We're talking fifth edition right back to beta here but anyway... Back in the 90s my best deck was the goblin deck with instants like lightning bolt/hammer of bogadan. In a slight mutation of that i mixed some of my goblins with big green creatures such as wurms. In such a deck such cards of spring of life proved invaluable. I used to have a friend that used to play countermagic that won alot. We're talking a purely blue deck here. Big creatures (such as the leviathan with cumulative upkeep) are impractical but the game is won eventually, if slowly.

Magic The Gathering - Posted By - Karma received: 0

baaah! humbug! drinky horse was better

Random Stuff - Posted By - Karma received: 0

A similar idea in that you're learning a language (Java) and then using different technologies with the same language.

Java Programming - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I prefer hard-cover books. As was mentioned above they have a better longevity. What to do with the dust cover while I am reading, though, is a question that has puzzled me since I first read See Ben Run. I can read ebooks, but I try to avoid it. I find I get fatigued far quicker when reading from a monitor for long periods without a break or distraction. In my PDF reader I can only see one page at a time comfortably. In a real book, I can most often see two. I find that with paper books, I am able to recover my position in a page easily because my eye can go back to that position. In an ebook, you're mostly dealing with scrollbars controlled by the mouse. There is no real "muscle memory" to be had there, so I can take quite a bit longer to go back to my position.

Books/Reading - Posted By - Karma received: 0

It's really just a matter of learning Java. When you've done that, using J2ME is not much more than just a matter of using some libraries.

Java Programming - Posted By - Karma received: 1

The other argument is the economic standpoint, less people in the prisons, meaning having to pay less taxes. I personally scoff at arguing such a utilitarian point in regards to a human life. I hear that with appeal processes and so on, an execution in America costs more than simply keeping them locked up for life. And given the amount of people actually executed in America every year, it's not as if they're going to be having to build extra prisons to house the extra convicts any time soon.

Politics - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I used to be really into twitter. I even got so sucked into it that I would use the text message feature to text in what I was doing when I was, say, walking down the road. My favourite trick would be to pinch a friend who also used twitter's mobile phone and send a message in saying something like "pooed myself". In the end I stopped using it, though, and in fact deleted my account. Why? Well, a similar reason to why I stopped bringing my digital camera on nights out. You spend scary amounts of time documenting (whether through telling twitter or taking pictures) yourself having fun rather than actually getting on with it.

Internet - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I've only ever played Nethack and Angband. Nethack is the one we all know and love. I have recently started playing as barbarians, which are really tough and have got me to my best depths in the dungeon. I still haven't ascended yet, though. Angband is based more on Lord of the Rings. You start off on the surface and there's a bunch of shops up there, which is a nice start, considering in nethack you can even find yourself burning prayers before you find a shopkeeper. The thing that put me off with Angband, though, is that the dungeon levels (other than the surface) are re-generated each time they are visited, so no place is the same twice. This spoils some of the fun for me.

Games - Posted By - Karma received: 1

If it takes 20 minutes to write, haven't you thought of doing it in a text editor then just pasting it in? I do that with anything more than a few lines long.

Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I think what they give in hospitals is more "oxygen-rich air" than just pure oxygen.. at least it must become that between leaving the cylinder and getting into the body.

Evil - Posted By - Karma received: 3

David, GB is the most heavily surveiled country on earth This is true. In fact, they say that if a person walks through the centre of an average city here, they are likely to be caught on film over two hundred times. The "surveillance bug" is catching on so badly here that people have even taken to installing CCTV systems to monitor their own homes. Businesses blatantly break the law by filming public areas such as pavements and get away with it. On a slightly different note, in some shops in London it is perfectly normal practice to have any bags you are carrying searched as you leave the store. People accept this, again under the "if you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear" maxim.

Australia - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Survival of the fittest?

Evil - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Well, survival of the aerobic as opposed to anaerobic organisms.

Evil - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I might be rehashing here, but for it to exist it must be perfect. If it cannot exist for whatever reason, it cannot be perfect. modus tollens?

Philosophy - Posted By - Karma received: 1

This pate is awful. it contains more marrowbone jelly than pork liver!

Random Stuff - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Random Stuff - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Could have used that as my avatar.. oh well

Random Stuff - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I've done it before when I've lost all the music from my hard drive and all I have left is the music on my ipod.

Tech Support - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Modus tollens says, if B is false, then A must be false too. Yes, sorry about that. Got a bit over excited in my rush to put the logical death match on the air

Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I absolutely hate two pints of lager and a packet of crisps. It's all that is on at this time of night other than weird films from the 60s and gambling shows, though.

Random Stuff - Posted By - Karma received: 0

to quote Jeeves: "I prefer the term jovial"

The holy church of Rob - Posted By - Karma received: 0

ah.. sorry, that went straight over my head when I replied to it

The Seven Deadly Sins - Posted By - Karma received: 1

the problem with this is that i can prove absolutely anything using logic... proving that circular logic 'works' is no less impressive than me proving that i am the almighty thunder god of the universe, which i can prove in no more than three (3) easy steps. (1) I am always right (2) I am always right (3) I am the almighty thunder god of the universe like this?

Mathematics - Posted By - Karma received: 1

For those who don't know, simply put: modus ponens: if a is true, then b is true modus tollens: if a is false, then b is false. Modus ponens is a simple form of proof: If there's water falling from the clouds, it's raining. Modus tollens is more indirect: If it's not my birthday I can't be having a shower.

Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I don't understand; why is statement (2) still necessary after the addition of statement (3)?

Mathematics - Posted By - Karma received: 1

lol... well, give me pencil and paper and i can give you pi to many significant digit, but ask me to remember, i cant make it pass 5 digits. I use a simple sentence to remember pi to six decimal places: How I wish I could calculate pi 3 .1 4 1 5 9 2 Another key moment in my geek journey came shortly after the first time I typed: qbasic

What Is A Geek? - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Well barainiac be as good now it's Vic Reeves presenting though?

Philosophy - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Harry Hill is my all time favourite comedian. "I have a really nice stepladder. Sadly, I never knew my real ladder."

Comedy - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Sad as it is, most, if not all, of the English speaking world these days is not a lot more than a sock puppet of America. It's the same here in the UK. There's not a lot of point in us having any laws of our own anymore. A lot of the culture here at least is governed by America and that must be a big decider in how people act. Also, no-one seems that bothered about the draconian American-style laws being introduced such as ID cards and not being able to take liquids onto aeroplanes. "If you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear", a lot of people say. I think those people miss the point entirely.

Australia - Posted By - Karma received: 5

When I'm walking: people who ride bicycles on the pavement When I'm driving: people who ride bicycles on the road

The Seven Deadly Sins - Posted By - Karma received: 2

I'm reasonably new to bonsai, having never tried to grow my own from seed. Can anyone suggest a nice hardy tree that I can try for starters?

Bonsai - Posted By - Karma received: 1

High-definition television and video. Yes the picture quality is much better and by being an early adopter you look like a bit of a pimp. The rub, however, is that to use next-generation devices such as high-definition DVDs and such, you have to use proprietary encrypted connections, which exist to make unauthorised copying harder. The specification of this connection is evolving, so some older HD equipment that claims to support the encrypted connections actually doesn't. Making backups of films will become nigh-on impossible. On top of all that, you're going to end up re-buying all those films that you bought on DVD to replace VHS on high-definition DVD, backwards compatibility or no, because I reckon that after a few years of widespread HD, watching a film at traditional resolutions will be like expecting someone now to go to an old theatre with the flickery screen and someone playing the piano in front of the screen.

Tech Support - Posted By - Karma received: 2

but havent we seen this sort of behavior elsewhere in history? when a nation or empire grow strong enough and have exerted some influence on others, somehow their law becomes the ultimate law, regardless of national boundary. Sadly this has happened repeatedly through history. Look at how the Soviet Union heavily influenced "satellite states" in eastern and central Europe in the 20th century for perhaps the most recent previous example of this.

Australia - Posted By - Karma received: 1

You can all cycle as long as I'm not driving or walking at the time

The Seven Deadly Sins - Posted By - Karma received: 2

I am in agreement. I have seen more proof in modus tollens.

Epic Hero Battles! - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I don't understand: if black matter is as yet still a theoretical stop-gap to explain all of the excess mass in the universe, how can we know which radiation to attempt to detect being given off by annihilation?

Astronomical - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I like Hugh Laurie's work in house. double plus good!

Late Night TV :D - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Normally I wouldn't be that fussed, but hopefully these are the last exams I will ever have to do.

Students - Posted By - Karma received: 1

For me, probably sitting up on bright summer nights as a small child reading my encyclopedia when I was meant to be sleeping.

What Is A Geek? - Posted By - Karma received: 3

Well, first we have to consider that many fish that are large enough to swallow a person whole are filter feeders, so it's not physically possible for anything as big as a person to be swallowed without injuring the fishy. I also think (and I'm not an authority here, just my reasoning) that a fish's stomach, just like any other contains all sorts of chemicals. Not just stomach acid but also the fumes that they must give off in such an enclosed space can't do you any good. I think it is conceivable to survive in a large fish for a time, but probably not in its stomach. If you could stay in its throat or something, then perhaps.

Geeks In Wales - Posted By - Karma received: 2

I'd say five hours of Murder, She Wrote would about do the trick.

Philosophy - Posted By - Karma received: 0

dont matter how i lay or sit or stand, as long as i sleep with the girl i love, the love of my life, in my arms. Don't you either get hot or decide after a while you need to "change stance" as it were?

Nocturnals - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Diagonally is indeed the only way of sleeping.

Nocturnals - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I must admit, the idea of science that can pin down how I act/feel and why can seem a bit unnerving at times.

Psychology - Posted By - Karma received: 1

vvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvvm

Science - Posted By - Karma received: 0

My favourite number is 70, the smallest weird number

Mathematics - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I say tomorrow's another day. A good night's sleep, and I'm normally as good as new again.

Life - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Same as bonk here. Although sometimes I think I'd have got into a better university if I had have arsed myself to do some homework/coursework.

Help! - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Pro-ses-ing Day-ta herbs (not urbz) or-ee-gano bah-sil

Linguistics - Posted By - Karma received: 1

It depends on the context I suppose. In computing, null can mean something, but something unknown.

Random Stuff - Posted By - Karma received: 2

I think having the legal age of drinking at 16 is a bit too low. Sure, I myself started drinking before I was even 16, but looking back, I don't think I had developed the maturity or understanding of drinking to enjoy it in a responsible manner. Before I turned 18 I was always gnashing my teeth at the way that I was unable to legally buy alcohol, as that was the "thing to do". Now I realise that it was probably dangerous and the times of sneaking into bars and more often than not getting chucked back out again were not so great after all.

Sex - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I love nothing more than a rare steak. I hate nothing more than waiters saying "sir, you do realise that rare means it'll be nearly raw?". It's as if they're expecting the Mr. Bean steak tartare sketch to happen.

Green Geeks - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Likewise, I don't even take paracetamol unless I'm in quite considerable discomfort.

Life - Posted By - Karma received: 1

In principle you would do it (as I daresay, would I, if the situation were that dire). But could you?

Life - Posted By - Karma received: 4

I am hoping for a brand new Vauxhall Astra at some point. Just need to get a few grand from somewhere...

Chit Chat - Posted By - Karma received: 2

No, but are they similar to transactions in other DBMS software?

MySQL - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I scrunch. That way your toilet paper will give you more bang for your bucks.

Life - Posted By - Karma received: 3

In that case, no, but I have used similar technologies in other DBMS software

MySQL - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I don't eat duck. That's because I just like ducks that much.

Green Geeks - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I have had an ipod for nearly two years now. I am overall not very happy with it though; the battery lasts ~4 hours tops, and of course I am forced to use the MP3 format for the music.

Gadgets - Posted By - Karma received: 1

It's not that I have a particular dislike for mp3, but up until getting the ipod all of my music was in Ogg Vorbis, which has had to be re-encoded to go on the ipod.

Gadgets - Posted By - Karma received: 2

I agree with bonk. I think they have it about right here in the UK.

Sex - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Mmmm.. Got a solid 7 hours last night with a cool breeze coming in the window... wonderful! Sounds like some good sleeping. I can't do that myself, because my flat is on a main road, the pavement is a popular thoroughfare for people returning from nightclubs, and on top of that, my bedroom window is just above a beeping traffic light .

Nocturnals - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I'd never heard of it, looks quite interesting, though.

Programmers - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I've noticed a lot of people saying Java. For me, Java is something I use to put food on the table. On a nice Sunday afternoon, I like to get the more 'fun' languages like brainfuck out

Programmers - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I don't usually like/read digg but I think their latest blog posting, in which they say that they will no longer remove submissions that discuss the code and to hell with the consequences, was the right thing to do.

Chit Chat - Posted By - Karma received: 3

Call my cynical but SoundExchange *would* put this. Surely the first person who could actually afford to fight these soulless bastards in court rather than settling would see this chucked out as nonsense?

Politics - Posted By - Karma received: 2

Read brainfuck program. Died Shortly after.

Stories - Posted By - Karma received: 1

I doubt that I could really find any wrong in what he says. He has been described as "Darwin's Rotweiller" and as a professional atheist. He knows what he is saying and even if I was against his way of thinking, I doubt that I could find any holes in his thinking that he wouldn't shoot straight out of the water.

Skepticism - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Squirtle for me. I don't know why, I just like him. And s/he grows into Blastoise too, who kicks arse.

Pokemon - Posted By - Karma received: 0

My favourite DS games: Animal Crossing (yes, I play this and I'm a boy) Mario Kart Advance Wars DS I still play these games, if not on a daily basis, even though the most recent purchase was back in early April 2006.

Nintendo - Posted By - Karma received: 0

It's a general problem with passwords. I would imagine that some people do indeed use the same password for this and their emails, and furthermore, that some of them use plain English words, which as you indicate, makes cracking laughably simple. I read an article quite some time ago that suggested people are better advised to list their passwords on paper and keep the list in their wallet. That way people can have distinct, stronger passwords for each site that they can look up. Moreover, if someone did take their wallet, they're more likely to be interested in money or credit cards than their password to myspace.

Hacking - Posted By - Karma received: 0

It's really tough to decide who I would call the greatest scientist of all time. There's a list as long as your arm of scientists without whom we would have a lesser understanding of the universe, life would be a lot more difficult or entire chunks of the current population just wouldn't be here. I would have to agree with Ati and say Stephen Hawking is about the greatest scientist of our time. After reading A Brief History of Time, I felt like I understood the universe around us infinitely better than before I started the book. And I'm not even a physicist. In fact during school it was my weakest discipline.

Science - Posted By - Karma received: 2

If I could get USB connectors for my controllers, I would probably play emulators more. I've had my NES for well over fifteen years now, and when I can get games to load at all, something as tiny as a butterfly flapping its wings in Tokyo can be enough to make my NES lock up/reset. Only problem is finding good roms of some of the games. Some of them aren't very good copies or have entire chunks missing from them.

Home Theater Geeks - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Emacs. It's so good and comfortable to use that I'm always finding myself pressing C-x C-s even in applications such as MS Office. When I'm bored, I can play with all of those exotic meta commands, or try my hand at elisp.

OSS - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I saw a similar thing going around Twitter a couple of days ago. Since I have NoScript installed on my Firefox, my delicious wasn't affected. Perhaps in future the NoScript kind of technology (perhaps dressed up a bit so less-savvy users can at least try to use it) could come as a standard feature of browsers. Alternatively, all these sites could fix their XSS holes, although expecting every site that could be exploited in this way to actually do this is probably a bit of a tall order.

Hacking - Posted By - Karma received: 2

Picard. It takes some sort of a superhuman to be able to sit around drinking Early Grey all day.

Star Trek - Posted By - Karma received: 1

Hello all, I stumbled across this place after being intrigued by the banner graphic near the bottom of the "Why are geeks so often atheists?" article, which in turn I found on reddit. Not got many friends yet (none, other than admin in fact), but the communities look like they'll be cool to post to. How long has Shuzak been going?

Suggest Shuzak! - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I rent my place, so I can't go tearing my roof off and replacing it with solar cells, however, I do intend to get solar-powered chargers for things like my phone, ipod and DS.

Green Geeks - Posted By - Karma received: 0

Well thanks for the offer, but the main offender is a game that has been ported to that many platforms that I've long since got a decent copy for a different platform. Now I could download entire rom collections, but considering I have a dissertation to hand in in the next few weeks, it probably wouldn't be the best idea

Home Theater Geeks - Posted By - Karma received: 1

That's funny, I'm a procrastinating undergraduate student

General - Posted By - Karma received: 0

I've played with just about everything over the years, but I always come back to using KDE. I find that more minimalist WMs such as Fluxbox just aren't substantial enough for me for daily use. I find that Gnome always looks superb at first, but after a few days I start to feel restricted by it.

Linux - Posted By - Karma received: 0

As someone who writes a lot of code, I find it more convenient to use the numbers along the top as it reduces the distance my fingers need to travel to get the result. Quite strangely, though, I do use the number pad on the rare occasions that I use calculator or spreadsheet applications.

General - Posted By - Karma received: 1