>By the way, ShakaUVM, I haven't seen you around much lately. I figured you had hurt yourself in an abortion clinic bombing or something. I'm glad to see you're back to let your far-right freak flag fly.
I missed you, too, ratty. But since I'm a moderate, that means that you, by comparison, must have fallen off the deep end of the left-wing pool. But we knew that already, didn't we?
>Fourth, even though federal income taxes have been steadily declining over the past 30 years, local taxes have shot through the roof. The portion a middle or working class income that goes to taxes is much higher than it was 30 years ago,
Poor people have paid less in income taxes every year since the 1940s. The bottom 50% of America makes 13% of the wages, but pays only 2% of the nation's income taxes. The actual tax rate paid by the median household peaked in 75 (at 12%), and is about half that level now (6%).
If you look at disposable income measures, Americans today have more disposable income than they did back in the 1960s.
Basically, we're better off now than we were 50 years ago, and it drives ideologues like you crazy trying to explain it away, because reality doesn't match your beliefs.
If it wasn't covered by insurance, then you were paying the inflated, hand-waving, magical price that hospitals set to fuck people that don't have insurance.
>>Back in the day, circa pre-Jesus, rape was ALWAYS the woman's fault. Woman gets brutally beaten and raped, the town ties her up and stones her for adultery. You're a whore, bitch.
No, the rapist was hauled out to the town gate and stoned to death. (Deut 22)
But, hey, thanks for contributing to the ongoing stigmatization of things you know nothing about.
>>This is just more from the "war on women" department. And while I don't agree with the stupid soundbite slogan "war on women" -- the disturbing trend which gives rise to it is a serious problem politically, but more important, socially.
The War on Women is as equality valid/invalid as the "War on Christmas". There's certain elements of truth to both of them (Target booting out the Salvation Army, for example), but they're grossly inflated and exaggerated for political gain.
>>Here, this year is unlike any other in recorded history.
Just to nitpick, while July was the hottest July in record, it only barely beat 1938 by a small fraction of a degree. It's like setting a world record in the Olympics by a fraction of a second.
Our local temps here in California were not record setting, as the 1898 temperatures were still higher.
So you have to look at it with a little bit of context.
(Real life example, though details changed a bit.)
Imagine coding a skiing simulator. You've got a 3D surface for your terrain, and you've written your collision code, and now you want to put gravity in. I was toying around with different ways of doing this, when I suddenly realized this was just a partial derivative from second-quarter calculus, and implemented it directly and immediately. Calculating the fall line (the line of fastest descent) was likewise trivial when I realized it was math that I'd already learned.
I've calculated solvers for ODEs, needed trig (sines, cosines, etc.) all over the bloody place in my code, used matrix math more than my fair share (3D code is rife with it), and generally feel that I'd be a better programmer if I'd taken more math classes in college. I had two years of math as an undergraduate, and I still feel like it wasn't enough for my needs.
This fucked up situation was intentional, too, as I learned from watching CSPAN.
Basically, our congressmen want to protect frivolous DMCA takedown notices on the rare/slight/insignificant chance that one of them might lose money defending their actual rights.
Yeah, and given how tough a lot of the programming challenge questions are (I did a few in college, and did reasonably well), being able to win a competition means the person was able to solve most or all of the problems, correctly, and *with all the edge cases considered*, in a very short period of time. So while I wouldn't care if a guy was #1 in the world or #10 in his college, I would see someone doing well in it as a very good recommendation for their programming skills.
Thinking of all the edge cases is often the hardest part, as the judges don't tell you why your code was rejected, only that it failed on one of the test cases. I quit competing after having one of my programs rejected for an absurd edge case that wasn't in the specification (basically, they wanted to add distance to a zero-length graph edge, which made no sense outside of the textual context of the problem)... and I was the only person in the room that had solved it. Or I guess I might not have been, and everyone had their programs rejected for that bullshit reason. So yeah, someone who can think of all the edge cases without them being explicitly specified is going to be a good programmer in my book.
This doesn't mean he'll have good social skills, or coding practices, or whatever, but in terms of being able to know how to program? Hell yes, I'd hire a competitor on the spot.
>>Second, SSDs have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper.
Not that big, not that cheap. But better, I guess.
>>You no longer need to decide between spending a fortune or segregating your apps out; a $60 SSD will hold the OS and every app you could ever possibly run
$60 = 60GB.
I have a 60GB SSD as my windows drive right now, and it's absolutely too small for my purposes. I don't have a single game installed on it. All my photos and videos are on my 2TB secondary HDD. And I have 2GB free. I'm upgrading to a 250GB SSD as we speak. I *may* move my Steam directory over. It's sitting at 170GB right now. =)
>>If you have a video taken down you can put it back up and the case is referred to a real person.
This is how it works, however the real person (Youtube Employee) just rubber stamps the copyright holder's claim, whether it is specious or not.
I think a massive lawsuit will be the only way to change this current regime. I think someone like NASA could claim real damages from spurious claims like this.
Rhetoric aside, it's buying for all intents and purposes. Buy the game, put it into offline mode, and there's nothing Valve can ever do to take the game away from you.
I dunno, I'm a D&D nerd, but there's something very satisfying about rolling vast handfuls of dice. In 4e, I rolled up a barbarian that rolls around 10 dice on an attack (which if you know 4e, is rather unusual).
The Gaussian mechanics also have some nice properties that D20 doesn't have.
Agreed. I'd even go a step further and have a Steam distribution throw out a lot of the options that make us nerds salivate. Or at least hide them a bit. Make it so that people can one-click install the OS with all the packages needed for games - including Steam - one click to buy games, and one click to play games, and you've got yourself a killer platform for most gamers.
Yep, even though there have been several Ubisoft games I've wanted to play in recent years, every time I see the Ubisoft name on a game, it's a death sentence for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Only 2% of Americans and 5% of Canadians make the minimum wage, and most of those are youngsters working part time to supplement their income.
>By the way, ShakaUVM, I haven't seen you around much lately. I figured you had hurt yourself in an abortion clinic bombing or something. I'm glad to see you're back to let your far-right freak flag fly.
I missed you, too, ratty. But since I'm a moderate, that means that you, by comparison, must have fallen off the deep end of the left-wing pool. But we knew that already, didn't we?
>Fourth, even though federal income taxes have been steadily declining over the past 30 years, local taxes have shot through the roof. The portion a middle or working class income that goes to taxes is much higher than it was 30 years ago,
Poor people have paid less in income taxes every year since the 1940s. The bottom 50% of America makes 13% of the wages, but pays only 2% of the nation's income taxes. The actual tax rate paid by the median household peaked in 75 (at 12%), and is about half that level now (6%).
If you look at disposable income measures, Americans today have more disposable income than they did back in the 1960s.
Basically, we're better off now than we were 50 years ago, and it drives ideologues like you crazy trying to explain it away, because reality doesn't match your beliefs.
Bullshit. Income has risen significantly since 1960, for all income ranges. Adjusted for inflation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_Income_Distribution_1947-2007.svg
>In the absence of "smart infrastructure" (which has far more dramatic "Big Brother" concerns)
Have you not noticed the cameras on intersections and along freeways these days? They're everywhere. At least here in California.
The government can already track you pretty much everywhere you go on public roads these days.
>>However, the visit was NOT for an emergency circumcision, and I heartily encourage parents of male babies to leave their sons uncut.
Why? In my opinion it should be a personal choice.
If it wasn't covered by insurance, then you were paying the inflated, hand-waving, magical price that hospitals set to fuck people that don't have insurance.
TF2 isn't that moddable, I don't think. Been a while since I looked at it, though.
>>Back in the day, circa pre-Jesus, rape was ALWAYS the woman's fault. Woman gets brutally beaten and raped, the town ties her up and stones her for adultery. You're a whore, bitch.
No, the rapist was hauled out to the town gate and stoned to death. (Deut 22)
But, hey, thanks for contributing to the ongoing stigmatization of things you know nothing about.
>>This is just more from the "war on women" department. And while I don't agree with the stupid soundbite slogan "war on women" -- the disturbing trend which gives rise to it is a serious problem politically, but more important, socially.
The War on Women is as equality valid/invalid as the "War on Christmas". There's certain elements of truth to both of them (Target booting out the Salvation Army, for example), but they're grossly inflated and exaggerated for political gain.
>I hate responding to AC's, but purchase of the OEM license has always been tied to some piece(s) of hardware purchased at the same time
If you're building your own machine, it seems likely you'll be picking up new hardware at some point, yes?
IIRC, at Fry's they usually tie OEM versions of windows to mobo purchases, which seems reasonable to me.
>>Here, this year is unlike any other in recorded history.
Just to nitpick, while July was the hottest July in record, it only barely beat 1938 by a small fraction of a degree. It's like setting a world record in the Olympics by a fraction of a second.
Our local temps here in California were not record setting, as the 1898 temperatures were still higher.
So you have to look at it with a little bit of context.
Yeah, Elemental was the first and last thing I bought from that company.
I don't trust Stardock to make a start menu replacement, in all honestly.
Classic Shell all the way for me.
>>That means that their second and third attempts will be absolutely #$(*#& horrible.
WHAT IF I TOLD YOU...
That I was expecting the narrator to start yelling, "Oh the humanity"?
(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F54rqDh2mWA)
(Real life example, though details changed a bit.)
Imagine coding a skiing simulator. You've got a 3D surface for your terrain, and you've written your collision code, and now you want to put gravity in. I was toying around with different ways of doing this, when I suddenly realized this was just a partial derivative from second-quarter calculus, and implemented it directly and immediately. Calculating the fall line (the line of fastest descent) was likewise trivial when I realized it was math that I'd already learned.
I've calculated solvers for ODEs, needed trig (sines, cosines, etc.) all over the bloody place in my code, used matrix math more than my fair share (3D code is rife with it), and generally feel that I'd be a better programmer if I'd taken more math classes in college. I had two years of math as an undergraduate, and I still feel like it wasn't enough for my needs.
This fucked up situation was intentional, too, as I learned from watching CSPAN.
Basically, our congressmen want to protect frivolous DMCA takedown notices on the rare/slight/insignificant chance that one of them might lose money defending their actual rights.
Yeah, and given how tough a lot of the programming challenge questions are (I did a few in college, and did reasonably well), being able to win a competition means the person was able to solve most or all of the problems, correctly, and *with all the edge cases considered*, in a very short period of time. So while I wouldn't care if a guy was #1 in the world or #10 in his college, I would see someone doing well in it as a very good recommendation for their programming skills.
Thinking of all the edge cases is often the hardest part, as the judges don't tell you why your code was rejected, only that it failed on one of the test cases. I quit competing after having one of my programs rejected for an absurd edge case that wasn't in the specification (basically, they wanted to add distance to a zero-length graph edge, which made no sense outside of the textual context of the problem)... and I was the only person in the room that had solved it. Or I guess I might not have been, and everyone had their programs rejected for that bullshit reason. So yeah, someone who can think of all the edge cases without them being explicitly specified is going to be a good programmer in my book.
This doesn't mean he'll have good social skills, or coding practices, or whatever, but in terms of being able to know how to program? Hell yes, I'd hire a competitor on the spot.
>>Second, SSDs have gotten a lot bigger and a lot cheaper.
Not that big, not that cheap. But better, I guess.
>>You no longer need to decide between spending a fortune or segregating your apps out; a $60 SSD will hold the OS and every app you could ever possibly run
$60 = 60GB.
I have a 60GB SSD as my windows drive right now, and it's absolutely too small for my purposes. I don't have a single game installed on it. All my photos and videos are on my 2TB secondary HDD. And I have 2GB free. I'm upgrading to a 250GB SSD as we speak. I *may* move my Steam directory over. It's sitting at 170GB right now. =)
>>Then, there is the endless low-level of depression that permeates most Philip K Dick - like a miasma. But he makes you want more, somehow.
Yeah, I finished reading Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep while backpacking in the middle of King's Canyon over a decade ago.
I just sat there bummed out of my fucking mind, staring in the full moonlight at some of the most beautiful scenery on the planet.
Dick's a drag, man.
>>If you have a video taken down you can put it back up and the case is referred to a real person.
This is how it works, however the real person (Youtube Employee) just rubber stamps the copyright holder's claim, whether it is specious or not.
I think a massive lawsuit will be the only way to change this current regime. I think someone like NASA could claim real damages from spurious claims like this.
Rhetoric aside, it's buying for all intents and purposes. Buy the game, put it into offline mode, and there's nothing Valve can ever do to take the game away from you.
You can never have enough d6s. :p
I always take about 100 to our Shadowrun gamedays, and it never seems to be enough for my friends.
I dunno, I'm a D&D nerd, but there's something very satisfying about rolling vast handfuls of dice. In 4e, I rolled up a barbarian that rolls around 10 dice on an attack (which if you know 4e, is rather unusual).
The Gaussian mechanics also have some nice properties that D20 doesn't have.
I still think the Shadowrun kickstarter should have given out 20 d6s as part of the $50+ package. =)
Agreed. I'd even go a step further and have a Steam distribution throw out a lot of the options that make us nerds salivate. Or at least hide them a bit. Make it so that people can one-click install the OS with all the packages needed for games - including Steam - one click to buy games, and one click to play games, and you've got yourself a killer platform for most gamers.
Yep, even though there have been several Ubisoft games I've wanted to play in recent years, every time I see the Ubisoft name on a game, it's a death sentence for them.
Haven't bought one of their games in years.