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AOL should get in on this. They could put all of those old CDs to good use.

Free internet program from the late 90's: "1000 hours free! Sign on today!" :)


> Potentially criminal groupls: everybody.

While this may be true, certain crimes are seen as worse than others. And, as un-PC as it may sound, certain demographics are many times more likely to commit certain crimes.

Homicide: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/mm6227a1.htm

Also, some government monitoring can be "for your own good":

Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance: http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/mmwrhtml/ss5704a1.htm

But, maybe the CDC is different than the NSA.


Government monitoring "for your own good" is pretty scary. We already have situations where people are attacked by the government or its agents because they did something that only harms themselves. For example [1]. Mass surveillance, if left unchecked, will eventually expand for whatever purposes the government wishes. Power is easy to incrementally grow (or in the case of the NSA, they simply ignore the laws) and very difficult to shrink again. We shouldn't think that this wouldn't be used against us sometime in the future and who can truly say that they never did anything harmless-but-illegal (take drugs? gambling? copyright infringement?) and as [1] shows, people have died for these "crimes".

[1] https://www.google.ie/search?q=sal+colusi&oq=sal+colusi&aqs=...


"Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience." -- C.S. Lewis

That's one of my favorite author quotes. The greatest evil in this world is done by those who can see their own work and tell themselves that it is good.


That is a fantastic quote. Thanks for posting it.


So wait... did I miss the part about what happens if they fail to do what I ask? What happens then?

"Finish my dissertation. Thanks."


> "Finish my dissertation. Thanks."

There are lots of academic ghostwriting services. While not ethical, I assume they are totally legal. It would be relatively easy to hire one of them.

https://www.lewrockwell.com/2010/11/ed-dante/the-shadow-scho...


Most things the answer isn't "No", but "Okay, this service will do it for $huge_number. Is that okay?"

Will it cure cancer for you? No. But if it can get you the best care available, that seems like a reasonable response.


Probably illegal, therefore a no-go under their TOS. And if not, well, at $100/hr ...


I never leave at 5pm, but I do normally wake up at 1pm... I hear this sort of schedule changes when you get a real job.


It doesn't have to. Look for a distributed company, tolerant of people in different timezones (likely also tolerant of those with different sleep patterns). 1pm where you are is 8am somewhere.

Or look for a place that needs people willing to do nighttime deployments, finish up things that have a next-day deadline, infrastructure, etc. A lot of people are happy not to have to do that, so having people that prefer it anyway is valuable to them.


I was thinking the opposite: wouldn't a very flexible display make for something that's very durable?

I'm imagining an ad for LG where Alex Rodriguez hits a big screen with a bat and it just flexes...


One of the greatest breakthroughs of my life was realizing that you only had to type "cheese steak jimmy's" once, then ctrl-c, then ctrl-v as much as you want. It was a great day.


Strangely I am responsible for the name of this cheat code. It's an accidental-turned-intentional misnomer for a place we used to eat a lot during Age2 development called Fred's Downtown Philly.


If you have written up any memories/folk lore from your days building this game, I would love to read it (and I'm sure many others here would too).


I have never written anything up personally, but I'm sure there is some stuff out there to be found.

Get any two former Ensemble employees together, possibly buy them a beer, and you will almost certainly get some stories that sound apocryphal but probably actually happened :)


Ensemble was a truly great studio. I hear people rag on AoE3 but I personally don't think Ensemble ever missed. Once. Between you and Westwood, RTS was pretty great for a long time.

Whatever you did for them, thanks for some really fun entertainment across many years of my own life.


Thank you for some truly wonderful memories! Back in school, my goal was to join Ensemble Studios. I was really disappointed to hear that it shut down. I'm now in the games industry and I owe it mostly to Age of Empires!


Ensemble employees get free beer from me for life, if I ever get the chance to meet any of you. You guys defined a big part of my childhood, and even today as a young adult I think back to lessons I learned from that game. It made a big impact on me in many ways.


You might be interested in the Age of Kings Postmortem: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131844/postmortem_ense...

It has a lot of behind the scenes details which I found interesting.


Thanks, I enjoyed reading that


I love to see/hear/read little behind-the-scene tidbits like this about the development of the great games of yore. It lifts the veil (or, the "fog of war" HAHA [sorry]) oh so slightly and lets you in on how the magic was made. Geez... I miss the 90's. I feel old now, but thank you for the skinny on that cheat code.


Rock on! This is a perfect example why i love hn! Thx 4 the comment :-p


That's the cheat code for 1000 food[0] for anyone curious.

[0] - http://www.neoseeker.com/aoe2-conquerors/cheats/pc/


Indeed, alongside lumberjack, robin hood and rock on. Even in LAN party multi player mode we used to allow these cheats, as it made the game more fun. Players would build enormous defensives with those resources until the mother of all battles would conclude the game.


howdoyouturnthison


Am I correct in thinking that this is only reasonable if you're already using D? The switching cost seems too high if you're python everything.

I tried the Armadillo C++ library a while ago (http://arma.sourceforge.net/). The speed up and time spend learning the syntax didn't seem worth it.


I completely understand that for existing projects it might not make sense to switch, but as I say at the start of the article

    why you should consider D for your next numerical project.


I just ran your column means benchmark. It is pretty impressive... maybe my C++ is trash. Never saw that much speedup with Arma. I'll try it out :)


My great grandparents had a small farm in Massachusetts between the 30's-50's. They had 8 kids (free labor for ~20 years). They did well enough to send all their kids to college, but not much beyond that.

Something tells me you can do okay with a small farm if you're a poor German immigrant who fought in WWI because you're not expecting much anyway. Happy to not be starving. The woman in the article should've expected less from the beginning. They can chalk it up as a learning experience, I guess.


> P-values should be used with strong caution.

FiveThirtyEight (and Scientific American, and others) did some pretty interesting articles about this recently if you haven't seen it:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/science-isnt-broken/

Just from personal experience, the use of p-values is really broken in biology/chemistry. The things I've heard principal investigators say...


I'm assuming this "Pricetopher" is the same guy? http://pricetopher.com/ That's a bit disturbing.


Rather interesting link. Their profiles seem quite different - this Pricetopher doesn't seem to have any tech aspects, seems to have an alternate LinkedIn account, isn't as well-spoken, and has felonies on record. But both are Chris L. Price, which is a bit of a coincidence. I'd still be surprised if they turned out to be the same person.


Yeah sorry, yesterday I thought "hmm a talented sociopath could make several completely different lives.., it's the same guy!" But no, looking again, they look completely different.


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