Yet also a fair statement. After all, when you attempt to join a community you either abide by the rules and customs of that community or else you leave and go elsewhere. You do not demand that community change to meet your world view.

To me this is the worst result of consoles being the primary development target. Dumbed down games. Overly simple console compatible control interfaces, overly simple game play, being shackled to what the current generation console is capable of while PCs race ahead in power.

Result: Piles of same old same old games with occasional kinda sorta bursts of something that resembles innovation. Mostly railshooters and sports games out the ass with occasional exceptions. Hell, what's the greatest thing about the new Call of Duty game? The dog and it is very pretty. Otherwise, it will likely be waist high walls as far as the eye can see between cut scenes. Because console.

While the idea, amend vice ignore, is good their proposed amendment is deeply flawed. The language used would not only prohibit corporate speech, thus killing any right to advertise or promote their products unless granted permission by government, it would have the effect of eliminating all rights from any corporation. Including rights of property and many others.

Clearly it was put forth by someone who really just hates corporations for no logical reason while failing to remember that the vast majority of corporations are small affairs who would be destroyed by such a thing just as much as the megaliths they presumably are against.

It is also amusing to me, and has been since the ruling, that no one was up in arms over Unions (frequently corporations themselves) were buying elections and it only became a problem when organizations that were not unions got into the act.

The dichotomy is not false, it just simply hasn't come to fruition yet. If we look to history when you have large numbers of people from different ethnic or cultural values coming together one of two things must happen. They all blend to form a new people or, in the best case, they live together with mutual tension and the occasional flare up and/or war.

It is not possible to be both one people and many. You can have a country made up of many different peoples. You cannot have a Nation made up of such.

The American model is not a loss of all distinctiveness. It is a subsuming of their past beneath their current home. They come here and become American, the shared ideal we all in theory hold. If other places can't mange that maybe that says more about them than it does about the US, no?

Then it is a good thing that they included provisions for modifying it, isn't it? The problem is that many people want to just pick and choose the parts they like and interpret the others in ways that make no logical sense when taken as a whole and accounting for the intentions of those who wrote it.

If one does not like it, one should campaign to amend it and not merely ignore or interpret away the parts one does not like.

Point of order... that's because the US has no official language. It is generally held that such would be a violation of the First Amendment. :)

Some States, California among them, have passed official language laws but as far as I know they all lack enforcement clauses.

The divide between the wealthy and poor means exactly jack shit unless you can demonstrate that the poor are becoming more poor relative to themselves. It doesn't matter a bit if the rich are getting richer unless you can prove that they are getting that way by directly harming the poor.

You also fail at life for saying that China is an example of the government getting out of the way and trying to compare the US to any of the places you listed. Yet clearly the solution to all our problems is more government regulation and ever higher taxes and penalties. Surely that will jump start the economy!

I'm going to have to call bullshit on this. Meat might be relatively expensive but there are lots and lots and lots of foods that are both inexpensive and good for you. On the other hand they aren't full of sugar and they require both knowledge and time to prepare. Which is to say they aren't compatible with being lazy and just wanting to whip out a box of something and call it "food".

Speaking from my own experience of crossing the border *a lot* I can't say I've ever seen or experienced even the slightest interest in my laptop or drives. Maybe they have more time at the land borders than they do at the airports I can't say. I haven't crossed at one of those in years but at the airports there's simply no time to deal with such things.

Yes... that's a thing.

Did you save more than a billion people from starvation? Did you prevent untold suffering and and social problems by ensuring sufficient food for a growing population? No. No you didn't. You know who did? Norman Borlaug.

And I'm going to have to disagree here. One might be able to argue that we don't 'own' enough in the digital realm vice it being licensed, but isn't that at least in part what is supposed to be so great about Linux and related bits?

In any case the comparison to Soviet Russia immediately falls on its face. I own my house, I own my business, I own my car and dozens of other things. It is annoying when people try and make comparisons between things when very superficially they are similar but they aren't even remotely close in scale or severity.

This isn't to excuse the NSA thing and related things as they are inexcusable. But to say that we've become Communist Russia because of digital licensing and such shows either profound ignorance or at least faulty logic. Communism has killed some 100 million people throughout history. How many people have been killed by EULAs?

You really put over a million records into a single excel spreadsheet and this was a good thing?

Just cause you have a hammer doesn't actually mean all the world is nails.

Every time this type of question comes up someone pipes up with this kind of statement.

It always makes me wonder if I'm the only one that has zero problems with sound? Or pretty much anything? Am I just that lucky and skillful and freaking awesome in selecting hardware?

For other desktop uses I again must just be some kind of freak outlier. The only time I've had problems using Linux in the office was when I worked at places that were outright Linux (really "non-Windows") hostile and would actively prevent you from using anything else or at best just didn't help a lick. If it wasn't that kind of place I had no problems doing everything everyone else was doing. Maybe it was just that my job didn't require me to be some fancy Excel jockey or something.

Am I really alone in that?

For the most part it isn't, but then again I didn't say it was. The person I was replying to asked where in the Constitution is there a right to privacy which showed they were falling into the classic trap of presuming that if there isn't an enumerated right to something then that right doesn't exist which isn't true.

Or to rephrase the problem another way, they were looking at the world as if Government must give them permission to do things as oppose to the way it is supposed to be which is that we gave Government permission to exist.