Various amusing or interesting topics, or things that shock and appall me. Kind of a miscellaneous bin.
Legalize the giving, but not the receiving, of bribes, giving the briber every incentive to report the bribee — including getting his bribe money back. I have to admire the guy who came up with this. The only reason to criminalize the giving of a bribe is moralistic outrage, a system like this would be …
Continue reading ‘“Reducing Bribery by Legalizing the Giving of Bribes”’ »
An unfortunate truth. (We’ve gotta laugh about this stuff or we’d go nuts.)
Besides the humorous and enlightening marketing lesson, this article points out a mental quirk of our species: the reward you get from something isn’t as important to your happiness as the amount of effort you had to put into getting it. I have perfectly sound and logical business reasons for always tackling the hardest programming …
I recently stumbled across a very funny parody site called The Content Farm. Extra funny if you’ve run across real content farms (they constantly steal Geek Drivel entries, so I see more than my fair share), but good even without that. (An as-yet-unidentified content farm, stealing and mangling one of Geek Drivel’s articles, has apparently …
I thought that the graphics in the Final Fantasy movie, ten years ago, were pretty realistic, and you could tell by the skin tone of some of the characters that it wasn’t real. But take a look at the video on this page… that’s damn realistic! I don’t know if the gameplay has the same …
Continue reading ‘“Lara Croft returns in next-gen Tomb Raider title”’ »
As a rule, I don’t put profanity in code comments. It’s unprofessional, if occasionally tempting in the extreme — especially after spending eight hours trying to work around an API or operating system bug to get your widget working on that last 5% of machines, only to find that it still fails. Apparently a lot …
Continue reading ‘“Cussing in Commits: Which Programming Language Inspires the Most Swearing?”’ »
Wow, newspapers are really getting desperate. I just got another call from a newspaper telemarketer (yes, yet again). When I said that I still wasn’t interested in a newspaper, he asked where I got my news, so I told him from the Internet. So far, no different than every other time these guys have called. …
Hey, we were raised on video games. And we never stopped playin’ ’em. 🙂 (And happy World IPv6 Day!)
If you’re a science fiction fan, this will give you quite a chuckle, I guarantee it. 🙂
Finally, the killer app for robotics has been found! 😉