I'm not saying people _should_ pirate the game, but your car analogy kinda sucks.
How about this, the car company comes out with a brand new car with octagonal wheels. The octagonal wheels make it harder to steal, but it does function as a car. Barely. (Except of course that a small percentage of buyers will find upon delivery that their new car actually has square wheels and won't budge at all.) The wheels are attached with special nuts that need a special tool to be removed, and the design of that tool is protected by the DMCA. So removing those nuts so you can replace the octagonal tires with round ones is a felony.
But then you discover some people have illegally gotten ahold of the plans for the car. They're willing to let you have a copy, and even use their giant 3D printer to print out the car for free. And oh yeah, they've already replaced the stupid octagonal tires in the plans with regular round ones.
It's a pretty silly thought experiment, but it would still theoretically be illegal and about matches the situation with the new SimCity. At least a lot more so than stealing a car just because you happen not to like On-Star.
My company has a iPad app for interfacing with our software. We don't have an Android app (though as an afterthought we have started developing an "agnostic" HTML5 interface.) Why is that? It wasn't because of market studies or user feedback or anything like that. It was because our CEO got an iPad, and she really liked it. So she thought we ought to be able to use our software with an iPad.
It doesn't matter how dumb you think CEOs are on average (though i've got to say, our CEO is pretty smart in general, even if i don't agree with her on this one decision) they can have a massive influence on what direction a company takes. Whether it's deciding which platforms to develop software for or what brand of phone the company will supply or something else i'm not even thinking of, if you can convince a bunch of CEOs that your product is a great thing there's probably something they can do to help you out.
You're quite happy with the benefits of the system, but you're dead set against having to pay any of the costs that support that system and the benefits it provides. So... you're a Republican?
So the same person is now in charge of both the Star Wars movies and the Star Trek movies?
I think i just felt a disturbance in the force, as if millions of fans involved in the never ending "which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek?" debates suddenly cried out in bewilderment and then their heads asploded.
Would the response be pretty disastrous for NK regardless of which part of the US they hit? Yeah. Would people care as much about a nuke hitting Anchorage as they would about it hitting SF? No.
I'm not saying they wouldn't care. They'd still be outraged. But there's definitely a hierarchy of importance in peoples' minds. Obviously everyone has a particular fondness for their home town/state, but outside of that there's probably a reasonable level of agreement, based on an amalgamation of population, political importance, economic importance, and cultural importance. Obviously DC is at the top. After that would be New York and Los Angeles. Then a big third tier, with San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, etc.
As long as NK is going to bluster and threaten, they're going to threaten the biggest target they can. Actually, i'm not sure why San Francisco is being focused on rather than Los Angeles. From NK's perspective the difference in the distance between them is pretty small.
It is amazing that you somehow read my post and thought i said anything at all about the Democrats. Or do you believe in a black and white world where if i say something negative about the Republicans it must mean that the Democrats are positive in exactly the opposite manner?
Look, suppose Republicans and their corporate cronies actually got everything they say they want and you and i are correct about the consequences. The end result would be global economic collapse and most likely revolution and possibly outright war. The poor tend to suffer disproportionately during such things, but the rich aren't entirely immune. (Especially if someone decides to start tossing nukes around.)
I seriously doubt that's what they actually want for themselves. So either they're being selectively stupid about some things, or you and i are being selectively stupid about some things. (Or alternately, the Republicans and corporations are demanding outrageous things either as a bargaining position or in exchange for favors, which could be it's own kind of stupid.)
People are rarely either smart about everything or stupid about everything. It's entirely possible to be good at gaining or maintaining money or power without being able to forsee long term consequences of some of your actions.
I'm not saying they're not wrong. And maybe they're not very nice people. But i seriosuly doubt they're plotting the downfall of western civilization while cackling madly. In fact it's entirely possible they're incredibly competent at some things but so totally deluded in other areas that they'd actually be surprised if their plans didn't work out. Look at Mitt Romney. He was competent enough to get rich and get the nomination, and yet he and a lot of the other Republicans were caught totally unprepared by reality on election day. Unless you think that was just part of a deeper plot?
Did you miss the post earlier today about automation in fast food?
So before long you'll be able to walk to McDonalds and order a meal made entirely by robots. And then you can go home and do your shopping and order stuff off of Amazon. A robot truck will deliver the items you ordered, which were packed by a robot at a warehouse, which received the goods (also by robot truck) from an automated factory.
Aside from boutiques and upscale restaurants which can only be afforded by the upper-class, where do you see the service industry in all of this?
What we _ought_ to do is find a way to decouple the association between productivity (measured either as output or compensation) and status/moral superiority.
Everyone should be provided with the basic necessities of life. Ideally in the form of actual housing, clothing, food, health care, education, etc, rather than being given a "welfare check" and told to find those things for themselves on the market.
Everyone should also be encouraged to do whatever they want with their lives. Some small percentage of people will be both willing and able to perform fundamentally productive tasks. (Research or whatever few tasks can't be automated.) A much larger percentage of people will be able to perform tasks that _could_ feasibly be automated, but which some people would prefer to do/have done for them by hand. (Art or all kinds, crafts, performance, running local pubs and restaurants, etc.) And some percentage of people, maybe very small, maybe rather large, will be unwilling or unable to think of anything useful or entertaining to do, and will just sit on their asses all day consuming stuff instead. And everyone else will have to learn to accept that without judging them for it. And after all, the middle group of people needs an audience to view their media and admire their crafts and go to their pubs and restaurants and what have you.
Sadly, many people would rather believe that some powerful, competent and malevolent group is in charge and causes all the bad shit that happens. Whether that group is the government, corporations, the UN, the Illuminati, or whatever.
The idea that sometimes shit happens because someone just screwed up is scary. The idea that sometimes shit just happens and it isn't even possible to stop it is scary. No one would have had to come up with the adage "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" if people weren't so eager to believe that there was someone to blame for intentionally causing all their problems instead.
Note of course this does not deny that governments, corporations, and other groups _can't_ purposefully do shitty things to people, just that people have a strong tendency to exaggerate the power, maliciousness and competence of those groups.
Some books have very memorable prose. Most books however strive to tell a good story. (Some books manage to do both. Standard plug for Lois McMaster Bujold here.)
For most books when you get involved in the story you're focused on what's happening in the story, not the exact prose that's used to tell that story. On Facebook you're only going to remember a post if something particularly dramatic happen (which for most people happens fairly rarely) or if they make a memorable quip. And most Facebook posts, especially those that get repeated and spread, tend towards the memorable quip end of the spectrum.
If you asked people to give a general outline of what happened in the book they read a week ago compared to what was going on in all their friends' lives as posted on Facebook a week ago the results would probably be much more balanced.
For _real_ security you need three factor authentication. something you can forget, something you can lose (a finger, an eye) and something you can set on fire (keycard, phone, etc.)
(Though if you're hardcore enough to set yourself on fire to prove a point we'll let you get away with two factor authentication. Mainly because if you're that crazy we'll agree to anything you say just to get you to go away quickly.)
...yes, and this demonstrates that a company can't necessarily get away with the same thing. That's kind of the point.
Lawmakers can get away with it because A: leaving the country is a bit more difficult than abandoning a company, and B: only people who are effectively single-issue voters are going to remember about the issue come the next election and care about it more than anything else the legislator has done in their term.
Because if it's true it's good evidence, and a good warning for other companies, that you can't send up a trial ballon and see if you can get away with something outrageous and just recant later if the users notice without suffering any negative long term effects.
I am not a serious Star Wars geek, but i know the game is set a few thousand years before the movies, which among other things is why there are tons of Sith running around. The Jedi philosophy has changed a lot over the entire history of the Star Wars universe (if you check the Wookipedia they've got detailed articles about events going back at least tens of thousands and quite possibly hundreds of thousands of years, though i forget the exact details.)
It's possible that at that point in history the Jedi hadn't adopted some of the more extreme "modern" views (no emotional attachments, must begin training practically at birth.) And of course as others have pointed out, Jedi aren't the only kind of character you can play in the game.
Well first of all, they successfully predicted it would be here now, so they must have done something right.
The issue is that mass is irrelevant when you're measuring how something is affected by gravity. This was the point of the (possibly apocryphal) experiments of Galileo. The force of the gravity on the object is proportional to the mass of the object, but the force needed to move the object is also proportional to its mass, so it all cancels out. Apophis will continue to follow the same path, no matter what its mass is.
Now technically speaking the weight of the object does affect the rate at which other things fall towards it. (If you drop a 2kg weight the earth "falls" upwards twice as fast as if you drop a 1kg weight, but the difference is obviously too small to be measured.) So if Apophis encounters an object close to or smaller than its own mass it will make a difference. However i'm pretty sure they aren't able to predict encounters with objects that small, so if it does happen it will be a totally unexpected event with an unknown affect on its orbit anyways.
First of all, i actually started out loading up the wikipedia article on Elite. I spent about 30 seconds skimming it without seeing anything that obviously said "real time sim" vs "turn based sim" before deciding i could instead, i dunno, start a discussion about it with the other people on slashdot. I'm sure i would have found what i was looking for if i'd spent longer at it, but aside from the first AC and yourself everyone else here has been polite and informative and i (and anyone else who had the same question and came across the thread after me) have learned far more from them than i would have learned from just reading the full wikipedia page.
As for the rest, really? You think there's some different set of games that _is_ especially impressive? If i'd played more obscure things and less popular stuff i would have more geek cred in your eyes? That's... rather sad actually.
What i've played isn't impressive, and i'm sure isn't really any more or less geeky than what anyone else here has likely played. All my list "proves" is that i've played a number of games, so by any reasonable standard whether any one particular game is in the list or not ought to be entirely irrelevant.
The whole "turn in your geek card" thing was kind of amusing back at the beginning, when people just used it for things like Star Wars and Star Trek. But the idea has become much more insidious since then. People are actually grading people on their geekiness in real life on a pass/fail basis. Most recently a lot of males have been trying to eject female geeks from geekdom because they supposedly don't measure up. The geeky things they do aren't geeky enough because of... reasons.
You yourself are aptly demonstrating the trait. Have you considered the possibility that maybe your grandma _is_ a geek? I don't know her so i can't say, but just from what you've said she already sounds a lot geekier than a lot of the other grandmas i've heard about. But on the other hand even if she clearly isn't a geek, how does her having played a game in the Civilization genre make that genre less geeky? Did it get grandma-cooties when she touched it? Despite your claims Civilization is pretty damn geeky. Take a look at Sullla's pages about Civilization and the incredibly complex succession and internet games he's participated in, and his rants about the failings of Civilization 5 and just try to claim that he and the other people like him aren't geeks.
Or is the problem less with your grandma and more with it being "immensely popular"? But you know what? The Avengers movie was pretty immensely popular too. Has that made the Avengers, or comics in general, less geeky than they were before? Or are you just cherry-picking attributes so you can deny geekdom to whoever you happen to disagree with? Are you viewing geekdom, whether consciously or not, as some kind of private club whose value only increases the smaller the membership is, necessitating you do your best to keep all the "noobs" out?
Maybe it's not a conscious process, but i've seen the same thing happening to a lot of geeky conventions. Many of the old SF conventions are starting to die out. In at least one of those cases i know for a fact that it's because a decade ago or so a decision was made to purposefully demphasize anime, ie "that new fangled stuff those damn young whippersnappers watch." So those "damn kids" went and started their own con (with anime, and hookers, and blackjack! Okay, maybe just the anime) which has gotten bigger every year, while the original con has gotten smaller, and the demographics noticeably older, every year since.
Being elitist and alienating new fans (whether intentional or not) only just hurts the group in the long run. Other conventions (ComicCon and DragonCon being pretty prominent examples) have said "you kids have some new thing you are geeeky about? Why don't you show us, and we'll show you the things th
I think the more important question, brought to my mind by the Death to Pennies video, is whether they'll round in all cases or just when paying with cash. There's obviously no need to round if you're using a debit or credit card.
The video makes the very informative point that when you're fiddling around with actual physical pennies at the register you're wasting not only your own time, but the time of everyone in line behind you. The difference of plus or minus a couple pennies literally isn't worth the time spent dealing with them for most people, even without counting the accumulated time you're costing everyone else. I believe it was estimated that the lost opportunity cost was at _least_ an order of magnitude larger than the loss from minting the pennies.
Which means that even if stores _always_ rounded up (which they're not actually doing) you'd _still_ come out ahead in the long run just from the time you saved.
Ahh yes, it's not enough to have played Tradewars 2002, SRE, BRE, Legend of the Red Dragon, Star Control 2, SimCity, Civilization, MoO, MoM, X-Wing, Ultima, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu, and more other series than i care to list at this point (or can even really remember.) The fact that i haven't played this one single 20+ year old game means that i have irretrievably lost all geek credibility. And having publicly admitted to the lack, instead of encouraging me to make up for that gap in my experience clearly the only possible course of action is to tell me to get the hell out of the club. And one wonders why geeks have a less than sterling reputation in some circles?
For those of us who aren't familiar with the original Elite (and can't check it out on Kickstarter because we're lazy or at work) what kind of game is it exactly?
Is it a turn based game like Tradewars 2002? Or is it a real time flight sim like Wing Commander or X-Wing with economics and upgradeable ships?
If it's the former i'll definitely jump in at the last minute. I loved TW2002 in high school. If it's the later... well i liked X-Wing, but i'm not convinced about the marriage of that type of game to an economic sim. (I've tried out the X series and some similar games on Steam, but the controls kind of sucked and i never got into them at all.)
What qualifies as major? I know i've seen ads for it a number of times. Admittedly i can't remember now if they were on TV or YouTube. Obviously putting self-promoting ads on YouTube is pretty easy for Google, but it's not like a lot of people wouldn't see them there.
I think between movies and Mythbusters my expectations for explosions are entirely out of whack with "common" explosions in reality, or at least what i expect to be shown off in internet videos. Those firecracker explosions were a lot quieter than i was expecting (at least as recorded in the video) and i was hoping to see either the cardboard box or the ballistic gel actually be broken apart by the explosion, but no such luck.
They seemed like the kind of thing that the Mythbusters would get when trying to reproduce the myth. The kind where they'd decide the myth was a failure and then go on and try to replicate the results with progressively larger amounts of explosive. Although given that they almost always end up having to scale things up i guess it makes sense that a "normal" firecracker just isn't that impressive.
It probably doesn't say much that most slashdotters aren't already familiar with, but this video is both entertaining and informative about the subject.
I can't speak for all english speakers, but the only terms i'm familiar with are AD/BC ("Anno Domini" and "Before Christ") and CE/BCE ("Common Era" and "Before Common Era".) AD and BC are by far the most common terms. BC and BCE are "politically correct" terms mostly used in scholarly works or by people who feel rather adamantly about being non-Christian.
And i'd certainly believe i'm confused about AC. As i said, this is the first time i've ever heard the term, and that seemed to be the only relevant wikipedia page.
It was pretty clear that he _had_ read your post, and was just confused by the "AC" notation. I'd never heard the term before either, and upon checking wikipedia i notice it says:
"These terms are chiefly found in modern Latin texts. English speakers are unlikely to recognize them. Neither the Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.), the American Heritage Dictionary (3rd ed.), nor P. Kenneth Seidelmann's Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac (1992, University Science Books) mention AC, ACN, or Ante Christum Natum."
If you're going to go around using terms that you know most people aren't going to recognize, especially ones that could easily be mistaken for typos of more common terms, there's no reason to be snarky when people predictably get confused. A simple definition of the term without trying to imply that the failure in comprehension was due to a lack of effort on their part would certainly do.
Unless of course you're deliberately baiting people so you can boast about how you know Latin and the attempt to denigrate their reading skills is meant to call attention to your own superiority. But that would be kind of a dick move.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying people _should_ pirate the game, but your car analogy kinda sucks.
How about this, the car company comes out with a brand new car with octagonal wheels. The octagonal wheels make it harder to steal, but it does function as a car. Barely. (Except of course that a small percentage of buyers will find upon delivery that their new car actually has square wheels and won't budge at all.) The wheels are attached with special nuts that need a special tool to be removed, and the design of that tool is protected by the DMCA. So removing those nuts so you can replace the octagonal tires with round ones is a felony.
But then you discover some people have illegally gotten ahold of the plans for the car. They're willing to let you have a copy, and even use their giant 3D printer to print out the car for free. And oh yeah, they've already replaced the stupid octagonal tires in the plans with regular round ones.
It's a pretty silly thought experiment, but it would still theoretically be illegal and about matches the situation with the new SimCity. At least a lot more so than stealing a car just because you happen not to like On-Star.
My company has a iPad app for interfacing with our software. We don't have an Android app (though as an afterthought we have started developing an "agnostic" HTML5 interface.) Why is that? It wasn't because of market studies or user feedback or anything like that. It was because our CEO got an iPad, and she really liked it. So she thought we ought to be able to use our software with an iPad.
It doesn't matter how dumb you think CEOs are on average (though i've got to say, our CEO is pretty smart in general, even if i don't agree with her on this one decision) they can have a massive influence on what direction a company takes. Whether it's deciding which platforms to develop software for or what brand of phone the company will supply or something else i'm not even thinking of, if you can convince a bunch of CEOs that your product is a great thing there's probably something they can do to help you out.
You're quite happy with the benefits of the system, but you're dead set against having to pay any of the costs that support that system and the benefits it provides. So... you're a Republican?
So the same person is now in charge of both the Star Wars movies and the Star Trek movies?
I think i just felt a disturbance in the force, as if millions of fans involved in the never ending "which is better, Star Wars or Star Trek?" debates suddenly cried out in bewilderment and then their heads asploded.
Would the response be pretty disastrous for NK regardless of which part of the US they hit? Yeah. Would people care as much about a nuke hitting Anchorage as they would about it hitting SF? No.
I'm not saying they wouldn't care. They'd still be outraged. But there's definitely a hierarchy of importance in peoples' minds. Obviously everyone has a particular fondness for their home town/state, but outside of that there's probably a reasonable level of agreement, based on an amalgamation of population, political importance, economic importance, and cultural importance. Obviously DC is at the top. After that would be New York and Los Angeles. Then a big third tier, with San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Detroit, Boston, etc.
As long as NK is going to bluster and threaten, they're going to threaten the biggest target they can. Actually, i'm not sure why San Francisco is being focused on rather than Los Angeles. From NK's perspective the difference in the distance between them is pretty small.
It is amazing that you somehow read my post and thought i said anything at all about the Democrats. Or do you believe in a black and white world where if i say something negative about the Republicans it must mean that the Democrats are positive in exactly the opposite manner?
Look, suppose Republicans and their corporate cronies actually got everything they say they want and you and i are correct about the consequences. The end result would be global economic collapse and most likely revolution and possibly outright war. The poor tend to suffer disproportionately during such things, but the rich aren't entirely immune. (Especially if someone decides to start tossing nukes around.)
I seriously doubt that's what they actually want for themselves. So either they're being selectively stupid about some things, or you and i are being selectively stupid about some things. (Or alternately, the Republicans and corporations are demanding outrageous things either as a bargaining position or in exchange for favors, which could be it's own kind of stupid.)
People are rarely either smart about everything or stupid about everything. It's entirely possible to be good at gaining or maintaining money or power without being able to forsee long term consequences of some of your actions.
I'm not saying they're not wrong. And maybe they're not very nice people. But i seriosuly doubt they're plotting the downfall of western civilization while cackling madly. In fact it's entirely possible they're incredibly competent at some things but so totally deluded in other areas that they'd actually be surprised if their plans didn't work out. Look at Mitt Romney. He was competent enough to get rich and get the nomination, and yet he and a lot of the other Republicans were caught totally unprepared by reality on election day. Unless you think that was just part of a deeper plot?
Did you miss the post earlier today about automation in fast food?
So before long you'll be able to walk to McDonalds and order a meal made entirely by robots. And then you can go home and do your shopping and order stuff off of Amazon. A robot truck will deliver the items you ordered, which were packed by a robot at a warehouse, which received the goods (also by robot truck) from an automated factory.
Aside from boutiques and upscale restaurants which can only be afforded by the upper-class, where do you see the service industry in all of this?
What we _ought_ to do is find a way to decouple the association between productivity (measured either as output or compensation) and status/moral superiority.
Everyone should be provided with the basic necessities of life. Ideally in the form of actual housing, clothing, food, health care, education, etc, rather than being given a "welfare check" and told to find those things for themselves on the market.
Everyone should also be encouraged to do whatever they want with their lives. Some small percentage of people will be both willing and able to perform fundamentally productive tasks. (Research or whatever few tasks can't be automated.) A much larger percentage of people will be able to perform tasks that _could_ feasibly be automated, but which some people would prefer to do/have done for them by hand. (Art or all kinds, crafts, performance, running local pubs and restaurants, etc.) And some percentage of people, maybe very small, maybe rather large, will be unwilling or unable to think of anything useful or entertaining to do, and will just sit on their asses all day consuming stuff instead. And everyone else will have to learn to accept that without judging them for it. And after all, the middle group of people needs an audience to view their media and admire their crafts and go to their pubs and restaurants and what have you.
Sadly, many people would rather believe that some powerful, competent and malevolent group is in charge and causes all the bad shit that happens. Whether that group is the government, corporations, the UN, the Illuminati, or whatever.
The idea that sometimes shit happens because someone just screwed up is scary. The idea that sometimes shit just happens and it isn't even possible to stop it is scary. No one would have had to come up with the adage "Never attribute to malice that which can adequately be explained by stupidity" if people weren't so eager to believe that there was someone to blame for intentionally causing all their problems instead.
Note of course this does not deny that governments, corporations, and other groups _can't_ purposefully do shitty things to people, just that people have a strong tendency to exaggerate the power, maliciousness and competence of those groups.
Some books have very memorable prose. Most books however strive to tell a good story. (Some books manage to do both. Standard plug for Lois McMaster Bujold here.)
For most books when you get involved in the story you're focused on what's happening in the story, not the exact prose that's used to tell that story. On Facebook you're only going to remember a post if something particularly dramatic happen (which for most people happens fairly rarely) or if they make a memorable quip. And most Facebook posts, especially those that get repeated and spread, tend towards the memorable quip end of the spectrum.
If you asked people to give a general outline of what happened in the book they read a week ago compared to what was going on in all their friends' lives as posted on Facebook a week ago the results would probably be much more balanced.
For _real_ security you need three factor authentication. something you can forget, something you can lose (a finger, an eye) and something you can set on fire (keycard, phone, etc.)
(Though if you're hardcore enough to set yourself on fire to prove a point we'll let you get away with two factor authentication. Mainly because if you're that crazy we'll agree to anything you say just to get you to go away quickly.)
...yes, and this demonstrates that a company can't necessarily get away with the same thing. That's kind of the point.
Lawmakers can get away with it because A: leaving the country is a bit more difficult than abandoning a company, and B: only people who are effectively single-issue voters are going to remember about the issue come the next election and care about it more than anything else the legislator has done in their term.
Because if it's true it's good evidence, and a good warning for other companies, that you can't send up a trial ballon and see if you can get away with something outrageous and just recant later if the users notice without suffering any negative long term effects.
I am not a serious Star Wars geek, but i know the game is set a few thousand years before the movies, which among other things is why there are tons of Sith running around. The Jedi philosophy has changed a lot over the entire history of the Star Wars universe (if you check the Wookipedia they've got detailed articles about events going back at least tens of thousands and quite possibly hundreds of thousands of years, though i forget the exact details.)
It's possible that at that point in history the Jedi hadn't adopted some of the more extreme "modern" views (no emotional attachments, must begin training practically at birth.) And of course as others have pointed out, Jedi aren't the only kind of character you can play in the game.
Well first of all, they successfully predicted it would be here now, so they must have done something right.
The issue is that mass is irrelevant when you're measuring how something is affected by gravity. This was the point of the (possibly apocryphal) experiments of Galileo. The force of the gravity on the object is proportional to the mass of the object, but the force needed to move the object is also proportional to its mass, so it all cancels out. Apophis will continue to follow the same path, no matter what its mass is.
Now technically speaking the weight of the object does affect the rate at which other things fall towards it. (If you drop a 2kg weight the earth "falls" upwards twice as fast as if you drop a 1kg weight, but the difference is obviously too small to be measured.) So if Apophis encounters an object close to or smaller than its own mass it will make a difference. However i'm pretty sure they aren't able to predict encounters with objects that small, so if it does happen it will be a totally unexpected event with an unknown affect on its orbit anyways.
First of all, i actually started out loading up the wikipedia article on Elite. I spent about 30 seconds skimming it without seeing anything that obviously said "real time sim" vs "turn based sim" before deciding i could instead, i dunno, start a discussion about it with the other people on slashdot. I'm sure i would have found what i was looking for if i'd spent longer at it, but aside from the first AC and yourself everyone else here has been polite and informative and i (and anyone else who had the same question and came across the thread after me) have learned far more from them than i would have learned from just reading the full wikipedia page.
As for the rest, really? You think there's some different set of games that _is_ especially impressive? If i'd played more obscure things and less popular stuff i would have more geek cred in your eyes? That's... rather sad actually.
What i've played isn't impressive, and i'm sure isn't really any more or less geeky than what anyone else here has likely played. All my list "proves" is that i've played a number of games, so by any reasonable standard whether any one particular game is in the list or not ought to be entirely irrelevant.
The whole "turn in your geek card" thing was kind of amusing back at the beginning, when people just used it for things like Star Wars and Star Trek. But the idea has become much more insidious since then. People are actually grading people on their geekiness in real life on a pass/fail basis. Most recently a lot of males have been trying to eject female geeks from geekdom because they supposedly don't measure up. The geeky things they do aren't geeky enough because of... reasons.
You yourself are aptly demonstrating the trait. Have you considered the possibility that maybe your grandma _is_ a geek? I don't know her so i can't say, but just from what you've said she already sounds a lot geekier than a lot of the other grandmas i've heard about. But on the other hand even if she clearly isn't a geek, how does her having played a game in the Civilization genre make that genre less geeky? Did it get grandma-cooties when she touched it? Despite your claims Civilization is pretty damn geeky. Take a look at Sullla's pages about Civilization and the incredibly complex succession and internet games he's participated in, and his rants about the failings of Civilization 5 and just try to claim that he and the other people like him aren't geeks.
Or is the problem less with your grandma and more with it being "immensely popular"? But you know what? The Avengers movie was pretty immensely popular too. Has that made the Avengers, or comics in general, less geeky than they were before? Or are you just cherry-picking attributes so you can deny geekdom to whoever you happen to disagree with? Are you viewing geekdom, whether consciously or not, as some kind of private club whose value only increases the smaller the membership is, necessitating you do your best to keep all the "noobs" out?
Maybe it's not a conscious process, but i've seen the same thing happening to a lot of geeky conventions. Many of the old SF conventions are starting to die out. In at least one of those cases i know for a fact that it's because a decade ago or so a decision was made to purposefully demphasize anime, ie "that new fangled stuff those damn young whippersnappers watch." So those "damn kids" went and started their own con (with anime, and hookers, and blackjack! Okay, maybe just the anime) which has gotten bigger every year, while the original con has gotten smaller, and the demographics noticeably older, every year since.
Being elitist and alienating new fans (whether intentional or not) only just hurts the group in the long run. Other conventions (ComicCon and DragonCon being pretty prominent examples) have said "you kids have some new thing you are geeeky about? Why don't you show us, and we'll show you the things th
I think the more important question, brought to my mind by the Death to Pennies video, is whether they'll round in all cases or just when paying with cash. There's obviously no need to round if you're using a debit or credit card.
The video makes the very informative point that when you're fiddling around with actual physical pennies at the register you're wasting not only your own time, but the time of everyone in line behind you. The difference of plus or minus a couple pennies literally isn't worth the time spent dealing with them for most people, even without counting the accumulated time you're costing everyone else. I believe it was estimated that the lost opportunity cost was at _least_ an order of magnitude larger than the loss from minting the pennies.
Which means that even if stores _always_ rounded up (which they're not actually doing) you'd _still_ come out ahead in the long run just from the time you saved.
"Turn in your geek card RIGHT NOW"
Ahh yes, it's not enough to have played Tradewars 2002, SRE, BRE, Legend of the Red Dragon, Star Control 2, SimCity, Civilization, MoO, MoM, X-Wing, Ultima, Bard's Tale, Might and Magic, Final Fantasy, Chrono Trigger, Seiken Densetsu, and more other series than i care to list at this point (or can even really remember.) The fact that i haven't played this one single 20+ year old game means that i have irretrievably lost all geek credibility. And having publicly admitted to the lack, instead of encouraging me to make up for that gap in my experience clearly the only possible course of action is to tell me to get the hell out of the club. And one wonders why geeks have a less than sterling reputation in some circles?
For those of us who aren't familiar with the original Elite (and can't check it out on Kickstarter because we're lazy or at work) what kind of game is it exactly?
Is it a turn based game like Tradewars 2002? Or is it a real time flight sim like Wing Commander or X-Wing with economics and upgradeable ships?
If it's the former i'll definitely jump in at the last minute. I loved TW2002 in high school. If it's the later... well i liked X-Wing, but i'm not convinced about the marriage of that type of game to an economic sim. (I've tried out the X series and some similar games on Steam, but the controls kind of sucked and i never got into them at all.)
What qualifies as major? I know i've seen ads for it a number of times. Admittedly i can't remember now if they were on TV or YouTube. Obviously putting self-promoting ads on YouTube is pretty easy for Google, but it's not like a lot of people wouldn't see them there.
I think between movies and Mythbusters my expectations for explosions are entirely out of whack with "common" explosions in reality, or at least what i expect to be shown off in internet videos. Those firecracker explosions were a lot quieter than i was expecting (at least as recorded in the video) and i was hoping to see either the cardboard box or the ballistic gel actually be broken apart by the explosion, but no such luck.
They seemed like the kind of thing that the Mythbusters would get when trying to reproduce the myth. The kind where they'd decide the myth was a failure and then go on and try to replicate the results with progressively larger amounts of explosive. Although given that they almost always end up having to scale things up i guess it makes sense that a "normal" firecracker just isn't that impressive.
It probably doesn't say much that most slashdotters aren't already familiar with, but this video is both entertaining and informative about the subject.
I can't speak for all english speakers, but the only terms i'm familiar with are AD/BC ("Anno Domini" and "Before Christ") and CE/BCE ("Common Era" and "Before Common Era".) AD and BC are by far the most common terms. BC and BCE are "politically correct" terms mostly used in scholarly works or by people who feel rather adamantly about being non-Christian.
And i'd certainly believe i'm confused about AC. As i said, this is the first time i've ever heard the term, and that seemed to be the only relevant wikipedia page.
"These terms are chiefly found in modern Latin texts. English speakers are unlikely to recognize them. Neither the Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.), the American Heritage Dictionary (3rd ed.), nor P. Kenneth Seidelmann's Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Almanac (1992, University Science Books) mention AC, ACN, or Ante Christum Natum."
If you're going to go around using terms that you know most people aren't going to recognize, especially ones that could easily be mistaken for typos of more common terms, there's no reason to be snarky when people predictably get confused. A simple definition of the term without trying to imply that the failure in comprehension was due to a lack of effort on their part would certainly do.
Unless of course you're deliberately baiting people so you can boast about how you know Latin and the attempt to denigrate their reading skills is meant to call attention to your own superiority. But that would be kind of a dick move.