>>If you lived in that town you would see the downside. Since they are so small sometimes they have to rely on tickets as a major source of revenue.
That's a travesty, pure and simple. There should never be a major economic reason to issue tickets - it makes a mockery of the very concept of justice.
>>All US banks are very happy to offer many years worth of transaction history to any Federal agency that desires this information. Too bad they won't do the same for their putative "customers".
Even horrible, horrible US Bank, who has to pull this data using a DOS prompt connection to their ancient mainframe, will make the data available to you (for a fee).
Wells Fargo has all the data you want or need (CSV format, or integrated downloads right inside of Quickbooks for auto-reconciliation, which is NICE), which goes back through the end of the last calendar year for all of your accounts. You can also set up guest access on a per-account basis, so my accountant can just grab my business transactions and not my personal ones.
>>I don't think he understands that civilians enlisting for those positions were techies before they joined the military. Just because I can type like the wind and work my way around a linux distro doesn't mean I can't shoot a M16A2 or M4
And vice versa, not all "real soldiers" are idiot jarheads. While there's a lot of it, with the time I spent in and around the air force, the officers (almost) always impressed me with their professionalism and commitment to learning. The best leaders know enough about a field to get by, and rely on their underling's experience for the rest. A completely clueless geek, TFA's right, might miss some of the common sense things that a professional solider would pick up on, but like you say, I don't think there's really a black and white distinction between nerds and soldiers.
He also bashes on things he doesn't get. "Social policies have a minor impact on the game"? Nothing could be further from the truth - 50% costs for settlers, free research from city-states, double XP for troops, +1 move and sight for all naval troops, etc., all make a huge impact on the game.
What he probably missed (since he was complaining about how slow you get them), and I missed the first time too, is that the cost for each social policy goes up 30% per city you found. So if you're rapidly expanding, you'll go from 20 turns per social policy (which is about standard) to 90 or even 100. But then again, you can get a social policy that doubles your culture output, so you can mitigate this somewhat.
>>To improve realism, it would be good if they added a raft-with-sail (likely how early humans reached Australia, now believed to have been 70,000 years ago - well beyond the timeframe of Civilization of any edition).
Well, to be fair, they did implement something very close to this. You start off with naval transports that look like Noah's Ark, and then as you tech up, occasional techs will give +1 speed to your transports, and upgrade the graphics as well, so by the time WWII rolls along, you have a pretty decent speed with your D-Day amphibious craft.
I'm enjoying it. Playing it on normal difficulty (prince), and I've made it to 1500AD without going to war with anyone. No real pressure to, either. Peace has a lot of benefits - earn gold, bribe city states, and they supply you with lots of resources. If you start blowing up city states, though, they get annoyed at you, and the present parade ends. They also give you lots of quests to earn reputation with them as well.
Culture is now like science - earn a certain amount, and you get a culture tech. (Remember fascism and the like? That's how you get them now. I love how it's implemented.) Instead of culture pushing boundaries out in all directions all at once, it's broken down to just one hex at a time of expansion, but a lot more often. Another good change.
Money can be used to buy units right off the bat, which means that gold is a lot more useful in Civ V than in previous versions (when you'd have thousands sitting around without much to do for them.)
Naval adventures are a lot better, with an early-ish tech allowing land units to build their own transports. They can't defend themselves, but it eliminates a lot of the annoyance of building transports and microing units on and off of them.
Diplomacy seems kind of limited. I miss the old diplomacy screen that shows all the plusses and minuses enemies have toward you. I think there's something missing here.
Overall, a very good game. It's nice to see that they didn't make another shit game like their latest Colonization attempt.
At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science.
Waiting for Superman makes one point clear - American kids are not lacking on confidence. So perhaps focusing more on building up their self-esteem, at the cost of a more rigorous education in math, science, and ELA, is not really the right way to go.
Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster, and this is from a kid that spent a large chunk of his childhood reading everything that interested him in the library. You need a structured learning enviroment, and kids need to be able to prove they've learned something at a certain level.
Does this mean the current system of standardized testing is ideal? Certainly not. Do grades always make sense? Especially in classes like Journalism or Art, which mainly grade merely on attendance, instead of quality? - no. But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills.
>>I would really love to fly on an aircraft that was designed like this.
Ditto. There are times, like when we're flying near lightning storms, that I'd love to be able to see more of the outside.
While the plane was bouncing around due to the turbulence, we were navigating through canyons of clouds in the air that were lit from within by lightning. Amazingly beautiful. I'd have loved for the whole fuselage to have been clear during that flight.
>>Why not admit that the bible, the holy foreskin, virgin birth, etc etc. are not metaphors, just collaborative works of fiction that evolved over time, but not fast enough to keep up with humanity extracting itself from the bronze age.
I'm pretty sure that the Bible is not a metaphor, and that foreskin is not a collective work of fiction.
You might want to rephrase what you're trying to say.
>>You have to remember why Christians get baptized in the first place: to remove original sin
If you consider Original Sin to be a nature that is anything less than perfect (which is what it more or less means these days), it makes sense. Redemption for your fuckups.
>>Or is he thinking that Adam and Eve were the original ancestors of all intelligent beings
Doubtful. Back in the middle ages, the question arose if elves and giants could be baptized. They'd been sending missionaries out to the northern reaches of Europe, where everyone knew giants and elves lived. So the pope considered it, and said, sure. They could be baptized, too, if they wanted it.
It's about an atheist curator of a natural history museum when an alien spaceship lands nearby.
They get into a long conversation, and the aliens are completely befuddled why he doesn't believe in God. If you look at all the cosmological constants, they say, it seems pretty clear the universe was engineered to support life.
Atheist: "But if there were multiple universes, we'd naturally be in one that can support life."
Aliens (dismissively): "Oh, there's no multiple universes."
I bought the Fallout games from them, real sad that they're gone now (or at least, appear to be gone).
The value they added wasn't just removing DRM, but in also making the old games compatible with new operating systems. It's a pain in the ass for me to get some of my older games to work, and I'm more than willing to pay $5 to let someone else do it for me.
Both the summary and the article go to great lengths to make a vague connection between rising sea levels and cutting off fishing. It's a mystery to me (and apparently most of slashdot) how they're connected, and neither the article or summary say what the connection is, but it's definitely implied.
>>Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games.
As a kid, I never found it very hard just to program in hypercard. Why did they need to add an additional layer of abstraction on top of it? It was never hard to use.
I've been playing around with Google App Inventor. It seems like a suitable tool to teach kids the fundamentals of modern programming (get/set methods, callbacks, etc.) with a pretty easy UI on top of it. I just don't think it's powerful enough to make real apps. Can you do checkers in it? I'm not sure.
BTW, if you pick up this week's edition of Time, it has a good series of articles about the problems facing education, and goes right along with what I was talking about in regards to needing evaluation in order to really tell which ideas work in the classroom. It also goes into the issues of teachers unions harming education, which is another pet peeve of mine.
Kind of reminds me of what photonic computing can do. Because photonic interference takes place more or less for free, if you can arrange your problem in a clever way, you can get the photons to do you work for you.
>>I'm left handed and I can say without a doubt, anyone who puts the mouse on the left hand side of the keyboard is stupid. I think this is probably the same.
Ditto. I'm left handed and I've learned to use a mouse with my right hand, right-handed scissors, throwing right-handed, etc. Confuses people when I take a southpaw stance when fighting, or when they see me writing left handed for the first time.
In 1997 we got a 30/3 cable modem service, shared with the neighborhood. Since we were the only people on it, we had a 30/3 connection for $60/month. Now I get a dedicated 24/2 connection from U-verse for the same price. I guess it's better now?
Oligopolys don't have the same sort of competition that drives down prices. Even if they don't fix prices, they don't have an incentive to get into a bidding war. For this reason, the price of cell phones is high, and has remained high. Maybe the Walmart thing, and further work by Cricket or Metro PCS will eventually push prices down.
This is really funny because according the attorney present when I closed on my house, they only way to close was in person. The former owner had to drive down from Maine to sell the house. Even then, it almost didn't happen as her husband was overseas (he was deployed with the National Guard) and when he deployed the military attorney that helped him write the legal papers giving his wife full power over their assets didn't have him explicitly write that she could sell the house as required. Since they were about to be foreclosed on, the attorney let it slide, but still I can't believe you could loose a house simply due to some e-mails.
It could work differently in different states. In other states they require attorneys to handle real estate transactions. Here in California, it's all done by licensed real estate agents / brokers.
We bought our house without ever meeting the seller. Which is a good thing, because by all accounts she was a screaming bitch.
Do you own land? I do. I have multiple pieces of land in three states. I have no title to anything. I have document showing the sale from the previous owner to me and a document from a title insurance company. That should be sufficient. There isn't a paper title like a car. It's not like the land moves. The titles are kept by the state. The papers indicating my ownership are kept in my home and not in a safe of any kind. If someone wished, they could get them. But, under US law, this type of fraud would leave the buyers with nothing and I'd still be the undisputed owner. If I wasn't the one to sign that I sold it, it wasn't sold. Period. The rules are evidently different in Australia, though.
I have a copy of the title that the state keeps on file for my house. That's not my point. There's (supposed to be) layers of security in place to prevent exactly this kind of stuff from happening. In particular, if you're selling a property and you can't come in person to sign for it, you need to visit a notary near you who is supposed to verify your identify and notarize the documents. An escrow company is only supposed to close after all forms have been signed and notarized.
That's why I said that some notary and/or the escrow company ought to get into trouble for this. That's the only value they really provide for the rather exorbitant amounts of money they charge.
Slashdot Mirror
>>If you lived in that town you would see the downside. Since they are so small sometimes they have to rely on tickets as a major source of revenue.
That's a travesty, pure and simple. There should never be a major economic reason to issue tickets - it makes a mockery of the very concept of justice.
>>All US banks are very happy to offer many years worth of transaction history to any Federal agency that desires this information. Too bad they won't do the same for their putative "customers".
Even horrible, horrible US Bank, who has to pull this data using a DOS prompt connection to their ancient mainframe, will make the data available to you (for a fee).
Wells Fargo has all the data you want or need (CSV format, or integrated downloads right inside of Quickbooks for auto-reconciliation, which is NICE), which goes back through the end of the last calendar year for all of your accounts. You can also set up guest access on a per-account basis, so my accountant can just grab my business transactions and not my personal ones.
>>I don't think he understands that civilians enlisting for those positions were techies before they joined the military. Just because I can type like the wind and work my way around a linux distro doesn't mean I can't shoot a M16A2 or M4
And vice versa, not all "real soldiers" are idiot jarheads. While there's a lot of it, with the time I spent in and around the air force, the officers (almost) always impressed me with their professionalism and commitment to learning. The best leaders know enough about a field to get by, and rely on their underling's experience for the rest. A completely clueless geek, TFA's right, might miss some of the common sense things that a professional solider would pick up on, but like you say, I don't think there's really a black and white distinction between nerds and soldiers.
The world is not Stargate.
PDANet tethers for free on Droid/ DroidX.
He also bashes on things he doesn't get. "Social policies have a minor impact on the game"? Nothing could be further from the truth - 50% costs for settlers, free research from city-states, double XP for troops, +1 move and sight for all naval troops, etc., all make a huge impact on the game.
What he probably missed (since he was complaining about how slow you get them), and I missed the first time too, is that the cost for each social policy goes up 30% per city you found. So if you're rapidly expanding, you'll go from 20 turns per social policy (which is about standard) to 90 or even 100. But then again, you can get a social policy that doubles your culture output, so you can mitigate this somewhat.
>>To improve realism, it would be good if they added a raft-with-sail (likely how early humans reached Australia, now believed to have been 70,000 years ago - well beyond the timeframe of Civilization of any edition).
Well, to be fair, they did implement something very close to this. You start off with naval transports that look like Noah's Ark, and then as you tech up, occasional techs will give +1 speed to your transports, and upgrade the graphics as well, so by the time WWII rolls along, you have a pretty decent speed with your D-Day amphibious craft.
>>Is it actually any good?
I'm enjoying it. Playing it on normal difficulty (prince), and I've made it to 1500AD without going to war with anyone. No real pressure to, either. Peace has a lot of benefits - earn gold, bribe city states, and they supply you with lots of resources. If you start blowing up city states, though, they get annoyed at you, and the present parade ends. They also give you lots of quests to earn reputation with them as well.
Culture is now like science - earn a certain amount, and you get a culture tech. (Remember fascism and the like? That's how you get them now. I love how it's implemented.) Instead of culture pushing boundaries out in all directions all at once, it's broken down to just one hex at a time of expansion, but a lot more often. Another good change.
Money can be used to buy units right off the bat, which means that gold is a lot more useful in Civ V than in previous versions (when you'd have thousands sitting around without much to do for them.)
Naval adventures are a lot better, with an early-ish tech allowing land units to build their own transports. They can't defend themselves, but it eliminates a lot of the annoyance of building transports and microing units on and off of them.
Diplomacy seems kind of limited. I miss the old diplomacy screen that shows all the plusses and minuses enemies have toward you. I think there's something missing here.
Overall, a very good game. It's nice to see that they didn't make another shit game like their latest Colonization attempt.
At a certain level though, a student has to be able to do arithmetic, be able to read, and write, in order to do anything in our society. If he's going to be an engineer, he needs math (especially algebra) and the fundamentals of science.
Waiting for Superman makes one point clear - American kids are not lacking on confidence. So perhaps focusing more on building up their self-esteem, at the cost of a more rigorous education in math, science, and ELA, is not really the right way to go.
Turning loose a kid in a library is just a recipe for disaster, and this is from a kid that spent a large chunk of his childhood reading everything that interested him in the library. You need a structured learning enviroment, and kids need to be able to prove they've learned something at a certain level.
Does this mean the current system of standardized testing is ideal? Certainly not. Do grades always make sense? Especially in classes like Journalism or Art, which mainly grade merely on attendance, instead of quality? - no. But kids do need, ultimately, to be able to prove they can do certain basic skills.
Been playing it all morning.
Be back later.
>>I would really love to fly on an aircraft that was designed like this.
Ditto. There are times, like when we're flying near lightning storms, that I'd love to be able to see more of the outside.
While the plane was bouncing around due to the turbulence, we were navigating through canyons of clouds in the air that were lit from within by lightning. Amazingly beautiful. I'd have loved for the whole fuselage to have been clear during that flight.
>>Why not admit that the bible, the holy foreskin, virgin birth, etc etc. are not metaphors, just collaborative works of fiction that evolved over time, but not fast enough to keep up with humanity extracting itself from the bronze age.
I'm pretty sure that the Bible is not a metaphor, and that foreskin is not a collective work of fiction.
You might want to rephrase what you're trying to say.
>>You have to remember why Christians get baptized in the first place: to remove original sin
If you consider Original Sin to be a nature that is anything less than perfect (which is what it more or less means these days), it makes sense. Redemption for your fuckups.
>>Or is he thinking that Adam and Eve were the original ancestors of all intelligent beings
Doubtful. Back in the middle ages, the question arose if elves and giants could be baptized. They'd been sending missionaries out to the northern reaches of Europe, where everyone knew giants and elves lived. So the pope considered it, and said, sure. They could be baptized, too, if they wanted it.
So this isn't much of a departure from precedent.
>>Alien: We came to be baptized. Praise Jesus!
You ought to read Sawyer's book, Calculating God.
It's about an atheist curator of a natural history museum when an alien spaceship lands nearby.
They get into a long conversation, and the aliens are completely befuddled why he doesn't believe in God. If you look at all the cosmological constants, they say, it seems pretty clear the universe was engineered to support life.
Atheist: "But if there were multiple universes, we'd naturally be in one that can support life."
Aliens (dismissively): "Oh, there's no multiple universes."
Quite an amusing book to read, actually.
I bought the Fallout games from them, real sad that they're gone now (or at least, appear to be gone).
The value they added wasn't just removing DRM, but in also making the old games compatible with new operating systems. It's a pain in the ass for me to get some of my older games to work, and I'm more than willing to pay $5 to let someone else do it for me.
Perhaps they think the fish will drown?
>>the techc companies will also agree not to lure away government tech workers with promises of higher salaries in the private sector.
As long as the government agrees not to do the same.
Oh, wait! Damn! Collusion!
>>Hypercard adventure game authoring tool I had for Macintosh that lead to some truly dreadful games.
As a kid, I never found it very hard just to program in hypercard. Why did they need to add an additional layer of abstraction on top of it? It was never hard to use.
I've been playing around with Google App Inventor. It seems like a suitable tool to teach kids the fundamentals of modern programming (get/set methods, callbacks, etc.) with a pretty easy UI on top of it. I just don't think it's powerful enough to make real apps. Can you do checkers in it? I'm not sure.
BTW, if you pick up this week's edition of Time, it has a good series of articles about the problems facing education, and goes right along with what I was talking about in regards to needing evaluation in order to really tell which ideas work in the classroom. It also goes into the issues of teachers unions harming education, which is another pet peeve of mine.
Very nice summary, thanks.
Kind of reminds me of what photonic computing can do. Because photonic interference takes place more or less for free, if you can arrange your problem in a clever way, you can get the photons to do you work for you.
The question of nothingness is perhaps the most important question there is.
>>I'm left handed and I can say without a doubt, anyone who puts the mouse on the left hand side of the keyboard is stupid. I think this is probably the same.
Ditto. I'm left handed and I've learned to use a mouse with my right hand, right-handed scissors, throwing right-handed, etc. Confuses people when I take a southpaw stance when fighting, or when they see me writing left handed for the first time.
>>In Los Angeles, CA the DWP is profitable and also was far more reasonable in their rates than say the rapists at Edi$on or PG$E.
The DWP even provides carbonated, yellow water at no extra charge through their pipes. :p
In 1997 we got a 30/3 cable modem service, shared with the neighborhood. Since we were the only people on it, we had a 30/3 connection for $60/month. Now I get a dedicated 24/2 connection from U-verse for the same price. I guess it's better now?
Oligopolys don't have the same sort of competition that drives down prices. Even if they don't fix prices, they don't have an incentive to get into a bidding war. For this reason, the price of cell phones is high, and has remained high. Maybe the Walmart thing, and further work by Cricket or Metro PCS will eventually push prices down.
It could work differently in different states. In other states they require attorneys to handle real estate transactions. Here in California, it's all done by licensed real estate agents / brokers.
We bought our house without ever meeting the seller. Which is a good thing, because by all accounts she was a screaming bitch.
I have a copy of the title that the state keeps on file for my house. That's not my point. There's (supposed to be) layers of security in place to prevent exactly this kind of stuff from happening. In particular, if you're selling a property and you can't come in person to sign for it, you need to visit a notary near you who is supposed to verify your identify and notarize the documents. An escrow company is only supposed to close after all forms have been signed and notarized.
That's why I said that some notary and/or the escrow company ought to get into trouble for this. That's the only value they really provide for the rather exorbitant amounts of money they charge.