MetaFilter

I mean, if you think Amazon would be queasy about selling this hypothetical book, don't imagine that mainstream publishers of the pre-digital age would have leaped at the chance, either.

The bigger issue is that once I buy a print book, it's sitting on my bookshelf. After I buy a Kindle book, it's still sitting on Amazon's servers and they can remove my access to it at will.

Thus, Calibre.
posted to MetaFilter by Holy Zarquon's Singing Fish at 11:08 AM on April 9, 2013

I bet that minister thinks twice about pinching someone's parking space again though.
posted to MetaFilter by biffa at 11:35 AM on April 9, 2013

At the June 2011 meeting, Munter, who participated via secure video link, began making his case that he should have veto power over specific drone strikes.

Panetta cut Munter off, telling him that the C.I.A. had the authority to do what it wanted in Pakistan. It didn’t need to get the ambassador’s approval for anything.

“I don’t work for you,” Panetta told Munter, according to several people at the meeting.

But Secretary... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by enn at 10:22 AM on April 9, 2013

Somehow, in my mind, I imagined him as a sort of jolly fellow, who happened to have harpoons that burst out of his arms, a talent he used for various good deeds.

He got a cat out of a tree once. Sort of.
posted to MetaFilter by Alvy Ampersand at 9:44 AM on April 9, 2013

There's no limit to what raccoons will do for Delicious Food (or Delicious Garbage, which I guess is the same thing to them).

I'm pretty sure that with an Arduino and some sort of trapdoor-box and a large quantity of Jif Extra Crunchy, you could train raccoons to solve the Traveling Salesman problem in polynomial time, or dramatically improve Netflix recommendations, or cure cancer.

Though they'd probably just chew through the side of the box,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kadin2048 at 6:28 AM on April 9, 2013

No wonder they can get into the garbage; they're half an evolutionary step away from calling in an airstrike on it.

When I was a kid, my family had a problem with racoons breaking into our garbage. One night, my dad decided the solution was to put cinder block on top of the trashcan. Of course, the racoons just pushed it off and got back into the trash. The next night, my dad took some bungee cords and lashed the cinder block to the trashcan. We woke... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Bulgaroktonos at 6:20 AM on April 9, 2013

...comparing the San Francisco Symphony with a kazoo player, spitting blood out the end of his instrument.

Honest to god I have, in my short life, attended more orchestral performances than I have ever wanted and given the choice I'd almost immediately pick the blood fountain kazooist over yet another one.
posted to MetaFilter by griphus at 5:09 AM on April 9, 2013

Microsoft's astroturfing campaign is disgusting. Oracle is terrible all around, and Expedia is basically Microsoft's Frankenstein. Say what you want about Google, but I'll use Google over anybody that attempts to compete via litigation and regulatory pressure rather than innovation (and as somebody who is reasonably well-informed about antitrust and competition law, most of these efforts seem like bullshit). How's that Metro UI working out for you, Steve?
posted to MetaFilter by Inspector.Gadget at 5:46 AM on April 9, 2013

Thomas is only 64? Ugh, he's gonna live to 104 at least.
posted to MetaFilter by Drinky Die at 10:00 PM on April 8, 2013

And that's why it's important to use good statistics to support your case -- statistics are a weapon, and if you don't know how to use them then your enemy can turn them against you.

So in the spirit of Scientist's quote, and in the spirit of "everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it", I did something about it. The next two paragraphs are methodology, you can skip to the table if that's not your thing.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Homeboy Trouble at 3:25 PM on April 4, 2013

Joe in Australia: There's always a reason to be especially vile and nasty about female politicians, and there's always a good reason for doing so.

Oh, yeah: you're totally getting it. We hate her because she's a woman. Yup.

And we hate Justice "FeelMyPockets Let'sTalkDonkeySexInTheWorkplace" Thomas because he's black.

If it makes you feel any better, my hatred of evil people is roughly equal for white Christian... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by IAmBroom at 9:18 AM on April 8, 2013

Maggie Thatcher is the reason the UK is not now in the state Greece is in.

This is just nonsense, in fact you can reasonably draw a line between the rise of the City as the saviour of the British economy under Thatcher and the creation of the economic bubble that created the current global depression
posted to MetaFilter by brilliantmistake at 9:08 AM on April 8, 2013

Maggie Thatcher is the reason the UK is not now in the state Greece is in.

Heh. No.
posted to MetaFilter by Artw at 8:53 AM on April 8, 2013

i wish it had sources for the illustrated facts so we could learn more

I was going to say the same thing. I want to know more about the study where they humiliated cows.
posted to MetaFilter by codacorolla at 3:24 PM on April 8, 2013

Sleeper, I remember my parents reading "Lives of a Cell" to the whole family on a long car trip. This would have been right around the time it came out-- I'm remembering '78 or '79. I would have been ten or eleven years old, and my brothers and sisters all a few years older. We lived in England, but my father worked for a company building a liquid natural gas plant in the Sahara desert, and he took us with him on an inspection trip (to the middle of Algeria with a young family, with... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by seasparrow at 12:59 PM on April 8, 2013

That brief essay on the health care system (in which he mentions the a inevitability of national heath care) is really pretty amazing:

The trouble is, we are being taken by the propaganda, and it is bad not only for the spirit of society; it will make any health-care system, no matter how large and efficient, unworkable. If people are educated to believe that they are fundamentally fragile, always on the verge of mortal disease, perpetually in need of support by... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by resurrexit at 12:46 PM on April 8, 2013

When I was in the eighth grade, I was sick for a week, and a family friend kept me on her sofa so I wouldn't infect my siblings with whatever I was ailing from. The only movies she had on tape were the Annette Funicello/Frankie Avalon beach films. I watched them over and over and over and developed a huge crush on Annette. So much so that my girlfriend at the time handmade me an Annette Funicello doll, with a tight sweater and Mousketeer ears. The doll lasted longer than our relationship, but... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by ColdChef at 2:37 PM on April 8, 2013

COBRA!: "Weirdly, I first heard of her as a child when reading a Garfield cartoon wherein Garfield was leching after her. I'd forgotten about that until just now, but god damn is that strange."

I had a similar experience, except instead of Garfield it was Dave Barry. "The Mickey Mouse Club made a big impression on us as youngsters, especially the part where Annette Funicello came marching out in a shirt with 'ANNETTE' written across the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by brundlefly at 1:03 PM on April 8, 2013

Instead, it looks like a bunch of young and enthusiastic programmers suggested that they model individual sims, and their management wasn't seasoned or smart enough to realize that this was folly.

Totally. This comes right back to r_n's Game Rant #47, Why an Industry with an Average Tenure of Five Years Will Continue to Suck.
posted to MetaFilter by restless_nomad at 10:44 AM on April 8, 2013

Malor: for reals. Even before the release, the noise about modeling individual sims made me very, very suspicious, and I wasn't the slightest bit surprised that it's gone so badly.

It is just stunning the depths of the ignorance the people in charge of this game have displayed. Not only are they incurious about cities, they don't really know much about computers, math, geometry, networks of semi-autonomous agents, or gamers. They've missed the point of the thing they're... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 10:43 AM on April 8, 2013

My two year old is currently crying because his banana is broken. By which I mean he took a bite out of a banana. Oh, wait, in the time it took me to type that sentence, he has now moved to crying because his sister's La La Loopsy doll will not fit inside the (solid, carved from wood, has no inside) Thomas the Tank Engine passenger car. Last night he was crying because when he turned a glass of water upside down, the water fell out. Yesterday morning, he was crying because I wouldn't put his... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by KathrynT at 9:36 AM on April 8, 2013

Thankfully I'm not able to remember any of my own tantrums (my parents assure me that I was much better than my brother), but good lord do I remember my little brother's.

I think our favorite one was that he would get mad at my dad for making his juice wrong (we cut Juicy Juice 50/50 with water to cut down the sugar and cost). Bro would throw a fit if you got the "recipe" wrong, but he could never remember which way was the right way.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by phunniemee at 9:59 AM on April 8, 2013

I'm in charge of the Peapod order for the office, and I always like to have instant oatmeal available as a breakfast option. A number of months back I ordered a box of the dinosaur oatmeal.

The dinosaur oatmeal is great for a number of reasons: it's a brown sugar flavor that basically tastes like candy, the packets have dino jokes and dino facts printed on them, and there are dinosaurs in it. It's basically the best oatmeal ever.

Anyway, I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by phunniemee at 9:50 AM on April 8, 2013

Interesting that for all the grumbling over SimCity 2013 I see in this thread there's very little discussion of the economic incentives at work here.

Well, the thing is, players don't give a rat's ass about the economic incentives. This is what companies like EA always seem to be surprised by - they provide a product designed to get them money, and they don't seem to understand why it doesn't work, because what the player wants is a product that does... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by restless_nomad at 9:34 AM on April 8, 2013

The traditional "pay for it once and it's yours forever" model will be left to the (rapidly growing) indie game market.

I do wonder what affect this has on the legacy of the current era of gaming. We love to wax nostalgic about the great games from the 80s and 90s- look at the recent lucasarts thread, or even various comments in this thread here. It's amazing to me that companies seem determined to squander that kind of good will, but the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by vibratory manner of working at 8:33 AM on April 8, 2013

Um.

It turns out sometimes when cats move in super slow motion they actually just look that much more like demons from the black abyss with their fangs and their yellow eyes and THEY ARE WATCHING ALWAYS WATCHING.

I am not calm.
posted to MetaFilter by kbanas at 8:07 AM on April 8, 2013

I no longer have any idea how the plots are supposed to work or why the characters do what they do or how the monsters are defeated. The Doctor might as well have been making animal noises for the last half of this episode and it would have been just as clear. You know how Star Trek scriptwriters would just write [tech] in their scripts, and later fill it in with something like "reverse the polarity of the space time defibrillator and fire the photon beam at the dilithium"? I think... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by painquale at 2:07 PM on April 7, 2013

In the past year, we have received thousands of emails and postcards protesting against EA for allowing players to create LGBT characters in our games. This week, we’re seeing posts on conservative web sites urging people to protest our LGBT policy by voting EA the Worst Company in America.

That last one is particularly telling. If that’s what makes us the worst company, bring it on. Because we're not caving on that.

That's... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Blazecock Pileon at 10:53 PM on April 7, 2013

I don't know how well EA does financially (I suppose decently) but now that the dust has settled on this game - the people who run EA should be running no-compete businesses like private prisons or Department of Defense contracting instead. If you're going to try to dictate reality to your customers, offer nothing, and expect to help yourself to as much of your customers' wallets as you want, you should make sure your customers can't say no first.
posted to MetaFilter by MillMan at 9:45 PM on April 7, 2013

Which is infuriating, because SimCity 2000 came with a hundred-plus-page tome about urban planning principles and how they related to the game. It was a core part of the thinking behind the series, dammit, and throwing that out in favor of some nebulous metric-based "fun" meter ignores the core user and the appeal of the game.
posted to MetaFilter by restless_nomad at 9:03 PM on April 7, 2013

I'd also like to echo everyone upthread who's talked about how pointless it is for them to try to model every sim. It's like trying to model the behavior of a gas by tracking every single molecule.
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:50 PM on April 7, 2013

Consumerist's rebuttal to EA's prebuttal.

"Many continue to claim the Always-On function in SimCity is a DRM scheme. It’s not. People still want to argue about it. We can’t be any clearer – it’s not. Period."

People still want to argue about it because EA also made it clear that "With the way that the game works, we offload a significant amount of the calculations to our servers so that the computations... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by the_artificer at 8:49 PM on April 7, 2013

The game is terrible for reasons beyond just the server issues or the deliberate damage inflicted in the interest of pretending it's an MMO. The model of what a city means is simple, stupid, and wrong — like, it's at least 30 years out of date on urban planning theory and even beyond that it makes pointless mistakes left and right.

Yes, this stuff is important. The game's model doesn't necessarily have to display any real fidelity to actual urban planning (that... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by You Can't Tip a Buick at 8:49 PM on April 7, 2013

I would be OK with simulating individual sims, computational excess aside, if the sims behaved remotely like real people. But they don't have fixed abodes, and every day they try to find a new job. No wonder the emergent behaviour is frustrating.
posted to MetaFilter by unSane at 8:40 PM on April 7, 2013

Even if it wasn't bugged out, damn is that a small plot of land. There's sandbox games and there's sandbox games.
posted to MetaFilter by Sys Rq at 8:28 PM on April 7, 2013

Well folks it was mighty hot today.

How hot was it?

Oh it was hot, trust me.
posted to MetaFilter by Splunge at 12:56 PM on April 7, 2013

Looks like Google has tapped into my subconscious mind. Anyone else have dreams like that? You're driving along and suddenly the road has turned into some terrifying rollercoaster thing with enough confusing overpass interchanges to be straight from a cartoon of the future as envisioned in 1938?

... just me then? Okay. Carry on.
posted to MetaFilter by cmyk at 11:30 PM on April 6, 2013

Careful home dubbing of an LP on a well-specced machine sounds pretty great, but I was a little kid when cassettes were big. I was happy when I could hit 'pause' on the tape recorder at the exact moment before Casey Kasem started talking.
posted to MetaFilter by box at 9:04 AM on April 7, 2013

Just the right size, never skips, never breaks.
My copy of Use Your Illusion I disagrees with your "never breaks" part.

I first decided that record companies were all bastards when I listened to my sister's copy of "Smells Like Teen Spirit" on cassette. The record company had sped it up so it was a semi-tone higher and faster, presumably to use less magnetic tape and keep the per-unit cost... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by infinitewindow at 8:50 PM on April 6, 2013

Wow, that is an really really terrible way of presenting the data.

It literally made me so angry that I spent a good fraction of an hour copying the damn data from the individual damn frames and making a better chart that doesn't have god-damn stuff jumping around all the god-damn fucking time.

Um. Here it is. I'll step away from the computer now.
posted to MetaFilter by narain at 3:33 AM on April 7, 2013

"For almost all of recorded history, musicians made very little..."

MOST made very little. There has always been, in centers of civilization, a journeyman and an elite entertainer class. If you were worth seeing live, you made a decent living, and if you were elite, you could get rich.

Consider the NYC and LA jazz scenes today: the medium to bigger fish in those big ponds make most of their money performing. They sure aren't rich, but they get by.
posted to MetaFilter by MeanwhileBackAtTheRanch at 12:24 AM on April 7, 2013

What is wrong with these people? Everyone knows that light sabers are issued with padawan-control locks for this very reason! Anyway, if you don't have enough control of the Force to get something out of a baby's hand, you have no business having a light saber in the house. Try a nice blaster.
posted to MetaFilter by GenjiandProust at 10:13 AM on April 7, 2013

When all you have is a lightsaber, everything looks like a battle droid.
posted to MetaFilter by George Lucas at 9:43 AM on April 7, 2013

I think North Korea is collapsing, and Lil' Kim is desperately trying to distract the wolves at his door.

This seems to be, if not likely — something that I have no ability to judge, certainly — at least an explanation that fits the facts at hand rather well. In particular, it explains the somewhat schizophrenic behavior of the DPRK and their seeming lack of caution for the cliff they're driving themselves over. If there is an internal power... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Kadin2048 at 4:55 PM on April 6, 2013

NK is a single country; we should be able to take it down.

It'll be over by Christmas!
posted to MetaFilter by Justinian at 2:44 PM on April 6, 2013

Mining asteroids will provide enough money and resources to cure cancer and every other conceivable disease. Set your sights higher.
posted to MetaFilter by blue_beetle at 9:09 AM on April 7, 2013

This is so awesome. A great use of space exploration. Neil De Grasse Tyson talks about this often: look, we don't have enough resources on this planet, and people are people, so we're not going to find a cute, easy social solution to overpopulation and climate change. Instead of complaining about it and hoping for disaster, let's fucking try something! Mining space rocks is a great idea. Let's try it!
posted to MetaFilter by Potomac Avenue at 8:12 AM on April 7, 2013

(I do expect there to be some kind of outcry like this, if MetaFilter is any gauge).

Depends on the framing. If the thread is presented as OH GOD NUKE EXPLOSION KILLS EVERYONE, then the thread will be about how that isn't a possibility and RTGs are proven, safe, reliable. If the thread is about RTGs as boring useful tech, then the thread will be full of RADIOACTIVITY KILLS.
posted to MetaFilter by the man of twists and turns at 6:02 AM on April 7, 2013

Every single kid with cancer should get this super special treatment. Make it a law.
posted to MetaFilter by orme at 7:50 AM on April 7, 2013

We aren't turning away chemo patients because we're spending money on space exploration, but you know that already.
posted to MetaFilter by incessant at 8:16 PM on April 6, 2013