That seems to me like the beginning of an aristocracy, where if you can afford to pay, you have more rights than people who can't pay. While an interesting concept in principle, and I'm sure it would work without any major increase in accidents and provide the state with more money -- I just can't support something that's ethically wrong in my opinion.

Because it isn't up to debate. If I started listing reasons why 4e killed my interest, all it would do is invite people to argue with each point, and say, "no, this was a *good* change", when none of it would make the game any less dead to me. You can't argue me into liking 4e by arguing each of the points why I dislike it. Hence, listing those points is a waste of time.

Oh, trust me -- Baldur's Gate and Icewind Dale and Neverwinter Nights series are some of my favorite CRPGs ever made, and I regularly replay them.

It just makes me a little sad that there will never again be more. There's a difference between replaying a game you know how it will turn out, and playing a wholly new game with surprises.

4th Edition killed my interest in D&D. It's a shame that I will apparently never have a new D&D computer game to play ever again, but I'm sticking with 1st-3rd Editions and Pathfinder which feels far more D&D than 4e ever will.

Forgotten Realms was one of my favorite fictional settings, but 4e killed that too, with the Spellplague and jump forward in time and everything, so again, 4e ruined not only D&D but also the Forgotten Realms.

Furthermore, Cryptic is one of my least favorite developers. They make very simplistic games that are all about combat mechanics and hack and slash, with no good story or intriguing characters anywhere in sight.

This is a strong pass. I'd *love* a good Forgotten Realms D&D game, but this provides for none of that. "good" is negated by Cryptic, "Forgotten Realms" is negated by 4e, and "D&D" is negated by 4e.

That doesn't seem correct to me. As per Wikipedia, "On June 1, Israel formed a National Unity Government by widening its cabinet, and on June 4 the decision was made to go to war. The next morning, Israel launched Operation Focus, a large-scale surprise air strike that was the opening of the Six-Day War."

So it seems the Israelis took land in an offensive war and I thus repeat my question, didn't the Israeli invade Palestinian lands pretty much exactly the same way the Germans invaded France? In both cases it was an offensive war in order to grab land that didn't belong to them. Gaza, Sinai, Golan, West Bank and all that -- they were never mandated to Israel in the founding of that nation -- they were territories they violently seized by initiating a war.

Seems a lot like the beginning of WWII to me.

And since Joe Average is always stupid, in every country, then that statement reduces to:

"If you're in a democratic country, you're going to have to pay for voter stupidity."

Which is a non-issue if we're sending people up for other reasons than to get astronaut training. If we're sending a geologist up to study a comet, then it doesn't matter that he's a novice at astronauting.

That may be your reasoning, but there are other lines of reasoning too, that don't require increased safety. For example, sending people up to do construction work on comets. That doesn't require increasing safety to massively redundant levels.

At a 25% level (or pick any other number, really, that you can agree with -- the point is reduced safety from current, not the exact 25% number) if you need 10 geologists up there, you send up 40. If you need 100 construction workers to build a moonbase, send 400. With a different safety percentage the numbers will be different, but the point is we don't need to be absolutely sure that if we send n people, then n people reach the destination. That's just an added excessive cost, and we can do it for cheaper if we accept some losses.

I'm not sure I understand. Didn't the Israeli invade Palestinian lands pretty much exactly the way the Germans invaded French lands?

So I don't see the difference you suggest.

So it's our role to be the world police? "This country isn't behaving like we want them to behave, so let's slap them around until they act according to Western morals and ethics. Let's beat them into thinking right."

If we force a culture to change, it will just be forced change, and it will revert as soon as we step out. Do we want to have to have a military presence in dozens of countries around the world, watching over them with an angry eye making sure they don't do anything different from us? And where would it stop? Where to draw the line? What kind of offenses are enough to warrant intervention? If we feel entitled to interfere in Iran because their method of execution is stoning, then do we have the right to invade Netherlands because they allow pot smoking? Different countries do have different laws and morals than our own countries, and if we step on the road of trying to "correct" every country out there to think exactly like us, it'll be a road leading to a World War. Do several European countries have the right to invade Texas because Texas has a barbaric death penalty? To "correct" Texas to be "right-thinking"? Does Sweden, with its different privacy laws, have the right to invade the United States to fix the US so that privacy is better protected? Each society has to evolve on its own, at its own pace, and in its own direction.

Can you elaborate on that supposed difference between WWII partisan groups and the Palestinian partisan groups? I'd love to hear what that important distinction separating the two is.

Doesn't the Israeli military play that exact role?

Err, citation needed. As far as I'm aware, Ahmadinejad has very consistently claimed that they are only pursuing civilian nuclear energy, not military nuclear bombs to attack other countries.

If you've got some proof that Iran is saying it's planning to attack other countries with nuclear bombs, I'd sure like to hear it. Otherwise, I call your bullshit.

Why not go back to expendable men though?

One of the reasons manned flights are so damn expensive is because there's redundancy after redundancy to try to do absolutely everything to ensure 99.99999% crew survival rate. By letting crew survival rate go down to, say, 25%, things could get a lot cheaper.

Now, some people are going to say, it's inhuman of society to gamble with the lives of its citizens, but I ask, isn't it ultimately the choice of every *individual* whether or not they want to gamble with their lives? Shouldn't an individual have the right to risk their life if they choose to? Tons of people bungee jump, hang glide, ride motorcycles, parachute, rock climb and so on, taking risks with their lives and society doesn't stop them. I know there would be people who would also choose to risk their lives for the advancement of our spaceflight. Why not take on those people who are willing to volunteer their lives, build some risky rockets, and go to space a lot cheaper.