Not long ago I was involved in a discussion that included a 'birther.' When presented with the overwhelming evidence that his position was false, his response was that he "believed" that Obama wasn't an American citizen, and that no amount of evidence to the contrary would ever change that.
What can you say to that kind of irrational response?
The Japanese actually rewrote their history at least once before. Near the end of the 19th Century those in power took a society that was on the brink of achieving a peaceful transition to democracy and over the course of a generation changed it into the kind of totalitarian state that could commit atrocities like Nanking.
Some of the changes they made then were very similar to the changes being suggested in Texas: emphasizing the "fact" that their nation was "divinely" inspired, among other things.
The quality of TV programming hasn't gone down any over my lifetime. I've just gotten older and wiser. Any perception to the contrary is likely heavily influenced by nostalgia.
To take TV news as an example, 60 minutes is an award winning TV news magazine that has never been more than a tabloid. It's always been a mix of fluff pieces and heavily slanted "investigative" pieces.
The French do not deserve the reputation for military ineptitude that Americans like to give them, but it was the other way around in Indochina. The US warned the French not to go back into Vietnam following WWII, but French national pride caused them to do so anyway in an effort to restore the prestige they felt they'd lost in the war.
The US then backed the French play, going so far as to reject Ho Chi Minh's request for aid after his having issued a declaration of independence partly modeled on our own. With the global situation rapidly settling into a bipolar state, the Vietnamese independence movement was left with no choice but to seek help from the other camp and became a Communist movement.
When the French pulled out, they may have indeed warned the US of the situation, but by that time preventing the supposed domino effect had become the foundation of US foreign policy, and our participation in some way or another was pretty much inevitable.
So, while the poster you were responding to has a laughably imbalanced view of Napoleon's achievements (the man's way of waging war was distilled into a set of doctrines that still form part of the foundation of western military thinking), the example you used to counter him with was an unfortunate one.
Yes, but some would like to be indexed without showing all that other information. For example, I would like for those who know be to be able to find me on Facebook by searching for my name, but I would rather they didn't get any of my information until I choose to add them as a friend. Why is that so difficult for some people (including those at Facebook apparently) to understand?
Disturbing the peace and trespassing are both generally misdemeanors, and one or the other would have been been appropriate if such was the situation. Instead the managers insisted that the police charge the woman with a felony. Hardly a case of the punishment fitting the crime.
Why does someone always bring this up? It's a game, not a simulator!
If I wanted to learn how to play a guitar, then I'd pick up a guitar. I just want to have some fun with my friends playing a game that happens to include music we like.
Please, stop acting as if people are using these games as a substitute for playing music, they're not. If all the music games were to suddenly disappear overnight, people would not go out and buy real instruments, they'd simply play a different game.
I don't know what criteria they used, but having lived most of my life in NWA, I can give you a few reasons why Bentonville could be considered bad for IT workers:
1) Payscale: you're going to be making less than you would doing an equivalent job in a different market. This goes for almost any job you work in the area.
2) Cost of Living: this is the justification for the lower payscale, and housing, taxes, and gas are cheaper here than in California, but everything else is the same or more expensive. Admittedly, housing and taxes can be a huge chunk, but not enough to justify the payscale differences. Of course the cheaper gas is nice because of number 3...
3) Public Transportation: there is none. You're lucky if there's even a sidewalk all the way to where you want to go. There is one company that provides limited options, but it focuses on serving the elderly, so isn't an option if you want to use it to commute to work.
4) Job Opportunities: there are none if you're dissatisfied with your current position. Most, if not all, of those 81 jobs are going to be with Wal-Mart, so if you don't like working for them you're most likely going to have to move to find a new job.
5) Dry County: seriously, you can't buy alcohol in a retail store anywhere in the county. This might sound OK if you don't drink, but it means that everyone who does has to drive outside the county to go buy their alcohol, and many decide to sample a bit before driving back.
6) Not Really A City: last time I checked, the city of Concord, CA had a greater population than the entire NWA metro area. Bentonville has a population of 32,000.
7) Shopping: there's a surprisingly large selection of shopping opportunities given the population, but that doesn't extend to the stores many tech geeks like to shop at. No Apple store, no Fry's and nothing that comes close. If you want to buy tech supplies in a retail store you're pretty much stuck with Best Buy.
8) Diversity: there isn't a lot, at least compared to other areas of the US.
I'm sure I could think of others given time. Don't get me wrong, it isn't a terrible place to live, and I could give a long list of good things about the area, but I agree with the article that it wouldn't be a great place for most IT workers that I've known.
Aside from the typo, that's exactly what I thought when reading the summary.
There are some other good points later in this discussion about the way bing works making this necessary for parental controls to work, but it would also make filtering out such results easier at the level of ISPs and governments as well.
I realize that a big part of the player base for Galaxies was Star Wars fans, but that wasn't the whole of the player base. I was a fan, but I didn't want to play Luke Skywalker, I wanted to play Han Solo so I was never interested in the great Jedi unlock quests. My friend wasn't a fan, but wanted to play a Jedi because it was hard to unlock, and when they changed it he lost interest in the game completely. To this day he still talks about how it was his favorite MMO ever up until they started changing it instead of fixing it.
I'm also not sure what the grandparent post is talking about when they say it sucked because of the sand-box style of play. There were a lot of things that were either unbalanced or simply didn't work in that game, but the open sand-box style of play is what kept us in the game despite all of that.
Notice that the antipathy is coming from people that hold political positions like sheriff or attorney general.
They are complaining about this now because of the "craigslist killer" incident bringing the issue to public awareness, and the accompanying cries from certain quarters to "do something about it."
I doubt most of the people that do the actual work of law enforcement are happy about the coming changes.
I haven't played The Witcher, but if there are no "good or bad" choices, then how is it a moral choice? Morality is the determination of what is good and what is not. If all the choices are morally neutral, then there is no moral choice.
On a more general note, the problem with using shades of gray in a system that awards points for "good and bad" actions, is that what is "neutral" is going to be a very subjective area and ultimately will reflect more on the morality of the developer than the player.
Take, for example, the use of mind altering substances. Is drinking alcohol morally neutral or an evil act? You're going to find quite a few people who claim the latter. Change alcohol to marijuana or cocaine and that percentage is going to go up significantly.
What if the game gives you the option to cheat on your taxes (leaving aside for the moment that it would probably be a very boring game)? Some would consider that a "good" action as a rebellion against unfair government oppression, others as a neutral action and yet others as "evil."
It's much easier to simply stick with moral choices which 90%+ of the population see as black and white.
"They'll raise prices": only if the market will bear it, which it might or might not depending on what they're selling.
"lower dividends": if their profits are lower, then yeah, but I don't see a problem here. Maybe their stockholders will be less likely to approve of moving everything but the corporate HQ overseas when they see it isn't saving money to do so.
"fewer jobs": Not for the US. Take away tax incentives and moving operations overseas becomes less attractive, maybe unattractive enough to actually move some of those operations already overseas back here. The end result could easily be more jobs in the US.
Another possible benefit is the increased competitiveness of small businesses which have been unable to take advantage of offshoring their operations. Now they'll be on a slightly more level playing field when compared to the big guys.
Just because you'd love to do something doesn't mean that you'd be good at it. I'd love to be a porn star, but my movies would be highly unlikely to sell very well.
On a more serious note, most people with three kids to feed won't take that pay cut no matter how much they love the job. Most people with a family are going to take the higher pay when offered a choice between work they love that pays poorly and work they're OK with that pays well.
It's no accident that most teachers I know are either childless or have a spouse with a higher paying job.
I've played most of the LEGO games, and completing the basic game has always been easy. Getting every single achievement and unlock is hard. This is one of the nice touches that lets these games be interesting both to children and their parents.
Why wouldn't they want that association? It's not like it would be the first time that a piece of NASA hardware took its name from a science fiction TV show.
Replace every instance of "gay" in the above post with "mixed" as in mixed race marriage. I find that it helps clarify just where the "bias and ignorance" lies.
Society's perceived best interest can take a flying leap when it tramples all over individual rights.
Every edition has had shakeups in the core classes. 2nd Edition dropped a bunch of favorites that were later reintroduced in supplements. 3rd Edition did the same thing.
My comments on the playability of the core books could have probably been a bit clearer: they're just as playable as the core books for any of the previous editions. Every edition of D&D has had a series of expansions for the core books, and I'm not sure why the poster I was responding to thought that 4th Edition would be any different. Heck, there were at least 12 books a year coming out for 3.5 from WotC alone, let alone the number of books coming out under the d20 license and the OGL!
This is the business model for just about every professional RPG publisher out there: release the core book or books and then release a stream of expansions. If they don't do that many gamers will consider the game to be "dead" and won't buy or play it at all.
It had its pluses and minuses. It got some good companies into the business, like Green Ronin.
Looking beyond the retail shelf to the RPG industry as a whole, there was an explosion of indy RPGs like Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard right at the same time that the OGL was at its height. Probably some of the most innovative systems ever created in the shadow of the OGL behemoth.
So in other words, you'll use their product as long as you don't have to pay for it.
The game is perfectly playable using the three core books, just as every other edition of the game was. Just like every other edition of the game, they continue to produce more books because that's their business model: sell books.
Also, I'm not a big fan of their online model, but it's not $15 per month, it's $4.95 to $7.95 per month depending on your subscription plan.
You don't think that's going to have a chilling effect on other Fox News employees?
Entertainment news is still news, and entertainment reporters are still reporters. Treating them differently in a case such as this sets a precedent that others in the company will be sure to notice.
Let's look at that from a different angle: corruption at the highest levels of government often includes involvement by large corporations. How often do you think that reporters are going to expose that corruption when they know they can get fired for something as harmless as reviewing a pirated movie?
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The National Socialist German Workers Party was no more socialist than the Democratic People's Republic of Korea is democratic.
It was a fascist state which is a corporatist form of government on the far right of the political spectrum.
Stop trying to rewrite history.
Sadly, this is so true.
Not long ago I was involved in a discussion that included a 'birther.' When presented with the overwhelming evidence that his position was false, his response was that he "believed" that Obama wasn't an American citizen, and that no amount of evidence to the contrary would ever change that.
What can you say to that kind of irrational response?
The Japanese actually rewrote their history at least once before. Near the end of the 19th Century those in power took a society that was on the brink of achieving a peaceful transition to democracy and over the course of a generation changed it into the kind of totalitarian state that could commit atrocities like Nanking.
Some of the changes they made then were very similar to the changes being suggested in Texas: emphasizing the "fact" that their nation was "divinely" inspired, among other things.
The quality of TV programming hasn't gone down any over my lifetime. I've just gotten older and wiser. Any perception to the contrary is likely heavily influenced by nostalgia.
To take TV news as an example, 60 minutes is an award winning TV news magazine that has never been more than a tabloid. It's always been a mix of fluff pieces and heavily slanted "investigative" pieces.
The French do not deserve the reputation for military ineptitude that Americans like to give them, but it was the other way around in Indochina. The US warned the French not to go back into Vietnam following WWII, but French national pride caused them to do so anyway in an effort to restore the prestige they felt they'd lost in the war.
The US then backed the French play, going so far as to reject Ho Chi Minh's request for aid after his having issued a declaration of independence partly modeled on our own. With the global situation rapidly settling into a bipolar state, the Vietnamese independence movement was left with no choice but to seek help from the other camp and became a Communist movement.
When the French pulled out, they may have indeed warned the US of the situation, but by that time preventing the supposed domino effect had become the foundation of US foreign policy, and our participation in some way or another was pretty much inevitable.
So, while the poster you were responding to has a laughably imbalanced view of Napoleon's achievements (the man's way of waging war was distilled into a set of doctrines that still form part of the foundation of western military thinking), the example you used to counter him with was an unfortunate one.
Yes, but some would like to be indexed without showing all that other information. For example, I would like for those who know be to be able to find me on Facebook by searching for my name, but I would rather they didn't get any of my information until I choose to add them as a friend. Why is that so difficult for some people (including those at Facebook apparently) to understand?
Disturbing the peace and trespassing are both generally misdemeanors, and one or the other would have been been appropriate if such was the situation. Instead the managers insisted that the police charge the woman with a felony. Hardly a case of the punishment fitting the crime.
Apparently you missed that this wasn't Canadian public health care, but a private insurance company.
The story shows the downside of profit-motivated health insurance, no matter where it is.
Why does someone always bring this up? It's a game, not a simulator!
If I wanted to learn how to play a guitar, then I'd pick up a guitar. I just want to have some fun with my friends playing a game that happens to include music we like.
Please, stop acting as if people are using these games as a substitute for playing music, they're not. If all the music games were to suddenly disappear overnight, people would not go out and buy real instruments, they'd simply play a different game.
I don't know what criteria they used, but having lived most of my life in NWA, I can give you a few reasons why Bentonville could be considered bad for IT workers:
1) Payscale: you're going to be making less than you would doing an equivalent job in a different market. This goes for almost any job you work in the area.
2) Cost of Living: this is the justification for the lower payscale, and housing, taxes, and gas are cheaper here than in California, but everything else is the same or more expensive. Admittedly, housing and taxes can be a huge chunk, but not enough to justify the payscale differences. Of course the cheaper gas is nice because of number 3...
3) Public Transportation: there is none. You're lucky if there's even a sidewalk all the way to where you want to go. There is one company that provides limited options, but it focuses on serving the elderly, so isn't an option if you want to use it to commute to work.
4) Job Opportunities: there are none if you're dissatisfied with your current position. Most, if not all, of those 81 jobs are going to be with Wal-Mart, so if you don't like working for them you're most likely going to have to move to find a new job.
5) Dry County: seriously, you can't buy alcohol in a retail store anywhere in the county. This might sound OK if you don't drink, but it means that everyone who does has to drive outside the county to go buy their alcohol, and many decide to sample a bit before driving back.
6) Not Really A City: last time I checked, the city of Concord, CA had a greater population than the entire NWA metro area. Bentonville has a population of 32,000.
7) Shopping: there's a surprisingly large selection of shopping opportunities given the population, but that doesn't extend to the stores many tech geeks like to shop at. No Apple store, no Fry's and nothing that comes close. If you want to buy tech supplies in a retail store you're pretty much stuck with Best Buy.
8) Diversity: there isn't a lot, at least compared to other areas of the US.
I'm sure I could think of others given time. Don't get me wrong, it isn't a terrible place to live, and I could give a long list of good things about the area, but I agree with the article that it wouldn't be a great place for most IT workers that I've known.
Why is the parent modded "Offtopic"?
Aside from the typo, that's exactly what I thought when reading the summary.
There are some other good points later in this discussion about the way bing works making this necessary for parental controls to work, but it would also make filtering out such results easier at the level of ISPs and governments as well.
Religion "gets a pass" in France because of the First Amendment to the US Constitution?
I realize that a big part of the player base for Galaxies was Star Wars fans, but that wasn't the whole of the player base. I was a fan, but I didn't want to play Luke Skywalker, I wanted to play Han Solo so I was never interested in the great Jedi unlock quests. My friend wasn't a fan, but wanted to play a Jedi because it was hard to unlock, and when they changed it he lost interest in the game completely. To this day he still talks about how it was his favorite MMO ever up until they started changing it instead of fixing it.
I'm also not sure what the grandparent post is talking about when they say it sucked because of the sand-box style of play. There were a lot of things that were either unbalanced or simply didn't work in that game, but the open sand-box style of play is what kept us in the game despite all of that.
Notice that the antipathy is coming from people that hold political positions like sheriff or attorney general.
They are complaining about this now because of the "craigslist killer" incident bringing the issue to public awareness, and the accompanying cries from certain quarters to "do something about it."
I doubt most of the people that do the actual work of law enforcement are happy about the coming changes.
I haven't played The Witcher, but if there are no "good or bad" choices, then how is it a moral choice? Morality is the determination of what is good and what is not. If all the choices are morally neutral, then there is no moral choice.
On a more general note, the problem with using shades of gray in a system that awards points for "good and bad" actions, is that what is "neutral" is going to be a very subjective area and ultimately will reflect more on the morality of the developer than the player.
Take, for example, the use of mind altering substances. Is drinking alcohol morally neutral or an evil act? You're going to find quite a few people who claim the latter. Change alcohol to marijuana or cocaine and that percentage is going to go up significantly.
What if the game gives you the option to cheat on your taxes (leaving aside for the moment that it would probably be a very boring game)? Some would consider that a "good" action as a rebellion against unfair government oppression, others as a neutral action and yet others as "evil."
It's much easier to simply stick with moral choices which 90%+ of the population see as black and white.
"They'll raise prices": only if the market will bear it, which it might or might not depending on what they're selling.
"lower dividends": if their profits are lower, then yeah, but I don't see a problem here. Maybe their stockholders will be less likely to approve of moving everything but the corporate HQ overseas when they see it isn't saving money to do so.
"fewer jobs": Not for the US. Take away tax incentives and moving operations overseas becomes less attractive, maybe unattractive enough to actually move some of those operations already overseas back here. The end result could easily be more jobs in the US.
Another possible benefit is the increased competitiveness of small businesses which have been unable to take advantage of offshoring their operations. Now they'll be on a slightly more level playing field when compared to the big guys.
Just because you'd love to do something doesn't mean that you'd be good at it. I'd love to be a porn star, but my movies would be highly unlikely to sell very well.
On a more serious note, most people with three kids to feed won't take that pay cut no matter how much they love the job. Most people with a family are going to take the higher pay when offered a choice between work they love that pays poorly and work they're OK with that pays well.
It's no accident that most teachers I know are either childless or have a spouse with a higher paying job.
I've played most of the LEGO games, and completing the basic game has always been easy. Getting every single achievement and unlock is hard. This is one of the nice touches that lets these games be interesting both to children and their parents.
Why wouldn't they want that association? It's not like it would be the first time that a piece of NASA hardware took its name from a science fiction TV show.
Replace every instance of "gay" in the above post with "mixed" as in mixed race marriage. I find that it helps clarify just where the "bias and ignorance" lies.
Society's perceived best interest can take a flying leap when it tramples all over individual rights.
Every edition has had shakeups in the core classes. 2nd Edition dropped a bunch of favorites that were later reintroduced in supplements. 3rd Edition did the same thing.
My comments on the playability of the core books could have probably been a bit clearer: they're just as playable as the core books for any of the previous editions. Every edition of D&D has had a series of expansions for the core books, and I'm not sure why the poster I was responding to thought that 4th Edition would be any different. Heck, there were at least 12 books a year coming out for 3.5 from WotC alone, let alone the number of books coming out under the d20 license and the OGL!
This is the business model for just about every professional RPG publisher out there: release the core book or books and then release a stream of expansions. If they don't do that many gamers will consider the game to be "dead" and won't buy or play it at all.
It had its pluses and minuses. It got some good companies into the business, like Green Ronin.
Looking beyond the retail shelf to the RPG industry as a whole, there was an explosion of indy RPGs like Burning Wheel and Dogs in the Vineyard right at the same time that the OGL was at its height. Probably some of the most innovative systems ever created in the shadow of the OGL behemoth.
So in other words, you'll use their product as long as you don't have to pay for it.
The game is perfectly playable using the three core books, just as every other edition of the game was. Just like every other edition of the game, they continue to produce more books because that's their business model: sell books.
Also, I'm not a big fan of their online model, but it's not $15 per month, it's $4.95 to $7.95 per month depending on your subscription plan.
You don't think that's going to have a chilling effect on other Fox News employees?
Entertainment news is still news, and entertainment reporters are still reporters. Treating them differently in a case such as this sets a precedent that others in the company will be sure to notice.
Let's look at that from a different angle: corruption at the highest levels of government often includes involvement by large corporations. How often do you think that reporters are going to expose that corruption when they know they can get fired for something as harmless as reviewing a pirated movie?