No, arguing about semantics does not mean what you think it does! It means arguing about what words mean instead of arguing substantively about the meanings themselves.
Proxies make it impossible to ban anyone. You can detect open proxies like slashdot does and prevent anyone from using any open proxy, but offenders can still use non-open proxies. You can charge for access like somethingawful does so that when you ban someone's account they have to pay $10 or so for another. That's about it.
This is not the world's first conversation game; there are many others. The best one I know of is a text game called Galatea, by Emily Short. The entirety of the game is a conversation with an animate statue. It's very complex and pretty interesting and fun to play, and there are many endings. http://www.wurb.com/if/game/1326
I can tell you how it works. You maintain your initial jumping velocity almost all the way up to the top of your jump. The peak of the jump occurs suddenly, and it's when you release the jump button or when the maximum jump-height is reached, whichever comes first. The maximum jump-height increases by a blockheight or two if you were sprinting when you jumped.
The only part that I'm not too sure about is what exactly happens to your velocity when you start to slow down at the peak of your jump. You might linearly decelerate like you'd expect from gravity, but it might be less newtonian than that; it's hard to tell just from the feel of the game.
Yeah, terminal velocity is relevant over a short drop if the acceleration is high and the terminal velocity is low (both true in mario)
Looking at the table they made, most of the falls are about half a second long. I'm too lazy to go test this but a lifetime of experience playing mario games makes me feel like this is far more than enough time to reach terminal velocity
This is an extremely poor analysis. It ignores terminal velocity, which is a huge factor, and it doesn't even acknowledge this in its "Sources of Error" section. The graph they produced is meaningless