If I am going to play a game where I am looking at someones ass all day, it's going to be a female ass.
It seems that a lot of guys who play female characters feel, very strongly, they need to tell everybody in the world that they are doing it "to look at the cute female asses" while playing the game.
Look, just say it. It's fun to play with gender roles.
That explanation is a lot less sad than obsessing over the posterior of a CARTOON for hours on end.
For that matter, I can't help but suspect that a lot of the pain relief brought about by playing Sports & Fighting games is the direct result of endorphins being released to deal with the soreness the controller is causing your thumbs.
For a control group, maybe they should just take some people with severe pain and gradually apply "thumb-screw" torture devices (short of doing permanent damage.) The results might be similar.
Does the word "duh" come to mind for any of these people?
The reason soaps are the way they are is because the largest marketable demographic that is at home from 11:00 AM until 3:00 PM is house-wives and stay-at-home moms of small children.
If you want to reach teenaged girls, you don't produce a show for them that runs while they are at school.
If a cop hears a woman screaming "help help I've been kidnapped" from inside your house, he can kick in your door without a warrent, because he has reason to believe that a crime is going on.
If he kicks in your door without such provocation, anything he charges you with is thrown out of court, and you can sue him for wrecking your door and invading your home.
Likewise, if you have a known terrorist on your speed-dial, I've got no problem whatsoever with federal goons listening to what you say to him next time you call him.
Having an affair in office isn't exactly illegal in any sense.
It would get most executives immediately fired from most jobs, but I personally think that the Republicans were wrong to weaken the Office of the President by going after him over a matter that could have been settled entirely in civil litigation. (And indeed, was settled in the long run.)
The fact that a President lied under oath in a courtroom is considerably more serious. To this day I believe the country would have been better off if Clinton did the right thing and resigned when that came out. Not because Gore would make a better President than Clinton, but because a President without Clinton's baggage and distractions would have been far more effective during those critical years (particularilly in dealing with the rising threat of terrorism.)
Remember when Clinton bombed the Sudan and parts of Afghanistan? Most of the country was talking about him "wagging the dog" the next day, because it happened to steal the front page away from a key development in his personal scandals. It became politically unviable for him to effectively follow up on that single, feeble attack. That should have been a rather clear signal to him that his own personal issues were going to prevent him from doing his job properly, and it was time for him to move over and let somebody else drive.
He was not found guilty by the Senate in his impreachment trial, but he was found in contempt of court and fined a rather substantial ammount of money.
So technically, yes. He was convicted of criminal behavior. It's all kind of irrelevant at this point, isn't it?
Is it really so much of a stretch to look back 40 years?
Yes. 40 years ago we were okay with censoring unflattering war news. 40 years ago in humiliated and disgraced an entire family if it became known that a girl had an abortion. 40 years ago desegregation was seen as controversial in some parts of the country.
40 years ago, an argument against the monitoring suspected terrorists would be seen as utterly preposterous by all but a handful of radicals.
We are a very different nation than we were 40 years ago. Nowadays, the issue of whether we ought to be monitoring these calls has become something that reasonable people can disagree upon.
Clinton-haters and Bush-haters asside, I continue to be astonished at our ongoing success at maintaining a democracy in which our rights are so well cared for that the suggestion of a relatively minor perceived infraction of privacy is seen by half the country as a dangerous outrage.
That is unless you need to be discredited to the public in some way.
Kindly site three examples of private citizens who have been publicly disgraced as a result of US government surveillance of their embarassing behavior.
If my "leaked" you mean "the President is giving stump speeches on how important it is to keep doing this", then yeah. Pretty huge leak though.
The point is that the government is spying on American citizens without a warrant. This is expressly forbidden in the Constitution.
The government is listening to conversations across international borders when they have reason to believe that crimes are being planned. This is not prohibited anywhere in the Constitution.
Clue: The Constitution was written before phones existed.
So if I'm talking to someone in Syria...I forfeit my rights as an American for the duration of the call?
Nope, you still have each and every right outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's just that the governement is going to listen to the call if they have probable cause to think you might be a terrorist.
Yesterday it was terrorists. Today it's pornographers. Tomorrow it's you. That is, if they aren't already surveilling you because of the pornography, which they probably are.
I think you might have an inflated opinion of just how interesting you are to law enforcement agencies.
If you're not about to blow up a federal building (or blow up your garage with a badly-planned meth lab), then the Justice Department really doesn't give a shit about what you are doing at home, or what genre of dirty pictures you are doing it with. Get over yourself.
Here's the problem...the phrase "Americans that the government is suspicious of", can (and is) defined differently every day. Such vagueness virtually invites a police state.
If that's the only problem with it, then I'm with the 53%, because my rule of thumb is to dismiss all "slippery slope" arguments outright. There are plenty of laws currently on the books which could be used to rationalize government misbehavior. That doesn't automatically make them bad laws, nor dows it automaticlally mean the government will misbehave in that manner.
For the entire duration of the Cold War, NSA policy was "tap all international calls outgoing from the US, but don't tell anybody." The fact that the government is currently telling people that they are doing it is actually a huge improvement.
By the way "Domestic Wiretaps" is an entirely misleading term. If somebody in Cleveland calls somebody in Syria, that is not a "domestic" call, and that's what we are talking about here.
I never understood people who think of their character levels as "accomplishments" that they had to work for, as if having a high two-digit number next to the word "Level:" on your character profile indicates anything other than an abundance of recent free time to click on cartoon pictures of monsters.
Did you enjoy playing the game up to that point? If so, you're not really losing anything important when your character is re-writen/nerfed/deleted/whatever. If you didnt' enjoy playing, then you were a fool to spend all that time on it, because your "accomplishment" is utterly meaningless outside of the animated chat-room your character resides in.
So many people interchange 'Gender' and 'Sex' freely without considering correct usage, it really irks me.
People do that with synonyms. They're wacky that way.
People who are picky about not using the word "sex" to mean the classification of males and females (almost all of whom are "transgendered" folk, it seems) are even more tedious than the psycho-nerds who feel compelled to point out that the made-up jargon word "virii" is not a correct latin plural.
No, no, no, no. I never asked about the viability of the alternatives, I just asked WHAT THEY ARE. A list of them, not a medial paper on their pros and cons.
A hard kick in the head is an alternative to novocaine. One assumes you are looking for good alternatives.
It's usually only.99 per song on iTunes if you buy a la carte.
Most full-length albums on iTunes are $9.99, whether it has ten songs or twenty. Once in a while, they charge $19.98 for a double-length album, and occasionally they can't get permission to sell an album from a label without hiking the album price up a few bucks, but for the most part this has been the case.
I find that 90% of the PC laptop owners who use the PCMCIA slot use it for one of the following:
1. A modem 2. An Ethernet port 3. WiFi 4. Bluetooth
Since the iBook can use internal cards for both WiFi & Bluetooth, and already has a modem & Ethernet port built in, it's no surprise that most iBook owners never miss the extra slot.
(Note: Dell and others eventually caught on to the advantages of internal wireless, and it's now fairly standard equipment these days, but Kudos to the iBook for being one of the laptops that pushed the market forward.)
An expansion slot is needed in the "Pro" version of Apple's laptop, however, because you never know what weird-assed expansion options a professional user is going to need two years from now. With that in mind, going with the best emerging standard instead of supporting legacy hardware is nothing less than what I would expect from Apple. Those currently upset over the loss of FW 800 will probably get over it when an ExpressCard for it comes out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC the standard PCMCIA bus isn't really up to snuff for that kind of bandwidth.
One I came across most recently: Using only wikipedia, try to come up with a list of all the alternatives to novocaine... You will be graded on accuracy.
Only a complete fool would rely only on a reference document of any kind for information which is in a constant state of flux. "Alternatives to novocaine" is an ever-evolving field of study. Every month, new information is published in places like The New England Journal of Medicine with updated test results and data about the safety and success rates of such drugs.
This is why we rely on the advise and guidance of medical professionals (who, one hopes, take the time to keep up on such subjects.) It's not really something that is wise of the layman to "dabble" in.
The purpose of encyclopedii (Ha-ha! If enough people use it, it will become a word! You can't stop it! Neener-neener-neener!) is to provide broad coverage of topics, not a deep undstanding of them.
For example, the post which kicked this off (somebody who didn't know what deus ex machina meant, something that typical holders of a liberal-arts degree would be expected to know, but an engineer for a tech school might not) is exactly the sort of thing one turns to an encyclopedia for. I'm pleasently surprised at what a good job Wikipedia now does for that sort of thing.
I count myself among those who was very skeptical when Wikipedia was getting off the ground, but just as I must now grudgingly admit that Kobe Bryant is a pretty good basketball player, I think it says a lot that Wikipedia is now the default first choice for looking up damn near any non-controversial subect.
I still continue to love to hate the Lakers, though. If Magic Johnson wasn't enough to make me a fan of that squad, there's no way in Hell that Kobe ever will, 81 points or not.
Blasphemer! As a member in good standing of the DNRC, I look forward to the day when you will be used by the rest of us for manual labor and/or food.... and doesn't have to rely on Deus Ex Machina...
Okay, I'm going to assume that you either don't know who Dogbert is, or else you don't know what Deus Ex Machina means, because you are clearly very confused about something.
Slashdot Mirror
If I am going to play a game where I am looking at someones ass all day, it's going to be a female ass.
It seems that a lot of guys who play female characters feel, very strongly, they need to tell everybody in the world that they are doing it "to look at the cute female asses" while playing the game.
Look, just say it. It's fun to play with gender roles.
That explanation is a lot less sad than obsessing over the posterior of a CARTOON for hours on end.
For that matter, I can't help but suspect that a lot of the pain relief brought about by playing Sports & Fighting games is the direct result of endorphins being released to deal with the soreness the controller is causing your thumbs.
For a control group, maybe they should just take some people with severe pain and gradually apply "thumb-screw" torture devices (short of doing permanent damage.) The results might be similar.
Does the word "duh" come to mind for any of these people?
The reason soaps are the way they are is because the largest marketable demographic that is at home from 11:00 AM until 3:00 PM is house-wives and stay-at-home moms of small children.
If you want to reach teenaged girls, you don't produce a show for them that runs while they are at school.
If a cop hears a woman screaming "help help I've been kidnapped" from inside your house, he can kick in your door without a warrent, because he has reason to believe that a crime is going on.
If he kicks in your door without such provocation, anything he charges you with is thrown out of court, and you can sue him for wrecking your door and invading your home.
Likewise, if you have a known terrorist on your speed-dial, I've got no problem whatsoever with federal goons listening to what you say to him next time you call him.
That's how "probable cause" works.
Having an affair in office isn't exactly illegal in any sense.
It would get most executives immediately fired from most jobs, but I personally think that the Republicans were wrong to weaken the Office of the President by going after him over a matter that could have been settled entirely in civil litigation. (And indeed, was settled in the long run.)
The fact that a President lied under oath in a courtroom is considerably more serious. To this day I believe the country would have been better off if Clinton did the right thing and resigned when that came out. Not because Gore would make a better President than Clinton, but because a President without Clinton's baggage and distractions would have been far more effective during those critical years (particularilly in dealing with the rising threat of terrorism.)
Remember when Clinton bombed the Sudan and parts of Afghanistan? Most of the country was talking about him "wagging the dog" the next day, because it happened to steal the front page away from a key development in his personal scandals. It became politically unviable for him to effectively follow up on that single, feeble attack. That should have been a rather clear signal to him that his own personal issues were going to prevent him from doing his job properly, and it was time for him to move over and let somebody else drive.
He was not found guilty by the Senate in his impreachment trial, but he was found in contempt of court and fined a rather substantial ammount of money.
So technically, yes. He was convicted of criminal behavior. It's all kind of irrelevant at this point, isn't it?
Page 1, paragraph 1:
Everybody has already heard your favorite joke about Chuck Norris. More than once.
Is it really so much of a stretch to look back 40 years?
Yes. 40 years ago we were okay with censoring unflattering war news. 40 years ago in humiliated and disgraced an entire family if it became known that a girl had an abortion. 40 years ago desegregation was seen as controversial in some parts of the country.
40 years ago, an argument against the monitoring suspected terrorists would be seen as utterly preposterous by all but a handful of radicals.
We are a very different nation than we were 40 years ago. Nowadays, the issue of whether we ought to be monitoring these calls has become something that reasonable people can disagree upon.
Clinton-haters and Bush-haters asside, I continue to be astonished at our ongoing success at maintaining a democracy in which our rights are so well cared for that the suggestion of a relatively minor perceived infraction of privacy is seen by half the country as a dangerous outrage.
That is unless you need to be discredited to the public in some way.
Kindly site three examples of private citizens who have been publicly disgraced as a result of US government surveillance of their embarassing behavior.
Oh, heck. Site one. I'll be very impressed.
If my "leaked" you mean "the President is giving stump speeches on how important it is to keep doing this", then yeah. Pretty huge leak though.
The point is that the government is spying on American citizens without a warrant. This is expressly forbidden in the Constitution.
The government is listening to conversations across international borders when they have reason to believe that crimes are being planned. This is not prohibited anywhere in the Constitution.
Clue: The Constitution was written before phones existed.
So if I'm talking to someone in Syria...I forfeit my rights as an American for the duration of the call?
Nope, you still have each and every right outlined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. It's just that the governement is going to listen to the call if they have probable cause to think you might be a terrorist.
that post was a clear as anything I've ever read on Slashdot.
Wow. Talk about your one-eyed monarch in the kingdom of the blind!
Yesterday it was terrorists. Today it's pornographers. Tomorrow it's you. That is, if they aren't already surveilling you because of the pornography, which they probably are.
I think you might have an inflated opinion of just how interesting you are to law enforcement agencies.
If you're not about to blow up a federal building (or blow up your garage with a badly-planned meth lab), then the Justice Department really doesn't give a shit about what you are doing at home, or what genre of dirty pictures you are doing it with. Get over yourself.
Here's the problem...the phrase "Americans that the government is suspicious of", can (and is) defined differently every day. Such vagueness virtually invites a police state.
If that's the only problem with it, then I'm with the 53%, because my rule of thumb is to dismiss all "slippery slope" arguments outright. There are plenty of laws currently on the books which could be used to rationalize government misbehavior. That doesn't automatically make them bad laws, nor dows it automaticlally mean the government will misbehave in that manner.
For the entire duration of the Cold War, NSA policy was "tap all international calls outgoing from the US, but don't tell anybody." The fact that the government is currently telling people that they are doing it is actually a huge improvement.
By the way "Domestic Wiretaps" is an entirely misleading term. If somebody in Cleveland calls somebody in Syria, that is not a "domestic" call, and that's what we are talking about here.
I never understood people who think of their character levels as "accomplishments" that they had to work for, as if having a high two-digit number next to the word "Level:" on your character profile indicates anything other than an abundance of recent free time to click on cartoon pictures of monsters.
Did you enjoy playing the game up to that point? If so, you're not really losing anything important when your character is re-writen/nerfed/deleted/whatever. If you didnt' enjoy playing, then you were a fool to spend all that time on it, because your "accomplishment" is utterly meaningless outside of the animated chat-room your character resides in.
My Yoda is rusty.
You should probably see a doctor about that. Some antibiotics might clear it right up.
So many people interchange 'Gender' and 'Sex' freely without considering correct usage, it really irks me.
People do that with synonyms. They're wacky that way.
People who are picky about not using the word "sex" to mean the classification of males and females (almost all of whom are "transgendered" folk, it seems) are even more tedious than the psycho-nerds who feel compelled to point out that the made-up jargon word "virii" is not a correct latin plural.
Usage defines language. Get over it.
No, no, no, no. I never asked about the viability of the alternatives, I just asked WHAT THEY ARE. A list of them, not a medial paper on their pros and cons.
A hard kick in the head is an alternative to novocaine. One assumes you are looking for good alternatives.
It's usually only .99 per song on iTunes if you buy a la carte.
Most full-length albums on iTunes are $9.99, whether it has ten songs or twenty. Once in a while, they charge $19.98 for a double-length album, and occasionally they can't get permission to sell an album from a label without hiking the album price up a few bucks, but for the most part this has been the case.
I find that 90% of the PC laptop owners who use the PCMCIA slot use it for one of the following:
1. A modem
2. An Ethernet port
3. WiFi
4. Bluetooth
Since the iBook can use internal cards for both WiFi & Bluetooth, and already has a modem & Ethernet port built in, it's no surprise that most iBook owners never miss the extra slot.
(Note: Dell and others eventually caught on to the advantages of internal wireless, and it's now fairly standard equipment these days, but Kudos to the iBook for being one of the laptops that pushed the market forward.)
An expansion slot is needed in the "Pro" version of Apple's laptop, however, because you never know what weird-assed expansion options a professional user is going to need two years from now. With that in mind, going with the best emerging standard instead of supporting legacy hardware is nothing less than what I would expect from Apple. Those currently upset over the loss of FW 800 will probably get over it when an ExpressCard for it comes out. Correct me if I'm wrong, but IIRC the standard PCMCIA bus isn't really up to snuff for that kind of bandwidth.
One I came across most recently: Using only wikipedia, try to come up with a list of all the alternatives to novocaine... You will be graded on accuracy.
Only a complete fool would rely only on a reference document of any kind for information which is in a constant state of flux. "Alternatives to novocaine" is an ever-evolving field of study. Every month, new information is published in places like The New England Journal of Medicine with updated test results and data about the safety and success rates of such drugs.
This is why we rely on the advise and guidance of medical professionals (who, one hopes, take the time to keep up on such subjects.) It's not really something that is wise of the layman to "dabble" in.
The purpose of encyclopedii (Ha-ha! If enough people use it, it will become a word! You can't stop it! Neener-neener-neener!) is to provide broad coverage of topics, not a deep undstanding of them.
For example, the post which kicked this off (somebody who didn't know what deus ex machina meant, something that typical holders of a liberal-arts degree would be expected to know, but an engineer for a tech school might not) is exactly the sort of thing one turns to an encyclopedia for. I'm pleasently surprised at what a good job Wikipedia now does for that sort of thing.
I count myself among those who was very skeptical when Wikipedia was getting off the ground, but just as I must now grudgingly admit that Kobe Bryant is a pretty good basketball player, I think it says a lot that Wikipedia is now the default first choice for looking up damn near any non-controversial subect.
I still continue to love to hate the Lakers, though. If Magic Johnson wasn't enough to make me a fan of that squad, there's no way in Hell that Kobe ever will, 81 points or not.
Ahh, the warm glow of "Flamebait" down-mods for ripping a TV show for not being particularilly funny.
;)
Because everybody knows that differing opinions are always flamebait, especially on really important matters like cartoons.
Fanboys are so predictable sometimes.
Oh, and your favorite band still sucks.
Stewie is far funnier than dogbert and...
... and doesn't have to rely on Deus Ex Machina...
Blasphemer! As a member in good standing of the DNRC, I look forward to the day when you will be used by the rest of us for manual labor and/or food.
Okay, I'm going to assume that you either don't know who Dogbert is, or else you don't know what Deus Ex Machina means, because you are clearly very confused about something.