Interesting Links for 18-8-2011

[andrewducker]

• Empathy breeds altruism, unless a person feels they have low status.
  (tags: empathy altruism status society)
• Civil disorder and looting hits Britain: We have been here before. Puts the media panic nicely in perspective.
  (tags: history riots britain society media)
• What happens if a tester finds a crucial bug in a game a week before it ships?
  (tags: gaming computer_games EpicFail)
• How Captain America got started
  (tags: funny animation)
• Notes on Arguing
  (tags: argument discussion)
• Abercrombie and Fitch offers to pay the cast of Jersey Shore not to wear its clothes.
  (tags: branding marketing tv funny)
• Pigeons Beat Humans at Solving 'Monty Hall' Problem
  (tags: pigeons humand intelligence EpicFail EpicWin)
• As I expected, now that banks can't charge poor people as much for going overdrawn they're denying them services instead.
  (tags: banking banks uk)
• The Daily Mail knowingly and commercially used my photos despite my denying them permission.
  (tags: copyright dailymail journalism photography)
• Markets are Efficient if and Only if P = NP
  (tags: economics complexity computing)

Comments

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

I'm dubious about the console crash thing. If the dude is in America as soon as he found out that it was being shipped - whether or not he was fired, he could have contacted the FTC which, under the whistleblower act, would have given him 33 percent of the company's total profits on all shipped units as a reward for bringing the problem to light. Hell, he could still do that and claim the money - so why wouldn't he or she do that rather than write a blog post about it where they don't even mention the game or the console?

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

I note the article meantioned the Myth II uninstaller bug, which was a similar issue; if you installed the game into your computer's root directory, the uninstaller would delete everything on the drive including personal documents (and part of the OS IIRC). This bug was discovered after the press review copies went out.

Bungie did the right thing, recalling all the pressed discs and replacing them. I chatted online briefly with one of the guys who'd had to break the shrinkwrapping on some of them to swap in the replacement... passed up my chance to get a copy of the "Driveblighter" version, though.

-- Steve admires them all the more for 'fessing up. Dunno if that makes this story more or less believable, though.

[naath.livejournal.com]

Not American? Been given vast quantities of money to not talk about it?

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

But he did say enough to violate any non disclosure agreement.

[calum]

I'm also dubious. That particular defect isnt a "rewrite whole file system" issue - all you'd have to do is lock out autosaves if a manual save is in process, or manual saves if an autosave is in process. A nice fix might have taken ages.. a "dont kill the console" fix for the issue as described doesnt sound hard.

[andrewducker]

"The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers."

(attributed to all sorts of people, but could have been said by anyone from any period of time).

Also, the last link is about _perfectly_ efficient markets. "Really quite efficient markets" are a different matter.

[momentsmusicaux.livejournal.com]

I really don't get the Captain America one...

[andrewducker]

He's renowned for throwing his shield around, in order to disable bad guys...

Empathy breeds altruism, unless a person feels they have low status.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

This sheer lack of empathy on the part of the perpetrators has shaken observers to their core. How could humans display such a lack of altruism toward their fellow man?

Curiously, the set of people asking this question about the rioters is almost completely disjoint from the set of people who used the same words in reference to Margaret Thatcher.