Slashdot Mirror

"it is fairly apparent that Notch is not some genius game designer, he just had the right idea at the right time, and got lucky that it went viral. Minecraft was not some amazing feat of design, it was a digital lego game that struck a chord with people."

Have you even played the game for more than 5 minutes? it had more depth and FUN my first hour playing it than all the games in the last ten years of gaming combined! Plus, kids fucking LOVE it. Southpark was bang on with its observation that everyone under 16 (maybe 20 now?) has played it and enjoyed it. If he's not a "genius" in some sense, with millions of accounts (paying like $25 each), then what the fuck dude, who the hell is?
He had the right idea at the right time, just like every other inventor in history. Nothing "genius" or not "genius" about it. Minecraft is an amazingly deep and thoughtful game, that is still getting free updates years after its release!

He is actually quite humble in the interviews I have read about him such as this one:
http://www.newyorker.com/tech/...

Minecraft is THE cult game of the last 10 years. The spinoffs, youtube channels, mods, servers, real life products, halloween costumes, t shirts... the list goes on and on. Minecraft steve, a creeper or other characters are easily as recognizable as mario, or a disney character to children these days.

There is a TONNE of value with the minecraft brand. Missing that means you are not in touch with the youths! and you lose at your evaluation of the situation.

http://www.newyorker.com/magaz... "Under civil forfeiture, Americans who haven’t been charged with wrongdoing can be stripped of their cash, cars, and even homes. Is that all we’re losing?"

Of course, I believe phrases like "the right to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed" are indisputably clear, and I'm astonished that people can find convoluted ways to try to tear it apart syntactically.and semantically.

Except you're missing the context. The full text is: " A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State,, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed."

So for 150 years, the 2nd amendment was interpreted to mean that states could raise armed militias, but that there was no individual right to bear arms. Citation: http://www.newyorker.com/news/...

"There was an article in the New Yorker last year - I wish I could find it - that talked about the enormous about of pressure being put on academic journals that affect big industries. It described cases where Monsanto and another big corporation set out to destroy an otherwise well-respected scientist who discovered a high health risk from one of their products."

It sounds like you're describing:
"A Valuable Reputation
...
The company documents show that, while Hayes was studying atrazine, Syngenta was studying him, as he had long suspected. Syngenta’s public-relations team had drafted a list of four goals. The first was “discredit Hayes.” In a spiral-bound notebook, Syngenta’s communications manager, Sherry Ford, who referred to Hayes by his initials, wrote that the company could “prevent citing of TH data by revealing him as noncredible.” He was a frequent topic of conversation at company meetings. Syngenta looked for ways to “exploit Hayes’ faults/problems.”
...
In 2005, Ford made a long list of methods for discrediting him: “have his work audited by 3rd party,” “ask journals to retract,” “set trap to entice him to sue,” “investigate funding,” “investigate wife.” The initials of different employees were written in the margins beside entries, presumably because they had been assigned to look into the task. "
http://www.newyorker.com/magaz...

Syngenta couldn't find any legitimate scientific flaws in Hayes's research so they waged a PR war against him.

Peer Review does not guarantee correctness. It just means that one group of academics has either prevented another group from publishing, or managed to get their own group's paper published.

Secondly, these kinds of study are subject to The Decline Effect, where the original spittle and salivation over the result soon turns to bemusement as it fails replication 25 years later.

Let me preface this by saying I think Limbaugh has become a self-important blowhard, who spends hours saying nothing, just to hear himself talk on the radio. I'm also no fan of the vast majority of idiots signed up as members of the Republican party.

But let's not try to cherry-pick historical events to make conclusions that just aren't there..... The Great Depression might have shown signs of going away before WWII, but you'd have to be kind of crazy to back the idea that America's prosperous period after WWII had nothing to do with winning the war! Essentially, on this one, Rush actually *is* right. Heck, if nothing else, one could make a strong argument that the war put America in an advantageous place in the world market simply because other major competitors were knocked out for a while. (It's easy to look good when the other players are still rebuilding decimated manufacturing capabilities and so on.)

And no... "massive govt. spending and growth" from WWII wasn't the magic ticket to prosperity.... Fools like GWB seemed to believe this, and America found out the hard way that you can't just dump a ton of money into having a war and expect automatic prosperity to result.

In reality, if America had some way to win WWII without all of the military expenditures, we would have been that much MORE well-off, post war, than we were.

Now, arguing about banking regulations, specifically? Yes, I think it's pretty widely understood that the deregulation in the Reagan era (and let's be honest here ... much of that had more to do with Reagan's economic advisers than Reagan himself) turned out pretty bad. If you had to put a face and a name to those ideas, you'd probably pin most of it on Alan Greenspan, who eventually admitted himself that he was wrong. (Essentially, he felt he did the right thing, philosophically speaking -- but didn't think the people put in charge of banking would be so short-sighted and irresponsible to do some of the things they were ABLE to do with the regulations lifted. Basically, he was guilty of believing too much in some of the people who supposedly could make wise business decisions.)

If you want to talk fundamental change that would actually help America's situation today? We've GOT to get rid of the Corporatism. Big businesses can NOT be allowed to infiltrate government and effectively become another arm of it! Too many people, today, have this simplistic notion that big businesses are evil/bad/wrong, and need to be forcibly dismantled -- or forced to give up a portion of their wealth to "everyone else". Big business, itself, is not the problem. A big business is just one of those small businesses people like to cheer for that did well enough, it got bigger and hired a lot more people. The PROBLEM comes in when government accepts financial gifts from said businesses for favors, or allows people with direct ties to the businesses to take key positions inside government itself and proceeds to get new legislation made/approved that only benefits those businesses.

IMO, Obama is just as guilty of perpetuating this as any of our last few presidents -- and the results are like a snowball rolling downhill. For example:

http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

In order to justify a budget increase of 300%+, the head of Microsoft Research had to write a really long essay beginning with business buzzwords (like embark, unprecedented, and endeavor) and ending with some justifications for his recommendations.

Yep, Myhrvold's memos were always substantial, they often defined the future of the company. This is from a New Yorker article in 1997.

Reading the memos chronologically, one can look at some of the business decisions that Microsoft faced during the years it grew to a nearly nine-billion-dollar giant that in 1996 earned two billion one hundred and ninety-five million dollars. It’s easier to understand the company’s path to success: a rare marriage of technical and business prowess.

Myhrvold's role was essentially to be the futurist at Microsoft. He was their forward thinker and gave them the geeky excitement that allowed them to make many of the right choices throughout the '80s and '90s. Ignoring him and concentrating instead of the business and litigation-driven path resulted in the gradual slide to the barely relevant, spiteful and fading dinosaur, shedding workers and market share we're saddled with today.

Imagine instead if they'd listened to him and worked towards this vision:

Myhrvold then turned to what he called “the truly personal computer—something which has the size and weight appropriate to be carried with you at all times.” This wireless “digital wallet,” as he called it, would allow anyone to communicate, untethered to a wire, by voice, video, fax, E-mail, or pager. The device would be a clock, an alarm, a schedule manager, a notepad, an archive of phone numbers and records, and a library of music and books. The digital signature produced by this wallet would have a personal I.D. for security, and could replace cash, credit cards, checks, and keys. He believed that the obstacles were economic and human, not technological. “The cost will not be very high—it is pretty easy to imagine a total cost of manufacture in the range of $100 to $250 on introduction, which means $400 to $1000 retail price,” he wrote. He guessed that keyboards would be superseded by devices capable of recognizing handwriting.

http://www.newyorker.com/archi...

OP is saying 22 pages is too long a memo to bet the company on, and gets modded insightful? Why?

Certain comments they make DO deserve to be downvoted to hell. If a round-earth skeptic made a comment claiming the world MIGHT be flat, they would likewise be downvoted to hell.

The fact is that there will always be some people left clinging to old beliefs that have to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern age by the rest of society that has passed them decades ago, whether it's that AGW is happening, legal gay marriage is going to happen, equal rights under the constitution for everyone regardless or race or gender is happening, eugenics is bullshit, or that you can't use leaches to cure a cold.

To these people, they will always be unconscious of the fact that they think beliefs are the same as truths, and no new truths are allowed to appear. These are also the people who impede the progress of medicine, biology, social rights, and other sciences because when the consensus goes against them, instead of reexamining their beliefs critically, they feel like they're being attacked and respond by holding on even more tightly to their beliefs.

Here is a recent widely circulated article about why such skeptics continue to exist:
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

In 2012, the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois ruled that an F.B.I. agent could not testify about the location of a defendant’s cell phone because the analyses did not rise to the level of trusted, replicable science.

she had a tumultuous, sometimes violent relationship with the victim, Jerri Williams. Cell records showed that at 10:27 on the morning of the murder, Roberts’s phone connected to a tower within 3.4 miles of Kelley Point Park, where Williams’s body was discovered. Her attorney felt that was enough to convict her.
But she was making that call while driving a red pickup truck more than eight miles away, as confirmed by a witness. The system had simply routed her call through the tower near the park. It also emerged that new DNA evidence placed another suspect, a man, at the crime scene. And another piece of evidence helped: moments earlier, Roberts had received another call that came through a different site. The two towers were 1.3 miles apart. She could not have traveled that distance in the forty seconds between the calls. And so her cell records, in a sense, helped to save her. Source: http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

Why? Read newyorker's excellent article and no i wont TLDR because its worth reading in its entirety. http://www.newyorker.com/repor...

No, It's very clear in the various letters it's there because they couldn't afford a standing army.

The right to bear arms on the federal level is relatively new. Until it the 1970's cities and states determined local laws. Orrin Hatch commissioned a report, ignored the reports finding, but still waved it around as proof. hell, 100 years ago and more many cities and towns didn't allow firearms;

Add to that congress can change the amendments should it like, this is really a PR issue created by the PR company the runs the NRA and also supports gun manufactures.
Here is a little bit of history regarding the NRA and politics. Surprisingly accurate for a media report.
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

In reality, neither - older people or the best for the job - get the job. Because if it were the most capable for the job, then new college grads would never get hired, would they?

It takes a couple of years experience to become good and productive.

The truth of the hiring in tech is that its capricious and based on fads - firms are lemmings.

Some big currently successful corp starts basing its hiring on some metric someone pulls out of their ass, and then everyone does it in the hopes of aping the success of that firm.

Google and Microsoft has fucked up hiring for everyone with their idiotic interview questions that they ended up getting rid of anyway.

See, the fact is companies have no clue how to get the best. They make metrics up, buy cute tests, hire consultants with their Ouija boards or whatever, and follow what currently successful companies are doing - who are also pulling shit out of their asses.

The best way to hire? Get a development manager with a long contact list in his smart phone and have him start calling people he knows can deliver and throw money at them.

Never fails.

If you or your company can't get "qualified people", it's because YOU suck - pay too low, having HR recruit or just being lemmings and following the herd on how to hire.

Don't forget people are starving in the USA, UK etc too! According to the way it's currently measured, I mean. Best get some GM bananas out there too. Don't worry about the consequences.

While you're at it, let's toy with Spanish Flu:

http://www.theguardian.com/com...

I mean, why not? Let the market decide, eh?

http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

Further, the most dangerous cities to live in today, are precisely those cities with the strictest gun control.

Those cities enacted gun control laws because they were already the most dangerous cities. The effectiveness of those gun control laws is up for debate, but you got the cause and effect completely backwards. And you're modded up +5 Insightful. God, what's happening to Slashdot these days?

empirical evidence weighs in on my side

Sure, some of it does. But there is at least an equal amount of evidence supporting the opposing side of view, unless you ignore Japan, Hawaii, and articles like this and (yes, you read that right, The American Conservative) this and this.

My hunch is that there is probably little to no correlation between gun control and crime rates. So gun control is probably not a good way of curbing crime. But claiming that the evidence is irrefutable that more guns equals more safety is patently absurd. It's just as bad as the NRA claiming that armed teachers in every school would have prevented Sandytown. (Maybe it would've, but we'd have four or five instances each year of clueless teachers injuring a coworker with an accidental discharge or killing a student they "swore had a knife.")

You don't need insider information, as there has been published information on the issue: for example. Steps are being taken and any large science project risks having such issues independent of the science and engineering behind the principles of the project. Having to manage and balance contributions from many countries does complicate and pile on the bureaucracy though.

Appeal to authority, argumentum ad populum and poisoning the well. Classy. The science is actually more interesting than you believe:

"First, twenty-four rhesus macaques were infected with the Lyme bacteria in the laboratory. After four to six months, half the macaques received aggressive antibiotic therapy, which, in theory, should have cured them, but the bacteria persisted in some of the animals. Then the scientists used a method called xenodiagnosis to determine if treatment worked in three other monkeys. They planted ticks that had been reared in the lab under sterile conditions on macaques that had received antibiotics, and let them feed for four days. When the ticks were removed and examined, the scientists found small numbers of intact, functioning spirochetes in two of them, which could have come only from the blood of the macaques."
( http://www.newyorker.com/repor... )

It is a fact that a significant amount of people chronically suffer from symptoms that are perfectly in line with the symptoms of Lyme, after having definitely had Lyme. So, that is 'a thing'. Whether the cause is indeed recurring Lyme, a yeast infection or damage to the body doesn't really matter all that much to those with the symptoms. Being dismissed as 'kooky' or being told to 'get over it' by assholes as yourself does matter.

US intelligence agencies operate with a policy of misinformation, they work from the top-down to indoctrinate their members that what they do is right, and for the good of the nation, and mustn't be revealed. Policy makers that are brought into this discussion are treated to the same indoctrination; taught that their cooperation is necessary to prevent "terrorism," a conveniently nebulous force that we all know can never truly be defeated. Read about how the NSA avoided or defeated policies that would rein in surveillance for the past 13 years.

I agree; law enforcement should be funded through standard taxes just like everything else.

If you want to fix schools, though, well. Maybe you should think twice about money being the answer to your woes. It isn't. We spend more on our schools than any other developed nation. Money, on the whole, is not the problem. The problem lies elsewhere.

You'll love this!

http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

Don't show Penn Jillette, though; he might start shouting at you.

For decades now we've treated the Internet like an open house with everybody welcome and everybody allowed to come in and browse. As more and more technologies/designs/secrets have been put into computer systems they've been linked via Intranets within organizations and more importantly, and stupidly, on the Internet in the name of saving time or they've just been exposed because the people who are supposed to protect that information are incompetent idiots. That's the root cause here, not protecting the information that's held in those systems. China and other governments have employed script kiddies and any other tactics like purchased vulnerabilities to dig in, but again it's up to the holders of that data to protect it and to know what kind of enemies they're up against. Industrial espionage is nothing new, it's been around for centuries so why are we all shocked that this is allowed to happen? The secrets of the A-Bomb were leaked out of Los Alamos by sympathetic spies and some were executed for it. The B-29 bomber, a program that cost more than the A-Bomb to develop, was completely reverse engineered from one aircraft that made an emergency landing in the Soviet Union. It was copied right down to the same overheating engine problem that destroyed many of the aircraft. Chinese spies have recently been sent to prison for espionage so why is this suddenly news?

While I'm glad that the US Govt. is trying to do something about all of this it's a bit late and ultimately it's up to all the industries that have technology worth stealing to start taking steps to protect their IP and their confidential information. This also means protecting yourself from the US government because as we all know the NSA is also passively watching everything you do. My suggesting is that there should be sufficient air gaps between your R&D/Competitive information and Intranets/Internet for starters and also start employing a risk mitigation strategy in your data handling practices because chances are your sensitive information is probably already public knowledge somewhere.

Mod parent up. Not sure if this New Yorker cartoon from the most recent issue will stay around long, but I saw it this morning and it sums up how I feel about much of computer software development the last thirty years since Smalltalk:
http://www.newyorker.com/image...

A character says "The new house is almost ready!" and it looks exactly the same as the rundown house in almost exactly the same location.

Software could be better, like the character could in theory have built a better house. But in practice, watching this play out of 30 years myself, much of what we get is just re-re-re-inventing the wheel. And there is a terrible waste in having to re-learning it slightly differently with slightly different bugs and limits, and little true progress. Often there is regress, since Smalltalk's keyword syntax is still more readable and expandable than C-like syntax.

Where would we be now if a truly free Smalltalk had had all the billions poured into it that Java had due to IBM and Sun's marketing clout and all the effort that has gone into JavaScript dues to Netscape/Mozilla/Google/etc.? Including the best of any LightTable ideas (a view with source when you hover over a name in code is indeed cool) and any other GUI improvements? As well as better libraries and better cross-platform support and better browser integration and so on?

Still, maybe JavaScript is the best we could hope for at this point, and better than we deserve, as someone else said and I echo in this submission from yesterday about James Mickens' last "USENIX "login" column explaining all that is wrong with the Web pages technically:
http://slashdot.org/submission...
Citing: https://www.usenix.org/system/...

But we got that mess for social reasons (competition, centralization, monetarization), not technical one, like I mention here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...

Social stuff like ParcPlace not being willing to license ObjectWorks/VisualWorks cheaply to Sun when they wanted to do a set top project (which ultimately lead to sun making Java).

Could Smalltalk be improved? Yes. Even the syntax could, like by using more C-like strings and comments while keeping the keywords. Could it benefit from type annotations for optimization? Probably yes too. And could it benefit from being built from textual sources instead of an image (like GNU smalltalk). Again yes. But investments in that direction would have produced so much more benefits than something like Java or JavaScript.

That said, after all the pain and suffering and waste, Java and JavaScript/HTML5/CSS3 have finally become half-way decent platforms. I'm moving more in a JavaScript direction myself for mostly social and practical reasons, despite knowing how great Smalltalk was and seeing how much it could have become. I talk about that on Slashdot here:
http://slashdot.org/comments.p...
http://developers.slashdot.org...

Smalltalk might still get there building on Java and JavaScript as with these projects:
http://amber-lang.net/
http://www.redline.st/

Mickens' comments are mostly true, but end up being tradeoffs for ubiquity and easy installs in the case of JavaScript -- even Alan Kay and Dan Ingalls agreed on that with their efforts toward the Lively Kernel driven by the fact they could not get many people to install Squeak or Squeak-based apps).
http://www.lively-k

Try linking to the actual f**king article

http://www.newyorker.com/repor...

Even Bill Gates and Satya Nadella couldn't install Win8.

http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

...and, in almost every case, carrying large amounts of cash has little to no consequence.

I visit the WSOP every year, and while they accept wire transfers at the Rio cage, nearly every player brings cash -- and not just the main event players. There's thousands of people like myself playing smaller events who have thousands of dollars in cash on them at and en route to the WSOP every year.

Yeah, good for you. Many, many people have been less lucky -- and perhaps you should pay close attention to what municipalities and states you travel through with your cash. (Some stories of how crazy this can get here.)

Care to tell us the rest of the story that was worth mentioning "just some beer in the back?"

Sounded like a reference to the kinds of things that allow law enforcement to arbitrarily seize assets to me. They spot something "suspicious," which is enough to constitute some minimum of "probable cause" ("I smelled something weird, and I spotted a case of beer in the back seat..."), ask to search the car, find a wad of cash, file a pseudo-lawsuit "State of X vs. $15,000," and the money disappears into the government's bank accounts.

Maybe there's more to the story, but it's also very possible that these people just happened to be driving through the wrong place and hit the cop who has a profit motive to arbitrarily seize assets. (And yeah, if you've never heard of this stuff happening before, it sounds freakin' CRAZY, but it does happen... all the time.)

Seriously, though, it sounds like your friends need to give 1/3 of that to a lawyer so they can get the other 2/3 back.

Yeah, good luck with that. These confiscations are notoriously hard to fight. The "friends" are probably not even an official party to some criminal proceeding -- instead, many of these cases are filed as "State of X vs. $15,000" (I wish I were kidding). Many municipalities will charge thousands of dollars in fees just for the right to file a challenge for the confiscation, so they might be out 10-20% of their money just to get the process started. Add on complicated and lengthy legal proceedings, and they'd be very lucky to get a fraction of it back. It might not be worth it at all. The only way to fix these sorts of problems is probably a class-action lawsuit against the offending municipalities.

By the way, for those who don't realize the craziness of civil forfeiture laws: law enforcement have routinely seized people's cash, cars, even houses -- with no trial, no criminal proceeding, often just a bare hint of "probable cause" or trumped up "suspicion." Look it up (for example, here's a good recent summary of some egregious examples.

While people traveling with a wad of cash are probably the most common target, this is a much bigger issue -- a truly shocking and extreme violation of basic rights.

Did this guy deserve to die?
http://www.newyorker.com/repor...

What we can never get away from is that human justice is always fallible, and as such must be, even in some paltry measure, reversible.

You cannot take back death.

.

All the stats I've seen say we work marginally fewer hours than 20 years ago, and significantly fewer than 50 years ago.
http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/09/working-hours
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/10/why-the-french-are-fighting-over-work-hours.html

What's changed is that the middle class has proportionately less income to splurge on luxuries such as playing golf.

The US civilian space program has regressed to 1970s levels. The greatest nation on earth needs a Russian rocket to get astronauts in space. Some private company with a shitload of government backing does what we used to be able to do 40 years ago on our own, and now people are acting like it's the Second Coming. I suspect that our oligarchy has decided that it's better to wait for Corporate America to figure out how to do with we already knew in the first place.

I don't see it -- the summary was taken word-for-word from a podcast? As in, someone transcripted and submitted it, including the quotes?

That podcast certainly wasn't the first source to report on the Citicorp Center design flaw -- there was article in the New Yorker in 1995 about it ( http://www.newyorker.com/archi... ).

There was an article in the New Yorker a few months ago about a scientist that was being harassed:

"A Valuable Reputation
After Tyrone Hayes said that a chemical was harmful, its maker pursued him"
"In 2005, [Sherry Ford, the communications manager, at Syngenta] made a long list of methods for discrediting [Hayes]: "have his work audited by 3rd party," "ask journals to retract," "set trap to entice him to sue," "investigate funding," "investigate wife.""

Link to the story

They couldn't refute Hayes "inconvenient" research so they had to silence him with a smear campaign.
The point is that I'm pretty sure there is a "Sherry Ford" who works for the Fossil Fuel industry. I'm sure that the F.F.'s "Sherry Ford" is licking his (or her) lips at the prospect of unlimited access to Mr. Mann's unpublished emails & documents. Unfortunately the F. F. industry has nearly unlimited resources and could afford to buy themselves an Attorney General (Ken Cuccinelli).
The enemies of science are gunning for Mr. Mann just as Syngenta is/was gunning for Hayes.

I sympathize. I have a similar story about my former Benz. At 70K miles I had repair problem with the motor. MB's fault really, had to have been set up wrong at the factory. Cost of repair was about $7K. They put in $2K, but I had to fork over the rest. I will never buy another Benz. I have owned several cars. None ever had a catastrophic failure at 70K miles. Of course the dealers will tell you that is why you should buy an extended warranty. My response is the policy and its renewal fee would have been about as much, so it would have been worthless to me. After I decided to get rid of the Benz, I was quite tempted to buy a Model S after driving one. Ultimately I thought I would wait until they add a few features I like that are available on other cars. When the warranty is about to expire on the new car I will buy the Tesla.

It's also worth noting what a huge difference there is when buying a car from a dealership and a Tesla from the store. I think 99% of us share the opinion that buying a car from a dealership is the most insulting retail experience there is. Dealers know it but don't care since the franchise laws protect them from reasonable market forces. No wonder they are all trying to stop Tesla from selling direct to consumers. But car dealers are not the only industry that plays the regulatory game. Just one of the worst abusers.

Harper’s (not to be confused with Harper’s Bazaar, which is an especially boring fashion magazine,) The Believer, and The Baffler all have good literary and art coverage as well as long-form lefty political journalism. The New Yorker is good too, and not as New York City centric as you might think, aside from the theater/music/event listings, but it’s weekly, so kinda expensive and easy to fall behind on. There’s some good stuff in Rolling Stone and Playboy from time to time but I wouldn’t keep either one on the coffee table where people could see them.

Answer: No. At least not for anything of consequence. Just look at how many successful petitions came out of change.org.
Anyone that thinks a web based protest would be effective should read "The Revolution will not be Tweeted" by by Malcolm Gladwell, published in New Yorker magazine, to understand why.

http://www.newyorker.com/repor...

Since you're going to ignore both Crimea's autonomy and their democratic vote to join Russia, lets talk about the Obama-backed election in Afghanistan where Karzai nakedly stole the vote. Putin should have totally gone before the U.N. and had Obama's Netflix account canceled.

Nobody can top American Exceptionalists for hypocrisy. Nobody.

Everybody is jumping on the horribleness of the proposal, nobody seems to be catching the very obvious: it's the wrong topic for a prison reformer.

I have to skim a lot of headlines myself - just reading the 1 sentence about the 4-year-old gives me willies; for all my liberal values and intellectual knowledge about death penalty as a surprisingly poor deterrent, I want evil vengeance on such animals myself. But it's folly to obsess on these cases, and this lady has terrible priorities.

We have very few needs for more awful punishments; while these disgusting cases do come up, they're very, very rare compared to the millions of less-serious crimes that cost the state huge sums to punish with current prisons.

If you want a great slashdot techie solution, you'll love this article in The Atlantic:
http://www.theatlantic.com/mag...

from a few years back about "imprisonment" with heavy use of the ankle-trackers that rule over your life. It points out that most of the people who commit most of the crimes that have the US prison system so huge are people with poor impulse control, bad habits, and bad companions. The ankle tracker can be configured to let them go to work, go home, not be off-path for more than minutes without police response, and importantly, out of the bars and the wrong parts of town. For quite a lot of the prison population, they could be paying a few payroll taxes that compensate for their $4K costs of monitoring and parole, instead of costing us as much as keeping a kid in Harvard (nearly every prisoner is $50K/year).

We may already be unaware that simple solitary confinement is something like the time-dilation drug, that it constitutes torture in its own right:
http://www.newyorker.com/repor... ...torture that reduced Hezbollah hostage Terry Anderson to methodically smashing his head into a wall in a suicide attempt after about 18 solid months of it. He spent 7 years as a hostage in total, and could describe his mind slipping away every time they took him away from other prisoners and subjected him to solitary. John McCain wrote :
                  “It crushes your spirit and weakens your resistance more effectively than any other form of mistreatment.” And this comes from a man who was
                    beaten regularly; denied adequate medical treatment for two broken arms, a broken leg, and chronic dysentery; and tortured to the point of
                    having an arm broken again.

So we're already doing THAT. It's horrible enough for about 99.999% of the worst of the worst. Can we focus on something cheaper and actually more effective for about 50% of the least of the worst and save a few dozen billion a year?

Bill Gates? Is that really you?

Only a few weeks ago you were having no end of problems with Windows 8.

This article sums it up nicely, I think.

Nice going, Arizona. Or at least, Arizona politicians.

Within a few months, Page and Brin had called Thrun to green-light a driverless-car project. "They didn't even talk about budget," Thrun says. âoeThey just asked how many people I needed and how to find them. I said, 'I know exactly who they are.'"

If this is any example, top tier companies putting together a hit squad don't look at resumes. They first make a key hire by making a can't-say-no offer to a professor at a top university, then he cherry-picks people with a name in the field.

http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...

Well, that quote is of one piece with what else we know about Obama. He thinks he is the best there is at everything. He has said that he wishes he could do everything, because he's a better speech writer than his speech writers, a better political director than his political directors, etc.

Source: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/11/17/081117fa_fact_lizza?printable=true

I think he is a narcissist. One of the signs of a narcissist is lack of empathy.

http://samvak.tripod.com/obama.html

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/08/12/130812fa_fact_stillman?currentPage=all

My response when someone says it's an unwritten rule is "So, where exactly is it in the rules?". And when they repeat that it's an unwritten rule, I say "So, it's not actually a rule then. Good, that means I'm still playing by the rules.". It's the same as the Redwood City team's use of the full-court press: entirely within the rules, it just violates an unstated agreement not to play at 100% the entire game. Sure it comes as a shock when you're suddenly faced with a team that doesn't back down from 100% ever, that doesn't back off and give you position. But is it really their fault that you're not ready for that? You can do the same thing just as easily as they did. Is it really reasonable to insist that they play the game the way you'd like it to be played, as opposed to the way the rules say it should be played?

NB: the above is why, in friendly card games, the groups I played in had explicit rules about checks and calls and minimum bids/raises to keep the game moving (and maximum raises to keep someone who's up from buying the pot).

You may believe the president to be a big joke, but the truth is probably a lot more nuanced.

I found this piece eye-opening - http://www.newyorker.com/repor... .

Nothing to worry about. It's just a 50th Anniversary tribute to Dr. Strangelove.
http://www.newyorker.com/onlin...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt00...

Because obviously less education is the solution. [/irony]

Seems to have worked for her...

The New Yorker published an article named The Open-Office Trap a couple weeks ago about open offices as well, and included research data that showed open offices are a net negative to productivity. Feeling good about doing something didn't actually make that thing good. :)

its laughable for people to think anyone who challenges deep political and financial power structures are going to 1. somehow be rewarded or applauded for their efforts or 2. get some sort of "fair trial" ... where a positive outcome for the WB would encourage others to follow suit.

You might have missed these:

Former U.S. Officials Give NSA Whistleblower Snowden Award in Russia
In first meeting with Americans since finding asylum in Russia, NSA leaker Edward Snowden gets Sam Adams Award for Integrity in Intelligence.

Snowden Among Nominees for a European Human Rights Prize
The Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, considered Europe’s top human rights award, has been bestowed on luminaries like Daw Aung San Suu Kyi and Nelson Mandela. This year, in a slap against Washington, the award could go to Edward J. Snowden, known as either the N.S.A. whistle-blower or a traitor, depending on one’s perspective.

No Contest: Edward Snowden is Person of the Year
In an effort to gin up a bit of publicity for its annual choice for “Person of the Year,” Time has released its list of ten finalists. They include Pope Francis, President Obama, Jeff Bezos, Miley Cyrus, Ted Cruz, and two Middle Eastern leaders: Bashar al-Assad, the embattled President of Syria, and Hassan Rouhani, the new President of Iran. Of these, Pope Francis is by far the strongest candidate, but even the radical new Pontiff can’t compete with another troublemaker on the list: Edward Snowden, the former N.S.A. contractor who is currently residing somewhere in Russia as the guest of Vladimir Putin, Time’s 2007 honoree.

I'd say abolish patents completely. They don't benefit society in general.

99% of ideas are easy/trivial, and very often when the time comes for an idea to be popular, there are many people with the same idea, so why award a monopoly to one person?
See: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/05/12/080512fa_fact_gladwell/?printable=true&currentPage=all

Only fools believe that if there weren't any patents people would keep their discoveries secret and technology might be lost. Have you ever read one of those broad and vague patents? They write them not so you can implement something but so that they can prevent as much implementation of anything as possible.

So when a patent application is reviewed by a patent office worker it's not easy to figure out in advance whether it should be approved- he's not likely to be an expert in all fields. The Patent Office is not punished for approving patents that should not be approved but is rewarded for approving patents.

I don't see an easy way of fixing things. If there isn't a way then patents should be abolished.

If you want to reward inventors and implementers of inventions I'd say you should set up a registry of inventions - you register your invention for a fee. The fee goes to a pool. Governments and others could contribute to the pool too. Every year or so, awards are given out for Inventions. There should be two categories of awards - one where winners are chosen by experts in that field, and another where winners are chosen by the public (random members of the public or similar).

It's easier in hindsight to see whether something is worthy or not. An inventor might be rewarded 20 years later for something really innovative that blazed a new path but most people didn't quite "get" at first- and took years of development. Whereas normal patents wouldn't reward such an inventor - the patents would have long expired, normal patents are more likely to reward bullshit patents like "one click".

What the law didn't do was allow insurance to be sold across state lines

Well fuck me, I had no idea my Humana policy required me to move to Kentucky. Oh wait, it doesn't, because this is bullshit.

But hey, let's say the government "allowed" insurance to be sold across state lines. You'd call up Humana and say "Hi, I'm in zip code 12345 but want to pay for insurance like I live in zip code 54321". The actuaries look at their tables of what providers in your area charge versus what providers in 54321 charge and say "well hell, if the government says so, sure." Enjoy paying $600 for a round trip flight to see your "local" in-network doctor.

Most likely, though, all the insurance companies outside of whatever one state makes it easiest for the insurance company to break their contract without paying your claims will close down or reincorporate there. Then they'll still charge you more if you live somewhere where healthcare is more expensive (like McAllen, TX) so you haven't actually saved anything. But hey, now it's explicitly interstate trade,so the federal government can regulate the fuck out of it.

The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.

Has the self-driving car at last arrived?