nickolai

a daisy-cutter. they're 30k a pop.

The Tropico series also do this pretty neatly (especially 3 and 4) - you can follow your 'tropicans' from their family home to the job, to the market for food, doctor, church etc. A policeman would follow your orders and run after someone you ordered arrested. Traffic path-finding is not perfect though.

But in Tropico, it is rare to have more than a thousand agents at any one time - whereas I think Sim City '13 has to simulate at least a couple orders of magnitude more agents. Not sure about that - I didn't buy the game.

>It feels odd to me that people can be so sure that games have no influence yet images of thin women in magazines has such a strong influence.

There is clearly an invitation to mimic the presented behaviour in both cases, however whether or not people follow up on this is another issue - mainly shaped by social norms. Being thin is socially acceptable and encouraged(whether or not it is a good thing is irrelevant). Killing people - isn't.

Also the action presented has to be related to the context it is presented in. An ad shows thin people in everyday life - so kids try to imitate by starving themselves in everyday life. Wargames present murder in context of a military conflict - well since we are NOT in the middle of a military conflict, there is no point imitating.

To be fair,

In any sufficiently-long comment thread, the probability of someone making $STATEMENT, approaches 1.

>> With the grasshopper technology the cost of a flight to orbit basically is the cost of rocket fuel...

>Even my car costs significantly more than just the fuel.

yes, but the cost of using your car for a drive from home to work is basically the cost of car fuel. As opposed to the cost of a full car + fuel because you decide to blow your car up once you get to destination, like we now do for rockets.

The thing is, having a comment in a tricky bit of code, and knowing that the comment may be confusing because some jackass (maybe myself six months ago ?) changed the code but missed the comment is IMHO still better than having no information whatsoever.

>Comments are for the weak,

Care to elaborate on this ? Commenting code is bad ? Or did I miss the irony ?

>Or do they have to channel the power into heaters each evening?

AFAIK, No. The battery generates 2kw of heat in addition to the electricity, so I dont think the rover even has any heaters.

    What time of the day do you usually have each activity? 
		Morning 	Afternoon 	Night 	Disperse throughout the day
    [...]
    Lunch
    [...]

Um... is that a trick question, or is there a part of the world where lunchtime doesn't separate the morning from the afternoon ?

> Something like a 2 year protection would give companies significant advantage, yet still allow smaller players to use the stuff in time.

Don't they take something like 2-3 years to only review the application and grant the patent at the moment ?

> In other words, they did the exact opposite of what the SOPA experience told them they should do.

No, from a strategic point of view, they did exactly what the SOPA experience told them they should do. Which is that if a generous contributor wants a possibly controversial bill passed, it has to be done as quickly and as quietly as possible. Or at least quickly enough to leave no time for an opposition movement to gather some serious momentum.

> Why wOuld I feel the need to inspect a book before buying it?

To make sure the pages will not start falling out before you're done reading it ? I had that happen to me several times with cheap paperbacks litterally falling apart before I was even through the first quarter of the book