You what now?

If our money were backed by gold and silver, people couldn’t just sit in some fancy building and push a button to create new money. They would have to engage in honest trade with another party that already has some gold in their possession. Alternatively, they would have to risk their lives and assets to find a suitable spot to build a gold mine, then get dirty and sweaty and actually dig up the gold. Not something I can imagine our “money elves” at the Fed getting down to whenever they feel like playing God with the economy.

Paulians don't even know what they're talking about when they claim to be quoting Ron Paul. If that isn't evidence of a cult of personality disorder, I don't know what is.

And yet it seems that the solution is MORE accountability in terms of separation regulations.

Predecessor to the Great Depression? Financial regulation-stripping that allowed everyone's money to get caught up in stock market crashes because banks were "investing" in that level of risk.

Predecessor to the Bush Recession? Oh look - repeal of Glass-Steagall reforms, allowing (once again) everyone's money to get caught up in stock market crashes because banks were "investing" in that level of risk.

Worshiping the almighty "market" to magically do anything but create greater and greater income equality is stupid and evidence that the right wing suffers from a collective mental disorder characterized by faulty logic and an inability to understand history.

Please learn to post without block-quoting everything into an unreadable gray mass. That's far more annoying than having smaller pagination breaks.

Thank you.

When the government can print money or borrow without practical limit, we have a great depression or the morass we're in now.

Actually, at the time of the Great Depression the US was still on the gold standard.

Paulians: they never let facts get in the way of a good rant.

If you're trying to render an entire "page" of text all in one go, sure.

If you're willing to scroll paragraph by paragraph and see a quantity of readable text at a time, not so much.

I swear, you kids are spoiled.

Ever held a paperback book that close to your face to read it? Notice the type looking a little bit "blocky"? Notice how you can see the flaws in the printing process?

No different. 75 ppi is just fine for an e-reader. And no respectable optometrist EVER recommends holding the book at that distance. Hold it at standard reading distance instead (say, 24 inches or higher) and run that calculation.

Yeah, that's another good comparison.

The problem with these guys is that they have forceful personalities conductive to a cult-of-personality campaign and organization style. So they say a few things that make sense (in a "blind pig finds an acorn every once in a while" sense) and then certain people are willing to jump on board with everything else they say without considering what's being said because "this guy started out making sense."

Consider the guy above you: "Tell me, what has had value for thousands of years. I guess that preferring a metal that has had value for thousands of years and will have value as far as we can tell for thousands more, over a piece of paper that politicians can print pretty much at will, makes hima loon."

Actually, the problem with goldbuggery is that it cannot work in the modern economic system for two reasons:
#1 - Most of the gold in the world is being used for industrial applications.
#2 - Even absent #1, there is not remotely enough gold in the world for even one major nation to create a "backing" system to allow people to trade in their currency for raw gold.

Additionally, even if that did exist, gold puts immense downward pressures on currency and economics. So much so that even at the beginning of the US, we actually existed on a silver standard, and only created a silver-to-gold exchange ratio in 1792 due to a shortage of enough silver to back the currency. The 1792 expansion was - tadahh! - the government instantly creating money by adding another so-called precious metal to the currency base.

Historically, goldbuggery and silverbuggery were pretty much at odds, and there was constant changing and exchanging of the two metals with other countries that were engaging in the same foolishness and setting their own silver-to-gold exchange rates. The Independent Treasury Act of 1848 caused a lot of gold to migrate to the British due to a skewed exchange rate; this also caused the gold rush of 1849, because gold was so overvalued by law. Constant changes in the availability of one metal or the other - due to finding of new veins for mining - would cause devaluation or overvaluation in one locality or another.

In short: hitching your finances to goldbuggery and silverbuggery is insanity. And it seems the only people who can't figure that out (the "never learned history so they're doomed to repeat it" crowd) tend to be on the Ron Paul side of the political spectrum.

If you can produce something at 75 ppi that's intended to be held at standard reading distance, then you're just fine - you're relatively close to computer monitor spacing anyways and you're really not that far off from the standard printing dimensions of a paperback book.

If you're expecting someone to hold it up to their eyeballs for cheap laser surgery (or hell, a pattern of eyeball abuse that'll cause them to need laser surgery eventually), then maybe you want more pixels. Not that it'll really help you, you'd do better with a pair of reading glasses anyways.

Except that he is currently retiring and not running for the House again this time around. So you won't have him anywhere.

Not that that's a bad thing. Someone up above said "he is the only candidate that talks truth"; this only applies where "truth" includes insane goldbuggery, hermitic levels of nativism and xenophobia, extreme isolationism, and a standard monologue that ought to begin with "ok, everyone put on your tinfoil hats now."

Ron Paul is to the Republicans what Lyndon LaRouche was to the Democrats - a weirdo who attached himself to their party for his own goals and who manages to get by on a cult-of-personality effect while never remotely breaking into the mainstream because when you get right down to it, his "fundamental principles" have been disproven by history time and again.

Hate to spoil a few things for you but:

- Colonel's original recipe:chicken grease salt.
- Coca Cola recipe: right here, most likely genuine.

Now as to the USPTO, the problem is that they are no longer paid to DENY patents. In the late 1970s/early 1980s, republicans in key positions began playing games with the system, setting up metrics for the patent examiners that judged their performance not by the number of processed patents, but by the number of APPROVED patents. Examine several patents a week, deny most of them, and your "job performance" was not as good as the moron who just rubber-stamped stuff a few cubicles down.

To top that, corporations came up with the idea of "patent slamming." The idea was to overload the patent system; every time the tiniest change to a system was made, it was filed as a new patent by the giant companies like IBM, Microsoft, Apple, GM, GE, etc. Particularly nauseating about it have been certain software houses, where it seems every new line of code ends up farted out by some shyster in the legal department as a new patent application.

The result has been that for about the last 30 years, the USPTO has been pointless. Not to say that meaningful patents are denied, but so many meaningless patents are granted that any patent in the past 30 years is suspect.

Patents like making a rectangle. Or turning a playing card sideways, a patent so fucking stupidly absurd it should have been laughed out of the office and shipped back to the fucking morons at WOTC/Hasborg along with a copy of Hoyle's Rules for Card Games as century-old prior art.

The last company to get all "multiple core happy" and "SLI On A Board" happy was 3dfx. Who NVidia bought out when they... oh yeah, crash and burned.

Whoops.

Time Quantum systems can create some very interesting calculations based on your framerate...

You know, calculating collisions is independent of resolution.

Not really, no. Calculating the aim direction and collisions of a firing arc is very dependent on resolution. Compare the firing arc jumpiness of Wolfenstein 3D to Doom; one of the big things you'll start to notice is that Wolfenstein isn't truly a "360 degree" turning radius, but instead moves a few degrees at a time for each keyboard tap. If you want to hit a bad guy, and he's in between arcs, you learn to aim consistently to one side (IIRC the right side) because the collision detection is programmed to compensate inward from your aim to that side.

Now with a mouse, you have to calculate where the crosshairs are pointing. Have a game rendering internally at 640x480, but visually at 1600x1200, and players are going to complain about a "jumpy" mouse and aiming system. So the programmers overcorrect instead - they render INTERNALLY as high as possible and allow the player to turn the resolution down for visual rendering... and it eats up a shit-ton of processing power no matter what.

And then there's "auto-aim correction" calculations for consoles...

Indeed.

Republicans always love regressive taxation. They don't even mind the payroll tax that much since it's highly regressive (capping out means it applies on 100% of the income of the poor and middle class, but 10% or less of the income of the upper class).

We could fix the tax system by classifying ALL income as income and eliminating the "capital gains" cheating bullshit, and eliminating the payroll tax caps and simply making it apply to all wages. But that'd never fly, because it'd be fair to all instead of the regressive taxation the Republicans want.

Consider:
If you ONLY consider income tax, somewhere around 50% of people have "no tax liability." A whole fucking lot of them are the senile delinquent Tea Party followers who no longer work because they're retired; the rest are mostly stay-at-home parents.

If you add in payroll taxes, it drops to 18%.

If you add in sales taxes, it drops to around 10%.

If you add in the various FEES that Republicans like to pass (remember, fees are even MORE regressive as a percentage of income) - stuff like auto registration fees for instance - it's around 5%.

But the Republicans still insist on ranting about people who "don't pay taxes."

Actually it's more a combination:

#1 - trying to make games run at OMG FUCKING HUGE RESOLUTION and OMG FRAMERATE are big ones. You want 120 FPS at 1600x1200 or higher? Well shit, there went a ton of calculating power. Even if your video board is handling the rendering, you still have to calculate collisions and other factors on CPU.

#2 - trying to make AI work is fucking HARD. Sure, you can code it to be perfect, and constantly win because it never misses, but then you're just replicating the kind of shitty experience you get on the Call of Duty and Halo servers full of aimbots and lag-hack cheaters. Make the AI miss too often, or make too many obvious mistakes, and it looks bad. The sweet spot is hard because inevitably, players figure out how to "trigger" the mistakes of the AI and then the game seems easy. And that's just FPS AI. RTS AI and anything involving team dynamics (like CTF), it gets even harder.

#3 - programming and dumbing it down for consoles. Compare: Deus Ex, Deus EX: Invisible War, Deus Ex: Human Revolution. The first, on PC, programmed for gameplay over graphics = phenomenal. The second, programmed for the console and graphics over gameplay, = a steam pile of shit. The third, programmed for console but for later gen consoles and with an eye towards trying to redeem the franchise's gameplay? Somewhere in the middle, good game, but still not up to the gameplay quality of the first.