I used to make money playing games on the internet, funded 3 semesters of college on it.

I lost my gaming mojo some time ago, when I was winning all of the time I was 18-20 or so, then I took a break so that I could actually pass college.

When I play now, even though I am "good" as in "very good" when I play, the gulf between me and someone who is 14 and plays every night is vast. The 14 year olds that play competitively are far better.

In pub games I can generally win handily, in say Call Of Duty style games, or Unreal style. But when it comes to competitive players, and I mean the ones who might win money, I am very slow and out of "gaming" shape.

I don't know exactly when it happened, but it was some time between the release of Call of Duty 1 and Call of Duty 2 were my "real" life started to take priority over being good at games.

About the only game I am still "awesome" in is Mechwarrior Living Legends (a mod for Crysis) and that is mostly because the game I earned most of my money in back in the day were mechwarrior gaming tourneys, and I never lost my head for the style, as it relies more on carefully thinking about what you are doing, rather than twitch skills.

In a game like COD4, being well placed and well set up gets you only so far against someone who can spin around, shoot you in the head, and move on before you have finished killing their bouncing figure moving through the map.

You didn't watch the video.

Fox Claimed that because the mosque was funded by someone they referred to as an evil terrorist, that by association the mosque was a victory for terrorists.

Stewart pointed out, in what he said was a stupid and childish game, that Fox News is funded by the same person that they referred to as an evil terrorist, and that if you used the _SAME_ Logic fox news used to claim the mosque was funded by an evil terrorist, then Fox News is funded by an evil terrorist.

Fox, in essence, bashed themselves by claiming that they (Fox News) were funded by Evil Terrorist funders. BUT only if you applied the same logic that they used to describe the Mosque in question.

It is called Satire, seriously, The Daily Show used to come on after a program were puppets made crank phone calls.

The biggest thing about names, which does not seem to be addressed, is that naming in systems (at least for America) means a LOT because of the need to remove duplications from data sets.

This is a very hard problem, and in the end everything the author states is correct to a point, but he misses a larger point.

It does not matter, in the end, what naming scheme is being used, as long as you treat the parsing of the name in some non destructive generic way that is consistent.

It doesn't matter that MacLean and McLean, or Mac Lean are all structurally different, all that matters is that when you are doing your matching they all are all managed in the same way.

IE Bob Mac Lean, parses similarly to Robert Mac Lean, which parses similarly to Robert McLean.

And you can play games with how you are doing the matching by simply creating them as full names as well, and doing other aspects of data hygiene/harmonization (whatever nomenclature you want to use).

Here is a caveat that is implied. Names only matter in matching, names that do not matter in matching are for display purposes and you just use some common method of capture. The Name Prefix, First Name, Middle Name, Last Name, Suffix format is always correct for this if your system has to be multi national. Multi national users of your site are going to be used to putting some consistent-ish thing in these fields, so dont worry about it.

I think your applying an idea of incompetence due to irrationality of the individuals who code the site.

When this is not the case, it was simply a matter of unexpected enthusiasm from the internet.

The individuals who made the mech packs and released them have an incredible coding competence, just not at the specific goal trying to be achieved here. The first "test" (the release of MTX with 3.1) actually worked out quite well.

The full "Free Release" that is being done now far exceeded that test release, and is what caused the issue.

It is a matter of not having had the opportunity to code for the specific scale involved.

Take slashdot for example, in its past it had issues scaling as well based on increased periods of demand (such as 9/11). the scale is different, certainly, but the idea is the same. Sometimes you build for one scale, and then another scale jumps right at you.

Having faced this myself when programming, say for an 11 million record database and then coding for a 200 million record database, I am quite willing to give these guys slack.

I was on the beta team for the mektek software, and it worked fine when we went through all of the tickets and hammered on it with our less than 50 people or so in the beta team.

I was on the beta team, and with the handful of beta testers none of this stuff came up.

That may not seem to be much of an excuse, but they had developed this for a specific volume of people and bought server space for that expected flow of individuals.

Instead it has been considerably more popular. Even some of the weird bugs about saving file paths were found months ago but had been fixed, and then re-introduced? Anyway, the feedback is being reviewed.

Seriously, every day when I realize I am living in a near future science fiction novel I become a bit happier.

I am just glad we have avoided the need for blade runners... so far.

This is different.

companies own everything, if you dont get in line your fucked.

But now those companies only follow the will of their shareholders, that aint the employees.

I work at a soul crushing place, I dont agree with their corporate or political policies, i work there because they pay me better than the competition and if i wouldnt work there I could go work for someone else with the same ideals as them, or i could simply not work or get into some kind of left wing low paying job.

You think a Billion is a lot?

The top 100 corpos could spend 1% of their total profits and spend 6 times that on a single candidate to make sure they win.

That is what this change in law does to us, fucks you and me in the ass.

You cant just "stop" working a company because its parent company goes against you in its policies, you almost couldnt work anymore considering everyone is owned by everyone now.

I took both discrete structures and vector calculus classes.

I have used the discrete structures, graphs, algorithms far more than I ever use calculus. The only time I would have had a need to use 3d space mapped to a map (IE doing a map) there were plenty of examples for the specific task on the internet.

That isnt, in of itself, an excuse but for the rarity of the need it was useful.

I avoided video game programming because I realized that it is not a lot of "fun" it is mostly managing vectors and such, which is nice for those that want to do it, and I passed the classes required for it, but it simply was not for me.

meat prices will stay static but leather prices will go up to compensate.

I can't wait till we get some slig action.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slig_(Dune)#Sligs

Calorie counting does work.

though I havent read the book, I read a study myself that said all weight loss is is calories in vs calories out.

I was told by my doctor that I would die by my mid 40's or have to be on maintenance drugs for the rest of my life, I was 303, and this was on August 31 2009.

Now, as of today I am 270 lbs, well on my way downward in weight.

I didnt eat any fancy foods, healthy foods, whole grain, or any of that. I tried that once and so hated my life I failed over and over to lose weight.

Instead I simply ate less of what I like, and made sure to calculate calories as well as I can and I started doing a little bit of exercise, about 300 calories a day (easy to do, just some small amount of walking).

I dont even need the exercise, I lost nearly 15 lbs without exercise. It is all calories in and calories out.

What I also hate is these advertisements where they argue "lose 20 lbs in a month!"

The first 20lbs is easy, just put the fork down and don't eat so much.

Its the next 20 thats hard.

playing ON the same computer that is hosting is a terrible, terrible idea.

It gives the host a massive advantage