the problem isn't when rich people buy big cars to flaunt status. Frankly, If you are rich, there isn't much of a difference in the gas mileage you get out of a Viper vs an Escalade. The problem in general is when everyone else can afford to buy big cars and run them. There is a general culture of buying big cars in the US, and while the gas price spikes in 2006-2008 and the recession have stunted that, there is an argument for not going back to where we were, both from a traffic safety standpoint and energy efficiency standpoint. I don't worry about general consumption trends when Hummers and Escalades have higher sales. Who cares, there aren't enough to matter. I care when the F-150 starts setting new sales records because almost everyone can afford one.

And of course, the point was that because prices are falling so fast right now, a small increase in prices due to a raised tax will be hardly noticed. Not very many people say "Gas only fell by 30 cents a gallon instead of 36 cents a gallon, I'm being ripped off!". And that is definitely right. It's not about raising prices to curb consumption, but specifically to take this opportunity to address a real tax shortfall when people will not be explicitly hurt by it.

huh, I just started reading up on this but only ONE twitter account made those threatening comments, it was not obviously any particular person, and could have been someone trolling as much as anything else.
you can't then, with a straight face, say it is 1000 or even 2 people doing this.

Hell, for all we know, it could be a cynical method of getting people to feel sorry for you and therefore, side with you. who knows? It seems to have worked quite well actually, as now a lot of folks make out like everyone on the other side has said things like this.

question, have you seen the agreements? I ask because I wonder if a press group can say they are bound by an embargo from releasing the review of the game until XX:YY time. That to me is what is needed. If press were honest that the reason no review has come out is because of an embargo, people could understand.

Then again, I have never bought a game day one, so maybe there are factors I am missing in why people buy the moment it is released with no reviews out and then get pissed out no reviewer warned them (which they obviously weren't waiting for anyways....)

you have to stop looking at it like that. there are two possibilities. either the blackout is set 17 hours after release, or the publisher gets a copy at release and tries to put something out as fast as possible, possibly without having played the game very thoroughly.

it wasn't like the publishers had a choice, though going forward, they should say well in advance of a game release that there is an imposed blackout until after release. really that is all that is required now that the general community knows what a blackout is.

It's like with financial market data actually. People like bloomberg get all the data a bit early (which is HUGE) so that it can be disseminated electronically through multiple sources at the release time. The flip side of the risk of insider trading and the government usually does a pretty good job of enforcing the blackout.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...

this is so appropriate.....

I question if you know what the world billion means. You throw it out like it has actually happened.

Kosher, organic, non-gmo are all choice labels. I do not have to stamp any one and I do it to cater to a subset of the population I can sell at a premium price. Anyone is allowed to stamp any advertising they want (except those regulated by the fda) as long as it is true.

You may be pissed that many major food brands don't care to label GMO free, well its because you are part of a minority. There are many smaller brands that do do this, just eat that.

To your example, kosher slaughtered food does not have to be labeled kosher. People do it to capture the market premium. Same thing here

Stop using facts to muddy the water.

When I read this I think of my fun discussions about how to get a baby to sleep or eat better with a mother...... The more facts you use the less likely you are to be listened to.

That is only round up seeds and is not the entire world of GMOs, especially those that are disease resistant. For example, Hawaiian papaya ringspot virus has been stopped/slowed by a GMO. Is it a forever solution? Of course not. But it doesn't require a fertilizer, it is just very expensive but makes your plans resistant to a virus that threatened their industry.

No, its because of point 4 and the fact the required yields were much lower as the revolution hit europe to prevent country wide starvation and social unrest because of famine.

Many areas of the world are dealing with more irregular rainfall, and many don't have giant excesses of water to waste (especially relative to the population you are trying to feed).

Remember mass starvation isn't allowed. It leads to large scale uprisings. So the question you have to ask is how do we remove the pest and water issues with in an area where large scale pesticides are too expensive and water isn't as regular a resource?

People may not like GMOs(they are like the black people of today) but no problems have been shown with them and they can reduce the water and pesticide issue. So the real question is given the local challenges that face Africa and the importance of stabilizing food resources before further economic development can really happen, why wouldn't you want them using GMOs? Even if profits are lower (studies show they are higher, but whatever), thw stability you get if you even prevent one from collapse is more than worth it.

The GP is a moron. Anyone who has been to India over the last 25 years (for about 25 years I went every year or two) knows food security has MASSIVELY improved. Hell, when I was really young we would carry boxes of Ritz crackers to the country so we would have something easy to eat if we either got food poisoning (every trip, at least once) or were going rural and knew there would be little to no food around.

He is literally spouting complete lies about a country he knows little or nothing of.

actually they can't. there are some great studies (out of france) and one off tests written about for years.

wine tasters, professionals I mean, cannot tell the different between a white and a red at the same temperature if you add dye to the white (tested at the Bordeaux institute I believe). And there are great stories of wine writers and tasters not being able to identify either of two wines they were given (turned out, no one got it right, and they were the same wine served at a temperate difference of 5 degrees).

Yes wines taste different. And wine tasting is basically the same as clairvoyance. Wine tasting is the greatest reality distortion field ever.

I know very little about headphones, but just looking them up, AKG seems to have tons of headphones in the same range and style as Bose (100-300 USD). Of course, almost all of bose falls in that bracket, but AKG seemed to have 5-6 offerings around there as well.

I thought his point was crystal clear. A software company will, by competition, want to offer software that is as versatile as possible to make you want to spend hundreds of dollars on that software.

a hardware company, on the other hand, offers software only as a complement to their hardware. And so frankly, using their software on any other hardware than their own they don't care about. so they won't waste time and money programming software that does X which does not support their business and by extension, their customers (you know, the folks who already own apple hardware). Of course, the base of OSX is an open source OS, so yeah, people have figured out how to modify config files just right to make it play with other hardware (and in some cases, written more complete drivers). But it isn't some trivial set of hardware checks they are bypassing. If so, it would be effortless to maintain a hackintosh. But it isn't effortless unless you buy very specific hardware, and even then it can still be a real PITA when you go to update the OS.

Of course, I have a lot of complaints of the apple direction of making everything glued down, irreplaceable or user upgradable ever, etc, etc. But that is relatively recent (i.e. started after my last computer upgrade) and so up till now have been a happy customer. I don't know if that will continue, but I so strongly prefer OSX I think it will for now. I still have a couple years at least before I cross that bridge so maybe they will come back to the light?

huh, how can an OS be unfit or fit for number crunching? number crunching is the least OS relevant task I've ever run across. can you give even a single example where the OS interfered with a number crunching application?

And my experience is windows is generally worse because you have a number of background applications putting a resource drain on your machine.

I think, and am no expert, that while the majority of hardware on a mac is the same as any old windows PC ( and these pieces are hardware are what completely determine user experience from a hardware perspective), there are certain pieces of hardware that because they are only sold on a mac, had no drivers available.

so for example, the isight camera and mac mice and keyboards have not traditionally had windows drivers written for them. but that doesn't mean I can't buy a laptop with a built in camera of equal specs and claim I have built an equivalent computer.

I say this as no expert, but as someone who used to build my own computers for the fun of it and install random OSs just to see what everyone was talking about.