His point was correct, though - LOST's ending wasn't defined when the series started, and the producers have stated that part of the reason Season 3 dragged so much was because they didn't have an end in sight and were getting kind of directionless.
ESPN already tried the "pay for premium content" approach - it's called "Insider", and for awhile (peaking a year or two ago), probably half the non-news content on the site was restricted to Insider subscribers. I'm not sure of the price for Insider, maybe $10 a year, and you got it free with an ESPN magazine subscription.
However, I've been noticing that the little "i" denoting Insider content is becoming more and more rare - there's exactly one of them on the front page of ESPN.com right now, and most of their blogs and archives have dropped it - so I'm wondering if they're phasing that out in favor of this new tactic.
Clinton won the Democratic popular vote largely because she didn't take her name off the ballot in Michigan as Edwards and Obama did (and as the party requested). Obama officially didn't get any votes in Michigan - the people who wanted to vote Obama ended up voting for "uncommitted", and somehow I doubt that Clinton is giving Obama those votes when she refers to the "popular vote".
I bet that if you conducted a survey of board game players, you'd find that they overwhelmingly think that the game in question is called "scrabble," not "crossword game."
That's a bad example - the game is actually called "Scrabble", so the fact that they think that's what it's called is irrelevant. A better test would be a different crossword game, like maybe UpWords - if you asked people what kind of game it was, they'd probably say it was "like Scrabble", not "a scrabble game", and I don't see how that genericizes the trademark at all, any more than I say Ford is "like Chevrolet".
By your logic, you could never trademark a board game's name, because obviously people are going to refer to a game by its name, and people will always compare a new game in a genre to an existing one (for example, saying a property-trading game is "like Monopoly"). I don't think there's any argument for genericization unless you've actually heard people refer to another crossword game as "a scrabble".
As far as the spirit of the Geneva Convention goes, it was intended to produce incentives for reciprocal treatment. If the US extends rights to people who don't qualify for them, then there is no incentive for any future opponents to bother treating US soldiers according the to Convention since it won't affect the treatment of their soldiers one way or the other.
Your claim makes some level of sense when applied to the current opponent, I suppose, (the Taliban and various Iraqi militias are obviously not following those rules), but I don't see how it makes any sense when applied to a real foreign army. Just because we offer the protections of the Geneva Convention to those who may not officially "qualify" in no way precludes us from stripping them from an opponent who does the same to us (not that I'm in favor of that, mind you - I'm of the opinion that we should attempt to maintain the moral high ground at all times).
I wouldn't give the Republicans all the credit - the cutting of the federal deficit has also been largely attributed to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which passed without a single Republican vote.
Nothing in the other post said that either of the two hypothetical guys were dipping into their rainy-day funds for the sofas - they're merely using different methods of payment. Regardless of their financial situation, the second guy is doing a better job of managing his money.
Actually, your traffic congestion plan might work if the majority of cars on the road were Volvos, and they were really bulky and took up lots of space on the road, causing a disproportionate amount of congestion per car. The simple fact is that it's much easier to kill someone with a gun than any other readily-available weapon - it requires less personal risk than a hand-to-hand weapon (because you can kill from a distance), it's more convenient than a bow, and it's more lethal than either.
To pick a simple real-world illustration, do you really think gangs would kill as many people if they had to replace their drive-bys with, I don't know, pitching throwing knives out the window at their targets, and gun battles were replaced with swordfights?
Pretty much everyone agrees fighting WWII with a chance to win was a better choice than rolling over and letting Hitler take over Europe. Any sincere Pacifist would disagree with this. Is strict Pacifism defined by refusal to take part in conflict, or by trying to minimize the destruction of human life? To put it another way, if there were a hypothetical situation in which killing 50,000 in military action would save the lives of a million who were targeted in a genocide, would that be acceptable?
It seems to me that by your definition, a "sincere Pacifist" society is destined to be subservient to a dictator or other power with fewer qualms about using violence.
What if I want to set up a network of personnel across the country who live-blog every NCAA sporting event, and broadcast it on a web site. Pretty much every major sporting event is already live-blogged by someone, although in pretty much every case the live-blogger is watching the games on TV. ESPN.com had Bill Simmons live-blog the first two days of the NCAA tournament this year; Deadspin has someone live-blog most championship games; lots of pro teams' discussion boards have "game threads" in which people post about the events of the game as it happens, which is for all intents and purposes a live-blog done en masse. Really, if someone has the choice whether to watch the game or read a live-blog, I can't think of a scenario in which they'd choose the blog.
Should they prohibit giving updated scores, too? You can find the score of an in-progress game in a myriad of sites throughout the web, and I can't imagine all of them are paying the leagues for the privilege. The AP sometimes provides partial game recaps for some games as they happen, especially if something notable occurs. The update even comes from the press box, in all likelihood.
And maybe all of those people can have computers with cameras, and stream video as well. Well, why not? I should be able to do that, right? No? Where do you draw the line? You draw the line between plain text and video, because they're completely different. On has a chance of cutting into your tightly-controlled viewership; the other has absolutely no bearing on it - if anything, people who have access to both will read the live-blog while they are watching the game.
I'll just start by saying that I'm a musician and a music lover and that an album that is put together as a piece of art is a beautiful thing - but just like any art that's put together for commercial purposes, an album that's designed as a vehicle for a few singles and some filler songs isn't. I disagree pretty strongly with the sentence I bolded - I don't understand why just because a piece of art is "put together for commercial purposes" that it can't be a beautiful thing. When I listen to music or look at a painting, I frankly don't care what the artist's motivation was; I just want to enjoy the artwork. Most of the great composers of history were employed by royalty or the church, and while we can choose to believe that their great works were all products of inspiration rather than profit (or, at least, the desire to keep their jobs), we really don't know that one way or the other.
The US may have the "most efficient" corn production, but that's one of the only foods that we produce more cheaply than we import (if that's actually true, which I don't know for sure; we may be net exporters just because of the huge amount we produce). In general, food is more cheaply imported than grown locally thanks to the fact that the US has a higher standard of living than other agriculture-heavy countries. The tariffs on sugar and ethanol imports, for example, aren't there because we hate Brazilians - those products are cheaper to import than to produce.
You do realize that you're categorizing individual farmers as "very rich", right? Have you ever actually met and talked to such people? I have a bunch of them for neighbors, and I'll tell you that they're a lot poorer than me, regardless of what our net worths are. Estate taxes are big problems for farming families who want to pass the farm on to the next generation. There are some tax breaks (basically reduced valuation for "special use" land like farmland), but in many cases those aren't enough, especially when you add in the value of the farm equipment.
You are aware that there has never been a documented case of a "family farm" lost to estate tax, aren't you? While it's true that they are more likely to pay estate taxes than individuals, it's still the ultra-rich that benefit the most from the repeal of the tax. I think it's telling that when the current bill repealing the estate tax was passed, it was after Congress rejected increasing the ceilings to $4 million, $8 million, and even $100 million dollars, all of which surely are above and beyond the value of a so-called "family farm".
The article mentions Diablo II, which to me was an extremely effective example.
SPOILER WARNING!
About halfway through the game, you are sent on a quest to Tristram, the town that your character saved in the original Diablo (you play as a different character in the sequel). During the mission introduction, you find out that the town was destroyed, and that it was caused by the actions of your character after he defeated Diablo in the original game. When you get there, the town is in flames, with corpses strewn about (including a few familiar ones); Griswold, the friendly blacksmith from the first game, is there, but as a mindless undead that you have to fight; and to top it off, the background music is the same as it was in the original. Despite being incredibly depressing, it was one of those moments that made me think, "Wow, this is a great game."
IANAL, but I don't believe I agree with your interpretation of the amendment. Specifically, I'm referring to this part: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized". This seems to imply that all searches should require warrants - if they wanted to allow warrantless searches, why bother with requirements for a warrant in the first place? Allowances for warrantless searches are a product of court decisions (which I agree with for the most part), not the Constitution itself.
Intelligence gathering is fine, but I don't see anywhere in the Constitution that gives the president the power to violate other portions of the Constitution while doing it.
Jedi Knight and KotOR aren't really related, other than both being Star Wars-based titles - Jedi Knight and its sequels are FPS (although they're largely played in third-person mode), while KotOR is an RPG. I don't necessarily see that they're picking one instead of the other - it's kind of like complaining that they picked Doom instead of Command & Conquer.
That is, unless you think they were just trying to pick one Star Wars game, in which case you're both wrong - they should've picked TIE Fighter.
I don't think actually selling units is the best way to run a snake-oil scam anymore. Once one person tries out your product and finds out that it's bogus, it's game over for you, because that customer can let everyone know about it right away. It's far better to issue some rosy press releases, rope in a few investors, and keep claiming that the "next prototype" is the one that will reel in the millions. For an example of this, see any Slashdot story about the Phantom game console.
Every sports game I've played supports multiple players per computer - I've played with as many as 3 gamepads on one PC as far back as NHL '99. The Need For Speed series had split-screen multiplayer (only two players on one PC, but many console racers have the same limitation) since NFS 2. PC ports of multiplayer console games generally maintain at least 2-player support (TMNT, the old Mortal Kombat ports, etc.), and there's always board/party games like the You Don't Know Jack series. Heck, the Tetris that came in the Microsoft Entertainment Pack for Windows 3.1 had split-screen multiplayer.
Granted, most of your choices are racing or sports games, but that's largely the case on a console, too. Really, about the only things missing that a console has are fighters and FPS's - most fighters aren't ported to the PC, and anyone who wants to play a FPS on a PC would probably yell at you if you tried to make them share a screen anyway.
If Barry Bonds did take steroids (and personally I think he did), I don't think it helped his teams success. The team would have found a power hitter somewhere else. The steroids just helped Barry become that player.
I don't necessarily buy this. Bonds didn't just become a power hitter (which he was already); he became the premier power-hitter in all of baseball, and his production was far greater than even the next-best players in the league. There was no way the Giants could have signed another player to get the same production, because that player did not exist.
Also, in baseball, a player has an extremely direct impact on his team's success due to the individual nature of offense in the sport. If a player is able to reach base more often and hit homeruns (the most efficient, predictable way to score runs) at an increased rate, which the steroids likely helped Bonds do (the increase in on-base percentage occurred because teams would intentionally walk him instead of risking that he would hit a homerun), he provides a demonstrable advantage to his team.
The Giants went to a World Series in 2002, and according to the recent book, Bonds began taking steroids in 1999. It would be interesting to see whether anyone in the statistical community has done any research into how the Giants would have likely finished had Bonds produced at his pre-steroid averages.
some sort of post facto review will probably be put in place to review national security claims so that it doesn't become the de facto excuse for wiretapping the opposition party for political gain.
Here's the problem with that justification - FISA already allows for retroactive approval. The government is allowed (I believe) 72 hours after the wiretap is performed to apply for the FISA warrant. The fact that they're not even bothering to do this strongly suggests that they are acting in bad faith.
Oddly, some of the outrage against Intelligent Design comes from "Theistic evolutionists." They say evolution is how God chose to order and create life. But the crux of Darwinism is precisely that evolution is undirected, stemming from *random* mutations. Those who say there is a purpose to evolution are no longer in the Darwinist paradigm. Whether they want to or not, they are advocating Intelligent Design.
This seems to be missing the point somewhat. Pretty much by definition, "theistic evolutionists" believe in the basic tenets of Intelligent Design (that God has influenced creation to fit God's will, in this case acting through evolutionary processes). The opposition comes when ID advocates propose that ID be taught in the public science curriculum. "Theistic evolutionists", as you call them, are opposed to the teaching of ID as science, as it offers no predictive or explanatory power (other than "God did it").
As I see it, it's a disagreement over how to explain stuff that we don't yet understand. Personally, I think that in a public school setting, "We don't know" is preferable to "We don't know, but some people think God did it."
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His point was correct, though - LOST's ending wasn't defined when the series started, and the producers have stated that part of the reason Season 3 dragged so much was because they didn't have an end in sight and were getting kind of directionless.
ESPN already tried the "pay for premium content" approach - it's called "Insider", and for awhile (peaking a year or two ago), probably half the non-news content on the site was restricted to Insider subscribers. I'm not sure of the price for Insider, maybe $10 a year, and you got it free with an ESPN magazine subscription. However, I've been noticing that the little "i" denoting Insider content is becoming more and more rare - there's exactly one of them on the front page of ESPN.com right now, and most of their blogs and archives have dropped it - so I'm wondering if they're phasing that out in favor of this new tactic.
Clinton won the Democratic popular vote largely because she didn't take her name off the ballot in Michigan as Edwards and Obama did (and as the party requested). Obama officially didn't get any votes in Michigan - the people who wanted to vote Obama ended up voting for "uncommitted", and somehow I doubt that Clinton is giving Obama those votes when she refers to the "popular vote".
I bet that if you conducted a survey of board game players, you'd find that they overwhelmingly think that the game in question is called "scrabble," not "crossword game."
That's a bad example - the game is actually called "Scrabble", so the fact that they think that's what it's called is irrelevant. A better test would be a different crossword game, like maybe UpWords - if you asked people what kind of game it was, they'd probably say it was "like Scrabble", not "a scrabble game", and I don't see how that genericizes the trademark at all, any more than I say Ford is "like Chevrolet".
By your logic, you could never trademark a board game's name, because obviously people are going to refer to a game by its name, and people will always compare a new game in a genre to an existing one (for example, saying a property-trading game is "like Monopoly"). I don't think there's any argument for genericization unless you've actually heard people refer to another crossword game as "a scrabble".
As far as the spirit of the Geneva Convention goes, it was intended to produce incentives for reciprocal treatment. If the US extends rights to people who don't qualify for them, then there is no incentive for any future opponents to bother treating US soldiers according the to Convention since it won't affect the treatment of their soldiers one way or the other.
Your claim makes some level of sense when applied to the current opponent, I suppose, (the Taliban and various Iraqi militias are obviously not following those rules), but I don't see how it makes any sense when applied to a real foreign army. Just because we offer the protections of the Geneva Convention to those who may not officially "qualify" in no way precludes us from stripping them from an opponent who does the same to us (not that I'm in favor of that, mind you - I'm of the opinion that we should attempt to maintain the moral high ground at all times).
I wouldn't give the Republicans all the credit - the cutting of the federal deficit has also been largely attributed to the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993, which passed without a single Republican vote.
Nothing in the other post said that either of the two hypothetical guys were dipping into their rainy-day funds for the sofas - they're merely using different methods of payment. Regardless of their financial situation, the second guy is doing a better job of managing his money.
Actually, your traffic congestion plan might work if the majority of cars on the road were Volvos, and they were really bulky and took up lots of space on the road, causing a disproportionate amount of congestion per car. The simple fact is that it's much easier to kill someone with a gun than any other readily-available weapon - it requires less personal risk than a hand-to-hand weapon (because you can kill from a distance), it's more convenient than a bow, and it's more lethal than either.
To pick a simple real-world illustration, do you really think gangs would kill as many people if they had to replace their drive-bys with, I don't know, pitching throwing knives out the window at their targets, and gun battles were replaced with swordfights?
It seems to me that by your definition, a "sincere Pacifist" society is destined to be subservient to a dictator or other power with fewer qualms about using violence.
The US may have the "most efficient" corn production, but that's one of the only foods that we produce more cheaply than we import (if that's actually true, which I don't know for sure; we may be net exporters just because of the huge amount we produce). In general, food is more cheaply imported than grown locally thanks to the fact that the US has a higher standard of living than other agriculture-heavy countries. The tariffs on sugar and ethanol imports, for example, aren't there because we hate Brazilians - those products are cheaper to import than to produce.
You are aware that there has never been a documented case of a "family farm" lost to estate tax, aren't you? While it's true that they are more likely to pay estate taxes than individuals, it's still the ultra-rich that benefit the most from the repeal of the tax. I think it's telling that when the current bill repealing the estate tax was passed, it was after Congress rejected increasing the ceilings to $4 million, $8 million, and even $100 million dollars, all of which surely are above and beyond the value of a so-called "family farm".
The article mentions Diablo II, which to me was an extremely effective example.
SPOILER WARNING!
About halfway through the game, you are sent on a quest to Tristram, the town that your character saved in the original Diablo (you play as a different character in the sequel). During the mission introduction, you find out that the town was destroyed, and that it was caused by the actions of your character after he defeated Diablo in the original game. When you get there, the town is in flames, with corpses strewn about (including a few familiar ones); Griswold, the friendly blacksmith from the first game, is there, but as a mindless undead that you have to fight; and to top it off, the background music is the same as it was in the original. Despite being incredibly depressing, it was one of those moments that made me think, "Wow, this is a great game."
IANAL, but I don't believe I agree with your interpretation of the amendment. Specifically, I'm referring to this part: "no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized". This seems to imply that all searches should require warrants - if they wanted to allow warrantless searches, why bother with requirements for a warrant in the first place? Allowances for warrantless searches are a product of court decisions (which I agree with for the most part), not the Constitution itself.
Intelligence gathering is fine, but I don't see anywhere in the Constitution that gives the president the power to violate other portions of the Constitution while doing it.
Jedi Knight and KotOR aren't really related, other than both being Star Wars-based titles - Jedi Knight and its sequels are FPS (although they're largely played in third-person mode), while KotOR is an RPG. I don't necessarily see that they're picking one instead of the other - it's kind of like complaining that they picked Doom instead of Command & Conquer.
That is, unless you think they were just trying to pick one Star Wars game, in which case you're both wrong - they should've picked TIE Fighter.
I don't think actually selling units is the best way to run a snake-oil scam anymore. Once one person tries out your product and finds out that it's bogus, it's game over for you, because that customer can let everyone know about it right away. It's far better to issue some rosy press releases, rope in a few investors, and keep claiming that the "next prototype" is the one that will reel in the millions. For an example of this, see any Slashdot story about the Phantom game console.
Granted, most of your choices are racing or sports games, but that's largely the case on a console, too. Really, about the only things missing that a console has are fighters and FPS's - most fighters aren't ported to the PC, and anyone who wants to play a FPS on a PC would probably yell at you if you tried to make them share a screen anyway.
I don't necessarily buy this. Bonds didn't just become a power hitter (which he was already); he became the premier power-hitter in all of baseball, and his production was far greater than even the next-best players in the league. There was no way the Giants could have signed another player to get the same production, because that player did not exist.
Also, in baseball, a player has an extremely direct impact on his team's success due to the individual nature of offense in the sport. If a player is able to reach base more often and hit homeruns (the most efficient, predictable way to score runs) at an increased rate, which the steroids likely helped Bonds do (the increase in on-base percentage occurred because teams would intentionally walk him instead of risking that he would hit a homerun), he provides a demonstrable advantage to his team.
The Giants went to a World Series in 2002, and according to the recent book, Bonds began taking steroids in 1999. It would be interesting to see whether anyone in the statistical community has done any research into how the Giants would have likely finished had Bonds produced at his pre-steroid averages.
Here's the problem with that justification - FISA already allows for retroactive approval. The government is allowed (I believe) 72 hours after the wiretap is performed to apply for the FISA warrant. The fact that they're not even bothering to do this strongly suggests that they are acting in bad faith.
Oddly, some of the outrage against Intelligent Design comes from "Theistic evolutionists." They say evolution is how God chose to order and create life. But the crux of Darwinism is precisely that evolution is undirected, stemming from *random* mutations. Those who say there is a purpose to evolution are no longer in the Darwinist paradigm. Whether they want to or not, they are advocating Intelligent Design.
This seems to be missing the point somewhat. Pretty much by definition, "theistic evolutionists" believe in the basic tenets of Intelligent Design (that God has influenced creation to fit God's will, in this case acting through evolutionary processes). The opposition comes when ID advocates propose that ID be taught in the public science curriculum. "Theistic evolutionists", as you call them, are opposed to the teaching of ID as science, as it offers no predictive or explanatory power (other than "God did it").
As I see it, it's a disagreement over how to explain stuff that we don't yet understand. Personally, I think that in a public school setting, "We don't know" is preferable to "We don't know, but some people think God did it."
200% in savings?! Is this a toll road?