By that reasoning we should have given no support to England or China in WW2, then we might have avoided Pearl Harbor. For another year or so until eventually they got around to us.
Isolationism doesn't work. Problems there can become problems here, and they usually get worse over time. Stopping Hitler at the Sudetenland would have saved untold millions.
Neutrality, like pacifism is morally bankrupt. It merely forces someone else to fight for you. Sure, you're hands are clean, but your conscience isn't, you're as guilty as the the guy who killed your neighbor. It also fails to protect you when the enemy turns their sights on you. They won't care that you minded your own business.
Without police, and the national equivalents, there is chaos or tyranny. If we weren't the global police, someone else would be. Who would we rather see in that role? Russia? China?
Let's see who's still cavalier about "foreign entanglements" when Obama has to step up.
NetZero offered free dialup. For a while it was unlimited, then they started limited how long you could be on, then eventually they just ended the free service.
Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Calling copyright infringement piracy makes light of what is happening off the Horn of Africa. Pirates kill, kidnap and steal things (REAL THINGS). It also demonizes making more of a commodity that is already infinite in supply. When we use "their" word, they win. Don't play their game, don't do their work for them.
i tried a dream notebook. In doing so i realized two things. 1) My subconscious is really farked up 2) My penmanship at 6am is horrid.
As for lucid dreaming, i have regular HL2/L4D dreams where my subcon wants me to die horribly. My guns jam or do nothing. But i use my game knowledge to say "no, a sniper rifle at this range would have taken that bastard down". It works pretty well, until i become too aware that i'm changing the dream and wake up.
3) i kinda wish i had that machine in "Until the End of the World". Some of my dreams are really fracking cool, others i just want to know what the hell is wrong with me.
Avionics are electronics relating to flight, maybe we can call mind/machine interface psionics. Not to be confused with D&D psionics which is a misnomer for psychogenics.
What if we replaced computers with glorified video game consoles with web browsers? It would be like the old webTV thing, but it could work more like a PC (interface wise). The user's preferences are saved on the server, but otherwise the machine runs off a flash ROM, or VM that the manufacturer maintains. When the screen saver kicks in the system resets, they they come back, the preferences change the interface to have the picture of the grandkids or a LoL cat as the wallpaper.
All it needs to do is browse the web, chat, vid cam, run MSO (or something that can Save As.doc).
is a less linear environment, and choices in play style. Some real choices would be nice... choices that effect the game as i play it rather than the cut scene at the end.
By play style i mean, i'd like to be able to choose several ways of getting through a problem. i like playing stealthy types, let me sneak past the splicers, or gank them or snipe them or find or access panel that goes around them. Some folks just wanna carry a giant gun and blast away.
Let me choose the order in which i clear out sections of the city. Aside from the last one or two which would have to be last. Make the bad guys scale with me.
Also - Real Time Difficulty Adjustment
Instead of selecting difficulty at the beginning, have the game watch your health, ammo, healing supplies and cash etc as you play. If you are taking too much damage, have the baddies do less damage for a while. If you're running out of ammo too fast, have the baddies drop more ammo, or make the baddies easier to hit.
80% of users need something to browse the web, play media and run MSO. Anything else is asking too much of them. Give folks an OS that is a glorified web browser/video game console that resets when they shut down.
The 3 computers people need 1) Video Game 2) General use (MSO, browser) {build this system and you'll be a brazillionaire} 3) Specialized systems (engineering, number crunching, media editing)
Non-people need Servers.
Sys Admins aren't people.
Computers are hard and scary because they have too many features, too many options. Even iMacs are too flexible/powerful for most users.
Are you factoring deaths of Iraqis caused *by Iraqis* and foreign insurgents? Just because they died, doesn't mean coalition troops (US or otherwise) did it. Does it seem likely that each soldier in Iraq has killed at least one person? Also, dead doesn't mean innocent. Hell, *civilian* doesn't mean innocent. If Abdul straps on a vest of C4, he's a combatant, uniformed or not, sworn to a government or not.
Would you prefer that we wait until we need a modern Air Force to build it? i'd rather have it and not need it, than need it and play catch up with China or Russia. The best way to keep those nations from acting up is to make sure they KNOW we'll school them before they try. The best defense is an overwhelming offense. Bad guys aren't dissuaded by morality or laws, but by fear.
The cost only seems high in relation to certain other things, its a matter of how we bend the numbers. We must also account for the fact that the US is in a real way the military of all of its allies. We spend 300B$ so Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands and the like don't have to.
Whatever = Twelve year old speak for "I don't have anything intelligent to say to refute you, so I'm going to be dismissive".
If you don't have an argument, don't make one. If you do, make it without being childish. __
Back to the topic.
Online classes won't work for everyone. i don't mind disappointing a computer. A teacher can make me feel guilty and prod me into paying attention. Impressing a teacher and then receiving a compliment from them is far more satisfying than a score from an application. i'd still prefer going to a class with humans.
Some sort of 2 seater hybrid should do the trick. Not all the cabs could be two seaters, but most could. Or have more zip cars that you use your credit card as the key. Maybe those cars that stack like shopping carts.
Have battery cars where you have a battery that goes all the way through the width of the car. When it is low, you drive to a station where they shove a new battery in on the right and the old battery pops out the left.
It might have also been because SR sounds cooler that RS, and that SR works with "Strategic Reconnaissance" while "Reconnaissance Strategic" seems awkward, French.
This is why i haven't found any FMRPGs that i like. WoW became a second job, i was thinking about auctioning and crafting while i was at work. The day i found myself entering my credit card number to buy imaginary money with real money was the day i unsubbed.
Player trade kills games for me personally. It causes twinking, farming and grinding. For those who don't mind such things, great, have fun. But such games won't get my money or my time. WoW and many other Gygaxian games also have huge power curves that kill the fun for me. Being n00bstomped sucked balls.
PlanetSide has a shallow power curve and no player trade/currency or crafting. No twinking, no grinding, no farming. You play to play. A one day old character and my 6 year old character could drive the same tank. My tank and your tank would have the same firepower, speed and armor. More advanced characters simply have more options/flexibility. Instead of rewarding having no life, PS rewards skill, teamwork and strategy. It's ain't Quake or UT, if you go charging in alone, you'll die. Territory you conquer stays conquered (until the enemy comes back for it). Instead of a paltry 30 vs 30, PS can have 130ish vs. 130ish vs. 130ish on a battlefield that takes minutes to cross by aircraft. It's also a game where any player can find a role. i can drive, fly or shoot worth a damn, so i'm a cloaker. i'm behind enemy lines destroying generators and hacking bases all by my onesies. Also, there isn't any of that instance BS. There are two instances, Europe and North America. If you're on the NA server, we can meet.
In PS you play to play. Advancement happens while you play and is a nice bonus, but you won't be thinking about "oh I have to collect 5 more rat spleens to level". You'll be thinking "let's kick these smurfs out of our continent!".
No, i don't work for SOE, but i love the game.
If anyone reading this is interested: Download TeamSpeak My outfit (guild) has a raid of about 50 to 60 players (air, armor, cavalry, spec ops) every Thursday night at 730 Eastern. Join the Gemini server, and create a Vanu Sovereignty character and look for us at Sanctuary Warpgate Tower B. We'll be the mass of vehicles and people with the tag Ghosts of the Revolution.
Meh. Dictionaries are descriptivist, meaning they record HOW a word is (ab)used... not what the word actually means. Saying it's ok because "it's in the dictionary" is like saying "but all my friends are doing it". Agnostic means "not knowing", "without knowledge". Decimate means "destroy/kill one tenth", not "completely destroy". Just because people use it that way doesn't make it right. Documenting the mistake doesn't make it less of a mistake.
When we dilute a word's meaning we lose something. We lose the ability to say what the word originally meant with just that word. Hence we say things like "Agnostic in the 'without knowledge' sense". Instead we should have just used the word that matched what we meant to say. Something like "neutral", perhaps.
It could be that the teenager who said he'd let HIS kids smoke weed and not eat their broccoli has become an adult upon having children of his own. Someone with no responsibility/power can say anything. Watch this.
"We should move to a beet based economy. Each dollar shall match a beet in the Federal Reserve".
i'm not in any position to make that happen (no power). If we did it or didn't, i wouldn't be responsible for whatever good or bad came of it.
So either Bush isn't as bad as we thought, or Obama isn't as good (i think it's a bit of both). Either pill will be bitter for some.
Obama's spoke against torture, and ordering the closing of Gitmo. The latter will take some time. Dumping them in federal prisons might be worse than leaving them there. So instead of being rash just to please a handful of voters, he's taking time to be a bit more careful than his predecessor.
That's the difference between adult and child. The child wants what it wants NOW. An adult tries to foresee costs consequences of each option, makes a decisions, forms a plan and then acts on it. W was a child. Some of Obama's supporters are children.
He's been consistent about saying that he plans to stay in Afghanistan to pursue AQ and OBL, so he's not wavering on that. A few of his dumber constituents might be unhappy about the Iraq timeline, but it's the only responsible way to do it. We can't just leave, logistically, politically or militarily. It takes time to pull up the tent stakes, i think people have no idea how big of an operation we have over there. Iraq is unprepared to handle itself just yet.
AFAIK, developing in Flash requires buying the developer tool. Is there a free as in beer Flash equivalent? If not, why? i think such a thing would be the cat's ass to developers.
i took a flash class in college. It gave me nightmares. Literal waking up in a cold sweat nightmares. i hated it with a passion. Direction otoH, was a breeze... but my school wouldn't let me use it because they figured design companies wouldn't use it because it was a pig (this was in the early aughties).
You could make Tatooine an island and the spaceships boats and it would all still make sense. Yes, it's fantasy with spaceships and lasers.
Sci-Fi shouldn't be the elements in the story, but the story itself. If you set Friends in the 29th century, it would be a SitCom. Ross having a cyberjack in his head wouldn't make the show cyberpuck or Sci-Fi. Frankenstein is Sci-Fi because it explores how science could be misused, despite being set in the 18th century (or whichever).
Slashdot Mirror
All that is needed for evil to triumph....
By that reasoning we should have given no support to England or China in WW2, then we might have avoided Pearl Harbor. For another year or so until eventually they got around to us.
Isolationism doesn't work. Problems there can become problems here, and they usually get worse over time. Stopping Hitler at the Sudetenland would have saved untold millions.
Neutrality, like pacifism is morally bankrupt. It merely forces someone else to fight for you. Sure, you're hands are clean, but your conscience isn't, you're as guilty as the the guy who killed your neighbor. It also fails to protect you when the enemy turns their sights on you. They won't care that you minded your own business.
Without police, and the national equivalents, there is chaos or tyranny. If we weren't the global police, someone else would be. Who would we rather see in that role? Russia? China?
Let's see who's still cavalier about "foreign entanglements" when Obama has to step up.
Pfft. i was the one pushing the interstellar dust together with the big bang still ringing in my ears.
All that screaming and crying i heard last night is my neighbor's wife's problem. Not mine.
So we can't work on one problem until we can solve them all?
NetZero offered free dialup. For a while it was unlimited, then they started limited how long you could be on, then eventually they just ended the free service.
"single party bit"
Did anyone else read that as 'single parity bit'?
Piracy is ship to ship armed robbery. Calling copyright infringement piracy makes light of what is happening off the Horn of Africa. Pirates kill, kidnap and steal things (REAL THINGS). It also demonizes making more of a commodity that is already infinite in supply. When we use "their" word, they win. Don't play their game, don't do their work for them.
Oh, and Lessig 4tW.
i tried a dream notebook. In doing so i realized two things.
1) My subconscious is really farked up
2) My penmanship at 6am is horrid.
As for lucid dreaming, i have regular HL2/L4D dreams where my subcon wants me to die horribly. My guns jam or do nothing. But i use my game knowledge to say "no, a sniper rifle at this range would have taken that bastard down". It works pretty well, until i become too aware that i'm changing the dream and wake up.
3) i kinda wish i had that machine in "Until the End of the World". Some of my dreams are really fracking cool, others i just want to know what the hell is wrong with me.
Avionics are electronics relating to flight, maybe we can call mind/machine interface psionics. Not to be confused with D&D psionics which is a misnomer for psychogenics.
It's that or Robotechnology/protoculture.
What if we replaced computers with glorified video game consoles with web browsers? It would be like the old webTV thing, but it could work more like a PC (interface wise). The user's preferences are saved on the server, but otherwise the machine runs off a flash ROM, or VM that the manufacturer maintains. When the screen saver kicks in the system resets, they they come back, the preferences change the interface to have the picture of the grandkids or a LoL cat as the wallpaper.
All it needs to do is browse the web, chat, vid cam, run MSO (or something that can Save As .doc).
is a less linear environment, and choices in play style. Some real choices would be nice... choices that effect the game as i play it rather than the cut scene at the end.
By play style i mean, i'd like to be able to choose several ways of getting through a problem. i like playing stealthy types, let me sneak past the splicers, or gank them or snipe them or find or access panel that goes around them. Some folks just wanna carry a giant gun and blast away.
Let me choose the order in which i clear out sections of the city. Aside from the last one or two which would have to be last. Make the bad guys scale with me.
Also - Real Time Difficulty Adjustment
Instead of selecting difficulty at the beginning, have the game watch your health, ammo, healing supplies and cash etc as you play. If you are taking too much damage, have the baddies do less damage for a while. If you're running out of ammo too fast, have the baddies drop more ammo, or make the baddies easier to hit.
Armin Shimerman's voice acting was... incredible. The voice work in general blew me away.
80% of users need something to browse the web, play media and run MSO. Anything else is asking too much of them. Give folks an OS that is a glorified web browser/video game console that resets when they shut down.
The 3 computers people need
1) Video Game
2) General use (MSO, browser) {build this system and you'll be a brazillionaire}
3) Specialized systems (engineering, number crunching, media editing)
Non-people need Servers.
Sys Admins aren't people.
Computers are hard and scary because they have too many features, too many options. Even iMacs are too flexible/powerful for most users.
Are you factoring deaths of Iraqis caused *by Iraqis* and foreign insurgents? Just because they died, doesn't mean coalition troops (US or otherwise) did it. Does it seem likely that each soldier in Iraq has killed at least one person? Also, dead doesn't mean innocent. Hell, *civilian* doesn't mean innocent. If Abdul straps on a vest of C4, he's a combatant, uniformed or not, sworn to a government or not.
Would you prefer that we wait until we need a modern Air Force to build it? i'd rather have it and not need it, than need it and play catch up with China or Russia. The best way to keep those nations from acting up is to make sure they KNOW we'll school them before they try. The best defense is an overwhelming offense. Bad guys aren't dissuaded by morality or laws, but by fear.
The cost only seems high in relation to certain other things, its a matter of how we bend the numbers. We must also account for the fact that the US is in a real way the military of all of its allies. We spend 300B$ so Germany, France, Japan, the Netherlands and the like don't have to.
Whatever = Twelve year old speak for "I don't have anything intelligent to say to refute you, so I'm going to be dismissive".
If you don't have an argument, don't make one. If you do, make it without being childish.
__
Back to the topic.
Online classes won't work for everyone. i don't mind disappointing a computer. A teacher can make me feel guilty and prod me into paying attention. Impressing a teacher and then receiving a compliment from them is far more satisfying than a score from an application. i'd still prefer going to a class with humans.
Some sort of 2 seater hybrid should do the trick. Not all the cabs could be two seaters, but most could. Or have more zip cars that you use your credit card as the key. Maybe those cars that stack like shopping carts.
Have battery cars where you have a battery that goes all the way through the width of the car. When it is low, you drive to a station where they shove a new battery in on the right and the old battery pops out the left.
You're being modded as a troll because of the tone of your post, not because of the content.
Cooler THAN. THAN, with an N.
Stupid fingers.
It might have also been because SR sounds cooler that RS, and that SR works with "Strategic Reconnaissance" while "Reconnaissance Strategic" seems awkward, French.
This is why i haven't found any FMRPGs that i like. WoW became a second job, i was thinking about auctioning and crafting while i was at work. The day i found myself entering my credit card number to buy imaginary money with real money was the day i unsubbed.
Player trade kills games for me personally. It causes twinking, farming and grinding. For those who don't mind such things, great, have fun. But such games won't get my money or my time. WoW and many other Gygaxian games also have huge power curves that kill the fun for me. Being n00bstomped sucked balls.
PlanetSide has a shallow power curve and no player trade/currency or crafting. No twinking, no grinding, no farming. You play to play. A one day old character and my 6 year old character could drive the same tank. My tank and your tank would have the same firepower, speed and armor. More advanced characters simply have more options/flexibility. Instead of rewarding having no life, PS rewards skill, teamwork and strategy. It's ain't Quake or UT, if you go charging in alone, you'll die. Territory you conquer stays conquered (until the enemy comes back for it). Instead of a paltry 30 vs 30, PS can have 130ish vs. 130ish vs. 130ish on a battlefield that takes minutes to cross by aircraft. It's also a game where any player can find a role. i can drive, fly or shoot worth a damn, so i'm a cloaker. i'm behind enemy lines destroying generators and hacking bases all by my onesies. Also, there isn't any of that instance BS. There are two instances, Europe and North America. If you're on the NA server, we can meet.
In PS you play to play. Advancement happens while you play and is a nice bonus, but you won't be thinking about "oh I have to collect 5 more rat spleens to level". You'll be thinking "let's kick these smurfs out of our continent!".
No, i don't work for SOE, but i love the game.
If anyone reading this is interested:
Download TeamSpeak
My outfit (guild) has a raid of about 50 to 60 players (air, armor, cavalry, spec ops) every Thursday night at 730 Eastern.
Join the Gemini server, and create a Vanu Sovereignty character and look for us at Sanctuary Warpgate Tower B.
We'll be the mass of vehicles and people with the tag Ghosts of the Revolution.
Meh. Dictionaries are descriptivist, meaning they record HOW a word is (ab)used... not what the word actually means. Saying it's ok because "it's in the dictionary" is like saying "but all my friends are doing it". Agnostic means "not knowing", "without knowledge". Decimate means "destroy/kill one tenth", not "completely destroy". Just because people use it that way doesn't make it right. Documenting the mistake doesn't make it less of a mistake.
When we dilute a word's meaning we lose something. We lose the ability to say what the word originally meant with just that word. Hence we say things like "Agnostic in the 'without knowledge' sense". Instead we should have just used the word that matched what we meant to say. Something like "neutral", perhaps.
"But but but living language"
Is that a question or a statement? It has the wording of a statement, but you've marked it as a question.
Indeed.
It could be that the teenager who said he'd let HIS kids smoke weed and not eat their broccoli has become an adult upon having children of his own. Someone with no responsibility/power can say anything. Watch this.
"We should move to a beet based economy. Each dollar shall match a beet in the Federal Reserve".
i'm not in any position to make that happen (no power). If we did it or didn't, i wouldn't be responsible for whatever good or bad came of it.
So either Bush isn't as bad as we thought, or Obama isn't as good (i think it's a bit of both). Either pill will be bitter for some.
Obama's spoke against torture, and ordering the closing of Gitmo. The latter will take some time. Dumping them in federal prisons might be worse than leaving them there. So instead of being rash just to please a handful of voters, he's taking time to be a bit more careful than his predecessor.
That's the difference between adult and child. The child wants what it wants NOW. An adult tries to foresee costs consequences of each option, makes a decisions, forms a plan and then acts on it. W was a child. Some of Obama's supporters are children.
He's been consistent about saying that he plans to stay in Afghanistan to pursue AQ and OBL, so he's not wavering on that. A few of his dumber constituents might be unhappy about the Iraq timeline, but it's the only responsible way to do it. We can't just leave, logistically, politically or militarily. It takes time to pull up the tent stakes, i think people have no idea how big of an operation we have over there. Iraq is unprepared to handle itself just yet.
AFAIK, developing in Flash requires buying the developer tool. Is there a free as in beer Flash equivalent? If not, why? i think such a thing would be the cat's ass to developers.
i took a flash class in college. It gave me nightmares. Literal waking up in a cold sweat nightmares. i hated it with a passion. Direction otoH, was a breeze... but my school wouldn't let me use it because they figured design companies wouldn't use it because it was a pig (this was in the early aughties).
W0rd.
You could make Tatooine an island and the spaceships boats and it would all still make sense. Yes, it's fantasy with spaceships and lasers.
Sci-Fi shouldn't be the elements in the story, but the story itself. If you set Friends in the 29th century, it would be a SitCom. Ross having a cyberjack in his head wouldn't make the show cyberpuck or Sci-Fi. Frankenstein is Sci-Fi because it explores how science could be misused, despite being set in the 18th century (or whichever).