Yeah, this is the truth and is often overlooked.. most people don't choose when to sell, they're forced to because they lost their job or are moving away. If the market is down and you want to sell, tough luck. Price your house high and it'll sit on the market for 6 months or more while you lose more money to mortgage payments. You can try to rent your house out, but it's highly unlikely you can get enough to cover costs even if you can keep it occupied. And it's a huge headache. And if you want to put it up for sale after renting, you'll likely need to do a lot of repairs after the tenants move out.

People tend to think rent is wasted money, but they fail to realize that for the first several years of a 30 year mortgage, they're mostly paying interest, which is also wasted money. By the time you would start building real equity, most people are selling due to job relocation, wanting a bigger house, etc.

Tax benefits are also always overstated. Deductions for interest and property tax are great, but don't forget to subtract the standard deduction you would take if you weren't itemizing.

You also have to pay 6% to a realtor when you sell, so you better hope your property value rose by at least 6% when you're forced to sell (unlikely in the current market).

And lastly, there's the opportunity cost of tying up your down payment in something that is unlikely to gain in value and is about as far from liquid as you can get.

Invest the money you save by renting and in most cases you'll come out ahead (who stays in 1 house for 30 years anymore?)

Just want to say thanks and good luck Rob.

I started reading slashdot in 8th grade, right around the time I installed Linux for the first time (Red Hat 5.0 I believe). slashdot kept me hooked on technology and geek culture all the way through middle school and high school. The articles and discussions on slashdot definitely influenced my decision to pursue a BS and MS in computer science, and then begin my professional life working in software development.

It sounds corny but it's hard to think of anything else that had such a profound impact on my life. While I don't read as religiously as I did in those early years, I still drop by now and again for nostalgia's sake.

Thanks again for creating this community.

Algorithmic trading is not effective if you have to pay commission on your trades. Their software only works if it's used by a corporation with
1) network connections to stock exchanges
2) seats on those exchanges, which allows stock to be traded directly instead of through a broker

If you can't beat a scripted bot in terrible gear than you are probably the worst wow player on the planet.

You might think it's easy to detect but I never heard from any GMs (and they were pretty hardcore about cracking down on bots at this time).

People did send tells early on when I was actively developing it and the code caused some weird behavior, like running in circles or against walls. They would usually ask if I was a bot looking to see if anyone would reply.

#1, those are zero sum games. It's completely different.

#2, my bot did not give anyone an unfair edge. My bot was similar to an above average player. It had to follow the rules of the game just as everyone else did.

I think it's a sad, sad commentary on our society when people take videogames so seriously.

Wow, that's a... unique way of looking at it. I really didn't care about the other side losing. The point of the battleground is to help your team win. It was less effective than if I was playing and giving it my all, but more effective than the average player (since almost nobody healed in battlegrounds).

This is actually the first time I've seen this reaction to BG botting with a smart bot. Most people are glad it's one less AFK bot sitting in the cave in AV.

Definitely, I've always enjoyed checking out game mods, map editors and other customizations.

Quake 1 was one of my favorite games, I still can't believe how long I played it, but between running a server and trying all the different game modes that came out, there was a lot to keep me busy and interested other than just playing it.

Well I did say "one of". I enjoyed arena and raiding as well.

Also, it was the process of developing the behavior that was fun, not "watching" it.

Perhaps you don't play wow, or the rules have changed, but that's not how the battlegrounds worked (a few years ago).

There is no bonus for being first on the meters. Being first was not depriving anyone of anything. It's merely a way to show how effective the code was.

You cannot steal honor from anyone. Everyone gets the same honor based on how many kills they're involved in and how well the team does in the match.

One of the biggest reasons one side would lose a BG is lack of healing, so if anything my bot was probably helping people gain honor.

Running Glider was one of the most entertaining things I did while playing. Glider comes with default behavior for every class, but you can develop your own in C#. I ended up writing some code for my druid to be a "Healbot", basically causing my character to run around and heal nearby allies.

It was quite simple - it would search for nearby players and try to stay in the middle of everyone. It would throw heals over time on anyone within range that was slightly injured, and cast big heals on people taking a lot of damage. I used it to farm honor in the PVP battlegrounds. After letting it run for hours, I'd take a look at the chat log and see lots of tells from people thanking me (it) for heals. Never once saw a comment calling it out as a bot. The mod I used to queue battlegrounds took screenshots of the match results, and many times my bot was #1 on healing (often by a large margin).

It was fun tweaking all the settings, by the time I maxed out on honor the code was pretty robust. I ended up modifying it a bit to follow around specific people (awesome for power leveling).

The CNN issue really bothered me. From my research, you can also prevent it by disabling third party cookies.

In Firefox it's in Tools->Options->Privacy->Use custom Settings for history

Baseball is only in USA and Canada? I guess Japan, South Korea, Mexico, all of central America, and most Caribbean islands aren't really countries.