Reminds me of this short story/essay by Borges: http://www.coldbacon.com/writing/borges-quixote.html

I kind of liked the idea of the gold auction house because it let you grid less time and spend more time thinking about how you want your build to play. If you want to play a glass cannon, then you can get lots of damage gear, lots of attack speed and critical % and go out and play the way you wanted.

One of the (very few) problems I have with Borderlands 2 is that when you get to the higher levels (true vault hunter or higher) you have to change your build after you get any new weapons in order to still be effective, and you cannot play the way you want. For example, if you get a shotgun with very few bullets and very high critical you have to go back to Sanctuary and respec to get the talent that makes your reloads faster and doubles the damage of your first bullet. If you wanted to play with snipers, tough luck.

That said, I always felt the real money auction house was just a gigantic money grab and Blizzard purposefully broke Diablo 3 on Inferno so that you could not pass it unless you spent a lot of money (which has since been fixed in patches, I've been told).

I find it hard to believe that you qualified your statement with a "once the whacko dispatched the teacher" which supports my argument that killing 28 people with a machete is harder than it is with a gun but you still decided to start name calling.

Even though I'm sure you have given this some thought, I am afraid that you still have not grasped the full extent of the problem, violence is not a simple issue that you can just attribute to one cause (over abundance of whackos), and having easy access to guns and very little deterrent to using them most definitely increases violence.

Yes, better gun regulation will not stop massacres everywhere instantly (nothing will), but it will help reduce the problem. And yes, knife registration would further reduce the problem, as would putting everybody in protective spheres and banning all human contact, but those solutions are not practical, which is why you won't see a lot of people lobbying for those.

To be fair, the Sandy Hook shooting was one lone shooter, while the killings in Nigeria were hundreds of rioters with machetes. It is a lot harder for a single person to kill 28 people with a machete than it is with a gun.

I love how they say that you should experience improvements and your music should reveal more of the intrinsic beauty of the original event and the mid-range should sound more natural. I mean, it probably won't, but it should.

Your analogy is completely wrong: it would be correct if my house had a very fancy security system, there is a note on the front that says "I will give $500 to anyone who detects a problem with my security", you rang to tell me you found one vulnerability but I decided to ignore you because I don't want to pay you and then you broke into my house and left a polite note apologizing for it but mentioning that you do, in fact, have a way to break the system. Still illegal, but if there is a jerk in the story it is Facebook for not ignoring the bug reports and not paying bounties.

Totally! Just because it is social commentary and not a romance doesn't mean it isn't awful, you should totally trust the anonymous coward and the many well-read, intelligent people he is making up!!

And yes, he did not provide any counter-arguments other than his inexpert opinion (which is so much better than your English literature major opinion on English literature), but still this is something that he just knows because of his faith and if you believe in something with enough faith we all know it automatically makes it truth.

Of course some people will argue that even if she was a terrible writer that does not give people the right to harass a woman that campaigned for something she wanted but those idiots are missing the point, and I don't have to tell you what the point is because several well-read, intelligent people I am making up know what the point is.

I bought a copy of the Orange Box, and proceeded to play Half Life 2 for a bit until I got the "AI Disabled" DRM. I went into the forums to ask about it and a moderator promptly shamed me for pirating the game. I eventually proved that I actually had bought the game and some Valve representative told me how to fix the issue, but I was definitely not happy about it. For the longest time I did not buy any more Valve games because a bug in their DRM code caused me to get flamed in their forums.

I'm not sure where you are hiring, but my company interviews a lot of people and most of them have trouble doing basic programming tasks (for example, iterating an array). Just on phone interviews we weed out two out of three candidates. From the candidates that actually make it on site only about half have decent interviews on relatively basic data structure and algorithm questions.

Foreign interviewers don't fare much better, though. We basically attempt to interview as many people as possible so we get the few competent ones no matter where they are from.

When we do hire H1Bs, they are paid exactly the same as US citizens, which is more than the average for our city for equivalent positions. Of course, my company does care about the quality of our software; maybe if we didn't care and hired every idiot out of college we wouldn't have a shortage of engineers.

According to Wikipedia there have been 27 school shootings since 1995, in those school shootings, 320 people have been killed (it is hard to tell how many of those were children, but a safe estimate would be half of them were because the incidents happened at school). I would say that a 27 to 1 ratio for incidents and around 160 children dead vs. 19 children dead is "in much smaller numbers".

But arguing about what kills more people is missing the point entirely. The problem is not that people can find some creative ways to kill other people, the problem is that currently it is very easy for a kid who has problems to grab a handgun and gun down whoever he doesn't like. The solution is not just outlawing guns, part of the solution probably has to be figuring out who these kids are and helping them adjust better to whatever they are going through, however, saying that because there are crazy people out there killing other people then we shouldn't do anything about school shootings is a bit like saying we should not spend any money researching a cure for cancer because people still sometimes die of the flu.

Well, at this point, even with your phone in your pocket and your laptop at home we all know you bough Apple and you even made it a point to note that it was expensive so, yes, I would say that it is important for Apple customers to be seen as people who have money to spend on expensive electronics.

From looking at the cover, maybe this was an issue with it looking very, very similar to another series of books that is fairly famous?

This, this a hundred times! I bought Driver: San Francisco on the Steam Summer Sale and was poignantly disappointed when I discovered that it was not protected with Steam but with UPlay. And it wouldn't be so bad if it didn't look as horrible, didn't feel as rushed, didn't have an annoying bug where it would not shut down properly when I tell it to shut down (it keeps on running in the background until I kill the process). Really, who thought it was a great idea to reinvent the wheel only this time it is square.

So mention one person who makes money out of Windows except for every person who makes money out of Windows because I disqualify them. Got it!

1. Valve
2. National Instruments
3. Piriform
4. Grig Software
5. Norton
6. McAfee
7. IBM

8. Just going from things in my start menu that either I or my company bought and as far as I am aware none of them are moving to the web and/or in decline (unfortunately in the case of McAfee).