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Comment Re:Good idea. The leap second is stupid. (Score 1) 230

Or more likely, every 1000-2000 years to one half-hour, by changing the zone files. This is well-tested, as countries change DST rules and UTC offsets all the time anyway.

The counter argument is that a relatively large adjust which is only done every thousand years has a much greater propensity to create unepxected chaos than a very small adjustment done relatively frequently every few years.

Comment Re:Nope! (Score 1) 206

Machine learning is a tool, yes. But what people today call "machine learning" is mostly what we used to call "data mining." You take some data, run it through an ML algorithm, get some model that appears useful, and you're done.

Spot on.

Data mining used to be a dirty phrase in science for good reason. It's not scientific. It can be extremely useful in an engineering context, it's good at solving problems, but it isn't science because it doesn't provide generalizable principles.

What it can provide, though, is interesting correlations which are otherwise impossible to spot, and open up new avenues of study and investigation.

Comment Re:crap (Score 1) 224

I find email works well because I can choose when to glance at it to see whether it's important.

IMs, on the other hand, I find as bad as being interrupted in person - in fact, often they're worse, especially when they follow the pattern
"Hi"
*30 seconds*
"Have you got a moment?"
*30 seconds*
"Just a quick question"
*30 seconds*

That's the best part of two minutes during which not only have I forgotten whatever I was juggling in my head, but that 'experienced developer' asking the question has failed to learn to type at any speed in a decade or three of keyboard use.

Doubly so if the person is sitting where they could walk round and ask faster than they can type their question...

Comment Re:No time zones, no DST, centons (Score 4, Interesting) 277

The issue of daylight would be dealt with locally.

The issue of date on the other hand becomes a whole lot more awkward. You either have the date change at 00:00 everywhere, which means that for much of the world it changes during the day (it's my birthday! but only until lunchtime!), or in the middle of the night locally, meaning that now I know what time it is anywhere in the world but no idea what date it is.

That would seem to be a harder problem than simply agreeing times in UTC, which we could do today, and people just doing the conversion to/from their local time as necessary.

And don't even get me started on people who thing that GMT is the same as UK time all year long...

Games

Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games 352

The Moving Pixels blog has an article about the delicate balance within video games between giving players meaningful choices and consequences that cannot necessarily be changed if the player doesn't like her choice afterward. Quoting: "One of my more visceral experiences in gaming came recently while playing Mass Effect 2, in which a series of events led me to believe that I'd just indirectly murdered most of my crew. When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding, and as control was given over to me once more, I did the only thing that I thought was reasonable to do: I reset the game. This, of course, only led to the revelation that the event was preordained and the inference that (by BioWare's logic) a high degree of magical charisma and blue-colored decision making meant that I could get everything back to normal. ... Charitably, I could say BioWare at least did a good job of conditioning my expectations in such a way that the game could garner this response, but the fact remains: when confronted with a consequence that I couldn't handle, my immediate player's response was to stop and get a do-over. Inevitability was only something that I could accept once it was directly shown to me."

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