You're confirming my point though. Even better than helping them is teaching them, but it does take more dedication and effort from both sides; teaching someone to solve their own problems is just the next step up. The point wasn't that it should be done, or how it should be done, but rather with what disposition it should be done. If you approach it as a burden then those you help will pick up on that emotion (trust me, they will even if you wouldn't) and that negativity will be reciprocated like all emotions (think about the contagiousness of smiles, aggression, and kind of "mob" mentality, etc). If you want to teach someone instead of just fix the problem yourself then you have to be a patient teacher, take joy in enriching their life and use the opportunity to cultivate and strengthen those social bonds as much as possible. I think too many of us treat the great responsibility that comes with our great power as a burden instead of an asset; it would be like a great guitar player being bitter that he "has" to play for his friends. Life is a team sport, and, like any, you're most successful when you work as a team.

That over half responded "Yes, at great cost to my eternal soul" suggests something. I understand that the #1 goal of CS kids is seeking efficiency and spending one's time helping someone who should learn to help themselves goes against that, but this is how you get people to like you. You use your skills to helps your friends and enjoy doing it, and they'll enjoy helping you in return. When people trade favors it strengthens social bonds, like how helping a friend move shows both people how close they consider each other, one saying you're a good enough friend to ask this favor of, the other that you're a good enough friend that I'll help. Still need an argument for efficiency? Ever try to move by yourself? It's harder than moving twice when you have two people each time...

With any luck at least it might be able to be used as precedent against them. If they can weasel, othe

Most of us probably download most all our shows anyway, and with RSS it really doesn't take much effort to get everything you want. It'll help send a message to the cable companies, you'll save money, etc. The only catch is you're less likely to run across new shows by accident, but a little effort on the internet will give plenty of suggestions (e.g. look at number of seeds on a torrent). Cable is obsolete (sorta).

I remember hearing about a system that uses photography and computer anaysis on the cars to figure out exactly how long you parked and whose car it is. Tie that to a credit card and you don't have to do anything. Except it also ends parking ticket revenues, which is priced in to the system. Would you be willing to pay more so that you'd never pay late fees again (a la Netflix)to compensate for the revenue loss? Perhaps capturing each minute of all cars who weren't paying for parking before (the ones who would have gotten tickets) would take care of it. If that's the case, it's really win win, if you think about it.

Why is this no surprise? New York has Wall St, coke is imported into many Florida and California cities, etc. The only thing remarkable about DC is the presence of the Government, and since so many people here (I'm a resident of the District) want to get high levels of clearance for their jobs, most won't touch any illegal drugs. Really surprised by this, even though I do know where to get dank coke ;-)

No, but I was just thinking about this. A meta-wiki would be amazing, as for each high level subject there could be a page talking about the main bits of it, but then also link to the subject's own wiki for which you can explore all the different aspects of that subject. The only catch is that currently all the wikis are independently run, so there's some loss of standardization (which is useful) and of course the problem of selecting the proper sub-wiki (if it even exists). Perhaps best not to use existing subject wikis and instead to start the meta-wiki with the ability to create new subject wikis on the fly, like metawiki.com/wikisubject/currentpage where the wikisubject can be created fresh and contains an entire wiki where each page is after the /. This way you could have a notability requirement only on the main wiki for subjects, so that there might be a wiki on web-comics (which is a notable subject) and that wiki could have as obscure web-comic related articles as it likes. There'd have to be a mechanism for articles to be cross listed across wikis if they fall under multiple categories, but that should be easy enough. Besides that, it might also be useful to be able to create sub-sub-wikis and such too, like a wiki on computer games, and then another sub wiki on WoW or something, and theoretically you could go to deeper levels as well. I don't know, just a thought.

Can I just say I love your rage and how everyone seems to ignore it because you're speaking sense. "Bullshit, you motherfucking liar." "Now go back to sucking Obama's cock, you know-nothing retard." Brilliant, though I would have added a few !s for good measure.

And to add my $0.02 to those environmentalists who don't seem to get it, if we crush the economy we crush our ability to innovate right now, and we crush education (our ability to innovate in the future). Innovation is the only way to solve these problems; we have too many people in the world now, and unless you want to give up all your tech (including your computers and the Internet), we aren't getting back to a sustainable level without it.

This is dead on, and I've been saying it for years. Too often people hear there's potentially a problem and think "We have to solve it!" What they don't do is ask any of the above questions. I've seen worse ideas than cap and trade, but as an economist (by degree and profession) I can tell you that it doesn't work how they suggest it will.

The Government really doesn't need to do anything to solve the global warming problem. Innovation is obviously the only real solution, and every energy company and tons of private equity funds are investing billions of dollars to create green technologies and green energy sources. They do this because they know if they can create something that is economically viable, they'll make more money than God. They also know that, besides as a potential goldmine, it also acts as a preventative measure in case bills like this do pass. Game theory suggests that all we really need is a credible threat that something like this might pass to spur innovation, we don't really need to force them to act right. And as an added bonus, it's much cheaper and more effective than passing this type of legislation, since their research budgets aren't crippled by bad policy. Why punish those who are already playing by the rules?

Yes, but that only effects people who use energy. Everyone here is so doom and gloom. Geez.

I was obviously kidding about the filling up space thing. I even mentioned sarcasm. As for cooling, I know you have to radiate heat and you don't have air passing over your radiators, but still, it's quite cheap to build a large radiator (build a heat shield too if you need to block the sun to keep it from heating up). Even very large radiators. And as for spent fuel and deorbiting, it seems that, since you have a local source of power, there's bound to be a relatively easy way to use the spent fuel as a propulsion device to both get rid of it and stay in orbit. Just a though.

Poppycock. You can spout all you want about the merits of green energy, but solar power is a terribly inefficient use of space. What will we do once we've filled up space with solar panels, huh? It'd be much better to just build a bunch of nuclear plants up there instead. Sarcasm aside, nuclear plants in space might not be such a bad idea if we can actually beam the energy to earth. Nuclear waste is no longer a problem, cooling is no longer a problem, not-in-my-backyard is no longer a problem, if we built a space elevator (which with a budget tied to the energy market [a multi-trillion dollar industry worldwide] would be pretty easy), then upkeep would be much more reasonable. It's worth a thought.

I suppose. I think there's something to be said about the mood set in cinematics that can't be with gameplay alone. Someone mentioned a cinematic of the Zerg attacking a science vessel, and you really get the feeling of how ruthless, unrelenting and uncompromising the Zerg are, and how terrifying engaging an opponent like that might be. Sure, the cinematic is just an example encounter and not terribly important plot-wise, but it adds a great deal to the realism of each individual conflict and a sense of desperation to the war as a whole. If that's not your bag, fine, but don't think that removing them to spend extra money of designers and programmers will make it a better game for everyone; for many it'll make it just an impersonal experience like Tetris or pong.

I'm guessing you've never read a newspaper headline. Using just a comma is a pretty common convention and any linguist will tell you that something is "proper" grammar so long as the reader understands it.