>>A tricky thing for Wiki to do on short notice as they typically govern by consensus.
Ooh! Some more good ones: Congress represents the people Lobbyists are just there to help congressmen understand their positions The Supreme Court is impartial
>>If anything, the music industry should probably be more afraid of Irish music than of the Irish government!
If you're bringing out the Wolfe Tones, you should mention Come Out Ye Black and Tans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORifieiZiP4), which shows the Irish fighting spirit as much as any song.
But yeah. Irish music is basically about rage against or independence from England, and occasionally about sex.
>>I thought there already was one - it's called trees.
100 growing trees absorb one tonne of CO2 per year. They stop growing rapidly after 20 years. The per-capita CO2 production is between 8 and 20 tonnes per year in developed countries. You need 1000 trees growing, that you cycle out every 20 years, so amortizing it out, that is 50 trees a year. Add in the land to grow 1000 trees, and the water needed for it.
Depending on how much your costs run, this can vary from a net profit, to $10,000 a year ($100/tree + labor + land + water).
>>You can see John Huntsman tip toe around certain questions about the envrionment by saying that he believes that a leader should listen to the experts in the field on the issues.
Hmm? He believes in global warming and evolution. He's the most pro-science candidate the Republicans have. Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution, it's been reported.
He also speaks Chinese, and is all round I think the best candidate. I'll vote for him if he 1) Didn't forge that racist attack ad against him and 2) He hasn't dropped out by the time my primaries roll around.:/
Yep. 4e was a horrible monstrosity. It did a couple things right, but then again, Pathfinder tended to do those things right in the same way, too.
I've been playing Pathfinder Society games recently, and enjoying it. (http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety)
I'm still active in the RPGA, just to hang out with friends I've had since the 90s, but pretty much everyone in it dislikes 4e to one degree or another. It wasn't like the 3e days where most people liked the new changes - I mean, really, the best defenders of it just say, "It's not that bad..." Skill challenges are one of the worst things, ever, in a RPG - they did more to destroy roleplaying in 4e than the miniatures-as-RPG model they used for its design.
When I get a hunger for actual roleplaying, I like game systems like L5R. (Weekend in Rokugan is this weekend in Kansas City!)
>>Some of the best role playing I have ever done was with a DM who didn't use any books, didnt use any dice, and jotted rough layouts on paper when they were needed - everything came out of his mind, he made the decisions and the story.
Eh, in my group of friends, we like having a well-defined set of rules (and house rules if need be) so that we all know what the common ground is. Then we all try to optimize the shit out of it (players and DMs both, with the DM generally restricting his fiat priviledges to only things PCs can do within their toolbox).
But, that's sort of what you get when you put a lot of computer science and math nerds into a game together.
Yeah, you beat me to it. D&D has been on a 3-5 year cycle for quite a while now.
I actually predicted 5th edition on New Year's Day on the WOTC boards (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/28811939/What_would_you_like_the_most_for_4E_in_2012&post_num=27#514478867) because of this cycle, and because they've been doing their characteristic drop in new material that preludes a new version coming out.
>>It's like a haircut. It's a lot easier to go one way than the other.
Depends. If we find economical means to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere, we could probably cool the planet faster than we can heat it with fossil fuels. Especially if you get into geoengineering.
>>Models can be checked. It's not just curve fitting to the temperature record: climatologists figure they're on the right track when their models predict phenomena like El Nino.
The problem is there's no shortcut for it as you move forward. While you can kinda-sorta validate your models by looking at different time periods, ultimately, having 100% predictive accuracy on the past is just an illusion of accuracy.
I worked in modelling for years, and the golden standard my professors always hammered into me was forward prediction. Not the ability to predict the past.
>>Apparently he hasn't the brainpower to realize that "secular atheist" and "radical islamist" governments are contradictory.
I won't criticize your brainpower for copying and pasting the same quote twice, as it was an honest mistake.
But the two are strange bedfellows. Secular atheists are generally on the side of Palestinians, whereas evangelical Christians and Mormons generally take the side of Israel. Why would Christians support Jews and atheists support Hamas? Hell, you tell me. But that's how the world is.
Correct, when it is cheaper to drive people tend to drive more. It's somewhat inelastic (limited vacation time, and time committed to commute), but it's a real effect.
This is why the benefits of hybrids are somewhat offset by the additional miles they drive.
>>Of course, in general public-school tuition is just set by T = O - S (T tuition, O overall cost, S state funding). >>What's changed radically in the last decade or so is state funding: dropping from, like, 80% to 20% in some states, and so the tuition necessarily rises to make up the difference.
All true, but it makes it appear that greedy state legislators have slashed college budgets by 75% in the last decade. This hasn't happened. What has happened is that *enrollment* has skyrocketed, which reduces the subsidy per student dramatically.
In other words, S = total state funding / # of students in college.
The tuition at my school (UC San Diego) has actually remained pretty constant over the last 40 years, adjusting for inflation, if you account for the vast increase in the number of students.
In other word, If you used to have 4,000 students at 100% subsidy, and now have 20,000 students at 20% subsidy, the total funding has remained constant. This is the fact that people always forget.
We can't raise the state subsidy (we're broke here in California), so the only two options are to reduce the number of students we let into state colleges, or reduce the per-student subsidies.
The freemium model is apparently working very well for a lot of MMORPGs and Facebook games. That said, I have little desire to play MMORPGs any more, and even less to "pay to win" at something I don't really care very much about. I actually subscribed to D&D Online after it went free to play for the reasons you outlined above (you know exactly how much you're going to spend, and all the freemium options worked out to a lot of money anyway), but the game permanently bugged my character, and I couldn't play it, and couldn't get a refund either, so that sort of left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole experience. Fuck Turbine's customer support.
The Old Republic is a fun single player game that just happens to be an MMORPG. If it becomes another freemium game, I'd quit it in an instant.
>>the Administration had somehow convinced the students that while pranks were acceptable, they had to be approved before being implemented. Suffice to say, the quality of pranks has since dropped.
Hmm, may or may not be a good thing. I can think of several senior pranks that were actively destructive and not funny, and others in the other subsets of {destructive,funny}.
1) Destructive and !funny: seniors rented a chainsaw and chopped the limbs off the beautiful eucalyptus trees lining the drive to the school, making them look like shaved toothpicks. School had to pay a fortune to replace them. Wasn't funny. 2) Destructive and funny: they covered a car in honey and birdseed. When the person (let's say it was the principal, even though it wasn't) went out to the parking lot, it was covered in birds eating at it. One free car wash later, and it was back to normal. 3) Nondestructive and !funny: they created an entire crime scene on campus after hours, with chalk outlines, broken beer bottles, and police tape. People didn't laugh it it (it was more a WTF moment), and the police actually came out an interrogated people, thinking some crime had actually happened. (Okay, maybe that last bit was a little funny.) 4) Nondestructive and funny: a certain computer science nerd introduced a virus on the school's computers that did nothing hostile (and didn't infect, so not a virus, whatthefuckever), but simply played the name of one of the graduating seniors, at a very low volume, once every half hour or so.
Our administration would have approved exactly zero of the above. So, sure, it would have been a net win for the campus in terms of property destruction, but the campus would have been a lot less of a fun place, which is an intangible that people value highly nonetheless.
In the case of Microsoft needing to approve rooting, and only allowing a limited number of "root licenses", I think it's a brilliant move. All the hardcore hackers will have theirs already, and if WP7 grows more, they can always issue more in small batches, which will pacify the nerds that will otherwise be working hard to root their systems, while still locking in 99% of the population into their closed ecosystem.
Microsoft understands Judo. Sony, by contrast, does not. A bit ironic.
>>All they ever do is use their meter to check the signals coming through the line. If the signals are good that is all they are interested in.
It may be a union issue.
I had problems at the last place I lived at (and this place, too, come to think of it), due to what I was told was a leaking conduit ruining the connection between my apartment and the nearest box, causing intermittent outages, which would last up to three or four days at a time. Couldn't get cable modem, so AT&T copper was my only real choice. They'd take a week to come out, so the internet would be back up by then, they'd test the cable, say it was fine, and then leave.
It took a dozen or so service calls to finally get them to dig up the yard and fix the conduit. But in the meantime, a number of guys came out, told me things they would try if they weren't prohibited by it by union rules, and then leave. Was... frustrating.
At my new place, the problem was that my house was phantom dialing random numbers without even having a single phone plugged in. I got a huge long distance bill and three visits from the police (random 911 dial) - that shit got fixed QUICKLY.
>>I've never seen an LED bulb flicker. Cheap CFLs, yes, but never LED.
As I said elsewhere, I have LED lighting on my fridge. When filling up a cup of water from it at night, it's fun to watch, since the high speed flickering of the LED lights makes the water move as if under a strobelight.
I'll sit there watching the small snapshots of the water splashing around as it fills.
Slashdot Mirror
Issa, Chaffetz and the gentlewoman from San Jose have introduced a LOT of amendments to fix the biggest abuses of SOPA.
They all got shot down.
You're the first nerd I've heard advocate for people losing root on their own computers.
No worries, though, Microsoft has heard your complaints and will deliver you a nice safe Walled Garden in Win8.
It's funny how many Pogues videos have a RIP Shane comment on them.
Everybody just sort of assumes he's dead by now.
>>A tricky thing for Wiki to do on short notice as they typically govern by consensus.
Ooh! Some more good ones:
Congress represents the people
Lobbyists are just there to help congressmen understand their positions
The Supreme Court is impartial
>>If anything, the music industry should probably be more afraid of Irish music than of the Irish government!
If you're bringing out the Wolfe Tones, you should mention Come Out Ye Black and Tans (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORifieiZiP4), which shows the Irish fighting spirit as much as any song.
But yeah. Irish music is basically about rage against or independence from England, and occasionally about sex.
>>I thought there already was one - it's called trees.
100 growing trees absorb one tonne of CO2 per year. They stop growing rapidly after 20 years.
The per-capita CO2 production is between 8 and 20 tonnes per year in developed countries.
You need 1000 trees growing, that you cycle out every 20 years, so amortizing it out, that is 50 trees a year.
Add in the land to grow 1000 trees, and the water needed for it.
Depending on how much your costs run, this can vary from a net profit, to $10,000 a year ($100/tree + labor + land + water).
Oh, and that's for *one person*.
>>Besides, who really cares what they believe for themselves?
Wasn't this thread about "geek issues"?
Huntsman is the only candidate that believes in, you know, science.
I expect Huntsman to drop out at some point, at which point I'd vote for Paul.
>>You can see John Huntsman tip toe around certain questions about the envrionment by saying that he believes that a leader should listen to the experts in the field on the issues.
Hmm? He believes in global warming and evolution. He's the most pro-science candidate the Republicans have. Ron Paul doesn't believe in evolution, it's been reported.
He also speaks Chinese, and is all round I think the best candidate. I'll vote for him if he 1) Didn't forge that racist attack ad against him and 2) He hasn't dropped out by the time my primaries roll around. :/
>>Pathfinder is what should have happened to 4.0.
Yep. 4e was a horrible monstrosity. It did a couple things right, but then again, Pathfinder tended to do those things right in the same way, too.
I've been playing Pathfinder Society games recently, and enjoying it. (http://paizo.com/pathfinderSociety)
I'm still active in the RPGA, just to hang out with friends I've had since the 90s, but pretty much everyone in it dislikes 4e to one degree or another. It wasn't like the 3e days where most people liked the new changes - I mean, really, the best defenders of it just say, "It's not that bad..." Skill challenges are one of the worst things, ever, in a RPG - they did more to destroy roleplaying in 4e than the miniatures-as-RPG model they used for its design.
When I get a hunger for actual roleplaying, I like game systems like L5R. (Weekend in Rokugan is this weekend in Kansas City!)
>>Some of the best role playing I have ever done was with a DM who didn't use any books, didnt use any dice, and jotted rough layouts on paper when they were needed - everything came out of his mind, he made the decisions and the story.
Eh, in my group of friends, we like having a well-defined set of rules (and house rules if need be) so that we all know what the common ground is. Then we all try to optimize the shit out of it (players and DMs both, with the DM generally restricting his fiat priviledges to only things PCs can do within their toolbox).
But, that's sort of what you get when you put a lot of computer science and math nerds into a game together.
Even in 3e/3.5, TK allowed basically unlimited damage when you'd accelerate a bundle of arrows at a target.
Yeah, you beat me to it. D&D has been on a 3-5 year cycle for quite a while now.
I actually predicted 5th edition on New Year's Day on the WOTC boards (http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/28811939/What_would_you_like_the_most_for_4E_in_2012&post_num=27#514478867) because of this cycle, and because they've been doing their characteristic drop in new material that preludes a new version coming out.
>>It's like a haircut. It's a lot easier to go one way than the other.
Depends. If we find economical means to scrub CO2 out of the atmosphere, we could probably cool the planet faster than we can heat it with fossil fuels. Especially if you get into geoengineering.
For example - http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-01/new-material-can-pull-carbon-dioxide-right-out-air-unprecedented-rates
>>Models can be checked. It's not just curve fitting to the temperature record: climatologists figure they're on the right track when their models predict phenomena like El Nino.
The problem is there's no shortcut for it as you move forward. While you can kinda-sorta validate your models by looking at different time periods, ultimately, having 100% predictive accuracy on the past is just an illusion of accuracy.
I worked in modelling for years, and the golden standard my professors always hammered into me was forward prediction. Not the ability to predict the past.
>>Apparently he hasn't the brainpower to realize that "secular atheist" and "radical islamist" governments are contradictory.
I won't criticize your brainpower for copying and pasting the same quote twice, as it was an honest mistake.
But the two are strange bedfellows. Secular atheists are generally on the side of Palestinians, whereas evangelical Christians and Mormons generally take the side of Israel. Why would Christians support Jews and atheists support Hamas? Hell, you tell me. But that's how the world is.
>>As was Knittel.
Knittel is a fool. His claims were posted and dissected a while ago.
My own take on it:
http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/o4elx/mit_researcher_explains_why_gas_mileage_is_still/c3egjvj
Correct, when it is cheaper to drive people tend to drive more. It's somewhat inelastic (limited vacation time, and time committed to commute), but it's a real effect.
This is why the benefits of hybrids are somewhat offset by the additional miles they drive.
>>Of course, in general public-school tuition is just set by T = O - S (T tuition, O overall cost, S state funding).
>>What's changed radically in the last decade or so is state funding: dropping from, like, 80% to 20% in some states, and so the tuition necessarily rises to make up the difference.
All true, but it makes it appear that greedy state legislators have slashed college budgets by 75% in the last decade. This hasn't happened. What has happened is that *enrollment* has skyrocketed, which reduces the subsidy per student dramatically.
In other words, S = total state funding / # of students in college.
The tuition at my school (UC San Diego) has actually remained pretty constant over the last 40 years, adjusting for inflation, if you account for the vast increase in the number of students.
In other word, If you used to have 4,000 students at 100% subsidy, and now have 20,000 students at 20% subsidy, the total funding has remained constant. This is the fact that people always forget.
We can't raise the state subsidy (we're broke here in California), so the only two options are to reduce the number of students we let into state colleges, or reduce the per-student subsidies.
Which would you prefer?
The freemium model is apparently working very well for a lot of MMORPGs and Facebook games. That said, I have little desire to play MMORPGs any more, and even less to "pay to win" at something I don't really care very much about. I actually subscribed to D&D Online after it went free to play for the reasons you outlined above (you know exactly how much you're going to spend, and all the freemium options worked out to a lot of money anyway), but the game permanently bugged my character, and I couldn't play it, and couldn't get a refund either, so that sort of left a bad taste in my mouth for the whole experience. Fuck Turbine's customer support.
The Old Republic is a fun single player game that just happens to be an MMORPG. If it becomes another freemium game, I'd quit it in an instant.
It was completely covered in bird shit.
>>the Administration had somehow convinced the students that while pranks were acceptable, they had to be approved before being implemented. Suffice to say, the quality of pranks has since dropped.
Hmm, may or may not be a good thing. I can think of several senior pranks that were actively destructive and not funny, and others in the other subsets of {destructive,funny}.
1) Destructive and !funny: seniors rented a chainsaw and chopped the limbs off the beautiful eucalyptus trees lining the drive to the school, making them look like shaved toothpicks. School had to pay a fortune to replace them. Wasn't funny.
2) Destructive and funny: they covered a car in honey and birdseed. When the person (let's say it was the principal, even though it wasn't) went out to the parking lot, it was covered in birds eating at it. One free car wash later, and it was back to normal.
3) Nondestructive and !funny: they created an entire crime scene on campus after hours, with chalk outlines, broken beer bottles, and police tape. People didn't laugh it it (it was more a WTF moment), and the police actually came out an interrogated people, thinking some crime had actually happened. (Okay, maybe that last bit was a little funny.)
4) Nondestructive and funny: a certain computer science nerd introduced a virus on the school's computers that did nothing hostile (and didn't infect, so not a virus, whatthefuckever), but simply played the name of one of the graduating seniors, at a very low volume, once every half hour or so.
Our administration would have approved exactly zero of the above. So, sure, it would have been a net win for the campus in terms of property destruction, but the campus would have been a lot less of a fun place, which is an intangible that people value highly nonetheless.
In the case of Microsoft needing to approve rooting, and only allowing a limited number of "root licenses", I think it's a brilliant move. All the hardcore hackers will have theirs already, and if WP7 grows more, they can always issue more in small batches, which will pacify the nerds that will otherwise be working hard to root their systems, while still locking in 99% of the population into their closed ecosystem.
Microsoft understands Judo. Sony, by contrast, does not. A bit ironic.
Yeah, I saw that story when it came out. Java was just released and the company was asking for people with 10 years of experience in it.
>>All they ever do is use their meter to check the signals coming through the line. If the signals are good that is all they are interested in.
It may be a union issue.
I had problems at the last place I lived at (and this place, too, come to think of it), due to what I was told was a leaking conduit ruining the connection between my apartment and the nearest box, causing intermittent outages, which would last up to three or four days at a time. Couldn't get cable modem, so AT&T copper was my only real choice. They'd take a week to come out, so the internet would be back up by then, they'd test the cable, say it was fine, and then leave.
It took a dozen or so service calls to finally get them to dig up the yard and fix the conduit. But in the meantime, a number of guys came out, told me things they would try if they weren't prohibited by it by union rules, and then leave. Was... frustrating.
At my new place, the problem was that my house was phantom dialing random numbers without even having a single phone plugged in. I got a huge long distance bill and three visits from the police (random 911 dial) - that shit got fixed QUICKLY.
>>I've never seen an LED bulb flicker. Cheap CFLs, yes, but never LED.
As I said elsewhere, I have LED lighting on my fridge. When filling up a cup of water from it at night, it's fun to watch, since the high speed flickering of the LED lights makes the water move as if under a strobelight.
I'll sit there watching the small snapshots of the water splashing around as it fills.
My wife thinks I'm weird.
Nice to know 2011 isn't over quite yet on Slashdot.