I agree that the GMO hysteria is way overblown, and the science on it causing any ill effects are nill. Tough non-GMO supporters tend to say that there's no long enough studies.

True enough, if you want a lifetime study you'll have to wait a great deal longer, since GMO foods only went commercial in 1994, tough i'm sure the studies were going on for ages before that.

In any case, what concerns me is the patent of crops, and while today as far as i know, the strain is patented for 20 years (atleast in the US) After that they become public domain as far as its makeup\modification is concerned. Fair enough.

The only issue i fear (which is not logical ), is that if\when GMO's become the "norm", and non modified crops are basically not grown anywhere, the rulebook goes out the window, some politicians gets alot richer, and the corporations now own all the plants\seeds. Forever.

I know it's extremely unlikely, but i dare anyone not to nod and think "yep, corporations would do that in a second if they could get away with it".

Let him run away to get a bigger gun, to get a hostage, or to harm someone else?

Given that they were in a car with weapons and bullet holes, all of those things were likely to occur. The officer did the right thing to protect the public.

Can you imagine if they didn't shoot, and an innocent bystander got killed? Everyone would be asking why they didn't shoot when they had the chance. It's a tough gig to be a cop.

The kid played with fire and got burnt.

Had the chance at what exactly, Bob? Why don't you count the number of times DPKR signed previous promises only to break them as Trump excused all their infractions for them by repeating Kim's line of "it was the Wests' fault". Who exactly is he the President of, seriously? He literally apologized for defending our Allies, "like a Bitch", to use his own phrase. He excused the regime and the individual of truly horrific crimes by saying "it's tough" to lead a country (giving himself ideas to run with).

I fail to see how even you, Bob, could be optimistic about the so-called "Summit".

Besides a Photo Op, this was just another opportunity for our President to do more under-the-table deals, because only the deeply corrupt play that game. Mr Real Estate just gushed about the incredible beachfront condo opportunities just waiting...for him to get at.

*promote gutsy move ... gonna be tough to get those grass stains out though

I got interested in that question based on the Elder Scrolls series. Morrowind had a basically static world, Oblivion was basically entirely scaled to the player, and Skyrim is scaled to the player but within a min/max range.

To me, Morrowind was great because it could put appropriately powerful rewards in difficult (or just plain obscure) areas. Oblivion in particular was bad at making leveling feel like a treadmill because every time you leveled up as the player, pretty much every enemy would be that much more powerful also. Skyrim was better about that since an area would generally set its difficulty scale based on the first time you visited it, so you could leave and come back later if it was too tough, but it still felt a little off.

Another associated problem is how loot gets influenced by those leveled lists. In Skyrim, loot in containers and in the inventory of leveled enemies generally scales, but loot sitting out in the open in the game world generally doesn't. Which is really annoying, because all generic loot pretty much everywhere ends up being crappy low-level iron. God forbid there's some steel, elven, or dwarven gear in places where it would totally make sense to be (say, dwarven gear in dwarven ruins) that you might venture into before that gear becomes "level appropriate".


In a related issue, one beef that I have with general RPG mechanics is how they all feel the need to make you drastically more powerful at level 5 compared to level 1, and again at level 10 compared to level 5, and so on. By the time you're near the level cap, you're probably 100-1000 times as powerful as you were at level 1, which gives a good sense of accomplishment but just doesn't seem realistic, and leads to this problem with fixed difficulty or level scaling. Western RPGs (boiling back to pen and paper DnD rules) certainly aren't great about this, but JRPGs are completely ridiculous about it, which is pretty much why Final Fantasy 3(6) was the last one that I enjoyed. In my adulthood, I just can't handle them -- even going back and trying to play FF3 that I *loved* way back when.

I'd like to see more games where you get more skills, polish, and versatility as you progress, but overall you aren't more than 3-5 times as powerful at max level as you were at the beginning. Mount and Blade is one of the few games I can think of that comes close to that.

This really rang true for me... (Cool Story Bro alert)

I spent a ridiculous amount of time playing two different RPGs in my early teen years: Ultima 6 and Final Fantasy 3 (SNES, FF6 by Japanese reckoning).

I treated Ultima 6 as a world simulator more than a "game", and so I never actually finished it because I had discovered and thrown away key plot items, and done enough"evil" stuff to have low karma that prevented me from actually proceeding with the story. But I didn't care much, I enjoyed just exploring and steamrolling anything that crossed my path.

Final Fantasy 3(6) was more forgiving though. I put experience eggs and other stuff on each character and then ground xp in the dinosaur forest, and eventually got every one up to level 99 with 9999 health and high stats. Similar to Ultima 6, I mainly enjoyed exploring and leveling up, so I had never even tried the final boss battle (Kefka) until I had every single character up to level 99 (not just 4-person party, I mean *every* character).

I figured being the final boss meant that it would be a tough fight no matter what. So I decked out a group of 4 (I liked Edgar, Sabin, Mog, and Umaro as my favorites) all with high end stuff. Edgar had Genji Gloves (dual wield) and Offering (attack 4 times per weapon, so 8 with Genji Glove), with Atma Weapon and Ragnarok swords.

Fight my way to Kefka, and order Edgar to "attack" -- 8 attacks of 9999 damage each, Kefka dies without getting so much as a single turn. Welp, guess I overprepared for that boss!

/end CSB

That was a hard fall at the end. Amazing comeback tough!

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Never had a python inside my house here in Thailand, but have had a couple of ~1m tree snakes (non-venomous) sneak out from behind dressers, etc.

But I am kind of known as the crazy snake-loving foreigner in my area, so I got called in to a neighbors kitchen one time and discovered a young monocled cobra (also about 1m). I really wanted to try to hold it by hand, but decided it was probably better to use a broom handle and guide it into a box. Then released it into an empty lot. Later, I realized that I probably should have opted for some eye protection -- some of the local cobras are spitters.

Generally, Thais kill snakes and then fire up the grill. Nice to see they kept this one alive, for the time being -- although the older fella yanking on the head probably didn't do it any favors. Snakes are quite tough though. Also fun to hear the chatter in Thai.

Disappointed...I was looking for a goldilocks moment.
This Russian is too tough, and this Russian is too mushy soft, but this Russian is the perfect tender consistency....nom nom nom.
Sure seems like a *terrible idea to me. What happens when they get 3' of snow tonight and wake up to a bear in the kitchen?

This is so true...

Programming without the internet was tough. I remember my early years of programming in ASM and C/C++. The only internet access was via BBSes and Trumpet Winsock. Your only source of real help was from Usenet groups and questionable help files. There was no such thing as Intelli-sense (as we know it now) or auto-complete; you pretty much had to memorize the parameters for all Win32 API calls and the STL for C++ was brutal to use. Programming nowadays is relatively easy in comparison - pretty much anyone can code thanks to the internet and fantastic online resources. Heck, my 7 yr old daughter is learning to write code using a Scratch-derived visual programming language and Cosmo (look it up, it's awesome). I started "coding" at 8 by typing out programs from an adventure game programming book, in BASIC (think old Infocom games, like Wishbringer/Zork, etc).

The challenge in today's programming environment is the rapid pace of change. It's so f'n hard to keep up with every new toolkit, platform, library, programming language enhancements, etc.

Sad video for sure (the music was a bit much though).

Kind of a tough call - I do think the truck driver deserves the majority of the blame and should at the minimum be charged with a hit and run - and probably more - as he did pass the cyclist and clearly did not proceed with any due caution on that turn.

With that said, as an avid cyclist myself, I trust NO ONE while riding. Looking at the video, there seems to be a bike lane symbol in the middle lane, suggesting that cyclists proceeding through the intersection should be using that lane. Now I don't think that is enforced by law, but if that is what the symbol is there for, this would be a perfect illustration as to why. Also, if you look even closer, it appears the truck had his indicator on before she pulled up beside him; i.e. she should have seen his indicator. I hate to put any blame on that poor woman and - I really hate to say this - this video only goes to show that both parties were at fault.

Possible, but I don't really think so. I think that the Medical minds of the time thought that physical shock, pressure waves from bombing etc. as you described, were a (or perhaps THE) primary cause of the psychological problems of returning soldiers. So the name "shell shock" came from there, but the symptoms that it was describing were psychological and, I think precisely equal to modern PTSD. Basically, "shell shock" became a polite euphemism for "soldier that got mentally messed up in the war and is having difficulty returning to civilian life".

My grandfather was an Army Air Corps armorer during WWII. He went through basic training, but his primary job was loading ammunition, bombs, external gas tanks, etc. onto P-47 airplanes. He was never in a direct combat situation, as I would describe it. He was never shot at, never in the shockwave radius of explosions, etc. But after the war he was described as having mild "shell shock", manifested by being withdrawn, not wanting to talk about the war, and occasionally prone to angry outbursts over seemingly trivial things. Eventually, he started talking about the war in his mid 80's, and here's a few relevant (perhaps) stories of his:

He joined the European theater a couple days after D-Day. Came to shore on a Normandy beach in the same sort of landing craft seen in Saving Private Ryan, etc. Even though it was days later, there were still LOTS of bodies on the beach, and thick smell of death. Welcome to the war!

His fighter group took over a French farm house adjacent to a dirt landing strip / runway. They put up a barbed wire perimeter with a gate on the road. In one of the only times I heard of him having a firearm and being expected to potentially use it, he pulled guard duty at that gate one evening. His commanding officer gave him orders to shoot anyone that couldn't provide identification on sight. While he was standing guard, a woman in her 20's rolled up on a bicycle, somewhat distraught. She spoke no English, only French. She clearly wanted to get in, and even tried to push past my grandfather. By the letter of his orders, he was "supposed" to shoot her. Instead, he knocked her off her bike when she tried to ride past after getting nowhere verbally and physically restrained her. At gunpoint! When someone that spoke French got there, it turned out that she was the daughter of the family that lived in the farm house. They had no food, and she was coming back to get some potatoes they had left in the larder.

Riding trains was a common way to get air corps support staff up to near the front, and also to get everybody back to transport ships at the end of the war. On one of those journeys later in the war, my grandfather was riding in an open train car with a bunch of his buddies. They were all given meals at the start of the trip. A short while later, the track went through a French town. A bunch of civilians were waiting around the tracks begging for food. I'll never forgot my grandfather describing that scene. It was tough for him to get out, and then all he managed was "they was starvin'!" He later explained that he and his buddies all gave up the food that they had to those people in the first town -- only to have none left to give as they rolled past similar scenes in each town on down the line.

When my mother was growing up, she and her brothers learned that they'd better not leave any food on their plates to go to waste. She has said that the angriest she ever saw her dad was when her brothers got into a food fight one time, and my grandfather went ballistic. They couldn't really figure out what the big deal was, until years later when my grandfather started telling his war stories and suddenly things made more sense.


A lot of guys had a much rougher war than my grandfather. Way more direct combat. Saw stuff much worse -- and had to DO things that were hard to live with. I think the psychological fallout of stuff like that explains the vast majority of "shell shock", without the addition of CTE-like physical head trauma. I'd wager that when the docs said Stewart's father's shell shock was a reaction to aerial bombardment, that was really just a face-saving measure to try to explain away the perceived "weakness" of his condition.

Maybe you should actually read the article before commenting on this?

Warning: it's a terribly written article that spends a lot of time on completely irrelevant details, also very NSFW, but to summarise (quoting from article):

When Ansari told her he was going to grab a condom within minutes of their first kiss, Grace voiced her hesitation explicitly. “I said something like, ‘Whoa, let’s relax for a sec, let’s chill.’”
...
She says Ansari began making a move on her that he repeated during their encounter. “The move he kept doing was taking his two fingers in a V-shape and putting them in my mouth, in my throat to wet his fingers, because the moment he’d stick his fingers in my throat he’d go straight for my vagina and try to finger me.” Grace called the move “the claw.”

Ansari also physically pulled her hand towards his penis multiple times throughout the night, from the time he first kissed her on the countertop onward. “He probably moved my hand to his dick five to seven times,” she said. “He really kept doing it after I moved it away.”

But the main thing was that he wouldn’t let her move away from him. She compared the path they cut across his apartment to a football play. “It was 30 minutes of me getting up and moving and him following and sticking his fingers down my throat again. It was really repetitive. It felt like a fucking game.”

Ansari wanted to have sex. She said she remembers him asking again and again, “Where do you want me to fuck you?” while she was still seated on the countertop. She says she found the question tough to answer because she says she didn’t want to fuck him at all.

End quoting.

I find it difficult to believe Ansari is "inexperienced". He's 34, famous, good-looking and funny. Hell, he wrote a damn book on the subject.

Now, even though I've lost count of the number of times I've said this, to be perfectly clear: I DO NOT THINK ANSARI IS GUILTY OF A CRIME.

But I also don't think that behaviour is acceptable. He acted like a total asshole.

But since we're talking about degrees of harm, you can still be an asshole and do actual harm without committing a crime.

Should his accuser have just left? Probably. Does that excuse his behaviour? Nope.

@newtboy

That's always the way with these people.

Trump's "tough on crime" really means he's tough on street-level crime and minorities. Billionaire bankers stealing from the poor are A-OK with him!

You know what the biggest type of economic crime in America is? At over double all other property crimes combined (auto crime, burglary, larceny, and robbery).

It's wage theft, where wealthy employers simply refuse to pay their employees at the level required by law or contract. The biggest proportion of wage theft is refusing to meet minimum wage standards. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wage_theft