okreallywtf

I would say that the looking glass games (thief, systemshock, etc), and the games that they inspired are a good place to start (deus ex and its sequels, the bioshock games, everything by Arkane right now [Prey is great]). The witcher games are incredibly rich, but since they do have books as source material I don't know if I would include them as much. I always thought the Psychonauts story and writing was great and an example of something that didn't have to be gritty, dark and dramatic.

I think games with the best stories often allow a lot of freedom to the player and just like in books, we all put some piece of ourselves into the protagonist. No movie will ever quite do justice to the character take part in creating. Add to that the fact that a lot of great story based games allow for choices that reflect our version of the character and it becomes impossible to have one vision that encompasses all of that.

Not only that, but imagine how many services you and your family and friends use that could be compromised? It could end up costing you unless you and your family pull out of all your online services.

The ultimate irony would be if your bank(s) got compromised by your but and some of your money was lost.

I've thought of this for the shift keys, I find that certain key combinations that require shift are a lot more awkward for my hands to do and I wonder if year after year eventually that is going to give me arthritis or increase the chances of it. I think that with a pedal it might make +, -, {, }, (, ) etc much easier on the hands to complete since they account for the worst stretches my hands have to make.

Good point. I don't think those issues cannot be resolved though, but it is one of those things that might not be as cut and dried as it seems. I wonder if biodegradable or recyclable bags made of paper or something else are the best of both worlds?

There are likely to be longer term positive effects of banning plastic bags as well though. Plastic bags don't biodegrade, but they do seem to break up into little bits and can make it into the food supply through fish and maybe other animals. I have a hard time believing that plastic bags as they are are an actual good solution to the problem of needing to get food to your house.

To me, the ideal solution to plastic bags is the same as the solution to most environmental problems: correctly account for the cost of the environmental damage and add that to the cost of the product (the company can chose to eat it or pass it on to the customer). I know that correctly calculating the cost is probably tricky but still. That would fix a lot of our environmental issues. Gas and coal are only cheap when we don't factor air quality into the equation.

I'm curious why I'm getting downvoted for this, it seems to be a pretty clear comparison to me.

First, are you seriously suggesting that they were popular for the reasons that you personally prefer them?

Second, even if it did cause an outbreak what does that tell us about how endemic hepatitis was already? Is that not an issue already that it was all around us such that simply changing the habits of our shopping bags could cause this problem? It sounds like there is a deeper issue that needs to be addressed.

I'm sympathetic to your particular issues and I hope that there is an acceptable middleground for people with your situation but these seem like some serious edge cases to me. That is not to say that I expect you to have to suffer because you are an "edge case", but I don't see why we can't essentially ban something that is a problem overall while still finding a way to protect your health needs.

I feel guilty when I get a soothie somewhere and don't have my straws and decide to go ahead and get a plastic one because I really want to drink it on the way home. Definitely good to have though. You need a nice pipette thing to clean them but it really isn't that hard.

Just to play devils advocate on this, this isn't very free market. How is this not clearly choosing winners and losers? What about the plastic bag producing companies and their shareholders? The government is choosing multi-use bag makers over single use bag makers.

I feel like this is "common sense" enough that people don't fight it, but if it is a more complex (and more important) issue like climate change and banning polluting power sources, it all the sudden becomes an ideological and philosophical issue and we have to just wait until the economics are just right to see whether we'll survive or not.

Why can't we treat polluting our air and water in the same way? Just because we don't have to see the pollution blowing around the roadway we aren't going to worry about it?

OK, so how long do you wait? How sure of a thing do we need? By that logic we wouldn't do anything. Do you think coal got started with a sure thing?

How is it we're more concerned with wasting some money than the possibility of catastrophic climate change? This is why the federal government should be more involved with combating climate change - nobody is willing to risk their money, or their power bill going up, even if it means essentially saving the world and/or our way of life.

Carbon capture seems like a bigger wildcard to me than battery technology. Battery technology has been improving pretty steadily and will likely continue to do so.

Capturing carbon from coal power plants adds cost to something that is already not cost effective. Capturing carbon in the atmosphere likely will require huge amounts of power - and if its not 100% renewable power its kind of pointless.

Nuclear is better than coal or natural gas, but there have been some high profile failures lately and the lead time on new nuclear is so high, as well as the sticker price.

They've had one for years too, I remember being pretty young and them being the only chain almost (aside from taco bell) that we could go to. It isn't a good veggie burger really, but at least they tried.

I thought they handled 1) by acknowledging that paying for "faster" service was really just paying for the service they used to get by default. They weren't really creating a fast lane as much as artificially slowing down the normal lane, which is I think an apt analogy.

As for 3, that seems kind of a stretch. I thought they did a half decent job, I don't think it does more harm than good for sure.

Sorry, it appears I can't edit it now. This is one of many accounts, you could take your pick, but at this point to have hope that things are going to turn out OK you have to ignore expert opinion and listen to conspiracy theorists essentially. For once, the doom-and-gloom predictions are coming from the mainstream and the "we'll be fine" predictions are coming from those on the fringes.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/nov/05/carbon-e...

How could this affect US solar prices/watt over the next 10 years or so? People seem to be taking a "this could be good in the long run" approach but there seems to be evidence that we don't have a "long run" to tackle climate change [1]. We seem to be playing chicken with a freight train and hoping that the economics will allow us to survive (because capitalism is more important than survival, essentially).

I'm not saying this is a bad move necessarily (I'm not entirely against protecting domestic industry to some extent), I'm just wondering if we were able to muster the collective will to take climate change seriously and do more than just let the market do its thing and hope for the best, how seriously could this affect the total cost? If we were to need to install 500GW of solar power over the next 5-10 years, would this dramatically increase the cost of that effort? Is it remotely possible that domestic production could accommodate a massive public push for solar?

Its being downvoted because it brings nothing to the conversation.

I don't know why this got downvoted, this is a pretty common theme across America. Look at the Alabama senate race and pretty much every race in North Carolina for examples. This, as well as gerrymandering, has lead to the disproportions in the house and state governments. Democrats being concentrated makes it much easier to have close races in terms of total votes cast per party, but disproportionate representation.

I see your point. Is it possible to achieve that type of functionality with a reasonable expectation of security?

Would allowing organizations to manage their own key(s) suffice? If all of the stored data was encrypted by the users (even if it was a single key for a client organization), that would do a lot. You would have to compromise the private key(s) for the organization as well as Slacks (now useless) data.

Minix is going to take over any day, just you wait and see!

I used to like reading papers but its been quite some time since I gave myself the dedicated time to do this. I only allow myself 5 minutes on any topic before I'm off to something else. Someone posted the links to the papers and after looking at the intro I realized I had everything I needed to understand the meltdown paper (and it seems, spectre) from my grad architecture class (shoutout to tomasulo!). Sitting down in the evening and reading through the meltdown was such a nice change of pace from my normal routine. I took notes and wrote down questions about parts that didn't make sense, and when I got to the end I found it so much more rewarding than reading some pop tech synopsis. I don't mean this in a superior way or that I'm special because I understood the paper, it was more about stretching my CS legs in a way I don't on a daily basis as a developer.

I might have less of an understanding about the real world implications until I look at the impacts, but people around me have been talking about it (at work, etc) and I realized they all had a pretty limited understanding of the vulnerability and how it worked (not because they aren't smart, they just didn't have time to read the actual paper and are more focused on how this affects us at work).

I want to make this a part of my normal routine, every week or so to pick an interesting, well written paper on a meaningful CS topic and have a leisurely, scholarly read like I used to do in school (well, in school there wasn't too much leisure to it).

I'm less familiar with Spectre than Meltdown but part of the issue to me seemed to be that everything hinged on the principal of memory isolation. To the point where all of physical memory was mapped from the kernel which was mapped to the user address space. It felt to me like having 1 great big lock and assuming it couldn't be broken.

I get that when you make the assumption that you cannot depend on memory isolation a lot goes out the window, but could there be a more layered approach that lessens the damage done when some assumption like that is challenged or is it appropriate to wait until that time to make changes?

The amount of damage possible when that assumption is chosen to be false seems to warrant considering changing the way process memory is mapped. This is at a software level but its similar to what you were saying, when is speed and performance going to be sacrificed for preemptive security measures? I'm sure that it already is in some ways since all security has a performance hit, but allocating processes and virtual memory is such a core feature of the kernel that I can imagine the performance hit could be significant (or was it just laziness to map all of physical memory to the kernel address space?)

My question would be - how are you supposed to know when to replace the battery? You can judge your battery capacity fairly decently yourself - if the phone used to be at 40% after a day of hard use and now it barely makes it to bedtime you know its degraded. Measuring relative performance of the phone would be very difficult to gauge yourself. Granted, in both situations you could have other issues (unknown apps running etc), but if you aren't changing anything about your phone for the most part you'll know when the battery is not doing as good as it has. You then know to replace it.

Even if this isn't planned obsolescence, it is tangential to it. They know they are putting a new phone out every year or so, and they are hedging their bets that people will move to it so this decision makes total sense for them financially. It feels underhanded even if not fraudulent, they made a decision that is better for them than you. God forbid you have to charge your phone during the day?

How? Did you mean to say tax pollution from petroleum powered vehicles?

Note: this doesn't mean despair and do nothing. I'm not saying this is what you mean't, just feel like we need to point that out because despair is very counterproductive. Also, this doesn't mean that climate mitigation is the only choice either, it is still cheaper to "diet" than it is to "exercise" to use a weight loss analogy. Lowering CO2 emissions is still going to slow climate change and hopefully give us time to come up with other mitigation strategies.

Was that part of the platform anywhere? I'm saying that the left has taken advantage of procedural stuff themselves (and therefore, haven't tried to fix the loopholes) and have for recent years suffered greatly because of it.

I honestly don't think that they've used as sleazy of tactics to get what they want (such as denying a president a supreme court appointment) but I don't have hard data to back that up other than a couple recent examples.

I'm saying they need to make it part of their platform. Someone has to be adult enough to realize that restoring our democracy to a more working order is essential. That means gerrymandering, campaign finance, filibusters etc.

I have to disagree, not because I want to though. One party has shown itself time and time again to put the interests of business far above those of the consumer and in many cases, act totally contrary to what opinion polling shows their constituents actually want on issues like gun control and net neutrality [1][2].

Given the fact that we only have 2 viable parties (yes it would be nice if that weren't the case but it is), what choice do we have but to dogpile on the party that responds at least somewhat to what constituents want and consistently supports pro-consumer policies? Sure both parties take money from wall street, but which one actually tries to protect the consumer from the excesses of wall street? People just keep saying "well they are all corrupt", don't look at who takes money and how much look at how their opinions and actions change after they take the money!

I'm against false dichotomy and false equivalencies. The only avenue I see is to make democratic reforms part of the democratic party platform where we prevent these problems in the long term. That will show if they can be a truly mature party, one that is willing to give up power to restore long term viability to our democracy.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/10/0... [2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2017/12/12...

It does remind me a bit of the trickle down economics. They are making it sound like that the only thing holding them back from massive innovation is profits lost to regulations and as soon as we get rid of those the floodgates will open - but they never do. The ISPs are going to use that money to consolidate their power, buy more companies that depend on their infrastructure and shovel money back to their shareholders and drive their stock price up. This is exactly what is going to happen with the tax bill (and is already happening due to the expectation of a tax bill), we're being sold that companies have been right on the cusp of increasing wages and hiring if it weren't for those pesky taxes they had to pay. When the jobs and wages don't come, they'll blame something else and down the road they'll take away another important thing, like labor protections or something. And we'll fall for it (collectively), its like a mystery box or something, we can't resist the idea of the free market as this chained beast that just has to be released and it will solve everything with no oversight or maintenance.

Just to make sure I understand, conservatives said that it would be a disaster if the ACA signed into law?

Assuming that is what you meant: just because that was not true doesn't mean that NN is not important. Granted, there is some fear mongering and worst-case thinking going on, but in the end I think that there is valid reasoning behind NN fears, just like the claims about the ACA were provably exaggerated at the time.

This kind of reminds me how the Iraq war is being used to sow distrust of the intelligence services now. Because there were mistakes made during a republican administration that was hell-bent to go to war in Iraq, we shouldn't trust them now when there is immense agreement about the Russian hacking and propaganda campaign.

What exactly were the other methods so that we all know?

Don't forget that ISP's have been buying up media companies and vice versa, this hasn't always been the case. We now have a situation where huge amounts of media have moved from traditional networks (cable, UHF, satellite etc) to the internet. This makes it incredibly appetizing to own the networks being used and offers a huge financial incentive to prioritize your own goods over others.

Factor in the way that corporations have been operating over the last decades (shareholder value is the number 1 priority) and you really do have a recipe for disaster for the consumer and small businesses.