amishforkfight

This is essentially what 'swatting' is.

I don't believe there is anything 'weird' about the tie-breaker, it's a pretty standard technique - local elections, tournament tie-breaking, movie night voting. What's weird about using second and third choices to determine the best when there's a tie for the first choice?

What I think is really weird is why would a system put much weight, if any at all, on someone's 4+ choice? We might be coming up with a result that received the most points, but are we actually coming up with a result that the most people will be happy with, or is it the least boring thing that people will put up with?

I don't do a lot of this kind of work, but as an interested party with sunday spare time, I think the problem here is that you're scoring anything other than the first picks.

If you just look at first picks, Newbie HBase wins 3 to 1. If for some reason Newbie HBase was in a 2/2 split with Mapreduce and KIR (flip James's top 2 votes), you then take into account 2nd rankings, which in this case means Newbie HBase wins again.

I don't believe you ever want to take into account someone's griefer vote, too much potential to game the system with no benefit to the group as a whole.

Thanks for the repost, I haven't read this before and found it quite good.

She's a Star Trek character that died a few times.

I thought the abuse was part of the story. The lengths we will go to preserve ourselves, even to destroying the weakest of us in the effort. The subsequent Ender novels delve into Ender coming to grips with how he was used and what he did.

Granted it's been forever since I read them.

The idea of a basic level of income isn't that it goes away once I find a job that pays the same or more, it's that I'm always guaranteed that base pay. If I take a job that pays an additional 2800 per month, then I'm grossing 5600/mo.

I don't think there's any reason to believe that low paying jobs will just go away, and more reason to think that the people who want nothing more than those low paying jobs will take them.

As someone whose employer just underwent Chapter 11 and a subsequent sale, I hope that the power-jousting, cockfights, backstabbing, and general dumbassery that I experienced will not happen to the members of THQ. The lengths some people will go through for some token of power...

In most RTS games, an arbitrary Resource Mine generates resource X at a fixed rate, but the resource is delivered into your resource pool in fixed-rate chunks. 100 units of X per minute, delivered at the top of the minute (for example). You can't purchase Unit Y until you have all 300 units of Resource X, so you wait 3 minutes.

TA employed a continuous economy system where you were more concerned with your resource Bandwidth rather than total quantity available. Energy or Metal mines added +X of their respective resource to your pool, but it was continuous and if your pool was full, excess resources just vanished.

The unique aspect to this system was that the player could begin constructing any building whether or not he had the resources available to finish it. The player didn't need 300 units of Resources X to start constructing Unit Y -- he just started building it. The construction units would open up and start taking in Resources at their fixed rate. If the resource pool ran out of resources, aka your construction needs outstripped your gathering capabilities, all construction slowed to the maximum rate at which you were able to gather resources.

A liquid economy, still one of the most fun I've ever played.

Confirmed -- I've used WebStorm and it's derivative PHPStorm for several years, they are excellent IDEs.

Another blog that talks about an ambiguously-named product and provides no links to or descriptions of said product. I had no idea what Cheddar was after a couple minutes of skimming the blog posts.

I'd imagine the allure of getting in early, perhaps?

Who would get offended by that? It's not even close to offensive.

PNG8 (which IE6 supports) has had support for alpha transparency for a long time, but only Fireworks was able to create those files. I'm guessing that these guys are making PNG8s? I haven't tested the site myself.

I'd like to see the prosecutors of these cases jailed for the equivalent time lost by by those wrongfully imprisoned. "Sovereign immunity?" Sorry, I guess you should do your job then. If you find out later that you did your job so wrong that someone loses 10 years of their life, you sure as shit better be the first one in line unlocking their cell.

Public officials have great power, and there needs to be an equally great responsibility and consequence for abusing that power. And yes, being ignorant or making the wrong decision counts as abuse of power.