With all of the Descent love, I can't believe nobody has mentioned Heretic yet. I only played either of them a handful of times (I was more of an RTS guy than an FPS guy, so Starcraft/Red Alert/Warcraft II was more my thing), but my buddies played both. Ahh, the good old days, when Windows 2000 was fresh and new.

*WHOOSH*

Yeah...I was borderline sympathetic up until that point. What a douche.

That's sort of like saying that everyone should be riding the bus because it's too resource-intensive to maintain a scooter or to have it serviced.

If all the software that those SMBs need to run worked in a cloud environment with no issues, then it would make sense.

Most of those small businesses, especially not-for-profits, can't spend as much on reliable bandwidth and network infrastructure as they'd need to in order to leverage a cloud solution and not face maddening slowdowns in ordinary workflows.

If you're resource-strapped and still running XP because you'd go broke upgrading PCs, OSes, and third-party software, then "the cloud" is not a panacaea, or even necessarily a good idea vs. a few hours a month of paying someone to do some basic maintenance.

Would have modded that one funny, myself...

I'd guess that if you can't determine the meaning of the phrase without help, you will fail to understand an explanation. The meaning is pretty obvious.

Seconded. The people that understand the risks generally don't represent a problem, but the people that don't understand them often also don't benefit from an explanation in a way that would change their behavior. Computers are not magic, but many people believe that they are. They also believe that antivirus software catches every single bad thing before it happens.

So we appear to agree that the addition of hate crime legislation is not useful.

That page is interesting...It describes what caused them to begin investigating crimes as hate crimes, it looks like it primarily has to do with certain individual states not doing a sufficient or even passably acceptable job of prosecuting civil rights violations.

...but racketeering laws aren't about thought, they're about identifying a series of activities that indicate a pattern of crime that is worse than a single event.

There are laws, but the laws concerning racketeering activity and hate crime legislation seem completely different in intent, spirit, and word.

I'm not pretending that there aren't secondary effects from acts of violence, but the crime isn't (shouldn't be) implying a threat against people that saw or heard about a murder, it's murdering people in the first place.

This type of legislation serves to label already-illegal offenses differently based on purported intent (a hate crime), which is not an additional deterrent to someone with said hateful intent (if they're damaged enough to commit the violent act in the first place).

Why is it not enough to say that murder is illegal? Should I be less afraid of a bigot killing me, my Caucasian wife, and my mixed race children because murder with hateful intent is viewed as being somehow worse than murder without it?

My argument here is about hate crime legislation being pointless as a deterrent, not about whether violent acts by bigots cause fear among the population that they are taken against.

Why should that matter? What if the offender would repeat the crime without respect to a given identifiable demographic? Is that not equally unacceptable?

I'm trying to determine how you're applying this definition to our discussion. Your view seems to be that there is an implied threat arising from a member of a group hearing about or observing a serious offense (murder, assault, battery, etc) that has to do with intent, specifically where the attacker has negative feelings towards a group and a member of the group is the person who was attacked.

Is that right, or am I misunderstanding your position?

I'm not saying that killing people for holding a political position isn't going to be prosecuted as a hate crime, I'm saying that both the law and said prosecution are a bad idea. We appear to differ on that point...I get it.

When you say "implied threat", what are you talking about, legally?

Implied anything (intimidation, threats, mugging) is non-action.

Klansmen make me (as a person of mixed race and dark skin) uncomfortable because of many of their beliefs, but I defend their right to think the stupid and hateful things that they think.

Hatecrime legislation takes the thoughts of a murderer or assailant and turns them into something that they are not, namely action.

I think that 30 counts of intimidation should be no more or less reasonable to prosecute in a situation where the intimidator holds an unpopular view (anti-gay, anti-minority, etc) than where they hold a popular one (anti-neo-nazi, anti-fred phelps, anti-klan, anti-caucasian).

Racketeering (legally) encompasses a variety of activities. Fraud is not separate from racketeering, it's one charge among many that get looked at collectively. Multiple charges within a certain time frame mean that instead of fraud, bribery, extortion, murder for hire, sexual exploitation of children, etc, the blanket charge of racketeering can be applied.

Going "I doubt your bullet" or "I doubt your knife" or "I doubt your fist" won't save your life, true. The first amendment is not there to assert that individuals have a right to deprive others of life with a firearm, it's there to assert that the government may not prohibit an individual from owning a firearm with which they might protect themselves.

I see many arguments against firearms as akin to arguments around hate crimes. The offending thing is not the despicable action (murder, assault), but a peripheral thing (a gun, an opinion).

Why don't we just add those five words to all of the other amendments in the same manner and at the same time?

I don't want to have amendments that apply to citizens unequally on purpose...that's a pretty stupid way for a present or past supreme court justice to think about "fixing" a constitutional amendment.