Just because you don't have sex doesn't mean that you don't have a sex.
The idea is that no matter which single race you choose to discriminate against, it would be less than 50% of the population. It fails because there's no reason a racist should only hate one other race, while a sexist by definition is only against one sex.
Metal detectors? Give me a break, any idiot can get past *that* with whatever weapon she desires short of a tank. I would say you should be able to get through a metal detector given a tank, as well.
It depends. If you have $4 on the first day you need the widget, then TCO certainly makes it sensible to get that one. But if you have a requirement and only $3 to get it done, TCO is just an acronym.
Some do, some don't. I once lost my card but had the number memorized, so I used it for online transactions. I had the card number right but had misremembered the CVN, though I didn't discover this for several months because the wrong one I was entering worked most of the time. Paypal and Blizzard were the only two merchants that actually rejected it. I wonder why the rest even asked since they obviously weren't checking.
The young do not have a monopoly on immaturity. I know of at least one cursing, griefing, camping hellion in WoW who is a well-paid professional in his mid-30s when not logged in.
He didn't... if you pay to play the CCG, you can get items in the MMO. People are probably buying the CCG just to play the CCG, but some are buying the CCG strictly for its potential MMO content, and that's what he's talking about.
EverQuest II is doing this. They only have one buy/sell server and it doesn't seem very popular, but note this is a community in which there is a stigma attached to buying things. There are undoubtedly players who would/should be playing there but aren't because of social pressure.
If you've played those games and can suggest some that are similar, I would be open to them. You might take a look at Gothic II. Should be able to find it cheap.
China's not communist despite the trappings of a communist regime. They are extremely capitalistic. This doesn't necessarily change your point because it is still a potential economic threat if you choose to view it in such a light, but I think it's an important distinction.
Re:You pretty much deserve all you get.
on
The $54 Million Laptop
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· Score: 3, Interesting
So crime is okay because victims should protect themselves? It is the duty of the weak and/or ignorant to bear aggression from those stronger or more informed? What a nice lawless society we should have! I don't know why I didn't see this before. Clint Eastwood's westerns taught us all we need to know about civilization.
The A4 Skyhawk is a very capable aircraft, and has multiple ordnance configurations. There are two wing mounted pylons, and a center mounted pylon. Each pylon is capable of being fitted with an MCBR - the Multiple Coconut Bomb Rack (later re-named by some pencil-pusher to the Multiple Carriage Bomb Rack.) Captain (now Lt. General, ret) William H. Fitch was instrumental in the development of the MCBR. It's not a question of where he grips it...
If your cattle - I mean, employees are so easily gotten rid of and replaced, why bother documenting at all? The entire point is to get the knowledge from your best/most senior employees before they leave. This is a big trend now because company loyalty is a thing of the past and so turnover is higher than it used to be. Show me an office where most of the people have been there for more than five years, and I'll show you a government office.
Going to start trying to shorten this up, no offense intended.
...cost of war...
I cannot argue specific numbers because I don't know them. But some of that money was already earmarked for defense, we didn't start at $0 and have to pay for it all, we started at some-odd billions of dollars already in the budget for that. The taxpayers didn't "lose" that money, it was already gone.
I'm not referring to a modern.50 with gyroscopic stabilization. Even an old 30-06 with hunting scope would qualify. Are you trying to make some special distinction?
Yes, I am. Those two weapons are not at all equivalent. I have fired an M14 with a scope at about 1200 meters. Even with the scope, it is not an automatic hit, and I was a pretty good shot at the time. When you say "sniper rifle" your audience is unlikely to assume that you mean a 40-year-old weapon, they're going to think you mean a modern piece of ordnance, and new sniper rifles are a damned sight more dangerous than an M1. In addition to that, a sniper is going to be a lot more dangerous from a quarter mile than any hunter, even a good shot, simply because hunters don't typically fire from those distances. If your only point is that hunting rifles are dangerous, okay conceded but I don't see the point. Calling an M1 a sniper rifle is disingenuous. It may have been a sniper rifle in 1945 but it wouldn't be considered one today unless it was heavily modified.
This was my point about how I grew up. Most households had guns... These things weren't secrets.
Unless I misinterpret you, all you're saying here is that weapons don't kill people, people do. This is actually my statement as well. You have anecdotal evidence that says people will treat weapons sensibly, but history has many counterexamples. Unfortunately, as you provide bigger and bigger military-grade weapons, the power of the few to affect the many increases. So it doesn't matter whether you and all your town-mates are model citizens even with rocket launchers. The next town over might not be. Or the town beyond that. Or some guys 1,500 miles away. It still blows you up. And historically SOMEONE in there will not be responsible.
If you wanted to kill me you could find many ways that would be just as effective as driving a tank over and blowing my house away, but with far less work or risk.
Shooting at you with the main gun of a tank is much, much easier than hitting you with a car. I don't even have to hit you or see you with a tank, a phosphorous round into your house will virtually guarantee your death... I don't even have to get within a block of you. And a tank is downright cumbersome compared to some of the stuff you're proposing to make available. In addition the potential for collateral damage is much higher. I really can't see where you're coming from here.
A far bigger risk to the neighborhood would be blowing up a gasoline tanker to kill someone. They've been stolen before, and are not as noticeable as tanks.
Gasoline tankers are also not available to common citizens. I suppose if you were sufficiently skilled and motivated, you could already steal a tank right now. How does this affect your change?
Glad to hear it. Did it occur to you that if you opposed it, you might not be in the group I was talking about?
The evidence for the statements being untrue was not available in the beginning. If you thought they were lying from the start, then either you work for the CIA or it was an unfounded kneejerk reaction. Yeah, it was pretty clear fairly early on and a lot of tunes changed, but not at the beginning when decisions were made. The only people who knew it was a lie then were the liars.
Pft. The reason given had nothing to do with the reasons used. It was c
But there is no car yet. These tags get used when some part of the engine is invented, and people seem to assume that a car will be built and then it will not be driven safely. Most of the articles I've seen this tag on are very basic advances, not applications at all. Application is where most of the caution needs to take place, isn't it? In addition, the tag is really only applied to certain sciences. I'm not as worked up as the OP, but I do agree that its use on the site has been primarily ignorant and pessimistic. Sometimes it's funny though.
That's an interesting idea, but it's also a little dangerous in my opinion. Once we have the MMO teams monitoring time played to determine billing, it's a short step back to the bad old CompuServe days of pay by the hour. Sometimes I'm a pretty avid gamer, I'm not excited to go back to that revenue model.
If 'we' have nukes, because 'they' have nukes, then I have partial responsibility in our next Hiroshima. It doesn't matter who is threatening me, if I let that nuke be used in my name, I'm as guilty as if I pushed the button myself. There may be a good reason to use the nuke. One that I'd accept, and push the button even. But if I'm morally liable for the use of the weapon, I think I'd like to hold onto it.
That seems arbitrary to me. Many of the things you do in life affect other people to some extent; are you this responsible about all of them? I see the nobility in your stance; I just don't think it's practical. You are assuming that you will always make rational decisions, and (more importantly) that everyone else will, too. Even the military, which you seem to consider reckless, doesn't do this. There is no "button." No one man in the US can launch nukes. Even the President has checks on him (though he admittedly has a lot fewer checks than you or I, who are presumably incapable altogether.) I don't think a decision like mass destruction should ever be in the hands of a single person.
Yes, I am suggesting that every citizen fight. If we don't fight, and dodge a call to war, does our country deserve to stand?
Not fighting and dodging a call to service are two different things. The majority of people in the armed forces are not front-line combat personnel.
IMHO those willing to fight should wall off a smaller country that they can defend, leaving the unwilling to their doom. If we have to draft people to fight, that's a vote, where a majority of people said they're unwilling to fight. But we'll treat them like slaves, put a gun in their hand and shoot them if they don't walk towards to the enemy with it.
This has never been American policy, not once, even when we had a draft (which we haven't had for over thirty years.) Even when you are drafted, you have a choice. If you're not willing to fight, you can always leave the country, which is exactly how you said it should be ("IMHO those willing to fight should wall off a smaller country that they can defend, leaving the unwilling to their doom.")
We're defending our moral right to live unmolested - by taking and abusing slaves, threatening them with death and forcing them to kill people. Doesn't sound very right...
No war was ever instigated for the moral right to live unmolested. That's propaganda. The draft is far from slavery, and it's only abuse if you consider being obligated to fulfill one's obligations abuse. There is no moral right to live in a particular society. If you choose to live in one, you must be willing to make sacrifices, the same sacrifices that others made to create and maintain the society you enjoy. For them it's heroism but for you it's abuse?
The war in Iraq is costing us a fortune.
Now here is something on which we may agree.
You think that if people had to give up half their possessions to support the war, that they would?
The war is very expensive but it's nowhere close to half the net worth of America. Do I think people would have given $20 or even $100 to support the war when it started? Yes, I do. Do I think that even some people who were against the war might have donated? Yes. Would that have been enough to finance the whole thing up until now? Certainly not! But you're almost certainly playing Monday morning quarterback. Only a very few people foresaw this result, because only a very few were even questioning it at the time, and those people were castigated. Be honest: when the war started, did you think it would still be going on in 2008? I was against the war from the start but I never imagined it would be managed as poorly as it was. As you noted, these are lessons I would have thought were well-learned. I wasn't against the war because we'd be mired in a protrac
Your assumptions are reasonable but incorrect. I was in the US Marine Corps for six years. I know exactly how it works. Of course we weren't morons, you don't have to be a moron to believe what authorities tell you in the absence of contradicting evidence. When I was in, were Communists the enemy? Yes. Why? I had never actually met one, nor had one done me harm. They were the enemy simply because we were told (again and again) that they were. I am not stupid, but if I had been asked to kill a man because he was a Communist, I would have complied immediately as long as the order was apparently lawful (e.g., I wouldn't have shot a prisoner.)
All of your thought processes as a soldier are not necessarily conventionally rational. I'm not saying that you're mindless because you're not, but obeying orders instantly is very high on your list because orders are generally assumed to be for the good of those you are defending. Enemies are, of necessity, assigned by people higher than you, often for inscrutable reasons that, after a time, you stop trying to fathom. If you do question it, appeals to emotion are very common. This is the phenomenon I oversimplified in my first post.
Finally, history bears me out. Anyone will fight anyone as long as they are convinced by a third party that they are enemies. The Crusades, just about any civil war, or protracted engagements like Afghanistan for the USSR or Vietnam for the US are all examples of bitter fighting over, objectively, nothing the actual fighters would strongly disagree about. They are fighting because they are told to fight, and they are told it is in the best interest of their loved ones. That's how war works. A normal man doesn't risk his life for a common soldier's wage.
I think the fact that there are players who never played any other MMO before WoW speaks volumes as well. This tells me that people with no knowledge of previous interfaces, systems or any of the pioneering games that lead to WoW decided to take the plunge and are staying. Plus I get a kick when I talk to these people and they ask me how long I've played. Saying "since beta" makes their eyes go wide, but saying "MMOs since 1997" makes their jaw drop.:-) Yeah, I'm an old gamer, and in my opinion, it will take a serious evolution of game to dethrone WoW. I fully expect that Blizzard will be the ones to take that next step, too. People tried WoW first because it was from Blizzard. That's all it took. The fact that the game turned out to have a great interface and very good graphics helped retention, but most of those people would have tried it anyway.
They are staying because WoW is good! No argument there. The interface is arguably still the best even after most new MMOs have been copying it for a couple of years now. I personally prefer the quickly outdated look for some reason, but I will not argue about art - WoW's is excellent and I don't blame anyone for liking it. As far as terrain, I think LotRO looks much better. As far as models, I don't think any game has had really good-looking models but City of Heroes has the best character creation system. I don't like WoW's PvP in general, they have some great ideas like Battlegrounds that are wonderful, but I think the classes are horribly imbalanced, always have been and probably always will be, and that doesn't make for fun PvP. I did play most of Arena Season 2, though. It could be fun sometimes.
I can't match you in a pissing contest, but I have been playing PC games since ~1984 and my first MMO was EverQuest in 1999, so I'm no newbie either. I think it's great that WoW brought so many new players into the genre (for example, if this many players had played Dark Age of Camelot I think that game's PvP would have been much better than anything in WoW - too bad they never had that many people even take a look.)
I'm not saying WoW isn't good. I just disagree that it's the best. For example, I think EverQuest II is, overall, a better game, but there's no way most people will even look at it - Sony has a horrible reputation and the art style really puts some people off. I think DAoC still has a better PvP system. Crafting is better in EQ II or LotRO. You tried them perhaps, but many many WoW players will never see whether they agree with me. As long as they're having fun it doesn't really matter. I'm just reacting to all the hype.
You do start over at level one but at some point you get to use skills from both classes at once, so you are actually advancing your main character. There's a cap on the secondary class, I think it was capped at half the level of your primary or something like that. You get some of the alt experience but it's not much the same (as you noted, you're the same race, etc.) although if you wait long enough to start your second class you'll be powerful enough to travel to another starting area and level up there.
Changing classes was also instant and free, so you could, e.g., level up healer levels so that you could still have a viable group when the healer wasn't online, and your healer wouldn't be completely gimped like an alt, he would actually be your main. Somewhat subtle perhaps but the experience overall was very different from an alt, at least to me.
We should be able to own anything our government stocks. If it's too horrible for a citizen to buy, it's too horrid for us to be involved in using at all. The government's stocks are dictated by external forces, though. Once America had nukes, anyone without nukes was/is at a big disadvantage, militarily speaking. If any significantly powerful government anywhere in the world is willing to stock something citizens shouldn't buy, you're out of luck. Either you get to where we are, with "military grade" equipment, or you are defeated and lose the right altogether.
Also, if you and I owned a partial share in a combat aircraft we'd be quick to use it for defense, but quite unlikely to fly it across the world on a hunt for non-existent WMDs. Assuming we could all see the future, yes. At the time this would easily have passed a vote. Your point is well-taken but I think this is a very bad example.
Having to directly foot the bill for a war (not hidden in tax) would keep most wars from ever happening. Couldn't disagree more. Wars don't happen because governments are petty and greedy and vengeful. Wars happen because people are all of those things. Yeah everyone's against the war now. That wasn't true when it started. Some of the people screaming the loudest now were screaming the opposite just as loudly then. Increasing the number of people that must approve military action just increases beauracracy and renders your military slow and unresponsive. This is generally a bad thing, I would argue that an unresponsive force is just as bad (though in a different way) as an overactive one.
Having an army that most of us will never actually see, and certainly don't see the results of, lets us use the army when we wouldn't be willing to shoot someone on the other side ourselves. No accountability in the use of the weapon because you don't have to look at the weapon to use it. This will always be the case unless you are suggesting that every registered voter personally go fight. We are well past the point economically and militarily where this is needed, or even desirable. Maybe I am misunderstanding you.
I support private ownership of military weapons because 1) it'll happen anyways 2) things like bioweapons are much scarier than a machine gun, or even a nuke and 3) trusting the military is trusting a bunch of individuals... individuals I'd trust more without an indoctrinating body capable of forcing them to perform immoral acts.
People don't need to be forced into immoral acts. Putting assault rifles and landmines and grenades in houses... what could possibly go wrong?
Sure, we'd get more tank-based bank robberies, but we'd kill far less foreigners in stupid wars. And maybe having to be responsible for our own defense would make us respect the difficulty involved and not only do it better, but perhaps piss off less people to make it easier. You think that any dude who can angrily hop in a tank with two drunk buddies will lead to less war? I hope you're young or from another planet, because you have a great deal to learn about humans.
Slashdot Mirror
Just because you don't have sex doesn't mean that you don't have a sex.
The idea is that no matter which single race you choose to discriminate against, it would be less than 50% of the population. It fails because there's no reason a racist should only hate one other race, while a sexist by definition is only against one sex.
I would say you should be able to get through a metal detector given a tank, as well.
So the Apple Store is the safest place to be?
It depends. If you have $4 on the first day you need the widget, then TCO certainly makes it sensible to get that one. But if you have a requirement and only $3 to get it done, TCO is just an acronym.
She's a fine girl; what a good wife she would be!
Some do, some don't. I once lost my card but had the number memorized, so I used it for online transactions. I had the card number right but had misremembered the CVN, though I didn't discover this for several months because the wrong one I was entering worked most of the time. Paypal and Blizzard were the only two merchants that actually rejected it. I wonder why the rest even asked since they obviously weren't checking.
The young do not have a monopoly on immaturity. I know of at least one cursing, griefing, camping hellion in WoW who is a well-paid professional in his mid-30s when not logged in.
He didn't... if you pay to play the CCG, you can get items in the MMO. People are probably buying the CCG just to play the CCG, but some are buying the CCG strictly for its potential MMO content, and that's what he's talking about.
EverQuest II is doing this. They only have one buy/sell server and it doesn't seem very popular, but note this is a community in which there is a stigma attached to buying things. There are undoubtedly players who would/should be playing there but aren't because of social pressure.
Dude, if that's one meal for you, you must weigh 250lbs.
For serious, Slim. Eat the whole box, get a real belly!China's not communist despite the trappings of a communist regime. They are extremely capitalistic. This doesn't necessarily change your point because it is still a potential economic threat if you choose to view it in such a light, but I think it's an important distinction.
If we could do that, there would be no posts.
So crime is okay because victims should protect themselves? It is the duty of the weak and/or ignorant to bear aggression from those stronger or more informed? What a nice lawless society we should have! I don't know why I didn't see this before. Clint Eastwood's westerns taught us all we need to know about civilization.
If your cattle - I mean, employees are so easily gotten rid of and replaced, why bother documenting at all? The entire point is to get the knowledge from your best/most senior employees before they leave. This is a big trend now because company loyalty is a thing of the past and so turnover is higher than it used to be. Show me an office where most of the people have been there for more than five years, and I'll show you a government office.
I cannot argue specific numbers because I don't know them. But some of that money was already earmarked for defense, we didn't start at $0 and have to pay for it all, we started at some-odd billions of dollars already in the budget for that. The taxpayers didn't "lose" that money, it was already gone.
I'm not referring to a modern .50 with gyroscopic stabilization. Even an old 30-06 with hunting scope would qualify. Are you trying to make some special distinction?
Yes, I am. Those two weapons are not at all equivalent. I have fired an M14 with a scope at about 1200 meters. Even with the scope, it is not an automatic hit, and I was a pretty good shot at the time. When you say "sniper rifle" your audience is unlikely to assume that you mean a 40-year-old weapon, they're going to think you mean a modern piece of ordnance, and new sniper rifles are a damned sight more dangerous than an M1. In addition to that, a sniper is going to be a lot more dangerous from a quarter mile than any hunter, even a good shot, simply because hunters don't typically fire from those distances. If your only point is that hunting rifles are dangerous, okay conceded but I don't see the point. Calling an M1 a sniper rifle is disingenuous. It may have been a sniper rifle in 1945 but it wouldn't be considered one today unless it was heavily modified.
This was my point about how I grew up. Most households had guns... These things weren't secrets.
Unless I misinterpret you, all you're saying here is that weapons don't kill people, people do. This is actually my statement as well. You have anecdotal evidence that says people will treat weapons sensibly, but history has many counterexamples. Unfortunately, as you provide bigger and bigger military-grade weapons, the power of the few to affect the many increases. So it doesn't matter whether you and all your town-mates are model citizens even with rocket launchers. The next town over might not be. Or the town beyond that. Or some guys 1,500 miles away. It still blows you up. And historically SOMEONE in there will not be responsible.
If you wanted to kill me you could find many ways that would be just as effective as driving a tank over and blowing my house away, but with far less work or risk.
Shooting at you with the main gun of a tank is much, much easier than hitting you with a car. I don't even have to hit you or see you with a tank, a phosphorous round into your house will virtually guarantee your death... I don't even have to get within a block of you. And a tank is downright cumbersome compared to some of the stuff you're proposing to make available. In addition the potential for collateral damage is much higher. I really can't see where you're coming from here.
A far bigger risk to the neighborhood would be blowing up a gasoline tanker to kill someone. They've been stolen before, and are not as noticeable as tanks.
Gasoline tankers are also not available to common citizens. I suppose if you were sufficiently skilled and motivated, you could already steal a tank right now. How does this affect your change?
Glad to hear it. Did it occur to you that if you opposed it, you might not be in the group I was talking about?
The evidence for the statements being untrue was not available in the beginning. If you thought they were lying from the start, then either you work for the CIA or it was an unfounded kneejerk reaction. Yeah, it was pretty clear fairly early on and a lot of tunes changed, but not at the beginning when decisions were made. The only people who knew it was a lie then were the liars.
Pft. The reason given had nothing to do with the reasons used. It was c
If he did then at the end it would turn out that the lead scientist is actually a monkey himself! Also, he's Bruce Willis.
But there is no car yet. These tags get used when some part of the engine is invented, and people seem to assume that a car will be built and then it will not be driven safely. Most of the articles I've seen this tag on are very basic advances, not applications at all. Application is where most of the caution needs to take place, isn't it? In addition, the tag is really only applied to certain sciences. I'm not as worked up as the OP, but I do agree that its use on the site has been primarily ignorant and pessimistic. Sometimes it's funny though.
That's an interesting idea, but it's also a little dangerous in my opinion. Once we have the MMO teams monitoring time played to determine billing, it's a short step back to the bad old CompuServe days of pay by the hour. Sometimes I'm a pretty avid gamer, I'm not excited to go back to that revenue model.
If 'we' have nukes, because 'they' have nukes, then I have partial responsibility in our next Hiroshima. It doesn't matter who is threatening me, if I let that nuke be used in my name, I'm as guilty as if I pushed the button myself. There may be a good reason to use the nuke. One that I'd accept, and push the button even. But if I'm morally liable for the use of the weapon, I think I'd like to hold onto it.
That seems arbitrary to me. Many of the things you do in life affect other people to some extent; are you this responsible about all of them? I see the nobility in your stance; I just don't think it's practical. You are assuming that you will always make rational decisions, and (more importantly) that everyone else will, too. Even the military, which you seem to consider reckless, doesn't do this. There is no "button." No one man in the US can launch nukes. Even the President has checks on him (though he admittedly has a lot fewer checks than you or I, who are presumably incapable altogether.) I don't think a decision like mass destruction should ever be in the hands of a single person.
Yes, I am suggesting that every citizen fight. If we don't fight, and dodge a call to war, does our country deserve to stand?
Not fighting and dodging a call to service are two different things. The majority of people in the armed forces are not front-line combat personnel.
IMHO those willing to fight should wall off a smaller country that they can defend, leaving the unwilling to their doom. If we have to draft people to fight, that's a vote, where a majority of people said they're unwilling to fight. But we'll treat them like slaves, put a gun in their hand and shoot them if they don't walk towards to the enemy with it.
This has never been American policy, not once, even when we had a draft (which we haven't had for over thirty years.) Even when you are drafted, you have a choice. If you're not willing to fight, you can always leave the country, which is exactly how you said it should be ("IMHO those willing to fight should wall off a smaller country that they can defend, leaving the unwilling to their doom.")
We're defending our moral right to live unmolested - by taking and abusing slaves, threatening them with death and forcing them to kill people. Doesn't sound very right...
No war was ever instigated for the moral right to live unmolested. That's propaganda. The draft is far from slavery, and it's only abuse if you consider being obligated to fulfill one's obligations abuse. There is no moral right to live in a particular society. If you choose to live in one, you must be willing to make sacrifices, the same sacrifices that others made to create and maintain the society you enjoy. For them it's heroism but for you it's abuse?
The war in Iraq is costing us a fortune.
Now here is something on which we may agree.
You think that if people had to give up half their possessions to support the war, that they would?
The war is very expensive but it's nowhere close to half the net worth of America. Do I think people would have given $20 or even $100 to support the war when it started? Yes, I do. Do I think that even some people who were against the war might have donated? Yes. Would that have been enough to finance the whole thing up until now? Certainly not! But you're almost certainly playing Monday morning quarterback. Only a very few people foresaw this result, because only a very few were even questioning it at the time, and those people were castigated. Be honest: when the war started, did you think it would still be going on in 2008? I was against the war from the start but I never imagined it would be managed as poorly as it was. As you noted, these are lessons I would have thought were well-learned. I wasn't against the war because we'd be mired in a protrac
Your assumptions are reasonable but incorrect. I was in the US Marine Corps for six years. I know exactly how it works. Of course we weren't morons, you don't have to be a moron to believe what authorities tell you in the absence of contradicting evidence. When I was in, were Communists the enemy? Yes. Why? I had never actually met one, nor had one done me harm. They were the enemy simply because we were told (again and again) that they were. I am not stupid, but if I had been asked to kill a man because he was a Communist, I would have complied immediately as long as the order was apparently lawful (e.g., I wouldn't have shot a prisoner.)
All of your thought processes as a soldier are not necessarily conventionally rational. I'm not saying that you're mindless because you're not, but obeying orders instantly is very high on your list because orders are generally assumed to be for the good of those you are defending. Enemies are, of necessity, assigned by people higher than you, often for inscrutable reasons that, after a time, you stop trying to fathom. If you do question it, appeals to emotion are very common. This is the phenomenon I oversimplified in my first post.
Finally, history bears me out. Anyone will fight anyone as long as they are convinced by a third party that they are enemies. The Crusades, just about any civil war, or protracted engagements like Afghanistan for the USSR or Vietnam for the US are all examples of bitter fighting over, objectively, nothing the actual fighters would strongly disagree about. They are fighting because they are told to fight, and they are told it is in the best interest of their loved ones. That's how war works. A normal man doesn't risk his life for a common soldier's wage.
People tried WoW first because it was from Blizzard. That's all it took. The fact that the game turned out to have a great interface and very good graphics helped retention, but most of those people would have tried it anyway.
They are staying because WoW is good! No argument there. The interface is arguably still the best even after most new MMOs have been copying it for a couple of years now. I personally prefer the quickly outdated look for some reason, but I will not argue about art - WoW's is excellent and I don't blame anyone for liking it. As far as terrain, I think LotRO looks much better. As far as models, I don't think any game has had really good-looking models but City of Heroes has the best character creation system. I don't like WoW's PvP in general, they have some great ideas like Battlegrounds that are wonderful, but I think the classes are horribly imbalanced, always have been and probably always will be, and that doesn't make for fun PvP. I did play most of Arena Season 2, though. It could be fun sometimes.
I can't match you in a pissing contest, but I have been playing PC games since ~1984 and my first MMO was EverQuest in 1999, so I'm no newbie either. I think it's great that WoW brought so many new players into the genre (for example, if this many players had played Dark Age of Camelot I think that game's PvP would have been much better than anything in WoW - too bad they never had that many people even take a look.)
I'm not saying WoW isn't good. I just disagree that it's the best. For example, I think EverQuest II is, overall, a better game, but there's no way most people will even look at it - Sony has a horrible reputation and the art style really puts some people off. I think DAoC still has a better PvP system. Crafting is better in EQ II or LotRO. You tried them perhaps, but many many WoW players will never see whether they agree with me. As long as they're having fun it doesn't really matter. I'm just reacting to all the hype.
You do start over at level one but at some point you get to use skills from both classes at once, so you are actually advancing your main character. There's a cap on the secondary class, I think it was capped at half the level of your primary or something like that. You get some of the alt experience but it's not much the same (as you noted, you're the same race, etc.) although if you wait long enough to start your second class you'll be powerful enough to travel to another starting area and level up there.
Changing classes was also instant and free, so you could, e.g., level up healer levels so that you could still have a viable group when the healer wasn't online, and your healer wouldn't be completely gimped like an alt, he would actually be your main. Somewhat subtle perhaps but the experience overall was very different from an alt, at least to me.
The government's stocks are dictated by external forces, though. Once America had nukes, anyone without nukes was/is at a big disadvantage, militarily speaking. If any significantly powerful government anywhere in the world is willing to stock something citizens shouldn't buy, you're out of luck. Either you get to where we are, with "military grade" equipment, or you are defeated and lose the right altogether.
Also, if you and I owned a partial share in a combat aircraft we'd be quick to use it for defense, but quite unlikely to fly it across the world on a hunt for non-existent WMDs.
Assuming we could all see the future, yes. At the time this would easily have passed a vote. Your point is well-taken but I think this is a very bad example.
Having to directly foot the bill for a war (not hidden in tax) would keep most wars from ever happening.
Couldn't disagree more. Wars don't happen because governments are petty and greedy and vengeful. Wars happen because people are all of those things. Yeah everyone's against the war now. That wasn't true when it started. Some of the people screaming the loudest now were screaming the opposite just as loudly then. Increasing the number of people that must approve military action just increases beauracracy and renders your military slow and unresponsive. This is generally a bad thing, I would argue that an unresponsive force is just as bad (though in a different way) as an overactive one.
Having an army that most of us will never actually see, and certainly don't see the results of, lets us use the army when we wouldn't be willing to shoot someone on the other side ourselves. No accountability in the use of the weapon because you don't have to look at the weapon to use it.
This will always be the case unless you are suggesting that every registered voter personally go fight. We are well past the point economically and militarily where this is needed, or even desirable. Maybe I am misunderstanding you.
I support private ownership of military weapons because 1) it'll happen anyways 2) things like bioweapons are much scarier than a machine gun, or even a nuke and 3) trusting the military is trusting a bunch of individuals
People don't need to be forced into immoral acts. Putting assault rifles and landmines and grenades in houses... what could possibly go wrong?
Sure, we'd get more tank-based bank robberies, but we'd kill far less foreigners in stupid wars. And maybe having to be responsible for our own defense would make us respect the difficulty involved and not only do it better, but perhaps piss off less people to make it easier.
You think that any dude who can angrily hop in a tank with two drunk buddies will lead to less war? I hope you're young or from another planet, because you have a great deal to learn about humans.