It does seem to me though, that iTunes has proved the "If you build it they will come" theory of digital distribution. The music industry kicked and screamed and cried and refused to build a good digital distribution center both because they were worried about piracy (which didn't really seem to get any worse), and because they were completely unconvinced it could ever make any amount of money. So Apple built iTunes, which is at best a "decent" attempt at a distribution center, and it's a license to print money. Once people realized that there was a (relatively) friendly store that had (a lot of) the content they wanted, they flocked there in droves. It's only gotten better as Apple has refined the UI and increased the catalog. Now anybody who's anybody in on iTunes. My dad can find his obscure Jazz musicians, my brother can find his favorite grunge bands, I can find weird Irish folk rock, and my wife can find the soundtrack to CSI. All in one place, and without too much effort.
It's pretty clear to me that the reason video production companies aren't making money hand over fist from the Internet is the lack of an iTunes store. It's not the music is magically easier to sell online, and it's not that Apple is magically successful where other companies are not. It's that there is no one place that I can go to reliably expect to find any movie or TV show I want with a reasonably easy searchable index. The bandwidth is mostly there, the storage is mostly there (I saw a not-quite-a-netbook at Costco for $750 yesterday with a 360GB HDD, and HDMI connector) all that is needed for the "iMovies" store to take off is someone to convince the video distributors to give them (something approaching) everything all the time at an acceptable level of quality, and for them make give a halfway decent UI. The People will come. Just like they did to the iTunes store.
If that means I won't get to hear what otherwise would have been pushed by the RIAA-members as the latest new fad
I don't know what it means for you exactly. If you're lucky enough to live in Seattle, New York, New Orleans, Chicago or other places with a really great local band scene it may not matter at all. When I lived in New Orleans I could go weeks without hearing a band that I didn't personally know members of. If, on the other hand, you live in a smaller city, or god forbid a small town, it could mean you'd be lucky to hear anything more than a local "cover band" more than once a every few months. I mean Huntsville (where I currently live) isn't exactly overflowing with new musical experiences from what I've seen. Even I'm probably lucky compared to the people in say, Vicksburg, MS, where the only time I saw any live bands at all was when they had small music festival (unless you count the guys at the Mexican Restaurant badly covering "Margaritaville" and "Hotel California")
It's a pretty unlikely scenario I'll grant you, but so it going back to patronage as the primary means to support artists.
Now that I totally agree with. The idea that people will NOT be a bit mussed and sweaty in 95F/99% humidity weather is fairly silly, but it still seems to be the expectation.
yeah, and you know who got to hear Mozart? Not you, chump. Musicians with patrons created and performed for their patrons. Musicians without patrons hoped people threw enough copper into their cups to allow to them both eat AND have a room that night. No it wasn't universally like that, there were paid gigs with orchestras at theaters and such, but mostly that was how it worked.
It may not be our job to figure out how they can make money, but it is our problem if they don't. It is clear to me that you (I'm using "you" generically here, what I'm say may not apply to you personally, but it applies to lots of people who hold similar opinions) value the work the artists create (or you wouldn't be downloading it every chance you get). If you value the professional quality of movies made by studios (as opposed to 'Ask a Ninja' or 'Pupu Broussard') or music made by professional musicians than it behooves you to worry about how we as a society might continue to pay for such things. Because we will miss them when they are gone. People will NOT continue to make movies without budgets. Really they CANNOT. Movies are expensive to make. Many fewer people will record music (and almost none will record professionally mastered music) if they cannot sell the recordings. If you're prepared to lose that as a sacrifice to the Gods of "information wants to be free", I suppose that's your right, but don't argue that it's not your problem unless you're prepared to live in the world you want to create.
Spoken like someone who has never lived in the Southern US. Trust me, standing in one place outside for 10 minutes in July in Dallas (or New Orleans, or Houston, or any of dozens of other such cities on the Gulf Coast and Desert Southwest) will give you an "unprofessional sweat" no matter how good a shape you're in. When it's 97F and 100% humidity (Gulf Coast, quite common) or 105F and who cares what the humidity is at that point (Desert Southwest), you sweat. Period. I used to get sweaty walking the block and half from my office to the bagel shop in New Orleans, and I ran 10Ks at the time.
I actually found changing trains in Europe to be way easier than changing planes. You get off the train, and since train tracks are usually much closer together than airport gates, you walk a few hundred feet and get on the other train when it arrives. No "boarding process", there's nearly always a chance to grab a snack, but no a really long wait. It was great. I think the longest we had to spend in a station was 45 minutes (which would be bloody short as a plane layover goes, I'd be worried about making my connection), and we had turnarounds as quick as 20 minutes. Boarding and getting off trains is much faster than planes, so you can get the changing process done easily. Only disadvantage is you have to wait on the boarding platforms which can be outside. Cold/heat can be uncomfortable in those circumstances, but I'd guess that recently built train stations have some way of getting around this (the European stations I used were generally older than modern climate control).
Dude, I offered a citation, her wikipedia page. I'm sorry I didn't link it, I didn't think wikipedia was that hard to find. The page quotes her as saying:
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
At least read what I wrote before you jump all over me and accuse me of crap. Given that it was one of the defining events of Miss Park's life, given that she was an NAACP employee at the time, given that the NAACP was already involved in a fight to get the bus laws changed, given that they had already tried to rally behind another woman for essentially the same reason before deciding that she wasn't "sympathetic enough" and deciding to find a new horse to back, I find it highly unlikely that Miss Parks misremembered these event.
The event isn't "Lost to history" there are (or were, many are probably dead now) multiple first hand witnesses who have all given the general outline of the same story. Rosa Parks was not just some tired lady who wanted a seat more than she wanted to stay out of jail. She was a hero who deliberately defied an unjust authority. Where the other story came from I don't know. Maybe some news talking heads though it sounded better, maybe it was a (slightly dishonest) defense at her trial, I have no idea, but I'm sure that if I had time I could find out. Since you're so interested in the story, look around yourself.
The fact that she's admitted it? Well, "admitted" is probably the wrong word, as it makes her sounds guilty of something, but she's stated as much for the record. She was affiliated with Civil Rights groups and went onto the buss to perform and act of civil disobedience. I dunno how the "she was just to tired" meme got started, or why it's propagate since the truth is more courageous than the fiction, but I heard her talk about it on NPR shortly after her death (obviously it was a recording). Read her Wikipedia page, she was a huge Civil Rights activist and worked for NAACP at the time of the most famous bus incident (She'd had a few other run ins with the Montgomery County Transit Authority apparently).
Second, an artist is driven to create, regardless of whether or not he is compensated with money.
I am SOOOO tired of this argument. Artists may be driven to create, regardless of financial compensation, BUT they are generally able to create more and do so more competently when they receive such compensation. Musicians of the exact same level of talent sound completely different when recored in the garage with a few mics and edited with Garage Band than they do when recorded in a professional studio with engineers and professional sound editors. Guys who don't have to work 8 hours a day as a waiter have more time to practice.
Don't even begin to talk about the cost of producing a even an inexpensive movie. Guys that produce little independent movies on their credit cards? For one thing they are rare, for another they do it with the hopeful expectation that they'll make the money back after release, and for a third they almost universally say the movies could have been better if they'd had more money to spend on it. What kind of movies do you like? Were you a big fan of LOTR? Hundreds of millions to make. Did you like Batman? Same. Even if you like classics like Spartacus or even the Maltese Falcon you're talking millions of dollars. "Low budget" movies like "The Blair Witch Project" cost in the hundred of thousands of dollars to make. Most stuff on You-tube was made for cheap though. Go see what you get for entertainment out of "artist[s]... driven to create" without a budget.
Even assuming that you're somehow right. That artists will somehow continue to create great stuff without budgets or equipment, is it fair? I get paid for my skills, why shouldn't they? Why are technical skills or construction skills more privileged than artistic skills? Because YOU want to consume everything you can without worrying to much about what some guy had to do to become that great on the guitar or film that awesome fight scene?
I'll again make it clear that the way current content companies are going about it is probably both wrong and ineffective. There needs to be someway to make money off of content that the vast majority of users will accept, while at the same time adequately compensating the artists, but guys like you aren't helping the process either. "I'm doing whatever I want, I refuse to consider that any of this has real value even though I want it, and anyway famine is good for the artistic soul" is not a solution, it's a large part of the reason that no solutions are forthcoming. The industry is so afraid of people like you that they are largely paralyzed, and won't move forward.
A lot of the "additional" hardware costs were bullshit too. Comparing the cost of Bluray drive Apple sells in it's stores to the price of one from Best Buy, as if the one from Best Buy wouldn't work on a Mac (assuming it's either USB or Firewire). Comparing the cost of an Airport Extreme base station and Apple branded network file sever to Cisco and Western Digital stuff, again as if Macs don't work with any networked hardware on the market. The only valid comparison in that whole list was between the two ATI video cards, since I'm pretty sure Apple actually does tweak the firmware on those.
p.s. Maybe your girl friend could have opted for breast reduction to go from "more than impressive" to "impressive"?
She was actually considering it when we parted company, but it wouldn't have mattered much to any potential dancing career at that point. For oe thing, you have to be practically build like a board to dance professionally (She was between a D and E cup, not freakish or anything but not likely to be shrunk to an A or B cup without serious surgery), and because she was to old to start a career by that point (we were in our younger 20s when we split, and she hadn't been dancing seriously in University. She wouldn't have been starting from "square 1", but she was way behind any potential peers). She was considering it primarily because the doctors thought she would be in for lower back pain as she aged.
Re: Your sig. The opposite is true too. I know from personal experience how stupid you can sound mispronouncing the Hell out a word whose exact definition you're quite clear on.
I visited London in 1996 during what was apparently a fairly punishing summer. I'm from Louisiana and would normally say that I know something about heat. It was hot, every bit as hot as anything I've experienced in the southern US, but we've already established that. The story here has to do with the girl I was dating at the time. Before she'd blossomed with a more than impressive bust size, she'd held ambitions of being a professional dancer (like, real ambitions, winning at regional level competitions at 13 and 14 years old ambitions, not "I wanna be a ballerina!" at 6 ambitions). Because of this she loved musicals. I like them too, don't get me wrong, but she LOVED them. The one single thing that we ABSOLUTELY had to do in our weekend in London was see a show. We managed to get tickets to see Miss Saigon at the Royal Drury Lane Theatre. Nice place, great show, I nearly died of heat stroke.
By the time you shoved some thousand or so people into the un-air-conditioned theater, packed like sardines into seats that were designed to hold the physiques of 400 or 500 years ago (I swear my knees were in my kidneys. I was ROTC at the time and in quite good shape, but I could still barely fit my butt in the seat. My girl, shorter and with a dancer's build other than her chest was more comfortable) your suspension of disbelief was aided considerably by the fact that it felt more like Vietnam in theater than Vietnam does. I loved London. I'll go back any time. I am NEVER going to another show in the summer. I'm sure they have lovely things playing in December.
I dunno what GP was talking about on the "tons of low level Draenei and Blood Elves running around". I think he though you meant you started just after BC was released, not WotLK. Having said that, it seem like you were on the wrong server. if you decide to give it another shot, try Thorium Brotherhood. We're a fairly old server, but with only a moderate population. On the disadvantage side, our economy kind of sucks on the low end, and gear for low to mid levels is expensive, and we're not great raiders (only a few guild ever finished Black Temple or Sunwell Plateau). On the nice side, most guild are willing to recruit young and help you out with leveling, and lots of people have multiple alts and there's usually groups to be had for low level instances with only moderate effort. I'm leveling a druid right now and she's done a couple 20s-30s instances.
On the other hand "spec" is of almost negligible importance until level 45 or so and only becomes really critical as you approach end game. I have personally healed instances as far as the Scarlet Monastery with a DPS spec Shaman, and I've run with non-spec healers in even early Outland instances. Being the proper spec helps of course, but it's not nearly as big a deal as gear is until later. I remember running Ragefire Chasm (The mini-instance in Orgrimmar for 13-15th levels) once and someone asked me if I was a "speced" healer. I was level 14, I'd spent a grand total of 5 talent points... Does it matter?
(For the uninitiated, you get 1 talent point per level from 10 on in WoW. A level 80 therefore has 71 points to spend. This can make a huge difference to how you play and what you are capable of. Lower level characters have many fewer points and are therefore getting less of an advantage from them, but conversely have greater flexibility because they are less specialized.)
I stand corrected, twice. Sorry for my mistake, I was so sure that ITT didn't give BS/BA degrees that I didn't even look. I'd give back the mod point someone gave me it I could.
That's not a Bachelor's degree, it's either an associates degree or a technical certification depending on the program and the amount of time spent in the program. You can, I will grant you, get a BA in criminal justice from the University of Phoenix, but that is an accredited university. Not a good one, but an accredited university.
I find your premise interesting. First, let's define a few terms. Sexuality is not defined by who you sleep with, it's defined by who you are attracted to. Thus a Homosexual is one who is attracted to people of their own sex, a Hetrosexual is one who is attracted to members of the opposite sex. Bisexuals are attracted more or less equally to member of both sexes, though many tend to "lean" one direction or the other, and most likely nearly anyone of either opposing identity has some capability to be attracted to either sex if the circumstances are right. Who people actually sleep with is relatively unimportant to discussions of sexuality. As you say, this is generally a choice. You might find yourself unable to sleep with someone totally repellent to you, but you can probably manage to get it up and sleep with anyone who fits into a very broad range of what you consider "attractive".
So if sexuality is a matter of whom you consider attractive, the question becomes: "do you chose who you are attracted to?" I don't. I walk down the hall, see a hot woman, and think "man I'd like to get some of that", I don't first try to consciously decide if I like what I see. Similarly if I walk down the hall and see a 600 pound hairy guy (or girl for that matter), no amount of talking to myself and rationalizing is going to convince me that there is an attraction there. I don't chose who I am attracted to, I most likely cannot chose to sleep with someone I find completely unattractive (which for me is most men), but within the zone of {people I find at least somewhat attractive, and who also consider me at least somewhat attractive} we chose by mutual consent who we sleep with.
It is therefore likely that homosexuals also do not chose who they are attracted to. It seems likely that when they see a very beautiful member of their own sex, they receive the same level of attraction as I would to seeing a beautiful member of the opposite sex. When faced with a member of the opposite sex, they most likely experience a the same ambivalence as I do on seeing a particular handsome man. For those who happen to fall in the middle of the spectrum, how they act on their sexuality might be a choice. If you find both men and women equally or nearly equally attractive, you can easily enough chose to only sleep with one or the other. If you fall much more firmly to either extreme, how you act on you sexuality is more or less out of your hands. If you are a man who simply does not find women attractive, your choices are abstinence or sleeping with men.
It is therefore possible for some "gay" people (who are mostly likely more like bisexual but chose to primarily sleep with people of the same sex) to feel that they are making a choice (a choice to "act gay" even if they have little choice about whether they actually are or not), while many others feel that they are not making a choice (because being more firmly on the "homosexual" end of the spectrum they are completely unattracted to member of the opposite sex). All your "evidence" proves is that some people who identify as gay, are actually bisexual enough to feel like they could go either way.
Ah, but there are more factors. First, Amazon, if they did this on purpose, pissed off more than the LGBT community. Most plenty of people who aren't gay support gay rights. Not all of them are likely to boycott or anything, but some will, and others will file information about what was done away to be added to any other anti-amazon feelings they may have. Second, there's online patterns which suggest that more pro-LGBT types are online than anti-LGBG. Finally there's the question of who buys more books, which again I tend to think would be slanted toward the pro-LGBG crowd. I'm making statements without numbers of course, but I think I am likely correct in most of those statements. Seems to me that if Amazon did this on purpose, they did pissed a demographic that is:
1) More likely to be a customer 2) More likely to be a good customer 3) Very vocal 4) Able to make it's opinions known
to placate a demographic that is:
1) Less likely to be a customer 2) Less likely to be a good customer 3) Very Vocal 4) Able to makes it's opinions known 5) But hadn't really been complaining
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe Amazon got infiltrated by the radical right while no one was looking, but a glitch seems more likely to me.
Plus the fire proximity suit, which is designed to repel heat. Even with all of that, I'm sure the guy would have died pretty much instantly, and vaporized quickly on contact, but to vaporize all of that before he even reached the molten metal? Seems unlikely. (Also, who the fuck walks on a catwalk over tons of molten steel without a safety strap?)
I REALLY hope Uldar is better than Naxx. I understand that Blizzard is trying to make things more accessible to casual players, and being a casual player I appreciate it. I was never going to go into Black Temple or Sunwell Plateau, hell barely three guilds on my server ever cleared them (it's an RP server and has a generally older and more casual crowd), but Naxx is really to far in the other direction. 25 man PuGs clear it all the time even on my relatively weak server. It's nice to be able to experience all of the content, but on the hand if I consider it fairly easy, guys who used to clear BT probably just sleep through it.
Mounts used to cost three times that and you couldn't get 4 golds for a stack of copper ore. I'll admit that getting AH gear is much more expensive than it used to be, but vendor stuff generally sells for much less than it used to until you get close to max level. Blizzard has done everything they can to make it quick and easy to get as far as Outland. After that things are about the same as they always were.
Slashdot Mirror
It does seem to me though, that iTunes has proved the "If you build it they will come" theory of digital distribution. The music industry kicked and screamed and cried and refused to build a good digital distribution center both because they were worried about piracy (which didn't really seem to get any worse), and because they were completely unconvinced it could ever make any amount of money. So Apple built iTunes, which is at best a "decent" attempt at a distribution center, and it's a license to print money. Once people realized that there was a (relatively) friendly store that had (a lot of) the content they wanted, they flocked there in droves. It's only gotten better as Apple has refined the UI and increased the catalog. Now anybody who's anybody in on iTunes. My dad can find his obscure Jazz musicians, my brother can find his favorite grunge bands, I can find weird Irish folk rock, and my wife can find the soundtrack to CSI. All in one place, and without too much effort.
It's pretty clear to me that the reason video production companies aren't making money hand over fist from the Internet is the lack of an iTunes store. It's not the music is magically easier to sell online, and it's not that Apple is magically successful where other companies are not. It's that there is no one place that I can go to reliably expect to find any movie or TV show I want with a reasonably easy searchable index. The bandwidth is mostly there, the storage is mostly there (I saw a not-quite-a-netbook at Costco for $750 yesterday with a 360GB HDD, and HDMI connector) all that is needed for the "iMovies" store to take off is someone to convince the video distributors to give them (something approaching) everything all the time at an acceptable level of quality, and for them make give a halfway decent UI. The People will come. Just like they did to the iTunes store.
If that means I won't get to hear what otherwise would have been pushed by the RIAA-members as the latest new fad
I don't know what it means for you exactly. If you're lucky enough to live in Seattle, New York, New Orleans, Chicago or other places with a really great local band scene it may not matter at all. When I lived in New Orleans I could go weeks without hearing a band that I didn't personally know members of. If, on the other hand, you live in a smaller city, or god forbid a small town, it could mean you'd be lucky to hear anything more than a local "cover band" more than once a every few months. I mean Huntsville (where I currently live) isn't exactly overflowing with new musical experiences from what I've seen. Even I'm probably lucky compared to the people in say, Vicksburg, MS, where the only time I saw any live bands at all was when they had small music festival (unless you count the guys at the Mexican Restaurant badly covering "Margaritaville" and "Hotel California")
It's a pretty unlikely scenario I'll grant you, but so it going back to patronage as the primary means to support artists.
Now that I totally agree with. The idea that people will NOT be a bit mussed and sweaty in 95F/99% humidity weather is fairly silly, but it still seems to be the expectation.
yeah, and you know who got to hear Mozart? Not you, chump. Musicians with patrons created and performed for their patrons. Musicians without patrons hoped people threw enough copper into their cups to allow to them both eat AND have a room that night. No it wasn't universally like that, there were paid gigs with orchestras at theaters and such, but mostly that was how it worked.
It may not be our job to figure out how they can make money, but it is our problem if they don't. It is clear to me that you (I'm using "you" generically here, what I'm say may not apply to you personally, but it applies to lots of people who hold similar opinions) value the work the artists create (or you wouldn't be downloading it every chance you get). If you value the professional quality of movies made by studios (as opposed to 'Ask a Ninja' or 'Pupu Broussard') or music made by professional musicians than it behooves you to worry about how we as a society might continue to pay for such things. Because we will miss them when they are gone. People will NOT continue to make movies without budgets. Really they CANNOT. Movies are expensive to make. Many fewer people will record music (and almost none will record professionally mastered music) if they cannot sell the recordings. If you're prepared to lose that as a sacrifice to the Gods of "information wants to be free", I suppose that's your right, but don't argue that it's not your problem unless you're prepared to live in the world you want to create.
Spoken like someone who has never lived in the Southern US. Trust me, standing in one place outside for 10 minutes in July in Dallas (or New Orleans, or Houston, or any of dozens of other such cities on the Gulf Coast and Desert Southwest) will give you an "unprofessional sweat" no matter how good a shape you're in. When it's 97F and 100% humidity (Gulf Coast, quite common) or 105F and who cares what the humidity is at that point (Desert Southwest), you sweat. Period. I used to get sweaty walking the block and half from my office to the bagel shop in New Orleans, and I ran 10Ks at the time.
I actually found changing trains in Europe to be way easier than changing planes. You get off the train, and since train tracks are usually much closer together than airport gates, you walk a few hundred feet and get on the other train when it arrives. No "boarding process", there's nearly always a chance to grab a snack, but no a really long wait. It was great. I think the longest we had to spend in a station was 45 minutes (which would be bloody short as a plane layover goes, I'd be worried about making my connection), and we had turnarounds as quick as 20 minutes. Boarding and getting off trains is much faster than planes, so you can get the changing process done easily. Only disadvantage is you have to wait on the boarding platforms which can be outside. Cold/heat can be uncomfortable in those circumstances, but I'd guess that recently built train stations have some way of getting around this (the European stations I used were generally older than modern climate control).
Dude, I offered a citation, her wikipedia page. I'm sorry I didn't link it, I didn't think wikipedia was that hard to find. The page quotes her as saying:
People always say that I didn't give up my seat because I was tired, but that isn't true. I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.
At least read what I wrote before you jump all over me and accuse me of crap. Given that it was one of the defining events of Miss Park's life, given that she was an NAACP employee at the time, given that the NAACP was already involved in a fight to get the bus laws changed, given that they had already tried to rally behind another woman for essentially the same reason before deciding that she wasn't "sympathetic enough" and deciding to find a new horse to back, I find it highly unlikely that Miss Parks misremembered these event.
The event isn't "Lost to history" there are (or were, many are probably dead now) multiple first hand witnesses who have all given the general outline of the same story. Rosa Parks was not just some tired lady who wanted a seat more than she wanted to stay out of jail. She was a hero who deliberately defied an unjust authority. Where the other story came from I don't know. Maybe some news talking heads though it sounded better, maybe it was a (slightly dishonest) defense at her trial, I have no idea, but I'm sure that if I had time I could find out. Since you're so interested in the story, look around yourself.
The fact that she's admitted it? Well, "admitted" is probably the wrong word, as it makes her sounds guilty of something, but she's stated as much for the record. She was affiliated with Civil Rights groups and went onto the buss to perform and act of civil disobedience. I dunno how the "she was just to tired" meme got started, or why it's propagate since the truth is more courageous than the fiction, but I heard her talk about it on NPR shortly after her death (obviously it was a recording). Read her Wikipedia page, she was a huge Civil Rights activist and worked for NAACP at the time of the most famous bus incident (She'd had a few other run ins with the Montgomery County Transit Authority apparently).
Second, an artist is driven to create, regardless of whether or not he is compensated with money.
I am SOOOO tired of this argument. Artists may be driven to create, regardless of financial compensation, BUT they are generally able to create more and do so more competently when they receive such compensation. Musicians of the exact same level of talent sound completely different when recored in the garage with a few mics and edited with Garage Band than they do when recorded in a professional studio with engineers and professional sound editors. Guys who don't have to work 8 hours a day as a waiter have more time to practice.
Don't even begin to talk about the cost of producing a even an inexpensive movie. Guys that produce little independent movies on their credit cards? For one thing they are rare, for another they do it with the hopeful expectation that they'll make the money back after release, and for a third they almost universally say the movies could have been better if they'd had more money to spend on it. What kind of movies do you like? Were you a big fan of LOTR? Hundreds of millions to make. Did you like Batman? Same. Even if you like classics like Spartacus or even the Maltese Falcon you're talking millions of dollars. "Low budget" movies like "The Blair Witch Project" cost in the hundred of thousands of dollars to make. Most stuff on You-tube was made for cheap though. Go see what you get for entertainment out of "artist[s]... driven to create" without a budget.
Even assuming that you're somehow right. That artists will somehow continue to create great stuff without budgets or equipment, is it fair? I get paid for my skills, why shouldn't they? Why are technical skills or construction skills more privileged than artistic skills? Because YOU want to consume everything you can without worrying to much about what some guy had to do to become that great on the guitar or film that awesome fight scene?
I'll again make it clear that the way current content companies are going about it is probably both wrong and ineffective. There needs to be someway to make money off of content that the vast majority of users will accept, while at the same time adequately compensating the artists, but guys like you aren't helping the process either. "I'm doing whatever I want, I refuse to consider that any of this has real value even though I want it, and anyway famine is good for the artistic soul" is not a solution, it's a large part of the reason that no solutions are forthcoming. The industry is so afraid of people like you that they are largely paralyzed, and won't move forward.
I dunno what he's talking about, my mac came with vi.
A lot of the "additional" hardware costs were bullshit too. Comparing the cost of Bluray drive Apple sells in it's stores to the price of one from Best Buy, as if the one from Best Buy wouldn't work on a Mac (assuming it's either USB or Firewire). Comparing the cost of an Airport Extreme base station and Apple branded network file sever to Cisco and Western Digital stuff, again as if Macs don't work with any networked hardware on the market. The only valid comparison in that whole list was between the two ATI video cards, since I'm pretty sure Apple actually does tweak the firmware on those.
p.s. Maybe your girl friend could have opted for breast reduction to go from "more than impressive" to "impressive"?
She was actually considering it when we parted company, but it wouldn't have mattered much to any potential dancing career at that point. For oe thing, you have to be practically build like a board to dance professionally (She was between a D and E cup, not freakish or anything but not likely to be shrunk to an A or B cup without serious surgery), and because she was to old to start a career by that point (we were in our younger 20s when we split, and she hadn't been dancing seriously in University. She wouldn't have been starting from "square 1", but she was way behind any potential peers). She was considering it primarily because the doctors thought she would be in for lower back pain as she aged.
That's the answer, he asked for the question.
Re: Your sig. The opposite is true too. I know from personal experience how stupid you can sound mispronouncing the Hell out a word whose exact definition you're quite clear on.
I visited London in 1996 during what was apparently a fairly punishing summer. I'm from Louisiana and would normally say that I know something about heat. It was hot, every bit as hot as anything I've experienced in the southern US, but we've already established that. The story here has to do with the girl I was dating at the time. Before she'd blossomed with a more than impressive bust size, she'd held ambitions of being a professional dancer (like, real ambitions, winning at regional level competitions at 13 and 14 years old ambitions, not "I wanna be a ballerina!" at 6 ambitions). Because of this she loved musicals. I like them too, don't get me wrong, but she LOVED them. The one single thing that we ABSOLUTELY had to do in our weekend in London was see a show. We managed to get tickets to see Miss Saigon at the Royal Drury Lane Theatre. Nice place, great show, I nearly died of heat stroke.
By the time you shoved some thousand or so people into the un-air-conditioned theater, packed like sardines into seats that were designed to hold the physiques of 400 or 500 years ago (I swear my knees were in my kidneys. I was ROTC at the time and in quite good shape, but I could still barely fit my butt in the seat. My girl, shorter and with a dancer's build other than her chest was more comfortable) your suspension of disbelief was aided considerably by the fact that it felt more like Vietnam in theater than Vietnam does. I loved London. I'll go back any time. I am NEVER going to another show in the summer. I'm sure they have lovely things playing in December.
I dunno what GP was talking about on the "tons of low level Draenei and Blood Elves running around". I think he though you meant you started just after BC was released, not WotLK. Having said that, it seem like you were on the wrong server. if you decide to give it another shot, try Thorium Brotherhood. We're a fairly old server, but with only a moderate population. On the disadvantage side, our economy kind of sucks on the low end, and gear for low to mid levels is expensive, and we're not great raiders (only a few guild ever finished Black Temple or Sunwell Plateau). On the nice side, most guild are willing to recruit young and help you out with leveling, and lots of people have multiple alts and there's usually groups to be had for low level instances with only moderate effort. I'm leveling a druid right now and she's done a couple 20s-30s instances.
On the other hand "spec" is of almost negligible importance until level 45 or so and only becomes really critical as you approach end game. I have personally healed instances as far as the Scarlet Monastery with a DPS spec Shaman, and I've run with non-spec healers in even early Outland instances. Being the proper spec helps of course, but it's not nearly as big a deal as gear is until later. I remember running Ragefire Chasm (The mini-instance in Orgrimmar for 13-15th levels) once and someone asked me if I was a "speced" healer. I was level 14, I'd spent a grand total of 5 talent points... Does it matter?
(For the uninitiated, you get 1 talent point per level from 10 on in WoW. A level 80 therefore has 71 points to spend. This can make a huge difference to how you play and what you are capable of. Lower level characters have many fewer points and are therefore getting less of an advantage from them, but conversely have greater flexibility because they are less specialized.)
I stand corrected, twice. Sorry for my mistake, I was so sure that ITT didn't give BS/BA degrees that I didn't even look. I'd give back the mod point someone gave me it I could.
That's not a Bachelor's degree, it's either an associates degree or a technical certification depending on the program and the amount of time spent in the program. You can, I will grant you, get a BA in criminal justice from the University of Phoenix, but that is an accredited university. Not a good one, but an accredited university.
I find your premise interesting. First, let's define a few terms. Sexuality is not defined by who you sleep with, it's defined by who you are attracted to. Thus a Homosexual is one who is attracted to people of their own sex, a Hetrosexual is one who is attracted to members of the opposite sex. Bisexuals are attracted more or less equally to member of both sexes, though many tend to "lean" one direction or the other, and most likely nearly anyone of either opposing identity has some capability to be attracted to either sex if the circumstances are right. Who people actually sleep with is relatively unimportant to discussions of sexuality. As you say, this is generally a choice. You might find yourself unable to sleep with someone totally repellent to you, but you can probably manage to get it up and sleep with anyone who fits into a very broad range of what you consider "attractive".
So if sexuality is a matter of whom you consider attractive, the question becomes: "do you chose who you are attracted to?" I don't. I walk down the hall, see a hot woman, and think "man I'd like to get some of that", I don't first try to consciously decide if I like what I see. Similarly if I walk down the hall and see a 600 pound hairy guy (or girl for that matter), no amount of talking to myself and rationalizing is going to convince me that there is an attraction there. I don't chose who I am attracted to, I most likely cannot chose to sleep with someone I find completely unattractive (which for me is most men), but within the zone of {people I find at least somewhat attractive, and who also consider me at least somewhat attractive} we chose by mutual consent who we sleep with.
It is therefore likely that homosexuals also do not chose who they are attracted to. It seems likely that when they see a very beautiful member of their own sex, they receive the same level of attraction as I would to seeing a beautiful member of the opposite sex. When faced with a member of the opposite sex, they most likely experience a the same ambivalence as I do on seeing a particular handsome man. For those who happen to fall in the middle of the spectrum, how they act on their sexuality might be a choice. If you find both men and women equally or nearly equally attractive, you can easily enough chose to only sleep with one or the other. If you fall much more firmly to either extreme, how you act on you sexuality is more or less out of your hands. If you are a man who simply does not find women attractive, your choices are abstinence or sleeping with men.
It is therefore possible for some "gay" people (who are mostly likely more like bisexual but chose to primarily sleep with people of the same sex) to feel that they are making a choice (a choice to "act gay" even if they have little choice about whether they actually are or not), while many others feel that they are not making a choice (because being more firmly on the "homosexual" end of the spectrum they are completely unattracted to member of the opposite sex). All your "evidence" proves is that some people who identify as gay, are actually bisexual enough to feel like they could go either way.
Ah, but there are more factors. First, Amazon, if they did this on purpose, pissed off more than the LGBT community. Most plenty of people who aren't gay support gay rights. Not all of them are likely to boycott or anything, but some will, and others will file information about what was done away to be added to any other anti-amazon feelings they may have. Second, there's online patterns which suggest that more pro-LGBT types are online than anti-LGBG. Finally there's the question of who buys more books, which again I tend to think would be slanted toward the pro-LGBG crowd. I'm making statements without numbers of course, but I think I am likely correct in most of those statements. Seems to me that if Amazon did this on purpose, they did pissed a demographic that is:
1) More likely to be a customer
2) More likely to be a good customer
3) Very vocal
4) Able to make it's opinions known
to placate a demographic that is:
1) Less likely to be a customer
2) Less likely to be a good customer
3) Very Vocal
4) Able to makes it's opinions known
5) But hadn't really been complaining
Maybe I'm wrong, or maybe Amazon got infiltrated by the radical right while no one was looking, but a glitch seems more likely to me.
Plus the fire proximity suit, which is designed to repel heat. Even with all of that, I'm sure the guy would have died pretty much instantly, and vaporized quickly on contact, but to vaporize all of that before he even reached the molten metal? Seems unlikely. (Also, who the fuck walks on a catwalk over tons of molten steel without a safety strap?)
I REALLY hope Uldar is better than Naxx. I understand that Blizzard is trying to make things more accessible to casual players, and being a casual player I appreciate it. I was never going to go into Black Temple or Sunwell Plateau, hell barely three guilds on my server ever cleared them (it's an RP server and has a generally older and more casual crowd), but Naxx is really to far in the other direction. 25 man PuGs clear it all the time even on my relatively weak server. It's nice to be able to experience all of the content, but on the hand if I consider it fairly easy, guys who used to clear BT probably just sleep through it.
Mounts used to cost three times that and you couldn't get 4 golds for a stack of copper ore. I'll admit that getting AH gear is much more expensive than it used to be, but vendor stuff generally sells for much less than it used to until you get close to max level. Blizzard has done everything they can to make it quick and easy to get as far as Outland. After that things are about the same as they always were.