"Every individual has the same options/rights/privledges/etc.",
As I tried to point out with my earlier Tocqueville quote, simply because everyone's rights have been equally violated does not mean that no rights have been violated.
"There are no "couples rights" -- even to equal protection. Only individual rights."
Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people peacably to assemble.
Then these "privileges" or "rules," by placing restrictions on who qualifies to be recognized by the state as a married couple, granting special favors to one group of people and denying them to a another, interferes with the right of free association in much the same way as laws against interracial marriage. The current state of marriage serves to promote one type of couple at the expense of another and the denial of marital advantages to a particular couple is then a violation of their right to assemble as they see fit.
I'm sorry, I was operating under the assumption that you thought you were a self-styled conservative yourself. The people have rights, they don't grant or take them away from each other, only to and from the government.
You'll note in our constitution that all rights not explicitly granted to the national government "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The reason it's not left with "the people" entirely is because "the people" are known for riding roughshod over the rights of the individual (which is what you promote by claiming that either the state or the people are the source of rights). Having the states and the people fight it out with each other was a mechanism to have the two groups too distracted in their struggles against each other that neither would be in a position to violate the rights of the individual (the true source of all rights). The whole point of conservative philosophy is that those regulations you want to avoid represent threats to these individual rights.
(Ultimatley, the main difference between "liberal" and "conservative" is that the liberal fears the state violating the rights of the individual while the conservative fears the people violating those same rights. Both philosophies obviously have their blind spots.)
"But government-recognized marriage arrangements are between a man and a woman."
"Congress shall make no law recognizing an establishment of religion." The only possible explaination for the requirement of one man and one woman is that the legisature is ignoring this requirement.
How does maintaining a government regulation that each married couple must consist of one man and one woman fit with your "the conservative side wants fewer regulations" statement?
"Individual "gays" can marry the same as individual straight folks. There are no more or fewer restrictions on them."
Only if you ignore the concept of romantic love. Heterosexual people can marry people they love, homosexuals can't. With your argument, what you've done is reduced the concept of marriage back to the classical definition of a business arrangement, and is this really the kind of atmosphere you want as the holy graile of raising children in?
It's also a violation of a person's right to associate with who they want, how they want. Whether or not someone can wave their hands enough to make it look OK in the eyes of the Fourteenth Amendment, there are other parts of the United States Constitution.
"It's equal rights for all individuals."
Equal, hm? Folks in North Korea also have equal rights for all (namely, none), does that make it OK? For being a self-proclaimed bastion of conservative political dogma, you sure don't seem to be familiar with the writings of Tocqueville, especially on his views of equality versus liberty.
I think that democratic communities have a natural taste for freedom: left to themselves, they will seek it, cherish it, and view any privation of it with regret. But for equality, their passion is ardent, insatiable, incessant, invincible: they call for equality in freedom; and if they cannot obtain that, they still call for equality in slavery.
"Well, based on what I've heard from people who still play FFXI, it may be because the total people playing was decreased by about half... "
I wish! Or are the people that left FFXI the ones that didn't seem to spend all freakin' day on Jeuno?
Seriously, Square-Enix needs to introduce some sort of Black Plague into the place to kill off anybody who spends more time in that overcrowded hellhole than is necessary to pass through on to points elsewhere.
"The First Ammendment's entire purpose is to protect political speech."
You are part of the problem. You are why my telephone rings off the hook with automated messages when election time rolls around (because the political "speech" is held to different standards from other forms of marketing, for whom such canned messages are flat-out illegal). There is no clause in the constitution making any sort of speech "more equal" than any other sort, and IMO, by classifying political speech as being more equal itself is an abridgment of the freedom of speech by specifying what can/should be talked about.
What teenaged girls are interested in cancer? Theyr'e teenagers, they're never going to die. No, you'd be more popular with the "naughty grannies" market.
Is Gates going after spammers per se, or going after competition They still sell out their Hotmail and MSN mailing lists to interested advertisers, don't they?
"The tiny mech handles just like the larger constructs, and has some impressive armament for its size, but the big draw of the tiny suit is the ability to "Neurohack" your way into full-sized mechs."
First off, Elemental class battle armor are nothing new, even to the electronic games. I seem to recall being able to play as an Elemental in MW2:Mercs. This has always confused me because battle armor is not a 'mech; it's Starship Troopers rather than Gundam.
But Elementals are infantry and the ground-pounder doesn't know jack about using a battlemech's weapons, let alone keeping it on its feet! Even in the pen-and-paper RPG, Gunnery/Battle Armor and Gunnery/BattleMech are two very different skill sets (after all, the former involves moving your body, the latter involves moving a joystick). What they do know is how to disable 'mechs when given the opportunity, from knee-capping them to ripping open the hatch, but... come on! This screams "munchkin!"
And beyond that, Elementals may be battle-armored, but they're still infantry and still very soft and squishy in the world of BattleTech; there are reasons why they're deployed in squads of 4-5. Unless they're given the opportunity to behave like infantry (say, ducking into buildings and using them for cover), they will die in mean and nasty ways. With four whole missiles and a point-defense pea-shooter combined with a top speed of a little over 32.4 km/h (yes, I did that in my head, I'm a geek), they can't catch what they can kill and can't kill what they can catch.
From the sounds of things, everybody would have been better off if MSFT introduced ProtoMechs instead of battle armor.
In FASA's waning days, before WizKids/FanPro got the license, it was a very, very, very bad idea for FASA to sell all the electronic BattleTech rights to MSFT. FASA Interactive should have just stuck with using them solely as a publisher, but this... Imagine if Valve sold the Half-Life name to Vivendi. Thanks to foolishness like this, the makers of Heavy Metal Pro, a series of record-sheet generators not only endorsed but used by FanPro, had to get written permission from Microsoft before getting the rights to sell BattleTech-related software.
This is obviously because of dwindling player numbers as players move on to newer games (such as EQ2). Eventually, of course, they'll have one sparsely-populated server, but what happens after that? Will they eventually drop the game entirely, ala Phantasy Star Online, will there eventually be a future where the single EQ server is free to play on (as the maintenance overhead all but disappears), or will something else happen?
What we're seeing here is what will probably be the natural death cycle of all currently popular MMORPGs (as opposed to the artificial death of DC PSO due to the death of the DC). This is going to be worth watching whether you play EQ or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Lots of people read articles about computer security.
FWD: Microsoft, AOL warn about new virus!
"I need u like Cuba Gooding needed a bigger part
He's way better than Ben Affleck"
He was also the wrong skin color for 1941. He didn't play a bigger part because the person he plays wasn't allowed to have a bigger part.
So, how's the funding for the sports programs?
"Every individual has the same options/rights/privledges/etc.",
As I tried to point out with my earlier Tocqueville quote, simply because everyone's rights have been equally violated does not mean that no rights have been violated.
"There are no "couples rights" -- even to equal protection. Only individual rights."
Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people peacably to assemble.
"privledges then."
Then these "privileges" or "rules," by placing restrictions on who qualifies to be recognized by the state as a married couple, granting special favors to one group of people and denying them to a another, interferes with the right of free association in much the same way as laws against interracial marriage. The current state of marriage serves to promote one type of couple at the expense of another and the denial of marital advantages to a particular couple is then a violation of their right to assemble as they see fit.
"I thought for sure you were going to suggest just about anywhere in the US of A."
Northwest Territories, Alaska... there's a difference?
Just more proof that Michigan is, in fact, part of Canada.
"around 250 million is supposedly improperly accounted for,"
Yeah, but that's 250 million Canadian dollars. Heck, I think I've got that in my pocket right now!
"If the electorate wants to add more rights,"
I'm sorry, I was operating under the assumption that you thought you were a self-styled conservative yourself. The people have rights, they don't grant or take them away from each other, only to and from the government.
You'll note in our constitution that all rights not explicitly granted to the national government "are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people." The reason it's not left with "the people" entirely is because "the people" are known for riding roughshod over the rights of the individual (which is what you promote by claiming that either the state or the people are the source of rights). Having the states and the people fight it out with each other was a mechanism to have the two groups too distracted in their struggles against each other that neither would be in a position to violate the rights of the individual (the true source of all rights). The whole point of conservative philosophy is that those regulations you want to avoid represent threats to these individual rights.
(Ultimatley, the main difference between "liberal" and "conservative" is that the liberal fears the state violating the rights of the individual while the conservative fears the people violating those same rights. Both philosophies obviously have their blind spots.)
"But government-recognized marriage arrangements are between a man and a woman."
"Congress shall make no law recognizing an establishment of religion." The only possible explaination for the requirement of one man and one woman is that the legisature is ignoring this requirement.
How does maintaining a government regulation that each married couple must consist of one man and one woman fit with your "the conservative side wants fewer regulations" statement?
Only if you ignore the concept of romantic love. Heterosexual people can marry people they love, homosexuals can't. With your argument, what you've done is reduced the concept of marriage back to the classical definition of a business arrangement, and is this really the kind of atmosphere you want as the holy graile of raising children in?
It's also a violation of a person's right to associate with who they want, how they want. Whether or not someone can wave their hands enough to make it look OK in the eyes of the Fourteenth Amendment, there are other parts of the United States Constitution.
"It's equal rights for all individuals."
Equal, hm? Folks in North Korea also have equal rights for all (namely, none), does that make it OK? For being a self-proclaimed bastion of conservative political dogma, you sure don't seem to be familiar with the writings of Tocqueville, especially on his views of equality versus liberty.
"Well, based on what I've heard from people who still play FFXI, it may be because the total people playing was decreased by about half... "
I wish! Or are the people that left FFXI the ones that didn't seem to spend all freakin' day on Jeuno?
Seriously, Square-Enix needs to introduce some sort of Black Plague into the place to kill off anybody who spends more time in that overcrowded hellhole than is necessary to pass through on to points elsewhere.
"The First Ammendment's entire purpose is to protect political speech."
You are part of the problem. You are why my telephone rings off the hook with automated messages when election time rolls around (because the political "speech" is held to different standards from other forms of marketing, for whom such canned messages are flat-out illegal). There is no clause in the constitution making any sort of speech "more equal" than any other sort, and IMO, by classifying political speech as being more equal itself is an abridgment of the freedom of speech by specifying what can/should be talked about.
"Whatever happened to the most elegant and simplist solution being the likely right explaination?"
Quantum mechanics happened.
"The characters act in a very hyperbolized manner"
Welcome to television!
"Look at Teen Titans!"
Made in the USA!
What teenaged girls are interested in cancer? Theyr'e teenagers, they're never going to die. No, you'd be more popular with the "naughty grannies" market.
"It does not have to be the most profitable, just decent."
Explain that to an investor.
"China's ok...but Cuba's bad?"
Florida sugar barons don't give a damn about China.
Yes, it means whether or not we're allowed to use condoms makes no difference to us (for some reason). :)
"(Yes, it's IGN, but it's not really a serious review.)"
Was this disclaimer really necessary?
Is Gates going after spammers per se, or going after competition They still sell out their Hotmail and MSN mailing lists to interested advertisers, don't they?
And that was just the Super Bowl!
The last starfighter is...
You obviously weren't smiling enough, then.
"The tiny mech handles just like the larger constructs, and has some impressive armament for its size, but the big draw of the tiny suit is the ability to "Neurohack" your way into full-sized mechs."
First off, Elemental class battle armor are nothing new, even to the electronic games. I seem to recall being able to play as an Elemental in MW2:Mercs. This has always confused me because battle armor is not a 'mech; it's Starship Troopers rather than Gundam.
But Elementals are infantry and the ground-pounder doesn't know jack about using a battlemech's weapons, let alone keeping it on its feet! Even in the pen-and-paper RPG, Gunnery/Battle Armor and Gunnery/BattleMech are two very different skill sets (after all, the former involves moving your body, the latter involves moving a joystick). What they do know is how to disable 'mechs when given the opportunity, from knee-capping them to ripping open the hatch, but... come on! This screams "munchkin!"
And beyond that, Elementals may be battle-armored, but they're still infantry and still very soft and squishy in the world of BattleTech; there are reasons why they're deployed in squads of 4-5. Unless they're given the opportunity to behave like infantry (say, ducking into buildings and using them for cover), they will die in mean and nasty ways. With four whole missiles and a point-defense pea-shooter combined with a top speed of a little over 32.4 km/h (yes, I did that in my head, I'm a geek), they can't catch what they can kill and can't kill what they can catch.
From the sounds of things, everybody would have been better off if MSFT introduced ProtoMechs instead of battle armor.
In FASA's waning days, before WizKids/FanPro got the license, it was a very, very, very bad idea for FASA to sell all the electronic BattleTech rights to MSFT. FASA Interactive should have just stuck with using them solely as a publisher, but this... Imagine if Valve sold the Half-Life name to Vivendi. Thanks to foolishness like this, the makers of Heavy Metal Pro, a series of record-sheet generators not only endorsed but used by FanPro, had to get written permission from Microsoft before getting the rights to sell BattleTech-related software.
Arrrgggghhhh!!!
This is obviously because of dwindling player numbers as players move on to newer games (such as EQ2). Eventually, of course, they'll have one sparsely-populated server, but what happens after that? Will they eventually drop the game entirely, ala Phantasy Star Online, will there eventually be a future where the single EQ server is free to play on (as the maintenance overhead all but disappears), or will something else happen?
What we're seeing here is what will probably be the natural death cycle of all currently popular MMORPGs (as opposed to the artificial death of DC PSO due to the death of the DC). This is going to be worth watching whether you play EQ or not.