Nor merited. The guy made a single video game, that's his life's accomplishment. What else really needs to be said?

What the game was. How he made it. How he sold it. How he continued developing it. How this method brought about a worldwide phenomenon.

Now a book on John Carmack, Warren Spector, Will Wright, Sid Meyer, Peter Molyneux, Cliff Bleszinski or even John Romero might actually be interesting and warranted.

To the niche audience of geeks and gamers who likes that type of game. Persson on the other hand made a game which is played by millions of eight to eighty year olds, and is still a big seller almost four years after its initial release. With Minecraft, we are clearly dealing with a significantly different gaming beast.

You are not going to have much advanced IT business left over there soon if this goes on.

I think we are witnessing the (not very) slow disintegration of the principals and reality of the American Internet. Whether the internet itself will survive this is another matter.

Do the best and the brightest know the difference between "lose" and "loose"?

I don't understand why some (most) people are scared of Latex.

As a regular latex user for the last 8 years, I have to say that I am not scared of latex.

I hate latex.

I could rant forever about how latex turns writing mathematics from a joy into a constant chore, or how errors and typos can take long to fix than it took to type the document, or how pages never, ever come out satisfactorally.

But I'll just note that the biggest issue with Latex is that it has its own idea of how your document should look, and if you disagree or ever dare attempt to override its page and space wasting decisions, you are in for a world of pain.

I(and the rest fo the world) need a handwriting recognition system for written mathematics. Something I can use to prepare "typed" documents by hand, writing my mathematics whereever I will on the page. Preferably, I need this before Latex ends up giving me another ulcer.

This is actually wierdly ontopic. There is a powerful analogy between modern touchscreen development and modern games. Touchscreens and games have bother become ever flashier, commiditised, and mass marketed, and yet when I use either, I find I get less done, and ultimately less enjoyment out of the whole process than I did with traditional computers and old school games.#

I'm SO happy that I pay for software. I don't have to deal with all of this open source drama bullshit, and have to worry about when somebody's temper tantrum decides to end or radically change some software that I rely on for my business. My eyes glazed over halfway through the story summary, and I really don't care.

If they didn't offer better prices, why would anyone trade with them?

Now you're outright misleading everyone.

Firstly: No-one chooses whom they trade with on an exchange. The exchange computers match up buyers to sellers. No-one asks for the HFT traders to come in, but has to live with the consequences of their entry as long as they continue to trade.

Secondly: While it is true that at most given instants HFT firms will currently provide the "best" price, this is not true over longer time periods. If there were enforced time delays in the exchange, sellers could wait a second or so to receive a better price, and buyers would pay the same or less without a HFT middleman jumping into the trade between milliseconds.

HFT is turning modern commodity and stock markets into a farce. Sooner or later, buyers and sellers are going to take their balls and go home.

... and transactions costs go up for everyone.

You keep repeating this, but the statement is directly at odds with the reality of a growing and profitable HFT industry. If transaction costs are going down, then how are HFT companies making so much money?

The actual reality is:
a) Millisecond HFTs have no effect on transaction costs vs 1 sec transaction speeds, and
b) HFTs make money by reducing value for the slower buyers and sellers at the stock exchange. Buyers pay more, and sellers get less for the same stock than they would if HFT trading did not exist.

You can jaw on about liquidity and transaction costs all you want. But the money that HFT is making has to come from somewhere. These companies do not add value, or provide services. As such the profits they make come from companies which do.

For all practical purposes, the HFTers are the exchange.

Except for the rest of the marks -- or "traders" as they were once known -- without whom HFT companies would have no-one to scrape all those pennies from.

It's the Ryanair, low cost airline effect. It's all about the price, squeeze every penny, charge for baggage, (pretend to) charge for toilet usage, just get them from A to B for the minimum advertised price and them make them pay for it in discomfort, inconvenience, or extra charges later.

And there's something to be said for this model. It has brought affordable, regular, international, air travel to the masses -- for the prices mentioned above.

But, look, let me put it this way: I will pay the extra â100 or even â200 euros per flight to fly with Aer Lingus or BA, in some modicum of comfort, without the mental overhead of restrictions, and to be dropped off in an actual city instead of an airport 80km from where I want to go. There are limits to how low people will go for the right price and I think the airline industry has already hit that mark.

I don't believe in the Yeti or Bigfoot but I have yet to hear any particular reason to assume there aren't such creatures either. If the places where both are said to exist can support bears they could support large primates as well. I'm thrilled to see some actual investigation of the yeti at least even it's no more effort than to remotely collect a couple samples and sequence them with no field work.

I can understand why the idea of an upright primate might make the anti-evolution crowd uncomfortable and cause an irrational level of opposition to the idea but I don't understand the irrational disdain spreading further than that. NOBODY credible investigates this, if they do anything it is set out with the bias of disproving some piece of evidence or providing an alternate explanation.

It is perfectly reasonable that there could be an upright primate, that it might well be reclusive, and given the size would likely have a low population. Credible researchers have spent decades actively looking to try to confirm the existence of a species. So why does looking for this one make you a crackpot? Just because the idea got media attention and there were a few hoaxes? The sightings of this creature go back hundreds of years. Isn't it worth someone who actually knows what they are doing actually making a real effort?

Unless they do, I doubt we'll ever know because guys going out in the woods at night and yelling and banging sticks together is not a strategy that is likely to EVER successfully find any woodland creature.

"But you gain recognition and get published if you prove someone else wrong."

But you get no funding from it and potentially make an enemy who now DOES have reason to scrutinize and point out your every mistake. If you aren't accomplished enough yourself your failure to replicate something isn't likely to even be published. And it isn't to the same degree. This is Dr. So-and-So, the man who did that brilliant work and discovered x,y,z impressive sounding thing vs This is Dr. So-and-So, he's never actually accomplished anything but he did a great job of failing to replicate his peer's results.

You'd be better off in the long run pretending to replicate or even expand on the results of your peers. It isn't like they are ever going to call you out on it, you've made an ally AND made it much more difficult for either of your reputations to be harmed by a third party regardless of their claims.

"And your academic progress is hampered if someone shows your results to be flawed."

Yeah, but apparently it's not likely and you can select areas of study to minimize the probability. Even if someone fails to replicate your results it isn't proof that you faked them.

"I think you are ignoring the competitive element."

I don't think so. Most people are probably working from the assumption that work accepted and that has passed peer review is most likely legitimate. Why spend all that time and effort in hopes someone else in wrong? And in a way you can prove? Even if you suspect they faked something, that just means you are likely to be able to get away with it too and as stated above there is more glory down that path.

It's no different than essays and other academic papers. You are required to provide references to support your assertions and credit sources but everyone knows the professor doesn't actually have time to read them. So people find credible and uncontroversial sources on topics that could well be saying something that could support their assertions. On the slim chance you were caught in it, you'd just find something you accidentally misinterpreted and be a little cautious for the next couple. And that's if you had to say anything, the professor is far more likely to assume (s)he has better comprehension of the topic than the student and add a note to educate the poor fledgling, they might not even reduce the grade over it depending on the topic.

All researchers in the sciences have a motivation to be published, in the form of recognition, academic progress, and financial motivation. Not many of them have an incentive stop working on looking great for producing results and check the work of someone else.

There's DNA taken from two distinct samples taken 800 miles apart, one them from an actual mummified animal body that anyone can test and examine.

That seems like more evidence than there is for the yeti to me. Also, I do agree this seems like more of a blow to the skeptics than the believers because while it seems the creature was not a large manlike primate there was in fact something up there. The problem with skeptics is that if everyone listens to them nobody investigates and finds the truth behind anything.

And it will be your fault.

While the general contempt being spat in the above post is rather direction-less, I feel that this statement at least is accurate. It is "our" (collective computerdom's) fault that the internet is being turned into a giant walled garden surrounded by watch towers.

The web needed technologies that put decentralisation, anonymity, and encryption into the hands of every single user by default. That never happened. It never happened because hackers did not
a) Write such software, or write such addons to existing software, and
b) Never pushed for such software to be written or included.

Where's the button on Firefox that turns on -- no, turns off from default -- encrypted browsing? Where's the auto-configured PGP setting in _all_ email clients, ready to send and receive encrypted mail by default? Where are the default sever settings in programs like Apache which support all of this across the web?

These things are no longer optional extras. In the face of the rumbling, Kafka-esque behemoth that the NSA is becoming, they are essential features which everyone on the web needs right now.

The first task: Get Firefox to accept self-signed certs without complaining.