Settlers of Catan is a German Board game created by Mayfair Games.
As a point of fact, Settlers of Catan was originally published by Kosmos as Die Siedler von Catan and created by Klaus Teuber. See more information Here. Mayfair Games has republished it (3 editions I believe) in English, here in the USA.
Basically, they are not American-style games where the game play follows the roll-the-dice/take-your-turn theme.
Very few American style games are interesting to old/young adult audiences. You don't see many gaming groups of 20+ somethings getting together to play Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders.
My sister in law bought me Isla Bohnita while she was on a trip to Germany a few years ago. Man did it suck.
Anyway, the only expansion for Bohnanza that I've enjoyed is the extra card set to play up to 8 players. It makes for a really long game, but it's cool having so many people to negotiate with if you've got the right crowd.
Perhaps Uwe Rosenberg will keep up his fued with Klaus Teuber. Each time Teuber released a new expansion/version to Settlers, Rosenberg released another card game/expansion to Bohnanza. Bohnanza is much better than settlers IMHO, but then that's because I like Uwe's wit.
They have an very interesting program that starts in the biology lab where they're recording the nerve impulse patterns of live cockroaches as the run. This data is then studied by the robotics team in order to develop locomotion routines for the robots.
Additionally, there is research coming out of this project which enables victims of paralysis to have implants which help them regain some mobility of other wise unusable limbs.
They have a very interesting project going on pursuing a cockroach design. Cockroaches have the fastest motor capability in the world. On the biology side of the research the cockroach's nerve impulses are being studied by cutting away the exoskeleton and attaching sensors to varios muscles involved with locomotion. The Computer Science and robotics end then studies this data to implement the cockroach's locomotion capability on the robot.
First is the end of the cold war, which happened as I was exiting high school and heading to college. I was all geared up for a career as an engineer working for a defense contractor, until a year after the wall fell and I figured out that the number of entry level positions for engineers was following the TP as the toilet's flushed.
Fortunately, I found a great interest in computer science, I mean it was like a calling to me in college. Amazingly, there were an abundance of paid summer jobs for computer people, where there were only a hand full of jobs for engineering types. That further convinced me and shortly there after my major changed to computer science. Point being that things are cyclical, engineering jobs are on the rebound, especially with all the cool technology the military now wants. Soon computer jobs will rebound too.
The second thing that I wanted to mention is that many of us professionals in the IT realm who work for small companies find that after a few years in a job, our salaries are way under the market rate for our skills and experience. When I had been in the business for five years, I was making about $48,000, my entry salary was $28,000. I started looking for a new job and found that many entry level positions were being filled at the $40,000-$45,000 range. I thought that really sucked, since I a lot more experience than those young grads. A big problem that I found in the interview process was that companies looked at my current salary as an indicator for my skills or lack there of. So I found it very difficult to ask for 15% salary increase to bump me up from the bottom to the middle of the income scales for someone at my experience and skill level. That being said, I don't know that I'd be happy joining the work force today with only a $28,000/yr salary, since inflation has affected things over the past 10 years, however, I certainly don't like the income scaling effect that I saw a few years ago. In effect, I'm already taking my experience and taking a job that pays less, just by the nature of the fact that the entry level salaries have increased faster than my annual raises.
Pardon me for sounding ignorant, but don't you have a representative government over across the pond?
You should be complaining about the price too!...and even louder than we do. Better yet, you should being doing more than complaining. Go make that parliment you have over there work for you. IT's not easy, but it's worth doing.
There's no reason why the demand should be so high for gasoline that it needs to be taxed to hell and priced at such a crippling level.
First of all, I'm not an SUV owner/driver, but whining about the price of gas has nothing to do with being an SUV owner. I'm not an SUV owner and I whine about the price of gas. I own a fairly fuel efficient Toyota Matrix which gets about 26MPG in the city and a little above 30 on long trips, but I pay more for a 12 gallon tank of gas now than I used to for a 19 gallon tank of gas a few years ago when I owned a Jeep.
Complaining about the price of gas is something we should all do, regardless of what we drive.
I get the feeling this survey attracted types who wanted to show off their earnings, or raises. I mean how can the group of 5-9 years guys get 6.8% average raises, while guys w/ 10-14 years experiene recieved a whopping 22.6% increase, yet their elder 15-19 group also only recieved 6.9% raises. I just cant see how this could happen to the actual group overall.
I agree, the raise percentages are unrealistic. I thought for a bit that perhaps those percentages were percentages of repsondents who actually got raises, instead of the average percent increase. I've been a programmer/sysadmin since the last century (heh really since 1995), and the only time I've gotten a raise over 4% has been when I change companies, and typically I don't switch unless I can get at least a 10% increase.
Aside from that, I'm in the $60K category overall, and was rated in the top 10% of workers here and got a measely 3.1% increase this year. What really pisses me off is that Congress decided to give themselves and the government employees a 4.1% minimum increase, which gets adjusted for locale. That means that the people I work for (NASA civil servants) whom, mostly don't even have degrees, much less skills, will get a larger raise than I do and I'm a top performer on my contract.
Measuring temperature is difficult, since the measurement device will also be generating heat, if it has electronic parts.
It is possible to generate a very accurate temperature reading with out using electronics in the sensor... I did research in college on using sapphire based fiber optic lines and interferometry techniques to measure the variance in signal over the fiber, with the fiber being exposed to variant temperatures. Very cool project.
I don't know if this would be widely accepted in the CIA. As a contractor at NASA who maintains collaborative web tools, like knowledge and document management systems, we have a very hard time getting the user populace to change from the print and file culture, to the save and upload culture.
Ideally, cities should have fibre lines going into homes controlled by a government department, that allows private companies to deliver the Internet and not compete with them.
I don't know about you, but the less government controlled crap that comes into my house the better!
There is a relatively simple way to change this trend in the United States.
First of all, buy American. If you're too cheap to buy a more expensive American made product over a cheaper foreign made product then stop complaining.
American made products are expensive for one reason...American labor is expensive, no matter what the skill level. Most American's believe it is "unfair" and beneath them to work in a sweat shop for a buck an hour.
The entire concept we American's have that sitting at a machine and manufacturing sneakers, clothes, cars, circuit boards or whatever is either beneath us or not worth our time is exactly what causes products made by American companies expensive. The fact that an unskilled laborer can make as much if not more money than a Masters Degreed programmer tells the tale. They're paying that unskilled person my wage because 1. he demands it, and 2. they can afford to.
Enter the foreign made competitive product selling for half the cost of the American made product. As the foreign made product gains market share the American company feels it can no longer compete, and therefore must find a way to become competitive and thus ships jobs off shore.
Solution! Buy American, and stop bitching that the product is too expensive.
Actually, Yahoo! isn't buying the search engine which was formerly known as Ultraseek. The CNET article references the fact that Verity just bought Inktomi's Business Search Software, and that the remaining Business Unit of Inktomi focused around improving it's consumer business. Which Yahoo! is probably much more interested in than the Corporate Search Engine business.
Just like the lunar landings. We all know that Nasa is just bouncing a signal from a pioneer 10 like space vehicle here on the ground off a relay station they into an orbit twice the distance from the sun to Pluto!
The Specs say built in 10/100baseT ethernet...why not wireless built in. Seems pretty useless to have such a portable device that need a wired network connection.
Re:Stop printing out stupid certificates...
on
Redirecting NASA
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· Score: 1
As a NASA contractor, I'm often reminded of the Dr. Demento Star Trek spoof Star Drek. With a mission to sell t-shirts, toy phasers, and anything else they can think of.
Slashdot Mirror
Settlers of Catan is a German Board game created by Mayfair Games.
As a point of fact, Settlers of Catan was originally published by Kosmos as Die Siedler von Catan and created by Klaus Teuber. See more information Here. Mayfair Games has republished it (3 editions I believe) in English, here in the USA.
OK, I'll bite. What's a "German-style" game?
Basically, they are not American-style games where the game play follows the roll-the-dice/take-your-turn theme. Very few American style games are interesting to old/young adult audiences. You don't see many gaming groups of 20+ somethings getting together to play Candy Land or Chutes and Ladders.
here here.
My sister in law bought me Isla Bohnita while she was on a trip to Germany a few years ago. Man did it suck.
Anyway, the only expansion for Bohnanza that I've enjoyed is the extra card set to play up to 8 players. It makes for a really long game, but it's cool having so many people to negotiate with if you've got the right crowd.
Perhaps Uwe Rosenberg will keep up his fued with Klaus Teuber. Each time Teuber released a new expansion/version to Settlers, Rosenberg released another card game/expansion to Bohnanza. Bohnanza is much better than settlers IMHO, but then that's because I like Uwe's wit.
Check out Case Western Reserve University's Biorobotics Research.
They have an very interesting program that starts in the biology lab where they're recording the nerve impulse patterns of live cockroaches as the run. This data is then studied by the robotics team in order to develop locomotion routines for the robots.
Additionally, there is research coming out of this project which enables victims of paralysis to have implants which help them regain some mobility of other wise unusable limbs.
Interesting that there was no mention of Case Western Reserve University's robotics program.
They have a very interesting project going on pursuing a cockroach design. Cockroaches have the fastest motor capability in the world. On the biology side of the research the cockroach's nerve impulses are being studied by cutting away the exoskeleton and attaching sensors to varios muscles involved with locomotion. The Computer Science and robotics end then studies this data to implement the cockroach's locomotion capability on the robot.
ain't that the friggin truth.
Now we can all pretend to be satellites on halloween.
There are two things that apply here.
First is the end of the cold war, which happened as I was exiting high school and heading to college. I was all geared up for a career as an engineer working for a defense contractor, until a year after the wall fell and I figured out that the number of entry level positions for engineers was following the TP as the toilet's flushed.
Fortunately, I found a great interest in computer science, I mean it was like a calling to me in college. Amazingly, there were an abundance of paid summer jobs for computer people, where there were only a hand full of jobs for engineering types. That further convinced me and shortly there after my major changed to computer science. Point being that things are cyclical, engineering jobs are on the rebound, especially with all the cool technology the military now wants. Soon computer jobs will rebound too.
The second thing that I wanted to mention is that many of us professionals in the IT realm who work for small companies find that after a few years in a job, our salaries are way under the market rate for our skills and experience. When I had been in the business for five years, I was making about $48,000, my entry salary was $28,000. I started looking for a new job and found that many entry level positions were being filled at the $40,000-$45,000 range. I thought that really sucked, since I a lot more experience than those young grads. A big problem that I found in the interview process was that companies looked at my current salary as an indicator for my skills or lack there of. So I found it very difficult to ask for 15% salary increase to bump me up from the bottom to the middle of the income scales for someone at my experience and skill level. That being said, I don't know that I'd be happy joining the work force today with only a $28,000/yr salary, since inflation has affected things over the past 10 years, however, I certainly don't like the income scaling effect that I saw a few years ago. In effect, I'm already taking my experience and taking a job that pays less, just by the nature of the fact that the entry level salaries have increased faster than my annual raises.
Wow, so I should be able to buy I 1987 Honda Civic for FREE down here int he states huh?
Pardon me for sounding ignorant, but don't you have a representative government over across the pond?
You should be complaining about the price too!...and even louder than we do. Better yet, you should being doing more than complaining. Go make that parliment you have over there work for you. IT's not easy, but it's worth doing.
There's no reason why the demand should be so high for gasoline that it needs to be taxed to hell and priced at such a crippling level.
First of all, I'm not an SUV owner/driver, but whining about the price of gas has nothing to do with being an SUV owner. I'm not an SUV owner and I whine about the price of gas. I own a fairly fuel efficient Toyota Matrix which gets about 26MPG in the city and a little above 30 on long trips, but I pay more for a 12 gallon tank of gas now than I used to for a 19 gallon tank of gas a few years ago when I owned a Jeep.
Complaining about the price of gas is something we should all do, regardless of what we drive.
I get the feeling this survey attracted types who wanted to show off their earnings, or raises. I mean how can the group of 5-9 years guys get 6.8% average raises, while guys w/ 10-14 years experiene recieved a whopping 22.6% increase, yet their elder 15-19 group also only recieved 6.9% raises. I just cant see how this could happen to the actual group overall.
I agree, the raise percentages are unrealistic. I thought for a bit that perhaps those percentages were percentages of repsondents who actually got raises, instead of the average percent increase. I've been a programmer/sysadmin since the last century (heh really since 1995), and the only time I've gotten a raise over 4% has been when I change companies, and typically I don't switch unless I can get at least a 10% increase.
Aside from that, I'm in the $60K category overall, and was rated in the top 10% of workers here and got a measely 3.1% increase this year. What really pisses me off is that Congress decided to give themselves and the government employees a 4.1% minimum increase, which gets adjusted for locale. That means that the people I work for (NASA civil servants) whom, mostly don't even have degrees, much less skills, will get a larger raise than I do and I'm a top performer on my contract.
Measuring temperature is difficult, since the measurement device will also be generating heat, if it has electronic parts.
It is possible to generate a very accurate temperature reading with out using electronics in the sensor... I did research in college on using sapphire based fiber optic lines and interferometry techniques to measure the variance in signal over the fiber, with the fiber being exposed to variant temperatures. Very cool project.
Should read...
"truly random numbers in random formats"
I don't know if this would be widely accepted in the CIA. As a contractor at NASA who maintains collaborative web tools, like knowledge and document management systems, we have a very hard time getting the user populace to change from the print and file culture, to the save and upload culture.
Ideally, cities should have fibre lines going into homes controlled by a government department, that allows private companies to deliver the Internet and not compete with them.
I don't know about you, but the less government controlled crap that comes into my house the better!
There is a relatively simple way to change this trend in the United States.
First of all, buy American. If you're too cheap to buy a more expensive American made product over a cheaper foreign made product then stop complaining.
American made products are expensive for one reason...American labor is expensive, no matter what the skill level. Most American's believe it is "unfair" and beneath them to work in a sweat shop for a buck an hour.
The entire concept we American's have that sitting at a machine and manufacturing sneakers, clothes, cars, circuit boards or whatever is either beneath us or not worth our time is exactly what causes products made by American companies expensive. The fact that an unskilled laborer can make as much if not more money than a Masters Degreed programmer tells the tale. They're paying that unskilled person my wage because 1. he demands it, and 2. they can afford to.
Enter the foreign made competitive product selling for half the cost of the American made product. As the foreign made product gains market share the American company feels it can no longer compete, and therefore must find a way to become competitive and thus ships jobs off shore.
Solution! Buy American, and stop bitching that the product is too expensive.
I was somewhat surprised not to see this article posted to /. regarding the court's decision against Mircosoft not including Java in Windows XP.
Flood them with Feedback...
The site wasn't mentioned in the article but you can find PCI-SIG here.
Or just directly hit up their feedback form.
Actually, Yahoo! isn't buying the search engine which was formerly known as Ultraseek. The CNET article references the fact that Verity just bought Inktomi's Business Search Software, and that the remaining Business Unit of Inktomi focused around improving it's consumer business. Which Yahoo! is probably much more interested in than the Corporate Search Engine business.
Just like the lunar landings. We all know that Nasa is just bouncing a signal from a pioneer 10 like space vehicle here on the ground off a relay station they into an orbit twice the distance from the sun to Pluto!
I especially like the Alternate Styles allowing for smaller/larger fonts!
The Specs say built in 10/100baseT ethernet...why not wireless built in. Seems pretty useless to have such a portable device that need a wired network connection.
As a NASA contractor, I'm often reminded of the Dr. Demento Star Trek spoof Star Drek. With a mission to sell t-shirts, toy phasers, and anything else they can think of.