Holy shit, who modded this informative? This guy isn't a lawyer, he "works with electricians and home owners".

Know what, my wife is a lawyer and I feel barely qualified to answer this post. What I do know is that my wife couldn't legally give advice to people unless she was a member of that state's bar association, even though she had been admitted into three other states and two federal jurisdictions. The law isn't the same from state to state and you can be held liable for your legal opinions.

What? Did you read your own comment? Anyone who describes a game to me like you just did with STO, I know I'd take a pass on that game. I regret I even played a month of STO because it was so shit. Yeah, space combat was fun until you realized it was the same damn thing over and over and over again.

Plus, did you know there were people who hit level cap before the game officially launched, essentially getting there in the two day head start period for those who pre-ordered? STO is not a solid game, but I will agree with you that there are worse games out there.

Actually, where I live, that might be considered a valid argument.

I see a lot of the comments are taking sides on which rules edition is best and that's fine and to be expected. Problem is, the biggest issue on this is not that they're using the 4e rule set, but that they handed yet another beloved property to Cryptic. Y'know, the guys who took the Star Trek MMO license and took a big steamy dump on it. The guys who took their Champions Online engine and skinned it Star Trek then called it a days work. The company who innovated on how to nickel and dime their player base and laughed from their pile of money conned from a bunch of Trek fans. The company that promised Atari that it could publish a new MMO every year so they could rake in the cash.

Yeah, this isn't Bioware doing Neverwinter Nights as an MMO, this is just Cryptic preparing to kick yet another nerd group right in the balls. My bet is that their precious "character customization" selling point, which they mention in every goddamn fluff piece from their marketing department is the same thing from when they were involved with City of Heroes/Villians which really amounts to your various options on a slider bar. Bah, I'm never giving Cryptic another damn dime. Gaming is better off if this company goes broke and folds.

I have a hard time calling a game that's released to different platforms a port. In the case of Dragon Age, Bioshock and Fallout 3 were all released to multiple platforms on launch...so you didn't get any of that right. Mass Effect was a port, but ME2 had a multiple platform launch.

Just because a game comes out with controls that work on consoles and PCs does not mean that it's a port. Sure the controls are dumbed down a bit, but not enough to dent the fun factor in the game.

Next topic, please.

You've got that backwards. Who watches the watchmen? I see what you did there.

You've played this little switch to make it look like WikiLeaks is the custodian, the watchman...but your own logic proves otherwise. You even say that this is Pentagon information, that some secrets should be kept secret and that by just living in the US, we've agreed to that contract.

Wrong, sir. Simply wrong. I'm going to bypass most of what you said because it's simple double-speak. You frame this in a way that is cowardly. Unarmed civilians, collateral murder...both within quotes as if to say that killing unarmed people is okay, that it is a justification. I'm not going to wade into the situation of the battle, but I posit to you that we can and should do better.

The government makes mistakes and we have seen too many times that it tries to cover them up rather than owning up to them. As a country we should strive for that higher ideal. Then perhaps the need for secrets, especially of a botched military operation where civilians died, doesn't need to become a state secret.

Where did I say this? I'm not saying that the Founders wouldn't be capable of understanding today's technology, but you seem to assume they would be able to immediately jump into our current society.

Your next ideas are all strawmen to the original thought. Personally, I don't care what your father was brought up with because you are demonstrating the ability to adapt with changes over time...same thing with your grandma. Pluck them out of time and then drop them into where we are now. My laptop might be considered witchcraft by the standards of a 1700's land owner because of the countless pieces that make it so--electricity, transistors, silicon, not to mention all of the abstract concepts that go into a program or operating system.

As far as your arguments about abstract concepts, I wish people would read them and other historical documents of the time. Of course, our soundbyte era has taken nearly all of these documents out of context and I find it hilarious when I find a Jefferson quote used to support unrestricted consumerism or people that consider that the constitution, a document that has worked into its fabric the ability to amend itself, is considered to be untouchable and unchanging.

No it's not. You know who I might trust? US Marshalls on board. Anything less and that's just fucking stupid. You cram in as many people aboard a tin can and expect people to be civil, it wouldn't take very much to watch air accidents go up exponentially. You are conveniently leaving out the human equation here. A US Marshall is on board, doing his/her job. You're willing to let any schmoe with a "permit", for whatever that's worth, carry a weapon on a plane. Could be that he's had a bad day and is not in the right frame of mind to make rational decisions and being armed might just give him reasons to act irrationally. No thank you. I'd rather risk the ridiculously rare event that a terrorist tries to take over a plane than have numerous armed strangers aboard every day.

And apparently you don't think that decompression aboard a plane is a serious enough event to want to prevent. Your concept of airline safety is much different than mine.

You forgot this then from your original post:

To which I was responding. Ah, then in your second post, you talk about what "the intent" was... So in this enlightened time where you are trying to put together an argument, I might have misread your intent? Do you see where I'm going with this? What gives you special insight to what the Founders intended or that the introduction of new information may change that "intent".

Don't be obtuse. You write a letter back in the 1700's, it would take days/weeks/months to get to it's destination. We have the possibility to converse in near real-time on a forum and in real time if we go to something like chat or IRC. Taking your argument to the logical extreme, which you seem so fond of doing, then we really don't have much different than our ancient ancestors from Persia, or even back further. You seem to assume that nothing is that much different from when we finally came out of our caves.

If you were to bring any of the founders to today they would be shocked at where we are and might struggle to understand many concepts we take for granted. This is still a time where they treated diseases with leaches for God's sake. If I showed even Thomas Jefferson my laptop, you think he could immediately get his brain around it? The more and more we progress, the more abstract our concepts become, but no...you seem to think that they'll understand everything and want to continue on just as they did back in 1770.

Setting aside your interpretation of the 2nd amendment, there are few worse things that I can think of than allowing untrained armed citizens aboard a commercial airliner. You have heard of decompression, right?

Similarly, your thought that the "original intent" should be carried to the end of time argument wears thin. Pirates were often mercenaries of the state and terrorists were pirates. Any thought of an invading army of America makes me chuckle and think that someone's been watching Red Dawn once too often.

Also, if you think then is not so different from now, just try to imagine what the founders would have thought of what we're doing right now on Slashdot. The internet would have blown their mind...and that's pretty commonplace today.

Jason Thompson...Jack Thompson's smarter brother.

Thank you, thank you. I'll be here all week.

Interesting. Funny though that I used to do all of my shopping through Pricewatch ages ago and got tired of having to order each separate part from a different company to get the lower price which was almost always compensated by outrageous shipping prices.

There's something to be said about paying a bit more (usually trivially more) for good customer service. Price is not the end all/be all for me as a consumer. You should notice that not once I mentioned price as a reason to shop from Newegg. As a company, they have my trust and that's difficult to do with people just slashing prices. And as another poster mentioned, if I order a part in stock, it is usually out the door that day. Also, I don't have to keep little pieces of paper everywhere from separate retailers to find out exactly what part I ordered as Newegg keeps a record of my purchases with my account that's easily accessible.

If price is your only yardstick for measuring, then you would be right. Fortunately for me, I educated myself on their other offerings and chose a company that delivers more than simple price breaks.

I've bought a lot of stuff from Newegg and they've been really good. They often get good marks for their RMA policy and returns on DOA equipment. Looks like to me they took the right steps here including stopping the relationship with the supplier who gave them the phony i7s and working to replace the ones that went out. There's nothing here that would prevent me from shopping with them again.

I'm not sure quoting Yahoo Serious will get you +5 Funny. Maybe +5 What the Hell?

How is the mascot gig going anyway?