If you're trying to make a quality fleet, you don't just build more ships and crew them with people who "really wanna be a fleet member!" You select for quality. If you want a horde that wins through exhausting your enemy, recruiting anyone who can fog a mirror (or other non-human equivalents) is acceptable. That doesn't explain Wesley, unless they've seen people like this before, and realize they're often more trouble than they're worth unless they're brought down a notch or two first. Hmm...

Colonies can be started for a number of reasons, only one of which is disaffection with the homeworld. Overpopulation, racial security, desire for a challenge, cultural/personal need for space, desire to see new things. If you don't think cultural difference couldn't lead to people not having a problem with the population of a region/planet per se and yet still not wanting to live in certain conditions, compare standing in line in Finland and India.

That's a pretty insightful statement, seeing how he claims to be white and southern (US, I presume). Way to go - your literacy is paying off!

We've been waiting and seeing for 15 years. People were reportedly surprised to hear he'd funded the Prop 8 group. The waiting and seeing part is adequately finished, I'd say. Although his more than a decade of apparently not firing people for their personal beliefs hasn't helped him any.

We also don't all work in a position of authority for 15 years, where he could easily have exerted his political views, and yet didn't to all appearances.

Like clothing. I'm sure there's no valid reason for that one, either.

Most things that have lasted for thousands of years have done so for a good reason. Find that reason, examine the possibility of other ways to meet the requirements, and maybe you will have a way to make it a thing of the past.

The two biggest reasons for marriage are raising children and determining inheritances. We can mitigate one (child-rearing) and set some rules in place of the other based on new technology like DNA testing, but the possibility of guaranteeing where obligations lie has only been around for a generation. Social norms will take a while to catch up.

I personally think marriage is a great idea, and I'm a big fan of freedom. (The two might be opposed to each other...) The trouble comes in when you tie things that aren't obviously interconnected and have to deal with the impact of that. Tax breaks and medical coverage being tied to marriage are just a couple of those. And also when you deal poorly with the things that are obviously linked to (the current idea of) marriage - child-rearing etc. - when the marriage dissolves.

I could see the use on a gaming rig (which is what the GPP mentioned). If the OS can handle it, dump the OS and your games on there, keep all saved data on your HDD/SSD, and have data access at a factor of 10x what you'd get from SSD (about 100x? 1000x? HDD). The only slowdown you'd see is on startup and game saves. Everything else would be now.

Not saying I'd bother doing something like this, but if the game you're playing is disk-intensive, you will see a world of improvement, even over SSD.

Now why games don't have an option of doing this themselves and saving you all the pain is another question. We live in an age where a good many of the serious gamers have more RAM than what is needed just to play the game and could easily have the game allocate a few GB as swap.

Put a camera where the sideview mirrors currently are. This gives you the field of view of the outside edge of the mirror, rather than mostly in the middle. Given the right alignment, it will see everything you can by moving your head around. Put two cameras there, and you can even put a "fish-eye mirror" view in part of the field of view, and have more perspective than you'd ever normally have.

Another option is to put the cameras on the roof, near where the windshield meets the roof. This could be done relatively discreetly, about like what the radio antennas look like now. With a design that incorporates the placement of cameras for this, you will likely have more field of view than you ever could do with mirrors, especially on the passenger side.

None of this negates any possible stereoscopic effect you would get from using mirrors rather than a camera.

This seems to be the attitude of the Roman government for a couple hundred years before the complete collapse of their nation. Then they started thinking that little things like the basic needs of the majority didn't really matter so much, and there was a revolution. America has gotten there a lot faster than Rome did. Maybe they will get to the next couple steps faster, too.

And by diverse you mean...everyone has to agree with everyone else.

As a general rule, I don't put up with intolerance, but I'm not saying I agree with his political choices, but I think he just might be able to separate his personal opinions from his work.

Also, he's in his fifties - his view is held by almost half the people in his demographic. Should they all be banned from leadership roles? A more reasonable idea might be to just wait for those who don't like the modern state of things to die off. It's a typical part of the process for a lot of social change. This will barely be an issue in a generation, although I can appreciate the discomfort this causes for everyone involved in the process.

You're looking at it from the wrong perspective. So are the people you're commenting about. Those who don't value interpersonal interaction (or haven't had it significantly hurt their career) see someone promoting something that holds little value for them. "It's all just marketing and bullshit actions to make the other person have better feelings about working with you. There's nothing of practical value here!" Then you come along and say, "What do you mean? Why all the hate?! She has a bunch of tools to help you get along better with other, diverse people." And the nerdy types respond with, "Exactly!"

I certainly see value in what she's presenting. But on a website made for people who count non-technical stuff as not "stuff that matters", she will get a cool reception. This can't be surprising. Certainly, once some of these people have been negatively impacted due to their behaviour (and they recognize it), or moved to a position where they have to deal with diverse types of people (management or hell, which are often thought of as the same thing), their perspective may change. Until then, this will be the typical response.

Do a little research. Watch 6 hours of the Kardashian family, and you will have it made. If the DM disagrees with your actions, say, "But I'm so pretty! Don't you want to be my friend?" If that doesn't work, say, "I have a Charisma of 23. I'm so pretty! Don't you want to be my friend?" At this point, he will either give in, or you will have a chance to sell your obviously useless equipment and buy a castle somewhere.

I get that you're joking, but this is pretty much how the world works sometimes. It seems that a pile of cash, some marketing, and the resultant celebrity status can take someone with a Cha of 15 (or less!) and give them a modified Cha of 20.

First, if this is going to be at all successful, the implementers are going to watch, and see what happens with the system in real-world use. Unless they happened on the perfect system right at the gate, there will be room for improvement. Second, they may have more than one category, not visible to the user. Maybe "complainers" (people who always report on people who kill them) and "bullies" (campers and griefers) will both get a red rating over time. (Yes, the guy who responds to everyone who's better than him by labeling him a cheater is a bad actor, just of a different style than the bully.) And if they're put in different categories, then you'll have a bunch of red guys who all happen to be complainers accusing each other of having nice aimbots and another bunch of guys saying "fuck you!" when someone kills them and hunting each other down for the rest of the session. Couple this with a little bit of trust management, where the opinions of people who are higher in your levels of trust will make their opinions carry more weight for your experience, and therefore who you're likely to be playing with. I don't need to know someone very well to decide that I think they're a bit of a dick, and a good game will keep us separate just to make everyone's experience better. And my opinion might be shared by my friends for a number of reasons, some of them valid.

Really, you're thinking about this too simplistically. Most of these games aren't some seasonal league where you have to play a bunch of the other teams to see who's the best, and the people who want to play will generally be enough that you can use some discrimination in your grouping to keep conflicting personalities apart without diminishing gameplay for anyone, let alone the good actors.

That doesn't appear to be the case in Canada. Last I heard, no mass John Doe subpoenas based on IP addresses, no cases with multiple defendants whose only connection is being caught by the same dragnet, and a maximum fine of $500 for any amount of non-commercial pirating, per case. This means that most IP lawyers will be taking a massive pay cut to even look at these cases. If the defendant stalls at all, they'll take a loss. And so there just isn't a lot of court cases for music and video piracy in Canada. Sure, we pay a percentage (about 10%, I think) on media prices to not have to put up with these lawsuits. It's been a couple years since I paid anything (haven't bought any media for a while), and I've never paid more than what I pay to go to the theatre every year. The people have won, and the lawyers have lost. It's pretty nice, actually.

Yes, we still have to keep on our toes, lest the politicians try to screw us over once again. But that's a better position than many other countries are in.

The far better system is to have someone trained and (over time) experienced with the system and have the customer see a copy of the screen so they can review what the order says. This is a small cost increase, and will reduce the high level of errors with outliers like yourself, and also help reduce the level of errors with people who tend to buy the standard stuff ("I wanted [no] cheese on that burger..."). It will also have the benefit of bypassing issues like non-payment (also solved for automated systems) and returns (EVERY return in the food industry is a loss in profit, if not a complete loss).

And what you will see is that you pay about 100 times what you paid before and a semi truck pulls up to your house rather than a mini-van. Because you pay per piece (with possible bulk reductions) for material objects. But that's not the deal that Comcast and AT&T have made with their customers.