Aran

Originally Posted By: nikki. You didn't go with the button-question, Frank. You suck. ... 7. Wait, what happened to question six? THAT WAS THE BUTTON ONE! My infamously insatiable curiosity has been awakened.

... I knew there were some weird characters in Unicode, but not that. That is awesome. ☣ is also cool, but it doesn't compare.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba 1. What is your name? My name is Arancaytar. 2. How old are you? I am twenty-three years old. 3. Where do you live? I live in Frankfurt, Germany. 4. What is your favorite color? #174389 (a light sky blue) and yellow. 5. How many phones do you own? Two. I have one on my desk (with a cord) and one cell. I also have one or two old cellphones still lying around, but they're both broken. 7. Wait, what happened to question six? That is classified. 8. Someone has just loaned you a time machine that can take you to any location on the planet during any time period. Where/when do you go? Go visit myself on last Thursday and tell myself to avoid losing my spare glasses. Either that, or go back in time to intimidate or assassinate the Fox exec who decided to cancel Firefly. 9. If you were forced to change your PDN to something completely unrelated to its current form and your original username, what would it be? Atrus. Edit: Wait, I forgot my PDN is currently Arancaytrus. Ory'Hara. 10. If you could transform at will into any living animal, what animal would it be? A cat. 11. It's ninja sliths versus pirate nephilim. Who should win? Vahnatai. Fun fact: Dikiyoba has been working on this thread on and off for over three years. At one question every three months? They don't look that sophisticated.

Originally Posted By: Tirien Post all your conspiracy theories here. That way other threads dont get hijacked with the insanity of 76.3% of us. Those numbers are suspiciously precise. Where did you get that data? You're watching us, aren't you? I know you're watching us.

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Triumph I'd never before considered ice cream's role in the vast world-spanning conspiracy...food for thought. Heh. One of Dikiyoba's favorite dreams involved the revelation that Canada had orchestrated the Cold War in order to keep the United States and Soviet Union from infringing on Canada's strawberry ice cream fishing industry in the Arctic. Sell the film rights to that.

Heh... I remember I found the comic in December 2007, and read the entire archive in pretty much one week over the break.

I don't think xkcd would be better as a blog. The observational humor strips (like the current one about driving directions) talk about trivial things or pet peeves - spending more than a single paragraph about a topic like that would turn a blog entry into just another rant on the internet. Edit: Also, the top half of my webcomic list is very nearly a subset of yours (the others being more obscure or less regular), but I notice there's no Schlock Mercenary. That's a really awesome one.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Yeah -- most colleges in the U.S. require you to take at least one or two basic courses in different "core" areas like math or writing, "distribution requirements." And I can't think of any U.S. colleges (except maybe St. John's) that don't give you a fairly massive amount of space to take electives. Argh. The curriculum at my college is so tightly regulated that I'm being arbitrarily blocked from getting an exam in a course I took last semester, just because it's officially a graduate-level course. Ironically, not only did I pass all its coursework, I'm the only one who did (it was a small audience).

Originally Posted By: Upright and Thrifty VGCats didn't stop. It just got updates on a non-schedule. —Alorael, who should throw on two non-webcomics. 365 Tomorrows is a sci-fi flash fiction site with one story per day. It's like a comic, but it's text! I read that too; it's awesome. What's the second non-webcomic? Also, for everyone who likes OOTS, here is another nice one that looks just like it.

Dreamhost had to migrate my site to a new server today, which unfortunately means I have to rebuild the PHP engine as the new system is slightly different from the old. All sites in the Ermarian network are going to be down for a while, hopefully not more than a day. Edit: Everything is up again, though the upgrade to PHP 5.3 may have resulted in a few idiosyncratic changes.

As a professional nitpicker, I am forced to point out that the the x-mancy terms are derived from Greek (manteia: divination), so you get necromancy, pyromancy and hydromancy instead of thanatomancy, ignimancy and aquamancy. Which means biomancy might fit the pattern more closely than vitaemancy. (Not that that is any of my business. I'm not even in this RP... )

The indentation definitely isn't supposed to be screwed up like that. I'm not sure if that happened this week, or earlier. There's more to this problem; it appears that the syntax highlighter (which also takes care of rendering indentation) is broken. It doesn't color any calls, either - just identifiers and flow-control keywords (if-then-else etc). I'll have to check out what happens there.

Er, right. I hadn't switched it back on yet.

Okay, the script data does indeed appear to be still there, though it doesn't appear to be loaded properly. Until this is fixed, it is vital that the node is not saved. Edit: Ack, never mind. I was looking at the wrong node - the conveyor belt script. That one's script actually was gone, because it was saved just now. Fortunately, all changes are revisioned, so that was fairly easy to undo. The actual bug was a missing custom patch, which I just had to reapply. All other scripts now show up fine. I rolled back the conveyor belt node to the last version, but repeated the changes to the description and memory cell fields. If you changed the script as well, you will have to do that again since that field didn't get saved.

Yeah, I had some trouble last week that resulted in my losing many of the customizations I had made to the Drupal modules used on the site. Some parts of the site don't work right now, though the data was not affected. Edit: Ah, the scenarios thing was easier than it looked like. Turns out I was missing the module that automatically determined whether a scenario had been released ("computed_field"). Now that works. The scripts part may be less easy.

In German (in fact I bought the first three before I was even fluent in English). That's the original version after all. (Come to think of it; Blue Byte is the only German game maker I can think of that made international fame, though my narrow view only really includes the strategy and RPG genre).

Originally Posted By: Matanbuchus Originally Posted By: Motherload http://gamma.nic.fi/~ribla17/tyopoyta_3.jpg I haven't really changed the structure of the icons in a couple of years. :\ Background photo is from a trip to lapland some years back. Love the contrast. Areena5 + HoMM3 <3 Also, EV Nova <3. I've seen videos of the RoaE Settlers game (think it's number 7?), but haven't played it yet - nor any since Settlers IV. Though I can say I've played each of them before that, even the first one. Edit: I need to stop this habit of immediately doing whatever I think of. Just spent an hour digging out my old CD, getting it to run in DOSBox, playing it and taking a screenshot for Wikipedia.

As long as it is not explained why his proof that 3-SAT (NP-complete) is not in P doesn't apply to the 2-SAT and XOR-SAT problems as well (which would be incorrect, since 2-SAT and XOR-SAT are both in P), it's probably broken. The summary of the issue goes like this, basically (for everyone too lazy to read Wikipedia or too intimidated by its terminology): There are some problems computers can solve fairly fast, like searching an unsorted list (n), comparing every pair of elements in a list to each other (n²), etc. Importantly, "fairly fast" just means "polynomial" - n^5 or n^10 are actually very slow algorithms, but they still count as polynomial. The set of these problems is called "P". Then there are some problems where a given solution can be checked quickly, but where an unknown solution can (so far as we know) only be found by brute-force checking of every possible solution. Since all possible solutions are usually permutations or combinations, that means there is an exponential number of them. For example, there are 52^10 possible mixed-case passwords with ten letters, or 10!=10*9*8*7*6*5*4*3*2 possible ways to arrange ten different given letters. Since exponential functions grow faster than polynomial ones, that means such a problem takes much longer to solve. The set of problems that are easy to verify, are called "NP", for "non-deterministic polynomial", the problems that are hard to solve are "NP-hard", and the problems that are both are called "NP-complete". The important part is that since "NP" is an upper bound on difficulty, all "P" problems are contained in "NP". The question everyone has been trying to answer is whether the reverse is also true: That is, whether there is some magical algorithm that can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time as well. This is almost certain to be false, but there is no proof for that yet. As it applies to this proof: The proof appears to focus on proving a well-known NP-complete problem to be actually unsolvable in P time. One important thing about NP-completeness is that all such problems are interchangeable: solve one problem in P-time, and they're all solved; prove one unsolveable in P, and they all are. The NP-complete problem he chose is called 3-SAT. The input is a Boolean formula like (x OR !y OR z) AND (y OR k OR !x), consisting of a number of bracketed parts connected by AND, each of which contains 3 variables (possibly negated) connected by OR. The solution (if it exists) is a combination of values for the variables (for example: x = y = z = TRUE, k = FALSE) that make the whole formula TRUE. This is an interesting one because there are slight variants that are far easier to solve (ie. in P), which are called 2-SAT (the same problem, but only 2 variables per clause) and XOR-SAT (the same problem, but only requiring that an odd number of parts must be true, rather than all of them). From the comments I've read so far, the prover hasn't been able to adequately explain why the proof doesn't apply to these variants as well. If it did, then it would have to be wrong.

I tend to play KoL for a few days straight a few times a year when I'm not burdened down with college stuff. I think I last left my Sauceror with only a bit of item grinding to go before facing the Sorceress.

Most of my webcomic bookmark list has already been mentioned: XKCD, Girl Genius, Schlock Mercenary, Order of the Stick, Questionable Content, Dresden Codak, Looking for Group, Scary Go Round / Bad Machinery and Penny Arcade. I do have some that are not yet posted, though: Sinfest, General Protection Fault, WTF Comics and The Noob. I also still read Dominic Deegan and UserFriendly, but some days I wish I didn't.

This is a small bird. This is the view from my window.

Click to reveal.. (Desktop) (enlarge) I keep all applications in the dock now. Also, my desktop interface is pretty awesome: Click to reveal.. (Cube) (enlarge)

Around 0400 today, both of my hard drives failed and were not mountable on reboot. I am hoping that it is only a temporary problem caused by temperature (the computer was running continuously for a record time of nearly 20 days) and I can bring the computer back up tonight. If I can't, then not being able to join the next Blood Marsh session is only one of the many ways my life is going to suck for the forseeable future. Edit: I am now /home-less. Magic smoke erupted. Fortunately everything I need immediately was backed up yesterday. Much of the stuff I would miss terribly was last backed up in January. A lot of what I haven't backed up in the intervening time is little notes, music, ebooks, code I was working on. I'd lose enough personal data to make it worth sending to a lab eventually. Fortunately, I'm on my way to the electronics store to pick up a replacement drive. => If nothing else goes wrong, I will be able to join you after all. Edit: Miracle upon miracles. My /home is fine. It was the backup drive that got blown up. I replaced it and have made new backups.

My original word was fornication-based, but then I ran into the auto-censor and felt that I should probably change it.

Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Master1 Yes. I was joking. I am aware of the atmospheric effects of volcanic eruptions. EDIT: I now realize that the true solution to climate change is a gigantic umbrella to protect us from any extra sunlight! It's been proposed, and it's actually not as crazy as it sounds. Basically you spew volcanic gases into the air and they block sunlight from entering, and if you calculate it correctly, then the blocking out of the sunlight should perfectly balance the greenhouse effect. There's a section covering it in much deeper (and more accurate) detail in Superfreakonomics (Which I recommend everybody read, along with Freakonomics, too!) Fine-tuned calculation? Just convene the International Council once every twenty years and vote to either nuke the icecaps or increase the solar shade to adjust the sea level! [/AlphaCentauri] Edit: Also, the atmospheric dust is not just counteracting global warming, but also grounding tens of thousands of flights, curbing emissions by hundreds of thousands of tons of CO2. (By comparison, Eyjafjallajökull itself is merely spewing an estimated 8000 tons.) As long as it doesn't get worse, this eruption might have been ecologically beneficial, overall. Of course, if Katla does blow (which is very possible) we're f--- *lamely* ...in deep trouble.