They airdropped into Hershey, PA and started busting caps. Killed everyone and razed it to the ground. Said some shit about "culinary crimes against humanity" and "chocoloate isn't supposed to taste like sweetened wax".
It was a bad scene, but some of the survivors who took shelter developed a bizarre affinity for round waffles. Psychologists who specialize in trauma-related cases have identified the condition as "Brussels Syndrome", and treatment typically requires many years of intense therapy, followed by a pharm regimen based on those prescribed for severe PTSD.
Anyway, being that the survivors were mostly comprised of Hershey Company middle managers, and that virtually all of the executives were wiped out in the battle, the upper levels of decision making at the confectionary giant are now heavily populated by individuals with a perverse liking for Belgian Waffles. they have since spread the taste throughout American society, and it has becomke increasingly difficult to find traditional, God-fearing American style waffles.
Being theater is not mutually exclusive to being taken seriously. Just because they couldn't really care less, doesn't mean they are somehow above throwing the people a meaningless and symbolic bone to appease them. Never forget: good theater keeps the lights on and the players employed.
And when they behave neither as an ethical individual, nor as an ethical agent of the government... what then? Or do you mean to insinuate that graft, corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and other abuses of power are somehow in the "national interest"?
I'll give you that slightly different considerations need to be made, and that those considerations might lead to decisions which would be morally reprehensible if made by a private citizen... but it does not logically follow that ALL government decisions are thus justified, and that's a somewhat naive position to hold.
And let's just say you're right, and everyone who works for TSA is stupid and poor. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but internet access is cheap and easy to get, so cheap and easy that even the poor and stupid are well-represented on the internet. Just check out some YouTube comments and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not sure that I would really classify all members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens as human... And I've observed a rather high concentration of inhuman examples at high levels of government.
Yes, but it was consistent, predictable, and given the context there was an internally plausible explanation: however the gun works, it doesn't work right on certain surfaces. I agree that it might have been nice if they found some other way of limiting the portal spawner's power, but all things considered it was pretty well done.
Better the gravity gun from HL2, which was really just an example of what happens when only 1/4 of the objects in your environment are actually objects. WAY better than Red Faction, where terrain could be destroyed, but only in small amounts, only so much within a load zone, had no other physics (yay floating rock islands!), and only where it wasn't actually useful to do so.
"I strongly doubt that doing so would earn any support from content creators."
s/creators/financiers
Actual creators tend to be pretty happy just knowing that somebody thought their content was cool, and if they can find some way to do it while putting food on the table they're downright ecstatic. The money guys who promise to put that food on their table if they'll please just sign on the dotted line, then often sue the actual creator into bankruptcy and forbid them from ever seeing their creation again are never happy with anything, even increasing sales and profits (which would, inevitably, have increased more if it weren't for the damned pirates).
All of the most creative people I've ever met, and most of the ones I've even heard of, have done what they do with virtually no expectation of financial reward and happily spread it into the world for people to see. Many of them find ways to monetize the endeavor to pay the bills without actually charging anyone to experience the work itself. I don't know many people living like rock stars from their creative works, but I do know many who make a decent living with them. I also know a lot of people who make absolutely no money, or even lose money, from their work, but do it anyway because that's what they love to do.
HDCP exists because a lot of suits decided they wanted it, and decided that anybody who didn't want it would have no real choice in the matter. They are able to enforce the decision by making sure that the only equipment available to end users is fully enveloped in whatever protection systems they want: even the creators who don't want it have the option of using it, or not distributing at all, and either way the executives win.
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has nothing to do with consensual adult relationships. It is thoroughly irrelevant to the question of gay marriage, and serves only as a red herring.
The clearest prohibition, from Leviticus, is wedged in between eating pork and picking up sticks on the Sabbath, and uses the same Hebrew adjective "toevah" as many, largely ignored, Levitical prohibitions. My experience is that those people who view homosexuality as inherently immoral read the Bible as confirming such belief, while people who do not view it as one more item on the list of fulfilled Law.
There are far more, and far clearer, prohibitions against heterosexual intercourse and the acquisition of material wealth. The latter was, in fact, one of the key points in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth... when all of the Christians start advocating for the renunciation of wealth and start giving away their money and possessions freely to those in need, I'll consider taking seriously their cries about the evils of homosexuality: until then, it's just hypocrisy bigotry.
Of course, none of that matters, because the US is not a Christian nation. Explicitly. The Treaty of Tripoli, a ratified foreign treaty legally equivalent to The Constitution itself as the highest law of the land, makes it so. Biblical law has no relevance in the law and governance of these United States.
He legally changed his name because fans refer to him as "Ochocinco" and he wanted to put it on his jersey, but because the NFL hates both fans and lulz, they only allow a person's legal surname to appear there. Rather than lay down and take it, he gave them a massive middle finger by changing his name.
The NFL actually has a surprising number of players that behave like btards, it's rather amusing.
"We've been over this, but for you and the rest of the slow-learners..."
Ad hominem, dismissed out of hand.
"Free market principles have are antithetical to slavery, where you get (virtually) free labor out of a human. Free markets do quite well at pricing labor. Forced labor is outside of that realm."
Says who? When? Historically speaking, the less we regulate labor markets, the cheaper labor becomes; whatever theories you may have to the contrary, empirical evidence pretty much trumps them. Furthermore, you clearly treat a system which allows slavery as a system which allows forced labor... such systems, traditionally, do not view slaves as people, but rather as property. Fleshy robots. Slaves are a product, a commodity, to be purchased or sold or manufactured. Barring slavery does nothing to make a market freer, it is a purely social rule.
"You'd think folks like you could come up with an actual example, but I suppose you're just saying this for the echo chamber (which put you up to +5)."
An example of what? The free market not being so great? I'd give one, or two, or more, but they'd be shot down as being failures of something else, "not enough deregulation" is the most common. The Great Depression, the Great Recession, the Gilded Age, the Reconstruction Period (see: The Jungle). Or do you mean an example of the free market creating slave labor? North Korea's Kaesong Industrial region, where South Korean firms hire cheap North Korean labor, but tender their pay directly to the DPRK government, for one.
Maybe, rather than assume that I'm some sort of ultra-leftist commie, you could move the window back from psycholand where the Becks and Limbaughs of the world have pushed it, and consider that maybe, just maybe, not everyone to the left of Friedman is a lunatic. I know that's a "radical" thing to propose, but really, it's for the best.
The same way we both know that absolute Communism doesn't work without having experienced it: any theory which proposes to create a utopia by ignoring the way humans actually behave is destined to fail.
I simply don't have any faith that humans could or would preserve a truly free market economy in a way that ensures survival, equitable distribution of scarce resources (which is, in fact, the entire point) or actually serves the best interests of ALL participants. I find people who believe otherwise are unbearably naive, or lying.
The freest market is, by most definition, a market without any restrictions. Your response says a lot more about right wing knee-jerk responses than my post says about left wing group think.
And where the hell do you get the idea that I don't understand liberty, or that I think the state is a god? Frankly, I find many right-wing concepts of "liberty" to be appalling, the right to sell yourself to the highest bidder isn't freedom, but without a concept of liberty how could I even come to such a conclusion? As for the state being god... I don't believe in a conventional deity, but to the extent we fashion the state into a genuine instrument of our better natures which maintains a just free society, then I suppose it could be argued that would fit my definition of an ideal deity. Definitely a stretch, though.
On the other hand, if it achieves a similar-but-still-obvious end (digital video is by no means a new concept, and neither is streaming it over the web, MPEG-LA didn't invent either idea) by similar-but-slightly-different means which are similar due more to the fact that they achieve the same ends than because one violates the other's IP, a reasonable patent judge might determine that the differences are great enough to deem MPEG-LA's patents overbroad. Courts are entirely capable of overruling decisions and rules made by other government agencies.
That might sound like a long shot, but if Google and Microsoft both throw in behind VP8 it would take some doing to beat them. Of course, if they lost, Apple would own the world for the next 2 decades or so, and FSM help us then. If only some way could be found to bring IBM, HP, or maybe Oracle to the VP8 side of things...
Or, moving away from doing things you perhaps ought not do... what if you're talking to prospective employers? What if you're going through issues in your personal life which are messy or acrimonious (ie. divorce) and simply can't let them to overlap with your job? What if your employer views all other employment, regardless of nature, as a conflict of interest and will act vindictively toward employees who take them on? What if you just don't want your employer to know what you do on your own time, because it's none of their business?
I can think of all sorts of reasons I wouldn't want my employer watching what I do off the clock even if what I'm doing is completely valid.
I can also see why the person footing the bill would have a right to see what it's being used for. Especially in this case, where the employer is, ultimately, ME. I don't want government employees doing inappropriate things with a phone I PAID FOR, and if they don't like it, they can either find a new line of work or pay for it themselves.
"Did you also troll discussions involving Nintendo when they dropped GB support from the DS (and again when GBA support was dropped from the DSi)?"
I heard a great deal of whining about that at the time, and every now and then I still hear it come up amongst GB enthusiasts. Yhe bottom line there, though, is that people tend to be more accepting when there is a clear physical reason that something can't be done.
"How about the 360's (initially) piss-poor backwards compatibility and Sega's complete ignorance of the concept?"
Microsoft got sick of the bitching and fixed it, Sega got sick of the bitching and folded. Both issues were widely known and often complained about, until they were made moot.
One of the issues here is that Sony already created a precedent for backwards compatibility: the PS2 could always run PSX games, and the 80gb PS3s were perfectly capable of running games from BOTH of those systems. Furthermore, with the amount of power available in the PS3, it should be fairly trivial to run PS2 games in an emulation mode without the need for any additional hardware at all. They could even sell it as an add-on, and make a decent chunk of change. Instead, they want to give lame excuses and pretend that it is just impossible to do something that they've already done and everyone knows about.
Before someone pulls a [citation needed] on you, this can be largely corroborated by wading through Encyclopedia Dramatica. Granted, you'll be exposed to a vast amount of shock porn, racism, homophobia and petty bickering along the way, but for a site devoted to trolling and memes it is often astonishingly (and brutally) factual.
I regret to inform you that you have been outbid. Privacy regulations and campaign contribution rules prevent me from telling you who the bidder was by name, sorry.
I can, however, tell you that all of the Dow Jones Industrial Average companies outbid you. Have a nice day, and don't forget to vote in November:snicker:.
Correct, even here in Massachusetts, widely regarded as downright stifling to gun owners and 2nd amendment rights, civilians are able to own, purchase and sell fully automatic weapons. Anyone who tells you otherwise is quite simply mistaken, and I assure you that there are MANY mistaken people here. Even a lot of gun dealers think you can't, and tell everyone who will listen.
Slashdot Mirror
"Do you say the disk is 9% worse, or 10x worse?"
Probably depends on which product we're advertising. No, scratch that, it depends ENTIRELY on which product we're advertising.
The correlation isn't with cats, though. It's with human toxo infections. You're grossly oversimplifying the process of disease propagation.
They airdropped into Hershey, PA and started busting caps. Killed everyone and razed it to the ground. Said some shit about "culinary crimes against humanity" and "chocoloate isn't supposed to taste like sweetened wax".
It was a bad scene, but some of the survivors who took shelter developed a bizarre affinity for round waffles. Psychologists who specialize in trauma-related cases have identified the condition as "Brussels Syndrome", and treatment typically requires many years of intense therapy, followed by a pharm regimen based on those prescribed for severe PTSD.
Anyway, being that the survivors were mostly comprised of Hershey Company middle managers, and that virtually all of the executives were wiped out in the battle, the upper levels of decision making at the confectionary giant are now heavily populated by individuals with a perverse liking for Belgian Waffles. they have since spread the taste throughout American society, and it has becomke increasingly difficult to find traditional, God-fearing American style waffles.
It's tragic, really.
Being theater is not mutually exclusive to being taken seriously. Just because they couldn't really care less, doesn't mean they are somehow above throwing the people a meaningless and symbolic bone to appease them. Never forget: good theater keeps the lights on and the players employed.
And when they behave neither as an ethical individual, nor as an ethical agent of the government... what then? Or do you mean to insinuate that graft, corruption, nepotism, cronyism, and other abuses of power are somehow in the "national interest"?
I'll give you that slightly different considerations need to be made, and that those considerations might lead to decisions which would be morally reprehensible if made by a private citizen... but it does not logically follow that ALL government decisions are thus justified, and that's a somewhat naive position to hold.
So, you're a total prick?
And let's just say you're right, and everyone who works for TSA is stupid and poor. Perhaps you haven't noticed, but internet access is cheap and easy to get, so cheap and easy that even the poor and stupid are well-represented on the internet. Just check out some YouTube comments and you'll see what I mean.
I'm not sure that I would really classify all members of Homo Sapiens Sapiens as human... And I've observed a rather high concentration of inhuman examples at high levels of government.
Yes, but it was consistent, predictable, and given the context there was an internally plausible explanation: however the gun works, it doesn't work right on certain surfaces. I agree that it might have been nice if they found some other way of limiting the portal spawner's power, but all things considered it was pretty well done.
Better the gravity gun from HL2, which was really just an example of what happens when only 1/4 of the objects in your environment are actually objects. WAY better than Red Faction, where terrain could be destroyed, but only in small amounts, only so much within a load zone, had no other physics (yay floating rock islands!), and only where it wasn't actually useful to do so.
The irony, of course, is that the Constitution states that treaties are the highest law of the land, equivalent to the Constitution itself.
Knowing that detail makes your post quite comical.
"I strongly doubt that doing so would earn any support from content creators."
s/creators/financiers
Actual creators tend to be pretty happy just knowing that somebody thought their content was cool, and if they can find some way to do it while putting food on the table they're downright ecstatic. The money guys who promise to put that food on their table if they'll please just sign on the dotted line, then often sue the actual creator into bankruptcy and forbid them from ever seeing their creation again are never happy with anything, even increasing sales and profits (which would, inevitably, have increased more if it weren't for the damned pirates).
All of the most creative people I've ever met, and most of the ones I've even heard of, have done what they do with virtually no expectation of financial reward and happily spread it into the world for people to see. Many of them find ways to monetize the endeavor to pay the bills without actually charging anyone to experience the work itself. I don't know many people living like rock stars from their creative works, but I do know many who make a decent living with them. I also know a lot of people who make absolutely no money, or even lose money, from their work, but do it anyway because that's what they love to do.
HDCP exists because a lot of suits decided they wanted it, and decided that anybody who didn't want it would have no real choice in the matter. They are able to enforce the decision by making sure that the only equipment available to end users is fully enveloped in whatever protection systems they want: even the creators who don't want it have the option of using it, or not distributing at all, and either way the executives win.
I'm sure they'd insist upon it...
The story of Sodom and Gomorrah has nothing to do with consensual adult relationships. It is thoroughly irrelevant to the question of gay marriage, and serves only as a red herring.
The clearest prohibition, from Leviticus, is wedged in between eating pork and picking up sticks on the Sabbath, and uses the same Hebrew adjective "toevah" as many, largely ignored, Levitical prohibitions. My experience is that those people who view homosexuality as inherently immoral read the Bible as confirming such belief, while people who do not view it as one more item on the list of fulfilled Law.
There are far more, and far clearer, prohibitions against heterosexual intercourse and the acquisition of material wealth. The latter was, in fact, one of the key points in the ministry of Jesus of Nazareth... when all of the Christians start advocating for the renunciation of wealth and start giving away their money and possessions freely to those in need, I'll consider taking seriously their cries about the evils of homosexuality: until then, it's just hypocrisy bigotry.
Of course, none of that matters, because the US is not a Christian nation. Explicitly. The Treaty of Tripoli, a ratified foreign treaty legally equivalent to The Constitution itself as the highest law of the land, makes it so. Biblical law has no relevance in the law and governance of these United States.
He legally changed his name because fans refer to him as "Ochocinco" and he wanted to put it on his jersey, but because the NFL hates both fans and lulz, they only allow a person's legal surname to appear there. Rather than lay down and take it, he gave them a massive middle finger by changing his name.
The NFL actually has a surprising number of players that behave like btards, it's rather amusing.
"We've been over this, but for you and the rest of the slow-learners..."
Ad hominem, dismissed out of hand.
"Free market principles have are antithetical to slavery, where you get (virtually) free labor out of a human. Free markets do quite well at pricing labor. Forced labor is outside of that realm."
Says who? When? Historically speaking, the less we regulate labor markets, the cheaper labor becomes; whatever theories you may have to the contrary, empirical evidence pretty much trumps them. Furthermore, you clearly treat a system which allows slavery as a system which allows forced labor... such systems, traditionally, do not view slaves as people, but rather as property. Fleshy robots. Slaves are a product, a commodity, to be purchased or sold or manufactured. Barring slavery does nothing to make a market freer, it is a purely social rule.
"You'd think folks like you could come up with an actual example, but I suppose you're just saying this for the echo chamber (which put you up to +5)."
An example of what? The free market not being so great? I'd give one, or two, or more, but they'd be shot down as being failures of something else, "not enough deregulation" is the most common. The Great Depression, the Great Recession, the Gilded Age, the Reconstruction Period (see: The Jungle). Or do you mean an example of the free market creating slave labor? North Korea's Kaesong Industrial region, where South Korean firms hire cheap North Korean labor, but tender their pay directly to the DPRK government, for one.
Maybe, rather than assume that I'm some sort of ultra-leftist commie, you could move the window back from psycholand where the Becks and Limbaughs of the world have pushed it, and consider that maybe, just maybe, not everyone to the left of Friedman is a lunatic. I know that's a "radical" thing to propose, but really, it's for the best.
The same way we both know that absolute Communism doesn't work without having experienced it: any theory which proposes to create a utopia by ignoring the way humans actually behave is destined to fail.
I simply don't have any faith that humans could or would preserve a truly free market economy in a way that ensures survival, equitable distribution of scarce resources (which is, in fact, the entire point) or actually serves the best interests of ALL participants. I find people who believe otherwise are unbearably naive, or lying.
The freest market is, by most definition, a market without any restrictions. Your response says a lot more about right wing knee-jerk responses than my post says about left wing group think.
And where the hell do you get the idea that I don't understand liberty, or that I think the state is a god? Frankly, I find many right-wing concepts of "liberty" to be appalling, the right to sell yourself to the highest bidder isn't freedom, but without a concept of liberty how could I even come to such a conclusion? As for the state being god... I don't believe in a conventional deity, but to the extent we fashion the state into a genuine instrument of our better natures which maintains a just free society, then I suppose it could be argued that would fit my definition of an ideal deity. Definitely a stretch, though.
On the other hand, if it achieves a similar-but-still-obvious end (digital video is by no means a new concept, and neither is streaming it over the web, MPEG-LA didn't invent either idea) by similar-but-slightly-different means which are similar due more to the fact that they achieve the same ends than because one violates the other's IP, a reasonable patent judge might determine that the differences are great enough to deem MPEG-LA's patents overbroad. Courts are entirely capable of overruling decisions and rules made by other government agencies.
That might sound like a long shot, but if Google and Microsoft both throw in behind VP8 it would take some doing to beat them. Of course, if they lost, Apple would own the world for the next 2 decades or so, and FSM help us then. If only some way could be found to bring IBM, HP, or maybe Oracle to the VP8 side of things...
Don't be silly, of course it does. And so do prohibitions on human slavery. The Free Market just isn't nearly so great as people make it out to be.
Or, moving away from doing things you perhaps ought not do... what if you're talking to prospective employers? What if you're going through issues in your personal life which are messy or acrimonious (ie. divorce) and simply can't let them to overlap with your job? What if your employer views all other employment, regardless of nature, as a conflict of interest and will act vindictively toward employees who take them on? What if you just don't want your employer to know what you do on your own time, because it's none of their business?
I can think of all sorts of reasons I wouldn't want my employer watching what I do off the clock even if what I'm doing is completely valid.
I can also see why the person footing the bill would have a right to see what it's being used for. Especially in this case, where the employer is, ultimately, ME. I don't want government employees doing inappropriate things with a phone I PAID FOR, and if they don't like it, they can either find a new line of work or pay for it themselves.
It's Hannah Montana.
OH GOD WHAT HAVE WE DONE?!?
Kill it with fire, kill it with fire!
"Did you also troll discussions involving Nintendo when they dropped GB support from the DS (and again when GBA support was dropped from the DSi)?"
I heard a great deal of whining about that at the time, and every now and then I still hear it come up amongst GB enthusiasts. Yhe bottom line there, though, is that people tend to be more accepting when there is a clear physical reason that something can't be done.
"How about the 360's (initially) piss-poor backwards compatibility and Sega's complete ignorance of the concept?"
Microsoft got sick of the bitching and fixed it, Sega got sick of the bitching and folded. Both issues were widely known and often complained about, until they were made moot.
One of the issues here is that Sony already created a precedent for backwards compatibility: the PS2 could always run PSX games, and the 80gb PS3s were perfectly capable of running games from BOTH of those systems. Furthermore, with the amount of power available in the PS3, it should be fairly trivial to run PS2 games in an emulation mode without the need for any additional hardware at all. They could even sell it as an add-on, and make a decent chunk of change. Instead, they want to give lame excuses and pretend that it is just impossible to do something that they've already done and everyone knows about.
Before someone pulls a [citation needed] on you, this can be largely corroborated by wading through Encyclopedia Dramatica. Granted, you'll be exposed to a vast amount of shock porn, racism, homophobia and petty bickering along the way, but for a site devoted to trolling and memes it is often astonishingly (and brutally) factual.
You can't vote out government contractors.
I regret to inform you that you have been outbid. Privacy regulations and campaign contribution rules prevent me from telling you who the bidder was by name, sorry.
I can, however, tell you that all of the Dow Jones Industrial Average companies outbid you. Have a nice day, and don't forget to vote in November :snicker:.
Correct, even here in Massachusetts, widely regarded as downright stifling to gun owners and 2nd amendment rights, civilians are able to own, purchase and sell fully automatic weapons. Anyone who tells you otherwise is quite simply mistaken, and I assure you that there are MANY mistaken people here. Even a lot of gun dealers think you can't, and tell everyone who will listen.