Just out of curiosity, how much would you, or those who inherit your property, have to pay to replace this septic system in 30 years compared to the cost of connecting to the government run system then as opposed to now?

Oh don't worry, with Rupert Murdoch's news agencies, you can be assured to get plenty of revisionist history.

No kidding. It's hard enough to keep a decent sci-fi show on the air while they are entirely entertainment / plot / character-driven. If he wants them to shoehorn in more hard-science technobabble to replace all the soft-science technobabble (bearing in mind that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic anyway) then I fail to see how the entertainment value will be enhanced beyond a very niche demographic.

I take it from the fact that you're posting now, that means you're a liberal then?

Citation needed. I've never heard of a game that came deliberately broken and then forced you to pay to fix. Games do often come broken out of the box, but those are usually fixed with patches (often available on or soon after launch day) that have been universally free to my knowledge.

Regardless, any such game that came broken would quickly earn a reputation and would subsequently flop, so if such a game exists then the reason I've never heard of it is probably because it failed in the market. No one is forcing you to buy these games, much less the additional content they will sell you after the fact.

Sure, as a consumer you may have an interest in whatever suits you, but that interest is not in relation to your being a member of the "open source world". Any interaction you have with Whoppers and Whopper-related products are completely independent of your status as a member of the "open source world".

Of course, the fact that ingredients and recipes for hamburgers are widely available, and I can make my own burgers at home with tools available to the public might make Hamburgers somewhat open-source. I just can't go selling it while calling it a Whopper.

I'm sorry, what were we talking about again?

Fair enough, and no real offense. I apologize too, I came off a bit harsher in my response than intended.

Well, I would agree with this point on some levels, but I think there are different degrees to which ads may go to present their desired message (sure they're all lies, but some lies are bigger than others). Not wanting to get too deeply mired in details of selecting for and selecting against a target audience, let me just say that to me there is a difference between a magazine cover airbrushing a model to artificially "idealize" her physique (though I also find this annoying and wish they wouldn't) and artificially replacing an already present individual with someone else entirely to "idealize" their portrayed work environment. If one needs to go that far then again I'd say it would just be more prudent (if only from a PR standpoint, seeing the results this situation has generated) to find a completely different image to use. One instance is altering a person to make them "better", and another is rejecting a person saying another type of person is "better". Not really as big since, as you point out, the whole ad is fake to begin with, but there are instances where places have done this with candid photos that actually did portray a reality they weren't satisfied with.

Well, truth be told this is just a general pet peeve of mine, and contrary to how it may have sounded, I react the same when they're replacing a white guy with black faces, or shopping in extra women into a board-room to pretend they don't have a glass ceiling. My initial response to you though was to point out that this type of diversity isn't unheard of in the US, but when companies have to go out of their way to so obviously fake it (or in this case, double-fake it), it starts crossing some lines. The real insult here (even more so than the racial one really) is that they thought this really shoddy job was acceptable.

Well, here I just have to agree 100%. I find some forms of targeted ads to be less "offensive" than others (at least they're trying to show me things I might be interested in), but this form of targeted ad is just, as you say, stupid.

This comment would make sense only if I didn't have the same reaction several years ago when some college did the same thing in reverse with one of its brochures: they felt they needed more diversity so they photoshopped an extra black guy's head over a white guy's. The issue isn't that the guy they replaced in this instance was black per-se, the issue is that they ungracefully replaced a person with another person for racially motivated reasons.

For something "this trivial" you seem to have taken about as much time out of your day to comment as I have. And yes, majority populations don't typically get subjected to outright racism, so this doesn't surprise me. Your point?

Emphasis mine, but you appear to be having a pretty deep seated emotional reaction here. So who's having the bad day here? If you get all uppity over it then you need to consider how great your life is when the biggest 'bad thing' that happens in your day is some guy on the internet comments on some photo being changed. If that's your 'bad day', then shut your pie hole and get a grip on reality.

Already did. Did I not mention the "born on the African Continent" bit in my first comment? Again, your point? Or were you just telling me to "go back to Africa you uppity negro"?

And contrary to your belief, my world doesn't revolve around your pathetic insecurities. But, this being an open forum, when a pet peeve comes up I feel free to comment on it honestly, and find great entertainment in seeing the closet ethnocentrists come crawling out of the woodwork and start screaming.

The funniest thing about this is that no one is even denying that this was a purely racially motivated shop-job, and yet people are still getting upset at the folks who are pointing out that it is.

You're right, they didn't air-brush his skintone to make him look white, they did the photoshop equivalent of putting a paper bag over his head with a photo of a white guy on it.

Yeah, that's much better.

In an attempt to portray yourself as color-blind, what you've actually ended up suggesting is that you subconsciously see a black guy as ugly and a white guy as good looking.

Is it even realistic for the US? Are you serious? I'm a black guy born on the African continent sitting in an office with a white woman and a jewish guy. In the office right next to mine there's an asian woman and a guy from the UK. Just walking down the hall yields people from every ethnicity. Sure there are obvious majorities and minorities, but it's almost impossible to snap a candid photo of this office and not have a pretty colorful palette of skin-tones. I'm not exactly a fan of political correctness, but I think this recent anti-PC movement smacks of a type of reactionary bigotry I'm even less comfortable with (probably because it always seems to be coming from the same 'demographic' of people).

The issue isn't that they felt having white guys in their ad would be more appropriate for their intended audience, the issue is that they whitewashed a black guy out of an existing image (poorly), suggesting that the black guy would be unacceptable (but the asian and woman were fine?). If they found the orriginal image inappropriate, then find, buy, or cast and shoot another photo that more suits your demographic. Slapping a black guy in white face is just stupid (look at the results), and I can't see how it's not insulting, if to no one else but your intended audience; suggesting they can't handle the sight of a black guy.

That's fine when you only have to deal with party raids, and full party pvp, but when you also have 1v1 pvp, a rocks, paper, scissors design to classes breaks horribly. The only way to balance this is instead of having rocks, paper, and scissor classes, you give each class a set of rocks, papers, and scissor abilities that they then have to use strategically against other classes and their rocks, papers, and scissors. But then, if each of these abilities has to be unique and interesting, and you have a half dozen or more classes with a number of optional skills each, you end up with the same problem of balancing your hundreds of rocks with your papers and scissors.

But in any of those instances, would they arrest the mechanic who did the modifications, or the owner who paid for them and drove the no longer street-legal car out of the shop?