Either way, you haven't seemed real interested in a productive dialog about this issue. You've told me to "go away", you've put words into my mouth and you've leap to conclusions that aren't supported by my writings. Perhaps we should call it here and just agree to disagree, hmm?
I told you to go away because you make stupid statements about how the left should support corporatism in the name of the workers. I told you to go away because you don't have any scientific basis for your arguments. I told you to go away because you haven't offered a serious and workable alternative to the incentive that Carbon Taxes would provide. I can get behind agreeing to disagree, and you can have your conclusion that I was the one not interested in productive dialog about the issue when it was you who really wasn't offering any defensible ideas in detail nor positions supported by science.
One thing though, don't conflate the American People with people who make up 2%-3% of the households in this country. citation provided.
P.S. -- I forgot to mention this in my haste to post my response but where do you get off being so damned certain that human impact on this globe is absolutely certainly 100% so minimal as to be inconsequential? I have an inflated opinion of said impact? You have a naive delusion that it doesn't exist at all to a degree we should care about what we do.
I am not interested in your relativistic view on the human impact on this world as much as I enjoy Carlin and other comedians who will rightly point out that life will find a way. The point is that the damage doesn't need to be done and the hardships on both humanity and the rest of life on Earth need not be considered inevitable because we are so comfortable with a wasteful culture and lifestyle.
How is it supposed to be comforting to know that some lifeforms would survive a complete extinction of most life including humans on this rock? Man, it really sucks that we all died out but at least some life continued on! What a childish angle to base an argument from.
For WoW, there are few players in between 1 and 80 at any given time, most are alts they don't want to explore the dungeon. They simply want $ITEM or their "random" done and over with. Same thing right now with the random heroic system, any skip-able boss is skipped, and no one talks. There isn't really a "party" there is not much of a feeling of a group. It's a 5 players all trying to get their badges and need the other 4(or at least the tank/healer) to do it.
This is a pretty jaded view and not really applicable even most of the time as far as I've seen. I level alts quite regularly since I'm not in a raiding guild and enjoy switching from all the various playstyles the classes offer, and I pretty much level now through the dungeon finder at the expense of traveling around doing quests. It's not that I don't enjoy questing, it's just that it's easier to queue as a healer/tank and do dungeon after dungeon to level (as well as more lucrative gear-wise) than it is to run around. And while it is true that some people are only doing the runs to down only the necessary boss(es), that is not the case all the time, and it's not unheard of to have a group object so strongly to such a mentality that the person who is insisting upon it gets votekicked and someone who is playing the game to enjoy the game brought on board. I regularly do this and when someone asks "Skip optional bosses?" my response is "I'm here for a reason, and that reason is not to simply get to the end. I'll take my loot and/or emblems, thanks." There's also plenty of socialization, even when grouping with the random dungeon finder. Maybe nobody talks in your groups because nobody takes the initiative to actually begin a discussion about anything, which is very easy to do. I tend to talk a lot with people and I keep an eye out for those I've grouped with before and enjoy grouping with. Those who are not fun to play with go on my ignore list and I don't have to deal with them ever again.
Also, if you really want a sense of community, get involved on one of the RP or RP-PVP servers. It's not that the non-RP servers don't have a community, it just doesn't in my opinion really match up to the vibrancy of the RP servers I have played on and do play on. A lot of people seem intimidated by the idea of imposed RP but that never happens unless you join a guild that absolutely requires it if you want to stay in. I am a very casual player and I only do "heavy" RP when I feel like it, which is to say not very often (once a week at the very most). I have always been a bit of a jokester and fun-seeker though so even when I'm not trying to RP I blend in pretty well.
Anyways, there are days i long for EQ1 style play, where you needed to get a group together to do anything, and your group would spend a few hours grinding out mobs for a quest. joking and carrying on along the way.
EQ1 is something I definitely don't miss, aside from having a Monk class. If ever there was a game that was absolutely nothing but a time-sink, it was EQ1. Most people do not find it enjoyable to keep camping a certain spot for a certain mob in the hopes of a certain drop for days on end. Most people do not find it enjoyable to create a very large group of players and hope that everyone knows exactly what the heck is going on. There's a reason why Blizzard cut down the raid sizes (Outside of Wintergrasp, I guess) to 25-man max. It was absolute chaos before and it was absolute BS to spend upwards of 6-10 hours in a single session doing a raid, and not even finishing!
So now you want to gut the economy on the basis of a science that you admit isn't "exact"? The climate has changed before you know. Homo sapiens are still here and thriving.
Lots of sciences aren't to an exact precision, and you are being disingenuous with your assertion that because something cannot be mapped or explained exactly through a scientific methodology that the methodologies and equations are somehow flawed beyond salvation. I suppose meteorology itself is absolute rubbish because it's not 100% accurate, eh? Shit, I guess we should just stop trying, and ignore that it is by and far more than accurate enough at this time. It will get better, just as our understanding and mathematical models and equations of forecasting climate change itself will. The models are not completely wrong, but they can at times be less than 100% accurate. This does not mean that the predictions said models make are inherently useless. You are basically saying they are, which is hogwash. I'm all for perfecting our equations and such, but I am not all for waiting until we are absolutely certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we see happening is actually happening before taking action. We have far more to lose from inaction than we do from action.
BTW, carbon taxes have nothing to do with reducing carbon. There's a number of ways we could do that without imposing new taxes.
Taxes are a great way of leveling the playing field to create greater incentive to get off of horrible habits. The horrible habit in question here is extremely unclean and non-renewable energy.
Carbon taxes represent another attempt at expanding the power and reach of government.
Cut the paranoid bullshit that ignores the fact that motivations must be created in this market. Jobs will migrate, profits will migrate, and we will all be better off when we are off of technology that destroys our planet in both the short and long term. Expanding the power and reach of government, that's the catch-all of this I don't like what the government is doing so clearly it is out of their bounds and nothing but a power grab mentality. I've got news for you -- Sometimes the government needs to act on things. Energy policy is completely within the realm of things that government can and should dictate.
You want my support for a carbon tax? Offset it with equal reductions in the income tax. Somehow I doubt you'd be willing to go along with that though....
I don't really want to get into a(n) (even more) futile discussion regarding who should and shouldn't bear tax burdens, but Earth to Shakrai, income taxes for people making on average less than $250,000 a year have dropped. You'll forgive me if I don't shed a tear for people with very large amounts of expendable income and wealth paying their fair share for piggybacking on the people who do the work and who have to suffer the consequences far more than a wealthy businessman. People keep saying it's in the best interests of the rich to not consolidate power and screw over the little man as if this supposition is at all supported by history. Now, the fact that it hasn't ever worked out that way doesn't mean that it could potentially, just like how there's never really been a truly Communist society that succeeded on it's own but hey it could work it just hasn't been done right! In theory the supposition is right, in practice people look out for themselves, and powerful businessmen often get to that point by being rather... hmm, psychopathic.
If you would argue that we need to give income tax credits to the wealthy in this country to offset them having to pay for Carbon Taxes, then what fucking motivation is being created here? Are you serious? Take from one hand and just transfer it to the other of the same person. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, let's nullify the Carbon Taxes by dropping income tax rates on the same people affected.
You see what you did there -- you implied that I only support the status quo when I've said nothing of the kind. Does it make it easier to write someone off when you can put words in their mouth and paint a negative picture of them in your mind?
Yes, it is, now go away. There's no reasoning with you when you can't even understand that climate research does not have to be an exact science to still be accurate in its overall predictions. These guys aren't trying to figure out if it will be raining next month, dolt. They are assessing general trends and patterns. As for nuclear energy, I do not object to looking into using it as an energy source if we were to use any of the more recent and advanced designs. Indeed, that is one of the points of the carbon tax system, to move away from forms of energy that would impose such a burden.
So what? It's still not going to kill us. It still doesn't have the impact on life as your "polluted air and water" straw man. From where I sit it seems pretty damned arrogant to proclaim that we need to destroy livelihoods and whole economies on the basis of climate models that can't even predict today using all of the historical data that we have.
Only by completely refuting all known science behind climate change research could someone say with as much certainty as you that increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere will do human civilization no harm. There is plenty of evidence that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, you would just seemingly rather believe it's all an elaborate hoax to destroy the economy and businesses, as if that's in the best interest of the global scientific community and the world as a whole.
And it isn't a straw-man, I was responding to your idiotic assertions that the left should embrace corporatism in the name of securing paychecks for the workers. If you meant in this particular situation only you didn't specify that, so maybe you should speak clearer next time? wizardforce also did not specify, and I am well-aware that Carbon Taxes are the beginning of the thread but the discussion took the turns that it did. Even speaking more broadly though and not about Carbon Taxes, your supposition is ridiculous and not worth serious consideration.
Go ahead and advocate for your carbon tax. You won't get it in the United States. Not even with 60 Democratic Senators could you find the support to get it through the US Congress. The EPA's threat to regulate it is an empty one -- the American people through Congress can cut off it's funding whenever they want. Nor would it matter even if you managed to get the US to commit economic suicide. China and India are not going to halt their efforts to pull their citizens out of poverty because of Al Gore.
I want your crystal ball. I am merely advocating something I am not making the assumption as you are that the end-result is already determined. Speculate all you want on how things will play out, I don't care one whit. As for the China and India remark, one can only hope that in time they can be persuaded to understand the severity of the situation. In the meantime, that doesn't excuse us doing nothing about the problem. Being greener does not have to equate to increased poverty and less of a role in global economics, but for some reason you seem to think that the two are absolutely inseparable. Science is continuously developing more efficient strategies for alternative energy and if we could get some more funding going on for things then progress would be even greater. The status quo should not and cannot be maintained.
Lastly, why do climate change deniers always act like Al Gore is the only person or even the biggest/most visible person in the climate change debate? I and most others are curious about your obsession with the guy over the silly claim that he allegedly said he invented the internet (he didn't) or his contributions to the climate change debate (he is a minor player and is not a climate change scientist nor does he pretend to be). We are interested in debating facts, not persons. You guys win over the misinformed far easier by attacking persons though instead of using reason.
Yeah, because the working man really needs to have polluted water and air that causes a wide array of problems. Yup, that's why leftists should embrace letting companies do whatever they want to the environment, so the workers can take a check home even if they're slowly destroying the habitat we all have to share.
Pick your offense. A drawing of Mohammed, a crucifix in urine, a burning flag, interracial or same-sex couples kissing in public. Every group has something it considers sacrilegious.
Only one group reacts with mass protests in the streets burning effigies as well as placing targets on peoples heads because of them exercising their freedom of speech. When was the last time you heard of a cartoonist getting stabbed to death in the streets for drawing Buddha, Jesus, or Moses? When was the last time someone who simply translated a book about Buddha, Jesus, or Moses met a similar fate? If there are moderate Muslims who want to live in modern times with us they need to take back control of their religion from the extremists that dominate the news and try to dominate our lives.
It takes an astounding lack of logic to draw the connections that you just did. And even if people of other faiths did react in such a way to such things, they are in the wrong too and are not to be tolerated. This whole "please guys stop being so mean!" act is getting really old really fast. I haven't and will not participate in this event because I personally have my mind elsewhere, but nobody anywhere has any right to tell me in the USA (and other countries with sane protections to free speech) to shut up and not talk about or draw something or someone because they are offended by it. As long as I'm not saying "Go kill such-and-such or so-and-so" then the most harm I'm doing is making someone think twice about a part of their life. Your delicate sensibilities regarding religious beliefs do not mean more legally than my ability to exercise my freedom of speech. You want to call me an asshole for exercising said freedom in a certain way? That's fine, and I really don't care. Censoring or threatening with death or violence is not fine though. That is when logical beings do care.
Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron. The article and the linked IRC log tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Chromium with a few checkboxes in "Under the Hood" defaulting to off.
The guy who runs that blog does not try to hide the fact that he's a Chrome developer, and he admits that there is the highly unlikely possibility that the person who was asking these questions was not the person who went on to release Iron. I was skeptical as well until I checked out the log file itself and quite honestly it would have to be an incredible coincidence for this guy to be asking such questions and providing the information that he does in his attempts to glean information on the right way to advertise his product as well as how to go about renaming the executable. There's more that makes it very reasonable to believe this is the guy who went on to release Iron, so please don't dismiss it until you've checked out the log file in detail. If this was a supremely unnecessary and elaborate hoax it sure is pulled off convincingly.
Using Iron after reading this information made me feel like I was supporting the wrong guy here and I couldn't do it anymore, it was just too uncomfortable seeing that this guy was looking for adsense revenue and to make a name for himself. The attitude of this developer is not one I would encourage at all.
As a further clarification, it's late night and I'm sorry I didn't word myself better, but what I was getting at is how so many people in the US who don't like Obama feel the need to call him a leftist, a socialist, a communist, when in reality he is so far detached from left-wing politics as to be depressing for those who are proponents of the left. One need only look at the health care reform bill and the speed at which DADT is being addressed to realize this. There are of course numerous other issues but these are the current thorns in my own side. If Obama was a hardline liberal then things would be dramatically different.
Since we know Pres. Obama is a straight ticket 'Progressive'
Obama is a moderate conservative: right wing (favoring the interests of the investment class), socially conservative (opposed to equality for gays and lesbians, opposed to the separation of church and state), and in favor of an aggressive foreign policy. Many of his policies that draw the most clamor from the Fox News set are close to, or even to the right of, those of Reagan or Nixon.
I genuinely despair that this is the truth of the matter for most people in the US.
>..as if because Obama nominates her she is going to assume every single position that you personally disagree with..
Pretty much. We don't have to know anything about her other than Obama has worked with long enough (Harvard Law Review and U of Chicago) that HE trusts her. Since we know Pres. Obama is a straight ticket 'Progressive' it is a safe bet he isn't about to nominate someone who isn't Party Regular. Apparently saying something so self evident gets modded Troll these days. Oh well, got Karma to burn.
Your "pretty much" attitude is a testament to your intellectual laziness. We know lots about her if we (this second we is referring to you specifically) bother to actually educate ourselves and do some reading. Most people don't initially know a lot about her because, whoa, go figure, most people don't follow specific institutions such as Harvard Law in an effort to profile rising talent that may or may not be tapped in the future. You're also using that word Progressive as a pejorative again without seeming to understand that there is nothing Progressive about a number of the stances on the issues that Obama and Kagan hold. Obama is a centrist, just as Bush was a centrist, just as Clinton was a centrist, and so on and so on. As for your karma to burn and complaining about moderation, awesome.
Amazing how fast she has risen with such a thin resume..... sorta like her patron in the White House. Almost makes ya think that around the time of Nixon/Reagan the Progressives figured out the American people would never elect an out of the closet Progressive/Socialist and started grooming a new breed who would leave no paper trail but would be quietly promoted into positions where they could be quickly jammed into high offices before anyone figured out what they really were.
I'd like to see your obviously impressive resume since you are so keen to disregard the success, academic or otherwise, of others whom you disagree with before having a complete and firm grasp over what they may or may not be thinking, and how their thought processes work. Kagan graduated magna cum laude in 1986 from Harvard Law School and has been furthering herself ever since. Are you implying that a SCOTUS nominee must be a federal judge for something like 20+ years before serious consideration? What are the fundamental prerequisites in your mind here? You can disagree with her views on things without dismissing her prestigious career (before you think to sling mud at using that term, look it up and realize it fits when speaking of someone who has had such resounding success in her career) as if it's nothing more impressive than getting a GED through the mail. Furthermore, that goes for Obama as well. It's astounding that you project your ignorance of these people and what they've done before they got under a spotlight as some sort of disqualifier. "I never heard of them, so WTF! They are obviously not qualified and are plucked from obscurity!"
The rest of your drivel is an intellectual bore not stating anything of significance, and I can see that we're done here because you are comfortable to wallow in your ignorance like a pig in the mud.
TL;DR version: The world does not revolve around you and what you are immediately aware of.
You've got some "clairvoyance" there to comfortably map out her entire SCOTUS career when she still has to make it through both the confirmation process and said career if she does get confirmed. It's completely reasonable to be wary of any incoming nomination to the most powerful court of the land. It's absolutely unreasonable to respond to a measured statement like "she might have a secret agenda but it's more likely she's just not very biased about stuff" with "Are really that naive or are you just a shill"? You sound like quite the shill yourself (I'm ignoring the qualifier of being paid of in some way since you are ignoring it too), essentially touting the Conservative talking points as if because Obama nominates her she is going to assume every single position that you personally disagree with, because she's obviously one of "them" if Obama nominated her.
I don't like her nomination, I personally don't think that replacing the liberal Stephens with the apparently executive-branch-friendly Kagan is necessarily the best way to go. But it takes a special kind of ignoramus to start yelling that the sky is falling because all you need to know about her you learned when you discovered what a dirty word "Progressive" is in your mind. Slap that label on her, it's obviously important to you to show other people how distasteful it is. The truth of the matter is that she's not expressed many (if any) really Progressive ideas so most of your post is vapid hot-air complaining at length about what every Conservative has been saying about every Liberal in recent history.
It will be interesting to see if Opera is able to maintain that crown. Chrome and Opera both are getting faster and faster with JavaScript and other things but I really wish that the Linux version wasn't lagging behind the Windows/Mac version.
Chrome allows you to hide ads through extensions but if you really don't want any bandwidth used on them at all why not use Privoxy, eliminate AdBlock extensions in all the web browsers you use, and enjoy an ad-free web experience? That way whatever browser you decide you want to use at any given time has ad-blocking because Privoxy filters it all out. I realize there are some certain scenarios where an extension would be preferable (or the only option) but for most cases Privoxy is by far the better solution rather than adding more on top of your web browser, introducing more possible points of weakness in performance or anything else.
SRWare Iron is a scam advertised by spreading FUD about Chrome and Chromium. The creator has admitted publicly that he created the project in order to gain ad revenue by appealing to people who want more privacy by bashing Google's browser, both the open source and "official" versions.
There is absolutely no reason to use it unless you would rather trust some random guy who makes it hard to get at the source code (Multiple parts of an archive upped to Rapidshare? Are you serious?), or are too unwilling to install AdBlock by yourself (The AdBlock Iron uses is at least supposed to block ads from loading altogether but it's not nearly as easy to setup or problem-free compared to the AdBlock extension) and turn off the features in the "Under The Hood" tab that some find unsavory. Not to mention the fact that development seriously lags behind since the person behind it can't be bothered apparently to create a simple rebranding script (Because that's effectively all it is).
And yes, I realize I used a lot of parentheses, and I apologize for that.
I don't know if you realize this or not but Vista was released over a year before Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and will be supported on the desktop for a year longer than 8.04 LTS (On the server they say support extends to April 2013). Here is how it breaks down:
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, released April 24 2008, supported until April 2011 (Desktop) and April 2013 (Server)
Windows Vista, released January 30, 2007, supported until April 10, 2012.
And keep in mind that date for Vista is Mainstream Support Retired. They've gone out of their way to keep products afloat as evidenced by keeping XP alive as long as they have. These numbers pretty much show that Vista is more of an LTS release than Ubuntu 8.04, if you're going by raw amount of time where the system will be supported. I like Ubuntu myself and recommend it to people looking into Linux, but come on now, Microsoft isn't allowed to release a new Windows until their previous one has been completely EOL'd?. It's not like Ubuntu isn't releasing non-LTS versions while still supporting 8.04.
And if you were just fooling around with your posts, well... well played, sir.
The thing was just recently announced, today. How about we let some time pass before we try to definitively state what is and isn't going to be added or removed? It's not entirely unlikely that during the course of development new spells abilities and talents will be fleshed out.
That gear you're complaining about, the previous arena season gear, is not only complete crap for PvE (Compared to gear you can get as drops in instances) but it doesn't even cost just honor points. Lots of these items are purchased with tokens and badges or require a minimum amount of rating. You get what you pay for, and if you think you're hot stuff in your easy PvP gear, well, have fun getting owned.
As far as what's happened to AV, AV has been the way it's been since what, the release of TBC? To call it mindless is a bit of a stretch, though a lot of the time it does come down to a match to see which team can manage to b-line to the other factions bosses. AV is still fun, I don't see what your objection could be, and there are plenty of other battlegrounds with differing playstyles. Personally, I thought the old, original AV was just about the most boring thing ever until they streamlined it.
P.S. -- "huge wave" of AFKers is a bit of an overstatement. I hardly ever see this problem, maybe it's just because I'm lucky to be in the Cyclone battlegroup.
Slashdot Mirror
I told you to go away because you make stupid statements about how the left should support corporatism in the name of the workers. I told you to go away because you don't have any scientific basis for your arguments. I told you to go away because you haven't offered a serious and workable alternative to the incentive that Carbon Taxes would provide. I can get behind agreeing to disagree, and you can have your conclusion that I was the one not interested in productive dialog about the issue when it was you who really wasn't offering any defensible ideas in detail nor positions supported by science.
One thing though, don't conflate the American People with people who make up 2%-3% of the households in this country. citation provided.
P.S. -- I forgot to mention this in my haste to post my response but where do you get off being so damned certain that human impact on this globe is absolutely certainly 100% so minimal as to be inconsequential? I have an inflated opinion of said impact? You have a naive delusion that it doesn't exist at all to a degree we should care about what we do.
I am not interested in your relativistic view on the human impact on this world as much as I enjoy Carlin and other comedians who will rightly point out that life will find a way. The point is that the damage doesn't need to be done and the hardships on both humanity and the rest of life on Earth need not be considered inevitable because we are so comfortable with a wasteful culture and lifestyle.
How is it supposed to be comforting to know that some lifeforms would survive a complete extinction of most life including humans on this rock? Man, it really sucks that we all died out but at least some life continued on! What a childish angle to base an argument from.
For WoW, there are few players in between 1 and 80 at any given time, most are alts they don't want to explore the dungeon. They simply want $ITEM or their "random" done and over with. Same thing right now with the random heroic system, any skip-able boss is skipped, and no one talks. There isn't really a "party" there is not much of a feeling of a group. It's a 5 players all trying to get their badges and need the other 4(or at least the tank/healer) to do it.
This is a pretty jaded view and not really applicable even most of the time as far as I've seen. I level alts quite regularly since I'm not in a raiding guild and enjoy switching from all the various playstyles the classes offer, and I pretty much level now through the dungeon finder at the expense of traveling around doing quests. It's not that I don't enjoy questing, it's just that it's easier to queue as a healer/tank and do dungeon after dungeon to level (as well as more lucrative gear-wise) than it is to run around. And while it is true that some people are only doing the runs to down only the necessary boss(es), that is not the case all the time, and it's not unheard of to have a group object so strongly to such a mentality that the person who is insisting upon it gets votekicked and someone who is playing the game to enjoy the game brought on board. I regularly do this and when someone asks "Skip optional bosses?" my response is "I'm here for a reason, and that reason is not to simply get to the end. I'll take my loot and/or emblems, thanks." There's also plenty of socialization, even when grouping with the random dungeon finder. Maybe nobody talks in your groups because nobody takes the initiative to actually begin a discussion about anything, which is very easy to do. I tend to talk a lot with people and I keep an eye out for those I've grouped with before and enjoy grouping with. Those who are not fun to play with go on my ignore list and I don't have to deal with them ever again.
Also, if you really want a sense of community, get involved on one of the RP or RP-PVP servers. It's not that the non-RP servers don't have a community, it just doesn't in my opinion really match up to the vibrancy of the RP servers I have played on and do play on. A lot of people seem intimidated by the idea of imposed RP but that never happens unless you join a guild that absolutely requires it if you want to stay in. I am a very casual player and I only do "heavy" RP when I feel like it, which is to say not very often (once a week at the very most). I have always been a bit of a jokester and fun-seeker though so even when I'm not trying to RP I blend in pretty well.
Anyways, there are days i long for EQ1 style play, where you needed to get a group together to do anything, and your group would spend a few hours grinding out mobs for a quest. joking and carrying on along the way.
EQ1 is something I definitely don't miss, aside from having a Monk class. If ever there was a game that was absolutely nothing but a time-sink, it was EQ1. Most people do not find it enjoyable to keep camping a certain spot for a certain mob in the hopes of a certain drop for days on end. Most people do not find it enjoyable to create a very large group of players and hope that everyone knows exactly what the heck is going on. There's a reason why Blizzard cut down the raid sizes (Outside of Wintergrasp, I guess) to 25-man max. It was absolute chaos before and it was absolute BS to spend upwards of 6-10 hours in a single session doing a raid, and not even finishing!
Lots of sciences aren't to an exact precision, and you are being disingenuous with your assertion that because something cannot be mapped or explained exactly through a scientific methodology that the methodologies and equations are somehow flawed beyond salvation. I suppose meteorology itself is absolute rubbish because it's not 100% accurate, eh? Shit, I guess we should just stop trying, and ignore that it is by and far more than accurate enough at this time. It will get better, just as our understanding and mathematical models and equations of forecasting climate change itself will. The models are not completely wrong, but they can at times be less than 100% accurate. This does not mean that the predictions said models make are inherently useless. You are basically saying they are, which is hogwash. I'm all for perfecting our equations and such, but I am not all for waiting until we are absolutely certain beyond a shadow of a doubt that what we see happening is actually happening before taking action. We have far more to lose from inaction than we do from action.
Taxes are a great way of leveling the playing field to create greater incentive to get off of horrible habits. The horrible habit in question here is extremely unclean and non-renewable energy.
Cut the paranoid bullshit that ignores the fact that motivations must be created in this market. Jobs will migrate, profits will migrate, and we will all be better off when we are off of technology that destroys our planet in both the short and long term. Expanding the power and reach of government, that's the catch-all of this I don't like what the government is doing so clearly it is out of their bounds and nothing but a power grab mentality. I've got news for you -- Sometimes the government needs to act on things. Energy policy is completely within the realm of things that government can and should dictate.
I don't really want to get into a(n) (even more) futile discussion regarding who should and shouldn't bear tax burdens, but Earth to Shakrai, income taxes for people making on average less than $250,000 a year have dropped. You'll forgive me if I don't shed a tear for people with very large amounts of expendable income and wealth paying their fair share for piggybacking on the people who do the work and who have to suffer the consequences far more than a wealthy businessman. People keep saying it's in the best interests of the rich to not consolidate power and screw over the little man as if this supposition is at all supported by history. Now, the fact that it hasn't ever worked out that way doesn't mean that it could potentially, just like how there's never really been a truly Communist society that succeeded on it's own but hey it could work it just hasn't been done right! In theory the supposition is right, in practice people look out for themselves, and powerful businessmen often get to that point by being rather... hmm, psychopathic.
If you would argue that we need to give income tax credits to the wealthy in this country to offset them having to pay for Carbon Taxes, then what fucking motivation is being created here? Are you serious? Take from one hand and just transfer it to the other of the same person. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense, let's nullify the Carbon Taxes by dropping income tax rates on the same people affected.
Yes, it is, now go away. There's no reasoning with you when you can't even understand that climate research does not have to be an exact science to still be accurate in its overall predictions. These guys aren't trying to figure out if it will be raining next month, dolt. They are assessing general trends and patterns. As for nuclear energy, I do not object to looking into using it as an energy source if we were to use any of the more recent and advanced designs. Indeed, that is one of the points of the carbon tax system, to move away from forms of energy that would impose such a burden.
Again, in the words of Charlie Booker, go away.
Quick post-edit because it's late and I spaced it:
should read
Only by completely refuting all known science behind climate change research could someone say with as much certainty as you that increased CO2 levels in the atmosphere will do human civilization no harm. There is plenty of evidence that anthropogenic climate change is occurring, you would just seemingly rather believe it's all an elaborate hoax to destroy the economy and businesses, as if that's in the best interest of the global scientific community and the world as a whole.
And it isn't a straw-man, I was responding to your idiotic assertions that the left should embrace corporatism in the name of securing paychecks for the workers. If you meant in this particular situation only you didn't specify that, so maybe you should speak clearer next time? wizardforce also did not specify, and I am well-aware that Carbon Taxes are the beginning of the thread but the discussion took the turns that it did. Even speaking more broadly though and not about Carbon Taxes, your supposition is ridiculous and not worth serious consideration.
I want your crystal ball. I am merely advocating something I am not making the assumption as you are that the end-result is already determined. Speculate all you want on how things will play out, I don't care one whit. As for the China and India remark, one can only hope that in time they can be persuaded to understand the severity of the situation. In the meantime, that doesn't excuse us doing nothing about the problem. Being greener does not have to equate to increased poverty and less of a role in global economics, but for some reason you seem to think that the two are absolutely inseparable. Science is continuously developing more efficient strategies for alternative energy and if we could get some more funding going on for things then progress would be even greater. The status quo should not and cannot be maintained.
Lastly, why do climate change deniers always act like Al Gore is the only person or even the biggest/most visible person in the climate change debate? I and most others are curious about your obsession with the guy over the silly claim that he allegedly said he invented the internet (he didn't) or his contributions to the climate change debate (he is a minor player and is not a climate change scientist nor does he pretend to be). We are interested in debating facts, not persons. You guys win over the misinformed far easier by attacking persons though instead of using reason.
Yeah, it's not like CO2 is a greenhouse gas or anything. Oh wait, it is. Damn.
Right on dude, wizardforce was totally expressing that sentiment!
Pike off with your red herring straw-man argument.
Yeah, because the working man really needs to have polluted water and air that causes a wide array of problems. Yup, that's why leftists should embrace letting companies do whatever they want to the environment, so the workers can take a check home even if they're slowly destroying the habitat we all have to share.
You are a short-sighted fool, just so you know.
Internet Tough-Guy Mode: Engage!
Only one group reacts with mass protests in the streets burning effigies as well as placing targets on peoples heads because of them exercising their freedom of speech. When was the last time you heard of a cartoonist getting stabbed to death in the streets for drawing Buddha, Jesus, or Moses? When was the last time someone who simply translated a book about Buddha, Jesus, or Moses met a similar fate? If there are moderate Muslims who want to live in modern times with us they need to take back control of their religion from the extremists that dominate the news and try to dominate our lives.
It takes an astounding lack of logic to draw the connections that you just did. And even if people of other faiths did react in such a way to such things, they are in the wrong too and are not to be tolerated. This whole "please guys stop being so mean!" act is getting really old really fast. I haven't and will not participate in this event because I personally have my mind elsewhere, but nobody anywhere has any right to tell me in the USA (and other countries with sane protections to free speech) to shut up and not talk about or draw something or someone because they are offended by it. As long as I'm not saying "Go kill such-and-such or so-and-so" then the most harm I'm doing is making someone think twice about a part of their life. Your delicate sensibilities regarding religious beliefs do not mean more legally than my ability to exercise my freedom of speech. You want to call me an asshole for exercising said freedom in a certain way? That's fine, and I really don't care. Censoring or threatening with death or violence is not fine though. That is when logical beings do care.
Everyone mentioning SRWare Iron should know about this little tidbit: The story of Iron. The article and the linked IRC log tell a very interesting story about a guy less concerned with having a good reason to fork and more concerned with making money off of adsense and publicity for creating a "privacy-respecting" Chrome which is basically a perpetually outdated Chromium with a few checkboxes in "Under the Hood" defaulting to off.
The guy who runs that blog does not try to hide the fact that he's a Chrome developer, and he admits that there is the highly unlikely possibility that the person who was asking these questions was not the person who went on to release Iron. I was skeptical as well until I checked out the log file itself and quite honestly it would have to be an incredible coincidence for this guy to be asking such questions and providing the information that he does in his attempts to glean information on the right way to advertise his product as well as how to go about renaming the executable. There's more that makes it very reasonable to believe this is the guy who went on to release Iron, so please don't dismiss it until you've checked out the log file in detail. If this was a supremely unnecessary and elaborate hoax it sure is pulled off convincingly.
Using Iron after reading this information made me feel like I was supporting the wrong guy here and I couldn't do it anymore, it was just too uncomfortable seeing that this guy was looking for adsense revenue and to make a name for himself. The attitude of this developer is not one I would encourage at all.
As a further clarification, it's late night and I'm sorry I didn't word myself better, but what I was getting at is how so many people in the US who don't like Obama feel the need to call him a leftist, a socialist, a communist, when in reality he is so far detached from left-wing politics as to be depressing for those who are proponents of the left. One need only look at the health care reform bill and the speed at which DADT is being addressed to realize this. There are of course numerous other issues but these are the current thorns in my own side. If Obama was a hardline liberal then things would be dramatically different.
Obama is a moderate conservative: right wing (favoring the interests of the investment class), socially conservative (opposed to equality for gays and lesbians, opposed to the separation of church and state), and in favor of an aggressive foreign policy. Many of his policies that draw the most clamor from the Fox News set are close to, or even to the right of, those of Reagan or Nixon.
I genuinely despair that this is the truth of the matter for most people in the US.
> ..as if because Obama nominates her she is going to assume every single position that you personally disagree with..
Pretty much. We don't have to know anything about her other than Obama has worked with long enough (Harvard Law Review and U of Chicago) that HE trusts her. Since we know Pres. Obama is a straight ticket 'Progressive' it is a safe bet he isn't about to nominate someone who isn't Party Regular. Apparently saying something so self evident gets modded Troll these days. Oh well, got Karma to burn.
Your "pretty much" attitude is a testament to your intellectual laziness. We know lots about her if we (this second we is referring to you specifically) bother to actually educate ourselves and do some reading. Most people don't initially know a lot about her because, whoa, go figure, most people don't follow specific institutions such as Harvard Law in an effort to profile rising talent that may or may not be tapped in the future. You're also using that word Progressive as a pejorative again without seeming to understand that there is nothing Progressive about a number of the stances on the issues that Obama and Kagan hold. Obama is a centrist, just as Bush was a centrist, just as Clinton was a centrist, and so on and so on. As for your karma to burn and complaining about moderation, awesome.
Amazing how fast she has risen with such a thin resume..... sorta like her patron in the White House. Almost makes ya think that around the time of Nixon/Reagan the Progressives figured out the American people would never elect an out of the closet Progressive/Socialist and started grooming a new breed who would leave no paper trail but would be quietly promoted into positions where they could be quickly jammed into high offices before anyone figured out what they really were.
I'd like to see your obviously impressive resume since you are so keen to disregard the success, academic or otherwise, of others whom you disagree with before having a complete and firm grasp over what they may or may not be thinking, and how their thought processes work. Kagan graduated magna cum laude in 1986 from Harvard Law School and has been furthering herself ever since. Are you implying that a SCOTUS nominee must be a federal judge for something like 20+ years before serious consideration? What are the fundamental prerequisites in your mind here? You can disagree with her views on things without dismissing her prestigious career (before you think to sling mud at using that term, look it up and realize it fits when speaking of someone who has had such resounding success in her career) as if it's nothing more impressive than getting a GED through the mail. Furthermore, that goes for Obama as well. It's astounding that you project your ignorance of these people and what they've done before they got under a spotlight as some sort of disqualifier. "I never heard of them, so WTF! They are obviously not qualified and are plucked from obscurity!"
The rest of your drivel is an intellectual bore not stating anything of significance, and I can see that we're done here because you are comfortable to wallow in your ignorance like a pig in the mud.
TL;DR version: The world does not revolve around you and what you are immediately aware of.
You've got some "clairvoyance" there to comfortably map out her entire SCOTUS career when she still has to make it through both the confirmation process and said career if she does get confirmed. It's completely reasonable to be wary of any incoming nomination to the most powerful court of the land. It's absolutely unreasonable to respond to a measured statement like "she might have a secret agenda but it's more likely she's just not very biased about stuff" with "Are really that naive or are you just a shill"? You sound like quite the shill yourself (I'm ignoring the qualifier of being paid of in some way since you are ignoring it too), essentially touting the Conservative talking points as if because Obama nominates her she is going to assume every single position that you personally disagree with, because she's obviously one of "them" if Obama nominated her.
I don't like her nomination, I personally don't think that replacing the liberal Stephens with the apparently executive-branch-friendly Kagan is necessarily the best way to go. But it takes a special kind of ignoramus to start yelling that the sky is falling because all you need to know about her you learned when you discovered what a dirty word "Progressive" is in your mind. Slap that label on her, it's obviously important to you to show other people how distasteful it is. The truth of the matter is that she's not expressed many (if any) really Progressive ideas so most of your post is vapid hot-air complaining at length about what every Conservative has been saying about every Liberal in recent history.
It will be interesting to see if Opera is able to maintain that crown. Chrome and Opera both are getting faster and faster with JavaScript and other things but I really wish that the Linux version wasn't lagging behind the Windows/Mac version.
Chrome allows you to hide ads through extensions but if you really don't want any bandwidth used on them at all why not use Privoxy, eliminate AdBlock extensions in all the web browsers you use, and enjoy an ad-free web experience? That way whatever browser you decide you want to use at any given time has ad-blocking because Privoxy filters it all out. I realize there are some certain scenarios where an extension would be preferable (or the only option) but for most cases Privoxy is by far the better solution rather than adding more on top of your web browser, introducing more possible points of weakness in performance or anything else.
SRWare Iron is a scam advertised by spreading FUD about Chrome and Chromium. The creator has admitted publicly that he created the project in order to gain ad revenue by appealing to people who want more privacy by bashing Google's browser, both the open source and "official" versions.
There is absolutely no reason to use it unless you would rather trust some random guy who makes it hard to get at the source code (Multiple parts of an archive upped to Rapidshare? Are you serious?), or are too unwilling to install AdBlock by yourself (The AdBlock Iron uses is at least supposed to block ads from loading altogether but it's not nearly as easy to setup or problem-free compared to the AdBlock extension) and turn off the features in the "Under The Hood" tab that some find unsavory. Not to mention the fact that development seriously lags behind since the person behind it can't be bothered apparently to create a simple rebranding script (Because that's effectively all it is).
And yes, I realize I used a lot of parentheses, and I apologize for that.
Further reading and insight on the topic.
I don't know if you realize this or not but Vista was released over a year before Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and will be supported on the desktop for a year longer than 8.04 LTS (On the server they say support extends to April 2013). Here is how it breaks down:
Ubuntu 8.04 LTS, released April 24 2008, supported until April 2011 (Desktop) and April 2013 (Server)
Windows Vista, released January 30, 2007, supported until April 10, 2012.
And keep in mind that date for Vista is Mainstream Support Retired. They've gone out of their way to keep products afloat as evidenced by keeping XP alive as long as they have. These numbers pretty much show that Vista is more of an LTS release than Ubuntu 8.04, if you're going by raw amount of time where the system will be supported. I like Ubuntu myself and recommend it to people looking into Linux, but come on now, Microsoft isn't allowed to release a new Windows until their previous one has been completely EOL'd?. It's not like Ubuntu isn't releasing non-LTS versions while still supporting 8.04.
And if you were just fooling around with your posts, well... well played, sir.
For further information on the TCP/IP stack and then some, you can check out this article here: linky.
The thing was just recently announced, today. How about we let some time pass before we try to definitively state what is and isn't going to be added or removed? It's not entirely unlikely that during the course of development new spells abilities and talents will be fleshed out.
That gear you're complaining about, the previous arena season gear, is not only complete crap for PvE (Compared to gear you can get as drops in instances) but it doesn't even cost just honor points. Lots of these items are purchased with tokens and badges or require a minimum amount of rating. You get what you pay for, and if you think you're hot stuff in your easy PvP gear, well, have fun getting owned.
As far as what's happened to AV, AV has been the way it's been since what, the release of TBC? To call it mindless is a bit of a stretch, though a lot of the time it does come down to a match to see which team can manage to b-line to the other factions bosses. AV is still fun, I don't see what your objection could be, and there are plenty of other battlegrounds with differing playstyles. Personally, I thought the old, original AV was just about the most boring thing ever until they streamlined it.
P.S. -- "huge wave" of AFKers is a bit of an overstatement. I hardly ever see this problem, maybe it's just because I'm lucky to be in the Cyclone battlegroup.