Dr Brain

Yeah, but it's hard to enforce. I check for it when I'm online, but I'm not sure if any of the other mods do.

I'm always annoyed by them, and more often than not I just leave the page. Statistics aren't important enough to drive players away over.

Why do the three approved ones have improper grammar (first missing a period, second has an ellipsis before the question mark, third has the ellipsis and no question mark)? Also why do you say Play SubSpace and link to getcontinuum? Why not say Play Continuum? Call me OCD, but advertising should be held to a higher than average standard.

That's because cron isn't the way to go. You want something more along the lines of run-asss.

It's like balancing a broom on your palm. No one's saying that it can't be done, but you've got everything working against you, and the slightest hiccup will cause the whole plan to fail.

If oil were to "run out" (something that seems geologically unlikely), then the supply would slowly decrease to zero as oil became harder to find (there would be no sudden jump). Since demand is presumably staying constant, there would come a point where the supply of oil based energy drops enough to make alternate energy viable enough to bridge the gap. There would never be a point where it's unprofitable, since there's no such thing (at the high level) in a free market. It would be the difference between existing and not existing. Shale oil, for example, is unprofitable to extract given the current price of oil. If supply were to drop, then the price difference would make it profitable at a certain point. This point would be before the oil ran out, for *any* viable energy system. You might argue that the price jump is worse than the government deciding, but that research money has to come out as taxes, and even a perfectly allocated taxation system (which the US federal government does not approach) introduces deadweight inefficiency: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tax#Deadweight_costs_of_taxation Industry is perfectly capable of doing research and development. There's risk in any R&D, but there's also reward. These risks and rewards are figured into the prices of goods sold by the companies. And you'd better believe people betting with their own money will make better choices than people betting with taxpayer money.

I can't think of any, besides war, I mean. Perfect example. Global warming has been debunked so many times, yet why are we still funding efforts to "stop" it? Also, most companies aren't as short sighted as you make out. Supply and demand will would make those energy technologies profitable far before any shortage of oil. It could also produce technologies that weren't imagined by the politicians. Not that there is a shortage of oil, mind you. The shortage is the product of the government ban on all things oil.

Fixed. It was a weird error. I had to remove all of the .db files. Scores are reset, and same with settings that use persist. ?Killmessages, for example.

Is the money taken from me not going into those things (and going in badly)? Is the government not regulating and subsidizing them? Is there any reason for me to pay for that? No. I understand how the progressive income tax works. Increased income is the way to get from poor to middle class, it isn't the way to get from middle class to rich. I also understand that taxes are going up, that inflation from government spending is a hidden tax (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflation_tax), and that more and more things are becoming taxed. I don't believe that it can continue at its current level indefinitely, and I certainly don't believe that it can continue going up. I think I'm more in danger of going from middle class to poor under the current situation. Once China stops buying our debt, I certainly will be.

I don't cede the point about roads, since there are plenty of workable alternatives (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-market_roads), but lets talk about the things that individuals *would* do (better), like energy, health care, insurance, investing, manufacturing, agriculture, and of course charity work. Why do I have to pay for people I've never met to make bad decisions and waste my money? I can think of nothing that isn't done better by private industry. Contrarily, I can think of nothing that a government does better than a free market would. Of course they are destroying my future. How could they not? I'm a highly skilled, educated, motivated individual in the prime of my life, yet I have no way to advance my station, since I'll be taxed right back to where I am because other people are envious. All I ask is freedom. I don't expect anyone else to pay for my mistakes, but I expect to not be forced pay for other's mistakes. When I want to help others, I can give to charity. I don't need someone taking my money and giving twenty cents on the dollar ($0.21 output for every $1.00 input was the last stat I heard on welfare). My question is why? Why do you feel the need to tax me?

Fixed the original post for you, spidernl. I bought nothing.

"This idea -- that government was beholden to the people, that it had no other source of power -- is still the newest, most unique idea in all the long history of man's relation to man. This is the issue of this election: Whether we believe in our capacity for self-government or whether we abandon the American Revolution and confess that a little intellectual elite in a far-distant capital can plan our lives for us better than we can plan them ourselves." -- Regan, 1964 Who among you believes that the tax money taken from you is better spent by the government than by yourself? Who among is so evil that you would steal my freedoms, take my livelihood, and destroy my future, and the future of my children to benefit yourself?

"Imagine the gall of these people, trying to make money? That's simply un-American." Shouldn't you direct your ire toward the legislators? They're the ones that added the loopholes (intentionally or not), and they're the ones that could correct it (by reworking the system to make sense, or closing it and causing economic chaos).

There's no reason it has to be hosted by HS. Anyone can run their own bot for this. There will always be the risk of losing money to a user made bot, but there's also the risk of losing money to the zone.

There are some engines that might work for SS, but I don't think the Source Engine is a good choice. It might make getting to 60% easier, but that last 40% will be a nightmare for a SS style game.

That'd be like using the SS engine for tetris. Whether or not it's possible doesn't matter; it's not a good idea.

That's what you get in a market with high barriers to entry. Crazy companies that don't care.

You mean 7 PM, of course.

"Can't download zones", "Zone list empty", "Directory servers broken?"

It's pretty clear, Ori. You show up on Saturday in TW, and they hold a big event in your honor.

Of course I realize that. However, I refuse to have a debate using antiquated terminology. Might as well debate using the terms Torrys and Whigs. If you want to rip on southern secessionists, that's fine, but don't call them conservatives and don't pretend they share any commonalities with modern conservatives (since they don't). Also, minor note: prohibitionists weren't conservatives by Bak's definition, they were liberals. The anti-prohibitionists were the "conservatives" (please note the quotes, I don't make Bak's mistake of thinking they have anything to do with modern conservatives). Also, loyalists weren't strictly conservatives, since they supported the changing policies of the Empire, while the rest of the colonists rejected the changing policies (the tea tax springs to mind). Of course the topics aren't cut and dry, but that's my whole point. Antiquated terminology has no bearing on modern debates.

I am a conservative and, like all conservatives, I want huge sweeping changes in the *current* the US political system. By that narrow definition of conservatism (supporting the status quo) that would be contradictory.

You can't be taken seriously when you make up definitions for words. Conservative is not the same as supporting the status-quo. If you believe that, then you've missed the entire point of conservatism. I'd never make the mistake of thinking liberalism is about changing things for change's sake. Please show the same courtesy.

I rarely clean mine because it rarely needs it.

Those countries all achieved a high standard of living and then moved toward socialism. Not the other way around. To quote someone else: "No nation has ever taxed itself into prosperity". I also disagree with several of the generalizations in that picture. I don't think it reflects the views of any single individual I've met. Perhaps if you average the views you might get something like that. But as any statistician will tell you, that can be highly misleading.