Aileron

To understand the reasoning behind the Second Amendment, and why this right was so early on the list, one needs to examine the motivations of the Founding Fathers. Their goal was to form a democracy that would not collapse back into a monarchy. Several monarchies had existed before that time, such as the Holy Roman Empire, which involved voting each leader in, but despite the presence of the vote the winner would always be the Prince of Austria. The Bill of Rights was written for that purpose, because without these rights, all we would have is a majority dictatorship in which the majority had best support the dictator if they knew what's good for them. Thus, if one wants to prevent collapse into fuedalism, one must examine the forces which gave rise to fuedalism in the first place. Fuedalism started as farmers would band together and give a lord a certain amount of money. The lord would in turn use that money to provide police and military services. Realise that police service is not much different than any other service, it is provided by an organization which will charge a fee to provide it, but keep in mind that police service is a "need" rather than a "want". The lord initially could not charge to much, because if he charged the farmers too much, they could drop from his service, buy weapons of their own, and protect their farms with their own two hands. His prices were governed by the laws of economics. After a while, people got the idea to ban weapons, for the same reasons used today. They imagined it would be harder for bandits and theives to get ahold of them. These bans occurred in virtually every fuedalistic society in history from Europe to the Middle East to Japan. What happened in each case was that once weapons were banned, the farmers did not have that opportunity to drop from their lord's protection service. The lord, having a monopoly on security, would increase his wages until his customers became in debt to him and became serfs. The rest is history. A ban on guns gives the government a monoply in security. The reason it is not blatant today is that there is enough compe!@#$%^&*ion for political offices which will stir up the mix. If a mayor gets too soft on crime or charges too many taxes, that mayor is replaced. However, the problem with that is that the only thing preventing something very much like fuedalism from occuring is the two-party system - should one of the parties collapse a path towards dictatorship would be opened. I for one would prefer something more reliable. Guns should be purchasable by virtually anyone. There should also be armed security forces in the private sector, capable of being employed by schools, malls, banks, or any other business. They should be able to deal lethal force to criminals without too much legal trouble. In practicality that would mean hiring street gangs to secure the streets as a secondary police force. To the liberal minded, this will seem like a terrible thing, but to me, what it would do is atleast give sinking communities an option to avoid the vicious cycle of crime and poverty which will occur when the justice system fails to do its job. Essentially, the check-and-balance here is between the government police and courts which have democratic authority, and the private detectives, bounty hunters, vigilantes, and security organizations which are able to fill in where the government is lacking. We need both. If we were to accept that the private forces could not truly function under an armament gap, then the Second Amendment is essential. Ofcourse, if you are a socialistic country like Canada, you are relying on your government to provide several "need" services within a monopoly, so arms freedom is moot. The system works fine now, fair enough. However, if one political party ever got a strong majority, realise that said party would control security, electricity, transportation, taxes, health care, communications, and a bunch of other things. All they would need to do then is find a cleaver way to prevent other political parties from forming, which seems doable given how many needs the major party would control, and then with their one-party domination they could then throw the essence of democracy out the window.

FYI, I had a job interview yesterday, in another state, and by the time I got back it was 10:00. Today, I was also occupied all day. The idea is it is random intervals, so if you don't want Moose Master to get the tallies, hold the position for 24 hours.

The solution was already stated: Oldskool ships aren't showing up this round. Unfortunately, this is a need because rasta and Whal already developed a transfer technique last round. I suspect that by the second month of this round that technique would have been perfected. Thus, the Oldskool ships had to go. With it, the primary motivation for keeping transfer out was rendered impossible: It will always be possible for a quitting member to transfer atleast all of his points out.

attacks are open in the SS RPG.

His account is insignificant either way. He won't be a decent farm for long, but nor would he really care about the little progress he has made so far, if he comes back, which he probably won't. His account will remain as a reward for the early attackers, who need something to look foward to this early in the round.

Hmmm...now that I think about it a more appropriate one would've been: Why hasn't attack been turned on? I was supposed to do that last night. It will occur at 9:00 Tonight. (Now before you all go around calling me lazy, the V RPG now has the final blank inventory screen, and the bots have been named and given images, though they are the same bots settings wise...count on the finished High Twop being atlesat lvl20. And for those who didn't read the setting post, yes Trench Wars is going to be the bad guys.) Back to the topic, Dav's click logs are legit. There are a couple of other suspicious characters in there, but nothing of the "this person is definitely cheating" variety, and certainly nothing of the "this person's cheating is going to dominate the game". Remember that keeping commander in mind will double the click output, and that upgrading your UP gets you the equivolent of a click every four hours. BTW Dav, is that sig a StarGate reference?

Usually any lame tactic that can be done by transfer can also be done by attacking. Generally, there are probably a dozen ways of cheating anyway, at least transfers are given a log which is relatively easy to sort through.

Its been going down for quite a while actually. JDS had made a long string of offenses, not one of which ban-worthy but the sum total of which justifies one. The last straw which broke the camel's back was when he made a disrespectfull sig of Sean Taylor, the Redskins player recently murdered. Polix did the ban, but all of staff is behind him because every one of us can name something that JDS had done that wasn't good for the forum.

JDS has been banned. Falcoknight is now the clan leader of A-Team Penetration Squad.

Well, this discussion seems to be over, as JDS has been banned for spamming by another admin. closed

The following are the changes which actually occurred so far: Weasel not has a covert bonus rather than sentry. Transfer Services are back in the game Merc income is now zero - it was debatable before, and with transfer back in it could be a lame way to hurt someone Nightwasp and Oldskool ships will not appear instead, it is expected that new players will receive goods from clan recruiters. Changes which were proposed but didn't happen, and why: Mission turns Turn cap - these things didn't occur because that would require a new Core, which as of yet isn't installed. Admittingly I was a little late putting this request in to Polix. Keep in mind that the current users of that version are experiencing bugs, so that Core may not be used. Another proposed change: I noticed today that transfer can do two functions, a fact I didn't notice before because I can't check the settings of a core which is inactive. Transfer can also be configured as a way for a player to trade one good for another with an imaginary market. A service could for instance trade greens for turns, or turns for untrained units. The problem is that it seems to only work by a one-to-one ratio. Currently if one of these were installed a player could trade 1,000 greens, which would be useless, for 1,000 turns, which would allow them to attack around the clock for a week. Thus I don't know what to do with it. Ideas would be welcome. Spies/Sentries for untrained could be usefull. Merc for greens would also be a good way to fire mercs, if that were needed now that merc income isn't negative.

At some time each day I'll check the rankings page. The players in the top 10 are awarded tallies: 10 for 1st rank, 9 for 2nd, 8 for 3rd, etc. Additionally, the person with the highest strike, defense, covert, and sentry earn an additional 5 tallies. The total amount of tallies awarded each day is 75, with a personal maximum of 30 to anyone who is the best at all four catagories (and incidentally must be ranked #1 overall). Individual tallies are not counted until the end of the round. For what its worth, individual tallies are not "official". Their purpose in the game is to rank clans and to reward performance throughout the round, as clan performance before the tally system was vague as the measure was the final top 3, two of which usually were people who had banked the whole round and merely popped up on the last day. Clan tally performance is in the "SS RPG Score" pinned topic of evilness. The time tallies are taken varies. This is somewhat intentional as if I announced any time in advance, people would start doing goofy stuff about 5 minutes before the announced time, whereas if it were completely random, players would seek constant performance throughout the day.

You and nobody else.

Oh, I forgot to change the Weasel last night. The problem was I've never attached a strategy to it that couldn't be better accomplished with a Warbird. The Weasel sentry bonus is now a spy bonus. The ship is suited towards the strategy of building a big defense while using sabotage to deal with attackers. No one chose it last round, and only one person chose it this round, and he happens to have a high spy so far so I don't think he'll care.

Moose Master, the final scores are in the pinned topic deceptively !@#$%^&*led "SS RPG Final Scores". Actually last round only had individual scores 'by popular demand'. I don't like individual scores, because they don't encourage teamwork. Suffice to say however that Dav scored WAY more individual tallies than anyone else...

The new round is on.

Final Scores for SS RPG: SSCentral Gods 2758 Winners 1337 Soldiers 2445 Forsaken Commanders 498 Unclaimed tallies: 322 DDM 186 Dungerons and Dregons 119 Here is an ugly chart showing how the round went. Y is daily tallies out of a total of 75 possible per day. X is the day. The chart clearly shows the first-month domination by the 1337 Soldiers, the second month domination by the Gods, and the resetting of the entire 1337 Soldiers clan by day 64. Individual Tally Totals: Dav 1330 JDS 948 Aileron 825 Falcoknight 434 rasta420 425 slicer 314 sound 313 AstroProdigy 285 HoT dOg 283 animol 275 The Real Picard 165 Whal 142 !@#$%^&*onearth 101 Smarties 94 UpC 86 Russky 51 Static Burn 42 attraction 27 Synook 25 gfd 7 Relos 6 Moose Master 1 Commentary: Hmmm...I thought Dav was beyond 1337...turns out I was mistaken by about 8 tallies. I also didn't think I kicked that much !@#$%^&*. Tie that with the fact that Dav wasn't the one destroying everyone's weapons, and I'm now beginning to realise why you people started farming me, massing me, making rude posts, and mailing fruit baskets laced with arsenic to my house. For a dead account who was farmed by everyone, animoL did quite well tally-wise. I also believe that Falco and rasta had gotten into an arguement as to which one of them was more valuable...well Falco was. The "Whatif" tally count. This tally count is not official. It takes the current membership of the clans and is the sum of all of the tallies scored by the current member's of that clan, even if said member was in a different clan at the time. It represents would would had happened if the clans had absolute coordination at the start of the round. These scores are not official, but are shown for several reasons: To quantify the quality of the clans' recruiting ability, to stop some of the "we would have won if..." complaints, and because with the magic of Excel it takes about 3 seconds for me to make this calculation. SSCentral Gods: 2856 1337 Soldiers: 2688 Forsaken Commanders: 344 DDM: 186

This round will end the same as the previous ones. The round will close at 8:00 PM EST and the new one will open at 11:00 PM, after that point a 72 hour period of no attacking will occur. This round however, you won't get turns over that time period, so there won't be such an overabundance of turns early on. A word of warning. We will be upgrading to a new version of the army core, and I don't know what is going to carry over and what isn't. Thus, you may find a second reset occuring within the first couple days.

The sentence for torching the trucks was fair - it's about the same as what you would get for three counts of grand theft auto. Actually the arson sentence is what was messed up - that guy should've gotten 30 years or so. Okay, the judicial system is messed up. So, what's new? Some sentences are way too light, hence the big push to put mandatory sentences on certain crimes. If I recall there was also a rape case where some guy raped a 4-yr old and got a 2-year sentence, or something like that. Those are caused by certain activist judges who need to be fired. These cases however, are not the norm, and are not a valid motivation to give other criminals lighter sentences. As for "squashing the environmentalist movement", such radicals actually damage their cause in more of a degree than any democratic governing body even is even capable. There actions make their fellows look more radical. Sure, that's how every fair-minded level headed rational person deals with others - if they disagree with you, burn their property. We all know that at!@#$%^&*ude is one step away from actually harming others. Eco-terrorists are a force of oppression, just as the white supremacists were (the white supremacists are at most a dying movement, hence why they aren't much of a threat). Eco-terrorists have their opinion and they can't tolerate anyone else having a different opinion.

Back to the topic though, I'll put it this way: There's a reason Ailestan's preferred method of execution is sending the offender on a sabotage mission, the origional humor to that was at the time I couldn't get it to work either.

I do !@#$%^&*ure you that the personal shots stopped right after you stopped reading...erm, mostly. But, the bigger question is: Why do you assign different standards of morality to different people? I mean, by any objective standard one would have to put the deeds the Red Cross has done over the deeds Iran's government has done. To criticise the former while lauding the latter would require two seperate standards of morality to be applied to each of them. It seems that to the former, any charity which incurs operating costs so that 100% of the money can't reach the poor should be condemned, but if Iran can come up with a political excuse for their activities, they should be praised. Iran's government has operating costs, and its leaders make money, so by the standard applied to the charities, Iran is also wrong. Charities usually have a political motivation for their actions, so by the standard applied to Iran, the charities are also right. This is morality by "bowling handicap", where an organization is !@#$%^&*igned a base expected performance which is added or subtracted from their true stance. To take offense when I claimed your thoughts were twisted by hate is dangerous. All humans have capacity for hate, myself certainly included. To deny its possibility is dangerous. I myself must admit that I attacked you personally when you criticised charities, and additionally must recognize that it was slightly hypocritical when the content of my post involved the budget problems !@#$%^&*ociated with the over-defensiveness of emotional causes. Still, the "bowling handicap" morality which you cited smells of evil, probably not from you but rather the individuals who came up with the idea. Under such a morality system, no organization on Earth has motivation to improve, only to perform better than usual whenever in the spotlight, infact having motivation to perform immoral actions whenever they won't be noticed, and thus this method of judgement was probably invented by forces who wish to curtail moral development.

Well, obviously no matter what your method of logic is, you can still make fallicies. In those two cases, the hasty generalization. The error in those two statements is in the generalization fallicy, not the inductive method itself. It is impossible to prove that either method is illogical, because when used properly they both produce valid arguements. I say inductive is stronger because I've seen it used ten times as often.

Sure SeVeR...everyone in the world is evil except you and Iran. Bush is evil. The Federal Reserve is evil. The entire nation of the United States is evil. The Pope is evil. Charities are evil. But Ahmenijad's gonna be the savior of the human race. I won't argue that the Federal Reserve doesn't have more power than it should have, but...go back and read the things you've written. You act like the world's a misrable place that's doomed to blow up in a couple years. Your senses seem to have been twisted by hate so much that you can't tell up from down. I didn't say the war was cheap. I said welfare was worse. However, the biggest factor is general inefficiency. This generally comes from situations which are neither moral nor emotional at which an emotion is !@#$%^&*igned. The first example I can think of this was the famous "Cross of Gold" speech by Bryant, an emotional speech regarding whether or not silver should be used to back currency. The issue was purely economic and financial, and if they had a computer back then, that computer could have determined the correct answer without any regard for morality or emotion. Since then, that's what the government does. When taxes are raised, politicians are "starving the lower classes" while when taxes are lowered they are "giving kickbacks to the wealthy". When discussing insurance, its about poor uninsured children. When the environment is discussed, its about the doom we are inflicting on future generations. Same thing with Health Care, Social Security, energy, or anything regarding safety. All of those issues can be solved empirically, but to do that one would need to consult an expert. But that enters the second part of the emotionalism, because all experts on any subject must either be inept or corrupt because their paycheck is signed by the federal government. Thus, the government doesn't trust its own people to solve problems emprically. And at the end of the day, some blow-hard poltician will simply do what he "feels is right", which works in a lot of issues, but doesn't make good accounting. All in all, here's a list of things which need to be done to balance the budget: 1) The media needs to start targeting politicians who make emotional issues out of empirical ones. Al Gore should not have received a peace prize for "Spreading Awareness of Global Warming." That particular issue should be discussed by geologists, ecologists, meteorologists, or to be more general "scientists", rather than some wanna-be president who can't even count votes without constantly needing recounts. 2) Politicians should be payed more. Yes, that's written correctly. The best government should have the best people running it, and generally the best people are going to do the job that pays them the most. When professional athletes have a higher salary than the president, we have a problem. However, the people we'd like to see in government are business leaders. Donald Trump for instance may be a jerk with what looks like a dead rodent on his head, but the man can balance a budget, and whatever we paid him would get returned thrice over when he gets things running more efficiently. 2b) We need to get rid of most of the lawyers. Too many members of the same profession leads to lack of intellectual diversity. 3) Tarriffs. And SeVeR, quit with the bs about the value of the dollar going down. It's not as important as you are making it out to be and you know it. 4) Where possible, for any certain function of government, there should be two redundant agencies !@#$%^&*igned to that function, placed in direct compe!@#$%^&*ion with each other.

First off, you should use an attachment next time. To answer your question: the difference is in the repair costs. Whenever you see two weapons of equal strength but unequal price, the cheaper one costs 2 points/dmg to repair while the expensive one costs 1 point/dmg. This difference is crucial because with 1 point repair weapons, its cheaper to repair, while 2 point weapons should be replaced. Hmm...I forgot about that. The plan was to divide everything by 1000 next round, but I can't, because the cheapest thing costs 1 point.

If I recall correctly, the biggest chunk of the national debt goes to welfare programs. Generally, the kinds of programs which really help nobody, but would be political suicide to vote against. The most recent near-example was Schips, which I can best describe as "P!@#$%^&* our pork for the children's sake". If Bush wasn't a lame duck, he would have passed the bill and we would have generated another billion or two in debt which no doubt would never have reached any child's hands. Usually that's how it goes. Some bill proposer comes up with a bad idea, cites some heartwarming problem, and then all politicians have to vote for it because if they didn't they'd look like a jerk. Also, people need to realise the government money isn't free. If government money isn't helping !@#$%^&* near everyone, it shouldn't be spent. Let the charities handle the poor. It might also be worth considering putting tarrifs on imports. JDS, you do realise that paper money has to be backed, don't you? The oldskool idea on the subject was that for every dollar the US Mint produces, there is an amount of gold in Fort Knox which that dollar represents. After a while they started including silver and other commodities, and in modern times they started backing it with a lot of goofy things. Still, all money has to be backed by something.