January 2012
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Are Design Patterns an Anti-pattern?
Design patterns are generally considered a good thing, but do they actually help run a user experience group? As a user experience group manager and an observer (and sponsor) of design pattern exercises, I’ve come to have serious questions about their actual utility. It’s not that design pattern libraries are bad, but that in a world of limited resources, it is it is not clear that the investment...
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UK Court Says You Can Copyright The Basic Idea Of...
We’ve talked a lot in the past about the “idea/expression dichotomy.” This is an important concept in copyright law that says you can only copyright the specific expression, and not the idea. This is supposed to protect people from getting accused of copyright infringement for basically making something similar to what someone else made. Unfortunately, as we’ve been...
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A Sci-Fi Garden Where Visitors Help Grow A Greener...
In some ways, H.O.R.T.U.S. feels like any other greenhouse. It has the usual phalanx of wide-spectrum light strips overhead and sunlight pouring into the windows and fresh oxygen pumping through in the air. It’s just missing one thing: actual plants.
Instead, 325 transparent “photobioreactor” bags—enclosed vessels for producing biomass—dangle off the ceiling and incubate nine...
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Pope calls for silence against Internet noise
The Pope would like all of us bloggers to shut the fuck up.
Pope Benedict XVI on Tuesday hailed the benefits of silent reflection to stop being “bombarded” by information from the Internet but said social networks could be useful modes of communication.
“People today are frequently bombarded with answers to questions they have never asked and to needs of which they were...
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TMI On The VJ, Toots
(Retail | Louisiana, USA) (An elderly woman approaches my counter at work.)
Customer: “Excuse me, young man, but is your grandfather’s name Sean?”
Me: “No, ma’am, why do you ask?”
Customer: “You look just like the sailor I celebrated VJ Day with!” *winks*
from Funny & Stupid Customer Stories - Not Always Right
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EC2 for Poets in 2012
Three years ago, I wrote a tutorial called EC2 for Poets that made it relatively easy for a technically proficient user to set up a Windows server in Amazon EC2. A few hundred people tried it, and were able to get servers running. They could install apps, and run web apps that they then could access from home or on the road. Having your own server “up there” can be pretty cool, makes a...
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Deadly bullshit therapy kills Quebec woman
We don’t often talk about it (since we usually have bigger fish to fry), but alternative therapies can be just as dangerous as any other form of superstitious. Most often, the danger in these therapies lies in the fact that “patients” often favor these pseudo-scientific treatments to the real deal, and end up paying for it later. Comedian Andy Kaufman, when diagnosed with cancer, spend his hard...
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Narrative isn’t usually content either
When I said that narrative was not a game mechanic, but rather a form of feedback, I was getting at the core point that chunks of story are generally doled out as a reward for accomplishing a particular task. And games fundamentally, are about completing tasks — reaching for goals, be they self-imposed (as in all the forms of free-form play or paideia, as Caillois put it in Man, Play and Games)...
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Rugby Film Highlights the Erosion of Women’s...
Women in Iran have it rough. This wasn’t always the case – at least, not the way it is today. Before the Islamic Revolution in 1979, most Iranian women didn’t wear veils. They were active in high levels of academia and government, so much so that even the conservative Revolution couldn’t completely erase their involvement. The civil law protected women’s rights, even when it contravened Sharia law...
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Why Developers Hate Antiviruses
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from Hacker News
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The Zynga Abyss - Treating Video Game Players like...
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from Hacker News
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[Vocal Dubstep] Sub Focus – Falling Down
London based Subfocus has become a household name among electronic music lovers over the past few years due to his razor sharp production style and versatility behind the decks. Anyone who heard his debut self-titled EP in 2009 undoubtably recognized this young producer’s skills as he rose beyond the rigid format of Drum and Bass and began producing everything from electro to dubstep, all with a...
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Small, Painful Buttons: Why Social Media Buttons...
You build sites for mobile devices, right? Then you might’ve noticed the one pesky issue with responsive sites is the loading speed, especially when there’s a slow cell connection. What you may not know is that there is a likely culprit for at least part of your problem — the ever-present social media buttons.
On small devices, such as mobile phones, bandwidth and latency are at a...
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A client has various business areas which are...
A client has various business areas which are identified by acronyms, including LAP, EQP and FAP. They wanted some new online adverts made up. I asked what ideas they’d had for the text. This is what they came back with
FAP online (everyone is doing it)
FAP in schools
FAP for life.
from Clients From Hell
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Ideas for movie moguls
President Obama asks that we suggest ways for the movie industry to control the Internet that we might not find so objectionable.
Nat Torkington tells an old joke in a new context. It’s a good one. God already gave the movie industry the Internet and it’s been shown you can make many billions of dollars selling things there. So why not sell movies too?
I think the President...
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Space Seed
Hello dear readers! Here is another SFAM installment for you. Not much to add except you are all wonderful people and thank you for letting me do this for my job.
I used a lot of purple for this comic.
from Scenes From A Multiverse
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Movie Theaters' Top Lobbyist Resorts To Making Up...
Okay, the lies and ridiculous claims from SOPA/PIPA supporters just keep getting more and more ridiculous. On a panel at Sundance about the whole SOPA/PIPA issue, it appears that John Fithian, president/CEO of the National Association of Theatre Owners (NATO), was able to sound even more tone-deaf and out of touch than the MPAA’s Chris Dodd! That’s really saying something these days....
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Do Pirate Sites Really Make That Much Money? ...
One of the key refrains from the supporters of PIPA and SOPA in pushing for those bills was about how “foreign pirates” were profiting off of American industry. However, as we’ve suggested plenty of times in the past, there’s little evidence that there’s really that much money to be made running such sites. Even more amusing, of course, is that the MPAA/RIAA folks...
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One Hour Per Second
visualizing the incredible rate of YouTube uploads
from Waxy.org Links
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Growing Enough Food to Feed the World
How can we feed a growing population in the midst of climate change and an appetite for more meat? These factors and more are straining the world’s agricultural capacity and pushing up the cost of food, which makes it difficult for the world’s poorest people to grow enough to feed their families.
from The Gates Notes
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Busta Rhymes Backs Megaupload, Says Record Labels...
Well, well. As we pointed out when the Megaupload shutdown happened yesterday, the company had recently named top producer (and husband to Alicia Keys) Swizz Beatz as CEO. Swizz knows tons of artists who respect him, and it seems that some of the biggest names in the business are pretty pissed off that the US government shut down Megaupload. First there’s Diddy, who put out a couple...
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Reverse Engineering a Schematic from a Circuit...
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from Hacker News
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Ownership Mentality: Art Gallery Prohibits...
I’ve always been a bit baffled by No Photography signs in museums and art galleries. Presumably they exist to make the exhibits more exclusive and attractive, but that misses the point of why people visit museums: they want to see these things in person, which is a vastly different experience from simply knowing what they look like. Nobody has ever seen a photo of a dinosaur skeleton or...
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For Rick Santorum, a Pregnancy That Is the Result...
Rick Santorum attempted to justify one of his most bizarre stances in an interview with Piers Morgan on Friday, and the results were predictably scary: Click here to view the embedded video.
Morgan: Do you really believe, in every case, [abortion] should be totally wrong, [including] cases of rape and incest? You’ve got two daughters… If you had a daughter that came to you who had been raped, and...
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An atomic theory of fun game design
This is the original essay in which I worked out the basics of my game grammar approach. It later became a GDC talk. This essay was written in 2004, and the genesis of it was working through issues with the crafting system in Everquest II with Rod Humble. This essay no longer represents my current understanding of game grammar, but it’s a decent start. This essay has never been publicly posted...
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Google+ relaxes real-name policy, allows...
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from Hacker News
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Chinese Lessons For SOPA/PIPA: The Great Firewall...
There’s an interesting LA Times article looking at the reaction in China to the recent SOPA/PIPA blackouts. While they (quite reasonably) point out that the level of censorship in China is much more extreme, one key point did catch my attention. Apparently, when the Great Firewall of China was first set up… Chinese officials defended it as a way to cut down on infringement:
Wen...
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Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans
Troy Hunt: Breaking CAPTCHA with automated humans.
This is crazy.
I shouldn’t be surprised, but there is actually a human-powered reCAPTCHA service out there. Solutions arrive in ~15 seconds and cost $0.001.
Advertise here with BSA
from Monday By Noon
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"You should have explained beforehand that I would...
“You should have explained beforehand that I would have to pay.” - He said, explaining that he thought the contract he signed was a joke.
from Clients From Hell
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Setting up an iPad in 2012
I remember reading an article in the NYT magazine that had a picture of a young woman who had been horribly disfigured in a fire when she was a kid. They showed her the picture. She didn’t know she looked like that. They asked what she saw when she looked in the mirror. She said there was a way of tilting her head and looking only at certain features that made her appear attractive....
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Yosemite HD
Another remarkable time-lapse, high definition video project has recently come out. This one is called the Yosemite Project, produced by Sheldon Neill and Colin Delehanty.
from Unreasonable Faith
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Anil Dash on the history and future of web protest
related: Marco Arment on stopping the next SOPA
from Waxy.org Links
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The disneyfication of tech
Truth is this — users are caught between tech and media. Neither of them is looking out for our interest. Each of them own politicians each owns tech. The tech industry is better at tech (no surprise) and the media industry is better at a lot of other things, including getting Congress to do their bidding.
I’ve been warning the news publishers to be careful about viewing Twitter...
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Infographic Of The Day: Bill Gates Is A Better...
Bill Gates is no Steve Jobs. He’s not a charismatic showman or messianic artist-technologist. He’s something arguably better than that: He’s an action hero. Who else but a comic-book superhuman could claim credit for saving nearly six million lives? Such is the argument made by a handsome infographic created by Frugaldad.com called “Redefining Action Hero: Bill Gates is Better than...
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Simple Genius: Chocolates You Customize From...
Modular systems are just plain smart, allowing you to tailor a design, change it around, and swap out individual components easily. So why not apply the principle to chocolate? Yes, chocolate. For her graduation project at ECAL, Elsa Lambinet collaborated with Swiss chocolatier Blondel to create customizable confections from interchangeable components—thereby realizing the fantasy of...
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Star Tracts
I’m not going to lie.
I may or may not have dressed up like Capt. Jean-Luc Picard for Halloween when I was kid.
I can admit it. I was a Trekkie.
Now, I never committed intellectual property theft created an elaborate evangelistic spoof of the show, but I can appreciate the effort.
After all, is there anything more incredibly terrible awesome than a guitar battle with a Klingon using a...
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Bread Is In The Eye Of The Beholder
(Bakery | Australia) Manager: *laughing* “You’re gonna love this. There was a complaint against you.”
Me: “Oh, okay?”
Manager: “Apparently you…um, package bread sticks suggestively.”
Me: “Pardon?”
Manager: “Yeah. This is what the actual complaint says: ‘She slid the bread stick into the paper bag while looking at my husband and smiling. I just know she was trying to flirt with him! We couldn’t...
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Narrative is not a game mechanic
I love stories. My chief hobby is reading. I was formally trained as a writer, not as a game designer (there wasn’t really any formal training for game design I got started, but that’s another story). I think most game stories are not very good. And I quite enjoy games with narrative threads pulling me through them. When I find a game with a good story, I frequently prefer to the story to the...
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Supreme Court rules Congress can re-copyright...
noooooo
from Waxy.org Links
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Gutters: Issue #244 - Gibson Quarter
Sure, it might seem childish, but you know what? We’re just gonna come right out and say it: Scott and Steve totally look like they are about to kiss on the cover of New Avengers #24.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that, of course. In fact, it would probably be the absolute boldest move in comics I’ve ever seen and leave a great many people scratching their heads...
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Anonymous Exacts Revenge for Megaupload Takedown
Hacker collective Anonymous has taken down websites belonging to the Department of Justice, RIAA, MPAA and Universal music in response to the recent shutdown of Megaupload.
View Article
from The Escapist : Latest News
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Zynga Loses $150 on Every New Paying Customer
Zynga could be losing as much as $150 on every new paying customer it picks up.
View Article
from The Escapist : Latest News
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A 3-D Movie Featuring The Space Junk Floating...
Our civilization relies on the fleet of satellites orbiting the planet, for everything from TV broadcasts to credit card payments. There’s a lot of them—974 in operation at last count. We’ve launched thousands more and many of those are still in orbit. An upcoming movie, Space Junk 3-D, attempts to give viewers a visceral appreciation for the overwhelming amount of trash that’s orbiting the...
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Feds Shutter Megaupload, Arrest Executives
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from Hacker News
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Are Democrats About To Lose An Entire Generation...
I’ve talked, in great detail, how the SOPA/PIPA debate has been a non-partisan discussion. It’s not bi-partisan and it’s not partisan. It’s just non-partisan. The debate has nothing to do with traditional Democrat or Republican lines. This has confused cable news, who has a script to follow, but doesn’t know what to do with strange bedfellows. However, some...
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An analysis of SOPA and PIPA Protest "Blackout"...
Many popular sites are blacked out today in protest of two acts before Congress, known as the Protect IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House. Long story short, the legislators barely know how to email, much less understand what a DNS takedown is. As I’ve been surfing around today bumping into SOAP sites, I noticed that every site is doing the...
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Band Promoting Humanism Will Donate CD Sales to...
The band Words Such As Burn recently put out a new album and they’re donating all the proceeds from sales to the Secular Student Alliance!
Lead singer Bruce Harris describes the humanist message in Flow, saying:
Flow is about what religion costs us, believers and unbelievers alike, in terms of lost love and wasted friendships. Most atheists I know have experienced the familiar story; Maybe a...
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PIPA supporters violating copyright
including cropping out credits
from Waxy.org Links
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Husbands In A Half-Shell
(I am a blind female. I am wearing a bright blue shirt with a bright green tank top underneath it to work. My husband and I work together. By the end of the day, I realize that they don’t go together at all.)
Me: “Hon, this outfit is really not cute at all. Why did you even let me leave the house in it?”
Husband: *very matter of fact* “Well, it kind of reminded me of Leonardo from the Ninja...