The conflict is already here.

In 2014 a lawsuit was brought a couple who rents their private property to host weddings as side income. A lesbian couple tried to rent the property for the day for their wedding.. Prior to the contract being finalized, the property owners discovered their would-be clients were were lesbians (presumably they had only talked with one partner up to that point). The property owners declined to host the wedding on religious grounds but said they were willing to let the couple use the farm for a reception if they so wished since a reception was non-religious in nature. The lesbian couple sued, won, and the property owners were fined 10-grand and forced to pay the couple $3000 ($1500 to each partner).

In 2013 the New Mexico Supreme Court ruled a photographer could not decline to photograph a gay marriage ceremony, as declining the work solely on the basis of the sexual orientation of the couple was a violation of discrimination law.

One the one hand I believe firmly that people should not be forced to give up their religious or moral beliefs just because they happen to own or run a business. On the other hand I believe public business must serve all equally. I see no good resolution to this.

US Army personnel with allergies to a particular medication are required to wear a red medical ID tag along with their normal set of ID tags. If this technology becomes common place, I expect those with crustacean allergies will be required to wear a red tag same as those with pencilin allergies.

You've got enough posts on this story that I don't think you're a troll. As such I'll engage you like a human being: 1) What do you think your oil money should be able to buy in addition to consumer goods? 2) Cite your source for Gadhafi's loans to European politicians.

Ah. I've never heard that term used before and Google was returning some strange results. Thanks for the information.

Can you expand on that?

Your stepson is fighting what's called the "kinetic" fight. That's the part where guns, bigger guns, and a whole lot of ammunition and ordinance are pointed at the enemy. YouTube and Twitter are part of what's called the "non-kinetic" war, which is a fancy term for "propaganda battle" or "making the world think we're the good guys." And frankly, Islamic insurgent groups (IS/ISIS/ISIL in particular) are winning that war (at least in Iraq, Afghanistan, and a number of other predominately Muslim countries) through Twitter, YouTube, and other social networking sites. So back to your original question: CENTCOM has a Twitter account for public relations purposes. It pushes "the good news stories" and tries to make the US look like the good guy.

The GP suffers from the misconception that not taxing people is the same as giving them money.

From what I understand (having talked to a lot of soldiers who've been stationed in South Korea), US presence is something of a contentious issue. Broadly speaking, the older generations who remember the Korean War prefer the US to stay, while the younger generations would prefer the US leave. (There's also a small segment of the younger generation that agitates for faster progress on re-unification now and then). A few soldiers I talked to told me stories of the elders going out to protests against US presence and smacking the protestors trying to get them to go home. As the older generation dies off, the resistance to US presence will increase.

[cynic] This is Slashdot, where anyone who disagrees with you is obviously a moron. Otherwise, they'd share your opinion. [/cynic]

The problem with specialized torrent sites are the membership requirements, either in terms of existing torrents to add that don't already exist or money. I've belonged to one specialized site that approached this correctly. You were given an initial amount of credits that could be applied to downloads. The only way to get more credit was to seed your files. The more you seeded, the more files you could download. Donations went strictly to pay for maintenance and hosting costs, but there was no requirement to spend money. Everything was organized, tagged, and easily searchable. Poor formats or bad files were marked usually within a hour of being posted and admins would delete these usually within 24 hours to avoid cluttering search results. Sadly the site shutdown last year with no warning (or at least none that I saw), I suspect at the behest of some three or four-letter agency.

Considering The Great Flood wiped out all but one human family from the world I'd say that's a pretty horrifying event. Further, as a practicing Christian, I'll say you have a really incomplete understanding of the Bible. There's assassinations (Judges 3:12-30), murder to cover up an illegitimate pregnancy (2 Samuel 11), incestuous rape (2 Samuel 13), and daughters seducing their father (Genesis 19:36). Granted most of these are portrayed in a bad light (guys like Ehud being an exception) but unless Saturn was inhabited when Sephiroth destroys it (I haven't played that game so I don't know) I'd say the Bible's body-count is pretty high compared to a lot of video games out there.

This particularly holds true for book ordered through Amazon. The spike in sales pushes up the product ranking making the item look more popular, since sales velocity has a strong effect on how Amazon ranks the popularity of an item. Larry Correia, a writer, occasionally does what he calls "Book Bombs" where he'll encourages his fans to go buy a book for a writer he likes on a particular date. The sales spike usually pushes the book's Amazon ranking up helping it get (temporarily anyway) more page views from folks who might not ordinarily browse it.

That's part of it, though for certain platforms like Steam logistics is less of an issue (really, all you're accounting for there is an increase in traffic load). The other part is accounting. Since the money for the pre-order has already been given it makes the company books looks healthier. Then (and don't ask me how this next part works because I've had CPAs explain it to me multiple times and I still don't understand it) the accountants / sales department can project Day One (and beyond) sales and estimate how much money they expect to make, which makes the company books look healthier than they actually are. A cheap trick certainly but it's rampant in the various entertainment industries including books and music.

That being said, I'm not against pre-orders. I've pre-ordered books before, titles from authors I'm 90% certain I'll enjoy. I do regret my Skyrim pre-order though, mostly because the PC version was buggy as heck when it first came out and it took significant patching before it was playable on my system.

Indeed! How dare someone else enjoy something I didn't! The nerve!

This is huge. I'm not particularly gifted, maybe slightly above average intelligence, but I sailed through high school with very little effort for the most part. My freshman year of college was, bluntly, a disaster because I wasn't prepared for the time investment required by my field of study. I learned more study habits in that first year of college than in the previous four years of high school combined.