I guess it's important to prove it analytically, but isn't this pretty much the basic misunderstanding of capitalism that our policymakers have had since the Great Society/War on Poverty nonsense since the 60's (at least)?
- We are dismayed by the heavy use of drugs so instead of addressing WHY people use drugs (or really, the "user" end of the equation at all) we try to build procedural walls around our country out of money. LOTS of money.
- We are dismayed by the poverty we witness across the country, so instead of addressing why we have a nearly permanent underclass, we simply legislate that 'companies have to pay them more', which doesn't solve anything - companies just pass these costs on and everyone has to pay more to subsidize the poor as well as now creating an even larger, more permanently-fixed underclass dependent on government largesse.
- We see the worldwide spread of a sexually-transmitted disease that is extremely lethal, and 100% totally avoidable. So we throw $billions at the idea of curing said disease, instead of rightly addressing the conduct that causes its spread.
We are a nation of consequence avoiders; we want to act heedless of the results of our actions and then seem to insist that somehow we 'deserve' someone to save our sorry asses. I mean, we're wealthy-enough that we can throw $billions at problems and when nothing improves, we just shrug and throw MORE dollars at it.
This is precisely the same situation - there are 'calls' for science majors to be paid more, without really addressing that we've morphed into a nonproductive economy where the obsession over THIS MONTH'S or THIS QUARTER'S financial numbers mean that there isn't much focus on long-term, general benefit research.
Of course, some will read this and misunderstand again, saying that 'we need to open some government-run general research institutions'...instead of recognizing that Adam Smith pulls, he never pushes. If you feel a push, it's more likely Darwin than Smith.
What's hard for this layman to understand is the certainty with which anthropologists and such have approached the issue.
Why would there be any question but that neanderthals and humans had sex together? OF COURSE THEY DID. In the 21st century, we call it Rule 34. Previously, it was simply called perversion: the human male will generally mate with anything that has an-even-somewhat-suitable orifice.
Everyone is comparing the PS3 to the XBox360 streaming as if they're equal. They aren't. According to my understanding they both require a Netflix subscription (naturally), but the XBOX version ALSO requires that you have one of their $50/year Gold Live access. PS3 = free.
Then you misunderstand the BASIC principle of the US' system of states. It's ok, most folks in Washington don't get it either, although I'd suspect a TEENY bit more Republicans might, than Democrats for whom the very idea is the antithesis of their party platform (if only anyone bothered to read it).
States in the US are not merely administrative subdivisions of the Federal entity, as they are in most countries. US states were meant to be nearly sovereign entities, except in a small, finite number of ways that they submitted to a collective Federal authority, such as coinage, military, and foreign policy.
The states are otherwise meant to determine their OWN policies and methods within the bounds of the Bill of Rights. A philosophical free market, as it were. If Alabama were to vote that they were some sort of KKK-run racist enclave, it would in very short order be the victim of a torrential brain- and capital-drain, leaving it a meaningless, backward, empty irrelevancy with a horrible standard of living unless and until they decided to pass laws that would be more likely to attract residents and businesses that are the sinews of civilization.
People are so obsessed with a fear of the tyranny of the majority, they forget that even more insidious is the tyranny of the MINORITY, where paranoid fear of the former paralyzes a democracy. Ultimately, questions must be decided by the will of the majority, as the least-bad solution, or some situations would never be solved.
As put by Madison in A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in 1785: "We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance. True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority; but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.
Sadly, iD hasn't seemed to have progressed one iota.
They conceptualized an entire genre of gaming, yet they can't seem to get out of the basic 'you walk down the hallway and *poof* the lights go out and a monster jumps at you' box.
Sure, every game is technologically magnificent but you'd think for their millions and millions of dollars, they could afford someone who could breathe a little life into the games.
Where's Rage, by the way? It could just be selective memory, but it seems like it's been a loooong time since D3, and I don't even see Rage on the hypemeter.
"...the issue should be brought to a wider vote to decide the matter."
And this is the crux.
Gay activists do NOT want democracy on this issue. They are a fringe group representing perhaps 10% of the population (in their optimistic numbers), and they know it (not to mention their militancy is driving the broadly tolerant middle ground against them as well).
They DON'T want a vote. The WANT to know who's 'opposing' this signing the petition. They have shown repeatedly that they have no problem with using intimidation and scare tactics to silence their opposition.
I have a very good friend who is openly gay and Republican (yes, I keep telling him that he needs pictures in the wild to prove he's not a hoax). He has told me repeatedly that he is perfectly comfortable being a gay man in any Republican gathering, yet if he dares acknowledge his political views at a Pride rally, he risks his physical safety.
He's opposed to gay marriage by the way; he said that letting the government have any say in hetero marriages was part of the reason they're so screwed up and valueless today.
Didn't RTFA but listening conditions matter a heckuva lot too.
Am I listening to high-grade isolation-cup headphones, with my eyes closed, doing nothing else? Or am I listening to buds in the exercise room while bike riding and reading?
Because I'll tell you, for the latter, there IS NO SIGNIFICANT difference. Nothing that matters.
I had a friend who was frustrated over the small amount of music he could fit into his (cheap, small) mp3 player. He was going to use it while waterskiing. I dropped it to the lowest possible resolution and he was happy as a clam.
...I hope they code the Surface better than they code the website. Wow, is that pokey and pointless.
That said, if I could get the faintest whiff of a donation of a Surface system and a grant to write D&D software for it (including extensive real-world testing) I'd be pretty damn eager too.
D&D 4.0, being more of a skirmish adventure game than a RPG, is really perfect for it.
I can see it work tho, you could have the maps dynamic, and fog-of-war'd. You could have the surface character- and stat-aware so that it would give you movement options, and just tap the character figure and target, get a dropdown of attack options, and it resolves the mechanics with lots of sound effects. Pools of blood could spread from badly injured/dead toons. You could either use figures atop the displayed map, or have animated icons for the characters which would look cooler anyway (minifigs and dungeon tiles makers? Your long painful struggle keeping your business afloat is about to end, anyway...).
Display animated spell effects OF COURSE, not to mention dynamic lighting and shadows, traps that happen when you move onto them (your character's animated response based on the internalized saving throw roll). NWN/DDO meet somewhere on a combination touchscreen/projector, basically.
Yeah, I could see this being cool.
I think they should also test long-range networked implementation, so I'd be happy to help if someone could donate a Surface.
Here's the money-shot: "Patrick Rothfuss fulminant debut with "Name of the wind" costs 25 Euro as a german book or 7 Euro as an english one (both including S&H)."
German book: $37.50 English: $10.50
The industry will live only as long as the populace will continue to tolerate subsidizing it.
That said, the Germans I know have a deep respect for books as matter - witness Inkheart, a (for Germany) wildly popular kids book about a love for books. Not the stories within, the actual BOOKS themselves, which as an American I find really strange and for some reason disturbing.
Nevertheless, this would suggest that there will always be a niche market willing to pay absurd prices for their books printed in German. I'm curious how small that niche will be, and how aggressively the EU will defend a single industry's collusive (although that implies a level of secrecy that's wholly absent here) pricing and behavior.
So, someone goes down to the waterline at low tide and says "hey! Lookit all the unused land! So they build their house. Then when the tide comes back in, we're all supposed to cry that they're going to get flooded out?
Stupid.
Whether humans are here or not, water levels will rise and fall. It will happen to every coastal city, it's just a matter of time. Fortunately humans are possibly the most adaptable creatures on the planet. Certainly climate change will result in costs and even possibly some deaths, but in the big picture, they're really nothing more than inconveniences.
All I can say is that the original Starfleet Command had a similar 'we match the challenge to your power' and it got old VERY quickly. In fact, due to scaling issues, it was far easier to progress in the campaign if you simply kept to the smaller ships, where the opponents then stayed as smaller ships and repair costs were always low.
Rank up to an uber-dreadnought? Your AI opponent would have one too.
It actually got old very quickly.
Part of the fun is NOT KNOWING if this 'next challenge' is going to be too much for you to handle. If you always know you can win, that's just boring.
"Now, isn't that by itself enough to get you thinking?"
Yeah, it makes me think that women understand better than to waste their development skills NOT GETTING PAID, and that hobby-time outside of work, they probably have better things to do than code.
"But the real flood of emotion comes from the anti-feminists and the average men who would like to deny the importance of feminist issues in FOSS. "
They "deny" the importance? HOW DARE THEY?!!
Doesn't that statement beg an enormous question - if feminist 'issues' have an inherent importance in FOSS at all?
Flame me if you want, but to me the answer's simply: no.
Pardon me, but it's SOFTWARE. And specifically, we're not even talking about actual coding, this is about the paradigm of coding software as Free Open Source. Oh noes, the forums on FOSS have some mouth-breathers who pop wood at the idea there might be a woman reading the text. Hello? Who cares? If Nancy Codemistress feels it's so important to identify her gender there, she can take what she gets. If it offends her sensibilities, then perhaps she should log in as Dogbert next time?
(And for those who are about to attack for saying 'why should she have to hide her gender?' - because it's irrelevant. Look, I didn't choose a "IMAREPUBLICAN" user name here either, think for a second about why - yet I don't bother asserting that I have some sort of 'right' to do so.)
I don't approve of arrested-development retards trolling women but I'm also getting sick of us trying to legislate away stupidity.
If women want to code for FOSS, great. If the basement-dwelling codegeeks scare them off, I think the planet will continue to turn and FOSS will lose out on some code contributors, as well as some validity as those who are driven away feed the rumormill about why they choose not to participate.
That said, and probably many too many words later, I frankly don't care. Do I (or by extension, you the reader) REALLY think a single piece of code's utility/application has ever in the history of mankind, been decided by the openness of it's code-generating-community to outsiders? Particularly something as already marginal as FOSS?
Even for navel-gazing nerdcakes, that's getting pretty damn obscure. To assert it's so relevant that it's some sort of controversy is laughable. Angels on a pin (of indeterminate gender OF COURSE).
Is it just me, or do ardent feminists really seem like people who not only see, but LOOK for their particular 'flavor' of problem everywhere? Sure, they'd turn that on it's head and say that, ipso facto, sexism (against women) is EVERYWHERE. Um, ya. To me that's just a symptom of some sort of religious obsessiveness that makes my Born Again friends equally obnoxious, seeing God everywhere as well. Both take a practically theological level of certainty that crosses well into circularity.
"This gun should be able to handle pretty much all of the consumables and many of the parts and materials needed by the space station."
Thus, this ALSO becomes the perfect economical method of sending celebrities and other supertourists into orbit as well, killing two birds (in effect, THREE) with one stone.
Hey, don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that they needed to. I think dynamite was a terrific invention that made the world better. But it clearly IS/WAS an effort to whitewash that perceived blemish from their family name.
By that standard, any German government that doesn't invade France should get the prize since it seems to be practically a reflex that they 'successfully resist'.
Personally, the idea that Gorbachev GOT a Nobel and Reagan didn't (bitter Nobel anti-Americanism notwithstanding, and the Left's repugnance for Reagan's unapologetic American triumphalism) was for me in the 1980s the earliest sign that the Nobel was merely a political prize, not an actual affirmation of accomplishment.
For that matter, the US policy of containment itself should have earned the Peace Prize, as the resistance and ultimate defeat of an exapansionist, evangelist doctrine like Communism (which killed tens of millions, far more than Nazism or Fascism) was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the 20th Century. Only China and NK are left, NK is nearly irrelevant except as a spoiler with nukes (thanks Bill!) and China is facing a long-building reconciliation of its centralist Marxist statism with the burgeoning capitalist new generations.
I see this a lot of places "there wasn't a big explosion or anything"...were there even EXPLOSIVES on the impactor? Fuel? I'd guess there wasn't, as any sort of oxydizer probably would run the risk of confusing the data grabbed.
So no, if you slam a chunk of essentially inert metal at a fairly high speed into a pile of gravel, you're not going to get a big Hollywood(tm) explosion.
"The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet."
Well, it seems to me that whatever the processes were that would have generated/collected water and organics on these asteroids, would just as likely have SIMILARLY generated/collected water and organics on the debris that accreted to form the earth in the FIRST place, no?
I mean, I understand that the accretion process from dust>>>planet was traumatic and probably involved a great deal of heat, but a) the crashing of meteorites to earth is easily just as traumatic b) while all the "envisionings" of early-forming protoearth illustrate it as a molten hellhole, I'm curious why? I could see a great deal of energy being generated by the collision/compression of the dust/debris cloud, but wouldn't most of this be in the gravitational center of mass? The outer surface would both suffer less compression heating AND be able to quickly radiate heat away, no? Further, this process would have taken at least hundreds of millions of years, and so not necessarily resulted in really high (ie molten lava) temps at any given point...?
In any case, it seems logical that the process of accumulating water/organics didn't simply *poof* start AFTER the Earth was formed, there were a good 6-8 billion years prior to that, and the pre-earth debris would likely have been just as covered.
It's even simpler - it's available to ANYONE who makes appropriate liberal noises, whether it matters or not. Being staunchly on the left wing helps tremendously.
It's ALL about appearances. 1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War 1988 United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces 1990 Mikhail Gorbachev 1993 Nelson Mandela 1994 Yasser Arafat 1995 Josef Rotblat
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs 1999 Médecins Sans Frontières 2001 United Nations
Kofi Annan 2002 Jimmy Carter 2005 International Atomic Energy Agency
Mohamed ElBaradei 2007 Al Gore
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2009 Barack Obama - nominated after TWO WEEKS IN OFFICE....it's a continuing list of the incompetent, irrelevant, and self-promoting.
In that sense, it's appropriate, considering the whole PRIZE is merely a sop to the Nobel family's conscience and an effort to whitewash their connection with the invention of dynamite.
What I got from the essay?... apparently MIT isn't rejecting people based on their narcissistic views of their own preciousness.
God, that was horrible.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with her in principle that it's NOT excessive to ask 18-yr-olds to express themselves cogently in a 500 word essay. I think that's a good hurdle for top schools.
But her essay wasn't a good example, it was drivel. Self-obsessive, whiny, emo drivel.
"...The executive order 'shows the federal government is leading by example' and 'sends a signal that distracted driving is dangerous,' LaHood said."
What a load of nonsense. I'm not arguing at all with the (relatively trivial) point about texting-while-driving being irresponsible and stupid.
But what this shows is that the FEDERAL government is bogged down in stupid minutiae, and is essentially worthless. What's next, an executive order to make sure you don't run with scissors? Don't drink your coffee before it's cooled sufficiently? Button up your overcoat?
Don't people understand the perniciousness of allowing our government to order the small details of our daily lives? Aren't we grownups anymore? Because how is a DEMOCRACY supposed to work where the idiocracy (apparently) can't be trusted to keep their own LIVES safe? In short, you can't legislate away stupidity, and the simple act of trying suggests either a pathetic abandonment of the essential nature of our way of life, or a malicious road to the circumscription of the powers of the people.
We're spending $trilions$ more than we have. We're entangled in a much-needed examination in how Health Care will be delivered in this country. We're engaged in two overseas conflicts where US soldiers are fighting and dying. We have the worst financial crisis in perhaps 50 years.
Good thing to know the president is making sure we get the Olympics* and that Fed employees aren't texting while driving !!
* just disregard that the $billions spent to build the new Olympic facilities would be paid to his slumlord friend who is now a White House advisor. That's probably just a coincidence.
"The upshot of this is that people sometimes have to be... nudged in the direction they "should" be going (whatever that means), and one way of doing that is taxing things that are bad for them."
BULL. SHIT.
See, *you* (or your favorite government entity) doesn't GET to decide what direction anyone "should" be going.
Don't you understand that the SAME logic could apply to someone establishing a new tax on people that (for example) don't go to church, since studies are generally consistent that religious people are happier than nonreligious? Would you seriously be OK with that? But shouldn't people be happy?
Once people are grownups, they are not only responsible and entitled to make their own decisions, they are REQUIRED to do so. If they make stupid choices THEY HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES. The moment that you insert a safety net for people's choices, you warp the entire society in subtle and far-reaching ways.
Fat? Smoker? Lazy slob? Drive too fast? Any of these things are CHOICES. And the moment that you try to claim that they have costs that impact others (ie medical costs 'borne by the system') you are simply reinforcing my point - remove artificial safety nets that protect people from their choices.*
* for that matter, get rid of the ones that protect companies from their stupid decisions, while you're at it.
Slashdot Mirror
Um....duh?
I guess it's important to prove it analytically, but isn't this pretty much the basic misunderstanding of capitalism that our policymakers have had since the Great Society/War on Poverty nonsense since the 60's (at least)?
- We are dismayed by the heavy use of drugs so instead of addressing WHY people use drugs (or really, the "user" end of the equation at all) we try to build procedural walls around our country out of money. LOTS of money.
- We are dismayed by the poverty we witness across the country, so instead of addressing why we have a nearly permanent underclass, we simply legislate that 'companies have to pay them more', which doesn't solve anything - companies just pass these costs on and everyone has to pay more to subsidize the poor as well as now creating an even larger, more permanently-fixed underclass dependent on government largesse.
- We see the worldwide spread of a sexually-transmitted disease that is extremely lethal, and 100% totally avoidable. So we throw $billions at the idea of curing said disease, instead of rightly addressing the conduct that causes its spread.
We are a nation of consequence avoiders; we want to act heedless of the results of our actions and then seem to insist that somehow we 'deserve' someone to save our sorry asses. I mean, we're wealthy-enough that we can throw $billions at problems and when nothing improves, we just shrug and throw MORE dollars at it.
This is precisely the same situation - there are 'calls' for science majors to be paid more, without really addressing that we've morphed into a nonproductive economy where the obsession over THIS MONTH'S or THIS QUARTER'S financial numbers mean that there isn't much focus on long-term, general benefit research.
Of course, some will read this and misunderstand again, saying that 'we need to open some government-run general research institutions'...instead of recognizing that Adam Smith pulls, he never pushes. If you feel a push, it's more likely Darwin than Smith.
What's hard for this layman to understand is the certainty with which anthropologists and such have approached the issue.
Why would there be any question but that neanderthals and humans had sex together? OF COURSE THEY DID. In the 21st century, we call it Rule 34. Previously, it was simply called perversion: the human male will generally mate with anything that has an-even-somewhat-suitable orifice.
Further, probably every one of us knows one or more people who LOOK like neanderthals - heavy brow ridge, differently-shaped head, etc. cf Ron Perlman http://goremasternews.files.wordpress.com/2009/07/ro-perlman.jpg
Commonsensically, it seems obvious.
Everyone is comparing the PS3 to the XBox360 streaming as if they're equal.
They aren't. According to my understanding they both require a Netflix subscription (naturally), but the XBOX version ALSO requires that you have one of their $50/year Gold Live access. PS3 = free.
That's a very non-trivial difference.
Then you misunderstand the BASIC principle of the US' system of states. It's ok, most folks in Washington don't get it either, although I'd suspect a TEENY bit more Republicans might, than Democrats for whom the very idea is the antithesis of their party platform (if only anyone bothered to read it).
States in the US are not merely administrative subdivisions of the Federal entity, as they are in most countries. US states were meant to be nearly sovereign entities, except in a small, finite number of ways that they submitted to a collective Federal authority, such as coinage, military, and foreign policy.
The states are otherwise meant to determine their OWN policies and methods within the bounds of the Bill of Rights. A philosophical free market, as it were. If Alabama were to vote that they were some sort of KKK-run racist enclave, it would in very short order be the victim of a torrential brain- and capital-drain, leaving it a meaningless, backward, empty irrelevancy with a horrible standard of living unless and until they decided to pass laws that would be more likely to attract residents and businesses that are the sinews of civilization.
People are so obsessed with a fear of the tyranny of the majority, they forget that even more insidious is the tyranny of the MINORITY, where paranoid fear of the former paralyzes a democracy. Ultimately, questions must be decided by the will of the majority, as the least-bad solution, or some situations would never be solved.
As put by Madison in A Memorial and Remonstrance Against Religious Assessments in 1785:
"We maintain therefore that in matters of Religion, no man's right is abridged by the institution of Civil Society and that Religion is wholly exempt from its cognizance. True it is, that no other rule exists, by which any question which may divide a Society, can be ultimately determined, but the will of the majority; but it is also true that the majority may trespass on the rights of the minority.
Sadly, iD hasn't seemed to have progressed one iota.
They conceptualized an entire genre of gaming, yet they can't seem to get out of the basic 'you walk down the hallway and *poof* the lights go out and a monster jumps at you' box.
Sure, every game is technologically magnificent but you'd think for their millions and millions of dollars, they could afford someone who could breathe a little life into the games.
Where's Rage, by the way? It could just be selective memory, but it seems like it's been a loooong time since D3, and I don't even see Rage on the hypemeter.
"...the issue should be brought to a wider vote to decide the matter."
And this is the crux.
Gay activists do NOT want democracy on this issue. They are a fringe group representing perhaps 10% of the population (in their optimistic numbers), and they know it (not to mention their militancy is driving the broadly tolerant middle ground against them as well).
They DON'T want a vote.
The WANT to know who's 'opposing' this signing the petition.
They have shown repeatedly that they have no problem with using intimidation and scare tactics to silence their opposition.
I have a very good friend who is openly gay and Republican (yes, I keep telling him that he needs pictures in the wild to prove he's not a hoax). He has told me repeatedly that he is perfectly comfortable being a gay man in any Republican gathering, yet if he dares acknowledge his political views at a Pride rally, he risks his physical safety.
He's opposed to gay marriage by the way; he said that letting the government have any say in hetero marriages was part of the reason they're so screwed up and valueless today.
Didn't RTFA but listening conditions matter a heckuva lot too.
Am I listening to high-grade isolation-cup headphones, with my eyes closed, doing nothing else?
Or am I listening to buds in the exercise room while bike riding and reading?
Because I'll tell you, for the latter, there IS NO SIGNIFICANT difference. Nothing that matters.
I had a friend who was frustrated over the small amount of music he could fit into his (cheap, small) mp3 player. He was going to use it while waterskiing. I dropped it to the lowest possible resolution and he was happy as a clam.
...I hope they code the Surface better than they code the website. Wow, is that pokey and pointless.
That said, if I could get the faintest whiff of a donation of a Surface system and a grant to write D&D software for it (including extensive real-world testing) I'd be pretty damn eager too.
D&D 4.0, being more of a skirmish adventure game than a RPG, is really perfect for it.
I can see it work tho, you could have the maps dynamic, and fog-of-war'd. You could have the surface character- and stat-aware so that it would give you movement options, and just tap the character figure and target, get a dropdown of attack options, and it resolves the mechanics with lots of sound effects. Pools of blood could spread from badly injured/dead toons. You could either use figures atop the displayed map, or have animated icons for the characters which would look cooler anyway (minifigs and dungeon tiles makers? Your long painful struggle keeping your business afloat is about to end, anyway...).
Display animated spell effects OF COURSE, not to mention dynamic lighting and shadows, traps that happen when you move onto them (your character's animated response based on the internalized saving throw roll). NWN/DDO meet somewhere on a combination touchscreen/projector, basically.
Yeah, I could see this being cool.
I think they should also test long-range networked implementation, so I'd be happy to help if someone could donate a Surface.
Good post.
Here's the money-shot: "Patrick Rothfuss fulminant debut with "Name of the wind" costs 25 Euro as a german book or 7 Euro as an english one (both including S&H)."
German book: $37.50
English: $10.50
The industry will live only as long as the populace will continue to tolerate subsidizing it.
That said, the Germans I know have a deep respect for books as matter - witness Inkheart, a (for Germany) wildly popular kids book about a love for books. Not the stories within, the actual BOOKS themselves, which as an American I find really strange and for some reason disturbing.
Nevertheless, this would suggest that there will always be a niche market willing to pay absurd prices for their books printed in German. I'm curious how small that niche will be, and how aggressively the EU will defend a single industry's collusive (although that implies a level of secrecy that's wholly absent here) pricing and behavior.
So, someone goes down to the waterline at low tide and says "hey! Lookit all the unused land! So they build their house. Then when the tide comes back in, we're all supposed to cry that they're going to get flooded out?
Stupid.
Whether humans are here or not, water levels will rise and fall. It will happen to every coastal city, it's just a matter of time. Fortunately humans are possibly the most adaptable creatures on the planet. Certainly climate change will result in costs and even possibly some deaths, but in the big picture, they're really nothing more than inconveniences.
All I can say is that the original Starfleet Command had a similar 'we match the challenge to your power' and it got old VERY quickly. In fact, due to scaling issues, it was far easier to progress in the campaign if you simply kept to the smaller ships, where the opponents then stayed as smaller ships and repair costs were always low.
Rank up to an uber-dreadnought? Your AI opponent would have one too.
It actually got old very quickly.
Part of the fun is NOT KNOWING if this 'next challenge' is going to be too much for you to handle. If you always know you can win, that's just boring.
"Now, isn't that by itself enough to get you thinking?"
Yeah, it makes me think that women understand better than to waste their development skills NOT GETTING PAID, and that hobby-time outside of work, they probably have better things to do than code.
Or did you mean to insinuate something else?
"But the real flood of emotion comes from the anti-feminists and the average men who would like to deny the importance of feminist issues in FOSS. "
They "deny" the importance? HOW DARE THEY?!!
Doesn't that statement beg an enormous question - if feminist 'issues' have an inherent importance in FOSS at all?
Flame me if you want, but to me the answer's simply: no.
Pardon me, but it's SOFTWARE. And specifically, we're not even talking about actual coding, this is about the paradigm of coding software as Free Open Source. Oh noes, the forums on FOSS have some mouth-breathers who pop wood at the idea there might be a woman reading the text. Hello? Who cares? If Nancy Codemistress feels it's so important to identify her gender there, she can take what she gets. If it offends her sensibilities, then perhaps she should log in as Dogbert next time?
(And for those who are about to attack for saying 'why should she have to hide her gender?' - because it's irrelevant. Look, I didn't choose a "IMAREPUBLICAN" user name here either, think for a second about why - yet I don't bother asserting that I have some sort of 'right' to do so.)
I don't approve of arrested-development retards trolling women but I'm also getting sick of us trying to legislate away stupidity.
If women want to code for FOSS, great. If the basement-dwelling codegeeks scare them off, I think the planet will continue to turn and FOSS will lose out on some code contributors, as well as some validity as those who are driven away feed the rumormill about why they choose not to participate.
That said, and probably many too many words later, I frankly don't care. Do I (or by extension, you the reader) REALLY think a single piece of code's utility/application has ever in the history of mankind, been decided by the openness of it's code-generating-community to outsiders? Particularly something as already marginal as FOSS?
Even for navel-gazing nerdcakes, that's getting pretty damn obscure. To assert it's so relevant that it's some sort of controversy is laughable. Angels on a pin (of indeterminate gender OF COURSE).
Is it just me, or do ardent feminists really seem like people who not only see, but LOOK for their particular 'flavor' of problem everywhere? Sure, they'd turn that on it's head and say that, ipso facto, sexism (against women) is EVERYWHERE. Um, ya. To me that's just a symptom of some sort of religious obsessiveness that makes my Born Again friends equally obnoxious, seeing God everywhere as well. Both take a practically theological level of certainty that crosses well into circularity.
"This gun should be able to handle pretty much all of the consumables and many of the parts and materials needed by the space station."
Thus, this ALSO becomes the perfect economical method of sending celebrities and other supertourists into orbit as well, killing two birds (in effect, THREE) with one stone.
Hey, don't misunderstand: I'm not saying that they needed to. I think dynamite was a terrific invention that made the world better. But it clearly IS/WAS an effort to whitewash that perceived blemish from their family name.
By that standard, any German government that doesn't invade France should get the prize since it seems to be practically a reflex that they 'successfully resist'.
Personally, the idea that Gorbachev GOT a Nobel and Reagan didn't (bitter Nobel anti-Americanism notwithstanding, and the Left's repugnance for Reagan's unapologetic American triumphalism) was for me in the 1980s the earliest sign that the Nobel was merely a political prize, not an actual affirmation of accomplishment.
For that matter, the US policy of containment itself should have earned the Peace Prize, as the resistance and ultimate defeat of an exapansionist, evangelist doctrine like Communism (which killed tens of millions, far more than Nazism or Fascism) was perhaps the greatest accomplishment of the 20th Century. Only China and NK are left, NK is nearly irrelevant except as a spoiler with nukes (thanks Bill!) and China is facing a long-building reconciliation of its centralist Marxist statism with the burgeoning capitalist new generations.
I see this a lot of places "there wasn't a big explosion or anything"...were there even EXPLOSIVES on the impactor? Fuel? I'd guess there wasn't, as any sort of oxydizer probably would run the risk of confusing the data grabbed.
So no, if you slam a chunk of essentially inert metal at a fairly high speed into a pile of gravel, you're not going to get a big Hollywood(tm) explosion.
"You say Obama doesn't deserve the Prize after 8 months in office and no major accomplishments?"
I believe you're mistaken.
Nobel nominations deadline was Feb 1.
He was in office what, 10 days, when he was nominated.
I somehow missed all that he accomplished in those 10 days.
"The scientists say these new findings support the theory that asteroids brought both water and organic compounds to the early Earth, helping lay the foundation for life on the planet."
Well, it seems to me that whatever the processes were that would have generated/collected water and organics on these asteroids, would just as likely have SIMILARLY generated/collected water and organics on the debris that accreted to form the earth in the FIRST place, no?
I mean, I understand that the accretion process from dust>>>planet was traumatic and probably involved a great deal of heat, but
a) the crashing of meteorites to earth is easily just as traumatic
b) while all the "envisionings" of early-forming protoearth illustrate it as a molten hellhole, I'm curious why? I could see a great deal of energy being generated by the collision/compression of the dust/debris cloud, but wouldn't most of this be in the gravitational center of mass? The outer surface would both suffer less compression heating AND be able to quickly radiate heat away, no? Further, this process would have taken at least hundreds of millions of years, and so not necessarily resulted in really high (ie molten lava) temps at any given point...?
In any case, it seems logical that the process of accumulating water/organics didn't simply *poof* start AFTER the Earth was formed, there were a good 6-8 billion years prior to that, and the pre-earth debris would likely have been just as covered.
It's even simpler - it's available to ANYONE who makes appropriate liberal noises, whether it matters or not. Being staunchly on the left wing helps tremendously.
It's ALL about appearances. ...it's a continuing list of the incompetent, irrelevant, and self-promoting.
1985 International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War
1988 United Nations Peace-Keeping Forces
1990 Mikhail Gorbachev
1993 Nelson Mandela
1994 Yasser Arafat
1995 Josef Rotblat
Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs
1999 Médecins Sans Frontières
2001 United Nations
Kofi Annan
2002 Jimmy Carter
2005 International Atomic Energy Agency
Mohamed ElBaradei
2007 Al Gore
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
2009 Barack Obama - nominated after TWO WEEKS IN OFFICE.
In that sense, it's appropriate, considering the whole PRIZE is merely a sop to the Nobel family's conscience and an effort to whitewash their connection with the invention of dynamite.
What I got from the essay?... apparently MIT isn't rejecting people based on their narcissistic views of their own preciousness.
God, that was horrible.
Don't get me wrong - I agree with her in principle that it's NOT excessive to ask 18-yr-olds to express themselves cogently in a 500 word essay. I think that's a good hurdle for top schools.
But her essay wasn't a good example, it was drivel. Self-obsessive, whiny, emo drivel.
"This is either a stunning rejection of America's first "celebrity" president, or else all those nasty Euros are racist."
Been to Europe lately?
I'd say C) Both.
"...The executive order 'shows the federal government is leading by example' and 'sends a signal that distracted driving is dangerous,' LaHood said."
What a load of nonsense. I'm not arguing at all with the (relatively trivial) point about texting-while-driving being irresponsible and stupid.
But what this shows is that the FEDERAL government is bogged down in stupid minutiae, and is essentially worthless. What's next, an executive order to make sure you don't run with scissors? Don't drink your coffee before it's cooled sufficiently? Button up your overcoat?
Don't people understand the perniciousness of allowing our government to order the small details of our daily lives? Aren't we grownups anymore? Because how is a DEMOCRACY supposed to work where the idiocracy (apparently) can't be trusted to keep their own LIVES safe? In short, you can't legislate away stupidity, and the simple act of trying suggests either a pathetic abandonment of the essential nature of our way of life, or a malicious road to the circumscription of the powers of the people.
We're spending $trilions$ more than we have.
We're entangled in a much-needed examination in how Health Care will be delivered in this country.
We're engaged in two overseas conflicts where US soldiers are fighting and dying.
We have the worst financial crisis in perhaps 50 years.
Good thing to know the president is making sure we get the Olympics* and that Fed employees aren't texting while driving !!
* just disregard that the $billions spent to build the new Olympic facilities would be paid to his slumlord friend who is now a White House advisor. That's probably just a coincidence.
Obviously he can't respond until he renews his library card.
"The upshot of this is that people sometimes have to be... nudged in the direction they "should" be going (whatever that means), and one way of doing that is taxing things that are bad for them."
BULL. SHIT.
See, *you* (or your favorite government entity) doesn't GET to decide what direction anyone "should" be going.
Don't you understand that the SAME logic could apply to someone establishing a new tax on people that (for example) don't go to church, since studies are generally consistent that religious people are happier than nonreligious? Would you seriously be OK with that? But shouldn't people be happy?
Once people are grownups, they are not only responsible and entitled to make their own decisions, they are REQUIRED to do so. If they make stupid choices THEY HAVE TO LIVE WITH THE CONSEQUENCES. The moment that you insert a safety net for people's choices, you warp the entire society in subtle and far-reaching ways.
Fat? Smoker? Lazy slob? Drive too fast? Any of these things are CHOICES. And the moment that you try to claim that they have costs that impact others (ie medical costs 'borne by the system') you are simply reinforcing my point - remove artificial safety nets that protect people from their choices.*
* for that matter, get rid of the ones that protect companies from their stupid decisions, while you're at it.