When work pays for travel, we take it. Vegas to be marketed at by a company? Sure. California for a Visual Basic conference? Sign me up!
Don't ever assume that people go to a conference somewhere because they want/like/care about the product or the conference. A week out of town, expenses paid, and nobody to make sure you actually go? That's what business is all about baby!
I'd say you're doing it wrong. The best investment I ever made was when I liberated a disused 2'x4' dry-erase board from a previous employer. It's got a 1" grid on it, and is fantastic for simplifying what you're talking about. Draw in the terrain, even ahead of the time if you want to. Steal props from any nearby kids, and you can have castles and trees to slap on it. You can write statuses next to anything on the board, and as long as you can remember to move them with any mobile things, it's all good.
Initiative gets put down on one corner, spells with a duration get drawn in, we've had mini-maps in one corner, with a box showing what part was being shown in the main board. Combat is too slow? A 30 sec egg timer fixes that. Strategy is fantastic, as long as you don't spend all game talking about what you *could* do. Trust me - after a few "...with combat fierce and heavy around him, John stands petrified, unsure of what to do. As an arrow flies past his head, Felicia leaps to action." "Sorry John, you took to long. Felicia - it's your turn." your PCs will start getting through combat more quickly.
And really, if you can give up micromanaging, it's even better. I've taken to describing the setup in words, then handing markers to my PCs. Let their imagination shape the bolder strewn valley with the stream running through it. Sometimes they come up with that I'd visualized sometimes not. Either way, I run with it.
I like the strategy of 4th ed. And that's coming from two decades of RPGs, with no major MMO games under my belt. Like anything, it can be done poorly and it can be done well. We play about 50/50 RP and strategy combat in my games. Some nights it's just about all RP, some nights it's just about all combat, and some it's an even mix. I'd recommend giving 4E a few more runs. Specifically, the skill challenges are pretty damn well done, and allow you to mix skills and RP EXTREMELY well, and very efficiently. Basically, you go around the table, and the PCs tell you what they're doing to help overcome the obstacle. There are a couple of main skills, but if they're creative, they can roll for others should they be able to work them in. You set a number of X successes before Y failures, and see if they make it. I've found that group failure is far more epic than single-player, single-roll failure. It's one thing when your fighter tries to climb a cliff and falls down and splats. It's another thing entirely when the dwarf using dungeoneering to look for loose rocks, the fighter is climbing, the rogue is tying knots in the rope, the elf is using acrobatics to balance on a 1" ledge, and they ALL fail! Who do you blame then? "Us."
it can hide the whole "combat system" from you, and just allow you to roleplay.
That would be awesomely terrifying! You'd have no idea if you were just unlucky, or if you couldn't actually hit something. If you succeed the first few times with no problem, it could be your skill, or it could be your luck. That would destroy the powergamers.
The more I think about it, the more awesome that sounds. Your ability levels would quickly transform into "awesome", "ok", "bad", and "sucks". You level up, and say, "I want to be a better fighter." Computer says, "Your fighting has improved". You say, "How much does that help me?" The computer replies, "You'll have to go find out..." Is it enough to take on the boss you've been circling, picking off his minions? Who knows.
That would make RPGs a ton more interesting, without the issues of a GM dictating everything.
I'm really curious - I haven't tried OSS4 yet, but the one thing I haven't ever gotten working on linux is the following setup:
Analog/Digital speakers, with a USB headset.
Can OSS4 handle USB sound? Can it mix multiple streams? Does it have an easy way to switch between input/output devices?
Pulse gave me hope for the above. Then fell flat on its face. I've never been able to get dmix to handle this setup, and ALSA doesn't seem to do it.
I hate to say it as a linux fanboy, but I want audio like Windows. Right-click on my audio button, and in two clicks I can choose my input and output devices, and all sounds are seamlessly mixed to make that happen. I don't really care about network audio, or any of the other fancy-ass shit that pulseaudio is supposed to do.
Really, I use a desktop, and I have multiple audio sources and devices. Mix them automatically, and give me a quick gui control for which piece of hardware should be handling each. That's all I really want.
Damn! I consolidated mine in 2004 or so, and managed to snag a 3.1% interest rate, which dropped to 3.0 if I let them automatically debit my bank account. Of course, these were federal loans consolidated by my state student assistance program, but still.
But now that I think about it, that represented 3-4 years of payments on my part. I bet my credit score was pretty good then, since I had no credit card debt, and was making a fair amount of money in comparison to my payments. I wonder how much difference credit score makes in your interest rate?
I grew up in the mountains of Vermont and NH, and it's NOT the greens who are against putting turbines in the hills. It's the average joe who lives in a town around where they want to put them that's firmly against them. The reasons:
a) That's traditional stomping grounds for many. Hunting, hiking, etc. b) We like our pristine, forest covered hills. We hate the power-line cuts which mar lots of the hills already, and we hate the ski areas which do as well. This would be another "slash a road up the side of a mountain, then clearcut chunks of it. c) It might cost us jobs. VT and NH make tons of money off tourism. People come to see the unspoiled (after we spent 150 years growing it back from the clearcutting) forests and beautiful, trackless hills. If our local hills get a wind farm on them, that tourism money goes to some other town. d) The corporations planning on wind farms are doing it behind the backs of the people that live there. Not asking them, not telling them anything. The first they know about it is that there are some folks from NYC or Boston surveying a mountain in their backyard. After the appropriate amount of outrage, the corporation holds a town-hall meeting where they lay out their plan to hack up the woods and stick towers up and fence parts of it off, and then act surprised when most of the people who live there don't support them.
Yes, the ultra-green group is irritating, and stops all sort of progress. But in the NE, it's generally not the greens who are the problem. It's the average citizen who's getting shafted by some corporation that forms the bulk of the opposition to new power generation plants.
Nobody likes it when some corporation from out of state comes in, whacks a bunch of trees down, and slaps a structure in. The corporations don't bother pitching it to the locals, they just assume that they can do whatever the fuck they want, wherever they want to do it. I watched this happen in the town next to where I grew up, where I used to go hunting. The plan was to close off the mountain, hack a road up it, and clearcut for a windfarm. The first the locals heard about it was when someone stumbled across the environmental impact statement buried on the state website. The people who surveyed the mountain came in from the back side, and never set foot in the town.
Yes, green power might be good, but when the corporation who does it is just another sneaky, fuck the consumers and citizens corporation, it doesn't matter. For a lot of the people in the NE, a power corporation is a power corporation, no matter if it's oil, nuclear, or wind. They're all just a bunch of lying, money grubbing, citizen-screwing, faceless corporations.
Eh, we'll just build them into door handles in airports and govt buildings. Flat piece of glass on the back, slightly thicker handle to contain the camera, and you just got fingerprinted, unless you were wearing gloves.
Multiple social networking sites linked to one email address, that's how.
If you don't bother linking the two together, it's really easy to get numbers like this. It's called "really poor statistics with unreliable research and no insight into your topic". It's all the rage these days.
Yep. For a long time now, if it says "EA" on the cover, I won't buy it. I don't care the genera. EA has burned me more than almost all the rest of the publishers combined.
I'll second the Penumbra games. They were FP without the S. Minimal amounts of killing, good atmosphere, with tons of moderately challenging puzzles to solve. Very reasonably priced as well.
The World Of Goo has a very functional linux port, and is one of the better games I've played in years.
I haven't been back to the Kingdom of Loathing for a year or so due to time constraints, but it's a pretty damn fun browser game. Free to play, but you can buy vanity items to help support it. And, of course.....TROGDOR!!!!!.......TROGDOR!!!!!...ahem.
I wish there was such a thing. But in most, when I kill that mob, it respawns. When I save the fair maiden from the terrible folks, she shows back up there ten minutes later. And I can't even save her a second time. That's not a living, persistent world. That's a dead, static world, which I can deform for a moment, but which snaps back into its old form after.
I'd love to see a game where the world really did change based on your actions. It shouldn't be that hard - if everyone in a party has saved the farmer's wife from the trolls, she doesn't show up, and the troll camp is empty. Forever. If you killed the goblin leader, and everyone else there did too, the goblins are gone. I'd really love to see that.
Give? This is MS! You have to PAY to NEED antivirus and antispyware programs.
The only giving that MS does is a kick in the balls. After dealing with their BS WGA shit, I don't take anything from them anymore. Because I *KNOW* that it's a kick in the balls, no matter how well it's disguised.
I'm a huge dork. Yet for the last few years, I've thrown big parties for my birthday. 30-40 people at them. A mix of 30% relatives, and 70% dorks. And they've been an awesome 6-7 hours of fun. The requirements? Booze, food, games, and places to sit. When my Aunt is getting tipsy while playing The Last Night on Earth with my dorky friends, all is well.
You don't need much of an excuse to throw a party - you need to provide enough of a good time that the people you invite want to come.
I manage this by running a grill for a few hours, providing games and tables, and asking people to bring copious amounts of booze. I don't understand how MS manages to do this. I offer food, fun, and a bunch of people to hang around with. Thus, my parties are well attended and a ton of fun. How does MS do the same, without even offering a copy of the OS?
How about old Fantasy? One of the best things I read in college was Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The meta-analysis you can do with it is amazing.
And you left out the Roberts in your sci-fi list. Shea and Anton should be on any HS reading list....might as well break them while they're young....
That's unlikely here on slashdot. You see, we in nerdom have taken what Python once stood for, and now venerate the group's work in an entirely inappropriate way. We are worshiping the golden calf, not the god. There will be nothing different here, just a parroting of the same lines, over and over, and over.
Long ago, before most slashdotters, Python was funny because they were doing something that NOBODY else had done. They were pushing boundaries. They were making the establishment feel uncomfortable. They were the Rock&Roll of TV, fighting to sail in their own direction. They were giving glimpses of nudity on television, using inappropriate language, naming characters "Biggus Dickus", and other inappropriate things.
In short, Python was great because they were new, they were fresh, they pushed the boundaries of what was considered indecent back, and they didn't resort to the same tired gag over and over and over.
They were the Shakespeare of their day, hiding grossly offensive material under clever linguistics. They took characters from around us, around history, around time, and put them in places they didn't belong. Then they explored that human dynamic. The English-speaking Brian in Roman lands, failing at Latin; The Viking and King Arthur in modern times; The Grannies in biker gangs; The accountant in places of danger and excitement.
They, like Shakespeare, Longfellow, and David Foley before them took us to a place we knew, and then perverted it while we stood there, slack-jawed. They, like Hisenberg and Bohr, kept us continuously uncertain of where we stood. Of where we started, and of where we would end up.
While many books have been written on the social commentary of the themes within Python's works, the one most cited is that of dying cats. From explosions to old women beating them on posts, it was clear that Python had something out for the furry pussy. While most have glossed over this theme as a histamine sensitivity, it clearly ties into their long-running theme of the uncertainty of the human condition. For them, the human condition has been observed. And it is a dead cat.
For that reason, I put off coming here. I knew that all I would find would be anti-Python. A repetition of lines; against all they stood for; all that made them great. While we can treasure the memories of enjoyment that their shows and movies brought us, we should remember the golden calf.
For that reason, I come here not to repeat a line, but to leave a brief message in their honor.
Do not look at the glass - look through the window. And out that window is a dead cat, having been observed by Python.
I highly doubt that two guys with a case of beer, a couple of utility knives, and a nail gun can lay these down and have them work as they are supposed to. Shingling a roof really doesn't require any skills, other than doing the peaks and valleys. If you can put down a shingle, and nail it to the roof, you're golden. If you can hack the excess off that hangs over the side with a knife, you can shingle 95% of a house.
Ignoring any interconnections between the shingles that must be lined up, (because, that's beyond a roofer's knowledge base) you still have to tie it into the house electricity. And you have to be able to slap the roof down in the beating sun, while standing on it, and driving nails through it. How exactly does that work if the roof is generating electricity as you do so?
It makes the disproportional response to the event look all the more asinine.
If we spent the TRILLIONS we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan combating auto fatalities and flu deaths, the net gain in human lives would have been tremendous. I can't even begin to calculate what that would have been like.
Instead, we launched a vastly disproportional response into two countries, killed a couple hundred thousand people, and laid waste to the two places.
I'm from the US, and I worry about crossing the border! Should I bring a laptop? Do I need to delete all personal information off it in case they take it at the border? If I get harassed at the border, and stick up for my constitutional rights as an American citizen, will I get tossed in jail?
When citizens have those sorts of concerns, I don't blame non-citizens for not wanting to come here. We've made the US completely hostile to tourism, because a dozen people came in LEGALLY, and launched a terrorist attack. which killed less people than a month's worth of auto accidents in this country.
Really, I wonder if it wouldn't be better for tourists to land in Mexico and just illegally enter the country. A ten hour hike through the desert seems less painful than trying to deal with the Border agency legally.
Slashdot Mirror
You do know that there is a difference between "member of an organization" and "employee", right?
When work pays for travel, we take it. Vegas to be marketed at by a company? Sure. California for a Visual Basic conference? Sign me up!
Don't ever assume that people go to a conference somewhere because they want/like/care about the product or the conference. A week out of town, expenses paid, and nobody to make sure you actually go? That's what business is all about baby!
I'd say you're doing it wrong. The best investment I ever made was when I liberated a disused 2'x4' dry-erase board from a previous employer. It's got a 1" grid on it, and is fantastic for simplifying what you're talking about. Draw in the terrain, even ahead of the time if you want to. Steal props from any nearby kids, and you can have castles and trees to slap on it. You can write statuses next to anything on the board, and as long as you can remember to move them with any mobile things, it's all good.
Initiative gets put down on one corner, spells with a duration get drawn in, we've had mini-maps in one corner, with a box showing what part was being shown in the main board. Combat is too slow? A 30 sec egg timer fixes that. Strategy is fantastic, as long as you don't spend all game talking about what you *could* do. Trust me - after a few "...with combat fierce and heavy around him, John stands petrified, unsure of what to do. As an arrow flies past his head, Felicia leaps to action." "Sorry John, you took to long. Felicia - it's your turn." your PCs will start getting through combat more quickly.
And really, if you can give up micromanaging, it's even better. I've taken to describing the setup in words, then handing markers to my PCs. Let their imagination shape the bolder strewn valley with the stream running through it. Sometimes they come up with that I'd visualized sometimes not. Either way, I run with it.
I like the strategy of 4th ed. And that's coming from two decades of RPGs, with no major MMO games under my belt. Like anything, it can be done poorly and it can be done well. We play about 50/50 RP and strategy combat in my games. Some nights it's just about all RP, some nights it's just about all combat, and some it's an even mix. I'd recommend giving 4E a few more runs. Specifically, the skill challenges are pretty damn well done, and allow you to mix skills and RP EXTREMELY well, and very efficiently. Basically, you go around the table, and the PCs tell you what they're doing to help overcome the obstacle. There are a couple of main skills, but if they're creative, they can roll for others should they be able to work them in. You set a number of X successes before Y failures, and see if they make it. I've found that group failure is far more epic than single-player, single-roll failure. It's one thing when your fighter tries to climb a cliff and falls down and splats. It's another thing entirely when the dwarf using dungeoneering to look for loose rocks, the fighter is climbing, the rogue is tying knots in the rope, the elf is using acrobatics to balance on a 1" ledge, and they ALL fail! Who do you blame then? "Us."
it can hide the whole "combat system" from you, and just allow you to roleplay.
That would be awesomely terrifying! You'd have no idea if you were just unlucky, or if you couldn't actually hit something. If you succeed the first few times with no problem, it could be your skill, or it could be your luck. That would destroy the powergamers.
The more I think about it, the more awesome that sounds. Your ability levels would quickly transform into "awesome", "ok", "bad", and "sucks". You level up, and say, "I want to be a better fighter." Computer says, "Your fighting has improved". You say, "How much does that help me?" The computer replies, "You'll have to go find out..." Is it enough to take on the boss you've been circling, picking off his minions? Who knows.
That would make RPGs a ton more interesting, without the issues of a GM dictating everything.
I'm really curious - I haven't tried OSS4 yet, but the one thing I haven't ever gotten working on linux is the following setup:
Analog/Digital speakers, with a USB headset.
Can OSS4 handle USB sound? Can it mix multiple streams? Does it have an easy way to switch between input/output devices?
Pulse gave me hope for the above. Then fell flat on its face. I've never been able to get dmix to handle this setup, and ALSA doesn't seem to do it.
I hate to say it as a linux fanboy, but I want audio like Windows. Right-click on my audio button, and in two clicks I can choose my input and output devices, and all sounds are seamlessly mixed to make that happen. I don't really care about network audio, or any of the other fancy-ass shit that pulseaudio is supposed to do.
Really, I use a desktop, and I have multiple audio sources and devices. Mix them automatically, and give me a quick gui control for which piece of hardware should be handling each. That's all I really want.
Damn! I consolidated mine in 2004 or so, and managed to snag a 3.1% interest rate, which dropped to 3.0 if I let them automatically debit my bank account. Of course, these were federal loans consolidated by my state student assistance program, but still.
But now that I think about it, that represented 3-4 years of payments on my part. I bet my credit score was pretty good then, since I had no credit card debt, and was making a fair amount of money in comparison to my payments. I wonder how much difference credit score makes in your interest rate?
You're part correct, but part grossly wrong.
I grew up in the mountains of Vermont and NH, and it's NOT the greens who are against putting turbines in the hills. It's the average joe who lives in a town around where they want to put them that's firmly against them. The reasons:
a) That's traditional stomping grounds for many. Hunting, hiking, etc.
b) We like our pristine, forest covered hills. We hate the power-line cuts which mar lots of the hills already, and we hate the ski areas which do as well. This would be another "slash a road up the side of a mountain, then clearcut chunks of it.
c) It might cost us jobs. VT and NH make tons of money off tourism. People come to see the unspoiled (after we spent 150 years growing it back from the clearcutting) forests and beautiful, trackless hills. If our local hills get a wind farm on them, that tourism money goes to some other town.
d) The corporations planning on wind farms are doing it behind the backs of the people that live there. Not asking them, not telling them anything. The first they know about it is that there are some folks from NYC or Boston surveying a mountain in their backyard. After the appropriate amount of outrage, the corporation holds a town-hall meeting where they lay out their plan to hack up the woods and stick towers up and fence parts of it off, and then act surprised when most of the people who live there don't support them.
Yes, the ultra-green group is irritating, and stops all sort of progress. But in the NE, it's generally not the greens who are the problem. It's the average citizen who's getting shafted by some corporation that forms the bulk of the opposition to new power generation plants.
Nobody likes it when some corporation from out of state comes in, whacks a bunch of trees down, and slaps a structure in. The corporations don't bother pitching it to the locals, they just assume that they can do whatever the fuck they want, wherever they want to do it. I watched this happen in the town next to where I grew up, where I used to go hunting. The plan was to close off the mountain, hack a road up it, and clearcut for a windfarm. The first the locals heard about it was when someone stumbled across the environmental impact statement buried on the state website. The people who surveyed the mountain came in from the back side, and never set foot in the town.
Yes, green power might be good, but when the corporation who does it is just another sneaky, fuck the consumers and citizens corporation, it doesn't matter. For a lot of the people in the NE, a power corporation is a power corporation, no matter if it's oil, nuclear, or wind. They're all just a bunch of lying, money grubbing, citizen-screwing, faceless corporations.
It'd fill up with advertisements and porn if it wasn't closely filtered.
It's an ASNS, actually. Have you ever read the comments posted here?
Eh, we'll just build them into door handles in airports and govt buildings. Flat piece of glass on the back, slightly thicker handle to contain the camera, and you just got fingerprinted, unless you were wearing gloves.
Multiple social networking sites linked to one email address, that's how.
If you don't bother linking the two together, it's really easy to get numbers like this. It's called "really poor statistics with unreliable research and no insight into your topic". It's all the rage these days.
See NMRI for details. Irrational fear is what's wrong with people.
Yep. For a long time now, if it says "EA" on the cover, I won't buy it. I don't care the genera. EA has burned me more than almost all the rest of the publishers combined.
That's a partial excuse. The more full excuse is that we decided that the LETTER of the law was more important than the SPIRIT of the law.
I'm not enough of a legal philosopher to figure out how to fix the problem, but I have hope in some society some day someone does so.
I'll second the Penumbra games. They were FP without the S. Minimal amounts of killing, good atmosphere, with tons of moderately challenging puzzles to solve. Very reasonably priced as well.
...ahem.
The World Of Goo has a very functional linux port, and is one of the better games I've played in years.
I haven't been back to the Kingdom of Loathing for a year or so due to time constraints, but it's a pretty damn fun browser game. Free to play, but you can buy vanity items to help support it. And, of course.....TROGDOR!!!!!.......TROGDOR!!!!!
living, persistent world
I wish there was such a thing. But in most, when I kill that mob, it respawns. When I save the fair maiden from the terrible folks, she shows back up there ten minutes later. And I can't even save her a second time. That's not a living, persistent world. That's a dead, static world, which I can deform for a moment, but which snaps back into its old form after.
I'd love to see a game where the world really did change based on your actions. It shouldn't be that hard - if everyone in a party has saved the farmer's wife from the trolls, she doesn't show up, and the troll camp is empty. Forever. If you killed the goblin leader, and everyone else there did too, the goblins are gone. I'd really love to see that.
Well mainframes take up a lot of physical space. It wouldn't be unheard of if one had a wide stance...
Give? This is MS! You have to PAY to NEED antivirus and antispyware programs.
The only giving that MS does is a kick in the balls. After dealing with their BS WGA shit, I don't take anything from them anymore. Because I *KNOW* that it's a kick in the balls, no matter how well it's disguised.
I'm a huge dork. Yet for the last few years, I've thrown big parties for my birthday. 30-40 people at them. A mix of 30% relatives, and 70% dorks. And they've been an awesome 6-7 hours of fun. The requirements? Booze, food, games, and places to sit. When my Aunt is getting tipsy while playing The Last Night on Earth with my dorky friends, all is well.
You don't need much of an excuse to throw a party - you need to provide enough of a good time that the people you invite want to come.
I manage this by running a grill for a few hours, providing games and tables, and asking people to bring copious amounts of booze. I don't understand how MS manages to do this. I offer food, fun, and a bunch of people to hang around with. Thus, my parties are well attended and a ton of fun. How does MS do the same, without even offering a copy of the OS?
We can call it MRI or something.....
Seriously, that sort of rebranding has worked fine in the past. No reason not to do it again with nuclear power.
How about old Fantasy? One of the best things I read in college was Tolkien's translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The meta-analysis you can do with it is amazing.
And you left out the Roberts in your sci-fi list. Shea and Anton should be on any HS reading list....might as well break them while they're young....
That's unlikely here on slashdot. You see, we in nerdom have taken what Python once stood for, and now venerate the group's work in an entirely inappropriate way. We are worshiping the golden calf, not the god. There will be nothing different here, just a parroting of the same lines, over and over, and over.
Long ago, before most slashdotters, Python was funny because they were doing something that NOBODY else had done. They were pushing boundaries. They were making the establishment feel uncomfortable. They were the Rock&Roll of TV, fighting to sail in their own direction. They were giving glimpses of nudity on television, using inappropriate language, naming characters "Biggus Dickus", and other inappropriate things.
In short, Python was great because they were new, they were fresh, they pushed the boundaries of what was considered indecent back, and they didn't resort to the same tired gag over and over and over.
They were the Shakespeare of their day, hiding grossly offensive material under clever linguistics. They took characters from around us, around history, around time, and put them in places they didn't belong. Then they explored that human dynamic. The English-speaking Brian in Roman lands, failing at Latin; The Viking and King Arthur in modern times; The Grannies in biker gangs; The accountant in places of danger and excitement.
They, like Shakespeare, Longfellow, and David Foley before them took us to a place we knew, and then perverted it while we stood there, slack-jawed. They, like Hisenberg and Bohr, kept us continuously uncertain of where we stood. Of where we started, and of where we would end up.
While many books have been written on the social commentary of the themes within Python's works, the one most cited is that of dying cats. From explosions to old women beating them on posts, it was clear that Python had something out for the furry pussy. While most have glossed over this theme as a histamine sensitivity, it clearly ties into their long-running theme of the uncertainty of the human condition. For them, the human condition has been observed. And it is a dead cat.
For that reason, I put off coming here. I knew that all I would find would be anti-Python. A repetition of lines; against all they stood for; all that made them great. While we can treasure the memories of enjoyment that their shows and movies brought us, we should remember the golden calf.
For that reason, I come here not to repeat a line, but to leave a brief message in their honor.
Do not look at the glass - look through the window. And out that window is a dead cat, having been observed by Python.
Agreed.
I highly doubt that two guys with a case of beer, a couple of utility knives, and a nail gun can lay these down and have them work as they are supposed to. Shingling a roof really doesn't require any skills, other than doing the peaks and valleys. If you can put down a shingle, and nail it to the roof, you're golden. If you can hack the excess off that hangs over the side with a knife, you can shingle 95% of a house.
Ignoring any interconnections between the shingles that must be lined up, (because, that's beyond a roofer's knowledge base) you still have to tie it into the house electricity. And you have to be able to slap the roof down in the beating sun, while standing on it, and driving nails through it. How exactly does that work if the roof is generating electricity as you do so?
It makes the disproportional response to the event look all the more asinine.
If we spent the TRILLIONS we spent in Iraq and Afghanistan combating auto fatalities and flu deaths, the net gain in human lives would have been tremendous. I can't even begin to calculate what that would have been like.
Instead, we launched a vastly disproportional response into two countries, killed a couple hundred thousand people, and laid waste to the two places.
Oh, so that makes everything okay then.
I'm from the US, and I worry about crossing the border! Should I bring a laptop? Do I need to delete all personal information off it in case they take it at the border? If I get harassed at the border, and stick up for my constitutional rights as an American citizen, will I get tossed in jail?
When citizens have those sorts of concerns, I don't blame non-citizens for not wanting to come here. We've made the US completely hostile to tourism, because a dozen people came in LEGALLY, and launched a terrorist attack. which killed less people than a month's worth of auto accidents in this country.
Really, I wonder if it wouldn't be better for tourists to land in Mexico and just illegally enter the country. A ten hour hike through the desert seems less painful than trying to deal with the Border agency legally.