Also, do you know about the new "family accounts"? Maybe you should give Bob @ Phone Support another call to ease your suffering.

I usually use a couple of computers at once, and I sometimes have a slow-paced game on one and want to play something faster on another while, say, waiting for turns to process or something.

Waiting for turns to process?

Are you playing on a PDP-11?

Yes, I'm aware of Offline Mode.

So what you're saying is you know very well it's technically possible to do what you want on Steam, but because some customer service rep tells you they don't want you to, you find the whole platform "really annoying".

Bah.

When a platform comes along that gives developers a sense of security and reason to invest in games and gives users the ability to install their games on more than one machine and when that machine goes belly up, to install them automatically on another machine (something you can't do on the old "X number of serial number uses is the limit" games), I would say it's pretty much a win-win.

Valve has done a pretty good job of being really friendly to gamers. They create a whole ecosystem of games and forums and support and communication to the dev community that never existed before, but you find it "really annoying" because you can't play some turn-based abomination that takes long enough between turns that you can go over to a second machine and play another game without the psychic pain of knowing Bob @ Phone Support said you shouldn't even though you could do it if you wanted.

Did I mention, "Bah"?

Assuming for the sake of arguments that longer voting times are caused by a higher population density and that blacks are disproportionately concentrated in high density areas, the racial disparity in voting times is likely a side affect of population density rather evidence of racism.

OK, fair enough. But then why do similar statistics apply even within a city?

And since polling places are supposed to be apportioned by population rather than by geographic area, why should greater population density cause longer waits? One factoid you need to know. It's long been a tradition that blacks vote as a congregation on Sundays. And in the Red states where blacks are most being disenfranchised, the new election laws have uniformly ended early voting on Sundays. Other early voting days are being continued, but for some reason they're cancelling Sunday voting.

If you look at the suite of new voting laws that are being passed since the Supreme Court lifted the pre-emption rules, you'll come to understand just how dramatic is the effort to prevent blacks, hispanics, the poor generally and students from voting in Red states. How do you take seriously any democracy that makes it disproportionately harder for certain populations to vote?

And perhaps blacks being "disproportionately concentrated in high density areas" is argument enough for why we still need affirmative action, no?

How about you track blacks and whites that live in the country and then blacks and white in the cities.

The figures are nationwide. Minorities have to wait twice as long to vote as whites:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...

Interesting that you should bring that up. The study specifically measured the length of time members of different races spend in the voting booth. There was no significant difference.

Citation above.

What you're saying is if I get in line to vote behind a black person, the polling officials will pull me out of line to go ahead of him, and make him wait an extra 30 minutes as well?

No. A specific case does not reflect the "average".

All it says is the lines are longer in black neighborhoods.

Regarding citations, I'm pretty sure you could have found this one yourself. It was the first google result:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...

I cited specifically Michigan in my statement, but the NYTimes article indicates nationwide blacks and hispanics wait twice as long to vote as whites.

Elections are not funded by precinct. They are funded by the state. If they're using different funding levels depending on the race of the neighborhood, that's a pretty good indication that it's not race-transparent.

Is Scalia seriously suggesting police can act on a tip only after proving that tipster is telling the truth?

As much as I hate to find myself anywhere near Scalia (through he's joined here by Ginsburg, Sotomayor, and Kagan), police can legitimately act on a tip only after proving that a tipster is *likely* to be telling the truth. In this case, after following the car for five minutes and not seeing anything that gave them suspicion that the driver was drunk, there's no way that they could have reasonable suspicion this guy was a drunk driver. Given the documented existence of SWATing, anonymous tips cannot be considered credible grounds for intrusion into a person's liberty.

Interestingly, in this case the tip was not anonymous, but that fact wasn't brought up in the original prosecution and so the tip is dealt with as anonymous.

Lucky for Scalia most progressives still believe in elections, democracy, rule of law and that SCOTUS interpretation of the constitution is the only legal interpretation.

Really? You believe that most progressives believe that in 1857, no person of African descent could be a citizen of a state, despite zero evidence for this decision in the text of the Constitution? And that in 1896, states could comply with the equal protection clause via "separate but equal" bullshit? Well, it does seem that "progressive" has been defined downwards since Obama came into office.

Human rights, democracy, the rule of law, and SCOTUS decisions, are areas that overlap sometimes but not always. Genuine progressives put human rights before the others.

The average wait for a white person to vote in Michigan is 7 minutes. The average wait for a black person to vote in Michigan is 46 minutes.

In Florida, Ohio, Indiana etc those ratios are much bigger.

Yeah, you still need affirmative action. It may be that slavery is like original sin and it can never be washed away and once you start a country that is based on owning other humans, you're never going to be redeemed completely. It can get better, and it can get worse, but it never goes away.

I've been playing the Rise of the Triad re-do lately, and I've noticed lots of doors. I mean a LOT of doors. I've also noticed that they all open. Either you can open it now or it's locked and you can open it later or it will open with a bad guy behind it and it's not for you to open at all because it opens from the other side, but dammit it will be opened at some point if you continue exploring.

The ease of movement of those old FPS games is a stunning contrast with the newer 3rd person shooter console games like Tomb Raider, which feel like you're controlling a marionette with rubberbands instead of strings and you're never sure if you're going to jump over that obstacle or use it for cover. The Mass Effect series is the same.

One third-person shooter that felt natural was Saints Row 3 and 4. But even there, as well-done as those games were, there would be some clumsiness. In an FPS like Half-Life 2, there was none of that.

Oh, Apple knows what its customers want. And the good news is that since Lawrence v Texas, it's even legal.

OK, I admit I had to look up "vesicle".

Stop laughing. It's been a quarter-century since I took a biology class

How can you tell if the logic is "faultless" if you don't start with the sort of rigorous and objective definitions that you have in math?

There is nothing objective about mathematics. Trace a mathematical proposition down, and it rest on axioms and definitions -- social and linguistic conventions. Those conventions have historically proven to have pragmatic value, but the question of what's pragmatically valuable is a subjective one; you cannot objectively demonstrate the value of going to the moon, or building a bridge, or even developing a new life-saving medical treatment.

The idea that math is some pure realm of eternal verities is Platonic bullshit.

A modern artist has the ability to write about what a particular work is intended to mean.

If you can write what a work of art is intended to mean, then you don't need art to say it, you can use ordinary prose. (Taking poetry and literary writing to be art rather than ordinary prose.)

What if you have a rock band, and replace the members one by one, but then the original members re-unite to play their classic tunes, but then both bands go on tour together?

I was delighted to learn that my hometown has a real-life example of the Ship of Theseus conundrum: the USS Constellation.

"Identity" is nothing but a social and mental convention.