The problem with UAC is that it pops up warnings for (seemingly) no reason, from the perspective of the regular user. They don't realize they're elevating their privileges, nor what that actually means, and so most users just click through UAC... until they get annoyed enough by it that they go googling for a way to turn it off.
The very fact that it doesn't require a password to elevate is what leads to people thinking it's no big deal. I don't particularly like the way Ubuntu does it either, but at least Ubuntu requires your password, and doesn't keep popping up the request every 5 seconds while you're installing something... it remembers that you've authorized it for 15 minutes, and doesn't ask again. Security that people can just click through without thinking isn't security at all.:)
But more seriously, the fact of the matter is, most of the tripe spewed against Microsoft hasn't been true since the pre-XP era. This combines with idiots who don't comprehend what security actually is, and buy into the, "LINUX IS TOTALLY SECURE! LOLZ!" crap.
Ok... I'll bite.... I will concede that Windows is a lot more secure than some folks will have you believe, but there is still one glaringly huge security flaw in Windows that would be ridiculously easy for Microsoft to fix: the accounts created during install time are all administrative accounts.
To its credit, Windows will allow you to change those accounts to non-administrative, and it will give you the option of creating non-administrative accounts when you later go in to the user cp, but by default, it still makes everybody an administrator unless explicitly told not to.
Now... the fundamentals of securing a Windows system are exactly the same as the fundamentals of securing a Linux system: don't run any unnecessary daemons, particularly daemons that listen to outside connections, and be careful what you allow to run on your computer. When possible, run anything that executes arbitrary code (like, say, Flash or Silverlight) sandboxed, or not at all. And above all, apply all security updates as soon as they're available. (well, assuming your source of security patches didn't get compromised....)
It's not hard to lock down a Windows system, and all of the above has been doable since NT3.1 in 1993. But as long as its default setting is for users to have administrative access, and it doesn't require any kind of secondary authentication to run programs with elevated permissions (and don't get me started on the debacle that is UAC), then Windows is *not* as secure as most Linux distros. The average user is simply not going to go out of their way to lock down a system once they have gone through the initial setup, and with that in mind, Windows is defective by design. It's in the name of usability, which is certainly understandable, but don't paint it with rose coloured glasses: you can achieve the same level of security under Windows, but you have to do more to reach it.
Better question is... what part don't you understand? They think that the source is unaffected, but have not verified that yet. There is a chance, however small, that the source has been affected by this compromise, which is scary news for anybody who's built/updated a new kernel from source since the breech happened.
When we can store more full-quality (we're talking 2880p and probably 120fps) video
Why on earth would you want to store video at a resolution greater than the number of photoreceptors in the human eye? You've only got 6 or 7 million cones combined between the 3 colours in your eye, and even (good) 1080p is indistinguishable from reality at a distance of 10 feet. 2160p would be 4x the number of pixels of a 1080p screen, and more than a million pixels more than you have cones. And that's assuming you're able to use all 7 million cones at the same time, which you can't because of the chemical reactions that need to take place in the eye before a cone is refreshed.
I could see wanting to increase the framerate to reduce motion blur and avoid jitter (though most people can't see jitter at rates higher than 60Hz on an LCD), but the pixel density you're talking about is basically pointless, at least for consumer applications. We don't really need to increase the pixel density... if you want to improve the quality of the image at this point, you need to increase the amount of information that's stored in each pixel... things like luma, hue, contrast, and spin in addition to the traditional RGB values, but commercially available displays that can reproduce that kind of information are a decade off at best.
The point being, you *wouldn't* have some days where you get 10 miles, others 100 miles, because you'd return to the station to do another swap.
It makes a degree of logistical sense to have all charging done at centralised charging stations. The impact on the grid of plug-in electric cars isn't very big right now, but imagine the impact when there's suddenly 2 million of them being plugged in overnight.
More than a few months... different manufacturer, but Intel has been shipping 28nm Arrandale processors for over a year now.:) I have one in the laptop sitting in front of me as I type this.
It seems a little self important to suggest that if I want a 3pm meeting then everybody can attend because it's 3pm everywhere. One time-zone means that *some* of us will need to be sleeping at 3pm.
It's more than that. We've had UTC for a long time, and before that, we have had GMT for over a century. People decided not to adopt GMT as their local time, because of the psychological impact... how would you feel if you had to get up and go to work at 2am every day?
In time, sure, people would adjust... but if would still screw you over if you moved to a different part of the world... your mind is used to the sun rising at 1am, and now it suddenly has to adjust to the sun rising at 7pm?
What boggles the mind the most, though, is that the submitter actually thinks he's the first person to come up with this idea. Short answer: if you can't wrap your head around timezones, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing business at the level where you need to deal with people in different timezones. They aren't exactly a difficult concept... even my 4-year old nephew doesn't have problems understanding that his aunt is an hour ahead of him, and that his grandparents are 6 hours ahead.
I actually have a high-end server, built in the last year, that's using an ATi Mach32 video card. That's a 20-year old video card in a system that's less than a year old. It works great in text mode... if I *wanted* to run it in graphics mode/X I would be able to, as the card supports VESA. You don't need a dedicated driver to use VESA, as VESA is itself a standardised driver that is not being removed from Linux any time soon.
OTOH, if you're still running a 3DFX VooDoo 2, you're probably not using it for gaming. It still works in VESA modes, and still works as a video card for 2D applications, it's just 3D accelerated modes that won't be supported any more. I have a server that still has an ATi Mach32 in it, and it works no problem, even though it's a much older card than the lot that's being dropped now.
There's a number of ways, but perhaps they're looking at rumble seats. There's no technical reason you couldn't put them in a standard 5-seater sedan, though it'd probably blow the 5-star safety rating that's part of the bet....
I'd be willing to consider something like an Asus Eee Transformer if it came in a 13" model. And there's a very simple reason for it: the main reason to buy the Transformer is the keyboard dock. I have tried using the on-screen keyboard on a coworkers ipad 2, and the number of missed or incorrect keystrokes was unbearable, and I know from experience that the reason I can't use a netbook for serious work is the size of the keyboard. From experience, about 13" is the minimum size laptop I can take and still have a usable keyboard. If my options are to buy a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard to work on, I'll just buy an ultraportable laptop, and get better functionality, for less money, in a form factor that takes up less combined space in my bag.
... you do realize that Apple's lawsuit was about their contention that the Samsung Galaxy Tab was a ripoff of the iPad? Putting Honeycomb on a Galaxy Tab doesn't really seem like that much of a stretch....
I've only had an Android phone for about 4 months, and my usage is e-mail and some web browsing...no social networking, streaming audio/video, etc., and I ran over 400MB last month.
Your web browsing is the lion's share of that usage... I use my android phone for e-mail primarily... I don't actually load the web browser at all unless I need to check something on maps. No social networking, no streaming audio/video. I send a *lot* of e-mail, and I rarely break 50MB/mo. I'm on a plan with 100MB/mo of data, and it's plenty for me. I don't even bother with wifi any more, because the battery lasts significantly longer with it off, and I'm nowhere near blowing my limit. (and my overage rate is $0.02/MB, so even if I did blow the limit, it wouldn't be that expensive)
You could, of course, use Excel (or any spreadsheet) for its intended purpose: working as a spreadsheet. It's actually remarkably effective when you use it as a balance sheet for something like a budget calculation. I wouldn't call that a "throwaway calculation", but we may differ on that point. I keep my monthly budget calculations in a spreadsheet because it's ridiculously easy to edit either the credit or debit column, and have everything update itself automatically. I also use it for back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out whether I can afford to change something I currently have/do. I keep my ledgers elsewhere, but for the actual budget, Excel/gnumeric/etc. are remarkably good tools for the job.
Odd, isn't it? A spreadsheet is good at the job it was originally designed for?
In foreign affairs, it used to be "the optimists learned Russian, the pessimists learned Chinese". Now, it's "the optimists learn Chinese, the pessimists learn Arabic".
Chances are, you've had some bad experiences with some bad hardware... I use powerline networking at home... the best link (that's actually a real world application) is about 40m of cable, and pulls 55-65mbit depending on what's running on the circuit at the time. The *worst* link is about 75m of cable between the two adapters, both of which are connected to a different phase of the power line, and pulls about 15mbit between the two.
That said, I still wouldn't consider powerline networking for the hotel. It's not a commercial-grade solution, and will not satisfy the needs of potentially hundreds of users. It's good for maybe 10-15 users at most before the line becomes saturated. If the hotel doesn't want to run Ethernet, and the existing Cat-3 that's there isn't good enough, then the person asking the question should wash his hands of it and let the hotel find somebody else who will install a product that they won't be happy with. Either that, or he should use the existing wireless network that's already there, and simply tie it in to the new 100mbit connection that's coming in.
If you haven't had a credit card number "borrowed" at least once a year, you're not shopping online. And not going to restaurants either.
Actually, I use my Visa card regularly: restaurants, gas stations, drug stores, parking, buying clothes, etc.. I usually carry a small amount of cash for incidentals, but if I'm having a $50+ meal with some friends, it goes on the Visa. I have even used the card at restaurants and stores overseas (Europe, the south Pacific, and the Caribbean). I have even been known to make the occasional purchase online, though that's mostly been computers and computer equipment. My habits with the card have not changed in more than 10 years, and I have never once had a fraudulent charge put through on my card.
You may say I'm just lucky, but I would say that I have a good credit card company. The one time I used it at a dive shop in Curacao having forgotten to advise the Visa folks that I was going to on vacation, they declined the charge, and 2 minutes later my cell phone rang: It was my bank, asking if I was traveling. I have had the same thing happen domestically, buying gas on a road trip, or even at a new station in a different part of town than where I usually buy gas.
If your card gets fraudulent charges that frequently, maybe you need to change banks?
The biggest change in Cataclysm was the healing model. Once a character passes level 80, the highest of the previous expansion, their costs to use healing spells increases to where by the time they are level 85; the new top level; their mana to healing cost has gone up four times. It is never a good idea in any game to make a player feel less effective as they progress. This one change alone had a very detrimental effect on players with many guilds report losses of people playing healers if playing at all; for some this was the only role they wanted and they when they stopped feeling effective they could not play.
Yup. My main characters were a shaman (Resto/Enh), and a priest (Disc/Shadow). Nobody wanted to let me play DPS, and I was seriously gibbled when it came to healing, especially with idiots who felt that the way to play was to pull everything and let your healer sort things out. I cancelled my subscription in January, and haven't looked back.... actually, I haven't even turned my gaming system on in almost 3 months, as I found that I really don't enjoy what's become of gaming any more. WoW is just one example of a major trend in gaming these days, which is a subscription-based service where they extract their monthly tithe for the privilege of wasting hours on end in an endless grind for moar stuffs. I do have a couple of free-to-play mmo's that I log in to when I'm in that "kill something" kind of mood, but other than that, I'm done with gaming.
I do intend to, at some point, buy a copy of Alice 2 and play that one through. I suppose that means I'll have to turn the gaming system back on, because the linux-based laptop with Intel graphics probably won't be beefy enough to run it.... >.> But that's mostly for nostalgia than anything else, as I just don't see a point in gaming much any more.
It has cartoonish cel-shaded graphics, which a lot of people my dismiss out of hand, but it's actually a very fun game. And it has a very good answer to the trinity: rather than getting rid of it, it embraces it, and makes it a lot easier for anybody to play any role by separating your class level from your character level. You can change class at any time as long as you're not in combat, so rather than holding up a party waiting for a tank and/or a healer, anybody can fill any role at any time. It also means that groups aren't sunk if your tank suddenly has to go or something, because somebody else can simply switch classes and fill that role. And since your class exp goes up a lot faster than your character exp, you're actively encouraged to change classes around while levelling so that it becomes quite difficult to not have at least 2 different classes at max level on the same character.
It's also free to play (right now, at least, as it's still in open beta), which gives it a huge advantage over WoW IMO....
You don't have to have been to an event to get to that conclusion, you just need to look at the rhetoric that comes out of those events, and at the candidates they put forward.
I have no doubt that there are some members of the Tea Party movement who actually do have a head on their shoulders, and who actually have a clue about how things should be done. But I also have no doubt that there's an awful lot of extremists whose wet dream is the return of the death penalty for being homosexual, and the return of slavery.
Have *you* looked at the candidates that they're putting forward?
To be fair, the problem isn't the party itself, it's the lack of a distinction between social and fiscal conservatism. In theory, the Tea Party movement is about fiscal conservatism. In practice, it's quite clearly being hijacked by social conservatives. The problem is that far too many Americans don't seem to understand that it's entirely possible to be a fiscal conservative while still supporting social progress. The Tea Party is going about it the wrong way, however... even if they supported social progress (which apparently they don't), a large part of balancing the books is bringing revenue in line. By all means, don't raise taxes on the middle and lower classes, they're taxed enough. But when people like Warren Buffett are going on record saying that taxes are too low on the rich, and that he really should be paying his fair share, something's seriously wrong when a movement that (theoretically) comprises those poor/middle classes prevent the taxes on the rich from being raised, and would rather gut spending on social programs designed to help those poor/middle classes.
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The problem with UAC is that it pops up warnings for (seemingly) no reason, from the perspective of the regular user. They don't realize they're elevating their privileges, nor what that actually means, and so most users just click through UAC... until they get annoyed enough by it that they go googling for a way to turn it off.
The very fact that it doesn't require a password to elevate is what leads to people thinking it's no big deal. I don't particularly like the way Ubuntu does it either, but at least Ubuntu requires your password, and doesn't keep popping up the request every 5 seconds while you're installing something... it remembers that you've authorized it for 15 minutes, and doesn't ask again. Security that people can just click through without thinking isn't security at all. :)
Ok... I'll bite.... I will concede that Windows is a lot more secure than some folks will have you believe, but there is still one glaringly huge security flaw in Windows that would be ridiculously easy for Microsoft to fix: the accounts created during install time are all administrative accounts.
To its credit, Windows will allow you to change those accounts to non-administrative, and it will give you the option of creating non-administrative accounts when you later go in to the user cp, but by default, it still makes everybody an administrator unless explicitly told not to.
Now... the fundamentals of securing a Windows system are exactly the same as the fundamentals of securing a Linux system: don't run any unnecessary daemons, particularly daemons that listen to outside connections, and be careful what you allow to run on your computer. When possible, run anything that executes arbitrary code (like, say, Flash or Silverlight) sandboxed, or not at all. And above all, apply all security updates as soon as they're available. (well, assuming your source of security patches didn't get compromised....)
It's not hard to lock down a Windows system, and all of the above has been doable since NT3.1 in 1993. But as long as its default setting is for users to have administrative access, and it doesn't require any kind of secondary authentication to run programs with elevated permissions (and don't get me started on the debacle that is UAC), then Windows is *not* as secure as most Linux distros. The average user is simply not going to go out of their way to lock down a system once they have gone through the initial setup, and with that in mind, Windows is defective by design. It's in the name of usability, which is certainly understandable, but don't paint it with rose coloured glasses: you can achieve the same level of security under Windows, but you have to do more to reach it.
Better question is... what part don't you understand? They think that the source is unaffected, but have not verified that yet. There is a chance, however small, that the source has been affected by this compromise, which is scary news for anybody who's built/updated a new kernel from source since the breech happened.
When we can store more full-quality (we're talking 2880p and probably 120fps) video
Why on earth would you want to store video at a resolution greater than the number of photoreceptors in the human eye? You've only got 6 or 7 million cones combined between the 3 colours in your eye, and even (good) 1080p is indistinguishable from reality at a distance of 10 feet. 2160p would be 4x the number of pixels of a 1080p screen, and more than a million pixels more than you have cones. And that's assuming you're able to use all 7 million cones at the same time, which you can't because of the chemical reactions that need to take place in the eye before a cone is refreshed.
I could see wanting to increase the framerate to reduce motion blur and avoid jitter (though most people can't see jitter at rates higher than 60Hz on an LCD), but the pixel density you're talking about is basically pointless, at least for consumer applications. We don't really need to increase the pixel density... if you want to improve the quality of the image at this point, you need to increase the amount of information that's stored in each pixel... things like luma, hue, contrast, and spin in addition to the traditional RGB values, but commercially available displays that can reproduce that kind of information are a decade off at best.
The point being, you *wouldn't* have some days where you get 10 miles, others 100 miles, because you'd return to the station to do another swap.
It makes a degree of logistical sense to have all charging done at centralised charging stations. The impact on the grid of plug-in electric cars isn't very big right now, but imagine the impact when there's suddenly 2 million of them being plugged in overnight.
I sit corrected... 32nm for the arrandale. it's the next generation that's 28nm.
More than a few months... different manufacturer, but Intel has been shipping 28nm Arrandale processors for over a year now. :) I have one in the laptop sitting in front of me as I type this.
.... you do realize that time zones were invented specifically because of the logistical nightmare that your suggestion creates?
It seems a little self important to suggest that if I want a 3pm meeting then everybody can attend because it's 3pm everywhere. One time-zone means that *some* of us will need to be sleeping at 3pm.
It's more than that. We've had UTC for a long time, and before that, we have had GMT for over a century. People decided not to adopt GMT as their local time, because of the psychological impact... how would you feel if you had to get up and go to work at 2am every day?
In time, sure, people would adjust... but if would still screw you over if you moved to a different part of the world... your mind is used to the sun rising at 1am, and now it suddenly has to adjust to the sun rising at 7pm?
What boggles the mind the most, though, is that the submitter actually thinks he's the first person to come up with this idea. Short answer: if you can't wrap your head around timezones, then perhaps you shouldn't be doing business at the level where you need to deal with people in different timezones. They aren't exactly a difficult concept... even my 4-year old nephew doesn't have problems understanding that his aunt is an hour ahead of him, and that his grandparents are 6 hours ahead.
I actually have a high-end server, built in the last year, that's using an ATi Mach32 video card. That's a 20-year old video card in a system that's less than a year old. It works great in text mode... if I *wanted* to run it in graphics mode/X I would be able to, as the card supports VESA. You don't need a dedicated driver to use VESA, as VESA is itself a standardised driver that is not being removed from Linux any time soon.
OTOH, if you're still running a 3DFX VooDoo 2, you're probably not using it for gaming. It still works in VESA modes, and still works as a video card for 2D applications, it's just 3D accelerated modes that won't be supported any more. I have a server that still has an ATi Mach32 in it, and it works no problem, even though it's a much older card than the lot that's being dropped now.
There's a number of ways, but perhaps they're looking at rumble seats. There's no technical reason you couldn't put them in a standard 5-seater sedan, though it'd probably blow the 5-star safety rating that's part of the bet....
Maybe he really did mean Live With God... as in... Die, Steve, Die, the world is a better place without you? :P
They're already available under $200. And not with a tiny 6" or 7" screen, either. I still won't buy one, because I still don't see the need.
I'd be willing to consider something like an Asus Eee Transformer if it came in a 13" model. And there's a very simple reason for it: the main reason to buy the Transformer is the keyboard dock. I have tried using the on-screen keyboard on a coworkers ipad 2, and the number of missed or incorrect keystrokes was unbearable, and I know from experience that the reason I can't use a netbook for serious work is the size of the keyboard. From experience, about 13" is the minimum size laptop I can take and still have a usable keyboard. If my options are to buy a tablet and a bluetooth keyboard to work on, I'll just buy an ultraportable laptop, and get better functionality, for less money, in a form factor that takes up less combined space in my bag.
... you do realize that Apple's lawsuit was about their contention that the Samsung Galaxy Tab was a ripoff of the iPad? Putting Honeycomb on a Galaxy Tab doesn't really seem like that much of a stretch....
I've only had an Android phone for about 4 months, and my usage is e-mail and some web browsing...no social networking, streaming audio/video, etc., and I ran over 400MB last month.
Your web browsing is the lion's share of that usage... I use my android phone for e-mail primarily... I don't actually load the web browser at all unless I need to check something on maps. No social networking, no streaming audio/video. I send a *lot* of e-mail, and I rarely break 50MB/mo. I'm on a plan with 100MB/mo of data, and it's plenty for me. I don't even bother with wifi any more, because the battery lasts significantly longer with it off, and I'm nowhere near blowing my limit. (and my overage rate is $0.02/MB, so even if I did blow the limit, it wouldn't be that expensive)
Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce (CIBC) :)
You could, of course, use Excel (or any spreadsheet) for its intended purpose: working as a spreadsheet. It's actually remarkably effective when you use it as a balance sheet for something like a budget calculation. I wouldn't call that a "throwaway calculation", but we may differ on that point. I keep my monthly budget calculations in a spreadsheet because it's ridiculously easy to edit either the credit or debit column, and have everything update itself automatically. I also use it for back-of-the-envelope calculations to figure out whether I can afford to change something I currently have/do. I keep my ledgers elsewhere, but for the actual budget, Excel/gnumeric/etc. are remarkably good tools for the job.
Odd, isn't it? A spreadsheet is good at the job it was originally designed for?
In foreign affairs, it used to be "the optimists learned Russian, the pessimists learned Chinese". Now, it's "the optimists learn Chinese, the pessimists learn Arabic".
Chances are, you've had some bad experiences with some bad hardware... I use powerline networking at home... the best link (that's actually a real world application) is about 40m of cable, and pulls 55-65mbit depending on what's running on the circuit at the time. The *worst* link is about 75m of cable between the two adapters, both of which are connected to a different phase of the power line, and pulls about 15mbit between the two.
That said, I still wouldn't consider powerline networking for the hotel. It's not a commercial-grade solution, and will not satisfy the needs of potentially hundreds of users. It's good for maybe 10-15 users at most before the line becomes saturated. If the hotel doesn't want to run Ethernet, and the existing Cat-3 that's there isn't good enough, then the person asking the question should wash his hands of it and let the hotel find somebody else who will install a product that they won't be happy with. Either that, or he should use the existing wireless network that's already there, and simply tie it in to the new 100mbit connection that's coming in.
If you haven't had a credit card number "borrowed" at least once a year, you're not shopping online. And not going to restaurants either.
Actually, I use my Visa card regularly: restaurants, gas stations, drug stores, parking, buying clothes, etc.. I usually carry a small amount of cash for incidentals, but if I'm having a $50+ meal with some friends, it goes on the Visa. I have even used the card at restaurants and stores overseas (Europe, the south Pacific, and the Caribbean). I have even been known to make the occasional purchase online, though that's mostly been computers and computer equipment. My habits with the card have not changed in more than 10 years, and I have never once had a fraudulent charge put through on my card.
You may say I'm just lucky, but I would say that I have a good credit card company. The one time I used it at a dive shop in Curacao having forgotten to advise the Visa folks that I was going to on vacation, they declined the charge, and 2 minutes later my cell phone rang: It was my bank, asking if I was traveling. I have had the same thing happen domestically, buying gas on a road trip, or even at a new station in a different part of town than where I usually buy gas.
If your card gets fraudulent charges that frequently, maybe you need to change banks?
HP should have just cranked out a phone with the hardware specs of a Nexus One with a big 3500mAH battery
So... you want them to come out with a phone that has a larger battery than my laptop?
The biggest change in Cataclysm was the healing model. Once a character passes level 80, the highest of the previous expansion, their costs to use healing spells increases to where by the time they are level 85; the new top level; their mana to healing cost has gone up four times. It is never a good idea in any game to make a player feel less effective as they progress. This one change alone had a very detrimental effect on players with many guilds report losses of people playing healers if playing at all; for some this was the only role they wanted and they when they stopped feeling effective they could not play.
Yup. My main characters were a shaman (Resto/Enh), and a priest (Disc/Shadow). Nobody wanted to let me play DPS, and I was seriously gibbled when it came to healing, especially with idiots who felt that the way to play was to pull everything and let your healer sort things out. I cancelled my subscription in January, and haven't looked back.... actually, I haven't even turned my gaming system on in almost 3 months, as I found that I really don't enjoy what's become of gaming any more. WoW is just one example of a major trend in gaming these days, which is a subscription-based service where they extract their monthly tithe for the privilege of wasting hours on end in an endless grind for moar stuffs. I do have a couple of free-to-play mmo's that I log in to when I'm in that "kill something" kind of mood, but other than that, I'm done with gaming.
I do intend to, at some point, buy a copy of Alice 2 and play that one through. I suppose that means I'll have to turn the gaming system back on, because the linux-based laptop with Intel graphics probably won't be beefy enough to run it.... >.> But that's mostly for nostalgia than anything else, as I just don't see a point in gaming much any more.
Try Eden Eternal.
It has cartoonish cel-shaded graphics, which a lot of people my dismiss out of hand, but it's actually a very fun game. And it has a very good answer to the trinity: rather than getting rid of it, it embraces it, and makes it a lot easier for anybody to play any role by separating your class level from your character level. You can change class at any time as long as you're not in combat, so rather than holding up a party waiting for a tank and/or a healer, anybody can fill any role at any time. It also means that groups aren't sunk if your tank suddenly has to go or something, because somebody else can simply switch classes and fill that role. And since your class exp goes up a lot faster than your character exp, you're actively encouraged to change classes around while levelling so that it becomes quite difficult to not have at least 2 different classes at max level on the same character.
It's also free to play (right now, at least, as it's still in open beta), which gives it a huge advantage over WoW IMO....
You don't have to have been to an event to get to that conclusion, you just need to look at the rhetoric that comes out of those events, and at the candidates they put forward.
I have no doubt that there are some members of the Tea Party movement who actually do have a head on their shoulders, and who actually have a clue about how things should be done. But I also have no doubt that there's an awful lot of extremists whose wet dream is the return of the death penalty for being homosexual, and the return of slavery.
Have *you* looked at the candidates that they're putting forward?
To be fair, the problem isn't the party itself, it's the lack of a distinction between social and fiscal conservatism. In theory, the Tea Party movement is about fiscal conservatism. In practice, it's quite clearly being hijacked by social conservatives. The problem is that far too many Americans don't seem to understand that it's entirely possible to be a fiscal conservative while still supporting social progress. The Tea Party is going about it the wrong way, however... even if they supported social progress (which apparently they don't), a large part of balancing the books is bringing revenue in line. By all means, don't raise taxes on the middle and lower classes, they're taxed enough. But when people like Warren Buffett are going on record saying that taxes are too low on the rich, and that he really should be paying his fair share, something's seriously wrong when a movement that (theoretically) comprises those poor/middle classes prevent the taxes on the rich from being raised, and would rather gut spending on social programs designed to help those poor/middle classes.