The lizard chick with the katana!
It would be quite interesting because it adds the extra problem of non-humans milling about in human history/future.

+1

@Sub-Topic:
If we do consider ourselves democracies or republics then WE are the ones responsible for the governments we elect.

Not like other totalitarian states where we love to punish the populace for actions committed by government they had no part in creating.

Strange that we elect them, yet when they pull some dumb shit, we quickly claim innocence and that we have no involvement!

Sorry, in a democracy they represent US (as in the people) and what they do in our name reflects upon us.

Yeah, on Maher or The Daily Show someone said that China will do what works and call it 'Socialism'.
Though kinda like we call 'Democracy' ;)

I think the initial statement of '$60 to expensive' is to simple.
To expensive for what?
For a standalone game that offers ~40 hours of entertainment? I think not.
Even a multiplayer game that sounds quite reasonable, as long as there are no monthly costs.
If I have to pay monthly, then I do not want to have to buy a box in advance.

What also might be indicated is that the days of trying to leech your clients for all they have are coming to a rapid end, even more so with Free2Play titles.

While WoW was massively popular and did earn the people a lot of money, it was like earning money off of Online Poker. Get the people hooked (emotionally) and then try to bleed them for all they have.
I see the same problem with Free2Play titles.

Contrary to that I go back to games like GuildWars (made by old Blizzard people) who did not try to leech their customers. You had to pay the full price for the boxed game (a nice box btw!) and then could play for free with ALL benefits. You did not even need the box because you only needed a small start-client you could download from the GW-page. i.e. no scratched DVDs.
While the addons and some other additions (more char slots) did cost extra, you were not missing out on the game just because you did not shell out money.

The devs (remember they were from Blizzard and created Diablo) knew that you did not need the subscription model to finance the game. So they did that and were quite profitable in a market dominated by WoW.

So I'd happily shell out $60 bucks for GuildWars2 because I know that that will be the last purchase I need to make to enjoy the game (at least from the game's point of view, HW purchases not included).

Good point. Could it be that the government is trying to raise the lower level of 'acceptable harm'?
Basically that would be the level at which the government can induce harm to get it's way without it becoming a civil rights issue.

I mean if you look at how your government already operates with pepper spray and tazers, they have already become the 'normal procedure' and not an exception.
Hence being sprayed and tazed is no longer considered 'to much'.

The excuses were quickly found why the police, you know the ones with the guns and the nightsticks and cuffs and whatnot had to use it against pacifist demonstrators doing a sit-in to 'protect themselves and the populace' and the people accept it.
Hey it is the police and what they do must be right. Heck they even threw those people in jail so the protesters must be criminals and deserve whatever they get.

So the powers will try to 1up the current level. 'How much more can we get away with?' If you look at what our governments can already get away with, I think we can all scratch the 'democratics' and 'republics' from our nations.

Now since all that has become the norm, what do you think the threshold is to torture someone? Not to mention a 'non-american dark skinned non-christian'?

It is not a lack of training or whatever when this happens. It is either sanctioned or the proverbial tip of an iceberg from a sick culture.

We claim to hold ourselves to the highest standards, yet drop them at the first chance we get. Kinda shows we never had those high standards in the first place, or at least only expected them from others.

I used to work in the mobile gaming industry for about 5y during the J2ME period and I can only say 'you aint see nothing!'

We had to build ~ 45+ 'unique' builds to support most of the phones back then. Unique being that we could often group certain features together and thus increase the amount of devices we could support with one version. It was also because back then we were limited to 64k, later 200k.
Also it allowed us to map the quality to the phones, so that we could provided the needed quality on each phone set. It made no sense to provide a high res gfx set to a nokia brick that had like 120x64 pixels.

One of my pet peeves back then was when someone asked me how they could write an app for the mobiles and sell millions, yet were clueless of the market. I explained countless times that they could either focus on a hand-full of devices with limited effort or build up a team for the whole she-bang, but that would not be something you did on the side. You would need latter for the profits.
Lets just say that they were often not very enthusiastic after this.

Then again, there were (game) comps that were highly profitable in doing exactly that because they had the knowledge and the team to hit all devices.

This also meant we had to build our games so that they could run under different platforms with little to no changes.
Hence and specialities you created your app on had to be 100% covered on all devices or you had a backup for when that did not work.

Now while with android a lot of problems were solved, you still have the fragmentation of devices and like. So like it or not, you will have to do this if you want to support a large device base.

In summary: know your market, know you platform and accept that you cannot have everything your way if you want to support a large device base.

Side note: all this kinda reminds me of a programming-generation-conflict I often see, especially (usually) between people who programmed in 'old' languages such as ASM, C/C++ or like, and 'newer' languages such as Java, C#, et al.
People who learned the ropes on the 'old' languages had to deal with all kinds of rudimentary stuff that 'modern' languages simply 'automagically manage' today. So many 'modern' programmers expect stuff to automatically work because the language is supposed to handle it for them.

i.e. Write once, run everywhere, even with hardware hacks.

Kinda also reminds me of discussions today concerning people using 'modern' languages complaining about having to write 'to much code'.

Didn't 'God' take a part of Adam to make Eve?

No, murder is clear. If you condone it, you support it.

Treason on the other hand is different for you must ask yourself, are you a patriot or a nationalist?
Contrary to popular (US) perception, it usually does not mean what you think it means.
* a patriot thinks people before nation (i.e. government)
Hence a patriot would do what is right for the people even if it means that a new nation is needed.
* a nationalist thinks nation before people
What the nation says is more important then what the people want.
This is usally what the people in the US and other countries think of when they call themselves 'patriots'.

So it depends on who you are committing treason against and what your beliefs are.
f.i. if you are a patriot, actions against your own nation (remember it means government here) are not treason.

'It was ok then' is nothing more then an excuse!
Wrong is wrong, no matter how you sugar coat it.

Just because you can do things does not make it right!

Though I really do wonder about your founding fathers. On one side they had slaves, yet on the other they had the 'all men are created equal' stuff.
Now either I do believe that all men were created equal, then not only having slaves but allowing such a thing in your territory is simply wrong, or they were not talking about slaves.
Perhaps they wanted to place themselves on the same pedestal as kings and lords and slaves were just not people.

But you know them darn people, they what was written back then at face value.

I even remembering the great slave liberator Lincoln mentioning that freeing the slaves was NOT the goal of the war. From the back of my mind, the goal of the war was not the liberation of the slaves but the survival of the union. If freeing the slaves helped that goal then he would do it.

Perhaps one idea on why so much detail was put into the landscape is that the story kind of reflects what he went through.
When you are young you have no eye for the beauty of nature and seek only action and adventure. Yet when you are in the midst of battle and are soaking yourself in anticipation and fright, seeing your comrades and enemies getting torn to shreds, what do you really seek? Perhaps your mind will float back to that stream at the foot of the snow covered mountains and you can still smell the flowers and hear the birds.

It is a joke. Just look at the Abu Ghraib trials or others where they were not tried for torture, murder and rape (which they did) but for 'dereliction of duty' or 'illegal discharge of a firearm'.
They are good 'ol boys and the military will protect them with such a show trial they would usually get a death sentence or at least life.

But Manning is not a "good 'ol boy", he broke the unwritten rules. And like in some cheap mafia film, he is going down. Preferably with as much publicity as possible. (anyone honestly think he could ever be let go? how long would he survive?)
They are only trying to get him to confess about the connections with Assange because he is their real target.
They will not stop from doing whatever possible to pin the tail on that donkey. Not like the military, nor their government, really is an honest bunch that would never fake stuff and lie to get what they want.

Uhm, wasn't Sen. Kennedy on the No-Fly list at one time? Not to mention people like Robert J. Johnson, John Lewis

or

Walter F. Murphy, McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton, reported that the following exchange took place at Newark on 1 March 2007, where he was denied a boarding pass "because I [Professor Murphy] was on the Terrorist Watch list." The airline employee asked, "Have you been in any peace marches? We ban a lot of people from flying because of that." "I explained," said professor Murphy, "that I had not so marched but had, in September 2006, given a lecture at Princeton, televised and put on the web, highly critical of George Bush for his many violations of the constitution." To which the airline employee responded, "That'll do it."

source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Fly_List

Very true, but they could join up with some of the most bad-ass hackers to fight this scum.
Seriously, if our governments were open minded and not accepting the crap from the Recording Mafia, they perhaps could work together with such groups.

When I look at anon or the CCC, these are some of the elite you would want help from. Make some deals with them.
We look away on this and that action, therefor you get me any information on site xyz.

Instead, to not alienate their donors, they would rather waste time going after pirated films and cds then use the time and resources to go after scum.

I know this is wishful thinking ... but when I think about what Anon is doing and our corrupt politicians are not, does anyone wonder why we celebrate Anon?
At least Anon go after the real scum.

Spot on!
Who watches the watchmen?

Just look at the UK, who has the MOST cameras (at least last time the numbers were posted) in the WORLD. Yet did it stop the terrorist attacks? What about the mob?
No, it just tracks people getting $hitfaced and making out in back alleys.