Well, there was a place called "Palestine" and what do you think you would call someone from this place?

The Bible refers to it at least four times, as "Palestine" or "Palestina" depending upon your translation of choice.

I would think a believer would be more well-versed on the Good Book.

There are, however, good and bad tools. Powerpoint is a bad tool, and it is not by accident that almost all presentations suck, and it's not because everyone is bad at it. The whole program is focussed on being flashy, not on content. There's 50 buttons and options for animations, colour, flash, bling, look-a-three-headed-monkey - and maybe 5 buttons for content. There are plenty of examples included for different visual styles, but none for different methods of content presentation.

And, like almost all Microsoft products, it wants to be everything to everyone. So it doesn't restrict you, but every designer knows that restrictions are great. You can put 9pt fonts on a Powerpoint slide. For 99% of the usage cases, that is an absolutely abysmal idea. But it leads to people misappropriating habits from Word for Powerpoint - if your content doesn't fit, shrink the font size. Ugh.

Powerpoint is for sales presentations to a large and anonymous audience. Basically, when you want to be Steve Jobs(1). In a small meeting, or something with interactivity, Powerpoint is probably the most misused tool on the planet today.

(1) Actually, if you want to give a professional presentation, you'll use Keynote, but if you want to be a cheap ripoff, you'll use Powerpoint.

Would he be the first US president with Canadian citizenship?

I wouldn't have believed it could be possible to find someone with an even bigger ego than Obama's. But we're a nation of hucksters now, so I suppose this is to be expected.

This. Even asking the question is fucking stupid.

He wanted to be left alone, there is nothing the public gains from knowing his identity except some entertainment. There are cases where identifying someone serves the public good, but in this case it really serves nobody except the rag that published it.

Hiding under his real name was actually pretty smooth. I'm sure a dozen nosy reporters passed him up before because they thought that can't be.

I don't think we're talking about the same guy.

I guess it's time for me to get that Brazilian wax.

It's important to put your best foot forward.

Thanks, that is good factual information to have.

Still, would losing 100 or 200 coins make headlines these days when thousands got lost and stolen in what makes the news (Silkroad, Mt. Gox, etc.) ?

Not a single someone, he's probably mention it. But how about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins? That's a few thousand bucks these days, not something that would make headlines beyond your Facebook page.

Exactly.

I hate paying taxes as much as everyone, but I'm not super-rich, so I don't have options to avoid it. Once you go above a certain income class, your tax burden drops, in both relative and absolute values, because you can make use of loopholes that normal people can't.

Corporations are the worst of it all. As they can split up, merge and do other trickery that physical humans can't, they can exploit the system to the maximum effect. And since everyone else does it, they almost have a duty to do so, because otherwise their shareholders will grill them about it.

The problem is that the tax systems allow this, which is caused by countries competing against each other to attract corporations. Which, if you are able to see it for a moment from outside the pot in which you're slowly being boiled, is quite insane and perverted.

As long as the countries of the world readily sell out to corporations and super-rich, nothing will change. Only when they realize that (at least yet) they have the tanks and the guns and the corporations don't and maybe the power-relationship should be the other way around, and then work together to fight the parasites, this will stop. All it needs would be a world-wide agreement to, say, leverage a fixed % of revenue from every corporation, no exceptions, no loopholes, no special deals.

I agree in principle, though not in degree. Let's be honest here: All advertisement is psychological warfare, and it is very, very imbalanced. It's millions of dollars in research and design vs. the usually untrained mind.

However, in the game there is also immersion, which is intentionally abused, and a situation that was artificially constructed. It's more like the soda stand in the theme park which is intentionally placed at exactly the distance from the intentionally way-too-salty french fries stand at which you realize that you're quite thirsty.

This is what we all hear all the time when it comes to advertisement, and I'm quite certain the advertisement experts are giggling so much they can hardly catch a breath. This false belief is one of the core reasons advertisement is still legal and not very heavily regulated. It's the Emperor's New Clothes situation - as long as that meme is out there, most people won't admit that they are, in fact, influenced by advertisement.

But you are. More than you believe. And claiming you aren't only proves denial, not freedom.

Uh, no we aren't.

Windows XP was released in October 2001. That's half a year after the initial release of OS X (March 2001). In fact, by the time XP came out, OS X was already on 10.1 (released in September 2001).
MacOS 9 is a full two years older, it was released in October 1999.

No, your example is actually a good example for the evilness of "f2p".

Of course you could just walk away and not drop any money. It's not like they put a gun to your head. Except that psychologically, that's exactly what they are doing. They are putting you into a situation where you are a) drawn in and b) stand more to lose in time and effort than in money.

This is extortion, plain and simple. These games are intentionally designed to put you into these situations so you part with your money.

Or did you drink that Progressive kool-aid about caring?

What can I say? I'm a soft touch when it comes to human beings, like that Palestinian dude with the sandals from 2000 years ago.

You know, the community organizer.

Apparently I need to repeat this fact: companies that make a net positive contribution to the Treasury in no way meet the definition of "subsidized."

Look up "externalities".