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Comment Re:I used to game... (Score 1) 79

I definitely think there are games out there fitting my needs - as I said, I place the blame partly on me for not wanting to do the research to find them.

I do agree that there are a lot of casual "Play this game on the bus on the way to work" games out there for mobile devices. Mobile device gameplay is a whole other ball of wax, though. I would prefer to sit down in front of a large screen and use physical buttons. I suppose I am just old like that. I can see the appeal of mobile gaming, and have played a few over the years.

I suppose one drawback to mobile gaming is the lack of socialization. I am not one to sit down and play a video game on my own very often. I would much rather play in a group. The few games I keep on my iPhone are mobile versions of board games that I play against other people via Game Center.

Comment I used to game... (Score 4, Interesting) 79

Growing up in the 80's, I played video games quite frequently. Now, though, I find myself avoiding them.

One reason is cost. I realize the cost really has probably not gone up that significantly from the NES days, but at that time it was my parents paying for a new console and games. Now I have to figure out how to justify a $60 game.

Another reason is that I much more enjoy a "play for 10-30 minutes, have fun, and then walk away" type of game. MarioKart is a great example of this. I can play with 0-3 other people and have fun. We can play for 10 minutes, or we can play for an hour. When we get done I can put the controller down and not feel like there is more to do. The playability even remains after I have "beat the game". Commingled in there is an easy learning curve. Sure, the game might be challenging, but I do not want to spend an hour just getting the basic controls figured out.

I am sure there are more games that fit this description, but as a casual gamer I am not willing to do the research just to figure out what games are out there. It is far easier to load up an emulator and play the original Castlevania for NES.

The games described int he article do seem to be closer to the type of game I would like to play.

Comment My experiences (Score 1) 595

Disclaimer: I work in tech, and have a basic understanding of networking. I am far from a full-time network engineer, however.

A few weeks ago I finally turned on IPv6 on my ISP-provided modem/router from CenturyLink. I confirmed using several devices that it is working.

What I have seen is that during normal browsing (almost all under OS X or iOS), there is more stalling and pages that fail to load. It is a small number, probably 1-3% of pages. This is a noticeable increase from pre-IPv6.

I do not have the interest to try to narrow down what is causing this. It could be OS X/iOS's networking stack, it could be a problem with the servers doing a dual IP stack implementation, or something else entirely.

When people ask if everyone is ready for IPv6, my question now is "Is the software ready for IPv6?"

Comment Added responsibilities = added compensation (Score 2) 583

I realize this would be difficult as a first-job type, but be very careful about taking on added responsibilities without any discussion with the powers-that-be about compensation. It is very easy for a "go-getter" to take on a lot more but never be recognized for those added responsibilities.

If nothing else, annual reviews should be an opportunity for you to bring up your now changed job description. As others have mentioned, salary negotiation is a key skill. If you are doing more for the company, you should use that as a negotiating advantage.

Oh, and start saving in a 401(k), IRA (Roth or otherwise) as soon as possible.

Comment Blows my mind (Score 2) 123

I have an addiction to information collection for my specific interests, which is why I'm going north of 12TB of historical crap. I understand his desire to archive all the things.

At least my wife can't complain about the amount of physical space the data takes up since HDD densities have been getting better recently...

Comment Re:Republicans could... (Score 1) 609

So, my ideological transition went from Reagan Republican to Goldwater libertarian to Rothbardian Anarchist.

Personally, I am socially boring, somewhat socially conservative, and evangelically religious. I don't (politically) care what other people do to themselves; as long as they and their government don't do it to me or my family.

I've really given up on government as an entity that can create moral good in the world; it seems that historical attempts to have government play that role have turned out poorly, both for the people involved and the morality being coerced.

I've tried to explain where my head is at so you can try and tailor the message in a way I might understand.

Can you help me understand what the "war on women" rhetoric is about?

Assume that I'm an intelligent person, with degrees in Math and CS, and extensively educated in history, medicine, politics, and economics.

Yet, despite this, I cannot for the life of me understand how people with different ideas came to those ideas via any plausible mental process. It seems to me that there are fallacies all around - why aren't they seeing them?

I want to assume that they are acting with good intentions, but I am unable to debug or understand them and their decision making process.

So, this is a legitimate request for help, and not a thinly veiled attempt to demean or attack someone.

Will you explain what the "war on women" is in a way that will cause me to want to listen? Explain what things are included in this war, and what things aren't.

I mean, my inclination is to throw a flag on the play before it even begins; a political "war on women" appears to suppose that all women should think and want the same things politically, which is self-evidently insulting to women and denies their essential individuality.

For instance, the only people I know personally who are tireless anti-abortion activists (and I know several) are all women. Are they part of the war on women?

I'll stop, and hope you craft a well-intentioned response.

Thanks.

Comment Re:How the executive wipes away democratic power? (Score 1) 121

The one thing I want to point out is that you should recognize the name "Cass Sunstein"; he's not some random academic, he was part of the Obama administration, and has a bunch of ideas that you will find either kooky or great, depending on how you align politically:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C...

He's also good about co-opting terms he disagrees with as a way to try and attack intellectual opposition. He calls a bunch of things libertarian that are flagrantly NOT libertarian, for instance.

Comment Re:It's not limited to the US (Score 5, Interesting) 220

Someone else covered this but is buried.

Bee colonies do not freeze in the winter. They starve.

We've been keeping bees in North Dakota, which is colder than wherever you are, for 7 years. All 3 of our colonies survived last winter. One is strong enough that we've split it this spring to try and prevent a swarm.

The way that bees operate in winter is amazing. The bees form a sphere, with the queen near its center. They vibrate their wings and bodies to create heat. The bees on the outside of the sphere obviously lose heat the fastest. The bees on the inside stay the warmest. The sphere of vibrating bees constantly turns itself inside out, over and over, so that the cooler outer edge bees return to the warm core and replenish their warmth, while the warm bees from the core circulate out towards the edges after they've recuperated.

This consumes lots of energy (and food).

As the cluster of bees does this, it moves upwards in the hive, consuming stored honey.

When they get to the top of the hive, they stop migrating. If they run out of honey, they die.

We use 2 deep supers and 1 medium honey super to over-winter our bees.

Comment A few points (Score 2) 509

1) The problem I see with the "Am I free to go?" question is that in all of the recorded interactions I have seen, the police officer more often than not just ignores the question.

Police: "Sir, can you tell me your address?"
Citizen: "Am I free to go?"
Police: "Sir, I need your address so I know if you should be on this street."
Citizen: "Am I free to go?"
Police: "Sir, do you live on this street or not?" ...and so on. Eventually the police officer will either concede the person is free to go, or will call for assistance.

2) For all of the talk about "99.6% of officers do not abuse their power", I have a problem when 99.6% of officers willingly choose to cover for the 0.4% that abuse their power. In my mind, that means that the 99.6% are also guilty of abusing their power, this time by not investigating and arresting criminals - in this case their coworkers.

If a big city police department was found to completely ignore the crimes of another subset of the population, that would be described as a corrupt police department. The fact that the subset in this question is the very same police department should not make a difference.

3) I am always confused by the "Let the investigation run its course, do not give in to the demands for immediate justice" calls that follow incidents of police brutality caught on tape. If someone records me shooting someone as they are running away from me, you had better believe I would be arrested as soon as the police located me. Putting me on paid leave for a few weeks while they "investigate"?

4) As was seen in the Baltimore riots and countless other major protests before, the police, as a department-wide policy, have no problem locking people up for 24-48 hours and then releasing them without charging them with anything.

The few people that are charged are caught in the catch-22 of being charged with resisting arrest, but no other crime. Their only crime was verbally and/or physically trying to prevent an officer from handcuffing them when the protestor was not doing anything illegal in the first place.

5) At what point do we start holding North Carolina officers responsible when they unconstitutionally pull people over for a burned-out rear tail light? NC law only requires a single "stop lamp" on the rear of a car. The Walter Scott incident should have never happened, as it is reasonable for NC officers to know by now that NC law has held being pulled over for only a failed brake light is unconstitutional.

Comment p-value research is misleading almost always (Score 5, Interesting) 208

I studied and tutored experimental design and this use of inferential statistics. I even came up with a formula for 1/5 the calculator keystrokes when learning to calculate the p-value manually. Take the standard deviation and mean for each group, then calculate the standard deviation of these means (how different the groups are) divided by the mean of these standard deviations (how wide the groups of data are) and multiply by the square root of n (sample size for each group). But that's off the point. We had 5 papers in our class for psychology majors (I almost graduated in that instead of engineering) that discussed why controlled experiments (using the p-value) should not be published. In each case my knee-jerk reaction was that they didn't like math or didn't understand math and just wanted to 'suppose' answers. But each article attacked the math abuse, by proficient academics at universities who did this sort of research. I came around too. The math is established for random environments but the scientists control every bit of the environment, not to get better results but to detect thing so tiny that they really don't matter. The math lets them misuse the word 'significant' as though there is a strong connection between cause and effect. Yet every environmental restriction (same living arrangements, same diets, same genetic strain of rats, etc) invalidates the result. It's called intrinsic validity (finding it in the experiment) vs. extrinsic validity (applying in real life). You can also find things that are weaker (by the square root of n) by using larger groups. A study can be set up in a way so as to likely find 'something' tiny and get the research prestige, but another study can be set up with different controls that turn out an opposite result. And none apply to real life like reading the results of an entire population living normal lives. You have to study and think quite a while, as I did (even walking the streets around Berkeley to find books on the subject up to 40 years prior) to see that the words "99 percentage significance level" means not a strong effect but more likely one that is so tiny, maybe a part in a million, that you'd never see it in real life.

Comment Re:wildfires? (Score 2) 304

So I agree entirely with your sentiment, except I chuckled when you wrote that you live in Seattle.

What's funny about that is Seattle is also full of rich dumb people that make dumb decisions.

If you've done the Seattle underground history tour, you know that Seattle basically sunk into the sound long ago. The whole city history is replete with stories of stupid people that fought nature and lost.

Recently, the highway 99 project comes to mind :)

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