bryondowd

Just out of curiosity, why Sony? Only negative thing I can recall hearing about them is blocking cross play to protect their console lead, which didn't seem too unreasonable to me.

DF is mostly single core CPU bound. I've heard it also doesn't play well at higher resolutions. Try turning the game resolution down to 1080p.

Haven't tried it yet, but I expect that you can use the scheduling menu to set up what you describe once, and switch them onto that schedule as needed. You'd want to set up a schedule with multiple station commands, each with a dwarf count of 1, on each tile you want them to stand.

Then you can swap them with a couple clicks between training, off duty, and whatever station schedules you need.

Haven't seen that bug happen so far. Wonder if it's just a case where someone had already mined out one of the tiles that should have been an up/down, so all the game could do is put a down stair. That said, I only really use stairs for exploration or project tunnels, and it's all ramps in my fortress proper.

I did notice that it seems like dwarves won't/can't dig straight up with stairs, they need another path up. Not sure if that's new or pre-existing limitation, as I haven't played classic in over a decade.

I did something similar. Ikea tabletops for the desk surface and back, two legs I found on Amazon to support the very ends, and a bunch of brackets from the local hardware store.

Biggest bonus was being able to set the height of the desktop to fit my short legs. Having a desk top at 26" looks somewhat comical, but now I can sit with my feet flat on the floor, knees at right angles, thighs resting on the seat, elbows and forearms resting on the armrest and hands resting on the desktop/peripherals. Nothing bent at an odd angle and no pressure points. The difference has been way more than expected.

Second best part is having a big L shaped desk with nothing to bang my knees on from one end to the other.

I worked on FAA systems for a while, mostly FDIO (Fight Data Input Output, aggravatingly pronounced Fido by controllers), where we couldn't even just refer to a monitor and keyboard as such, had to go and call them a RANK (Replaceable Alpha Numeric Keyboard) and CRT (in spite of them long since having moved away from Cathode Ray Tube technology)

Wonder if maybe you could take the offenders to small claims court, if you have that much info. Might be enough to get them to choose an easier target.

If there's significant overlap with ICBMs I could see it being reasonable from the perspective of maintaining military production readiness.

Imagine you need a bunch of people trained to do X, and machines capable of Y, in order to build your missiles, but you don't need many missiles right now, but if a war against a major power broke out you'd need to ramp up production massively and instantly. Either you keep making missiles you don't need, or you somehow train people and maintain machines without actually using them, either way you're spending just to maintain readiness for no immediate value. Or you find a close enough use where you can get some value by producing something similar enough that you can convert to military use rapidly.

That wouldn't be so much political pork as actually practical. But I know little to nothing in this area, so just speculation.

Man, I had a similar experience working with code from a French manufacturer. The comments were mostly translatable, but the variable names were hell. It's bad enough trying to figure out in English whether acc is an abbreviation of acceleration, or accuracy, or some acronym, etc. Trying to expand a three letter abbreviations in a language you don't know it's nearly impossible.

Made me really lean towards never abbreviating in variable names unless it was extremely necessary for brevity, and also provide good comments.

To be fair, state and local governments would have to increase the total tax burden on their populace to increase education funding, or makes cuts to other things in their domain. The federal government could certainly cut the military budget and grant those funds to state or local education programs, without increasing anyone's tax burden.

That said, my understanding is that the military budget mostly goes to salaries, so any drastic cuts would leave us with massive unemployment. You'd have to take things really slow to make that big a change in the labor force without pretty ugly side effects.

Wouldn't efficiency affect the cost of cooling, given that the excess energy becomes heat?

Is there a max angle at which two lasers could pass through the pupil and strike the retina? That's assuming that strikes elsewhere don't pose a blinding risk for the energy level required to kill a mosquito, which I have absolutely no support for. But if that is the case, you could place your lasers and define a kill zone where no two can converge with less than a safe angle.

If the assumption isn't correct, you could possibly still place at least two lasers and define a narrow zone between them where the angle would be about 180 degrees. Would be damned tough to hit an eye from two sides at once. But that limits you to half power per laser, which probably isn't enough margin.

Don't most investment homes rely on tenants to offset the maintenance and tax costs of owning the home? Construct enough to meet demand for places to live and the rental market should drop, which would hurt the home-as-investment model, which in turn should bring down home prices, right?

Makes sense that a cockpit wouldn't need a clear distinction between brackets and parenthesis, or |. But I am surprised about the similarity of 0 and O. I recall when I went to the ATC academy they really drilled in using a horizontal slash through zeros when hand-written. Also had to underline the letter S in any case where it could be ambiguous with the number 5 (as in a plane's tail number). I think we also had to put a horizontal strike through the letter Z to distinguish it from a 2.

You could make the same argument for software. Where do you draw the line "starting from scratch" in software? Does incorporating third party libraries make it not from scratch? What about the standard library of your language of choice? What about using the abstraction of a high level language in general vs a low level language, or straight machine code? For that matter, is it from scratch if you didn't design the logic gates on the chip itself? Or perhaps even come up with the concept of logic gates from electrical and material science principals.. etc..

I'd say that if you are gluing together a bunch of known-good components into a specific configuration that isn't a full copy of something else, you're building from scratch.

In 2011, so the value of BTC at the time was between $1 and $32.

I see short-circuit for correct behavior all the time, most frequently in the format: if (pointer && pointer->member == value)

Where you want to make sure a pointer you've been given isn't null before you try to dereference it. Without short-circuit, this becomes a segfault.

I wonder if you could get some positive results by using students as tutors. Imagine if a certain number of hours per week, you paired up students in grade X with students in grade X-1, to have the older students help the younger ones to learn the material they leaned the previous year. This would also help cement that knowledge in the older group. Then you also have time where the students in grade X are tutored by students in grade X+1, through the same process. During this time, the teachers' jobs would be to provide support.

Interesting concept, but seems like it only works for fairly small arrays, right?

You could fit 40 base-3 values into a 64 bit integer, but in order to read/write index 39, you have to perform 39 multiplications/divisions. So no efficient random access. And is there any way to encode more than 40 base-3 values if your largest integer is 64 bits? If you need 45 elements, I guess you could use an array of 5 8-bit integers where each 8-bit element represents 5 base-3 elements. Of course, now you're limited to increasing the size of your array to increments of 5 (or more generally, smallest efficient integer size / log base 2 of the number of representable values)

Applying for a job isn't claiming that you meet the requirements, it's testing whether you meet the requirements. So the closer analogy would be installing an app that claims to require 8 GB RAM, just to see if it'll run anyway on your PC with only 4 GB RAM. Maybe the installer will block you, or maybe not, as long as you aren't tweaking your PC to report to the installer that it has more RAM when queried.

These studies almost always point to a very limited set of the "wealthiest" for their study. And if you think about it, it's obvious that the very top of the pyramid will mostly have people who were able to concentrate wealth somehow, rather than inheritors. Often, inheritance is split between more than one person. That alone would account for a lot of inherited wealth not meeting an arbitrarily "wealthiest" category. So naturally there's going to be a lot of churn at the top.

That article seems to be an anecdotal story from a single person. Sad, but hard to point at it as support for or against legalization without being able to show that similar cases are more common under one system than the other.

Sadly, people with mental health issues and difficult families being preyed upon by abusers is common, even here in the US.

The first result of searching for the word `wife` in the linked page:

See, e.g., Black’s Law Dictionary (6th ed.1990) (defining rape as the ‘act of sexual intercourse committed by a man with a woman not his wife and without her consent, committed when the woman’s resistance is overcome by force or fear, or under other prohibitive conditions’).”

Not sure it proves what the GP was saying, though. The second result is similar, and seems to be referencing an actual law.

Don't those stats only prove that criminalized prostitution is a negative? I expect you'd have a huge differential if you took similar stats from people selling weed in a place that strictly enforces a ban vs a place where it is legal and regulated. Probably not when it comes to rape, but violent/armed encounters are probably negligible for a legal weed shop, but common in an underground industry. Naturally, in the latter case, people would overwhelmingly want to get out, not because of the job itself, but the opportunists that crop up due to the lack of legal oversight.

It could be a factor, but probably not a main one.

I know first hand that there are organizations that will help people in poor countries get a tourist visa to a wealthier country, and set them up with under the table jobs for a few months so they can go home with enough cash to support their families for the rest of the year. Not legal, but relatively harmless.

I've heard stories, but no personal knowledge, of traffickers pretending to be one of the above organizations, but once the victim is in the foreign country, they effectively enslave them using some combination of confiscating their documents, direct threats, threats against relatives, and lying/exaggerating what the local law enforcement will do if they find out they came to work illegally. By the time people back home realize something is wrong, the traffickers have already moved on. No idea how accurate or how common this is.

Same would apply to orgs offering to smuggle people into a wealthy country without a visa with the intention of staying indefinitely. In either case, I suppose a freer flow of labor could reduce that grey market and therefore the opportunity for abuse.

If you create a bloc of people providing a service that is illegal, now you've formed a criminal organization, at least in the eyes of law enforcement, and you've painted a target on your back. Can't really unionize effectively unless you're on the right side of the law. Which is another argument for decriminalization.

Just couldn't resist nerding out about probabilities. Summing failure rates would potentially get you above 100% chance of failure. What you'd really want is the product of success rates. So, if you have a 1% failure rate on a module, and you have 50 modules, that'd be 0.99^50, which brings you to about 60% success rate, or 40% failure rate overall. For 500 modules that drops to less than 1% success rate.

But yeah, agree that the odds of failure are probably lower pulling in a handful of monoliths that are well exercised than hundreds of miscellanea of varying robustness.

Yeah, I've never encountered the social behavior the author describes. In my experience, people walk when the escalator happens to be clear ahead of them, and stop behind the next cluster of standers. I've never seen standers make an effort to stay to one side. So walking is just an opportunistic and limited benefit to the system. Perhaps its regional.

Since a few people are just throwing out roguelikes they like, I figure I'd like to mention a couple that had an impact on me:

Incursion: Halls of the Goblin King

The mechanics, skills, classes, etc are basically ripped from DnD, which I've never had the opportunity to play, so I found it engaging. The author was touting the game as a sort of prequel/sample, just a single 10 floor dungeon, with the intention of using the engine to create a more expansive campaign, but then he moved on to other things, open sourced the project and abandoned it. Someone else forked it, but only to fix some bugs and improve playability, not to continue the grand vision. I think it still stands on its own as a worthwhile game, but its always been a disappointment that the full idea was never realized.

DoomRL

This one was actually a finished game. It did a good job of getting the feel of a fast paced shooter while still being a typical turn based roguelike. Things like being able to decrease the enemy's chance to hit you by moving perpendicular to their line of fire were a nice touch. I think they eventually started to get some pushback from the owners of the Doom IP, and pivoted to a new game called Jupiter Hell, that's supposedly the same feel with a different scenario, but I've never gotten around to checking it out.

Perhaps doing nothing was the best move. Perhaps making a move would have resulted in Germany focusing more on the Western front and maintaining good relations with Russia. Very different conflict at that point. Without the losses on the Eastern front, perhaps Germany is able to fend off a French and British offensive, and end up invading both France and Britain.