I think the point the GP was making was that, yes the US military can instantly and overwhelmingly wipe out any civil resistance. However that is entirely dependent on said soldiers of the US military actually following those orders. If there was a civil insurrection, there is a real possibility that soldiers would simply refuse to open fire on civilians and also possible that they would simply join them.
Doesn't happen much, does it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_State_shootings
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson_State_killings
Look, left-wing parties are likely to do well in our next election, but no-one sensible here, left or right, wants to raise the corporation tax rate. These companies provide our jobs.
If a raise would be announced, ordinary people here would really start to protest.
Ireland is not the US, where lower-middle class working people will protest on the streets saying that Mario Antoinette should have more cake.
I'd like to see a game that isn't a click-fest, but still would offer some action and nice visuals. Something with the gameplay involving giving orders to partially autonomous troops. After giving orders, you could watch and see how they fare and perhaps give some further orders, maybe with some possible penalty incurred for breaking radio silence. Or in the setting of a Total War type of game, there could be a limited number messengers who would take time to reach the troops and even have a chance to fail in delivering your orders.
Scourge of War: Gettysburg and its predecessors Take Command: 2nd Manassas and Take Command: Bull Run pretty much work that way. The graphics are dated (think Medieval: TW quality) but functional enough, the gameplay fairly slow and meticulous. Most battles start with 5-20 minutes of maneuvering into attack positions, after which you order your divisions/brigades their set targets and watch them march into the fray. If and when things start looking bad you start to micromanage individual batteries and regiments. That's when it gets really hectic and interesting. Or you can play Empire: TW and watch the beautifully rendered but historically ridiculously inaccruate soldiers run up and down mountains on a tiny battlefield while being bombarded by overpowered artillery.
Multigrid is theoretically O(s), so I don't immediately see how this is such a huge leap. Of course the actual complexity also depends on the problem and the implementation. Maybe their method.is applicaple to a wider variety of problems.
Also, the "iterated sparsifying" sounds a lot like algebraic multigrid.
Why is this a troll?
Because anyone who points out that modern greens have abandoned real convervationism for made-up issues like CO2 "pollution" gets modded a troll on
Dozens of identical TIE advanceds circling around in one big furball, desparately trying to get on each others' tails for minutes on end. No skill needed. Just lean on the stick and twitch the trigger whenever you see a craft flash past your sights.
No thanks.
Seriously guys, we're limited by the technology. There's a reason CRPGs and JRPGs are what they are -- it's just not feasible to make the kind of experiences you are asking for. Consider Mass Effect or Dragon Age, games that have hundreds of thousands of pages of text. Even they feel "railroady" at times. You can't join the villain, after all, because they didn't have an extra 5 years to write, script, draw, program, etc that scenario and the 500 sub-scenarios involved.
That's the problem with modern games. They assume the player needs to be inundated with pages upon pages of mediocre fantasy guff to keep them engrossed in what is otherwise a plastic and unconvincing game world that has an economy entirely run on monster loot.
Make the game world logical if not realistic, fill it with NPCs that act like you would expect them to, and allow the PCs to act in meaningful ways with them. The players imagination can fill in the gaps and come up with a great story. Darklands might play like a multiple choice quiz at times, but it did this nearly two decades ago.
I Finland everyone has a national identification number.
So am I living in some socialist police state, or is it just a matter of what kind of government implements this kind of a scheme?
Finland is one of those countries that could be turned into a police state if TPTB were more motivated towards evil and if the national spirit was a bit different. Off the top of my head, we've recently had:
Back already!
Seriously, read the article. Yeah, I must be new here. Sure the panel contains some climate scientists. It would be a bit dumb not to. It also contains a statistician and a physicist.
But now I've just spoiled your latest notion, you'll have to find another bogus reason to disbelieve it.
Two unbelievers out of seven do not matter when you read the report. It's only nine pages long. It flat out says they are not interested in discussing whether the science is sound. They spend more paragraphs castigating AGW critics than they do the deplorable conduct evidenced by the CRU emails. My favorite part is the one where they state that more advanced statistical methods would probably not have improved the results, while at the same time suggesting more advanced statistical methods be used next time. So the purpose of using better statistics for the panel is not to obtain more certain results, but simply to obtain a more credible facade for the spaghetti reconstructions the climatologists love so much.
"If we continue to cut back on smoke pouring forth from industrial smokestacks, the increase in global warming could be profound," Kintisch writes in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times. Kintisch isn't talking about greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide; he's talking about another kind of pollutant we put in the sky -- "like aerosols from a spray can," he tells NPR's Guy Raz. "It turns out that those particles have a profound effect on maintaining the planet's temperature." Greenhouse gases and aerosol pollutants work in opposing ways on the Earth's climate, Kintisch explains. "The greenhouse gases warm the planet when they're emitted, because they absorb heat reflected up from the ground -- the greenhouse effect. These aerosols, though, do the opposite. They block sunlight, they make clouds more reflective -- and by doing that, they actually cool the planet. "The problem is that we're cutting the cooling pollution as we make our air cleaner," he says. Some scientists, he says, are confident that this is connected to global warming, but they don't know how large the effect is. "That's the frightening thing, because if it's a big cooling effect, it means that we've been actually warming the planet more than we know," Kintisch says. "As we take away that unexpectedly helpful cooling mask, we're going to be facing more global warming than we expected.
BINGO!
We are experiencing system trouble -- do not adjust your terminal.