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Yes, because hippies are merely a convenient straw-man caricature for you to mock. So they'll believe any dumb-ass thing you want them to in order to make you look like you're winning the argument.

I'm not a hippie myself though, so my view is that we do need a military: one about one tenth the size of what we have now. The reason our military keeps growing year and year and STILL can't keep up with our demands on it is that it generates its own demand: the more military we have, the more we rely on it as our primary means of getting things done (whether it is the right tool or not), and the more other nations (rightly) fear our military power, and build up their militaries in response, and so the more we have to build up our own military to stay ahead. A classic arms race, but the end of this little game is that America will bankrupt itself, USSR style, by going into massive debt to support its military. Cool as high-tech weaponry may be, you can't eat it, and you can't house your citizens with it. At some point the whole economic edifice will come tumbling down under the weight of all that non-productive military spending, and the USA will cease to be a global superpower -- ironically not because of too little defense, but because of too much.

these people truly think they are doing the right thing. They are not inherently evil, even if their actions end up seeming that way. In the end it is a skewed view of the individual, not someone being actively evil.

At the risk of calling out the Godwin Nazis, Hitler and Sadaam also truly thought they were doing the right thing for their respective countries and were honestly not trying to be evil, but were trying to be a savior for their respective peoples. Anyone who knew them personally knows that.

It is amazing how many people don't understand this basic thing, that no successful leader considers himself evil, but sincerely considers his opponents evil, i.e. the caricatures of the Jews in the case of Hitler, etc., as the source of all evil. And there is some logic that can be used to justify any such demonization. It is spin leading to polarization, which is what makes the world go around and often becomes the excuse for ignoring one's own supposed ethics and morals.

One of Gate's villified enemies (I can name a series of others) was so-called software piracy, which he more than anyone else has made into a crime more than it ever was before. As much credit as the uninformed give him for progress in computers, this has destroyed growth and freedom that would have come otherwise. Could Unix have emerged under the current copyright regime? Operating systems would have been built for commodotized hardware one way or the other, but it was one more degree of freedom lost that is now hard to recover from under his shadow.

it's incredibly sophisticated and subtle.

What's interesting to me is that, in fact, it's not all that subtle -- if you really know anything about what creationists are like and what they believe. It's only believable if your perception of creationists is a caricature of reality to begin with. Yes, they do twist logic into knots, because they presume the result, and then go about looking for the evidence, but their reasoning is much more believable that what is presented at this site. The errors tend to be omission of inconvenient facts, not the sort of completely bizarre thinking you find on this hoax site.

wanna bet that if I don't realize it's a big parody, then neither will the kids who get sent there by clueless adults to learn about creationism?

My point is that adult believers in creationism aren't going to send any kids there, because creationists would instantly recognize the site as a hoax and be very annoyed at the misrepresentation of their ideas.

How nice of you to generalize and lump all fundamentalist Christians into a big category as if every one them comes to their conclusions through the same straw man reasoning that you give when in fact there a wide variety of reasons any one person in that category has come to his or her beliefs including both rational and irrational ones.

For instance, I consider myself a fundamentalist Christian in the sense that I take the Bible to be true and the foundations of what Christian beliefs represent. However, I did not come to embrace this belief system because of blind faith in the Bible like in the well-known condescending caricature thrown around by presumptious atheist types.

Based upon my reason and experiences, I have a belief in a creator that we may call God. This belief is logically first in my religious belief system. Likewise, based upon my studying of historical evidences and my reason, I have belief in the accuracy of the content of the Gospels and the Epistles. Together with my knowledge of cultures of the time, my experiences, my knowledge of human nature, and my belief in God, I reasoned that Jesus of Nazareth was miraculously resurrected and that what He claimed about His relationship to God was true and that He spoke the truth. Finally, based upon historical accuracy when verifiable as well as the fact that Jesus and the early Church appear to have accepted the accuracy of the Old Testament scriptures, I accept them as such as well.

I have no desire to get into the various reasons why I believe in God or what reasoning brought me to believe in Jesus and His teachings. My point is that despite your stereotype, many Christians do not start with the Bible, but instead come to accept the Bible in the same way that you might accept the word of a trusted friend.

Finally, you may call the Bible "HIGHLY UNRELIABLE" if you like, but in so far as it is verifiable, it stands up remarkably well to critical examination. Yes, one can engage in hair-splitting over sections here and there if that is your cup of tea, and I have spent no small amount of time doing this sort of thing, but I have found that the questions raised always have reasonable answers and that usually the folks trying to find problems with the text are precommitted to disbelief rather than open minded enquirers. The real "problem" is the miraculous events recorded in it come smashing into conflict with any a priori commitment to the philosophy of naturalism.

I have found that at the heart of the matter is the world view of belief or disbelief. If you for one reason or another have accepted belief in a divine creator, then this changes the meaning of the very evidences one sees. Likewise, if you have for one reason or another rejected the belief in a creator and the possibility of miracles from the start, then even should something miraculous happen right before your eyes, you would still find means of doubting it. When we consider evidence, it is always colored by our fundamental worldviews.

You might get short term improvements, but they're countered by long term negatives. These long term negatives can be the better choice compared to certain illnesses

You're being way too general — the facts do not back you up. For instance, what are my long term negative drug-induced side effects of having a single cup of coffee in the morning? What are they from a joint a day? What are they from a glass of wine with my evening meal (I mean, other than better cardiac health?) You see, your broad strokes do not actually apply; you're just parroting a lifetime of conditioning by the government. The FACT of the matter is that not all drug use results in side effects, and not only that, not all side effects are bad.

Moderation is key, but you should recognize that a healthy person already has everything in moderation.

No. Come on. That isn't even a caricature of the true state of affairs. The IQ curve goes from way below 100 to way above. In "healthy" people. My IQ is way, way over 100. I'm healthy. No moderation about either issue. I'm *very* healthy, and compared to the median, I'm also very smart. Who am I to say that Joe Sixpack isn't to have access to my kind of smarts if the simple act of gunning down a pill can hand it to him for a period of time when he thinks it would be useful to him? Who are you to say so? Are you the kind of person who would refuse a crutch to a person born without a leg just at the juncture when crossing the street would get him laid? I mean, it is bad enough you want to "protect" me from having my coffee in the morning, but really! If a drug helps a person learn, and they're in school, you'd go so far as to deny the drug? You're cruel, is what you are.

If you only use a little, you only get a little effect and a little negative side effect. If you want a noticeable effect, then you get noticeable negative effects too. So what's the point?

You're just hand-waving again. Some drugs give a little effect, and some give a lot. Sometimes the little effect is what you want (ie morning coffee -- caffiene in small doses.) Sometimes the large effect is what you want. But the fact is, your attempt to tie large negative effects with large drug effects is unscientific and frankly, smacks of total ignorance. Many drugs have large desired effects without large side effects. I could write all day about them. The idea that because a drug is recreational, that it somehow cannot be without side effects... that's just the department of homeland stupidity talking, there. Some drugs have large side effects, some don't. Some develop them over time. Some don't. Some develop them immediately and noticably; some don't. Drugs, like everything else on this planet, are all over the map. So we have to turn to what is constant here, and *that* is the right of a person to make choices for themselves. And what is the best thing we can do there? Educate. Stop lying, the way the government has been doing for many years now, since well before "Reefer Madness." If we don't know something, just admit it, instead of making things up. That'll encourage people to find out what the facts are, instead of making up crap to fit some moronic agenda like the "war on drugs."

I am not telling you that you can't use these drugs, but if you do use them (and by use I mean abuse if you're normally healthy) you have to assume all risk.

The risk is indeed mine. As it should be. There is no reason it should be yours, or society's. I absolutely agree. Personal responsibility for one's actions should be unavoidable, and avoiding responsibility is undesirable for an ethical person in any case. Making it easy to avoid is just encouraging unethical behavior.

Your environment shouldn't feel obliged to help you when you screw yourself up, which is practically inevitable if you go for a noticeable ef

I had to throw that in there after "see you in Gitmo liberal boy" didn't clue in the faithful that was a caricature of that drag queen haridan or the mouth-breathing, pill-popping, overgrown frat boy.

"Since I didn't say that, you have your own strawman arguement. I didn't say it was the same, I said it sets up a precedent, which it does. And since you bring up the distiction between intelligence levels vs intelligence capacity, you illustrate my point nicely, as down syndrome people would usually be considered to have a much different capacity for intelligence."

First you say that I am arguing against a straw man, and then you basically repeat what I said you were saying. Classic!

"It is not about saying "If you want to do stem cell research you also want to kill disabled people", it's saying that if you get a decision to allow ebryonic stem cell research based on a particular line of reasoning, that line of reasoning can then be used (precendent, remember) in other decisions."

Not when that line of reasoning is a caricature, not the actual reasoning. You simply can't get from the idea that capacity to think or feel at all, or to have ever done so, is a necessary pre-requisite for rights to executing down syndrome kids. You just can't.

"It is not dishonest, it is demonstably true that people reason this way, for example, Peter Singer who indeed does have the opinion that it is ok to kill disabled children. "

While I don't agree with all of Singer's positions, I think it is pathetic how people misrepresent them in this way. It basically boils down to lying about his arguments, or pulling musing points made in a long philosophical digression with quite different conclusions out of context. If you wanted to demonstrate that you aren't attacking straw men, you just failed again. Too bad there isn't a contest for people who fail the most. Though if there was, I'm sure you'd somehow manage to fail at it.

That's exactly why I disliked Sephiroth and why he seemed like a caricature. He was pretty much and over-powered superhuman. Plus (if I remember the story correctly) he had a good reason for wanting to destroy the earth. Sometimes I felt sympathetic for him.

Kefka, OTOH, was a seriously messed up human. He was a genocidal maniac who killed for no good reason. I could look at him, and liken him to Hitler or other despotic leaders who use mass murder to rise to and keep their power. But, yeah, he did look like a fruit. Check out the instruction book drawings. He was basically a clown.

I find Kefka far more evil than Sephiroth, who seemed more like a bad caricature of a villain. ANd except for the Aeris parts of the story, the FF7 story just seemed contrived. When you put everything together at the end, it still didn't really make sense.

You might want to take a look at the Final Fantasy VII Ultimania Omega, which was a book published in Japan that explains the story. After reading that, especially seeing exactly how Jenova, Sephiroth, Cloud, and Zack all are connected, it makes a whole lot more sense.

I find Kefka far more evil than Sephiroth, who seemed more like a bad caricature of a villain. ANd except for the Aeris parts of the story, the FF7 story just seemed contrived. When you put everything together at the end, it still didn't really make sense.

I'd like to call academic feminists "useful idiots" in that respect, but that'd be letting them off the hook as they have often whole-heartedly promoted the idea that women have no legitimate right to choose a traditional housewife role.

Nice caricature, and I'm sure it's useful to you when maintaining your worldview, but it doesn't represent reality. Feminist ideology is, and always has been, about choice.

I think there is a certain amount of usefulness to this notion, however what I think it needs to clarify is that when the player is what causes the improbable action, it spends far less of the 'credibility budget' then when the game seems to be the impetus.

When I drive off a ramp, flip over and cause a 15 car explosion in GTA, it doesn't really affect my notion of the game as a vaguely believable caricature of America. However, if that happened all around me constantly it would bust that and I'd feel like I were in crazy stunt world or something.

I think that the difference in credibility effect between player impetus and game impetus is so great that the mere suggestion that player freedom is a bad thing is almost entirely busted.

It certainly makes it more difficult for the -game- to respond to the player in credible ways, but it isn't directly what the player did that hurts that credibility.

I'd say that arbitrarily limiting a player's freedom has a credibility damaging effect as well, since you feel like you are in an invisible straight jacket whenever there exists a mind numbingly obvious solution to a problem that can only be dealt with in the circuitous manner decided by the game developer.

Terrorism is real!
The fear of terrorism is real!

The importance given to terrorism and the weight of that fear are unreal (even surreal).

Nobody denies that terrorism exists or that it has affected the lives of several people.
Then again, lightning bolts are real too and they have affected the lives of several people.

Still, governments are hardly curtailing people's liberty to go out on a storm or forcing then to wear a chain-mail suit when doing so.

Yet some people are willing to accept and even agree that, to protect themselfs from terrorism, more and more power should be delivered in the hands of some while at the same time making those that get that power less and less accountable.

How did we, as members of "democratic" societies, managed to get even the twisted caricature of democracy that we have instead of police states if beyond me.

Generally, if I use a root account, it's because I'm doing a mix of admin and other stuff. I could equally well use a user who is specifically configured for what I want. Root's powers go well beyond what I'm likely to use at any given time.

The primary reason people don't like role-based computing is that it's bloody hard to get it configured correctly. A big source of complaints is for servers like Apache, which do a lot of very different tasks and can (potentially) access many different types of service.

But hard is not the same as impossible. It does require effort, though, and a lot of planning in terms of what you are doing. Role-based computing is not designed for sit-down-and-hack operators, it's designed for people who architect their systems and know the interrelationships involved.

This is not to criticise the sit-down-and-hack folk - for a start, I'm usually one of them, and for another, the architects may be great admins but they're generally poor coders outside of the "mission critical" applications (life support, for example). Sit-down-and-hack types get things done, they get things done fast, and they get things done now. Software from such coders is frequently buggy, which is why peer-review is essential. Ultimately, though, hackers (in this correct use of the term) don't need all the powers of root - though usually far more than Windows allots to general users.

The problem with having a set number of specially-designed caricature user-types (which is the Windows model) is that users invariably end up way too restricted or way too powerful. REAL role-based computing is as fine-grained as you like, with the ideal restrictions being solely that you can't do what you wouldn't want to do anyway.

This is not to say hardened Linux, Trusted Irix, or any other system out there, is vastly better. I believe that there's a few thousand times as much room for improvement as there have been improvements since the first time-sharing OS' were developed. However, if we fail to criticise what is blatantly incorrect design, nobody will ever design anything better. If the inferior design is considered "good enough", there will be no motivation to design anything better - and no incentive for users to switch to it.

It is absolutely vital for the health of the industry that critics wrench every last defect that they can find out of a system and hold them to the light. In Open Source, this is part of the normal software lifecycle and is usually done on mailing lists, bugtrackers and pubs across the globe. For closed source, especially with the limitations on discovery placed by assorted US laws, we rely on tech journalists to do this work.

Sure, the journalist in question could have done a better job. They could probably have found twenty times the faults, and compressed the article to half the size in the process. But instead of telling me why they're not really "problems", maybe you should be telling journalists to explain their conclusions better and to dig a little deeper into the subject.

Hell, Windows 2000 reputedly came out with 65,536 known, documented bugs. Where were the investigative journalists, the go-getters, hunting through every last scrap of available information, questioning/bribing Microsoft employees for every last drop of data? If journalists don't have any problems doing this for celebrity movie stars who have done no harm and have no real capacity to - ever, then why not do this in an industry where a crashed computer could cost billions in some cases, or a breeched server could compromise tens of millions of bank accounts or credit cards? In both cases, we're talking nine or ten figure sums. Telephon

A fundamental principle of the current international order is that states cannot make their subjects effectively stateless.

Generally, Israel hasn't made any of its Palestinians subject "effectively stateless". There are three major groups of Palestinians today:

1. Those living in various other Arab countries - obviously, Israel is not obliged in any way to give them citizenship.
2. Those living inside the state of Israel - except for very few exceptions, those have full Israeli citizenship. One of the reasons I'm outraged by comparisons of Israel to South-Africa is how tolerant Israel actually is. Note that many of these full citizens are actively supporting the Palestinian "cause" - more bluntly: Palestinian terror - against Jews on the land that gave them full citizenship. I suspect many other countries, if not the vast majority of them, would reserve quite a different treatment to a minority supporting the enemy at the time of war, even less bloody then the one (with thousands of casualties) we're having with the Palestinians now. Yet we, who grant them such status, are condemned by countries like Syria (directly involved in numerous massacres of its racial minorities) with the cooperation not only of villains like China but also much of the western world. Appearantly, Jews can never do anything right.
3. The Palestinians who were outside the borders of Israel since its inception - to whom I really don't see why Israel should grant citizenship. Even if they weren't actively involved in attempts to harm Israel as a state in the lives of its inhabitants, no moral obligation stemming from reason or the internation laws which you quoted, obliges Israel to grant them citizenship. Even the original UN decisions recognized that the rights of the Jewish people to self-expression, and indeed the very lives of its members, would be threatened by forcing it to "assimilate" hostile Palestinians population. The decision called for two states - Israel, and Palestine. The Palestinians objected to this. Not that they wanted a state or anything like that - there hasn't been a soverign state in the land of Israel for hundreds of years before modern Zionism emerged. They just didn't like the Jews. Their plan was generally to massacre the most they can, which would cause the survivors to escape and the "problem" to go away. It's amazing how little the Palestinian approach has changed: the above is explicitly endoresed by Hamas today.

In my opinion creating a static defence line against enemies is a perfectly proportional solution. Nobody ever questioned the existence of Hadrian's wall, the Great Wall of China, or the Maginot line. Unfortunately it is in a provocative place. This is more a pragmatic than a principled judgment. I don't believe for a minute that all Palestinians are going to be happy and satisfied if they get a sovereign state along the 1967 borders, but at least it creates a situation where Israel can wash its hands in innocence when further violence occurs.

Unfortunately, the Israeli experience indicates that we can never "wash our hands in innocence", not as far as the world's opinion (not to mention the Arab world) is concerned. Israel is always painted by the Arabs as an unlawful aggressor. And this caricature is usually accepted, pretty much as delivered, on other parts of the world.

Whenever Israel makes a concession, it is always - always! presented as:

1. A proof Israel has been doing wrong all along, and frequently a proof of Israel's "crimes", whichever they might be.

2. "Too little, too late". Generally, there's always something wrong with Israeli concessions. Our Arab enemies never accept concessions as they are, always use them as basis for further demands. This is especially true with the Palestinians. When we withdrew to the internationally recognized borders in Lebanon, Hizbullah suddently decided that they have a right to Mount Dov and the Shaba Ranches as well, so the

These companies, against all empirical evidence, hope that by placing "Mobile Web" buttons, "download ringtone" buttons, music playing and downloading, buy "Brickout" buttons, and "send picture|movie|text message|email" buttons all over the phone, such that they intrude in every basic phone operation, eventually you'll give up and finally download that low-bitrate song for $3, or rack up $30 worth of internet browsing charges trying to figure out how to lookup movie times on some affiliate's "mobile web" site, or spend another $3 on a ringtone that sounds like someone playing Yankee Doodle on a kazoo. If nothing else, they hope that you'll accidentally activate one of these "features" so they can charge you for it. Plus, there's no incentive for them not to do this.

Or by making it so complicated, or even impossible, to transfer data off your phone that you'll finally just throw up your arms in disgust and pay $0.75 to send that tiny, grainy, blurry picture to yourself in an email.

This has almost nothing to do with what the customer wants. It has a great deal to do with what cell phone companies wish you would do.

So...

Cameras are built in to cell phones so that you'll pay the cell phone company some outrageous fee to transmit that picture to yourself or someone else, not because most people like taking pictures with their phones.

Video downloads are available so you'll pay ridiculous video service, data, and/or airtime charges, not because most people like watching animated postage stamps.

Mobile web interfaces intrude everywhere so that you'll accidentally turn on the browser and pay stratospheric per-byte transfer charges, not because any sane person likes squinting at a bad caricature of a web page trying to figure out how the hell to find anything useful.

And so on.

I hope that helps clarify your question: "what's up with these companies?"

In my opinion, a big part of the problem stems from the fact that in the United States, the cellular carriers can (and do) dictate which models of phone you can buy, which features will be on those phones, and that you can only buy those phones directly from them. So, for example, a Motokia 1234 will only work with Springular if you buy it from Springular, and Veri-Mobile won't then let you use that Springular phone on the Veri-Mobile network -- the names are phony, but you get the idea. Then the providers all but force you to sign multi-year lock-in contracts, so you can't effectively tell the provider to shove it when they try to screw you.

For those in the know there are sometimes ways around this, but most people don't have the time, or even realize it's possible, to figure out ways around these issues. Then the cellular companies have little or no real competition, but do have guaranteed revenue and no real reason to do the right thing with added "feature" services, phones, rate plans, or anything else.

So, in my opinion, the best way to start solving the crappy phone problem is to take control of the phones away from phone companies -- does anyone else around here remember when you could only use ATT POTS telephones, and what happened when you could use any phone? -- and break the mandatory contractual lock-in provisions of cell phone agreements.

Of course this would, literally, take an act of Congress and this isn't a Congress that seems to care much about the problems that affect real people. My only cynical hope is that some endangered congressman up for re-election will see it as an opportunity for some hometown political grandstanding...but I'm not counting on it.

Feds Hunt Hezbollah in New York
Hezbollah may be planning to activate sleeper cells in New York & other cities to stage an attack as the nuclear showdown with Iran heats up.

Bin Laden: Moussaoui Wasn't 9/11 Conspirator
Zacarias Moussaoui had no link to the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, a voice purporting to be that of Al Qaeda leader Usama bin Laden said on an audiotape that surfaced on a Web site Tuesday.

Iran Closes Newspaper Over Cartoon Furor
The government closed one of the country's top three newspapers Tuesday, detaining its editor and cartoonist for publishing a caricature that caused members of Iran's Azeri minority to riot in protest.

Expert: Iran Will Have Nukes Soon
Iran will be able to produce two nuclear bombs a year by March of next year, a much different timetable than many have envisioned.

Palestinian Cops, Hamas Battle in Gaza
Hamas militiamen and Palestinian police attacked each other in a chaotic firefight that killed an aide to the Jordanian ambassador.

Tips Lead Coalition Forces to IED Factory
Coalition forces located and killed six terrorists, detained three and destroyed a safe house during a search for the 'Prince of IEDs.'

Annan: Sudan Prevents Aid from Reaching Darfur
UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan warned the Sudan government that its restrictions on vital supplies and relief workers distributing them in Darfur constituted a violation of international humanitarian law.

Tensions High in Liberia as Returnees Claim Homes
The return of thousands of Liberians from camps across West Africa is fuelling tension over the ownership of land and homes in northern Nimba.

"Granted he may disagree with me about *why* there are no good examples of specific transitional forms"

Neither of them would agree with you in the slightest insofar as YOU understand transitional forms and are falsely trying to imply that they understand them.

"From my point of view, it is noteworthy that evolutionists can't rely on their evidence to tell me with much specificity at all what life-forms we specifically evolved from, but still want me to believe with 100% certainty that I evolved from a chimp of some sort."

You're just being disingenuous here. Just because I can't tell you exactly where every solider placed their boots at Gettysburg doesn't mean I can't demonstrate that the battle happened or have a very high degree of certainty about its overall course of events, many and and always increasing grasp of the specifics, and its outcome. Such is the case with common descent as a whole and evolutionary change in particular.

The evidence for our relation to chimps is rock-solid. But you don't understand it at all yet or how it fits together and why a vast convergence of evidence is such a powerful demonstration of accuracy. Which is okay, except that you think you have it all figured out already, which is hardly the sign of an open mind.

Of course, the idea of a creature who fits into every single taxonomic definition of an ape, without exception, telling me that he's incredulous that he's related to other apes is even sillier. You're telling me this with a mouth full of molars that are distinctively ape molars, unlike any other teeth in the entire animal kingdom other than an apes. With the same density of hair folicles. With all, in fact, the features that distinguish apes from all other forms of life. Heck, before evolution overturned the apple cart, even creationists lumped the apes in with man. Linneus dared anyone to show him a major morphological justification for separating them. And that was all before any hint of genetic evidence that cross-confirmed fossil evidence that all of course tied in in exactly the right way with geographic evidence and so forth.

"Even though in our public education evolution was the only idea of origins presented to us, we still haven't seen strong enough evidence to completely convince us."

Again, this is ridiculous. Because of the controversy, evolution is barely covered at all in most non-college realms: you'd be hard pressed to find high school classes that really cover it, and in many places in the Bible Belt, it's not taught at all. It's no wonder that people have such a caricatured and limited view of what evolution is and why it's considered so fundamental to the history of life on earth.

Learning the nitty-gritty details of a language is absolutely necessary to program successfully in it. However, for an introductory CS course, the nitty-gritty details of a language shouldn't matter. In fact, teaching it in a language with as few details is possible is probably best. I learned to program in Scheme (no, I don't go to MIT) and I must say it was probably the best thing that could have happened to me; Python, used in conjunction with an IDE, would probably be just as good. Worrying about what needs to be included in your interface has nothing to do with OOP and everything to do with Java. The fact that I learned about everything conceptually long before I ever actually programmed anything has made me a much stronger coder than I would otherwise have been.
And, if you must use Java (a ridiculously verbose caricature of a language IMHO...) definitely use an IDE. You will spend more time trying to get people to type the right sequence of commands than actually teaching anything about CS if you try to use javac to do everything.

Another thought:
You mention "borrowing ideas from a culture." That's not really what they're doing. The devs are using their own (frequently misguided) ideas about another culture as a base for their game. Better than that would be to do the culture justice by including an accurate portrayal of it, if they like it enough to use it. They're not just basing aspects of the game on other cultures: they're putting caricatures of other cultures in their game. Everything we know about the rest of the world, save the parts we've personally visited, comes to us through the media (including games). If media producers don't portray people and cultures as honestly as they can, then they're actively contributing to cultural misunderstanding. If you want artistic license, make it all up. While you may not have any malicious intent, any stereotypes you use affect real people. If you want to use a real culture, then you owe it to the people who inspired you to show them as they are, rather than as you imagine them to be.