"A giant steaming pile of awesome."

Nah... Noonian Hutt, Jabba's son.

You forgot to mention that the Democrats had provisions that allowed the FCC to dictate "balance" for political opinion sites. They tried to sneak in censorship provisions, and a fast-lane (in the deal with Google), in the final version of "Net Neutrality".

There is zero correlation between the name of the proposed law and its effect in practice. If you draft legislation and call it "The Save the Babies Act", then include provisions for removing arsenic regulation in the water supply coupled with a gag order, the law is bad and should be struck down. This is especially true when one side blocks amendments that would fix it (*cough* Democrats). You'll have to suffer the opposition and the media trumpeting about how you "hate babies" and have investments in pitchfork factories, but you really should work to kill that proposed law.

Baloney.

Fukushima: Built in the late 60s and early 70s.
Chernobyl: Began operation in the 70s.
Three Mile Island: Constructed in the late 60s and early 70s.

We have far newer designs for nuclear reactors for which it would be physically impossible for them to melt down or fail catastrophically. 40+ years experience in how to do something better can count for an awful lot. For example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_modular_reactor

They'll just select the reality where the necessary language is still spoken. Those guys are lazy that way.

Anathem is an awesome work.

From the EO:

Section 1. Policy. The Federal Government must have the ability to communicate at all times and under all circumstances to carry out its most critical and time sensitive missions. Survivable, resilient, enduring, and effective communications, both domestic and international, are essential to enable the executive branch to communicate within itself and with: the legislative and judicial branches; State, local, territorial, and tribal governments; private sector entities; and the public, allies, and other nations. Such communications must be possible under all circumstances to ensure national security, effectively manage emergencies, and improve national resilience.

So government communication takes precedence over all other kinds of communication.

5.2(e) satisfy priority communications requirements through the use of commercial, Government, and privately owned communications resources, when appropriate;

They can "seize" when this new "committee" decides it's necessary.

He also revokes Reagan's EO which says this:

3.e.1. [the government must] Plan for and provide, operate and maintain telecommunications services and facilities adequate to support the National Command Authorities and to execute the responsibilities assigned by Executive Order No. 12333;

That EO says the government must maintain its own facilities, and outlines war powers and non-war emergency powers, but says the government has to make sure its own crap works in emergencies. This new order says the new "committee" has the authority to ensure that private communications assets work in emergencies so that the government can seize them when such an emergency is declared. The committee also has the authority to decide when such an emergency exists.

No tinfoil required, to see this as another power grab.

If a technocrat really was operating on evidence, then they'd have to eliminate OSHA for not moving the needle on workplace safety.

Evidence: http://www.cato.org/pubs/handbook/hb105-36.html

The problem with the usual derision surrounding this subject is that it's based on a standard interpretation of the English word "day". The actual ancient Hebrew (or Aramaic, I forget which) word in that particular text means "an indefinite period of time". The Bible merely indicates separate periods of time in which those creative acts took place, but gives no actual finite duration for those acts.

Believing the universe was created in 6 24-hour periods is incorrect. Believing that the Bible says the universe was created in 6 literal 24 hour periods is also incorrect.

The U.S. Constitution was designed to restrict what the government could do to those it governed. The Founding Fathers were more concerned with what people who held power could do when that power was arbitrary and unchecked.

The problems with government we have now are not a matter of not finding or identifying the right experts, because the system of government was originally designed to allow experts to function independently of government. The chief design flaw in such a republican democracy is that it depends almost entirely on the morality of its citizens. This system of government could never hope to control a selfish people out to "get theirs". It could never hope to maintain itself if the representatives were chosen for the bacon they brought home rather than the recognized desire to preserve the individual liberties of fellow citizens.

In selecting representatives it required only that we recognize forthrightness, honesty, and the prioritization of individual liberty over governmental power. But in order to recognize that in others, those same desires and convictions must be present in those doing the selection. When the majority no longer select along those lines, but select on popularity or out of some notion of personal gain, we get what we starting to see now; arbitrary power exercised by the capricious and corrupt.

We don't have a total loss yet, of course. We're not close to being the most corrupt country on Earth, but we're not the least corrupt anymore. Our education, in particular with regard to the notion of individual liberties as innate and not granted by government, is sadly lacking now. If we don't teach the importance of the system of government, and we have a complicit media that continues to deliver the message that the Constitution is just some piece of paper that is no longer useful (or worse, means what we decide it means today), then selection of representation will be poor.

From TFA:

Weisend, who is working on a US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency programme to accelerate learning, has been using this form of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to cut the time it takes to train snipers.

That's from page 2. Do more than skim.

*mulph*

So that's how you spell that. I will use that from now on, well done.

...you've been able to trade real life money for ships, items, ...

But you've been able to trade it for things other players made. Other players made those ships and items (or ran the missions or complexes to get the items). In effect, you were buying game time for someone else in exchange for their in-game efforts.

Even when you did buy these things from other players, they didn't make it an "I win by credit card" situation. I say this as someone who has bought Plex and sold them for ISK.

So... babyzoink recommended the names Leofila, Diamorgan... and Ass.

I might as well just use George Carlin's "words". On second thought, I'll keep it clean and name my servers after Mitch Hedberg jokes. My servers shall now be called "fishclump", "goaround", and "smaquisthefrog".

My guess would be that the classes Kagetsuki took at Stanford were Computer Science classes, not programming classes. Those classes, I'd venture, were intended to teach you what computers can do. Computer Science and Programming are not the same thing.

By the same token, I suspect the classes in Japan that Kagetsuki mentions were classes on the craft of programming, and not computer science. They would teach how to tell a computer what to do, as opposed to teaching the range of opportunities. So vocational training rather than science.

You mean you dislike being able to lose? You dislike having human opponents? Or you dislike minimum competency requirements?

You actually have to try reasonably hard to lose everything, but if, for example, you buy a character with three years worth of skills, it's possible if you don't bother to learn the game basics.

You have to purposely ignore warnings. You have to put your character in situations where your ship will be destroyed. You then have to hang around while they take the time to target your pod and kill you. Assuming the character was sold to you with a proper clone, you then have to go do it all over again to lose your skills. You've not lost any assets beyond the two ships (one of which was likely free) and any implants in your character's head at the time of the initial pod-kill. You would then have to give away all your money, or continue to lose ships and buy new ones to lose all your assets. Finally, you'd have to do all of this in low or null security space instead of "hi-sec". Then you'd have to purposely avoid activities like missions, mining, killing NPC pirates in asteroid belts, trading, manufacturing, salvaging, and exploration to ensure you had no income.

All of this is possible, but if you manage to pull this off, you kind of deserve it. In fact a better way to put it would be to say "you have earned your losses."

Why shouldn't players be able to make a significant impact on the game world? If you can't really make an impact, then you're merely an incidental game mechanic instead of a driving force.

Now I'm not going to say that if you love WoW you'll love EVE. The two are very different games.

But there's not much else like heading into a fight with other players where you're risking your hard-earned (or bought with real money :p ) ISK. The risk makes the victory all the sweeter, or the loss all the more educational.