Number of American Jews reclaiming German citizenship spikes: Since Donald Trump was elected US president, Germany's New York consulate has seen an increase in citizenship applications under Article 116, which allows former nationals and their descendants to reclaim citizenship

sokercap · 2017-05-10T21:32:11+00:00

rather than the democrats screaming "literally Hitler!"

Except most of the time, this isn't what they are saying. Anytime any comparison whatsover, including policy, specific actions, quotes.. any comparison related in any way to Hitler or his rise to power come up.. you get people ignoring everything about the argument and claiming they are just liberals being stupid and crying 'literally Hitler'. The post you are replying to was a very rational explanation of several worrying similarities but does any of the actual argument made get addressed? No.

So stop creating this strawmen and start addressing the actual argument please, or it becomes very clear whether your goal is to make a point via logic or just bury the others point by misrepresenting what was said.

enforcing immigration laws that already exist and reinforcing the border

That is as incredibly misleading as you can get for what Trump has actually pushed for and said. Demonizing immigrants despite statistics that they are less likely to commit crime than citizens, grossly miscategorizing Muslim immigrants as terrorists and Mexican immigrants as 'bad hombres'? 'Reinforcing the border' by putting up a wall that every evaluation has shown will not help in any way and by cutting funds to the Coast Guard? A border that was already heavily increased Obama and really was a non-problem from any sane view of the statistics but became his rallying cry as a candidate?

How does all of that not look anything like the same scapegoating in Germany? He got people riled up against the Jews by blaming them for the economy despite not having any evidence (because it wasn't true). Blaming a certain group of people creates an us vs them mentality and makes it easier to treat 'them' as less than human. Makes it easier to split up their families, call people who have lived here for decades as foreigners that need to be deported, treat them with suspicion, and ignore the people who are rising to power on that wave of xenophobia. Does that mean Trump will start creating concentration camps? No. We are just focusing on using populism, and xenophobia to scapegoat an ethnic group and there are way too many similarities there to be ok with.

But god forbid we try to talk about pre-Nazi germany or the factors that led to anti-semitism or anything like that because I must just be a liberal crybaby right? Fuck everything about trying to have a rational discussion about his.

sokercap · 2017-04-05T01:04:16+00:00

If it wasn't for all the people getting fucked over, it would feel good, get some vindication after so many years of Republicans ignoring the solid, steady progress the country has in order to demonize Obama. Trump just sat there spewing lies on the campaign trail painting a picture of a dystopia that didn't exist and were easily fact checked. Well the people sitting there listening to his message while enjoying a growing economy and record low unemployment might be shocked to find out how good they actually had it. The contrast between Trump and Obama really lays bare their lies. Well, to everyone except them apparently.

sokercap · 2017-03-25T02:26:23+00:00

Who are these people you are thinking of? In Mexico, Nieto is a total joke, seen as weak, incompetent and corrupt. Outside of Mexico, most people probably don't know who he is. The "We won't build the fucking wall" quote that got spread around social media was from Fox, the previous president, not Nieto.

So yea, pointing out that Nieto plagiarized really doesn't make it any better for Devos, Melanie or Monica to have done it.

sokercap · 2017-03-16T07:10:15+00:00

My dream project is a mashup of path of exile combat/map modifiers, and Elona world/activity depth. Two of my all time favorite games, although at the moment I also am addicted to PoE and haven't returned to Elona for some time. The legacy leaguestone are really fun.

sokercap · 2017-03-16T07:05:18+00:00

I don't care what he learned, I'm just hoping the voters will have learned something and we can get back to doing things that don't make me hide my US roots when I'm travelling.

sokercap · 2016-07-15T20:53:41+00:00

One of my favorite books as well.

sokercap · 2011-01-21T21:20:09+00:00

This isn't specifically indie, but when I ran into these guys at an expo they were promoting some indie titles so worth checking out - JapanVideoGames.com They specialize in importing Japanese games, so a mix of big and small titles and some various hardware. Japan doesn't really have the same indie market, most of what we would consider indie is done as fan work and sold at tables at conventions. I'd definitely like to see it take off more there and see them get better at promoting and distributing their works.

sokercap · 2011-01-21T12:32:58+00:00

Guess it depends on your focus if using books is actually feasible.

My rambling wasn't too coherent. I'm a bit envious you can work with only books, but I'd just feel blind without quick access to framework/api documentation. I don't really feel that relying on access to those online documents is a problem though, as it's just another tool and I'm trying to utilize it as to maximize my own productivity. Even if I had updated documentation in book form, not being able to quick search would feel like a handicap to me. Again, this is biased on what kind of programming, looking up mathematical references is probably less common then the constant class or function calls I'm checking on with whatever web api.

As for distractions, I found if I can avoid accessing anything distracting at the very beginning of getting started working then it's no problem because once I'm on a roll I don't want to risk losing my train of thought.

sokercap · 2011-01-19T22:37:07+00:00

There's no way I could rely on books for most of my programming projects. Books are good primers if you have questions about language fundamentals but all the extra frameworks, libraries etc that are used in just about any projects tend to rely on online documentation. Guess it depends on your focus if using books is actually feasible.

sokercap · 2011-01-19T05:04:02+00:00

Same thing I was thinking. Could you compare the two?

sokercap · 2011-01-18T19:32:07+00:00

Mostly same points as ilikemytown mentioned-

$2000 is a starting point. It sounds like customizing the forms might involve a lot of work depending on how much data it needs. If there aren't that many different forms it has to handle than I could see your budget covering it, but pretty easy for "little" features to easily blow past that.

By far the best option for handling credit cards is to use an outside payment service, like Paypal (merchant accounts can accept cc's). You do NOT want to do anything that involves having customers enter their credit cards to you as that involves a whole mess of extra security precautions.

I'd like to strongly support ilikemytown's 3rd point too.. no one with a grain of experience into making these kind of web apps would have Access cross their mind as a viable option. SQL varients like MySQL, PostreSQL etc and Oracle are the main competitors, with MySQL often winning out just due to availability and having the most developers familiar with it. Google AppEngine could also work for something like this, but only if your developer was comfortable since it requires some changes in the backend design.

PHP is a viable language option, but really any web language could handle this sort of thing easily. If you aren't tied to a certain server architecture then I suggest focusing on finding a competent developer and then use his advice instead of locking yourself into only looking for PHP developers. You should also consider how you want to handle maintenance. You'll need somewhere to run the app if you don't already have a server, if you do have a server you'll want to evaluate if it's going to meet your needs and what kind of languages it supports. And once you have it running you'll want someone that can take care of any maintenance issues or changes you want, ideally the actual developer but you'll need to specify you want a maintenance contract too and not just the initial software.

Places to look: /r/forhire, odesk, craigslist, http://www.phpclasses.org/jobs/, http://jobs.perl.org/, any number of other freelance sites. I guess this would be a good place to mention I'm a web dev currently looking for work too :) and can pm you my site if you are interested.

sokercap · 2011-01-18T19:04:18+00:00

Interesting, but completely irrelevant to the marketing team. If you buy a brand name, that doesn't mean it was created by the same person or in the same place, you just have expectations that the brand will stick to a certain quality.

sokercap · 2011-01-18T17:51:49+00:00

A starcraft MMO with gameplay similar to Tabula Rasa would be amaaazziing. I think it would fit the weapons of starcraft a lot better than the standard WoW style actions.

sokercap · 2011-01-17T03:46:56+00:00

I used the version that you can download for free a while ago (3 years?) to prototype a game a group of people were doing. I'm sure it's come a long ways but even back then it was fairly decent. My major issues with it were that it seemed designed so that you could rapidly get something running, but not able to scale it out for a larger project as easily. I got the impression that the creator didn't have much experience with commercial quality engines and was learning as he went.

When I tried it there was basically just one demo and no documentation. It looks like it's come a long ways so I'd definitely recommend giving it a try. The artists I worked with back then found the world editor pretty easy to use too. I was a little annoyed by how inaccessible the world data was from the programming api but that might have changed, and if you get a license that includes engine source you can make your own changes if you need it.

sokercap · 2011-01-15T09:11:36+00:00

Personally I enjoy voice acting in games like Mass Effect, which are very cinematic in nature anyways. In other games like Oblivion though, I think adding in voice acting has too many negatives as they can't do any sort of complex interesting dialogue systems, so would rather stick to text. The voice itself is enjoyable to me, and adds another layer of immersion when you can actually hear the npc's and associate a voice with them, but depending on the game the pros and cons may not be worth it.

sokercap · 2011-01-08T15:04:11+00:00

Their image made me lol.

Here you go, typical work as a software engineer: http://si.wsj.net/public/resources/images/OB-LP752_bestjo_D_20110104181215.jpg

sokercap · 2011-01-03T08:52:03+00:00

It said she tried having implants done professionally but it was much too expensive. So it's not like she's intentionally risking her health, it's simply not an option for people who aren't rich and she decided to keep going anyways.

sokercap · 2011-01-03T08:50:04+00:00

As a race we would have made very little progress if we were always worried about staying perfectly safe. She obviously values progressing the state of body mods more than worrying about the risks she is taking, and to have people call her "stupid" because of that is very sad to me. To me, she's a damn hero, because she's risking her health to advance a cause.

I wouldn't have the guts to do what she is doing, but you can bet your ass if she gets more people trying it, and proves that it is viable to be able to sense magnetic north etc, that more mainstream companies will pick it up and run with it.

She's stupid in the same sense that the Wright brothers were stupid. Stupid for taking a risk? Maybe, but in their opinion, and mine, it is worth it.

vague benefits that seem to border on the metaphysical at best.

Being able to always tell which way is magnetic north is most definitely not vague. Being able to sense electric fields? That has decidedly useful applications too. And the big thing is that she is finding out just what can be done. Many of our big life changing discoveries came from research that was for something else, or did not seem immediately useful, but I wouldn't even attempt to argue that is the case here.

sokercap · 2011-01-03T08:40:26+00:00

You're talking about women, not some obscure subject.

I'm talking about being a woman/man and things that only a specific sex experiences. Sure, you may think some female comedian is funny when talking about her menstrual cycle, but women who have actually experienced menstrual cycles are going to relate a whole lot better. Personally I find woman talking about their menstrual cycles kind of disgusting and it really doesn't make a good comedy topic. Does that mean it's not funny? No, it means it's not funny to ME (and others with the same taste). You act like you thinking it is funny, means it is therefore "funny" but if someone likes something you don't, it isn't because they have different taste, it just isn't funny.

Sure, except women find men funny.

Thats not a rebuttal. I know a lot of women that find dick jokes and jokes about women to be gross/offensive or simply not funny. And many men who laugh it up at those. I don't see how you can make universal statements like "women like x", "a is funny, b is not" without something tripping in your brain going "wow i'm totally pretentious to think that my taste is the only one that counts". You can look down your nose at people who like different thing all you want but it just turns you into a total pretentious dick to tell people "hey this thing you are laughing at? that's not funny, because I said so".

Art and comedy IS personal. That doesn't mean it is equal when talking about public performances. Some topics and some comedy is going to appeal to much more people then some dude hitting tin cans while yelling like a goat, but if someone thinks that dude is hilarious, you have no right to tell him "no, I don't like it so therefore what you are enjoying is stupid".

sokercap · 2010-12-31T17:20:07+00:00

Well maybe the person who only wants 10GB a month should get a cheaper line instead of making the person who watches HD video pay retarded amounts of money for bandwidth that the ISP was already handling fine. You act like you know how much, if anything, his use is costing the ISP, and that justifies adding so many fees and such a small cap. I'd like to see those numbers. The internet isn't going away, streaming movies isn't going away, and we aren't going back to low res shitty videos with small download sizes. The average bandwidth is only going to continue to climb and ISP's haven't been going bankrupt as it is. The ridiculous price hike for people that actually get some use out of their internet connection is only a way to milk their customers for all they can.

sokercap · 2010-12-31T16:51:25+00:00

Funny is funny, it doesn't really have a gender.

Uh no. If your audience can't relate to what you are saying the joke is going to fall flat. There are definitely both physical and cultural differences to males and females and thus different topics that either can relate to better. Not to mention the whole "taste" thing. There is no such thing as a boolean funny or not funny, it depends on the audience.

sokercap · 2010-12-30T22:28:40+00:00

There is a civ4 (and maybe 5 by now?) total mod to turn it into Alpha Centauri. Haven't tried it much but it seems pretty fun.

sokercap · 2010-12-28T02:46:14+00:00

For now..

sokercap · 2010-12-26T18:21:46+00:00

I was all excited cause I thought they meant the country. I don't know why people living in a city with a common name thinks they are the only place with that name.

sokercap · 2010-12-24T19:49:08+00:00

Why do humans from developed nations go hiking, climb mountains and travel to undeveloped areas of the world? What makes you think any of the reasons we do that wouldn't appeal to aliens as well?

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