How about for being the first minority figure to win the highest office of a country in a democratically run election?
Uhm... let's see. When Kennedy was elected, Catholics were a minority. In many countries, women and "minorities" have been President or Prime Minister, and of course they had an easier time of it seeing as how some of those governments cycle through parliaments 2-3 times a year when the no-confidence vote hits, plus it's easier when you have coalition governments made of 5-6 parties.
We are already so used to a black man being in the white house
Funny. The correct term is "multi-racial."
that the novelty has worn off, but up until the moment he actually won there were plenty of people who may have hoped, but never believed that anybody other than a white man could win the presidency.
Yes. We call these people "paranoid."
His wife is only 5 generations removed from ancestors who were slaves in this country.
So are a lot of people. A lot of people in Africa are only 5-6 generations from the blacks who rounded her relatives up and sold them onto a boat to become slaves.
50 years ago he wouldn't have been able to use the same drinking fountain as white people. And today he is our president.
Which means, among other things, that he now gets a personal bathroom and drinking fountain all to himself.
Proving that while racism may always exist, it can be overcome to this level is a pretty damn big accomplishment, IMO.
And blowing it by having his lieutenants toss off the race card to deflect any criticism of his policies, makes the "accomplishment" moot.
Then there's always the problem that not a single thing you have mentioned has a damn thing to do with world peace.
...WTF? She constantly worked to raise the standard of living for the ultra-poor, the orphaned, the sick, and those who were dying. To ensure that they had food, clean water, access to basic medicine, access to basic education, and (gasp!) spiritual guidance and consolation when they needed someone to talk to.
The works of her charity, the Missionaries of Charity, include: - hospices (places where people who are terminally ill can go to receive basic medical care, comfort, and say goodbye to their family and friends in a dignified environment). - hospitals. - Homes for people with HIV/AIDS (who are generally pariahs in Indian society and have severe difficulty finding places to live). - Homes for people with leprosy and tuberculosis (similar to homes for those with HIV/AIDS). - Soup kitchens - Orphanages - Schools - Family/childrens' counseling programs
She willingly accepted living in the same conditions as the people she was trying to help, giving away everything she possibly could to them. Her life and her charity were all about trying to ease suffering for people. They did amazing things, and still do, with an incredibly minimal set of resources to distribute over all the people they work to help.
Lessee: - Catholics are (based on church teachings) for government-provided healthcare. - Catholics are (based on church teachings) for government-provided welfare programs. - Catholics are (based on church teachings) for as little and non-harsh punishment of criminals as can be managed. - Catholics are (based on church teachings) for government-provided support to families who deliberately have more children than they can afford to support. - Catholics are (based on church teachings) for the abolition of immigration law and the elimination of international borders.
That all seems pretty left-wing. Yes, they're against birth control and condoms, but so are (at least on paper) the major Baptist conventions, most Lutheran denominations, and most Muslim factions.
Wow. Where did you get your preprogrammed response, a random Dailykos generator? You must be a troll!
I am saddened you have no ability or desire to do any research before launching predefined responses that indicate how meaningless your contribution to any discussion will be.
The conservative party caters to BIG FUCKING BUSINESS
Oh really? Let's see... coal mining? Yep, big business. Banks? Big, big fucking business. Media conglomerates? Yep, big business. Movie companies? Hell yeah. Big music labels? Yep.
What do all of those have in common? Oh yeah, they overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democrats...
They could care less about the working stiff who earns less than $75,000/year.
Hm. Every time my taxes go up, it's Democrats doing it. I make less than $50,000/year. They raise my taxes, I have less money to support my family. Yet I "make too much" for most government-given benefits. I don't think the Democrats care about me very much at all...
If you have more than 5 million in the bank, and your income is over 1/4 million, yes, I can see why you would prefer the republicans. But, don't tell me that you're a "working man". That bird don't fly. Graduating from an Ivy League college, just to join the Good Old Boy's club doesn't qualify you as a "working man". Never has, never will.
I make under $50,000/year. I didn't go to an Ivy League college, I paid my own way from a Tier 2 college on partial merit-based (National Merit Scholar) assistance. If I had been female or black, I was told by most of the places I applied that (a) if I wasn't accepted, being female/black would have gotten me in and I was rejected so they could meet minority-quota, or (b) I was accepted but all their scholarship money was reserved for female or "minority" students and the basic NMS assistance was all I'd get out of them.
Fuck the "Good Old Boys" club, and equally fuck the "we discriminate on race/sex" crowd. As the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said, "the best way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race."
My objection to the Democrats is simple: from the time I have been able to work (and I started working at age 15) every time they get power, my taxes go up. They jacked up the sales tax in my home county, they jacked up the property taxes and nearly put my family out of our house at one point, they jacked up payroll taxes, they jacked up income taxes on both the state and federal level. I'm a "working stiff" and they don't care shit about me, and if you believe the Democrats care about working stiffs, you're either clueless or brainwashed.
The point of the Nobel Prizes is to recognize people who do good for mankind. Three of them are for advancement in the sciences. One is for "in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency." One, a little more nebulous (and reputedly a form of attempted moral consolation after Nobel witnessed the horrors his invention of dynamite had caused), is for the advancement of "Peace" (exact wording: "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.")
Nobel's will specifies the following things: - the prizes are to be awarded for something already accomplished. - the prizes are to be awarded to someone living (it can't be awarded posthumously, which is why there was a "bye year" when Gandhi died and the committee realized they'd royally fucked up and missed their chance to recognize his work). - One is to be awarded for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and "international peace."
In the sciences, the time lag is tremendous. This is partly a result of some early awards being given to "advances" or "discoveries" which were later discredited; the downside is that a number of possible recipients have been passed over because they died before the committee had fully vetted them. Literature's time lag has evolved as the committee shifted to covering a body of long work from an author, rather than a single book.
The "Peace Prize" is the most politically charged, and many propositions have come forth to alter it and prevent bad awards being made. Left-wingers go after the 1973 choice of Henry Kissinger (for negotiating the Vietnam peace accords) based on his involvement in other conflicts. As early as 1905, the choice to award it to President Roosevelt (for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War) was criticized because his administration was involved in a bloody revolt-suppression in the Phillipines at the same time. Right-wingers criticize the political handing of the award to Al Gore. The choice to give it to Yasser Arafat, given that he kept leading and encouraging terror attacks for years after (also, because it was awarded for the Oslo Accords but Arafat was recorded saying on Palestinian national radio the next week that signing the Accords was a sham on his part), is hit often, as is the award given to anti-semite Jimmy Carter in 2002. Rigoberta Menchu nearly had her 1992 prize revoked after it was revealed that much of her autobiography (which was part of the basis given in the committee's written statement on why she received the award) was a fabrication. Cordell Hull, given the award in 1945 for helping found the UN, had 5 years prior been the major decision-maker (Secretary of State) in FDR's administration when they sent a ship full of Jewish refugees back to Europe (most of those refugees then were killed in the Holocaust).
So yeah, there's ample tradition on many fronts to criticize the awarding of the Peace Prize. Given that the nomination process closed when Obama was only in office eleven days, I think anyone from any side is justified in saying that giving it to Obama is premature, since the requirements are that you have already done something worth giving you the award, not that you are "expected to" do certain things.
That's a pretty odd way to try to twist it. In the current Norwegian political climate, that's like saying "yeah, uh, he's from the right-wing faction of Greenpeace."
Uhm... you're talking about a religiopolitical movement which prescribes (among other things) that, to prove she has been raped, a woman must have four male witnesses to the penetration. And for bringing a charge that she cannot prove, she can then be convicted and sentenced for admitting to having extramarital sex. This is not a construct of the "society", this is a ruling passed down from the founder of the religion.
No, not really. He hadn't done something deserving one.
Then again, given that ALL you need to be "nominated for a Nobel Prize" is to have some "relevant member of the community" (easier identifiable in the scientific areas) write a letter to the relevant committee nominating you, the actual "nominated for" tag is pretty meaningless.
Henry Kissinger won in 1973. The committee was not nearly so left-wing back then (neither was the appointing body).
Mother Teresa rarely stepped into politics and her work was about charity towards the poor. What's your basis for calling her "about as far right as they come"? Especially since if you read the official Catholic Catechism (the teachings and stated opinions of the Catholic Church, which she held as her guide for morality) they actually come down left-of-center as well.
But if building a bridge to the Muslim community across the world-- which numbers one in four inhabitants on this earth-- counts
First off, I don't know that it does. Getting Al Qaeda to stand down completely? Getting the Muslim community to accept the concept of womens' rights? Convincing countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. that laws outlawing any religion but their own are a violation of every basit tenet of human rights? Now THOSE would be accomplishments.
What you just mentioned is so vague as to be meaningless, as well as not being something he has come remotely close to accomplishing yet.
The best game companies in the world do that. Companies like yours, and apparently now Bioware (a sad, sad day) go with the "Fuck it, ship it and we'll issue a patch later" mentality. The fact that every console now has a network connection has been great for the cheesy Halo crowd and party-game crowd, but it's encouraging piss-poor coding practices and cutbacks in proper testing and bug-checking and making the console market look more like the "why should I buy a game new, it won't work right till 6 months later when they issue a patch" PC market every day.
If I believed for a nanosecond that the "DLC" wasn't supposed to have been a part of the shipping game that was ripped out so that EA could make more money on it, I would give them the benefit of the doubt. But come on. This is EA. This is the worst company on the planet in terms of attitude towards the customer. I wouldn't leave them alone with tip money on the table after lunch, let alone trust them to ever do the right thing on any larger scale.
The win was so meaningless and out-of-place that the CBS morning news anchors actually did a double-take and assumed it was someone playing a practical joke on their teleprompter when it ran across the first time.
CBS, who have their lips glued to Obama's butt when it comes to news "reporting."
You're right, the "win" was precisely a slam at Bush in particular. The reason? Unlike every sane part of the Nobel foundation, the "Peace Prize" committee is made up of 5 guys appointed by the Norwegian parliament, which is about as left-wing as they come and tilts the committee the same way. This is similar to when they handed it to Al Gore previously, a move widely recognized as having no basis in fact but being merely a slam at Bush because they were still pissed about the way the 2000 elections turned out.
Of course, they're also recognized as much for people they failed to award (such as Gandhi, whose death finally shocked them into saying "oops, no living person exists qualified for the award" for a year because according to the terms of Alfred Nobel's will they cannot award the Peace Prize posthumously) as their routine mistakes (such as Yasser Arafat, awarded a "Peace Prize" and then proceeding to go on to lead over 20 more years of terrorist attacks).
There is a fine line between "bonus content" for first owners and "crippled content" for secondary owners. I'm sure different people will draw distinguishing line at different places.
I draw the line where what's on the disc looks like an unfinished product that requires the "first user only DLC" to make the game look complete. In this case, that looks EXACTLY like what Bioware (at EA's forcing) did: they pulled an entire finished character and associated options/quests/dialog/etc from the game and put it up as pay-for DLC.
The "guitar skin" for the upcoming Brutal Legend thing? Doesn't really annoy me. It's just a skin. When you yank finished characters, quests, or levels? Yeah, that pisses me off.
I sincerely doubt they thought, "Hey, let's give a bonus to the first owners," instead they were thinking, "Let's incent people to buy new by making the game harder if you buy used."
You're not quite thinking like an EA stooge yet. The actual thought process is "let's fuck over the secondary market as royally as possible. We can't actually make the game break for them but we can make it so incomplete that nobody in their right mind wants to buy it used. What about the people who don't stick their console on a network? Fuck 'em. We've already got their money and they won't find out they have a crippled copy till it's too late."
The core problem here is that DLC cannot be resold. That's the real violation here, that's what's really going wrong.
Agreed. All DLC should be required to offer a burn-to-disc option for preservation's sake. The "well we record your purchase on our server and you can re-download it at any time" argument doesn't hold water: database crashes are common, and I'm not going to be happy when they shut the server off 5 years from now and I can't get to my purchase any more. Just look what happened to the last few "managed server" music sites...
You put out "exclusive free DLC that only the first owner gets", you're intentionally crippling the game for anyone who buys used. Given that the game is being sold and that's that (EULA's having been routinely tossed out in court because anything in them violating the Doctrine of First Sale is unconscionable) crippling the resale is bullshit and borderline illegal.
You put out "pay for DLC" the day it comes out? That tells me that they pulled finished content from the game build in order to try to make extra cash. It's like a car dealership selling cars, then after they have the money telling customers "oh by the way, we took out the spare tire and jack and some of the important wiring... but we'll sell them back to you."
What really hacks me off is the bit lately where there's "free DLC" that you can only get by preordering the game from a specific retail outlet. More and more games are doing this and it's getting pissier and pissier. It's gotten to the point where if I see that, I deliberately will NOT buy the game until at least 9 months after release and then I'll grab it used. Inevitably, they put all the "exclusive" crap up for either free or pay download (like Soul Calibur 4, where the TV ads showed Yoda fighting Vader but the 360/PS3 releases each only had one character, followed 3 months later by a $6 DLC to get the other character), so I'll buy the damn thing used and then spend the difference on the DLC to get the actual, complete title they should have shipped in the first place.
You hear me, game companies? You do this "exclusive code for DLC if you preorder from Gamestop" bullcrap, I don't buy your game till I can get it used for cheap. You want me to buy it new, stop doing that crap.
If a game is having a few glitches with shadows, chances are its with an ATI card.
Funny. In my past experience, if a game is glitching on graphics in some way, chances are it's an Nvidia GPU. Doubly likely if it sounds like a someone turned on a vacuum cleaner inside your box whenever you start a game...
Of my two sets (yeah, I purchased an update a few years after the original) one of them does precisely the same, yes. The older set syncs the glasses using a wire, with a pass-through for the monitor.
I simply worry about their ability to get it done at all.
Not the NIMBY's and the environmental impact, just the corruption factor and the fact that it's Tax-N-Spendifornia. If they were in the black it'd be one thing but they want the federal gov't to pay for it when they are deep in a major budget crisis? If I were the feds (or the rest of the nation) I'd say "screw you, come back when you can manage your own budget and maybe we'll talk."
Slashdot Mirror
How about for being the first minority figure to win the highest office of a country in a democratically run election?
Uhm... let's see. When Kennedy was elected, Catholics were a minority. In many countries, women and "minorities" have been President or Prime Minister, and of course they had an easier time of it seeing as how some of those governments cycle through parliaments 2-3 times a year when the no-confidence vote hits, plus it's easier when you have coalition governments made of 5-6 parties.
We are already so used to a black man being in the white house
Funny. The correct term is "multi-racial."
that the novelty has worn off, but up until the moment he actually won there were plenty of people who may have hoped, but never believed that anybody other than a white man could win the presidency.
Yes. We call these people "paranoid."
His wife is only 5 generations removed from ancestors who were slaves in this country.
So are a lot of people. A lot of people in Africa are only 5-6 generations from the blacks who rounded her relatives up and sold them onto a boat to become slaves.
50 years ago he wouldn't have been able to use the same drinking fountain as white people. And today he is our president.
Which means, among other things, that he now gets a personal bathroom and drinking fountain all to himself.
Proving that while racism may always exist, it can be overcome to this level is a pretty damn big accomplishment, IMO.
And blowing it by having his lieutenants toss off the race card to deflect any criticism of his policies, makes the "accomplishment" moot.
Then there's always the problem that not a single thing you have mentioned has a damn thing to do with world peace.
...WTF? She constantly worked to raise the standard of living for the ultra-poor, the orphaned, the sick, and those who were dying. To ensure that they had food, clean water, access to basic medicine, access to basic education, and (gasp!) spiritual guidance and consolation when they needed someone to talk to.
The works of her charity, the Missionaries of Charity, include:
- hospices (places where people who are terminally ill can go to receive basic medical care, comfort, and say goodbye to their family and friends in a dignified environment).
- hospitals.
- Homes for people with HIV/AIDS (who are generally pariahs in Indian society and have severe difficulty finding places to live).
- Homes for people with leprosy and tuberculosis (similar to homes for those with HIV/AIDS).
- Soup kitchens
- Orphanages
- Schools
- Family/childrens' counseling programs
She willingly accepted living in the same conditions as the people she was trying to help, giving away everything she possibly could to them. Her life and her charity were all about trying to ease suffering for people. They did amazing things, and still do, with an incredibly minimal set of resources to distribute over all the people they work to help.
Lessee:
- Catholics are (based on church teachings) for government-provided healthcare.
- Catholics are (based on church teachings) for government-provided welfare programs.
- Catholics are (based on church teachings) for as little and non-harsh punishment of criminals as can be managed.
- Catholics are (based on church teachings) for government-provided support to families who deliberately have more children than they can afford to support.
- Catholics are (based on church teachings) for the abolition of immigration law and the elimination of international borders.
That all seems pretty left-wing. Yes, they're against birth control and condoms, but so are (at least on paper) the major Baptist conventions, most Lutheran denominations, and most Muslim factions.
Tell that to the woman recently executed in Iran for converting to Christianity...
Wow. Where did you get your preprogrammed response, a random Dailykos generator? You must be a troll!
I am saddened you have no ability or desire to do any research before launching predefined responses that indicate how meaningless your contribution to any discussion will be.
The conservative party caters to BIG FUCKING BUSINESS
Oh really? Let's see... coal mining? Yep, big business. Banks? Big, big fucking business. Media conglomerates? Yep, big business. Movie companies? Hell yeah. Big music labels? Yep.
What do all of those have in common? Oh yeah, they overwhelmingly vote and donate to the Democrats...
They could care less about the working stiff who earns less than $75,000/year.
Hm. Every time my taxes go up, it's Democrats doing it. I make less than $50,000/year. They raise my taxes, I have less money to support my family. Yet I "make too much" for most government-given benefits. I don't think the Democrats care about me very much at all...
If you have more than 5 million in the bank, and your income is over 1/4 million, yes, I can see why you would prefer the republicans. But, don't tell me that you're a "working man". That bird don't fly. Graduating from an Ivy League college, just to join the Good Old Boy's club doesn't qualify you as a "working man". Never has, never will.
I make under $50,000/year. I didn't go to an Ivy League college, I paid my own way from a Tier 2 college on partial merit-based (National Merit Scholar) assistance. If I had been female or black, I was told by most of the places I applied that (a) if I wasn't accepted, being female/black would have gotten me in and I was rejected so they could meet minority-quota, or (b) I was accepted but all their scholarship money was reserved for female or "minority" students and the basic NMS assistance was all I'd get out of them.
Fuck the "Good Old Boys" club, and equally fuck the "we discriminate on race/sex" crowd. As the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court has said, "the best way to stop discriminating based on race is to stop discriminating based on race."
My objection to the Democrats is simple: from the time I have been able to work (and I started working at age 15) every time they get power, my taxes go up. They jacked up the sales tax in my home county, they jacked up the property taxes and nearly put my family out of our house at one point, they jacked up payroll taxes, they jacked up income taxes on both the state and federal level. I'm a "working stiff" and they don't care shit about me, and if you believe the Democrats care about working stiffs, you're either clueless or brainwashed.
Nice try. Now pull the other one. No, the other other one...
Honest typo, it happens. I hit the "2" key instead of the "1" key. They're right next to each other and my keyboard is small and chiclet-ish.
And remember, by the time they'd officially awarded the prize, Arafat's other front groups had already resumed suicide bombings.
Dude, I condemn based on written Shari'ah law, universally recognized by Muslim religious authorities...
Try again.
The point of the Nobel Prizes is to recognize people who do good for mankind. Three of them are for advancement in the sciences. One is for "in the field of literature the most outstanding work of an idealistic tendency." One, a little more nebulous (and reputedly a form of attempted moral consolation after Nobel witnessed the horrors his invention of dynamite had caused), is for the advancement of "Peace" (exact wording: "to the person who shall have done the most or the best work for fraternity among nations, for the abolition or reduction of standing armies and for the holding and promotion of peace congresses.")
Nobel's will specifies the following things:
- the prizes are to be awarded for something already accomplished.
- the prizes are to be awarded to someone living (it can't be awarded posthumously, which is why there was a "bye year" when Gandhi died and the committee realized they'd royally fucked up and missed their chance to recognize his work).
- One is to be awarded for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature, and "international peace."
In the sciences, the time lag is tremendous. This is partly a result of some early awards being given to "advances" or "discoveries" which were later discredited; the downside is that a number of possible recipients have been passed over because they died before the committee had fully vetted them. Literature's time lag has evolved as the committee shifted to covering a body of long work from an author, rather than a single book.
The "Peace Prize" is the most politically charged, and many propositions have come forth to alter it and prevent bad awards being made. Left-wingers go after the 1973 choice of Henry Kissinger (for negotiating the Vietnam peace accords) based on his involvement in other conflicts. As early as 1905, the choice to award it to President Roosevelt (for negotiating the end of the Russo-Japanese War) was criticized because his administration was involved in a bloody revolt-suppression in the Phillipines at the same time. Right-wingers criticize the political handing of the award to Al Gore. The choice to give it to Yasser Arafat, given that he kept leading and encouraging terror attacks for years after (also, because it was awarded for the Oslo Accords but Arafat was recorded saying on Palestinian national radio the next week that signing the Accords was a sham on his part), is hit often, as is the award given to anti-semite Jimmy Carter in 2002. Rigoberta Menchu nearly had her 1992 prize revoked after it was revealed that much of her autobiography (which was part of the basis given in the committee's written statement on why she received the award) was a fabrication. Cordell Hull, given the award in 1945 for helping found the UN, had 5 years prior been the major decision-maker (Secretary of State) in FDR's administration when they sent a ship full of Jewish refugees back to Europe (most of those refugees then were killed in the Holocaust).
So yeah, there's ample tradition on many fronts to criticize the awarding of the Peace Prize. Given that the nomination process closed when Obama was only in office eleven days, I think anyone from any side is justified in saying that giving it to Obama is premature, since the requirements are that you have already done something worth giving you the award, not that you are "expected to" do certain things.
That's a pretty odd way to try to twist it. In the current Norwegian political climate, that's like saying "yeah, uh, he's from the right-wing faction of Greenpeace."
Uhm... you're talking about a religiopolitical movement which prescribes (among other things) that, to prove she has been raped, a woman must have four male witnesses to the penetration. And for bringing a charge that she cannot prove, she can then be convicted and sentenced for admitting to having extramarital sex. This is not a construct of the "society", this is a ruling passed down from the founder of the religion.
Condemning a wart for being a wart is proper.
No, not really. He hadn't done something deserving one.
Then again, given that ALL you need to be "nominated for a Nobel Prize" is to have some "relevant member of the community" (easier identifiable in the scientific areas) write a letter to the relevant committee nominating you, the actual "nominated for" tag is pretty meaningless.
Henry Kissinger won in 1973. The committee was not nearly so left-wing back then (neither was the appointing body).
Mother Teresa rarely stepped into politics and her work was about charity towards the poor. What's your basis for calling her "about as far right as they come"? Especially since if you read the official Catholic Catechism (the teachings and stated opinions of the Catholic Church, which she held as her guide for morality) they actually come down left-of-center as well.
But if building a bridge to the Muslim community across the world-- which numbers one in four inhabitants on this earth-- counts
First off, I don't know that it does. Getting Al Qaeda to stand down completely? Getting the Muslim community to accept the concept of womens' rights? Convincing countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, etc. that laws outlawing any religion but their own are a violation of every basit tenet of human rights? Now THOSE would be accomplishments.
What you just mentioned is so vague as to be meaningless, as well as not being something he has come remotely close to accomplishing yet.
Hey, I just won a Nobel Peace Prize too! Says something about my "continued work to end the crisis in Sudan." Don't remember ever going to Sudan.
Then again, I didn't know they were packaging these things in cracker-jack boxes...
If it's not ready, don't ship it.
The best game companies in the world do that. Companies like yours, and apparently now Bioware (a sad, sad day) go with the "Fuck it, ship it and we'll issue a patch later" mentality. The fact that every console now has a network connection has been great for the cheesy Halo crowd and party-game crowd, but it's encouraging piss-poor coding practices and cutbacks in proper testing and bug-checking and making the console market look more like the "why should I buy a game new, it won't work right till 6 months later when they issue a patch" PC market every day.
If I believed for a nanosecond that the "DLC" wasn't supposed to have been a part of the shipping game that was ripped out so that EA could make more money on it, I would give them the benefit of the doubt. But come on. This is EA. This is the worst company on the planet in terms of attitude towards the customer. I wouldn't leave them alone with tip money on the table after lunch, let alone trust them to ever do the right thing on any larger scale.
The win was so meaningless and out-of-place that the CBS morning news anchors actually did a double-take and assumed it was someone playing a practical joke on their teleprompter when it ran across the first time.
CBS, who have their lips glued to Obama's butt when it comes to news "reporting."
You're right, the "win" was precisely a slam at Bush in particular. The reason? Unlike every sane part of the Nobel foundation, the "Peace Prize" committee is made up of 5 guys appointed by the Norwegian parliament, which is about as left-wing as they come and tilts the committee the same way. This is similar to when they handed it to Al Gore previously, a move widely recognized as having no basis in fact but being merely a slam at Bush because they were still pissed about the way the 2000 elections turned out.
Of course, they're also recognized as much for people they failed to award (such as Gandhi, whose death finally shocked them into saying "oops, no living person exists qualified for the award" for a year because according to the terms of Alfred Nobel's will they cannot award the Peace Prize posthumously) as their routine mistakes (such as Yasser Arafat, awarded a "Peace Prize" and then proceeding to go on to lead over 20 more years of terrorist attacks).
When levels are missing, characters are missing, storyline options/quests are missing? That's a crippled game.
Yeah, if you don't get a skin or two, tough cookies. If you're missing a major character from the game, or something of that sort, it's crippled.
There is a fine line between "bonus content" for first owners and "crippled content" for secondary owners. I'm sure different people will draw distinguishing line at different places.
I draw the line where what's on the disc looks like an unfinished product that requires the "first user only DLC" to make the game look complete. In this case, that looks EXACTLY like what Bioware (at EA's forcing) did: they pulled an entire finished character and associated options/quests/dialog/etc from the game and put it up as pay-for DLC.
The "guitar skin" for the upcoming Brutal Legend thing? Doesn't really annoy me. It's just a skin. When you yank finished characters, quests, or levels? Yeah, that pisses me off.
I sincerely doubt they thought, "Hey, let's give a bonus to the first owners," instead they were thinking, "Let's incent people to buy new by making the game harder if you buy used."
You're not quite thinking like an EA stooge yet. The actual thought process is "let's fuck over the secondary market as royally as possible. We can't actually make the game break for them but we can make it so incomplete that nobody in their right mind wants to buy it used. What about the people who don't stick their console on a network? Fuck 'em. We've already got their money and they won't find out they have a crippled copy till it's too late."
The core problem here is that DLC cannot be resold. That's the real violation here, that's what's really going wrong.
Agreed. All DLC should be required to offer a burn-to-disc option for preservation's sake. The "well we record your purchase on our server and you can re-download it at any time" argument doesn't hold water: database crashes are common, and I'm not going to be happy when they shut the server off 5 years from now and I can't get to my purchase any more. Just look what happened to the last few "managed server" music sites...
Bullshit.
You want to put out DLC? Sure.
You put out "exclusive free DLC that only the first owner gets", you're intentionally crippling the game for anyone who buys used. Given that the game is being sold and that's that (EULA's having been routinely tossed out in court because anything in them violating the Doctrine of First Sale is unconscionable) crippling the resale is bullshit and borderline illegal.
You put out "pay for DLC" the day it comes out? That tells me that they pulled finished content from the game build in order to try to make extra cash. It's like a car dealership selling cars, then after they have the money telling customers "oh by the way, we took out the spare tire and jack and some of the important wiring... but we'll sell them back to you."
What really hacks me off is the bit lately where there's "free DLC" that you can only get by preordering the game from a specific retail outlet. More and more games are doing this and it's getting pissier and pissier. It's gotten to the point where if I see that, I deliberately will NOT buy the game until at least 9 months after release and then I'll grab it used. Inevitably, they put all the "exclusive" crap up for either free or pay download (like Soul Calibur 4, where the TV ads showed Yoda fighting Vader but the 360/PS3 releases each only had one character, followed 3 months later by a $6 DLC to get the other character), so I'll buy the damn thing used and then spend the difference on the DLC to get the actual, complete title they should have shipped in the first place.
You hear me, game companies? You do this "exclusive code for DLC if you preorder from Gamestop" bullcrap, I don't buy your game till I can get it used for cheap. You want me to buy it new, stop doing that crap.
If a game is having a few glitches with shadows, chances are its with an ATI card.
Funny. In my past experience, if a game is glitching on graphics in some way, chances are it's an Nvidia GPU. Doubly likely if it sounds like a someone turned on a vacuum cleaner inside your box whenever you start a game...
No, they don't.
Of my two sets (yeah, I purchased an update a few years after the original) one of them does precisely the same, yes. The older set syncs the glasses using a wire, with a pass-through for the monitor.
I simply worry about their ability to get it done at all.
Not the NIMBY's and the environmental impact, just the corruption factor and the fact that it's Tax-N-Spendifornia. If they were in the black it'd be one thing but they want the federal gov't to pay for it when they are deep in a major budget crisis? If I were the feds (or the rest of the nation) I'd say "screw you, come back when you can manage your own budget and maybe we'll talk."