IIRC, the Rooskies supposedly used a blinding laser against a passing US ship in one of the daily near bump-and-grinds between the navies, with several sailors partially blinded, but that the US hushed it up because the Rooskies are our friends now. Saw it on TV on an evening 60 minutes clone so it must be true.
> How inhumane is this, when compared to fuel-air
> munitions, etc?
A good point. (Interestingly, I learned the daisy cutters were not fuel air devices, but rather conventional high explosives. The reason is that it is too difficult to disperse the fuel into the air above a certain size, and the explosive power desired was just requiring too much material for dispersion.)
The intellectually embarassing parent grandparent post shows how irrational arguments will be to support irrational, indefensible viewpoints.
The US is evil, so we must create arguments that "group by nonessentials" in order to conjure up an invalid association.
Japan, a militaristic dictatorship without freedoms, broke some treaties and things were Bad.
Germany, a militaristic dictatorship without freedoms, broke some treaties and things were Bad.
Therefore, the US, who hasn't broken treaties, and even saying they bent some is stretching it, therefore will become a militaristic dictatorship without freedoms.
That American soldier just punched that German concentration camp guard after viewing thousands of starving prisoners and seeing the extermination chambers. Those evil Americans!
Bush was very gracious to extend the Convention to the captured Taliban who, though not wearing uniforms, were nevertheless official government troops.
> These Muslims are simple folk who believe that
> if you kill in the name of your god, and win,
> that proves your god is more powerful.
Arthur: Brother Maynard! Bring up the Holy Robot Plane Laser Remote Control of Antioch.
Maynard: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine to twenty-one.
Second Brother: And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the cheeseburgers and taquitos and toasted pop tarts and untoasted pop tarts and dorito three dees, even though they be a bit icky, and corn dogs and cheese stuffed crust pizza and pepperoni stuffed crust pizza and cheese and pepperoni st
Maynard: Skip a bit, Brother.
Second Brother: First thou shall insert the Radio Shack 9 volt into the controller. Then shalt thou twizzle the joystick. Thou shalt not twist the joystick, nor turn it, nor shalt thou wiggle it, excepting as to begin the twizzling. Once the twizzling is reached, then pilotist thou they Holy Robot Plane Laser Remote Control of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
You are correct, your parent poster's worldview is under tremendous assault. When one's worldview is shown to be illogical, one reacts with anger as a mental last line of defense against something one has an enormous emotional investment in.
The US must be evil, you see. We've been believing that in our little intellectually conceited cliques for decades now. Blowing up a bus of children is really just an understandible, if irrational, response to US evil. All those starving children in Iran? Yes, Saddam could direct his money to save them. He doesn't, so the US is evil because it refuses to give more aid that will be redirected, too, see? See how that works? We should have only used sanctions, but sanctions are bad, see?
"By clicking here, you acknowledge this website is not responsible for any heart attacks or strokes you may receive as a result of the physical activity of clicking on things on this web site, nor will you hold this web site responsible for deep vein thrombosis caused by extended periods sitting and viewing this web site. We recommend you get up and stretch and walk around for at least 10 minutes every hour."
Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazines have savaged this study, listing many holes a trickster could use to gain information.
Also, if I recall, the control group against which he was measured (to show he did much better) was asked incorrect questions. He would make a statement that happened to be correct ("Joe is your brother") and the control would be asked "Who is Joe"? Not guessing the brother was considered wrong for the control group.
Given the cold reading guessing, that was likened to him being able to shoot an arrow at a target blindly, then the control group would have to Robin Hood his arrow, regardless of where it was stuck.
There are plenty of E-mail programs that will auto-hyperlinkize a (non-escaped) URL.
In fact, all the hoopla about Microsoft's auto-hyperlinking of words to their own dictionary is non-inline (may be inline internally prior to feeding it to the HTML renderer) to the original data stream.
Anyone remember Hypercard/Supercard from the Mac? (Do they still exist?) You could hyperlink stuff way back when. The web is more than a little reminiscent of that.
Reminds me of the color photographs from the mid-1800's reprinted in National Geographic last year.
Color? Not possible.
Actually, the guy took 3 pictures through 3 filtered lenses, then to display them, projected them through 3 lenses on a screen. Ne'er seen as a printed image till 150 years later.
That's the secondary reason for keeping the jury system -- the government will have to explain the law sufficiently that the common person can understand it.
The primary reason, of course, being jury nullification, one of the checks and balances people have over the three rings.
Keep in mind that, assuming the game is roughly on track, that the last few months are left to optimization (especially important for a 3D game), bug fixing, and installation-bug-fixing for all manner of CPU setups out there.
It's no wonder this closed preview (that's why it was closed) gave a rough time. It should have come with a huge list of issues and a phone number to call for installation problems. Your review should have known about this (and many "preview copies" reviews I read mention as much that they won't criticise bugs, poor performance, lacking features, and so on.)
Now when a hunk of crap like Tribes II gets to the store as official, final product, and I get 10fps with all settings on lowest such that I can only play D with everything looking like a mud blob, then that is definitely deserving of a poor review.
But remember that games AI is on the crest of acting like a six year old.
It will shoot wildly, and run away when shot at, hiding in a closet, and think the Hulk can beat Superman, and that Spiderman can beat them both, and that is somehow an improvement over current nonsentient autofollow, autoaim, dodging, seeing-thru-walls-cheating that-hand-Thresh-his-head-on-a-platter-bots.
And we all know how good a six year old would be at Starcraft or Total Annhilation.
The Colecovision (especially ADAM) was the record holder in vaporware, with dozens of titles that never made it to cartridge or "supertape".
But that's not the point here. The point is the official Colecovision magazine, which was a dozen pages of a mailed advertisement.
It had these precious features:
- Bursts everywhere with words saying "You have to have this!" and "You've got to have this!" and "Everyone else has this!"
- A portion talking about Donkey Kong that had a paper sticker over part of the article with a newly-written paragraph. Upon carefully peeling up the sticker, you saw the original paragraph had a reference to how Donkey Kong "retells the King Kong story", oops, sorry, King Kong is copyrighted, and we're having a tough enough time fighting off lawsuits over a giant ape game...
- Reviews of things like the supertape version of the awesome cartridge Smurfs game, or the soon coming T-bone Powers game (whatever it was called) or the Tunnels and Trolls game, or blah blah blah.
The only cosmic thing from that game was the cosmic justice that Coleco went bankrupt over it after it ate up all the profits of even the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Advertising goes for a lot more than just games magazines. Witness a fashion magazine with an article (not a layout) about a fashion model or a teen mag with an article about Sarah Michelle Gellar, only to see ads with them covering the very expensive first few pages and foldouts.
Anyway, previews are also not the most accurate. I have an issue of some old games magazine that lists "Quake killers"
- Diakatana (it will r00l!)
- Sin (it will r00l!)
- Half Life (it will be an also-ran, look at that boring looking single scene, a guy standing in a doorway.)
- Duke Nukem 4 (it will be released soon!)
- Another I can't remember, probably for what would be an obvious reason.
I acknowledge that fact. I just never pass up a chance to take a dig at heavy handed socialism posing as rights, we're here from the government and we're here to help you. The listing of rights is a piece of work that describes current EU nations' laws as being a damned near perfect instantiation of a damned near perfect set of rights. Urrrrp.
When the prelude talked about rights cause you to have responsibilities, I knew they weren't just talking about "your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." It's good and healthy to have a serious problem with a concept of rights that forces others to do anything other than simply leave you the hell alone.
> would inevitably result in a society with
> much higher voter turnout, and less strict laws
> - I bet marijuana would become legal quickly,
> for example.
You have to be careful with this. Live by the populist sword, die by the populist sword. Homosexuality might be made even more illegal. Your children might say the Lord's Prayer at school every morning whether they wanted to or not. Evolution might not be taught in schools, but that a god waved his hand 10k years ago, and that all dinosaur bones are fakes created by the Devil would be.
And of course, there's the always popular "those evil Jewish businessmen", or it's (somewhat more) modern version "those evil Generic businessmen" ruining your life...just authorize me the authority to bonk them over the head, and I'll make your life better -- I promise!
Actually, if you view a multitude of laws as being more for the purpose of giving the government something to hold you for at its whim, then a transparent society would be hideous.
There are thousands of old laws that never expire and never get repealed. There are thousands of other laws that are not really intended to be enforced but are passed to please the masses (witness, for example, laws against sodomy.)
If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I would think this was some high school student's term paper of what he considers deep political philosophy.
It says you have the "right to liberty". Yet:
- Consider article 14 "the right to education"
"This right includes the possibility to receive free compulsory education."
That is possibly the worst 1984/Brave New World NewSpeak I have ever heard. Your "right to education" includes the power to force others, at the point of a gun, to cough up cash to hire teachers, and here is the precious part your right includes the power of others to force you to partake of that education.
Every single one of these "rights" is exercised as permitted by law, which is to say, it isn't a right. Witness article 16 "The freedom to conduct a business in accordance with Community law and national laws and practices is recognized."
What the hell does that mean other than there is no right other than what the governments allow? Almost all the described "rights" are these non-rights that exist as designed by law.
"No one may be deprived of his or her posessions, except in the public interest"
"Public interest" is a nonsense phrase that means "whenever the government feels like" because the governments are defined as agents of the public. Would not a US government lawyer have dreams of a phrase like "use of property may be regulated by law in so far as is necessary for the general interest"?
Can anyone please propose any possible thing a government may do that could not be argued is in the "general" or "public" interest?
Other idiocy at random:
"The Union recognizes...the rights of the elderly...to participate in social and cultural life."
Notice the brutish absence of the right of the elderly to continue working past mandatory retirement ages. It's couched in their leading "a life of dignity and independence", i.e. you're done working now, here's your monthly check, don't try to work or we'll have to un-dignify you.
"The right of so-and-so is inviolable, as is permitted through national laws governing its exercise."
This clownish listing of "rights" does little more than wrap current national laws of EU with a piece of wet bread that justifies, indeed holds holy, the current laws. "A right to a free job placement service"? Puh-leeze.
Any conjured up right that restricts the government's power over me is a welcome thing in my opinion.
I'm eagerly awaiting the right not to be forced to join the government's health care plan because of someone other person's fantasy that it's better for me and they're so convinced they'll jail me if I don't go for it.
Slashdot Mirror
IIRC, the Rooskies supposedly used a blinding laser against a passing US ship in one of the daily near bump-and-grinds between the navies, with several sailors partially blinded, but that the US hushed it up because the Rooskies are our friends now. Saw it on TV on an evening 60 minutes clone so it must be true.
> How inhumane is this, when compared to fuel-air
> munitions, etc?
A good point. (Interestingly, I learned the daisy cutters were not fuel air devices, but rather conventional high explosives. The reason is that it is too difficult to disperse the fuel into the air above a certain size, and the explosive power desired was just requiring too much material for dispersion.)
Yes.
The intellectually embarassing parent grandparent post shows how irrational arguments will be to support irrational, indefensible viewpoints.
The US is evil, so we must create arguments that "group by nonessentials" in order to conjure up an invalid association.
Japan, a militaristic dictatorship without freedoms, broke some treaties and things were Bad.
Germany, a militaristic dictatorship without freedoms, broke some treaties and things were Bad.
Therefore, the US, who hasn't broken treaties, and even saying they bent some is stretching it, therefore will become a militaristic dictatorship without freedoms.
Uhhhhh, Ok, Mr. Blame America First.
Terminator: Hasta la vista, winner.
That American soldier just punched that German concentration camp guard after viewing thousands of starving prisoners and seeing the extermination chambers. Those evil Americans!
Bush was very gracious to extend the Convention to the captured Taliban who, though not wearing uniforms, were nevertheless official government troops.
> These Muslims are simple folk who believe that
> if you kill in the name of your god, and win,
> that proves your god is more powerful.
Arthur: Brother Maynard! Bring up the Holy Robot Plane Laser Remote Control of Antioch.
Maynard: Armaments, chapter two, verses nine to twenty-one.
Second Brother: And the Lord did grin, and the people did feast upon the cheeseburgers and taquitos and toasted pop tarts and untoasted pop tarts and dorito three dees, even though they be a bit icky, and corn dogs and cheese stuffed crust pizza and pepperoni stuffed crust pizza and cheese and pepperoni st
Maynard: Skip a bit, Brother.
Second Brother: First thou shall insert the Radio Shack 9 volt into the controller. Then shalt thou twizzle the joystick. Thou shalt not twist the joystick, nor turn it, nor shalt thou wiggle it, excepting as to begin the twizzling. Once the twizzling is reached, then pilotist thou they Holy Robot Plane Laser Remote Control of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.
All: Amen
You are correct, your parent poster's worldview is under tremendous assault. When one's worldview is shown to be illogical, one reacts with anger as a mental last line of defense against something one has an enormous emotional investment in.
The US must be evil, you see. We've been believing that in our little intellectually conceited cliques for decades now. Blowing up a bus of children is really just an understandible, if irrational, response to US evil. All those starving children in Iran? Yes, Saddam could direct his money to save them. He doesn't, so the US is evil because it refuses to give more aid that will be redirected, too, see? See how that works? We should have only used sanctions, but sanctions are bad, see?
Well, at least they could give James Spader his job back now. He isn't doing much of note lately.
Enemy Mine?
Umm, anyone ever hear of the brilliant Robinson Crusoe On Mars, fools?
Sheesh, some people have no concept of history and original sources.
More of Lips and less of the mentally challenged, moody space vampire.
"By clicking here, you acknowledge this website is not responsible for any heart attacks or strokes you may receive as a result of the physical activity of clicking on things on this web site, nor will you hold this web site responsible for deep vein thrombosis caused by extended periods sitting and viewing this web site. We recommend you get up and stretch and walk around for at least 10 minutes every hour."
Look at the honkin' disclaimers on the issues with the text and broadband version links. Good god, no wonder she makes a Slashdotter's willie hard.
Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic magazines have savaged this study, listing many holes a trickster could use to gain information.
Also, if I recall, the control group against which he was measured (to show he did much better) was asked incorrect questions. He would make a statement that happened to be correct ("Joe is your brother") and the control would be asked "Who is Joe"? Not guessing the brother was considered wrong for the control group.
Given the cold reading guessing, that was likened to him being able to shoot an arrow at a target blindly, then the control group would have to Robin Hood his arrow, regardless of where it was stuck.
There are plenty of E-mail programs that will auto-hyperlinkize a (non-escaped) URL.
In fact, all the hoopla about Microsoft's auto-hyperlinking of words to their own dictionary is non-inline (may be inline internally prior to feeding it to the HTML renderer) to the original data stream.
Anyone remember Hypercard/Supercard from the Mac? (Do they still exist?) You could hyperlink stuff way back when. The web is more than a little reminiscent of that.
Reminds me of the color photographs from the mid-1800's reprinted in National Geographic last year.
Color? Not possible.
Actually, the guy took 3 pictures through 3 filtered lenses, then to display them, projected them through 3 lenses on a screen. Ne'er seen as a printed image till 150 years later.
That's the secondary reason for keeping the jury system -- the government will have to explain the law sufficiently that the common person can understand it.
The primary reason, of course, being jury nullification, one of the checks and balances people have over the three rings.
Keep in mind that, assuming the game is roughly on track, that the last few months are left to optimization (especially important for a 3D game), bug fixing, and installation-bug-fixing for all manner of CPU setups out there.
It's no wonder this closed preview (that's why it was closed) gave a rough time. It should have come with a huge list of issues and a phone number to call for installation problems. Your review should have known about this (and many "preview copies" reviews I read mention as much that they won't criticise bugs, poor performance, lacking features, and so on.)
Now when a hunk of crap like Tribes II gets to the store as official, final product, and I get 10fps with all settings on lowest such that I can only play D with everything looking like a mud blob, then that is definitely deserving of a poor review.
But remember that games AI is on the crest of acting like a six year old.
It will shoot wildly, and run away when shot at, hiding in a closet, and think the Hulk can beat Superman, and that Spiderman can beat them both, and that is somehow an improvement over current nonsentient autofollow, autoaim, dodging, seeing-thru-walls-cheating that-hand-Thresh-his-head-on-a-platter-bots.
And we all know how good a six year old would be at Starcraft or Total Annhilation.
The Colecovision (especially ADAM) was the record holder in vaporware, with dozens of titles that never made it to cartridge or "supertape".
But that's not the point here. The point is the official Colecovision magazine, which was a dozen pages of a mailed advertisement.
It had these precious features:
- Bursts everywhere with words saying "You have to have this!" and "You've got to have this!" and "Everyone else has this!"
- A portion talking about Donkey Kong that had a paper sticker over part of the article with a newly-written paragraph. Upon carefully peeling up the sticker, you saw the original paragraph had a reference to how Donkey Kong "retells the King Kong story", oops, sorry, King Kong is copyrighted, and we're having a tough enough time fighting off lawsuits over a giant ape game...
- Reviews of things like the supertape version of the awesome cartridge Smurfs game, or the soon coming T-bone Powers game (whatever it was called) or the Tunnels and Trolls game, or blah blah blah.
The only cosmic thing from that game was the cosmic justice that Coleco went bankrupt over it after it ate up all the profits of even the Cabbage Patch Kids.
Advertising goes for a lot more than just games magazines. Witness a fashion magazine with an article (not a layout) about a fashion model or a teen mag with an article about Sarah Michelle Gellar, only to see ads with them covering the very expensive first few pages and foldouts.
Anyway, previews are also not the most accurate. I have an issue of some old games magazine that lists "Quake killers"
- Diakatana (it will r00l!)
- Sin (it will r00l!)
- Half Life (it will be an also-ran, look at that boring looking single scene, a guy standing in a doorway.)
- Duke Nukem 4 (it will be released soon!)
- Another I can't remember, probably for what would be an obvious reason.
etc.
Sounds like the way I used to write my 10th grade English papers.
I acknowledge that fact. I just never pass up a chance to take a dig at heavy handed socialism posing as rights, we're here from the government and we're here to help you. The listing of rights is a piece of work that describes current EU nations' laws as being a damned near perfect instantiation of a damned near perfect set of rights. Urrrrp.
When the prelude talked about rights cause you to have responsibilities, I knew they weren't just talking about "your right to swing your arm ends where my nose begins." It's good and healthy to have a serious problem with a concept of rights that forces others to do anything other than simply leave you the hell alone.
> would inevitably result in a society with
> much higher voter turnout, and less strict laws
> - I bet marijuana would become legal quickly,
> for example.
You have to be careful with this. Live by the populist sword, die by the populist sword. Homosexuality might be made even more illegal. Your children might say the Lord's Prayer at school every morning whether they wanted to or not. Evolution might not be taught in schools, but that a god waved his hand 10k years ago, and that all dinosaur bones are fakes created by the Devil would be.
And of course, there's the always popular "those evil Jewish businessmen", or it's (somewhat more) modern version "those evil Generic businessmen" ruining your life...just authorize me the authority to bonk them over the head, and I'll make your life better -- I promise!
Actually, if you view a multitude of laws as being more for the purpose of giving the government something to hold you for at its whim, then a transparent society would be hideous.
There are thousands of old laws that never expire and never get repealed. There are thousands of other laws that are not really intended to be enforced but are passed to please the masses (witness, for example, laws against sodomy.)
If I didn't see it with my own eyes, I would think this was some high school student's term paper of what he considers deep political philosophy.
It says you have the "right to liberty". Yet:
- Consider article 14 "the right to education"
"This right includes the possibility to receive free compulsory education."
That is possibly the worst 1984/Brave New World NewSpeak I have ever heard. Your "right to education" includes the power to force others, at the point of a gun, to cough up cash to hire teachers, and here is the precious part your right includes the power of others to force you to partake of that education.
Every single one of these "rights" is exercised as permitted by law, which is to say, it isn't a right. Witness article 16 "The freedom to conduct a business in accordance with Community law and national laws and practices is recognized."
What the hell does that mean other than there is no right other than what the governments allow? Almost all the described "rights" are these non-rights that exist as designed by law.
"No one may be deprived of his or her posessions, except in the public interest"
"Public interest" is a nonsense phrase that means "whenever the government feels like" because the governments are defined as agents of the public. Would not a US government lawyer have dreams of a phrase like "use of property may be regulated by law in so far as is necessary for the general interest"?
Can anyone please propose any possible thing a government may do that could not be argued is in the "general" or "public" interest?
Other idiocy at random:
"The Union recognizes...the rights of the elderly...to participate in social and cultural life."
Notice the brutish absence of the right of the elderly to continue working past mandatory retirement ages. It's couched in their leading "a life of dignity and independence", i.e. you're done working now, here's your monthly check, don't try to work or we'll have to un-dignify you.
"The right of so-and-so is inviolable, as is permitted through national laws governing its exercise."
This clownish listing of "rights" does little more than wrap current national laws of EU with a piece of wet bread that justifies, indeed holds holy, the current laws. "A right to a free job placement service"? Puh-leeze.
Any conjured up right that restricts the government's power over me is a welcome thing in my opinion.
I'm eagerly awaiting the right not to be forced to join the government's health care plan because of someone other person's fantasy that it's better for me and they're so convinced they'll jail me if I don't go for it.