Because she’s not necessarily breaking the fourth wall. She’s a hacker who uses spy gear, could just be turning off a camera she’s using to record the whole affair.

Yeah, it’s a trick play. Not something you do for a long period of time, just something you can bust out for a few seconds of advantage when it counts most. Knowing when to pull that sort of move is what separates trolling from sound strategic thinking.

If the game is in sudden death and the attackers need only a couple of seconds of holding the point, the defenders haven’t done “relatively well”. They’re on the edge of defeat and are barely hanging on. Good on the other team for pushing that extra inch for victory with a clever and difficult play.

Skywatch?

I use Mint.com to keep track of my actual cash balance. Their mobile app automatically calculates your balance based on the accounts you link it to, subtracting credit card balances from bank balances.

Why? Because that $200mil difference is a portion what the government expects to collect in interest on your money while they have it.

Hey, sorry about the late reply. Been crazy here lately and no time to browse io9.

To be fair: it's one of those sort of self-reinforcing loops of perception, driven more by author profits than cultural bias. If an author thinks they can get 5% more sales by using a different-gendered pseudonym? They'll do it.

Oh, there are exceptions, especially among those authors that managed to break out of the pack, or are unusually talented. Some also choose to break the mold as a marketing gimmick, which is risky with a high payoff if you succeed. (It's much easier to become the "best male writer of romance fiction" than it is to…

The thing is, that subtle bit of perception is enough to make a writer use a pseudonym. You "end up" reading male authors, because "few" female authors write hard SF or space opera. If you're like most people this will actually subconciously influence your selections, especially if you're picking something largely…

There actually is some truth to this. There's a public perception in certain genres that men and women "just write different". In classic sci-fi for example they'll contrast Isaac Asimov with Ursula K. LeGuin. In modern supernatural fantasy they might contrast Jim Butcher with Stephanie Meyers.

Start saying it, then. I work in the publishing industry, and quite a number of male romance authors publish under female pseudonyms for the purposes of attracting readers.

There is of course the possibility that not all people will value the same traits, and the choices people make in "guided evolution" will actually lead to greater diversity, and possibly even speciation within the human population?

I think this should be their option. They can REMOVE the score, or mark it "erroneous" and have it not contribute, but that cannot REPLACE their score. This keeps companies from revising their scores in response to publisher pressure, but allows for them to avoid dragging down (or up) a game that doesn't deserve it.

There's a free app called "lightflow" that makes great use of it. Unless you're saying you have an iPhone in which case you're boned.

There's a possible causation/correlation error in the logical thinking here: even if we did find out that the universe is built on a grid, it doesn't mean it's a simulation. A grid of some sort might just be how the universe is naturally structured at the smallest scale, and we happen to have stumbled on a similar…