I was in a "Data Processing" class in high school in 1983-84. In the class, we learned a little COBOL, and some Applesoft BASIC, as well as some generic input/output theory type stuff. One of the assignments was writing a program in Applesoft BASIC. Everyone else drew pictures on the screen or had it just print stuff in response to a carriage return. I wrote something I called "Nuclear Devastation". It was a cityscape in nice high-res 40x40 15 color graphics. It wasn't overly detailed but you got the idea. On the bottom line, it printed: "Press any key to nuke this city!". You'd press a key, the screen would flash twice, a mushroom cloud would grow in the same delicious graphics and then you'd be presented with the destroyed cityscape. On the bottom line it asked "Do you want to nuke this city again?".
Idiocy has little correlation with measured intelligence. Putting effort in to vote requires effort. Idiots can't put in effort. They don't care enough but to scratch their immediate itches. Food, sex, football, celebrity gossip.
Essentially why I am against online voting. Makes it too easy for idiots to vote. You should have to do some work to at least get to the polling place, or mail in your absentee ballot beforehand.
It's pretty much the only barrier, and it seems to work pretty well.
If you are going to do the civil disobedience, you have to be prepared to accept the consequences. Killing yourself and then having the "information must be free" crowd whine about it later isn't civil disobedience. It's a very ineffective form of rebellion. No government is going to get behind that, it'd be like coddling secession or nullification.
Listen, the warmists started with the notion that they had to stretch the truth to get their point across. The collections of quotes are legion from the 70s and 80s, even 90s, from disparate voices held in esteem in environmental circles. The fact that that policy is biting you in the ass now is pretty predictable. It was one of those strategic errors you can never fix. Like your virginity, you only get to lose your credibility once.
Anyway, deflecting at this point is pointless. The damage is done.
Static guns and discwasher brushes notwithstanding, vinyl had a lot of issues with dust that people are soon going to discover, if they haven't already.
That was right about the time the name Cliff Burton passed out of their collective minds. After that, being a really wretched form of pop was just fine.
That's not entirely fair, they were chasing the Nirvana money - Nevermind had just come out and I am sure everyone saw dollar signs.
The best analogue of the problem with the 3R rules is...the 1E AD&D rules. Poorly organized, too many special cases, not enough specific examples of rule execution. Any rule set that requires hundreds of errata questions has a problem, no? (on a side note, I suspect i'm a closet masochist for liking 1E AD&D, too) Anyway, I don't consider *me* understanding the rules to be an advertisement for how well written they are. I understand 3R just fine, but I also understand law. It's just most other people don't. I have to show them gameplay and then the light goes off.
Sabin at least would fully understand why you'd short-circuit even vital elements of a game for playability. Hell, he spends a goodly portion of his book talking about the various simplifications he has made to avoid overcomplexity and most importantly to make the simulations he uses with his students fit within class time constraints. Dunnigan, also, in his 3E of his design book provides us with a totally stripped down game which is entirely bereft of fluff. No, I think they'd appreciate design decisions like those made in 3R to speed play. As noted, it still takes a day to play...
Hell, compare AWAW or Prados' 3R (the modern edition) with even 4e AH TR...you see Greenwood's hand removing complexity. Prados' original 3R design was division level and included fair bits of the complexity that muddied the first two mentioned games. Greenwood knew what he was doing.
And yes, that we can agree it's a great game and I have gotten many, many hours of joy and sometimes even stress playing it.
It remains a simulation, however imperfect. Prados wasn't writing it for pure entertainment value. Recommend a read of Dunnigan's book or Sabin's "Simulating War" if you don't understand why it remains a simulation.
The rules are acknowledged obtuse by the original authors and were revised several times in a halfhearted attempt to make them better. Googling the topic will find the relevant links.
I've been playing the game for nearly 40 years and there's not a whole lot that one could say about it that I haven't researched to death.
No he didn't. The closest he came to a majority was 37% in any kind of election we might consider free. And in this case, free meant brownshirted thugs hectoring people on the street and administering beatings.
That said, the number of people who agree with me are going to be very limited. It's complicated, takes a day to play, the rules are obtuse and it's intended as a strategic simulation and hardly captures any wartime flavor or even individual units. I find most games - particularly the ones listed in the summary - to mostly be a bore.
It's illustrative of the issue - there is no best game.
(4th edition rules of the original AH game is my preference, for those who care)
You can make the same argument about the ASMs the Russians would have been firing from the Tu-22s. The ships all had chaff and jamming capabilities, and many had SAMs and CIWS. That is irrelevant. The missiles all worked - not as well as the manufacturers suggested, but they did. The AIM-54 was quite sufficient to hit a target as large and unmaneuverable as the Backfire or Badger. The AS-4 and AS-6 were perfectly capable of killing NATO shipping, naval or otherwise.
The AIM-54 was retired because it was felt it wasn't needed anymore. I think it was a bad decision, but there you go. Also, it was a heavy missile and the other platforms in use now aren't capable of firing it anyway. Moreover, the AIM-120 is a far better AAM anyway, though much shorter ranged.
A good game of Harpoon should cure you of these illusions that the crap didn't work. It did.
Well, we made him into a fugitive, so what did you expect? Now he has to earn his keep somehow. I'm waiting now for someone to tell me that they'd like to count trees or kill themselves rather than eke out a living by giving minimal assistance to your 'hosts'? That's a BS argument on its face.
This is a problem of US government creation, not Snowden's. We forced him into a very bad solution set. Give up his integrity or hang the extent of the surveillance out for public view. Just shows you how weak-willed the rest are...or entirely lacking in integrity.
I disagree entirely. He was/is a patriot. I was all over Manning for being a traitor, based on motive and the actions he/she took. I'm a Republican and have been for a long time.
Snowden was doing us a favor and sacrificed a nice cushy life for that. I have a hard time calling a person who did that a traitor. The fact that he's holed up in Russia speaks volumes toward where the United States has gone wrong with extraconstitutional surveillance and paramilitary action after 9/11. We used to be the place where political prisoners fled to, rather than away from.
The country I grew up in wouldn't tolerate what is going on right now with renditions, endless war composed of drone strikes and literally unfettered domestic surveillance.
Slashdot Mirror
I was in a "Data Processing" class in high school in 1983-84. In the class, we learned a little COBOL, and some Applesoft BASIC, as well as some generic input/output theory type stuff. One of the assignments was writing a program in Applesoft BASIC. Everyone else drew pictures on the screen or had it just print stuff in response to a carriage return. I wrote something I called "Nuclear Devastation". It was a cityscape in nice high-res 40x40 15 color graphics. It wasn't overly detailed but you got the idea. On the bottom line, it printed: "Press any key to nuke this city!". You'd press a key, the screen would flash twice, a mushroom cloud would grow in the same delicious graphics and then you'd be presented with the destroyed cityscape. On the bottom line it asked "Do you want to nuke this city again?".
I was given an F and made to erase the program.
Idiocy has little correlation with measured intelligence. Putting effort in to vote requires effort. Idiots can't put in effort. They don't care enough but to scratch their immediate itches. Food, sex, football, celebrity gossip.
Essentially why I am against online voting. Makes it too easy for idiots to vote. You should have to do some work to at least get to the polling place, or mail in your absentee ballot beforehand.
It's pretty much the only barrier, and it seems to work pretty well.
If you are going to do the civil disobedience, you have to be prepared to accept the consequences. Killing yourself and then having the "information must be free" crowd whine about it later isn't civil disobedience. It's a very ineffective form of rebellion. No government is going to get behind that, it'd be like coddling secession or nullification.
Apparently they bottled it with ozone in it. It stank.
Ever tasted ozonated water? Spent a year of my life in the Middle East drinking that awful stuff. No thanks.
Woops. Thanks AC, must've been thinking about subsidies for some reason or just transposed the word. I'm getting old...
So you kind of knew what you were in for with him, if you were paying attention.
Since the place is locked up as tight as Tibet once was, it's hard to imagine subsidies doing much. But yay for empty gestures!
Listen, the warmists started with the notion that they had to stretch the truth to get their point across. The collections of quotes are legion from the 70s and 80s, even 90s, from disparate voices held in esteem in environmental circles. The fact that that policy is biting you in the ass now is pretty predictable. It was one of those strategic errors you can never fix. Like your virginity, you only get to lose your credibility once.
Anyway, deflecting at this point is pointless. The damage is done.
Static guns and discwasher brushes notwithstanding, vinyl had a lot of issues with dust that people are soon going to discover, if they haven't already.
The bleeding of credibility from each [exaggeration, lie, bald untruth (pick one)] is the ultimate cause of the "denier" victory over the "warmist".
That was right about the time the name Cliff Burton passed out of their collective minds. After that, being a really wretched form of pop was just fine.
That's not entirely fair, they were chasing the Nirvana money - Nevermind had just come out and I am sure everyone saw dollar signs.
The best analogue of the problem with the 3R rules is ...the 1E AD&D rules. Poorly organized, too many special cases, not enough specific examples of rule execution. Any rule set that requires hundreds of errata questions has a problem, no? (on a side note, I suspect i'm a closet masochist for liking 1E AD&D, too) Anyway, I don't consider *me* understanding the rules to be an advertisement for how well written they are. I understand 3R just fine, but I also understand law. It's just most other people don't. I have to show them gameplay and then the light goes off.
Sabin at least would fully understand why you'd short-circuit even vital elements of a game for playability. Hell, he spends a goodly portion of his book talking about the various simplifications he has made to avoid overcomplexity and most importantly to make the simulations he uses with his students fit within class time constraints. Dunnigan, also, in his 3E of his design book provides us with a totally stripped down game which is entirely bereft of fluff. No, I think they'd appreciate design decisions like those made in 3R to speed play. As noted, it still takes a day to play...
Hell, compare AWAW or Prados' 3R (the modern edition) with even 4e AH TR...you see Greenwood's hand removing complexity. Prados' original 3R design was division level and included fair bits of the complexity that muddied the first two mentioned games. Greenwood knew what he was doing.
And yes, that we can agree it's a great game and I have gotten many, many hours of joy and sometimes even stress playing it.
It remains a simulation, however imperfect. Prados wasn't writing it for pure entertainment value. Recommend a read of Dunnigan's book or Sabin's "Simulating War" if you don't understand why it remains a simulation.
The rules are acknowledged obtuse by the original authors and were revised several times in a halfhearted attempt to make them better. Googling the topic will find the relevant links.
I've been playing the game for nearly 40 years and there's not a whole lot that one could say about it that I haven't researched to death.
No he didn't. The closest he came to a majority was 37% in any kind of election we might consider free. And in this case, free meant brownshirted thugs hectoring people on the street and administering beatings.
I suspect that we'll be using limited numbers of active buoys to corral and guide sub traffic to the wolves.
There is zero chance that we'll take out even a significant fraction of the enemy boats right away. I have more respect for the Russians than that.
That said, the number of people who agree with me are going to be very limited. It's complicated, takes a day to play, the rules are obtuse and it's intended as a strategic simulation and hardly captures any wartime flavor or even individual units. I find most games - particularly the ones listed in the summary - to mostly be a bore.
It's illustrative of the issue - there is no best game.
(4th edition rules of the original AH game is my preference, for those who care)
Are you conscious of passive sonobuoys? You should get familiar with them.
Also, familiar with towed arrays. Active sonar is almost never used.
The Su-27 had no capability to reach the ranges required to kill carrier groups. The Backfires and Badgers would have had to go in alone. Same as now.
A cursory reading of Red Storm Rising or a game of Harpoon would cure most people of these illusions.
You can make the same argument about the ASMs the Russians would have been firing from the Tu-22s. The ships all had chaff and jamming capabilities, and many had SAMs and CIWS. That is irrelevant. The missiles all worked - not as well as the manufacturers suggested, but they did. The AIM-54 was quite sufficient to hit a target as large and unmaneuverable as the Backfire or Badger. The AS-4 and AS-6 were perfectly capable of killing NATO shipping, naval or otherwise.
The AIM-54 was retired because it was felt it wasn't needed anymore. I think it was a bad decision, but there you go. Also, it was a heavy missile and the other platforms in use now aren't capable of firing it anyway. Moreover, the AIM-120 is a far better AAM anyway, though much shorter ranged.
A good game of Harpoon should cure you of these illusions that the crap didn't work. It did.
How is it that we got a Church Committee, limited as its gains were, back in the 70s and then zilch now?
Well, we made him into a fugitive, so what did you expect? Now he has to earn his keep somehow. I'm waiting now for someone to tell me that they'd like to count trees or kill themselves rather than eke out a living by giving minimal assistance to your 'hosts'? That's a BS argument on its face.
This is a problem of US government creation, not Snowden's. We forced him into a very bad solution set. Give up his integrity or hang the extent of the surveillance out for public view. Just shows you how weak-willed the rest are...or entirely lacking in integrity.
I disagree entirely. He was/is a patriot. I was all over Manning for being a traitor, based on motive and the actions he/she took. I'm a Republican and have been for a long time.
Snowden was doing us a favor and sacrificed a nice cushy life for that. I have a hard time calling a person who did that a traitor. The fact that he's holed up in Russia speaks volumes toward where the United States has gone wrong with extraconstitutional surveillance and paramilitary action after 9/11. We used to be the place where political prisoners fled to, rather than away from.
The country I grew up in wouldn't tolerate what is going on right now with renditions, endless war composed of drone strikes and literally unfettered domestic surveillance.
I'm talking about not routing the traffic, not firewalls per se. Border security is pointless - the traffic has to be stopped before that.