nihilocrat

> I've worked in environments like that. Unfortunately, the open space looks like "not working" to people and is highly visible. Since no one wants to be publicly seen as not working, they just ended up being a very nicely decorated and inviting ghost town.

FYI, this is exactly what happens to luxurious and inviting game rooms at videogame companies.

This one's particularly great:

http://youtu.be/1-zhdU4GSBA

You can tell there are pretty often some weird syncing errors, but hey, it's worth it for stuff like this.

Drone attack.

Just to clarify, I'm not wearing a tinfoil hat, I just have seen the circumstances of some drone attacks: against US citizens in places where no war was declared and with collateral damage shrugged off. From the US perspective, it is an easy means of getting rid of people they don't like with neither the need for judicial proceedings nor formal declaration of war. The only thing that is really stopping them right now is that Assange is currently in a highly populated part of the UK, and not in the middle of nowhere in Yemen.

If they did that here, we'd need to find a new CEO... but the programmers would be in good shape.

Am I the only one who can't read this graph? It looks like it's rotated 90 degrees and there's no time axis so I don't see what this is representing. I don't understand what the legend for the Y axis means.

I also think government dilutes the effectiveness of the experts it employs, but at the same time the private sector is amazingly, exceedingly incapable of seeing benefit from anything but immediate profits. Investing in highly risky pilot programs which have high costs and uncertain benefits is something the private sector, except perhaps a few optimistic billionaires, would never do. If we had never supported difficult-to-quantify never-never projects, we wouldn't be finding exoplanets, we would have never discovered that asteroids are clumps of unfathomably abundant resources, we would have never gotten to the Moon, and Europeans would never have explored the New World, because the benefits at the time seemed dubious and the funding came from governments.

I am optimistic just because I have a high amount of trust for German government. They are a lot more cautious and less bandwagon-hopping and more capable of pulling stuff like this off whereas for most other industrialized governments the Energiewende would just be a dramatic stage show created by former-execs-turned-bureaucrats to put taxpayer dollars into contractor's pockets without any concern for actual results.

This is not really possible if you are working on a mass-market product, like a videogame. Financial success is synonymous with publicity, so if you STFU you will almost certainly not succeed.

Sure, you don't need to brag about it or post sales figures directly on your site (Minecraft), but people are going to notice and often try to clone your game.

"If you destroy publicly funded research, you leave us in a situation where only the big corporations can afford the drastic security precautions needed to continue biotechnology research - and you therefore further promote a situation you say you are trying to avoid."

Considering the scary amount of money and power Monsanto has, and the terrifying things they do with their GM patents, this is probably be best argument if you are convinced GM plants are evil.

Well, that and the fact that it's /research/ and not the industrial growing of GM foods.

Why recharge when you can just replace the batteries in such a situation? It would make for a better show, anyways.

Crytek deserves all the praise they get for their hard work in rendering...

...but...

Why are we conditioned to think that "the future of gaming" is solely a function of a game's audiovisual quality? I would like to see a "future of gaming" video that shows off highly-interactive (rather than just very pretty) gameworlds and characters. NPCs that notice you are trying to put a bucket on their heads, for example.

I don't feel the analogy is entirely accurate. Imagine having to learn 5 "if" statements, or 10 ways to say "++". In a spoken conversation, you don't get to look up the API docs if you forgot something. However, most programmers are likely at least bilingual because most programming books are in English and many companies in non-English countries use English as a common language.

However, I do feel there's some similarities between constructing a possibly-correct sentence and seeing if it actually works, and constructing some possibly-correct code and seeing if it compiles.

What you are doing is called code-switching:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching

I use "exploiting" in a more technical sense here. An exploit is using a bug in the game for personal gain, in an always-on multiplayer game with an economy affecting all players, the permanent effects of an exploit can be much worse. That's not what's happening here, because no bugs are necessarily being exploited (though maybe at one point they were; a buggy drop rate resulting in excessively high yields for farmers, for example) but the farmers tend to get lumped in with the exploiters in the developer's mind because the exploit/fraud departments of customer service work pretty closely together.

Gold farming has generally been considered a fraud of sorts, because it can seriously damage the in-game economy or the player perception of the economy, and many gold farmers perform actual fraud (creating accounts with fake or stolen CC numbers).

Actually, there's a major shift in the industry (to "free to play") that companies have been making. Basically, the company provides an in-game item shop where players can use real money to buy in-game items. These shops accomplish pretty much what this guy was doing, but keep the money in the company purse, and circumvent many of his limitations: there's no need to farm the game when you make the game, and you can sell items which farmers could never obtain.

In almost all cases, it has meant a higher amount of revenue, either for brand-new games or for games which transition to the F2P model or an in-between hybrid model. It looks like, generally, big-name MMORPGs are still starting out with a subscription model, but most games at other tiers are launching free-to-play with an item shop. Lots of long-running MMOs are transitioning to a hybrid model to add revenue to a product from which little is expected but also little is being spent on (just enough money to keep the servers running and keep a slow flow of updates).

I think it would be much harder these days for a player to make money by through farming, except for with the old guard of MMORPGs which still don't have an item shop. I could be wrong, I am not looking at these economies closely so I don't know if the farmers are actually able to provide items / prices competitive with the developrs.

I work at a company that makes MMOs. If this guy's statements are true, then he was making significantly more money exploiting an MMO than I do by programming one.

The irony is staggering.

I believe NYC is implementing a bike-share program like the ones in Montreal, London, and other cities. Basically, you pay a subscription fee (or you can just pay as you go, of course) to get a bike from a docking station, ride it to another docking station closest to your destination, and push it into the station and forget about it.

The biggest problem, which does not at all make the system impractical, seems to be the availability of working bikes and open docks at the stations you choose. The city (Montreal) seems to have trucks that go around and redistribute bikes fairly often based off of the real-time data the stations give them. Still, there have been several situations where during peak hours there are favorite "pick-up" and "drop-off" points, meaning there are no bikes for you to pick up, and if you do get a bike, there is no space at the station where you want to drop it off. There is usually a bike or two that's broken down at each station, so it's important to put every bike through a few tests to avoid frustration.

For me, the times that it was the most useful was either to commute, supposing a bike was actually available, or to get home after a late night out after the metro has closed. I hate taxis and will only take one at last resort, it was awesome to just take a bike back home.

I overall liked it but it's difficult for me to justify the added cost, since I'm not about to get rid of my metro pass. I would probably end up saving money if I replaced my pass with bikes and packs of metro tickets if I really wanted to, but that would not work during the winter when the stations go away.

Move to Canada?

It's easier than moving to the US. :)

This sounds like the most common reaction to users accidentally causing errors in data: lock everything down and only allow a very specific operation, and complain loudly and specifically (i.e., incomprehensibly) if they get out of line, in order to protect the data. Did someone find a new way to screw up? Add another restriction.

I sometimes wonder why these interfaces are so freaking common for anything not facing the general public.

You can't compare seeing human beings interacting in a "true 3D", real-life setting to the same thing happening on a screen. You don't get depth perception, and there are artifacts of recording in video and audio (even in modern HD shows) that make a real-life scene distinctly different. I don't know scientifically how that's important, I just know there's a difference. You know there's a difference if you ever see someone on TV and then see them in real life for the first time.

A remote doesn't explore causality inside the media, it's only exploring "when I press a certain button it will switch to a different show which is not of my choosing and which I can't predict". They might correllate pressing the same numbers with the same show at the same time of the day. The "camera angle" interactivity in live theater doesn't get into causality at all, just different ways you can look at or listen to a scene, but in videogames causality is rarely so random.

Think of it at a very basic, I-don't-know-what-TV-or-videogames-are level: I press the channel up button on the remote, the image suddenly changes to something entirely different. If I do this a few hours later, the former image and the latter image are entirely different from before. Let's even assume I'm watching Netflix and I've figured out how to navigate menus: the menu is interactive, but the media I'm watching doesn't give me any control over what's happening inside the media. In a videogame, if I press a button a character will move, a gun will shoot, a menu will open. If I do the same thing a few hours from now, the same thing will happen. A different thing might happen in a predictable context: if my dude is in front of a wall he might climb the wall rather than jump when I press A, it's generally bad design to allow otherwise. The link between cause and effect is much more clear, and my role as an agent of cause is much more clear as well.

There is a cool German word for companies like Facebook or Google, which collect mounds of information about their users: Datenkrake : http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Datenkrake

Video games allow the user to interact with the media and cause reactions to input. It allows us to explore causality at a very personal level, even though the systems and entities invovled are entirely virtual.

Live theater allows the user to control what to focus on during each scene. If there is a conversation, we can choose who the "camera" is pointing at. We are also looking at real human beings interacting with each other. The experience is mildly interactive.

Passive screen-based media gives us neither set of choices.

I've always been curious, regarding "speaking with a Southern drawl, with a stuffed-up nose from a bad cold" ... are there non-native English speakers here who have had particular difficulty using speech-to-text because of an accent? Have the British, Irish, Scottish, Australians, Canadians, Jamaicans, or South Africans had trouble because of their dialect?

Speech-to-text sounds like it will be a constantly tough problem. Even humans aren't 100% accurate, or even 99% accurate, depending on the circumstances.

Reminds me of Carl Sagan's musings on marijuana usage.

Insurance would not be quite as clear-cut, but I suppose it would be a sensible option. Companies would point to herd immunity (linked in the comments above) to avoid paying for vaccination for 30% or so of the population. I'm sure they have ways to put people into that 30%, and knowing them, they will try to cheat their customers of every penny they can.

For the record, since Netflix Canada launched sometime last year, it has been a streaming-only service. We have a kind of sucky selection that is getting better as time passes, but I can understand why they went streaming-only. From this perspective, it's pretty odd seeing people disapproving of the choice or showing attachment to the DVD service.

Here in Montreal (perhaps also in other large cities) I can order groceries online from any of the major supermarkets and have them delivered to me (mind you, I don't have a car) for a reasonable minimum order value and a mere $2-3 extra. Maybe you are intentionally not targetting these cities, otherwise the idea is not really new at all.

You want to see a grumpy clerk? Go to Switzerland and forget to put the little sticker on your bags of produce. Damn.

Because our main job skills do not revolve around self-promotion and manipulation of others.

The fact that human beings are capable of spending "an entire week devoted to thinking up ways of being cruel to another human being" when the other human being has been nothing but honest and welcoming is why I believe that we are an inherently evil species that doesn't deserve its place on this planet.

Basically the biggest trouble I have had learning a spoken language is in getting over the awkwardness of never being able to understand the other person or come up with a quick reply. You probably need to get used to sounding like an idiot all the time and constantly misunderstanding what people are trying to say. Then, get used to people switching to English even though that's really not helping your situation. If you have no trouble with that, you're much better off than I am.

Another useful skill that I alluded to is the ability to quickly and accurately simplify your thoughts into words that you know in the language in question. You will learn that a lot of the time in English you are just adding layers and layers of nuance to what you are saying rather than more clearly saying what you are actually thinking.

That's a good point, but I think it's a similar issue to computer security. Yeah, changing your SSH port to a custom one isn't going to keep out someone who scans your ports, but it will keep out the millions of losers who are looking for easy prey and not bothering with a portscan. With each security measure that is potentially crackable, but harder, the pool of crackers that are going to put in the effort gets smaller.