I did not read anything by that Lomborg fellow, but I RTFA, and the articles do not say "Rejoice, for Global Warming is a myth!", but rather "Rejoice guardedly, for we may have a bit more time than we feared to rein in Global Warming."
So I wouldn't break out the Champagne yet.
--
Severin's first law:
"For every ratio, there is an equal and opposite irratio."
'tis the season of JOY! One of the geekiest games ever, reborn!
But there's a rub:
On their home page, Monsterstudios tell us to "Expect Chain Reaction to fully support OS X and Linux operating systems sometime in early Fall 2003".
Early Fall?
*quick look into calendar*
OK, at least in time for Christmas, then?
Please?
Just like Julius Caesar, huh?
You mean like Abraham Lincoln?
Troll. Of course people always were murdered, that never was the question. But to go out on a limb: as a 0th degree approximation, I estimate that more politicians/VIPs/celebrities were killed by guns within the last fifty years than by whatever means in all of previous recorded history, even corrected for the
greater number of modern politians/VIPs/celebrities. The exact numbers are left as an exercise for the reader.
If you want to kill somebody and are willing to put lots of work, brains, money and/or your life into it, you can kill that person. And taking another human being's life should be no easier than that. Which leads me directly to...
Hilter was an elected official too!
[...]
And lets not even get started with those "stupid" jews and not leaving Germany.
Yes, Hitler was an elected official - your point being? You are aware that even in the police state that was the Third Reich, people were plotting and executing and dying for plotting and executing assassination attempts against Hitler, right? And that these came rather close to succeeding, and he survived several times by sheer luck (or, as he put it, destiny)? You are furthermore aware that thousands and tens of thousands of people managed to flee from Germany and the territories the Germans annected without recourse to guns?
So I repeat: if you want to kill that dictator, you always can get guns, explosives, a knife in a bouquet or whatever you deem necessary -- there's no need to stack up on them "just in case". And if you realize that your country becomes the sort of a country that you don't want to live in anymore and you want to get away, you always can get away. ... but if you can't read the writing on the wall, then even your precious guns will not help you.
(Nitpick: it's "Hitler". And you'd have had to worry about the SA initially and the Gestapo later, less about the SS.)
No my one weapon will hardly make a difference, but the 50 million+ in the hands of my fellow countrymen certainly will make a pretty big dent in the first air force base we come across.
Right. What makes you think that you will get more backing from gun crazy "from my cold dead fingers!" types than from sane armed forces personnel? If I were you, I'd rather believe that a significant portion of the US military will show common sense and refuse to shoot at fellow citizens (and there have been surveys to that effect) than that I could get even one percent of your "50 million+" to agree on even a name. ("People's Front of Texas? SPLITTER!")
To get back on the subject, what it boils down to is just this:
It should be hard for people to kill other people. It should require a certain amount of premeditation to even acquire the means. If you consider it necessary to put another human being to death, this should definitely be harder than walking to your car, opening the trunk and getting out a firearm loaded with live ammo. This sort of thing just begs for lethal "accidents".
"Getting shot with an 1700s pistol or a modern Glock can both produce a fatal result."
JFK and Martin Luther King would probably still be alive today if they had lived at the time of the founding fa-- Er. *cough*
JFK and Martin Luther King would probably still be alive today if the weapons available in the 60s were restricted to those that the founding fathers had available at their time. This is just a guess, of course, but this whole "Voting from the Rooftops" thing is based on your average braindead fucker being able to blow somebodies brains out at long distances with modern weaponry. I'd rather lots of checks and balances surrounding that kind of power, giving it only into the hands of a trusted group of people controlled by the people as a whole. Or does everyone on your network have admin rights?
"Tyrants can be *shot*." But your tyrant is my democratically elected president! The point where somebody becomes a tyrant and should be removed from office is open for discussion, but nobody should be granted a veto right in form of a gun. That's what a democracy is: discuss it, vote on it, go with the majority. If the whole thing turns out to have been a bad idea, start over - don't start shooting.
"Surely you agree that maintaining guns of equal strength in the police and citizenry is important?", in other words:
"But who will protect me from the Army/Police/Coast Guard/National Guard/...?"
If the whole process deteriorates to the point where those that bear arms to Protect And Serve the population follow orders to subjugate said population, the place would have long lost all appeal to live there, and I'd have started packing. Besides, your Desert Eagle won't help a lot once the Air Force starts playing, so forget about the "equal strength" thing: there's always gonna be a bigger kid on the block. And you do trust the Air Force not to start carpet bombing in the US, right?
Bullshit. It isn't the kids that have changed, rather the media reporting on those kids.
There is an order of magnitude more coverage on this kind of stuff these days. Perhaps even more. The sensationalist media of today has no qualms about letting everyone in the world know about some poor kid who got beat to death after school. Before, this sort of thing was often kept hush; who wants everyone in the world to know that your child, your sibling, your friend, a fellow community member did such a thing?
I submit that this kind of thing simply did not happen as often. Yes, there was violence fifty years ago, and a hundred, and five hundred years ago. But it seems to me that excessive aggression used to be stronger inhibited than these days. Just as a wolf will not bite another wolf that had rolled over in submission, a boy fighting with another boy would not kick the kid once he had it on the ground. He had won the fight and the wooden spinning top, there was no need (and no precedent!) to hurt and possibly kill the loser.
For further Food For Thought I point you to
"KIDS TODAY ARE BETTER TRAINED TO KILL".
Me? I blame TV.
No, I kid you not.
Fine, but the question is:
Can we afford to wait until we know that, yes indeed, the climate did change, and yes, it was due to hot house gases?
Can we?
I say the risk is not worth the gain.
I apologize if I initially pegged you as one of the unthinking "Environment Protection == Return to Stone Age" types that I occasionally have to deal with. You seem to have read a bit on the matter. Still:
Ever read Factor 4, or anything by the Lovins? They show, with tons of examples, a way to raise overall productivity or wealth while reducing the impact on the environment. That includes stuff like CO2-output.
WRT my car tycoon: There were people that did argue against a connection between smog and exhaust emissions, just as there were people that saw no connection between smoking and lung cancer. I'd rather have our grandchildren shake their heads at our silly worries than spit on our graves for our blindness. If you did a Quick Save somewhen around 1950, do tell us -- otherwise, I'd watch closely what we do during our go at the game.
(And BTW: it's "Sir", as well. One of the 17 Houses of the Dragaerans. Er, never mind.)
So what should be done? Throttle all industrial production for first-world nations, and leave third-world nations exempt.
Riiiiiiight...makes sense to me.
You, sir, are a troll.
Last I heard, the emphasis was on reducing CO2, not production. Just because most industries today blow tons of CO2 into the atmosphere does not mean that they have to: there are ways to reduce CO2-output without hurting production.
You sound a bit like an automobile tycoon in the 70s saying: "There's no proof that exhaust emissions cause smog! And besides, cutting our cars' fuel consumption or cleaning up emissions is expensive and is going to hurt our competitive edge!"
To make a short article shorter (and enlighten the German-impaired):
SCO Germany got fined 10,000 EUR because they transgressed against an injunction ordering them to remove from their web page any allegation that Linux contained ill-gotten IP of SCO's. Apparently they overlooked something when cleaning up their pages.
However, there was no judgment on whether or not these allegations are correct, so put the champagne back in the fridge, guys.
When I'm walking through a bad neighbourhood here in Germany I feel a lot less worried than in a similar situation in the US, because here, the threat consists of knives, baseball bats, pepper spray and the occasional hand gun, whereas in the US, you might find yourself staring at a large caliber machine gun. Now, I'm pretty confident concerning my ability to run away from knives, but bullets are a different league.
The question of self defense boils down to what you want to defend against: Do you need your gun to defend against the occasional ruffian or to preemptively kill someone who seriously is out to get you? In the former case, I personally trust in my brains to calm the drunkards, in my legs to run away from the gangs and in the police to deal with anyone toting a gun (the German SWATs are pretty capable). In the latter case, when someone is willing to invest a lot of time and money to see you dead, you're dead anyway, because your gun won't help you defend against, say, a 50 cal sniper rifle.
So I'd say the strict gun control laws in Germany make me feel a lot more in control of potentially threatening situations simply because here, guns are not used for anything less than a bank robbery.
Slashdot Mirror
I did not read anything by that Lomborg fellow, but I RTFA, and the articles do not say "Rejoice, for Global Warming is a myth!", but rather "Rejoice guardedly, for we may have a bit more time than we feared to rein in Global Warming."
So I wouldn't break out the Champagne yet.
--
Severin's first law: "For every ratio, there is an equal and opposite irratio."
It's one of these new Proactive Undo Buttons called "Preview"...
Congratulations.
'tis the season of JOY! One of the geekiest games ever, reborn!
But there's a rub:
On their home page, Monsterstudios tell us to "Expect Chain Reaction to fully support OS X and Linux operating systems sometime in early Fall 2003".
Early Fall?
*quick look into calendar*
OK, at least in time for Christmas, then?
Please?
If you want to kill somebody and are willing to put lots of work, brains, money and/or your life into it, you can kill that person. And taking another human being's life should be no easier than that. Which leads me directly to
So I repeat: if you want to kill that dictator, you always can get guns, explosives, a knife in a bouquet or whatever you deem necessary -- there's no need to stack up on them "just in case". And if you realize that your country becomes the sort of a country that you don't want to live in anymore and you want to get away, you always can get away.
(Nitpick: it's "Hitler". And you'd have had to worry about the SA initially and the Gestapo later, less about the SS.) Right. What makes you think that you will get more backing from gun crazy "from my cold dead fingers!" types than from sane armed forces personnel? If I were you, I'd rather believe that a significant portion of the US military will show common sense and refuse to shoot at fellow citizens (and there have been surveys to that effect) than that I could get even one percent of your "50 million+" to agree on even a name.
("People's Front of Texas? SPLITTER!")
To get back on the subject, what it boils down to is just this:
It should be hard for people to kill other people. It should require a certain amount of premeditation to even acquire the means. If you consider it necessary to put another human being to death, this should definitely be harder than walking to your car, opening the trunk and getting out a firearm loaded with live ammo. This sort of thing just begs for lethal "accidents".
Nitpick: Wasn't that "Hasbro"?
See, that's where I disagree.
"Getting shot with an 1700s pistol or a modern Glock can both produce a fatal result."
JFK and Martin Luther King would probably still be alive today if they had lived at the time of the founding fa-- Er. *cough*
JFK and Martin Luther King would probably still be alive today if the weapons available in the 60s were restricted to those that the founding fathers had available at their time. This is just a guess, of course, but this whole "Voting from the Rooftops" thing is based on your average braindead fucker being able to blow somebodies brains out at long distances with modern weaponry. I'd rather lots of checks and balances surrounding that kind of power, giving it only into the hands of a trusted group of people controlled by the people as a whole. Or does everyone on your network have admin rights?
"Tyrants can be *shot*."
But your tyrant is my democratically elected president! The point where somebody becomes a tyrant and should be removed from office is open for discussion, but nobody should be granted a veto right in form of a gun. That's what a democracy is: discuss it, vote on it, go with the majority. If the whole thing turns out to have been a bad idea, start over - don't start shooting.
"Surely you agree that maintaining guns of equal strength in the police and citizenry is important?", in other words: "But who will protect me from the Army/Police/Coast Guard/National Guard/...?"
If the whole process deteriorates to the point where those that bear arms to Protect And Serve the population follow orders to subjugate said population, the place would have long lost all appeal to live there, and I'd have started packing. Besides, your Desert Eagle won't help a lot once the Air Force starts playing, so forget about the "equal strength" thing: there's always gonna be a bigger kid on the block. And you do trust the Air Force not to start carpet bombing in the US, right?
For further Food For Thought I point you to "KIDS TODAY ARE BETTER TRAINED TO KILL".
Me? I blame TV.
No, I kid you not.
Please tell me you'd use public transport.
Fine, but the question is:
Can we afford to wait until we know that, yes indeed, the climate did change, and yes, it was due to hot house gases?
Can we? I say the risk is not worth the gain.
I apologize if I initially pegged you as one of the unthinking "Environment Protection == Return to Stone Age" types that I occasionally have to deal with. You seem to have read a bit on the matter. Still:
Ever read Factor 4, or anything by the Lovins? They show, with tons of examples, a way to raise overall productivity or wealth while reducing the impact on the environment. That includes stuff like CO2-output.
WRT my car tycoon: There were people that did argue against a connection between smog and exhaust emissions, just as there were people that saw no connection between smoking and lung cancer. I'd rather have our grandchildren shake their heads at our silly worries than spit on our graves for our blindness. If you did a Quick Save somewhen around 1950, do tell us -- otherwise, I'd watch closely what we do during our go at the game.
(And BTW: it's "Sir", as well. One of the 17 Houses of the Dragaerans. Er, never mind.)
You sound a bit like an automobile tycoon in the 70s saying: "There's no proof that exhaust emissions cause smog! And besides, cutting our cars' fuel consumption or cleaning up emissions is expensive and is going to hurt our competitive edge!"
Riiiiiiight...makes sense to me.
I know it's a bit late in the discussion, but allow me to point to Hebrew:
Wrds r ntllgbl s lng s ppl wrt dwn th cnsnnts. K, thr r sm pssbl mx-ps, spcll wth shrt wrds, lk fr nstnc "s" nd "s". Bt t wrks srprsngl wll, ll thngs cnsdrd.
To make a short article shorter (and enlighten the German-impaired):
SCO Germany got fined 10,000 EUR because they transgressed against an injunction ordering them to remove from their web page any allegation that Linux contained ill-gotten IP of SCO's. Apparently they overlooked something when cleaning up their pages.
However, there was no judgment on whether or not these allegations are correct, so put the champagne back in the fridge, guys.
When I'm walking through a bad neighbourhood here in Germany I feel a lot less worried than in a similar situation in the US, because here, the threat consists of knives, baseball bats, pepper spray and the occasional hand gun, whereas in the US, you might find yourself staring at a large caliber machine gun. Now, I'm pretty confident concerning my ability to run away from knives, but bullets are a different league.
The question of self defense boils down to what you want to defend against:
Do you need your gun to defend against the occasional ruffian or to preemptively kill someone who seriously is out to get you?
In the former case, I personally trust in my brains to calm the drunkards, in my legs to run away from the gangs and in the police to deal with anyone toting a gun (the German SWATs are pretty capable). In the latter case, when someone is willing to invest a lot of time and money to see you dead, you're dead anyway, because your gun won't help you defend against, say, a 50 cal sniper rifle.
So I'd say the strict gun control laws in Germany make me feel a lot more in control of potentially threatening situations simply because here, guns are not used for anything less than a bank robbery.