Yeah, I kinda question this article, and its focus solely on defective panels from China - we don't really have a reference point for what sort of defect rate is 'normal'.

It boggles me that people can repeat mantras like that and get modded up as insightful. 'Bad'? 'Good'? Can you not pause for a moment to consider 'for whom'?

Yeah, sure, a nice warm humid environment is awesome for a very biodiverse set of tropical diseases. It is surely also worth it to lose much of the existing local ecosystems to be replaced by a set of warm-climate invaders which will, over subsequent millions of years, generate new biodiversity.

I'm *sure* this is what everyone wants.

GeoGuessr DLC announced?

An exception that proves the rule. Even with minor novelty vendors like bitmunchies, at some point there needs to be an interaction with a real economy. That is, with suppliers, with landlords, utilities companies, so on and so forth. At those points, for the business to continue existing, there needs to be the large scale conversion of bitcoins to USD, or whatever the local currency is. However you might be personally be about to avoid bitcoin conversion on the small scale, that's only the tip of the iceberg.

People who sell drugs have to eat. Grocery stores don't accept bitcoins.

If the First Amendment is broken, and commonly abused to create a government alienated from the needs and wishes of the people, then it needs to be fixed. I can never comprehend the US trend of continuing to allow the letter of laws pervert their intent.

For thousands of years mass starvation was common, infant mortality was huge, the majority of people were chattel slaves living on a barter system, while the tiny minority of aristocrats lived in decadent luxury as their gold magically became more valuable through no effort of their own. Yeah, that'll be a *great* thing to go back to.

Yeah, reward saving - when large proportions of the population live a precarious enough existence as it is, with *nothing to save*, and would under a deflationary system see the debt they have instead automatically increase over time.

Too bad you don't understand what the word 'most' means.

You can look at the buying power of the USD in terms of commodities, yes, and to make it fair, you look at commodities that people actually normally spend money on, like groceries and rent, rather than stuff that is the preserve of speculators like gold and silver. That's how inflation is calculated.

Silver is more valuable, because if you sell your silver and buy stuff with it, you can buy a lot more stuff these days. $1.25 in 1964 would have the buying power of approximately $8.78 in 2010 dollars, according to CPI inflation measures.

Why pick silver? Why not pick gold? Houses? Cellphones? Water? Oh right because you had better use the specific good that backs up your ideology, I guess.

You have a right to your games. But the customer also has a right to know. Does every one who bought Call of Duty know that they are funding arms manufacturers and that these games were made with the intention of marketing to them? Would all of them purchase the game if they did know?

I won't, now that I know.

The point is that they never told us. If they were up front about 'buy this game and you fund the weapons industry' then I can be an informed consumer and I'd be fine with you buying your games while I go buy my own. Instead all of a sudden I'm told that 10+% of my games purchase goes to something I oppose. I'm not saying ban this sick filth, I'm saying that these need to be clearly labelled, because it matters if I'm effectively funding the wars that I oppose.

People who buy car games are generally happy with subsidising those car companies existence, and indeed can generally be assumed to support motor sports. People who buy FPS games, especially internationally, cannot be assumed to actually favour the real versions of the virtual conflicts they are fighting in.

But the fact that it's the gun industry is the whole point. I, and many people despise the gun industry. I play these games expecting them to be meaningless catharsis, not channeling my money directly to them, and getting back propaganda. The games companies hide their licensing arrangements because they know it would hurt sales. You may find it hard to empathise because you are of the proportion of people who think gun companies are all hunky dory, but imagine if this was happening with an industry you personally hate.

Say, for example, DRM. Imagine that you just found out that Slashdot licenses the Your Rights Online logo from StarForce and channels 10% of advertising revenues to them. If I sit here and say this is no big deal, would you accept that?

Oh, sure, gun companies will definitely try to make money. I'd argue that such actions are amoral, but that's a minor point.

The main blame here is on the games companies licensing the names, in establishing these relationships, paying the money, hiding it from their customers.