What's amusing about their rather extensive naming rules is that some of the in-game NPC's violate it. Characters like Chief Engineer Scooty and Sprock (who together help you go through a transporter like device) are very obvious plays on Star Trek characters and violate rule 11. Presumably they're exempt from their own rules, but that's cold comfort to anyone who might have had a similar parody name and been forced to change it, only to be confronted with it by an NPC.
one could argue that Occam's razor favors atheism, since it favors the fewest suppositions. Postulating God to explain complex events inserts an equally complex entity into the explanation. So, the argument goes, the scientific view would favor atheism.
Speaking as an atheist, your argument holds no water, simply because atheism doesn't make any attempt to explain complex events. Therefore you can't compare the two in this manner. At best you could say all atheism claims is that the reason for existence is not god.
A while back compaq came out with a line of computers similar to this called the iPaq (if you want to search on ebay or google, search for iPaq desktop so you don't get all the pocket pc hits). The big thing it didn't have was an optical drive. But I recall it being a pretty small form factor device.
You cannot start doing a cost-benefit analysis on human life without opening the door to some very ugly scenarios. If we can kill one baby to save 100 people, well what about killing one baby to improve the standard of living for 1000 people? Can we kill one poor baby for one rich baby? Can we start harvesting bums' organs for rich people? There are many unspoken bargains in the world that assume human life is sacrosanct. Its an interpretation of the golden rule. That's why people don't really blink when they hear a story about 3 people dying trying to save 1 person from danger.
Basically, you can want to promote the idea that its OK to trade one life for another or many others, but only if the life being traded is your own. Anything else is unethical.
My contact is at Activision and basically says Troika has run out of publishers that will put up with them. I'm currently playing Bloodlines after finishing HL2, and I'm seriously amazed at how little they did with the engine. Its buggy, glitchy and nowhere near as good looking as HL2. I'm sure it will sell lots of copies, but aside from some minimal physics stuff, it looks like they slapped the RPG onto the old HL1 engine, not Source. I'm not saying that's what they did, just that thats what it looks like.
Sure... Activision released the game because they made a huge investment into Troika, but apparently after getting this done, Activisions not going to throw good money after bad. Granted, my source isn't high up in Activision, so his word isn't some sort of guarantee. I'm just saying what I heard.
Kruschev said 'We will bury you', NOT 'We will crush you'. The gist of the statement was that the stable soviet emptire would be around long after capitolism died under the weight of itself. Clearly he put too much stock in the long term survival of his government, but its not the same thing as claiming he wanted to dominate the west.
Acceleration for a railgun is proportional to the length. As for Kevlar, I haven't seen the calculations for what the tensile strength of the cable material needs to be for the moon, but I know for the earth, nothing less than carbon nano-tubes will do. On the other hand, ground based electromagnetic acceleration is completely within our current technological grasp. I fully support the building of a space elevator for earth, but I think its unnecessary for the moon and that other mechanims would better serve at a cheaper cost.
This is entirely pointless. The purpose of a space elevator is to bring something to orbital speed without the inefficiency of a rocket and carrying your own fuel to make such a large delta-V. A spcae elevator does this by climbing to a given point where the existing velocity on the ground is now orbital speed, but make no mistake, you're still adding a ton of energy to the object as it crawls out of the gravity well.
But there's another way. You can accelerate something sideways. The reason this wouldn't work on earth is because of drag by the atmosphere. On the moon that's not a problem. So you a railgun acceleration system to launch the vehicle sideways, speed it up to escape velocity and let go. It will simply fall away from the surface of the moon. Like a space elevator's cargo, it now only needs to carry a small amount of fuel for its delta-v to maneuver.
I cringe a little bit whenever I see a computer do lots of special effect and zooming and beeping when it returns some piece of information. They appear to have a UI optimized for whatever the task at hand is. I also cringe when I look at the fabulous places they work with enourmous rooms and huge glass walls. However, these don't bother me too much. They're a staple of TV shows, and its no use complaining about them any more than it is complaining that everyone on the show, whether stars or guest stars is chisled/buxom and good looking.
What does get to me is that they solve every case. I like Law & Order because you see guilty people get off scott free. In CSI, you don't see a lot of unresolved cases, if any. You never see unsolved cases. you never see hunches that lead nowhere. If a detective thinks there's something at the crime scene he missed, he's going to be right, and you end up in the show 3 minutes later with him examining some suspect fiber. What really bothers me is whenever they say 'X happened yesterday' or 'X happened this morning' and I'm like... BULLSHIT! There's no way you just scoured that much area/data/dna and came up with a result in that amount of time. Not unless CSI is the biggest employer in your city.
And guess what... the fingerprint matching device is NOT going to render every last fingerprint it tries to find a match on. God I can't stand those shows.
Remember that human volunteers have a high chance at screwing up also
When humans screw up they tend to do it randomly, and therefore not affect the outcome. When computers screw up they tend to do it non-randomly, as in this case where staight party votes for dems went to libertarians instead consistently.
Add to this that a paper trail can be rechecked as many times as is required to ensure its accurate. Certainly if the difference is a single vote out of 100,000, then the human error in vote counting comes into play, but then by the same token, so does voter error, such as pressing the wrong button. But the vote is almost never that close. When it is then you just have to accept that the margin is below statistical margins and live with whatever the certified result is because there's no way to determine the truth.
Because people tend to keep things like strawberries and melon's around the house. No one keeps rotten eggs around the house, so its an immediate indication that something is WRONG. When selecting an adulterant, you don't want someone chasing after it because they like the smell.
It costs Valve goodwill and credibility. I'm sure there are numerous people going into a store and purchasing the game with no foreknowledge of the official release date or that they won't be able to take it home and start playing. When they discovered that they've just paid a chunk of change for nothing (at least nothing for this weekend) its going to piss them off. I know it would piss me off. When I bought the game on steam I was still working under the assumption that I'd be able to play it as soon as it was 'done'. Done to me means when they finish making it, not when Vivendi deigns to allow us to play. I've already purchased this game and there's no way I can undo the transaction, but this will be the last game I buy from Valve. Between this and the original Sep 30/03 release date they promised and then didn't comment on when it passed, they've used up all their goodwill.
Since enough people have already discredited your broomstick argument as having anything to do with hydrogen, I'll approach the 'invisible flame' argument.
First off, even if the flame is almost completely invisible in daylight, any flamejet that is big enough to be a serious concern is probably going to cause the air the start to incandece. Second, companies are perfectly capable of adding adulterants to make the flame any color they want. For instance, the reason you can smell natural gas leak is because the gas company adds a rotting eggs smell. Otherwise your house could fill up with natural gas and you wouldn't know before you were dead. A tiny fraction of some other gas added to pure hydrogen would probably easily be able to make the flame a bright and obvious color.
So your plan to better the world relies on a) logic decending on the masses and b) that actually bringing them round to your point of view. Good luck with that.
I don't think replacing the two party system with something better is impossible. I just think that if you plan to move the mountain you'd better have a better plan than 'push real hard and hope everyone else gets the same idea and decide to push in the same direction.
Yes, he will 'steal' some of Kerry's votes, but the fact of the matter is that the dems have been extremely active in trying to keep Nader off ballots via legal manuevers, rather underhanded if you ask me; not the sort of thing that I would find inspiring in my leaders
Hope you're not voting for bush then, because the repulicans are enaging in just as much legal wrangling to try to put him ON ballots.
I hate to say this, but you may be barking up the wrong tree. Registration levels are usually way below population levels, so the idea that voter registration groups managed to hit everyone in the county, even the people missed by the census, AND get them to register seems pretty unlikely. Also, the eligible voters in a given region are actually a subset of the population, since you can't vote if you're under 18. All these factors work against your arguments. On the other hand no one has posted a link to any actual backing for this story, so it might just be apocryphal bullshit anyway.
The rules of chess indicate there are two sides. You cannot come up and place a piece on the board that does not belong to one of those two sides, no matter how strongly you feel about it. Its simply outside of the rules. Nominally, third parties are not outside of the rules, but in practical terms they are. What is needed is more and more people in one of the two main parties saying we need to change the rules so third parties aren't excluded. People seem to be reacting as if I'm some sort of shill for the status quo and the two party system. I'm not. I'd probably vote for someone else if I thought that could change the outcome of the election in a favorable way. What I am is a engineer, and as such a pragmatist. As such, I look to working with the tools that are effective. The only tools available right at a national now are the DNC and the GOP.
Yes. I wonder if that is what happens when a dictator claims that he received 99% of the vote.
No, the dictator does it by rigging the election rules so that there are no other parties. What the Dems and Reps have done is rig the election rules so that no third parties actually have any real influence. That's what I'm opposed to.
I'd rather vote for someone that isn't going to take my rights away
Thus ensuring that more of your rights get taken away by the more conservative party. Look, if you honestly believe that both parties are going to take away your freedom, then join the one that is going to take away less, and make sure that by being a part of that party they take away even less than they would otherwise. Maybe if more people like you had been in the Demcrative party we'd have someone like Dean instead of a 'skull & bones' man.
Honestly, if you can't tell the difference between Kerry and Bush, that's cause you're so far round the fucking bend you can't see the bend.
The Libertarian party EXACTLY aligns with my ideals, why would I choose a party that "closely" aligns with my ideals!?
By this argument everyone should just vote for themselves. And yes I think its good to compromise in politics. If no one compromises, what you have is not politics, but war. Dumbass.
I would rather continue voting for candidates who agree with my views that bear ANY responsibility for the crap going on by voting for either a Republican or a Democrat.
By voting for someone you know isn't going to win, and being unable to vote in the primaries for the major parties, you become JUST as responsible for the state of the country. You can't get off that easy.
Slashdot Mirror
What's amusing about their rather extensive naming rules is that some of the in-game NPC's violate it. Characters like Chief Engineer Scooty and Sprock (who together help you go through a transporter like device) are very obvious plays on Star Trek characters and violate rule 11. Presumably they're exempt from their own rules, but that's cold comfort to anyone who might have had a similar parody name and been forced to change it, only to be confronted with it by an NPC.
A while back compaq came out with a line of computers similar to this called the iPaq (if you want to search on ebay or google, search for iPaq desktop so you don't get all the pocket pc hits). The big thing it didn't have was an optical drive. But I recall it being a pretty small form factor device.
Basically, you can want to promote the idea that its OK to trade one life for another or many others, but only if the life being traded is your own. Anything else is unethical.
Sure... Activision released the game because they made a huge investment into Troika, but apparently after getting this done, Activisions not going to throw good money after bad. Granted, my source isn't high up in Activision, so his word isn't some sort of guarantee. I'm just saying what I heard.
I've heard from an insider that Troika is pretty much no more, so I wouldn't expect a lot of post-release patches for that game.
Kruschev said 'We will bury you', NOT 'We will crush you'. The gist of the statement was that the stable soviet emptire would be around long after capitolism died under the weight of itself. Clearly he put too much stock in the long term survival of his government, but its not the same thing as claiming he wanted to dominate the west.
Acceleration for a railgun is proportional to the length. As for Kevlar, I haven't seen the calculations for what the tensile strength of the cable material needs to be for the moon, but I know for the earth, nothing less than carbon nano-tubes will do. On the other hand, ground based electromagnetic acceleration is completely within our current technological grasp. I fully support the building of a space elevator for earth, but I think its unnecessary for the moon and that other mechanims would better serve at a cheaper cost.
But there's another way. You can accelerate something sideways. The reason this wouldn't work on earth is because of drag by the atmosphere. On the moon that's not a problem. So you a railgun acceleration system to launch the vehicle sideways, speed it up to escape velocity and let go. It will simply fall away from the surface of the moon. Like a space elevator's cargo, it now only needs to carry a small amount of fuel for its delta-v to maneuver.
What does get to me is that they solve every case. I like Law & Order because you see guilty people get off scott free. In CSI, you don't see a lot of unresolved cases, if any. You never see unsolved cases. you never see hunches that lead nowhere. If a detective thinks there's something at the crime scene he missed, he's going to be right, and you end up in the show 3 minutes later with him examining some suspect fiber. What really bothers me is whenever they say 'X happened yesterday' or 'X happened this morning' and I'm like... BULLSHIT! There's no way you just scoured that much area/data/dna and came up with a result in that amount of time. Not unless CSI is the biggest employer in your city.
And guess what... the fingerprint matching device is NOT going to render every last fingerprint it tries to find a match on. God I can't stand those shows.
When humans screw up they tend to do it randomly, and therefore not affect the outcome. When computers screw up they tend to do it non-randomly, as in this case where staight party votes for dems went to libertarians instead consistently.
Add to this that a paper trail can be rechecked as many times as is required to ensure its accurate. Certainly if the difference is a single vote out of 100,000, then the human error in vote counting comes into play, but then by the same token, so does voter error, such as pressing the wrong button. But the vote is almost never that close. When it is then you just have to accept that the margin is below statistical margins and live with whatever the certified result is because there's no way to determine the truth.
Because people tend to keep things like strawberries and melon's around the house. No one keeps rotten eggs around the house, so its an immediate indication that something is WRONG. When selecting an adulterant, you don't want someone chasing after it because they like the smell.
It costs Valve goodwill and credibility. I'm sure there are numerous people going into a store and purchasing the game with no foreknowledge of the official release date or that they won't be able to take it home and start playing. When they discovered that they've just paid a chunk of change for nothing (at least nothing for this weekend) its going to piss them off. I know it would piss me off. When I bought the game on steam I was still working under the assumption that I'd be able to play it as soon as it was 'done'. Done to me means when they finish making it, not when Vivendi deigns to allow us to play. I've already purchased this game and there's no way I can undo the transaction, but this will be the last game I buy from Valve. Between this and the original Sep 30/03 release date they promised and then didn't comment on when it passed, they've used up all their goodwill.
First off, even if the flame is almost completely invisible in daylight, any flamejet that is big enough to be a serious concern is probably going to cause the air the start to incandece. Second, companies are perfectly capable of adding adulterants to make the flame any color they want. For instance, the reason you can smell natural gas leak is because the gas company adds a rotting eggs smell. Otherwise your house could fill up with natural gas and you wouldn't know before you were dead. A tiny fraction of some other gas added to pure hydrogen would probably easily be able to make the flame a bright and obvious color.
You really need to stop buying boxes and get a bigger TV.
I don't think replacing the two party system with something better is impossible. I just think that if you plan to move the mountain you'd better have a better plan than 'push real hard and hope everyone else gets the same idea and decide to push in the same direction.
The pratical result of such actions causes the greater of two evils to take power.
Hope you're not voting for bush then, because the repulicans are enaging in just as much legal wrangling to try to put him ON ballots.
I hate to say this, but you may be barking up the wrong tree. Registration levels are usually way below population levels, so the idea that voter registration groups managed to hit everyone in the county, even the people missed by the census, AND get them to register seems pretty unlikely. Also, the eligible voters in a given region are actually a subset of the population, since you can't vote if you're under 18. All these factors work against your arguments. On the other hand no one has posted a link to any actual backing for this story, so it might just be apocryphal bullshit anyway.
I'll bring the pitchforks if someone else can commit to the torches.
The rules of chess indicate there are two sides. You cannot come up and place a piece on the board that does not belong to one of those two sides, no matter how strongly you feel about it. Its simply outside of the rules. Nominally, third parties are not outside of the rules, but in practical terms they are. What is needed is more and more people in one of the two main parties saying we need to change the rules so third parties aren't excluded. People seem to be reacting as if I'm some sort of shill for the status quo and the two party system. I'm not. I'd probably vote for someone else if I thought that could change the outcome of the election in a favorable way. What I am is a engineer, and as such a pragmatist. As such, I look to working with the tools that are effective. The only tools available right at a national now are the DNC and the GOP.
No, the dictator does it by rigging the election rules so that there are no other parties. What the Dems and Reps have done is rig the election rules so that no third parties actually have any real influence. That's what I'm opposed to.
Thus ensuring that more of your rights get taken away by the more conservative party. Look, if you honestly believe that both parties are going to take away your freedom, then join the one that is going to take away less, and make sure that by being a part of that party they take away even less than they would otherwise. Maybe if more people like you had been in the Demcrative party we'd have someone like Dean instead of a 'skull & bones' man.
Honestly, if you can't tell the difference between Kerry and Bush, that's cause you're so far round the fucking bend you can't see the bend.
By this argument everyone should just vote for themselves. And yes I think its good to compromise in politics. If no one compromises, what you have is not politics, but war. Dumbass.
By voting for someone you know isn't going to win, and being unable to vote in the primaries for the major parties, you become JUST as responsible for the state of the country. You can't get off that easy.