Mythology is replete with examples of sex changes. Clearly it's been on people's minds for quite a while. It's not surprising that it's happening now that it's possible; even with our crude technology, there are plenty of early adopters. I doubt it's going to go anywhere

You're kind of right, though. The technology will probably improve drastically. In 50 years, you won't even be able to notice it. To follow your analogy, we stopped doing lobotomies because we invented risperdal.

this isn't offtopic.

did i offend someone by pointing out that the Quinn-hate started before the accusations of sexual manipulation? lol.

Depression Quest is definitely a game in the sense that it's a really primitive interactive fiction. Zork is generally considered a game, so I don't see why Quinn's shouldn't be. Admittedly, it might not be a good game, but it is a game.

I played Depression Quest a while ago, long before this drama started. it was unpolished and had a lot of typos, but i thought it was a cute idea. iirc, wasn't the original outcry from "gamers" due to DQ being greenlit on Steam despite their not wanting it there? Honestly, I didn't understand that; if you don't like it, don't play it. I haven't been following this silly episode very well; it seems to have drifted onto various groups trying to "own" the incident. (yawn)

Mr. President, we must not allow an anal gap!

good to know.

palm oil is quite expensive, however. i'd be very surprised if they weren't using the much more plentiful petroleum byproduct.

it's not simple, but neither is it extremely difficult. the factors he cites are important, and sang froid is much more important than technical analysis if you're playing with your own money. however, from one example you can conclude basically nothing.

if just 1,000 people all invested their entire savings in a single double-zero roulette roll, you're almost guaranteed to have a few very lucky winners. does this mean it was a good idea? and is it that unreasonable to think there are about 1,000 similar people who tried exactly what this person did, and failed?

there really is no baseline here for a meaningful comparison, and some people do just get lucky. there's that old joke about applying to work for N banks and making a different prediction about a fixed set, S, of stocks to each one; if N=2^|S|, you'll sweep one of them, guaranteed.

having a large liquidity pool also simply lets you make high-risk investments that others literally can't. there's nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but neither should you conclude that individual merit is the driving factor.

the article is a puff-piece. the better question to ask about articles like this is "why are they making a big deal out of it right now?". you sometimes get some interesting and disturbing connections, especially when the correlations unfold in the following few months. it rarely has much to do with the putative content.

it also doesn't contain any oil, but it does contain propylene glycol which is derived from petroleum (or other fossil fuels).

oh, don't bother. you can't resolve every stupid nitpick people bring up, and even if you did no one will bother reading past the "+5, Insightful" nitpick anyway.

fuck this place.

admittedly, this usage doesn't really show how impressive spotlight is, so read the last sentence as an auxiliary statement, not a conclusion. :)

but, yes, spotlight is by far the best indexing/search tool i've used on any platform.

isn't it wonderful to have such freedom of choice?!

on OS X it's just cmd-space to bring up the spotlight, and then you start typing "terminal" until it auto-completes, which is probably after "ter" (or even "te" unless you use textedit often). spotlight is awesome.

without US political and military might, Microsoft wouldn't be nearly as safe doing business abroad as they are now.

i don't know exactly how much they should owe for this service, but it's stupid to say it's nothing.

uh-huh, there are plenty of other folks with engineering degrees and good grades who are doing great at life.

it should be obvious to anyone with intelligence that intelligence is not in itself sufficient for, well, pretty much anything. why don't you tell us what the real problem is?

well, yeah, children are dumb; even, or especially, the smart ones.

however, Livius said "I've still seen very few environments where [intelligence isn't a liability], and all of those only well after childhood."

for a grown adult, this is just pathetic (without mitigating factors, at least). even Spock could occasionally pretend not to be autistic when it was to the advantage of his commission.