First of all, i agree with you almost exactly about all the reasons why i am not personally very interested in VR. It just doesn't mesh with the way i play games.
_However_, if Nintendo wanted to go that route they would have to do one of two things. First, they could allow more than one VR set to be used at the same time. The only way i could see them making it "affordable" for the system to support multiple VR viewpoints is if most of the hardware was in the headsets themselves while the "console" acts as a server to keep them coordinated. However i'm not sure if that's really feasible.
The _other_ thing they could do (either independently or in addition to the above) is make the game simultaneously playable in VR and on a normal TV. The TV might duplicate the viewpoint of the VR player or show some other viewpoint, depending on the game. The other people in the room might have some part to play in the game, either directly via controllers or by relaying information verbally to the VR player (imagine a more complicated version of "pin the tail on the donkey,") or they might just act as observers. (Presumably offering snide commentary and/or laughing at the player's mistakes.)
In any case, i think Nintendo needs to have _some_ kind of gimmick for the NX. I used to think it might be good enough for Nintendo to come out with more advanced hardware that was on par with the PS4 and XBOne, allowing 3rd parties to easily port games over to expand the library, but the rumors of PS4.5 and XBOne.1 seem to indicate that Sony and Microsoft won't be sitting still long enough this generation for that tactic to be successful.
"The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?"
I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it? The things i really like rarely make the semifinals and even more rarely win, but i don't feel compelled to invent some "SJW" conspiracy to explain it. (The fact that people _still_ insist on using that term to create a singular enemy out of nothing is just mind boggling.) A bunch of LGBT people and their friends got on a celebratory high because of the social progress their cause has been seeing lately. Because they're a relatively small part of the overall voting base they had a disproportionate effect on the awards for the shorter works, which usually get less attention. (For the exact same reason those are the categories that the Puppies have had the most success in.) Did they go a little overboard in their enthusiasm in this case? Maybe. But it is far from the first time the Hugos (or any other awards) has gone through some kind of phase, nor will it be the last i expect. It would have blown over soon enough, but the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign and have only prolonged the problem.
"I think it's not so much that they hate his books, and more that they hate Scalzi the man, and that pretty much because he hated them first.
My respect for Scalzi plummeted when I read him taunting Larry Correia on Twitter. I've met 5-year-old children with more good manners and dignity."
Many of the people who ended up founding the Puppies had a hate on for Scalzi years before the Hugo kerfuffle. I don't know what started in back in the day, but it's certainly been long standing and mutual. A lot of the stuff i've seen from the anti-Scalzi side has been filled with bile and hate, while i rarely see that from the pro-Scalzi side. But like everyone else i do have a biased viewpoint.
I've got to say though the goodreads link you shared doesn't really make a good case for what you're claiming. Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general. And Correia himself isn't coming off sounding very well in his response to it.
" I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year."
See, this is conflating two different issues, and is probably a fundamental part of the whole problem to begin with. There is a group of LGBT people amongst the Hugo voters (not an organized groups trying to control the vote in some sinister manner, just a Venn diagram type group of people who happen to have similar viewpoints) but there is a far larger, far older overlapping group, the "fen". These are the people who have been going to conventions forever, who _run_ the conventions and who hobnob with the authors and each other at those conventions, and write the fanzines and do the podcasts and all that other stuff. They participate heavily in WorldCon and the running of the Hugos and so of course the results of those awards tend to reflect their tastes.
And i can tell you that for any self-selecting fan group that runs their own awards if you create something that panders to that group it has much higher odds of winning. The degree and style of pandering varies between contests, but it's always there. Tha
The millennials at the company i work for seem to be, on average, hardworking and productive members of the team. The people who are a little older and have been with the company for five or ten years may still have a leg up on them, but that's because of experience which is obviously something that only comes with time.
Perhaps the hiring practices at your company need improvement? Or maybe you need to adapt more? What does "can't function without their cell phones" mean exactly anyways?
"the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain."
IANAAP, but i suspect the argument goes like this: if you're pointing a radio telescope at a comet you actually point it at the comet and take observations from the comet, you're not paying attention to any stars that happen to be near it because that's not what you're trying to observe. What is theorized to have happened in this case is that they were taking observations from the star as a comet passed in front of it, and the signal from the star was presumably modulated (or whatever the correct technical jargon is) by the comet's atmosphere, producing a signal you would not see when looking at either a comet or a star alone.
The fact that it hasn't happened many other times despite there being a lot of comets around is that space is big. You just won't believe how etc, etc.
It's a pretty simple theory and it's pretty easy to test, the only difficulty being actually getting telescope time. The only reason other astronomers are complaining is because they don't want to give up their own telescope time combined with the usual in-field competitiveness.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to play the corruption game yourself. Get a bunch of like minded citizens together, take up a collection, and hand your politicians paper bags of money. Most people don't want to do this, so the system goes on as it always has. FYI, local politics is way more corrupt than national politics, but the scale is smaller so it's less noticeable.
That's not the _only_ way. In the democratic/democratic-republic countries the politicians in question _are_ elected. All you need is a significantly large portion of the populace that is well informed and willing to look deeper than the surface ads and soundbites and vote for the honest politicians who are willing to change the system. There _are_ honest politicians. They can be difficult to distinguish from the well camouflaged crooks and liars and normally operate at an evolutionary disadvantage, but if the voting populace actually paid attention to what actually happened between elections it would be possible to pick out the honest people after a couple election cycles.
So a significant block of well informed voters with a long attention span who are willing to prioritize honesty over the usual left vs right pandering.
...okay, maybe your method is the only _practical_ way.
"Not only will it clone cattle, but the factory, which will be located in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, will also cater to more specific needs by genetically engineering police dogs and thoroughbred race horses."
It gets a brief mention in the title and then the body focuses on cows, dogs, and horses rather than the part about cloning humans???
Actually checking TFA, it says:
"There are currently no plans in the pipeline to clone and produce humans in a bid to eradicate disease, but Xiaochun has said that this can change if people become more open to the idea of it."
So it sounds like the cloning humans is just a "hey, we could do this at some point" thing, and not part of the initial plan of operation?
In any case, i'm not sure why this is a good solution to a demand for more meat. In the long run (and possibly even the short run) doing a little more research and building a cultured meat factory would probably be a lot more cost effective than cloning the entire cow.
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"
I understand that the current tech is really great for what it does, and i'm sure a ton of FPS/3PS and cockpit racing/combat fans will jump right in.
However i'm a fan of strategy and RPG games, particularly 2D ones. The only 3D game i've played a great deal of in the last several years has been Minecraft. (And given some of the jump scares i've experienced in that i'm not sure i'd _want_ to be more immersed in it.)
I also tend to multitask a lot. Currently i'm playing Stardew Valley and i'm constantly tabbing back and forth between the game and various guides and forums and spreadsheets. I'll also frequently be paying-half attention to whatever show my SO is currently watching at the time, or put on some show of my own in the background if she's not watching something. I'm unsure of how any of that would work well with VR. AR maybe, but not VR.
So is there something i'm totally missing about the appeal? Or am i just not the target audience?
I got into the twitter game late, earlyish 2011, and i'm still using it.
A quick check reveals that, loosely grouped, of the 79 people i follow, 27 are personal friends, 18 are authors (because i'm a SF/F nerd,) 7 are what i'm calling group/event accounts (conventions, meetup groups, etc), 5 are musical artists, 5 are minor geeky celebrities, 5 are "joke" accounts (Emo Kylo Ren being one of the most recent examples) 4 are themed accounts (pictures of cute animals, pictures of people doing dumb things, etc), 4 are internet friends that i've never met in person, and 4 are food trucks.
So in general my rational uses are keeping in touch with friends, keeping abreast of events (usually on a smaller and more personal scale,) and being entertained.
The advantage of twitter over choosing to "just follow blog updates of my favorite artists/devs via a web scrapper" is that A: i don't have to create/edit a web scapper, and B: honestly these days i don't seem to have time to keep up with writing my own blog much less reading everyone else's. There are some days where i can't even keep up with twitter and some stuff falls off the edge into the abyss. (Which in some ways is a nice feature, since that way i'm not tempted to go back and catch up from where i last left off. Unlike, for example, podcasts, where i'm currently stuck back in mid-2015 and gradually falling further and further behind.)
You can pick any demographic you care to name and some portion of it is on twitter. Award wining scientists, best selling artists, poor and struggling artists, famous celebrities, average joes, raging assholes, total idiots, famous movie stars, less famous TV stars, unheard of podcast "stars", restaurants, stores, libraries, events, etc.
So if you really hate the userbase, i guess you just hate the entire human race? Although it seems more likely you just don't have any cool friends on twitter and you're not very good at searching for content there and thus after a brief review you just think you hate the userbase.
As for hating the content... I've seen some very funny things said in 140 characters. I've seen some very profound things too. And of course i've seen even more things of interest linked from tweets. But it seems like a lot of people get a feeling of superiority out of hating on Twitter, and thus heap scorn on the idiotic tweets and users and without looking very hard for counter-examples. (And similarly for G+ as well, though presumably for entirely different reasons.)
What it says is "the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered" and then later "warmer than the global average of 1951-1980." And if you check the linked charts as mentioned before (this one being the most data intensive) you can see that the data goes back to 1880.
Reading comprehension is good. So is logic. If you apply both you can see that if the reference period of 1951-1980 is (on average) warmer than the years before 1951 (which is the case, -0.001 avg vs -0.235 avg) and 2016 is warmer than the reference period of 1951-1980 (+1.13 vs -0.001 avg,) then by the simple application of the transitive property you can determine that 2016 is warmer than the years before 1951.
This post really ought to be marked as redundant since i'm just details of the facts that i already pointed out in the first post, but unfortunately you still appear not to get it. Which means either you're a troll or... well, i don't want to get this marked as flamebait instead.
Just out of curiosity, where precisely do you believe it say recorded history began in 1951?
In particular, the charts and graphs linked in the article shows January temperatures going back to 1880. (And yes, this January was warmer than all of them.) I think you may be conflating different statements into a single assumption?
So if we want to get non-technical people to care about technical issues we just need to find some way in which it negatively impacts a popular sports, preferably during an important game or tournament.
So how do we get the NSA to screw up March Madness?
It's certainly not a perfect control, but it would be interesting if they ran the tests in the reverse order.
If in that "control" there was no correlation between the people who cheated in the first round and those who won in the second round, particularly if the amount of cheating in the "control" was less than the non-control, you could make an argument that winning in the first round of the non-control was what caused the increase in cheating of the second round of the non-control.
For that matter it would also be useful to have a third group that played two rounds with cheating available in both rounds. Would the total amount of cheating increase or decrease between rounds? Would the same people cheat both times, or would it vary based on how well they did in the first round, or would it be totally random?
"On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads"
Wow, that reader must consume a hell of a lot of news! If he (i'm guessing it's a he) is causing 20% of your traffic by himself you definitely deserve some compensation from him, but i'm not sure how $1 more a week is going to significantly impact your finances.
I know this is offtopic, but why the use of the word "tens" in the the summary? Perhaps it's a regional thing (western US here) but the term "dozens" seems much more natural to me. Unless you're talking about the very narrow range of 20-23 items i can't think of a good reason why "tens" would be preferred.
That explains neither how the design killed so many people nor what the better alternative would be.
From the description of the problem the only issue i can imagine is them is making the design so exact, and not building in any adjustability at all, that pilots with shorter than average arms would have trouble reaching the controls and pilots with shorter than average legs would have trouble reaching the pedals and etc. However i find it hard to believe that anyone, even the military, even when aggressively aiming for an "optimum average", would be so dumb as to build in absolutely no methods for adjusting the seat/controls/etc. And if they were actually that dumb it ought to be stated explicitly, because it's not a conclusion that a lot of people would jump straight to.
At semi-random intervals they should have inserted a couple frames of stuff that would actually need to be rated, to prevent the censors from just fast-forwarding or skipping large chunks, which i suspect is what actually happened.
A good introductory SW engineering project? I assume you've already done basic maintenance projects and such before and are looking for something entirely new. So i'd suggest starting out with a very small droid. If you keep the functionality limited it should be pretty cheap and simple to construct and program.
After that i think there are two paths you could take. Since you'll already have experience with motivators it should be simple to scale up a little and create some kind of vehicle. I would suggest a small one person speeder. Alternately if you're willing to branch out into high energy physics you could try to create your own blaster.
And if you're really ambitious and willing to learn both fields you could eventually work up to building your own fully armed and operational X-Wing! After which you'll have mastered all the basics and from that point on the sky's the limit!
(And don't get fooled! Some people might try to convince you that building a lightsaber is so easy that any man-child could do it. However along with requiring special skills that apparently aren't tought to the general public it also requires very rare and expensive materials of the highest quality. I assure you that if in a fit of petulant rage you try to create one without adequate training, using whatever leftover bits of crystal you're able to find lying around, you'll just end up with some crackling, sputtering piece of crap that will vent waste plasma all over the place and won't even be able to hold a coherent beam.)
Slashdot Mirror
First of all, i agree with you almost exactly about all the reasons why i am not personally very interested in VR. It just doesn't mesh with the way i play games.
_However_, if Nintendo wanted to go that route they would have to do one of two things. First, they could allow more than one VR set to be used at the same time. The only way i could see them making it "affordable" for the system to support multiple VR viewpoints is if most of the hardware was in the headsets themselves while the "console" acts as a server to keep them coordinated. However i'm not sure if that's really feasible.
The _other_ thing they could do (either independently or in addition to the above) is make the game simultaneously playable in VR and on a normal TV. The TV might duplicate the viewpoint of the VR player or show some other viewpoint, depending on the game. The other people in the room might have some part to play in the game, either directly via controllers or by relaying information verbally to the VR player (imagine a more complicated version of "pin the tail on the donkey,") or they might just act as observers. (Presumably offering snide commentary and/or laughing at the player's mistakes.)
In any case, i think Nintendo needs to have _some_ kind of gimmick for the NX. I used to think it might be good enough for Nintendo to come out with more advanced hardware that was on par with the PS4 and XBOne, allowing 3rd parties to easily port games over to expand the library, but the rumors of PS4.5 and XBOne.1 seem to indicate that Sony and Microsoft won't be sitting still long enough this generation for that tactic to be successful.
"The typical Sad Puppies member is not so much decrying "left-wing" as decrying SJW-ish works. Have you read "If You Were a Dinosaur My Love"? I refuse to believe that it was the best short fiction in its year, but it got nominated for the Hugo. Was it because it checked the right boxes... SJW themes, written by a woman?"
I didn't personally think those were the best works those years either, but do people really need to get so riled up about it? The things i really like rarely make the semifinals and even more rarely win, but i don't feel compelled to invent some "SJW" conspiracy to explain it. (The fact that people _still_ insist on using that term to create a singular enemy out of nothing is just mind boggling.) A bunch of LGBT people and their friends got on a celebratory high because of the social progress their cause has been seeing lately. Because they're a relatively small part of the overall voting base they had a disproportionate effect on the awards for the shorter works, which usually get less attention. (For the exact same reason those are the categories that the Puppies have had the most success in.) Did they go a little overboard in their enthusiasm in this case? Maybe. But it is far from the first time the Hugos (or any other awards) has gone through some kind of phase, nor will it be the last i expect. It would have blown over soon enough, but the Puppies made things infinitely worse by deciding to stage their campaign and have only prolonged the problem.
"I think it's not so much that they hate his books, and more that they hate Scalzi the man, and that pretty much because he hated them first.
My respect for Scalzi plummeted when I read him taunting Larry Correia on Twitter. I've met 5-year-old children with more good manners and dignity."
Many of the people who ended up founding the Puppies had a hate on for Scalzi years before the Hugo kerfuffle. I don't know what started in back in the day, but it's certainly been long standing and mutual. A lot of the stuff i've seen from the anti-Scalzi side has been filled with bile and hate, while i rarely see that from the pro-Scalzi side. But like everyone else i do have a biased viewpoint.
I've got to say though the goodreads link you shared doesn't really make a good case for what you're claiming. Scalzi's tweets, are certainly silly and juvenile (and really, you don't expect people to be silly and juvenile on twitter from time to time?) but they don't actually seem to be directed at Correia, just the Puppies in general. And Correia himself isn't coming off sounding very well in his response to it.
" I've never met anyone who genuinely believed that Redshirts was the best novel of its year, deserving of Hugo status; I've heard it is a light and fun read ("swashbuckling" maybe?) but it can't have been the best novel published that year."
See, this is conflating two different issues, and is probably a fundamental part of the whole problem to begin with. There is a group of LGBT people amongst the Hugo voters (not an organized groups trying to control the vote in some sinister manner, just a Venn diagram type group of people who happen to have similar viewpoints) but there is a far larger, far older overlapping group, the "fen". These are the people who have been going to conventions forever, who _run_ the conventions and who hobnob with the authors and each other at those conventions, and write the fanzines and do the podcasts and all that other stuff. They participate heavily in WorldCon and the running of the Hugos and so of course the results of those awards tend to reflect their tastes.
And i can tell you that for any self-selecting fan group that runs their own awards if you create something that panders to that group it has much higher odds of winning. The degree and style of pandering varies between contests, but it's always there. Tha
The millennials at the company i work for seem to be, on average, hardworking and productive members of the team. The people who are a little older and have been with the company for five or ten years may still have a leg up on them, but that's because of experience which is obviously something that only comes with time.
Perhaps the hiring practices at your company need improvement? Or maybe you need to adapt more? What does "can't function without their cell phones" mean exactly anyways?
"the young men of the governing class, are habituated to lead a life of luxury and idleness both of body and mind; they do nothing, and are incapable of resisting either pleasure or pain."
- Plato, The Republic, 380 BC
IANAAP, but i suspect the argument goes like this: if you're pointing a radio telescope at a comet you actually point it at the comet and take observations from the comet, you're not paying attention to any stars that happen to be near it because that's not what you're trying to observe. What is theorized to have happened in this case is that they were taking observations from the star as a comet passed in front of it, and the signal from the star was presumably modulated (or whatever the correct technical jargon is) by the comet's atmosphere, producing a signal you would not see when looking at either a comet or a star alone.
The fact that it hasn't happened many other times despite there being a lot of comets around is that space is big. You just won't believe how etc, etc.
It's a pretty simple theory and it's pretty easy to test, the only difficulty being actually getting telescope time. The only reason other astronomers are complaining is because they don't want to give up their own telescope time combined with the usual in-field competitiveness.
The only way to stop stuff like this is to play the corruption game yourself. Get a bunch of like minded citizens together, take up a collection, and hand your politicians paper bags of money. Most people don't want to do this, so the system goes on as it always has. FYI, local politics is way more corrupt than national politics, but the scale is smaller so it's less noticeable.
That's not the _only_ way. In the democratic/democratic-republic countries the politicians in question _are_ elected. All you need is a significantly large portion of the populace that is well informed and willing to look deeper than the surface ads and soundbites and vote for the honest politicians who are willing to change the system. There _are_ honest politicians. They can be difficult to distinguish from the well camouflaged crooks and liars and normally operate at an evolutionary disadvantage, but if the voting populace actually paid attention to what actually happened between elections it would be possible to pick out the honest people after a couple election cycles.
...okay, maybe your method is the only _practical_ way.
So a significant block of well informed voters with a long attention span who are willing to prioritize honesty over the usual left vs right pandering.
"Not only will it clone cattle, but the factory, which will be located in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, will also cater to more specific needs by genetically engineering police dogs and thoroughbred race horses."
It gets a brief mention in the title and then the body focuses on cows, dogs, and horses rather than the part about cloning humans???
Actually checking TFA, it says:
"There are currently no plans in the pipeline to clone and produce humans in a bid to eradicate disease, but Xiaochun has said that this can change if people become more open to the idea of it."
So it sounds like the cloning humans is just a "hey, we could do this at some point" thing, and not part of the initial plan of operation?
In any case, i'm not sure why this is a good solution to a demand for more meat. In the long run (and possibly even the short run) doing a little more research and building a cultured meat factory would probably be a lot more cost effective than cloning the entire cow.
Sir! The radar, sir! It appears to be... jamsed!
It is always a temptation to an armed and agile nation
To call upon a neighbour and to say: --
"We invaded you last night--we are quite prepared to fight,
Unless you pay us cash to go away."
And that is called asking for Dane-geld,
And the people who ask it explain
That you've only to pay 'em the Dane-geld
And then you'll get rid of the Dane!
It is always a temptation for a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say: --
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane.
It is wrong to put temptation in the path of any nation,
For fear they should succumb and go astray;
So when you are requested to pay up or be molested,
You will find it better policy to say: --
"We never pay any-one Dane-geld,
No matter how trifling the cost;
For the end of that game is oppression and shame,
And the nation that pays it is lost!"
I understand that the current tech is really great for what it does, and i'm sure a ton of FPS/3PS and cockpit racing/combat fans will jump right in.
However i'm a fan of strategy and RPG games, particularly 2D ones. The only 3D game i've played a great deal of in the last several years has been Minecraft. (And given some of the jump scares i've experienced in that i'm not sure i'd _want_ to be more immersed in it.)
I also tend to multitask a lot. Currently i'm playing Stardew Valley and i'm constantly tabbing back and forth between the game and various guides and forums and spreadsheets. I'll also frequently be paying-half attention to whatever show my SO is currently watching at the time, or put on some show of my own in the background if she's not watching something. I'm unsure of how any of that would work well with VR. AR maybe, but not VR.
So is there something i'm totally missing about the appeal? Or am i just not the target audience?
"The genetic roots of today's Irish, in other words, existed in Ireland before the Celts arrived."
So does that make them the original hipsters?
There are 2 types of people in the world.
1: People who categorize other people into lists of types.
2: People who don't.
I got into the twitter game late, earlyish 2011, and i'm still using it.
A quick check reveals that, loosely grouped, of the 79 people i follow, 27 are personal friends, 18 are authors (because i'm a SF/F nerd,) 7 are what i'm calling group/event accounts (conventions, meetup groups, etc), 5 are musical artists, 5 are minor geeky celebrities, 5 are "joke" accounts (Emo Kylo Ren being one of the most recent examples) 4 are themed accounts (pictures of cute animals, pictures of people doing dumb things, etc), 4 are internet friends that i've never met in person, and 4 are food trucks.
So in general my rational uses are keeping in touch with friends, keeping abreast of events (usually on a smaller and more personal scale,) and being entertained.
The advantage of twitter over choosing to "just follow blog updates of my favorite artists/devs via a web scrapper" is that A: i don't have to create/edit a web scapper, and B: honestly these days i don't seem to have time to keep up with writing my own blog much less reading everyone else's. There are some days where i can't even keep up with twitter and some stuff falls off the edge into the abyss. (Which in some ways is a nice feature, since that way i'm not tempted to go back and catch up from where i last left off. Unlike, for example, podcasts, where i'm currently stuck back in mid-2015 and gradually falling further and further behind.)
You can pick any demographic you care to name and some portion of it is on twitter. Award wining scientists, best selling artists, poor and struggling artists, famous celebrities, average joes, raging assholes, total idiots, famous movie stars, less famous TV stars, unheard of podcast "stars", restaurants, stores, libraries, events, etc.
So if you really hate the userbase, i guess you just hate the entire human race? Although it seems more likely you just don't have any cool friends on twitter and you're not very good at searching for content there and thus after a brief review you just think you hate the userbase.
As for hating the content... I've seen some very funny things said in 140 characters. I've seen some very profound things too. And of course i've seen even more things of interest linked from tweets. But it seems like a lot of people get a feeling of superiority out of hating on Twitter, and thus heap scorn on the idiotic tweets and users and without looking very hard for counter-examples. (And similarly for G+ as well, though presumably for entirely different reasons.)
Death... by SnOO-SnOO!
What it says is "the record for the hottest month in recorded history has been shattered" and then later "warmer than the global average of 1951-1980." And if you check the linked charts as mentioned before (this one being the most data intensive) you can see that the data goes back to 1880.
Reading comprehension is good. So is logic. If you apply both you can see that if the reference period of 1951-1980 is (on average) warmer than the years before 1951 (which is the case, -0.001 avg vs -0.235 avg) and 2016 is warmer than the reference period of 1951-1980 (+1.13 vs -0.001 avg,) then by the simple application of the transitive property you can determine that 2016 is warmer than the years before 1951.
This post really ought to be marked as redundant since i'm just details of the facts that i already pointed out in the first post, but unfortunately you still appear not to get it. Which means either you're a troll or... well, i don't want to get this marked as flamebait instead.
Just out of curiosity, where precisely do you believe it say recorded history began in 1951?
In particular, the charts and graphs linked in the article shows January temperatures going back to 1880. (And yes, this January was warmer than all of them.) I think you may be conflating different statements into a single assumption?
So if we want to get non-technical people to care about technical issues we just need to find some way in which it negatively impacts a popular sports, preferably during an important game or tournament.
So how do we get the NSA to screw up March Madness?
Well why don't you just go take over the world, see if I care!
It's certainly not a perfect control, but it would be interesting if they ran the tests in the reverse order.
If in that "control" there was no correlation between the people who cheated in the first round and those who won in the second round, particularly if the amount of cheating in the "control" was less than the non-control, you could make an argument that winning in the first round of the non-control was what caused the increase in cheating of the second round of the non-control.
For that matter it would also be useful to have a third group that played two rounds with cheating available in both rounds. Would the total amount of cheating increase or decrease between rounds? Would the same people cheat both times, or would it vary based on how well they did in the first round, or would it be totally random?
"On an average day, more than 20 percent of the traffic to WIRED.com comes from a reader who is blocking our ads"
Wow, that reader must consume a hell of a lot of news! If he (i'm guessing it's a he) is causing 20% of your traffic by himself you definitely deserve some compensation from him, but i'm not sure how $1 more a week is going to significantly impact your finances.
I know this is offtopic, but why the use of the word "tens" in the the summary? Perhaps it's a regional thing (western US here) but the term "dozens" seems much more natural to me. Unless you're talking about the very narrow range of 20-23 items i can't think of a good reason why "tens" would be preferred.
That explains neither how the design killed so many people nor what the better alternative would be.
From the description of the problem the only issue i can imagine is them is making the design so exact, and not building in any adjustability at all, that pilots with shorter than average arms would have trouble reaching the controls and pilots with shorter than average legs would have trouble reaching the pedals and etc. However i find it hard to believe that anyone, even the military, even when aggressively aiming for an "optimum average", would be so dumb as to build in absolutely no methods for adjusting the seat/controls/etc. And if they were actually that dumb it ought to be stated explicitly, because it's not a conclusion that a lot of people would jump straight to.
(For example, many users are frustrated by Samsung's TouchWiz skin, as well as the bloatware resulting from deals with carriers.
https://xkcd.com/859/
(An unmatched left parenthesis creates an unresolved tension that will stay with you all day.
But I think ransomware operators are worse, and need to be strung up by the fucking balls.
It's this kind of sexism that keeps women out of the Russian ransomware field.
Actually, if this punishment was successfully implemented then very soon i expect there would be _only_ women in the Russian ransomware field.
At semi-random intervals they should have inserted a couple frames of stuff that would actually need to be rated, to prevent the censors from just fast-forwarding or skipping large chunks, which i suspect is what actually happened.
A good introductory SW engineering project? I assume you've already done basic maintenance projects and such before and are looking for something entirely new. So i'd suggest starting out with a very small droid. If you keep the functionality limited it should be pretty cheap and simple to construct and program.
After that i think there are two paths you could take. Since you'll already have experience with motivators it should be simple to scale up a little and create some kind of vehicle. I would suggest a small one person speeder. Alternately if you're willing to branch out into high energy physics you could try to create your own blaster.
And if you're really ambitious and willing to learn both fields you could eventually work up to building your own fully armed and operational X-Wing! After which you'll have mastered all the basics and from that point on the sky's the limit!
(And don't get fooled! Some people might try to convince you that building a lightsaber is so easy that any man-child could do it. However along with requiring special skills that apparently aren't tought to the general public it also requires very rare and expensive materials of the highest quality. I assure you that if in a fit of petulant rage you try to create one without adequate training, using whatever leftover bits of crystal you're able to find lying around, you'll just end up with some crackling, sputtering piece of crap that will vent waste plasma all over the place and won't even be able to hold a coherent beam.)