Settlers is incredibly random, but also is affected greatly by the pseudorandomness of other player's actions. After initial town placement, before the first turn begins, some players can be at such a disadvantage as to be unlikely to win.

Ticket to Ride doesn't suffer from this problem, because competitive players know the routes, predict the paths of those in the lead, and block them.

I agree that some randomness is necessary to level the playing field, as otherwise you have a game like chess and it's boring if you aren't well matched to your opponent. As I posted elsewhere in the thread, games that feel fun are games of luck + strategy, where something random happens but then you can make the best of it through meaningful choices. Games of strategy + luck (i.e randomness after decisions, rather than before) can feel frustrating if the randomness undoes the planning. Luck + no meaningful decisions (monopoly, candy land) is just stupid if you are over 10.

The difference also lies in how the randomness affects you. Games where you make choices, then a random event occurs (like a die roll) to resolve everything can feel frustrating. On the other hand, games where something random happens, then you make (meaningful) choices based on it, feel more empowering to the player.

Talisman - Random event (die roll) followed by sometimes-meaningful choice (which direction to walk) followed by random event (card draw)
Alien Frontiers - Random event (dice roll) followed by meaningful choices (how to manipulate and deploy the dice)
Monopoly - Random event (die roll) followed sometimes by obvious "choice" (whether to buy or not) or by no choice at all (pay rent)
Power Grid - Random event (power plant card draw) followed by meaningful choices (what to bid, where to build, what to power)

Any of these games can be fun to the right sort of people in the right mood, but games where meaningful choices aren't nullified by a die roll tend to attract more replayability from the adult board game crowd. I'm neglecting the pseudorandom effects of other players actions on your choices (such as a shortage of fuel in power grid, or someone else building where you wanted to) because understanding and predicting the strategies of your opponents is a learnable skill.

Games where nothing random ever occurs (i.e. chess) can garner high devotion, but to be enjoyable they also need to be complicated enough to require significant skill to master (i.e. tic-tac-toe has no randomness other than who goes first, but is not enjoyable once you are older than six). These games can also be frustrating if there is a skill gap between players.

Places where speed causes accidents is a very small subset of places where people speed. If the cameras cause all places where people speed to become places where they break suddenly and cause accidents, then they hurt far more than they help.

You are a troll. DIAF and have a nice day.

Forbes is driven by MBA-types looking for next-quarter results. Of course they don't understand the concept of long-term research. If anyone today has taken up the mantle of research dropped by Bell Labs and GE, it would be Google and Elon Musk.

While some of Elon's ventures are public (now), the pure research is all done with his private money. Only Google is doing research as a public company with loud investors who'd rather pump-n-dump.

As I understand the law from previous readings, it is legal to rent or buy an antenna and install it on land you rent or own, but it is not legal to rent or buy access to an antenna on land you neither rent nor own.

Think of the scenario of living at the bottom of a hill that blocks access to all the TV signals from the nearby town. If the guy who owns the top of the hill installs an antenna and runs a cable down to your property line, he can't sell you access to that cable. Likewise, you can't buy an antenna and install it on his property, and run your own cable to your property. (As I understand the law, stupid as it may be.)

What you might be able to do is rent 10 square feet of land on the top of the hill, and sign an access agreement to that land for you and your cable. Then you should be able to do whatever the hell you want with those ten square feet (subject to your rental agreement) including install an antenna. This wasn't aero's business model so it wasn't explored by this case. Of course, in a city there may be laws that limit where and how sub-parcels of land can be rented. I suspect someplace advertising themself as "roof top storage units with gigabit Ethernet connections) would be legal even if you happen to install an antenna and network-controlled DVR in them. Hard to know.

I take photographs each year at SXSW, just walking the street and looking for interesting people. Many of those people pose for me when they see the camera. Facebook picked one of those pictures for the cover of my album, so apparently they think my year is summed up by a group of people I don't know, one of which is giving a fake blowjob to a green balloon dildo.

I didn't share the album with my friends and family - or open it at all.

I stated facts, which you ignore. You also ignore the fact that the majority of humans have something called empathy, a natural instinct that keeps the species from destroying itself. While instinctual empathy tends to be limited to those around us, it does extend for some to those more distant that are suffering. That will keep those people fed and, yes, breeding. The only logical way to reduce that population growth, given the existence of empathy, is thus to bring those people out of poverty, and plenty of studies show population growth slows and levels off when communities develop a strong middle class and women's rights aren't withheld.

Your options, as someone who lacks empathy, are to either try to kill off everyone who does, or I guess just bitch about it on the internet. So I guess you have that part down.

Sure, machine logic has strange seemingly obvious gaps. The pedestrian trying to cross though was spot on, and half of humans would just pull out without seeing him at all.

I don't know about the oatmeal, but you're probably spot on for the car.

Toll roads already use surge pricing in some places, to keep the toll lanes uncongested during times of high demand. Uber's patent is so similar as to be obvious.

The Oatmeal review I linked (looks like as first post) includes a discussion of a similar scenario, which the car handled better than many people would.

Let's assume he earns 3% interest on his money. That's in the ballpark of realistic. Let's also assume (for the sake of argument) that he took out a 30 year mortgage on that $70M mansion, like those people you have a nickname for. That means he'll pay maybe $150M total for it over 30 years, or $417k per month.

He earns $6.25M per month on interest alone, so his house payment would be less than 7% of his income. (Let's say less than 15% taking into account electricity, cleaning, taxes, etc.) That doesn't make him anywhere close to the 50% rate you cite for "poor people living in a big house". And that makes him pretty smart - not and idiot.

Your logic is... flawed. Well fed, educated children have fewer children than those that live in poverty. And the mentally ill account for a full third of the homeless. Add in those genuinely down on their luck and in need of a better safety net, and we'd be over half the homeless through no fault of their own.

At a measly 1% rate of return, he'll make 25 million a year for life on the interest from that one-time paycheck. If he'd gotten $100M for Minecraft and just spent $70M of it on the mansion, I'd agree with you. But he got $2.5 billion. If he doesn't want to maintain the mansion, he can just give it away and buy another one every other year for the rest of his life and he'll be okay.*

I'm ignoring taxes and stuff. I have a headache.