But there is no point short of driving a semi-trailer yourself where you can pull even enough in mass to not take an excessive amount of shock upon being hit by a semi. The obsession with driving SUV's and big trucks to be "safe" annoys me. All you're doing is putting more energy into the equation when you end up wrecking.
I've never had a problem with people who actually use their large vehicles for real work. I have a truck myself; It has hay growing in the back, and the engine is custom so I can pull a bigass horse trailer.
But when I go to the store, I don't drive a monster that only gets 8 miles to the gallon. I drive my old Camry.
And snow? No way. Having driven a big truck, and a small car with front wheel drive, give me the car any day. The only way to keep the truck on the road is to go by the quarry, and get 'em to dump a half ton of sand in the back for balance, and you can only do that for so many years before the sand pile beside your driveway becomes obscene.
I used to drive a p.o.s saturn, and I got plowed in all the time. My neighbors with their sporty, non-four-wheel-drive SUVs would be spinning their tires and getting nowhere. The saturn was so light, I could pop it in neutral, get out, and push it out.
The problem is never the small car smashing into something; it's trivial to reinforce a car against the g-forces generated by it smashing into a solid object, because both sides of the equation are known, and the amount of energy can be calculated.
The problem is always something else smashing into the small car. The aforementioned SUV is a good example. And this is always going to be a problem with efficient cars, as long as the disincentives to driving a large, heavy, fuel-inneficient monster are too low. Fuel prices will eventually put an end to those for all but the most wealthy.
When it hits a point where all cars are comparable in mass, then that sort of thing will cease to be an issue.
Gasoline is mostly hydrocarbons, so while some of it will indeed form H2O when burned (oxygen combining with the hydrogen part of the hydrocarbon), a goodly chunk of it will form CO and CO2. Gotta get rid of that carbon somehow.
Chemistry is like everything else. What comes in on one side must be accounted for on the other side.
Heh. Now if only we could find a way to filter the virtual tea-bagging...
Pure role playing would be nice; lot of companies have role playing servers, but it's never really given serious support, so you still end up with the annoying l33t sp33kers showing up every now and then breaking up the mood.
Usually, for me, it's not about the voice, its about the content, and there is no filter that is ever going to fix that. There are a few guildies of mine I leave on perma-mute because they're just so goddamn annoying...Great players, some of them, but jesus.
That being said, I'd definitely like to see some filter technology. It'd add a lot to the ambiance. I think actually a lot of issues with that are currently relating to the voice actors guild, and their (understandable, though buggy-whippish) desire not to see a lot of high quality voice reproduction make it into games.
Patents are a big problem, when someone patents the equvalent of a hammer, and you're stuck without a really basic tool.
Other times, someone patents "the way it's done" and the result is, when you try and find another way to do it, you actually find a better way.
The problem is, you never know which one you're going to get when you're just starting. I definitely thing innovation can overcome most patents, but a lot of time that's a real pain in the ass, when all you want to build is a slightly better breadbox.
...when I say, "We'll really miss the non-business you did with us, all the expanded capabilities that our non-installed software failed to provide to your business that didn't need them anyway."
Maybe, one day, long in the future, you'll see fit not to install us again. Until then though, we'll have to accept that we had a good long non-run, and leave it at that.
Considering the slide Firefox has been in in my personal satisfaction index, I find myself not giving a damn that they're afraid of a little competition.
I use OSS because I like the way it works. If it doesn't work well enough, I use something else. Firefox isn't going to stay my browser of choice if there is something out there that does the job better.
Now I'm not really fond of Safari, but if it runs fast, loads fast, doesn't hog system memory, I'm going to start using it. End of fricking story.
Physical media is fast becoming irrelevant, so Blu-Ray's victory may be short...But as long as physical media is king, having the largest physical media rental outlet exclusively stocking your product is pretty key.
Who the hell actually buys porn anymore anyway? And in high def? I don't want to see that stuff in high def.
If that were the case, then file sharing, for example, could be legally laid at the door of the ISPs, along with the burden of stopping it. The RIAA wouldn't have to bother suing individuals, they could sue the telecoms.
Generally speaking, postings on the internet are assumed to be the property of the poster, and not of the site itself. This is clearly the assumption the litigators in this particular case are working under, as they are still attempting to sue the posters, rather than the site.
There is a difference between shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater and shouting "So and So is an incompetent whore!" in a crowded theater. One is a criminal offense, and the other is an actionable civil offense.
Now most people agree on criminal offenses. It's very specifically spelled out in law, precedent, and even the constitution.
Civil offenses are a grey area. You can take the person to court, if you can figure out who they are, but you can't send the cops to their house without the support of a judge, and even if you've got that, the process is much slower, and any action against the accused offender has to be filtered through several layers, and with restricted penalties.
So I can understand why a forum that is privacy-conscious enough to keep no IP logs would still be quick to respond to a criminal offense, and slow to respond to a civil complaint. The question will be, can you claim common carrier status when you're protecting the anonymity of your posters?
I used to run a weekly newspaper with a free classified section, which, as all free classifieds do, attracted it's share of libel...The only way we could really keep ourselves legally protected was to censor out recognizable personal data, to make libel difficult or impossible to prove. People still tried, but without a name or an address, it's pretty much impossible.
No one hold journalists to any sort of accountability except other journalists. To think anything else is absurd.
Frankly, and speaking here as someone who's married to a journalist and works at a newspaper, I am sick to fricking death of the whole "objective coverage" line that people keep insisting on, even when their obvious bias shows through...Fox News, I'm looking at you.
What we need is a few solid outlets who are willing to dig and hold people accountable, even at the cost of objectivity. The crap that people get away with now blows my mind, that a politician can claim, "I never said that" and no one but the fricking "Daily Show" has the stones to throw up a clip of them saying it.
So while Michael Moore isn't my favorite person, and while he does indeed grate on my nerves, I completely respect him for being a person who is willing to sift through the crap and put together a argument backed up by hard video data in an attempt to prove his point. Yea, it's biased, but the "objective" outlets are just ignoring this stuff, and it needs to be seen.
Fuck culture. I've already said what I think of that. Did you weep for the foot binders? They can somehow deal with the lack of whale oil, just like the rest of us.
And you're right, it does deprive the human race of something...Not a cultural bloodsport, but a thing of beauty.
And bullshit it's a strawman; if their long term survival wasn't in question, I wouldn't give a damn. But it is, and that is the whole point.
So yea, it comes right back to it: for you, all human uses and human desires are ahead of every other living thing in the whole world. God forbid someone has to change their ways to keep from driving something else to extinction.
We know already that morality extends to intangible things. We generally view lying, infidelity, theft as immoral things. Most people would consider blowing up a church or a museum to be immoral, even if there were no people in it.
Apparently you, however, would only see this as immoral in that it deprives someone of property, rather than immoral in that it deprives the world of something precious and intangible.
Apparently also, you think that any action done toward a living thing, as long as that living thing wasn't human, to be purely ecological. Torture small animals, torture large animals, it's okay, morality only applies to people.
Now I'm not a wacky vegan here to tell you that meat is murder, but the unnecessary destruction of an entire species is beyond the pale. I don't see any possible justification, beyond that they pose an immediate threat to our whole species.
Life has value (if you don't think so, why are you still here?) It follows therefore that living things have value. To destroy a thing of value for no better reason than because you can, not through a real need for survival...That's not moral.
And nihilist? You called me a fucking nihilist? Do you even know what it means? The belief that beauty and truth and living things have an intrinsic moral value is nihilism? The belief that nothing has an intrinsic moral value....That would be nihilism.
So my friend, you are a much greater nihilist than I, since you believe that less things have worth than I do.
Looking at it from a purely ecological point of view, how many big whales to we need? As long as the giant krill-swiller niche is filled, who cares if the rest get butchered? There are faster breeding smaller whales that'll do the trick, and hell, extra nutrients in the ocean will benefit all kinds of species.
The reason we don't go right ahead and extinct the whales is because we've done that before. As a species, we've killed a lot of things. We're the best hunters this mudball has ever known, second to none.
But over time, we've by and large gotten our fill of mindless bloodshed, and started trying to save a little of what we've destroyed. Not because some ecological niche depends on it. Not because we depend on it. But because somewhere inside, we've decided that destroying it, just because we can, isn't the right thing to do.
Informed of what? That there aren't very many bowheads? Or that their numbers have been semi-stable since the late 70's?
It's not enough of an upward trend. They don't need to be stable at a few thousand...That is a low fricking ebb. And of those few thousand, they're almost all in the same place. They used to be common throughout the arctic.
There are a number of countries that whale significantly that have been in and out of the IWC, and countries have been lying about their numbers since forever...the USSR famously reported 2,700 Humpback whales taken over a 50 year period when they actually took more like 48,000 whales. Even if they didn't lie about it, there is nothing that could be done about it if someone decided they no longer wanted to be bound...The IWC is voluntary and powerless.
Japan, for example, when the US threatened sanctions if they didn't stop their commercial whaling, switched to scientific "lethal sampling"...In 2002 they "sampled" as many whales as Norway caught commercially.
Norway and Greenland both hunt under the same exemption that the eskimo's use, except between them they get 15 times as many whales.
Iceland has been and out of the IWC, violated it's rules, etc.
And having an opinion is not the same as dismissing a competing idea out of hand. You didn't replay to anything except two lines at the bottom of my post, and there you only nitpicked.
Try this: Taking the top three whaling countries, plus the eskimos, and set them all to hunting bowhead whales. In the time that it takes a single bowhead to be born and grow until it reaches sexual maturity (15 years), the species would have been hunted to extinction twice ((500 + 500 + 150 + 50) * 15 = 18,000 dead whales).
Most of them aren't Bow's of course, they're Minke's, and there are zillions of Minke's...Maybe even as many as 500,000. But for 1200 dead whales a year, you're still taking 1.5% of the species in the time it takes one to reach maturity, not counting, you know, squid and sharks.
Their quota's are for the bowheads specifically, so they can hunt 50 bowhead whales per year.
There is a lot of argument over the sustainability numbers...So much so that it would be my preference to err on the side of caution, especially given the over all population problem they're having over what used to be their range.
Not all whales no, but there is argument on whether 50 dead per year out of 7800 known living bowhead whales who have a lifespan of 100+ years is sustainable in the long term. Couple that with accident, misadventure, and old age, and it won't take much to make 50 unsustainable.
50 seems like a lot more when you realize that 80 is 1% of the whole population. 100 would probably be close to 1% of the entire bowhead population, depending on what estimates you take...Some people think the total number globally to be as low as 8000. (7800 or so being hunted by your eskimos, with a few other critically endangered groups around the world).
Long lifespans make "sustainability" numbers extremely hard to calculate. Now we know that Bowheads live even longer than we thought, which makes those numbers even more suspect. Right now, Bowhead's are nearly extinct in some areas.
Lots of activities are negative to whales. This is why, if we want whales around, we should restrict the hunting of whales. Lot's of things can kill whales, but some of those things we can quite easily control.
Come right down to it, whales are highly intelligent mammals...the only highly intelligent mammals still being systematically hunted in a legal fashion. I don't see any real reason for it, except that some people like to say, "This is the way we've always done it."
So Closeminded: the idea that hunting whales should be further curtailed (popular idea), doesn't rate with you. Uninformed: You apparently think that all countries have agreed to the whaling moratorium (they haven't) and that the sustainability numbers are viewed as scientifically accurate (they aren't).
It doesn't even matter. What this breaks down to is, Real-time vs Turn-based. The Turn-based people are completely sure that it can't be fallout if they can't take an hour to decide their move, or that it'll be a buttonfest or any of a number of other knee jerk reactions.
I'll be frank: I never liked the mechanics in fallout. It pretty much made a few builds unbeatable, and that was all there is to it. If you decided to go any way other than pure ranged combat, you had to be an expert in running like hell, because you'd be cut down in every random encounter (fallout 2 was almost obscene with this, where you could get random encounters with people who had submachine guns while you're still using the little "pow pow" pistol).
If you did go pure ranged combat (and it was surprisingly annoying to work with this build until you could get the first pistol), the late game was a lark, where you'd just zip around blowing peoples heads off with critical hits to their fricking eyes...Hardly any challenge at all.
I just want a game with all the setting and humor of fallout; something which could be duplicated by a good writing/art team, and an interface that won't have my charismatic gambler character wandering into the middle of a patrol of supermutants carrying plasma rifles. I don't give a damn if it's real time or not.
Cultural relativism is always stupid, whether you're talking about something like whaling, or whether you're talking about footbinding, or female genital mutilation...Just because someone has done it for a thousand years, doesn't make it right.
Then you make a completely irrelevant comparison (humans vs squid and sharks), and speculate wildly about it's childbearing years.
Well, having worked with Unions a time or two, the things that irk the living hell out of me about unions are as follows:
1) The "Screw you I'm Union" attitude that they cop whenever performance is an issue, or, especially, when you ask them to help with something that is not explicitly covered in their contract. As far as they're concerned that job is their property, and it can't be taken away without a huge costly fight, and so they know they're not going to be held accountable.
2) The near-unbearable sense of entitlement. The world owes them, not just a job, but a job, top notch benefits, a pension, and an annual salary increase not tied to performance.
3) The slimy tactics they use to discriminate against non-union workers, whether it's old school intimidation, or blacklisting companies that work with non-union employees, or lobbying state governments to require union credentials to get a license for skilled work.
Union's started off as a good thing, and they put forth some good change. But now? Now they're more like a parasite than a symbiote; they'll kill their host and not give a damn, because they've got to get theirs.
Heavily unioned industries in this country are doing like crap; it's hard to be competitive and flexible when your workforce decides what you're going to be building a year in advance.
I can't even imagine what that would be like in I/T...Server meltdown in the night, "Ah screw you, I'll fix it in the morning." Major security breach in the financials system, "Get someone else, I'm on my coffee break." Have to wait 4 hours to replace a hotswap harddrive because the guy whose job it is to officially do that thing is working the night shift. Can't allowed to move a computer across the room because that's the job of your unioned building services people.
I work primarily in an environment in which the 5 primary browsers are #1 Safari, #2 IE 6/7, #3 IE 5 (Mac), #4 Netscape 4 point fricking 7 (I wish that was a joke), and #5 Firefox.
Basically it's just a hell of required operating systems and incompatible web/proprietary apps forcing certain unfortunate browser choices.
In all of this, this browser hell on earth, IE is by _far_ and away the biggest pain in my ass. Fricking Netscape 4.7 with it's awful awful awful javascript implementation is not as annoying as IE, and don't get me going on how IE breaks compatibility with fricking IE from version to version.
I am forced to make everything as absolutely minimalist and general as possible, and I can get it to a point where it works on everything except 1 of the 3 versions of IE I have to deal with, and it's pretty much a different version each time.
So yea, you're a complete troll. The goddamn standards were around before IE, and the only reason IE broke standards was to force people to have to use their crappy bizarro "standards" and make them rich.
Slashdot Mirror
But there is no point short of driving a semi-trailer yourself where you can pull even enough in mass to not take an excessive amount of shock upon being hit by a semi. The obsession with driving SUV's and big trucks to be "safe" annoys me. All you're doing is putting more energy into the equation when you end up wrecking.
I've never had a problem with people who actually use their large vehicles for real work. I have a truck myself; It has hay growing in the back, and the engine is custom so I can pull a bigass horse trailer.
But when I go to the store, I don't drive a monster that only gets 8 miles to the gallon. I drive my old Camry.
And snow? No way. Having driven a big truck, and a small car with front wheel drive, give me the car any day. The only way to keep the truck on the road is to go by the quarry, and get 'em to dump a half ton of sand in the back for balance, and you can only do that for so many years before the sand pile beside your driveway becomes obscene.
I used to drive a p.o.s saturn, and I got plowed in all the time. My neighbors with their sporty, non-four-wheel-drive SUVs would be spinning their tires and getting nowhere. The saturn was so light, I could pop it in neutral, get out, and push it out.
The problem is never the small car smashing into something; it's trivial to reinforce a car against the g-forces generated by it smashing into a solid object, because both sides of the equation are known, and the amount of energy can be calculated.
The problem is always something else smashing into the small car. The aforementioned SUV is a good example. And this is always going to be a problem with efficient cars, as long as the disincentives to driving a large, heavy, fuel-inneficient monster are too low. Fuel prices will eventually put an end to those for all but the most wealthy.
When it hits a point where all cars are comparable in mass, then that sort of thing will cease to be an issue.
Gasoline is mostly hydrocarbons, so while some of it will indeed form H2O when burned (oxygen combining with the hydrogen part of the hydrocarbon), a goodly chunk of it will form CO and CO2. Gotta get rid of that carbon somehow.
Chemistry is like everything else. What comes in on one side must be accounted for on the other side.
Heh. Now if only we could find a way to filter the virtual tea-bagging...
Pure role playing would be nice; lot of companies have role playing servers, but it's never really given serious support, so you still end up with the annoying l33t sp33kers showing up every now and then breaking up the mood.
Usually, for me, it's not about the voice, its about the content, and there is no filter that is ever going to fix that. There are a few guildies of mine I leave on perma-mute because they're just so goddamn annoying...Great players, some of them, but jesus.
That being said, I'd definitely like to see some filter technology. It'd add a lot to the ambiance. I think actually a lot of issues with that are currently relating to the voice actors guild, and their (understandable, though buggy-whippish) desire not to see a lot of high quality voice reproduction make it into games.
Patents are a big problem, when someone patents the equvalent of a hammer, and you're stuck without a really basic tool.
Other times, someone patents "the way it's done" and the result is, when you try and find another way to do it, you actually find a better way.
The problem is, you never know which one you're going to get when you're just starting. I definitely thing innovation can overcome most patents, but a lot of time that's a real pain in the ass, when all you want to build is a slightly better breadbox.
...when I say, "We'll really miss the non-business you did with us, all the expanded capabilities that our non-installed software failed to provide to your business that didn't need them anyway."
Maybe, one day, long in the future, you'll see fit not to install us again. Until then though, we'll have to accept that we had a good long non-run, and leave it at that.
Considering the slide Firefox has been in in my personal satisfaction index, I find myself not giving a damn that they're afraid of a little competition.
I use OSS because I like the way it works. If it doesn't work well enough, I use something else. Firefox isn't going to stay my browser of choice if there is something out there that does the job better.
Now I'm not really fond of Safari, but if it runs fast, loads fast, doesn't hog system memory, I'm going to start using it. End of fricking story.
Who knew the market for dead hookers was so crazy? I foresee a new application for Balmer's chair throwing skillz...
Physical media is fast becoming irrelevant, so Blu-Ray's victory may be short...But as long as physical media is king, having the largest physical media rental outlet exclusively stocking your product is pretty key.
Who the hell actually buys porn anymore anyway? And in high def? I don't want to see that stuff in high def.
If that were the case, then file sharing, for example, could be legally laid at the door of the ISPs, along with the burden of stopping it. The RIAA wouldn't have to bother suing individuals, they could sue the telecoms.
Generally speaking, postings on the internet are assumed to be the property of the poster, and not of the site itself. This is clearly the assumption the litigators in this particular case are working under, as they are still attempting to sue the posters, rather than the site.
There is a difference between shouting "Fire!" in a crowded theater and shouting "So and So is an incompetent whore!" in a crowded theater. One is a criminal offense, and the other is an actionable civil offense.
Now most people agree on criminal offenses. It's very specifically spelled out in law, precedent, and even the constitution.
Civil offenses are a grey area. You can take the person to court, if you can figure out who they are, but you can't send the cops to their house without the support of a judge, and even if you've got that, the process is much slower, and any action against the accused offender has to be filtered through several layers, and with restricted penalties.
So I can understand why a forum that is privacy-conscious enough to keep no IP logs would still be quick to respond to a criminal offense, and slow to respond to a civil complaint. The question will be, can you claim common carrier status when you're protecting the anonymity of your posters?
I used to run a weekly newspaper with a free classified section, which, as all free classifieds do, attracted it's share of libel...The only way we could really keep ourselves legally protected was to censor out recognizable personal data, to make libel difficult or impossible to prove. People still tried, but without a name or an address, it's pretty much impossible.
No one hold journalists to any sort of accountability except other journalists. To think anything else is absurd.
Frankly, and speaking here as someone who's married to a journalist and works at a newspaper, I am sick to fricking death of the whole "objective coverage" line that people keep insisting on, even when their obvious bias shows through...Fox News, I'm looking at you.
What we need is a few solid outlets who are willing to dig and hold people accountable, even at the cost of objectivity. The crap that people get away with now blows my mind, that a politician can claim, "I never said that" and no one but the fricking "Daily Show" has the stones to throw up a clip of them saying it.
So while Michael Moore isn't my favorite person, and while he does indeed grate on my nerves, I completely respect him for being a person who is willing to sift through the crap and put together a argument backed up by hard video data in an attempt to prove his point. Yea, it's biased, but the "objective" outlets are just ignoring this stuff, and it needs to be seen.
Fuck culture. I've already said what I think of that. Did you weep for the foot binders? They can somehow deal with the lack of whale oil, just like the rest of us.
And you're right, it does deprive the human race of something...Not a cultural bloodsport, but a thing of beauty.
And bullshit it's a strawman; if their long term survival wasn't in question, I wouldn't give a damn. But it is, and that is the whole point.
So yea, it comes right back to it: for you, all human uses and human desires are ahead of every other living thing in the whole world. God forbid someone has to change their ways to keep from driving something else to extinction.
We know already that morality extends to intangible things. We generally view lying, infidelity, theft as immoral things. Most people would consider blowing up a church or a museum to be immoral, even if there were no people in it.
Apparently you, however, would only see this as immoral in that it deprives someone of property, rather than immoral in that it deprives the world of something precious and intangible.
Apparently also, you think that any action done toward a living thing, as long as that living thing wasn't human, to be purely ecological. Torture small animals, torture large animals, it's okay, morality only applies to people.
Now I'm not a wacky vegan here to tell you that meat is murder, but the unnecessary destruction of an entire species is beyond the pale. I don't see any possible justification, beyond that they pose an immediate threat to our whole species.
Life has value (if you don't think so, why are you still here?) It follows therefore that living things have value. To destroy a thing of value for no better reason than because you can, not through a real need for survival...That's not moral.
And nihilist? You called me a fucking nihilist? Do you even know what it means? The belief that beauty and truth and living things have an intrinsic moral value is nihilism? The belief that nothing has an intrinsic moral value....That would be nihilism.
So my friend, you are a much greater nihilist than I, since you believe that less things have worth than I do.
Sure it's a moral issue!
Looking at it from a purely ecological point of view, how many big whales to we need? As long as the giant krill-swiller niche is filled, who cares if the rest get butchered? There are faster breeding smaller whales that'll do the trick, and hell, extra nutrients in the ocean will benefit all kinds of species.
The reason we don't go right ahead and extinct the whales is because we've done that before. As a species, we've killed a lot of things. We're the best hunters this mudball has ever known, second to none.
But over time, we've by and large gotten our fill of mindless bloodshed, and started trying to save a little of what we've destroyed. Not because some ecological niche depends on it. Not because we depend on it. But because somewhere inside, we've decided that destroying it, just because we can, isn't the right thing to do.
That's morality.
Informed of what? That there aren't very many bowheads? Or that their numbers have been semi-stable since the late 70's?
It's not enough of an upward trend. They don't need to be stable at a few thousand...That is a low fricking ebb. And of those few thousand, they're almost all in the same place. They used to be common throughout the arctic.
Sure there are more than there were, but still.
There are a number of countries that whale significantly that have been in and out of the IWC, and countries have been lying about their numbers since forever...the USSR famously reported 2,700 Humpback whales taken over a 50 year period when they actually took more like 48,000 whales. Even if they didn't lie about it, there is nothing that could be done about it if someone decided they no longer wanted to be bound...The IWC is voluntary and powerless.
Japan, for example, when the US threatened sanctions if they didn't stop their commercial whaling, switched to scientific "lethal sampling"...In 2002 they "sampled" as many whales as Norway caught commercially.
Norway and Greenland both hunt under the same exemption that the eskimo's use, except between them they get 15 times as many whales.
Iceland has been and out of the IWC, violated it's rules, etc.
And having an opinion is not the same as dismissing a competing idea out of hand. You didn't replay to anything except two lines at the bottom of my post, and there you only nitpicked.
Try this: Taking the top three whaling countries, plus the eskimos, and set them all to hunting bowhead whales. In the time that it takes a single bowhead to be born and grow until it reaches sexual maturity (15 years), the species would have been hunted to extinction twice ((500 + 500 + 150 + 50) * 15 = 18,000 dead whales).
Most of them aren't Bow's of course, they're Minke's, and there are zillions of Minke's...Maybe even as many as 500,000. But for 1200 dead whales a year, you're still taking 1.5% of the species in the time it takes one to reach maturity, not counting, you know, squid and sharks.
Apparently that's "sustainable" to some people.
Their quota's are for the bowheads specifically, so they can hunt 50 bowhead whales per year.
There is a lot of argument over the sustainability numbers...So much so that it would be my preference to err on the side of caution, especially given the over all population problem they're having over what used to be their range.
Not all whales no, but there is argument on whether 50 dead per year out of 7800 known living bowhead whales who have a lifespan of 100+ years is sustainable in the long term. Couple that with accident, misadventure, and old age, and it won't take much to make 50 unsustainable.
50 seems like a lot more when you realize that 80 is 1% of the whole population. 100 would probably be close to 1% of the entire bowhead population, depending on what estimates you take...Some people think the total number globally to be as low as 8000. (7800 or so being hunted by your eskimos, with a few other critically endangered groups around the world).
Long lifespans make "sustainability" numbers extremely hard to calculate. Now we know that Bowheads live even longer than we thought, which makes those numbers even more suspect. Right now, Bowhead's are nearly extinct in some areas.
Lots of activities are negative to whales. This is why, if we want whales around, we should restrict the hunting of whales. Lot's of things can kill whales, but some of those things we can quite easily control.
Come right down to it, whales are highly intelligent mammals...the only highly intelligent mammals still being systematically hunted in a legal fashion. I don't see any real reason for it, except that some people like to say, "This is the way we've always done it."
So Closeminded: the idea that hunting whales should be further curtailed (popular idea), doesn't rate with you. Uninformed: You apparently think that all countries have agreed to the whaling moratorium (they haven't) and that the sustainability numbers are viewed as scientifically accurate (they aren't).
It doesn't even matter. What this breaks down to is, Real-time vs Turn-based. The Turn-based people are completely sure that it can't be fallout if they can't take an hour to decide their move, or that it'll be a buttonfest or any of a number of other knee jerk reactions.
I'll be frank: I never liked the mechanics in fallout. It pretty much made a few builds unbeatable, and that was all there is to it. If you decided to go any way other than pure ranged combat, you had to be an expert in running like hell, because you'd be cut down in every random encounter (fallout 2 was almost obscene with this, where you could get random encounters with people who had submachine guns while you're still using the little "pow pow" pistol).
If you did go pure ranged combat (and it was surprisingly annoying to work with this build until you could get the first pistol), the late game was a lark, where you'd just zip around blowing peoples heads off with critical hits to their fricking eyes...Hardly any challenge at all.
I just want a game with all the setting and humor of fallout; something which could be duplicated by a good writing/art team, and an interface that won't have my charismatic gambler character wandering into the middle of a patrol of supermutants carrying plasma rifles. I don't give a damn if it's real time or not.
Cultural relativism is always stupid, whether you're talking about something like whaling, or whether you're talking about footbinding, or female genital mutilation...Just because someone has done it for a thousand years, doesn't make it right.
Then you make a completely irrelevant comparison (humans vs squid and sharks), and speculate wildly about it's childbearing years.
I think you're close-minded and uninformed.
Well, having worked with Unions a time or two, the things that irk the living hell out of me about unions are as follows:
1) The "Screw you I'm Union" attitude that they cop whenever performance is an issue, or, especially, when you ask them to help with something that is not explicitly covered in their contract. As far as they're concerned that job is their property, and it can't be taken away without a huge costly fight, and so they know they're not going to be held accountable.
2) The near-unbearable sense of entitlement. The world owes them, not just a job, but a job, top notch benefits, a pension, and an annual salary increase not tied to performance.
3) The slimy tactics they use to discriminate against non-union workers, whether it's old school intimidation, or blacklisting companies that work with non-union employees, or lobbying state governments to require union credentials to get a license for skilled work.
Union's started off as a good thing, and they put forth some good change. But now? Now they're more like a parasite than a symbiote; they'll kill their host and not give a damn, because they've got to get theirs.
Heavily unioned industries in this country are doing like crap; it's hard to be competitive and flexible when your workforce decides what you're going to be building a year in advance.
I can't even imagine what that would be like in I/T...Server meltdown in the night, "Ah screw you, I'll fix it in the morning." Major security breach in the financials system, "Get someone else, I'm on my coffee break." Have to wait 4 hours to replace a hotswap harddrive because the guy whose job it is to officially do that thing is working the night shift. Can't allowed to move a computer across the room because that's the job of your unioned building services people.
Screw that.
I work primarily in an environment in which the 5 primary browsers are #1 Safari, #2 IE 6/7, #3 IE 5 (Mac), #4 Netscape 4 point fricking 7 (I wish that was a joke), and #5 Firefox.
Basically it's just a hell of required operating systems and incompatible web/proprietary apps forcing certain unfortunate browser choices.
In all of this, this browser hell on earth, IE is by _far_ and away the biggest pain in my ass. Fricking Netscape 4.7 with it's awful awful awful javascript implementation is not as annoying as IE, and don't get me going on how IE breaks compatibility with fricking IE from version to version.
I am forced to make everything as absolutely minimalist and general as possible, and I can get it to a point where it works on everything except 1 of the 3 versions of IE I have to deal with, and it's pretty much a different version each time.
So yea, you're a complete troll. The goddamn standards were around before IE, and the only reason IE broke standards was to force people to have to use their crappy bizarro "standards" and make them rich.