Not a bad critique, if a bit simplistic and immature (wah wah, I have to work for a living, I'm a slave-serf!) I do wonder if you think society could really be arranged much differently at this point in our development (unless you're the David Icke type there's nothing particularly remarkable about the "aristocrats" - they're just people), and if so, how. Unless you just like griping for its own sake, and have no intention of trying to change things for the better.

Just like locked doors, which have been proven time and again to be ineffective against theft. Thus, we should abandon all locks.
I mean, look at all those people who complain about losing their keys and being locked out of their house or car. It's gotten to a point where the only people who complain about being locked out are the people who use locks. You're not one of those fools who locks their door, are you?

I've been on Slashdot a while, and this is still possibly the worst analogy I've ever seen posted. On like, all sorts of levels.

Bravo, sir.

increase or decrease entropy. Do something!

Well, except for that last one. (Taking into account any system as a whole, since it's kind of impossbile as best we can tell.)

I never said three twin towers. But you forget that more than 2 buildings were destroyed that day. These videos are alittle tinfoil hat but just look at the info and not the spin How did WTC 7 collapse? [youtube.com] also there is Incriminating evidence [youtube.com] and finally atleast watch this one and make your decision on if the building fell because of the fires and not something more controlled 4409 unseen footage [youtube.com]

So, if I'm understanding your premise, the mysterious conspiracy which destroyed the Twin Towers through some method other than the goddamned 767's full of jet fuel that struck them also decided to destroy the WTC 7 building across the street despite it not being hit directly by anything for... what purpose exactly? Did they just have some extra explosives left over and didn't know what else to do with them?

I also like how you refer the conclusions of pretty much every structural engineer who examined the events as "spin". Because of course the building couldn't have fallen due to damage and uncontrolled fires from two of the largest skyscrapers in the world collapsing right next to it - that's what they *want* you to think!

I'm not saying some elements of the government and intelligence services didn't take advantage of the events for their own goals afterwards, or couldn't have theoretically been involved in letting them happen in the first place (however unlikely), but if you can't accept that just maybe being hit by giant metal tubes full of liquid specifically designed for combustion in full view of hundreds of witnesses might be a reason for the structural collapse of some buildings, there's not much point in attempting to hold a rational conversation with you.

Also, random videos on youtube are not generally a particularly reliable source of information.

(I don't know who will even see this at this point, but despite the apparently unironic Palin quote in your sig you seem fairly sane, so what the hell...)

They're irrelevant as being representative of a large trend in the country as a whole, which you seemed to be using them as, in an attempt to counter my point that a significant percentage of those who didn't like the health care bill did so because it didn't go far enough if you look closer at the data. The same way I wouldn't claim to know that everyone just loves the health care bill because my personal circle of friends does.

Polls can have their problems, especially if done using biased questions as you said, but I'll take the overall view afforded by multiple independent polls over the anecdotal evidence of any one person's small group of non-random demographically and geographically isolated peers any day.

I have my doubts you actually know this from personal experience as opposed to Sarah Palin's twitter feed, but nevermind. A far as I can tell, your argument is that the bill doesn't do enough to stop insurers from denying coverage to children with special needs by claiming pre-existing conditions. What? Isn't your entire point that you don't want the government regulating insurers to prevent them denying coverage, etc? You're reminding me of the people nonsensically shouting "keep the government out of my Medicare!"

Anyway, looking it up, apparently the language in the bill wasn't clear as to whether the coverage denial protection for children would take effect this year or 2014. The loophole is supposedly being closed by HHS regulations that will specfy this year, but rate increases will probably still be possible until 2014. Again, see above. I'm not sure how some protections for families with special needs children are worse than leaving them to the mercy of the insurance companies as is, but ok.

I'm not sure what you're saying here. Short of asking every person in involved their opinion (which is what voting is supposed to do, although it isn't practical to do on a frequent basis at present), well-conducted polling is the best way to estimate the breakdown of opinions in the country as a whole. My statistical argument didn't have much to do with the merits of the bill itself, but with your ridiculous claim that a law being passed that you personally don't like is somehow "tyranny", despite it being done through proper procedures by duly-elected congressional representatives, and the bill itself or a stronger version of it being supported by many people in the country. Again, the argument that it isn't Constitutional doesn't have a leg to stand on in court by modern standards, so good luck with that.

I'm not that big on the idea of the individual mandate myself, but I can see the reasons for it, and it's a fine only. My opinion will basically depend on exactly what the exceptions for "financial hardship" will entail, as applying it to anyone who doesn't have insurance because they can't afford it seems decidedly counterproductive.

(I used to hate the idea of being forced to buy car insurance when I was younger, until I realized it wasn't primarily for my benefit, but for that of the other drivers I might hit, and it made more sense)

I assume you're talking about abortion here. Stop being evasive, your opposition to federal reimbursement of them likely isn't based on efficiency, but ethics. I can respect wanting to stay as far away from infanticide as possible, although I don't believe the current legal limits allow them to take place late enough to rise to that level (I would have to check the state breakdowns on abortion limits and the research on fetal nervous system development to be sure- in my opinion, anything conscious enough to feel pain deserves ethical consideration). In any case, abortions are currently a valid medical procedure as defined by law, and the current limits on Medicaid reimbursement for them aren't being changed.

You're going to have to be more specific on which provision of the bill you're talking about, unless this is a "death panel" thing, in which case I can safely ignore it.

The national polls are split, as I said. And one election does not a nationwide certainty make, although if people really dislike the bill that much, they are of course free to elect enough Republicans to repeal it.

The whole Death Panels thing was absurd hyperbole based on allowing doctors to help patients with end of life planning (something Palin had previously supported), and you know it. Either that, or you're deluded.

That bill (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/America%27s_Affordable_Health_Choices_Act_of_2009#Reimbursement_for_counseling_about_living_wills) wasn't even the one that passed, anyway.

What are you talking about? It was signed on the 24th. (http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Executive_Order_13535)

I didn't say they were law, what's your point? Where would Federal money to reimburse abortions be coming from if not from executive branch agencies?

See above. Are you saying there's something in the Bill that would contradict his Executive Order?

I've read it (more people should, it's surprisingly short). They're going by the same broad interpretation of legislative power we've been using for the last century or so. It's hardly unprecedented.

We do have a representative democracy. It's also a constitutional republic, but I used the term specifically to highlight the difference between our system of government and a direct democracy, in which the public directly votes on all issues, rather than our elected representatives. If you want the country to be run entirely by public referenda, you're free to advocate for a direct democracy, but it isn't what we have currently. Personally, I think our voting systems would have to be made a good deal more convenient and efficient before even considering it, and even then there are problems with the idea (see: California).

What's that? *Gasp, shock* The people you know and talk to tend to agree with you? Why, that's... utterly irrelevant. I don't give a shit about your anecdotal evidence. There are over 300 million people in this country, and I doubt your self-selected group of friends and acquaintances is a good representative sample, or large enough to be statistically meaningful.

The most recent polls are somewhat evenly split as to whether the majority of the public supports or dislikes the health care bill (there may have been differences in how the questions were asked), but my point is it doesn't really matter, policy changes are up to the elected officials until the next round of elections, and by then most people will probably be aware that the Communist Death PanelsOMG!!1!! doom-and-gloom was nonsense.

Also, two of the objections you named seem to be about the bill not being inclusive enough, which I thought was the opposite of your issue with it. (I would say the abortion one was refuted by the President's executive order reaffirming the ban on Federal funds going to them, but I suppose you could argue he'll just reverse it later)

That's your opinion. The Supreme Court and something like a century of legislative precedent would likely disagree with you.

This argument isn't entirely unreasonable; I don't particularly like the broad interpretation of things like the commerce clause in lieu of passing specific Constitutional amendments to specify powers either, but that's how our government has functioned for a long time now, with some instances going back to the early post-founding days. The lawsuits by the state attorney generals are a publicity stunt- they aren't expecting them to actually hold up in court.

The US Government became a tyranny [merriam-webster.com] when the reigning political party ran roughshod over the American people to get as much of their agenda through as they could before the next election.

No, passing their agenda is exactly what elected officials in a representative democracy are supposed to do. If you want to bring up polls about the health care bill a) They're technically irrelevant - we have a representative democracy, not direct, and b) A significant percentage of those polled didn't like the bill because it didn't go far enough to change health insurance.

If you actually believe what you wrote and aren't just trolling, you're a deluded idiot.

I owe my success and productivity to working harder than I have to, and spending less than I make. If these things are penalized, I will work only the minimum I can get away with, and die as deep in debt as possible.

While I can sympathize with this point of view from an idealistic perspective, as a practical matter I have to say you're full of it. We already have a progressive income tax, so why aren't you "working the minimum possible" now, if you consider that being penalized? Unless you're referring to a completely Communist system in which what you earn has no bearing on how much you keep, but who's advocating that? (If you say "Obama", I will smack you. The current Democrats are hard-right compared to actual Communists). If not, I have to ask at what tax rate you would suddenly make the binary switch from "working harder than you have to and saving" to working as little as possible and trying to die deep in debt (and you'd better time your death correctly, or you might have an unpleasant last few years and end up ironically relying on the public assistance that was "penalized" from your fellow citizens).

I'm not saying that tax rates can't affect productivity, just that I'd imagine the affect is more or less a smooth curve distribution, in terms of what individuals find it affects their motivation and to what extent. My guess is for the majority of high earners the marginal rates would have to be far higher than they are now to have a significant affect, given that the highest brackets were over 80% throughout the 40's and 50's, and we still had millionaires then (not to mention those years included some of the best, economically, for the US). I believe we're currently at about 36%, going to 39% once some of the current tax cuts expire, which is still fairly low by historical standards.

BTW, your career theory doesn't explain Doom, Hexen, and Quake 1.

I said it was an overall statistical shift, not some absolute division. Hence, there were still shoot-and-blow-stuff-up games before, and there are still 2-D turn-based strategy games today. I would actually consider the games you mentioned part of the change (although their direct decendants have become somewhat niche again in favor of other shooter lineages like CoD, Half-Life, various FPS-RPG's, etc). I also forgot to mention I would consider PC gamers becoming younger, from adults to teens and below, part of the shift as well. Although it probably wasn't until around the success of Doom that the industry as a whole realized just how many adolescent boys then had access to relatively sophisticated PC's.

You seem to have misread my post if you think I was railing against anything. I was attempting to explain a statistical difference, not attach a value judgement to it. I enjoy the modern output of the games industry just fine.

I think you are mis-attributing the surge in twitch-based games. It's about thrill. Excitement versus reward. Adrenaline versus forethought. Sex versus study. Action versus intrigue. Gone are sports, gone are board games, gone is our ingenuity, in are the days of fleeting and immediate thrills.

Because of course no humans ever preferred immediate gratification to intellectual stimulation before the last 10 years. Here, have a microfiber cloth, your rose-tinted glasses are getting smudged from pressing them onto your face so hard.

It seems to me the statistical change in PC game genres is attributable to: a) Better technology, which makes shooting and blowing things up more gratifying than before, and b) the demographic shift in away from computer science majors and hardcore geeks to the more general public. The console market is a bit different, having always been a bit more populist, but there's still been a similar shift recently with the popularity of the Wii/DS and various "casual" games.

If you don't like the change, fine, but I don't think it's some harbinger of the downfall of society (which I believe everyone starts to see once the get over 40, for as long as civilization has existed).

Genres like 2D RPGs and turn-based strategy games still exist, they're just often only made by smaller developers, since the larger ones are chasing the big bucks in the more popular genres. Hopfully the rise of digital distribution and the subsequent lessening of the premium on shelf space will lead to large developers creating smaller teams to work on more niche genres.

Games like Descent 1 + 2 would never get a green light today because "Guy with a gun" is the most popular game-type.

... You do realize those are "Guy in a spaceship with a gun" games, right?

After looking it up, supposedly the reason it's less noticeable on an LCD has less to do with the the pixel lag time (as I thought) than the backlight frequency, which is usually in the multiple kHz range (for fluorescent backlights, or completely continuous with LED backlights).

Was it on a CRT monitor? I specifically said it wouldn't work on most LCD's. Idiot.

You're batshit insane if you think the human eye can distinguish between 60, 90, and 120 frames per second. You're equally deluded if you think 30fps isn't "smooth" when movies are played at 24fps.

You're an idiot. I don't know where this myth came from that the eye has some set limit on framerate, but I'm tired of seeing it from people who apparently never play games. The human visual system doesn't work in terms of discrete frames, it's a continuous information flow (with a lot of processing done on it). For your information, I can tell the difference between a 60Hz and 85Hz refresh rate on a monitor displaying a still image (the former gives me a headache on most monitors), let alone moving graphics. The only reason 24FPS looks remotely acceptable for movies and the like is the motion blur that comes from the relatively long shutter speeds (the time the shutter is open per frame) of movie cameras, something that cgi artists have learned to replicate artificially, otherwise the sequence of crystal-clear rendered images animating at such a low framerate looks really janky. Higher shutter speeds can be used for effect, as seen in some scenes in Saving Private Ryan and the like (moving objects look clearer but seem to jump across the screen in discrete frames), but there's still some blur. Pause a movie during a fast action scene sometime and notice how blurry moving objects are (it's not just from digital compression, it's an artifact of the slow shutter speeds they have to use to make the movement look continuous). Remove the motion blur, and no, the image isn't remotely smooth at 24FPS. Ideally the framerate would be high enough that the individual frames could be perfectly clear (for cgi, or as close as you can get with high shutter speeds on live action), and any motion blur would come naturally from the human visual system (it would be lessened since our eyes are specifically designed to track moving objects to avoid blur), leading to a smoother, clearer picture, but the current framerates aren't up to that. I've always thought that, say, Michael Bay movies would be far more tolerable visually at something like 120FPS, because he seems to ignore the limitations, shaking the camera around and moving objects past it at speeds that turn everything into a blurry mess at 24FPS (which is a technological artifact that never should have remained as long as it has, really).

There's a reason developers on modern consoles brag when they get their games running at 60 instead of 30 FPS (if it made no difference, they could lock it at 30 like most games and get more detail onscreen). There's a reason PC gamers like to have a framerate at least as high as their monitor's refresh rate. There's a reason for 120Hz TV's (although those are using interpolation to "fake" the extra frames, and would provide better results if the original video was taken at 120Hz). The reason isn't that all the above people are deluded, it's because higher framerates look demonstrably better.

Do me a favor sometime, and find a CRT monitor, set the desktop to its highest refresh rate, and wave a finger in front of it without moving your eyes. You see those individual finger-images? That's from the strobe effect of the refresh rate (this doesn't work on most LCD monitors, since the natural lag time provides pretty much constant illumination, similar to how most lightbulbs hide the 60Hz AC rate). The faster you move your finger, the bigger the gaps between the finger images. If you can find a refresh rate at which the gaps are small enough that it appears to be a continuous movement even when moving your finger extremely quickly (hint: you can't on any consumer monitor I'm aware of), I'll accept that as something approaching the limits of the human eye. Until then, shut up.

You seriously think they upload the command(button press) and don't execute it in a local shell program for the game in the set top box (STB)?

I'm not sure what you mean by this. If it was running a version of the game in the local set tob box, the box would just be a gaming PC, and the entire service would be pointless.