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Comment Re:I don't think it would matter (Score 1) 57

There was little opportunity to prevent Stockton Rush from operating an unsafe vessel outside of a totalitarian environment we wouldn't want. However, when you start offering rides to paying customers, things change. That should and can be regulated. It is hard to hide. Furthermore, Rush fired staff who pointed out the problems. A better whistleblower system might have made their voices heard.

Comment Re:make it open-source instead? (Score 1) 106

and quite another to spend more money on it.

And that's the core of the issue.

If it were profitable the companies wouldn't be shutting it down.

If it meaningfully impacted customer sentiment or business goals, they'd open up or release servers, or make that last-minute change to the game as a final update.

As games are, so much time has passed. The original dev team has moved on two titles, three titles, maybe even more since the initial development, especially for long-running games. The maintenance teams have also come and gone. The last teams who are there when the games are 'turning out the lights' are skeleton crews or some IT guys who reboot the machines when needed. The institutional knowledge has moved on, the teams have moved on, build farms have been repurposed, etc.

A few promised to keep source code and servers in escrow to be sure they were distributed when the product eventually ended, and that made approximately zero difference to the industry.

I'd argue for most people, it's not the servers they way, it's the nostalgia. It's the remembering the good times with guild members, the anticipation of new worlds opening up and the novelty of seeing them when they're new. It's remembering the overfilled lobbies, active auction houses with all the powerful items, the peak excitement of crowded, vibrant communities. There is no joy that comes with opening a server and seeing the player count: 0/1500 - open for join, or a quest that needs 5 participants while knowing the servers are empty.

Comment Re:D.o.g.e. (Score 1) 180

What a bunch of cunts this administration is. When all is said and done I seriously hope some of them will be found out to have colluded with foreign powers and hung for treason.

These days people use bullets, the 4th box of liberty.

Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley, and Kennedy, all shot and killed while in office. Seven more presidents had shots that landed but didn't kill them. Most presidents in the 1900's and all of them in the 2000's have had assassination attempts that were intercepted and stopped before they could get their shots fired at the president.

The story is that even during the constitutional convention, when discussing why a president would leave power after a successful impeachment and conviction, or after an election, one of the delegates reminded them "if they don't go peacefully, they can always be removed the traditional way", which ended the discussion.

A positive thing I note is that after all modern authoritarian regimes collapse, many of their followers become unemployable. The SS after Nazi Germany, the Stasi after the cold war, many KGB agents after the fall of the Soviet Union ended up turning to organized crime instead if they weren't picked up by the new government's security/intelligence services. People just don't want to hire them. I suspect in a couple years, anybody who decided to remain at ICE will struggle to find jobs as long as that's on their resume, and government prosecutors moved from being a prestigious mark for a lawyer into quickly becoming a limiting factor instead. From the first administration, quite a few struggled to get work after it ended, I'm assuming it's going to be worse for them after round two, however this current presidency ends.

Comment Re:I get it. (Score 1) 130

all else being equal I would be more likely to hire a more experienced worker over a new grad ... I just don't buy the idea that remote work doesn't come with a mentoring and growth penalty.

Agreed. For as far back as I've known it, companies are reluctant to hire less experienced workers, and mentorship is seen as a high cost rather than valuable.

In smaller environments, hiring an inexperienced worker or recent grad was seen as a cost to repay your own mentorship; everyone was expected to take at least one new person under their wing, sometimes multiple. Mentoring is generally considered essential, and it's part of the transition from senior worker into leadership. Seniors train juniors, and those approaching retirement finish out their careers training everybody, mostly just supervising and commenting, and that's a good thing for knowledge transfer, both for institutional knowledge and collective wisdom across the industry.

In corporate environments people want to hire already-trained, drop-in experts. Phrases like "hit the ground running", rather than "six month training period", unless the worker themselves are expected to pay for that training period. Companies see training, mentorship, and learning as something people do on their own time, not something the company does. And there's no retirement phase where the declining workers spend their days passing along their institutional knowledge, they're fired the moment after passing their peak, and the institutional knowledge vanishes.

Comment Re:FBI SURVEILANCE VAN (Score 1) 164

Same, I had that for a while.

The wifi names were "Surveillance Van 5" and "Surveillance Van 24" for 5Ghz and 2.4GHz channel. I set the family's cell phones network device names "Surveillance Operator 1", "Surveillance Operator 2", "Surveillance Operator 3", and "Surveillance Operator 4". For house guests sometimes it got a chuckle, "connect to surveillance van 24". I know when I went to friends who took their networks seriously, I had someone ask about it.

Comment This is actually old tech. (Score 3, Insightful) 65

The ability to convert a spectrogram to sound has long been known in the speech research community. In 1950 a device known as the Pattern Playback was built at Haskins Laboratories. You would draw an artificial spectrogram and feed it to the machine and it would play back the corresponding sound. It was used to perform experiments on the acoustic cues for speech perception. The original machine was last used for research in 1976. See the Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Comment Re:Not Constitutional (Score 1) 58

Supporting Windows XP means modifying it to deal with changes in hardware and patching bugs, especially security problems. That requires on-going effort on the part of Microsoft, so it is understandable that they will not keep at it indefinitely. (You would, I imagine, justifiably feel ripped off if a year after XP came out Microsoft dropped support.) Keeping a game playable in the sense required by the bill just requires the publisher either to keep the server running or to distribute a version that allows players to run their own server. Neither of those requires the kind of ongoing effort that continued support for an OS would.

Comment It's all about definitions. (Score 5, Insightful) 177

Seems like this all boils down down definitions. What does a grade mean?

If a grade means understanding the material, there's no reason every student couldn't get an A. Sure, many won't, but when we're talking about Harvard students, especially at lower-level courses, the barriers to get into the school are so high that it makes sense most students would be able to master the material.

If grades are relative to other students, even if every student understands the material perfectly there's still going to be the curve, some A's, B's, C's, and some must fail.

Comment Re:Self-selection (Score 2) 81

Turning the link purple to go to the report, then following that link to the actual study, you can look at those concerns.

Oddly enough, the post-doc researchers at University College London doing research in behavioral science and psychiatry, published through Oxford University, do indeed answer the questions.

The paper shows is something they noticed and want to investigate further, presented as "the first evidence" not a final conclusion. They started from the UK Household Longitudinal Study data, data going back to 1991 and publicly available to any registered researcher, and cross checked against a few others with related sampling information. They looked at ages from 16 to 90, marital status, children, education level, employment status, household income, area deprivation index (living in poor areas to rich areas) and reported disabilities.

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