Soylent has extremely low article quality from what I've seen. I think this place is still the best.

Thank you for your valuable contribution to this discussion. Out of sheer wonder, I almost dropped the frog legs I was eating, such was your display of intelligence and maturity.

*Ribbit*... sorry. Can't help myself.

I would recommend you try to seek out meet ups by people who don't appear to be steretypical nerds then. Eurogames (or german style games) are especially good for that, since they tend to have wider appeal. If you still have an interest in american games, there's bound to be someone in the group who enjoys them. I've lived in Toronto and Montreal, came to both places having 0 friends, and met people using eurogame meet ups. A good way to find people also is to go to game pubs, if there's any in your region. They don't attract the same crowd as the gamer stores. And really, just check around the gamer stores for one that looks more "clean", for a lack of better words. Sometimes they have game nights which attract different crowds of people, so you can meet people who aren't the steretypical dirty magic player.

None of my gamer friends fit the unfortunate gamer nerd stereotype, yet we have some fun and challenging boardgame sessions together. I say if you feel a need to meet people you should try out what I told you. And don't give up the first time if you don't like the ambience, there's bound to be a game group near you that's friendly.

Bill 101 is necessary to preserve French in a sea of anglophones. Look at francophone communities outside of Quebec. Their numbers are diminishing. Unfortunately, we have to impose regulations to protect our language. You also have to remember that not long ago, almost all of the wealth of the province belonged to anglophones. People think that stuff is ancient history, but my grand-parents can tell you about living in a Quebec dominated by an english minority. Bill 101 exists in part to ensure that francophones will never again be second class citizens. They can get overzealous at times, but if you spend any amount of time on slashdot, you know government fuck ups are a reality. The bill does a lot more good than harm. I am disappointed that so many anglophones seem to think Quebecois are some kind of strange animal, that we act irrationally, when if you understand where we're coming from and what our values are, our actions make perfect sense. I think if bilingualism was more common in the country, then people could read french media for themselves and realize that we make a lot of sense, rather than getting second hand information with some bias thrown in. That would solve a lot of issues.

As for the attitude you got, that's a pretty unfortunate reality of a polarized country. There's generally more resentment amongst the older folks or the less educated, or those who are less in contact with anglophones. We're like 2 generations away from having taken control of our province, so it'll take a little while for that stuff to die down. The important thing is that these people are not given a podium and do not have an opinion that is considered mainstream, so their ignorance will disappear with them. Reading newspapers from other provinces, and having lived in Toronto for a while, the anti-Quebec sentiment, while not shared by every Canadian, seems a lot more mainstream...

Anyway, I'm sorry people treated you badly, but I thought the comment I was replying to was an all too common gratuitous attack. When people start talking about which region of a country is "the worst", you know that this way lies terrible generalization. You don't add to it by bashing your favourite target...

Almost every single article anglophones write about Quebec serves to bash the province. Seriously, compare the anglophone press to the francophone press. The propaganda campaign form the english side is ridiculous, and then they have the gall to project their xenophobia onto quebecois and make claims about how racist we are. I'm glad that we are taking the high road on this, but the baseless accusations levied at us from anglophones only serves to strenghten the anti-Canada sentiment here. But by all means, please use this discussion on Canada to inform us of your dislike for Quebec, it's not like that's particularly uncommon.

I was going to suggest Dominion if no one did it. I think the best thing to be said about Dominion is that despite the deck building mechanic, it is at its core a puzzle game. It is very easy to teach (the turn order can be learned with Action Buy Cleanup Draw - ABCD) and will be fun with people who have never played boardgames before while still being a very engaging game for the more cerebral players. As far as video games go, I think we are really fortunate to have so many high quality free to play games on PC these days. Path of Exile, Hearthstone and Dota are all games I would heavily reccomend.

You need to make gamer friends. If you live in a large enough city, there's bound to be boardgame gatherings you can go to. I started out playing a few games with a friend, then I moved away and met new people and couldn't really play the old games I enjoyed. After meeting people at gatherings in my city, I now have a whole new collection of games to play and people to play them with. :)

I'm cool with politics posts if they have a link to science or technology, but this doesn't. At all. News for nerds people, news for nerds...

This comment is severely underrated. The GP is a pedantic explanation of the scientific process. The use of the word "proven" is quite adequate here considering how rock solid our evidence for the sun's fusion processes are.

-_-

I honestly have to agree. I mean, it's kind of neat to hear form an old timer, but it's mostly just him bitching about life. There is some entertainement value from hearing and old dude bitch about life, but not much education value.

Before anyone else gets the wrong idea, you should really watch this video, which explains why Twitch has become so big: Why we watch It was a response to a really biased report on this by the BBC. This is more than just "a bunch of nerds watching people play games".

I think the gamer market will keep the desktop model alive and well for a while. Most serious PC gamers want to build their own machine. Though the "one mobile device to do all" approach will certainly be a big thing eventually.

I'm using archlinux with Awesome WM, a tiling window manager. The width of my screen allows me to have a tall window on the left, where the main file I'm working on is, while keeping two terminal windows open on the right for various uses. The width of my screen is being fully used. :) Also, none of the things you said invalidate what I wrote. Are there still some things you need desktops to do? Yup. Unless you've found a good way to develop software on a tablet... Or play games at high resolution and 120 fps. Or do video processing. Or write novels. Or make spreadsheets. You get the point. People need to do these things, so they need desktops. If anything, you're basically making an argument for why the year of the linux desktop is close: Microsoft no longer respects the desktop, but it is still very important to linux.

I disagree. Fridges haven't really been getting any better for a while, but no one claims that industry is dead. You'll have to buy new desktops because like everything else, they'll eventually stop working. And I wouldn't be so quick to say extra power will never be needed. The average computer has been fully capable of doing all tasks the average user needs to get done for a quite a few years now, but they keep getting stronger anyway. That's because you can find new things to do with that power. And of course, work computers or gaming computers can absolutely make use of extra power. Finally, companies can still work to make computers more silent or power efficient. I think there's still room. What we'ere seeing is a diversification of ways to interact with technology, which inevitably means a reduction of market share for the older products, but as long as these products are still needed, the industry will be in good shape.