While I'm not going to try to deny that there are shifty funeral directors, my comments were based on first hand experience as the guy who puts the body in the hole. There are regulations that the cemetery has to follow to be allowed to operate. I was a cemetery employee, paid by the local government, and never once received a dime from any funeral home--even when the funeral director failed to bring pall bearers and we were asked to carry a casket, the cheap bastard never even offered to give us a tip.
Where I worked, and in all the cemeteries I've been in, it's the job of the "gravediggers" to stay out of the way and not get involved in any capacity with the services. The funeral home is supposed to supply all materials for the burial, in accordance with local regulations; the only thing we provided was the digging, filling and mowing, also the cement footer for the headstone to be placed on was provided by the cemetery.
I worked in a cemetery for two years, mostly as just a caretaker, mowing the grass, trimming around headstones, straightening the headstones that the riff-raff came and knocked down, things like that, but I did have to do a few burials, and it was a highly educational experience.
In New York, a body is required to be buried in a concrete "vault", which is nothing more than a box for the casket to go in. This is to prevent diseases from leeching out of the body and into the ground where they can infect the groundwater or the cemetery employees. I was told by my overseer that the law was enacted after a particularly rainy year in which a number of cemetery workers had contracted TB from standing in muddy pits digging graves next to plots where TB victims had been buried. How true it is, I don't know, but, as someone who has been in a pit, digging that hole, I was glad to know that the plots around me and uphill of me were all ones with vaults.
The rules for cremated remains don't require that the ashes be placed in a vault, and there are special rules for Jewish and Islamic burials, whose faiths require that the corpse be buried in contact with the soil, but I only got those in passing and never had to bury any Jews or Muslims, so I don't know the details.
In New York, the death penalty is in a sort of limbo at the moment. Before being placed "in review", as it were, knowingly killing an officer of the law was a capitol offense. I think that Spitzer is trying to at least get cop-killers the needle again, even if we don't go back to using the death penalty in all events.
Not that I'd pretend to know the mind of anyone so daft as an elected official, just a guess.
Well, NYC often treats itself as being a separate entity from the rest of the state, but New York State law requires a driver to stop if a pedestrian is in the crosswalk. It does not matter if they are in your lane or the opposite lane, if they have stepped down off the curb, you are required to stop. If the City wants to do something about citizens getting hit, they need to enforce the laws that already exist, not create new ones. After the first few hundred people get fined, maybe word will begin to work its way into people's skulls. If it doesn't, the City can write bales of tickets, collect the fines and put the money towards a good cause.
This article--and resulting discussion--are the first I've actually heard of Lotto tickets on thermal paper. Here in New York, Lotto tickets are still run off on dot matrix printers.
Other people have mentioned what the Warforged are, so I won't touch that. Another responder gave his (presumably) own summary of the game, but I'm going to go ahead and add my own.
First, if you're an old AD&D guy, the new 3.5 rules may be somewhat rough to get past your craw: No more THAC0, no more race-specific classes, all new classes of spellcasters, bizzare new combat rules. 3rd Edition was built with miniature play in mind, and it really shows in the combat rules.
If you can get past the rules changes, DDO is a game with at decent graphics, and usually good audio. Not great, the color palette runs heavy into the brown range and the textures are uninspired, but they serve their purpose. Dungeons will, from time to time, have voice overs by a "DM" that add a nice touch, and while the music that plays whilst you're on a crawl is usually good, the music that fills Inns is often grating.
And you're going to spend a lot of time in Inns. The other poster pointed out how rare healing potions are, but didn't bring up the fact that you can't heal--without spells or potions--while you're in a dungeon unless you find a--single-use--rest shrine. You can't set up a camp and sleep to regain a few hit points, or to relearn a spell. Inns are the only way to recharge.
Combat in the game is real-time, and while it's disgustingly difficult sometimes (when's the last time you needed to roll a 17 to hit a kobold?), it's handled well. That is to say it's the most 'realistic' combat in an MMO, in that strategy is valuable and rewarded. Unfortunately, it doesn't prevent the combat from becoming a click-fest.
Be prepared to find a group to play with. The game is not designed for single-players, period. Many people will argue that tabletop D&D requires at least two players anyway, but the difference is that in tabletop games, the dungeons can be scaled to groups from 1 to 10 or more. In DDO, most of the dungeons I ran needed 3 people if you wanted a chance to get through without dying, 4 to be safe.
All quests are dungeons, also, so if you like variety, well, you've got sewers and cellars, sometimes a warehouse. When you're not in a dungeon, and wandering the streets, the streets are empty, except for 'vendors'. You can't pick pockets on the streets, or break into shops, or arrest ruffians who are doing the same. You can just walk to either the Inn, the store or the dungeon.
This all sounds pretty damning, and combined with an ugly, often unintuitive interface and the difficulty of getting together a pickup group, it really is. The only redeeming factor are the dungeons themselves. Every class is useful when you're down in the hole. Rogues have a purpose, from picking locks to disarming traps. DDO is the only MMO I've played that makes those skills useful.
If you've only got a few hours per week, and have a dedicated group of friends who will play with you, it can be fun, but Neverwinter Nights is a better choice: less expensive, no fee to play, the ability to save your game when you need to log off for the night (and pick up where you left off) and unlimited ability to innovate, thanks to the toolkit and the modules that have already been written. NWN2 is slated for mid-October release right now, as well, with even more promise than the first. I and my group of gaming buddies, eagerly await its release.
Likewise, NCSoft is supposed to release Dungeon Runners before the end of the year. Free to download, free to play, the game looks like WoW, DDO and Diablo II had some kind of crazy lovechild. The designers have said that you'll have to pay for 'premium' content, but that the game is prefectly playable without any of the pay-for stuff.
Let's look at the opposite question. Let's say you're an MS employee. Let's say you tried out a crucially important product from a different MS division and you really, reallllly hate it.
I know a guy whose dream job is to be able to make music. He loves writing music, growing up he spent countless hours learning about music and acoustics. He's also damn good with math. When he graduated college with a math/comp sci degree, I was startled, but, as he explained, if you go to school to study music, they will teach how NOT to make the music you want to be able to.
Before finishing his degree, Microsoft had already signed him on, and agreed to pay moving expenses from Boston to Seattle, more or less. This man hates MS, comes from a family of devoted Mac users. But he saw the dollar signs and decided that if he made enough money quickly enough, he could spend the rest of his life on music.
Now, John (name changed) is not the easiest guy to get along with, and upon getting to MS and beginning work, he found all manner of coding practices that he disagreed with. And he was vociferous about it, angering almost everyone above him, save those few souls who saw that, indeed, by trimming this out and doing that, it would make a more efficient function. John was promoted because of his ability to see these flaws and fixes. This lead to people writing WORSE code that he was then forced to fix. After a year or so of this, John quit.
Are you going to be found interviewed on gamesetwatch.com talking about this? I'm guessing no.
When John left, he told the people above him at MS exactly why he was leaving: the department was turning out shitty code and no one other than he seemed to care about it; that struggling to work in their environment and under their terms was destroying his ability to pursue the creativity that was a part of his life.
Less than one year after leaving MS, John was, again, living in Boston when he was contacted by the head of the department he had been working for. The worst offenders whom John had cited had been fired and MS was happy to pay his moving expenses, again, and reinstate him in his old position if he would come back. It's not the same case as what you mention, no, but it does demonstrate that *shock* Microsoft does listen to internal feedback, even if it happens to be scathingly negative, and is willing to make changes to improve itself. Maybe not always, but it happens.
I don't know much about the 360, but I read a (print) article a couple years ago on Xbox Live that indicated the reason why broadband was required for Live was because of the way that the Xbox components were designed to work together. Basically, what was being intimated what that you had to have a minimum of 128Kbps down because that was the least amount of data that the Xbox was capable of processing.
Since many people who have broadband don't actually have that fast of a connection (768K max downstream over variable speed DSL is common), I would think that the 360 pauses your download just to be sure that it is getting access to the most amount of data that it can; a machine can only operate as fast as its slowest component.
As a subscriber to Sirius radio, albeit it one with old hardware, I'm interested to see how this plays out, but rather doubt that the RIAA will get anywhere unless it also convinces all stereo makers to stop including a "Record" option, or include some kind of physical device to prevent the recording of over-the-air broadcasts.
I pay $13/month for the right to listen to music free of adverts. If I choose to route my receiver through the car stereo, through the A/V equipment in the living room or just through the boombox in the computer- or bedroom, I am able to. If I choose to record something being broadcast, whether it's an NFL game or an hour's worth of Channel 20 "Octane", I'm doing nothing different from those individuals who record advertisement-sponsored over-the-air radio. OTA listeners are paying by listening to the adverts; I'm paying actual MONEY.
If the RIAA doesn't wany me listening to it's content when and where I like, it should stop releasing material, and I'll be happy to keep listening to the indie artists I do listen to, and I'll be happy to go in search of others.
Also size and weight matter no matter what people tell you. If you are going up against someone 100lbs heavier than you with an equivalent skill level you will probably lose. These are just the facts. Anyone who does serious sparring against resisting opponents knows this.
I've two very good friends who are into the Bujinkan, a husband and wife team. He just recently was awarded the right to teach, and has opened a school where he is co-instructor with a much more senior member, one who has taken the "sword test" referred to in TFA. She, on the other hand, is a relative novice, and is lucky, on a good day, to measure in at 5'3".
At a demonstration I sponsored in June, she was able to show quite convincingly how a very small woman is able to take down, bind and otherwise incapacitate an assailant a foot taller, and several tens of pounds heavier. The assailant in this case was a student of classical Okinawan karate with an aproximately equal skill level. Her husband did the same on a man, again, markedly out massing him, who is well trained in akido and Shindo-muso-mu (I might be spelling that wrong).
SIZE is not the determining factor. TECHNIQUE is. Regardless of how well your opponent resists, it is, simply put, child's play to defeat an opponent, even one of equal or greater skill, if you adhere to basic principles of technique. I can say from long experience that the victory goes not to the best trained, but to the one who fails to make mistakes.
To think that a 76 year old man is going around throwing around guys half his age with ease is silly. They're either cooperative opponents or so incredibly untrained they may as well be cooperative.
To make such judgements without knowing the facts is silly. You talk about serious sparring, but if you're willing to make outrageous statements like this, I highly doubt that you take what you are doing that seriously.
How is this hard to believe? Martial artists in both the east and the west have been doing just this sort of thing for centuries. The level of skill Soke Hatsumi has achieved over the years would make ANY action he undertakes casual. Likewise, there are classically trained fencing masters walking around today who can do the same thing. Timing and distance are everything. You start off practising it slowly, then move up to combat speed over time, and, eventually, the actions are second nature. To the untrained, the master (be s/he Asian or European) quickly gets in there, his hands and arms are a blur, and then someone is lying on the ground. To one who is trained in these things, it's clear that the master has closed distance and, while the opponent is unstable due to the momentum of his attack, has applied just the necessary force to topple the already unstable adversary. It doesn't take strength, just finesse (sp?).
IBM used to make ALL their employees wear suits while entering and leaving the campus. Janitors would carry their uniforms/coveralls with them, or leave them in the locker room and change clothes upon arrival and departure. It was strictly forbidden for any employee to make the company look bad in any possible way. In fact, if an employee was found to have cashed his or her paycheck at an institution other than a bank, they were subject to termination.
Admittedly, this was the 50s, and today you can see IBM employees standing outside the building in short sleeves, smoking a cigarette, but the idea remains the same: IBM demanded that the world take them seriously, and to ensure that the world would, they fostered an appearance of great power and presitge. If OSS wants the world to take it seriously, it needs to take itself seriously. Not necessarily to the extremes of IBM, but if you can't be bothered to pay attention to your appearance when making a public presentation, how can the public be sure that you pay attention to the details that they find significant?
The issue, truly, should not be "The public should accept me the way I am," or "He should look the way we expect." No one is truly expecting a perfect situation, although they might hope for one, and concessions can and should be expected. You don't have to cut your hair, but make sure you brush it out before putting it in a ponytail. Likewise, sandals may feel great, but most people don't enjoy seeing other people's toes (and if you're wearing socks with your sandals, you're defeating the point of the sandals in the first place); wear loafers or dock shoes, they're as comfortable, and about as lazy as footwear can get and they even provide extra protection from people stepping on your toes or dropping stuff on them. You, largely, keep your style and the public sees you making an effort to please them.
Of course, we are human, and we live in a world that doesn't appreciate compromise, but a guy can dream.
This is not strictly true. Light simply thinks that it's the fastest thing going. The truth of the matter is that dark is faster than light, for no matter how fast light goes, it gets there just to discover that dark was there first.
The Eastern US is not colder THIS year. But last year saw one of the coldest January-February periods in history where I live (the Finger Lakes region of NY). The winter before that was also extremely cold, featuring, again, some of the coldest temperatures in decades.
A home health aide (in New York, they need to be certified, thus are CHHA) is an employee at a retirement home who does not have nursing certification, but usually does almost anything that the nurse can do. They wake and (depending on the (retired) individual's mental and physical state) help to dress the old people, make sure that they get meals on time, provide companionship, help them to shower and use the lavatory (particularly in the case of dementia paitents), pass out and make sure that medications are taken, etc.
There are also some who provide in-home care for those individuals who still live in their own houses, cooking meals and going shopping, driving them to doctor's appointments, what have you; the CHHA stays with them during the day and the old person has the house to him/herself at night.
My fiancée is a CHHA (she's 24 and working her way through school to get a teaching degree), and has held both kinds of positions, and typically does work with dementia paitents. But not all CHHA's are young: I know a woman who is in her 70s and does the same work.
Your points are interesting, but not entirely true in all cases.
Committing a murder during the course of a felony (the rape, in this case)--in some states--automatically bumps the murder up to 1st degree, which means, depending on where you're being tried, that you'll be looking at life without parole or the death penalty.
Similarly, if you break into someone's house and are caught, wind up killing the person who catches you and decide NOT to kill the rest of the family, and have a good lawyer, you can argue that the murder was accidental, demonstrate that you were only there for a little petty theft, you might be able to shake the 1st degree murder and work your way down to 3rd degree murder or even down to manslaughter. 20 years is certainly better than life without parole.
Not intended to be legal advice, use with caution, don't run with scissors, etc.
Just trying to figure out...When did anyone actually accept the New York Post as a valid source of information? I no longer even read the front page of the Post; it's actually worse than my local, rather shitty paper.
As someone who has some experience in this field, I can say that even a half-decent AI, able to react in real time, would slaughter the guy who is mindlessly flailing.
I fence. Not the fencing that is on the Olympics, or the USFA or FIE or any of it, but Classical and Historical fencing, fencing as a martial art. And with over six years of dedication to the Art, more than four of which have been spent studying the two-handed sword, I can assure you that flailing about is useless. You might get lucky, once, maybe a handful of times, but you WILL meet an opponent who will cut you into shreds.
If the AI is given basic knowledge of simple and compound parries, and also simple and compound attacks, creating a challenging duel would be fairly straight foward. The player is attacking from this angle? Parry here. Riposte there, based on the position of the "blade". Games are already able to "learn" your attacking preferences, so adding this strategy also becomes an easy addition: The player attacks to a high line target 85% of the time, or parries with high parries that expose the lower targets? Feint high, attack low.
If Nintendo builds a game that is able to simulate, even just decently, "sword" fighting, I'll not only buy a Revolution, I'll buy one for each and every one of my friends.
...But I've never had ANY trouble with my Windows box online. For the longest time, I left it on, on my broadband connection, unprotected and never had so much as a single attempt at hacking or hijacking my computer.
My Linux box was constantly the target of Windows exploits--which I laughed at for hours--but no one ever bothered with my Windows box.
And since I know this is/., and must sound like an invitation to some of you, it IS firewalled, patched, running AV and anti-spyware programmes right now, but the point remains: While there are horror stories out there about how hackers are able to take over your computer even before you get it home and out of the car, it's probably a lot less common than the sops who write these articles want you to believe. Yes, make sure your computer is secure, but no, don't be so scared of it that you don't use it.
Does having the internet keep me from reading more? Possibly, but not directly. I buy, on average, 3 books and 4 magazines each month. I read the newspaper every morning, and have such a tremendous stack of books lying around (one day, I really should get shelves) that I never want for something to read.
I dislike Sci-Fi, and focus primarily on Fantasy, but I enjoy some classical literature and general fiction. Kurt Vonnegut shares equal pile-space with Dante, but both of them are dwarfed by L E Modesitt Jr. I also read a good deal of religious and 'spiritual' work, even a fair share of stupid new age nonsense, so Aliester Crowley sits there next to books on Mayan mythology and the Tao Te Ching rests atop my copy of the the Bible.
I read at work; I read while my fiancee is playing Rise of Nations; I read during the boring television programmes that I have to suffer through. When I was in high school, I carried a novel to every class and read through all of them, except Calculus and my Tech/Shop class. I used to read for an hour or three before bed every night, but don't quite so often anymore because I've taken to playing online games with friends whom I've moved far away from. When I lived nearer to them, and could keep in touch more regularly and reliably, the internet never affected my reading.
So, if you wanted to, you could say that the internet has cut into my reading time, but not in the dastardly, make-everyone-stupid way that the intelligesita want the population to believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Where I worked, and in all the cemeteries I've been in, it's the job of the "gravediggers" to stay out of the way and not get involved in any capacity with the services. The funeral home is supposed to supply all materials for the burial, in accordance with local regulations; the only thing we provided was the digging, filling and mowing, also the cement footer for the headstone to be placed on was provided by the cemetery.
In New York, a body is required to be buried in a concrete "vault", which is nothing more than a box for the casket to go in. This is to prevent diseases from leeching out of the body and into the ground where they can infect the groundwater or the cemetery employees. I was told by my overseer that the law was enacted after a particularly rainy year in which a number of cemetery workers had contracted TB from standing in muddy pits digging graves next to plots where TB victims had been buried. How true it is, I don't know, but, as someone who has been in a pit, digging that hole, I was glad to know that the plots around me and uphill of me were all ones with vaults.
The rules for cremated remains don't require that the ashes be placed in a vault, and there are special rules for Jewish and Islamic burials, whose faiths require that the corpse be buried in contact with the soil, but I only got those in passing and never had to bury any Jews or Muslims, so I don't know the details.
Not that I'd pretend to know the mind of anyone so daft as an elected official, just a guess.
Well, NYC often treats itself as being a separate entity from the rest of the state, but New York State law requires a driver to stop if a pedestrian is in the crosswalk. It does not matter if they are in your lane or the opposite lane, if they have stepped down off the curb, you are required to stop. If the City wants to do something about citizens getting hit, they need to enforce the laws that already exist, not create new ones. After the first few hundred people get fined, maybe word will begin to work its way into people's skulls. If it doesn't, the City can write bales of tickets, collect the fines and put the money towards a good cause.
This article--and resulting discussion--are the first I've actually heard of Lotto tickets on thermal paper. Here in New York, Lotto tickets are still run off on dot matrix printers.
First, if you're an old AD&D guy, the new 3.5 rules may be somewhat rough to get past your craw: No more THAC0, no more race-specific classes, all new classes of spellcasters, bizzare new combat rules. 3rd Edition was built with miniature play in mind, and it really shows in the combat rules.
If you can get past the rules changes, DDO is a game with at decent graphics, and usually good audio. Not great, the color palette runs heavy into the brown range and the textures are uninspired, but they serve their purpose. Dungeons will, from time to time, have voice overs by a "DM" that add a nice touch, and while the music that plays whilst you're on a crawl is usually good, the music that fills Inns is often grating.
And you're going to spend a lot of time in Inns. The other poster pointed out how rare healing potions are, but didn't bring up the fact that you can't heal--without spells or potions--while you're in a dungeon unless you find a--single-use--rest shrine. You can't set up a camp and sleep to regain a few hit points, or to relearn a spell. Inns are the only way to recharge.
Combat in the game is real-time, and while it's disgustingly difficult sometimes (when's the last time you needed to roll a 17 to hit a kobold?), it's handled well. That is to say it's the most 'realistic' combat in an MMO, in that strategy is valuable and rewarded. Unfortunately, it doesn't prevent the combat from becoming a click-fest.
Be prepared to find a group to play with. The game is not designed for single-players, period. Many people will argue that tabletop D&D requires at least two players anyway, but the difference is that in tabletop games, the dungeons can be scaled to groups from 1 to 10 or more. In DDO, most of the dungeons I ran needed 3 people if you wanted a chance to get through without dying, 4 to be safe.
All quests are dungeons, also, so if you like variety, well, you've got sewers and cellars, sometimes a warehouse. When you're not in a dungeon, and wandering the streets, the streets are empty, except for 'vendors'. You can't pick pockets on the streets, or break into shops, or arrest ruffians who are doing the same. You can just walk to either the Inn, the store or the dungeon.
This all sounds pretty damning, and combined with an ugly, often unintuitive interface and the difficulty of getting together a pickup group, it really is. The only redeeming factor are the dungeons themselves. Every class is useful when you're down in the hole. Rogues have a purpose, from picking locks to disarming traps. DDO is the only MMO I've played that makes those skills useful.
If you've only got a few hours per week, and have a dedicated group of friends who will play with you, it can be fun, but Neverwinter Nights is a better choice: less expensive, no fee to play, the ability to save your game when you need to log off for the night (and pick up where you left off) and unlimited ability to innovate, thanks to the toolkit and the modules that have already been written. NWN2 is slated for mid-October release right now, as well, with even more promise than the first. I and my group of gaming buddies, eagerly await its release.
Likewise, NCSoft is supposed to release Dungeon Runners before the end of the year. Free to download, free to play, the game looks like WoW, DDO and Diablo II had some kind of crazy lovechild. The designers have said that you'll have to pay for 'premium' content, but that the game is prefectly playable without any of the pay-for stuff.
I know a guy whose dream job is to be able to make music. He loves writing music, growing up he spent countless hours learning about music and acoustics. He's also damn good with math. When he graduated college with a math/comp sci degree, I was startled, but, as he explained, if you go to school to study music, they will teach how NOT to make the music you want to be able to.
Before finishing his degree, Microsoft had already signed him on, and agreed to pay moving expenses from Boston to Seattle, more or less. This man hates MS, comes from a family of devoted Mac users. But he saw the dollar signs and decided that if he made enough money quickly enough, he could spend the rest of his life on music.
Now, John (name changed) is not the easiest guy to get along with, and upon getting to MS and beginning work, he found all manner of coding practices that he disagreed with. And he was vociferous about it, angering almost everyone above him, save those few souls who saw that, indeed, by trimming this out and doing that, it would make a more efficient function. John was promoted because of his ability to see these flaws and fixes. This lead to people writing WORSE code that he was then forced to fix. After a year or so of this, John quit.
Are you going to be found interviewed on gamesetwatch.com talking about this? I'm guessing no.
When John left, he told the people above him at MS exactly why he was leaving: the department was turning out shitty code and no one other than he seemed to care about it; that struggling to work in their environment and under their terms was destroying his ability to pursue the creativity that was a part of his life.
Less than one year after leaving MS, John was, again, living in Boston when he was contacted by the head of the department he had been working for. The worst offenders whom John had cited had been fired and MS was happy to pay his moving expenses, again, and reinstate him in his old position if he would come back. It's not the same case as what you mention, no, but it does demonstrate that *shock* Microsoft does listen to internal feedback, even if it happens to be scathingly negative, and is willing to make changes to improve itself. Maybe not always, but it happens.
Since many people who have broadband don't actually have that fast of a connection (768K max downstream over variable speed DSL is common), I would think that the 360 pauses your download just to be sure that it is getting access to the most amount of data that it can; a machine can only operate as fast as its slowest component.
I pay $13/month for the right to listen to music free of adverts. If I choose to route my receiver through the car stereo, through the A/V equipment in the living room or just through the boombox in the computer- or bedroom, I am able to. If I choose to record something being broadcast, whether it's an NFL game or an hour's worth of Channel 20 "Octane", I'm doing nothing different from those individuals who record advertisement-sponsored over-the-air radio. OTA listeners are paying by listening to the adverts; I'm paying actual MONEY.
If the RIAA doesn't wany me listening to it's content when and where I like, it should stop releasing material, and I'll be happy to keep listening to the indie artists I do listen to, and I'll be happy to go in search of others.
I've two very good friends who are into the Bujinkan, a husband and wife team. He just recently was awarded the right to teach, and has opened a school where he is co-instructor with a much more senior member, one who has taken the "sword test" referred to in TFA. She, on the other hand, is a relative novice, and is lucky, on a good day, to measure in at 5'3".
At a demonstration I sponsored in June, she was able to show quite convincingly how a very small woman is able to take down, bind and otherwise incapacitate an assailant a foot taller, and several tens of pounds heavier. The assailant in this case was a student of classical Okinawan karate with an aproximately equal skill level. Her husband did the same on a man, again, markedly out massing him, who is well trained in akido and Shindo-muso-mu (I might be spelling that wrong).
SIZE is not the determining factor. TECHNIQUE is. Regardless of how well your opponent resists, it is, simply put, child's play to defeat an opponent, even one of equal or greater skill, if you adhere to basic principles of technique. I can say from long experience that the victory goes not to the best trained, but to the one who fails to make mistakes.
To think that a 76 year old man is going around throwing around guys half his age with ease is silly. They're either cooperative opponents or so incredibly untrained they may as well be cooperative.
To make such judgements without knowing the facts is silly. You talk about serious sparring, but if you're willing to make outrageous statements like this, I highly doubt that you take what you are doing that seriously.
How is this hard to believe? Martial artists in both the east and the west have been doing just this sort of thing for centuries. The level of skill Soke Hatsumi has achieved over the years would make ANY action he undertakes casual. Likewise, there are classically trained fencing masters walking around today who can do the same thing. Timing and distance are everything. You start off practising it slowly, then move up to combat speed over time, and, eventually, the actions are second nature. To the untrained, the master (be s/he Asian or European) quickly gets in there, his hands and arms are a blur, and then someone is lying on the ground. To one who is trained in these things, it's clear that the master has closed distance and, while the opponent is unstable due to the momentum of his attack, has applied just the necessary force to topple the already unstable adversary. It doesn't take strength, just finesse (sp?).
What's the motto around here? Correlation does not indicate causation?
Admittedly, this was the 50s, and today you can see IBM employees standing outside the building in short sleeves, smoking a cigarette, but the idea remains the same: IBM demanded that the world take them seriously, and to ensure that the world would, they fostered an appearance of great power and presitge. If OSS wants the world to take it seriously, it needs to take itself seriously. Not necessarily to the extremes of IBM, but if you can't be bothered to pay attention to your appearance when making a public presentation, how can the public be sure that you pay attention to the details that they find significant?
The issue, truly, should not be "The public should accept me the way I am," or "He should look the way we expect." No one is truly expecting a perfect situation, although they might hope for one, and concessions can and should be expected. You don't have to cut your hair, but make sure you brush it out before putting it in a ponytail. Likewise, sandals may feel great, but most people don't enjoy seeing other people's toes (and if you're wearing socks with your sandals, you're defeating the point of the sandals in the first place); wear loafers or dock shoes, they're as comfortable, and about as lazy as footwear can get and they even provide extra protection from people stepping on your toes or dropping stuff on them. You, largely, keep your style and the public sees you making an effort to please them.
Of course, we are human, and we live in a world that doesn't appreciate compromise, but a guy can dream.
This is not strictly true. Light simply thinks that it's the fastest thing going. The truth of the matter is that dark is faster than light, for no matter how fast light goes, it gets there just to discover that dark was there first.
The Eastern US is not colder THIS year. But last year saw one of the coldest January-February periods in history where I live (the Finger Lakes region of NY). The winter before that was also extremely cold, featuring, again, some of the coldest temperatures in decades.
There are also some who provide in-home care for those individuals who still live in their own houses, cooking meals and going shopping, driving them to doctor's appointments, what have you; the CHHA stays with them during the day and the old person has the house to him/herself at night.
My fiancée is a CHHA (she's 24 and working her way through school to get a teaching degree), and has held both kinds of positions, and typically does work with dementia paitents. But not all CHHA's are young: I know a woman who is in her 70s and does the same work.
Committing a murder during the course of a felony (the rape, in this case)--in some states--automatically bumps the murder up to 1st degree, which means, depending on where you're being tried, that you'll be looking at life without parole or the death penalty.
Similarly, if you break into someone's house and are caught, wind up killing the person who catches you and decide NOT to kill the rest of the family, and have a good lawyer, you can argue that the murder was accidental, demonstrate that you were only there for a little petty theft, you might be able to shake the 1st degree murder and work your way down to 3rd degree murder or even down to manslaughter. 20 years is certainly better than life without parole.
Not intended to be legal advice, use with caution, don't run with scissors, etc.
To top it all, it's traditionally reccomended that any Nouveau that hasn't been consumed by January 1st should be destroyed.
It was called, if I'm remembering correctly, Tao Feng: Fist of the Lotus. The IDEA was cool. The GAME was...well, it was.
Not all that different from the good old American dating system when you think about it.
I fence. Not the fencing that is on the Olympics, or the USFA or FIE or any of it, but Classical and Historical fencing, fencing as a martial art. And with over six years of dedication to the Art, more than four of which have been spent studying the two-handed sword, I can assure you that flailing about is useless. You might get lucky, once, maybe a handful of times, but you WILL meet an opponent who will cut you into shreds.
If the AI is given basic knowledge of simple and compound parries, and also simple and compound attacks, creating a challenging duel would be fairly straight foward. The player is attacking from this angle? Parry here. Riposte there, based on the position of the "blade". Games are already able to "learn" your attacking preferences, so adding this strategy also becomes an easy addition: The player attacks to a high line target 85% of the time, or parries with high parries that expose the lower targets? Feint high, attack low.
If Nintendo builds a game that is able to simulate, even just decently, "sword" fighting, I'll not only buy a Revolution, I'll buy one for each and every one of my friends.
My Linux box was constantly the target of Windows exploits--which I laughed at for hours--but no one ever bothered with my Windows box.
And since I know this is /., and must sound like an invitation to some of you, it IS firewalled, patched, running AV and anti-spyware programmes right now, but the point remains: While there are horror stories out there about how hackers are able to take over your computer even before you get it home and out of the car, it's probably a lot less common than the sops who write these articles want you to believe. Yes, make sure your computer is secure, but no, don't be so scared of it that you don't use it.
Not the worst pun, just the one that the fewest people have grasped yet. BOB Almighty, people...
I dislike Sci-Fi, and focus primarily on Fantasy, but I enjoy some classical literature and general fiction. Kurt Vonnegut shares equal pile-space with Dante, but both of them are dwarfed by L E Modesitt Jr. I also read a good deal of religious and 'spiritual' work, even a fair share of stupid new age nonsense, so Aliester Crowley sits there next to books on Mayan mythology and the Tao Te Ching rests atop my copy of the the Bible.
I read at work; I read while my fiancee is playing Rise of Nations; I read during the boring television programmes that I have to suffer through. When I was in high school, I carried a novel to every class and read through all of them, except Calculus and my Tech/Shop class. I used to read for an hour or three before bed every night, but don't quite so often anymore because I've taken to playing online games with friends whom I've moved far away from. When I lived nearer to them, and could keep in touch more regularly and reliably, the internet never affected my reading.
So, if you wanted to, you could say that the internet has cut into my reading time, but not in the dastardly, make-everyone-stupid way that the intelligesita want the population to believe.