I'll just point out that, aside from the physical inability for any government agency to ever really keep a secret, this is the only way to fight and win a war against terrorism.
What if, after the Madrid train bombing, or the Bali night club bombing, the newspapers were covered with stories about how the explosions were the result of this or that natural occurance/mechanical failure/etc. And anyone that tried to claim ownership of the incident was immediately disproven and dismissed?
Deny terrorists their public infamy, terrorism loses it's purpose.
You mean like this? http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/tec hnology/mars_plane_020612-1.html
"An evolved ready-for-Mars craft would sport a nearly 65-feet (20-meter) wing span. Also, that wing would be inflatable and topped by energizing solar cells."
The happiest people in the world don't necessarily have "nothing". They have what they want and need.
Happiness is *never* only about what you have, it's about what you want vs. what you have. I'm not particularly wealthy, I don't have nearly the 'toys' many of my friends have, but I'm happy as heck.:)
(Not really arguing, just something to whittle away the 29 minutes to the weekend.)
...the elitists of the world would want some way to stratify PC ownership. Same reason that there are Kias, and there are Porsches. The small-penis crowd needs to validate itself through what it owns.
Maybe you could squeeze a little more blatant envy in there, but I doubt it. Unless you're willing to contend that driving a Kia is the same experience as driving a Porsche, that's a pretty meaningless statement.
Look, the difference between a Kia and a Porsche is about $50,000 (give or take). If $50,000 is a smaller % of my income than the "fun factor" I'd get out of driving it, then I'd buy a Porsche. Yes, for *some* people that fun-factor has to do with gratuitous exhibition of wealth, I suppose. But I know quite a few guys that have Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, etc. that DON'T drive them around daily but only for fun on closed circuits or on rallies. How is this explained in your penis-exhibition theory?
Likewise, I have a good system - not cutting edge but top of the line when I built it 18 months ago. I don't put my system specs in my.sig, I don't share this info around anywhere generally (or here specifically in case you'd think I'm metaphorically waving my member around). Why do I have it? Because I play some games (WW2OL is a good example) that really do play better with high-end machines and the horsepower = better graphics, higher screen resolutions, fewer stutters, etc. Simply put: more fun. And the fact that it's a high end machine doesn't mean I want to flaunt it, it means that I can afford it within my budget of discretionary $$, at least equivalent to the fun I get out of it.
Sorry, but I'm just so sick of this class envy crap. I know it's a political year and we're all getting class-war propaganda dumped on us by one party 24/7, but still....
If reliability was an issue, even FREE services can be used to provide a level of redundancy higher than burned media.
Yahoo Mail Hotmail 123Mail heck, I think even Marijuana.com offers a free webmail account.
Poor people aren't morons, but they may have to actually deal with their situation instead of demanding that the world do so for them.
When I *was* poor and had to rely on the bus or a crappy unreliable car (for example) I simply had to cope with the potential unreliability of my ride by having backup plans. It was a simple fact of my lack of resources, and a good motivator for me to change my condition.
Pardon me if the irony of this statement astounds me.
Actually, its nice people can have an outlet to do things that they cant do in real life. This is why you see so many Marijuana art in the game, Goth looking people. Our society won't permit or allow people to be totaly free, sometimes you have to go online to make a little digital freedom. Some peoples just cant show up as the bank teller dressed on Goth in RL, so SL has to do. The USA wont allow gay's to marry, or legalize drugs, online you can be and do what you want. (Well, mostly, but thats another topic...)...Amazing how many Slashdot readers are Conservatives. People should be free from moral censorship, as in (They should... comments) just shows how far from a open democracy we really are.
Hilarious.
See, what's *really* interesting and amusing about this is how narrowly Liberals (as this poster obviously identifies themself) actually define what 'free from moral censorship' MEANS.
Read Wagner James Au's 10-part story on the "War of the Jessie Wall" parts I-V at http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_07_07_archive.php #20030707 parts VI-X at http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_07_14_archive.php (both sets of articles are bottom-to-top chronologically)
Essentially, here we have a large associated group of conservative, relatively militaristic players who entered Second Life. They went to the "free fire" area where PK'ing was allowed. The original residents, mostly groovy liberals who thought they were building in a totally free zone so they could be (I supposed) free from moral censorship, didn't like it much when OTHER people were also free from moral censorship - ie. free to do what THEY wanted. So, despite knowing that the ruckus-making element was a small portion of the WW2OL group (it ended up being identified as three people), a number of these "peace, love & understanding" types decided that they were going to execute a little 'country justice' against ANYONE from the group. Stereotyping, anyone? Anyone?
Let's point out meanwhile that during the war between the WW2OLers (and their libertarian fellow-travelers, of which there were some) and everyone else whom I'll lump together as the Utopians, it was the Utopians that kept appealing to Linden Labs asking them to 'stop the madness'.
Ultimately, it did end with Linden Labs (who, I think, did a good job in letting the community resolve these things internally until the very end) finally changing the rules to make the place more 'utopian' (no violence, no posting offensive images, etc.).
But unless you live in China, appealing to an all powerful government doesn't WORK in the real world. Liberals seem unable to see that benign tyranny (even of the utopian variety) is STILL tyrannical, and anything else short of absolute freedom - even if you dare to be Conservative - is hypocrisy. "We're doing this for YOUR own good" is unacceptable to Leftists when the government says it about banning Marijuana, why is it ok then for the Liberals to say it when they are banning GUNS?
As least libertarians are generally consistent. Government should leave people mostly alone. But, as free as YOU should be to be able to wear Goth clothes when you want, or marry whom you want, I should *also* be free to say "I'm your employer/landlord, and I find that repulsive - change or find a new job/apartment" without getting SUED. It wasn't conservatives who opened the Pandora's box of legislating public values.
Kind of like what the Constitution says, ironically.
even the arrest of Sven Jaschan...has done nothing to curb the problem
What about the public evisceration and flaying of Mr. Jaschan alive? I'd say by the time you've brutally tortured to death your 5th or 6th l33t hax0r, the number of new viruses might just start to fall.
(having just spent all last night cleaning & disinfecting a friend's home LAN, after one of his kids accidently went to a wrong url...)
PRECISELY. If you can't bear the idea of something being lost, it's YOUR JOB to do what's necessary to save it.
Alexandria Felton logged on to her Hotmail account last month and was shocked to find that all of her saved files were gone. At stake was years' worth of personal and business correspondence, photos and the itinerary for a recently purchased trip...
Alexandria is a moron. It's a *free* service, you get what you pay for. No backup medium is 100% reliable, but most reasonable people would consider Hotmail to be a particularly stupid place to keep important information.
I find that in the long run, the SO is much more important to me than any game will ever be, no matter how powerful/how much money/how much time I spend playing it
That's a perfect example: "September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."
It's a good example, actually. The explosion and subsequent death/injuries are because of the CHEMICAL explosion and, despite the massive blast, there was never any danger of the warheads either going off or being dispersed in dirty-bomb style.
I'd say that's a testament to the safety of the darn things.
...since so much of history is about the nuances of personality and sheer human perversity, since Computer games really don't convey that aspect very well.
I personally think boardgames - even something as simple as Diplomacy springs to mind - are far more useful in teaching the complexity of human interaction in international diplomacy, for instance.
I very much wish that everyone who wants to spout their opinion about modern statecraft be forced to play a high-stakes game of Empires in Arms all the way through, with multiple players on a side. Suddenly you'll understand why most states are inherently conservative in their decision making and slow to react to world events.
Although I've had intense political discussions in games like VGA Planets, or pretty much any slow-playing, massively multiplayer game.
The Simpson House is located in Pressboard Estates, a development of 3 and 4 bedroom, working class houses adjacent to Springfield's central business district. The house number is sometimes given as 59, 94, 723, or 1094, but in most often seen as 742 Evergreen Terrace. The Simpsons have lived at this address since 1983.
Heh, touché. But you have to admit that by the time of Henry Cabot Lodge's letter in August 1919, it was already abundantly clear that nothing had really CHANGED in Old World politics, except for the Entente Cordiale resolving the historical acrimony between Britain and France.
It was already clear that - far from Wilson's unrachable idealism - the LoN was mutating into nothing more than an engine for stabilizing both Britain and France's weakening power. If you think the LoN was so satisfactory, you're clearly not Irish.
Frankly, most of the objections put forth by Lodge and Borah are the PRECISE reasons that the United Nations is a meaningless debating society today. None of the issues with which they had problems has ever actually been resolved, merely 'talked around'.
[pic not available] Well, we were *almost done* with it, and someone broke into our workshop. Now we have to examine our equipment to make sure no l33t h4xx0r loaded up spyware or hacked into it or anything. [6 months later] [crickets chirping] No really, now, we're *almost* done with it! You guys will see it REALLY soon!*
* Oh yeah, and that TF2 case mod we're working on is also *this* close to being done. We've been working on it for YEARS and it's really looking sweet! No, you can't see pictures. It's secret!
Now there's a ringing endorsement... "America: We Could Be Worse!"
Bloody well right it is. Welcome to the Real World (tm) where America is not some noble Cavalier who wears white armor, always tells the truth, and comes to the aid of swooning maidens. You charming Old Worlders disabused us of our naivete in Versailles - we came to fight back the evil Hun, and saw that once France and Britain (the "good guys", in our simplistic view) were safe, they went back to their rapacious self-interest and (since Germany was prostrate at the time) cheefully dismembered the Ruhr and economically gang-banged her until the success of radical nationalism was practically a foreordained conclusion. For these countries to then shake an admonitory finger at the US for pursuing a course of self-interest strikes me as just a touch hypocritical.
America IS a country made up of humans just like every OTHER country. I think by & large our political leaders would like to almost always do the "right thing" but we've been shown so many times that 'nice guys finish last', that we're always politically teetering between the Realpolitikers (who say the world is a crappy place and we have to play that way too to survive), the self-loathing Liberals (who have some fucked-up view that the world is all sweetness and light except for the US), and the Isolationists (who want to just tell everyone else to piss off and leave us alone).
Great Britain, and America (which is historically little more than Great Britain 2.0): we could be one HELL of a lot worse, and you're lucky we're not, because that's about the best you're going to get in this world. Someday someone WILL come along and knock us off the Superpower seat - that's unquestionable. And, my wager is that you're going to find out then that weren't nearly as bad as you thought we were.
The parent post to this is precisely why the Chicken-Little school of environmentalists has utterly no credibility with anyone but already-committed environmentalists.
As I read it, the above post says "the globe is warming, the reefs are dying."
OK, yes, as far as it goes, this is probably true. HOWEVER, does this not also mean that some areas in which the conditions were too cool for the formation or abundance of reefs might now be so? Unless you are a creationist environmentalist (are there any?), you'll concede that the Earth has been around for at least a billion years. For several hundred million of those years, it was quite a bit warmer than it is now. Yet life (and even the oh-so-delicate-reefs) continues to exist.
Stop it. The globe is warming, so what? We'll adapt or die.
Environmentalists simply want to LOCK a very dynamic system into its current state forever, which obviously won't work.
But here's why Abu Ghraib is on the front page, and those stories are not: They're Americans.
And a more telling case of patronizing racism I've never seen. It's bad because white folks do it, and they're 'better' than that. Maybe if the US Army had only been only sensible enough to send units of latinos and Black Americans over to commit heinous acts, there'd be less of an outcry, because the mainstream liberal elite expect so little of them ANYWAY (see also: Affirmative Action).
Americans, acting on behalf of America, tortured the hell out of people.
Only by the pasteurized, politically-correct, naive 21st Century Western view could this be termed "tortur(ing) the hell out of people". Read some history maybe, and realize that there are things one HELL of a lot worse than having a dog bite you, or being made to stand on a milk crate with a bag on your head. What's next? They're being forced to watch BLACK AND WHITE televisions? Without satellite channels? Call the UN!
I think these soldiers went too far. They are being punished. I expect that the punishment WILL reach up the ladder to an appropriate level - probably the commander of the prison, and I hope that it also ends the careers of the intelligence officers who felt that putting these soldiers in the 'gray area' of regulation under the implied control of civilians was appropriate.
I also think that its being blown way out of proporation for the political mileage value. But then most/.'ers would disagree me, since they agree that George Bush is only slightly less bad than the seven-headed beast of the apolcalypse. And hey, anything to get him out of office, right? Being able to cast shit on a Republican is even more fun when you can wrap yourself in the lily-white robes of sanctimoniousness, isn't it?
I don't think the list of cases above is an apologia, or any sort of attempt to redirect attention. The point is: where is the outcry? Where are the anguished wails of the American Left and the 'enlightened' masses of the world who are so horrified by these pictures?
The fact that such things (and far, far worse) go on every day WITHOUT COMMENT on the mainstream media, or sparking mass Anti-American demonstrations makes one naturally wonder what it is about the Iraq prisonal 'scandal' that fuels such particular outrage. The only thing I can see is that it's a clear chance to take a shot at a much-disliked president and his policies which have otherwise been too successful to criticize effectively.*
*(Cue wave of 'jobless recovery' trolls, and tinfoil hatters who respond to any suggestion that this President has done ANYTHING right, as sharks do to chum in the water, and with about as much sense.)
(initial admission that I didn't RTFA) Here in the exurbs of Minneapolis, most of the local grocery stores offer online ordering and frankly we use it a lot. It's a flat $10 delivery fee, which is WELL worth the money when you consider the time you save driving to the store, pushing a cart around, and driving home again, especially amortized against a $300 grocery bill. We can save $10 just in a little judicious coupon use.
Whether this is a short-lived experiment, or the last-gasp of local groceries trying to stave off the combined expansion of warehouse grocery chains like Cub/Rainbow, and the combined big-box retail-now-combined grocery/retail stores I don't know. But personally, I can't see why people WANT to physically go shopping. I have better things to do.
I've personally solved that by changing my expectations. [advert] I prefer to play WW2OL (www.wwiionline.com) where there's little to no point in role playing, so it's not missed. 3 years after a rough release, it's a great game, and the only one I'm willing to shell out my $$ for.[/advert]
Obviously, that's not a solution for most. My experiences with actual ROLE PLAYING are so integrally tied to the social aspect of getting together with friends, I can't really imagine an online game really replacing that, unless it had fulltime video conferencing I guess.
But you're right, for the 'adventure' side of things, I'm addicted to www.kingdomofloathing.com.:)
Slashdot Mirror
At least we wouldn't loose that Mars probe!
Quick check: Beagle was all-metric, yes?
...because developing weapons technology is only useful if it solves TODAYS problems. :roll:
Look how well that mindset served us so far: at the beginning of every war - WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, etc.- we've been 100% ready...
(to fight the last war...)
TIP: maybe this would seem more relevant if it was in, I dunno, Chinese?
I'll just point out that, aside from the physical inability for any government agency to ever really keep a secret, this is the only way to fight and win a war against terrorism.
What if, after the Madrid train bombing, or the Bali night club bombing, the newspapers were covered with stories about how the explosions were the result of this or that natural occurance/mechanical failure/etc. And anyone that tried to claim ownership of the incident was immediately disproven and dismissed?
Deny terrorists their public infamy, terrorism loses it's purpose.
You mean like this?c hnology /mars_plane_020612-1.html
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/te
"An evolved ready-for-Mars craft would sport a nearly 65-feet (20-meter) wing span. Also, that wing would be inflatable and topped by energizing solar cells."
The happiest people in the world have nothing.
:)
I call BS.
The happiest people in the world don't necessarily have "nothing". They have what they want and need.
Happiness is *never* only about what you have, it's about what you want vs. what you have. I'm not particularly wealthy, I don't have nearly the 'toys' many of my friends have, but I'm happy as heck.
(Not really arguing, just something to whittle away the 29 minutes to the weekend.)
...the elitists of the world would want some way to stratify PC ownership. Same reason that there are Kias, and there are Porsches. The small-penis crowd needs to validate itself through what it owns.
.sig, I don't share this info around anywhere generally (or here specifically in case you'd think I'm metaphorically waving my member around). Why do I have it? Because I play some games (WW2OL is a good example) that really do play better with high-end machines and the horsepower = better graphics, higher screen resolutions, fewer stutters, etc. Simply put: more fun. And the fact that it's a high end machine doesn't mean I want to flaunt it, it means that I can afford it within my budget of discretionary $$, at least equivalent to the fun I get out of it.
Maybe you could squeeze a little more blatant envy in there, but I doubt it. Unless you're willing to contend that driving a Kia is the same experience as driving a Porsche, that's a pretty meaningless statement.
Look, the difference between a Kia and a Porsche is about $50,000 (give or take).
If $50,000 is a smaller % of my income than the "fun factor" I'd get out of driving it, then I'd buy a Porsche. Yes, for *some* people that fun-factor has to do with gratuitous exhibition of wealth, I suppose. But I know quite a few guys that have Porsches, Lamborghinis, Ferraris, etc. that DON'T drive them around daily but only for fun on closed circuits or on rallies. How is this explained in your penis-exhibition theory?
Likewise, I have a good system - not cutting edge but top of the line when I built it 18 months ago. I don't put my system specs in my
Sorry, but I'm just so sick of this class envy crap. I know it's a political year and we're all getting class-war propaganda dumped on us by one party 24/7, but still....
Very good point. If she paid for the service, then she could reasonably have had higher expectations.
/.ers to service promised from software firms. It's pretty sad that it's so necessary.
Not everyone has developed the finely-tuned cynicism of
If she paid, I wholeheartedly downgrade (upgrade?) my opinion of her from "moron" to "naive".
Bah, sophistry.
If reliability was an issue, even FREE services can be used to provide a level of redundancy higher than burned media.
Yahoo Mail
Hotmail
123Mail
heck, I think even Marijuana.com offers a free webmail account.
Poor people aren't morons, but they may have to actually deal with their situation instead of demanding that the world do so for them.
When I *was* poor and had to rely on the bus or a crappy unreliable car (for example) I simply had to cope with the potential unreliability of my ride by having backup plans. It was a simple fact of my lack of resources, and a good motivator for me to change my condition.
Pardon me if the irony of this statement astounds me.
...Amazing how many Slashdot readers are Conservatives. People should be free from moral censorship, as in (They should... comments) just shows how far from a open democracy we really are.
p #20030707p
Actually, its nice people can have an outlet to do things that they cant do in real life. This is why you see so many Marijuana art in the game, Goth looking people. Our society won't permit or allow people to be totaly free, sometimes you have to go online to make a little digital freedom.
Some peoples just cant show up as the bank teller dressed on Goth in RL, so SL has to do. The USA wont allow gay's to marry, or legalize drugs, online you can be and do what you want. (Well, mostly, but thats another topic...)
Hilarious.
See, what's *really* interesting and amusing about this is how narrowly Liberals (as this poster obviously identifies themself) actually define what 'free from moral censorship' MEANS.
Read Wagner James Au's 10-part story on the "War of the Jessie Wall" parts I-V at http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_07_07_archive.ph
parts VI-X at http://secondlife.com/notes/2003_07_14_archive.ph
(both sets of articles are bottom-to-top chronologically)
Essentially, here we have a large associated group of conservative, relatively militaristic players who entered Second Life. They went to the "free fire" area where PK'ing was allowed. The original residents, mostly groovy liberals who thought they were building in a totally free zone so they could be (I supposed) free from moral censorship, didn't like it much when OTHER people were also free from moral censorship - ie. free to do what THEY wanted.
So, despite knowing that the ruckus-making element was a small portion of the WW2OL group (it ended up being identified as three people), a number of these "peace, love & understanding" types decided that they were going to execute a little 'country justice' against ANYONE from the group. Stereotyping, anyone? Anyone?
Let's point out meanwhile that during the war between the WW2OLers (and their libertarian fellow-travelers, of which there were some) and everyone else whom I'll lump together as the Utopians, it was the Utopians that kept appealing to Linden Labs asking them to 'stop the madness'.
Ultimately, it did end with Linden Labs (who, I think, did a good job in letting the community resolve these things internally until the very end) finally changing the rules to make the place more 'utopian' (no violence, no posting offensive images, etc.).
But unless you live in China, appealing to an all powerful government doesn't WORK in the real world. Liberals seem unable to see that benign tyranny (even of the utopian variety) is STILL tyrannical, and anything else short of absolute freedom - even if you dare to be Conservative - is hypocrisy. "We're doing this for YOUR own good" is unacceptable to Leftists when the government says it about banning Marijuana, why is it ok then for the Liberals to say it when they are banning GUNS?
As least libertarians are generally consistent. Government should leave people mostly alone. But, as free as YOU should be to be able to wear Goth clothes when you want, or marry whom you want, I should *also* be free to say "I'm your employer/landlord, and I find that repulsive - change or find a new job/apartment" without getting SUED. It wasn't conservatives who opened the Pandora's box of legislating public values.
Kind of like what the Constitution says, ironically.
even the arrest of Sven Jaschan ...has done nothing to curb the problem
What about the public evisceration and flaying of Mr. Jaschan alive? I'd say by the time you've brutally tortured to death your 5th or 6th l33t hax0r, the number of new viruses might just start to fall.
(having just spent all last night cleaning & disinfecting a friend's home LAN, after one of his kids accidently went to a wrong url...)
PRECISELY.
If you can't bear the idea of something being lost, it's YOUR JOB to do what's necessary to save it.
Alexandria Felton logged on to her Hotmail account last month and was shocked to find that all of her saved files were gone.
At stake was years' worth of personal and business correspondence, photos and the itinerary for a recently purchased trip...
Alexandria is a moron. It's a *free* service, you get what you pay for. No backup medium is 100% reliable, but most reasonable people would consider Hotmail to be a particularly stupid place to keep important information.
you ever wondered exactly how to go about engineering away the 50 million deaths due to aging that occur each and every year....
Why would we want to?
We've eliminated death by aging! w00t! More feeble senescent retired oldsters sucking off the world's productive tit. Um, yay.
And traffic already sucks, thanks, without adding some 300 year old methuselah trying to merge onto the freeway at 5.2 mph ahead of me.
I find that in the long run, the SO is much more important to me than any game will ever be, no matter how powerful/how much money/how much time I spend playing it
/. then?
So, she reads
That's a perfect example:
"September 19, 1980 - An Air Force repairman doing routine maintenance in a Titan II ICBM silo in Arkansas drops a wrench socket which rolls off a work platform and falls to the bottom of the silo. The socket strikes the missile, causing a leak from a pressurized fuel tank. The missile complex and surrounding area is evacuated and eight and a half hours later, vapors within the silo ignite and explode with enough force to blow off the two 740-ton silo doors and hurl the nine megaton warhead 600 feet (180 m). The explosion fatally injures an Air Force specialist and twenty-one other USAF personnel are injured."
It's a good example, actually.
The explosion and subsequent death/injuries are because of the CHEMICAL explosion and, despite the massive blast, there was never any danger of the warheads either going off or being dispersed in dirty-bomb style.
I'd say that's a testament to the safety of the darn things.
...since so much of history is about the nuances of personality and sheer human perversity, since Computer games really don't convey that aspect very well.
I personally think boardgames - even something as simple as Diplomacy springs to mind - are far more useful in teaching the complexity of human interaction in international diplomacy, for instance.
I very much wish that everyone who wants to spout their opinion about modern statecraft be forced to play a high-stakes game of Empires in Arms all the way through, with multiple players on a side. Suddenly you'll understand why most states are inherently conservative in their decision making and slow to react to world events.
Although I've had intense political discussions in games like VGA Planets, or pretty much any slow-playing, massively multiplayer game.
Crusader Kings goes even further. Also from Paradox.
RTFA of course
The Simpson House is located in Pressboard Estates, a development of 3 and 4 bedroom, working class houses adjacent to Springfield's central business district. The house number is sometimes given as 59, 94, 723, or 1094, but in most often seen as 742 Evergreen Terrace. The Simpsons have lived at this address since 1983.
Heh, touché.
But you have to admit that by the time of Henry Cabot Lodge's letter in August 1919, it was already abundantly clear that nothing had really CHANGED in Old World politics, except for the Entente Cordiale resolving the historical acrimony between Britain and France.
It was already clear that - far from Wilson's unrachable idealism - the LoN was mutating into nothing more than an engine for stabilizing both Britain and France's weakening power. If you think the LoN was so satisfactory, you're clearly not Irish.
Frankly, most of the objections put forth by Lodge and Borah are the PRECISE reasons that the United Nations is a meaningless debating society today. None of the issues with which they had problems has ever actually been resolved, merely 'talked around'.
[pic not available]
Well, we were *almost done* with it, and someone broke into our workshop. Now we have to examine our equipment to make sure no l33t h4xx0r loaded up spyware or hacked into it or anything.
[6 months later]
[crickets chirping]
No really, now, we're *almost* done with it! You guys will see it REALLY soon!*
* Oh yeah, and that TF2 case mod we're working on is also *this* close to being done. We've been working on it for YEARS and it's really looking sweet! No, you can't see pictures. It's secret!
Now there's a ringing endorsement... "America: We Could Be Worse!"
Bloody well right it is. Welcome to the Real World (tm) where America is not some noble Cavalier who wears white armor, always tells the truth, and comes to the aid of swooning maidens. You charming Old Worlders disabused us of our naivete in Versailles - we came to fight back the evil Hun, and saw that once France and Britain (the "good guys", in our simplistic view) were safe, they went back to their rapacious self-interest and (since Germany was prostrate at the time) cheefully dismembered the Ruhr and economically gang-banged her until the success of radical nationalism was practically a foreordained conclusion.
For these countries to then shake an admonitory finger at the US for pursuing a course of self-interest strikes me as just a touch hypocritical.
America IS a country made up of humans just like every OTHER country. I think by & large our political leaders would like to almost always do the "right thing" but we've been shown so many times that 'nice guys finish last', that we're always politically teetering between the Realpolitikers (who say the world is a crappy place and we have to play that way too to survive), the self-loathing Liberals (who have some fucked-up view that the world is all sweetness and light except for the US), and the Isolationists (who want to just tell everyone else to piss off and leave us alone).
Great Britain, and America (which is historically little more than Great Britain 2.0): we could be one HELL of a lot worse, and you're lucky we're not, because that's about the best you're going to get in this world. Someday someone WILL come along and knock us off the Superpower seat - that's unquestionable. And, my wager is that you're going to find out then that weren't nearly as bad as you thought we were.
It's a little longer, but it works for me.
Sorry to disabuse you of your illusions.
The parent post to this is precisely why the Chicken-Little school of environmentalists has utterly no credibility with anyone but already-committed environmentalists.
As I read it, the above post says "the globe is warming, the reefs are dying."
OK, yes, as far as it goes, this is probably true. HOWEVER, does this not also mean that some areas in which the conditions were too cool for the formation or abundance of reefs might now be so? Unless you are a creationist environmentalist (are there any?), you'll concede that the Earth has been around for at least a billion years. For several hundred million of those years, it was quite a bit warmer than it is now. Yet life (and even the oh-so-delicate-reefs) continues to exist.
Stop it. The globe is warming, so what? We'll adapt or die.
Environmentalists simply want to LOCK a very dynamic system into its current state forever, which obviously won't work.
But here's why Abu Ghraib is on the front page, and those stories are not: They're Americans.
/.'ers would disagree me, since they agree that George Bush is only slightly less bad than the seven-headed beast of the apolcalypse. And hey, anything to get him out of office, right? Being able to cast shit on a Republican is even more fun when you can wrap yourself in the lily-white robes of sanctimoniousness, isn't it?
And a more telling case of patronizing racism I've never seen. It's bad because white folks do it, and they're 'better' than that. Maybe if the US Army had only been only sensible enough to send units of latinos and Black Americans over to commit heinous acts, there'd be less of an outcry, because the mainstream liberal elite expect so little of them ANYWAY (see also: Affirmative Action).
Americans, acting on behalf of America, tortured the hell out of people.
Only by the pasteurized, politically-correct, naive 21st Century Western view could this be termed "tortur(ing) the hell out of people". Read some history maybe, and realize that there are things one HELL of a lot worse than having a dog bite you, or being made to stand on a milk crate with a bag on your head. What's next? They're being forced to watch BLACK AND WHITE televisions? Without satellite channels? Call the UN!
I think these soldiers went too far. They are being punished. I expect that the punishment WILL reach up the ladder to an appropriate level - probably the commander of the prison, and I hope that it also ends the careers of the intelligence officers who felt that putting these soldiers in the 'gray area' of regulation under the implied control of civilians was appropriate.
I also think that its being blown way out of proporation for the political mileage value. But then most
I don't think the list of cases above is an apologia, or any sort of attempt to redirect attention. The point is: where is the outcry? Where are the anguished wails of the American Left and the 'enlightened' masses of the world who are so horrified by these pictures?
The fact that such things (and far, far worse) go on every day WITHOUT COMMENT on the mainstream media, or sparking mass Anti-American demonstrations makes one naturally wonder what it is about the Iraq prisonal 'scandal' that fuels such particular outrage. The only thing I can see is that it's a clear chance to take a shot at a much-disliked president and his policies which have otherwise been too successful to criticize effectively.*
*(Cue wave of 'jobless recovery' trolls, and tinfoil hatters who respond to any suggestion that this President has done ANYTHING right, as sharks do to chum in the water, and with about as much sense.)
"Fortune Favors the Bold"
how do you say in latin: "i.e. not us."?
(initial admission that I didn't RTFA)
Here in the exurbs of Minneapolis, most of the local grocery stores offer online ordering and frankly we use it a lot. It's a flat $10 delivery fee, which is WELL worth the money when you consider the time you save driving to the store, pushing a cart around, and driving home again, especially amortized against a $300 grocery bill. We can save $10 just in a little judicious coupon use.
Whether this is a short-lived experiment, or the last-gasp of local groceries trying to stave off the combined expansion of warehouse grocery chains like Cub/Rainbow, and the combined big-box retail-now-combined grocery/retail stores I don't know. But personally, I can't see why people WANT to physically go shopping. I have better things to do.
I've personally solved that by changing my expectations.
:)
[advert]
I prefer to play WW2OL (www.wwiionline.com) where there's little to no point in role playing, so it's not missed. 3 years after a rough release, it's a great game, and the only one I'm willing to shell out my $$ for.[/advert]
Obviously, that's not a solution for most. My experiences with actual ROLE PLAYING are so integrally tied to the social aspect of getting together with friends, I can't really imagine an online game really replacing that, unless it had fulltime video conferencing I guess.
But you're right, for the 'adventure' side of things, I'm addicted to www.kingdomofloathing.com.