drakeandrews

It's implying that one should start using "gay" as a superlative instead of as a derogatory statement.

I've always taken it to be that it's a polyfill if it's somewhat elegant, or where a newer technology encompasess a superset of an older one and a shiv if it's somewhat hackish or where older technologies are made to stand in for newer ones. I am probably wrong.

I rent a two bed flat with two other people in a nice part of Zone 3, paying ~£500pcm for rent and council tax (together we're paying about ~£1300pcm total).

I could quite happily rent a two bedroom cottage in the lake district and pay all my bills out of that £500.

Solve all problems for x, where we hope x is the comfort and continued meaningful existence of humanity and not, say, the maximisation of paperclips.

In structures with a small radius, the "gravity" differential between your feet and your head is a bigger issue than the Coriolis effect. Large structures using the tether approach produce sufficiently large forces on the tether that it becomes a significant engineering problem. Tether structures also suffer the issue that they are much harder to stop and start than a ring structure. This is important because you do not want the structure spinning whilst you make course adjustments. There are modifications to the design that compensate for this, but they add significant complexity to the design of the ballast.

The ESA have put a lot of thought into this, as have Rosmoscos. I assume NASA have put a fair amount of thought into it as well, but I've nothing to back that up.

How about January 2nd? It's the day on which the GCU Arbitrary left Earth orbit in The State of the Art.

I see them all the time on the London Underground, especially in stations without wi-fi, which smacks me as especially odd. I've never tried to scan the code (it's perhaps a few inches across on the other side of the track) but I can't imagine it contains everything it needs to show the user something interesting.

The city is certainly a geographic area. It's the City of London, an entirely separate city with it's own government and everything.

You also get unlimited bus travel through all of London and if you're on a travel card, you can safely travel overground to any station without exit gates without fear of paying extension charges.

Out of interest, where'd you recommend getting a decent burrito? I used to go to Adobo on High Holborn, but as I spend less time in central and more time in east london, it seems like a little far to go.

This is a strange sentiment to me, moreso because it's something my own father has expressed he'd like to do. But as someone who considers "getting wasted" something I'm happy leaving to other people, what's wrong with drinking a nice beer or two, or a couple of glasses of wine, in good company?

Contact is close, in that (spoilers, in case anyone hasn't read the book) the signal being broadcast contains instructions on a device to send its occupants via a wormhole network to a rendezvous point.

Apparently both Cambridge and "Canadia" are inside London, and their search is catching a fair amount of stuff that isn't a job advert from twitter.

In the UK, that would qualify as destruction of evidence 9/10 times. Source: Looked into doing something similar to protect confidential information and sought legal advice first.

A non-zero quantity of people have a gender that is separate and different to their sex. By marking out differentating sex and gender as "vernacular revisionism", you are contributing to making the lives of a non-zero quantity of people worse than they need to be. Erasure sucks, please don't perpetuate it.

Warning, the link contains pictures of a man on fire.

Isn't it sinister because it's serving organised crime? Would you feel it similarly sinister if the market had been cornered by a startup (or three) with some silly name and a pile of VC debt?

Satoshis are the lowest denominator of bitcoin, being .00000001BTC

Would you care to explain why? Cash is really useful, lots of little places don't take cards and couldn't if they wanted to. As much as I despise it, the vagueries of "I owe you four fifty for lunch but all I have is a ten, so take the ten and that'll cover pizza next week." are a nice part of my social interaction with my friends. Electronic transfers (either bank account to bank account or paypal etc.) are useful for stuff >£20 but I can't see myself splitting lunch and going through the (understandably) rigorous security checks my bank enforces to pay a couple of pounds (says the guy who once wrote a cheque for a copy of the i[1] (I'd been given a cheque book by my bank and cheques are novel to me, not having been old enough for them to be anything other than that thing grandparents send you that you can swap for money)).

Bank tellers are useful in that they are a human being with whom I can discuss things about my account with face-to-face, which is useful when something's gone belly-up with their systems and you need a real person who can see you're also a real person and hit the damn thing a few times until it works.

Finally, I'm still going to need a proper bank account for things like credit, overdrafts, standing orders of rent and such to people who haven't moved over to bitcoin yet, not to mention paying my taxes and taking my earnings from companies that pay in pounds sterling, US dollars, euros or other traditional currencies. It only makes sense that instead of holding a mass of bitcoins, that my bank (nominally HSBC for myself) holds a much larger mass and allows me to make payments in BTC much like I would in any of the hundreds I already can. If I wanted to hold BTC myself, then I could open an account in BTC much like I could open a EUR or USD account now.

[1] The i is a 20 pence newspaper by the makers of the Independent. Prior to moving to London where if you're not paying attention you can amass fifteen copies of the Evening Standard whilst walking across the river, I tended to buy a copy of the i every day going into college because it was something I could read entirely whilst eating breakfast and tended to avoid the fluff I noticed in larger papers on slow news days.

You sir, are a godsend. This is wonderful. Thank you.

It's been a while since I was in the states, but last I saw most of the drive through ATMs had cameras pointed at where the user should be.

Because the experiment ends with explaining to a few fine officers of the law that no, you weren't trying to rob the bank, you were just doing an experiment.

Or plain not being let into the bank. Most banks (in the UK at least) will not let people covering their faces into the bank.

Until I can walk into my local bank branch (or any of the hundreds of currency conversion stalls that dot London) and ask for a couple hundred satoshis, or deposit bitcoins direct into my bank account, bitcoin isn't ready to be a legitimate alternative currency, let alone an alternative to payment processors such as Paypal.

Isn't a conservative outlook literally a status-quo preference, you wish to conserve what was instead of risking what might be?

From the OED

    conservative, adjective.
     1. adverse to change or innovation and holding traditional values: [...]

The primary meaning of conservatism is more to do with being risk averse and disliking change than the political movement it (sadly) shares its name with. In this regard, the author's usage of the word makes sense. He wished to conserve what was there previously without regard of what it may have made way for.

This sounds familiar. Most of my friends (both in an out of tech) have similar. We also often have a second box full of folders that we're One Day™ going to use to organise our important pieces of paper into.

Most jellyfish are barely even animals, many are in fact several colonies of highly interdependent species that happen to work together in the form of a jellyfish. As long as you feed them and keep them warm/cold/lit/dark as appropriate to the species you have, it's no worse than having a pet plant.

Cephalapods on the other hand are significantly more intelligent that previously though, and therefore unless you could provide a sizable (like med-large house sized) enclosure for several of them... Don't keep cephalapods.

Art isn't created on a commercial scale by big corporate entities for exactly that reason unless it drives some other corporate interest (i.e. advertising, graphic design etc.). There is a subset of people who would continue to write code for themselves given no financial compensation, because they enjoy writing code. Similarly, there are people who create art purely for the joy of making art. Much as Google abandoned Reader and Alerts, don't expect Exxon to make an entry to the Turner prize.

Music has a large corporate aspect, but then a lot of music is done as art for the love of creation or the love of playing.

Healing the impoverished, for many people, is part of ones responsibilities as a human being. Everyone has the right to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness", right? A lot of people consider health to fall under life and therefore much like the maintainance of civil liberties (wouldn't it be so much more profitable if you could own your staff?) it shouldn't be left to the whims of the market.[1]

[1] I'm a) british and b) practically a communist so your mileage may vary on that one.

If someone is going around causing issues sufficiently that they're a repeat offender, I don't see why they should be given additional chances. Let them have their ever shrinking circle of misogynists, just don't let them into conferences. Access is a privilege, not a right.

The argument that because in these two cases (of the damn near uncountable issues of people having to put up with similar comments, criticisms or slurs) the person in question wasn't in any danger doesn't mean that in every instance the person was neither in danger nor felt in danger. And what's more, these comments, jokes etc. actively contribute to an environment where it is insinuated that these words and by extension these actions are okay.

So an asshat making a sexist joke will hopefully never rape someone, but they're certainly making it a more fertile environment for the bastard who then goes on to rape someone. Under this understanding of the issue, yes it makes sense to actively exclude those people making sexist (or for that matter homophobic, racist etc., the "rape culture" argument extends just fine to other examples) jokes.

I'm not saying getting the offender banned from GDC should be the only action, by all means confront the offender too. But you can't expect people to be able to, or feel safe in, confronting someone who has already shown a disregard for their agency.

In an ideal world, it'd go something like this:

    Hear ugly -> confront offender -> extract apology -> inform others

But of course, for a large number of people it'll be more like this:

    Hear ugly -> ensure safety of ones self and others -> inform others

Merely confronting the asshat is great until you discover the asshat in question is just doing this again and again and saying sorry as if that makes their original transgression alright. There needs to be something the offending party can lose for it to make sense, especially when the potential reputation loss isn't in the circles they care about anyway.

And in one respect, making a change isn't my first priority. My first priority is making these places a safe place for people to be. Making the people who would otherwise make this an unsafe space rethink their actions is a secondary goal.