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Comment I know one guy who will never know... (Score 1) 267

When I was in high school my Biology 20 teacher found an old book in the library with various colour blindness test diagrams in it, and thought it would be fun to pass it around during class everyone could check it out.
On the the guys at the back of the class (you know the ones) cheated on it.

Comment Non-divisive "reality" competitions can be fun (Score 3, Interesting) 465

After being incredibly turned off by "reality" shows that contain no reality at all ("Dangerous Flights" is the most egregious example I've seen lately), I was totally absorbed by Penny Arcade's low-budget reality show offering of Strip Search last year. (The site is slightly misorganized, but you can find stuff if you try).

The show was a dozen web comic artists in competition. The premise of a single artist being funded and supported by Penny Arcade for a year was motivational, and the simple act of appearing in an episode granted even the entrants ousted first an audience for their work. While it was clear the producers provided for the possibility of backstabbing and conflict, they didn't go out of their way to insert any, and in the end the show was all the better for it. I'd actually put PA's Strip Search above 90% of professional, high-budget, high-production-values TV series.

My point being, it's totally possible to structure an interesting show where game dev competition is friendly and rewarding for all, and producers with zero-sum on the brain don't exist. It just hasn't been made yet, apparently.

Comment Re:STILL not accurate and STILL misquoted (Score 1) 182

And I built 1 system with an OCZ Petrol and it vaporized the partitions 6 months later, so that's 100%. I think luck had more to do with success than anything.

I actually _was_ surprised to get a replacement Vertex 4 fairly quickly, which reminds me I should open it and flash it while the firmwares are still easy to get.

Comment Re:TFA does a poor job of defining what's happenin (Score 5, Informative) 470

What is "unstable code" and how can a compiler leave it out?

The article is actually using that as an abbreviation for what they're calling "optimization-unstable code", or code that is included at some specified compiler optimization levels, but discarded at higher levels. Basically they think it's unstable due to being included or not randomly, not because the code itself necessarily results in random behaviour.

Comment Re:Not sure what's more depressing (Score 5, Informative) 68

This was a standard clinical study with 100 fully-aware participants trying to improve PTSD diagnosis to help the incidents of suicide and psychological issues in returning vets. You've got plenty of other things to gripe about with PATRIOT / PRISM / etc., but for crying out loud this isn't one of them.

Comment Re:woosh (Score 5, Insightful) 255

They don't get it. The people who block your content in-line can send you back any page they choose, including a 404.

Of course they can. The idea is that those doing the blocking have been forced to do so, and thus can use this alternate error page to distinguish these cases, and show their users how much of the internet they're missing due to government intervention.
A standard 404 could be legitimate, and isn't going to help garner any group support for open-ness.

Comment Re:Are you serious? (Score 4, Insightful) 282

It's really for stolen phones .. just like the kill switch for the internet was for emergency purposes. This has nothing whatsoever to do with cutting off people's means of communicating effectively with each other.

Don't be asinine. Your cellphone can already be tracked, tapped, disabled, folded, spindled and mutilated. What this is about is centralising and sharing information about stolen phones so that the utility of stolen phones diminishes to the point that you walking around with an iPhone doesn't look like an easy 200$ target to ne'er-do-wells.

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