katovatzschyn

Or so simple as speeding when you drive? There are many laws which do not function as they should.

A raiding guild for 40 players is typically composed of no less than 60-70 regular players to deal with precisely this problem. Top guilds will often have enough players to fill three or more raid groups in order to have enough prepared players for the "main raid."

katovatzschyn

14년 전discuss

The factors that make it seem most like a work of fiction:

- No screenshots with players visible.

- Play only continues when all 30 people are online at once. Anybody who has tried to make something like this happen will immediately notice how difficult it is for this to occur with any kind of regularity whatsoever, yet the claim is that this was happening for weeks.

katovatzschyn

14년 전discuss

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=efWTPuc6YAA

katovatzschyn

14년 전discuss

The disregard for the physics of the situation is actually quite insulting. The "demonstration" is so far from realistic its not even worth a debunking.

Here is an example of what this man is claiming to have done, actually being done, by a team of engineers working for years:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0E77j1imdhQ

katovatzschyn

14년 전discuss

Could it perhaps be that a very simple thought experiment is not a strong model for the chaotic actions of hundreds of millions of people over several years?

katovatzschyn

14년 전discuss

And, continuing back from hexadecimal, we have the splendid:

    842254760070427756125843951997302119090555319708

in base 10 for the magnet link of the torrent containing the list of magnet links for the pirate bay's torrents. Shall we add to the list of illegal numbers?

Perhaps its prime factorization also belongs on that list.

    2^2×3^2×23×89×24733×462111028392156064869667382167578133253

Best to include the Roman numeral version of the number, as it's equally illegal.

http://i.imgur.com/JROu8.png

It would also be wise to outlaw the URL I've just linked, and perhaps also the combination of letters "JROu8" as they also contain the information in question given proper context.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illegal_number

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

Not exactly. There were 3.500m people alive then, and about 7.000m now, but because many of the 3.500m died and were replaced over those 44 years, you would actually be older than more than half of the world with high probability.

According to the figures provided, 77.500m humans total in 1967, 83.200m total now, so 5.700m had been born since then, but the population only increased by 3.500m, meaning 2.200m people had died since 1967. Without stronger data, it's impossible to say whether the people dying tended to be older or younger than a certain age, so it's not possible to say with any reasonable certainty what the actual fixed point is, or even the ratio of people younger or older than you.

Though, Wolfram Alpha reports the median age of the Earth to be about 27,6.

http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=world+%7C+median+age

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

    Feisal: Our own prisoners, Mr. Bentley, are taken care of, 'til the British can 
    relieve us of them, according to the Code. I should like you to notice that.

    Bentley: Yes, sir. Is that the influence of Major Lawrence?

    Feisal: Why should you suppose so?

    Bentley: Well, it's just that I heard in Cairo that Major Lawrence has a horror 
    of bloodshed.

    Feisal: That is exactly so. With Major Lawrence, mercy is a passion. With me, it 
    is merely good manners. You may judge which motive is the more reliable.

         - Lawrence of Arabia

Good business is built on mutual trust, consistency, and reliability; art on exceptionalness and originality. It should be no surprise that designers and businessmen so often clash, one is playing for the middle of the normal distribution, the other longs for the fringes.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

Out of curiosity;

Google Chrome was released about 37 months ago. 15 versions were released since then, so Google averaged about 15/37 versions per month, the "Chrome constant." Lynx was released in 1992, around 228 months ago. 228(15/37)=v92. So, were Lynx to have used an approximately similar version enumeration to Chrome, it would currently be at around version 92.

Similarly:

  Opera: 178 * (CC) = v72

  Konqueror: 180 * (CC) = v72

  Firefox: 83 * (CC) = v33

  Internet Explorer: 194 * (CC) = v78

  Safari: 105 * (CC) = v42

  Lynx: 228 * (CC) = v92

Another note of interest is that almost all of these browsers had their respective releases in September or October.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

>As much as it pains me, because probably the price will fall even further, I'll keep some BTC around just in case...

Swiss Francs, CAD, and even USD are much safer if stability is your concern. If the Euro indeed collapses as you seem to fear, you may even find yourself making gains.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

> but if you're branding an operator, brand it everywhere.

And this behavior is what provoked the statement that the engineers are no longer in control- branding trumping usability.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

Surely because what a person claims they want often varies drastically from what they actually want.

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spagh...

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

Were I to infer anything from that data, it would be that "mindshare" is not a significant metric. 95% market share, and near parity in "mindshare?" That smacks of irrelevancy to me.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

From Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine:

In February 1993, Canada was in the midst of financial catastrophe, or so one would have concluded by reading the newspapers and watching TV. “Debt Crisis Looms,” screamed a banner front-page headline in the national newspaper, the Globe and Mail. A major national television special reported that “economists are predicting that sometime in the next year, maybe two years, the deputy minister of finance is going to walk into cabinet and announce that Canada’s credit has run out…. Our lives will change dramatically.

The phrase “debt wall” suddenly entered the vocabulary. What it meant was that, although life seemed comfortable and peaceful now, Canada was spending so far beyond its means that, very soon, powerful Wall Street firms like Moody’s and Standard and Poor’s would downgrade our national credit rating from its perfect Triple A status to something much lower. When that happened, hypermobile investors, liberated by the new rules of globalisation and free trade, would simply pull their money from Canada and take it somewhere safer. The only solution, we were told, was to radically cut spending on such programs as unemployment insurance and health care. Sure enough, the governing Liberal Party did just that, despite having just been elected on a platform of job creation.

Two years after the deficit hysteria peaked, the investigative journalist Linda McQuaig definitively exposed that a sense of crisis had been carefully stoked and manipulated by a handful of think tanks funded by the largest banks and corporations in Canada, particularly the C. D. Howe Institute and the Fraser Institute (which Milton Friedman had always actively and strongly supported). Canada did have a deficit problem, but it wasn’t caused by spending on unemployment insurance and other social programs. According to Statistics Canada, it was caused by high interest rates, which exploded the worth of the debt much as the Volcker Shock had ballooned the developing world’s debt in the eighties. McQuaig went to Moody’s Wall Street head office and spoke with Vincent Truglia, the senior analyst in charge of issuing Canada’s credit rating. He told her something remarkable: that he had come under constant pressure from Canadian corporate executives and bankers to issue damning reports about the country’s finances, something he refused to do because he considered Canada an excellent, stable investment. “It’s the only country that I handle where, usually, nationals from that country want the country downgraded even more – on a regular basis. They think it’s rated too highly.” He said he was used to getting calls from country representatives telling him he had issued too low a rating. “But Canadians usually, if anything, disparage their country far more than foreigners do.”

That’s because, for the Canadian financial community, the “deficit crisis” was a critical weapon in a pitched political battle. At the time Truglia was getting those strange calls, a major campaign was afoot to push the government to lower taxes by cutting spending on social programs such as health and education. Since these programs are supported by an overwhelming majority of Canadians, the only way the cuts could be justified was if the alternative was national economic collapse – a full blown crisis. The fact that Moody’s kept giving Canada the highest possible bond rating – the equivalent of an A++ – was making it extremely difficult to maintain the apocalyptic mood.

Investors, meanwhile, were getting confused by the mixed messages. Moody’s was upbeat about Canada, but the Canadian press constantly presented the national finances as catastrophic. Truglia got so fed up with the politicised statistics coming out of Canada, which he felt were calling his own research into question, that he took the extraordinary step of issuing a “special commentary” clarifying that Canada’s spending was “not out of control,” and he even aimed some veiled shots at the dodgy math practiced by right-wing think tanks. “Several recently published reports have grossly exaggerated Canada’s fiscal debt position. Some of them have double counted numbers, while others have made inappropriate international comparisons… These inaccurate measurements may have played a role in exaggerated evaluations of the severity of Canada’s debt problems.” With Moody’s special report, word was out that there was no looming “debt wall” – and Canada’s business community was not pleased. Truglia says that when he put out the commentary, “one Canadian… from a very large financial institution in Canada called me up on the telephone screaming at me, literally screaming at me. That was unique.”

By the time Canadians learned that the “deficit crisis” had been grossly manipulated by the corporate-funded think tanks, it hardly mattered – the budget cuts had already been made and locked in. As a direct result, social programs for the country’s unemployed were radically eroded and have never recovered, despite many subsequent surplus budgets. The crisis strategy was used again and again in this period. In September 1995, a video was leaked to the Canadian press of John Snobelen, Ontario’s minister of education, telling a closed-door meeting of civil servants that before cuts to education and other unpopular reforms could be announced, a climate of panic needed to be created by leaking information that painted a more dire picture than he “would be inclined to talk about”. He called it “creating a useful crisis."

http://www.metafilter.com/106249/US-Credit-Rating-Downgrade-...

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

I think there's the same dichotomy in tech journalism as there is in science journalism, perhaps other journalism as well but I'm not qualified to comment on other topic's veracity, namely, that the people who in fact understand the topics and are qualified to talk about them much more often actually work in the field and don't merely report about it.

From that nature, I am more inclined to rely on journalism for facts and overview alone, and less inclined to rely on them for their opinion than I am actual professionals in the field.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

I maintain that the best way to get started with functional programming is to pick a functional language and try to write a program with it.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

Maybe it's not reasonable now or ever but I'd quite love to think of Google as a company capable of doing things that are immensely interesting but have no obvious, immediate, practical "use."

I don't know if they are there quite yet. It seems to me that they still strongly incentivize shipping products and making things people will use within in their corporate culture. I might be wrong. There could be a light coming on.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

To be simplistic, it seems that things are quite different this time. The fundamentals of crises may be the same or similar, but the world has -never- been linked in the way it currently is, and the world population, and total consumption has -never- been as high as it currently is.

I hate to argue against an entire book with a sentence like that, but claiming that this is a "pretty vanilla financial crisis" seems to take the overall situation in a dismissive light that I don't agree with.

katovatzschyn

15년 전discuss

Can you offer any criticisms or arguments to support the claim that Slavok is a "bullshit artist," outside of the claim itself, or your own qualifications to so easily dismiss a prominent and respected public intellectual who commands respect and has a severe and extensive resume?

katovatzschyn

Submissions

"Online astroturfing is more advanced and more automated than we’d imagined."

Opera Browser AMA (Ask Me Anything) on reddit

How Will You Measure Your Life?

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