otakucode

16 ms·

91.
by otakucode 7y ago
The problem I see with Uber is that, at the end of things, all they provide is some software running on some servers. While not an easy weekend project, it would not be impossible for a distributed system to replace it, making whatever lif
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by otakucode 7y ago
My understanding, and this might just be marketing PR I honestly don't know, is that Anker sends their own QA people to the factories in China, so they're able to meet a higher standard. I always rely on them for battery stuff, a
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by otakucode 7y ago
According to the book 'The Everything Store,' Amazon's search engine is a matter of internal contention. Years ago, when people noticed that Amazon's search engine was terrible (as it is), someone from another group in
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by otakucode 7y ago
You make certain that even a 'failure' can break even, and make it so that a success gets milked for all its worth. While you can't increase the chances of a win, you can affect the payout, essentially.
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by otakucode 7y ago
You are correct, but I think your prediction false. We need to remember that "Hollywood" is a specific set of entities. We're not talking about independent film producers. We're talking about the largest film publishe
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by otakucode 7y ago
You are making the presumption that a modern parent would permit their child to go outside and play without going with them. The primary reason most kids don't want to play outside is because their parent goes with them and kills ever
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by otakucode 7y ago
And how does society view those people? Deserving of their compensation, and the general overall view is that they earned that money?
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by otakucode 7y ago
Not necessarily. There is always a balancing act done when looking at something like a game. How much of the game are you going to accept as "they are processing this as reality" and how much of it are you going to throw away an
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by otakucode 7y ago
The brain is exceptionally excellent at distinguishing between and dealing differently between fiction and reality. Consider an actor. Either on a stage, or on the set of a film. They walk into frame, and another person, a real human bei
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by otakucode 7y ago
I can't think of any situations where self-benefit, when not justified by claims it will make you more able to function as a worker or 'contribute to society' (aka an employer), isn't laced with implications of inherent
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by otakucode 7y ago
That is the only way to sell recreation or relaxation to Americans. Benefiting yourself or pursuing pleasure always has to be justified. I can't recall the source, but I read a long and insightful article about this specifically and
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by otakucode 7y ago
It made sense in the past. But, it's not actually focused on productivity, it focuses specifically on suffering and the effort. When productivity is possible without strenuous effort, something which wasn't very common in the pa
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by otakucode 7y ago
Or, realize how much work you actually need the worker to do, and stop insisting on 40+ hour work weeks. Pay them for the work they are doing, not their hours. That's what salary positions are SUPPOSED to exist for. If they complete
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by otakucode 7y ago
Exhibit A should be Eric Schmidt's book 'The New Digital Age' in which he explains his view that because Google is rich, they should therefore take the reigns of global culture and decide the moral and social norms of society
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by otakucode 7y ago
Running YouTube at a loss of hundreds of millions a year for over a decade on a billion-dollar+ infrastructure purely and solely to guarantee that no competition could ever rise against it would, I think, be an easy sell as anti-competitive
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by otakucode 7y ago
Let's see if Eric Schmidt stands by his "if you haven't done anything wrong, you shouldn't have anything to hide" viewpoint in the coming months. Should be fun.
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by otakucode 7y ago
That is a savagely, tragically dangerous position to take in a country with subsidized healthcare. We have many examples of unintended consequences resulting from attempted behavior modification with the goal of improving health, and gover
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by otakucode 7y ago
In the medical literature there is a classification referred to as a "chipper" who generally smokes only 1 or 2 cigarettes a week on average. Humans are many and varied.
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by otakucode 7y ago
That has not been my experience. With a cigarette, once you start it going, you basically need to finish the whole thing in a short period of time. If you really only wanted one or two drags, sorry, you're down for 10 minutes or so o
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by otakucode 7y ago
Whatever the cause, it has to be something extremely subtle and very unlikely to occur. We know that from the simple numbers. Tens of millions of people vaping on an hourly basis for years amounting to ~500 cases means that whatever is oc
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by otakucode 7y ago
The primary reason for a need for guns is to retain the ability for a violent uprising to overthrow an oppressive regime should one arise. One of the benefits of the American system is that it does not assume infinite beneficence and etern
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by otakucode 7y ago
Name the last school shooting that took place at a school without surveillance cameras. Can you? I doubt it. School shootings predominantly occur at the most locked-down and oppressive schools in the country. The solution to some adoles
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by otakucode 7y ago
That is doubtful. Consider scale. While there are a few dozen really densely packed cities, there are a couple orders of magnitude more small cities. There simply aren't enough people to 'fill up' the small cities in the U
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by otakucode 7y ago
Criminal negligence requires violation of established standards. Not just 'common industry practice' or even 'basically sensible', but legally established standards bodies who have laid out what practices and requiremen
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by otakucode 7y ago
I hear pig farmers will have lots of land available soon.
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by otakucode 7y ago
It has bothered me for decades that this seems to be a 'bug' in the design of the US government system. ~500 people whose job is to create new laws. 9 people who can effectively remove them (SCOTUS), and who have a very limited
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by otakucode 7y ago
There would definitely be a market for 'open source appliances' I believe. Appliances built to last, based on modular design, and with full documentation available along with plenty of hooks included to permit third party creatio
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by otakucode 7y ago
'Make game of that which makes as much of thee' is some ancient wisdom. This sort of behavior by Google certainly does justify providing no more than a 12 hour window to Google to fix problems under responsible disclosure. Many
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by otakucode 7y ago
And will continue to do so because anyone who wants to create a new browser will be locked out of supporting EME by Google as we've already seen happen a couple times. Then once they get rid of the address bar and URLs, the only way t
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by otakucode 7y ago
Why is a very lightweight 15" laptop out of the realm of possibility? It's not like displays today are inherently heavy. If OLED panels become viable for notebooks, they weigh nearly nothing, but even with existing LCDs with LED

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