Besides which, I already know how it will go after the USA falls apart: the New England states will form the nation of...New England; NY will go their own way, California will split into 3, and the Confederacy will rise again.
Naw, I've seen how it goes down. The western states will combine under new leadership based in Wyoming, the eastern states will combine with their government in Ohio, and The Republic of Texas will be the tie-breaker. =D
They've so dumbed down the MMORPG market that it is impossible for any other company to come out with any sort of game that isn't hand holding and brain dead at its core.
And adding insult to injury, Hand Holding Online and Brain Death Online did it first! But everyone thinks Blizzard is the innovator...
Imagine if Microsoft or Apple came along and dictated that their operating systems could no longer legally be used as a platform running any "p2p sharing software" (since as we ALL know, torrents and other types of p2p sharing are inherently bad, right?).
If both of them did it, then I'm imagining The Year of Linux on the Desktop finally coming to pass! =D
Pretty unusual? I stopped playing for the same reason. Maybe you can collect some people for a PUG in 30-45 minutes if you're lucky...
Get on a high population server, don't run something really obscure (e.g. anything not in the latest expansion), and 45 minutes is when you're very un-lucky. If you can tank or heal, unlucky would be having to wait 20 minutes (almost certainly for the other character type). If you can tank or heal, and you want to run the daily instance, you can get a group in just a few minutes.
Maybe I am not the best player, but that was my experience. I found that it took about 4 hours to do all that. And that's not counting the time to research the instance.
Hm, lemme guess, you stopped playing before the first expansion? Yeah, a lot of the instances there were gigantic. Sunken Temple, Stratholme, those were ridiculous crawls. Certainly a lot of the more casual players didn't even get to see them.
In TBC, even with a bad group an instance run would take 2.5 hours tops. With a decent group (by pug standards) you could clear most places in a little over an hour. In Wrath they've went even further, and now 45 minutes is a reasonable time frame to complete most instances with a decent group.
How do adults find the time to put in 4 hours a night (a few times a week) with full time jobs and kids? Do you just lock the kids in the closet with a jar of peanut butter and a pillow?
It's called the weekend. After you mow the lawn and clean the eaves troughs you send the kids to the neighbor's to play and sit down for some gaming. On weekends its even easier to find a group; already you see people PUGing the 10-man raids.
I mean it's the same question as to how adults find time to watch as much TV as they apparently do. I know a lot of people who have kids in roughly the 4-10 range who go to be hours after their kid does, and if they're older than that they can generally handle not having direct supervision. People manage, is my point.
I really liked WoW, but the time commitment to do anything fun was just too much for me.
I understand what you're saying. I guess that's really my point -- you can't do much of anything in just an hour or two, so if 5-mans aren't "casual", then really, what is?
Obviously for you the answer was "nothing, I'm outta here":)
I admit the whole gitmo thing isn't an ideal example, how about this one, from when the man clinched the nomination:
More like a great example because it perfectly demonstrates how the raw literal meaning of words fails to capture the actual intended meaning. He meant what I and nearly everyone else thought he meant. We correctly interpreted his meaning, whether we believed that meaning or not. Your literal interpretation was wrong.
If you believe he is promising to reverse global warming, you're a sucker, plain and simple. It's not pedantry, it's the fact of the matter; it's not a promise, a completely subjective and poetic expression. Do you believe in this? March with me!
If you don't think he is implying that he plans to implement environmental policies designed to counter global warming, then you're a fool who can't understand plain English. Of course he's explicitly said that he intends to do that, but that just means that if you'll allow context to be considered then it's even more obvious what he meant when he said that line.
Does that mean I believe he WILL simply because that's what his words meant? No, and I have no idea how or why you conflated these ideas! Because as I already said, those are not the same thing! I understood what he actually meant, what the intended message was, and what he wanted the audience to take from the statement.
Seriously, next you'll tell me that "Read my lips: no new taxes" wasn't a promise of no new taxes.
You say 'literal pedantry' (no bias there) is the least critical kind of thinking, yet no one seems to do it...
Yes, because it's a non-critical way of thinking that doesn't represent actual human communication. Literal pedantry -- what's the bias, that's exactly what you're advocating, you actually said people shouldn't "decide" what someone else means as if you don't have to do that constantly -- completely fails to understand the meaning of the majority of forms of expression. That's why nobody does it outside slashdot, and why slashdotters so often fail to comprehend simple english.
I think you want there to be a falsehood because you are personally invested in the belief that politicians are liars, and you'd rather believe the country is being destroyed by a few bad apples (or "sociopaths") than the fact that a big chunk of the population has bad deductive reasoning skills -- probably brought on by NCLB standardized testing;).
No, I'm invested in utterly destroying the notion that pedantry is a superior form of reasoning, and the notion that if it is possible to interpret what someone says in a way that it is not a lie, then they were not and could not have been lying. This mentality has been heavily abused, and I think it's responsible for damaging people's understanding of lies and truth, and their deductive reasoning ability in general.
Politics is just one of the places where the tolerance for weasel words you're advocating is at its worst. But I'm against this way of thinking in all walks of life.
I'm telling you to beware of what this politician says, and you keep saying people should be credulous!
No, not once have I said anyone should be credulous or anything like that. I said that you should actual listen to what a politician says, and what someone says is rarely the same as what the words they utter literally mean. Pedantry is not and never will be the most correct way to interpret meaning.
I'm saying that, because of this obvious and simple fact of language, we should not allow politicians or anyone else to slide their way out of obvious lies due to semantic pedantry. How you convert that into we should believe whatever a politician says (and then be mad later after we find out we're "duped"), I have no idea, but let me assure you that is absolutely not the case.
In fact, what I'm saying (have already said, really) is that you should be even more
It's dishonesty and deception but not lying (since they don't actually say anything false).
To "say" something is more than just reciting words. It's expressing something. And if what you express is false, that's a lie. Just because when something is taken literally it isn't a lie, doesn't mean that the actual expression wasn't a lie. That's my whole point. Nobody actually uses pedantic literalism as their sole mode of expression, ergo using pedantic literalism as the sole judge of what is and is not a lie misses entire realms of human communication that are clearly lies.
Will you declare victory when he orders it closed down and quietly relocated somewhere else? Because that's what's in the works right now.
Citation? And no, if he closes Gitmo in order to stay true to the literal word of his promise, then opens a new prison that does the same thing, that's just as bad.
Or would you prefer that the CIA have no interrogation facilities at all? In which case, will you be among those who scream at the government for the next "fail to prevent"?
I would prefer they have no interrogation facilities where extra-legal techniques can be used outside any oversight. And there's zero evidence that such a facility would help prevent anything. All they do is increase the risk when innocent people are eventually sent home with a horror story to tell.
No, if he never had the intent to close Guantanamo at the time the statement was made, then thats a lie.
Well, sure, it would be a lie the moment he uttered it knowing it not to be true, but we'd know that it was a lie when he didn't try to close it. If he tries to and can't for some bizarre reason, sure I'd take that into account too, I'm not trying to make this some binary black/white thing. That's what pedants do.
The statement seams pretty clear to me, IE he would use his office to put a end to the use of Gitmo as the excuse to ignore US and international laws. As such no one can claim his statement was a lie if the prison is closed, but the facility is kept in use for other purposes (or even kept as a prison but with US/international scrutiny.)
Yeah, see, you got the message too. I knew it wasn't so difficult. And yeah he was obviously talking about the prison, not the military base itself. I don't think the last one would really work though. The only point to having a prison there is for the sake of being outside U.S. law. So I can't see that happening.
Der der der... Yeah. I'm saying it's nothing more than a prop, not an actual lie detector, which is why the very non-miracle very fake no-machinery version "worked" just as well.
You actually thought I was defending the "machinery" by saying it's as effective as a seismograph? BAW HAW HAW.
I think you're arguing for complete solipcism in language, and that people should be held responsible for what their listeners conclude. and not what they themselves say... It's not about natural language. You're arguing that voters shouldn't be required to think critically about the things they hear, and that everybody gets to just sorta "decide" all subjectively what the speaker meant.
You're the one arguing against critical thinking!
Literal pedantry is the least critical kind of thinking you can do with language. You're honestly telling me that you can never tell what someone meant by what they said, beyond the most pedantic literal meaning possible, devoid of contextual clues or any implied meaning, and that you should never "hold them responsible" for anything of the sort? That something can only be a lie if it goes against this literal interpretation of what was meant?
And meant is not the same as believed! That's my whole point, you're advocating letting someone get away with lies to manipulate the public, so long as their was some semantic pedantic bullshit that lets them weasel out of it. And now you're even saying we should do this because it's good for the country, it's "healthy" politics?!
You can't honestly tell me that Barak Obama didn't want the people listening to believe that when he said "Yes we can close Gitmo" he wanted people to tie his campaign slogan implicitly with the follow on "by electing Barak Obama". Same as "Yes we can recover the economy" and "Yes we can restore our international reputation". Absolutely when he said these things, regardless of clueless semantic arguments, his intended meaning was that he would try to do those things.
If he didn't try, then he'd have broken a campaign promise, and I see absolutely no reason to excuse that for the sake of pedantry! Useless, idiotic, not-thinking-is-smart-no-really pedantry! Though I picked this example in particular because Barak Obama has actually ordered that Gitmo be closed. Now try telling me that's not what he meant.
Just the same, when Obama says "Yes we can close Guantanamo!" he isn't promising to do a goddamn thing, he's just phrasing his aspirations for what America could do in such a way that people hear "OMG Barack is gonna close gitmo!"
This is not lying, and treating it like it is is just victimology of the voter against eeeeeeevil politicians.
That is absolutely lying! We're talking about natural language communication here, not a programming language. Words and phrases have meaning that are not necessarily the sum of their individual parts, there is context involved that guides the necessary interpretation of both sides. As in, pedantic literal interpretation is not, and has never been, the sole judge of the meaning of a sentence.
When the words spoken by a speaker are designed to convey a certain meaning to the listeners, and the listeners receive that meaning, then we call that successful communication. When that correctly conveyed meaning is deliberately false, that's a fucking lie!
When the speaker also designs their words to leave themselves a semantic escape valve so they can claim to have meant something else later, that doesn't mean they weren't lying, it means they knew they were lying and thus needed the out!
When Obama said "Yes we can close Gitmo", everyone correctly interpreted that to mean that if he were elected, he would close Gitmo. That is the meaning he obviously intended to convey. If he doesn't close it, then that's a lie*. And if he defended himself by saying that all he had meant was he thought it was something America could do hypothetically, then that makes him a double liar because that obviously is not the message he intended to convey when he spoke!
The only people who think that isn't lying are: 1) People who've sacrificed reason itself on the Altar of Pedantry. 2) Liars who are lying about it not being lying and just like being able to use semantics to escape from obvious lies.
I refuse to sacrifice my ability to detect lies covered with such a thin ruse to either group of people.
* So far so good on this count, but of course I won't be happy until the thing is really truly closed.
A better approach (read more effective) would have been if they used the money they paid those lawyers to instead commission their own study of the effectiveness of lie detectors. This of course assumes that they actually believe in their own product, and don't already know it to be a scam.
No, I'm pretty sure that they could get their own study commissioned to show what they wanted to show without believing in their product one bit. In fact that probably helps, since they would know to make sure they were paying for specific results rather than trusting in the outcome.
Yeah it's new. It's the first time they've teleported quantum information between entangled atoms over this distance. I guess it's harder than doing it with photons due to... mass? Certainly it's not like you take the exact same setup you use to do photon teleportation, and it just works -- bamf! -- on atoms.
So it's nothing really 'new' in the sense that it's the same ol' teleporting-information-but-no-information-you-can-use trick just with a matter instead of energy. It's definitely something new in the sense that we couldn't do it before.
Incremental progress. I like it; I don't get why it doesn't satisfy some people.
Only in the common three spatial dimensions. They're pretty much right on top of each other in the 5th and 6th dimensions, which results in all kinds of practical jokes going on between their physics departments.
Polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, coin flips, sticking your hand in the statue's mouth and Scientology's "E-Meters" all share the same validity in catching lies -- basically none. It's all pretend "science" with cool moving needles and wires, but you might as well be watching a seismograph for all the good it does you. It simply gives government agencies and insurance companies an excuse to call you a liar. "Hey, don't look at me, the MACHINE says you're lying..."
Oh, all those things (including the seismograph) can have quite a bit of validity at catching lies... if the person being interrogated believes they are valid lie-catchers. As a psychological tool in the hands of an interrogator skilled in the 'old fashioned' method of detecting lies, they can be quite handy.
That's about the only use a polygraph has. Enough people don't know what crocks they are that they may be convinced that their lies have been or will be discovered by the machine and spill the truth. I've even heard of a detective faking it by using a non-functional box, with a concealed switch that made red and green lights come on. He made it flash red when he thought the suspect was lying, and well he was right enough that the suspect panicked and confessed.
Of course, if an empty box and a hand switch work equally well as the 'real thing', that kinda defeats the need for polygraph vendors and their expensive toys. Thus this kind of lawsuit.
Except that if the lie detector says the scientists are telling the truth, the company can either:
How do you know the lie detector will say the scientists are telling the truth? The scientists themselves say its results are the same as chance.
Your scenario only works if the lie detector works, in which case the scientists are wrong (though not necessarily lying, so we don't get into any paradoxes here).
Hate to break it to you buddy, but having to gather 10 other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan is not casual.
If it can't be reliably done in an hour including the time to get a group together its not casual. Not saying its bad or good, but there it is.
Then you don't consider even 5-man non-heroic instances to be casual (at least, certainly not instances prior to Wrath, and even then a typical PuG takes more than an hour especially including time to get the group together).
I mean, I have an uncle who played WoW, and could only play for two hours a night due to work schedule, so instance running was largely impossible -- thus why he stopped playing. However that's pretty unusual circumstances. I'd wager most "casuals" will still put in more than two hours of game time on those occasions that they do play.
Personally, my definition of "casual" is: If you can PUG it, it's casual.
By that definition, when ZA was released it wasn't casual. Soon after the Sunwell Isle expansion, it was casual. People were plucking "[9] other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan" out of trade chat on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Everything you are describing is the production stage. The technology waiting in the wings would not be in any stage of production, it would be in the lab phase.
Actually, the last step I mentioned, which is actually the farthest backward in time and thus the first, was the lab work to develop technology to eventually be put into production. I mean it takes quite a lot of R&D just to figure out how a transistor node that is three or more generations more advanced than the current production tech would even work at all. It takes a decade to go from that work to a functional production facility. They need to be driving that initial lab work, otherwise in ten years they'll find themselves without any new technology to go to. Calling that "waiting in the wings" is crazy.
They are not sitting on a massive pool of technology, doling it out as slowly as they can. The idea that they invented 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, and 22nm in an afternoon -- or a half dozen years, and are just waiting on the smaller technologies until they feel they "need" to actually put them into use is ridiculous, obviously so if you have any idea what goes into developing them.
T3 was T2 with the volume turned up on everything and the only interesting character removed. In T2 even Awnuld had character development, T3 had zero for anybody. Hell, John actually managed to regress during T3 to being a whinier loser than he was at the start of T2, and at least then he had the excuse of being 13. Claire Danes was nothing but a name for the bill; there was no reason for her character to even be in the movie. Other than that, it was a giant rip-off of T2. That's what I don't get, everything there is not to like in T2 is in T3, only louder and dumber, and with plenty of additional flaws besides.
The only redeeming feature of T3 is the amazing crane chase scene with real destruction in an era where every big-budget action movie was doing everything with CGI. That was refreshing, at least.
I'd almost give it the ending, since they had the guts to end it on a downer. But since it immediately followed the incredibly lame "i'll appeal to the brainwashed person's inner self" cliche only on an already-had-to-be-brainwashed-to-be-good machine it was hard to take it seriously. And when John picked up the mic in the command center, there was zero reason to think anyone on the other end would be interested in having him as their leader.
Slashdot Mirror
Besides which, I already know how it will go after the USA falls apart: the New England states will form the nation of...New England; NY will go their own way, California will split into 3, and the Confederacy will rise again.
Naw, I've seen how it goes down. The western states will combine under new leadership based in Wyoming, the eastern states will combine with their government in Ohio, and The Republic of Texas will be the tie-breaker. =D
They've so dumbed down the MMORPG market that it is impossible for any other company to come out with any sort of game that isn't hand holding and brain dead at its core.
And adding insult to injury, Hand Holding Online and Brain Death Online did it first! But everyone thinks Blizzard is the innovator...
Imagine if Microsoft or Apple came along and dictated that their operating systems could no longer legally be used as a platform running any "p2p sharing software" (since as we ALL know, torrents and other types of p2p sharing are inherently bad, right?).
If both of them did it, then I'm imagining The Year of Linux on the Desktop finally coming to pass! =D
Not if the magnetic field is weaker than whatever you use to hold them together.
Take a regular magnet and cut it in half, gees do I have to do all the heavy thinking around here.
Well I'm handling all the heavy drinking so somebody has got to pick up the slack.
For those of us (like me) who were confused when the DAQ acronym started being peppered in the parent post, it means "Data AcQuisition".
Oh man, that makes way more sense than what I was thinking, "Dark Age of Quamelot".
Pretty unusual? I stopped playing for the same reason. Maybe you can collect some people for a PUG in 30-45 minutes if you're lucky...
Get on a high population server, don't run something really obscure (e.g. anything not in the latest expansion), and 45 minutes is when you're very un-lucky. If you can tank or heal, unlucky would be having to wait 20 minutes (almost certainly for the other character type). If you can tank or heal, and you want to run the daily instance, you can get a group in just a few minutes.
Maybe I am not the best player, but that was my experience. I found that it took about 4 hours to do all that. And that's not counting the time to research the instance.
Hm, lemme guess, you stopped playing before the first expansion? Yeah, a lot of the instances there were gigantic. Sunken Temple, Stratholme, those were ridiculous crawls. Certainly a lot of the more casual players didn't even get to see them.
In TBC, even with a bad group an instance run would take 2.5 hours tops. With a decent group (by pug standards) you could clear most places in a little over an hour. In Wrath they've went even further, and now 45 minutes is a reasonable time frame to complete most instances with a decent group.
How do adults find the time to put in 4 hours a night (a few times a week) with full time jobs and kids? Do you just lock the kids in the closet with a jar of peanut butter and a pillow?
It's called the weekend. After you mow the lawn and clean the eaves troughs you send the kids to the neighbor's to play and sit down for some gaming. On weekends its even easier to find a group; already you see people PUGing the 10-man raids.
I mean it's the same question as to how adults find time to watch as much TV as they apparently do. I know a lot of people who have kids in roughly the 4-10 range who go to be hours after their kid does, and if they're older than that they can generally handle not having direct supervision. People manage, is my point.
I really liked WoW, but the time commitment to do anything fun was just too much for me.
I understand what you're saying. I guess that's really my point -- you can't do much of anything in just an hour or two, so if 5-mans aren't "casual", then really, what is?
Obviously for you the answer was "nothing, I'm outta here" :)
I admit the whole gitmo thing isn't an ideal example, how about this one, from when the man clinched the nomination:
More like a great example because it perfectly demonstrates how the raw literal meaning of words fails to capture the actual intended meaning. He meant what I and nearly everyone else thought he meant. We correctly interpreted his meaning, whether we believed that meaning or not. Your literal interpretation was wrong.
If you believe he is promising to reverse global warming, you're a sucker, plain and simple. It's not pedantry, it's the fact of the matter; it's not a promise, a completely subjective and poetic expression. Do you believe in this? March with me!
If you don't think he is implying that he plans to implement environmental policies designed to counter global warming, then you're a fool who can't understand plain English. Of course he's explicitly said that he intends to do that, but that just means that if you'll allow context to be considered then it's even more obvious what he meant when he said that line.
Does that mean I believe he WILL simply because that's what his words meant? No, and I have no idea how or why you conflated these ideas! Because as I already said, those are not the same thing! I understood what he actually meant, what the intended message was, and what he wanted the audience to take from the statement.
Seriously, next you'll tell me that "Read my lips: no new taxes" wasn't a promise of no new taxes.
You say 'literal pedantry' (no bias there) is the least critical kind of thinking, yet no one seems to do it...
Yes, because it's a non-critical way of thinking that doesn't represent actual human communication. Literal pedantry -- what's the bias, that's exactly what you're advocating, you actually said people shouldn't "decide" what someone else means as if you don't have to do that constantly -- completely fails to understand the meaning of the majority of forms of expression. That's why nobody does it outside slashdot, and why slashdotters so often fail to comprehend simple english.
I think you want there to be a falsehood because you are personally invested in the belief that politicians are liars, and you'd rather believe the country is being destroyed by a few bad apples (or "sociopaths") than the fact that a big chunk of the population has bad deductive reasoning skills -- probably brought on by NCLB standardized testing ;).
No, I'm invested in utterly destroying the notion that pedantry is a superior form of reasoning, and the notion that if it is possible to interpret what someone says in a way that it is not a lie, then they were not and could not have been lying. This mentality has been heavily abused, and I think it's responsible for damaging people's understanding of lies and truth, and their deductive reasoning ability in general.
Politics is just one of the places where the tolerance for weasel words you're advocating is at its worst. But I'm against this way of thinking in all walks of life.
I'm telling you to beware of what this politician says, and you keep saying people should be credulous!
No, not once have I said anyone should be credulous or anything like that. I said that you should actual listen to what a politician says, and what someone says is rarely the same as what the words they utter literally mean. Pedantry is not and never will be the most correct way to interpret meaning.
I'm saying that, because of this obvious and simple fact of language, we should not allow politicians or anyone else to slide their way out of obvious lies due to semantic pedantry. How you convert that into we should believe whatever a politician says (and then be mad later after we find out we're "duped"), I have no idea, but let me assure you that is absolutely not the case.
In fact, what I'm saying (have already said, really) is that you should be even more
It's dishonesty and deception but not lying (since they don't actually say anything false).
To "say" something is more than just reciting words. It's expressing something. And if what you express is false, that's a lie. Just because when something is taken literally it isn't a lie, doesn't mean that the actual expression wasn't a lie. That's my whole point. Nobody actually uses pedantic literalism as their sole mode of expression, ergo using pedantic literalism as the sole judge of what is and is not a lie misses entire realms of human communication that are clearly lies.
Will you declare victory when he orders it closed down and quietly relocated somewhere else? Because that's what's in the works right now.
Citation? And no, if he closes Gitmo in order to stay true to the literal word of his promise, then opens a new prison that does the same thing, that's just as bad.
Or would you prefer that the CIA have no interrogation facilities at all? In which case, will you be among those who scream at the government for the next "fail to prevent"?
I would prefer they have no interrogation facilities where extra-legal techniques can be used outside any oversight. And there's zero evidence that such a facility would help prevent anything. All they do is increase the risk when innocent people are eventually sent home with a horror story to tell.
No, if he never had the intent to close Guantanamo at the time the statement was made, then thats a lie.
Well, sure, it would be a lie the moment he uttered it knowing it not to be true, but we'd know that it was a lie when he didn't try to close it. If he tries to and can't for some bizarre reason, sure I'd take that into account too, I'm not trying to make this some binary black/white thing. That's what pedants do.
The statement seams pretty clear to me, IE he would use his office to put a end to the use of Gitmo as the excuse to ignore US and international laws. As such no one can claim his statement was a lie if the prison is closed, but the facility is kept in use for other purposes (or even kept as a prison but with US/international scrutiny.)
Yeah, see, you got the message too. I knew it wasn't so difficult. And yeah he was obviously talking about the prison, not the military base itself. I don't think the last one would really work though. The only point to having a prison there is for the sake of being outside U.S. law. So I can't see that happening.
You're too stupid to understand that I wasn't saying they are useful in the sense of being functional devices, so your opinion means nothing.
Geeze, you're such a monopole.
That is BS.... "Miracle" technologies don't exist
Der der der... Yeah. I'm saying it's nothing more than a prop, not an actual lie detector, which is why the very non-miracle very fake no-machinery version "worked" just as well.
You actually thought I was defending the "machinery" by saying it's as effective as a seismograph? BAW HAW HAW.
I think you're arguing for complete solipcism in language, and that people should be held responsible for what their listeners conclude. and not what they themselves say... It's not about natural language. You're arguing that voters shouldn't be required to think critically about the things they hear, and that everybody gets to just sorta "decide" all subjectively what the speaker meant.
You're the one arguing against critical thinking!
Literal pedantry is the least critical kind of thinking you can do with language. You're honestly telling me that you can never tell what someone meant by what they said, beyond the most pedantic literal meaning possible, devoid of contextual clues or any implied meaning, and that you should never "hold them responsible" for anything of the sort? That something can only be a lie if it goes against this literal interpretation of what was meant?
And meant is not the same as believed! That's my whole point, you're advocating letting someone get away with lies to manipulate the public, so long as their was some semantic pedantic bullshit that lets them weasel out of it. And now you're even saying we should do this because it's good for the country, it's "healthy" politics?!
You can't honestly tell me that Barak Obama didn't want the people listening to believe that when he said "Yes we can close Gitmo" he wanted people to tie his campaign slogan implicitly with the follow on "by electing Barak Obama". Same as "Yes we can recover the economy" and "Yes we can restore our international reputation". Absolutely when he said these things, regardless of clueless semantic arguments, his intended meaning was that he would try to do those things.
If he didn't try, then he'd have broken a campaign promise, and I see absolutely no reason to excuse that for the sake of pedantry! Useless, idiotic, not-thinking-is-smart-no-really pedantry! Though I picked this example in particular because Barak Obama has actually ordered that Gitmo be closed. Now try telling me that's not what he meant.
Just the same, when Obama says "Yes we can close Guantanamo!" he isn't promising to do a goddamn thing, he's just phrasing his aspirations for what America could do in such a way that people hear "OMG Barack is gonna close gitmo!"
This is not lying, and treating it like it is is just victimology of the voter against eeeeeeevil politicians.
That is absolutely lying! We're talking about natural language communication here, not a programming language. Words and phrases have meaning that are not necessarily the sum of their individual parts, there is context involved that guides the necessary interpretation of both sides. As in, pedantic literal interpretation is not, and has never been, the sole judge of the meaning of a sentence.
When the words spoken by a speaker are designed to convey a certain meaning to the listeners, and the listeners receive that meaning, then we call that successful communication. When that correctly conveyed meaning is deliberately false, that's a fucking lie!
When the speaker also designs their words to leave themselves a semantic escape valve so they can claim to have meant something else later, that doesn't mean they weren't lying, it means they knew they were lying and thus needed the out!
When Obama said "Yes we can close Gitmo", everyone correctly interpreted that to mean that if he were elected, he would close Gitmo. That is the meaning he obviously intended to convey. If he doesn't close it, then that's a lie*. And if he defended himself by saying that all he had meant was he thought it was something America could do hypothetically, then that makes him a double liar because that obviously is not the message he intended to convey when he spoke!
The only people who think that isn't lying are:
1) People who've sacrificed reason itself on the Altar of Pedantry.
2) Liars who are lying about it not being lying and just like being able to use semantics to escape from obvious lies.
I refuse to sacrifice my ability to detect lies covered with such a thin ruse to either group of people.
* So far so good on this count, but of course I won't be happy until the thing is really truly closed.
A better approach (read more effective) would have been if they used the money they paid those lawyers to instead commission their own study of the effectiveness of lie detectors. This of course assumes that they actually believe in their own product, and don't already know it to be a scam.
No, I'm pretty sure that they could get their own study commissioned to show what they wanted to show without believing in their product one bit. In fact that probably helps, since they would know to make sure they were paying for specific results rather than trusting in the outcome.
i.e. no different from most stories on slashdot.
Most stories on slashdot are simultaneously a failure and a gigantic failure. :P
Yeah it's new. It's the first time they've teleported quantum information between entangled atoms over this distance. I guess it's harder than doing it with photons due to... mass? Certainly it's not like you take the exact same setup you use to do photon teleportation, and it just works -- bamf! -- on atoms.
So it's nothing really 'new' in the sense that it's the same ol' teleporting-information-but-no-information-you-can-use trick just with a matter instead of energy. It's definitely something new in the sense that we couldn't do it before.
Incremental progress. I like it; I don't get why it doesn't satisfy some people.
Only in the common three spatial dimensions. They're pretty much right on top of each other in the 5th and 6th dimensions, which results in all kinds of practical jokes going on between their physics departments.
Polygraphs, voice stress analyzers, coin flips, sticking your hand in the statue's mouth and Scientology's "E-Meters" all share the same validity in catching lies -- basically none. It's all pretend "science" with cool moving needles and wires, but you might as well be watching a seismograph for all the good it does you. It simply gives government agencies and insurance companies an excuse to call you a liar. "Hey, don't look at me, the MACHINE says you're lying..."
Oh, all those things (including the seismograph) can have quite a bit of validity at catching lies... if the person being interrogated believes they are valid lie-catchers. As a psychological tool in the hands of an interrogator skilled in the 'old fashioned' method of detecting lies, they can be quite handy.
That's about the only use a polygraph has. Enough people don't know what crocks they are that they may be convinced that their lies have been or will be discovered by the machine and spill the truth. I've even heard of a detective faking it by using a non-functional box, with a concealed switch that made red and green lights come on. He made it flash red when he thought the suspect was lying, and well he was right enough that the suspect panicked and confessed.
Of course, if an empty box and a hand switch work equally well as the 'real thing', that kinda defeats the need for polygraph vendors and their expensive toys. Thus this kind of lawsuit.
Except that if the lie detector says the scientists are telling the truth, the company can either:
How do you know the lie detector will say the scientists are telling the truth? The scientists themselves say its results are the same as chance.
Your scenario only works if the lie detector works, in which case the scientists are wrong (though not necessarily lying, so we don't get into any paradoxes here).
Hate to break it to you buddy, but having to gather 10 other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan is not casual.
If it can't be reliably done in an hour including the time to get a group together its not casual. Not saying its bad or good, but there it is.
Then you don't consider even 5-man non-heroic instances to be casual (at least, certainly not instances prior to Wrath, and even then a typical PuG takes more than an hour especially including time to get the group together).
I mean, I have an uncle who played WoW, and could only play for two hours a night due to work schedule, so instance running was largely impossible -- thus why he stopped playing. However that's pretty unusual circumstances. I'd wager most "casuals" will still put in more than two hours of game time on those occasions that they do play.
Personally, my definition of "casual" is: If you can PUG it, it's casual.
By that definition, when ZA was released it wasn't casual. Soon after the Sunwell Isle expansion, it was casual. People were plucking "[9] other people of specific classes at the same contiguous timespan" out of trade chat on a lazy Sunday afternoon.
Everything you are describing is the production stage. The technology waiting in the wings would not be in any stage of production, it would be in the lab phase.
Actually, the last step I mentioned, which is actually the farthest backward in time and thus the first, was the lab work to develop technology to eventually be put into production. I mean it takes quite a lot of R&D just to figure out how a transistor node that is three or more generations more advanced than the current production tech would even work at all. It takes a decade to go from that work to a functional production facility. They need to be driving that initial lab work, otherwise in ten years they'll find themselves without any new technology to go to. Calling that "waiting in the wings" is crazy.
They are not sitting on a massive pool of technology, doling it out as slowly as they can. The idea that they invented 65nm, 45nm, 32nm, and 22nm in an afternoon -- or a half dozen years, and are just waiting on the smaller technologies until they feel they "need" to actually put them into use is ridiculous, obviously so if you have any idea what goes into developing them.
T3 was T2 with the volume turned up on everything and the only interesting character removed. In T2 even Awnuld had character development, T3 had zero for anybody. Hell, John actually managed to regress during T3 to being a whinier loser than he was at the start of T2, and at least then he had the excuse of being 13. Claire Danes was nothing but a name for the bill; there was no reason for her character to even be in the movie. Other than that, it was a giant rip-off of T2. That's what I don't get, everything there is not to like in T2 is in T3, only louder and dumber, and with plenty of additional flaws besides.
The only redeeming feature of T3 is the amazing crane chase scene with real destruction in an era where every big-budget action movie was doing everything with CGI. That was refreshing, at least.
I'd almost give it the ending, since they had the guts to end it on a downer. But since it immediately followed the incredibly lame "i'll appeal to the brainwashed person's inner self" cliche only on an already-had-to-be-brainwashed-to-be-good machine it was hard to take it seriously. And when John picked up the mic in the command center, there was zero reason to think anyone on the other end would be interested in having him as their leader.