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*i

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Everything posted by *i

  1. One other quick thing about enforcing rules and such. Just remember that Members and Moderators on forums they do not moderate are not supposed to tell people they are misbehaving or state what the rules are. We have plenty of Global Moderators patrolling these forums who can deal with these cases. It's not that we wouldn't mind the help, it's just that we feel it best to keep roles clear here, especially for new members. That way signals don't get crossed and we can minimize contradictions. Thanks!
  2. Sorry, but solicitation without Jeff's permission is not allowed. He doesn't go around to other game forums posting advertisements, so we don't allow that here. I'm locking this thread. If Jeff gives the okay, I'll unlock it.
  3. I think Tim was gone by the time Ikonboard rolled around. He was quite active in the Aceron board days, and perhaps in the early Lyceum.
  4. I wonder how Alcritas is doing these days...
  5. Yeah, I remember her. Hope she's doing well. TM versus ET. TM certainly could be quite abrasive and a bit of trouble, but overall he did really care about the community and gave a lot. Also, as others have said, he really could be a likable guy. I really do miss him. My last interaction was perhaps four years ago now, and it seems he had really matured a bit. Kind of disappeared soon after, which is too bad. ET on the other hand was not only rude and arrogant at times, but also quite manipulative and egocentric willing to skirt the boundaries of the rules and then blame the moderators for finally dropping the hammer. He also lacked all the good things that TM did for this community. Edit: I did have the title "The Establishment" for quite a long time until I switched to the Avernum-themed one.
  6. *i

    Welcome Triumph!

    Even more good news! Triumph has been promoted to a moderator position. Please join me in congratulating him!
  7. New boards and a few years since we last added any moderator. Time to promote some of our "newer" oldbies.
  8. Fixed the error. Apologies.
  9. Jerakeen is the newest moderator! Please join me in congratulating him her.
  10. More good news! Nikki has been given a moderator position to help out with the game forums. Let's all congratulate him!
  11. Fellow Spiders! One of our members, Sylae, has volunteered to help us out with this transition. This is someone who has been an exemplary member and earned the respect of the moderator team, and it is my pleasure to welcome her. Congratulations, Sylae!
  12. ^ This. I think another editor is out of the question, for reasons others have mentioned. It would make a decent number of people happy and be a good PR move.
  13. I think that's pretty accurate. Jeff used to do shareware software distribution for others back when it was still called shareware. He hated it and stopped. Other than what Death Knight said, Jeff has made no indications he's interested in changing much about his business plan.
  14. *i

    Goodbye, General!

    Very sad to see you go, but things change. Thanks for everything Slarty and hope to see you around the game forums!
  15. Malevolence, I told you to stop spamming. This is, in many ways, worse than spam. Either way, this topic ends.
  16. Malevolence, please stop spamming. It's fine if you want to critique aspects of the games, but please do so in a coherent and constructive way.
  17. Malevolence, stop spamming with the pointless posts. You've been warned.
  18. Malevolence, please stop the profanity and not make pointless posts like this one.
  19. *i

    Custom Titles?

    No person picks them...they arise through other means.
  20. SoT -- Sounds like quite an accomplishment if you get it accepted. I know what you mean about the stress of waiting for acceptance/rejection from a journal. Best of luck! Re: Measurement -- This has always been a sticking point since the beginning of quantum mechanics. Before something is measured (whatever that means) an object exists in a weird symphony of all possible states. The act of measurement causes this symphony to collapse into one note, and which note it collapse to is related to the amplitude of its wavefunction (or more precisely the wavefunction times its complex conjugate). Now exactly what constitutes measurement is a difficult question, whose answer has more often lied more in the realm of philosophy than physical science, often requiring a living, intelligent observer to make an observation. The interpretation that I personally find most plausible is that interactions with other quantum states cause the wavefunction to collapse and therefore constitute a "measurement". Now, the question is whether a measurement is a binary event or more fuzzy I believe is still an open question. Is one interaction between two quantum states enough to cause a complete collapse of the wavefunction, or does it require a large number of them such that there exists some number of interactions that the quantum state intermediately "measured" and is only partially collapsed and resolved? In other words, macroscopic objects may be able to measure themselves, but what does it mean when we have a small collection of a few hundred atoms? In terms of irreversiblity, the only way to know the entropy of a system has increased (or decreased -- yes, this is possible since the second law only speaks to averages) is to measure it. Prior to measurement, the state exists as a probability cloud where it is possible the entropy has increased, it may have decreased, or it may be the same. For processes involving macroscopic objects, the pull of statistical averages is so strong that upon measurement (by an outside observer or by itself) the system has almost always gained entropy. In terms of the small collection of atoms, things are a lot less certain as to what is exactly going on.
  21. Theory is and will always be very important because it informs the experimentalists what to look for and where they should conduct measurements. Of course, theorists are nothing without experiments, because experiments are the way to differentiate which theories describe reality and those that are merely interesting sets of equations. Even if what we find out the vanilla result (see SoT's post above) I suspect it still will not be the end of particle physics as a discipline. There are still nuclear physicists busy today even though we have a pretty good fundamental understanding of how the nucleus works. There's a lot of important little details yet unresolved. I suspect there will be a shift from building bigger and bigger machines and finding new particles to understanding the details about the ones we already know. This is probably a good thing, because if we spend more efforts looking at the interactions of more "mundane" particles like pions, kaons, etc. we can better understand the showers from cosmic rays, which impact the functionality of electronic components in airplanes or satellites. This is particular interest to people I work with, since part of our project is to write software to simulate all those interactions with all sorts of physical models, and we can't really match measured data yet. So yeah, I think there's plenty of work left to be done in particle physics.
  22. The problem with the old system is that while it gave you a lot more flexibility, this flexibility was mostly an illusion in that you really just had numerous ways to unknowingly create poor builds where you would eventually be unable to advance the game because your characters are too weak. The number of good builds really has not changed between the iterations, it's just a lot more difficult to make truly bad choices.
  23. Northernmost: Edinburgh, Scotland, UK 55.9500° N, 3.2200° W Southernmost: Rio de Janiero, Brazil 22.9083° S, 43.2436° W Easternmost: Tokyo, Japan 35.6833° N, 139.7667° E Westernmost: San Francisco, CA, USA 37.7750° N, 122.4183° W North-South distance: 78.8583 degrees East-West distance: 262.1850 degrees Area: 20,675 degrees-squared
  24. *i

    Almost there.

    Let's not have discussions about who is or isn't racist please. I'm pretty much in agreement with Slarty on this, so I'm not going to repeat what he just said. Moving right along...
  25. If enough of your crimes get witnessed in a certain area, it will become hostile to you. The threshold is town specific. This prevents you from stealing everything in an area.
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