these years now that feel like the golden age of online gaming will be the dark ages of games as historians of the future try to recreate what online play was like now for many titles.

While I agree with your premise, you overlook the fact that many of us in the "first gen" of gamers already view this as a "dark age". Personally, I have a fairly impressive game library, spanning a dozen platforms and worth probably tens of thousands of dollars (at original retail price*) worth of games. And I basically stopped buying games about a decade ago, with a few notable exceptions.

Make no mistake, I still game regularly - Between the occasional non-obnoxious modern release, and the back catalog of once-great games that I still haven't played (just finished Fallout a few weeks ago, no idea how I never got into that when it first came out), I figure I have enough material to keep me content for the rest of my life. But I will not play any game that depends on any aspect of the game under the exclusive control of a third party. Open servers and a really viable single-player mode, or GTFO, simple as that.


* Not that I actually paid full retail, which counts as an entirely different problem with modern games - Reselling a game used to mean putting it back in the box (or putting everything you had left in a ziplock bag), and passing it along to someone else for a few bucks. Now, if you even have the option of reselling it, you usually need to do so with the "permission" of the publisher. Fuck that!

Facepalm...that's how ad-based websites work!

Yes and no. You have it basically correct, but have omitted a key fact in this particular situation - Youtube can only exist by virtue of the fact that its users give them the vast majority of their content.

It sounds great, as a business model, to get paid for reselling something you can get for free, but not all of your audience will quietly put up with the fact that they count as the product.

They make you an offer, you decline and go elsewhere. Who was successful in that negotiation? Nobody.

I agree with you as a technicality, but in spirit, you've accomplished the same thing...

Who won? The person who says "screw your pathetic offer" and does go elsewhere for a better deal. The company that fills a position they have open with someone good enough that they didn't need to accept the first lowball offer that came their way.

And who lost? The company forced to either leave a position vacant, or possibly worse, fill it with someone so inexperienced (or just plain bad at what they do) that they had no alternatives but to accept the first paying offer that came their way.

This can only work out well, both in terms of Reddit's future staffing and Pao's goal of equalizing the playing field for women, if Reddit suddenly starts leading the industry for salaries. And as much as I like Reddit - I just don't see that happening.

Yet we don't negotiate for toothpaste, gas, etc.

Of course we do - We just do it in a way less blunt than "A shekel for that, you must be mad!".

Do you pay $6 for your toothpaste at 7-11, or $4 for the same brand and size at Walmart? Similarly, do you fill your car at the closest QwikyMart charging $0.15 higher than everyone else, or do you plan ahead to get gas at the average-priced Shell/Mobil/Major-Brand-X, or do you go out of your way to get gas at Sams for $0.10 less than everyone else has? We "negotiate" low margin prices by virtue of choosing where we buy. We don't try to talk most retail outlets down, we simply don't shop there except as a last resort.

And on the subject of cars, when you move up to much higher margin items, like furniture and cars and houses - Do you still just pay list, or do you negotiate? Well, guess what - I make a couple times the cost of a new car per year; and you can bet your ass I'll negotiate my salary (and the price of a car/house/couch) to the best of my ability. And no, I won't trade cash-in-hand for equity. I might trade it for vacation time, only because I value that higher than money, but oddly enough I have yet to find a company willing to even consider that particular trade-off. Huh, you'd almost think they want to get as much work out of me for as little money as possible, almost like... like... some sort of negotiation!

On the "bright" side, though, this will have the desired effect for Pao - Good negotiators won't even apply to work at Reddit, they'll go somewhere that recognizes the value of someone skilled at negotiation (a valuable skill in itself,useful in far, far more contexts than mere salary discussions). And assuming her premise holds true (I honestly don't know whether it does or doesn't), she will in effect get more women working there, and Reddit will benefit from underpaying them due to having banned negotiation in the name of "equality". That deserves a hell of a golf-clap, Ellen! It takes balls - erm, ovaries - to sell out your own kind in the name of protecting them from discrimination. Kudos!

"In the early 1960s, the Hawaii Island Chamber of Commerce began encouraging astronomical development of Mauna Kea, as an economic stimulus [...] UH rebuilt its small astronomy department into a new Institute for Astronomy, and in 1968 the Hawaii Department of Land and Natural Resources gave it a 65-year lease for all land within a 4 km (2.5 mi) radius of its telescope

Yes, I would have a problem with you randomly appearing and taking a dump on my front lawn, because I pay the government roughly 1.5% of the value of my home every year for the continued privilege of having the mostly-exclusive right to decide who gets to defecate on my lawn.

If, however, I put out an ad for someone to come fertilize my lawn with human excrement, and awarded you an exclusive contract to do the job for the next 65 years... Well then, I wouldn't really have much to right to bitch about you doing exactly what I asked you to, now would I?

Now git offa mah lawn, whippersnapper!

It's more about it being sacred for the gifts it gave the early Hawaiians in the form of food, water and other resources than of it being because of ghosts.

"The summit of Mauna Kea was seen as the "region of the gods", a place where benevolent spirits reside. Poliahu, deity of snow, also resides there."

Like I said, ghosts.

In any case, whether "ghosts" or "we liked hanging out there 1500 years ago", neither makes any difference as to whether or not we should build an observatory in one of the single most suitable spots on the planet for its primary purpose.

Seriously?

"Killed X people. He admits it. His lawyers admit it. We have video proving he did it." "Yep, guilty".
"Injured Y people. He admits it. His lawyers admit it. We have video proving he did it." "Yep, guilty".
"Conspired to do the above. He admits it. His lawyers admit it. We have video proving he did it." "Yep, guilty".
"Used a firearm to do the above. He admits it. His lawyers admit it. We have video proving he did it." "Yep, guilty".
"Did the above in a public place. He admits it. His lawyers admit it. We have video proving he did it." "Yep, guilty".
"Disrupted commerce with the above. He admits it. His lawyers admit it. We have video proving he did it." "Yep, guilty".

Really, it takes 23 minutes of deliberation per charge for 30 variations of the above list, none of which either the defendant or his lawyers or the physical evidence disputes? Hell, it amazes me it took 23 minutes total. Most likely scenario, the jury included one complete bastard who liked finally getting his 23 minutes of attention and milked it for every second he could.

You have given the single, most concise answer in this discussion.

We have stopped building an expensive modern scientific instrument that will improve all of humanity, because of fucking ghosts. And not even ghosts in the "poltergeist" sense, but ghosts in the "my great grandaddy told me Jesus cries when you eat a ham and cheese sandwich" sense - Such complete nonsense that any adult should feel ashamed that such idiotic words might come out of their mouth in voicing their objections to this telescope.

The sooner we as a species stop humoring these morons, the better.

/ Not an atheist.
// Not psychotic enough, though, to pretend I know god's will about big rock, meteorites, walls, and mountain tops.
/// Also not just "pro science, so fuck you" - I'd say the same about building a Walmart in the same spot.

Instead of asking "what now", doesn't anyone wonder why TC chose to self-destruct, invoking its own canary and refusing to let anyone keep the name?

If the devs just wanted out, they could have passed on the name to a blessed successor. Even if they wanted to act petty and protect the name for no good reason, they didn't need to invoke their canary. Something about this just doesn't make a whole lot of sense.

Hmm, if we question whether or not we can trust that the NSA didn't get to the original devs... How can we trust that they didn't get to the auditors? "Yup, all clear! Enjoy! (Can I have my kids back now, Mr. Suit?)"

The famous "51% attack" requires both malice *and* luck.

First of all, just hitting 51% doesn't guarantee that you will continue to have a longer available chain than the rest of the network, a hard requirement to pull off a 51% double-spending attack. Until you start getting into the 60 or 70% range, you can at best cheat for a few blocks in a row.

And since such double-spending becomes instantly detectable and would pretty much obliterate confidence in the network, you would effectively have the ability to double-spend a suddenly-worthless currency. Only someone intentionally looking to destroy BitCoin would waste the resources to control that much processing power, only to make all their high-end dedicated hardware worthless in the process. And before you suggest someone like the NSA could do it - Currently it would take 2.2 zettaflops; for comparison the entire Top500 only pull 309 petaflops, or about 0.007% (no, I didn't misplace the decimal or forget to multiply by 100 there) of the aggregate power of the Bitcoin network.

ads are displayed in a way that would not be permitted on broadcast or cable television.

Porn is not permitted on broadcast television either. Welcome to the internet.

Last 5 winners of the Hugo Best Novel: Ancillary Justice, Redshirts, Among Others, Blackout/All Clear, The Windup Girl/The City & the City.

So which ones are "message" novels?

Red Shirts sure as hell isn't. Ancillary Justice is interesting, but I certainly would consider it a hell of a lot less "mandatory message" driven than this year's The Dark Between the Stars.

THREE of the best five novellas are John C. Wright? I mean he is not a terrible writer, but seriously? That's what their team considers the best science fiction novellas published this year?

I agree they did nothing illegal. But their nominations are pretty shit compared to what was published this year. I think they managed not to include a single one of my top picks for novels, novellas, or novelettes.

Also, that nomination for Wisdom from My Internet is just embarrassing. At least as embarrassing as that dinosaur love story.

Are you actually asserting that Kevin J. Anderson's book is better than the latest William Gibson?

Are you seriously going to tell me that John C. Wright wrote THREE of the best five novellas of the year?

Either you have terrible taste in science fiction or you haven't actually bothered looking at the nominees yet.