costard

Diesel, I think you've highlighted one of the truisms of humans - we have difficulty distancing ourselves from the emotional effect of the subject at hand in an attempt to discuss the subject (and thereby solve the problem) rationally. The legal standpoint and the direction it gives is a neat way of letting the organisers of the event make a choice: defuse the situation (by cancelling the event - a non-rational approach as far as the subject is concerned: the whole class is punished for the inability of those responsible to arrive at a rational solution) or take a rational approach: Yankee Dog's suggestion. Getting people to behave rationally in a circumstance where they are normally irrational demands social process skills of the highest order: the debate mustn't be allowed to be derailed (with fearmongering or appeals to an irrational text on behavioural conformity) and has to be managed with extreme care. The solution to be arrived at should be a fair one or it will be widely condemned, a judgement on the leadership ability of the people involved. As far as the age/gender choice of the prom participants is concerned: when you're talking about sex, there is no more conservative group than young adults. Their exposure to the debate may be broader than that of an older generation, but their personal experience of the subject is far more limited and their ability to rationalise is therefore extremely limited. So, you get powerful emotions in play on both sides; having their leadership similarly handicapped (through the promulgation of social norms designed to bring about a political result - usually a "divide and conquer" approach) doesn't help. As it is, the class as a whole has been punished in a most unfair manner, and as a result, they have turned on the the person they see as the one to blame: a person who has elected to push the boundaries of her immediate society with a display of courage - a refusal to lie about or hide her sexuality. In this fashion, your society destroys its young leaders and maintains the status quo. Anybody with the brains to analyse the result gets out and you're left with a society that has to find it's leaders from a pool of compliant mediocrity.

Tell her that ignorance is a reason, not an excuse, for her incorrect call on your writing. She's just plain wrong.

re: the Vitamin D stuff (good read by the way DT, thanks) - it occurs to me that people getting out in the sun and manufacturing more Vitamin D are also getting more exercise, something which is already proved to have much the same benefits for many of the same diseases.

Sweet! Membership hath its privileges - you scabrous, festering, ill-used denizens of the lesser Houses. And Joe, whilst it may not be your fault ('though whose might it be?), it's still your responsibility. Pah, you're as worthy as Emrys. Still three days of my five-day weekend to go - suffer in your jocks, merkins.

And you've lost two thirds of a platoon trying to get across a river, so far. I gloat! hear me.. tra-la-la-itu! rune, house shaw has defaulted me a great win through being too feckless to rise to a challenge. [The legitimacy of the challenge is in the detail of whether or not a house rune exists, or nay. I await the Justicar's ruling with bated breath.] Verily I say unto you, it was a worthy challenge, and callously and rudely ignored. [More truth be told, Shaw was asleep, again. And his minions lack the, um, balls to lie down and take their kicking.] So promote me before you kick off for good and leave me orphaned, you heartful bastard. Better yet, you up for a game?

.. percentage gain in armour penetration or percentage gain in survivability? I thought the arnour was the same (I'm well prepared to be wrong on that). If it's survivability then the AI is programmed wrong - it should take out the greater threat (as you have with the manual target). Of course, if the Firefly is at greater range, then you (and the AI) have a differential equation to solve...

Because - and the mongrel character limit strikes again. I hatehatehatehatehate the ****ing simplistic ruleset which says that something worth saying needs to made up of ten characters or more, it totally changes the meaning of the post to have to explain why. Sucks be to you, denied of the pearl of brevity.

Maybe tweak the Sherman VC - 60/30/10? With, say, 50 rounds max ammo, that's 35/10/5 going to 30/15/5 rounds apiece. Maybe better balance for an AT gun when you have the vanilla Shermans carrying HE for you? I'd be happier if the dedicated AT tanks carried 40-50% HE loadout, too. It seems to me to be a waste of APDS and AP rounds if your average tank survives 50% of an armoured encounter.

Thanks for the link dieselT. It has it all - coercive contracts, aggressive and unwelcome invasion, life changing penalties for daring to stand up for yourself. Rule by corporate police. Probably a good idea to put extra fire extinguishers around the uni campuses.

Not to mention the increased chance of a cardiac arrest or being squashed by a bus.

I'd rate it a six - good brio, but lacking in the specific moist timbre.

I hope you counted the spoons.

Well, if you click on Melbourne you get the Hun, a right wing rag. No paper worth reading in the Australian selection.

I'd recommend nair for your fuzzy date, Diesel.

Long term interests (like rule of law) holding the short termers to lawful behaviour. Not easy to do when your police force has a long standing and popularly accepted culture of lawbreaking. Even harder when the laws are re-written to legalise socially destructive behaviour (witness the banking law changes of 1997 in the US). It's hard to strike the balance between stability (which a one or two party system tends to give) and progression: regular parliamentary terms and polls at least give some sort of chance for the populace to choose their leaders. I guess we'll have to wait to see how Ukraine's democratically elected government tackles corruption: there is no doubt that a modern economy cannot compete on terms where it's business owners are subject to theft by police or other organs of the state. Your tax base disappears right quick and your army ends up having to do the job of the police - and the politicians. It's just people being people - there have only been about 100 generations of humans since Christ's birth so it's no wonder we still haven't got it right. We don't look like getting it right anytime soon, either.

Yep, this is what happened. The exchanges were mostly set up in the centre of towns that the Germans were bombing in order to disrupt French supply. Quite a few were deliberately targeted by units of the German Army behind enemy lines. Once the blitzkrieg had gained momentum the French High Command coudn't keep abreast of the day to day developments and its decision making (and morale) suffered accordingly. German command units were using the Enigma coding machine early on in the war - I don't think it was broken until '42? so orders weren't being broadcast in the clear. And the naval variant (which used an extra coding rotor) wasn't broken until a US lieutenant managed to grab a key from a sinking submarine in the Atlantic - in '43? sorry 'bout the fuzzy dates.

Uh-oh, schism. I blame Emrys, plus the moderator for not strangling the bastard offspring he created. Chris, hi to your dad and hope he's feeling better soon.

The Vogons didn't have it on you for prose, that's for sure Michael. Feckless - now there's an adjective that has come into it's own. No takers from the House of Pshaw (happy thought, perhaps they're all dead?). I win by default. Rune, promote me: I need the title for my CV.

I think its the English nobility that have a problem with English kings. They know the breed too well.

Water, being a liquid, has no crystalline structure. Ice does. Drawing a correlation between the presence of music and the formation of crystals is an exercise for the faint of mind and the extremely gullible. Still, that is a largish number of people.

Or, to paraphrase: (he wishes he'd written that, poor festering pool)

Max range of the Mk19 1500m. I've found it useful at 1200m suppressing trenches and rooftops. Hull down works better at this range against standard red AT. I'd like to see an area fire from the Mk19 be described in the same way as a linear pattern in a mortar mission - suppress a trench line instead of one spot on the trench. Of course, you usually have more than one AAV, and something like a literal ton of ammo fully loaded (plus infantry gear..)

Oh woe is Bugged. Probably not, you festering pool of smug correctedness.

John. it's far more likely that the positive aura of the farmer, having a good time playing/listening to music instead of ... I dunno, getting drunk or fighting with auntie sam. Sure, the music has its effect, but it is secondary to the enhanced brainwave patterns of the happy, productive, music playing farmer. Too bad he lives in earthquake country.

Communications plays a great part: in Normandy, the German lines of supply were being smashed and they had fewer reserves to put in place against an Allied army whose supply line was largely uninterrupted. In 1940, the French army was reliant on a telephone system (the German Army was using radios to a far greater extent) and an organisational structure that required the higher level commanders in the field receive their orders from Paris. Several French counterattacks were planned, but by the time the intelligence from the front had reached Paris, the plans made and the orders sent back out (days later) the circumstances had changed and the plans were of no use.