December 15th, 2009 | 
Author: In its mania for jailing people, Britain has declared trivial offences crimes
an article in the UK newspaper Guardian by Simon Jenkins (Thursday 12/11/2009) speaks out against the over-criminalization of Britain in an effort to “be tough on crime”.
Quote: Only the Americans among civilised democracies love prisons more than the British. For imprisonment Britain leads Europe, jailing convicts for non-violent crimes that most countries handle with non-custodial sentences, or do not regard as crimes at all. Thousands of British offences are for the “crime” of not obeying a government official.
Hat-tip to Wendy McElroy.
Reason TV interviews the authors of If We Can Put a Man on the Moon: Getting Big Things Done in Government in this 10 minute video. The book is a serious analysis of the failures of government action from conception to design to implementation.
Tags: Jonah Goldberg has a great post over at National Review Online about the Climate email scandal. Clock on over to read the whole thing, but here are a few salient points:
In a long string of embarrassing e-mail exchanges, CRU scientists discuss with friendly outside colleagues, including Penn State University’s Michael Mann, how to manipulate the data they want to show the world, and how to hide the often-flawed data they don’t. In one exchange, they discuss the “trick” of how to “hide the decline” in global temperatures since the 1960s. Again and again, the researchers don’t object to just inconvenient truths but also inconvenient truth-tellers. They contemplate and orchestrate efforts to purge scientists and journals who won’t sing from the same global-warming hymnal.
In one instance, Phil Jones, the CRU director, says a scientific journal must “rid (itself) of this troublesome editor,” who happened to publish a problematic paper. In another, Jones says we “will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
These documents reveal the trick behind how they hide the dissent. Climate-change activists often dismiss critics by noting that the skeptics haven’t offered their arguments in peer-reviewed literature. Hence why they work so hard to keep dissenters out of the literature! Indeed, whatever the final verdict on the CRU’s shenanigans, two things are already firmly established by even a sympathetic reading of these documents.
And when you loss the Daily Show…
I have been green lighted to acquire a new PC. Since STO and Champions are probably in my gaming future I need to make sure the system can keep up with the pack. So what are the system requirements/recommendations for STO?
The minimum system requirements are:
- OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit)
- CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo 1.8 Ghz or AMD Athlon X2 3800+
- Memory: 1GB RAM
- Video: NVIDIA GeForce 7950 / ATI Radeon X1800 / Intel HD Graphics
- Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard
- DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher
- HDD: 8GB Free Disk Space
- Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required
- Disc: 6X DVD-ROM
The recommended system specifications are:
- OS: Windows XP SP2 / Windows Vista / Windows 7 (32 or 64-bit)
- CPU: Intel E8400 Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2 5600+
- Memory: 2GB RAM+
- Video: NVIDIA GeForce 8800 / ATI Radeon HD 3850+
- Sound: DirectX 9.0c Compatible Soundcard
- DirectX: Version 9.0c or Higher
- HDD: 8GB Free Disk Space
- Network: Internet Broadband Connection Required
- Disc: 6X DVD-ROM
Happy Thanksgiving!
Massively has an intriguing Q&A with Cryptic concerning space combat.
Here’s a snippet…
Lok1: Why is combat so important in STO? Why does it happen frequently?
Al Rivera: There are several reasons. We wanted to build an exciting game that appealed to Trek fans and non-Trek fans (let’s call them future Trek fans) alike. The epic space battles from Wrath of Khan to the Dominion War of Deep Space 9 offered great gameplay potential. We wanted to create something exciting, unique, and decisively Trek – and the tall combat mechanics of Star Trek offered an abundance of all 3. But combat is not the only option is STO. There are plenty of exploration, research, gathering and humanitarian opportunities throughout the STO universe.
-Drexel-: How will the use of our weapon systems and abilities be limited during combat?
That’s a pretty big question, so let’s focus on the basics. There are 4 power systems – Weapons, Shields, Engines and Auxiliary. During combat you will need to manage power between these 4 systems, which will modify one system at the expense of another. Your ship has a several weapons slots where you can equip weapons like beam arrays, cannons, torpedoes and mines. Your weapons and some abilities have limited firing arcs – for instance phaser arrays have a 250 degree firing arc, while cannons have a 45 degree firing arc. Many weapons can be fired at once, but firing too many energy weapons will drain your weapon power. Some weapons, like torpedoes have individual cool-down timers as well as linked cool-down timers, as are many Bridge Officer abilities.
Omar Epps and Pittsburg Steelers Head Coach Mike Tomlin do look an awful lot alike. It was in Lookliker.com and Sports Illustrated. It doesn’t take long before fiction replicates reality and the good writers of House let the none sports fans in on the joke.
I would post the photo here. But that would save you the trouble of “Binging” it and seeing all the myriad of variations on the theme.
It’s been a long time since I gave this subject any thought, but as part of my scholarly journey into objective comparative theology, I spent a good deal of time studying cultural metaphysics and the occult as viewed from various religious traditions.
I believe think a conclusion that there are events and energies behind what we call “haunting” and/or “possession” is a fair intellectual pursuit… as are the nature of these events and energies open for equally fair debate.
In then end, as a more rational thinker… I cannot commit to any of these suppositions as part of my world view. Regardless of that fact, Demonology is a tantalizing and even entertaining line of study for a genre geek like me, so I put together a reflection on the research I did.
Supernatural events are reported to follow a system of progression. In the following post, I will highlight the 5 stages of Demonic or Spiritual Influence.
STO is in closed beta at this time, but Cryptic has released two videos detailing ship combat.
“Word on the street” from “people in the beta” suggests that these videos are dead on representation of what you should expect to see while playing this game.
Here’s Part 1:
And here’s Part 2:
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