How about the Street Fighter II series? Certainly, at some point, if not from the beginning, it was so bad -- it became a joke. I have recently started up a game of this, not because it was fun, but it was a great laugh -- its infamous.
You're kidding, right? The game that largely launched the 2D fighter genre in America? There were similar games before SF II, but it was the first of its kind to reach the kind of popularity it has when it was out.
You could make the argument that someone along the way its sequels became derivative and boring compared to games like the Tekken series, but the original SF II was a classic.
Someone's either being very nationalistic or grossly ignorant of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian history.
Ever wonder how three distinct, relatively regionally separated groups like the Shia Arabs, the Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds all got lumped into one country with a minority in charge? Thank Britain colonial rule of Iraq.
Same question for the ethnic divisions of Afghanistan? Same answer.
Want to understand why Muslims and Hindus were at each others throats at the end of British rule of India? Thank British divide-and-control strategies for ruling the empire.
Nearly every intra-national ethnic and religious conflict over the past century in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia can trace its roots back to the effects of colonial Europe and its policies of balancing ethnic enemies against one another. Had most of these groups remained in separate nation states, most of this conflict would not be present. I single out the British because they were the nation most in control of the Middle East and Southeast and Central Asia where the majority of predominantly Muslim nations are located, and it was the British who set up the modern geographical borders of the nations in those areas.
Actually, yes. Trolls love to inject the spoilers in places where people trying to avoid them wouldn't avoid looking. They might randomly comment in the middle of a thread on a random blog or discussion site.
Try a brief search of Slashdot for the spoiler from the last book. Note what kinds of articles come up. "Apple's Aperture Reviewed" from May 2005 (two months before release of the book) is one of them, and a glance at the summary shows that there was a post titled with the spoiler. You would certainly find a lot more if Google's snapshots of the pages included posts which had been modded down to -1 below the threshold for a anonymous user (like Google) to see. You could not view Slashdot comments for two whole months without stumbling onto the big spoiler.
So, yes, smart-ass -- someone did make us read the spoilers. The only thing that mitigated it was the massive amount of fake spoilers being tossed around too. There was enough doubt to keep you in suspense, but when you finally found out which ones were real, they had a lot less emotional impact than they would've had you not known.
Yeah, and since when -- in the whole of history -- would taking out the British from the equation have had a negative effect on the Middle East. Practically the whole Muslim world owes Britain a black eye for the effects the British empire has had on history there.
No. That would be idiotic. The man may be a ideologue, but this kind of stupidity transcends even those blinders.
American soldiers are WAY too expensive to use like this. We're already suffering a troop recruitment shortage without the perception that the lives of our troops are expendable in "Charge of the Light Brigade"-style tactics. Doing this would waste billions of dollars of equipment and completely end all Army recruitment. US soldiers are not easily replaceable.
Even so, this isn't what any hypothetical drug based on this research would actually do. It'd be more useful (in the evil sense) for doing things like ethnic cleansing and scorched earth tactics since you can keep the soldiers from being traumatized afterwards than it is for suicide charges.
My third knee-jerk response is that I should've read the fine article.
This isn't an anti-fear drug. It's not even a drug. They just found that by genetically engineering mice to have more or less Cdk5 and determined its effects on their response to a floor which had caused them trauma after the trauma had passed. Mice with less Cdk5 got over their fear quickly, and mice with more Cdk5 were terrified to be in a similar situation.
For all we know, this is how propranolol actually works, though I can't dig up any articles to this effect.
I forget where I read it... it was probably linked from here anyway, but there was some discussion about why suicide bombers are muslim and all that. The bottom-line is polygamy.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing that pop-science writers come up with when they don't know a dang thing about the subject they're writing about. Polygamy amongst Muslims is very rare outside of the very wealthy. Polygamy by its very nature of excluding otherwise fit males from the breeding populace can only exist in situations where there is a strong inequality between the power of males. Poor and powerless people don't become polygamists without the favor of the wealthy or powerful.
There's a much stronger correlation between young male poverty and suicide bombing then there is to polygamy. The core reasoning (a desperation born from the lack of ability to marry and support a family) is much the same, but this is not because there are no women available as much as its because there are no jobs available.
After all the Palestinian gender ratio (as of 1997) is 1.036 males to every female which nicely tracks the world average of 1.05. Polygamous marriages constitute only 4% of Palestinian marriages, and this should not be enough to push the gender ratio significantly out of balance. Note that China has a horrible ratio of 1.06 males to every female due to illegal abortions of female children, and it's not a hotbed of suicide bombers.
My first knee-jerk response was that this would be combined with propranolol, the drug that suppresses traumatic memories which is intended to stop PTSD but could instead be abused to prevent guilt over atrocities.
My second thought was of how amazingly boneheaded of an idea administering an anti-fear drug would be in a war zone -- especially for US soldiers carrying an amazingly expensive array of military gear and having had expensive combat training. Soldiers need fear as a survival mechanism. Without it, they'd do amazingly stupid and suicidal things.
You'd use a drug like this if your army were cannon fodder with poor supplies and training. I could see a use for this for suicide bombers or *maybe* for overrunning positions defended by few soldiers, but that's it.
The biggest strawman part of your argument was the following:
Even as an atheist, I do think that we have gone too far in taking historical aspects of the impact of religion on American life out of schools. But frankly the problem is, as in all countries, the fundamentalists. If that term is too broad, I do apologize. I'm aiming squarely at the biblical literalists, the ones whose worldviews are threatened by modern biology, geology, physics, cosmology, and basically everything from the Enlightenment on down. I don't mind at all if my neighbor believes that Jesus died for their sins, but I do mind if they want the school curriculum changed because they don't think that evolution or the heliocentric solar system can be reconciled with the bible.
The guy was griping about being allowed to sing some religious songs in his school but not Christmas carols and not being allowed to critique Islam. This whole block I quoted is a rant against fundamentalists in an attempt to tar people who complain about Christianity being singled out with the brush of flat-earthers and young-Earth creationists. Classic strawman -- you were bring up things that had nothing to do with what he was talking about in an attempt to make people who hold his views look bad as a group.
It's very simple. Our system positively selects for corruption, and it always will so long as the support of a few wealthy men is necessary to successfully compete in an election. I volunteered in the finance office of a campaign for governor, and you have no idea just how expensive a campaign is and just how much that money hinges on a short list of generous donors until you've gone over the public finance disclosures of your candidate and their opponents. Only the super, super rich can self-finance.
With that sort of pressure, corruption is inevitable. With the exception of a few wealthy ideologues, nobody gives money to a campaign without expecting some sort of favorable legislation passed for them. No candidate can survive without this sort of favor swapping. The best you can do is to decide who you're willing to compromise yourself to.
Take Hillary Clinton for example. Back when her husband was President, she was instrumental in getting the White House back away from that horrible bankruptcy reform bill that would eventually get passed in 2005. You can read more about this in "The Two-Income Trap" because the author of the book was instrumental in convincing her it was a bad idea. The bill contains such gems as prioritizing the repayment of credit card debt before child support and alimony payments. Clinton was horrified by the bill originally and promised to defeat "that awful bill" which was "unfair to women and children."
Now a few years later after successfully running for the Senate after receiving $140,000 of campaign contributions from banking executives, Senator Clinton voted in favor of the bill when it came up unchanged in 2001 and in every other year it was introduced until its passage in 2005. This is what corruption is all about -- bills for bills.
Even the most principled politician has to hold their nose and do something terrible in exchange for getting to prioritize the issues that really matter to them. For some politicians, this eventually eats away at everything they did care about until nothing is left but the matters of power and money. For other politicians, pork spending, anti-consumer legislation, and corporate welfare were their highest principles to begin with.
This sort of thing happens constantly, and it will happen until we can somehow kill the relationship between big donations and a successful bid for office. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is dead set on the idea that money equals free speech and forgets that the point of free speech is to give all citizens a chance to air their views. With big money being thrown around like this, the voices and opinions of the little guy mean absolutely jack outside of the voting booth. This means that some issues will never be properly examined (like copyright extension) because the few powerful interests have well bribed both sides on the issue.
This is why almost all of our elections are about "culture war" nonsense. It's a distraction from the real issues about government power and the spending of our tax dollars are decided with phone calls, industry drafted bills, and big fat checks. You just wave gay marriage or video game violence and the voters look that way while the other hand is busy digging in the graft.
I'm in favor of the latest raft of public election financing draft bills. You agree not to accept any money from private individuals, and in exchange the government matches what your opponent spends. The best part is that since they're voluntary, the Supreme Court can't knock them down without extremely tortured logic. To qualify, all you have to do is get a certain critical mass of signatures, and then you spend the entire election trying to speak to the people instead of spending (literally) 70-90% of your time begging for money. Trust me; this is what an election is really like -- candidates are just panhandlers trading dignity for much larger sums of cash than a homeless person. It's disheartening to watch.
You're right that it's a straw man argument he's making, but it's pretty darned close to my experience with my fellow Christians who think that we're a persecuted minority. It's frankly a delusional mindset, but it's a tool used by various leaders to get us to rally together on various topics. Nothing makes people willing to accept a combative worldview and to ignore flaws within in favor of the flaws of others better than to tell them they are under attack. It's a story as old as time.
In modern times, no. However, in pre-Temperance America, there was no easier way to export corn from the country's rich corn-growing belts than corn-based alcohol. Dried corn has bulky to ship, could go bad in transit, and had less market, so whisky was the way to go. In colonial America, people drank about 3-4 times the amount of alcohol the average American drinks today, and these rates would go up over the next couple of centuries until the Temperance backlash put a stop to that. Ever since the British tried to cut off colonialists supplies to sugar and molasses for rum during the Revolution, corn whisky from the Midwest took over as America's hard liquor of choice.
Not surprising. You're eating significantly more calorie-dense foods than before -- more fats, more sugars, less fiber-rich carbohydrates. Most vegan fare is extremely healthy in comparison to what most other people eat. I really do wish I could be vegan or at least just some kind of vegetarian for health reasons, but all my favorite foods are meat -- red meat in particular.
On the other hand, if you were 26 when you shifted diet, you may have just hit that time in your life when metabolism changes and it becomes easier to gain weight -- especially if you're now more sedentary than you were in your college years (walking to class, etc.).
Where, in jcr's post did he talk about any of that?
All he said was that it's the combined fault of the sugar and corn lobbies and Congress that sugar is so expensive and corn sweetener is so cheap. This is objective fact. The only reason our country is considering corn-based ethanol fuel (one of the least efficient methods of production) is because of our sugar tarriff and corn subsidy regime.
He also suggested that corn syrup is "crap," which is an opinion, but does not imply the reason why he thinks it's crap.
All the rest of your tirade against him for making a "stupid argument" seems to be about the connection between obesity and corn syrup which he makes no reference to in the post you replied to. Basically, your entire post is either a straw man argument or a complete non sequitur. Did you actually read his post, or were you just eager to find a highly moderated post to ride on to inject your own opinion about something else being argued elsewhere in the (borne-out) hopes of getting modded up?
If you've never done it, go low-carb for a month. For many Americans, you can kind of cheat on this by simply not drinking sweet drinks and not eating candy or other sweets for a month -- you don't have to go full anti-bread and pasta and rice. Cut out diet drinks too and just drink water or unsweetened tea.
Somewhere over the course of this month, you will begin to realize just how much sugar is hidden in fast food. McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal. I've tried to avoid fast food ever since I did this a few years ago by accident when I tried to switch to only drinking water to save money and lose weight. It's really obscene.
(Unfortunately, after long enough not drinking sugary drinks, you do become used to the flavor and learn to ignore it in fast food again, but it's still an eye opener as long as you remember it.)
Most of the reason I use a strategy guide is make sure I don't miss something.
A lot of side-quests in many games involve hunting for certain items across the world. The locations these items are hidden in may be somewhat obscure. In addition, various dungeons in games will hide certain bits of treasure in strange places.
Basically, these are exactly the sort of things that I would've picked up on on the 2nd or 3rd replay of a game when I was in high school that made those games great to replay. However, as an adult, I don't have time to replay games yet I still have the same satisfaction from doing all the side-quests. Strategy guides are required for me to do every last bit of a game on the first run-through with my limited free time, but that doesn't make a game bad in my opinion.
After all, there are people with free time who still play games.
Depends on what you mean by complete. If you mean that it's bad for a game to need a strategy guide to finish the main storyline, I'd agree with you. If you're saying that complex side-quests are a bad thing, then I'd have to disagree.
I never saw it coming. Not the actual crimes mind you, but the pre-2008 accountability. Seeing the crimes coming was just a matter of knowing history and applying logic.
Even so, I should've seen the weak accountability coming. Immunity to prosecution? What a gyp. Well, I'd like say that maybe we'll see some Supreme Court action as a result of the prosecution of this, but I don't hold high hopes for that working out well after last month's run of rulings.
Why was Saddam Hussein described as living in a spider-hole and Cheney's bunker is described as an undisclosed, secure location?
Because Saddam Hussein lived in an actual dirty hole in the ground big enough for one person, and Dick Cheney was off hunting at the estates of rich buddies.
Has Cheney ever gone on a publicly-known vacation? No, he's always been at "undisclosed locations" which the American people falsely assumed were secure bunkers in our post-9/11 delusions that the administration was competent. The whole Harry Whittington shooting blew the lid off of that. The whole "undisclosed location" bit is just another manifestation of Cheney's obsession with secrecy.
By abusing the PATRIOT Act, they are risking having it taken away from those agents who would use it legally to prevent some sort of terrorist attack from happening again.
That is inexcusable... or unpardonable.
You've been on a roll recently. I give it two thumbs up! (Nice nick, BTW.)
Most anti-virus software isn't storing the checksums of your commercial packages, just of the viruses.
A few cheaper, shareware/freeware kinds do. It's mostly a tactic for intrusion detection though.
You'll find that any EULA that prevents you "distributing derivatives of the software" could be interpreted strictly to mean that you couldn't generate and publish checksums.
A checksum is no more a derivative work of the software than publishing how much size it takes up on disk nor the list of the names of files it installs. It's a factual description and not a creative work. It wouldn't be considered a copyrightable work in its own right, after all, and "derivative works" is a very specific legal term that originates in copyright.
And the other point that you glossed over is the prohibitive cost of buying a legitimate copy of every version of every commercial package in order to install them to create these checksums.
Now that's a legit objection, but it has nothing to do with any imagined legal liability which is my main objection. I never disputed that it wouldn't be expensive. I'm just boggled by your idea that checksumming software constitutes a derivative work.
Or very few people copy DVDs and then seed them, allowing movie piracy to be rampant. Or movie piracy is rampant from non-DVD sources (such as theater cam releases).
The two aren't actually mutually exclusive, though the MPAA is almost certainly inflating numbers (if not just making them up), and I'd really love to see the methodology for where the NYT got theirs.
You do realize that the "evil" in "necessary evil" is figurative not literal [...]
I'm sorry -- are you stating that necessary evil is never actually evil? That's a dark road to walk down, and at the very end is the belief that the ends always justify the means. War is a necessary evil, but do not think that just because it is necessary for our survival that it is not mass murder.
Now, back to the police. Never forget that police are human beings and thus fallible. Any time you hand someone the keys to power over you, you invite them to abuse that power if you do not ensure oversight of their actions. Read your civil rights history if you forget that power can be abused by those charged to protect us. Read about the things done under the veil of "national security" as part of COINTELPRO.
This isn't conjecture. This isn't mad conspiracy theory. This is history, and it's people like you that doom those who know history to watching everyone else repeat it.
Slashdot Mirror
How about the Street Fighter II series? Certainly, at some point, if not from the beginning, it was so bad -- it became a joke. I have recently started up a game of this, not because it was fun, but it was a great laugh -- its infamous.
You're kidding, right? The game that largely launched the 2D fighter genre in America? There were similar games before SF II, but it was the first of its kind to reach the kind of popularity it has when it was out.
You could make the argument that someone along the way its sequels became derivative and boring compared to games like the Tekken series, but the original SF II was a classic.
Someone's either being very nationalistic or grossly ignorant of Middle Eastern and Southeast Asian history.
Ever wonder how three distinct, relatively regionally separated groups like the Shia Arabs, the Sunni Arabs, and the Kurds all got lumped into one country with a minority in charge? Thank Britain colonial rule of Iraq.
Same question for the ethnic divisions of Afghanistan? Same answer.
Want to understand why Muslims and Hindus were at each others throats at the end of British rule of India? Thank British divide-and-control strategies for ruling the empire.
Nearly every intra-national ethnic and religious conflict over the past century in Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia can trace its roots back to the effects of colonial Europe and its policies of balancing ethnic enemies against one another. Had most of these groups remained in separate nation states, most of this conflict would not be present. I single out the British because they were the nation most in control of the Middle East and Southeast and Central Asia where the majority of predominantly Muslim nations are located, and it was the British who set up the modern geographical borders of the nations in those areas.
This is history. Deal with it.
So, somebody MADE you read the spoilers?
Actually, yes. Trolls love to inject the spoilers in places where people trying to avoid them wouldn't avoid looking. They might randomly comment in the middle of a thread on a random blog or discussion site.
Try a brief search of Slashdot for the spoiler from the last book. Note what kinds of articles come up. "Apple's Aperture Reviewed" from May 2005 (two months before release of the book) is one of them, and a glance at the summary shows that there was a post titled with the spoiler. You would certainly find a lot more if Google's snapshots of the pages included posts which had been modded down to -1 below the threshold for a anonymous user (like Google) to see. You could not view Slashdot comments for two whole months without stumbling onto the big spoiler.
So, yes, smart-ass -- someone did make us read the spoilers. The only thing that mitigated it was the massive amount of fake spoilers being tossed around too. There was enough doubt to keep you in suspense, but when you finally found out which ones were real, they had a lot less emotional impact than they would've had you not known.
Yeah, and since when -- in the whole of history -- would taking out the British from the equation have had a negative effect on the Middle East. Practically the whole Muslim world owes Britain a black eye for the effects the British empire has had on history there.
If they had a shirt of this, I would wear it to the book store on release day.
Interesting. Please, if you can do find me some info on this. I'd like to see his research. Any clues to finding it would be handy.
No. That would be idiotic. The man may be a ideologue, but this kind of stupidity transcends even those blinders.
American soldiers are WAY too expensive to use like this. We're already suffering a troop recruitment shortage without the perception that the lives of our troops are expendable in "Charge of the Light Brigade"-style tactics. Doing this would waste billions of dollars of equipment and completely end all Army recruitment. US soldiers are not easily replaceable.
Even so, this isn't what any hypothetical drug based on this research would actually do. It'd be more useful (in the evil sense) for doing things like ethnic cleansing and scorched earth tactics since you can keep the soldiers from being traumatized afterwards than it is for suicide charges.
My third knee-jerk response is that I should've read the fine article.
This isn't an anti-fear drug. It's not even a drug. They just found that by genetically engineering mice to have more or less Cdk5 and determined its effects on their response to a floor which had caused them trauma after the trauma had passed. Mice with less Cdk5 got over their fear quickly, and mice with more Cdk5 were terrified to be in a similar situation.
For all we know, this is how propranolol actually works, though I can't dig up any articles to this effect.
I forget where I read it... it was probably linked from here anyway, but there was some discussion about why suicide bombers are muslim and all that. The bottom-line is polygamy.
Yeah, that's the sort of thing that pop-science writers come up with when they don't know a dang thing about the subject they're writing about. Polygamy amongst Muslims is very rare outside of the very wealthy. Polygamy by its very nature of excluding otherwise fit males from the breeding populace can only exist in situations where there is a strong inequality between the power of males. Poor and powerless people don't become polygamists without the favor of the wealthy or powerful.
There's a much stronger correlation between young male poverty and suicide bombing then there is to polygamy. The core reasoning (a desperation born from the lack of ability to marry and support a family) is much the same, but this is not because there are no women available as much as its because there are no jobs available.
After all the Palestinian gender ratio (as of 1997) is 1.036 males to every female which nicely tracks the world average of 1.05. Polygamous marriages constitute only 4% of Palestinian marriages, and this should not be enough to push the gender ratio significantly out of balance. Note that China has a horrible ratio of 1.06 males to every female due to illegal abortions of female children, and it's not a hotbed of suicide bombers.
My first knee-jerk response was that this would be combined with propranolol, the drug that suppresses traumatic memories which is intended to stop PTSD but could instead be abused to prevent guilt over atrocities.
My second thought was of how amazingly boneheaded of an idea administering an anti-fear drug would be in a war zone -- especially for US soldiers carrying an amazingly expensive array of military gear and having had expensive combat training. Soldiers need fear as a survival mechanism. Without it, they'd do amazingly stupid and suicidal things.
You'd use a drug like this if your army were cannon fodder with poor supplies and training. I could see a use for this for suicide bombers or *maybe* for overrunning positions defended by few soldiers, but that's it.
The biggest strawman part of your argument was the following:
The guy was griping about being allowed to sing some religious songs in his school but not Christmas carols and not being allowed to critique Islam. This whole block I quoted is a rant against fundamentalists in an attempt to tar people who complain about Christianity being singled out with the brush of flat-earthers and young-Earth creationists. Classic strawman -- you were bring up things that had nothing to do with what he was talking about in an attempt to make people who hold his views look bad as a group.
It's very simple. Our system positively selects for corruption, and it always will so long as the support of a few wealthy men is necessary to successfully compete in an election. I volunteered in the finance office of a campaign for governor, and you have no idea just how expensive a campaign is and just how much that money hinges on a short list of generous donors until you've gone over the public finance disclosures of your candidate and their opponents. Only the super, super rich can self-finance.
With that sort of pressure, corruption is inevitable. With the exception of a few wealthy ideologues, nobody gives money to a campaign without expecting some sort of favorable legislation passed for them. No candidate can survive without this sort of favor swapping. The best you can do is to decide who you're willing to compromise yourself to.
Take Hillary Clinton for example. Back when her husband was President, she was instrumental in getting the White House back away from that horrible bankruptcy reform bill that would eventually get passed in 2005. You can read more about this in "The Two-Income Trap" because the author of the book was instrumental in convincing her it was a bad idea. The bill contains such gems as prioritizing the repayment of credit card debt before child support and alimony payments. Clinton was horrified by the bill originally and promised to defeat "that awful bill" which was "unfair to women and children."
Now a few years later after successfully running for the Senate after receiving $140,000 of campaign contributions from banking executives, Senator Clinton voted in favor of the bill when it came up unchanged in 2001 and in every other year it was introduced until its passage in 2005. This is what corruption is all about -- bills for bills.
Even the most principled politician has to hold their nose and do something terrible in exchange for getting to prioritize the issues that really matter to them. For some politicians, this eventually eats away at everything they did care about until nothing is left but the matters of power and money. For other politicians, pork spending, anti-consumer legislation, and corporate welfare were their highest principles to begin with.
This sort of thing happens constantly, and it will happen until we can somehow kill the relationship between big donations and a successful bid for office. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court is dead set on the idea that money equals free speech and forgets that the point of free speech is to give all citizens a chance to air their views. With big money being thrown around like this, the voices and opinions of the little guy mean absolutely jack outside of the voting booth. This means that some issues will never be properly examined (like copyright extension) because the few powerful interests have well bribed both sides on the issue.
This is why almost all of our elections are about "culture war" nonsense. It's a distraction from the real issues about government power and the spending of our tax dollars are decided with phone calls, industry drafted bills, and big fat checks. You just wave gay marriage or video game violence and the voters look that way while the other hand is busy digging in the graft.
I'm in favor of the latest raft of public election financing draft bills. You agree not to accept any money from private individuals, and in exchange the government matches what your opponent spends. The best part is that since they're voluntary, the Supreme Court can't knock them down without extremely tortured logic. To qualify, all you have to do is get a certain critical mass of signatures, and then you spend the entire election trying to speak to the people instead of spending (literally) 70-90% of your time begging for money. Trust me; this is what an election is really like -- candidates are just panhandlers trading dignity for much larger sums of cash than a homeless person. It's disheartening to watch.
Unti
It's pretty close to the actual number, according to The American Religious Identification Survey which pegged the number at 88% in 1990 and 81% in 2001.
You're right that it's a straw man argument he's making, but it's pretty darned close to my experience with my fellow Christians who think that we're a persecuted minority. It's frankly a delusional mindset, but it's a tool used by various leaders to get us to rally together on various topics. Nothing makes people willing to accept a combative worldview and to ignore flaws within in favor of the flaws of others better than to tell them they are under attack. It's a story as old as time.
In modern times, no. However, in pre-Temperance America, there was no easier way to export corn from the country's rich corn-growing belts than corn-based alcohol. Dried corn has bulky to ship, could go bad in transit, and had less market, so whisky was the way to go. In colonial America, people drank about 3-4 times the amount of alcohol the average American drinks today, and these rates would go up over the next couple of centuries until the Temperance backlash put a stop to that. Ever since the British tried to cut off colonialists supplies to sugar and molasses for rum during the Revolution, corn whisky from the Midwest took over as America's hard liquor of choice.
Read more about it here.
Not surprising. You're eating significantly more calorie-dense foods than before -- more fats, more sugars, less fiber-rich carbohydrates. Most vegan fare is extremely healthy in comparison to what most other people eat. I really do wish I could be vegan or at least just some kind of vegetarian for health reasons, but all my favorite foods are meat -- red meat in particular.
On the other hand, if you were 26 when you shifted diet, you may have just hit that time in your life when metabolism changes and it becomes easier to gain weight -- especially if you're now more sedentary than you were in your college years (walking to class, etc.).
Where, in jcr's post did he talk about any of that?
All he said was that it's the combined fault of the sugar and corn lobbies and Congress that sugar is so expensive and corn sweetener is so cheap. This is objective fact. The only reason our country is considering corn-based ethanol fuel (one of the least efficient methods of production) is because of our sugar tarriff and corn subsidy regime.
He also suggested that corn syrup is "crap," which is an opinion, but does not imply the reason why he thinks it's crap.
All the rest of your tirade against him for making a "stupid argument" seems to be about the connection between obesity and corn syrup which he makes no reference to in the post you replied to. Basically, your entire post is either a straw man argument or a complete non sequitur. Did you actually read his post, or were you just eager to find a highly moderated post to ride on to inject your own opinion about something else being argued elsewhere in the (borne-out) hopes of getting modded up?
If you've never done it, go low-carb for a month. For many Americans, you can kind of cheat on this by simply not drinking sweet drinks and not eating candy or other sweets for a month -- you don't have to go full anti-bread and pasta and rice. Cut out diet drinks too and just drink water or unsweetened tea.
Somewhere over the course of this month, you will begin to realize just how much sugar is hidden in fast food. McDonalds and Burger King buns as well as Pizza Hut pizza sauce taste repulsively sweet once you're no longer used to a certain minimum amount of sugar in each meal. I've tried to avoid fast food ever since I did this a few years ago by accident when I tried to switch to only drinking water to save money and lose weight. It's really obscene.
(Unfortunately, after long enough not drinking sugary drinks, you do become used to the flavor and learn to ignore it in fast food again, but it's still an eye opener as long as you remember it.)
Most of the reason I use a strategy guide is make sure I don't miss something.
A lot of side-quests in many games involve hunting for certain items across the world. The locations these items are hidden in may be somewhat obscure. In addition, various dungeons in games will hide certain bits of treasure in strange places.
Basically, these are exactly the sort of things that I would've picked up on on the 2nd or 3rd replay of a game when I was in high school that made those games great to replay. However, as an adult, I don't have time to replay games yet I still have the same satisfaction from doing all the side-quests. Strategy guides are required for me to do every last bit of a game on the first run-through with my limited free time, but that doesn't make a game bad in my opinion.
After all, there are people with free time who still play games.
Depends on what you mean by complete. If you mean that it's bad for a game to need a strategy guide to finish the main storyline, I'd agree with you. If you're saying that complex side-quests are a bad thing, then I'd have to disagree.
I never saw it coming. Not the actual crimes mind you, but the pre-2008 accountability.
Seeing the crimes coming was just a matter of knowing history and applying logic.
Even so, I should've seen the weak accountability coming. Immunity to prosecution? What a gyp. Well, I'd like say that maybe we'll see some Supreme Court action as a result of the prosecution of this, but I don't hold high hopes for that working out well after last month's run of rulings.
Why was Saddam Hussein described as living in a spider-hole and Cheney's bunker is described as an undisclosed, secure location?
Because Saddam Hussein lived in an actual dirty hole in the ground big enough for one person, and Dick Cheney was off hunting at the estates of rich buddies.
Has Cheney ever gone on a publicly-known vacation? No, he's always been at "undisclosed locations" which the American people falsely assumed were secure bunkers in our post-9/11 delusions that the administration was competent. The whole Harry Whittington shooting blew the lid off of that. The whole "undisclosed location" bit is just another manifestation of Cheney's obsession with secrecy.
By abusing the PATRIOT Act, they are risking having it taken away from those agents who would use it legally to prevent some sort of terrorist attack from happening again.
That is inexcusable... or unpardonable.
You've been on a roll recently. I give it two thumbs up!
(Nice nick, BTW.)
Most anti-virus software isn't storing the checksums of your commercial packages, just of the viruses.
A few cheaper, shareware/freeware kinds do. It's mostly a tactic for intrusion detection though.
You'll find that any EULA that prevents you "distributing derivatives of the software" could be interpreted strictly to mean that you couldn't generate and publish checksums.
A checksum is no more a derivative work of the software than publishing how much size it takes up on disk nor the list of the names of files it installs. It's a factual description and not a creative work. It wouldn't be considered a copyrightable work in its own right, after all, and "derivative works" is a very specific legal term that originates in copyright.
And the other point that you glossed over is the prohibitive cost of buying a legitimate copy of every version of every commercial package in order to install them to create these checksums.
Now that's a legit objection, but it has nothing to do with any imagined legal liability which is my main objection. I never disputed that it wouldn't be expensive. I'm just boggled by your idea that checksumming software constitutes a derivative work.
Or very few people copy DVDs and then seed them, allowing movie piracy to be rampant.
Or movie piracy is rampant from non-DVD sources (such as theater cam releases).
The two aren't actually mutually exclusive, though the MPAA is almost certainly inflating numbers (if not just making them up), and I'd really love to see the methodology for where the NYT got theirs.
You do realize that the "evil" in "necessary evil" is figurative not literal [...]
I'm sorry -- are you stating that necessary evil is never actually evil? That's a dark road to walk down, and at the very end is the belief that the ends always justify the means. War is a necessary evil, but do not think that just because it is necessary for our survival that it is not mass murder.
Now, back to the police. Never forget that police are human beings and thus fallible. Any time you hand someone the keys to power over you, you invite them to abuse that power if you do not ensure oversight of their actions. Read your civil rights history if you forget that power can be abused by those charged to protect us. Read about the things done under the veil of "national security" as part of COINTELPRO.
This isn't conjecture. This isn't mad conspiracy theory. This is history, and it's people like you that doom those who know history to watching everyone else repeat it.