mookie

Counterpoint:

 

When people are fed a string of lies about "higher powers" and putting some invisible deity #1 in your life, even above family, then you have killings in the name of religion.

 

And as horrific, tragic and senseless as this latest incident in Conn. was, it pales in comparison to the number of deaths throughout history caused by "religion."

 

And yes, that includes ALL religions - including Judeo-Christianity.

 

It would appear you and I have *vastly* differing views on religion/God/afterlife/etc. That's ok - there's room for all opinions. One's daily actions speak volumes louder than anything you, I or anyone else can type on an Internet forum.

Moreover, the chief complaint against religion -- that it is history's prime instigator of intergroup conflict -- does not withstand scrutiny. Religious issues motivate only a small minority of recorded wars. The Encyclopedia of Wars surveyed 1,763 violent conflicts across history; only 123 (7 percent) were religious. A BBC-sponsored "God and War" audit, which evaluated major conflicts over 3,500 years and rated them on a 0-to-5 scale for religious motivation (Punic Wars = 0, Crusades = 5), found that more than 60 percent had no religious motivation. Less than 7 percent earned a rating greater than 3. There was little religious motivation for the internecine Russian and Chinese conflicts or the world wars responsible for history's most lethal century of international bloodshed.

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/08/06/god_and_the_ivory_tower?page=0,2

So, about one in fifteen wars in known history were caused by religion.

Unbanned, and yes the name is not acceptable.

Easier to clean up than octopi.

The current mapcycle list:

de_aztec

de_dust

de_nuke_ve_fix

cs_office

de_train

de_season_go

cs_italy

de_mill_b1

de_dust2

de_inferno

de_mirage_go

That's eleven (11) maps. It's set to random, so, yes, some maps will be played more often and some less often.

Assuming your list is accurate, it looks like Mani used nine (9) different maps in the thirteen (13) games it selected maps for, failing to use only two maps in the mapcycle (Train, Season). Some maps were used twice, but none were used three times. That seems good.

P.S.

The server is set up in this way to make the automatic selections work better with/after admin action.

If the server ran a straight cycle, any time an admin deviated from the cycle, it would result in parts of the cycle being repeated while other parts were skipped (once admins stopped setting the maps).

If the server continued/resumed the cycle where it was last left off, this may also result in repeated maps, as the map being chosen manually might be the second or third future map in the cycle. At times, this actually causes maps to be repeated consecutively.

If the server required the whole cycle to be used before repeating any randomly-chosen maps, the server would be likely to choose a map again immediately after an admin decided to skip it (about 50/50).

You've already been in Oregon so long that that shirt is unremarkable?

Reminds of those recent mentions of the unacceptable and bad intel that the US had on Iraqi WMD. But I guess that sort of outrage only applies to Republican presidents and administrations.

 

Well, to be fair, this bad intel possibly resulted in the exclusion of the words terrorism and Al-Qaeda from talking points. While the bad intel on WMD resulted in a war that cost us thousands of US lives. I don't think these two examples are at the same level of outrage.

 

 

 

 

 

Shaftiel

This is nothing but a distraction. This idea, of an alleged lack of confidence in information about who was responsible, does nothing to address the question of why the ambassador to the the UN and the white house press secretary were actively promoting a lie.

Of course the standard move here will always be to remind us all that George W Bush did this or that. Everyone who reads these throwbacks to Bush, a way to distract from things Obama is doing, should keep in mind what these distractions are really about: most of the people who criticized Bush for creating these foreign wars now have nothing to say about Obama doing the same thing, and they feel a need to bring up Bush again and again in the hopes that no-one will notice their hypocrisy.

Closed for necroposting.

Have to agree, it seemed pretty bad; CT models are very difficult to see, and my framerate was too low to aim properly in most of the map.

They have Black Friday in Japan?

I was thinking more of new games; I hadn't realised until now that people were still making games in this style but apparently they are.

Winter is a time when various porters, stouts, schwarzbiers, spiced ales and lagers hit the shelves, in addition to a lot of beers in those categories that are around year-round.

It's a little early in the season (although winter beers started to appear here a few weeks ago), but what are you drinking or looking forward to? And, possibly more importantly, what do you eat with these beers? Are there beers (seasonal or not) that go surprisingly well with typical winter or Christmas-season foods?

So far all I've picked up are seasonals from Samuel Adams (Winter Lager) and Dogfish Head (Chicory Stout) and a few locals.

Samuel Adams' Winter Lager tastes OK, very lightly spiced, but not that different from their Vienna lager (Boston Lager) or marzenbier (Octoberfest).

Dogfish Head's Chicory Stout is much bitterer than I expected (shouldn't be surprising considering that what they label as brown ale tastes more like a good stout). Very dry and at 5.2% not nearly as strong (or harsh) as most of their other beers. Of course now is also the time when their Indian Brown Ale (rich, dry, smooth dark ale, tasting subtly of coffee and chocolate; also very good used sparingly in a rich/dark chili) and Raison d'Être (somewhat dark ale with noticeable raisin and caramel flavor) become most useful, with rich desserts especially landing in the fridge.

Harpoon's Chocolate Stout is rich and dry (not too dry), very nice if you like that kind of thing. Might be available nationally or at least quite a distance from New England due to the popularity of their IPA. At worst, you could drink this with any food based on a fruit that would go with chocolate (apple pie, pumpkin pie, raspberry/strawberry/cherry) or most desserts on the shortbread-cookie-caramel-fudge spectrum.

Magic Hat's Heart of Darkness (stout) is dark but otherwise doesn't seem to have that much going for it as a stout. It's a little more soft or even a little tangy, more like a porter than a stout. I suspect Magic Hat is not that easy to get outside of the Northeast anyway.

Wachusett's Black Shack Porter seemed similar: dark, somewhat rich, a little soft and tangy.

I've seen several SCUMM-style games (think Monkey Island) on Steam when looking through the various deals this weekend (especially Indie games on sale) and clicking through to other games. Are many of these games good? Do they play similarly to old SCUMM games? The quality of these (in terms of story and challenge/puzzle) is almost impossible to guess from screenshots and videos.

I'm confused, maybe you can straighten it out: how exactly is Congress going to cause or fail to avert a global monetary collapse by the end of the year?

Oh did Brussels schedule a global monetary collapse for New Year's Eve?

evidence is backed up by some right-wing blog post or fox news

How can we have a debate when we cannot even agree on the facts? How can we post evidence + source when you just go and dismiss our source of evidence as being biased when it clearly is not?

Please don't misunderstand this as a defense of FOX; I don't watch FOX and don't know how biased or unbiased they are. Hopefully the inconsistency here is clear: the news sources cited by people you disagree with are biased against your worldview, but it's impossible to have a reasonable conversation because everyone can't agree that the news sources that you cite are clearly unbiased.

Of course we're not going to see a video of Obama saying that the ambassador to Libya was killed by a mob angry about a video posted on Youtube. Obama largely disappeared on this issue; he said nothing substantial except that it was a tragedy insert synonym here and justice will be done. Instead, Carney and Rice went out and told a story that unknown violent extremists hijacked a spontaneous protest over some film, and the completely random result was that the ambassador to Libya was killed. It's hard to forget that this is the story that was out there, because this is the story that most of the media was repeating for at least two weeks.

What we've learned since is that this story, created by the administration, was a lie. Islamists did not use spontaneous protests as cover for the assassination of a US diplomat; the administration used spontaneous protests to distract from the fact that they knew in real time that a US diplomat was being assassinated, and chose to do nothing.

http://www.guardian....benghazi-attack

On Sunday, UN ambassador Susan Rice, when asked about the impetus for the attack, said that "this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo," and added: "In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated." In other interviews, she insisted that the Benghazi violence was a "spontaneous" reaction to the film.

 

Predictably, and by design, most media accounts from the day after the Benghazi attack repeated the White House line as though it were fact, just as they did for the Bin Laden killing. Said NPR on 12 September: "The US ambassador to Libya and three other Americans were killed in an attack on the US consulate in Benghazi by protesters angry over a film that ridiculed Islam's Prophet Muhammad." The Daily Beast reported that the ambassador "died in a rocket attack on the embassy amid violent protests over a US-produced film deemed insulting to Islam." To date, numerous people believe – as though there were no dispute about it – that Muslims attacked the consulate and killed the US ambassador "because they were angry about a film".

http://abcnews.go.co...t-premeditated/

U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice said the attack on the American consulate in Benghazi last week was not premeditated, directly contradicting top Libyan officials who say the attack was planned in advance.

 

“Our current best assessment, based on the information that we have at present, is that, in fact, what this began as, it was a spontaneous – not a premeditated – response to what had transpired in Cairo,” Rice told me this morning on “This Week.”

 

“In Cairo, as you know, a few hours earlier, there was a violent protest that was undertaken in reaction to this very offensive video that was disseminated,” Rice said, referring to protests in Egypt Tuesday over a film that depicts the Prophet Muhammad as a fraud. Protesters in Cairo breached the walls of the U.S. Embassy, tearing apart an American flag.

 

“We believe that folks in Benghazi, a small number of people came to the embassy to – or to the consulate, rather, to replicate the sort of challenge that was posed in Cairo,” Rice said. “And then as that unfolded, it seems to have been hijacked, let us say, by some individual clusters of extremists who came with heavier weapons… And it then evolved from there.”

 

Ambassador Christopher Stevens, along with three other Americans, were killed in Libya following the assault on the American consulate in Benghazi, on the 11^th anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks. Rice said the FBI is examining the attack, saying their investigation “will tell us with certainty what transpired.”

 

Rice’s account directly contradicts that of Libyan President Mohamed Yousef El-Magariaf, who said this weekend that he had “no doubt” the attack was pre-planned by individuals from outside Libya.

http://www.weeklysta...ack_652761.html

CBS reports this morning that witnesses are saying "that there was never an anti-American protest outside of the consulate [in Benghazi, Libya]. Instead, they say, it came under planned attack. That is in direct contradiction to the administration's account of the incident."

There was just an update that the server hasn't picked up yet.

Apparently the smoke grenade now doubles as a fire extinguisher.

There is not. It was discussed, but due to rules set by the mod team, it was decided that we would not have a server.

I understand why some people believe this to be the case. However, even if the top 1% gave ALL of their money to the government, it STILL wouldn't balance the budget.

 

How did you come to this conclusion?

 

According to Wikiepedia the top 1% own 34.6% of the wealth in 2007. http://en.wikipedia....ealth,_2007.jpg

 

The total US wealth is 118 trillion as of 2008 http://en.wikipedia....e_United_States

 

118 * .346 = 40 trillion. That means the 1% hold roughly 40 trillion in wealth.

 

Our national debt is 16 trillion and our deficit is only around 1 trillion a year. http://www.brillig.com/debt_clock/

 

Math says the 1% could cover the deficit 40 times.. or almost pay off our entire debt 3 times.

 

I get the feeling a lot of people underestimate how much the 1% actually own. It's not your doctors making 200k a year.

I get the feeling a lot of people don't understand the difference between wealth and income.

To put this math another way, if the Federal government stole absolutely everything that the wealthiest 1% of US citizens own, not taxing them at a high rate, but actually stealing all their money and quantifiable assets, it would only balance the Federal budget for about 40 years at the rate of the current deficit. I'm not sure that these numbers are actually right, but these are the numbers you're using.

It's also worth noting, that, given the amount of fraud in various financial institutions, the estimate that all US citizens combined own $118 trillion (in 2008) in wealth is dubious, and the real number could be less than half that. A lot of that wealth may be fraudulent paper wealth for things that are not worth as much as they're claimed to be.

I just heard NBC is now reporting that Obama won Ohio in 2008.

What does sexism have to do with political correctness?

Censoring speech that is supposed to be offensive to some people based on their identity is the definition of political correctness.

Sexim is a huge issue on the internet and something should be done about it, especially in male dominated places of the internet like video games.

Some people use the Internet to transmit all kinds of verbal abuse indiscriminately. Sexism is substantially less of an issue on the Internet than homophobia or racism.

But from your comment, if you think it's a, "bad sign", that they are trying to eliminate sexism in their game the only conclusion I can come to is you're either sexist or think sexism is a good thing. Maybe you're into harassing women on the internet?

My point is that the fact that the executive producer of the game is focused on something other than the game itself is likely to predict that the game will not be as good as it could be. Your lack of reasoning, whether disingenuous or not, is not persuasive. Your suggestion that, because I disagree with someone's efforts to censor speech on the Internet, I am some kind of pervert is frankly rhetorical terrorism designed to suppress dissent.

Always a bad sign when the people who are supposed to be making sure a game is good are focused on political correctness instead.

Sometimes, players will be unable to connect to the server. They will receive a message indicating either that they failed to connect to the session (even though the server is up and visible), or that they are banned from joining the session (different message from message noting that their Steam ID is banned). In either of these cases, the server will need to have the map changed and probably be restarted to clear it up. If you receive one of these messages, please let someone know as soon as possible, since usually this issue will affect all players trying to join (not just you).

Added de_mirage_go (Strike), de_nuke_ve_fix, de_piranesi. Currently, none of these are on rotation. I've read rumours that de_nuke_ve_fix can cause problems, so please keep an eye out for anyone having difficulty connecting or server crashes while this map is on.

Stuck warmup rounds are a known bug. You enter the game, but no players are able to damage each other. This usually happens when the first player joins the server.

Suiciding (kill in console) will usually cause the warmup round to end. If it doesn't, try pressing E to also control the bot on your team, and suicide the bot.