No Man's Sky just should have been a procedurally generated universe. They failed at a relatively simple goal that can be complicated to construct.

This takes imagination and a type of understanding that's more rare to come by, and more difficult to execute.

I used to be a pretty strong "doubter", if not a denier. I made a gradual shift away from that, but one strong instance of shift was when Neil Degrasse Tyson presented it as a (relatively) simple physics problem in his new Cosmos series. Before we started burning fossil fuels, x% of the sun's energy was reflected back into space. Now, with a higher concentration of CO2, x is a smaller number. That energy has to go somewhere, and at least some of that is going to be heat energy.

Still, I don't think that anything on the level of "average individual citizen/household of an industrial country" is really where anything needs to happen. Yes, collectively, normal people in their daily lives contribute to Climate Change. But the vast majority of us, even as a collective single unit, contribute less than industrial / government / infrastructure sources.

Fossil fuels have been a great source of energy that has massively contributed to global advances in the past century. BUT, although we didn't know it in the beginning, they have this associated cost/downside. Fossil fuels also have a weakness in that they are not by any means inexhaustible, and costs rise as that becomes more and more obvious. In turn, that tends to favor the status quo in terms of the hierarchy of industrial nations versus developing or 3rd world countries -- we've already got the money and infrastructure in place to use fossil fuels, developing countries can't afford the costs.

All of this makes me think that 2 things need to happen:
A) Governments need to encourage the development of energy sources etc. that move us away from using fossil fuels. Tax breaks to Tesla Motors, tax incentives to buyers of solar cells for their homes, etc. etc.
B) If scientists/pundits/whoever really want people to stop using fossil fuels (or just cut down), they need to develop realistic alternatives. I'll bring up Tesla Motors again for deserving huge kudos in this area. Americans (and in general citizens of developed countries) have certain expectations about how a car should perform. Electric cars have traditionally been greatly inferior to a car burning fossil fuels in terms of living up to those expectations, but Tesla threw all that out the window and made a car that car people actually like to drive. It isn't just "vaguely functional if you really want to brag about how green you are", it is actually competitive with or superior to a gas-engine car for most users/consumers (some caveats for people who need to drive long distances in a single day).

We need to get more companies / inventors / whoever developing superior, functional alternatives to fossil fuel technologies. We need governments to encourage and enable those developments, NOT to cave to lobbyist pressure from big oil etc. and do the opposite. Prices will start high (like Tesla), but if you really are making a superior product, economy of scale will eventually kick in and normalize that out.

Outside of the consumer level, the same thing goes for actual power production. Even if we did nothing (which I would certainly not advocate), eventually scarcity and increased difficulty in obtaining fossil fuels (kinda sad that the past 2 decades of pointless wars 95% driven by oil haven't taught us this lesson yet, but there it is) will make the more "green" alternatives (solar, wind, tidal, nuclear, whatever) more economically practical. That tipping point will be when we see the real change begin.

I'm a Comp Sci grad who spent a great deal of time doing 3D coding so yes, I've got some idea what is involved here.

Best case scenario here is you have to track down an existing 3-D model that matches the object you want to manipulate close enough to do well. You also need that model's texturing to match close enough to look good. They don't clearly show how you map that model to a portion of your 2d image, but if they have made that relatively simple it is the 'big deal' portion they are showing off because that is very hard, and most likely has some finicky bits to it.

Also, the first bit of finding a good matching 3-d model is the killer. Armed with a well matched 3-D model, something like Blender already let you do this relatively easily. Finding that model is the hard part and for anything living it's simply not going to exist in 90% of cases, so your gonna just not do it, or do what the movie guys are already doing and build your own model.

I'm not saying there's not good work here, but I am sceptical of the fact that the real nuts and bolts of what would make this a 'big deal'(the UI mapping) isn't being shown. Furthermore, the animated origami clinches my skepticism. Sorry, but 3-D animation of 'some object' in your 2d image has NOT been made easy or IMHO been changed at all by their product. 100% of the effort there is the 3-D animation of the object, which you still have to get somebody to do artistically, full stop.

I don't think you can look at it as either-or. I'm not sure you can even simplify down to single issues like "wages" because there will be outliers on either side.

I think on average (if I can use such a term) we still have a male supremacy in many if not most areas.

I think gender is important and our physical bodies dictate many of our abilities or potential abilities; I don't think it's possible to be entirely gender neutral on most issues. Women should have less winnings in Tennis, because they play less and they play less well. Hell, they could just abolish women's and men's tennis and only have a joint competition - then it certainly would favor it fairly. It would however mean that the female to male ratio would be 1:20 all of a sudden, since the male body is built stronger in general.

How it should be approached I don't really know. It won't be easy to change the people's minds in a positive way. Too many feminist proponents think they're Rosa Parks and feel completely justified in debasing and downright embarrassing behavior like the girl at the end of the video, the PyCon incident, "Elevatorgate" etc. I don't have a problem with them standing up for themselves at all - everyone should be free to protect their space, but they should also respect others' space (now I'm talking PyCon particularly).

Right now the male/female discussion has very little scientific base (at least as far as I know), we only have anecdotal stuff. It would be interesting to have studies going in neutrally and examining the basic differences in women, so we have some basis to argue from.

Some things are relatively simple - women can have babies, men can't - this means time off from work, etc etc. Right now employers consider this when hiring and shouldn't they?

Other things are grabbed out of thin air like: men focus on single things better, while women multitask better. I'd like to see some data for that and for other differences between the sexes.

Gorillaman seems to want to gender/sex out of the discussion entirely; I'm not sure that's really fair or helpful since we are different.

I suppose I would like people to not be thought of as a mass of blue and red, but rather as individuals and judged on the individual skills. Like say, compare ME and Serena Williams - there's no possible argument that I would beat her in tennis (or most any physical activity) ever. She should clearly be valued higher than me in those areas.

Sports solve the issue by going around it - making guy sports and girl sports. That's one solution, but segregating society is not cool. Imagine making guy workplaces and girl workplaces. Not really cool, is it? So, how do we find jobs, places in society that appeals to the individual? I would imagine we figure out the requirements of job and judge applicants on their merits - some women would beat all men in some jobs, and vice versa.

I don't think society is trying to keep women down, at least not consciously. Consider if the present position is caused natural evolution of society or if its patriarchal rule enforcing it? If you look at the hyper-muslim countries, I'd say it was the patriarchal rule, but over here? I'm not sure.

Ramble ramble.

If anyone wants to read more about Stephen and LGBTQIA youth, here is the NYT article.

The New York Time's

Generation LGBTQIA

By MICHAEL SCHULMAN

Published: January 10, 2013

STEPHEN IRA, a junior at Sarah Lawrence College, uploaded a video last March on We Happy Trans, a site that shares "positive perspectives" on being transgender.

In the breakneck six-and-a-half-minute monologue - hair tousled, sitting in a wood-paneled dorm room - Stephen exuberantly declared himself "a queer, a nerd fighter, a writer, an artist and a guy who needs a haircut," and held forth on everything from his style icons (Truman Capote and "any male-identified person who wears thigh-highs or garters") to his toy zebra.

Because Stephen, who was born Kathlyn, is the 21-year-old child of Warren Beatty and Annette Bening, the video went viral, garnering nearly half a million views. But that was not the only reason for its appeal. With its adrenalized, freewheeling eloquence, the video seemed like a battle cry for a new generation of post-gay gender activists, for whom Stephen represents a rare public face.

Armed with the millennial generation's defining traits - Web savvy, boundless confidence and social networks that extend online and off - Stephen and his peers are forging a political identity all their own, often at odds with mainstream gay culture.

If the gay-rights movement today seems to revolve around same-sex marriage, this generation is seeking something more radical: an upending of gender roles beyond the binary of male/female. The core question isn't whom they love, but who they are - that is, identity as distinct from sexual orientation.

But what to call this movement? Whereas "gay and lesbian" was once used to lump together various sexual minorities - and more recently "L.G.B.T." to include bisexual and transgender - the new vanguard wants a broader, more inclusive abbreviation. "Youth today do not define themselves on the spectrum of L.G.B.T.," said Shane Windmeyer, a founder of Campus Pride, a national student advocacy group based in Charlotte, N.C.

Part of the solution has been to add more letters, and in recent years the post-post-post-gay-rights banner has gotten significantly longer, some might say unwieldy. The emerging rubric is "L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," which stands for different things, depending on whom you ask.

"Q" can mean "questioning" or "queer," an umbrella term itself, formerly derogatory before it was appropriated by gay activists in the 1990s. "I" is for "intersex," someone whose anatomy is not exclusively male or female. And "A" stands for "ally" (a friend of the cause) or "asexual," characterized by the absence of sexual attraction.

It may be a mouthful, but it's catching on, especially on liberal-arts campuses.

The University of Missouri, Kansas City, for example, has an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Resource Center that, among other things, helps student locate "gender-neutral" restrooms on campus. Vassar College offers an L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Discussion Group on Thursday afternoons. Lehigh University will be hosting its second annual L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Intercollegiate Conference next month, followed by a Queer Prom. Amherst College even has an L.G.B.T.Q.Q.I.A.A. center, where every group gets its own letter.

The term is also gaining traction on social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr, where posts tagged with "lgbtqia" suggest a younger, more progressive outlook than posts that are merely labeled "lgbt."

"There's a very different generation of people coming of age, with completely different conceptions of gender and sexuality," said Jack Halberstam (formerly Judith), a transgender professor at the University of Southern California and the author, most recently, of "Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal."

"When you see terms like L.G.B.T.Q.I.A.," Professor Halberstam added, "it's because people are seeing all the things that fall out of the binary, and demanding that a name come into being."

And with a plethora of ever-expanding categories like "genderqueer" and "androgyne" to choose from, each with an online subculture, piecing together a gender identity can be as D.I.Y. as making a Pinterest board.

BUT sometimes L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. is not enough. At the University of Pennsylvania last fall, eight freshmen united in the frustration that no campus group represented them.

Sure, Penn already had some two dozen gay student groups, including Queer People of Color, Lambda Alliance and J-Bagel, which bills itself as the university's "Jewish L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. Community." But none focused on gender identity (the closest, Trans Penn, mostly catered to faculty members and graduate students).

Richard Parsons, an 18-year-old transgender male, discovered that when he attended a student mixer called the Gay Affair, sponsored by Penn's L.G.B.T. Center. "I left thoroughly disappointed," said Richard, a garrulous freshman with close-cropped hair, wire-framed glasses and preppy clothes, who added, "This is the L.G.B.T. Center, and it's all gay guys."

Through Facebook, Richard and others started a group called Penn Non-Cis, which is short for "non-cisgender." For those not fluent in gender-studies speak, "cis" means "on the same side as" and "cisgender" denotes someone whose gender identity matches his or her biology, which describes most of the student body. The group seeks to represent everyone else. "This is a freshman uprising," Richard said.

On a brisk Tuesday night in November, about 40 students crowded into the L.G.B.T. Center, a converted 19th-century carriage house, for the group's inaugural open mike. The organizers had lured students by handing out fliers on campus while barking: "Free condoms! Free ChapStick!"

"There's a really vibrant L.G.B.T. scene," Kate Campbell, one of the M.C.'s, began. "However, that mostly encompasses the L.G.B. and not too much of the T. So we're aiming to change that."

Students read poems and diary entries, and sang guitar ballads. Then Britt Gilbert - a punky-looking freshman with a blond bob, chunky glasses and a rock band T-shirt - took the stage. She wanted to talk about the concept of "bi-gender."

"Does anyone want to share what they think it is?"

Silence.

She explained that being bi-gender is like manifesting both masculine and feminine personas, almost as if one had a "detachable penis." "Some days I wake up and think, 'Why am I in this body?' " she said. "Most days I wake up and think, 'What was I thinking yesterday?' 

"Britt's grunginess belies a warm matter-of-factness, at least when describing her journey. As she elaborated afterward, she first heard the term "bi-gender" from Kate, who found it on Tumblr. The two met at freshman orientation and bonded. In high school, Kate identified as "agender" and used the singular pronoun "they"; she now sees her gender as an "amorphous blob."

By contrast, Britt's evolution was more linear. She grew up in suburban Pennsylvania and never took to gender norms. As a child, she worshiped Cher and thought boy bands were icky. Playing video games, she dreaded having to choose male or female avatars.

In middle school, she started calling herself bisexual and dated boys. By 10th grade, she had come out as a lesbian. Her parents thought it was a phase - until she brought home a girlfriend, Ash. But she still wasn't settled.

"While I definitely knew that I liked girls, I didn't know that I was one," Britt said. Sometimes she would leave the house in a dress and feel uncomfortable, as if she were wearing a Halloween costume. Other days, she felt fine. She wasn't "trapped in the wrong body," as the cliché has it - she just didn't know which body she wanted.

When Kate told her about the term "bi-gender," it clicked instantly. "I knew what it was, before I knew what it was," Britt said, adding that it is more fluid than "transgender" but less vague than "genderqueer" - a catchall term for nontraditional gender identities.

At first, the only person she told was Ash, who responded, "It took you this long to figure it out?" For others, the concept was not so easy to grasp. Coming out as a lesbian had been relatively simple, Britt said, "since people know what that is." But when she got to Penn, she was relieved to find a small community of freshmen who had gone through similar awakenings.

Among them was Richard Parsons, the group's most politically lucid member. Raised female, Richard grew up in Orlando, Fla., and realized he was transgender in high school. One summer, he wanted to room with a transgender friend at camp, but his mother objected. "She's like, 'Well, if you say that he's a guy, then I don't want you rooming with a guy,' " he recalled. "We were in a car and I basically blurted out, 'I think I might be a guy, too!' "

After much door-slamming and tears, Richard and his mother reconciled. But when she asked what to call him, he had no idea. He chose "Richard" on a whim, and later added a middle name, Matthew, because it means "gift of God."

By the time he got to Penn, he had been binding his breasts for more than two years and had developed back pain. At the open mike, he told a harrowing story about visiting the university health center for numbness and having a panic attack when he was escorted into a women's changing room.

Nevertheless, he praised the university for offering gender-neutral housing. The college's medical program also covers sexual reassignment surgery, which, he added, "has heavily influenced my decision to probably go under the Penn insurance plan next year."

PENN has not always been so forward-thinking; a decade ago, the L.G.B.T. Center (nestled amid fraternity houses) was barely used. But in 2010, the university began reaching out to applicants whose essays raised gay themes. Last year, the gay newsmagazine The Advocate ranked Penn among the top 10 trans-friendly universities, alongside liberal standbys like New York University.

More and more colleges, mostly in the Northeast, are catering to gender-nonconforming students. According to a survey by Campus Pride, at least 203 campuses now allow transgender students to room with their preferred gender; 49 have a process to change one's name and gender in university records; and 57 cover hormone therapy. In December, the University of Iowa became the first to add a "transgender" checkbox to its college application.

"I wrote about an experience I had with a drag queen as my application essay for all the Ivy Leagues I applied to," said Santiago Cortes, one of the Penn students. "And I got into a few of the Ivy Leagues - Dartmouth, Columbia and Penn. Strangely not Brown.

"But even these measures cannot keep pace with the demands of incoming students, who are challenging the curriculum much as gay activists did in the '80s and '90s. Rather than protest the lack of gay studies classes, they are critiquing existing ones for being too narrow.

Several members of Penn Non-Cis had been complaining among themselves about a writing seminar they were taking called "Beyond 'Will & Grace,' " which examined gay characters on shows like "Ellen," "Glee" and "Modern Family." The professor, Gail Shister, who is a lesbian, had criticized several students for using "L.G.B.T.Q." in their essays, saying it was clunky, and proposed using "queer" instead. Some students found the suggestion offensive, including Britt Gilbert, who described Ms. Shister as "unaccepting of things that she doesn't understand."

Ms. Shister, reached by phone, said the criticism was strictly grammatical. "I am all about economy of expression," she said. "L.G.B.T.Q. doesn't exactly flow off the tongue. So I tell the students, 'Don't put in an acronym with five or six letters.' "

One thing is clear. Ms. Shister, who is 60 and in 1979 became The Philadelphia Inquirer's first female sportswriter, is of a different generation, a fact she acknowledges freely, even gratefully. "Frankly, I'm both proud and envious that these young people are growing up in an age where they're free to love who they want," she said.

If history is any guide, the age gap won't be so easy to overcome. As liberated gay men in the 1970s once baffled their pre-Stonewall forebears, the new gender outlaws, to borrow a phrase from the transgender writer Kate Bornstein, may soon be running ideological circles around their elders.

Still, the alphabet soup of L.G.B.T.Q.I.A. may be difficult to sustain. "In the next 10 or 20 years, the various categories heaped under the umbrella of L.G.B.T. will become quite quotidian," Professor Halberstam said.

Even at the open mike, as students picked at potato chips and pineapple slices, the bounds of identity politics were spilling over and becoming blurry.

At one point, Santiago, a curly-haired freshman from Colombia, stood before the crowd. He and a friend had been pondering the limits of what he calls "L.G.B.T.Q. plus."

"Why do only certain letters get to be in the full acronym?" he asked.

Then he rattled off a list of gender identities, many culled from Wikipedia. "We have our lesbians, our gays," he said, before adding, "bisexual, transsexual, queer, homosexual, asexual." He took a breath and continued. "Pansexual. Omnisexual. Trisexual. Agender. Bi-gender. Third gender. Transgender. Transvestite. Intersexual. Two-spirit. Hijra. Polyamorous."

By now, the list had turned into free verse. He ended: "Undecided. Questioning. Other. Human."

The room burst into applause.

Correction: January 10, 2013, Thursday

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction: An earlier version of this article and a picture caption referred incorrectly to a Sarah Lawrence College student who uploaded a video online about being transgender. He says he is Stephen Ira, not Stephen Ira Beatty.

Source NYT

Fair Use

Oh wow, that was great. Haven't played Chess since my school days. Now I mostly play/watch videogames, but wow, Chess is just such a perfect game. Complexity from relatively simple rules. Wish I was better at it.

Your description of a teacher's job is like me describing my current IT job as such: "Really, all I do is work with the same technology products. I just Read The F'ing Manual and install the stuff."

That would be a pretty ignorant way of looking at my current job.

You have never taught in a public school. First off, a teacher who reads directly out of the textbook day in and day out is a crappy teacher. Even the crappy teachers I worked with didn't just pick up the book and read what was in there, and assign the exercises at the end of the chapter. You also live in this wonderful fantasy world where the students arrive in your classroom, like perfect brain sponges, and they'll just magically hear what you say, or read the textbook, and magically, they overcome their various learning disabilities, weaknesses in various types of intelligence, distractions in life, and just ...

POOF! THEY LEARN AUTOMAGICALLY!

Not to mention a teacher's role is not simply to teach facts and information. A teacher's role is also to help inspire students to want to learn and do more well beyond the classroom. Those are the teachers students remember for the rest of their lives. I can still name you my favorite teachers from elementary, middle, high school, and college. I remember specific lessons from each one that really spoke to me. I became a history teacher because of my high school history teacher, Claire Tilton, who still teaches to this day, and she's still unbelievable at her job, but she's "just a high school teacher" I guess to you.

I wouldn't be where I am today without those teachers. And those teachers did more than just inspire me; I knew probably a dozen or so people who did 180's and loved history after being in Ms. Tilton's class.

It's one thing to know the subject matter; it's a whole other thing to be able to help another human being who is struggling to understand it learn it, or motivate a completely disinterested human into wanting to learn about it. If you think that people who can do this are a dime a dozen, I don't know what to tell you. I think we end up losing a lot of talented teachers who do inspire because society doesn't value education as it should.

>> ^chilaxe:

@heropsycho
You're certainly right on some elements, but I think there are a number of facets to this issue.
We can probably test the difficult of a job by looking at who can and who can't do that job. Most teachers, like Matt Damon's mom standing next to him, probably can't do particularly cognitively complex jobs like that of a $125k per year software engineer. I took a class in the education & child development department of my college, and I was surprised by how easy the subject matter was relative to classes in e.g. the sciences.
She probably teaches the same (or at least similar) middle school or high school subjects every year, and her primary job (AFAIK) is to follow the instructions in the teacher's edition textbook on a relatively simple subject matter that can be understood by teenagers. Her primary job is not to innovate technologically or come up with a new business strategy to outsmart ruthless competitors; it's to follow instructions.
That's a really different job from something like writing 50 page technical specifications documents, and salaries tend to be proportional to the cognitive complexity required, since anyone can do cognitively simple jobs, but only a limited number of people can do cognitively complex jobs.

@heropsycho

You're certainly right on some elements, but I think there are a number of facets to this issue.

We can probably test the difficult of a job by looking at who can and who can't do that job. Most teachers, like Matt Damon's mom standing next to him, probably can't do particularly cognitively complex jobs like that of a $125k per year software engineer. I took a class in the education & child development department of my college, and I was surprised by how easy the subject matter was relative to classes in e.g. the sciences.

She probably teaches the same (or at least similar) middle school or high school subjects every year, and her primary job (AFAIK) is to follow the instructions in the teacher's edition textbook on a relatively simple subject matter that can be understood by teenagers. Her primary job is not to innovate technologically or come up with a new business strategy to outsmart ruthless competitors; it's to follow instructions.

That's a really different job from something like writing 50 page technical specifications documents, and salaries tend to be proportional to the cognitive complexity required, since anyone can do cognitively simple jobs, but only a limited number of people can do cognitively complex jobs.

Longde's video was originally an embed that didn't work. In that regard it was a faulty dupeof, obviously. They do look pretty much identical now though. I dunno.

I don't know how you store votes, but it would be a relatively simple matter to make a little data redundancy to make sure you can dedupe as well.

Have a variable number of lists with votes that merges within 1-2 days, so more than one dupeof can happen within a short period of time and you'd still be able to revert.

>> ^campionidelmondo:
Personally, I feel that even if it's not considered a dupe in this case, it should be. This is a very specific case and apparently falls through a hole in the rules imo.
We're talking about a video of an audio song that has no visual component, so a slideshow was added to it. Alternatively it could've had a still image or an unrelated video added, but the visual component is pretty much random. It's the song that's of importance and that's being sifted.
Ok, so the slideshows could be quite different, fair enough. However, if we don't consider this a dupe, then there's nothing stopping people from looking for popular songs on here and then resifting the exact same songs, just with a different pseudo-visual component, such as a slideshow/scene from a movie/still image etc.
Of course, the added visual component could be of great quality, like setting a great song to a very fitting scene from a movie...things like that. It's a thin line that begs more discussion imo.
Stripping rasch of his dupeoff powers seems a bit much. Especially, like burdturgler pointed out, given how much effort he puts into maintaining the videos.


I think it should not. I would rather that the votes too care of those cases, because they are not duplicates, even if the songs are the same. I don't think we should analyze "what the video is about" so we can figure out if its a dupe or not - it should be relatively simple and if there are doubts, then I'd rather discuss it than throw another version out. If we've all seen a great version of X song with an unofficial music video, would the official music video be a dupe? Not at all, and it should not be that other way either - it's a whole package. The only grey area there is, is when the differences are trivial. That's my opinion anyway.

In any case, in spite of the enmity towards rasch from me, I still respect his tireless effort in dead fixes and dupeofs, with that many of them anyone can make a mistake. I would think it's just a slap on the wrist; there's no reason to cut off a working limb, so to speak.

Someday I need to put together a grand theory on the origin and nature of conspiracy theories, and try to prove an evolutionary linkage between them and more modern memetic virii like spam and computer viruses.

They certainly seem to be evolving on a parallel path. Computer viruses were originally the playthings of bored nerds with semi-destructive streaks, but eventually evolved into tools to be used for profit. In the same way, I think a lot of older conspiracy theories were just made up by people with too much time on their hands, but have now evolved into intentional viral propaganda (see virtually anything a spam e-mail says).

It seems to me that there should be some sort of (relatively) simple informational filter that could be developed to help separate the wheat from the chaff.

I suspect a few basic tests could weed most of them out, starting with:

1. Does the conspiracy story put forth a falsifiable hypothesis?
   
2. Does the conspiracy theory provide a better fit to the observed data than the conventional one?
   
3. Does the conspiracy theory ascribe plausible means, motive, and opportunity to carry it out?
   
4. Does the conspiracy theory explain why information about its existence has been permitted to leak out?
   

This one actually passes the first test, since it's predicting a global pandemic that significantly reduces the population, though I suppose since they don't give us a timeline they can always claim that they're still "working out the details" or something.

In this particular case, I think "motive" is highly questionable. Malthusian economics have kinda fallen by the wayside. There's no particular reason to think that population reduction would be a net benefit to our current economy. If it's to follow the Georgia Guidestone's plan, then becoming more attuned to nature would steer me more towards a conspiracy to get us to stop using coal, oil, eating meat, spraying pesticides, fertilizer, etc. and force us all to reuse & recycle everything.

The WHO planning to decimate the earth's population in pursuit of an excuse to centralize power in a world government while enacting a radical environmentalist agenda sure sounds like conservative propaganda to me.

Maybe there's some crony capitalism going on with who's getting contracts to supply the vaccine. That part I buy. Everything else sounds like "Obama has never been able to produce a Birth Certificate" to me.

I live in Canada. Comedy Central sold syndication and advertising rights (in Canada) to a broadcaster here so to avoid legal complications block their videos to IPs originating from here. Unfortunately this relatively simple financial decision makes other things less simple..

Where do you call home?

In reply to this comment by MikesHL13:
No problem. I assume it was blocked for you. Curious...what country?

In reply to this comment by notarobot:
Thanks, MikesHL. I ask about the dates sometimes so I can look them up on thecomedynetwork.ca site to see what everyone else is laughing about.

In reply to this comment by MikesHL13:
The post date on Comedy Central was 7/15/09. I also noticed it was in the "Week of 7/13/09 Summary".

In reply to this comment by notarobot:
episode date?

Fair enough, yeah I found it surprising how much more difficult it became when we started looking at PDEs. You'd think the step up from 2 to 3 dimensions would be relatively simple but no ...

Anyway, doing an advanced maths modelling unit at the moment with ODE/PDEs where we model stuff like the diffusion, advection and chemotaxis effects of a cell density in time and space. In fact I should be studying up on an exam for it right now

The premise is relatively simple. At heart it is a multiplayer game. You control a hero (demigod) which you move around a map with friendly and enemy heroes. You have to complete some objective, as a team, for instance destroy enemy heroes X times or capture more bases than the other team.

You have your hero unit, which gains levels during the game - up to 20 - and you have skill point you can distribute on a skill tree, which gives the hero different abilities, both active and passive. (Much like Warlords Battlecry)

Then you have summoned units, which your hero summons with an item you can buy at your base. At the base, you can buy several different items at varying costs. You earn gold by killing enemies and capturing flags and so on.

You can upgrade your hero with these items and you can upgrade your base by buying "items" for it. The base basically runs itself, and by capturing points you get access to the buildings that are in that little zone, for instance a better item shop. (This is much like the Old School game "Z".)

More over there is a steady flow of "reinforcements" which are like a general flow of very low level troops, which can mass over heroes - combined with your own hero, this can be lethal, but on their own they don't stand up to much punishment. By upgrading your base building, you can make these reinforcements more varied, with healers and stuff, so they are more of a threat.

And that's basically it. A huge arena fight.

ac:
I think this way is much better than the old, but it could be solved relatively simple by making a bigger hovering tooltip

"
Queued at: [date][time ago]
Last published at: [date][time ago]
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Like item hovers on wowhead.

Or it could be a user setting. It's not like the data is not still recorded (I presume), so it would be relatively easy for lucky to make it a chosen setting, just default it the way it is now.