Frankly, I'm completely burned out on WoW. Since October '06 I've paid a total of 13 months, so I probably played about 12, and I got one character to 80, no raiding. Ever. And since I was a Warlock, my entire existance in PvP basically boiled down to blowing up a whole bunch of Ally as destro until someone noticed I was tearing huge holes in the group, at which point I became a sitting duck for whichever OP melee class decided it was time for me to die. Booooring.

However, I do enjoy the events Blizzard adds to the game now and then, so I'm kind of interested in going back for one more month before Cataclysm actually is released. I'll take part in the pre-release event, then just cancel when the game launches.

And, I'm sorry... but D3 and SC2? Same game as the ones I already own from the series, it looks to me.

Your newsletter, etc.

It's really just common sense. Two competent and of-age human beings should be able to enter into any legitimate, legally binding contract they want. I don't care if 100 men all want to enter into a contract that gives them the same legal rights as a "traditionally" married couple. So be it.

Take marriage out of the state entirely. If churches want to discriminate, fine, just so long as their discrimination has absolutely no legal recognition what-so-ever. You can marry whoever you want, and not marry whoever you don't want, just don't try to make the rest of us play by your rules.

See... here's the trouble. They book that all these factions pull their beliefs from was, at some point, written by a bunch of mysognstic goat herders wandering around in the desert having divine hallucinations. If you believe that they're conveying the word of an all-loving (yet genocidal), all-knowing (yet he bothered to put us all in Eden knowing we'd get kicked out anyway), all powerful (but he lets all life on Earth suffer mightily just for the sake of it) god, you don't really get to pick and choose which parts of it you like.

Either the book is the divine word of the lord, or it's something a bunch of people we know next to nothing about wrote in an alcove while they waited out a sandstorm. If it's the former, you're kind of screwed about the parts you don't like (and the parts that don't make sense, and the parts that contradict the other parts and....). If it's the latter, and you're just going to listen to humans for an explanation as to how the universe works, you may as well just go ahead and drop the religion thing altogether.

I'm with Bill Dog. Either take the whole part and parcel - including the mysognism, bigotry, violence, and racism - or drop the pretenses and just go secular.

P.S.: I was raised Lutheran too... by a bunch of weathered, racist, homophobic, angry rednecks. Not a good introduction to religion.... as you may have noticed.

WoW is pretty much dead as a game ... I played through Ulduar...

And so did ten million other nerds with nothing better to do with their time, and ten million nerds will do it again with Cataclysm, which is exactly why it's not dead and exactly why Cataclysm will continue to suck the cash out of people's pockets for another year or two.

Absolutely. It's really just a matter of picking a set of starting assumptions that everybody is comfortable with.

Even if you believe in a creator granting it, and you believe that this creator will punish people who deny such rights, it's still not a part of the universe's rules. Since religion is an entirely human construct, and the rules that go with religion are relevant only to humanity, all consequences of the acknowledgment of free speech are strictly contained within the bounds of human experience.

In other words, the rules of the universe shape the universe's behavior and evolution. Human free speech existing or not has nothing to do with how the universe functions, so it's not a rule of the universe. Gravity will continue to function the same either way, as will light, thermodynamics, etc.

It's an entirely human concept, and some people believe that, like free speech, people have a right to live and that in a just society we should be using our resources to uphold that right just as we expend resources upholding our right to free speech. It's an arguable point, but I don't think it's arguable that either of those things exists as an inherent rule of nature.

So if you try to gain control of the gun, and fail, then its not possession, but you did try so its attempted. That could explain the law on the books. How that relates to somone shooting themselves? Yeah, can't help you there!

Well, he shot himself by mistake while it was in his pants, so he didn't really have "control" of it, so you have a technicality there....

I think suppressing political expression is not cool

I agree. I think the image itself and its supposed "message" is stupid, but I still think the image takedown was unjustified and that it should be put back up. I also think, however, the idea that this was done for political reasons, as a number of people are trying to argue, rather than as a "Cover Your Ass" sort of thing over a potential copyright fight, is absurd.

but I'm trying to figure out where people feel they should be privileged to the best medical care in the world without having to pay for it or provide back to society an equal or greater benefit.

Why do you feel entitled to freedom of speech? There is no such thing, inherently. There is no universal rule that you must be allowed to speak freely. If that right is taken from you and you're silenced, the universe will simply continue on as if nothing happened, save for the immediate differences it makes in your tiny little insignificant piece of this planet.

Some of us simply believe that in an affluent and supposedly just society we should view the situation as a moral prerogative. If you disagree, that's fine, but, frankly, it's a pretty crummy way to view the people around you. I tend to view human life as a little more valuable than that. Honestly, I've seriously tried to get my wife to leave this country because of people like you, though. What sense is there in living in a "society" that views its citizens with such incredible contempt that you would even think to say something so ridiculously callous and selfish? We might as well just revert to animalistic anarchy and let the strong cull the weak. A situation, I might add, you likely wouldn't survive (nor I).

I would not ask a stranger to pay for my life. It's just not right. I would gladly accept death.

I'm going to go ahead and say the odds are pretty well-stacked against that being true. I'm sure there are a very few people like that around, but if I had to bet and you really went to your deathbed, I'd go ahead and lay down a pretty heft sum that you're full of crap with that statement.

Too many people are in "Me" mode.

Like the people who value green paper in their wallet over an actual human's life?

that has not happened

If you'd bother to RTActualFA you'd have noticed that he was, in fact, contacted by Flickr which is one of the provisions of the DMCA: that the operator notify the "infringer" of the takedown. For all you know, that contact was a DMCA notice. If you'd bothered to read the rest of this thread, you'd also know that DMCA angle is speculation on the motivation based on Flickr's statement of copyright concerns. The difference between my speculation and yours is that mine is much more likely to be accurate.

Like I said, enjoy your crazy conspiracy theory. Since that's all you have, I'm not going to keep wasting time arguing with you anymore than I would a birther, flat-earther, or moon landing hoax nut. The unfortunate part of this behavior, though, is that someday somebody like you really will be unfairly targeted for your political beliefs in a situation like this, and nobody's going to believe you because you and the entire right in this country are just absolutely hellbent on treating the Boy Who Cried Wolf like an instruction manual rather than a cautionary tale.

ignore the facts surounding the situation

The facts are that one image with two potentially infringing elements which was broadcast all over the world and used to create an image that become internationally notorious via major media outlets was removed from a site that continues to host thousands if not tens of thousands of anti-Obama anti-democrat images.

There is no conspiracy, no political hit job going on here. Somebody got a takedown notice or got too touchy over the possibility of getting one and removed a piece of parody work they shouldn't have. Same thing that's happened hundreds, if not thousands of times before on all sorts of different media-rich websites like Flickr, DeviantArt, and Youtube which allow users to upload content. Even Slashdot has fallen victim to DMCA claims and removed user posts as a result.

You go ahead and run with this crazy "Flickr is a bunch of lefties" conspiracy theory though. Let me know how it works out for you. Maybe you can get some birthers or some screaming town hall rioters to join you on this.

It's not improbable at all, especially if he lived in a rural area. You can't be denied care for an emergency condition in an ER, but if you're in the ER, it's an emergency. If it's an emergency brought on by a chronic, untreated ailment, odds are you're in pretty bad shape and at a much greater risk of death than if you'd been treated for the underlying cause earlier on. As an example, if you show up in the ER with an undiagnosed malignant tumor in its last stages, you can still be saved, but your odds of being saved are extremely decreased by that point.

Furthermore, many rural areas in the U.S. do not have ready access to the most modern treatment options available. If I go fifteen miles north, as the crow flies, over the mountains I can see out my front window, those people have horrible treatment options. They are, basically, limited to less than half a dozen family doctors and a small free clinic that is not capable even of treating a broken bone. The quickest access they have to modern medicine in an emergency is a 40 minute helicopter flight to the nearest university medical center.

Our doctors, hospitals, specialists, and medicines are, by and large, incredible in the U.S. Our access to them, however, is pretty sorely lacking for a great number of people.

I don't know that he's telling the truth, and I don't know that his brother/friend (sorry, I forgot the relationship) did everything he could have, but, based on the rural area I grew up and still visit sometimes, I could absolutely see how it happens.

Nobody's saying that Time definitely issued a DMCA takedown request, it's just one possibility regarding the claim of copyright concerns Flickr issued. Another possibility is that the owner of the Ledger/Joker image issued a request, and a third possibility is that Flickr simply got antsy about the Joker image and the Time image and pre-emptively removed it as a TOS violation. These are the three most likely explanations assuming Flickr is telling the truth.

More remotely, it's possible that Flickr is lying and initiated the takedown as a partisan attack on the free speech of the individual who created the image. Of course, this happily ignores the thousands of original and derivative anti-Obama and anti-Democrat works that can readily be discovered on Flickr with these common anti-Obama/Democrat searches:

nobama, impeach, obama socialist, anti-democrat

I'll ask you the same thing I asked the other guy I'm arguing with. Are you honestly trying to tell me that you can't see how one image duplicated hundreds of thousands of times, repeatedly displayed in major international media outlets, linked to from all over the web, and used to vandalize hundreds of public spaces over a period of two weeks might - just might - draw a bit more attention to itself from a jittery media host than the typical Flickr image that will never be seen but by a few random internet users who happen to use the site? Are you really trying to argue that an image with international major media exposure and notoriety is on par with some random "Bushitler" nonsense that only a dozen internet users will ever see? Is that really your argument here?

Riddle me this, Batman. If this is all about hating on Obama detractors and right-wingers, why is Flickr still hosting thousands of anti-Obama and anti-Democrat images that can easily be found with these simple search terms:

nobama
obama socialist
anti-democrat
impeach Obama

In fact, there are a bunch of derivative works of the Obama joker image in those results. You know what the main difference between those and the one that gotten taken down is? The one that gotten taken down was being plastered all over causways, bridge abuttments, national TV and the internet, and those weren't.

Maybe, just maybe you can set aside all the insanely irrational conspiracy theories for one moment and think about why an image that's been duplicated hundreds of thousands of times and gained international notoriety might attract a little more negative attention from a copyright holder than a bunch of images that never left a site that only a subset of internet users ever visit.

I don't know why the right thinks that being perpetually offended and outraged at things that don't exist is a good way to go about rebuilding its influence in America, and, frankly, at this point, I don't even care anymore.

Since everything you say is a lie, what you just said must not be true, and therefore you're wrong. I assume you'll respect my new approach to "discussions" with you given that it's exactly the same standard you apply to the president?