if 3rd parties are betting on the outcome of the match then that's gambling, but it's not gambling for the players to submit a fee and then compete and for the winner then to get that prize
gamble
v. gambled, gambling, gambles v. intr. 1. a. To bet on an uncertain outcome, as of a contest.
1. b. To play a game of chance for stakes.
... omitting the other, more general definitions of doing anything risky. It's only gambling for the participants if they're playing a "game of chance". FPS doesn't qualify.
Seems to me that if you're competing in an event in which you can lose money, you're gambling.
No. Strictly, you don't "lose" money; you can only gain it. In Ultimate Arena, for example, everyone pays a tournament entry fee, and whoever wins takes the prize. I'd compare it to, say, one of those stupid carnival games, like where you try to toss a ring over a bottle. There, you pay a fee to get in, and you have the possibility of winning a prize.
Don't poker players gamble?
Yes, because poker is a game of chance. To forestall your objection over this category, the dictionary defines "game of chance" as
A game, usually played for money or stakes, in which the winner is determined by a chance event, as by drawing numbers or throwing dice.
Actually, that's kind of limp. Well, I'll just say that chance plays a larger role in a game of chance than it does in a game of skill. I don't think anyone would argue with me that FPS is 95% skill.
I suppose you could argue that they're submitting a fee (the ante) and then competing, but it sure looks like gambling to me.
It's not "arguing", it's a fact. That's what they're doing.
Tiger Woods isn't gambling because he doesn't pay a fee to play in a tournament. If he and I go out on Monday and play for five bucks a hole, we're gambling.
The defining factor isn't the (non-)existence of an entry fee, but the nature of the game. I don't know if Tiger has to pay entry fees or not -- I imagine he at least has to pay a PGA membership fee or some such -- but if I entered myself into a local tennis tournament for $5, for which there was a $500 winning prize, would I be gambling? Clearly not, except in some small semantic sense in which anything risky someone tries to accomplish is "gambling".
Oh damn, that's not what you're saying, is it? If so, who gives a crap? It's not like casino gambling, and no one should be complaining over it. Actually, I have no problems with casino gambling, either.
Some other players in this battle for two faces are Sen.s Edward Kennedy and John F. Kerry. Both bashing any effort to increase US oil production, both wanting to preserve the scenic views of their porperty in Nantucket by opposing wind power there.
Not quite accurate. Teddy apparently opposes the wind farm, but hasn't actively worked against it. And the article doesn't say whether or not Kerry opposes the wind farm, just that the opponents are unlikely to get help from him. The article doesn't say whether or not Kerry owns property in Nantucket, either.... Article quotes follow:
Ultimately, though, the Kennedy that the alliance most wants on its side is Ted, but to date he has made only halting efforts on its behalf.
[...] opponents hold out scant hope that their junior senator, John Kerry, will lend them his aid. ''Kerry's in a box,'' says Cliff Schechtman, editor of The Cape Cod Times. ''He owns a house on Nantucket, but he's running for the presidency on a strong alternative energy platform.'' So they wait for Teddy to swoop in and introduce legislation that will bring Cape Wind's plans to a stop.
forcing their version of Christian prayer into public schools
No, you've got that backwards. Rightist Christians have been trying to get the right to have their children be allowed to pray in school - again. It was never a requirement, but now it's not allowed.
I challenge you to find me a law, anywhere, that makes it illegal for children to pray in school. Such a law would certainly violate the 1st Amendment. If, as you say, there have been incidents where schools have suspended children "for praying at lunch (quietly and unthreateningly, with their heads down)", then that's fucked-up, and those schools were way out of line.
Your flat statement that "it's not allowed", in reference to children praying in school, is wrong. No one is stopping kids from praying on their own time in school. What courts have ruled unconstitutional, and what groups like the ACLU continue to file lawsuits to prevent, are situations like this one, where a school's graduation ceremony and other activities are routinely opened with prayers.
In fact, the ACLU regularly stands up for students' religious expression when it's threatened by school authorities.
trying to outlaw the burning of the American flag as a form of protest
The only flag burning I've heard of being protested, and the only attempted legislation I've read about, is that in relation to white power supremists. [...] Maybe you could point out to me whatever article refers to these Christian Nazis wanting to outlaw it as a form of protest?
Read this AP story from June 4th -- the House just passed an anti-flag-burning amendment... again. The vote was 300-125, with most no votes from Dems and most yes votes from Repubs. "Christian Nazis" aren't referred to specifically, but you'll certainly have difficulty locating (m)any right-wing Republican who voted against the amendment.
Okay, I'll admit I might have let out a slight "heh".
That initial outburst of "... Dobby's our friend!" / "Dobby!? Dobby's a fucking fag!" (assuming that is what he was saying under the bleeps... fucking censors) had me on the floor for about half a minute. My best laugh in a week or so. Plus, I had refreshed and noticed the story just 5 minutes after it came up, so I managed to skate in right ahead of the/.-ing!
Now, gentlemen, I believe my day is complete. I think I'll take a nap and linger over my glorious victory on the intarweb.
... and I agree, at least with what I'm familiar with. Sadly, of all the games in the top 25, I've only played SoM, FF IV, Chrono Trigger, and FF VI. However, when I feel like making a list, I always rank FF VI near the top of my heap of favorite console games, so I'm glad to see them give it first place.
It's just unbelievable how that game transcends its 16-bit Super NES sound and sprite graphics. It's epic, in so many ways -- a fantastic plot, with fantastically deep/moving/cool characters, and ridiculously memorable music. I remember thinking Kefka's theme was so kickass, I'd pick it out on our piano. I can still hum a boatload of songs from that game. I also liked how the entire game was stuffed with stuff to do; I'm sure I spent 60 hours or more every time I played through it. And the ending! More than 20 minutes of glorious reward at the end of that amazing battle against the statues and Kefka, with screen time given to every character. Certainly the best ending to anything I played on SNES. Actually, I'd be hard-pressed to find a better ending to any game, on console or PC.
Chrono Trigger and FF IV are the shit too, of course. And from everything I've heard, FF VII really whips the llama's ass as well; I think I'll finally get off my lazy ass and play it through sometime this summer.
Let's not forget that it was the US who funded and trained Iraq's soldiers during the war against Iran.
To try to get rid of the Islamic radicals who took over the government in Iran. Y'see, Islamic-radical types are bad news.
So the Islamists ruling Iran were that much worse than the fascist dictatorial Baathists running Iraq? We supported Islamists like Osama bin Laden's mujahedeen in Afghanistan against the Soviets. Yeah, the Soviets were bad guys. The problem is, U.S. foreign policy isn't based on who is the "worst" party in a given sociopolitic conflict; it's based on who the top-level guys have decided to target at a specific moment. Kissinger and his crew supported Pinochet's coup in Chile in the 70s, and we continued giving them aid while Pinochet unleashed a hellish reign of terror over Chile's citizens.
The U.S. has a history of supporting one side or another in various conflicts in foreign shitholes, where one side isn't really much better than the other. All sorts of crap in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. It's just gigantically stupid; we don't get any lasting results, because we go for short-term "gains" (regimes that look like they'll support whatever issue we're insterested in) instead of, say, uniformly supporting democratic governments.
The A-Bombs ended WWII, and the occupation turned Japan into a first-world democracy.
Well, the second part is right.
The atomic bombs ended the war, but they certainly weren't necessary. The main sticking point for the U.S. government in the surrender negotiations that went on for months before the bombs were dropped was the preservation of the Emperor's person and power. Yet after the bombs were dropped, the Japanese still only surrendered when they were guaranteed... the preservation of the Emperor's person and power. From what I read, Truman's decision to use atomic weapons had more to do with providing a demonstration to the burgeoning Soviet power than anything specific to Japan.
For me, at least, that explains why they were dropped on civilian targets, killing more than a hundred thousand noncombatants. Because it was impressive. If the U.S. had wanted to convince the Japanese government they had a superweapon, dropping the bombs over a sparsely-populated area would have been adequate.
enh... No, I think seeing a dub irreversibly taints the anime in question. (Excepting such quality dubs as Cowboy Bebop.) My experience with cartoon network's stuff has been pretty conclusive in this area. For example, let's take the Tenchi Muyo OVA. Yeah, I understand it's not the greatest series ever. But even if I tried to enjoy a sub, my mind would be assaulted with horrific memories of awful voices: that mind-rapingly-annoying bitch who voiced Aeka; the whiny fucker who did Tenchi; the cringingly-poorly-acted Mihoshi. Filth. I'd rather "save" the anime for later, when I've found a sub, than try to enjoy it dubbed. Dubs are the work of Satan.
Going the other way, trying to watch dubs where I've already seen the subs: I am physically unable to watch more than 30 seconds of dubbed Inuyasha. The wretched, stereotypical female voice for Kagome, and the same for the guy doing Inuyasha... it's like trying to watch Pokemon or something. I caught a couple seconds of the Evangelion dub when it was first aired, and it was appalling. Same goes for Rurouni Kenshin.
Anyway, I'm already seeing stuff now, from p2p. It would be a hell of a lot nicer to get subs coming down the pipe onto my tv instead of having to download them, but given a choice between dubs on tv and fansubs from p2p, I'll take the fansubs any day.
Unfortunately, as we all know, p2p blows chunks, and shit is really fucking hard to get. So I'd rather have an anime channel than not. But I'm still going to complain until I see some subs on tv.
One thing bothered me (almost all songs 99 cents, even those 1 minute), as primus tends to put short little songs between longer ones.
Yeah, Tool does the same thing. Though it wouldn't make sense to pick up those tracks unless you're also getting the "normal" ones -- the filler tracks usually only make sense in the context of the album. And the whole album is cheaper than buying tracks separately.
Which reminds me... I don't have an Apple, so I haven't seen anything for myself, but I wonder, if short tracks are priced at $1, what about long tracks? My default example would be something like the 4th movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. That's 25 minutes long and weighs in at 25 megs on my hard drive (in ogg vorbis). Except the reviewer said the classical selection sucked, so... hm, rock... the longest Tool track I have is Disgustipated, off Undertow; that's 15 minutes long, and 17 megs in ogg. Or hell, how about Tull's Thick as a Brick? That's 40 minutes.
Okay, so you'd be hard pressed to find many really long pop/rock songs, but with classical that can happen quite often. It would be really cool if Apple could stop the classical suckage, and still offer big tracks at $1. Mahler's Jupiter Symphony? That'll be 1 dollar! Brahms' 2nd Symphony? 1 dollar! lol
How many users of Google Text Ads are there? Let's see. Google Text Ad click throughs on Slashdot are about half of the volume of Google Text Ad click-throughs. Therefore there are about 700 Text Advertisers. A recent article put Google Text Ads at about 80 percent of the Text Ads market.
enh... This section doesn't really work, and then when you move right into "Now Freshmeat is also dead..." it's just a total non sequitur.
You also forgot to finish with a "Fact: text ads are dying"; that's usually critical.
On the whole, however, great job. I laughed pretty hard, myself. Of course, I still always at least chuckle at any vanilla "BSD is dying" troll on those occasions when I go slumming at -1, so maybe my standards aren't too high =)
2. People say State has no right to make laws in the privacy of someones home
No. (And I assume by "People" you're referring to the plaintiffs.) The following quote is from this CNN story: "The Lambda Legal Defense Fund in New York, a gay-rights group, is urging the court to revisit the Bowers decision and to rule that prosecuting same-sex couples, but not heterosexuals, for sodomy violates the equal-treatment standard." The widespread use of the "in the bedroom" phraseology is just a euphemism; it's not literally what the plaintiffs are arguing. Indeed, obviously the laws of the State don't abruptly lose their power inside someone's home -- you can't rape/murder/torture someone inside your home.
3. "Senator from PA" says wait: the State should be able to have power in the bedroom, because then your saying "anything goes" which is not right. State needs to be able to make incest, rape etc. illegal in the bedroom.
No. Look, incest (well, most types) and rape are already illegal. No one is suggesting I should be able to rape anyone who comes in my house. What Sen. Santorum actually said (taken from this page) is the following: "And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does." The Senator is arguing that the State can regulate consensual sex. Santorum would like laws that ban homosexual sex. Hell, much more than that: I'm sure he'd ban adultery, oral sex, anal sex, non-missionary style sex... anything he (doesn't) want. It's a gross violation of privacy.
4. "Senator from PA"'s statement taken out of context and blown out of proportion, people say he "hates homosexuals" which he even said was untrue and there is no evidence to show that fact.
I'd like to second the other reply by saying I also saw Episode I while I was in high school, and it sucked ass.
Talk to the average school kid out there who hasn't yet lost the ability to go along with a moviemaker's vision.
Hardly. Unless by "school kid" you mean a 1st-grader from elementary school. I'm sure the kindergarteners out there are finding the prequels quite entertaining, which makes sense because Lucas is obviously tailoring the movies to them. How else to explain unimaginably unwatchable dreck like JarJar?
I wish us older Star Wars fans would stop pissing on the parade for the younger fans.
It's not a parade; the prequels aren't some golden opportunity for young people to see a series that will loom large in their memory as the years go on. The crap Lucas is putting out will fade away quickly, but luckily no one will care, because we'll have the Lord of the Rings to take its place.
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· Score: 3, Insightful
If there's one thing that I have really disliked about this war, it's the slick glossy marketing, the "psy ops" that are apparently designed to work on us at home instead of people in Iraq, the mounds and mounds of pure bullshit assembled to justify what is essentially an elective war, and the relentless and well orchestrated vitriol aimed at anyone who dares criticize the president during this phony crisis that he insisted on creating in the first place.
Well said, well said.
I partly disagree with your conclusions about Bush's motives, though. Certainly oil is in the equation, but I don't see Israel weighing heavily on Bush's mind, nor Iraq having much to do with Israel. My own pet theory is simply: misguided continuation of the "war on terror". The administration started that entire, long, drawn-out process of invading Iraq almost a year before we actually did it. So, a couple months after we roasted the Taliban in Afghanistan. Back then, I imagine it was a case of Bush sitting around in his office, pondering who to go after next, and coming up with... Iraq! Hey, they have no links whatsoever to terror, but they're rumored to have WMD, plus Saddam tried to have Poppy killed! Let's get that muthafucka!
Now, obviously Karl Rove wouldn't have let Bush just attack anyone he wanted -- unless it had some benefit. I think the benefit from Iraq has been clear enough: heightened approval ratings for the President. Hey, they need something to take everyone's mind off the economy... especially since Bush's monstrous tax cut (oh sorry, I mean "jobs and growth package") doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of doing anything productive except shoring up the Republicans' "death before taxes" political base. Now, it looks like we're going to move on and focus our attention on Syria. Well, 2 years left in the term; that's enough time to conquer a whole crapload of countries.
[sigh] Dude, dude, dude. You failed your pedantism.
You were correct about Chimera coming first and being followed up by (the stupidly-named) Camino, but it's "née". The accent is on the first 'e'. Actually, you only need the second 'e' if the noun is feminine, but let's just leave it on to be safe.
There is lots of stuff 80,000 miles up with a ground speed of zero that has me worried now. Why isn't it falling back down?
Dude, what are you talking about? "Ground speed"? If you mean an object in space that stays above the same point on the Earth, that's geosynchronous orbit, and said object would have to be 35,786 kilometers = 22,241 miles up, and the point must be on the equator. An object in said orbit would have a velocity of 3339 m/s.
A real benchmark may be impressive, considering a 3.06Ghz Dell system was only 2 times faster than the 1.25Ghz G4 in the best case - a Mhz/Mhz comparison should put it closer to 2.4 times faster.
Nope. Read the article closer next time, because your entire reply is just wrong. It was a dual 1.25 GHz G4. And 3.06 / 2*1.25 = 1.224. So your elaborately compiled list of result ratios just reinforces White's claims -- they're all greater than 1.224, making the Mac, indeed, more poorly performing than the P4.
The project lead continued to spend the money, in some cases for purposes that were at best dubious and at worst clearly opposed to the wishes of the grant source.
I have no idea what you're referring to here. Was Theo sending grant money to the Iraqi government, or something? Certainly you can't be referring the the beer quote, since it's specifically stated that DARPA money wasn't spent on beer. As if that was in doubt...
After a great start, they decided to hang out with friends, do their own thing, and drink beer out of their helmets. And then they threw dung at the guys in the suits paying for the party.
So the OpenBSD team shouldn't be allowed to drink alcohol while they're being funded by DARPA? What should the rules be? No parties, wear full IBM business suits, 50000 lines of code per month? And I'd hardly call Theo's opposition to war in Iraq "[throwing] dung" at the DOD. He's got lots of company, especially in Canada.
PR's four engineers built the Digital Restrictions Management (DRM) language in about two years before version 1 was commercially adopted by Nokia and others in preference to Microsoft's XrML standard, in part due to political reasons, says chief scientist Renato Iannella. [emphasis added]
A (semi-)major news outlet ran a story with DRM defined as Digital Restrictions Management, with "Restrictions" replacing the original "Rights". That is extremely fucking cool.
At least, I've never seen this before. Is it just me?
The open source development of GNOME v2.0 was still on-going at the end of 2002, and did not stabilize in the timeframe that HP had earlier anticipated.
Erm, so HP needed development on GNOME 2 to stop, by the end of 2002, so that they could use it? What the hell?
What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?
Wasn't that one of Stephen Hawkins theory? That the machines will advance much faster then Humans and become superior, so the Humans need to start enhancing themselves geneticly now so we won't lose?
You may be referring to the Singularity, put forward by Vernor Vinge. That postulates that with the birth of true machine intelligence, the machines will be able to design smarter machines, who will then design even smarter ones, ad infinitum.
No matter how we increase our own intelligences genetically, it seems unlikely that we could match machine AI. The question then becomes how to maintain control over the AIs -- ie, how to have them serve us, or at least live alongside us, rather than enslave us.
Let's say I invent a really good robot that automatically plays football. It means we get to watch better football on TV, and you don't need to pay them huge salaries, so everyone's a winner! Unfortunately, kids stop kicking balls around, and everyone who plays football loses both a pasttime and a healthy form of exercise and socialisation.
This is a pretty bad example, frankly. Why would kids stop kicking balls around? So they could watch football on tv? Football's already on tv. People play because they want to.
We may make the human species far "better", but what would be better?
Commonly-accepted virtues. Beauty, honor, intelligence, athleticism, etc.
If we were all beautiful and intelligent and suave? There's a place for people who are obsessed with this false ideal of perfection - Hollywood.
Those are some virtues; they're not the only ones. Also, don't think that everyone will be maximal representations of these virtues: genetics is important, but so is environment. Everyone will be smarter, but there will still be gradations of intelligence -- they'll just be of IQ 150-250 instead of 50-150, say.
What makes us special is our character, our spirit, not some superficial traits we can genetically modify, and so going down the road of genetically engineering humans will only serve to make people even more obsessed with essentially meaningless traits.
The virtues that you would most likely mean by "character" should be just as "easy" to genetically manipulate as, for example, suaveness. In any case, why should people become more obsessed with these "meaningless" traits (intelligence and beauty are meaningless?) than they are now? There may be an "arms race" of people trying to maximize genetic expressions, but I don't see how this would contribute to an obsession about certain traits. Once you're born, that's it; you can try to get as good a deal for your children as possible, but once they're born, that's all you can do as far as genetics is concerned. After that, you can only obsess over normal, environmental stuff -- which is what we alread do now.
There's also a genetic problem with genetic unification, which is neatly illustrated by the way that Monsanto and others are thinning and consolidating their gene pools.
You need to post some evidence of genetic consolidation stemming from genetic modification on plants; as far as I know, this is not occurring. There are many companies developing GM foods, each with different research strains.
There are many hundreds of different type of rice around the world, and the strength of this is that should a disease or pest come along that affects one type, the chances are that others won't be susceptible. If they are all oe or two types taken from the same original parent, they're all doomed.
You forget that man has been selectively breeding plants since the dawn of agriculture. As it stands, this has resulted in, specifically, a wide variety of rice grains.
Genetic diversity is extremely important, and any genetic engineering that tries ti consolidate is only asking for nature's troubles.
As I said, "natural" crops have been bred for certain traits for millennia; modern genetic engineering simply takes that to a more sophisticated level. Most importantly, I don't see any one single "supercrop" taking over and displacing all others. This is not happening now, and it isn't any more likely to happen now: your scenario could have occurred with natural breeding, as well.
Come on people, let's be scientific here. Scientists (as opposed to technologists) study things in safe isolation, with a view to discovering the whole truth about the subject, and this simply isn't what is happening with genetic engineering.
I feel like exercising some physics knowledge, so here we go....
Most of the problems revolve around the fact that any expedition to mars would last up to 3 years(apollo 11 took around a week) [...]
Sure, 3 years with shite technology.
Consider this: The CLOSEST that mars gets to earth is 86.5 million KM [...]
Without bothering to check that figure, let's assume you're correct. Solving some basic mechanics equations, we see that assuming a constant acceleration, we will need a time t=sqrt(x / a) to traverse half of a distance x. Set x to your figure of 8.65*10^10 m, and arbitrarily use an acceleration of 2 gravities, so a = 19.613 m/s^2. Now solving for t yields t = 66409.9 s -- that is, 18.447 hours. Translated to normal-speak, all this means that for a constant acceleration of 2 Earth gravities, a ship would reach the halfway point between Earth and Mars (yeah, yeah, I'm ignoring planet motion, but these times are short enough that it doesn't matter) in 18 hours. Assume constant deceleration after the halfway point, and the ship would come to a stop at Mars in twice that time it took to reach the halfway point, so 36 hours.
Oh, is 2 gravities a bit much? I suppose that would be stressful, even if it's only for 3 days, so let's try a simple 1 gravity instead. That yields an Earth-to-Mars time of 187836 s = 52.177 hours. So with our astronauts under a force identical to what they'd feel on the Earth's surface, they'd reach Mars in 52 hours. Only 4 days.
[...] any communication with the earth is going to take 5 minutes to get there and the response 5 minutes to get back. That means that for any problem that can't be solved in 10 minutes you're completely on your own.
That's okay; Columbus was on his own, too. We'd have laggy communication, which is better than nothing.
[...] not to mention the degeneration of muscles, bones and the heart caused by being weightless for long periods of time [...]
As I've mentioned, my hypothetical ship will be under 1 gravity of thrust, so with the decks aligned perpendicular to the direction of thrust, the astronauts would have the illusion of normal gravity. No severe muscle deterioration.
[...] nutrition(how do we keep our astronauts in tip top shape for months on end when we have no way of getting food to them) [...]
rofl... I've never seen that argument before. I imagine the astronauts will take some food along with them.
[...] radiation and pyschological problems (think being couped up in a space the size of your living room with 5 people for a couple of years) [...]
It's "cooped". And on my ship, the travel time isn't nearly long enough to worry about problems like that. Radiation is a problem; we would need heavy shielding.
Yes, most of these problems are solvable (especially if we develop a technology considerably faster than chemically fuelled rockets) [...]
Precisely! I suggest a (relatively!) simple nuclear fission reactor. Bring your parts up over a period of time on a good rocket with a nice $/pounds ratio (ie, anything except the wretched Space Shuttle), and assemble in orbit. The extremely modest 1 gravity acceleration I'm suggesting will be no problem for a nuclear engine.
"What what whaaaaaat?!", you're saying? Nothing crazy about nuclear power on ships. Our nuclear submarines travel through an environment not unlike space, and they do quite well. It seems to me that the main trouble would be assembling everything in orbit, since we've never done anything quite like that before. An appropriately-designed space station would help; too bad the ISS is a near-useless piece of crap on the same order as the Shuttle.
Anyway, this is all the stuff that's been running around in my brain for a good long while now. Anyone reading, feel free to point out any fuck-ups.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks ac, funniest comment I've seen in months.
Oh damn, that's not what you're saying, is it? If so, who gives a crap? It's not like casino gambling, and no one should be complaining over it. Actually, I have no problems with casino gambling, either.
Your flat statement that "it's not allowed", in reference to children praying in school, is wrong. No one is stopping kids from praying on their own time in school. What courts have ruled unconstitutional, and what groups like the ACLU continue to file lawsuits to prevent, are situations like this one, where a school's graduation ceremony and other activities are routinely opened with prayers.
In fact, the ACLU regularly stands up for students' religious expression when it's threatened by school authorities.
Read this AP story from June 4th -- the House just passed an anti-flag-burning amendment... again. The vote was 300-125, with most no votes from Dems and most yes votes from Repubs. "Christian Nazis" aren't referred to specifically, but you'll certainly have difficulty locating (m)any right-wing Republican who voted against the amendment....
You're right on with the firearms issue.
Now, gentlemen, I believe my day is complete. I think I'll take a nap and linger over my glorious victory on the intarweb.
It's just unbelievable how that game transcends its 16-bit Super NES sound and sprite graphics. It's epic, in so many ways -- a fantastic plot, with fantastically deep/moving/cool characters, and ridiculously memorable music. I remember thinking Kefka's theme was so kickass, I'd pick it out on our piano. I can still hum a boatload of songs from that game. I also liked how the entire game was stuffed with stuff to do; I'm sure I spent 60 hours or more every time I played through it. And the ending! More than 20 minutes of glorious reward at the end of that amazing battle against the statues and Kefka, with screen time given to every character. Certainly the best ending to anything I played on SNES. Actually, I'd be hard-pressed to find a better ending to any game, on console or PC.
Chrono Trigger and FF IV are the shit too, of course. And from everything I've heard, FF VII really whips the llama's ass as well; I think I'll finally get off my lazy ass and play it through sometime this summer.
The U.S. has a history of supporting one side or another in various conflicts in foreign shitholes, where one side isn't really much better than the other. All sorts of crap in South America, Africa, and the Middle East. It's just gigantically stupid; we don't get any lasting results, because we go for short-term "gains" (regimes that look like they'll support whatever issue we're insterested in) instead of, say, uniformly supporting democratic governments.
Well, the second part is right.The atomic bombs ended the war, but they certainly weren't necessary. The main sticking point for the U.S. government in the surrender negotiations that went on for months before the bombs were dropped was the preservation of the Emperor's person and power. Yet after the bombs were dropped, the Japanese still only surrendered when they were guaranteed... the preservation of the Emperor's person and power. From what I read, Truman's decision to use atomic weapons had more to do with providing a demonstration to the burgeoning Soviet power than anything specific to Japan.
For me, at least, that explains why they were dropped on civilian targets, killing more than a hundred thousand noncombatants. Because it was impressive. If the U.S. had wanted to convince the Japanese government they had a superweapon, dropping the bombs over a sparsely-populated area would have been adequate.
Fucking excellent work.
Going the other way, trying to watch dubs where I've already seen the subs: I am physically unable to watch more than 30 seconds of dubbed Inuyasha. The wretched, stereotypical female voice for Kagome, and the same for the guy doing Inuyasha... it's like trying to watch Pokemon or something. I caught a couple seconds of the Evangelion dub when it was first aired, and it was appalling. Same goes for Rurouni Kenshin.
Anyway, I'm already seeing stuff now, from p2p. It would be a hell of a lot nicer to get subs coming down the pipe onto my tv instead of having to download them, but given a choice between dubs on tv and fansubs from p2p, I'll take the fansubs any day.
Unfortunately, as we all know, p2p blows chunks, and shit is really fucking hard to get. So I'd rather have an anime channel than not. But I'm still going to complain until I see some subs on tv.
Which reminds me... I don't have an Apple, so I haven't seen anything for myself, but I wonder, if short tracks are priced at $1, what about long tracks? My default example would be something like the 4th movement of Beethoven's 9th Symphony. That's 25 minutes long and weighs in at 25 megs on my hard drive (in ogg vorbis). Except the reviewer said the classical selection sucked, so ... hm, rock... the longest Tool track I have is Disgustipated, off Undertow; that's 15 minutes long, and 17 megs in ogg. Or hell, how about Tull's Thick as a Brick? That's 40 minutes.
Okay, so you'd be hard pressed to find many really long pop/rock songs, but with classical that can happen quite often. It would be really cool if Apple could stop the classical suckage, and still offer big tracks at $1. Mahler's Jupiter Symphony? That'll be 1 dollar! Brahms' 2nd Symphony? 1 dollar! lol
You also forgot to finish with a "Fact: text ads are dying"; that's usually critical.
On the whole, however, great job. I laughed pretty hard, myself. Of course, I still always at least chuckle at any vanilla "BSD is dying" troll on those occasions when I go slumming at -1, so maybe my standards aren't too high =)
I partly disagree with your conclusions about Bush's motives, though. Certainly oil is in the equation, but I don't see Israel weighing heavily on Bush's mind, nor Iraq having much to do with Israel. My own pet theory is simply: misguided continuation of the "war on terror". The administration started that entire, long, drawn-out process of invading Iraq almost a year before we actually did it. So, a couple months after we roasted the Taliban in Afghanistan. Back then, I imagine it was a case of Bush sitting around in his office, pondering who to go after next, and coming up with... Iraq! Hey, they have no links whatsoever to terror, but they're rumored to have WMD, plus Saddam tried to have Poppy killed! Let's get that muthafucka!
Now, obviously Karl Rove wouldn't have let Bush just attack anyone he wanted -- unless it had some benefit. I think the benefit from Iraq has been clear enough: heightened approval ratings for the President. Hey, they need something to take everyone's mind off the economy... especially since Bush's monstrous tax cut (oh sorry, I mean "jobs and growth package") doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell of doing anything productive except shoring up the Republicans' "death before taxes" political base. Now, it looks like we're going to move on and focus our attention on Syria. Well, 2 years left in the term; that's enough time to conquer a whole crapload of countries.
You were correct about Chimera coming first and being followed up by (the stupidly-named) Camino, but it's "née". The accent is on the first 'e'. Actually, you only need the second 'e' if the noun is feminine, but let's just leave it on to be safe.
At least, I've never seen this before. Is it just me?
What does "stabilize" mean, anyway? Halting devel work on GNOME 2 because work on GNOME 3 has started?
rofl... Fucking well done. You'd have my mod points, if I had any.
Ah, damn. This comment points to some ponderings by Stephen Hawking, similar to those I described above.
No matter how we increase our own intelligences genetically, it seems unlikely that we could match machine AI. The question then becomes how to maintain control over the AIs -- ie, how to have them serve us, or at least live alongside us, rather than enslave us.
This is a pretty bad example, frankly. Why would kids stop kicking balls around? So they could watch football on tv? Football's already on tv. People play because they want to.
Commonly-accepted virtues. Beauty, honor, intelligence, athleticism, etc.
Those are some virtues; they're not the only ones. Also, don't think that everyone will be maximal representations of these virtues: genetics is important, but so is environment. Everyone will be smarter, but there will still be gradations of intelligence -- they'll just be of IQ 150-250 instead of 50-150, say.
The virtues that you would most likely mean by "character" should be just as "easy" to genetically manipulate as, for example, suaveness. In any case, why should people become more obsessed with these "meaningless" traits (intelligence and beauty are meaningless?) than they are now? There may be an "arms race" of people trying to maximize genetic expressions, but I don't see how this would contribute to an obsession about certain traits. Once you're born, that's it; you can try to get as good a deal for your children as possible, but once they're born, that's all you can do as far as genetics is concerned. After that, you can only obsess over normal, environmental stuff -- which is what we alread do now.
You need to post some evidence of genetic consolidation stemming from genetic modification on plants; as far as I know, this is not occurring. There are many companies developing GM foods, each with different research strains.
You forget that man has been selectively breeding plants since the dawn of agriculture. As it stands, this has resulted in, specifically, a wide variety of rice grains.
As I said, "natural" crops have been bred for certain traits for millennia; modern genetic engineering simply takes that to a more sophisticated level. Most importantly, I don't see any one single "supercrop" taking over and displacing all others. This is not happening now, and it isn't any more likely to happen now: your scenario could have occurred with natural breeding, as well.
Oh, is 2 gravities a bit much? I suppose that would be stressful, even if it's only for 3 days, so let's try a simple 1 gravity instead. That yields an Earth-to-Mars time of 187836 s = 52.177 hours. So with our astronauts under a force identical to what they'd feel on the Earth's surface, they'd reach Mars in 52 hours. Only 4 days.
That's okay; Columbus was on his own, too. We'd have laggy communication, which is better than nothing. As I've mentioned, my hypothetical ship will be under 1 gravity of thrust, so with the decks aligned perpendicular to the direction of thrust, the astronauts would have the illusion of normal gravity. No severe muscle deterioration. rofl... I've never seen that argument before. I imagine the astronauts will take some food along with them. It's "cooped". And on my ship, the travel time isn't nearly long enough to worry about problems like that. Radiation is a problem; we would need heavy shielding. Precisely! I suggest a (relatively!) simple nuclear fission reactor. Bring your parts up over a period of time on a good rocket with a nice $/pounds ratio (ie, anything except the wretched Space Shuttle), and assemble in orbit. The extremely modest 1 gravity acceleration I'm suggesting will be no problem for a nuclear engine."What what whaaaaaat?!", you're saying? Nothing crazy about nuclear power on ships. Our nuclear submarines travel through an environment not unlike space, and they do quite well. It seems to me that the main trouble would be assembling everything in orbit, since we've never done anything quite like that before. An appropriately-designed space station would help; too bad the ISS is a near-useless piece of crap on the same order as the Shuttle.
Anyway, this is all the stuff that's been running around in my brain for a good long while now. Anyone reading, feel free to point out any fuck-ups.