Enoch

HOU at BUF: HOU CLE at CHI: CHI SEA at DAL: DAL DEN at BAL: BAL SF at IND: IND MIA at NYJ: MIA NYG at PHI: NYG STL at DET: DET JAX at TEN: JAX OAK at SD: SD CAR at ARI: ARI MIN at GB: MIN AT at NO: NO @Volo, I'm sure it's a typo, but you somehow picked the Forty-Niners to win the OAK-SD game.

Well, besides the possibility of running less-than-full, another way that very-large ships may be less efficient: Sometimes, they have to take the long way around. By the dimensions announced in the video (56M wide, 397M long), that ship is by far post-Panamax, although it appears to be sub-Malaccamax. International shipping in general has been hit quite hard by the recession. I recall some coverage a number of months ago about the backlog of empty container ships just sitting at anchor in Singapore, waiting for the West's appetite for Chinese exports to perk back up. By sitting still in a warm-weather port, the hulls of the ships were growing beards of kelp that really hurt the efficiency of their operations, but the owners preferred to keep close to China so that they were ready when the export rates jumped back up again. Based on the Baltic Dry Index, there has been some bounce-back in international shipping, but nowhere near its '07 to early '08 levels. A lot of the ships coming onto the market now-- having been ordered back when things were booming-- aren't finding much cargo to keep them running. I know it's way off topic, but I have always found international shipping interesting. Edit: a 9/28/09 update: The fleet is still there. Picture:

I don't find this particular focus to be all that objectionable-- making one big new efficient ship is probably a gain over running several smaller older ships, so long as there is sufficient demand to keep it running full. The kite is pretty silly, yes-- far more symbolic than it is effective. But that doesn't change the fact that people are interested in increasing the efficiency (the big gain to the operators) and the enviro-friendliness (a useful thing to highlight for political reasons) of container ships. I also wouldn't say that greenies are delighted by bureaucracy. (Hippies generally don't mix with regulators all that well.) More that they are surrounded by the glowing conviction that they are of the enlighted few who see the correct way of things, and that the world outside of them is mostly ignorant and a little bit corrupt. Government is seen as a tool to punish the corrupt and educate the ignorant, the latter of which will inevitably result in the world acclaiming the clear correctness of their cause. (Which is not to say that there are not large elements of their cause that are quite likely correct.) But, yes, people do take things too far. There are lots of examples of poor design, over emphasis on minor symbolic changes, poor decisions from a cost-benefit point of view, etc. The ones that bug me most are the changes driven primarily by people marketing toward the environmental sensibilities of consumers ("Buy our product if you care about the environment-- look, it's got leaves on the labels and everything!"), particularly when the actual impact of the products is no different from their competitors, and when their marketing efforts yeild policy changes based on poor data.

Seriously. The original Fallout manuals were entertaining, but if I ever have to wade through a D20-style laundry list of class, race, feat, skill, and spell descriptions again, it'll be too soon.

Combat armor was easy to repair if your Karma was high. The armor worn by those squads of mercs that hunted for high-karma PCs could be used to repair it. I found a suit of combat armor in (I think) that trippy ghost vault early on and wore it for most of the game. I agree with many of Slowtrain's points on some of the too-obsolete weapons in FO3. I did, however, like how each weapon type had a unique variant or two with an different look and improved (usually) stats. Even if it lacked much detail and backstory, it touched some of the same notes that the unique weapon descriptions in the IWD games did-- that's not just any hunting rifle (or just any +2 Shortsword), that's Ol' Painless! There should be at least something to recommend each one of them, though. A unique tire iron or nailboard is a neat detail, but there isn't much point if nobody is going to actually use them. On Sawyer's question, I can see both sides. There is also some appeal to getting one gun, giving it your attention, TLC, and the best mods you find, and keeping it as your constant companion throughout the journey. But the whole 'New Lo0t' rush is a pretty core part of an RPG's appeal, and I don't know how well that extends to finding a new stock to put on your combat shotgun. Also, more weapon variety in look and utility (even if only for enemies) is a good thing.

Out of curiosity, is there some industry tradition that other developers get games early, or were ya'll just first in line among the plebes?

I was underwhelmed by MotB. It had its moments, but ultimately I just didn't have a whole lot of fun playing it and had to force myself to finish the game. I understood the spirit-eater mechanic as an interesting attempt to get around the 'just rest after every encounter' problem that the NWN2 OC had. But it just wasn't fun to use in practice (with the exception of the dialogue-based uses). I didn't find the companions to be all that interesting. The Red Wiz had some moderately compelling mystery about her, and Okku was fun, if a bit insufficiently fleshed-out. But Gann was just irritating, and the Dove was only interesting to the extent that you can read lots of FR/D&D cosmology while keeping a straight face. (A test which I have failed several times.) Once the core mystery was resolved when I met with Safiya's mom, I lost interest in playing out the rest-- I knew that the story was going to take care of the betrayer's soul-swap, and I didn't care enough about my or any of the other character's fates beyond that point to want to slog through any more supposedly-epic combat. Also, epic-level D&D = teh suck. Particularly when the writing tries to match your character's 'epic-ness' with overly grandiose stuff about dying gods, destroying worlds, and cosmic justice. The effort put into fanning the player's ego just feels unseemly.

Hendrick's is a very good gin, although I'm not sure that it would be a good match with the orange bitters. With its distinctive cucumber/rose flavor, it is probably best served as I recall the maker recommends: with a cucumber slice dropped into the glass.

So what kind of coat are the people in those images wearing?

Please don't turn this into one of those threads. Over the weekend, I was shopping for groceries and impulse-bought a bottle of orange bitters. (This now brings my count of bottles of ****tail bitters to 3: Angostura, Peychaud's, and Orange.) Last night I made what I'll call an "antique martini" because it's how the drink was put together ca. 1880: roughly 3-4 parts gin (I like Plymouth) and 1 part good dry vermouth (Noilly Prat is the best of the common brands, and quality matters here), stirred with ice, strained into a chilled glass with 2 shakes of orange bitters in it, then garnished with a small twist of lemon peel. (Then, take an olive, throw it in the trash, and dump the brine down the sink. This drink does not need to be polluted with seawater to mask its flavor. If you must add one for the look, tradition, and to have a snack when you're finished, give it a thorough rinse beforehand.) Whoever decided to change the recipe over the years was insane. Ian Fleming, of course, is at least partly to blame. As are the marketing firms that popularized vodka in the West in the 40s & 50s. And the famous functional alcoholics likes Churchill and Bogart who insisted upon the 'ultra dry' martini, with a veneer of machismo covering their addiction's need to maximize their C2H5OH intake, did their share of damage to all our taste buds as well.

I remember reading over this thread this weekend, but somehow I missed this quote.

I'll third mkreku's idea. It'll be tricky to balance what you can find (i.e., what people with 0 repair skill will be using) and what a high-repair character can patch together. Perhaps a role for shopkeeper repair would be appropriate-- when you're in the barter interface, and the seller has an item that can be used to repair the weapon/armor you're currently using, give the player a choice to have the shopkeeper use it to repair your stuff for a few more caps than you would spend purchasing it. It could be a quest reward, too: bring 10 porno mags to Skeeter and get a 5% condition upgrade to an item of your choice.

I keep two long coats. One is a traditional khaki-colored trenchcoat. This is for rainy conditions-- throw on a nice wool cap and you can get through light rain just fine without an umbrella. It has a button-in liner for seasonal variations, but it's still not warm enough for true wintertime conditions. The other is an dark grey (nearly black) wool topcoat. This is my primary wintertime outerwear. Paired with a nice thick scarf, it's as warm as a ski parka (with the bonus of being knee-length) and infinitely more fashionable. The cut of the coat is mostly a stylistic choice, although the single- v. double-breasted choice is important. Double-breasted coats will be warmer and more weatherproof. But they can also exacerbate the 'portly frame' issues, making you look wider across the middle. And a longish scarf, if positioned correctly, can address the problem of wind/rain blowing in between the buttons on a single-breaster.

Length should depend on primary means of locomotion. If you walk and take lots of mass transit, get a long (knee length or so) coat. If you drive, get a shorter one. Long coats are great in foul weather, but can make getting into and out of cars difficult.

Green Bay at Cleveland: GB San Diego at Kansas City: SD Indianapolis at St. Louis: IND Minnesota at Pittsburgh: MIN New England at Tampa Bay: NE SF 49ers at Houston: HOU Buffalo at Carolina: CAR NY Jets at Oakland: NYJ Atlanta at Dallas: ATL Chicago at Cincinnati: CHI New Orleans at Miami: NO Arizona at NY Giants: NYG Philadelphia at Washington: PHI

Well, sure, he doesn't. He needs Congress to passe a statute in regulation of interstate commerce that delegates said power to the executive first. The big idea now is in making executive bonuses sensitive to the longer-term success of the company, e.g., via stock options that can't be exercised until a designated number of years has passed.

Ultimately, every large organization needs someone at the top, who gets to (has to?) make the calls on the most difficult and important decisions that the organization faces. Regardless of that person's skills, that position involves a lot of reputational risk. In the private sector, high risk means high salary. And when those tough decisions turn out quite well, that salary looks justified. (Even if all they were doing is taking the advice of brilliant subordinates.) That said, executive pay among huge firms is one of those areas where the behavioral economists' arguments are far more convincing than those of the traditional 'compensation based on free market competition and value-added' economists. Specifically, executive pay between huge competing firms leads to an 'over signaling' bidding war: Companies try to signal to markets that their business is strong by publicly paying their executives a lot of money; competitors react in kind; before long you have lots of execs making lots more than they should based on the value they add to the company; and no company can bid down their compensation package without creating the public perception that the firm is in trouble. Combine that with the fact that the decision-makers involved are all in the boardroom, among people who, for the most part, have been or want to be big company execs themselves, and the countervailing downward pressure on compensation tends not to emerge.

A fund manager is someone who runs a fund for an investment bank or similar institution. A financial adviser is someone who consults with individuals and might recommend buying into a fund for an investment bank. If you're being pitched "GiantBank Mutual Fund" as a financial product to buy, take a close look at how much of your money will be going to pay the people who run GiantBank Mutual Fund. Fees are really the only thing that you have complete advance knowledge and control of when you're making an investment decision, so they should be at the top of the list of things to pay attention to. I said 'tax adviser' as a general term, not knowing if Aussies had a different word they used. But, yeah, an accountant who works in personal taxation is what I'm talking about. I owe my wisdom and wit to years of patient study, hard work, and drinking the blood of my vanquished enemies.

With a 5-10 year time horizon, I'd advise to minimize the portion of the funds that go into equities. Currency markets, too. People who have put far more research and work than you ever will into trying to predict trends, time market cycles, and the like have, do, and will continue to lose their shirts on this kind of stuff every day. Unless this is really a luxury windfall that you wouldn't particularly mind losing a good hunk of, I'd put the bulk of it into something with a guarantee of your principal from a reliable source. If your anticipated draw-down of the funds is 20+ years out, a more stocks-heavy portfolio makes more sense. But I still wouldn't do so with more than 60% of the corpus, and I'd do my best to diversify it across lots and lots of companies, countries, and industries. And keep an eye on the two things that most retail investors don't pay enough attention to: fees and taxes. With regard to fees, be a skeptic-- assume that professional fund managers are all tossers who have lucked into market-beating returns in the past and have no greater-than-average likelihood of doing so in the future. Thus, target funds (like the S&P 500, or whatever the Aussie or international equivalents are) that are simply automatic indices of equities, rather than ones that have fancy investment bankers managing which investments to buy and sell. With such funds, you may not know whether the market is going to go up and down, but you do know that a certain percentage of your returns aren't going to buy some fund manager a new Lexus every year. Be very wary of financial advisers who try to push you into high-cost managed funds-- kickbacks of fees are not uncommon. And avoid making frequent trades-- most brokerage houses take a cut on every transaction. The one expert I would advise consulting with is a tax adviser (a tax accountant or the like). It's easy enough to set up a low-cost investment account on your own and buy some low-fee broad-market indices-- you can do that by yourself and be no worse off than with a high cost broker or financial adviser (so long as you're not picking your own individual equities). But before you do so, talk to a tax expert, tell him/her when you want the money and what for, and he/she should have advise on what sorts of accounts to set up, and how to minimize the portion of your gain that the taxman takes. (e.g., in the States, there are tax-sheltered accounts that one can set up for educational expenses, first-time homebuying, and retirement)

Played the Demo. Not bad. The combat wasn't nearly as frustrating as I remember Gothic 2 being. I doubt I'll buy it at full price, but I'll keep my eyes open for a sale or price drop sometime in the months to come.

Good for you, although that's some rather pricey bourbon to be mixing up with ginger ale. Save the good stuff for the sipping!

As covered in the other thread, this is me to a tee. In school, I would habitually leave papers to write the night before the deadline, briefly skim reading assignments and still jump headfirst into the in-class discussions, etc. But I don't think I let it get out of hand. Even when I left major papers to write in one night, I had always at least gathered the sources I would need in advance, and on the whole, I always ended up doing well enough for my purposes-- I was a pretty consistent B+/A- student. I do think that the humility-inducing terrible job I held for 18 months after getting my BA was a motivating factor in overcoming some of this. I was more responsible in law school. Now in the professional world, I am still very much a deadline-junky. But the work is usually less half-assed now than it was back then, simply because the standard for performance is higher, and there is (I think) a degree of failure that I won't let myself fall to. I have long since figured out that ego was a major factor behind my procrastination and occasional half-assedness. I don't want to pour my heart and soul into something because that opens the possibility of being judged as a failure. (The same thing makes me terrible at picking up chicks. Luckily, I found one who was willing to hit on me and married her to avoid this problem in the future. )

That's the story of my academic career right there. Probably my professional career, too.

And to block out the names of certain politicians, like **** Cheney. Its really annoying, I dont understand why youd need a fucntion like that. Especially since it removes words that are not curse words like vagina or **** ( p e n i s ) edit: so the male gential organ is offensive but the female isnt?!! That one's not about offensiveness, it's about spam. (Hint: When is the last time you saw a message board spambot try to sell you vagina enlargement?)

Heh. I've also had a little Facebook drama with a cousin. I inadvertently narc'ed him out. Dude's 17, and not the most responsible of youths. Posted a status update something along the lines of "Mom found my pot again. fml." I posted a comment to the effect that this might not be the smartest thing in the world to be sharing with 982 of his closest "friends," particularly given that his dad is a prosecutor and could get into job-related trouble if people knew about illegal substances in his house. He generally took the advice with a laugh and (I think) deleted that posting. So, a couple days later, I was chatting with my mom on the phone and mentioned this little story. In turn, a day or two after that, she was talking to my aunt, and when my aunt tells her about finding her son's stash, she says "oh, yeah, I heard about that," and tells auntie about cousin's facebook posting. He then catches hell from his mom a second time, blames me, and un-friends me. Fun times.