Most democraties have bills of rights in their constitutions. The USA is a bi-partizan dictatorship compared to most other nations. The rules of elections are hardwired to prevent a third party ever emerging so there is no chance of parties dying off, which prevents the natural cycle of life for political parties and causes the stale political system currently in power in the US where most Dems and Reps are mostly the same centrists paid by the same lobbys. Now if there were 5-6 parties in power and they had to get to get an agreement between 2-3 parties for any decision to be made, then there would be much more flexibility, just like there is in most of the EU.

The exact point is that State can not do such things (or delegate it to their deputies), but it does not mean that private companies cann't do that. Now that all malls are owned and secured by private companies, they have every right to restrict speech on their private property.

The Constitution of the USA does not grant you the rights to speak at Blizzard. The First Amendment _only_ grants you a limited right to speak at your Government. That is it. Any other speech is not protected.

Criticizing Obama or Bush - Freedom of Speech applies.
Criticizing Blizzard, AT&T or your neighbour - no Freedom of Speech protection there.

'Freedom of speech' in the US is strictly confined to speech that is addressed towards the Government (as defined in the Constitution), no other speech is protected.

I always turn it on, it is very sensible to have it on by default to ease the game for new players.

Apparently 'auto cast self' is now on by default and all the weird people that had it off got it turned to on when the patch hit.

The described system is fair in the short term, but does not has any protections against long term flukes of bad luck that are really frustrating. Most DKP systems guard against that. I am a strong proponent of zero sum DKP systems.

Another fun system that I've seen work great lately is simple hidden bidding when the winner gets the item for the price of the second highest bid + 1 DKP and the bids are wispered to an officer.

Besides being cartoonish, the Alliance symbol is just too damn complex - imagine it as a tatoo: all the small lines and wigglies and the colors ... It would simply never work. Alliance need to get a good graphic designer and get a new logo - something that would work fine in a small size and in a large size, in color and in monochrome, something with simple lines that anyone could replicate by hand and still very recognisable.

That is the main reason why most artists choose to use Horde logo - it is by far a better logo.

Lordaeron had a nice logo, but the logo of the Alliance is just crap.

Just logged on, looks to be working.

Logging in -> Connecting -> Loggin in to the game server -> Connected -> Disconnected.

No change over the last hour. Looks like Blackhand, US is not coping with the load very well.

Well, the Curse Client stopped working in Linux, so .. screw them.