Actually, that's not quite true. My given name, "Brian Green" is dreadfully common. I was at a conference recently where someone tried to add me on LinkedIn but I didn't show up in the first page of results on their phone. I told them to search for my pseudonym, "Psychochild", and I was the only result.

And that's the reason why I've kept using my pseudonym, even in a professional environment. (Okay, I'm a game developer, so it's a bit more acceptable.) But, if you have a very common name then using a pseudonym can help make you easier to find.

Caveat: I'm an MMO developer and I like the microtransaction system. In short, if you're not the biggest game (if you're an indie developer, for example), you can't compete with a larger developer via subscriptions. They'll make more money with more subscribers, therefore the $15 someone pays for another game will feel "worth more" than the money paid for your smaller game. You can read a more in-depth analysis on my professional blog.

The example I give of why I like microtransactions as a player is that I can control my costs easier. I play Dungeons & Dragons Online with some friends, which uses this business model. I can tell you exactly how much money I've spent on DDO: $100. I've also played WoW in the past, but I don't know exactly how much money I've spent on it. I will say I know I've spent more than $100 just on buying boxes for the original game and expansions for WoW.

Anyway, it's not like subscriptions are inherently virtuous. Just ask anyone how much they love their cell phone provider or cable company. You can be gouged by unscrupulous businesses with a subscription or any other business model, even "free" given that most companies sell your personal data to support that business model.

"The Prineville FB data center employs 35 people, but the tech jobs were all filled out of area"

Wrong, and wrong again. Just because you live nearby doesn't mean you have a clue what is going on inside. More than half the full-time tech jobs have been filled locally.

Additionally the site has been under construction for over a year and a half employing hundreds of people, both locally and from all over the Pacific Northwest. All those folks have been spending their money in Crook County, hotels, restaurants, bars, etc. Every day for the past 18 months. I've seen Central Oregon before this project began, and since - the economic benefits have been palpable and positive.

You are wrong. They will, and they do.

Datacenter work is the "blue collar" end of the IT spectrum. With the right toolset in place, anyone can be trained to do it.

TheyTookOurJobs: While I completely believe Apple is paranoid enough to believe that everyone is stealing their generic unappealing design,

I don't know if you'd noticed or not, but a lot of people really do try to steal Apple's designs, or at least their thunder. It's the step between (5) observe with mounting horror and a hint of awakening greed how well the Apple product is doing in its newly impacted niche and (7) boast proudly that Apple's not the only one to have a design in that niche.

Incidentally, (4) is "complain how generic and obvious the Apple product is, and decry how it can't possibly amount to anything in its selected niche." Whether (4) is an honest reaction or a premeditated defense against claims of (6) is left as an exercise for the reader, and probably best judged on a case-by-case basis.

Oh, you joke.

Nethack, as itself? Almost certainly not. Nethack, reskinned to immerse the player in an artistic or cultural situation? With a sufficient advertising budget to convince people to actually play it? That might pass and, depending on the situation or scenario you present, it might even be worthwhile.

As a further example, remember that any game which would be suitable for this grant doesn't even necessarily have to be playable, just evocative. Consider the innocuous-seeming board game Train , which was pretty much designed to make you want to stop playing most of the way through the first time and never to try it again. That one didn't just hit its mark, it kicked it in the kielbasa. To its detriment, some people failed to realize that the board game was villifying the original event, and instead chose to hate on the board game for celebrating it.

Stormy Dragon: Given the deficit problem we already have, why should we be spending money to produce a good that is already being produced in massive quantities, particularly a good that only the well off (who can afford high end PC's or expensive gaming equipment and subscription) will be able to take advantage of?

There's a little more to it than just shoveling money at video game companies. Down below I posted a one-sentence paragraph from the article. Here are the ones from right before and right after that one:

TFA: There is a new emphasis on innovation, as well as strengthening creativity through access to the arts.

We’re encouraging media projects that enhance public knowledge and understanding of the arts through multi-platform or transmedia means.

This is, I gather, supposed to be art with a purpose, and that purpose is to raise awareness in some capacity, be it appreciation of other artistic media or social issues. For that reason, I consider this a good thing, even though I can't take advantage of it myself.

Beside the issue I raised below, they're looking for "innovation" in whatever game comes out, and I find it hard to believe they're experienced enough or equipped to judge games in that capacity. If Zynga gets into this grant business, I could advocate nuking the plan from orbit, just to be on the safe side.

Given the terms of the grant, I see them having trouble finding appropriate projects to fund. For that reason, I can't help worrying that this all could go down poorly.

On the one hand, sure, they're going to give these grants to smaller, actual "indie" development groups. But on the other hand...

TFA: In order to reach the widest possible audience, priority will be given to projects that include substantive public engagement strategies, including well articulated social media strategies.

If I'm reading this right, they're looking for indie developers that are set up with good PR and exposure. There aren't that many of those, are there?

MACDefender requires that you agree to install it. It's not able to infect your Mac without your knowledge and consent.
AND : Just drop it in the trash bin to get rid of it. Hassle free. Click and drag. That's it.

I know of no malware that (a) would give up so easily or (b) would not take the opportunity once it got the first privileges to run with them as far as they could.

Drag it to the trash? If it doesn't rewrite .bashrc to start a process to make sure it's installed and running when the system starts up, then it's not a proper malware. If anything, it should throw up more alerts when it detects a disruption and claim that something the user did has caused a configuration error—contact the mothership with credit card in hand to download the full version that will actually protect (snicker!) you.

The problem is the same with any other malware: once it gets its hooks into the system and a whiff of legitimacy, it should be all over the place.

Fortunately, it doesn't have to crack MacOS's security when the user either forgets to lock it down in the first place or opens the mac up specifically to let the malware in.

And the vector is the same: why crack the operating system when the user is so much more accommodating?

I had an idea which I thought at the time was novel. I haven't worked out all the kinks in it yet, but if it could be made to work, I think it could be awesome.

It starts with a home server, web-facing and firewalled against casual intrusion. You keep your data on that in some standard configuration which lets outside companies tap into and add value to the data of everyone who registers their servers with that company.

Example: Photo-sharing on a social network. You'd have your pictures on your home computer in a given format that the outside system could read. You'd register your server with flickronlylessskeezy.com, and users on that system could see your pictures, comment on them, etc. The second logical step would be to register your home server to hold the lists of friends and comments.

Advantages: The data would stay on your computer. You control who does and doesn't access it by registering and deregistering outside services and controlling privileges, and if the service goes down, all that's lost is an accessor method; your data is still in your control. And if some organization decides they absolutely need to take down some incriminating or inconvenient data, an attack on a single server will take care of it without damaging the service for everyone else (beyond not seeing that special data).

Disadvantages: It does require either static IP addresses or tracking back through dynamic IPs, and more than a little computer knowledge on the part of the user, including database management, although with some very specialized software, there might be ways to make this user-friendly. It would also benefit greatly from decent connection speeds and ISPs who don't throttle "power users" (which right now is damn near none of them). And some companies which get in on this might want to stifle competition by using non-standard or proprietary data formats, which means if the service goes down your data is stuck in a black box which you can't open.

...

Well, once those problems are cleared, anyway, I think it could work. Thoughts?

All right, let's see. "Entrenched", "sales", "player engagement" those line up well, we're off to a good start. "Hours of _____" isn't even on the board, while "online play" is, and that looks promising. "DLC" doesn't help any. "Quality" and its variations isn't on the grid, but perhaps it should be. Oh, good, "innovation" and "curve" are both there in good places. "Services" isn't on the grid either, but "community" is, and —ooh, hang on!

"Sales", "player engagement", "online play", "innovation", and "staying power!" Yes! BINGO! What do I win?

Purely decorative. They are not "security barriers" they are just decorative concrete slabs.

Google has never made their *datacenter* designs, or even their locations public. They have shared their server design, or at least an outdated one.

From what I've heard from Ex-Googlers they never actually deployed the container concept beyond one half, of one of their many, many facilities.

What is the "bigger problem" by not deleting articles? As I said in the GGP, the bad stuff should be fixed by contributors if enough (knowledgeable) people visit the page. Which, to me, is leaps and bounds better than the current situation where someone with no knowledge on a topic can advocate the deletion of an article and keep submitting it for deletion despite what people active in the field the article relates to advise.

Ultimately, I think that's the problem with article deletion; it's a way for people to wield some modicum of power over "the encyclopedia anyone can edit." It basically says that "anyone" cannot be trusted to do the right thing, which kind of invalidates Wikipedia's whole reason for existence.

Why is it so vital to classify stuff as "garbage" and "non-garbage"? (The fact that you chose to use the word "garbage" with negative connotation says a lot.) Good stuff gets looked at, the rest (shallow self-promotion, astroturfing, libel, etc.) gets corrected if it's something a lot of people will run into. Given the cost of running Wikipedia already, it's not like a few tens of thousands of pages is going to make a difference in a digital world.

The thing I loved about Wikipedia back in the day was the ability to find obscure stuff. Yeah, I could search for it online, but that didn't give me the context. It was a real joy to just lose yourself reading links in Wikipedia. But, after seeing a bunch of articles I care about get removed, it's less of a joy because I have to wonder what other information was deemed "not notable" enough for me to read.

The ultimate problem with "deletionism" is that people with no real knowledge of the topic are often the ones calling for deletion. Or, worse, you get someone who has a personal interest in deleting an article as "revenge", as in the case of the Old Man Murray issue from last week.

Here's my "faling out of love witih Wikipedia" story: An article on "Dragon Kill Points" (DKP) was deleted back in the day by someone who thought it wasn't notable; as a respected MMORPG developer, I argued it was a very notable and important concept to the field. I managed to help put off two deletion attempts on the basis of "not notable" in the span of a few months, only to have the article deleted later in a "speedy" process. The first two proposals came from the same person (after the first one was an unambiguous "keep" result), and the three requests came all within 4 months of each other. This seems a bit beyond someone wanting to "clean up" the site. Of course, the article was added back some years later, but it's a shadow of its former self and not nearly as useful.

Lesson learned! Not is a lot of potentially useful information missing, I also learned that anything I contributed in my field might be wiped out by someone who just doesn't like it. I'll spend my time doing something more useful than contributing or using Wikipedia, thanks.