Drachefly

Yeah, there's a long, long history of accusations being leveled against Senator Clinton, thorough investigations being conducted, often by her opposition, and them turning up nothing, yet the accusations get a hundred times the media coverage as the exonerations get.  If she were really as crooked as Trump claims, you'd think they'd have been able to prove at least one crime by now.

All presidents push up against their Constitutional limits about as hard as they can, but it slanders most of them to say they didn't stay within its limits.  You may disagree where those limits *should* be, but that's not the same thing at all.  They do have habit of changing their own opinions on where those are from their time in Congress.  Aside: have we had a President other than Taft who sat on the Supreme Court?  It'd be interesting to see if they switched back.  Obama is still fairly young and a former Constitutional Law professor....
And contributions affect policy?  Say it isn't so. 
Seriously with the bloody obvious influence exerted by donors to political campaigns, we're supposed to get worked up over contributions to a charity?  If donors to the Clinton campaign, or people paying them actual speaking fees, aren't getting more for their money than donors to the charity, the Clintons must be paragons of virtue as politicians go.  But nobody wants to call much attention to that sort of thing, might encourage campaign finance reform or something.
 
 

Strongly disagree. Trump has done many, many bad things; Clinton gets in trouble even when she doesn't do anything. Relevant John Oliver: 
 

Well, just compare their policies side by side. Giant Meteor's are even more destructive than Trump's. Trump wants to deport illegal immigrants; Giant Meteor wants to kill them all. Trump would blow up the country's economy; Giant Meteor would blow up the country. Trump wants to repeal Obamacare, denying health care to millions of Americans; Giant Meteor wants to literally kill everyone. Etc.

Eh, bouncing is about as good.  The Bernoulli effect is too small by about an order of magnitude lift an airplane.  Lift is probably better understood starting from the third law of motion as reaction from redirected airflow (works better for supersonic flight, though as reaction to shed vortexes that are given downward momentum it's not terrible even for subsonic lift), or from irrotational circulation (which is where aerodynamics texts usually start).  The children's book airplane version of the Bernoulli effect is usually nonsense anyway, seemingly built around some fantasy in which adjacent packets separated at the leading edge somehow need to be neighbors again when leaving the trailing edge.  Lift that and imagine air sucked around the trailing edge to the bottom of the wing and are on your way back to irrotational circulation (or generating those vortexes)

Let's see. Susan is going to bring Justin. At that moment, Justin happens to be in the company of Luke and due to a verbal miscommunication brings him along. Ashley is initially alone but near the entrance to the Verres home she spots a hurt puppy, picks it up and brings it along. Soon after, Good Tom and his girlfriend dramatically enter through a window, intending to save the puppy. That is when Sarah arrives, but speaking of puppies, Larry has attached himself to her and she hasn't had the heart to tell him to go away. Both are being shadowed by a suspicious Rich who believes that something conspiracious is going on.
Meanwhile, Tensaided has decided to close early that day. Seeing that Rich is trailing Sarah and Larry, he suspects that Rich is up to no good and follows him to lay down the decahedronic law on him. However, George had just then decided to rent the latest Jason D. Poit movie and spotted Tensaided close the place early. He promptly gives chase, hoping to make Tensaided reopen the store a moment. But as it happens, Greg and Dex spots the cavalcade and attach themselves to its rear end because Greg is worried about what is going on.
This is when Twilight Sparkle rings the doorbell to the Verres place, looking for Tara and Andrea. (Shut up. The other side has griffins, right? Then it has unicorns, too. By my mandate.) A somewhat bewildered Grace opens the door for her at which point practically everybody else arrives...
Cue Marx Brothers stateroom scene.

It wouldn't surprise me if Dan's built all this up making us think that Jerry's description of what could happen if an Immortal gets too bored and powerful is referring to Pandora, when it's probably Voltaire that's the insane one.

I'm not very happy with the wording Pandora used. It doesn't flow well. I'd have just said, "darn it, her conscience is strong enough to interfere - I can't give her any of them." A core of inner goodness seems a bit over-the-top. Ah well, not a big deal.
 
ETA: it seems like Dan is trying to take "ashley could be bad?" and hit it with a giant hammer when a screwdriver tightening would have done.

It depends on the kind of story you are writing. Is there somehow a death quota to meet? I always felt that the flaw in TOS was not necessarily the fact that only Redshirts died but the fact that they had to die at all. It were as if the assumption was that the audience would not get that a situation was dangerous unless someone got killed.
I am a great opponent of death for death's own sake. If you kill off a character, do it for better reason than merely shock value. The worst character deaths are those where someone gets killed purely to shock the audience (as my late grandmother rather nastily put it, 'making a big boom to wake them up from being sound asleep') and then the effects or consequences never get examined or explored. No, if someone has to die, do it with great care and respect for the character and the consequences. And last but certainly not least, for the audience as well.

We already have computers capable of doing that and operating at 12V or less internally. There is no reason why a control panel should be connected to plasma conduit.

Because it would actively hinder our objectives to do so?

It's literally the opposite of appeasing ISIS. "Radical Islam" is what they prefer us to say.

ISIS also wants us to believe that they represent all Muslims, so rhetoric such as Trump's proposal to ban all Muslim immigration is playing right into their hands.

Mary Sue does not apply to any of the immortal characters.

Iran already had all the materials and capabilities needed to build a nuclear bomb. The question was, when? Without a deal, the chances they would have been delayed as long as this deal is due to last are very poor indeed, and that chance relies on military intervention.
As for the 'track record in the mideast' paragraph - all of those claims seem very shaky to me, especially... actually, yeah, all of them.  The 'Apology Tour' was named that by Obama's political blood enemies, and if it contained any apologies, I'd like to see them. What could we possibly have done to help Green Revolution? Why would our arms sales to Egypt be canceled based on the outcome of an election?
The efforts to arm the rebels in Syria were a failure, yes, but that's because the situation on the ground and who would end up aligned with whom was very murky. Of all the weapons set aside for rebels, we actually delivered very few - a farcically small amount... and good thing, because yes, they ended up on the wrong hands. This was not due to carelessness. Had they actually been careless, it would have been far, far worse.
How does Iran cheat on the deal daily?
The 'Bland Euphemisms'? He's avoiding using the words that the enemy wants him to use! "Violent Extremism" is literally true and a strong condemnation. He condemns it plenty. He just refuses to hand the enemy a major propaganda tool.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2015/02/how_obama_thinks_about_islam_and_terrorism_why_he_chooses_his_words_so_carefully.html

Iran already had all the materials and capabilities needed to build a nuclear bomb. The question was, when? Without a deal, the chances they would have been delayed as long as this deal is due to last are very poor indeed, and that chance relies on military intervention.
As for the 'track record in the mideast' paragraph - all of those claims seem very shaky to me, especially... actually, yeah, all of them.  The 'Apology Tour' was named that by Obama's political blood enemies, and if it contained any apologies, I'd like to see them. What could we possibly have done to help Green Revolution? Why would our arms sales to Egypt be canceled based on the outcome of an election?
The efforts to arm the rebels in Syria were a failure, yes, but that's because the situation on the ground and who would end up aligned with whom was very murky. Of all the weapons set aside for rebels, we actually delivered very few - a farcically small amount... and good thing, because yes, they ended up on the wrong hands. This was not due to carelessness. Had they actually been careless, it would have been far, far worse.
How does Iran cheat on the deal daily?
The 'Bland Euphemisms'? He's avoiding using the words that the enemy wants him to use! "Violent Extremism" is literally true and a strong condemnation. He condemns it plenty. He just refuses to hand the enemy a major propaganda tool.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2015/02/how_obama_thinks_about_islam_and_terrorism_why_he_chooses_his_words_so_carefully.html

Iran already had all the materials and capabilities needed to build a nuclear bomb. The question was, when? Without a deal, the chances they would have been delayed as long as this deal is due to last are very poor indeed, and that chance relies on military intervention.
As for the 'track record in the mideast' paragraph - all of those claims seem very shaky to me, especially... actually, yeah, all of them.  The 'Apology Tour' was named that by Obama's political blood enemies, and if it contained any apologies, I'd like to see them. What could we possibly have done to help Green Revolution? Why would our arms sales to Egypt be canceled based on the outcome of an election?
The efforts to arm the rebels in Syria were a failure, yes, but that's because the situation on the ground and who would end up aligned with whom was very murky. Of all the weapons set aside for rebels, we actually delivered very few - a farcically small amount... and good thing, because yes, they ended up on the wrong hands. This was not due to carelessness. Had they actually been careless, it would have been far, far worse.
How does Iran cheat on the deal daily?
The 'Bland Euphemisms'? He's avoiding using the words that the enemy wants him to use! "Violent Extremism" is literally true and a strong condemnation. He condemns it plenty. He just refuses to hand the enemy a major propaganda tool.
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2015/02/how_obama_thinks_about_islam_and_terrorism_why_he_chooses_his_words_so_carefully.html

Wait. He said 'methods'. I wonder if the term 'method' was meant in the OOP sense, which basically boils down to 'function of an object and perhaps some other arguments'. In other worse, the restriction might be very narrow - 'do not execute this algorithm on this data type'. Which, incidentally, I think has the potential to be a reasonable restriction, depending on the algorithm and data type (if you implement a sentient being, say)
I'm pretty sure that's not what was meant, but there's wiggle room for it to be that, if an author (Dan or a fic-writer) wanted to interpret it that way.

This is something I have learned about moderating: it is, in essence, purely negative. It can restrict and shut down but it cannot on its own contribute or improve. Positive contributions all stem from the posters themselves. For that reason I try to exercise as much restraint as I can.
I have more than once been criticised for moderating too aggressively or being too restrictive. I regret that but I must rely on my judgment and experience, imperfect and incomplete as they may be. I do not wish a return to the toxic state these forums once suffered from and if I see anything even resembling a step in that direction I intervene, preferably with a gentle nudge but with direct action if I have to.
That being said, I repeat that the current positive state of the forums is to be credited to the posters here and I am glad to see people having such a good time.

Aaaaaah! Giant snake!
Oh, phew. It's satiated and probably in torpor.
 
I might as well repost the quotes I put up last time... and some others.
 
 
It is difficult to cherry pick the whole of the tree.
-- Unique Identifier, Slate Star Codex comments on 'Black people less likely', 2015-02-12
Give a man a mask and he will show you his true self.
-- Oscar Wilde
I'm not well disposed to uncritical thought, particularly not from my own side. People opposing my viewpoint do, after all, have the excuse of being wrong.
-- Eleas, on SDN
It is hard to believe that a man is telling the truth when you know that you would lie if you were in his place.
-- H.L. Mencken
The plural of anecdote is not “data”. But the singular of anecdote is “enough data to disprove a universal negative claim”.
Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex - 'Polyamory is boring' 2013-04-06
This post is true in spirit, in fact, in totality and in detail. It is inarguably correct and I can't see for the life of me how anyone is going to, OR COULD refute any point of it. I am aware that someone is going to try though. 
-- Tonot, on the Erfworld Forums, about something by Lipkin
I consider that I understand an equation when I can predict the properties of its solutions, without actually solving it.
—- Paul A. M. Dirac
Quoted in F Wilczek, B Devine, Longing for the Harmonies
On two occasions I have been asked by Members of Parliament 'Pray Mr. Babbage, if you put the wrong numbers in to the machine will the right answers come out?' I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
-- Charles Babbage
They're not being mean to you because you're an outsider, they're just not going to handle you with kid gloves when you come along claiming your idea will overturn most of their lives' work.
-- GMailvuk, XKCD, on a putative Theory of Everything, 2015-02-10
the mark of a civilized man is the capacity to read a column of numbers and weep
-- attributed to Bertrand Russell
Censorship is telling a man he can’t have a steak just because a baby can’t chew it.
-- Mark Twain
Remember, if it’s in the news don’t worry about it. The very definition of news is “something that almost never happens.” When something is so common that it’s no longer news — car crashes, domestic violence — that’s when you should worry about it.
-- Bruce Schneier
This is the only journal article I’ve ever read where, in the part of the Discussion section where you’re supposed to propose possible reasons for your findings, both authors suggest maybe their co-author hacked into the computer and altered the results.
-- Scott Alexander, "The Control Group is Out of Control", concerning a study by Dr.s Wiseman and Schlitz on psychic effects
In science, 'fact' can only mean 'confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.' I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
-- Stephen Jay Gould
If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations, then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation, well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.
-- Sir Arthur Stanley Eddington, The Nature of the Physical World (1915), chapter 4
Nature is the ultimate bigot, because it is obstinately and intolerantly devoted to its own prejudices and absolutely refuses to yield to the most persuasive rationalizations of humans.
-- J. R. Molloy
Our government teaches the whole people by its example. If the government becomes the lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy.
-- Louis D. Brandeis
As the would-be leaders of the French Revolution could explain (if they were still alive), the biggest problem with rabble-rousing is that if one succeeds, he will find himself surrounded by aroused rabble.
-- Maggie McNeill, The Widening Gyre
A politician thinks of the next election; a statesman, of the next generation.
-- Paul Claudel
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong remedies.
-- Groucho Marx
Overload the police with victimless crimes and other minutiae and eventually only creeps and bullies remain cops.
-- Rick Gaber
Unnecessary laws are not good laws, but traps for money.
-- Thomas Hobbes
The reason it's hard to learn new skills late in life is not just that one's brain is less malleable. Another probably even worse obstacle is that one has higher standards.
-- Paul Graham (in Is it Worth Being Wise?)
Everything you worry about will be many times better, but people will continue to feel just as bad.
-- teleny, on Everything2, in reference to the passage of time.
I am starting to think I was previously a little too charitable toward Marx. My objections were of the sort “You didn’t really consider the idea of welfare capitalism with a social safety net” or “communist society is very difficult to implement in principle,” whereas they should have looked more like “You are basically just telling us to destroy all of the institutions that sustain human civilization and trust that what is baaaasically a giant planet-sized ghost will make sure everything works out.”
-- Scott Alexander, Slate Star Codex, book review: Singer on Marx
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
-- Gandhi
Dictatorships are never as strong as they think they are, and people are never as weak as they think they are.
-- Gene Sharp
Laura Ingalls Wilder had a “normal” childhood that happened to involve scarlet fever, teen pregnancy, and the systematic annihilation of the native peoples whose land she and her neighbours were homesteading. To her, this was a successful, well-spent youth. To us, it sounds like Thunderdome.
-- Madeline Ashby, Jan 28 2009, on a whatever.scalzi.com comment thread
Faith IS NOT knowledge, but evil of not measuring.
-- Gene Ray, of Timecube.com fame
When I look back upon what I have said in life, I find I envy dumb people
-- Seneca
I'd be a bum on the street with a tin cup if the markets were efficient.
-- Warren Buffett
No, my privilege is merely to not be subject to a certain type of egregious bullshit which no person should have to endure, and all I gain from this privilege is a blindness concerning what goes on around me.
-- JediBear, at the Whatever, concerning 'privilege' as in 'the invisible knapsack'
The law, in its majestic equality, forbids the rich as well as the poor to sleep under bridges, to beg in the streets, and to steal bread.
-- Anatole France
Patriotism is supporting your country at all times, and your government when it deserves it.
-- Mark Twain
Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter.
-- Martin Luther King Jr.
The reasonable man expects to conform to society. The unreasonable man expects society to conform to him. Therefore, without the unreasonable man, there would be no progress.
-- George Bernard Shaw
If you make a post defending rationalism on a rationalist blog, dozens of rationalists will suddenly show up arguing you’re not being sufficiently charitable to the person attacking them.
-- Scott Alexander, comment on his 'Why I am not Rene Descartes'
The point of having an open mind is to make it up occasionally.
-- Marcello Herreshoff
There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance--that principle is contempt prior to investigation.
-- Herbert Spencer 
A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is about the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?
I now believe that if I had asked an even simpler question -- such as, What do you mean by mass, or acceleration, which is the scientific equivalent of saying, Can you read? -- not more than one in ten of the highly educated would have felt that I was speaking the same language. So the great edifice of modern physics goes up, and the majority of the cleverest people in the western world have about as much insight into it as their neolithic ancestors would have had.
-- C.P. Snow
For if all goes well, the question "What is fun?" shall determine the shape and pattern of a billion galaxies.
-- Eliezer Yudkowsky
Metaphysics isn't about answers. It's about questions. The questions tell you everything about the person asking them, and nothing about the universe.
-- Surgoshan (Sluggy.net)
Wouldn’t it be much worse if life were fair and all the terrible things that happen to us, come because [we] actually deserve them? So now I take comfort in the general hostility and unfairness of the Universe.
-- Marcus, Babylon 5
The law of gravity, while disputed by few, has failed to convince most people that it is our moral obligation to lie on the ground rather than standing, jumping, or climbing as we see fit.
-- snol, on Everything2 (in comparison to the law of evolution)

Personally I find the idea of sex with another man to be kinda unpleasant-sounding and would never want to marry one. So I have coped with this by only sleeping with women and marrying one of them instead. It has worked out well for me as a coping technique and I heartily advocate it for those folks who oppose legalizing gay marriage.
-- Don Whiteside™ (@donw) at the Whatever, 2014-02-10
A puritan is a person who pours righteous indignation into the wrong things.
--  G.K. Chesterton
In lit, the protag is broken, and the story is about dealing with that; in genre, the SITUATION is broken; the protag generally isn’t, because that’s not the story. Lit readers look at a genre book and go huh? How can there be a story? Protag not broken!
-- El, on 2009-jan-28, on a whatever.scalzi.com comment thread.
Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
-- C. S. Lewis
 
You will never break the laws or commit violence against anybody while I’m alive, and if you try it, you won’t do it when I’m dead, either.
-- Emperor Tiberius, to his son Drusus, paraphrased (obv since this isn't the kind of thing that gets written down by the principals)
"Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen pounds nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds nought and six, result misery." –- from David Copperfield, Dickens
Market exchange is a pathetically inadequate substitute for love, but it scales better.
-- S. T. Rev
We never bother running a computer program unless we don't know the output and we know an important fact about the output.
-- Marcello Herreshoff
I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times.
-- Bruce Lee
He's discussing morality, and thus couldn't care less how many dead bodies hit the ground.
-- Weremensch
 
Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.
-– Abraham Lincoln
I can accept failure, but I can't accept not trying.
-- Michael Jordan
She uses the phrase ‘most people’ as the first person singular pronoun.
-- Xopher, via the whatever at Scalzi.com (not its original use, though it is the original speaker)
The purpose of training is to ensure a standardized response to a predictable situation.
The purpose of education is to ensure a reasoned response to an unpredictable situation
-- via OldCrow, Sluggy boards
A good way to judge content in a game is to remove the rewards. If there was no reward for tackling the task you were given, would you ever bother doing it? If the answer is no, there's probably something wrong with your content.
-- SirNiko, KoL forum
I frequently remind myself, when the difficulties of dealing with other apes are getting to be too much to tolerate, that it's a problem so hard that we evolved brains capable of maintaining a global technological civilization and figuring out quantum mechanics as a side effect of trying to solve it, and I should maybe cut myself some slack.
-- TheOtherDave, lesswrong.com, on Evolving to Extinction
The concept of intellectual cowardice was not something she wanted to think about.
-- Erfworld Book 0 (about princess Jillian)
Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble.
-- Samuel Johnson
Whoever is already a monster should see to it that he fights monsters. And if I gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss is gonna break eye contact first.
-- Peter Seebach (apologies to Nietzsche)

Forgot this one, not sure who made it. Hauled it out for April Fool's day

I wasn't even including Trans people in that statement, I would imaging if the ability was available, they'd probably use it in a heartbeat. But certainly many cis people would be curious about it, me for instance, I'm a guy, I'm totally comfortable being a guy, there's a lot of things about being a girl that I wouldn't want to deal with, but if the option to switch back and forth safely and easily was available, I'd be curious enough to try it for a bit. Whether I end up liking it or not is something I can't answer because I don't know what it's like so it really could go either way.

Personally I think an equine form for Elliot would be great!
I may be somewhat biased.
 

I still don't agree. That would be the act of a man seeking to blame someone else for his own actions, fully along the lines of "The Devil made me do it", and I have a far higher opinion of Mr. Verres than that. If anyone knows the power of Mr. Verres' temper, it is Mr. Verres himself. I think he has enough self-honesty to not do that.