Data scraping can work, as long as you have a team that can keep up with changes to the interface and counter various approaches to block the scraping-specific requests. Somehow, I don't think this will work for the long-term on Windows Phone systems - but then again, Windows Phone itself may not last too terribly long in this incarnation either, so it may be fine for its purpose, which is to latch onto low-information customers with shallow but momentary appealing features.

Ryan Fenton

Ha! Am I biased, and selective in the messages I put out into the world? Yes - I'm a human being.

Is there anything wrong with that?

I just want appropriate labeling on the biased articles that are using misleading language to disguise the bias they are proffering.

I'm perfectly OK with bias - in fact, I highly encourage proselytizing and debate, and love to learn about religions of all sorts. I just don't appreciate approaches that use lies and distortions to push the proselytizing as if it were something it were not. Like with the Templeton foundation.

Ryan Fenton

The key thing missing in the headline: "In treatment of depression".

Other things missing: "in one isolated study", "in an article summarizing the study, without any direct link to the research", and of course, "a highly biased interpretation meant to generate views based on obvious controversy."

Keep in mind, this may also be highly cultural, as many nations have much larger percentage non-believing populations, but not worse depression or suicide rates that correlate.

Ryan Fenton

http://what-if.xkcd.com/7/

Basically, this advice either boils down to "get out if/while you can", or else we're going to have to take some amazing steps to even get a small portion of the population out of the gravity well.

Which is actually good advice from one perspective - it's a very good negotiating approach.

We know that all paths we see before us seem to lead to epic population tragedies.

The cost of each of them is almost unlimited, in terms of taking away a meaningful future for humanity.

The private sector very strongly resists any attempt to do basic non-commercial research that can lead to a solution to any of these tragedies (and in fact is at least the indirect cause of many of them).

The reasonable answer, without requesting it, would seem to be an increase in funding by many of the nations of the earth for basic research. An increase in space exploration by China, for instance, would lead to a new space race, meaning more research and education.

More research and education will lead to progress towards solving basic problems, and possible escape from earth.

But for now in the US, conservatives think it will lead to more liberals, so it will be opposed strongly until they fear China enough to allow some progress.

Ryan Fenton

Why own a large device pretending to be a smartphone, when you can just use a smart phone?

I mean, if it were set up out of the box to be used for business and, well, PC gaming out of the box, then I'd be interested in a system with Windows 8... but instead, it's an OS that is very ashamed of being a PC, and every time I access it's configuration, I'm going to see whole-screen interfaces, and other throwbacks to pre-3.1 Windows concepts that phones need to use, and for some reason are pushed everywhere in Windows 8.

Why would I use a system that is reluctant at best, to serve as an OS the way I'd like to use it? I'll stick to Windows 7 for my PC games, and I can't imaging any of the businesses I've ever worked at wanting to switch to 8 either.

But I'm sure there's some folks that like Metro. I mean, Microsoft had to be focus testing with someone - I just can't imagine who'd select that interface as the better to use.

Ryan Fenton

From the Journal of Mad Science: A Cure for Addiction

Crazy they called me! CRAZY! But it is not _I_ who have surrendered the war on drugs! I know drugs - and the only real cure is PAIN. And the best PAIN? Direct laser to the brain!

Now, I know what you're all thinking! Dr. Madd, you're thinking, the brain doesn't have any pain receptors! You're thinking I just want to cure addiction with death! Ha! Death is no cure - it is FAILURE.

For you see - this is not some fleshy-burny laser, oh no! This is a laser set to trigger two particular threshold states in the neurotransmitter pathways... specifically, the pathways relating to heat, and cold.

And as any CHILD knows, both of those combined equate to the sensation of PAIN. Raw, sweet PAIN - far sweeter than any drug. Such an all-encompassing PAIN.

Such ecstasy an horror is unleashed, that the mind scrambles through everything it can, just to make sense of it. The end result is usually one of two things - a hyper-receptive state, where the ... subject is willing to accept instruction in thanks for the experience, or a simple silence that at least commits no more crimes such as seeking out drugs.

Such a cure! Were I a less modest man, I would call it a REVOLUTION in treatment!

I expect to be able to roll out full production within the next two to five years, and am highly interested in investments.

-Dr Maddeus Maddington Madd III, esq.

Importing people who will be automatically put into a process of exporting if they lose their job always seemed more than a bit cruel to me.

The effect of H1b has been to flood the market with fake job offers (intended to find no one available), increase the desperation of the average job seeker (where it doesn't lower wages directly, it has other effects), and to shift the job market gradually overseas as intimate knowledge of US business is shifted to people who aren't allowed to remain in the US market.

It's a mixed result - but mostly negative for the US at large.

Why not just allow more immigrants for technical fields? That way, they can start companies here, they don't have to live in such fear while working, and can pay socially beneficial taxes when they do (statistically) reach the higher incomes they are bound to reach.

Passing laws just to increase profit margins of companies at the expense of workers seems highly corrupt/inefficient. We're a nation of immigrants - we shouldn't shy away from making the nation stronger with citizens - and we've had huge problems with, um, drawing distinctions about labor variants of citizens in the past.

Ryan Fenton

And a [spam]* sandwich is just a sandwich with [spam] as an ingredient. I won't eat a sandwich I suspect has [spam] in it, or smells of [spam]. I raise my eyebrows hearing so many people arguing that "you can hardly notice the [spam]", and "Mmm, mmm - you really got to try this, it's really great [spam]" in cases like these. I'm sure there really are some people who really like [spam], but it's not something anyone I've met would prefer over any other ingredient, given the choice.

*censored for increased Montey Python reference rating.

Ryan Fenton

It's all associations. Associations with nature, associations from culture, associations we build from other music, etc. It's how our brain works, and how it's keyed to react to environmental events.

We can like fast driving beats because they match our excitement we've felt at other things. We can like slower rhythms for their likeness to intelligible patters we recognize in our lives. In general, the music just has to be present, and we'll generate the associations.

Dissonance just tends in our environments to get associated with things breaking, noises of discomfort, and instruments malfunctioning in one way or another.

Electronic music, like Commodore 64 music, has had to cope with odd dissonance being an element of its sometimes limited expressive set - and so has found interesting ways to blend in dissonance that gets interestingly divorced from the usual associations. It's why even though I'm not especially a musical connoisseur, I can appreciate some quality uses of dissonance in context.

Ryan Fenton

When I was at PAX Dev a couple of weeks ago, one good way to get a laugh would be to mention virtually any player-manipulative or too openly copying large sections of games, then just insert the word 'Zynga'.

The words 'E.A.' will also get some laughs connected to generic corporate thuggery, but after the whole 'Worst Company in America" stuff, it's a bit overplayed.

Ryan Fenton

In business economics, this is known as a negative externality, or costs imposed on others through your economic actions- and in modern business, negative externalities are almost something to be maximized, so long as they don't lead to direct consequences.

So yeah, as a modern business, this is exactly what is desired - enact a system that openly screws over everyone, so long as it can have some chance of benefiting your business in some way. Short-term interest is the primary motivation of publicly traded corporations, and indeed folks can and have been sued for not making it the first concern above all others.

From pollution, to overharvesting, to lawsuits, to claims on resources of all kinds - companies will always increase the rate at which they harm others as time goes on.

Ultimately, you need some public, long-term interests expressed as part of the legal/economic/legislative system, otherwise, we'll keep getting crap like this. It's why most of the more developed nations end up being more socially governed than the US has been over time.

Ryan Fenton

Yeah - It was quite late when I posted, and I was a little, well, loopy by then. 5 days of convention events and parties would frazzle anyone, I'd think.

Ryan Fenton

I've been to E3 before PAX existed, and this year I'm at PAX Prime (And PAX Dev), and it's been a totally better experience all around.

1. No booth babes - don't get me wrong, I love the female form, but there's a huge difference between PAX fans of all shapes dressed up in what they genuinely want to, with real life behind it, and the going-through-the-motions gals hired at E3. Don't get me wrong - companies still specifically hire marketing girls between 20-30 from agencies in a lot of cases, but the lowered sleaze factor helps in making for an environment where nerd-sexy can thrive - and I fully support that.

2. Parties are way better. I remember the Rockstar events at E3, and so on - but just last night, I came from a creepy, but superb costume party held in a Mansion clone of the level they've been demoing, compete with a rather well-done ARG - it was certainly money wasted that really should have gone into the development, but as long as these companies waste the money, I did find the whole experience far more compelling than "here's some drinks and music and trailers, don't you think we're cool."

3. The folks are really a functioning community. Any time there's a slack, of someone's having a hard time, you'll find a lot of humanity there. I left my laptop in a room on the first day, and a chain of people helped make sure it got to the lost-and-found - and that's just a tiny story. "Don't be a dick" is still in its functional golden era there, and it doesn't look like it's faltering soon.

Don't get me wrong, there's plenty of healthy skepticism and differences in opinion, and hardships exist all over (mostly from 70,000 people), but it all works remarkably well. Enforcers (small army of volunteers) helps too.

Final day is tomorrow - bittersweet and exhausting, but still awesome.

Ryan Fenton

Obligitory XKCD

We have the technology, we can escape the gravity well if we REALLY want to... but thanks to our robot friends and other tools, we also know how little there is right away out there for us.

I agree with the overall idea that technology will advance faster than we can travel. Robots and engineered life will quickly advance to the point of making terraforming plausible to start within a lifetime, possibly making nearby planets worth the extreme costs of travel.

Moreover though, by the time we have a place to travel to to live long-term, we may find it easier to alter ourselves than our environment. What was a robot before may have the mind of a 'real' person in a dozen generations or so, or close enough to it.

As far as we've advanced in the past few centuries, I'd think we'd advance in all kinds of directions before the fruits of terraforming/long-term offworld housing would pay off.

Near-earth technology Sci-fi books always had to postulate that offworlders end up always clever enough to somehow advance scientifically at a rate many times faster than their home planet, and always seem to take place after the incalculable mass was already in place to have terraforming and long-term living already transferred to the moon/mars/wherever. But I don't think that romantic notion of offworld hyper-competence would ever get a chance to play out, compared to the rate of change we've been riding for centuries at an ever-increasing rate, even with revolutions and depressions.

Ryan Fenton

Who thought that CPU's didn't bottleneck gaming performance? Who ever thought that? Only the smallest of tech demos only used GPU resources - every modern computer/console game I'm aware of uses, well, some regular programming language that needs a CPU to interpret instructions and is inherently limited by the standards of clock cycle and interrupt tied to those CPUs.

GPUs only tend to allow you to offload the strait-shot parallelized stuff - graphic blits, audio, textures & lighting - but the core of the game logic is still tied to the CPU. Even if you aren't straining the limits of the CPU in the final implementation, programmers are still limited by the capacity of them.

Otherwise, all our games would just be done with simple ray-traced logic, using pure geometry and physics, there would be no limits on the number or kind of interactions allowed in a game world, game logic would be built on unlimited tables of generated content, and we'd quickly build games of infinite recursion simulating all known aspects of the universe far beyond the shallow cut-out worlds we develop today.

But we can't properly design for that - we design for the CPUs we work with, and the other helper processors have never changed that.

Ryan Fenton