Game design may just have outgrown you. Imagine being a movie maker in 1920 -- you point the camera at a stage play, it doesn't start on fire, you're a genius. Then all of a sudden you have to do cuts, sound cues, makeup... Suddenly you suck at movie design compared to someone who learned from Citizen Kane instead of the radio. How many years was it before anyone even realized Monopoly was a bad game? 
If that geothermal system doubles your power use for 5 minutes out of every 30 then the maximum you can save by eliminating it entirely and having your pool turn to ice is 8% of your power bill (.5*5/30). The green and the pink both look like they're consuming more power than that overall.
[quote]The buttons of the scrolls could look like seals so there could be a slight 3d button effect as well without looking out of place.[/quote] Ooh, that's hot.
So Brad, why the different view from you and the forum dwellers? Is it because they don't understand how much an organization can accomplish with hundreds of thousands of dollars compared to what they could program on their own? Is it because they're not the kind of people who "get things done" so they don't understand what is an unnecessary delay? Is it because this is just one more game out of many to you and you know you don't actually get happier players from putting
Frogboy, if you rated all your AIs at 5-7, tops, what's the highest rated AI you've ever played against? Civ4 had the best islandhopping AI I've ever seen, you could copy that for a start.
No, the 47% is not in dispute. You can equivocate about ALL taxes, but when you get specific - Federal INCOME taxes - that removes the equivocation (like SS Taxes). But your statement "Clearly they are as they are supporting not only the poor, but another third of the country as well" only makes sense if the 47% statistic refers to all taxes. If the 47% refers to just one tax among many, then it doesn't (by itself) support saying "The rich are sup
Not sure how that loophole works, Paladin -- [quote]You do not have to carry on regular full-time business activities to be self-employed. Having a part-time business in addition to your regular job or business also may be self-employment. -- IRS [/quote] My unclear quote was saying that Dr Guy was appealing to the fact that the rich support 47% of income tax payers to counter my assertion that the ric
Paladin, you don't pay income tax, but you pay self-employment tax, right? In large and painful quarterly installments? That's social security tax, and it's a real tax. Clearly they are as they are supporting not only the poor, but another third of the country as well. Your "clearly" depends on the 47% statistic, which is in dispute here.
whenever I’ve brought up that nearly half of Americans pay zilch to the fed in income taxes they scoff that it’s probably some far right propaganda. Nope. It’s real. Here's where the propaganda comes in: they know people are going to mistake "47% pay no income tax" for "47% pay no tax at all." If the statistic were, "47% pay no Social Security tax," no one would be repeating it on talk radio and blogs because it would be obvious that t
I read this post after I posted my other comment. Some of these specifics (invasive species, gray water) look like things where you can actually raise the profile of something and help bring the cost down by being an early adopter. Like how Priuses help bring hybrid technology closer to the masses. Greenies could get behind that even though it's an expensive display.
I think overall the greenies could accept it. Of all people they should know that any new belief they introduce to society is going to be co-opted by consumerism. But they could look at it like people spreading a religion: You don't expect that Emperor Constantine is going to stop exploiting people and give up all luxury just because he went Christian. That's not what emperors do. But you know that he's making it socially acceptable so that y
Judging by Five Factor Personality Theory from psychology, "Discipline" is "Conscientiousness" and "Passion" is "Extraversion." I recommend adding the book Spent to your pile for a discussion of how conscientiousness is the most desired personality trait by employers. When you ask yourself why people don't take it easy instead of runn
I doubt you could feed one major US city with an airlift. You guys have no idea of the scale of what you're talking about. Also, the planes supplying Berlin took off from inside Germany . Not across the Atlantic. Finally, why not just use the air transport to transport the people to where the food is? That's a lot less weight and only takes one trip. Most countries that would be likely to launch such an attack (North Korea, Iran, etc)
I agree with utemia there. "Nature, red in tooth and claw" is an ideology -- humans are not as violent nor as selfish as conservatives think they are. We just tell stories about how violent we are to intimidate other people and how dangerous other people are so we'll look to the State for protection. Humans actually have more adaptations for working together than almost any other species besides ants (emotional mirroring, an instinct to specialize that leads
Getting back to the original point, "I am certain that essential systems could be repaired in time to prevent the complete breakdown of society and anarchy and restore order" is wishful thinking. According to the New Scientist article linked to in this post , melted transformer hubs cannot be repaired, only replaced. That means recovery would take months or years. That article is talking about a s
It's possible (even likely) this EMP thing will turn out to be basically hype, but as long as your preparations also prepare you for avian flu, Kristallnacht, flood, Y2K bug, etc, it's probably worthwhile. It seems like EMP would be a really useful addition to the United States nuclear arsenal if it really worked. Few civilian casualties, infrastructure only -- basically our whole Kosovo campaign in a can. On the other hand, we might have to keep it secret because we would
I went and found your last post about this, just thought it might be interesting again.
Uh, that Civil War link probably should have gone to page 3 of the article instead.
I do think most of us underestimate how common poor health is -- how many people cannot get up off the floor by themselves, have toothache every day, have side effects of medication. It's not only your poor health, either -- if your child has a mental disability, or hydrocephaly, that's gonna eat up your productive time too. The reason we overlook it is that it's not a "normal" thing people talk about on TV ("darn this foot pain, I'm limping everywhere today") and most peop
quote]MOST income inequality in the United States is due to amount of hours worked. Not differences in per hour.[/quote] That's at the heart of this, isn't it? If people get paid different because they have different jobs, then pay is more about status and pie-slicing. If they get paid different because they have different hours, then pay is more about work effort. At first glance, it seems unlikely that hours worked is the main cause of income inequality because hou
That would be a far cooler article if you could hover over the little boxes and see what the figure is today. Off topic, it still happens to me both on Firefox at home and IE 6 at work that clicking "Login" at the upper right takes me to a broken link, https://www.joeuser.com/ login or https://www.joeuser.com/%20login (depending on whether the browser parses the space or not), instead
Hey, Bradman, I thought you might like some of the stories at VoiceoftheHive.com , such as Diplomatic Immunity, Bee Buffet, or Confessions of an Impractical Beekeeper.
I am sorry Brad, but I have to give Obama a chance before I criticize his actions. Otherwise, we will get slammed with "why all this hate for our President" articles. My dad summarized this attitude as "You gotta swear him in before you cuss him out."
BTW, anyone reading the comments here can hopefully observe that rather than the liberals commenting arguing whether Time is biased or not they try to redirect the conversation into other areas. You should be more specific because I'm not sure if you're referring to me or not. I'm gonna assume not so I don't have to bother defending myself. I would also be curious regarding what charities people support. For example, a Christian char
I would really like to see a liberal reply to that point. I don't think there is one cut-and-dried talking point that all liberals can use to defend ourselves -- the study results seem pretty robust, the implications are pretty serious, and the criticism hurts. I've always been kind of vexed by it (because it criticizes my tribe, not because I'm a slack giver myself). I went specially looking for an answer just for you and I found one that kind of
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