Exactly. No public posts? No public profile. Mention to the user that they're doing something "profile-oriented" that's going to start appearing on their profile if you really want to do the silly "activity-log" approach to a home-page (that is, every YouTube video or Blogger post the user likes and comments appears on their page) - once the user starts doing actions in public, that's the time to lazily create the public page, and that's the time to ask the user the hard question of "hey, I'm going to start collecting all your public commentary and public likes into a single place so everybody can see the stuff you say and like, is this good? yes? Awesome. No? Let me set up a pseudonym for you to do that"
Google obviously wanted people who were active public commenters/contributors on their properties (YouTube, Picasa, and Blogger) to automagically be part of Plus, and that's not a terrible idea (obviously treating commenting and sharing as the exact same operation without distinguishing it to the reader is a terrible idea, but that's just a detail). But why foist Plus on all the lurkers? Lurkers don't add value to Plus anyways.
Interestingly, asking Google to define "decimate" returns a modern definition, "kill, destroy, or remove a large percentage or part of", and a historical one, "kill one in every ten of (a group of soldiers or others) as a punishment for the whole group".
Honestly I have never really found a situation where I wanted to exactly (or even slightly) mean reduce by 10%. It is too specific of a definition to be truly useful.
I find it much more convenient, and useful, to have a word that means the current modern definition of decimate. Perhaps decimate is a poor choice to represent that, but honestly not every word has to sound or have roots that directly relate to the definition of the word. It is more important words are used, rather than languish or die in history books.
There's somewhere around 1,000,000 words in the English language.
> Honestly I have never really found a situation where I wanted to exactly (or even slightly) mean reduce by 10%. It is too specific of a definition to be truly useful.
I hope you realise that your use cases for words isn't the same as every other English-speaker's.
> I find it much more convenient, and useful, to have a word that means the current modern definition of decimate.
The word you're looking for, as mentioned, is devastate. Perhaps ruin, destroy, wreck, ravage, desolate, demolish, raze, etc. If you're happy with a phrase rather than a single word there's plenty more to choose from to convey your desired meaning.
> Perhaps decimate is a poor choice to represent that, but honestly not every word has to sound or have roots that directly relate to the definition of the word.
Agreed, but where words have a specific use (even if not to you) it's frustrating to have their meaning modified to a concept that is more than adequately conveyed by dozens of other, existing, commonly used words.
That's my point.
> It is more important words are used, rather than languish or die in history books.
I tried in both FF and Chrome, no issues with performance noticed. Do you have a lot of plugins with FF?
I actually had an opposite problem, the game was incredibly generous with its imprecise collision. I could rotate twice and catch two rectangles falling at the same time on the same paddle and finish a group. I was overwhelmed by the number of sides I had to simultaneously defend and the number of different falling pieces. The animations, I don't think, made much difference in difficulty or ease. Mostly I wound up surprised that I had cleared a group, rather than the opposite problem you described.
IANAL, and yes, you can not copyright game mechanics or ideas. This is why so many clones of every game exists. Because no one owns the rights to "a tower defense".
There is only one successful Tetris clone lawsuit.[1] Most Tetris clones are removed just because they are fairly aggressive with their claims (not necessarily because their claims are valid).
The successful suit was due to the playing field having the exact same dimensions as well as very similar visual expressions as regular Tetris outside of the just the game mechanic.
What? Of course the apparent affect matters. If the underlying physical principles can be understood, there is a possibility of increasing its efficiency for larger throughput. And if the underlying process isn't understood, there is no way to rule out something that isn't actually producing thrust or some other fluke.
Finally, the whole point of science is to discover things. Not make magic :|
I think what he means is even if it turned out to just be thermal energy, then that means this device has the capability of directing thermal energy as a viable proportion source, so its still pretty great : )
I don't mean to suggest it wouldn't be of interest. As you point out it would be of paramount interest to discover the physics behind it. The Pioneer Anomaly, however, was very very small indeed. This effect appears to be many orders of magnitude greater.
In those studies that show removing a lane can improve traffic flow or adding a lane can worsen traffic, that is only true of particular lanes/roads in different areas. In fact, it is more than likely that removing any one lane from any road is more likely to worsen traffic than it is to improve it.
It is entirely dependent on the network patterns of the traffic flow itself, not the roads.
The latter isn't used because it sounds cooler, it is literally rooted in the "kill" command on UNIX systems of old. The kill command is still used today, but can be used to send signals to running applications aside from "please exit immediately".
If you want to get really nitpicky, halt isn't as absolute and precise as kill. Halt can mean that the app's activity is simply paused, but its resources are still held and it can in the future be resumed from its original position. Kill very much and in no uncertain terms means to immediately terminate the execution of an application without further processing of the current task.
They really aren't interchangeable terms. If you are talking about interchangeability to an end-user who doesn't have such knowledge, I would argue even then some users may understand the different between not using an app and actually terminating it. Such as halting a video vs closing the window. If you are looking for analogies of proof of understanding, people say to "kill the engine" or other mechanical devices. So again, the term "kill" used in reference to terminating things isn't that weird.
The individual who was surprised to hear of killing an app could have been surprised for a variety of reasons, but not in such a way that I think "halt" should be used over kill.
Unfortunately, while showing what we would consider "intuitively bad data" may seem like a bad idea, only actually empirically testing it can we measure and quantify the exact impact that bad data (either shown purposefully or accidentally, or unknowingly) will have on users.
It may have in fact turned out that what we intuitively think as bad data results in better matches or better experiences. I think experimenting is worthwhile, so long as it is done in the open as they have been doing.
I remember reading about this concerning Netflix. They used to have a competition on who can come up with a better recommendation algorithm. They eventually decided not to implement the best one because what they were getting was good enough, and since most people were streaming instead of getting a dvd, the more recommendations the better. They could just try and if they don't want to see the whole movie, rate it and instantly pick another.
I'm pretty sure they didn't implement it because it was an extremely impractical solution.
Edit:
"We evaluated some of the new methods offline but the additional accuracy gains that we measured did not seem to justify the engineering effort needed to bring them into a production environment." - https://www.techdirt.com/blog/innovation/articles/20120409/0...
>Streaming has not only changed the way our members interact with the service, but also the type of data available to use in our algorithms. For DVDs our goal is to help people fill their queue with titles to receive in the mail over the coming days and weeks; selection is distant in time from viewing, people select carefully because exchanging a DVD for another takes more than a day, and we get no feedback during viewing. For streaming members are looking for something great to watch right now; they can sample a few videos before settling on one, they can consume several in one session, and we can observe viewing statistics such as whether a video was watched fully or only partially.
I wouldn't say that this makes you wrong, but I'd say you are partially right.
People like you are the whole reason the US' media is complete shit.