dkimball

6 ms·

1.
by dkimball 16y ago
But on the other hand: "[The well-managed business'] workmen have the leisure to enjoy life and the wherewithal with which to finance that enjoyment." Ford theorizes that greater amounts of leisure time and better pay for workers are good f
2.
by dkimball 16y ago
You experience adventure games pretty differently from how I do. Also note that "merit" and "enjoyment" are different things.
3.
by dkimball 16y ago
On actually reading the article: this title is a bad summary. (Makes me think of Slashdot.) What the article covers is the point, which I hope is uncontroversial, that stimuli give rise to responses, and influence the course of cognition: h
4.
by dkimball 16y ago
But, he can only be persuaded by the arguments that will necessarily persuade him, not necessarily those which correspond to reality. What merit is it to simply find the right button to push?
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by dkimball 16y ago
I looked at this article, but I don't think the experiment proves as much as Libet claims it does. Neither he nor subsequent researchers seem to have gone beyond toy problems (what EEG activity appears in someone writing or programming?). A
6.
by dkimball 16y ago
More to the point than the Geneva Conventions: the UN Convention Against Torture, which is exactly what it sounds like. As for whether waterboarding is torture under US law: the US executed a few Kempaitai (Japanese secret police) agents fo
7.
by dkimball 16y ago
The pleasure of writing, and/or bragging rights -- the same way that Wikipedia came to be what it is.
8.
by dkimball 16y ago
On the other hand, it can take a long time for ideas to be accepted. Even Pasteur was a radical in his day; and I can't find him on Wikipedia, but there was a French doctor who introduced the idea of washing one's hands -- I think in carbol
9.
by dkimball 16y ago
Thanks for the update, and for giving it a chance. I agree that the production values are pretty bad... Good luck in your search. I've never heard of an ad-hoc implementation of assembly language before, but while we're talking about wantin
10.
by dkimball 16y ago
You know, on considering, I think you're right -- he doesn't advise against rules engines, just the Greenspun's Rule version. (Greenspun's Rule is that "any sufficiently long-running project includes a slow, buggy, and ad-hoc implementation
11.
by dkimball 16y ago
Alex Papadimoulis of the Daily WTF has an article on this -- it's his opinion that the simple, "bone-headed" approach is the best one for constraints like this, and homegrown business rule engines are dangerous: http://thedailywtf.com/Arti
12.
by dkimball 16y ago
Just to set the record straight, Caché -- which is the last man standing of MUMPS packages at the present day -- includes support for bitmaps. It also contains support for everything else from AJAX to the kitchen sink, since it originates w
13.
by dkimball 16y ago
You're right, it was the dopamine system I was thinking of -- the phrase had escaped me. On Cheney: I think it's possible to say when someone's having a sybaritic lifestyle and when they're not; certainly someone who's as eagerly discussed
14.
by dkimball 16y ago
Two words: Poop sock. MMORPGs have everything to do with being in the zone, nothing to do with sexuality; these two motivations are both exceptionally powerful. I remember an experiment with rats, where an electrode was hooked up directly t
15.
by dkimball 16y ago
I think it's because of who proposed it: the New Progressive Party of Puerto Rico, according to Wikipedia in the "51st State" article. I like the arrangement, too, but I can see why its provenance might taint it in some eyes. That's unfortu
16.
by dkimball 16y ago
I agree, I don't think it does. $50 feels like a lot even for a commercial-grade game, $60 feels like a fortune; gaming also has an enormous piracy problem (look up what happened to Paradox Interactive with the release of _Demigod_). Gaming
17.
by dkimball 16y ago
There's always been a folk culture, including folk songs -- with "folk" and "songs" as separate words, "songs part of the popular consciousness" as opposed to "songs sung in an Appalachian dialect with a banjo, a long beard, and highly un-A
18.
by dkimball 16y ago
This is evocative of ferrethandjobs.com, although in that case it was a matter of capital letters not coming through. URLs seem to require their own grammatical rules to avoid outrageous results, and this is just considering English; incorp
19.
by dkimball 16y ago
I'd like to see that, too. I'm skeptical about this -- especially the part where she burned her identity documents to avoid being linked to a Communist coup that occurred when she was 102. Everyone knows that little old ladies are not to be
20.
by dkimball 16y ago
As the old saying goes, "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent"...
21.
by dkimball 16y ago
This is doubly ironic with Apple's hipster, Manhattan-liberal gestalt...
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by dkimball 16y ago
No, I'm saying that you should never pay your workers less than they need to live on or drive them to exhaustion, even if the market will bear it.
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by dkimball 16y ago
China's extraordinary growth is because it's in the process of industrialization -- which, by definition, only happens once for a given country, and in which ideology does not have a very significant influence. Examples of industrialization
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by dkimball 16y ago
So, 100 years ago, this kind of weight was sideshow-worthy (and remember the other things one would see in a circus sideshow...); today, it wouldn't turn heads on a subway. However: the US has become _more_ health-conscious in the past 100
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by dkimball 16y ago
(I'm going to lose karma for this, but...) Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.
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by dkimball 16y ago
The Winter War, like Manchuria, was a "crime against peace" by the standard of Nuremberg; that establishes that Stalin, like both Hitler and Hirohito, had launched a small aggressive war prior to WWII. The purges were not part of the war an
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by dkimball 16y ago
Overtime here is not mandatory, but employers have an obligation to pay a wage suitable to their employees' dignity as fellow human beings -- not necessarily their country's minimum wage; and from the article, it does not sound like 770 RMB
28.
by dkimball 16y ago
The defensiveness of some of these comments is unsettling. Inhumane conditions are inhumane no matter where they are, and no matter what the situation is in the society; it is never right to do to one's workers what this article is describi
29.
by dkimball 16y ago
I think the budget part is the largest one -- the extremely low capital necessary compared to almost any other field. Paul Graham has an essay on, I think, things noticed in the startup culture by someone native to a different field -- who
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by dkimball 16y ago
My criterion is pre-1945 body count for the governments in question, including non-military actions (like the Holocaust of the Jews, Gypsies, and Slavs; and the Holodomor of the Ukranians) as well as military. It doesn't matter whether or n

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