The version of SF2 I had (which I would have no idea which release it was) had both vomit-colored vomit and blood-colored vomit. But in both cases it came spewing from the mouth of the fighter.
As if just having the characters puking all over wouldn't be bad enough. I thought that was more disturbing than the blood!:)
Heh. If I could have seen the slippery slope and where it would lead us, I would have been cheering them on. No, really. I liked Eternal Darkness a lot and want them to make more games like it. Games where the blood and guts are there for a reason -- to instill horror!
The issue of blood and gore truly hit a head with Mortal Kombat. The Genesis version of the game contained as much of the blood from the arcade version as the Genesis could render. The SNES version had "sweat" flying all over. Even though the SNES version was better, people were buying the Genesis version for that reason. I didn't play the SNES version much, so I can't remember what they did with the fatalities. It'd be pretty funny if they just colored the blood grey.
While I can understand N's reluctance to release an uncensored MK, it was somewhat hypocritical since the SNES version of Street Fighter II (which came out earlier) features the fighters vomiting blood in big streams. Maybe since that wasn't the main feature of the game it slipped by their censors.
Anyway, Nintendo getting into the whole "adult" thing brought us Eternal Darkness, and that by itself makes the loss of whatever innocence was presumed before worth it.
Re:Trip down memory lane
on
20 Years of NES
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If by "pirates" you mean "people who wanted to make NES compatible games without paying the almighty N for the privilege" then you are right.
Nintendo has always amused me with their business tactics. They are as conniving and controlling as Microsoft or Sony, but since they only seem to want to rule their corner of the video game world with an iron fist (rather than using that control as a lever to get into every aspect of the electronics world, like the other two) it has seemed more amusing than disturbing. Plus they have always been dedicated to making good, fun games.
I still am a proud owner of Gauntlet for the NES that was one of the classic examples of a game made without the Seal of Approval. Ultimately a frustrating and boring game, still better than a lot that did carry the Seal (such as, say, Donkey Kong 3). I got my copy of Gauntlet from Toys 'R' Us, so I doubt it was "pirated".
Yeah, that's not true. I don't know how fast an electron moves (I'm assuming not the speed of light, since they have mass, and that quantum physics I know little about probably comes into play), but in a normal conductor they don't move very far before slamming into something. Individual electrons don't move that far or fast on their own, it's the aggregate and resulting field that really moves.
But that's not really the problem. Transmit time is still quite low (I've heard 1ns per 6 in of trace on a board). Latency isn't really the problem. The problem is -- how fast can you change the signal? That's bandwidth. Here electrical conductors suffer because of parasitic capacitance and inductance, skin effects, reflections, induced current from nearby conductors, and a whole host of other signal integrity issues. It gets worse the longer the channel is and the more things you have connected to it. If you're wondering why the MP Pentium 4s have been on a 100MHz QDR front side bus since they were released, this is why. It's also why even point-to-point interconnect like AMDs has only recently broken 1 GHz.
Optics don't really have this issue. Two fiber optic cables next to each other don't interfere with each other. You don't have to overcome the capacitance of the channel to change from one value to the next. You just send photons of one frequency, and then switch to the next. As fast as you can switch is how much bandwidth you can get.
Alright, I'm not really liking this explanation anymore. To just directly answer your question: the advantage is 100 GHz interconnect in a way that could potentially be built into chips.
Also the whole idea of titles being banned is stupid. Who determines what is and is not a title?
Well, the game has a number of fixed titles that it assigns. I don't see why any title outside of those should be affected.
Yet to me it seems particularly stupid because the game doesn't allow spaces in your names, nor capitalization of anything but the first letter. So if you tried to forge yourself a title, it'd be obvious and just make you look stupid!
Example: Base name: Chewbacca With earned title: Master Sargent Chewbacca With forged title Mastersargentchewbacca
I'm not thinking the last name there really causes a problem, in so much as having a stupid name that tells everyone around you that you're an idiot is a "problem". I consider it a feature!
Re:Oh wow, no kidding?!
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course, my bet is that the first sign that the boards of Corporate America get wise to this, CEOs will be lobbying hard for laws to protect them.
I really hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but that's not going to happen.
The Boards of Corporate America are also the CEOs of Corporate America. For example, the CEO of my corporation is also the Chairman of the Board, and he's also on the Board of Directors of another company. This is pretty typical. It's all a big incestuous network of corporate executives.
So no, the Boards are never going to outsource executive positions because they would be outsourcing themselves. That's why CEO salaries keep going up, why bonuses keep going up, why golden parachutes have become standard, why driving a company into the ground doesn't seem to prevent a CEO from finding work at another company. Because the Boards that are making these decisions are executives themselves, or would like to be, and thus want the "industry standard" to be as high as possible.
Consider also that between the lot of them, this incestuous net of directors/executives also owns a huge portion of the stock. The rest is mostly held by retirement funds, which are run by fund managers. None of these people are going to go along with the idea. The change we are looking for will not come from within the halls of corporate america.
goes on to predict the maximum possible computational power if all the mass of a laptop were converted to energy (e=mc^2)
"You have selected 'utilize all rest energy'. This feature will convert your laptop's mass into energy for computation. This will allow your job to complete in the minimal theoretical time as predicted by quantum theory. WARNING: May vaporize you and everything around you. You will have approximately forty two femto-seconds (4.2*10^-14 s) to write the answer down and reach the minimum safe distance of thirty miles. Proceed? (Y/N)"
Oh yeah, I buy that. What party is that senator Disney owns from again?
Both parties are corporate whores because that's where their campaign money comes from, the only difference is how flagrant the handouts are and what distraction issues they prattle on about (gays! violent video games!) while they're passing out the loot to the corporations.
Supporting grossly disproportionate wages
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 1
To think, they could be spending more on their own countrymen and supporting their grossly disproportionate wages.
But that is exactly what they are doing with the H1-Bs: Spending more on their own countrymen (meaning members of their country club) and supporting their own grossly disproportionate wages. Disproportionate by any comparison: U.S. Executive to U.S. employee, U.S. executive to non-U.S. executive, U.S. executive/employee ratio to non-U.S. executive/employee ratio. Take your pick!
It's not the oppressed foreigner that takes advantage of the visas. They are just the smokescreen, the distraction intended to be the target of our ire. If we are the rich to the H1-B poor, then Robin Hood is actually King John and he's keeping 75% of what he takes. I doubt Robin Hood we be as famous for the description "He steals from the rich to make himself exceedingly rich, oh and to pay the poor a little".
Oh wow, no kidding?!
on
The H-1B Swindle
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
No kidding it's a swindle. That's the whole thing that pisses me off about it! I have no problem in general with some American losing their tech job in favor of some non-American gaining a tech job. What I have a problem with is that what really happens is an American loses their well paying tech job, some non-American gains a usually well paying job by their standards but still vastly less than what it replaced, and then the executives give themselves phat bonuses for saving money.
They have no incentive to pay them well. As always, they will pay only the absolute minimum necessary to get someone to do the job, and yes considerations like "quality" are fortunate if they are considered at all like all non-bean-countable aspects of business. The result is more money concentrated in the hands of the few, fewer well-paying jobs for skilled people in this country, and oh yeah a little bit different distribution of what wealth remains. Gutting the American middle class for fun and profit!
And if the ones getting those not-so-bad paying jobs in India think they aren't going to be next when the greedy whores realize that someone in China will work for a third of what the Indian does, well, they'd be exactly like we were not so long ago.:)
I wish there was some reasonable way to cap the salary of executives to, say, 20x what their average employee makes, including outsourced/contracted work (which is part of what makes this seem impractical to me). Cap their bonuses and other compensation similarly. Then you'd stop seeing employers struggling to pay their employees less and less, they'd have an incentive to pay them more. Since they'd be paying more for employees, you might see them caring more about quality that they're getting for their money no matter where they are hiring from.
And I assume the converse is as well, namely that pointing out that it's *not* stealing is to sound morally OK.
Very bad assumption, since there are many things that aren't stealing that are not morally OK. Countering an incorrect comparison is not the same as creating another one. If I was going to use the same framing tactic to make copyright violation sound morally OK, I'd call it "kitten feeding".
The point is that you have to consider copyright violation for what it is.
Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Psychologists call it "rationalization."
Yeah, because I really need a rationalization to help me sleep better at night for speeding.:P
Speeding truly is victimless *if* it doesn't result in increased danger to others. Copyright violation, on the other hand, isn't victimless.
Who exactly is the victim when an illegal copy is made? No, you can't assume that the copyer would have paid for a copy if the illegal copy was not available. I am never going to buy the SP disc I copied the song from. So please explain to me who the victim was here?
I find it funny that you can accept speeding as a victimless crime (with the big caveat that it can't increase danger, which is the reason speed limits exist), but just assert that copyright violation is not victimless with no caveats at all.
And there's a big difference between DMCA violation violation of copyright as it previously stood.
No kidding. And there's a big difference between violating copyright and depriving someone of a material posession.
Just as many times as people point out this "correction" as if it really mattered - it's illegal either way, regardless of what you call it.
But the point of calling it stealing is not to establish that it is illegal -- this is a given. We all know this.
The point of calling it stealing is to make it sound morally wrong. This is why the correction does matter. Pretty much everyone thinks stealing is morally wrong, and the argument serves to try to transfer that feeling onto a different crime entirely in order to justify punishments far harsher than what "hypothetical loss of potential sales" would actually warrant.
Legality isn't morality. I don't feel like I've sinned when I go five over the speed limit, I don't feel like I've sinned when I copy one song from a Smashing Pumpkins album that I would never buy, and I don't feel like I've sinned when I violate the DMCA to watch a DVD under Linux.
Do you think minor traffic violations should result in jail time? What if I called it stealing? Sure, it's not, but both are illegal so that doesn't matter! Send the thieves to prison!
As opposed to Bill Clinton's invasion of two "wrong" countries Haiti and Kosovo... a "quagmire" I think we're still stuck in. Not to mention his poor execution of the efforts in Somalia and his indifference to the people of Rwanda.
And the inability of our current President to learn from those conflicts and instead get us in even worse quagmires with even worse execution* is a great endorsement for him.
Honestly, I can't understand the mentality that thinks "But the guy five years ago did the same things" is a valid excuse for what's happening today. Is the idea that Democrats/Clinton fans won't want to admit to their Hero's failings, so the "Clinton did the same thing" argument will cause them to give Bush a pass?
This is what partisanship gets us, people.
Besides, it's not a crime to "leak" the names of CIA agents unless the intent was to expose them.
I'm sorry, that's not correct. Read the law. If you intentionally release information that discloses the identity of an agent, and you know they are undercover, then you have violated the law. Intent to uncover is not an element, just knowing that this is a possible outcome of your actions. Rove clearly intended to release the information, the fact that he did it to discredit Wilson is irrelevent. If Rove knew that Plame's identity was being protected, then he broke the law.
I know you didn't say it, but to stave off any talking-point responses, notice that it also doesn't matter that he didn't mention her by name. "Wilson's wife" is more than ample to identify her. How stupid would that be, anyway, if it wasn't a crime as long as you didn't use their name?
But I guess all this overshadows the fact that the 9/11 commission says Mr. Wilson lied about the Nigeria-Iraq connection, which is what the liberals want.
Maybe, but I highly doubt the administration wants more attention paid to the 9/11 commision, either, since it basically savages all the made up reasons we went to war.
* How can anyone justify the continued employment of Rumsfeld? I wouldn't hire that man to invade my fridge.
I like how you bold "in any way" to imply no qualifications, when the phrase is immediately followed by the actual qualification "that suggests presidential support or endorsement". Was that intentional, or are you just happy to boldface whatever makes the government correct? I'm sure they'll make their case, no reason to make it for them.
It's not like the project will be started in 34 years and done in a year using then-current technology. A lot of military and space programs take decades to complete (the effect of our wonderously efficient contractor system not considered separately), so they are made mostly of technology decades older than what is available at the time they are finished. A solar station project scheduled to be complete in 2040 is certainly going to begin fairly soon.
Not only does this make the planning possible as you're only considering technology in the next few years, it also has the benefit of allowing the technology used to become "mature". I have heard that radiation-hardened 486s are still popular in space applications because while they were new when a lot of the designs were being created, they are now time-tested in a way that a modern CPU is not, and thus the old cpu wins over the new one that is 100x more powerful. Besides, since the 100x more powerful cpu didn't exist when the project was planned, they didn't design in any need for such a thing.
And so it will go with the space station (with the big assumption that it's actually going to happen). If someone tells you they are going to build a massive project like that in 30 years, but using tech they hope will be available in 20, that's when you know they are full of it.
I hope this doesn't keep you up at night, but all the article means is that the velociraptor would dig his claws deep into your entrails to hold you still while he killed you with his teeth, like a cat killing a mouse. Or like the thing the lives in your closet.
Very good point. I like my Treo, but that's because I used to carry around a Palm and a cell phone and now I only have one (that's smaller than the palm was). I like taking notes, making grocery lists, even occasionally looking something up on the internet with the use of a keyboard and stylus on a screen that at least compares favorably to a cell phone.
But whenever I pull it out to make a call, someone will exclaim "You phone is huge!" "It's also a PDA," I'll say. "Oh," they'll say, in a manner that sounds to me like "I now understand why it is big, but not why you'd want to carry it".
Even if you took it as not a joke, there certainly was a way to look at it that doesn't involve assuming the guy is defending the actions of scammers. Half your rant was about your own assumptions.
As far as moderation, everyone knows that when you get mod points you also get a heaping portion of crack cocaine to go with it. Saying the mods agreed with you does not make you look more reasonable.:)
I still don't think the joke lends itself very well to your explanation, but that's just me.
Yeah, it's just you. Premise of the joke:/. poster == computer geek == guy who sits in front of computer all day (and night) == hasn't walked a mile before.
This was pretty obvious, and your "I'm going to just assume you meant that as an excuse for scamming people" was pretty dumb.
Whatever reason they may have is actually important to the situation, but I stress it is not excusable to go and murder, steal, and scam people, but if you want to defeat the enemy you must know their motives.
The problem is many people don't understand the difference between an explanation (why something happened) and an excuse (why what happened is okay).
This has led to the belief that understanding terrorists is the same as excusing the terrorists.
This has led to us not understanding the terrorists, and thus being ineffective at fighting them.
I have a real problem with any life view that makes failing to solve problems a requisite outcome.
Slashdot Mirror
The version of SF2 I had (which I would have no idea which release it was) had both vomit-colored vomit and blood-colored vomit. But in both cases it came spewing from the mouth of the fighter.
:)
As if just having the characters puking all over wouldn't be bad enough. I thought that was more disturbing than the blood!
Heh. If I could have seen the slippery slope and where it would lead us, I would have been cheering them on. No, really. I liked Eternal Darkness a lot and want them to make more games like it. Games where the blood and guts are there for a reason -- to instill horror!
Dude, nice troll, but they did get nailed in anti-trust action.
As always, the reason they got nailed was not because they were a monopoly, but because they abused that position to eliminate competition.
The issue of blood and gore truly hit a head with Mortal Kombat. The Genesis version of the game contained as much of the blood from the arcade version as the Genesis could render. The SNES version had "sweat" flying all over. Even though the SNES version was better, people were buying the Genesis version for that reason. I didn't play the SNES version much, so I can't remember what they did with the fatalities. It'd be pretty funny if they just colored the blood grey.
While I can understand N's reluctance to release an uncensored MK, it was somewhat hypocritical since the SNES version of Street Fighter II (which came out earlier) features the fighters vomiting blood in big streams. Maybe since that wasn't the main feature of the game it slipped by their censors.
Anyway, Nintendo getting into the whole "adult" thing brought us Eternal Darkness, and that by itself makes the loss of whatever innocence was presumed before worth it.
If by "pirates" you mean "people who wanted to make NES compatible games without paying the almighty N for the privilege" then you are right.
Nintendo has always amused me with their business tactics. They are as conniving and controlling as Microsoft or Sony, but since they only seem to want to rule their corner of the video game world with an iron fist (rather than using that control as a lever to get into every aspect of the electronics world, like the other two) it has seemed more amusing than disturbing. Plus they have always been dedicated to making good, fun games.
I still am a proud owner of Gauntlet for the NES that was one of the classic examples of a game made without the Seal of Approval. Ultimately a frustrating and boring game, still better than a lot that did carry the Seal (such as, say, Donkey Kong 3). I got my copy of Gauntlet from Toys 'R' Us, so I doubt it was "pirated".
Yeah, that's not true. I don't know how fast an electron moves (I'm assuming not the speed of light, since they have mass, and that quantum physics I know little about probably comes into play), but in a normal conductor they don't move very far before slamming into something. Individual electrons don't move that far or fast on their own, it's the aggregate and resulting field that really moves.
But that's not really the problem. Transmit time is still quite low (I've heard 1ns per 6 in of trace on a board). Latency isn't really the problem. The problem is -- how fast can you change the signal? That's bandwidth. Here electrical conductors suffer because of parasitic capacitance and inductance, skin effects, reflections, induced current from nearby conductors, and a whole host of other signal integrity issues. It gets worse the longer the channel is and the more things you have connected to it. If you're wondering why the MP Pentium 4s have been on a 100MHz QDR front side bus since they were released, this is why. It's also why even point-to-point interconnect like AMDs has only recently broken 1 GHz.
Optics don't really have this issue. Two fiber optic cables next to each other don't interfere with each other. You don't have to overcome the capacitance of the channel to change from one value to the next. You just send photons of one frequency, and then switch to the next. As fast as you can switch is how much bandwidth you can get.
Alright, I'm not really liking this explanation anymore. To just directly answer your question: the advantage is 100 GHz interconnect in a way that could potentially be built into chips.
Also the whole idea of titles being banned is stupid. Who determines what is and is not a title?
Well, the game has a number of fixed titles that it assigns. I don't see why any title outside of those should be affected.
Yet to me it seems particularly stupid because the game doesn't allow spaces in your names, nor capitalization of anything but the first letter. So if you tried to forge yourself a title, it'd be obvious and just make you look stupid!
Example:
Base name: Chewbacca
With earned title: Master Sargent Chewbacca
With forged title Mastersargentchewbacca
I'm not thinking the last name there really causes a problem, in so much as having a stupid name that tells everyone around you that you're an idiot is a "problem". I consider it a feature!
Of course, my bet is that the first sign that the boards of Corporate America get wise to this, CEOs will be lobbying hard for laws to protect them.
I really hate to have to be the one to tell you this, but that's not going to happen.
The Boards of Corporate America are also the CEOs of Corporate America. For example, the CEO of my corporation is also the Chairman of the Board, and he's also on the Board of Directors of another company. This is pretty typical. It's all a big incestuous network of corporate executives.
So no, the Boards are never going to outsource executive positions because they would be outsourcing themselves. That's why CEO salaries keep going up, why bonuses keep going up, why golden parachutes have become standard, why driving a company into the ground doesn't seem to prevent a CEO from finding work at another company. Because the Boards that are making these decisions are executives themselves, or would like to be, and thus want the "industry standard" to be as high as possible.
Consider also that between the lot of them, this incestuous net of directors/executives also owns a huge portion of the stock. The rest is mostly held by retirement funds, which are run by fund managers. None of these people are going to go along with the idea. The change we are looking for will not come from within the halls of corporate america.
goes on to predict the maximum possible computational power if all the mass of a laptop were converted to energy (e=mc^2)
"You have selected 'utilize all rest energy'. This feature will convert your laptop's mass into energy for computation. This will allow your job to complete in the minimal theoretical time as predicted by quantum theory. WARNING: May vaporize you and everything around you. You will have approximately forty two femto-seconds (4.2*10^-14 s) to write the answer down and reach the minimum safe distance of thirty miles.
Proceed? (Y/N)"
Oh yeah, I buy that. What party is that senator Disney owns from again?
Both parties are corporate whores because that's where their campaign money comes from, the only difference is how flagrant the handouts are and what distraction issues they prattle on about (gays! violent video games!) while they're passing out the loot to the corporations.
To think, they could be spending more on their own countrymen and supporting their grossly disproportionate wages.
But that is exactly what they are doing with the H1-Bs: Spending more on their own countrymen (meaning members of their country club) and supporting their own grossly disproportionate wages. Disproportionate by any comparison: U.S. Executive to U.S. employee, U.S. executive to non-U.S. executive, U.S. executive/employee ratio to non-U.S. executive/employee ratio. Take your pick!
It's not the oppressed foreigner that takes advantage of the visas. They are just the smokescreen, the distraction intended to be the target of our ire. If we are the rich to the H1-B poor, then Robin Hood is actually King John and he's keeping 75% of what he takes. I doubt Robin Hood we be as famous for the description "He steals from the rich to make himself exceedingly rich, oh and to pay the poor a little".
No kidding it's a swindle. That's the whole thing that pisses me off about it! I have no problem in general with some American losing their tech job in favor of some non-American gaining a tech job. What I have a problem with is that what really happens is an American loses their well paying tech job, some non-American gains a usually well paying job by their standards but still vastly less than what it replaced, and then the executives give themselves phat bonuses for saving money.
:)
They have no incentive to pay them well. As always, they will pay only the absolute minimum necessary to get someone to do the job, and yes considerations like "quality" are fortunate if they are considered at all like all non-bean-countable aspects of business. The result is more money concentrated in the hands of the few, fewer well-paying jobs for skilled people in this country, and oh yeah a little bit different distribution of what wealth remains. Gutting the American middle class for fun and profit!
And if the ones getting those not-so-bad paying jobs in India think they aren't going to be next when the greedy whores realize that someone in China will work for a third of what the Indian does, well, they'd be exactly like we were not so long ago.
I wish there was some reasonable way to cap the salary of executives to, say, 20x what their average employee makes, including outsourced/contracted work (which is part of what makes this seem impractical to me). Cap their bonuses and other compensation similarly. Then you'd stop seeing employers struggling to pay their employees less and less, they'd have an incentive to pay them more. Since they'd be paying more for employees, you might see them caring more about quality that they're getting for their money no matter where they are hiring from.
And I assume the converse is as well, namely that pointing out that it's *not* stealing is to sound morally OK.
:P
Very bad assumption, since there are many things that aren't stealing that are not morally OK. Countering an incorrect comparison is not the same as creating another one. If I was going to use the same framing tactic to make copyright violation sound morally OK, I'd call it "kitten feeding".
The point is that you have to consider copyright violation for what it is.
Whatever helps you sleep better at night. Psychologists call it "rationalization."
Yeah, because I really need a rationalization to help me sleep better at night for speeding.
Speeding truly is victimless *if* it doesn't result in increased danger to others. Copyright violation, on the other hand, isn't victimless.
Who exactly is the victim when an illegal copy is made? No, you can't assume that the copyer would have paid for a copy if the illegal copy was not available. I am never going to buy the SP disc I copied the song from. So please explain to me who the victim was here?
I find it funny that you can accept speeding as a victimless crime (with the big caveat that it can't increase danger, which is the reason speed limits exist), but just assert that copyright violation is not victimless with no caveats at all.
And there's a big difference between DMCA violation violation of copyright as it previously stood.
No kidding. And there's a big difference between violating copyright and depriving someone of a material posession.
Just as many times as people point out this "correction" as if it really mattered - it's illegal either way, regardless of what you call it.
But the point of calling it stealing is not to establish that it is illegal -- this is a given. We all know this.
The point of calling it stealing is to make it sound morally wrong. This is why the correction does matter. Pretty much everyone thinks stealing is morally wrong, and the argument serves to try to transfer that feeling onto a different crime entirely in order to justify punishments far harsher than what "hypothetical loss of potential sales" would actually warrant.
Legality isn't morality. I don't feel like I've sinned when I go five over the speed limit, I don't feel like I've sinned when I copy one song from a Smashing Pumpkins album that I would never buy, and I don't feel like I've sinned when I violate the DMCA to watch a DVD under Linux.
Do you think minor traffic violations should result in jail time? What if I called it stealing? Sure, it's not, but both are illegal so that doesn't matter! Send the thieves to prison!
As opposed to Bill Clinton's invasion of two "wrong" countries Haiti and Kosovo... a "quagmire" I think we're still stuck in. Not to mention his poor execution of the efforts in Somalia and his indifference to the people of Rwanda.
And the inability of our current President to learn from those conflicts and instead get us in even worse quagmires with even worse execution* is a great endorsement for him.
Honestly, I can't understand the mentality that thinks "But the guy five years ago did the same things" is a valid excuse for what's happening today. Is the idea that Democrats/Clinton fans won't want to admit to their Hero's failings, so the "Clinton did the same thing" argument will cause them to give Bush a pass?
This is what partisanship gets us, people.
Besides, it's not a crime to "leak" the names of CIA agents unless the intent was to expose them.
I'm sorry, that's not correct. Read the law. If you intentionally release information that discloses the identity of an agent, and you know they are undercover, then you have violated the law. Intent to uncover is not an element, just knowing that this is a possible outcome of your actions. Rove clearly intended to release the information, the fact that he did it to discredit Wilson is irrelevent. If Rove knew that Plame's identity was being protected, then he broke the law.
I know you didn't say it, but to stave off any talking-point responses, notice that it also doesn't matter that he didn't mention her by name. "Wilson's wife" is more than ample to identify her. How stupid would that be, anyway, if it wasn't a crime as long as you didn't use their name?
But I guess all this overshadows the fact that the 9/11 commission says Mr. Wilson lied about the Nigeria-Iraq connection, which is what the liberals want.
Maybe, but I highly doubt the administration wants more attention paid to the 9/11 commision, either, since it basically savages all the made up reasons we went to war.
* How can anyone justify the continued employment of Rumsfeld? I wouldn't hire that man to invade my fridge.
Are we really willing to give in that easily?
I like how you bold "in any way" to imply no qualifications, when the phrase is immediately followed by the actual qualification "that suggests presidential support or endorsement". Was that intentional, or are you just happy to boldface whatever makes the government correct? I'm sure they'll make their case, no reason to make it for them.
It's not like the project will be started in 34 years and done in a year using then-current technology. A lot of military and space programs take decades to complete (the effect of our wonderously efficient contractor system not considered separately), so they are made mostly of technology decades older than what is available at the time they are finished. A solar station project scheduled to be complete in 2040 is certainly going to begin fairly soon.
Not only does this make the planning possible as you're only considering technology in the next few years, it also has the benefit of allowing the technology used to become "mature". I have heard that radiation-hardened 486s are still popular in space applications because while they were new when a lot of the designs were being created, they are now time-tested in a way that a modern CPU is not, and thus the old cpu wins over the new one that is 100x more powerful. Besides, since the 100x more powerful cpu didn't exist when the project was planned, they didn't design in any need for such a thing.
And so it will go with the space station (with the big assumption that it's actually going to happen). If someone tells you they are going to build a massive project like that in 30 years, but using tech they hope will be available in 20, that's when you know they are full of it.
I hope this doesn't keep you up at night, but all the article means is that the velociraptor would dig his claws deep into your entrails to hold you still while he killed you with his teeth, like a cat killing a mouse. Or like the thing the lives in your closet.
Goodnight!
Very good point. I like my Treo, but that's because I used to carry around a Palm and a cell phone and now I only have one (that's smaller than the palm was). I like taking notes, making grocery lists, even occasionally looking something up on the internet with the use of a keyboard and stylus on a screen that at least compares favorably to a cell phone.
But whenever I pull it out to make a call, someone will exclaim "You phone is huge!" "It's also a PDA," I'll say. "Oh," they'll say, in a manner that sounds to me like "I now understand why it is big, but not why you'd want to carry it".
Even if you took it as not a joke, there certainly was a way to look at it that doesn't involve assuming the guy is defending the actions of scammers. Half your rant was about your own assumptions.
:)
As far as moderation, everyone knows that when you get mod points you also get a heaping portion of crack cocaine to go with it. Saying the mods agreed with you does not make you look more reasonable.
Honestly I want you to believe that this transaction is real and never a joke.
:)
I think it's pretty ironic that they are actually being sincere here. "I honestly want you to believe that you are not being ripped off".
I'm just wondering how many of the "lose vs loose" spelling nazis exploded when they read your subject line.
I still don't think the joke lends itself very well to your explanation, but that's just me.
/. poster == computer geek == guy who sits in front of computer all day (and night) == hasn't walked a mile before.
Yeah, it's just you. Premise of the joke:
This was pretty obvious, and your "I'm going to just assume you meant that as an excuse for scamming people" was pretty dumb.
Whatever reason they may have is actually important to the situation, but I stress it is not excusable to go and murder, steal, and scam people, but if you want to defeat the enemy you must know their motives.
The problem is many people don't understand the difference between an explanation (why something happened) and an excuse (why what happened is okay).
This has led to the belief that understanding terrorists is the same as excusing the terrorists.
This has led to us not understanding the terrorists, and thus being ineffective at fighting them.
I have a real problem with any life view that makes failing to solve problems a requisite outcome.
Newsflash: everywhere you go, you will find stupid people.
That's not true. Just last night I was playing playing poker and I looked around the table and couldn't see a single moron!
That's the price they pay for aid. They can have the aid and the strings, or freedom and no aid. Apparently they've opted for the former.
Yeah, it's almost like you can get a starving person to agree to any Faustian deal you want! And we can still call it "aid".
I'm helping!
I'm helping!