There's actually some people who think he decided the best way to destroy the peace-loving, near-communistic early christians was to infiltrate their group, and twist JC's message of peace into something utterly different.
While I agree it has made flying planes and docking ships easier , I don't see how it has saved anyone any money. Planes were navigating and boats were docking just fine long before GPS came along. It's made their jobs easier, and probably safer, but has it saved any money?
By making people's jobs safer, it is saving money. Take a 70ft commercial fishing vessel with 6 crew aboard. Assume the ship's lost when it strikes a reef. Four of the men are picked up by the Coast Guard before they drown. The two that died have reasonable life insurance policies, and the ship is a total loss. It's valued at well over a million dollars, all told. Also consider that today, with all the modern safety equipment aboard, about 250 such boats are lost every year in the US alone. A hundred years ago, when there was about 1/5 the number of people fishing, there was still about 200 a year lost. So without GPS systems, the EPIRB satelite network, and a variety of other "cool" systems, we'd probably be looking at over a billions dollars a year, and a thousand-odd lives, lost.
Then again, I may not be an entirely impartial observer, seeing as how my job would be a lot harder if GPS didn't exsist.
I'm not even touching the biblical portion... but the second half...
Worse yet, modern acturial tables show that you've got a 1:500 chance of being struck and killed by a moving vehicle in any given year- which gives a theoretical limit of about half the 1000 year limit given.
First off, I'd love to see any actual actuarial table that gives a 2 out of 1000 chance per year of an automobile-related fatality. According to these guys , there was 38,252 fatalities out of a population of 290,810,000 in the US in 2003. That works out to about.13 out of 1000. A couple of orders of magnitude less than what you quoted.
Secondly, the idea that any chance gives a "theoretical limit" shows your total lack of understanding how statistics or probability works. What it will sometimes be expressed as is an amount of time till you'd have a 50% chance of a fatal accident... which, in the case of the actual statistics, and not the ones you made up, is 5331 years. If you include death from non-ageing related disease, crime, and "Hey y'all, watch this", you probably get a 50% chance of living 1000 years.
I practically cried when the first time I saw that Pelican go down... (And then I died, because I just sat there staring at Foehammer as it exploded, going "Holy shit, they actually killed her..." And then time ran out.)
I have to wonder why you linked to that one rather than this one... Still, the US doesn't look too good. But as they say... reported crimes indicates willingness to report crimes just as much as the number that occur.
but I get more or a laugh out of Army of Darkness than a scream and I assume Evil Dead is the same.
Couldn't you at least have the courtesy to read a few of the previous comments on the trilogy (of sorts) before assuming that because the third movie is a comedy, so was the first...
I dislike Bush more, and have more to lose, than you, I'm pretty sure. (I'm a Libertarian in the military. You figure it out.) But, the point is... that chart is crap. I don't know about any state, but I do know about North Carolina & Ohio, and neither of them used completely e-voting. In fact, Ohio only used about 16% electronic voting. I didn't look up the percentages in NC, but neither my parents nor my best friend used a touch-screen system.
History books would do well to mention Stalin's approx 60 million deaths instead of Hitler's smaller 6 millions as the ultimate atrocity.
Well, it was about 6 millions Jews... just under a million Gypsies, a few hundred thousand gays, a few million Christians who tried to help hide Jews... oh, yeah, and then there were all of the people who didn't die in concentration camps...
That GWB is just doing what the people who voted for him want?Well, 50% of the people who bothered to vote seem to think he was doing a good job, so... yeah, I think he is.
It's like saying "I wish everyone in the world would start off on an equal footing. I wish people didn't inherit money from their parents, so that people would have to succeed or fail on their own merits, not on their parents. So I won't take any money from them after I turn 18."
See the problem? The idea of permadeath is twofold - one, you have to be more careful, and when you die, you start over. Two - only very skilled players will have a lvl 60 whatever. People who just have too much free time to treadmill won't.
lawsuits - interesting that the lawsuit aspect was brought up. I don't know of any law that would prohibit the use of these.
You do realize this statements are unrelated. There's no law against serving really hot coffee, but McD's got sued for that. I be willing to bet that most lawsuits aren't based on the commission of a particular crime, but instead on injury of some kind caused by someone's actions or negligence.
1.) When is the expansion coming out that features the Tyranids and Imperial Guard?
We want the C'Tan and their soulless buddies!
More to the point... I think they could make it be true to spirit of the games, and still have a role-playing element to it. Start off with a 200 or 300 point army and a basic lord. As you played PVP battles or completes PVC quests, your army gets bigger and your lord gets more powerful.
My problem with the RTS genre is the "S" part - collecting resources at the scene of the battle only always seemed a bit unrealistic to me. Dune 2 was probably the only game in which that made a lot of sense, and that was because of the world.
Truer words have probably been said before, but only in short sentences. (The cow is dead, or what-not.)
Anyway, I completely agree with you. Overly paranoid "activists", overly paranoid media, and an overly paranoid government have convinced many otherwise reasonable people that the world is much too dangerous for kids to be kids. (Lawyers don't help.) Not only outside activities... but chemistry sets, electronics sets, darts, pool, anything that requires pointy objects or "dangerous chemicals" to do... the list goes on and on.
Let me say, at the outset, that I'm not voting for Bush this fall. (I'm probably going to write my father in, because I think Bush & Kerry are both way too interested in being involved in the rest of the world.)
I don't think the problem is going to be the number of missles we're able to block - we'd probably have dozens, or hundreds, of anti-ballistic missles available. The problem would be the percent. I doubt we could ever get enough to block a Russian (or Chinese) attack. That would almost never work - even with a 99% success rate (much better than we'll probably ever see), the sheer number of missles mean that dozens would get through.
But look at, say, North Korea. If we had such a system, or licensed one to China, South Korea, and Japan, even a dozen missles would have a decent chance of being stopped by a system that failed one time out of five.
Realizing that nations don't have unlimited resources is important - but that goes both ways. If you think a conflict is likely, look at the alternative. No missle shield could mean hundreds of thousands dead today, two to three times that dead over the next few years, and hundreds of billion dollars of infastructure destroyed. With an effective missle defense system, you could reduce those casualties to ten percent... or eliminate them completely, with a bit of luck.
I'm not making it up. Good for you for knowing so much about the classifications.
Well, when you post something with a.) no references b.) facts that obviously haven't been checked, and c.) contradictory statements, then you either made it all up, or half-remember some story you read a few years ago and are filling in the details you don't recall.
I do know that ferrets fucking bite. Yup, you're right. My two ferrets bite each other all the time. But you're confusing play-fighting with an attempt to eat.
Reason #1 : Weasels & ferrets aren't rodents at all, they're mustelids. Think skunks, otters, minks. They eat rodents, actually. And chincillas aren't even closely related to weasels, so I don't know why you're putting them all together.
Reason #2 : Mustelids are all pretty particular about what they eat. (Except wolverines.) Humans are way too big. Besides, even with filed teeth, they'd probably still try to gnaw on something they thought was food.
It wasn't just dust accumulating on the panels that was supposed to degrade their performance... the change in season, and the eventual loss in maximum battery charge after cycling them so many times... This page sums it up.
From what I understand, it wasn't directly a money related problem, it was a weight related problem. As in, they had a set size limit for the rover itself, which was set by the size of the transport, which was set by the size of the rocket used to get it from Earth to Mars. Since it was assumed the lower inclination of the Sun after about 90 days would make the rover unable to hold a charge, they didn't figure it was worth the effort to include a broom. Of course, then, after they got it there, somebody had the idea to park it with the southern side uphill, so the panels would be more directly hit by the sun. Of course, now other stuff is starting to fail...
Like many other situations (true line-item-vetos, for instance), neither party wants to change the current situation for fear the other party will benefit
Of course, that's some of the reason. But myself, and some of us (like the Supreme Court ) oppose it because it unconstitutionally puts more power in the hand of one person, something we should all be extremely wary of, regardless of how nice they seem today.
Slashdot Mirror
I never thought I'd see that day somebody was using "Jurassic Park" to try to win an arguement about science.
I think I need to go drink more.
(And were that the case, I think the world would be even more amusingly surreal.)
Makes ya think, eh?
While I agree it has made flying planes and docking ships easier , I don't see how it has saved anyone any money. Planes were navigating and boats were docking just fine long before GPS came along. It's made their jobs easier, and probably safer, but has it saved any money?
By making people's jobs safer, it is saving money. Take a 70ft commercial fishing vessel with 6 crew aboard. Assume the ship's lost when it strikes a reef. Four of the men are picked up by the Coast Guard before they drown. The two that died have reasonable life insurance policies, and the ship is a total loss. It's valued at well over a million dollars, all told. Also consider that today, with all the modern safety equipment aboard, about 250 such boats are lost every year in the US alone. A hundred years ago, when there was about 1/5 the number of people fishing, there was still about 200 a year lost. So without GPS systems, the EPIRB satelite network, and a variety of other "cool" systems, we'd probably be looking at over a billions dollars a year, and a thousand-odd lives, lost.
Then again, I may not be an entirely impartial observer, seeing as how my job would be a lot harder if GPS didn't exsist.
Worse yet, modern acturial tables show that you've got a 1:500 chance of being struck and killed by a moving vehicle in any given year- which gives a theoretical limit of about half the 1000 year limit given.
First off, I'd love to see any actual actuarial table that gives a 2 out of 1000 chance per year of an automobile-related fatality. According to these guys , there was 38,252 fatalities out of a population of 290,810,000 in the US in 2003. That works out to about .13 out of 1000. A couple of orders of magnitude less than what you quoted.
Secondly, the idea that any chance gives a "theoretical limit" shows your total lack of understanding how statistics or probability works. What it will sometimes be expressed as is an amount of time till you'd have a 50% chance of a fatal accident... which, in the case of the actual statistics, and not the ones you made up, is 5331 years. If you include death from non-ageing related disease, crime, and "Hey y'all, watch this", you probably get a 50% chance of living 1000 years.
I practically cried when the first time I saw that Pelican go down... (And then I died, because I just sat there staring at Foehammer as it exploded, going "Holy shit, they actually killed her..." And then time ran out.)
the most challenging part of the first game. At least, as far as I was concerned.
I have to wonder why you linked to that one rather than this one... Still, the US doesn't look too good. But as they say... reported crimes indicates willingness to report crimes just as much as the number that occur.
Couldn't you at least have the courtesy to read a few of the previous comments on the trilogy (of sorts) before assuming that because the third movie is a comedy, so was the first...
I dislike Bush more, and have more to lose, than you, I'm pretty sure. (I'm a Libertarian in the military. You figure it out.) But, the point is... that chart is crap. I don't know about any state, but I do know about North Carolina & Ohio, and neither of them used completely e-voting. In fact, Ohio only used about 16% electronic voting. I didn't look up the percentages in NC, but neither my parents nor my best friend used a touch-screen system.
Well, it was about 6 millions Jews... just under a million Gypsies, a few hundred thousand gays, a few million Christians who tried to help hide Jews... oh, yeah, and then there were all of the people who didn't die in concentration camps...
Not quite. Most of the state (84%) didn't use electronic voting. But... some of them certainly did.
That GWB is just doing what the people who voted for him want?Well, 50% of the people who bothered to vote seem to think he was doing a good job, so... yeah, I think he is.
See the problem? The idea of permadeath is twofold - one, you have to be more careful, and when you die, you start over. Two - only very skilled players will have a lvl 60 whatever. People who just have too much free time to treadmill won't.
You do realize this statements are unrelated. There's no law against serving really hot coffee, but McD's got sued for that. I be willing to bet that most lawsuits aren't based on the commission of a particular crime, but instead on injury of some kind caused by someone's actions or negligence.
I love the .sig
We want the C'Tan and their soulless buddies!
More to the point... I think they could make it be true to spirit of the games, and still have a role-playing element to it. Start off with a 200 or 300 point army and a basic lord. As you played PVP battles or completes PVC quests, your army gets bigger and your lord gets more powerful.
My problem with the RTS genre is the "S" part - collecting resources at the scene of the battle only always seemed a bit unrealistic to me. Dune 2 was probably the only game in which that made a lot of sense, and that was because of the world.
Anyway, I completely agree with you. Overly paranoid "activists", overly paranoid media, and an overly paranoid government have convinced many otherwise reasonable people that the world is much too dangerous for kids to be kids. (Lawyers don't help.) Not only outside activities... but chemistry sets, electronics sets, darts, pool, anything that requires pointy objects or "dangerous chemicals" to do... the list goes on and on.
I don't think the problem is going to be the number of missles we're able to block - we'd probably have dozens, or hundreds, of anti-ballistic missles available. The problem would be the percent. I doubt we could ever get enough to block a Russian (or Chinese) attack. That would almost never work - even with a 99% success rate (much better than we'll probably ever see), the sheer number of missles mean that dozens would get through.
But look at, say, North Korea. If we had such a system, or licensed one to China, South Korea, and Japan, even a dozen missles would have a decent chance of being stopped by a system that failed one time out of five.
Realizing that nations don't have unlimited resources is important - but that goes both ways. If you think a conflict is likely, look at the alternative. No missle shield could mean hundreds of thousands dead today, two to three times that dead over the next few years, and hundreds of billion dollars of infastructure destroyed. With an effective missle defense system, you could reduce those casualties to ten percent... or eliminate them completely, with a bit of luck.
Well, when you post something with a.) no references b.) facts that obviously haven't been checked, and c.) contradictory statements, then you either made it all up, or half-remember some story you read a few years ago and are filling in the details you don't recall.
I do know that ferrets fucking bite. Yup, you're right. My two ferrets bite each other all the time. But you're confusing play-fighting with an attempt to eat.
Reason #1 : Weasels & ferrets aren't rodents at all, they're mustelids. Think skunks, otters, minks. They eat rodents, actually. And chincillas aren't even closely related to weasels, so I don't know why you're putting them all together. Reason #2 : Mustelids are all pretty particular about what they eat. (Except wolverines.) Humans are way too big. Besides, even with filed teeth, they'd probably still try to gnaw on something they thought was food.
From what I understand, it wasn't directly a money related problem, it was a weight related problem. As in, they had a set size limit for the rover itself, which was set by the size of the transport, which was set by the size of the rocket used to get it from Earth to Mars. Since it was assumed the lower inclination of the Sun after about 90 days would make the rover unable to hold a charge, they didn't figure it was worth the effort to include a broom. Of course, then, after they got it there, somebody had the idea to park it with the southern side uphill, so the panels would be more directly hit by the sun. Of course, now other stuff is starting to fail...
You've complaining about improper grammar when somebody is using Yoda-speak. I mean, come on...
new?
Of course, that's some of the reason. But myself, and some of us (like the Supreme Court ) oppose it because it unconstitutionally puts more power in the hand of one person, something we should all be extremely wary of, regardless of how nice they seem today.