They could have given people this as the last expansion and maybe the game wouldn't have started hemoraghing players in record numbers. Maybe it would have been fun to play a little longer, if only for nostalgias sake.
Instead they gave us kung fu pandas...........
Nothing at all about the gaming experience has changed. You will quickly level up to the new cap by questing. You will then hit a brick wall you need gear to get over and that gear will take you months of grinding to get it. You will feel a sense of accomplishment for a month or two and then a new dungeon will be released that lets everybody else get gear that's better for a trivial amount of effort. Everybody will get new abilities that look and act different, but still make every class the same and good luck finding a place on your spell bar to place them because every character has several dozen abilities all left over from vanilla and countless expansions.
You WILL grind for gold grind for rep grind for points
Same game, slightly different graphics, exact same play style.
It was little known that they charged different rental rates depending upon the competition in the area. For instance if the Blockbuster were close to another video rental store they would charge the usual amount for a rental. But in areas where Blockbuster was the only rental store around they would charge up to a dollar more per rental. That is inexcusable for a national chain to price gouge like that. When confronted about it, the store charging the higher amount basically said they charge more when there is no competition nearbye.
I'm glad they went under, they got their just desserts.
"things which eveyone uses", no not everyone uses commercial versions of those products, and there are plenty that brag about "not using animal testing". and that contain no animal products whatsoever. You've been brainwashed by big corporations is all.
you list products like beer and inks which not everyone uses, or people can easily make their own without animal products or buy those which do not contain animal products
clothes can be made without animals, easily bought.
You really have no clue.
Animal derived products work their way into many other products you wouldn't think to ask about, and they won't tell you, contain animal products. Again, the color black.....Do you use a checkbook? Black ink in it... Do you have ANYTHING in your home that is black plastic or colored black?
And I said that beer was just one of MANY products in which fish bladders are used as a settling agent. You think beer is the only thing?
Anyway you have really missed the point here. The point is that products you dont associate with food or animals, often either has animal derived ingredients, or was developed with animal testing.
Do you really think the FDA will let something designed for human use or conception be released without being tested? What do you think they're testing it on.
Look it's one thing to say you don't want to wear leather and animal skins and you don't want to eat meat, eggs, fish, or milk products. But complaining about a LIFE SAVING vaccine because it's animal derived (please lookup how vaccines are made if you think there are any other kind) strikes me as being incredibly stupid not to mention naive considering the many other things they already use that has animal products in it.
If you take one thing away from this conversation let it be this. You do not live by yourself in a sterile world and everything you eat, wear, use, see, came from something else. Every bit of your body came from eating other living things because thats what life does, it re-cycles, and if you think you can re-cycle without animals you're sorely mistaken.
So once again we have a story with a vegan angle which seems to be popping up more and more anytime people act stupidly. One of the girls was concerned about 'animal products' in the vaccines.
Let me just leave this little chestnut there for you all. No matter how much you try to avoid using products with animal derived ingredients, or animal tested products, you will have to use them unless you make every single thing that goes in or on your body by hand and never buy a single thing.
Some things which contain animal products: The color black, used in inks, toners, plastics, is often made from burning animal bones. Beer and many other products use ground fish swim bladders as a settling agent, which is later filtered back out. Many pills and capsules are coated in gelatin as well as many food products, beauty products, and it's made from ground animal collagen. The color red in many products is carmine red, and it's made from ground insects.
Some thing which everyone uses that are tested on animals. Shampoo toothpaste mouth rinse soap skin cream the perfumes in soaps and shampoos and creams
Some things we all benefit from that are based on vivisection, killing lab animals, etc Most of modern medicine vaccines insulin (did you know the head of PETA is a diabetic?) almost any healthcare you get, medications, treatments, even things like cat scans, are derived from testing and knowledge gained from using animals as human surrogates.
If you want to live a life that does not benefit from animal products or animal testing, you're talking about walking into the wilderness by yourself with no clothes and no tools and not making use of anything from society, no technology, no products, no knowledge.
LIFE MEANS KILLING OTHER THINGS EITHER BY DIRECT ACT OR FOR COMMUNAL BENEFIT. THESE ARE LAWS OF NATURE AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. GET USED TO IT IF YOU WISH TO LIVE.
The last time I checked, the editorial staff at a journal wasn't expected to vouch for or ascertain the scientific merit of a paper. Journals are the realm of proof reading for spelling errors etc etc, not doing peer review.
The way it's supposed to work is
1. A paper is written 2. A paper is submitted to a journal 3. The journal ascertains the subject of the paper 4. Journal sends copies of that paper to other experts on the subject of the paper 5. Those peers then vouch for or criticize the paper 6. Journal either rejects or accepts the paper for publication.
That's assuming all the power comes from the phaser. The chemical bonds inside the human body contain quite a bit of fuel themselves. One need only kick start a chain reaction. One need only dehydrate the subject body to trigger an exothermic reaction resulting in a body that could burn as well as coal, poof no more body, just carbon dioxide and a little ash. For instance if you dehydrate sugar in sulphuric acid it is an exothermic reaction that make the carbon rich byproducts easily combustable.
Another way this might be done is if the phaser array doesn't destroy anything, if it merely re-arranged some of the molecules say converting the water in your body to sulpuric, hydrochloric, or nitric acid. It certainly doesn't take gigajoules of energy for acid to disintegrate a body.
Now thinking outside the box, the most important thing this article should hold for a Trekkie is that it takes gigajoules of energy to disintegrate a body but they don't say how many it would take to re-integrate it. That's right, if you can take a body apart molecule by molecule that is the basis of the outbound loop of a teleporter, The idea being that the information about where those molecules were is transmitted to another location where a matter re-integrator either re-assembles the stream of molecules, or creates new ones.
If a band were to be so bad as to not make a single note in tune, but so good with pro-tools they could make themselves sound professional, then they may be a terrible band but if they are THAT good at pro-tools they are as good as anybody in the business and would make excellent studio console jockies.
This is like arguing that photoshop is destroying professional photography when terrible photographers can simply 'fix' it in photoshop. We know that not to be true. Likewise no amateurs making youtube videos in Vegas is serious competition to hollywoods dollars.
Yes there is a lot more music out there but that is simply a side effect of having the tools to create music become much more accessible. Instead of a music company A&R man deciding what people want to hear, people actually decide directly. If they like an artist they listen to and hopefully buy from that artist. If they don't like an artist they turn a blind eye. The unfortunate bit for the music industry is often times the bad music that is being ignored is their professionally produced shovelware crap.
I would also like to point out that the main determinator as to an artists pay scale is not the quality of their music, it is their fame and it has always been so. Remember the Funk brothers making all of those great Motown songs, shaping an entire decade of american musical culture, yet a lot of them could barely hang on as studio musicians and that was back in the 'golden days' before home recording.
Yet if you get fame and manage your finances you can make tons of money with little to no talent. You need look no further than any of the 'solo' artists who don't write their songs, don't play an instrument, don't even decide what the music will be about, and couldn't sing it without autotune. Hell, Milli Vanilli proved back in the 90's that to become famous and make money and win awards you didn't have to sing at all, just lip sync and look like a model.
So while there are many problems as the ancient music industry adopts to modern innovations in home recording and the ability of artists to speak directly to their fan base and sell their albums directly to their fans without the music industry middlemen, better access for aspiring musicians to be able to make professional sounding music in their bedroom, is not one of those problems.
It's fitting in a way because if that asteroid threatens earth we are going to use our weapons to destroy it in order to defend our lives. Seriously though this makes me sick to my stomach. Trayvon was a punk with a record and he was not some innocent martyr to black people but was instead a hoodlum who assaulted the wrong guy.
Yes don't want you to know as in there are plenty of reports talking about pots evils that have been discredited and the DARE program outright lied to a generation of people.
It's not a conspiracy it's a simple fact that it is difficult to have a meaningful debate about marijuana policy without disinformation about it's supposed harms.
And your assertion that "you've seen it" how people drive when their stoned, I know nothing about the road worthiness of your friends or family, sober or high, but you miss the point and start doing a straw man argument. I wasn't advocating smoking pot and driving and I don't know where you decided to argue that back.
The disinformation is that marijuana kills brain cells and makes you stupid. This has never been proven but it has been proven that alcohol kills brain cells and in fact if given to children and infants it causes life long mental impairment.
I doubt you have had much experience with the real effects of Marijuana to know real dangers from disinformation.
You obviously have no idea of what you're talking about. Marijuana intoxication increases attention sometimes to the point of excluding everything else. It can cause a person to focus on one thing and to give it their undevided attention similar to the way someone may get caught up in a good book or movie and not notice their cat jumped up on the couch.
In any case all of these arguments about Marijuana this, Marijuana that, trying to talk about negative effects are disingenuous at best. The fact is that there are MANY legal substances that have a far greater effect and impairment on people and their development than pot. The strongest opposition to marijuana decriminalization are often the people who know the least about it's actual effects, have had no experience with it, and perpetrate the same old disproven hokey science and myths.
The human brain has receptors for THC, the active chemical in marijuana. No other plant or drug binds to these receptors, they are exclusive to thc. Now why would that be if it were something that "killed brain cells" and made people stupid?
Let me tell you a few things about Marijuana that these rabid anti pot lobbyists don't want you to know.
1. It was made illegal in El Paso at the turn of the century not as a way to control drugs but as a way to persecute Mexican immigrants. 2. One of the most detailed and comprehensive studies on marijuanas effects was commissioned by Nixon. When the report concluded that marijuana does not harm people, lower IQ, destroy braincells, is not physically addictive, is safer than alcohol or tobacco, they squashed the report. President Regan buried it when he took office and instead supported the DARE program, one of the biggest misinformation campaigns in the last 30 years. 3. Marijuana is safer than table salt. It has no known toxicity and is impossible to overdose on. Marijuana intoxication also leaves no "hangover" or any lasting effects on people other than a sense of wellbeing. 4. Most of the illegally grown marijuana is grown locally. Buying pot may be illegal but it DOES NOT send money to the Taliban..... 5. The war on drugs has been a costly failure. Hardcore drugs like Heroin, Cocaine, and Methamphetamine continue to be cheaply available throughout the US. The only thing the war on drugs has helped is funnel more money into the hands of drug cartels much the same way that prohibition did to mobsters running illegal alcohol did. Prohibition didn't work then and it doesn't work now.
The only reason it is still illegal is because of circular logic.
Marijuana is illegal because it is bad. Marijuana is bad because it is illegal.
So we now have laboratory mind control?/golfclap Christians have been doing this for 2000 years now. It may be lowtech but it's definitely mind control.
When does the state of Texas allow an unfit parent to place their child in danger and not take custody away? When the parent is unfit for religious reasons.
Seriously do people who write these things even bother to read about the subject they are writing about?
When they make statements like "championing the idea" it makes a false impression that Galileo made the discovery or that it wasn't in common knowledge at the time. Not to mention his beef with the church had less to do with his scientific views and more to do with his attempt to interpret scripture to explain what he saw through his telescope.
Discovering Saturn had "ears" yes. Heliocentricism no.
The earth is a cold place. snow and ice are relatively new things in earths history and on geologic time scales they just started ocurring. The earth has historically had higher levels of CO2, and far warmer temperatures, Did this cause any problems? No it did not.
There were more species, greater plant growth, and more bio diversity than at any other time in earths history. Sea levels were higher but there were no ice caps and far from being a climate disaster, the warmer, higher CO2 earth could support MORE life.
Contrast that with the global cooling that's occurred in the last 20 million years and it's plain to see that having entire continents like Antarctica frozen solid and under miles of ice is not a normal or healthy state for our planet.
The irony is that so called 'green' movements actually seek to keep the global thermostat set on deep freeze, which HURTS plants, limits bio diversity, and we all suffer cold winters, countless deaths caused by incliment winter weather and millions of dollars of damage every year during winter months. Entire continents of our planet are uninhabitable frozen wastelands, and the most fertile soil in the northern and southern hemispheres goes to waste under months of permafrost every year.
There is nothing "green" about climate alarmists. They want to keep the earth cold when the greatest benefit to actual plant and animal life is to let it warm back up.
Thinking McAfee's security products are consumer virus scan is like thinking all Dells products are Best Buy laptops.
The simple fact is the majority of the product line up are non consumer and invisible to you. I'm not just talking about enterprise malware, I'm talking about IDS, IPS, SIEM, Solidifiers, Risk and Compliance, Encryption, etc.
The majority of the product line up and business model is corporate and government customers monitoring and blocking threats on the wire. Little or nothing to do with some rinky dinky bloatware on your walmart laptop.
Sweat is processed in pockets here and here, urine and excreta on the thighpads here. With a properly maintained stillsuit you may survive for weeks, even in the deep desert.
What is a 14yr old doing drunk at a party in the first place? Where were the parents to protect their child not just from drinking, but from online abuse? What in the hell were they thinking? If this crap happened to my daughter she would be grounded until she got retirement benefits and I wouldn't allow her near a computer for almost as long. If my kid was fucked up and being bullied, suicidal, drinking, I would send them to therapy as well.
Global warming is ruthless. Scientists have uncovered evidence that global warming is also responsible for
That terrible taste when you drink orange juice after brushing your teeth. Making your dog drag it's butt across the carpet. Stealing your credit card and using it to charge lots of porn. Windows 8 lackluster sales performance.
And the most disturbing revelation of all is that global warming steals one of your socks out of the dryer leaving you wondering why you only have 1/2 of a pair.
The world had much higher levels of carbon dioxide millions of years ago and the effect was that there were more species alive and thriving than at any other time since. The planet was also several degrees warmer but that didn't harm plant and animal life, they exploded in diversity and numbers. When are we going to realize that the planet is still in recovery from the last ice age? The global thermostat changes of it's own accord whether human beings live in caves and hunt in packs, or fly to a space station.
There are bigger problems in the world. Disease, war, hunger, human rights violations, and our ever decreasing personal freedoms. How about we spend our time, effort, and money, on fixing things that will actually benefit society and spend a little less time worrying about carbon dioxide.
Who's bright idea was it that it's a 'good thing' our planet is frozen solid almost perpetually above and below certain lattitutdes? During the time of the dinosaurs there were no polar ice caps and the world was much hotter than even global warming predicts we could get. Was the planet one big smouldering desert that killed off tons of species? Nope. It had a higher biodiversity than we have ever seen in mankinds entire history. Storms were no worse than they are today, more of the available land was habitable, and life THRIVED.
Ask me if I'm afraid of global warming, go ahead, ask me.
No.
If the Arctic starts to become ice free in the summer months it will allow for unprecedented access to the ocean, open up shorter, cheaper, more environmentally friendly trade routes for ocean vessels, not to mention exploration of the ocean and it's depths.
Now if we could only thaw out Antarctica too then we would really be moving along. Yeah we might lose a little coastline around the planet but the rise would be gradual and we would adapt. Remember Jamestown, North America's first settlement? Underwater right now. The fact is that coastlines already change even within a few generations, why be worried about loosing some more? The earth isn't going to flood, it's not going to e a 'water world'. Were the dinosaurs underwater? Nope.
Antarctica is an entire continent that is virtually inaccessible and unexplored. Underneath millions of years of snow and ice is an entire land waiting to come free of a million year deep freeze complete with new mountains, lakes, not to mention habitable land. Who knows what we will discover locked beneath the ice there. It makes me excited.
So don't worry, learn to enjoy not having thousands of people and millions of dollars in lost wages and damage every year from severe winter weather, and uh yeah. We get to go swimming in December, a reward for returning the earth to it's natural state of not being frozen solid year round.
I'm playing devils advocate in this post and trying to get you non gun owners to see how unreasonable you are being when you tell gun owners what they should be allowed to buy and own.
Every year there are FAR more deaths caused by automobiles than firearms can even begin to touch. But do we blame the 80 year old who is probably too old to drive and hit the accelerator thinking it was the brake, and mowing down dozens of people in the process? Or do we blame the dangerous automobile which in the hands of the inept, or the maniacal, allows a normal human being to become an unstoppable killing machine.
Imagine instead of a school shooting, the debate was somebody driving into a crowded market and running dozens of children over. And in response to this, instead of seeing it for the singular act of craziness it is, the politicians and non car owners go up in arms saying that cars are dangerous, and no reasonable person could ever need a car with more than 60 horsepower because the speed limit is 55-70mph in most states. Then New York passes a landmark law that bans all sports cars, all trucks, and mandates that no car can have more than 60 horsepower or a gas tank that can run for more than an hour so that people cannot go on long police chases.
Now imagine, as a car owner, having these people telling you that YOUR car is the reason for the tragic mowing down of little kids, not the stupid driver, but the car itself and then further imagine that the politicians and non car owners start trying to tell you that nobody needs a car with more than 60 horsepower or an hour of gasoline.
That is exactly what is happening right now to gun owners. The same way that you might like to drive something more than an econobox because it's fun, and you like sporty cars, some gun owners like exotic guns, and semi automatic rifles. You don't like faster cars because you think you're going to drive in the Indy 5000 some day any more than some gun owners like assault rifles because they think they might need to fend off armed attackers.
Except that you may never be exptected to drive in a professional racecar race but it's absolutely important to the freedom of your country that you should be able to arm yourself to fend off all attackers foreign AND DOMESTIC. The reason we have the right to bear arms is to defend our nation from all tyranny, whether it be a corrupt government or a foreign invader.
As many people have stated, assault rifles make up less than 1% of firearm deaths every year. Mass shootings happen incredibly infrequently and they are the fault of deranged individuals. If I needed to kill dozens of people I wouldn't need an AR15, I'd just need to point the front end of my car into a crowd of people.....your car is more of a killing machine than any rifle, and everybody has one.
Society operates on trust. Trust that the other people you meet arn't trying to do you harm. This is the only way our society can operate. If we operated on the assumption that everyone was trying to do us harm, we could never leave our houses, we could never do business with each other, socialize, work with each other, in effect society would cease to exist. The fact that mass murders sometimes occur is a small price we sometimes pay for having an open society built on trust. Inevitably some people will betray that trust, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't trust each other, it means some people are despicable.
How to win at terrorism, attack people, and instead of blaming you they blame each other. Instead of punishing you, they punish themselves. Instead of taking away your freedom by putting you in prison, they take away their own freedoms. This is how terrorism wins folks.
Blame the asshole who pulled the trigger, not the weapon they chose and definitely not the people who also use those weapons. Think about the killing power of an automobile the next time you are driving past a school crossing full of children. Trust.
And for the record, you don't even have a constitutional right to own and operate an automobile but you do for owning and using firearms.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps this is true. Combine cute cats with Lolspeak and half teh internetz nao usez lolzpeak.
They could have given people this as the last expansion and maybe the game wouldn't have started hemoraghing players in record numbers. Maybe it would have been fun to play a little longer, if only for nostalgias sake.
Instead they gave us kung fu pandas...........
Nothing at all about the gaming experience has changed. You will quickly level up to the new cap by questing. You will then hit a brick wall you need gear to get over and that gear will take you months of grinding to get it. You will feel a sense of accomplishment for a month or two and then a new dungeon will be released that lets everybody else get gear that's better for a trivial amount of effort. Everybody will get new abilities that look and act different, but still make every class the same and good luck finding a place on your spell bar to place them because every character has several dozen abilities all left over from vanilla and countless expansions.
You WILL
grind for gold
grind for rep
grind for points
Same game, slightly different graphics, exact same play style.
I have no sympathy for Blockbuster Videos.
It was little known that they charged different rental rates depending upon the competition in the area. For instance if the Blockbuster were close to another video rental store they would charge the usual amount for a rental. But in areas where Blockbuster was the only rental store around they would charge up to a dollar more per rental. That is inexcusable for a national chain to price gouge like that. When confronted about it, the store charging the higher amount basically said they charge more when there is no competition nearbye.
I'm glad they went under, they got their just desserts.
you make no valid point at all.
"things which eveyone uses", no not everyone uses commercial versions of those products, and there are plenty that brag about "not using animal testing". and that contain no animal products whatsoever. You've been brainwashed by big corporations is all.
you list products like beer and inks which not everyone uses, or people can easily make their own without animal products or buy those which do not contain animal products
clothes can be made without animals, easily bought.
You really have no clue.
Animal derived products work their way into many other products you wouldn't think to ask about, and they won't tell you, contain animal products. Again, the color black.....Do you use a checkbook? Black ink in it... Do you have ANYTHING in your home that is black plastic or colored black?
And I said that beer was just one of MANY products in which fish bladders are used as a settling agent. You think beer is the only thing?
Anyway you have really missed the point here. The point is that products you dont associate with food or animals, often either has animal derived ingredients, or was developed with animal testing.
Do you really think the FDA will let something designed for human use or conception be released without being tested? What do you think they're testing it on.
Look it's one thing to say you don't want to wear leather and animal skins and you don't want to eat meat, eggs, fish, or milk products. But complaining about a LIFE SAVING vaccine because it's animal derived (please lookup how vaccines are made if you think there are any other kind) strikes me as being incredibly stupid not to mention naive considering the many other things they already use that has animal products in it.
If you take one thing away from this conversation let it be this. You do not live by yourself in a sterile world and everything you eat, wear, use, see, came from something else. Every bit of your body came from eating other living things because thats what life does, it re-cycles, and if you think you can re-cycle without animals you're sorely mistaken.
So once again we have a story with a vegan angle which seems to be popping up more and more anytime people act stupidly. One of the girls was concerned about 'animal products' in the vaccines.
Let me just leave this little chestnut there for you all. No matter how much you try to avoid using products with animal derived ingredients, or animal tested products, you will have to use them unless you make every single thing that goes in or on your body by hand and never buy a single thing.
Some things which contain animal products:
The color black, used in inks, toners, plastics, is often made from burning animal bones.
Beer and many other products use ground fish swim bladders as a settling agent, which is later filtered back out.
Many pills and capsules are coated in gelatin as well as many food products, beauty products, and it's made from ground animal collagen.
The color red in many products is carmine red, and it's made from ground insects.
Some thing which everyone uses that are tested on animals.
Shampoo
toothpaste
mouth rinse
soap
skin cream
the perfumes in soaps and shampoos and creams
Some things we all benefit from that are based on vivisection, killing lab animals, etc
Most of modern medicine
vaccines
insulin (did you know the head of PETA is a diabetic?)
almost any healthcare you get, medications, treatments, even things like cat scans, are derived from testing and knowledge gained from using animals as human surrogates.
If you want to live a life that does not benefit from animal products or animal testing, you're talking about walking into the wilderness by yourself with no clothes and no tools and not making use of anything from society, no technology, no products, no knowledge.
LIFE MEANS KILLING OTHER THINGS EITHER BY DIRECT ACT OR FOR COMMUNAL BENEFIT. THESE ARE LAWS OF NATURE AND THERE IS NOTHING YOU CAN DO ABOUT IT. GET USED TO IT IF YOU WISH TO LIVE.
The last time I checked, the editorial staff at a journal wasn't expected to vouch for or ascertain the scientific merit of a paper. Journals are the realm of proof reading for spelling errors etc etc, not doing peer review.
The way it's supposed to work is
1. A paper is written
2. A paper is submitted to a journal
3. The journal ascertains the subject of the paper
4. Journal sends copies of that paper to other experts on the subject of the paper
5. Those peers then vouch for or criticize the paper
6. Journal either rejects or accepts the paper for publication.
That's assuming all the power comes from the phaser. The chemical bonds inside the human body contain quite a bit of fuel themselves. One need only kick start a chain reaction. One need only dehydrate the subject body to trigger an exothermic reaction resulting in a body that could burn as well as coal, poof no more body, just carbon dioxide and a little ash. For instance if you dehydrate sugar in sulphuric acid it is an exothermic reaction that make the carbon rich byproducts easily combustable.
Another way this might be done is if the phaser array doesn't destroy anything, if it merely re-arranged some of the molecules say converting the water in your body to sulpuric, hydrochloric, or nitric acid. It certainly doesn't take gigajoules of energy for acid to disintegrate a body.
Now thinking outside the box, the most important thing this article should hold for a Trekkie is that it takes gigajoules of energy to disintegrate a body but they don't say how many it would take to re-integrate it. That's right, if you can take a body apart molecule by molecule that is the basis of the outbound loop of a teleporter, The idea being that the information about where those molecules were is transmitted to another location where a matter re-integrator either re-assembles the stream of molecules, or creates new ones.
If a band were to be so bad as to not make a single note in tune, but so good with pro-tools they could make themselves sound professional, then they may be a terrible band but if they are THAT good at pro-tools they are as good as anybody in the business and would make excellent studio console jockies.
This is like arguing that photoshop is destroying professional photography when terrible photographers can simply 'fix' it in photoshop. We know that not to be true. Likewise no amateurs making youtube videos in Vegas is serious competition to hollywoods dollars.
Yes there is a lot more music out there but that is simply a side effect of having the tools to create music become much more accessible. Instead of a music company A&R man deciding what people want to hear, people actually decide directly. If they like an artist they listen to and hopefully buy from that artist. If they don't like an artist they turn a blind eye. The unfortunate bit for the music industry is often times the bad music that is being ignored is their professionally produced shovelware crap.
I would also like to point out that the main determinator as to an artists pay scale is not the quality of their music, it is their fame and it has always been so. Remember the Funk brothers making all of those great Motown songs, shaping an entire decade of american musical culture, yet a lot of them could barely hang on as studio musicians and that was back in the 'golden days' before home recording.
Yet if you get fame and manage your finances you can make tons of money with little to no talent. You need look no further than any of the 'solo' artists who don't write their songs, don't play an instrument, don't even decide what the music will be about, and couldn't sing it without autotune. Hell, Milli Vanilli proved back in the 90's that to become famous and make money and win awards you didn't have to sing at all, just lip sync and look like a model.
So while there are many problems as the ancient music industry adopts to modern innovations in home recording and the ability of artists to speak directly to their fan base and sell their albums directly to their fans without the music industry middlemen, better access for aspiring musicians to be able to make professional sounding music in their bedroom, is not one of those problems.
It's fitting in a way because if that asteroid threatens earth we are going to use our weapons to destroy it in order to defend our lives. Seriously though this makes me sick to my stomach. Trayvon was a punk with a record and he was not some innocent martyr to black people but was instead a hoodlum who assaulted the wrong guy.
Yes don't want you to know as in there are plenty of reports talking about pots evils that have been discredited and the DARE program outright lied to a generation of people.
It's not a conspiracy it's a simple fact that it is difficult to have a meaningful debate about marijuana policy without disinformation about it's supposed harms.
And your assertion that "you've seen it" how people drive when their stoned, I know nothing about the road worthiness of your friends or family, sober or high, but you miss the point and start doing a straw man argument. I wasn't advocating smoking pot and driving and I don't know where you decided to argue that back.
The disinformation is that marijuana kills brain cells and makes you stupid. This has never been proven but it has been proven that alcohol kills brain cells and in fact if given to children and infants it causes life long mental impairment.
I doubt you have had much experience with the real effects of Marijuana to know real dangers from disinformation.
You obviously have no idea of what you're talking about. Marijuana intoxication increases attention sometimes to the point of excluding everything else. It can cause a person to focus on one thing and to give it their undevided attention similar to the way someone may get caught up in a good book or movie and not notice their cat jumped up on the couch.
In any case all of these arguments about Marijuana this, Marijuana that, trying to talk about negative effects are disingenuous at best. The fact is that there are MANY legal substances that have a far greater effect and impairment on people and their development than pot. The strongest opposition to marijuana decriminalization are often the people who know the least about it's actual effects, have had no experience with it, and perpetrate the same old disproven hokey science and myths.
The human brain has receptors for THC, the active chemical in marijuana. No other plant or drug binds to these receptors, they are exclusive to thc. Now why would that be if it were something that "killed brain cells" and made people stupid?
Let me tell you a few things about Marijuana that these rabid anti pot lobbyists don't want you to know.
1. It was made illegal in El Paso at the turn of the century not as a way to control drugs but as a way to persecute Mexican immigrants.
2. One of the most detailed and comprehensive studies on marijuanas effects was commissioned by Nixon. When the report concluded that marijuana does not harm people, lower IQ, destroy braincells, is not physically addictive, is safer than alcohol or tobacco, they squashed the report. President Regan buried it when he took office and instead supported the DARE program, one of the biggest misinformation campaigns in the last 30 years.
3. Marijuana is safer than table salt. It has no known toxicity and is impossible to overdose on. Marijuana intoxication also leaves no "hangover" or any lasting effects on people other than a sense of wellbeing.
4. Most of the illegally grown marijuana is grown locally. Buying pot may be illegal but it DOES NOT send money to the Taliban.....
5. The war on drugs has been a costly failure. Hardcore drugs like Heroin, Cocaine, and Methamphetamine continue to be cheaply available throughout the US. The only thing the war on drugs has helped is funnel more money into the hands of drug cartels much the same way that prohibition did to mobsters running illegal alcohol did. Prohibition didn't work then and it doesn't work now.
The only reason it is still illegal is because of circular logic.
Marijuana is illegal because it is bad.
Marijuana is bad because it is illegal.
So we now have laboratory mind control? /golfclap
Christians have been doing this for 2000 years now. It may be lowtech but it's definitely mind control.
When does the state of Texas allow an unfit parent to place their child in danger and not take custody away? When the parent is unfit for religious reasons.
Bad debtors being ostracized by their friends and family. This sickens me.
Seriously do people who write these things even bother to read about the subject they are writing about?
When they make statements like "championing the idea" it makes a false impression that Galileo made the discovery or that it wasn't in common knowledge at the time. Not to mention his beef with the church had less to do with his scientific views and more to do with his attempt to interpret scripture to explain what he saw through his telescope.
Discovering Saturn had "ears" yes.
Heliocentricism no.
What are these info leak wars and what do they have to do with Messier objects? Hogwash. pfft. :)
The earth is a cold place. snow and ice are relatively new things in earths history and on geologic time scales they just started ocurring. The earth has historically had higher levels of CO2, and far warmer temperatures, Did this cause any problems? No it did not.
There were more species, greater plant growth, and more bio diversity than at any other time in earths history. Sea levels were higher but there were no ice caps and far from being a climate disaster, the warmer, higher CO2 earth could support MORE life.
Contrast that with the global cooling that's occurred in the last 20 million years and it's plain to see that having entire continents like Antarctica frozen solid and under miles of ice is not a normal or healthy state for our planet.
The irony is that so called 'green' movements actually seek to keep the global thermostat set on deep freeze, which HURTS plants, limits bio diversity, and we all suffer cold winters, countless deaths caused by incliment winter weather and millions of dollars of damage every year during winter months. Entire continents of our planet are uninhabitable frozen wastelands, and the most fertile soil in the northern and southern hemispheres goes to waste under months of permafrost every year.
There is nothing "green" about climate alarmists. They want to keep the earth cold when the greatest benefit to actual plant and animal life is to let it warm back up.
Thinking McAfee's security products are consumer virus scan is like thinking all Dells products are Best Buy laptops.
The simple fact is the majority of the product line up are non consumer and invisible to you. I'm not just talking about enterprise malware, I'm talking about IDS, IPS, SIEM, Solidifiers, Risk and Compliance, Encryption, etc.
The majority of the product line up and business model is corporate and government customers monitoring and blocking threats on the wire. Little or nothing to do with some rinky dinky bloatware on your walmart laptop.
Sweat is processed in pockets here and here, urine and excreta on the thighpads here. With a properly maintained stillsuit you may survive for weeks, even in the deep desert.
What is a 14yr old doing drunk at a party in the first place? Where were the parents to protect their child not just from drinking, but from online abuse? What in the hell were they thinking? If this crap happened to my daughter she would be grounded until she got retirement benefits and I wouldn't allow her near a computer for almost as long. If my kid was fucked up and being bullied, suicidal, drinking, I would send them to therapy as well.
Global warming is ruthless. Scientists have uncovered evidence that global warming is also responsible for
That terrible taste when you drink orange juice after brushing your teeth.
Making your dog drag it's butt across the carpet.
Stealing your credit card and using it to charge lots of porn.
Windows 8 lackluster sales performance.
And the most disturbing revelation of all is that global warming steals one of your socks out of the dryer leaving you wondering why you only have 1/2 of a pair.
The world had much higher levels of carbon dioxide millions of years ago and the effect was that there were more species alive and thriving than at any other time since. The planet was also several degrees warmer but that didn't harm plant and animal life, they exploded in diversity and numbers. When are we going to realize that the planet is still in recovery from the last ice age? The global thermostat changes of it's own accord whether human beings live in caves and hunt in packs, or fly to a space station.
There are bigger problems in the world. Disease, war, hunger, human rights violations, and our ever decreasing personal freedoms. How about we spend our time, effort, and money, on fixing things that will actually benefit society and spend a little less time worrying about carbon dioxide.
Who's bright idea was it that it's a 'good thing' our planet is frozen solid almost perpetually above and below certain lattitutdes? During the time of the dinosaurs there were no polar ice caps and the world was much hotter than even global warming predicts we could get. Was the planet one big smouldering desert that killed off tons of species? Nope. It had a higher biodiversity than we have ever seen in mankinds entire history. Storms were no worse than they are today, more of the available land was habitable, and life THRIVED.
Ask me if I'm afraid of global warming, go ahead, ask me.
No.
If the Arctic starts to become ice free in the summer months it will allow for unprecedented access to the ocean, open up shorter, cheaper, more environmentally friendly trade routes for ocean vessels, not to mention exploration of the ocean and it's depths.
Now if we could only thaw out Antarctica too then we would really be moving along. Yeah we might lose a little coastline around the planet but the rise would be gradual and we would adapt. Remember Jamestown, North America's first settlement? Underwater right now. The fact is that coastlines already change even within a few generations, why be worried about loosing some more? The earth isn't going to flood, it's not going to e a 'water world'. Were the dinosaurs underwater? Nope.
Antarctica is an entire continent that is virtually inaccessible and unexplored. Underneath millions of years of snow and ice is an entire land waiting to come free of a million year deep freeze complete with new mountains, lakes, not to mention habitable land. Who knows what we will discover locked beneath the ice there. It makes me excited.
So don't worry, learn to enjoy not having thousands of people and millions of dollars in lost wages and damage every year from severe winter weather, and uh yeah. We get to go swimming in December, a reward for returning the earth to it's natural state of not being frozen solid year round.
4 months ago I submitted a slashdot story about Uplay being hacked and it didn't get picked up.
Vindication!
I'm playing devils advocate in this post and trying to get you non gun owners to see how unreasonable you are being when you tell gun owners what they should be allowed to buy and own.
Every year there are FAR more deaths caused by automobiles than firearms can even begin to touch. But do we blame the 80 year old who is probably too old to drive and hit the accelerator thinking it was the brake, and mowing down dozens of people in the process? Or do we blame the dangerous automobile which in the hands of the inept, or the maniacal, allows a normal human being to become an unstoppable killing machine.
Imagine instead of a school shooting, the debate was somebody driving into a crowded market and running dozens of children over. And in response to this, instead of seeing it for the singular act of craziness it is, the politicians and non car owners go up in arms saying that cars are dangerous, and no reasonable person could ever need a car with more than 60 horsepower because the speed limit is 55-70mph in most states. Then New York passes a landmark law that bans all sports cars, all trucks, and mandates that no car can have more than 60 horsepower or a gas tank that can run for more than an hour so that people cannot go on long police chases.
Now imagine, as a car owner, having these people telling you that YOUR car is the reason for the tragic mowing down of little kids, not the stupid driver, but the car itself and then further imagine that the politicians and non car owners start trying to tell you that nobody needs a car with more than 60 horsepower or an hour of gasoline.
That is exactly what is happening right now to gun owners. The same way that you might like to drive something more than an econobox because it's fun, and you like sporty cars, some gun owners like exotic guns, and semi automatic rifles. You don't like faster cars because you think you're going to drive in the Indy 5000 some day any more than some gun owners like assault rifles because they think they might need to fend off armed attackers.
Except that you may never be exptected to drive in a professional racecar race but it's absolutely important to the freedom of your country that you should be able to arm yourself to fend off all attackers foreign AND DOMESTIC. The reason we have the right to bear arms is to defend our nation from all tyranny, whether it be a corrupt government or a foreign invader.
As many people have stated, assault rifles make up less than 1% of firearm deaths every year. Mass shootings happen incredibly infrequently and they are the fault of deranged individuals. If I needed to kill dozens of people I wouldn't need an AR15, I'd just need to point the front end of my car into a crowd of people.....your car is more of a killing machine than any rifle, and everybody has one.
Society operates on trust. Trust that the other people you meet arn't trying to do you harm. This is the only way our society can operate. If we operated on the assumption that everyone was trying to do us harm, we could never leave our houses, we could never do business with each other, socialize, work with each other, in effect society would cease to exist. The fact that mass murders sometimes occur is a small price we sometimes pay for having an open society built on trust. Inevitably some people will betray that trust, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't trust each other, it means some people are despicable.
How to win at terrorism, attack people, and instead of blaming you they blame each other. Instead of punishing you, they punish themselves. Instead of taking away your freedom by putting you in prison, they take away their own freedoms. This is how terrorism wins folks.
Blame the asshole who pulled the trigger, not the weapon they chose and definitely not the people who also use those weapons. Think about the killing power of an automobile the next time you are driving past a school crossing full of children. Trust.
And for the record, you don't even have a constitutional right to own and operate an automobile but you do for owning and using firearms.