This one is buzz worthy.

Would anyone agree with me that programming might be one of the hardest mental tasks a person can do? I guess the only thing harder would be actually working at a burger joint and not being respected by your manager or customers day in and day out, letting your mind rot as you do a repetitive task anyone could do.

Idea #1: Graphical MMORPG for PC on internet before UO came out. Even though I didn't finish, thousands of hours of code is always good for a man.

Idea #2: An online auction site. I heard of people selling stuff on usenet and thought there's room for one online auction site.

Idea #3: Instant messaging before it was on PC Internet. I was too busy writing a MMORPG to pause to do this.

Idea #4: Looking at Slashdot and Fark, I figure theres room for a general news site with unlimited voting, I tried to code something like Digg for a while before I heard of it, then gave up when I found both Digg and Reddit.com

I just assume most tech savvy programmers know stuff like this. I don't think I'm special to come up with multibillion dollar ideas and see them succeed under other people's development. I figure most people know what is gonna get big and just don't have the resources to code it all. Like I'm back on the horse to make a MMORPG, and I should have it done 2011. We're negotiating a contract with a publisher now for the single player version which is finished aside from a bug or two, and publisher requested changes. I'll be happy to post this free to play Flash game on Slashdot when we get it up on a publisher for January or February release.

If you look at his diagram, I think he is calling for teraforming of the desert to a forest of some sort. I think he's using solar arrays to desalinate water, and then use the electricity to irrigate the desert. I don't understand the whole thing, but teraforming the desert so there is no more sandstorms sounds more plausible than getting your equipment eroded by sandstorms.

Oh what I meant to say is,"Every solar attempt made brings us closer to realizing what is possible to do." It sounds ambitious for this guy to think he's going to solve desert solar, but I wouldn't want to stand in his way. Maybe he could help the pool of research in the field.

The thing is, it doesn't cost much to try. And if this thing works, it could be a huge boon for the world. We definitely need to ramp up production on solar to get extra energy. Surplus energy could be used for electric cars of the future. Electric cars could then transport goods cheaper than they do now, allowing for people with low income to afford transportation & food.

I think any book that you can put online should be free. This way we'd have an awesome Internet library so big it encompasses any piece of work that anyone has put online. Authors could still make money, but they'd have to be smart about it. Mainly the biggest boon from this is the cost of getting an education would be closer to 0. So when you do you're one Laptop per child, they could get every book ever known to man available to them. Also K-12 education would have their books for free. As education costs go down, the intelligence of society goes up! There might be a lull of book creation for a few years in protest, but when people start writing the books, they'll be much more educated and do a better job. There is a lot to it, but I am arguing that putting everything you can scan and put online to be free would result in a better educated society. We'd even be able to bring a 1rst world education into 3rd world countries.

Regardless if the laws change or not, I'm making it a personal goal of mine to educate people better and cheaper through software. I'm not doing it immediately though. First things first, get my feet on the ground with some video games. If I can get a money machine through video games, I can then do more humanitarian projects. Cuz the thing is,"Even if they don't change the IP law, no one says you can't rewrite a ton of books yourself, and give it out for free."

Fruit trees in Haiti would be awesome. Haiti's intense poverty means a lot of their trees were cut down through exploitation. Now people are starving to death. Fruit trees would not be an immediate fix, but next year, you'd have lives saved and healthier people.

Yah I worked for UPS too when I was commuting 45 minutes each way to Carnegie Mellon. I respected people's packages there as do most. No one wants to lose their job. And you'd lose your job the instant anyone sees you seriously mishandling a package. The worst I ever did at UPS was not check mistakes so sometimes I sent the wrong package to a different hub down the road.

I do like your notion of why long cylindrical objects get hurt. It makes perfect sense that it has more angles of attack and its also like a lever in itself so it can exert extra pressure on itself if packed incorrectly.

In a down economy, if you can't get a job, there's no shame in doing some UPS for a while. The way I always looked at it was,"4 hours a night where I get paid to be at a gym." It isn't that bad of a deal for some. The only problem is if you start doing the math of how many years you need to work there before you pay off your student loans, then you can become defeatist easily.

I first played Pac-man at age 3, and the experience stayed with me. I had a computer when I was like 4-6. I was copying from a book coding before I knew what any of the things I typed did. One of the programs I ran was a fun math game for adding/subtracting on TI-99. It is my strong opinion if someone would write a chain of computer math games from K-12, and then distributed them for free, there could be the start of a revolution in education. I actually plan on doing this if I get a gaming company running well so I have the resources and time to dedicate to a project for the world.

For most practical think on your feet applications, multiplying numbers should be done by rounding them to close approximations. So you have 357 and 289. 357 is close to 350. 289 is close to 300, the difference of rounding is good because you're going up in one and down in another. So now you're looking at multiplying 300x350. 100x100 is 10,000, so 3*3 =9, so 300x300 is 90,000. now you just have the trivial matter of 300x50. 3/2=1.5, so you're looking at 10.5 * 10,000. So you have the answer is 10500. With the aid of a calculator, I got 103,173 so it isn't far off. It is real easy to think about this way.

If you think on your feet and you try to do stuff like,"Carry the 1, remember a number in a short term memory cache, and then do another multiplication and try and remember again, by the time you do your new calculation, you probably forgot your short term." I'd hazard a guess(this is all conjecture from now on) that brains like to use the same variable over and over again to store data, and when you start doing a complex calculation it could rewrite the same memory location. I don't know about your brain, but I budget between processing and memory. If I'm constantly thinking about stuff, my memory goes and I need an external aid. If I'm just memorizing stuff, my processing goes. Try doing 357x289 and use a notepad to record your states and it is easy(memorization). Alternatively you could use a calculator and do 357x9 then memorize the result, followed by 357x80 then memorize result followed by 357x300 and memorize the result. Then you use your memory to add the three numbers in your head. If you can be pure memory or processing, the task doesn't get difficult.

Anyone remember the early 80s where there were basic video games, calculators in the department stores, and computers were terribly expensive? You think to yourself,"Maybe someday there will be more computers and video games around." And before that computers were rarer still and more basic. And now we're living in a world where computers are everywhere and are pretty satisfactory. You gotta think maybe in 30 years the world will be populated with decent AI robots of various types. Just like I couldn't conceive of all the types of video games possible in the future then, I can't conceive of all the types of robots possible in the future now. This feeling of,"Anything is possible in the future" brings a warm feeling into my heart. I just hope robots don't become cheap soldiers that any rich guy can own his personal army.

So you can read screenplays of other people? Are you allowed to moderate them up or down? If so, Hollywood could just buy the highest moderated screenplay :P What could possibly go wrong?

Imagine if you had a kid on Mars. Your kid would have all the prestige of being the first born of Mars. But then he/she would not be able to socialize with other people except through laggy teleconferancing.

I forgot to add the hilarity of running really low on food. So instead of dying, you start eating all sorts of deadly enchanted mushrooms, drink potions, and even read scrolls in hopes of finding a satisfy hunger scroll. If you run low on light things are better, because you can start conserving on light and only using light when you need it, still things are rough. Also you don't just have unlimited identify scrolls, so you tend to save them for the best things you can find. If you get a ton of identify scrolls, you can start iding some potion stacks. If you're daring, you can just drink potions as you find them. Or you can tactically just drink potions in dire situations in hopes you get a lucky effect that will stave of sure death.

When you play regular non ironman Angband, you miss out on all the little things that make it a great game. In case you're wondering, the rules I use for ironman are: A one time run to town is optional depending on how you feel like playing. Then you cannot ever take stairs up or use a town recall scroll. If you see down stairs, you don't need to take them, it is just an option. Your choice of character is up to you. Don't ever reroll your stats, just go with the first roll.

Its sometimes fun to optionally go Random Race/Random class, but after you die enough, you might get annoyed at having to run a class you don't want on the next run.