fuchikoma

@Dean: Most likely. It's not that unusual for more British English or antiquated words to fall into that category. @Ethan: Good point - I think it all depends on how one uses it. And also, that's exactly how friggin' was used in my experience. I don't really hear it anymore as an adult.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U9guK9PqkmE Lyrics and vocals by IZNA. She reminds me of Shiina Ringo, vocally.

FWIW, my take is... Friends and I have used "aye," though it's unusual, it's not at all hard to understand. Most people would probably understand "best y' do." Said like that, people here might assume it was carried in from Newfoundland. I've heard "faffing" once or twice in my life, but wouldn't count on someone getting it. Flagging is definitely mainstream - I've read it even in American news, but referring more to campaigns or stocks rather than people. Flummoxed should work with anyone with an above average vocabulary. I used to hear "friggin'" on playgrounds as a kid - it's not really taboo here, but it's a bit impolite. Gaffer means boss? To me, a gaffer is the guy on a TV or movie set who coordinates the wiring and electrical setup. Some say that someone "takes no guff" from someone else, but it's more a saying unto itself. Dunno who could define "guff" on its own. Surely "lass" can't be a regional thing to that extent? (But, it would sound foreign here even though anyone would understand it.) I could swear "manky" was part of some clique's slang like 15-20 years ago... We use "pop" here. There are actually maps of the US based on which areas say "pop" and which say "soda." There's quite the split it seems... I bet parts of Canada also use "soda..." Pudgy is an adjective that anyone would know. Reeks is also universal. Vexed is more like annoyed here, and maybe slightly advanced vocab. Yonder would work, but has a very literary feel.

Yeah, that's exactly what it is. I asked the devs and they said the iPhone 3GS is just too long in the tooth to make the game work with it. I didn't know Cydia had OS restrictions - I've run outdated, broken programs a lot from it. The real app store will restrict on version though. I'm thinking Apple must have some kind of device restriction scheme too... since someone might have an older CPU like mine, or an A4, A5(X), A6X, or the above in dual core, with varying levels of GPU at 1-4 cores, at different resolutions. Anyway, they've awakened a great hunger for Starfox now... I'm gonna look around and see what's out there, but I may end up with an iPod Touch 5 or iPad Mini before too much longer. (Tough call though since the iPhone 5 is 2-3x the device of those or the 4S - but it's priced to bankrupt if you buy it without a contract.)

Woah... That looks like the Star Fox sequel I've waited for 19 years for but never got... and I can't play it, apparently because I don't have a front-facing camera.

@MaliciousH: There's some awesome Russian choral music out there. A few years ago I went on a binge and grabbed a bunch of Red Army Choir stuff... Do you mean девочек и танк as in the anime? (Shouldn't that be in German? ) Is that show any good? ...it sounds ridiculous... That Hokuto Musou track reminds me most of Daisuke Ishiwatari Anyway, here's one that SoundHound found for me when I was watching the Simpsons Halloween Special... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYPu4zWLWzs I admit I'm an uncultured ruffian and first heard it in While I'm talking about borrowed riffs... can anyone name the guitar part at 0:40 and 2:07 in this video? I'm sure it's from somewhere else but I've been searching for a good decade or so for the answer...

Looks like the equivalent of an RSA SecurID fob... May as well, if it's cheap enough, since the CVN is already printed on the card, and static until the card's reissued. This way, someone could copy your whole card number and still not use it without the card itself.

I see that MSGI ("minority sexual and gender identities") has been pushed, but hasn't taken off... Also, that there are many variations and controversy already, including FABGLITTER and QUILTBAG, though those seem to try too hard to make a mnemonic, and could still be subject to modification and extension that breaks this. There's a fair criticism in the article about using a catch-all as well I guess you just can't please all the people all the time. If only it were easier to tell which people to please at a given time...

Ok, maybe I'm overreacting. But it used to be LGB and some have pushed for LGBTI and LGBTIH, so when Dean said "I think it's LGBTAQ at the moment" I thought "ok... so how long before it's LGBTIHAAAHQFP? Someone will always say they're being left out..." and with some of the easily offended proponents of different causes, it seemed like no list would be long enough to catch all by specific inclusion.

You did... Again, it's hard to keep tabs on the list - apparently more than I thought. And I'm not saying it was coined externally, or even suggesting there is a centralized group. Just saying that it feels like something for which it's especially tricky not to offend anyone when discussing. For instance, I've seen people discussing transgender issues get offended when someone referred to non-transgender people as "straight," saying that the implication of non-straightness was discriminatory and that everyone should get used to using "cisgender." It may be a separate issue, but most people probably don't even know the word. Not everyone is like that, but at times it's a bit like navigating a minefield. I also wonder when genetic hermaphrodites will end up on the standard acronym, since they're not transgendered, at least from a mismatched identity POV and gay/hetero would be subjective and quite dependent on the individual?

I'm putting in crazy time to Forza Horizon lately. Sure, it has a lot of things that rub me the wrong way (like traffic, heh) but I can't deny that it has a firm hold on me. An unexpected perk of the open roads is that a lot of them have really twisty, hilly sections that undulate sharply, adding the challenge of being tossed into the air at higher speeds, or trying to corner but having your apparent weight reduced (it's fun landing an aerial drift on the road and nailing it without losing control...) Much different from the typical well-planned race track, even Laguna Seca or the Nurburgring. While it's a little annoying to have opponents use shortcuts, it's not really abused, and it's a nice change from the mainstream Forza series, where in many places if you run a little bit off-track, your car is stopped by the Catcher's Mitt Of God, bleeding off 100km/h in 5 feet. The music is... IMO... terrible, but like others in the series, there's no problem with using your own. You can even skip both company logos at the start of the game, where on Turn10's Forzas, you must see and hear their logo every time it starts up.

If not androgynous, there are also people who identify as asexual... but I feel like the alternate-sexuality category is getting far too varied and changing too much for non-activists to keep up on. If "queer" is unacceptable, I think there should be another general term that can apply generically to various alts, since at times it feels like someone's moving the goalposts on trying to find a politically correct term to use. It's like "I don't want to offend anyone... so I just won't bring it up since I don't know what the current terminology is" and if that's a common response, then it's a step back.

lol. Slander always proves your point, doesn't it? It's not "tinhat business," it's evolution of a product. It's the decision not to spend a large amount of resources supporting an old legacy system until the end of time. I've said this isn't something that's going to happen in Windows 8 (*cough* unless you consider Windows RT to be Windows 8...), but probably 1-2 generations after that in Win9 or Win10. Come on, Faiblesse, you claim to work in IT, but you don't know this? You don't just yank the rug out from under customers and let them plummet - you plop a new rug down next to it until most of them have moved over to the new one, then when there are only a few left on the old one, and there always will be no matter how long you wait, you say "sorry, but it's no longer worthwhile for us to support this. The new one should do what you want, so it's all we're supporting now" and you pull the plug. Just like they did for MS-DOS, and product support for older Windows versions (Though the eagerness to off the Start menu signals they're rather more eager to get on with this than many would have liked...) They've seen how well the walled garden worked for Apple, and how amazingly little resistance there was to it, despite the relative freedom on other PDA platforms... and decided they wanted a cut of that too. So they hopped onto the MS-vetted App Store model, and now they're pushing it. If it goes over like a lead balloon, then they'll surely back off. If it takes off, which it very well might since it's convenient and the average user doesn't have extraordinary needs, then once desktop is a niche, they'll drop it and those who REALLY need it can probably run older versions of Windows in a VM until that's no longer useful for anything and running desktop apps becomes as running DOS apps is today. This isn't some farfetched conspiracy theory - it's virtually certain to happen. The only uncertainty is when, and what the replacement will be. I'm not saying it will be Metro/Windows Runtime, but I am saying that if they can help it, it will be through the Microsoft app store. They'll never lose most enterprise and most gamers, because they'll inevitably buy the New Thing and play by its rules, and be relatively well supported overall. And if they lose some gamers due to rating restrictions? Ask Australia or anywhere that refuses classification to adult titles what that's like - it's been a reality for many for a long time geopolitically as it is. Hell, look at adult games on the PC Engine or Sega Saturn, and the utter lack of them on any console after 2000. What if they lost some gamers? Whatever - it's a fait accompli so it's not as if it can't happen. Also, the thing about the Android power button is that they didn't change the way it's done just to be new and innovative. The hardware power button is a software power button, and they could have changed it to press = on, double-press = sleep, triple press = off... but they didn't, because people have expectations that it will work like any other comparable device.

Gamasutra article on what Anna Anthropy (Lesbian Spider Queens of Mars, Calamity Jane) said about the shortfalls of token characters in games made by people who don't understand their issues firsthand.

Gamasutra article: Windows 8's hidden dangers to game developers makes the case that as an adult rated game, Skyrim for instance, wouldn't even pass certification for the Windows app store... along with predictions that the desktop would eventually be abandoned. Nothing in-depth there though, just what I was suggesting, that MS-DOS eventually was deprecated and removed as well.

That really is a big enough pill to swallow even on the desktop. On a tablet, it's... at least a bit insane. iOS has been bloating, rather badly over the years... but for the 3GS versions, that basically means the installers/firmware packages are... 3.1.3: 291 MB 4.3.3: 420 MB 5.1.1: 687 MB Not... over a dozen GB!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZPSf_YJqn7A

WhiteMagic is one of those things where you hear it and go "oh! Of course!" RGBW OLED pixels for power saving.

Good point, Tenshi. I think the Dreamcast, but also more recently, the PSP, are examples of how cheap development leads to diverse and creative games. (Yeah, PSP is full of ports, but especially if you import, there are lots of quirky games that are rarer on more costly systems. At least indie projects have helped ease this though...)

Another reason not to get too excited is that IIRC, the PS3 was rumored to have 1GB of RAM, and wasn't the Vita supposed to have more RAM than it did? Nothing's really final until it ships.

Earworm? Dunno about that, but the Kiyoshi Hikawa version of this has been popping into my head for a few days now... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7oJXktfJi4E I'm afraid if I started belting it out, people would think realize I'm strange... Bah, not fooling anyone anyway... (ﾟдﾟ) "O---i! ♪"

Perhaps - we'll see if things like Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc get Metro versions. While I've had the release candidate of Win8 for a while, I haven't done a lot in Metro apps, but I can imagine a tab system for managing multiple windows/layers. But in any case, I'm not assuming the Metro as it is now will be the only option for generations to come. If the gateway to Windows programming necessarily leads through the App Store, then the apps will be designed for whatever interface they allow or push. If they can make it easy enough for the average user, it will become the norm and specialty applications will just have to adapt as they always do (for instance when Vista restricted direct access to parallel and serial(?) ports, breaking compatibility with a huge range of applications and printer drivers.) While Linux taking a Metro-like interface is unlikely (copyright and IP issues), Ubuntu has already gone to Unity. And like I was saying, it may not be wholly MS' fault (well... aside from strong-arming OEMs like usual) but 5-10 years from now, it would be a great relief if a branded PC (Dell, HP, Apple, Toshiba, Acer, etc) could even boot a version of Linux. I suspect motherboard makers like Asus and MSI will hold out longer at least... @Dean: I was referring to Windows RT, not the Windows Runtime, but even though every version of Windows gets shortened to Win[version], they've unfortunately shortened Windows Runtime to WinRT... It's kind of like when everyone under the sun called a PlayStation a PSX, then Sony released a PS2 DVR called "PSX". But if I say "WinRT" in the future, I mean Windows RT, the Metro, ARM CPU version of Windows.

Oh, there are definitely technical reasons they can leave Metro apps intact, but this is a case of a lot of tightly related things that are each a bit unsettling, but innocuous enough on their own, coming together at roughly the same time. I want it to sound crazy, and 5 years ago it kind of was, but I keep seeing things that support it. Get rid of desktop mode? Why not? A bunch of office workers I supported switched from computers to iPads because they did what was needed. WinRT uses the excuse of architecture (Arm) to lock down development only to what MS has directly approved. That kind of thing used to be unheard of - for instance, PalmOS, where you were allowed to do anything to anything if you liked. It would be suicide to kill desktop now, but already they're offering a version of Windows that can't support it. Will it be a requirement for users in Win9? Win10? They're laying the groundwork to migrate people away from it and pushing it hard. There was a time when it would be suicide to remove DOS support too, but now we just have a command shell, which is different, and in the last few generations, NTVDM was removed from Windows. It's all a matter of timing, delivery, and how they accommodate the need for what they removed. I see a future where desktops are a lot more like iPads and even then I'm kind of amazed it's progressed this far today.