Slashdot Mirror

117 hostages died, nearly all of them because of gas poisoning: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/eur... . So, next time people start protesting, similar gas might be used to 'control' them. Doesn't it make you feel safer?

You have to spend a great deal of money and have already swallowed all the Kool-Aid.

You've been able to buy an entry-level Mac Mini for $499 since 2005. That's only $100 more than Dell's lowest cost Inspiron.

It's not like the natives wouldn't do it themselves. Their neighbors in Syria have been at it ever since the civil war started.

You're right. That makes it excusable.

It's not like the natives wouldn't do it themselves. Their neighbors in Syria have been at it ever since the civil war started.

Nice to see breakthrough research like this coming from a single-payer healthcare system like the UK. When people start saying that the only places that can afford groundbreaking medical research are the ones where the "customers" pay a fortune, it'll be good to be able to point them to things like this.

According to http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/heal...

"The lack of financial incentive for the pharmaceutical industry could help explain why it has taken so long for the research to get this far. Using a patient's own cells to heal them means there is no profit for the pharmaceutical industry."

But I'm not sure where the funding did come from, some at least came from the Polish government. The scientist mentioned in the BBC article works at UCL (University College London), which has a large NHS teaching/research hospital (UCLH), but it won't necessarily be 100% NHS funding for this work. I think this is the paper: http://dx.doi.org/10.3727/0963... .

I can't find a single place "advertising" all the research the NHS funds. Here's a couple of sites: http://www.uclh.nhs.uk/researc... http://www.imperial.nhs.uk/res...

No need to feel sorry, that constitution didn't apply to America. After the British government failed to apply to the American colonists the rights secured to Britons in the Glorious Revolution the American colonists ultimately decided to have an even more glorious revolution of their own and write a constitution that applied to them.

As to the "written Constitution" of the UK....

The UK constitution

The UK constitution is often described as an 'unwritten constitution', but it is best described as 'partly written and wholly uncodified' (Budge et al, 1998).

It is derived from a number of sources. Its principal source is statute law, i.e., laws passed by the UK Parliament.

The beautiful thing will be if a vaccine is produced.......watching the cognitive dissonance in all those anti-vaxers who also are posting hysterical things about ebola. Will they risk the autism?

Just hold onto that thought for .... at least 14 months.

GSK are not expecting to have a vaccine in production lines before 2016.

I understand that cultural critic Anita Sarkeesian, who made the statement that the best thing men could do to support women was to believe them when they say they are being harassed, has had a death threat made against her. Are the police involved? If somebody made an anonymous death threat against me I'd call the police and expect them to take it seriously. How is this being handled in this case (I don't know how things work in the USA).

The summary is a blatant rip-off of the BBC article found here.

I remember seeing 1000 dollar bills as a small child, about 20-25 years ago. I don't think they exist anymore.

See this article for genuine current 1 million British Pound and 100 million British Pound notes: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

Organised crime fears cause ban on 500 euro note sales
  http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk/8678886.stm
13 May 2010

Exchange offices in the UK have stopped selling 500 euro banknotes because of their use by money launderers.

The Serious Organised Crime Agency says 90% of the notes sold in the UK are in the hands of organised crime.

I can't really find a better article, but as I recall, the investigation showed that a relatively small number of financial organizations were ordering huge volumes of 500 euro notes, which were then never showed up for circulation in England.

The sheer amount of SSRI's in the water will keep the fish happy.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/hea...

i've got evidence the other way , voyager one was the first man made object to leave the solar system
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

maybe the poster was watching a russian translation of 2001

Heck, the physicists at CERN fooled themselves for quite a while when their experiments demonstrated that they had succeeded in sending information at greater than the speed of light.

No, they didn't fool themselves. The differece between this and that is that Rossi is claiming it works--and the CERN folks were saying "we got this result but we DON'T believe it was correct; please help us locate the error." That's the tack that Rossi should be taking if he were legitimate.

The media sensationalized the scientists at CERN because it made a better story. However, your version of reality does not match reality itself.

I agree with you that the U.S. handles birth control education and birth control availability badly compared to all other developed nations.

I stumbled on the fact that Britain had a similarly bad rate back in 2004 (about 40% unplanned) so they are doing something right.

But then I stumbled on more indicating that unplanned births are aborted at a high rate in Britain these days- so they may still be getting pregnant at a higher rate- and just aborting a lot more.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/news/news...

Still, even with only 16%, it's about 140,000 unplanned pregnancies that were born.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

Recreational sex results in about 1/3 of the net population growth of ~400,000 for the country making it "one of the fastest growing populations in the EU."

(for all this I'm ignoring the cases where people are planning on having a baby and have recreational sex...)

It surprised me how intensely people want to believe that birth control is totally reliable.

Hunting a troll down and gutting them, while not smart personally, might send a message to the rest of them. You're not as anonymous on the internet as you think you are.

Curiously, the troll believed to be targetting Medeleine McCann's family was found dead in a hotel earlier this week

Why the Trolls Will Always Win

They don't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

And sometimes they really don't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

Why the Trolls Will Always Win

They don't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

And sometimes they really don't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

Why the Trolls Will Always Win

They don't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

And sometimes they really don't.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-2...

Lego got pissed off at the UK treasury who had used Lego minifigures as part of the UK campaign against Scotland's independence from the UK, see Scottish independence: Lego dropped from Treasury Buzzfeed

Lego, at the time, said they were politically neutral and would not allow their brand to be associated with any political stance.

NASA and its climate partners (like GISS, NCDC) have been saying that. I don't know who else is saying that, unless they're quoting those sources.

For a long time I think NASA had the only satellite that could measure ice mass accurately. ESA launched their one a couple of years ago, quite a bit fancier than the NASA one, and it's showing the same thing:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-27465050

West Antarctica continues to lose ice to the ocean and this loss appears to be accelerating, according to new data from Europe's Cryosat spacecraft. The dedicated polar mission finds the region now to be dumping over 150 cubic km of ice into the sea every year. It equates to a 15% increase in West Antarctica's contribution to global sea level rise.

The internet gives us a unique opportunity to do that with strong cryptography that even the government can't break. What Britstow is really saying is that we need to speed up efforts to encrypt and protect everything from the biggest threat to our safety and freedom: him.

Except that this is the UK, so if you don't hand over your encryption key to the police, you go to jail. Failure to disclose an encryption key is a specific offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

If you do hand it over, but they had to ask you more than once, you go to jail anyway.

The internet gives us a unique opportunity to do that with strong cryptography that even the government can't break. What Britstow is really saying is that we need to speed up efforts to encrypt and protect everything from the biggest threat to our safety and freedom: him.

Except that this is the UK, so if you don't hand over your encryption key to the police, you go to jail. Failure to disclose an encryption key is a specific offence under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act.

If you do hand it over, but they had to ask you more than once, you go to jail anyway.

Why the fuck did the US invade Iraq in 2003?

We resumed the hostilities suspended in 1992, because Saddam Hussein failed to fulfill his cease-fire obligations and our patience finally ran out. Yes, we should've done it earlier, but Bill Clinton was not the kind...

the US young service men and women I feel sorry for.

Yeah, the "sophisticated" (but impotent) Europe might be understanding it, but here in America we have a distinct dislike for mad dictators. Why, some of us even still subscribe to the doctrine of that previous adorable President from Chicago:

“Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.”

By withdrawing from Iraq too early, we failed the Iraqis. The fault, however, is not in invading in the first place, but in electing an incompetent "community organizer" to Presidency on account of his race — with a lunatic providing "foreign policy expertise"...

It is a shame, which Obama is finally beginning to rectify. Unfortunately, I doubt he'll succeed — not for lack of trying, but simply due to incompetence of a man, who never ran anything successful until his own election campaigns. Maybe, his spectacular failure will inoculate Americans against his kind of approach for a few decades — the way Jimmy Carter's presidency did in its time...

Assuming that you consider [the Japanese] getting vending machines with used panties [..] less fucked up.

From what I've heard, those *did* exist (and still do to a limited extent), but even at their peak weren't remotely as common nor as prominent as most people in the west seemed to believe. Apparently most of the ones around were associated with nearby sex/erotica shops, i.e. generally more out-of-the-way locations.

Back to Saturday morning cartoons... I get the impression that this is (or was) an American cultural phenomenon(?) In the UK, both the BBC and ITV showed a lot of US import cartoons when I was a kid, but my primary memory of those is of them being shown on weekday afternoons, after school. I don't recall them ever being generally referred to as "saturday morning" cartoons here.

Indeed, that's probably because though Saturday morning television on the two main channels (BBC1 and ITV) *was* aimed at kids, it was primarily in the form of circa three-hour magazine shows like Tiswas, Swap Shop, Going Live!, SMTV, etc. Those generally included lots of different segments and features. Though they did include some cartoons as part of the mix, that was never the sole focus- far from it, it's certainly not what I associate with them.

This was pretty much the standard "Saturday morning" format here from the mid-70s until the decline of such programming on the main channels in recent years.

I get the impression that this format wasn't so common in the US, at least not in the "golden era" the "Saturday morning cartoons" nostalgia seems to be harking back to. Though I understand that many cartoons were shown as part of "The [Main Feature Character] Hour" and the like (where a number of cartoons were tied together under the banner of the most well-known one), that's still basically "all cartoons" and somwhat different to the live format shown on UK TV.

Are we sure it's October 1st and not April 1st?

When I first saw this on the BBC news site my first thought was that this was beyond parody.

Charlie Brooker apparently stopped doing TV Go Home (a bizarre send-up of British TV listings) when reality TV ideas started coming up with ideas that were becoming as strange as his joke versions (e.g. "Touch the Truck in which contestants must continually touch a truck for 24 hours in order to win the truck as a prize").

This is the movie version of that- it already sounds like something that would have belonged in a comedy parody in recent years. You could try sending it up or taking the p***, but why bother?

The particularly silly bit in the BBC report is the comment, "In this new universe, as you'll soon find out, there's much more to Tetris than simply clearing lines." Er, no, there isn't. That's why you're going to have to make up virtually everything about it.

When the "Space Invaders" film was mooted, I (along with everyone else) thought it was ludicrous, since the original game was little more than "you are shooting waves of aliens [which we understand are "invading" from "space" going by the two-word "plot" written on the arcade cabinet]". It was likely to be little more than transparent attempt to graft a nostalgia-invoking brand on a generic sci-fi movie, which- going by recent Hollywood films- was unlikely to have much more plot than the original game.

But "Tetris: The Movie" takes the biscuit. I wasn't engaging in hyperbole when I said it was beyond parody- I don't think there's anything you can say about this sort of thing that makes it sound more ludicrous than simply restating the idea itself.

Enough of that. Here's a little musical relief.

The real worrying stuff is here:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-p...

The best photo is not of Mars...but the women workers of ISRO (Indian Space Research Organization) handling the Mars mission celebrating.

BBC has a good report and the photo...http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-india-29357472

As a tweeter asks..when was the last time we saw women scientists celebrating a space mission?

Yeah, I want an Octopod!

The dirty three (US, Canada and Australia) all produce more than 16 tonnes CO2 per person.

The EU about 6.8

China produces 7.2

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

Perhaps the US should demonstrate how big countries lead and actually do something meaningful about its emissions instead of hypocritically lecturing.

None of the figures above actually account for outsourcing manufacturing to China from the US and EU. In that light the Western country's CO2 production is much and China's lower.

Yippie Ki Yay: US drone strikes: Memo reveals case for killing Americans

+1 Subtle Irony. Well played, sir or madam!

Ukraine conflict: 'Russia has taken control of Crimea'
Boat collisions spark Japan-China diplomatic row

This BBC article may help. There are a number of theories regarding international law and the legality of the U.S. led actions in Syria. Defense of neighboring states (Iraq, Jordan, etc.) and humanitarian aid being the two that make the most sense (IMHO).

the Syrian government has lost all control over the parts of Syria held by IS.

Indeed, until very recently, it has made no attempt to dislodge it, leaving this task instead to the armed opposition groups. Damascus is manifestly unable or unwilling to discharge its obligation to prevent IS operations against Iraq from its own soil. Syria cannot impose the costs of its inaction or incapacity in relation to IS on neighbouring Iraq.

Hence, under the doctrine of self-defence, the zone of operations of the campaign to defeat IS in Iraq can be extended to cover portions of Syria beyond the control of the Syrian government.

And...

Finally, it would be possible to base a claim for action on the activities of IS in Syria itself.

The Syrian government is under the obligation to secure its population from crimes against humanity committed on its territory. Clearly, it is unable to do so, having lost control over areas occupied by IS.

Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-e...
Build then study.

Fine, here's another: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.u...

He was egged by in irate local resident not a yes campaigner. Jim Sillars got egged, he suggested that he hand it in to a food bank next time and carried on.

Fucking Google the other 400 references yourself you lazy bigoted blinkered twat.

Ok, i tried Google and I got

Here's a No campaigner arrested for kicking a woman in the stomach

80 year old Yes campaigner had his arm broken

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.u...

What was that you were saying about personal attacks. You epitomise the No campaign, playing the victim when it is you who are the aggressor.

As an Englishman observing this from outside Scotland (but from within the UK), I find the geographical breakdown interesting. The overall result was 55.30% No and 44.70 % Yes, but looking at the results from the 32 councils only four had majorities for the Yes vote. 28 had a majority for No (albeit very slim in one instance).

The councils where the Yes vote was in the majority were all urban. In all the rural (and some urban) councils the No vote had the majority. OK, some of these are a lot smaller (in population) than the councils where the Yes vote had the majority, but they were a lot larger geographically.

What was very interesting was that some areas which voted No are SNP strongholds, including Alex Salmon's own constituency.

I think there is enough here to keep the pundits going for months!

Since I last posted, the pledge from the parties behind the No campaign for more devolution powers have already fallen apart. A lot of people voted no because they were promised a more federalised UK

I assume you mean Milliband's statement at 17:42 BST:

"Our task now is to make sure that we deliver on the timetable we've set out, to deliver extra powers to the Scottish Parliament, and we will deliver on that."

See http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/live/uk-scotland-29130277

Don't worry, as someone from England, I want to see the leaders keep the promise they made. Don't give up yet!

(For our non-UK readers Milliband is the leader of the Official Opposition, and potential next Prime Minister. His words carry clout.)

Yeah, and aliens could land too, and there will be nuclear war, and the world will end also!

Oh wait, you were being serious? You used the words "the way things are going" but that's not actually the way things are going. Based on current trajectories the UK is showing the healthiest growth of just about all rich Western economies and it's doing so whilst maintaining a reduction in deficit too.

Further, a number of studies suggest it's likely to see itself increase in global rankings overtaking France, and maybe even Germany in the next 20 years:

http://www.theguardian.com/bus...

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/busi...

So yeah, you may be right, maybe something drastic will happen and things will go into reverse again, but that's not what the current figures suggest so any such possibility is merely unfounded speculation.

Yeah, sure, Scotland could've chosen not to be part of that and that would've been their decision, but I think most Scots saw through the nationalist pessimism towards the UK and recognised that for all our faults, maybe things aren't so bad - we're growing faster than anyone else in the G7 and seeing drastic declines in unemployment to boot - find me a country without political issues, but as far as ours go they're pretty small fry compared to some of the issues some countries are having, we've been growing well for well over a year now and some of our neighbours are still slipping in and out of recession - right now and for the foreseeable future the UK is still a pretty good place to be.

Faster political change would be nice, many people think it's not happening at all, but it is. In recent years we've seen things like the exposure of the expenses scandal, we've seen the closeness of phone hacking and the political classes, we've seen an alternative voting system referendum that was lost, exposure of sexual abuse in parliament, we've seen a coalition for the first time in 60 years- now many people will view all these things are negatives, things that ended badly, didn't turn out well, but they're not, they're all part of a bigger picture- the tide is turning against entrenched Westminster, in the last 50 years most of those things listed above would've been unthinkable, the fact they're happening is evidence that the vested minorities that've had so much power for so long in Westminster are losing their grip. I'm normally a cynical, pessimistic person myself, but since I started to take a step back on this issue and piece it all together, rather than look at individual events in isolation, as well as looking at the wider world in general (i.e. the arab spring) it seems pretty clear that politicians are losing power to the people as part of a long slow, probably multi-decade process - it's slow but it's happening, and I'm optimistic that Westminster cannot and will not be able to carry on with business as usual for much longer- they're already faltering and I fully suspect that this independence referendum is another nail in the coffin for the old way of doing things.

God only knows I've hated my country long enough and thought about leaving enough times (thankfully I can easily obtain dual citizenship through my partner, or just make use of our EU membership to fuck off elsewhere in the EU) but right now I think the signs are good, I think change is happening, it's painfully slow but I'm not convinced this is something that you can fix overnight, I think it takes almost a generational change in politicians (which might explain why there has been some progress already- I believe last election that far more than half the MPs that were elected were completely new) but it's happening, and we're getting there.

That brings up a good point. That is probably why the government automatically deducts taxes from the paychecks of most employees.

Then maybe your duty even extends to things like civil disobedience to try and obstruct you government from behaving in this way? I am not sure I actually agree with this, but I do understand people who do.

There is an interesting side point to this though with regard to Israel in that US taxpayers do help foot the bill to pay for their armed forces. They also pay a sizable amount to Egypt to keep the military there Israel friendly and maintain the blockade of Gaza.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrar...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/worl...

Does this make US citizens compliant also for the deeds of the Israeli armed forces? $3.1 billion is quite a lot after all.

Of course the problem with this argument is that in many cases the US taxpayer simply has no idea what their money is spent on.

while 95% of the population still live in extreme poverty and could make more use of the billions wasted on this project

Nah, sorry, this argument doesn't work. Far more billions are wasted on completely useless military activity than the relatively miniscule space program of all nations put together - and the space programme at least has a use ...

As 'The Hawk' says, we urgently need to set up an off-world colony before the next asteroid strike wipes our species out. We had an unexpected visit from such an asteroid whizzing past inside the orbit of our geostationary satellites just a couple of days ago - this house-sized lump of rock was only detected for the first time about a week before it arrived. Who knows how long we've got before one of these things actually collides with us. Apparently such an event is now overdue in geological timescale terms.

More space programme please.

That's how it works in Germany, actually.

The Honourable Woman, which I watched recently, is an excellent drama that does a brilliant job of showing how fucked up the Israel/Palestine situation is, and, why the Americans are a bunch of fucktards who just can't help but get involved. I know it's just a TV drama, but I honestly believe that the actions depicted in the film are exactly what is going on without any of us knowing.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/tech...

We've had electric buses for a while in Milton Keynes. That 30 mile range can be dramatically increased with small top up charges at the end of the routes. Drive 5 miles, top up 4 miles, Drive 5 miles, top up 4 miles etc... Then have a big charge overnight.

So offer me one. Give me a internet license for BBC online and let me stream it from whereever I am on the planet. If you want you can do it by creating your own VPN and renting that to me.

Isn't that what iplayer is?

Gentlemen, gentlemen... please calm down! You are talking past one another. The terms "left" and "right" are archaic, dating back to the French National Assembly of 1789. At that time "left" meant progressive, radical, secular, revolutionary; while "right" meant conservative, monarchic, religious. All of that is so far behind us that it's pretty much irrelevant nowadays.

The BBC is *pro-establishment*. Partly because it had a nasty near-death experience when it tried to tell the truth about Tony Blair and the Dodgy Dossier: the director-general had to resign, heads rolled, and since then everyone has known that the only thing to do is parrot the government line. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_...

The BBC is also pro-establishment because of its membership. It leans very heavily towards well-educated, middle-class, liberals who (rightly or wrongly) try very hard to be politically correct at all times.

These facts confuse anyone who tries to apply old-fashioned categories like "left" and "right". The BBC seems to be "right" because it's pro-establishment; but it also looks "left" because it's politically correct. However, I find that if you assume the BBC will always speak truth to power you will be absolutely wrong. The BBC will, in fact, tell power exactly what it thinks power wants to hear. Because, to be honest, that's how you get on in life these days.

From what I hear, things aren't all that different in the US media.

Methinks BBC did what they did on the advise of their lawyers, and I am sure that there are still plenty of good people within BBC who can discern good from bad, right from wrong

So ... why don't all of us contact BBC and tell them what we think ?

Their website is at http://bbc.com/

You can contact them via http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/cont...

Or file a complaint at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaint...

Their worldservice email address is at worldservice.letters@bbc.co.uk

Their FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/bbcwo...

Let them know, let BBC know how wrong they are about VPN

Methinks BBC did what they did on the advise of their lawyers, and I am sure that there are still plenty of good people within BBC who can discern good from bad, right from wrong

So ... why don't all of us contact BBC and tell them what we think ?

Their website is at http://bbc.com/

You can contact them via http://www.bbc.co.uk/faqs/cont...

Or file a complaint at http://www.bbc.co.uk/complaint...

Their worldservice email address is at worldservice.letters@bbc.co.uk

Their FB page is at https://www.facebook.com/bbcwo...

Let them know, let BBC know how wrong they are about VPN

... Culture "Minds", drones, and humans/cyborgs all have privacy of what is in their own thoughts and memories. However, anything in a non-sentient "databank" is public to all (so, externally stored communications or designs in that sense are publicly shareable). I'm just re-reading "Excession" (out loud to my kid) where Banks made that point. In the "Culture", Banks makes it clear that sentient beings of any sort (including typical drones) have a variety of rights related to independence. When I first read that, coming from an idea of free software and free culture, it seemed somehow strange or wrong that the AI "Minds" or drones would have that sort of privacy, but now it seems to make more and more sense to me, given the sort of issues raised in the article, including that there can be many times when the line is blurred between human and machine. But the probably deeper issue is what it means to have an advanced post-scarcity "Culture" where many of the citizens are entirely non-biological (like the AI "Minds" that run much of everything).

BTW, the original "RUR" story from 1920 (where the term "robot" came from) has almost exactly the same plot as you outline for BG.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R....

A lot of long-term robotics (like Asimo) is implicitly the quest for the ideal "slave". The question is, at what points does something have rights? In the USA and elsewhere animals have some legal rights (or at least laws to protect them) since starting about a 150 years ago, and that campaign I've heard eventually led to children having independent rights (on the logic of, why should a horse or dog have rights when a child does not?).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.nal.usda.gov/awic/p...
"The first national law to regulate animal experimentation was passed in Britain in 1876--the Cruelty to Animals Act of 1876. This bill created a central governing body that reviewed and approved all animal use in research. After that, there were numerous countries in Europe that adopted some regulations regarding research with animals. "

Also:
http://www.humanium.org/en/chi...
"At the beginning of the 20th century, children's protection starts to be put in place, including protection in the medical, social and judicial fields. This kind of protection starts first in France and spreads across Europe afterwards. Since 1919, the international community, following the creation of The League of Nations (later to become the UN), starts to give some kind of importance to that concept and elaborates a Committee for child protection."

However, going back to hunter/gatherer times thousands of years ago, there was in many such cultures (from what remains of them) at least an ethic of giving thanks to the larger "animal" kind (e.g. "Rabbit") that you killed for it letting you kill it so you might survive. But it's hard to know for sure what such cultures really believed day-to-day in all circumstances. And some such cultures had various sorts of slavery.

I don't know what the line is where a mechanism (mechanical or electronic or photonic or fluidic or other) becomes self-aware, or even if that should be the line. Or at what point can a mechanism feel "pain" or "pleasure"? Is that ultimately a political and/or religious question?
http://www.rfreitas.com/Astro/...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/tec...

And also:
http://www.aspcr.com/
"We are the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Robots, founded in 1999 in Seattle, Washin

Its totally possible to make changes in human behavior to minimize or reverse destructive impacts on ecosystems. Obviously every scenario will be different but lets keep it up!

This is also misleading. Almost all the blue whales are gone, and remain critically endangered.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/scie...

While applauding the success of the conservation efforts in the California region, the scientists are well aware that not all whale populations have managed to rebound. In Antarctica, blue whales are at approximately 1% of their historic numbers.

"California blue whales are recovering because we took actions to stop catches and start monitoring," said Cole Monnahan, "If we hadn't, the population might have been pushed to near extinction - an unfortunate fate suffered by other blue whale populations."

the fact that you think women need different types of games kind of make you misogynistic in your thinking

No it does not, and for two reasons:
1 - showing empathy for female gamers and trying to identify their needs is clearly not a display of hatred
2 - unless you have evidence that all game types are played in equal proportions by both genders, he's probably right

"the typical Candy Crush Saga player is a woman aged 25-45"
-- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/maga...

Incidentally why are slasher movies misogynistic? Men die too. In fact, it's usually a woman that survives. Clearly they're feminist movies.