Not really. It's just that the average person really doesn't need the equivalent of a 1980's supercomputer sitting on their desk for reading e-mail and surfing the web. It used to be that you required a PC to do anything related to computing, and that's just not the case anymore. I was talking to my parents the other day, and told them that when they were ready for their next computer, they should probably just get a simple tablet and hook up a keyboard to it. Anything more for them is just unnecessary overkill, and does more harm than good. They're in their 70's, and are intimidated by technology, so the simple capabilities of a tablet seem best for them.
Personally, I'm running a 6 year old PC as my main development machine. It was a high-quality PC at the time, costing over $4K. GPU is outdated (I opted for quiet operation rather than the most power), but since my own game isn't really pushing any hardware limits to speak of, that's fine. It's still as snappy as ever. I'll honestly don't even know when I'll consider upgrading, so long as it keeps running.
It's sometimes odd to hear others pronounce code, because it may not align with your own mental map of how things should be pronounced. I remember getting mildly distracted when watching one of Stephen Lavavej's videos because he would call shared_ptr "shared putter" (with the u pronounced similar to 'put'). Why would you abbreviate the sound when it's not any shorter than "pointer"?
When reading code by myself, though, I think the translation to a phonetic translation happens quite subconsciously, because I'm typically not aware of it at all. It obviously happens to some extent, or I wouldn't have been bothered by STL's reading. So, trying to think it through (which I haven't done before, really), I can assure you that == would never be "equal equal". It would be "is equal to". "cout" is not "kowt", but "see-out". And I use > so infrequently, I think I don't even bother with a mental pronunciation.
No, it's absolutely not about brute-force searching. The search space for Go is so massive that even the fastest computers really can't do exhaustive, brute-force searches for a solution. That's part of what made an AI winning at high-level Go such a milestone. To give you some context: the search space for Go is significantly larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.
I agree that it's a bit silly to call these algorithms "AI", but they're not nearly as simplistic as you're making them out to be. To be effective, the algorithms have to do a massive amount of heuristics-based culling before it can start searching for solutions, or else it would get bogged down in the math, no matter how fast it was.
My understanding is that cabbages can also sense when they're under attack. They emit a chemical signal that attracts wasps, who then feast on the herbivore invaders. Pretty cool, evolutionary warfare. It's led to some extraordinary adaptations in nature's brutal eat or be eaten battle arena.
That bug in the corner of the screen just bugged me too much. I'm probably a bit weird about stuff like that, but those things drive me to distraction. So I voted with my wallet, and canceled.
Also, $15 extra a month for one channel? Ehh... no. Those are "add-on" prices only for someone used to cable's exorbitant $100 a month plus fees. Maybe when I don't have to think about my budget quite as much... Too bad, as I've heard good things about Westworld.
As a professional videogame developer, I approve of this trend. Except that we need to get women playing more videogames as well. For equality, of course.
I prefer to delve deeper into the few languages I already know and use on a daily basis, and focus on mastering my craft with those particular tools. My feeling is that I'm better served by focusing on a few languages that I'll actually be using. As interesting as it may be to pick up Haskell or Prolog, I can't think of how I'd even want to use those languages in my current development efforts. I've got plenty of projects without inventing new ones simply for the sake of learning a language.
As for learning new languages, I do that as the need arises. I entered the workforce knowing Pascal and C/C++, and subsequently learned Lua, C#, Objective-C, HLSL, GLSL, Bash, and Python.
I released my first open source project a while ago. So far, not much interest other than me. On the plus side, it means my project's "community" is extremely harmonious.
You wasted 30 minutes of your life on this? Let's never mind the fact that it's your *life* you wasted and look at from an economic standpoint. You make how much per hour? Indian in call center makes how much per hour? I don't see how you are winning.
I'm guessing he counted that in his "entertainment" time allotment.
In any case, I'd prefer to call this a "public service" rather than a "waste of time". Those 45 minutes he forced them to spend was 45 minutes they could NOT spend scamming some other poor soul who might be genuinely bamboozled by these scum.
As much grief as Microsoft gets for it's Windows 10 shenanigans (and rightly so, IMO), for any corporation who relies on Windows already, it seems like upgrading to Windows 10 isn't such a bad idea. As far as I can see, we're pretty much past the point of major internal structural changes with Windows. The last really big one was Windows Vista, which changed the driver model, rewrote major systems (like the audio stack), etc. As a developer, I'd imagine those are the sorts of things that cause compatibility issues. In-version upgrades can sometimes have this effect, of course, but it's certainly more rare.
Since Windows 10 is supposed to be the last version of Windows (or most accurately, it's the last branded version of Windows), this skirts around a lot of the old OS update pain, since MS has done a lot to improve the OS's in-place update capabilities over the last couple of years. And of course, corporations have a LOT more control over upgrade scheduling, telemetry exfiltration, and so on.
Really, it's consumers that tend to get the raw end of Windows 10. Corporations are obviously Microsoft's preferred customers.
Yes, and all that costs you is the ability to run and deploy the software that's critical to your infrastructure.
I happen to know someone who works in a small city IT dept. As far as I understand it, they're a 100% Windows department, mostly because all the software the city uses is available on Windows. Unless that software the city depends upon actually runs and works on the OS you're advocating, there's precisely zero chance it will ever happen. There is some very specialized (and expensive) software that, for instance, police departments use internally for most of its day to day operations. If there's any alternative OS support, it's for mobile like Android or iPad, so officers can connect to city systems and access data remotely using an iPad or similar device.
So, no. No one is going to be switching to FreeBSD, because none of the software they actually need to use is available on FreeBSD. It would be great if this weren't the case and we had more competition on the desktop, but wishing it were otherwise doesn't change the hard reality of the situation.
I think you're correct. When I was growing up, our family lived on a quarter acre plot of land, which is pretty big for most suburban plots, with a decent-sized garden in back with very good river-basin soil. We couldn't even completely feed our own family of four with that large garden. A single isle unit will likely be ravaged into barren emptiness within the first few days, after which it will take weeks to "restock" itself, during which time it's completely useless to the store. This should be obvious to anyone who looks at the large amounts of highly perishable items that are put on display every morning at a decently-sized supermarket. No matter how efficient hydroponic farming is, I don't see how it can keep up with supermarket demands at that small scale.
Supermarkets are mostly distribution centers, and in some limited cases, preparation centers, not places to grow food. The idea is to pack as much selection into as small a space as possible with as wide a variety of goods as possible. I just don't see how this can really work in practice.
Good for him. I'm going to be in the same boat as this guy in a year or so, and I've actually given quite a bit of thought to how to deal with the issue of people sharing my game. It's going to happen, so for those that want the game for free, I was thinking of releasing a special version of the game with a small Paypal button or something like that in the credits menu. But I don't want it in the retail game for paying customers. So... I dunno, upload it to Pirate Bay myself with "PayPal=true" in the game's config file? That way people can make sure they're getting a clean, signed, malware-free package as well (for instance, on Mac, the entire app is signed, data and all, unlike Windows where just the exe is signed). Maybe. I've got some time to think about what to do.
That being said, my game will be DRM-free (on platforms where I have a choice in the matter), so there won't be a need for keys. That just seems like a pain in the ass for no good reason. I did notice that this dev had a DRM-free version available too, and he joked it would have been much easier if they had uploaded that version. I wonder why he'd bother with releasing both DRM'd and DRM-free versions?
Interesting, sounds like he's gotten pretty attuned to some of those specific words and phrases. Like I said, I had a cat, so I don't have any first-hand experience with a dog's capacity to understand speech. You'll forgive my initial skepticism though, I hope, as I've noticed that people tend to anthropomorphize their pets to a pretty significant degree, but obviously you see his responses every day and know him best.
Basically, the gist is that dogs process speech in very much the same way humans do, according to some new(ish) research that used brain-scanning techniques while talking to dogs using a variety of techniques. From the article:
“So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant.... This appears to contradict the idea that dogs only understand tone of voice and do not have an idea of the words actual meaning. While they might respond tentatively to a praising tone using words they do not understand – or even insults – they are only genuinely happy when they understand the praise they are receiving.
Probably seems pretty obvious to you though, I guess.;-)
Nothing so grandiose. Just small class that randomly corrupts bytes in a memory buffer or string. Basically, it first chooses a random 0-100% odds of corruption, then iterates through each byte in the buffer, and if another random value is greater than the corruption odds, I replace the existing byte with a random one. Stupidly trivial, but still caught a number of crashes in rare corner cases I probably never would have found any other way.
It took a tiny bit more work to set up the test scenario, which was to create an array of sample scripts (called the "corpus", as I understand it), then loop through those in a parallel array (in two phases, as I mentioned), starting with a known seed value so I can reproduce a crash as needed. Not counting the embedded corpus scripts, it was less than 150 lines of code.
Yes, how dare a security researcher make a suggesting that might help a project find and mitigate future bugs after discovering some very serious issues using the aforementioned techniques. I mean, it's not like security is a core feature of a VPN anyhow. I'm sure they have much better things to do with their time than to harden their library using well-known methodologies that many others are using to enhance security and robustness their products.
Just curious... do you think that some of that understanding is based on contextual clues? For instance, "let's go to bed" would tend to come at night, and "do you want a piece of chicken" may come when it's already available for him to smell and associate with your words. I've heard dogs are very social animals, attuned to obeying a pack leader (you), so when you order him out of your chair, he may be responding to other non-verbal cues you give him as well, and then perhaps later associated the phrase. I'm not suggesting that he doesn't understand quite a bit, as there are plenty of examples of dogs learning lots of verbal commands, but I wonder about the possibility of it being enhanced by general situational awareness.
On the other hand, I was *terrible* at understanding my cat, and being a cat, she didn't care much about what I had to say either. I forgot to unlock her kitty door once, and she came meowing at me. I thought it was cute how she wanted attention, and later felt like an idiot for not understanding her after I spotted the door. Her communication seemed obvious in retrospect. Then again, cats can be nicely blunt about what they want. If she wanted attention, she'd just jump up on my chest as I was reclining on the couch. Message received, head-scratching commencing...
Fuzzing is essentially harnessing the power of our modern computational power in a brute force fashion, combined with the knowledge that many errors (especially crashes), by nature, can be leveraged into an exploit.
In my own scripting language project, I have two fuzz tests I perform - I first fuzz a set of source scripts, and in another test, I fuzz a set of compiled bytecode, which exercises both the lexer/parser and runtime interpreter phases. I didn't even bother with a library either, just a small routine that randomly swaps and corrupts source from the original. It's really amazing how simple something like that will catch so many bugs.
Honestly, I was implementing this just for the sake of robustness. No one but me is using the library yet, and it's just for local use in my game engine. But if you're connected to the internet in any way, there's really no excuse these days for not having a set of fuzzing tests you regularly run during your normal regression testing, and there are some great libraries available to help do this. You can even leverage Google's massive computational resources for testing for free (perhaps even get paid a small bounty) if your project is important enough, which OpenVPN certainly is. Hopefully the OpenVPM devs/maintainers take note of this and make this happen, and we'll all be more secure for it.
BTW, if you ever want to read about an incredibly comprehensive test and regression suite, check out SQLite's description of their testing methodology: https://www.sqlite.org/testing...
That's the problem with offering players a lot of choice: it's hard as hell to resolve vastly diverging storylines* in any meaningful way, what with limited time and budgets. But honestly, it felt like Bioware didn't even try. Worse, they actually pulled a Sean Murray (back then, it was just known as "lying") in describing the ending, saying how it would be far more than a "choose A, B, or C". It's hilarious and sad, because that's exactly what we got.
I'm glad I didn't even bother with the latest mess of a Mass Effect, glitchy animations aside. I figured EA would somehow destroy Bioware. I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
* Many games, including one I worked on, address this through converging storylines. The stories arcs diverge early, but then come together at a later point. Otherwise, it's too much work to create completely separate third-arc stories and set-piece battles, which are typically among the most labor-intensive in the game. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than a lame A/B/C choice.
Except that it was more or less a one-hit wonder in the videogame world. It attracted a lot of attention for its novelty and visual flair, but ultimately, didn't hold up so well in the gameplay department.
The videogame industry went through their "interactive movie as a game" phase a few decades ago. Maybe media companies need to do the equivalent. I suspect it will probably end in the same way.
Sorry, for the confusion. I completely botched that line in a last minute edit. What I meant to say was:
Among all hourly wage earners earning minimum wage (3.9 percent), minimum wage earners 25 or younger account for 3% of the total. That is, over 75% of minimum wager earners are 25 years old or younger. Make more sense?
Your point about ranges above minimum wage jobs are well taken, but I'd imagine we can probably extrapolate from these "bottom rung" numbers a bit, meaning the demographics of "near minimum wage" are probably fairly similar to "at minimum wage", with gradual demographic shifts as the wages go up. That said, I hesitate to engage in too much speculation without hard numbers to look at. That would be somewhat hypocritical of me, given my earlier post.
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Not really. It's just that the average person really doesn't need the equivalent of a 1980's supercomputer sitting on their desk for reading e-mail and surfing the web. It used to be that you required a PC to do anything related to computing, and that's just not the case anymore. I was talking to my parents the other day, and told them that when they were ready for their next computer, they should probably just get a simple tablet and hook up a keyboard to it. Anything more for them is just unnecessary overkill, and does more harm than good. They're in their 70's, and are intimidated by technology, so the simple capabilities of a tablet seem best for them.
Personally, I'm running a 6 year old PC as my main development machine. It was a high-quality PC at the time, costing over $4K. GPU is outdated (I opted for quiet operation rather than the most power), but since my own game isn't really pushing any hardware limits to speak of, that's fine. It's still as snappy as ever. I'll honestly don't even know when I'll consider upgrading, so long as it keeps running.
It's sometimes odd to hear others pronounce code, because it may not align with your own mental map of how things should be pronounced. I remember getting mildly distracted when watching one of Stephen Lavavej's videos because he would call shared_ptr "shared putter" (with the u pronounced similar to 'put'). Why would you abbreviate the sound when it's not any shorter than "pointer"?
When reading code by myself, though, I think the translation to a phonetic translation happens quite subconsciously, because I'm typically not aware of it at all. It obviously happens to some extent, or I wouldn't have been bothered by STL's reading. So, trying to think it through (which I haven't done before, really), I can assure you that == would never be "equal equal". It would be "is equal to". "cout" is not "kowt", but "see-out". And I use > so infrequently, I think I don't even bother with a mental pronunciation.
No, it's absolutely not about brute-force searching. The search space for Go is so massive that even the fastest computers really can't do exhaustive, brute-force searches for a solution. That's part of what made an AI winning at high-level Go such a milestone. To give you some context: the search space for Go is significantly larger than the estimated number of atoms in the universe.
I agree that it's a bit silly to call these algorithms "AI", but they're not nearly as simplistic as you're making them out to be. To be effective, the algorithms have to do a massive amount of heuristics-based culling before it can start searching for solutions, or else it would get bogged down in the math, no matter how fast it was.
My understanding is that cabbages can also sense when they're under attack. They emit a chemical signal that attracts wasps, who then feast on the herbivore invaders. Pretty cool, evolutionary warfare. It's led to some extraordinary adaptations in nature's brutal eat or be eaten battle arena.
That bug in the corner of the screen just bugged me too much. I'm probably a bit weird about stuff like that, but those things drive me to distraction. So I voted with my wallet, and canceled.
Also, $15 extra a month for one channel? Ehh... no. Those are "add-on" prices only for someone used to cable's exorbitant $100 a month plus fees. Maybe when I don't have to think about my budget quite as much... Too bad, as I've heard good things about Westworld.
As a professional videogame developer, I approve of this trend. Except that we need to get women playing more videogames as well. For equality, of course.
I prefer to delve deeper into the few languages I already know and use on a daily basis, and focus on mastering my craft with those particular tools. My feeling is that I'm better served by focusing on a few languages that I'll actually be using. As interesting as it may be to pick up Haskell or Prolog, I can't think of how I'd even want to use those languages in my current development efforts. I've got plenty of projects without inventing new ones simply for the sake of learning a language.
As for learning new languages, I do that as the need arises. I entered the workforce knowing Pascal and C/C++, and subsequently learned Lua, C#, Objective-C, HLSL, GLSL, Bash, and Python.
I released my first open source project a while ago. So far, not much interest other than me. On the plus side, it means my project's "community" is extremely harmonious.
This is presumably about getting people off XP or Vista, which never had a free upgrade path.
You wasted 30 minutes of your life on this? Let's never mind the fact that it's your *life* you wasted and look at from an economic standpoint. You make how much per hour? Indian in call center makes how much per hour? I don't see how you are winning.
I'm guessing he counted that in his "entertainment" time allotment.
In any case, I'd prefer to call this a "public service" rather than a "waste of time". Those 45 minutes he forced them to spend was 45 minutes they could NOT spend scamming some other poor soul who might be genuinely bamboozled by these scum.
Also, that's Mary Jo Foley, msmash, unless she has an evil twin I don't know about.
As much grief as Microsoft gets for it's Windows 10 shenanigans (and rightly so, IMO), for any corporation who relies on Windows already, it seems like upgrading to Windows 10 isn't such a bad idea. As far as I can see, we're pretty much past the point of major internal structural changes with Windows. The last really big one was Windows Vista, which changed the driver model, rewrote major systems (like the audio stack), etc. As a developer, I'd imagine those are the sorts of things that cause compatibility issues. In-version upgrades can sometimes have this effect, of course, but it's certainly more rare.
Since Windows 10 is supposed to be the last version of Windows (or most accurately, it's the last branded version of Windows), this skirts around a lot of the old OS update pain, since MS has done a lot to improve the OS's in-place update capabilities over the last couple of years. And of course, corporations have a LOT more control over upgrade scheduling, telemetry exfiltration, and so on.
Really, it's consumers that tend to get the raw end of Windows 10. Corporations are obviously Microsoft's preferred customers.
Yes, and all that costs you is the ability to run and deploy the software that's critical to your infrastructure.
I happen to know someone who works in a small city IT dept. As far as I understand it, they're a 100% Windows department, mostly because all the software the city uses is available on Windows. Unless that software the city depends upon actually runs and works on the OS you're advocating, there's precisely zero chance it will ever happen. There is some very specialized (and expensive) software that, for instance, police departments use internally for most of its day to day operations. If there's any alternative OS support, it's for mobile like Android or iPad, so officers can connect to city systems and access data remotely using an iPad or similar device.
So, no. No one is going to be switching to FreeBSD, because none of the software they actually need to use is available on FreeBSD. It would be great if this weren't the case and we had more competition on the desktop, but wishing it were otherwise doesn't change the hard reality of the situation.
I know it's passé to read TFA, but:
Volvo's safety engineers began filming kangaroos' roadside behaviour in a nationally recognised hotspot for collisions in 2015.
There's a picture of a Volvo vehicle with "Kangaroo detection data collection vehicle" printed on its side.
So... they're working on it, with good training data.
I think you're correct. When I was growing up, our family lived on a quarter acre plot of land, which is pretty big for most suburban plots, with a decent-sized garden in back with very good river-basin soil. We couldn't even completely feed our own family of four with that large garden. A single isle unit will likely be ravaged into barren emptiness within the first few days, after which it will take weeks to "restock" itself, during which time it's completely useless to the store. This should be obvious to anyone who looks at the large amounts of highly perishable items that are put on display every morning at a decently-sized supermarket. No matter how efficient hydroponic farming is, I don't see how it can keep up with supermarket demands at that small scale.
Supermarkets are mostly distribution centers, and in some limited cases, preparation centers, not places to grow food. The idea is to pack as much selection into as small a space as possible with as wide a variety of goods as possible. I just don't see how this can really work in practice.
Good for him. I'm going to be in the same boat as this guy in a year or so, and I've actually given quite a bit of thought to how to deal with the issue of people sharing my game. It's going to happen, so for those that want the game for free, I was thinking of releasing a special version of the game with a small Paypal button or something like that in the credits menu. But I don't want it in the retail game for paying customers. So... I dunno, upload it to Pirate Bay myself with "PayPal=true" in the game's config file? That way people can make sure they're getting a clean, signed, malware-free package as well (for instance, on Mac, the entire app is signed, data and all, unlike Windows where just the exe is signed). Maybe. I've got some time to think about what to do.
That being said, my game will be DRM-free (on platforms where I have a choice in the matter), so there won't be a need for keys. That just seems like a pain in the ass for no good reason. I did notice that this dev had a DRM-free version available too, and he joked it would have been much easier if they had uploaded that version. I wonder why he'd bother with releasing both DRM'd and DRM-free versions?
Interesting, sounds like he's gotten pretty attuned to some of those specific words and phrases. Like I said, I had a cat, so I don't have any first-hand experience with a dog's capacity to understand speech. You'll forgive my initial skepticism though, I hope, as I've noticed that people tend to anthropomorphize their pets to a pretty significant degree, but obviously you see his responses every day and know him best.
I did a quick search on the subject, and found this article you might find interesting: http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Basically, the gist is that dogs process speech in very much the same way humans do, according to some new(ish) research that used brain-scanning techniques while talking to dogs using a variety of techniques. From the article:
“So dogs not only tell apart what we say and how we say it, but they can also combine the two, for a correct interpretation of what those words really meant. ... This appears to contradict the idea that dogs only understand tone of voice and do not have an idea of the words actual meaning. While they might respond tentatively to a praising tone using words they do not understand – or even insults – they are only genuinely happy when they understand the praise they are receiving.
Probably seems pretty obvious to you though, I guess. ;-)
Nothing so grandiose. Just small class that randomly corrupts bytes in a memory buffer or string. Basically, it first chooses a random 0-100% odds of corruption, then iterates through each byte in the buffer, and if another random value is greater than the corruption odds, I replace the existing byte with a random one. Stupidly trivial, but still caught a number of crashes in rare corner cases I probably never would have found any other way.
It took a tiny bit more work to set up the test scenario, which was to create an array of sample scripts (called the "corpus", as I understand it), then loop through those in a parallel array (in two phases, as I mentioned), starting with a known seed value so I can reproduce a crash as needed. Not counting the embedded corpus scripts, it was less than 150 lines of code.
Yes, how dare a security researcher make a suggesting that might help a project find and mitigate future bugs after discovering some very serious issues using the aforementioned techniques. I mean, it's not like security is a core feature of a VPN anyhow. I'm sure they have much better things to do with their time than to harden their library using well-known methodologies that many others are using to enhance security and robustness their products.
Just curious... do you think that some of that understanding is based on contextual clues? For instance, "let's go to bed" would tend to come at night, and "do you want a piece of chicken" may come when it's already available for him to smell and associate with your words. I've heard dogs are very social animals, attuned to obeying a pack leader (you), so when you order him out of your chair, he may be responding to other non-verbal cues you give him as well, and then perhaps later associated the phrase. I'm not suggesting that he doesn't understand quite a bit, as there are plenty of examples of dogs learning lots of verbal commands, but I wonder about the possibility of it being enhanced by general situational awareness.
On the other hand, I was *terrible* at understanding my cat, and being a cat, she didn't care much about what I had to say either. I forgot to unlock her kitty door once, and she came meowing at me. I thought it was cute how she wanted attention, and later felt like an idiot for not understanding her after I spotted the door. Her communication seemed obvious in retrospect. Then again, cats can be nicely blunt about what they want. If she wanted attention, she'd just jump up on my chest as I was reclining on the couch. Message received, head-scratching commencing...
Fuzzing is essentially harnessing the power of our modern computational power in a brute force fashion, combined with the knowledge that many errors (especially crashes), by nature, can be leveraged into an exploit.
In my own scripting language project, I have two fuzz tests I perform - I first fuzz a set of source scripts, and in another test, I fuzz a set of compiled bytecode, which exercises both the lexer/parser and runtime interpreter phases. I didn't even bother with a library either, just a small routine that randomly swaps and corrupts source from the original. It's really amazing how simple something like that will catch so many bugs.
Honestly, I was implementing this just for the sake of robustness. No one but me is using the library yet, and it's just for local use in my game engine. But if you're connected to the internet in any way, there's really no excuse these days for not having a set of fuzzing tests you regularly run during your normal regression testing, and there are some great libraries available to help do this. You can even leverage Google's massive computational resources for testing for free (perhaps even get paid a small bounty) if your project is important enough, which OpenVPN certainly is. Hopefully the OpenVPM devs/maintainers take note of this and make this happen, and we'll all be more secure for it.
BTW, if you ever want to read about an incredibly comprehensive test and regression suite, check out SQLite's description of their testing methodology: https://www.sqlite.org/testing...
That's the problem with offering players a lot of choice: it's hard as hell to resolve vastly diverging storylines* in any meaningful way, what with limited time and budgets. But honestly, it felt like Bioware didn't even try. Worse, they actually pulled a Sean Murray (back then, it was just known as "lying") in describing the ending, saying how it would be far more than a "choose A, B, or C". It's hilarious and sad, because that's exactly what we got.
I'm glad I didn't even bother with the latest mess of a Mass Effect, glitchy animations aside. I figured EA would somehow destroy Bioware. I just didn't expect it to happen so quickly.
* Many games, including one I worked on, address this through converging storylines. The stories arcs diverge early, but then come together at a later point. Otherwise, it's too much work to create completely separate third-arc stories and set-piece battles, which are typically among the most labor-intensive in the game. It's not a perfect solution, but it's better than a lame A/B/C choice.
Except that it was more or less a one-hit wonder in the videogame world. It attracted a lot of attention for its novelty and visual flair, but ultimately, didn't hold up so well in the gameplay department.
The videogame industry went through their "interactive movie as a game" phase a few decades ago. Maybe media companies need to do the equivalent. I suspect it will probably end in the same way.
I hope they don't stop scanning e-mails. Their spam filters wouldn't be very effective otherwise.
Intent is everything.
Sorry, for the confusion. I completely botched that line in a last minute edit. What I meant to say was:
Among all hourly wage earners earning minimum wage (3.9 percent), minimum wage earners 25 or younger account for 3% of the total. That is, over 75% of minimum wager earners are 25 years old or younger. Make more sense?
Your point about ranges above minimum wage jobs are well taken, but I'd imagine we can probably extrapolate from these "bottom rung" numbers a bit, meaning the demographics of "near minimum wage" are probably fairly similar to "at minimum wage", with gradual demographic shifts as the wages go up. That said, I hesitate to engage in too much speculation without hard numbers to look at. That would be somewhat hypocritical of me, given my earlier post.