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cynest

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I wonder if COD:GHOSTS will beat this. From what I'm seeing, GTAV has a few advantages:

Non-yearly (or biyearly) release schedule for an extremely well-known franchise.

No outstanding publisher issues of note, especially gaffes related to gameplay "dumbing down"

A number of factors contributing to somewhat inflated review scores including normal reactions to AAA titles and the GTA series' tendency to hit the right buttons for reviews that doesn't necessarily reflect on gameplay

I'm reading Harry Turtledove's Worldwar series right now, and I'm struck by the comparisons he makes between Soviet and Nazi military doctrines. Essentially, the former is controlled by individuals too paranoid to allow for any initiative on the part of individuals under their command, while the latter actively encourages initiative on the part of commanders and dog-faces (grunts). One side effect of this is that German soldiers get away with much less deferential behavior. The result are seen both in previous battles between the two, and with the conflict against the Lizards (invaders from another planet with a much more restrictive bent than even the USSR) where the Nazis generally perform much better given their technology.

I wonder if a similar level of encouraging initiative exists in technology due to the fact that there's a low ceiling on how far you can pass most decisions up before running into nontechnical persons. Looking at it from another side, technical careers might allow for more initiative simply by the ability to enter the market via unconventional means.

Unconnected to the above, it seems to me that these sort of leaks are easier to perform versus a lot of political actions especially with the technical skills of leakers. Leaks' effect per unit of time to follow through surpasses most anything else I can think of. The only real downside is the resultant criminal penalties. Infodumps like Swartz's are similarly relatively easy to perform.

My experience has been somewhat different. 2012 was a wholly miserable year for me and I honestly feel that it was rather pointless ordeal exacerbated by toxic relationships I lack the means to escape.

AOPA is purely general (non-commercial) aviation, so the first point is correct, although iirc the data was from actual incidents.

I don't know if anything like that has ever happened in a heavy aircraft. However, commercial pilots have pretty big health requirements to make situations like that less likely.

But is that truly de-anonymizing? I share my legal name with several famous people, and numerous SEO'd professionals. Barring more specific searching knowing specific details I am relatively hard to identify. Same with just about anyone who fits the (common first name, common last name) paradigm. On the other hand (rare first name, rarer last name) is relatively easy to uniquely identify.

Thq is getting desperate it seems. Really hoping they're able get their next wave of games out before they go under.

>- Prescriptions are in units of pills, not nanograms of active substance

While that level of precision would be nice, pills are delineated by dosage so you can simply give 100mg of substance to one patient, and 200mg to another.

> It's not hard to imagine a near future, if not a present, in which a person's identity is entirely evaluated, shaped, and determined by a monolith such as facebook.

I don't think this is entirely correct. I think that facebook is better described as a catalyst for those who would do the evaluating, shaping, etc.

I feel that there is a still stronger form of the argument out there. Or maybe it's closely related. It incorporates what you just said as well as the fact that intelligence != social status. If I could figure out how to properly word it, I would be quite a ways ahead of where I am now.

Even though I had no clue about actual economics at the time, this is what I saw as so screwy in runescape. A lot of the ingame money came from alchemy. A few clever people had figured out that the two of the highest tier bows were easy to produce en masse and so created a market for their components. Since runescape does not have a shard system like WoW or other MMOs, this particular market was huge. RMT (real money traders) came in and automated the gathering of these components. Jagex tried numerous methods of eliminating RMT from the game, including fixing ingame prices to within a certain amount. Not sure what happened then, but I still can't figure out why they didn't simply fix the mechanic at the heart of it.

> From melting icecaps to near constant nuclear war its a sign of an AI that that too easily bounces from one extreme to another.

Strategy games put the player in the role of the fascist dictator. Your goal is to further your own nation at the expense of everything else. In reality, groups of people have different incentives and act quite a bit differently.