The fact no one will seriously be able to challenge the site selection on environmental grounds will simply speed getting the shovels into the ground.
You should look into the rehabilitation of contaminated sites before stating anything quite so strongly. The undesirability of contaminated land can make it environmentally valuable and worth protecting. Environmental grounds for legal argument aren't nearly as limited as you're pretending.
You should travel more. I live in Arizona and there are plenty of places here and in surrounding states, with neighborhoods (generally ranches), where you need to drive more than an hour to get to the nearest gas station, and further for a bar.
You're not a historian yourself by any chance, are you? I happen to be, and am a bit confused by your thinking. You seem to be creating a strawman by insisting your opponent holds his opinions so rigidly, which he clearly doesn't.
History, as we all should know by now, is little more than a narrative. It seeks to simplify reality and explain where we are in the context of where we've been. Note that history is distinct from record keeping. As a result of this simplification, history is inherently bias even when attempts are made to avoid this bias. You should read some essays by Romila Thapar for a fairly quick explanation of how this plays out and maybe avoid asserting your seemingly incomplete understanding so proudly in the mean time. Your criticisms aren't entirely unfounded, but you're stepping on your own foot here.
A bit late jumping here, but I work in a used bookstore that also sells games, consoles, dvds, and electronics. We essentially function as a pawn shop with a trade credit system. I work in the gaming/electronics department and we poach gamestop's pricing for what they carry and use a combination of digital press, amazon, and ebay to find our selling prices. Standard payouts are 1/2 trade, 1/4 cash for things we don't care much about, and around 3/5 trade 1/2 cash for things that we really want and know will sell. Nothing is fixed, the employees buying are allowed to use their own discretion. We discount most things 10% if you're nice to us, %20 if you're an educator.
The result? A huge community of loyal customers who benefit from our business model. Not because our prices are necessarily great compared to what you can find online, but because you can get rid of a wide variety of media you aren't using and apply that towards things you want, finding things that aren't available anywhere else. We're also the only source in the region for collectible old school consoles and their games. It sucks to give someone $80 for a 360, but the ones that get $30 for a working NES, or $50 for a Master System with all the trimmings are happy. I would much rather be keeping these things circulating than have them end up in a dumpster. Our product diversity separates us from gamestop, but I don't see their general model as being necessarily evil.
I have a t400 without a camera. It's a great piece of equipment. It would certainly fit your needs but seems a touch overkill unless you're working with a limitless budget.
It'll be nice to have an option to hop into a game for a little bit without committing to an hour+ long campaign or versus match. One of the main reasons I don't play very much is that I can rarely sit down for a couple hours and get a full round in.
You don't? Firebombs (or any other form of generalized attack) are certainly devastating and morally reprehensible when dropped on population centers. They can make people exposed to the explosion and resulting fire just as dead as someone killed by a nuclear blast. What they don't do is cause radiation poisoning, irradiated water, plants, and wildlife, birth defects, and all the other things associated with exposure to high levels of radiation. Oh, and those nasty consequences of the application of nuclear weapons are also present in the production and testing prior to military application.
Still care to argue that there isn't a meaningful distinction?
Both forms of attack are reprehensible, but also distinct. The nature of the conflict does not change this. The agent of destruction does not change this. Your straw man could be vaporized or incinerated, it's just as weak.
To say nukes were only used once or twice is terribly misleading. Nukes were only used in a military capacity twice. Even more accurately, they were only used in a military capacity against strategic targets twice. They've been used for political posturing and military advancement approximately 2,000 times in various settings and with varied payloads.
This isn't intended to devalue the magnitude of the decision to effectively annihilate large numbers of human populations or suggest that testing is necessarily equivalent, just to remind you that the tactical application of nuclear weapons is not the only undesirable consequence of developing, distributing, and maintaining those weapons. Even unused nukes have serious consequences to the well being of humans and ecosystems in general.
The display of force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that the weapons were too morally reprehensible to use against human targets. The militarization of the United States and other nations has prevented critical assessment of the relative danger of these weapons from being reflected in policy until fairly recently. Check the graph on that wiki. Does it seem as if people suddenly became aware of the danger of nukes in 1945, or merely their effectiveness? And I'm not even getting into the tailings piles, superfund sites, government payouts to victims of testing, and so on.
Pedantic? Try having a complete thought before accusing someone of pedantry. There are more things going on here than the dramatic end of people's lives or your fantasies about interstellar warfare.
I've never had a huge issue with cell phone or email downtime, but I regularly bitch at my ISP for extended outages and have always been credited the paltry sum of downtime that I paid for. This works out to a little more than a dollar for every 24 hours of service outage and is really nothing more than a symbolic slap in the face from me to them. As a student I generally have enough free time to notice/care when my internet service isn't working. Calling help desks and being told to restart my system over and over has made me bitter. If I started having problems with other services I pay for and continually got the same useless advice rather than an honest explanation of what's going on and had the time, I would probably try to get money back on them too.
How would anyone go about demanding infrastructure upgrades to ensure 99.999% uptime? Entry costs for a new business are prohibitive and most communications companies have their users by the balls.
He demanded that I support the relationship of Neanderthals with other homo genus members (not even arguing the sapien angle) with fossil evidence of Neanderthals in Africa and only conceded error so far as to say that Neanderthals are as related to homo sapiens as snakes are related to worms. This is an otherwise intelligent person who believes he understands evolution and science fairly well. Apparently he attended a lecture a few years ago on the Lucy find and somehow mutated that lecture into his current understanding. How can you engage with people like this in a productive way without being insulting? TFA addresses the basic misunderstanding and urges for consistently rejecting these sorts of positions, but is that even my priority at this point? Everything about the thought process he's using to arrive at his conclusions is flawed, but his insistence that he knows what he's talking about makes it impossible to discuss anything he might disagree with meaningfully.
My thoughts exactly. The article reads like countless conversations I've had with friends over lunch in the school cafeteria. As far as I can tell the author isn't even concerned with consoles, just the games that are played on them. It seems like he unwittingly endorses the PC running emulation software as the greatest system of all time.
Pointless.
While you can decry his argument (which is admittedly underdeveloped in that interview) as being hypocritical, it is difficult to deny that he is discussing a contemporary change in the political, intellectual, and legal climate of the world, albeit with a primary focus on Sweden. The structure of your argument, claiming that he is both abusing and coveting anonymity rests upon the supposition that abuse is taking place. Regardless of whether or not you believe file sharing to constitute an abuse, the current argument has moved well beyond your simplistic view of file sharing being a necessary abuse.
Oh, and hello/.
Slashdot Mirror
If only all games added something cuddly and evil when you asked for an easy run through.
The fact no one will seriously be able to challenge the site selection on environmental grounds will simply speed getting the shovels into the ground.
You should look into the rehabilitation of contaminated sites before stating anything quite so strongly. The undesirability of contaminated land can make it environmentally valuable and worth protecting. Environmental grounds for legal argument aren't nearly as limited as you're pretending.
You should travel more. I live in Arizona and there are plenty of places here and in surrounding states, with neighborhoods (generally ranches), where you need to drive more than an hour to get to the nearest gas station, and further for a bar.
You're not a historian yourself by any chance, are you? I happen to be, and am a bit confused by your thinking. You seem to be creating a strawman by insisting your opponent holds his opinions so rigidly, which he clearly doesn't.
History, as we all should know by now, is little more than a narrative. It seeks to simplify reality and explain where we are in the context of where we've been. Note that history is distinct from record keeping. As a result of this simplification, history is inherently bias even when attempts are made to avoid this bias. You should read some essays by Romila Thapar for a fairly quick explanation of how this plays out and maybe avoid asserting your seemingly incomplete understanding so proudly in the mean time. Your criticisms aren't entirely unfounded, but you're stepping on your own foot here.
A bit late jumping here, but I work in a used bookstore that also sells games, consoles, dvds, and electronics. We essentially function as a pawn shop with a trade credit system. I work in the gaming/electronics department and we poach gamestop's pricing for what they carry and use a combination of digital press, amazon, and ebay to find our selling prices. Standard payouts are 1/2 trade, 1/4 cash for things we don't care much about, and around 3/5 trade 1/2 cash for things that we really want and know will sell. Nothing is fixed, the employees buying are allowed to use their own discretion. We discount most things 10% if you're nice to us, %20 if you're an educator.
The result? A huge community of loyal customers who benefit from our business model. Not because our prices are necessarily great compared to what you can find online, but because you can get rid of a wide variety of media you aren't using and apply that towards things you want, finding things that aren't available anywhere else. We're also the only source in the region for collectible old school consoles and their games. It sucks to give someone $80 for a 360, but the ones that get $30 for a working NES, or $50 for a Master System with all the trimmings are happy. I would much rather be keeping these things circulating than have them end up in a dumpster. Our product diversity separates us from gamestop, but I don't see their general model as being necessarily evil.
I have a t400 without a camera. It's a great piece of equipment. It would certainly fit your needs but seems a touch overkill unless you're working with a limitless budget.
It'll be nice to have an option to hop into a game for a little bit without committing to an hour+ long campaign or versus match. One of the main reasons I don't play very much is that I can rarely sit down for a couple hours and get a full round in.
You don't? Firebombs (or any other form of generalized attack) are certainly devastating and morally reprehensible when dropped on population centers. They can make people exposed to the explosion and resulting fire just as dead as someone killed by a nuclear blast. What they don't do is cause radiation poisoning, irradiated water, plants, and wildlife, birth defects, and all the other things associated with exposure to high levels of radiation. Oh, and those nasty consequences of the application of nuclear weapons are also present in the production and testing prior to military application.
Still care to argue that there isn't a meaningful distinction?
Both forms of attack are reprehensible, but also distinct. The nature of the conflict does not change this. The agent of destruction does not change this. Your straw man could be vaporized or incinerated, it's just as weak.
Pedantic? Really?
To say nukes were only used once or twice is terribly misleading. Nukes were only used in a military capacity twice. Even more accurately, they were only used in a military capacity against strategic targets twice. They've been used for political posturing and military advancement approximately 2,000 times in various settings and with varied payloads.
This isn't intended to devalue the magnitude of the decision to effectively annihilate large numbers of human populations or suggest that testing is necessarily equivalent, just to remind you that the tactical application of nuclear weapons is not the only undesirable consequence of developing, distributing, and maintaining those weapons. Even unused nukes have serious consequences to the well being of humans and ecosystems in general.
The display of force in Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrated that the weapons were too morally reprehensible to use against human targets. The militarization of the United States and other nations has prevented critical assessment of the relative danger of these weapons from being reflected in policy until fairly recently. Check the graph on that wiki. Does it seem as if people suddenly became aware of the danger of nukes in 1945, or merely their effectiveness? And I'm not even getting into the tailings piles, superfund sites, government payouts to victims of testing, and so on.
Pedantic? Try having a complete thought before accusing someone of pedantry. There are more things going on here than the dramatic end of people's lives or your fantasies about interstellar warfare.
I've never had a huge issue with cell phone or email downtime, but I regularly bitch at my ISP for extended outages and have always been credited the paltry sum of downtime that I paid for. This works out to a little more than a dollar for every 24 hours of service outage and is really nothing more than a symbolic slap in the face from me to them. As a student I generally have enough free time to notice/care when my internet service isn't working. Calling help desks and being told to restart my system over and over has made me bitter. If I started having problems with other services I pay for and continually got the same useless advice rather than an honest explanation of what's going on and had the time, I would probably try to get money back on them too. How would anyone go about demanding infrastructure upgrades to ensure 99.999% uptime? Entry costs for a new business are prohibitive and most communications companies have their users by the balls.
He demanded that I support the relationship of Neanderthals with other homo genus members (not even arguing the sapien angle) with fossil evidence of Neanderthals in Africa and only conceded error so far as to say that Neanderthals are as related to homo sapiens as snakes are related to worms. This is an otherwise intelligent person who believes he understands evolution and science fairly well. Apparently he attended a lecture a few years ago on the Lucy find and somehow mutated that lecture into his current understanding. How can you engage with people like this in a productive way without being insulting? TFA addresses the basic misunderstanding and urges for consistently rejecting these sorts of positions, but is that even my priority at this point? Everything about the thought process he's using to arrive at his conclusions is flawed, but his insistence that he knows what he's talking about makes it impossible to discuss anything he might disagree with meaningfully.
Plus, he's an aspiring breeder.
My thoughts exactly. The article reads like countless conversations I've had with friends over lunch in the school cafeteria. As far as I can tell the author isn't even concerned with consoles, just the games that are played on them. It seems like he unwittingly endorses the PC running emulation software as the greatest system of all time. Pointless.
While you can decry his argument (which is admittedly underdeveloped in that interview) as being hypocritical, it is difficult to deny that he is discussing a contemporary change in the political, intellectual, and legal climate of the world, albeit with a primary focus on Sweden. The structure of your argument, claiming that he is both abusing and coveting anonymity rests upon the supposition that abuse is taking place. Regardless of whether or not you believe file sharing to constitute an abuse, the current argument has moved well beyond your simplistic view of file sharing being a necessary abuse. Oh, and hello /.