This reply is hideously late, but I'd like to throw in my thanks for your work. I'm a game developer, and as a rule we're terrible at preserving our history. Most emulator writers do tremendous work in trying to keep a little bit of our history alive that would otherwise pass into oblivion.

Keep it up!

Being fat, old(er), and white doesn't necessarily protect you. I was walking around the town where I live late at night (was working with Europeans, so I slept odd hours and still wanted to get some exercise) when the cops stopped me. Now, it was cold and by the coast so I had 2 layers of coats on and I have a long beard. The police officer basically admitted that he stopped me because I looked poor/homeless. He also asked me what I did and if it provided good wages.

I cooperated because although I think it's BS to be stopped like that, I didn't feel like making an issue at midnight in the cold. But, yeah, you can still be stopped just for looking wrong in other ways besides skin color. Still, these types of laws need to be stopped; as someone else said, the right to freely assemble becomes a lot less potent if you have to identify yourself and then be cross-referenced on a database thus eliminating anonymity.

There's a lot of activity on Google+, the problem is that you have to invest some time and effort to find the good conversations.

The circles Google+ uses are it's best feature and it's biggest weakness. You can send out updates only to people who you want to see. But, the problem is that newcomers to the network don't see anything you're just sharing with a circle. So, to someone who just signs up, it looks like there isn't much going on.

In my case, I was lucky enough to have a few people involved with indie tabletop RPG development add me, probably because I'm a somewhat known MMO developer. From them I was able to add a few more people, and some of them shared their circles, and now I have nearly 3000 people who post about tabletop RPG stuff in my circles. There's a wealth of information there, but if I hadn't found the first few people I wouldn't have known about it.

I wonder if Google+ could do something about this. Maybe have some "official" circles for people to join into to see some activity immediately upon joining. It won't replace personal circles, but might help fight the perception that nothing goes on at Google+.

Ultimately, the lesson here is that you get out of Google+ proportional to what you invest into it. If you just add a few friends to circles it's boring. Find some existing circles on stuff you care about and it'll blow your mind.

Introverted does not mean "shy". It means that you interact with people differently. Essentially the GP is correct: for an introvert, dealing with people drains your energy. Extroverts, on the other hand, get energy from interacting with others.

As a fellow introvert who is not shy, I can completely understand why you would want to IM instead of chat while in the same room. When you're concentrating on something (which introverts tend to do more often than extroverts), interruptions can be destructive to the thought process. Actually, my significant other does something similar, where she'll send me links to videos she thinks are funny rather than demanding I watch them right then and there even though we're in the same home office.

If you're interested in learning more, I highly recommend the book The Introvert Advantage by Marti Olsen Laney. It goes into some of the practical explanations for why introverts are the way they are, and delves a bit into the science behind it. Great for introverts who want to understand themselves, and for extroverts to get some kind of understanding why introverts act the way they do.

Yea, screw Shakespeare. Somebody else woulda been Shakespeare right? Even Ben Jonson got, "O Rare Ben Johnson." I suppose you'da put it: "O w/e Ben Jonson...."

$6 million is pocket change to a company that has $5.2 billion in annual revenue.

Right, but any money spent on IT is a waste to the stuffed shirts, until something blows up, which, inevitably, gets them off the fence. Telling the COs in a meeting, "our worst possible downtime with the current allotted budget might be as bad as 3 days," makes them all look at each other with satisfaction and approval, seemingly, ok with being down 3 days in theory. Then, after 3 hours of downtime, they are talking about outsourcing all of IT for 10 times the amount of budget they barely allowed that caused the downtime....

Short of it:
Pre-disaster: IT should be cheap if not free.
Post-disaster: IT will get all the money it needs, but a new crew.

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.

Godwin's! No Quirk's Exception!

--Bentsen

Good point. The challenge is to not let an enemy define you.

Hannibal largely defined Rome, but then Rome beat Carthage, to then lose its republic in time....

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.

The bible is a large, complex book, used for every purpose under the sun -- good and bad.

But we are now discussing upwards of 3 things as I see: religion, morals/ethics and the existence of god. I would like to focus on the last point, as that seems to be the focus of this entire story on /., and in the main thread. The fact that it quickly ... _quickly_ ... degenerates into the greater issue of how humanity fucks up religion (as it does all else), serves no purpose to this point.

The simple fact of whether or not there was a causer who caused causation (i.e., the cosmos), is an extremely simple question. I am not claiming to have the answer. Others here seem to know 'devoutly' what that answer is.

I'm a senior analyst by trade, and I work with younger guys who come to me with problems all day, seeking advice and answers. I have a set of principles that I provide them with when dealing with a problem, among which are:

-If it is now broke, when it was not before, then it is impossible to say, "nothing changed."

-To solve any problem, you _must_ start with the truth. This means, removing all the husks (the trash) of everything else currently in the way (attitudes, politics, deceptions, agendas). (This is pure existentialism).

-Lastly: I do not know the answer to that question. What you have provided so far does not contain the answer either. Claiming it is the answer, when it is not, does not mean it is. Basically: I don't know that, so you can't know that.

Once these things are generally resolved, the solution reveals itself.

Typically, on /., too much gets in the way of the real question, and the real answer is simply never addressed.

To focus on the issue of religion as a problem, when asking the question of the existence or not of god, will never get one to the answer of the original question....

As to the "brilliant post":

What if the one who believes in god does not believe he is a friend, nor dictates anything, nor will ever punish anyone for not following rules, nor does he give 2 fucking shits about anything in this universe? I am at this point frustrated over these stuff shirts. Apparently, a basic handbook on "isms" must be handed out. Thumb forward to the "Ds" in such a book, and look for the letters "eism."

"If a group of people does it, it suddenly turns into a religion."

Yes, and only religious people have ever done anything bad. No one has ever done a bad thing irreligiously. My god, gulags are as much figments of the imagination as this god guy....

/facepalm

"Each and every one of you stating facts that there's no way you can know...."

Apologies. I meant to say, "no way you can sanely believe in a god...."

We truly cannot know. Indeed, we are best to always claim unknowledge in all things, else, reality will blast us -- /queue Ringer....