Falcon9

Yeah, we slowly "outlasted" the coworkers and now it's just us over here. Management is happy, we're happy, old coworkers have jobs elsewhere. Side note: we only brought the good parts of the "gang" over, left the deadweight behind.

We had to do this the old fashioned way with my current team: One person gets in the door at the new company, talks up the abilities of the old team members and how they would slot in nicely with new company's needs and gets another person in, then another until the old team is fully reunited in the new company. We've been a very effective unit once we removed the road blocks in the new company!

Possible answer from the script's "notes" page: "the degree hanging in her office is aspirational. she would've gotten it. It's a reminder of everything she gave up"

"They couldn’t force me to have an online presence after all."

Read your terms of enlistment, soldier. They can and they do.

Yeah, most manufacturers would be happy with that deal. It isn't what Amazon is doing though.

When I sell to CostCo, I'm very happy to manufacture their house-branded vitamin C in exchange for them carrying my premium name brand vitamin C in stores as well. I make money on both products. (Heck, I as the manufacturer pay money out of my own pocket to advertise that CostCo branded vitamin C.)

Just a point of discussion:

> “Exactly,” agreed Danielle, “and just like with the previous project, the model will get some wrong, but this will be outweighed by the cost savings of not having to check every single gadget.”

And that's how we consumers go from being able to receive a 100% reliable product every time (i.e. "Quinn's team works very hard to avoid penalties") to needing to go through the hassle/delay/cost of returns. Sure the QA department "has to pay" for the return, but does that economic model accurately include the cost of lost goodwill?

Thanks, dang. It was once true that a surefire way to rack up a large amount of karma in HN was to make a nasty, uncharitable statement like that. I've experienced the weird ridiculous thrill of it myself, on another account, along with the deflating realization that I'm being rewarded (such as it is, karma having no actual value) for participating in the destruction of civilized discourse. I appreciate you actively stepping in and articulating the argument against such "parlor games" and the drive to make HN different in that way, even though I've seen that it doesn't always win you fans in the community.

Hey, as long as they buy a new telescope and do their best to make the measurements they're proposing then there's nothing shifty going on here as far as I can make out. Obviously nobody has to give anyone any money. (I am always a little extra skeptical of GoFundMe funds for specific projects though since the funds are transferred even if the goal is not met.)

Huh? You're buying an account that gives you the ability to further buy monthly access to a living, changing world, and nobody reasonable who forked over money to Blizzard expected or expects otherwise.

My initial thoughts were that such density in Ironforge is not much compared to Vanilla or TBC high pop realms(1) from back in the day(2), and that latency is painful to watch. Then he went outside and that explained the latency and also represented probably the largest crowd I've seen in one place. I hope Morhaime and some of the other guys at Blizzard see this video.

(1)By calling it a realm instead of a server I suppose I out myself as a former WoW GM.

(2) Fairly typical player density early in Vanilla (in an atypical and hillarious situation): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ_WdYvwrDA

I have to say I agree with the casino's lawyer:

"Baccarat is a game of pure chance," Christopher Pymont, Genting’s lawyer said in court. "It is not a game of skill, it is not a game of mixed skill and chance."

"You are not supposed to know what is coming out of the shoe," he said. "Those are the rules."

That said, the court doesn't seem to agree that it's quite so cut and dried, essentially saying that if Ivey didn't have the croupier rotate certain cards for him (manipulating the cards via the croupier) and instead had some other method of identifying high and low cards then it would not have been cheating.

Of course, as Daniel Negreanu puts it (bluntly): "Big fish sets all the rules, okays all the rules, they need to eat it when they get beat and not be whiny biatches about it."

Very easy? I'd say "possible" at best. And now you've got access to a battle.net account. Took a heck of a lot more work than asking someone for username/pass in a live chat, and what you gained access to is worth a heck of a lot less. Plus Blizzard actually does keep backups and records and will be able to fix the situation for the account owner.

I'd be surprised if ever a Blizzard account was compromised by someone sending in a false picture.

Hello, Of Course I Still Love You, nice to land on you.

[I love that SpaceX has the Falcon and the Dragon, and that the autonomous landing drones are named for starships in Ian M. Banks' Culture series. Cool technology _should_ get cool names.]

Where in Vegas do you live/shop/drive?

I mean I grew up in Southern California. Now I live in Vegas. I go to the grocery store and I have to be on full alert to make sure I don't hit some random pedestrian who decides for the fifth time in the day to play Russian roulette by stepping into the middle of the street to cross without even looking up to see if anyone is noticing. At the grocery store, people are walking around like zombies in pajamas that they seem to have been wearing for the past three days straight. I leave the grocery store and load up my car, then I push my empty cart to the cart collection bin. When I get back to my car someone else is loading up their car, with their cart behind my car. I get in my car and wait to finish and when they do, they leave their cart behind my car and drive away. Not to mention the very sad sacks who spend all their time and money in the casinos.

The people here are poor, and my perception is that they don't have much hope and/or desire to affect any kind of change in their life. They just seem not to give a crap.

I don't live in a nice part of town, and I suppose it could just be culture shock for me personally having moved from Irvine to Not-Summerlin, Vegas, but that's my perception.

Where do you draw the line? Should I legally be allowed to run my own League of Legends client that is current version - 0.0.1 since that's no longer available to players, and offer all skins/runes at a fraction of the cost to my user base?

There is something of a problem here, but the solution (as ever) is not a simple one.

And the customer service concerns are an interesting consideration as well - Game Masters use ever evolving tools (which evolve with the game client) to be able to more effectively help players. Changing the client will break the tools which will require new tools to be developed, new policies to be developed around those tools, new (or really, old but forgotten) types of solutions for game issues that have been obsoleted.

Just imagining this small aspect of the overall challenge makes it clear to me that this type of server just would never happen on an official basis - so many cross-linked considerations and it's really hard to make a business case for almost any of them, even if it would be a lot of fun from a player point of view. Which means that allowing a volunteer community like Nostalrius is really the ideal, outside of the reality of the law which requires protecting intellectual property in all cases in order preserve it in the cases where you really want to. Could some kind of official license be made available specifically for Nostalrius?

Yeah, it's hard to make the business case for leaving money on the table - with every expansion comes change and change much more than the expansion cost is really what is causing the gating effect.

I'd wager so since you own a book, not the content of the book. But the law is a funny thing.

Cheap housing, cheap decent food options, access to all-you-can-eat-entertainment, relative proximity to SoCal/beach all factor in as well. But the Summer is miserable (IMO) and the people here just don't give a crap about life, so it can be pretty draining to live in Vegas as well.

And with Xcode 7 you can deploy apps to your iOS devices with a free dev account.

The writing is poorer in RPO, but the exuberance and energy of the story itself made that not matter for me.

I enjoyed it, though less than Ready Player One which has a similar vibe. I was amused that my Google-employed friend docked it a star for showing Google as a nerdy utopia which she did not feel began to accurately reflect the truth of the company.

So that it would self-fulfill the prophecy and Julie would be safe instead of headline news for some terrible reason.

It's already happening without Twitter's involvement.

There's a whole marketplace of influence out there, if you only start asking the right people. Want a cute but not overly bright reality TV star to tweet about your handbag company? There's a price for that. Looking instead for a popular recording artist to mention your viral video? Pricier, but very doable. Of course, Twitter doesn't get a share of this money.

I wonder if he actively realizes that the persuaders on Social Media are inevitably for sale to the highest bidder (albiet with veto power over things they may actually care about)? [I know how much it costs for Martha Stewart to send a tweet about your business... I don't love this world we live in.]

It may be a little painful to watch John who doesn't really have any idea what's going on, but he's managed to make quite a fair amount of progress through trial and error and lots of outside help (both good and bad advice) - but mostly it's completely fascinating to me to see physically this historic device, a solid state machine using only TTL chips with no CPU/RAM/ROM - plus the tools used to diagnose and address issues on the chip level. Also -- hooray for industry standards allowing replacement of a chip from another random board produced a decade later.

Is it really? That's awesome.

A fabulous example of a chess hustler in action (against a Grandmaster): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5vnpOp0U_g

This shows a hustler "strategy" not mentioned in the article around 2:25, as well as the recommended move of switching the clock position when you're playing as Black.

Filmed as part of The Tim Ferriss Experiment TV show (available on iTunes!)