chilldream

Either it stops being optional after some point, or they tricked me into converting vis-a-vis some Dark Pattern (which is if anything even more scummy as far as I'm concerned). My YouTube account is separate from my Gmail account and I can assure you that I never would have added a g+ page to it on purpose given the choice.

I think the disconnect here is that people don't seem to get that "I voluntarily signed up for a social network" is an important step for a lot of people. It's entirely possible that a lot of people who hate g+ now wouldn't have minded it if it came out of the ether right after Facebook got popular, instead of being retrofitted onto something that already existed and foisted on that userbase above its protests. You can't just unilaterally change the purpose of your site and expect people who liked the old site to automatically like the new one.

FWIW, I also hate Facebook Connect and refuse to use it on principle despite having a Facebook account I voluntarily use.

Facebook has an opt-in mechanism called "signing up for a Facebook account." G+'s equivalent is "signing up for an unrelated service, possibly as long as a decade ago."

Yes, exactly this. I was fine with my Google Account; now I have a Google Social Networking Boondoggle. And the rare times G+ makes a difference in my use of other services, the net effect has been worse (I'm still not over the YouTube thing)

I don't identify with the "social justice" movement for similar reasons, but that doesn't mean racism doesn't exist, and that certainly doesn't mean it's productive to try to remove discussion about racism from an arena so profoundly racist.

Look up "The Southern Strategy" and its relation to drug criminalization. Look up "Stop and Frisk". Look up the reasons behind criminalizing crack at a higher level than cocaine. Incarceration rates, prosecution rates, execution rates, literally everything even vaguely related to this topic. It's pervasive. If you choose to ignore that, minorities who think you don't have their interests at heart probably have a point.

> P.S. Just saw that immediately race was brought up. As a tip to anyone who wants to make a difference, people in power will divide you into as many groups as you let them in order to subjugate you.

You can simultaneously recognize that the system is biased against certain races while also avoiding infighting based upon race. It's kind of ironic that you tell people to pay more attention to reality and then essentially tell people to pretend racism doesn't exist in one of the most racist segments of US society.

The average person does not make a cost-benefit analysis for things like this because that would require admitting that the question is complicated, or must result in some risk of death. Instead they silently drop the cost half of the equation by telling themselves that 0% risk of death must be possible, and rationalize away the costs of such a delusion by ignoring cases like this, or figuring that the victim must have deserved it somehow (with the silent assumption that nothing like this could ever happen to them or their loved ones).

In recent years Obama justified various state excesses by saying something like "You can't have 100% security and 100% privacy." My immediate thought was, "Well, that's vacuously true, because you can't have 100% security ever."

Actual threats, stalking, and intimidation do exist. The problem here isn't that threats don't happen, it's that anyone with half a brain can see that this conversation wasn't a serious threat.

I'm 31 and my adult life has been about a 50/50 split between OK and WA. They're not as different as you might think.

> "protecting" games has been a problem, almost literally forever. On the one hand you want folks to benefit from there work, on the other hand sometimes a 'derivative' is a much much better game

Despite this argument's merit in general, it's a complete digression in this particular case. They didn't just heavily copy his game, but then turned around and named it similarly, registered a trademark, then turned that trademark against him. At what point do we stop pretending these people are anything but thieves?

Also, reading "obvious" as "obvious to the general public" rather than "obvious to the person I'm speaking to right now: a journalist specifically asking for comment because they already believe it's not a Starbucks" and expecting that interpretation to hold up anywhere that matters is the kind of thing you only see in Internet lawyering.

> Edit: also, the indentation in the first example is obviously just a means of illustrating that whitespace is non-significant with this project. I don't think they're suggesting code ought to be written without correct indentation.

Does anyone anywhere have a realistic example of Python's indentation system being a hindrance? To me, the complaint always comes across as "I should hypothetically be able to do things that I would never actually do or endorse doing"

And it's not like there's no flexibility for weird corner cases. I mean, all of these things are already legal Python 3:

    for i in range(10): print(i)

    # although you wouldn't actually do this
    a = 3; b = 5; # a,b = 3,5

    # and you REALLY wouldn't do this but I couldn't help coopting their example

    if foo == "bar": _=(
        print("indenation"),
     print("doesn't"),
           print("matter!")
     )

> Also, isn't your argument re: information asymmetry an argument in favor of F2P?

It's an argument that developers and consumers can both be correct to gravitate toward F2P. It's not an argument that this is the happiest equilibrium for either. It's the same rationale behind lemon laws; the absence of such laws pushes the market toward a position where buyers have to assume all cars are secretly busted, sellers have to price their cars accordingly, and the market ultimately gravitates toward people selling busted cars because nothing else is profitable.

Atheist who grew up in Oklahoma here. The people in this thread who think that the correct tactic is to immediately jump to "Why is your religion better than Mayan creation myths?" are completely clueless. If you ever even met a creationist, you would know that that would just make them dig in their heels and "confirm" their low opinion of mainstream science.

The idea of tiptoeing around religious fundamentalism may bother you, but ultimately you have to decide if you want to be as "right" as possible or if you want to have a shot at convincing someone. And if you don't care about convincing the kind of person who can be a young earth creationist in 2014, then I don't know why you'd even pay attention to any of this.

While I think your response is justified in this specific case given the small sample size, I don't think making two "contradictory" complaints is necessarily wrong in this context. If you make a lot of Type I errors, it might be the cost for reducing Type II errors, and if you make a lot of Type II errors, it might be the cost of reducing Type I errors, but if you make a lot of Type I and Type II errors, then maybe whatever you're doing just sucks.

The difference in your example is that you're trying to catch the same user in the best mood and not filter some users out.

People keep saying "this isn't preventing anyone from rating," but that's total nonsense. If one user can get to a rating in one click while the other has to exit your app and go hunt it down in the store, you are filtering the latter out even if your filter is not 100% effective.

> I actually think it's a great idea for any developer.

> With that said, it's obviously not in the end user's best interest

I think you mean, "a great idea for developers who don't mind abusing their users"

> you seed with something they can predict

One of my favorite examples of this ever: Once in Las Vegas a keno machine mistakenly used a fixed seed. Meaning once someone figured this out, he could show up when the game started for the day and predict what the machine would do with 100% accuracy.

http://www.americancasinoguide.com/slot-machines/the-worlds-...

The scoring is based on upvotes from other users. This often does translate to the "top answers" being dubious one-liners.

Honest question, why is it bad if a union becomes powerful enough to convince an employer to sign a contract forbidding them to hire non-union employees or fire during a strike? I can think of some answers, but none that can't also be applied to, say, usury laws which makes the average internet libertarian's position on unions feel hypocritical to me.

It depends on which stripe of libertarianism you're talking about, although I'd argue that it's the worst variants that would say "no". It's not a use of force in the strictest sense, but it is an attempt to subvert market pressures in order to maintain concentrations of power.

Further coverage:

http://photographyisnotacrime.com/?s=dominic+holden

I'm posting that link mostly for the name of the blog, to demonstrate that this kind of incident is common enough in the US to have its own blog. Personally I'm hoping this becomes moot when police officers are required to wear their own cameras while on duty.

The point is, if a company wants the public to forgive them for terrible outcomes, they should have to give the public the evidence that they deserve forgiveness instead of having random people shill for everything they do on spec. It is possible for corporations to make mistakes, or to do bad things, and it's perfectly legitimate to call them out when that appears to be the case.

(I also think Google has long past squandered any right to the benefit of the doubt, but I don't see the need to get into that right now)

> It's not unlike when I was eight and pumping quarters into Gauntlet in order to reach the next level -- Blue Warrior's health dropped whether or not you were taking damage

You certainly could play arcade games that way, but the good ones could generally be beaten on one credit if you were skilled enough at the game. Plenty of modern enthusiasts still consider this the only "legitimate" way to play such games.

The difference between this and most freemium games is that it's your skill being tested and not your tolerance for pain, and many of us find the former a far more palatable thing to test.

There are now enough good games in the universe that I have trouble imagining the person who can legitimately think, "I have too much time, I should play some garbage to fill it."

> All of AA and everyone who's ever quit smoking stand as evidence

Have you ever met a "former" addict? Plenty will tell you it's not as simple as that, unless you're using your own novel definition of "choice," "free will," and given studies generally show genetic predisposition is a factor, "born with."

> a free-to-play game is a fully functional game

I suspect my definition for "fully functional" is different from yours, but I have high standards.

> If consumers hated freemium, it wouldn't dominate the app store.

Actually it's entirely possible for something hated to also be the most profitable course of action given things like information asymmetry. For instance, if people would be happier with good $20 apps, but it's so hard to tell which $20 apps are good that no one is willing to risk buying them, then you end up with the current situation.

I'm not necessarily saying that this is the case (much as I hope it is), but I would love nothing more than for reviews like this to bring people around to how exploitative this model is, and how much it encourages bad game design.

Gaming is actually the most evil possible context for freemium. It encourages bad design at literally every level, in ways that generally do not transfer to other types of software.

If freemium were generally just a demo for a better game, you would be right that there's nothing wrong with it, but optimizing a game for freemium means a worse game. Watch the second video in the article; the "best value" gem cart is in the ballpark of just straight up buying a game. Except you don't get the entire game.

You could beat the good arcade games on one credit, and if you were skilled enough to do so it was the best possible experience. Some people still consider it the only "legitimate" way to play those games.

Not impossible, but you do have to do some brazen, easily-detected stuff like watch the table for awhile and refuse to sit down unless the count goes positive.