It Wouldn't Be The Worst Thing If North Korea Nuked The Ocean, And Other Facts
WHAT WE LEARNED THIS WEEK
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​Welcome to What We Learned This Week, a digest of the most curiously important facts from the past few days. This week: A conversation about assholes, the pinnacle of video game controller design and the end of software as we know it.

Everyone Is An Asshole, At Some Point

If one were to live their life by a simple maxim, "Don't be an asshole" seems sensible enough. And yet every day we run into assholes. Sometimes the asshole is your boss. Sometimes it's a friend. Sometimes, more often than not, it's the president.

Vox's Sean Illing spoke with asshole scholar Robert Sutton on how to potentially avoid the assholes in your life, and the end result presents more questions than it does solutions. Are you the asshole? Am I the asshole? Are we all assholes?

To answer these questions, it's best you read their conversation in full. You owe it to yourself. Otherwise, I'm sorry but you're kind of an asshole.

[Vox]

It Wouldn't Be The Worst Thing If North Korea Nuked The Ocean

Okay, look. We can all agree that North Korea having nuclear weapons is bad. In fact, you could argue that anyone having nuclear weapons is bad. I'm far from an expert on nuclear warfare, but it seems the only good reason for having nuclear weapons is because everyone else has nuclear weapons. Only a good guy with a nuke can stop a bad guy with a nuke and so on and so forth.

When it comes to the prospect of North Korea blowing up the middle of the ocean with a nuke, Motherboards Caroline Haskins reports that it's actually not that bad?

Sure, in terms of our current geopolitical struggle with the Hermit Kingdom, North Korea nuking the hell out of the sea is not good. But practically speaking, if we're just to examine the singular event of detonating a 140 kiloton nuclear bomb in the water, the effects would be minimal.

Please read Haskins' story, it's full of detail, nuance and fun facts you can share with your friends the next time you're discussing us slouching towards nuclear annihilation.

[Motherboard]

Video Game Controller Design Has Peaked

Kotaku's Kirk Hamilton makes an important point: The controllers of all three major game consoles are virtually the same in their layouts. There are two clickable thumb sticks, four face buttons, two shoulder bumpers, two triggers, a directional pad and start and select buttons. 

This has been the norm for just over a decade, and it's not crazy for one to assume that this is just the ad-hoc industry standard. It makes cross-platform support for games easier, its familiar to players and most developers aren't wont for more controller options. So have we finally arrived upon the Perfect Controller Design?

Hamilton dives into the various third-party controller offerings and finds that, at least in the competitive scene, there's definitely room for improvement. 

[Kotaku]

Software Is Providing Too Much Service

In the summer of 2007, "Live Free or Die Hard" hit the box office. In it, a disgruntled hacker, Thomas Gabriel, uses computers to take over just about all of Washington DC's infrastructure. At the time, it was a sort of laughable cautionary tale. John McClane is now the angry Baby Boomer luddite, who doesn't quite understand how Gabriel is doing what he does (computers or some shit) but definitely knows how to stop it (his fists).

Flash forward a decade and now we have programmer James Somers writing in the Atlantic about how code, specifically bad code, is corrupting what used to be steadfast societal bedrocks, like 911 call centers. And since just about everything now has some sort of code running in the background, we're faced with a problem. Everything will break, and unlike the real world, finding issues within the code isn't always obvious.

Somers details a new movement within software engineering, one that will require developers to think about code in a radical new way, but will make the potential long-term flaws much more visible.

[The Atlantic

<p>Steve Rousseau is the Features Editor at Digg.&nbsp;</p>

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