HarJIT

Have you tested speed between your computer and your wife's, just in your home network over wifi?
That speed is an absolute upper limit on the speed at which you can get anywhere else. (Assuming your wife's computer isn't so lame that it can't run its network connection at full wifi speed.)

The Moderator: It does not. There is no rule against expressing concern about how policies may potentially affect one's life.

It really depends on whom is in charge. If it is a ham-handed control freak, the harsh method might be the default setting. On the other hand, a more intelligent leader will weigh options more carefully first.

It works perfectly as far as I can tell. It is not about change blindness. The joke is that someone is bound to notice something strange... and yes, they have. Many times before.

Spoony is struggling with personal problems and he will either cope with them or not. I personally believe in giving him space. 2016 was a horrible year and 2017 hasn't been much of an improvement so far. I am perfectly willing to wait for better times to show for him and the rest of us.

Nowadays we could put a smartphone - with the possible exception of a battery to last all day - in a wristwatch.
But imagine typing on that on-screen keyboard...

Fruit is intended to be eaten - in hopes that you (or some animal) will swallow the seeds and deposit them somewhere else in a nice lump of fertilizer.
This even extends to hard-to-eat fruits like ghost peppers. (Yes, botanically they are fruit. So are tomatoes, and several other things that are culinary vegetables.) The catch there is that the seeds will rarely survive the typical mammalian herbivore's teeth and digestive system, so US eating them is not good for the plant's genome. They can pass through a bird's beak and digestive system with a rather high survival rate, though... and birds don't have the receptors to notice capsicum.

Exactly. The reason Hornbills are monogamous can be described as a kind of Nature's version of M.A.D. Mutually Assured Destruction. Basically for those of you unaware of them. Hornbill are a type of bird. The female will nest in a tree hollow, which the male will wall shut with mud. The exception being a narrow slit that he delivers food through and she drops waste out off. This serves to both protect her, and the young until they are developed enough to leave the nest, but it also means that she is quite literally incapable of seeing anyone else. In the meantime the male spends so much time and energy in order to feed them that he is literally incapable of spending energy on another mate.

"Character is what you are in the dark."  
Elliot has been dividing her life for the past year(?) between sleeping as a woman and waking as a man.  When she sleeps she communes with the koan of her dreams, and paints the walls of her subconscious with a landscape that is shifting, over time, from what it was when he was only him.
The pm has dropped into her waking mind like a stone in a pond, and the ripples continue to draw her thoughts deeper.  She does not swim these depths with ease, it is closer to  a struggle for her to move here.  The effort of it renders her supine, and then takes half her breath as she drops to a whisper while speaking a truth to herself about who she is become.  It is a revelation, a truth not anticipated, and it advances on her like a great wave.  
This is why her main expression is worry shading into fear.   She does not fear judgement - her blood family is accepting to the point of indifference, her friends are literally every color of the rainbow, and her girlfriend actually really digs her difference.  This is  about identity, and that very uncomfortable sensation as you discover that its not at all simple.

I do not believe that torture works as an information gathering technique. Once again setting aside the ethics of it (something I only do with the utmost reluctance) it is simply too unreliable. Granting that history shows examples of occasions where it has 'worked', I feel unconvinced that it includes a full sample of the occasions where the 'information' obtained has been incomplete, misleading or even wrong. For example, who cares if the 'fellow conspirators' torture victims have named were actually in the conspiracy or were just desperate attempts to buy time free of pain. Certainly not the Gestapo or the KGB, the terror effect of mass arrests would be the same regardless of the actual guilt/complicity of those arrested.
And given that accurate information exists, that can be used to speed ordinary interrogation, too. And do not underestimate the techniques available to professional interrogators, be they gentle or rougher. As to the time expended, well, the whole point of that POS 24 is to insert an artificial time limit that 'justifies' the torture. For example, I would like to know how many nuclear detonations in our world could have been prevented if torture had been employed rather than ordinary interrogation. I did read an article written by a professional interrogator in the US Army who mentioned the 'deficit' you hinted at above. He had been working with a youth who had given him some decent info, but then the youth was sent to 'special interrogation.' When he returned from it and the interrogator resumed work, he had clammed up. Totally. He no longer cooperated in any way or form. The interrogator could not prove anything but was morally certain that his subject had undergone torture in the 'special interrogation' unit.
As for the brilliant interrogation technique you mentioned above, many forms of it still exist and are used frequently. For example, family members sympathetic to the cause of the interrogators are sent to visit the subjects where they are held. Authority figures respected by the subjects work very well, too, particularly priests of their faith. Much depends on the subjects themselves. Conscripts are wonderful subjects. Often they will resent having been forced to fight and a little kindness and promise of safety and preferential treatment will have them chattering endlessly in no time.
Lastly and important to me is the fact that as soon as one employs torture one has immediately and completely ceded the moral high ground. There are many beliefs and ways of living in this world I am utterly inimical to. I do not wish to resist them by becoming them.

The correct reply is "I do and therefore I'm not a vegan"
Human is not able to survive without eating other lifeforms or at least parts of them. Arguably least "violent" food is milk and eggs (unfertilized of course), despite many vegans not eating it.
Even just recognizing that animal is expressing desire against something is not so easy. Starting with the relatively common knowledge that cats and dogs have almost opposite body languages ...

Context for anyone who needs it.
 

Except that Elliot's last line implies that Noah was shirtless at the time.

By everything lawful good, it would be at that.

I partially agree. But entertainment can and often does spread misinformation unintentionally. It usually does so by reinforcing existing stereotypes and occasionally so through a complete lack of understanding of complex subjects. More, entertainment may also be used for the active dissemination of propaganda. As an example, the Nazis would use it quite cleverly. Many German artists and film makers in the thirties did not like to portray Nazi ideology. Instead of persecuting them for their reluctance they were encouraged to make romantic movies or tales from happier times. Thus they could tell themselves that they were not actually supporting Nazism, but they were in this way sending the message that things weren't really so bad and that the world was going on as normally. And of course this was exactly what the Nazis wanted them to do.
It may also be done more directly. As a more modern example, the execrable series 24 has done much to normalise torture in the public mind. The 'heroic' protagonist, in order to prevent some dire disaster like a nuclear device about to detonate, is 'forced' to employ torture in order to extract needed information from the villains. And somehow the magically unflawed information the 'hero' gains always allows him to save the day. All of this is, of course, utter hogwash.
Firstly, real world intelligence does not run like a bad Hollywood script. While time is important and often critical, it is rare indeed that any agent is faced with a ticking 24-hour clock and knows exactly when it is too late. Next and just as important, torture does not work as it does in Hollywood scripts, either. In fact, quite apart from being ethically and morally bankrupt, its primary issue is that it does not work at all. Torture victims tell their torturers what they think they want to hear, not the truth. Worse yet, while it is indeed true that anyone will eventually break under torture, a determined enemy can thwart their torturers by initially 'confessing' to clouds of misinformation. When they finally break, even if they do tell the truth at the time -- as said, even someone broken will not necessarily say the truth but only what they think the torturers want to hear -- it will be buried in everything else the victim has said till then. And if the torture continues, well, the truth didn't work, the victim will then try something else again to make the pain stop.
Professional interrogators, on the other hand, can get enormous amounts of information and cooperation out of their subjects. Very often without the subject even realising how much it is giving away. They also scorn torture as counterproductive.
More positively, entertainment may also be used to educate or provoke thought, and while it is all but impossible to do so in a truly apolitical way it can at the very least attempt to do so in a detached or bipartisan manner that does not sermonise or harp on a message. For example, I recently saw a children's cartoon that sent a quiet message about the importance of gun safety. Note: not gun control, gun safety. I personally live in a country where firearms are carefully controlled and am quite happy with that state of affairs. Nonetheless, from my time in the Army and the Home Guard I am also a firm believer in being careful with the durn things. I have on the internet at times exchanged opinions with NRA members or even ordinary people who very strongly believe in the right to bear arms. Disagree as we might on that, I have yet to meet any owner of a firearm that did not fully agree with me on the absolute necessity of being careful with an instrument that, when all is said and done, is intended to kill your fellow beings.
If that cartoon managed to make at least some children stop and think about the fact that guns aren't actually toys it may have saved lives. And that is no bad thing.

Indeed. And had he commented on that in a more reasonable manner than the melodramatic and sanctimonious form 'putting plot development on hiatus' I might have taken less issue or no issue at all. As it is, he reminded me of a past poster who went into long tirades about a sequence he called the 'Trapped in the Basement' storyline where he lamented how everything took place in Tedd's basement and the story never left it.
Said sequence was a total of thirteen pages long. Eleven if you count two pages in the middle of it that skipped elsewhere.

There once was this Danish TV show that made a truly horrible attempt at deconstructing Oedipus Rex in a science fiction setting as, I swear to God, an opera. The prophet was replaced with a supercomputer and the King was a dictator. Interestingly, while the chosen method was rather painful to watch, the actors themselves did an excellent job and the story itself was well crafted. In brief: the King was told that his son would kill him but refused to have him put to death as the computer recommended. Instead he had him anonymously adopted into a privileged family. What made the story so interesting was that the King persistently refused to believe in the prophecy and every time the supercomputer made a recommendation he refused to follow it. However, the resulting policies nonetheless made life harder for the population and his son eventually became a revolutionary who led a resistance against his father. Finally there was a confrontation between him and the dictator where the embittered ruler confessed to all he had done and why. His son then asked if the computer had also foretold that he would die at his hands, and his father shouted, "Yes! That was why I did all this!" And then, finally understanding, the son stepped back from the precipice. He asked his father if he would resign, and his father agreed. The two of them embraced, the son refused to succeed his father, and the resistance began the painful return to democracy. The supercomputer, its prophecy thwarted by the human variable, went into an endless loop and ceased to be a menace, or at least ceased being annoying.
It's odd. I hated the singing and the music, but the rest of the story I rather liked. As a deconstruction it worked very well and its message was basically that prophecies, self-fulfilling or otherwise, may be thwarted by refusal to surrender one's free will. A rather hopeful ending for a dystopic story, really, and since most pretentious Danish taurine ordure has unhappy endings imposed by mandate, that gave it another plus point in my book.

The Moderator: I am reopening the thread in part because I feel better able to handle it and in part because I feel it provides an important and needed outlet for the posters here. As always, I request of posters to be extra careful in respecting the forum posting rules when posting here. Thank you.
~tOH.

Given that some people commit suicide out of despair that they can not physically match their subjective sex, I would imagine that it would lead to an incredible degree of envy to find out about a person who can apparently alter their biological sex at will. Thoughts of "How can/Why can't I have that too?" would be strong.

I know Dan doesn't read this forum, and I'm only one voice among many, but I'm saying this here anyway...
I'm currently regularly reading about 80 webcomics, and among them are maybe three I'd read for the graphic art. EGS is not one of those few. I'm here for the story and the characters. One of Dan's characters cosplaying as some other character will rarely interest me more than a blank page would. If his sketches and pinups don't reflect on his characters or story, then I'd actually prefer he not take the time to post them. (And I know how little of his time that should take.)
Feel free to disagree. It's largely a matter of taste, and people have different tastes.
 

It really makes me shake my head when stories and film have characters that are told prophecies that they will be killed by their child or by someone from a village or something, so they go out of their way to do anything they can to prevent it, but it's the act of doing so that causes the prophecy to be fulfilled. It makes me wonder is said "prophecies" are more like a test. Give a king or emperor a prophecy, see how they react, a good king may ignore it, or takes steps so that people don't have a reason to kill him, a bad king would go on a witch hunt and try to use fear to make people think twice about going against. Maybe the "prophecies" are fabricated by people who wish to manipulate the king, get him to act in ways that would benefit them, or provoke a war with another king.

Oedipus gets a bum rap.
He was separated from his parents at a very early age (due to a prophecy that he would kill his father the king), so he didn't know his biological mother and father.
Years later some stranger attacked him on the road for no apparent reason, and he successfully defended himself from the murderous stranger.
Continuing on his journey, he arrived at a city in crisis. In addition to said crisis, its king was missing and presumed dead, and had no heirs. He resolved the crisis and in exchange was offered the throne if he would marry the prior king's widow - whom he had never met before. He accepted the deal.
Later he found out that the stranger who had attacked him was his father and the widow he had married was his mother. Which he got more than a bit upset about.

There are cultures where it is quite common to greet close friends by kissing them on the cheek, or even both cheeks. I would be a little startled to learn that every single person in these cultures proved to be homosexual.

As an Italian-American all I can say is that may heritage would be a lot poorer without the Tomato. Which for those of you who do not know came from the America's