It's not true, of course - but even if it were, they'd just ban all oranges, like they did to hemp cloth.
hemp cloth is banned? In the US? I've been a criminal for something like forty years, then, since I bought a pair of hemp sandals and a hemp tee shirt from an ad in the back of an issue of Mother Earth News in 1972. Seriously -- I've been buying hemp products (clothes and paper, mostly) since the early seventies. It was mail order at first, but I live in a large enough metropolitan area now that I can go to any of our four malls and readily find hemp products.
Bottom line is that when she is on duty as a teacher and the meter is running for the taxpayers, she is acting on behalf of the government and as such is obliged to restrain herself accordingly.
As a tax-payer, I expect a science teacher whose salary I'm paying to call bullshit on fallacious reasoning and magical thinking when he sees it. The teacher in question didn't attack any specific religion, he attacked the specifically fallacious arguments used by religions to justify their beliefs, and according to the court, he did it without crossing any church/state dividing line at all. Here's my bottom line for you, in the form of a question: Religion has no special status in the US government, why do you think it should have special protection in a US school?
It is, and must be, official government policy that individuals working for them, especially in a position of educating children, stay out of religious matters. Students are ordered to go to school and told to believe everything that the teacher tells them. What the individual says in that context has a lot of force, more than ordinary first amendment right to free speech.
Arguing that truth and logic must be suppressed to protect the children (especially high-school aged children) is pretty lame. Asserting that this teacher forfeits his right to free speech because he might actually sway somebody with it is not only lame, it is fucking asinine; teachers are *supposed* to sway the opinions of their students.
From what I read in that transcript, the teacher is out of line.
No, he's not out of line. He's doing his job as a teacher. Shooting down illogical, irrational crap whenever it rears its ugly head is what I as a tax-payer expect a teacher to do as long as I'm paying his salary.
A generous reading can exonerate the teacher from actually denying the existence of God, but it goes well beyond simply pointing out that intelligent design is not scientific
One does not need a "generous reading" to be "exonerated" for asserting that belief in deity is illogical -- go troll somewhere else.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a school is not a government institution, and the teacher is not a government employee, is he? So he can say whatever he wishes about religion, and still not invoke the "Church and State, separate!"-clause.
In Hungary, there's something called the National Curriculum, but that only specifies the rough topics and lays out a track to follow to the end of high school. Inside those topics, the teachers are free to subdivide their classes, and teach whatever they wish, since they aren't government employees (only public servants), and although the schools are government/municipality-funded, they are not government institutions.
You are wrong. It has nothing to do with the public servant/government employee distinction you are making (a distinction, by the way, that is emphatically not made by most US citizens) but everything to do with the source of the funds for the school. We have public schools that are funded by tax payer money, and private schools that are not. You can teach what ever you want to teach about religion in a private school, because the school is run by voluntary donations. Nobody is being forced to support a religion they don't happen to believe. But in a public school, you cannot teach *any* religion, because tax-paying citizens who do not subscribe to a particular belief (or to any religious belief at all) would be rightfully outraged. Creationists, and other religious fundamentalists have been trying to insert their particular brands of irrationality into public school curricula for a long time, and have been always been denied by the US court system when enraged tax-payers protested.
Wait a minute. A court opens the door to religion-bashing teachers telling their students how stupid they are for believing in God, and you're worried that the religious people of the country will just get worse? Wow, what a warped perspective.
No, not warped. Entirely rational, actually. After a humiliating experience like that, it would be entirely prudent to expect retaliation. Maybe you need to check *your* perspective. Religious fundamentalists have been rebuffed by the courts, this being only the most recent humiliating defeat for them, and even the elites in their own political parties are distancing themselves from the extremist portion of the base. What options do the extremists have left? In a word: Martyrdom. That is what the GP is worried about, and you would be too, if you had any perspective at all.
I would like some consideration to be given this question when it comes to so called intellectual property: can the thing for which one claims ownership actually be owned? To answer the question, I offer a simple test: if I am tempted to claim it is stolen, do I still possess it? Put another way, I do not think it is right or even necessary to claim the exclusive possession of ownership over something which cannot be dispossessed.
Hmmm. A Beretta 92F and a "No Trespassing" sign trump Gauis' legal theories. Property is something that can be defended; ownership and possession emerge from the act of defense. You are certainly free to invoke Gauis when you are trying to drink from a spring on land that I defend; whether or not you are a thief is a question only a jury will really care about, and perhaps your next-of-kin.
But to your test. If I steal a candy bar from a box of identical candy bars at the Quickie Mart, can the owner of the Quickie Mart claim to be dispossessed? After all, he still possesses, according to your test, the identical candy bar. Indeed, to put it another way, what does "dispossession" mean, when it is trivial to produce copies of something?
When it comes to IP, focus on what is being defended. Don't be sidetracked by questions of ownership or possession. Let ancient notions of ownership and possession rest in peace with Gaius.
We all know it was created just a few thousand years ago on day 4.
NASA could have saved the trip if they'd just asked the local priest!
Pastor, not "priest". The Roman Catholic Church is much more friendly to the idea of a non-literal creation (from a Biblical perspective) than many popular Protestant groups.
I was raised in a Protestant household. I now lead a Protestant household (Baptist). I've been to several churches, camps, meetings, and various gatherings. I have never, ever met a preacher or other leader that believed the EarthSunMoonStars were 6000 years old. Now, I'm sure that these people exist and use religion as their reasoning, but there are nutjobs in every group. Saying that because of the occasional nutjob believes it, all or most must believe the same thing is no different that saying because the occasional Muslim wants to kill all humans then all Muslims want to kill all humans.
HERE. Would it be fair for me to say that many NASA scientists are spies? Of course not. Then why is it fair for you to stereotype any other group based on a few nutjobs who mental illness is in no way related to whatever group you are using them to belittle?
It's not just "a few nutjobs," dude -- half the US population, for example, thinks creationism is true. It's not stereotyping if the trait being selected for is shared by a large percentage of the outgroup. Half is a large percentage, for any value of "large" you care to assert. Which is why I'm sceptical of your assertion that you've never met a creationist "preacher or other leader." Given the pervasiveness of creationism in the US population, and the assumption that you are living in America, it is statistically highly unlikely that your assertion is true.
Pastor, not "priest". The Roman Catholic Church is somewhat less likely to burn you at the stake for supporting the idea of a non-literal creation (from a Biblical perspective) than many popular Protestant groups.
...and that is not a bad thing.
Casual gamers want to be able to socialize and be rewarded with peer recognition. Farmville, Angry Birds, Foursquare (the last is not a game, per se, but the socialize-peer recog mechanic is identical) provide exactly that. Socializers want rewards for doing things they *like* to do, and they want their friends to know about it, instantly. That just doesn't happen in WoW. As it stands in WoW right now, socializers face a stunningly steep learning curve and a long, tedious grind to the level cap before any of the social aspects (such as they are) of the game are available. And when they do get to the level cap, they face continuous, scathing criticism from gamers who could care less about the number of pets somebody has when they need a 'lock who can actually melt face in a raid.
Social forces are culling the herd that is the WoW subscriber base -- I see the drop in subscribers as reflecting the gamer/socializer divide, and that is why it is not a bad thing for WoW gamers. I think Blizz's rock-paper-scissors approach to game balance has been pitch perfect; what is happening is Blizz is not really catering to the socializers, so they are departing in droves, creating a smaller but more pure gamer community. This isn't a death knell for WoW -- even if half the subscriber base turns out to be socializers who are looking for instant gratification via non-challenging, non-threatening venues like Angry Birds or Farmville, that still leaves BC - level numbers of real gamers to raid and PvP with.
I have a Samsung 80Gb IDE drive and it takes about 40s to boot to a working desktop, so that's not it. I'd consider any machine* taking longer than 2 minutes to boot to be in dire need of maintenance.
*from about 2003 onwards
Please reconsider. I would guess that you have never worked on a large LAN in a corporate environment, where centralized authentication is the norm. In a corporate environment, boot times have very little to do with the underlying hardware, and almost everything to do with the network topology and group policy management. When you have several thousand users simultaneously hitting domain controllers each morning at the beginning of the business day, all the hardware in the world isn't going to speed the process up. Losing several minutes a day per user is an acceptable trade off for mitigating the risk of major productivity loss due to unauthorized access, compromised data integrity, or malicious employees.
So this storiy is basically a tacit admission either that:---
Blackberry and Facebook are doing realtime or near-realtime surveillance of users and sending suspicious information to the British police; or
The British police are capable of, and are, listening in on Blackberry or Facebook* without the co-operation of these corporationsi i.e., they're surveilling network traffic or similar. Facebook is entirely conducted through HTTPS nowadays, so if this be the case, that the bobbies can listen in is an even more significant revelation.
* This conclusion wouldn't hold of course if the police are merely trolling through what people post in public on Facebook, which is entirely a possibility considering how ignorant many people are about discretion and privacy.
Well, there is a third possibility. It is entirely possible a friend of a friend got invited to the water fight, and decided to fuck over his mate by showing the local constable selected bits of the original invitation. No need to postulate that level of surveillance by the police when simple human maliciousness is available...
these things need to be told to your doctor, not a facebook page. your doctor will then report this to the company and the government along with some data about you so that scientists can try to make a theory or find some common elements between people complaining about side effects.
Your advocacy of the scientific method is admirable. Unfortunately, the scientific method will be jettisoned, if there are huge profits to protect. Big Pharma is not above suppressing data that casts unfavorable light on their products (Vioxx), or misrepresenting safe levels of use (Oxycontin) to increase sales. The free exchange of information is rarely in the best interests of commercial companies. That is why they have entire departments devoted to controlling the information available to consumers about their products, which in turn is why consumers need avenues of communication that are outside the control of Big Pharma's marketing departments.
While I understand the issue with other chemicals, why should it be bad if water is contamined with methane? Wouldn't it just "precipitate" (in a gaseous form) when the water gets to the surface?.
If methane accumulates in high enough quantities, it can pose a serious fire/explosion hazard. That's why gas companies add a chemical to it that makes it smell so bad -- so the leak has a good chance of being detected before the gas can accumulate to those levels. But in the fracking case, the methane will not be not tagged with an odor. If a residential water supply is compromised by methane from a fracking operation, every time a home owner turns on a tap, methane will be released into the house and will accumulate over time. Accumulated methane will detonate when it comes into contact with an ignition source, like the igniters in gas stoves or space heaters. If there is enough methane present, it will demolish the house and seriously injure/kill anybody who happens to be nearby.
ohh so inform me how a foreign country is going to shut down all communication. I would love to hear that. Last i checked, there's phone and radio as backup to loss of the internet. Backbone routers go down every day, rerouting occurs and their fixed. What you're suggesting is that everyone in the US gets DDOSed all at once? I somehow doubt you realize how the internet works. How there are all private networks that interconnect at multiple different places, that if a private network goes down it doesn't affect everyone.
Yes, that is exactly what is being suggested, but I don't think you really appreciate the magnifying effect that dependency on infrastructure has when it comes to a DDOS, especially a deliberate DDOS by an entity with the resources and will power to do it right. Script-kiddies doing it for the evuls is not the same as a government intent on neutralizing a perceived threat. Color me pessimistic, but I don't think an attack on a country is going to stop at the computer networks -- if an internet attack is successful enough to be noticed by the general public, it is probably too late. A shooting war is starting up, and the attacker is playing to win. Classes at your university may continue for a few days, or weeks even, but as the rest of the infrastructure -- power production facilities, medical centers, water treatment plants -- fall to coordinated attacks from covert intel/military assets, life as you know it is going to change dramatically for the worse.
In current scientific models our atoms come from supernovae. According to current scientific models, Carbon, Oxygen and other atoms are formed in stars and scattered around the Universe via supernovae. Every atom in your body was once in the fiery furnace of a star just before it exploded, if our current scientific models are correct. Now we know that, later on, the precursors to the DNA that makes us who we are were floating around in meteors in space. They crashed to Earth where, over time, it is possible that it could have developed into DNA, cells, and life.
Scientific explanations are just models that fit the available data, and therefore can't make things boring or, make them incredibly cool because the are just models that will be abandoned if further observations invalidate them.
I think you are minimizing the impact of even one failed mission. In a government funding environment where even the military budget and Social Security are no longer sacrosanct, you can't afford any negative publicity when you are going hat in hand to your funders. The thinking public understands the risk, but thinking people don't control the purse strings -- politicians do.
your naivete is stunning, to say the least. you have obviously never witnessed a wikipedia edit war. or read anything posted by Matt Drudge. or looked at the Fox News website lately. the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually. A sharp edge in the hands of a surgeon is a life-saving scalpel. In the hands of a dim-wit conservative, it is a fucking blade at the throat of your civil rights.
I'm getting squick and squee from this. The squick comes from the fact that Fox is famous for the way they give journalistic cover to right wing nutbars -- this looks like Fox might be trying to deflect some of that criticism as they ramp up their "coverage" of the 2012 American presidential race, and I'm horrified that the producers might have accepted huge barrels of money to lend their credibility to the Fox marque.
With that said, the squee is that I wouldn't be surprised if Seth McFarlane has managed to troll Fox. This quote from the show's producers is a bit of a give-away (emphasis mine).
the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time. It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.
The original Cosmos series never tried to "unite skepticism and wonder." Rational people can be moved by a phenomenon and remain skeptical of the proffered explanations. If that is part of the stated goal of the producers, their target audience probably isn't rational thinkers, but rather irrational types who routinely point to emotional and spiritual experiences as proof of the existence of their deity. I expect McFarlane will jump the ID shark at some point in the series and force Fox to either pull the show, affirming that people who watch Fox are, by and large, irrational, or leave it on and force Fox to contend with confused, angry bible-thumpers flooding their call-in shows, which will still affirm that most of their viewers are, by and large, irrational.
Game started easy and stayed easy on easy mode, and started some-what hard and got impossible on hard mode.
Oblivion had a hard mode? Really? Are we talking about the same Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? The game that should have been called, "Elder Scrolls IV: The Exploit?"
The game where one could, after completing an early quest line, exploit spell crafting to craft nukes able to one-shot every NPC, and two- or three-shot the end-game boss? Or, if hack-and-slash was more one's play style, exploit armor crafting to craft some clothing that rendered one invisible, and thus invulnerable to counter attacks (even from the end-game boss?)
The game where enemy leveling was tied to the player character's use of "primary skills?" One simply chose primary skills that complement, say, a hack-and-slasher, then played as a mage. This exploit made it trivial to keep all of the enemies at relatively low levels, while your secondary skills became stronger and stronger with use. Facing a boss with only level 6 powers while your secondary skills were level 20 was a ridiculous game-breaker for me.
What is hard or impossible about a game that is riddled with exploits? IMHO, the only thing "hard" about this game was resisting the temptation to exploit the design flaws. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't like shelling out $50 for a game whose only replay value is as a test of my personal integrity. I will check out Skyrim as soon as it is available; if no game-breaking exploits like the ones that plagued Oblivion surface, I'll consider purchasing it.
Slashdot Mirror
This is stuff of urban legends - Nanofsky's trippy oranges.
It's not true, of course - but even if it were, they'd just ban all oranges, like they did to hemp cloth.
hemp cloth is banned? In the US? I've been a criminal for something like forty years, then, since I bought a pair of hemp sandals and a hemp tee shirt from an ad in the back of an issue of Mother Earth News in 1972. Seriously -- I've been buying hemp products (clothes and paper, mostly) since the early seventies. It was mail order at first, but I live in a large enough metropolitan area now that I can go to any of our four malls and readily find hemp products.
Even if the game is something that you can improve on during each iteration?
A relatively short game that has new paths every time you run it, like Civilization, Card Games or Tetris can be good and worth their money too.
That is the first time I've ever heard Civ characterized as 'relatively short.'
Bottom line is that when she is on duty as a teacher and the meter is running for the taxpayers, she is acting on behalf of the government and as such is obliged to restrain herself accordingly.
As a tax-payer, I expect a science teacher whose salary I'm paying to call bullshit on fallacious reasoning and magical thinking when he sees it. The teacher in question didn't attack any specific religion, he attacked the specifically fallacious arguments used by religions to justify their beliefs, and according to the court, he did it without crossing any church/state dividing line at all. Here's my bottom line for you, in the form of a question: Religion has no special status in the US government, why do you think it should have special protection in a US school?
It is, and must be, official government policy that individuals working for them, especially in a position of educating children, stay out of religious matters. Students are ordered to go to school and told to believe everything that the teacher tells them. What the individual says in that context has a lot of force, more than ordinary first amendment right to free speech.
Arguing that truth and logic must be suppressed to protect the children (especially high-school aged children) is pretty lame. Asserting that this teacher forfeits his right to free speech because he might actually sway somebody with it is not only lame, it is fucking asinine; teachers are *supposed* to sway the opinions of their students.
From what I read in that transcript, the teacher is out of line.
No, he's not out of line. He's doing his job as a teacher. Shooting down illogical, irrational crap whenever it rears its ugly head is what I as a tax-payer expect a teacher to do as long as I'm paying his salary.
A generous reading can exonerate the teacher from actually denying the existence of God, but it goes well beyond simply pointing out that intelligent design is not scientific
One does not need a "generous reading" to be "exonerated" for asserting that belief in deity is illogical -- go troll somewhere else.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but a school is not a government institution, and the teacher is not a government employee, is he? So he can say whatever he wishes about religion, and still not invoke the "Church and State, separate!"-clause.
In Hungary, there's something called the National Curriculum, but that only specifies the rough topics and lays out a track to follow to the end of high school. Inside those topics, the teachers are free to subdivide their classes, and teach whatever they wish, since they aren't government employees (only public servants), and although the schools are government/municipality-funded, they are not government institutions.
You are wrong. It has nothing to do with the public servant/government employee distinction you are making (a distinction, by the way, that is emphatically not made by most US citizens) but everything to do with the source of the funds for the school. We have public schools that are funded by tax payer money, and private schools that are not. You can teach what ever you want to teach about religion in a private school, because the school is run by voluntary donations. Nobody is being forced to support a religion they don't happen to believe. But in a public school, you cannot teach *any* religion, because tax-paying citizens who do not subscribe to a particular belief (or to any religious belief at all) would be rightfully outraged. Creationists, and other religious fundamentalists have been trying to insert their particular brands of irrationality into public school curricula for a long time, and have been always been denied by the US court system when enraged tax-payers protested.
Wait a minute. A court opens the door to religion-bashing teachers telling their students how stupid they are for believing in God, and you're worried that the religious people of the country will just get worse? Wow, what a warped perspective.
No, not warped. Entirely rational, actually. After a humiliating experience like that, it would be entirely prudent to expect retaliation. Maybe you need to check *your* perspective. Religious fundamentalists have been rebuffed by the courts, this being only the most recent humiliating defeat for them, and even the elites in their own political parties are distancing themselves from the extremist portion of the base. What options do the extremists have left? In a word: Martyrdom. That is what the GP is worried about, and you would be too, if you had any perspective at all.
More likely against Android tablets.
iPads are for content consumers, not creators.
they are turing machines. the creation/consumption divide is as artificial (and as nebulous) as the data/program divide.
I would like some consideration to be given this question when it comes to so called intellectual property: can the thing for which one claims ownership actually be owned? To answer the question, I offer a simple test: if I am tempted to claim it is stolen, do I still possess it? Put another way, I do not think it is right or even necessary to claim the exclusive possession of ownership over something which cannot be dispossessed.
Hmmm. A Beretta 92F and a "No Trespassing" sign trump Gauis' legal theories. Property is something that can be defended; ownership and possession emerge from the act of defense. You are certainly free to invoke Gauis when you are trying to drink from a spring on land that I defend; whether or not you are a thief is a question only a jury will really care about, and perhaps your next-of-kin.
But to your test. If I steal a candy bar from a box of identical candy bars at the Quickie Mart, can the owner of the Quickie Mart claim to be dispossessed? After all, he still possesses, according to your test, the identical candy bar. Indeed, to put it another way, what does "dispossession" mean, when it is trivial to produce copies of something?
When it comes to IP, focus on what is being defended. Don't be sidetracked by questions of ownership or possession. Let ancient notions of ownership and possession rest in peace with Gaius.
We all know it was created just a few thousand years ago on day 4.
NASA could have saved the trip if they'd just asked the local priest!
Pastor, not "priest". The Roman Catholic Church is much more friendly to the idea of a non-literal creation (from a Biblical perspective) than many popular Protestant groups.
I was raised in a Protestant household. I now lead a Protestant household (Baptist). I've been to several churches, camps, meetings, and various gatherings. I have never, ever met a preacher or other leader that believed the EarthSunMoonStars were 6000 years old. Now, I'm sure that these people exist and use religion as their reasoning, but there are nutjobs in every group. Saying that because of the occasional nutjob believes it, all or most must believe the same thing is no different that saying because the occasional Muslim wants to kill all humans then all Muslims want to kill all humans.
HERE. Would it be fair for me to say that many NASA scientists are spies? Of course not. Then why is it fair for you to stereotype any other group based on a few nutjobs who mental illness is in no way related to whatever group you are using them to belittle?
It's not just "a few nutjobs," dude -- half the US population, for example, thinks creationism is true. It's not stereotyping if the trait being selected for is shared by a large percentage of the outgroup. Half is a large percentage, for any value of "large" you care to assert. Which is why I'm sceptical of your assertion that you've never met a creationist "preacher or other leader." Given the pervasiveness of creationism in the US population, and the assumption that you are living in America, it is statistically highly unlikely that your assertion is true.
Pastor, not "priest". The Roman Catholic Church is somewhat less likely to burn you at the stake for supporting the idea of a non-literal creation (from a Biblical perspective) than many popular Protestant groups.
FTFY
...and that is not a bad thing. Casual gamers want to be able to socialize and be rewarded with peer recognition. Farmville, Angry Birds, Foursquare (the last is not a game, per se, but the socialize-peer recog mechanic is identical) provide exactly that. Socializers want rewards for doing things they *like* to do, and they want their friends to know about it, instantly. That just doesn't happen in WoW. As it stands in WoW right now, socializers face a stunningly steep learning curve and a long, tedious grind to the level cap before any of the social aspects (such as they are) of the game are available. And when they do get to the level cap, they face continuous, scathing criticism from gamers who could care less about the number of pets somebody has when they need a 'lock who can actually melt face in a raid. Social forces are culling the herd that is the WoW subscriber base -- I see the drop in subscribers as reflecting the gamer/socializer divide, and that is why it is not a bad thing for WoW gamers. I think Blizz's rock-paper-scissors approach to game balance has been pitch perfect; what is happening is Blizz is not really catering to the socializers, so they are departing in droves, creating a smaller but more pure gamer community. This isn't a death knell for WoW -- even if half the subscriber base turns out to be socializers who are looking for instant gratification via non-challenging, non-threatening venues like Angry Birds or Farmville, that still leaves BC - level numbers of real gamers to raid and PvP with.
I have a Samsung 80Gb IDE drive and it takes about 40s to boot to a working desktop, so that's not it. I'd consider any machine* taking longer than 2 minutes to boot to be in dire need of maintenance.
*from about 2003 onwards
Please reconsider. I would guess that you have never worked on a large LAN in a corporate environment, where centralized authentication is the norm. In a corporate environment, boot times have very little to do with the underlying hardware, and almost everything to do with the network topology and group policy management. When you have several thousand users simultaneously hitting domain controllers each morning at the beginning of the business day, all the hardware in the world isn't going to speed the process up. Losing several minutes a day per user is an acceptable trade off for mitigating the risk of major productivity loss due to unauthorized access, compromised data integrity, or malicious employees.
So this storiy is basically a tacit admission either that:---
Blackberry and Facebook are doing realtime or near-realtime surveillance of users and sending suspicious information to the British police; or
The British police are capable of, and are, listening in on Blackberry or Facebook* without the co-operation of these corporationsi i.e., they're surveilling network traffic or similar. Facebook is entirely conducted through HTTPS nowadays, so if this be the case, that the bobbies can listen in is an even more significant revelation.
* This conclusion wouldn't hold of course if the police are merely trolling through what people post in public on Facebook, which is entirely a possibility considering how ignorant many people are about discretion and privacy.
Well, there is a third possibility. It is entirely possible a friend of a friend got invited to the water fight, and decided to fuck over his mate by showing the local constable selected bits of the original invitation. No need to postulate that level of surveillance by the police when simple human maliciousness is available...
these things need to be told to your doctor, not a facebook page. your doctor will then report this to the company and the government along with some data about you so that scientists can try to make a theory or find some common elements between people complaining about side effects.
Your advocacy of the scientific method is admirable. Unfortunately, the scientific method will be jettisoned, if there are huge profits to protect. Big Pharma is not above suppressing data that casts unfavorable light on their products (Vioxx), or misrepresenting safe levels of use (Oxycontin) to increase sales. The free exchange of information is rarely in the best interests of commercial companies. That is why they have entire departments devoted to controlling the information available to consumers about their products, which in turn is why consumers need avenues of communication that are outside the control of Big Pharma's marketing departments.
While I understand the issue with other chemicals, why should it be bad if water is contamined with methane? Wouldn't it just "precipitate" (in a gaseous form) when the water gets to the surface?.
If methane accumulates in high enough quantities, it can pose a serious fire/explosion hazard. That's why gas companies add a chemical to it that makes it smell so bad -- so the leak has a good chance of being detected before the gas can accumulate to those levels. But in the fracking case, the methane will not be not tagged with an odor. If a residential water supply is compromised by methane from a fracking operation, every time a home owner turns on a tap, methane will be released into the house and will accumulate over time. Accumulated methane will detonate when it comes into contact with an ignition source, like the igniters in gas stoves or space heaters. If there is enough methane present, it will demolish the house and seriously injure/kill anybody who happens to be nearby.
Soylent Graphene is Girl Scouts!!
FTFY
ohh so inform me how a foreign country is going to shut down all communication. I would love to hear that. Last i checked, there's phone and radio as backup to loss of the internet. Backbone routers go down every day, rerouting occurs and their fixed. What you're suggesting is that everyone in the US gets DDOSed all at once? I somehow doubt you realize how the internet works. How there are all private networks that interconnect at multiple different places, that if a private network goes down it doesn't affect everyone.
Yes, that is exactly what is being suggested, but I don't think you really appreciate the magnifying effect that dependency on infrastructure has when it comes to a DDOS, especially a deliberate DDOS by an entity with the resources and will power to do it right. Script-kiddies doing it for the evuls is not the same as a government intent on neutralizing a perceived threat. Color me pessimistic, but I don't think an attack on a country is going to stop at the computer networks -- if an internet attack is successful enough to be noticed by the general public, it is probably too late. A shooting war is starting up, and the attacker is playing to win. Classes at your university may continue for a few days, or weeks even, but as the rest of the infrastructure -- power production facilities, medical centers, water treatment plants -- fall to coordinated attacks from covert intel/military assets, life as you know it is going to change dramatically for the worse.
In current scientific models our atoms come from supernovae. According to current scientific models, Carbon, Oxygen and other atoms are formed in stars and scattered around the Universe via supernovae. Every atom in your body was once in the fiery furnace of a star just before it exploded, if our current scientific models are correct. Now we know that, later on, the precursors to the DNA that makes us who we are were floating around in meteors in space. They crashed to Earth where, over time, it is possible that it could have developed into DNA, cells, and life.
Scientific explanations are just models that fit the available data, and therefore can't make things boring or, make them incredibly cool because the are just models that will be abandoned if further observations invalidate them.
FTFY
I think you are minimizing the impact of even one failed mission. In a government funding environment where even the military budget and Social Security are no longer sacrosanct, you can't afford any negative publicity when you are going hat in hand to your funders. The thinking public understands the risk, but thinking people don't control the purse strings -- politicians do.
your naivete is stunning, to say the least. you have obviously never witnessed a wikipedia edit war. or read anything posted by Matt Drudge. or looked at the Fox News website lately. the internet is a tool, nothing more, nothing less. it's like a knife, actually. A sharp edge in the hands of a surgeon is a life-saving scalpel. In the hands of a dim-wit conservative, it is a fucking blade at the throat of your civil rights.
I'm getting squick and squee from this. The squick comes from the fact that Fox is famous for the way they give journalistic cover to right wing nutbars -- this looks like Fox might be trying to deflect some of that criticism as they ramp up their "coverage" of the 2012 American presidential race, and I'm horrified that the producers might have accepted huge barrels of money to lend their credibility to the Fox marque.
With that said, the squee is that I wouldn't be surprised if Seth McFarlane has managed to troll Fox. This quote from the show's producers is a bit of a give-away (emphasis mine).
the story of how human beings began to comprehend the laws of nature and find our place in space and time. It will take viewers to other worlds and travel across the universe for a vision of the cosmos on the grandest scale. The most profound scientific concepts will be presented with stunning clarity, uniting skepticism and wonder, and weaving rigorous science with the emotional and spiritual into a transcendent experience.
The original Cosmos series never tried to "unite skepticism and wonder." Rational people can be moved by a phenomenon and remain skeptical of the proffered explanations. If that is part of the stated goal of the producers, their target audience probably isn't rational thinkers, but rather irrational types who routinely point to emotional and spiritual experiences as proof of the existence of their deity. I expect McFarlane will jump the ID shark at some point in the series and force Fox to either pull the show, affirming that people who watch Fox are, by and large, irrational, or leave it on and force Fox to contend with confused, angry bible-thumpers flooding their call-in shows, which will still affirm that most of their viewers are, by and large, irrational.
Bravo. Well said, sir. Where are my damn mod points when I need them?
Don't feed this troll, folks.
ob XKCD
Game started easy and stayed easy on easy mode, and started some-what hard and got impossible on hard mode.
Oblivion had a hard mode? Really? Are we talking about the same Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion? The game that should have been called, "Elder Scrolls IV: The Exploit?"
The game where one could, after completing an early quest line, exploit spell crafting to craft nukes able to one-shot every NPC, and two- or three-shot the end-game boss? Or, if hack-and-slash was more one's play style, exploit armor crafting to craft some clothing that rendered one invisible, and thus invulnerable to counter attacks (even from the end-game boss?)
The game where enemy leveling was tied to the player character's use of "primary skills?" One simply chose primary skills that complement, say, a hack-and-slasher, then played as a mage. This exploit made it trivial to keep all of the enemies at relatively low levels, while your secondary skills became stronger and stronger with use. Facing a boss with only level 6 powers while your secondary skills were level 20 was a ridiculous game-breaker for me.
What is hard or impossible about a game that is riddled with exploits? IMHO, the only thing "hard" about this game was resisting the temptation to exploit the design flaws. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't like shelling out $50 for a game whose only replay value is as a test of my personal integrity. I will check out Skyrim as soon as it is available; if no game-breaking exploits like the ones that plagued Oblivion surface, I'll consider purchasing it.