you spend years making games that bomb until you hit on one idea that works and that clicks with people.

Basically, years of honing your game design skills and trying new ideas and then someone comes along and copies your mechanics and your game is irrelevant just like that.

It depends on where hemp out performs. If hemp doesn't grow as well where cotton does then you cotton growing land becomes much less valuable.

there's more to it than just Mary Jane. You don't think the cotton lobby has noticed the wonder material that is hemp?...

the truly smart people, you're Eisenstein and what have you, are too busy with the incredibly interesting problems they can comprehend to bother with the sort of wealth gathering that you're thinking of when you say "meritocracy". The ones that we're talking about when we say "inequality" aren't all that brilliant. They're loaded with advantages from generations of accumulated wealth. They're rent seekers. The "Investor Class". People who spend their entire day not solving problems or building things or making new things but just figuring out who to gather wealth.

You'll never have your meritocracy. Eisenstein was too busy with relativity to bother trying to run a county. Now Mitt Romney, he's got plenty of time for it. He's also got a Car Elevator...

I think if you look you'll find most basic research (e.g. the really expensive stuff that's hard to do) is paid for by your gov't (or European gov'ts if you live in the USA, we've been cutting funding left and right since Reagan...).

NASA (along with a lot of German Rocket scientists) got us to the moon and DARPA + the Universities created the communication network we're using now...

I guess Capitalism got us the 99 cent double cheeseburger. Oh wait, it was gov't farm subsidies that make that possible too....

it's a dictatorship and/or kleptocracy that happens to use communist rhetoric. Why this fact escapes so many people is beyond me. Maybe it's the 75+ years of indoctrination and thinly veiled McCarthyism...

is AMD wants to be able to sell you a PC ready to go. APU+Storage+Ram = computer, and in a few more years the APUs will be fast enough to hang with current gen consoles.

the China Syndrome was less about a nuclear disaster and more about cover ups and ignoring of known safety issues. It sorta sounds like we _did_ have a China Syndrome situation here...

they'll be a little bit of laughs and chatter, but it doesn't sound like the Hotel's hurting for business, and by tomorrow /. will have forgotten all this. Heck, can you name me the hotel without scrolling up to the summary and reading (no fair if you've got a 4k monitor and don't need to scroll)?

If anything they probably backed down because they'd just find themselves getting a tonne of credit card disputes, which you're allowed to do because of a Gov't imposed requirement written into a law...

they made really nice ones, at least as far as screen. I'm guessing they can't compete with the heavily subsidized Amazon Kindles though...

how you feel about that hindrance the first time you get hit by an uninsured Uber driver...

and often weren't bad value for the money. You got to play games on far more advanced hardware than you could afford at the time and the operators maintained a public space you could play others in.

DLC's & free to play are the same. You can do them right and wrong. I've generally heard good things about Warframe and League of Legends. On the other end of the spectrum you've got Dungeon Keeper and Candy Crush Saga. And right in the middle you've got stuff like Mechwarrior tactics.

Heck, if you want a real world example look at the stuff Games Workshop is doing recently where Expensive high value models that used to belong in specific rule expansions have been introduced into the main game to sell more of them. I expected a backlash but instead the fans were happy they could justify the purchase of a $300 model kit with the knowledge they could use it in game :P, go figure.

you know. Those various black societies are very inclusive and generally run by very nice people.

Black people in America have lived with 200 years of institutionalized racism. I've got a black trucker friend who doesn't do runs through the South to this day. So I can't really begrudge them their societies...

On the other hand I'd say Whites are tremendous victims of racism: their own. The right wing in this country has convinced the white man that "Welfare Queens" (read: Black people) are a bigger problem then declining wages and competing with slave labor. The think tanks aren't even very secretive about it. Google "Southern Strategy".

Can force you into debt. School cloths. Food. Medicine. A toy for the birthday.

Losing a job and not being able to find another can force you into debt. You need to eat. We've been dismantling the Safety Net for 40 years. If you think you're protected and you're not already rich then your nuts.

It's also ridiculous to say you're not "forced" into debt when you need medical attention. Experience the pain of an infected tooth or a Kidney Stone you can't pass and tell me about the "choices" you have then.

Christ, what the hell is wrong with this world. Human beings need certain thing to survive. I've said this before and will again: If we can put a man on the moon why the hell can't we feed our kids?

The Business doesn't call the number on the Card, they call a number provided by their Point of Sale Vendor and/or bank to get the code.