I checked the temperature this morning at 8 am it was 18 degrees outside.
At 10 it was 24.
At 12 it was nearly 30.
By noon tomorrow it will likely be 174 degrees outside!

..well, so pretty much have all the FUD-spreaders in the CDC, government, and NGOs who've been all telling us that "any moment" we could get a "deadly flu" since the (ha ha ha) Sars "epidemic".

All I've ever gotten is the "Cry Wolf" heebie jeebies.

If I have a $7.6 billion cushion, I frankly don't care if you knock me from my perch.

Granted this was beta, but here's what I found:

- a slavish determination to mimic World of Warcraft's aesthetic. Unsurprising, since the dev team AFAIK largely came from Blizzard. IMO this is a little too slavish, coming off like "WoW sci fi with guns". To me it's jarring that you have nicely-detailed characters with hi-rez textures, but you're running around a world with a klunky geometry that screams "this is all computers can handle in 2004". TF2 showed that you could adhere to a non-representational, 'cartoony' theme without necessarily deliberately going so far as to mimic the design compromises of a decade ago.

- Obviously this is entirely subjective, but there's a very fine line between quirky/kitschy and cheesy. The "bad guys" n00b island story line in Wildstar is cheesy; the good guys story is cheesy AND sappy. WoW had a certain sort of self-referential humor to a lot of what it did (at its best), and that has seemed to dominate latter releases *cough* *cough* Pandas *cough*. Wildstar continues this unfortunate narrative/editorial choice, with everything from animations to storyline being so "over the top" that it has to be self-mocking (with the 'good guy' side adding a further drippy saccharine layer of narrative - the tutorial quest has you saving a guy's pregnant wife...)

- They've already very much adopted the modern-mmo paradigm of "go to quest hub, get a bunch of quests, complete those quests, move to next hub". There's almost never (at least in the first 12-15 levels) a point where you go backward, for any reason. Everything is very conveniently placed; when you hit a place where you level up, there's a new-skill trainer already waiting for you.

- Some clever design ideas in UI, communicating what enemies are doing and what you're doing (and the area effects) clearly and intuitively.

It's WoW40k, nothing more, nothing less. Personally, I don't find the modern design choices in MMOs for 'everything to be easy' to be interesting or engaging, but that's not Wildstar's fault at all. They're very solidly in the current mainstream.

IF the system asked "do you want us to save your cc# for later purchases?" and they affirmed, it's the parents' problem.

If, OTOH the cc# was saved without advising the user that it WOULD be saved, that's just economic opportunism, and SHOULD be illegal - saving cc# data in a format that it can be executed for a transaction without affirmative confirmation by the sole cardholder is pretty much the same as making a copy of their cc, no?

I assume that this is really the core of the idea - that the move would raise coal prices enough to stimulate more investment in renewables. I'm not saying it's a good idea, or even a better idea than investing this $50B directly into renewables, but I imagine that this is what they must have been thinking.

But the point is, the remaining 90% of the coal would be left in the ground, where it is not going to hurt anybody. This isn't about punishing coal miners or even mining companies. This is supposed to be about protecting the Earth's atmosphere and climate.

"...what else is the government supposed to do with the money?..."

Maybe not take it in the first place?

I know, you're a democrat, that's inconceivable.

Sure, that's a lot of applicants, but really the most important thing is DO ENOUGH OF THEM HAVE VAGINAS?

I mean, really, otherwise it's obviously sexism at work.

When we hear these impressive bandwidth numbers, usually a prophecy that "the future is on the cloud" is not far behind. Once our connection to the server is faster, we will get everything we could want without doing any of the computing on site. But people forget that a very low latency is also very important to the cloud experience, and there is very little that we can do about latency. At some point, we just run into fundamental laws of nature. I have a feeling that in my lifetime, consumers will basically stop caring about the width of their pipe (for most, it will be wide enough), and prefer the ISPs that give them the best ping. People who are thinking a few tech generations in the future would do well to keep this in mind, I think.

My daughter is in AP Calc in high school, has a 4.0 GPA, and scored 34 on the math portion of the ACT.

Yet we were in a store with a 10% discount, she held up a $50 item and said "so how much would this be?". /facepalm.

Sometimes, if you're pretty, it's easier just to not think.

I could be that PERHAPS there IS a difference in some math skill between males and females?

I know it's heinously non-politically-correct to suggest that the sorts of hormonal variations that developmentally result in gross anatomical changes might actually have an impact on the subtle chemistry of brain development as well...we're perfectly willing to recognize that (speaking broadly) women are in fact better at multitasking or that men are better at 3d shape understanding. Is it impossible that there isn't actually some real difference in, say, instinctual math that vanishes in a focused, testing setting?

I'm 46; I've found over my life that often these sorts of 'common perceptions' commonly HAVE a kernel of truth in them. Often misapplied, misunderstood, or blown out of proportion, but nevertheless a root in fact.

I will say that I've far more often seen women spend 15 minutes trying to precisely divide a dinner tab more precisely than men, who'll tend instead to just throw down roughly their share plus some, even if that results in the wait staff getting a huge tip. I know that's not specifically a math skill, but it's one of those real-world anecdotes that feed this perception.

They already sold a trailer of weed to Canadian prison guards and smuggled weed into the US using a "drone" model train. This is exactly the sort of thing they would do! Bubbles buys a quadrocopter to play with, Julian figures out how to use it for selling drugs, Ricky crashes it, Trevor and Corey take the blame.

Simple: the feds need to stop subsidizing water redistribution.

If California needs water to have a bountiful strawberry industry, then California (or better still, strawberry farmers) can pay for it.

Yes, that means the price of strawberries go up.
But who should pay for strawberries:
- the person that buys and eats them, or
- the person that buys and eats them PLUS the hundreds of millions of taxpayers dinged little tiny bits of money to go to make sure that strawberry is affordable?