Gonna go a little out of order here.

Correlation is not causation.

Hitler and Mussolini did unpleasant things in the name of National Socialism. The Japanese emperor did unpleasant things in the name of his glorious empire. The dictators of 20th century South and Central America did unpleasant things in the name of capitalism. The Iranian and Saudi governments do unpleasant things in the name of Islam. Then Chinese (now) do their unpleasant business in the name of harmony and social order.

Sociopaths say and do whatever the fuck it takes to gain and keep power, which tends to be whatever will get the locals of that place and time are likely to go along with. Communism was a convenient way to whip up the terribly oppressed masses of what were then near-feudal societies. It might as well have been a new religion - Stalin would still have been scheming his way to the top, in a funny hat if necessary.

Don't mistake my argument - I'm not supporting communism here. But it also annoys me that someone can make a shallow statement like that as if it were a full explanation of the history, especially as I never want to see that particular bit of history repeated.

No. They killed people because they were sociopaths with unchecked power. Go read history and you'll find everything they did done by others for a hundred other gods, fatherlands, and miscellaneous causes.

Stalin had Lenin killed to get power. He spent the rest of his life purging random people in the party in order to eliminate or control those that knew where all the bodies were buried. Saddam Hussein's reign was much the same. Oh, and Hitler's. And let's not forget the old Czar's secret police or how folks ended up in the Bastille. As has been the reign of many, many, others like them.

Stalin got a bunch of Russians killed in WWII. Like the Czar (and, well, pretty much everyone) did in WWI. Like countless idiot leaders have all throughout history. No common ideology, just idiocy and the threat of unspeakable violence against anyone that would dare correct it.

Stalin purged religious folks, made their lives miserable, wrecked their shit, sent them off to camps. So did Hitler. And some of the Ottoman rulers. And the Romans at times. And, if the bible is to be believed, even the ancient Hebrews on their way into the "promised land". And many many others. Ideology isn't the common thread here; it's tyrants that want to eliminate groups that might band together to oppose them (and taking all their stuff must be a nice bonus, too).

Stalin fucked up the economy and millions starved to death. While the scale and speed of Stalin's famines is impressive, government mismanagement causing economic suffering is hardly unique. People in parts of Africa starve and die of preventable diseases every day because the warlords horde everything. People die for similar reasons in some of India's more badly managed rural areas. I know people in the former USSR who tell me of friends, family members, and neighbors that got sick and died because they couldn't afford to heat their homes after the collapse of communism, or because they were malnourished, or because what medical infrastructure there was completely collapsed and the nearest doctor was a day's drive away. Is that an indictment against capitalism, or is it just corruption, cronyism, and high-level idiocy? Rulers have been starving the masses to death, wondering why they don't just eat cake instead, since ancient times, regardless of gods or ideals.

So no, Stalin didn't kill because he was a communist. He killed because that was his path to power and because he was an idiot who'd kill anyone that tried to help him past his own idiocy. He kept killing because people were, for a very long time, either too in love with him (or what he claimed to stand for) or too afraid of him or just plain too indifferent to do a goddamn thing about it.

But let's just blame it on communism. Yeah, that's way easier than talking about the social and political environment they took power in and the factors that enabled them and why nobody stopped them before they did such great damage. If we did that, we might notice parallels forming as the political process decays in our own societies, and that would just be so unpleasant...

My thanks to you and your friend for putting that online (and for the image gallery as well). It's simple, but still pretty damn cool.

Yes. Because, and I thought this was clear, I'm not bitter that my parents divorced or about the misery that attended the divorce itself.

To clarify further, what I am bitter at is that the "thou shalt not commit adultery/divorce is wrong/what god has joined together..." attitudes they were brought up with were a direct contributing factor in the years of miserable marriage they shared after any hope for fixing things was gone. The same attitudes which vastly magnified the feelings of betrayal, guilt, and general unpleasantness that followed the divorce. I'm bitter that the Christian culture they grew up and married in has latched onto adultery - a mere symptom - and has largely rejected the fact that people change, sometimes you can't fix things by trying, and it's OK to move on and god really won't hate you or send you to hell for all eternity because of that.

What's my motivation to put the other first if I no longer love her? Will going through the motions make me start loving her again? Because my parents tried that for years and it didn't work out so well for them.

Sometimes people just grow apart and you can't always fix it. I mean, you can try to grow together, but things happen and people see them differently, and over years those differences can add up. Better to part amicably and find others you can love than to feel unloved, miserable, and trapped, blame each other for that feeling, and then hurt each other as hard as you can when it all finally does go to hell and the lawyers get involved.

I don't deny that at all. But I counter that even small children can tell when their parents no longer love each other, and it's far worse to rob them of a chance at seeing first-hand what a real loving family looks like just to spare them a few months of trauma. Trauma heals. Being ignored for years on end because your parents are too busy sniping at each other to display any sort of love at all? Well, that heals too, but nowhere near as quickly or completely.

That's why I'm glad my parents divorced. Because if they hadn't, that's all I would have had growing up. That and a lot of bitterness towards my friends because how fucking unfair is it that they get to have nice parents that aren't too busy with their own shit to look at them?

And growing up with a father so disinterested in her and her mother that he could just take off and abandon them is going to somehow fill that void? No offense, but I would think your step-daughter wanted a father, not just some indifferent man that her mother happened to cohabit with.

Transportation and long-distance communications do exist, you know. My parents ended up living over a thousand kilometers apart, but I still had them both. Divorce doesn't take fathers away from little girls. Indifferent assholes breaking all contact with their offspring are what makes fathers go away.

Yeah. I could have done with hyperbole tags around that bit (there I go, thinking things are obvious again). I don't actually mean that there's some sort of conspiracy on the part of pastors.

My point is though that the attitudes concerning sex, marriage, and fidelity I saw preached at a lot of churches (back before I abandoned the faith entirely) consisted of telling people to feel guilty for urges and acts that wouldn't really be an issue at all if the fundamentals (like actually loving the person you're with) were in place. Fundamentals which were completely ignored and glossed over: "Oh just love each other unconditionally - it's easy with god's help!" You know what someone that's fallen out of love hears? They hear, "Try harder, your best just clearly isn't cutting it (and what's wrong with you anyway?), god has probably abandoned you."

I've seen these attitudes, both in my own family and in others, lead to absurd amounts of unnecessary and utterly avoidable misery. So much so that I find "Thou shalt not commit adultery" to be an offensively shallow and simplistic (as though people that love each other need to be told to not go around hurting each other) basis for a system of promoting the stability of families, which trivializes the real issues which actually do wreck families and scar individuals for life.

That's what makes me bitter.

Are you asking? Because my parents divorced over adultery, and I'm fine with it. Honestly, they were miserable, and their relationship was beyond repair. They needed something shocking like that one unfortunate little slip to break the stony silence and get things finished. If not that, I can easily imagine it being a suicide attempt a few years down the line... So adultery is absolutely fine by me - if you're at the point of cheating on your spouse, there are already far, far, more important things the two of you should deal with than a bit of sex.

And for the "stay together for the children!" crowd: fuck off. The year of misery that followed the divorce is well worth the normal moved-on-with-our-lives people that continued raising me thereafter, especially since the alternative would have been another twelve or so years of being practically ignored by people who silently (but obviously) despise each other. I mean talk about setting a bad example for impressionable minds...

I have a few close friends who's parents also divorced over similar issues. They say largely the same thing. Anecdotal, yes, but worth consideration.

From my point of view that commandment (and all the other "what god has joined together..." bullshit) has nothing to do with preserving the stability of marriages and everything to do with providing the priesthood with a steady stream of neurotic angry people in dire need of counselling services.

For those that honestly don't know and do want slightly more details, you can see some of my old comments here and here. Sorry about the tone, I was bored, and the trolls looked so very hungry...

For those who find clicking difficult, the most relevant bit is this:

The review is written by the reviewer. The score is purchased by the game publisher.

The River he met in the library was at the end of her life (unless he goes back and re-downloads her into a body at some point). The River in Time of Angels is a younger River (she chides the Doctor for giving out spoilers when he introduces her as a professor, which she isn't yet). Actually, if I remember correctly, the River in the library actually asks him if they've "done" the crash of the Byzantium yet when she's trying to figure out how far back in his timeline she is.

The River in The Pandorica Opens is even younger than that, and if the pattern holds the next time we see her she'll be younger yet again.

I'll start off by saying I don't think you should have been down-modded. I speak other languages too and I think I understand what it is you think is missing from English, in terms of precision. But as much as I love languages with sane and consistent rules for making up new words, I have to disagree with the assertion that English is imprecise. English itself is ridiculously precise, by virtue of it's ridiculously large vocabulary (which is a natural consequence of constantly borrowing in everybody else's words). The main issue I have with the language, in terms of precision, is that most English speakers simply can't be bothered to learn all the words, which renders them less useful when addressing a general audience. So the vocabulary is tedious to learn, yes, but the grammar is absurdly easy and less fraught with ambiguities than the others that I know.

Well, if I had a ton of (say, retirement) money invested in a big company, I'd want that company raping you as hard as possible, too! After all, if they rape you hard enough, I might get rich!~

For those that didn't see the "sarcasm mark" at the end of that, I don't actually think that way, but the world is full of short-sighted people that can't think far enough ahead to realize how destructive that attitude is towards the social systems that support their self-centered little lives, and how they are, in aggregate, costing by far the vast majority of us far more than we ever get back...

Does it really matter what shape the politician is? I mean, can't we just skip to the bit with the frictionless vacuum?

Well, it depends on your compiler options and what subset of C++ you're talking about. Enable exceptions and you automatically get a slowdown in any function that declares a class with non-trivial destructor on the stack and does anything that can't absolutely be proven to never throw (such as an indirect function call, virtual call, or even [on certain platforms where hardware exceptions are magically turned into C++ exceptions] execute a single instruction). Yes, I know there are platforms with "zero-cost" exception handling, the problem is there are many many others without it.

Then there's the debate about how best to expose (better yet: prevent) sloppy coding. Yes, in the hands of an expert, C++ offers no disadvantage, but it's often very difficult to find fifty experts (all without excessive egos) to work together on a project. And when you're on a platform where cache misses are *horribly expensive*, making a loop slow is as simple as typing "virtual" somewhere in a base class of some type who's methods you're calling (this besides bugging out the method that was meant to hide the inherited definition). That sort of shit can take *ages* to track down because it's utterly nonobvious when you open up the loop that's being slow. Overloaded operators and, to an extent, function overloading are also commonly culprits in this sort of situation - though I'd say the benefits pay for the cost in these cases.

"Correct" C++, especially template code, besides taking ages to compile, also tends to run like shit in debug mode. Have you taken a look at the implementations of various std::algorithm methods? Layer after layer of overload selecting based on type traits. Do that in a loop and your debug build ends up orders of magnitude slower than a release because inlining is disabled. If your program's definition of correctness includes run time and you heavily use Boost or the STL, you can kiss your debug build goodbye and jump straight to printf debugging, because whereas you might have a 10% faster machine to counter the 10% cost of a debug build, chances are you're not going to have one 1000% faster just lying around somewhere.

And then you have scenarios where OO in general can encourage bad habits, so a language like C where it's possible but ugly helps keep people on the straight-and-narrow. In my experience, there's a lot of merit to that way of thinking, but a lot of the specific cases where it comes up are subtle I really don't have the time to convincingly back up the general rule with a thousand little seemingly unconnected examples.

Of course, I do use C++ a fair amount, limiting myself to whatever subset seems right for the job. It's entirely possible to do anything at all in C++, but that knowhow is resource that's rarer than you might expect and almost impossible to detect in an interview. If I had a project where I needed to hire a dozen other coders I would very strongly consider avoiding C (or, if I expect to have the time, be an utter Nazi about which subset of C++ I'm going to permit into the codebase).

What do you call the dreams where you're simultaneously experiencing multiple viewpoints, none of which you might call fully lucid but the sum total of which may well exceed ordinary levels of consciousness?

For instance, if I'm dreaming about wandering through a maze, I'll very often be simultaneously aware of an I-RTS-cursor PoV building out the maze and an I-lost PoV walking through it. And while both I-RTS-cursor and I-lost are in themselves aware that it's a dream and even that the other unit of consciousness is there, they have no access to the other's inner state, so I-lost doesn't know the layout (though he intrinsically recognizes the maze as a work of "self") and I-RTS-cursor has no idea what turn I-lost will take next. Both are intrinsically recognizable as "self", but they operate within a restricted subspace of possible thoughts (and are often, within their own subjective PoV, aware of this fact in that they'll consciously put big error bars on their thoughts to maintain coherence).

It's difficult to explain the sensation clearly, but what I can state with absolute clarity is that it's exactly like the mind is playing a game with itself, where it spawns off a "shard" of consciousness for every element of that game. So the gaming comparison is, in my experience, extremely apt. Bah, I'm rambling, I'll stop...

And the instant that sort of thing reaches any sort of critical mass, laws will be passed, and the authorities will step on it hard. At best it would turn into the mire that is the current state of anti-"piracy" enforcement, where people get sued into ridiculous settlements for decades while the available hardware is locked down ever more and more... If anything it'd be a sneakernet since shutting that down is a little more involved than driving around scanning for the mesh signals.

If anything is to change, then the powers responsible for the status quo must be broken, along with the culture of acquiescing because it's "their" infrastructure (built on all that public land with all those lovely subsidies, tax breaks, and government-granted monopolies). Given that the vast majority either stands behind the status quo or doesn't give a shit either way, I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Hahahahahahahahaha! Hahaha! Hoo. Hah. Heh... Whew... Oh man, that's funny. Tell another one...

Yup. We need new curse words, we've worn the old ones out to the point where they mean nothing, even when spoken by those that don't often swear. If this keeps up, in fifty years, "fuck" will be commonly used as an article to indicate emphasis and have no other meaning whatsoever.

They are legally and ethically obligated to ensure that such a thing can never happen. If there's not enough fucking booming, they can fucking have more made ahead of time. It's not even prohibitively expensive given that the cost can realistically be split across all operations in the region (it's not like each platform, or even each company, needs its own full set of booming).

As opposed to what? Improper booming does nothing. It is exactly as good as zero booming. Worse, even, since it wastes time and resources that could be put to better use than providing photo-ops for idiots with titles.

So yes. Yes they should have done as much proper fucking booming as possible and removed some oil from the water. That would be better than wasting time and boom and neither removing nor meaningfully slowing the progression of any oil whatsoever.

Some combination of which area most of the oil is heading for and which area would be the most catastrophic to lose.

They screwed up a long time ago, the screwed up a little while ago, they're screwing up right now, and they show no sign of changing that trend in the near future. Accurate enough for you?