Titus Ultor
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Posts posted by Titus Ultor
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I made two, but because I realized that I could mark my exact house only after I placed the first one.
The one under "Cory" is my exact home, down to the pool and roof color. It was remarkably hard to find, considering that I didn't think to use the "hybrid", and had to do it all by the highway system and what I thought the roof of landmark buildings would look like.
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Gorgeous, gorgeous. I'm always impressed by the way our texture artists take history and make it alive in such an amazing fashion.
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The city is flooded, and the water is contaminated. The idea is that, while they're stuck and uncomfortable, at least most of them aren't dying from diseases and starvation while trying to escape.
The saddest part about this is that over sixty-seven millions dollar for Louisiana's disaster preparedness and response was requisitioned for the war in Iraq, scuttling a plan to make the shoreline much more protected from such natural disasters.
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It's generally a religious thing, but it can refer to any movement or person that wishes to do anything exactly by traditional standards (i.e., a coach for a football team).
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Dr. Dre feat. Snoop Dogg - Deep Cover
Good ol' gangsta' rap, foo's.
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It would probably require a recording studio to have a ring of panoramic cameras around all sides.. possible, but definately expensive.
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I doubt that something of the level of the Great Depression will come again; and if it does, the Europeans will invariably have more kids, as people tend to do when they lose money (for some reason).
Most Muslims, even in ghettos, are moderates, and not fundamentalist who will impose strict guidelines of entire nations. Neither will a high percentage of Muslim population destroy European culture: at "worst", a hybrid of cultures would be created.
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Rate of attack will most likely not go down as the units take damage.
One may think that this is a bit unrealistic, but then again, so is a soldier taking a dozen arrows hits.
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The new texture set looks absolutely amazing!
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Beowulf would tie in well for the Tolkein crowd, anyway..
If I'm not mistaken, I believe he wrote at least one thesis on it, and read it himself in a reading group, although his copy was in Old English.
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To say that the Church (both Catholic and Protestant) has not both held back science, education, and help to the impoverished is a bit silly. The church never ordered people to be stupid; instead, it simply installed such ideals as "divine right" in the heads of the various populaces. To say that telling someone that their position is life is dependent on bloodline and divine intervention isn't exactly encouraging to any field of progress (thus, the Middle Ages..)
Also, the Church certainly has kept women stupid for, well, even (if to a much lesser extent) unto today. By ordering them under penalty of Hell to subjection and domestic life, stupidity almost became a value for men to find among potential female mates.
EDIT: a few brief points about Clodhopper's.. ideas.
Here's a good one! How do you know that the solar system didn't revolve around the earth at one time? Maybe it changed at one point and people realized it and changed their theories.Because celestial happenings such as that would exact an incredible amount of force and change upon the earth, or would happen over such a long period that human history could not encompass its breadth. Also, unless the sun has grown significantly (another such event as before), it would be entirely impossible for it to revolve around the earth.
It's not just Humans, mind you, but also all the animals. And even if it isn't just all the animals, all we need is one example. Think about it: A cat is sitting on the front porch, when suddenly a dog barks at it and starts chasing it. What does the cat do? It sums up the situation, and decides if this dog is a threat, and if it is, then to either fight, or run away.Animals do not act by logic or reason; they react by instinct. "Fight or flight" is actually predetermined by an animal's surroundings, and the preparedness of the various types of adrenaline to be released at any given moment. Therefore, an animal will fight back against a predator no matter what the circumstances while in a corner, but may retreat while in open space. It is instantaneous and instinctual, and no reasoning or rationalizing is involved; therefore, there is no logic.
Humans, on the other hand, do not act by such instinctual reactions in every circumstances. When faced with a threat, humans will have an quick, generally short natural reaction (i.e., jumping in fright), followed by a brief period of reasoning. For instance, after someone manages to sneak up behind you and touch your shoulder, you jump and probably turn your head by instinct. Then, however, you surmise your assailant to determine whether or not to continue in further defensive actions, or simply to say "You scared me!". An animal, on the other hand, would be much more prone to react with full-scale violence upon such a surprise, unless a smell or sight recognition of friend stopped them.
Furthermore, full reasoned logic is something that no non-human creature can even hope to attain; in fact, if an animal could, we might be forced to encompass it in our definition of human. The logic that enables humans to muse, "I think, therefore I am" is an ability far beyond that of any other documented creature. The ability to write, read, and use syntax are also evidence of logic beyond animal knowledge.
..if gravity is present when there is no life, it obeys the Laws of Physics, and Physics flows from Logic. From that, it is a simple deduction to the Laws of Logic. Logic was here before us, and it will be here when we die.Physics do not flow from logic. They are simply natural observations, with perhaps some basic logic used to quantify them into generalizations which humans can comprehend. Logic is the creation of man used to understand his surroundings. The universe does not move on some sort of logical means, for it operates on physics and other scientific principles. While logical things exist outside of the field of logic itself, they are only logical because everything is, when examined at every possible stage and with an open mind; we only call them "logical" because we can quantify it in terms of the area of logic.
Logic, then, is only a means of defining and classifying pre-existing orders and situations. It is not a science, by any means: it is generally considered a part of philosophy, as Aristotle himself described it.
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Having just passed Tolkein in British Literature, I feel I have a couple points to throw into the discussion regarding the origins and his intentions in creating the universe he did in his works.
For one, Tolkein was a scholar of Anglo-Saxon culture and history, first and foremost. He was an expert and avid reader of the various stages of English, and well-versed in the surviving mythology of both the Vikings and the Anglo-Saxons. However, due to the almost complete illiteracy of both of these cultures, most of their rich culture died with the invasion of the Normans in the late 11th century. Tolkein's universe is, quite evidently, the world of fantasy that was lost over time. He wished to create a British set of mythology, a national identity (as aforementioned, he did not expect the books to be particularly popular, or his intentions to be suitably fufilled).
If one wants evidence of the Anglo-Saxon presence, consider these few points. Smaug, the dragon in the Hobbit, is respledent of the Anglo-Saxon mythology and description of dragons, particularly in regards to the cache of riches (a component of dragons which very few other cultures had). Another similiarity is in runes. Runes (for instance, moon-runes that can only be seen in a certain phase of the moon) hold a special and oft magical power in Tolkein's world. In the Anglo-Saxon world, the runes were (obviously enough) not quite magical, though the ability to be able to pull detailed information from a series of lines on a stone must have been simply mind-boggling and awe-inspiring to someone who had no concept of writing.
The three main races Tolkein placed in his universe (dwarves, humans, and elves) have their places in Anglo-Saxon society.
To a Anglo-Saxon, the Romans must have simply seemed to be of an entirely different breed of humans: they were slighter of build and less physically impressive than they, but their society, architecture, military prowess, and history was so much more advanced than their own.
The old Celtic remnants in Britain could easily be explained as an inspiration for drawves. Expert crafters and sturdy warriors, capable of creating everything from Stonehenge to the greatest examples of blacksmithery in the Western world.
To Tolkein, his world was one where he could let his own imagination play in the depth and complexity of Anglo-Saxon mythology and his own creation. I think they he wished the same thing on all English (to an extent, obviously), for I somehow doubt that Tolkein considered only himself capable of writing of his world. It wouldn't seem fair if only he could have imagination. Basically, I'm a completist, by the standards of the first post.
I realize that I'm not a scholar per se of Tolkein, but being a historian and a closet fan of Tolkein, I feel that I can make these statements without feeling too out of place.
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I'm voting Sony, if only because the system seems to be the one that appeals to the most, if only because of the game selection.
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Or not... It's not hard for a core group of individuals to maintain consistency over a several hundred year period. If the same teachings are passed down identically, then there is no reason for deviations. unless of course there's an agenda (i.e., Council of Trent).
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I'm a Biblical scholar of sorts, and accusing me of not knowing what I'm talking about is quite untrue, not to mention uncalled for.
The Bible isn't riddled with contradictions, really. But I could write a book about anything right now, and not have contradictions.
I don't see how this thread will produce intellectual discussion..
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The main negative effect of randomization of statistics would be this: a "lucky" player could end up with a series of strong or well-hitpointed units, while a more unfortunate opponent would end up with increased values in speed or other lesser statistics. Perhaps if there could be percentage limits on it, it might work. But for random maps, it could make units of too unreliable or unpredictable strength for fair play for all players.
I think it'd be a really cool idea, though, if it could be implemented. Keep the ideas coming, Stevo. We love to see new people with new ideas to add into the game!
When it comes to units with titles, remember that you'll have actual Hero units to build!
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My only complaint is with the personality of God himself; for instance, in the Old Testament, he wipes out nearly all of humanity once, orders the Jews to commit genocide on the Canaanites, gets angry at the Jews and begins to kill the entire lot of them, raises rapacious civilizations to punish entire nations for the actions of their leaders...
And in the New Testament, he sends his son to die a rather excruciating death so that people can be sent to heaven.
Just seems sort of odd.
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That certainly sounds like a trap, as Michael was insinuating. As a Bible scholar (slash atheist), I'm aware that any sort of holes in the Bible that can be found can be patched up with some sort of rationalized spackle.
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The Russian suicidal nature was diminished by armor in artillery in the European Theatre, but it is entirely probably that the tanks would bog down once they hit the farmlands of Manchuria.
Also, Marshall Zhukov maintained a consistent high casualty rate even as his tactics evolved. He simply relied entirely on brute force, and the tenacity of the German defenders (which is upstaged very much so by the Japanese) could cause quite a bit of damage.
In the end, the Russians lost nearly 25 million men in WWII. I agree that most of the casualties occured in the first two years (until Kursk, as a good marking place), but Russia still lost millions of soldiers after that.
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Several points:
The entire war with Japan had required civilian casualties. Attacking of non-combatants began with the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, in which the Japanese fighter-bombers strafed a hospital with a large, clear Red Cross painted on the top.
When one further examines the death toll of the Allied bombings of mainland Japan as a whole, one fact becomes clear: the atomic bomb caused no more casualties or damage than the most common alternative form of bombing: two or three waves of incendiary bombs. As it were, a single atomic bomb cost more than flying three or four squadrons of planes and equipping them with fire bombs.
Given that the effects of radiation were not known at the time, this is the paradigm that Truman, the military, and their various advisors had: similiar amount of damage with a much higher shock value, but with a higher cost.
When considered with the fact that American resources at this juncture were virtually limitless, the use of the atomic bomb was simply a matter of course. Not only did the simple, massive effect of two consecutive bombs destroying over half of their respective targets, as well as the entrance of the U.S.S.R. into the war, cause the Japanese to surrender, it also put the U.S. instantly far ahead of U.S.S.R. in the rapidly approaching and easily forseeable Cold War.
When it comes to the whether or not the atomic bombs were necessary per se information after the fact, I have another brief bevy of facts to point out.
The Japanese government had no intentions of resigning. The so-called "Peace Faction" within the Cabinet was small, unorganized, and in general uninfluential positions to the Emperor, and they alone made attempts to surrender completely to the U.S. The Emperor himself was clearly staunch
in his views on the matter, especially since he didn't want to lose his position, and be held responsible for war crimes (which would have led to his execution, invariably). For the U.S., sentencing all those responsible for the war crimes to their fitting punishments was to be done regardless of the Emperor's status as "Emperor-God".
After the first bomb was dropped, according to the Japanese Minister of War, the general consensus of the people was that the bomb was an irreproduceable event. The Japanese had two (one for the Imperial Navy, one for the Imperial Army, as usual) programs for developing nuclear weaponry, and thusly both branches understood the massive and staggering amount of resources it took to create one. They reasoned that the U.S. simply couldn't have two examples of such an amazingly powerful weapon.
Two days after the first bomb was dropped, the Soviet Union entered the war, attacking Manchuria. There were nearly wo million Imperial Army troops still stationed in Manchuria, all of which had already begun mobilizing for the suicidal brand of warfare used in the Pacific Islands against the U.S. The first battle against the Soviets was epically bloody, since the Soviets were well known in the European Theatre for being fanatically suicidal, if not to the same extent as the Japanese. In a way, the entrance of the Russians into the war only sealed the will of the Japanese leaders for the universal banzai fate for the Japanese people.
The second bomb, however, was the third of three devastating events in a period of four days. Over three hundred thousand Japanese had died in Hiroshima, Manchuria, and now Nagasaki, with another 1.7 million prepared to be split into two massive, easily destructible pockets by the Soviet armed forces. The U.S. appeared to have the ability to drop atomic bombs in rapid sucession, and in, apparently, large numbers. If the U.S. could do this, there would be no chance for the Japanese people do die honorable deaths at the hands of their enemy; they would simply be slaughtered wholesale with a quickness and immediacy unseen beforehand.
Surrender was the only option: perhaps the Japanese emperor realized that his own life was now at risk (for Truman had said before the first bomb's drop that he would leave the Emperor intact, but purely ceremonial) for a sudden, dishonorable death, as well as the lives of his entire people.
The effects of the one hundred thousand people who suffered injury from radiation are certainly pitiable and regretable, but consider this: if the atomic bomb hadn't rendered the swift surrender, the Soviets would have slaughtered the never-surrendering Japanese pockets at massive cost to both side.
Given the ratio of casualties in the American campaign, Japanese deaths would have totaled over a million lives, with the survives either injured or in Russian virtual enslavement. The Russians would have suffered a relatively light hundred thousand casualties, by U.S. statistics; however, the Red Army was no where near the level of equipment and training of the U.S. Marines, and would probably take three or four times the casualties taken by the Marines in any given situation.
The choice to drop the atomic bomb on an actual city was fairly simple. The aim of the American military was to destroy Japan's military infrastructure, and the bomb achieved this end spectacularly, if a bit inefficently. Secondly, we only had two bombs. To waste one on a valueless target, particularly when the bomb dropped on Hiroshima was of a type that had not been tested, would have been a monumental waste of resources. Furthermore, the Japanese government would not have understood just how much destruction the atomic bomb could cause to actual Japanese cities.
Nearly a dozen Japanese cities had been spared the destruction of fire bombing for the sake of leaving unscathed cities for the atomic bomb to be released on. If these cities had been firebombed instead, each would have received damage similiar to that of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, although the radiation trouble would have obviously not been present.
Essentially, the usage of the atomic bombs simply ended the slaughter sooner with a unique brand of its own slaughter. However, it would seem that the slaughter of the atomic bombs actually ended up saving a great deal of lives.
In the end, though, Major General LaFay (general-in-charge of the fire bombings of the Home Islands) had this to say about the American usage of civilian bombings (even before the atomic bomb was mentioned to him), "If we were to lose this, we'd be the ones tried as war criminals".
Sorry about the long post. I just read a Time article and saw a couple of History Channel documentaries on the topic, so I wanted to get some of these facts into the mix.
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Surely you two know that all one needs to do to prove something is to prove the impossibility of the contrary. In this case, all I would need to do is to prove the impossibility of atheism. And if atheism is falsified, the only other option is theism.
This is untrue, for there are two more options at your disposal: agnostism, admitting that knowing whether or not god(s) exist is impossible with current evidence, and deism, which is believing that god(s) exist, but only in such a way that they don't participate in human affiars, and thusly not practicing religion.
Secondly, on the topic of logic and mathematics: they are simply theories and laws drawn from observation and calculation of actual physical things, and extrapolations of physical things. Addition is obvious, subtraction the same. Multiplication and division are rather simple, too. In fact, one of the greatest holes in ancient mathematics was the lack of the concept of zero. Zero doesn't exist, since if it did, there'd be something. So, in essense, our knowledge of mathematics is drawn firstly from observation, and secondly from logic based on those observations.
In a similiar way, logic was discovered (not created) by observation and realization of its existence. Are we not using it right now in this debate? Logic simply exists. Nothing seemingly illogical has happened in scientific history (disregarding human behavior; however, many of the oddities of human behavior can be traced back to a source) that has no logical explanation. Logic makes sense. It is not the creation or by-product of human agenda or human thought. It can only be quantified and qualified by human thought and agenda.
Oh, and, Clodhopper, while I'm thinking of it: the quote in your profile is by Benjamin Franklin, not Thomas Jefferson. Benjamin Franklin was a deist, by the way.
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It's about reputation and professionalism, I fear.
You could mod those in, you know.
Maybe we should just have a "make-you-own-cheat" trigger?
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Despite my name, I'm only around a quarter Irish. If given the choice, I would've put Germanics, since the rest of me is German in heritage.
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I especially do not want all these special taxes like property taxes and income taxes, when they go to a government that is in extreme debt and does not show any intention of paying it back
"Special taxes"? That's sort of silly. The original and most basic tax and the property tax, and the income tax has been present in societies for thousands of years, if a bit more roughly managed than modern nations.
And then you speak of illegal immigration as a problem.. but you don't want to pay lot of taxes. There's a simple equation to explain how that view is sort of paradoxical:
Stuff you want the gov't to do = Money = Taxes
Unless you want everyone to volunteer for border guarding (which would cost more than the relatively small amount of taxes you pay right now), taxes are a requirement for patrolling borders, protecting against terrorism, preventing extremism..
The economy can only support so many illegal immigrants.Actually, because of the influx of cheap labor, local economies are boosted by illegal immigration. Especially when the immigrants are generally hard-working, and robust. The only people who are screwed over are the native labor force; however, as you said, you're not a socialist, so my breath is wasted.
New Orleans Mayor Issues 'Desperate SOS'
in Hall of Intellectuals
Posted
Did anyone not find themselves awash in pure irony upon reading that? Pretty intense.