>Two things had become constants at id: the lack of interesting games, and the boundary-pushing tech. Lets be honest, the only thing at id that kept it notable was Carmack. And I say that with a crushed, broken heart, as one who's run a TF server, mastered the trick jumps, and played thousands of rounds well after Quake was out of its prime.

Indeed. What was remarkable about Quake and Quakeworld was not the single player game (though lord knows I've played it through enough times by myself and in co-op) or the story, but the graphics technology, the client-server architecture (which *still* hasn't been beaten today, IMO, - no other modern game lets you move as fast as QW), and the ease of modability. QuakeC is a terrible hack, which is why they dropped it in Quake 2, but it had several important advantages: almost anyone could pick up the source code and mod it (leading to Team Fortress and then CustomTF), and since it was all run within a sandbox, you could download executable code from the internet and run it on your server without risking compromising your server. Quake 2, with its DLLs, didn't have that protection, which is one of the reasons why I stayed with Quakeworld.

Because QW was sandboxed, it was theoretically easier to debug, but the aforementioned hackishness of it meant that in reality debugging the thing was a nightmare for several important classes of bugs. I remember spending hours looking at where my code would crash, putting in sanity checks everywhere, and then having the problem turn out to be we were exceeding some internal limit in QuakeC. That the compiler would just silently ignore. Or entity overruns. Or the netcode limit on sending updates. Or the hardcoded limit on entity speed that had a soft limit that it would silently ignore. That sort of thing.

It was very impressive technology for something Carmack just hacked together in (IIRC) a couple days. I spent two quarters in my compilers class building my own language, and we didn't even have to write a VM to interpret the emitted code. It was brilliant, but hackish.

I'm sad as well, Phrosty... Carmack leaving id is the end of an era for me. I still have my emails I traded with him back in the day on implicit parallelization of Q2 code on the Tera Supercomputer...

>>Look at the poor state Fallout 3/New Vegas were released in, as well as Skyrim.

Which were better than Morrowind, which was better than Daggerfall. But that's specifically Bethesda Softworks (except FNV, which was made by Obsidian), a company with only a passing interest in QAing their code.

Obsidian actually did spend a lot of effort testing FNV (a friend of mine is near the top on the credits list), but it still had a ton of game breaking bugs at first. In part, it's because the Gamebryo engine is a buggy piece of shit, in part because it's a massive game, and in part because they missed a lot of the bugs.

Id's engines were and are much less buggy, but even still Rage was unplayable at release and I haven't tried it since.

Republicans threatened it, but Reid actually did it. He's also blocked all Republican debate and amendments to bills, which is a pretty unprecedented power grab in an institution that has always tried to pay lip service to minority rights.

> Don't call it a come back, Valve/Steam has been doing it for years.

And ID before that. They made a lot of their money by releasing highly modifiable games. Team Fortress was originally a Quake 1 mod, which became a Quakeworld mod, which became a Half-Life Mod, which became a standalone product in the Orange Box.

Valve reaps the rewards of the mod teams they buy, but ID profited by having everyone and their mother buy the game so they could play TF.

>Meanwhile, some appointees can never get approved under any circumstances.

Google Harry Reid's "nuclear option" he took a short while ago.

>In your opinion.

In my professional opinion. I've worked for over a decade as a professional evaluator of teachers.

>Nice straw man.

Do you even know what a straw man means?

>ohh, making up number to fit your narrative, well done. Right their with the finest anti-vaccines, young earth creationist.

I work as a professional evaluator of teachers. Do you?

No?

Oh.

>Pff, you can't even learn how to do an insert after 6 years of using ribbon, and we are suppose to believe you went to community college at 11?

I prefer using this method of text input. Fortunately Slashdot doesn't force us to use the same text input methods they wrote for children.

>But the truth is that "bad teachers" are the minority.

Doesn't matter. They're a sizeable minority.

All you need is one bad math teacher, and your math career is over. If you have a terrible trig or precalc teacher, you're going fail AP Calculus. If you have a terrible AP Caluclus teacher, you'll fail differential equations in college, and so forth.

So if even 10% of teachers are bad, that's a line of Russian Roulette that will hit most kids by the time they finish school.

When I happened to me, I had to enroll in a local community college class to get the education I didn't get from my middle school.

While I did it, I don't expect many 11 year olds would do the same.

> A 1000 square foot flat-roof house could support up to 111 solar panels for 22kWh per day

111 solar panels? Are you crazy?

I have a regular sized house in the suburbs, and my roof supports no more than 20 panels.

I've never seen a normal house with 100+ panels on it.

>And yes, everything that consumes finite resources is everybody's business, that's why water and energy policies are so often in the news -- you can't separate water and energy from consumption, since whether it's food, lumber, or home automation equipment, everything needs water and energy to create.

I propose we create a system that will regulate how society allocates limited resources to people. We could even set it up so that people who contribute more to society are given more allocations, in order to incentivize them to contribute to society instead of just consuming resources. We could even create a secondary market for allocations, so people could choose what interests them more - energy, housing space, water, location, etc. We could even set up the government to operate by just taking percentages of these allocations, and trading those allocations to accomplish things like building roads and parks.

We could call this system "money".

Solar produces at 5PM anyway, but also: http://papundits.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/load-curve.jpg

>>Thats the other thing, we don't need all this extra power in the middle of the day, we need it at 6 oclock at night when everyone turns on the big screens and ovens.

That's the winter power curve. During summer, consumption peaks around noon to the early afternoon, as people run their ACs full blast. This peak is also much higher (~33% or so) than the winter peak draw.

Summer at noon to early afternoon also happens to be the time when solar is at peak production, so it's very useful at helping to deal with the highest levels of draws which lead to rolling blackouts.

>Basically they become a free power storage and backup facility only paid for any extra usage) for the customers, which is great for adoption, but means that non solar customers are adding further subsidy to the solar customers (over and above the common subside via taxation/government grants).

Not here in California. We get to pay a monthly fee to be hooked up to the grid that is independent of our net power generated or consumed.

Even still, PG&E has lobbied (and is still lobbying) to not have to pay customers for net power generated. Why? Because, hey, free money, I guess. I don't imagine any other reason they could justify that.

I got into an argument with a guy on Reddit who claimed solar only saved utilities on fuel costs for generation, but fuel is the lion's share of power costs involved in natural gas plants. So rooftop solar really does save them money on generation.

There's no excuse for them to be able to charge for net watts I generate and not even reimburse me the pittance they do now.

>LED's and CFL bulbs use between 5 and 25% of the power an equivalent Tungsten or Halogen bulb might by converting all of the energy input into light instead of heat.

And look like shit. And often have a bad form factor that doesn't fit into places where incandescents can go.

>Saudi and Soviet Oil is what powers your SUV

No, it doesn't. It's pretty much all produced in North America now.

>he wanted to take all the oil and keep it for America

He turned it all over to the Iraqis, dude.

Precisely what I find ridiculous about the situation. They want to have it both ways.