How would you know what voice they raise? You're getting it filtered through the American press, and the voices of those normal citizens in other countries are also being filtered by their own media. Anyway, a huge chunk of the American population went along with the Bush Wars, and believed outright propaganda (many still cling to it). Sure there were dissenters, but the didn't get so much airtime as the war hawks, if you recall. Prior to rise of the internet, US Forces conducted some totally brutal campaigns in Latin America and very few Americans dissented or ever knew the details - it didn't go with the official statements which the TV and newspapers reported - this is stuff you can research now very easily, but the vast majority of Americans are still oblivious. Given the general American lack of consciousness or caring about the history of American atrocities, how can you criticize residents of a third world country - many of whom do not have even electricity, TV or internet access, and many who are under oppressive regimes who censor their speech with disappearance, jail or death - for not "raising their voice".

The only issue being that the J-20 and more recent Chinese stealth planes look nothing like an F-117 at all.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/11086277#post1 http://foundationfordemocraticadvancement.blogspot.com.au/2012/10/insight-into-venezuelas-automated.html Here are some details on the checks and balances, audit trail on Venezuelan voting machines. All that, at a minimum should be part of any standard: All machines use open source code which is published and checkable. All machines produce 3 records of each vote cast: internal storage, transmitted via secure lines to central servers, and a paper ballot to be placed in a box, and counted manually to check against both the machines internal hard-drive and data in the servers for that machine. The hard-drive data for each machine is also encrypted, by a combined key that each political party plus the electoral commission provides a partial piece for each machine that only they know. This means that no one party can add fake votes to a machine, after the election the drives can be backed up on cloned drives, the parties swap their encryption keys and can independently audit the machines to check that they match the paper ballots.

You can't really dispute one ad-hominem with another ad-hominem. Just because someone is a casual browser on /. doesn't affect the truth of their statement.

This girl is a well-known Wiccan. And better than anything you'll ever get http://www.theage.com.au/ffximage/2006/08/28/horne_narrowweb__300x303,2.jpg

Hear hear, the GP is all like "I dropped to a C average but it totally wasn't my fault!"

In fact WoW or MMO's in general are NOT the targets of Bartle's complaints. He's taking aim at facebook flash games which are hyped as "multi-player" but are really just repetitive single-player games with a thin veneer of linkage to your "facebook friends". They really blackmail you to keep logging back in, i.e. "log in at 4pm or we'll kill your crops"

You should read the article. He did say specifically "games played on social network sites", i.e. Facebook flash and Java Applet games is what we're talking here. Boot up Frontierville, Baking Life, Chocolatier, Cafe Life. That sort of thing. Play those for a few weeks, then get back to me. You'll know what he's talking about then. Or, if you want something more "manly" try Battle Stations, Kingdoms of Camelot, Legacy of a Thousand Suns. Those are a little better, but not as "popular" as the type listed above.

Have you played any number of "social games" on Facebook? I have, mainly at the behest of my girlfriend. Normally I play FPS, RTS, RPG type games, starting from the late 1980's. And I've played a fair few MUDs since the telnet days. Facebook games are OK-ish for a while, but the "social" is only skin deep, and every game uses the same types of interaction. There's little attempt to really explore the possibilities of multi-player. It's like every player creates their own little single-player farm/bakery/city/castle and you get to peek at each other's work and send network "pokes", gifts and requests. That is all you do. How's that really social? At least MUDs or MMO's have a shared world, your avatars can interact, rather than lots of single-player games, only pretending to be linked together. There seems to be a real lack of creativity in the Facebook/flash game making community, they copy each others systems too much. Maybe it's due to technical limitations of the facebook platform, but once proper MUDs/MMOs can run inside facebook, I think they will take off in a big way.