I guess I can breathe now?
It was really hard to find: practically HIDDEN in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Alito
"Alito's majority opinion in the 2008 worker protection case Gomez-Perez v. Potter cleared the way for federal workers who experience retaliation after filing age discrimination complaints to sue for damages. He sided with the liberal bloc of the court, inferring protection against retaliation in the federal-sector provision of the Age Discrimination in Employment Act despite the lack of an explicit provision concerning retaliation."

I'm delighted Sotomayor ruled this way, and hope fervently that every justice - conservative or liberal - makes rulings on such bases. I expect that they do, actually, no matter what side of the political fence they're on. There is PLENTY of room in our Constitution for interpretive difference, based on personal ideology, but there are some cases where ideology should be nearly irrelevant.

Next time you make such a blanket statement however, you might want to do some research - and while you're at it, look up the meaning of "tendentious internet wanker".

I think it's simpler than that: survey bias.

When someone asks me to take a survey, I generally say no...usually I have more important things to do with my time than that (like, well, pretty much anything).

So the people who are agreeing to be surveyed are already a self selected group of either a) people who have nothing better to do, and b) people who desperately want someone else to know their feelings on a subject.

I'd argue strongly that amongst the right, evangelicals are FAR more likely to be in group b. (And according to the parties I go to, leftists are almost always more likely to want to advertise their politics generally anyway.)

So unless a survey includes clear data on how many people refused to be surveyed or gave no answer (who are likely disproportionately republicans), I tend to ignore its conclusions, or shift them at least 10 to 15 points to interpret them at all.

Do you really need me to list the 50+ games that SUCKED for each gem you've listed (and I'd agree with your list, except you missed System Shock)?

What the OP is really on about is the fact that we're swimming in games today and most of them suck....exactly like yesteryear. Now he has the advantage of hindsight to say "oh, that one was really a classic".

Oh and re BG you might want to check: http://www.baldursgate.com/
or http://www.baldursgateii.com/

Except that there isn't a single company out there whose primary goal is "maximize everyone's salary". And fundamentally, that's not the point of a company in the first place.

Aside from that, you've nailed it.

...these parents are going to find evidence that they are right: Turning off the Wi-Fi will, I believe, lead to statistically significantly better performance by students.*

*Not by any means directly due to the Wi-Fi, indeed, but because neither kids nor teachers will have the ability to distract themselves by browsing the web during the school day. If they turn off cell access (meaning no texting either) they'll see a similar improvement.

Personally, I'd rather not work for a firm where the quality of my work doesn't equate in the least with the pay calculations. Do I look like some unionist drone (at least in Europe, they are usually paid along the same sort of gridded scale).

Yes, of course, anyone rationalizing it will simply say "well, we only keep exceptional people" - to which, after 30 years in the workplace, I call "bullshit".

In every group there are going to be achievers and slackers. Frankly, I want my compensation*/pay to be the highest I can compel the company to pay me, otherwise yeah, I will go somewhere else.

*note, compensation isn't pay - there are a host of other ways a company can compensate an employee that can be hugely beneficial that aren't cold, hard, taxable cash.

Don't let the lure of nostalgia fool you.

Go to some abandonware site, play a few of these ancient games...frankly, they rather stink. I mean, they were great in the day, no question.

But by today's standards (and no, it's NOT JUST THE GRAPHICS) they usually are very simplistic, clumsy, with limited reflex-based gaming choices at best. Tactical choices are extremely limited, conflict resolution is opaque and arbitrary. Save game? Hahahahaa, no, sorry.

Really, don't let yourself be fooled by your rose colored glasses. There's no reason to punish your kid by making them play old crappy titles so they "appreciate" the new ones more. Don't waste your or their time.

Nota bene: I'm 46. I started playing Oregon trail on a MECC terminal in 3-4th grade at age 9? 10? I've been a dedicated gamer since then, playing everything from the Atari800 Space Vikings from cassette tape, to Apple II space empires, to Ultima (before they had numbers), etc etc and so on. Bought my own first computer (a Zeos 386-20, regrettably without a co-processor, I simply couldn't afford it) in my early 20s, wrote computer game reviews for nearly 15 years, and have been involved in several titles from alpha to release. If there's anyone who could be suffused with nostalgia, it's me.

I *agree* with what he did.

I doubt I'd have had the courage, honestly, to go as far.

Nevertheless, the idea that future generations "will never know a private thought" is complete histrionic bullshit. In my experience, the people complaining about a lack of privacy today are people that snapchat, twitter, and facebook regularly.

To rephrase then: "Socially-addicted attention whores have no privacy"...
Is that a surprise?

It's not either/or. He can be admirable for what he did AND be a drama queen in his comments.

...because right now we're wishing it was in fact "warming" going on...

"...They'll never know what it means to have a private moment to themselves â" an unrecorded, unanalyzed thought..."

Bullshit. This is just drama-queen nonsense right here.

No, their complaints aren't private...because they post them immediately to Facebook, snapchat them to someone else, or can't help but tweet their latest crisis to their 465 followers. Surprise, announcing your private thoughts and feelings to hundreds if not thousands makes it unlikely your thought is "private".

Today, any person can have a "private moment". They can have "private thoughts". There are even lots of opportunities for actual privacy, and they're pretty much all the same ways people have done these things through the centuries (unless you choose to avail yourself of modern communications).

To claim otherwise is pure histrionics.

Yes, because we are talking climate, not weather.

There is no (zero, zip,zilch, nada) correlation between a single snapshot (be it anything less than an aggregated sum of. centuries) and climate. Honestly, it's no more relevant than saying "we got more/less snow this year" or "we had a lot of/no hurricanes this year" (yes this is also an error the op made)...that's weather trivia, interesting, and certainly impactful on humans, but not "climate".

I think Science Fiction does occasionally let us all indulge our inner nihilist, with a sort of dystopian future-template somehow graven in our minds by modern culture.

As a counterpoint, though, I'd like to offer http://www.cracked.com/article_20731_5-amazing-pieces-good-news-nobody-reporting.html which sums neatly the fact that we (as humanity generally) are far more likely on the track of a UFP than a Dark Stellar Empire.

I believe it was in that sense that Iain Banks connected a relatively "hard"-ish science fiction (depending on which of the umpteen definitions you prefer) with a rock-solid core of optimism. His stories could be absolutely bleak on a personal level, with an overlay of brutal, naked realpolitik on a political level, yet he somehow managed to convey that ultimately we - as humanists, as small-l liberal enlightened thinkers, "won" as a species.

We will dearly miss you, Mr Banks.

"how do you make money off a free app that near-instantly vaporizes all content?"

The annual payment you're getting from the NSA to make sure they're permanently on the cc list?