Dantius

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Originally Posted By: Dantius On a semi-related note semi-semite-related? Booooo!

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S The Bible is one historical source, but it is hardly a document that can be assumed to record history with perfect accuracy. The Israelites were Canaanites themselves. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canaanites On a semi-related not, it always amuses me when people (usually Israel supporters) accuse Arabs of being anti-Semitic. It's a great litmus test to figure out if people are really familiar with both sides of the issue.

Borlaug is my hero. Well, him and Malthus. Which is kind of an odd pair of heroes, when you think about it.

Originally Posted By: Skwish-E It is interesting to note that Middle Class has been defined by some as household income between $20,000 and $100,000, but the 2009 US Poverty Guidelines put a family of 4 with a household income of $22,050 or less in the poverty class. What does Middle Class mean anyway? Five minutes of research on the subject will tell you that nobody really knows what middle class is as an absolute, but everybody uses the term to argue some point. Of course, more research may find better answers. Do any of you have a chart of what middle class household income should be adjusted for family size (and location/cost of living)? Middle class is a category that everyone wants to apply to themselves. The poor want to be middle class, and the rich want to seem to be middle class. This means that the boundaries are constantly being pushed wider and wider- which is how a family of 4 making $20,000 a year and a family of 4 making $200,000 a year will both try to be accepted as "middle class"

AP credit arms races are stupid, especially when colleges don't accept more than two or three of them. Of course, they only work because students keep buying into them, because they're told that they are needed to get into college. I've never seen the point in trying to teach college-lite concepts to highschoolers. The material either goes over their head and they're wasting their time and effort, or they master it and then reach college and find out that crucial concepts were not taught in the AP course that were in the Level I course and that they've preemptively hamstrung themselves trying to get it out of the way. And don't get me started on how stupid gen ed requirements are in general. There is no reason that I should take on massive debt so that I can become a "well rounded" person, since apparently analysis of Shakespeare is required to become a chemical engineer now. I am giving you money so that you will give me a degree as quickly and as cheaply as possible, and I don't want to spend a third of my time in college wasting my money taking courses that I'll never use again when I could be taking more useful courses or picking up a double or even triple major for the same amount of time and money.

Originally Posted By: Tyranicus It is the end of an era. Steve Jobs has been the CEO of Apple since 1997. At that time, the company was almost dead in the water. Now, it has more money than any other US company. He led Apple during the development of the iPod, the most popular brand of portable music player ever made and the iPhone, which completely revolutionized the smartphone scene. Oh hey, I'll leave this here then. Don't mind me, just passing by...

I'm pretty amazed someone wrote a 400k piece of fanfiction for Jeff's games. IIRC, the games themselves only have around 100k worth of dialog. Then again, the people on fanfiction.net are pretty obsessive sometimes. This one woman wrote a two million word Mass Effect novel. That's four times the length of War And Peace, written about a video game. Talk about dedication and/or insanity.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S By the way, the "my ancestors weren't around for slavery so it's not my responsibility" argument falls apart unless you are also willing to renounce all of the progress made by other people's ancestors, from which you benefit. lolwut? That has nothing to do with the topic at hand. There's no reason that I should renounce, say, lightbulbs because they were invented before my ancestors emigrated to America. What, exactly, does giving up technological innovations and progress have to do with my ancestors culpability or lack thereof with he slave trade? (BTW, I'm not even sure what aforementioned culpability has to do with the discussion. If my great-great-great-great granduncle Jeremiah Stone owned slaves [full disclosure: I'm a late-1800's immigrant on both sides of the family, so this is hypothetical], how does that have anything to do with my current position on the subject? They're independent of one another- I wouldn't automatically be racist if my ancestors were, I'd be racist if I were racist. Don't punish the son for the sins of the father and all that.)

Originally Posted By: Nikki. Fun fact: I chose a Gaelic name for Creidne because of Sean Connery (also I like Gaelic names, but I mainly chose that name for this character because of Sean). Whether this makes you more likely to imagine an "enhanced" Connery or not is ultimately up to you. I choose to imagine her as Sean Connery in the man-thong bandolier he wears in that one movie. Y'know: Click to reveal.. (AAUGH MY EYES)

Forty-two!

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity This semester I have to teach mechanics again. The physics subject, that is. I'm not training auto repairpersons. In fact I'm very fuzzy about how engines work. I'm trying to learn. As part of that, I recently drove a motorcycle for the first time. It's a lot harder than it looks. I never got out of first gear, and although I stayed in chugging control for a couple hundred meters, on the way back I wiped out, at very low speed. My only injury was a bruise, but I managed to break the bike's clutch lever. Oops. Now I'm both impressed and alarmed that people ride these things at high speed on highways. Protip: If someone ever asks you to fix your car for them, just pop the hood, look around inside, and then say it's a problem with the carburetor and they should see a mechanic about it. Gets them off your case every time.

Dude, there are more digits in Graham's number than there are atoms in the universe. The human mind cannot even conceptualize how larger it is.

Originally Posted By: Jukai Playable Rakhashi, anyone? Can we have philosophizing Rakhasi, instead?

Well, considering we have 4 of the 5 players in the chat room, I think we could go ahead with the session of the DM wants to show up...

Well, not to take the words out of Excalibur's mouth, but I frankly agree strongly with his statements- I'd rank drug policy #2 behind education policy in terms of their ability to wreak havoc on the lower classes- and make no mistake, this is a class issue, and not a racial one. Look, let me take a bit of time to go over this in detail, since tl;dr posts seem to be the norm in this thread. There are many policies adopted by the federal government that disproportionately affect the poor. Sales tax is a great example, because while it ostensibly affects everyone equally, it actually has the result of vastly raising the cost of living for the poor to a perhaps unsustainable level, while it's a mere annoyance for the middle class and irrelevant for the rich. It's the same with drug policy- while it ostensibly affects everyone equally, it hurts the groups who have the most drug users the hardest- the poor. Now, the problem with this is that when people say "the poor" they mean a group that is both disproportionately black and, if you are black, that you are disproportionately likely to be a member of, for various reasons that have been discussed quite thoroughly above that mostly pertain to education. So anyways, you now have a group that is disproportionately likely to be black and at a increased vulnerability to use drugs. Now one of the big problems of being poor is that you can't actually represent your interests in the political system as well as you could if you were middle class or upper class. So these drugs that you are at an increased risk of taking are illegal (which is incredibly stupid for many, many reasons). This does two things: 1. Raises the price 2. Makes you a criminal for using them So drugs, as a commodity, are way, way more expensive then they should be, which means that if you start taking them, you have o fork over larger and larger proportions of your income than you would if they were legal, and if you are caught with them, you're almost certainly going to jail because the legal recourse you can afford isn't as much as the middle class or upper class users can afford. So now you're in jail. If you had a family, they probably got deprived of at least a portion of their revenue stream, making them more likely to be poor, you now have a felony conviction, making it next to impossible to get a job, you can no longer vote, meaning that in the eyes of the government you are useless, and you've now trapped yourself and possibly your family and kids in a vicious cycle that's incredibly difficult to get out of. And, to make matters worse, the money that you bought the drugs with, instead of being taxed and sent to the federal government and the growers in Mexico who need the money to feed their families, winds up in the hands of various gangs and drug cartels, who then use the money to either make Mexico a warzone or the inner cities of the US one, causing immense civilian casualties and loss of government revenue fighting them. So it's not really that drug policy is keeping blacks poor, so much as it is keeping the poor poor, who are likely to be black. It's just as serious a problem amongst white and Mexican poor people as it is blacks, it just gets slightly less exposure from those groups. EDIT: Since Excal posted a video, I think It's one of the few thing I agree with Friedman on.

You want a really big number? How about limx->oo [x]? Sure, it grows real slow, but it'll eventually get orders of magnitude orders of magnitude bigger than anything!

As a person who occasionally has input over who gets hired in my organization, I'd like to point out that it's ridiculous to posit statements like "All else being equal, would you hire the black/Chinese/Indian/Jew or the WASP?", because in my entire life I have never had two applicants that are somehow "equally" qualified. Everyone is simply so inherently different that it's stupid to try and say thing like "You hired the white guy over this equally qualified black guy" or vice versa, when they were two different people with totally different qualifications. I always just pick the most qualified person for the position, and since more often than not that position requires very specific prerequisites, there is always an exceptionally limited pool of applicants, and often one does tend to stand hear and shoulders above the rest, so it's not a difficult decision and there's rarely two applicants with similar qualifications in direct competition. And before someone accuses me of discrimination in the rare instance of direct competition, the choice has never in my life come down to "black vs. white". It's almost always "not white vs. other not white"- with Chinese and Indian dominating. And in the circumstances where it actually is white v non white, I usually wind up picking the non white guy 70% of the time, because they're often more qualified for the position or a beter fit.

If anything, I see more white people dressing that way than black people. I'm more inclined to chalk it up as a generational thing than a racial thing, but your perception may be different.

Does Intrade have odds on the world ending in 2012? Because I'd like to put around my money where my mouth is- that this entire "2012" hysteria was cooked up by either New-Agers mentally crippled from all the drugs, or people looking to profit off of aforementioned NAs. Besides, even if there is an apocalypse, I'll be fine. There's a FEMA concentration camp I can escape to!

Originally Posted By: Karoka Originally Posted By: Tyranicus Originally Posted By: Nikki. *Applauds*. You've gone up ten-fold in my estimation, sir. Seconded. Thirded. Fourthed for you, Skwish-E! You go Skwish-E!

Originally Posted By: Trenton Uchiha, rebel servile. Unless they are the GENEFORGE POWERED ONES? god does anyone listan to me? *facepalm* No.

Can't make it unless it's later, and even then I'd be late. Anytime next week works, though.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity Now magnetic storage is reaching some fundamental limits for information density. (If the domains get much smaller, they'll be able to have their magnetization flipped by random thermal fields, meaning that your hard drive would need to be drastically cooled to avoid constant data corruption. You don't want to have to keep topping up your laptop with liquid nitrogen.) Not only that, but the size of the storage available is now getting so large that the machine code that's decades old is now starting to have difficulties dealing with running an OS in all that space. On WinXP, for instance, you can't have more than IIRC 2.2 TB worth of memory, simply because it can't handle that much memory. So it looks like we'll probably hit the absolute storage limit sometime in this decade. FUun stuff. Of course, there's no reasont his couldn't be expanded, but that would be pretty tricky by my understanding, and it's not like most people really need 5 or 10 TB of storage for anything we have today...

Originally Posted By: Nioca Fourth, during the shootout last session, Clyve fired his gun three times in one round: Quote: (10:15:46 PM) Clyve Fourier: I fire off three pistol shots through the van to see if it hits anyone. (10:15:47 PM) Clyve Fourier: mageantonius rolled 1 20-sided die: 4 [...] (10:18:27 PM) DM: [Clyve] fires his pistol, but doesn't hear any screaming so probably didn't find his target. My question is, what are the rules governing this (assuming there are any)? That wasn't during combat, though. They weren't shooting back, so I was basically shooting to see if I could penetrate their cover. I'd imagine it was just the same as any action taken out of combat.

Originally Posted By: The (Armored) Ratt So what did you guys use to alter your images, and where are you hosting them? Paint can do it, and Tinypic is a good hosting site. I'm glad to see this is catching on! Soon, they'll see the power of the inverted colors! THEY'LL ALL SEE!