I thought that new starting zones would be the best addition that they could make. Running the same zones over and over again for your new characters is kinda boring. Sure, theres some efficiency increase when you know how it works, but I actually enjoyed exploring the world with a lower level character too.
I think you may be forgetting that physical response and psychological/emotional response can be totally divorced from eachother.
For instance, many women who are rape survivors report having experienced physical arousal symptoms while being raped. For many of them this causes some considerable self-doubt and horrible feelings of guilt.
If we apply your "Homophobes are either queer or wimps" mentality to rape victims (the analogy being physical response to sexual stimuli) I think you can see the absurdity that arises. It makes "she was asking for it" seem urbane.
More likely, homophobes posess psychological attributes that make them abhor homosexuality. The fact that their bodies respond to that stimulus makes it even worse for them. As with the example of physical symptoms of arousal in female rape victims, being betrayed by your own body can cause severe psychological tension. I am not a psychologist, but where a woman might respond with guilt and self-doubt, a male might respond with violence.
Something that also is worth noting. Pop psychology states that males are heavily skewed toward visual stimulus when it comes to sexuality, while females are much less so. I wonder how female homophobes would react to the same visual experiment. Come to think of it, are there any female homophobes?:)
Reading the summary of the story I was thinking how great it would be to have a poll for each controversial story where we could vote on how we think the average/.'er will react. I was betting on the "free speech at all costs" crowd posting a ton of explanations of how this is just like the "don't taze me, bro" incident.
However, it seems cooler heads have prevailed. Bravo/., bravo.
This is in many ways very similar to yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater.
You can yell "fire!" in a number of places without a problem. Similarly you can wear a "bomb-look-alike-" shirt many places and not have a problem. However an airport is not one of them.
I would think that this device, if use on Americans, would be an immediate deterrent. However it would, in my case, piss me off immensely. Not a fleeting kind of pissed either; more of a "shoot all the politicians you can find and wrap their bullet ridden bodies in the American flag and fly them from the largest flagpoles and buildings in sight" kind of pissed.
In a country like the US where people are relatively well armed pulling this kind of stunt could dangerously disrupt the delicate-but-fucked-up ballance between the tolerable angst of the population and the near autonomous function of the governemnt.
Maybe we should just whisper the word "black", just like we do when we say the word "terminal cancer", or "homosexual", or "AIDS", you know, since the word "black" is so inhernetly racist that it shouldn't be spoken in civilised conversations.
Or maybe, just maybe, perpetuation of racsim is predicated on hyper-sensitivity.
So you are trying to say that you have never thought of a joke at someone else's expense, nor laughed at one?
Sorry, but as a former innocent who had little malice and even less guile, I find that impossible to believe.
And, in this case, respect is given by simply understanding the man and his works enough to make a "roast" style joke about him. If he were living and someone said it to him he would probably laugh.
As for myself, if anyone wants to make jokes about me after I am dead, please do. I only require that you do it well. That someone would even utter my name after I am gone is respect enough for me, much less if the thought of me can provide entertainment for those still living.
For those of us who loved the beginning of the series and were then put to sleep by Jordan's attempt at epic prose, it was a very funny joke.
If you liked Jordan that is cool, you can defend him. But allow yourself a second of humor in light of the semi-conscious remembrance that all of us will one day go the way of Jordan.
When I got about 3-4 books in (it had something to do with a magic bowl) I was already laboring under slow plot development that was putting me to sleep.
Then, about two thirds of the way through the book, I read a rather generic paragraph describing horses and I swore I had read it earlier in the same book.
Whether it was the same paragraph or it was just so similar that it gave the impression that I had read it before, or it was an actual paragraph from an earlier Jordan book I don't know. I do know that that sensation completely broke my sense of suspension of disbelief so thoroughly that I never read another book by Jordan again.
I was very disappointed to say the least. The beginning of the series was fantastic.
Public record should be just that, public. Here is what your kind of obfuscationist lawyer talk leads to (with props to our dearly beloved Douglas Adams):
Mr. Prosser said, "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know."
"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur. "Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no, he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me."
"But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
My quoted comment alludes to that actually. The "top of the scale" for those afflicted with a communist-ruling-party worldview has many weaknesses. You point out one weakness, but the gist of my comment you quoted was to say that even though he sucks by our standards he is doing quite well by his own limited standards.
Next you will be saying that Rove knew that Bush's tactics would engender this response and that it is exactly what they planned so they could create the (one world government / police state / utopian master race of right wing Christians).
Jesus man, put down the salvia and rejoin us all in the frame of reference we call reality.
You call him a thug but he plays the cards nicely. He is feared but not hated by his own people. Just because he is brutal, evil, and acts in a completely unrestrained way toward his opposition does not mean that his actions are not that of a statesman. It just means that he ascribes to a different form of statesmanship than you and I respect.
He is effective and efficient. Moral concerns are nothing to him and his supporters. For someone steeped in the culture of corruption and disregard for human life that only communist leadership can engender, I would say he is performing near the top of the scale.
This is the central problem with communism and all power-centric governments. They see the people of a country as a resource, like coal or gold. There is no exploitation because the people are owned by the government. MAterials cannot be exploited. They are just cogs in the wheels of a machine, turning the vast meaningless mechanism of nationalistic self sustenance, indifferent to the hypocritical indulgences and liberties of the ruling classes. How can a leader of a country like this not be brutal and evil to the eyes of a country where individual freedom is valued over almost all other concerns?
Interesting that you can take one single incident with some obviously racist people and extrapolate it to cover two whole countries.
I also wonder how you identified the political leanings of those people. Did you happen to see their voter registration cards while they were disparaging you? Or did you happen to engage them in a socio-poltiical discussion and graph their responses on a political spectrum?
Funny that you would take that one incident and condemn a whole region of people for it. Personally I would just condemn those people who said it. Thinking to yourself that everyone else in the whole midwest region thinks the same way as a few ignorant individuals you encountered smacks of bigotry itself, mixed with unhealthy doses of paranoia.
If I were to follow your methodology of thought I would call all black people racists. I even have a much better sample size. I have been mugged 3 times. I have been violently attacked by people I do not know and have never shared so much as a look with on 5 occasions. All of these transgressions were performed by black people and were accompanied by racial epithets like "Lets go kick the white boy's ass" or "I like your watch, honky, give it to me." Fortunately, somewhere along the way, I realized that individual people are responsible for their own actions. You can't blame their race, or where they are from, or how they talk, or what they look like.
It would do you well to attribute blame to those individuals who actually do you wrong and not to a whole subset of people. It makes you look less biased, bigoted, and hateful.
That one tank is the limiting reagent. If it runs out the whole thing fails, regardless of the integrity of the communications equipment and the other 3 engines.
My guess is future satelites will be built with (*GASP*) fuel gauges so that you don't have to have a freaking team of PHD guys trying to figure out which one will fail first and modeling how to use the other engines to compensate for the one that gets the most usage.
Damn, with a brain trust idea like this someone might even think to put aysemetrically sized tanks on the thing because one or two engines get used more than the others.
Sorry, but it just seems that if we know that $200 million communication satellites will plummet from the sky due to one (1) engine failing while the others still have a reasonable amount of fuel you might have planned for a way to make use of that excess fuel before the thing lifted off. Of course with a measly $200 million budget you can't account for all these niggling little inconveniences, right?
Pardon me if I don't cry out with excitement at this "discovery." It looks more like a built in obsolescence feature has been circumvented rather than an actual technical breakthrough.
Seriously, who didn't learn the lesson of the limiting reagent in high school chemistry?
Slashdot Mirror
I thought that new starting zones would be the best addition that they could make. Running the same zones over and over again for your new characters is kinda boring. Sure, theres some efficiency increase when you know how it works, but I actually enjoyed exploring the world with a lower level character too.
...or, at the bottom of a river, cast around your feet, in the shape of shoes, slowly drowning you.
"IANAL, but oughtn't that to be illegal?"
I have no idea but I do think that "oughtn't" should be illegal.
I can't even pronounce it much less figure out what was left out from the apostrophy! It made my teeth hurt just to read it.
I think you may be forgetting that physical response and psychological/emotional response can be totally divorced from eachother.
:)
For instance, many women who are rape survivors report having experienced physical arousal symptoms while being raped. For many of them this causes some considerable self-doubt and horrible feelings of guilt.
If we apply your "Homophobes are either queer or wimps" mentality to rape victims (the analogy being physical response to sexual stimuli) I think you can see the absurdity that arises. It makes "she was asking for it" seem urbane.
More likely, homophobes posess psychological attributes that make them abhor homosexuality. The fact that their bodies respond to that stimulus makes it even worse for them. As with the example of physical symptoms of arousal in female rape victims, being betrayed by your own body can cause severe psychological tension. I am not a psychologist, but where a woman might respond with guilt and self-doubt, a male might respond with violence.
Something that also is worth noting. Pop psychology states that males are heavily skewed toward visual stimulus when it comes to sexuality, while females are much less so. I wonder how female homophobes would react to the same visual experiment. Come to think of it, are there any female homophobes?
Reading the summary of the story I was thinking how great it would be to have a poll for each controversial story where we could vote on how we think the average /.'er will react. I was betting on the "free speech at all costs" crowd posting a ton of explanations of how this is just like the "don't taze me, bro" incident.
/., bravo.
However, it seems cooler heads have prevailed. Bravo
This is in many ways very similar to yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater.
You can yell "fire!" in a number of places without a problem. Similarly you can wear a "bomb-look-alike-" shirt many places and not have a problem. However an airport is not one of them.
My little contribution:
3/ Satellite based pain ray projector.
I would think that this device, if use on Americans, would be an immediate deterrent. However it would, in my case, piss me off immensely. Not a fleeting kind of pissed either; more of a "shoot all the politicians you can find and wrap their bullet ridden bodies in the American flag and fly them from the largest flagpoles and buildings in sight" kind of pissed.
In a country like the US where people are relatively well armed pulling this kind of stunt could dangerously disrupt the delicate-but-fucked-up ballance between the tolerable angst of the population and the near autonomous function of the governemnt.
Last time I checked Anthrax was still a bacteria. I can make environmentally resistant "spores" but its still a bacteria.
Maybe we should just whisper the word "black", just like we do when we say the word "terminal cancer", or "homosexual", or "AIDS", you know, since the word "black" is so inhernetly racist that it shouldn't be spoken in civilised conversations.
Or maybe, just maybe, perpetuation of racsim is predicated on hyper-sensitivity.
...cuz he doesn't care anymore?
So you are trying to say that you have never thought of a joke at someone else's expense, nor laughed at one?
Sorry, but as a former innocent who had little malice and even less guile, I find that impossible to believe.
And, in this case, respect is given by simply understanding the man and his works enough to make a "roast" style joke about him. If he were living and someone said it to him he would probably laugh.
As for myself, if anyone wants to make jokes about me after I am dead, please do. I only require that you do it well. That someone would even utter my name after I am gone is respect enough for me, much less if the thought of me can provide entertainment for those still living.
Well thank goodness for global warming.
We've been waiting for over 400 years for this thing to open!
(see its all perspective)
If that doesn't move you over to the pro-global warming camp, just imagine what women will be wearing if the global summerime temp rises 10 degrees!
Dude, it was a JOKE!
For those of us who loved the beginning of the series and were then put to sleep by Jordan's attempt at epic prose, it was a very funny joke.
If you liked Jordan that is cool, you can defend him. But allow yourself a second of humor in light of the semi-conscious remembrance that all of us will one day go the way of Jordan.
When I got about 3-4 books in (it had something to do with a magic bowl) I was already laboring under slow plot development that was putting me to sleep.
Then, about two thirds of the way through the book, I read a rather generic paragraph describing horses and I swore I had read it earlier in the same book.
Whether it was the same paragraph or it was just so similar that it gave the impression that I had read it before, or it was an actual paragraph from an earlier Jordan book I don't know. I do know that that sensation completely broke my sense of suspension of disbelief so thoroughly that I never read another book by Jordan again.
I was very disappointed to say the least. The beginning of the series was fantastic.
Public record should be just that, public. Here is what your kind of obfuscationist lawyer talk leads to (with props to our dearly beloved Douglas Adams):
Mr. Prosser said, "You were quite entitled to make any suggestions or protests at the appropriate time, you know."
"Appropriate time?" hooted Arthur. "Appropriate time? The first I knew about it was when a workman arrived at my home yesterday. I asked him if he'd come to clean the windows and he said no, he'd come to demolish the house. He didn't tell me straight away of course. Oh no. First he wiped a couple of windows and charged me a fiver. Then he told me."
"But Mr. Dent, the plans have been available in the local planning office for the last nine months."
"Oh yes, well, as soon as I heard I went straight round to see them, yesterday afternoon. You hadn't exactly gone out of your way to call attention to them, had you? I mean, like actually telling anybody or anything."
"But the plans were on display..."
"On display? I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them."
"That's the display department."
"With a flashlight."
"Ah, well, the lights had probably gone."
"So had the stairs."
"But look, you found the notice, didn't you?"
"Yes," said Arthur, "yes I did. It was on display on the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying 'Beware of the Leopard.'"
My quoted comment alludes to that actually. The "top of the scale" for those afflicted with a communist-ruling-party worldview has many weaknesses. You point out one weakness, but the gist of my comment you quoted was to say that even though he sucks by our standards he is doing quite well by his own limited standards.
Maybe I'm just drunk, or maybe, just maybe, that is one of the funniest (and "truest") thing I have ever read.
Thanks!
Next you will be saying that Rove knew that Bush's tactics would engender this response and that it is exactly what they planned so they could create the (one world government / police state / utopian master race of right wing Christians).
Jesus man, put down the salvia and rejoin us all in the frame of reference we call reality.
"...the marks of a mafioso thug, not a statesman"
Silly.
Did you ever read _The_Prince_?
You call him a thug but he plays the cards nicely. He is feared but not hated by his own people. Just because he is brutal, evil, and acts in a completely unrestrained way toward his opposition does not mean that his actions are not that of a statesman. It just means that he ascribes to a different form of statesmanship than you and I respect.
He is effective and efficient. Moral concerns are nothing to him and his supporters. For someone steeped in the culture of corruption and disregard for human life that only communist leadership can engender, I would say he is performing near the top of the scale.
This is the central problem with communism and all power-centric governments. They see the people of a country as a resource, like coal or gold. There is no exploitation because the people are owned by the government. MAterials cannot be exploited. They are just cogs in the wheels of a machine, turning the vast meaningless mechanism of nationalistic self sustenance, indifferent to the hypocritical indulgences and liberties of the ruling classes. How can a leader of a country like this not be brutal and evil to the eyes of a country where individual freedom is valued over almost all other concerns?
"Humans could put persons on Mars, yet we still quibble about dumb things."
One thing I often consider:
Imagine what humanity could accomplish if we could all work together for a common goal.
Mars would be trivial.
Interesting that you can take one single incident with some obviously racist people and extrapolate it to cover two whole countries.
I also wonder how you identified the political leanings of those people. Did you happen to see their voter registration cards while they were disparaging you? Or did you happen to engage them in a socio-poltiical discussion and graph their responses on a political spectrum?
Funny that you would take that one incident and condemn a whole region of people for it. Personally I would just condemn those people who said it. Thinking to yourself that everyone else in the whole midwest region thinks the same way as a few ignorant individuals you encountered smacks of bigotry itself, mixed with unhealthy doses of paranoia.
If I were to follow your methodology of thought I would call all black people racists. I even have a much better sample size. I have been mugged 3 times. I have been violently attacked by people I do not know and have never shared so much as a look with on 5 occasions. All of these transgressions were performed by black people and were accompanied by racial epithets like "Lets go kick the white boy's ass" or "I like your watch, honky, give it to me." Fortunately, somewhere along the way, I realized that individual people are responsible for their own actions. You can't blame their race, or where they are from, or how they talk, or what they look like.
It would do you well to attribute blame to those individuals who actually do you wrong and not to a whole subset of people. It makes you look less biased, bigoted, and hateful.
That one tank is the limiting reagent. If it runs out the whole thing fails, regardless of the integrity of the communications equipment and the other 3 engines.
My guess is future satelites will be built with (*GASP*) fuel gauges so that you don't have to have a freaking team of PHD guys trying to figure out which one will fail first and modeling how to use the other engines to compensate for the one that gets the most usage.
Damn, with a brain trust idea like this someone might even think to put aysemetrically sized tanks on the thing because one or two engines get used more than the others.
Sorry, but it just seems that if we know that $200 million communication satellites will plummet from the sky due to one (1) engine failing while the others still have a reasonable amount of fuel you might have planned for a way to make use of that excess fuel before the thing lifted off. Of course with a measly $200 million budget you can't account for all these niggling little inconveniences, right?
Pardon me if I don't cry out with excitement at this "discovery." It looks more like a built in obsolescence feature has been circumvented rather than an actual technical breakthrough.
Seriously, who didn't learn the lesson of the limiting reagent in high school chemistry?
Jesus man! Watch what you link to.
I need a few thousand lorazepam and as many hours of therapy after reading those hyped up conspiracy theorists' comments.