I would think this might push the Oregon-ians, to do like CO did, and just decriminalize pot use for recreational use, and therefore bypass the need for a medical prescription?

It was tried in the last election and was narrowly defeated (47% approved, if I recall). It might have passed if it wasn't heavily lobbied against by, ironically, the medical marijuana industry.

I expect as more people see Washington and Colorado not degrade into a lawless wasteland of stoned out degenerates, future attempts will prove more successful.

64 bit is no advantage on a device with less than 4 GB of non-upgradeable RAM.

How this keeps getting trotted out as fact every time there is a story about these phones I'll never know. And of all places, here on slashdot where people should know better.

There are many other reasons why a 64 bit architecture is helpful. You may not know of them, but they exist. Many of them apply to game development, which was a big push if you watched the initial product announcement.

And that's where I stopped reading.

Too bad. The rest of the comment was insightful and completely devoid of any further grammatical errors.

That was actually the GOAL o the nun that designed Monopoly. It was to show how Capitalisim would inevitably move all of the wealth to one guy that had everything and would sit on his wealth.

I never knew this about the game. It's an interesting experiment from a philosophical perspective and casts the game in a slightly different light. It's too bad the lesson it intended to teach (it's no fun to play an economic game rigged against you) was applied to tabletop games instead of being taken as political commentary.

ps - why is one a "motor" and another an "engine?" What's the difference?

According to MIT, not really anything these days.

They both came to describe the same thing from two different linguistic directions. It seems the only distinction between the terms these days is more rooted in nomenclature within a specific discipline and less on overall semantic accuracy.

Believe it or not, some people do still buy and play board games.

And believe it or not, they've been gaining in popularity lately.

It's been a long time coming, but the Monopoly Stigma is slowly dissipating. I think Monopoly was the Mt. Saint Hellens of board games. It blew up, left a swath of scorched earth and desolation in a generation of people who grew up thinking games were stupid, pointless and nothing but dumb luck followed by three hours of a runaway winner forcing everyone else to keep playing. Over time, that desolation becomes fertilizer for the next generation.

If you're interested in giving a post-Monopoly tabletop world a look, there are a couple of key resources:

Tabletop

A bi weekly show hosted by Wil Wheaton showcasing a host of "gateway games". He gets three other internet famous (and sometimes proper famous) people to come play a game with him. He lightly goes over the rules, and they play.

A lot of effort goes into showing the fun interactions between the players that happens over the table - truly the best part of tabletop gaming. These are 30 minutes each, professionally produced and great fun to watch with the whole family. Overall, it's a great resource for finding something that may appeal to you and your friends/family.

The best part is watching Wil repeatedly lose episode after episode.

Board Game Geek

An extremely thorough, mature and self-built resource of pretty much all things tabletop game related. The community here is one of the best I've ever seen on the internet. Seriously, flame wars so germane and polite that they're helpful. Games are well reviewed, well discussed, and ranked overall.

The rankings are generally pretty spot on, but there is an overall tendency to devalue lighter games making it a bit difficult to find good gateway games. Be careful with this one if you have a tendency to lose hours whenever you land on IMDB, Wikipedia or TVTropes.

You almost always have to go to a solid game shop to get decent ones, but they exist.

I have yet to need to do anything other than order things from Amazon. Granted, if you're looking for some obscure Euro that's out of print, Amazon probably doesn't have it (or it's $300) - but then again, neither does your Friendly Local Game Shop.

So, if I'm uninsured and facing major narrowing of the arteries, I can go smoke a joint in a police station and get free heart surgery?

So this has been the Obama Health Care plan all along?!

1. 1. Progressively strip rights away from the citizens criminalizing almost everything.
2. 2. When a medical situation arises, simply arrest and treat.

Bam, single payer public health care!

exazctly this, I leave mine open, why? because I can barely get a signal in my kitchen which is like 10 meters from the router (through 3 walls).. crappy wireless router. The laneway is 20 meters away from the house. And the road is like 200 meters from the house. If someone unwanted can actually access my network, I have a bigger problem.

It's pretty easy for an attacker to hook up a high gain directional antenna in order to remain out of sight.

I remember what it was like and GP was spot on. Progressive enhancement was not only the best practice, but a requirement of professional web design. Websites were expected to be standards compliant and usable if the browser did not support Java, Javascript, VBScript, CSS, Shockwave, or any other extension. Anybody whose website failed to work in Lynx was derided as an idiot.

The web worked like that for roughly 5 years in the early nineties. Then people outside the academic and military industries started using it and all of our happy, idealistic concepts about what the web was supposed to be began to erode.

We fought, as 'professionals', to do things 'the right way', and we priced ourselves right out of the market as everyone's nephew became a 'web developer'. The reality was that as time marched on the people paying the bills didn't care. The 'ideal web' collapsed almost immediately the moment moneyed interests moved in.

I can't see looking back at that time as anything other than wearing rose tinted glasses. Sure, the web was amazing, valiant, noble and revolutionary when I was in college. I look back on those years fondly as well, but I recognize that nostalgia plays a large part in that.

It's all anecdotal, but it seems that I get far fewer virus infections than many people that just blindly turn it on.

That's not because you disable JavaScript, it's because you're the kind of person that disables JavaScript.

Exactly. The banks are extremely 'poor hostile' - and why shouldn't they be? From the bank's perspective, people who don't carry a significant balance and live close to the edge are a huge risk with little reward. The Free Market would call this a rational decision.

Of course, you pretty much have to have a bank account to get by these days without being picked up and shaken (like this story) for loose change once in a while. There are a plethora of examples of predatory practices aimed at those who can't quite get above the poverty line themselves. Because what are they going to do? They're going to shut up, pay the 15% fee and buy the diapers - finding themselves even further behind and trying to make it up next month.

There's a pretty real barrier in this society that dissuades people under and near that line from ascending above it. And then the callous among us stand up and tell them to 'just get a bank account'.

In Europe, fuel costs are so high (due to taxes) that they are almost reaching parity with manufactured fuel in cost, which I suspect may well be the long term politicians goal (i.e. they can switch us all over and it would not cause a massive price shock).

Except for the massive price shock in terms of how much less money the government would collect without that tax in place...

I have an easy way i use to tell if a law smells bigoted, replace the group named in the law with black or Jew and if it sounds like something out of the 1930s? Well then its probably just good old fashioned bigotry.

Force anyone supporting such laws to restate them in the form: "I think the government should forcibly remove the following rights I enjoy from <insert target group here> because...". No matter what comes after the 'because', that statement should cause revulsion in everyone if the target group is anything other than 'legally convicted criminals'.

Wouldn't that be great, just abolish marriage as a whole. Cohabitation is the ultimate goal. This is pretty apparent in the tax code. I'm married (technically) but I pay my taxes like I'm single and it doesn't make a fucking bit of difference.

From a tax perspective it's not the marriage that earns the breaks, but the children. The former (usually) leads to the latter. The government doesn't care about you falling in love and marrying your soulmate, so they don't incentivize it. Growing their tax base, however, is well worth rewarding.