That's nice and all, but $400 is pretty nuts. Having just gotten one of these for %60, I don't feel like I've missed out.

So it's a cultural thing then. Well all right, thanks.

My friends kids, 4 girls, 3 boys (what can I say, it's Utah)

If you don't mind me going a little off topic: this is a stereotype that I'm not familiar with. I think there's a Mormon prohibition on abortion, but none on other forms of birth control, right? So why the many children?

How can a game be "fantastic" when it isn't even finished? How do you evaluate that? Is this just riding on hype, or is this a Google style permanent beta?

Diablo 3's DRM wasn't about piracy, it was about creating a market for the real money auction house. The auction house that, ironically, they removed later on for ruining the game.

Usually it isn't phrased as intelligence vs. not, it's described as conscious vs. unconscious. Conscious thought does happen in the brain, but a lot of unconscious things that you do are more distributed. Sneezing, orgasms, some reactions, are managed by your spinal cord.

There was that famous headless chicken, forget his name, that survived for quite a long time with no brain.

I don't think that there is a debate about whether or not people should be trying to blind pilots, only about the severity of the offense. You say that the pilots don't have a lot of time to react, and I'm sure that's true, but it doesn't address the point that I was making, namely that cars are easier and more plentiful targets, and drivers on a highway have even less time to react than pilots do.

If the lasers were all the same wavelength (color) then you could probably make a window that would filter that wavelength. Since they're not, you can't.

If this became a really serious problem then I could see regulating laser pointers to be all the same color, but as the other poster pointed out this doesn't seem to be nearly dangerous enough to be worth the attention (and prison sentences) that it's getting.

If this is such a big deal, why haven't we heard all the stories about car accidents caused by people blinding drivers on the highway?

If you happen to be in/around New York, the Business and Science Library has knock-off Aeron chairs. I don't know the brand, but they're pretty terrific. It's a nice library too.

This is the one that I was looking for.

I'd also like the accordion script for replying to a comment, so I don't have to go to a new page.

Again, not the point. Does the example work better for you if I say Jesus instead of God then?

Besides, if you want to get pedantic then the Christian god isn't a separate species since it's capable of mating with a human and producing fertile offspring.

Why would species matter? It's not as though "race" has any biological meaning. I think that's nitpicking - the point is bigotry, not whether bias falls within a particular category.

The KKK is certainly racist, but it's not racist to believe in racial superiority. It's only racist to be wrong about it. (To the extent that "race" is an actual thing.)

Let's try a little exercise: the Christian god, assuming it exists, is perfect in every way and is superior to you and your race. Is that a racist thing to say?

I'd say that a work can only be sexist or racist if its creator doesn't mean for it to be. Intentional racism is generally either a bad joke or a troll - done to provoke. The KKK isn't intentionally racist, assuming that they actually believe what they preach.

As for the folks in the article, these people seem to be searching for something to feel guilty about. There are some real negative stereotypes, but smooth skin? Homogenised facial structures (whatever that means)? Their solution seems to have been to make all of their female characters either old or weird looking, and from a player's perspective (male) I kinda like that. Putting so much thought into the portraits seems to have given them more character than most. However, there's nothing particularly enlightened here - no one likes to fantasize about being ugly. Even the grizzled-veteran-with-the-knife-fighting-scars fantasy is just a different kind of attractiveness.

That said, how we relate to our media is an interesting subject. The best article that I can recall was this one comparing four versions of The Office. It's not all about beauty, but that's part of it:

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/television/2006/09/foreign_office.html

I really love that everybody can mod the comments here, and number of mod points is unlimited.

With the small community that we have currently this is the only way to do it, but my experience with Reddit is that this does not scale up. Frequently on Reddit I find myself wishing for the independent moderation of the old site - the fact that mod points are limited means that people think a bit before throwing them out, and the fact that there's a cap of five means that one viewpoint can't be voted up to tower over all the others.

Oh come on. Being popular is not the same thing as having a cult of personality. Granted, sometimes the fans of a person or product can spoil the product, through no fault of the product itself. I'll agree that Tyson gets perhaps a little more press than needed but, none the less, Tyson seems to simply be an outgoing science advocate, much like Bill Nye.