Bartimaeus

Congress grilling Comey about Hillary giving out classified information, for anyone who wants to see.

So was Hitler...and so were Theodore Roosevelt, and George Washington, and James K. Polk, and Robert E. Lee, and... Convictions in of themselves don't make the (wo)man, I will agree...but at least you know where they're coming from.

Nice. ...Although, I've actually seen 980s for a little sub-300 recently...but still.

In my view, he didn't give up on trying to fix the inequality between whites and blacks (and other minority groups) - in whatever forms he believes inequality manifests itself as - even when blacks overwhelmingly voted against him. He didn't give up on seniors even when they overwhelmingly voted against him. He didn't give up on women's rights even when women didn't vote for him perhaps quite as well as he would've liked. The way I see it, by steadfastly refusing to give in and say, "Well, I guess Hillary's making all the decisions now! Make sure to vote for her!" as would be the norm in today's party politics, he is not giving up on the people who voted for him and his vision...and NOT Hillary and hers. He's fighting tooth and nail for those people...and the way I see it, this is how politics should be done - with a little conviction. He will still end up endorsing her after he's done everything he possibly could because convictions will require him to in the face of a lack of better options, and I can understand and respect that, even if I don't particularly like it. So yes, I think it's unfair to imply that he's still in it all for himself, when it seems pretty obvious that he's not.

And I was perfectly O.K. with that, but... This is what I took issue with, and nothing you've responded with since has been about that. Maybe I didn't make that totally clear when I originally responded, but I did mention his motives for not conceding multiple times.

Again, thanks, guys. This is the same sister whom I had mentioned in months past, where I had said bad things would happen if people didn't start changing their behavior. Well, they didn't, and, well, here we are. I probably don't say this very often, but I really wish I had been wrong. That's life, though.

Says the guy getting on Sanders' case for continuing to protest party politics.

You are literally assigning a motive to his actions that he has not expressed, when in fact, he has expressed other motives for doing what he has done. I am perfectly O.K. with the Democratic Party being unhappy with him for not following the status quo in accepting the winner's coronation and subsequently letting them walk all over him. In turn, I'm pretty unhappy with them for ignoring his platform and supporters as hard as they have done, and for ignoring the vast, vast majority of his nominations for party positions. They were ignoring him and whatever "leverage" - your words - he had to begin with, so I hardly care if that leverage disappears by him continuing his little protest of crappy party politics. Indeed, it just makes me like him better by refusing to tote the line until the very end and the party less for trying to coerce him into doing so, and that's probably much the same for other Sanders supporters. Yes, if it were my choice, he should not endorse Hillary at any point, or give a very weak one at best - something along the lines of, "...Well, she's not Trump. I leave the matter to the voters and their consciences." I think his convictions regarding how bad Trump is are a little stronger than mine, though, so it'll probably be a stronger endorsement than that.

You assigned a motive to his actions that I feel is pretty unfair towards him, which is what I asked about. I am pretty sure he doesn't give a crap about "party unity", and why should he? The nominee will be decided at the convention regardless.

Source of him saying something to that effect? From what he's said, he's pretty clearly just trying to represent his share of the vote (who he feels is not represented well by Clinton) all the way to the convention as best as he can.

Thanks, guys.

Speaking of health and hell, I attended my sister's funeral today.

The average life expectancy of a larger breed like a great dane vs a smaller one like a beagle is pretty different...in fact, according to wikipedia, it's up to double for the beagle. So do you just say, "Yeah, great danes have a life expectancy of like 50 years, while beagles are a little over 100"? Why even use such an arbitrary conversion rate when it doesn't even account for the wildly different breed-specific differences? ...And anyways, a year is supposed to be (approximately) one orbit of the planet around the sun, so in my books, dog years are exactly the same as people years unless said dog is living on Mars or something...

What Guard Dog means to say is, yes, yes they effectively are. To vote elsewise is really just to try to legitimize third party candidates a little more for future elections...it will (almost absolutely guaranteed) have no effect for this one.

Yeah, based on how he went on and on about saying that there was no way a person could've reasonably done what she had done without knowing it to be negligent, I actually thought it was going to be a recommendation to indict. I mean, how does saying something like that not lead one to believing an indiction would be out of place?

Yep, just as I said: mentioned gross negligence on her part and her staff in various ways, but no recommendation to indict. Ah well. Trump 2016!

FBI Director is having a press conference to announce something very likely related to the Clinton case in half an hour. Based on the fact that it's a public press conference (an unusual format for this sort of thing), I am guessing there will be no indictment. Regardless, we'll know something soon! Knowing our luck, this is probably just an announcement of an announcement of an announcement.

Well, I mean, theoretically, if the alt-bots were written well enough, moderators deciding whether or not to approve posts wouldn't probably check stuff like IP address the vast majority of the time, so really, they still could be... For examplA problem has been detected and BOT21-BARTIMAEUS has been shut down. If this is the first time you've seen this error, restart the program. If this error appears again, please contact your system administrator or the technical support group for further assistance.

Why equate that with autism? Autism is a pretty wide spectrum of stuff...seems kinda silly to generalize like that when it really just boils down to idiots being idiots.

I recently just saw a sale for new Hitachi Ultrastar 2TBs for $45 per. It was an intriguing deal, one that I nearly jumped on, but the seller was not an authorized reseller and therefore the drives didn't get the full warranty, or I definitely would have. I'm not really in the market for an HDD, even one that cheap, and I didn't want it to just sit around collecting dust, try to use it a few years from now and then have it die on me real quick like HDDs have a tendency to do these days with zero warranty to help... Amazingly, my Seagate 1TB has shown remarkable endurance over the past six years since I got it. 5.2 years of up-time (thanks SMART data), still working like a champ. Guess I got lucky - still make backups semi-frequently, though.

Who's the bigger nitwit, Trump Bruce or (we) the people who keep engaging with and/or insulting him?

But my world is already rock! I think Presidential Candidate Asteroid is merely attempting to take credit for the hard work of their predecessors. Sadly, I just don't think I can vote for such a patently dishonest candidate... but the alternatives are actual politicians so what the heck

Original article title: Lynch to Remove Herself From Decision Over Clinton Emails, Official Says New title: Lynch to Accept F.B.I. Recommendations in Clinton Email Inquiry http://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/02/us/politics/loretta-lynch-hillary-clinton-email-server.html?_r=1 "Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch announced on Friday that she would accept whatever recommendation career prosecutors and the F.B.I. director make about whether to bring charges related to Hillary Clinton’s personal email server. Her decision removes the possibility that a political appointee will overrule investigators in the case." That's an interesting development.

I would say that this sounds like two (or three) separate issues, really. When I'm playing a sorcerer in Baldur's Gate, every level-up is a game-changer to some degree, every level up makes at least a moderate impact on how I play the class (not every level-up will be perfectly equal, of course, for complex reasons, but...). I would say that that feels like good game design - as Wrath of Dagon said, it gives a very solid and satisfying sense of progression, it makes me feel like every level-up is valuable. Again, some level-ups will be better than others - depending on spell choice (and what's available for choosing) and what new amounts of memorizations I will get for each spell level and the such - but yeah. I agree with most of the rest of what you said, though...I would just hesitate to call "game-changers [...] dumb" in a blanket statement. It depends.