mdemare

Any of you fellow SMAC fans play Beyond Earth? Is it a spiritual successor?

Oh yeah, totally! Surprised there hasn't been, thought it was a hit (for an RTS, that is)

Oh, yeah, SMAC is the best civ ever. Man, that game had atmosphere. The faction leaders were great. And the technology! Will we have to research Alphabet for the sixth time in Civ6? Well, SMAC had us research Mind/Machine Interface, Frictionless Surfaces, Digital Sentience...

And the Planet Busters! God, I'd love a SMAC 2!

You could easily live to ninety. If that happens, you expect to be working until ninety?

"Low-income residents in wealthy areas, such as New York City and San Francisco, have life expectancies significantly longer than those in poorer regions."

That's somewhat surprising. I wonder if the reverse holds - do rich people in poorer regions have shorter life expectancies than in richer regions?

But there are TONS of great games on iOS!

Ticket to Ride, Carcassonne, NS Hex, Battle of the Bulge, Agricola, Does Not Commute, This War Of Mine, Spider 2, Tiny Wings, Prune, etc. etc. I've bought 100-200 games, many of them very good.

XCom and Pandemic are the ones that I've spent the most time on. The iPad is a fantastic form factor for board games, and XCom worked better IMHO on iPad than on console or PC.

There's http://www.metacritic.com/game/ios for recommendations. Works well. That said, discovery on the App Store is simply atrocious. Absolutely terrible and a complete embarrassment for Apple since the start. Even recommending games to me that I already own!

Puzzle Games:

Java SE includes a lot, but it does emphatically not include a reasonable amount of useful string methods. These are the javadocs for string: https://docs.oracle.com/javase/7/docs/api/java/lang/String.h... and these are the rubydocs: http://ruby-doc.org/core-2.3.0/String.html

The difference is absolutely massive. When working on Java projects, I've always included commons/StringUtils reflexively, and even then Ruby is quite a bit ahead.

The same applies to collections / enumerables. There's a lot in Ruby that I don't like, but powerful "batteries included" standard libraries for the basics like strings and collections are the bedrock of any programming language. It only takes hard work to write them and test them, not any specific skill, so there is no excuse for all the language out there that are skill lacking, in 2016, a sensible collection of utility methods.

Not any capital city - Brussels specifically. There was a lockdown of nearly a week after the Paris attacks. People were really bracing for an attack, in a way that London, Berlin, Amsterdam, Vienna, etc. weren't.

I agree (about Python, not node.js). This was my introduction to Python. What a mess! Nothing quite worked, and the instructions were very incomplete. Install with or without sudo? System python, homebrew or something else? Python2 or python3? When pip installs libraries, then what's easy_install? How come I can't specify which python version to use for easy_install?

I tried pretty much every permutation, starting with the recommended one in the tutorial, and every one ended in a different error.

Don't get me wrong, the Ruby tooling situation for instance is probably just as bad, only I've gotten used to that by now.

Just imagine what would have happened if the Fed would have used their current strategy in 1995, or 2005.

The same as what's happening now? Sure, then blame the Fed.

Something dramatically different? Then maybe there's something else going on, and the Fed is merely responding to that.

I collect ebooks instead - better yet, I collect Kindle Samples, which are free. I can sleep peacefully at night, knowing that all books that I want to read are on my Kindle, and when I actually want to read them, I start reading, and buy them when I get to the end of the sample (and plan to continue reading).

Just "bookmark all tabs" (Chrome), and name them Tsundoko. Now they're just as accessible as before; you haven't lost them. But they no longer take up screen real estate or RAM.

Really miss him. I even read his posts on subjects I didn't care about, like Borderlands or Emacs. Read them all the way through too, sometimes more than once.

Being good at social skills also means being effective at manipulating other people. That doesn't sound so warm and fuzzy, but it sure is a valuable skill in management. I'm not sure if women have an edge over men there.

If Sanders is up against Cruz, and Trump is a 3rd party candidate, it's unclear who'd win.

> He has no chance of winning the general election even if he were nominated.

Well, that depends who he is up against. Imagine Sanders vs. Cruz with Trump as a 3rd party candidate...

Emm Err Deux

Jeff compares the DK2 to Quake resolution (640x480), but I think that's quite misleading. Quake looks terrible, to modern eyes, but that has little to do with the resolution, and much more with the low polygon count, low quality textures and the lack of lighting effects.

Run Far Cry 4 at 640x480, and it'll look much better.

I remember reading that Dutch windmills kill 30K birds per year. Dutch cats kill 30 million birds.

> Well, sometimes it can be wonderful to be in a place without any sign of civilization, except perhaps the road you're walking on.

Agree, but in Holland, that ship has sailed.

> In psql you can just edit your last command in your $EDITOR.

Cool! How?

Profits _are_ earnings. Companies that make no profit and trade at 30x earnings, trade at 0.

Good luck eating 3000kcal of lentils in one day.

Does this work when using the fish shell, which is not bash compatible?

Actually I assumed you were a time traveller.

You're probably not a native speaker of English, but of Latin. In Latin, `ignorare` can mean `not to know` in addition to its meaning of `not to pay attention to`, but in English, it only has the meaning of `not to pay attention to`.

Vale.

Another part of this mystery is that Dutch people don't really consider a 32-hour work week to be "part-time". Especially since in most sectors the official full-time work week is only 36 hours. I think I'm the only one of my friends working 40 hours.

Suppose there are 10M programmers worldwide. Should there be 10M programming blogs?

Negative interest currently only applies to a few banks and governments.

The goal of the central banks here is to get people to spend/invest their money instead of saving it.

Actually, The Paul Krugman delusion is the illusion that people have that they have much more insight in economics and economic policy than Paul Krugman, despite never having studied economics, or read a textbook or a journal in economics.