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The Real 'Stuff White People Like' Screenshot-sm 286

Here's an interesting and funny look at 526,000 OkCupid users, divided into groups by race and gender and all the the things each groups says it likes or is interested in. While it is far from being definitive, the groupings give a glimpse of what makes each culture unique. According to the results, white men like nothing better than Tom Clancy, Van Halen, and golfing.
Books

Neal Stephenson Unveils His Digital Novel Platform 157

pickens writes "The NY Times reports that Neal Stephenson's company Subutai has released the first installment of Stephenson's new novel, Mongoliad, about the Mongol invasion of Europe, using what it calls the PULP platform for creating digital novels. The core of the experience is still a text novel, but authors can add additional material like background articles, images, music, and video and there are also social features that allow readers to create their own profiles, earn badges for activity on the site or in the application, and interact with other readers. Stephenson says the material is an extension of what many science fiction and fantasy novels already offer. 'I can remember reading Dune for the first time, and I started by reading the glossary,' Stephenson says. 'Any book that had that kind of extra stuff in it was always hugely fascinating to me.' Jeremy Bornstein says Subutai is experimenting with a new model for publishing books and says the traditional model of paying for content may not hold up when the content can 'be canned and sent around to your friends for free,' but that people will hopefully still pay for content if 'the experience is so much more rich, so much more involving.'"

Comment Re:Why so discriminating? (Score 3, Interesting) 1036

He told me that the Sodom and Gomorrah story is about hospitality law and not homosexuality.

This is supported by Ezekiel chapter 16:

Behold, this was the guilt of your sister Sodom: she and her daughters had pride, excess of food, and prosperous ease, but did not aid the poor and needy. They were haughty and did an abomination before me.

The men of Sodom were certainly sodomites, but that's not why their city burned.

Comment Re:Then why not C? (Score 1) 663

If I had to start with assembly I would have left the programming field entirely after that first high school course. Fortunately, they started me on something more approachable (C++, although Python would have been even better) where you can have a working program within an hour of sitting down at the keyboard for the first time.
Piracy

Estimating Game Piracy More Accurately 459

An anonymous reader tips a post up at the Wolfire blog that attempts to pin down a reasonable figure for the amount of sales a game company loses due to piracy. We've commonly heard claims of piracy rates as high as 80-90%, but that clearly doesn't translate directly into lost sales. The article explains a better metric: going on a per-pirate basis rather than a per-download basis. Quoting: "iPhone game developers have also found that around 80% of their users are running pirated copies of their game (using jailbroken phones). This immediately struck me as odd — I suspected that most iPhone users had never even heard of 'jailbreaking.' I did a bit more research and found that my intuition was correct — only 5% of iPhones in the US are jailbroken. World-wide, the jailbreak statistics are highest in poor countries — but, unsurprisingly, iPhones are also much less common there. The highest estimate I've seen is that 10% of worldwide iPhones are jailbroken. Given that there are so few jailbroken phones, how can we explain that 80% of game copies are pirated? The answer is simple — the average pirate downloads a lot more games than the average customer buys. This means that even though games see that 80% of their copies are pirated, only 10% of their potential customers are pirates, which means they are losing at most 10% of their sales."

Comment Re:no reform. (Score 1) 2044

Yes, if you pulled everybody out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow you could fund this health care bill. But that would cause far more people to die than health reform would save.

Comment A good first step (Score 1) 171

but college students are some of the most strongly connected people around. They are more likely to be friends with their neighbors (who all share their age and occupation), Facebook adoption rates in their social circle are very high, and they have a very strong overlap between work, living arrangements and social life.

This isn't generally worrisome for the rest of us, who aren't Facebook friends with everyone on our street or office building.

Announcements

Rock Band 3 Officially Announced For Holiday 2010 76

An anonymous reader writes "Philippe Dauman, Viacom CEO and President, announced today that Harmonix is currently working on the next Rock Band game, Rock Band 3, due for release Holiday 2010. 'The company is pursuing the game in spite of an industry-weakening decline in the once-booming genre of peripheral-equipped music games. Although the franchise has generated over $1 billion to date, the category in general saw sales contract by as much as half throughout 2009. MTV Games parent Viacom also saw Rock Band declines drag on its balance sheet in its last fiscal quarter, and expressed a need to refocus away from pricey peripherals in favor of software. It also said that due to royalties it would need to be more "selective" about track listings, and that it needs more support from the music industry in that department.'"

Comment Re:What about side-scrollers? (Score 1) 205

A side-scroller probably wouldn't improve your peripheral vision at all, because your eyes are generally focused on the right side of the screen rather than the center. A first-person shooter or racing game, on the other hand, requires you to look at the center of the screen fairly often but also to be alert to quick developments on the edge of the screen. Of course, you'd have to be very close to the monitor to actually exercise the edge of your vision in this way.

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