No, the "issue at hand" was a comment about raising tax rates and raising revenues. There was nothing about removing loopholes.
It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the company or about the rich people behind it: they're inextricably tied together, and moving portions of the company takes even more paperwork than moving the people. Either way, eliminating the loopholes in tax law is the topic at hand, because that method both "cut[s] costs and increase revenue" -- just as the poster you replied to was talking about. And of course the rich move from time to time; look up the study I mentioned before, and note that an increase in taxes had no appreciable effect on high-income relocation.
You have, of course, conveniently ignored the second option I mentioned -- reducing income by using the tax laws.
Did you somehow miss the entire discussion about loopholes? Oh, wait, you just said loopholes were irrelevant... but now they are relevant, because you're talking about tactics like moving income offshore. Make up your mind.
Yep, that's a good summary of what I said.
You're really not good at this whole reading comprehension thing, seeing as you specifically argued against healthcare companies having any responsibility for the current prices, and then said this was solely because of malpractice lawsuits. I didn't summarize you, I ridiculed your gratuitous simplification of a complex subject.
The rest of your post is a lot of scare quotes and very little sense. I never talked about raising rates, you throw "socialism" into the discussion as if the word itself should be somehow denigrating, and completely fail to address the real question: why a system that currently works for dozens of countries would somehow not work here.
There's so much stupid in this post I can barely begin to address it.
Point one: the issue at hand is removing loopholes everywhere, not just in one jurisdiction. So unless the rich want to move between countriesâ"hardly a trivial task, even with money to grease the wheelsâ"they'll be stuck with the same increased tax rate wherever they go.
Point two: even if the loopholes weren't fixed consistently, the rich don't "just move" whenever tax rates rise. It's a non-trivial task to switch houses, schools for the kids, marinas for the yachts... not to mention all the other incidentals. Rich or poor, people put down roots wherever they live. A study completed just a few weeks ago verified this by noting how moving rates among the wealthy remained constant (about 4%, if I remember correctly) despite the introduction of a tax on the wealthy in New Jersey.
Point three: Nothing is ever simple. You sound like an industry shill by denying that a for-profit middleman (as most HMOs and health insurance companies are) could possibly have anything to do with rising costs. Yes, malpractice lawsuits are almost certainly one of the contributors, but to state unequivocally that the middleman concerned only with fattening its shareholders has nothing to do with the absurd increases we've all witnessed is outright idiocy. Or is half of Europe not a sufficiently relevant example for you, that a government can improve the medical quality of life for its citizens more cheaply and efficiently than a private company?
Repeat after me: an HTTP connection is not a contract.
Site owners are free to offer suggestions as to how to show the content they're freely offering who connects to their public server. I am similarly free to ignore those suggestions, and accept or render only the parts I want.
After all, if they don't want me seeing the content, all they have to do is stop giving it away.
It's certainly "fucked-up" -- but I'm not suggesting that the beta testers get ALL of the blame either. Blizzard isn't a perfect analogy here, because they're a developer that has an established history of listening to fans, and they're speaking the same language. Square seems to be dipping their toes into the shark-infested waters of usability testing, so I was trying to be constructive. It's worth analyzing what might've gone went wrong, no?
You can definitely blame this on the majority of the beta testers. I was one.
While there were plenty of other problems with the beta test itself -- abysmal build quality and unnecessarily limited playtimes were two big problems, the primary downfall was the total lack of direction from the developers and moderators. I brought up many of these same issues (particularly the UI mechanisms, as I'm a UI guy professionally) on the beta forums; a few posters agreed with me, but the majority of the replies came from slavering, rabid fanboys. These idiots took umbrage at mild suggestions or observations -- to say nothing of real, rigorous, and honest feedback -- and essentially drowned out anything useful. The most commonly repeated aphorisms were along the lines of "It'll be fixed by launch" and "How dare you suggest that anything Square produces is less than perfect."
Given that not a single one of the issues I brought up appears to have been fixed, it appears Square listened solely to the yes-men. It's also plausible that they really didn't learn anything from FFXI, as others are saying, but they did at least solicit user feedback this time.
Community colleges offer virtually the same learning experience as a full university, especially for basic education credits -- and what do most students take in their first two years, anyway? So unless you live within walking distance of a top-ten university, chances are you'll be just as challenged by the content, and you get all the benefits of geographic accessibility at a fraction of the cost. Plus, most community colleges have a maximum class size of 30 rather than 300.
Similar program in Washington state, has been around for 20 years now. Students can enroll full-time in college and fully skip the last two years of high school if they meet the admissions criteria (though you don't get your diploma until the end of your 12th year.) This gets them an Associates in Arts and Sciences, which is immediately transferable to any Washington 4-year public university, and is guaranteed by law to fulfill their basic education (e.g. non-major) classes at that university. Alternatively, they can go part-time and simply transfer the credits, though not all are guaranteed to correspond to basic ed requirements.
Incidentally, I did the former, starting at 14. The administrator in TFA who thinks maturity is a problem for anyone who wants to do this program, though, needs to get a clue. While I'm well aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, it was an amazing program that beat the pants off the "high school experience." People at community colleges generally want to be there, and the elevated age levels mean that you're surrounded by people with experience that you can learn from.
This is incorrect. You can quantitatively measure "quality", and all it takes is a little effort to define criteria. The easiest example I can think of is measuring the average amount of time required for users to complete a task. For things like web sites, this can be gathered trivially via Analytics or any other stat program. There is nothing subjective about it -- if you do it right. Most usability professionals know how.
As for programmers working alone, though, that's something no one else can solve.
... someone finally makes an addon that wholly, completely, disables the StupidBar. Yes, I know about the about:config hacks and the existing addons. This is an issue I keep up with, after all.
And please, don't bother to reply if you're just going to parrot how much you LOVE the "Awesome Bar" and think I should give it an umpteenth chance. Been there, done that, still think it sucks.
Some of us signed up with Hotmail before Microsoft acquired it, or haven't felt inconvenienced enough to switch. I only use it for site registrations anyway, I've got my own domain for my 'real' email.
It's pretty rare (and, as you say, a little creepy) when someone goes out of their way to ask about leading a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop. However, the way you've phrased your comment indicates that you're confusing homosexuality with pedophilia. They're two very separate things: one is normal, the other is illegal. If you find it strange that any gay man or lesbian would want to work with children, please examine your prejudices; after all, millions of straight people grow up wanting to be elementary school teachers or social workers.
This has nothing to do with sound operational strategy, and everything to do with irrational fear and bigotry.
Anyway, what usually happens is that a parent wants to enroll their child, but there's no active Scouting troop nearby. The parent talks to his/her neighbors, gets enough kids together to start a troop, and they end up being the Scoutmaster/GS leader. Since it's a pretty thankless job, responsibilities get passed around and/or pushed onto others. There are always chaperons and assistants needed to make a troop run well, and that's where people try to get neighbors, friends, and co-workers to help--whether they're straight or gay.
Me? I'm gay, and an Eagle Scout, but I never did like camping. (That might have had something to do with 95% of my Scouting campouts involving rain, no exaggeration.) I'd help out with a troop if asked by a close friend. And, in case it wasn't abundantly clear before, I'd sooner shag a woman than look twice at a child.
As a crafter, I'd much rather return to those days; I could actually make money back then, but more importantly, so could anyone else.
The problem with removing gil from the online economies is that it forces price drops on everything without adjusting item drop rates as well. You've got billions of gil disappearing literally overnight, while item rates remain the same. What happens (and has happened) is that consumable prices stay solid, because they're always in demand, but the rest of the crafting professions tank and drop like rocks. Of course, RMT aren't stupid; they moved into Cooking and Alchemy, the two consumable professions. And so this is what the economy looks like as more and more players get priced out of their own markets:
The above graph starts at the end of the inflation period, roughly March 2006. Now, realize that those lines are not merely price indicators, but also a representation of earning power; after all, this is a graph of player-to-player transactions, not NPC-to-player (which are a constant currency drain.) The reason for this recession (let's call it what it is, really) is Square's response. It wasn't just that prices dropped, but that the ability of players to earn gil was severely restricted and the amount of time required for farming was far beyond what many people could stomach. It's led to a lot of departures from the game, myself included.
How exactly do you expect a municipal Internet service to be paid for, if not with taxes? Or are you one of those people who expects governments to deliver services paid for by fairy dust and wishes?
You mean, "Spurred by the impending holiday." It's highly unlikely that the upswing in PS2 sales has any meaningful correlation with PS3 scarcity; after all, I still don't know a single person who actually plans to get one. The PS2 and PSP, however, are still as viable (and cheap, comparatively!) as they were a month ago.
Because IE automatically ships with Windows, he said, users satisfied with IE7 may not find enough reasons to download and install Firefox when they buy a new computer.
Anyone who found enough reasons to download Firefox before (Adblock? Mouse gestures?) is certainly going to find enough reasons after IE7's release. I downloaded the beta several weeks ago; after a few days of casual usage, I was underwhelmed, annoyed at the intrusive and bloated UI, and unsatisfied as to the permanence and functionality of the new security features. If all you want is tabbed browsing, I suppose IE7 might work, but that's far from being Firefox's only worthwhile feature.
Obviously, I'll be getting IE7 along with everyone else -- it's a security update, after all -- but that doesn't mean the blue 'E' will ever get clicked. And if my father and sister value their free tech support, they won't be clicking it, either.
First, "wonderful" is a subjective judgment -- as was my assertion that there haven't been any RPGs worth buying for a year. You cannot treat them as objective just for the purposes of argument.
Second, the "snob" factor was mentioned solely in reference to people who only consider a single, tightly defined genre as "real" RPGs, excluding others that fall under the same umbrage for no logical reason.
Third, your entire post is a wonderful of a tu quoque fallacy. Even if what you said was true, it wouldn't make my statements any less true.
Let me quote from my comment and bold it for emphasis:
there hasn't been a decent RPG out for almost a year -- not one that I've wanted to buy, anyway.
I'm sure there were decent RPGs released in the last year, but none of them piqued my interest, or the interest of my friends. My friends are a pretty diverse group, and if NONE of them thought anything was worth getting -- except for a few that picked up DQ8 -- that says something.
I agree that some people refuse to get anything but Final Fantasy, but I'm not one of those people. Sure, a publisher's history does mean something, but a majority of bad reviews means more.
OK, so in the last story, people wondered why KH2 was selling so well. I responded that the sales were for two reasons:
There's been a dearth of other RPGs worth buying, for the past year
KH2 is a well-made game
Most of the people responding to that comment figured that I either was simply unaware of, or ignoring, so many other games. (I was ignoring them, since they didn't hold any interest for me; most of them were not high sellers, indicating that they didn't hold any interest for a lot of other people too.) Several posters took it upon themselves to bash the Kingdom Hearts series as "not [a] real RPG", claiming that despite battle systems, experience points, and a distinct leveling system -- nah, they don't qualify. Final Fantasy -- arguably one of the largest RPG franchises in the world -- was quickly brought up as the "RPG for wimps."
So here are my questions:
Why are RPGers so snobbish about what games they'll call an RPG?
Why are people like me, who prefer storyline, graphics, music, and "fun" gameplay over interminable level-grinding and cheap-move boss fights, so disdained?
What unique qualities make an RPG different from other games?
The reason KH2 is so popular is that there hasn't been a decent RPG out for almost a year -- not one that I've wanted to buy, anyway. More, there won't be another big-name RPG out until FF12, which is supposedly delayed until Thanksgiving.
That said, it's a very great game in its own right. But it's arriving in the middle of a giant drought for the RPG market.
You are paying for the privilege of learning from an expert in a subject.
Precisely. But I learn my way, not my professor's way. There's an awful lot of teachers who know quite a bit about their subject matter and absolutely nothing about how to teach a group of students, or absolutely nothing about how people learn in general. It's my personal experience that many of those same teachers have (1) no interest in technology as a learning assistance tool, (2) engage in willful ignorance when such benefits are presented to them, and (3) attempt to control their classroom with an iron fist. I may be paying for the privilege of learning from an expert, but that does not give them carte blanche to give me orders. There is a wide gulf between maintaining order in a learning environment and attempting to discipline students because of perceived inattention; one is required, the other a pathetic display of inflated self-worth.
If something is interfering with her teaching, she has every right to remove it from her classroom.
There's a wide gulf between someone playing a game with the sound up in class, obviously distracting students, and students that are taking notes on a laptop (or, god forbid, amusing themselves during a boring stretch.) If a teacher is so self-absorbed as to feel slighted when not receiving the complete and full attention of every person in the vicinity, it's time for them to find another profession. Personally, I think a two-week stint as a corporate trainer to a bunch of managers would do many professors a world of good.
It's nice that you're a Graduate Student and all, but you've obviously not learned proper respect for your professors yet. Grow up!
After so many years of school -- and that many awful, expanded-ego professors -- respect is something I don't automatically give just because someone's standing behind a lectern. Respect is something I give to people, not positions.
Slashdot Mirror
It doesn't matter whether you're talking about the company or about the rich people behind it: they're inextricably tied together, and moving portions of the company takes even more paperwork than moving the people. Either way, eliminating the loopholes in tax law is the topic at hand, because that method both "cut[s] costs and increase revenue" -- just as the poster you replied to was talking about. And of course the rich move from time to time; look up the study I mentioned before, and note that an increase in taxes had no appreciable effect on high-income relocation.
Did you somehow miss the entire discussion about loopholes? Oh, wait, you just said loopholes were irrelevant ... but now they are relevant, because you're talking about tactics like moving income offshore. Make up your mind.
You're really not good at this whole reading comprehension thing, seeing as you specifically argued against healthcare companies having any responsibility for the current prices, and then said this was solely because of malpractice lawsuits. I didn't summarize you, I ridiculed your gratuitous simplification of a complex subject.
The rest of your post is a lot of scare quotes and very little sense. I never talked about raising rates, you throw "socialism" into the discussion as if the word itself should be somehow denigrating, and completely fail to address the real question: why a system that currently works for dozens of countries would somehow not work here.
There's so much stupid in this post I can barely begin to address it.
Point one: the issue at hand is removing loopholes everywhere, not just in one jurisdiction. So unless the rich want to move between countriesâ"hardly a trivial task, even with money to grease the wheelsâ"they'll be stuck with the same increased tax rate wherever they go.
Point two: even if the loopholes weren't fixed consistently, the rich don't "just move" whenever tax rates rise. It's a non-trivial task to switch houses, schools for the kids, marinas for the yachts ... not to mention all the other incidentals. Rich or poor, people put down roots wherever they live. A study completed just a few weeks ago verified this by noting how moving rates among the wealthy remained constant (about 4%, if I remember correctly) despite the introduction of a tax on the wealthy in New Jersey.
Point three: Nothing is ever simple. You sound like an industry shill by denying that a for-profit middleman (as most HMOs and health insurance companies are) could possibly have anything to do with rising costs. Yes, malpractice lawsuits are almost certainly one of the contributors, but to state unequivocally that the middleman concerned only with fattening its shareholders has nothing to do with the absurd increases we've all witnessed is outright idiocy. Or is half of Europe not a sufficiently relevant example for you, that a government can improve the medical quality of life for its citizens more cheaply and efficiently than a private company?
Repeat after me: an HTTP connection is not a contract.
Site owners are free to offer suggestions as to how to show the content they're freely offering who connects to their public server. I am similarly free to ignore those suggestions, and accept or render only the parts I want.
After all, if they don't want me seeing the content, all they have to do is stop giving it away.
It's certainly "fucked-up" -- but I'm not suggesting that the beta testers get ALL of the blame either. Blizzard isn't a perfect analogy here, because they're a developer that has an established history of listening to fans, and they're speaking the same language. Square seems to be dipping their toes into the shark-infested waters of usability testing, so I was trying to be constructive. It's worth analyzing what might've gone went wrong, no?
You can definitely blame this on the majority of the beta testers. I was one.
While there were plenty of other problems with the beta test itself -- abysmal build quality and unnecessarily limited playtimes were two big problems, the primary downfall was the total lack of direction from the developers and moderators. I brought up many of these same issues (particularly the UI mechanisms, as I'm a UI guy professionally) on the beta forums; a few posters agreed with me, but the majority of the replies came from slavering, rabid fanboys. These idiots took umbrage at mild suggestions or observations -- to say nothing of real, rigorous, and honest feedback -- and essentially drowned out anything useful. The most commonly repeated aphorisms were along the lines of "It'll be fixed by launch" and "How dare you suggest that anything Square produces is less than perfect."
Given that not a single one of the issues I brought up appears to have been fixed, it appears Square listened solely to the yes-men. It's also plausible that they really didn't learn anything from FFXI, as others are saying, but they did at least solicit user feedback this time.
Community colleges offer virtually the same learning experience as a full university, especially for basic education credits -- and what do most students take in their first two years, anyway? So unless you live within walking distance of a top-ten university, chances are you'll be just as challenged by the content, and you get all the benefits of geographic accessibility at a fraction of the cost. Plus, most community colleges have a maximum class size of 30 rather than 300.
Running Start
Similar program in Washington state, has been around for 20 years now. Students can enroll full-time in college and fully skip the last two years of high school if they meet the admissions criteria (though you don't get your diploma until the end of your 12th year.) This gets them an Associates in Arts and Sciences, which is immediately transferable to any Washington 4-year public university, and is guaranteed by law to fulfill their basic education (e.g. non-major) classes at that university. Alternatively, they can go part-time and simply transfer the credits, though not all are guaranteed to correspond to basic ed requirements.
Incidentally, I did the former, starting at 14. The administrator in TFA who thinks maturity is a problem for anyone who wants to do this program, though, needs to get a clue. While I'm well aware that the plural of anecdote is not data, it was an amazing program that beat the pants off the "high school experience." People at community colleges generally want to be there, and the elevated age levels mean that you're surrounded by people with experience that you can learn from.
This is incorrect. You can quantitatively measure "quality", and all it takes is a little effort to define criteria. The easiest example I can think of is measuring the average amount of time required for users to complete a task. For things like web sites, this can be gathered trivially via Analytics or any other stat program. There is nothing subjective about it -- if you do it right. Most usability professionals know how.
As for programmers working alone, though, that's something no one else can solve.
[citation needed] ;)
There's been a few studies that claimed this, but they had flawed methodologies. Unfortunately, it's lead to widespread misconceptions. Here's a relevant literature review with more information.
... someone finally makes an addon that wholly, completely, disables the StupidBar. Yes, I know about the about:config hacks and the existing addons. This is an issue I keep up with, after all.
And please, don't bother to reply if you're just going to parrot how much you LOVE the "Awesome Bar" and think I should give it an umpteenth chance. Been there, done that, still think it sucks.
Better yet, why don't you tell us the name of your (former?) insurance company, so that people know better than to do business with them?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail
Acquired by Microsoft in 1997.
Some of us signed up with Hotmail before Microsoft acquired it, or haven't felt inconvenienced enough to switch. I only use it for site registrations anyway, I've got my own domain for my 'real' email.
It's pretty rare (and, as you say, a little creepy) when someone goes out of their way to ask about leading a Boy Scout or Girl Scout troop. However, the way you've phrased your comment indicates that you're confusing homosexuality with pedophilia. They're two very separate things: one is normal, the other is illegal. If you find it strange that any gay man or lesbian would want to work with children, please examine your prejudices; after all, millions of straight people grow up wanting to be elementary school teachers or social workers. This has nothing to do with sound operational strategy, and everything to do with irrational fear and bigotry. Anyway, what usually happens is that a parent wants to enroll their child, but there's no active Scouting troop nearby. The parent talks to his/her neighbors, gets enough kids together to start a troop, and they end up being the Scoutmaster/GS leader. Since it's a pretty thankless job, responsibilities get passed around and/or pushed onto others. There are always chaperons and assistants needed to make a troop run well, and that's where people try to get neighbors, friends, and co-workers to help--whether they're straight or gay. Me? I'm gay, and an Eagle Scout, but I never did like camping. (That might have had something to do with 95% of my Scouting campouts involving rain, no exaggeration.) I'd help out with a troop if asked by a close friend. And, in case it wasn't abundantly clear before, I'd sooner shag a woman than look twice at a child.
As a crafter, I'd much rather return to those days; I could actually make money back then, but more importantly, so could anyone else.
The problem with removing gil from the online economies is that it forces price drops on everything without adjusting item drop rates as well. You've got billions of gil disappearing literally overnight, while item rates remain the same. What happens (and has happened) is that consumable prices stay solid, because they're always in demand, but the rest of the crafting professions tank and drop like rocks. Of course, RMT aren't stupid; they moved into Cooking and Alchemy, the two consumable professions. And so this is what the economy looks like as more and more players get priced out of their own markets:
Server economy comparison graph from FFXIAH
The above graph starts at the end of the inflation period, roughly March 2006. Now, realize that those lines are not merely price indicators, but also a representation of earning power; after all, this is a graph of player-to-player transactions, not NPC-to-player (which are a constant currency drain.) The reason for this recession (let's call it what it is, really) is Square's response. It wasn't just that prices dropped, but that the ability of players to earn gil was severely restricted and the amount of time required for farming was far beyond what many people could stomach. It's led to a lot of departures from the game, myself included.
How exactly do you expect a municipal Internet service to be paid for, if not with taxes? Or are you one of those people who expects governments to deliver services paid for by fairy dust and wishes?
Spurred by the scarcity of the PlayStation 3...
You mean, "Spurred by the impending holiday." It's highly unlikely that the upswing in PS2 sales has any meaningful correlation with PS3 scarcity; after all, I still don't know a single person who actually plans to get one. The PS2 and PSP, however, are still as viable (and cheap, comparatively!) as they were a month ago.
FF8 was also released for the PC (yes, even in the US.)
Anyone who found enough reasons to download Firefox before (Adblock? Mouse gestures?) is certainly going to find enough reasons after IE7's release. I downloaded the beta several weeks ago; after a few days of casual usage, I was underwhelmed, annoyed at the intrusive and bloated UI, and unsatisfied as to the permanence and functionality of the new security features. If all you want is tabbed browsing, I suppose IE7 might work, but that's far from being Firefox's only worthwhile feature.
Obviously, I'll be getting IE7 along with everyone else -- it's a security update, after all -- but that doesn't mean the blue 'E' will ever get clicked. And if my father and sister value their free tech support, they won't be clicking it, either.
First, "wonderful" is a subjective judgment -- as was my assertion that there haven't been any RPGs worth buying for a year. You cannot treat them as objective just for the purposes of argument.
Second, the "snob" factor was mentioned solely in reference to people who only consider a single, tightly defined genre as "real" RPGs, excluding others that fall under the same umbrage for no logical reason.
Third, your entire post is a wonderful of a tu quoque fallacy. Even if what you said was true, it wouldn't make my statements any less true.
Thanks for playing!
Let me quote from my comment and bold it for emphasis:
I'm sure there were decent RPGs released in the last year, but none of them piqued my interest, or the interest of my friends. My friends are a pretty diverse group, and if NONE of them thought anything was worth getting -- except for a few that picked up DQ8 -- that says something.
I agree that some people refuse to get anything but Final Fantasy, but I'm not one of those people. Sure, a publisher's history does mean something, but a majority of bad reviews means more.
OK, so in the last story, people wondered why KH2 was selling so well. I responded that the sales were for two reasons:
Most of the people responding to that comment figured that I either was simply unaware of, or ignoring, so many other games. (I was ignoring them, since they didn't hold any interest for me; most of them were not high sellers, indicating that they didn't hold any interest for a lot of other people too.) Several posters took it upon themselves to bash the Kingdom Hearts series as "not [a] real RPG", claiming that despite battle systems, experience points, and a distinct leveling system -- nah, they don't qualify. Final Fantasy -- arguably one of the largest RPG franchises in the world -- was quickly brought up as the "RPG for wimps."
So here are my questions:
The reason KH2 is so popular is that there hasn't been a decent RPG out for almost a year -- not one that I've wanted to buy, anyway. More, there won't be another big-name RPG out until FF12, which is supposedly delayed until Thanksgiving.
That said, it's a very great game in its own right. But it's arriving in the middle of a giant drought for the RPG market.
You are paying for the privilege of learning from an expert in a subject.
Precisely. But I learn my way, not my professor's way. There's an awful lot of teachers who know quite a bit about their subject matter and absolutely nothing about how to teach a group of students, or absolutely nothing about how people learn in general. It's my personal experience that many of those same teachers have (1) no interest in technology as a learning assistance tool, (2) engage in willful ignorance when such benefits are presented to them, and (3) attempt to control their classroom with an iron fist. I may be paying for the privilege of learning from an expert, but that does not give them carte blanche to give me orders. There is a wide gulf between maintaining order in a learning environment and attempting to discipline students because of perceived inattention; one is required, the other a pathetic display of inflated self-worth.
If something is interfering with her teaching, she has every right to remove it from her classroom.
There's a wide gulf between someone playing a game with the sound up in class, obviously distracting students, and students that are taking notes on a laptop (or, god forbid, amusing themselves during a boring stretch.) If a teacher is so self-absorbed as to feel slighted when not receiving the complete and full attention of every person in the vicinity, it's time for them to find another profession. Personally, I think a two-week stint as a corporate trainer to a bunch of managers would do many professors a world of good.
It's nice that you're a Graduate Student and all, but you've obviously not learned proper respect for your professors yet. Grow up!
After so many years of school -- and that many awful, expanded-ego professors -- respect is something I don't automatically give just because someone's standing behind a lectern. Respect is something I give to people, not positions.
I'm in Seattle and bought tickets a few weeks ago. We'll see what they deliver here.