Humodour

Are the Evangelicals are just going to vote Democrat if the Republicans are less hardliner for some of the religious concerns? The issue here, IMO, is the primaries. In order to become the Republican candidate you need to win over the Republican voters, of which the Evangelicals will have a larger piece of the pie. This results in candidates trying to win those votes by catering to them, and then on the national level they have to rescind those hardline perspectives. If Republicans don't support their isues, they'll simply stay home and not vote. "The problem is the primaries" is like saying "the problem is democracy". These people are the Republican party. No. About 40% of US Americans do not vote. It's highly likely that if the evangelicals didn't vote, you'd have other people who would suddenly be willing to vote doing so instead, because politics has become less extreme and insane. For instance, the socially and economically libertarian group would probably return to the Republican party if the prudes left. Certainly, your democracy isn't properly representative anyway because it consistently skips about 40% of its members.

It's your computer's way of telling you not to play the game because it's bad.

Morrowind is considered one of the greatest RPG of all time for many, so I interested in why you think it is a terrible game? Because it has no story, atmosphere, or overarching plot. Morrowind is just a sandbox. It's fun for a while, but then you suddenly feel really dirty once you complete the main quest and realise the game is more shallow than a toddler's wading pool full of pee. The best part of Morrowind was the dwarven ruins.

A lot of those numbers could be broken down to the simple fact that the states on the right have fewer rich people and industry, thus there's less federal taxes to be generated. I don't see the crime in getting federal dollars back since the federal system is a parasite anyway. But some of the so called "conversative" states do need to answer for running a budget into the dirt. "I'M A LIBERTARIAN - GOVERNMENT REDISTRIBUTION IS EVIL! EXCEPT WHEN IT GOES TO REPUBLICAN STATES!" Besides the fact that evidence-based government redistribution is actually a very good thing (e.g. universal health coverage), and that Libertarianism is nuts, you're really contradicting yourself matey.

What the Australian voters managed to prevent is what the Russian politicians have adopted - internet censorship via deep packet inspection. http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/russias-leap-in-internet-control/2012/11/12/0ade4f4a-29c5-11e2-b4e0-346287b7e56c_story.html Russia is essentially emulating China: crush opposition, censor all media including the Internet, and make a few rich and powerful families even richer and more powerful.

The Democrats now have a supermajority in California. Also, the California voters passed a ballot initiative that raises taxes. lol.

It's an interesting thought experiment to consider what would happen if you, roughly, got all the Democrat states, made a country out of them, then took the Republican states and made a country out of them, and then came back 20 years later to see what each country had become.

It's cool. I was responding to Wrath of Dagon, not you. Your posts didn't seem worth replying to. I consider you a person. In fact, after this election, I consider you guys people more than ever, because I can see that you are GENUINELY disheartened that Obama won. That's full-blown emotion I can empathise with (even if I support Obama). It's just a shame that the polices you, Mitt, and many Republicans support are cruel and crazy towards other members of your society. That does not make me want to think of you as a loveable rogue - a Republican who's still a nice guy with the best intentions. No, it makes me think of you as somebody selfish with an Ayn Randian outlook on life. Your society is politically polarised for a reason - because one of the major parties, the Republican Party, has lost its marbles. That's not something we'll ever be able to reconcile unless one of us changes. I fundamentally just don't like what the Republican party represents, and I fundamentally don't like people who still support what the Republican party represents. I can't apologise for this, but whether I like you or not does not correlate with whether I consider you a person worthy of respect (to re-iterate: I do). Unfortunately, I don't always succeed at demonstrating this while making my point, which is something I'm working on. I find it simply appalling to dislike someone because their politics are not my politics. It does explain why so many people around the world are killing each other though. I can honestly say I enjoy discussing things with people who don't think like I do and have never held that against them. Now if someone is sour, snarky, sarcastic, arrogant, condescending, I could see disliking them. That whole "not a person" think was from a post you made BTW :http://forums.obsidi...als-discovered/ You're a creationist too, then? OKAY, I take it back.

It's cool. I was responding to Wrath of Dagon, not you. Your posts didn't seem worth replying to. I consider you a person. In fact, after this election, I consider you guys people more than ever, because I can see that you are GENUINELY disheartened that Obama won. That's full-blown emotion I can empathise with (even if I support Obama). It's just a shame that the polices you, Mitt, and many Republicans support are cruel and crazy towards other members of your society. That does not make me want to think of you as a loveable rogue - a Republican who's still a nice guy with the best intentions. No, it makes me think of you as somebody selfish with an Ayn Randian outlook on life. Your society is politically polarised for a reason - because one of the major parties, the Republican Party, has lost its marbles. That's not something we'll ever be able to reconcile unless one of us changes. I fundamentally just don't like what the Republican party represents, and I fundamentally don't like people who still support what the Republican party represents. I can't apologise for this, but whether I like you or not does not correlate with whether I consider you a person worthy of respect (to re-iterate: I do). Unfortunately, I don't always succeed at demonstrating this while making my point, which is something I'm working on.

Well that hasn't happened in this thread, so why did you bring it up? I strongly disagree. Regardless of whether a kid falls in love with coding or intends to pursue it as a career, I think that given society of 2012 and the unstoppable direction of technology, those kids who don't understand basic parts of computer science - especially the notion of programming (and all the tech savvy it builds up) and being able to do the simplest stuff like hello world and a factorial function - are at a huge disadvantage for their future. Programming should be taught to children regardless of their desired career path - but it should be done in as a fun and visceral a way as possible, which I would argue is via the Arduino ecosystem, partly because of the very strong feedback that exists between coding and real-life outcomes (oh! so if I change the delay number in the main loop, this LED blinks on and off more quickly or more slowly! cool! and if I change this frequency value in this buzz code, this piezoelectric buzzer emits a different note!). Now, I personally don't think this kid is going to end up a game programmer. Maybe a physicist. Maybe an economist. Maybe a musician. But who cares? He's interested in it for now, and the OP is and should use this opportunity to teach him or her programming. Programming is a life skill.

Well the Australian dollar is what you want (the AUD is the third most traded currency after the Euro and USD), but be warned: Australia is far, far more socialist than the USA, thank glob. We've got a federal-level carbon-methane-nitrous tax in response to global warming, an extra tax on mining profits because we believe the resources in the ground belong to all Australians, universal publically funded healthcare, universal publically funded education (right up to and including university), we have strictly enforced speed limits on our roads, ditto drunk driving (the limit is literally like 1 or 2 standard drinks), owning guns here is difficult and heavily policed by the government, etc. I think these things are all excellent, but to anybody complaining about Obama winning a second term they probabily represent a communist paradise (or is it dystopia to you?). Further, in many states/territories, councils, and even federally, the centre-left Greens control the balance of power. This is because we use a far more enlightened electoral system than the USA's first-past-the-post and thus we're capable of maintaining third parties with real power indefinitely. In fact, the Greens would be the 4th party, with the 3rd being the socially conservative and fiscally agrarian socialist farmer party the Nationals (in coalition with the conservative Liberal party). Oh, and close to 50% (or more) of Australians don't give a damn about religion, while about half of that number genuinely don't believe in god, magic, or mysticism at all. Heck, they don't not believe in it per se, they just never think about it because it's all pointless bollocks. So yeah, invest your cash in the glorious Socilist States of Australia please! We'd love to take your money!

Yeah - it's HTML 5. And YouTube will be switching to it by default soon.

There is an entire field called 'concurrent programming' which disagrees with you and wants to violently punch you in the face.

If you're into building your own computer from scratch from NAND, then writing a compiler for a language to use on the computer, then writing a small OS to run it and the version of Tetris you coded on it, then try this (click 'Course' on the left-hand menu): http://www.nand2tetris.org/ It's nice because it's a general brush-up on almost all aspects of computer engineering, computer science, and software engineering. Plus, you get to build your own computer. I think I've grown on hardware projects like this and Arduino these days because it's so much easier to get the motivation for a project this way. Thinking of interesting things to programme on the PC is actually kind of hard for me because they get too complex way too fast, then I get sidetracked on minutae and lose interest. But building a device that waters each of my pot plants when the moisture level in the soil falls too low? That captures my imagination in easily manageable chunks.