There's enough overlap from one game to another that it doesn't take a fresh 10,000 hours to master the next game that comes along. A surprising amount of the pro level skill is in fact mechanics (as in physically moving quickly and accurately enough to play the game at high level). There are several SC2 professionals that started their careers playing twitch FPS games for example. Within a genre... well there's not that much difference between SC2 and Command and Conquer, let alone Brood War and SC2.

Another aspect: This is probably one of the reasons Blizzard has stretched the SC2 release out over 6 years (that and making a dumptruck full of money). Every few years there's a new expansion which adds new elements but uses the same basic structure. Freshens up the game without forcing high level players to start from scratch.

And redo other things.... The phrase "Kulindadromeus zabaikalicus of a feather flock together." doesn't really roll off the tongue.

A nonprofit competitor is required by law to spend any profits they make on upgrading infrastructure. So unless they massively overhire or have higher expenses because of economies of scale or renting a more expensive building, the nonprofit is pretty much guaranteed to be able to undercut any for-profit competitor while providing better service, because it doesn't have the extra overhead of profit taking.

Particularly if all you need is heat. You could potentially build an almost entirely passive desalinization plant fairly readily by building a greenhouse atop the ocean and making the roof slope towards the sides with catch basins that then flow downhill towards the shore. The only thing required is an insane amount of glass (and an insane amount of space to dedicate to it).

Rum, of course. Or, if you prefer, vodka.

That's nice. Now for a thought. Let's imagine Amazon runs a script and raises all their prices, every single one of them, by 1% Would anyone notice? Would anyone care? Is 1% even enough to justify looking elsewhere for a product? They'd still be cheapest on 90% of things, why would anyone bother?

Guess what, they just boosted their profits by $700,000,000. Ok, lets say some people do shop elsewhere, so call it $600,000,000. Not just their revenues, their actual profits. And investors are running away

Thankfully, my 401k is heavily invested in many and various Sack businesses ... Retirement here I come!

Perhaps this just shows the difference between types of people that compete vs. cooperate or selfish vs. selfless. Personally, I hope that if I'm ever in a situation like that for real, I'm the latter type of person.

This is the real problem. We have no knowledge of who and what are on these lists, nor do we have any way of obtaining that knowledge. Every single person on them could be someone who trained in Pakistan with known terrorists or every single one of them could be regular people who have done absolutely nothing to warrant surveillance (which is what a "watch" list is, if you didn't gather by the name). We don't know, we can't know. The system is entirely and completely opaque to anyone outside it (and probably the vast majority of those tasked with updating it).

What was the quote from the Vietnam war era? "In order to save the village we had to destroy it"... something along those lines anyway. Except this time round the "village" is the "freedom" that so many claim to champion.

I don't know why this is marked troll. We may not be there yet, but all it's going to take is one guy in a position of power with the will to use it the way McCarthy did. That's a pretty damn small barrier between "freedom" and "blacklists".

Well... It's leaning in the same sense that I did when I accidentally hit my thumb with a hammer and my grandfather said that I should try and not do that again - and that he had learned that solution himself in his younger days. Grandfathers are often helpful like that.

Leon should have kept his cool, like Rachael did later, as it turns out the Voight-Kampff test is checking whether someone is a Lesbian, not a Replicant.