The Gaming Den

Um, tzor, your argument in favour of wasteful expenditure of resources, the continued destruction of civil rights, and the general inconveniencing of travels is that somebody you know died? You also appear to be trying to justify the TSA using the nonoccurence of a 9/11 scale event on American soil ...

That's a simple binomial distribution question. You have N tests (i.e. N dice) and want to calculate whether you get R successes (i.e. R hits) then the formula is nCr * p^r * p'^(n - r). P is the probability of success (i.e. change of getting 5/6) and P' is the inverse of that probability (i.e. 1-P,...

http://scienceblogs.com/notrocketscienc ... istake.php

This... explains a little.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2wLYgbS8HeA

Make of it what you will.

My father had his bike stolen within view of five CCTV cameras and not a single one was checked. Why? Because the criminals don't stop committing crimes when they might get caught from CCTV footage - they just wear balaclavas or tights over their heads, or just trust that the police won't bother ch...

I, too, would like to read an Exalted rant. Even a preliminary version.

Cat's out of the bag about CCTV . Now the authorities are reduced to saying things like "but they make people feel safe!" I'll play devil's advocate here ... how many crimes were possibly prevented because pepople, knowing that they could be caught, didn't even bother to think about commi...

Cat's out of the bag about CCTV. Now the authorities are reduced to saying things like "but they make people feel safe!"

You know what else would make people feel safe? Being safe.

This is nothing unexpected. The LDP has been through how many PMs in how many years?

If some people will want to cede limelight in certain areas in exchange for more limelight in other areas, we could give limited crossover abilities that give bonuses in their minitier of origin, but are usable in others. For example, the Fairy Princess character might take A Lady's/Lord's Favour in...

Oh great, Republicans have Steve Forbes, OMG we are so evil. Democrats have George Soros what does that make them? The Democrats are not the ones claiming that the things they do are spontaneous and unplanned. In fact, it'd be pretty silly to claim that Obama's healthcare plan is spontaneous and un...

My real name gets a notice that I was born in the late 1800s, and nothing else. My pseudonym gets stuff on my pseudonymsake.

If you use the "Japan's rape rates are low" argument around someone who supports the ban they'll instantly respond with "Women in Japan don't report rapes". I believe that they'll use rape figures to justify the ban if they go down (look, rape incidence went down), but claim that...

People in the UK got riled up over MPs spending a couple thousand pounds to clean out their moats. We actually heard about it OVER HERE they were getting so much shit for it. They filled secondary domiciles on public expense accounts during a recession . That's not "oh, they lined their pocket...

Traditionally witch covens act to put only a single, powerful, curse on the target. Perhaps some way to add teamwork benefits to the curse-giving could cover that?

Umm, tzor, why am I to be afraid? It's a future possibility, not an imminent reality. It's even noted in the things you quote as being contested, with reasonable arguments both ways. You've yet to answer that criticism of your argument in any form. I'm not even afraid should the UNPA become an immin...

It's sort of one reason why the UN fails. Imagine if in the New York always wanted to score political brownie points against California. Now imagine if several of the big states, including the above two have veto power in the senate. Nothing would ever get done in the senate. Government requires th...

I just found it annoying that they say things like "Piracy is a crime" which is factually untrue. Piracy is a civil, not criminal, legal issue. At least in the UK it is.

Also, that video? I'm not allowed to view it; copyright reasons.

Disc standards do not need studio approval. See: VHS The fact that some studios own disc standards should tell you something is wrong. -Crissa Successful disc standards need studio approval. Even if that approval is gained after design, when the design is irrevocable. In modern times the degree of ...

I can see how they make sense, actually. It's not a good plan, but it was a reasonable attempt. Disc standards need studio approval, and the region codes were the simplest way (i.e. cheapest) to get studios on board.

International Waters and Oil Rigs are a separate region to most other places (Region 8 ). However, people in these regions probably use DVD players with different region codes from that assigned - I presume they use ones from the country of origin for most of their employees to allow employees to pl...

Yeah, I was just being snotty. I think that only three have used the veto power, though. -Crissa All 5 have . The People's Republic of China used their Veto a mere 6 times between 1946 and 2007, and every other permanent member has used theirs 18 or more times. The French Republic has used theirs t...

That's true. It's eight people with veto power over the rest of the world instead of three. The Security Council is comprised of more than 3 nations. There are 15 members, of which only the 5 permanent members (the People's Republic of China, the Russian Federation, the French Republic, the United ...

From this we have a plethora of problems in and of itself. First and foremost “how stupid” questions are in and of themselves rhetorical questions similar to the infamous question “when did you stop beating your wife.” There are, in fact, very intelligent arguments on both sides. Even the notion of...