I get mod points all the time, like monthly. I meta-moderate all the time - not every day but three or four times a week. I read at -1 all the time and always have. Seriously, it seems like I get mod points more than I really even want them. I've let points expire more than once, but then I try to be judicious about things.
The only complaint I really make about the moderation system here is that it is too easy and all too common to find comments modded down because the moderator disagreed with an opinion rather than anything actually inappropriate or disruptive. Even then, I meta-moderate a lot of those out of existence too.
You make it sound like it's scary difficult or something. A friend and I have distilled a great deal of liquor, usually from batches of wine that didn't quite make the cut.
Take any bottle of beer or wine, heat it up until the alcohol starts to evaporate and then recapture the alcohol. Hmm, maybe that's too exacting to be safe...
I will never have an up to date console system just to play games. I waited until I could get a PS2 with built in networking for $129 new. I'll get a PS3 someday, maybe, if the price ever drops enough - like $250, and chances are good that even then I would wait like six months before I'd buy one.
On the other hand, I will ALWAYS have a relatively modern PC. Imagine WOW on a PS3/360 with a custom WOW keyboard attached? All I see are dollar signs and more crap to clutter up my home (not to mention more appliances that can break.) I don't want to play WOW on my TV nor do I want a custom WOW keyboard - that goes for almost any of the games I play on my PC. Perhaps you are right about most games heading to consoles, but without some evidence backing that claim up I am skeptical (I'd be more willing to accept it if you said many, but not most.)
I suppose there's a bright side to your prediction though - the day I can't play my favorite games on my PC is the day that I'll finally cut off ties to MS for good.
All this time, I just assumed it was because it couldn't remember the words.
Actually the earth knows the words but was concerned that the RIAA might sue.
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. - from the Rosa Parks autobiography My Story
The story is actually much more involved than that as well. Rosa Parks was sitting in the blacks only section but when more white people got on the bus the driver moved the sign designating where blacks could sit back one row. He then told the four blacks in those seats to move, three of them did but Rosa Parks did not. I don't know if she thought it was going to bring ab out social change, but it seems pretty clear she had a point to prove.
I'm not sure what your post is actually trying to say. Your comparison could easily be applied to either side in the global warming debate, and arguably more effectively to those trying to censor dissenting opinion (whichever side that may happen to apply to at any given point in time.)
[quote]...very little has been done to increase the quality of life in our later ages...[/quote]
While I am not trying to suggest that I am satisfied with progress on geriatric quality of life, I am curious to know how you quantify this statement. I can only offer anecdotal evidence, within my own lifespan I have personally witnessed what appears to be a very significant improvement in the quality of life at later ages.
I barely knew my paternal grandfather, who died at 56 of a heart attack. What little I do know of him, was that he spent his last few years in very poor health. His wife lived to 85 and to be honest, the only reason she deteriorated in her final years was that she simply refused to follow the advice of her doctors any longer. (I vividly recall her 93 year-old sister chiding her for not sticking with her physical therapy after breaking her leg in a fall.) My father is the oldest of five siblings and at 68 still goes to the gym at least three days a week and still participates in things like playing lazer tag with his grandchildren.
The story on my mother's side is not quite so bright but even so, she and her surviving siblings are without exception more active and engaged in life in their late 60's than either of their parents were in their late 50's. The story with my wife's relatives is much the same both of her parents are over 60 now and in good enough shape to play golf four or five times a week, go to the pool with their grandchildren and generally live a more lively social life than even my wife and I manage.
Maybe my experience is out of the norm, but I really don't think so. Fitness and healthy living really did become a lot more important over the last three or four decades, and I think we are now seeing the result of that trend. Personally I am in favor of anything that pushes the average lifespan up (and yes, I'm willing to acknowledge and deal with the issues that creates on a global level.)
My question was simply just how cold of a climate was it where the 6500 sq/ft house was built. Allow me to blather on a little...
I live in Michigan. In an ordinary winter my heating bill gets pretty damn high in a 2300 sq/ft house, and I rarely set my thermostat over 68 F (in fact most of the time it's programmed for 64 F.)
My aunt and uncle live in Anchorage, where they have an electric heater on their car just so it can actually be started on winter mornings. Their house is about the same size as mine and much better insulated but their heating bills are still slightly higher than mine.
I lived in central Texas for a couple years. I barely noticed a difference in my utilities in the winter, but running the AC in the summer was a killer.
Back in my army days I knew a guy from Guam who insisted that the temperature there is ALWAYS 72 F and windy (maybe he was talking out of the side of his neck, but for the sake of this discussion let's just run with it.). Keeping a house of any size at 70 F under those conditions would be quite inexpensive I'd imagine.
I grasp the point that the GP was making, but quoting a dollar figure isn't really informative.
Thank you for bringing a modicum of sensibility to the discussion. Thirty years ago the same people who are now screaming that we must fight global warming were screaming that we needed to fight global cooling. A study of media coverage of the issue shows that popular opinion on the issue flip flops every 15 - 30 years, dating back to the 1890's.
Don't get so worked up. We're doing the best we can to use up all the oil so we can ALL stop polluting so much. I can't imaging a more responsible way to handle the situation...
Signing Kyoto would do NOTHING to correct the environmental imbalances that already exist. Signing Kyoto would do virtually NOTHING to correct any impending environmental disasters. It is too little too late, and sacrificing the U.S. economy on a symbolic gesture is arguably even less responsible than the decisions that have brought us to the point we are at now.
You could put it on a bathroom mirror so you could look at your calendar or watch the news or whatever while you prepare for your day. Maybe seniors could have a reminder of which pills to take displayed on the door of the medicine cabinet.
On top of all that, let's not forget it would open all sort of new possibilities for watching pr0n.
Elrond - Elf from Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit.) L. Ron Hubbard - Science Fiction writer who founded a religion on a bet with a bunch of other sci-fi writers and got carried away with himself. (Also wrote westerns.)
While I know almost nothing of Scientology, I've read all of L. Ron Hubbard's sci fi and found most of it to be quite entertaining.
While I don't necessarily agree that robotic exploration is better, I think an approach that uses robots is called for.
Mostly, I tend to agree with the author of the blog. We need orbital stations first, but even so, we should also be sending robotic construction vehicles to the moon to start preparing a base for future habitation NOW. I think it makes a lot more sense to have most of a moon base built before we arrive.
Imagine the first construction crew arriving on the moon to find and extensive labyrinth of tunnels and chambers already bored deep into the lunar surface, with piles of building materials on site and mostly in place for quick use. The same thing goes for Mars when we someday take that step - in all honesty we should have robots prepping both locations for YEARS before we try to send human beings.
I think most people just miss the point that making space exploration and colonozation a reality is about resources. There has to be a reason to go there that justifies the expense. Sure, a lot of us think that just going there to get humans off the planet is a good reason but unless it can be made profitable it just isn't going to happen. When it becomes profitable to mine asteroids or the moon, or to manufacture things that cannot be reasonably made in a gravity well, that's when space colonization will truly take hold.
Robots can get us a lot closer to such a reality than we are now, but in the end establishing a permanent human presence outside of Earth's gravity well will be necessary to truly exploit the resources that are currently beyond our reach.
While your imagery indeed paints a horrifying image, you offer zero evidence of any such butchery. Considering that these are scientists and not high school biology students gone wild, I tend to believe that they would be working in a more orderly and methodical manner. It's also not too hard to visualize a non-invasive research program, followed by a humane and sterile surgical procedure less invasive than some cancer treatment. Given the right spin almost anything can be imagined to be gory and horrifying.
Should we be stewards of the planet? Absolutely. Does that mean that scientific research and experimentation on animals is somehow inherently unethical? Not by a long shot.
Such a horrific, sickening abuse of life is appalling. Elaborate please. I don't find it particularly horrifying, abusive maybe but not horrifying. As far as appalling, well I'd suggest that runs to personal taste. I'd say that the cattle, pig or chicken industries would much better fit your description (although I'm glad to have them around too.)
How so? Here we have someone suggesting that somehow GWB & Co. are going to blatantly violate the U.S. Constitution in order to keep him in office. The fact is that the 2nd ammendment to the U.S. Constitution is there specifically to prevent this sort of thing from occurring.
As for being a nut job, who knows, maybe your are right but I'm not posting as an AC...
If Bush is the conspirator's puppet (which seems pretty damn likely) then it means that he is exactly as dumb as most people suspect. Once again,/. conspiracy assertions without a shred of evidence or other support. Just give me something, anything, even remotely credible that there is some sort of organized conspiracy in which GWB is some sort of puppet.
Come on, give it up! Who is behind it? Haliburton? CIA? Pat Robertsone? Don't keep us in suspense. If you are going to make wild assertions about conspiracies, the least you could do is lay out the whole theory for us.
...There are a great many Americans who expect Bush to pull some kind of trick to remain in office past 2008 Care to back up this wild ass statement with any sort of poll or something? While I'll gladly concede that there are people who believe this, I'll also concede that there are people who say the holocaust didn't happen, that Elvis is still alive and that there really is a tooth fairy.
Seriously, you think the same American people who just handed power to the democrats would stand for anything of the sort? I think you should consider expanding your list of reading/viewing choices, it might bring you a few steps toward reality.
I will say this much though: If Bush & Co. do manage some sort of martial law take over, it's all the friggin gun control nuts to thank for making it impossible for us to fight back. That IS exactly the situation the founding fathers had in mind when they put in the second ammendment.
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I get mod points all the time, like monthly. I meta-moderate all the time - not every day but three or four times a week. I read at -1 all the time and always have. Seriously, it seems like I get mod points more than I really even want them. I've let points expire more than once, but then I try to be judicious about things.
The only complaint I really make about the moderation system here is that it is too easy and all too common to find comments modded down because the moderator disagreed with an opinion rather than anything actually inappropriate or disruptive. Even then, I meta-moderate a lot of those out of existence too.
You make it sound like it's scary difficult or something. A friend and I have distilled a great deal of liquor, usually from batches of wine that didn't quite make the cut.
Take any bottle of beer or wine, heat it up until the alcohol starts to evaporate and then recapture the alcohol. Hmm, maybe that's too exacting to be safe...
I will never have an up to date console system just to play games. I waited until I could get a PS2 with built in networking for $129 new. I'll get a PS3 someday, maybe, if the price ever drops enough - like $250, and chances are good that even then I would wait like six months before I'd buy one.
On the other hand, I will ALWAYS have a relatively modern PC. Imagine WOW on a PS3/360 with a custom WOW keyboard attached? All I see are dollar signs and more crap to clutter up my home (not to mention more appliances that can break.) I don't want to play WOW on my TV nor do I want a custom WOW keyboard - that goes for almost any of the games I play on my PC. Perhaps you are right about most games heading to consoles, but without some evidence backing that claim up I am skeptical (I'd be more willing to accept it if you said many, but not most.)
I suppose there's a bright side to your prediction though - the day I can't play my favorite games on my PC is the day that I'll finally cut off ties to MS for good.
Actually the earth knows the words but was concerned that the RIAA might sue.
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in. - from the Rosa Parks autobiography My Story
The story is actually much more involved than that as well. Rosa Parks was sitting in the blacks only section but when more white people got on the bus the driver moved the sign designating where blacks could sit back one row. He then told the four blacks in those seats to move, three of them did but Rosa Parks did not. I don't know if she thought it was going to bring ab out social change, but it seems pretty clear she had a point to prove.
Thank you for bringing a modicum of reasoned thought to the discussion.
I'm not sure what your post is actually trying to say. Your comparison could easily be applied to either side in the global warming debate, and arguably more effectively to those trying to censor dissenting opinion (whichever side that may happen to apply to at any given point in time.)
Wow, sorry for the crappy formatting. I guess that will teach me to use the preview option.
[quote]...very little has been done to increase the quality of life in our later ages...[/quote] While I am not trying to suggest that I am satisfied with progress on geriatric quality of life, I am curious to know how you quantify this statement. I can only offer anecdotal evidence, within my own lifespan I have personally witnessed what appears to be a very significant improvement in the quality of life at later ages. I barely knew my paternal grandfather, who died at 56 of a heart attack. What little I do know of him, was that he spent his last few years in very poor health. His wife lived to 85 and to be honest, the only reason she deteriorated in her final years was that she simply refused to follow the advice of her doctors any longer. (I vividly recall her 93 year-old sister chiding her for not sticking with her physical therapy after breaking her leg in a fall.) My father is the oldest of five siblings and at 68 still goes to the gym at least three days a week and still participates in things like playing lazer tag with his grandchildren. The story on my mother's side is not quite so bright but even so, she and her surviving siblings are without exception more active and engaged in life in their late 60's than either of their parents were in their late 50's. The story with my wife's relatives is much the same both of her parents are over 60 now and in good enough shape to play golf four or five times a week, go to the pool with their grandchildren and generally live a more lively social life than even my wife and I manage. Maybe my experience is out of the norm, but I really don't think so. Fitness and healthy living really did become a lot more important over the last three or four decades, and I think we are now seeing the result of that trend. Personally I am in favor of anything that pushes the average lifespan up (and yes, I'm willing to acknowledge and deal with the issues that creates on a global level.)
My question was simply just how cold of a climate was it where the 6500 sq/ft house was built. Allow me to blather on a little...
I live in Michigan. In an ordinary winter my heating bill gets pretty damn high in a 2300 sq/ft house, and I rarely set my thermostat over 68 F (in fact most of the time it's programmed for 64 F.)
My aunt and uncle live in Anchorage, where they have an electric heater on their car just so it can actually be started on winter mornings. Their house is about the same size as mine and much better insulated but their heating bills are still slightly higher than mine.
I lived in central Texas for a couple years. I barely noticed a difference in my utilities in the winter, but running the AC in the summer was a killer.
Back in my army days I knew a guy from Guam who insisted that the temperature there is ALWAYS 72 F and windy (maybe he was talking out of the side of his neck, but for the sake of this discussion let's just run with it.). Keeping a house of any size at 70 F under those conditions would be quite inexpensive I'd imagine.
I grasp the point that the GP was making, but quoting a dollar figure isn't really informative.
Thank you for bringing a modicum of sensibility to the discussion. Thirty years ago the same people who are now screaming that we must fight global warming were screaming that we needed to fight global cooling. A study of media coverage of the issue shows that popular opinion on the issue flip flops every 15 - 30 years, dating back to the 1890's.
This all means nothing if the house happens to be in a warm climate. It might help if you said where you happened to build this house.
Don't get so worked up. We're doing the best we can to use up all the oil so we can ALL stop polluting so much. I can't imaging a more responsible way to handle the situation...
Signing Kyoto would do NOTHING to correct the environmental imbalances that already exist. Signing Kyoto would do virtually NOTHING to correct any impending environmental disasters. It is too little too late, and sacrificing the U.S. economy on a symbolic gesture is arguably even less responsible than the decisions that have brought us to the point we are at now.
You could put it on a bathroom mirror so you could look at your calendar or watch the news or whatever while you prepare for your day. Maybe seniors could have a reminder of which pills to take displayed on the door of the medicine cabinet.
On top of all that, let's not forget it would open all sort of new possibilities for watching pr0n.
I agree wholeheartedly and have said as much many times in many places.
Whoever modded this flamebait needs to switch to decaf. That's some funny shit.
Elrond - Elf from Lord of the Rings (and The Hobbit.)
L. Ron Hubbard - Science Fiction writer who founded a religion on a bet with a bunch of other sci-fi writers and got carried away with himself. (Also wrote westerns.)
While I know almost nothing of Scientology, I've read all of L. Ron Hubbard's sci fi and found most of it to be quite entertaining.
While I don't necessarily agree that robotic exploration is better, I think an approach that uses robots is called for.
Mostly, I tend to agree with the author of the blog. We need orbital stations first, but even so, we should also be sending robotic construction vehicles to the moon to start preparing a base for future habitation NOW. I think it makes a lot more sense to have most of a moon base built before we arrive.
Imagine the first construction crew arriving on the moon to find and extensive labyrinth of tunnels and chambers already bored deep into the lunar surface, with piles of building materials on site and mostly in place for quick use. The same thing goes for Mars when we someday take that step - in all honesty we should have robots prepping both locations for YEARS before we try to send human beings.
I think most people just miss the point that making space exploration and colonozation a reality is about resources. There has to be a reason to go there that justifies the expense. Sure, a lot of us think that just going there to get humans off the planet is a good reason but unless it can be made profitable it just isn't going to happen. When it becomes profitable to mine asteroids or the moon, or to manufacture things that cannot be reasonably made in a gravity well, that's when space colonization will truly take hold.
Robots can get us a lot closer to such a reality than we are now, but in the end establishing a permanent human presence outside of Earth's gravity well will be necessary to truly exploit the resources that are currently beyond our reach.
While your imagery indeed paints a horrifying image, you offer zero evidence of any such butchery. Considering that these are scientists and not high school biology students gone wild, I tend to believe that they would be working in a more orderly and methodical manner. It's also not too hard to visualize a non-invasive research program, followed by a humane and sterile surgical procedure less invasive than some cancer treatment. Given the right spin almost anything can be imagined to be gory and horrifying.
Should we be stewards of the planet? Absolutely. Does that mean that scientific research and experimentation on animals is somehow inherently unethical? Not by a long shot.
How so? Here we have someone suggesting that somehow GWB & Co. are going to blatantly violate the U.S. Constitution in order to keep him in office. The fact is that the 2nd ammendment to the U.S. Constitution is there specifically to prevent this sort of thing from occurring.
As for being a nut job, who knows, maybe your are right but I'm not posting as an AC...
Come on, give it up! Who is behind it? Haliburton? CIA? Pat Robertsone? Don't keep us in suspense. If you are going to make wild assertions about conspiracies, the least you could do is lay out the whole theory for us.
Seriously, you think the same American people who just handed power to the democrats would stand for anything of the sort? I think you should consider expanding your list of reading/viewing choices, it might bring you a few steps toward reality.
I will say this much though: If Bush & Co. do manage some sort of martial law take over, it's all the friggin gun control nuts to thank for making it impossible for us to fight back. That IS exactly the situation the founding fathers had in mind when they put in the second ammendment.
Thrall for Senate from the great state of Durotar!