egawrangler

OMG! Engadget was not the first to find out about this totally awesome whizz bang new phone's release?!?!?! I feel empty not being able to read the witty banter of some self-satisying techie kid who smears the internet with their own personal mantra on how its cool to be a "geek". I might collapse not being able to fulfill my life with the quirky retorts, tongue-and-stupid third person banter, or super duper awesome podcasts. Damn engadget....where have you been? Oh yeah, I remember, discussing the finer points of your wikipedia professorship as you sip cafe mocha at your local non-starbucks. You just hate those high prices and how someone there called you an emo kid....

"The Apple store works for Apple because Apple makes the hardware and the software."

One thing is for sure, the internet has produced a plethora of self-taught experts convinced of their own empirical brilliance. Please don't rely on Google search results to promulgate your opinion.

I work (yes, RIGHT NOW) for a motherboard manufacturer who produces boards for Gigabyte. And no, I WON'T mention their name. But I will say this, we were just contracted to build boards for the 17-inch MacBook Pro. Apple DOES NOT make the hardware.

And about making the software....that's debatable. One might ask, who "makes" FreeBSD?

I can't believe no one has commented on the incredibly creepy asian guy wearing this piece of garbage! Creepy "sort-a" beard, creepy chubby facial expression, creepy techie glasses....and a huge creepy ZIT! This clown is a pedifile in training for cripes sake!!

And another comment, because I know this whole Civil War comparison is going to flare up. Of the many, many heroes, that were of African descent, and also fought for the Union in the Civil War, only a small percentage were "contraband" as was the common term then. This meant they were repatriated slaves, runaways, or liberated peoples from the South. These "contraband" fought for freedom and equality in the way most of us wish the rest of the Army had. Those other people in the Army? They fought for what most every American does, security of their home, and a healthy, wealthy life.
The North was just as unfriendly a place for blacks as many were in the South. Thus further defining the scope of the Emancipation Proclomation...a document whose intent was to cripple the South's major source of labor for their primarily agrarian economy. The idea of equality among men, although just and righteous, was merely the sugar sweet coating of Lincoln's great plan.
The fact that the Emancipation Proclomation is one of the greatest documents ever to come out of this fledgling nation, in it's production and hope of true equality, was sadly....merely a side effect.
Any refute to it, whether saying "your ancestors" fought for freedom, or idyllically symbolizing a difference among men merely by a video game title, is wrong.

Whoops, forgot to add that the 78% of soldiers in the Civil War were UNION soldiers.

Additionally, the argument over this game being a cultural celebration is completely valid. I completely agree about the cultural aspects of such a game and view this as such. However, the game still divides us (if only in title and material), and that is the ethereal problem that continues to harvest racism everywhere.
The cultural aspects of this game would have been better celebrated as features of another, more culturaly omnipotent game. I see no differen between a game like BCFx or Cuban Baseball Training Experience. Both are games designed with the best intentions, but the most disastorous results.
Sorry for my spelling, it was getting late....

Abscissa -
You're obviously one of the more intelligent ones on here and after reading all these posts, I can see that your maturity and social awareness are probably going to make you successful in the future. However, your arguments in support of this game are inherently flawed, and I think you've just failed to see a lot of the history and social stratum of this issue...here's why:
America suffers from an "us versus them" parallel racism that has been present ever since Benjamin Franklin warned Congress of the issue that would "fracture our union" in the early 1800's. As long as we perpetuate that mentality (blacks are the us, and whites are the them or vice versa) we will never reach true equality such as most of us desire. You stated in one of your first posts that your white ancestors fought to free the slaves. You would be interested to know that most (78%) of white soldiers in the Civil War despised blacks, and deemed their freedom only as a necessity for defeating an even more hated Confederacy. Read "Battle Cry of Freedom" if this is news to you.
The point is that racism is not a demographic, but rather a plague of simplistic hatred.
Also, you insist on using the "us" and "you" pronouns when referring to a collective of racist whites or blacks. Please understand that this verbage, this simple grouping, is the most poignant and implicit example of the racism which none of us think we have, but is evident in our every day speech. If you consider yourself NOT a racist, thereby believing all people are created equally, then don't make it a habit to segregate them.
You mentioned recently that Irish, Scottish, French, etc. are nationalities and not races. This is also untrue by definition. You see, a long time ago, cavemen started to spread all over the world and the continents drifted. Their separation from one another and respective habitats created a proportional evolution. Studies have shown (Newsweek's report on cranial capacity, MIT's evolutionary physiology department, and most recently the work of the group of Swedish anthropologists studying Asian pigment genes) that each "race" of people have miniscule evolutionary differences between one another. Obviously African from Caucasian in terms of skin tone, but also Chinese from Japanese in terms of average femur length and ocular cavities. Therefore, evolution is continually reshaping the homo sapien genome and diversifying more and more "species" or races of human beings. Then in fact, there are many different races out there. Yes, Irish and French are two separate races! HA!
We are all in fact a little different from each other, but to emphasize these differences and to perpetuate them into stereotypical slander that fractures social interaction, is racism at it's heart. I'm sure the intentions of this video game are in the highest standards of enjoyment and family fun, but the blatant undertones symbolize the violent division in our American culture. Your college is at the pillar of Academia (I know from having lectured there) but the perpetuation of a school based solely on it's skintone is self-defeating. I'm not saying your school is racist, but as long as we continue to celebrate terms like HCBA, however benevolent they are, we are perpetuating the underlying racism that bubbles over the minds of nearly every American, every day.
Few of us can say they completely ignore color, but the better of us can say they completely ignore race.