DU: Try a Long Island Ice Tea. For some reason, the flavors mix so that you can barely tell that it's alcoholic, even though a well-made one will pack a hell of a kick.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:12 AM on November 16, 2009

The History of the Internet in a Nutshell

Very short. Nutshells don't (yet?) have TCP/IP connectivity.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:30 AM on November 16, 2009

Oh fer chrissake, it's a picture and a mention that he raised more money in a day than any Presidential candidate ever has. It's notable and worth mentioning. It's not about Ron Paul, it's about the Internet. Geeze.

Flagging the post because you hate Ron Paul that much is ridiculous. It's not like the guy has freaking cooties.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:01 AM on November 16, 2009

What a great post, Devil Tesla. I loves me some Animaniacs, and you did all the work for me! :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:28 AM on November 15, 2009

Honestly, I think Animaniacs at its best stands toe-to-toe with Bugs and Daffy. Their sendup of Apocalypse Now was ridiculously good, and of course all the Pinky and the Brain shorts were great stuff.

But, overall, they were much spottier than Bugs-era WB. A lot of their work was pretty meh. I particularly disliked the Rita and Runt cartoons. Blech. I like my cartoons funny, and Rita and Runt made the cardinal sin of taking themselves ever so... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:42 PM on November 15, 2009

That's a good point, and the Bugs era lasted for a long, long time. Wikipedia says that Bugs was in 161 cartoons all by himself, and that's not even counting the other characters. Animaniacs was only produced for about three years. At their best, they were hysterically funny, and I wish they'd done better in the ratings... given a few more years of production, they might have ended up as powerful a force in syndication as Bugs.

And, I guess I'm an uncultured cretin,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:06 PM on November 15, 2009

Regardless of the 'full story', it's not claimed in any way that he threatened anyone with the gun, or that he attempted to use it.

Have the British gone fucking insane?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:31 PM on November 15, 2009

Offhand, I'd guess it's probably codespeak for 'fewer commercials'.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 6:28 AM on November 15, 2009

It's pretty clear what 2000-2009 should be called. 70s, 80s, 90s, naughties.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:27 PM on November 14, 2009

Isn't it interesting that these allegations surface so soon after Galbraith claimed that the UN mission in Afghanistan was corrupt?
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:53 PM on November 12, 2009

Ugh, eight months ago people were whining about deflation.

Well, you throw enough new trillions into the money pool, turning enough of those derivatives into cold, hard cash, and the outcome is pretty damn predictable.

The dollar dropping has very little to do with Iraq, however, as far as I can see.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:27 AM on November 13, 2009

Pastabagel: Look harder. We were running a deficit before we invaded Iraq. The cost of that war is around $1.4 trillion. Then we had bailouts, a stimulus plan, a recession, etc. It all comes from the same pot of money.

Meh. In the grand scheme of Things that Are Wrong, with ten-trillion-dollar bailout packages, the government nationalizing both the biggest insurer of mortgages and the two biggest issuers, and banks continuing business as usual with... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:27 PM on November 13, 2009

Yeah, but that's $1.4 trillion spent to commit mass murder. Seems pretty wrong to me

I agree with you completely. All I'm saying is that I don't think that's a major causative force in the dollar's decline. It contributes, but it's a small player compared to the huge array of other forces involved.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:20 PM on November 13, 2009

What a cool trick! Thanks so much for the post.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:37 PM on November 13, 2009

Nah, that's just a symptom. If you fill the forest with underbrush, by fighting fires with fertilizer-laced water, you will get opportunistic species that populate that vegetation. They're not the blame for the later, greater fires.

I agree with The Whelk that Prosperity Gospel is a terrible idea, but it's most likely caused by the housing bubble, rather than the other way around. Everyone was 'getting rich', and churches needed an excuse to make that okay.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:22 PM on November 13, 2009

Did we do it wrong?

No, but the system did, by providing massive quantities of money at rates that are far too low. Good for you for taking advantage and getting out of debt, but as you can see, it's not good for the overall economy.

It feels great, though. For awhile.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 7:33 PM on November 13, 2009

"Reducing the number of timezones" has been translated incorrectly from the original Russian.

It would be more correct to say "making those people who live in inconvenient places get up earlier."

:-)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:04 AM on November 13, 2009

The thought occurs that racism may be how humanity will speciate.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:23 PM on November 11, 2009

First, a minor matter of preference. If you're going to make difficulties called "hard" and "nightmare", you really have to make them difficult. I realize that not everyone has the same skill level so I'll even allow "hard" to be easier than I feel it should be. But "nightmare"? Really, this needs to be made a lot more difficult.

I strongly suspect your main character is a mage, or you're not playing on PC. (The... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:42 PM on November 9, 2009

As for the tank/dps/healer trinity, I've been trying to track down where those gameplay roles originated.

I think it really took effect in the MMO era, probably with Everquest 1. The entire reason for tank/healer/dps is because monster AI is stupid in online games. When they're having to run hundreds or possibly thousands of AI routines on just a couple of very fast computers, they have to be very simple. And so they made the game... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:28 AM on November 11, 2009

Well, it's true that you don't have to balance as religiously as you otherwise would, but I can tell you that playing the Normal difficulty version on the PC, with my main toon as a rogue, was punishingly difficult, where playing as a mage is pretty easy. I understand, now, how you can have me saying "Wow, this game is tough!", and Justinian saying, "Wow, this game is easy!" and have us both be right.

I've only gone through the Mage Tower part of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:21 AM on November 11, 2009

I remember being very underwhelmed by Great Giana Sisters way back when: it felt like a cheap, low-quality knockoff of SMB, and I had no interest.

Looking at that speedrun with fresh eyes, untainted by any nostalgia, I'm struck by two things. First, I was completely correct in my original assessment; it was, indeed, a cheap, low-quality knockoff. But second, it's also apparent that this was a one-man programming effort. The viewpoint changes when you realize you're... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:10 AM on November 10, 2009

Patents historically were intended to allow an inventor to profit from the invention for most of his or her working career, leading to the 17-year term. But the patented creation had to be fully described in the patent application, so that when it expired, the knowledge entered the public domain, free for all to use. This gave a powerful incentive to create new things, but it also meant that society as a whole would eventually get all the benefits.

This works really... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:50 PM on November 9, 2009

One thing that they talk about in the voiceover commentary for Portal is that physics gets very, very weird around portals, and there are zillions of possible bugs and edge cases that can do evil things to the state of your game.

IIRC, Valve said that they implemented little bubbles around portals with simplified physics; the bubble encompasses both the entrance and the exit. So if you drop something into a portal, before it gets there, it gets handed into a different... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:24 PM on November 7, 2009

Obviously, you should reason and negotiate with children, because they spring from the womb with their rational facilities fully intact.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:52 PM on November 7, 2009

You know, Jon Stewart's recent deconstruction of Fox News, while very funny, was also brilliant. He pointed out exactly how the bullshit actually works, in plain terms and without pandering to his audience.

Just because he's coming at it from the 'funny' angle, instead of the Dreadfully Serious Professorial angle, doesn't make his analysis any less cogent or incisive. Scholarly analysis is so often about the person doing the analysis, rather than... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 2:03 PM on November 6, 2009

Somehow, I doubt the judge would convict him, especially considering that the counterfeit was worth about 10,000 times as much as a real penny. :)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:42 AM on November 5, 2009

Man, talk about overthinking the damn dial puzzle. :-)
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 2:15 PM on November 4, 2009

The Great American Melting Pot, my ass. Jerk.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:28 PM on November 3, 2009

When I was three, my mother said to me
Eat up your greens and say your grace
While on TV they put a dog in space
And left her there
Should have seen her face

-- Moxy Früvous, Laika
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:04 AM on November 3, 2009

The primary driver of the three asset manias we've had (stocks, real estate, and debt) has been an excess of cash from the original source, the Federal Reserve. Somewhere in the mid-90s, the Clinton administration redefined the measurements of inflation, with the primary goal, of course, of making the economy look better. It appears that Alan Greenspan believed them, because right in that timeframe, monetary injection rates increased substantially.

Liquidity chases... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:24 AM on October 31, 2009

turned into a full-fledged

... mania. Left a word out.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:30 AM on October 31, 2009

Looked at from another angle: these bubbles were obvious at the time, and it's the Federal Reserve's primary remit to prevent this sort of thing from happening. Whether or not you agree with the causation argument, it's quite clear that they have utterly and absolutely failed in their role of oversight.

The housing bubble could have been stopped in its tracks at any time, almost overnight, by simply raising interest rates to a sane level. Securitization provided the... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:33 AM on October 31, 2009

This is probably just a technical thing. If you lay out your maps so that they fit in a nice clean rectangle, then you can jam all the maps into a single block of RAM in the cartridge. As Link moves around, you just change the X and Y index pointers by a fixed offset into that chunk of RAM, and voila, he's on a new screen.

The upper left screen would be at offset 0,0; the middle square might be 63,63, and the lower right square might be 127,127. It's probably using... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:59 PM on October 28, 2009

Actually, to be more accurate, each corner would be at a given byte offset from the base of the array. (bytes are organized like a number line, from 0 to however many you have.)

If each screen is X bytes wide and Y bytes tall, and your 'map' is N screens wide, to find the corner of the map at 3 right, 2 down, one simple algorithm would:

1. Hardcode the starting location for the map array.
2. Hardcode a bytes-per-screen constant of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:42 PM on October 28, 2009

Count me as another Wind Waker fan. I loved that game. The cel shading was awesome, and the atmosphere was first-rate. There are some visual shots (like the frozen monsters on the chessboard) that were stunningly awesome.

I can totally see why people would be bored by the sailing, but it never bothered me, for whatever reason. I had a lot of fun zooming around and picking up secrets. I think that was the first game with the camera mechanic, and I enjoyed that too.... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 9:52 AM on October 29, 2009

Any creature that can grieve and go through death rituals for lost loved ones should be extended basic rights.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:58 PM on October 27, 2009

It's kind of blowing my mind that you could believe all the crazy that scientology wants you to believe and then choke on the relatively mundane and common (although just as wrong) opinion of gays.

Eh, I dunno. The whole Jesus-does-miracles-and-is-resurrected-after-death isn't fundamentally that much more insane than alien galactic overlords killing people and making ghosts that haunt the living. Really, any particular religion's creation myth isn't... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 8:29 AM on October 26, 2009

Not directly related to programming, but an aside to that old canard 'knowing how long things take': Check out the Non-Deterministic Hardware section of this LWN writeup, a few paragraphs in.

Apparently, measuring hardware response times gives results that are not statistically distinguishable from random numbers. There's a link to a PDF paper about attempts to benchmark the Linux kernel; their results were highly imprecise timings for things. It appears that systems... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:05 PM on October 25, 2009

On the other hand, what if they'd taken the time they spent on the unit tests to make a nice GUI front end, or basic implementations of standard algorithms? It could have been more work for me to track down the bug, but less work for the average Hadoop user.

In many cases, the user would have been staring in baffled frustration at a more advanced program that didn't work, just like it didn't work for you. The unit tests allowed you to diagnose and... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:28 PM on October 25, 2009

greasy Cheetoh fingers

That's something that keeps striking me repeatedly with these demos; we really want to have the same device be both input and output (touchscreen and display), but hard physical reality is that we are oily critters, and leave smears on everything we touch. On something like a keyboard, that smear isn't visible and evaporates, but on a smooth display surface, it looks awful.

It really seems to me that in... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:16 PM on October 21, 2009

Wow, ChurchHatesTucker, that's almost exactly what I was thinking about. Note to self: read all links before posting.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:18 PM on October 21, 2009

What a neat short radio program. Thanks for posting it!
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 3:08 AM on October 21, 2009

This appears to be an issue of breaking election law, in that they're using SQL code (which is most emphatically interpreted code, in direct violation of some statute or other.) But from what I've seen of the actual code itself (very limited), there hasn't been any demonstrated effort to build in hooks for fraud or any such nonsense.

The current code examples appear entirely benign.... hiding a candidate, for instance, is extremely common, if they're in a district... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 11:32 PM on October 20, 2009

And the republicans were the ones who opposed using statistical modeling to estimate the true number

I think I'd rather have the direct count, myself, even if it's lower. Statistics can be bent in all kinds of strange ways, and given some of the really crazy justifications you see in other government numbers, the devil we know strikes me as preferable. A direct count may be low, but at least it's honest.

And, overall, I'm of... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 5:07 AM on October 20, 2009

Is it that hard to go uncounted? In 1980, I was living alone in West L.A. and got the Long Form Census in the mail. Dropping it in the wrong pile in my filingpiling system, I forgot about it until Spring Cleaning 1981 and never got a knock on the door or even a 2nd Notice in the mail.

I was slow in the 2000 census, incredibly busy, and they just would not leave me the heck alone. I don't remember whether I got reminder notices in the mail, but they... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:23 PM on October 20, 2009

If you read nothing else today, make time for this article. It's freaking awesome.
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 10:49 PM on October 19, 2009

Sophist: it doesn't sound like this theory is very different,

Well, it's far advanced over the version I learned in school; there are specific metabolic pathways described, a description of how the scaffolding might have served as replacements for cell walls before they were evolved, and how that scaffolding itself encouraged the creation of both RNA and DNA.

The other theories that I've been exposed to don't really even... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 12:22 AM on October 20, 2009

Further, it's worth pointing out that scientific results have accelerating returns; results from research this year allows further research next year, which allows even more research the year following. Particularly in a field this new, where we know so little, this is very much like compound interest, and spending $100,000 this year to spark off $10,000,000 in research next year may be completely worth it, even if waiting a year drops the initial $100k to $10k.

I... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 4:57 PM on October 19, 2009

Masses of people are losing the plot of civilization, getting lost in their own fantasy storylines.

This is true in an awful lot of disparate areas. We substitute wishful thinking for hard reality, because we're insulated from the details.

Idiocracy is coming true, in a sense; whether through genetics or simple laziness, we're no longer smart enough to maintain a civilization as large as we have. We're overrun with liars,... [more]
posted to MetaFilter by Malor at 1:45 AM on October 18, 2009