1979 Dystopian Vision That Came True

I HAVE THIS recurring nightmare. Jonas Salk has just announced his cure for polio. A bill is introduced in Congress to require mandatory inoculation of school children under HEW direction. Opposition then appears. Ronald Reagan urges "free choice by parents rather than compulsion by government." Mobil runs advertisements with the headline, "From gas tanks to bloodstreams. Where will government go next?" An associate professor of economics does a study for the American Enterprise Institute dem...

 The Car Example for OOP

The `Car extends Vehicle` or `Duck extends Bird` type of tutorial obscures more than it illuminates. In good OO programming, we don’t make class hierarchies in order to satisfy our inner Linnaeus. We make class hierarchies in order to simplify the code by allowing different parts of it to be changed independently of each other, and to eliminate duplication (which comes to the same thing). Without any context as to what the code needs to accomplish, you can’t make a judgment about whether...

 Null Island

There is a special place on Earth at an equally interesting location. Although it has no spatial extent, it has a thriving community and digital economy: every day many people record their fitness activities, there are countless properties offered to sale and it is even the origin of malicious cyber attacks1. Many restaurants are located there, and delivery drivers are always available to make stops at vacation rentals, there is social media activity with millions of photos uploaded, and the ...

 How Games Influence Strategic Culture

Rules define many of the ways a player or team can achieve the primary goal in a given game. For example, because American football requires teams to advance the ball a certain distance over a series of downs or give up the initiative, the game evolves as a series of set-piece plays. Soccer, in contrast, is far more fluid, with virtually continuous activity throughout the game. Soccer and American football do share one common rule in that both last a standardized period (albeit with opportuni...

 Ten Golden Rules of Go

Tan Bu De Sheng （贪不得胜） - The greedy do not get success Ru Jie Yi Huan （入界宜缓） - Be unhurried to enter opponent´s territory Gong Bi Gu Wo （攻彼顾我） - Take care of oneself when attacking the other Qi Zi Zheng Xian （弃子争先） - Discard a stone to gain sente She Xiao Jiu Da （舍小就大） - Abandon small to save big Feng Wei Xu Qi （逢危须弃） - When in danger, sacrifice Shen Wu Qing Su （慎勿轻速） - Make thick shape, avoid hast...

 The Pattern of Decentralization-Centralization

There are two categories of true believers, in my mind. There are those who, for example, are building a new decentralized user-empowering financial system. And to them, history teaches us that there will always be new avenues for power to become centralized. In fact, the entire history of the computer industry was radical openness, which led to a lot of innovation, which later led to closing it down. For example, IBM released the PC specs. Everybody could build a PC. Michael Dell was a col...

 Principles of Technorealism

1. Technologies are not neutral. A great misconception of our time is the idea that technologies are completely free of bias -- that because they are inanimate artifacts, they don't promote certain kinds of behaviors over others. In truth, technologies come loaded with both intended and unintended social, political, and economic leanings. Every tool provides its users with a particular manner of seeing the world and specific ways of interacting with others. It is important for each of us to c...

 Subjected Under the Guise of Freedom

Any disciplinary power that expends effort to force human beings into a straitjacket of commandments and prohibitions proves inefficient. It is significantly more efficient to ensure that people subordinate themselves to domination on their own. The efficacy defining the system today stems from the fact that, instead of operating through prohibition and privation, it aims to please and fulfill. Instead of making people compliant, it endeavors to make them dependent. This logic of neoliberal...

 Pinball Algorithms

In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually r...

 Personal Growth is Not Hoarding Knowledge

Personal growth is about figuring things out and gaining experience, not hoarding knowledge. An attitude that promotes discovering the new and the valuable is far more important. Thus, your tactics and strategy should always be changing and evolving. Adopt fresh tactics regularly to replace your old ones. Today is more important than yesterday. What's yours is not the new technique, but rather the effort that goes into unearthing it. Knowing what's needed to make those discoveries will allow...