A title this would be, had I the originality.

I'll be returning to the US on the 11th/12.
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If you have a bunch of lights in series, and you know the mean time before failure (MTBF) per lightbulb, how do you calculate your overall MTBF? Or, same question, but substituting "lifetime" for "MTBF"?

I suspect it's not as simple as "each bulb has a 1 in 10,000 chance of failing in any hour, I have 100 bulbs, thus my MTBF is 100 hours", since the failure graph isn't linear, it's bathtub shaped.

This post will be written retroactively at some point (once I get enough comments!), and will be written in the future, so that as many of the comments as possible make sense.

So please comment creatively!

I can see it going several ways ways: people building upon each other's posts (which might shoehorn me), or competing with different topics (which might make the initial post harder to write), or they could do something I don't expect, or they could just not comment at all...

Phone had all my passwords from everything. If you've ever given me access to anything, please revoke it and change your passwords to be secure.

Admittedly, the passwords were encrypted, but there's no telling whether the reader of the encrypted files makes a temp version that's undeletable when it read them. I *think* it takes steps against that, but never tested. So just be safe.

Well, woke up to find a note through my door saying we were overdue for a bill we'd already paid, had to go to my landlord to sort that out.

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Day wasn't a total loss, though. I cooked us pizza and didn't burn it. Yay.

John Romero is probably the biggest Name in the gaming industry. Sure, amongst my circle of friends, Richard Gariott is bigger, but John Romero has household name status, and there's prettymuch no other game designer that can say that.

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Please sign this petition to stop the 2-warnings silliness. It's the one the ORG are recommending.
http://38degrees.org.uk/page/s/mandelsonweb

Someone on the nano forums asked this question. Here's my effort to answer it.

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There seems to be a common strawman attack (or a confusion?) that there exist people who claim that gods logically cannot exist. People who don't call themselves "atheists" claim this is what "atheism" means.( Read more... )

Went to the IGDA picnic at Richard "Lord British" Gariott's castle ranch today. Shook hands with him, the Fat Man, Mike McShaffrey(who did U8/9), most of the DomainOfHeroes.com crowd, and many, many others. And I ate far, far, FAR too much SaltLick bbq.

RG is currently suing his recent employers NCSoft for $24M, touring the country to give talks on his recent trip to space and preparing for another trip to space where he'll... get this... skydive down from space.

Tomorrow I prepare to drive 2000 miles back up to Wisconsin with Heidi, to pack up Her stuff and truck it all back down here.

I woke for the last time in my flat, my phone waking me after just two hours of sleep. I went one more time through my checklist: rubbish and recycling was out, a note was stuck to the letterbox to ask people not to stick newspapers through the letterbox, and so on.

( I was ready. )

No, WE are married :)
More later.
Please don't phone/txt about it though, it costs crazy money in Canada.

Photos here:
http://www.facebook.com/home.php?ref=home#/album.php?aid=100404&id=574621894

More later.
So tired.

It's getting close!

http://dewimorgan.livejournal.com/41687.html has our plans for the trip.
I'll try to take pics and stuff of the wedding, and stick 'em up here and My FaceBook.

We'll be meeting GT there too! Whee!

In English, there's no good way to autopluralise just by looking at the last letter.
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Solipsism is the philosophical theory that the only thing you can be confident in knowing is that you exist, in some form, by some definition of "exist". "I think, therefore I am."

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The Hero sets out, in the footsteps of his Mentor, tracking him, and ultimately finding him. they have time for a brief chat, then the master dies. Whether in a noble act of self-sacrifice, or a terrible act of betrayal, it doesn't matter, so long as he's dead.

Don't ever, EVER write this story.

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It's that time of life again! I had an enjoyable yearlong busman's holiday from my jobhunting, working for ABI. But I've pretty much worked myself out of a job now: the last of the projects I was hired to help them finish should be polished off by the end of the week, and it's time to dig out the old job harpoon and set sail again.

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Read an interesting post over at the aptly named Elder Game, about a brave attempt by City of Heroes to add user created content to a grind-based MMO.

People commented that the outcome (exploit quests galore) was natural: people don't like the grind, the grind is stupid. Making exploit quests to get around the grind is just common sense!( Read more... )

Every nation surveils their citizens on the net. So do ISPs. So do criminal organisations. But I repeat myself.

They do this because they can. Because we let them.

And by "let", I don't mean we give them permission: I mean we make it possible for them to do so. The US has proven that merely legislating against snooping will just mean they do it secretly.

The answer is to use no plaintext in your internet communications.( Read more... )

Anyone know of a good, up-to-date YUM repository for Centos, with Mysql 5.1 and matching versions of PHP 5.2 and Apache 2.2?
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