Bay 12 Games Forum

I kinda would expect the guy who was saying that he was going 40... to follow that by something like "...I didn't see the limit drop to 35 because the sign was blocked by a tree/large truck/etc."

I did make some lawyers (prosecution and public defender) WTF-face by asking the judge to double my fine once.

I had swerved multiple times while driving to dodge someone who, best I could tell, was determined to intentionally cause an accident; but all the cop could have seen from his position was me swerving.

The PD and Prosecution had agreed to dropping the fine to $25+25 'costs' or such, for $50; however, for some reason I was nearly the last case being heard that session.

While waiting both the PD and prosecution kept making simple mistakes, or were unprepared for cases, which was pissing the judge off; so when the prosecution gave his recommendation of the $50 fine, the judge said that seemed too low, and asked the clerk (or someone) to look up what the usual fine was.

At that point both the PD and Prosecution started arguing against the judge (instead of each other), and I had previously looked up the max fine could be $2500... So I raised my hand and asked if I could say something.

Me: "I was thinking that the $50 seemed kind of low, for a punishment to be effective it should hurt a little, I was thinking it should be at least $100"

Judge: "That's the smartest thing I've heard all day. So ordered."

PD and Prosecution: 

RE: Lion girl; do you think she realizes it's not a TV?

Walking home from elementry school one day, got offered a ride from my neighbor, in his fancy sports car.

Got home, went inside, never really thought about it again.

15 some years later, neighbor gets arrested for having molested about 30 other boys.

My first thought on hearing that:

My favorite thing about Skyrim is the potential for duel-weilding in the next Fallout.

But I hope I don't get disappointed like from the lack of horses in New Vegas... even if they were NPC only, like say, having the Khan's ride in to the battle at the dam... or NCR 'salvaged' power armor troops mounted like knights of yor...

But yeah, Skyrim just feels a little too generic; it's very good, but not quite great; evolutionary, not revolutionary.

To misquote Bill Gates (from the Simpsons)

I didn't get rich by writing a lot of checks.

...I don't know what hashmaps and dictionaries are.  So uh, what are they?  And what makes them so great?

Fast lookups in large lists of objets.

First you have to know what a binary search is, it's like how you (should) search a phone book, or a real life paper dictionary, start in the middle, and keep splitting in half until you find the item.

A dictionary (IIRC, I might be wrong, a dictionary could use a hashtable internally to store it's keys) does this on the field you specify as the key; so that a thousand item dictionary can be searched in 10 tests, or a million items searched in 20.

Then you have to know what a Hash is, it's a number generated from an object; a simple example of a hash would be to take the sum of the digits of a phone number, and then only keeping the last digit, so 555-1212 sums to 21, so a hash could be '1'.

A hashmap allows you to quickly locate a known object; it won't help you at all if you only have part of the data, like knowing the number ends with -1212 is useless in this case.

So, we have the phone number than hashes to '1', so we can store the '555-1212' in a sub-list (known as a bucket) referred to as '1'.

So, if we want to answer the question "Is 555-1212 on the do-not-call list?" we don't have to check bucket 0,2,3,4,5,6,7,8, or 9, only bucket 1; dividing the time to answer that type of question by the number of buckets (10)

A bucket can contain multiple items, '555-1221 -1122 -2211 -2112... all have the same sum of digits, so would end up within the same bucket; some hashtables (like the one in .net) automatically expand the table size as it gets fuller, trying to keep a balance between number of buckets, and the size of the buckets (as close to 1 as possible)

An advantage of a properly written and used Hashtable is that the entries are balanced, with an equal chance for any hash value; while if you load up a dictionary with phone numbers all in the same area code and prefix, it might waste time trying to narrow down to the whole set... like

500-000-0000
750-000-0000
625-000-0000
562-500-0000
...

which would be a watse if all your entries start with 555-XXX-XXXX

Quote from: kaenneth on January 10, 2012, 05:02:56 pm

Showering too long/often can strip the natural oils from your skin, leaving it feeling 'dry'

So, quick showers, and/or long baths are the best options; a long shower or quick bath is a waste of water.

I'd like to see the supporting evidence for this. My hair is the healthiest, thickest hair I've ever seen dangle from a man's scalp and I take showers every day.

Too often meaning more than twice a day, or more than for 30 minutes...

Showering too long/often can strip the natural oils from your skin, leaving it feeling 'dry'

So, quick showers, and/or long baths are the best options; a long shower or quick bath is a waste of water.