Twilight Dirac

I have always heard that the food is awful, but as I haven't visited I have never had a chance to verify that. Also, the British accent is quite awesome.

Want kind of video game? The are various programs for game design hobbyist out there that have built in compilers that let you modify their base operation with code, which may be a good way to start. Their are also hobbyist communities out their dedicated to the same. The only one I am really familiar with is hbgames.org but I am sure their are plenty of others as well.

College is a great way to transition yourself into adulthood if you can avoid burying yourself into debt while attending it. I think the main problem is people who have no idea what they want from college enroll in pricey Universities that really won't offer them anything beyond want a community college would. As someone who has been involved in the University system for over a decade, much of the prestige of a University is based on its research activities, something you are unlikely to be involved with as a Freshman or Sophomore or even an undergraduate at all unless you are very, very ambitious. Year one of college you are going to be learning the likes college composition I and calculus I, and you aren't likely to take anything more away from classes like these when they are taught at Harvard instead of community college, and community college might even do a better job teaching these subjects as the professors won't be involved in research that they think is more important than you. Now once you get to junior and senior level courses that are highly technical in nature then having access to the best minds of a high ranking University matters, but that only does you good if you actually bother to enroll in such courses (I am talking things like special relativity and quantum mechanics here). If you are taking softball courses just to get your degree, having the best and the brightest available as instructors doesn't matter if all your interested in taking are courses like "Chemistry in Modern Life". So much like anything else you only get out of college what you put into it. I know from personal experience that their are numerous bullshit courses available that can be used in place of calculus, chemistry and physics for general education requirements (not really familiar with how to cop-out of other general ed requirements because I never specialized in those areas), and anyone who is taking them is essentially robing themselves of part of the education they are paying for. Take real college courses and even if you don't end up using them in your future career, you will have at least learned something and your life will be richer for it. So basically unless you already have a very clear plan on what your going to be doing or have some awesome scholarships, community college and in-state universities are the way to go. If you discover you are particularly talented in one area, you can often attend a better university as a graduate student, where the university's expertise and reputation will matter far more, and where financial assistance actually becomes easier to acquire.

I live in central Florida and rather like it. It is warm all year round so I rarely need to worry about protective clothing, and the outdoors tend to be bright and vibrant when it isn't raining, rarely is their any perpetual overcast. The state government is pretty decent as well. No state income tax, reasonable sales tax, generally lax laws and I can buy alcohol on Sundays (and from any merchant I want). The only major downside are the roads, which are always congested and filled with incompetent motorist, although I hear that is a problem almost everywhere, and at least Florida roads are wide, have proper medians and shoulders, and are laid out in a clear grid.

This list will probably be similar to that other gaming thread: Master of Magic - The best 4X fantasy grand strategy of all time. Many other games have claimed to be Master of Magic (Age of Wonders, War of Magic, Fallen Enchantress, etc.) and all have failed. The sheer variety and open ended nature of this game have never been replicated. Master of Orion 2 - The best 4X space strategy game of all time. The various elements of this game are just so much more inventive, original and fun than the likes of Galactic Civilizations or Sword of the Stars. Civilization 5 - The best "normal" grand strategy game out there. Although to be fair, arguable all Civilization titles and Alpha Centauri are classics in their own right. Baldur's Gate 2 - Best RPG of all time. Huge, rich world with open ended gameplay, huge variety of character options and excellent tactical combat. Ultima Series - Best RPG series of all time, at least up until the point where EA killed it (Ultima 8 and 9). These were always open ended games with immersive stories, detailed control over the main characters stats and equipment, tactical combat and what is probably the best dialogue system I have seen in any game genre. Final Fantasy 6 - Best JRPG of all time. This game broke all the irritating constraints JRPG's are normally subjected to. It had a huge, freely explorable overworld, a considerable degree of player directed character development, and surprisingly nuanced combat, all without sacrificing the characteristically strong Final Fantasy style story. Oh, and the villain actually succeeds in destroying the world. Super Mario 3 - Still the best Mario game of all time after two and a half decades. I never quite saw the same variety of settings and power ups in any of the sequels. Deus Ex - Best single player FPS of all time. RPG like character elements including skills and transhumanist augmentation that translated directly to an open ended FPS engine game that incorporated stealth, hacking and smart shooter elements. Honorable mentioned to Human Revolution which is still a worthy sequel that fell just short of the mark. X-Com: Enemy Unknown - Actually surpasses the original. Amazing tactical combat with a huge range of options including the use of drones and jetpack equipped troops with strong character customization and a very interesting strategic game.

Governments provide at the bare minimum the following three necessary services: 1.) They remove murderers, rapist, muggers and other criminals from society so they cannot continue to harm innocent people. There is no disputing that these types of criminals exist and need to be dealt with, as these crimes occur on a daily basis and these criminals must be apprehended by police on a daily basis. 2.) They prevent other governments from invading and annexing what would otherwise be poorly defended territory. 3.) They prevent gang leaders, warlords and the like from assembling their own personal armies of thugs and using force to compel the rest of society to serve them. The trick has always been to prevent any institution with enough power to contain the three aforementioned problems from immediately turning around and using that selfsame power against the population. Hence we have constitutionally limited government, democratic elections, civilian rights, separation of powers, a court system and a whole host of other controls to prevent this. It is far from perfect as these controls seem to barely work most of the time, but it is still vastly preferable to living under a local warlord who is subject to no such controls.

With the possible exception of the really early atari/intellivision generation, I think all generations of gaming have produced their share of both absolute crap and timeless classics. The NES in particular had a parade of unplayable crap, but it also had the original Zelda, Mario 3, which I still consider the best Mario game of all time (and Mario 2 was awesome in its own right), and an excellent port of Ultima 4 to name a few games. The best thing is most of these games are still playable and still hold up, and thanks to gog.com in particular many of them can be run on modern computers with a minimum of effort. Among the games that have never been topped in my opinion are: Mario 3 Ultimas 4-7 Master of Magic (which I have been playing recently) Master of Orion 2 Alpha Centauri Star Control 2 Baldur's Gate 2 Deus Ex (although Human Revolution comes darn close to topping it) Final Fantasy 6 Most of these games are 1 to 2 decades old and are just as deep and complex as anything released today. Which isn't to say that the current generation is bad. If anything, there almost seems to be too many games out now, you can spend entire evenings just browsing the Steam catalogs. Current generation games that I think will stand as timeless classics include Civilization V and X-Com: Enemy Unknown/Enemy Within, and maybe Planetside 2.

I broke out my copy of Master of Magic this week and won a game as a Nature mage / conjurer. This game is still a blast even after two decades of age.

I don't hold anything against Sandler, he seems like a nice enough guy, I just think his movies are terrible.

There is no substitute for classic rock. Bon Jovi, Guns and Roses, AC/DC, Elton John, just really good stuff.

Recently Beyond Earth and its troll stations that constantly drop in your ideal settling spot. If you have played this game, you know what I am talking about.

There is a special place in Hell reserved for the awfulness that is the Adam Sandler movie. I never understood why people like this guy's work, his material is downright painful to sit through.

Do the likes of spoonyexperiment.com and sfdebris.com count? Because I find a lot of these guy's videos absolutely hilarious.

The biggest one for me is the hacking minigame in Deus Ex: Human Revolution. You hack things so often that this minigame becomes downright tedious, I vastly preferred how this was handled in the original were it was simply a factor of time and resources. I played through HR twice and might very well be compelled to play through it again, except that I just loathe to go through this minigame. I wish I could find a mod that disabled it. I also second the Ethereal and indeed anything psychic power related in the original X-Com. Psy powers were completed broken in that game.

Ok, this is a notational issue. If you want to use this notation, you still need to keep track of the fact that their are two distinct roots and that OP flipped them on you when he moved the minus one in the radical into the denominator in steps 4 through 7.

I always found this idea quite absurd. Of course it makes a sound, all the physical mechanisms for doing so are in place even if you are not their to observe it. What I find particularly odd is nobody ever proposes the converse of this situation. It a falling tree somehow managed not to do something that occurs every time it is observed just because no observer is present, why not have the falling tree do something that is never observed just because no observer is present? How about if a tree falls in the forest and nobody sees it, does it suddenly turn purple? That proposition makes just as much sense, but nobody seems befuddled by it. The standard explanation is that to earn a Ph.D., you must add to the total sum of human knowledge or something along the lines. A simple paper will not suffice. You can obtained a Masters with Thesis by writing a technical paper, but not a Ph.D. You must discover something new. It is actually quite easy to discover something new when you start to get highly specific, highly specialized and highly technical. I earned mine by making a twisting beam of light, another professor already knew how to create it mathematically, but I came up with a specific arrangement of optics needed to bring the required mode superposition into reality to create the twisting beam and that got me a Ph.D. A colleague of mine showed that if you focused ultrafast light with a sufficiently short focal length lens, it could filament without the assistance of the Kerr effect, which is usually consider the culprit for that kind of effect. A lot of the other physics related to filamenting light were understood, but nobody caught that nuance. That earned him a Ph.D. The whole original contribution thing is not that hard to do once it gets this absurdly specialized. Actually this phenomenon is widely recognized and well understood. It goes by the name of "photonic crystals" and "photonic bandgaps". Basically, if you can design a material or cavity that won't permit energy transfer at the frequency of spontaneous emission, you can keep an atom in an excited state. It is a rather active area of research and these structures are now being designed into optical fibers. They got nothing to do with Dr. Milo Wolff's rules, as an atom doesn't need to "see" anything to radiate into vacuum, but blocking spontaneous emission is doable.

I don't know where you got this idea from, but it is wrong. The square root of n, is by definition, the number r such that r^2 = n. So if n = 2, then r = -2 is a valid solution because (-2)^2 = 4. Don't rely on the conventions written into machines, they typically assume that you already understand the mathematical nuances of the square root function.

But the problem is further defined. You started with +1 before using the square root expressions, so when you switch back and get +1 and -1 as the answer, you better darn well pick +1. This problem is little more than a sleight of hand that tricks the reader into choosing the wrong root, thus giving a nonsense answer.

I second (or should it be fourth?) Vital's explanation. The dual value of the square root is how you managed to flip the sign.

You can sure as heck do worse than majoring in a foreign language. Mastering a second language is always useful. However, it may be less than an ideal candidate for earning a Ph.D. in. A Ph.D. is a research degree, and I am not certain how much research can be conducted in the field of knowing Spanish. Just earning the degree requires you to discover something nobody else on the planet knows. For the sciences, this is actually quite easy, but I am not certain how this would work with Spanish. I almost think you might end up doing a bunch of historical and anthropological research, both to earn the Ph.D. and to actually use it. The difficulty associated with earning a Ph.D. in Spanish is probably why you aren't seeing it offered in the first place.

That is quite bizarre. It is probably one of the most original Mario games out there and at the time it was down right revolutionary.

I second Navi from Zelda I second the Starfox crew I also want to add ClapTrap from Borderlands

This is the first time I have ever heard that argument or of the game Doki Doki Panic.

I always enjoyed the music to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, it fits the game perfectly. Also, the original Deus Ex has perhaps the best title screen theme ever. Beyond Earth which just came out also has a stellar sound track.

Whenever I log onto Steam, I find a store filled with more games than I could ever have a chance to play. If anything, the market almost feels over saturated now. Here are some recent released that were downright awesome: Bioshock Infinite - 2013 Borderlands 2 - 2012 Divinity Original Sin - 2014 Planetside 2 - 2012 Guild Wars 2 - 2012 Civilization Brave New World - 2013 Civilization Beyond Earth - 2014 StarDrive - 2013 X-Com Enemy Unknown - 2012 Diablo 3 - 2012 FTL - 2012 Lord knows what else you can find in the Steam store. I keep on meaning to check out Starport Gemini myself.