Attaching new ideas to the existing system was part of the D&D tradition. Hell, my campaign is run with my own 400 page typeset customized version of the Cyclopedia.
Dnd 4.0 is not attaching ideas-- it is a new product that uses the old name. It is WoTC bringing the MtG concept to D&D. Dnd4.0 is about as much D&D as Gurps is.
You have to remember- this is a group where a majority (despite a history of black (i.e. from slaves) intellectuals) think that learning and education are "white" and bad and so they choose to speak poorly and avoid education.
It's crazy... knowing math is not a white thing. When a black person is a victim of racism, it is not because they traced their lineage from slaves-- it's because of the way they look and sound.
I find it fascinating that other libertarians also feel like the democratic party has become closer to libertarianism than the republican party is.
I now view the republican party as the party of corporatism (a flavor of fascism), oligarchy, lost personal freedom to live as I want, irresponsible spending (wildly more so than... say bill clinton was), and foreign intervention.
And I was a reagan republican- brought into voting by him basically.
I personally was a ron paul supporter, tho I my current preferred vote would be obama->mccain->clinton. I am pretty sure that Clinton is *unelectable* against McCain short of him dying of old age before the election.
A ton of republicans crossed over last night and voted for clinton on Rush Limbaugh's suggestion. They are all crowing about it on the Laura Ingram show this morning. And none of them will vote for clinton in the real election.
It's a very cynical and effective move. It drains both campaigns of cash- keeps both candidates hammering at each other- and may even force a brokered convention (which I view as a good thing).
I agree that working families have to go home- but i also say a lot of republicans didn't stick around for the democratic caucus and it is my opinion that the caucus's are closer to what the popular vote would be without Rush's brilliant, if twisted idea. Voting insincerely undercuts the entire process. In this case, many votes for Clinton were really votes against her and for McCain.
It's not really wondering on talk radio this morning. A republican from butler county said they had 30,000 republican voters cross over and every other caller is a republican claiming to have crossed over and voted clinton.
I think the Texas Democratic Caucus's are giving a better picture of how the democrats voted with the possible exception of the 200 mile mexico edge of texas and San Antonio which probably genuinely went to clinton.
Basically, every republican county except dallas, clinton took by wide margins with a historically high "democratic" turnout. There are many reports of the democratic caucus's being held outside because there was insufficient room for them inside.
It looks like Rush Limbaugh still has the mojo. The republicans are going to be able to make a mockery of the democratic primary now that McCain has been selected. I swore I would never vote for clinton (My pick would be obama, then mccain, then..well.. not clinton). But this tactic has me reconsidering.
As a long term player of the game- it seems to me that what they are calling Dnd4.0 is basically a new product cashing in on the D&D name.
It may be a good game, it may be a bad game, it is most certainly another attempt to mine your wallet without adding as much value as the money it will take out.
This article focuses on modern scientific research on the origin of life. For religious beliefs about the creation of life, see creation myth.
--- I would put it this way... "Assuming no supernatural, unmeasurable, unrepeatable life creation happened-- then given the known facts about chemistry, geology, etc., how could life have started?"
Of course, after a few weeks of this, most scientists just say "given the known facts about chemistry, geology, etc., how could life have started?" because literally ANYTHING is possible if you grant that supernatural miracles are possible.
The sun could blink out of existence for a day. The earth could be teleported to another galaxy. Every man on earth could become female instantaneously. The entire planet could be submerged in water which then somehow goes away somewhere. Or... water could pile up in the middle east higher than the mountains but not flood the rest of the earth. Or a divine holy being could order killing all the men and old people in a village and taking the young women (i.e. raping them) as wives because it was a good thing since the divine being ordered it. Or a huge canyon could form in the pacific ocean allowing us to walk from california to australia.
ANYTHING is possible-- you can't rule out ANYTHING when you allow supernatural miracles... so to simplify things (and at least because supernatural miracles are so damn rare- and real big ones like those reported in the various old holy books haven't happened for over 1,000 years) scientists just assume they are not going to happen and that good science can only be based on repeatable, measurable, i.e. real, natural (not supernatural), things...
After verifying basic facts recorded by scientists in my labs. After reading about what the scientific method is.
I have *faith*, (trust without verifying) that most "scientific" statements can (and WILL) be measured and reproduced by someone else if the truth or falsity of those statements matter. I do not actually try to verify them myself any more. That faith and trust was earned-- not crammed into my head when I was too young to defend myself.
I know some scientists do lie about their data from time to time and I still generally have faith. I know that they are also wrong (but not lying) a lot too. But if what they say matters, it will be verified or contradicted by others sooner or later. As a result, for any mature field of study, only the edges are really subject to doubt.
I have "faith" that evolution has been hammered at hard enough that the essential facts of the scientific theory are true. But it is faith-- it is not based on exhaustively reading, rechecking, and retesting the basic facts myself. I know the basics but I'm not an evolutionary biologist or somesuchlike. And I feel that I am justified in having faith in it. I believe it the facts produced by science in a faith-like way.
I think a lot of people are like me- they have faith in science-- and it is the faith of dealing with someone that has been truthful to you for many years so that you no longer stop to verify everything they say because it would just be a waste of time.
A good D&D game combines sitting around talking with friends about movies, school, your life with * puzzle solving * ensemble acting * lots of calculating * making moral choices that give you practice for real life * or just reveling in being bad since it doesn't really count * painting * collecting * drawing * writing stories * telling jokes * a lot of laughter-- sometimes so hard you can't breath.
Even a bad game has most of these-- but often drops the acting part. The worst are where the referee seems themselves competing with the players instead of entertaining them since they can always win by adding more foes or an unsolvable puzzle.
Almost all my friends flowed from D&D-- even the sporting friends came through a D&D connection.
My leadership job success flowed in part from EQ experience running large organizations (i.e. guilds) and that came from a D&D friend and from D&D.
The relatively drug-free, bright, success-oriented crowd of nerdy types I was with in high school and in college all came from D&D. Heck- my ex-wife was in my first D&D group for as long as we were married.
Not sure where i would be if I had not heard about the "d&d room" at Spectrum Con '88.
Evolution is an observed process (including the development of new species of insects in the last 100 years). Evolution is driven by random mutations (observed), natural selection (observed), sexual selection (observed) and other selection pressures. A good example for you would be this: Catholics have a strong pressure to produce lots of children from people who find it easy to believe in god.
Over time, more of the population is likely to believe in god because of this group. A lot of atheists tend to produce less or no children. So, over time, they will become a smaller part of the population. After as little as 500 years, you might have a population mostly made of followers of belief systems that promote having lots of kids.
Now that atheist types and homosexual types are not forced to hide (by fear of death) among the religious population and procreate, over time, they are likely to become less common.
The reason I BELIEVE in evolution is that by the scientific method, it is based on hard facts. Theories based on those facts have been used to predict unknown things. When observed and measured, those unknown things turned out to follow the prediction of the theories (most recently genetic frequencies and the morphology of that fossil up in canada).
On the other hand...
I hope we can both agree- God can't be measured. Science does not say he exists or not. Science is based on measurable reality. Hot, Cold, Light, Dark, Hard, Soft, Acid, Akaline. God is none of these things.
The only reason science (and evolution) bothers you is that when we get around to measuring things, the hard, cold facts contradict a few chapters of your religious books. And you are willing to lie to try and protect those chapters. You are willing to pass laws that pi is 3.0 instead of 3.1415 because of a biblical verse. You are willing to kill people because of a biblical verse. You are willing to behave extremely immorally in order to protect your religious verses. To me that says more about your faith in your version of god (who should not be threatened by facts).
A final fact... there are something like 1,000 religions-- at least 10 have over 100 million followers. Most of these religions are incompatible with each other. Yet each religion has many followers with strong faith (strong enough to die for, to lie for, to forgo sex for) and how the hell can any of us choose which of those faiths might be the right one?
Let's keep schools for *facts*. And the theory of evolution is just as much a fact these days as the theory of gravity is.
A central problem with the cylons would be this...
Once Cain's Six dies within range of a rebirth machine, then ALL Six's from that point on will have suffered those experiences. And any other similar bad experience (fall in love with someone, have your heart broken- then get reborn).
I get the impression existing six's do not share thoughts by telepathy but if so- the problem is even worse.
If any individual cylon does something bad and corrupting-- then everyone of that model is equally corrupted.
If another country of humans destroyed 97% of the citizens of my country, I would have no hesitation killing 100% of them.
The rest I agree with tho I think I'd be willing to torture on the "Nuke in the City" morality test.
The medical experimentation on humans by the Cylons clearly qualifies as torture. Things done to the humans during the occupation by cylons clearly qualify as torture (and very insidious disturbing psychological torture at that).
The fact is that a lot of cylons act really evil on screen so why are you forgetting that?
The "comic book code" against killing and doing bad things is wonderful until you are genuinely in a situation of "total war". Once you are in total war, then literally anything goes against such an enemy.
read "the case for christ"... then read the critiques of it.
the combination seems to be locking down my lack of faith despite recent troubling times for me.
it would be so wonderful to gain faith and basically go insane and be happy the rest of my life because there was an imaginary being out there to take care of me.
but I just can't do it.
The only decent argument that didn't feel like a strawman was the "adverse argument" witness. "case" doesn't include any real critics but it feels kinda nice at first- until you read the critiques..
One of the absolute stupidest move they could pull was to fly mexican flags and talk about taking the land back for mexico. That got a lot of people's attention about how many of them were here.
They started enforcing the law in oklahoma and arizon and now texas has been flooded with 400k illegal immigrants who left those states because no one would hire them.
It's that simple guys.
Enforce the laws against business owners (here is your huge fine or jail time) and we go back to needing a small border force to stop a tiny amount of border crossers (vs the estimated 4 MILLION crossing in 2006 of whom 850k were caught and deported).
I agree and I say advise every student that they should intern.
What businesses should realize is that students have a lot of energy but no experience and a lot of them lack the grit to finish when it gets boring.
A good seasoned program + 2 interns is a good combination. The interns do not argue with the good programmer all the time or try to put their "stamp" on the project. They just code a LOT and learn a LOT from the seasoned hand.
It is so sad, here in 2008, to STILL see companies pay $150 an hour to a consulting firm for recent college grads who lack any experience in thinking ahead 5 years.
I'm a good programmer- but there ARE superstars. I've known a few. They tend to be fanatics and don't work so well in teams. They write superior code, quickly. They are not so great on huge projects (unless paired with novices as above) because they get on each others nerves.
A good team needs one superstar with authority to decide things, a few solid programmers to catch the mistakes the superstar does make, and an equal amount of rookies.
However, I believe that those in control of society are getting better at dealing with civil disobedience.
I think they used to be embarrassed by it but are no longer. I also think they are better at spinning it, or suppressing reporting of it, or negating it's impact (in part by say, smearing the person being civilly disobedient.)
Slashdot Mirror
Attaching new ideas to the existing system was part of the D&D tradition. Hell, my campaign is run with my own 400 page typeset customized version of the Cyclopedia.
Dnd 4.0 is not attaching ideas-- it is a new product that uses the old name. It is WoTC bringing the MtG concept to D&D. Dnd4.0 is about as much D&D as Gurps is.
You have to remember- this is a group where a majority (despite a history of black (i.e. from slaves) intellectuals) think that learning and education are "white" and bad and so they choose to speak poorly and avoid education.
It's crazy... knowing math is not a white thing. When a black person is a victim of racism, it is not because they traced their lineage from slaves-- it's because of the way they look and sound.
I find it fascinating that other libertarians also feel like the democratic party has become closer to libertarianism than the republican party is.
I now view the republican party as the party of corporatism (a flavor of fascism), oligarchy, lost personal freedom to live as I want, irresponsible spending (wildly more so than... say bill clinton was), and foreign intervention.
And I was a reagan republican- brought into voting by him basically.
I personally was a ron paul supporter, tho I my current preferred vote would be obama->mccain->clinton. I am pretty sure that Clinton is *unelectable* against McCain short of him dying of old age before the election.
A ton of republicans crossed over last night and voted for clinton on Rush Limbaugh's suggestion. They are all crowing about it on the Laura Ingram show this morning. And none of them will vote for clinton in the real election.
It's a very cynical and effective move. It drains both campaigns of cash- keeps both candidates hammering at each other- and may even force a brokered convention (which I view as a good thing).
I agree that working families have to go home- but i also say a lot of republicans didn't stick around for the democratic caucus and it is my opinion that the caucus's are closer to what the popular vote would be without Rush's brilliant, if twisted idea. Voting insincerely undercuts the entire process. In this case, many votes for Clinton were really votes against her and for McCain.
It's not really wondering on talk radio this morning. A republican from butler county said they had 30,000 republican voters cross over and every other caller is a republican claiming to have crossed over and voted clinton.
..well.. not clinton). But this tactic has me reconsidering.
I think the Texas Democratic Caucus's are giving a better picture of how the democrats voted with the possible exception of the 200 mile mexico edge of texas and San Antonio which probably genuinely went to clinton.
Basically, every republican county except dallas, clinton took by wide margins with a historically high "democratic" turnout. There are many reports of the democratic caucus's being held outside because there was insufficient room for them inside.
It looks like Rush Limbaugh still has the mojo. The republicans are going to be able to make a mockery of the democratic primary now that McCain has been selected. I swore I would never vote for clinton (My pick would be obama, then mccain, then
As a long term player of the game- it seems to me that what they are calling Dnd4.0 is basically a new product cashing in on the D&D name.
It may be a good game, it may be a bad game, it is most certainly another attempt to mine your wallet without adding as much value as the money it will take out.
Thanks!
I am a bit slap-dash in these slash-dot posts at times.
I also used to say "exacerbate" as "exerbate" to the annoyance of my friends.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis
As the article says...
This article focuses on modern scientific research on the origin of life. For religious beliefs about the creation of life, see creation myth.
---
I would put it this way... "Assuming no supernatural, unmeasurable, unrepeatable life creation happened-- then given the known facts about chemistry, geology, etc., how could life have started?"
Of course, after a few weeks of this, most scientists just say "given the known facts about chemistry, geology, etc., how could life have started?" because literally ANYTHING is possible if you grant that supernatural miracles are possible.
The sun could blink out of existence for a day. The earth could be teleported to another galaxy. Every man on earth could become female instantaneously. The entire planet could be submerged in water which then somehow goes away somewhere. Or... water could pile up in the middle east higher than the mountains but not flood the rest of the earth. Or a divine holy being could order killing all the men and old people in a village and taking the young women (i.e. raping them) as wives because it was a good thing since the divine being ordered it. Or a huge canyon could form in the pacific ocean allowing us to walk from california to australia.
ANYTHING is possible-- you can't rule out ANYTHING when you allow supernatural miracles... so to simplify things (and at least because supernatural miracles are so damn rare- and real big ones like those reported in the various old holy books haven't happened for over 1,000 years) scientists just assume they are not going to happen and that good science can only be based on repeatable, measurable, i.e. real, natural (not supernatural), things...
I disagree to this extent.
After verifying basic facts recorded by scientists in my labs.
After reading about what the scientific method is.
I have *faith*, (trust without verifying) that most "scientific" statements can (and WILL) be measured and reproduced by someone else if the truth or falsity of those statements matter. I do not actually try to verify them myself any more. That faith and trust was earned-- not crammed into my head when I was too young to defend myself.
I know some scientists do lie about their data from time to time and I still generally have faith. I know that they are also wrong (but not lying) a lot too. But if what they say matters, it will be verified or contradicted by others sooner or later. As a result, for any mature field of study, only the edges are really subject to doubt.
I have "faith" that evolution has been hammered at hard enough that the essential facts of the scientific theory are true. But it is faith-- it is not based on exhaustively reading, rechecking, and retesting the basic facts myself. I know the basics but I'm not an evolutionary biologist or somesuchlike. And I feel that I am justified in having faith in it. I believe it the facts produced by science in a faith-like way.
I think a lot of people are like me- they have faith in science-- and it is the faith of dealing with someone that has been truthful to you for many years so that you no longer stop to verify everything they say because it would just be a waste of time.
A good D&D game combines sitting around talking with friends about movies, school, your life with
* puzzle solving
* ensemble acting
* lots of calculating
* making moral choices that give you practice for real life
* or just reveling in being bad since it doesn't really count
* painting
* collecting
* drawing
* writing stories
* telling jokes
* a lot of laughter-- sometimes so hard you can't breath.
Even a bad game has most of these-- but often drops the acting part. The worst are where the referee seems themselves competing with the players instead of entertaining them since they can always win by adding more foes or an unsolvable puzzle.
Almost all my friends flowed from D&D-- even the sporting friends came through a D&D connection.
My leadership job success flowed in part from EQ experience running large organizations (i.e. guilds) and that came from a D&D friend and from D&D.
The relatively drug-free, bright, success-oriented crowd of nerdy types I was with in high school and in college all came from D&D. Heck- my ex-wife was in my first D&D group for as long as we were married.
Not sure where i would be if I had not heard about the "d&d room" at Spectrum Con '88.
hehehe.
Okay... I'll bite.
Evolution is not the reason we are here.
That is ambigenisis.
Evolution is an observed process (including the development of new species of insects in the last 100 years).
Evolution is driven by random mutations (observed), natural selection (observed), sexual selection (observed) and other selection pressures. A good example for you would be this: Catholics have a strong pressure to produce lots of children from people who find it easy to believe in god.
Over time, more of the population is likely to believe in god because of this group. A lot of atheists tend to produce less or no children. So, over time, they will become a smaller part of the population. After as little as 500 years, you might have a population mostly made of followers of belief systems that promote having lots of kids.
Now that atheist types and homosexual types are not forced to hide (by fear of death) among the religious population and procreate, over time, they are likely to become less common.
The reason I BELIEVE in evolution is that by the scientific method, it is based on hard facts. Theories based on those facts have been used to predict unknown things. When observed and measured, those unknown things turned out to follow the prediction of the theories (most recently genetic frequencies and the morphology of that fossil up in canada).
On the other hand...
I hope we can both agree- God can't be measured. Science does not say he exists or not. Science is based on measurable reality. Hot, Cold, Light, Dark, Hard, Soft, Acid, Akaline. God is none of these things.
The only reason science (and evolution) bothers you is that when we get around to measuring things, the hard, cold facts contradict a few chapters of your religious books. And you are willing to lie to try and protect those chapters. You are willing to pass laws that pi is 3.0 instead of 3.1415 because of a biblical verse. You are willing to kill people because of a biblical verse. You are willing to behave extremely immorally in order to protect your religious verses. To me that says more about your faith in your version of god (who should not be threatened by facts).
A final fact... there are something like 1,000 religions-- at least 10 have over 100 million followers. Most of these religions are incompatible with each other. Yet each religion has many followers with strong faith (strong enough to die for, to lie for, to forgo sex for) and how the hell can any of us choose which of those faiths might be the right one?
Let's keep schools for *facts*. And the theory of evolution is just as much a fact these days as the theory of gravity is.
But if you pick a point of reference sufficiently far away, then wouldn't it appear essentially the same throughout your area?
So for a stardate, they could pick a quasar in another galaxy far above the plane of the milky way galaxy.
Welcome to Slashdot.
Interesting that over and under rated not not meta moderated.
Oddly, I recently started getting 10 mod points when I moderate.
I must have passed some threshhold for fair moderation or years moderating.
A central problem with the cylons would be this...
Once Cain's Six dies within range of a rebirth machine, then ALL Six's from that point on will have suffered those experiences. And any other similar bad experience (fall in love with someone, have your heart broken- then get reborn).
I get the impression existing six's do not share thoughts by telepathy but if so- the problem is even worse.
If any individual cylon does something bad and corrupting-- then everyone of that model is equally corrupted.
If another country of humans destroyed 97% of the citizens of my country, I would have no hesitation killing 100% of them.
The rest I agree with tho I think I'd be willing to torture on the "Nuke in the City" morality test.
The medical experimentation on humans by the Cylons clearly qualifies as torture. Things done to the humans during the occupation by cylons clearly qualify as torture (and very insidious disturbing psychological torture at that).
The fact is that a lot of cylons act really evil on screen so why are you forgetting that?
The "comic book code" against killing and doing bad things is wonderful until you are genuinely in a situation of "total war". Once you are in total war, then literally anything goes against such an enemy.
read "the case for christ"... then read the critiques of it.
the combination seems to be locking down my lack of faith despite recent troubling times for me.
it would be so wonderful to gain faith and basically go insane and be happy the rest of my life because there was an imaginary being out there to take care of me.
but I just can't do it.
The only decent argument that didn't feel like a strawman was the "adverse argument" witness. "case" doesn't include any real critics but it feels kinda nice at first- until you read the critiques..
And, you must admit, among the hispanics as well.
One of the absolute stupidest move they could pull was to fly mexican flags and talk about taking the land back for mexico. That got a lot of people's attention about how many of them were here.
They started enforcing the law in oklahoma and arizon and now texas has been flooded with 400k illegal immigrants who left those states because no one would hire them.
It's that simple guys.
Enforce the laws against business owners (here is your huge fine or jail time) and we go back to needing a small border force to stop a tiny amount of border crossers (vs the estimated 4 MILLION crossing in 2006 of whom 850k were caught and deported).
If energy is not scarce, then the earth will melt down to slag.
We can only radiate so much energy off to space-- the rest goes into the planet.
I agree and I say advise every student that they should intern.
What businesses should realize is that students have a lot of energy but no experience and a lot of them lack the grit to finish when it gets boring.
A good seasoned program + 2 interns is a good combination. The interns do not argue with the good programmer all the time or try to put their "stamp" on the project. They just code a LOT and learn a LOT from the seasoned hand.
It is so sad, here in 2008, to STILL see companies pay $150 an hour to a consulting firm for recent college grads who lack any experience in thinking ahead 5 years.
I'm a good programmer- but there ARE superstars. I've known a few. They tend to be fanatics and don't work so well in teams. They write superior code, quickly. They are not so great on huge projects (unless paired with novices as above) because they get on each others nerves.
A good team needs one superstar with authority to decide things, a few solid programmers to catch the mistakes the superstar does make, and an equal amount of rookies.
Give the ability to control that animitronically over the internet...
And you could also save the data stream so you could replay a session you enjoyed.
Main problem with real dolls for the purely physical side is they can't move effectively yet.
sales tax on annual gross sales.
except for hollywood's funny accounting- but i do not think even they mess with taxing authorities.
So basically Jeffrey A. Kimmel said the following...
PLEASE WIDELY PUBLICIZE MY CLIENTS AND CAUSE UNENDING DOS ATTACKS ON THEM.
Thank you,
Jeffrey A. Kimmel
Meister Seelig & Fein, LLP
140 E. 45th St., 19th Fl.
New York, NY 10017
(212) 655-3578
I think your answer is more plausible.
It prevents any anonymous tips during that period.
I agree with your point.
However, I believe that those in control of society are getting better at dealing with civil disobedience.
I think they used to be embarrassed by it but are no longer. I also think they are better at spinning it, or suppressing reporting of it, or negating it's impact (in part by say, smearing the person being civilly disobedient.)