Not to mention that most online gaming communities are full of sociopaths. An online game may have amazing gameplay, but if I'm being called names every minute or to I lose all interest.

Maybe cities just don't have the right mix of amenities, price, space, parking, and other factors to make them better places to put certain businesses.

Not to mention the higher taxes inside of cities. In Cleveland, for example, Progressive Insurance wanted to put a big office building right in downtown Cleveland. Then they looked at the taxes they would be paying. The City of Cleveland refused to make an exemption for them. That is fully within their rights, of course. Anyway, where was the office built?

Right outside of the Cleveland city limits. Close to the city, but not where they'd have to pay the extra taxes. Cleveland City Council was pissed of course but they only have themselves to blame.

This stuff matters to businesses. It affects everything they do and it affects the end cost to the customer. After all - a customer, in order to purchase a product or service, needs to pay for all of the costs required to provide that good or service. That includes taxes the business must pay. People always clamoring for more taxes on business never seem to realize that in their fervor to punish businesses for being successful, the real person who is being punished is the customer. Not the business.

In a competitive market a company cannot afford to be paying unnecessary taxes.

Businesses aren't the only things leaving NYC either; many high profile wealthy people are leaving, or have left, for the same reason. Same in California.

I can't speak to the accuracy of historic weather data or modern weather models, but I can say this:

Global Warming / Climate Change (pick one, please) alarmists do themselves an incredible amount of damage when they do the following:

1. Grossly exaggerate predictions and base everything on the worst case they can find.
2. Manipulate charts to make changes look far more significant than they really are.
3. Instantly ridicule anyone who disagrees with them on anything, even if that disagreement is valid.

Let's say for the sake of argument that all of the predictions from these weather models are 100% accurate, all of the research and data is correct, and that the climate is indeed warming because of CO2 emissions, and that the climate will warm 5 Celsius degrees in the next 200 years. Let's pretend that the science is completely perfect.

Even if all of that is true, you will find a lot of people who won't even bother listening because they remember crazy predictions like "New York city will be underwater in 20 years!" and "We're all going to be cannibals! Cannibals, I say!"

Do you see why so many people don't listen to those who are trying to push human-caused climate change?

Politics needs to be taken out of the equation. Completely. Everything needs to be 100% transparent. The science needs to be broken down in ways the average person can understand. Even if that happens, it will be decades before the damage the global warming alarmists have caused can be reversed.

Yup, I'm a nerd, but I bet I'm in great company here.

Lately I have played the following systems:

D&D 3.5 / Lots o' House Rules: Chief among them getting rid of that chaos engine known as the d20. It has been replaced by 3d6 to allow for a probability curve. Some other numbers have been adjusted. Because of the bias towards rolling 10 and 11, those feats which add +2 to skills are actually worth something!

FATE: Fate's aspect system is fantastic, and we have been incorporating it into other games as well. Had a fun time recently where I was playing a mercenary during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and a small team had to infiltrate a Russian-owned (or so we thought) secret military base. We didn't find missiles - we found cloning vats full of JFKs! Oh no! Is our president even the real JFK?!

(Old) World of Darkness: Specifically Werewolf. Can't get enough of this vastly underrated game. The themes carried throughout the game as a whole are fantastic, and it reaches into all kinds of place historically and metaphysically. Besides - werewolves are cool.

Like you I imagine, I've been playing online games for a long time. I even ran a half dozen TFC / Natural Selection / CounterStrike / Half-Life Deathmatch / etc. servers for three or four years. I never found cheating to be common except for CounterStrike. For some reason that game attracted cheaters like crazy. The other games, not so much. Cheating wasn't just uncommon - it was rare.

When PunkBuster and similar products became popular it was amazing how much better I became compared to other players when playing on a protected server. (o:

VAC has, in my opinion, done a very good job overall of keeping up with the cheating crowd. I can't remember the last time I came across a player that I suspected of cheating - and having had to do detection manually by watching player behavior, I'm very confident in this.

There's a few things you can look for manually when looking for cheaters.

Your typical aimbot is easy to detect. Jump into spectator mode or whatever and pick the first person view for the selected player. Instead of the smooth movements a typical player will have, you'll see the player's aim snap to positions on a screen. It's rare to see these anymore because detection is so incredibly easy.

Driver hacks to provide see-through textures, or model hacks that have a long cross through them that extend through walls, are also pretty easy to detect by watching the player. Is someone across the map and scoring head shots through walls? Does he always seem to know where the enemy is? He's using one of these.

The interesting cheat is the second one (wall / model hacks) which allows one to see opponents behind objects, because it's not a mechanical advantage like an aim bot; it's a strategic advantage, an information advantage. It doesn't change the ability of the cheater to aim more accurately; it changes the cheater's behavior. A player without the cheat information will act as if the opponent is not there; a player with the information will.

So, you'll see tactical advances / retreats, shots fired / grenades thrown, etc. that would not occur in normal non-cheating game play. Yes; there will always be the person who gets the lucky what-the-hell shot. That happens.Sometimes more than once. What you need to look for is a consistent pattern over time that cannot be attributed to simply being "good", having a better overall strategy, or having an unusual play style.

I bet that with enough information collected it would be possible to detect this kind of behavior and flag individual players for follow-up manual inspection. It would be a fascinating bit of research, really.

Resource hacks are very dead these days, as information about resources (ammunition carried, money earned, life amount, etc.) are all stored server-side for most games. There's no way for the client to fiddle with that data.

Sell it. I don't need the world's biggest laser. I'd much rather have the money.

Yes, there may be these incredible "Hypersonic" missiles, but only the people with the capability to build or purchase them will have those missiles. Everyone else will be using conventional sub-sonic missiles. Also consider the many, many missiles (hundreds of thousands? I don't know) that currently exist right now and will be used in the future.

Today's anti-missile systems will be useful for many years to come.

What about the currency is artificial? It is no more artificial than the US Dollar. One is just generated using an algorithm while the other is generated by updating a row in some bank's database or by literal printing of dollars.

Neither has an intrinsic value. The numbers in your bank account right now have no intrinsic value. They only have value because people will accept your numbers in exchange for their goods and services. Things like BitCoin are no different. It has value not because it has an inherent value, but because someone is willing to offer you other things for it.

Which to use? That's easy - whichever one supports your conclusion, which is the conclusion that most pleases the person funding your "research".

Unfortunately, climate and environmental "science" has been taken over by political interests. It's very difficult to find studies that aren't tainted in some way.

Lies, Damn Lies, and Statistics...

Parents have a right to request alternate assignments if they are unhappy with part of the school's curriculum.

Also, please explain to me how allowing The Invisible Man to reside on a school library shelf is like taking your kid to a strip club.

What? Black slave owners? I don't believe it! Surely this is just another lie from the white devils! ...Oh, wait a minute...

Hope and Change, man. Fight the military industrial complex, stick it to the man, fight for the little guy, eat the rich!

Seriously though - you cannot be surprised about this. If you are, you either:

1. Have not been paying attention, or
2. Are not intellectually honest, or
3. Both 1 and 2.

No, I'm not saying that putting an (R) after a name instead of a (D) would make it any better. I'm sure that some of these spying programs were started under President Bush Jr., or perhaps Clinton, or Bush Sr., or maybe even earlier.

You see, nearly all of the politicians these days are big government advocates, and part of big government means they want to watch you so that they can control you. It's for your own good though, see. It's to keep you safe. Or something.

I am reminded of a woman who called Mike Trivisonno's radio show on WTAM a few years back. She was an old woman from Russia, back when it was part of the USSR. She was angry, screaming at us (the American people in general), "Don't you see what you are doing? Don't you know where this will lead? I left Russia to get away from this! What are you doing?"

You an I are very much the same, here.

I can't see myself wanting to turn the lights on and off, or adjust the temperature, or start the dish washer from the other side of the earth. Also, not only will there by the tracking etc., but if i can do these things from anywhere - so can some guy with the latest zero day exploit.

I just don't see the value here and I see a lot of reasons why it is a BAD thing.

The whole flying spaghetti monster was created just to troll religious people - you know that, I know that, everyone knows that, and people who run around pretending to believe in it really are just being trolls.

If someone has a point to make, fine, but you're not going to convince the other guy by mocking them.