Aran

Originally Posted By: Rowen brb, going to watch netflix on campus now. ...

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Originally Posted By: Actaeon Despolaris Vale SOMEONE DO THIS. NOW. "Despolaris" rings a bell from long ago. And I mean really long ago, like 2004 or something. I don't even remember the specifics of the conversation anymore.

I didn't. I might have a truly ancient backup from late in 2005 (the one we reloaded when Polaris sank early in 2007), but nothing more. I ran a weekly database backup for quite some time later on, but those were all stored on my web host account and I completely lost that folder. That was a sad day. All is fleeting. Edit: I just realized the potential for a nice allusion.

Originally Posted By: Khoth I've been reading Clockwork Rocket by Greg Egan. He takes the science in his science fiction really seriously - it has to have more diagrams and graphs than any other fiction book ever, and that's not even including the 80000 word university-level explanation on the author's website. I'm enjoying the book even though I'm not really following all the physics explanations. (It's basically an exploration of how things would work if spacetime intervals worked like s² = x² + y² + z² + c²t².) I've read a little bit of this book as well now, but haven't had much time to continue.

The missing posts were created between May 2008 and October 2009, so no browser cache in the world would still have them. archive.org has a few pages, but unfortunately very little.

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: The (Armored) Ratt I just have to say, Rowen how does your internet achieve a 26Mb/s down speed and a 1Mb/s up speed? many ISPs cap uploads on residential plans to stop people from running servers on them On ADSL, it's more of a technical limitation than a deliberate cap, since upstream and downstream traffic runs on different frequency bands. The upstream bandwidth is lower to allow a greater downstream rate (some ISPs allow you to adjust that ratio). Though many ISPs do want to prevent customers from running servers, and also use stuff like firewalls and NAT to accomplish this. Using my home computer as a personal cloud server, I'm worried that NAT might become more frequent when addresses run out and providers still don't want to go with IPv6.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Eh, everyone kills the dinosaurs on their first trip. It's a rite of passage. I thought that was Hitler. Raptor-Hitler?

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Quote: Edit Reason: Dantius Fact # 0-1: I used to make money as a student by hustling people in chess games. Intelligent people have a tendency to vastly overestimate their skill at chess. Must be a vanity thing. I wish I would've thought of that. In high school, I had a reputation for being a fairly good chess player. Some of my opponents had rich parents, so I could've made a small fortune--or at least enough money to pay for lunch every day. For this to have worked, the reputation would have been counterproductive.

Aw, I was hoping for a new census topic. And it would be nonsensical to answer again, since the significant difference is that I am a year closer to the heat death of the universe.

Originally Posted By: Present Ongoing Breakup I'm trying to think of a workaround for the security image exploit, and I'm drawing a blank. Well, instead of an entering credentials to see an image, you and the bank site could verify a shared secret without transmitting the secret. This would allow you and the server to verify each other's identity without leaking credentials.

Originally Posted By: I made a vow with zombies in it. —Alorael, who changed his account name and stopped having problems. And by "changed his account name" he means "argued with the bank until they admitted that having to close and immediately open an account, getting all new cards and handling an enormous wad of cash, is an idiotic plan in which everyone loses." Mh; my login is my account number (and therefore likely the primary key in their database) which means it probably would be easier to open a new account than to get it changed.

Yeah, started late in 2009. Wheee!

Yes, there is quite a bulk of data that got deleted from Spiderweb without being archived on PPP.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer In my college dorm a guy was complaining about his Saudi Arabian roommate "accidently" drinking his 12 pack of beer (144 ounces - over 4 liters(. He had thought it was safe because the Saudi's religion forbade alcohol. The roommate was selflessly sacrificing himself to save him from that evil stuff.

Originally Posted By: Mnemonics to remember mnemonics Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity My fingers are slipping off it ... Aaaaaaaaaahhhhhh! I'm a little baffled when people write out their deaths. I'm even more baffled when they write out the scream of losing contact with the device they're using to write. It is a fine tradition that I believe Howard Lovecraft started. Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Man, Harold Camping must be embarrassed about his incredibly poor math skills. You'd think he'd get it right on the sixth attempt...

I guess this isn't the year when they finally immanentized the Eschaton after all. Hail Eris!

(And I feel fine.) So to you guys living west of the Atlantic (and thus pre-18:00) I just wanted to drop a note that we're still alive and unraptured over here, so the apocalypse appears to be subject to some technical delays. (I wonder how Camping will take it this time.) I found one of the most awesome list-type Wikipedia articles in the process of reading about this (I have too much time, apparently). The last decade when the world wasn't scheduled to end were the 1820s. The last decade with only a single scheduled apocalypse were the 1950s. The last item on the page is particularly great.

For practical purposes, people born on February 29 have their birthday on March 1 in non-leapyears. It really doesn't change that much. The formula isn't that complicated either. What are the odds of the nth person being born on a day nobody else was born on, assuming n-1 people already don't share birthdays? For the first, 100%; there's nobody else. For the second, 364/365 days "free". For the third, 363/365 days, as the first two are distinct. For the fourth, 362/365 days. ... For the twenty-third, 343/365 days, or 94% The odds of nobody sharing birthdays is therefore 365! / 342! / 365^23, which is roughly 50% Therefore the opposite - that at least two people share a birthday - is equally likely at 50%.

And on the other hand, if you're looking for someone who shares your birthday specifically, you won't get even odds until there are at least 253 people in the room with you. Probability is weird like that. Of course, while not many people have 250 friends whose birthdays they keep track of, even via Facebook, you're likely to have thousands of second-degree acquaintances. Therefore, if you say "today is my birthday", you're almost certain to get at least one response of "hey wow, that's the same day as my friend Y" from your friend X. (And if you're friend X, then you're likely to see this happen a hell of a lot, since you're back to the original Birthday Problem then.) My sister rented a flat together with three roommates who randomly met when she started studying. All four of their birthdays are consecutive.

One of my favorites too. Though The Call of Cthulhu is still my absolute favorite by HPL. Also, the series of stories exchanged between Lovecraft and Robert Bloch is nice to follow - they killed off each other in the course of it. Bloch's Shambler from the Stars, HPL's The Haunter of the Dark, and Bloch's sequel The Shadow from the Steeple Also, Lin Carter's Green Star series is pretty fun. I found the first three volumes (unfortunately only a German translation) at a book sale, and wanted to get my hands on an original copy of all five forever. Edit: Lin Carter also wrote an unbelievably awesome fragment that was posthumously published. Each night the dream comes, and I sink submerged into another mind, an alien form which toils in metal chambers cold, bizarre, amidst the teeming warrens of a nightmare realm, where insect-mages strive to pen below some monstrous peril scarcely glimpsed or named... oh mother, mother, ever the same dark dream! The snouted worms can track us through our dreams. Edit: One thing I've always wondered about is the peculiar reference to Yith of all places. The Nug-Soth of Yaddith lose hope when they realize that only the people of Yith could have helped them, and Yith is long-gone. HPL's own Shadow out of Time says that the "Great Race of Yith" (the first or only people in the universe to have mastered time travel*) evacuated their world and migrated across time and space into the bodies of a different species (which were cone-shaped**) on Earth, where they apparently left a vast collection of records before leaving yet again. Carter's Visions of Yaddith and HPL's Through the Gates of the Silver Key both have humans exchange minds with Nug-Soth mages. That means what the Nug-Soth were looking for might have been right under their noses at some point. * Yith = Gallifrey?<br> ** Who may or may not have been fond of the word "Exterminate".

It would theoretically possible to implement this using hashes. However, preventing users from repeating passwords ever shows such a ridiculous misundrstanding of security practices that I wouldn't bet on it.

That's exactly what I started doing last year. I wrote a small prototype module called "littlefoot" that picks one of about 10 SW-related questions. Apparently I didn't do it right, which led me to block registrations entirely - however, I went through the code again and it works now. Also blocks names under five letters or with numbers.

Subtlety is indeed my middle name, and also my first and last name. Also, I've read Jeff's post and it seems to rate Minecraft quite positively. Of course, he does say it's a completely different thing than most other games for adults, and mixing genres like that might not be a good idea. Or even if it is a good idea, it might not be one that gains wide popularity. Blades of Avernum was an awesome idea, and never sold as well as it should have. Personally, I'd love an RPG with a world I could really interact with and shape. There would have to be a fine-tuned combination of linearity (dialogue, plot) and openness, but it wouldn't be a sandbox game like Minecraft exactly, nor an ordinary modern RPG. It'd be something different entirely - perhaps even different from the aforementioned ADOM. Openness requires vast tons of more effort for a game the same size, of course, and considering it might not gain popularity, it'd be a really risky endeavor. (However, it worked for Notch. He made something nobody had done before - as a computer game - and it became an instant hit. The millions who bought Minecraft are largely adults and bought it for themselves. Among ten randomly sampled CS students in my college, roughly five would be actively playing it or have done so.) Edit: The ultimate advancement might be a game that you're not only playing, but also changing and developing while you play it. You're not just knocking down and building a few walls in a pre-established realm, but changing and creating areas, introducing new characters and dialogue, creating plot that meshes with the game world already there. Wikiblades.

As an ADOM/Nethack veteran, I actually like this idea. Making a pickaxe usable wouldn't be that much of a change in the set of junk items. Some stones should be impervious (like agate, basalt, etc.) and others crumble more easily (like sandstone and adobe). Might be an interesting idea for a BoA scenario. (Hey, and then we could make an axe chop down trees, and add some way - like perhaps some special table or something - to combine the wood from the tree with an iron bar to make another pickaxe... )