Bulldrek v3.0

WillyGilligan

Loving it. Never having read the books I have no problem following the different threads. Even if I miss a character's name, having the visual cues me immediately to where I am in the flow. On top of that, it's somewhat difficult for the TV show to depict people's motivations without their internal...

WillyGilligan

I pretty much love it more than all other things combined, but I'm such a huge fan of the books, I can't really tell how good the show is, objectively. One impression I get, though, is that it's fucking difficult to follow if you haven't read the books; watching with friends who are new to the whol...

WillyGilligan

3278 wrote:What would you be using it for? General celestial observation, or terrestrial?

The usual.

WillyGilligan

Raygun wrote:t that big, pompous bullshit wedding they just had for a monarch? What the fuck is that all about in this day and age? I have no idea why they hang on to that sillyness. Anyway...

This opinion aligns you with a chunk of the British population.

WillyGilligan

Yeah, gas in Hawaii is going at a steady clip. Fortunately I get COLA, and I jumped at the chance to live on the base closest to my job. Pretty soon I need to start walking/biking to work, which will happen when I figure out the route/gate issue with that. It puts my commute at about an hour one way...

WillyGilligan

Why haven't we heard more from Al-Quaeda over the years? It could be that their leadership has been forced into various forms of hiding, restricting their ability to coordinate their activities. They may have decided to let the smaller groups they'd inspired shoulder more of the burden. Osama may ha...

WillyGilligan

Nicephorus wrote:And let's not lose sight of the important thing. 46 points.
http://www.nerdprideradio.com/?page_id=40

You grim reaping bastard, what's your secret? I must know!

Elf, quick question: what's your minimum threshold of evidence?

WillyGilligan

UBL has apparently been killed in a special forces raid. How long till we see the retaliation, and what are the odds of someone looking a lot like UBL sending a new tape in a day or two?

WillyGilligan

"I think those pixels are resolving to a nipple. Or maybe it's bacne. I've been waiting so long I don't even care anymore. Score!"

WillyGilligan

Growing old sucks. I'm going to run my kids through a Pathfinder module tomorrow, but that's the extent of my gaming right now. But, I'm in one of the geekier fields in the geekiest Branch of the military, so I still have hope.

WillyGilligan

DV8 wrote:A 3.3 would be big news here in .nl, but isn't that, like, an average Tuesday for Hawaiians?

Fun fact: I totally did not notice the 3.6 quake we got here. Found out about it later. I might have noticed some noise that I thought was normal for downtown Honolulu near the highway.

WillyGilligan

Everyday!

WillyGilligan

[quote="3278" Then you turn inside out, cry whenever you set foot in a city, and never want to do anything but raise your children on remote, uninhabited islands. Or so I hear. I sort of do this already. Except I don't cry (no tear ducts), and don't have children. Hell, if you're just abl...

WillyGilligan

I like small bursts of attention. I tend to pepper conversation with retarded puns and other low forms of wit. If I get 1 laugh in every 10 attempts I call it good.

Otherwise, I like to hang at the edge and offer observations as they come.

WillyGilligan

Because I can't tell who's reading which forum, I'll just post this twice. I'm stealing this from another forum, and that How the World Works guy, but apparently the President is set to give a speech to schoolchildren soon. The notes from the Dept. of Education have given teachers some ideas for tea...

WillyGilligan

The German family is my favorite, because they were honest enough to put the beer in with the food budget.

WillyGilligan

Co-worker stories? I'm in! Once on deployment I was sharing a trailer with some maintainers. They'd managed to finagle a nice big TV hooked into the base's cable, so they could watch during slow times. Not a lot of channels, but you could get news, American TV shows...and the Fashion Channel. The fi...

WillyGilligan

WillyGilligan

I mean, I knew the Italians came in during the Renaissance and were insufferable pricks about how smart they were, but you'd think that'd just spur further growth as the two cultures took stuff in wildly different directions before synthesizing each other's views and continuing to build on it. Inst...

WillyGilligan

I actually knew something about this a few months ago, but I take crappy notes. I want to say that it was tied into the political situation at the time, specifically the rise in religious fundamentalism. I might have something in a bit.

WillyGilligan

I'm sorry. You have a lot of long conversations ahead of you, and I wish you luck. For my end; I'm the spendthrift in the marriage, but it's all about absent-minded laziness more than status seeking. With four kids on our salaries, we should eat out of the house maybe twice a month. Instead, we get ...

WillyGilligan

I will point out, regarding your wife and the house/socializing thing, that it's harder to give up something than it is to substitute something. If all that you're offering is "less", then it's not going to be attractive. People don't naturally gravitate towards asceticism, after all. Soci...

WillyGilligan

From NPR: "The Obama administration is considering shifting detainees from the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay to locations in the U.S., including the military penitentiary at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., and a soon-to-be closed maximum-security prison in Standish, Mich. Standish City Manager M...

WillyGilligan

And the other point, if you start running roads for profit, whose to say a company looks at the numbers for repairing a road, or making a new one, and simply says 'too expensive, not doing it, but not selling it either?' Then you get into gov't mandates and we're back where we are now only arguing ...

WillyGilligan

Part of why I think that TDP and some other methods aren't ready to replace a lot of oil-based energy, is because they're not currently cost-effective compared to oil. With a lot of support from Congress and widespread use, they would be. They're just not quite there yet. Really, the only thing TDP...

WillyGilligan

Okay, I'm back. In case you didn't have half an hour to spend listening to HowTheWorldWorks, the relevant portion is about 15 minutes in. It goes, with some editing to remove his pauses and restatements: "Have you looked at government run roads? They're always under construction, there are alwa...

WillyGilligan

So I was listening to this guy and amid a lot of other discussion, he brings up the idea that the federal government should be out of even roads. That the free market can provide better roads than the government can. Is there anything to this? Because that doesn't seem feasible to me at first glance...

WillyGilligan

Now I wish that I'd studied more on Napoleon. All I know now is that Waterloo nearly sunk the fortunes of the Rothchilds when he lost so quickly. Do you mean some variant of "wait for the other guy to fuck up"? edit: Just looked it up and the best quote I have is "show up and see what...

WillyGilligan

This is an interesting read after four years.

WillyGilligan

WillyGilligan

It's a little different for me. I'm wise enough that I wouldn't have bothered so long in this thread as I did back then, but I'm still sort of spinning my wheels intellectually. I need to start feeding my head new stuff and start speaking with more knowledge and less five minute expert.

WillyGilligan

Why do men, statictically, more often commit suicide by hanging or with a gun and woman slice their wrists and use pills? How does it feel to be mentally ill. I mean, serious mental illness. Depersonalization disorder or something. How does a peadophile feel? How does it feel, to know that your doi...

WillyGilligan

Crazy Elf wrote:
3278 wrote:I've never once even considered how cells adhere to each other
These days it's usually due to funding from the North-Western tribal regions in Pakistan.

I loled.

WillyGilligan

If I remember correctly, this happened back when I was deploying pretty frequently and had non-mission time and available internet to burn. Its much easier to get wrapped up in that sort of thing when it's new, you're in your mid-twenties and are away from your family. I'm looking back at my posts, ...

WillyGilligan

I have noticed a sharp increase in the use of this word over the last few years. Almsost everything that Obama is doing gets called socialist, or almost any Democrat proposal, really. The word is now occupying the same head space as agnostic, where it's a word you use when you lack the proof, or at ...

WillyGilligan

Oddly enough, I've become that way with the forums. Started out as something to read, then I got furiously involved in the discussions, now it's just sort of places I read because that's what I do.

WillyGilligan

To me, using taxpayer money for disaster recovery, or the military, or maintaining historical monuments aren't tinkering with the economy. You do them for a primary purpose, and there are secondary economic effects. We use those resources regardless of the potential economic benefit. Compared to thi...

WillyGilligan

And that sort of records management is what I was referring to as timestamping a process flow. And of course, should something go astray its impertive to see where in the chain it went wonky. But by proof I was referring to a preponsity to keep communication (in a conflict) on email in order to hav...

WillyGilligan

One my supervisor likes to use is "Email sent is not communication achieved." It's best used to overcome distance and to have timestamps of when the conversations happened, but people really are crap with it. Agreed, but there is a thin line between documenting process flow through timest...

WillyGilligan

Could you give a fer'instance? I'm just not able to see a fast moving issue that a government agency can realistically respond to within days. Bushfires, for example. Within a few days the state and federal government had come up with funding for the affected families, as well as allocated resource...

WillyGilligan

* when facing conflict, take the conversation off email and pick up the phone if you want to resolve rather than escalate the problem One my supervisor likes to use is "Email sent is not communication achieved." It's best used to overcome distance and to have timestamps of when the conver...

WillyGilligan

I also feel - but this is a bit of a tangent - that we're losing our sense of decorum. I'm big on it, I get that and that's how I was raised. A little more flexibility wouldn't hurt, sure. But as I read in (name of blog) the other day, there was a time when people used to get dressed not just for s...

WillyGilligan

Like hell. Society advances all the time and new issues spring up that need to be dealt with. If you don't adjust things to an ever changing environment you totally fuck your country. Governments pay for more than just social programs. Of course, and I've suggested adjustment, as the decades roll b...

WillyGilligan

Funny enough, PBS is running a documentary miniseries called the Ascent of Money. Not too much yet on government involvement, but I think it's coming.

WillyGilligan

Sam wrote:Why do babies get the squits when they are teething?

I know I've heard this one over the years, but I forget. I'm gonna go with either:

A: increase in drool being swallowed.

or

B: Stress causing change in digestion

WillyGilligan

No, except in the most trivial sense, because a "generation" - even within one nation, even within one socioeconomic class, even within one subculture - is made of too many voices to average them down to one artist who can meaningfully be said to represent them. At best, sometimes you fin...

WillyGilligan

I told you! Dumbass. What? I was supposed to just stop reading before the epilogue? Well, I think that's kind of customary for veteran Stephenson readers. Okay, it's been a few years since I read that series, so could you remind me what's so bad about the epilogue before I start rereading the whole...

WillyGilligan

Burn notice had a decent return, I thought. I also like the follow up show Royal Pains, at least enough to give it a few weeks.

WillyGilligan

Thanks to Pistons, I saw this article: http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2009/04/conservatives-live-different-moral-universe8212and-heres-why-it-matters The thrust of it is an attempt to quantify some of the differences between conservatives and liberals (in the only country that matters, of cours...

WillyGilligan

Crazy Elf wrote:He could be saving the anger. If I were him I'd save my punches for closer to the actual election. Set them up now, knock them down later.

Yeah, the thread is old, but this is topical, damnit!

http://www.nbc.com/Saturday_Night_Live/ ... a/1056126/

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Osama Bin Laden dead, time for the end credits?

Indoctrination?

Privatized roads?

Socialism!

Conservative-liberal morality