Reading that article I almost laughed myself into a coughing fit. Wow, if there was ever an incisive literary critic of horrible literature, he takes the cake.

If the U.S. Congress could fix their debt problem they would have already, I rather doubt they like pissing away money in interest payments. My personal opinion is that it is politically and physically impossible for them to do so, thus the US will wind up defaulting. It's just a matter of how and when you want the default to go down. Do you prefer straight up telling your creditors to go take a hike or do you try to inflate your way out, hoping that with the addition of magic fairy dust you can somehow avoid the resulting market correction due to your actions? The US chooses the latter and that is how they will default, it just won't be called that. To mutilate a quote from Warren Buffet, "the market is a voting system in the short run and a weighing system in the long run."

It's too bad really, I quite like my country despite all of our shortcomings, and I'd rather not see major social upheaval on my doorstep and on my streets. On the upside, it means there is a chance that after all that happens we won't be financing a global imperialistic military, a welfare state, or foreign dictators. There is always a silver lining.

I hadn't gone to much more than 1 movie a year (Ironman and I couldn't even remember the others, mediocre obviously) for the past couple of years being underwhelmed with well most of the products, the prices steadily going up, so on.

So recently I've been trying to make an effort to see more flicks and I did go to two recently, and these problems immediately stood out to me:
1) The picture is kinda grainy, it isn't a dealbreaker for me but for what they're charging it's definitely annoying
2) The sound is just loud enough to make my ears hurt. I mean if they just turned it down a bit it'd be fine but at least till your drawn into the film it's a huge detractor for me, I guess I could sit in the back but it's all surround sound anyways right?
3) Maybe it's just inflation but the prices seem to be a bit high, even the matinee isn't all that cheap, but also not a dealbreaker

Well I guess I wouldn't care if I about the price or get too picky about picture quality if I had a good time, but films continue to underwhelm and the sound continues to be too damn high. Also I'm only in my mid-20s so it's not like I'm some old geezer going on about kids and their new fangled noise. Oh well maybe I'll try to do more outdoors stuff instead, more personal too.

I didn't buy the game because of these... issues. So if 3 and 4 are more or less untrue then I guess my friends who bought it don't know what they're are talking about. But I'm dead positive 2 and 5 are true which is enough reason for me not to buy the game. And by not buy the game I don't mean hit the torrents, I refuse to sink to blizzards level.

Okay, so it may not seem like a big deal if you have a decent net connection, heck even satellite would be fine, however if you don't it's a nightmare. Hence no sale. Yes it's trivially easy to just install the game on 10-15 PCs, it's also pretty easy to pirate the stupid thing from what I hear so the bloody mess is just token resistance (as others have pointed out). I guess we'll just have to politely disagree.

Are you being serious? Okay let me list off all the things SC2 does that I find to be jerk-ish, call them DRM or Flying Monkeys With Tophats, I don't really care they're asinine:
1) Online activation for install (this one I'm cool with, especially if it means I don't need to type in a bloody CD key again... either or would be cool but whatever)
2) Periodic activation every 30 days - this one seriously ticks me off after I've already activated once then wtf?
3) Can only play offline/not logged in under guest account, prisoner on your own machine blah blah, also that play can't be translated to your battlenet account
4) must make a battlenet account to install the game, and that comes with several onerous restrictions which I won't go into here
5) no LAN - where I grew up, which is where my parents still live, which is the only place where I see all three of my brothers at the same time, there is no freaking internet. Now where I'm at the 'net is very nice, beyond nice, but I will never pay money for a game which asks me to be beholden to what the dev's thought was 'enabling piracy' when that feature is and has been part and parcel of games since I was old enough to hold a mouse, as regards LAN, I don't care if the shadow copy comes back or not, we can each buy a copy that's cool, but I want my game to just work, not install haxxorpatch.exe just to play the stupid thing, I hear DOW2:R has very nice LAN capabilities, guess which one I bought?

The reason I can live with a one-time on install online activation but not the periodic one, and not the must be logged into "really use it", and not the no LAN play is practical too: at my parents house we'd haul our machines to somewhere with a connection get the games working and installed, unplug, test, then haul them back home, ya it was a PITA but it worked. But with the periodic or always on stuff... that's no longer viable. And any dev' who thinks it's "ok because everybody has internet and if they don't they must live in the backwoods lol" will never see a red cent from my ass.

With that in mind:

is either ignorant or very dishonest.

Right, so what makes a better computer product is just some dude in a lab with exotic mathematics, groundbreaking chemicals, new ways to make magnets etc? This is flagrant bullshit just as much as the "I don't need no stinkin' math n' science" type of thinking is, it's just better disguised. I wish slashdotters (and the rest of the psuedo-intellectual crowd re: I 3 science but I couldn't lift a finger to help cuz you know...) would remember the point to a market is to sell things other people want. That is to say if people are paying money for it, then they probably value it for some reason. Maybe it annoys them less, maybe it looks better, maybe it helps them get shit done, maybe it helps them remember stuff and the list goes on. You know what, you're right there have been some tech bubbles in our short little history but life goes on and if you are dumb enough to get ensnared by one well then you were gonna waste your money somewhere, BS vaporware company was just an outlet. In short if this is really how you think you are going to be very bitter for a very long time. I hope you're not.

I'd tell the CA legislature that if a user 'opts out' they also opt out of the ability to use my services.

On a more serious note, users already have multiple ways to opt out:
1) Use a different frickin website
2) Don't use the websites
3) disable cookies for that site
etc.

But never let it be said that the CA legislature thought through its actions or that it didn't try to stick its nose in other people's business while they had plenty of their own self-created problems.

I just built a gaming rig, this past summer, and I ordered a razer mouse and keyboard off newegg to go with it, both died due to manufacturing defects within 6 months. I checked around on google and it looks like a bunch of other people had the same problems with those products and then some got RMAs and the replacement units did the same thing... I saved myself the UPS fee and put it towards a nice logitech mouse and keyboard, sturdy as heck.

Sorry post got screwed up: last bit should read: I mean, climate change arguments aside, I think that there is something about the "amount of refugees" in that quote, but I just can't put my finger on it. So ya, maybe that report is an assessment or projection of areas that are at higher risk or whatnot, but that specific bit pretty clearly states an amount and a projected future amount.

Ok, let's read it again:

I mean, climate change arguments aside, I think that there is something about the "amount tion on areasof refugees" in that quote, but I just can't put my finger on it. So ya, maybe that report is an assessment or projec that are at higher risk or whatnot, but that specific bit pretty clearly states an amount and a projected future amount.

Well it's really too bad that a decent space program wasn't maintained. But I don't know, I've just got this feeling that there's not that much stuff to do up there unless/until you have better robotics. I'm not against a modern manned space venture based on some principle, it's just that it doesn't seem all that useful right now. If I'm wrong feel free to point it out.

Right, because you HAVE to buy an iPhone and a toyota or hell a car and a cell phone for that matter. I know successful well to-do people with neither.

Exactly. My personal crystal ball says: eventually windows will be surpassed as on OS by one that does everything out of the box without the user dicking around on the net installing adobe, firefox etc. MS can never do this for fear of anti-trust suits, it's not like they have the functionality sitting around they can push as an update so when it happens they'll be 3 years behind and playing catchup. After that we'll suddenly realize how we screwed them over. I don't have a particular affinity for the company but ya... Also that's to say nothing of whether or not MS would've ever pulled their head out of their ass and made this kinda stuff happen regardless of lawsuits. I mean you have that many resources, income employees etc and you can't just make stuff happen seriously?

So my personal backup situation looks like this:
-email on webmail
-system images on a external hard drive, which don't get updated terribly often ~once a year
-another external hard drive to backup /home more frequently
-in case my externals fail (say flood, fire whatnot) important docs and pictures in dropbox

So my question is this: is there a better offsite backup which offers a large amount of storage space (my system images clock in at ~550GB) for relatively cheap? Last time I checked a terabyte of data on E3 will run about ~$1700 a year? So what does everybody else do? Note that even the largest paid dropbox size is 100GB and a lot of the competition is the same I think. Worst case scenario for me is I lose everything except email, docs and pictures, which isn't the end of the world but I do have some fairly expensive software that I'd lose... What does everybody else do, upload it to bittorrent: Katy_PerRy_latest_single?

I think the question as posed (by the OP not you) is demeaning to both science and religion but hey that's just me. What I mean is this: science is an iterative process whereby we figure out the underlying rules, try to build machinery that takes advantage of that, until the machinery proves that the rules weren't good enough and the process starts over. That's not a bad thing it's just the way it is and given that we're not perfect how it's always gonna be.

I won't go into what religion is or isn't because it's just bound to start a flame war at best, but if one is looking for an entire complete set of philosophy (of science and the world around you) which can be proven a posteriori or by use of logic starting with "I think therefore I am" and so on until one reaches the point whereby he can develop a system of math and science as we currently know them without assuming any axioms or "beliefs" on the basis of "it's just the way it is" then I think you're smoking it. Namely there are philosophical underpinnings to science and math which you essentially can't "prove" on the other hand the two differ quite a bit in practice.

But all this posturing that "science" is better because you can prove it, sounds like elitism to me (and vice versa). Namely there are certain things you can't, and one or the other isn't better, they're just different. Does science give us a good understanding of the value of human life, or what morals to follow or what should legal and not? Not really, and not directly. But how many theological treatises by the Vatican got us to the moon? None. See they're just different things for different problems. Anybody who tries to conflate the two as conflicting or if one is better is bullshitting you.