This is Slashdot. Subtlety doesn't work. Your joke needs to be a 2-ton brick to the head for people to get it, and even then you'll probably still have one or two guys taking you seriously.
The winner-takes-all nature of the electoral college is not codified in the Constitution. What is, is that states elect electors in a manner of their choosing, and those electors then vote on the president. What makes this a winner-takes-all system is that most, if not all, states have mandated that the electors vote for the president that the people voted for.
Yep. The voters seem to put way too much stock into the power of the president. As bad as Bush was, the current CF we are in does not rest solely on his shoulders. Come 4 years time, I think we'll once again see that simply changing our president will not fix everything, and that there are severe limits to what Obama can do as an executive.
Technically, creationists are the creationists of the 21st century, and that's sad.
But truthers are cut from the same cloth. Ignore facts and evidence that don't support your hypothesis, and hyper-scrutinize those that seem to. They've already decided what to believe, and the evidence must either support that, or be made to support that.
Kind-of off-topic, but I'm really stunned at how this shows that people just don't understand our government. I'm seeing so many questions that assume that the president has control over state and local government issues, should be doing things that should be handled by local governments, or assume that the president has legislative or judicial powers. Seriously.
Yes, they hire marketing guys. Who do you think came up with the idea that used game sales are terrible and hurting the industry? If they can convince consumers that buying used games hurts the game companies, that its unfair to the game companies, and that they should accept methods of strong-arming them into buying new for the "good of the industry," then they will, because that will make their companies more profitable. What you are reading from these companies IS marketing, make no mistake. Its just marketing designed to make you happy about the fact that the companies are trying to screw you.
Obama isn't president yet. Furthermore, the blame is shared upon members of Congress. Finally, it is Bush that would sign the hypothetical bailout. I'm not sure where you're getting this "Obama is bailing out the auto industry" from.
According to wikipedia, the Kindle supports a variety of non-DRMed formats. Wikipedia doesn't have any info on the N810. Going off only my memory (and gut), most of the ebook readers I've seen do support non-DRMed formats. I think that the problem is with publishers.
My WoW was actually banned while it was deactivated! This was several years ago, so I don't know if it still applies, but they were using some auto-detection tools to do mass bannings. Despite the fact that I had cancelled my account and not payed in several months, they marked mine as banned.
I emailed them, and they swapped my status from "Banned for exploits" to "Banned because your account was stolen." The idea that my account was stolen was, of course, ridiculous, because my card wasn't being charged, the account was still deactivated, and none of the account details had been changed.
The long and short of it is that they wanted some ridiculous level of documentation, such as a fax of my birth certificate. Since I wasn't even playing (I just felt that one day I might want to play again) I didn't bother.
Disc is a good spec that balances healing with damage. You can't pump out the DPS like a shadow priest, but with a good disc build, plus 3 points into spirit tap, I never had to sit and drink. Disc is also pretty good at healing. You don't have the AOE panic heals you get from circle of healing, but you rarely need those in 5-mans, and Penance is an incredible single-target healing spell (less mana and more healing than Greater Heal, channeled but activates instantly).
The only problem I had were groups that thought I couldn't heal because I wasn't holy. I respecced holy when I hit 80 for raiding.
I'm not talking about the current discussion. I'm talking about in general.
Other Guy: Hey, omg, the NFL game last night! What do you think? Me: Oh, I'm not really interested in sports, sorry. Other Guy: *looks at me like I just kicked his dog*
I find sports uninteresting in the same way most people find my gaming hobby or my Japanese hobby or anything else I do uninteresting. Its not a big deal, people have different interests. Just when I talk about mine in mixed company, I'm told that I need to shut up about my "nerd crap," while if I don't get gushy about football people act like I just pulled my pants down and pissed on their shoes.
So lets not act like its just the sports haters that pull that kind of shit, OK? OK.
Oh and for the record, I think the OP was joking, and everyone (including the OP) overreacted to it. But then again, my sports-loving friends usually laugh at that sort of thing.
Personally, I've never understood the hate-on some people have for people like myself who simply don't like watching sports. Its amazing how much disgust registers in their face to a simple, "Sorry, I don't follow sports." You'd think I kicked their dog or something.
Its individual and on-demand, and door-to-door, which addresses three of the biggest complaints about mass-transit in places I've lived. Its far less efficient though.
Interesting. I can't do your test because I have the XBox version. I'm going off of memory here, but I don't the l->w thing at all, and a lot of those I don't remember. Some of them are different than I remember. For example, I remember "ho dup" being more like "hold up" and "You be fine, girl" as "You'll be fine, girl". I will have to pay special attention to the dialog the next time I play the game.
Just be glad you don't work for a bank. I have a relative who works for a bank, and she gets the race card played at least once a day, usually because she won't violate federal laws or remove *repeatedly* incurred charges, or violate myriads of fairly mundane policies. I also have a black friend who also gets the race card played on him from time to time by black customers. Figure that one out.
Apparently what works best is to either treat them like children, or outright ask them if they are really playing the race card.
Apparently, most of the other customers of the same race find it embarrassing and annoying. They want to be treated fairly, and people throwing a temper tantrum and throwing the race card at the drop of a hat makes it undeservedly harder for them.
Huh? Louis in Left 4 Dead always seemed to pronounce pills as "pills" for me. Actually, one of the things I noticed is that the designers seemed to explicitly avoid the usual stereotypes for Louis. He speaks clearly, is pretty well dressed, and is a systems analyst in the IT department. Its actually kind-of refreshing character because its explicitly not stereotypical. Well, except that Left 4 Dead focuses more on the gameplay than the (non-existent) plot, so those kind of details tend to be irrelevant.
I would imagine that they wanted to continue the story with the protagonists that they established in the first two games, rather than start introducing new characters. They used the same characters for Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil: Code Veronica. They added a side-kick character for Resident Evil 3, but the main protagonist was a character from Resident Evil. They're trying to keep the story moving. Their picking of a white character was motivated because its canon, not along racial lines. They could have added a local African cop, sure, but it would be at the expense of developing their current characters, and complicating the plot that they have laid out in the previous games. The black people "acting like savages" is, as you pointed out, because they're friggen zombies.
Basically what it amounts to is that they're continuing a pre-existing story in a certain setting, and as a result you have a white guy killing black zombies. There's nothing explicitly racist about the story, but people are choosing to project their own racist feelings on the game.
I don't see why institutionalized racism plays into this. You'd have to argue that somehow the setting and plot of the game are falling into old stereotypes and thus perpetuating them. I'm at a loss as to what stereotypes this game is supposed to be perpetrating. Its just a white guy running around killing Africans because *drumroll* he's in Africa and the Africans are zombies! Not only is that not a typical horror stereotype (i.e. the black survivor always dies), its pretty much devoid of any stereotypes on the face of it. Hell, look at a typical horror game or movie, and look at the zombies. Mostly white, right? In many cases, all white.
Now, I don't know much about RE5 other than the synopsis. Maybe they have Africans in there acting out stereotypes. I don't know. If they do, then yeah there would be a point. But how it has been portrayed in the media is that because a white American is in Africa killing African zombies, it is explicitly (the claim is explicit, not implicit) racist. That view is ignorant.
Now, video games in general have a long way to go in terms of good diverse characters. Woman characters still come off as teenage fantasies more often than not. Black characters are typically abysmal (Cole from Gears of War, uhg!). But the bitching about Resident Evil 5 comes off as a group of people looking for a reason to be offended.
Because our military is stupidly large. I mean, take a look at the wikipedia page for a summary about how much we spend compared to other countries. If we just stopped dicking around in other countries' affairs and used our force defensively, we could easily halve our budget. Hell, maybe we could actually use diplomacy so that we can rely more on our Asian and European allies for defense. But then again, most people feel that if we can't simultaneously take on 3 or 4 countries alone then we can't possibly be safe. Thats setting aside the fact that the countries that are most able to invade us don't have much of an incentive to, because it would be negative for their economies.
The military's only product, aside from blatently immoral acts, is to provide safety to Americans and American interests. It distracts our industry from more productive means. And I don't say this to take away from our troops, because it is important to have a strong and competent military. But at some point it becomes big enough, and any more money thrown at it is pissing that money away, and I feel that we have long since passed that point. The World Wars and Cold War are over, and we no longer need a huge standing military. Well, once we get out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yes, you're thinking of deficit, not debt. If taxes equaled spending today, then we'd still have many trillions in debt. In order to reduce the debt to 0, you either have to start from 0 and keep taxes equal to government spending, or increase taxes beyond government spending and whittle it down.
Car insurers get to do it because your zip code supplies relevant information: the patterns of traffic, amount of traffic, and status of the roads can change dramatically based on your zip code. Knowing what kind of traffic conditions you are going to be driving in is an important type of information that can only be determined by knowing where you're going to drive. They need your zip code to make an informed decision.
A loan, on the other hand, requires collecting and verifying a great deal of financial information to determine whether they are at risk of defaulting. A person from a poor neighborhood is more likely to be poor, yes, but you can determine if that person is poor from the financial information that you obtain. Once you have a person's financial information, any information you can glean from their zip code has been rendered redundant. That is, unless you want to discriminate on race or ethnicity, which is what was happening and why the CRA was passed.
I'll repeat that again: once you have a person's financial information, the zip code does not give you any more information about a persons' ability to pay a loan.
Banks had access to the information that they needed to make safe loans, and they were able to make safe and profitable loans under the CRA for over 30 years. The CRA did not force banks to take risks, it did not put an undue burden on banks, and it has little to no relevance in the current financial crises, other than being a handy scapegoat to justify deregulation.
No the CRA forbid banks from withholding loans for reasons unrelated to the actual risk of the loans. It did not force banks to take risky loans, and banks could definately do credit checks, check income, and perform all the myriad of relevant checks. What the CRA said is that you can't turn down an application because someone comes from, say, a primarily latino neighborhood.
If the person can't afford it then the CRA doesn't force the bank to lend. In fact, the CRA lowers a bank's rating if it engages in risky lending. It does not prevent risk analysis, and it does not require risky loans.
To top it off, the vast majority of the bad loans originated from banks not covered by the CRA. Most of those banks had *gasp* less federal oversight!
That's why its hard to understand. Because the very basis for the argument is bullshit.
Not that it matters. This has been hashed and rehashed again and again, and yet the libertarians will trot it out as if its some grand revelation.
No it didn't. It said that the location or race of that the person could no longer be considered. That is, banks could no longer red-line (look it up). They could still deny people based on their credit and income. See the wikipedia article on the CRA. The criticisms mostly suggest that the CRA had nothing to do with the crisis. At best, they could point out innuendo (the CRA made banks *feel* like they had to do sub-prime lending) rather than a direct causal link.
When entering the market involves burying cables on public and private land, then you can hardly make an argument that its "easy to enter." Comcast and its ilk aren't being abusive because of government regulations, but because its so friggen hard to break into the market that competition is a moot point. You may have a point if municipal governments owned the lines and leased them, but then that would *gasp* socialism.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Slashdot. Subtlety doesn't work. Your joke needs to be a 2-ton brick to the head for people to get it, and even then you'll probably still have one or two guys taking you seriously.
Correct me if I am wrong.
The winner-takes-all nature of the electoral college is not codified in the Constitution. What is, is that states elect electors in a manner of their choosing, and those electors then vote on the president. What makes this a winner-takes-all system is that most, if not all, states have mandated that the electors vote for the president that the people voted for.
Yep. The voters seem to put way too much stock into the power of the president. As bad as Bush was, the current CF we are in does not rest solely on his shoulders. Come 4 years time, I think we'll once again see that simply changing our president will not fix everything, and that there are severe limits to what Obama can do as an executive.
Technically, creationists are the creationists of the 21st century, and that's sad.
But truthers are cut from the same cloth. Ignore facts and evidence that don't support your hypothesis, and hyper-scrutinize those that seem to. They've already decided what to believe, and the evidence must either support that, or be made to support that.
In other words, "You're doing it wrong!"
Kind-of off-topic, but I'm really stunned at how this shows that people just don't understand our government. I'm seeing so many questions that assume that the president has control over state and local government issues, should be doing things that should be handled by local governments, or assume that the president has legislative or judicial powers. Seriously.
Yes, they hire marketing guys. Who do you think came up with the idea that used game sales are terrible and hurting the industry? If they can convince consumers that buying used games hurts the game companies, that its unfair to the game companies, and that they should accept methods of strong-arming them into buying new for the "good of the industry," then they will, because that will make their companies more profitable. What you are reading from these companies IS marketing, make no mistake. Its just marketing designed to make you happy about the fact that the companies are trying to screw you.
Obama isn't president yet. Furthermore, the blame is shared upon members of Congress. Finally, it is Bush that would sign the hypothetical bailout. I'm not sure where you're getting this "Obama is bailing out the auto industry" from.
According to wikipedia, the Kindle supports a variety of non-DRMed formats. Wikipedia doesn't have any info on the N810. Going off only my memory (and gut), most of the ebook readers I've seen do support non-DRMed formats. I think that the problem is with publishers.
My WoW was actually banned while it was deactivated! This was several years ago, so I don't know if it still applies, but they were using some auto-detection tools to do mass bannings. Despite the fact that I had cancelled my account and not payed in several months, they marked mine as banned.
I emailed them, and they swapped my status from "Banned for exploits" to "Banned because your account was stolen." The idea that my account was stolen was, of course, ridiculous, because my card wasn't being charged, the account was still deactivated, and none of the account details had been changed.
The long and short of it is that they wanted some ridiculous level of documentation, such as a fax of my birth certificate. Since I wasn't even playing (I just felt that one day I might want to play again) I didn't bother.
Disc is a good spec that balances healing with damage. You can't pump out the DPS like a shadow priest, but with a good disc build, plus 3 points into spirit tap, I never had to sit and drink. Disc is also pretty good at healing. You don't have the AOE panic heals you get from circle of healing, but you rarely need those in 5-mans, and Penance is an incredible single-target healing spell (less mana and more healing than Greater Heal, channeled but activates instantly).
The only problem I had were groups that thought I couldn't heal because I wasn't holy. I respecced holy when I hit 80 for raiding.
My experience is the same as other posters. My history classes always underscored the fact that WW2 was largely provoked by the Treaty of Versailles.
I'm not talking about the current discussion. I'm talking about in general.
Other Guy: Hey, omg, the NFL game last night! What do you think?
Me: Oh, I'm not really interested in sports, sorry.
Other Guy: *looks at me like I just kicked his dog*
I find sports uninteresting in the same way most people find my gaming hobby or my Japanese hobby or anything else I do uninteresting. Its not a big deal, people have different interests. Just when I talk about mine in mixed company, I'm told that I need to shut up about my "nerd crap," while if I don't get gushy about football people act like I just pulled my pants down and pissed on their shoes.
So lets not act like its just the sports haters that pull that kind of shit, OK? OK.
Oh and for the record, I think the OP was joking, and everyone (including the OP) overreacted to it. But then again, my sports-loving friends usually laugh at that sort of thing.
Personally, I've never understood the hate-on some people have for people like myself who simply don't like watching sports. Its amazing how much disgust registers in their face to a simple, "Sorry, I don't follow sports." You'd think I kicked their dog or something.
Its individual and on-demand, and door-to-door, which addresses three of the biggest complaints about mass-transit in places I've lived. Its far less efficient though.
Yes, after all, lets never forget about the Bush administration jailing Michael Moore, Stephen Colbert, John Stewart...
Interesting. I can't do your test because I have the XBox version. I'm going off of memory here, but I don't the l->w thing at all, and a lot of those I don't remember. Some of them are different than I remember. For example, I remember "ho dup" being more like "hold up" and "You be fine, girl" as "You'll be fine, girl". I will have to pay special attention to the dialog the next time I play the game.
Just be glad you don't work for a bank. I have a relative who works for a bank, and she gets the race card played at least once a day, usually because she won't violate federal laws or remove *repeatedly* incurred charges, or violate myriads of fairly mundane policies. I also have a black friend who also gets the race card played on him from time to time by black customers. Figure that one out.
Apparently what works best is to either treat them like children, or outright ask them if they are really playing the race card.
Apparently, most of the other customers of the same race find it embarrassing and annoying. They want to be treated fairly, and people throwing a temper tantrum and throwing the race card at the drop of a hat makes it undeservedly harder for them.
Yeah, people suck.
Huh? Louis in Left 4 Dead always seemed to pronounce pills as "pills" for me. Actually, one of the things I noticed is that the designers seemed to explicitly avoid the usual stereotypes for Louis. He speaks clearly, is pretty well dressed, and is a systems analyst in the IT department. Its actually kind-of refreshing character because its explicitly not stereotypical. Well, except that Left 4 Dead focuses more on the gameplay than the (non-existent) plot, so those kind of details tend to be irrelevant.
I would imagine that they wanted to continue the story with the protagonists that they established in the first two games, rather than start introducing new characters. They used the same characters for Resident Evil 4 and Resident Evil: Code Veronica. They added a side-kick character for Resident Evil 3, but the main protagonist was a character from Resident Evil. They're trying to keep the story moving. Their picking of a white character was motivated because its canon, not along racial lines. They could have added a local African cop, sure, but it would be at the expense of developing their current characters, and complicating the plot that they have laid out in the previous games. The black people "acting like savages" is, as you pointed out, because they're friggen zombies.
Basically what it amounts to is that they're continuing a pre-existing story in a certain setting, and as a result you have a white guy killing black zombies. There's nothing explicitly racist about the story, but people are choosing to project their own racist feelings on the game.
I don't see why institutionalized racism plays into this. You'd have to argue that somehow the setting and plot of the game are falling into old stereotypes and thus perpetuating them. I'm at a loss as to what stereotypes this game is supposed to be perpetrating. Its just a white guy running around killing Africans because *drumroll* he's in Africa and the Africans are zombies! Not only is that not a typical horror stereotype (i.e. the black survivor always dies), its pretty much devoid of any stereotypes on the face of it. Hell, look at a typical horror game or movie, and look at the zombies. Mostly white, right? In many cases, all white.
Now, I don't know much about RE5 other than the synopsis. Maybe they have Africans in there acting out stereotypes. I don't know. If they do, then yeah there would be a point. But how it has been portrayed in the media is that because a white American is in Africa killing African zombies, it is explicitly (the claim is explicit, not implicit) racist. That view is ignorant.
Now, video games in general have a long way to go in terms of good diverse characters. Woman characters still come off as teenage fantasies more often than not. Black characters are typically abysmal (Cole from Gears of War, uhg!). But the bitching about Resident Evil 5 comes off as a group of people looking for a reason to be offended.
Because our military is stupidly large. I mean, take a look at the wikipedia page for a summary about how much we spend compared to other countries. If we just stopped dicking around in other countries' affairs and used our force defensively, we could easily halve our budget. Hell, maybe we could actually use diplomacy so that we can rely more on our Asian and European allies for defense. But then again, most people feel that if we can't simultaneously take on 3 or 4 countries alone then we can't possibly be safe. Thats setting aside the fact that the countries that are most able to invade us don't have much of an incentive to, because it would be negative for their economies.
The military's only product, aside from blatently immoral acts, is to provide safety to Americans and American interests. It distracts our industry from more productive means. And I don't say this to take away from our troops, because it is important to have a strong and competent military. But at some point it becomes big enough, and any more money thrown at it is pissing that money away, and I feel that we have long since passed that point. The World Wars and Cold War are over, and we no longer need a huge standing military. Well, once we get out of Afghanistan and Iraq.
Yes, you're thinking of deficit, not debt. If taxes equaled spending today, then we'd still have many trillions in debt. In order to reduce the debt to 0, you either have to start from 0 and keep taxes equal to government spending, or increase taxes beyond government spending and whittle it down.
Car insurers get to do it because your zip code supplies relevant information: the patterns of traffic, amount of traffic, and status of the roads can change dramatically based on your zip code. Knowing what kind of traffic conditions you are going to be driving in is an important type of information that can only be determined by knowing where you're going to drive. They need your zip code to make an informed decision.
A loan, on the other hand, requires collecting and verifying a great deal of financial information to determine whether they are at risk of defaulting. A person from a poor neighborhood is more likely to be poor, yes, but you can determine if that person is poor from the financial information that you obtain. Once you have a person's financial information, any information you can glean from their zip code has been rendered redundant. That is, unless you want to discriminate on race or ethnicity, which is what was happening and why the CRA was passed.
I'll repeat that again: once you have a person's financial information, the zip code does not give you any more information about a persons' ability to pay a loan.
Banks had access to the information that they needed to make safe loans, and they were able to make safe and profitable loans under the CRA for over 30 years. The CRA did not force banks to take risks, it did not put an undue burden on banks, and it has little to no relevance in the current financial crises, other than being a handy scapegoat to justify deregulation.
No the CRA forbid banks from withholding loans for reasons unrelated to the actual risk of the loans. It did not force banks to take risky loans, and banks could definately do credit checks, check income, and perform all the myriad of relevant checks. What the CRA said is that you can't turn down an application because someone comes from, say, a primarily latino neighborhood.
If the person can't afford it then the CRA doesn't force the bank to lend. In fact, the CRA lowers a bank's rating if it engages in risky lending. It does not prevent risk analysis, and it does not require risky loans.
To top it off, the vast majority of the bad loans originated from banks not covered by the CRA. Most of those banks had *gasp* less federal oversight!
That's why its hard to understand. Because the very basis for the argument is bullshit.
Not that it matters. This has been hashed and rehashed again and again, and yet the libertarians will trot it out as if its some grand revelation.
No it didn't. It said that the location or race of that the person could no longer be considered. That is, banks could no longer red-line (look it up). They could still deny people based on their credit and income. See the wikipedia article on the CRA. The criticisms mostly suggest that the CRA had nothing to do with the crisis. At best, they could point out innuendo (the CRA made banks *feel* like they had to do sub-prime lending) rather than a direct causal link.
When entering the market involves burying cables on public and private land, then you can hardly make an argument that its "easy to enter." Comcast and its ilk aren't being abusive because of government regulations, but because its so friggen hard to break into the market that competition is a moot point. You may have a point if municipal governments owned the lines and leased them, but then that would *gasp* socialism.