we are about to [lose] the ability to put people in space No. We're losing the active program of launching people into space on American soil, so we can do it right. Kind of like if we stopped refining crude oil for two years so we could rebuild all our refineries using a new method.
Pure propaganda. Once you start looking into that, Americans claimed that every MiG in Vietnam/Korea was shot at least twice. Got a reference? If not, STFU.
The answer to propoganda you don't like is not propoganda you do like.
but xenophobia can be very rational Nope. Xenophobia is by definition irrational. It can however, be productive, and a rational mind can reasonably foster Xenophobia for survival's sake. But Xenophobia is not, itself, rational.
A musket isn't as useful or respectable when everyone else has M1A2s though. It is when all you've got is gunpowder and lead. The average soldier can't make bullets for his M1A2 in the field. The musketeer... can.
Which is exactly why VB has the staying power it does.
Is Newsweek [denisdutton.com] a tabloid? How about Time Magazine? [businessandmedia.org] How about the NY Times [newsbusters.org]? Actually, yes. All three are "town-crier" style publications, focused mostly on reporting what other people in the world say and do. None of them are a scientific journal.
The pollution from my four-banger car is not causing people in underdeveloped countries to starve to death. Over reactions from GW Doomsday predictions are. The $120 a barrel crude oil has little if anything to do with present-day reactions to Global Warming. And that's what's causing the widest and sharpest increase in the cost of food, not the redeployment of farmland to create biofuel.
And that's ignoring that the loudest reactions to Global Warming have never been ethanol, but conservation and pollution controls instead.
1. CO2 is a very minor greenhouse gas Link?
2: The amount of CO2 [we] release into the atmosphere is pathetic compared to the other gases The relevant question is "amount we add to the atmosphere that was not there before." What other gases do we dig up and throw into the environment in a larger quantity?
3: The hottest years on record predate the industrial revolution A: Link?
B: Yes. The era of planet formation was pretty hot. Your point?
C: The industrial revolution predated worldwide temperature monitoring. The "record", such as it goes, it incomplete.
4[a]. There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one) The sun isn't providing enough additional power to the Earth to explain the observed increase in temperature. Yes, we are watching the sun.
4[b]you simply resort to either the "your workin for big oil" or the "i'm more rightgous than you" defense, neither of which is a valid scientific defense. An ad hominem attack is no more valid in a scientific political discussion than any other discussion.
I'll have to beg your forgiveness; the "global warming isn't a threat / is not our fault" line has been embraced by the same slice of the body politic that claims DDT doesn't hurt baby eagles, smoking doesn't cause cancer, and you can cut taxes forever and still pay for a war.
If when you argue on the same side of an issue as those who have long since ceded any claims to credibility to the scientific method, you get associated with their tactics until argued otherwise. "Silence implies consent", and all.
I still think Napalm (or Mark 77 Firebombs if you want to avoid the Geneva Convention); rules the day when it comes to inhuman active weapon If you're only judging by the inhumanity of it, then you can't beat a knife.
There's very little that's as bad as being hacked to death by a rusty foot of steel.
You can't just go around picking up everyone's grass clippings and store them, or take a week transporting them. Sure you can. You just need to get the cost of the conversion + transportation to lower than the cost to farm it locally.
But then you have the problem of that farm land competing with our food growing farm land...which causes land prices to rise, causing increased food costs. You have no idea how much ariable land is in the United Sates, do you?
If it was just a question of land, we could feed the entire plant. Just us. Forget India, Europe, China, Africa, or any other breadbasket.
(And tell your parents that their house really isn't worth a quarter of a million dollars, and they should just sell.)
I was just thinking this, and if and when this biomass fuel supply does become readily available, guess who it will be coming from? O&G companies, and they will be charging similar prices as gas, because really, who wants to take a pay cut. Better a pay-cut, or profit-cut, than federal regulation of your entire industry.
Anyone who thinks the US Government is somehow immune from nationalizing vital industries needs to read a history book.
This is what happens when big business tries to embrace an Open philosophy - they realize they can't make money from it, and give up. It's just happened faster in the RPG industry than it has in the software industry. Oddly enough, if WotC got over their NIH-fetish and released a "Open D&D" book that borrowed from their licencees, they'd likely as not make money with it. Especially if they tried it with their actually valuable IP -- Eberron, Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, etc.
WotC backing out of the OGL is a case of a compromise destroying a vision, not the vision being unworkable.
Oh and for the completely mis-informed who think 4E is like Wow, that is old news and been debunked hundreds of times all ready. The comparison to WoW and MMORPGs in general has been made by actual WotC staff. If nothing else, "all classes have spell-like abilities" pegs it 100%. (The rest can be abscribed to all MMORPGs trying really hard to be "MMO-D&D")
Though try finding ANY major RPG that has support 3rd party like DnD Head down to your local bookstore. Tell me the "major" games you see.
Last time I checked, there was D&D, Storyteller, and d20-variants like Mutants and Masterminds.
Storyteller has a "Storyteller d20" book written by Monte Cook.
D&D has, well, d20.
And the d20 variants often have explicit "this is how our system works" trademarks, similar to d20.
Find me a major RPG that DOESN'T support third-party products, and is still a viable business. All of the "major" RPG manufacturers went d20 ten years ago, and are either contractually obligated to stay open, or will go for WotC's GPL.
Conversely, every review I've read by people who've actually played it, and everything I've heard from the people I know who are playtesting it right now, has been overwhelmingly positive, to the point where I have no question in my mind about wanting to switch over to 4e as soon as is possible. People who have actually played it fall into three camps.
1: The people who wrote it.
2: People who went to a convention just to play it.
3: Folks who have NDAs, that limit what they can say.
What part of this audience makes you think it's a fair metric for how good the game actually is?
People who aren't automotive engineers always trivialize the implementation and think it's a great idea. Actual vehicle engineers realize that in many ways a series hybrid is the worst of both worlds: more complicated than an EV and a gas car combined, less efficient than an EV for short-range driving (because of the extra weight), and less efficient than a parallel hybrid (or even a normal gas car!) on long trips. Somehow I think you're ignoring some important considerations, such as "gasoline generator runs at maximum efficiency", "no need to combine drive trains", "electric motors built with fewer moving parts", etc.
Considering that a "serial hybrid" is how diesel freight trains and M1-A1 tanks work, I'm less than convinced of your random dismissal of their potential. Especially with GM pushing exactly that concept as their next fuel design.
Yeah, I realize you said you wanted the generator to be removeable, but that's another fantasy of armchair engineers. Yes, it's possible to engineer your complicated system, but it will add unacceptable weight and cost. At least you didn't say you wanted a removeable (swappable) battery. Wow. If only there was some way, some magical way that we could (1) standardize power output and (2) secure heavy loads in automobiles...
A removable generator is hardly the engineering nightmare you make it out to be. Heck, the darn thing has to be removable ANYWAY, for service/replacement/etc. Throwing in the manual and letting a dedicated owner do it themselves is hardly an engineering problem.
Gas cars will be around for decades, so you can borrow/rent/own a second car if/when you really need it. Quick: how many Americans will buy a car they cannot drive from one end of the country to the next?
Many countries use electrified rail for hauling freight. It's the only option that's long-term sustainable. Electric rail only makes sense if you don't have a more cost-efficient alternative. Even if all the fossil fuels go away and we are forced to produce all our own fuel, I wouldn't assume that hydrogen or artificial hydrocarbons won't be more efficient -- and both are every bit as long-term sustainable as pure electric.
The cliche is Sorry, that's not a cliche. It's a perfectly acceptable phrase.
A "cliche" is a demeaning way to refer to a phrase that you think is hokey, dated, or just shouldn't be part of the language. "snuff out" is embedded enough that you've got as much hope of panning it as "think outside the box", "in the nick of time", or, the best example of linguistic snobbery, "ain't".
The environment is changing, in much the same way it has for the past few million years. We're not doing it. The environment is. Wow. So you're saying, in defiance to a wider margin than "a nuclear bomb is feasible" had, that throwing massive amounts of carbon and other pollutants into the sky is having NO effect?
I'm truly shocked by your scientific acumen.
The Climate Crisis is not that the environment is changing. It's that it's changing far, far too fast.
Libel laws have a lot to do with it if you say someone is committing fraud and they aren't... Libel's only possible if:
1: It's not true 2: A reasonable person wouldn't conclude that it is true. 3: A different reasonable person might believe that you're telling the truth. 4: Said person's disbelieve causes harm to the libelee.
Slander and Libel are pretty tough things, but like Assault, they require a common sense test. (Accidentally bumping into someone on a crowded street is not Assault, even if they scream their head off.)
I'd prefer that "access" meant you could read and write, but since copy/paste/write would "work" it may be all that is required. Substitute "physical hardware" with "software" and apply the same logic.
I rent you a computer. You save your files to a flash drive. You don't pay, I take the computer back.
No court in the world will require that I give you a computer to let you read your files. Even if the computer has zero value to me. At most, I'll need to remove any encryption lock and leave your files in a format that an ordinary practiioner of the profession can access them.
Does this free license apply only to pen-and-paper games or could you build a [non-commercial] computer RPG based on the WoTC rules? 1: Based on past behavior, no.
2: You'll have better luck trying a COMMERCIAL game than vice versa.
I wonder why they chose to "open" the D&D system but left their CCG systems closed? 1: Because D&D's patentable innovations were created twenty years before WotC bought TSR.
2: Because Ryan Dancy convinced them that it's save tabletop gaming as a whole, and D&D's bottom line in particular, to let smaller companies support D&D.
One point that is often forgotten when discussing the OGL and D20 license is that game rules cannot be copyrighted Neither can a story. Or a collection of facts. But if you add enough details to a story, or enough specificity to those facts, you have a fairly solid case that you have something distinct and copyrightable.
The game rules for D&D are "everyone sits around a table, and one person describes the world. The referee asks players what they want to do, has them roll dice to determine specifics, and the game continues as a collaborative drama."
Where exactly the line between the above (which anyone can, and several people have, stolen exactly) and photocopying a D&D book falls is something you need a lawyer for. Kind of like how you need a lawyer to make sure the deed you write to give to a bank is a valid deed.
There are many, many videos available of mosques being destroyed in Iraq... Yep. Sunnis blowing up Shiite Mosques, Shiite blowing up Sunni Mosques, the United States bombing Mosques used as terrorist bases...
Got a reference to any of those, btw? With a date, and the name of someone who can be called to confirm that they happened?
Smart bombs are a tiny, tiny fraction of ordinance dropped -- they just kept replaying the footage of the laser guided bomb dropping down a chimney to make you think all war we wage is nice and tidy like that. The vast majority are traditional bombs Sorry, your information is out of date.
Concurrent to the invasion of Iraq the US Air Force started fitting JDAMs to its extant stockpile of munitions -- a small mass-produced pod attached to an extant weapon that turns a dumb bomb into a smart bomb.
Last number I heard, the dumb/smart bomb ratio was at 50/50 and rising.
I have a hard time believing that the U.S. military really cares that much about saving innocents. They don't so much care about saving innocents, as they care about not making life difficult for themselves. And, in most places they operate, that means not hitting a church or blowing up an innocent without either advance warning or a clear intention on doing so.
The pilot enters inputs into a computer requesting particular actions and the computer decides if and how to implement those requests, i.e. maneuver or drop bomb. Ah, no.
The computer decides HOW. The only time when it even comes close to "if" is if there's a fail-safe built in to the system -- and that's not so much deciding now to as being unable to figure out how.
And if you think the Pilots in cockpits and controlling UAVs don't have to enter a specific command each and every time a weapon is fired, I've got a bridge to sell you
How do they reason that there needs to be 2 Neither the F/OSS folks nor the Microsoft folks will abandon their established format. There will be two formats, no matter what the ISO does.
So, the best thing the ISO can do is formalize each "standard", and get each party used to listening to it and using it as the reference.
This is because religion, as we know it, has been torturing and killing scientists at the stake for (at least) the last two thousand years. Here's a hint: don't ignore ancient Greece when you try to talk about science. 1: Sorry, the vast majority of those burned at the stake really were burned for heresy -- that is, saying something against Church Doctrine. And in large part they said it because of a religious, not scientific, conviction.
2: Ancient Greece is largely where we get our understanding of religion FROM.
Slashdot Mirror
The answer to propoganda you don't like is not propoganda you do like.
Which is exactly why VB has the staying power it does.
And that's ignoring that the loudest reactions to Global Warming have never been ethanol, but conservation and pollution controls instead.
B: Yes. The era of planet formation was pretty hot. Your point?
C: The industrial revolution predated worldwide temperature monitoring. The "record", such as it goes, it incomplete. 4[a]. There are a number of other factors such as the above that you can't/don't give an explaination for (solar activity being one) The sun isn't providing enough additional power to the Earth to explain the observed increase in temperature. Yes, we are watching the sun. 4[b]you simply resort to either the "your workin for big oil" or the "i'm more rightgous than you" defense, neither of which is a valid scientific defense. An ad hominem attack is no more valid in a scientific political discussion than any other discussion.
I'll have to beg your forgiveness; the "global warming isn't a threat / is not our fault" line has been embraced by the same slice of the body politic that claims DDT doesn't hurt baby eagles, smoking doesn't cause cancer, and you can cut taxes forever and still pay for a war.
If when you argue on the same side of an issue as those who have long since ceded any claims to credibility to the scientific method, you get associated with their tactics until argued otherwise. "Silence implies consent", and all.
There's very little that's as bad as being hacked to death by a rusty foot of steel.
If it was just a question of land, we could feed the entire plant. Just us. Forget India, Europe, China, Africa, or any other breadbasket.
(And tell your parents that their house really isn't worth a quarter of a million dollars, and they should just sell.)
Anyone who thinks the US Government is somehow immune from nationalizing vital industries needs to read a history book.
WotC backing out of the OGL is a case of a compromise destroying a vision, not the vision being unworkable.
Last time I checked, there was D&D, Storyteller, and d20-variants like Mutants and Masterminds.
Storyteller has a "Storyteller d20" book written by Monte Cook.
D&D has, well, d20.
And the d20 variants often have explicit "this is how our system works" trademarks, similar to d20.
Find me a major RPG that DOESN'T support third-party products, and is still a viable business. All of the "major" RPG manufacturers went d20 ten years ago, and are either contractually obligated to stay open, or will go for WotC's GPL.
1: The people who wrote it.
2: People who went to a convention just to play it.
3: Folks who have NDAs, that limit what they can say.
What part of this audience makes you think it's a fair metric for how good the game actually is?
Considering that a "serial hybrid" is how diesel freight trains and M1-A1 tanks work, I'm less than convinced of your random dismissal of their potential. Especially with GM pushing exactly that concept as their next fuel design. Yeah, I realize you said you wanted the generator to be removeable, but that's another fantasy of armchair engineers. Yes, it's possible to engineer your complicated system, but it will add unacceptable weight and cost. At least you didn't say you wanted a removeable (swappable) battery. Wow. If only there was some way, some magical way that we could (1) standardize power output and (2) secure heavy loads in automobiles...
A removable generator is hardly the engineering nightmare you make it out to be. Heck, the darn thing has to be removable ANYWAY, for service/replacement/etc. Throwing in the manual and letting a dedicated owner do it themselves is hardly an engineering problem. Gas cars will be around for decades, so you can borrow/rent/own a second car if/when you really need it. Quick: how many Americans will buy a car they cannot drive from one end of the country to the next? Many countries use electrified rail for hauling freight. It's the only option that's long-term sustainable. Electric rail only makes sense if you don't have a more cost-efficient alternative. Even if all the fossil fuels go away and we are forced to produce all our own fuel, I wouldn't assume that hydrogen or artificial hydrocarbons won't be more efficient -- and both are every bit as long-term sustainable as pure electric.
A "cliche" is a demeaning way to refer to a phrase that you think is hokey, dated, or just shouldn't be part of the language. "snuff out" is embedded enough that you've got as much hope of panning it as "think outside the box", "in the nick of time", or, the best example of linguistic snobbery, "ain't".
I'm truly shocked by your scientific acumen.
The Climate Crisis is not that the environment is changing. It's that it's changing far, far too fast.
1: It's not true
2: A reasonable person wouldn't conclude that it is true.
3: A different reasonable person might believe that you're telling the truth.
4: Said person's disbelieve causes harm to the libelee.
Slander and Libel are pretty tough things, but like Assault, they require a common sense test. (Accidentally bumping into someone on a crowded street is not Assault, even if they scream their head off.)
I rent you a computer. You save your files to a flash drive. You don't pay, I take the computer back.
No court in the world will require that I give you a computer to let you read your files. Even if the computer has zero value to me. At most, I'll need to remove any encryption lock and leave your files in a format that an ordinary practiioner of the profession can access them.
2: You'll have better luck trying a COMMERCIAL game than vice versa.
2: Because Ryan Dancy convinced them that it's save tabletop gaming as a whole, and D&D's bottom line in particular, to let smaller companies support D&D.
The game rules for D&D are "everyone sits around a table, and one person describes the world. The referee asks players what they want to do, has them roll dice to determine specifics, and the game continues as a collaborative drama."
Where exactly the line between the above (which anyone can, and several people have, stolen exactly) and photocopying a D&D book falls is something you need a lawyer for. Kind of like how you need a lawyer to make sure the deed you write to give to a bank is a valid deed.
Got a reference to any of those, btw? With a date, and the name of someone who can be called to confirm that they happened?
It's VERY easy to fake a video on the internet.
Concurrent to the invasion of Iraq the US Air Force started fitting JDAMs to its extant stockpile of munitions -- a small mass-produced pod attached to an extant weapon that turns a dumb bomb into a smart bomb.
Last number I heard, the dumb/smart bomb ratio was at 50/50 and rising. I have a hard time believing that the U.S. military really cares that much about saving innocents. They don't so much care about saving innocents, as they care about not making life difficult for themselves. And, in most places they operate, that means not hitting a church or blowing up an innocent without either advance warning or a clear intention on doing so.
The computer decides HOW. The only time when it even comes close to "if" is if there's a fail-safe built in to the system -- and that's not so much deciding now to as being unable to figure out how.
And if you think the Pilots in cockpits and controlling UAVs don't have to enter a specific command each and every time a weapon is fired, I've got a bridge to sell you
So, the best thing the ISO can do is formalize each "standard", and get each party used to listening to it and using it as the reference.
2: Ancient Greece is largely where we get our understanding of religion FROM.
3: Did you just call Jesus Christ a scientist?