Messages

"Mum, will I be a knight like Guybrush if I drink the blood of my little brother?"
Sounds a bit like an Eric-Cartman-ish line.

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If anything, I'd propose an Android port. It's getting so popular that there even are Net- and Notebooks running on Android nowadays. Plus, the underlying kernel is a linux one, so it shouldn't be too hard (hopefully). I do think there was a Mac port for AGS already, though.

(Not only does Windows Mobile suck, but you can't run around making a port for every OS used by 1 or 2 people. BTW, will you throw away your regular IBM PC once your HTC phone has arrived? Because if so, the last line of your post would apply to you, too.)

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Aye, same here.

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I think mine's blodvarg. Been a while since I last used Skype, though.

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It was a bit hard for me to get what he was saying, but from what I understood, didn't he say he snuck in in order to get positive proof that there's actually something happening "behind the scenes?"

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I'd so play this.

Pixelated,
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What about a disclaimer stating exactly what you said, that although the photographic footage depicts existing persons, they are not in any way linked to the characters they depict in the game?

Just a thought.
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But one thing's for sure: When I watched Trainspotting in English I only understood approximately 2/3 of what has been said in the movie. At least I could follow the plot.

Uh... wasn't that Scots? Anyways, if you want to clearly hear the differences between British accents, listen to a Manchester Radio Station and then continue with a, say, Bristolian one? Or listen to any song by The Futureheads (especially "First Day") and then continue with a song from, say, Hard-Fi.

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Right. Back to the initial question. ;-)

Here in Germany, what you learn in school is quite mixed up. In the first years, you'll learn British English, and British English only. Then, you switch to American English (and again, American English only) for a year or two, after which both the pupil and his/her teacher are allowed to choose which one to use, as long as they stick with it. That said, you don't learn genuine accents at all (which is why most Germans still speak with a typical German accent).

Most people will be heavily biased afterwards. If they've been to either country, they'll prefer the corresponding accents (and despise the others). Curiously, this is not true for people having been to Australia or New Zealand, they'll still choose between British and American accents (although most of those (read: everyone of them I know personally) would go for British). Other influences play a certain role, too. In the vicinity of Darmstadt, for example, you'll find quite a few Americans (they've still got army grounds there), so most of them (again: everyone I know personally) prefer American accents and are either completely neutral or negative when it comes to British accents. Same goes for people whose families have any kind of connection to either country ("My mum was a hippy in the 60s" does count pro-American, "the Americans are bringing their crap (McDonald's etc.) over here!" pro-British.). Again, the rules for people having been to any of those countries apply, curiously even stronger (dismissing the other accents as "not proper English").

Speaking for myself, I've been to Bristol (the UK one) quite a lot, and I have many very positive memories connected to that place, so naturally, I prefer British accents. (Funny thing is, I've developed a bit of a London-ish accent, although I've been there only twice.) I don't mind American accents though, I just don't think they sound as pleasant as British ones (at least around where I've been).

Although I do quite like how what I believe to be an urban New-York-ish accent turns "person" into "poison." That's your Freud right there, lads.

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P.S.: And yes, "skånskan" does suck. :-P

Everything comes down to maths. So everything is possible. I'm gonna go build a lab now and create a time machine.
Actually, that might not be too far from the truth, seeing as people considering it impossible to fly.
Let me just make up a theory: it is possible to remove background noise; a (very basic) algorithm could be recreating the foreground by the existing noise removal algorithms and then subtract a certain percentage (your 50% parameter right here) of that from the original audio.

No less impossible then the alteration of individual notes, which, I think, you really oversimplified, TerranRich. Just adjusting the waveforms would eventually result in a chipmunk effect or, of course, considering lower notes, the opposite. Trying to avoid that would be quite easy in the former, but leave you with blanks to fill in the latter case. You'd have to actually recreate the note from the original recording, exactly taking into account where an individual note starts and ends (which stops being simple when the player uses more than just two fingers). Considering the notes were not computer-generated in the first place, they won't be exactly accurate. Plus, you have the player's--let's call it "feeling"--to the song, so you actually have to filter out an individual note from, say, a 5 note chord, alter it, and put it back in again, of course with the original note seperated and removed from the other 4 ones. No more possible than seperating background from foreground.

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But the survey was still on the whole population, right? To take into account both consumers that stopped and non-consumers that started after the legalization? Anyway, assuming these are reliable stats, it's definitely weighing in favour of legalizing cannabis. Though we don't have the percentage of weed smokers in the population to know if that drop is actually significant as a whole. (How much money will be saved in absolute terms.)

Yup, all that was taken into account. I assume the stats to be quite reliable, because I remember my then-teacher in politics as quite a reliable person. Of course, I don't have the original sheet anymore, so I can't actually find the original stats and have to trust my memory, but from what I remember, it was exactly as I said--the "cool kids" doing it because it was illegal outweighed every other group of consumers, and therefore once they stopped doing it, the consumption rate went so far down that even if you took into account the Germans which still try to smuggle weed from the Netherlands to Germany (so, technically belonging neither to the population nor to the consumers), you still had a massive gain.

Or something like that.
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The consumption rate went down to 40% or went down by 40%? If it's "to", what was the starting percentage? If it's "by", from where to where?

From what I remember, it was "to" 40% (bear in mind that this discussion was about 5 years ago, so although the data of course doesn't change, it might have been "by" 40% and me just not remembering it). This refers to the consumers only, not the whole population, so in either case it's from 100%. Sorry if that one was a bit unclear.

Clarifying,
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Will I necessarily become sick because I do pot? No. But my chances of doing so increase. Multiply these chances by the number of people that would become users thanks to the legalization, you have a potentially very high cost.

Again, if we take Holland as example, the consumption rate actually went down to 40-ish %. And if you multiply something by 40%, or .4, the "potentially very high cost" actually decreases from the status quo.

Reminding,
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As pointed out earlier, legalisation has positive effects, p.e. shrinking consumption rate, economic advantage (i.e. tax) and such.
Plus, I find that an educational approach more often than not works better than prohibition. See p.e. the US of A in their 1920s.

Q.e.d.
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We discussed this back in school (in Germany, that is), and had the Netherlands as an example. After legalisation, the consumption rate went down to, I think, about 40%(-ish) of what it was before.
The cool kids do it because it's illegal? Well, then the solution is obvious.

By the way, there was one judge in Germany who fought for legalisation of cannabis. After stating that if it was illegal, so should alcohol be, he got so many letters with death threats (mainly from Bavaria) that he immediately got police protection. Made me think a lot.

Shrugging,
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Wow. That's kind of a new piece of information for me. I didn't know there were actual examples of grammar inventions. (Plus, I never knew the exact difference between nynorsk and bokmål. I always thought that was due to some spelling reform or something, because of the "ny," but never did any research.) Still, I consider my statement "true in the major part of cases." Because that's how grammar actually was created, people looked at how people spoke, and tried to find a set of rules (hence all the irregularities and exceptions).

My (hopefully not too harsh) rant against what I like to call "grammar pedants" (in a general sense--I do not mean to imply that any of the forum members are pedants) probably is due to my experiences here in Germany, where almost everybody complains about how people talk nowadays, using more and more English words and less German ones. Some actually see this as the downfall of the German language. (My standard reply uses the example of "level," the 'German' word for which would be "niveau" or "etage," both borrowed from the French language.)

Still, I can't imagine people who write "must of" instead of "must've" actually caring that much about current grammar, so this part of the discussion might not be as important as I (we?) see it right now.

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Exactly. By the same means, our current grammar has evolved. So you should hate the current grammar as well, not to mention all the ones of the last two millenia.

Seriously. Nobody has ever followed grammar (except for the pedants, naturally), grammar has always followed the people's language usage. That is why language changed, that is why grammar changed, and that is why every generation of language complains about the decay of the next one.

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There's a lot of things that are considered incorrect, but still are used in modern language. For example, in German, we are starting to use a tense the German language doesn't actually have, p.e. "Ich habs Dir gesagt gehabt," which would mean something like "I've had told you." There are a lot of languages (especially the Romanic ones, like French) having that tense, and we probably have it from there. However, it wouldn't surprise me if, a few years from now, we would have incorporated that into German.
Grammar is, and always was, a try to normalise the way people talk, a try to find rules for the respective languages. Hence, while it's a good thing to know your grammar(s), one shouldn't be too bothered if other people don't, because the mistakes of today might well become correct with time.

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Same idea, but a different coding style:

Code: ags

int d[] = { 1, 0, -1, 0 };
int x = startX, y = startY, len = 2, dir = 0; //startX and startY are the respective coords to start with.

while (boundary_check()) {
  for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    do_something_at_square(x, y);
    x += d[dir];
    y += d[(dir + 1) & 3];
  }

  dir = (dir + 1) & 3;

  for (int i = 0; i < len; i++) {
    do_something_at_square(x, y);
    x += d[dir];
    y += d[(dir + 1) & 3];
  }

  len++;
}

The "& 3" basically works like "% 4," but is handled quicker by the CPU, as it just binary-ANDs with "11." Also, we don't need two arrays, as the circles are basically the same, but biased by 1. If your boundary check is just checking the length, you could init len to 1, remove the len++ line and use something like "while (len++ < max_length) {."

I suppose Radiant's code might still be a tad more efficient, though.
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Yeah, I'll definitely be playing this, too. I'm past my Metal-ish time, but still.
Oh, and if you need a hand with the translation, just PM me--as of yesterday, I'm officially on holiday and have lots of spare time.

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