Back in the Quake II era, there was a "nudechick" skin for it. Hard to lose using that skin, unless you were playing against the PMS clan (those ladies could frag like nobody's business) or ran across another female gamer (and there were a lot more than most people realized). I considered that skin a kind of a cheat.
I had a Coconut Monkey skin I got from PC Gamer (back before PC gamer got bought out and started sucking), and stopped using it when I discovered that some folks didn't realise that the coconut monkey was a player and not a prop.
My favorite was the Baal skin, even though it was so big it was hard for someone shooting at you to miss. It was so big and ugly people would actually turn and run rather than shoot when they saw it, but I never considered taking advantage of someone's cowardice and stupidity as a cheat.
However, one person's "industry" is another person's "private affairs".
I don't think I quite understand. Can you cite an example?
I agree, something like a NHS or Medicare for all would be excellent. But how do you counter the arguments that it is "interfering with my private affairs".
Simple -- how is NHS or medicare "interfering with private affairs"? I never understood that argument. I have no choice in health care now; I can't choose between insurance companies (well, I can because my employer offers different ones, but most folks can't, and I have to choose between the 3 or 4 offered), and all those plans limit what doctors I can go to and what is covered. And I have no say whatever about what the insurance companies do, but with government I at least have a vote.
Well, there are chick flicks and action movies, and women drag their SOs to the chick flicks, but a whole lot of womaen like action movies, too. But when I was playing Quake and Quake II online and had a fairly popular web site devoted to it, I was amazed at the amount of email I got from women gamers who loved playing. There were actually a whole lot more women playing Quake than most folks realized; most female players didn't advertise their gender and in fact kept it secret.
Remember "Yello There", the parody of Blue's News? IMO it was the funniest web site around then. Its webmaster/writer, Niel "Kneel" Harriot, a Brit, was a fan of my site and I of his, and we exchanged emails for a couple of years (and threw barbs at each other on our web sites, great fun) until he became crippled with muscular dystrophe. I found out shortly before he disappeared that "his" name was Janet.
Yello There was a hiliarious FPS site run by a woman.
Well, targeting isn't what should be done, anyway -- unless your only purpose in making the game is to make money. Ironically, do that and your game isn't likely to sell. Writing a book that you would want to read, making a movie that you would want to see, making a game that you would want to play makes for good reading, watching, and playing. "Targeting and audience" is just hackwork and usually results in dreck. Look at the music industry, for example. Music shouldn't be an industry.
Back in the Quake days there were a LOT of woman playing Quake. I had a fairly popular Quake website and got a lot of email from players, and discovered that a lot of "guys" were really women who kept their sex secret to avoid the juvenile sexual harrassment. Of course, there were also a lot of proud females, one clan, the PMS clan (Psycho Men Slayers) comes to mind.
My daughters were teenagers then, and both of them were avid Quake players. We had lots of fun playing on the home network I'd set up. My oldest daughter's 26 now, and is still an avid gamer. My youngest is assistant manager at a GameStop store across the river from Cincinatti. The ex-wife never was into gaming, so of the Quake players in my family, two thirds were female.
Well, one reason is that games which are designed to target everyone tend to be watered down, "design by committee" type mindless pap.
That's what happens when the primary purpose of your "art" is to make money.
I think the best games were from back when maybe six guys would make them. You'd have a graphic artist, a musician, a programmer, and a few other guys. Great games like Duke Nukem (my favorite incarnation of that was the original side scroller), Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake were done by very small teams like that.
I think what's odd is that game developers don't see their art as art. I had an online discussion about that with Charles Broussard once; he was adamant that what he did wasn't art. I still maintain that it is.
I'm not suggesting increased taxes for businesses, just that they pay their fair share -- which many companies, like GE and the oil companies, aren't doing. IMO they should drop corporate tax rates to more like other countries, while closing all the loopholes that allow companies to get away with paying far less than they should.
Giving tax credits to companies, like the oil companies, who are making billions in profits is either retarded or corrupt.
the problem of the ballooning debt isn't getting any better after Bush.
War is expensive. Damned expensive.
I'm also pretty sure that Clinton didn't give Bush the precise plans on the 9/11 attack. But go ahead, blame everything on Bush.
It happened under his watch. He wasn't as culpable for WTC as Truman was for Pearl Harbor, but senior FBI agents ignored warnings from junior FBI agents. You're responsible for the conduct of your employees, and the FBI is part of the executive branch.
The joke's on him and us, because we are really paying for the previous generation, not our own healthcare. Now that the baby boomers are retiring, and the cost of healthcare is spiraling out of control, it can't continue.
The boomer generation is a temporary blip, the "pig in the python".
Right, the housing meltdown was caused by the high price of gasoline and not by people acting irrationally and dishonestly in the midst of a gigantic bubble.
The gasoline was only part of it, of course, but had it stayed under $2 per gallon the housing crisis wouldn't have been nearly as bad. The Clinton administration shares part of the blame for that, since the situation wouldn't have happened if banking regulations hadn't been stupidly relaxed. But the fact is, people could afford the houses they bought when they bought them. People expect raises and don't expect to be laid off.
The saddest part is, history repeated itself. Read Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen (required reading in a history course I took in 1976). Chapter 11 is about the housing bubble that was partly responsible for the Great Depression.
As to health care, Obama and Congress screwed up big time on that. The #1 reason we have the most expensive but far from the best health care in the world is the insurance companies, both health insurance and malpractice insurance. A single payer system like every other industrialized nation (and many non-industrialized nations) has is the fix for that. Obama's plan is just a gift to the insurance industry.
Nearly everyone (especially students) has many email accounts
This I don't understand. I only have three -- my personal email account, a throw-away account for crap like registering for web pages, and a work email account. I check the work email at work (in fact keep the client open all day), check the personal account before I go to work in the morning, and don't check the spam account at all.
The activism angle I can see, that does sound useful if you're into that sort of thing (which I was when I was in college). But... do you keep Facebook open 24/7?
I don't understand why a game developer would want to tailor games to a single sex, male of female. The broader the appeal the larger the audience. Why target only half your potential audience? Games are an art form, and every artist wants as many people as possible to enjoy their works.
I seem to remember a decade or so ago someone attempted to target girls with some game or another, and it was denounced by women as sexist.
Now, kid's games I can see targeting one sex or another. My daughters had a Barbie game on the PC and they loved it. No boy would want to play it, however.
Also, it shows that there has historically been a much higher rate of facing the death penalty for murder among blacks than among whites convicted of murder.
Yes, that's so, but I'm not convinced it's racial. A rich man can get away with murder -- remember OJ? But I'm sure you're eight in some jurisdictions -- Texas, for example. They finally did away with the death penalty in Illinois after it was proven that half the men on death row were innocent.
Also, did you notice that almost no women get executed, regardless of race or economics, even in Texas?
I know we're on the same side of this discussion, mcgrew. Did I fail to make my point clear originally?
Personally, I'm not going to text 20 people to ask if they want to have a meeting tomorrow
That's what email is for.
Besides, the majority of the people I invite to things on Facebook I have no other way of contacting. Don't have their phone number, don't have their email
Personally, if I don't know them well enough to have their phone number or email address, I can't see any reason why I'd want to contact them.
I'm sure it's different if you're older -- I'm currently in college
My daughter's your age, and she checks her email. In fact, her phone beeps when an email comes in. My phone beeps when I get an email, too, and I'm using Yahoo webmail for my email. I can check it on my computer, or access it on my phone when I'm not near a computer.
few people check their email as often as they check Facebook
Sorry, but that really sounds stupid to me. Everybody with an internet connection has email, not everybody (contrary to popular oppinion) has a facebook account. There's no possible way to contact me on facebook.
In five years they'll all move on to the next big thing and leave facebook behind, just like they did with... um, I can't remember the name of the last big social networking site, all my musician friends used to use it, as did I. Nobody's on it today, which is why I'm taking a pass on facebook.
You intimated in your post that people were being randomly rounded up without charge or recourse
I have no idea what you saw in the comment that intimated that anything was random. The folks in Gitmo weren't charged with crimes, held as POWs, or given access to legal assistance.
The Supreme court has ruled that a US citizen detained as an enemy combatant must be allowed to challenge the accusations in a US civilian court.
In fact, a US Citizen was held for over a year before the Supreme court ruled that, and the Constitution applies to everyone, not just US Citizens. No where in the Constitution does it say one has to be a citizen to enjoy these God-given rights. The constitution doesn't grant rights, it merely protects them.
Getting arrested and held while the justice process runs it's course is not denying you your rights.
The seventh amendment:
In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.
No charges were filed, no judge was seen, no witnesses were called. I was not allowed to see anyone. I was imprisoned for twenty four hours with no recourse whatever.
The eighth amendment:
Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.
No bail was in fact offered, and in fact Illinois law says bail can't be granted.
My rights certainly WERE violated, and I didn't even break any laws at all. I was the victim, and missed work the next day! If you think this was right and proper, I just don't know what to say, except I hope it never happens to you.
It's not as simple as they'd have you believe. When my tax bill goes up, I have no choice but to pay it. When the cost of light bulbs goes up, I buy fewer light bulbs. Ge's tax is voluntary to me. If they raise prices, their sales go down. Leaving the price the same and having smaller dividends may in fact result in higher profits and dividends.
Tax increases do NOT automatically cause a rise in prices. Notice how long it took for the rise in transportation costs to affect the prices of the things you buy -- you can't charge any damned thing you want for your goods, or nobody will buy them. Business raises prices reluctantly except when their production can't match their sales.
If Kraft raises the price of cheese, I eat a different brand of cheese or eat less cheese.
If you believe that tax breaks for corporations result in lower prices, you are a fool. The only thing theat results in lower prices is the inability to sell goods.
The budget was balanced when Bush took office. Where were the tea partiers when he was President?
It took him eight years to run up a trillion dollar defecit and turn a booming economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression. The spending that caused the budget to balloon out of control was war. The WTC was bombed under Clinton, under Clinton the FBI arrested them and sent them to jail. Clinton warned Bush about Bin Laden, Bush didn't listen, the WTC was attacked again and we went to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then Bush got us into Iraq because he ignored his own intelligence agencies. Slicing the rich's taxes made the defecit even worse, and only an idiot would believe that cutting taxes on the rich will help the economy -- a businessman isn't going to hire unless his production can't meet his sales, but give the poor and middle class tax breals and they'll spend it and put it right back into the economy, creating demand for the rich's products and creating even more jobs. Under oil men Bush and Cheney gasoline skyrocketed from $1 per gallon to $4.50 per gallon, and people have to have gasoline to go to work. Pay the mortgage or go to work? Hmmm? THAT'S what caused the housing meltdown. And, why are the oil companies getting government subsidies? Why doesn't GE have to pay income tax?
Now you want to balance the budget by taking away Social Security amd medicare from my dad, who's been paying SPECIAL TAXES FOR IT all his life?
Son, you must be smoking some powerful meth, because your brain ain't workin' right. Our taxes are lower than any time in the last fifty years. Stop the war, get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the ultra-rich, and give the middle class a break, and you'll fix both the economy AND the defecit.
I don't sell computers, but I build them out of junk parts and give them away. Giving a chick an old but useable computer is a good way to get laid. Read Asimov's Second Foundation; he knew (and Asimov was a nerd's nerd, he held a PhD in biochemistry, and taught and did cancer research at Boston University).
I'm a nerd. My first computer was a slide rule. I hacked ten dollars transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes (they were woth $200 back then) using a dollar's worth of parts and a soldering iron (1966).
I wrote a battle tanks game for a TS-1000 (1 mHz chip, 4k memory) in Z-80 assembly, which I had to assemble the machine code by hand since there were no assemblers for it (1982).
I took a Radio Shack MC-10 and software-hacked it to increase its screen resolution from 40x40 to 640x480 (this was in 1983) and wrote a drawing program for it, that would print out the pictures on its cheap plotter.
I had the world's fastest IBM XT in 1990 -- I'd upgraded it so much that the only original parts were the case and power supply.
Don't try to outnerd me, three eyes, I build wierder things than you out of breakfast cereal!
Mean and median aren't necessarily the same; e.g. the median income in the US is lowerlower than the average (mean) income. However, in the case of IQ, they are the same.
You are correct except for one fact: there are more white people collecting food stamps and medical cards than black people (look it up). Of course, the reason is that there are more white people. Government isn't at war with "people with an unfortunate skin color", they're at war with people with an unfortunate lack of money.
I live in Illinois, and that just isn't the case, although it seems so. What looks like racism is actually classism. More blacks than whites are incarcerated because the poverty rate is higher among blacks; rich people seldom get arrested for anything here, poor people regardless of color are scared shitless of the cops, whether the poor person is a law abising citizen or not. In Springfileld it's mentioned that blacks are pulled over more often than whites, but what I see is that a late model car can zoom past a Springfield cop doing twice the speed limit, while a hooptie will get pulled over for the slightest excuse, and the color of the driver is irrelevent in either case. My daughter's first car was a beat up, rusted out hooptie and she was pulled over constantly, despite the fact that she's lilly white. When that car died and she got a more respectable one, the traffic tickets stopped.
Nobody would mind Bill Cosby or Oprah Winfrey living next door to them, but nobody would want anybody from Springfield's east side, white or black, to be their neighbor. It isn't race, it's class.
Racism is a tool of the rich to keep the poor at each others' throats, preventing them from attacking the rich. When Bush said "I don't want to hear about class warfare" I thought "well, he should stop waging it then."
Also, in Illinois and probably other states, domestic battery will have you jailed overnight without bail, without seeing a judge, and you're usually released the next day, innocent or not. I endured this even though I was the victim and didn't defend myself and I was the one to call the cops, and the "domestic partner" wasn't my girlfriend and didn't live there. Even a single 24 hour period in jail is punishment; jail ain't fun at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Back in the Quake II era, there was a "nudechick" skin for it. Hard to lose using that skin, unless you were playing against the PMS clan (those ladies could frag like nobody's business) or ran across another female gamer (and there were a lot more than most people realized). I considered that skin a kind of a cheat.
I had a Coconut Monkey skin I got from PC Gamer (back before PC gamer got bought out and started sucking), and stopped using it when I discovered that some folks didn't realise that the coconut monkey was a player and not a prop.
My favorite was the Baal skin, even though it was so big it was hard for someone shooting at you to miss. It was so big and ugly people would actually turn and run rather than shoot when they saw it, but I never considered taking advantage of someone's cowardice and stupidity as a cheat.
However, one person's "industry" is another person's "private affairs".
I don't think I quite understand. Can you cite an example?
I agree, something like a NHS or Medicare for all would be excellent. But how do you counter the arguments that it is "interfering with my private affairs".
Simple -- how is NHS or medicare "interfering with private affairs"? I never understood that argument. I have no choice in health care now; I can't choose between insurance companies (well, I can because my employer offers different ones, but most folks can't, and I have to choose between the 3 or 4 offered), and all those plans limit what doctors I can go to and what is covered. And I have no say whatever about what the insurance companies do, but with government I at least have a vote.
Well, there are chick flicks and action movies, and women drag their SOs to the chick flicks, but a whole lot of womaen like action movies, too. But when I was playing Quake and Quake II online and had a fairly popular web site devoted to it, I was amazed at the amount of email I got from women gamers who loved playing. There were actually a whole lot more women playing Quake than most folks realized; most female players didn't advertise their gender and in fact kept it secret.
Remember "Yello There", the parody of Blue's News? IMO it was the funniest web site around then. Its webmaster/writer, Niel "Kneel" Harriot, a Brit, was a fan of my site and I of his, and we exchanged emails for a couple of years (and threw barbs at each other on our web sites, great fun) until he became crippled with muscular dystrophe. I found out shortly before he disappeared that "his" name was Janet.
Yello There was a hiliarious FPS site run by a woman.
Well, targeting isn't what should be done, anyway -- unless your only purpose in making the game is to make money. Ironically, do that and your game isn't likely to sell. Writing a book that you would want to read, making a movie that you would want to see, making a game that you would want to play makes for good reading, watching, and playing. "Targeting and audience" is just hackwork and usually results in dreck. Look at the music industry, for example. Music shouldn't be an industry.
Back in the Quake days there were a LOT of woman playing Quake. I had a fairly popular Quake website and got a lot of email from players, and discovered that a lot of "guys" were really women who kept their sex secret to avoid the juvenile sexual harrassment. Of course, there were also a lot of proud females, one clan, the PMS clan (Psycho Men Slayers) comes to mind.
My daughters were teenagers then, and both of them were avid Quake players. We had lots of fun playing on the home network I'd set up. My oldest daughter's 26 now, and is still an avid gamer. My youngest is assistant manager at a GameStop store across the river from Cincinatti. The ex-wife never was into gaming, so of the Quake players in my family, two thirds were female.
Well, one reason is that games which are designed to target everyone tend to be watered down, "design by committee" type mindless pap.
That's what happens when the primary purpose of your "art" is to make money.
I think the best games were from back when maybe six guys would make them. You'd have a graphic artist, a musician, a programmer, and a few other guys. Great games like Duke Nukem (my favorite incarnation of that was the original side scroller), Wolfenstein, Doom, and Quake were done by very small teams like that.
I think what's odd is that game developers don't see their art as art. I had an online discussion about that with Charles Broussard once; he was adamant that what he did wasn't art. I still maintain that it is.
I'm not suggesting increased taxes for businesses, just that they pay their fair share -- which many companies, like GE and the oil companies, aren't doing. IMO they should drop corporate tax rates to more like other countries, while closing all the loopholes that allow companies to get away with paying far less than they should.
Giving tax credits to companies, like the oil companies, who are making billions in profits is either retarded or corrupt.
Sadly, you're right. Amazing that we are becoming what we fought WWII against. My uncles who fought in that war are probably spinning in their graves.
the problem of the ballooning debt isn't getting any better after Bush.
War is expensive. Damned expensive.
I'm also pretty sure that Clinton didn't give Bush the precise plans on the 9/11 attack. But go ahead, blame everything on Bush.
It happened under his watch. He wasn't as culpable for WTC as Truman was for Pearl Harbor, but senior FBI agents ignored warnings from junior FBI agents. You're responsible for the conduct of your employees, and the FBI is part of the executive branch.
The joke's on him and us, because we are really paying for the previous generation, not our own healthcare. Now that the baby boomers are retiring, and the cost of healthcare is spiraling out of control, it can't continue.
The boomer generation is a temporary blip, the "pig in the python".
Right, the housing meltdown was caused by the high price of gasoline and not by people acting irrationally and dishonestly in the midst of a gigantic bubble.
The gasoline was only part of it, of course, but had it stayed under $2 per gallon the housing crisis wouldn't have been nearly as bad. The Clinton administration shares part of the blame for that, since the situation wouldn't have happened if banking regulations hadn't been stupidly relaxed. But the fact is, people could afford the houses they bought when they bought them. People expect raises and don't expect to be laid off.
The saddest part is, history repeated itself. Read Only Yesterday by Frederick Lewis Allen (required reading in a history course I took in 1976). Chapter 11 is about the housing bubble that was partly responsible for the Great Depression.
As to health care, Obama and Congress screwed up big time on that. The #1 reason we have the most expensive but far from the best health care in the world is the insurance companies, both health insurance and malpractice insurance. A single payer system like every other industrialized nation (and many non-industrialized nations) has is the fix for that. Obama's plan is just a gift to the insurance industry.
Nearly everyone (especially students) has many email accounts
This I don't understand. I only have three -- my personal email account, a throw-away account for crap like registering for web pages, and a work email account. I check the work email at work (in fact keep the client open all day), check the personal account before I go to work in the morning, and don't check the spam account at all.
The activism angle I can see, that does sound useful if you're into that sort of thing (which I was when I was in college). But... do you keep Facebook open 24/7?
I don't understand why a game developer would want to tailor games to a single sex, male of female. The broader the appeal the larger the audience. Why target only half your potential audience? Games are an art form, and every artist wants as many people as possible to enjoy their works.
I seem to remember a decade or so ago someone attempted to target girls with some game or another, and it was denounced by women as sexist.
Now, kid's games I can see targeting one sex or another. My daughters had a Barbie game on the PC and they loved it. No boy would want to play it, however.
The big whoop: raising two kids and four stepkids
OK, I concede, you win -- I only raised two kids. Lots harder than programming or hardware hacking!
Also, it shows that there has historically been a much higher rate of facing the death penalty for murder among blacks than among whites convicted of murder.
Yes, that's so, but I'm not convinced it's racial. A rich man can get away with murder -- remember OJ? But I'm sure you're eight in some jurisdictions -- Texas, for example. They finally did away with the death penalty in Illinois after it was proven that half the men on death row were innocent.
Also, did you notice that almost no women get executed, regardless of race or economics, even in Texas?
I know we're on the same side of this discussion, mcgrew. Did I fail to make my point clear originally?
It's possible.
Personally, I'm not going to text 20 people to ask if they want to have a meeting tomorrow
That's what email is for.
Besides, the majority of the people I invite to things on Facebook I have no other way of contacting. Don't have their phone number, don't have their email
Personally, if I don't know them well enough to have their phone number or email address, I can't see any reason why I'd want to contact them.
I'm sure it's different if you're older -- I'm currently in college
My daughter's your age, and she checks her email. In fact, her phone beeps when an email comes in. My phone beeps when I get an email, too, and I'm using Yahoo webmail for my email. I can check it on my computer, or access it on my phone when I'm not near a computer.
few people check their email as often as they check Facebook
Sorry, but that really sounds stupid to me. Everybody with an internet connection has email, not everybody (contrary to popular oppinion) has a facebook account. There's no possible way to contact me on facebook.
In five years they'll all move on to the next big thing and leave facebook behind, just like they did with... um, I can't remember the name of the last big social networking site, all my musician friends used to use it, as did I. Nobody's on it today, which is why I'm taking a pass on facebook.
You intimated in your post that people were being randomly rounded up without charge or recourse
I have no idea what you saw in the comment that intimated that anything was random. The folks in Gitmo weren't charged with crimes, held as POWs, or given access to legal assistance.
The Supreme court has ruled that a US citizen detained as an enemy combatant must be allowed to challenge the accusations in a US civilian court.
In fact, a US Citizen was held for over a year before the Supreme court ruled that, and the Constitution applies to everyone, not just US Citizens. No where in the Constitution does it say one has to be a citizen to enjoy these God-given rights. The constitution doesn't grant rights, it merely protects them.
Getting arrested and held while the justice process runs it's course is not denying you your rights.
The seventh amendment:
No charges were filed, no judge was seen, no witnesses were called. I was not allowed to see anyone. I was imprisoned for twenty four hours with no recourse whatever.
The eighth amendment:
No bail was in fact offered, and in fact Illinois law says bail can't be granted.
My rights certainly WERE violated, and I didn't even break any laws at all. I was the victim, and missed work the next day! If you think this was right and proper, I just don't know what to say, except I hope it never happens to you.
Yeah, my sister, daughters, ex-wife, mother, nephews, niece, and even my mom all do, too. My 80 year old dad doesn't, he doesn't even own a computer.
It's not as simple as they'd have you believe. When my tax bill goes up, I have no choice but to pay it. When the cost of light bulbs goes up, I buy fewer light bulbs. Ge's tax is voluntary to me. If they raise prices, their sales go down. Leaving the price the same and having smaller dividends may in fact result in higher profits and dividends.
Tax increases do NOT automatically cause a rise in prices. Notice how long it took for the rise in transportation costs to affect the prices of the things you buy -- you can't charge any damned thing you want for your goods, or nobody will buy them. Business raises prices reluctantly except when their production can't match their sales.
If Kraft raises the price of cheese, I eat a different brand of cheese or eat less cheese.
If you believe that tax breaks for corporations result in lower prices, you are a fool. The only thing theat results in lower prices is the inability to sell goods.
The budget was balanced when Bush took office. Where were the tea partiers when he was President?
It took him eight years to run up a trillion dollar defecit and turn a booming economy into the worst recession since the Great Depression. The spending that caused the budget to balloon out of control was war. The WTC was bombed under Clinton, under Clinton the FBI arrested them and sent them to jail. Clinton warned Bush about Bin Laden, Bush didn't listen, the WTC was attacked again and we went to war with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Then Bush got us into Iraq because he ignored his own intelligence agencies. Slicing the rich's taxes made the defecit even worse, and only an idiot would believe that cutting taxes on the rich will help the economy -- a businessman isn't going to hire unless his production can't meet his sales, but give the poor and middle class tax breals and they'll spend it and put it right back into the economy, creating demand for the rich's products and creating even more jobs. Under oil men Bush and Cheney gasoline skyrocketed from $1 per gallon to $4.50 per gallon, and people have to have gasoline to go to work. Pay the mortgage or go to work? Hmmm? THAT'S what caused the housing meltdown. And, why are the oil companies getting government subsidies? Why doesn't GE have to pay income tax?
Now you want to balance the budget by taking away Social Security amd medicare from my dad, who's been paying SPECIAL TAXES FOR IT all his life?
Son, you must be smoking some powerful meth, because your brain ain't workin' right. Our taxes are lower than any time in the last fifty years. Stop the war, get rid of the Bush tax cuts for the ultra-rich, and give the middle class a break, and you'll fix both the economy AND the defecit.
I don't sell computers, but I build them out of junk parts and give them away. Giving a chick an old but useable computer is a good way to get laid. Read Asimov's Second Foundation; he knew (and Asimov was a nerd's nerd, he held a PhD in biochemistry, and taught and did cancer research at Boston University).
I'm a nerd. My first computer was a slide rule. I hacked ten dollars transistor radios into guitar fuzzboxes (they were woth $200 back then) using a dollar's worth of parts and a soldering iron (1966).
I wrote a battle tanks game for a TS-1000 (1 mHz chip, 4k memory) in Z-80 assembly, which I had to assemble the machine code by hand since there were no assemblers for it (1982).
I took a Radio Shack MC-10 and software-hacked it to increase its screen resolution from 40x40 to 640x480 (this was in 1983) and wrote a drawing program for it, that would print out the pictures on its cheap plotter.
I had the world's fastest IBM XT in 1990 -- I'd upgraded it so much that the only original parts were the case and power supply.
Don't try to outnerd me, three eyes, I build wierder things than you out of breakfast cereal!
Mean and median aren't necessarily the same; e.g. the median income in the US is lowerlower than the average (mean) income. However, in the case of IQ, they are the same.
wages rose by 16%
Bullshit.
1984 was about comminism, Animal Farmn was about facism (the other end of the spectrum).
You are correct except for one fact: there are more white people collecting food stamps and medical cards than black people (look it up). Of course, the reason is that there are more white people. Government isn't at war with "people with an unfortunate skin color", they're at war with people with an unfortunate lack of money.
I live in Illinois, and that just isn't the case, although it seems so. What looks like racism is actually classism. More blacks than whites are incarcerated because the poverty rate is higher among blacks; rich people seldom get arrested for anything here, poor people regardless of color are scared shitless of the cops, whether the poor person is a law abising citizen or not. In Springfileld it's mentioned that blacks are pulled over more often than whites, but what I see is that a late model car can zoom past a Springfield cop doing twice the speed limit, while a hooptie will get pulled over for the slightest excuse, and the color of the driver is irrelevent in either case. My daughter's first car was a beat up, rusted out hooptie and she was pulled over constantly, despite the fact that she's lilly white. When that car died and she got a more respectable one, the traffic tickets stopped.
Nobody would mind Bill Cosby or Oprah Winfrey living next door to them, but nobody would want anybody from Springfield's east side, white or black, to be their neighbor. It isn't race, it's class.
Racism is a tool of the rich to keep the poor at each others' throats, preventing them from attacking the rich. When Bush said "I don't want to hear about class warfare" I thought "well, he should stop waging it then."
I don't think "Borg" applies to the Chinese, I think it fits the US better. After all, we're the ones who seem to want ethe whole world to be like us.
The best example is Gitmo.
Also, in Illinois and probably other states, domestic battery will have you jailed overnight without bail, without seeing a judge, and you're usually released the next day, innocent or not. I endured this even though I was the victim and didn't defend myself and I was the one to call the cops, and the "domestic partner" wasn't my girlfriend and didn't live there. Even a single 24 hour period in jail is punishment; jail ain't fun at all.