Did anyone see the Science Channel's future cars special? I've been drooling over this www.flytheroad.com. Ever since I saw the Akira movie, I always wondered why they never made a cool-looking enclosed motorcycle that didn't expose the driver to the elements. And, I'm not talking about the goofy-looking Irkel-mobile.
There's a hell of a lot more to going to Mars that we need to understand and this experiment fills in some of the picture. Not that the radiation danger isn't important, but other experiments can deal with that problem. This requires an unprecedented combination of restriction and isolation. I think that we're going to find that the psychological impact on "astronauts" will change how we're going to need to design these missions. So, no Mars Direct-style flights in small cramped spacecraft. I suspect that the mission lengths will mandate larger, roomier spacecraft with more amenities. Which means no Mars flight by 2030 or whatever they're saying now.
1. You're driving a Metro (my parents came horrifyingly close to making it my first car). 2. You don't use AC. I tried that involuntarily one summer. Very miserable experience and showing up sweating to meetings and dates isn't a great trade-off. 3. Your friends are all yuppies. This is just a guess since, if they're all gettting about 1/3 to 1/4 of your gas mileage, they must be driving huge SUVs and Hummers.
The idiocy of our government crying about the growing threat from China is that WE gave it the resources. It was our idiotic "free" market economics that opened up China to most favored nation status. It was our idiotic international trade policies (like the WTO which doesn't base tariffs on traditional foundations like human and worker rights and diplomatic relationships) that force our workers to compete with indentured servants and near-slave labor. It's our greed that is sending manufacturing plants overseas. Is anyone surprised that the trade secrets within them is being stolen by the host countries? Hell, even the bourgeois financial analysts on cable news are saying "invest overseas" without a clue about the sad irony in their advice.
Now, someone explain to me again how free market or libertarian policies are making this country stronger? We've tried all this BS before and it failed just as hard and fast the LAST time!
What they're saying is people should be able to affect game play out-of-band just because they don't have the time to commit to legitimately compete with other players. The end result? Legitimate players get tired of BS headshots, or in this case, artificially inflated prices that force others to spend even more time farming for the items they want. So, everyone loses.
As a kid we used to play the 1st version of the RPG that must have been released back in the late 80s. It was far more a slick a production than all of the other RPG books out there (I probably played 10-15 in my life), had humor (Storm Trooper recruitment posters and astromech droid ads), and a very cool dodge-first combat system. Everything was driven from D6s as I remember and accounted for armor penetration (idiotically omitted from games like the Robotech RPGs).
My favorite feature of the games though was that it distilled Star Wars down to its crucial elements for GMs to follow:
1. The characters are as unimpressed with their own gadgets as you would be with a remote. A ship's capatain should never shake his fist at a target on a giant view screen and yell to his crew "Fire the proton torpedoes!". 2. Technology just works. Don't worry about silly rationalizations like you see in Star Trek (sorry fans). But, know the limits of the technology. 3. The world is black and white. Some people just haven't picked sides yet. Very Romantic (not the soap opera definition). 4. The banter between characters is so colloquial. No technobabble.
My one disappointment with the new SW movies was that they'd forgotten these elements.
Most hobbies produce tangible output, develop practical skills, and boost your happy meter. Computers (development and admin; NOT game playing), modeling, gardening, auto repair; those are hobbies. Gambling is a "past time" in the literal sense. All you do is drop money. Only a tiny fraction of players develop the skills to derive benefit.
Gambling has such a big downside that it's one place I can see the government having to step in. My observations, some based on fact others on conjecture:
When the money gets big enough, the are enough resources available to start fixing games, paying off already rich players, rigging machines and software, etc.
Gambling isn't one of those vices make worse by prohibition.
Regardless of what the mayor tells you, the money will not go to the children. I live in KC where the governments simply played the shell game with the so called "education" revenue and kept the education budget constant. Though, it seems to help a little in South Carolina. But, back home social services are well funded anyway.
Gambling doesn't generate revenue like manufactured goods do. You're just taking someone's movie money.
The jobs generated pay crap wages. Much better options out there for civic leaders.
I never understood the fundamentalist insistence on literal interpretation of the Bible. I'm big into art history and one of the observations I made in was the heavy symbolism of the Late Roman/Early Christian era and its impact on the Bible. Some of the symbolism has been lost to time or is obscure. The Fish has been brought back, but how many Christians recognize the peacock as a representation of God? I vaguely remember reading a passage from Revelations about a beast with 1000 eyes. This isn't some hideous late show monster; it's either God himself or a servant of God (the eyes symbolizing God's omnipotence and omnipresence).
What is a day to God? Does the Bible mean that it literally took 24 X 6 hours to create the Earth? Probably not.
No, the first *crash* site. Had the aliens used standard Orion units instead of Crithmorian feeler lengths, the landing thrusters would have kicked in on time. I'm sure we'll find the wreckage at the bottom of the hole.
My problem with sniper rifles in some games isn't the presence, but how they're implemented. Snipers should have a longer stabilization period. If you can run and hop around then square up on a hip shot in a split second, that makes the sniper unrealistic. In BF2, the engineers get crummy points for doing their job while medics rack up points like a pinball machine. Games just never seem to balance out all the classes well (not saying it's easy to do either).
Each has its problems. With Symbian it's cost (don't know about the available developer resources). At a few dollars a seat, the licensing fees add up quickly. With Linux its standardization. There is no one Linux OS out there with a ubiquitous platform SDK; but that will all change if/when LiMo pans out. As for Windows, its, cost and end-user usability. Windows has a great suite of developer tools and resources, but for a mobile OS it really sucks. Win CE is essentially stripped-down Windows with a different shell. Plus, the costs are astronomical. I think its current $3/seat for the Smartphone build and $16/seat for Pocket PCs. Now, that's a kick it your CFO's gut.
If iPhones can hit the market with all the bells and whistles that users want, lower cost, and Mac's reputation for usability, they can take over the market. Symbian is still king, but the mobile OS market is wide open with the collapse of Palm and Microsoft's failure to step up to the plate.
...you bury seeds. This is another example of the IMO idiocy of the Milton Friedman Chicago Boys school of economic theory. Even an incompetent government is fundamentally dedicated to serving the people. A corporation is dedicated to generating profit. When you give corporations control (directly or indirectly) of government responsibilities, they'll inevitably sacrifice public service for profit.
Look at the ages of offenders. Criminals outgrow crime for the most part. Knock out males under the age of 24 and life is peaches. Sense and Nonsense about Crime and Drugs: I think is the name of the book.
Sex offenders, let me narrow my argument to child predators, are far different from other criminals. Most other criminals typically get tired of cycling through jail, get bored with crime and mature, kick the drug habits that put them there, etc. Child predators are for whatever reason programmed to be attracted to kids, who are weak and naive. NO ONE wants one living next door. If I had kids and one moved in next to me, I'd bet I'd do whatever it took (short of murder or assault) to get rid of him.
False accusations and imprisonment is another (and serious) issue. And, I agree that we need to come up with stronger definitions of what a sexual predator is. I'm thinking of the awful case of the A student all star athlete (a senior in high school) who got busted having sex with a freshman. For reasons largely due to race, he was convicted under sexual predator laws and sent to prison for something like 10 years.
I work for a tiny IT company founded about 10 years ago. My boss bought an entire class C and had it until about 4 years ago when we restructured our network. At the time that would have been about 50 resolvable addresses per employee!
And Bush WAS thinking about the draft, not just conscription. Now, you may choose to believe that Bush was just curious about the state of the SSS after about 30 years of it being stagnant. I believe the draft was going to be reinstated. Of course, that would have taken a hell of a marketing campaign kind of like the one that convinced 72% of Americans that Iraq was responsible for 9/11.
I don't call giving the public legitimate info underhanded.
Not for political gain, for political *statement*. Rangel took a lot of heat for his bill (which he voted against). Look at what you're saying about it. And, not to sound superior but I don' think you understand the purpose of the "Bring Back the Draft" bills. Dems hear rumors and see some circumstantial evidence that the administration is considering the draft. The war is running poorly (though 3/4s of the citizens don't know it at the time) and the military has no way to sustain its deployments. Dems decide to force the Republicans hand by prematurely submitting a bill for a draft.
This prevents the President from slowly building up momentum to change public sentiment against the draft or to prepare for renewing the draft surreptitiously and places Republicans on the record against the draft. Note that the Rangel bill pretty much killed all of the supposedly innocuous draft inquiries.
You've been told over and over again that the Dems introduced the draft bill to scare people into voting for them. That makes no sense as it would be idiotic for Dems to do since:
1. They introduced the bill and it was easily associated with Dems 2. They knew it would fail resoundingly (even the author voted against it, something 400-2 in the House)
Politics isn't as cynical as people think. Most of the problems come from the Rovian "ends justify the means" attitude or the Dems lack of faith in the people (a legitimate concern).
Except, there WERE reports that the military and administration was asking questions regarding firing up the draft. The proposed bill was like a non-binding resolution, forcing members of Congress to make a statement one way or the other (they've been abused lately, but they do have a legitimate place). It was NOT some cynical plan to push a bill on the table and blame the other side. That makes not a bit of sense and can be discredited in about a second.
Now if I find out that the President is dusting off the Selective Service hammer, my ears would perk up, too. I'll give you the point that the Dems used it for political gain, but that doesn't mean the draft wasn't back on the table.
There's a lot more to politics than the public face and the propaganda. Try to look one level below the veneer.
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Did anyone see the Science Channel's future cars special? I've been drooling over this www.flytheroad.com. Ever since I saw the Akira movie, I always wondered why they never made a cool-looking enclosed motorcycle that didn't expose the driver to the elements. And, I'm not talking about the goofy-looking Irkel-mobile.
Ideally, your testers would be your Guinea pigs.
There's a hell of a lot more to going to Mars that we need to understand and this experiment fills in some of the picture. Not that the radiation danger isn't important, but other experiments can deal with that problem. This requires an unprecedented combination of restriction and isolation. I think that we're going to find that the psychological impact on "astronauts" will change how we're going to need to design these missions. So, no Mars Direct-style flights in small cramped spacecraft. I suspect that the mission lengths will mandate larger, roomier spacecraft with more amenities. Which means no Mars flight by 2030 or whatever they're saying now.
Well, there's the problem with your "remedy":
1. You're driving a Metro (my parents came horrifyingly close to making it my first car).
2. You don't use AC. I tried that involuntarily one summer. Very miserable experience and showing up sweating to meetings and dates isn't a great trade-off.
3. Your friends are all yuppies. This is just a guess since, if they're all gettting about 1/3 to 1/4 of your gas mileage, they must be driving huge SUVs and Hummers.
The idiocy of our government crying about the growing threat from China is that WE gave it the resources. It was our idiotic "free" market economics that opened up China to most favored nation status. It was our idiotic international trade policies (like the WTO which doesn't base tariffs on traditional foundations like human and worker rights and diplomatic relationships) that force our workers to compete with indentured servants and near-slave labor. It's our greed that is sending manufacturing plants overseas. Is anyone surprised that the trade secrets within them is being stolen by the host countries? Hell, even the bourgeois financial analysts on cable news are saying "invest overseas" without a clue about the sad irony in their advice.
Now, someone explain to me again how free market or libertarian policies are making this country stronger? We've tried all this BS before and it failed just as hard and fast the LAST time!
I NEVER shared my pot with my sister, big stupidhead.
What they're saying is people should be able to affect game play out-of-band just because they don't have the time to commit to legitimately compete with other players. The end result? Legitimate players get tired of BS headshots, or in this case, artificially inflated prices that force others to spend even more time farming for the items they want. So, everyone loses.
What's a SW remote?
As a kid we used to play the 1st version of the RPG that must have been released back in the late 80s. It was far more a slick a production than all of the other RPG books out there (I probably played 10-15 in my life), had humor (Storm Trooper recruitment posters and astromech droid ads), and a very cool dodge-first combat system. Everything was driven from D6s as I remember and accounted for armor penetration (idiotically omitted from games like the Robotech RPGs).
My favorite feature of the games though was that it distilled Star Wars down to its crucial elements for GMs to follow:
1. The characters are as unimpressed with their own gadgets as you would be with a remote. A ship's capatain should never shake his fist at a target on a giant view screen and yell to his crew "Fire the proton torpedoes!".
2. Technology just works. Don't worry about silly rationalizations like you see in Star Trek (sorry fans). But, know the limits of the technology.
3. The world is black and white. Some people just haven't picked sides yet. Very Romantic (not the soap opera definition).
4. The banter between characters is so colloquial. No technobabble.
My one disappointment with the new SW movies was that they'd forgotten these elements.
Most hobbies produce tangible output, develop practical skills, and boost your happy meter. Computers (development and admin; NOT game playing), modeling, gardening, auto repair; those are hobbies. Gambling is a "past time" in the literal sense. All you do is drop money. Only a tiny fraction of players develop the skills to derive benefit.
Gambling has such a big downside that it's one place I can see the government having to step in. My observations, some based on fact others on conjecture:
I never understood the fundamentalist insistence on literal interpretation of the Bible. I'm big into art history and one of the observations I made in was the heavy symbolism of the Late Roman/Early Christian era and its impact on the Bible. Some of the symbolism has been lost to time or is obscure. The Fish has been brought back, but how many Christians recognize the peacock as a representation of God? I vaguely remember reading a passage from Revelations about a beast with 1000 eyes. This isn't some hideous late show monster; it's either God himself or a servant of God (the eyes symbolizing God's omnipotence and omnipresence).
What is a day to God? Does the Bible mean that it literally took 24 X 6 hours to create the Earth? Probably not.
...when you combine a robot and a chair?
My job
No, the first *crash* site. Had the aliens used standard Orion units instead of Crithmorian feeler lengths, the landing thrusters would have kicked in on time. I'm sure we'll find the wreckage at the bottom of the hole.
My problem with sniper rifles in some games isn't the presence, but how they're implemented. Snipers should have a longer stabilization period. If you can run and hop around then square up on a hip shot in a split second, that makes the sniper unrealistic. In BF2, the engineers get crummy points for doing their job while medics rack up points like a pinball machine. Games just never seem to balance out all the classes well (not saying it's easy to do either).
Each has its problems. With Symbian it's cost (don't know about the available developer resources). At a few dollars a seat, the licensing fees add up quickly. With Linux its standardization. There is no one Linux OS out there with a ubiquitous platform SDK; but that will all change if/when LiMo pans out. As for Windows, its, cost and end-user usability. Windows has a great suite of developer tools and resources, but for a mobile OS it really sucks. Win CE is essentially stripped-down Windows with a different shell. Plus, the costs are astronomical. I think its current $3/seat for the Smartphone build and $16/seat for Pocket PCs. Now, that's a kick it your CFO's gut. If iPhones can hit the market with all the bells and whistles that users want, lower cost, and Mac's reputation for usability, they can take over the market. Symbian is still king, but the mobile OS market is wide open with the collapse of Palm and Microsoft's failure to step up to the plate.
...you bury seeds. This is another example of the IMO idiocy of the Milton Friedman Chicago Boys school of economic theory. Even an incompetent government is fundamentally dedicated to serving the people. A corporation is dedicated to generating profit. When you give corporations control (directly or indirectly) of government responsibilities, they'll inevitably sacrifice public service for profit.
BIFF (security guard brute): Dork!
Look at the ages of offenders. Criminals outgrow crime for the most part. Knock out males under the age of 24 and life is peaches. Sense and Nonsense about Crime and Drugs: I think is the name of the book.
Sex offenders, let me narrow my argument to child predators, are far different from other criminals. Most other criminals typically get tired of cycling through jail, get bored with crime and mature, kick the drug habits that put them there, etc. Child predators are for whatever reason programmed to be attracted to kids, who are weak and naive. NO ONE wants one living next door. If I had kids and one moved in next to me, I'd bet I'd do whatever it took (short of murder or assault) to get rid of him. False accusations and imprisonment is another (and serious) issue. And, I agree that we need to come up with stronger definitions of what a sexual predator is. I'm thinking of the awful case of the A student all star athlete (a senior in high school) who got busted having sex with a freshman. For reasons largely due to race, he was convicted under sexual predator laws and sent to prison for something like 10 years.
...for the sodomizing you're going to suffer trying to take on WoW?
I work for a tiny IT company founded about 10 years ago. My boss bought an entire class C and had it until about 4 years ago when we restructured our network. At the time that would have been about 50 resolvable addresses per employee!
And Bush WAS thinking about the draft, not just conscription. Now, you may choose to believe that Bush was just curious about the state of the SSS after about 30 years of it being stagnant. I believe the draft was going to be reinstated. Of course, that would have taken a hell of a marketing campaign kind of like the one that convinced 72% of Americans that Iraq was responsible for 9/11. I don't call giving the public legitimate info underhanded.
Not for political gain, for political *statement*. Rangel took a lot of heat for his bill (which he voted against). Look at what you're saying about it. And, not to sound superior but I don' think you understand the purpose of the "Bring Back the Draft" bills. Dems hear rumors and see some circumstantial evidence that the administration is considering the draft. The war is running poorly (though 3/4s of the citizens don't know it at the time) and the military has no way to sustain its deployments. Dems decide to force the Republicans hand by prematurely submitting a bill for a draft.
This prevents the President from slowly building up momentum to change public sentiment against the draft or to prepare for renewing the draft surreptitiously and places Republicans on the record against the draft. Note that the Rangel bill pretty much killed all of the supposedly innocuous draft inquiries.
You've been told over and over again that the Dems introduced the draft bill to scare people into voting for them. That makes no sense as it would be idiotic for Dems to do since:
1. They introduced the bill and it was easily associated with Dems
2. They knew it would fail resoundingly (even the author voted against it, something 400-2 in the House)
Politics isn't as cynical as people think. Most of the problems come from the Rovian "ends justify the means" attitude or the Dems lack of faith in the people (a legitimate concern).
Except, there WERE reports that the military and administration was asking questions regarding firing up the draft. The proposed bill was like a non-binding resolution, forcing members of Congress to make a statement one way or the other (they've been abused lately, but they do have a legitimate place). It was NOT some cynical plan to push a bill on the table and blame the other side. That makes not a bit of sense and can be discredited in about a second.
Now if I find out that the President is dusting off the Selective Service hammer, my ears would perk up, too. I'll give you the point that the Dems used it for political gain, but that doesn't mean the draft wasn't back on the table.
There's a lot more to politics than the public face and the propaganda. Try to look one level below the veneer.