I sincerely hope the next thing to come along isn't some version of goatseroll. (Personally, I've got my fingers cross for the return of duckroll.)

I think that the effect of piracy upon console game has been greatly overstated. I've actually heard people say that it was piracy that killed the Dreamcast, which can play pirated CD-Rs. As a prior comment said, it certainly hasn't hurt the PS1, or PS2 for that matter.

Concerning the Wii, it's kind of amazing when I browse around Nintendo fansites and find people actually -applauding- (in that fansite way) Nintendo for its lockout system. They've internalized their concern over the fate of the company to such an extent that they prefer that their system has a system to prevent them from doing what they want with the hardware.

Nintendo makes some of the best games out there, but let's not forget that they are not all sunshine and roses. In the NES' heyday they played distribution hardball with stores to keep unlicensed games off of shelves, and they controlled all manufacturing of their own games and those of licenses and thus could cripple a company's sales if they wished.

The company experienced a great humbling when the Genesis beat them for a while in the U.S. marketplace, and an even greater humbling when the Playstation beat the N64 handily. It seems they're now more honest in their dealings with other studios, especially if their WiiWare outreach is legit. They've even started an open-source OS project, although they say it's for research only.

But they're still a major console manufacturer and software company, and that seems to inevitably leads to a conflict of interest between them and customer rights these days. They possess software patents, make use of lockouts in all their systems, regional lockouts in non-portable systems and system-locked DRM for Wii Virtual Console downloadable software. They make tremendous use, as most software companies do, on Non-Disclosure Agreements to keep information other than just trade secrets obscure. NDAs so saturate game development that even the press must often sign them to gain access to pre-release software. The Wii system software is updated frequently, but does not reveal in the dialog before the update what the update does, and the purpose of the last update, which provides no new features, is yet unknown.

#28, one leads directly to the other. The result of the United States' repressive attitude towards sex is that the first reaction of under-educated folk to it becomes HURR HURR TITTIES. Then the prudes have a look at that reaction and say "You SEE? That's exactly why all traces of sexuality must be scrubbed from our culture!"

Ah, for once I found an article before BB did! I read all this last week, in fact bought the magazine for this article.

One of the things I found most depressing was how the Chinese government is going to set up special, unfiltered connections to the outside specifically for hotels hosting foreign visitors for the upcoming Olympics, specifically to give that appearance of openness. Because what's good for their own people isn't quite good enough for their visitors.

If this were Metafilter, I would SO favorite this....

Wait a second, BoingBoing has a favorites feature now! Checked.

Cheating in real life == taking good notes with you. It's weird that kids are punished for what's good sense everywhere else.

I have to echo the sentiment of the prior comment that said by the time they copied out the cheat sheet, they had memorized everything on it as a consequence of the copying. I never cheated, but I had a couple of math tests where they let us take in an index card with limited notes. Often, the act of compiling the notes was enough to remember the stuff, and the card would go unused.

Good for your father darguad! Especially making the owners help put their animals to sleep if the reason is petty. I mean, sheesh.

But yeah, I won't be able to read the blog either, it's too sad. Which makes me wonder, maybe we need a blog like this for all the Iraqi civilians who perish in fighting each day....

I hated that game.

It's nice to see there's still some unqualified awesomeness remaining in kids programming!

Jonathan V., there are FAQs written about Ms. Pac-Man, but those FAQs also mention the fact that the first few seconds of each board, the red and pink monsters have a (probably pseudo-)random element in order to throw off the patterns that made high-level Pac-Man play a matter of memorization.

Also of note: the article itself states that the AI could do better than an average player, but its average score over 50 games is 8186. This is still no great shakes. (And it leads me to wonder where they found their human players, who had average scores of less than this.)

Reading up on this makes it seem possible that a virus might be part of the problem. I had previously heard that it might be a fungus.

Kind of weird to think that the U.S.' gigantic agribusiness apparatus could be laid low by bees. (I'd say kind of awesome if food prices and starvation weren't at stake.)

I got condescended to by a police officer a few months back for saying something-or-other was "fucking stupid" to a university library clerk. Disorderly conduct was the threatened charge. I still smolder a little thinking about it.

However, I didn't intend to direct that particular F-bomb (which I don't drop often) at the clerk, but rather at the system. And not even at the library system in general, but at the specific intersection of circumstances that produced a bizarre situation at hand. In cases like that, I think it's perfectly legitimate to be upset and annoyed, and being told to clam it or be carted out in cuffs in no way serves to lessen that annoyance.

This said....

There are lots of people in the world with different values than us, and sometimes I kind of wish more people -did- get a little offended at hearing cursing. I wholeheartedly disagree that police action is an appropriate response to a mere "fuck," written or spoken, but if someone had asked for an apology from me for saying it at the time, I probably would have given it.

Most MST viewers CAN make their own comments. But the comments do tend to be better when it's several professional writers doing it, who have had the opportunity to watch the movie several times to come up with more material, and have had an editor look through it to choose the best lines.

On the whole CT vs Rifftrax thing.... I'd really like to give them the benefit of the doubt on this. If there is actually some animosity there between them, I can see myself getting sick of the idea of riffing, by these people at least, real fast. The idea that people could become prima donas over -making fun of bad movies- seems remarkably petty.

Fortunately, the Rifftrax side of things seems to be pretty laid back about it at least. The CT guys, however, have very conspicuously said nothing about Rifftrax. At the moment at least, I'd like to think they're just focusing on their own things.

A few months back I actually saw a CNN headline, on-air, that read:

SEX WITH A VAMPIRE: She bit him, drank his blood

On-screen, they had an artist's mock-up of a lady with fangs and a mean expression. I wasn't sure which was worse, the whole vampire angle, or the fact that a woman biting a date somewhere in the world was somehow newsworthy.

Dear god, this is excellent!

Doing some more looking around YouTube finds this from the same show...

...oh crap, someone else already posted it. Well no matter, this looks to be nearly a Daily Show level of awesomeness.

Yeah, and how many years did it take them to finally do this obvious, obvious thing? Depresses the hell out of me.

Matt Miller's right on the money, the very first two books are quite different from the others, not better or worse, just different. They're a bit more whimsical, and are more likely to invent huge ideas for the sake of little jokes. They're also more straight-forward fantasy quest books, perhaps the only two in the whole series.

My favorites are the Rincewind and Watch series, but I find few Discworld books completely unpalatable... except for the Witches novels. For some reason, they really bug me.

Now that's awesome. Although doesn't pinball lose something without the playfield art? Maybe if they made translucent decals of the original artwork....

This is why I don't like these kinds of math puzzles.

Here the player is being asked to make a decision completely rationally, but can he expect machine-like rationality from the other participants, or is the player supposed to expect the participant he shoots first to shoot back? The answer to that question determines my response.

Oddly, the original source of the puzzle made the participants not cowboys but cyborgs, which not only makes the percentages a little more reasonable but also implies that the opponents will act rationally.

There's a Huddle House around here that actually has a menu with special prices for police officers, complete with a cheery piece of clip-art at the top. Nearly made me sick when I noticed it.

I never thought about stuff like that much until one night, sitting behind a police car in a McDonald's drive-thru, I heard the officer berate the poor employee working the window for offering him free food. "I don't accept free food!" The worker explained it was the general policy for that restaurant.