People keep bringing up the latest augmentations (mobile phones, apps et al) - but I still find the most compelling example, by virtue of lasting evidence, optical prosthetics (i.e.: eyeglasses).

For centuries we have been able to enable a large segment of the population to be functional and contribute to society while being fully dependent on technological prosthetics.

As a myopic, I'm acutely aware that my whole ancestral line has benefited from our ability to compensate physical disabilities through technical ingenuity. After all, if I'm legally blind to drive without lenses, I'm sure I wouldn't have been of much help hunting mastodons.

And I'm seriously skeptical any intellectual capacity would have saved my skin when I stuck a spear on the chieftain's head because he was indistinguishable from any other animal +/- 1 meters of cubic area...

privacy != security.

Compromising your banking account information is a matter of security - it's about protecting resources or confidential data, and in that case you have all the reasons to go into a rant about not sharing info if you want to keep it secret.

Compromising your family's friends and activities is a matter of privacy - it's about protecting from undue intrusion and interference in their daily private life. The whole point of privacy is that these personal thoughts and activities are not *important* enough to be public, much less secret - it's the quotidian life. And the importance of keeping that private is that quotidian actions are not public speech or performance and are simply 'no one's business'.

It's no secret that public disclosure of the most banal activities modifies their behavior - you don't even need some oppressive authority watching and acting on that information, social pressure is good enough for a conforming/normalizing effect.

If everything in life is assumed to be public and subject to inspection by strangers, people will censor their actions and interactions in different ways - most by avoiding anything socially questionable or even just atypical, others by turning daily life into a clandestine process (and incidentally reinforcing the idea that privacy is about 'suspicious, secret activities').

If I had mod points I would tag this as insightful.

I keep waiting for the inevitable Onion article for "Facebook CEO complains about unfair price competition from Russian hackers", except I wouldn't be too surprised to see it instead on the WSJ.

What's more is that if there is ever a time when you shouldn't be relying on your language to keep you save, it's in a data structures class.

Could you please elaborate on this point?

This is pretty much what I was asking about in my first reply, but I haven't seen it answered yet.

Sure, not all pointer arithmetic is unsafe, but the safe operations you do need for data structures can be done in any high-level language. For the cases where you do need to be careful all the time and cover your edge cases, then by definition you're dealing with *unsafe* operations.

That's fine, so are a lot of other very useful things we depend on for our daily lives (cars, electricity, carpentry tools, etc), and I'd agree learning how to deal with system-level languages is similarly important and useful.

But it *still* has little to do with teaching and learning data structures - and frankly I have yet to hear of a good reason to force such a mix, other than blind tradition or silly 'my language is better than your language' arguments.

Perhaps we have different worries about crappy performance on modern machines: my own Core2 also feels slower than it should be, and crappy native code seems to accomplish that just fine by itself - so I'm more likely to blame the guys who can't do heaps and B-trees than the guys who choose not to do pointer arithmetic.

I don't get why this is marked as 'Troll'.

I don't quite agree with the AC, but he has a legitimate point: design documentation *should* be written by the developers who authored and understand the design, and not by someone reverse engineering the system after the fact.

When we are talking about a large uncodumented system-level codebase, any newcomer is by defintion a 'novice', will spend an inordinate amount of time trying to determine *intent* out of the code, and will likely get many such guesses wrong. On most software shops, this would be discarded as a horrible idea because you simply have better options.

Still, I'd disagree with the poster that for OSS documentation-by-API-user "is worse than no documentation at all".

Having a novice contribute such documentation could force developers more experienced on that area to review it, encourage them to correct it or even replace it with their own, and at the very least highlight the fact there is a documentation gap.

I'm not sure how that answers the original question - what part of the internals of data structures cannot be taught in Python or other high level languages?

Or are you saying that really understanding data structures requires unsafe pointer arithmetic?

I'm not sure that is accurate anymore - it may be for PC games from indie backgrounds where you go out of your way to download the demo, but most blockbuster games heavily promote their demos much like studios do with their movie trailers. You see them sponsored on console online services as 'hot demo of the day', included with CDs on gaming magazines, etc. I can't remember the last time I "went out of my way" to check out a demo from EA, for example.

You do have to proactively *play* the demo, of course - but that's not different from trailers these days for heavily marketed movies. Most people watch trailers for summer blockbusters on the internet long before they get to the movie theater for another movie.

Even if that were not the case, mainstream entertainment seems to be happily to the 'full demo' model anyway - isn't that exactly what webisodes and video blogs provide for their relevant storytelling IP? (Heroes, Galactica, etc. even Burn Notice has that stuff)

They're not doing it just because, they do it because they see an ROI on giving a sample of the story and the experience for free.

And if they do what you fear, they'll fail to keep up with competitors who can find ways to monetize demos without annoying their customers or simultaneously invalidating the primary reason customers download demos (vs DLCs or full games) and killing a good chunk of the market for the full game (those who play the demo and don't feel like buying an 'old game' again)... or, you know, against anyone who don't change anything at all - that's still going to fare better.

EA cannot pretend they're the only choice in the market - even their leverage as the 'giant distributor' loses value as digital distribution becomes the norm, *particularly* in that (4 hour, 15$) segment they're targeting here. They can't afford to provide low value here because they're not competing against just their peers in the gazillion-dollar--60-hour-blockbuster market, but also against *everyone else*, including casual/indie game shops targeting short, cheap games as their bread and butter.

Ultimately, I still think that unless they're talking about true episodic content (a la Sam & Max) this is a horrible idea for EA itself.

This plays directly against their strengths: large studio, big pockets, lots of marketing translate well to 'big games' where high production values are a big differentiator (voice acting, large narratives and cut-scenes, art assets, etc). It would be a lot easier to compete with lower production values against any shorter game, like these demos, simply because 4-hours require or even allow a lot less art, etc.

Think about how much easier it would be for a new adventure/rpg game studio to compete in quality against a 4-hour Bioware game. EA may argue that's just 'a sneak peak of the full experience' but when you're charging 15 bucks, the only difference for the consumer would be that the game is less polished and has no ending.

I'm guessing you're just being snarky, but taking your comment at face value: that's a hasty assumption to make; even if you assumed all politicians are liars (which isn't very scientific either) it doesn't follow that all leaders, or even most important leaders, are politicians. If you also consider all the differences between political processes in different countries and cultures, in terms of public exposure, accountability, and levels of direct and indirect power - there are a lot of variables that would account for the usual complaint.

The experiment design seems to reduce this to few enough variables, in a general enough context, to legitimately say "power makes people better at lying".

Note that from TFA this wasn't a survey among known leaders - they randomly assigned power relationships to equivalent populations in an experiment, and found a correlation. So this rules out many of the alternative arguments: self-selection ('better liars acquire power'), specialized populations ('publicly elected politicians need to be better liars'), or learned behavior ('people in power become desensitized to lying').

Interesting - I didn't get that impression from the article.

There was speculation from the author that the slums are inherently "greener" because they recycle and don't consume as much energy, etc. But every mention of hard data or studies about urban density being more efficient seems to be about the City in general, not the slums per se; and it's really about the unsurprising fact that centralizing populations leads to innovation and economies of scale for services and infrastructure.

The only quote talking about data on whether the slums are greener laments the lack of proper 'footprint analysis':

"The concept has been very useful in shaming cities into better environmental behaviour, but comparable studies have yet to be made of rural populations, whose environmental impact per person is much higher than city dwellers. Nor has footprint analysis yet been properly applied to urban squatters and slum dwellers, which score as the greenest of all."

The argument for an unplanned self-improving community is interesting, but it is unclear how is that different from any other community structure that does something like that (from condominiums and suburbia to unincorporated towns) - and how it relates to the other measurable efficiencies described in the article, which in the slums still have roots on central planning (electricity, garbage collection, sanitization, etc).

The single paragraph is too vague an argument to know whether this is a process that complements underlying infrastructure (in which case slums are a bad, but interesting, example), or *the main process* for improving the community - in which case slums are the best example, and they confirm it is a *horrible* argument.

I won't argue that shanty-towns don't evolve as communities in an "organic" fashion, and are surprisingly efficient at addressing survival needs. But those "organic" constructions and waterways do not help when a strong rain wipes out neighborhoods under a mudslide, or ad-hoc sewage systems contaminate the local water supply.

I think the lesson here is in how easy it is to miss the point when trying to solve a problem if you're obsessing about tuning a few 'macro' numbers, where none of them measures what you should be trying to achieve.

The main valid reason for us to worry about environmental impact is because messing up the environment risks long-term quality of life for the human population. The planet ecology works on a timescale of billions of years, and has been able to handle many a mass extinction event in the past - it wouldn't be the first time it has to deal with some 'irresponsible species', thank you very much.

*We* are the ones that may be in trouble, because we can't handle global changes comfortably - but humans are a resilient species, willing to survive in overcrowded communities within the tiny ecological niches that may remain inhabitable. Of course, the sudden changes can result in large-scale migrations, and the loss of both material and human infrastructure, and of the intellectual capital that could rebuild it. Lack of surplus resources and of government structure would probably result constant violence and competition for power - due to lack of stability to establish government structures and law enforcement. In general, the end of civilization should not be an entirely unfamiliar picture.

A slum is the failure of the city to integrate a population into its system of life. They are a glimpse of civilization at the *brink* of failure - but still holding on to their existence by the fringe benefits of being connected to the city surplus (energy, services, jobs), and the (often slim) hopes of opportunities to enter that system.

The slum as an "environmental solution" seems either:
- Stupid: hey, we'd also reduce risks of cancer if we just cut down our average life expectancy by 25 years!
- Callous: as long as the *poor people* and their growing population stay in the slums, overall *we* are fine and our quality of life doesn't need to change. Finally an environmental justification to get rid of that pesky 'social mobility' fad from these last few centuries...

Perhaps if games didn't spend money on Hollywood types like this they could cut costs a fair whack- most people wouldn't even know it's Kiefer Sutherland in CoD5, so why not just use someone else who can speak and would be MUCH cheaper.

Perhaps because there can be a thin line between "not spending on those hollywood types for voice-acting" and "hire uncle joe to do it".

We had a few generations of cd-rom games to prove the latter doesn't work that well, even when the games embraced the B-movie-feel of cheap acting for their own atmosphere (Texas Murphy, anyone?). Professional voice acting is one of the things that have improved on gaming regardless hardware upgrades - and it does make a difference (if the game needs voice at all, of course).

Now, most games certainly don't need to hire James Earl Jones for NPC dialogue, but I imagine the thinking goes something like animated movies in the US: a single case of atrocious voice-acting kills the story, so if you need to hire pros you might as well not take risks and use known actor names to get more sales.

Owning this niche market didn't help Apple to expand the Mac consumer base for decades.

They've owned the graphics space since forever, but that alone didn't make them cool/fun for average people - it just made the PC the work computer, and the Mac the computer for 'that one graphics person at work'.

Not everyone who writes something is a writer.

Not everyone who remixes is a musician.

Not everyone who picks up a brush is an artist.