Dantius

Originally Posted By: Future Wonderbolt They all suck, go die or something like that.

This thread proves too valuable to abandon a second time... So, in breaking news, Mitt Romney has chosen Paul Ryan to be his VP running mate. Or, as the Onion puts it, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan To Awkwardly Hug, High Five For Next Three Months. I'm very surprised. It's been clear for a while at least that Romney has a structural gap in the polls that is refusing to close (You know you have a problem when Fox polls Obama at +9 points), so he couldn't go for a safe choice, but I would have bet money he would have gone for Rubio to help win Florida and maybe narrow the Hispanic vote to slightly less embarrassing margins. The fact that he's decided to try and reroll the entire election by picking Ryan says something about where he thinks he is. At least now nobody can claim that Romney's plans lack specifics- Ryan is nothing if not exactingly specific on what he's going to cut and by how much.

Originally Posted By: Student of Trinity [snip] Personally, I think it's been quite clear since Sokal at least that shockingly large swathes of the non-scientific academic disciplines not only have no clothes, but have never really had any in the first place and still feel no compulsion to saddle themselves with fabriconormative instruments of loomiarchal oppression. A rather sad state of affairs, but it's not something that can be fixed from the outside, and all the people who are capable of fixing it are either already in other careers or don't feel compelled to do anything about it in the first place, when they could be studying other fields entirely.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer and he is adopted and secretly the son of the Emperor that was supposed to have been killed at birth ... ...No, he's the son of the emperor's right-hand man who killed the sage with a dark past an hour into the movie. Duh.

The Glory of the Many demands you play System Shock 2 first.

Originally Posted By: Triumph I find this thread bizarre and kind of creepy. Eeeeyup. Same here.

Before they send us To a grave Alien Beasts use Burma-Shave.

Originally Posted By: Cairo Jim That's an equation? An expression, technically. But most people don't really know the difference, as evidenced by the fact that that image's file name is "The_Engineer's_Favorite_Equation.png" and not "The_Engineer's_Favorite_Expression.png"

Originally Posted By: Rechtawthgin: Aran's impersonate Click to reveal.. (How to make a Sentry Gun )) Click here ----------- -Sentry Ahead, Nightwatcher False. That is only my fourth favorite equation.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan Anyway, here's an article I remember reading on the topic of randomness in games. It's written by Mark Rosewater about Magic, so skim over the examples if you're not familiar with that game, but a lot of the points apply to computer games (and other games) as well. For me, like many others here, randomness is good in some games mainly because it stops players from "mathing out" before doing anything, and because it spreads decision points throughout play. I'm sorry, I couldn't take anything he said seriously after he claimed that A New Hope was better than Empire Strikes Back. Also, his argument that chess is essentially random because a player doesn't know what lines will be effective against your opponent is stupid in addition to being wrong- not only are the vast majority of master-level games published, enabling review of them to analyze weaknesses, but t really doesn't take many games at all to get a feeling of an opponent's play style. He really should stick to Magic rather than attempting to defend his pet theory by spouting off about games he has no clue what he's talking about.

You are all missing the obvious explanation. ...

Originally Posted By: Actaeon I am not a big fan of these tests, as I often come out of them looking like a psychopath. Hoo boy. You think you look like a sociopath? My personal favorites: Click to reveal.. AGREEABLENESS..............1 Trust....................1 Morality.................1 Altruism.................1 Cooperation..............0 Modesty..................0 Dutifulness..............1 Anger....................70 Intellect................91 Liberalism...............75 I think that some of those are pretty close, but I doubt I'm as dramatically Manichean as the test makes me out to be. I'm not quite sure why they came out as 1's and 0's (I would have guess high single digits or low teens myself), though. I think part of the problem is that I tend to flanderize my own responses by only picking the "Agree/Disagree strongly" options. I think I had a grand total of 3 "Neither agree nor disagree" options out of all 120, and I doubt I had many more than thirty or forty "Mildly agree/disagree".

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith I don't get how you can "fail" an interview. It seems like a pretty shallow process for determining whether or not someone is worth hiring. I don't see interviews as a question of "Who, among these people, should be hired", because it's stupid to try and base that off of a few minutes of talk to someone. Rather, it's a question of "Who, among these people, should not be hired", and then once you've pared down the pool a bit, picking the ones who are best qualified for the job based on what they've done, what they're capable of, recommendations, etc. It's actually quite simple to fail an interview, all you really need to do is not be properly prepared. The attitude of "If you can't be bothered to put on a suit, we can't be bothered to give you a job" seems stupid at first glance, but since all the pointless hoops you are made to jump through are so trivial, the fact that you aren't exerting the minimum effort to meet the requirements imposed on you for a couple minutes is telling. Conversely, being able to pass an interview tells me nothing except that you can fake it well*, which while valuable, only says that I should go back to your resume and work out if you're what I'm actually trying to find or a poseur. That said, there are several stupid interview things that seem to be all the rage now, like asking people do to Fermi problems that have no answer to see "how they think". I don't care if you can properly estimate the number of ping-pong balls that can fit in Yankee stadium! I mean, at least have the courtesy to give applicants a problem that has a solution that is possible to work out, then you'll actually get useful data in the form of "did they answer this question right, yes or no".

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Most people reading this have no idea what ethnicity you are, Harehunter, or what other demographic groups you belong to. If you think jokes that showcase stereotypes about categories of people are tasteful in your private life, that's your business, but this is not the place for them. He has posted pictures, correct? So the information is publicly available...

Originally Posted By: Juan Carlo Click to reveal.. (Spoilers, duh) I don't know if the creators intended it or not, but I'd say what little political message is there is pretty conservative. The movie for the most part avoids politics, but Bain at least seems to be aligned somewhat with the OWS movement. Obviously, I think he's just using the rhetoric to further his cause, but the movie doesn't really paint a pretty picture of OWS sorts of sentiments as it ultimately shows them to lead only to violence and extremism. The only problem is that the politics of his group are left pretty vague--he does give a few speeches about the poor rising up against the wealthy to take back the city, but it's all left pretty half baked. As a consequence, I never really understood his or Talia Al'Ghul's motivation for doing anything. They were prepared to blow themselves up to succeed at their goal, but I still don't understand why they were so passionate as they are never really given a cause. This problem goes all the way back to "Batman Begins" where Ras Al'Ghul explains that his secret assassin guild has been destroying cities when they become too corrupt for centuries--but even there they never really explain why they do it other than just saying that they do. Plus, Ras Al'Ghul, while passionate, never seemed like the sort who would blow himself up to succeed. So having his daughter suddenly become a suicide bomber was kind of strange. Maybe this is something that is greater explained in the comics, though, I don't know. But I've always though The Dark Knight was pretty conservative too--or, at least, "neo con" when when it came to issues of national defense in the post-911 Bush era. Click to reveal.. (My response) See, this case may be an instance Nolan brilliantly directing Bane is such a manner that it leaves his motivations wide open enough for you to ascribe your own personal bogeyman's mores to him, but I got a clear feeling that Bane's ideology was more informed by straight-up libertarianism to an almost Randian degree as opposed to vanilla OWS. His primary motivation seemed to be less "Let's party murder the rich like it's 1789" and more "Let's 'free' the people of Gotham from the government by removing all cops and federal troops". Definitely got a neocon, pro-PATRIOT vibe, though that subtext was noticeably stronger in the last one. It seems to me that, in the muddle that was the second half of the movie, it was trying to make a almost Hobbesian point about bellum omnium etc., which it then proceeded to undercut spectacularly- instead of ordinary citizens being the ones doing the looting and murdering-rich-people thing, it was Gotham's most hardened criminals, who had just been freed from prison and armed. So it wound up much more "Mad Max meets NYC" (honestly, it's quite clear from Bane's armor that that was what they were going for) than "Deep social commentary on the nature of mankind", which seemed kind of silly. Two, two and a half stars out of four, tops.

Originally Posted By: *i No person picks them...they arise through other means. "other means" == "on the whim of drunk SW mods in the CalRef chat"?

Oh hey, check it. Nifty.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Is anybody else getting a really uncomfortable sense of deja vu right now? My, what a harsh, cruel question to ask. You monster.

I think it's pretty hilarious that Rush Limbaugh tried to link the use of Bane as a villain to a liberal socialist Hollywood plot to smear Romney's firm Bain. Ignoring the fact that the character is two decades old, written by a conservative Republican, and that it's Romney's own fault for naming his private equity firm a homonym for "deadly poison" instead of something like [boring adjectve/noun] [Capital/Management/Consulting/Funds].

Originally Posted By: Lilith Originally Posted By: Dantius If there is one murder per 200 lifetime units (whatever the hell that means) What it means is exactly what you said: that about one in every 200 Americans is murdered. See for yourself: in 2009, for example, 0.7% of all deaths were attributed to homicide. But that is only in terms of Americans who die that year, which account for a tiny fragment of the population. It's not a case of "1 in every 200 Americans are murdered" like you say, but rather than "1 in 21,000 Americans are murdered*". You can't break down that number across lifetimes, because murder rates change from year to year, and so does population- you're basically taking one year of statistics and generalizing that to a 78-year range, which is definitely not kosher.

Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S I don't know if Dikiyoba was just talking about highly publicized killing sprees, but I wasn't. According to the FBI, there are about 16,000 homicides per year in the U.S. Divide by the number of teens and adults (I'm using age 15+ for ease of availability of statistics) and you get around 1 homicide a year per 12,000 people. Life expectancy is 78, subtract 14 for the age group, that gives 64 years in the potential-murderer age bracket. Now the number changes to (very roughly) 1 homicide per 200 lifetimes. There is a clear statistical misrepresentation here. I can't put my finger on exactly where it occurs, but just look at your conclusion and twist it around a bit, and you'll see something is wrong. If there is one murder per 200 lifetime units (whatever the hell that means), then, given that the average person knows closely ~150 people (and probably is acquainted with closer to a thousand over the course of their lifetime), by your conclusion ever single person in the US over their lifetime would expect to know one to five victims of murder and one to five murderers on average, which is obviously not the case (after all, every murderer has to have a victim, too). Also, that assumes that murders are equally distributed amongst all age groups- I'm not very sure that 70-year olds murder at anywhere near the rate 20-year olds do. I'm pretty sure that the vast majority of homicides would be committed in the age range of under-30's- meaning that given people's predilection for having friends at around their age group, most people on SW would already have met their first couple murderers or victims, which again, I highly doubt to be the case. Originally Posted By: HOUSE of S Our track record doesn't look so great now. Whether or not it is the fault of society as a whole, the collective performance of our society isn't great. I'd lay down serious cash that, taken as a whole, our current society- relative to any others in the past- has a vastly lower mortality rate, not just in terms of homicides, but also in terms of wars, diseases, famine, infant mortality, etc. By historical standards, and across just about any metric imaginable, our current society is just about a paradise on earth- outside of a few isolated conflicts, people on the planet enjoy all-time lows of violence and death in general, and are richer, live longer, enjoy more rights, and are happier than any other previous time period ever. So yeah, I'd say that the collective performance of our society is pretty amazing, thank you very much.

Originally Posted By: Enraged Slith Originally Posted By: Goldenking That is a possibility, but I won't presume to speak for his intentions short of seeing an in-depth psychological evaluation conclude as such. Moreover, even if it is what he wants that doesn't mean we have an obligation not to grant it to him. Society would be doing itself a disfavor if it didn't try to figure out what was going on. I don't see why anyone should care what he has to say. Yep, as far as I'm concerned you officially forfeit any obligation society has to rehabilitate you when you murder 12 people and wound over 50.

http://www.isidewith.com/results/28247716 Pretty much what I expected: tending towards Obama, largely agreed with Democrats on domestic issues, Republicans on foreign affairs (although I actually think Obama has done an excellent job on that front), and Libertarians on nothing except that they should have the freedom to go play in traffic as children, and apparently environmental issues? That did surprise me somewhat, although none of the options given were very representative of my views on the subject. Also, I manged a stunning 0% agreement with Virgil Goode, which as I read up on his policies sounds like a very good thing.

Originally Posted By: Triumph Every time I see the thread title, I think of Jabba the Hutt saying "This bounty hunter is my kind of scum." Maybe there should be a survey of forum-users' favorite bounty hunters. Hmm. I'd have to go with Urdnot Wrex on that score.

ADoS is back permanently now? Curses! Now it will require effort to surpass his post level! I had hoped he would be gone, and I could just make another few hundred and coast into 16th, but nooo...