Singular they has rapidly taken over to the point where it's now even used for persons where there is a presumed gender. While I may be fighting a losing battle, by god does it need fighting.
Why do you feel it needs fighting? I really don't think it's critically important to communicate gender with every use of a pronoun. We don't have separate pronouns for different races, young vs. old, short vs. tall, fat vs. skinny, smart vs. stupid, obstinate grammar nazi vs. speaker of contemporary english, etc., so what makes the detail of gender so important that it alone must be embedded in the pronoun? I really can't see a purpose for automatically referencing gender every time you refer to a person other than to reinforce sexism.
We don't have a "proper" gender-neutral singular pronoun, so we use "they" and "them" instead. It doesn't matter if this behavior has precedent dating back to the 1300s or if it started last week. What matters is that it's currently widespread and unambiguously understood by most (if not all) modern english speakers. The dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive. You are witnessing the evolution of language in action! Don't fight it, be fascinated and pleased!
Naturalistic fallacy. Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn't mean we have to eat meat, or even that we should.
(not that I don't - I'm just pointing out the reasoning flaw)
Yes it does. It is a scientific fact humans need to eat meet. It is part of our diet. Vegans suffer massive health problems because if their diet.
No, they don't. If anything vegans are more healthy because they actually tend to pay attention to what they eat. I suppose it would be possible for a highly ignorant vegan to give themselves health problems with malnutrition, but most don't. Most omnivorous americans, however, do suffer massive health problems because their diet contains too much fat, salt, sugar, and protein, but not enough vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.
Now, I'm definitely not advocating veganism. I think they're being pretty silly, especially the ones who actually believe that eating meat is unnatural (sadly there's more than a few). It is possible (and even ideal) to have a healthy diet that includes some meat. But the amount of meat that most americans eat is unhealthy and unsustainable.
Generally speaking, highway patrol and state troopers will always cite you for an infraction. Town and city cops will let things slide depending on your attitude.
My experience has been exactly the opposite; it's the city cops that are totally unforgiving asshole revenue-generation machines, while county sheriffs and highway patrol are much more likely to let you off with a warning (and more likely to be kind, pleasant, respectful, and helpful human beings and not just an armed bully drunk on their own power).
I will bet you that these "bottleneck" employees were being paid an hourly wage and would be sent home early if the day's work were completed early.
I'll take that bet. They were hourly, but on a preset schedule. The company owner believed in not screwing over employees, so all the "regulars" got a 40-hour schedule, mostly regardless of workload. Sending people home early was strongly discouraged. There were many small jobs that could be picked up after an order was underway, like refilling supplies or sorting order-tracking papers. That's what the rest of the production line was doing while waiting for the trickle of orders to pass through the bottlenecks.
Well, I stand corrected in this particular case. Occasional shitty individual employees are a universal constant regardless of even the best working conditions. But shouldn't it be relatively easy to fire those problem employees for incompetence/failure to perform job duties/failure to meet quota/etc? I have always lived in an at-will state, so I'm not super-familiar with how it works elsewhere, but I always assumed that "not doing your job" was pretty much always valid grounds for termination.
Go figure, the owner was a decent human being.
Oh, that's why you had decent working conditions. The company was small enough that it was still owned by an actual human being, and not some faceless corporate monstrosity whose only concern is short-term shareholder profits.
I've also worked under an employment contract, in a state without at-will laws. In that company, there were several employees who would be the bottleneck for the whole production line. They would intentionally work slower, so they'd keep a single job to do for the whole day, instead of having to find another task when they ran out of work. Where running a batch of incoming orders should take about 2 hours, they'd somehow manage to make it last all day.
I will bet you that these "bottleneck" employees were being paid an hourly wage and would be sent home early if the day's work were completed early. Many hourly workers find themselves in a situation where they wouldn't be able to afford their rent if they don't get all of their hours every week, and getting another job to cover those missing hours isn't even an option because the first employer still expects the worker to always be available for their scheduled 40 hours even when they aren't actually working and being paid for all of them, so "bottlenecking" is really a matter of basic survival for many. Pay your employees an actual living wage and this problem mostly disappears. The best places to work are the ones that offer performance-based compensation (bonuses for finishing early, or the opportunity for a faster worker to make a per-order rate that ends up being better than the minimum hourly rate). Sadly, most companies seem content to incentivize bottlenecking by punishing their fastest and most efficient employees with reduced hours and corresponding reduced pay. I once very gently pointed out this logical fallacy to one of my employers (I was a "lead" worker and had noticed this behavior in some of my team) and was fired (for no stated reason; "at-will" strikes again) not long after.
Oh it's the sanctions that kill people. Sorry but it was the leaders of Iraq who refused to play nice with the world even after they invaded Kuwait and were subsequently forced back onto their own soil. It was the leaders of Iraq who murdered millions of their own people throughout the 80s and 90s. It was the leaders of Iraq who refused to deliver the UNICEF and other aid to those in need in their own country. It was the leaders of Iraq who plundered the revenues from the "oil for food" program instead of feeding their own population.
Your socialist revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes guns kill people. Sorry people kill people as illustrated above.
It's easy, quit threatening people and play nice with the world, quit having a childlike temper tantrum and the sanctions will be lifted.
So you're ok with punishing innocent people for the crimes of their tyrants? It's not like the people who are suffering from the sanctions have any influence over the actions of their government. Their leaders aren't even democratically elected. Additionally, the people at the top who are actually responsible for the evil that the sanctions are in response to are incredibly well-insulated from the effects of those sanctions. In fact, the crazy dictators who run these countries actually use these foreign sanctions to their advantage, as a rallying cry to motivate their people to hate the "evil" western powers that are making them suffer.
Your incredibly short-sighted revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes that corrupt dictators represent the will of their subjects, and that punishing their subjects somehow punishes them. I hope you're just a troll.
I have a good friend who is a proud owner of a very large TV. He is also one of those weirdos who likes to watch everything squished. When I ask him why, his response is that he feels like he's not getting his money's worth unless every inch of the screen is in use. Black bars make him feel like he's just not getting full value out of his expensive, giant TV.
I don't really understand it, myself. I have a very hard time watching incorrect aspect ratio TV for more than a couple minutes (unless it's animation). If I'm watching squished (or pan & scan) content, I don't feel like I'm getting full value out of the content. I don't even notice black bars if I'm enjoying what I'm watching. Different people have different priorities, I guess.
What we need are dedicated facilities for the highly intelligent to push them to the limits of their mental capacity, funded not to produce specific results but to see what happens.
This country's addiction to fossil-fuel-intensive travel is inappropriate and unsustainable, and actively fucking the environment of the entire planet from multiple directions. This conspiracy to make travel undesirable/expensive might actually be in the service of a greater good.
Or it could just be about good old totalitarian control, restricting the movements of the slave class.
I agree 100% with your point about digital copies being preferable, but as long as we're still buying media on discs, this may be the best $17 I have ever spent:
Ah the irony here will be the dozens of slashdotters who claim that this has nothing to do with socialism, or communism (in China the state does not even allow one to make the difference).
Ok, you're probably a troll, but I'll bite. This has nothing to do with socialism or communism. Socialism and communism are economic models. They are both quite neutral on the subject censorship of political speech. What's going on here is called fascism. Fascism, defined as a system of absolute governmental control, is compatible with any economic model, including the form of capitalism practiced by the western world.
I understand that the american media deliberately makes this point hard to understand, but socialism/communism are opposed to capitalism, while fascism is opposed to a democracy/republic model. You can easily have fascist capitalism, and you can easily have democratic communism.
There. Is no such thing as a progressive muslim state. They are all horrendous in one form or another. Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works.
This is a true statement. However, it is still a true statement if you take out the word "muslim". Let's not contribute to divisiveness....
But let's compare to some other businesses. Banks, for instance, are businesses that are often targeted by criminals. They - OH MY GOD - list their addresses publically! I feel the bank's right to privacy has been violated here. Not only that, but how can the banks survive now that the criminals know where they are?! OMG!
Seriously, people. If you legalize the growing of marijuana, it's just like any other product now. You want to run a respectable business, then do it. If you are concerned about security, do what any other company concerned about security would do, put down the pipe, and GET SOME SECURITY.
Well, yes. Your argument would make sense if pot were currently legal. However, it's not. The growers, even the ones approved by the state for medical purposes, have to keep a low profile from the feds. Armed guards patrolling the garden are not really compatible with stealth.
Also, the only reason people are so interested in stealing the marijuana is because it's so valuable, and the only reason it's so valuable is that it's still a controlled substance. Once it is legal, secrecy and security will not be as necessary because robbing the pot garden won't be any more profitable to the thief than robbing a tobacco plantation.
Scarcity (even when artificially imposed) creates value. Value attracts thieves. Remove the scarcity, remove the value, remove the thieves. Pretty simple, actually.
throat and lung cancer is from smoking period not from nicotine. it doesn't matter what your smoking you really shouldn't be inhaling it.
While this does sound like it really ought to be true, actual peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that pot smoke has no measurable harmful effect when it comes to lung cancer. Weird and counter-intuitive, but apparently true.
As for turning your brains into mush, long term effects are hard to judge, but every adult I have met who smoked pot back in the 60's and 70's are not what I call intelligent or well off anymore. But I have a limited pool to work from as most of them are also big drunks, and so have other problems that need to be accounted for.
I have met a pretty large sample base of adults who smoked pot back in the 60s and 70s. They run the complete range from six-figure-salary CEO to career fuck-up jailbird, just like any other fairly large sample group. As also appears to be the case with your sample group, it is much easier to draw a correlation between heavy alcohol use and mush-brain than it is to correlate it to pot.
While it is universally accepted that some aspects of cognition are impaired when actively under the influence of marijuana, I see no evidence of long-term effects.
If a bunch of pot smokers want to turn their brains to Jello and wreck their lungs, throats and mouths, let them And if the voice of all ignorance continues to spread fear, uncertainty, doubt, and lies, let them.
Tax and regulate, tax and regulate, that's all we hear is tax and regulate. First you spread lies and then you want to tax and regulate--taxations and regulations justified by the lies previously spread. Control freak much?
Did you just seriously call the person arguing to end drug prohibition a control freak?
Let's bring the soldiers home so they can't accidentally kill children, journalists, or innocents. Or get killed themselves. And I don't mean two years from now ('bama's schedule) but immediately. Tomorrow. The Soviets wisely stopped fighting in Afghanistan when they realized it's hopeless to civilize that mountain country, and we should too. We'd save a LOT of lives.
Ok, I want to end our foreign wars as much as the next guy (maybe even more - my brother-in-law is risking his life in Iraq as we speak, but that's besides the point), but we can't just up and leave without making an even bigger mess than we already have. If we were to just pull out now, the power vacuum will be almost immediately filled by some very unpleasant local religious zealot warlords that will make life shitty for everyone nearby for a very long time.
We have to finish what we started or it gets even worse. That's the sad reality of the situation. It would have been better to not get involved in the first place (or at least to get involved very differently than we did), but now that we're here the only responsible action is to see it through.
It amazes me that you can't concieve of the possibility that this is the first planet in the galaxy for life to have formed.
While it is technically possible, it seems astronomically unlikely considering the size and age of this galaxy. Our sun is not even a first generation star. First life in the galaxy should have occurred billions of years before our solar system even formed.
We haven't found any evidence of it anywhere else, and it's not from lack of looking.
It most certainly is from lack of looking. So far in all of human history, all we have done is a decent (not perfect) job of looking on the moon, and made a half-assed attempt at checking a few square feet of mars (if it was teeming with life we wouldn't have missed it, but we hardly checked exhaustively). 99.99999.... % of the galaxy is still left completely unexplored. We don't have enough data to even think about making conclusions about the prevalence of life in our own solar system, let alone the rest of the galaxy.
Titan and Europa are good candidates. If we don't find any there, we may not find any anywhere.
Yes, they are good candidates for carbon-based "life like us". Given the spectroscopy results of Titan's atmosphere, I would actually be surprised if we didn't find at least simple bacteria-like life there.
However, I am certain there is more than one basic path to "life" in this universe (even in this galaxy). We arrogantly assume that other life must function in a similar manner to us, so we only bother to even consider looking in environments vaguely similar to ours for life vaguely similar to us. There may well be life on Venus, or even Mercury, or the surface of the sun, or hanging out in the Oort cloud (just not anything remotely similar to Earth life). Even our science fiction does a piss-poor job of exploring this concept.
Reading this article, I was puzzled by two things.
First: Why is this just starting to happen now? Masked vigilante heroes are older than dirt (at least in story and song). They have been portrayed in mainstream popular media since at least the 30s. By the 50s/60s, you have adults that have grown up in a world where comic book superheros have always existed. Why does it take another 50 years for people to start imitating?
Second: Why have none of these fools gotten themselves killed yet?
Are the answers to these questions related? If they are, does that mean that people are just getting stupider?
The only thing I really hated about BSG was the word "Frack". I hated it in both the original series and the remade series.
A totally contrived lack of swearing in oh-shit life-or-death situations would have been worse. The writers used "frack" instead of "fuck" so that the actors could swear with realistic emotion without pissing off the FCC. Would you rather they said things like "oh fudge" and "gosh darn it"? Or worse, not express emotion with expletives at all?
Now, I would prefer if they had just went with "fuck", because I think censorship of "naughty" words is one of the stupidest things our society does. But given the real-world puritanical limitations, I though "frack" was actually a pretty clever idea.
P.S. I agree with your point about too much technobabble on TNG. I have said before that since so many problems are solved by rigging the main deflector dish to fire an inverse tachyon pulse that there should just be a button for it on the captain's chair.
Slashdot Mirror
Singular they has rapidly taken over to the point where it's now even used for persons where there is a presumed gender. While I may be fighting a losing battle, by god does it need fighting.
Why do you feel it needs fighting? I really don't think it's critically important to communicate gender with every use of a pronoun. We don't have separate pronouns for different races, young vs. old, short vs. tall, fat vs. skinny, smart vs. stupid, obstinate grammar nazi vs. speaker of contemporary english, etc., so what makes the detail of gender so important that it alone must be embedded in the pronoun? I really can't see a purpose for automatically referencing gender every time you refer to a person other than to reinforce sexism.
We don't have a "proper" gender-neutral singular pronoun, so we use "they" and "them" instead. It doesn't matter if this behavior has precedent dating back to the 1300s or if it started last week. What matters is that it's currently widespread and unambiguously understood by most (if not all) modern english speakers. The dictionary should be descriptive, not prescriptive. You are witnessing the evolution of language in action! Don't fight it, be fascinated and pleased!
Ask Slashdot: What's your favorite Sci-Fi apocalypse?
This is my all-time favorite apocalyptic scenario:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KQ6zr6kCPj8&ob=av3n
I'm not really sure what line of scientific research leads to it though...
Naturalistic fallacy. Just because we evolved to eat meat doesn't mean we have to eat meat, or even that we should.
(not that I don't - I'm just pointing out the reasoning flaw)
Yes it does. It is a scientific fact humans need to eat meet. It is part of our diet. Vegans suffer massive health problems because if their diet.
No, they don't. If anything vegans are more healthy because they actually tend to pay attention to what they eat. I suppose it would be possible for a highly ignorant vegan to give themselves health problems with malnutrition, but most don't. Most omnivorous americans, however, do suffer massive health problems because their diet contains too much fat, salt, sugar, and protein, but not enough vegetables, fruits, and whole grains.
Now, I'm definitely not advocating veganism. I think they're being pretty silly, especially the ones who actually believe that eating meat is unnatural (sadly there's more than a few). It is possible (and even ideal) to have a healthy diet that includes some meat. But the amount of meat that most americans eat is unhealthy and unsustainable.
Generally speaking, highway patrol and state troopers will always cite you for an infraction. Town and city cops will let things slide depending on your attitude.
My experience has been exactly the opposite; it's the city cops that are totally unforgiving asshole revenue-generation machines, while county sheriffs and highway patrol are much more likely to let you off with a warning (and more likely to be kind, pleasant, respectful, and helpful human beings and not just an armed bully drunk on their own power).
I will bet you that these "bottleneck" employees were being paid an hourly wage and would be sent home early if the day's work were completed early.
I'll take that bet. They were hourly, but on a preset schedule. The company owner believed in not screwing over employees, so all the "regulars" got a 40-hour schedule, mostly regardless of workload. Sending people home early was strongly discouraged. There were many small jobs that could be picked up after an order was underway, like refilling supplies or sorting order-tracking papers. That's what the rest of the production line was doing while waiting for the trickle of orders to pass through the bottlenecks.
Well, I stand corrected in this particular case. Occasional shitty individual employees are a universal constant regardless of even the best working conditions. But shouldn't it be relatively easy to fire those problem employees for incompetence/failure to perform job duties/failure to meet quota/etc? I have always lived in an at-will state, so I'm not super-familiar with how it works elsewhere, but I always assumed that "not doing your job" was pretty much always valid grounds for termination.
Go figure, the owner was a decent human being.
Oh, that's why you had decent working conditions. The company was small enough that it was still owned by an actual human being, and not some faceless corporate monstrosity whose only concern is short-term shareholder profits.
I've also worked under an employment contract, in a state without at-will laws. In that company, there were several employees who would be the bottleneck for the whole production line. They would intentionally work slower, so they'd keep a single job to do for the whole day, instead of having to find another task when they ran out of work. Where running a batch of incoming orders should take about 2 hours, they'd somehow manage to make it last all day.
I will bet you that these "bottleneck" employees were being paid an hourly wage and would be sent home early if the day's work were completed early. Many hourly workers find themselves in a situation where they wouldn't be able to afford their rent if they don't get all of their hours every week, and getting another job to cover those missing hours isn't even an option because the first employer still expects the worker to always be available for their scheduled 40 hours even when they aren't actually working and being paid for all of them, so "bottlenecking" is really a matter of basic survival for many. Pay your employees an actual living wage and this problem mostly disappears. The best places to work are the ones that offer performance-based compensation (bonuses for finishing early, or the opportunity for a faster worker to make a per-order rate that ends up being better than the minimum hourly rate). Sadly, most companies seem content to incentivize bottlenecking by punishing their fastest and most efficient employees with reduced hours and corresponding reduced pay. I once very gently pointed out this logical fallacy to one of my employers (I was a "lead" worker and had noticed this behavior in some of my team) and was fired (for no stated reason; "at-will" strikes again) not long after.
Oh it's the sanctions that kill people. Sorry but it was the leaders of Iraq who refused to play nice with the world even after they invaded Kuwait and were subsequently forced back onto their own soil. It was the leaders of Iraq who murdered millions of their own people throughout the 80s and 90s. It was the leaders of Iraq who refused to deliver the UNICEF and other aid to those in need in their own country. It was the leaders of Iraq who plundered the revenues from the "oil for food" program instead of feeding their own population.
Your socialist revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes guns kill people. Sorry people kill people as illustrated above.
It's easy, quit threatening people and play nice with the world, quit having a childlike temper tantrum and the sanctions will be lifted.
So you're ok with punishing innocent people for the crimes of their tyrants? It's not like the people who are suffering from the sanctions have any influence over the actions of their government. Their leaders aren't even democratically elected. Additionally, the people at the top who are actually responsible for the evil that the sanctions are in response to are incredibly well-insulated from the effects of those sanctions. In fact, the crazy dictators who run these countries actually use these foreign sanctions to their advantage, as a rallying cry to motivate their people to hate the "evil" western powers that are making them suffer.
Your incredibly short-sighted revision of history is appalling. You are the type of person who believes that corrupt dictators represent the will of their subjects, and that punishing their subjects somehow punishes them. I hope you're just a troll.
I have a good friend who is a proud owner of a very large TV. He is also one of those weirdos who likes to watch everything squished. When I ask him why, his response is that he feels like he's not getting his money's worth unless every inch of the screen is in use. Black bars make him feel like he's just not getting full value out of his expensive, giant TV.
I don't really understand it, myself. I have a very hard time watching incorrect aspect ratio TV for more than a couple minutes (unless it's animation). If I'm watching squished (or pan & scan) content, I don't feel like I'm getting full value out of the content. I don't even notice black bars if I'm enjoying what I'm watching. Different people have different priorities, I guess.
It's like living in an insane asylum. Only without the access to good drugs.
You can't get good drugs? That sucks man... maybe try hanging around your local college campus?
What we need are dedicated facilities for the highly intelligent to push them to the limits of their mental capacity, funded not to produce specific results but to see what happens.
You mean like google?
This country's addiction to fossil-fuel-intensive travel is inappropriate and unsustainable, and actively fucking the environment of the entire planet from multiple directions. This conspiracy to make travel undesirable/expensive might actually be in the service of a greater good.
Or it could just be about good old totalitarian control, restricting the movements of the slave class.
Most likely both.
The English system goes by powers of 2. 1 gallon is 4 quarts (missing unit in between).
The in-between unit isn't missing, it's "half". Perhaps you don't realize "quart" is just shorthand for "quarter gallon"?
I agree 100% with your point about digital copies being preferable, but as long as we're still buying media on discs, this may be the best $17 I have ever spent:
http://www.amazon.com/SkipDr-Manual-Disc-Repair-System/dp/B0015ACUKC/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1301969120&sr=8-3
Ah the irony here will be the dozens of slashdotters who claim that this has nothing to do with socialism, or communism (in China the state does not even allow one to make the difference).
Ok, you're probably a troll, but I'll bite. This has nothing to do with socialism or communism. Socialism and communism are economic models. They are both quite neutral on the subject censorship of political speech. What's going on here is called fascism. Fascism, defined as a system of absolute governmental control, is compatible with any economic model, including the form of capitalism practiced by the western world.
I understand that the american media deliberately makes this point hard to understand, but socialism/communism are opposed to capitalism, while fascism is opposed to a democracy/republic model. You can easily have fascist capitalism, and you can easily have democratic communism.
There. Is no such thing as a progressive muslim state. They are all horrendous in one form or another. Human rights, crime, despotism, corruption, justice, the works.
This is a true statement. However, it is still a true statement if you take out the word "muslim". Let's not contribute to divisiveness....
But let's compare to some other businesses. Banks, for instance, are businesses that are often targeted by criminals. They - OH MY GOD - list their addresses publically! I feel the bank's right to privacy has been violated here. Not only that, but how can the banks survive now that the criminals know where they are?! OMG!
Seriously, people. If you legalize the growing of marijuana, it's just like any other product now. You want to run a respectable business, then do it. If you are concerned about security, do what any other company concerned about security would do, put down the pipe, and GET SOME SECURITY.
Well, yes. Your argument would make sense if pot were currently legal. However, it's not. The growers, even the ones approved by the state for medical purposes, have to keep a low profile from the feds. Armed guards patrolling the garden are not really compatible with stealth.
Also, the only reason people are so interested in stealing the marijuana is because it's so valuable, and the only reason it's so valuable is that it's still a controlled substance. Once it is legal, secrecy and security will not be as necessary because robbing the pot garden won't be any more profitable to the thief than robbing a tobacco plantation.
Scarcity (even when artificially imposed) creates value. Value attracts thieves. Remove the scarcity, remove the value, remove the thieves. Pretty simple, actually.
throat and lung cancer is from smoking period not from nicotine. it doesn't matter what your smoking you really shouldn't be inhaling it.
While this does sound like it really ought to be true, actual peer-reviewed scientific studies have shown that pot smoke has no measurable harmful effect when it comes to lung cancer. Weird and counter-intuitive, but apparently true.
As for turning your brains into mush, long term effects are hard to judge, but every adult I have met who smoked pot back in the 60's and 70's are not what I call intelligent or well off anymore. But I have a limited pool to work from as most of them are also big drunks, and so have other problems that need to be accounted for.
I have met a pretty large sample base of adults who smoked pot back in the 60s and 70s. They run the complete range from six-figure-salary CEO to career fuck-up jailbird, just like any other fairly large sample group. As also appears to be the case with your sample group, it is much easier to draw a correlation between heavy alcohol use and mush-brain than it is to correlate it to pot.
While it is universally accepted that some aspects of cognition are impaired when actively under the influence of marijuana, I see no evidence of long-term effects.
If a bunch of pot smokers want to turn their brains to Jello and wreck their lungs, throats and mouths, let them
And if the voice of all ignorance continues to spread fear, uncertainty, doubt, and lies, let them.
Tax and regulate, tax and regulate, that's all we hear is tax and regulate. First you spread lies and then you want to tax and regulate--taxations and regulations justified by the lies previously spread. Control freak much?
Did you just seriously call the person arguing to end drug prohibition a control freak?
Seriously?
Cognitive dissonance much?
Let's bring the soldiers home so they can't accidentally kill children, journalists, or innocents. Or get killed themselves. And I don't mean two years from now ('bama's schedule) but immediately. Tomorrow. The Soviets wisely stopped fighting in Afghanistan when they realized it's hopeless to civilize that mountain country, and we should too. We'd save a LOT of lives.
Ok, I want to end our foreign wars as much as the next guy (maybe even more - my brother-in-law is risking his life in Iraq as we speak, but that's besides the point), but we can't just up and leave without making an even bigger mess than we already have. If we were to just pull out now, the power vacuum will be almost immediately filled by some very unpleasant local religious zealot warlords that will make life shitty for everyone nearby for a very long time.
We have to finish what we started or it gets even worse. That's the sad reality of the situation. It would have been better to not get involved in the first place (or at least to get involved very differently than we did), but now that we're here the only responsible action is to see it through.
It isn't "leet" unless you spelled it something like c10n3. Just tacking numbers on the end of a normal word isn't the same thing at all.
Also, this is the internet. Somebody always cares.
It amazes me that you can't concieve of the possibility that this is the first planet in the galaxy for life to have formed.
While it is technically possible, it seems astronomically unlikely considering the size and age of this galaxy. Our sun is not even a first generation star. First life in the galaxy should have occurred billions of years before our solar system even formed.
We haven't found any evidence of it anywhere else, and it's not from lack of looking.
It most certainly is from lack of looking. So far in all of human history, all we have done is a decent (not perfect) job of looking on the moon, and made a half-assed attempt at checking a few square feet of mars (if it was teeming with life we wouldn't have missed it, but we hardly checked exhaustively). 99.99999.... % of the galaxy is still left completely unexplored. We don't have enough data to even think about making conclusions about the prevalence of life in our own solar system, let alone the rest of the galaxy.
Titan and Europa are good candidates. If we don't find any there, we may not find any anywhere.
Yes, they are good candidates for carbon-based "life like us". Given the spectroscopy results of Titan's atmosphere, I would actually be surprised if we didn't find at least simple bacteria-like life there.
However, I am certain there is more than one basic path to "life" in this universe (even in this galaxy). We arrogantly assume that other life must function in a similar manner to us, so we only bother to even consider looking in environments vaguely similar to ours for life vaguely similar to us. There may well be life on Venus, or even Mercury, or the surface of the sun, or hanging out in the Oort cloud (just not anything remotely similar to Earth life). Even our science fiction does a piss-poor job of exploring this concept.
Reading this article, I was puzzled by two things.
First: Why is this just starting to happen now? Masked vigilante heroes are older than dirt (at least in story and song). They have been portrayed in mainstream popular media since at least the 30s. By the 50s/60s, you have adults that have grown up in a world where comic book superheros have always existed. Why does it take another 50 years for people to start imitating?
Second: Why have none of these fools gotten themselves killed yet?
Are the answers to these questions related? If they are, does that mean that people are just getting stupider?
The only thing I really hated about BSG was the word "Frack". I hated it in both the original series and the remade series.
A totally contrived lack of swearing in oh-shit life-or-death situations would have been worse. The writers used "frack" instead of "fuck" so that the actors could swear with realistic emotion without pissing off the FCC. Would you rather they said things like "oh fudge" and "gosh darn it"? Or worse, not express emotion with expletives at all?
Now, I would prefer if they had just went with "fuck", because I think censorship of "naughty" words is one of the stupidest things our society does. But given the real-world puritanical limitations, I though "frack" was actually a pretty clever idea.
P.S. I agree with your point about too much technobabble on TNG. I have said before that since so many problems are solved by rigging the main deflector dish to fire an inverse tachyon pulse that there should just be a button for it on the captain's chair.
Dude, calling people out for using "gay" as a pejorative is pretty gay.
She is a promiscuous Oompa-loompa
You, sir, owe me a new chair! :)
(OK, not really, but I did actually fall out of it laughing!)