You are right that "the game of yore" is looked at mostly with rosy colored glasses, but not for the correct reason IMHO. There were as much stinker , maybe more , in the past than there is now. But on the other hand you can't say the mechanic got more complex today. GUI and graphic got more compelx, this is right. You can't compare, say, a planescape torment graphic with a mass effect. But on the complexity, the depth of the game, I would wager that a lot of game of yore , the best one, are quite more complex that most twitch game of today. Mass effect as PRG touted as it was, is really a simple shooter with a few dialogue/rpg elements added it to sweet the deal. Bioshock ? Ditto. What reach maybe the same complexity is oblivion and NWN2.
All in all I would say that today's game have a tendency to reach a wider audience and be slightly less down in complexity, but higher in quality. But more important, the barrier to entry to compete to the top, is TODAY unwindable for an amateur. It was not so when graphic were not so complex.
You realize that diesel engine were originaly made to run on vegetable oil, right ? when it was presented at the universal fair (1910?) diesel did not have any petroleum product in mind, he had the german farmer in mind as producer of the fuel source. It is only later when petroleum was found to be more convenient that we switched to use diesel from petroleum refinement. I can imagine a biofuel engine running on vegetable oils instead of ethanol.
Reiser also acknowledged that he and his wife had fought and that he had strangled her, a source familiar with the investigation said.
So the blood in the car and in the house were...red herring ? He was convicted on something which actually did not happen ? (it might also be that the "source" is blowing hot air).
you actively believe t5here is no god. You have faith there is no god. I don't believe actively there is no god. I am saying I am waiting for falsification/evidence of its existence, until then I put it in the same category as pink flying unicorn, ice breathing dragons, santa claus. In other word my atheism is not based on faith at all. Thus the argument that atheism is based on faith is a false over generalization (and the argument it is a religion is even wronger). QED.
You really want to misuse a law , set a precedent, just to get revenge on somebody ? It ain't even a slippery slope, it is a whole pandora box. It does not matter for me if she was hitler after a sex change herself, misuse of a bad law is misuse, and anybody whatever the degree of their guilt driven to prison by misuse of a law should be released immediately. That you suddenly for the sake of a revenge think this is OK to misuse the law open the door to god-knows-what.
Not really. Agnostic says that the truth is unknowable and thus don't take a position. Atheist comes in two group , the strong and weak one. One of them says there is no proof of existence of god and there cannot be. The other says , until you bring proof of existence of God, I won't believe in it just as I don't believe in pink flying unicorn or whatever mythological object, NO FAITH in non-existence is involved here, just plain skepticism of unfalsifiable things. You are using the first definition whereas the GP was using the other one. Both exists. And Atheism is INDEED no religion, just like not-collecting-stamp is not a hobby.
I do not mount the hard drive. The point is actually NOT to have a hard drive attached, else I would use WUBI or install ubuntu directly. so.... "it's quite possible that a virus will trash your devices (you do have a hard drive attached, right?). Plus, being a live CD everything is going to be run as root." There is nothing to trash to begin with, nothing interesting to exploit (maybe the BIOS and even that....).
Were live-CD browser like firefox taken into account ? I have been using Gutsy Gibbon live CD for a long time, and it is naturally not an updated version, which anyway I would not care for since there is nothing to exploit on my CD. Same for all people browsing from a VM.
As pointed out by the long post below, other sources include but are not limited to : a huge proportion of the foreign media, foreign countries, UN inspectors.
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
I have NO IDEA on how fast ice melt, and I am a physicist (*). I bet whatever you want the average joe on the street won't have an idea either. As for knowing a ton is huge... Well no shit sherlock. Does that help your average A/C unit buyer ? Not at all. On the other hand, 3.5 kwh means I know how much I will pay on my next electricity bill (which are not counted in tons). And that tell 95% of the world how much energy will the A/C unit consume. And I bet your average US consumer would be more happier knowing one A/C consume 3.5 kwh than 2 tons for the same aforementioned reason. Combine that with a clearly defined efficiency and you are all set.
(*) but I can talk to your hours long about boring forbidden transition n-sigma*
When thinking of the GeStaPo (Geheime Staat Polizei) Most people will remember the torture , the sending to concentration camp, the executions, the kidnapping and nobody see you again, rather than the petty search in secret. You know, like nearly all security/spionnage agency of the world are doing right now, like DGSE, CIA, And sometimes even the police in the middle of an inquiry when they don't want to alert the perp etc...
I know that travel and landing is auto-piloted. I dunno for take off, but I don't think it could not be done. And frankly, I trust far more an autopilot than a real one, in a "normal" situation as a machine is more able to get it right all the time without potential of error. Now if there is an emergency/abnormal landing then I would trust the pilot more.
It is easy to be critical of the government. It is another can of worm to have a well grounded criticism. Anybody can say "bush sux", but it takes a bit more to ground this , with for example "bush sux because he led us in a trillion dollar war and changed irak to a hotbed of anti american hate" or something. I think what the GP was saying is not that it is wrong to criticism science, government, but rather that criticism is usually of the first kind. Just like the criticism of Louisiana of evolution is , well, not that well founded.
The above was a different can of worm on "skepticism", it was not linked to any data or science, but rather to cultural problem. One could certainly argue succesfully that it is in no way linked to current cliemtn change skepticism, as this skepticism is linked in NO data whatsoever, just like skepticism against semmelweiß theory was not linked to data. In other word, your example is not an example of a crowd being wrong, but an example of a crowd ignoring data and science. In other word it is a perfect example for climate change on the contrary to what you think.
Furthermore comparing temperature trend which are calculated over 10's of years and requesting people make a prediction on average each year is STUPID. Repeat after me, it is STUPID if your variance can be higher than your trend, which is the freaking case with climate change temperature prediction (0.2 ) and year to year temperature average which can reach more than that. A more doable prediction would be to predict that the trend will continue in the next 10 years, no matter if there are anomalous peak or depth.
You make it sound as if only the chinese were emitting soot. Actually this is both india and china are contributing 35% of the soot. Remember we are speaking of roughly 2+ billion people out of 6, so roughly 1/3 of the population contributing to 1/3 of the soot. I tried to google for the US contribution, but did not find anything relevant, but it would interesting to know.
But even worst for your theory is this (article): "Forty percent of soot comes from the same sources as greenhouses gases, notably the burning of coal and oil, and will only be reduced as quickly or slowly as economies become less carbon intensive. But the remaining 60 percent of black carbon in the atmosphere comes from the more easily altered practices of burning biofuels and forests, the authors say.".
So in other word we are only looking at 40% of the carbon emission from both china and India due to the economic increase for those aforementioned 35%. The rest seems to be from wood burning, domestic use (I dispute that this would be easily changed btw). But the real killer for the "china=reasponsible" mantra many seem to sing is this : ""Providing alternative energy-efficient and smoke-free cookers, and introducing transferring technology for reducing soot emissions from coal combustion in small industries could have major impacts" on reducing soot's role in global warming, they conclude. Such measures would result in a 70-80 percent reduction in heating caused by black carbon in south Asia, and a 20-40 percent cut in China, according to the study.
The authors caution, however, that soot reduction can only help delay unprecedented climate change, which is due primarily to CO2 emissions".
In other word, a country responsibility to global GW can still be measured by the carbon footprint per head that its inhabitant left in the past, and by absolute emission today. Which make the US quite responsible for the last few 10s of years , and we can start pointing finger at China, which can then point finger back at the US and EU which jump started their economy and wealth over the back of everybody else and now want to curb everything.
In other word it is way more complicated that you make it.
PS: what I found most interesting is the life time of soot in the atmosphere is 1 week. In other word this is a problem which could be quickly solved by all party, but NOT a solution to the Climate Change.
UK population : 60 million. So to get a similar figure to the US we need to multiply by 6. 60K handgun crime in the UK , compared to 500K. Unless I missing something, handgun crime in the US is still 8 time higher than in the UK. So even if there was a rise from 6K to 12K at peak (it went down to 9K recently for 2007), the rate of handgun crime is still way higher in the US, so it ain't really utterly convincing that handgun really help fighting crime, or a ban thereof is REALLY the reason the number of crime related to handgun, or even homeowner invasion rose. PS: to the guy citing a 2001 statistic , nice try. How about citing a recent statistic ? It took me 10 seconds to enter handgun crime statistic UK and clicking the first links.
One interessant fact is that in the US, handgun crime dropped by 50% since 1993. Now I would like to know if really during that time MORE city imposed handgun restriction or LESS (yes I know correlation would not imply causation, but that would certainly be a good angle to research , no matter on which side of the issue you feel yourself).
I have got a few scares on my body which tell me that such people should lose more than their license, and that rather quickly at the second offense, if not even first. To all those cell phone user in car, speeder, and so on : get lost.
The GGGP do not do that. He let them OVERTAKE him, and then only he overtake them and leave a good distance between them and him. Although I disagree with the GGGP method, don't paint them worst than they really are.
I knew from about the youngest age that the bottom line is "don't get caught". If I recall correctly, this is why sociologist think this is the main reason we invented "allmighty gods with after death judgement and punishment". So that the majority would follow the line, instead of having the majority of people misusing the societal resource as long as they don't get caught.
If you take something like only 1% of the gun incident get reported (a far cry from your 99.99% or 0.01% reported) and look at the statistic, then you suddenly get an enormous amount of gun incident. Which make no sense unless you have gun blazing all the day long. A similar statistic I disputed was the one from the NRA pretending that every year 800000 rape are avoided (or so was claimed by a NRA member), which is roughly 20 time the rape rate per year in the US (800K=~0.7 percent as opposed to 34.2 per 100000 for rape). To put it in perspective one of the worst country with has got a 0.12% rape rate per year (I think it is South Africa). So NRA was pretending in essence that attempted rape rate in the US was nearly 1 women out of 150 roughly per year, AND 6 time the worst rape rate of the worst country on earth for which statistic is available.
Your claim is about as good as the same above. You pretend that gun stops incident and thus are not reported is about the same quality : zero evidence of that happening. On the other hand there is a well documented amount of incident which would not be happening if gun were restricted (all domestic incident involving non intended wounding/killing by firearm). I am not saying that the US and NRA are inherently wrong with their support of weapon for people in absolute (I personnally dislike gun and would be distraught at them being available freely by anybody, but this is a personal preference based on my own culture, and not a real "scientific" opinion on whether really a society with freely available gun is better off), but using fake statistic and pulled out of a dark place numbers certainly make you seem to have a very weak position, since you need to made up fact for it.
Now I wish moderator could also post somehow the why and how of their moderation. Because with my best will I cannot understand how this was modded flamebait. It certainly use sarcasm to point out that the "good guy with riffle" of the parent was not realistic, but it certainly don't call for a flamebait mod... Can one of the other poster explain why I was modded flamebait ?
Slashdot Mirror
You are right that "the game of yore" is looked at mostly with rosy colored glasses, but not for the correct reason IMHO. There were as much stinker , maybe more , in the past than there is now. But on the other hand you can't say the mechanic got more complex today. GUI and graphic got more compelx, this is right. You can't compare, say, a planescape torment graphic with a mass effect. But on the complexity, the depth of the game, I would wager that a lot of game of yore , the best one, are quite more complex that most twitch game of today. Mass effect as PRG touted as it was, is really a simple shooter with a few dialogue/rpg elements added it to sweet the deal. Bioshock ? Ditto. What reach maybe the same complexity is oblivion and NWN2.
All in all I would say that today's game have a tendency to reach a wider audience and be slightly less down in complexity, but higher in quality. But more important, the barrier to entry to compete to the top, is TODAY unwindable for an amateur. It was not so when graphic were not so complex.
You realize that diesel engine were originaly made to run on vegetable oil, right ? when it was presented at the universal fair (1910?) diesel did not have any petroleum product in mind, he had the german farmer in mind as producer of the fuel source. It is only later when petroleum was found to be more convenient that we switched to use diesel from petroleum refinement. I can imagine a biofuel engine running on vegetable oils instead of ethanol.
I thought that this was actually a myth and U.S. ISP don't have a common carrier status.
Reiser also acknowledged that he and his wife had fought and that he had strangled her, a source familiar with the investigation said.
...red herring ? He was convicted on something which actually did not happen ? (it might also be that the "source" is blowing hot air).
So the blood in the car and in the house were
you actively believe t5here is no god. You have faith there is no god. I don't believe actively there is no god. I am saying I am waiting for falsification/evidence of its existence, until then I put it in the same category as pink flying unicorn, ice breathing dragons, santa claus. In other word my atheism is not based on faith at all. Thus the argument that atheism is based on faith is a false over generalization (and the argument it is a religion is even wronger). QED.
You really want to misuse a law , set a precedent, just to get revenge on somebody ? It ain't even a slippery slope, it is a whole pandora box. It does not matter for me if she was hitler after a sex change herself, misuse of a bad law is misuse, and anybody whatever the degree of their guilt driven to prison by misuse of a law should be released immediately. That you suddenly for the sake of a revenge think this is OK to misuse the law open the door to god-knows-what.
Not really. Agnostic says that the truth is unknowable and thus don't take a position. Atheist comes in two group , the strong and weak one. One of them says there is no proof of existence of god and there cannot be. The other says , until you bring proof of existence of God, I won't believe in it just as I don't believe in pink flying unicorn or whatever mythological object, NO FAITH in non-existence is involved here, just plain skepticism of unfalsifiable things. You are using the first definition whereas the GP was using the other one. Both exists. And Atheism is INDEED no religion, just like not-collecting-stamp is not a hobby.
I do not mount the hard drive. The point is actually NOT to have a hard drive attached, else I would use WUBI or install ubuntu directly. so.... "it's quite possible that a virus will trash your devices (you do have a hard drive attached, right?). Plus, being a live CD everything is going to be run as root." There is nothing to trash to begin with, nothing interesting to exploit (maybe the BIOS and even that....).
Were live-CD browser like firefox taken into account ? I have been using Gutsy Gibbon live CD for a long time, and it is naturally not an updated version, which anyway I would not care for since there is nothing to exploit on my CD. Same for all people browsing from a VM.
As pointed out by the long post below, other sources include but are not limited to : a huge proportion of the foreign media, foreign countries, UN inspectors.
The reason a ton is useful is that people know how fast ice melts. They know (roughly) that a ton is a heckuva lot of ice. When you tell them your A/C is a "2 ton unit" they can then get an idea of how much energy is used - a lot more than just mentioning a figure in kW.
I have NO IDEA on how fast ice melt, and I am a physicist (*). I bet whatever you want the average joe on the street won't have an idea either. As for knowing a ton is huge... Well no shit sherlock. Does that help your average A/C unit buyer ? Not at all. On the other hand, 3.5 kwh means I know how much I will pay on my next electricity bill (which are not counted in tons). And that tell 95% of the world how much energy will the A/C unit consume. And I bet your average US consumer would be more happier knowing one A/C consume 3.5 kwh than 2 tons for the same aforementioned reason. Combine that with a clearly defined efficiency and you are all set.
(*) but I can talk to your hours long about boring forbidden transition n-sigma*
and strike anyone who has accepted money from the entertainment cartels or their lobbyists.
So... You are advising him not to vote at all ?
When thinking of the GeStaPo (Geheime Staat Polizei) Most people will remember the torture , the sending to concentration camp, the executions, the kidnapping and nobody see you again, rather than the petty search in secret. You know, like nearly all security/spionnage agency of the world are doing right now, like DGSE, CIA, And sometimes even the police in the middle of an inquiry when they don't want to alert the perp etc...
Only if the protocol are locked down to a few and known. And it only works if no jitter is intentionally added for non time critical applications.
I know that travel and landing is auto-piloted. I dunno for take off, but I don't think it could not be done. And frankly, I trust far more an autopilot than a real one, in a "normal" situation as a machine is more able to get it right all the time without potential of error. Now if there is an emergency/abnormal landing then I would trust the pilot more.
It is easy to be critical of the government. It is another can of worm to have a well grounded criticism. Anybody can say "bush sux", but it takes a bit more to ground this , with for example "bush sux because he led us in a trillion dollar war and changed irak to a hotbed of anti american hate" or something. I think what the GP was saying is not that it is wrong to criticism science, government, but rather that criticism is usually of the first kind. Just like the criticism of Louisiana of evolution is , well, not that well founded.
The above was a different can of worm on "skepticism", it was not linked to any data or science, but rather to cultural problem. One could certainly argue succesfully that it is in no way linked to current cliemtn change skepticism, as this skepticism is linked in NO data whatsoever, just like skepticism against semmelweiß theory was not linked to data. In other word, your example is not an example of a crowd being wrong, but an example of a crowd ignoring data and science. In other word it is a perfect example for climate change on the contrary to what you think.
Furthermore comparing temperature trend which are calculated over 10's of years and requesting people make a prediction on average each year is STUPID. Repeat after me, it is STUPID if your variance can be higher than your trend, which is the freaking case with climate change temperature prediction (0.2 ) and year to year temperature average which can reach more than that. A more doable prediction would be to predict that the trend will continue in the next 10 years, no matter if there are anomalous peak or depth.
You make it sound as if only the chinese were emitting soot. Actually this is both india and china are contributing 35% of the soot. Remember we are speaking of roughly 2+ billion people out of 6, so roughly 1/3 of the population contributing to 1/3 of the soot. I tried to google for the US contribution, but did not find anything relevant, but it would interesting to know.
:
But even worst for your theory is this (article)
"Forty percent of soot comes from the same sources as greenhouses gases, notably the burning of coal and oil, and will only be reduced as quickly or slowly as economies become less carbon intensive. But the remaining 60 percent of black carbon in the atmosphere comes from the more easily altered practices of burning biofuels and forests, the authors say.".
So in other word we are only looking at 40% of the carbon emission from both china and India due to the economic increase for those aforementioned 35%. The rest seems to be from wood burning, domestic use (I dispute that this would be easily changed btw). But the real killer for the "china=reasponsible" mantra many seem to sing is this :
""Providing alternative energy-efficient and smoke-free cookers, and introducing transferring technology for reducing soot emissions from coal combustion in small industries could have major impacts" on reducing soot's role in global warming, they conclude. Such measures would result in a 70-80 percent reduction in heating caused by black carbon in south Asia, and a 20-40 percent cut in China, according to the study. The authors caution, however, that soot reduction can only help delay unprecedented climate change, which is due primarily to CO2 emissions".
In other word, a country responsibility to global GW can still be measured by the carbon footprint per head that its inhabitant left in the past, and by absolute emission today. Which make the US quite responsible for the last few 10s of years , and we can start pointing finger at China, which can then point finger back at the US and EU which jump started their economy and wealth over the back of everybody else and now want to curb everything.
In other word it is way more complicated that you make it.
PS: what I found most interesting is the life time of soot in the atmosphere is 1 week. In other word this is a problem which could be quickly solved by all party, but NOT a solution to the Climate Change.
To you and the people answered you :
12000 at the peak in UK Same statistic for the US : 500000 victims
UK population : 60 million. So to get a similar figure to the US we need to multiply by 6. 60K handgun crime in the UK , compared to 500K. Unless I missing something, handgun crime in the US is still 8 time higher than in the UK. So even if there was a rise from 6K to 12K at peak (it went down to 9K recently for 2007), the rate of handgun crime is still way higher in the US, so it ain't really utterly convincing that handgun really help fighting crime, or a ban thereof is REALLY the reason the number of crime related to handgun, or even homeowner invasion rose. PS: to the guy citing a 2001 statistic , nice try. How about citing a recent statistic ? It took me 10 seconds to enter handgun crime statistic UK and clicking the first links.
One interessant fact is that in the US, handgun crime dropped by 50% since 1993. Now I would like to know if really during that time MORE city imposed handgun restriction or LESS (yes I know correlation would not imply causation, but that would certainly be a good angle to research , no matter on which side of the issue you feel yourself).
I have got a few scares on my body which tell me that such people should lose more than their license, and that rather quickly at the second offense, if not even first. To all those cell phone user in car, speeder, and so on : get lost.
The GGGP do not do that. He let them OVERTAKE him, and then only he overtake them and leave a good distance between them and him. Although I disagree with the GGGP method, don't paint them worst than they really are.
I knew from about the youngest age that the bottom line is "don't get caught". If I recall correctly, this is why sociologist think this is the main reason we invented "allmighty gods with after death judgement and punishment". So that the majority would follow the line, instead of having the majority of people misusing the societal resource as long as they don't get caught.
All will agree that this is fair use if drudge retort quote 79 words out of 790. But this is less defensible if the quote is 79 words out of say, 91.
If you take something like only 1% of the gun incident get reported (a far cry from your 99.99% or 0.01% reported) and look at the statistic, then you suddenly get an enormous amount of gun incident. Which make no sense unless you have gun blazing all the day long. A similar statistic I disputed was the one from the NRA pretending that every year 800000 rape are avoided (or so was claimed by a NRA member), which is roughly 20 time the rape rate per year in the US (800K=~0.7 percent as opposed to 34.2 per 100000 for rape). To put it in perspective one of the worst country with has got a 0.12% rape rate per year (I think it is South Africa). So NRA was pretending in essence that attempted rape rate in the US was nearly 1 women out of 150 roughly per year, AND 6 time the worst rape rate of the worst country on earth for which statistic is available.
Your claim is about as good as the same above. You pretend that gun stops incident and thus are not reported is about the same quality : zero evidence of that happening. On the other hand there is a well documented amount of incident which would not be happening if gun were restricted (all domestic incident involving non intended wounding/killing by firearm). I am not saying that the US and NRA are inherently wrong with their support of weapon for people in absolute (I personnally dislike gun and would be distraught at them being available freely by anybody, but this is a personal preference based on my own culture, and not a real "scientific" opinion on whether really a society with freely available gun is better off), but using fake statistic and pulled out of a dark place numbers certainly make you seem to have a very weak position, since you need to made up fact for it.
Now I wish moderator could also post somehow the why and how of their moderation. Because with my best will I cannot understand how this was modded flamebait. It certainly use sarcasm to point out that the "good guy with riffle" of the parent was not realistic, but it certainly don't call for a flamebait mod... Can one of the other poster explain why I was modded flamebait ?