hoho

Don't forget that they'll be also breaking every single SSP-only mod beyond (reasonable) repair with 1.3.

Have you actually, you know, read the bible? It's by far one of the worst books to base your morality on. We don't need a bronze-age myth to base our lives on. By selecting the better bits out of the horrible thing we've proven we are perfectly capable of deciding for ourselves.

And getting what kind of results? If it's >60-70% then something is terribly wrong with the grading system or expected level of language skills.

Robot translators suck at most languages. When I doubt in some word I just type it to regular google search and see if the search results are what I expected.

Physical strategy guide for a modpack that changes drastically every few months is a recipe for disaster.

One problem I have with religious people doing things "out of love" is I can never be sure if they actually care or are just being selfish and try earning brownie points for their god.

Not sure if staying on topic or legit mistakes there. Either way, well done Also, why would you press shift + 2 to write 2?

So yeah, Defense Grid 2 is on it's way. It WILL be done no matter what, only question is how fast and at what quality. If they don't meet their actual goal of 1M then they'll just finish up whatever they can and the full game will come out later when they've scraped together enough resources for it. Though the intermediate steps towards that goal are also pretty nice. To speed things up and boost the quality feel free to support it at kickstarter: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/hiddenpath/defense-grid-2 They are also running some competitions every week during the kickstarter project with the old defense grid right now. I'm not sure what the prizes are but who cares, I can get something for playing the game and doing other stuff!

This doesn't work without atmosphere. Pretty much the only thing that could counter such a "flack missile" is nuke that simply burns up all the debris and sharpnel. Good luck detonating it accurately enough when stuff flies around at several km/s. Then again you'd likely screw yourself more with the EM blast the nuke causes

Any ideas how to cool the stuff down? Generally reactors produce about as much or even more heat than energy. Using just radiation to get rid of excess heat won't be easy. I have an easy "fix" for that: fill your missile with a bunch of pellets. You can shoot down the missile but the pellets will keep moving your direction. Combine that with orbital velocities (likely the shooter and target are on different orbits with quite big relative speed) and you'll still be screwed :)

Yeah, distances in space will likely be closer to several hundreds of km when doing battles. Also I'm almost certain majority of them will be fought while orbiting something, not in open space so figuring out the path your projectile takes will need quite a bit of brainpower. In those conditions you'll be far better off with a guided missiles than any kind of non-guideable projectile and keep projectile weapons for close-quarter fighting. Those rail/coilgun speeds you cited are most likely from huge ship-based things that eat up tremendous amounts of power and have very low rate of fire. Unless we send up nuclear reactors I don't see them being feasible for usage in space.

Good thing that oxygen is inside the gunpowder then! And significantly more prone to problems as well. I agree that rail/coilguns are more powerful than traditional firearms per-projectile but you won't be able to strap one to a single soilder and have him/her fly around with it due to the MASSIVE energy requirements. Also, you don't really need that much power in space to really mess up someones day. Without air resistance traditional bullets will pack significantly more punch in space than they do on Earth. Ejecting casings isn't really all that much of a problem and there are caseless bullets and extremely fast shooting guns: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caseless_ammunition <- show me a railgun capable of covering nearly as big area with projectiles in that amount of time.

"Teach a man to reason and he'll think for a lifetime" - Phil Plait "There is a cult of ignorance in US, and there always has been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge."" - Isaac Asimov

Why lasers and railguns? Plain-old gunpowder-powered bullets work excellently in space: In fact they work waaaay better there than in Earth atmosphere. Take a high-power sniper rifle. That 10g+ of metal travelling at 1km/s+ is pretty nasty. Add to that the vehicles moving at several km/s relative to each other themselves.

Most kids that happen to born in religious families do get their rights infringed. Yes, they are. How do they manage to stay ignorant on one area and not the rest is quite weird to me. I must be some kind of a weirdo then that has never thought such a thing is possible to exist. Living in a country with nearly the lowest rate of theists probably helps. All I need to start believing in one is decent proof. I've yet to see anyone providing anything that would actually make any kind of sense. Believing "just in case" is rather stupid thing to do in my oppinion. "Any religious person" is quite definitely false, you haven't really seen the crazy stuff I have Also why shouldn't I be hostile towards something that has brought that much bad to this world?

I already said why I want it: I want to learn more about how universe works. As for unnatural, well, we've been living unnatural lives for past few hundreds of thousands of years, why not do so in future? Looking at all the evidence I have combined with tiny bit of logic (it doesn't take much, really) I've concluded that when I die my "soul" will cease to exist. It has never been anything but my neurons firing in certain patterns. When that stops everything ends for me. "Solving the mystery" would be equivalent to jumping off a building to see if perhaps in this specific time atoms rearrange themselves to make the pavement soft enough for me to survive. Considering the odds of that happening I'd like to be able to postpone that experiment, if possible. Ignoring that you basically killed the flower while encasing it in plastic you can't ignore the fact that it did last longer and was capable of sensing this world longer. By life extending I assume I won't have to start living in a box but that I can enjoy it as much as I do at the moment. Average person a couple hundred years ago used to live up to around 40-ish, less if you were poor. Today in many countries people live twice that on average. Is that unnatural and bad? I definitely don't think so. That's my whole point: it's slowed down so the experience can last longer. Though with good enough technology I'm quite certain (near) immortality is possible, except for accidents obviously. Heh, don't worry. I have nothing against people not sharing my world views. Only thing I wish they'd do is explain why exactly they don't so I could see if perhaps there is something wrong in my reasoning. Similarly I expect them to explain how they've arrived to their world view. You are doing FAR better than anyone else at it so far and that really is something considering I've had a metric ton of discussion on the subject yeah, I'm not really hoping for immortality all that much and I know there is (almost) no protection against accidents. But still, I'd love to live long enough to for example see if we manage to colonize some our closer planets, make implants and prosthesis that vastly improve our lives (seeing wider spectrum of EM radiation, direct mind access to computers, robotic limbs, ...), develop a real AI or figure out a way to travel to other stars. I'm 27 and within even my short lifetime there have been insanely huge changes in the world and I'd love to see where we can get to in next few hundred years. In reality I'd be glad to live until, say 150 or so. Though that makes the great leap of faith (heh) that humanity doesn't quite completely collapse once energy crysis really hits us in about 10-15-ish years or so. As for mind uploading specifically, it would open up all sorts of weird and interesting areas. For example making a full-blown and identical copy of yourself would be trivial. I think I might enjoy discussing things with a group made up of copies of myself. Similarly it will be possible to modify yourself in any way you like. It would be rather awesome, I believe And for life extension, I saw some lecture on TED a while ago where they said they are experimenting on rats and have been able to extend their lives by some 2-3x in labs and it's getting better every year. Obviously it's far from human testing, not to mention wide-spread use but potential is definitely there. I don't believe that humans have some basic hate or destructive tendencies. It all comes from the environment (read: other people, customs and teachings) and again ultimately boils down to ignorance. No, we are not. If we were we, as a specie, would have died out long ago. They can only have power over ignorant masses. That's also the main reason why all sorts of power systems generally try to make people ignorant: they are easier to manipulate and control. Similarly cannibalism and slavery used to be in our blood, assuming that you mean doing those things for longer periods of time qualifies as "being in blood". We've mostly managed to get rid of those. I'm sure we can get rid of the rest of the bad stuff as well. It definitely won't happen overnight, it'll be a (very) slow process. True but nowadays we actually have the capability of knowing about pretty much everything going on on the planet and also quite a bit about stuff close to us in the universe. If we, as a specie, want to survive we pretty much need to start working together as a whole or we'll perish here fighting each others. Next global extinction event is not a question of "if" but "when" and we need to be ready for it. Good in theory but fails utterly in practice. Just think of any of the more religious countries, try to say "no" there and you'll be lucky to survive to next day. Not long ago there was a man sentenced to prison for spreading anti-religious messages on FB in Indionesia. In US it's generally not as severe but there are definitely tons of problems with it. If you are being told about god and to not try to use any critical thinking about religion since the day you were born it's pretty hard to be able to change anything. Also power of community can be really strong. Only rare few people are strong enough to go against the views of their peers. Brainwashing works. I've compared the good and bad sides and effects of religion and I've concluded the bads are far FAR worse in grand scheme of things and pretty much all the good is replaceable with other, often better, stuff. Though specifically, what kind of hope do you mean that religion can give that nothing else can? I can't think of anything, really. Well, except perhaps having an afterlife but going by the traditional paradise concept, well, yeah. I'd rather not spend eternity in that inhumane torture chamber. Why torture chamber? That's only thing it can be once you start to think logically about it. Here's a starter: you had an annoying relative/friend that you didn't want to spend time with. What happens when you both end up in paradise? One of you will be pretty sorry for the rest of eternity. Other option is you'll be lobotomized to not be anything similar to the person you were on Earth. You basically cease to exist and something else takes your place and it won't be you any more. As for what FFGF has been saying, I basically am saying the same thing, just using fancier sentences :)

For me it basically boils down to the fact that I want to live forever or well, at least a few hundred years I want that simply to be able to learn more about the universe we live in (and quite possibly about other universes ) Only practical way it can work is if we figure out a way to either upload ourself to internet or to work out practically working life-extending medical procedures. Both are basically feasible but are mostly held back by the fact that humanity isn't investing in science nearly as much as we could. Instead we are popularizing ignorance. It's depressing to see how being dumb and not using critical thinking and rationality is considered a good thing and it gets told to us in media constantly. In addition we make up stupid "rules"* to divide ourselves to distinct groups that fight each other in one way or another instead of cooperation. Religion is a thing that combines both ignorance and fighting. If we'd stop with the bullshit we could put several orders of magnitude more effort and resources into research to come up with ways to actually survive the next few decades and just maybe figure out a way towards increasing our life span. *) nations, religions, sexual preferences, wealth, ... Well, that's my ultimate goal but being realistic I'm almost certain that won't be happening in my lifetime. Though it doesn't stop me from trying to move the world towards that goal so perhaps some of my descendants once could enjoy a better world. Here comes the other problem I have with religions. What about the kids that born into a religious family? How often are they given a free choice for their world view to either choose one of the thousands of religions their parents didn't follow or perhaps simply not believe in grownup version of Santa? I consider this a child abuse at highest order.

To repeat once more, just in case, I like music that has interesting melody. Just tons of low frequency noise isn't interesting. Bass in combination with other stuff on the other hand can easily be. I'm also no expert, I just say what I like. When I say something is bad I simply mean I personally don't like it. It doesn't mean anyone else shouldn't like it either If there exists such a thing as good dubstep it hasn't been linked here yet. Not sure if this is dubstep but I like it far more than anything other linked here: Also, yes, trance-techno-house and all sorts of electronic music can be good. Obviously not all of it is but there are quite a few very nice, uhh, songs? that I like. A few more examples of the stuff I like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6GqRsmffeVI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eXqPYte8tvc <- THE best acoustic guitar performance I've ever heard http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5HNtsdtnBfk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PT90dAA49Q <- one of those rare things I listen for the words and meaning instead of melody <- the movie this is from is also pure awesomeness There are tons more stuff I'd like to link but I CBA to search for them at the moment and my likes history has been overwritten by a mountain of lectures by now. If anyone is interesting in learning about interesting sciency-stuff I could link those instead :D

Indeed it is. First time I heard it I was left speechless for quite long time and I've been using it as ringtone since the first phone capable of using custom music as it. Look at the links under the song, I linked to the groups other works there as well. Their entire album is pure brilliance and I've yet to hear anything as special. Too bad they got into some internal problems some years ago and stopped making more awesome stuff :(

You want good music? Here is some: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XxuvZMZDuBo <- extremely quiet at start, just give it time or turn up the volume. Volume increases gradually For me music is good when it has interesting melody or in rare cases deeper meaning.

Lada does have buttons, a whole bunch of them actually. My chipcard reader has no buttons:

Don't worry, I'm not some delicate flower that can't handle questions. Everyone should be able to back up their claims. Too bad religions are pretty much incapable it by definition But to answer, just start with the linked 30 question thing. Religion couldn't exist if people would think logically about it, they have to be ignorant in order to make it work. For starters did you know that there have been numerous researches done that pretty much unanimously have concluded that religious people are more prone to violence and crime while also being less moral and compassionate? http://www.religiondispatches.org/dispatches/laurilebo/4576/are_atheists_more_moral_than_the_religious http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2011/apr/11/aetheists-research-scientists http://www.rejectionofpascalswager.net/atheistmoral.html http://freethoughtpedia.com/wiki/Percentage_of_atheists#1997_Federal_Bureau_of_Prisons_Statistics vs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religion_in_the_United_States#Main_religious_preferences_of_Americans Notice that last three are basically equivalent to non-religious Also, do you think genital mutilation of kids of both sexes would exist without religion?

It's my personal belief (ha!) that being religious is a sign of mental deficit. It can be as simple as being too lazy to figure things out and instead take the easiest to understand explanation, not being capable of critical thinking about some specific topics or in worse case actual full-blown lunacy. People of any and all religions, I invite you to answer these 30 simple questions: http://30questionsproject.weebly.com/the-30-questions.html I'd especially love to see your answers to at least some of those. I've yet to hear about any religion that wold hold up once you start to really think rationally about it. My main problem with religions is that they actively promote and praise ignorance and make critical thinking look like it was a bad thing. Besides causing general and widespread harm due to all sorts of pointless rituals, customs and life values it also holds back our evolution as a species. [edit] A wise man once said something like: "When left to their own devices good person will do good things and bad person will do bad things. To make good person do bad things, that takes religion." This has been proven over and over again over thousands of years and is still valid today.

Kinda busy atm so I can't do a proper response, sorry. There is a LOT more I'd like to say about religion Morals are NOT based on religion. They are based on common sense and what's beneficial for humanity in long term. Religions actually teach you to do all sorts of immoral things that no sane person would ever do. Was religion a must-have for any of these things? Definietly not. Also, people generally do good because they are good people, not out of fear of being eternally punished. Also, you might want to look up the death camps aka Mother Theresa's "hospitals". Awesomely moral and good stuff she did, right? Also, there are plenty of horrible teachings in the new testament as well: http://skepticsannotatedbible.com/cruelty/nt_list.html No, new testament did NOT make old one invalid. It's the word of God and God can't be wrong, according to himself. If it would have made it invalid then it would mean the word of God was wrong. Thus how can we even trust he got it right this time? I'm a guy with common sense. That's all it takes to be moral. Also, morals should be based on intelligent design, not bronze age misconceptions: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R_wXEjQ1kdU

So using critical thinking and scientific method instead of praising ignorance and belief without any evidence and is now "high and mighty"? If so then, yes, I guess am. If you really want to put a label to me then i'd prefer it to be anti-theist, though. Religions in pretty much all their forms are incredibly immoral and have very bad effect on humanity in long-term. We'd be FAR better off without them.