I'm not going to disagree with you - Denmark's a really wonderful country.
However, I will take a slight issue with your comparison. It's one thing to have a set of rules governing and supporting an homogenous* population of 5 million. It's entirely another thing to have a set of rules that apply to an ethnically and culturally diverse state of 300 million. Not just a matter of scale, there are intrinsic differences that make the problem far more than (only) 60x bigger.
Denmark 91% Danish descent - not simply by skin color, but from a common ethno-cultural background 83% of them are Lutheran
The US? More than 31 ethnic groups number over a million members. White 74.67% --- and this includes Danes, Germans, Swedes, British, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, Hungarian, etc, etc, etc.... Hispanic 14.50% Black 12.12% Asian 4.32% Indian 0.82% Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.14% Other/multiracial 7.92%
No, I envy your society in many ways. I live in Minnesota and while I'll probably be accused of being a racist for saying so, I believe a lot of the reasons Minnesota has (had) such a historically high 'quality of life' has been our overwhelming Nordic homogeneity as well...but now as we're absorbing ever-increasing numbers of Somalis, Hmong, and a host of culturally-foreign emigrants from Chicago, well, Minneapolis/St Paul is becoming just another shitty crime-ridden and emotionally empty American city.
"The achillies' heel in all this is that if everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. You've debased the term to a meaningless point." The other Achilles heel is a practical one: if everything's illegal, nobody cares about the laws anymore. Hey, I'm happy to hand over my $$ to an artist for the product of their blood, sweat, and tears. It *IS* work to produce art, and I have no problem rewarding the producers of same for what they do. However, I don't believe that all the financial parasites between them need to be similarly rewarded for legally interposing themselves, so I try to buy only direct from the artist - their website, or whatever. I also don't believe that the artists' 3rd+ generation descendant is quite so 'entitled' to a financial sinecure since they had a productive g'g'grandparent.
Ultimately, commerce will out: people will find a way to get what they want and if a government tries to interpose itself, either the government comes down (if it's a really big thing like democracy) or a black market evolves (if it's trivial like alcohol).
I think his insight is sound, but then he goes off into moonbat land.
"Did someone at Barksdale try to indirectly warn the American people that the Bush Administration is staging nukes for Iran?"
Why don't you take off the tinfoil hat and look for a simpler explanation: that we wanted the IRANIANS to know that we are probably staging nukes into the Mid East. (Not like our carrier groups don't have a few, c'mon.)
If one looks like one might be confronting a theocratic possibly-nuclear power which is run by people whose goals may just be to bring on the "end of times" for their 13th Imam or whatever, mightn't it be a decent idea to 'telegraph' to them that our forces in the theater will be capable of dealing with whatever conflict they choose to engage in? Tactical, one-sided Assured Destruction in a post Cold-War world.
Note, as of 4 pm CST 9/5/07, Ubi has PULLED their files for some reason. I wonder if ANYONE got 4 gigs of free games in the short time they were posted...
Sorry/., but this is the sort of crap reporting that is persistent on the web and (because they're desperate to retain viewers/readers) is becoming the de facto standard in print and media journalism.
Appending "Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality." to the end of an article strongly implying causality in every sense, doesn't absolve the reporter from the false conclusions he/she implies throughout the rest of the article.
That the correlation was run at ALL implies that someone was 'looking for something' - suspect 1. The layer upon layer of dependent statistics leading to a very authoritative-sounding "the likelihood that this is a concidence is 7%" makes it sound very scientific and accurate - suspect 2
Sorry, this is FUD passed off as news supported by phony statistics.
Most media stories (carried by commercial media conglomerates) are motivated by a desire to sell products, and contain little to no actual science! (shock)
"Caveat Emptor" applies to just about everything you see, read, or hear as well. Be (at least) skeptical of everything you hear, and you'll be just fine.
"In Norway we have a socialistic government, and we are currently rated as the best country in the world to live in."
And I'm sure that the fact that by geographic circumstance you are sitting on a gigantic puddle of the worlds most needed commodity is just a coincidence, it's really only because you're socialist that you have such a high standard of living.
Not taking it personally at all, I find the discussion interesting.
I'd say the issues (for Bioshock in particular) are a little deeper than your suggestion. For example, is a "little girl" in a video game entitled to the moral level of restraint that we would, for example, offer any child in the real world? Assuming this, what if she is evil (in this case, doing something heinous)? What if what she is doing isn't intrinsically evil (if you accept such absolutes) but merely surviving the only way she can? What if sacrificing an unknown (in this case a little girl, playing bluntly on most people's sympathetic nature to children and girls in particular) is the only way that YOU can survive? Would you?
I think a case can be made that there IS a fairly serious point* on the bounds of moral relativism, utilitarianism, as well as a more '4th wall' meta-question of how far the bounds of our real-world definitions stretch, to each of us. Is a collection of pixels "a girl" in a moral or ethical sense? How about a collection of lines? At what point (as a *very* crude example) on the spectrum below does "pedophilia" appear, and why? I think everyone's answer is going to vary at least a bit.
* don't get me wrong though, this isn't a subtle point in Bioshock, in fact I think it's almost trite but the medium is still rather young.
1- a drawing of a stick figure having sex with a smaller stick figure 2- an animated graphic of the above 3- an animated graphic of a simplistic human figure and a small (but adult-proportioned) human figure 4- animated graphic of more realistic proportions still stick figures 5- authetic proportions, but still stick figures 6- as 5, but simple line drawings 7- as 6 but only shaded 8- as 7, but drawn realistically 9- rendered computer graphics 10- photorealistic computer graphics 11- actual people
Now about your point that 'violent' art is escapist, I agree that it certainly CAN be. But I don't think Saving Private Ryan (for instance), while horrifically violent, avoided at all the consequences of that violence for the viewer. As I think I mentioned before, violence can CERTAINLY be gratuitous and in fact I think it sadly IS, in Hollywood, to a large degree. But I can completely understand why many people simply don't want to be confronted with SPR's level of violence, no matter how 'valuable' the reason.
Well, yes, "great" is a self-evidently subjective measure.
Many people, I believe, like movies (& books, & videogames) that challenge one's preconceptions - that present the viewer with a moral dilemma, or a challenging set of circumstances. Other people want nothing but mild escapist entertainment that allows them to NOT be confronted with the challenges that they (for example) might face in their occupations. Generally, I would argue, movies in the 'challenging' category are more likely to be widely considered 'great' in an artistic sense than "Benji Saves the Day".
I think Bioshock is an interesting game. I like that it requires some level of judgement from the player, rather than nothing but reflexes. Of course, forcing the player to make moral choices runs a fine line: it can be just as gratuitous (and thus meaningless) as violence or nudity in movies, neither of which automagically make a movie challenging EITHER (Hollywood I'm looking at you). I think (like in movies) it's more likely that a challenging game is going to get serious consideration as "art" than Commander Keen.
Oooh - a videogame that (due to its interactivity) forces you to make uncomfortable moral choices that might teach you something about yourself? That's bad?
I mean, it's not like there have ever been great movies that make you uncomfortable, right? Lolita? Solaris? Satyricon? The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, her Lover? Trainspotting? Requiem for a Dream? American History X? Hotel Rwanda?
Yeah, certainly none of those are anything but sordid entertainment - no actual value to any of them.
You know, that's a very noble thought. But the reality is, if you simply refuse, you allow the PHBs to define their OWN metrics, which can be orgasmically stupid: - 1 point for every spam mail that the PHBs get that they don't want. - 1 point for every time a website that they want to get to is blocked - 1 point for every time they see anyone in the company surfing a non-business website
You let them define the measures, and you'll be looking for a job. It's a truism that they DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE DOING. To let them measure and qualify your job would be nuts.
At least in MN, you're not registered in the order you vote - you're registered in the order you ARRIVE. Then you stand in line, and take the next available booth.
Then, you stand at the booth, mull over your unknown, least-hated, or no-competition candidates. It's actually quite rare that people walk away from the voting booths in the exact same order that they went into them.
So yeah, you can use the timestamps + registration to determine who voted how....+/- maybe a half dozen voters, which makes a great deal of difference.
Now, if the voting station turnout is slow when you voted? Then yeah, you are probably identifiable. But this isn't nearly the story it's made out to be, and would be less of a story if more people voted.
Which, no matter which side you are on the issue, you must admit is a much more...convenient... term.
The reason people use the term "Global Warming" is because that's the term that was thrown around so casually to start the discussion.
"Global Warming", pictures of melting snow on mountains, melting glaciers, melting arctic ice, increasing temperatures....that's the language of the film An Inconvenient Truth. There's not a single comment in that film (as I recall, feel free to correct me) about temps going down anywhere, ever, or anything that would taint the "OMG the world is heating up" message.
It's *only* once the naysayers put forth enough data to show that the changes were neither homogenous nor unidirectional, the canon was changed to "global climate change".
So yeah, it IS global climate change. It *may* be that it's changing faster than ever. It may even be that some avoidable human activity is accelerating it. But (I would say thanks to the fervent, 'infallible' approach that the frothing eco-nuts brought to the issue) the entire subject has been reduced to the level of a religious argument: on both sides you have True Believers flinging poo at each other and no actual hope of resolution.
"The game's combat system was designed in an attempt to use what its creater, Steve Perrin, had experienced through live-action combat with the Society for Creative Anachronism. An attack is rolled using percentile dice (a 10 sided die, twice, to create numbers between 01-99, and 00 counts as 100). If your skill level is equal to or higher than the number rolled, you have hit your target. The defender has the chance to try to avoid the blow or parry it, again determined with percentile dice. For very low rolls there was a system of critical hits (armour protection negated), or for certain weapons a chance to 'impale' (double damage). Attackers always had a chance of missing (if they rolled 96% or above). They also had a very small chance of Fumbling, where something unfortunate happened to the attacker, such as losing a piece of equipment, falling over or even causing damage to themselves or friends. (These outcomes were randomly determined following the botched attack roll.)
A key component of the RuneQuest combat system was hit location. Successful attacks were allocated randomly to a part of the target's body. (Or else a particular part could be aimed at with a reduced chance to hit.) Combined with the inate chance of everyone to hit, as well as the critical/impale system, this meant that even the most powerful character could be disabled and killed by a weak opponent. For example, a lucky hit against a leg, weapon arm or head could render a character defenceless or severely limited in their attack.
The original versions of RuneQuest were known for making most levels of magic notably weaker than in other games, at least in its ability to directly attack rather than enhance a warrior's ability. Magical attack was resolved with a comparison between the attacker's and the target's Power provided an single percentile chance of the spell working.
As a result, combat in RuneQuest became more detailed, slower and always in some ways riskier than most other RPGs. This often meant play was not as combat focused as other RPGs."
Not mentioned explicitly above, each location is armored so that armor is subtracted from the damage applied to result in the damage actually taken by the location. ex: Broadsword is d8+1 dmg (plus a strength bonus of 0 to generally 1d6 or 2d6 for the biggest, strongest humans), armor is 1 for soft leather, up to 12 for plate.
Try it!
But back On-topic: Interestingly, I had a conversation years ago with Monte Cook in which he'd mentioned that one or more of the lead 3rd edition editors was a big fan of RQ and you can see it in umpteen ways. It *appears* from the description above that some of the more obvious RQ elements are being diluted.
"If you don't fund it properly, it just ain't going to work."...and that's the sort of nonsense comment that leaves it broken. I'm sure the Teacher's Unions love it, however.
Simply throwing money at problems rarely solves them.
Let's take a good sized class, perhaps 25 students. That's $287,500 per year to educate them. Let's give the teacher a really nice salary - we want someone GOOD, who enjoys their work! - of $87500, leaving us $200,000. Good suburban office space is leasing at just under $2/sqft...let's give these kids LOTS of space, and assume a goodly portion of shared spaces (a gym, a cafeteria, auditorium, etc.) 2500 sqft = 60,000 per year leaves us with $140,000. (Ignoring for the moment that School Districts and cities can/should obviously do MUCH better than 'market'.) Let's even hire a nicely-paid assistant for the class, always better to have smaller groups learning when you can, and there's a lot of paperwork to teaching: $40,000/yr.
You're telling me that a class of 25, with a budget of $100,000/yr for materials, can't manage better than 40th percentile in Math?
If that's true, is another $200/student really going to make any difference? $2000?
You could buy them each an adequate laptop and STILL have $60,000/year for other supplies.
I call complete BS on your "underfunded" assertion - that's the lazy answer. US Public education is a perfect example of waste, bureaucracy, sinecure, and mismanagement from top to bottom.
Teaching is one of the hardest jobs there is. I believe that more of the $$ should be going to the teachers and students, than whatever rathole it's disappearing down now. Many schools in the Western world are doing much, much better on much, much less than the US spends per pupil. We need to examine why, and see if we can emulate it.
Nota bene: it's easy to be a critic, but harder to provide suggestions, so I'll make a few - schools have suffered from 100 years of 'mission creep' (ok, really only the last 40). School != Parents, and we need to stop expecting that teachers will parent our children for us. - less funding for special-needs students. Yes, we all feel sorry for them, but schools are now doing the work that mental hospitals used to do. Why? I can understand that if Timmy is slightly disabled, having an aide work with him to get him up to speed is fine; but when you have 2 full time special-ed teachers in 1 elementary school to deal with a roomful of children who (AT BEST) *might* be able to feed themselves? That is educational dollars being wasted in medical care. That should NOT be a school's responsibility. - English...the Mpls Schools crow about their 'diversity' of having courses in some 60+ languages. That's idiotic and wasteful. Elementary and High School ESL classes, otherwise all English. - End social promotion. Teachers found passing children who do not meet grade benchmarks are fired. Stop the focus on 'self-esteem'. If a kid has trouble, hold him back. If this makes him sad, perhaps he'll work a little harder. - 8-5 school day, 48 weeks a year.
Yes, this is harsh. But I'm 39, and my opinion of high school is informed by my experience. As a junior, I stopwatched my school days for a week. Out of a 7.5 hour day, I would start the timer whenever we were going over new material, or reviewing it the 1st time, or testing. I
Without a scale to compare to, the gouge looks HUGE and devastating.
I've heard on the radio that they are discussing a roughly 3" scrape....which, if scaled to the longest axis, is objectively pretty small, but when considered against the turbulence, heat, and pressure that those belly tiles are faced with? It looks huge and devastating again.
Those astronauts have balls of steel if they ride that thing down again.
....both sides have established a religious level of conviction of their position, and no compromise is possible or desired. Certainly intelligent discussion, moderate debate, and consensus are discouraged if not actually torpedoed by zealots of the Left and Right extremes.
Pretty much like every serious issue in American politics.
"INTERPRETATION: The better outcomes for cardiovascular and total mortality seen in the overweight and mildly obese groups could not be explained by adjustment for confounding factors. These findings could be explained by the lack of discriminatory power of BMI to differentiate between body fat and lean mass."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not going to disagree with you - Denmark's a really wonderful country.
However, I will take a slight issue with your comparison. It's one thing to have a set of rules governing and supporting an homogenous* population of 5 million. It's entirely another thing to have a set of rules that apply to an ethnically and culturally diverse state of 300 million. Not just a matter of scale, there are intrinsic differences that make the problem far more than (only) 60x bigger.
Denmark
91% Danish descent - not simply by skin color, but from a common ethno-cultural background
83% of them are Lutheran
The US?
More than 31 ethnic groups number over a million members.
White 74.67% --- and this includes Danes, Germans, Swedes, British, Italian, Russian, French, Spanish, Hungarian, etc, etc, etc....
Hispanic 14.50%
Black 12.12%
Asian 4.32%
Indian 0.82%
Hawaiian/Pacific Islander 0.14%
Other/multiracial 7.92%
No, I envy your society in many ways. I live in Minnesota and while I'll probably be accused of being a racist for saying so, I believe a lot of the reasons Minnesota has (had) such a historically high 'quality of life' has been our overwhelming Nordic homogeneity as well...but now as we're absorbing ever-increasing numbers of Somalis, Hmong, and a host of culturally-foreign emigrants from Chicago, well, Minneapolis/St Paul is becoming just another shitty crime-ridden and emotionally empty American city.
I'd mod you up but I'm out of points.
"The achillies' heel in all this is that if everything is sacred, nothing is sacred. You've debased the term to a meaningless point."
The other Achilles heel is a practical one: if everything's illegal, nobody cares about the laws anymore. Hey, I'm happy to hand over my $$ to an artist for the product of their blood, sweat, and tears. It *IS* work to produce art, and I have no problem rewarding the producers of same for what they do. However, I don't believe that all the financial parasites between them need to be similarly rewarded for legally interposing themselves, so I try to buy only direct from the artist - their website, or whatever. I also don't believe that the artists' 3rd+ generation descendant is quite so 'entitled' to a financial sinecure since they had a productive g'g'grandparent.
Ultimately, commerce will out: people will find a way to get what they want and if a government tries to interpose itself, either the government comes down (if it's a really big thing like democracy) or a black market evolves (if it's trivial like alcohol).
10 am site posted to /.
10:04 apparently it worked.
10:33 it's down.
More like "My server! The website does nothing!"
I think his insight is sound, but then he goes off into moonbat land.
"Did someone at Barksdale try to indirectly warn the American people that the Bush Administration is staging nukes for Iran?"
Why don't you take off the tinfoil hat and look for a simpler explanation: that we wanted the IRANIANS to know that we are probably staging nukes into the Mid East. (Not like our carrier groups don't have a few, c'mon.)
If one looks like one might be confronting a theocratic possibly-nuclear power which is run by people whose goals may just be to bring on the "end of times" for their 13th Imam or whatever, mightn't it be a decent idea to 'telegraph' to them that our forces in the theater will be capable of dealing with whatever conflict they choose to engage in? Tactical, one-sided Assured Destruction in a post Cold-War world.
Note, as of 4 pm CST 9/5/07, Ubi has PULLED their files for some reason.
I wonder if ANYONE got 4 gigs of free games in the short time they were posted...
I hate it when people do that, I wish there were editors to catch it.... sigh.
p x?id=61#NewsMain
R ayman-Raving-Rabbids-%5BFree-Game---Ad-Supported%5 D
P rince-of-Persia:-Sands-of-Time-Full-Game-%5BFree-G ame---Ad-Supported%5D
F ar-Cry-Full-Game-%5BFree-Game---Ad-Supported%5D
The link to the C&C page that actually gives you the files (C&C GDI, C&C Nod, and XP install instructions) http://www.commandandconquer.com/intel/default.as
Rayman Raving Rabbids 11 meg
http://www.fileplanet.com/180428/180000/fileinfo/
Prince of Persia Sands of Time: 1200 megs http://www.fileplanet.com/180411/180000/fileinfo/
Far Cry: 2.7 gigs (!)
http://www.fileplanet.com/180410/180000/fileinfo/
Sorry /., but this is the sort of crap reporting that is persistent on the web and (because they're desperate to retain viewers/readers) is becoming the de facto standard in print and media journalism.
Appending "Of course, correlation doesn't prove causality." to the end of an article strongly implying causality in every sense, doesn't absolve the reporter from the false conclusions he/she implies throughout the rest of the article.
That the correlation was run at ALL implies that someone was 'looking for something' - suspect 1. The layer upon layer of dependent statistics leading to a very authoritative-sounding "the likelihood that this is a concidence is 7%" makes it sound very scientific and accurate - suspect 2
Sorry, this is FUD passed off as news supported by phony statistics.
Most media stories (carried by commercial media conglomerates) are motivated by a desire to sell products, and contain little to no actual science! (shock)
"Caveat Emptor" applies to just about everything you see, read, or hear as well. Be (at least) skeptical of everything you hear, and you'll be just fine.
"In Norway we have a socialistic government, and we are currently rated as the best country in the world to live in."
And I'm sure that the fact that by geographic circumstance you are sitting on a gigantic puddle of the worlds most needed commodity is just a coincidence, it's really only because you're socialist that you have such a high standard of living.
You can't there, we already planted a flag. It's ours, by your rules.
Not taking it personally at all, I find the discussion interesting.
I'd say the issues (for Bioshock in particular) are a little deeper than your suggestion. For example, is a "little girl" in a video game entitled to the moral level of restraint that we would, for example, offer any child in the real world? Assuming this, what if she is evil (in this case, doing something heinous)? What if what she is doing isn't intrinsically evil (if you accept such absolutes) but merely surviving the only way she can? What if sacrificing an unknown (in this case a little girl, playing bluntly on most people's sympathetic nature to children and girls in particular) is the only way that YOU can survive? Would you?
I think a case can be made that there IS a fairly serious point* on the bounds of moral relativism, utilitarianism, as well as a more '4th wall' meta-question of how far the bounds of our real-world definitions stretch, to each of us. Is a collection of pixels "a girl" in a moral or ethical sense? How about a collection of lines? At what point (as a *very* crude example) on the spectrum below does "pedophilia" appear, and why? I think everyone's answer is going to vary at least a bit.
* don't get me wrong though, this isn't a subtle point in Bioshock, in fact I think it's almost trite but the medium is still rather young.
1- a drawing of a stick figure having sex with a smaller stick figure
2- an animated graphic of the above
3- an animated graphic of a simplistic human figure and a small (but adult-proportioned) human figure
4- animated graphic of more realistic proportions still stick figures
5- authetic proportions, but still stick figures
6- as 5, but simple line drawings
7- as 6 but only shaded
8- as 7, but drawn realistically
9- rendered computer graphics
10- photorealistic computer graphics
11- actual people
Now about your point that 'violent' art is escapist, I agree that it certainly CAN be. But I don't think Saving Private Ryan (for instance), while horrifically violent, avoided at all the consequences of that violence for the viewer. As I think I mentioned before, violence can CERTAINLY be gratuitous and in fact I think it sadly IS, in Hollywood, to a large degree. But I can completely understand why many people simply don't want to be confronted with SPR's level of violence, no matter how 'valuable' the reason.
Well, yes, "great" is a self-evidently subjective measure.
Many people, I believe, like movies (& books, & videogames) that challenge one's preconceptions - that present the viewer with a moral dilemma, or a challenging set of circumstances. Other people want nothing but mild escapist entertainment that allows them to NOT be confronted with the challenges that they (for example) might face in their occupations.
Generally, I would argue, movies in the 'challenging' category are more likely to be widely considered 'great' in an artistic sense than "Benji Saves the Day".
I think Bioshock is an interesting game. I like that it requires some level of judgement from the player, rather than nothing but reflexes. Of course, forcing the player to make moral choices runs a fine line: it can be just as gratuitous (and thus meaningless) as violence or nudity in movies, neither of which automagically make a movie challenging EITHER (Hollywood I'm looking at you). I think (like in movies) it's more likely that a challenging game is going to get serious consideration as "art" than Commander Keen.
Your mileage may, of course, vary.
Oooh - a videogame that (due to its interactivity) forces you to make uncomfortable moral choices that might teach you something about yourself? That's bad?
I mean, it's not like there have ever been great movies that make you uncomfortable, right?
Lolita?
Solaris?
Satyricon?
The Cook, the Thief, his Wife, her Lover?
Trainspotting?
Requiem for a Dream?
American History X?
Hotel Rwanda?
Yeah, certainly none of those are anything but sordid entertainment - no actual value to any of them.
I promise to laugh the next time a white community is sexually terrorized by monkeys.
There, do you feel better? I'm sure you can go to politically correct heaven now.
You know, that's a very noble thought. But the reality is, if you simply refuse, you allow the PHBs to define their OWN metrics, which can be orgasmically stupid:
- 1 point for every spam mail that the PHBs get that they don't want.
- 1 point for every time a website that they want to get to is blocked
- 1 point for every time they see anyone in the company surfing a non-business website
You let them define the measures, and you'll be looking for a job. It's a truism that they DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU'RE DOING. To let them measure and qualify your job would be nuts.
Well, that's the end of free packets of sugar.
The polling place has a list of registered voters in that district. As you vote, your name is checked off so you cannot vote twice.
At least in MN, you're not registered in the order you vote - you're registered in the order you ARRIVE. Then you stand in line, and take the next available booth.
Then, you stand at the booth, mull over your unknown, least-hated, or no-competition candidates. It's actually quite rare that people walk away from the voting booths in the exact same order that they went into them.
So yeah, you can use the timestamps + registration to determine who voted how....+/- maybe a half dozen voters, which makes a great deal of difference.
Now, if the voting station turnout is slow when you voted? Then yeah, you are probably identifiable. But this isn't nearly the story it's made out to be, and would be less of a story if more people voted.
Couldn't watermarking be considered illegal according to the various anti-subliminal laws on the books around the world?
Which, no matter which side you are on the issue, you must admit is a much more...convenient... term.
The reason people use the term "Global Warming" is because that's the term that was thrown around so casually to start the discussion.
"Global Warming", pictures of melting snow on mountains, melting glaciers, melting arctic ice, increasing temperatures....that's the language of the film An Inconvenient Truth. There's not a single comment in that film (as I recall, feel free to correct me) about temps going down anywhere, ever, or anything that would taint the "OMG the world is heating up" message.
It's *only* once the naysayers put forth enough data to show that the changes were neither homogenous nor unidirectional, the canon was changed to "global climate change".
So yeah, it IS global climate change. It *may* be that it's changing faster than ever. It may even be that some avoidable human activity is accelerating it. But (I would say thanks to the fervent, 'infallible' approach that the frothing eco-nuts brought to the issue) the entire subject has been reduced to the level of a religious argument: on both sides you have True Believers flinging poo at each other and no actual hope of resolution.
Um, play Runequest? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Runequest
"The game's combat system was designed in an attempt to use what its creater, Steve Perrin, had experienced through live-action combat with the Society for Creative Anachronism. An attack is rolled using percentile dice (a 10 sided die, twice, to create numbers between 01-99, and 00 counts as 100). If your skill level is equal to or higher than the number rolled, you have hit your target. The defender has the chance to try to avoid the blow or parry it, again determined with percentile dice. For very low rolls there was a system of critical hits (armour protection negated), or for certain weapons a chance to 'impale' (double damage). Attackers always had a chance of missing (if they rolled 96% or above). They also had a very small chance of Fumbling, where something unfortunate happened to the attacker, such as losing a piece of equipment, falling over or even causing damage to themselves or friends. (These outcomes were randomly determined following the botched attack roll.)
A key component of the RuneQuest combat system was hit location. Successful attacks were allocated randomly to a part of the target's body. (Or else a particular part could be aimed at with a reduced chance to hit.) Combined with the inate chance of everyone to hit, as well as the critical/impale system, this meant that even the most powerful character could be disabled and killed by a weak opponent. For example, a lucky hit against a leg, weapon arm or head could render a character defenceless or severely limited in their attack.
The original versions of RuneQuest were known for making most levels of magic notably weaker than in other games, at least in its ability to directly attack rather than enhance a warrior's ability. Magical attack was resolved with a comparison between the attacker's and the target's Power provided an single percentile chance of the spell working.
As a result, combat in RuneQuest became more detailed, slower and always in some ways riskier than most other RPGs. This often meant play was not as combat focused as other RPGs."
Not mentioned explicitly above, each location is armored so that armor is subtracted from the damage applied to result in the damage actually taken by the location. ex: Broadsword is d8+1 dmg (plus a strength bonus of 0 to generally 1d6 or 2d6 for the biggest, strongest humans), armor is 1 for soft leather, up to 12 for plate.
Try it!
But back On-topic: Interestingly, I had a conversation years ago with Monte Cook in which he'd mentioned that one or more of the lead 3rd edition editors was a big fan of RQ and you can see it in umpteen ways. It *appears* from the description above that some of the more obvious RQ elements are being diluted.
"If you don't fund it properly, it just ain't going to work." ...and that's the sort of nonsense comment that leaves it broken. I'm sure the Teacher's Unions love it, however.
/secid=-1/compid=-1/site=pes
Simply throwing money at problems rarely solves them.
In 2004, the City of Minneapolis was spending more than $11500 per student, for a math proficiency below the 40th %ile, and reading around 55th %ile. And don't tell me it's the crowded classrooms...15.2 students/teacher. That would be a joke, if it wasn't so serious.
http://www.schoolmatters.com/app/location/q/stid=2 4/llid=116/stllid=148/locid=956260/stype=/catid=-1
So tell me again, it's the MONEY?
Let's take a good sized class, perhaps 25 students.
That's $287,500 per year to educate them.
Let's give the teacher a really nice salary - we want someone GOOD, who enjoys their work! - of $87500, leaving us $200,000.
Good suburban office space is leasing at just under $2/sqft...let's give these kids LOTS of space, and assume a goodly portion of shared spaces (a gym, a cafeteria, auditorium, etc.) 2500 sqft = 60,000 per year leaves us with $140,000. (Ignoring for the moment that School Districts and cities can/should obviously do MUCH better than 'market'.)
Let's even hire a nicely-paid assistant for the class, always better to have smaller groups learning when you can, and there's a lot of paperwork to teaching: $40,000/yr.
You're telling me that a class of 25, with a budget of $100,000/yr for materials, can't manage better than 40th percentile in Math?
If that's true, is another $200/student really going to make any difference? $2000?
You could buy them each an adequate laptop and STILL have $60,000/year for other supplies.
I call complete BS on your "underfunded" assertion - that's the lazy answer. US Public education is a perfect example of waste, bureaucracy, sinecure, and mismanagement from top to bottom.
Teaching is one of the hardest jobs there is. I believe that more of the $$ should be going to the teachers and students, than whatever rathole it's disappearing down now. Many schools in the Western world are doing much, much better on much, much less than the US spends per pupil. We need to examine why, and see if we can emulate it.
Nota bene: it's easy to be a critic, but harder to provide suggestions, so I'll make a few
- schools have suffered from 100 years of 'mission creep' (ok, really only the last 40). School != Parents, and we need to stop expecting that teachers will parent our children for us.
- less funding for special-needs students. Yes, we all feel sorry for them, but schools are now doing the work that mental hospitals used to do. Why? I can understand that if Timmy is slightly disabled, having an aide work with him to get him up to speed is fine; but when you have 2 full time special-ed teachers in 1 elementary school to deal with a roomful of children who (AT BEST) *might* be able to feed themselves? That is educational dollars being wasted in medical care. That should NOT be a school's responsibility.
- English...the Mpls Schools crow about their 'diversity' of having courses in some 60+ languages. That's idiotic and wasteful. Elementary and High School ESL classes, otherwise all English.
- End social promotion. Teachers found passing children who do not meet grade benchmarks are fired. Stop the focus on 'self-esteem'. If a kid has trouble, hold him back. If this makes him sad, perhaps he'll work a little harder.
- 8-5 school day, 48 weeks a year.
Yes, this is harsh. But I'm 39, and my opinion of high school is informed by my experience. As a junior, I stopwatched my school days for a week. Out of a 7.5 hour day, I would start the timer whenever we were going over new material, or reviewing it the 1st time, or testing. I
Without a scale to compare to, the gouge looks HUGE and devastating.
I've heard on the radio that they are discussing a roughly 3" scrape....which, if scaled to the longest axis, is objectively pretty small, but when considered against the turbulence, heat, and pressure that those belly tiles are faced with? It looks huge and devastating again.
Those astronauts have balls of steel if they ride that thing down again.
....both sides have established a religious level of conviction of their position, and no compromise is possible or desired. Certainly intelligent discussion, moderate debate, and consensus are discouraged if not actually torpedoed by zealots of the Left and Right extremes.
Pretty much like every serious issue in American politics.
BMI = teh stupid.
d &cmd=Retrieve&dopt=AbstractPlus&list_uids=16920472 &query_hl=1&itool=pubmed_DocSum
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubme
Study showing that people "overweight" BMI 25-29 actually had a LOWER rate of cardio disease than leaner people.
"INTERPRETATION: The better outcomes for cardiovascular and total mortality seen in the overweight and mildly obese groups could not be explained by adjustment for confounding factors. These findings could be explained by the lack of discriminatory power of BMI to differentiate between body fat and lean mass."