but sheer ineptitude, incompetence, and stupidity.
The way we do elections isn't helping. The media does sound bites, so sound bites are what people have to go on. The education system (run by the left wing for the past 30 years) has now raised two generations of people that don't even know how to balance their own checkbook, much less properly budget for a lifestyle that's within their means.
Mass media tells people "you deserve everything right now," and the masses buy right into it.
It's not so different on the top end. "Company X is too big to fail" means they have carte blanche to do what they want, and the government bails them out... so rather than having a proper market correction, the effects are hidden and come back to bite us in the ass in the form of a repeat of Carter-era Stagflation.
Letting one party have power is a bad thing. It happened with Carter, it happened with Clinton, it happened with Bush, and it's happening with Obama right now. One party in power = government spending like drunken sailors on a binge in shanghai.
If we had a line item veto, I'd say just to keep it split so that the checks and balances built into our system would work. As it stands, I want a republican legislature and a democrat president, simply because the republicans are slightly less likely to spend hog-wild when Congress gets around to writing the budget. If it's not in the budget, the President doesn't get a chance to sign off on it, but when the Democrats stick crap in the budget (see the 1980s and the last two years under Bush), the President's only current method of countering is to veto the whole damn thing and risk the media furor of "OMG HE SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT" to force them to write something reasonable.
Fire the whole damn government and start over, let businesses fail if they fail (otherwise yes, they get bloody fucking reckless and expect a bailout), and get things working as they should for a change.
Oh, and California? What a perfect example. The Granola State (home of Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes) deserves what they got for electing who they elected.
I grew up in a Midwestern city on Lake Michigan. More than 3/4 of my somewhat long life was spent there. Survived the existence of commie Frank Zeidler's rule as mayor. You might have heard of us - we're the city that made Beer famous.
The people that we hang out with? Let's see... white guy married to latino woman. White guy married to latino woman. White guy dating black girl. Black guy married to white woman. White guy married to white woman. White guy married to white woman. Latino guy engaged to white woman. Indian (dot, not feather) woman dating black guy. Asian guy who I can remember dating every single race at one point or another.
You were saying again?
Why the fuck would I shout "nigger lover" or anything of the sort? Why would I shout anything at all? The truth is, you get a black woman dating a white or latino or asian guy, and you watch the screams and stares and racist shit that comes out of the "black folk"'s mouths about them "takin' our wimmin." It'll equal anything you claim to have heard in the other direction.
Here's a hint: Chris Rock had it right. Get the hint: if you are hateful, it doesn't matter what color you are. If you are a thug, if you are a criminal, if you're going to behave as a jerk to the rest of the world, I don't give a shit what color you are. "Race" doesn't cause problems in society, economics and people who are just assholes are the cause of problems in society.
Oh, and white people aren't moving into all-white Southern neighborhoods because of "white flight". That's another one of your baseless assumptions (have you even been out of the South before???). What they are doing is selling the $800k houses whose mortgages have finally been paid off and moving where they can pay $200k in cash for new construction.
Bull-fucking-shit. Who are they supposedly selling these $800k houses to then?
My current neighborhood, 5 years ago, was 30% white, 40% asian, 10% black, 20% latino. It's now 5% asian, 10% white, 40% black, 45% latino. There's also been a pair of "low income targeted housing" apartment complexes dropped in a mile down the street from us (average house price, prior to that construction, was ~$140,000). Crime, especially gang-related crime (drug busts, drug/gang-related fights, and arrests at the local high school) is now 4 times what it was five years ago.
Elim Garak: "I believe in coincidence. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidence." Tell me, what would YOU think of the situation above? What would you do, faced with a school system going to shit and trying to raise your kids? Probably the same thing all the asians except for the elderly/childless few in the neighborhood did, hmmmm?
Did I say most? I mentioned the two cities I saw that were the absolute worst. Unsurprisingly and uncoincidentally, these two cities also had (a) very high unemployment rates, (b) very high crime rates, (c) very bad public schools and correspondingly bad academic achievement (also a constant "brain drain" whereby the few decent academic achievers each year get the hell out and never came back), (d) very high rates of teen pregnancy, unwed motherhood, and mothers who do not know who the father(s) of their child(ren) are, and (e) a high percentage of "generational" receivers of various public assistance programs.
It is no coincidence that this is the case. The "best and brightest" of these communities are smart enough to get the hell out. The rest, to a large extent, live off of government subsidy and either are in fear of, or participate in, organized crime of some sort. I can show you any number of small towns/cities in Mexico that are similarly afflicted. If you go out to California, you will find them - and they will still be majority-latino. If you go to Canada, you will find them (though not in as great number simply because it is harder to be an indigent mooch in colder, less hospitable climates, which also contributes to the fact that cities in more southern climates have a larger homeless population), and they will be majority-white.
It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economics, but I was pointing it out in contrast to the GPP's racist-bitch-whine "waah I hate the south because it's all full of whites and I hate whites" bullshit.
The funny thing about that is that as left-wing and sissyfied as we've gotten, you'll likely be called a bully yourself, and given a major sentence (for me it was a full week in-school suspension while the bully had his mom call in sick for him all week, AND I got fucked over because the science teacher refused to give class notes or allow me to hand in the homework saying "if you're not in class too bad").
Look at what we deal with. Foreign policy - we have bullies all over the place. Our "President" Black Jimmah Cartah Dah Messiah? Oh yeah, he wants to "sit down and talk" with the bully Ahmadammanutjob from Iran, just to start with.
Funny, traveling the South, the highest concentration of idiots I found was in Louisiana, in particular in majority-black cities like New Orleans and Pineville/Alexandria.
Mostly white people living in almost all-white neighborhoods.
God forbid people should move out of crime-ridden, vermin and drug-infested neighborhoods like, say, this piece of crap or that piece of crap given the ability to go elsewhere... keep in mind that so-called "white flight", which actually involves (because it's economic and not race-based) middle-class (often asian and white, but even middle-class latinos and blacks who don't want to be around the crime being brought in to their neighborhoods) people fleeing their neighborhoods when they start seeing the neighborhood go downhill, is a universal phenomenon and doesn't just happen in the US - there are great examples in Africa (where it's about rival tribes), India, and Europe.
All of a sudden it begins to sound reasonable... basic law should be written in normal language.
Lawyers have invented legalese to make themselves indispensible, because no normally-functioning human can understand half the laws in the land. "Common law" and "precedent" dictate that nobody can even know what constitutes an infringement at a given time. In fact, not even the government can tell you how many possible felonies there are any more thanks to laws that are based on treaties, based on "you can't do this if it would violate the law of some shithole country whose government gets overthrown every 6 months but we have a treaty with them and a whole bunch of other countries" or based on "a regulation yet to be created by a government bureaucracy or shithead appointee to be named later."
It may be time for a reset. Toss everything out, rewrite the laws to be clearly understandable, re-institute basic civics courses in public school, and go from there. I'd rather not have it get to the point where I have to consult a fucking lawyer before tying my shoes or using a public restroom, but it might one day come to that the way we're currently headed.
And the necessary corrolary: Easy cases also make bad law.
"Easy" cases make bad law because they allow for bad decisions - "the law says one thing, but Mr. Greasy-Haired Used Car Salesman is so obviously running a dishonest business..."
"Hard" cases make bad law because they get decided on a very narrow point of law and set of facts, but then a thousand greasy shysters (er... "lawyers") cite them as precedent for cases that have almost no similarity at all.
In fact, the current way our system is cooked up, the overall conclusion to make is probably that adherence to precedent in general makes for shitty law.
Was that a transcript from the case or a transcript from the latest session of Congress?
Seriously though... any time speech is regulated, there's a problem. Yes, the Supreme Court has ruled that the right to Free Speech is not absolute, but the prosecution of a girl for calling another girl names over a dispute over a boy? A matter for parents and possibly high school guidance counselors, or on the rare outside case for a psychiatrist, but not for the courts.
Or some marketing droid wrote that statement for him. I remember similar crap mouthed by various computer company CEO's about Vista.
Windows 7 is, fundamentally, just Vista SP2. There's a little less in the way of "you need to confirm access to continue" screen nagware, and the hardware requirements are about the same as Vista. The only reason it's not getting panned as a resource hog is that Vista only ran well on almost "bleeding edge" hardware, and 2.5 years later that's "hey it runs well on a couple year old sytem."
One of them is the idea that human nature doesn't change over time. You get the same basic plotlines in pro wrestling, daytime soap operas, evening emo teenybopper soaps (buffy, angel, etc), scifi series... the only difference is the trappings of the medium.
Of course, the same has been said about literature. People argue about the number of basic plots, but the theory - that if you look long enough, you'll find something that you are repeating "close enough". The same is also true in music, especially since the nonmusical fools involved in US judicial decisions and copyright law have made decisions that make the number of possible melodies extremely limited (and most of those mathematical possibilities also happen to be atonal shit that would make a Yoko Ono concert sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in comparison).
You want to attack Star Trek for "not focusing on" the technology? TV shows sell themselves on the actors, pure and simple. Without characters, you don't have story, and at best you get rotten shit like Star Wars Episode 1.
Combos weren't part of the original Street Fighter games until humans figured them out.
And the fact that they were inherent to the system rather than being a preprogrammed set of arbitrary values in a "it's a combo because we say so" list (like every other crappy fighting game, tekken/virtuafighter/etc had done) was what made Capcom's games so strong. You could find new ones by analyzing the system. Some of them worked on some characters but not others because they were bigger or smaller than the "average" sized character, and thus might "fall out" of the combo when their smaller sprite failed to collide with hit detection.
Then they were added to later versions so that the computer could take advantage of them.
No, the AI was simply reprogrammed to know the ones that the developers/playtesters had figured out.
Rocket Jumps? I'm sure the developers coded for it from day 1.
Actually, no. They were a reaction to code written for explosions to move "movable" objects (boxes, powerups, dead bodies, and included in the list, players). The fact that they were coded to "add acceleration", and stacked directly with jump acceleration, was not explicitly coded for.
And different humans have different creative problem solving methods. This is why real AI is hard.
Oddly enough, that was what made Deus Ex so brilliant, and the sequel so piss-poor. In the first, the designers really worked hard to give the players options - different paths for the run-and-gunners, methods for the stealthers/snipers to get around to spots to take guards out, and so on. The sequel, meanwhile, was just linear level after linear level.
You can't code for all contingencies.....and a truly adaptable AI would need to have learning skills to handle those scenarios that were not inherently programmed in.
A truly adaptable AI might (for example of a fighting game) in a writable section of the hard drive, store a list of the combos that the player had successfully used or that the player used most often. Given another 10 years (for processors to get even more powerful), it might analyze that for a weakness.
I'd love to see it. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it, either. I'll take the decision tree + random variance that we get now, throw in a little "Easy = 3, Medium = 5, Hard = 10" Enemy scaling and I'll still play video games. When I want an opponent that is challenging, I'll go online and play against real people.
The one problem with that is that in addition to the fact that real people learn (or at least, some portion of the human population learns from their mistakes, setting aside anyone who's ever shopped at Wal-Mart), real people have Genuine People Personalities, meaning a large percentage of them are Real Assholes.
Or you could have "adjustable difficulty" games where the computer simply cheats. Fighting games do a lot of that.
For instance, they don't have to input their moves, so certain combos exist for them that simply don't work for a real human that has to input moves via the control pad or joystick and wait for the input buffer to process and hope it processes correctly. Zangief and Guile, for instance, were able to pull off "impossible to input" combinations in most Street Fighter franchise games. Half the characters in Virtua Fighter 5 and 6 have moves like that, especially with the "grab counter" system wherein characters can be immune to grabs simply by entering every single possible grab mechanic into the input buffer in less than 0.05 seconds (the "higher difficulty" VF characters are all pretty much completely immune by default thanks to this mechanic, again because they don't have to deal with the reality of physically moving the joystick or pressing the buttons).
Or alternatively, they'll have "too fast to realize" reactions, where the moment a combo is a little bit behind (often before it's even displayed on screen), they will execute a safe-fall/combo-breaker/instant-recovery move and then go into their return combo. A normal human with normal human reaction times wouldn't be able to pull it off, at least not every-single-time-without-fail, but the computer (again "knowing" what has happened before it is displayed on the screen, and being the "referee" of when the "window" for those moves exists) doesn't have this problem.
A golf handicap works to change the game. At the top levels (about 5 or below) it's primarily about skill. Competition between low-handicappers is amazing to watch.
Between other players, the handicap isn't about "leveling" the playing field, it's about rewarding improvement. The same is true in bowling, which uses a similarly designed handicap system. Your overall team wins not by merely playing the same game at the same level every time, but by getting better consistently. It's not even close to a "rubberband."
Tennis ladders and beginner/expert/pro leagues are the alternative, they deliberately try to stratify the game so that players of approximately-even skill can play together. Also true of this point is chess point rankings, which again reward improvement - you can't gain points by going around just defeating people way below you, you have to play people who are either near your level, or above your level. You have to challenge yourself and improve your skills.
Rubber-banding is about "snapping back" the leader. Handicaps, organized-skill-tier leagues, and numeric skill rankings are about determining who the best opponent is to teach you something to improve your skills, while not overwhelming you so much that you feel the game is hopeless.
Rubberbanding is horrible because it either teaches bad sportsmanship to those in the lead, or it makes people give up the game in disgust, and it does nothing to improve the skills of those receiving the dubious "benefit" of the rubberband mechanic.
Simple method of winning in any version of Mario Kart after they introduced the damn blue flying shell:
- Stay in the high middle (2nd/3rd place) almost all through the race. - In your last lap, hoard up a good item (triple mushroom boost, invincible star boost, triple red shells). - In the last 1/3 lap, boost/crash/shoot the hell out of the one or two players ahead.
The lesson to be kids: ride someone's coattails, use them as cover, then kill them when they're not useful anymore.
You mean, apart from the sheer number of left-wing shibboleths one must parrot to appease the various "coalition groups" that make up the so-called "democrat base" to have any hope of nomination for anything significant?
I suggest re-taking Political Science 101 and going from there.
Actually, the concept of rape victims having abortions is a question that's been debated heavily.
There are two sides of the equation, and two equally valid responses, that are entirely based on where your belief structure lies.
The first - IF you believe that from the moment of conception, a "human being" exists as such, then; - the fetus is a human child, yes the result of rape, but in no way responsible for the circumstances of its creation; - allowing the abortion is saying to the mother, "because violence was done to you, we will give you one free chance to kill an innocent baby."
The alternative - IF you believe that the fetus begins being a human being at some later point, then; - the idea that the mother will be reminded "oh shit, I'm pregnant because I was raped" every day is a much heavier factor; - the abortion should be done as early as possible.
Now obviously there are other things to consider. What happens to the fetus/baby once it is born? Taken instantly to adoption? Orphanage? Will the child ever be told "you were adopted out because you're the result of a rape"? Given the immense psychological damage rape can cause, will carrying to term result in the mother becoming suicidal?
It is not an easy question. It has never been an easy question. Moreover, because the situation itself is so grotesque, there is no easy and non-grotesque position to take on what should be done. Mother Theresa firmly believed in the Catholic Church's position that life begins at conception. As I showed above, logically from her perspective, abortions in the situation were merely piling more murder (of, in her perspective, innocent babies) on top of the murder and rape that had already been committed.
Now if you disagree, then that's a philosophical difference and you can feel free to do so. The questions of "when life begins" and "what to do in countless grotesque situations where all the possible solutions are pretty much equally crap" have been debated for millenia.
Again, the question is not easy. But trying to use her position to declare that she was somehow an evil person? I think that is overstepping.
Minority quotas are unconstitutional as per the supreme court ruling University of California V. Bakke
Yes, that happened in 1978. Unfortunately, we keep getting cases back to the Supreme Court. Why? Because the Bakke decision doesn't ban having minority quotas, it bans the college itself establishing a strict numerical quota on paper.
If, on the other hand, some asswipe racial supremacist organization sends them a letter threatening to sue if they don't reach a certain percentage number, and they forward it to everyone involved in admissions, their ass is still covered and the quota still exists.
You probably didn't bother to actually pay attention to why you were rejected, or you're making up bullshit.
I was shown, on paper, exactly what was going on, by the admissions office. They hated the policy but that was that. Fuck you.
Hm. Of course, the other reason the stories have trouble getting out is that it's pretty hard to be a journalist in Iran if you don't toe the mullah's line...
The financial aid office didn't tell me "good news, you don't have to pay because you're Black and Female". I have about $40,000 in student loans from a bank.
Where'd you go for college? What were your test scores? I was shown the quota sheet. I was shown the criteria for entry - you could get into the colleges with about 150 less SAT just by having different color skin or boobs instead of a penis. I was shown the list of scholarships that listed gender or race as a criteria for even applying.
I need you to imagine for a moment that you are a Black woman. You have to work with people. You have to apply for jobs. You sometimes need help from people. And all of these people are white men who have been told time and time again, they would have all the things they deserve and all the things they worked for, except that all of those things were given to people like you instead. This is in spite of the fact, they're making more money than you and they have the job you wish you had.
I need you to imagine you're a white teenager for a moment. You're the son of parents who are not rich, grandson of grandparents who are both not rich (they're TEACHERS for fuck's sake), great-grandson of people who came across the ocean with nothing but the clothes on their back and a dream to raise their kids with more than they could have in the "old country."
You've worked your ass off in school. Studied hard for every test, worked hard on every paper and project. Practiced and practiced, ecstatic when your SAT and ACT scores came in high. Ecstatic when you qualified for scholarships based on your hard work. Worked your ass off in multiple school extracurricular groups, worked your ass off tutoring other students as a volunteer, worked your ass off in Scouts, did everything you needed to do.
So you walk in to the college you wanted to get into and get the big slap in the face. We can't take you, you see. Your scores are higher than most of the incoming freshman class. You have more extracurricular and leadership and community service experience as well. But, you see, your application wound up getting reviewed after most of them in the random shuffle, and we've run out of spaces for "your type". All the spots we have left are for someone who's got nowhere near your qualifications, hasn't worked half as hard, but has a different skin color or different urinary plumbing.
Think about that for a second. Think hard on it. I don't know how hard you worked or not for college. From the sound of $40,000 in debt, I hope it was pretty hard. But I don't know. What I do know is that the lesson I learned in the college application process is that hard work means precisely two things when faced with skin color quotas: jack and shit.
Better yet, imagine you finally have a chance to get a promotion that will put you over that $50,000 mark. And the person who has to decide whether to give it to you or the next guy has just finished reading some slashdot post about how the other guy deserves it and you don't. I'm just saying.
In other words, I have to wonder: did one of these people get a free pass? Which one worked their ass off to get here?
I'd rather not have to wonder, thanks. As the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said: "The best way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race."
The problem is, it's the "Second Coming" of Jimmy Carter. If you compare Obama's policies today to 1977-1978 the matchup is downright frightening. I think we had enough pain the first time...
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but sheer ineptitude, incompetence, and stupidity.
The way we do elections isn't helping. The media does sound bites, so sound bites are what people have to go on. The education system (run by the left wing for the past 30 years) has now raised two generations of people that don't even know how to balance their own checkbook, much less properly budget for a lifestyle that's within their means.
Mass media tells people "you deserve everything right now," and the masses buy right into it.
It's not so different on the top end. "Company X is too big to fail" means they have carte blanche to do what they want, and the government bails them out... so rather than having a proper market correction, the effects are hidden and come back to bite us in the ass in the form of a repeat of Carter-era Stagflation.
Letting one party have power is a bad thing. It happened with Carter, it happened with Clinton, it happened with Bush, and it's happening with Obama right now. One party in power = government spending like drunken sailors on a binge in shanghai.
If we had a line item veto, I'd say just to keep it split so that the checks and balances built into our system would work. As it stands, I want a republican legislature and a democrat president, simply because the republicans are slightly less likely to spend hog-wild when Congress gets around to writing the budget. If it's not in the budget, the President doesn't get a chance to sign off on it, but when the Democrats stick crap in the budget (see the 1980s and the last two years under Bush), the President's only current method of countering is to veto the whole damn thing and risk the media furor of "OMG HE SHUT DOWN THE GOVERNMENT" to force them to write something reasonable.
Fire the whole damn government and start over, let businesses fail if they fail (otherwise yes, they get bloody fucking reckless and expect a bailout), and get things working as they should for a change.
Oh, and California? What a perfect example. The Granola State (home of Fruits, Nuts, and Flakes) deserves what they got for electing who they elected.
Yep. All you need is one jumped-up shyster snake...er "lawyer"... and we're off to the races again.
If SPARC, or their parent corp Sun Microsystems, wants to be good citizens, the lawyer who sent this should lose his job.
I grew up in a Midwestern city on Lake Michigan. More than 3/4 of my somewhat long life was spent there. Survived the existence of commie Frank Zeidler's rule as mayor. You might have heard of us - we're the city that made Beer famous.
The people that we hang out with? Let's see... white guy married to latino woman. White guy married to latino woman. White guy dating black girl. Black guy married to white woman. White guy married to white woman. White guy married to white woman. Latino guy engaged to white woman. Indian (dot, not feather) woman dating black guy. Asian guy who I can remember dating every single race at one point or another.
You were saying again?
Why the fuck would I shout "nigger lover" or anything of the sort? Why would I shout anything at all? The truth is, you get a black woman dating a white or latino or asian guy, and you watch the screams and stares and racist shit that comes out of the "black folk"'s mouths about them "takin' our wimmin." It'll equal anything you claim to have heard in the other direction.
Here's a hint: Chris Rock had it right. Get the hint: if you are hateful, it doesn't matter what color you are. If you are a thug, if you are a criminal, if you're going to behave as a jerk to the rest of the world, I don't give a shit what color you are. "Race" doesn't cause problems in society, economics and people who are just assholes are the cause of problems in society.
Oh, and white people aren't moving into all-white Southern neighborhoods because of "white flight". That's another one of your baseless assumptions (have you even been out of the South before???). What they are doing is selling the $800k houses whose mortgages have finally been paid off and moving where they can pay $200k in cash for new construction.
Bull-fucking-shit. Who are they supposedly selling these $800k houses to then?
My current neighborhood, 5 years ago, was 30% white, 40% asian, 10% black, 20% latino. It's now 5% asian, 10% white, 40% black, 45% latino. There's also been a pair of "low income targeted housing" apartment complexes dropped in a mile down the street from us (average house price, prior to that construction, was ~$140,000). Crime, especially gang-related crime (drug busts, drug/gang-related fights, and arrests at the local high school) is now 4 times what it was five years ago.
Elim Garak: "I believe in coincidence. Coincidences happen every day. But I don't trust coincidence." Tell me, what would YOU think of the situation above? What would you do, faced with a school system going to shit and trying to raise your kids? Probably the same thing all the asians except for the elderly/childless few in the neighborhood did, hmmmm?
Did I say most? I mentioned the two cities I saw that were the absolute worst. Unsurprisingly and uncoincidentally, these two cities also had (a) very high unemployment rates, (b) very high crime rates, (c) very bad public schools and correspondingly bad academic achievement (also a constant "brain drain" whereby the few decent academic achievers each year get the hell out and never came back), (d) very high rates of teen pregnancy, unwed motherhood, and mothers who do not know who the father(s) of their child(ren) are, and (e) a high percentage of "generational" receivers of various public assistance programs.
It is no coincidence that this is the case. The "best and brightest" of these communities are smart enough to get the hell out. The rest, to a large extent, live off of government subsidy and either are in fear of, or participate in, organized crime of some sort. I can show you any number of small towns/cities in Mexico that are similarly afflicted. If you go out to California, you will find them - and they will still be majority-latino. If you go to Canada, you will find them (though not in as great number simply because it is harder to be an indigent mooch in colder, less hospitable climates, which also contributes to the fact that cities in more southern climates have a larger homeless population), and they will be majority-white.
It has nothing to do with race, and everything to do with economics, but I was pointing it out in contrast to the GPP's racist-bitch-whine "waah I hate the south because it's all full of whites and I hate whites" bullshit.
The funny thing about that is that as left-wing and sissyfied as we've gotten, you'll likely be called a bully yourself, and given a major sentence (for me it was a full week in-school suspension while the bully had his mom call in sick for him all week, AND I got fucked over because the science teacher refused to give class notes or allow me to hand in the homework saying "if you're not in class too bad").
Look at what we deal with. Foreign policy - we have bullies all over the place. Our "President" Black Jimmah Cartah Dah Messiah? Oh yeah, he wants to "sit down and talk" with the bully Ahmadammanutjob from Iran, just to start with.
Sigh.
Funny, traveling the South, the highest concentration of idiots I found was in Louisiana, in particular in majority-black cities like New Orleans and Pineville/Alexandria.
Mostly white people living in almost all-white neighborhoods.
God forbid people should move out of crime-ridden, vermin and drug-infested neighborhoods like, say, this piece of crap or that piece of crap given the ability to go elsewhere... keep in mind that so-called "white flight", which actually involves (because it's economic and not race-based) middle-class (often asian and white, but even middle-class latinos and blacks who don't want to be around the crime being brought in to their neighborhoods) people fleeing their neighborhoods when they start seeing the neighborhood go downhill, is a universal phenomenon and doesn't just happen in the US - there are great examples in Africa (where it's about rival tribes), India, and Europe.
"The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
All of a sudden it begins to sound reasonable... basic law should be written in normal language.
Lawyers have invented legalese to make themselves indispensible, because no normally-functioning human can understand half the laws in the land. "Common law" and "precedent" dictate that nobody can even know what constitutes an infringement at a given time. In fact, not even the government can tell you how many possible felonies there are any more thanks to laws that are based on treaties, based on "you can't do this if it would violate the law of some shithole country whose government gets overthrown every 6 months but we have a treaty with them and a whole bunch of other countries" or based on "a regulation yet to be created by a government bureaucracy or shithead appointee to be named later."
It may be time for a reset. Toss everything out, rewrite the laws to be clearly understandable, re-institute basic civics courses in public school, and go from there. I'd rather not have it get to the point where I have to consult a fucking lawyer before tying my shoes or using a public restroom, but it might one day come to that the way we're currently headed.
A lawyer has one of two jobs.
But a lawyer is not allowed to break basic ethical codes in doing their jobs.
Every time I see one of these cases, I see a lawyer who should have their license pulled on ethical grounds.
And the necessary corrolary: Easy cases also make bad law.
"Easy" cases make bad law because they allow for bad decisions - "the law says one thing, but Mr. Greasy-Haired Used Car Salesman is so obviously running a dishonest business..."
"Hard" cases make bad law because they get decided on a very narrow point of law and set of facts, but then a thousand greasy shysters (er... "lawyers") cite them as precedent for cases that have almost no similarity at all.
In fact, the current way our system is cooked up, the overall conclusion to make is probably that adherence to precedent in general makes for shitty law.
Was that a transcript from the case or a transcript from the latest session of Congress?
Seriously though... any time speech is regulated, there's a problem. Yes, the Supreme Court has ruled that the right to Free Speech is not absolute, but the prosecution of a girl for calling another girl names over a dispute over a boy? A matter for parents and possibly high school guidance counselors, or on the rare outside case for a psychiatrist, but not for the courts.
Bullshit. I've been testing for months and the answer is YES.
Or some marketing droid wrote that statement for him. I remember similar crap mouthed by various computer company CEO's about Vista.
Windows 7 is, fundamentally, just Vista SP2. There's a little less in the way of "you need to confirm access to continue" screen nagware, and the hardware requirements are about the same as Vista. The only reason it's not getting panned as a resource hog is that Vista only ran well on almost "bleeding edge" hardware, and 2.5 years later that's "hey it runs well on a couple year old sytem."
Television has any number of tropes.
One of them is the idea that human nature doesn't change over time. You get the same basic plotlines in pro wrestling, daytime soap operas, evening emo teenybopper soaps (buffy, angel, etc), scifi series... the only difference is the trappings of the medium.
Of course, the same has been said about literature. People argue about the number of basic plots, but the theory - that if you look long enough, you'll find something that you are repeating "close enough". The same is also true in music, especially since the nonmusical fools involved in US judicial decisions and copyright law have made decisions that make the number of possible melodies extremely limited (and most of those mathematical possibilities also happen to be atonal shit that would make a Yoko Ono concert sound like the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in comparison).
You want to attack Star Trek for "not focusing on" the technology? TV shows sell themselves on the actors, pure and simple. Without characters, you don't have story, and at best you get rotten shit like Star Wars Episode 1.
Combos weren't part of the original Street Fighter games until humans figured them out.
And the fact that they were inherent to the system rather than being a preprogrammed set of arbitrary values in a "it's a combo because we say so" list (like every other crappy fighting game, tekken/virtuafighter/etc had done) was what made Capcom's games so strong. You could find new ones by analyzing the system. Some of them worked on some characters but not others because they were bigger or smaller than the "average" sized character, and thus might "fall out" of the combo when their smaller sprite failed to collide with hit detection.
Then they were added to later versions so that the computer could take advantage of them.
No, the AI was simply reprogrammed to know the ones that the developers/playtesters had figured out.
Rocket Jumps? I'm sure the developers coded for it from day 1.
Actually, no. They were a reaction to code written for explosions to move "movable" objects (boxes, powerups, dead bodies, and included in the list, players). The fact that they were coded to "add acceleration", and stacked directly with jump acceleration, was not explicitly coded for.
And different humans have different creative problem solving methods. This is why real AI is hard.
Oddly enough, that was what made Deus Ex so brilliant, and the sequel so piss-poor. In the first, the designers really worked hard to give the players options - different paths for the run-and-gunners, methods for the stealthers/snipers to get around to spots to take guards out, and so on. The sequel, meanwhile, was just linear level after linear level.
You can't code for all contingencies.....and a truly adaptable AI would need to have learning skills to handle those scenarios that were not inherently programmed in.
A truly adaptable AI might (for example of a fighting game) in a writable section of the hard drive, store a list of the combos that the player had successfully used or that the player used most often. Given another 10 years (for processors to get even more powerful), it might analyze that for a weakness.
I'd love to see it. But I'm not going to hold my breath waiting for it, either. I'll take the decision tree + random variance that we get now, throw in a little "Easy = 3, Medium = 5, Hard = 10" Enemy scaling and I'll still play video games. When I want an opponent that is challenging, I'll go online and play against real people.
The one problem with that is that in addition to the fact that real people learn (or at least, some portion of the human population learns from their mistakes, setting aside anyone who's ever shopped at Wal-Mart), real people have Genuine People Personalities, meaning a large percentage of them are Real Assholes.
Or you could have "adjustable difficulty" games where the computer simply cheats. Fighting games do a lot of that.
For instance, they don't have to input their moves, so certain combos exist for them that simply don't work for a real human that has to input moves via the control pad or joystick and wait for the input buffer to process and hope it processes correctly. Zangief and Guile, for instance, were able to pull off "impossible to input" combinations in most Street Fighter franchise games. Half the characters in Virtua Fighter 5 and 6 have moves like that, especially with the "grab counter" system wherein characters can be immune to grabs simply by entering every single possible grab mechanic into the input buffer in less than 0.05 seconds (the "higher difficulty" VF characters are all pretty much completely immune by default thanks to this mechanic, again because they don't have to deal with the reality of physically moving the joystick or pressing the buttons).
Or alternatively, they'll have "too fast to realize" reactions, where the moment a combo is a little bit behind (often before it's even displayed on screen), they will execute a safe-fall/combo-breaker/instant-recovery move and then go into their return combo. A normal human with normal human reaction times wouldn't be able to pull it off, at least not every-single-time-without-fail, but the computer (again "knowing" what has happened before it is displayed on the screen, and being the "referee" of when the "window" for those moves exists) doesn't have this problem.
Wrong.
A golf handicap works to change the game. At the top levels (about 5 or below) it's primarily about skill. Competition between low-handicappers is amazing to watch.
Between other players, the handicap isn't about "leveling" the playing field, it's about rewarding improvement. The same is true in bowling, which uses a similarly designed handicap system. Your overall team wins not by merely playing the same game at the same level every time, but by getting better consistently. It's not even close to a "rubberband."
Tennis ladders and beginner/expert/pro leagues are the alternative, they deliberately try to stratify the game so that players of approximately-even skill can play together. Also true of this point is chess point rankings, which again reward improvement - you can't gain points by going around just defeating people way below you, you have to play people who are either near your level, or above your level. You have to challenge yourself and improve your skills.
Rubber-banding is about "snapping back" the leader. Handicaps, organized-skill-tier leagues, and numeric skill rankings are about determining who the best opponent is to teach you something to improve your skills, while not overwhelming you so much that you feel the game is hopeless.
Rubberbanding is horrible because it either teaches bad sportsmanship to those in the lead, or it makes people give up the game in disgust, and it does nothing to improve the skills of those receiving the dubious "benefit" of the rubberband mechanic.
Simple method of winning in any version of Mario Kart after they introduced the damn blue flying shell:
- Stay in the high middle (2nd/3rd place) almost all through the race.
- In your last lap, hoard up a good item (triple mushroom boost, invincible star boost, triple red shells).
- In the last 1/3 lap, boost/crash/shoot the hell out of the one or two players ahead.
The lesson to be kids: ride someone's coattails, use them as cover, then kill them when they're not useful anymore.
Taqiyya much?
Try checking out the law as written in Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and the ridiculous crap that almost got passed in Iraq with their new government.
You mean, apart from the sheer number of left-wing shibboleths one must parrot to appease the various "coalition groups" that make up the so-called "democrat base" to have any hope of nomination for anything significant?
I suggest re-taking Political Science 101 and going from there.
Actually, the concept of rape victims having abortions is a question that's been debated heavily.
There are two sides of the equation, and two equally valid responses, that are entirely based on where your belief structure lies.
The first - IF you believe that from the moment of conception, a "human being" exists as such, then;
- the fetus is a human child, yes the result of rape, but in no way responsible for the circumstances of its creation;
- allowing the abortion is saying to the mother, "because violence was done to you, we will give you one free chance to kill an innocent baby."
The alternative - IF you believe that the fetus begins being a human being at some later point, then;
- the idea that the mother will be reminded "oh shit, I'm pregnant because I was raped" every day is a much heavier factor;
- the abortion should be done as early as possible.
Now obviously there are other things to consider. What happens to the fetus/baby once it is born? Taken instantly to adoption? Orphanage? Will the child ever be told "you were adopted out because you're the result of a rape"? Given the immense psychological damage rape can cause, will carrying to term result in the mother becoming suicidal?
It is not an easy question. It has never been an easy question. Moreover, because the situation itself is so grotesque, there is no easy and non-grotesque position to take on what should be done. Mother Theresa firmly believed in the Catholic Church's position that life begins at conception. As I showed above, logically from her perspective, abortions in the situation were merely piling more murder (of, in her perspective, innocent babies) on top of the murder and rape that had already been committed.
Now if you disagree, then that's a philosophical difference and you can feel free to do so. The questions of "when life begins" and "what to do in countless grotesque situations where all the possible solutions are pretty much equally crap" have been debated for millenia.
Again, the question is not easy. But trying to use her position to declare that she was somehow an evil person? I think that is overstepping.
If you believe the Democrats are "a coalition of various flavors of middle-of-the-roaders", you obviously don't have any clue.
OR, you could stop being a dishonest shill.
Minority quotas are unconstitutional as per the supreme court ruling University of California V. Bakke
Yes, that happened in 1978. Unfortunately, we keep getting cases back to the Supreme Court. Why? Because the Bakke decision doesn't ban having minority quotas, it bans the college itself establishing a strict numerical quota on paper.
If, on the other hand, some asswipe racial supremacist organization sends them a letter threatening to sue if they don't reach a certain percentage number, and they forward it to everyone involved in admissions, their ass is still covered and the quota still exists.
You probably didn't bother to actually pay attention to why you were rejected, or you're making up bullshit.
I was shown, on paper, exactly what was going on, by the admissions office. They hated the policy but that was that. Fuck you.
Funny. The Telegraph's not exactly a "religious" site...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iran/3179465/Hanged-for-being-a-Christian-in-Iran.html
Neither is Radio Free Europe:
http://www.rferl.org/content/Two_Iranian_Christians_May_Face_Execution_For_Apostasy/1779217.html
Hm. Of course, the other reason the stories have trouble getting out is that it's pretty hard to be a journalist in Iran if you don't toe the mullah's line...
The financial aid office didn't tell me "good news, you don't have to pay because you're Black and Female". I have about $40,000 in student loans from a bank.
Where'd you go for college? What were your test scores? I was shown the quota sheet. I was shown the criteria for entry - you could get into the colleges with about 150 less SAT just by having different color skin or boobs instead of a penis. I was shown the list of scholarships that listed gender or race as a criteria for even applying.
I need you to imagine for a moment that you are a Black woman. You have to work with people. You have to apply for jobs. You sometimes need help from people. And all of these people are white men who have been told time and time again, they would have all the things they deserve and all the things they worked for, except that all of those things were given to people like you instead. This is in spite of the fact, they're making more money than you and they have the job you wish you had.
I need you to imagine you're a white teenager for a moment. You're the son of parents who are not rich, grandson of grandparents who are both not rich (they're TEACHERS for fuck's sake), great-grandson of people who came across the ocean with nothing but the clothes on their back and a dream to raise their kids with more than they could have in the "old country."
You've worked your ass off in school. Studied hard for every test, worked hard on every paper and project. Practiced and practiced, ecstatic when your SAT and ACT scores came in high. Ecstatic when you qualified for scholarships based on your hard work. Worked your ass off in multiple school extracurricular groups, worked your ass off tutoring other students as a volunteer, worked your ass off in Scouts, did everything you needed to do.
So you walk in to the college you wanted to get into and get the big slap in the face. We can't take you, you see. Your scores are higher than most of the incoming freshman class. You have more extracurricular and leadership and community service experience as well. But, you see, your application wound up getting reviewed after most of them in the random shuffle, and we've run out of spaces for "your type". All the spots we have left are for someone who's got nowhere near your qualifications, hasn't worked half as hard, but has a different skin color or different urinary plumbing.
Think about that for a second. Think hard on it. I don't know how hard you worked or not for college. From the sound of $40,000 in debt, I hope it was pretty hard. But I don't know. What I do know is that the lesson I learned in the college application process is that hard work means precisely two things when faced with skin color quotas: jack and shit.
Better yet, imagine you finally have a chance to get a promotion that will put you over that $50,000 mark. And the person who has to decide whether to give it to you or the next guy has just finished reading some slashdot post about how the other guy deserves it and you don't. I'm just saying.
In other words, I have to wonder: did one of these people get a free pass? Which one worked their ass off to get here?
I'd rather not have to wonder, thanks. As the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said: "The best way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race."
Oh, Obama's the "Second Coming" alright.
The problem is, it's the "Second Coming" of Jimmy Carter. If you compare Obama's policies today to 1977-1978 the matchup is downright frightening. I think we had enough pain the first time...