Meh. Even without the real money auctions, and reasonable loot drops that don't force you to go to the auction house, and even if the story wasn't the weakest of the three, and even if the gameplay was fun, and even if the skill and player stats system wasn't geared towards noobs, and, hell, even if they allowed LAN play and offline single-player, I still wouldn't care. Torchlight II. Had all the desireables from day one, none of the corporate crap that encumbered D3, and it was made by some of the same folks who made D1 and D2. So D3 is largely irrelevant to me anyway. Of course, I still don't play Torchlight nearly as much as I did D2, but I'm long out of school, I have a job, and a nascent business, and I live walking distance from crazy fun beaches and trails, so this is to be expected. Now, I WISH there were more hours in the day, so I could do all this and still have time to game. Considering relocating to Venus, but that seems like too many hours in the day.

Oh, they still have civics classes. Took one in high school. Basically, you're taught "this is how the government works, this is how it has always worked, and it always works correctly, and it's the best government in the world." Critiques from students such as "well, here's a real world example that shows it doesn't work that way" or "well, that doesn't strike me as best, particularly in a place that bills itself as the land of the free" are met with hostility because it disrupts the all-important curriculum plan, and you'll be dismissed without discussion. The class was essentially state-sponsored indoctrination, coaching kids to uncritically accept the government as ideal and immutable. Critical thinkers need not apply.

Significantly less. I don't play Diablo II anymore, and Diablo III sucked. Nuff said.

I hope everyone you know realizes what an awful person you are and you die alone and miserable.

At my previous place of employment, I had trouble writing out my "goodbye" letter to the team remaining, as most of the good stories involved people who not only weren't there, but no one left even knew them.

That might be a sign, btw, for any managerial types, to worry about your staff turnover. Just sayin.

I'd rather go the other way, get the government out of picking winners/losers here and institute across the board apt tax while wiping out income/capital gains/inheritance taxes (keeping ss and gas taxes because they correspond with payout).

Depending on what your goals for a taxation system are, that's downright terrible. I agree with wiping out income tax, but not all capital gains tax. (I would eliminate capital gains tax on investments that produce new wealth - like profit made off buying new machines to build new products, but keep the tax for all "buy low sell high" gains) Inheritance tax I'd change along with property tax in general, which I'd change to be percentile based; that is, your tax rate is higher if you are in a higher percentile bracket of total wealth.

Consumption taxes are bad, because you are taxed if you have to consume (or the system must have complicated exemptions for "minimum allowed consumption"), but if you have extra to spend, you will (on average) consume less (in nominal terms) if consumption is taxed and you have the option of not consuming. Unless the taxing entity (government) adequately creates evenly-distributed demand with its tax revenue, consumption taxes will be a drag on the economy.

Sure, but as far as intrinsic utility is concerned it doesn't matter when I get involved with bitcoin ... well, in fact it does: right now the price instability and general uncertainty mean it is far better to not get involved, wait for all this nonsense to sort itself out and join the game once everything is settled, stable, and bitcoin is actually being used purely for its intrinsic utility. In other words, it's better for me to ignore it for a few more years at least.

I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it. The reported result sounds like a mildly interesting result that happened to pop up in the first pass.

Given the advanced tools available these days for graph mining (largely developed for social network analysis among other things) I suspect some rather more interesting results may start coming out soon. What may seem hard to track on an individual basis may fall somewhat more easily to powerful analysis tools that get to make use of the big picture. I bet there's some interesting info on cliques and exchanges that could be teased out by serious researchers with some decent compute power at their disposal. Pseudonymity may be even weaker than you might think.

Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.

Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.

* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.

Although we are technically in New Jersey...

Being primarily a mathematician and not a computer scientist or engineer I've used Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma and R. I've also programmed in Python, Perl, C, and Java and dabbled in things like Lisp and Haskell.

All the "math" programs on that list are terrible programming languages; they work great as interactive environments for doing (potentially symbolic) computation, but writing code in them? Ugh. If I actually have to write scientific computing code it's going to be in Python using numpy and sympy, or C if I need performance.

All the different math programs all have their strengths and weaknesses: Matlab kicks the crap out of the other for anything numerical or linear algebra related, both for ease of expression and performance; R has far more capabilities statistically than any of the others -- data frames as a fundamental data type make that clear; Magma is incomparable for the breadth and power of its algebra, none of the other come remotely close; Mathematica and Maple are ... well, sort of a poor jack of all trades that do most things but none of it very well.

Unless you care about EMC or heat dissipation or something else that depends on the interactions between the components, yes, you can think of electronic circuits that way.

I suppose for logic-only devices this works, but as soon as you start wanting to do something that requires power, you can't just drop circuits together like that.

A lot of 'desktops' these days are things you don't see immediately; the toolkits, internationalization/localization, canvases, setting centralization and management, advanced font handling, notification plumbing etc. that most GUI applications make use of these days (from one desktop or another). Presuming you're using apps other than xterm (and perhaps you are not) you are actually making use of most of this stuff; the part of the `desktop`you`re not using is simply the window manager and the panels which are, ultimately, the tip of the iceberg.

Are you fucking retarded? That guy, as you call him, represents FEMA and has full authority from FEMA to do what he did. There has been no overturning of this decision by higherups. By your "special" logic, no federal agency EVER does anything bad: it's always just some guy who works there. By real logic, this is FEMA's doing.