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User: twoallbeefpatties

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  1. Re:The Jerk on What Should Start-Ups Do With the Brilliant Jerk? · · Score: 2

    Do not taunt happy brilliant jerk?

  2. Re:Diablo 3 is fine. on Game Review: Torchlight 2 · · Score: 2

    I concur. I cannot help but be amazed at the number of people who think that Blizzard killed their puppies or something. I mean, just look at this thing... "Gift of the gods?" "The new best game ever?" I think Borderlands 2 is probably the game of the year, but I don't think anyone's granted it sainthood yet.

    And then there's this: Sure, you can only reallocate the last three skill points you've spent, and you can't redo all your stats and skills once you're leveled up. That's so that you learn from your mistakes and go back and play the game again. Fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. I'm halfway through Borderlands 2. I want to try Guild Wars 2 when I'm done. I have a double-digit list of games from Steam sales that I haven't gotten around to, including wanting to finish SpaceChem. Do not tell me that it's a bonus for me to have to play a game multiple times in order to figure out what works. That is goddamned Stockholm Syndrome, and I have other things I could be doing.

    I played Diablo 3. I beat inferno with my monk before paragon levels were introduced. I had a full set of good gear, but I stuck with tankier stuff and mostly ignored damage so that I wouldn't need millions of gold in order to buy what I needed. This meant that I couldn't cruise through the last area and had to do a ton of kiting and positioning, but it also meant the last playthrough was a genuine challenge, and I enjoyed the trying to keep up valor stacks while trudging my way through heaven.

    D3 was not the game of the year. The online issues were horrible. The crafting system was unnecessary for what it was. The difficulty of inferno was enjoyable for me since I got what I wanted from the AH, but it also required people to stalk the AH since the just-good gear that they got from drops wasn't enough to go on. But it was also a game that uniquely dared to let me mix and match and try out twenty-five different skills to my heart's content, to find things that I liked or to just experiment when I got bored of one path, and you wouldn't have to torture me to say I liked what I played.

    I will probably buy Torchlight 2 on the winter sale, and then I'll wait until there's a respec mod for cheaters before I turn it on. I want to not be angry about this - I honestly have no issue with games existing for people who are not me. You want a game based on oldschool skill trees and locked-in levelling? Hey, go have fun. But I personally can't play another game where I click the same skill a billion times without getting to try out anything else, only to have to quit at level 30 because the choices I made at level 20 made me too weak to progress further, and there's something that gets under my skin about what seems to be a whole political movement that thinks that makes me a socialist.

  3. or Brazil on Ask Slashdot: What's the Most Depressing Sci-fi You've Ever Read? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    You know, I read 1984 when I was in junior high (which was in the early 90s), and it was a dark and frightening read. But it didn't really hit me that hard. Then as an adult a few years ago, I watched Terry Gilliam's Brazil for the first time, and it depressed the hell out of me.

    1984 is a story about an ultra-competent government that manages to run everything just the way it wants to and convince people to act and think how it wants. Brazil was a story about an amazingly incompetent government that so much fails at it's job as to take society down with it. Guess which one I find more relevant to the current state of affairs?

  4. Re: Vegetarians on Meat the Food of the Future · · Score: 2

    I have a friend who's veg but allows for dairy products, which is where I believe she gets a lot of her protein. That might be an interesting question, is whether or not cows as dairy machines could provide the same protein/fat requirements as meat on using less energy or space.

  5. A eulogy for 4th edition on Slashdot's Rob Rozeboom Interviews D&D Designer Mike Mearls (video) · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ah, 4th edition. You tried so hard, and you largely succeeded. You gave healers something to do other than cast heal spells every turn, and a day of dungeoneering was able to continue past the first battle instead of everyone going, "The cleric's used up his spells - we're going back to base!"

    You gave defensive builds a place in the world without making them boring. You took away a wizard's level 1 crossbow and gave him all the fireballs he wanted. You gave every class something to do other than basic melee attacks. You made characters interesting right from level 1 instead of forcing people to pray for an interesting character 10 levels down the road.

    You took away multiclassing, and there was a gnashing of munchkin teeth, but you gave us arcane swordsmen and holy assassins and psychic healers. You broke up the age-old racial tradition of just elves, humans, and dwarves by sticking tieflings, dragonborn, goliaths, and devas into the main books. You got rid of prestige classes, those wonky things that forced people into specific build types, and instead gave us multiple builds for the base of a class and paragon paths for later on. Your flavor was more focused on the character than on the class min/maxing.

    But, in your certain rush to fix everything that was wrong with D&D, you forgot the feel. You felt that you could discard the very makeup of the game and craft something new from scratch. Despite the interesting things that happened to a new character, your demand for balance forced you to keep everyone the same beyond level 1. While many people rallied behind you, you split the community as the players who had been in the game for years threw up their hands in disgust and went to a fork of your previous system, preferring an imperfect system that felt more like something from their youth and less like those infernal MMORPGs.

    I've seen the playtest, and at first glance it looks like something that tries to bring the two groups together. But the PnP RPG faces a diminished audience from the outset, what with kids all distracted by their new-fangled machine, and the audience that you drove away has come to call you a heretic and isn't bound to return even if you pander to them again. Godspeed to you, Wizards, but I fear there's not much more you can do.

  6. Private Hiring Back to 2008 Levels on IT Salaries and Hiring Are Up — But Just To 2008 Levels · · Score: 1

    It's not just IT. This link is a graph of all reported employees in America over the past four years: http://www.businessinsider.com/the-chart-public-sector-vs-private-sector-employment-2012-6 In summary, the number of workers in the private sector is back up to about where it was in 2008 (which is still too small for a growing economy). It's the lagging public sector that's keeping overall employment rates below where they were before the recession.

  7. Re:Of course it's the market! on Bloomberg, WSJ: Student Aid Increases Tuition · · Score: 1

    On the one hand, I heard a debate on KCRW's To The Point a while back about college costs. One of the guests was a college administrator who said the same thing - he said that the biggest cost of his small school was faculty wages, and the price of faculty was staying high while some of the other costs were decreasing.

    On the other hand, while Googling a relevant link for this topic, I looked into faculty costs a little, and I found a number of links suggesting that professor salaries have essentially stayed the same over the years, rising about the same as inflation. So I'm not sure exactly how true that is.

  8. Planet Money Podcast on the subject on Bloomberg, WSJ: Student Aid Increases Tuition · · Score: 1

    And for anyone with a few minutes to spare, you can listen to the whole Planet Money podcast on this topic: (Link)

  9. Of course it's the market! on Bloomberg, WSJ: Student Aid Increases Tuition · · Score: 4, Informative
    Why is it the market? Because we say it's the market! Don't bother investigating or ask colleges why they raised tuitions! Just assume it's the market! MARKET! The link in the OP is, predictably, an opinion piece and not any sort of survey or discussion with actual educators.

    This link leads to a study by a nonprofit group that had some different answers:

    The main reason tuition has been rising faster than college costs is that colleges had to make up for reductions in the per-student subsidy state taxpayers sent colleges. In 2006, the last year for which Wellman had data, state taxpayers sent $7,078 per student to the big public research universities. That's $1,270 less (after accounting for inflation) than they sent in 2002.

    Public universities have been reining in overall spending per student in recent years. Flagship public universities' spending per student has risen from about $12,400 in 1995 to $13,800 in 2006 after accounting for inflation. But since 2002, spending at public colleges has generally not exceeded inflation.

    Increases in spending were driven mostly by higher administration, maintenance, and student services costs. Public universities spent almost $4,000 per student per year on administration, support, and maintenance in 2006, up more than 13 percent, in real terms over 1995. And they spent another $1,200 a year on services such as counseling, which was up 23 percent. Meanwhile, they spent about $8,700 a year on classroom instruction for each student, up about 9 percent.

    Big private universities, powered by tuition and endowment increases, have increased spending dramatically while public schools have languished. Total educational spending per student at private research universities has jumped by almost 10 percent since 2002 to more than $33,000. During that same period, public university total spending was comparatively flat and totaled less than $14,000 a year.

  10. Re:Uh....May Fools Day? on Dungeons & Dragons Next Playtest Released · · Score: 1

    There's got to be some sort of internet law about how impossible it is to have a discussion about D&D without talking about how other systems are better.

  11. Re:"Not voting" on House Passes CISPA · · Score: 1

    Could Ron Paul not have made similar arrangements?

    No, because that would've implied the two political parties coming to a gentlemanly agreement. This sort of thing has died over the past three decades over here.

  12. Shouldn't wages be going up in other careers? on Reversing the Loss of Science and Engineering Careers · · Score: 1

    Last year I became a truck driver when I needed a career change. I'm told that the industry has a dearth of over-the-road (OTR) truck drivers. Most guys don't want to spend their entire day on the road, not getting home every night (or even every week), not seeing their families or having a social life. OTR is the position that newbies get dumped into, it's just what they have to take to get a foothold into the profession, but a lot of them end up pulling regional or local work as soon as they can get a year's experience under their belts.

    Having said all of that, I've also read trucker forums where some guys say they wish new OTR drivers would stop joining the profession, because then maybe the pay would finally go up. The average OTR company driver is making $40k-$50k depending on their experience levels, and what's more, it's entirely dependent on how much work you get since you're usually paid by the mile rather than hourly or salary. You run all day and don't get home much, but you have to fight for that middle-class salary.

    This is something that I've heard across various professions, that wages are just not going up even when there's demand. I suspect the "real problem" here is actually not that companies want to secretly give all the jobs to foreigners. I think the problem is that the American economy no longer correctly pays for employment in accordance with demand. As other people have said about the way managers get paid more, we have some long-ingrained ideas about who is supposed to get paid what in this country, and it's hard as fuck-all to get anyone to change their minds on that, even when they aren't attracting anyone at that price.

  13. What sacrifices? on Book Review: Occupy World Street · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Over the past three decades, the masses have had declining wages. The masses have seen fewer employers offering health and retirement benefits. The masses have seen explosive growth in the cost of education, which was supposed to be the method by which they bettered themselves. The masses suffered unemployment and foreclosure as the result of the last economic collapse.

    I think a lot of the masses, which have already lost quite a bit, are starting to ask, "When are the controllers going to start sacrificing as much as we have?"

    You said, "...not one single President or politician has asked *any* American to sacrifice *anything* in over 40 years." Obama suggested that the tax rates for the top earners go back to the place where they were ten years ago, and he was branded a job-killer and capitalism-hater. Maybe it's not the masses that are your problem here.

  14. The future of novelty music on Ask They Might Be Giants About Almost 30 Years of Music · · Score: 1

    Your music has long occupied a sort of middle ground between "real" pop rock and the kind of music you used to hear on Dr. Demento. These days, the Internet has sort of lead a revolution in novelty-type music, from flash cartoon showtunes to YouTube remixes to rappers who write rhymes for a deliberately nerdy audience. I'm sure you're at least familiar with part of this phenomenon due to your recent tour with Jonathan Coulton. What's your observation on the future of the silly song?

  15. Re:Al Gore Busted! on 150th Anniversary of Greenhouse Climate Theory · · Score: 1

    I'm assuming it's a sort of projectionism. Many on the far right lionize Ronald Reagan and Bill O'Reilly to such a degree that they assume that the left must have golden calves of their own that they absolutely worship.

  16. Re:Rumour has it PRESS ONLY at this stage. on Diablo III Beta Begins · · Score: 1

    I watched the stream from the Day9 site the other night. Best line of the night, while playing the witch doctor:

    "OH ****, KILL IT WITH FROGS"

  17. Reminds me of something on Microsoft Has Lost $5.5 Billion On Bing Since 2009 · · Score: 1

    Initially a money sink, expected to be profitable five years down the road... Wasn't that the same thing that happened to the original XBox?

  18. Re:Yeah, class warfare. That's right. on White House Proposes "Wealthy Tax" · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The other problem with labels like class warfare is how much they miss the point of what actual class warfare is.

    You're giving the phrase too much credit. The term "class warfare" is just an advertising slogan. It's what conservatives say in response to any program which might raise revenues on the upper class. It's not something that can be torn apart and dissected - it's just a phrase meant to evoke a gut response and get people to vote the other way. History means nothing to a slogan.

  19. Re:Private companies are always accountable after on US House 'Creator' of TSA Wants To Kill It · · Score: 1

    The standard libertarian assumption is that government stands in the way of the free market, and that if the government would just get out of the way, then the market would flourish and make all the right decisions. It is an argument that the government should be drownable in a bathtub in order to make a better system. When you ask a libertarian what recourse someone would have in this system if they are abused by a private business, they say they such businesses that abuse their customers will eventually die out. People will stop patronizing businesses that do wrong, or customers will band together to form boycotts.

    Thus the idea that business will be stronger than government but weaker than individuals - though granted, weaker than individuals acting deliberately or otherwise in tandem. What's wrong about that? How does that not represent the libertarian ideal? After all, if government would just get out of the way, then things would be better, right? Individuals don't need the government to deal with large businesses that harm them, right?

    "the unchallenged assumption that government has to be more powerful than the individual." My ideal system is one in which the individual, the government, and private businesses all have checks on each other of about equal power. Say, for example, when many individuals are wronged by a company in a small amount, they should have the right to file class action claims to settle those disputes. In the realm in which a large employer does wrong with its employees, those employees should be able to unionize to represent their interests. If a government does wrong with its constituents, there should be sunshine policies to ensure that the public knows what's going on so that they can make informed decisions at the voting booth. I don't see how my sig has anything against that.

  20. Private companies are always accountable after all on US House 'Creator' of TSA Wants To Kill It · · Score: 2

    "By entering this metal detector, you have agreed to the EULA of this airport's security measures, including the clause that all disputes with this security checkpoint will be resolved through binding arbitration..."

  21. Re:Parent not joking on New Sony PSN ToS: Class Action Waiver Included · · Score: 1

    Why do I want to pay $10 extra for a product to prevent the very unlikely possibility of losing $50? I wouldn't willingly pay $10 for insurance against such a loss.

    ...You seriously think that insurance against major settlements is going to increase the cost of the good by 20%? Can you name any other good or service in which taking out insurance against fraud on that product causes a 20% increase on the price of the good? I'm pretty sure conservatives don't even make that much of a claim about the price increase from medical malpractice insurance.

  22. Parent not joking on New Sony PSN ToS: Class Action Waiver Included · · Score: 1

    That's the whole point. NO ONE is up for filing 20,000 lawsuits. That's why the corporations are going this route, because they no that no one will be up to filing small lawsuits for claims that might barely get you back triple-digit amounts.

  23. Re:Server needed rebooting .. on IT Crises vs. Vacation: Sometimes It Isn't Pretty · · Score: 1

    The CEO and the power user were mortified that they couldn't figure out which button to push, says Laping, but this particular machine was a Dell rack server with a flat design rather than the tower configuration with which the men were more familiar.

    The two kept pushing a button that was for adjusting the display, not turning the unit on and off. When nothing happened, they panicked. In the end, everyone agreed that the easiest solution would be for Laping to physically fix things himself. "I had to drive two hours back to push a power button," says Laping, recalling that he turned right around and got back on the road once the NIC was up and running again.


    All I could think of was The IT Crowd: http://youtu.be/nn2FB1P_Mn8

  24. Re:Killed by the mp3 player on Sony Announces End For MiniDisc Walkman · · Score: 1

    Well shit, I consider myself enlightened.

  25. Killed by the mp3 player on Sony Announces End For MiniDisc Walkman · · Score: 1

    I had a minidisc player in college that I purchased for two reasons. One, you could hold a few albums' worth of cds on a single disc, so you could carry around a larger library, and the ability to fast forward from track to track made it a lot more convenient than cassette recorders for putting together mixtapes but having the ability to skip and rewind songs. Those features were quickly overtaken by mp3 players, with even more accessibility.

    The second reason I liked the minidisc was that it had a mic input. I carried around a small microphone, and I occasionally recorded bits of shows, or I recorded ambience to use in little sound projects that I had. Today I have an iPod touch with a built-in mic, which is plenty adequate for recording those bits of audio in the real world that I want to hang onto. However, the iPod doesn't have a mic input, so I can't stick in a better mic and record something at a higher quality. But that one feature isn't really enough for most people to still want to carry around a disk of physical memory. Maybe someday I'll break out that little recorder for field recording again.