A lot of movie fans were shocked as the movie “Avatar” was defeated by the movie “The Hurt Locker” in a lot of categories.

If you think Avatar should have won, you are not a movie fan. Also, you should not reproduce.

you gotta drop this objectivity thing and just let your writers say what they really think. This whole objectivity thing is ridiculous. Everyone knows it’s bullshit, and the more you stick to it and try to pretend it’s true, the more stupid and dishonest you look. Let me give you an example. I’ll say a name, and you say the first thing that pops into your head. Okay?

He says that’s okay, so I go: Sarah Palin.

Idiot, he says.

I’m like, Right on, so why don’t you just say that? Every time you write her name, put “idiot” after it? Like it’s a title? Like “Sarah Palin, Idiot.” Or, put it in front of her name, like, “Idiot Sarah Palin said today …” Or just use it as a subordinate clause. “Sarah Palin, who is an idiot, today called for …”

Fake Steve on the New York Times. Classic.

So, what about Flash running on Apple devices? We have shown that Flash technology is starting to work on these devices today by enabling standalone applications for the iPhone to be built on Flash. In fact, some of these apps are already available in the Apple App Store such as FickleBlox and Chroma Circuit. This same solution will work on the iPad as well. We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen.

I think if I were Adobe I'd be using a little more stick with my carrots here. Adobe may need Apple more than Apple needs Flash on the iPhone. May. But the reverse is clearly true on the Mac. If Adobe drops Flash support on OSX. Only about 8% of people in the US use Macs, and 3% globally, but nearly all want Flash.

One of the biggest gripes people have with Macs are all of the things you can't do. Like playing PC games? Many major ones don't support it natively, Ask my coworkers who run League of Legends in VMWare, it's brutal. Email client? Have you seen Apple Mail and Entourage? Both are abysmal.

Removing Flash from OSX would have a majorly deleterious effect on their market share. Flash is so tightly couple with the web that the freetard backlash wouldn't have any effect at all. A few big sites like YouTube might find some other way to work around it, but there would be enough MLB.com type plays out there to make people bitch to Cupertino non-stop.

So if I'm Adobe, I'm gambling here and telling them it's all or nothing.

God's Wrath According To Pat Robertson

700 Club founder Pat Robertson stated that the earthquake in Haiti, which may have killed 100,000 people, was God's punishment for a deal Haitian slaves made with the devil 200 years ago to get out from under French rule. Here are some other tragedies and Robertson's explanations for them:

• Eruption of Mount St. Helens, 1980: Divine wrath was incurred when people were too busy enjoying the natural beauty of Washington state and not spending enough time appreciating God
• Space Shuttle Challenger Explosion, 1986: Ten-year-old Walt Sudul, of Racine, WI, made friends with a Jewish boy at school
• Oakland Hills Firestorm, 1991: Emily Garrity pointed out a logical inconsistency in the concept of an omnipotent god to her Sunday school teacher
• Magic Johnson Tests Positive for HIV, 1991: An ardent Portland Trail Blazers fan, God was horrified to see His team lose 4-2 to the Los Angeles Lakers in the 1991 Western Conference Finals, and thus decided to give the winner's best player AIDS
• Crash of American Airlines Flight 587, 2001: Though the flight was filled with pious individuals, God was distracted by a masturbating 14-year-old in Boise, ID and was therefore unable to keep the aircraft from falling apart in midair, like all planes would without His loving intervention
• Columbine High School Massacre, 1999: Tinky Winky
• Indian Ocean Tsunami, 2004: Newlyweds Todd and Nancy Tate experimented with non-missionary sex during their honeymoon
• Hurricane Katrina, 2005: Divine retribution for Girls Gone Wild: Mardi Gras (Volume 3)

I'm not much of a basketball player. Middle-age, with a shaky set shot and a bad knee, I can't hold my own in a YMCA pickup game, let alone against more organized competition. But I could definitely beat LeBron James in a game of one-on-one. The game just needs to feature two special rules: It lasts until I score, and when I score, I win.

We might have to play for a few days, and Mr. James's point total could well be creeping toward five figures before the contest ended, but eventually the gritty gutty competitor with a lunch-bucket work ethic (me) would subject the world's greatest basketball player to a humiliating defeat.

The world's greatest nation seems bent on subjecting itself to a similarly humiliating defeat, by playing a game that could be called Terrorball. The first two rules of Terrorball are:

(1) The game lasts as long as there are terrorists who want to harm Americans; and

(2) If terrorists should manage to kill or injure or seriously frighten any of us, they win.

Photo illustration by John Kuczala

Read More

• Crunching the Risk Numbers

These rules help explain the otherwise inexplicable wave of hysteria that has swept over our government in the wake of the failed attempt by a rather pathetic aspiring terrorist to blow up a plane on Christmas Day.

People will happily forgive a game for being too easy, because it makes them feel badass. If a game is too hard, they will get angry, ragequit, hold a grudge, and never buy your games again.

I really couldn't disagree with this article much more. Easiness and depth are almost mutually exclusive and both have their place. If you want high user numbers and low RPU (think Farmtown) then yeah, dumb it down until you can't dumb it down anymore. Think to yourself "could the average person who owns a Sarah Palin t-shirt play this game?".

If you're going the opposite way though, with relatively low sales volume and high RPU (like any console game or my latest Facebook game, Starfleet Commander) then you want the game to be hard. Difficulty is directly proportional to engagement.

And by that I do not mean hard to use of course. A good model to look at is Ocarina of Time. The puzzles and the game were as difficult as anything out at the time short of maybe Myst, but the controls were as intuitive and easy to use as the many 3d RPGs still being made a decade later.

I think this is the direction in which Facebook games are moving too because the RPUs of a real game are obscene. Engagement is directly proportional to RPU (revenue per user, by the way) and higher RPU means you can spend more money acquiring a customer. With organic growth stalling, or on the web where it's largely unproven, squeezing dimes out of users is going to be extremely key to long-term success.

If Facebook's invite system removes organic growth like a lot of people suspect, you'll see the flood of Farm games and other easy to play, low RPU, high volume Flash games turn into a trickle.

And there's a line there clearly, difficulty and engagement don't scale together forever. At some point it becomes just painful. But difficulty (which, even in an RPG, does not necessarily equate to a player dying) is not something to be shunned.

But hey, who needs health care reform anyway?

My guess: they're serious about claiming they're serious about fighting it, and that's about it. It's not their fault, it's the nature of the game.

Between them and ustream, I was always able to find a Stanley Cup playoffs stream, and not just of the finals either. The rooms were linked to from some popular forums, and persisted from one game to another, so it wouldn't have been hard to prevent.

And it's not surprising. If this traffic graph:

http://siteanalytics.compete.com/justin.tv+ustream.tv/

is even close to correct it's a dead heat between those two sites. Guess what's likely to tip the scales in one's favor?

YouTube got big largely on copyrighted content. In fact still the most popular clips there are professionally-produced music videos. The simple fact is that user generated content is largely crap that nobody cares about, and all of it added together isn't as in-demand as one Katy Perry video.

So the video sites will go around claiming "we're covered by the DMCA" and "we're developing software to stop it" but really their incentive is purely to allow copyright violations, and shocker, that's what they do.

It’s no secret that most people use the same password over and over again for most of the services they sign up for. While it’s obviously convenient, this becomes a major problem if one of those services is compromised. And that looks to be the case with RockYou, the social network app maker.

This is no surprise to anyone who has ever dealt with RockYou. These people are as dumb as a box of rocks. That they've raised $119 million never ceases to amaze me. Here are just two of my experiences so far.

1. When emailing all developers, instead of using some mailing list software, or hell even BCCing everyone, they simply CC'ed hundreds or maybe thousands of people. On multiple occasions. Despite having promised to fix it after the first.

Once they sent out one that said "Merry Christmas" filling my Inbox with scores of replies, half of which said "Merry Christmas to you too!" and half of which said "take me off of this list."
2. Negotiating a two-week ad run with us, followed by sending us a contract for x months. When returned, sending us a contract for 2x months. When we decided "what the hell?" and signed it, having run the ad for far longer than 2x months and then sending us a massive bill.

So yeah, this doesn't exactly come as a surprise. RockYou is the short bus of the social games industry. I'm just glad I use Roboform so all any potential hacker got is some random string used only for them. And I'm not worried about someone getting my email address since RockYou already sent that out to everyone.