Bay 12 Games Forum

Well, here's a little bit of fun. Apparently gorsuch may have indulged in a wee bit of plagiarism, which is interesting considering his scholarship rigor has been being played up during the confirmation hearing. Don't really have the gaf to hunt down original sources and look at what's being considered directly, but I can say that the comment about citations and dissertations regarding legal philosophy is utter and complete bullshit; the experts the white house offered up on that subject were lying out their ass on that one.

Any writing at that level and with that degree of importance gets pretty much zero bloody slack on that front, and academia of that nature (and most other sorts, too) starts hammering that point in a hell of a lot earlier than the time you start work on a dissertation. If anything, legal work related stuff is even more strict on the subject, since there's few other fields quite so well equipped to understand the potential legal complications and why you don't risk entanglement with them.

Yeah, looking at it, at least so far as stellaris goes, it'd basically be a hive mind except rather than being willing to destroy natives or being necessarily expansionist, it requires alien population to maintain and grow its own. Probably open up some other ethos to the behavior. Conceptually you could have a peaceful facehugger species, that only uses nonsophonts or consenting free sophonts to propagate. It'd be a helluva' thing to implement. Capitalist facehuggers of galaxy 623 are coming to hire your street walkers.

Not sure how they'd program that.

Well, off the top of my head, you'd start with a slave race (possibly nonsentient, initially) on your home planet, and require a certain amount of extraspecies access (slaves, natives, something specifically gene engineered, hired surrogates, etc.) on a planet for the population of your species to grow. At least so far as basic abstraction goes, I don't think it'd be terribly difficult.

I'unno, that list seems to be leaving out "can only reproduce via other species", so it's not as bad as it could be. The cannibalistic facehugger lords of galactic debauchery will have to wait for another day.

The Democrats eroded filibusters for nominations with their move to pack federal courts, and now the Republicans are giving them their own medicine over kicking and howling.

... did just notice this bit of revisionist golden mean bullshit, though. The dems did that after the GOP filibustered five fucking hundred obama appointees, including multiple moderates and outright conservatives. They were literally killing the judiciary when reid did that, even blocking their own people just to stop obama from getting anything done. Meanwhile the GOP is threatening to wreck the SCOTUS rules without even a single actual nominee fully stopped by filibuster, in the face of an opposition party known for being willing to appoint moderates to judicial (among other) positions. This is not a case of own medicine by even the most remote of bloody measures.

The GOP also had the better part of a bloody year staring in the face of a compromise nominee, and pitched a shitfit to stop him from even being voted on. Any worry about an ultra-leftist was their own goddamn fault at that point.

Let's try to not equivocate behavior that is radically different in the degree of bad faith involved. Letting that bullshit fly is a huge chunk of what let the GOP get as bad as it is, and by extension drug our entire bloody political system to the point it's at.

Though yeah, hard to see where the end of this whole hyperpartianship goes, just seems like it'll swing wildly from one end to the other...

Eh, only for so much longer, most likely. Or at least what it's swinging between is likely to change. The voting patterns of the younger generations are not something that's exactly in favor of the GOP, and they're both starting to come in more and growing older (i.e. becoming more likely to vote). You can expect the reps to either change fairly drastically over the next twenty or thirty years, or become marginalized. Not so sure I'd say the same thing about the dems, but eh.

Huh. Penseives not actually storing memory, but extracted parasites that happen to use them as a sort of camouflage? It'd make the wizard saner, while acting as a preserver and delayed infection vector.