I don't like the "rockstar" label, but excellent software developers are more than worth it, as Fred Brooks knew years ago...

Study after study shows that the very best designers produce structures that are faster, smaller, simpler, clearer, and produced with less effort. The differences between the great and the average approach an order of magnitude.

I don't have the book in front of me, but there is a reference at http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks.

That book is worth rereading every few years.

Then, and this is the absolute most important part, I walk away when I hit my goal, usually $50 or $100.

If you really can get a positive expectation on a particular roulette wheel because of a flawed wheel or flawed croupier (which I doubt), then this does not make sense. If you have an advantage, then it doesn't matter whether you have hit your goal or not. Over the very long run, if you always bet when you have an advantage, you will have a positive expectation. Or maybe does the croupier change his behavior or the house level the wheel after you have made your $100?

First, before marrying, discuss and make sure you can agree how to handle the following things:
 

1. Money
2. Religion
3. Children
4. In-laws
 

Second, make sure that both of you view marriage as a final, irrevocable decision. If either of you keep divorce in your back pocket as an option, then you have two strikes against you.

Actually, I did read those lines, and found nothing remotely suggesting the Bible is considered by the Catholic church to be "fallible and contradictory," which was what was asserted by the poster I quoted.

On the contrary, I line 107 claims the opposite: "The inspired books teach the truth. Since therefore all that the inspired authors or sacred writers affirm should be regarded as affirmed by the Holy Spirit, we must acknowledge that the books of Scripture firmly, faithfully, and without error teach that truth which God, for the sake of our salvation, wished to see confided to the Sacred Scriptures."

How does interpretation and contemplation suggest fallibility or contradictions? How does trying to read the text in the sense it was intended (not necessarily literally) imply fallibility or contradictions?

Many people assert that the Bible is fallible and contradictory, but to say the Catholic church holds that position is ignorant.

Um, not so much. See http://www.va/archive/catechism/p1s1c2a3.htm#II for the Roman Catholic position.

I don't think that word (oxymoron) means what you think it does.

I liked Wolverine.

Um...yuck.

They make it expensive, and they can make it more immersive, but they do not contribute automatically to making a game fun, which is what it's all about.

I agree that if it isn't 3D, it isn't immersive. An for me if it isn't immersive then it might as well be FreeCell. I might play FreeCell while waiting for my kid's soccer game to start, but I sure won't pay for it.

Granted I am just a single data point, but to get me to buy a new game, it needs to have something even more ambitious than what has been done before. Figure out how to do an MMORPG with full PvP while keeping griefers in check, with a fully dynamic world in which changes made by players stick, and with NPC AI that immerses me enough that I don't think about "aggro radius," and you will have my purchase in a heartbeat.

Maybe. But there are possible answers to the seeming dilemma:

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-will-foreknowledge/#2.1

Everyone makes decisions with the implicit belief that their decisions matter. Now, if we have free will, then they actually do.

and

So why the eternal wanking over whether or not we possess a property that cannot be measured and doesn't effect our lives in any way?

Because people care whether their decisions matter?

We are not changing. We are growing.

Minor nit: growth is change. If your concept of space and time is accurate, then from the outside looking in we are no more growing than we are changing.

I understand (in a wimpy pop-science kind of way) the 4D space-time "block" concept...the concept that all of space and time just is.

However, that concept in and of itself doesn't preclude free will. Rather it only means that from some god's eye point of view all of the free will choices within space-time have "already" been made.

What I don't understand is how experience emerges from a static space-time. I don't even understand how experience emerges within time. (I've written enough software to be skeptical of increasing complexity at some point magically producing sentience.) I think the question of how conscious experience happens is somehow related to the free-will question.

I got a chance to use a Connection Machine (real, not emulated) in the late 1980s, just a couple of years out of college. It was an internal R&D project for a defense contractor, porting a computational fluid dynamics program I didn't understand from Cray vectorized Fortran to the CM's *Lisp. Fun stuff.

I even got a chance to visit Thinking Machines headquarters in Boston, and hear Danny Hillis speak. Here he was speaking to a room full of suits, dressed in jeans, sneakers, and a T-shirt. I remember thinking at the time that being able to do that was quite an indicator of success.

Yeah, yeah, I know...offtopic, overrated, etc. So mod me down if you must. (Or is that just reverse psychology on you moderators? Muhahaha!)