Also, dft, it's not that I support capitalism any different than you do. I'm just more of an agorist while you seem to want to live in this muddied middle ground between socialism and capitalism. A place nonexistent without the use of force and coercion to get everyone to play along by your rules of central planning.

There's a reason why Marxists despised social democrats. It's because they've confused the message of socialism and bastardized it. It's also why the national socialists tried to wipe the social democrats out, because they're a threat to their designs for national central planning.

@gwiz665, I don't see the controversy. I'm not sure what feelings are inconsequential to whatever force there is on VS. A dupe is a dupe. It's nothing personal. And certainly we shouldn't be encouraging people to not dupeof dupes, right?

I apologize becase I really don't understand why or how people's feelings could be hurt over a dupe, and why that should be cause for people to not dupef a dupe. This is just muddying what's a clear black-and-white rule.

Not to mention the chains can break and the guy is sitting in an unprotected cab, or something on the wheel itself could snap.

Or the damage it could do the machine if it didn't come free at some point...something has to give somewhere.

Either that ground was sloppy muddy when they drove into it, or they spun their wheels until they got stuck so bad they had to do this. Better off to stop and get some other kind of machine/truck or winch system to pull you.

This is one of those things you learn when you work in dirt......if the ground is suspect, walk it before you drive through it. If it won't hold you, it's not going to hold the machine. And don't park machines where you can't get to them with other machinery to pull them free if the ground turns to mush under them during the night or after a storm...if there's no stable looking parking options.

You know what I hated about this?

We have ALL witnessed the horror of the 2004 tsunami in the countless videos that showed up at the time.
Tell me 1 of those videos where the fucking water was anything close to transparent? The water in these effects is transparent and very clean for the most part.

We all saw that in a tsunami, it instantly becomes a torrent of muddy looking water. I would understand FX people creating a really unrealistic explosion in space, since we never really saw one. But this?

Major fail in my book.

As I understand it that law is loosely interpreted given the circumstances. Sure peace officers are to uphold the law 24/7 but when they are out to dinner with their families? If an officer is ill equipped to deal with the situation then they should differ to those better equipped.

I'm also fairly certain that the laws applicable to officers differs from state.

As for this "If anything, by your brethren who now think you're a pussy," bullshit; courage is doing the right thing when everyone else is doing the wrong thing. Meaning don't let peer pressure or fictive kinship affect the way you handle a situation. It clouds judgment and muddies the waters making it impossible to uphold the law objectively.

While not the best source it is very interesting to see opinions of those who stand in the line of duty. Of the more cognitive writers in the forum linked below, most of those seem to agree that being a good witness is the best way for an off duty officer to uphold the law.

http://www.wikilaw3k.org/forum/Law-Enforcement-Police/Police-Officers-when-off-duty-346696.htm

>> ^Payback:

>> ^NordlichReiter:
There's a use of force continuum for a reason.
Just because we can't see what is going on doesn't mean that the officers use of a weapon is warranted.
What I saw was an escalation in force that was unwarranted which ended in the officer putting the lives of the perpetrator and his at risk. He was outnumbered and practically waylaying on a drunken idiot who was on the ground with friends who were there.
Here's how I would have handled the situation ask them to leave upon which no acquiescence I would contact the police and tell them there is a drunk and disorderly person on the property which I am protecting.
Being an off duty cop working security means that if you make an arrest that's double the paperwork. There's paperwork for the client in your contracted capacity and then paperwork for the police in your official capacity. Fuck that, if I'm off duty then the guys working that night can do the official paperwork.

A cop is a cop on duty or off. Like teachers, they are held to a higher standard than regular careers. Unlike the rest of us they do NOT have the right to ignore laws being broken. Like everyone else, they also do not have the right to break the law, but I was just pointing out a specific, important difference.
If you were a cop, and you did what you said you would, you could be penalized in some way. If anything, by your brethren who now think you're a pussy.

>> ^charliem:


These net-neutrality pundits seem to be making out that the big companies want to abuse the way that QOS is assigned....ie. identifying streams from providers that pay a premium and giving them a higher priority, irrespective of the traffic class.
Is this whats actually happening?

No, but that's because the internet has always had Net Neutrality regulation up to this point, through FCC fiat.

Net Neutrality advocates want new legislation that enshrines the de facto FCC policy in law, so that it's not subject to the whims of whoever is FCC chair (or put another way, so that Internet regulation isn't dependent on the honesty of the occupant of the White House).

As for whether the companies would do the things the Net Neutrality activists say they would, the telecom companies are openly saying they need to do things like bandwidth metering, and selling prioritized traffic rights because otherwise they simply won't be able to afford expanding their networks to meet demand.

>> ^charliem:


If thats the case, then the only regulation that needs to be passed is one that enforces the correct application of QOS categorization...ensuring that Voice gets Voice level QOS tagging, video gets video tagging, generic content gets no real priority, and network management protocols get highest (routing / switching protocols).
I dont see how they could make that political at all....present it to congress in that way, and enforce correct prioritization as law. No problem.


Thinking as a technical guy, I agree, that would be ideal. The problem is, who decides what "correct" application of QoS is? The FCC? A standards board dominated by representatives of the telecommunications committees? The network providers themselves?

There's also a problem with enforcement. That doesn't go away under pure neutrality, but at least then you're just testing to see if the service providers are doing any traffic shaping, rather than having to get into the nitty gritty of the specific shaping logic, and then trying to discern whether the intent of each rule was noble (traffic optimization) or criminal (anti-competitive business practice, or an attempt to limit free speech).

Smart companies could and would easily muddy the waters in the second system. (e.g. We're not limiting bandwidth to Netflix because we have a business agreement with Hulu, it's because Netflix is a huge resource hog that's causing slowdowns for our other customers...).

[redacted]

@Mcboinkens "Do you have any evidence of this in the animal world?"

In the time it took you to type that sentence you could have searched the topic yourself and found tons of material on the subject. Requests for evidence or references should be restricted to weird, obscure facts or statistics that can't easily be verified.

"Just looking at the facts, it is pretty obvious that it is a huge disadvantage in nature to be gay."

Do you have any evidence of that? There are many examples in nature of organisms where the primary goals of living are not individual reproduction or even survival. Worker bees are females that do not reproduce their own genetic code and often sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony. These traits are not genetic defects. There may well be some evolutionary reason for some humans to have a genetic predisposition to being homosexual. Even if, as you say, you're not homophobic, to suggest that it's a genetic defect is an example of muddied thinking and accomplishes nothing but to feed the homophobic trolls.

>> ^blankfist:

I doubt anyone can or should call Democrats left.

...

Also, during the Bush Presidency, did we forget all the anti-war protesters storming public meetings and carrying signs and yelling? It's the same really. Both sides feel there side isn't doing enough to "fight back".


This is the only part of your comment I agree with. Democrats are only "left" by way of comparison, not because they're actually left of center in any measurable way. Democrats today are to the right of Nixon on many, many issues.

>> ^blankfist:
[T]he whole left vs right paradigm is arbitrary and makes no sense currently. The terms 'right' and 'left' were created based on where political factions were seated in the Assembly during the French Revolution of the late 18th Century. On the left sat the National Party in favor of the Revolution and on the Right sat the Royalist Democrats in favor of a Constitutional.

You left out a word at the end of that sentence. Monarchy. Constitutional Monarchy.

Which is to say, left vs. right was borne out of a division on whose interests should take primacy, those of the nobility and the church, or the commoners?

That's how the parties still divide up today, you just have a lot more propaganda out there trying to muddy the issue.

>> ^blankfist:
I say the right vs. left scale should be total government on the left and no government on the right.

The old left-right struggle was basically a question of whether the landed nobility should get to have total authority (since they owned all the land), or whether authority should flow from rule of law set by an egalitarian democratic process.

The left pretty much won that fight, and ever since the right wants to make the government the enemy, because it gives commoners some sort of power over them.

That's why the royalists want you to believe that they're in a noble struggle against "government" in favor of "meritocracy", because now they need popular support for their cynically self-serving power grab.

It's the modern-day noble lie. The rich deserve all the power because they say they earned it with their own individual industriousness, never mind all the evidence to the contrary. And don't you dare ask questions about whether it's right that any one man should have so much more power than another, it's a sin to question those of noble birth just engaging in class warfare.

The old definition of left & right is still apt, it's just that the right has to pretend it's about something else now.

>> ^blankfist:
I also think the Dems have showed their teeth just as fervently as the Republicans. I mean, yeah, the tea party takes the cake, but Bill O'Reilly is tame these days next to Maddow and Olbermann.

You obviously don't watch any of those shows.

Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

The American was really good - the Australian seemed a bit muddy to me.

One of our old dogs would do the same thing. We didn't figure it out at first, until we found a mess of muddy paw prints in the tub.

Looks rather awesome.

Only niggling criticism would be the Dothraki around the 0:40 mark.. I imagined them to be mostly naked oily Mongolian-looking men on very strong horses. They look a bit more like the Merry Men here..

Oh well.. other stuff looks great. I just hope they don't make it too pretty or epic, and bit raw and muddy.

The sharpened textures and coloured lights made my eyes strain. Not a fan.

I always liked regular muddy brown GLQuake along with the re-vis'd transparent water maps.

I remember following Quake Done Quick and Quake Done Quicker when they were being worked on. Great stuff. I remember being amazed when they skipped sections where gates normally closed by making sure monsters were there, so the the closing routine didn't work properly.

This starts off interesting and then goes nowhere.

I think many systems are unnecessarily complex: government, legal, even videosift's queue; and I think a lot of good could be done by simplifying the tax structure, reducing the number of laws, and otherwise reducing complexity of systems so they are more efficient.

Certainly we could benefit from a more pacifist society but remember, Woodstock only lasted for 3 days. Eventually we need to provide food, services, protection, etc and a field full of muddy hippies won't provide any of that.

This video got me thinking about the old expression that "no questions are stupid"

First off, I realize of course that this is fiction, and the priest is an actor, nevertheless I cant imagine a real priest doing a much better job answering these questions. Sure, he might tackle the situation better, but I suspect the kids questions would still remain unanswered. The simplest explanation for this is that its not because the questions are bad, immature or irrelevant, its because the superstition they are probing is bad,immature and irrelevant.

This is why religions rely on "faith". in itself a muddy and wishy washy concept, but an effective means to keep the religion muddy and wishy-washy. Faith is like a border, restricting the faithful from ever poking the house of cards. "My house of cards is rock solid, but dont get to close, dont cough or do any sudden moves around it. Rock solid i say."

One of the many reasons I like evidence-based ideas over superstition is because they can actually stand scrutiny and questioning, and there really are no dumb questions.