Not to sound like a smartass, but why would you bother to PLAY then?
I mean, I'm exactly in the demographic you talk about - I'm a casual, 5-10-hour-per-week player. I have lots of guildmates that I started with, that hit 60 (in WoW) months before I did, they all have full sets of Tier 1/2 epic gear, while I'm still strugging to get my first few Tier 1 pieces. When I started MC, they had just about moved it to 'farm' status. Now that I'm ready to farm MC and hit ZG, they are almost ready to break into AQ. I'm always a step behind, and actually adventuring with players that started months after I did, and I'll watch them pass me by in phat lewt as well.
But even to me, this seems silly.
There's a basic disparity: I DON'T PLAY AS MUCH AS THEY DO. You can't simply "rule" that away without invalidating the work that they've done.
There's a constant flow of WoW forum posts about hardcore players vs. casuals, and what I simply don't get is why the casuals (like myself) feel that somehow there "needs to be a system" that allows them somehow to compete with the guys/gals that grind 12 hours per day. WoW is an equipment-centric game; the more time you spend, you get better stuff. Ergo more time = more powerful character. Even in totally non equipment centered games, it's that way. WW2OL has NO equipment specific to the character - if you're a rifleman, you have a rifle just like everyone else on your side. The quality of the character is essentially totally based on the developed skillz of the player, as with other FPS games. In fact, there it's worse: if you don't play regularly, you're going to get owned even FASTER by the hardcore players because they simply have more practice.
No, I have to say anyone who advocates a system by which offline characters can improve AS A MEANS OF LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD BETWEEN PLAYERS is mistaken; like real-life, the harder you work, the (generally) the better the reward. To try to break that is misguided.
"Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it. "
My problem is with the term vested interest. The classification itself is pretty damn subjective.
How do you define the term? Are you ready to categorically conclude that someone editing a Congressman's bio page (for example) MUST be biased and incapable of objectivity if they work in a congressional office for one party or the other? Or (more shaky, in my opinion) are you simultaneously going to conclude that people WITHOUT formal affiliations are therefore entirely objective and editing altruistically? What if they actually donated $50 million to moveon.org or financed the publication of the Swift Boat book during the last campaign? Are they presumed to be objective? Or is objectivity defined in practical terms inveresely to how candid they are about their background?
Really, it becomes a "who watches the watchers" question, with infinite iterations.
First we have Boomer mommies that are scheduling C-sections because just waiting around for Junior to pop out just doesn't fit into their busy schedule.
Now we have evidence that suggests that if that DINK woman decides to pop out a pup she may live a little longer?
Not to say that people are so self-interested they'd have a baby just for their own medical advantages, but hey, at least that adoption waiting list for white infants might start growing shorter.
Please, I hope nobody suggests that this will keep women looking younger because then we'd be up to our armpits in babies for adoption from wealthy suburban communities and Hollywood.
Actually, demonstrably false. It was gay groups that were advertising GLBT-friendly guilds in game chat and forums. There are about a zillion ways to get the word out about 'biased' or 'exclusionary' guilds OTHER than yelling it in zone chat.
Like just about everything ELSE about "GLBT-pride" (adoption, marriage, etc.)...it's actually not that the EVIL conservatives have made it an issue, really, unless you consider a "get your [personal, private fetish] out of my face" response to be 'making it an issue'.
And if one thing should be taken from this experience, above anything else, should the fate of the universe ever be in your hands, only bother to seek the aid of girls under the age of 30.
Or, should you want just about anything else - happiness, fun, etc. look there too. At least in my experience.
I doubt any of you will see this because I'll just get whacked with the "troll" moderation, but here's what I find interesting:
This is a democracy. >50% of the voters* not only voted for Bush in 2000, but even more voted for him in 2004. * and please, tinfoil hatters refrain from commenting on the Florida elections of 2000. NO reputable survey of the votes has found that the result was contestable, despite a number of them having a clear intent to find "something", whether that be because of a bias against the president, or simply because scooping the other news services on it would make them a pile of $$.
Now, I understand it's very self-validating to presume that the people in the room that disagree with you (i.e. HALF of them) must just be stupid ignoramuses. Perhaps a more reasoned approach might be to wonder why these people that are probably just as smart as you have come to opposite conclusions. Because, lacking objective proof, the odds that YOU might actually be in the stupid half of the room are pretty much 50/50.
I'm waiting for some engine developer to write a combined physics/visual engine for which you have a world of inherent objects, each with visual (color, texture, etc) and phsyical (mass, etc) characteristics.
It used to be it took a few hours to whip up a level in Quake. With each generation though, the time to make a single room of any reasonable quality has at least doubled, if not trebled. The "community" production of user-made levels has dropped by orders of magnitude each generation as well.
Really, the concept of building a map in N-space from basic polygons should be dead - If you're going to build a "house" in a new 3d engine, you should be able to literally BUILD it of materials like you would a real house - pieces of wood with a resistance to force LIKE WOOD, a flammability LIKE WOOD, so your final wall would 'behave' in-game like a wood wall, and you don't have to program in the properties from scratch every time.
Think about how hard it is to model a good-looking coffee cup from polygons and curves. A biatch. Why not an engine that comes with a Sears-catalog (or Home Depot, or whatever) of pregenerated stuff that you can edit generally (changing color, length, whatever) and then plop into your world? Coffee cup? Pick that hefty one. Make it black. Glossy. Now 'pour' in liquid. Boiling hot. If it gets knocked over (or shattered), the liquid pours out onto whatever surface it's on/above, and then flows to the lowest point.
So I guess for me it's not the rendering tech per se, it's that we keep getting the engine without the car, or even the parts to build the car. We should be past that.
If you don't like it, take your money and business elsewhere.
Blizzard is a company, conducting its business how it sees fit. It makes its policy statements very clear. As long as it is following this policy (or, really, even if it isn't) YOU are the consumer, it's YOUR DOLLAR that funds them.
Personally, I expect that 'open chat' would devolve into a brain-mushifying torrent of abortion and political arguments, gender issues, the occasional stoner demanding the legalization of pot, and people spamming for cybersex. Woo, now THAT sounds like fun!
I mean, have you ever LISTENED to Barrens chat? (shudder)
*Truth in Advertising notice: I personally believe the 'freedom of association' principle logically reveals the inherent absurdity of anti-discrimination laws, too.*
Whoever taught you were incorrect then. Science's biggest strength is the fact that it is based around the concept that what we know can, and likely is wrong, and that it can only be verified by observing facts.
I agree with you in both cases, that this is science's greatest strength and it was incorrectly presented.
HOWEVER, I'll also point out that - barring a few scientists that are very forthright about the limits of their knowledge with "Well, we're pretty sure about X, but we don't know how it explains Y..." or "The best we can tell, Z is true. But..." - I *rarely* hear scientists talking about the limits or doubts of their own knowledge. Maybe it's simple human ego, or maybe it's a fear of empowering the creationists, (er "intelligent design advocates"...nahhh creationists is more accurate) but to me science would be a lot more credible if MORE scientists were more forthright about what they know, what they suppose, what they hypothesize, and what they're guessing at.
Go to any undergrad science course. Science is taught as a certain bedrock of facts with no doubt, no questions, and certainly no 'grey' areas.
How's that for ironic? The scientists don't hedge enough, and the politicians hedge too much.
It's too bad you posted AC, because I thought you comments were thoughtful and interesting. Thank you. In the interest of actually sustaining a reasonable discussion on the topic, I'm just going to post my replies and genuinely hope you come back!
Warming: If the predictions are right, we might all end up dead. To me this is the sort of hyperbole that poisons the discussion. We're not going to all end up dead (well, WE ALL ARE within the next 80-100 years, obviously, but I think I understand your point). Climate has NEVER been static, and it's fruitless to hope that it will be so. Pave a small but significant % of the earth's surface, give every person a multitude of devices that add heat to the global system (I have a computer, boiler, car, lights, the power plants to power my stuff, my TV, stereo, toaster, oven, the systems to draw out the natural gas to power my stuff, my washer, my dryer, etc...times probably a billion for all the other people on this planet), OF COURSE there's going to be warming. Just feel the heat of 1 car engine running for 20 minutes times the millions and millions of cars running every moment, it's logical. Personally, I think this has far more to do with global warming than CO2 particularly, which is why I'm unconvinced that radical efforts to reduce CO2... short of killing 3/4 of humanity or at least throwing them back into the stone age where their heat-output was probably on the order of "1 cooking fire per family"...are going to have any worthwhile effect.
Higher CO2 levels: Our crops are adapted to specific temperatures, humidity levels and CO2 levels. Lots of tough weeds will love that extra CO2, but our wheat and soy won't. I'm afraid I remain unconvinced. I grew up on a farm and we dealt a lot with seed developers, I have no doubt that - as long as people stop being fearful of GM crops - we can engineer plants as fast as change requires. Sure, the weeds may like it, but that ALSO means more CO2 sequestered in vegetable matrices in a (climatologically-speaking) very, very short timeframe.
Fresh Water: You can't drink polluted water, and we will get more polluted water when ocean levels rise and the seas flood human cities with all their waste. This feels very much like a kitchen-sink argument to me, with "we're running out of freshwater" crowd piggybacking on the "global warming" bandwagon. Again, this pollutes (no pun intended) the point of the global warming case. I agree that sea-level rise is a concern, mainly because the locations on which humanity placed their cities was based on immediate human convenience, NOT on permanent habitability. We need to accept that and figure out what we're going to do: do we rebuild New Orleans in a place that we KNOW is going to get whacked again? IMO I'd say no, but I'm not making the decision, either. Face it, in a scale of 000's of years, this question LOGICALLY is going to come up over and over again, for all but a tiny minority of cities. Our population centers developed organically, and really - to the geologic timescales of the earth - are no more permanent than anthills. We need to either accept that or deal with it. As far as fresh water is concerned, of more issue is the long term depletion of deep aquifers, not the glaciers (who gets their water from glaciers?). Again, we're in a position where we can technologically solve the issue with enough electricity, but we have to accept the 'fouling' of our nest is pretty much inevitable with the 5 billion people on the earth today, and accept the cost (more nuclear plants, at least until we get fusion).
Coral Reefs: current corals will be wiped out before new coral reefs with better adaptation can form Granted. But this doesn't mean that corals go away. They just go away for our life time, or the life times of our kids. They may even be important to the ecosystem, but life on this planet will continue to thrive, even without corals. I sometimes get the strong feeling that w
Look, I think the political creatures in Washington are essentially pork-feeding, selfish, backbiting wh0res generally, but let's be honest - they are not alone.
The IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly. This is simply WRONG. I'd wager that a HUGE number of people posting in Wiki are self-interested, or are grinding some sort of political axe.
Just because John Smith isn't actually EMPLOYED by the DNC doesn't mean his revision about President G.W. Bush is automatically based on an altruistic desire to post the truth. One minute reading any intarweb forum will tell you that much.
Roberta Johnson could be posting a revision to the Ted Kennedy article because she's an ardent Republican that hates him. Her edits are somehow more 'valid' than that of a staffer in Cheney's office?
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so?
Can someone please answer the following questions concisely and clearly?
- If I look at a graph like http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/gat2005- 600x283.gif it is certainly convincing that there is warming going on. No question. But all of these graphs seem to start in the 1800s. I've seen other graphs showing longer spans in which the current temperatures, while high, are still well within the normal deviation. How is it that we KNOW that *this time* it's going to go higher? All the models I've read about that project this sort of thing are so full of assumptions and broad variables that they are pretty much useless.
A rise of two Celsius, researchers conclude, will be enough to cause: * Decreasing crop yields in the developing and developed world - Don't plants prefer warmer, higher-CO2 atmosphere? Wasn't it much warmer than +2C at intermittent periods in humanity's past, as well as in more ancient geologic epochs?
* Tripling of poor harvests in Europe and Russia * - What does this even mean? I presume they mean a tripling of the FREQUENCY of bad harvests? Last time I checked, Europe and Russia were not the major food producers of the world. Wouldn't increased temperatures open up large swaths of North America to cultivation more intensively than before? This shift of 'main agricultural region' northward also sort of neatly solves the issue about soil and water table exhaustion in the Central US too, doesn't it? Also, don't most of the tests of increased-CO2 environments show an increased growth, increased CO2 absorption using LESS moisture? That sounds pretty good to me?
Large-scale displacement of people in north Africa from desertification *
Up to 2.8bn people at risk of water shortage * - I don't see how global warming is going to affect this? As far as I can see, the 'global warming' crowd is also predicting increased frequency and increased intensity weather events (ie rain?) which will be recharging aquifers faster than usual. Personally, I think there are just way too many people living in way too crummy of areas.
97% loss of coral reefs * - Please. This one is utterly incredible. Maybe 97% loss of CURRENT coral reefs? But as far as I know there have been coral reefs all the way back to the Cenozoic, in conditions of FAR higher global temperature. Basically, if one area gets warmer, other areas that were previously too cool for reef formation will then be warmed into the reef-friendly climate range. Coral reefs are neither static nor permanent.
Total loss of summer Arctic sea ice causing extinction of the polar bear and the walrus * Again, FUD: assuming the polar bear and the walrus are entirely unable to adapt to changing conditions. Yes their conditions will change, but with the warming of arctic waters mightn't an increased seal population lead to a BOOM in polar bear populations? I sincerely doubt that polar bears and walrus will vanish.
Spread of malaria in Africa and north America - Great! Now maybe we can go back to using DDT which was the victim of FUD (Silent Spring) 30 years ago but which has since been proven NOT to cause the terrible results illustrated in that book.
"... when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power." -Alston Chase
Personally, every time someone raises a doubt about global warming, the reporter attacks the questioner as a tool of big oil or somesuch. Anyone ever question the motivations of the people proclaiming global warming? Their credulity, their histrionics, and their repeated chicken littling (first it was overpopulation, then we're going to run out of oil about every 15 years, then it was going to be a global ice age, now it's global warming....) all cast HUGE doubts on their credibility with THIS particular disaster.
1) you can always choose to travel by other means. Airlines are not run by the government, therefore they are not "public" entities. They are private businesses who may set their policies however they like. If their policies are draconian and restrictive (as I'm sure all the Chicken Littles crying here believe), choose a different mode of transport.
2) If you feel it's SO important and SO onerous, get George Soros to fund you and bankroll your own airline, one where there are NO SECURITY CHECKS AT ALL. Let me know in a year if you have any passengers.
Yes, how DARE private businesses enact strict policies to protect their multimillion dollar investments and the consumers who pay for the use of said systems. That's like...crazy talk!
I agree with Blizzard that this is merely consistent application of their policies. Would GLBT people object if I said "I'm recruiting for a guild, we really only want heterosexuals pls, kthx." Of course they would.
Personally, I think that's wrong headed, but I'm a freedom-of-association type myself. If I want to have a guild for blue-eyed tall people into bestiality and reject anyone else, what would be wrong with that? But no, once the formulation becomes general enough, people nevertheless excluded from the generalization declare 'victim' status and call the lawyers...
Everytime I disagree with the leanings of the slashdot mods I get modded down as "troll" or "flamebait" but I'll try it anyway.
Sorry, I call BS on the Chicken Littleing of the NYT. The answers to this "survey" are invariably tainted one way or the other depending on how the question is phrased, and what questions are begged in the phrasing.
OMFG we're becoming a police state! Um, no. Notice: we're having this discussion, and you haven't been arrested by jackbooted thugs. Any black helicopters hovering outside your window?
It's pretty clear that we have a media that despises this president, and everyone in his administration. They will forge documents, steal things from the National Security archives, report patently untrue stories without retraction, everything up to (but so far not including) throwing their feces at him. I wonder if that kid that borrowed the Mao book has been released from the FBI?
If one truly innocent, normal person were 'disappeared', don't you think it would be FRONT PAGE NEWS? If there was one hint at domestic political opponents vanishing into "Rove's Concentration Camps"(tm), wouldn't it perhaps be screamed to the world until the heavens shook?
It's not, at least I haven't heard it. And do you seriously think a conspiracy to do so wouldn't have been revealed?
We have a leftist, elitist intelligentsia that has "Hate Bush" as their secular religion. Ironically, to these rudderless moral relativists there is really no evil in the world....except GW Bush. Anything he says is stupid, anything he does is wrong, and anyone he likes is evil, too.
So yes, in this case I'm criticising the messenger because frankly, we've heard the message again, and again, and again, but that STILL doesn't make it true. This isn't a police state, and your exaggeration only drains what little credibility you had to start with.
one important thing (in my experience) the UK doesn't have so much of is militant fundamentalism. Well, let's be careful there.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/07/london. tube/ "LONDON, England (CNN) -- As Friday dawns in London, investigators are picking through the carnage created by a coordinated bomb attack on three of the city's Underground trains and a double-decker bus."
Oh wait, are you talking about the 'stupid, ignorant, fat, lazy, white-trash' Christian militant fundamentalists that we can all make fun of, or the 'we dare not say anything bad about them because it would be politically incorrect despite the fact that their morality seems stuck in the friggin eighth century AD' Islamic militant fundamentalists?
Looking at the sample shots of the WoW character, it's apparent that some of the gear is not translated? I wonder why? Also, I wonder how well it would translate non smooth-skinned characters (=Taurens).
That really sucks if you live in a country with poor mass transportation like, uh... 90% of the United States. It's going to be mostly OK in many European countries, where mass transportation (including high-speed trains) is already a fact of life and renewable energies are being increasingly adopted. I am not saying it will be a walk in the park, because it won't be, but most wealthy countries consume too much energy and waste so much of it.
LOL, oh noes! gasoline prices in the USA are going to spike to 2x what they are now......bringing our gas prices somewhere close to where Europe's are TODAY.
No, the bigger fear is that as people overreact to the dire "sky is falling" media projections, the "Green" (actually socialist/communist) parties in every country will gain more supporters for their fascistic anti-business, anti-capitalist agendas. THAT'S when our economies are going to go in the toilets....
Slashdot Mirror
Not to sound like a smartass, but why would you bother to PLAY then?
I mean, I'm exactly in the demographic you talk about - I'm a casual, 5-10-hour-per-week player. I have lots of guildmates that I started with, that hit 60 (in WoW) months before I did, they all have full sets of Tier 1/2 epic gear, while I'm still strugging to get my first few Tier 1 pieces. When I started MC, they had just about moved it to 'farm' status. Now that I'm ready to farm MC and hit ZG, they are almost ready to break into AQ. I'm always a step behind, and actually adventuring with players that started months after I did, and I'll watch them pass me by in phat lewt as well.
But even to me, this seems silly.
There's a basic disparity: I DON'T PLAY AS MUCH AS THEY DO. You can't simply "rule" that away without invalidating the work that they've done.
There's a constant flow of WoW forum posts about hardcore players vs. casuals, and what I simply don't get is why the casuals (like myself) feel that somehow there "needs to be a system" that allows them somehow to compete with the guys/gals that grind 12 hours per day. WoW is an equipment-centric game; the more time you spend, you get better stuff. Ergo more time = more powerful character. Even in totally non equipment centered games, it's that way. WW2OL has NO equipment specific to the character - if you're a rifleman, you have a rifle just like everyone else on your side. The quality of the character is essentially totally based on the developed skillz of the player, as with other FPS games. In fact, there it's worse: if you don't play regularly, you're going to get owned even FASTER by the hardcore players because they simply have more practice.
No, I have to say anyone who advocates a system by which offline characters can improve AS A MEANS OF LEVELLING THE PLAYING FIELD BETWEEN PLAYERS is mistaken; like real-life, the harder you work, the (generally) the better the reward. To try to break that is misguided.
BINGO.
"Wikipedia says the controversy raises questions about whether it is ethical for those with a vested interest in the subject to edit entries about it. "
My problem is with the term vested interest. The classification itself is pretty damn subjective.
How do you define the term? Are you ready to categorically conclude that someone editing a Congressman's bio page (for example) MUST be biased and incapable of objectivity if they work in a congressional office for one party or the other? Or (more shaky, in my opinion) are you simultaneously going to conclude that people WITHOUT formal affiliations are therefore entirely objective and editing altruistically? What if they actually donated $50 million to moveon.org or financed the publication of the Swift Boat book during the last campaign? Are they presumed to be objective? Or is objectivity defined in practical terms inveresely to how candid they are about their background?
Really, it becomes a "who watches the watchers" question, with infinite iterations.
You *know* that the first picture is going to be some grad student's ass.
First we have Boomer mommies that are scheduling C-sections because just waiting around for Junior to pop out just doesn't fit into their busy schedule.
Now we have evidence that suggests that if that DINK woman decides to pop out a pup she may live a little longer?
Not to say that people are so self-interested they'd have a baby just for their own medical advantages, but hey, at least that adoption waiting list for white infants might start growing shorter.
Please, I hope nobody suggests that this will keep women looking younger because then we'd be up to our armpits in babies for adoption from wealthy suburban communities and Hollywood.
Babies - the new Botox!
Actually, demonstrably false.
It was gay groups that were advertising GLBT-friendly guilds in game chat and forums.
There are about a zillion ways to get the word out about 'biased' or 'exclusionary' guilds OTHER than yelling it in zone chat.
Like just about everything ELSE about "GLBT-pride" (adoption, marriage, etc.)...it's actually not that the EVIL conservatives have made it an issue, really, unless you consider a "get your [personal, private fetish] out of my face" response to be 'making it an issue'.
And if one thing should be taken from this experience, above anything else, should the fate of the universe ever be in your hands, only bother to seek the aid of girls under the age of 30.
Or, should you want just about anything else - happiness, fun, etc. look there too. At least in my experience.
Adam Ghetti is Swahili for "Derek Smart".
I bet this is the last MMOG anyone will EVER own.
I doubt any of you will see this because I'll just get whacked with the "troll" moderation, but here's what I find interesting:
This is a democracy. >50% of the voters* not only voted for Bush in 2000, but even more voted for him in 2004.
* and please, tinfoil hatters refrain from commenting on the Florida elections of 2000. NO reputable survey of the votes has found that the result was contestable, despite a number of them having a clear intent to find "something", whether that be because of a bias against the president, or simply because scooping the other news services on it would make them a pile of $$.
Now, I understand it's very self-validating to presume that the people in the room that disagree with you (i.e. HALF of them) must just be stupid ignoramuses.
Perhaps a more reasoned approach might be to wonder why these people that are probably just as smart as you have come to opposite conclusions. Because, lacking objective proof, the odds that YOU might actually be in the stupid half of the room are pretty much 50/50.
Did they work?
I mean, ahem, there's this friend of mine that's a little insecure....
-5 (Letdown)
I first read this as "John **Carmack** developing new MMOG?"
I'm waiting for some engine developer to write a combined physics/visual engine for which you have a world of inherent objects, each with visual (color, texture, etc) and phsyical (mass, etc) characteristics.
It used to be it took a few hours to whip up a level in Quake.
With each generation though, the time to make a single room of any reasonable quality has at least doubled, if not trebled. The "community" production of user-made levels has dropped by orders of magnitude each generation as well.
Really, the concept of building a map in N-space from basic polygons should be dead - If you're going to build a "house" in a new 3d engine, you should be able to literally BUILD it of materials like you would a real house - pieces of wood with a resistance to force LIKE WOOD, a flammability LIKE WOOD, so your final wall would 'behave' in-game like a wood wall, and you don't have to program in the properties from scratch every time.
Think about how hard it is to model a good-looking coffee cup from polygons and curves. A biatch. Why not an engine that comes with a Sears-catalog (or Home Depot, or whatever) of pregenerated stuff that you can edit generally (changing color, length, whatever) and then plop into your world? Coffee cup? Pick that hefty one. Make it black. Glossy. Now 'pour' in liquid. Boiling hot. If it gets knocked over (or shattered), the liquid pours out onto whatever surface it's on/above, and then flows to the lowest point.
So I guess for me it's not the rendering tech per se, it's that we keep getting the engine without the car, or even the parts to build the car. We should be past that.
If you don't like it, take your money and business elsewhere.
Blizzard is a company, conducting its business how it sees fit. It makes its policy statements very clear. As long as it is following this policy (or, really, even if it isn't) YOU are the consumer, it's YOUR DOLLAR that funds them.
Personally, I expect that 'open chat' would devolve into a brain-mushifying torrent of abortion and political arguments, gender issues, the occasional stoner demanding the legalization of pot, and people spamming for cybersex. Woo, now THAT sounds like fun!
I mean, have you ever LISTENED to Barrens chat? (shudder)
*Truth in Advertising notice: I personally believe the 'freedom of association' principle logically reveals the inherent absurdity of anti-discrimination laws, too.*
Whoever taught you were incorrect then. Science's biggest strength is the fact that it is based around the concept that what we know can, and likely is wrong, and that it can only be verified by observing facts.
I agree with you in both cases, that this is science's greatest strength and it was incorrectly presented.
HOWEVER, I'll also point out that - barring a few scientists that are very forthright about the limits of their knowledge with "Well, we're pretty sure about X, but we don't know how it explains Y..." or "The best we can tell, Z is true. But..." - I *rarely* hear scientists talking about the limits or doubts of their own knowledge. Maybe it's simple human ego, or maybe it's a fear of empowering the creationists, (er "intelligent design advocates"...nahhh creationists is more accurate) but to me science would be a lot more credible if MORE scientists were more forthright about what they know, what they suppose, what they hypothesize, and what they're guessing at.
Go to any undergrad science course. Science is taught as a certain bedrock of facts with no doubt, no questions, and certainly no 'grey' areas.
How's that for ironic? The scientists don't hedge enough, and the politicians hedge too much.
It's too bad you posted AC, because I thought you comments were thoughtful and interesting. Thank you. In the interest of actually sustaining a reasonable discussion on the topic, I'm just going to post my replies and genuinely hope you come back!
... short of killing 3/4 of humanity or at least throwing them back into the stone age where their heat-output was probably on the order of "1 cooking fire per family"...are going to have any worthwhile effect.
Warming:
If the predictions are right, we might all end up dead.
To me this is the sort of hyperbole that poisons the discussion. We're not going to all end up dead (well, WE ALL ARE within the next 80-100 years, obviously, but I think I understand your point). Climate has NEVER been static, and it's fruitless to hope that it will be so. Pave a small but significant % of the earth's surface, give every person a multitude of devices that add heat to the global system (I have a computer, boiler, car, lights, the power plants to power my stuff, my TV, stereo, toaster, oven, the systems to draw out the natural gas to power my stuff, my washer, my dryer, etc...times probably a billion for all the other people on this planet), OF COURSE there's going to be warming. Just feel the heat of 1 car engine running for 20 minutes times the millions and millions of cars running every moment, it's logical.
Personally, I think this has far more to do with global warming than CO2 particularly, which is why I'm unconvinced that radical efforts to reduce CO2
Higher CO2 levels:
Our crops are adapted to specific temperatures, humidity levels and CO2 levels. Lots of tough weeds will love that extra CO2, but our wheat and soy won't.
I'm afraid I remain unconvinced. I grew up on a farm and we dealt a lot with seed developers, I have no doubt that - as long as people stop being fearful of GM crops - we can engineer plants as fast as change requires. Sure, the weeds may like it, but that ALSO means more CO2 sequestered in vegetable matrices in a (climatologically-speaking) very, very short timeframe.
Fresh Water:
You can't drink polluted water, and we will get more polluted water when ocean levels rise and the seas flood human cities with all their waste.
This feels very much like a kitchen-sink argument to me, with "we're running out of freshwater" crowd piggybacking on the "global warming" bandwagon. Again, this pollutes (no pun intended) the point of the global warming case. I agree that sea-level rise is a concern, mainly because the locations on which humanity placed their cities was based on immediate human convenience, NOT on permanent habitability. We need to accept that and figure out what we're going to do: do we rebuild New Orleans in a place that we KNOW is going to get whacked again? IMO I'd say no, but I'm not making the decision, either. Face it, in a scale of 000's of years, this question LOGICALLY is going to come up over and over again, for all but a tiny minority of cities. Our population centers developed organically, and really - to the geologic timescales of the earth - are no more permanent than anthills. We need to either accept that or deal with it.
As far as fresh water is concerned, of more issue is the long term depletion of deep aquifers, not the glaciers (who gets their water from glaciers?). Again, we're in a position where we can technologically solve the issue with enough electricity, but we have to accept the 'fouling' of our nest is pretty much inevitable with the 5 billion people on the earth today, and accept the cost (more nuclear plants, at least until we get fusion).
Coral Reefs:
current corals will be wiped out before new coral reefs with better adaptation can form
Granted. But this doesn't mean that corals go away. They just go away for our life time, or the life times of our kids. They may even be important to the ecosystem, but life on this planet will continue to thrive, even without corals. I sometimes get the strong feeling that w
Look, I think the political creatures in Washington are essentially pork-feeding, selfish, backbiting wh0res generally, but let's be honest - they are not alone.
The IP ranges of US Congress have been currently blocked, but only for a week until the issue can be addressed more directly.
This is simply WRONG. I'd wager that a HUGE number of people posting in Wiki are self-interested, or are grinding some sort of political axe.
Just because John Smith isn't actually EMPLOYED by the DNC doesn't mean his revision about President G.W. Bush is automatically based on an altruistic desire to post the truth. One minute reading any intarweb forum will tell you that much.
Roberta Johnson could be posting a revision to the Ted Kennedy article because she's an ardent Republican that hates him. Her edits are somehow more 'valid' than that of a staffer in Cheney's office?
Wikipedia is an open document. The revisions are clear and publicly visible. Why is it all right to censor and prohibit posters whose motivations are obviously suspect, while completely (naively?) ignoring the gazillions of posters whose motivations are probably no less base, but not obviously so?
This is wrong.
50 posts and nobody calls "FUD" on this?
- 600x283.gif it is certainly convincing that there is warming going on. No question. But all of these graphs seem to start in the 1800s. I've seen other graphs showing longer spans in which the current temperatures, while high, are still well within the normal deviation. How is it that we KNOW that *this time* it's going to go higher? All the models I've read about that project this sort of thing are so full of assumptions and broad variables that they are pretty much useless.
Can someone please answer the following questions concisely and clearly?
- If I look at a graph like http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/info/warming/gat2005
A rise of two Celsius, researchers conclude, will be enough to cause: * Decreasing crop yields in the developing and developed world
- Don't plants prefer warmer, higher-CO2 atmosphere? Wasn't it much warmer than +2C at intermittent periods in humanity's past, as well as in more ancient geologic epochs?
* Tripling of poor harvests in Europe and Russia *
- What does this even mean? I presume they mean a tripling of the FREQUENCY of bad harvests? Last time I checked, Europe and Russia were not the major food producers of the world. Wouldn't increased temperatures open up large swaths of North America to cultivation more intensively than before? This shift of 'main agricultural region' northward also sort of neatly solves the issue about soil and water table exhaustion in the Central US too, doesn't it? Also, don't most of the tests of increased-CO2 environments show an increased growth, increased CO2 absorption using LESS moisture? That sounds pretty good to me?
Large-scale displacement of people in north Africa from desertification *
Up to 2.8bn people at risk of water shortage *
- I don't see how global warming is going to affect this? As far as I can see, the 'global warming' crowd is also predicting increased frequency and increased intensity weather events (ie rain?) which will be recharging aquifers faster than usual. Personally, I think there are just way too many people living in way too crummy of areas.
97% loss of coral reefs *
- Please. This one is utterly incredible. Maybe 97% loss of CURRENT coral reefs? But as far as I know there have been coral reefs all the way back to the Cenozoic, in conditions of FAR higher global temperature. Basically, if one area gets warmer, other areas that were previously too cool for reef formation will then be warmed into the reef-friendly climate range. Coral reefs are neither static nor permanent.
Total loss of summer Arctic sea ice causing extinction of the polar bear and the walrus *
Again, FUD: assuming the polar bear and the walrus are entirely unable to adapt to changing conditions. Yes their conditions will change, but with the warming of arctic waters mightn't an increased seal population lead to a BOOM in polar bear populations? I sincerely doubt that polar bears and walrus will vanish.
Spread of malaria in Africa and north America
- Great! Now maybe we can go back to using DDT which was the victim of FUD (Silent Spring) 30 years ago but which has since been proven NOT to cause the terrible results illustrated in that book.
"... when the search for truth is confused with political advocacy, the pursuit of knowledge is reduced to the quest for power." -Alston Chase
Personally, every time someone raises a doubt about global warming, the reporter attacks the questioner as a tool of big oil or somesuch. Anyone ever question the motivations of the people proclaiming global warming? Their credulity, their histrionics, and their repeated chicken littling (first it was overpopulation, then we're going to run out of oil about every 15 years, then it was going to be a global ice age, now it's global warming....) all cast HUGE doubts on their credibility with THIS particular disaster.
Absolutely the right ruling.
1) you can always choose to travel by other means. Airlines are not run by the government, therefore they are not "public" entities. They are private businesses who may set their policies however they like. If their policies are draconian and restrictive (as I'm sure all the Chicken Littles crying here believe), choose a different mode of transport.
2) If you feel it's SO important and SO onerous, get George Soros to fund you and bankroll your own airline, one where there are NO SECURITY CHECKS AT ALL. Let me know in a year if you have any passengers.
Yes, how DARE private businesses enact strict policies to protect their multimillion dollar investments and the consumers who pay for the use of said systems. That's like...crazy talk!
I agree with Blizzard that this is merely consistent application of their policies.
Would GLBT people object if I said "I'm recruiting for a guild, we really only want heterosexuals pls, kthx." Of course they would.
Personally, I think that's wrong headed, but I'm a freedom-of-association type myself. If I want to have a guild for blue-eyed tall people into bestiality and reject anyone else, what would be wrong with that? But no, once the formulation becomes general enough, people nevertheless excluded from the generalization declare 'victim' status and call the lawyers...
Everytime I disagree with the leanings of the slashdot mods I get modded down as "troll" or "flamebait" but I'll try it anyway.
Sorry, I call BS on the Chicken Littleing of the NYT. The answers to this "survey" are invariably tainted one way or the other depending on how the question is phrased, and what questions are begged in the phrasing.
OMFG we're becoming a police state! Um, no.
Notice: we're having this discussion, and you haven't been arrested by jackbooted thugs. Any black helicopters hovering outside your window?
It's pretty clear that we have a media that despises this president, and everyone in his administration. They will forge documents, steal things from the National Security archives, report patently untrue stories without retraction, everything up to (but so far not including) throwing their feces at him. I wonder if that kid that borrowed the Mao book has been released from the FBI?
If one truly innocent, normal person were 'disappeared', don't you think it would be FRONT PAGE NEWS? If there was one hint at domestic political opponents vanishing into "Rove's Concentration Camps"(tm), wouldn't it perhaps be screamed to the world until the heavens shook?
It's not, at least I haven't heard it. And do you seriously think a conspiracy to do so wouldn't have been revealed?
We have a leftist, elitist intelligentsia that has "Hate Bush" as their secular religion. Ironically, to these rudderless moral relativists there is really no evil in the world....except GW Bush. Anything he says is stupid, anything he does is wrong, and anyone he likes is evil, too.
So yes, in this case I'm criticising the messenger because frankly, we've heard the message again, and again, and again, but that STILL doesn't make it true.
This isn't a police state, and your exaggeration only drains what little credibility you had to start with.
They talk?
Sweden is going to become the first country in the world to break the dependence on fossil energy
Perhaps they meant EXTERNAL fossil fuels....I mean, in this case they could just be planning to re-conquer Norway.
Helluvalot more believeable and doable in that timeframe.
one important thing (in my experience) the UK doesn't have so much of is militant fundamentalism.
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Well, let's be careful there.
http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/07/07/london
"LONDON, England (CNN) -- As Friday dawns in London, investigators are picking through the carnage created by a coordinated bomb attack on three of the city's Underground trains and a double-decker bus."
Oh wait, are you talking about the 'stupid, ignorant, fat, lazy, white-trash' Christian militant fundamentalists that we can all make fun of, or the 'we dare not say anything bad about them because it would be politically incorrect despite the fact that their morality seems stuck in the friggin eighth century AD' Islamic militant fundamentalists?
Who's going to start doing this for money?
Looking at the sample shots of the WoW character, it's apparent that some of the gear is not translated? I wonder why? Also, I wonder how well it would translate non smooth-skinned characters (=Taurens).
That really sucks if you live in a country with poor mass transportation like, uh... 90% of the United States. It's going to be mostly OK in many European countries, where mass transportation (including high-speed trains) is already a fact of life and renewable energies are being increasingly adopted. I am not saying it will be a walk in the park, because it won't be, but most wealthy countries consume too much energy and waste so much of it.
...bringing our gas prices somewhere close to where Europe's are TODAY.
...
LOL, oh noes! gasoline prices in the USA are going to spike to 2x what they are now...
No, the bigger fear is that as people overreact to the dire "sky is falling" media projections, the "Green" (actually socialist/communist) parties in every country will gain more supporters for their fascistic anti-business, anti-capitalist agendas. THAT'S when our economies are going to go in the toilets.
Not sure why this is rated as Funny (+5).
Sounds like a perfect translation success to me.