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Comment I went to RPI (Score 1) 283

From what I hear, if you go to MIT you'll work 18 hours a day and have no social life. If you go to RPI, you'll work 12 hours a day and have no social life.

The most important thing I learned from RPI was how to fail. It was an important life lesson, but it had nothing to do with my degree. I worked way harder and got way worse grades than I ever did in high school. From what I've heard MIT is a worse version of the same thing. I graduated with an embarrassingly low GPA. But I learned it's more important for me personally to fail at something hard than succeed at something easy.

The upside is that pretty much everyone around the world have heard of MIT, where RPI is only know in the serious engineering community. My first job out of school was working for the Army. No matter how many times I corrected my boss, he still thought I went to RIT.

Comment Maybe I'm just old... (Score 2) 136

...but I hate the recent trend of having different game mechanics and controls for single player and multiplayer. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of Starcraft 2, Medal of Honor, and I know there's others.

All I can think when I play those kinds of games is that the game was cobbled together from a broken set of priorities. It ruins the experience for me, I expect the single player be training for multiplayer. I would never dream of playing the multiplayer first, even in a game series I was intimately familiar with.

And I definitely agree with Randy, games should be built with a purpose and intent. When you start tacking on features last minute, or adding game play mechanics that don't fit with the world of the game, you're telling your customers that you really don't care about them.

Comment Re:So why was it deleted? (Score 1) 432

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:SchuminWeb

Yikes. That is an incredibly unprofessional bio. It's not a dating page, it should be your qualifications for doing the job. Editing jobs, newspaper work, schooling related to the field, etc. He has none of that.

Protip: photos of you in tie-dye and sandals do not inspire confidence in your professionalism.

Comment Re:Really? People are surprised? (Score 5, Insightful) 402

I don't understand what you're getting at. First you say :

An organization aids a person in obtaining classified documents

then you say

He had nothing to do with actually getting them

Which are contradictory. You also said

They have chat logs implicating Assange in aiding Bradley Manning with submitting the documents. The law is pretty clear about these things

which clearly isn't true. The law here is very murky, and "aiding in submitting documents" probably isn't a crime. If there was a clear crime comitted here, we'd have heard specifically what it is by now.

Comment Re:My experiences of Fallout: New Vegas bugs (Score 1) 397

And so the game publishers have convinced you that bugs are not an issue. I hate to break it to you, but there are bugs reported on almost every quest (checkout the quests on fallout.wikia.com and see). Performance issues with a major video card manufacturer are also not a minor issue. The worst is that every Bethesda game (Daggerfall, Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3) has had issues like this which shouldn't have made it past quality control. This isn't a one time thing. I've played all of these games, they are great games, but I will not buy Bethedsa games anymore until they release the Gamne of the Year edition which has the final patch (and usually a community patch to fix what Bethesda hasn't)

Wow you're not kidding. I haven't played Fallout 3, but I went to the wiki page you mentioned. 3 of the 4 random quests I clicked on had a bug section. One of them was a list of about 5.

Comment Re:Not equal (Score 3, Informative) 113

An interesting modification to StarCraft which would give AIs a run for their money would be cooperative play where several users operate one team on the field, and where the several users have a hierarchy and delegate command of corps of units to other players, maybe one player handling resources while another scouts while a third consolidates the offensive force.

This is basically what we would do in 4 v 4 Age of Empires. The person farthest from the other team would be "resource bitch". They would focus on tech upgrades to mining and farming, and be responsible for constantly supplying the other players with food, stone, etc. The other players would have no economy but would build cavalry, siege weapons, etc based upon what tech their civilization was best at.

Comment Common Human Factors Oversight (Score 1) 426

Being left handed, I've had this happen all my life. There's nothing more frustrating than picking up a tool only to find the grip has been molded for a right hand. Or guns with cheek pads only on the left side. Fountain pens don't really work being pushed rather than being pulled. Left handed sports equipment is always more difficult to find.

You adapt at an early age. Yeah it sucks. Basically you have to learn to be halfway decent with your right hand just to get by.

Comment Re:I can only agree... (Score 1) 312

Going to a coffee shop to find every place being used all evening by single persons with their laptop and a cup of coffee (that's most likely cold by then) is really frustrating. It's probably even more frustrating to the owner who sees is investment monopolized by clients that bring only little income to the place.

Simple solution: Just sit down at an empty chair anyway. The most you'll get is some dirty looks. It's not like Mr. Artist is going to do anything about it.

Alternate solution: Talk to the owner. Most small coffee shops are very protective of paying customers, and will work with you to find a free table.

Comment Re:Good Heavens! (Score 1) 387

CDs are in fact "records"; they are as much records of performances as LPs were. I don't know why people stopped calling them records just because the media holding the records changed.

EXACTLY. Please mod parent UP!

(It's also reasonable to call a CD an "album," as in a collection of things, in this case, songs.)

By that definition, books and movies are also "records". But if you were to call a DVD player a "record player", you're technically correct, but everyone will look at you funny. A record player plays records, aka LPs.

I'm sure you've seen that Simpsons episode where Martin refers to his brain as his "calculator". Don't be that guy.

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