Viewing profile — dkimball

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 a…

You experience adventure games pretty differently from how I do. Also note that "merit" and "enjoyment" are different things.

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…

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 butt…

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…

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…

The pleasure of writing, and/or bragging rights -- the same way that Wikipedia came to be what it is.

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 int…

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 as…

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-runni…

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 busin…

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 everythi…

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 whe…

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 exper…

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 wh…

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 t…

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 App…

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 outr…

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 …

As the old saying goes, "The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent"...

This is doubly ironic with Apple's hipster, Manhattan-liberal gestalt...

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.

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…

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…

(I'm going to lose karma for this, but...) Your "tl;dr" was tl; I dr.