The most accomplished spy I know of was Garbo, a double-agent who successfully convinced Nazi Germany that D-Day was just a diversion, among many other things. His story is fascinating.

Yeah, I think I would have bought a new console, too. Not a Microsoft one, though.

For the purposes of this argument, there are two types of games: story/character-driven games, and gameplay-driven games. For gameplay-driven games, it really doesn't matter. The player character is not the important part of the game and whatever color he happens to be really isn't any sort of commentary, it's just arbitrary. So yeah, for that, go ahead and make a character creator and let people have choices. I don't really think the "sexuality" choices would really have much of an affect on appearance, though, so forgive me if I think that one can be left out.

For story/character-driven games... it depends. Above all else, you shouldn't shoehorn "diversity" in for the sake of diversity. When you're trying to tell a story, there are other things that are much more important. You want your story to make sense, you want it to fit, you want your characters to be believable and meaningful, and you want to create an experience that the player cares about. Sometimes, one or more of those goals are mutually exclusive with diversity. This is especially true with realistic fiction stories; it's just a fact of life that many interesting settings didn't really have a lot of diversity.

Now, for something more fantastical, like something set in the future or some kind of fantasy, there's more room for that kind of thing, but even then, you're not going to put a character in solely for the sake of "diversity." The statement you're making with that is that race is meaningful, that it's something that we need to "balance" in games. I would say that's racist in itself. The whole idea is supposed to be that it *doesn't* matter. So, to that end, I would say: bring your vision out. Make the characters you want to make, and don't worry about what all these neo-progressives tell you to write about. There are more important things you should be focusing on than what color skin your characters wear.

Listen, I'm all for advancing technology and taking risks, but this particular application has the potential to do very real harm to the test subjects. It's one thing if the researchers put themselves at risk, but putting others at risk because of our own ignorance is unacceptable. I would suggest we do such experiments on animal brains until we have a more thorough understanding of whether or not they'll have serious consequences for human brains.

GP didn't say it reached critical mass, merely that there are a lot of things happening right now. Valve is making a major push toward getting developers to do things on Linux. I think that has yet to finish playing out; the pieces are still moving.

Are they using SSL, or are they using TLS? Which version of either are they using? Most modern browsers support TLS 1.1 and 1.2, but I can imagine Google falling back to 1.0 or even SSL for compatibility with fossils.

As much as I personally love Google Talk, it's about as dead as you can get. Most links have been redirected to Hangouts, and those that aren't, you have to access manually. If anyone cares, here's the only working link that I'm aware of for Google Talk: http://www.google.com/talk/ind...

I see this get tossed around a lot and, somehow, it ended up +4 insightful this time. Why do you seem to think that we should only work on one single problem at a time? Should we put all medical research on hold to stop wars? Should we give up on finding new forms of efficient energy because people are fighting each other? The fact that people are "killing each other" (different people, by the way; the author's not really involved with that and probably isn't a specialist in that field, so his ideas wouldn't be helpful there) does not mean that we can't work on improving ourselves in other ways while continuing to work on that particular problem. The solutions and the pursuit of them are not mutually exclusive.

Considering the UK's absurdly overbearing libel laws, I find your suggestion (even with source) hard to believe.

I don't see how the rest of your post lends itself to support the supposition that "I don't understand statistics." Rather, it seems to support the supposition that "I don't understand the problem of how statistics is misused in the medical field." I'm willing to concede either (I'm not a statistician, I only have a cursory background in statistics to begin with), but if you saw something blatantly wrong with what I wrote, I'd be interested in knowing what it was.

As for not knowing about the problem of the misuse of statistics in the medical field, that's true. I wasn't aware it was a problem at all, and the post I was responding to seemed like he was just generalizing based on a misunderstanding of basic statistics and how it's applied to research. Considering the context of the comment (it's in re a story about anti-vaccination folk, people who are notorious for misunderstanding basic science and using that misunderstanding to condemn a large body of what is basically well-established fact), I felt it was appropriate to assume that my understanding of his comment was correct. But it seems that wasn't the case, and if so, I was in error; I apologize.

I don't think forcing the children of stupid parents out of education (public schooling and libraries) is the solution to this problem.