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If someone were to redo the Belyaev fox breeding experiment with coyotes, or better yet, wolves. Not only would this provide some fascinating info on how rapidly the initial domestication of dogs took place, but it would also provide a _much_ less dangerous pet for those morons who want to own wolf-dog hybrids. OTOH, such clueless idiots might turn any dog they own into a dangerous creature. |
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Game Over: Inmate Can't Play Dungeons & Dragons - A man serving life in prison for first-degree intentional homicide lost his legal battle Monday to play Dungeons & Dragons behind bars.
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inger was told by prison officials that he could not keep the materials because Dungeons & Dragons ''promotes fantasy role playing, competitive hostility, violence, addictive escape behaviors, and possible gambling,'' according to the ruling. The prison later developed a more comprehensive policy against all types of fantasy games, the court said.
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Department of Corrections spokesman John Dipko said the department was pleased with the decision and will continue to enforce rules that are designed to maintain a safe environment.
Seriously, time spent slaying orcs is time the inmates _aren't_ shivving each other or plotting jailhouse rape. They want to maintain a safe environment, they should be encouraging this sort of thing. On the other hand, prisons are supposed to be punitive, so I don't have that much sympathy for the guy. after all, putting a playstation in every cell would probably reduce violence too, but I don't see that happening any time soon either.
Edit: Link fixed. |
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I think you'd have to be deliberately obtuse to claim Danny Glover believes global warming causes earthquakes. It was obvious to me that what he meant by "What happened in Haiti " was "Death and devastation due to natural disasters in general", not earthquakes in specific. |
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It's not the Porcine Death Plague, and it's not the "normal" variety I got vaccinated for either. So obviously, it's the universe's way of telling me to become an anti-vaxxer. See, got two shots, and still got sick! :-P |
| » The difference between Harry Reid and Trent Lott. |
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When Reid made his "unfortunate comments", he was making an observation of fact: That in our country, black people who are light skinned and speak the middle/upper class dialect of English are at a social and political advantage over those who are darker or who have "ghetto" manners of speech. Yes, I'm sure both of these facts are uncomfortable for many of us to contemplate, and he could have phrased his observation better, but they're still objectively true.
Trent Lott, on the other hand, was expressing an opinion. Specifically, the opinion that America would have been a better place if an avowed racist running on a "Segregation Forever!" platform had won the presidency. _That's_ why he got hounded out of his leadership position.
Jan. 11th, 2010 @ 01:15 pm
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| » Gotta love security theater. |
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Back when I was in the Army, every single time I went on a plane, I got pulled aside for "additional screening". So did several other people in my unit. I figure there could have been 2 reasons for this: 1) As an Arabic linguist, I _did_ have a lot of personal contacts with people from scary Muslim countries. Of course, since those contacts were all work related, and most of them were _also_ American soldiers, any intelligently run screening program would have discounted them. 2) The screeners, in trying to make their quotas, were deliberately targeting people that they knew would be both harmless and conditioned to be cooperative with petty authority figures. Either way, something stupid was going on.
Jan. 10th, 2010 @ 10:04 pm
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| » Oh noes! Radiations! |
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So apparently we're all gonna get cancer from the new body scanners that they're thinking about installing at all the airports. Oh, calimity! But if wikipedia is accurate, someone being scanned with a backscatter x-ray machine will get exposed to 0.005 - 0.009 millirems of radiation. While you're actually in the air, you're exposed to about .3 millirems per hour. Unless I'm doing the math wrong, that means that a full body scan is equivalent to the additional radiation exposure of 1-2 minutes of flight time. I have a hard time believing that it's a significant danger.
Jan. 9th, 2010 @ 02:40 pm
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| » Glee! But also huh? |
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So apparently next summer, Lego is offering a line of collectible minifigs. The first wave looks like a nurse/doctor, a western outlaw, a steampunk robot, a crash-test dummy, a Mexican wrestler, a Indian, a ray-gun wielding astronaut, a Forestman, a clown, a caveman, a diver, a cheerleader, a ninja, a zombie, an Emo kid, and a man in a tuxedo. Ten of them are awesome, five are OK, and one is "meh", so provided they're not too expensive, I'm gonna try to catch them all. Hopefully initial reports are correct, and they'll come in opaque polybags rather than boxes, and I'll be able to pick them out by feel. But the steampunk robot will be the seventh minifig with a robot arm. Why have _all_ of them had the right arm be robotic? Why are there no left-handed cyborgs?
Anyways, boy will I be annoyed if this is _another_ Europe-only theme...
Dec. 20th, 2009 @ 11:24 pm
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| » Frustration and annoyance. |
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Nobody seems to have ever made a Lego version of Tiamat and posted it online. This would be good for me: A niche unfulfilled! A bold opportunity to shower the world with genius! Groupies! Alas, though, Lego does not appear to ever have made the Bionicle style dragon head in either black or white plastic. Red, blue, and green, yes, but that's only 3 out of 5 heads. So I guess I'll have to make my own heads, knowing bitterly that Lego could have made my job easier, but chose not too. Sniff. They only hit me 'cuz they love me.
On the other hand, nobody seems to have posted any Silver Dragons yet either. The only question is if Lego has made enough _other_ pieces in the "Pearl light Grey" color to so it. Let's check...
(Five minutes later) Looks like they have most of them, except for the tail and wing pieces. Compromises may have to be made.
Edit: And some of the other pieces I'd need are available in "Metallic silver", which is a relatively close match (And not to be confused with "Chrome Silver", which isn't. "Flat Silver" is also reasonably good. The only problem is the pieces I still can't find are plain bricks and plate. Maybe the design can do without. Hmmm...
Dec. 19th, 2009 @ 04:32 pm
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| » Is it possible to be "Transracial"? |
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Our contemporary culture generally looks down on ethnic minorities who attempt to "pass", because hey, we're supposed to celebrate our differences and stuff. But if a hypothetical brown person felt they were really "white on the inside", and just had plastic surgery and chemical skin lightening to match the body they were born up to their inner self, shouldn't we respect that, at least to the same extent we do the transgendered?
Dec. 15th, 2009 @ 11:28 pm
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| » Mantra of the day. |
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"It's not the puppy's fault she's gross. It's not the puppy's fault she's gross. It's not the puppy's fault she's gross..."
She is awful cute though, when she's not doing unspeakably revolting things.
Dec. 15th, 2009 @ 02:27 pm
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| » I am a bad person, but this is complete BULLSHIT. |
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One of the reason's I am bad, is because my first thought about reading this:
Dr Peter Watts, Canadian science fiction writer, beaten and arrested at US border.
Was "Wow, that's just like a scene from one of his books! Eerie." He is a notoriously depressing writer, you see.
It's bullshit because we, as a nation, are becoming the sort of authority worshiping sheep that many assholes' first reaction is to assert he MUST have done something to deserve it; and many non-assholes will complacently accept that even if he didn't do anything legally/morally wrong, the border guards, just like any other Officer of the Law, still have a purely pragmatic "right" to treat civilians as they damned well please, secure in the knowledge that they'll never be punished, so it's better to just keep your eyes down and say "Yes Sir". Not "Yes, Massa" though. As appropriate as it might be, such sarcasm will get you an assbeating-and-resisting-arrest charge too.
And the biggest bullshit is that, as things stand, thee complacent masses are right. Even if he beats the charge of assaulting a thug's jackboots with his face, they probably won't be held accountable. This is the America that pants-wetting hysteria about the "War on Terror" and "Being Tough on Crime" have made. We asked for it, so we'd better enjoy it.
Edited for grammar and spelling, 2 hours later.
Dec. 11th, 2009 @ 03:13 pm
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| » Damn I'm good. |
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I just got excused from a Final since I'd done so well on previous tests/projects that there was no way I could possibly have gotten less than an A for the course as a whole. Granted, it was an introductory course, but I still feel better about having done so poorly on other courses earlier. :-)
Dec. 11th, 2009 @ 02:34 pm
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| » They just keep getting stupider. |
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What's dumber than jaywalking on the day after an 18 inch snowfall, when the roads are far too slippery for an oncoming car to possibly stop if you chance to fall down? Doing so while pushing a BABY STROLLER. I'm all for would-be Auto-Darwinists taking themselves out, but endangering kids who might not have inherited their stupidity is just wrong.
Dec. 10th, 2009 @ 04:46 pm
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| » Wonder how long this'll last? |
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Henrico Medal of Honor winner, 90, ordered to remove flagpole. Though really, the fact that the homeowner in question is a MoH winner shouldn't matter, it would be equally reprehensible for the petty tyrants of that homeowners association to order ANY patriotic American not to fly their flag.
Dec. 2nd, 2009 @ 09:22 pm
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| » And now for something light and fluffy: |
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Jazz Hands Kitten!
Dec. 1st, 2009 @ 07:40 pm
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| » Call me a heartless bastard... |
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But I ain't buyin' it. I can easily believe someone who was originally thought to be in a vegetative state could have been misdiagnosed. I can also believe he could communicate, eventually, by toe-tapping, and that unspecified brain-imaging showed he was cognitively functional. But "Facilitated Communication"?!?! Come on, that crap was discredited a long time ago. As was Clever Hans.
Fortunately, there should be a relatively easy way to verify this one way or another: There now exist assisted communication devices that operate based on pupil tracking software. If they hook him up to one and his "un-facilitated" words match up with what the facilitator is currently "helping" him to type, I'll apologize profusely, but I'm not gonna hold my breath. Now, to be fair, I guess it's certainly possible he wouldn't have the necessary muscular control to focus on a computer screen well enough for the software to work. In that case, he wouldn't be able to focus on a freaking KEYBOARD either. For (Bleep)S sake, his EYES ARE CLOSED IN THE VIDEO. God, people are stupid.
Edit: I'd also like to know what exactly the "state-of-the-art imaging" was, the article doesn't say.
Nov. 24th, 2009 @ 04:47 pm
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| » Huh. |
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Weird to know that a place I've been at (The SRC at Fort Hood) Just got shot up. For the sake of everyone else in the Army with an Arabic name, I'm hoping that this wasn't terrorism, or a lot of loyal American Soldier's are going to have to put up with a lot of crap because of it. Of course, if it was, then that would be intentional on his part. On the other hand, I would think it more likely that mental problems would be overlooked in a career officer than extremist sympathies. On the third hand, he apparently had accomplices.
Update: Now the article is saying those other suspects were released, and the officer in question had expressed dissatisfaction with his upcoming deployment. So it was a lone psycho after all.
Nov. 5th, 2009 @ 06:06 pm
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| » Idiots. |
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Yes _another_ campus-area bicyclist ran a red light and cut me off today. And the moron glared at ME when I honked the horn at him. I swear, I'd be doing Darwin a favor...
Oct. 27th, 2009 @ 10:08 pm
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