Rostere

I never really thought that. The alien spaceship was mapped by some kind of probe, right? Obviously if somebody takes off his helmet, that person has previously measured the surrounding atmosphere as being safe to breathe. There are a lot of things which are not explained in Prometheus, I think that adds greatly to the mysterious atmosphere of the movie. Some things really are better when you get to fill it out with your own imagination. But for that to be a significant positive factor, the movie also has to drop a lot of interesting threads to follow. I think that Prometheus succeeded in doing that pretty well. Secondly, we appear to have entirely different pictures of how scientists think I don't think it would be unrealistic for scientists to be reckless, or curious to such a degree that they hurt themselves or others. That is probably pretty close to the truth. On the other hand, I think it is more unrealistic when in Interstellar, pretty much all of the main characters are so very confused about their own and others struggle between utilitarianism and egoism. They drop a lot of lines which comes out terribly awful. There's too much drama.

Fourth along on the top row, is...can it be a broach of purest Green? Can it be? Could it be true.. that I hold in my mortal hands, a nugget of pure Green?

So I went and saw Interstellar. I must say that I had pretty high expectations. In hindsight, I don't know exactly why. In any case, I think the film was hurt greatly by too much in-your-face sentimentality. Subtlety was obviously not on the menu for the guys who made this movie. Especially the ending was very jarring. It really disturbs me how the movie at times tries to be very scientific and at times throws all science out of the window. "Love transcends time and space". Really, as a biologist you haven't thought of love as a process localized in the brain? The main characters, who are supposed to be scientists, often do not act and think like scientists at all. And so the best "space" movies continue to be Solaris, Alien and 2001 with Prometheus being the only modern contender to that top 3. What a shame.

You must be a special kind of person to like singleplayer MMOs. I think that has already been established. To be honest, I have no idea what he is doing on these forums.

Well played, but I will remind that Government does not equate society, nor culture. Rights are a moral construct, which is a cultural phenomena. This predates The State. In that way, Rights exist prior and outside of the The State's legitimate authority and purview to grant, restrain, or qualify. That The State has any legitimate or moral authority is itself a myth, much in the way of "The Social Contract" fable. You are absolutely correct in that a state does not have any inherent authority, but the rest is just completely inane nonsense. Firstly, a "state" in our context here is any herd, flock or group of people who live together, where some individuals have more authority than others. You should know that people have lived roughly in this way since before even the advent of speech (for the sole reason because it enables people to do more things, which helps people to survive). What is typically called a "state" today is just the current top-level manifestation of the amazing ability of humans to organize and work in an hierarchy. It's pointless to try to distinguish this from "society" or "culture" in a legal and anthropological context, since they are connected. By the way, are you interested in anthropology? I would recommend you read the book "Guns, Germs and Steel". You view that something outside of legislation gives some kind of inherent rights is completely nonsensical (a myth, in your words). A "moral construct"? You do realize that I could say that just about anything is a "moral construct", right? And that it would signify absolutely nothing with regards to the concepts of a state or legal rights? A state does not inherently have any authority at all, just like you do not inherently have any rights at all. "Rights" only makes sense as legal terminology, in which case it means entirely different things depending on the legal corpus in question. This is what I meant when I said that rights are granted to you by the social contract - the "social contract" being all the stuff we have made up which constitute the laws of a state, both rights and obligations. A "state" is simply just a name for a convenient organizational solution for people to get along. You can love or hate the concept of a state, but it's very sad that you have realized that the authority of the state and the law and the "rights" they give have zero intrinsic deeper meaning, while yet maintaining that there is another meaningful definition of "rights" that has some kind of precedence over this. We are discussing made-up conventions. It's utterly pointless to say that one holds precedence over another in any other sense than legal, because there is no inherent order of precedence for made-up conventions. You can believe that one SHOULD hold precedence over some other in your state, but then: And that is why we typically want democracy as a way of organizing our states, which excels in enforcing and adjusting laws to suit the moral convictions of a majority of the population, in a certain defined region, on the speck of dust of strictly limited size we live on. There are no inherent rights of any kind, no ghosts, no Santa Claus. It's time for you to grow up and realize that.

This might come as a surprise to you Valsuelm, but nobody has any inherent rights at all. It's all a convention, actual rights are granted to you by the social contract. If you don't understand that you are just as stupid as the people believe in ghosts and Santa Claus.

This just in: http://www.darpa.mil/NewsEvents/Releases/2014/11/09.aspx Okay, well, it is a few days old, but anyway.

This thread is actually getting interesting.

Countries that have 10 or more parties divide the same way. There is nearly always two competing wings taking turns at being in opposition. The advantage of having 10 or more is that there will be more flavors available and that you will be more likely to be able to vote for a party representing more or less your demographic interests. When it comes to governing, a coalition vs a majority of the same party, it really doesn't matter as much as one would think. I would even suggest that having to bargain for most major pieces of legislation is an advantage. Indeed, the same argument holds true (although if there are more parties, this allows for a greater chance of "orthogonal" parties who are mostly interested in specific issues not on the main axis) about two "wings" in other systems, but their internal composition may vary freely. If you are interested in preserving nature and live in the US, you might vote for the Democrats if you perceive them to be infinitesimally better in that regard. But if you were already a Democrat voter, there's not very much you can do. There is only ever a point in changing your policies as a party in a two-party system if you can win over independents or those on the other side. Thus the rational thing to happen in a two-party system is a race to the middle, with the only other competitor being if voters so much lose faith in the whole democratic system that they stay at home, realizing that the system gives their vote minimal opportunity to for for what they really believe in. In a proportional system, there is more often a party which really does represent YOUR views. Firstly, this is a much more flexible system than one based one the (distributed) winner-takes-all principle, with respect to the internal composition of the two "wings". Secondly, if you can vote for something you actually want, you are more likely to vote in the first place. Thirdly, a system with more parties is in general much healthier since the competition for voters is much harsher, especially inside your own bloc. The politicians must listen much more closely to their voters, or they will immediately leave your party for another, closely aligned party. Another point you are missing is that the US system of elections to the HoR is not intrinsically proportional to actual political support in any sense at all. You could have a party with the support of 50% of the US population, plus one person for every district that gets to send a representative, and have them control 100% of the representatives. The fact that it is possible to redraw district border to fine-tune this (and that this is happening!) should be enough for any person to immediately reject this bizarre system. The winner-takes-it-all principle - the polar opposite of the proportional principle - is a system that is perfectly tailored to throw away the maximum number of votes, and my guess is that was only used because it must have been far easier to organize voting that way back in the days. This since you don't have to sum the results of all the votes centrally. Hell, even John Adams realized all of this, and he lived 250 years ago: "It should be in miniature, an exact portrait of the people at large. It should think, feel, reason, and act like them. That it may be the interest of this Assembly to do strict justice at all times, it should be an equal representation, or in other words equal interest among the people should have equal interest in it.".

The two-party system follows from game theory, given the current democratic system in the US. If we assume that most people have the same political axis (or possibly several axes which happen to align which each other) as most important factor when deciding which party to vote for, a third party is a nonsensical idea. The only people who are likely to get elected without affiliation to either Democrats or Republicans are people who have jumped ship from one of the parties, or people who were already famous and rich enough to fund their own campaign. It's a system which naturally converges to two (meaningful) choices only for the voter. You could call it "the Nader effect" if you want.

I'm 24. My very first game would probably be Full Throttle (narrated to me in Swedish by my dad), or perhaps SkiFree.

wat You do know that there are actual Salafi parties in Egypt, right? They did not do particularly well at the polls... Egypt's MB is more close to the AKP of Turkey.

They are not looking for a "proper" submarine, but a midget submarine. This has nothing to do with the Russian navy, it's a counter-intelligence operation. It is important to distinguish between what official sources say and what media say. This thing here:

No.

I know you would and that's the sad thing. He's really right. But it also depends on what you want to read about. People often have an inexplicable need for self-gratifcation. So Americans want to read about how America is good, Russians want to read about how Russians are good, and so on. Furthermore, people want to believe that what they are reading is the truth - they can't digest contradictory narratives or uncertainties. So if you're a newspaper, you can't change your predominant narrative all the time or else the audience will be confused. You can't admit when you aren't sure or else the audience will believe you're clueless. I would never trust a newspaper to criticize it's own country enough. This turns into a feedback loop which ends up skewing all media. You're free to explain how you think people write better journalism with a gun to the head from the political leadership than without, however.

I real life, people consider me a drunk and ne'er-do-well. I often come across as rambling and incoherent at worst, at best brilliant but eccentric. I don't know, does that fit with how you perceive me on this forum?

Arcanum optional traits = awesomeness. That's how it should be done.

Great! I hope they take the time they need to make the game we want!

This is essentially why we must have governments: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prisoner%27s_dilemma Unless every single human being suddenly starts altruistically acting for the common good in Prisoner's dilemmas such as shared defense, shared infrastructure, et.c.. In any case, what many people with libertarian views fail to understand is that the governments as we currently know them would immediately come into existence, given they had the power to change their country as they wished. You would get areas owned by a central authority, where you would pay for infrastructure or GTFO, pay for defense or GTFO, obey the local laws or GTFO, and so on. People would avoid the ****ty and the unsafe areas and keep to the safe and civilized ones. Eventually various areas would go to war with each other, and the ones without centralized leadership would be conquered by the others. You get the society you deserve. If all people were able to make altruistic decisions in prisoner's dilemma-type situations, we could have libertarianism. But to be honest, that's about as realistic as if we could program a "Big Brother" AI (or find perfect leadership in any shape) which would be able to consistently make better decisions for everyone than they could make themselves, in case we could have the perfect totalitarian society. Until any of these extreme situations appear, the state would do well to try to find the balance between them: force people into making altruistic decisions when it would be rational (from an egoistic perspective) to be a parasite, and try to interfere as little as possible in mutual benefit deals between people or entities.

As long as the concept is properly explained at some point (for example, in a neat-looking manual) I don't think there is a problem. You don't have to find out what a "graze" is with no prior knowledge every time you graze an opponent in combat. In my mind, grazes gives the combat more variation and character. Personally, I'd rather have critical misses like in Arcanum, but you can't have everything. Ideally, you would also have creatures which are easy to graze, with only a small window for a critical hit (high defense?), representing something big and tough with a small weak point. The problem with simplistic RPGs is that different creatures are just the same ****, but with more HP, and dealing more damage. There is no rock/paper/scissors thinking in this system, just more DPS or less DPS. The current system with both grazes (dependent on accuracy/defense), interrupts, damage type, DT, DR, minimum damage and penetration allows for much more realistic modeling. It will be harder to balance but when it is balanced, it will be so much more rewarding to play. I'd rather Obsidian released a flawed diamond whose balance can be perfected by mods/patches than a piece of simplistic turd which leaves modders thinking they would be just as well off making their own game from the start.

I think grazing is a great idea. I like heterogeneous and realistic systems anyway. Who cares about simplicity? This is not WoW.

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/gish

Don't talk **** about AI programs

The Sweden Democrats are just a scheme for the right-leaning unemployed and people with lacking education to secure their unemployment insurance and pensions. The recent right-wing government have struck a hard blow against the pensioners in Sweden. They have also not been good to the unemployed and the ill, although I personally think they have maintained a reasonable level there. What do you do when you are right-leaning person of mediocre skill who are faced with increased globalization? It has long been a theory of mine that political sympathies have their basis in psychology. A right-leaning person is not going to vote for a left-wing party, even if that would be sensible from an egoistical perspective. So you don't vote for a left-leaning party to secure you unemployment money. You will seek you solution further rightwards. The only solution that can be offered from the political right is one of "conserving the society", shutting out outside competition, whether in the form of free-market unions like the EU or immigrants competing for jobs. The Sweden Democrats have gained most of their voters from Moderate party, the previous party farthest to the right in Sweden. This is in part because they have all but completely abandoned a backwards agenda of protectionism, isolationism, social conservatism, and so on. Admittedly it's been a very long time since the Moderate party represented those things, but anyway. Those only became a hot topic gradually after the fall of Communism, the enlargement of EU and the following globalization. The modern part of Sweden's politicians are among the most cosmopolitan in the entire world. While those are sending Sweden as a whole down a road of economic growth - which can be seen in the successes of the recent right-wing government - this leaves individual persons behind. A person with no skill at anything sitting in a small town in rural Sweden would be much better off with a government with no visions shutting itself off from the world. Of course that would lead to long-term catastrophe, but the people who vote for such a party aren't really good at thinking or else they would not have found the allure of those parties in the first place. They claim that the other options are all alike, and that the politicians do not listen. The first point is far from true, but sure, from their perspective all options look like **** because the future for inbred small-town unemployed men with no education (Sweden Democrat voters) looks increasingly bleak, accelerating with globalization. Yes, the politicians do not listen to them, because they don't agree with their opinions. It's really the same thing as with Luddites during the industrial revolution. If you replace 70% of all workers with machines you will have created an angry, unemployed mob. If you swim with the globalization, increase free trade, outsourcing and so on you will also in the end create an angry mob. The leaning to the left might vote for pseudo-communists, those leaning to the right will vote for nationalists. The people voting for the Sweden Democrats are not die-hard racists like their politicians, they are angry, confused and very, very afraid of change. The nationalist wave in Europe is composed of modern-day Luddites who can't deal with globalization. They are one of history's brake blocks. It's sad, but we have to take their opinions into account because they are also humans.