Personally, I think it would be hilarious if he turned himself in to American authorities, and they just immediately handed him over to Sweden.

I won’t begrudge Mozilla their (ill-conceived, IMO) attempts to “update” Firefox’s UI as long as they still provide the tools for me to make it look and work decently. That’s more than I can say for Chrome, which started out ugly and unusuable, actively refused to give the user any customization abilities, and has…

No, Mozilla didn’t kill Thunderbird in 2012; the article is flatly wrong there. They announced they were deemphasizing Thunderbird development then, but they have continued to produce security and maintenance updates. Which, I mean, what other development do you actually need in an email client, really?

I would feel somewhat better about the new logo if Firefox hadn’t long since followed Chrome down the path of hiding the protocol part (“http://”)of the URL when using plain old http. I mean, I typically turn that off in about:config, but it’s a weird choice.

I absolutely loathe Chrome’s UI. It’s a poorly designed waste of space that manages to look completely out of place on every single desktop OS in existence, and, unlike Firefox, it lacks customization and extension support to address its biggest shortcomings. I could just about live without vertical-style tab support…

Well, I meant “all bets are off” in the sense of “standard trademark law isn’t necessarily the be-all and end-all,” but you’re right, and I appreciate the clarification.

Assuming it’s anything like trademark law, they’re all but required to do that. But I’m just surprised because of the number of fairly high-profile games of the mid-1990s that seemingly got away with appropriating the symbol. It seems unlikely to me that the Red Cross would have reached out to Nintendo on the matter…

Fair enough. As I said, it could have been a combination of the two. But Earthbound definitely was impacted by Nintendo of America’s content guidelines, and the presence of a cross would have likely violated that rule even if the ICRC hadn’t been in the picture.

Yep. I think we tend to forget how easy global communication has become, and how difficult it used to be. It was only one year before the coronation, in 1951, that American broadcasters had managed to do coast-to-coast domestic transmissions, with then-President Truman giving a speech about the treaty that ended the…

The difference is that while the screens were small on those 1940s sets, the resolution was no different than what you’d see up through the mid-2000s (assuming you’re in North America): 525 lines. These 1920s and early 1930s sets, by comparision, were both small physically and in terms of resolution, generally ranging…

I actually really, really like the level design in Mega Man 6. The introduction of a more non-linear approach and multiple exits was a great one that I wish hadn’t been abandoned after one outing. The robot masters weren’t among the most inspired, but they were a considerable improvement over Mega Man 5's altogether…

As great as Mega Man Unlimited is (and it is great, don’t get me wrong), I find its difficulty to be a little too unforgiving for my tastes. Though its been substantially nerfed in more recent versions, Rainbow Man’s stage is still harder than just about any official level, and it flies well past “challenging” en…

Both are superb, but I’ve always found Dive Man’s music to be my favorite regular level track of the franchise.

Mega Man 4's soundtrack is superb, frankly. I know Mega Man 2 gets more love in that department, but I think I have to give a slight edge to this one. It’s definitely an improvement over Mega Man 3 (which had a couple of good songs, but far too many forgettable ones).

Mega Man X is one of the better games of the Mega Man franchise, but I’ve never seen it as the be-all and end-all so many of its supporters make it out to be. The robot master/maverick designs are good, and the idea of changing up certain aspects of the levels based on the order you visit them is a great one (Flame…

Look, Mega Man 4 has some problems in its boss design, certainly. Poor Toad Man clearly only graduated from video game boss academy on a technicality, and its not like Ring Man was the most inspired of concepts. But I won’t accept anyone telling me that a game that featured both Skull Man and Pharoah Man was “less…

Trademark law definitely works like that in most jurisdictions, which is why there is a requirement that the mark hold take steps to protect their rights. When they don’t, they risk the mark becoming genericized and losing it in court (as happened with several formerly-trademarked words like “kleenex” and “cola”).

Some of the Castlevania games got away with flaunting Nintendo’s censorship rules to an extent. But other games definitely did not: all of the pre-PlayStation Final Fantasy games released in the US had offending crosses removed, as, for that matter, did numerous Castlevania games (the subweapon cross is still there,…

Yeah, it’s not like the symbol itself is a new thing, either. So the smart money is likely on the International Committee of the Red Cross not knowing about or not caring to enforce their rights over video games in the same way they had been doing for movies until the last decade or so, I guess.

Under normal trademark law, certainly. But since the Geneva Convention has been mentioned, I’m thinking there are considerations above and beyond normal national trademark laws here. If it’s a matter of international treaty, all bets are of when it comes to mark genericization.