When I was a kid I did Unicef collection every Haloween. We got an orange cardboard coin box at school, and collected donations to it along with our trick-or-treat. Unicef used these funds to build water wells for people in Africa who had only access to contaminated surface water.

A decade or two later, we found that many of these wells accessed aquifers that were contaminated by arsenic. And that thus we kids had funded the wholesale poisoning of people in Africa, and that a lot of them had arsenic-induced cancers that were killing them.

OK, we would not make that mistake again, and today we have access to better water testing. But it caused me to lose my faith that we really do know how to help poor people in the third world, no matter how well-intentioned we are.

And we had better not go around curing disease withoput also promoting birth control. Despite what the churches say, and the local dislikes and prejudices. Or we'll just be condemning more people to starve.

Hey, be fair, If Obamacare actually had death panels, we probably would have gotten it right...

Eh, less than $120,000/flight hour, pinkie swear!

Or simply fall into the (really rather common) category of 'Yes, it's a motive; but nothing you say can really convey why it would be so motivating."

Not all affect states can be conveyed verbally, especially to people who haven't experienced them. All you can do is use hollow allusions to them.

Do we all know what words like 'hate', 'jealousy', 'frustration' mean? Sure. Do we know what they mean in the sense used by somebody who would offer one or more of them as an explanation for why he would face nearly certain death or capture in order to shoot up a terminal in LAX? Probably not. Not even clear that we could.

I avoid it like the plague, and your post provides a couple of the reasons why.

While it might occasionally inspire a pithy line, Twitter's artificial limitations turn interaction with, oh, other parts of the internet that you might want to make pithy comments about, into a totally unnecessary clusterfuck, one that isn't even voluntary anymore (for reasons that, no doubt, have everything to do with Twitter's desire to protect users from scammy 3rd party redirect services, rather than their attempt to find a revenue model...)

Sure, once you've already gone down the dumb path, further stupidity will inevitably be required to handle the consequences of your earlier actions; but that's not really a very comforting excuse.

Anybody who uses a link-shortening service especially for the purposes of complying with a totally arbitrary character limit, deserves what they get.

Seriously. What is a 'link shortening service' except a way to add another layer of quasi-DNS (except under the control of, probable analytics surveillance of, and subject to any uptime failures, retention limits, etc. of, a single entity) to the process of accessing something on the internet? Even better, since it isn't real DNS, it lacks all of the relatively mature, implementation-agnostic, tools for dealing with DNS and its issues, its behavior can vary nontrivially between providers (so if you aren't handling the shortened link exclusively with a common web browser, it may not work as expected, unlike DNS resolution), and it's a fantastic way to hide phishing and malware from the casual.

You can't really do without one layer of DNS; because remembering IPs is a pain (and tricks like round-robin load balancing are crazy useful); but what kind of sick masochist voluntarily adds additional layers of crippled-semi-DNS?

The US has a shitload of back-stock, and the operation in charge of incinerating it into safety seems to have outbreaks of competence deficiency from time to time; but if the US is party to ongoing flouting of the ICWC, they sure are quiet about it. Their nukes, of course, will be streamlined a bit for cost reasons; but you'll have to pry the remainder out of their cold, dead, hands. Chemical and biological, though, haven't been major programs in some decades.

If it's going to be more like Iraq, anybody who isn't us can damned well have it; but I don't want any part of that adventur.

Oh, I'd be the last to argue that he isn't weaseling around (while the 'incentives alignment' theory of stock options is noble, implementation has... encountered assorted complexities under field conditions, to put it politely).

My point was merely that (ironically enough), the guy who was decrying 'socialism' was actually using a we-worship-rich-guys version of the 'labor theory of value' argument(a socialist classic), while the person he was arguing against was using the (more common among people who describe themselves as 'socialists'; but theoretically quite similar) 'no one man's labor can possibly be worth 24534x another's!' labor theory of value(also a fairly common, as well as fairly direct, implication of the labor theory of value).

Had Ellison been a midlevel engineer or something, Mr. Capitalism never would have gone with the 'But without Ellison, PRODUCT X would have crashed and burned! He deserves 200 million if he wants it!' argument. Damn employee can take his salary, and like it, and if he think's he's worth more, he can ask for a raise or man up and start his own company...

The numbers are bigger (owning a little over 20% of Oracle stock is Not Small); but if you want to be a not-socialist, the CEO is still just an employee, working for the shareholders, and he gets the salary market forces command (Har, har, because that's how executive compensation works... In your dreams), and absolutely fuck-all for having 'made this company'. Even if he made it 100%, he only owns 20-odd%, and works for the people who own the rest.

Or, y'know, somebody familiar with the concept of 'property'. Oracle is a publicly traded company (not that this is always a good idea; but they did it), not some sole proprietor outfit. It sold substantial chunks of itself to assorted third parties, so now they get a say. That's about as far from 'socialism' as you can reasonably get.

It doesn't matter whether or not the claim that "Larry Ellison made that company" is true or not because he doesn't own most of it. He is a major shareholder(a trifle under 25%, I think); but he gets paid as an employee of a company owned by a collection of people, including himself, not because Oracle is his personal candy jar and he can get paid what he likes.

He's certainly the most identifiable personality; but charisma is not the foundation of property rights...

Tell the guy with the laptop that if he can't handle it, he should push his graphics settings down from 'hurt me plenty' to one of the lower difficultly levels.

The usual nuisance is uneven wear. Y'know those solid-colored bullshit-ticker-bars that 'news' stations love or the channel watermark in the upper right on some stations? Well, those subpixels are getting a little extra workout (and, just for extra fun, R, G, and B tend not to wear at exactly the same rate...) and it can take rather less than 50,000 hours for pronounced nonuniformity to show itself if you try to display something like an all-white test screen.

"The more onscreen objects there are the more slowdown there is." Even when the framerates are fully in order, that one's a kicker: How did the developers ensure that framerates would be adequate on consoles, and on average PCs? By keeping the amount of stuff on screen down. And so we have pop-in, RPGs where a 'city' has maybe 100 people (spread across multiple areas with lots of clutter to occlude sightlines, and various other deviations from either the realistic or the epic, depending on what the occasion demands.

Arguably (as with physics acceleration for destructible environments) that's the more difficult chicken-and-egg problem: If it's just a matter of how pretty things are, I can make it work on weak hardware, and if you have a nice GPU you can crank up the resolution, anti-ailias you little heart out, and set all the draw distance sliders to maximum.

If, however, it simply isn't possible to cater to people who I need as customers if my environment has 500 NPC armies clashing or if castles can be knocked down one stone at a time, with realistic friction/leverage/impact, I can't just 'dumb down' for weaker systems, I'd actually need to rebalance the game, since the weak system version might never have you facing more than 20 NPCs, and can't have any puzzles/requirements that involve destructible environments (or I need a whole separate set of game assets with scripted quest-destructables that just have hit points and 'damaged' textures). It's a different game.

This isn't to say that the effort to support all levels of prettiness is zero, I've no doubt that it isn't; but unless a contemporary rendering engine is downright broken, it should at least be possible for the gamer enthusiasts to render at substantially higher resolutions, more AA, longer draw distances, higher poly models and higher rez textures at greater distances, etc. without any changes to the core game. The same is Not true of changes that require power but are also integral to gameplay. If some people are seeing 'real' backgrounds (with actual NPCs and scenery doing their thing, and the laws of perspective applied) and other people are getting skyboxes and a few low-detail mountains, you can't let either party interact at great distances, or you'll risk changing the game.

Also, they tend not to have swap files, which makes a difference. A PC will run like dirt if it is actually swapping all the time; but if a program gets optimistic about what it will need, or is sitting idle, it's basically free to shove it onto the disk and forget about it.

Without that, it's either in memory or taken out back and shot. This has led to some improvements in applications designed to be tolerant of sudden death; but if you need to terminate a program because you can't store its state, the amount of state you can preserve for when you restart the program is obviously somewhat constrained.

It also helps that cheap and dreadful audio systems (looking at you, PC speakers...) commonly have runs of unshielded signal cable sitting between the audio-out and the actual amplifier. Picking up enough RF interference to actually drive a speaker would be a bit alarming (with a high-efficiency mono earpiece, passive AM receivers can do it, crystal radio style; but that's because the whole system is built around the challenge of turning the whisper of power from a big AM antenna into sound); but enough RF interference to be faithfully amplified by the amplifier, which more or less just cranks up anything within its capabilities and dumps the output to the speaker, doesn't take much power.

Noise on the low voltage, pre-amplifier side of things gets amplified, so its effects are disproportionately audible. Noise picked up by the big, chunky, post-amplifier speaker cables? usually trivial.