Actually, he didn't do this. Part of the LD is that the theme/topic for the Dare isn't revealed until the game starts. He actually spent about twenty minutes staring at a 5-line text file labelled "ideas," just thinking out loud while he tried to come up with a game type.
That doesn't mean he didn't have a lot of prepared material. For example, when I was in school, I would have an essay planned out days in advance of an english exam, despite not knowing what topics were available until actually sitting the exam. With practice, its possible to bend and twist the given topics so your prepared material fits nicely. I imagine you could do the same with LD - plan the gameplay and art style and how different aspects should be coded in advance and then tweak it to suit the theme/topic once its been announced.
Oh, I see. I thought that the individual contestants came up with their ideas entirely on their own. I suppose this approach makes it much easier to judge, and more competitive as well.
I actually enjoyed that part of Anathem. I was in highschool when I read it, so a good portion of that book was actually teaching me concepts. His use of alternate universes was pretty fascinating, and having science to back it up (real or otherwise) just made it that much better.
(Side note: I don't know the names of a good amount of those things in the real world. I could explain the HTW theories, Lorites, and whatnot to an average person, but the real terminology escapes me.)
There are a lot of releases, and fairly often; I've had versions go "out of date" on me within a week of its release. The forums are very active, and when they say something is unbalanced or broken, it tends to get fixed. Some things are not serious game-breakers, even if they are mildly broken (see: elephants in the versions that Boatmurdered used), and those tend to stay in until it becomes a pain to deal with.
Basically, it's just trial-and-error. But it makes for an interesting game, because you're never quite sure if everything will work as expected.
That last point is my primary complaint about these systems. While yes, this is actually a quite reasonable series of warnings (the first four carry no penalties at all), it still bothers me that there is no real proof behind any of this. As far as I know, all the content owners have to say to the ISP is that such-and-such IP was uploading our content X, and then the warnings begin. There's no first- or third-party fact-checking (which, I admit, would be quite difficult with torrents anyway), it is, as you say, "hearsay." I'm not quite sure why, but the RIAA and other organizations now carry as much weight as our government regarding our internet access (can the state even shut down a customer's access at all? I have no idea, but if it can't, that's even worse).
That was my first thought as well. However, I like Hulu's viewing page, so I'm glad YouTube is taking after it (or seems to be, anyway). It's a much less distracting screen than the current YT page is, since all of the suggested videos and commends and whatnot are below the video, possibly even off-screen, instead off directly to the right of whatever you're trying to watch.
I have the option to not make it permanent at the bottom of the dialog in 4.0.1 on OS X. By default, it's checked, but it is also clearly there for me.
Edit: A screenshot, for anybody that doesn't see it: http://i.imgur.com/rkZ4c.png Just above "Confirm Security Exception" is the checkbox.
Bad UI then. I never got that far. The button on the "WARNING!" page says "Add Exception..." which leads me to believe that it will not be temporary. If it is a temporary exception, then why do I need to add it anywhere.
I'm surprised they're not offering even a lesser iPod (iPod Nano, for example) instead. While the the gift card makes sense, since it could get a student comfortable with purchasing through iTunes, I think something that doesn't have a firm dollar amount attached to it would have worked better. iPods are useful; you can listen to music, watch stuff, and so on... $100 by itself feels like a bribe.
I like the new Gnome Shell. It feels like Ubuntu's Unity shell, but Done Right. The Shell is kind of hard to describe, because it almost- but not quite- does away with the traditional desktop/window/taskbar model. It reminds me, in a way, of OS X. It's shiny and cohesive, but also functional.
I liked the fact that desktops are a fluid resource: you don't define that you want 4 desktops arranged on a 1x4 grid, you simply drag a window the next desktop down and it pops another one up below it. If you empty out a desktop, it disappears and the unused desktop moves up. The integrated messaging is useful for me, since I use Facebook and Google chats constantly. It's very out-of-the-way, but still right there when you need it.
In terms of dislikes, it felt very strange to not have a taskbar hanging out on the bottom of the screen. I think it's something that I'll just have to get used to (once I get a build for Ubuntu with the right theme), but I for one am not ready to entirely drop the window list. I understand the rationale for taking it away, since it is distracting, but it's also an indicator of how much work my system is/isn't doing at a given time.
Is it bad that I want to browse using this bare idea? I had Ubiquity installed in FF3.6, and it was quite handy. The inline maps and other website commands were more and more useful as you got used to them. Integrating it into the browser like this would be at least a neat experiment, if not a useful fork/revamp of Firefox.
There's still a market for people who want to manually upgrade. There was a comment thread on HN a few months ago about this as well (no way we'll be able to find it now, I don't remember the story), but it summarized my views very well. I like knowing what is or isn't being installed on my computer. I've got a bash script to automatically download and update to the newest Firefox, so the act of upgrading isn't a chore. But I don't want a given company, be it Google or Mozilla, to arbitrarily change what's on my computer.
That's not to say I don't see the allure of automatic updates, but I just don't want them to be silent and mandatory.
For a web browser there is no reason not to want to use the newest build, especially while HTML5 and CSS3 are being actively implemented. Your bash script is just your own version of Mozilla's auto updater.
Sure there is. A while ago, while I was using the 4.0 beta, I ran into a problem: modal dialogs wouldn't work. In beta 4 they worked just fine. Beta 5, just fine. When beat 6 rolled around, they stopped working. I reverted and used that until beta 12 fixed my problem. 6-11 were useless for some of the things I used it for (example: TiddlyWiki editing) because Javascript alert() and confirm() dialogs would literally not show up.
EDIT: also, the bash script is there because I install Firefox to /usr/local, and it's easier to type "update-firefox" in an already-open terminal than to reboot Firefox as root so it can modify my files. I'm aware it's redundant, but it also a) requires my active participation, so I can't miss it and b) lets me downgrade, in case of something like what happened above.
