Personally, I wish there was. A simple voter's registration test that requires a very basic knowledge of how the state and federal government function. By "very basic" I mean stuff that gets covered in less than a week in an 8th grade civics class -- branches of government, bicameral legislature, how elections are actually conducted (such as electors being the real deciders rather than the populous and such).
The zones are divided into "tiers" that cover roughly 10 level ranges, the races are paired up territorially into opposed groups. For each tier, there's areas for each race and a contested area between them, allowing open world PvP at any level, while simultaneously being places you never actually need to go (you can go the entire scale without setting foot in the contested regions). There are also BG-like scenarios, which follow the City of Heroes style model of bumping you to an appropriate level for the event, so you don't get destroyed, per se.
Essentially, so long as you don't cross the "griefers be here" line, you never have to deal with them, and there's no reason you strictly need to do so. Ever. Class balance seems pretty close too, though it does hold a rock-paper-scissors kind of structure to it. They solved the problem of having classes focused on CC and strong debuffs by simply not having theme. There are no fears, no polys, no long duration slows, roots, or stuns. CC renders you immune to it for a period of time. I used to hate open PvP in WoW. I'd be willing to try it again in War, once server pops stabilize some and I can get on the server my friends are on on the correct side.
Most likely. I for one would have the same reaction to this happening to Obama, Paul, Clinton, or any other politician: "It was a stupid thing to do, and a major privacy violation. OTOH, maybe being subject to insane illegal violations of their privacy will make them potentially respect the need for privacy."
I think the phrase "protecting corporate issues and interests" was intended to mean specifically those positions that act in favor of large corporations, as opposed to those that involve corporations in a manner that restricts them from doing as they'd like.
oodaloop claimed that Iraq was tied to the '95 OKC bombing as well as the '93 WTC and '98 embassy bombing. I responded to the OKC claim, rather than the others, because it is clear that Iraq wasn't involved.
I didn't suggest that we tack "but not those guys" onto the Constitution. I suggested that we nail anyone appropriate within the organization to the wall for the various legal offenses they've performed. The beliefs of Scientologists, if strange, are perfectly fine for them to believe. The criminal actions of the group, however, are not. Things like Operation Freakout and Operation Snow White being the most well known examples.
"Not even the advocates of their signing believe they can sign about "the abstract".. this basically means that, without context to guess their intended signs from, you can't understand them.. and that means they're not using language."
...then neither do most toddlers.
Seriously, I've never heard a toddler talk about anything that didn't involve either immediately present persons or things, or very specific things that had been given proper names to them recently. This is just from personal experience, however.
Most of what I've heard from those who've recently learned to walk generally involved no more than two word, subject object sentences. "Hug" (holding her arms outstretched at me), "Have Candy" (pointing at her candy corn), and "Candy?" (holding a piece of the candy corn out to me) are examples from my great niece just yesterday.
Now, your last sentence I can agree with, despite being an atheist. In general, the teaching of Jesus can be summed up largely as "be nice to each other for a change". There's also a strong "believe in the Jewish God" vibe unfortunately, but to go with it a "prayers should be done privately and quietly" that limits things somewhat. Unfortunately, noone listens to everything he had to say.
He said "We have never seen a species jump barriers". You see, any adaptation where the resultant single generation offspring is even remotely the same general kind of thing doesn't count. That's just adaptation within a species.
When a reptile lays an egg that hatches into a bird, or dogs have kittens, *THEN* it will count. Walking stick insects becoming somewhat different walking stick insects doesn't.
That evolutionary biology doesn't say that there will be those kinds of massive single generation changes doesn't mean anything, not being able to trivially demonstrate them proves evolution is wrong. Somehow. =p
HotHead games, first distributed on HotHead's own platform, Greenhouse (http://playgreenhouse.com). The also release on XBLA, being the most expensive XBLA game to date.
They then released on Steam approx 3 weeks later, with the only mention of it prior to the date of release being that "Steam is a great service, it's just currently not one of the distribution methods on the list." With no means to activate a Greenhouse copy on Steam (which Steam says requires nothing more than a list of keys to activate against and that they offer the service for games distributed on Steam at no cost [good for advertising, I guess]], and HotHead says is absolutely impossible because they are two separate DRM systems), and the Steam version having more features (e.g. Achievements), of course (though HotHead says at least Achievements will be in Ep 2, and get backported to Ep 1 once introduced).
Amusingly, most of the activity on the official forum for the game for a long while was the thread regarding the Steam release and people feeling like they'd been baited into buying the GH release by being told what they were and the lack of further communication. The thread was locked finally on 7/21/08, and it's only on page 2 of the forum, to give you an idea how much activity they have.
Actually, I thought there were at least some cases of a signing chimp composing "sentences" that demonstrated some insight into what the signs meant, rather than just "I move my hands this way and get a treat". Nothing beyond your average toddler, but more than teaching your dog to shake hands for a treat.
Err, the '95 OKC attack? Exactly how was Iraq tied to it again? As I understand it, it was entirely domestic, and (to quote the Wikipedia article, since I like the phrasing): "Investigators determined that they were sympathizers of a militia movement and that their motive was to retaliate against the government's handling of the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents (the bombing occurred on the anniversary of the Waco incident)."
The only link between Iraq and '95 OKC bombing was a conversation between American Morning's Miles O'Brien and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). If you have some other connection, then please cite it for me.
Right, you can't ban the cult for being a "cult", but you can hit many of their personnel for various discretions.
Something tells me you don't understand the kinds of things their organization has pulled. They've abused the legal system in just about every way imaginable (this story is a mild example), they've done things that have led directly to the death of at least one member of their organization, they have as a standard practice the harassment and torment if not outright silencing of any major critics (there was actually documentation in one case of their attempt to drive one critic either insane and institutionalized or otherwise to commit suicide, by systematically destroying her life, to the point of tormenting her in assorted ways, burying her in legal fees, and getting a member to work his way in to being a close and understanding friend, so they could spy on her, and potentially off her if it could be made to look like an accident -- lookup Operation Freakout).
You are misunderstanding. What the ISPs want to do, would be the equivalent of this:
You (on Sprint) call me (on Cingular). Both Sprint and Cingular charge you full price for the call, then both Sprint and Cingular charge me full price for the call, despite you not having a contract with Cingular, and me not having a contract with Sprint, becasue in theory we both were using parts of both of their networks.
It does Acid2, gives mixed results on Acid3 for me (has come out 53, 76, 77, 78, and 79 on various runs -- sometimes the red background cat image appears, usually all but the last box is in greyscale, and LINKTEST FAILED always appears at the bottom in red).
Going on to another bright spot from Wal-Mart. There was an "illegal" (as in massive animal abuse) puppy mill in the area that was broken up, and the local Wal-Mart, Target, and one other store (can't think for the life of me who the third was) donated a huge amount of food and supplies to the shelter that was going to be holding the ridiculous number of dogs in the short term (plan being to redistribute them between shelters some, and hopefully adopt at least some of them off before they have to euthanize them -- we're talking a ridiculous number of dogs).
Unfortunately, I'm not a dog person, and I've only had one pet adopted from a shelter in my life (the others were picked from a cardboard box shortly after being weaned before they got to the shelter in the first place -- not exactly hard to find "free kittens to good home").
I know this will offend some people, but perhaps government relief monies should have a per person cap for living in a given region for a given type of natural disaster. As in, after you've been flooded/earthquaked/tornadoed/what-have-you'd (where I live, it's commonly flooding, but only certain hollows are bad about it [and the locals even tell *them* to build elsewhere]) n times in a given region, government monies will only assist you in relocating (preferably as close as possible while *not* being within said area, so as to cause minimal disruption), not in rebuilding *again*.
No, kidding. Although I'm on the other side of "at-will" -- I am hard enough to replace where I work that I jokingly respond to questions like "can you work an extra 4 hours today?" or "Can you come in Saturday?" with "At-will you say?" =)
This would be a compromise. Allow anyone found not guilty of a crime to have their records anonymized (preferably to the extent of being "John Doe'd") so that they aren't haunted by having been accused of a crime, as opposed to being found guilty of a crime. Or maybe we should see how hard it is to get wild accusations brought against large numbers of people who are important, but not so important as to be able to effectively cheat the system.
Actually, can someone please explain to me why American politics act like the 1st and 2nd Amendments are mutually exclusive? It seems like if you push hard to protect one, you have to want to crush the other underheel. I've never quite got that.
Pretty much, but at the same time, that's practically the only reason my home state gets anything -- one of our senators is both the oldest senator in history and the one who has held the longest term in office. He'll get replaced in a couple of terms though -- not because we'll want to vote him out, but rather because he'll die eventually.
This is exactly why I think we should hold off on drilling our own reserves. In about a decade, start preparing for drilling, taking the time to build the rigs and such, not rushing into it, and then only really dig deep into our currently untapped oil if/when MidEast oil is no longer a luxury we have. It's a larger total net gain, as opposed to the "Waah! My SUV is too expensive to drive now!" that seems to be the reasoning most of our citizenry has right now. For the record, I carpool with a friend, splitting gas down the middle, driving a total of 100 miles daily (50 each way), plus some sidetrips, and a weekly 20 miles each way to a D&D game and back, in a sedan-type car. We refill the gas twice weekly. It's about $40 for a tank. It could be cheaper, but it's not going to kill us anytime soon.
If we're lucky, the rising gas prices will lead to more efficient cars becoming a major part of the market. I actually miss my old '92 Geo Metro convertible, and that thing gave up everything for mileage, but it managed 40 mpg redlining it (which admittedly didn't take much, and was how you drove at 70 on the interstate -- shook like crazy at that speed, any faster and it would start to make altogether unwholesome noises).
Ya know, that one got me too. I don't know about anyone else here, but the offices I've worked in all have drop ceilings. Ya know, the wall ends at the ceiling tiles? The ones, you can easily climb over...
We did that once at my college. Our Comp Sci department was very small, and they "stole" "our" lab from us, and gave all the student engineering societies sections of a standard office setup (even though all the others had some prearranged offices that had been kept for years -- only we were evicted from our previous spaces [we eventually made our diplomacy checks and smooth talked all the other engineering societies out of their office space there to get some breathing room]), and to make it even crueler, gave us a single small office with a locked door and no existing key. We had the sole female member of the group (who conveniently was half anyone else's height and lightweight enough that lifting her was trivial [as in under 80 lbs]) and sent her over the ceiling to let us in. She got nicknamed "the ACM cat burglar" after that (which was more pleasant than anything else our offensive nicknames guy had ever called anyone).
I hate to say this, but the whole concept of acupuncture boils down to the idea that stimulating specific points in the body will trigger various nervous responses.
In this case, that stimulating a point that is physically nowhere near the urinary tract can cause immediate urination.
I'd be willing to accept the possibility of acupuncture being effective in anything where triggering a nervous response could be useful, and chalk it's effectiveness not being properly understood by modern "western" medicine as being a limitation of our understanding of exactly how the nervous system is "wired".
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Personally, I wish there was. A simple voter's registration test that requires a very basic knowledge of how the state and federal government function. By "very basic" I mean stuff that gets covered in less than a week in an 8th grade civics class -- branches of government, bicameral legislature, how elections are actually conducted (such as electors being the real deciders rather than the populous and such).
You have to consider the way War is structured.
The zones are divided into "tiers" that cover roughly 10 level ranges, the races are paired up territorially into opposed groups. For each tier, there's areas for each race and a contested area between them, allowing open world PvP at any level, while simultaneously being places you never actually need to go (you can go the entire scale without setting foot in the contested regions). There are also BG-like scenarios, which follow the City of Heroes style model of bumping you to an appropriate level for the event, so you don't get destroyed, per se.
Essentially, so long as you don't cross the "griefers be here" line, you never have to deal with them, and there's no reason you strictly need to do so. Ever. Class balance seems pretty close too, though it does hold a rock-paper-scissors kind of structure to it. They solved the problem of having classes focused on CC and strong debuffs by simply not having theme. There are no fears, no polys, no long duration slows, roots, or stuns. CC renders you immune to it for a period of time. I used to hate open PvP in WoW. I'd be willing to try it again in War, once server pops stabilize some and I can get on the server my friends are on on the correct side.
Most likely. I for one would have the same reaction to this happening to Obama, Paul, Clinton, or any other politician: "It was a stupid thing to do, and a major privacy violation. OTOH, maybe being subject to insane illegal violations of their privacy will make them potentially respect the need for privacy."
I think the phrase "protecting corporate issues and interests" was intended to mean specifically those positions that act in favor of large corporations, as opposed to those that involve corporations in a manner that restricts them from doing as they'd like.
oodaloop claimed that Iraq was tied to the '95 OKC bombing as well as the '93 WTC and '98 embassy bombing. I responded to the OKC claim, rather than the others, because it is clear that Iraq wasn't involved.
I didn't suggest that we tack "but not those guys" onto the Constitution. I suggested that we nail anyone appropriate within the organization to the wall for the various legal offenses they've performed. The beliefs of Scientologists, if strange, are perfectly fine for them to believe. The criminal actions of the group, however, are not. Things like Operation Freakout and Operation Snow White being the most well known examples.
"Not even the advocates of their signing believe they can sign about "the abstract".. this basically means that, without context to guess their intended signs from, you can't understand them.. and that means they're not using language."
...then neither do most toddlers.
Seriously, I've never heard a toddler talk about anything that didn't involve either immediately present persons or things, or very specific things that had been given proper names to them recently. This is just from personal experience, however.
Most of what I've heard from those who've recently learned to walk generally involved no more than two word, subject object sentences. "Hug" (holding her arms outstretched at me), "Have Candy" (pointing at her candy corn), and "Candy?" (holding a piece of the candy corn out to me) are examples from my great niece just yesterday.
Those seem pretty context dependent to me.
Now, your last sentence I can agree with, despite being an atheist. In general, the teaching of Jesus can be summed up largely as "be nice to each other for a change". There's also a strong "believe in the Jewish God" vibe unfortunately, but to go with it a "prayers should be done privately and quietly" that limits things somewhat. Unfortunately, noone listens to everything he had to say.
He said "We have never seen a species jump barriers". You see, any adaptation where the resultant single generation offspring is even remotely the same general kind of thing doesn't count. That's just adaptation within a species.
When a reptile lays an egg that hatches into a bird, or dogs have kittens, *THEN* it will count. Walking stick insects becoming somewhat different walking stick insects doesn't.
That evolutionary biology doesn't say that there will be those kinds of massive single generation changes doesn't mean anything, not being able to trivially demonstrate them proves evolution is wrong. Somehow. =p
HotHead games, first distributed on HotHead's own platform, Greenhouse (http://playgreenhouse.com). The also release on XBLA, being the most expensive XBLA game to date.
They then released on Steam approx 3 weeks later, with the only mention of it prior to the date of release being that "Steam is a great service, it's just currently not one of the distribution methods on the list." With no means to activate a Greenhouse copy on Steam (which Steam says requires nothing more than a list of keys to activate against and that they offer the service for games distributed on Steam at no cost [good for advertising, I guess]], and HotHead says is absolutely impossible because they are two separate DRM systems), and the Steam version having more features (e.g. Achievements), of course (though HotHead says at least Achievements will be in Ep 2, and get backported to Ep 1 once introduced).
Amusingly, most of the activity on the official forum for the game for a long while was the thread regarding the Steam release and people feeling like they'd been baited into buying the GH release by being told what they were and the lack of further communication. The thread was locked finally on 7/21/08, and it's only on page 2 of the forum, to give you an idea how much activity they have.
Actually, I thought there were at least some cases of a signing chimp composing "sentences" that demonstrated some insight into what the signs meant, rather than just "I move my hands this way and get a treat". Nothing beyond your average toddler, but more than teaching your dog to shake hands for a treat.
Currently, that is true, however in the past they did demand 10% of your income. Check out the origin of the term tithe.
Err, the '95 OKC attack? Exactly how was Iraq tied to it again? As I understand it, it was entirely domestic, and (to quote the Wikipedia article, since I like the phrasing): "Investigators determined that they were sympathizers of a militia movement and that their motive was to retaliate against the government's handling of the Waco and Ruby Ridge incidents (the bombing occurred on the anniversary of the Waco incident)."
The only link between Iraq and '95 OKC bombing was a conversation between American Morning's Miles O'Brien and Dana Rohrabacher (R-CA). If you have some other connection, then please cite it for me.
Right, you can't ban the cult for being a "cult", but you can hit many of their personnel for various discretions.
Something tells me you don't understand the kinds of things their organization has pulled. They've abused the legal system in just about every way imaginable (this story is a mild example), they've done things that have led directly to the death of at least one member of their organization, they have as a standard practice the harassment and torment if not outright silencing of any major critics (there was actually documentation in one case of their attempt to drive one critic either insane and institutionalized or otherwise to commit suicide, by systematically destroying her life, to the point of tormenting her in assorted ways, burying her in legal fees, and getting a member to work his way in to being a close and understanding friend, so they could spy on her, and potentially off her if it could be made to look like an accident -- lookup Operation Freakout).
You are misunderstanding. What the ISPs want to do, would be the equivalent of this:
You (on Sprint) call me (on Cingular). Both Sprint and Cingular charge you full price for the call, then both Sprint and Cingular charge me full price for the call, despite you not having a contract with Cingular, and me not having a contract with Sprint, becasue in theory we both were using parts of both of their networks.
It does Acid2, gives mixed results on Acid3 for me (has come out 53, 76, 77, 78, and 79 on various runs -- sometimes the red background cat image appears, usually all but the last box is in greyscale, and LINKTEST FAILED always appears at the bottom in red).
Going on to another bright spot from Wal-Mart. There was an "illegal" (as in massive animal abuse) puppy mill in the area that was broken up, and the local Wal-Mart, Target, and one other store (can't think for the life of me who the third was) donated a huge amount of food and supplies to the shelter that was going to be holding the ridiculous number of dogs in the short term (plan being to redistribute them between shelters some, and hopefully adopt at least some of them off before they have to euthanize them -- we're talking a ridiculous number of dogs).
Unfortunately, I'm not a dog person, and I've only had one pet adopted from a shelter in my life (the others were picked from a cardboard box shortly after being weaned before they got to the shelter in the first place -- not exactly hard to find "free kittens to good home").
I know this will offend some people, but perhaps government relief monies should have a per person cap for living in a given region for a given type of natural disaster. As in, after you've been flooded/earthquaked/tornadoed/what-have-you'd (where I live, it's commonly flooding, but only certain hollows are bad about it [and the locals even tell *them* to build elsewhere]) n times in a given region, government monies will only assist you in relocating (preferably as close as possible while *not* being within said area, so as to cause minimal disruption), not in rebuilding *again*.
No, kidding. Although I'm on the other side of "at-will" -- I am hard enough to replace where I work that I jokingly respond to questions like "can you work an extra 4 hours today?" or "Can you come in Saturday?" with "At-will you say?" =)
This would be a compromise. Allow anyone found not guilty of a crime to have their records anonymized (preferably to the extent of being "John Doe'd") so that they aren't haunted by having been accused of a crime, as opposed to being found guilty of a crime. Or maybe we should see how hard it is to get wild accusations brought against large numbers of people who are important, but not so important as to be able to effectively cheat the system.
Actually, can someone please explain to me why American politics act like the 1st and 2nd Amendments are mutually exclusive? It seems like if you push hard to protect one, you have to want to crush the other underheel. I've never quite got that.
Pretty much, but at the same time, that's practically the only reason my home state gets anything -- one of our senators is both the oldest senator in history and the one who has held the longest term in office. He'll get replaced in a couple of terms though -- not because we'll want to vote him out, but rather because he'll die eventually.
This is exactly why I think we should hold off on drilling our own reserves. In about a decade, start preparing for drilling, taking the time to build the rigs and such, not rushing into it, and then only really dig deep into our currently untapped oil if/when MidEast oil is no longer a luxury we have. It's a larger total net gain, as opposed to the "Waah! My SUV is too expensive to drive now!" that seems to be the reasoning most of our citizenry has right now. For the record, I carpool with a friend, splitting gas down the middle, driving a total of 100 miles daily (50 each way), plus some sidetrips, and a weekly 20 miles each way to a D&D game and back, in a sedan-type car. We refill the gas twice weekly. It's about $40 for a tank. It could be cheaper, but it's not going to kill us anytime soon.
If we're lucky, the rising gas prices will lead to more efficient cars becoming a major part of the market. I actually miss my old '92 Geo Metro convertible, and that thing gave up everything for mileage, but it managed 40 mpg redlining it (which admittedly didn't take much, and was how you drove at 70 on the interstate -- shook like crazy at that speed, any faster and it would start to make altogether unwholesome noises).
Ya know, that one got me too. I don't know about anyone else here, but the offices I've worked in all have drop ceilings. Ya know, the wall ends at the ceiling tiles? The ones, you can easily climb over...
We did that once at my college. Our Comp Sci department was very small, and they "stole" "our" lab from us, and gave all the student engineering societies sections of a standard office setup (even though all the others had some prearranged offices that had been kept for years -- only we were evicted from our previous spaces [we eventually made our diplomacy checks and smooth talked all the other engineering societies out of their office space there to get some breathing room]), and to make it even crueler, gave us a single small office with a locked door and no existing key. We had the sole female member of the group (who conveniently was half anyone else's height and lightweight enough that lifting her was trivial [as in under 80 lbs]) and sent her over the ceiling to let us in. She got nicknamed "the ACM cat burglar" after that (which was more pleasant than anything else our offensive nicknames guy had ever called anyone).
I hate to say this, but the whole concept of acupuncture boils down to the idea that stimulating specific points in the body will trigger various nervous responses.
In this case, that stimulating a point that is physically nowhere near the urinary tract can cause immediate urination.
I'd be willing to accept the possibility of acupuncture being effective in anything where triggering a nervous response could be useful, and chalk it's effectiveness not being properly understood by modern "western" medicine as being a limitation of our understanding of exactly how the nervous system is "wired".