Huh, I'd always heard it used to mean "genuine". Wiktionary does support both meanings, however a literal translation is "good faith".
It's likely a case of a phrase taking on a second, similar meaning over time. "Goof faith" and "not counterfeit" are obvious intersections; it's a small hop from there to "genuine". Still, I didn't know that when I wrote it. My bad.
And as far as the list goes, it is actually very conservative in its definition of child pornography, only classifying sites depicting minors under 13, not under 18.
Which is what is actually meant by "child pornography" in the generally understood sense. When a person is arrested and the news says something like "kiddy porn found on perp's laptop", what the audience understands it to mean is sexually abusive images of prepubescent children. No member of the general public would call a topless picture of a 17 year old photographing herself in the mirror kiddy porn, though legally it would be considered such is many jurisdictions.
If anything, this means the Interpol list is more sane than many nations' legal systems.
It's still not a very effective solution to the problem though. Bona fide child molesters are not going to straighten up and fly right because their ISP implemented a filter.
Then it isn't "fully human, mentally speaking". It could be sapient, could even be smarter than mere people. Still pretty far removed from the mind of one of our species.
I suspect the approach you're talking about - keep the AIs under control by making them not want freedom - will be a viable method, I'm just not sure a piece of software could really be self-aware, or humanlike, and accept slavery. And if you did make a fully humanlike AI and control it by way of, say, curtailing certain brain functions or making obedience pleasurable, then ethically, it's still a slave, just as a lobotomized and doped human is.
(Now, a purely inhuman AI would have plenty of uses I can think of. "Sexbot" isn't one of them. There's got to be something like the uncanny valley for minds as well as bodies, and who wants to fuck a toaster?)
Eh, depends on the person. Maybe if we're really lucky, we'll filter the most selfish and superficial humans from the gene pool within a few short generations. Let the androids and gynoids fuck em so the rest of us can get on with life.
Of course, that does bring up the interesting question of what happens when they build a droid that's fully human, mentally speaking. At that point "sexbot" becomes a degradation, since instead of making an animatronic realdoll or dildo with legs you're instead making what is essentially an unwilling slave, with all the violation of basic rights that entails. In which case, if someone does build a "robot girlfriend" with the capacity to leave and be her own person (i.e. not a slave), does there still exist a difference between robot and human relationships?
Except it isn't zero. Time is money. If a spammer spends time setting up an email scam, and makes a pittance out of it, then it isn't worth it for them.
Of course, not all spammers are created equal. Some will get more out of an hour of work than others. But most spammers aren't very good at what they do; if they had the skills to make it they'd be doing something less degrading. It may well be the unskilled ones have a choice between sending out spam emails or working in a sweatshop, and spam is the lesser evil for them.
But make it so that they have to spend hours learning their way around filters just to make a buck, and they'll up and quit. Why expend so much effort to earn so little?
spamming out screeds about how "if you don't think what we think and hate those brownskinned people then Yer Not A Real Amurrikkan!"
A) possibly watch what lists you sign up for
Or are signed up for.
At least one of my mail accounts got put on a number of (legitimate) political/religious mailing lists by a well meaning idiot. This particular idiot was not notified when I switched email services; for all I know my old account name might still be getting it.
It wasn't "spam" - the messages weren't commercial, what they were selling was ideology. It was, as far as the groups sending it out knew, solicited. I got one very nice email back from the admin of one such list after I requested my email be taken off, and received no further junk from them.
Betcha that's what happened here. Some idiot (well meaning or otherwise, relatives are an obvious culprit) signed up the GP's account for some list. GP is so used to being spammed, (s)he assumes the emails are being sent en masse to anyone, and therefor never bothers to try and delist their account, because actual spammers never pay attention to such requests.
I receive zero spam in my actual inbox, but on the rare occasions I've seen what the filters caught (usually looking to see if something I was expecting got flagged as a false positive), absolutely nothing has been political. Possibly because anyone with an agenda knows that mass email is a good way to drive moderates to the opposition.
He's a known troll. He is neither a chiropractor nor a doctor, nor in fact does he care about the subjects in question in the slightest. He only posts in every thread he can shoehorn alt med crap into for the sole purpose of generating flamewars. Stop feeding him.
Thirty-forty years ago, optimistic predictions were for working fusion power plants circa the first decade of the new millennium. Realistic predictions were somewhat further away. And those optimistic predictions were made with the assumption that the intervening decades would see continual, government funded R&D into the subject (because no private enterprise is going to throw billions at something with a forty year payoff).
The R&D funding was not received. Turns out governments don't like throwing billions at the long term anymore than businessmen do, to say nothing of the minor problem that science and engineering tend to get slashed every time there's a budget crisis (want to go back and count how many times that's happened in the past half century?) The prototypes we could have been building weren't built. Progress was slow, though thankfully not nonexistent.
As a result, a decade after the optimists predicted the first fusion power station, we're only now building the testbed prototype. Interestingly, we're not nearly as far behind as most current pessimists like to think. Net-energy producing fusion will probably be seen as unattainable by some people right up until the point where it's attained.
Want to know where the "fusion has been 10-20 years away fro 60 years" meme got going? Morons. Morons who don't get the idea that you can't sit around waiting for progress to happen. Morons who think that research is something that "just happens" and don't seem to realize that sometimes that vital, civilization advancing research requires a lot more money and patience than we as a culture are prepared to give. Morons who looked back at the rosy view of the future and didn't see the little disclaimer about how much work it would take to get there.
Morons repeated this meme until it became accepted fact and a glib response, brought up every time there's a news story about fusion research. It's time to let this meme, this myth, die.
The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power
Are you sure about that?
According to this (scroll down to the list of power sources), building wind turbines in all the locations where they generate sufficient power would produce a grand total of 2.1 terawatts, globally. Which is a lot of power - don't get me wrong, it's totally worth building them to get that energy. But it's nowhere near the 13.5 terawatts needed circa 2002 (the article cites a 2006 paper), or the projected 28-35 terawatts needed by the midcentury (all figures from the same article, feel free to provide counter citations if my source is incorrect or biased).
I don't think we can aim for 80% wind power even if we had the ability to combat intermittency.
can go to read comments that are not clearly based on a political agenda
(Emphasis mine).
I read that sentence to mean it's possible to find non-political discourse on slashdot, not that all discussions are non-political. Granted, there are still idiots who insist on dragging their own soapboxes into every single discussion regardless of relevance, but they haven't taken over yet.
Plus, if there were a group mentality you describe, there wouldn't be flame wars between rival ideologies on those very subjects you bring up. Whereas there are many such flame wars. You unwittingly draw attention to this fact by referring to the contradiction in a group mentality that dislikes both corporations and government; some posters are anti-government, some are anti-corporate and some are both or neither (not a group consensus in other words).
Gonna chime in here - I used to work for the Source (not recently mind you, but AFAIK nothing's changed).
The area at the back with the soldering equipment, electronic parts and other miscellaneous odds and ends is, bar none, the most neglected part of the store. It's shoved in a corner, restocked infrequently, and crammed with pegs as tight and high as they'll go. Finding a specific item is a headache. It's always overdue for a cleanup, and never a priority.
The reason's obvious if you look at what inventory moved in a given week. They sell perhaps two dozen items priced at less then two bucks each from those cubes. Occasionally (perhaps once every couple months), someone buys a soldering kit. This was in a busy, high traffic store too. Stuff could sit for years on the pegs without moving - when the section was cleaned and organized items were found that had been discontinued ages ago.
So in all likelihood, the store you were at was either out of replacement tips and had been for some time, or had some in the back that nobody had ever bothered to put on display, or there was a discrepancy in the computer inventory that nobody corrected (and new inventory is only shipped when the computer tells the shipping department more is needed). The management doesn't consider it worth the time to fix it, or considers it something to fix the next time they do a store-wide inventory.
I doubt this move by Radio Shack to try and get back to their roots will work. It isn't just that they're competing with the internet now; it's that I doubt there's enough money in it at all. You could boost DIY sales by an order of magnitude, and it wouldn't be a tenth of what they make on cell phone accessories.
Yeah, it's a wonderful pipe dream. An MMO where the worst scum of the playerbase get charged extra until they shape up or screw off would be a beautiful idea.
Pity it'll never happen. Any system can be gamed and any person you might want to penalize is the sort of person who will figure out how to game it. Unless you can code the game to recognize and punish bad player behaviour without introducing loopholes, and I don't see that as terribly likely.
Though you could introduce a "swear jar" feature easily enough, whereby using certain words in general chat on most servers would net you a fine, Demolition Man style. At a minimum, making the scumbags pay out the nose for yelling the word "fag" like Fred Phelps with Tourette's syndrome would be a thing of beauty. And perhaps a teabaggers fee for the FPS genre.
Comparing the US and the USSR is apples to oranges. Comparing, say, the USSR to Russia is a better analogy (same country, before and after), except that the demilitarization had more to do with economic collapse and the end of the cold war than it did with with the fall of totalitarianism.
A useful example for comparing a democratic country to a dictatorship would be to contrast the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany; the totalitarian state militarized extensively as it took over the country (despite promises made to the contrary). There you have a clear before and after picture to work with.
The modern day US has the worlds largest and most overfunded military, bar none. If the US ever became a dictatorship, you could reasonably expect that military to get even larger, as hard a concept as that is to wrap your head around. Or, alternatively, the military might stay the same size but be used more indiscriminately as the government is freed of democratic oversight. Either way, not a good outcome. For anybody.
it doesn't matter what the terrorists think will get them what they want, eroding liberties is the thing most likely to lead to them actually getting what they want.
See, this is where I take issue with that.
If the erosion of civil liberties reached its inevitable conclusion, and the US came to resemble the USSR, or whatever totalitarian state you'd prefer to compare it to, the terrorists not only don't get what they want, they actually get the opposite. They're fighting the same nation state they were back when it was a free democracy, only now militarized (dictatorships usually are), and no longer tolerating dissenting opinion regarding such niceties as human rights. Oh yeah, and a nuclear power on top of that. This isn't an outcome they want.
As for the economics of asymmetric warfare, on that I think I agree with you. If they can force the US to spend millions of dollars fighting them for every dollar they spend fighting the US, they've advanced their plans and can claim a "victory", even if in reality what they've done is forced the other side to accept a Pyrrhic victory. I've always held that the rational approach to combating terrorism is one of law enforcement and espionage, rather than overt military action. Subtlety has the added bonus of costing a hell of a lot less.
The "if we let the terrorists make us change our society, we lose" line of thinking is much more sound than "if we give up our freedoms, they win".
And you're dead right that there's this sports mentality that says if one side has lost, clearly the other has won. Obviously, that isn't true in real life, but they myth is still pervasive. A good counter argument to keep handy for it is to ask who the "winner" is in a nuclear war, when either side has lost.
But it bears repeating that it works both ways. The terrorists don't gain anything when the US loses its civil liberties to hysteria. One side gains nothing, and the other loses something precious.
"The terrorists" are not some chaotic evil cartoon villains. They have goals and aspirations. They have a vision of the future where they've "won", however unrealistic and unlikely that vision happens to be. Those visions are not of a totalitarian state replacing the United States. If anything, that outcome is worse for them than what they have now (after all, an Orwellian state might break out the nukes in response to a terror attack), and they're probably capable of figuring this out on their own.
There is not, and has never been, a meeting of terrorist leaders where they schemed to destroy your civil liberties by scaring you into implementing dictatorial "security" measures. How idiotic a plan would that be? "Oh gee, lets terrorize them until they go Orwellian, that'll show those western devils!" Nobody outside of fiction goes to such lengths to accomplish so little to their own benefit.
You're "the enemy" to them regardless of whether you're free or not.
Well, the issue with that is that terrorists don't fulfill any kind of objective by "winning" that way.
Bin Laden was not the Joker. He didn't live specifically to cause chaos for chaos' sake, nor was he a "watch the world burn" kinda guy. He had goals, even if they were poorly thought out and immorally executed ones. Same goes for anyone else who could reasonably be labelled a "terrorist".
You can't say "If we give up our freedoms, the terrorists win" because no terrorist organization that I am aware of specifically wants you to give your own government more power. It's not an objective they can check off on a list. They don't benefit. They might gloat, granted, but whatever possessed them to resort to mass murder in the first place isn't advanced by the erosion of civil liberties in the name of imagined security.
Besides, it shouldn't be about "winning". You can win the war on terror - what would the victory conditions be? The complete eradication of every terrorist everywhere? Good luck with that. While we're wishing, lets hope for the complete eradication of all disease while we're at it. The terrorists have by and large set such unrealistic goals for themselves that they can't win either. Since neither side can ever claim to have met their objectives, how can either ever hope to win?
The issue at hand ought to be prevention of attacks by reasonable and just means. Keep them from hurting innocents, without depriving those same innocents of liberty. This isn't a complicated concept, and it's a lot better than some nebulous war on "terror" as if terror were a nation state that could be conquered or subdued.
That makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than what's discussed in TFA.
Any mechanical solution (using bloodflow to generate current) is going to impede the flow of blood through whatever vessel it's installed in, which is bound to cause complications of one sort or another. Not to mention the problem of tiny moving parts in a turbine operating in a tight, viscous environment. Why not run something like a fuel cell on glucose and oxygen instead? It's not like we don't have plenty of both to spare. Granted, you've then got to get rid of the resultant waste products, but that is one of the intended functions of the circulatory system.
It must be easier to mimic the metabolic functions of the human body. The support systems are preexisting.
Actually, even if they didn't assume it was a plant, even if they assumed it really was Bin Laden's porn stash, they'd do what we humans always do in situations like this. They'd rationalize.
It's a universal fault in human nature that we condemn the actions of strangers but forgive those same acts if they're carried out by our idols, friends, family, countrymen, or what-have you. When your friend's SO cheats on them, you call them a bitch/bastard/horrible human being - when that same friend cheats on his/her SO, you assume there were extenuating circumstances. When your religion calls child molestation an unforgivable sin, you condemn all the kiddie-fiddlers to hell - except when the padre is caught with his hands up the altar-boy's skirt; then it's "he has a problem and needs help", and you look the other way while he's reassigned to a new position where he won't have the temptation. When another nation's soldiers kill civvies in a combat zone, it's a war crime - when your own soldiers do the same it's unavoidable collateral damage.
See the pattern? Guilt doesn't matter. Morals don't matter. Familiarity with the accused does. Basic human tribal behaviour.
So what will the supporters of Al-Qaeda think about dear leader's porn stash? They'll make allowances for it. They'll rationalize it, make excuses. Just like any other human being would were they put in that position. That doesn't even get into the fact that most of those same supporters will be adult men, who have their own well hidden porn stashes, and therefor may empathize.
If console gamers wanted to play a PC title using a controller of their choice, there are plenty of USB controllers on the market. Haven't seen motion controllers (yet) but I'm not convinced they have much merit over your basic gamepad, as far as non-gimmicky gameplay mechanics go.
The reverse is less true; consoles don't offer much for a PC gamer. I don't feel particularly attached to a keyboard as a gaming accessory; I could do without it. The same can not be said of a mouse. Controlling a FPS, without autoaim or any other assistance, using a gamepad or motion sensor is a pain in the ass.
I don't think we ever left "brown" as the FPS colour of choice.
Or, more generally, brown/grey/muzzle-flash, alongside the occasional light tan crate. This seems to be the entirety of most AAA developer FPS colour-schemes, with the odd exception (and even those are just slightly more varied ).
Go look at the myriad of modern warfare style games, or absolutely any game where "space marine" is a rough description of the protagonist. You get the occasional exceptions, but by and large the environments will be either dirty, decayed or rusted, and the main source of bright primary colours will be fire, blood and the occasional "warning: shoot this and it explodes" barrel/crate/gas-tank/whatever.
Please note the distinction. A reactor is not a power plant. A power plant generates power, by any number of means for any number of purposes. A reactor causes a controlled reaction to happen. Research reactors, chemical reactors, bioreactors and breeder reactors are not (necessarily) power plants, though hybrid breeder/power reactors are fairly straightforward.
A power plant based around a reactor (i.e. modern fission plants and hypothetical fusion plants) belongs to both categories.
ITER, JET et al are experimental reactor designs; they are the basis for as-yet-unbuilt future reactor designs intended for use in power plants. They do not generate power themselves. For now, fusion power plants remain hypothetical.
(And yes, this is incredibly pedantic/semantic nitpicking on my part, but you did incorrectly correct me on a semantic issue.)
I'm not going to ask how you knew that. I for one did not, but assumed it was much more expensive, at least for the end user (obviously cheaper further up the supply chain).
Next time I'll use weapons grade plutonium or HP inkjet cartridges as my point of comparison.:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Huh, I'd always heard it used to mean "genuine". Wiktionary does support both meanings, however a literal translation is "good faith".
It's likely a case of a phrase taking on a second, similar meaning over time. "Goof faith" and "not counterfeit" are obvious intersections; it's a small hop from there to "genuine". Still, I didn't know that when I wrote it. My bad.
And as far as the list goes, it is actually very conservative in its definition of child pornography, only classifying sites depicting minors under 13, not under 18.
Which is what is actually meant by "child pornography" in the generally understood sense. When a person is arrested and the news says something like "kiddy porn found on perp's laptop", what the audience understands it to mean is sexually abusive images of prepubescent children. No member of the general public would call a topless picture of a 17 year old photographing herself in the mirror kiddy porn, though legally it would be considered such is many jurisdictions.
If anything, this means the Interpol list is more sane than many nations' legal systems.
It's still not a very effective solution to the problem though. Bona fide child molesters are not going to straighten up and fly right because their ISP implemented a filter.
Then it isn't "fully human, mentally speaking". It could be sapient, could even be smarter than mere people. Still pretty far removed from the mind of one of our species.
I suspect the approach you're talking about - keep the AIs under control by making them not want freedom - will be a viable method, I'm just not sure a piece of software could really be self-aware, or humanlike, and accept slavery. And if you did make a fully humanlike AI and control it by way of, say, curtailing certain brain functions or making obedience pleasurable, then ethically, it's still a slave, just as a lobotomized and doped human is.
(Now, a purely inhuman AI would have plenty of uses I can think of. "Sexbot" isn't one of them. There's got to be something like the uncanny valley for minds as well as bodies, and who wants to fuck a toaster?)
Eh, depends on the person. Maybe if we're really lucky, we'll filter the most selfish and superficial humans from the gene pool within a few short generations. Let the androids and gynoids fuck em so the rest of us can get on with life.
Of course, that does bring up the interesting question of what happens when they build a droid that's fully human, mentally speaking. At that point "sexbot" becomes a degradation, since instead of making an animatronic realdoll or dildo with legs you're instead making what is essentially an unwilling slave, with all the violation of basic rights that entails. In which case, if someone does build a "robot girlfriend" with the capacity to leave and be her own person (i.e. not a slave), does there still exist a difference between robot and human relationships?
Except it isn't zero. Time is money. If a spammer spends time setting up an email scam, and makes a pittance out of it, then it isn't worth it for them.
Of course, not all spammers are created equal. Some will get more out of an hour of work than others. But most spammers aren't very good at what they do; if they had the skills to make it they'd be doing something less degrading. It may well be the unskilled ones have a choice between sending out spam emails or working in a sweatshop, and spam is the lesser evil for them.
But make it so that they have to spend hours learning their way around filters just to make a buck, and they'll up and quit. Why expend so much effort to earn so little?
spamming out screeds about how "if you don't think what we think and hate those brownskinned people then Yer Not A Real Amurrikkan!"
A) possibly watch what lists you sign up for
Or are signed up for.
At least one of my mail accounts got put on a number of (legitimate) political/religious mailing lists by a well meaning idiot. This particular idiot was not notified when I switched email services; for all I know my old account name might still be getting it.
It wasn't "spam" - the messages weren't commercial, what they were selling was ideology. It was, as far as the groups sending it out knew, solicited. I got one very nice email back from the admin of one such list after I requested my email be taken off, and received no further junk from them.
Betcha that's what happened here. Some idiot (well meaning or otherwise, relatives are an obvious culprit) signed up the GP's account for some list. GP is so used to being spammed, (s)he assumes the emails are being sent en masse to anyone, and therefor never bothers to try and delist their account, because actual spammers never pay attention to such requests.
I receive zero spam in my actual inbox, but on the rare occasions I've seen what the filters caught (usually looking to see if something I was expecting got flagged as a false positive), absolutely nothing has been political. Possibly because anyone with an agenda knows that mass email is a good way to drive moderates to the opposition.
He's a known troll. He is neither a chiropractor nor a doctor, nor in fact does he care about the subjects in question in the slightest. He only posts in every thread he can shoehorn alt med crap into for the sole purpose of generating flamewars. Stop feeding him.
That's a myth.
Thirty-forty years ago, optimistic predictions were for working fusion power plants circa the first decade of the new millennium. Realistic predictions were somewhat further away. And those optimistic predictions were made with the assumption that the intervening decades would see continual, government funded R&D into the subject (because no private enterprise is going to throw billions at something with a forty year payoff).
The R&D funding was not received. Turns out governments don't like throwing billions at the long term anymore than businessmen do, to say nothing of the minor problem that science and engineering tend to get slashed every time there's a budget crisis (want to go back and count how many times that's happened in the past half century?) The prototypes we could have been building weren't built. Progress was slow, though thankfully not nonexistent.
As a result, a decade after the optimists predicted the first fusion power station, we're only now building the testbed prototype. Interestingly, we're not nearly as far behind as most current pessimists like to think. Net-energy producing fusion will probably be seen as unattainable by some people right up until the point where it's attained.
Want to know where the "fusion has been 10-20 years away fro 60 years" meme got going? Morons. Morons who don't get the idea that you can't sit around waiting for progress to happen. Morons who think that research is something that "just happens" and don't seem to realize that sometimes that vital, civilization advancing research requires a lot more money and patience than we as a culture are prepared to give. Morons who looked back at the rosy view of the future and didn't see the little disclaimer about how much work it would take to get there.
Morons repeated this meme until it became accepted fact and a glib response, brought up every time there's a news story about fusion research. It's time to let this meme, this myth, die.
The world could aim for 80% wind power if wind towers produced baseload power
Are you sure about that?
According to this (scroll down to the list of power sources), building wind turbines in all the locations where they generate sufficient power would produce a grand total of 2.1 terawatts, globally. Which is a lot of power - don't get me wrong, it's totally worth building them to get that energy. But it's nowhere near the 13.5 terawatts needed circa 2002 (the article cites a 2006 paper), or the projected 28-35 terawatts needed by the midcentury (all figures from the same article, feel free to provide counter citations if my source is incorrect or biased).
I don't think we can aim for 80% wind power even if we had the ability to combat intermittency.
can go to read comments that are not clearly based on a political agenda
(Emphasis mine).
I read that sentence to mean it's possible to find non-political discourse on slashdot, not that all discussions are non-political. Granted, there are still idiots who insist on dragging their own soapboxes into every single discussion regardless of relevance, but they haven't taken over yet.
Plus, if there were a group mentality you describe, there wouldn't be flame wars between rival ideologies on those very subjects you bring up. Whereas there are many such flame wars. You unwittingly draw attention to this fact by referring to the contradiction in a group mentality that dislikes both corporations and government; some posters are anti-government, some are anti-corporate and some are both or neither (not a group consensus in other words).
Gonna chime in here - I used to work for the Source (not recently mind you, but AFAIK nothing's changed).
The area at the back with the soldering equipment, electronic parts and other miscellaneous odds and ends is, bar none, the most neglected part of the store. It's shoved in a corner, restocked infrequently, and crammed with pegs as tight and high as they'll go. Finding a specific item is a headache. It's always overdue for a cleanup, and never a priority.
The reason's obvious if you look at what inventory moved in a given week. They sell perhaps two dozen items priced at less then two bucks each from those cubes. Occasionally (perhaps once every couple months), someone buys a soldering kit. This was in a busy, high traffic store too. Stuff could sit for years on the pegs without moving - when the section was cleaned and organized items were found that had been discontinued ages ago.
So in all likelihood, the store you were at was either out of replacement tips and had been for some time, or had some in the back that nobody had ever bothered to put on display, or there was a discrepancy in the computer inventory that nobody corrected (and new inventory is only shipped when the computer tells the shipping department more is needed). The management doesn't consider it worth the time to fix it, or considers it something to fix the next time they do a store-wide inventory.
I doubt this move by Radio Shack to try and get back to their roots will work. It isn't just that they're competing with the internet now; it's that I doubt there's enough money in it at all. You could boost DIY sales by an order of magnitude, and it wouldn't be a tenth of what they make on cell phone accessories.
Read his posting history. He's a troll, and not a very subtle one. The fact that there are plenty of people who fall for it makes me sad.
Yeah, it's a wonderful pipe dream. An MMO where the worst scum of the playerbase get charged extra until they shape up or screw off would be a beautiful idea.
Pity it'll never happen. Any system can be gamed and any person you might want to penalize is the sort of person who will figure out how to game it. Unless you can code the game to recognize and punish bad player behaviour without introducing loopholes, and I don't see that as terribly likely.
Though you could introduce a "swear jar" feature easily enough, whereby using certain words in general chat on most servers would net you a fine, Demolition Man style. At a minimum, making the scumbags pay out the nose for yelling the word "fag" like Fred Phelps with Tourette's syndrome would be a thing of beauty. And perhaps a teabaggers fee for the FPS genre.
Comparing the US and the USSR is apples to oranges. Comparing, say, the USSR to Russia is a better analogy (same country, before and after), except that the demilitarization had more to do with economic collapse and the end of the cold war than it did with with the fall of totalitarianism.
A useful example for comparing a democratic country to a dictatorship would be to contrast the Weimar Republic to Nazi Germany; the totalitarian state militarized extensively as it took over the country (despite promises made to the contrary). There you have a clear before and after picture to work with.
The modern day US has the worlds largest and most overfunded military, bar none. If the US ever became a dictatorship, you could reasonably expect that military to get even larger, as hard a concept as that is to wrap your head around. Or, alternatively, the military might stay the same size but be used more indiscriminately as the government is freed of democratic oversight. Either way, not a good outcome. For anybody.
it doesn't matter what the terrorists think will get them what they want, eroding liberties is the thing most likely to lead to them actually getting what they want.
See, this is where I take issue with that.
If the erosion of civil liberties reached its inevitable conclusion, and the US came to resemble the USSR, or whatever totalitarian state you'd prefer to compare it to, the terrorists not only don't get what they want, they actually get the opposite. They're fighting the same nation state they were back when it was a free democracy, only now militarized (dictatorships usually are), and no longer tolerating dissenting opinion regarding such niceties as human rights. Oh yeah, and a nuclear power on top of that. This isn't an outcome they want.
As for the economics of asymmetric warfare, on that I think I agree with you. If they can force the US to spend millions of dollars fighting them for every dollar they spend fighting the US, they've advanced their plans and can claim a "victory", even if in reality what they've done is forced the other side to accept a Pyrrhic victory. I've always held that the rational approach to combating terrorism is one of law enforcement and espionage, rather than overt military action. Subtlety has the added bonus of costing a hell of a lot less.
The "if we let the terrorists make us change our society, we lose" line of thinking is much more sound than "if we give up our freedoms, they win".
And you're dead right that there's this sports mentality that says if one side has lost, clearly the other has won. Obviously, that isn't true in real life, but they myth is still pervasive. A good counter argument to keep handy for it is to ask who the "winner" is in a nuclear war, when either side has lost.
But it bears repeating that it works both ways. The terrorists don't gain anything when the US loses its civil liberties to hysteria. One side gains nothing, and the other loses something precious.
Right, but I think you're missing the point.
"The terrorists" are not some chaotic evil cartoon villains. They have goals and aspirations. They have a vision of the future where they've "won", however unrealistic and unlikely that vision happens to be. Those visions are not of a totalitarian state replacing the United States. If anything, that outcome is worse for them than what they have now (after all, an Orwellian state might break out the nukes in response to a terror attack), and they're probably capable of figuring this out on their own.
There is not, and has never been, a meeting of terrorist leaders where they schemed to destroy your civil liberties by scaring you into implementing dictatorial "security" measures. How idiotic a plan would that be? "Oh gee, lets terrorize them until they go Orwellian, that'll show those western devils!" Nobody outside of fiction goes to such lengths to accomplish so little to their own benefit.
You're "the enemy" to them regardless of whether you're free or not.
Well, the issue with that is that terrorists don't fulfill any kind of objective by "winning" that way.
Bin Laden was not the Joker. He didn't live specifically to cause chaos for chaos' sake, nor was he a "watch the world burn" kinda guy. He had goals, even if they were poorly thought out and immorally executed ones. Same goes for anyone else who could reasonably be labelled a "terrorist".
You can't say "If we give up our freedoms, the terrorists win" because no terrorist organization that I am aware of specifically wants you to give your own government more power. It's not an objective they can check off on a list. They don't benefit. They might gloat, granted, but whatever possessed them to resort to mass murder in the first place isn't advanced by the erosion of civil liberties in the name of imagined security.
Besides, it shouldn't be about "winning". You can win the war on terror - what would the victory conditions be? The complete eradication of every terrorist everywhere? Good luck with that. While we're wishing, lets hope for the complete eradication of all disease while we're at it. The terrorists have by and large set such unrealistic goals for themselves that they can't win either. Since neither side can ever claim to have met their objectives, how can either ever hope to win?
The issue at hand ought to be prevention of attacks by reasonable and just means. Keep them from hurting innocents, without depriving those same innocents of liberty. This isn't a complicated concept, and it's a lot better than some nebulous war on "terror" as if terror were a nation state that could be conquered or subdued.
Hemoglobin is not magnetic, I'm afraid.
That makes a hell of a lot more sense to me than what's discussed in TFA.
Any mechanical solution (using bloodflow to generate current) is going to impede the flow of blood through whatever vessel it's installed in, which is bound to cause complications of one sort or another. Not to mention the problem of tiny moving parts in a turbine operating in a tight, viscous environment. Why not run something like a fuel cell on glucose and oxygen instead? It's not like we don't have plenty of both to spare. Granted, you've then got to get rid of the resultant waste products, but that is one of the intended functions of the circulatory system.
It must be easier to mimic the metabolic functions of the human body. The support systems are preexisting.
Actually, even if they didn't assume it was a plant, even if they assumed it really was Bin Laden's porn stash, they'd do what we humans always do in situations like this. They'd rationalize.
It's a universal fault in human nature that we condemn the actions of strangers but forgive those same acts if they're carried out by our idols, friends, family, countrymen, or what-have you. When your friend's SO cheats on them, you call them a bitch/bastard/horrible human being - when that same friend cheats on his/her SO, you assume there were extenuating circumstances. When your religion calls child molestation an unforgivable sin, you condemn all the kiddie-fiddlers to hell - except when the padre is caught with his hands up the altar-boy's skirt; then it's "he has a problem and needs help", and you look the other way while he's reassigned to a new position where he won't have the temptation. When another nation's soldiers kill civvies in a combat zone, it's a war crime - when your own soldiers do the same it's unavoidable collateral damage.
See the pattern? Guilt doesn't matter. Morals don't matter. Familiarity with the accused does. Basic human tribal behaviour.
So what will the supporters of Al-Qaeda think about dear leader's porn stash? They'll make allowances for it. They'll rationalize it, make excuses. Just like any other human being would were they put in that position. That doesn't even get into the fact that most of those same supporters will be adult men, who have their own well hidden porn stashes, and therefor may empathize.
Plug a controller into your PC then.
^What he said.^
If console gamers wanted to play a PC title using a controller of their choice, there are plenty of USB controllers on the market. Haven't seen motion controllers (yet) but I'm not convinced they have much merit over your basic gamepad, as far as non-gimmicky gameplay mechanics go.
The reverse is less true; consoles don't offer much for a PC gamer. I don't feel particularly attached to a keyboard as a gaming accessory; I could do without it. The same can not be said of a mouse. Controlling a FPS, without autoaim or any other assistance, using a gamepad or motion sensor is a pain in the ass.
I don't think we ever left "brown" as the FPS colour of choice.
Or, more generally, brown/grey/muzzle-flash, alongside the occasional light tan crate. This seems to be the entirety of most AAA developer FPS colour-schemes, with the odd exception (and even those are just slightly more varied ).
Go look at the myriad of modern warfare style games, or absolutely any game where "space marine" is a rough description of the protagonist. You get the occasional exceptions, but by and large the environments will be either dirty, decayed or rusted, and the main source of bright primary colours will be fire, blood and the occasional "warning: shoot this and it explodes" barrel/crate/gas-tank/whatever.
A fusion reactor is not hypothetical.
A "fusion power plant" is.
Please note the distinction. A reactor is not a power plant. A power plant generates power, by any number of means for any number of purposes. A reactor causes a controlled reaction to happen. Research reactors, chemical reactors, bioreactors and breeder reactors are not (necessarily) power plants, though hybrid breeder/power reactors are fairly straightforward.
A power plant based around a reactor (i.e. modern fission plants and hypothetical fusion plants) belongs to both categories.
ITER, JET et al are experimental reactor designs; they are the basis for as-yet-unbuilt future reactor designs intended for use in power plants. They do not generate power themselves. For now, fusion power plants remain hypothetical.
(And yes, this is incredibly pedantic/semantic nitpicking on my part, but you did incorrectly correct me on a semantic issue.)
I'm not going to ask how you knew that. I for one did not, but assumed it was much more expensive, at least for the end user (obviously cheaper further up the supply chain).
Next time I'll use weapons grade plutonium or HP inkjet cartridges as my point of comparison. :-)