Annoying Questions I'd Like Answered...

Count Arioch the 28th · Tue Mar 10, 2015 9:42 am

fbmf wrote:Jagermeister and Rumple. Also called an oil spill.

Yeah, that's a bit hardcore for me. Jager and anything is something I can't handle...

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 5:34 pm

hyzmarca wrote:Greek debt crisis hypothetical:

What would happen if Greece hasically sold itself to some other country, such as Russia or China?

Say Russia agrees to pay Greece's debt, and in turn Greece is now a member state of the Russian Federation, with all that entails, rather than a sovereign state. But at the same time it refuses to pull out of the EU and the Eurozone.

How can you "refuse" to pull out of the EU? It's a suite of treaties; an agreement between nations to enact favorable policies in return for reciprocity. Greece could go about acting like it was still part on the Union by passive-aggressively honoring passports and letting importers do business with impunity, but if nobody else feels like doing the same for the Greeks, then they would just eat shit.

angelfromanotherpin · Post by **angelfromanotherpin** » Tue Mar 10, 2015 8:57 pm

I have a couple of friends who want to publish an adventure they wrote. They don't care about profit, they just want to get it out into the world for other people to enjoy. Advice?

Nachtigallerator · Post by **Nachtigallerator** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 12:45 am

I have a stubborn PC problem that refuses to go away, and I also find most tech boards unhelpful, so have this:

I got a new PC in early december, it worked fine until february, when it started randomly freezing/stuttering in FF or during games, then even while browsing files. My first guess was malware and I finally got a working Win7 ISO to reset the system. It was fine for one or two hours until the stuttering came back in.

So, assuming that it's probably not malware (already ran Anti-Malware, tdssKiller and ADWCleaner, found nothing but some Adware) any chances that this is actually a hardware problem in a new computer?

Blasted · Post by **Blasted** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 12:48 am

I'd bet money on it being a hardware issue rather than a software issue.
Given that it's a new PC I'd be inclined to have it in for repair.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 2:50 am

Nerd question.

So, a lightsaber can deflect laser blaster bolts, right? Well, what would happen if a lightsaber was used to deflect a lead bullet? (My hypothesis is that the blade would melt the bullet, causing the melted lead to spray all over the dude wielding the saber, causing big unhappy for said dude.) Is there a precedent in Star Wars for that kind of thing?

Unrelated question.

The default time zone thingy for the den is GMT. What setting do I have to put it to to make it EST?

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 3:09 am

IIRC canonically slugthrower shots that strike lightsabers just disintegrate and don't hurt the jedi, but on the other hand they also don't get bounced.

I know it's come up in the EU, but I can't remember precisely where.

Meikle641 · Post by **Meikle641** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 3:45 am

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I have a couple of friends who want to publish an adventure they wrote. They don't care about profit, they just want to get it out into the world for other people to enjoy. Advice?

Probably DriveThruRPG or a blog.

Omegonthesane · Post by **Omegonthesane** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 8:11 am

Shrapnel wrote:Nerd question.

So, a lightsaber can deflect laser blaster bolts, right? Well, what would happen if a lightsaber was used to deflect a lead bullet? (My hypothesis is that the blade would melt the bullet, causing the melted lead to spray all over the dude wielding the saber, causing big unhappy for said dude.) Is there a precedent in Star Wars for that kind of thing?

Same question with conventional swords. At Discworld Con about... ooh, 10 or 12 years ago now, I distinctly recall someone explaining to me at length how using a very hot thing to cut a sword in half when that sword is actually moving towards you is a bad idea, and can't but wonder if the EU has addressed this to the satisfaction of the wank fantasies of Jedi fanboys.

Fwib · Post by **Fwib** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 11:27 am

No getting filthy physics on the shiny magic!!

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 3:44 pm

Shrapnel wrote:The default time zone thingy for the den is GMT. What setting do I have to put it to to make it EST?

I think the difference is -5.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 4:57 pm

Okay, by messing around with it, I've discovered that the difference is actually -4 to make it EST. So Maj was very close.

----

@Nerd Question: This is one of those things that you start wondering about at two in the morning when you can't sleep.

Looking through Wookieepedia's page on "slugthrowers", I found this:

Wookieepedia wrote:However, they remained popular for the unique advantages they offered. For example, during the days of the Galactic Republic, mercenaries fearing an intervention by Jedi Knights used rapid-fire slugthrowers that were impossible to completely deflect with a lightsaber, unlike blaster bolts.

So it seems things like machine guns are effective over lightsabers. Apparently, there are also bullets made out of cortosis, so there's that.

Maxus · Post by **Maxus** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 5:04 pm

Shrapnel wrote:Okay, by messing around with it, I've discovered that the difference is actually -4 to make it EST. So Maj was very close.

Daylight-saving time.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 5:09 pm

Oh.

Stupid arbitrary time saving methods.

Maj · Post by **Maj** » Wed Mar 11, 2015 6:27 pm

My bad. I wondered that when I posted, but had to leave and didn't have time to double check.

Nachtigallerator · Post by **Nachtigallerator** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 3:39 pm

Blasted wrote:I'd bet money on it being a hardware issue rather than a software issue.
Given that it's a new PC I'd be inclined to have it in for repair.

I contacted support, and after they raised the possibility that the harddrive might be borked, I ran some diagnostic program on it, which found "to many floating / re-allocated sectors" or something - I have no idea what that means ins detail, but my uncle who does agrees that it's probably done for.
I'm sending it in for replacement today, though, so thanks for the pointer!

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 5:13 pm

That probably means that some of the storage space on the hard drive is messed up. There are utilities that can more-or-less route around the damaged bits and clean things up, but in general when a hard drive starts showing problems they're going to get progressively worse.

Quality control on laptop hard drives seems to be relatively shoddy this decade for some reason. Lots of failures in the first six months.

Nachtigallerator · Post by **Nachtigallerator** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 6:08 pm

Gee, that matches up with what I found on the internet. Ever since I've started becoming somewhat familiar with medicine, I'm extremely skeptical of the "Google til you have a plausible model" solution of substituting for a lack of actual knowledge. And I know just enough about computers to get myself in a lot of trouble.

But my uncle does various PC repair things for a living and said something about especially failure-prone drives as well (for some reason, there's no manufacturer name on the drive). Luckily, it had the decency to fail about three months after purchase, so I'm getting the replacement for free.

The inside of the PC was well-constructed, though, which makes me optimistic that the retailer isn't staffed by complete hacks. I've opened up far messier cases, with brilliant construction solutions like a hard drive kept in position by a single (!) screw.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 7:35 pm

None of the electronics manufacturing processes are entirely perfect, so there's a quality-control step where components are tested after being completed to determine if they actually meet the specifications, and if they fail they might be tossed out or have the failing portions deactivated and get sold as lower-end components*. Obviously, some manufacturers are more careful about this than others. A failure in the first three months probably means the drive was faulty when shipped; a same-model replacement could very well last years if everything went smoothly in the manufacturing process.

*I've only actually heard about this happening with multicore CPUs, it would be more problematic to do with hard drives.

Eikre · Post by **Eikre** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 8:49 pm

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 9:04 pm

Quality control is supposed to catch the stuff that will fail in the first segment before it's actually shipped. I'm not sure if it's actually gotten worse or if people I know have just been unlucky.

Occluded Sun · Post by **Occluded Sun** » Thu Mar 12, 2015 9:17 pm

angelfromanotherpin wrote:I have a couple of friends who want to publish an adventure they wrote. They don't care about profit, they just want to get it out into the world for other people to enjoy. Advice?

A number of fansites already host free adventures associated with particular campaign settings. Also, sites like DriveThruRPG have free downloads of certain products - they might be able to persuade them to host a pdf of an adventure if it was professional-looking enough.

Shrapnel · Post by **Shrapnel** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 4:39 pm

Where's a good place to watch subbed anime?

I really want to watch the later Digimon series, and Netflix doesn't have 'em.

name_here · Post by **name_here** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 5:07 pm

Unfortunately, the answer is "all over the damn place". Big legal places are Hulu, Funimation, Crunchyroll, and Viz Media, plus some other companies upload their stuff to youtube sometimes.

AndreiChekov · Post by **AndreiChekov** » Wed Mar 18, 2015 5:32 pm

kat.ph if you want to download them