rvkennedy

Exactly: the source is "open" to paying subscribers, just as the source to... just about any closed source software anywhere, can be seen if you buy a licence to see it. It fits NO definition of OS that I'm aware of.

I find it amazing that there still hasn't been a film or TV adaptation of Iain M Banks. Not that such a thing would be necessary or a validation of his writing; but I'd love to see it imagined and realized visually. It's a vision of perhaps the best possible case for the human future - if we don't fuck up.

I'm in two minds about reading Rand: on the one hand, I've heard nothing but contempt for the quality of her writing from commentators I respect - i.e. prose, structure, etc. On the other, as I'm assuming I would disagree with her theses I would like to do so from an informed perspective. Should I bother?

But this colour already has a name. It's called "black".

I feel a bit gutted that Sam Adams wasn't founded by, you know, Sam Adams.

I couldn't help but search the pdf for brace rules, and lo:

AV Rule 60

Braces ("{}") which enclose a block will be placed in the same column, on separate lines directly before and after the block.

Example:

if (var_name == true)

{

}

else

{

}

HTML would be much easier to write if it were based on JSON. Less bandwidth too. Has this been attempted?

Actually, Pakistan is mentioned once in the context of being a possible suspect, as are the USA and China. The other mention is to state that only the Pakistani media initially took an interest in the death of one scientist, which is hardly some kind of negative accusation.

Ctrl+C means copy the text, with optional formatting. It doesn't mean "run a script", and this little trick implies two things: first, that the author is going to assume that anyone who copies text is trying to steal the content without attribution; secondly, that having been corrected in your naughty ways, you'll blithely accept the link he's pasted in there.

It's a web faux-pas, the equivalent of having your whole site in Flash, or trying to disable right-click for fear that someone might steal your precious, precious content.

That depends - were they risk aware or did they assume Sony would produce another PS3-style effort?

Or, in fact, click-bait internet "top 10" lists in general.

Surely there are only 95 repeated pairs of three digits between 100100 and 194194? And another 95 symmetric numbers. With a leading zero you have 195 each way.

His argument is really against using exceptions as part of normal operation, which I agree with. I've noticed when writing plugins to big monolithic programs like 3DS Max and game engines that these tend to throw and catch exceptions as a matter of course, which is a pain when you're trying to debug your own plugin code.

An exception should mean "normal operation cannot continue", and should signify a bug in your code. As such, it is an exceptionally good software development tool.

Defenders of the State on this issue tend to answer the question they want to be asked - "should the state have secrets".

No-one (except maybe Julian Assange) is arguing that the State shouldn't have secrets - the recent leaks occurred not as a blow against secrecy but to expose State wrongdoing. That's why it's whistleblowing, and not just vandalism.

Guys like Blair like to pretend that they're fighting for the government's right to keep secrets, which no-one is seriously challenging; they run shy of addressing the specific secrets exposed - be it military misbehaviour against civilians, civil servants deceiving lawmakers and so on.

But if copyright infringement is theft, doesn't that make communications into possessions?

He claims to be a Microsoft Engineer, but talks like a Microsoft PR. "Consumer delight"? "Sick second screen"? I don't know any technical person who uses this kind of doublespeak.

Does this mean that someone born with synthetic DNA is guilty of infringement if they have children? Do they need to buy a licence to keep living? Perhaps as a compromise, the court can decide that they count as three fifths of a person.

In academic philosophy, a "zombie" is a person without a "soul" - it is physically indistinguishable from any other person, but lacks conscious experience. It simulates the outward appearance of conscious experience by virtue of having a fully functional brain.

Sadly, this question is not related to the possibility that chemical spills can cause the dead to rise and eat brains.

In the question, "communitarianism, egalitarianism, or libertarianism", 40% said "Other".

I'd really like to know if any one idea dominates here - for example, if 38% of philosophers espouse totalitarianism, that's worth getting into.

Yes, in fact I hear that a company called OCP is running some interesting experiments in just that area: http://blog.khanneasuntzu.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/OCP...

Revolutions occur not during, but after times of intense hardship. When the general population has enough time and resources to inform themselves of perceived imbalances in the power structure, and isn't expending all their efforts on survival, they have the opportunity to become politically active.

This is why smart dictators keep their populations in constant poverty and either war, or war-readiness.

When this story comes up, it serves me as a timely reminder to check The Oatmeal for new material.

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/dog_paradox

It's really only an accident of history that there's such a sharp division between humans and other animals in terms of intelligence and advanced culture. If we'd developed technology while there were still intermediate species like Australopithecus and Homo Habilis around, it would have lent greater clarity to the fact that we are just a branch of a varied tree.

Choose any random cow or other livestock animal. You and Bessie have at least one common ancestor.

They had the right to self-determination, just as the 13 rebel colonies did in seceding from Britain. But they gave up that right a-priori by enslaving an entire section of their population. The same could be argued about the American Revolution, but Britain had not raised any significant complaint about colonial slave-holding, so had no real standing from that perspective.

The property prices, and thus rents, are why Silicon Roundabout will have a very hard time building a true startup ecosystem in London. Young people just starting out are paying most of their monthly income on rent. How can they be encouraged to take a financial risk when they have such crazy outgoings? How can people from the regions be attracted to London to build businesses when they can't get digs within easy reach of the hacker spaces?

The City is a whole separate problem - they pay very very well for good IT talent, siphoning a lot of good people who would otherwise be ideal for the startup market. You could go into finance for a few years, build up some security before starting your business, but who will you be able to hire when you do?

Now this is getting interesting. For a decentralized virtual currency:

A person that creates units of this convertible virtual currency and uses it to purchase real or virtual goods and services is a user of the convertible virtual currency and not subject to regulation as a money transmitter.

I would translate that to mean "no sales tax"... and that won't last long.

The point is that if cancer and heart disease are disease of aging, but were rare in paleolithic times, then a life expectancy lower than the age at which they are expected to strike does not preclude the possibility that there were other factors than early death that reduced their incidence.

If a disproportionate number of people died before the age of 5, a life expectancy of 40 means that many lived beyond that age, and would be expected, all things being equal, to have contracted cancer and/or heart disease.

Reading through the sci-fi tropes of this article, they could have just gone with "2013 is the same as 1988 but with networked computers", and saved a great deal of paper.

25 years is not remotely long enough for a city in the developed world to have more than a smattering of new buildings, and yet the future LA they came up with is utterly transfigured into a Syd Mead utopia. I love a bit of Mead, but Blade Runner was set in 2019, and I'm not sure that our attack ships have even reached the Shoulder of Orion yet, much less caught fire!

So what will 2038 look like? Pretty much like 2013, but most of the cars will be electric. But they'll still look like cars, not space-cruisers, and they won't fly (often).

Tim's key quote:

"If we don't put the hooks for the use of DRM in… people will just go back to using Flash."

- this underestimates the momentum at play, and the fact that developers have already found ways to monetize HTML-based content. Flash is never coming back.

They are paying out:

Settle all open positions and calculate the settled account value of all Member accounts immediately.