...and I'm probably going to hell for it, but here goes:
Q: What's the difference between Sarah Palin's mouth and her vagina?
A: Retarded things come out of her vagina only sometimes.
Offended? Listen to that prank phone all and consider how retarded her end of the conversation was. The mere possibility that this imbecile even has the potential of getting into the White House is far more offensive than the joke.
Also, you know what the problem with this is? The ones that are going to survive aren't going to be cute cuddly little puppy dogs. They're going to be cockroaches that can see heat and that shoot molecular acid on you while you're sleeping. They're going to be bird-eating spiders. Octopi that walk on land and reshape/recolor themselves to look like a tree or boulder... until they pounce and eat you.
Yes, but there might also be a downside.
it's more complicated than you think
on
The Gym Arcade
·
· Score: 1
There's already been a boom and bust with the exercise computer game market, way predating the Wii.
For serious training types, used in the comfort of your own home, they've had road simulators for years. You hook your regular bike up to it and the computer projects the road course onto a big projection screen in front of you. You use this when it's the winter months and you can't ride out in the real world. There's no game element to it, it's pure sim. Not very common, very expensive, only for bike addicts.
Now there have been networked racing games in the past for the exercise bikes. Primitive polygon graphics, limited number of games, the companies just couldn't make enough money at it to stay in business.
What they're talking about in the links has promise. The question remains as to whether the gyms can make back their investment in gamer hardware. I do think it would be cool to have eight units at your home gym and can either race against them or against other gyms over the net. And the number of game concepts, you could have it pure racing, something more like twisted metal, and the treadmill add-ons for FPS intrigue me.
If it doesn't work by default on your laptop, someone did some specific development work on Windows to make it work. The machine almost certainly doesn't conform to ACPI specs. When a computer does, Linux works quite well. Thinkpads are usually very good about it.
My next laptop will be Ubuntu. Anyone keeping a list on hardware compatibility by manufacturer? I'd like to get a laptop I can count on for at least 6 to 8 years of dependable computability. I'd hate to have to stop getting the upgrades when I find out Ubuntu 10 works but 11 doesn't.
I am not sure if this is the right place to respond. I am interested.
Joe the Plumper
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system > From: Cmdrtaco > Subject: Wanted > > Gentlemen, I am looking for an unwashed penis to suck. Would anyone be willing to provide? >
Trollfail.
Everyone knows embarrassing sex solicitations go out on Craigslist now.
Doesn't seem to me like games are a good medium to spread your political messages - after all, games are... well, games.
Depends on the game. The best modern one I saw was one where you got to play the US military. You had a little animated city street full of civilians and a few terrorists -- civilians wore white turbans, the terrorists wore black ones. You had a missile with a large splash radius to kill the terrorists with. If you hit a terrorist, he died. If you hit a civilian, they died, too. If the civilian was only wounded, he turned into a terrorist. After a few minutes of play the entire street was swarming with terrorists. A pretty effective demonstration of what happens when you use hand grenades to swat flies.
There's also Monopoly.
The history of Monopoly can be traced back to the early 1900s. In 1904, a Quaker woman named Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George (it was supposed to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies). Her game, The Landlord's Game, was commercially published a few years later.
Because games are so interactive, they can do a better job of explaining an idea than just reading it in the book or having someone lecture about it in front of the classroom. Of course, since we're talking about a game, it's very easy to skew the rules to enforce your point of view. One could just as easily create a Christian game like monopoly where all the squares represent sins and demonstrate that it's impossible to get all the way around the board to heaven without pulling the Jesus card. Sort of like how Ayn Rand would use her books to justify Objectivism. "But Ayn, people don't behave that way in the real world!" "Well, they should!"
I think that the Obama campaign has pushed the envelope on new media efforts but they've still only scratched the surface.
MTV's bullshit censorship changes with the times. Back in the early-mid '90's, they'd censor the word "ass" and other lame stuff from Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg videos(remember how half the screen was blurred out for some reason or other?).
If only they could have blurred out the other half of the screen and bleeped the rest of the song. Or how about playing some rock? There's already BET for rap and hip-hop.
I wouldn't have a problem with this if we could be assured of fair, impartial, and reasonable moderation. But we know exactly how likely that is.
Aside from the grinding and taking over your life parts of MMO's, the other thing that really bugs me about them is you are now at the mercy of the publisher. Nobody can revoke my right to play a single-player game and the only way to lose my progress is if my save game files get corrupted. But with an MMO, one bad mod interaction can ruin your entire game. "Hey, I've played X for Y years and I've never even talked to a mod." True, but I've seen several instances of people getting burned by bad calls, up to and including the loss of accounts. Certainly when there's a serious argument with management about game policies like the devs cheating in EVE Online, the people who first raised the accusations were the first to lose their accounts. And even more a less serious infraction, someone I knew misunderstood the distinction between being able to trade game cards for in-game currency versus simply paying money for currency which is a no-no. He almost lost an account he had a year on with that one because that's a one-strike-and-your-out TOS violation.
I doubt this is going to bite EA in the ass, even though by rights it should. It'll certainly bite some gamers in the ass, that's for sure.
Apps written expressly for the iphone run faster than the java apps on the G1.
I can't really afford either phone right now which is just as well because I don't know which one I like more. The iPhone is slick, has nice integration but Apple also locks down 3rd party apps. The G1 represents more freedom but is newer than the iPhone and so has more kinks to work out by the time they get to the G2.
My biggest hope is not just that competition between these phones improves hardware features and functionality, they can also do something to break the backs of the mobile carrier monopoly. The profit-sharing for the iPhone store is as revolutionary as the phone itself, not to mention it's a far friendlier platform to develop for versus previous phones. But damn, the monthly bills on these phones is disgusting.
So are the Dems. As far as principles go, the only difference between them is that people have forgotten how full of crap the Dems are.
Looks like they're poised for the White House and a super-majority in Congress. It's up to them now to either do good or show themselves for the craven shit-weasels people say they are. God, I hope Obama pushes Pelosi and Reid out so we can get real leadership in.
Re:L-pills always the scariest gadgets
on
James Bond Gadgets
·
· Score: 1
The point of the cyanide pill isn't to give your life for the cause.
I'm aware of that as an adult but as a child I always conflated the two. And it makes for a good point, anyone will break under torture. I know the Tamil Tigers make L-pill training a daily event so that the thought of taking the capsule from around your neck and biting down on it becomes second-nature, it will be the unthinking, unquestioning response when faced with capture. Pretty scary stuff.
Suicide pills I've always found to be scary, even scarier are the people who employ them. There's just something unsettling to Western sensibilities when someone is willing to give their lives for a cause, not just in the "might not come back from this mission" context but "I'm biting down on a cyanide ampule and there's no coming back from--ACK!" To the western mind, the slight chance of survival from an apparently suicidal mission is completely different from an intentionally suicidal mission where success must include your death.
The first one of these scenes I ever saw as a kid was Dr. No where Bond is chasing the guy down from the airport and he kills himself with poisoned cigarettes. Really messed with my mind as a kid but now I think it could be hysterical if done with a bit of an Austin Powers mirth. Bond chases the guy down, he takes the L-pill and gives a look of defiance that gives way to shock when Bond says "Good man, I was just going to ask you the time, there was no need to run away." Then he croaks.
Here's something that's bugged me for years (morbid though alert). You can easily add a couple of servos to a car's control system and control it via remote (although long range trips would be tricky even with long-range communications and a camera).
Servos and remotes are cheaper than people. Why do we still have suicide bombers?
Because a driverless car downtown might draw some attention? No, seriously. Aside from the difficulty of a remote driver having good situational awareness in crappy Iraqi traffic, there's also the matter of camouflaging intent. Some suicide missions involve multiple people. Understandable if there's three separate bombers hitting one location but why have two people with one bomb? Why not have the second guy drive another bomb vehicle or hold back for another mission? Camouflage.
Two guys are driving a delivery truck. You wouldn't think suicide bomber, that's only a loner. Now you've got a delivery driver arguing with the compound guard. C'mon, I got a delivery, I need inside. The guard would already be shooting at a driverless truck coming at him but this delivery looks like every other delivery coming through the gate.
Right before we went into Afghanistan, a popular leader of the Northern Alliance gave an interview to a foreign television crew. This was a multi-man crew, the journalist, cameraman, and soundman. The bomb was in the camera. Interview starts, the television crew, their target, and several bystanders are killed. No single person could have gotten that close but several people posing as a film crew? That seems reasonable.
I've also heard stories about kids included in suicide vehicles. They're probably not the driver's kids, who knows how they were abducted. But they're in the car making it look eminently civilian when the driver pulls up and hits the detonator.
This sort of thing has two benefits for the terrorist. One, he gets to destroy his target. Two, now the GI's are all jumpy and no longer willing to discount kids as a sign the car is safe, they'll end up shooting up more innocent civilians, raising the terror level, and making the people more enraged with America.
But the software running on them is universally awful. Is the clone phone market a vast, nascent install-base for Android, and part of Google's end game?
What, a parallel to the PC/PC-compatible watershed? God, I hope so. The next step is getting them to change the billing rates for wireless, they're killing us.
I do find it amusing that the Republicans are resorting to the "divided Government" card and warning us all about the dangers of a single party controlling Congress and the White House. If they were being just a little bit more intellectually honest they'd end the argument with "Look how badly we fucked it up when we had that much power!"
That's because they aren't a party of principles, just self-service. In the 2000 election, they thought Bush would win the popular vote and Gore the electoral college and they were all set to argue that the EC was antiquated and shouldn't really be paid attention to because it did not represent the will of the people. When the exact opposite happened, they switched arguments without missing a beat.
I say someone is principled when they stick by what they say they believe in, even if it is inconvenient to them. The unprincipled man is the one who bitches about the dishonesty of nobody returning his lost wallet but pockets the money when he finds someone else's wallet with the snide justification that the other guy should have been more careful.
Every time someone claims ANYTHING about water on mars, it always trails with "There could have been/should/would been life!". Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.
As with most things, there are shades of gray here. For instance, it is possible to think that the war was a good idea, but that the occupation was poorly executed.
Yes, it's possible to think the war was a good idea, if you stood directly to profit from it. If you thought that it was in America's best interest, you would be sadly mistaken. The war has enriched the usual suspects but done nothing to secure America, either by preventing foreign attack or procuring foreign oil supplies. It was a failure on both moral and Machiavellian grounds. No one who did not directly profit from this war could possibly say it was a good idea. It may have been sold on those grounds and some of the proponents may have entertained Tom Clancy fantasies about it but a factual analysis shows it was all really about the money.
Someone who thought this war was a good idea, from liberating those poor little Iraqis to saying it would make America safer, they are as sincere and wrongheaded as doctors practicing blood-letting with leeches to get the toxins out of their patients.
I think it will be the same trap that Bush fell into... he'll face a friendly congress that wants EVERYTHING that they've been waiting for since '94 when they lost control. Spending will go absolutely out of control. The divided Clinton years produced a surplus for the first time in, what, 30 years?
There are bad Democrats who need clearing out, just like there are bad Republicans. I'm personally incensed that Pelosi and Reid said that "impeachment is off the table" when they were expressly sent there in 2006 with a mandate to do something about Bush and his wars. My nightmare scenario is active obstruction from the Republicans and feckless do-nothingism from the Democrats. I hope Obama can kick ass and take names cuz if he can't, we're truly fucked. I want to see him learn some tactics from the Republicans about lining up votes and beating the shit out of recalcitrant congresscritters who think they're going to be able to derail national policy for their own little pork projects. He needs to push to get rid of Jefferson since he's a corrupt fucking Dem who makes the Dems look as bad as Republicans. He needs to push to get Stephens out for being a felonious fuckwad, Pelosi and Reid need pushed out of leadership roles because they are feckless appeasers, and anyone else who tries to play petty politics while this nation is in crisis needs their dicks stomped on. And I trust Obama will be able to use a little more politeness and finesse than I did here. He seems to be pretty good at that.
Obama will spend all of his first few years dealing with the recession - he'll have the same problems that Bush I did, though the recession might be worse.
It's going to be a lot worse. Hopefully he'll be more engaged and get the right people on the task. Bush 1 saw himself as a foreign policy guy and didn't understand that thair economy thing. I believe Obama knows the economy is the biggest thing scaring people right now, far more than the terrorism shit that the Republicans used to lead us around by the nose for the past eight years.
It's not that child pornographers shouldn't be prosecuted, but like it or not, they're still entitled to the same due process as normal, "non-pervert" criminals. This "it's for the children" stuff shouldn't fly when we claim to follow the rule of law.
And anything we can do to deflate the "think of the children" hysteria will help protect our society. It's not that protecting children is a bad thing, it's that turning people into frothing flesh-rending mobs at the drop of a hat is a bad thing. If I were a nasty sort of black-hatted individual, the quickest way I can think of for destroying an enemy would be planting kiddie porn on his computer and dropping a dime to the authorities. Kiddie porn will be the new "baggie of drugs to plant on a perp." I wouldn't be surprised to see cops dropping usb drives on accidentally shot guys. "No, don't worry, I just planted kiddie porn on the guy. Disciplinary action? We'll probably get a medal for this."
Incidentally, your tagline: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Messiah." Is that an inept slam against Obama?
It amazes me how many people get personally offended and go on flaming rampages every time Bush is labeled a scapegoat. Yet at the same time- these very same people likely (and rabidly) supported Bush's government while we were going to war against other scapegoats for other countries. How very hypocritical.
It's crazy but we're talking religious beliefs here, not logic. My dad is hardcore right-wing and we argued the war before it started. I told him I had a bad feeling about it, didn't feel the evidence was solid, and thought that this was a war of convenience, not necessity. I personally felt that they would find a pile of old nerve gas shells and declare WMD's were found, even though the WMD's they implied were nuclear. (Personally, I think equating chem and bio with nuclear is like saying a.38 snub-nose pistol and a battleship's main 18" guns firing 2000lb shells are the same thing. I mean yeah, technically both guns but Jesus, there's a difference!) Anyway, I told him before the war I thought it was a bad idea and the course of events would show who was right. I turned out to be right but he doesn't accept it.
He's conceded "Obongo the Magic Negro" is going to win this election and predicted all sorts of dire consequences. I smiled and said "Well, either things are going to be great, turn to shit, or just muddle along as they have been. Best case, worst case, or middle case. The course of events will show us what will happen and we'll see who's right." I think he's going to be facing unprecedented obstructionism from the right, making Clinton's years look like a cake-walk. The Republicans are going to throw every monkey-wrench they can find so that they won't just predict Obama's failure, they'll ensure it. I do think Obama is up to the challenge. But if he fucks himself and by extension us like Clinton, I'll admit it and condemn him for it. If things go swimmingly over the next four years and we have a complete turnaround, I doubt my dad will be willing to admit it. He'll be looking under every rock to find a bug and prove that everything is thus completely horrible.
Typically these rockets are more efficient than their chemical cousins. For a given reactant mass, rockets will give you more thrust (can't get into orbit with anything but rockets at this point) but the plasma and ion engines are more efficient, low-thrust but higher change in velocity (delta-v.)
As it was described, a mars mission using an ion engine would not leave the space station with a dramatic blast of flame. The captain would say "turn the engine on," go, get coffee, watch a movie, look out the window and still be able to wave back to people at the station. Tune back in three weeks later and he'll be moving at a clip that would make chemical rockets weep in jealousy.
John McCain's own polling gives him hope, an aide says
When John McCain insisted, during his appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," that he was doing "just fine" in a presidential race in which the polls have shown Barack Obama with a steady lead over the last few weeks, many may have dismissed the comment as just something that a candidate has to say.
Not so, said a campaign official who spoke on background with The Times' Bob Drogin. The aide said the campaign's internal polling showed McCain down only 4 percentage points nationally -- a sharp improvement from a week ago -- and closing fast.
State-by-state, the private polling also showed McCain up 1 point in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Missouri, and behind by only 3 points in Virginia (a new Washington Post survey found him down 8 there).
McCain almost assuredly needs to capture all five states to win the presidency. And even that may not be enough if he fails to win Pennsylvania, one of his campaign stops today. Without Pennsylvania, McCain needs to pull more electoral votes out of some combination of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico or Iowa -- all states where, as of now, the internal numbers look bleak.
The anonymous McCain official argued a comeback remains doable. "Check with me Wednesday," the aide said. "If we're still within the margin of error (in polling), we're going to win."
Flanking is valuable because of KISS - when the enemy has to cover his 12 and his 6 at the same time, vs. two of your units that only have to cover their 12, he covers both less adeptly than he would cover one. It's a win for you.
But you have to consider you fight with the army you have. Fake retreats are an enormously successful tactic. Act like your formation is breaking into flight, the enemy breaks their ranks to chase you down, your formation then reforms a line behind the hill, backed up with missile troops the enemy didn't know you have, now the enemy is out of defensive position and can be attacked with a higher chance of success. The Mongols used these tactics to great effect.
This simply would not work with less than a superbly drilled and disciplined army, i.e. your typical feudal levy. There's a fine line between acting like you're retreating in disarray and truly retreating in disarray. Individual soldiers want to live and nobody wants to be risking death on the battlefield after the day has already been decided. If a general has a year to whip his soldiers into shape before taking them into battle, he can make them do whatever he wants. Hell, just turning an infantry line 90 degrees while on a parade ground without breaking ranks is difficult, let alone when under fire. If the general doesn't have the luxury of training, if he's forced to fight with a pick-up team that was assembled last week, he simply must use the most KISS-like tactics possible because trying to get any fancier would ensure confusion and defeat.
If you want a football analogy for this, there's a beautiful video on youtube, it's a college football game where the greatest play ever made was made. One team runs the ball clear back up the field for a touchdown. What made it so great was the lateral passing involved. I've never watched much football but from what I've seen of it, the only guy throwing the ball is the QB. At most I've seen other people fumble it and the other team gain possession, that's it. In this play, there's like five or six lateral passes as runners are boxed in by the opposing team, they would pass the ball to someone who's open and the march down the field would continue. The defenders couldn't figure out where the ball was because it was moving so quickly, everyone scrambling for position and just being out of place. The far end of the field already had a marching band on it since everyone had assumed the game was just about over and the offense just smashes through the tubas and makes a touchdown.
As it was explained to me, you don't see that kind of thing in football that much because there's too many ways for it to go wrong. Some of those lateral passes were thrown blind, there was no telling who might be under it. They got lucky. As it was, the winning team had players who were also on the rugby team and so they were well-drilled in this style of play and could bring something unusual to the field. But again, they also got lucky. Other teams have tried making use of this sort of play and it just never works out right, especially when the other teams expect it and know how to counter it.
Slashdot Mirror
...and I'm probably going to hell for it, but here goes:
Q: What's the difference between Sarah Palin's mouth and her vagina?
A: Retarded things come out of her vagina only sometimes.
Offended? Listen to that prank phone all and consider how retarded her end of the conversation was. The mere possibility that this imbecile even has the potential of getting into the White House is far more offensive than the joke.
Also, you know what the problem with this is? The ones that are going to survive aren't going to be cute cuddly little puppy dogs. They're going to be cockroaches that can see heat and that shoot molecular acid on you while you're sleeping. They're going to be bird-eating spiders. Octopi that walk on land and reshape/recolor themselves to look like a tree or boulder... until they pounce and eat you.
Yes, but there might also be a downside.
There's already been a boom and bust with the exercise computer game market, way predating the Wii.
For serious training types, used in the comfort of your own home, they've had road simulators for years. You hook your regular bike up to it and the computer projects the road course onto a big projection screen in front of you. You use this when it's the winter months and you can't ride out in the real world. There's no game element to it, it's pure sim. Not very common, very expensive, only for bike addicts.
Now there have been networked racing games in the past for the exercise bikes. Primitive polygon graphics, limited number of games, the companies just couldn't make enough money at it to stay in business.
What they're talking about in the links has promise. The question remains as to whether the gyms can make back their investment in gamer hardware. I do think it would be cool to have eight units at your home gym and can either race against them or against other gyms over the net. And the number of game concepts, you could have it pure racing, something more like twisted metal, and the treadmill add-ons for FPS intrigue me.
If it doesn't work by default on your laptop, someone did some specific development work on Windows to make it work. The machine almost certainly doesn't conform to ACPI specs. When a computer does, Linux works quite well. Thinkpads are usually very good about it.
My next laptop will be Ubuntu. Anyone keeping a list on hardware compatibility by manufacturer? I'd like to get a laptop I can count on for at least 6 to 8 years of dependable computability. I'd hate to have to stop getting the upgrades when I find out Ubuntu 10 works but 11 doesn't.
Hello,
I am not sure if this is the right place to respond. I am interested.
Joe the Plumper
> Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.system
> From: Cmdrtaco
> Subject: Wanted
>
> Gentlemen, I am looking for an unwashed penis to suck. Would anyone be willing to provide?
>
Trollfail.
Everyone knows embarrassing sex solicitations go out on Craigslist now.
Doesn't seem to me like games are a good medium to spread your political messages - after all, games are... well, games.
Depends on the game. The best modern one I saw was one where you got to play the US military. You had a little animated city street full of civilians and a few terrorists -- civilians wore white turbans, the terrorists wore black ones. You had a missile with a large splash radius to kill the terrorists with. If you hit a terrorist, he died. If you hit a civilian, they died, too. If the civilian was only wounded, he turned into a terrorist. After a few minutes of play the entire street was swarming with terrorists. A pretty effective demonstration of what happens when you use hand grenades to swat flies.
There's also Monopoly.
The history of Monopoly can be traced back to the early 1900s. In 1904, a Quaker woman named Elizabeth (Lizzie) J. Magie Phillips created a game through which she hoped to be able to explain the single tax theory of Henry George (it was supposed to illustrate the negative aspects of concentrating land in private monopolies). Her game, The Landlord's Game, was commercially published a few years later.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopoly_(board_game)
Because games are so interactive, they can do a better job of explaining an idea than just reading it in the book or having someone lecture about it in front of the classroom. Of course, since we're talking about a game, it's very easy to skew the rules to enforce your point of view. One could just as easily create a Christian game like monopoly where all the squares represent sins and demonstrate that it's impossible to get all the way around the board to heaven without pulling the Jesus card. Sort of like how Ayn Rand would use her books to justify Objectivism. "But Ayn, people don't behave that way in the real world!" "Well, they should!"
I think that the Obama campaign has pushed the envelope on new media efforts but they've still only scratched the surface.
MTV's bullshit censorship changes with the times. Back in the early-mid '90's, they'd censor the word "ass" and other lame stuff from Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg videos(remember how half the screen was blurred out for some reason or other?).
If only they could have blurred out the other half of the screen and bleeped the rest of the song. Or how about playing some rock? There's already BET for rap and hip-hop.
I wouldn't have a problem with this if we could be assured of fair, impartial, and reasonable moderation. But we know exactly how likely that is.
Aside from the grinding and taking over your life parts of MMO's, the other thing that really bugs me about them is you are now at the mercy of the publisher. Nobody can revoke my right to play a single-player game and the only way to lose my progress is if my save game files get corrupted. But with an MMO, one bad mod interaction can ruin your entire game. "Hey, I've played X for Y years and I've never even talked to a mod." True, but I've seen several instances of people getting burned by bad calls, up to and including the loss of accounts. Certainly when there's a serious argument with management about game policies like the devs cheating in EVE Online, the people who first raised the accusations were the first to lose their accounts. And even more a less serious infraction, someone I knew misunderstood the distinction between being able to trade game cards for in-game currency versus simply paying money for currency which is a no-no. He almost lost an account he had a year on with that one because that's a one-strike-and-your-out TOS violation.
I doubt this is going to bite EA in the ass, even though by rights it should. It'll certainly bite some gamers in the ass, that's for sure.
That David played, and it pleased the lord,
but you don't really care for music, do you?
Not, but it's the craptastic idle design that's really chapping my ass.
Apps written expressly for the iphone run faster than the java apps on the G1.
I can't really afford either phone right now which is just as well because I don't know which one I like more. The iPhone is slick, has nice integration but Apple also locks down 3rd party apps. The G1 represents more freedom but is newer than the iPhone and so has more kinks to work out by the time they get to the G2.
My biggest hope is not just that competition between these phones improves hardware features and functionality, they can also do something to break the backs of the mobile carrier monopoly. The profit-sharing for the iPhone store is as revolutionary as the phone itself, not to mention it's a far friendlier platform to develop for versus previous phones. But damn, the monthly bills on these phones is disgusting.
So are the Dems. As far as principles go, the only difference between them is that people have forgotten how full of crap the Dems are.
Looks like they're poised for the White House and a super-majority in Congress. It's up to them now to either do good or show themselves for the craven shit-weasels people say they are. God, I hope Obama pushes Pelosi and Reid out so we can get real leadership in.
The point of the cyanide pill isn't to give your life for the cause.
I'm aware of that as an adult but as a child I always conflated the two. And it makes for a good point, anyone will break under torture. I know the Tamil Tigers make L-pill training a daily event so that the thought of taking the capsule from around your neck and biting down on it becomes second-nature, it will be the unthinking, unquestioning response when faced with capture. Pretty scary stuff.
Suicide pills I've always found to be scary, even scarier are the people who employ them. There's just something unsettling to Western sensibilities when someone is willing to give their lives for a cause, not just in the "might not come back from this mission" context but "I'm biting down on a cyanide ampule and there's no coming back from--ACK!" To the western mind, the slight chance of survival from an apparently suicidal mission is completely different from an intentionally suicidal mission where success must include your death.
The first one of these scenes I ever saw as a kid was Dr. No where Bond is chasing the guy down from the airport and he kills himself with poisoned cigarettes. Really messed with my mind as a kid but now I think it could be hysterical if done with a bit of an Austin Powers mirth. Bond chases the guy down, he takes the L-pill and gives a look of defiance that gives way to shock when Bond says "Good man, I was just going to ask you the time, there was no need to run away." Then he croaks.
Here's something that's bugged me for years (morbid though alert). You can easily add a couple of servos to a car's control system and control it via remote (although long range trips would be tricky even with long-range communications and a camera).
Servos and remotes are cheaper than people. Why do we still have suicide bombers?
Because a driverless car downtown might draw some attention? No, seriously. Aside from the difficulty of a remote driver having good situational awareness in crappy Iraqi traffic, there's also the matter of camouflaging intent. Some suicide missions involve multiple people. Understandable if there's three separate bombers hitting one location but why have two people with one bomb? Why not have the second guy drive another bomb vehicle or hold back for another mission? Camouflage.
Two guys are driving a delivery truck. You wouldn't think suicide bomber, that's only a loner. Now you've got a delivery driver arguing with the compound guard. C'mon, I got a delivery, I need inside. The guard would already be shooting at a driverless truck coming at him but this delivery looks like every other delivery coming through the gate.
Right before we went into Afghanistan, a popular leader of the Northern Alliance gave an interview to a foreign television crew. This was a multi-man crew, the journalist, cameraman, and soundman. The bomb was in the camera. Interview starts, the television crew, their target, and several bystanders are killed. No single person could have gotten that close but several people posing as a film crew? That seems reasonable.
I've also heard stories about kids included in suicide vehicles. They're probably not the driver's kids, who knows how they were abducted. But they're in the car making it look eminently civilian when the driver pulls up and hits the detonator.
This sort of thing has two benefits for the terrorist. One, he gets to destroy his target. Two, now the GI's are all jumpy and no longer willing to discount kids as a sign the car is safe, they'll end up shooting up more innocent civilians, raising the terror level, and making the people more enraged with America.
But the software running on them is universally awful. Is the clone phone market a vast, nascent install-base for Android, and part of Google's end game?
What, a parallel to the PC/PC-compatible watershed? God, I hope so. The next step is getting them to change the billing rates for wireless, they're killing us.
I do find it amusing that the Republicans are resorting to the "divided Government" card and warning us all about the dangers of a single party controlling Congress and the White House. If they were being just a little bit more intellectually honest they'd end the argument with "Look how badly we fucked it up when we had that much power!"
That's because they aren't a party of principles, just self-service. In the 2000 election, they thought Bush would win the popular vote and Gore the electoral college and they were all set to argue that the EC was antiquated and shouldn't really be paid attention to because it did not represent the will of the people. When the exact opposite happened, they switched arguments without missing a beat.
I say someone is principled when they stick by what they say they believe in, even if it is inconvenient to them. The unprincipled man is the one who bitches about the dishonesty of nobody returning his lost wallet but pockets the money when he finds someone else's wallet with the snide justification that the other guy should have been more careful.
Every time someone claims ANYTHING about water on mars, it always trails with "There could have been/should/would been life!". Find me a fossil and then we'll talk.
McCain?
*gasps of outrage*
What, too soon?
As with most things, there are shades of gray here. For instance, it is possible to think that the war was a good idea, but that the occupation was poorly executed.
Yes, it's possible to think the war was a good idea, if you stood directly to profit from it. If you thought that it was in America's best interest, you would be sadly mistaken. The war has enriched the usual suspects but done nothing to secure America, either by preventing foreign attack or procuring foreign oil supplies. It was a failure on both moral and Machiavellian grounds. No one who did not directly profit from this war could possibly say it was a good idea. It may have been sold on those grounds and some of the proponents may have entertained Tom Clancy fantasies about it but a factual analysis shows it was all really about the money.
Someone who thought this war was a good idea, from liberating those poor little Iraqis to saying it would make America safer, they are as sincere and wrongheaded as doctors practicing blood-letting with leeches to get the toxins out of their patients.
I think it will be the same trap that Bush fell into... he'll face a friendly congress that wants EVERYTHING that they've been waiting for since '94 when they lost control. Spending will go absolutely out of control. The divided Clinton years produced a surplus for the first time in, what, 30 years?
There are bad Democrats who need clearing out, just like there are bad Republicans. I'm personally incensed that Pelosi and Reid said that "impeachment is off the table" when they were expressly sent there in 2006 with a mandate to do something about Bush and his wars. My nightmare scenario is active obstruction from the Republicans and feckless do-nothingism from the Democrats. I hope Obama can kick ass and take names cuz if he can't, we're truly fucked. I want to see him learn some tactics from the Republicans about lining up votes and beating the shit out of recalcitrant congresscritters who think they're going to be able to derail national policy for their own little pork projects. He needs to push to get rid of Jefferson since he's a corrupt fucking Dem who makes the Dems look as bad as Republicans. He needs to push to get Stephens out for being a felonious fuckwad, Pelosi and Reid need pushed out of leadership roles because they are feckless appeasers, and anyone else who tries to play petty politics while this nation is in crisis needs their dicks stomped on. And I trust Obama will be able to use a little more politeness and finesse than I did here. He seems to be pretty good at that.
Obama will spend all of his first few years dealing with the recession - he'll have the same problems that Bush I did, though the recession might be worse.
It's going to be a lot worse. Hopefully he'll be more engaged and get the right people on the task. Bush 1 saw himself as a foreign policy guy and didn't understand that thair economy thing. I believe Obama knows the economy is the biggest thing scaring people right now, far more than the terrorism shit that the Republicans used to lead us around by the nose for the past eight years.
It's not that child pornographers shouldn't be prosecuted, but like it or not, they're still entitled to the same due process as normal, "non-pervert" criminals. This "it's for the children" stuff shouldn't fly when we claim to follow the rule of law.
And anything we can do to deflate the "think of the children" hysteria will help protect our society. It's not that protecting children is a bad thing, it's that turning people into frothing flesh-rending mobs at the drop of a hat is a bad thing. If I were a nasty sort of black-hatted individual, the quickest way I can think of for destroying an enemy would be planting kiddie porn on his computer and dropping a dime to the authorities. Kiddie porn will be the new "baggie of drugs to plant on a perp." I wouldn't be surprised to see cops dropping usb drives on accidentally shot guys. "No, don't worry, I just planted kiddie porn on the guy. Disciplinary action? We'll probably get a medal for this."
Incidentally, your tagline: "Ein Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Messiah." Is that an inept slam against Obama?
This will probably kill my Karma, but...
It amazes me how many people get personally offended and go on flaming rampages every time Bush is labeled a scapegoat. Yet at the same time- these very same people likely (and rabidly) supported Bush's government while we were going to war against other scapegoats for other countries. How very hypocritical.
It's crazy but we're talking religious beliefs here, not logic. My dad is hardcore right-wing and we argued the war before it started. I told him I had a bad feeling about it, didn't feel the evidence was solid, and thought that this was a war of convenience, not necessity. I personally felt that they would find a pile of old nerve gas shells and declare WMD's were found, even though the WMD's they implied were nuclear. (Personally, I think equating chem and bio with nuclear is like saying a .38 snub-nose pistol and a battleship's main 18" guns firing 2000lb shells are the same thing. I mean yeah, technically both guns but Jesus, there's a difference!) Anyway, I told him before the war I thought it was a bad idea and the course of events would show who was right. I turned out to be right but he doesn't accept it.
He's conceded "Obongo the Magic Negro" is going to win this election and predicted all sorts of dire consequences. I smiled and said "Well, either things are going to be great, turn to shit, or just muddle along as they have been. Best case, worst case, or middle case. The course of events will show us what will happen and we'll see who's right." I think he's going to be facing unprecedented obstructionism from the right, making Clinton's years look like a cake-walk. The Republicans are going to throw every monkey-wrench they can find so that they won't just predict Obama's failure, they'll ensure it. I do think Obama is up to the challenge. But if he fucks himself and by extension us like Clinton, I'll admit it and condemn him for it. If things go swimmingly over the next four years and we have a complete turnaround, I doubt my dad will be willing to admit it. He'll be looking under every rock to find a bug and prove that everything is thus completely horrible.
Old Ted had better be watching his ass, lest his own tubes get clogged.
Maybe he should eat more fiber.
...keep all of our best and brightest in one location. What could possibly go wrong?
When the oil runs out, they'll be kicking the asses of the marauding biker gangs with their soy-powered roadsters?
Typically these rockets are more efficient than their chemical cousins. For a given reactant mass, rockets will give you more thrust (can't get into orbit with anything but rockets at this point) but the plasma and ion engines are more efficient, low-thrust but higher change in velocity (delta-v.)
As it was described, a mars mission using an ion engine would not leave the space station with a dramatic blast of flame. The captain would say "turn the engine on," go, get coffee, watch a movie, look out the window and still be able to wave back to people at the station. Tune back in three weeks later and he'll be moving at a clip that would make chemical rockets weep in jealousy.
John McCain's own polling gives him hope, an aide says
When John McCain insisted, during his appearance Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press," that he was doing "just fine" in a presidential race in which the polls have shown Barack Obama with a steady lead over the last few weeks, many may have dismissed the comment as just something that a candidate has to say.
Not so, said a campaign official who spoke on background with The Times' Bob Drogin. The aide said the campaign's internal polling showed McCain down only 4 percentage points nationally -- a sharp improvement from a week ago -- and closing fast.
State-by-state, the private polling also showed McCain up 1 point in Ohio, North Carolina, Florida and Missouri, and behind by only 3 points in Virginia (a new Washington Post survey found him down 8 there).
McCain almost assuredly needs to capture all five states to win the presidency. And even that may not be enough if he fails to win Pennsylvania, one of his campaign stops today. Without Pennsylvania, McCain needs to pull more electoral votes out of some combination of Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico or Iowa -- all states where, as of now, the internal numbers look bleak.
The anonymous McCain official argued a comeback remains doable. "Check with me Wednesday," the aide said. "If we're still within the margin of error (in polling), we're going to win."
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2008/10/john-mccains-ow.html
Just like the last two times.
Flanking is valuable because of KISS - when the enemy has to cover his 12 and his 6 at the same time, vs. two of your units that only have to cover their 12, he covers both less adeptly than he would cover one. It's a win for you.
But you have to consider you fight with the army you have. Fake retreats are an enormously successful tactic. Act like your formation is breaking into flight, the enemy breaks their ranks to chase you down, your formation then reforms a line behind the hill, backed up with missile troops the enemy didn't know you have, now the enemy is out of defensive position and can be attacked with a higher chance of success. The Mongols used these tactics to great effect.
This simply would not work with less than a superbly drilled and disciplined army, i.e. your typical feudal levy. There's a fine line between acting like you're retreating in disarray and truly retreating in disarray. Individual soldiers want to live and nobody wants to be risking death on the battlefield after the day has already been decided. If a general has a year to whip his soldiers into shape before taking them into battle, he can make them do whatever he wants. Hell, just turning an infantry line 90 degrees while on a parade ground without breaking ranks is difficult, let alone when under fire. If the general doesn't have the luxury of training, if he's forced to fight with a pick-up team that was assembled last week, he simply must use the most KISS-like tactics possible because trying to get any fancier would ensure confusion and defeat.
If you want a football analogy for this, there's a beautiful video on youtube, it's a college football game where the greatest play ever made was made. One team runs the ball clear back up the field for a touchdown. What made it so great was the lateral passing involved. I've never watched much football but from what I've seen of it, the only guy throwing the ball is the QB. At most I've seen other people fumble it and the other team gain possession, that's it. In this play, there's like five or six lateral passes as runners are boxed in by the opposing team, they would pass the ball to someone who's open and the march down the field would continue. The defenders couldn't figure out where the ball was because it was moving so quickly, everyone scrambling for position and just being out of place. The far end of the field already had a marching band on it since everyone had assumed the game was just about over and the offense just smashes through the tubas and makes a touchdown.
As it was explained to me, you don't see that kind of thing in football that much because there's too many ways for it to go wrong. Some of those lateral passes were thrown blind, there was no telling who might be under it. They got lucky. As it was, the winning team had players who were also on the rugby team and so they were well-drilled in this style of play and could bring something unusual to the field. But again, they also got lucky. Other teams have tried making use of this sort of play and it just never works out right, especially when the other teams expect it and know how to counter it.