jstevens85

My guess is that those mental models don't provide much comfort to people suffering from depression. Our brains evolved over many years and they require certains things to be present to be able to work at a normal mood elevation. Research suggests that the ability to find meaning or living according to "core values" is a necessity for most of us to escape depression. Whether or not it's logical or rational is irrelevant, it's how our brains work and it's just as important as sunlight, physical movement, and normal Vitamin D levels.

South Korea - military dictatorship until the late 80s

Taiwan - one party state + martial law from 1949 - 1987.

Singapore - one party has held power for over 40 years.

These three countries have transformed themselves into advanced high-income economies. My expectation is that China will follow the same path as its neighbours - authoritarian government + restrictions on personal freedom during the rapid industrialisation phase, then eventually a transition to a functioning democracy once urbanisation is mostly complete. If China can attain the same GDP per capita as the Asian Tigers, then it will easily be larger than the US economy.

They did this before with the nytimes and it didn't end the way Tesla would've liked. The writer had a number of problems, and Elon Musk accused him of being dishonest to create a story.

Here's the original article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/automobiles/after-a-chargi...

And here's some coverage of the controversy:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/automobiles/after-a-chargi...

There's a lot of academic literature that supports the claim that reports of suicide in the media lead to an increase in the number of suicides. This is often referred to as "copycat suicide" or "the Werther effect". As a result, journalists and academics are often very careful about they way they publicly discuss suicide attempts. More information can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copycat_suicide

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/2094294?uid=3737536&ui...

http://bjp.rcpsych.org/content/197/3/234.abstract

Your point still stands, but Singapore is far more western than Japan.

While university sport certainly exists, the major differences are that i) they don't generate any revenue, and ii) student athletes don't receive any advantage in university admissions.

their shit-bag leader spends all of their money developing weapons that even the most hard-up revolutionaries wouldn't be caught dead with.

I was under the impression that the attraction of nuclear weapons is that they can help reduce total defence spending. They act as a strong deterrent to any country considering an invasion thus allowing NK to reduce the size of its standing army as well as spending on traditional weaponry and military hardware.

Except that publishers won't agree to such a deal, meaning that any console implementing such a policy would lose third-party support resulting in significantly decreased sales units, and ultimately billion dollar loses for the console manufacturer.

I'm guessing that the publishers were only willing to allow features such as family sharing etc in exchange for limiting used disc sales.

Those rules were relaxed three years ago.

http://n4g.com/news/607824/apple-approves-manomios-c64-2-0-a...

From the article:

FISA orders can range from inquiries about specific people to a broad sweep for intelligence, like logs of certain search terms, lawyers who work with the orders said.

Looks like personal data could be turned over (well, at least part of your search history) even if you're not being targeted individually.

I'm looking forward to buying it, and I haven't bought a game in years. While there are definitely a lot of people out there who really wanted the game on day 1, and are very hurt that they might not be able to play it very much for a few days, I'm guessing the majority of people who will buy SC during its lifetime will not be affected buy it, will not care, and won't even be consciously aware that it's published by EA or its reputation.

Could someone explain why she felt compelled to talk? She was advised to by her lawyers, and she was concerned that she'd be arrested if she didn't. Was it because she had a legal obligation to assist in the investigation of the crime?

> who had both the chance and the opportunity to use the access to leak stuff that could have been quite damaging to the company - yet didn't

According to the article, he'd leaked "troves" of development documents to the writer of the article. It appears he may be the source, or one of the sources, behind the unprecedented amount of detail that has been leaked ahead of the console announcements.

From the article:

> Dylan wanted to know about next-gen systems, and somehow he learned plenty. He got development documentation for the next PlayStation and Xbox. Long before I'd sized him up as a hacker, he'd sent me troves of PDFs and white papers describing the functionality of both the code-named Orbis and Durango. The documentation was loaded with programming code—and with details.

Could you add an email to your profile? I'd like to email you regarding Masters courses at UniMelb.

Authoring the RSS spec may be an exaggeration. A history of RSS can be found here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RSS

Basically, it seems like the original RSS spec (RSS 0.9) was authored by two guys at Netscape, and released in March 1999, followed by RSS 0.91 in July 1999.

At this point, it looks like Netscape lost interest in RSS, and the project was forked into two competing versions, one lead by Dave Winer, and the other by the RSS-DEV Working Group. Dave Winer published the specs RSS 0.91 (different to Netscape's), 0.92, 0.93, .94 and then 2.0 between 2000-2002.

In August 2000, a competing fork was started by Rael Dornfest, who posted a draft of RSS 1.0, which appears to have been written by himself. He asked for interested parties to join a working group, of which Aaron became a member. This group became known as the RSS-DEV Working Group, and 1.0 was published in December 2000.

It's hard to say how much involvement Aaron had in this working group (I haven't read through the archives), but RSS had certainly existed for some time before Aaron became involved.

If he accepted the plea bargain of six months, then the case wouldn't have gone to trial, avoiding the excessive legal fees. I don't understand the timeline, but had he accepted the plea bargain, is it not possible that he would have already served his sentence by now?

I don't have any idea about how easy it would be to detect a laptop connected directly to an Ethernet switch, but the court documents do mention that Aaron placed the laptop in the closet on December 26th, and it wasn't noticed until January 4th. Perhaps many of the IT administrators were away on Christmas holidays?

Why are you mentioning the figure of 35 years? According to the WSJ, the prosecution was planning to push for seven years at trial, and were willing to offer six months in exchange for a guilty plea. It's also my impression that many people end up being released early, so the actual time spent in prison would've been shorter.

It seems odd that they would state that one of their cofounders "brings a degree in electronics and computing from M.I.T." when he in fact went to Manukau Institute of Technology.

>They make $575 in profit from an iPhone but pay the Foxconn workers $7 to assemble it. They could double the pay and still make a very huge profit.

Assembling the iPhone is a small and very insignificant part of the manufacturing process. What about the manufacturing of the steel, glass, LCD panels, logic boards, processors and IC chips, antennas, speakers, microphones, screws, cameras, batteries, and cables?

Obviously if it's unethical for Apple to contract the assembling of the iPhones to a manufacturer that pays high wages relative to the average Chinese job, then it must also be unethical to buy components from suppliers that also pay their factory workers a similar wage. Clearly, doubling the wage for all factory workers who work on any component of the iPhone will have a huge impact on the manufacturing cost far beyond the extra $7 you suggest it to be.

Traditional publishers trembling? That would seem unlikely to me given that one of the legends of the game development community only managed to raise a budget equivalent to an average XBLA game.

According to Isaacson's biography, it was Markkula who insisted that Jobs be heavily involved in the non-engineering areas of the company.

The Social Network was adapted from The Accidental Billionaires by Ben Mezrich. The screenplay followed the original book closely.

>If true, this would completely change the balance-of-power in the Apple-Samsung legal battles.

Don't think that's true. Worst-case scenario is that Apple releases a firmware update that removes the switching functionality and forces the 4S antennae to behave like an iPhone 4 (assuming the functionality can be turned off by software). Patent litigation will then continue as before.

Apple is an international company. They sell stuff outside of the US. Why would someone living in Europe/Asia/Africa give a shit about American jobs?

|Again, what other country is out there doing more to defend freedom?

Examples of the US defending freedom.

1973 Chilean coup d'état

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

The US supports a coup of the democratically elected President Salvador Allende who is replaced by the dictator Augusto Pinochet. Chile lived under a military dictatorship until 1990. Pinochet was responsible for the death and torture of tens of thousands of Chileans.

1953 Iranian coup d'état

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1953_Iranian_coup_d%27%C3%A9tat

The US overthrows the democratically elected government of Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddegh and have him replaced with the Shah of Iran, who acts as a proxy for US interests and uses the Iranian Intelligence Agency to crush political opposition.

US support of Saudi Arabia

Saudia Arabia is an absolute monarchy with no political parties or elections. It was rated in the Economists 2010 Democracy Index to be the seventh most authoritarian country in the world, and ranked higher than both Iran and Libya. The Saudia Arabian monarchy has given hundreds of billions of dollars to the US in exchange for military weaponry and the building of military infrastructure. Recently, Obama approved the biggest arms sale in US history, $60.5 billion in arms sold to Saudia Arabia.

Now, I'm getting a bit tired, so I'm not going to go into a lot of detail for the rest, but you can look into US support for King Abdullah in Jordan, US support of Murbarak in Egypt, US support for Suharto in Indonesia, the list goes on.

Sometimes the US supports democratic governments, often they support brutal tyrannical dictators. Generally it has to do with whether or not the policies of theses countries are in alignment with US economic interests.

That should be Queensland police, not Australian.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_rendition_by_the_...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imam_Rapito_affair

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maher_Arar

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Khaled_El-Masri

>Apple makes a profit on every iDevice sold, every iApp sold, through iAds and on the $99/year developer fee.

What evidence do you have to support the allegation that Apple makes a profit on every App sold?

Firstly, there's the cost of having the application tested, approved, uploaded and categorised. There's also the cost of hosting the app as well as the credit card processing fees. Users have the right to re-download any app they've purchased in the past. What about a 99c app that weighs in at 2GB? Does Apple really make a profit after credit card processing fees and bandwidth costs?

As for the $99/year developer fee, there are costs involved in providing support, moderating forums, and approving applications.