I don't know if it goes that far. Certainly, some videogames are more realistic than others (within reason of course... for instance, the original Deus Ex would have enemies simply collapse if rendered unconscious, but actually bleed a pool of blood if killed).
At the same time, the ability to have a "realistic environment" is always a strange goal. I will admit to laughing during Fallout 3 the first time a wasteland wanderer ran up to me to thank me for my work on the Wasteland Survival Guide, handed me a gift... and promptly ran off into the wilderness to be tackled and torn to shreds by the nearest Yao Guai. Not that I was laughing at the circumstance, more the combination of AI limitations and random spawn points that caused it to happen. (Don't worry. I killed the Yao Guai, then looted both corpses. Can't have a maneater running around willing to attack other humans after all.)
But as for the rest... Again, Deus Ex had civilians. Killable ones. So did the first two Fallout games (hell, if you weren't in Britain, there were killable KIDS). And you should expect that people will do stupid things. Sometimes it's going to the dark side in the game for a while. Sometimes it's wasting an entire clip of ammo on that freaking annoying Claptrap. Sometimes it's piling six dozen grenades under a Warthog to see how high it will flip.
Gamers push boundaries. They test things. Give them a sandbox and they (at least some of them) will diligently work to tunnel their way out.
Thanks to Disney and the corrupt shills that have taken over the government, games made in the 1980s won't "expire copyright" and return to the public domain until sometime after 2100. If there isn't yet ANOTHER "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" copyright extension passed in the meantime.
Part of the problem is that copyright doesn't take into account the life of the medium any more. Imagine what happens when most books are only available on e-readers and most e-readers no longer read the format the book was put out in (not so hard to imagine: think of some of the books that only exist on B&N Nook format and imagine that B&N goes under and nobody bothers to code a translator because "well most of it is on Kindle anyways", followed by B&N's servers shutting down and nobody having a remaining copy of the book anywhere).
The longer copyright terms are, the more information we LOSE to bad circumstances and bitrot. For one of the most famous cases, consider the missing episodes of Dr. Who - the BBC now has a comparatively huge bounty out for anyone who has them, even if it's a really crappy telecine.
Why is it that corporations get tax breaks at all?
Why is it that the ultra-rich, mostly Republicans, get to shuffle their income through loopholes like calling it "capital gains" (taxed at a mere 15%) while the middle class get robbed blind by the tax code?
We should fix the tax code, that's no question. But the "fixes" supported by the Republicans are more Robber Baron style "crony capitalism", nothing more.
How about a little goddamn quality control in the first place.
Gamers gravitated to console away from PC in part because there wasn't the "ship now, patch later if we fucking bother" problem on consoles. Consoles couldn't patch. You shipped a game with a game-breaking bug, you'd better be prepared to replace it for any affected customer. Nintendo had to do exactly that, paying to repair save files and ship SD cards back and forth for a game-breaking Metroid bug in the most recent Metroid on the Wii.
So what happened? Now, Xbox360 and PS3 are plagued by "ship now, patch later" crap. And the gamers are starting to get fucking fed up - though not enough to go back to PC, where games are shipped with so much fucking game-breaking DRM that they're basically unplayable anyways.
Oh? "Silly balanced budget amendment" - right. Where they lie about it and use clever accounting tricks to make it look like it's balanced when it's not.
Where they've "added 73k jobs over the last 10 years" - at the same time NOT keeping up with their population growth so that their unemployment problem is just as big as anywhere else.
With some of the lowest taxes... yes, and the crappiest government and services (got a fire department? Whoops no, you have a 20 minute wait for the one assigned to your area to reach you) in the nation.
A couple billion set aside in the "rainy day fund"... which they should have used to NOT be firing schoolteachers left and right.
Oh yeah, and a zoolander governor who played fudge-the-math when TX got an education funding grant, funneling the "grant" into education while simultaneously pulling other money OUT of the education budget for his own personal slush funds.
If it is CO2 we build nuke plants like there is no tomorrow. If it deforestation we stop that and probably plant the crap out of trees.
Given that trees (all plants really, but trees coexist with ground cover to give much greater density in a square mile) have this amazing spot in the ecosystem regarding the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere, it's safe to say that deforestation has a heavy effect upon CO2 imbalance as well. Why not do both, convert to nuclear plants and stop engaging in rampant deforestation? Oh yeah, your brain is too deformed to handle more than one idea simultaneously. Or too put it another way: you're too fucking stupid to see the forest for the trees.
I tried to read the rest of your inanity, but you're simply deranged and you're still hooked on the idea that "man isn't causing environmental change." Walk outside in the morning and have a nice lungful of smog, watch your kids and grandkids develop asthma from it, and then go fuck yourself.
What gets me is fuckwits like you who repeat the same bullshit over and over and over again while being slapped in the face by scientific evidence.
1. First you must PROVE the climate is getting warmer. Not that hard.
Not only is it not that hard, it's been proven time and again. In fact, some of the evidence comes from the scientist referenced in TFA, whose evidence was SO STRONG that the denialist fuckwit society had to launch ad hominem attacks and witch-hunt level bullshit trying to discredit him personally because they couldn't discredit the scientific papers he produced based on strong, accurately collected data.
2. Next you have to prove it will KEEP getting warmer, i.e. that it isn't a cyclical process at work. It has been much warmer than it is now in the not too distant past. The Romans grew grapes and exported wine from England when they ruled there.
See point #1.
3. Then you have to prove it is the fault of our CO2 releases and not deforestation and other alterations man is making to the planet.
Why is "All Of The Above" an inaccurate answer? I personally find the fact that we denude the landscape and cover more and more of the earth's surface with concrete and asphalt every year without planting shade plants and green space to be a major concern.
4. Then you get to propose a solution, prove it will actually work and then justify the cost against the cost of mitigation. It might be less expensive to just relocate some coastal cities in a mile and enjoy the extra harvests from Canada and Siberia to feed our growing numbers.
The proposed solutions are much cheaper than relocating the entire populations of cities. They're just rejected by immature, greedy assholes like you who don't want to accept that it means humanity, as a whole, has to get together and behave more responsibly about resource usage rather than following the lead of greedy two-faced dickholes like yourself.
Do we denude large areas of diverse ecosystem to replace them with single-crop, runoff- and mudslide-prone, resource-leeching farmland that requires us to constantly re-spread manure and other fertilizers the hard way because what the plants take out of the soil is no longer being naturally replenished? YES.
Do we denude large areas of diverse ecosystem and replace them with urban jungles made of cement and asphalt, creating "urban heat islands" (ironically enough something that the denialist idiots claim is causing "bad" readings from measurement stations used round the world to aggregate the average surface temperature)? YES.
Does this cause some animal species to die out and others to adapt their behavior around the major alterations we make to the world? YES.
The idea that we are doing something "inconsequential", or that our behavior cannot be linked to the changes going on in the world, is stupid. It is mind-blowingly stupid. Insanely stupid, as in quickly reaching the point that I am convinced only someone with a diseased mind or a complete lack of connection to reality could actually hold it in their head for any length of time. It's like seeing a red balloon and insisting till your dying breath that the balloon is actually blue. It's that goddamn insane.
Skepticism in the face of something that doesn't hold up is fine.
Skepticism in the face of what is Bloody Fucking Obvious, on the other hand, is not.
The fact that humans are causing climate change should be as obvious as the nose on your face. The fact that we cover mass percentages of landmass in the hottest parts of the world in asphalt and concrete, without even bothering to plant sufficient green spaces or shade plants, is bloody fucking obvious. The fact that we denude forests and lush, diverse ecosystems to make way for millions of acres of single-plant farmland is bloody fucking obvious. The fact that animals and plants have begun adapting to OUR man-made changes in the environment, with some dying out and others altering habits, is bloody fucking obvious. The fact that due to climate shifts, previously "tropical" plants are migrating (e.g. not just spreading but surviving well) at higher latitudes than they were ever recorded surviving before - that is Bloody Fucking Obvious. Likewise for the shifted patterns in timing and location of migratory bird species and the shifted survival rates and patterns of environmentally sensitive "warning species", like many species of frogs that scientists look to as an indicator of the health of their overall ecosystem.
If I warn you that the piano movers up the stairs just lost their grip and a piano's coming down at you, and you turn to me and say you're skeptical, I am gonna say you're a dead fucking moron about the time it crashes into your head. Climate change, and humanity's role in it, IS that fucking obvious. Skepticism is not just unwarranted, it's downright stupid.
The problem is that the "more overt effects" have to be measured generationally over decades, rather than instantaneously, and most of the public - especially those retards who keep voting Republican - have an attention span less than that of a goldfish these days.
Or as John Stewart has been saying lately in covering the Republican primaries and the media reactions... "Squirrel!"
Point out the long-term trend, and you get "but it was just cold yesterday" or "but we just had (insert record cold/hot day here)." Bah. Entire brain structures dedicated not to handling data and excising the bad from the good to avoid "garbage in, garbage out" but instead to deliberately destroying good data so that no matter what you put in, you get garbage out.
We know about genetics. The first genetics experiments on dominant/recessive genes and horticulture that we have on record were done by CHRISTIAN MONKS.
We can easily observe, through plant experimentation and experimentation on shorter-lived creatures (mice and fruit flies are used often, specifically because they have well-mapped genomes and a short enough lifespan to do the experiments without taking decades per generation), the effects of selecting for certain genetic traits. In the long term, we can observe the same being done by farmers, who select certain crop traits to favor for planting and controlled seeding or insemination (Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat, and the varieties of wool produced by various sheep subspecies based on the desire for whatever characteristic is needed in the thread produced from it), or even the development of recognized breeds of dog and cat.
It is sometimes hard to see why a particular trait is selected for in nature - sometimes, it's not the specific trait, but merely the fact that it coexists on the same genetic area as something else that was an advantage, and just tagged along for the ride - but it is rather obvious through observations of changing climate and ecosystem that certain animals have developed certain traits, due to their carrying an advantage in lifespan or procreative ability, and that certain other traits have "selected out" of the population. It's even fairly obvious in the other direction, when different species develop very similar abilities because the surrounding environment pushes them in the same direction, a process called "convergent evolution."
If you say we don't "fully understand" evolution, that's fine. Feel free to say we need to study it more. I certainly agree, the more about it we know, the better off we'll be, though we also get dangerously close to the day when people start selecting out the dumbest fetuses for abortion, or even start to try genetic teasing in the womb to eliminate certain traits. Then again, we may finally eliminate the genetic quirk that makes some people so mind-blowingly stupid that in the face of overwhelming evidence, they still can convince themselves that evolution is a "lie" and that we were all put here by some damn critter no more real than the spaghetti monster behind the moon.
No, dotcoms have taught us that products designed to be a fucking flash in the pan will - surprise surprise - be a goddamn flash in the pan.
PHBs and cro-magnon MBA types wrongly have decided that this applies to every product, whether designed well or not. You know the type I speak of: the ones who don't know what all this "fire" stuff is really good for and are busy focus-group testing the wheel to figure out how many corners it should have and whether it should come in black, brown, white or mauve.
The sort of morons who in the entertainment industry, destroy smart and intelligent shows like Futurama, Firefly, Dresden Files, and Eureka while simultaneously letting Tyler Perry make movie after movie and greenlighting the latest piece of shit "ow my balls" level reality show or sitcom about rednecks fucking their sisters while getting into a love triangle with the neighbor's dog.... crap. I just gave the Fox producers another show idea didn't I?
Funny. I test-played OnLive and the service was absolute shit. Horrible lag, jitter, and an inability to run consistently without crashing. I wouldn't try them again unless you paid me enough to buy a second Xbox360 to put upstairs.
The fact that you claim their piece of shit, single-controller, buggy as hell setup is "amazing" tells me you're a shill.
Part of the other problem is that they've run every other trade-in place out of business.
Trading in to Half-Price Books, I get even less back in value than I would at Gamestop.
There used to be two other independent trade-in/used stores near me, but they both closed down after Gamestop dropped a store across the fucking street from them and began running "just in our store, buy 2 get 1 free" sales every other week till they were run out of business. It's illegal to do that, but how are single-store operators ever going to manage to lawyer up to fight the 900lb gorilla, and what would they get out of it even if they won?
I tried selling off a "full pack" (2 turntables plus game) of DJ Hero 2 that one of my relatives had given me for my birthday on Craigslist. This was 2 weeks after it came out. Bundle retail was $150, I offered it up for $100. Got one response back which was some dumbshit who said "giv u 20 bux 4 it." Trying to sell your used games on eBay is similarly inane unless you're some shop that does nothing but sell crap on eBay all day long.
So what's left? Well, basically I wait till Gamestop has one of those deals where they have an extra $x in credit for turning in a few games at once. Then I pile up the ones I've decided I don't want to save, and off they go.
It may not be a failure of the school system to "emphasize federal and state organization." It may just as likely be a function of people coming up with stupid fucking names for positions.
For example, I can tell you that even grad students in Political Science would be at a loss if you asked them what the fuck a "comptroller" is supposed to be. Or an "Ombudsman." Why? Because these titles, much like "Commissioner", are so vague as to be completely fucking meaningless without a hell of a lot of specific context.
You ask someone what a "railroad commissioner" does, they'd probably give you a best guess. But would you ever think a "railroad commissioner" would be involved in gas utilities and pipelines? No? Well that's part of the purview of the "Texas Railroad Commission."
Before you smart off about how people don't know what a "commissioner" does, start at the source. See if there's any fucking rhyme or reason or logical connection to the name and the job duties first.
People who don't see what "good" music and art are to a well rounded education are fucking morons like you.
If anything, dump the intramural sports crap that leads to glorifying the inbred gaptoothed moron jocks over those who have the brainpower and spend the time to excel in intellectual subjects.
I have no problem with carolers. Why not join them and go sing with your neighbors and get to know some of them as you go around?
Oh, right, you're a solitary basement-dweller. Don't worry. At that time of year and in the traditional eveningtime caroling, there's no natural light to burn you.
The county says it made "substitute service" of its complaint by leaving a copy of the summons with "Jane Doe," who was identified as Navarro's "sister" and "co-tenant." Another copy was sent by first-class mail....
In July 2001, Navarro filed a motion to set aside the court's judgment because a blood test proved he was not the boys' father. Although both the federal and state "challenge periods" had long passed, he argued that the mother had committed fraud by naming him.
He also claimed to have never received the original complaint or default judgment. The court denied the motion.
The Japanese celebrate Christmas as pretty much a secular holiday. There's something to be said for a holiday whose primary functions are getting people together, spending time with family/friends, showing your appreciation for others in a positive way, and injecting a little levity into the darkest (literally) part of winter.
I doubt we'll lose Christmas. But hopefully we'll lose the insane religious nuttery that goes with it.
Now if only we could get rid of all the terrorist crap associated with Ramadan and Eid, and the crazy insane thousands-of-people-dead crap that happens at the end of Hajj each year...
The man named on the birth certificate DID NOT EVEN KNOW THE MOTHER. He was never actually served with papers, they dumped them on the doorstep with some woman who wasn't even related to him and claimed "surrogate service of paperwork." He never had any relationship with the not-his-child.
I swear. Slashdot's gone to shit. Morons like you can't even be bothered to check their facts.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know if it goes that far. Certainly, some videogames are more realistic than others (within reason of course... for instance, the original Deus Ex would have enemies simply collapse if rendered unconscious, but actually bleed a pool of blood if killed).
At the same time, the ability to have a "realistic environment" is always a strange goal. I will admit to laughing during Fallout 3 the first time a wasteland wanderer ran up to me to thank me for my work on the Wasteland Survival Guide, handed me a gift... and promptly ran off into the wilderness to be tackled and torn to shreds by the nearest Yao Guai. Not that I was laughing at the circumstance, more the combination of AI limitations and random spawn points that caused it to happen. (Don't worry. I killed the Yao Guai, then looted both corpses. Can't have a maneater running around willing to attack other humans after all.)
But as for the rest... Again, Deus Ex had civilians. Killable ones. So did the first two Fallout games (hell, if you weren't in Britain, there were killable KIDS). And you should expect that people will do stupid things. Sometimes it's going to the dark side in the game for a while. Sometimes it's wasting an entire clip of ammo on that freaking annoying Claptrap. Sometimes it's piling six dozen grenades under a Warthog to see how high it will flip.
Gamers push boundaries. They test things. Give them a sandbox and they (at least some of them) will diligently work to tunnel their way out.
Thanks to Disney and the corrupt shills that have taken over the government, games made in the 1980s won't "expire copyright" and return to the public domain until sometime after 2100. If there isn't yet ANOTHER "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" copyright extension passed in the meantime.
Part of the problem is that copyright doesn't take into account the life of the medium any more. Imagine what happens when most books are only available on e-readers and most e-readers no longer read the format the book was put out in (not so hard to imagine: think of some of the books that only exist on B&N Nook format and imagine that B&N goes under and nobody bothers to code a translator because "well most of it is on Kindle anyways", followed by B&N's servers shutting down and nobody having a remaining copy of the book anywhere).
The longer copyright terms are, the more information we LOSE to bad circumstances and bitrot. For one of the most famous cases, consider the missing episodes of Dr. Who - the BBC now has a comparatively huge bounty out for anyone who has them, even if it's a really crappy telecine.
Why is it that corporations get tax breaks at all?
Why is it that the ultra-rich, mostly Republicans, get to shuffle their income through loopholes like calling it "capital gains" (taxed at a mere 15%) while the middle class get robbed blind by the tax code?
We should fix the tax code, that's no question. But the "fixes" supported by the Republicans are more Robber Baron style "crony capitalism", nothing more.
How about a little goddamn quality control in the first place.
Gamers gravitated to console away from PC in part because there wasn't the "ship now, patch later if we fucking bother" problem on consoles. Consoles couldn't patch. You shipped a game with a game-breaking bug, you'd better be prepared to replace it for any affected customer. Nintendo had to do exactly that, paying to repair save files and ship SD cards back and forth for a game-breaking Metroid bug in the most recent Metroid on the Wii.
So what happened? Now, Xbox360 and PS3 are plagued by "ship now, patch later" crap. And the gamers are starting to get fucking fed up - though not enough to go back to PC, where games are shipped with so much fucking game-breaking DRM that they're basically unplayable anyways.
If they don't want them to be left open, then they shouldn't be SHIPPED open. Plain and simple.
Oh? "Silly balanced budget amendment" - right. Where they lie about it and use clever accounting tricks to make it look like it's balanced when it's not.
Where they've "added 73k jobs over the last 10 years" - at the same time NOT keeping up with their population growth so that their unemployment problem is just as big as anywhere else.
With some of the lowest taxes... yes, and the crappiest government and services (got a fire department? Whoops no, you have a 20 minute wait for the one assigned to your area to reach you) in the nation.
A couple billion set aside in the "rainy day fund"... which they should have used to NOT be firing schoolteachers left and right.
Oh yeah, and a zoolander governor who played fudge-the-math when TX got an education funding grant, funneling the "grant" into education while simultaneously pulling other money OUT of the education budget for his own personal slush funds.
fuck TexASS. And fuck liars like you.
If it is CO2 we build nuke plants like there is no tomorrow. If it deforestation we stop that and probably plant the crap out of trees.
Given that trees (all plants really, but trees coexist with ground cover to give much greater density in a square mile) have this amazing spot in the ecosystem regarding the absorption of CO2 from the atmosphere, it's safe to say that deforestation has a heavy effect upon CO2 imbalance as well. Why not do both, convert to nuclear plants and stop engaging in rampant deforestation? Oh yeah, your brain is too deformed to handle more than one idea simultaneously. Or too put it another way: you're too fucking stupid to see the forest for the trees.
I tried to read the rest of your inanity, but you're simply deranged and you're still hooked on the idea that "man isn't causing environmental change." Walk outside in the morning and have a nice lungful of smog, watch your kids and grandkids develop asthma from it, and then go fuck yourself.
What gets me is fuckwits like you who repeat the same bullshit over and over and over again while being slapped in the face by scientific evidence.
1. First you must PROVE the climate is getting warmer. Not that hard.
Not only is it not that hard, it's been proven time and again. In fact, some of the evidence comes from the scientist referenced in TFA, whose evidence was SO STRONG that the denialist fuckwit society had to launch ad hominem attacks and witch-hunt level bullshit trying to discredit him personally because they couldn't discredit the scientific papers he produced based on strong, accurately collected data.
2. Next you have to prove it will KEEP getting warmer, i.e. that it isn't a cyclical process at work. It has been much warmer than it is now in the not too distant past. The Romans grew grapes and exported wine from England when they ruled there.
See point #1.
3. Then you have to prove it is the fault of our CO2 releases and not deforestation and other alterations man is making to the planet.
Why is "All Of The Above" an inaccurate answer? I personally find the fact that we denude the landscape and cover more and more of the earth's surface with concrete and asphalt every year without planting shade plants and green space to be a major concern.
4. Then you get to propose a solution, prove it will actually work and then justify the cost against the cost of mitigation. It might be less expensive to just relocate some coastal cities in a mile and enjoy the extra harvests from Canada and Siberia to feed our growing numbers.
The proposed solutions are much cheaper than relocating the entire populations of cities. They're just rejected by immature, greedy assholes like you who don't want to accept that it means humanity, as a whole, has to get together and behave more responsibly about resource usage rather than following the lead of greedy two-faced dickholes like yourself.
Oh good fucking grief.
Do we denude large areas of diverse ecosystem to replace them with single-crop, runoff- and mudslide-prone, resource-leeching farmland that requires us to constantly re-spread manure and other fertilizers the hard way because what the plants take out of the soil is no longer being naturally replenished? YES.
Do we denude large areas of diverse ecosystem and replace them with urban jungles made of cement and asphalt, creating "urban heat islands" (ironically enough something that the denialist idiots claim is causing "bad" readings from measurement stations used round the world to aggregate the average surface temperature)? YES.
Does this cause some animal species to die out and others to adapt their behavior around the major alterations we make to the world? YES.
The idea that we are doing something "inconsequential", or that our behavior cannot be linked to the changes going on in the world, is stupid. It is mind-blowingly stupid. Insanely stupid, as in quickly reaching the point that I am convinced only someone with a diseased mind or a complete lack of connection to reality could actually hold it in their head for any length of time. It's like seeing a red balloon and insisting till your dying breath that the balloon is actually blue. It's that goddamn insane.
Skepticism in the face of something that doesn't hold up is fine.
Skepticism in the face of what is Bloody Fucking Obvious, on the other hand, is not.
The fact that humans are causing climate change should be as obvious as the nose on your face. The fact that we cover mass percentages of landmass in the hottest parts of the world in asphalt and concrete, without even bothering to plant sufficient green spaces or shade plants, is bloody fucking obvious. The fact that we denude forests and lush, diverse ecosystems to make way for millions of acres of single-plant farmland is bloody fucking obvious. The fact that animals and plants have begun adapting to OUR man-made changes in the environment, with some dying out and others altering habits, is bloody fucking obvious. The fact that due to climate shifts, previously "tropical" plants are migrating (e.g. not just spreading but surviving well) at higher latitudes than they were ever recorded surviving before - that is Bloody Fucking Obvious. Likewise for the shifted patterns in timing and location of migratory bird species and the shifted survival rates and patterns of environmentally sensitive "warning species", like many species of frogs that scientists look to as an indicator of the health of their overall ecosystem.
If I warn you that the piano movers up the stairs just lost their grip and a piano's coming down at you, and you turn to me and say you're skeptical, I am gonna say you're a dead fucking moron about the time it crashes into your head. Climate change, and humanity's role in it, IS that fucking obvious. Skepticism is not just unwarranted, it's downright stupid.
The problem is that the "more overt effects" have to be measured generationally over decades, rather than instantaneously, and most of the public - especially those retards who keep voting Republican - have an attention span less than that of a goldfish these days.
Or as John Stewart has been saying lately in covering the Republican primaries and the media reactions... "Squirrel!"
Point out the long-term trend, and you get "but it was just cold yesterday" or "but we just had (insert record cold/hot day here)." Bah. Entire brain structures dedicated not to handling data and excising the bad from the good to avoid "garbage in, garbage out" but instead to deliberately destroying good data so that no matter what you put in, you get garbage out.
Evolution is trivial to prove.
We know about genetics. The first genetics experiments on dominant/recessive genes and horticulture that we have on record were done by CHRISTIAN MONKS.
We can easily observe, through plant experimentation and experimentation on shorter-lived creatures (mice and fruit flies are used often, specifically because they have well-mapped genomes and a short enough lifespan to do the experiments without taking decades per generation), the effects of selecting for certain genetic traits. In the long term, we can observe the same being done by farmers, who select certain crop traits to favor for planting and controlled seeding or insemination (Norman Borlaug's dwarf wheat, and the varieties of wool produced by various sheep subspecies based on the desire for whatever characteristic is needed in the thread produced from it), or even the development of recognized breeds of dog and cat.
It is sometimes hard to see why a particular trait is selected for in nature - sometimes, it's not the specific trait, but merely the fact that it coexists on the same genetic area as something else that was an advantage, and just tagged along for the ride - but it is rather obvious through observations of changing climate and ecosystem that certain animals have developed certain traits, due to their carrying an advantage in lifespan or procreative ability, and that certain other traits have "selected out" of the population. It's even fairly obvious in the other direction, when different species develop very similar abilities because the surrounding environment pushes them in the same direction, a process called "convergent evolution."
If you say we don't "fully understand" evolution, that's fine. Feel free to say we need to study it more. I certainly agree, the more about it we know, the better off we'll be, though we also get dangerously close to the day when people start selecting out the dumbest fetuses for abortion, or even start to try genetic teasing in the womb to eliminate certain traits. Then again, we may finally eliminate the genetic quirk that makes some people so mind-blowingly stupid that in the face of overwhelming evidence, they still can convince themselves that evolution is a "lie" and that we were all put here by some damn critter no more real than the spaghetti monster behind the moon.
Well I was somewhat referencing the Hitchhiker's Guide radioplays, but they are a tad obscure...
No, dotcoms have taught us that products designed to be a fucking flash in the pan will - surprise surprise - be a goddamn flash in the pan.
PHBs and cro-magnon MBA types wrongly have decided that this applies to every product, whether designed well or not. You know the type I speak of: the ones who don't know what all this "fire" stuff is really good for and are busy focus-group testing the wheel to figure out how many corners it should have and whether it should come in black, brown, white or mauve.
The sort of morons who in the entertainment industry, destroy smart and intelligent shows like Futurama, Firefly, Dresden Files, and Eureka while simultaneously letting Tyler Perry make movie after movie and greenlighting the latest piece of shit "ow my balls" level reality show or sitcom about rednecks fucking their sisters while getting into a love triangle with the neighbor's dog. ... crap. I just gave the Fox producers another show idea didn't I?
Funny. I test-played OnLive and the service was absolute shit. Horrible lag, jitter, and an inability to run consistently without crashing. I wouldn't try them again unless you paid me enough to buy a second Xbox360 to put upstairs.
The fact that you claim their piece of shit, single-controller, buggy as hell setup is "amazing" tells me you're a shill.
Part of the other problem is that they've run every other trade-in place out of business.
Trading in to Half-Price Books, I get even less back in value than I would at Gamestop.
There used to be two other independent trade-in/used stores near me, but they both closed down after Gamestop dropped a store across the fucking street from them and began running "just in our store, buy 2 get 1 free" sales every other week till they were run out of business. It's illegal to do that, but how are single-store operators ever going to manage to lawyer up to fight the 900lb gorilla, and what would they get out of it even if they won?
I tried selling off a "full pack" (2 turntables plus game) of DJ Hero 2 that one of my relatives had given me for my birthday on Craigslist. This was 2 weeks after it came out. Bundle retail was $150, I offered it up for $100. Got one response back which was some dumbshit who said "giv u 20 bux 4 it." Trying to sell your used games on eBay is similarly inane unless you're some shop that does nothing but sell crap on eBay all day long.
So what's left? Well, basically I wait till Gamestop has one of those deals where they have an extra $x in credit for turning in a few games at once. Then I pile up the ones I've decided I don't want to save, and off they go.
It may not be a failure of the school system to "emphasize federal and state organization." It may just as likely be a function of people coming up with stupid fucking names for positions.
For example, I can tell you that even grad students in Political Science would be at a loss if you asked them what the fuck a "comptroller" is supposed to be. Or an "Ombudsman." Why? Because these titles, much like "Commissioner", are so vague as to be completely fucking meaningless without a hell of a lot of specific context.
You ask someone what a "railroad commissioner" does, they'd probably give you a best guess. But would you ever think a "railroad commissioner" would be involved in gas utilities and pipelines? No? Well that's part of the purview of the "Texas Railroad Commission."
Before you smart off about how people don't know what a "commissioner" does, start at the source. See if there's any fucking rhyme or reason or logical connection to the name and the job duties first.
If you don't like the carolers, wait a few minutes, they'll go away.
They also don't do it at fucking 2am like the 16 year old shits who like to blast a lot of bass (c)rap from their car driving through where I live.
Not only that, it kicked my dog and stole my grandmother's false teeth!
People who don't see what "good" music and art are to a well rounded education are fucking morons like you.
If anything, dump the intramural sports crap that leads to glorifying the inbred gaptoothed moron jocks over those who have the brainpower and spend the time to excel in intellectual subjects.
I have no problem with carolers. Why not join them and go sing with your neighbors and get to know some of them as you go around?
Oh, right, you're a solitary basement-dweller. Don't worry. At that time of year and in the traditional eveningtime caroling, there's no natural light to burn you.
The county says it made "substitute service" of its complaint by leaving a copy of the summons with "Jane Doe," who was identified as Navarro's "sister" and "co-tenant." Another copy was sent by first-class mail. ...
In July 2001, Navarro filed a motion to set aside the court's judgment because a blood test proved he was not the boys' father. Although both the federal and state "challenge periods" had long passed, he argued that the mother had committed fraud by naming him.
He also claimed to have never received the original complaint or default judgment. The court denied the motion.
Here's a PDF of the court ruling:
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data2/californiastatecases/b155166.pdf
You're a lying asshole, so shut the fuck up.
The Japanese celebrate Christmas as pretty much a secular holiday. There's something to be said for a holiday whose primary functions are getting people together, spending time with family/friends, showing your appreciation for others in a positive way, and injecting a little levity into the darkest (literally) part of winter.
I doubt we'll lose Christmas. But hopefully we'll lose the insane religious nuttery that goes with it.
Now if only we could get rid of all the terrorist crap associated with Ramadan and Eid, and the crazy insane thousands-of-people-dead crap that happens at the end of Hajj each year...
We'll see how long it takes them to get to the next zebra crossing.
Did you even do the most rudimentary reading?
The man named on the birth certificate DID NOT EVEN KNOW THE MOTHER. He was never actually served with papers, they dumped them on the doorstep with some woman who wasn't even related to him and claimed "surrogate service of paperwork." He never had any relationship with the not-his-child.
I swear. Slashdot's gone to shit. Morons like you can't even be bothered to check their facts.