Vorlonagent

The EPA has only itself to blame by exceeding its mandate and overzealously regulating. There's always a backlash. Have it your way. I'll take the hit for being too tired of hearing about what Trump says and how it means the sky is falling to be able to process your specific concerns. Yeah I've seen Bill get in one of those places at times, too. That and some of the eyerolling cutsey stuff his show does with Dennis Miller. I like Miller as a commentator. He's smart and funny and doesn't need stupid cartoons and/or sound effects sharing his screen. I actually don't watch cable so by definition I don't watch Fox News unless I'm visiting my mom who lets it run through the entire run of talking heads while she reads a book. Of course a political party is going to take a victory as a mandate, no matter how slim the margin of victory is. It's how you play the game. Trump doesn't have power to be drunk on. He's just a Prez with an allied congress. I haven't seen Trump arrogantly overreach his limits yet. he hasn't pushed anything on the US yet that the nation has pushed back against hard saying "we do NOT want this!" or bulled ahead anyway. He may do so once he starts pushing the major points of his legislative agenda, but he hasn't started in on that yet. I include Trump's temporary travel ban on refugees or persons from a shortlist of countries. There's plenty of people who don't like it, true. But not anywhere at the levels of dislike we saw for Obamacare when it was in Congress. At this stage, it's just the usual suspects making the expected amount of noise. I don't know who the Commonwealth Fund is or if they have an ideological bias. A quick google-fu suggests they are at least somewhat skewed to the Left. We'll otherwise have to agree to disagree here. I saw no seeking of middle ground during ACA's time in Congress. Sure the D's would have liked a couple of R's to sign on so they could say Obamacare was "bipartisan", but that's about it. I saw no flexibility or willingness to compromise in the Democrats. They didn't need it and wouldn't drop the matter even when they found it hard to keep some of their own in line. And they lost big time because of it. We can pick over things Trump says and be disturbed by them if we want. I don't think you're really concerned about talk. You're concerned that Trump with translate that talk into action. So the focus becomes Trump's current actions, which are a far better measure of his future actions than what he says. At the moment there isn't much action to go on. What little there is, however, suggests that the nightmare scenarios you are concerned about may not be as bad as feared or won't materialize at all. You can drive yourself nuts with possible futures while we wait for more hard data, but all you'll have for it is lost sleep and frayed nerves. And you'll still have to cope with whatever actually happens anyway. You're burning emotional resources now that you'll want later being concerned. I'd say someone is ideologically compromised if their ideology is more important to them instead of things like integrity or professionalism. What's Yates' obligation as acting AG? Seems to me courtesy and professionalism would have Yates keep herself out of the public eye and do her job more or less the way the new AG would until the AG officially takes over. Instead, Yates went out of her way to undermine Trump. By publicly announcing that she would not defend Trump's immigration order, Yates departed "how things are usually done". Yates herself destroyed the traditional courtesies that would have protected her position. Trump just did the obvious thing by ejecting someone he could no longer trust. What am I supposed to think of someone who acted as unprofessionally as Yates did? Her actions look ideologically motivated, so what else is there to say but that she is "ideologically compromised"?

Sarah could have kicked her spell off standing or even sitting by the road.

It's entirely reasonable to think Yates is grandstanding for partisan political reasons. Yates is an Obama appointee. I consider it obvious that Obama's Attorney General appointments were compromised ideologically, but understand others may differ. If Obama politicized the top positions, why not others down through the ranks?

I think they can when they are so ideologically unique only conservative focused news network on cable or broadcast TV) Also Fox is roundly and routinely hated from seemingly all quarters liberal or left. The only reason Fox is so large is *because* they are the only conservative news network interrupting what would otherwise be uniformly liberal-biased news coverage on broadcast and cable. I can go with this. Though my politics are right of center there aren't many of the Fox talking heads I have much respect for. I pretty much like Bill O'Rielly. Sean Hannity and whatever that woman they have on after him, they both are really ideological and really annoying to watch or listen to. I don't remember a government takeover of healthcare ever being popular. Hillary Clinton chaired a healthcare reform committee that ran into the same issues the Democrats did in 2009. Clinton quite reasonably chose not to sail into that storm. I describe the 2009 democrats as drunk with power because they did sail into the storm. They had a filibuster-proof majority of 60 senators (until Ted Kennedy died and was replaced with a Republican) so they didn't have to give a french fried fig about what anybody thought. And once they started down the healthcare reform road they couldn't stop themselves and looked for some way, any way, to push legislation onto the country. As I say, I never heard that 69% of the US favored a government takeover of heathcare (I can believe that 69% wanted "something done") but I do remember that at the point where ACA passed 69% of the US was against it. The Republicans reaped majorities in state government, congress and the got the presidency as a result. I hope you get to see enacted some of the good stuff you want from Trump. I don't see a strawman here. A staple of the Clinton Campaign was to take what Trump said and make it seem like some ominous policy statement. I've heard people repeat these assertions more or less verbatim and more or less continuously claiming the wolf is at the door from before the election through Trump's inauguration. Now that Trump is doing things, the complaints I hear now are at least new ones. Do you have any examples of Trump Executive Orders changing the status quo here? Just today, I thought I saw a newsblurb saying Trump was keeping Obama Admin policy. That's is the problem you have when all you have is an Executive Order. A stroke of a pen changes everything. They who live by the EO, die by it. Blame the Democrats for pushing ACA down the nation's throat and destroying their ability to help or defend the trans population, among other things. At least one Supreme Court case should be moving through the courts. I'd be surprised if there wasn't.

garbage in, garbage out, as the programmer's saying goes...

Certainly lacking "common sense" as would be considered "common" to the majority of people in our culture. Agh, people can get complex... I look at losing touch with common sense as exiting under the umbrella of emotion. I make an emotionally-driven commitment and my intelligence labors overtime to rationalize and justify that commitment, including warping what I consider "normal" or "common sense."

Grace would probably want a lick at the ice cream too... Maybe with maybe without understanding the romantic/sexual connotations of what Tedd is doing. Questions about these people are deflected simply by pleading ignorance and mostly telling the truth. Sarah: "You saw a guy who looks like me? Lucky guy. I don't have any brothers and my cousins don't live in town..." Tedd: "Don't know who you're talking about. I'm an only child and the only cousins I have in town are Nanase Kitsune and her younger sister Akiko."

Aren't cultists usually tied to a cult emotionally? Wouldn't that make intelligence an independent variable?

"Just one more...duty...to perform..."

I wouldn't expect starfleet to follow Scotty's rules verbatim. They'd cut a few corners here and there at least. And before Scotty there was the reports from the manufacturer and military testing before putting the phaser banks into mass production.

We can have murals on flying pieces of walls... We'd probably want to use updated building materials than might be standard for the Nile Delta. Sheetrock is lighter and easier to levitate than a full meter of solid stone backing and does less impact damage on collisions with students...

"God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly."

Then there's Mr. Guy's cousin "This" who works at Gunnerkrigg Court...

If a flying hall monitors are the problem, wouldn't flying murals be the solution?

The best answer I'd say we have is Cranium has never been identified as a "Wizard" and leave it at that. We don't really know if she is or isn't.

Making mistakes is how we learn... I call it "tuition in the School of Life" My last post suggested that the Enterprise's phasers actually performed exceptionally well by any objective standard. You just have to remember that there's a lot of phaser firings going on in the background that we aren't being shown. The typical space battle we see in Classic Trek phasers fire at most 4 or 5 times, often less. The Federation's design spec might even call for 10 or even 20 firings. The Enterprise put its phasers through at least 100 firings if not several hundred, over the course of the episode. It was back-to-back, constant repeated use with little if any time for proper maintenance. Pardon the pun but that's stellar performance.

One of the more common problems with early machine guns was the heat buidup simply from using ammo propelled by combustion. I've read that gun barrels melting was a common issue. While I have no knowledge of the French machine gun of which you speak, I wouldn't be surprised to find it jammed from heat-related distortion of its internal components. Let it cool down, it might be fine again...for a few rounds more. On that note, the Enterprise was putting its phasers through exceptionally heavy use. It's arguable that few if any space battles take hours of constant weapons use, but "hours of constant use" was exactly what the Enterprise was doing with its phasers. When you're pushing a weapons system that far past what it was designed for, failures are inevitable. The performance of the Enterprise's phasers was actually a tour de force in reliability, probably due as much to Scotty's engineering staff and his maintenance practices as how the phasers were built. One expects that Scotty's standards for his staff were probably above and beyond normal StarFleet procedure.

Any politician at the national level, it's a surprise. D or R...

That is Trump's greatest advantage and liability at the same time. If Trump were representative of the Republican Party, we'd be talking about President Clinton now.

I agree. Ed Verres is not a prejudiced man. Tedd needs to tell his dad what's up and get it settled.

I cut Balance of Terror some slack. The 1960s were only 20 years removed from World War 2 where we played out the Destroyer vs. Submarine drama on both fronts. We were the destroyers in the Atlantic and the submarines in the pacific. The whispering on the Romulan ship would make perfect intuitive sense to 1960s viewers, though it doesn't survive any serious scientific scrutiny. It was also Classic Trek's first dive into starship combat of any kind and they made a ton of mistakes even as compared to later combat sequences in the same show.

You know, you're probably right but the comic makes more sense this way...

Not at all. the Spell book simply has an UpdateSpellText(CasterName,Password,SpellName,SpellText,NewSpell) It's straightforward object-oriented programming. Getting a new spell calls UpdateSpellText with appropriate data. A polling scheme is unlikely in any event. In Sister2 we see a spellbook update in real time. Designing a complete function call would be more complex since we'd have to deal with adding/updating spells that contain other spells, such as Fae Punch for Nanase's fairydolls or adding Elliot's Secret ID forms to his Cheerleadra spell. A generalized function would probably have to deal with multiple levels of spell containership (Imagine one of Elliot's Secret ID getting one of more of their own specialized spells) All this raises the possibility of hacking a spellbook or setting up a second independent spellbook connection and downloading a caster's entire catalog of spells. It might not let a Wizard learn them (but it might!) but knowing exactly what magical options an opponent (or even ally) has is extremely useful.

With an idea how the book updates, Tedd might be able to reverse-engineer the rest. What if binding a book to a magic user creates a function fall which updates the book?