steauengeglase

I wouldn't say they are powerful, but they are a subculture and subcultures can turn on a dime.

Wait, so between $327 and $587 (wonky 70s inflation) a semester in today's dollars? I'd have killed for that.

Yep. Same here.

For you young 'uns itching for the headaches of yesteryear SDF has been kicking, in one form or another, since 1987. Yep, you can also setup a vanity (~) page(s). http://sdf.org/index.cgi?faq%3FBASICS%3F11 or dive into the wonders of Gopher space http://sdf.org/?tutorials/gopher

Do you have a non-Washington Times link? W.T. is often dubious. When not dubious it is inflammatory.

I feel like there is a joke about Carl Gustaf learning to read in 1998 in there somewhere.

Even in a conjectural utopia, for legal reasons, you'll always need some kind of "hard copy". No one wants thought blasts from the IRS.

Drop down consoles like Guake and Yakuake are one of those few things that have become a necessity for me in the *nix world.

It isn't the morality. It is the fear that we'll turn them into martyrs.

The Alex Jones crowd always seem to have spare cash.

Awareness is good for stopping bad things that are coming down the pipe, but it pretty worthless for getting rid of bad things that are already in place.

To change the entrenched you need big industry players behind you and a willingness as a customer to lose something in the exchange for their new benefit.

Napoleon changed war with interchangeable people. Eli Whitney changed war with interchangeable parts. Kalashnikov changed war with interchangeable nations.

There are plenty of female psychopaths out there. The difference is that women are more socialized than men (hiding more obvious traits) and they seldom take the macho (sometimes violent) route to feed their egos.

They aren't always charming and intelligent, sometimes they are repulsive and brutal.

I'd say the big warning signs are cruelty, a repulsion of weakness while also finding it irresistible, rapidly changing tactics (sometimes within seconds) that shift between dominance and attempting to garner empathy that begin to appear shallow after the first few salvos, highly manipulative to ends that don't really matter, and always "clever".

In reality the sheriff saw an opportunity for positive press and went for it. You don't turn down free PR.

Most fields within economics fall within social science, not natural science. That doesn't make a non-science, but like psychology there is a lot of weak ground for shills and hacks to cause major damage.

I'd rather know Shiller's ideas on how to throw out the bad ideas in the public consciousness than if his field of study will make it in the long term. Policy is too often treated more like a religion than an implementation of tested ideas.

Hipsterism is nothing new (we were complaining about it back when affluent kids started hitting juke joints in the poor part of town). We call it a sub-culture but it isn't one and never has been.

It is most often upper-middle kids (generally white) adopting and gentrifying sub-cultures and then abandoning them when all of the cool has been drained out. What is left becomes fodder for "ironic" mockery.

That is what the author never thinks of addressing. What he boils down to "they hate me because they think I want attention" isn't because he wants attention, it is because he has taken on the trappings of a group who devour other groups.

'Leaker' is the closest thing to neutral. With most people he is either a 'whistle-blower' or a 'traitor'.

You don't need to patch the problem and anyone trying is probably out to sell you $50 million system.

In my state an inmate was broken out with a helicopter. The Dept of Corrections had an interesting solution. Anyone caught looking up at the sky goes into solitary confinement. No one has tried it since.

You don't patch the cause of the problem, you break the part of the will that would even make you think about the solution. It is much cheaper and it creates a more malleable population.

Not that I approve of the approach but the voters wanting anything that can't be painted as 3 hots and a cot.

"Pressing still further, AMC is giving new Breaking Bad episodes to Netflix viewers in the United Kingdom right after they air in the US, instead of the weeks-to-months delay that is typical for exporting top-flight US shows."

This. It blows my mind that in this era if your content doesn't require localization efforts why it isn't made universally available ASAP. Cult followers run off to news site and message boards and twitter and where ever else to talk about their favorite show and that gets more people interested. Not making it available spoils all of that momentum and waiting months is just shooting yourself in the foot.

I'm looking at you BBC/PBS-Masterpiece joints.

Lately it seems like this work has been more pre-engine research and crunch time follow-up, so I can't say I'm too worried for id.

He has made it pretty clear over the last few years that there really isn't a lot for him to do there, at least on interesting stuff. Writing rendering engines has become more incremental than revolutionary and I get the feeling that, for him, stuff like mega texture was about as interesting as writing a new zip program.

It is one of the few titles that hits the sweet spot of things like Pirates of Silicon Valley or The Social Network. It tells a gripping story of a successful underdog in tech that is accessible and entertaining. Kushner did a great job, though I wonder how much artistic license he took with the D&D campaign stuff.

True, we learned from these mistakes.

Slavery is an unforgivable stain on our souls, something we'll have to live with for eternity. The same goes to the relocation and genocide campaigns against Native Americans. We've never allowed ourselves forgiveness for those sins and we never should.

The brutality in the Philippines sickened Americans to that point that the old colonialism had be traded in for quiet skullduggery. We also learned from the internment camps. When cries came out to round up everyone of middle eastern descent after 9/11 we ignored them and made new mistakes.

Deep down we Americans know that if there is a Hell we probably deserve to go to it, but that doesn't stop us from trying to learn from our mistakes. We are fatally flawed, not essentially evil.

That is the real battle over all of this. It isn't state secrets, but a generational shift. The young live with the cynicism and pain of past mistakes and can't figure out why the old continue down broken paths. Unfortunately, today's young will have to let the generations that follow walk with the knowledge of our mistakes. And what doozies we've handed them: Eternal War, torture and deep resentments and distrust between state & citizen and citizen & state. I wish them luck.

There is one huge difference, they are a 3rd party walled garden. They get a lot of flack but they were the only ones in a good position to do what they did at the time. The market place scene needs 3rd parties like Steam, GOG, (to some extent) Amazon, etc.

You don't buy insurance from the hospital or heaven forbid, Pfizer. You are only guaranteeing that all of the terms and conditions are against you. So why do the same with software by giving either the platform maker and/or publisher's extra leverage (yes, Valve publishes their own games, a whopping 1 game per year, but they'd likely quit making games before they'd give up selling someone else's software)? This is the unsung problem of UPlay, Origin, etc. as well as iTunes and whatever MS call their market places this week.

3rd parties need customers to exist. 1st parties can just make deals with other 1st parties for their survival. It is the same problem we had with the recording industry. Who cares if CDs are $15? There is plenty of money in breakage, movie tie-ins, TV singing contests, cell phone ring tones, advertising cross-overs, etc. In other words, mass market incest.

The road of the 1st party is the road to gamer fuel, in game ads, E.T., slow matchmaking services, platform locking, and above all product stagnation. Folks can hate Steam for whatever reason, fine, but please, go to another 3rd party if you can. Without them the future is bleak.

As far as GPL'd games go, they have the same problem as regular games. Asset generation for AAA titles is too expensive and too slow. If you want to fix that problem don't look to a new engine that will be outdated by the time your game is finished or a distribution platform. Devote your time to breaking the development cost/time problem and give that to everyone. As soon as we beat that, we will break the "1999 cycle" and we'll get the game that people beg for but the industry can't afford to produce.

It probably worried the neighbors up to the point where they realized there wasn't a fire.

I can't imagine he'll end up driving it enough for that to be a problem. In 2 or 3 years (more like 6 months) he'll get tired of moving it around and paying for fuel. In the end the worst case scenario will end up being caught behind the guy as he heads out to some small town's Christmas parade so their real engines aren't being wasted driving Santa down Main St.

For $1,500 he got a deal. It is worth at least that much in scrap.

There is nothing like a Selectric's keyboard. Bought one in the early 2000s, disconnected from the internet for a year, moved out into the woods and typed on nothing but the Selectric. Never did get around to writing the great American novel though.

Oh and this is pretty nifty. http://hackaday.com/2012/06/13/turning-an-ibm-selectric-into...

Most of these groups are very small with little influence (though some are very active politically, though it isn't listed, the Sons of Confederate Veterans loves to make life hard for state legislators and Governors). Many of these are literally holes in the wall, like The Redneck Shop in SC (not discrediting racism in the SE, but most people have other things to do with their time).

What is really going on: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Black_belt_counties.png

Also you have a disproportionate number of historically black colleges in the South as compared to the rest of the US. Upper-middle black households are more likely to send their kids to schools like Spelman and Morehouse and if kids like anything, they like sex.

Retaining any optimism when it comes to ATT and the FCC is a difficult task. Every FCC hearing involving ATT seems to be the same old song and dance. So yes, having a conversation would be nice, but it won't be allowed. Not a real conversation or even small talk about the weather.

Genachowski (and whoever his replacement happens to be) will smile and do what Randall Stephenson tells him to do. McDowell will threaten to sue himself and the FCC, saying the FCC has no right to do anything, under any circumstances and any action is a socialist affront to God and Country. Clyburn will do her "what does this do for the black community" bit and if we miss the saving throw a few red necks will get pissed off, further derailing things. Unsure of Rosenworcel and Pai, hopefully one of them will say something useful, but that is only praying for Judy and Punch.

Meanwhile both representatives standing in front of the chair persons will really be lobbyists for ATT. One will say that any action suggested will never be enough and the other will say that any action will be too much. Blah, blah, blah, some things never change.

I'd genuinely love to see a conversation (on anything), but that conversation will never really happen.

Mama said I could find a nice girl at church, so I tried a bigger stretch of holy ground.

Yes. It tells an important story about product creation.

DuckTales had to make it over 65 episodes and under budget. It had simple goals and it accomplished them.

Look at Apple at their brightest hours. You can say that the iPhone was Apple throwing down the gauntlet and rejecting the tyranny of buttons and saved us all, but the reality is simple. Touch was expensive and bad for a long time, so Apple waited until touch was cheap and good, then they solved for X. They didn't care if you didn't buy iWorks for your iMac and your iPad, they just wanted to sell hardware.

That is the secret to success for many products and avoiding it is the road to failure for many others: if affordable{solve for x();} else {do something else();}

MS and Disney have shot themselves in the foot numerous times. MS making sure they didn't hurt other product lines created huge waste and left consumers hesitant. Disney obsessed with the Disney Princess and drove away everyone but the pre-teen girl and parents didn't bother taking their kids to see The Princess and the Frog because Dad would lose his mind and empty his walled if he thought he'd have to spend another second in Hanna Montana-ville. Instead of just solving for X, they lost consumers who assumed they'd get screwed down the road somewhere.

It was a good example of when outsourcing works. Japanese animation was still cheap at the time (mid 80s to early 90s). Same thing happened with Korea after that. No idea where that will move next.

It gave the show's developers the opportunity to think about what did and didn't work instead of managing the politics.