TheMightyEthan

I got the first two episodes for free from PS+, but I haven't gotten around to actually playing them yet.

I wouldn't say I found statics hard, I think I got a low B, I just didn't do as well in it as I did in my other physics classes.

For reasons unbeknownst to me statics was my worst physics class. I love physics, and did great in dynamics. I think it might have been my professor's teaching style just not clicking with me or something. @Mal: If you already failed it once I don't think you'd be doing yourself any favors by taking it on top of that already packed schedule, you'd just be setting yourself up to fail again. I'd drop at least one class if you're going to add the physics, especially if it means another lab.

Both are happening. Quantum entanglement that fuchikoma linked to (otherwise known as "spooky action at a distance"... truly; gotta love physicists) is one aspect of it, but the other is "classical transmission", which just means me telling you in some way (radio signal, laser beam, screaming across a room, whatever) something about what I measured. You can take that information and apply it to your half of the entangled pair. But yeah, how you transmit that data really has no impact on the underlying process. The entanglement means that the two particles affect each other instantaneously no matter how far apart they are, but that is useless unless you know what state the other particle was in, which is where the classical transmission comes in (and why it doesn't violate relativistic causality, which requires that information cannot travel faster than the speed of light). Basically even though the effect occurs instantaneously you can't measure it until you've received the classically transmitted information, so no information has been transmitted until you receive that.

What you guys are describing as pubs does sound similar to a lot of what we would call breweries. Yes, a brewery is where they make beer, but like FDS said in the alcohol thread American is the land of the microbrewery. There are a lot of bar/restaurant things that we call breweries because they brew their own beer on-site, in the back. Looking it up I guess technically these entities are called "brewpubs", but I've only ever heard them called breweries.

So I'm at the beginning of Chapter 2, but I just wanted to post my theory as to what's happening (partially for verification so that if I'm right I can say "I called it!" later): Don't tell me if I'm right.

We've got both kind of establishments like you guys are describing, but we'd just call them all bars.

But I mean Bob still has to DO something with the data. If I'm Alice and I scream across the room "It's in state 4!" or whatever that's not going to magically transform the particle ("transmit" in this case just means deliver the information in some way). I just want to know what it is Bob does.

So I just tried to read up on quantum teleportation and whatnot on Wikipedia, and my head asplode. I can't tell if it's a case of the writers not dumbing it down enough, them dumbing it down too much, or just being a topic which it is impossible to dumb down enough. *Edit* - I think it's that they're dumbing it down too much, because here's what I learned: 1 - Alice and Bob have entangled particles. 2 - Alice measures one aspect of her particle's state. 3 - Alice transmits that information to Bob. (So far so good, I understand it through this point) 4 - Something happens, presumably involving a wizard. 5 - Bob's particle is now identical to the state that Alice measured. All the articles skip step 4, how Bob takes the information sent by Alice and applies it to his particle, so that's where I get lost.

Should be taken with a grain of salt though, since obviously how many people pirate a game is extremely difficult to track. I wonder what the numbers would look like if they were scaled based on how many systems were sold. Anyway, piracy of course has some kind of impact, but trying to say what that impact is is next to impossible.

Scribblenauts and Advance Wars.

Yeah, I don't think there really are any common pub/bar names in the US, other than "The Library" which is popular in university towns ("No mom, I promise I'll be at the library all night...")

I believe that marriage is a sacred bond between M men and N women, where M and N are non-negative integers. @Jack: What was Rick Perry's mistake?

Yeah, I agree that's most likely, I'm just trying to be optimistic.

I liked Coraline a lot, but this is the first I've ever heard of ParaNorman.

@Strangelove: That was my first thought of Twilight Princess too (I played both versions at launch, because I had a Gamecube and my brother had a Wii), but I played it again on the Wii shortly before Skyward Sword came out and decided I actually liked the Wii controls better than the Gamcube controls. Totally agree about the NSMBWii controls blowing goats for nickels, though.

It's also possible it could be something like 360 did with Xbox 1 games: it upsamples some but not others.

WiiU has been stated to be backward compatible with "most" Wii games, but AFAIK no word on whether they're upsampled to HD or just rendered at original resolution.

*discs

Yeah, several people have suggested a deposit system where if they're fake/trolling/whatever they forfeit it but if it's a legitimate game they get it back. The "when" is definitely a question though, but ultimately that's just details. Really though I think Valve is just approaching this the same way they approach everything else on Steam: put it out there and then iterate, so in that sense I agree it wasn't really "thought through". Overall I think this is a good thing for indies wanting to get on Steam, but that doesn't mean it's perfect.

I don't think the issue is that they're unwilling to bet it, it's that a lot of indie devs, especially ones just starting out, are barely scraping by, and while they could come up with the $100 there's other stuff that they could use it for as well. That said, a few people have pointed out that if it's that much of a burden you could start selling your game elsewhere, and just use the first $100 of proceeds to put it on Greenlight. If you can't make $100 off it from other sources then it probably wasn't going to get Greenlit anyway.

Yeah, if you have an actual CD why didn't you just use it to start with?

I thought it was pretty great URL shortening. I've found that two of the best sources for anything contentious are the BBC and (ironically) the Christian Science Monitor.

It's supposed to be live in the US too.