alanschu

The Old Republic

/me grabs popcorn.

I'd recommend against believing people that claimed to have been a part of the "beta" for TOR.

For the record I'm 29. I would be surprised if every person waiting in line to play the game was under the age of 26. I don't feel as though I have any issues appreciating a game like BG2 though I was 20 when I played it. However, there is a new guy recently hired that just turned 20, and BG2 is his favourite game of all time and he was 11 when he first played it. He's also a big fan of DAO. I disagree that it'd be different. Many of the term tester QA staff are big fans of BioWare games (which is probably why they apply) and many of them are big fans of both DAO and BG2. The average age of this staff is around 24-25.

where is this coming from? you keep talking about this global Bio obsession, I have yet to see a single adult person who plays Bioware games. maybe the people around me are just very strange, I don't know. but these "old timers who secretly love Bio games" are more of a myth I'd wager most of our demographic is made up of people that are adults (over the age of 18). I don't have specific numbers but I do know that there is no shortage of people over the age of 18 that are very excited for new BioWare games. We meet them as they wait in line at game conventions to try the hands on demos. These are just anecdotes, and while there may be no "old timers that secretly love Bio games" I can say there are certainly old timers that openly love Bio games.

Let me rephrase it then: Your statement: "The writers are not writing the stories they want to write in the first place" is incorrect. Writers constantly writing stories they don't want to write are not writers that enjoy their work, which is why I phrased it the way that I did. The entire team works on the story and overarching plot, but I would disagree that the writers don't write the stuff that they want to write. Yes there are concessions in places due to restrictions from the tools used and the art assets available, but I wouldn't say that the people on our team don't find ways to include stuff that they want to write about.

It's presumptuous to assume that the writers don't enjoy aspects of what they write. Trust me, they do. Which is good IMO. You're looking at this with way too narrow of a view and making an assumption that Isabella's inclusion is purely based upon one person going "I want this character in" and essentially having an implied hissy fit if she doesn't get her way, without the rest of the team discussing and agreeing upon Isabella's inclusion in the game. I don't experience content very much, but the general air from many of the playtesters is that Isabella is a very fun character to interact with and in the early going I'd say she's a front runner for my favourite NPC in the game. Though there are some that I don't know much about so I'll reserve my judgment.

One time he said that the North Korean solution of literally nailing refugees together (like driving a metal spike through their skin since it's so malleable) wasn't an atrocity but rather a demonstration of resourceful thinking from a progressive society. While not relating directly to an atrocity denial/rationalization, my favourite was still him getting pissy because people mourned Michael Jackson's death while kids died Coltan farming so we could have our precious cell phones, while insisting that the coltan in my computer equipment comes from the 0.5% world supply that they provide, while assuring us that he never buys his computer equipment new, and the used components that he buys does not contribute to the world supply of Coltan usage without realizing that him buying used goods enables others to purchase new goods. This was shortly after he joined the boards and it'll always stick out for me. For the most part he's been good for a laugh ever since.

Although Boo admitted on this forum that he pirates games.

Your original statement was referring to "how big" Dragon Age was. I do not think Titanic is a very good movie, but there is no disputing that it was a big movie. Unless things have changed, it was mentioned a couple months ago at work. ME2 did well too (zomgbbq fantastic to start), but DAO has sold through more units. A large part of this, I believe, is that it also had a PS3 SKU. ME2's numbers will benefit from a PS3 release as well. I believe both games are appreciably close.

Dragon Age is BioWare's best selling game in its history. Take that for what you will.

As far as I know there isn't one. Since I don't content test though and don't know the full inner workings of the story, I won't state definitively that there isn't one because if it turns out there is one then people rage at me. The bit-tech review spent a lot of time talking about archdemons though for some reason.

what is this i don't even The sequence of events described by bit-tech's preview are incorrect. He talks about things happening in weird orders, and is inferring things that the character is most definitely not saying. There isn't even an archdemon in the demo. (I don't test content, but I did playthrough the demo. I don't even know if there's an archdemon in the game at all).

That's not a valid argument, and you know it. It's not valid to point out the opposite end of the parenting spectrum? I'll be honest, I'm a bit surprised that everyone here is willing to end the guy's career. Do any of you have children? It isn't an on and off switch, it is a permanent change of consciousness. Ask your parents. You're presenting a false dichotomy in doing so Hurlshot. As you point out, it's a spectrum, and there are better ways he could have approached this situation then abusing his powers. I remember locally a police officer was reprimanded because he ran an attractive lady's license plate so that he could get contact information to ask her out on a date. He wasn't fired, but was reprimanded, which is exactly what I think should happen to the police officer here. I feel the father exercised poor judgment in feeling it was appropriate to abuse his powers as a police officer, because as a police officer he SHOULD know better. These are exactly the type of people we do not want behaving with irrational emotions while wearing the uniform. Unfortunately it'll probably sour the relationship with his daughter as well. If this "permanent change of consciousness" is something the father cannot sufficiently separate from his job, he should, however, consider that maybe this career is no longer suitable for him given his responsibilities as a parent. He's well within his means to exercise some "fear tactic" as a father without relying on being a police officer. As for YOU on the other hand... I am exceptionally disappointed that you feel you'd feel just as justified in abusing your powers as a school teacher in order to "teach someone a lesson" in order to "protect" your daughter. It's unfortunate that you still feel a need to coerce your teenage children through means of fear. I'm not sure why he feel it is so. I always understood my parents had authority through my dependence on them, but they stopped over parenting me by the time I hit 12. Yes I'd get punished for doing stuff that they did not approve of, but the coercion due to fear disappeared long before I was considering having sex. I didn't have underage sex (nor underage drink for that matter) because I respected my parents enough, as well as the autonomy they slowly granted me each year. I also learned and respected the women that I was with and didn't want to risk jeopardizing my future or their future. And no, I don't have a child, so unfortunately you'll just casually dismiss everything I say for that reason alone. Keep this thought process in mind, however, the next time you offer an opinion about anything you don't have direct experience about. Kudos to you for being honest, but in spite of everything else I approve of your anecdotes of being a teacher, at this time I'd be hard pressed to allow you to teach any child I had. The unfortunate difference between you and the police officer is that I can at least rationalize that the police officer acted irrationally and made a poor decision as a result. You've already given up and accepted that you'd make a poor decision, despite being cognizant of that fact and hence able to do something to prevent yourself from acting stupid. Slightly tangential is that (and I feel the police officer did this): over parenting is a very serious issue as far as I'm concerned. As a result elementary students in my elementary school are no longer allowed to engage in fun physical activity such as tag during recess because a boy hurt himself while playing, and parents were worried about their child getting hurt and petitioned the school board to no longer allow it. As for this: I think it just shows he exercised poor judgment here twice. Are you trying to argue that two wrongs make a right or something? I don't see how anything changes because he did it to both teenagers involved. To reiterate, I do not feel this is worthy of ending his career, and I feel he does deserve punishment in this regard. I also feel both teenagers behaved irresponsibly without full understanding of the potential consequences of their actions.

I think he called Michael Jackson a white guy but I don't really remember. My favourite memory of him was his whole Coltan debacle. He did tell me that the Coltan in my computer was mined by disadvantaged children in Africa. He also said that buying things has no influence on the rate of production of things. I do think he lied about never purchasing new electronic equipment (since it would prevent him from undermining the point he was making to me), but I can't prove it. Really, this thread is just full of so much win.

I think this is where you might be confusing yourself a little bit. Yes, an unlikely event occurs every time you draw 5 cards. However, it is typically a different unlikely event that occurs every time you draw 5 cards. It is unlikely that I would draw the cards that I listed a page ago. You can agree with this because it's just as unlikely that I would draw those 5 cards again. Two events happen when I draw 5 cards from a deck of cards, and one (as Oblarg points out) is part of the probability mass function of the other. One event is the probability that I draw any 5 cards (the probability of this is 1). The other event is the probability that I draw 5 specific cards in a specific order. This event is very small, and a part of the probability mass function of a discrete random variable. The sum of all points on a probability mass function is 1, since it's a sum of all the probabilities of all outcomes. Oblarg, I'll need you to verify my math here, as it's been a looong time, but I hope this might clear things up: So Dagon asks "Given that A has already happened, how do we compute P(A and B)." Which I read and interpret as, effectively, what is the probability of B happening, given A has happened. In probability notation, this would be P(B | A). To clarify, given that A has already happen, what is actually being asked is what is the P(B | A), since we know A has happened. If I am not mistaken, this would be: P(B | A) = P(A and B) / P (A) [A and B are indepedent events, so P(A and B) = P(A) * P(B) which is, for easy math sakes, lets say 0.01. P(A) = P(B) so 0.01 * 0.01 = 0.0001] = 0.0001 / 0.01 = 0.01 = P(B) Given that A has already happened, we're calculating P(B|A) in order to find out a solution to P(A and B) where A has already occurred. It's late, so I think this may be a bit off. Let me know.

I think something is being lost in understanding somehow. The odds of him actually getting the sequence that he did is not made irrelevant because he didn't predict it in advance. The probability that he got the sequence that he did is still the same. If I have 5 coin flips, the probability that I get H, H, T, H, T is exactly the same as the probability I get T, T, T, T, T. Yes the probability of getting some sequence is 1. But I can make that assertion at the beginning or at the end. This doesn't not refute that drawing 100 Aces from 100 decks of cards is the same probability of drawing any unique ordered sequence of cards. The probability of you drawing a unique sequence is 1, but the unique sequence that you get is still just as rare as getting 100 Aces. Of course it is, because if you're going to use any non-Ace value, the probability of drawing those cards is 51/52 instead of 1/52. This isn't what the example illustrated though. I have a deck of cards beside my computer right now. I just drew 5 cards from it in this order: Jack of Clubs 3 of Hearts 4 of Spades 7 of Spades King of Diamonds So yes, this is some sequence, which I would have gotten regardless. But the probability that I would get this specific sequence is still 1 / ( 52 * 51 * 50 * 49) or 1 / 6 497 400 While you're quick to accept that this is indeed some sequence of cards, you seem to only think that the probability of this event happening matters if and only if it was predicted to happen before the event occurred. This is not the case. The probability of my drawing that sequence of cards is still the same. There is a 1 / 6 497 400 chance that I would have been correct if I had predicted a sequence of cards. We all seem to agree on this, except that you seem to feel that because I didn't explicitly predict it before hand, I have not actually drawn a unique sequence of cards, but just some sequence of cards. I'm saying I did both (since a unique sequence of cards is a subset of some sequence of cards). This still demonstrates that an event that is particularly rare still occurred. In fact, this event is so rare that I suspect it would take me a significant amount of time to draw these same 5 cards in this order again. Yet, this sequence still did come up during my drawing of cards.

I never claimed it does, you keep arguing against something you think I'm saying instead of what I'm actually saying. Dagon, the fact that you believe a single trial is impossible gives a very strong indication that you do not believe that the Poisson distribution has no memory. As Oblarg states, you can break any sequence of events into a sequence of single trials. I won't dispute that it's much more likely for a "one in a million" event to happen over several hundred thousand trials as opposed to the next trial. However, if the event occurs at time interval T, then the event MUST have happened immediately after the time interval T - 1. Since the Poisson process does not have a memory, this means that it happened on the next trial. Since the Poisson process does not have a memory, the probability of any event happening on the very next trial is going to be the same, regardless of which trial you are actually on. To put it more mathematically: For any time interval T, the probability of an event succeeding in the next time interval, T + 1, of a Poisson process is the same regardless of the value of T, where T goes from 0 to infinity.

Assuming you were playing with a European Roulette Table: Your odds would have been (1/37)^7 x (36/37) x (1/37)^2 to get the specific order your mentioned. (about 7.5e-15) The odds of you winning 9 times out of 10 attempts would be 10 times more likely (though still quite small) 10! ---- x (1/37)^9 * (36/37) 9!

This is true, but it still does occur on a specific trial. What you described her "just as likely to happen on the 1st as on the millionth" is essentially a Poisson-distribution. If over the interval of a million trials, the lambda for this poisson distribution is going to be 1. This means that we reasonably expect the event to happen once in a million trials (which makes sense because E[X] where X is a Poisson random variable is lambda). So at 0 trials, we expect the event to happen once from trial 1 to trial 1 million. If we do 300,000 trials and the event doesn't occur, the distribution doesn't occur, we cannot say that we expect the event to happen once in the next 700,000 trials because it failed the past 300,000. Our estimate after 300,000 trials will have to remain that we expect it to happen once in the next million trials (300,001 to 1,300,000). In other words, the Poisson process has no memory. The probability that the event happens on the very next trial from where you are (regardless of what trial you're on) is always going to be very low. But there must be a trial that immediately precedes the successful event. In fact, the probability that something that happens "once in a million years" actually occurs only once over that interval is e^-1 = 0.36. It's more likely to NOT occur precisely once during that interval.

The chances of some person winning the lottery are indeed higher. However, for some person to win the lottery, a specific person must win it. If you take a million people, and randomly choose one of those people to receive a million dollars, the probability that someone wins a million dollars is 1. But the probability of any individual winning a million dollars is all the same: 1 in a million. I think this is where you started to gravitate towards when you started to discuss smaller populations when determining multiple lottery winners. It is true that you must have had someone win one lottery in order to win a second. So the probability that some person wins their second lottery with the next lottery event is 0 if no one has yet won a lottery. If one person has won the lottery, then the probability that some person wins their first lottery is 999,999/1,000,000 and the probability that some person wins their second lottery is 1/1,000,000. However, the probability for any individual to win the next lottery is 1 in a million, regardless of whether or not they have already won a lottery. This is because each lottery event is an independent event. The results of the previous lottery wins will not affect the chances of any of those 1,000,000 individuals winning the next lottery. They will all still be 1 in a million. If there is no chance of a non-winning ticket to be drawn (like in a 50-50 draw), then yes the probability of some person winning the lottery is 1. Most lotteries do not play this way though.

My professor did not assume she is only spending 1 dollar in each lottery. He said that she played 100 times (i.e. played in 100 different lotteries). The probability, which he states we don't have enough information to determine, is going to be directly affected by how much she spends per lottery drawing. We don't know this value, but we assumed a constant probability because it'd be a nightmare to calculate otherwise. I don't see how "the more correct statement would be she spend a total of $100 playing" has to do with anything given the formula stated, to be honest. I'll defer to the individuals that have received philosophical doctorates in the field. It's my impression that your statement is changing what we are discussing the probability of.

I just wanted to chime in that I spoke with my professor (since I live near campus). Essentially I had a chat with him and he said that the probability of an event happening does not change to 1 after it occurs. He thinks what the person is confusing is independent events. The probabilities of past independent events are irrelevant to future events. In other words, what I got out of it was the standard axiom of independent events in conditional probability: P ( A | B ) = P ( A ) if A and B are independent events. (note for others: That line is read as: 'The probability of A given B happened equals the probability of just A happening, if A and B are independent events.' From his actual email, to determine the probability for this woman to win the lottery 4 times would be: I noticed someone else brought up the binomial distribution (Oblarg). Essentially the formula is: x! --------- x p^y x (1-p)^(x-y) (x-y)! y! Where: x = number of lotteries attempted y = number of lotteries won p = probability of winning a lottery If we use his numbers of x = 100, y = 4, and make an estimate of p, we'll get the probability of her achieving what she did. This assumes no foul play, and a consistent chance of winning the lottery every time. If we assume p = 1/1000, the probability of her winning the four lotteries that she did win is about 1/3,562,121 If we assume p = 1 in a million, the probability of her winning the four lotteries that she did is about 1 in 3.9e-18 And just to clarify, I hope that with the explanation of independent events, people can understand that if 1 person in the world won the lottery, and everyone all played it again with an equal chance of winning, the odds of the previous winner winning a second lottery is the same as any non-winner winning his first lottery. EDIT: I think Oblarg has summed things up nicely.

Another elementary concept of probability theory too. As luck would have it, a friend of mine on facebook posted this >.> <.<

Yes I was being sarcastic I don't recall the continuous Random Variable, but if we pretend that the world moved in discrete seconds for a moment, it's effectively a poisson-distribution. Simply because something has lambda value of 1 trillion, doesn't mean it cannot happen in the next interval. In fact, if the event does occur, it MUST happen immediately after the prior interval. It was more a comment to the various times Dagon seemed to indicate that in order to observe something that has a once in a trillion year occurrence, you must live to be a trillion years old. Though as you and I both know, even that's not a guarantee you'll see it I wish I could remember the continuous distribution though. Gamma? Dammit...