I should point out that my comment conflated hybrids with wall-powered electric cars. An old silliness of mine that I don't seem to be able to give up. Much the same is true though, and the difference in efficiency between a hybrid and any other very light car is not all that large.
The real key is to address how we generate power centrally. That will address more than just CO2 emissions.
That said, the chart I linked to is ONLY for the U.S., and yes, coal is less than %20 of our energy production and around 75% of our energy production-related emissions source (I'm eyeballing that figure from the chart)... coal is a huge problem in terms of pollution, so climate change / global warming aside, I'm happy to see it go away. Nuclear power is an issue only so long as we continue to have a "not in my back yard" response to waste disposal (the science around which is pretty impressive these days).
Actually, the linked article is fairly good for Real Climate. They do the usual dance of trying to demonstrate that anyone who doesn't want to throw all SUVs into the ocean can't be a real scientist (while villifying anyone who works on studying the Sun), but they do cover well the VAST gulf between this theory and a practical resolution to the warming trend of the last century. This work in no way ANSWERS any questions.
It does shed some light on some areas of uncertainty, and that's a good thing. I quote Real Climate, "Svensmark's paper itself is indeed of some interest. Aerosol processes are among the most uncertain, and most studied, aspects of climate and these experiments might be useful in adding to that field." I'd agree, and I look forward to more work in that area... assuming that these researchers aren't denied funding on the basis of having become "too controvercial", which is the typical fate of anyone who brings the "consensus" into question....
Actually, not driving SUVs doesn't help much. The real alternative to SUVs (and trucks, minivans, etc.) is lighter vehicles. Hybrids sound good, but really their efficiency is almost entirely based on their weight, not the fact that the oil is being burned at a powerplant rather than in your car. In fact, power generation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gasses.
What would help quite a lot is converting from coal and petroleum to nuclear power generation. That would pretty much solve the problem over-night, slashing our CO2 production by nearly 50%! What impact that would have on the climate... isn't actually 100% clear. It certainly is likely to have some impact, though.
Personally, I'm not concerned. I'd rather address mercury pollution than greenhouse emissions any day of the week. After all, warmer weather never caused my father to stop being able to tie his own shoes....:-/
I'd also like to mention that just because you're an adult and out of your mothers basement doesn't mean that all adults throw away their game playing time. Some actually, you know, make time for it. 1) I'm an adult (have been for a couple decades)
2) I play games
3) Whenever spore comes out, I'll probably try it out, but I don't really care when
4) If there were a basement appartment involved, it would be mine (and one day it probably will be, if she doesn't move into a nursing home instead)
I'm willing to give them until late 2007 / early 2008 After which.... what? You will ask for your money back? Play another game in the meantime? Exit their target age-range?
The real question is: who cares? Blizzard answered that with their extended beta of World of Warcraft: no one. No one cares when you release it; they care about what you release and how playable it is.
Spore could be released in 2020, but as long as it delivers a solid game that people want to play, it will be a success. The only time pressure for them is their funding.
Yep, get rid of all the cheats. And get rid of those silly 3D graphics. Take these modern gamers down a notch: give 'em rogue and let 'em prove they're good enough for nethack.
So, forgive me.. I could just be naive; but what does C or C++ calling semantics / methods have anything to do with calls into the OS?
No, you're right, it has nothing to do with C/C++. The GP was just another example on/. of "I'm going to seem smart by discrediting the article, and the easiest way to do so is make something up without reading the article". You really should not take that kind of insulting tone unless you're sure you're right. The Windows API is C++ at a high level, but the calling model continues to be very much built around C++ even at the low level. This means that the call tree for "syscalls" (and the article isn't clear how they're defining that term) is going to be radically different on Windows than it is on Linux. but that's not going to be BAD per se.
What's more, the article is skimpy as heck, so the fact that I read it really doesn't help.
This is fluff, and bad statistics based on its own fluff to boot. Just ignore the article.
An attacker doesn't care -why- there are a bunch of system calls. Its all machihe language at that point. That those calls happen presents an opportunity to inject malicious code. Explain that in concrete terms. Explain exactly how making a system call allows one ot inject malicious code. Please.
I don't buy it, and moreso, I don't buy that you can boil complexity (which certainly has security implications) down to a one dimensional analysis based on the number of nodes in the call tree.
It's good that Slashdot is covering it, though. I do like the fact that we periodically get the chance to debunk some of the misinformation on the Web.
Taken completely out of its original context, the graphs are a useful way to compare real-world examples of C and C++ calling models, though. You'll notice that IIS (C++) has these "clusters" of activity where one routine acts as a nexus for calls into many others. This is fairly standard practice in C++ where you might have an accessor that triggers lots of behavior. In the C version, there's a much more visually procedural pattern where a function calls a few others, and then returns to a function that calls its tree of functions, but might overlap with a few calls to the previous function's utility functions, etc.
NO! This is a terrible, terrible misuse of information. The person who came up with those graphs should be forced to read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" Edward R Tufte until their eyes fall out!
IIS is written in C++.
Apache is written in C.
These graphs show the different calling models of C++ and C.
Having kids, I don't think this is misguided... How is it not misguided? What is a "screen name"? What is a "sex offender"?
Should the little old lady who was picked up for "sodomy" (which in many parts of the world can still mean performing oral sex on your spouse) have to tell some sex offender database that they are signing up with their bank's Web site under a particular username? Can you imagine the resulting abuse of that information?
I live in a state in the U.S. where a teacher went to jail because she had an affair with a student of hers who was underage. When she got out of jail, they got married (he was now of age). Should she continue to have to publicly disclose everything she does because the person she fell in love with happened to be a year too young? That seems like a failure of the punishment meeting the crime, and a burden to the system and to her that has no benefit to society. It also puts her in the position of being harrassed for the rest of her life with no chance of reprieve.
No, this is not the way to solve the problems that people are concerned about.
Watch the Frontline episode entitled, "Tank Man". They do a decent job, given the sparse details available, at analyzing what Yahoo!, Google and Cisco did for China. Cisco's involvement isn't just providing routers that can filter traffic.
Exxon wants something built (fake science in regards to climate change) You are saying, then, taht Exxon has stated that they will refuse to pay if the fingings are correct and well documented? That is, they do not care about the content of the findings alone, but the fact that they must be fake?
When RSA puts up a bounty for breaking crypto, they do so because that answer is vitally important, not because they want to be wrong. Exxon is doing roughly the same. They are putting up a bounty on this work because it vital to their business interests that this data be correct. If there's any way to assail climate theory that suggests that warming is anthropogenic, then they want that to be found, and those who established the opposing theories should be thrilled to have such an effort undertaken. Recall that this is not football (of the world or U.S variety). Nor is it a debate. This is the scientific method at work, and the more highly skilled people are highly motivated to produce valuable research the better. What bothers me is the tendency to ignore the science and focus on sources of funding; "desirability" of results, etc.
In the USA, officers of a company have a legal obligation to not intentionally harm the company's stock value through policy decisions. It's entirely possible that if the company leadership "grew a pair" and the result was being kicked out of China, the stockholders would file suit.
Show me the law.
There is, to my knowledge, no such law. What officers of a company have is a fiduciary duty to increase stockholder value according to the terms of the stockholder's purchase of stock. This includes, and is almost entirely circumscribed by the details of the S1 or "red herring" filing with the SEC. If your S1 says, "we will lose money, year after year, until everyone allows freedom of the press in their countries," then that's what your stockholders can hold you to. They understood the terms under which they were getting in bed with you (or should have... that's their duty), and can't complain when you do what you said you would.
This is one of the reasons that Google's S1 is important. It doesn't guarantee that they'll do the right thing, but if they do, and stockholders complain, they can always point to their S1 and say, "what part of 'Don't be evil' did you not understand?" It's not a marketing thing, it's a legal disclaimer.
In this case, it's not clear to me if Google did the right or the wrong thing, and I don't think we can answer that objectively... yet. Yahoo! and Cisco, on the other hand, have clearly hurt the Chineese people in tangible ways (Cisco is probably responsible for far more arrests than Yahoo!, but they don't get the same bad press because you can't point to specific instances where their monitoring tools have identified activists). For them, there's no other alternative, since their actions would have to be outright illegal for them to not pursue any profit that they can.
I have to say that, post-Google's IPO, I would never issue an S1 that didn't contain at least a vague morality clause like Google's. It's actually good business practice.
I disagree. I think that the reason for people searching for Yahoo! on Google is that Yahoo! offers far, far more than search. I typically forget that Yahoo has a search service, but I visit their site every day. Their news service is nicely tailored to my stock portfolio; their yellow pages service is easy to use and typically more accurate and complete than searching on Google maps; and their financial research services are better than anything else that's free.
Now, I don't typically search for Yahoo!. I have bookmarks for that. However, I could see why people would.
To draw a parallels between Wikipedia (which is uncontrolled) and Open Source (which is controlled) just does Open Source a disservice. Well, first off, Wikipedia isn't uncontrolled, and what you are focusing on seems to be a fundamental difference in release cycles rather than development models. In an open source project of sufficient scope to map to Wikipedia, there are typically a core of "admins" who do not write code nearly so much as they make sure the various sub-projects are working together. Wales and the Wikimedia Board do this for Wikipedia et al.
Then you have the various projects that make up the whole product. Look at the Linux kernel or Firefox/Mozilla for examples of this. Wikimedia is also broken down into projects (sites, software components and other major efforts). None of what you see when you edit a Wikipedia page is really involved at this level, and nor is most of what a developer would interact with directly involved at this scope for an open source project.
Now, it's true that at the lowest level, Wikipedia itself has looser constraints over editing than a typical OSS project, but I think that's the nature of the media asserting itself. Software needs to exit a "development phase" and uniformly have all of its parts be correct and usable at once. An encyclopedia need never truly exit a development phase across the board, as a "failure" in one part of its information does not the rest of it to fail to function. Thus, the release cycle need not be as monolithic as it is in most OSS projects.
All of that said, I don't think the comparison is fair for one reason: Wikipedia is still growing and changing dramatically. I don't think that you'll see the same project in 5 years. Wikipedia itself will likely exist, but the way its managed will almost certainly change as it continues to mature and the maintainters continue to learn from their successes and failures.
I think you are mis-reading a lot of this. When you say "a reconfiguration of the Merit system (multiple times), Talents a few times and around about 10 new dungeons," you triviallize a lot of very complex work.
Some of those 10 dungeons you talk about are essentially stand-alone games that keep guilds of hundreds of players busy for months. Some of them are so large that you are given special mounts to explore them, and they dramatically changed the power-levels and lore of the game.
My experience contradicts yours. I have a WoW account upgraded to TBC, and I cannot even log on from a non-TBC installation (correctly patched to the latest version). There's something wrong with your machine. I got TBC 24 hours after it was released, and I was able to log in fine.
Further, after installing TBC all the 2.0.x patches are being applied, even the humongous 200+MB 2.0.1... Yes, of course they are. The TBC disks were pressed before those patches were released, so they update your old installation OR the TBC-updated installation. That, however, does not contradict anything I said. You got the patches regardless of TBC being released, and you got them even if you didn't update to TBC. You also got all of the other benefits including PVP and talent features.
You also got many new instances since the initial release of WoW without ever buying an expansion.
Overall, there's a lot to complain about (in a game this large with millions of players min/maxing everything into the ground, that's unavoidable), but this is, by far, the best MMO I've seen, and much of that is due to quality of execution more than code.
There are many things that Blizzard needs to do in a new MMO:
Distinguish it from WoW (an RTS MMO would certainly do that)
Remove the "realms" or "servers" division while not throwing 8 million players into one virtual room (hard problem, but whoever solves it first pretty much wins the market)
Remove the "I'd like to play with my friends, but I'd have to level for 2 months first" problem without trivializing the value of leveling (another hard problem, but City of Heroes had what sounds like a passable solution)
I'd personally like to see a "Universe of Starcraft" or the like, but I'd *really* like to see something like a MMO Diablo with the above problems solved. I liked the Diablo storyline and world much more than Warcraft, but that's just a matter of taste.
Remember that Warcraft is a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy elements. The orcs, in this world, are an alien species that was banished from their homeworld. The new race, the Drenai, are literally a spacefaring race whose homeworld was blown up.
You probably want to get the expansion and explore it.
This $50 expansion is basically a big patch for their game.
In fact, you're entirely wrong. The patch itself was released for "free" to the entire playerbase in early December, and fine-tuned before and after (but not on the day of) the release. The expansion only unlocks new content such as the new continent of Outland, 2 new races, lots of new gear and quests, etc.; it patches nothing. Nothing.
The 2.0.1 patch (link to release notes) was released Dec. 5. The 2.0.6 patch was released today. None of that required that you pay for the expansion, and while we, the player-base, whine about every percieved "nerf" that comes along, we have to admit that the game has gotten substantially better, deeper and richer even without the expansion, in the last month.
What we all got without buying an expansion at all:
Honor System Revamp - A major new way of doing player-vs-player (PVP) that improved on the old system by making it far less "play it or lose it"
New arena PVP instances
A re-tooled UI API that improves security, and thus reduces gold-farming and botting abuses
The full level 1-70 talent system revamp (even though you can't level to 70 without the expansion, you can choose to spend your points on getting level-70-ready talents with the patch)
A massive improvement to pet-classes in the high-end game by giving bonuses from gear to pets as well
A looking-for-group tool that enables a much smoother means of finding others to play with
Support for advanced MacOS graphics features that makes WoW much nicer on Macs
Blizzard isn't that other MMO company. They are cold and unresponsive sometimes simply due to the massive number of players, but their overall approach has always been one of giving the community new features and content for their monthly subscription. There's now even more that you can buy, but I think anyone who has played the expansion will have to admit that you get a LOT for your money.
"I know of at least two labs (one is a well known observatory) that saw funding for good science dry up because Gore and his ilk saw their results used by their political opponents (out of context, of course)."
Really? Which labs?
Yes, exactly; the best response to a scientific community in which research organizations are penalized for being too controvercial is to mention their names on Slashdot. Heh.
If you don't think this really happened, then I invite you to read through the congressional record for the last decade. There's an awful lot that is scary as heck in there, and you'll eventually come to the phrase "enemy of the planet."
Most of the grandstanding is happening in the popular press (you won't find it in scientific journals - even the climatology journals), frequently encouraged by groups such as junkscience. I don't blame realclimate for defending climatology any more than I blame evolutionary biologists for defending evolution. I don't really see the difference between defending climatology and defending evolution. Do you?
There's so much wrong with that statement...
First off: watch An Inconvenient Truth. The movie is full of grandstanding. That's essentially all it is. He makes claims out of context, claims that there's consensus on the most extreme predictions (flooding of huge parts of North America, for example, which international consensus disagrees with by an order of magnitude over the next 100 years). Keep in mind that Al Gore (as Senetor) was a big chunk of the problem. He spent a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that federal funding got cut off for anyone who diagreed with his take on the science. I know of at least two labs (one is a well known observatory) that saw funding for good science dry up because Gore and his ilk saw their results used by their political opponents (out of context, of course). This isn't a case of some crackpot saying, "you should fund my research," but of well established labs that have reputations going back nearly a century having to change the areas in which they do research because of political pressure. That's when I stopped accepting the "consensus" on faith, and got a lot more skeptical.
The problem is that folks who point this out are risking their jobs, so yes, the hucksters and con-men are among them in greater numbers than in the general population... that doesn't mean that anyone in that group is wrong, but yes it means you have to examine the work closely. I don't think that's the mode of incentive that our government and private funding bodies are giving climatology right now.
What realclimate and other such outlets tend to do is attack the people involved for taking "the other side", while using a one-sided argument against select pieces of the science to justify their attacks. I've never visited realclimate without getting the sense that that site could be wholy replaced by evangelism of any other flavor without chaning a whole lot. That they include footnotes is just window-dressing used to justify some very, very harsh attacks. So, as far as realclimate "defending scince"... no.
I also take exception to the comparison between evolution and climate. Climatology is not really under attack. That is, no one is saying, "climatology is bunk... it's all just the hand of God." Also, no one is suggesting that junk pseudoscience be taught in schools when it comes to climate. All we (the dissent) are suggesting is that the ratchet down the political discourse, and let the people doing real work in the field hash this out without yelling at them or yanking funding for suggesting "the wrong thing."
Slashdot Mirror
I should point out that my comment conflated hybrids with wall-powered electric cars. An old silliness of mine that I don't seem to be able to give up. Much the same is true though, and the difference in efficiency between a hybrid and any other very light car is not all that large.
The real key is to address how we generate power centrally. That will address more than just CO2 emissions.
There's no reason not to get started.
That said, the chart I linked to is ONLY for the U.S., and yes, coal is less than %20 of our energy production and around 75% of our energy production-related emissions source (I'm eyeballing that figure from the chart)... coal is a huge problem in terms of pollution, so climate change / global warming aside, I'm happy to see it go away. Nuclear power is an issue only so long as we continue to have a "not in my back yard" response to waste disposal (the science around which is pretty impressive these days).
Actually, the linked article is fairly good for Real Climate. They do the usual dance of trying to demonstrate that anyone who doesn't want to throw all SUVs into the ocean can't be a real scientist (while villifying anyone who works on studying the Sun), but they do cover well the VAST gulf between this theory and a practical resolution to the warming trend of the last century. This work in no way ANSWERS any questions.
It does shed some light on some areas of uncertainty, and that's a good thing. I quote Real Climate, "Svensmark's paper itself is indeed of some interest. Aerosol processes are among the most uncertain, and most studied, aspects of climate and these experiments might be useful in adding to that field." I'd agree, and I look forward to more work in that area... assuming that these researchers aren't denied funding on the basis of having become "too controvercial", which is the typical fate of anyone who brings the "consensus" into question....
Actually, not driving SUVs doesn't help much. The real alternative to SUVs (and trucks, minivans, etc.) is lighter vehicles. Hybrids sound good, but really their efficiency is almost entirely based on their weight, not the fact that the oil is being burned at a powerplant rather than in your car. In fact, power generation is the largest contributor to greenhouse gasses.
.... :-/
What would help quite a lot is converting from coal and petroleum to nuclear power generation. That would pretty much solve the problem over-night, slashing our CO2 production by nearly 50%! What impact that would have on the climate... isn't actually 100% clear. It certainly is likely to have some impact, though.
Personally, I'm not concerned. I'd rather address mercury pollution than greenhouse emissions any day of the week. After all, warmer weather never caused my father to stop being able to tie his own shoes
2) I play games
3) Whenever spore comes out, I'll probably try it out, but I don't really care when
4) If there were a basement appartment involved, it would be mine (and one day it probably will be, if she doesn't move into a nursing home instead)
The real question is: who cares? Blizzard answered that with their extended beta of World of Warcraft: no one. No one cares when you release it; they care about what you release and how playable it is.
Spore could be released in 2020, but as long as it delivers a solid game that people want to play, it will be a success. The only time pressure for them is their funding.
Yep, get rid of all the cheats. And get rid of those silly 3D graphics. Take these modern gamers down a notch: give 'em rogue and let 'em prove they're good enough for nethack.
No, you're right, it has nothing to do with C/C++. The GP was just another example on
What's more, the article is skimpy as heck, so the fact that I read it really doesn't help.
This is fluff, and bad statistics based on its own fluff to boot. Just ignore the article.
I don't buy it, and moreso, I don't buy that you can boil complexity (which certainly has security implications) down to a one dimensional analysis based on the number of nodes in the call tree.
It's good that Slashdot is covering it, though. I do like the fact that we periodically get the chance to debunk some of the misinformation on the Web.
Taken completely out of its original context, the graphs are a useful way to compare real-world examples of C and C++ calling models, though. You'll notice that IIS (C++) has these "clusters" of activity where one routine acts as a nexus for calls into many others. This is fairly standard practice in C++ where you might have an accessor that triggers lots of behavior. In the C version, there's a much more visually procedural pattern where a function calls a few others, and then returns to a function that calls its tree of functions, but might overlap with a few calls to the previous function's utility functions, etc.
NO! This is a terrible, terrible misuse of information. The person who came up with those graphs should be forced to read "The Visual Display of Quantitative Information" Edward R Tufte until their eyes fall out!
IIS is written in C++.
Apache is written in C.
These graphs show the different calling models of C++ and C.
That is *all* they show.
Should the little old lady who was picked up for "sodomy" (which in many parts of the world can still mean performing oral sex on your spouse) have to tell some sex offender database that they are signing up with their bank's Web site under a particular username? Can you imagine the resulting abuse of that information?
I live in a state in the U.S. where a teacher went to jail because she had an affair with a student of hers who was underage. When she got out of jail, they got married (he was now of age). Should she continue to have to publicly disclose everything she does because the person she fell in love with happened to be a year too young? That seems like a failure of the punishment meeting the crime, and a burden to the system and to her that has no benefit to society. It also puts her in the position of being harrassed for the rest of her life with no chance of reprieve.
No, this is not the way to solve the problems that people are concerned about.
Watch the Frontline episode entitled, "Tank Man". They do a decent job, given the sparse details available, at analyzing what Yahoo!, Google and Cisco did for China. Cisco's involvement isn't just providing routers that can filter traffic.
When RSA puts up a bounty for breaking crypto, they do so because that answer is vitally important, not because they want to be wrong. Exxon is doing roughly the same. They are putting up a bounty on this work because it vital to their business interests that this data be correct. If there's any way to assail climate theory that suggests that warming is anthropogenic, then they want that to be found, and those who established the opposing theories should be thrilled to have such an effort undertaken. Recall that this is not football (of the world or U.S variety). Nor is it a debate. This is the scientific method at work, and the more highly skilled people are highly motivated to produce valuable research the better. What bothers me is the tendency to ignore the science and focus on sources of funding; "desirability" of results, etc.
There is, to my knowledge, no such law. What officers of a company have is a fiduciary duty to increase stockholder value according to the terms of the stockholder's purchase of stock. This includes, and is almost entirely circumscribed by the details of the S1 or "red herring" filing with the SEC. If your S1 says, "we will lose money, year after year, until everyone allows freedom of the press in their countries," then that's what your stockholders can hold you to. They understood the terms under which they were getting in bed with you (or should have... that's their duty), and can't complain when you do what you said you would.
This is one of the reasons that Google's S1 is important. It doesn't guarantee that they'll do the right thing, but if they do, and stockholders complain, they can always point to their S1 and say, "what part of 'Don't be evil' did you not understand?" It's not a marketing thing, it's a legal disclaimer.
In this case, it's not clear to me if Google did the right or the wrong thing, and I don't think we can answer that objectively
I have to say that, post-Google's IPO, I would never issue an S1 that didn't contain at least a vague morality clause like Google's. It's actually good business practice.
I disagree. I think that the reason for people searching for Yahoo! on Google is that Yahoo! offers far, far more than search. I typically forget that Yahoo has a search service, but I visit their site every day. Their news service is nicely tailored to my stock portfolio; their yellow pages service is easy to use and typically more accurate and complete than searching on Google maps; and their financial research services are better than anything else that's free.
Now, I don't typically search for Yahoo!. I have bookmarks for that. However, I could see why people would.
Then you have the various projects that make up the whole product. Look at the Linux kernel or Firefox/Mozilla for examples of this. Wikimedia is also broken down into projects (sites, software components and other major efforts). None of what you see when you edit a Wikipedia page is really involved at this level, and nor is most of what a developer would interact with directly involved at this scope for an open source project.
Now, it's true that at the lowest level, Wikipedia itself has looser constraints over editing than a typical OSS project, but I think that's the nature of the media asserting itself. Software needs to exit a "development phase" and uniformly have all of its parts be correct and usable at once. An encyclopedia need never truly exit a development phase across the board, as a "failure" in one part of its information does not the rest of it to fail to function. Thus, the release cycle need not be as monolithic as it is in most OSS projects.
All of that said, I don't think the comparison is fair for one reason: Wikipedia is still growing and changing dramatically. I don't think that you'll see the same project in 5 years. Wikipedia itself will likely exist, but the way its managed will almost certainly change as it continues to mature and the maintainters continue to learn from their successes and failures.
I think you are mis-reading a lot of this. When you say "a reconfiguration of the Merit system (multiple times), Talents a few times and around about 10 new dungeons," you triviallize a lot of very complex work.
Some of those 10 dungeons you talk about are essentially stand-alone games that keep guilds of hundreds of players busy for months. Some of them are so large that you are given special mounts to explore them, and they dramatically changed the power-levels and lore of the game.
You also got many new instances since the initial release of WoW without ever buying an expansion.
Overall, there's a lot to complain about (in a game this large with millions of players min/maxing everything into the ground, that's unavoidable), but this is, by far, the best MMO I've seen, and much of that is due to quality of execution more than code.
I'd personally like to see a "Universe of Starcraft" or the like, but I'd *really* like to see something like a MMO Diablo with the above problems solved. I liked the Diablo storyline and world much more than Warcraft, but that's just a matter of taste.
I don't have a good screenshot of the many, many kinds of guns from muskets to shotguns to massive canons that are in the game, but:
Technology: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/ima
Space: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/burningcrusade/ima
Remember that Warcraft is a hybrid of science fiction and fantasy elements. The orcs, in this world, are an alien species that was banished from their homeworld. The new race, the Drenai, are literally a spacefaring race whose homeworld was blown up.
You probably want to get the expansion and explore it.
In fact, you're entirely wrong. The patch itself was released for "free" to the entire playerbase in early December, and fine-tuned before and after (but not on the day of) the release. The expansion only unlocks new content such as the new continent of Outland, 2 new races, lots of new gear and quests, etc.; it patches nothing. Nothing.
The 2.0.1 patch (link to release notes) was released Dec. 5. The 2.0.6 patch was released today. None of that required that you pay for the expansion, and while we, the player-base, whine about every percieved "nerf" that comes along, we have to admit that the game has gotten substantially better, deeper and richer even without the expansion, in the last month.
What we all got without buying an expansion at all:
Blizzard isn't that other MMO company. They are cold and unresponsive sometimes simply due to the massive number of players, but their overall approach has always been one of giving the community new features and content for their monthly subscription. There's now even more that you can buy, but I think anyone who has played the expansion will have to admit that you get a LOT for your money.
There's no strawman here, just the insantity of that statement.
Yes, exactly; the best response to a scientific community in which research organizations are penalized for being too controvercial is to mention their names on Slashdot. Heh.
If you don't think this really happened, then I invite you to read through the congressional record for the last decade. There's an awful lot that is scary as heck in there, and you'll eventually come to the phrase "enemy of the planet."
There's so much wrong with that statement...
First off: watch An Inconvenient Truth. The movie is full of grandstanding. That's essentially all it is. He makes claims out of context, claims that there's consensus on the most extreme predictions (flooding of huge parts of North America, for example, which international consensus disagrees with by an order of magnitude over the next 100 years). Keep in mind that Al Gore (as Senetor) was a big chunk of the problem. He spent a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that federal funding got cut off for anyone who diagreed with his take on the science. I know of at least two labs (one is a well known observatory) that saw funding for good science dry up because Gore and his ilk saw their results used by their political opponents (out of context, of course). This isn't a case of some crackpot saying, "you should fund my research," but of well established labs that have reputations going back nearly a century having to change the areas in which they do research because of political pressure. That's when I stopped accepting the "consensus" on faith, and got a lot more skeptical.
The problem is that folks who point this out are risking their jobs, so yes, the hucksters and con-men are among them in greater numbers than in the general population... that doesn't mean that anyone in that group is wrong, but yes it means you have to examine the work closely. I don't think that's the mode of incentive that our government and private funding bodies are giving climatology right now.
What realclimate and other such outlets tend to do is attack the people involved for taking "the other side", while using a one-sided argument against select pieces of the science to justify their attacks. I've never visited realclimate without getting the sense that that site could be wholy replaced by evangelism of any other flavor without chaning a whole lot. That they include footnotes is just window-dressing used to justify some very, very harsh attacks. So, as far as realclimate "defending scince"
I also take exception to the comparison between evolution and climate. Climatology is not really under attack. That is, no one is saying, "climatology is bunk... it's all just the hand of God." Also, no one is suggesting that junk pseudoscience be taught in schools when it comes to climate. All we (the dissent) are suggesting is that the ratchet down the political discourse, and let the people doing real work in the field hash this out without yelling at them or yanking funding for suggesting "the wrong thing."