She has no choice. Sure, she's got a decent gig in her various projects, but if Palin's elected, Fey has a LOCK on employment for the next 4, probably 8, and even the possibility of 12-16 years.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
On the point of the original article: well duh. "People prefer people that look like themselves" - news at 11. I'd thought that was obviously the root cause of everything from racism to the fact that most married people look like each other.
A+ for a great effort at historical revisionism, but I call bullshit. Your post implies that environmentalists opposing nuclear power WAS possibly justified because it was a technology that was in its infancy?
C'mon.
I was The environmentalist opposition to nuclear power was NEVER "Great idea, but it just needs a little more development before we consider it safe enough."
To even imply that there was ANY point at which Environmentalists of the 70's and 80's would approve of nuclear power, ever, is disingenuous.
To expand on this, let's assume that we're middle-of-the-road average in terms of development speed.
Our local molecular cloud collapsed into the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Let's take 5 billion years as the outside guess for 'minimum age of system to develop starfaring species'.
Our galaxy (ignoring all the others, just to keep the numbers sensible), is about 13.2 billion yrs old. That means something like 8.5 billion years of 'available development' time ahead of us.
Now, if we assume that we're on the cusp of starflight ourselves (say we develop it in the next 1000 years), then we're n00bs at this. Of the random distribution of the peoples we encounter (remember, we're assuming we're totally average) assume half are less advanced, and half are more advanced. Arguably, since detection and travel technologies are probably one of the prime measures of 'advancement', one could say that we'll find those less advanced than ourselves, and those more advanced will find us.
Of the 'less advanced', again asserting an even distribution along the curve from 'barely sapient' to 'slightly behind us', we'll find a whole range of peoples displaying all different levels of development. (Of course, given how humans treat other humans, I wouldn't really want to be in their shoes, thanks.)
More frighteningly, if we say that the 'more developed' peoples will also range from 'just slightly more advanced' to '8.5 BILLION years more advanced', it's clear that in any reasonable scenario, a single civilization that finds us will likely be millions, if not BILLIONS of years more advanced than ourselves. Would we even RECOGNIZE them as anything? Can amoebas even sense that we exist? (Fortunately, the corollary is that we have very little of value or could even be recognized as competing in any way with the huge majority of civilizations we'd encounter...)
So I think it's nearly certain that if another people encountered us, odds are that they are so staggeringly advanced beyond us that we are unlikely to even detect/recognize them, much less would they have any inclination to interact with us...and I frankly hope they don't, because human-amoeba relations haven't tended to care much about the amoeba's well-being.
"...In the 18th second: "kollo nafsin tha'iqatol mawt", literally: "Every soul shall have the taste of death'... almost immediately after, in the 27th second: "kollo man alaiha fan", literally: "All that is on earth will perish.""
"No, he didn't. It wasn't McCain, try the other one." Somehow the link (you know, the one that proves your comment isn't just tendentious bullshit?) got omitted by the posting system. Could you post it again please?
"George W. Bush. His only public service consisted of..." In short, pretty much the same amount of experience that Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Carter had? Is that really what you meant to say?
"McCain - G. Gordon Liddy" So, if I understand you, your defense is "yeah, Obama associates with terrorists, but McCain hangs out with people that say mean stuff!"? And after then playing 'the association game' you claim it's only for morons. Um, ok. I guess you got me there, Tex.
"Archetypal left wing" Thanks for overreacting. I'm sure you speak for most of the members in your cadre, which is fine. Your visceral reaction would suggest that I hit a nerve. Are you too a left-wing, intellectualist, relativist, everything-about-the-US-sucks, political-correctness-espousing liberal? I'm going to guess yes. In fact, I rather expect that I could guess your position on every issue in this campaign, as well as abortion, gay marriage, global warming, and a whole host of template issues where you can just spout the latest vibe from DailyKOS.
"Kindergartners+sex ed" How does "Obama said that he wants kindergartners to have age-appropriate sex ed" = I think he's a moslem? Even for slashdot standards, that's extraordinary strawmanship. I think he's a racist black Christian, is that clear enough? Oh wait, no, the Reverend White was his friend and mentor for 20+ years, but Obama never really heard him say anything objectionable.
1) please provide a link for the 'charging women to get rape exams' - you imply McCain does so, so you must have a link. Otherwise it's tendentious bullshit. 2) pro-choice - ok, Obama is clearly pro-choice. 3) picking a running mate on tits and ovaries - it's better for a party to propose its presidential candidate based on his skin color? And before you disagree, please let me know how many other first-term senators not named Kennedy are fast-tracked for high political office from day one (in fact, from the opening speech of the LAST presidential campaign's DNC convention), if not simply for his skin color? 4) you're right, he prefers that KINDERGARTNERS take sex-ed. Brilliant. Oh I'm sorry, he did say 'appropriate sex ed' for their age...and that would be what, exactly? 5) economic plan - I'd disagree with you that his plan is coherent, but that's opinion.
Personally, I don't think BHO is a terrorist. He merely works closely with them, socializes with them, launches his political career using their radical contacts and friends, from their living room, and then disingenuously asserts they were merely 'a guy in the neighborhood'. You can bet if McCain was having political parties at the homes of admitted and unrepentant abortion-clinic bombers, that might make the news?
I don't really like McCain too much, but I like Obama far, far less. He's an archetypal left-wing, intellectualist, relativist, everything-about-the-US-sucks, political-correctness-espousing liberal that I personally find tiresome. (And yes, I include a goodly proportion of/. readers as probably in that same demographic.)
FWIW I couldn't give a crap if he's muslim, christian, hindu, or whatever. (I would object to Scientologist, however.) I'd expect any of them to compartmentalize their faith and their governance equally.
"3,240,689 snail mails spamming the Elven-kings for Cialis to buy, 70,456,535 click-under ads for the Dwarf-lords to refinance their home of stone, 900,222,486 emails for Mortal Men lacking in size, 1,989,392,666 popups for the Dark Lord reading his pr0n In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie. One Ring to spam them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to fleece them all and in their greed bind them In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie."
"So you see, a conservative will always be two or three, or four steps behind the real action..."...and the other side of the coin - a Liberal is often two, three, or four steps past the edge of the cliff.
Which would you rather be? Short of the edge or past it?
"Obama is the one who favors an internet unfettered by tiered service "packages"..."...but fettered by government regulation and oversight.
Personally, I'd rather let the free market sort it out. Want to download terabytes of pr0n? Sure...pay for it. Look, I think it's bullshit that the ISP's were selling something that was overstated. But that doesn't mean that you can really get something for nothing.
"Unlimited" connectivity is/was like the current banking industry or airlines that oversell seats per plane: the offer is good but invisibly rests on a supposition of a % of non-use. You store your money in the bank, but if everyone went and asked for their cash, the bank doesn't really have it. Airlines are screwed whenever everyone that buys a ticket shows up for the plane.
Similarly, the 'broadband' offers supposed that even if you DID approach the physical limit of the service, almost nobody was simultaneously doing so, thus there was almost always available bandwidth headroom.
Well, now the internet is more mainstream, and EVERYONE is using more bandwidth. OK. So who here believes that bandwidth is really infinite? Or that EVERYONE can download gigabytes of movies, tv, pr0n, whatever without there being an impact? And impact means cost.
Personally, I'd prefer the utterly free market, with limited oversight preventing monopoly control and fraud. But government-program-style management, with undoubtedly a dose of social engineering eventually, generally f*cks things up completely.
That's better than mine - "Light, Medium, and Heavy armors will now protect the character proportionally more".
I mean, I understand some trivial stuff would slip through the beta process, but nobody noticed that ARMOR wasn't working? When the game is all about combat?
I'd say "hypocrisy, thy name is... well, anonymous coward" but that would be redundant, wouldn't it?
1) I don't really give a shit about the rest of the world's view. We're talking about the American congress, and American political parties. To use anything but an American context is absurd.
2) so you don't see the ridiculousness of your own position? "The people that agree with me, well, they're the NORM, those other people are wingnuts!" is a terribly juvenile (although not-uncommon) view in our modern political life, and a sign of a certain level of egoism that immediately diminishes public debate and the possibility of constructive discussion.*
* but then you posted as ANONYMOUS, so you weren't looking for CONSTRUCTIVE debate, just drive-by commenting in an attempt to appeal to the masses. So...well, to communicate on your level, then: fuck you, anonymous partisan troll.
Yes, Fox does this. That makes it 1 for Fox, and 4 for CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN.
To suggest (as you are) that ONLY Fox does it is tendentious bullshit.
The others just flip it the other way around. Constantly you'll hear about Republicans in congress, rarely without the moniker 'conservative' added. Please, tell me the last time you heard Democrats labelled as 'liberal Democrats'? That would be?....Almost never. You'll also hear far-right, right-wing, and religious as adverbs for Republicans. I can't recall the last time I heard their opposites - far-left Democrat Barney Frank, left-wing John Conyers, or secular Nancy Pelosi. I wonder why?
So I'm going to assume you're not ignorant, and just believe you're being a disingenuous hypocrite with your own obvious political axe to grind.
Fox News is crap for a whole lot of reasons, but only marginally because their slant is merely the opposite reflection of the general media.
I understand Mythic's disinterest in supporting forums, I do. I see that the WoW forums and (especially) the AoC forums are full of whiny bitches who represent a tiny fraction of the community but whose complaints ring loud in such a forum.
However, lacking an OFFICIAL forum for people to exchange ideas, get support, and make suggestions is an error. (WAR has no official forum.)
Age of Conan was released as a beautiful but deeply flawed and dysfunctional game (yes, I am a subscriber until my payment runs out in Dec). Without the ample log of problems and solutions by USERS on that forum, they wouldn't have even gotten my funds for 6 months.
Fortunately with WAR I haven't had those technical problems, but there are a lot of people who have, and I can't imagine their experience is improved by lacking any single place to shuffle through others' experience and solutions. One great example was the beta access sold through Target. It was INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING because I spent HOURS trying to get my beta key to work, only to find out on some peripheral website that it was mentioned that the Target beta codes were a misprint - wherever there was an "O" printed, it should be read as "Q". What? Not a WORD about this on the front page of the Mythic site? Frankly, that's idiotic.
Certainly, a community is growing, and will eventually reach the breadth of the WoW community, I'm sure. But not having an official forum is rather stupid, IMO.
I'd agree with pretty much everything you've written, but I'd add one caveat regarding a situation that it doesn't appear you've considered: advertising.
I'll give you two examples, a sexual one (for the sex-averse prudish Americans) and a violent one (for the pantywaist Euros). - A man is dragged from a car, protesting and in terror. He's made to kneel on the pavement, begging the unseen assailant "Don't, please, don't...please..." The muzzle of a pistol barrel is put to his temple and the screen crashes to black with the sound of a gunshot. - A beautiful young woman and a studly young man are kissing passionately in an evening office setting. She pushes off his jacket, and starts unbuttoning his shirt while they discuss some plot point. The camera view moves to his right quarter from behind, so you can see her face as she sinks to her knees and starts unbuckling his belt.
BOTH of these scenes have come up in ads for TV programs that came on WHILE WE WERE WATCHING CHILDRENS' PROGRAMMING. Normal TV, not cable.
Perhaps I'm both prudish and a pantywaist, but I don't believe EITHER of those scenes are appropriate for pre-teen children. No, neither scene actually showed what was being categorically implied/displayed, but to suggest therefore that it was "ok" is ludicrous.
I entirely agree with you about parents bearing the complete responsibility for vetting programming their children shall watch - but how is a parent supposed to intercept or review this? There's no practical way I can think of. Your kid could be watching some entirely educational or child-appropriate show, but five or six times an hour it's intercepted with this?
Personally, I've pretty much given up on broadcast TV. But I can see how parents would be incensed at their inability to control viewed content... even when they are conscientiously working to make sure it's age-appropriate.
"Now, if someone, asks for a loan they cannot possibly pay, who bears more responsibility: the person asking, or the banker who approves it."
The person asking for the loan. Oh wait, that's not the answer you were fishing for.
It all depends on what happens after the loan fails. If the person asking for the loan cries that they are losing their house, and the government must bail them out, that's baloney - when you take out a loan, it's YOUR problem to figure out if you can afford it. Anything else is stupidity. You are putting up some sort of collateral, and the amount of attention you should pay is directly proportional to how important that collateral is to you.
If the bank, when foreclosing on the loan, finds that the collateral isn't worth nearly what they thought it was, and then goes crying to the gov't for restitution, then the banker's at fault for not doing his job with a level of attention and rigor commensurate with the amount he was lending and achieving adequate security for that amount.
Do a quick search on CRA and the rewrite during the Clinton administration that compelled lenders to issue subprime loans to receive a decent CRA rating. Does that sound like a free market?
"Some facts in the report: According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, "Accounting for nearly two-thirds of household growth in 1995 to 2005, minorities contributed 49 percent of the 12.5 million rise in homeowners over the decade." . . . "Without the sudden expansion of sub-prime lending, most of these homeowners would have been denied access to credit."
Sub-prime growth from $210 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005 represented 20% of the dollar value of loans and 7% of originations of outstanding mortgages. [$35 billion in 1994, $125 billion in 1997]
The Harvard study reports that in 2004 high-income minority communities (more than 50% minority) have about 19% of all mortgages as high-cost mortgages compared to 7% for predominantly white. They have 25% vs. 12% in moderate income communities and 28% to 18% in Low-income areas.
By the mid-90s, sub-prime instruments like ARMs had been around since the deregulation of the early 80s. They took off in the 90s. Sub-prime growth from $210 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005 represented 20% of the dollar value of loans . .."
Perhaps that 49% of new homeowners SHOULDN'T HAVE EVER GOTTEN LOANS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
"The money is not clearly accounted for, against constitutional principles, and it only goes to serve large corporations.
Where is the public outcry? Where are the Republican talking heads when the budget is being discussed?"
Why did you say Republican? Aside from brief stints, the CONGRESS (you know, the guys that write and approve of the BUDGET) has been controlled by Democrats. And unless you're asserting that this entire crisis was caused exclusively during one of those brief stints (which would simply be tendentious nonsense) why would you imply that Republicans are to blame here?
That's not insightful, that's complete balderdash.
How do you have a democracy where some votes aren't going to be close? Yes, 269 is an exceedingly small number, but what's the alternative? That you have to have a supermajority to win an election over the incumbent (although, given the incumbents' advantages and American voting history, it seems that way sometimes....)?
It doesn't matter if you have a billion people voting and the spread is as small as 1 vote, it STILL is simply how it works.
And one could finally argue that the vote difference is small...so is the difference between candidates. Neither one will radically change ANYTHING, and that's a result of the primary and caucus result
Slashdot Mirror
She has no choice. Sure, she's got a decent gig in her various projects, but if Palin's elected, Fey has a LOCK on employment for the next 4, probably 8, and even the possibility of 12-16 years.
That's nothing to sneeze at.
On the point of the original article: well duh.
"People prefer people that look like themselves" - news at 11. I'd thought that was obviously the root cause of everything from racism to the fact that most married people look like each other.
A+ for a great effort at historical revisionism, but I call bullshit.
Your post implies that environmentalists opposing nuclear power WAS possibly justified because it was a technology that was in its infancy?
C'mon.
I was The environmentalist opposition to nuclear power was NEVER "Great idea, but it just needs a little more development before we consider it safe enough."
To even imply that there was ANY point at which Environmentalists of the 70's and 80's would approve of nuclear power, ever, is disingenuous.
But nice try, really.
You know that some lobbyist will pay some legislator (who has their own spam callers, every re-election season) to make this illegal.
We need to then find that legislator, and shoot him/her.
We need to then find that lobbyist, and impale them as an example to others.
Then all will be just a little more 'right' with the world.
To expand on this, let's assume that we're middle-of-the-road average in terms of development speed.
Our local molecular cloud collapsed into the solar system about 4.6 billion years ago. Let's take 5 billion years as the outside guess for 'minimum age of system to develop starfaring species'.
Our galaxy (ignoring all the others, just to keep the numbers sensible), is about 13.2 billion yrs old. That means something like 8.5 billion years of 'available development' time ahead of us.
Now, if we assume that we're on the cusp of starflight ourselves (say we develop it in the next 1000 years), then we're n00bs at this. Of the random distribution of the peoples we encounter (remember, we're assuming we're totally average) assume half are less advanced, and half are more advanced. Arguably, since detection and travel technologies are probably one of the prime measures of 'advancement', one could say that we'll find those less advanced than ourselves, and those more advanced will find us.
Of the 'less advanced', again asserting an even distribution along the curve from 'barely sapient' to 'slightly behind us', we'll find a whole range of peoples displaying all different levels of development. (Of course, given how humans treat other humans, I wouldn't really want to be in their shoes, thanks.)
More frighteningly, if we say that the 'more developed' peoples will also range from 'just slightly more advanced' to '8.5 BILLION years more advanced', it's clear that in any reasonable scenario, a single civilization that finds us will likely be millions, if not BILLIONS of years more advanced than ourselves. Would we even RECOGNIZE them as anything? Can amoebas even sense that we exist? (Fortunately, the corollary is that we have very little of value or could even be recognized as competing in any way with the huge majority of civilizations we'd encounter...)
So I think it's nearly certain that if another people encountered us, odds are that they are so staggeringly advanced beyond us that we are unlikely to even detect/recognize them, much less would they have any inclination to interact with us...and I frankly hope they don't, because human-amoeba relations haven't tended to care much about the amoeba's well-being.
Oh, I'm sorry, I meant to type "-1, religionofwecan'ttakeajoke"
"...In the 18th second: "kollo nafsin tha'iqatol mawt", literally: "Every soul shall have the taste of death' ... almost immediately after, in the 27th second: "kollo man alaiha fan", literally: "All that is on earth will perish.""
-1,religionofpeace?
"No, he didn't. It wasn't McCain, try the other one."
Somehow the link (you know, the one that proves your comment isn't just tendentious bullshit?) got omitted by the posting system. Could you post it again please?
"George W. Bush. His only public service consisted of..."
In short, pretty much the same amount of experience that Presidents Clinton, Reagan, and Carter had? Is that really what you meant to say?
"McCain - G. Gordon Liddy"
So, if I understand you, your defense is "yeah, Obama associates with terrorists, but McCain hangs out with people that say mean stuff!"? And after then playing 'the association game' you claim it's only for morons. Um, ok. I guess you got me there, Tex.
"Archetypal left wing"
Thanks for overreacting. I'm sure you speak for most of the members in your cadre, which is fine.
Your visceral reaction would suggest that I hit a nerve. Are you too a left-wing, intellectualist, relativist, everything-about-the-US-sucks, political-correctness-espousing liberal? I'm going to guess yes. In fact, I rather expect that I could guess your position on every issue in this campaign, as well as abortion, gay marriage, global warming, and a whole host of template issues where you can just spout the latest vibe from DailyKOS.
"Kindergartners+sex ed"
How does "Obama said that he wants kindergartners to have age-appropriate sex ed" = I think he's a moslem? Even for slashdot standards, that's extraordinary strawmanship. I think he's a racist black Christian, is that clear enough? Oh wait, no, the Reverend White was his friend and mentor for 20+ years, but Obama never really heard him say anything objectionable.
1) please provide a link for the 'charging women to get rape exams' - you imply McCain does so, so you must have a link. Otherwise it's tendentious bullshit.
2) pro-choice - ok, Obama is clearly pro-choice.
3) picking a running mate on tits and ovaries - it's better for a party to propose its presidential candidate based on his skin color? And before you disagree, please let me know how many other first-term senators not named Kennedy are fast-tracked for high political office from day one (in fact, from the opening speech of the LAST presidential campaign's DNC convention), if not simply for his skin color?
4) you're right, he prefers that KINDERGARTNERS take sex-ed. Brilliant. Oh I'm sorry, he did say 'appropriate sex ed' for their age...and that would be what, exactly?
5) economic plan - I'd disagree with you that his plan is coherent, but that's opinion.
Personally, I don't think BHO is a terrorist. He merely works closely with them, socializes with them, launches his political career using their radical contacts and friends, from their living room, and then disingenuously asserts they were merely 'a guy in the neighborhood'. You can bet if McCain was having political parties at the homes of admitted and unrepentant abortion-clinic bombers, that might make the news?
I don't really like McCain too much, but I like Obama far, far less. He's an archetypal left-wing, intellectualist, relativist, everything-about-the-US-sucks, political-correctness-espousing liberal that I personally find tiresome. (And yes, I include a goodly proportion of /. readers as probably in that same demographic.)
FWIW I couldn't give a crap if he's muslim, christian, hindu, or whatever. (I would object to Scientologist, however.) I'd expect any of them to compartmentalize their faith and their governance equally.
"3,240,689 snail mails spamming the Elven-kings for Cialis to buy,
70,456,535 click-under ads for the Dwarf-lords to refinance their home of stone,
900,222,486 emails for Mortal Men lacking in size,
1,989,392,666 popups for the Dark Lord reading his pr0n
In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie.
One Ring to spam them all, One Ring to find them,
One Ring to fleece them all and in their greed bind them
In the Land of Mordor where the Spammers lie."
Fixed that for you.
"So you see, a conservative will always be two or three, or four steps behind the real action..." ...and the other side of the coin - a Liberal is often two, three, or four steps past the edge of the cliff.
Which would you rather be? Short of the edge or past it?
"Also, I notice - they're the last to switch their lights on when it starts to get dark - or when there's fog/spray on the motorways."
Um, most BMW/Jag's etc have autosensing lights and wipers. My Passat does. I haven't touched my wiper or light controls for YEARS.
So perhaps it's not the driver, it's something as angst-free as the sensor sensitivity setting?
"The New York Times reports on a recent study that shows the US fails to encourage academic talent as a culture."
This can only be news to the slashdotters that don't have children?
"Obama is the one who favors an internet unfettered by tiered service "packages"..." ...but fettered by government regulation and oversight.
Personally, I'd rather let the free market sort it out. Want to download terabytes of pr0n? Sure...pay for it.
Look, I think it's bullshit that the ISP's were selling something that was overstated. But that doesn't mean that you can really get something for nothing.
"Unlimited" connectivity is/was like the current banking industry or airlines that oversell seats per plane: the offer is good but invisibly rests on a supposition of a % of non-use. You store your money in the bank, but if everyone went and asked for their cash, the bank doesn't really have it. Airlines are screwed whenever everyone that buys a ticket shows up for the plane.
Similarly, the 'broadband' offers supposed that even if you DID approach the physical limit of the service, almost nobody was simultaneously doing so, thus there was almost always available bandwidth headroom.
Well, now the internet is more mainstream, and EVERYONE is using more bandwidth. OK. So who here believes that bandwidth is really infinite? Or that EVERYONE can download gigabytes of movies, tv, pr0n, whatever without there being an impact? And impact means cost.
Personally, I'd prefer the utterly free market, with limited oversight preventing monopoly control and fraud. But government-program-style management, with undoubtedly a dose of social engineering eventually, generally f*cks things up completely.
...scientist proposes whacky, counterintuitive theory to drum up publicity/attention/funding dollars.
News at 11!
That's better than mine - "Light, Medium, and Heavy armors will now protect the character proportionally more".
I mean, I understand some trivial stuff would slip through the beta process, but nobody noticed that ARMOR wasn't working? When the game is all about combat?
I'd say "hypocrisy, thy name is ... well, anonymous coward" but that would be redundant, wouldn't it?
1) I don't really give a shit about the rest of the world's view. We're talking about the American congress, and American political parties. To use anything but an American context is absurd.
2) so you don't see the ridiculousness of your own position? "The people that agree with me, well, they're the NORM, those other people are wingnuts!" is a terribly juvenile (although not-uncommon) view in our modern political life, and a sign of a certain level of egoism that immediately diminishes public debate and the possibility of constructive discussion.*
* but then you posted as ANONYMOUS, so you weren't looking for CONSTRUCTIVE debate, just drive-by commenting in an attempt to appeal to the masses. So...well, to communicate on your level, then: fuck you, anonymous partisan troll.
Yes, Fox does this. That makes it 1 for Fox, and 4 for CBS, ABC, NBC, CNN.
To suggest (as you are) that ONLY Fox does it is tendentious bullshit.
The others just flip it the other way around. Constantly you'll hear about Republicans in congress, rarely without the moniker 'conservative' added. Please, tell me the last time you heard Democrats labelled as 'liberal Democrats'? That would be?....Almost never. You'll also hear far-right, right-wing, and religious as adverbs for Republicans. I can't recall the last time I heard their opposites - far-left Democrat Barney Frank, left-wing John Conyers, or secular Nancy Pelosi. I wonder why?
So I'm going to assume you're not ignorant, and just believe you're being a disingenuous hypocrite with your own obvious political axe to grind.
Fox News is crap for a whole lot of reasons, but only marginally because their slant is merely the opposite reflection of the general media.
I understand Mythic's disinterest in supporting forums, I do.
I see that the WoW forums and (especially) the AoC forums are full of whiny bitches who represent a tiny fraction of the community but whose complaints ring loud in such a forum.
However, lacking an OFFICIAL forum for people to exchange ideas, get support, and make suggestions is an error. (WAR has no official forum.)
Age of Conan was released as a beautiful but deeply flawed and dysfunctional game (yes, I am a subscriber until my payment runs out in Dec). Without the ample log of problems and solutions by USERS on that forum, they wouldn't have even gotten my funds for 6 months.
Fortunately with WAR I haven't had those technical problems, but there are a lot of people who have, and I can't imagine their experience is improved by lacking any single place to shuffle through others' experience and solutions. One great example was the beta access sold through Target. It was INCREDIBLY FRUSTRATING because I spent HOURS trying to get my beta key to work, only to find out on some peripheral website that it was mentioned that the Target beta codes were a misprint - wherever there was an "O" printed, it should be read as "Q".
What?
Not a WORD about this on the front page of the Mythic site?
Frankly, that's idiotic.
Certainly, a community is growing, and will eventually reach the breadth of the WoW community, I'm sure. But not having an official forum is rather stupid, IMO.
I'd agree with pretty much everything you've written, but I'd add one caveat regarding a situation that it doesn't appear you've considered: advertising.
I'll give you two examples, a sexual one (for the sex-averse prudish Americans) and a violent one (for the pantywaist Euros).
- A man is dragged from a car, protesting and in terror. He's made to kneel on the pavement, begging the unseen assailant "Don't, please, don't...please..." The muzzle of a pistol barrel is put to his temple and the screen crashes to black with the sound of a gunshot.
- A beautiful young woman and a studly young man are kissing passionately in an evening office setting. She pushes off his jacket, and starts unbuttoning his shirt while they discuss some plot point. The camera view moves to his right quarter from behind, so you can see her face as she sinks to her knees and starts unbuckling his belt.
BOTH of these scenes have come up in ads for TV programs that came on WHILE WE WERE WATCHING CHILDRENS' PROGRAMMING. Normal TV, not cable.
Perhaps I'm both prudish and a pantywaist, but I don't believe EITHER of those scenes are appropriate for pre-teen children. No, neither scene actually showed what was being categorically implied/displayed, but to suggest therefore that it was "ok" is ludicrous.
I entirely agree with you about parents bearing the complete responsibility for vetting programming their children shall watch - but how is a parent supposed to intercept or review this? There's no practical way I can think of. Your kid could be watching some entirely educational or child-appropriate show, but five or six times an hour it's intercepted with this?
Personally, I've pretty much given up on broadcast TV. But I can see how parents would be incensed at their inability to control viewed content ... even when they are conscientiously working to make sure it's age-appropriate.
"Now, if someone, asks for a loan they cannot possibly pay, who bears more responsibility: the person asking, or the banker who approves it."
The person asking for the loan.
Oh wait, that's not the answer you were fishing for.
It all depends on what happens after the loan fails.
If the person asking for the loan cries that they are losing their house, and the government must bail them out, that's baloney - when you take out a loan, it's YOUR problem to figure out if you can afford it. Anything else is stupidity. You are putting up some sort of collateral, and the amount of attention you should pay is directly proportional to how important that collateral is to you.
If the bank, when foreclosing on the loan, finds that the collateral isn't worth nearly what they thought it was, and then goes crying to the gov't for restitution, then the banker's at fault for not doing his job with a level of attention and rigor commensurate with the amount he was lending and achieving adequate security for that amount.
" They can't accept the fact that the free market is what caused this mess."
AHAHAHAAHHAHAHHAHAAHAHAHAHAHA
(breath)
AHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
"...free market..."??
AHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHA
Do a quick search on CRA and the rewrite during the Clinton administration that compelled lenders to issue subprime loans to receive a decent CRA rating. Does that sound like a free market?
http://bigpicture.typepad.com/comments/2008/06/harvards-state.html
Harvard study regarding the rewriting of CRA in 1995:
"Some facts in the report: According to the Joint Center for Housing Studies of Harvard University, "Accounting for nearly two-thirds of household growth in 1995 to 2005, minorities contributed 49 percent of the 12.5 million rise in homeowners over the decade." . . . "Without the sudden expansion of sub-prime lending, most of these homeowners would have been denied access to credit."
Sub-prime growth from $210 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005 represented 20% of the dollar value of loans and 7% of originations of outstanding mortgages. [$35 billion in 1994, $125 billion in 1997]
The Harvard study reports that in 2004 high-income minority communities (more than 50% minority) have about 19% of all mortgages as high-cost mortgages compared to 7% for predominantly white. They have 25% vs. 12% in moderate income communities and 28% to 18% in Low-income areas.
By the mid-90s, sub-prime instruments like ARMs had been around since the deregulation of the early 80s. They took off in the 90s. Sub-prime growth from $210 billion in 2001 to $625 billion in 2005 represented 20% of the dollar value of loans . . ."
Perhaps that 49% of new homeowners SHOULDN'T HAVE EVER GOTTEN LOANS IN THE FIRST PLACE?
You're either being disingenuous or stupid.
"The money is not clearly accounted for, against constitutional principles, and it only goes to serve large corporations.
Where is the public outcry? Where are the Republican talking heads when the budget is being discussed?"
Why did you say Republican? Aside from brief stints, the CONGRESS (you know, the guys that write and approve of the BUDGET) has been controlled by Democrats. And unless you're asserting that this entire crisis was caused exclusively during one of those brief stints (which would simply be tendentious nonsense) why would you imply that Republicans are to blame here?
... is that Mi6 is using a freaking Nikon Coolpix camera, and due to government procurement systems, probably paid $1000 for it...
What's next, we see James Bond with a Hello Kitty umbrella?
That's not insightful, that's complete balderdash.
How do you have a democracy where some votes aren't going to be close? Yes, 269 is an exceedingly small number, but what's the alternative? That you have to have a supermajority to win an election over the incumbent (although, given the incumbents' advantages and American voting history, it seems that way sometimes....)?
It doesn't matter if you have a billion people voting and the spread is as small as 1 vote, it STILL is simply how it works.
And one could finally argue that the vote difference is small...so is the difference between candidates. Neither one will radically change ANYTHING, and that's a result of the primary and caucus result
Um, isn't the source code also downloadable from their site?
http://www.srware.net/software_srware_iron_download.php
Look at the bottom - the source is available in 4 parts, it seems.