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Comment Re:Academia is willing to protect total dicks (Score 0) 345

OTOH, under the old standard the professor would be forbidden to approach the female student no matter how provocative she was

That's the whole point! Under any standard, the professor should be forbidden from having any romantic interaction with a student. Period. There is no scenario in which the power differential between a faculty and a student leads to a fully consensual relationship.

Comment Re:Going bust not unique to drop-outs (Score 2) 281

If your argument was valid, then it would be reflected in the numbers.

The fact is that on average, college graduates earn more than high school graduates, even after taking into account the cost of a college education. That does not mean that there aren't edge cases, or statistically significant differences between the debt vs. education that some places offer and that a prudent student will take these things into account, but on aggregate, you are better off going to college than not despite the debt incurred.

Comment Why are you getting it? (Score 4, Insightful) 421

The cost is not worth it, not for a device that you'll be using for yourself.

I have one that I got for research purposes, and I love it. However, I would not have paid my own money for it. It does not provide $1500 of utility at the moment.

Now, if you are looking to get into wearable computing application development, that's a different story and I'd say get one. Try to get your company to pay for it, though.

Comment Re:Protip: (Score 1) 646

> Nope, stored in the cupboard under the sink. Easy for me to get to. My parents taught me what the poison and corrosive substance symbols meant by the time I was about 4 or 5.

This is what we refer to as "sampling bias."

Of course you survived this. If you didn't, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

This doesn't negate the fact that poisonings happen and it is irresponsible to leave poisons lying around where someone who has not developed the full use of reason or proper impulse control can find them.

Comment Re:It doesn't matter. (Score 1) 368

I keep hearing this quoted over and over and while it's true, it misses the point. He wasn't talking about fast and sloppy vs. slow and lean. He was talking about correct and efficient vs. correct and inefficient. Broken code doesn't enter the picture. You can't optimize something that is broken, you can only optimize something that isn't working as well as it should be.

So, stop quoting that line and fix your stupid code. When it works, we can decide if it needs to be optimized further or not.

Comment Re:Hallife for mac (Score 1) 228

"Throw all that hard work down tubes"?

Do consider what we are talking about here, really. A small group of programmers working for 3-4 months. This is probably somewhere around $40-60 thousand dollars.

Those are the sunk costs. Any economic analysis starts by discarding sunk costs because in the end, they don't matter. Psychologicaly they do, but when you are looking at profitability, they don't matter.

Now, we need to add the costs of finishing the project (another month? Who knows?), beta testing, marketing, distribution, etc. Then we need to come up with a figure to represent the "bad feelings" that the game may generate, as well as the support costs that come up afterwards (patches, tech support, etc.)

I don't know these numbers, chances are nobody outside the developers do. But it's not as simple as saying that the game was almost finished therefore they should have released it.

Personally, I think that ports are a bad idea. Getting a game that was a hit a year ago and then porting it to another platform invariably ends up with discrepancies in the support, having the game really be treated as a second class citizen.

Now, there's a difference with games that weren't ports, but were coded that way. For example, the games by Bungie and Blizzard. There's also Imperialism II, by SSI. Those were good cross-platform games, and didn't feel like ports.

r.

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