Dantius

If you're on a loan, try to graduate in 3 years or otherwise as fast as possible, especially if you're getting a specialized degree. Since you'll be picking up the tab sooner or later, it's crucial to try and minimize the eventual costs, especially since you'll be paying interest, too. You mention going to grad school. I'd strongly recommend that you get an undergrad degree, go work for a few years to work off your undergrad debt, and then go to grad school- I'm no admissions officer, but I'd imagine that being able to demonstrate a strong commitment to working in the real world would certainly give you a leg up on some random undergrad who hasn't done anything other than get a degree. Props for picking a STEM major that's probably going to result in high compensation and easy employment- it's stupid for people to go to college and cripple themselves with debt in order to get a degree that contributes nothing towards their earnings potential.

Originally Posted By: Trenton the dragon lord I wish I could be stuck in the middle, have responsibilities, but not to many. Have fun, party, stay young, and not work. Whats that age again? Like, 17-18... I've heard this question asked before (i.e. what age would you become if you could), and nobody ever answers teenage years (and only a few say college), because frankly those years suuuucked. Almost everybody there said later 20's to mid 30's were the happiest times of their lives, and I'd have to concur with that- independence, in many cases you're married but without kids, most have some semblance of financial stability (i.e. free of crippling debt like you could be in your early 20's), an a whole host of other factors.

Originally Posted By: Mod. Not sure about ATI and Nvidia, but I for some reason favor ATI. As for AMD and Intel, I like AMD much better. I have two PCs with the same specs specs, besides the processors, and both have integrated graphics chips. The Intel one is supposed to be better and is brand new, while the AMD has been sitting around for a while getting cluttered. The AMD gets a steady FPS of at least 125 (where I cap it) on my favorite FPS on almost every map. The Intel often drops to around 40 FPS, despite having the graphics settings on the PC to max performance. Why on earth would you need 125 FPS? Modern monitor only have a refresh rate of 60 Hz, meaning that over half of the frames rendered by you GPU aren't even displayed, and the human eye has trouble perceiving any difference beyond 40 FPS or so. There is literally no reason to tax your computers hardware and shorten its lifespan to get a framerate of 125- it's just stupid.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan (Side rant: what's with the pervasive idea that parents must pay for their child's college education? Students are adults by that point; can't they pay for it themselves? What's next, parents paying for their child's first house?) (After a minute of second thought, I realized that I'm going to get a lot of flak for this statement. Don't want to derail the topic; something for General, perhaps?) My parents didn't put a single cent towards my tuition. They did, however, pick up the tab on every one of my brothers' and my sisters', which is why I have, ah, quite strong feelings on the subject. Even though I managed to get scholarships that were not negligible, I was still over 100k in the hole from undergrad alone, and I had to pick up the entire tab for grad school years later, so it was probably pushing a fifth to a quarter of a million if you totaled it up (I did work off the undergrad debt before going to grad school. Wise decision). However, I did manage to land a good enough job that I was able to make the debt go away without crippling myself with finance costs, but there was really no guarantee of that, and certainly that wouldn't happen if I graduated today. If I ever had kids (hahahaha fat chance), I'd probably just pick up their tuitions without comment (iff they got a useful degree, of course) because I had severly disadvantaged myself for the first half of my life with that debt, and I wouldn't want them to go through that if I had the ability to stop it.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus I will see you and raise you one

nvidia, but really that's solely because I just found out Priem was an RPI graduate. Institutional loyalty and all that.

Originally Posted By: Lilith the logistics alone are baffling You expect white supremacist skinheads to bother with things like logistics?

Originally Posted By: FnordCola I'm pretty sure if the government were interested in going after people based on their choice of conspiracy literature, they'd be more interested in those who read, say The Turner Diaries or Behold a Pale Horse Turner Diaries is available online for free, but I don't remember where- it might be the Anti-Defamation League or some other group. I tried to read it once, it was probably the most shockingly appalling book I've ever read- and I didn't even make it past the part where they Click to reveal.. graphically executed every white woman in the country not married to a white Christian male. Dude makes Mein Kampf look like something Elie Wiesel wrote.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Even with a small number of people, there's a high chance that at least two share a birthday. Put 23 people in a room, and there will be ~50% chance that a birthday is shared. Clearly all that mathematics is wrong, since it does not account for the probability that someone was born on February 29.

Originally Posted By: like the aphex twins in here [snip] The best part of that toy is that it comes from "Jesus Christ Superstore".

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Originally Posted By: Dantius Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith http://www.avernum.com/images/avernum/AvernumIntro.jpg The Empire is arresting Jesus? Wow. I cannot unsee this. Action Jesus is now canon. Aaand my party for A:EFTP is now going to be the buddy-cop duo of Action Jesus and Pilate. Thanks a lot for the image, Jeff.

I'm sure that this got touched on somewhere in the Federalist Papers, but I'm too lazy to look it up. It was probably Hamilton saying something about how people have a tendency to passion and irrationality and faction because they suck, or something. Just thinking about it, I'm pretty sure that the reason has something to do with the delegation of powers "not expressly given to Congress" to either the States or the People. Since making (federal) laws is pretty expressly delegated to the Congress, that power is not only not delegated, but any attempts to delegate it would require an amendment to the Constitution. Fortunatly, I'll give Congress some credit in that nobody there is stupid enough to try and let government be dictated by the rapidly changing whims of anybody able to punch a hole in a ballot. The reasons that States can do it is because states can rewrite their constitutions every few decades to deal with changing circumstances, so it was probably just edited in when some people started getting antsy about it.

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith http://www.avernum.com/images/avernum/AvernumIntro.jpg The Empire is arresting Jesus? Wow.

Um, links please?

Click to reveal.. (It's-a-me, Mario) Mario "Chains" Campiardi, L1 Male Mafia Enforcer (Dantius) STATUS: Healthy LOCATION: Shadowing party outside ranch ATTRIBUTES: 4STR(+1)/2DEX/3PER/1INT HP [10+2S]: 18/18/18 AC [10+D]: 12 SPD [3+½D]: 4 Bloodthirsty – 1PD Ability 'Bloodlust', grants +6THP, +2HIT for [2+½lvl] rounds when used. [Ready, 2/2] SKILLS Intimidation: 4 Sneak: 3 (+1) Athletics: 2 Observation: 2 (+1) Search: 2 (+1)

Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Freytag's triangle is so general that it's useless for analyzing fiction. However, it's still important for writing fiction. It's a lot easier to write stories that follow more complicated structures if you have the basic triangle down. Dikiyoba. I only bother reading fiction whose narrative structure provides a good approximation of fractal behavior.

Originally Posted By: The Turtle Moves They are a bunch of whiny babies. Shima is the worst. I am reminded of Jeff's thoughts on companion quests in his review of Mass Effect 2: Originally Posted By: JV Also, if you are forced to have these yahoos on your ship, "helping you", asking for favors, and bugging you with their issues, you should always have the option of feeding them into the mass-energy reactor. Hey, your ship has to be fueled somehow. So will we be able to feed our companions to Redbeard's shark tank while twirling our mustaches in Avadon II?

Originally Posted By: Actaeon anything CAN be a d *raises eyebrows archly*

Originally Posted By: The Mystic And yet I've had Hotmail tell me that such a password is very weak, and then tell me that a 6-character password full of garbage was very strong. In addition to being a terrible email service, Hotmail also apparently lies. The algorithm to generate "password strength" probably counts characters and repetitions, but that's not how algorithms to break passwords work. For a better analysis of password "strength", try this.

Originally Posted By: Necris Omega Originally Posted By: Tatters and Tears —Alorael, who didn't learn his lesson from using ladders. He did learn it, at least a bit, by refusing to use a ladder to get chemicals and dumping two liters of blue dye on himself. So... should we go with the Blue Man Group reference, the Eiffel 65 Blue reference, or the Avatar reference? Oh, Avatar all the way. Sniper rifles are kind of like bows.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Why bring up the example of devaluing currency if you yourself admit that it's a horrible thing to do and no one should ever do it? Why not jump straight to "inflation and unemployment and interest rates"? Because I like providing hypothetical examples to illustrate my point, because I didn't want to trawl through CEPR and/or Brookings Institute archives to find multiple citations to support all my points like I did last time this topic came up, and because it's funny to picture the US doing that to China? And BTW, I don't think it's horrible and no one should ever do it. There are definitively some things to be said for slightly devaluing the dollar:yuan ration to something closer to 1:5 or 1:6 from 1:7. It would go a long way towards fixing trade imbalances and increasing US competitiveness in China- it's just devaluing it to something more along the lines of 1:1 in order to pay off our debt owed to China that's stupid and should never be done. EDIT: Originally Posted By: *i Secondly, the US could ignore the request, essentially saying "Come and take it, if you dare." I am now an advocate of *i's "Come at me, bro" theory of economics.

Originally Posted By: Micawber In the long run, the protests will make no difference. In fifty years' time, China will be calling the shots. Think we have no influence now? Just wait. It always annoys me when people voice this opinion. China owns a small segment (~15% IIRC) of the US debt. The US debt is in dollars. Not coincidentally, the US also prints dollars. Do people who think that China will "own" the US also think that, in fifty years, the people running the US will be so stupid they will literally forget how to print money to pay off our debts? If China somehow tries to use debt as a serious leverage point to the level where they would "own us", the Fed could literally just print (well, not print, but you get the idea) a special run of $2.5 trillion and send it to China with a note attached reading "Enjoy your massively devalued US currency holdings, suckers!" Sure, it would cause hyperinflation, but then we'd be out of debt! That's why it's disingenuous to talk about government debt like it's personal debt. While I can't just write up a sheet of paper saying "THIS IS WORTH MY MORTGAGE" and send it to my bank and expect it to be paid in full, the government totally can do that with the public debt. It's just that that would have so many more repercussions that it's not worth it- and that, in the long run, debt really doesn't matter as much as things like inflation and unemployment and interest rates, so it's really just a red-herring issue tossed out to distract from important economic issues.

Originally Posted By: Polaran (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... ) I don't think Jeff likes that idea...

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S On Steve Jobs again: Here's the other side of the story. http://gawker.com/5847344/what-everyone-is-too-polite-to-say-about-steve-jobs He also parked his car in handicapped spots before he even got sick. There are plenty of examples of Jobs generally being a terrible human being, up to and including criminal activity- securities fraud to be precise (his board backdated stock options and he made some of them take the fall for him). He pretty much winds up getting a free pass for all of it, though- which is ridiculous. On the more humorous side, we might get flash now. Or, even better, dividends. I might pick up some AAPL after it stops its current nosedive, and that would just be fantastic.

Nuthin'.