreciably worse than the current mess and might be a bit better.
Are you still bitter over that one Ubuntu support thread where you acted like a jerk and people didn't magically fix your problem? Holding a grudge for over a year doesn't exactly give you the moral high ground here, you realize.
Microsoft's business centers around maintaining a monopoly through network effects and muscling other people around with anticompetitive practices. Their "stealing other people's inventions" is, exactly as I said previously, typically done a day late and a dollar short. How long did it take them to realize the internet wasn't a passing fad? Microsoft's abusive (and successful) behaviors would change very little regardless of how many patents exist. I wish Microsoft WOULD steal other people's inventions more, maybe then their software wouldn't suck so much.
In regard to the other point, you're leaving out the costs of actually promoting and distributing a new product, as well as the issue of customer relationship and support costs. Additionally, trademarked design elements and copyright on things like embedded software would prevent lazy duplication. It's still a nontrivial amount of effort that you often won't see out of large corporations until someone else has already proven an idea is viable.
Since when is MegaTechCorp that observant and efficient? The more likely scenario goes like this:
You develop something new and innovative. You put it together, get some made, start selling them. MegaTechCorp doesn't even notice your puny business. You sell some more. MegaTechCorp notices now, but is heavily invested in their own solution and, given the massive inertia of large corporations, does nothing but spew marketing spin that your clever little gadget is lame (maybe it lacks wireless and has less space than a Nomad, who'd go for that?).
Two years later you've carved out a modest chunk of the market before MegaTechCorp realizes they missed the boat and suddenly scrambles to get their lazy, overpaid corporate engineers to throw together a knockoff of yours. Their market dominance lets them force their way into the market, but your first mover advantage and higher quality from two years of experience lets you hold onto your share. Meanwhile ten KiloTechCorps churn out cheap imitations of the products from you and MegaTechCorp.
Eventually you either grow bloated and bureaucratic yourself and lose to some new upstart, entrench yourself in a submarket and specialize heavily, become another MegaTechCorp yourself, or get bought out by GigaOverlordCorp who decided to buy their way into the market they just noticed exists (five years late).
Note that nowhere in that scenario do patents come into play. Frankly, even without patents, if MegaTechCorp can out-innovate the upstart inventor chances are the idea wasn't really all that innovative in the first place.
To be fair, from what I've heard most regular game programmers don't have much in the way of a life, either... :) (especially ones working for EA)
Besides, it's more likely this guy's CUSTOMERS that need a first life.
Yes, but this is sex... on the INTERNET. That makes it novel and original, right? I bet he could get a patent on the idea. I'm sure some people would make noises about "prior art", and say it's "obvious" but let's be reasonable, if "sex on the internet" was that obvious why isn't everyone else doing it?
You may be interested in reading http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Short_selling
That said, the risk profile for such "investments" are usually... awkward. And, as the saying goes, the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.
There, I fixed that for you. Your analogies are terrible. I'm not endangering anybody against their will. Actually, you want to endanger me against my will. People do get severely injured and even killed by vaccine reactions.
It really doesn't hurt you if I get the disease, as long as you are protected by your vaccine. Maybe I just want to prevent the extinction of yet another species, offering myself to protect it. :-) Whatever, it's none of your business.
That logic only works if I trust you to stay on your own property. Now, I don't specifically distrust you (in fact chances are that you are trustworthy) but experience shows that if given the freedom to endanger others, a small but substantial portion of people will abuse that freedom. Since there's no good way to tell ahead of time who will be responsible and who won't, and because vaccines are reasonably cheap and safe, from the view point of society as a whole it makes the most sense to make sure everyone is vaccinated.
And frankly, unless you're a survivalist living off the grid in a secluded mountain cabin somewhere you're a part of society, and when something impacts the safety of others in society, sorry, but it IS other people's business. Of course, if you are living off the grid I apologize fully and commend you for your principled stand. :)
By the way, the health risks of vaccines do exist, but are severely overhyped.
No vaccine: passive, death unlikely, no harm at all if I'm uninfected, no harm at all if I don't have sex WITH UNVACCINATED PEOPLE, any potential sex partner can choose the vaccine for themselves...
I mean gee, if it is so great, why don't my sex partners just get the vaccine? That'd work way better than me getting the vaccine, because they might have sex with other people too!
You're missing the point. Diseases aren't independently chosen risks, they have to be transmitted. Vaccinations don't just keep one person safe, they stop the propagation of the disease, and it is beneficial to society as a whole to enforce broad vaccination. With enough people immune, the disease becomes less common or can even be wiped out.
Your argument is about like saying "I should be able to drive drunk if I want, if I get injured it's my fault and if other people don't like it they should stay off the road." Selfish little freeloaders who whine about their "freedom" to endanger everyone else's health ought to be dragged kicking and screaming if necessary to get their vaccines.
That said, my earlier post was more directed at "moral" busybodies who think letting kids die is fine because immunizing them MIGHT look SORT OF like encouraging them to have sex, which is quite possibly one of the most reprehensible and disgusting things I have ever heard of, and probably a new moral low even for that crowd. Your attitude is merely childish, not evil.
If you care about other people's daughters, get your son vaccinated for HPV too. Or, if you DON'T care about other people's daughters, campaign against the vaccine for political reasons. Because nothing says "moral principles" like wanting kids to die from a preventable disease!
That's fair enough, and I can't argue the point. They're very good for what they are (fun, minimalist reasoning puzzles) but they don't and probably were never intended to have mass-market appeal. And no, I don't have the graphics skills to do it either (otherwise I would).
However I have been tempted to make a Flash or Javascript reimplementation... wouldn't be able to use his backends that way, unfortunately, but I'd love to be able to play those truly anywhere, even when I can't download his (such as on my Wii, hahaha).
I think some of them could convey the information better (black box!) and someone could be easier to tell when the puzzle is complete (pattern, net, etc) and some could be easier to read. And Sudoku could have a better input mechanism altogether, perhaps offering choices for those who can type and those who would rather click. There have been many interfaces invented for it, but very few that I enjoy using. Simon's is not one of them.Well... many of the games--black box, pattern, tents, others--sometimes lack good error displays. For instance, pattern should highlight filled-in row/columns that do not match the numbers, and black box would benefit greatly from showing trajectories automatically somehow, perhaps as lines crossing the grid that bend and warp as you place guesses.
A few other minor things too; it'd be nice to be able to move groups of points in untangle, it'd be nice if lines were multi-colored in slant to make loops easier to spot by something besides trial and error, etc.
I've not played computer sudoku other than his. How else do people do it?
Again, the puzzles and their code are very very well done, it's just the interface that I don't like. And as I stated before, that, more than anything, is the difference between a game and a hit game.But it's worth noting that interface means more than just glitz and pretty pictures. I've played many games arguably better looking than Simon's puzzles that were no fun because the controls were unresponsive, the display was confusing, etc. Pretty pictures can improve a good interface but make a bad one worse...
Many, many players see it differently, and it would be rash to assume the government will never agree with them--especially when acknowledging the commonly held attitude (that players DO own their virtual stuff in some sense) helps open the door to taxation for large transactions of virtual goods.