If you don't have your charger, you can't use a standard micro USB cable to replace it. Developers shouldn't be pushed to the same standard...they should adopt standards to allow their product to be more competitive and for customer convenience. I'm not sure why you're defending Apple's use of a proprietary connector, especially as an iPhone user...they are limiting your adaptability heavily.

In Ultima Online years ago, if you committed a murder or criminal action in town, you could be killed by guards. If you committed a criminal action out of town, you could be freely attacked by anyone with zero consequences for ~5 minutes...if you died, anyone could loot your body and take everything you had on you. If you committed a murder and were reported by the victim, you gain a short term and a long term murder count and become a criminal (and therefore can be attacked by anyone) for 5 minutes but you could loot everything they had on them. Once you got 5 long term murder counts, you became a murderer and were freely attackable by anyone at any time for any reason without consequences to them, you could not return to any town, and the only access to your bank was in a lawless town frequented by other murderers or groups of innocents coming to raid.

The only way to get rid of short and long term murder counts was play time. Short term murder counts take 8 hours of play time to drop one and, if you had more than 5 short term murders and died, resurrecting would cause you to incur 'stat loss' whereby you lose 33% of your accumulated skills (which sucks a vast array of ballsacks...like..so many ballsacks). Long term murder counts take 40 HOURS of PLAY TIME to remove ONE. Essentially you had two options; (1) become a murderer and hide out for a day or two while you worked off some short terms and one long term to get below the threshold of 5 and become an 'innocent' again (or at least get below 5 short terms so you're rid of stat loss and you can play, even though everyone can attack you wherever you go) or (2) go balls to the wall and become a straight up pk.

That was probably the best game I have ever played (before it was fucked by Origin and EA) and I haven't seen anything like it since. I think the specific reason for this was the balance of the approach but the fact that you still had the freedom to do what you wanted, as you should in any sandbox style game (especially MMOs). All modern games try to find that balance but fail so miserably because the only drawback to death in subsequent games is a temporary resurrection sickness or having to run all that way again or looking like an idiot. No one really cares about dying because nothing really happens when you die and nothing really happens when you successfully evade pursuit or beat your attacker. Even more importantly was the fact that even people playing as innocents could still have a bad day and rampage a bit without screwing things up forever. That and the fact that if you talked shit, you better plant your ass in town or be able to back yourself up because people with only a couple murder accounts will kill your ass for being a dick.

Living the life of the roving pk required that you were extremely clever, very skilled, and played way more UO than any human should ever have. Ultimately most people had multiple characters and at least one of them was red (murderers were indicated by the normally 'blue' name over your head becoming 'red'). I played initially as an innocent while building my character and getting used to the game but the first time I was chased down by a group of pks I felt that adrenaline rush and, even though I lost everything, it was unlike any experience in any game before or even after. By the time I was done with UO, I had played on several different servers but my favorite was Napa Valley...I had 3200 murders and a 7.5mil gold bounty on my head. 1280 of those were a single 15 day killing spree after GMs had placed rocks in front of my house to let it decay because they didn't like me. I didn't hack, I didn't cheat - I just killed the shit out of everyone I could and the GMs hated the complaints...so I gave them some work to do. By the end of the spree I had resurrected with stat loss 3 times but that completely fucked my character so I had a friend turn my head in for a bounty, gave him 2.5 mil, and sold the other 5 mil on eBay for $140 bucks (when gold was worth something in the game).

Good point. Although there are a ton of other uses such as borosilicate glass and ceramics where we may not be able to recover it as easily (or at all) for use in reactors so that does have to be considered as loss. Until we're desperate enough and we start stealing beakers from labs to recycle the boron heh.

Another poster above you mentioned that 80% of extracted Boron is B-11 so ~1,000 years worth is more accurate if all the Boron in the Turkey mines were used for energy generation only...nevertheless, your post shows exactly why this technology is pretty enticing. B-11 is much, much easier to obtain than U-235 and, if the technology doesn't go the way of vapor, has the potential to change everything. Looking at this article, it appears that your estimate may be a bit off, though, regarding Turkey's Boron reserves:

Going a step further, it looks like Turkey's deposits account for at least 2.88 billion tons of the total 4 billion tons in reserves around the world...definitely enough to keep us running for a while. Considering that we're already using 4 million tons a year for other industry and accounting for future growth (let's throw a random number at it and say 150% for a total of 10 million tons a year), then adding the current power requirements of the world, we get 10.0008 million tons a year of usage. Even using those numbers (and the 80% extraction rate), we're at 319.97 years of boron resources left.

And shitballs...looking at Eti Maden's site, I just found the following that makes me wonder about my previous source:

I don't know if the first article is believable or not so I'll just say that we have between 94.07 and 319.97 years of power and industry in Boron...which isn't amazing but it isn't bad either.

I think that if they are armies of scientists the weapons would be anything but makeshift. We're talking mechs powered by mini two-laser fusion reactors blasting each other with plasma rifles and missile volleys to weaken the energy shield around the Borax mine's defenses.

Fuck. Yes.

I appreciate your considered response and I rescind my previous comment about your logic being retarded given your reply. My sarcasm was intended to identify that this was not just the US...this was the leaders of almost all of the major world powers standing behind idiotic policies of easing regulations. Sure, there may have been louder voices (and the US was certainly one of them) but ultimately all those involved in this debacle need to be held accountable and I'm tired of the US shouldering the blame for ALL of it.

There are greedy assholes in positions of power everywhere willing to do almost anything for more power or more money and, if anything, those in the US and other 1st world countries have to be at least a LITTLE more wary about the way they go about severely bending the rules because they have to at least pretend to be accountable. Many of those who should be sharing in the responsibility can simply do what they want with little to no resistance and did so willingly and without prompting when this opportunity to commoditize these bad/risky debts through easing of regulations came about.

Unless he is in WITSEC and his death was faked, I'm pretty sure, no :)

I guess ODB2 could be his resurrected, upgraded self.

I have this problem constantly when referring to the OBD port. I can't seem to stop calling it ODB and I hum "I'm the ODB as you can see. Every eye, don't you be watchin' me"...every single time.

Wtf are you talking about? I didn't post anon...in fact, this is my real name idiot. That is as anti-anon as you can get.

I call shenanigans! SHENANIGANS!!!

NO ONE smiles when they pay their property taxes. All jokes aside, it sounds like you live in a newer area of the city that is more upscale and has a newer police station. The type of officers that get transferred to the new stations are either experienced and ready for retirement or they are consistently top performers and are ranking up by moving to the new station. The retirees don't mind just cruising around and they don't want to get out to give tickets unless they HAVE to. The top performers are looking to make an impression and they are on top of their game 24/7 (and lower ranked officers are pushed by these officers as well because they don't want the newbies to make them look bad).

Give it about 10 years and we'll see. This is the exact scenario my parents' dealt with when their home was completed ~15 years ago. For a long time there was a regular patrol of the area and my parents felt comfortable at all times. In two circumstances they had to call the police to report breakins to vehicles by some high schoolers but the police arrived within minutes and nabbed the kids. The key was their response time, though. Today, however, if you were to sit on the front porch for 24 hours you MAY see a single officer driving down the largest street in the area (which they live on). If you call to report a crime, you're waiting a minimum of an hour. Crime rates in the area have gone up in the last 10 years and the number of police at the local precinct has increased more than the crime rate so I'm not sure what they are doing all day. All I know is that one of the officers who used to be on regular patrol in the area 10 years ago can now be found parked behind Vons in the alley about 5 miles away...where there are no home...where there has never been a single reported breakin or suspicious activity.

A friend of mine used to work for that precinct and said everyone had gotten lazy so he left for a new precinct. Apparently the officer who parks behind Vons sleeps there 3-5 hrs a day but since all of the go-getters have moved on, he has become a Sergeant and can't really be fucked with. That's grounds for termination btw, except that another officer got sent home for a day for sleeping over 4 hours away and missing a call for a mugging 2 blocks away and was on patrol the next day. High five for mediocrity.

You realize that calling people common is akin to calling them peasants. Unless you are part of the English aristocracy, that also includes you. Good job with your caste system, mate! Make sure to get out of the way before you're horsewhipped.

You're both yo-yos...shut up ya yo-yos.

Seriously, there are way too many things wrong with this argument AND the original video by Professor Duane to even respond to without spending my entire day counterpointing. A child could tear apart this argument....who the fuck is Bennett Haselton and why should anyone be listening to him at all? I don't generally subscribe to the point of view that you have to 'be someone' to make good points but if you're going to come out of nowhere, don't be just another twit without any ability to argue logically. We have enough of those assholes on the partisan news networks that inform and divide our country daily (USA - if you live elsewhere you're probably familiar with this also).

Mr Haselton...if you are reading this, as I hope you are, go back to fighting censorship on the internet as opposed to trying to present any sort of arguments about civil rights and police encounters. If you want people to listen to you in any sort of public forum, you are going to need to go back to school and get yourself enrolled in some logic classes at the very least so you don't just spew out fallacies like diarrhea.

Totally agree...no other countries in the world are responsible in ANY way for the coming economic collapse. Clearly the US is filled with much more intelligent people working daily to exploit the rest of the world. Pony up the oil bitches.

Your logic is retarded but unfortunately you are right about the part where we want to control as much oil as possible...just like every other country in the world.

I threw up my hands when I saw "An MCSE cert helps here..." but then I read the rest of the sentence. Well played...well played.

Uhm. You can't have a low 'grade' fundamental element. You can have a lower purity level (which may be what you mean by grade) which can then be refined into a more pure 'higher grade'. Since there is a worldwide shortage outside of the US' apparent cache of helium, though, doesn't it make us look like we are metaphorically wiping our asses with our extra helium because we have so much when we throw it into balloons instead of treating is as a valuable resource?

I like balloons and I don't want to ruin a child's birthday, but I don't think it is necessarily a good use of the resource to have a floaty thing on a string that makes your voice sound funny and I don't think that the lack of floating balloons at parties will ruin anyone's day. Also, IANAScientist but I'm pretty sure that the 'low grade' helium is still suitable for experimentation and, with minimal refinement, can be used for medical purposes as well:

Ultimately it isn't like balloon helium is somehow a different thing than medical helium...in my opinion we are simply wasting an important resource for something frivolous. Balloons can be put on sticks...actually I think that might be more fun so that the children can beat one another with the balloons. But then one of them loses the balloon and stabs another child and....wait...ALL BALLOONS SHOULD BE ON STICKS.