I get really tired of hearing the "damn dirty hippies" angle too. There was an Iraq vet shot in the god damn face and an 80 year old women pepper sprayed. People need to pull their heads out of their asses and see these people for what they are: regular people. They aren't just hipster college kids, hippies, lazy jobless losers, etc. There are people just like you and me and they are trying to fight for chance that would actually benefit US but people shit on them. Why? Why would you not support a group that is working towards things that would help you? I see an overwhelming ability of people in this country to consistently not support things that would actually benefit them and I simply do not understand.

As I get older (in contrast to what people say), I've actually become more liberal. At this point, I have 0 fucks to give for rich people and how much money they think that they're entitled too. These infamously low taxes we are dealing with now are simply not the way things have ever been done in America. WW2 taxes on the rich were are 90%. NINETY GOD DAMN PERCENT. And you know what? They just dealt with it and paid their dues to society. America was better for it. Also anyone who tells you that rich people work harder than we do can go fuck themselves. I think we all know how rich people got rich and it isn't because they worked harder than us. Most of them start at a higher station, they cheat to the top, and they basically have good luck. To imply that a CEO works harder than the guys loading boxes into trucks at UPS, the person cleaning shit out of the bathrooms, or the guy getting up at 3am to work on a building is obscene. I do not buy it. I simply don't. They aren't rich because they worked harder...they are rich because they are taking advantage of the system.

Huh? The editors rewrite the submissions sometimes too? I've been here a while now and I honestly didn't realize that. WTF? o_O

Thank you for typing these arguments out in such a concise, logical, and well written manner that even a person with no scope on this issue could immediately grasp. I've been saying the same thing but the way you've written it here just puts those perfect finishing touches on the argument. I'm partly replying just so I don't lose your post since I imagine I'm going to refer back to this a few times.

The program is bloated. It runs like shit on every computer I've ever run it on and even normal people hate it a lot of the time. iTunes is not a Windows program and it shows. Big time.

Cars previously did not exist at all. If you're going to convince someone to get an electric car rather than use gas it has to be BETTER not worse. People aren't going to jump through hoops for this sort of thing. They're used to convenience.

Yeah except there are gas stations as far as the eye can see. Not quite the same for this. Quit being stupid.

Yeah except by "protect" you probably mean "twist and muddle everything they stood for," right? When the Tea Party first started, it seemed interesting. I was interested. What it has become now is a giant clusterfuck of stupidity. It isn't even a shadow of what it stood for because opportunistic douche bag politicians jumped onto the bandwagon and used it for their own ends.

No. The sad part is that as time goes on it has gone from being a dramatic slippery slope to disturbingly accurate. I've read 1984 quite thoroughly and while I understand what you mean, the fucked up part is that the stuff in the book is coming true more and more every day and that's just sad.

Which is good because those servers have gone down quite a few times. It's to the point that I turned off account validation permanently on my server because I was sick of having to turn it on and off all the time when those servers went down.

But hey, at least we HAVE that option. It's actually quite nice. Not to mention you don't really need any of that to play single. :p

I use Windows too, but I had to laugh a bit at not having to screw around with drivers etc. I have an ATI card (4870x2 I bought from a friend)...probably 'nuff said right there, but yeah...the drivers are shit. I have to screw around a lot with this thing. YMMV of course, but sometimes it's still a pain in the ass. Linux just has different kinds of problems. Weirder ones. Shit that you wouldn't normally see break...but Windows certainly isn't frustration free. Now I wouldn't even begin to claim that's Microsoft's fault because quite frankly, they've really made some great strides. Vista broke a lot of shit, but it needed to happen. Now we have a more secure system with a better driver model. I love that they finally caught up to Linux like 10 years later and the graphics driver can be reloaded without the system blue screening. My video driver can and has crashed before even with something as simple as playing a Youtube video (granted this is relatively rare and relegated to one bad release here or there), but it's nice the whole damn system doesn't go careening off a cliff when that happens like it used to. The fault mostly lies with ATI writing horribly shitty drivers. They've gotten better than they used to be but they honestly have nothing on nVidia's drivers. I just wish the nVidia cards weren't so damn expensive sometimes. Those middle of the road ATI cards are very attractively priced but after the experience I've had with this card, I'm probably never going to get an ATI card again.

That being said, I actually like to use Windows now with Windows 7. I use as much free software as possible inside (Pidgin, Libre Office, Firefox, and basically anything I can get on PortableApps.com) so I'm doing fairly well there but the system itself is finally just...nice. I don't feel like I'm fighting with it. I did try and use a free alternative to UltraMon (zbar...I have 2 monitors) but that app is kind of a piece of shit. It has a little ways to go...too much bugginess. I go back to Linux now and sort of don't care anymore...especially with how much gaming I do...there's no point to even boot into Linux at this point except to dick around.

I would love to see Linux get some serious prospects at gaming but there are too many distros. I can guarantee if gaming does become serious, it's going to be locked into ONE distro in which case, what's the fucking point? I don't like Ubuntu that much and you KNOW they'd be the target. I dunno...maybe we'd get lucky and they'd define some sort of gaming subset for the various distros. Doesn't matter much though since no one gives a shit yet. I can only hope Steam will one day come to Linux and they'll finally do some serious work on graphics drivers. Performance is terrible and so is the power control stuff. Oh and X. Basically, fuck you if you aren't using the open source ATI driver apparently because you're going to LOVE configuring the damn thing by hand in your xorg conf. Awesome. That's what people want to do. I can't believe in 2011 I still have to open the config file up just because it's a binary driver. Why the hell can't it detect the shit for me like it did when I was using the OSS driver? x_x

You laugh. Watch, there really WILL be a hat and I'm not even kidding. :p

Just did 256x256 just for shits and giggles. It looks pretty damn amazing with all that nice stuff in the texture pack I found. I also installed a mod that allows the HD stuff and a bunch of other performance options. :)

Yeah, I've seen the kind of shit programmers have made for interfaces. I think people have a knee jerk reaction to anything considered "artsy" or whatever here. I've seen enough terrible...terrible UI designs to know that just being a software engineer in NO way means you know how to design a good UI. I used a program my friend wrote and it honestly took every bit of intelligence I possess to figure out how the fuck anything got done. It was a good program but the interface was just...godawful. What we're seeing here with some of these things are just bad decisions by some people...not the proliferation of UI designers.

I question how much more difficult this is with a Union than firing someone with approval from the HR department at a typical bigger business. At my work, it's relatively difficult to fire someone, but if you keep very good documentation...once they've screwed up enough, their ass is grass. You need proper justification. Yeah it's annoying but quite frankly...tough shit. I'd prefer it be a little harder to fire people than the bullshit we've seen in the past. Without a good HR department, bosses pretty much do whatever the hell they want. I've seen this side too where HR basically works WITH the managers; instead of trying to prevent the firings they pretty much help them do it.

I'd love to see proof of the guy punching someone in the face and not getting fired. I find that extremely hard to believe. There may be other circumstances or the poster may be lying. Like you said...I'm pretty sure he'd be arrested pretty much immediately. :p

Yeah, I think that if you really sit down and think about it...we all started with Windows (or at least a hell of a lot of us) or are at least absurdly familiar with it to the point that we don't need help with that stuff at all. I don't google for how to make wifi work in Windows...I know what I need. Windows is so common that even some of the normies can figure out some of this stuff because of the vast array of information that even a simpleton can follow out there on the internet. We don't think of it as hard to understand because we are SO used to it. Linux is somewhat more complicated sometimes but the fact remains that either of these things could be done with a little effort and it in either case, a full install of the OS for either would scare the shit out of any normal user if everything did not automatically install itself.