I doubt any actual gamers would have given money for DNF's production. No, a debacle like that can only be financed by monkeys in suits who are completely disassociated from reality in every way. That's not saying nobody would have bought DNF, but it's been a running joke of a game that never would be released for YEARS. Only an idiot would finance something like that.
With that list of demands, I'd make a large wager that you'll never invest in any sort of game development. Request changes? So you know better what a nebulous idea of a game will need better than the developer? Why don't you just go make it yourself, then? Mass-sourced funding like this is banked on the fact that the people buying in have some level of trust that the game dev is going to make a good game. If you don't believe that, you're not going to give them money, no matter what concessions they make. Large investors changing games just because they're funding them... that's exactly why people dislike big players like EA so much, because they'll buy out a small studio and then dictate how they make their games.
That's pretty unrealistic. That means that the ONLY money he'll make from the game is during the game's development. Three cheers to people who do make open source games and all, but your solution is not really a solution for most people.
Two examples of funding the development of a game that I can think of offhand: Mount&Blade and NS2. M&B has already been released, a while back. I'd paid them about 10 bucks long before it was finished, got a copy when it was done (beats payin full price!). NS2's doing something similar, with a cheap pre-order, and a more expensive pre-order that also gives access to Alpha. I think that's working out real well for them so far.
Just because you ask a community for help doesn't mean it has to benefit the entire community. you can ask the community for help, and in turn only return a benefit to those who decide helping you is worth their time. If it works out, the people who didn't invest early will have to pay full price for a game that's good and the early adopters get to play a good game for a bargain-basement price. If it doesn't, the early folk are out usually 10-20 bucks. It's really a good model if you can't find a more definite source of funding, at least if the game you're making looks like it's going to be good.
The government is NOT monitoring WoW. This was something that was picked up by a GM. He probably was reported by somebody for saying this in the trade channel, in fact -- GMs don't often actually actively monitor chat, but when someone reports something, they do have the ability to check out a log of recent chatter in the channel.
Your post doesn't make sense. Did you even *browse* TFA? Kid's 18 years old, first of all, that's not a kid. That's an adult, it's reported as a kid because it's more SHOCKING! if the police are wasting time over a kid than a legal adult. SPIN! Don't forget there's been several cases recently where postings were made on the internet shortly before somebody like this kid DID go on a killing spree. I'm sure you remember that right? There is precedent for people boasting about serious crimes that will result in loss of life in their chosen favorite online hang-out before the fact. The kid also stated that he had heard making a threat like that would get the cops at your door and wanted to test it, so I'm going to guess he said a bit more than "I'M GONNA BLOW UP A PLANE LOLZ".
I completely fail to see how you could think that if he was a terrorist that the response was idiotic. What would YOU have done? Sent somebody to observe him, when the threat was he would be blowing up a plane the NEXT MORNING? I'm sorry? Fact of the matter is, he singled out a specific plane and a specific time, and that crosses the threshold from throw-away threat in to actual threat. This is no different than making a posting somewhere that in the morning you're going to shoot up your school (hai2u 4chan), or walking through a mall and being overheard telling somebody that you're going to blow up the library at XYZ address first thing Monday morning.
Stop acting like this kid's been mistreated. He deserves what he gets for acting a fool. He's not a kid, he's a god damned adult, he should know better than to do something like this.
That's stretching it a bit. We can explain why people can't fly, and why they can't drink a gallon of arsenic and hydrofluoric acid. I don't believe we could explain why an algal bloom like this couldn't happen. There's still quite a bit about the oceans and marine life that we don't really have a good handle on, so making definite statements like that just doesn't seem prudent.
Oh, and for the record.. people *can* fly, it just takes some sort of machinery to get it done;)
Well sure, obviously.. I'm just fairly used to people jumping on things like this and screaming about a man-caused global catastrophe, over what turns out to be a natural phenomenon we simply haven't observed yet. That seems to be the popular thing to do these days, but it makes about as much sense as, upon hearing of the discovery of a new species, shouting about how this species was never there before and therefor must be caused by humanity changing the environment.
Right.. but the ranks of the unemployed are often both young, and often immigrants as well. I'm guessing it's weighted even worse towards young and immigrants in France, I've heard tell of some wacky labor laws over there.
Oh, and I can tell they have no intention of integrating because well.. DO they? It doesn't take a majority of an immigrant population refusing to integrate into the existing society to cause issues. We've got issues with that here in the states, even, and we don't really have people moving here from highly oppressive extremist nations that continue to espouse the same beliefs that turned their former homeland into a shithole. Good example would be that police dog over in England. Had to remove the poor lil guy's picture from.. eh I forget what they were passing out, some sort of flyer or something, but there was an outcry from muslims because dogs are unclean vile beasties. How's that for integrating? A demand that their new homeland change to accommodate them rather than they change to accommodate their new homeland. Or the riots in Belgium, launched by an immigrant population who felt that their beliefs were more important than the standing traditions of their new homeland. Again, a lack of flexibility in integrating into a new society. It's not that immigrants must throw away old customs and just fade into the crowd, but I know when I'm visiting someone else's house I don't begin telling them how to run the place.
It's not that I'm painting with a broad brush here. All the muslims I've personally met have been just regular people, not hate-spewing suicide bombers, but nor have they been rattling sabers at everything they could find in this country that didn't match up with the way things were back home. Er, to put it another way, it's a bit like the stereotypical American tourist who goes overseas and gets pissed because nobody speaks English -- except in this case, it'd be more "moving there" instead of "visiting" and "can't fit their SUV down the main streets" or whatever other typically patently American behaviour you'd find distasteful across the pond.
It's really not that paranoid, don't you read international news? There's a huge amount of immigration flowing right from the middle east into all parts of europe. England recently removed a picture of a police dog from posters because Muslims don't care for dogs -- a POLICE DOG! Granted it's just a dog but it's not a stretch for them to next claim that if you are Muslim the police are not allowed to use K-9 units in your presence.. which is a completely ludicrous precedent to set -- there's no difference between that and "Oh we don't like cars", or pants, or whistles, and claim the use of whatever you don't like is insulting and degrading and racist. The riots in France a few years ago were caused by a disproportionately large number of young muslims, and even worse, a few years back Paris banned topless sunbathing on its beaches. You can't tell me a Frenchman came up with that idea. Belgium had quite a tiff with their muslim population over the printing of cartoons depicting Mohammed if you recall. Oh, and Sweden's quickly climbed to the top of the list of "Places for a Young Muslims to Travel and Find Young Girls to Rape". I'm not claiming they're the rapin'est folk around, but there's clearly a cultural clash going on that is being handled VERY fucking poorly by the immigrants. Painting things broadly, much of the immigration moving in to Europe has no intention of ever integrating into the society around them. I've heard a number of islamic religious leaders prattling on about the return of lands that rightfully belong to the muslims -- that would be Europe -- through invasion -- that would be immigration. There's a difference between a military invasion and a social invasion. A social invasion (I'm sure there's a better term) is more of a mass migration, a large movement of one people into the lands of another people and displacing the previously established culture through sheer weight.
Yes, Europe on a whole is bowing down to the Muslim immigrants and doing what it is that they do best... appeasement. Appeasement is never seen as a kindness, always a weakness.
I think it's a bit much to say these do not happen at the poles. We simply haven't encountered one yet. Algae do live in cold water, the question's just why are there so many all of a sudden? This area of the ocean is pretty rich in marine life normally, though the water is cold. There's a ton of fishing and even a show about crabbing in the general area, and colder waters (especially where they mix with warm water) are incredibly rich in nutrients (though I don't know enough offhand to say this is one of those areas, it.. prroooobbably is, or is close to one). Algal blooms in the gulf and off the west coast tend to be caused by runoff from agricultural waters rich in fertilizers. I doubt there's much of that so far north, but there may have been some nutrient-stirring or even -releasing during the recent earthquakes up there? That's a total stab in the dark. I'm not a scientist or even an amateur in this field, but I do know that shaking water can stir stuff up from the bottom. though looking at wikipedia.. this has happened before, at least near this area. Down near the bottom there's a picture of a bloom from 1998 in the Bering Sea (the rich sea area I was talkin about) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algal_bloom
This might really be more a case of people unfamiliar with a phenomenon blowing it way out of proportion because they don't know that it's happened before. The original article did mention there was concern it was an oil spill, and that quite often there's investigations into strange things in the area that are thought to be oil spills but rarely turn out to actually be so... so at this point I'm thinking this has happened before, if maybe not quite on this scale, but it just wasn't picked up widely by news organizations so you and I never knew about it.
... wait, what? I'm afraid I don't understand that last part in the least, but it sure sounds like lawmakers passed a law that essentially states their infallibility. please tell me there's some sort of misunderstanding here. Even the Pope, the voice of god on fucking earth, has apologized for mistakes.
You also need to account for the cost of the vehicle, really. EV1 sticker price used to figure lease amounts, according to wikipedia, were $33k to $44k -- you can get a car much, much cheaper than that, that'll most likely last longer (batteries have a finite life, internal combustion engines are very durable and don't lose much efficiency at all with age if maintained well). Lifetime costs could be higher, as well as lifetime carbon footprint.. uh, but actually figuring that out for a post that only you and I will see is way way too much work. Big batteries aren't that easy to make, though, and the EV1 made use of a lot of magnesium and other strong and light high-tech materials that are more costly to produce than aluminum and steel (as well as, in the case of any polymers, non-recyclable or at best recyclable only through a large investment of energy, unlike aluminum and steel). Oh, and the EV1's max range (with the better batteries) was more like 120-240km, with the high end being I'm assuming a more flat-out, less stop-and-go range (always going to lose energy, even with regenerative braking).. well, using similar top-end ideal situations like that, my first car was a 1990 Chevy Lumina, and on long drives down south I could regularly hit 30mpg, my best was 33mpg. In normal driving, at highway speeds, in a mid-sized family sedan (which by today's standards would be more in line with a full-sized sedan). Best part, it only took a couple minutes to fill the tank, as opposed to the 8 hours an EV1 would take for a full charge. Owning an electric car pretty much discludes ever taking a road trip.
It's not that electric cars will NEVER be viable -- and for some, they already may be. It's that as we've seen with corn ethanol, wind power, hell make your own list.. there's been one hell of a push recently to move technologies into the mainstream long before they've been developed to a point where they're truly useful. That actually winds up SLOWING a useful adoption of the tech. Corn ethanol's a great example. It's bad. Period. But it's been mandated, so there has and will be a great deal of money spent to push corn ethanol into production and use.. 5-10 years down the road when we realize it was bad tech and easily surpassed by a more efficient and cheaper method of ethanol production, all the money and energy spent pushing corn ethanol is going to just be wasted. Right now, electric cars are like corn ethanol. They're just not ready for prime time -- the cars themselves, that is, without getting into the problems of electricity usage (california's already pretty fucked on that issue anyway). Oh, and your example's fine and dandy but I was screaming about third-shifters because the guy I originally responded to had some ridiculous idea on how to prevent people from charging their cars during peak power usage by raising rates and discounting offpeak, and his example was $1.00kWh peak, $0.05kWh off-peak.
Really, the danger is less the abandonment of the electric car and more the premature and government-mandated adoption of the electric car. That would do far more damage than waiting an extra 5 or 10 years, especially if it turns out that we figure out how to efficiently and cheaply produce ethanol via means that don't include human foodstuffs. The economic impact could be cripplingly large if we were to rush to mandate a tech like electric cars too soon....of course, then there's the hybrids. Those do look pretty promising. Just so long as we don't go to hydrogen, good lord. Spilling acid from batteries and gasoline both would be safer than hydrogen leaking out, if you were to have an accident.. I'm sure it'll find uses but god damn keep it out from under my driver's seat. Talk about unsafe at any speed, you wouldn't even need to add model rocket engines to a hydrogen car to make it explode.
Actually, the supreme court down there DID rule that he was in violation of the constitution and ordered and arrest warrant. The army then kicked him to the curb, rather than imprison him. Any way you look at it, legally, he should no longer be in power. Exile instead of imprisonment? He SHOULD be happy for that, but somehow the rest of the world is taking this opportunity to say something against military coups. Uh, rather than, maybe taking the chance when it's a coup against a leader that wasn't about to be arrested for violation of the constitution.
Mkay, so you fall under the furry-trumpeting-the-praises-of-SL category, then. You wouldn't happen to be the guy with the fox-headed avatar I've seen pictures of in business mags?
The only reason I rant against SL is because it's constantly paraded around as something it's not.
It's a social sandbox. Period end of story. There's nothing WRONG with a social sandbox, but after years now of buzz-heavy articles about how it's so next-gen and how it is the future of online interaction and businesses would be foolish not to establish a presence, I'm long since fed up with it all. SL is just a 3D freeform RP chat room. Don't make it out to be more than it is and there's no problem. Case in point, this article: How in the hell is it better training to see a picture of an NPC choking and learn to push "A" to save their life, than it would be to ACTUALLY practice the skills you'd use to save someone's life on a dummy that you can pretend is choking? It's not the choking you need to learn, it's the things you need to do to stop the choking you need to learn. It seems to me this training would be much better accomplished through the use of dummies and a soundstage ER set up in a shed, with the part of the 'realistic victim' being played by actual people (either live or via video clips) with the students making a judgement based on those actors as to what actions need performed on the dummy. In short, it's just more hype making SL out to be something that it is not.
Right, uh, no, this isn't about anything that IS happening. This was about electric cars charging during off-peak hours -- those hours that third-shifters are *at* work. It's a stupid and bad plan simply because the people coming up with the plan never take into account anyone NOT working a 9-to-5 mon-fri job located less than 20 miles from their home.
I could have just as easily attacked the plan due to the limited range of the cars, clearly nobody makes weekly visits to family an hour or more away. YEAH! Fuck them old folks anyway. Just put them in a goddamned home already, sheesh. Or the fact that cars do represent a tremendous amount of freedom to travel that would be removed if we transitioned to electric vehicles. I'm making an 800-mile (one-way) trip about once a month right now, because it's not a bad drive, because I can, because it's cheaper than flying, because it's fun. I've only a need to stop once, maybe twice, start to finish, and those stops take 10 to 15 minutes (depending on how long I spend peeing..). Try THAT with an electric.
All problems with electric vehicles that are never brought up because they are not part of the life of those trying to impose their electric vision on others. My point is simply that this sort of behaviour is fucking selfish and narrow-minded and exactly the sort of thing that would destroy our way of life.
Oh, and you go ahead and denigrate third-shifters all you want. Maybe you should just go ahead and try and live without the benefit of anybody working at night -- after all, they're just a bunch of fucking idiots for working at night anyway! Better hope you never wake up in the middle of the night with chest pains and a numb arm there champ, because the doctors in the ER over night are just a bunch of fuckheads who couldn't figure out how to use their brain to get a REAL job anyway.
Because Linden has one hell of a PR machine, basically. Throw futuristic buzzwords in, sprinkle liberally with perverts and furries and flying dongs.. you're left with a lot of people writing for a lot of business and trade mags about how next-gen SL is, how that sort of interaction is the future of (insert legit subject here), and vigorously defending those viewpoints so nobody suspects they actually are perverts or furries or flying dongs. We all know they actually are, though.
YEAH! Good idea. Who the fuck works at night anyway. Fuck them 3rd shifters! Buncha no-good blue collar workers, 24-hour store clerks, and hospital workers anyway. Assholes all of them. Make those bastards pay for having the gall to hold jobs that aren't standard 9-to-5 office jobs. Because hey, white collar pencil pushers are the only people that matter anyway, right?
Let's go back to two games I played and HATED because of the forced-grouping. EQ and DAOC. EQ was *terrible* about requiring a group to do... anything. Except for certain classes. DAOC was the same way. In both cases, the intention was always to force people to group up to do pretty much anything at all. Hell, even just getting from Point A to Point B was often dangerous alone.
It's just not fun. Period, end of story.
To build an MMO like that, you're assuming there will be an equal distribution of the classes required to do anything. You're assuming there will be as much tanks and dps as healers. That's.. not true, at all. Never happens. And nobody wants to spend their limited time in-game sitting around waiting for people to show up so MAYBE they can go push a single button over and over and gain a half a level. Spend 2 hours looking for a group, and 1 hour actually grouping? It's just not fun any way you slice it.
Forced grouping works GREAT in certain games, and certain aspects of games. Look at D&D. You KNOW when you're playing D&D that you'll have a group with you, because if you don't.. you're not playing. You don't decide to play and then sit around your table waiting for random people to walk by and ask them if they happen to be the class you need in your group. That happened in EQ and DAOC constantly. It's dumb. In WoW, end-game raids are generally scheduled, and even those that aren't? They're at least end-game, where the majority of your player base will wind up, so at least there's a wide pool of people to draw on. Even that wasn't enough, though, so WoW has added tons of tools to help people find other people to group with for end-game content, and of the 3 archtypes -- tank, dps, heal -- most classes can handle at least two of those jobs, and with dual specs it's really, really simple. And honestly, it still kinda sucks. A few people don't show up to a scheduled raid, you have to spend time looking for fill-ins. PUGs don't always even get off the ground.
Basically, forced-grouping in MMOs fails because people don't like sitting on their ass typing "LFG" over and over and over when they're *supposed* to be playing a game and having fun. Once you add all the retards into the equation, you wind up spending too much time typing "LFG" and once you're done with that, it's probably 50/50 odds that you'll have to start doing it again shortly because whoever you find will be too stupid to group with.
Honestly WAR handled it pretty well, at least up until level 30 or so (when I quit..). Solo you'd be fine 99% of the time, but each time you added to your group you became more and more effective. WoW group play compared to solo I often found to actually slow me down, even with guildies on vent, but WAR it really always payed off but never was necessary. Really a shame they got so much wrong with that game, because they did get a lot right.
... that's seriously how noise complaints go down across the pond? the cops refer it to a bunch of pencil pushers? jesus christ. that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
here in the states if your party's too loud, the cops knock on your door and tell you to STFU, if they're nice and think you'll listen. People go home. Basically they stop the party however possible, and if they have to come back they get serious about it.
You're right though, that changes the whole story from "poor dude gets his birthday ruined" to "inconsiderate asshole's nefarious plan foiled". Though I can't say I exactly support the idea of arresting people BEFORE a crime was committed (4pm, no chance they were too loud or any such shit), and it doesn't change the fact that the anti-rave laws on the island are really fucked up and bad. Not that our RAVE act is great (huh, air conditioned rooms and bottled water are drug paraphernalia, didja know that?) but at least they only apply to parties where it can be argued that the purpose is the consumption of drugs. So... "asshole unfairly gets what he deserves"? Meh, I guess.
You're right on both parts, essentially. I think they also were monitoring calls originating in the US that were made to foreign numbers they believed to have ties with terrorism, too, but honestly it's hard to really figure out what the truth is and was with so much fear-mongering and hyperbole going on.
Oh, and the program itself wasn't really new, it's been around forever. Bush & Co. just tweaked the rules around a little bit -- a move that I think was less about invading the privacy of Americans (which they've been able to do for several decades now) and more a matter of removing a bottleneck. The whole secret wiretap deal has to be approved by a secret court, I think there's a 24 or 48 hour window in which they can start a wiretap and then seek approval by this secret court. Well, in the wake of 9/11, they were using this quite a bit, and I'm of the belief that they circumvented the court not because they wanted to be Big Brother but because they knew that most these wiretaps would NOT result in any information but felt that at the time it was best to cast as wide a net as possible, immediately, and later worry about narrowing things down from "possible" to "likely".
The secret court, of course, only would be able to review so many requests for secret wiretaps at once, and if you're looking at a list of 1,000 possibles and you think 100 of them are pretty likely, let's say it would take a week for a court (and you) to go through and decide which of those 1,000 were the ones you wanted.. well, I believe the idea was simply to not worry about the time limit due to the huge volume and keep all the wiretaps in place until some sort of review could be done, rather than potentially miss out on valuable information because of a paperwork bottleneck.
Not that I really care for the idea of secret courts or meetings or wiretaps or anything, but overblown fearmongering and fingerpointing pisses me off even more. Especially when it's hypocritical fingerpointing. It's not like the democrats in power were oblivious to what was going on (see also, criticism of the information on WMDs before the Iraq War from the democrats when in fact they had access and agreed with the intelligence reports at the time.. fucking i'll-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too bullshit).
If the party is too loud, I'm quite sure there would be existing laws on the books to deal with that. Noise ordinances and the like, specifically aimed at people who are just too loud, especially too loud late at night. If the party was held somewhere illegally -- hi mr. warehouse -- there is also a set of laws to deal with that. Trespass laws.
No, this law was passed to stop people from having raves when it was held on private land, with permission, in areas where nobody would be calling in complaining about noise. Because of the evil MDMA and K and pot these kids were taking. It's all for the children, understand, they need to be protected via jail time and criminal records.
We in the US had a similar deal pass, but it's not nearly so draconian or invasive... but then again, Brits will be Brits and if there's anything British it's draconian and invasive police forces (I kid, but only *slightly*).
Why didn't they use discretion? Because that would be admitting wrong on their part. Like that would fucking happen -- nosir, it matters not that they were expecting glowstick-wielding pacifier-chewers and found 30-somethings with a grill and beer. They came to break up a party and by god nothing is going to deter them from running around in their ninja get-up barking orders at confused and upset people. You've gotta feel like you've got a big dick somehow, and admitting they goofed and called all their buddies to come help for no reason is about as far opposite a big-dick feeling you can get this side of your gramma applying ice to your boys wearing naught but a sheer negligee.
It was 'marginally profitable' for Fox because they aired it at 7pm est on sundays. 1 hour before the Simpsons. At that point in time they were also putting out commercials for their Sunday line-up that stated... "YOUR SUNDAY STARTS AT 8!"
I don't know if you recall that, but I do. Futurama was marginalized right out of the gate by Fox. Right now, I think there's 3 or 4 networks showing reruns of Futurama, which is at least one network per season.. clearly, the show WAS good, and SHOULD have been profitable, but suffered from a godawful time slot, NFL-preemptions, and a complete lack of any interest in promoting it by Fox. The movies also suffered for similar reasons.. I guess they were on TV but I'll be damned if I know when.
I'd be willing to bet that the slashed budget is just ComCen trying to be cheap-asses (as usual). Exactly what programming on that channel is really worth anything anymore, please remind me? daily show, colbert, and southpark are the only original content I can find on comedy central in the next 4 days. Oh, and Michael and Michael, which just looks like it's going to be bad. They titular actors look BORED in the PROMO COMMERCIALS for their own show. YEAH! I'll watch that, oh yeah.
Nah.. this is just comedy central trying to make money without spending money.
Slashdot Mirror
So 18 year olds aren't adults, huh? That's funny. You're funny. Ha ha. See, I'm laughing. Ha.
I doubt any actual gamers would have given money for DNF's production. No, a debacle like that can only be financed by monkeys in suits who are completely disassociated from reality in every way.
That's not saying nobody would have bought DNF, but it's been a running joke of a game that never would be released for YEARS. Only an idiot would finance something like that.
With that list of demands, I'd make a large wager that you'll never invest in any sort of game development. Request changes? So you know better what a nebulous idea of a game will need better than the developer? Why don't you just go make it yourself, then?
Mass-sourced funding like this is banked on the fact that the people buying in have some level of trust that the game dev is going to make a good game. If you don't believe that, you're not going to give them money, no matter what concessions they make. Large investors changing games just because they're funding them... that's exactly why people dislike big players like EA so much, because they'll buy out a small studio and then dictate how they make their games.
$richdudewhopaidforit
... do you maybe mean... the Pope?
and yes, he was on Mike's case, he hit him with his cane once and actually had to apologize for it.
That's pretty unrealistic. That means that the ONLY money he'll make from the game is during the game's development. Three cheers to people who do make open source games and all, but your solution is not really a solution for most people.
Two examples of funding the development of a game that I can think of offhand: Mount&Blade and NS2. M&B has already been released, a while back. I'd paid them about 10 bucks long before it was finished, got a copy when it was done (beats payin full price!). NS2's doing something similar, with a cheap pre-order, and a more expensive pre-order that also gives access to Alpha. I think that's working out real well for them so far.
Just because you ask a community for help doesn't mean it has to benefit the entire community. you can ask the community for help, and in turn only return a benefit to those who decide helping you is worth their time. If it works out, the people who didn't invest early will have to pay full price for a game that's good and the early adopters get to play a good game for a bargain-basement price. If it doesn't, the early folk are out usually 10-20 bucks. It's really a good model if you can't find a more definite source of funding, at least if the game you're making looks like it's going to be good.
The government is NOT monitoring WoW. This was something that was picked up by a GM. He probably was reported by somebody for saying this in the trade channel, in fact -- GMs don't often actually actively monitor chat, but when someone reports something, they do have the ability to check out a log of recent chatter in the channel.
Wat. Stop making baseless conjecture and passing it off as fact, your post is in no way correct.
Your post doesn't make sense. Did you even *browse* TFA? Kid's 18 years old, first of all, that's not a kid. That's an adult, it's reported as a kid because it's more SHOCKING! if the police are wasting time over a kid than a legal adult. SPIN!
Don't forget there's been several cases recently where postings were made on the internet shortly before somebody like this kid DID go on a killing spree. I'm sure you remember that right? There is precedent for people boasting about serious crimes that will result in loss of life in their chosen favorite online hang-out before the fact. The kid also stated that he had heard making a threat like that would get the cops at your door and wanted to test it, so I'm going to guess he said a bit more than "I'M GONNA BLOW UP A PLANE LOLZ".
I completely fail to see how you could think that if he was a terrorist that the response was idiotic. What would YOU have done? Sent somebody to observe him, when the threat was he would be blowing up a plane the NEXT MORNING? I'm sorry? Fact of the matter is, he singled out a specific plane and a specific time, and that crosses the threshold from throw-away threat in to actual threat. This is no different than making a posting somewhere that in the morning you're going to shoot up your school (hai2u 4chan), or walking through a mall and being overheard telling somebody that you're going to blow up the library at XYZ address first thing Monday morning.
Stop acting like this kid's been mistreated. He deserves what he gets for acting a fool. He's not a kid, he's a god damned adult, he should know better than to do something like this.
That's stretching it a bit. We can explain why people can't fly, and why they can't drink a gallon of arsenic and hydrofluoric acid. I don't believe we could explain why an algal bloom like this couldn't happen. There's still quite a bit about the oceans and marine life that we don't really have a good handle on, so making definite statements like that just doesn't seem prudent.
Oh, and for the record.. people *can* fly, it just takes some sort of machinery to get it done ;)
Well sure, obviously.. I'm just fairly used to people jumping on things like this and screaming about a man-caused global catastrophe, over what turns out to be a natural phenomenon we simply haven't observed yet. That seems to be the popular thing to do these days, but it makes about as much sense as, upon hearing of the discovery of a new species, shouting about how this species was never there before and therefor must be caused by humanity changing the environment.
Right.. but the ranks of the unemployed are often both young, and often immigrants as well. I'm guessing it's weighted even worse towards young and immigrants in France, I've heard tell of some wacky labor laws over there.
Oh, and I can tell they have no intention of integrating because well.. DO they? It doesn't take a majority of an immigrant population refusing to integrate into the existing society to cause issues. We've got issues with that here in the states, even, and we don't really have people moving here from highly oppressive extremist nations that continue to espouse the same beliefs that turned their former homeland into a shithole. Good example would be that police dog over in England. Had to remove the poor lil guy's picture from.. eh I forget what they were passing out, some sort of flyer or something, but there was an outcry from muslims because dogs are unclean vile beasties. How's that for integrating? A demand that their new homeland change to accommodate them rather than they change to accommodate their new homeland. Or the riots in Belgium, launched by an immigrant population who felt that their beliefs were more important than the standing traditions of their new homeland. Again, a lack of flexibility in integrating into a new society. It's not that immigrants must throw away old customs and just fade into the crowd, but I know when I'm visiting someone else's house I don't begin telling them how to run the place.
It's not that I'm painting with a broad brush here. All the muslims I've personally met have been just regular people, not hate-spewing suicide bombers, but nor have they been rattling sabers at everything they could find in this country that didn't match up with the way things were back home. Er, to put it another way, it's a bit like the stereotypical American tourist who goes overseas and gets pissed because nobody speaks English -- except in this case, it'd be more "moving there" instead of "visiting" and "can't fit their SUV down the main streets" or whatever other typically patently American behaviour you'd find distasteful across the pond.
It's really not that paranoid, don't you read international news? There's a huge amount of immigration flowing right from the middle east into all parts of europe. England recently removed a picture of a police dog from posters because Muslims don't care for dogs -- a POLICE DOG! Granted it's just a dog but it's not a stretch for them to next claim that if you are Muslim the police are not allowed to use K-9 units in your presence.. which is a completely ludicrous precedent to set -- there's no difference between that and "Oh we don't like cars", or pants, or whistles, and claim the use of whatever you don't like is insulting and degrading and racist. The riots in France a few years ago were caused by a disproportionately large number of young muslims, and even worse, a few years back Paris banned topless sunbathing on its beaches. You can't tell me a Frenchman came up with that idea. Belgium had quite a tiff with their muslim population over the printing of cartoons depicting Mohammed if you recall. Oh, and Sweden's quickly climbed to the top of the list of "Places for a Young Muslims to Travel and Find Young Girls to Rape". I'm not claiming they're the rapin'est folk around, but there's clearly a cultural clash going on that is being handled VERY fucking poorly by the immigrants. Painting things broadly, much of the immigration moving in to Europe has no intention of ever integrating into the society around them. I've heard a number of islamic religious leaders prattling on about the return of lands that rightfully belong to the muslims -- that would be Europe -- through invasion -- that would be immigration. There's a difference between a military invasion and a social invasion. A social invasion (I'm sure there's a better term) is more of a mass migration, a large movement of one people into the lands of another people and displacing the previously established culture through sheer weight.
Yes, Europe on a whole is bowing down to the Muslim immigrants and doing what it is that they do best... appeasement. Appeasement is never seen as a kindness, always a weakness.
I think it's a bit much to say these do not happen at the poles. We simply haven't encountered one yet. Algae do live in cold water, the question's just why are there so many all of a sudden? This area of the ocean is pretty rich in marine life normally, though the water is cold. There's a ton of fishing and even a show about crabbing in the general area, and colder waters (especially where they mix with warm water) are incredibly rich in nutrients (though I don't know enough offhand to say this is one of those areas, it.. prroooobbably is, or is close to one).
Algal blooms in the gulf and off the west coast tend to be caused by runoff from agricultural waters rich in fertilizers. I doubt there's much of that so far north, but there may have been some nutrient-stirring or even -releasing during the recent earthquakes up there? That's a total stab in the dark. I'm not a scientist or even an amateur in this field, but I do know that shaking water can stir stuff up from the bottom.
though looking at wikipedia.. this has happened before, at least near this area. Down near the bottom there's a picture of a bloom from 1998 in the Bering Sea (the rich sea area I was talkin about) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algal_bloom
This might really be more a case of people unfamiliar with a phenomenon blowing it way out of proportion because they don't know that it's happened before. The original article did mention there was concern it was an oil spill, and that quite often there's investigations into strange things in the area that are thought to be oil spills but rarely turn out to actually be so... so at this point I'm thinking this has happened before, if maybe not quite on this scale, but it just wasn't picked up widely by news organizations so you and I never knew about it.
... wait, what? I'm afraid I don't understand that last part in the least, but it sure sounds like lawmakers passed a law that essentially states their infallibility. please tell me there's some sort of misunderstanding here. Even the Pope, the voice of god on fucking earth, has apologized for mistakes.
You also need to account for the cost of the vehicle, really. EV1 sticker price used to figure lease amounts, according to wikipedia, were $33k to $44k -- you can get a car much, much cheaper than that, that'll most likely last longer (batteries have a finite life, internal combustion engines are very durable and don't lose much efficiency at all with age if maintained well). Lifetime costs could be higher, as well as lifetime carbon footprint.. uh, but actually figuring that out for a post that only you and I will see is way way too much work. Big batteries aren't that easy to make, though, and the EV1 made use of a lot of magnesium and other strong and light high-tech materials that are more costly to produce than aluminum and steel (as well as, in the case of any polymers, non-recyclable or at best recyclable only through a large investment of energy, unlike aluminum and steel).
Oh, and the EV1's max range (with the better batteries) was more like 120-240km, with the high end being I'm assuming a more flat-out, less stop-and-go range (always going to lose energy, even with regenerative braking).. well, using similar top-end ideal situations like that, my first car was a 1990 Chevy Lumina, and on long drives down south I could regularly hit 30mpg, my best was 33mpg. In normal driving, at highway speeds, in a mid-sized family sedan (which by today's standards would be more in line with a full-sized sedan). Best part, it only took a couple minutes to fill the tank, as opposed to the 8 hours an EV1 would take for a full charge. Owning an electric car pretty much discludes ever taking a road trip.
It's not that electric cars will NEVER be viable -- and for some, they already may be. It's that as we've seen with corn ethanol, wind power, hell make your own list.. there's been one hell of a push recently to move technologies into the mainstream long before they've been developed to a point where they're truly useful. That actually winds up SLOWING a useful adoption of the tech. Corn ethanol's a great example. It's bad. Period. But it's been mandated, so there has and will be a great deal of money spent to push corn ethanol into production and use.. 5-10 years down the road when we realize it was bad tech and easily surpassed by a more efficient and cheaper method of ethanol production, all the money and energy spent pushing corn ethanol is going to just be wasted. Right now, electric cars are like corn ethanol. They're just not ready for prime time -- the cars themselves, that is, without getting into the problems of electricity usage (california's already pretty fucked on that issue anyway).
Oh, and your example's fine and dandy but I was screaming about third-shifters because the guy I originally responded to had some ridiculous idea on how to prevent people from charging their cars during peak power usage by raising rates and discounting offpeak, and his example was $1.00kWh peak, $0.05kWh off-peak.
Really, the danger is less the abandonment of the electric car and more the premature and government-mandated adoption of the electric car. That would do far more damage than waiting an extra 5 or 10 years, especially if it turns out that we figure out how to efficiently and cheaply produce ethanol via means that don't include human foodstuffs. The economic impact could be cripplingly large if we were to rush to mandate a tech like electric cars too soon. ...of course, then there's the hybrids. Those do look pretty promising. Just so long as we don't go to hydrogen, good lord. Spilling acid from batteries and gasoline both would be safer than hydrogen leaking out, if you were to have an accident.. I'm sure it'll find uses but god damn keep it out from under my driver's seat. Talk about unsafe at any speed, you wouldn't even need to add model rocket engines to a hydrogen car to make it explode.
Actually, the supreme court down there DID rule that he was in violation of the constitution and ordered and arrest warrant. The army then kicked him to the curb, rather than imprison him. Any way you look at it, legally, he should no longer be in power. Exile instead of imprisonment? He SHOULD be happy for that, but somehow the rest of the world is taking this opportunity to say something against military coups. Uh, rather than, maybe taking the chance when it's a coup against a leader that wasn't about to be arrested for violation of the constitution.
Mkay, so you fall under the furry-trumpeting-the-praises-of-SL category, then. You wouldn't happen to be the guy with the fox-headed avatar I've seen pictures of in business mags?
The only reason I rant against SL is because it's constantly paraded around as something it's not.
It's a social sandbox. Period end of story. There's nothing WRONG with a social sandbox, but after years now of buzz-heavy articles about how it's so next-gen and how it is the future of online interaction and businesses would be foolish not to establish a presence, I'm long since fed up with it all. SL is just a 3D freeform RP chat room. Don't make it out to be more than it is and there's no problem. Case in point, this article: How in the hell is it better training to see a picture of an NPC choking and learn to push "A" to save their life, than it would be to ACTUALLY practice the skills you'd use to save someone's life on a dummy that you can pretend is choking? It's not the choking you need to learn, it's the things you need to do to stop the choking you need to learn. It seems to me this training would be much better accomplished through the use of dummies and a soundstage ER set up in a shed, with the part of the 'realistic victim' being played by actual people (either live or via video clips) with the students making a judgement based on those actors as to what actions need performed on the dummy.
In short, it's just more hype making SL out to be something that it is not.
Right, uh, no, this isn't about anything that IS happening. This was about electric cars charging during off-peak hours -- those hours that third-shifters are *at* work. It's a stupid and bad plan simply because the people coming up with the plan never take into account anyone NOT working a 9-to-5 mon-fri job located less than 20 miles from their home.
I could have just as easily attacked the plan due to the limited range of the cars, clearly nobody makes weekly visits to family an hour or more away. YEAH! Fuck them old folks anyway. Just put them in a goddamned home already, sheesh. Or the fact that cars do represent a tremendous amount of freedom to travel that would be removed if we transitioned to electric vehicles. I'm making an 800-mile (one-way) trip about once a month right now, because it's not a bad drive, because I can, because it's cheaper than flying, because it's fun. I've only a need to stop once, maybe twice, start to finish, and those stops take 10 to 15 minutes (depending on how long I spend peeing..). Try THAT with an electric.
All problems with electric vehicles that are never brought up because they are not part of the life of those trying to impose their electric vision on others. My point is simply that this sort of behaviour is fucking selfish and narrow-minded and exactly the sort of thing that would destroy our way of life.
Oh, and you go ahead and denigrate third-shifters all you want. Maybe you should just go ahead and try and live without the benefit of anybody working at night -- after all, they're just a bunch of fucking idiots for working at night anyway! Better hope you never wake up in the middle of the night with chest pains and a numb arm there champ, because the doctors in the ER over night are just a bunch of fuckheads who couldn't figure out how to use their brain to get a REAL job anyway.
Because Linden has one hell of a PR machine, basically. Throw futuristic buzzwords in, sprinkle liberally with perverts and furries and flying dongs.. you're left with a lot of people writing for a lot of business and trade mags about how next-gen SL is, how that sort of interaction is the future of (insert legit subject here), and vigorously defending those viewpoints so nobody suspects they actually are perverts or furries or flying dongs. We all know they actually are, though.
YEAH! Good idea. Who the fuck works at night anyway. Fuck them 3rd shifters! Buncha no-good blue collar workers, 24-hour store clerks, and hospital workers anyway. Assholes all of them. Make those bastards pay for having the gall to hold jobs that aren't standard 9-to-5 office jobs. Because hey, white collar pencil pushers are the only people that matter anyway, right?
Simply put, people are a waste of time.
Let's go back to two games I played and HATED because of the forced-grouping. EQ and DAOC. EQ was *terrible* about requiring a group to do... anything. Except for certain classes. DAOC was the same way. In both cases, the intention was always to force people to group up to do pretty much anything at all. Hell, even just getting from Point A to Point B was often dangerous alone.
It's just not fun. Period, end of story.
To build an MMO like that, you're assuming there will be an equal distribution of the classes required to do anything. You're assuming there will be as much tanks and dps as healers. That's.. not true, at all. Never happens. And nobody wants to spend their limited time in-game sitting around waiting for people to show up so MAYBE they can go push a single button over and over and gain a half a level. Spend 2 hours looking for a group, and 1 hour actually grouping? It's just not fun any way you slice it.
Forced grouping works GREAT in certain games, and certain aspects of games. Look at D&D. You KNOW when you're playing D&D that you'll have a group with you, because if you don't.. you're not playing. You don't decide to play and then sit around your table waiting for random people to walk by and ask them if they happen to be the class you need in your group. That happened in EQ and DAOC constantly. It's dumb. In WoW, end-game raids are generally scheduled, and even those that aren't? They're at least end-game, where the majority of your player base will wind up, so at least there's a wide pool of people to draw on. Even that wasn't enough, though, so WoW has added tons of tools to help people find other people to group with for end-game content, and of the 3 archtypes -- tank, dps, heal -- most classes can handle at least two of those jobs, and with dual specs it's really, really simple. And honestly, it still kinda sucks. A few people don't show up to a scheduled raid, you have to spend time looking for fill-ins. PUGs don't always even get off the ground.
Basically, forced-grouping in MMOs fails because people don't like sitting on their ass typing "LFG" over and over and over when they're *supposed* to be playing a game and having fun. Once you add all the retards into the equation, you wind up spending too much time typing "LFG" and once you're done with that, it's probably 50/50 odds that you'll have to start doing it again shortly because whoever you find will be too stupid to group with.
Honestly WAR handled it pretty well, at least up until level 30 or so (when I quit..). Solo you'd be fine 99% of the time, but each time you added to your group you became more and more effective. WoW group play compared to solo I often found to actually slow me down, even with guildies on vent, but WAR it really always payed off but never was necessary. Really a shame they got so much wrong with that game, because they did get a lot right.
... that's seriously how noise complaints go down across the pond? the cops refer it to a bunch of pencil pushers? jesus christ. that's the dumbest thing I've ever heard.
here in the states if your party's too loud, the cops knock on your door and tell you to STFU, if they're nice and think you'll listen. People go home. Basically they stop the party however possible, and if they have to come back they get serious about it.
You're right though, that changes the whole story from "poor dude gets his birthday ruined" to "inconsiderate asshole's nefarious plan foiled". Though I can't say I exactly support the idea of arresting people BEFORE a crime was committed (4pm, no chance they were too loud or any such shit), and it doesn't change the fact that the anti-rave laws on the island are really fucked up and bad. Not that our RAVE act is great (huh, air conditioned rooms and bottled water are drug paraphernalia, didja know that?) but at least they only apply to parties where it can be argued that the purpose is the consumption of drugs. So... "asshole unfairly gets what he deserves"? Meh, I guess.
You're right on both parts, essentially. I think they also were monitoring calls originating in the US that were made to foreign numbers they believed to have ties with terrorism, too, but honestly it's hard to really figure out what the truth is and was with so much fear-mongering and hyperbole going on.
Oh, and the program itself wasn't really new, it's been around forever. Bush & Co. just tweaked the rules around a little bit -- a move that I think was less about invading the privacy of Americans (which they've been able to do for several decades now) and more a matter of removing a bottleneck. The whole secret wiretap deal has to be approved by a secret court, I think there's a 24 or 48 hour window in which they can start a wiretap and then seek approval by this secret court. Well, in the wake of 9/11, they were using this quite a bit, and I'm of the belief that they circumvented the court not because they wanted to be Big Brother but because they knew that most these wiretaps would NOT result in any information but felt that at the time it was best to cast as wide a net as possible, immediately, and later worry about narrowing things down from "possible" to "likely".
The secret court, of course, only would be able to review so many requests for secret wiretaps at once, and if you're looking at a list of 1,000 possibles and you think 100 of them are pretty likely, let's say it would take a week for a court (and you) to go through and decide which of those 1,000 were the ones you wanted.. well, I believe the idea was simply to not worry about the time limit due to the huge volume and keep all the wiretaps in place until some sort of review could be done, rather than potentially miss out on valuable information because of a paperwork bottleneck.
Not that I really care for the idea of secret courts or meetings or wiretaps or anything, but overblown fearmongering and fingerpointing pisses me off even more. Especially when it's hypocritical fingerpointing. It's not like the democrats in power were oblivious to what was going on (see also, criticism of the information on WMDs before the Iraq War from the democrats when in fact they had access and agreed with the intelligence reports at the time.. fucking i'll-have-my-cake-and-eat-it-too bullshit).
If the party is too loud, I'm quite sure there would be existing laws on the books to deal with that. Noise ordinances and the like, specifically aimed at people who are just too loud, especially too loud late at night.
If the party was held somewhere illegally -- hi mr. warehouse -- there is also a set of laws to deal with that. Trespass laws.
No, this law was passed to stop people from having raves when it was held on private land, with permission, in areas where nobody would be calling in complaining about noise. Because of the evil MDMA and K and pot these kids were taking. It's all for the children, understand, they need to be protected via jail time and criminal records.
We in the US had a similar deal pass, but it's not nearly so draconian or invasive... but then again, Brits will be Brits and if there's anything British it's draconian and invasive police forces (I kid, but only *slightly*).
Why didn't they use discretion? Because that would be admitting wrong on their part. Like that would fucking happen -- nosir, it matters not that they were expecting glowstick-wielding pacifier-chewers and found 30-somethings with a grill and beer. They came to break up a party and by god nothing is going to deter them from running around in their ninja get-up barking orders at confused and upset people. You've gotta feel like you've got a big dick somehow, and admitting they goofed and called all their buddies to come help for no reason is about as far opposite a big-dick feeling you can get this side of your gramma applying ice to your boys wearing naught but a sheer negligee.
It was 'marginally profitable' for Fox because they aired it at 7pm est on sundays. 1 hour before the Simpsons. At that point in time they were also putting out commercials for their Sunday line-up that stated... "YOUR SUNDAY STARTS AT 8!"
I don't know if you recall that, but I do. Futurama was marginalized right out of the gate by Fox. Right now, I think there's 3 or 4 networks showing reruns of Futurama, which is at least one network per season.. clearly, the show WAS good, and SHOULD have been profitable, but suffered from a godawful time slot, NFL-preemptions, and a complete lack of any interest in promoting it by Fox.
The movies also suffered for similar reasons.. I guess they were on TV but I'll be damned if I know when.
I'd be willing to bet that the slashed budget is just ComCen trying to be cheap-asses (as usual). Exactly what programming on that channel is really worth anything anymore, please remind me? daily show, colbert, and southpark are the only original content I can find on comedy central in the next 4 days. Oh, and Michael and Michael, which just looks like it's going to be bad. They titular actors look BORED in the PROMO COMMERCIALS for their own show. YEAH! I'll watch that, oh yeah.
Nah.. this is just comedy central trying to make money without spending money.