Also, do you know about the new "family accounts"? Maybe you should give Bob @ Phone Support another call to ease your suffering.

I usually use a couple of computers at once, and I sometimes have a slow-paced game on one and want to play something faster on another while, say, waiting for turns to process or something.

Waiting for turns to process?

Are you playing on a PDP-11?

Yes, I'm aware of Offline Mode.

So what you're saying is you know very well it's technically possible to do what you want on Steam, but because some customer service rep tells you they don't want you to, you find the whole platform "really annoying".

Bah.

When a platform comes along that gives developers a sense of security and reason to invest in games and gives users the ability to install their games on more than one machine and when that machine goes belly up, to install them automatically on another machine (something you can't do on the old "X number of serial number uses is the limit" games), I would say it's pretty much a win-win.

Valve has done a pretty good job of being really friendly to gamers. They create a whole ecosystem of games and forums and support and communication to the dev community that never existed before, but you find it "really annoying" because you can't play some turn-based abomination that takes long enough between turns that you can go over to a second machine and play another game without the psychic pain of knowing Bob @ Phone Support said you shouldn't even though you could do it if you wanted.

Did I mention, "Bah"?

Assuming for the sake of arguments that longer voting times are caused by a higher population density and that blacks are disproportionately concentrated in high density areas, the racial disparity in voting times is likely a side affect of population density rather evidence of racism.

OK, fair enough. But then why do similar statistics apply even within a city?

And since polling places are supposed to be apportioned by population rather than by geographic area, why should greater population density cause longer waits? One factoid you need to know. It's long been a tradition that blacks vote as a congregation on Sundays. And in the Red states where blacks are most being disenfranchised, the new election laws have uniformly ended early voting on Sundays. Other early voting days are being continued, but for some reason they're cancelling Sunday voting.

If you look at the suite of new voting laws that are being passed since the Supreme Court lifted the pre-emption rules, you'll come to understand just how dramatic is the effort to prevent blacks, hispanics, the poor generally and students from voting in Red states. How do you take seriously any democracy that makes it disproportionately harder for certain populations to vote?

And perhaps blacks being "disproportionately concentrated in high density areas" is argument enough for why we still need affirmative action, no?

How about you track blacks and whites that live in the country and then blacks and white in the cities.

The figures are nationwide. Minorities have to wait twice as long to vote as whites:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...

Interesting that you should bring that up. The study specifically measured the length of time members of different races spend in the voting booth. There was no significant difference.

Citation above.

What you're saying is if I get in line to vote behind a black person, the polling officials will pull me out of line to go ahead of him, and make him wait an extra 30 minutes as well?

No. A specific case does not reflect the "average".

All it says is the lines are longer in black neighborhoods.

Regarding citations, I'm pretty sure you could have found this one yourself. It was the first google result:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02...

I cited specifically Michigan in my statement, but the NYTimes article indicates nationwide blacks and hispanics wait twice as long to vote as whites.

Elections are not funded by precinct. They are funded by the state. If they're using different funding levels depending on the race of the neighborhood, that's a pretty good indication that it's not race-transparent.

The average wait for a white person to vote in Michigan is 7 minutes. The average wait for a black person to vote in Michigan is 46 minutes.

In Florida, Ohio, Indiana etc those ratios are much bigger.

Yeah, you still need affirmative action. It may be that slavery is like original sin and it can never be washed away and once you start a country that is based on owning other humans, you're never going to be redeemed completely. It can get better, and it can get worse, but it never goes away.

I've been playing the Rise of the Triad re-do lately, and I've noticed lots of doors. I mean a LOT of doors. I've also noticed that they all open. Either you can open it now or it's locked and you can open it later or it will open with a bad guy behind it and it's not for you to open at all because it opens from the other side, but dammit it will be opened at some point if you continue exploring.

The ease of movement of those old FPS games is a stunning contrast with the newer 3rd person shooter console games like Tomb Raider, which feel like you're controlling a marionette with rubberbands instead of strings and you're never sure if you're going to jump over that obstacle or use it for cover. The Mass Effect series is the same.

One third-person shooter that felt natural was Saints Row 3 and 4. But even there, as well-done as those games were, there would be some clumsiness. In an FPS like Half-Life 2, there was none of that.

Oh, Apple knows what its customers want. And the good news is that since Lawrence v Texas, it's even legal.

OK, I admit I had to look up "vesicle".

Stop laughing. It's been a quarter-century since I took a biology class

OK, I realize I may skew a little older than many Slashdot readers, so here. Consider this your Easter gift:

http://youtu.be/ftgAG3Vnif8

Do you think you can use adamantium in a 3D printer?

Asking for a friend.

I had an uncle with a wooden leg and I thought it was a big deal until I found out my aunt had a cedar chest.

Unlike every previous launch, however, we the taxpayers are paying a fixed price to SpaceX, instead of the bloated cost-plus contracts that are large part of the reason why there hasn't been much progress in manned spaceflight in the last four decades.

Well, it's theoretically less expensive, but not yet. If you extrapolate out 50 missions, you start seeing SpaceX making an actual profit instead of a projected profit based on a fee stream.

My problem is that the entire thing still relies on government. If there is value in a "private" space industry, it hasn't been found yet.

Further, none of the profits ever materialize if you look at the external costs of the federal government already having done the hard work. Unless you believe SpaceX started with a clean sheet of paper and didn't make use of the past half-century of government space programs.

At best, you can say that there's a place for government and private industry to work together on the really big things like space travel. Without the government over-spending, there's good reason to believe we'd never have seen any space program at all. Or, convince me that without the initial public investment, any private company would have done the basic research required to send the first satellite into space.