>Your recent lull in attacks on scientists prompted me to ignore your accusation that I'm quite simply lying
That's... hilarious, because 1) that hyperlink doesn't have me accuse you of "quite simply lying" anywhere in it (in fact, you are nowhere in the thread), which 2) makes that a lie.
Anyone who cares to see which of us are telling the truth (which is most likely nobody), can go ahead and click on that link and see what I wrote myself.
>I don't think i have have even come close for any CD, i might make it to 20 - 40 for a good album. Think how long 4500 min (100 plays of the album with 3min tracks) is if you believe that is the norm. No average artist will be listened to the required amount to achieve the breakeven price.
Do you use iTunes? You can actually check how many times you've listened to each track, and there's usually an auto playlist set up for you with your 25 most played tracks.
My top track (from the Dubliners) has 135 plays since 10/10/11, and much of my top 25 are from that album. To be fair, I am learning a lot of their songs on my viola, but if we go to the first song I wasn't trying to learn, it still has 96 plays since 2011. My 25th most played song has 58 plays since 6/2/9.
I have some mp3 tracks that I've been listening to since '95. I don't have play statistics for them, but the numbers you're talking about are certainly not out of the ballpark.
Since each iTunes track is one dollar, we can divide a dollar by the number of plays to determine how many cents per play the artist is getting. For the Dubliners album, we're looking at about a penny a play. For, say, the Dethalbum, which has about 20 plays average across the album, this works out to about 5 cents per play.
Overall, her half a cent a play, for people who have never heard of her and maybe don't even like her music, is actually a reasonable rate.
> We just have to spend the money to build superconducting grids, solar towers, and other similar systems. The only reason we're not doing it on a large scale is that the folks designing the hardware haven't gotten the cost down to a point where it is cheaper than burning quarter-billion-year-old dead plants and animals yet.
Right. *Other than technology that doesn't exist yet*, there's no reason we shouldn't be on a solar-based power grid.:p
Gas has 40x the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, and "charges" (from a pump) much, much faster.
There's a reason we still burn dead plants and animals, and it's not because we want to destroy the environment. It's because green technology can't compete with dead plants. (Yet.)
> It is DEA policy to reject anything with less than $50,000 equity
Yeah, they're going after my friend because his land is all paid off. Mortgaged properties can be protected by the bank's legal team, so the US Attorneys avoid trying to seize them.
It's utterly shocking that our country isn't up in arms over this.
Regardless, US Attorney Wagner seems to think that seizing the assets of non-drug-related landowners will be sufficient to scare them all into doing the police work for him.
Yes, US Attorneys are the most powerful, and least controlled, people in our government. Even the president has more checks and balances on his power than what these guys get away with.
A US Attorney is trying to seize the assets of a friend of mine, who is guilty of doing nothing but leasing land to some farmers, that grew pot on it without his knowledge. He's running into debt fighting the case, but the US Attorney is going full bore anyway, since it doesn't cost *him* anything to try to make an example out of someone.
I think we should institute loser-pays in all lawsuits involving US Attorneys. (Unless we have this already? I don't know.) There's a reason why 90%+ of all cases with them are plea bargained out - the US Attorneys have effectively unlimited resources, and can drain you dry fighting them.
>Users don't give a flying shit about "x86" they just give a shit about having good apps to run. iOS and Android already offer that in spades.
Uh, what? Being able to play Crusader Kings 2 on a tablet is a huge selling point.
I just returned yet another Android tablet that broke on me, and so have a bunch of in-store credit burning a hole in my pocket... I'm seriously debating getting the Surface Pro.
I hate Windows 8 with a passion, though, and the touch cover is terrible. So I'll wait to see if I can live with the type cover.
>What OP said. Unless she actually enjoys gaming you will have as much luck getting her into that as she would getting you into crocheting.
Not true. My friend is like the horse whisperer, but for women.
His wife wasn't interested in gaming, so he started her with something simple and addictive (Super Puzzle Fighter) and then expanded her horizons from there.
She wasn't interested in pen and paper roleplaying games, so he got her interested in the story of the campaign, and costuming (it was a Victorian D&D campaign, the Masque of the Red Death), and expanded it from there.
She wasn't interested in having kids. So he bought her a couple cats, and expanded into humans from there. They now have two kids.
And to answer your objection, no, she's still not a gamer by any sense of the word. But she'll play with him occasionally and have a good time.
>BTW, the Soviets conducted experiments where they tried to breed female volunteers with apes, so I doubt there'll be much trouble with finding volunteers for this one.
>Make an example out of the prosecutors who turn minor complaints or annoyances into massive criminal cases by firing them and ruining their careers. When they whine, "But this is ridiculous and completely out of proportion with what we did! We were just doing what the system is set up for us to do!" we might get some new allies in the fight to change the system.
US Attorneys are the closest things to dictators our country has. Chris Christie said that as governor he missed the power he had a US Attorney. They're designed to be independent, and firing them for what cases they choose to bring to trial has ended up backfiring before. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy) As the wikipedia entry says, "The U.S. Attorneys, in their pursuit of justice, wield enormous power. Their political impartiality in deciding which cases to prosecute and in arguing those cases before judges and juries with diverse views is essential."
I think *this* needs to change.
And they need to be liable for abuse of their power.
I'm watching it happen in my own life. US Attorney Wagner (http://www.justice.gov/usao/cae/us_attorney/index.html) here in California is currently actively trying to ruin the life of one of my friends. Wagner is the guy that recently made front page headlines on the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/us/14pot.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) for arresting medical marijuana folks licensed in California. My friend is a landowner whose tenants grew pot on his land without his knowledge. For this, Wagner is attempting to seize all of their assets, both related to the case and unrelated. He's doing this all around the state (http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2011/10/07/california-u-s-attorneys-issue-statement-on-targeting-marijuana-industry/), and there's nothing that we the people can really do about it - he apparently feels very comfortable where he sits, ruining the lives of innocent people, because he feels it will intimidate landowners across the state into what he feels the law should be.
It's ridiculous, and it's unconstitutional in my opinion.
>3.) tight vertical spacing is archaic and stupid, unless absolutely necessary for some display reason
Mentally, we can deal with code that is chunked together on the screen. This is why I wrote my code folding patch for Vim - you could search for a keyword, and fold away all the code that didn't match it (and include lines of context around each hit).
So if you were refactoring, and wanted to look at each instance of your initfooblah member function, by just searching for initfooblah, all the relevant code would be on the screen, and everything else would get folded away.
Even doing something as simple as hitting n to move to the next hit causes a mental wipe, which can cause you to refactor the next line slightly differently and introduce a bug, because it's not all on the screen together.
As a Master's Student in CS, I thought a *lot* about the mental process of coding, and avoiding these mental wipes.
The Secret World took the opposite approach to class design - almost unlimited flexibility in how you put your class together, using a point-based system. You're limited to 7 or 8 active and passive skills (ala Guild Wars), so high "level" players don't necessarily have better powers, just more choices to select between them. Everyone in the game, additionally, is multiclassed.
I hated the cookie-cutter nature of WoW. I hated getting yelled at in raids because I took talents that matched my playstyle instead of something they read on the forums (even though I could show to them how hemorrhage was a better raiding attack than what they wanted, it didn't matter). I really hated the more and more and more homogenization of the builds. I'm surprised they don't just have a dozen or so pregenerated characters and just let people play with those, the way the game has been going.
I quit a long time ago, returned briefly for each expansion (except Pandaren, because fuck Blizzard), and just shook my head as it got worse and worse. I'd beat the single player content, uninstall, and unsubscribe.
>Zynga has a psychologist on staff to advise their designers on how to make a game people will feel compelled to play, and the approach works.
Yes, as reflected by their ever-rising stock price.
Oh, wait, no.
People hate Zynga because their "games" are crap. If you can call them games, really. Any "game" that can be played optimally by a very short shell script really isn't a game in my opinion.
So when I click to dial someone on my DroidX, and I can fast count to 20 before the phone connection screen even launches, which of the four problems above do you think it is? I'll experiment with your solutions (does CyanogenMod help?), but I'm curious what you think the main culprit is with something as simple as calling - or worse, answering - using the default phone app.
Slashdot Mirror
So, wait.
You're linking a post from another Slashdotter that you cyberstalk... to demonstrate that you can't follow posts correctly on Slashdot anymore?
Was that the point?
I won't read a wall of text. But you don't need to look far for me catching you in a lie. You just did, above.
>Your recent lull in attacks on scientists prompted me to ignore your accusation that I'm quite simply lying
That's... hilarious, because 1) that hyperlink doesn't have me accuse you of "quite simply lying" anywhere in it (in fact, you are nowhere in the thread), which 2) makes that a lie.
Anyone who cares to see which of us are telling the truth (which is most likely nobody), can go ahead and click on that link and see what I wrote myself.
Hey, my stalker is back!
Awesome.
>Nonsense. Making a new roof white rather than black has negligible costs, and many benefits.
Yes. I thought I mentioned this in a post on here, but it appears that comment got eaten.
To be fair, -2AC actually makes sense to me, both as a D&D nerd, and in the context of global warming.
I'd argue that we should do geoengineering until we can switch entirely to CO2-neutral tech (or close enough).
I've run the cost comparison on it. It's horrendously expensive for very little benefit.
>I don't think i have have even come close for any CD, i might make it to 20 - 40 for a good album. Think how long 4500 min (100 plays of the album with 3min tracks) is if you believe that is the norm. No average artist will be listened to the required amount to achieve the breakeven price.
Do you use iTunes? You can actually check how many times you've listened to each track, and there's usually an auto playlist set up for you with your 25 most played tracks.
My top track (from the Dubliners) has 135 plays since 10/10/11, and much of my top 25 are from that album. To be fair, I am learning a lot of their songs on my viola, but if we go to the first song I wasn't trying to learn, it still has 96 plays since 2011. My 25th most played song has 58 plays since 6/2/9.
I have some mp3 tracks that I've been listening to since '95. I don't have play statistics for them, but the numbers you're talking about are certainly not out of the ballpark.
Since each iTunes track is one dollar, we can divide a dollar by the number of plays to determine how many cents per play the artist is getting. For the Dubliners album, we're looking at about a penny a play. For, say, the Dethalbum, which has about 20 plays average across the album, this works out to about 5 cents per play.
Overall, her half a cent a play, for people who have never heard of her and maybe don't even like her music, is actually a reasonable rate.
> We just have to spend the money to build superconducting grids, solar towers, and other similar systems. The only reason we're not doing it on a large scale is that the folks designing the hardware haven't gotten the cost down to a point where it is cheaper than burning quarter-billion-year-old dead plants and animals yet.
Right. *Other than technology that doesn't exist yet*, there's no reason we shouldn't be on a solar-based power grid. :p
Gas has 40x the energy density of lithium-ion batteries, and "charges" (from a pump) much, much faster.
There's a reason we still burn dead plants and animals, and it's not because we want to destroy the environment. It's because green technology can't compete with dead plants. (Yet.)
Though I do agree we need more scientists in cabinet positions, his banner solution to global warming was painting rooftops white.
Good riddance to him.
> It is DEA policy to reject anything with less than $50,000 equity
Yeah, they're going after my friend because his land is all paid off. Mortgaged properties can be protected by the bank's legal team, so the US Attorneys avoid trying to seize them.
It's utterly shocking that our country isn't up in arms over this.
Regardless, US Attorney Wagner seems to think that seizing the assets of non-drug-related landowners will be sufficient to scare them all into doing the police work for him.
You open your character sheet with a left click.
Right click is almost entirely unused in the game (only as a shortcut to immediately enter the diplomacy screen with someone).
Yes, US Attorneys are the most powerful, and least controlled, people in our government. Even the president has more checks and balances on his power than what these guys get away with.
A US Attorney is trying to seize the assets of a friend of mine, who is guilty of doing nothing but leasing land to some farmers, that grew pot on it without his knowledge. He's running into debt fighting the case, but the US Attorney is going full bore anyway, since it doesn't cost *him* anything to try to make an example out of someone.
I think we should institute loser-pays in all lawsuits involving US Attorneys. (Unless we have this already? I don't know.) There's a reason why 90%+ of all cases with them are plea bargained out - the US Attorneys have effectively unlimited resources, and can drain you dry fighting them.
>Users don't give a flying shit about "x86" they just give a shit about having good apps to run. iOS and Android already offer that in spades.
Uh, what? Being able to play Crusader Kings 2 on a tablet is a huge selling point.
I just returned yet another Android tablet that broke on me, and so have a bunch of in-store credit burning a hole in my pocket... I'm seriously debating getting the Surface Pro.
I hate Windows 8 with a passion, though, and the touch cover is terrible. So I'll wait to see if I can live with the type cover.
If you want to interview my friend for it, he works at Microsoft.
>What OP said. Unless she actually enjoys gaming you will have as much luck getting her into that as she would getting you into crocheting.
Not true. My friend is like the horse whisperer, but for women.
His wife wasn't interested in gaming, so he started her with something simple and addictive (Super Puzzle Fighter) and then expanded her horizons from there.
She wasn't interested in pen and paper roleplaying games, so he got her interested in the story of the campaign, and costuming (it was a Victorian D&D campaign, the Masque of the Red Death), and expanded it from there.
She wasn't interested in having kids. So he bought her a couple cats, and expanded into humans from there. They now have two kids.
And to answer your objection, no, she's still not a gamer by any sense of the word. But she'll play with him occasionally and have a good time.
>BTW, the Soviets conducted experiments where they tried to breed female volunteers with apes, so I doubt there'll be much trouble with finding volunteers for this one.
"Volunteers".
>Make an example out of the prosecutors who turn minor complaints or annoyances into massive criminal cases by firing them and ruining their careers. When they whine, "But this is ridiculous and completely out of proportion with what we did! We were just doing what the system is set up for us to do!" we might get some new allies in the fight to change the system.
US Attorneys are the closest things to dictators our country has. Chris Christie said that as governor he missed the power he had a US Attorney. They're designed to be independent, and firing them for what cases they choose to bring to trial has ended up backfiring before. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dismissal_of_U.S._attorneys_controversy) As the wikipedia entry says, "The U.S. Attorneys, in their pursuit of justice, wield enormous power. Their political impartiality in deciding which cases to prosecute and in arguing those cases before judges and juries with diverse views is essential."
I think *this* needs to change.
And they need to be liable for abuse of their power.
I'm watching it happen in my own life. US Attorney Wagner (http://www.justice.gov/usao/cae/us_attorney/index.html) here in California is currently actively trying to ruin the life of one of my friends. Wagner is the guy that recently made front page headlines on the NYT (https://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/14/us/14pot.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0) for arresting medical marijuana folks licensed in California. My friend is a landowner whose tenants grew pot on his land without his knowledge. For this, Wagner is attempting to seize all of their assets, both related to the case and unrelated. He's doing this all around the state (http://blogs.kqed.org/newsfix/2011/10/07/california-u-s-attorneys-issue-statement-on-targeting-marijuana-industry/), and there's nothing that we the people can really do about it - he apparently feels very comfortable where he sits, ruining the lives of innocent people, because he feels it will intimidate landowners across the state into what he feels the law should be.
It's ridiculous, and it's unconstitutional in my opinion.
Here is a petition to remove Wagner from office:
https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/petition/fire-us-attorney-wagner-abuse-federal-powers/K7mgGkHG
>3.) tight vertical spacing is archaic and stupid, unless absolutely necessary for some display reason
Mentally, we can deal with code that is chunked together on the screen. This is why I wrote my code folding patch for Vim - you could search for a keyword, and fold away all the code that didn't match it (and include lines of context around each hit).
So if you were refactoring, and wanted to look at each instance of your initfooblah member function, by just searching for initfooblah, all the relevant code would be on the screen, and everything else would get folded away.
Even doing something as simple as hitting n to move to the next hit causes a mental wipe, which can cause you to refactor the next line slightly differently and introduce a bug, because it's not all on the screen together.
As a Master's Student in CS, I thought a *lot* about the mental process of coding, and avoiding these mental wipes.
Some sports can have perfect play easily programmed into them (such as with pool), but are interesting to us because we are not perfect.
I'm talking about intellectual games.
The Secret World took the opposite approach to class design - almost unlimited flexibility in how you put your class together, using a point-based system. You're limited to 7 or 8 active and passive skills (ala Guild Wars), so high "level" players don't necessarily have better powers, just more choices to select between them. Everyone in the game, additionally, is multiclassed.
I hated the cookie-cutter nature of WoW. I hated getting yelled at in raids because I took talents that matched my playstyle instead of something they read on the forums (even though I could show to them how hemorrhage was a better raiding attack than what they wanted, it didn't matter). I really hated the more and more and more homogenization of the builds. I'm surprised they don't just have a dozen or so pregenerated characters and just let people play with those, the way the game has been going.
I quit a long time ago, returned briefly for each expansion (except Pandaren, because fuck Blizzard), and just shook my head as it got worse and worse. I'd beat the single player content, uninstall, and unsubscribe.
>Zynga has a psychologist on staff to advise their designers on how to make a game people will feel compelled to play, and the approach works.
Yes, as reflected by their ever-rising stock price.
Oh, wait, no.
People hate Zynga because their "games" are crap. If you can call them games, really. Any "game" that can be played optimally by a very short shell script really isn't a game in my opinion.
So when I click to dial someone on my DroidX, and I can fast count to 20 before the phone connection screen even launches, which of the four problems above do you think it is? I'll experiment with your solutions (does CyanogenMod help?), but I'm curious what you think the main culprit is with something as simple as calling - or worse, answering - using the default phone app.
They are arbitrary. Just like Celsius.
But it (Fahrenheit) maps better to human experience than Celsius.