Ok, so if you're going to get into actual math instead of barbarian math, it's a lot less fun.
First, we're talking 3.0 and 3.5 and Pathfinder, that should be obvious in context. That's also the great majority of tabletop RPG gaming.
Second, you get closer to a bell curve the more you roll. The distribution on a d12 is flat- you have the same odds of rolling a 1 as a 6 as a 12. This graph looks like a line. Add two dice together and now you have a line going up to to a middle point, then coming back down. Add a bunch and you get a bell curve.
The average 1d12 roll is 1+12/2 = 6.5. The average 2d6 roll is 2( (1+6)/2 ) = 7.
The average damage from critical hits is the same for the range "20x3" and "19-20". The "20x3" range means that on a 20 you threaten triple damage (or something equivalent to it), and on a 19 you deal normal damage. The "19-20" range means that on a 19 or 20 you threaten double damage (or something equivalent to it). Since all the other numbers are the same, you can add the 1x + 3x and compare to the 2x + 2x and see that both average out the same (excepting the case where a 19 doesn't hit- in that case the 20x3 would win because the only valid crit combination is two 20s, but you can discard this edge case pretty much).
So the critical damage is the same in both cases (on average), and the die roll is 0.5 higher on average for the 2d6 versus the 1d12.
But... that's not the end of the comparison. The fact that larger numbers mean different things, and that you aren't damaging a target dummy, are important as hell. What would you rather YOUR character have to take a swing from- a guy with a greatsword- say he has an attack bonus A, and rolls 2d6+10, or a guy with a greataxe, who has attack bonus A, and rolls 1d12+10? Remember that the crit with the greatsword is an unlikely event, and may or may not knock you out, but the crit with the greataxe could gib you dead. The average case is that both hit and deal damage, but that the damage isn't going to hit you down to zero.
The fact is, this case happens a LOT, and the 17 versus the 16.5 is some 3% boost at that point, and in many cases less. Sure, it's more, but you would almost always choose the case to happen where your odds of survival are almost guaranteed..... and if that's what your ENEMY thinks, it's reasonable to take the opposite strategy. If he has to play differently because your greataxe COULD just flat out behead him, then that's helping you and your team.
So the barbarian logic isn't wrong- he just doesn't make his decision based on an average case, and he's playing the opponents fears instead of a slightly higher damage per round weapon choice.
You are bad barbarian. 2d6 is greatsword damage, and you want to roll a damned 12. 1d12 is a great axe, and has a better chance of rolling 12. Therefore, 1d12 is better than 2d6. Also, the greataxe crits for triple damage on 20, and the greatsword crits for double damage on 19 or 20, so you want the greataxe again because 3 is bigger than 2.
> Two: All gamers, apparently, go through a phase where they blame their dice for things not going their way. Get over it.
Sounds like someone botched their "FUN" stat roll. Consider going Paladin with those stats...
And I think you know the reason you roll dice isn't to generate random numbers, it's to hit the goddamned monsters. These are two very different things.
Well, why doesn't it just say "play"? If the play button is international, you can put localized text underneath it. Also, things can be made in China and not written in Chinese- for instance, nothing on my iphone is in Chinese, and it was made in China.
I'm not sure exactly how much they do for the USG. They've mentioned their "lawful intercept" abilities, which sounds much more like "we can respond to subpoenas" and very much not "everything everyone writes gets checked and filtered and flagged".
You also make it sound like the idea of the Pakistani government having full access to communications is the same exact thing as the USG having full access to communications. These are definitely different things. It's very reasonable to proclaim that you want NO ONE to have access to your communications- that you and the people you are communicating with should have access to the data, and no one in the middle, not Blackberry, not some government, no one. It's also reasonable, though less likely to work out in reality, to proclaim that you are ok with the company having access, as long as they don't willfully share it with governments.
But even if you have that opinion, the USG and the Pakistani governments are not the same thing. Comparing the USG to the Pakistani government is frankly absurd. To claim otherwise is just anti-American drivel. That doesn't mean you have to be ok with the NSA tapping your comms- just recognize that it's a fundamentally different thing.
This seems like a poor justification, though. The current system works pretty hard to give you incentive to take a profitable degree, such as nursing, and makes degrees that are lacking immediate practical benefit, such as philosophy, rarer. But note well: we have a nursing shortage! It's very hard to find enough nurses. We have no shortage of philosophy majors. Why would you want to encourage even more silly degrees? This will hurt people who need their salary, and not bother in the slightest those that don't- it fucks people who are POOR and who WORK HARD, and coddles those who have FAMILY MONEY and those who DO NOT WORK.
Basically, the more options you have besides working with your degree, the better this deal is for you. It's pretty nightmarish.
There are so many stupid rules, asking why any given one is around is literally a waste of time. Rest assured there is both no real reason, and some idiot story that some impassioned fool will tell you, based on bullshit. Search long enough and all you'll find is the impassioned fool, and the subsequent idiot story.
On a more serious note, I don't see Israel as any kind of good guy here. The fact that their opponents are, by comparison, monstrous, doesn't excuse what's going on.
I will also say that you bring up one big thing that is entirely missing- because Arabic is not a common language outside of the middle east, most Americans have no goddamned idea what's going on. Buddhists and Islamists melt together in one pool of "oppressed peoples" that is generally understood only by reflex. Some random powerless hick in Alabama says something insensitive about black folks and that's national news, some soldier of a terrorist regime promises literal genocide and then slaughters people, that's just whatever and you see it linked to on some blog.
Yea, this is really ludicrous. They own a part of you forever?
If the educators were free to fish for good prospects, this could maybe be ok, if not morally questionable. But when you realize that you'll still need to check all the "enough of this sort of person" boxes, this gets even spookier.
> Most (all?) airlines don't allow a device that can broadcast
During the flight, you normally can't use "cellular technology". During takeoff and landing, they will often say no wireless (which includes bluetooth), but it's never ever enforced.
> Beats are the headphones of Dr. Dre, by Dr. Dre, for Dr. Dre.
Generally agree. Those headphones are poop on treble. I prefer Grado by far for sound quality, and for gaming I use Audio Technica. Bose requires a lot of research to not get one of their crap models by accident, and I just don't think I'll ever own a Beats.
> I thought 100% CPU loops in a background application were exactly what the App Store review process was designed to prevent.
I'm pretty sure it's more for security issues, but I'm not aware of a program that spams CPU like this. I know that some apps are active in the background annoyingly, but I'm in the habit of force killing apps I don't want sitting around anyway. Waze is the big one that started me on this kick- there's no setting to turn it off in the background, and it always will update the botnet with your location, so it's a 100% force kill every time I use it. But I have plenty of games that sit in the background without using CPU or power, and contact apps, and browsers- it's pretty uncommon to find a drainer daemon app.
> A better design would be a spring-loaded recessed plug
I bet a better design on cars would be to move the brakes somewhere else too, and you could back that up with response time studies. The point is WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER STANDARD. I don't want to have to carry a stupid converter around. Does it go in the pocket with the keys, so the keys slowly ruin it? Does it go in the pocket with the phone, so it slowly dings up the phone? Do I put it in back pocket? Do I leave it on the headphones, or near them? How do I remember where I put it after the headphones have been in a normal jack for a week?
It adds complexity and gives us nothing in return. Your idea adds complexity and cost for a minor use case.
Anyway, I actually doubt they will do this at all. It's really dumb. I doubt they'll do YOUR idea either, but for a different reason- it seems that new standards only exist to solve business problems, not real ones.
> Might it not help if Microsoft had Cortana working correctly on windows 10 first?
One of my theories for why Microsoft collects data so aggressively with Cortana (this is separate from all their crappy bullshit spying you can't turn off- Cortana is trivial to disable) is that they need a ludicrous sum of data to improve Cortana.
So I don't think that they need to improve Cortana before rolling it out to more devices- I think everyone they can get on Cortana will result in a vastly improved Cortana, so the opposite is true.
Anyway, this is good news for Cortana users. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend any of the data harvester programs for their privacy concerns, but unlike all the telemetry you can't turn off, there's a valid and good engineering reason for Microsoft to funnel everything Cortana eats- because they need it all to improve Cortana.
Apple's move to the larger "plus" option did so very much to help battery life. I also think that there are Androids available with more than a single day, but I'll concede it's rare in general.
I think it's nuts to swap out the headphone jack for any reason at all. I also really think that the "thin" thing is overdone- I already consider any of the larger breed phones too fragile without a case, so you could make it as thin as a card and I'd still need to wrap it in plastic so it doesn't bend and die.
Really excellent headphones use the standard jacks, and will not be converting over. Grado, Audiotechnica, and many others simply do not have a funny little iphone connector, and likely never will. While I'm sure there will be some dumb converter you can buy, who wants to keep that crap in their pocket, or attached to their headphones (which you will have to track carefully when plugged into a normal outlet).
It's true that mostly I listen on little crappy remote earbuds, but that's absolutely not the case that this is ALL I want to listen to.
Moving to this will remove my ability to use real headphones on Apple phones. That's totally shit.
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Ok, so if you're going to get into actual math instead of barbarian math, it's a lot less fun.
First, we're talking 3.0 and 3.5 and Pathfinder, that should be obvious in context. That's also the great majority of tabletop RPG gaming.
Second, you get closer to a bell curve the more you roll. The distribution on a d12 is flat- you have the same odds of rolling a 1 as a 6 as a 12. This graph looks like a line. Add two dice together and now you have a line going up to to a middle point, then coming back down. Add a bunch and you get a bell curve.
The average 1d12 roll is 1+12/2 = 6.5. The average 2d6 roll is 2( (1+6)/2 ) = 7.
The average damage from critical hits is the same for the range "20x3" and "19-20". The "20x3" range means that on a 20 you threaten triple damage (or something equivalent to it), and on a 19 you deal normal damage. The "19-20" range means that on a 19 or 20 you threaten double damage (or something equivalent to it). Since all the other numbers are the same, you can add the 1x + 3x and compare to the 2x + 2x and see that both average out the same (excepting the case where a 19 doesn't hit- in that case the 20x3 would win because the only valid crit combination is two 20s, but you can discard this edge case pretty much).
So the critical damage is the same in both cases (on average), and the die roll is 0.5 higher on average for the 2d6 versus the 1d12.
But... that's not the end of the comparison. The fact that larger numbers mean different things, and that you aren't damaging a target dummy, are important as hell. What would you rather YOUR character have to take a swing from- a guy with a greatsword- say he has an attack bonus A, and rolls 2d6+10, or a guy with a greataxe, who has attack bonus A, and rolls 1d12+10? Remember that the crit with the greatsword is an unlikely event, and may or may not knock you out, but the crit with the greataxe could gib you dead. The average case is that both hit and deal damage, but that the damage isn't going to hit you down to zero.
The fact is, this case happens a LOT, and the 17 versus the 16.5 is some 3% boost at that point, and in many cases less. Sure, it's more, but you would almost always choose the case to happen where your odds of survival are almost guaranteed..... and if that's what your ENEMY thinks, it's reasonable to take the opposite strategy. If he has to play differently because your greataxe COULD just flat out behead him, then that's helping you and your team.
So the barbarian logic isn't wrong- he just doesn't make his decision based on an average case, and he's playing the opponents fears instead of a slightly higher damage per round weapon choice.
You are bad barbarian. 2d6 is greatsword damage, and you want to roll a damned 12. 1d12 is a great axe, and has a better chance of rolling 12. Therefore, 1d12 is better than 2d6. Also, the greataxe crits for triple damage on 20, and the greatsword crits for double damage on 19 or 20, so you want the greataxe again because 3 is bigger than 2.
This is correct. Don't forget to "charge" the dice by leaving them on their highest faces either.
> Two: All gamers, apparently, go through a phase where they blame their dice for things not going their way. Get over it.
Sounds like someone botched their "FUN" stat roll. Consider going Paladin with those stats...
And I think you know the reason you roll dice isn't to generate random numbers, it's to hit the goddamned monsters. These are two very different things.
Not just possible but pretty much required for the task. Obviously the calculator was poor.
No one will stop using physical dice. That's absurd.
Geesh people, I click on the story to find out which die rolls the most 20s. Lead with that! I want to crit dragons, and I want pictures of spiderman!
Well, why doesn't it just say "play"? If the play button is international, you can put localized text underneath it. Also, things can be made in China and not written in Chinese- for instance, nothing on my iphone is in Chinese, and it was made in China.
English has thorn and eth too. All Englishes also have more sounds than can be expressed in the character set.
> But they already do all this for the USG
I'm not sure exactly how much they do for the USG. They've mentioned their "lawful intercept" abilities, which sounds much more like "we can respond to subpoenas" and very much not "everything everyone writes gets checked and filtered and flagged".
You also make it sound like the idea of the Pakistani government having full access to communications is the same exact thing as the USG having full access to communications. These are definitely different things. It's very reasonable to proclaim that you want NO ONE to have access to your communications- that you and the people you are communicating with should have access to the data, and no one in the middle, not Blackberry, not some government, no one. It's also reasonable, though less likely to work out in reality, to proclaim that you are ok with the company having access, as long as they don't willfully share it with governments.
But even if you have that opinion, the USG and the Pakistani governments are not the same thing. Comparing the USG to the Pakistani government is frankly absurd. To claim otherwise is just anti-American drivel. That doesn't mean you have to be ok with the NSA tapping your comms- just recognize that it's a fundamentally different thing.
This seems like a poor justification, though. The current system works pretty hard to give you incentive to take a profitable degree, such as nursing, and makes degrees that are lacking immediate practical benefit, such as philosophy, rarer. But note well: we have a nursing shortage! It's very hard to find enough nurses. We have no shortage of philosophy majors. Why would you want to encourage even more silly degrees? This will hurt people who need their salary, and not bother in the slightest those that don't- it fucks people who are POOR and who WORK HARD, and coddles those who have FAMILY MONEY and those who DO NOT WORK.
Basically, the more options you have besides working with your degree, the better this deal is for you. It's pretty nightmarish.
The Pakistani government is not equivalent to the USG.
There are so many stupid rules, asking why any given one is around is literally a waste of time. Rest assured there is both no real reason, and some idiot story that some impassioned fool will tell you, based on bullshit. Search long enough and all you'll find is the impassioned fool, and the subsequent idiot story.
On a more serious note, I don't see Israel as any kind of good guy here. The fact that their opponents are, by comparison, monstrous, doesn't excuse what's going on.
I will also say that you bring up one big thing that is entirely missing- because Arabic is not a common language outside of the middle east, most Americans have no goddamned idea what's going on. Buddhists and Islamists melt together in one pool of "oppressed peoples" that is generally understood only by reflex. Some random powerless hick in Alabama says something insensitive about black folks and that's national news, some soldier of a terrorist regime promises literal genocide and then slaughters people, that's just whatever and you see it linked to on some blog.
> and (my favorite) How to Stab a Jew
Like, do they think Jews have a special weak spot, like the end boss to a video game? Is this Gradius?
"In the name of Mohammad, you must expose the flashing blue core. Position your option to strike that, and spam level 2 Ripple Laser!"
You don't have to favor the Palestinians to oppose censorship.
Yea, this is really ludicrous. They own a part of you forever?
If the educators were free to fish for good prospects, this could maybe be ok, if not morally questionable. But when you realize that you'll still need to check all the "enough of this sort of person" boxes, this gets even spookier.
> Most (all?) airlines don't allow a device that can broadcast
During the flight, you normally can't use "cellular technology". During takeoff and landing, they will often say no wireless (which includes bluetooth), but it's never ever enforced.
Common misunderstanding, that and microwave charging are features of ios 8.
> Beats are the headphones of Dr. Dre, by Dr. Dre, for Dr. Dre.
Generally agree. Those headphones are poop on treble. I prefer Grado by far for sound quality, and for gaming I use Audio Technica. Bose requires a lot of research to not get one of their crap models by accident, and I just don't think I'll ever own a Beats.
> I thought 100% CPU loops in a background application were exactly what the App Store review process was designed to prevent.
I'm pretty sure it's more for security issues, but I'm not aware of a program that spams CPU like this. I know that some apps are active in the background annoyingly, but I'm in the habit of force killing apps I don't want sitting around anyway. Waze is the big one that started me on this kick- there's no setting to turn it off in the background, and it always will update the botnet with your location, so it's a 100% force kill every time I use it. But I have plenty of games that sit in the background without using CPU or power, and contact apps, and browsers- it's pretty uncommon to find a drainer daemon app.
> A better design would be a spring-loaded recessed plug
I bet a better design on cars would be to move the brakes somewhere else too, and you could back that up with response time studies. The point is WE DON'T NEED ANOTHER STANDARD. I don't want to have to carry a stupid converter around. Does it go in the pocket with the keys, so the keys slowly ruin it? Does it go in the pocket with the phone, so it slowly dings up the phone? Do I put it in back pocket? Do I leave it on the headphones, or near them? How do I remember where I put it after the headphones have been in a normal jack for a week?
It adds complexity and gives us nothing in return. Your idea adds complexity and cost for a minor use case.
Anyway, I actually doubt they will do this at all. It's really dumb. I doubt they'll do YOUR idea either, but for a different reason- it seems that new standards only exist to solve business problems, not real ones.
> Might it not help if Microsoft had Cortana working correctly on windows 10 first?
One of my theories for why Microsoft collects data so aggressively with Cortana (this is separate from all their crappy bullshit spying you can't turn off- Cortana is trivial to disable) is that they need a ludicrous sum of data to improve Cortana.
So I don't think that they need to improve Cortana before rolling it out to more devices- I think everyone they can get on Cortana will result in a vastly improved Cortana, so the opposite is true.
Anyway, this is good news for Cortana users. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend any of the data harvester programs for their privacy concerns, but unlike all the telemetry you can't turn off, there's a valid and good engineering reason for Microsoft to funnel everything Cortana eats- because they need it all to improve Cortana.
Apple's move to the larger "plus" option did so very much to help battery life. I also think that there are Androids available with more than a single day, but I'll concede it's rare in general.
I think it's nuts to swap out the headphone jack for any reason at all. I also really think that the "thin" thing is overdone- I already consider any of the larger breed phones too fragile without a case, so you could make it as thin as a card and I'd still need to wrap it in plastic so it doesn't bend and die.
Really excellent headphones use the standard jacks, and will not be converting over. Grado, Audiotechnica, and many others simply do not have a funny little iphone connector, and likely never will. While I'm sure there will be some dumb converter you can buy, who wants to keep that crap in their pocket, or attached to their headphones (which you will have to track carefully when plugged into a normal outlet).
It's true that mostly I listen on little crappy remote earbuds, but that's absolutely not the case that this is ALL I want to listen to.
Moving to this will remove my ability to use real headphones on Apple phones. That's totally shit.