Roodgorf

For a supposedly economics oriented site this article sure spends a lot of time talking about celebrities and how much of a sham it is for them to title themselves "Dr." I am completely on board with the unearned title thing, but how many paragraphs about various people's shelves full of honorary degrees do we need? The title asks why but doesn't supply a straightforward, albeit somewhat obvious, answer until the last quarter of the article. I hate to be another "where is all the real journalism?" person but, seriously where is it?

I have to say, I don't really understand your criticisms as you've presented them, perhaps I'm missing something.

The "brainy mice" are pretty clearly the ones with the inhibited PDE4B enzyme. What is it you're mocking here, the use of the buzzwordy phrase?

> at least make the primary source available.

They give the contact information of the researcher and cite the paper, mentioning that it is available upon request. How does its open availability fall under the responsibility of the journalist?

I remember a time when I enjoyed AVGN and his ilk, but man, I find it harder and harder to stomach the obnoxiously over-the-top outpouring of anger over such inconsequential things (e.g. the Pixels rant). It's particularly frustrating seeing this sort of thing in contrast to the story of the struggles the Virtual Boy developers went through.

Interesting, that seems like a pretty reasonable way to do it. Another case of convenience taking precedence over security, I guess.

Wait, so VW has an RFID immobilizer and a physical key? I've only ever seen cars having one or the other.

Another repo I like to check out for CS research papers and the like: https://github.com/papers-we-love/papers-we-love

I'm interested to see where this concept goes, particularly in its stated mission to provide an educational experience for the underserved. Most non-traditional students, no matter how motivated, simply don't have the time or resources to trudge their way through the traditional college experience. Should we not be concerned about educating them as possible as well? I believe so, and some of the barriers to traditional college for someone in their 30's, say, requiring a student be physically onsite, just seem absurd.

I think it's also important to note that this is not intended as an all-out replacement of traditional colleges, just a potential alternative. In an institution as old and important as this, cultivating innovation rather than hiding from it is absolutely vital.

Sure, but the level of responsibility required by the user as a curator doesn't seem like it would hold past a critical mass. The insane amount of reposts that Buzzfeed-esque garbage gets just isn't all that encouraging to me. Short of the decidedly undemocratic method of only counting a certain group of users' ratings, I'm just not confident it would change things at scale.

Exactly. Except that this supposed ratings system could potentially have a bigger impact on quality than the cable model, though I'm not entirely convinced.

I assume most channels make their income almost entirely off of advertisers, and channels which are not watched as frequently are presumably not paid as much. In the proposed system I would assume the idea is to decrease/remove advertising and content providers would be given a share of the revenue based on user ratings? Seems interesting, but probably not terribly practical. It seems this could devolve into clickbait hell pretty quickly.

I suppose the heading and maybe opening paragraph could be seen to give that impression, but the article makes note of the fact these are new nucleotides numerous times throughout the article. I found that pretty sufficient for showing that there are not in fact actual letters in DNA.

I don't know that anecdotal evidence about driving conditions is really a great way to talk about driving on gravel. I'm also an Iowan who grew up on gravel roads and frequently drove faster than 50 mph, but if I'm being totally honest I recognize that it wasn't a great idea. On more than one occasion a loose patch of gravel or surprise deer has nearly sent me into a tree at 60 mph.

Sure, the people who frequently use those roads are the ones who will know them best and be able to predict their condition, but your stopping/maneuvering power is so much worse on gravel that assuming an average speed of anything greater than, maybe even near 50 mph seems pretty reckless.

Very cool, thanks for the information. I'm obviously more ignorant of Mozilla projects than I even thought.

If that were to happen, how big an impact would that have on Firefox OS development? I admittedly don't understand the project too well, but they had to port Gecko to work in Gonk right? Would there be significant overhead getting Servo working under Gonk?

I actually don't believe that's entirely true either, or at least not as "bad" as you seem to think. Sure, any sort of advertiser would like you to use that product/service, but it's isn't necessarily trying to impact the way you think. There are plenty of ad campaigns that are simply trying to be made known. Without that, how would you expect any product to reach some sort of critical mass? Word of mouth alone?

Firefox, for example, used several different marketing avenues including a newspaper ad to try to make people aware of them. As far as I recall, that was all they were trying to do, let people know another browser option was out there. It seems a stretch to consider that as trying to manipulate your thinking.

I will fight anyone who tries to tell me that a auto-playing video with sound enabled is not just as annoying as a small static image on the side of a page. Even when I'm somewhere with a limited internet connection. [sarcasm]

If these companies simultaneously put their foot down in this way and did not waiver I really doubt the government would go through with doing anything that would risk them leaving. Any one of these examples alone would be a huge loss to the market for, say, the United States. The political backlash would be enormous, and that's not even including the community actually concerned about privacy.

That being said, whether such an ultimatum would ever actually happen? Yeeeeeah...

This is some very impressive stuff, I look forward to trying it out. Question: Have you run into any cases where the hints have actually caused significant roadblocks to discovering the underlying problem? I can't count the number of times a compiler error has sent me down the wrong path entirely, I wonder how much worse/better this is with more human-readable hints.

Potential headline: "Hey, I just learned about an interesting thing."

I think you're right in the confusion of koan and kata, but unfortunately yes, I have seen a lot of that happening lately (perhaps due to greater awareness of the word from recent popularity of CodeWars[0]?). Interestingly I've only seen this mistake in this direction, I have not seen any koans mislabeled as kata.

[0] http://www.codewars.com/about

I honestly can't tell if this is sarcastic or not. Are you saying that you believe ethical practices are so vastly different across arbitrary distinctions like state borders?

But what would be the incentive for other site owners to use it then? It seems like in this scenario, the only time anyone would want to use the tool on their live site would be when they are sure they are getting an A+, any other sites that don't care about that score just wouldn't add the tool and any changes that might lower that score would presumably being taken care of before rolling out to production.

It seems like it would just turn into unnecessary bragging for the site owner. I wonder if the scoring would still be useful for development though, or if they would just try to fix as many problems as possible anyway.

This is exactly what I kept thinking of. You could basically do a search/replace of "chess" with "video games" and be pretty close to the sentiment towards gaming in most media until very recently. And with the advent of eSports, the comparison seems all the more apt.

The audacity! Europeans had feudalism for... as long as I can remember! Who do those colonists think they are?

For what it's worth, the 14th amendment was not adopted until 1868, nearly a century later.

I think your third point is what's most striking about the dissenting opinion. Not providing marriage licenses to couples based on the arbitrary criteria of sex is a deliberate act of denying a specific group of people access to marriage.

The women's and civil rights movements went against the traditions of plenty of millennial old cultures such as the "Kalahari Bushmen and the Han Chinese, the Carthaginians and the Aztecs"[0] as well.

[0]http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-556_3204.pdf#p...

This post about Wikipedia's policy regarding secondary sources seems to articulate this idea pretty well. http://weskaggs.net/?p=5053

> this effect is the reason why cities are warmer than their surrounding rural areas.

Anthropologically produced heat is certainly a contributor, but as the article itself says, I believe the majority of the difference is more accurately attributed to the large amount of concrete in cities which takes much longer to dissipate heat.

The first graph on that second link is a bit confusing and seems pretty disingenuous. It has the "observations" region stretching to 2050. The rest of the article seems much more factual and interesting, but why start with something so misleading if your supposed goal is to debunk misleading projections?

I think your parenthetical at the end is most important to the marketing strategy behind the way the book is named as opposed to your suggestions. In my experience discussing with people who do want to learn to program, their first question is generally "What's the best/easiest language to start with?". Having no knowledge of coding whatsoever leads one to focus on comparatively superficial things like language, so I can imagine more beginners being drawn to "Here's how to use Python" vs. "Here's how to program".

That's an interesting example that hadn't occurred to me while reading. Beyond the debate over destination/emotional state, I wonder if there is a limitation of how long the trip is? It seems that after a certain amount of time passes your frame of reference might not be precise enough for this effect to be noticeable.