I don't give a fuck what BMW "deserved." When I run a search engine, I want it to return the correct results for my search.
Okay, BMW was bad for fucking up my search by pushing their rank higher than it should be. Bad, bad BMW. No soup for you, BMW.
But now I'm supposed to think that Google is good for fucking up my search in the other direction? I don't think so. Fix your damn code, you lazy bums. These kinds of tactics are only going to make me move on to search companies which actually do what I want them to do, which is to help me find what I'm looking for.
The moment Google stops being the most useful tool for finding stuff on the web, they cease to have any reason to exist.
Removing the cross-hair would probably be a bad idea.
In most FPS games, the cross-hair is a stationary object, because the player is always facing exactly where they are aiming. This means that PvP gamers could "cheat" to get an edge on their opponent by adding a cross-hair to their monitor with a small transparent vinyl sticker, or even hanging a weighted string down the center, and taping another string across the horizontal axis.
There's another option, and one which I might consider.
I'm not gay, but I may very well might go out of my way to express pro-gay rights values within the context of the game's roleplay setting.
"Curse those fiendish orcs. Do you know that most of them lack the capacity to tolerate same-sex unions? Indeed, this evil philosophy has so infected the world, that one even hears the same opinion expressed among our Alliance Brothers. Now it appears that the gods of Norrath have responded to this swell of hatred by prohibiting them from all creatures on both sides of this war! Alas, the injustice of it all!"
And then, when they dare to ban my account in response, hop on board the class-action* and drive the assholes into bankruptcy while getting a partial refund of what I've spent the game over the last year.
*Disclaimer: I utterly detest 90% of the class action lawsuits which get filed in America, but shit like this (and the Ford Pinto) is what they were invented for.
Fact: these people do not have the same protection under the law that heterosexual couples have.
Fact: Unmarried straight people don't have these same "protections" either.
I still say the ideal solution is for society to stop discriminating in favor of married people. Fix that, and 90% of the reason why lack of gay marriage is a problem goes away.
It's a common tactic of gay marriage opponents - they're just trying to tar the issue with anything they can find, and 'Man marrying livestock' seems universally repugnant. I believe the technical term is 'straw-man'
Actually, I brought it up, and I'm a gay marriage supporter. I think even whatever type of marriage seems "repugnant" to both you and I should still be allowed, provided that it only involves those competent and free to enter into the contract of their own volition.
So you're trying to say that a same-sex couple can not "raise children in a healthy environment"?
I am sorry, but that's just bigotry.
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
A second mom can love her daughter very dearly, but (unless the difference between genders is far more superficial than commonly-accepted evidence seems to indicate) she can never be the girl's father.
If you believe fathers are not particularilly important to a child, then there's no problem, but that seems to be a point which is still open to debate.
Likewise, a second dad, no matter how fantastic of a parent he is, isn't really a mom. Same arguments apply.
I'm not saying the grandparent post is correct. I actually disagree with it, and think kids are far more robust about family structures than what sociologists like to claim.
I'm just saying one shouldn't throw around a word as strong as "bigot" so carelessly, simply because somebody disagrees with you on a civil liberties issue. It dilutes the meaning and power of the word, leaving us with nothing to say when we want to describe genuine bigotry.
Anybody marrying anything does not exactly speak well of us as a people or as a civilization.
I think we may have to agree to disagree here. With the exception of those who have free will yet lack the ability to consent (children, animals, etc.), anybody who tells anybody else who they can't marry speaks far worse of a civilization than somebody marrying a member of their gender, more than one person, a computer, a car, or whatever.
Bottom line: Marriage within the Church is a sacred institution. Marriage in society at large ought to be a private contract, and therefore none of anybody else's business.
On the other hand, if everybody has bread and circuses, it's a pretty good indicator that our system is mostly working. Even 90% of civil liberties issues come about as a result of people being denied equal opportunity to access one or the other.
Do you really think it's possible to implement the wide, sweeping reforms the LP proposes without completely destabilizing and possibly destroying the economy?
No.
Please observe that I used a lower-case "L." I speak only for my own libertarian views, not for a party which wants to quickly impose radical reforms in the direction of such a philosophy.
And, moreover, since rich people are taxed much more than poor, don't you think it would wildly shift the distribution of wealth into the richest hands immediately and do an excellent job of destroying the middle class?
It wouldn't shift the "distribution of wealth", it would end it. Wealth, for the most part, would remain in the hands of those who generate it.
That, of course, is widely off-topic from the discussion of civil liberties which we are currently having.
There's been some really nice anti-semitism in Ogrimmar's general chat and trade channels on my server as well.
Judging by how they are handling this issue, they will ban anybody who expresses their tendancy towards Judaism, in order to prevent immature reactions from being provoked in the general population.
Or maybe they won't ban them. Maybe they will relocate all those characters to a camp or two in the Kharanos. The gnomes have a good train system they can use for shipping them in large groups, if packed in tight enough, while there, those with crafting skills can be put to use, while the others can be taught mining. It's the perfect "final" solution to all those troublemakers, ja?
Actually, homosexual marriages in the US are not legal because it's a back-door way (pardon the pun) to get in on all that sweet graft of economic and legal incentives which were intended to keep the parents of children together.
The hypocracy here is that men and women who are incapable of producing their own biological offspring are still allowed to get married, even though they are no different (procreatively speaking) from gay couples.
Being a libertarian, of course, I'm all for dropping all those freebies (and slashing everybody's taxes to make up for it) and then letting anybody marry anybody or anything they choose... but alas, libertarian nut-jobs like me never get elected to anything.
Making add-ons for the iPod is a $1 billion business. Does that sound like hyperbole? Consider this. Last year, Apple sold 32 million iPods, or one every second. But for every $3 spent on an iPod, at least $1 is spent on an accessory...
Okay, now let's see. Accessories are a $1B business, and for every dollor spent on accessories, three dollars are spent on iPods. That makes iPods a $3B business.
32 million iPods sold into $3B is and average price per iPod of $93.75.
Last time I checked, most of the iPods cost way more than that, and none of them are cheaper. Somebody is pulling numbers out of his ass somewhere.
and even higher-end producers like Bose and Coach make iPod add-ons now.
For the sake of accuracy, please make that the last time you ever use "higher-end" and "Bose" in the same sentence, unless it's to say something like, "there's the higher-end, and then there's overpriced crap like Bose."
Stardom is a fading thing. Thresh was extremely well known back in the days of Quake I.
If I stopped 200 random people on the corner of Hollywood and Vine during the peak of the Quake I tournament days, I seriously doubt a single one of them would have known who the fuck Thresh was. Gaming tournaments was not something the general public paid any attention to at all back then.
In other words, he was not a "superstar" because nobody was famous for playing video games in the 90s.
Hell, even today there are Texas Hold 'Em players with more name recognition than Fatal1ty, but at least he's had his picture in a few newspapers and magazines.
I remember the hype over Thresh, and I could not even begin to tell you what he looked like.
While it is true that computing power, storage, etc generally marches forward at a fairly predictable rate, there are definitely points along the way when the computer you bought yesterday is much "worse" than the computer that you could have bought today.
Yes, but if you can afford to wait a month just prior to one of those big jumps, you can also afford to wait a month prior to a small increment. Whether something huge is around the corner or not, it always pays to wait unless you really need a computer right away.
And if you really need a computer right away, then what's just around the corner doesn't matter, because you need something that does the job now.
The answer to the actual question the headline is asking ("buy or wait") is the same answer as it always is, no matter what:
If you really, really need a new computer now, buy one now.
If you don't, don't.
No matter what, there will be something new computers can do next year that the one you buy today can't do. C'est la vie. Don't buy computers you don't need, and this will never be a problem.
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You almost made Diet Coke shoot out my nose. Good work. :)
When we see someone else shoot a gun, even a video game character, the exact same neurons fire.
So that makes watching a movie different from playing a game... how?
A private contract between X and Y cannot affect Ys rigths relating to country Z.
But country Z can commit to honoring the terms of private contracts between X and Y, provided that contract fits within the scope of its legal system.
In fact, in a libertarian system of government, upholding private contracts is 90% of what the government exists for.
I don't give a fuck what BMW "deserved." When I run a search engine, I want it to return the correct results for my search.
Okay, BMW was bad for fucking up my search by pushing their rank higher than it should be. Bad, bad BMW. No soup for you, BMW.
But now I'm supposed to think that Google is good for fucking up my search in the other direction? I don't think so. Fix your damn code, you lazy bums. These kinds of tactics are only going to make me move on to search companies which actually do what I want them to do, which is to help me find what I'm looking for.
The moment Google stops being the most useful tool for finding stuff on the web, they cease to have any reason to exist.
All of that stuff can and should be made available via private contracts, if you ask me.
Removing the cross-hair would probably be a bad idea.
In most FPS games, the cross-hair is a stationary object, because the player is always facing exactly where they are aiming. This means that PvP gamers could "cheat" to get an edge on their opponent by adding a cross-hair to their monitor with a small transparent vinyl sticker, or even hanging a weighted string down the center, and taping another string across the horizontal axis.
There's another option, and one which I might consider.
I'm not gay, but I may very well might go out of my way to express pro-gay rights values within the context of the game's roleplay setting.
"Curse those fiendish orcs. Do you know that most of them lack the capacity to tolerate same-sex unions? Indeed, this evil philosophy has so infected the world, that one even hears the same opinion expressed among our Alliance Brothers. Now it appears that the gods of Norrath have responded to this swell of hatred by prohibiting them from all creatures on both sides of this war! Alas, the injustice of it all!"
And then, when they dare to ban my account in response, hop on board the class-action* and drive the assholes into bankruptcy while getting a partial refund of what I've spent the game over the last year.
*Disclaimer: I utterly detest 90% of the class action lawsuits which get filed in America, but shit like this (and the Ford Pinto) is what they were invented for.
Fact: these people do not have the same protection under the law that heterosexual couples have.
Fact: Unmarried straight people don't have these same "protections" either.
I still say the ideal solution is for society to stop discriminating in favor of married people. Fix that, and 90% of the reason why lack of gay marriage is a problem goes away.
It's a common tactic of gay marriage opponents - they're just trying to tar the issue with anything they can find, and 'Man marrying livestock' seems universally repugnant. I believe the technical term is 'straw-man'
Actually, I brought it up, and I'm a gay marriage supporter. I think even whatever type of marriage seems "repugnant" to both you and I should still be allowed, provided that it only involves those competent and free to enter into the contract of their own volition.
You just completely missed the "middle man" pun there, didn'tcha?
So you're trying to say that a same-sex couple can not "raise children in a healthy environment"?
I am sorry, but that's just bigotry.
Only if you subscribe to the notion that a parent of one gender or the other is not particularily important.
A second mom can love her daughter very dearly, but (unless the difference between genders is far more superficial than commonly-accepted evidence seems to indicate) she can never be the girl's father.
If you believe fathers are not particularilly important to a child, then there's no problem, but that seems to be a point which is still open to debate.
Likewise, a second dad, no matter how fantastic of a parent he is, isn't really a mom. Same arguments apply.
I'm not saying the grandparent post is correct. I actually disagree with it, and think kids are far more robust about family structures than what sociologists like to claim.
I'm just saying one shouldn't throw around a word as strong as "bigot" so carelessly, simply because somebody disagrees with you on a civil liberties issue. It dilutes the meaning and power of the word, leaving us with nothing to say when we want to describe genuine bigotry.
Anybody marrying anything does not exactly speak well of us as a people or as a civilization.
I think we may have to agree to disagree here. With the exception of those who have free will yet lack the ability to consent (children, animals, etc.), anybody who tells anybody else who they can't marry speaks far worse of a civilization than somebody marrying a member of their gender, more than one person, a computer, a car, or whatever.
Bottom line: Marriage within the Church is a sacred institution. Marriage in society at large ought to be a private contract, and therefore none of anybody else's business.
On the other hand, if everybody has bread and circuses, it's a pretty good indicator that our system is mostly working. Even 90% of civil liberties issues come about as a result of people being denied equal opportunity to access one or the other.
Do you really think it's possible to implement the wide, sweeping reforms the LP proposes without completely destabilizing and possibly destroying the economy?
No.
Please observe that I used a lower-case "L." I speak only for my own libertarian views, not for a party which wants to quickly impose radical reforms in the direction of such a philosophy.
And, moreover, since rich people are taxed much more than poor, don't you think it would wildly shift the distribution of wealth into the richest hands immediately and do an excellent job of destroying the middle class?
It wouldn't shift the "distribution of wealth", it would end it. Wealth, for the most part, would remain in the hands of those who generate it.
That, of course, is widely off-topic from the discussion of civil liberties which we are currently having.
I say screw the middle man.
So... You're saying 3-way marriage should be okay too, then?
There's been some really nice anti-semitism in Ogrimmar's general chat and trade channels on my server as well.
Judging by how they are handling this issue, they will ban anybody who expresses their tendancy towards Judaism, in order to prevent immature reactions from being provoked in the general population.
Or maybe they won't ban them. Maybe they will relocate all those characters to a camp or two in the Kharanos. The gnomes have a good train system they can use for shipping them in large groups, if packed in tight enough, while there, those with crafting skills can be put to use, while the others can be taught mining. It's the perfect "final" solution to all those troublemakers, ja?
Actually, homosexual marriages in the US are not legal because it's a back-door way (pardon the pun) to get in on all that sweet graft of economic and legal incentives which were intended to keep the parents of children together.
The hypocracy here is that men and women who are incapable of producing their own biological offspring are still allowed to get married, even though they are no different (procreatively speaking) from gay couples.
Being a libertarian, of course, I'm all for dropping all those freebies (and slashing everybody's taxes to make up for it) and then letting anybody marry anybody or anything they choose... but alas, libertarian nut-jobs like me never get elected to anything.
Making add-ons for the iPod is a $1 billion business. Does that sound like hyperbole? Consider this. Last year, Apple sold 32 million iPods, or one every second. But for every $3 spent on an iPod, at least $1 is spent on an accessory...
Okay, now let's see. Accessories are a $1B business, and for every dollor spent on accessories, three dollars are spent on iPods. That makes iPods a $3B business.
32 million iPods sold into $3B is and average price per iPod of $93.75.
Last time I checked, most of the iPods cost way more than that, and none of them are cheaper. Somebody is pulling numbers out of his ass somewhere.
Britain has just launched the HMS Daring, a 600 million pound-sterling (umm ... roughly US$ 1 Billion) battleship complete with iPod docks.
;)
Ooooo. How much is the full 3-year AppleCare on that?
And does that cover oil leaks? We are talking about British engineering, after all.
and even higher-end producers like Bose and Coach make iPod add-ons now.
For the sake of accuracy, please make that the last time you ever use "higher-end" and "Bose" in the same sentence, unless it's to say something like, "there's the higher-end, and then there's overpriced crap like Bose."
Do you know who Hedy Lamarr was?
Yes I do. Point being?
Stardom is a fading thing. Thresh was extremely well known back in the days of Quake I.
If I stopped 200 random people on the corner of Hollywood and Vine during the peak of the Quake I tournament days, I seriously doubt a single one of them would have known who the fuck Thresh was. Gaming tournaments was not something the general public paid any attention to at all back then.
In other words, he was not a "superstar" because nobody was famous for playing video games in the 90s.
Hell, even today there are Texas Hold 'Em players with more name recognition than Fatal1ty, but at least he's had his picture in a few newspapers and magazines.
I remember the hype over Thresh, and I could not even begin to tell you what he looked like.
While it is true that computing power, storage, etc generally marches forward at a fairly predictable rate, there are definitely points along the way when the computer you bought yesterday is much "worse" than the computer that you could have bought today.
Yes, but if you can afford to wait a month just prior to one of those big jumps, you can also afford to wait a month prior to a small increment. Whether something huge is around the corner or not, it always pays to wait unless you really need a computer right away.
And if you really need a computer right away, then what's just around the corner doesn't matter, because you need something that does the job now.
The answer to the actual question the headline is asking ("buy or wait") is the same answer as it always is, no matter what:
If you really, really need a new computer now, buy one now.
If you don't, don't.
No matter what, there will be something new computers can do next year that the one you buy today can't do. C'est la vie. Don't buy computers you don't need, and this will never be a problem.
If people need a wiki reference to know about him, then the term "superstar" doesn't really apply, does it?
You're not raining on my parade, you're just being a smart-ass in response to an honest question.