I've been messing around in firefall as well. It's surprisingly fun, basically a MMORPG that's a first/third person shooter (you can do both, and they both have pros and cons).
Crafting is pretty fun in it as well. So is resource gathering, which is basically a "king of the hill" minigame in itself - you drill the ground, which pisses off the local wildlife, and the bigger the drill, the nastier stuff comes after it. It was utterly awesome when it was competitive in melding pockets a couple of patches back - not only were you fighting the mobs rushing you and your drill but you were also trying to find veins to tag them on time, and clear the solo guys by kiting your mobs onto their drills. Very cutthroat, and quite fun.
But the best part is still that it's a shooter with all the RPG elements. You can build the best battleframe in the world but if you don't know how to move and shoot in FPS, you're going to get boned fast and hard. On the other hand a really good FPS player with a basic battleframe can be quite decent, as levelling up only makes you about twice-thrice as powerful in comparison to typical MMO where you become tens, in some cases hundreds of times more powerful as you level up.
Personally I didn't need to pay a dime so far, because cosmetics just don't appeal to me and I got the bike after just a few days of purple thumping and selling. That said I always had a knack for finding good groups for running harder content in MMOs, so YMMV.
He does have a point in that nuclear would likely not have to shut down, at least not for long. Both far greater security measures and lack of need for coolant towers, as coast nuclear plants usually use sea water as coolant, would indeed be far more likely to survive disaster intact.
You don't have the same choice with geothermal which is very much tied to the location of the source.
Expensive control systems are there to avoid local spikes on household level. They not only do not help the grid, they are specifically designed to maximize net metering - feeding power back into the grid to maximize ROI in the areas where power companies are forced to pay for electricity put back into the grid. I think you owe it to yourself to stop clueless raging and educate yourself on how grids work, why energiewende is so damn expensive, and why brownouts and grid collapses happen.
That is some serious rewriting of history. Protestants were just as big of a part of the massive religious wars that we had in Europe as catholics. You're simply doing the same thing as many people here are doing with islam - claiming that "my side is right and all others are wrong!"
No. That is just a massive perversion of discussion about history with religious fairytales.
The point was that so called "religious" items in our culture are in fact adapted by religion from local culture to better integrate into it. Such as celebration of christmas on the day of roman winter solstice, decided by church elders in 4th century as to assist conversion of Europe to the religion, as most of Europe considered that day to be among the biggest celebratory days in the calendar.
Same thing with many items that people blame islam for. Veil? Arabic tradition. Genital mutilation of women? North African tradition. And it's often completely ignored that other religions in the region typically practice the same thing. Christians in North Africa? Yes, they mutilate their women. Christians in Middle East? Yes, their women mostly veil their hair.
The only difference is that we also see moderate christianity in our daily lives which contradicts those points, so we do not associate christianity with these nasty habits. We do not on the other hand have the same advantage with islam, so the extremes from a complete different region with completely different culture become the symbols of religion, instead of symbols of region for many.
Except that buddhist warrior monks make most christian crusader seem like pasifists, and current buddhist mass murdering of muslims in certain Asian countries actually made it to the media in the West, while taoists practice(d) organized violence on country level.
Religions themselves are incredibly passive indeed. But religion doesn't matter. What matters is people who are practicing it. And human nature is one of the few constants around the globe.
It doesn't make much sense to power an island that has a functional alternative in geothermal with nuclear. It's a bit like trying to shoot birds with a machine gun. A massive overkill.
Your understanding of electric grid is nonexistent however. Most of solar connection allow for feeding excess energy back into the grid. Most of the grids across the globe are not designed for this sort of action in large amounts. Instead they are designed for few large producers feeding power, sent through high voltage DC lines, transformed to AC 110/220/whatever you get in your region at your local transformer station. When solar was a curiosity, transformer stations and grid in entirety could handle it. On a large scale however, you'll need to build up a far more complex grid with complex logic on transformer station level - one of the main reasons why German energiewiende project is so damn costly. To get wind and solar to be functional on large scale, they need to effectively rebuild much of their grid to cope with inherent instability caused by it.
This is the same problem. The more small power generators that cause production spikes into the grind there are, the more unstable the grid becomes during those switching moments. The UPS you're talking about is effectively designed to smooth out the spike load on the appliances in the household. The grid however is about large scale spikes from solar producing/not producing, as entire area worth of solar and wing tends to work in sync. This causes very spikey energy production behavior, requiring complex grid logic and solid amount of hot reserve power to prevent brownouts and in worst case grid collapses if it hits large enough area at once.
This is a very real problem, and one that at least germans are working very aggressively on right now. And it's very costly one to address properly, as it requires a significant rework of entire grid once certain threshold is crossed.
I'm saying that someone in mozilla clearly thought it would please their bosses at google if they developed a mobile OS that would basically tether its users to google services tighter than android does.
You seem to completely dismiss the concept of human nature, and desire to please those who pay you.
1. I'm objecting to REMOVAL OF FEATURES. Specifically massive wholesale demolishion of UI with aim to remove functional user control over browser. 2. On a decent PC, no one cares if one browser is a few millisecond faster to render than other. If they did, we'd have a whole lot more sales for machines with SSDs and most sold internet connections would have been fast ones. These actually impact the performance of the browser in a very tangible, noticeable way. 3. Indeed, hence the "when google clearly didn't exercise it's power over mozilla years ago". And I don't really need to make a "snarky comment about numbering", as I stopped updating my firefox at 3.6.28. Bastardized chrome UI slapped on top of gecko that was firefox 4 onward is unusable for me and it's easier to secure this browser with rather draconian ruleset in things like ghostery, adblock and noscript than spend hours to day trying to unfuck whatever it is that mozilla people decide to fuck up in UI in next release. If something breaks, I have the other usable browser, IE, usable through IETab extension.
Most advances in tolerance came from secular movements, which religion thought tooth and nail every time. They still do. Look at the whole gay marriage issue. Woman priesthood issue. And so on. Who's pushing for it? Secular population. Who's against it? Religious.
Same thing for islam. It obviously didn't grant equality (do you even understand what time period we're talking about?) but it codified into law the fact that woman actually had a specific set value at which she was comparable to the man. This was a completely new concept in itself, as at the time, women were considered property of men and had no rights that could in any way infringe on those of men that owned them.
Christian-centric Europe didn't start adapting the same principles until that, alongside a lot of other cultural influences was imported during the period of Crusades.
It's completely fair to ask those who introduce significant inherent instability into the grid to pay for equipment that balances it out. It's not a punishment. Spikey power feedback into the grid caused by solar is inherently very difficult for traditional electrical grid to handle.
If you look at the history, islam was actually the starting point of the current equality movement, as it was the first large organized religion codified in law the fact that certain people generally viewed as "worthless" (i.e. women in christianity) actually had enough value to be able to match superior people (i.e. men in christianity) in a court of law.
No amount of women giving evidence could ever match a man in christian court. Man was inherently a superior being to a woman according to christianity - something that much of christianity still actively practices. Yet evidence by several women (you'll have to look up the exact amount, I can't be bothered at the moment) can actually defeat evidence provided by a man in islamic court.
It's pretty ironic that so many people are ignorant of that historical fact. We imported this concept along many other things such as out numeric system from Middle East.
And you are absolutely correct, islam just like most organized religions is full of intolerance today. Same goes for christianity - most of advances in tolerance have come from secular world, and imposed on local religion. Christianity fought it tooth and nail and lost in most places. Islam is in the progress of fighting the same thing today.
How is that different from Christianity with all its different sects, islam with all its different sects, buddhism with all its different sects and and so on?
As for lack of government support, I would encourage you to take a long hard look at certain regions in India where they currently have severe problems with hindus attacking both buddhists and muslims in the same region with silent acceptance from local government. It's a very real problem that India is struggling to cope with today. It is true that there are no theocracies based on hinduism, however I find that to be a rather strange criteria to grab onto, considering that most countries in the world aren't theocracies and those that are typically use their local religion as a tool of control and means to an end.
Which examples are you not aware of? African sectarian violence largely split over religious lines? Middle East and its constant tribal warfare often among sectarian and religious lines? The fact that most christian sects of middle east and north Africa adapt the same rules as other religions in terms of genitalia mutilation?
Or are you generally unaware that most of the "religious" customs of today are in fact old customs that weren't religious but converted to religious as religion of choice gained ground to ease conversion? Take everyone's favorite christmas for example. In the bible, Christ was born in spring. We celebrate his birth in the day when Romans celebrated winter solstice, as decided by Church in 4th century to assist in conversion of Northern Europe to christianity.
Same thing for most of the customs often painted as "islamic" by our nice media. Female genitalia mutilation? Middle Eastern and North American tradition. Practiced by almost everyone in the region, regardless of religion. Black clothes that cover hair for women? Middle Eastern (pre-islamic) tradition. Christian copts practice it for example.
Essentially the main reason why christianity is currently less oppressive in general than islam is the location of most of the converts. I.e. it's not the religion - it's the local culture and its level of social and technological progress in these times. Go back in history about a thousand years, and you'll see the polar opposite - Middle East being the cradle of modern Western Civilization inheriting most of the scienticfic, mathematical and art from Rome's collapse and Europe stuck in religiously extremist dark age with many nasty barbarian habits such as witch hunts being adapted into christianity.
They benefit from firefox OS being basically a thin client, which requires services being located in the web. That is one of the google's main attraction points. Most of the competition on the other hand focuses on installed native software.
And islam has similar rules, segregating non-muslims in places where they are not treated well, while in other places they were treated VERY well, encouraged to settle and left alone to practice [insert religion that wasn't deemed able to displace main religion] without restraint.
Wait, were you talking about how similar christianity and islam are? We certainly seem to agree on that point.
So when are people like you going to start taking responsibility for things like butchering done by various christians in middle east, genitalia mutilation done by christians in middle east, terrorist acts by Breivik et al, and so on?
Fact is, these people have a lot more in common with the extremist islamists (and also extremists [insert religion here]) worldwide. We have buddhists murdering the hell out of people in Burma, hindus butchering people in India and so on. Common element? Extremist religion.
Not so common element? The actual name of the religion. Moderate islam is pretty much like moderate christianity - take a look at former CIS countries that didn't get murdered by saudi-funded wahabbists, most of the muslims in Europe and Northern America. And before you explode at that one spamming extremist references, compare the extremists to, for example, christian laestadianism, which does most of the extremist stuff from suppression of women's rights to arranged marriages for children to paedofilia - and these people outnumber muslims in my country about 10:1, and they're pretty damn scary - I have a friend who to quote his words "managed to escape his family's grasp".
Fact is, christianity is about as much a "religion of peace" as any other large organized religion, be it buddhism, islam, hinduism, thaoism or any other. And you can mod me "troll" as much as you want - that particular fact will not go away no matter how much PR bullshit keeps getting spewed from TV screens. The only difference is that people like you view christianity as inherently righteous, and anyone who isn't doing it like you think it should be done is "doing it wrong". At the same time you do not accept that other religions should get the same right, and instead put them all under the same umbrella, extremists or moderates.
And in the end, like most hypocrites, you claim righteousness to be on your side.
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I've been messing around in firefall as well. It's surprisingly fun, basically a MMORPG that's a first/third person shooter (you can do both, and they both have pros and cons).
Crafting is pretty fun in it as well. So is resource gathering, which is basically a "king of the hill" minigame in itself - you drill the ground, which pisses off the local wildlife, and the bigger the drill, the nastier stuff comes after it. It was utterly awesome when it was competitive in melding pockets a couple of patches back - not only were you fighting the mobs rushing you and your drill but you were also trying to find veins to tag them on time, and clear the solo guys by kiting your mobs onto their drills. Very cutthroat, and quite fun.
But the best part is still that it's a shooter with all the RPG elements. You can build the best battleframe in the world but if you don't know how to move and shoot in FPS, you're going to get boned fast and hard. On the other hand a really good FPS player with a basic battleframe can be quite decent, as levelling up only makes you about twice-thrice as powerful in comparison to typical MMO where you become tens, in some cases hundreds of times more powerful as you level up.
Personally I didn't need to pay a dime so far, because cosmetics just don't appeal to me and I got the bike after just a few days of purple thumping and selling. That said I always had a knack for finding good groups for running harder content in MMOs, so YMMV.
In other words, you miss being completely brokenly overpowered.
(Full disclosure: I was very active in arenas with a SL/SL lock and arms warrior back then, mostly playing with both dreamstate and resto druids).
He does have a point in that nuclear would likely not have to shut down, at least not for long. Both far greater security measures and lack of need for coolant towers, as coast nuclear plants usually use sea water as coolant, would indeed be far more likely to survive disaster intact.
You don't have the same choice with geothermal which is very much tied to the location of the source.
I've never met that mythical creature, so I can't comment.
Expensive control systems are there to avoid local spikes on household level. They not only do not help the grid, they are specifically designed to maximize net metering - feeding power back into the grid to maximize ROI in the areas where power companies are forced to pay for electricity put back into the grid. I think you owe it to yourself to stop clueless raging and educate yourself on how grids work, why energiewende is so damn expensive, and why brownouts and grid collapses happen.
That is some serious rewriting of history. Protestants were just as big of a part of the massive religious wars that we had in Europe as catholics. You're simply doing the same thing as many people here are doing with islam - claiming that "my side is right and all others are wrong!"
No. That is just a massive perversion of discussion about history with religious fairytales.
The point was that so called "religious" items in our culture are in fact adapted by religion from local culture to better integrate into it. Such as celebration of christmas on the day of roman winter solstice, decided by church elders in 4th century as to assist conversion of Europe to the religion, as most of Europe considered that day to be among the biggest celebratory days in the calendar.
Same thing with many items that people blame islam for. Veil? Arabic tradition. Genital mutilation of women? North African tradition.
And it's often completely ignored that other religions in the region typically practice the same thing. Christians in North Africa? Yes, they mutilate their women. Christians in Middle East? Yes, their women mostly veil their hair.
The only difference is that we also see moderate christianity in our daily lives which contradicts those points, so we do not associate christianity with these nasty habits. We do not on the other hand have the same advantage with islam, so the extremes from a complete different region with completely different culture become the symbols of religion, instead of symbols of region for many.
Except that buddhist warrior monks make most christian crusader seem like pasifists, and current buddhist mass murdering of muslims in certain Asian countries actually made it to the media in the West, while taoists practice(d) organized violence on country level.
Religions themselves are incredibly passive indeed. But religion doesn't matter. What matters is people who are practicing it. And human nature is one of the few constants around the globe.
Should obviously say "north African".
It doesn't make much sense to power an island that has a functional alternative in geothermal with nuclear. It's a bit like trying to shoot birds with a machine gun. A massive overkill.
Your understanding of electric grid is nonexistent however. Most of solar connection allow for feeding excess energy back into the grid. Most of the grids across the globe are not designed for this sort of action in large amounts. Instead they are designed for few large producers feeding power, sent through high voltage DC lines, transformed to AC 110/220/whatever you get in your region at your local transformer station. When solar was a curiosity, transformer stations and grid in entirety could handle it. On a large scale however, you'll need to build up a far more complex grid with complex logic on transformer station level - one of the main reasons why German energiewiende project is so damn costly. To get wind and solar to be functional on large scale, they need to effectively rebuild much of their grid to cope with inherent instability caused by it.
This is the same problem. The more small power generators that cause production spikes into the grind there are, the more unstable the grid becomes during those switching moments. The UPS you're talking about is effectively designed to smooth out the spike load on the appliances in the household. The grid however is about large scale spikes from solar producing/not producing, as entire area worth of solar and wing tends to work in sync. This causes very spikey energy production behavior, requiring complex grid logic and solid amount of hot reserve power to prevent brownouts and in worst case grid collapses if it hits large enough area at once.
This is a very real problem, and one that at least germans are working very aggressively on right now. And it's very costly one to address properly, as it requires a significant rework of entire grid once certain threshold is crossed.
I'm saying that someone in mozilla clearly thought it would please their bosses at google if they developed a mobile OS that would basically tether its users to google services tighter than android does.
You seem to completely dismiss the concept of human nature, and desire to please those who pay you.
1. I'm objecting to REMOVAL OF FEATURES. Specifically massive wholesale demolishion of UI with aim to remove functional user control over browser.
2. On a decent PC, no one cares if one browser is a few millisecond faster to render than other. If they did, we'd have a whole lot more sales for machines with SSDs and most sold internet connections would have been fast ones. These actually impact the performance of the browser in a very tangible, noticeable way.
3. Indeed, hence the "when google clearly didn't exercise it's power over mozilla years ago". And I don't really need to make a "snarky comment about numbering", as I stopped updating my firefox at 3.6.28. Bastardized chrome UI slapped on top of gecko that was firefox 4 onward is unusable for me and it's easier to secure this browser with rather draconian ruleset in things like ghostery, adblock and noscript than spend hours to day trying to unfuck whatever it is that mozilla people decide to fuck up in UI in next release.
If something breaks, I have the other usable browser, IE, usable through IETab extension.
Most advances in tolerance came from secular movements, which religion thought tooth and nail every time. They still do. Look at the whole gay marriage issue. Woman priesthood issue. And so on. Who's pushing for it? Secular population. Who's against it? Religious.
Same thing for islam. It obviously didn't grant equality (do you even understand what time period we're talking about?) but it codified into law the fact that woman actually had a specific set value at which she was comparable to the man. This was a completely new concept in itself, as at the time, women were considered property of men and had no rights that could in any way infringe on those of men that owned them.
Christian-centric Europe didn't start adapting the same principles until that, alongside a lot of other cultural influences was imported during the period of Crusades.
It's completely fair to ask those who introduce significant inherent instability into the grid to pay for equipment that balances it out. It's not a punishment. Spikey power feedback into the grid caused by solar is inherently very difficult for traditional electrical grid to handle.
Same as extremist christianity? Smart blacks? Non-greedy jews? Non-evil russians? Warlike buddhism?
If you look at the history, islam was actually the starting point of the current equality movement, as it was the first large organized religion codified in law the fact that certain people generally viewed as "worthless" (i.e. women in christianity) actually had enough value to be able to match superior people (i.e. men in christianity) in a court of law.
No amount of women giving evidence could ever match a man in christian court. Man was inherently a superior being to a woman according to christianity - something that much of christianity still actively practices. Yet evidence by several women (you'll have to look up the exact amount, I can't be bothered at the moment) can actually defeat evidence provided by a man in islamic court.
It's pretty ironic that so many people are ignorant of that historical fact. We imported this concept along many other things such as out numeric system from Middle East.
And you are absolutely correct, islam just like most organized religions is full of intolerance today. Same goes for christianity - most of advances in tolerance have come from secular world, and imposed on local religion. Christianity fought it tooth and nail and lost in most places. Islam is in the progress of fighting the same thing today.
How is that different from Christianity with all its different sects, islam with all its different sects, buddhism with all its different sects and and so on?
As for lack of government support, I would encourage you to take a long hard look at certain regions in India where they currently have severe problems with hindus attacking both buddhists and muslims in the same region with silent acceptance from local government. It's a very real problem that India is struggling to cope with today. It is true that there are no theocracies based on hinduism, however I find that to be a rather strange criteria to grab onto, considering that most countries in the world aren't theocracies and those that are typically use their local religion as a tool of control and means to an end.
I guess I hit the nerve?
Which examples are you not aware of? African sectarian violence largely split over religious lines? Middle East and its constant tribal warfare often among sectarian and religious lines? The fact that most christian sects of middle east and north Africa adapt the same rules as other religions in terms of genitalia mutilation?
Or are you generally unaware that most of the "religious" customs of today are in fact old customs that weren't religious but converted to religious as religion of choice gained ground to ease conversion? Take everyone's favorite christmas for example. In the bible, Christ was born in spring. We celebrate his birth in the day when Romans celebrated winter solstice, as decided by Church in 4th century to assist in conversion of Northern Europe to christianity.
Same thing for most of the customs often painted as "islamic" by our nice media. Female genitalia mutilation? Middle Eastern and North American tradition. Practiced by almost everyone in the region, regardless of religion. Black clothes that cover hair for women? Middle Eastern (pre-islamic) tradition. Christian copts practice it for example.
Essentially the main reason why christianity is currently less oppressive in general than islam is the location of most of the converts. I.e. it's not the religion - it's the local culture and its level of social and technological progress in these times. Go back in history about a thousand years, and you'll see the polar opposite - Middle East being the cradle of modern Western Civilization inheriting most of the scienticfic, mathematical and art from Rome's collapse and Europe stuck in religiously extremist dark age with many nasty barbarian habits such as witch hunts being adapted into christianity.
They benefit from firefox OS being basically a thin client, which requires services being located in the web. That is one of the google's main attraction points. Most of the competition on the other hand focuses on installed native software.
And islam has similar rules, segregating non-muslims in places where they are not treated well, while in other places they were treated VERY well, encouraged to settle and left alone to practice [insert religion that wasn't deemed able to displace main religion] without restraint.
Wait, were you talking about how similar christianity and islam are? We certainly seem to agree on that point.
By that logic, same should apply to christians.
So when are people like you going to start taking responsibility for things like butchering done by various christians in middle east, genitalia mutilation done by christians in middle east, terrorist acts by Breivik et al, and so on?
Fact is, these people have a lot more in common with the extremist islamists (and also extremists [insert religion here]) worldwide. We have buddhists murdering the hell out of people in Burma, hindus butchering people in India and so on. Common element? Extremist religion.
Not so common element? The actual name of the religion. Moderate islam is pretty much like moderate christianity - take a look at former CIS countries that didn't get murdered by saudi-funded wahabbists, most of the muslims in Europe and Northern America. And before you explode at that one spamming extremist references, compare the extremists to, for example, christian laestadianism, which does most of the extremist stuff from suppression of women's rights to arranged marriages for children to paedofilia - and these people outnumber muslims in my country about 10:1, and they're pretty damn scary - I have a friend who to quote his words "managed to escape his family's grasp".
Fact is, christianity is about as much a "religion of peace" as any other large organized religion, be it buddhism, islam, hinduism, thaoism or any other. And you can mod me "troll" as much as you want - that particular fact will not go away no matter how much PR bullshit keeps getting spewed from TV screens. The only difference is that people like you view christianity as inherently righteous, and anyone who isn't doing it like you think it should be done is "doing it wrong". At the same time you do not accept that other religions should get the same right, and instead put them all under the same umbrella, extremists or moderates.
And in the end, like most hypocrites, you claim righteousness to be on your side.
Christianity has similar rules for non-christians. Research the word "ghetto" and its origins to find out more.
Burning oil sand. Not sand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oil_sands