Androsynth

I disagree. They patented a scientific process, which is what patents were originally designed for. This is a case where patents are actually not disgusting. (If I am misinterpreting the patent, please let me know)

Should chemists have not been allowed to patent the Haber Process? That is a chemical reaction. If chemical reactions are occuring all around us, isnt it disgusting to be able to patent it? No, because patenting a scientific process is a (the?) legitimate patent use case.

pull to refresh is a disgusting patent. Any of the patents mentioned recently by Samsung or Apple are disgusting. This isn't.

I think it would be possible if the forum tracked what you have viewed and then greyed out or made it noticeably different than what is new.

local storage would be sufficient to store the viewed pages without cluttering up a db on the server.

Chill out dude.

If you want to live in the bay area, you have to work for it. If you want to live on $10 a day, the point is you dont want to work for it. You can't have both.

Living on $10 a day can be done. Go build an earthship in Taos.

If anyone else wants to find out more about Edward Bernays, and how he created the field of public relations, I highly recommend the bbc documentary The Century of the Self. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Century_of_the_Self

It is very much in line with the quote that pteredactyl posted. He also did a lot of early work in consumerism and marketing.

Its easy for entertainers to make that joke. But history has shown that in general, people prefer independence over technology.

The US is experience the type of issues that all empires experience as they transition from plateau to decline (crushing bureaucracy, close ties between business and state, overwhelming federal debt, etc etc). Whats interesting is that the EU is trying its hardest to emulate those issues without actually ascending to an empire itself. They are copying an empire in decline. The EU is a cargo cult.

The product is the method. This is also true of MMOs, what would happen if you removed the xp bar from those games? The 'game' would practically cease to exist.

I know a lot of middle aged women who use fv as the main method of keeping in touch with friends and family. Their games are addicting, but no more than WoW or LoL. Those are considered 'real games', but there is a lot of crossover in the addiction mechanics.

This board hates Zynga a whole lot more than their customers do because we are not their customers. This board is the equivalent of someone from an older generation sneering with contempt as I spend 12 hours straight in a raid.

My point is not to disparage this board, but to point out that anyone who plays modern video games shouldn't look down on casual games, because both have fully embraced addiction as a fundamental mechanic (as television did a long time ago, although it has recently upped its intensity as well).

Zynga is devoid of any emotion or creativity and is only seeking to make money through addictive mechanics, but have you played any SOE or EA games lately?

>before everyone migrated for the cushy disease and war-ridden life agriculture offers

Cushy unless youre a peasant.

>Survival was a bitch until we figured out farming and trade

I think this is a misconception leftover from earlier eras. But I don't think it is the commonly accepted scientific viewpoint anymore. see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_society

note: this comment isnt directly about this post, it is comparing the comments of this post to the comments of one of yesterdays posts: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5006368.

Yesterday there was a debate about whether the spewing leaded gasoline fumes into the air was something that should be regulated by the govt or privately litigated. The pro-regulators handily won the votes battle, but this post is an example of why it is bad in a general sense.

The government is a giant complex system. It is also extremely prone to the slippery slope. If you allow the federal govt one new dept. they will make 5; if you allow the govt to increase budget by $1B, they will increase it by $100B; if you allow them to regulate one industry, they will regulate them all.

You can't judge the govt by a single mandate, you have to judge it as a whole. This is why federal regulations are bad in a general sense, because you start with something 'good' (the environment) but you are giving them permission to eventually regulate IP and other areas where more powerful business interests may not allow the regulations to turn out the way you want.

If you want the negative externalities of businesses (eg clean air) regulated by the govt, you have to acknowledge that they now have permission to regulate everything similar. But while the public has limited resources (energy, time and money) to fight for 'good' regulation, the corporations have essentially an infinite amount of each. It is a nebulous, interconnected system and the slippery slope is a very real dilemma here.

So its easy to downvote an anarcho-capitalist because you think the clean air act was a good thing or because private litigation is a bad thing, but you have to look at their underlying reasoning. Every inch you give the state, it takes a foot and in the end you only approve of 1/12 of the moves they make.

no, he is saying that video games give him the simple pleasure of watching stats go up as he performs repetitive tasks. He derives pleasure from simple, yet ultimately hollow achievements because that is the type of praise he was raised on.

The joke is that there is nothing sci-fi about this :)

A lot of libertarians respect Marx. In general, he had a good understanding of the problems of a capitalist society and bad solutions to those problems.

If you are talking about his vision and insights, like oscilloscope, you get respect. If you espouse socialism, you don't.

Fantasy Flight makes some good examples of american style games.

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/17226/descent-journeys-in...

http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/59294/runewars

You are setting yourself up for failure using these methods.

- You're being misleading by asking them to write a concat method when you really want unit tests for that method. Just be straightforward. You're being too clever for your own good.

- People rarely code in a linear fashion. For example, I often write the meat of my methods first. Then do edge cases / error handling in a second or third pass. I have been dinged for this in interviews before. But imo, it says nothing about me as a programmer.

- You want them to be comfortable with tools, but they are behind enemy lines and under enemy fire. Dont expect them to achieve any kind of comfort level (and I would put 'thinking to use debugger' up there as something you would forget/ignore while being uncomfortable).

- When you are in extreme concentration mode, do you talk to others? Probably not. If you want them to talk, ask them questions. Again you're expecting them to read your mind. (also, keep them away from a keyboard if you want them to talk. Put them in front of a white board instead)

As others have said, talking to people and getting to know them and how they solve problems is much better than giving them mechanical interviews.

> It seems clear that good people need to band together, get some serious firepower, and create a safe haven where the One Rule (no destruction) is strictly enforced.

This almost exactly describes what the Taliban did. Except in their moral system, the One Rule is different than in your moral system.

The Civil War is an excellent example, and the best example of the ones I gave.

> a military which does not use bureaucracy loses wars to ones that do.

You couldn't be more wrong about this. The decentralized Vietnamese beat the (by-then) bureaucratic US.

The US army during WWII was defined by its ability to delegate to the lowest possible level of the officer hierarchy and this was one of the major reasons it was able to beat the rigid and highly-centralized Nazis.

The Confederacy came within a stones throw of winning the Civil War, which would have been the equivalent of two guys in their garage taking down one of the worlds largest Corporations. They lost because of the overwhelming differences in resources, but their agility and ability to promote talent allowed them to run circles around the North for the first two years.

Winfield Scott and Hernando Cortes both won in Mexico because they distanced themselves from their respective governments. They were allowed complete freedom from bureaucracy because they went out of communication range of the politicians.

Sun Tzu actually made a name for himself by beating a major neighboring kingdom with a tiny, but agile force.

I could keep going...

Which is much, much safer than driving drunk. Even then, it will be illegal drive while under the influence of marijuana. This is basically a Wont someone think of the children! type argument.

I agree with some of what you are saying (healthcare, educational arms race..) but you live in one of the most expensive areas in the US (the world?). That is a personal choice.

(also buying a car thats ~5 years old is much more cost efficient than buying new)

dishwasher and washer/dryer? Dont you mean smart phone and tablet?

Long after Steve Jobs is relegated to the dustbin of Past Industrialists and Apple has regressed to the mean, Stallmans work will still be moving both technology and our society forward in ways that are meaningful and positive.

taking attendance doesnt allow you to boast about how you are being proactive. It also isn't a reason to ask for a big budget increase.

Its interesting that theres another thread right now about how being unwavering on political issues. Isn't A/B testing about as far from that as you could possibly get?

If you are trying to get elected at the national level and you are A/B tesing, isn't wavering exactly what you are doing? Isn't it it essentially well-targeted and opportunistic populism? Isn't this very, very bad?

(this comment isnt aimed at pella, more aimed at the idea of politicians a/b testing)

Thats a valid theory, but only going back to the dawn of TV/Radio. Before that politicians actually had to have some content in their messages.

for example, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincoln%E2%80%93Douglas_debates

The format for each debate was: one candidate spoke for 60 minutes, then the other candidate spoke for 90 minutes, and then the first candidate was allowed a 30-minute "rejoinder." The candidates alternated speaking first. As the incumbent, Douglas spoke first in four of the debates.

Those were 3 hour debates. Now all a politician has to do is look good holding a football.

(this is basically paraphrasing Neil Postman's work from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death)

> You mean the movies made about people who were unwavering in real life? .. Lincoln

I haven't seen the movie, so I don't know how he is being portrayed in current pop-culture, but the only thing Lincoln was unwavering in his support of was keeping the Union intact. That is generally not the issue that he was considered 'unwavering' on, but it is.

Anyway, kind of OT.

The author of this gist is also one of the developers of http://appjs.org/. It looks like they may be related.

Obligatory link to Irwin Schiff's 'How an Economy Grows and Why it Doesnt' http://freedom-school.com/money/how-an-economy-grows.pdf

But regarding your original point, foreign govts and banks hold the US dollar because historically it has been strong, stable and accepted everywhere. It has no intrinsic value and recently governments are moving away from solely pegging their currencies to the US dollar as it has weakened relative to other currencies in the past few decades (eg Euro).

Another reason they take the US dollar is that they have no other choice. If China or Saudi Arabia were to say 'we want gold!' or 'we want resources!', trade relations would have stopped a long time ago.

Dynamic systems tend to runaway by themselves, whether there is resistance or not. At the very least they tend to become unrecognizable from the original system within a short time whether there was resistance or not (which is chaos theory in a nutshell).

They are able to kill with relative impunity in Mexico because the Govt isnt big enough or strong enough to stop them. If they killed an American politician, regardless of which side they are on, it would draw the focus of the US law enforcement agencies. This would cause them some very serious issues.

They have been careful to keep the violence south of the border and I think they are cognizant of the fact that killing south of the Rio Grande brings profit, killing north of the Rio Grande can bring ruin.