Humodour

Are the Evangelicals are just going to vote Democrat if the Republicans are less hardliner for some of the religious concerns? The issue here, IMO, is the primaries. In order to become the Republican candidate you need to win over the Republican voters, of which the Evangelicals will have a larger piece of the pie. This results in candidates trying to win those votes by catering to them, and then on the national level they have to rescind those hardline perspectives. If Republicans don't support their isues, they'll simply stay home and not vote. "The problem is the primaries" is like saying "the problem is democracy". These people are the Republican party. No. About 40% of US Americans do not vote. It's highly likely that if the evangelicals didn't vote, you'd have other people who would suddenly be willing to vote doing so instead, because politics has become less extreme and insane. For instance, the socially and economically libertarian group would probably return to the Republican party if the prudes left. Certainly, your democracy isn't properly representative anyway because it consistently skips about 40% of its members.

It's your computer's way of telling you not to play the game because it's bad.

Morrowind is considered one of the greatest RPG of all time for many, so I interested in why you think it is a terrible game? Because it has no story, atmosphere, or overarching plot. Morrowind is just a sandbox. It's fun for a while, but then you suddenly feel really dirty once you complete the main quest and realise the game is more shallow than a toddler's wading pool full of pee. The best part of Morrowind was the dwarven ruins.

A lot of those numbers could be broken down to the simple fact that the states on the right have fewer rich people and industry, thus there's less federal taxes to be generated. I don't see the crime in getting federal dollars back since the federal system is a parasite anyway. But some of the so called "conversative" states do need to answer for running a budget into the dirt. "I'M A LIBERTARIAN - GOVERNMENT REDISTRIBUTION IS EVIL! EXCEPT WHEN IT GOES TO REPUBLICAN STATES!" Besides the fact that evidence-based government redistribution is actually a very good thing (e.g. universal health coverage), and that Libertarianism is nuts, you're really contradicting yourself matey.

What the Australian voters managed to prevent is what the Russian politicians have adopted - internet censorship via deep packet inspection. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/russias-leap-in-internet-control/2012/11/12/0ade4f4a-29c5-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_story.html Russia is essentially emulating China: crush opposition, censor all media including the Internet, and make a few rich and powerful families even richer and more powerful.

The Democrats now have a supermajority in California. Also, the California voters passed a ballot initiative that raises taxes. lol.

It's an interesting thought experiment to consider what would happen if you, roughly, got all the Democrat states, made a country out of them, then took the Republican states and made a country out of them, and then came back 20 years later to see what each country had become.

It's cool. I was responding to Wrath of Dagon, not you. Your posts didn't seem worth replying to. I consider you a person. In fact, after this election, I consider you guys people more than ever, because I can see that you are GENUINELY disheartened that Obama won. That's full-blown emotion I can empathise with (even if I support Obama). It's just a shame that the polices you, Mitt, and many Republicans support are cruel and crazy towards other members of your society. That does not make me want to think of you as a loveable rogue - a Republican who's still a nice guy with the best intentions. No, it makes me think of you as somebody selfish with an Ayn Randian outlook on life. Your society is politically polarised for a reason - because one of the major parties, the Republican Party, has lost its marbles. That's not something we'll ever be able to reconcile unless one of us changes. I fundamentally just don't like what the Republican party represents, and I fundamentally don't like people who still support what the Republican party represents. I can't apologise for this, but whether I like you or not does not correlate with whether I consider you a person worthy of respect (to re-iterate: I do). Unfortunately, I don't always succeed at demonstrating this while making my point, which is something I'm working on. I find it simply appalling to dislike someone because their politics are not my politics. It does explain why so many people around the world are killing each other though. I can honestly say I enjoy discussing things with people who don't think like I do and have never held that against them. Now if someone is sour, snarky, sarcastic, arrogant, condescending, I could see disliking them. That whole "not a person" think was from a post you made BTW :http://forums.obsidi...als-discovered/ You're a creationist too, then? OKAY, I take it back.

It's cool. I was responding to Wrath of Dagon, not you. Your posts didn't seem worth replying to. I consider you a person. In fact, after this election, I consider you guys people more than ever, because I can see that you are GENUINELY disheartened that Obama won. That's full-blown emotion I can empathise with (even if I support Obama). It's just a shame that the polices you, Mitt, and many Republicans support are cruel and crazy towards other members of your society. That does not make me want to think of you as a loveable rogue - a Republican who's still a nice guy with the best intentions. No, it makes me think of you as somebody selfish with an Ayn Randian outlook on life. Your society is politically polarised for a reason - because one of the major parties, the Republican Party, has lost its marbles. That's not something we'll ever be able to reconcile unless one of us changes. I fundamentally just don't like what the Republican party represents, and I fundamentally don't like people who still support what the Republican party represents. I can't apologise for this, but whether I like you or not does not correlate with whether I consider you a person worthy of respect (to re-iterate: I do). Unfortunately, I don't always succeed at demonstrating this while making my point, which is something I'm working on.

Well that hasn't happened in this thread, so why did you bring it up? I strongly disagree. Regardless of whether a kid falls in love with coding or intends to pursue it as a career, I think that given society of 2012 and the unstoppable direction of technology, those kids who don't understand basic parts of computer science - especially the notion of programming (and all the tech savvy it builds up) and being able to do the simplest stuff like hello world and a factorial function - are at a huge disadvantage for their future. Programming should be taught to children regardless of their desired career path - but it should be done in as a fun and visceral a way as possible, which I would argue is via the Arduino ecosystem, partly because of the very strong feedback that exists between coding and real-life outcomes (oh! so if I change the delay number in the main loop, this LED blinks on and off more quickly or more slowly! cool! and if I change this frequency value in this buzz code, this piezoelectric buzzer emits a different note!). Now, I personally don't think this kid is going to end up a game programmer. Maybe a physicist. Maybe an economist. Maybe a musician. But who cares? He's interested in it for now, and the OP is and should use this opportunity to teach him or her programming. Programming is a life skill.

Well the Australian dollar is what you want (the AUD is the third most traded currency after the Euro and USD), but be warned: Australia is far, far more socialist than the USA, thank glob. We've got a federal-level carbon-methane-nitrous tax in response to global warming, an extra tax on mining profits because we believe the resources in the ground belong to all Australians, universal publically funded healthcare, universal publically funded education (right up to and including university), we have strictly enforced speed limits on our roads, ditto drunk driving (the limit is literally like 1 or 2 standard drinks), owning guns here is difficult and heavily policed by the government, etc. I think these things are all excellent, but to anybody complaining about Obama winning a second term they probabily represent a communist paradise (or is it dystopia to you?). Further, in many states/territories, councils, and even federally, the centre-left Greens control the balance of power. This is because we use a far more enlightened electoral system than the USA's first-past-the-post and thus we're capable of maintaining third parties with real power indefinitely. In fact, the Greens would be the 4th party, with the 3rd being the socially conservative and fiscally agrarian socialist farmer party the Nationals (in coalition with the conservative Liberal party). Oh, and close to 50% (or more) of Australians don't give a damn about religion, while about half of that number genuinely don't believe in god, magic, or mysticism at all. Heck, they don't not believe in it per se, they just never think about it because it's all pointless bollocks. So yeah, invest your cash in the glorious Socilist States of Australia please! We'd love to take your money!

Yeah - it's HTML 5. And YouTube will be switching to it by default soon.

There is an entire field called 'concurrent programming' which disagrees with you and wants to violently punch you in the face.

If you're into building your own computer from scratch from NAND, then writing a compiler for a language to use on the computer, then writing a small OS to run it and the version of Tetris you coded on it, then try this (click 'Course' on the left-hand menu): http://www.nand2tetris.org/ It's nice because it's a general brush-up on almost all aspects of computer engineering, computer science, and software engineering. Plus, you get to build your own computer. I think I've grown on hardware projects like this and Arduino these days because it's so much easier to get the motivation for a project this way. Thinking of interesting things to programme on the PC is actually kind of hard for me because they get too complex way too fast, then I get sidetracked on minutae and lose interest. But building a device that waters each of my pot plants when the moisture level in the soil falls too low? That captures my imagination in easily manageable chunks.

Voting results has seen an ebb and flow, however. Oh, definitely. It's essentially sinusoidal (with occasional 3 terms of the same party or a single term of one party here and there). Actually, I suppose it's more a step function. But Volourn was basically acting like it's sinusoidal/step-like by nature, rather than because of internal dynamics. No way Jose. If the alternative party is consistently ****, people will never vote for them. Japan, for all its cultural differences, is perhaps a good example of that. The Republicans can easily win again. People would just LOVE to vote for a socially progressive (or at least centrist) and fiscally conservative party (in the German way, not the stupid Tea Party way). But the Republicans won't win again until they change.

Krezzie, this is why you are bonkers and sitting in your strange ivory tower, constructed completely out of astro-turf. Because if you honestly think that Joe Soap in Ohio didn't vote for Romney because of his position on AGW then you are nuts. Calm it down you hothead. Some Ohioans won't vote against a Republican candidate because of his lies on global warming by itself. Other Ohoians will vote against him because of this. But yet more Ohians will definitely vote against a candidate with a twisted anti-abortion stance who denies evolution is real and believes global warming is a conspiracy theory or is natural. Maybe if the Republican party moderates on all the other areas where it lies and screams about science, he could get away with lying his pants off about global warming. Just as the economy alone won't win a candidate election, and nor will claims of tax cuts or tax hikes, or even his stance on gay marriage... how a candidate stands on all of issues combined WILL win or lose him the election. Global warming is, very rightly, one of these issues for a LOT of people. A candidate which stands on the right side of history (i.e. acting on the findings of science) on global warming is going to be more and more likely to be elected as time goes by. And we saw that in the response of the people living in New York and New Jersey. Ohioans might not care - but the coastal states sure do. Oh and by the way - Obama would have won re-election even if he had of lost both Ohio and Florida because of how strongly he carried Colorado.

It doesn't go in cycles at all, Volourn. People don't vote in cycles. They don't go "oh, the Dems have been in power for 8 years, now I'll vote Republican". People vote according to issues relevant to them. The Republicans are not relevant to women, Hispanics, African-Americans, Asians, or educated people. Take a look at the demographic analyses of the election. Take a look at how the Hispanic and black vote-share has changed over the past, say, 4 elections. The only way the Republicans can start winning again is by either a) relying on a huge Democratic screw up, or b) being less racist, more tolerant, more willing to compromise, and less stupid (c.f. evolution, rape, global warming).

Yeah, I thought of that as I was posting. Although I think Deus Ex 1 pulled off an acceptable level of scientific accuracy, too - for what constituted scientific accuracy in the year 2000. Based on some of the stuff I've seen in Nature articles, modern nanotechnology is both far more advanced in some ways and far less advanced in other ways than Deus Ex 1 nanotechnology. Still internal consistency is a basic requirement of scientific accuracy, so if games could at least nail that down first, it would be a good start (and, really, an endpoint for fantasy games). Some do. Many don't. Judging by the article, these guys are way ahead of that, though. The article was excellent - I recommend everyone reads it.

One of the first things I ever built as a "self taught" C64 programmer (several years before I signed up for CS at the university) was a two-pass assembler, basic was just too slow Does building your own DMA hardware using only 74xx series of chips count as qualification for handling boolean math? I had no problems constructing my own neural networks and train them (when I was younger). It would be interesting to see how it perform on quantum computers. I once developed (as part of a team) a programming language for distributed processing on a network of Unix machines for calculating humongous arrays (wave simulation), but it didn't really involve any math, just logic and an understanding of grammar and processes. What people feed into the arrays and do with the results was less important for me I guess the coding itself was never really what interested me as much as the analysis and design process. Implementation is just a tool to realize your ideas. Besides, you can get people to help you with the coding I'm impressed. It sounds like you've done a lot of the types of things I want to do. What did you do with neural networks? And have you seen this natural-artificial neural network? http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/biomedical/bionics/rat-brain-robot-grows-up My degree covers analogue and digital signal processing (good old Fourier), embedded systems, and telecommunications networks. It's fun, but a bit dry. So I focus on learning quantum computation, neural networks, and extra linear algebra in my spare time. I used to love calculus. Now I find it a bit daunting, which is sad. On the other hand, I used to hate linear algebra, and now it seems mechanical and relaxing. What gives?

About ****ing time! I'm absolutely sick of the pseudoscience bull**** which artists push these days. I will be all over this game if what is said in the article is true. I think I pledged so I guess I'm all over it anyway, but still. Deus Ex 1 may have been 'magick-y', but it adhered to its own internal rules. And heck, it had internal rules in the first place! The Fallouts were also fairly like this (tending to delve often into real-world science, politics, and economics amongst the odd vacuum tube and mutant). Even Planescape: Torment - a fantasy game - was like this.

Entirely anecdotal, but I suck at math (a nice way of saying 'a complete disaster') and made modestly successful career out of development Maybe my natural affinity for languages and transforming problems into something I can visualize (in my mind) and express with the tools at hand may have helped. It sure wasn't math. I don't know if you could get by like that these days. I mean, I already know plenty of people my age who do, and I suppose they're doing well for themselves - it'd be hard not to as a programmer. But the market is saturated with IT grads - and while yes, I admit the demand does tend to grow indefinitely as does the supply - it stands to reason that if you can programme and do linear algebra, you're going to get the job in place of the guy who can only programme, all other things being equal. Personally I'm focusing on assembly languages and embedded programming, because I see a vital niche market with a core group of old developers who are retiring and not being replaced by anyone my age. It's nice - I can forget about all that software engineering and object orientation bull**** and JUST CODE. And I don't even have to pay for it by learning some incomprehensible bull**** like Fortran. Besides, if you can't do linear algebra, how do you expect to be able to programme a quantum computer?! The same way modern Javascript kiddies are able to code beautiful fractals in their web browser without knowing what a NAND gate is, I suspect.

Kinky lol. Should that be sexa-? Or hex-? Just keep in mind that Windows doesn't perform as well under virtualisation as it does when run natively. I imagine this is also true for Linux. A better idea, Gorth, would be to download the Ubuntu 12.10 .iso file (which you'll need to do either way): http://www.ubuntu.com/download/desktop And then use this simple programme to make a bootable USB stick (with some persistent storage if you desire): http://www.ubuntu.com/download/help/create-a-usb-stick-on-windows This way, you can try out Ubuntu natively from the USB, and then even install it as a dual-boot if you like what you see. Obviously USB 2.0 is much slower than internal SATA, but it should be better than virtualisation. Maybe. Again, I note that installing Ubuntu as a dual-boot on a separate partition does NOT damage or modify your Windows install in any way, even when you're turning your single Windows partition into 2 partitions (one for Windows, one for Ubuntu). Still, always good to do a backup when dealing with partition tables on a hard drive you care about. I never do, though.

Regarding where the Republicans are going horribly, horribly, wrong, a huge chunk of their "wrongness" can be found in their collective attitude to science and maths: an attitude of disdain. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than their approach to the science of evolution or global warming (it's the same approach for both), but if we don't want to go down that path, then let's just look at how they handled Nate Silver's electoral predictions (his blog is linked to in the very first post of this thread): http://blog.chron.co...om-nate-silver/ What must go on in their minds to sustain their crazy in the face of insurmountable evidence that they are crazy? You know who the GOP remind me of? Iranian politicians.

OKAY, odd, you're saying that we SHOULDN'T adjust for inflation? What a ludicrously novel idea! I think it's a load of tripe, but I don't care, because exactly the same trend line is evident whether adjust for inflation or not, so again: Republicans = bad for stock market, Democrats = good. Insofar as using stock market growth as an indicator of presidential performance is a good idea - which it surely isn't - but you conservatives seem to be in love with money, so I'll run with what works for you. http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Q1a3bP-GV8Y/T1ajvk0N9oI/AAAAAAAABSg/8TheBHlMppk/s1600/Dow%2BInflation-Adjusted%2BClosing%2BPrices.jpg Unfortunately the time scale is very large and the graph logarithmic, which makes it harder to discern the Republican ****-ups of the stock market. But as you can tell, the trend lines are almost identical, and the inflation rate for the past 20 years or so in America has been low single digits, so it hardly matters anyway. If you can provide a better non-inflation-adjusted graph, feel free. But I do take your claim that "adjusting for inflation is wrong" as evidence that you're clueless. If you don't adjust for inflation, then you CANNOT compare a dollar today to a dollar a year ago or 10 or 20 years ago. It's apples and oranges. You MUST adjust for inflation.