msg's comments

I can personally recommend the following from this batch:

Don't Starve: a brilliant, brutal wilderness survival game. Great sound and art. Mine/craft cycles combined with a lot of world to explore and secrets to uncover, and permadeath.

Prison Architect: a prison designer and deep simulator of guards, prisoners, bottles, tunnels, and sundry.

Rogue Legacy: a roguish 2D action platformer where each life's dungeon crawl takes you further into a skill/stat progression

The Swapper: a 2D puzzle platformer with a cloning gun and something to say

Gunpoint: a 2D sneaky hacking game, where you break into buildings and rewire security systems to steal intel

The reason to call it a spectrum is that the affected have often the same underlying mental and behavioral patterns, but spread across a wide range of severity from high functioning to uncommunicative.

I don't know how helpful it is to draw fine distinctions when the causes and effects of autism are still so poorly understood. For the non-expert, becoming aware that there are many people with related conditions of speech, social, and motor delays and disabilities is a much more important bridge to cross.

I basically buy DSM-V's decision to lump all the autism spectrum disorders under one label for now. It is an acknowledgment that up to now, calling someone Autism Spectrum Disorder or Asperger's Syndrome or Pervasive Development Disorder - Not Otherwise Specified was a highly subjective distinction without a difference. But it did make a difference in terms of the conditions health insurance would cover, to the detriment of the ASD person.

For my family it involved speech therapy, occupational therapy, and early classroom and social experiences.

Autism is a wide spectrum, but it often involves speech delays, trouble empathizing with others, repetitive behaviors, and a desire for ritual.

You can learn more about it here:

http://www.autismspeaks.org/what-autism

A lot hinges on the definition of "servers" being used. And how the question was put to Alexander. If there's even one alternate interpretation he can say No. Another non-denial denial. He is talking at lawyer-level now. This level of detail is not present in the Politico story.

Not that he would say Yes if we asked in the right way!

Unfortunately Season 2 just wrapped up for the year. They won't be going again until Binding of Isaac: Rebirth comes out. Here's the website though.

http://boilr.org

This article has an interesting meta about the conflict between the gourmet and environmental protection approaches to exotic wildlife, that itself is half food article and half human interest story about octopus punching.

Worth the read.

Each time the survey appears you can elect whether or not to participate. If you are a Linux user currently dropped into Windows to whom this issue of OS identity matters, you can opt out.

Hear my kind tone of voice encouraging you to engage.

If you feel that hypocrisy gives you a free pass to avoid engaging with a very deep belief system with a philosophical head start on you of no less than centuries, and your capsule summary of the Roman Catholic church is "medieval" and "moralizing"...

I would say you actually need more exposure to Catholicism, not less.

Hypocrisy is a universal... so it is actually a horrible signal if you are trying to figure out what to believe. And Christianity at least has a history of facing this issue head on.

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean. In the same way, on the outside you appear to people as righteous but on the inside you are full of hypocrisy and wickedness."

-- Jesus, in Matthew

The "Catholic values" you criticize and approve of are not "catholic". Forgive the pun.

Edit: I see a way to read your statement as saying that Duquesne has a twisted view of Catholic values. Which I could agree with. However there is another reading, not difficult to stumble into, where you are trying to make a general statement about Catholic values, which I could not agree with.

It's a bit of a stretch to believe that the Nintendo 64 developers on boxed cartridge software foresaw a day when someone would try to "cheat" using an emulator and specifically coded against it. You can't use save states like this to play a live game on the original system.

If there was a way to skillfully roll the dice, it would give a massive advantage to dice-practicers (in this particular game).

The OP really objects to the illusion of agency. If his random number were generated seeded by the number of microseconds since the dice roll animation began, he would have no complaints. Even though the dice roll is just as random one way or the other.

I too love this bundle. Pretty awesome that the three charities are Watsi, Child's Play, and EFF.

The games are all very distinct from each other and top notch. My three favorites:

Fez: a perspective-altering puzzle platformer. It's cute, clever, and well designed.

FTL: a real-time starship crew management game, where you assign people to stations and target your opponent's systems. You fly through randomly generated galaxies and have random encounters. Super replayability.

Mark of the Ninja: a stealth-action ninja platformer with very high production values and multiple paths to victory.

If your fingerprints go on a fraud list, you can't get new ones.

You can't repudiate your fingerprints.

Similar, worse problems for iris and DNA.

Imagine being on a watch list that you can't get off of.

This is not a good road to go down.

My college really just wanted algorithms and multivariable calculus. It probably varies from program to program.

Another important consideration is what emphases the MS program will offer. Mine had tracks in AI, Software, Distributed Systems, and Bioinformatics. CS is very broad and you won't have time to do everything in the course of two years. Think about your goals and your focus a little.

My story is somewhat similar.

I took a BA in Linguistics, worked for a while, then discovered computers. I spent a year on prerequisites and then did an MS in CS. I got good grades and did a thesis and it opened a lot of doors for me.

Some things that an MS CS degree will teach you that you may not have learned as a seasoned developer are: How to invent solutions to cutting edge problems. How to operate at scale using efficient algorithms and appropriate data structures. How to think about problem spaces. How to research. How to operate at the correct level of abstraction and how to get a level deeper when the abstraction leaks. The intersection between math, stats, and software. How to think like a computer.

To me it sounds like that's exactly what you want to do. One way or another you want these skills.

You may want to separate your desire for these skills from your desire to be credentialed for these skills. It is going to take a while to see how employers react to the Georgia Tech online MS. I believe the vast majority will treat it as second-class for a while. The judgment of HR departments is a lagging indicator. But the top tier employers may not care and just test you to see if you walk the walk.

You don't need a top tier school to get a good job. My MS is from a state university, and I work for Amazon.

Going a little deeper, we are talking about a 53 man roster times 32 teams, only some percentage of which drive drunk with or without the program.

How much impact does this actual issue have? What is the over/under on how many marginal drunk driving accidents the partnership with Uber will prevent per year? 10?

The primary effect will be to set up these 1500 or so celebrities as examples for how to behave when drunk. If using Uber after a bender is good enough for John Q Sportshero, then it's good enough for you. And that may make a real difference for the other 300 million of us.

Re: 1, I guess I use myself as an example of a technologist who is aware of the moral implications of his work. I don't deny that there are sellouts and such. A technologist in the next decade is free to choose the work that catches their fancy, and free to have moral objections to their work and leave for more satisfying work. I also believe that wholesale surveillance is on the wrong side of history, and in the long run, people who are free to choose will not support the surveillance state. Thus the surveillance state will get the dregs, plus or minus.

Re: 2, I'm actually responding to this point in the parent, which says the source of the next generation of NSA recruitment pool is: talk-radio fear mongers who continually generate a stream of xenophobic, america-fuck-yeah types who will happily spy on their countrymen. You may be able to see how I connected the dots to Fox News.

I will connect them further. Fox News has an aging viewership for many reasons. Watching talking heads, as a model of receiving information about the world, is on the way out. Fox has committed to ideologies that, for one reason or another, are not believed by young people. In parallel to the changes to work noted by Stross, there are changes to media consumption that are also driving younger generations farther from the baby boom culture.

Code Complete was my first book on engineering (the first edition). Even though the coding examples were in Ada and Pascal, I ate it up.

It provides a lot of useful mental approaches to programming, and the reasons to code something one way or another. If it's long winded, that's a consequence of its being a comprehensive survey. Certainly, as a software engineering textbook, it has no peer.

The essence of the argument is "tell me that you want the kind of thing that money just can't buy". The hypothesis is that the next generations will feel similar convictions, only more so.

The counterargument that the NSA has just not found the right dollar amount to clear the market of conscientious objectors assumes a lot about what people want out of life. It might be "rational" to take 500 million dollars not to do your life's work. On the average, you will not be that productive in your lifetime, so the 500 million in the hand is more than worth the 5 million in the bush.

But if you are filled with a sense that you are the one person who can accomplish a unique purpose in the limited time you have alive, then I think no amount of money is going to turn you aside.

Again the cynical counterargument is that just like time is fungible for money, your life is fungible for the next wild eyed visionary. But I think we all have a few heroes about whom we can say: "Never again will such a person walk the earth." They may be successful, but they're not the sellouts.

I have not heard of NSA offering f-you money to engineers so it may be a moot point.

"A" hires "A"; "B" hires "C". And Generation Z's "A" players will not work for the NSA.

You don't just need loyalists. You need loyalists who are good enough to operate your systems, who are also conscience-free enough to dissociatively split what they're doing from how they do it, day to day. And you have to have 100% accuracy to avoid the next Snowden.

Speaking as an engineer hiring for software, we are desperate for good people. It is a seller's market out to the horizon. "A" engineers will be picking among many options for at least the next decade, another generation of change.

I am at the head end of Generation Y. I have a nice computer job. And in my personal life story I have already voted with my feet against working for similar institutions. I can pick my post, more or less, and I picked one that doesn't offend my personal convictions about privacy and power.

Computer science does force you to think hard about bullshit. You can't bullshit a compiler. I remember thinking in an early experience with C, my code is right, there must a be a bug in the compiler. You get chastened in a hurry with that kind of attitude.

I guess I'm just saying there is a negative correlation between the anti-knowledge you get from Fox News and the sense of mastery you get from making a computer do what you need it to. So the future of the NSA is decay.

I think it is because "lie" implies a falsehood you could disprove, say in court. "Misled" implies a judgment that the president told a technical truth that he intended to be misleading. It could get confusing if you said he "lied", then he showed you how, technically, what he said was true. Falling back to a weaker "misled" at that point would take a lot of air out of the argument.