Vorlonagent

china, the carp in the air's so thick you could probably watch an eclipse safely with no eye protection. That's not true anymore in the US, I don't think even in LA.

Agreed again, but if she were in a similar place as Sarah where she was using the spell a lot, she would probably progress at a faster pace just as Sarah has.

Prof...stop that! You're supposed to be getting better. It sez so right here in the script!

At first I think I'd agree with you. But over time, I'd think she'd be tempted to experiment with touch. First casual contact and then more intimate touch.

China isn't doing anything for Paris that they weren't going to do anyway. Their emission targets are where their build projects are already going to put them anyway. So any voluntary effort the US puts into emission control by definition beats the no-effort china is putting forth. It also artificially helps China's numbers that they are far worse polluters and carbon-emitters than the US. We've gone after most of the low-hanging fruit that China still needs to work on.

I am not a fan of the US unnecessarily further hobbling its economy in order to set a good example, so pulling out of the Paris Agreement makes sense. Same reason why I was happy to see GW Bush pull the US out of Kyoto. The US example continues to be reducing emissions without being hamstrung by treaty. That seems a reasonable example to follow. If we're looking for bad examples, Paris pretty much lets China and India do whatever they want. They get gold stars just for showing up. The US will make more emission reductions outside the Paris framework than either China or India will make inside it.

It wasn't there again today I wish, I wish it'd go away.

Another case where personal growth and maturity have gotten in the way of a good time.

Details, details... That narrow timeframe where Ellen could have accidentally fired off her courageous transformation via buildup, Pandora would have been of the mind to encourage her. And not to reduce the buildup either.

...but it would do a great job at depleting the magic buildup.

Point taken.

She was definitely supposed to recover from magic buildups sooner. It stands to reason that she'd get spells easier, but that's technically not in canon. Usage is all that's been put in the comic. One wonders how many new spells Nanase may have gotten. One can imagine her using her clothing replacement spell a lot.

For Ellen to get so many spells she must have done a lot of play with her beams. Probably with Nanase...

The image in my head is Rich freezes standing straight up, and the slide follows.

Makes sense. It just occurred to me that Rich has one more reason to be shocked. His pants and underwear just slid off him. That shirt is likely all he's wearing north of his socks. It's looking to me like Larry's hips are wider as a girl so his pants might be even be tight.

Rich is simply a bigger guy and he's overweight. FV5ed, He's still apple-faced but his cheek line changed from jowl to cheekbone. Larry's hairstyle and glasses are very distinctive. I don't know if he's androgynous so much as just lean-faced in both forms so there's minimal difference. I like how Nanase is setting them up with the distraction. And Ellen is 2x FV5 just to give us FV5 effects on an already female body.

...nit to mention the freeloaders are by evolution, the most adept at threading the bureaucracy.

I think something similar when I hear the name "Thomas the Tank Engine"

Those darn space wizards... "Yogurt! I HATE Yogurt!"

But without some kind of reinforcement the trope loses ground to normalcy. The needle doesn't move permanently. There are definite skill overlaps. A skilled torturer like a skilled interrogator, needs to be very good at reading people under duress. A skilled interrogator also needs to be a good reader of people not under duress. Transmission would be limited by the Rebel flagship's ability to receive, not the Library dish's ability to send....Probably. The library's function is to act as a repository for data. It's possible that the library has lousy transmission speed but can simultaneously process 145,352 such connections at once. Need a faster connection? use multiple channels. The size of real-world dish antennae also lend the ability to discern and resolve fainter signals. So perhaps the dish size is related to the volume of space the library serves. If we assume that the flagship is the limiting end and it can transmit as fast as it could receive, the question is finding a relay point with as much bandwidth as the flagship. We start getting into aspects of Star Wars technology that there's no hard continuity for. How large was the Flagship's data reception/transmission hardware? Just because the ship is large doesn't mean the comms equipment must be. Could Leia's ship house comparable hardware? We don't know. Complicating the whole question is the fact that we're talking about a fantasy universe with technological trappings, not a sci-fi universe. Logic is only applied topically.

On US disks and tapes a FBI warning comes very first thing when the disk spins upB before main title, before ads for other movies or disks, before the logo animations for all the production companies. First. Thing. That too but what I meant is that roughing up leia's ship would create too many protests in the Senate, weakining the Empire's hold more than bringing in a Rebel spy would strengthen it. It's still politics though. Maybe. The only way would be if I could hack C3P) and put the files on his drive without him knowing with a little program that would pop up and tell him if the need arose. He'd sell the Rebellion out without even intending to, just by blurting the wrong thing out at the wrong time. There's really no time. Leia doesn't know her cover has been blown until after she'd been boarded and even then she's still trying to maintain the fiction that the Empire attacked and boarded a diplomatic vessel. I seem to remember something...

Yeah. It's gotten worse and it has escalated through following election cycles. I'd say more but that would be fore the politics thread. Autocratic regimes also tend to choose leaders for loyalty rather than ability, often relying on family ties. (Some NSFW language) I'm the sure the Rebels would have been stopped by that opening "FBI Warning" screen you can't FF past... (which come to think of it you may not see in European region disks or tapes, but probably see something similar) I think we saw an effective cover finally failing. I think the Empire suspected Leia, but she was too politically delicate to touch. Remember Leia's quote "the more you tighten your grip, the more systems slip through your fingers". I'm petty sure she also said the Senate wouldn't stand for her ship being stopped and boarded. That all says the Empire still needed the voluntary cooperation of planetary governments to rule. They were likely looking for a reason to arrest her that would pass muster and hadn't found anything that would justify the risk of actually moving against her. They couldn't just park a star destroyer on her for fun or come down on her like the mafia the way they did Lando in "Empire Strikes back". Believing she had the stolen Death Star plans would change that calculus. maybe Jawas have horrible wifi... And to be honest if I were R2D2, I'm not sure *I'd* trust C3PO with a copy of the plans. K2SO4, on the other hand, I'd copy plans over to without a clock-cycle's hesitation. I'm not sure R2D2 could have trusted any of the other droids in the Jawa sandcrawler either. Once R2D2 left Leia's ship, his decisions to keep the plans to himself seems reasonable even if there are valid second-guesses you can make.. Restraining bolts might also make copying to anyone difficult without the Jawas knowing or impossible without having to ask them. Nor would I hand out copies of the plans to every rebel. Not even close. Just playing the odds, some are going to get caught and some of them are going to break under torture and that creates a data trail pointing back at you. (Until the star destroyer is in your rearview mirror, maintaining cover would continue to be important) You do, however, transmit to a small number of reliable couriers to get the plans moving by different routes.

There is also the question of opportunity. The US entertainment Industry culture has a definite opinion on the matters politic and that can put a thumb on the scales for or against certain perspectives getting screen time. I tend to think that any propaganda value 24 had was not lasting without reinforcement from other venues. It may have had an effect, but it was very likely a self-correcting one. It only occurred to me this morning that I might be reflecting some kind of selection bias. The world could use torture because the world's always used torture, not necessarily because it's even the best tool for the job but because it's what we've always done.."A foolish consistence is the hobgoblin of tiny minds" and all that. An episode of Mythbusters attempted to determine if Chinese water torture was effective. It was scary effective at least on someone not trained to deal with it. A well-timed tractor beam would have aborted the entire trilogy. It would have been foolish to open fire on an uninhabited escape pod. If someone had, for example, tossed the plans in the pod and hit the launch button, you want those plans so you know you have actually found them. So you don't just let the pod go. But the last thing you want to do is blow it up. even an inhabited one. Whoever is running from the empire, you want them alive. Lucas can be excused for not thinking in terms of electronic documents which could be copied any number of times. The 70s thought in terms of paper documents so there was only one copy of the plans to find. Rogue One on the other hand can be faulted. SPOILERS FOR ROGUE ONE! It's very dramatic to have Princess Leia's ship depart the fast-disappearing Rebel flagship but in reality the flagship should have rebroadcast the plans the moment It had the chance. One set of plans = single point of failure. I was annoyed that they chose to have Leia's ship speeding away from the doomed known-Rebel ship. It's probably more dramatic that way, but there would be no way it could expect to maintain its cover as a diplomatic vessel as Leia maintained in Ep 4 when it is observed leaving the scene. She should have been close but safely away from the action, receiving the plans and running before the ship was detected beyond the sensor blip when it went to lightspeed. For Vader to find her ship that fast after the Rogue One raid, Leia had to be under suspicion for some time. As with the Rebel flagship, once Leia's ship was outside Imperial detection, its first job would be to create alternate routes for delivering the plans to the Rebel leadership.

Not even the fittest. Those who have the most effective strategies for getting laid by their own kind.

A one-off is just that: A one-off. Sight-unseen I don't think 24 would make a deep or lasting change in most people's psyches just of itself. TV can be a powerful mind-changing tool, but it has to be used in a certain way to be powerful. It's reasonable to be concerned but I think also reasonable to feel reassured if 24 is not fitting a larger pattern of propaganda. I'd class Torture as an expedient and agree that the dice roll with different modifiers for each that are case by case. I think history bears out the expedient aspect but I'll also concede that both historically and by distribution across the planet today, governments who feel compelled to give a damn about the people they govern are few and far between. Maybe we haven't given interrogators their due. I can roll with this. Agreed. I have no condemnation for US intelligence or the FBI. And there were other factors. Following the 60s, the US had installed a legal firewall that kept foreign intelligence agencies like the CIA and NSA from operating on US soil or sharing information with domestic law enforcement like the FBI. 9/11 took place after a very divisive election with the presidency changing parties and the new guy attempting to set up shop against the backdrop of a recession-slumped economy. The executive branch was both still struggling to get moving and was very distracted.