This is inevitably what goes through my head whenever I see a device with some clever hardware tchotchke - "That nice." I say, "But it'll only work as long as the device is using their software, which ties me to their OS and possibly configuration, limits my privacy options, etc." So a laptop with a second screen, like the Razer Blade Pro, or a phone like the Yota, is ultimately pretty useless.

Thanks. I guess you got downmodded for the ex-Windows comment, but it was still a helpful reply. Appreciated.

There isn't anything this thin and light, there aren't any AMD CPUs that can run at a decent speed at such low power, but on larger notebooks they're competitive at the low end if you factor in the GPU. An A10 is both faster and cheaper than Iris Pro.

Trouble is, most people who care about that want something discrete. But for a cheap notebook which is actually gaming-capable an A10 is a good choice.

I used to be a sys admin, but that was years ago and currently I only use Linux on the desktop. I don't suppose that someone could explain to me (or just give me a link to an explanation): what is systemd exactly, what does it change, and why do people both love and hate it so much?

I've seen enough of these stories now to kind of get the feeling that it's mostly admins who hate this, and they mostly hate it because it's change and it screws up their configs. Is that right? Is there any other reason to hate it? I have no idea what the motivation is on the other side.

Because that wouldn't actually reduce the number of babies, it would just make them poorer and less educated. We certainly do need to reduce the population, but there's no evidence to suggest that welfare programs, daycare, foodstamps, etc., are contributing to the birth rate. Even when the payouts of those programs are tied to the number of children that the recipients have. In fact there's some evidence for the opposite, that using welfare to alleviate some of the very worst effects of poverty can lower the birthrate.

Not enough though, clearly, welfare isn't the magic bullet that's going to bring the population down. Unfortunately, a lot of people use the fact that greater prosperity goes hand-in-hand with lower birth rates as an excuse to ignore the problem... I suspect that this is something that isn't going to be even widely acknowledged, let alone solved, until an awful lot of people have died violently.

There's some kind of cognitive disconnect here.

Question: "Why then the West wants to give out money to help those "poor" countries?"
Answer: "China didn't receive any fucking foreign aid from nobody" "Tens of millions of people perished"

Question: "they never got any "Western aid" at all, and still, they survived, right?"
Answer: "Tens of millions of people perished"

Look, the survival of the country doesn't mean shit. Countries are just organizational tools. The aid has the objective of improving the lives of the people, not the country, and it does work - it has been rigorously demonstrated to work when it's done a certain way under certain conditions. All that the article is trying to do is point out that those conditions are very idiosyncratic and that aid organizations need to take that under consideration.

For anyone who makes the mistake of believing this AC, the actual TL;DR is: Ideas that work well, even ideas that have been demonstrated to work very well through rigorous study, oftentimes only apply to the specific area which was studied. For this reason charitable development needs to stop thinking big and start working incrementally, village by village. Nothing and nobody can pull an entire country or continent out of poverty in a timeframe that isn't counted in decades.

He gives examples - a rigorous four-year study found that giving deworming pills to children in a particular area in Kenya had a larger impact on school attendance than giving them textbooks, even though they were very short on textbooks. A deworming program has subsequently been rolled out to cover millions of children in Africa and India, with a hope for similar results, but they've stopped with the rigorous testing with the feeling that they've sufficiently demonstrated the program's usefulness. The author points out several reasons why, for some areas, textbooks might still be a better answer and makes the claim that grand programs like this one can be both ineffective at their goals and have pretty crazy unforeseen consequences. There's a funny example of unforeseen consequences with a group of teenage latina girls who went through a workshop intended to keep them out of gangs, a successful workshop: not one of them was arrested for violence within six months of the end of the program. However, within those six months every one of them had become pregnant. Apparently gang membership was fulfilling a need for them that found they had to satisfy in some other way.

That is indeed funny, since he repeatedly said that he would return to Sweden for trial in they promised not to extradite him. Given there are several items on that list which should, in principle, make extradition impossible, this should have been a dead easy promise to make. And yet they refused to make such a promise.

Not the stock value, but it can certainly hurt the company. Ending Apartheid is the usual example of a social goal which was aided by divestment. Here's a little blurb explaining how that works.

Actually, I think I got to wrapped up in finding something that we could agree over. I want to correct myself: I would not be right there with you, even over this far lessor "outrage." The furthest that I can go honestly is to say that among the excerpts that the blog author has chosen to show us, I don't see Barbie doing any engineering. I would never even consider protesting something like this when all I've got to go on are a few scans chosen by an obviously heavily slanted author.

Of course, I'm not going to protest "Barbie inaccurately portrays one of her multitudes of professions" anyway...

She's a freaking high school student, what are you expecting here? No one's going to hire her anyway, just for being too young.

Once again, the only thing that the book says Barbie can't do is complete the entire game by herself. It doesn't say that she can't code, it only says that she isn't coding right then, it doesn't say that she can't fix her computer, it only says that fixing her computer will go faster if she and her teammates work together. And even if it did, even if there existed a problem that Barbie couldn't solve, I submit that this wouldn't be the fucking end of the world. She's not some kind of wizard, I don't understand why it's weak to ask for help once in a while.

If the complaint was that this was an inaccurate portrayal of what it means to be a computer engineer then I'd be right there with you. Game designers are not necessarily engineers, and high school students aren't engineers anyway. So fine, I'll grant that this isn't a very good book since that is supposed to be the point. But that is not what people are up in arms over here.

This is definitely one of the better summaries of Gamergate that I've read. For the last thing though - in the grand scheme of things gaming journalism may be nothing but entertainment news. However, integrity is literally their entire product. An investigative journalist sells their research: what they've discovered about an important issue, or that hard-to-get interview. A gaming journalist sells their opinion, it has no value whatsoever if their integrity has been compromised.

This doesn't happen. Read the page scans in TFA, like I suggested, rather than regurgitating the commentary. She says that she's only creating the design ideas (at the time that Skipper asks this question) and that she'll need Steven and Brian's help to turn it into a real game. That's teamwork, not helplessness.

And of course "it's faster if we help." What do you want Barbie to be here, an anti-social loner? Living in her parents' basement and doing everything by herself is supposed to be better? She's working in a team and her teammates offered to help. At no point in any of the pages shown in TFA does Barbie just sit back and "lets the boys do it."

I'll grant that the book does seem to confuse a bit what engineering means, especially since Barbie in this doesn't seem to be any older than high school (she refers to her instructor as "teacher" rather than professor, "Ms Smith"). I've never heard high school students referred to as engineers. So the last line is a little off, you're right.

None the less, the idea that Barbie giving orders to a couple of code monkeys would be degrading to Barbie is just bizarre. Very few people look at the person who's in charge and probably better paid and think to themselves, "Well that person must be an idiot."

I have no idea, TFA article only shows two pages of that: one where Barbie asks one of her teammates, Steven, to pull files off of Skipper's hard drive, and another where Steven reports back that he was successful. The post doesn't show any pages where they're working on Barbie's computer (which also has a virus) or on cleaning Skipper's computer. These pages either don't exist or were omitted from the post for not supporting the blogger's story.

I did do a cursory search for the book online, since it would be nice to see the full text of the book rather than just what the blogger is willing to show, but unsurprisingly I wasn't able to turn up anything. We're talking about an incredibly trite children's book after all, one of a billion.