Dantius

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Is it? I think the classic pattern tends to involve "this person who brought you up is not your real father/whatever. actually, this king/hero/wizard/sith is!" So you're saying I should have gone with the KotOR joke on the Mallak angle, instead of the ESB joke on the "your father" angle?

Originally Posted By: Artemis~ Good point, though according to definition a country's HDI is measured by life expectancy, literacy, education and standards of living compared to countries worldwide. A country's size doesn't affect these things too much, perhaps resource wise though. Size does make things more difficult. If a country that has to educate 100,000 people at a cost of 100,000*X dollars per year, it can make do with a small bureaucracy and limited facilities, and so on and so forth, and manage to spend, say, .8 X directly on the children's educations. A country that educated 50,000,000 people per year with 50,000,000*X dollars needs a large bureaucracy, spread out over a vast area, that requires money and such to upkeep and run. With a larger prerequisite system, they might only spend .6*X dollars directly on a student's education, and so even though the "theoretical" amount of money is identical, the practical amount of money is much smaller. Originally Posted By: Artemis~ Japan has technology that we won't hope to see for years here in America, yet they're small. But also, Cambodia i small too and fairly under developed. Yes, but Japanese technology poses no threat to us, so it is out of the purview of security threats, and thus irrelevant. Besides, do talking robots and such really elevate our standard of living? Originally Posted By: Artemis~ Perhaps if we didn't spend a crapload of money sticking our nose into other country's buisness, we'd have a higher standard of living. So the US should simply sit back and watch Qaddafi slaughter civilians? We don't have a moral obligation to use our ability to crush his forces and utterly stop his repression? We posses the most expensive military in the world, and one of the most frequently cited justifications for this fact is that we use it to protect those that cannot justify such spending. If this is true, they why should we not "interfere" in other countries business by deposing brutal dictators and undemocratic regimes? BTW, I do, in fact, support further massive military intervention in Libya. But for chrissakes, our President (both Obama and Bush) needs to learn that if you are going to prosecute wars, YOU HAVE TO RAISE TAXES. Also, it is possible to vastly reduce the DOD's budget and not impair their ability to fight the types of war we now face. Originally Posted By: Artemis~ I know that sounded harsh, but we have homeless and starving people right here, I don't think we can afford to spend money on other countries right now. The US actually gives away extra food to other countries (not saying this is a bad thing, just inefficient) when we have to subsidize our farmers. Here's the problem. While I can understand this kind of "set our own affairs in order first" type of thinking, the fact is, the percentage of people in the US in real, serious need of food, that would stave if they did not receive aid, is vastly in terms of number and percent than numbers in other countries. North Korea, for instance, is a country where millions would literally starve to death if we stopped sending them food aid. Farm subsidies < millions dead. For proof of the fact that millions can die in a famine, just look at the Holodomor- a famine created in Ukraine by the orders of Josef Stalin. It killed more people than the entire Holocaust, a much more widely known genocide (12 million was the figure I read, versus 11 for the Holocaust), but instead of bothering with death camps and gas, Stalin simply cut off food. It's a terrible way to die, and mass casualties are very plausible. EDIT: Originally Posted By: Dikiyoba Originally Posted By: Dantius because the government has decided that some things are more important than that, like [...] infrastructure and so forth. Hahaha. (For those of you who can't figure out why Dikiyoba is laughing, it's because the USA's infrastructure is generally old and badly maintained.) Trust me, I know. Expressways built 50 years ago by Eisenhower weren't even supposed to last this long. Luckily, Obama is putting more money into infrastructure and development under the ARRA, which is a solid move, IMO.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES That was Mallak. Mallak was the advisor of King William, Brandon's father, and he brought Brandon up as his grandson after the king was killed -- he was not his real grandfather. (There's gotta be a tvtropes page for that.) So Mallak's dramatic revelation was "No Brandon- I am not your [grand]father!"? That's a twist on the classic pattern...

Originally Posted By: Artemis~ Imo, I'm american and I still don't think we're the bomb-dot-com. Most European countries actually surpass us in technology and are higher are the human development index scale. Technology, I doubt, simply because of the fact that the US military spends about a kajillion dollars on R&D in order to stop countries from surpassing us in technology, or at least in technology that could prove to be a threat to our security. Plus, it's easy to score high on the HDI when you're a tiny country with a very homogeneous and xenophobic population, like many high-scoring European countries are (Switzerland, for example). While the US may be somewhat xenophobic, we're certainly neither small nor homogeneous, so we tend to have problems ensuring that our citizens have thigh highest standard of living possible, because the government has decided that some things are more important than that, like security and infrastructure and so forth.

Originally Posted By: Dintiradan There's also the fact that classical liberalism is different from modern liberalism, but I don't think many people use 'liberal' in the older sense nowadays. Well, just about all political parties are classical liberals- you don't see many people arguing for mercantilism or colonialism nowadays.

Originally Posted By: Pemptus It's the Dragon Age (or most other dialogue-based rpg games too, I suppose) dilemma all over again - I want an effective and balanced party with a full array of skills, AND some interesting conversations. I simply cheated that need by building a main PC so powerful that he didn't really need any support except for disarming traps and picking locks and such. Then, I could just take whoever I thought would be the most interesting party companions all the time.

Originally Posted By: Randomizer Poker is different in that the casino gets a fee for hosting the game, but all the remaining money goes to the winners. If you are serious and skilled then you can make money in the long run by remembering how other players play given certain hands and their tells on whether they have a good or bad hand. The remake of Casino Royale does cover this briefly in the gambling scene between James Bond and Le Chiffer. It comes down to minimizing losses when you aren't likely to win the hand and trying to extract the most money when you can. In the original book, he plays Baccarat, a game vaguely resembling blackjack, but where the players and even the house have zero input on the play of the hand- there are tables that tell the house when to draw and when to stay, and the game is simply played straight down via those tables until the hand is over. So it is rather odd that they decided to switch Bond from playing a game of random chance and predetermined outcomes to a game of skill and psychology (and some random chance). I guess they think it's less badass for Bond to win based totally on random chance, though I don't know why they didn't just substitute in, say, a chess or Go tournament if they wanted to so a game of skill alone. It is rather curious, though, as Baccarat is the only casino game in existence where there is one consistent bet that yields even money but has a 51% probability of occurring. Of course, the casino circumvents this by having you pay off 5% of your winnings from bets made on that wager as a comission, but still.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES "Addition Over and Over" would be a pretty good name for all of Math, really. I say that out of respect, btw, and not disrespect. Addition By Any Other Name would be better, IMO.

Originally Posted By: loyal servile of sasuke uchiha im in seventh grade...do you expect me to know them? I knew most basic single-variable calculus by the end of 9th grade, and was up to multivariable and vector calc by 11th. I'm sure it's possible to learn at least some basic differentiation and integration before High school. Wikipedia it, and then use your knowledge to impress you friends.

Originally Posted By: Impudent Strumpet! Originally Posted By: Dantius Look at me, I can't even be bothered to write my own message! I am truly the more optimal spammer! FYT. I was also going for that, too, but it needs to be posted all by itself, so doing that and the comic wouldn't work.

Oh look, nobody's posted this yet!

Originally Posted By: Friendship like an iron spike This thread is nearly 8 years old. Please don't respond to ancient relics like this. The original participants are long gone and the problem hasn't come up again. It's probably a spammer attracted by the thread's title- look at his signature.

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES It really does appear that homosexuality has gone the way of players being able to summon demons. Something Jeff has no problem with himself, but doesn't want to risk alienating touchy parents over. Yes, because Westboro Baptist Church totally has better things to do than complain over a few hundred words in an obscure game containing over 100,000 of them... ...Wait. They don't, do they?

I dislike the concept of a "like" button without the existence of an equally weighted "dislike" button. Delivering meaningless praise without equal avenue to criticize is just hollow and pointless. Besides, I've always found it far more useful to be unnecessarily harsh on mediocre work than overly praiseworthy- it tends to motivate more, and a superior product thought to be horrifyingly bad by its author is better than over complacent mediocrity thought to be brilliant by its author.

Originally Posted By: Master1 Euler's method is hardly used any more in generating functions, or so my calc teacher says. I know that Apple's "Grapher" program has Euler's, Runge-Katta's, and Romberg's methods all built in. There may be other applications of Euler's of which I am unaware. That seems often to be the case when I assert things. Oh well, I'm still young. I simply used Euler's Method as a stand in for all the other ways of approximating solutions to IVP's that have names I don't remember. I'm way too lazy to remember all of them, so I just stick to the ones involving Newton, Leibniz, Gauss, and Euler.

Originally Posted By: Micawber Just to keep things (un)clear, only a few functions are accurately approximated by their Taylor series. sin(x) and exp(x) are in fact rare examples. In a certain sense, almost all functions are non-analytic. Yeah, but it's still useful because there are functions that don't have a closed form but are still analytic, like erf(x) and I believe Bessel functions, so Taylor series are useful for calculating values by just adding, multiplying, and dividing, instead of having to perform definite integration or Euler's method, which are far more complex.

Originally Posted By: Micawber IOn Alex's original point, it is true that any kind of overt homoerotic writing is pretty unlikely to appear in popular media, especially US based. But this is hardly unique to Spiderweb. Personally, I would be more inclined to first complain about non-existent or stereotyped portrayal in 99%* of mainstream films, tv, radio and newspapers, before I got round to the indie RPGs... *cough* *cough* Dragon Age *cough*

Originally Posted By: iollmann Quote: But who pays more for a loaf of bread if they don't have to? Dunno, but have you ever tipped at a restaurant? It's not that different. But who will be Inspector Javert or Jean Valjean in this bread-based analogy we have going?

No, let's try again: A Taylor series is a way of approximating non-polynomial functions using polynomials. For instance, sin(x) and e^x are not polynomials, but can both be approximated as such. If you graph the polynomial 1+x+(x^2)/2+(x^3)/6+(x^4)/24+... and just keep on adding terms of the form (x^n)/n!, then the graph will eventually become a function that almost equals e^x for all x. Naturally, the more terms you add, the closer it gets to perfectly accurate. Here's an illustration where n is just the degree of the polynomial approximation:

What? Gerrymandering? No, none of that here, no sir!

Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES "America is a mistake, admittedly a gigantic, engorged, throbbing- err, mistake, but a mistake nevertheless. Sorry, got sidetracked there" -- Sigmund Freud FYT

Originally Posted By: Alex Originally Posted By: Dantius Ah yes, the lottery. Better known by its colloquial epithets, "the tax on the stupid" or "the tax on those who can't do math". Well, for most people, health insurance is also a bad investment if you only consider the expected value. If you presume death is an infinitely unfavorable outcome, then it does have a positive expected value again. Even just assigning it a very very high negative value will result in a positive expected value.

Originally Posted By: Rowen Libya? What is that? I type of food dish? Fun fact: One of my friends works as a teacher, and he assigned a current events paper to his class. One of his students returned a paper detailing the evils wrought on Libya by its three dictators: Qaddafi, Gaddafi, and Khadafi. I found it hilarious. Depressing, but hilarious.

Originally Posted By: Excalibur Originally Posted By: CRISIS on INFINITE SLARTIES Obama's re-election seems like a sure thing at this point. He isn't wildly popular with the public, but he's significantly more popular than anyone in congress, from either party. He also seems to be very planful with both his words and actions, with the result that -- even if you disagree with his words and his actions -- it's hard to attack him personally, rather than just attacking his ideology. U.S. involvement in the Libyan Civil War could potentially cause him problems. Otherwise, I agree that his reelection chances are fairly high. I doubt it. Libya is fairly low on the radar of most Americans today. It's nowhere near what Iraq or Afghanistan was during W's term. In fact, I'm actually quite surprised that it hasn't received far more coverage than it has.

Originally Posted By: The Mystic Scary indeed. I'd probably make a better candidate. Here's a quick litmus test to see whether or not you're a better candidate than Trump. Q. How many times have you managed to run a casino into the ground? A. Zero B. One C. Two D. Three or more If you responded anything other than (d), congratulations! You're more fiscally responsible than Donald Trump! And do keep in mind that the person you elect will largely determine the fiscal direction this country will take over the next four years. Whoop-de-do.