Do you really, really, believe that Bin Laden decided to spend several years planning the 9/11 attack, sacrifice several people, kill thousand of innocent people just because he wanted, without a reason? Do you really be that terrorist are the "bad guy" that decides to kill random people
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers. He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated. He hates the West, all of it, regardless of whether or not a given subsection of it is involved in Iraq or not. America is the "Big Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan" and anybody who isn't actively trying to destroy both nations is the enemy of Islam.
You people amaze me. You are able to throw your hands up in the air at the oddball decisions of President Bush, and say, "Well, he's a religious weirdo, who knows what those people think," but you're attempting to explain the actions of terrorists through logic. "We deserve it," for some reason. "We caused this. This is our fault, if we hadn't (done whatever), then they wouldn't have done this."
No. Bullshit. They tried to knock over the World Trade Center in 1993 when Bill Clinton was president. Why? They bombed the USS Cole during Clinton's term. Why? They slaughtered hundreds at our embassies in Africa. Why? President Clinton mostly ignored them, why did they still want to get us? All because of Gulf 1? If there's no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, why in the world would these terrorists be so upset about Iraq?
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11? How hard would it be for just ONE al Qaeda sympathizer or sleeper cell operative to build a bomb and blow up the food court at a shopping ball? Or a zoo? An amusement park? A sporting event? A crowded bus? Why? NOT ONE. Not one in 4 years. There's almost 300,000,000 people in our borders, and NOT ONE OF THEM has done this. Why?
I actually don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas. (1) They're busy dying in Iraq (2) Our new security policies after 9/11 have been successful on some level (3) They get to America and begin to live here and experience our country while planning their assault, and after experiencing freedom, stability, and economic success, their urge to blow themselves to smithereens or get arrested while trying to both other people up abates and eventually vanishes. Why destroy this? It's paradise compared to the disease-infested cess pools they came from.
Terrorist don't act randomly and kill people without a reason, why would they?
Yes, they do, because they're irrational people. Rational people do not blow themselves up. Rational people do not blow themselves up in an effort to kill other people because they are of a specific religion. You give them too much credit.
They're not stupid.
Yes, they are. Stupid, and brainwashed.
Yes, there was something that EEUU did that triggered the 9/11, go and learn some history, you'll find that the collaboration in the WWII doesn't neccesarily means that EEUU is always the "good guy".
What history? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
The government creates new programs to fix their old programs which have created new problems when they failed to fix some other program. Instead of just cancelling the offending program, we introduce a new program to deal with it.
It is not the job of government to solve all of our problems. More government is almost never the answer to any problem. The problem here is the credit system and lack of accountability on the part of businesses for identity fraud. The banking system doesn't suffer nearly as badly from these problems. Why is that? It's the credit system, which is one of the few areas of the American economy that is under-regulated.
The creators of the Bill of Rights were largely enlightenment-types that didn't adhere to any organized religion.
Modern liberalism bears little resemblance to enlightenment liberalism. This is largely because modern American leftists tend to embrace collectivism, and englightment liberalism tended to focus more on the mobility and elbow space of the individual. The foundations of the country are based in creating a document that defined the limits of government, not a basis from which to expand it's reach into our lives. Libertarians most closely resemble the mindset of Enlightenment liberals. The next-closest would be American conservatives, and then American liberals. American conservatives are trending left on fiscal issues and moving further right on social issues, which is maddening since fiscal conservative policy and liberal social policy most closely resemble the foundations of Enlightenment liberalism. With the Republicans abandoning that space and the Democrats making no effort to fill it, it's a sad time for anybody who gives a shit about their rights or their lives.
To use your terms, the nutbars who led the Revolution were definitely the "hippies" of their day as compared to the "fundie" royalists.
No, because the people who founded this country were intelligent political thinkers who believed in individual freedoms mitigated by individual responsibility. Hippies were rebellious kids who wanted to do whatever the fuck they want regardless of the consequenes.
Just because you wish the framers were conservative Christians doesn't make it so; they were, as compared to their contemporaries, closer to being radical left-wing freaks.
This is utterly inaccurate if you're trying to compare them to the modern left-wing in American politics. At the time, they were contemporary liberals and left-wingers, and certainly radicals in their way. But they bear little resemblance to modern-day leftists and liberal leaders. If your goal is to suggest that modern day leftists "have it right" since our founding fathers were leftists, I have to disagree. I mostly agree with the principles laid out in the Federalist papers and the tenents of Enlightenment liberalism and individualism. The American Democratic party embraces almost none of those things (nor does the Republican party anymore). But I agree that one thing they certainly were not is God-fearing Christian men. They may have paid lip service to it, but it was nothing more than that.
Then don't go there. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you. Some of the best equipment comes from the Honor system. I play 2 days a week for a few hours and manage to maintain a medium rank with some decent gear. Play and do what's fun. No, you won't be quite as uber and people who DO get into this kind of stuff, but so what? I hate big dungeon raids and I wouldn't go on one of these even if I did have time. I've never done Onyxia or MC and I never plan to. Don't use the content that you dislike, but lots of people DO like it, so dont' get bent out of shape that BLizzard is adding it. And for those of you bitching that WoW doesn't innovate, well you gave up on the game too soon.
The BBC is reporting that people don't see downloading copyrighted material as theft, despite concerted efforts by the games, music and movie industries to convince them otherwise
You guys act like no other news sources have a political bias in their reporting.
When a poll showed Senator Kerry ahead of President Bush in the 2004 Presidential elections, CNN reported, "Kerry pulls ahead of Bush in latest poll."
When President Bush reclaimed the lead, they reported, "Bush apparantly leads Kerry."
Now, this was an isolated incident. A qualifier like "apparantly" was not used in any other poll reporting for either candidate being ahead. But it happened, it continues to happen, and it will happen again.
We just don't care here because we're mostly liberals and what seems to a right-winger as a "liberal bias" looks to us like the objective truth. It matches our worldview, why would we question it or suspect there of being any bias?
This same phenomenon is responsible for conservative embrasure of FoxNews. Much of what they read on Fox matches their worldview, and other news outlets appear, to them, to be absurdly biased.
In other words, it's a matter of perspective, and frankly I've found Fox's reporting to be no more egregiously biased than any other. I'm sure somebody will respond to this post with 15 examples of horrible, unforgivable sins of journalism by Fox. I'll be there's hundreds that could be cited in the last 30 days alone. But comparing how Fox spins its stories to how any other large news outlets spins it's stories, I really haven't seen that Fox's trangressions are measurably less forgivable.
And "spin" usually comes in the form of reporting selected truth and omitted selected other truth. Of accurately reporting one side of an issue and often ignoring the opposit side. And the worst is when anchors and journalists recite what one large, unsourceable, unverifiable, and undefined group of people "say" or "think" and ignoring the other. For example:
"Critics of Senator Kerry claim that he (insert thing that would make me not want to vote for Kerry here)."
By not reporting what supporters of Senator Kerry say on the same topic, the anchor/journalist/reporter has spun the story against Senator Kerry.
Another technique is to appear impartial by inaccurately or incompletely reporting the other side, or cherry-picking weak arguments or obvious red herrings, while ignoring stronger arguments.
"Critics of Senator Kerry have suggested that his anti-war rhetoric during Vietnam makes him unfit for office. Supporters counter that Senator Kerry looks good in a suit."
This crap happens all the time, and it's all biased journalism. It just doesn't seem biased when you agree with the slant.
(One more thing: why are we linking to Fox News [foxnews.com] for our stories? I feel dirty now.)
Probably because Fox News is a news source that can and does report objective stories frequently, despite its editorial slant. Just like CNN manages to report objective stories frequently despite it's editorial slant. Just like EVERY OTHER NEWS SOURCE manages to report objective stories frequently despite having an editorial slant.
Fox's slant is just unacceptable because it's right-leaning. Or, if you're a right-winger, Fox is "objective" and everybody else leans left. Whatever you have to tell yourself to avoid considering that what you believe might be crap.
Wouldn't you just love to have a frank conversation with Kissinger about how honorably they ended their meddling?
I didn't say they ended it honorable, only that it was ended. To be fiar, Nixon also STARTED meddling elsewhere. I mentioned this in my original post. Comparing Nixon to Bush isn't a great comparison, it's a Pavlovian response. If you hate Bush, you probably hated Nixon too. Even though you weren't alive when he was president.
Unfortunately, as bright as he is, he seems to have gotten this ugly little short-term political edge that has suddenly given me a nervous tic. Science fiction authors always have been futurists, but normally they're quite the idealists. This new generation of more hardcore dystopians is, well, depressing... They don't seem to realise that the pendulum swings, and right now we're in an ultra-Nixon era.
Nixon gave America a number of valuable reforms that liberal in both the contemporary political sense and the Enlightenment sense. Nixon ran a fiscally-responsible government with a balanced budget. The Nixon era gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon ended America's ineffectual meddling in another nation's internal matters. Nixon honorably served his nation on active duty in the Navy. Nixon instituted a number of critical reforms to American monetary policy that lengthed the natural cycles in capitalism of boom and lowered the bust cycles. We used to have recessions every 3-5 years. Now they happen ever 8-10, and rarely last more than a quarter or two. Nixon cracked down on organized crime, proposed legislation to mandate gas savings for America to control oil prices, normalized relations with China, created NOAA, the DEA, SALT 1, and signed the space shuttle program into law.
How is that like the current administration, which has spent irresponsibly and frivilously, started a war it doesn't know how to end, lowered air quality standards, done nothing about the oil situation, thumbed its nose at North Korea, and the man in charge was never on active duty.
Now, I can give you a list of a half-dozen things that Nixon did that were terrible, but this knee-jerk impulse to liken All Things Bush to Dick Nixon is misguided. Nixon was actually a decent president by a number of reasonably measures. George Bush is not, by almost any measure. In most ways, his administration has been mediocre, but even conservatives have trouble justifying some of the goofball stuff our president cooks up.
The point he's trying to make is.. we have CAD today. and all the experience from then. We should be able to pop out the equivalent design in a matter of weeks compared to doing all of the design work with pencil, paper, models and all of the calculations with slide rules and mechanical calculators.
The point I'm trying to make is that whipping up a design that passes all the relevent federal and NASA checks and balances for approval and human safety (don't you think our safety requirements are just a liiiiitle stricter now than they were in 1960?) and stays within NASA's budget isn't going to take a few weeks, it's going to take months, and probably years. We cannot just re-engineer that old hardware, it won't meet our needs or serve the ultimate purpose of a return trip to the moon. The "equivilent" design is unlikely to show up for years, especially since it has to take into account other projects like the space station and a replacement vehicle for the shuttle. This isn't a single-purpose critter we're throwing together.
Even if we COULD just re-engineer those old machines, we'd have to go back through all the old contractors, have them dig up designs, and then re-start assembly facilities. Getting a machine facility up and running can take a long time by itself. I get your point and his but you're not getting mine: there's more to this than just repeating a stunt we've already done. It's been how many years since the Byzantine Empire faded into the annals of history and we still aren't sure how to reproduce Greek Fire? A bad example, I know, since the formula was a secret, but it's not as simple as you guys make it out to be to re-start production on designs that were engineered 40-50 years ago. It's not CHEAP either, you're basically starting from scratch, even if you're just building the same thing all over again, because none of the production facilities are in place at any of the contrators who built this stuff, and you'll have to pay them all over again to setup those facilities and get engineering teams together to modernize the parts and add safety features that will undoubtedly alter the design. It really is probably cheaper to start from scratch.
I don't speak for everyone regarding the flak NASA gets, but If they're like me...
I have to say this every day on Slashdot: don't assume everybody is like you. They're not. Thank god. Regardless, I am one of the people that shares your dim view of the shuttle program. I think the science conducted on it has been very valuable, but it's basically a really expensive zero-G research platform. The scientific benefits of the space station are even more dubious.
Regardless, that has nothing to do with my opinion for why it's not a trivial matter to just repeat what we did in the 1960's. The Apollo program was cancelled early due to its expense, statistical danger (it was believed that, if all planned Apollo missions were carried out, we'd lose at least one crew; this belief became a conviction after Apollo 13), and questionable scientific merit. The point had been made: the Stars and Stripes are on the moon; the Hammer and Sickle are not. There was no reason to keep going, given the cost, danger, and fact that the mission was accomplished.
We're going back for an entirely different purpose, and we need different vehicles and technologies to accomplish that purpose.
What, did we lose the Saturn blueprint or something?
The Saturn V wasn't the only piece of technology we used. There's also the landing vehicle, the lunar orbitor, etc. We don't have any of those things laying around and the people, facilities, and processes involved in engineering them are dead, retired, or demolished. Kennedy's moon mission was just about getting there and bank so we could thumb our noses at the Soviet Union. Neener neener neener. If we go again, the mission is different. This time it's about conducting science and testing vehicles and technologies for taking us to Mars and beyond.
Kennedy's moon landings were a stunt for international bragging rights. If that's the only reason we wanted to go again, it'd be much easier. Also, we know much more about the hazards of space travel now, and have to re-engineer ships to deal with it. The attitude of this nation is MUCH different now than it was in 1960. Government regulations are far stricter, and the loss of crew is less acceptable (not that people ever ACCEPTED the loss of a crew but the flak NASA catches for it now is far worse than what they got 40 years ago).
Computer technology is different and probably incompatible with the hardware systems of those old monsters, and the launch facilities in Florida aren't big enough to launch a Sat-V anyway (they never were, either, the Sat-V had to be rolled out with its own tower).
So you can't just rebuild everything, it's not that simple.
Nothing more, nothing less. People've been doing it for more than a decade. It's only now that Joe Sixpack and the media discovered it as another amazing thing that the Internets could do, and starting hyping/buzzwording the crap out of it.
No kidding. I read on Wikipedia a while back that some dude named Justin Hall is considered one of the first bloggers, he started way back in 1994! Well, shit, that's when I started, as well as almost everybody I know who is interested in web technologies.
And I imagine most other geeks my age also started at about that time. How you can pick out one guy and say, "He started it" is beyond me.
I've had a personal web site since 1994, when it was hosted on "studsys", a Sparc cluster at Marquette University. I also had another side on Marquette's VAX/VMS system. My web site has mostly been a repository of my thoughts, ideas, and interests (just like every OTHER personal web site). Most of us who've been maintaining web pages for more than a year or two have been blogging since the beginning, although we never called it that. Mine was called "Jim's Diary" until somebody accused me of copying the Onion (which I'd never heard of at the time), so I changed it. Anyway, it's been around forever, it's what people enjoy doing, and it's not going to go away or vanish because of waxing and waning in its popularity. I don't read anybody else's blog because I haven't found anybody else who is interesting to read. Well, except for one guy whose blog I read when I was going through my divorce, because this guy's psycho wife made mine look like an earthbound angel. Anyway... I was disinterested in the rise of blogs and I'm equally disinterested in their "fall". I'm pretty sure nobody reads mine either, but I don't really care. It's a history of my changing opinions, ideas, attitudes, and a repository of links, resources, and photographs. It ain't going away just because blogs aren't cool anymore.
Anybody who designed a pvp mud knows how this works.
1. Make small, incremental changes, and measure the effects for a few weeks before determining if they've solved any problems.
2. Don't listen to the loudest and most frequent complainsers. It's the guy who never says anything and then one day pens a detialed analysis of your classes who is most likely to have some good insight.
3. Play your classes yourself and understand what your players are bitching about.
4. Understanding that somebody is ALWAYS going to be bitching about class balance, and just beacuse people are still bitching doesn't mean it's not well-balanced.
5. Classes and zones you design early on tend to be much less powerful (and the zones much more difficult) than those that are designed late in the process. Your early classes tend to be moderately powerful with strong checks and balances in their best abilities. The later work tends to be moderately powerful but without the checks and balances. Just look at Warlocks in WoW, compared with Paladins or Shamans. Look at any game, really, and how many of the add-on classes or races were MUCH MUCH better than the stock stuff? They have to be. If they're not any better, nobody buys the expansion to play them.
6. That leads me to my next point - you want to keep classes balanced, look at races. In a perfect game, you'd have 1 race. Barring that, races with minor stat variations and a few tricks, but no major differences are key.
7. Design the game (the mechanics, the zones, the quests, etc) with your classes in mind and then DO NOT ADD CLASSES. The new classes invariably will rip through the "old world" and only be challenged in the new zones designed with that class in mind. I think my #1 advice to any MMORPG is to never add additional classes beyond your starting crop. I'm sure people will point out countless examples of this being done successfully, but I think it's a major disaster waiting to happen most of the time.
8. Even better than all this - DON'T HAVE CLASSES in the first place.
When my tax money has to fund it, it doesn't matter if I use the service or not. Most of the public services provided by state and local government go unused by myself, but I pay for them anyway.
My mom and dad couldn't set up a filter if they had to. (They don't have one.) They don't have the technological prowess to set one up even if they wanted one. Are they dumb? No. Both my parents know TONS more than me about many things, they just aren't technically elite.
Mine either. They just wouldn't let me watch porn or make 1-900 calls. And if I did it anyway, they found out and punished me for it.
So people in Utah have been asking for a little help from the state government to get an option of blocking things they don't want at the ISP level.
I understand their want and need but this is not the government's job. If there is demand for this service, it's up to the market to provide it. If there's not sufficient demand for the market to create the service, or it's not affordable to implement, then I don't think the government should step in and subsidize it with tax money.
Is there anything wrong with that? I say absolutely not.
I say there absolutely is. You say it's not mandatory. It's not mandatory for me to subscribe to this service but it would be mandatory for the ISP to provide it. This is economic planning, and it always fails. On some scale, I tolerate this sort of thing (such as 911 service on cell phones for emergencies). But forcing a market sector to provide a service like this is not reasonable. If the market in Utah of all places cannot provide sufficient motivation for the service, then it is not the business of government to step in and require it.
Um, they don't. That's not how Social Security works.
You'd be much better off at retirement time if you got the 30-year treasury rate...
No, it's one of the proposals on the table, however, to "fix" social security. If we're going to let people get out of the asinine financial blunder that is Social Security, at least give people the freedom to choose their own investments. If people are too stupid, by our government's lofty standards, to do that, then publish a list of "best buys" or even set up accounts through the government where you can turn the decisions over to them.
If your kids can't surf the net without finding porn, don't let them surf the net without supervision. Or just don't have kids. I don't want your standards imposed on my kids, as they may be to strict or too open for my tastes.
Amen. As a conservative, I believe in a limited government whose primary role is to preserve my individual liberties, not eliminate them. YOU can enact whatever restrictions YOU want in YOUR home for YOUR family. But don't you dare pass a law that makes it mandatory that I subscribe to the same standards.
Don't confiscate part of my income and force me to invest it in treasury bonds. Provide me with education and information, and let me decide what retirement options are right for me and my family.
Don't confiscate my money and force me to buy government health care. Provide me with education and information and let me decide what health care options are right for me and my family.
Don't confiscate my money and use it to fund content-blocking laws that will decide for me what I can and cannot see on the internet, or on television, or in magazines, or in movies, or wherever else. Let me make my own decision on what I will and will not see, and what my children will and will not see. It's not the government's job to raise my child, the government is always too involved.
Err... where are you getting this?? Can you provide a reference please?
Go to your library, find the Catholic Code of Canon Law, and look it up. I asked this very question of a Catholic priest when I was preparing for marriage in the Catholic Church. He said he honestly didn't know what the Catholic Church's official stance was, and turned around and grabbed this big fat book and looked it up. I read it myself. It specifically says that the origin/cause of homosexuality is unknown, but that homosexuals do not choose to be homosexuals. Until more is known about homosexuality, Catholic Canon indicates that homosexuals are called by God to a life of chastity.
unlike religion, science is self-correcting over the long term. If someone fudges the data and comes up with a wrong conclusion eventually someone else will discover that and get it right.
Yes. Religion never reviews its own practices, views, and procedures, and changes them. That's why Catholic masses are still spoken in Latin, women must wear hats in church, women can't be deacons or altar servers, diabetics are forced not to eat on Fridays, the church condemns homosexuality as an abberation (actually, some Christian churches do this, but Catholic Canon Law states that homosexuality is not chosen by the individual, the causes of it are unknown, and a man cannot be condemned for being something that is not of his choosing).
I'd posit that religion is much slower to change than science, but no less capable of it.
For the record, I am not a practicing religious person of any kind and generally distrust organized religion in general. I did, however, think your post was predictable backlash against what you believe to be Christian hegemony.
It is so frustrating to me to see so many governments getting the intent of copyright and patent completely backwards. The power of these two concepts to drive innovation is in their *expiration* and not in their original issue. The idea behind these concpets is that if the creator wants to continue his nice exclusive income, he darn well better come up with something new and cool before the old income dries up.
This isn't insightful at all, it's backwards. The way copyright and patent law encourages innovation is by protecting the ability of an inventor/innovator to profit by his ideas. This is especially important for small businesses or individuals without considerable wealth who cannot start up production. This is to protect intelligent people and their ideas from being exploited by large businesses. The expiration is patent law is not what drives innovation, it's the promise of having a grace period to make some money off of it. If inventing something would just result in some huge corporate cloning your idea and making a fortune off of it, nobody would do it. Patents protect the intellectual property of the inventor. The expiration clause is to protect capitalism and competition, not to encourage innovation.
What kind of developers, Linux or otherwise, can't learn how to write VC++ or C#? They're not exactly new development paradigms or anything.
I suspect the company quoted in the article had a lot of developers who knew what they liked and liked what they knew. The idea of learning a new OS and new APIs didn't really appeal to them, so they just said "we can't do it!" and went off to hire new people.
Let's see, first I said, about 4 years ago, "There will be a color iPod soon." And everybody told me, "No way, that'd be stupid and pointless." The translation from Defensivegeek into English is, "I hope not, or I won't have the coolest, latest toy any more to lord over my friends!"
I also have been agreeing with the industry analysts who said Apple would be running on Intel chips before long, and I've been vindicated.
Now, if my prediction that Microsoft will have a Linux or other UNIX-like kernel in Windows by 2015 holds up I'll consider myself the Nostradomus of IT.
Slashdot Mirror
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers. He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated. He hates the West, all of it, regardless of whether or not a given subsection of it is involved in Iraq or not. America is the "Big Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan" and anybody who isn't actively trying to destroy both nations is the enemy of Islam.
You people amaze me. You are able to throw your hands up in the air at the oddball decisions of President Bush, and say, "Well, he's a religious weirdo, who knows what those people think," but you're attempting to explain the actions of terrorists through logic. "We deserve it," for some reason. "We caused this. This is our fault, if we hadn't (done whatever), then they wouldn't have done this."
No. Bullshit. They tried to knock over the World Trade Center in 1993 when Bill Clinton was president. Why? They bombed the USS Cole during Clinton's term. Why? They slaughtered hundreds at our embassies in Africa. Why? President Clinton mostly ignored them, why did they still want to get us? All because of Gulf 1? If there's no connection between al Qaeda and Iraq, why in the world would these terrorists be so upset about Iraq?
And, I ask you, why has there not been a single American civilian death on our own soil since 9/11? How hard would it be for just ONE al Qaeda sympathizer or sleeper cell operative to build a bomb and blow up the food court at a shopping ball? Or a zoo? An amusement park? A sporting event? A crowded bus? Why? NOT ONE. Not one in 4 years. There's almost 300,000,000 people in our borders, and NOT ONE OF THEM has done this. Why?
I actually don't know the answer, but I have a few ideas. (1) They're busy dying in Iraq (2) Our new security policies after 9/11 have been successful on some level (3) They get to America and begin to live here and experience our country while planning their assault, and after experiencing freedom, stability, and economic success, their urge to blow themselves to smithereens or get arrested while trying to both other people up abates and eventually vanishes. Why destroy this? It's paradise compared to the disease-infested cess pools they came from.
Terrorist don't act randomly and kill people without a reason, why would they?
Yes, they do, because they're irrational people. Rational people do not blow themselves up. Rational people do not blow themselves up in an effort to kill other people because they are of a specific religion. You give them too much credit.
They're not stupid.
Yes, they are. Stupid, and brainwashed.
Yes, there was something that EEUU did that triggered the 9/11, go and learn some history, you'll find that the collaboration in the WWII doesn't neccesarily means that EEUU is always the "good guy".
What history? I have no idea what you're talking about here.
It is not the job of government to solve all of our problems. More government is almost never the answer to any problem. The problem here is the credit system and lack of accountability on the part of businesses for identity fraud. The banking system doesn't suffer nearly as badly from these problems. Why is that? It's the credit system, which is one of the few areas of the American economy that is under-regulated.
Modern liberalism bears little resemblance to enlightenment liberalism. This is largely because modern American leftists tend to embrace collectivism, and englightment liberalism tended to focus more on the mobility and elbow space of the individual. The foundations of the country are based in creating a document that defined the limits of government, not a basis from which to expand it's reach into our lives. Libertarians most closely resemble the mindset of Enlightenment liberals. The next-closest would be American conservatives, and then American liberals. American conservatives are trending left on fiscal issues and moving further right on social issues, which is maddening since fiscal conservative policy and liberal social policy most closely resemble the foundations of Enlightenment liberalism. With the Republicans abandoning that space and the Democrats making no effort to fill it, it's a sad time for anybody who gives a shit about their rights or their lives.
To use your terms, the nutbars who led the Revolution were definitely the "hippies" of their day as compared to the "fundie" royalists.
No, because the people who founded this country were intelligent political thinkers who believed in individual freedoms mitigated by individual responsibility. Hippies were rebellious kids who wanted to do whatever the fuck they want regardless of the consequenes.
Just because you wish the framers were conservative Christians doesn't make it so; they were, as compared to their contemporaries, closer to being radical left-wing freaks.
This is utterly inaccurate if you're trying to compare them to the modern left-wing in American politics. At the time, they were contemporary liberals and left-wingers, and certainly radicals in their way. But they bear little resemblance to modern-day leftists and liberal leaders. If your goal is to suggest that modern day leftists "have it right" since our founding fathers were leftists, I have to disagree. I mostly agree with the principles laid out in the Federalist papers and the tenents of Enlightenment liberalism and individualism. The American Democratic party embraces almost none of those things (nor does the Republican party anymore). But I agree that one thing they certainly were not is God-fearing Christian men. They may have paid lip service to it, but it was nothing more than that.
I must be some kind of retard, I build my stuff with Perl and PostgreSQL.
Then don't go there. Nobody is holding a gun to your head and making you. Some of the best equipment comes from the Honor system. I play 2 days a week for a few hours and manage to maintain a medium rank with some decent gear. Play and do what's fun. No, you won't be quite as uber and people who DO get into this kind of stuff, but so what? I hate big dungeon raids and I wouldn't go on one of these even if I did have time. I've never done Onyxia or MC and I never plan to. Don't use the content that you dislike, but lots of people DO like it, so dont' get bent out of shape that BLizzard is adding it. And for those of you bitching that WoW doesn't innovate, well you gave up on the game too soon.
It isn't theft, it's copyright infringement.
It's an Associated Press story, you dipshit. Are you seriously asking why we want our news from the actual press instead of somebody's blog?
When a poll showed Senator Kerry ahead of President Bush in the 2004 Presidential elections, CNN reported, "Kerry pulls ahead of Bush in latest poll."
When President Bush reclaimed the lead, they reported, "Bush apparantly leads Kerry."
Now, this was an isolated incident. A qualifier like "apparantly" was not used in any other poll reporting for either candidate being ahead. But it happened, it continues to happen, and it will happen again.
We just don't care here because we're mostly liberals and what seems to a right-winger as a "liberal bias" looks to us like the objective truth. It matches our worldview, why would we question it or suspect there of being any bias?
This same phenomenon is responsible for conservative embrasure of FoxNews. Much of what they read on Fox matches their worldview, and other news outlets appear, to them, to be absurdly biased.
In other words, it's a matter of perspective, and frankly I've found Fox's reporting to be no more egregiously biased than any other. I'm sure somebody will respond to this post with 15 examples of horrible, unforgivable sins of journalism by Fox. I'll be there's hundreds that could be cited in the last 30 days alone. But comparing how Fox spins its stories to how any other large news outlets spins it's stories, I really haven't seen that Fox's trangressions are measurably less forgivable.
And "spin" usually comes in the form of reporting selected truth and omitted selected other truth. Of accurately reporting one side of an issue and often ignoring the opposit side. And the worst is when anchors and journalists recite what one large, unsourceable, unverifiable, and undefined group of people "say" or "think" and ignoring the other. For example:
"Critics of Senator Kerry claim that he (insert thing that would make me not want to vote for Kerry here)."
By not reporting what supporters of Senator Kerry say on the same topic, the anchor/journalist/reporter has spun the story against Senator Kerry.
Another technique is to appear impartial by inaccurately or incompletely reporting the other side, or cherry-picking weak arguments or obvious red herrings, while ignoring stronger arguments.
"Critics of Senator Kerry have suggested that his anti-war rhetoric during Vietnam makes him unfit for office. Supporters counter that Senator Kerry looks good in a suit."
This crap happens all the time, and it's all biased journalism. It just doesn't seem biased when you agree with the slant.
Probably because Fox News is a news source that can and does report objective stories frequently, despite its editorial slant. Just like CNN manages to report objective stories frequently despite it's editorial slant. Just like EVERY OTHER NEWS SOURCE manages to report objective stories frequently despite having an editorial slant.
Fox's slant is just unacceptable because it's right-leaning. Or, if you're a right-winger, Fox is "objective" and everybody else leans left. Whatever you have to tell yourself to avoid considering that what you believe might be crap.
Wouldn't you just love to have a frank conversation with Kissinger about how honorably they ended their meddling?
I didn't say they ended it honorable, only that it was ended. To be fiar, Nixon also STARTED meddling elsewhere. I mentioned this in my original post. Comparing Nixon to Bush isn't a great comparison, it's a Pavlovian response. If you hate Bush, you probably hated Nixon too. Even though you weren't alive when he was president.
Nixon gave America a number of valuable reforms that liberal in both the contemporary political sense and the Enlightenment sense. Nixon ran a fiscally-responsible government with a balanced budget. The Nixon era gave us the Environmental Protection Agency. Nixon ended America's ineffectual meddling in another nation's internal matters. Nixon honorably served his nation on active duty in the Navy. Nixon instituted a number of critical reforms to American monetary policy that lengthed the natural cycles in capitalism of boom and lowered the bust cycles. We used to have recessions every 3-5 years. Now they happen ever 8-10, and rarely last more than a quarter or two. Nixon cracked down on organized crime, proposed legislation to mandate gas savings for America to control oil prices, normalized relations with China, created NOAA, the DEA, SALT 1, and signed the space shuttle program into law.
How is that like the current administration, which has spent irresponsibly and frivilously, started a war it doesn't know how to end, lowered air quality standards, done nothing about the oil situation, thumbed its nose at North Korea, and the man in charge was never on active duty.
Now, I can give you a list of a half-dozen things that Nixon did that were terrible, but this knee-jerk impulse to liken All Things Bush to Dick Nixon is misguided. Nixon was actually a decent president by a number of reasonably measures. George Bush is not, by almost any measure. In most ways, his administration has been mediocre, but even conservatives have trouble justifying some of the goofball stuff our president cooks up.
The point I'm trying to make is that whipping up a design that passes all the relevent federal and NASA checks and balances for approval and human safety (don't you think our safety requirements are just a liiiiitle stricter now than they were in 1960?) and stays within NASA's budget isn't going to take a few weeks, it's going to take months, and probably years. We cannot just re-engineer that old hardware, it won't meet our needs or serve the ultimate purpose of a return trip to the moon. The "equivilent" design is unlikely to show up for years, especially since it has to take into account other projects like the space station and a replacement vehicle for the shuttle. This isn't a single-purpose critter we're throwing together.
Even if we COULD just re-engineer those old machines, we'd have to go back through all the old contractors, have them dig up designs, and then re-start assembly facilities. Getting a machine facility up and running can take a long time by itself. I get your point and his but you're not getting mine: there's more to this than just repeating a stunt we've already done. It's been how many years since the Byzantine Empire faded into the annals of history and we still aren't sure how to reproduce Greek Fire? A bad example, I know, since the formula was a secret, but it's not as simple as you guys make it out to be to re-start production on designs that were engineered 40-50 years ago. It's not CHEAP either, you're basically starting from scratch, even if you're just building the same thing all over again, because none of the production facilities are in place at any of the contrators who built this stuff, and you'll have to pay them all over again to setup those facilities and get engineering teams together to modernize the parts and add safety features that will undoubtedly alter the design. It really is probably cheaper to start from scratch.
I don't speak for everyone regarding the flak NASA gets, but If they're like me ...
I have to say this every day on Slashdot: don't assume everybody is like you. They're not. Thank god. Regardless, I am one of the people that shares your dim view of the shuttle program. I think the science conducted on it has been very valuable, but it's basically a really expensive zero-G research platform. The scientific benefits of the space station are even more dubious.
Regardless, that has nothing to do with my opinion for why it's not a trivial matter to just repeat what we did in the 1960's. The Apollo program was cancelled early due to its expense, statistical danger (it was believed that, if all planned Apollo missions were carried out, we'd lose at least one crew; this belief became a conviction after Apollo 13), and questionable scientific merit. The point had been made: the Stars and Stripes are on the moon; the Hammer and Sickle are not. There was no reason to keep going, given the cost, danger, and fact that the mission was accomplished.
We're going back for an entirely different purpose, and we need different vehicles and technologies to accomplish that purpose.
The Saturn V wasn't the only piece of technology we used. There's also the landing vehicle, the lunar orbitor, etc. We don't have any of those things laying around and the people, facilities, and processes involved in engineering them are dead, retired, or demolished. Kennedy's moon mission was just about getting there and bank so we could thumb our noses at the Soviet Union. Neener neener neener. If we go again, the mission is different. This time it's about conducting science and testing vehicles and technologies for taking us to Mars and beyond.
Kennedy's moon landings were a stunt for international bragging rights. If that's the only reason we wanted to go again, it'd be much easier. Also, we know much more about the hazards of space travel now, and have to re-engineer ships to deal with it. The attitude of this nation is MUCH different now than it was in 1960. Government regulations are far stricter, and the loss of crew is less acceptable (not that people ever ACCEPTED the loss of a crew but the flak NASA catches for it now is far worse than what they got 40 years ago).
Computer technology is different and probably incompatible with the hardware systems of those old monsters, and the launch facilities in Florida aren't big enough to launch a Sat-V anyway (they never were, either, the Sat-V had to be rolled out with its own tower).
So you can't just rebuild everything, it's not that simple.
No kidding. I read on Wikipedia a while back that some dude named Justin Hall is considered one of the first bloggers, he started way back in 1994! Well, shit, that's when I started, as well as almost everybody I know who is interested in web technologies.
And I imagine most other geeks my age also started at about that time. How you can pick out one guy and say, "He started it" is beyond me.
I've had a personal web site since 1994, when it was hosted on "studsys", a Sparc cluster at Marquette University. I also had another side on Marquette's VAX/VMS system. My web site has mostly been a repository of my thoughts, ideas, and interests (just like every OTHER personal web site). Most of us who've been maintaining web pages for more than a year or two have been blogging since the beginning, although we never called it that. Mine was called "Jim's Diary" until somebody accused me of copying the Onion (which I'd never heard of at the time), so I changed it. Anyway, it's been around forever, it's what people enjoy doing, and it's not going to go away or vanish because of waxing and waning in its popularity. I don't read anybody else's blog because I haven't found anybody else who is interesting to read. Well, except for one guy whose blog I read when I was going through my divorce, because this guy's psycho wife made mine look like an earthbound angel. Anyway... I was disinterested in the rise of blogs and I'm equally disinterested in their "fall". I'm pretty sure nobody reads mine either, but I don't really care. It's a history of my changing opinions, ideas, attitudes, and a repository of links, resources, and photographs. It ain't going away just because blogs aren't cool anymore.
1. Make small, incremental changes, and measure the effects for a few weeks before determining if they've solved any problems.
2. Don't listen to the loudest and most frequent complainsers. It's the guy who never says anything and then one day pens a detialed analysis of your classes who is most likely to have some good insight.
3. Play your classes yourself and understand what your players are bitching about.
4. Understanding that somebody is ALWAYS going to be bitching about class balance, and just beacuse people are still bitching doesn't mean it's not well-balanced.
5. Classes and zones you design early on tend to be much less powerful (and the zones much more difficult) than those that are designed late in the process. Your early classes tend to be moderately powerful with strong checks and balances in their best abilities. The later work tends to be moderately powerful but without the checks and balances. Just look at Warlocks in WoW, compared with Paladins or Shamans. Look at any game, really, and how many of the add-on classes or races were MUCH MUCH better than the stock stuff? They have to be. If they're not any better, nobody buys the expansion to play them.
6. That leads me to my next point - you want to keep classes balanced, look at races. In a perfect game, you'd have 1 race. Barring that, races with minor stat variations and a few tricks, but no major differences are key.
7. Design the game (the mechanics, the zones, the quests, etc) with your classes in mind and then DO NOT ADD CLASSES. The new classes invariably will rip through the "old world" and only be challenged in the new zones designed with that class in mind. I think my #1 advice to any MMORPG is to never add additional classes beyond your starting crop. I'm sure people will point out countless examples of this being done successfully, but I think it's a major disaster waiting to happen most of the time.
8. Even better than all this - DON'T HAVE CLASSES in the first place.
When my tax money has to fund it, it doesn't matter if I use the service or not. Most of the public services provided by state and local government go unused by myself, but I pay for them anyway.
My mom and dad couldn't set up a filter if they had to. (They don't have one.) They don't have the technological prowess to set one up even if they wanted one. Are they dumb? No. Both my parents know TONS more than me about many things, they just aren't technically elite.
Mine either. They just wouldn't let me watch porn or make 1-900 calls. And if I did it anyway, they found out and punished me for it.
So people in Utah have been asking for a little help from the state government to get an option of blocking things they don't want at the ISP level.
I understand their want and need but this is not the government's job. If there is demand for this service, it's up to the market to provide it. If there's not sufficient demand for the market to create the service, or it's not affordable to implement, then I don't think the government should step in and subsidize it with tax money.
Is there anything wrong with that? I say absolutely not.
I say there absolutely is. You say it's not mandatory. It's not mandatory for me to subscribe to this service but it would be mandatory for the ISP to provide it. This is economic planning, and it always fails. On some scale, I tolerate this sort of thing (such as 911 service on cell phones for emergencies). But forcing a market sector to provide a service like this is not reasonable. If the market in Utah of all places cannot provide sufficient motivation for the service, then it is not the business of government to step in and require it.
No, it's one of the proposals on the table, however, to "fix" social security. If we're going to let people get out of the asinine financial blunder that is Social Security, at least give people the freedom to choose their own investments. If people are too stupid, by our government's lofty standards, to do that, then publish a list of "best buys" or even set up accounts through the government where you can turn the decisions over to them.
Amen. As a conservative, I believe in a limited government whose primary role is to preserve my individual liberties, not eliminate them. YOU can enact whatever restrictions YOU want in YOUR home for YOUR family. But don't you dare pass a law that makes it mandatory that I subscribe to the same standards.
Don't confiscate part of my income and force me to invest it in treasury bonds. Provide me with education and information, and let me decide what retirement options are right for me and my family.
Don't confiscate my money and force me to buy government health care. Provide me with education and information and let me decide what health care options are right for me and my family.
Don't confiscate my money and use it to fund content-blocking laws that will decide for me what I can and cannot see on the internet, or on television, or in magazines, or in movies, or wherever else. Let me make my own decision on what I will and will not see, and what my children will and will not see. It's not the government's job to raise my child, the government is always too involved.
Go to your library, find the Catholic Code of Canon Law, and look it up. I asked this very question of a Catholic priest when I was preparing for marriage in the Catholic Church. He said he honestly didn't know what the Catholic Church's official stance was, and turned around and grabbed this big fat book and looked it up. I read it myself. It specifically says that the origin/cause of homosexuality is unknown, but that homosexuals do not choose to be homosexuals. Until more is known about homosexuality, Catholic Canon indicates that homosexuals are called by God to a life of chastity.
Yes. Religion never reviews its own practices, views, and procedures, and changes them. That's why Catholic masses are still spoken in Latin, women must wear hats in church, women can't be deacons or altar servers, diabetics are forced not to eat on Fridays, the church condemns homosexuality as an abberation (actually, some Christian churches do this, but Catholic Canon Law states that homosexuality is not chosen by the individual, the causes of it are unknown, and a man cannot be condemned for being something that is not of his choosing).
I'd posit that religion is much slower to change than science, but no less capable of it.
For the record, I am not a practicing religious person of any kind and generally distrust organized religion in general. I did, however, think your post was predictable backlash against what you believe to be Christian hegemony.
This isn't insightful at all, it's backwards. The way copyright and patent law encourages innovation is by protecting the ability of an inventor/innovator to profit by his ideas. This is especially important for small businesses or individuals without considerable wealth who cannot start up production. This is to protect intelligent people and their ideas from being exploited by large businesses. The expiration is patent law is not what drives innovation, it's the promise of having a grace period to make some money off of it. If inventing something would just result in some huge corporate cloning your idea and making a fortune off of it, nobody would do it. Patents protect the intellectual property of the inventor. The expiration clause is to protect capitalism and competition, not to encourage innovation.
I suspect the company quoted in the article had a lot of developers who knew what they liked and liked what they knew. The idea of learning a new OS and new APIs didn't really appeal to them, so they just said "we can't do it!" and went off to hire new people.
I also have been agreeing with the industry analysts who said Apple would be running on Intel chips before long, and I've been vindicated.
Now, if my prediction that Microsoft will have a Linux or other UNIX-like kernel in Windows by 2015 holds up I'll consider myself the Nostradomus of IT.
...without the Expensive Hardware Lobbing scorecard. Play along at home.