I have been designing a program to play DnD over the internet lately. One with battlemaps, chats, dicerollers, stuff like that. I am aware of OpenRPG and similar products but I'm not completely happy with them (the UI, the functionality, a lot of things) so I've decided to write my own one. I think that writing a wave plugin for the missing stuff instead might be worth giving some thought.
I like gametable myself (http://gametable.galactanet.com/), but I think there is a need for a better online tabletop RPG simulator.
>>I did not, all I said was that mining and refining of the fuel produces CO2 as well as building the plants. Anyone who ignores those ignores science.
And saying that we shouldn't switch to nuclear, when the CO2 savings we're taking about would be over 90%, means you essentially don't understand math. Or concepts like opportunity cost. Or comparative issues, like solar, wind, hybrid cars, etc., all requiring substantial amounts of CO2 to switch to.
It's like complaining that when you give a guy a dime and get back a dollar, that it cost you a dime.
>>Uh huh. Is that REALLY what you think I am suggesting?
Uh, after ranting a bit about the evil-ness of banks, bankers, and the fractional reserve system, you said: "If Bruce Wayne was such a genius, he would have taken out the elites instead of beating up on the poor and neglected."
Unless you mean that elite only corresponds to the evil people that make lots of money instead of the good people that make lots of money, then yeah, you were advocating Batman essentially destroying society.
>>If Bruce Wayne was such a genius, he would have taken out the elites instead of beating up on the poor and neglected, which setting aside the Joker, is exactly what he does. I put it down not to his being evil, but to his writers being naive child-men.
Yes, because society would be SO much better if anyone who became successful would get assassinated by Batman.
One problem killing the iPhone, is that most of the iPhone's weaknesses are one policy change away from disappearing.
Enough people want background apps? Well there they are. Enough people want customizable lock screens? Alright, that's easy enough. Enough people want shared file storage? There, done. Enough people want post-hoc approval of apps, like Android? No problem, it'll save Apple time and money to boot. Enough people want unsigned apps distributed outside the app store? Ok, here you go. Enough people want Flash, or other browser plugins? Fine, Adobe has been clamoring to put Flash on iPhone since it's inception. Enough people want root access? Fine, administration is their problem.
All of these are addressed by jailbreaking an iPhone, and yet Apple has been doing it's damnedest to shut down jailbreaking. Even my local AT&T store's techs will show you how to jailbreak a phone, because they know there's a huge market demand for it, and it helps them sell more phones.
>>Really? The Razr is commonly touted as Motorola's last great success. I knew several people who bought, and were happy with, the Razr, including my wife.
I had one. Returned it. I prefer my phones to not have sharp corners.
Also, the data synching feature was broken at launch. Dunno if they ever fixed it.
>>Oh, and nuclear power does produce CO2. Producing the fuel creates CO2, as does building the plants.
It's because of math-phobes like you, we still have coal power in this country.
By this argument, we shouldn't buy hybrids or eat locally grown food, or even switch to solar (since solar panels actually require a fair amount of CO2 expenditure to create, at least according to the people at Real Climate) since they all have CO2 costs. Coal burning power plants produce 40% of America's CO2 production. If nuclear fuel production even exceeds 1% of our current CO2 production, I'll eat my shoes.
The subsidies argument also doesn't hold any water (since nuclear power is also taxed to pay for shutting them down as well). If you do an analysis of the costs of nuclear in France, you'll see it makes both economic and environmental sense. Anyone who believes otherwise is essentially ignorant.
>>I had to pay $80 for map and interface upgrades to my Magellan Roadmate 2200T, and while it was worth it,
I don't think $80 for a map update is really worth it, especially when the cost of a GPS unit is usually in the $200-$300 range. On my Nuvi, it cost $250 for the unit, but map updates cost $80 for one, or $120 for a lifetime subscription, which is akin to highway robbery. Replacing the car charger is $120 as well. Lifetime traffic? That's down to around $40 now, but when it came out it was an annual fee.
It's case in point why closed systems are bad. Or not that they're "bad", per se, but bad in that the companies often try to block people from hacking their own devices (first sale doctrine, what?) in order to enforce their ridiculous fee structure on the populace.
>>Not true in this book: if anything, it feels like falling down a water slide.
That's Sanderson's trademark style. In Mistborn, you think he's setting everything up for a trilogy. Then events start flying by faster and faster, and by the end of it it seems like he's packed an entire trilogy into the first novel.
I think that's why Harriet picked him to finish the WoT series... if anyone can do it, he can.
Maybe I'll ask Harriet and Brandon when they come to Half-Moon Bay on the 20th. I get to meet them as a Storm Leader, woot!
>>Are there more consumers of oil now then ever in history? What is the rate of oil consumption? Is the rate increasing or decreasing?
As of right now, and for the last couple decades, proven reserves have risen faster than consumption.
>>Because nuclear is unsafe and produces waste that is also dangerous.
Bullshit. Pure and simple.
>>This source of energy is also non-renewable.
Solar is non-renewable as well by the same standard. The sun will burn out eventually, will it not? If we have enough uranium for the next 200 years, which we do, it's sort of stupid to worry about it right now.
>>Do you know what the concept of peak oil is? Why do you think that earth has 200 years left of oil for us to consume?
Are there 1) More proven oil reserves or 2) Less proven oil reserves today than there was a year ago?
>>Why hope for "alternatives" when we already have viable alternatives today. Wind, Solar, Geothermal, tidal, and wave.
If by viable you mean three times as expensive (and in the case of solar, might be worse for global warming), then sure. I note you don't mention nuclear, which is the only power source that doesn't produce CO2 and costs the same as coal.
>>It does not matter if you like suburbia or not, the reality is this way of life is not sustainable and will eventually end with the decline of oil production.
Doubtful. Non-Sustainability is predicated on 1) Oil vanishing completely and 2) Alternatives not being developed in the 200 years we have before oil runs out.
>>Using hydroponics locally is far more sustainable then trucking in non-editable "corn" from the midwest to be processed and integrated in much of our food supply.
Studies have shown that local farms are actually worse for the enviroment than the megafarms, as they're a lot less efficient. Sure, we could probably put hydroponics on the tops of skyscrapers and such, but the free market will basically handle all of that for us, without needing to impose a dictatorship on our citizens to plan for a future that will never arrive.
We know that other tasks involving acquired skills are influenced by natural ability. Intelligence is partly inherited, athletic ability is partly inherited, etc. It should come as no surprise that a task requiring some cognitive skill (paying attention to the right things) and physical skill (good steering, etc) is also influenced by genetics.
Good thing there's no cultural correlation with genetic similarities, eh?
There are huge cultural differences in how people drive. In Italy, people seem to have a passing regard for things like lane markings, etc., when on the interstate. I loved watching drivers just meandering from one lane to another, or just driving stradding two lanes at once. Very different from how, say, people tend to drive in Germany. But if you were to do a genetic similarities analysis on these different populations, you'd probably get all sorts of false positives.
Honestly, genetic correlation tests like these are the modern day equivalent of phrenology.
>>The road system in the USA is a complete waste of money and resources.
Yes, we need to replace our roads with mass transit solutions, like buses... oh, shit.
Or systems like BART that cost a billion dollars per quarter mile! Oh, wait, we're talking about wastes of money...
Perhaps we could take an approach like what LA did, which was back in the 1970s to defund development on interstates and pour the money into mass transit solutions like light rail and buses. And now LA has the best traffic in the nation! Look at the difference between LA (which defunded road development) and Orange County, which has been conducting extensive interstate development to local roads. Wait, what? LA traffic is a horrible snarl that only unclogs when you get to the border with Orange County? Shit.
I guess all our hippie ideas are wrong, aren't they?
>>The FDA has had a table of valid genetic biomarkers for medications for several years now.
Yeah, exactly, this isn't really new news. When my wife started pharmacy school at UCSF in 2004, she took a class on pharmacogenetics, the study of how your genes affects how you interact with the drugs. CYP4, as TFA mentions, is one of the most important liver enzymes, but there's a lot of differences in populations due to genetics.
Alcohol Dehydrogenase and another liver enzyme (that I can't recall off the top of my head) are the two primary ways alcohol gets broken down in your system. There's very major differences between races if they have the gene that codes for it. Irish and German populations have close to 100%, whereas in countries like China and Japan the rates are much lower, something like 40% and 20%, respectively. I recall people studying that back in 1995, when I was an undergraduate at UCSD - they'd put fliers up around the campus saying, "If you're asian, and you're over 21, we'll pay you to come to our lab and drink free beers." Damn racists.
A lot of people claim that human races don't exist, saying that we're all genetically indistinguishable. While the idea is a noble one, it is not actually true, and would actually harm valid research and medical outcomes.
>>If a place smells like a moose just died in it, especially if its also visibly dirty, then I just sort of get the impression that it doesn't actually matter what I do in there.
Personally, I just want to kick the shit out of anyone who sits next to me with a horrible case of BO.
You can look at your own charts. There's no dispute over the numbers, only what they mean. You think the depression of '37 was caused by him abandoning his socialist ways (whatever that means), I say because he pulled massive amounts of money out of the system via the means I've already listed. People like Greenspan and Bernanke have both stated that the monetarist view of the depression is the right one.
FDR's socialist experiments like the FSA, by the way, were massive failures, with his attempts at doing communist-inspired collectivization of farms having about the same effect in America as it did in the Ukraine during the same time period. You know, the one that resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians (leading to signs being posted by the Stalinists saying that eating other human beings was strictly against the law). Likewise, his interference in the markets had the same effect on the economy has Hugo Chavez is having today - Hayek would be rolling around in his grave, except he's been proven right. Price and Wage Controls are recipes for disaster.
>>FDR takes office. Things get much better, with GDP rising faster than it had pre-depression. >>Do you have access to alternate histories, perhaps some form of time travel?
Unemployment stays incredibly high through the 1940s. The GDP never exceeds even what it was in 1929 until 1940. "Rising faster" is like one of those Newsweek articles saying that "parasailing is the fastest growing sport in America!" because their numbers rose from 1,000 to 2,000 in a year. It's a sort of natural experiment. By comparing what happened during the depression compared with other periods of low money supply, we can see that the depression was a lot more painful and a lot more prolonged than other ones. Why? We can argue that. But I'd point to the guy in charge of intervening in the economy.
Slashdot Mirror
I like gametable myself (http://gametable.galactanet.com/), but I think there is a need for a better online tabletop RPG simulator.
>>They really need to kick the military off their prime waterfront real estate.
Uh, it has been closed for over a decade now.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treasure_Island_(California)
>>I did not, all I said was that mining and refining of the fuel produces CO2 as well as building the plants. Anyone who ignores those ignores science.
And saying that we shouldn't switch to nuclear, when the CO2 savings we're taking about would be over 90%, means you essentially don't understand math. Or concepts like opportunity cost. Or comparative issues, like solar, wind, hybrid cars, etc., all requiring substantial amounts of CO2 to switch to.
It's like complaining that when you give a guy a dime and get back a dollar, that it cost you a dime.
>>Uh huh. Is that REALLY what you think I am suggesting?
Uh, after ranting a bit about the evil-ness of banks, bankers, and the fractional reserve system, you said: "If Bruce Wayne was such a genius, he would have taken out the elites instead of beating up on the poor and neglected."
Unless you mean that elite only corresponds to the evil people that make lots of money instead of the good people that make lots of money, then yeah, you were advocating Batman essentially destroying society.
>>If Bruce Wayne was such a genius, he would have taken out the elites instead of beating up on the poor and neglected, which setting aside the Joker, is exactly what he does. I put it down not to his being evil, but to his writers being naive child-men.
Yes, because society would be SO much better if anyone who became successful would get assassinated by Batman.
All of these are addressed by jailbreaking an iPhone, and yet Apple has been doing it's damnedest to shut down jailbreaking. Even my local AT&T store's techs will show you how to jailbreak a phone, because they know there's a huge market demand for it, and it helps them sell more phones.
>>You seriously expected a phone called a Razr and in the commercial had it falling and sticking into a piece of metal to NOT have sharp corners?
Yeah, it was my bad.
I should have known better than to eat the jagged metal Krusty-O's as well. Mea Culpa.
>>Math-phobes like me?
If you put nuclear power in the same CO2 categories as coal-burning plants, you obviously don't understand the concept of orders of magnitude.
Nuclear power is safe, and the only cheap alternative to coal.
>>Really? The Razr is commonly touted as Motorola's last great success. I knew several people who bought, and were happy with, the Razr, including my wife.
I had one. Returned it. I prefer my phones to not have sharp corners.
Also, the data synching feature was broken at launch. Dunno if they ever fixed it.
>>It's free.... with a data plan or cell phone plan.
Versus $8/day even with a cell or data plan, which is what they charge on my current phone.
>>Oh, and nuclear power does produce CO2. Producing the fuel creates CO2, as does building the plants.
It's because of math-phobes like you, we still have coal power in this country.
By this argument, we shouldn't buy hybrids or eat locally grown food, or even switch to solar (since solar panels actually require a fair amount of CO2 expenditure to create, at least according to the people at Real Climate) since they all have CO2 costs. Coal burning power plants produce 40% of America's CO2 production. If nuclear fuel production even exceeds 1% of our current CO2 production, I'll eat my shoes.
The subsidies argument also doesn't hold any water (since nuclear power is also taxed to pay for shutting them down as well). If you do an analysis of the costs of nuclear in France, you'll see it makes both economic and environmental sense. Anyone who believes otherwise is essentially ignorant.
>>I'm not going to pay a monthly fee to use something.
It's free.
>>AT&T is choking hard with a ton of people browsing the web
It's Verizon.
(Which makes statement #1 so amazing to actually be true. They are firmly within the anal-violation school of retail pricing.)
>>I had to pay $80 for map and interface upgrades to my Magellan Roadmate 2200T, and while it was worth it,
I don't think $80 for a map update is really worth it, especially when the cost of a GPS unit is usually in the $200-$300 range. On my Nuvi, it cost $250 for the unit, but map updates cost $80 for one, or $120 for a lifetime subscription, which is akin to highway robbery. Replacing the car charger is $120 as well. Lifetime traffic? That's down to around $40 now, but when it came out it was an annual fee.
It's case in point why closed systems are bad. Or not that they're "bad", per se, but bad in that the companies often try to block people from hacking their own devices (first sale doctrine, what?) in order to enforce their ridiculous fee structure on the populace.
>>Not true in this book: if anything, it feels like falling down a water slide.
That's Sanderson's trademark style. In Mistborn, you think he's setting everything up for a trilogy. Then events start flying by faster and faster, and by the end of it it seems like he's packed an entire trilogy into the first novel.
I think that's why Harriet picked him to finish the WoT series... if anyone can do it, he can.
Maybe I'll ask Harriet and Brandon when they come to Half-Moon Bay on the 20th. I get to meet them as a Storm Leader, woot!
FYI: They're on a book tour right now. http://www.dragonmount.com/News/?p=764
>>Are there more consumers of oil now then ever in history? What is the rate of oil consumption? Is the rate increasing or decreasing?
As of right now, and for the last couple decades, proven reserves have risen faster than consumption.
>>Because nuclear is unsafe and produces waste that is also dangerous.
Bullshit. Pure and simple.
>>This source of energy is also non-renewable.
Solar is non-renewable as well by the same standard. The sun will burn out eventually, will it not? If we have enough uranium for the next 200 years, which we do, it's sort of stupid to worry about it right now.
Sorry, but I have prior art on a truly immortal and bug-free program:
10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD"
20 GOTO 10
Let me know who I should contact so MIT can send the royalty checks on my software patent to me.
>>Do you know what the concept of peak oil is? Why do you think that earth has 200 years left of oil for us to consume?
Are there 1) More proven oil reserves or 2) Less proven oil reserves today than there was a year ago?
>>Why hope for "alternatives" when we already have viable alternatives today. Wind, Solar, Geothermal, tidal, and wave.
If by viable you mean three times as expensive (and in the case of solar, might be worse for global warming), then sure. I note you don't mention nuclear, which is the only power source that doesn't produce CO2 and costs the same as coal.
>>It does not matter if you like suburbia or not, the reality is this way of life is not sustainable and will eventually end with the decline of oil production.
Doubtful. Non-Sustainability is predicated on 1) Oil vanishing completely and 2) Alternatives not being developed in the 200 years we have before oil runs out.
>>Using hydroponics locally is far more sustainable then trucking in non-editable "corn" from the midwest to be processed and integrated in much of our food supply.
Studies have shown that local farms are actually worse for the enviroment than the megafarms, as they're a lot less efficient. Sure, we could probably put hydroponics on the tops of skyscrapers and such, but the free market will basically handle all of that for us, without needing to impose a dictatorship on our citizens to plan for a future that will never arrive.
Good thing there's no cultural correlation with genetic similarities, eh?
There are huge cultural differences in how people drive. In Italy, people seem to have a passing regard for things like lane markings, etc., when on the interstate. I loved watching drivers just meandering from one lane to another, or just driving stradding two lanes at once. Very different from how, say, people tend to drive in Germany. But if you were to do a genetic similarities analysis on these different populations, you'd probably get all sorts of false positives.
Honestly, genetic correlation tests like these are the modern day equivalent of phrenology.
>>The road system in the USA is a complete waste of money and resources.
Yes, we need to replace our roads with mass transit solutions, like buses... oh, shit.
Or systems like BART that cost a billion dollars per quarter mile! Oh, wait, we're talking about wastes of money...
Perhaps we could take an approach like what LA did, which was back in the 1970s to defund development on interstates and pour the money into mass transit solutions like light rail and buses. And now LA has the best traffic in the nation! Look at the difference between LA (which defunded road development) and Orange County, which has been conducting extensive interstate development to local roads. Wait, what? LA traffic is a horrible snarl that only unclogs when you get to the border with Orange County? Shit.
I guess all our hippie ideas are wrong, aren't they?
Fuck.
>>Soviets couldn't pre-emptively blow up missiles that were always on the move and hard to locate.
"Always on the move" is a bit overly optimistic, wouldn't you say?
>>Hasn't that DARPA challenge proven it's feasable?
I have a lot of friends that worked on the grand challenge, and no, it's not ready for primetime.
I live right next to where they do autonomous driving testing on the I-15, and I don't think we'll see this for a long time yet.
Mainly though, is the liability issue holding this back.
>>The FDA has had a table of valid genetic biomarkers for medications for several years now.
Yeah, exactly, this isn't really new news. When my wife started pharmacy school at UCSF in 2004, she took a class on pharmacogenetics, the study of how your genes affects how you interact with the drugs. CYP4, as TFA mentions, is one of the most important liver enzymes, but there's a lot of differences in populations due to genetics.
Alcohol Dehydrogenase and another liver enzyme (that I can't recall off the top of my head) are the two primary ways alcohol gets broken down in your system. There's very major differences between races if they have the gene that codes for it. Irish and German populations have close to 100%, whereas in countries like China and Japan the rates are much lower, something like 40% and 20%, respectively. I recall people studying that back in 1995, when I was an undergraduate at UCSD - they'd put fliers up around the campus saying, "If you're asian, and you're over 21, we'll pay you to come to our lab and drink free beers." Damn racists.
A lot of people claim that human races don't exist, saying that we're all genetically indistinguishable. While the idea is a noble one, it is not actually true, and would actually harm valid research and medical outcomes.
>>If a place smells like a moose just died in it, especially if its also visibly dirty, then I just sort of get the impression that it doesn't actually matter what I do in there.
Personally, I just want to kick the shit out of anyone who sits next to me with a horrible case of BO.
It's true - bad smells do cause bad thoughts.
>>I knew you wouldn't cite any facts.
You can look at your own charts. There's no dispute over the numbers, only what they mean. You think the depression of '37 was caused by him abandoning his socialist ways (whatever that means), I say because he pulled massive amounts of money out of the system via the means I've already listed. People like Greenspan and Bernanke have both stated that the monetarist view of the depression is the right one.
FDR's socialist experiments like the FSA, by the way, were massive failures, with his attempts at doing communist-inspired collectivization of farms having about the same effect in America as it did in the Ukraine during the same time period. You know, the one that resulted in the deaths of millions of Ukrainians (leading to signs being posted by the Stalinists saying that eating other human beings was strictly against the law). Likewise, his interference in the markets had the same effect on the economy has Hugo Chavez is having today - Hayek would be rolling around in his grave, except he's been proven right. Price and Wage Controls are recipes for disaster.
>>FDR takes office. Things get much better, with GDP rising faster than it had pre-depression.
>>Do you have access to alternate histories, perhaps some form of time travel?
Unemployment stays incredibly high through the 1940s. The GDP never exceeds even what it was in 1929 until 1940. "Rising faster" is like one of those Newsweek articles saying that "parasailing is the fastest growing sport in America!" because their numbers rose from 1,000 to 2,000 in a year. It's a sort of natural experiment. By comparing what happened during the depression compared with other periods of low money supply, we can see that the depression was a lot more painful and a lot more prolonged than other ones. Why? We can argue that. But I'd point to the guy in charge of intervening in the economy.