Actually, Toy Story 2 was supposed to be the typical low-budget straight-to-video Disney sequel, but thanks to the way technology was moving, Pixar was able to do even better work with less money, and the early dailies looked so good that they convinced Disney to do it as a full theatrical release.
I don't doubt that an el-cheapo Toy Story DVD for the kid's market is what this new project really is. They know how to turn that particular production plan into money, and have been doing so for years.
Ask a friend who can draw well to draw you a big musclular dude. Color him bright green. Put purple pants on him.
Does he look enough like the Hulk that you could get sued for selling the image?
Now, with the character creator, you can also make a big muscular dude. You can color him green. You can put purple pants on him.
Which part of the character creator should be crippled to prevent this "violation"? Should you not be allowed to make green-skinned heroes? No purple-colored pants? No muscular dudes?
Or perhaps the best thing to do what Cryptic does: have a policy which forbids you from playing a Hulk copy, resulting in the character getting deleted if they catch it while policing the game.
The variety of choices available in the CoH character creator pretty much makes it the same thing as selling a set of art pens to somebody who knows how to draw well.
This might be worth a little more detail for those who have not seen the character creator.
The 3 "body types" are:
1. Your basic silver-age comic broad-chested male hero figure. 2. Your basic silver-age comic veluptuous female hero figure. 3. Your basic stocky, thick-necked muscular freak figure.
Any of those basic body types can be adusted in height from 4' to 8' tall, with slight variation of waist size.
From there, you have a simple hero in tights and boots. Each section of the costume can be changed in a wide variety of ways, (such as a few skirt designs for the females, or swapping out tights for clothing that looks more like high-tech armor) and for every part, the entire ROY G BIV spectrum of color is available in about 20 increments, along with about ten darkness/saturation levels for each tone. Solid black and solid white are also available, although natural skin tones are not (because there were way too many "nude" characters running around in an early beta.)
Various two-tone patterns are available for the torso, legs, and boots, but none of them are instantly-recognizable trade dress of Marvel properties. (For example, you can't make a suit covered in spider webs, or with a huge skull on the chest.)
There is also the option of adding one of about 50 logos on the chest, including alphanumeric characters. These options do not seem to be very popular with solo adventurers, as most people don't want to be Yet Another hero with an anarchy symbol or a yin/yang on his chest, but they are frequently used by "supergroups" as identifying marks.
For each body type, there are a handful of faces to chose from, with a handful of "masked" alternatives, and about a dozen hairstyles. Details such as goggles, rebreathers, cigars, forhead horns, etc. can also be added. Skin tones cover most of the range of natural human pigments, plus a few "otherworldly" colors (although not with quite as much variety as the costume options).
So you can, by spending 20 minutes or so experimenting with choices, produce a hero that looks a little bit like a power ranger, or an X-man, but comic book characters who have genuinely distict looks, like batman or spider-man, are almost impossible to replicate very closely. The heroes who are easiest to mimic are those which don't really are not so unique. The Hulk, for example, is just a large man who happens to be green. Make a large man who's green, and it will look a bit like the Hulk.
Most of the time, it's not worth the hassle. At best, your allegedly-copyright-violating homage to your favorite hero will usually look like a cheap halloween costume. Plus, even as you pat yourself on the back for thinking of aping a relatively obscure hero (such as "Driver X" from the old Speed Racer series or something), you will probably log in and bump into somebody else who had the exact same idea five minutes later.
While everybody tries their hand at duplicating an existing design, just to experiment with the limits of the character design program, most players consider it far more interesting to come up with heroes of their own.
Oddly enough, it's far easier to replicate unusual real-world people than it is to mimic somebody like Wolverine. Last time I played, I bumped into a "Conan O'Brian" who would still be instantly recognizable as the famous late-night host even without the name floating above his head.
The best I could find was a comment that he preferred lower income taxes, which is not a surprising statement from a conervative Republican.
Exactly my point. It's not a surprise when Greenspan supports tax cuts, nor is it a surprise when Buffett opposes them.
Buffett may, in fact, be correct. My point was simply that for you to say "even Warren Buffett says" as an example of somebody who you would expect to support the tax cuts was deliberately misleading. Anybody who knows about Warren Buffett's political views would expect his opposition to the tax cut, just as one would anticipate Greenspan's support for it.
Just for the record, I'm not a huge fan of Keynesian deficit stategies for pumping up the economy. I would prefer to see the scope and size of government sharply reduced.
That said, to imply that the massive deficit would be gone, or even small and managable, absent the tax cut, is utter folly. The dollar amount we are talking about with this cut is dwarfed by the revenue losses caused by the faultering economy, and the massive expenditures in social services in the year following the 9/11 attacks. (Remember all those "emergency" 3-month extensions of unemployment benifits? In the short term, that was far more costly than the tax cuts.)
Also, you continued to dodge my point, that if you cut everybody's taxes exactly in half, that would portrayed by the left as a huge give-away to the rich and a Bad Thing, because in actual dolloars they would be getting a tax cut which is shockingly larger than the middle class.
Finally, if you really want to soak the rich, an income tax is just about the worst way to do it. The truely rich folk in America (like Theresa Heintz-Kerry, for example) don't have "income." They have wealth. Top-bracket income taxes hit a few CEOs, but also nail almost every farmer and small business owner.
I went through the numbers a few months ago, and found that a mere 1% "wealth tax" on the actual holdings of Billionaires, and a 0.5% tax on those with $500 Million or more, would generate about $98 Billion a year, and the various Wal-Mart heirs and Microsoft board members who would be hit by such a tax would probably never miss it. If you genuinely think higher taxes for rich people is the way to go, I would suggest starting there.
Tax rebates as a percentage of income is a deliberately obfuscatory tactic.
I didn't. I was speaking of the tax rebates as a percentage of taxes paid.
If we found a way to cut everybody's taxes in half, it would be perceived by the left as a huge give-away to the rich, because they pay most of the tax burden, so their equal rate reduction would represent a vastly larger sum of money.
Bull. The middle class is helped more by tax breaks for the middle class.
A tax break for me is a $300 check. Nice to get, but it's not going to change my life. A tax break for the mega-sized corporation which I work for is a huge bonanza for me and all of my coworkers, espcially since we are also share-holders. I define a supply-sider as somebody who understands this.
Your "ad hominem" attack on Buffett might matter if he was arguing about Bush's personal hygiene
It wasn't an attack on Buffett. It was an attack on you for trying such a silly tactic as selecting one financial manager who happens to be a liberal Democrat, and expecting us all to be shocked that he did not endorse the Bush tax cuts. When Alan Greenspan reverses his recent statement about the tax cuts being largely responsible for the current recovery, you will have a news story. Buffett being critical of a Republican policy is not worth raising an eyebrow over.
Back in my college days, I voted LP a lot more than I do now that age and corruption has set in.
When I mentioned to my loony-left Poli-Sci prof (who was one of my favorite teachers, in spite of my disagreeing with her on almost every issue) that I was a Libertarian, she replied by saying:
"Ah yes. The Libertarians. The party which went so far to the right that they came back around to the left again."
When people say "left" in America, they mean "left" in the American sense of the word (Howard Dean, Jessie Jackson, and yes... John Kerry), not in the European Socialist sense of the word.
I know that no leader among the Democrats has been left enough to keep the wackos at the Villiage Voice happy, but in the US, anybody that far left is considered part of the lunatic fringe.
In fact, no Democrat since Mondale has advocated returning tax policy to pre-Reagan levels.
For that matter, the left-right battles of 40 years ago on social issues are mostly over, with the exception of abortion rights. All of the other hot-button civil rights issues of the 20th Century (integrated schools, anti-segregation laws, sexual harrassment and discrimination, accissibility for people with disabilities, etc.) have not only been won by the progressives, but won so firmly that you would have a hard time finding a Republican who disagrees with them.
On social issues, we are down to wrangling over whether same-sex couples can call their union a "marriage" or not. On fiscal matters, we are debating on whether the top marginal rate should be in the high 30s or the low 30s.
In spite of how noisy the last election was, the fact is that most Americans have already reached a consensus on most of the big issues. There are new defninitions for "right" and "left", based on how one wishes to make minor tweaks within the kind of society we currently have, and that's simply how it's going to be for the immediate future.
I might not get tired of repeating this anytime soon, because it's an important point:
Almost all the states are purple.
There were only five states in which one candidate or the other won 2/3 of the vote (Idaho, Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah for Bush, the District of Columbia for Kerry). Most of the other states were extremely close. The margin of victory was 10% or less in 25 states.
"Blue State" Demorctats: Unless you are from DC, Mass, RI, or VT (states where Kerry had a margin of victory over 20%), you are not really from a blue state. There are several neighbors on your block who voted for Bush.
Notice that neither Texas nor California, states which were supposedly extremely partisan one way or the other, turned out to be not as lopsided as everybody thought.
Democrats and Republicans live near each other all over the country, so we can all drop this "Jesusland" and "People's Republic of Canada" crap any time now, okay?
(Disclaimer: I voted for Bush, but come from Minnesota, which Kerry won by 3%... and I get along great with friends who voted Democrat. People who actively dislike members of the opposite party genuinely baffle me.)
Personally, as a Bush voter, I would completely support the election of Kerry if he won enough electoral votes. It's how we do things here. Clinton never won a popular majority, but I still considered him my legitimate President.
That said, I think people are probably getting worked up over nothing. Bush won Ohio before all the absentee ballots were counted. I suspect that a recount will probably show an even wider margin of victory for Bush in that state.
Now, call for a recount in a few other close states, such as Iowa, and you might be able to string something together.
Kerry gets my official Class Act Recognition Award for doing the right thing here and not whining about it. Even if he throws that award over the White House fence, I'll still always remember the graceful way in which he accepted a relatively narrow defeat. I hope he considers running again in 2008.
For that matter, what if she sings his stuff? I don't really care for her music, but she's probably one of the only pop singers who would have anywhere near the range required to vocalize the "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." I think I would actually pay to hear that, just for the novelty of it.
The guy says he doen't go for wacky conspiracy theories, and you suggest he watches Frontline. That's pretty funny.
Wacky conspiracy theories is what Frontline is best at! It's a fantastic show, but they are prone to connecting dots based on very flimsy evidence and wild speculation.
You might as well have suggested watching F-9/11 to learn about that oil pipeline which was the REAL reason we attacked the Talliban.
Then, when he was done with that, he could watch "WACO: The Rules of Engagement" so he could learn about how Bill Clinton and Janet Reno sent in stormtroopers to murder those clean-cut religious people in a massive fireball for almost no reason.
Ooo... don't forget about how Mark Fuhrman planted that bloody glove at O.J. Simpson's house, or how JFK was murdered by a cabal lead by Lyndon Johnson and included his own brother.
He won't believe any of that though... he's probably one of THEM!
No. He's working on a sequel to F911. His films generally do much better when Republicans are in power. Why would he have any regrets? Democrats treat him like a rock star, and Republicans give him lots of free publicity by trying to shout him down. This election was the best possible outcome, as far as he's concerned.
By the way, the main story is stupidly misleading. The media said all along that youth turn-out was up, but since all voter turn-out was up the youth vote was still proportionately about the same as it has always been. Obviously, young voters were no more "energized" by all that "Rock the Vote" crap than anybody else.
Personally, I consider this a Good Thing. I'm cheerfully advocate that all uninformed voters should just stay home on Election Day... and sitting in any coffee house near a college campus will give you a very real sense of just how uninformed a lot of 19-year old students really are about politics... and those are the ones smart enough to go to college!
1. The tax cuts were weighted heavilly towards the middle and lower income brackets. Some people got rebate checks who didn't even pay any taxes in. It only appears to favor the rich if you look at it as an actual dollar ammount, rather than a percentage of total taxes paid in, because the rich pay in the vast majority of our tax revenues. I know this, because I got a tax-break check in 2002, and I was unemployed at the time.
2. Tax breaks for the rich help the middle-class more. If a poor person can buy Kraft macaroni & cheese instead of MegaMart generic macaroni & cheese, it doesn't help the economy much at all. It certainly doesn't help me in any way, unless I'm working for Kraft (and it could also hurt me, if i'm working for the generic food factory.) If the fat-cats who like to invest in the company I'm working for can suddenly collective put another hundred grand or so into growing the company, that's another co-worker in my department.
3. Warren Buffett is a partisan Democrat. The fact that he's gotten rich off his investments doesn't change that. There are lots of rich liberals out there. Saying "even Warren Buffett, the uber-Capitalist, says Bush was wrong" carries about as much weight as saying "even Rush Limbaugh, a member of the media (and we all know how pro-Democrat the media is...), thinks John Kerry would have made a lousy President."
How do you write in Linux on XBox? With the gamepad, or am I missing something?
The X-Box controller ports are a goofy proprietary shape, but are actually using standard USB connections.
A simple adapter allows you to plug in an ordinary USB keyboard & mouse, and such adapters can be found on a wide variety of hacker sites if you don't feel like making one yourself.
Microsoft makes their money selling SDK licenses to game makers, not X-Boxes to Linux geeks.
Addressing your points individually:
1. The X-Box game catalog is smaller than the PS2, but better. The only PS2-only game which fill X-Box owners with any sense of envy whatsoever is GTA-SA. HALO2 and the upcoming DOA-Ultimate more than make up for the year-long lag it takes to see the GTA series games get ported to the X-Box and PC.
2. One quick glimpse at VA-Linux's stock value will confirm that nobody is pumping money into slashdot.
3. None of these Linux hacks have come from Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft has done their best to make hacking their systems difficult (such as banning chip-mods from X-Box Live connectivity.)
Either
1. You are a bitter M$ hater who can't ever recognize when something vaguely related to their eeevil company is cool.
2. You are a paid, astroturfing shill working for $ony.
You completely ignored the last half of my sentence: united into a federation.
If you re-read my original post you will find, among the federal responsibilities I listed, providing a common defense.
States in the US are not completely independent, as they are in the EU, but nor are they mere subdivided districts, as Canadian provences are. They collect their own income and/or sales taxes, have their own legislatures (the structure of which are determined by their own constitutions), determine their own funding levels for education, transportation, etc., write their own criminal justice codes, and so on and so on.
IIRC, Full Throttle came out about the same time as Outlaws.
And 1996 was 8 years ago. At the rate games evolve, you gotta treat that like dog years. Besides, anything pre-Special Editions are "the early years" as far as anything Lucas-related is concerned.
I know it's always a shock to somebody in their 30s to be told that the stuff they listened to in college is already considered "classic rock", but that's the way it goes.
By the way, X-Wing didn't do much for me. It struck me as a slightly less-impressive alternative to the Wing Commander series. "X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter" offered team PVP dogfights with Star Wars ships, just when LAN parties were at their peak of popularity, and was therefore the bizz-omb.
You are talking about two completely different types of nations.
Canada is one state, divided into provences.
America is fifty states, united into a federation.
The purpose of the US federal government is to provide a common defense, print a common currency, and regulate insterstate commerce. The role has expanded somewhat since the founding, particularilly in the areas of protecting individual rights, but we are still governed by our states.
If I murder my neighbor, it is the State of Minnesota, not the US, which throws me in prison. If I lose my job and wish to file for unemployment assistance, I apply with Minnesota, not the federal government. If I even want a fishing license, I get it from Minnesota.
As I understand it, if an Ottowan murders somebody, he is tried in a Canadian court. If he loses his job, he gets whatever commie benifits they have up there from the Canadian government. If he wants to fish, he applies for a license from the government of Canada.
Even in its early days, it was pretty good. "Outlaws" was far and away the most fun solo shooter (with the best story behind it) I ever played prior to HALO.
Jedi Knight was also a blast, and X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter was brilliant.
I have not bothered with SWG, because it takes a lot to get me excited about a level-treadmil MMORPG these days, but I still regard LA as one of the best game makers out there.
if x-wing pilots in Star Wars spent the years leading up to attacking the Death Star wandering Tatooine killing Tuscan Raiders to save up for an R2 unit
Tuscan Raiders? Oh come on! Every nerd worth his salt knows that if you want to train to be an X-Wing pilot on Tatooine, there's only one way to go: You gotta bulls-eye womp rats with your T-16.
The parent poster was not trying to make a case for why you should support Bush, but rather making the point that not all Bush voters conform to the comfortable little (extremely bigoted) stereotype which some lefties have chosen to set up for them.
A point-by-point listing of "pro" and "con" opinions about various Bush policies is not really needed to make that point, and will distract from the important fact which was being made: As much as some of you would like to tell yourselves otherwise, not all Bush supporters are red-necked, Bible-thumpin', mouth-breathing "NASCAR dads."
I would not call it "devious." California, among other states, have been using ballot initiatives to encourage voter turn-out for years now.
Sure, a lot of evangelicals were motivated to get out and vote by the chance to formalize their state's legal definition of marriage to exclude gay couples... but then again, those in pro-gay-marriage groups were probably equally motivated to vote, if not more so. If civil libertarians could not match the numbers of those who want to tell other people how to live, then perhaps we are not quite the haven of secular libertarianism that some people once suspected.
Disclaimer: I voted for Bush, and am a practicing Christian, but would have voted against such an initiative if my state had one. Like V.P. Cheney, I'm one of those Republicans in the "freedom means freedom" camp. What other people do at home has nothing to do with me.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, Toy Story 2 was supposed to be the typical low-budget straight-to-video Disney sequel, but thanks to the way technology was moving, Pixar was able to do even better work with less money, and the early dailies looked so good that they convinced Disney to do it as a full theatrical release.
I don't doubt that an el-cheapo Toy Story DVD for the kid's market is what this new project really is. They know how to turn that particular production plan into money, and have been doing so for years.
Okay... try this.
Ask a friend who can draw well to draw you a big musclular dude. Color him bright green. Put purple pants on him.
Does he look enough like the Hulk that you could get sued for selling the image?
Now, with the character creator, you can also make a big muscular dude. You can color him green. You can put purple pants on him.
Which part of the character creator should be crippled to prevent this "violation"? Should you not be allowed to make green-skinned heroes? No purple-colored pants? No muscular dudes?
Or perhaps the best thing to do what Cryptic does: have a policy which forbids you from playing a Hulk copy, resulting in the character getting deleted if they catch it while policing the game.
The variety of choices available in the CoH character creator pretty much makes it the same thing as selling a set of art pens to somebody who knows how to draw well.
This might be worth a little more detail for those who have not seen the character creator.
The 3 "body types" are:
1. Your basic silver-age comic broad-chested male hero figure.
2. Your basic silver-age comic veluptuous female hero figure.
3. Your basic stocky, thick-necked muscular freak figure.
Any of those basic body types can be adusted in height from 4' to 8' tall, with slight variation of waist size.
From there, you have a simple hero in tights and boots. Each section of the costume can be changed in a wide variety of ways, (such as a few skirt designs for the females, or swapping out tights for clothing that looks more like high-tech armor) and for every part, the entire ROY G BIV spectrum of color is available in about 20 increments, along with about ten darkness/saturation levels for each tone. Solid black and solid white are also available, although natural skin tones are not (because there were way too many "nude" characters running around in an early beta.)
Various two-tone patterns are available for the torso, legs, and boots, but none of them are instantly-recognizable trade dress of Marvel properties. (For example, you can't make a suit covered in spider webs, or with a huge skull on the chest.)
There is also the option of adding one of about 50 logos on the chest, including alphanumeric characters. These options do not seem to be very popular with solo adventurers, as most people don't want to be Yet Another hero with an anarchy symbol or a yin/yang on his chest, but they are frequently used by "supergroups" as identifying marks.
For each body type, there are a handful of faces to chose from, with a handful of "masked" alternatives, and about a dozen hairstyles. Details such as goggles, rebreathers, cigars, forhead horns, etc. can also be added. Skin tones cover most of the range of natural human pigments, plus a few "otherworldly" colors (although not with quite as much variety as the costume options).
So you can, by spending 20 minutes or so experimenting with choices, produce a hero that looks a little bit like a power ranger, or an X-man, but comic book characters who have genuinely distict looks, like batman or spider-man, are almost impossible to replicate very closely. The heroes who are easiest to mimic are those which don't really are not so unique. The Hulk, for example, is just a large man who happens to be green. Make a large man who's green, and it will look a bit like the Hulk.
Most of the time, it's not worth the hassle. At best, your allegedly-copyright-violating homage to your favorite hero will usually look like a cheap halloween costume. Plus, even as you pat yourself on the back for thinking of aping a relatively obscure hero (such as "Driver X" from the old Speed Racer series or something), you will probably log in and bump into somebody else who had the exact same idea five minutes later.
While everybody tries their hand at duplicating an existing design, just to experiment with the limits of the character design program, most players consider it far more interesting to come up with heroes of their own.
Oddly enough, it's far easier to replicate unusual real-world people than it is to mimic somebody like Wolverine. Last time I played, I bumped into a "Conan O'Brian" who would still be instantly recognizable as the famous late-night host even without the name floating above his head.
The best I could find was a comment that he preferred lower income taxes, which is not a surprising statement from a conervative Republican.
Exactly my point. It's not a surprise when Greenspan supports tax cuts, nor is it a surprise when Buffett opposes them.
Buffett may, in fact, be correct. My point was simply that for you to say "even Warren Buffett says" as an example of somebody who you would expect to support the tax cuts was deliberately misleading. Anybody who knows about Warren Buffett's political views would expect his opposition to the tax cut, just as one would anticipate Greenspan's support for it.
Just for the record, I'm not a huge fan of Keynesian deficit stategies for pumping up the economy. I would prefer to see the scope and size of government sharply reduced.
That said, to imply that the massive deficit would be gone, or even small and managable, absent the tax cut, is utter folly. The dollar amount we are talking about with this cut is dwarfed by the revenue losses caused by the faultering economy, and the massive expenditures in social services in the year following the 9/11 attacks. (Remember all those "emergency" 3-month extensions of unemployment benifits? In the short term, that was far more costly than the tax cuts.)
Also, you continued to dodge my point, that if you cut everybody's taxes exactly in half, that would portrayed by the left as a huge give-away to the rich and a Bad Thing, because in actual dolloars they would be getting a tax cut which is shockingly larger than the middle class.
Finally, if you really want to soak the rich, an income tax is just about the worst way to do it. The truely rich folk in America (like Theresa Heintz-Kerry, for example) don't have "income." They have wealth. Top-bracket income taxes hit a few CEOs, but also nail almost every farmer and small business owner.
I went through the numbers a few months ago, and found that a mere 1% "wealth tax" on the actual holdings of Billionaires, and a 0.5% tax on those with $500 Million or more, would generate about $98 Billion a year, and the various Wal-Mart heirs and Microsoft board members who would be hit by such a tax would probably never miss it. If you genuinely think higher taxes for rich people is the way to go, I would suggest starting there.
Tax rebates as a percentage of income is a deliberately obfuscatory tactic.
I didn't. I was speaking of the tax rebates as a percentage of taxes paid.
If we found a way to cut everybody's taxes in half, it would be perceived by the left as a huge give-away to the rich, because they pay most of the tax burden, so their equal rate reduction would represent a vastly larger sum of money.
Bull. The middle class is helped more by tax breaks for the middle class.
A tax break for me is a $300 check. Nice to get, but it's not going to change my life. A tax break for the mega-sized corporation which I work for is a huge bonanza for me and all of my coworkers, espcially since we are also share-holders. I define a supply-sider as somebody who understands this.
Your "ad hominem" attack on Buffett might matter if he was arguing about Bush's personal hygiene
It wasn't an attack on Buffett. It was an attack on you for trying such a silly tactic as selecting one financial manager who happens to be a liberal Democrat, and expecting us all to be shocked that he did not endorse the Bush tax cuts. When Alan Greenspan reverses his recent statement about the tax cuts being largely responsible for the current recovery, you will have a news story. Buffett being critical of a Republican policy is not worth raising an eyebrow over.
That reminds me of a great line I once heard.
Back in my college days, I voted LP a lot more than I do now that age and corruption has set in.
When I mentioned to my loony-left Poli-Sci prof (who was one of my favorite teachers, in spite of my disagreeing with her on almost every issue) that I was a Libertarian, she replied by saying:
"Ah yes. The Libertarians. The party which went so far to the right that they came back around to the left again."
When people say "left" in America, they mean "left" in the American sense of the word (Howard Dean, Jessie Jackson, and yes... John Kerry), not in the European Socialist sense of the word.
I know that no leader among the Democrats has been left enough to keep the wackos at the Villiage Voice happy, but in the US, anybody that far left is considered part of the lunatic fringe.
In fact, no Democrat since Mondale has advocated returning tax policy to pre-Reagan levels.
For that matter, the left-right battles of 40 years ago on social issues are mostly over, with the exception of abortion rights. All of the other hot-button civil rights issues of the 20th Century (integrated schools, anti-segregation laws, sexual harrassment and discrimination, accissibility for people with disabilities, etc.) have not only been won by the progressives, but won so firmly that you would have a hard time finding a Republican who disagrees with them.
On social issues, we are down to wrangling over whether same-sex couples can call their union a "marriage" or not. On fiscal matters, we are debating on whether the top marginal rate should be in the high 30s or the low 30s.
In spite of how noisy the last election was, the fact is that most Americans have already reached a consensus on most of the big issues. There are new defninitions for "right" and "left", based on how one wishes to make minor tweaks within the kind of society we currently have, and that's simply how it's going to be for the immediate future.
I might not get tired of repeating this anytime soon, because it's an important point:
Almost all the states are purple.
There were only five states in which one candidate or the other won 2/3 of the vote (Idaho, Nebraska, Wyoming and Utah for Bush, the District of Columbia for Kerry). Most of the other states were extremely close. The margin of victory was 10% or less in 25 states.
"Blue State" Demorctats: Unless you are from DC, Mass, RI, or VT (states where Kerry had a margin of victory over 20%), you are not really from a blue state. There are several neighbors on your block who voted for Bush.
Notice that neither Texas nor California, states which were supposedly extremely partisan one way or the other, turned out to be not as lopsided as everybody thought.
Democrats and Republicans live near each other all over the country, so we can all drop this "Jesusland" and "People's Republic of Canada" crap any time now, okay?
(Disclaimer: I voted for Bush, but come from Minnesota, which Kerry won by 3%... and I get along great with friends who voted Democrat. People who actively dislike members of the opposite party genuinely baffle me.)
Personally, as a Bush voter, I would completely support the election of Kerry if he won enough electoral votes. It's how we do things here. Clinton never won a popular majority, but I still considered him my legitimate President.
That said, I think people are probably getting worked up over nothing. Bush won Ohio before all the absentee ballots were counted. I suspect that a recount will probably show an even wider margin of victory for Bush in that state.
Now, call for a recount in a few other close states, such as Iowa, and you might be able to string something together.
Kerry gets my official Class Act Recognition Award for doing the right thing here and not whining about it. Even if he throws that award over the White House fence, I'll still always remember the graceful way in which he accepted a relatively narrow defeat. I hope he considers running again in 2008.
45RPM vinyl singles...
I guess it's a sign of the times that you couldn't have just said "45's" with the expectation of being understood by everybody here.
I suddenly feel very old.
What if Mariah Carey plays Bach?
For that matter, what if she sings his stuff? I don't really care for her music, but she's probably one of the only pop singers who would have anywhere near the range required to vocalize the "Toccata and Fugue in D minor." I think I would actually pay to hear that, just for the novelty of it.
lol
The guy says he doen't go for wacky conspiracy theories, and you suggest he watches Frontline. That's pretty funny.
Wacky conspiracy theories is what Frontline is best at! It's a fantastic show, but they are prone to connecting dots based on very flimsy evidence and wild speculation.
You might as well have suggested watching F-9/11 to learn about that oil pipeline which was the REAL reason we attacked the Talliban.
Then, when he was done with that, he could watch "WACO: The Rules of Engagement" so he could learn about how Bill Clinton and Janet Reno sent in stormtroopers to murder those clean-cut religious people in a massive fireball for almost no reason.
Ooo... don't forget about how Mark Fuhrman planted that bloody glove at O.J. Simpson's house, or how JFK was murdered by a cabal lead by Lyndon Johnson and included his own brother.
He won't believe any of that though... he's probably one of THEM!
No. He's working on a sequel to F911. His films generally do much better when Republicans are in power. Why would he have any regrets? Democrats treat him like a rock star, and Republicans give him lots of free publicity by trying to shout him down. This election was the best possible outcome, as far as he's concerned.
By the way, the main story is stupidly misleading. The media said all along that youth turn-out was up, but since all voter turn-out was up the youth vote was still proportionately about the same as it has always been. Obviously, young voters were no more "energized" by all that "Rock the Vote" crap than anybody else.
Personally, I consider this a Good Thing. I'm cheerfully advocate that all uninformed voters should just stay home on Election Day... and sitting in any coffee house near a college campus will give you a very real sense of just how uninformed a lot of 19-year old students really are about politics... and those are the ones smart enough to go to college!
Three points.
1. The tax cuts were weighted heavilly towards the middle and lower income brackets. Some people got rebate checks who didn't even pay any taxes in. It only appears to favor the rich if you look at it as an actual dollar ammount, rather than a percentage of total taxes paid in, because the rich pay in the vast majority of our tax revenues. I know this, because I got a tax-break check in 2002, and I was unemployed at the time.
2. Tax breaks for the rich help the middle-class more. If a poor person can buy Kraft macaroni & cheese instead of MegaMart generic macaroni & cheese, it doesn't help the economy much at all. It certainly doesn't help me in any way, unless I'm working for Kraft (and it could also hurt me, if i'm working for the generic food factory.) If the fat-cats who like to invest in the company I'm working for can suddenly collective put another hundred grand or so into growing the company, that's another co-worker in my department.
3. Warren Buffett is a partisan Democrat. The fact that he's gotten rich off his investments doesn't change that. There are lots of rich liberals out there. Saying "even Warren Buffett, the uber-Capitalist, says Bush was wrong" carries about as much weight as saying "even Rush Limbaugh, a member of the media (and we all know how pro-Democrat the media is...), thinks John Kerry would have made a lousy President."
How do you write in Linux on XBox? With the gamepad, or am I missing something?
The X-Box controller ports are a goofy proprietary shape, but are actually using standard USB connections.
A simple adapter allows you to plug in an ordinary USB keyboard & mouse, and such adapters can be found on a wide variety of hacker sites if you don't feel like making one yourself.
4) None of the above.
Microsoft makes their money selling SDK licenses to game makers, not X-Boxes to Linux geeks.
Addressing your points individually:
1. The X-Box game catalog is smaller than the PS2, but better. The only PS2-only game which fill X-Box owners with any sense of envy whatsoever is GTA-SA. HALO2 and the upcoming DOA-Ultimate more than make up for the year-long lag it takes to see the GTA series games get ported to the X-Box and PC.
2. One quick glimpse at VA-Linux's stock value will confirm that nobody is pumping money into slashdot.
3. None of these Linux hacks have come from Microsoft. In fact, Microsoft has done their best to make hacking their systems difficult (such as banning chip-mods from X-Box Live connectivity.)
Either
1. You are a bitter M$ hater who can't ever recognize when something vaguely related to their eeevil company is cool.
2. You are a paid, astroturfing shill working for $ony.
3. You are a complete idiot.
You completely ignored the last half of my sentence: united into a federation.
If you re-read my original post you will find, among the federal responsibilities I listed, providing a common defense.
States in the US are not completely independent, as they are in the EU, but nor are they mere subdivided districts, as Canadian provences are. They collect their own income and/or sales taxes, have their own legislatures (the structure of which are determined by their own constitutions), determine their own funding levels for education, transportation, etc., write their own criminal justice codes, and so on and so on.
IIRC, Full Throttle came out about the same time as Outlaws.
And 1996 was 8 years ago. At the rate games evolve, you gotta treat that like dog years. Besides, anything pre-Special Editions are "the early years" as far as anything Lucas-related is concerned.
I know it's always a shock to somebody in their 30s to be told that the stuff they listened to in college is already considered "classic rock", but that's the way it goes.
By the way, X-Wing didn't do much for me. It struck me as a slightly less-impressive alternative to the Wing Commander series. "X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter" offered team PVP dogfights with Star Wars ships, just when LAN parties were at their peak of popularity, and was therefore the bizz-omb.
You are talking about two completely different types of nations.
Canada is one state, divided into provences.
America is fifty states, united into a federation.
The purpose of the US federal government is to provide a common defense, print a common currency, and regulate insterstate commerce. The role has expanded somewhat since the founding, particularilly in the areas of protecting individual rights, but we are still governed by our states.
If I murder my neighbor, it is the State of Minnesota, not the US, which throws me in prison. If I lose my job and wish to file for unemployment assistance, I apply with Minnesota, not the federal government. If I even want a fishing license, I get it from Minnesota.
As I understand it, if an Ottowan murders somebody, he is tried in a Canadian court. If he loses his job, he gets whatever commie benifits they have up there from the Canadian government. If he wants to fish, he applies for a license from the government of Canada.
See the difference?
No. Next question.
Even in its early days, it was pretty good. "Outlaws" was far and away the most fun solo shooter (with the best story behind it) I ever played prior to HALO.
Jedi Knight was also a blast, and X-Wing vs. Tie Fighter was brilliant.
I have not bothered with SWG, because it takes a lot to get me excited about a level-treadmil MMORPG these days, but I still regard LA as one of the best game makers out there.
aspirin, cellophane, nylon, thermos, escalator...
;)
You can google for more if you like.
if x-wing pilots in Star Wars spent the years leading up to attacking the Death Star wandering Tatooine killing Tuscan Raiders to save up for an R2 unit
Tuscan Raiders? Oh come on! Every nerd worth his salt knows that if you want to train to be an X-Wing pilot on Tatooine, there's only one way to go: You gotta bulls-eye womp rats with your T-16.
... or in this case, 108%
The parent poster was not trying to make a case for why you should support Bush, but rather making the point that not all Bush voters conform to the comfortable little (extremely bigoted) stereotype which some lefties have chosen to set up for them.
A point-by-point listing of "pro" and "con" opinions about various Bush policies is not really needed to make that point, and will distract from the important fact which was being made: As much as some of you would like to tell yourselves otherwise, not all Bush supporters are red-necked, Bible-thumpin', mouth-breathing "NASCAR dads."
I would not call it "devious." California, among other states, have been using ballot initiatives to encourage voter turn-out for years now.
Sure, a lot of evangelicals were motivated to get out and vote by the chance to formalize their state's legal definition of marriage to exclude gay couples... but then again, those in pro-gay-marriage groups were probably equally motivated to vote, if not more so. If civil libertarians could not match the numbers of those who want to tell other people how to live, then perhaps we are not quite the haven of secular libertarianism that some people once suspected.
Disclaimer: I voted for Bush, and am a practicing Christian, but would have voted against such an initiative if my state had one. Like V.P. Cheney, I'm one of those Republicans in the "freedom means freedom" camp. What other people do at home has nothing to do with me.