Vendetta Online has a system of license levels which unlocks content, but combat success is 90% skill and 10% equipment (after the first couple of levels which probably take an experienced player less than an hour). Smart use of low level ships/weapons in the hands of a skilled player will kill a relative noob with top-notch gear every time.

What I'm trying to say: levels aren't really the problem, making "level" the most important determiner of success is the problem.

I use xmonad as window manager, which AFAIK is not installed out of the box on any distro but on ubuntu takes me around 2 minutes to set up (using existing .files). I use it mainly for programming but also some gaming, but I never have bleeding edge hardware.

I figure I could just as well use debian or mint, I don't really think I would notice any difference as long as the package repository is reasonably stocked. I use ubuntu because it is my first linux experience that I used for more than a week, and because of the enormous amount of support, stupid forum questions with non-stupid answers, etc. It helps if an answer to a problem is directly applicable.

Genuine question: Besides the desktop environment, are there any real differences between all the Debian derivatives?

If you have enough prisoners to take a seat in parliament, then maybe those people deserve representation?

Even ignoring the problem of getting him from power, ICC has no jurisdiction as Korea isn't a signatory and the UN security council is needed either to refer the case to the ICC or to create an ad hoc tribunal. Even if China might as some point decide to stop propping up its neighbour, it is not very likely that they will allow them to be tried in court.

FTFY!

FTFY

Hmm, that is kind of stupid, but that should be easy to solve, no?

The 'moderate' link/button is also stupid, but that's quite minor.

One of the lessons I learnt last year is "never change more than one thing at the same time if it can be avoided". Why did they not just change the ui, keeping the system intact, or change the system, keeping the ui intact? Then, if the new system works, they can always change the ui...

Warning: stupid question ahead!

Okay I've seen beta and browsed for about 5 minutes. I seems to me like a fairly trivial redesign from something that is ugly (but feels like home) to something that is just plain ugly. Below the articles are the familiar comments with mod points in a tree structure that most of the time doesn't make a lot of sense, and a way to filter on comment quality (moderation). I don't see how this is so difficult from the current system, so I probably missed something somewhere.

  Can you explain how it is breaking the discussion/moderation system?

According to the wiki on Pumped-storage hydroelectricity (PSH), 'PSH accounts for more than 99% of bulk storage capacity worldwide: around 127,000MW, according to the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI), the research arm of America's power utilities.' Since in pumping the size of the reservoir is not the limiting factor, but rather the throughput of the pumps, this means that PSH can be used to store the daily output of 127GW worth of power plants. Britain's consumption is 35.8GW on average, and 57.490GW at peak (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_in_the_United_Kingdom), so the global installed PSH's could easily absorb the UK's production.

In the UK, however, there seems to be only one plant (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinorwig_Power_Station), costing 425M GBP in 1974 capable of absorbing around 1GW worth of power, so nowhere near 50% of base load, so it seems that PSH costs around 425M/1G = 0.5 pounds per watt capacity. Apparently, a new nuclear plant costs about US$ 5,339/kW., or 4 pounds per watt capacity, while windmills cost around 1-2 pounds per watt. So, assuming enough sites for PSH can be found, the costs for power storage capacity seems to be 5-25% of the cost for generation capacity.

According to the wiki, "The stalling of the UK nuclear power programme in the late 1980s and the coincident "dash for gas" increased the network's ability to respond to changes in demand, making the use of pumped storage for day/night load balancing less attractive. As a result, a similar facility planned for Exmoor was never built.[2]"; so it seems that at the time the demand is what limited PSH construction, not cost or environmental factors.

http://www.world-nuclear.org/i...
http://www.windustry.org/resou...

xmonad all the way! I switched a couple years back. The lack of a nice settings file* or UI dialog meant that it took me a couple days to get everything the way I wanted, but now I am completely happy. I just never realised how little a window manager really needs to do. If I see people working with actual windows (i.e. floating windows with borders, close icons etc) it just looks so clumsy.

For me, having a numbered desktop for each task I'm working on and not having to bother with moving/resizing windows, plus a WM that is fully functional within half a second after logging in, even on a 4 year old computer, is a great boon to productivity.

*) for those not fluent in Haskell...

Don't forget that this is not an American issue, it is more or less common to the developed world. Sure, the US has a worse case of obesitas than other countries, but also in Europe the percentage of people overweight and obese is increasing quickly. So, the answer does not lie with corn subsidies or corn syrup, or at least not solely.

I think the main reason is simply affluence and the displacement of industry by services. Sure, that was also the case 20 years ago, but in much lesser degree, and especially 40 years ago. It takes time to grow fat. Less regard for traditional family life and lack of a person dedicated to running the household also results in more junk food and less attention for eating.

I would be fine with you not wearing a seat belt, as long as it does not affect me when you get into an accident, including:
- my health insurance premium does not go up because you pose a greater risk of requiring treatment (if your answer is: differentiate premiums between seat belt wearers and libertarians, how do you monitor that differentiating without an even greater breach of your Liberties?)
- my taxes don't go up because you are now a burden on the emergency medical care system
- the road is not closed off longer because the accident is now more serious, leading to more traffic jams.
- if an accident is my fault, my punishment does not go up because you are now dead/seriously injured instead of not/lightly injured
- the police and medical staff are still available to help me and not wasting their time on the greater time required to investigate/treat a serious or fatal accident compared to a fender bender. If your answer is: hire more police and medical staff, than realize that this will drive up the cost of said staff by more demand. If your answer is: train more staff to increase supply, this will cost taxpayer money since those institutions are generally subsidized, and/or take potential candidates from other fields where they would actually add value to society rather than scrape your libertarian remains off the tarmac.

In other words, your decision to not wear a seat belt places a claim on a number of scarce goods if you get into an accident, which affects more people than just you.

Positive rights such as public safety and national defense are different from the classical (negative) rights that the parent referred to. Classical rights (e.g. the negative rights listed in the US Bill of Rights such as freedom from censorship, cruel punishment, illegal search and seizure) do not need a government to enforce them, since without a government you wouldn't need those rights.

Of course, the negative rights that protect you from the government are worth an awful lot without a bunch of positive rights which indeed need a government to enforce them, such as the right to life and property. The thinking of the Bill of Rights is that the (U.S.) government would naturally provide for positive rights such as the right to property (by enforcing already existing common law) and the national security (since fighting the Brits was the raison d'etre of the U.S. government); but that the government would need to be forced to provide for the 'negative' rights.

Also, positive rights are generally political choices: how much healthcare, education, and public safety is reasonable and when is the cost (in dollars or liberty) too high? So, it can be wise to leave those to the political process, while the negative rights are best enshrined in the constitution and left to the judiciary; although it is easy to argue that by not updating the constitution to reflect such positive rights such as non-discrimination and privacy the US supreme court was forced to become more political than similar bodies in other states such as the German Bundesverfassungsgericht.

You are right in a sense, but I think you are seeing "rights" too narrowly. The distinction that is generally made is between classical, negative rights (the ones in your 'bill of rights') and the positive, modern, or social rights (such as in your "equal protection" clause and in many european constitutions and also in some articles of the universal and European declarations of human rights.

The right to free speech is a "classic" (human) right. It is something between you and the government, and it acts as a prohibition on the government. It is a 'negative right' in that the government isn't forced to *do* anything, they're forced to not do stuff, like putting you in prison if you say stuff. The bill of rights used the phrase "congress shall pass no law" for a reason. The right doesn't mean that the government has to pay publishing cost for your newspaper, and it also doesn't mean that other citizens are forced to listen to you or banned from telling you that you're a twit if you 'exercise' your basic right. These rights can be "absolute" in the sense that they allow no exceptions, although it often isn't (the classical example being yelling 'fire!' in a crowded cinema) and in principle they cannot clash, since every negative right bans the government from doing something. The right to the freedom of the press and the freedom of religion do not clash: if you exercise your press freedom to say that not all Catholics are holy, there is no clash of rights, since the freedom of religion never prohibited you from saying that, it simply prohibits the government from establishing, favoring, regulating, or banning any religion.

The right to healthcare (and education, housing, property non-discrimination, etc) are all "social" (human) rights. They are generally positive rights, where the government has to provide something for the citizen. These rights are never absolute, in the sense that it is obvious that no one can receive all the education, health care, etc that money can buy. Also, these rights can clash with each other and with the classical rights: my right to self-expression can clash with your right to non-discrimination.

Sometimes, a right can be both 'positive' and 'negative'. For example, the right to "life" in the universal and European declaration of human rights (and implied in your declaration of independence) is mainly negative, in prohibiting the government of killing you in most circumstances, but can (and is) also interpreted positively as a positive duty to prevent certain loss of life and/or to investigate suspicious death. Similarly, the right to own property (e.g. article 17 UDHR but see also the 3d-5th amendment in the US Bill of Rights) is a negative right in prohibiting the government from taking your stuff (except through taxes, eminent domain etc.). However, it also implies a duty for the government to protect your property by banning and investigating theft etc, although the US Bill of Rights is phrased to exclude those duties by listing prohibitions against search, seizure, and quartering by the government, and does no list a "right to property".

Sources:
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Bill_of_Rights
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positive_obligations
- http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
- www.echr.coe.int/Documents/Convention_ENG.pdf

Very good!

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