VLC has been far from the best media player on Linux. I went back to mplayer because its speed is unparalleled, seeking in a stream is fast and doesn't break the playback completely, and it doesn't flail around and spaz out if it doesn't understand how to play something.
No one actually cares about the consumer (looking at you, apple fanboy)
Netflix cares, or used to care about the consumer, because they had to. But now they're not just a content delivery service, they're a content creation service as well. The content creators/owners should not be in charge of the streaming services because they have conflict of interest with their own customers. Content companies SHOULD license their content to any streaming service for a reasonable price, but they don't. Even Netflix won't do that anymore because they're trying to drive their subscriptions to their service by being the sole place where you can watch Stranger Things, etc.
Exclusive contracts screw the customers. They get zero value from it. It's what fragments the market so badly and why so many of us still say "fuck streaming, seriously." We got a taste of the good life from the Netflix DVD-by-mail era, and now the good life is gone.
Considering the fact that rightwingers have been sending men to die in wars for years while women are safe back home, I would say that this hardly only the left's worldview.
Sometimes fiction imitates life and you see the same thing. I know a bunch of MRA-types think Game of Thrones sucks because there are so many "strong females" in it right now (the show kindof sucks now, but for different reasons..) but that's what happens when all of the men of various houses, army leaders, patriarchs, and kings all try their best to kill each other. Many die, and the women fill the power vacuum, but it wouldn't have happened if the men didn't make up all the soldiers, battle commanders, generals, and kings.
Not all of them are this extreme, but a person reaches a point where there are so many problems that have no solutions that eliminating the problems - the constant source of difficult decisions - with a relatively simple choice that then requires no decision-making after... it's appealing.
Of course it's appealing, but it's also a decision that there is no coming back from. You won't be able to say "oops, I made a mistake. Maybe I was wrong about all this." You're not smart enough to know that your problems can't be solved. I'm not either. None of us are.
Insistence otherwise seems selfish at best
I would say suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness. Maybe that person has no ties to others. Maybe they just can't see those ties to others. For most people it's not the case, and suicide is one of the most devastating things you can do to another person. But hey, you won't be around to pick up the pieces and deal with the consequences.
Lock up your remotes. They are a security risk. If someone breaks into your house they can use them to change your TV settings!
Yeah, last year some dudes broke into my house and set the TV to the Playboy channel and then left it on that channel for my wife to find! I'm lucky they didn't steal anything, but it took awhile to convince my wife that the neer-do-wells had broken in.
I think you still consider yourself powerless. The idea that you're not strong enough or worthy enough to keep living for your own sake is so ingrained that you need someone else is out there who wants you to stay alive.
That's true, and it's one of the big draws of AA, and why AA sucks (useless) for a lot of people, because it teaches you that alcoholism is a disease that everyone is too weak to combat themselves. Mostly bullshit, but some people NEED that message and can only exist under it.
If you've owned someones router sufficiently to get onto their LAN, why would you bother with their TV? There are way richer targets on the average home network.
The TV is harder for the user to secure, and it's unlikely to change much for years. If someone owns a PC, chances are the user will notice -- degraded performance, anti-virus or other product sending out warnings, more computer-savvy relative running tests. It's more likely to be wiped or replaced. Almost no one thinks of checking the TV for something it might be doing behind the scenes. It's a tempting target because it's less likely to get fixed unless your rootkit thing is sloppy enough to affect the watching experience.
Treatment is available, but in the US, you cannot treat someone, even for mental issues, against their wishes. You can only forcibly treat someone if their illness is considered violently dangerous to others.
In my state, the number of homeless on the streets went up a huge amount and has been an out of control problem ever since when the governor closed the mental hospitals.
Very few people in the middle class will see anything like that. That those cuts also sunset in two years while all the other cuts that benefit the upper class are permanent shows where the intention lies.
Really? So what does that make of someone like Trudeau in Canada, or Nanci Pelosi(Dem), or Keith "ethnostate are great" Ellision(dem leadership) for example. I realize that by looking at the leadership and high-leadership in the opposing party has already set an incredibly low bar,
They do not set a very high bar, but they set it quite a bit higher than Trump does. I'm a conservative who stays far away from the Republican Party, because they sold their souls and integrity for an election victory. I have a lot more admiration for Bill Crystal or a Never-Trumper than I do a fraudster.
it seems, that by his own actions he's managed to accomplish more then Obama did and actually went through the house and senate instead of imposing rules, regulations and unconstitutional orders by EO's.
The only things Trump has accomplished, besides the Tax Bill, has been through the executive action. Many of those were also rejected for their illegality, but hey, they score political points with his base!
Oh yes, that is absolutely true. But if you can't copy the actual original media, you're going online and downloading pirated copies, and that's where things get murky. It's a bit like a medical cannabis patient buying weed from a guy in a back alley. He might be legally allowed to smoke, but the way he's getting it could get him into trouble.
And to clarify my own post... He's probably still in the clear though, as these days anti-piracy efforts focus on the sharers, not the leechers. It didn't used to be that way, but that's where we're at now.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you own media (game, movie, music), you are entitled to make a backup copy on whatever media you chose
Oh yes, that is absolutely true. But if you can't copy the actual original media, you're going online and downloading pirated copies, and that's where things get murky. It's a bit like a medical cannabis patient buying weed from a guy in a back alley. He might be legally allowed to smoke, but the way he's getting it could get him into trouble.
Furthermore, what I was talking about back in the day was shareware (more common in the 1980s)
Ah, for the time when you would trade disks on the schoolyard loaded with 20 or so shareware games. Sadly, I never had network access in the 80s (mom did not believe in having computer modems which would tie up the lines or cost money we didn't have).
Well, I played till Mist of Pandora. Just a few days to level from 80 to 90... most boring expansion ever. Did only visit a part of the world, the stupid kung fu panda simply made me sad.
I'll admit I liked the pandas, but that's fine. Warlords (the next expansion) had a good leveling experience, but the endgame was terrible outside of raiding. Probably their worst expansion. The current expansion, Legion, is probably their best expansion.
I love BC, but the zone and quest design was pretty bad. They are simply much better at crafting interesting storylines and interesting zone design now than they were back then. BC had killer raids, though. 5-mans were fairly fun.
Wrath had well-laid out zones and good quests. No problems there. However, they hit a nasty bump at the start of the end game, as the 5-man dungeons were a bit predictable and really really stupidly easy. Naxx-10/25 was ridiculously easy as well. They rebounded nicely with Ulduar, one of the best raids they've ever done, and added a hard mode for those who wanted more challenge. The rest of the expansion was pretty good too. There was a long time gap between the last content patch and the next expansion, though. That started an unpleasant trend.
Cataclysm started off well, though the zones were a bit buggy. The 5-mans were hard (this is good!) but so much effort went into the 1-60 redesign that there was nothing left for the endgame. This was the first real endgame doldrums, and this expansion sucked because of it, its only saving grace being excellent raid design. But if you weren't raiding, you weren't doing much. At the end of the expansion, they made the decision to make 5-mans super-easy again, and the new 5-mans released towards the end which were bland and trivial. Dragon Soul lasted too long; there was too long a gap until the next expansion.
Pandaria had very well designed zones and dungeons and raids, and there was a decent amount to do in the endgame. If you didn't like the whole panda thing, then that's unfortunate, but otherwise it was a pretty good expansion.
Warlords of Draenor. Hooboy. I think most acknowledge that this was Warcraft's worst expansion. Some good questlines, but they had to scrap many things in development, and it threw the whole feel of the continent for a loop. It felt half-finished because it was half-finished. I think much of their design team either left or was fired or reassigned.
Legion. Excellent, excellent expansion, top to bottom. I honestly do think that the game is in the best state it's been in since the Vanilla/BC days. If you want casual content you have LFR and regular dungeons, if you want the harder content you have the fixed 20-man mythic raids and higher levels of mythic+ five-man dungeons. Plenty of solo content (way more than I can do..)
The developers/designers have no clue. They think attracting new 16 year olds to the game as new players makes more money than keeping the 50 year olds in the game.
Not that many 50 year olds are going to stay in the game no matter how much you try to make it like the old days. Games need -new- players, or they die completely. There is no way to keep all the old players in the game. If it doesn't change/improve, the old players are going to leave anyway because "it's just the same old thing." Keeping it static in an attempt to keep the old player-base who didn't want change is a fool's dream.
Also, they realized in BC that their raid design philosophy was totally broken. Less than 5% of the Warcraft players ever saw the inside of 40-man Naxx during Vanilla. Similar numbers apply to Sunwell in BC. That's too much effort that was put into the game that very few people ever saw. It was after that where they offered stripped-down versions of the raids so people could at least see the content, if not clear the difficult option. Afterwards they added flex-mode raiding, probably one if not the best post-launch features they ever added to the game, though it had the side effect of killing the fixed 10-man raid, so I'll never see the inside of mythic raids again.:-D
When the broadband companies took all those federal subsidies to increase Internet broadband, they used their own "creative" definition of what broadband Internet should be and dumped all that money into cell service. My guess is whenever they talk about Internet service, they're still counting stupid phone data availability.
Uhhh, hell no. Every PC game I played for the first 20 plus years had no mechanism to "phone home" to check in and see if the copy I was using was legit... You have been thoroughly brainwashed (or just grown up with fewer rights) than those of us who knew gaming before DRM where game makers went by the motto
I'm not brainwashed, I'm not talking about what is moral here, only what is legal. I just realize that the way we do things and the way we've always done things has not always been strictly legal. This was my first rationalization of piracy in the 90s, when I realized that the only way to play the game I'd paid for when the original media was scratched/damaged was to pirate. Looking around I found that it wasn't legal, but it wasn't immoral either. I still have my original boxes of King's Quest II and III on their 5.25" floppies, but I doubt that the 24-year-old floppy drive that I'd saved from my college computer could read them, and I wouldn't feel guilty about downloading disk images for them either.
Reverse-engineering WoW protocol counts as circumvention of copy protection (Blizzard will definitely argue it to be true.)
It would be trivial to argue as well. Without private servers, a Blizzard subscription is the only way to play the game. Add private servers, and a subscription is no longer required.
Yet Russia is more than capable of standing up to the United States. They are more than willing to operate without the blessing of the UN or NATO, and they don't particularly care about sovereignty rights or human rights which started hamstringing US military operations in Vietnam.
The total amount of money spent doesn't matter -- at some point you only need to reach a certain threshold of nuclear weapons. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing in a room awash with gasoline. One side has five matches, the other side has fifty. Each is concerned who has more matches. The amount of weapons that are available to either side are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed dissuade the other.
Ah yes, the "Deep State." The usual charge made by people who don't realize that President is not a purely authoritarian position. IE, the Justice Department, FBI/CIA, court system, etc, are supposed to be independent of the President even though he appoints some of their members. They are not, and should not be the tool of the President in any democratic government.
I posted too soon. I should have responded to the rest of the post.:-D
Second, it's the whole "What do you got to lose" factor.
Yeah, people post a lot of false equivalency "both of the sides are the same" stuff, and it usually comes back to bite them when it turns out... yeah, you do actually have a lot that you can lose if one side is hostile to your interests.
There's been a few movements to move things back left (Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, etc)
Bernie didn't have a chance, and it wasn't because of Clinton shenanigans, though that certainly was a stupid move that blew up in the DNC's faces. The US population is just not socialist enough to elect a guy like Bernie president. Not like with the current congress he would have had much of a chance of doing anything anyway, but he would at least have gotten Merrick Garland in the Supreme Court, or another similar justice of his own choosing.
They're trying to primary Feinstein, but not sure if that's going anywhere
Hard to say. Much of the country seems to hate Democrats from California, though they absolutely LOVE Republicans from California, as much as they love to talk about the state as being a black hole of Republicanism.
Katherine Harris is another name being floated, but she's way too new. Elizabeth Warren? Maybe? I think she might have lost too much momentum since 2015. She should have challenged Clinton instead of stepping aside like a good party peon; if "Fauxcahontas" was the worst scandal one could pin on her, she would have had it made against Trump, instead we got the Clinton train wreck. Not sure if the young Kennedy lad is going anywhere; it seems like it, though I think Americans are leery of family dynasties like the Clintons, Kennedys, Bushes, etc.
First, he makes folks feel good. Make America Great Again hits ya right in the feels.
I always hated that statement, partly because it implies that the country wasn't great in the first place. It ain't perfect, but I think the US was pretty darned great.
You miss the point. If President Trump said the sky was blue, you would dispute that with him. You would come up with SOME reason for it to be untrue.
No, you put words in his mouth. YOU are saying that, not him. His point was that President Trump making a statement is not any reason to believe that statement is true. He has lied enough that he can't be trusted on anything, so you have to look elsewhere for the truth.
If he thought the crowd size was one thing, and was incorrect - that is not necessarily a lie. People can be wrong and still be sure they are right.
Yes, but when the easily-checked sources say one thing, and you just want to believe (and claim) another thing, at that point it becomes a lie, not just misinformed.
Maybe it should be dependent on usage now. We live in a constantly changing world. I think copyright, trademark and patet law should be rewritten from the ground up.
I think it should stay the way it is, because in today's environment, if it was ever to be "rewritten," it would be a lot less "free" than it is today. Intellectual property would simply be enshrined as pure property, with copying rights enshrined having no limitation just like physical property. The only pushback against that we ever get today is because the older rules were a little more non-copyright-holder friendly and respected that copyright was supposed to be a balance -- a limitation on someone's rights with the expectation that they get something in return: more works entering the public domain. Yeah, yeah, I know, continuous extension of the already-ridiculous copyright terms have broken this agreement, but I do think that things COULD get a lot worse, and absolutely would in our current overly-friendly environment to corporate copyright interests.
From or After(not sure) the the third expansion you could have downloaded them for free.
Yeah, but it still requires a game subscription. They let you play for free up to level 20. Right now, they offer "World of Warcraft" (including every expansion before the current one, 1 - 100) for $10, though you will need to purchase a subscription or game time to actually play the game. The current expansion retails for $30 now.
They also offer "World of Warcraft: Complete Collection" for $90, and I'm not sure what really is the point of that. I think it comes with Legion and a pre-purchase for the next expansion ($50 value) along with a month of game time ($15 value), so it's basically the $10 bundle and $25 for Legion. So I guess that whole bundle saves you... $5? Maybe worth it if you really want to play NOW, but it'll be more economical a year from now.
Everyone playing retro servers bought this and therefore legitimately can play it without copyright violation...
I'm... guessing that's probably the case, but there doesn't have to be. For instance, I'm pretty sure you can't use the actual WoW client with a legacy server, you have to download a copy of the client that was the version that matches the server. There's no check to tell if you owned the game, so technically anyone who never bought the game could download that client and pay without playing. I think doing that counts as a copyright violation even if the user owns the full retail version of the game with a current subscription.
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VLC has been far from the best media player on Linux. I went back to mplayer because its speed is unparalleled, seeking in a stream is fast and doesn't break the playback completely, and it doesn't flail around and spaz out if it doesn't understand how to play something.
No one actually cares about the consumer (looking at you, apple fanboy)
Netflix cares, or used to care about the consumer, because they had to.
But now they're not just a content delivery service, they're a content creation service as well. The content creators/owners should not be in charge of the streaming services because they have conflict of interest with their own customers. Content companies SHOULD license their content to any streaming service for a reasonable price, but they don't. Even Netflix won't do that anymore because they're trying to drive their subscriptions to their service by being the sole place where you can watch Stranger Things, etc.
Exclusive contracts screw the customers. They get zero value from it. It's what fragments the market so badly and why so many of us still say "fuck streaming, seriously." We got a taste of the good life from the Netflix DVD-by-mail era, and now the good life is gone.
Considering the fact that rightwingers have been sending men to die in wars for years while women are safe back home, I would say that this hardly only the left's worldview.
Sometimes fiction imitates life and you see the same thing. I know a bunch of MRA-types think Game of Thrones sucks because there are so many "strong females" in it right now (the show kindof sucks now, but for different reasons..) but that's what happens when all of the men of various houses, army leaders, patriarchs, and kings all try their best to kill each other. Many die, and the women fill the power vacuum, but it wouldn't have happened if the men didn't make up all the soldiers, battle commanders, generals, and kings.
Not all of them are this extreme, but a person reaches a point where there are so many problems that have no solutions that eliminating the problems - the constant source of difficult decisions - with a relatively simple choice that then requires no decision-making after... it's appealing.
Of course it's appealing, but it's also a decision that there is no coming back from. You won't be able to say "oops, I made a mistake. Maybe I was wrong about all this." You're not smart enough to know that your problems can't be solved. I'm not either. None of us are.
Insistence otherwise seems selfish at best
I would say suicide is the ultimate act of selfishness. Maybe that person has no ties to others. Maybe they just can't see those ties to others. For most people it's not the case, and suicide is one of the most devastating things you can do to another person. But hey, you won't be around to pick up the pieces and deal with the consequences.
Lock up your remotes. They are a security risk. If someone breaks into your house they can use them to change your TV settings!
Yeah, last year some dudes broke into my house and set the TV to the Playboy channel and then left it on that channel for my wife to find! I'm lucky they didn't steal anything, but it took awhile to convince my wife that the neer-do-wells had broken in.
I think you still consider yourself powerless. The idea that you're not strong enough or worthy enough to keep living for your own sake is so ingrained that you need someone else is out there who wants you to stay alive.
That's true, and it's one of the big draws of AA, and why AA sucks (useless) for a lot of people, because it teaches you that alcoholism is a disease that everyone is too weak to combat themselves. Mostly bullshit, but some people NEED that message and can only exist under it.
If you've owned someones router sufficiently to get onto their LAN, why would you bother with their TV? There are way richer targets on the average home network.
The TV is harder for the user to secure, and it's unlikely to change much for years.
If someone owns a PC, chances are the user will notice -- degraded performance, anti-virus or other product sending out warnings, more computer-savvy relative running tests. It's more likely to be wiped or replaced. Almost no one thinks of checking the TV for something it might be doing behind the scenes. It's a tempting target because it's less likely to get fixed unless your rootkit thing is sloppy enough to affect the watching experience.
Treatment is available, but in the US, you cannot treat someone, even for mental issues, against their wishes.
You can only forcibly treat someone if their illness is considered violently dangerous to others.
In my state, the number of homeless on the streets went up a huge amount and has been an out of control problem ever since when the governor closed the mental hospitals.
$1k-3k tax cuts for middle-class are crumb
Very few people in the middle class will see anything like that. That those cuts also sunset in two years while all the other cuts that benefit the upper class are permanent shows where the intention lies.
Really? So what does that make of someone like Trudeau in Canada, or Nanci Pelosi(Dem), or Keith "ethnostate are great" Ellision(dem leadership) for example. I realize that by looking at the leadership and high-leadership in the opposing party has already set an incredibly low bar,
They do not set a very high bar, but they set it quite a bit higher than Trump does. I'm a conservative who stays far away from the Republican Party, because they sold their souls and integrity for an election victory. I have a lot more admiration for Bill Crystal or a Never-Trumper than I do a fraudster.
it seems, that by his own actions he's managed to accomplish more then Obama did and actually went through the house and senate instead of imposing rules, regulations and unconstitutional orders by EO's.
The only things Trump has accomplished, besides the Tax Bill, has been through the executive action. Many of those were also rejected for their illegality, but hey, they score political points with his base!
Oh yes, that is absolutely true. But if you can't copy the actual original media, you're going online and downloading pirated copies, and that's where things get murky. It's a bit like a medical cannabis patient buying weed from a guy in a back alley. He might be legally allowed to smoke, but the way he's getting it could get him into trouble.
And to clarify my own post...
He's probably still in the clear though, as these days anti-piracy efforts focus on the sharers, not the leechers. It didn't used to be that way, but that's where we're at now.
IANAL, but my understanding is that if you own media (game, movie, music), you are entitled to make a backup copy on whatever media you chose
Oh yes, that is absolutely true. But if you can't copy the actual original media, you're going online and downloading pirated copies, and that's where things get murky. It's a bit like a medical cannabis patient buying weed from a guy in a back alley. He might be legally allowed to smoke, but the way he's getting it could get him into trouble.
Furthermore, what I was talking about back in the day was shareware (more common in the 1980s)
Ah, for the time when you would trade disks on the schoolyard loaded with 20 or so shareware games.
Sadly, I never had network access in the 80s (mom did not believe in having computer modems which would tie up the lines or cost money we didn't have).
Well, I played till Mist of Pandora. Just a few days to level from 80 to 90 ... most boring expansion ever. Did only visit a part of the world, the stupid kung fu panda simply made me sad.
I'll admit I liked the pandas, but that's fine. Warlords (the next expansion) had a good leveling experience, but the endgame was terrible outside of raiding. Probably their worst expansion. The current expansion, Legion, is probably their best expansion.
I love BC, but the zone and quest design was pretty bad. They are simply much better at crafting interesting storylines and interesting zone design now than they were back then. BC had killer raids, though. 5-mans were fairly fun.
Wrath had well-laid out zones and good quests. No problems there. However, they hit a nasty bump at the start of the end game, as the 5-man dungeons were a bit predictable and really really stupidly easy. Naxx-10/25 was ridiculously easy as well. They rebounded nicely with Ulduar, one of the best raids they've ever done, and added a hard mode for those who wanted more challenge. The rest of the expansion was pretty good too. There was a long time gap between the last content patch and the next expansion, though. That started an unpleasant trend.
Cataclysm started off well, though the zones were a bit buggy. The 5-mans were hard (this is good!) but so much effort went into the 1-60 redesign that there was nothing left for the endgame. This was the first real endgame doldrums, and this expansion sucked because of it, its only saving grace being excellent raid design. But if you weren't raiding, you weren't doing much. At the end of the expansion, they made the decision to make 5-mans super-easy again, and the new 5-mans released towards the end which were bland and trivial. Dragon Soul lasted too long; there was too long a gap until the next expansion.
Pandaria had very well designed zones and dungeons and raids, and there was a decent amount to do in the endgame. If you didn't like the whole panda thing, then that's unfortunate, but otherwise it was a pretty good expansion.
Warlords of Draenor. Hooboy. I think most acknowledge that this was Warcraft's worst expansion. Some good questlines, but they had to scrap many things in development, and it threw the whole feel of the continent for a loop. It felt half-finished because it was half-finished. I think much of their design team either left or was fired or reassigned.
Legion. Excellent, excellent expansion, top to bottom. I honestly do think that the game is in the best state it's been in since the Vanilla/BC days. If you want casual content you have LFR and regular dungeons, if you want the harder content you have the fixed 20-man mythic raids and higher levels of mythic+ five-man dungeons. Plenty of solo content (way more than I can do..)
The developers/designers have no clue. They think attracting new 16 year olds to the game as new players makes more money than keeping the 50 year olds in the game.
Not that many 50 year olds are going to stay in the game no matter how much you try to make it like the old days.
Games need -new- players, or they die completely. There is no way to keep all the old players in the game. If it doesn't change/improve, the old players are going to leave anyway because "it's just the same old thing." Keeping it static in an attempt to keep the old player-base who didn't want change is a fool's dream.
Also, they realized in BC that their raid design philosophy was totally broken. Less than 5% of the Warcraft players ever saw the inside of 40-man Naxx during Vanilla. Similar numbers apply to Sunwell in BC. That's too much effort that was put into the game that very few people ever saw. It was after that where they offered stripped-down versions of the raids so people could at least see the content, if not clear the difficult option. Afterwards they added flex-mode raiding, probably one if not the best post-launch features they ever added to the game, though it had the side effect of killing the fixed 10-man raid, so I'll never see the inside of mythic raids again. :-D
When the broadband companies took all those federal subsidies to increase Internet broadband, they used their own "creative" definition of what broadband Internet should be and dumped all that money into cell service. My guess is whenever they talk about Internet service, they're still counting stupid phone data availability.
Uhhh, hell no. Every PC game I played for the first 20 plus years had no mechanism to "phone home" to check in and see if the copy I was using was legit... You have been thoroughly brainwashed (or just grown up with fewer rights) than those of us who knew gaming before DRM where game makers went by the motto
I'm not brainwashed, I'm not talking about what is moral here, only what is legal. I just realize that the way we do things and the way we've always done things has not always been strictly legal. This was my first rationalization of piracy in the 90s, when I realized that the only way to play the game I'd paid for when the original media was scratched/damaged was to pirate. Looking around I found that it wasn't legal, but it wasn't immoral either. I still have my original boxes of King's Quest II and III on their 5.25" floppies, but I doubt that the 24-year-old floppy drive that I'd saved from my college computer could read them, and I wouldn't feel guilty about downloading disk images for them either.
Reverse-engineering WoW protocol counts as circumvention of copy protection (Blizzard will definitely argue it to be true.)
It would be trivial to argue as well. Without private servers, a Blizzard subscription is the only way to play the game. Add private servers, and a subscription is no longer required.
When it spends as much money on its military as the next ten nations combined, the United States can do whatever it damned well pleases. Might makes right.
Yet Russia is more than capable of standing up to the United States. They are more than willing to operate without the blessing of the UN or NATO, and they don't particularly care about sovereignty rights or human rights which started hamstringing US military operations in Vietnam.
The total amount of money spent doesn't matter -- at some point you only need to reach a certain threshold of nuclear weapons. To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the nuclear arms race is like two sworn enemies standing in a room awash with gasoline. One side has five matches, the other side has fifty. Each is concerned who has more matches. The amount of weapons that are available to either side are so bloated, so grossly in excess of what's needed dissuade the other.
Ah yes, the "Deep State." The usual charge made by people who don't realize that President is not a purely authoritarian position. IE, the Justice Department, FBI/CIA, court system, etc, are supposed to be independent of the President even though he appoints some of their members. They are not, and should not be the tool of the President in any democratic government.
I posted too soon. I should have responded to the rest of the post. :-D
Second, it's the whole "What do you got to lose" factor.
Yeah, people post a lot of false equivalency "both of the sides are the same" stuff, and it usually comes back to bite them when it turns out... yeah, you do actually have a lot that you can lose if one side is hostile to your interests.
There's been a few movements to move things back left (Bernie Sanders, Justice Democrats, etc)
Bernie didn't have a chance, and it wasn't because of Clinton shenanigans, though that certainly was a stupid move that blew up in the DNC's faces. The US population is just not socialist enough to elect a guy like Bernie president. Not like with the current congress he would have had much of a chance of doing anything anyway, but he would at least have gotten Merrick Garland in the Supreme Court, or another similar justice of his own choosing.
They're trying to primary Feinstein, but not sure if that's going anywhere
Hard to say. Much of the country seems to hate Democrats from California, though they absolutely LOVE Republicans from California, as much as they love to talk about the state as being a black hole of Republicanism.
Katherine Harris is another name being floated, but she's way too new. Elizabeth Warren? Maybe? I think she might have lost too much momentum since 2015. She should have challenged Clinton instead of stepping aside like a good party peon; if "Fauxcahontas" was the worst scandal one could pin on her, she would have had it made against Trump, instead we got the Clinton train wreck. Not sure if the young Kennedy lad is going anywhere; it seems like it, though I think Americans are leery of family dynasties like the Clintons, Kennedys, Bushes, etc.
First, he makes folks feel good. Make America Great Again hits ya right in the feels.
I always hated that statement, partly because it implies that the country wasn't great in the first place. It ain't perfect, but I think the US was pretty darned great.
You miss the point. If President Trump said the sky was blue, you would dispute that with him. You would come up with SOME reason for it to be untrue.
No, you put words in his mouth. YOU are saying that, not him.
His point was that President Trump making a statement is not any reason to believe that statement is true. He has lied enough that he can't be trusted on anything, so you have to look elsewhere for the truth.
If he thought the crowd size was one thing, and was incorrect - that is not necessarily a lie. People can be wrong and still be sure they are right.
Yes, but when the easily-checked sources say one thing, and you just want to believe (and claim) another thing, at that point it becomes a lie, not just misinformed.
Maybe it should be dependent on usage now. We live in a constantly changing world. I think copyright, trademark and patet law should be rewritten from the ground up.
I think it should stay the way it is, because in today's environment, if it was ever to be "rewritten," it would be a lot less "free" than it is today. Intellectual property would simply be enshrined as pure property, with copying rights enshrined having no limitation just like physical property. The only pushback against that we ever get today is because the older rules were a little more non-copyright-holder friendly and respected that copyright was supposed to be a balance -- a limitation on someone's rights with the expectation that they get something in return: more works entering the public domain. Yeah, yeah, I know, continuous extension of the already-ridiculous copyright terms have broken this agreement, but I do think that things COULD get a lot worse, and absolutely would in our current overly-friendly environment to corporate copyright interests.
Also, "abandon" doesn't invalidate the copyright ownership of the product.
Certainly not, but it certainly helps me "abandon" any guilt over downloading a ROM, especially if I'd paid for the game already back in the day.
From or After(not sure) the the third expansion you could have downloaded them for free.
Yeah, but it still requires a game subscription. They let you play for free up to level 20.
Right now, they offer "World of Warcraft" (including every expansion before the current one, 1 - 100) for $10, though you will need to purchase a subscription or game time to actually play the game. The current expansion retails for $30 now.
They also offer "World of Warcraft: Complete Collection" for $90, and I'm not sure what really is the point of that. I think it comes with Legion and a pre-purchase for the next expansion ($50 value) along with a month of game time ($15 value), so it's basically the $10 bundle and $25 for Legion. So I guess that whole bundle saves you... $5? Maybe worth it if you really want to play NOW, but it'll be more economical a year from now.
Everyone playing retro servers bought this and therefore legitimately can play it without copyright violation...
I'm... guessing that's probably the case, but there doesn't have to be. For instance, I'm pretty sure you can't use the actual WoW client with a legacy server, you have to download a copy of the client that was the version that matches the server. There's no check to tell if you owned the game, so technically anyone who never bought the game could download that client and pay without playing. I think doing that counts as a copyright violation even if the user owns the full retail version of the game with a current subscription.