Nanotech isn't a silver bullet anymore than, say, fusion would be. You'd be faced with massive energy requirements no matter what you do.
Let's say you've got advanced self-replicating nanotbots that are designed to liberate that carbon from Co2 to make copies of themselves with. Where are said bots getting their power? Co2 is fairly stable stuff after all; it's going to require alot of power just to break up enough molecules to make more nanotech, and presumably the energy requirements for nanobot (re)production aren't going to be trivial either.
Plants manage this via photosynthesis, but even then they use raw materials other than just Co2, and the sheer quantity of carbon we'd have to use up to make venus livable is massive.
Even if you solve that problem, how to you go about thinning the atmosphere? We're talking about getting rid of enough gas to make draining the earth's oceans seem trivial by comparison. Locking down Co2 into solids, and keeping it that way may not be possible, and if it is it may not be feasable.
Finally, there are issues beyond the planet's atmosphere to consider. It's too close to the sun, it's rotation period is too long, and IIRC it doesn't have a magnetic field. Any one of those problems would be a massive engineering undertaking to solve; try solving all of them.
The reason we're adapted to a 24 hour day is because earth has always had a 24 hour rotation period (more or less anyway, since IIRC it's slowed down slightly over many millions of years). It's simple evolutionary biology - we have X time per day to take advantage of, and thus we have become adapted to that many. If earth had a 40 hour day, we'd have adapted to that instead.
The greenhouse effect does not affect the rate of heat absorbtion of the planet; instead it affects the rate of heat dissipation by slowing the rate at which heat radiates into space (IIRC, this has to do with the amount of IR radiation reflected by Co2 in the upper atmosphere).
Ice ages happen when the rate of reflection increases; glacial growth leads to more of the planet covered by reflective ice, leads to lower temperatures, leads to glacial growth (loop). That may have been what you were thinking of.
I suppose global warming might make less light reflect back into space if the glaciers recede further, in which case there would be actual reflection involved. But that would be a side effect if it did happen, and I don't know enough meteorology to make an educated guess.
"Well, let's see, you're getting an illegally modified copy of the game without compensating the owner. I'd call that theft. But, if you'd rather, you can always call it "copyright violation". I find that to be a little too unweildy, and would rather use the simpler term: stealing.
If you've bought the game, you already have a way to use it legitimately. Refusing to use that way and supporting pirates by using the cracked version of the game is still illegal. No matter how you try to spin it, it's still illegal. And, if you really did legally buy the game, it's also extremely pointless and stupid."
The usual arguement that copying = stealing revolves around the idea that the person using cracked software is therefor denying the creator of the game a legitimate sale. After all, if you download something, you aren't buying it. Assuming that the creator has already been compensated, which is the case if the person downloading the crack bought the game legitimately, then how is it stealing?
Sounds to me like you don't apply much critical thinking to your definition of the word "steal".
As for it being pointless and stupid, I'm currently replaying through Baldur's Gate, a game I bought back in high school. I've copied disks 1-5 onto my HD (purely for convieniece)m since the game + expansion has 6 disks, and you often need to swap disks when you zone. I can't do this with more recent games because of copy protection, unless of course I download a crack. I'd say cracking to get around copy protection schemes when you aren't engaging in piracy is perfectly fine morally, and a grey area legally in most countries (read: outside the US).
Hehe, well I did mention bad movie science as one of the things that bugged me:-)
Anyway, "parsecs" is the least of the movies problems in terms of science fiction accuracy. Having the ships make "jumps to lightspeed", and not take years to cross even short interestellar distances, or having "laser" tech that fires oval bolts moving at a few hundred meters/sec max would be the top of the list for me.
Misuse of the word parsec would be somewhere down aroundthe same level as having a giant, non-humanoid slug attracted to humanoid females.
"So basically, if all the nations on Earth would finally get their shit together and we somehow became a single pacifist society, that would work great. Until we met the aliens. Then we'd have to defend ourselves. That means we'd have to continue developing weapons in preparation for dealing with an unknown future external threat, or play a pretty big game of catch-up."
Humans adopt pacifism (to the point where they revise their written history to cover up earlier wars). Humans meet aliens, who are not pacifist. Humans relearn how to fight awfully fast, to avoid getting eaten.
What's funny is how the humans win - mankind relies on STL ships, and these ships use reaction drives (essentially thermonuclear rockets). A reaction drive is effective as a weapon in direct proportion to it's mass effeciency as a drive, which was the whole point of the first story in which kzinti appeared.
Hehe, can't beleive I got into this conversation... never knew the cannonical explanation. Ya learn something new every day.
Anyway, chain reaction or gaping hole, you would kinda expect safety systems. RL reactors typically won't fail or meltdown without signifigant compromise to their backups, and their backup's backups. If star wars were done as literary sci-fi, the author would probably have made the battle more complex in some way to make the idea of a fighter killing something planet sized beleivable.
See Larry Niven's Ringworld books as an example of a planet sized (larger, actually) construct that was almost destroyed - pages and pages are dedicated to explaining how things went wrong and why. Things like what systems failed, and why, where greed was involved, what things were sabotaged, why the people that should have been maintaining/protecting it died off, etc. It makes the idea of a massive construct being felled by something as simple as a solar flare seem plausible.
But like I said, its much easier to view star wars as fantasy. If you accept the idea that it's a standard fantasy epic, supported with sci-fi backdrops and themes, then realism doesn't matter so much. Fantasy stories aren't expected to be realistic (they'd be terribly boring if they were), they're merely expected to be internally consistant, thus making suspension of disbelief possible.
Which is where the whole ewok thing falls down. They aren't internally consistant with the other stuff in the movies. They're a great merchandising ploy, but they pretty much kill the whole idea that the empire is even remotely threatening. Both previous movies made it clear that the empire can't be defeated by brute force - ANH has them defeated by subtlety and sabotage, amd ESB has the rebels running away when attacked openly. But apparently the secret to killing stormtroopers, and their mechanized walking tanks, is using rocks and pointy sticks....
Yeah, but you'd figure they'd at least put a grill on the business end to cover the thing. Or failing that, put a U shaped kink in the line akin to a sink trap. Hell, any configuration other than a linear hole going from surface to core would have been safer - and if a bunch of underfunded rebels can find that weakness just by looking at the blueprints, you'd figure that a big military with a budget would have found out about them during beta testing:-)
Design by comitee at it's finest. That or ole' George couldn't be bothered to think up a more realistic excuse for making a planet sized ship go boom in one shot.
It's been awhile since I watched the movies. I do remember that it wasn't just the ewoks that bothered me, in terms of suspension of disbelief. Most of what I found hard to swallow about the series was either science/engineering stuff ("laser" weapons that shoot bolts, a planet sized spacecraft with an unprotected vent leading down into the reactor), or plot holes. However, those can be excused if you take a step back and look at star wars as fantasy, rather than sci-fi. It may be unrealistic, but it's mostly internally consistant.
What bothers people about ewoks is that they break from that internal consistancy. Here we have a mighty empire, ruling thousands of systems, with energy weapons, walking tanks and armoured soldiers - and they get their asses kicked by teddy bears with spears. How the hell are we supposed to see the empire as being this massive military superpower, when pointy sticks are all it takes to kick their asses?
I think most people would have been fine with ewoks if they'd at least been carrying stolen imperial guns or something. It still would have been silly, but suspending disbelief would have been simpler.
Alternatively, designing a multiplayer RPG to be something other than a grind would also help. I suspect that it's the heavy reliance on time and money sinks that really screw these games over - for weak willed gamers, buying gold/characters/plat/whatever is the path of least resistance when compared to grinding for hours on end.
The problem is that the appeal of single player RPGs doesn't translate well into a multiplayer environment. Most developers try to fatten up their MMOs with grinding content, designed to keep players on a leveling treadmill for money and experience. As long as this remains normal, the games will likely suffer from gold selling and the like.
Also, a skills based system without character transfers would still be open to account trading, even if the EULA specifies otherwise - as long as the seller can trade a username and password for real life cash, they can't be stopped.
Agreed. I'm sure the main reason for the numbers favouring Sony over Microsoft is the fact that non-techies don't understand the phrase "rootkit", but they do understand the phrase "fuck, it broke".
Ay, you've got a point. But the basic principle can be applied more generally - for instance (for corporations) "my right to make a buck stops where your right to a safe work environment begins".
The main problem isn't that libertarian principles can't be adapted for the real world - the problem is more that libertarianism is untested and often compromised when embraced by politicians.
The basic principal libertarians tend to apply when it comes to people hurting each other is "my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins". Essentially, the assumption is that an ideal government would still have law and order (based on protection people's rights), but would be expected not to interfere in people's live beyond that.
Now, if you meant that a libertarian government wouldn't be able to control things like corporate misbehavior, or that small, low-tax government wouldn't be able to provide policing as well as it can now, then perhaps you're right. But if you seriously thing that mist libertarians want zero government at all, then you need to check your facts. Like the other posters said libertarian =! anarchist.
The best summation of the two main American political parties I've seen goes something like this: Both parties are conservative reactionaries. The Democrats are conservatives who want to drag America back to the 1960's and the Republicans are conservatives who want to drag America back to the 50's.
Neither party is in favour of individual liberty or rights. Neither favours smaller government or reduced government spending. They differ only in what past era they wish to recreate.
Most of the material that was cut at the last minute was still available on the disk (if you extracted the sound files, there were whole trees of dialouge that was left out of the retail game). Just about the only thing that was left unfinished before being cut was the droid planet; everything else exists in some form.
These folks have been trying to reintroduce the removed content via player-made mod. They aren't done yet, but if you check the progress reports, they're getting there.
Definately loved the character side quests - finding out more about your companions made the game feel alot deeper. PST, the KOTOR games and the BG series are just about the only D&D style RPGs where your party memebers were more than just pack mules. Not surprising, given that they were developed by the same two teams (Bioware and Black isle/Obsidian).
Just to clarify - "fascist" and "totalitarian" are not synonomous.
Fascism is a highly specific form of government, as listed by the OP. Nazi Germany is the most obvious and well known example.
Totalitarian dictatorships are much much broader, and much older. Stalinist Russia is an example; and there, fascism was villified. Communism and fascism don't mix terribly well.
I'd say you can't have fascism without edging into totalitarianism, but you can have totalitarian governments that are not fascist. Likewise, you can have theocratic totalitarianism without fascism (pre-war Afghanistan under the Taliban).
Right, because the only possible explanation for this must be that our entire theory of evolution must be out to lunch. No, it couldn't possibly be anything else/sarcasm.
Every single time the theory of evolution needs to be revised, you ID/creationist zealots pounce and proclaim that "evolution is disproved!!!" Bullshit.
A scientific theory is subject to revision when and if new data shows itself. That is in part why they're called theories - theory in science does not mean "guess", as ID proponants like to insinuate, but rather means an explanation for a phenominon that is as current as our understanding can make it. When we learn more, we go back and make changes to a theory to account for the new data.
Theories are almost never completely thrown out, but are often radically altered as we become more knowledgeable; Einstein didn't disprove Newton's theories about motion, but because of him we do know far more than Newton did in his time.
This does not disprove Darwin. Quit salavating; your bias is showing.
Just on your last point about level 1 auction house mules, those are not generally gold farmer related, at least not in WoW. I don't know why you made that assumption, but it's unfounded.
First, it's easier to use an alt to buy and sell things on the AH while my actual characters are in some other part of the world. The in game mail system makes it simple to transfer items to that mule and sell them there. Same idea applies when it comes to buying items; just log the mule in and bid/buyout an upgrade item. Second, it's convienient to have a character to store things on, and have an extra bank. My mule currently has leathermorking materials in storage while I wait for my LW character to reach a level when he can use them. And finally, there are mods out there like Auctioneer that require you to occasionally scan the AH in order to get a bead on how much certain items are generally bought and sold for.
Also, most gold farming accounts aren't owned by the person using the characters. They themselves are essentially doing a (poorly) paid job using company equipment, and they share that equipment with their coworkers. How would they be able to make mule characters for using the AH with when 1) they never log off and 2) they don't own the account?
I recall seeing world religion courses offered in high school. This would have been just a few years back, so it may be a matter of where and when you went to school.
The person you're replying to is right though, it's a sufficiently controversial subject that most people will tend to avoid it. The teachers who would want to teach such a course are invariably going to be the ones that won't be able to take an objective stance on the subject.
There is no law against examining religions in the public school system. There is only a law against endorsing any given religion by teaching public school students to beleive in it.
What the article basically says is that hardcore gamers can become fixated on games, and will respond to games as positive stimuli. A gaming "addict", according to TFA, will react with "longing" to still screens of a game they want to play. This is news?
What this basically boils down to is that games, like every other pleasureable activity in the world, can become psychologically addictive. This isn't exactly new information. And it isn't worth getting worked up over, though doubtlessly gamers will be offended by the comparison to junkies, and concerned parents types, or asshats that cater to them *cough, Jackass Thompson, cough*, will make this out to be some fucking national crisis.
Exactly. What's confusing people is the assumption that the hydrogen is being used to power the vehicle. The article summary is quite misleading.
Think of the hydrogen here as something a bit like a spark plug, though IIRC diesel engines have something a bit different from spark plugs. Spark plugs used stored power to initiate combustion, spending stored chemical energy in the battery to release more chemical energy fromm the fuel. The hydrogen here is using stored chemical energy to release more energy from the fuel than would normally be released. The chemical energy from the hydrogen doesn't power the vehicle, just like the chemical energy from the battery doesn't; it's the diesel fuel. The benefits are higher fuel effeciency.
You get the hydrogen for free basically, especially if the vehicle were equipped with more advanced ways to generate electricity like regenerative braking. This isn't in violation of thermodynamics or anything, it just squeezes a little more effeciency out of the system than you'd otherwise get.
Slashdot Mirror
Eh, I think you missed the GP's point.
Nanotech isn't a silver bullet anymore than, say, fusion would be. You'd be faced with massive energy requirements no matter what you do.
Let's say you've got advanced self-replicating nanotbots that are designed to liberate that carbon from Co2 to make copies of themselves with. Where are said bots getting their power? Co2 is fairly stable stuff after all; it's going to require alot of power just to break up enough molecules to make more nanotech, and presumably the energy requirements for nanobot (re)production aren't going to be trivial either.
Plants manage this via photosynthesis, but even then they use raw materials other than just Co2, and the sheer quantity of carbon we'd have to use up to make venus livable is massive.
Even if you solve that problem, how to you go about thinning the atmosphere? We're talking about getting rid of enough gas to make draining the earth's oceans seem trivial by comparison. Locking down Co2 into solids, and keeping it that way may not be possible, and if it is it may not be feasable.
Finally, there are issues beyond the planet's atmosphere to consider. It's too close to the sun, it's rotation period is too long, and IIRC it doesn't have a magnetic field. Any one of those problems would be a massive engineering undertaking to solve; try solving all of them.
Was that a joke? It's sometimes hard to tell on /.
The reason we're adapted to a 24 hour day is because earth has always had a 24 hour rotation period (more or less anyway, since IIRC it's slowed down slightly over many millions of years). It's simple evolutionary biology - we have X time per day to take advantage of, and thus we have become adapted to that many. If earth had a 40 hour day, we'd have adapted to that instead.
Actually, not "reflected", but rather "radiated".
The greenhouse effect does not affect the rate of heat absorbtion of the planet; instead it affects the rate of heat dissipation by slowing the rate at which heat radiates into space (IIRC, this has to do with the amount of IR radiation reflected by Co2 in the upper atmosphere).
Ice ages happen when the rate of reflection increases; glacial growth leads to more of the planet covered by reflective ice, leads to lower temperatures, leads to glacial growth (loop). That may have been what you were thinking of.
I suppose global warming might make less light reflect back into space if the glaciers recede further, in which case there would be actual reflection involved. But that would be a side effect if it did happen, and I don't know enough meteorology to make an educated guess.
"Well, let's see, you're getting an illegally modified copy of the game without compensating the owner. I'd call that theft. But, if you'd rather, you can always call it "copyright violation". I find that to be a little too unweildy, and would rather use the simpler term: stealing.
If you've bought the game, you already have a way to use it legitimately. Refusing to use that way and supporting pirates by using the cracked version of the game is still illegal. No matter how you try to spin it, it's still illegal. And, if you really did legally buy the game, it's also extremely pointless and stupid."
The usual arguement that copying = stealing revolves around the idea that the person using cracked software is therefor denying the creator of the game a legitimate sale. After all, if you download something, you aren't buying it. Assuming that the creator has already been compensated, which is the case if the person downloading the crack bought the game legitimately, then how is it stealing?
Sounds to me like you don't apply much critical thinking to your definition of the word "steal".
As for it being pointless and stupid, I'm currently replaying through Baldur's Gate, a game I bought back in high school. I've copied disks 1-5 onto my HD (purely for convieniece)m since the game + expansion has 6 disks, and you often need to swap disks when you zone. I can't do this with more recent games because of copy protection, unless of course I download a crack. I'd say cracking to get around copy protection schemes when you aren't engaging in piracy is perfectly fine morally, and a grey area legally in most countries (read: outside the US).
Hehe, well I did mention bad movie science as one of the things that bugged me :-)
Anyway, "parsecs" is the least of the movies problems in terms of science fiction accuracy. Having the ships make "jumps to lightspeed", and not take years to cross even short interestellar distances, or having "laser" tech that fires oval bolts moving at a few hundred meters/sec max would be the top of the list for me.
Misuse of the word parsec would be somewhere down aroundthe same level as having a giant, non-humanoid slug attracted to humanoid females.
"So basically, if all the nations on Earth would finally get their shit together and we somehow became a single pacifist society, that would work great. Until we met the aliens. Then we'd have to defend ourselves. That means we'd have to continue developing weapons in preparation for dealing with an unknown future external threat, or play a pretty big game of catch-up."
Take a look at Niven's Kzinti stories. It's remarkably close to what you're describing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kzinti
Humans adopt pacifism (to the point where they revise their written history to cover up earlier wars). Humans meet aliens, who are not pacifist. Humans relearn how to fight awfully fast, to avoid getting eaten.
What's funny is how the humans win - mankind relies on STL ships, and these ships use reaction drives (essentially thermonuclear rockets). A reaction drive is effective as a weapon in direct proportion to it's mass effeciency as a drive, which was the whole point of the first story in which kzinti appeared.
Hehe, can't beleive I got into this conversation... never knew the cannonical explanation. Ya learn something new every day.
Anyway, chain reaction or gaping hole, you would kinda expect safety systems. RL reactors typically won't fail or meltdown without signifigant compromise to their backups, and their backup's backups. If star wars were done as literary sci-fi, the author would probably have made the battle more complex in some way to make the idea of a fighter killing something planet sized beleivable.
See Larry Niven's Ringworld books as an example of a planet sized (larger, actually) construct that was almost destroyed - pages and pages are dedicated to explaining how things went wrong and why. Things like what systems failed, and why, where greed was involved, what things were sabotaged, why the people that should have been maintaining/protecting it died off, etc. It makes the idea of a massive construct being felled by something as simple as a solar flare seem plausible.
But like I said, its much easier to view star wars as fantasy. If you accept the idea that it's a standard fantasy epic, supported with sci-fi backdrops and themes, then realism doesn't matter so much. Fantasy stories aren't expected to be realistic (they'd be terribly boring if they were), they're merely expected to be internally consistant, thus making suspension of disbelief possible.
Which is where the whole ewok thing falls down. They aren't internally consistant with the other stuff in the movies. They're a great merchandising ploy, but they pretty much kill the whole idea that the empire is even remotely threatening. Both previous movies made it clear that the empire can't be defeated by brute force - ANH has them defeated by subtlety and sabotage, amd ESB has the rebels running away when attacked openly. But apparently the secret to killing stormtroopers, and their mechanized walking tanks, is using rocks and pointy sticks....
Yeah, but you'd figure they'd at least put a grill on the business end to cover the thing. Or failing that, put a U shaped kink in the line akin to a sink trap. Hell, any configuration other than a linear hole going from surface to core would have been safer - and if a bunch of underfunded rebels can find that weakness just by looking at the blueprints, you'd figure that a big military with a budget would have found out about them during beta testing :-)
Design by comitee at it's finest. That or ole' George couldn't be bothered to think up a more realistic excuse for making a planet sized ship go boom in one shot.
Eh, suspension of disbelief only goes so far.
It's been awhile since I watched the movies. I do remember that it wasn't just the ewoks that bothered me, in terms of suspension of disbelief. Most of what I found hard to swallow about the series was either science/engineering stuff ("laser" weapons that shoot bolts, a planet sized spacecraft with an unprotected vent leading down into the reactor), or plot holes. However, those can be excused if you take a step back and look at star wars as fantasy, rather than sci-fi. It may be unrealistic, but it's mostly internally consistant.
What bothers people about ewoks is that they break from that internal consistancy. Here we have a mighty empire, ruling thousands of systems, with energy weapons, walking tanks and armoured soldiers - and they get their asses kicked by teddy bears with spears. How the hell are we supposed to see the empire as being this massive military superpower, when pointy sticks are all it takes to kick their asses?
I think most people would have been fine with ewoks if they'd at least been carrying stolen imperial guns or something. It still would have been silly, but suspending disbelief would have been simpler.
Alternatively, designing a multiplayer RPG to be something other than a grind would also help. I suspect that it's the heavy reliance on time and money sinks that really screw these games over - for weak willed gamers, buying gold/characters/plat/whatever is the path of least resistance when compared to grinding for hours on end.
The problem is that the appeal of single player RPGs doesn't translate well into a multiplayer environment. Most developers try to fatten up their MMOs with grinding content, designed to keep players on a leveling treadmill for money and experience. As long as this remains normal, the games will likely suffer from gold selling and the like.
Also, a skills based system without character transfers would still be open to account trading, even if the EULA specifies otherwise - as long as the seller can trade a username and password for real life cash, they can't be stopped.
Agreed. I'm sure the main reason for the numbers favouring Sony over Microsoft is the fact that non-techies don't understand the phrase "rootkit", but they do understand the phrase "fuck, it broke".
Ay, you've got a point. But the basic principle can be applied more generally - for instance (for corporations) "my right to make a buck stops where your right to a safe work environment begins".
The main problem isn't that libertarian principles can't be adapted for the real world - the problem is more that libertarianism is untested and often compromised when embraced by politicians.
The basic principal libertarians tend to apply when it comes to people hurting each other is "my right to swing my fist ends where your face begins". Essentially, the assumption is that an ideal government would still have law and order (based on protection people's rights), but would be expected not to interfere in people's live beyond that.
Now, if you meant that a libertarian government wouldn't be able to control things like corporate misbehavior, or that small, low-tax government wouldn't be able to provide policing as well as it can now, then perhaps you're right. But if you seriously thing that mist libertarians want zero government at all, then you need to check your facts. Like the other posters said libertarian =! anarchist.
The best summation of the two main American political parties I've seen goes something like this: Both parties are conservative reactionaries. The Democrats are conservatives who want to drag America back to the 1960's and the Republicans are conservatives who want to drag America back to the 50's.
Neither party is in favour of individual liberty or rights. Neither favours smaller government or reduced government spending. They differ only in what past era they wish to recreate.
You might want to take a look at this:
http://www.team-gizka.org/
Most of the material that was cut at the last minute was still available on the disk (if you extracted the sound files, there were whole trees of dialouge that was left out of the retail game). Just about the only thing that was left unfinished before being cut was the droid planet; everything else exists in some form.
These folks have been trying to reintroduce the removed content via player-made mod. They aren't done yet, but if you check the progress reports, they're getting there.
Another vote for PST as the best RPG :-)
Definately loved the character side quests - finding out more about your companions made the game feel alot deeper. PST, the KOTOR games and the BG series are just about the only D&D style RPGs where your party memebers were more than just pack mules. Not surprising, given that they were developed by the same two teams (Bioware and Black isle/Obsidian).
Jack Thompson, I presume?
Just to clarify - "fascist" and "totalitarian" are not synonomous.
Fascism is a highly specific form of government, as listed by the OP. Nazi Germany is the most obvious and well known example.
Totalitarian dictatorships are much much broader, and much older. Stalinist Russia is an example; and there, fascism was villified. Communism and fascism don't mix terribly well.
I'd say you can't have fascism without edging into totalitarianism, but you can have totalitarian governments that are not fascist. Likewise, you can have theocratic totalitarianism without fascism (pre-war Afghanistan under the Taliban).
Bah, on slashdot? I think you overestimate the amount of subtlety here :-) If he is being witty, he's doing too good of a job imitating the trolls.
Right, because the only possible explanation for this must be that our entire theory of evolution must be out to lunch. No, it couldn't possibly be anything else /sarcasm.
Every single time the theory of evolution needs to be revised, you ID/creationist zealots pounce and proclaim that "evolution is disproved!!!" Bullshit.
A scientific theory is subject to revision when and if new data shows itself. That is in part why they're called theories - theory in science does not mean "guess", as ID proponants like to insinuate, but rather means an explanation for a phenominon that is as current as our understanding can make it. When we learn more, we go back and make changes to a theory to account for the new data.
Theories are almost never completely thrown out, but are often radically altered as we become more knowledgeable; Einstein didn't disprove Newton's theories about motion, but because of him we do know far more than Newton did in his time.
This does not disprove Darwin. Quit salavating; your bias is showing.
Just on your last point about level 1 auction house mules, those are not generally gold farmer related, at least not in WoW. I don't know why you made that assumption, but it's unfounded.
First, it's easier to use an alt to buy and sell things on the AH while my actual characters are in some other part of the world. The in game mail system makes it simple to transfer items to that mule and sell them there. Same idea applies when it comes to buying items; just log the mule in and bid/buyout an upgrade item. Second, it's convienient to have a character to store things on, and have an extra bank. My mule currently has leathermorking materials in storage while I wait for my LW character to reach a level when he can use them. And finally, there are mods out there like Auctioneer that require you to occasionally scan the AH in order to get a bead on how much certain items are generally bought and sold for.
Also, most gold farming accounts aren't owned by the person using the characters. They themselves are essentially doing a (poorly) paid job using company equipment, and they share that equipment with their coworkers. How would they be able to make mule characters for using the AH with when 1) they never log off and 2) they don't own the account?
Only if they dress in full pirate regalia. Yarr! :-)
I recall seeing world religion courses offered in high school. This would have been just a few years back, so it may be a matter of where and when you went to school.
The person you're replying to is right though, it's a sufficiently controversial subject that most people will tend to avoid it. The teachers who would want to teach such a course are invariably going to be the ones that won't be able to take an objective stance on the subject.
There is no law against examining religions in the public school system. There is only a law against endorsing any given religion by teaching public school students to beleive in it.
What the article basically says is that hardcore gamers can become fixated on games, and will respond to games as positive stimuli. A gaming "addict", according to TFA, will react with "longing" to still screens of a game they want to play. This is news?
What this basically boils down to is that games, like every other pleasureable activity in the world, can become psychologically addictive. This isn't exactly new information. And it isn't worth getting worked up over, though doubtlessly gamers will be offended by the comparison to junkies, and concerned parents types, or asshats that cater to them *cough, Jackass Thompson, cough*, will make this out to be some fucking national crisis.
Exactly. What's confusing people is the assumption that the hydrogen is being used to power the vehicle. The article summary is quite misleading.
Think of the hydrogen here as something a bit like a spark plug, though IIRC diesel engines have something a bit different from spark plugs. Spark plugs used stored power to initiate combustion, spending stored chemical energy in the battery to release more chemical energy fromm the fuel. The hydrogen here is using stored chemical energy to release more energy from the fuel than would normally be released. The chemical energy from the hydrogen doesn't power the vehicle, just like the chemical energy from the battery doesn't; it's the diesel fuel. The benefits are higher fuel effeciency.
You get the hydrogen for free basically, especially if the vehicle were equipped with more advanced ways to generate electricity like regenerative braking. This isn't in violation of thermodynamics or anything, it just squeezes a little more effeciency out of the system than you'd otherwise get.