mcappleton

I think republishing someone else's work without permission them is morally wrong, but offering a taxi ride is only wrong insofar as it is illegal. One is a good law protecting content creators, the other is crony capitalism. So I think there is a difference.

Why not use Linux? Same price point advantage, and even better than mac for development because you can develop on the exact same distro you will use for your server.

You make a good point. However I still think it's underhanded an unnecessary. People are going to buy from amazon for a host of other reasons such as convenience and maybe free shipping if they are prime members. I think amazon needs to compete based on value add, not with an underhanded contract.

I will almost never sign a so-called "standard" software development contract because standard practice is to treat the little guy poorly. I think the same goes with amazon. Just because it is standard doesn't mean it's right.

I'm all for competition. If amazon is the best, then more power to them. However if they stifle competition, that's a problem.

From what I have read and my experience, they are stifling competition. For example, I read a persons blog post who said amazon had a rule that you can't sell your product on amazon and sell it for less on your own site. That's just rotten. Also I have an ebook on amazon and in order to get exposure you have to exclusively sell on amazon. I get why he does these things, but that's just not right.

Amazon isn't a horrible corporation, but I think some of the things they do are anticompetitive and should be changed.

So are they too big? No being big is fine and helps them be more efficient. The real question in my mind is if they are using their size to compete unfairly.

I mean 3D like age of mythology. For me personally, I would gladly put up with the extra controls for the sake of more eye candy. It makes it more immersive for me. I think I like ape2 better than aoe3 in many ways, but it's just so hard for me to switch from aoe3s full 3D graphics back to those of aoe2

A good 3D remake would use the same models, which really are beautiful. But in 3D you could experience them with so much more clarity, from any angle and at any zoom. It just makes the experience so much more immersive.

I realize that this is just my personal taste... I love 3D movies too!

Some people love games no matter the graphics. For me I can't stand games with bad graphics. I think all these reboots are money grabs that add little given today's standards. They need to do a 3D remake of aoe otherwise it's just pointless if you ask me.

I know a lot of people think graphics don't matter. If that's you, I respect that. But for me personally, I would actually consider starting a team to do a 3D remake that is fully compatible with the original.

I think it's much better to tax the cars you don't want rather than to subsidize the cars you do want. Why? Because the state is not doing well financially, and they are not in the place to drop 3 billion on subsidies.

I think it also makes more sense from a moral standpoint. If using a gasoline powered car contributes more to the environment's woes, paying the tax is giving back to society in return for having made it a slightly worse place via pollution. It is also better to directly tax the undesirable car that way the tax is directly associated with the undesirable car, as opposed to a general income tax. This may be less politically feasible for that reason though.

I thought no the easiest way to understand is this:

You could spend 1 million dollars a day for 270 years before you ran out.

Lol... I'm talking about a furnished one. A relative of mine had an furnished unit they rented out and I remember this was an issue. They paid a pretty expensive cleaner as far as cleaners go, but thought it was worth it.

It's not just the publishing industry that is the problem. It is merely a symptom of the greater malaise in higher education as a whole.

The focus is on degrees, not on true learning. So much of what occurs is in universities is total waste. But people put up with it to get the paper. As long as people keep blindly giving absurd sums of money to get the paper, these expensive publications will last. The answer is for people to wake up and value learning over a diploma. When that happens, then finally issues like this will go away. Heck, as a bunch of people have pointed out, many of these papers aren't even for real learning. They are worded in such a way as to make them sound smart to their peers, but unintelligible to the public.

People are afraid of "super intelligent" AI that can make itself smarter taking over the world. Well they didn't count on people becoming "superintelligent", making themselves smarter :)

Not sure how well these Chinese experiments will work out though. For some reason I doubt it will have the amazing effects they intended, at least in the near term.

Getting it cleaned by somebody who won't steal your stuff is a challenge. They can just say that it was taken by the renter.

Lol, what you are saying is true, but I actually do find some content about coding here!

Also I appreciate the discussions. Instead of one agenda rammed down mu throats, I get to see the honest opinions of a lot of people.

Men get drafted and get their arms and legs blown off, women can stay home. Spare the women and children in war.

I don't think it's cultural. Most men have an innate desire to protect women, and treat them with special favor. This was the historical way women were protected before they had voting rights. Now, they have both political power, and men still tend to give them the special favor they had before. So it leads to an imbalance in society

The standard of evidence should be the same as that of any other crime - I.e. Innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.

If you locked a person in a cage for 10 years, you would be considered a horrible person. It's no different if you get other people to do it for you. A truly false accusation is a terrible crime that must be punished like any other. But it must be proven false beyond reasonable doubt just like any other crime.

The thing I like most about TS is interfaces. I use a single "options" parameter for functions whenever there are a bunch of parameters, and having autocomplete for it makes life so much easier.

False accusations should be punished with the same penalty as the accuser tried to put upon the innocent. Until that happens, people will see no reason to stop false accusations that they think will help them.

I'm very glad I found Hacker news. Sometimes I read the news just cause I'm bored. Now I can just read hacker news which helps me be a better coder instead of draining me of emotional energy

Funny, I was watching a video of a guy with a prosthetic hand. He loved it. He said he went from almost committing suicide to being ok with life again. When he talked about his bionic hand, he said "I'm not left handed, I'm other-handed", as he turned his hand a full 360... It was pretty funny.

Economists these days are basically trying to find a way to avoid hard work and thrift. Unfortunately the only way we get better computers is by very smart people working very hard to develop better machines. The only way we get houses is by people building them. And the only way to obtain a net worth is to save more than one spends. However, economists seem to think that with enough money printing, borrowing, and other shenanigans they can somehow get more houses built in the places they are most needed. Of course, it is a joke and wrecks out everybody's wealth in the process.

As Hazlitt taught:

'The art of economics consists in looking not merely at the immediate but at the longer effects of any act or policy; it consists in tracing the consequences of that policy not merely for one group but for all groups.'

Anyone interested in clearing through the crud should read Henry Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson.

Crony capitalism stinks, but the first amendment protects freedom of the press. You are crossing into very dangerous territory when you limit the right to express one's political opinion, even if it is corrupt.

Perhaps a better idea would be to have the voters decide on how much a senator should get paid after his term is completed. That might help keep them more true to their campaign promises.

I think calling such speech "violence" may be a straw man. By calling it violence, people are intentionally equating his words with physically hurting someone. Since everyone knows that physically hurting someone is unacceptable, they are more likely to reject the speech. I think calling it violence is an intellectually dishonest smear

I clicked through to the actual bills decsription and would agree this is pretty ridiculous. However us support for Israel is important because they will do a much better job of handling the Iranian threat than the us government.

Agreed. Also there is something "magical". Nobody understands how our consciousness works. While people will tell you it "arises from the brain" nobody has the slightest clue about how that works. It's a really hard problem when you think about it because our subjective experience has no mass , no length, no height, and is in that way not even material. Our consciousness is very important to our function, and without it, all artificial intelligence remains artificial and has no ultimate "reality check" on whether it's decisions are good or bad for it.