xkcd

SuicideJunkie

Babies are indeed a lot like demons. Always keep them contained in a circle and watch them relentlessly.

SuicideJunkie

Yeah, bit too much of a stretch I suppose.
Perhaps it is simply pronounced q for only even multiples of (ue)s?

SuicideJunkie

From an english perspective, que should be pronounced the same, and q definitely is.
Therefore, spell it q(ue)* to keep things general.

SuicideJunkie

Incidents of the week hint that the transporter can be used to refurbish most custom hardware, so that aging won't be an issue.
Political will and research budgets are likely to be the limiting factor for all the proposed solutions.

SuicideJunkie

I think the map operates a fixed distance out into the blackness. Scanning out further would activate more unscanned border tiles in that case, but overall the point remains that just because you can't see them, doesn't mean they're not there. I started a Bobs + Angels game, and after a decent start...

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A tile is the finest resolution of terrain (and to a degree, unit size) that matters to the player. It doesn't have to be proportional to anything. Consider Tic-tac-toe, Chess, Go, Civ, EVE. The number of tiles (and the size of zipped savestates) goes up immensely, but the strategic value of each de...

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Despite the automation, engineers are still required on starships. From what we see, the maintenance requirements of a full person on non-specialized hardware is significantly more than the encoded people can provide (random engineer (or worse, generic crew member #42) stuck in the computer due to a...

SuicideJunkie

Also fun is to beam rockmen into a flaming room so it can't be recaptured by the crew. If that room is the medbay, then you can lock down all the living crew into the 'safe' areas of the ship while you smash the dangerous rooms. Breach weapons are particularly good for anti-AI work too. The ship AIs...

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People-storage progress does appear to be a thing across the series. The population of holographic people keeps going up even if they're forgotten quickly in terms of plot, and their mobility and independence is on an upward trend, even if it is a surprisingly slow rate. The biggest hindrance to peo...

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Hey!
Do you realize that we have been doing SpaceShips all wrong for their entire history?
We should be able to cut costs by a huge amount once we inform NASA of the mixup.

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The best non-destructive way to secure a computer is to power it off. And that doesn't help against those with physical access. If you want to fully secure a system theoretically, you need to drop the entire thing into a black hole. And we won't really know if that is secure until the quantum mechan...

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da Doctah wrote:The problem with sandboxing is a couple of times a week you have to clean out the cat poop.

In many cases, you can configure your load balancer to automatically delete and replace the defecative clusters as they drop out of service.

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It also implies that cults are bad, and their members are easy targets since they've actively destroyed their own moral weight.

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On the other hand, with perfect conditions and setup, you can get the ball to stop and turn around arbitrarily close to the top of the hill. In the smooth hill most people would imagine, close to the top it is very flat. By getting arbitrarily close to the flat top before stopping, you can have the ...

SuicideJunkie

Are these turns being processed and drawn manually?
I feel like this could be solved with ~~algorithms~~ a couple regexes and 2D perl arrays. Maybe some sockets and html for I/O?

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That sounds like personal incredulousness being passed off as a trivial conclusion of absurdity. I don't care what it sounds like, I care what it is. What it is, is an argument for the necessity of continuity of operations over substrate for continuity of consciousness to exist, via phenomenology. ...

SuicideJunkie

Why not have another referendum or three until you can call off the whole thing?
That's how it worked in the other direction, right?

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If it is enough that the structure of the cortex is encoded in these operations, then consciousness should be present in some sense in all of them, but that seems plainly absurd. That sounds like personal incredulousness being passed off as a trivial conclusion of absurdity. I don't see what's so a...

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Doing that with just one kid leaves you open to flaws in cookie security.

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For the genetic family side, I call everyone past first-level "some cousin." For the in-law side, I just call them whatever the SpousalUnit calls them. I'm much more interested in their dogs than the humans anyway. My new puppy is starting to annoy his adoptive cousin by trying to play wi...

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If someone promulgated a sarcastic or ironically reversed usage of a term commonly used in health and safety, they'd be rightly pilloried for it, and possibly arrested for endangering others if it somehow caught on. I am literally 100% certain that this would not, in fact, be the case. It can't be ...

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In Arabic, it gets more mixed up than that: "I live in a big house with my parents, my two sisters and my brother, I sail every weekend in the summer and I was a teenager," the last part in past tense identifying the time at which the earlier parts in present tense were true. That sounds ...

SuicideJunkie

Say; what are the rules in the situation where the umpires are unable to make a call, and the instant replay video equipment is not available/sufficient?

SuicideJunkie

Old Bruce wrote:
Soupspoon wrote:
netsplit wrote:Who would win in a fight, the Hulk or a high pressure jet of chlorine trifluoride?
Whichever it was, it'd be angry and green.

Call me when it's all over.

Warn me before it starts!

It hasn't started, so consider yourself warned.

SuicideJunkie

It would be easier and more immediate if you summarize the rules and give a map of the level. Useful for those at work too.
It would also future-proof the context.

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We can certainly say it isn't new.
And there are a lot of bigger targets that would have been noticeably hit if it was not-unheard-of.

Might make for a mad scientist movie plot tho.

SuicideJunkie

$1,000 a week might seem like enough to comfortably retire on but, with 3% inflation, 10 years from now that will be worth less than $40K a year and ten years from then it will be worth less than $30K a year. If there is some major inflationary event, you are really going to wish you hadn't left th...

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Personally, I think the $1000/week for life thing was/is? pretty ideal, although it clearly depends on how old you are now. The continuous amount means it is enough to retire immediately if you hate your job, while being small to maximize odds and brush off moochers. Not enough for me to buy a ticke...

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Instead of trying to hide it as a cold blackbody, why not light up the surface and look like a cooler star, pocketing the energy difference? Mosey on over to where you want to be inconspicuously, and use "solar flares" to slightly twerk your approach so as to "naturally" use othe...

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There's a little lawn-stick ad on the route from the office I drive by most days on the way back from picking up lunch. > Help's with anything Is what it says near the bottom. Anything... except for language apparently. Edit/PS: I think a pavement café would be selling pavement-themed food and drink...

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Unfortunately there's almost no air in the bag to protect them, and someone went and broke all the space-time chips into 10^-35m fragments.

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Dark energy is due to high end civilizations wanting us youngsters to get off their visible universe lawns. Dark matter is the result of mid level civilizations' bureaucracy demanding that the stars run on time despite all the practical problems of being too far from galactic centers. Dark humor is ...

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Well, you could go right to where they're being generated, but I expect it will turn out like https://what-if.xkcd.com/73/, and you'll be killed by mundane side effects of the area before you really notice the gravity waves on a macro scale.

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Eebster the Great wrote:It also can't just "turn into X-rays and gamma rays" unless it annihilates antimatter, because lepton and boson numbers are conserved.

What if we make a brief black hole and let it evaporate? We can feed it pure matter, and get the inconvenient values shaved off with all the other hair.

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If we add a jug labelled ω... ...then the problem is trivial. At least trivial in the sense that any infinite problem is trivial. The catch is that there is no jug labeled ω, but the ball "is supposed to go there". The question reduces to "where is the place that doesn't exist?"...

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Zohar wrote:Really I was hoping for something that would make me feel similar to being in an impressionist painting of a Parisian cafe, so I don't think either of those scratches that itch, but still good things to know about.

You're not talking about Passpartout are you?

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Definitely. When I look at 9/11 I see (in addition to all of the obvious things that everybody sees) quite a marvel of engineering in that these towers - after such massive impacts and with thousands of gallons of burning jet fuel everywhere - managed to remain standing as long as they did - one fo...

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Area applies more to absolute values, while the angles indicate the fractions of the total. This is apparent when you consider a big slice of a small pie and a small slice of a big pie in the same presentation. In this case, the angles are still normal fractions of the total (15/130 for example), an...

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The Nazis also had problems with the weather back in the 40s.

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From what I understand they're pretty different from the original. I enjoyed both of the recent games a lot. Yeah, the original is a lot more simulation while the remakes are a lot more "gamey" - for instance, in the original, the rank structure is based on the number of active soldiers -...

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