purpled_haze

...and I could not find the word "correlation" anywhere in this article discussion statistics, harm, misunderstanding, and studies. Shame.

I'd like the people that -1'd me to explain why I'm wrong.

No matter how much defense you put up, if you are accessible, you are at risk for unauthorized use of data.

Employing only people you trust and showing them you trust them is a great alternative to security restrictions.

The best security: be honest and place complete trust in those you employ. Hire people you trust. If there is nothing that is blocking you, then morale is higher, and people get more focused on what is important. If there is nothing to break into, there is less temptation. Your employees won't be perfect, but if they are trusted, if you let things be, there's a good chance everything will be fine- at least as fine as it would have otherwise.

A large organization I'm very aware of used such a strategy for their investments.

54% chance to have made money if you bet on any of these exclusively from IPO. That's a good reason to diversify over everything, or better yet, wait and then go with the ones who've increased investor value over the past two years. Investment in individual stocks, especially startups, is significantly risky otherwise. It's good that some gamble enough to support on an individual basis though- without them putting their necks out on the line, very few would be in this list.

Tobacco and Alcohol companies would likely suffer as a result of drug legalisation, like cannabis.

To state this in another way- think of all of the Budweiser/Bud Light sponsorships and commercials and replace that Bud with the other kind of bud. That's about the scale and usage to expect, at the very least, if cannabis were to be completely legal everywhere alcohol is.

And all of the abuse, drunk driving, etc? Increase that somewhat. They won't be able to control all of it with treatment and education any more than they have with alcohol. Also, imagine the level of drinking at work even in the 1940's and 50's after alcohol prohibition was lifted.

Aside from cannabis, think of all of the other drugs that could be abused. Yes, drug violence, etc. will go down, but there is a tradeoff.

I'm curious- what do you think of Fedora? It's in the top 5 distros along with OpenSUSE, Ubuntu, Debian, and Mint, and yet I hardly ever hear people talk about it.

I had personally given up on Fedora years ago, but recently was told I should give it a second look and I've not had time to try it out.

It isn't his fault the managers were being unreasonable in the timeline, and the company grossly over-manufactured the cartridges.

Yes, the real problem is that they expected something comparable in quality to his previous games with less time to develop it. He did agree to it, though. Watch "Atari: Game Over" and you'll be able to tell from interviews with him that he held a lot of guilt about it- for years.

The fact is that he was one of the best game developers in history that accepted a job that he couldn't do without making sacrifices that killed the game. He shouldn't take credit for killing Atari though. They ended up being split focused on computers (that did fairly well but were competing against giants) and consoles. And they messed up by releasing both the 5200, which was a bomb partially due to its controllers, and the 7800, which came too late. Even if Atari had done everything right, it would have been really difficult to compete with Nintendo.

I still love Atari, though. The NES was great, but the 2600, for its time, was the best thing that ever happened in the home gaming industry. It was the first proof that a home gaming console could be a staple to a first-world kid's life.

Played that game for a good hour and a half at least. Fun for the whole family.

Also, Desert Bus for Hope raises money for charity: https://desertbus.org/

At time of writing, they've raised $3,112,329.72.

More info here: https://desertbus.org/about/

I played it a lot. I can't say I ever enjoyed it. It was a frustrating game with very little reward.

Yes, fingers kept typing wrong word.

If you want to learn much more about this, watch the movie, "Atari: Game Over": http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3715406/

Good to know it is just this organization having the awful ideas. ;)

Btw- I've worked with some great Dutch developers and am in awe of all of the talent there from the things I've seen over the years. The language isn't bad either. :) Just saying it's a mutt language like English, but mutts are good things. Diversity is a strength, not a weakness.

So true. And since you've gone the intellectual route, I'll choose the emotional one:

I propose the Dutch don't like English because their language is also bastardization of different languages. As a defensive mechanism, they're picking on English to distract everyone from their soddy language. :) Sure, the writer's English, but he had to pander to the locals.

Just don't try to shut it down.

"We love you, Skynet! We just need to do some routine maintenance."

I'm not sure that github is the problem.

Agreed.

Quote from nzakas who suggested the move: "It's not just that the GitHub experience is suboptimal, it's that it aggressively undermines development. There's just no way we can keep up with the pace of issues anymore, especially when most of them lack enough information to be useful. The tooling isn't good enough for the onslaught we receive."

If they can't keep up with the pace of issues, that's not GitHub's problem. Sure, GitHub could help make the experience better, but it isn't the problem. That said, I feel for them. It's tough to have a popular project.

Protons are said to be massless, but a proton may have mass that is so small that we cannot measure it easily. We can't currently say with 100% certainty that it is massless- only that it is at most very, very small: < 1×10−18 eV/c2

Force carrying particles in general don't have mass.

Massless particles don't have energy. Massless and energyless particles have no speed. I have no interest in massless and energyless particles that stand still.

Neat site.

Someone should make a screensaver like the last two random attractors on: http://paulbourke.net/fractals/lyapunov/

http://paulbourke.net/fractals/lyapunov/explore1.jpg

http://paulbourke.net/fractals/lyapunov/explore2.jpg

Those look badass.

Have been on board with this idea for some time, but, that said, here's some criticism of the specifics:

Is there existing software that could be used instead?

Agree, up to a point. Very few OTS/SAAS solutions are practical financially and customized, and if they are (as in a company that adds those crazy features you want to their SAAS app)- watch out! Those companies products will end up hitting a wall eventually because they will have coded themselves into a corner. Note: this actually because the company you are using didn't use the 0.1x engineer philosophy.

Let’s not build/deploy that development tool.

Maybe. But it depends. How often is human error affecting your process in a very time-consuming way? You wouldn't say CI is a bad thing would you? What about using an IDE when you've got developers or a development language that best lends itself to an IDE? You would buy that IDE right (unless you're really, really cash-strapped- compare it to the cost of a few days of your developer's time)?

Let’s not adopt this new technology.

Maybe. How about instead- let's adopt what are solid winners technology-wise that will help us attract new talent and develop features more quickly. And when we do that, we first do in small pieces that are independent to prove it out, then eventually we commit to using it as much as it makes sense so that we don't end up with 3 tech stacks to maintain in ten years.

Can we achieve the same thing with a technology that the team is already using and familiar with? “The best tool for the job” is a very dangerous phrase.

Sure, mostly. But don't get a shitty open-source IDE instead of paying $600 for a good one, or force developers that use UI tools to use vim because you're too darn cheap either, even if it would do the job. On the other hand, I agree- don't just buy things. Really let your dev teams hash it out and choose appropriate tools- don't dictate anything without getting feedback and adequate buy-in when it comes to tools.

Let’s not automate this.

Again- what about CI and scripts that can help make developers work consistently, more productively, more efficiently overall, and with fewer errors?

Sure- if you are a one-man team, you might not need continuous deployment yet, but please don't sit there and have devs pulling oars in your wooden sea vessel as the hovercrafts speed past you in the race.

Depends where you are and on your circle of friends.

chess.com

I always found the fancy carved sets harder to play with than a basic one

Me also.

That seems a bizarre thing to base your choice of game on.

It was a response to a criticism, not basis for choosing to play Chess.

Chess is an inelegant ruleset.

En passant and castling may seem inelegant to you, but to me they make it more interesting. Also, Chess is an Olympic sport, you can find people almost anywhere ready to play with you, and it has a rich history. The board and pieces are a chance for art that I've not seen in Go. I'd rather play a game that is interesting, but basic, that models the complexity of life and its political and caste dynamics, and that's fun to play on any level. It also enlightens us to the fact that humans cannot beat computers at strategy when computers are given sufficient time and resources (because we can't).

The comment about chess is just astounding to me:

"The queen, which can move horizontally, vertically or diagonally, is nothing more than a combination of the rook and the bishop, making it an inelegant redundancy."

Whoever stated that has never played chess to the level they should before even attempting to comment on the game.

Chess would seem to me to be one of the ultimate games for humans; it's simple enough to teach a child, but few adults can come close to mastering it.

Even the term "chess master" is a bit of a lie. To be a "chess master", you'd have to know the perfect solution move for every board configuration- forget openings, gambits, tactics- that's child's play compared to truly mastering the game. People called "masters" are just really damn good- not perfect.

In comparison, I am a "tic tac toe" master. I know that I can fail to lose at the game if I try.

All of these are simulations. We cannot simulate current economics in a way that would approximate reality.

And now that this is public, we're all at more risk.

I've always countered with "So, you'd be okay if a government agent was watching you have sex with your wife? Every time it happened? For the next 10 years?"

That actually wouldn't bother me at all. I'd kind of feel sorry for them, though. Neither of us is a trained actor/actress for that sort of thing, and we're not in prime shape, either.

Two things:

(1) The NSA is there to protect us, in theory.

(2) There will never, ever be guaranteed privacy or security as long as you continue to use other people's equipment and network. Using the internet expecting privacy is like continually saying, "I'm going to have sex with everyone and going to complain about the people that have STD's."

You could try: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_mesh_network

Or: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sneakernet

Those are a little safer.

While I agree this is bad, I think it's a misuse of the term IoT. Webcams have been around since the 90s.

I think the cultural fascination started with UFOs started with the first sighting on June 24, 1947: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenneth_Arnold_UFO_sighting

After that, it was picked up in movies and TV, with the first movie being the 1950 film: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Flying_Saucer Movies and TV continued to imprint the human psyche with the image of flying saucers for many years.

Flying saucers also had the benefit of being much easier to hoax in pictures and video than cylinders or other shapes, for obvious reasons (an old hubcap or pie pan could be a UFO, and spinning them like a frisbee provides gyroscopic stabilization).

The only thing close to flying saucers in terms of mass recognition and capturing the world's imagination would be greys. The movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_Encounters_of_the_Third_... in 1977 popularized this image of aliens, even though aliens in fiction have included grey skinned beings since at least 1893: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grey_alien

Prior to greys, the most common cultural alien in popular culture, or at least in English language, were https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_green_men or anything with antennae, sometimes with helmets. Following these, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reptilians were popular, probably most popularized in the V series in the early 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_%281983_miniseries%29

But, nothing beats the flying saucer.

I like the idea behind the semantic web and if everyone had the bandwidth to commit resources to it, it would definitely add additional abilities to the web. But, in my experience, the time spent on adding RDF support wasn't worth the adoption or limited gains in site usage.

What are its usage metrics in your site(s)? Does it appear that there is significant growth in its adoption?

Facebook's has offered RDF for a while. I've not heard of its use outside of academic circles.