I have some similar anecdotes, if it makes you feel better. I don't get hit on by many teenaged girls though, never have -- mostly because I'm a gargoyle of a human being.
In high school, I knew a bunch of the 14-16 year old girls dating early to mid twenties guys though. All but two of the girls in my social circle were like that. I ended up dating one of those two, and the other one was with the same guy throughout high school and was more than a little repressed. My GF's best friend actually gave her the "You can do what you want, but I wouldn't date a guy under 23" speech about me. Honestly, the girls dating the much older guys were probably healthier from a mental standpoint than either of the other two, but one of them was really, really "there's something not right with that girl" stepford smiling repressed girl (you could tell when she was on the rag, she only showed emotion at all a couple of days per month), and the other had excessively overprotective parents that did things like recording and reviewing all her phone conversations on the "not so invasive" side. So, they might not be the best standards for comparison.
Honestly, my experiences in high school and college make me think that either the age of consent needs dropped a few years in most places, that it needs raised a *lot* based on the girls I knew in college.
Of course, the law should require you to be 18 to purchase explicit digital product as much as it does magazines, but only so long as we're talking the same definitions. The problem is that something like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is in the realm they want to declare explicit and illegal to sell to minors, while the same kind of content as a movie, TV show, comic book, novel, or even magazine (somehow) would not be "explicit" in a manner as to be categorized with the likes of Hustler as far as sale to minors.
There's no reason that laws making it illegal to sell certain categories of content to minors shouldn't be medium-agnostic. That isn't this however, this is a desire to make certain addition kinds of content also "explicit", but only when presented in the form of a video game.
This is literally the "Comic books/rock music/whatever are evil and somehow innately different than all other media" fight all over again but with the next type of media.
If that was meant as a reply to me, then sort of, but the Matrix hadn't come out yet at the time. Apparently the "reality is an illusion and we can sway it with our Wills" thing is a common occurrence in various forms of mysticism.
You did not touch on the possibility of an uninvolved creator, however. As in the deist conception of God, one that creates, but then is uninvolved with his creation.
I'm not sure how that would functionally differ from atheism however, as an uninvolved creator would only differ from no creator in the sense that it might appreciate your worship if it happens to be watching but being uninvolved it would give no sign this was the case anyways.
Amusingly, I've known people who believe in magic (not the stage illusionist kind, but rather the "changing of events in accordance with one's Will" kind) but not deities of any variety. They had a weird kind of "reality is a collective hallucination, so by dissociating ourselves from the events at hand and creating a firm belief in something we can effect events in order to coincide with that belief" sort of belief.
I would enjoy that kinda of spectacle very much, despite a general dislike for the burning of books in the general sense.
Maybe kick it up a notch and go a grand display, lay out a pattern of each book in the shape of it's faith's respective iconography/related sign. Burning a 20 foot wide star of David made of Torahs on one day, a 20 foot cross of assorted translations of the bible the next. Maybe go bigger than that, even. Be careful to utilize exactly the same number of each tome, in an approximately equal distribution of translations. Mix in filler paper if there's not enough to make the symbol required (I can't imagine having enough Wiccan Rede's at 1 Rede/Bible to create a suitably impressive display, for example).
That creates an interesting idea for a monument this Christmas. When the assorted religious types want to put up assorted displays on state property, I wonder how hard it would be to get a permit to put up a small bonfire of religious texts of those faiths who have a holiday at that time of the year.
Would be an interesting combination artistic statement about what commercialism does to faith/militant atheist display.
There are a lot of paedophiles out there who would be offended by that connection.
Bringing up Aisha, huh? There's more to that whole tale than "OMG Mohammad is a pedo!" Also, arranged child marriages like that weren't terrifically rare and were acceptable in that part of the world at that time in history.
Your freedom of X exists only up to the point where it begins to violate someone else's freedom of Y?
Caused me to have a crazy thought though -- someone needs to go all Scientology and create a faith from whole cloth, wherein one of the core tenants/rituals/whatever is something that is otherwise explicitly illegal in the US.
So the PSP hacking scene disappeared after the last firmware that had a kernel mode exploit (necessary to get an ISO loader to work), right? Not so much, in fact Sony closes the current homebrew hole every firmware revision (that's all most of them even do) even though since 5.55 (I think that's the one) they only allow for "legit" homebrew.
Also, it's been a few scant weeks since any homebrew could be created for the PS3, and we only have two examples -- one of them installs a game from a legitimate Blu-Ray PS3 disc to the HDD (this is your big piracy app, and it doesn't mount ISOs or anything like that) and an FTP server.
The thing is that while your biggest *market* for a hack to run arbitrary code is always piracy, the producers of the same also tend to be homebrew/tinkerer types. Accordingly, guess what language the hack's distribution is crouched in?
That the "evil piracy" part of it still required you to have an original disc to install from (it's literally just an "Install game from disc completely to HDD" feature) makes it not as bad as it could be.
That the open source implementation of the hack (PSGroove) doesn't support doing even that out of the box (though it's trivial to alter the source to get it to -- you only have to change four values in an array) might suggest something. Yes, PSGroove specifically and explicitly altered the original hack to break the Backup Manager and only the backup manager.
As an aside, a way to get your PS3 to access PSN without patching is already in place, and a homebrew FTP server was also released today.
As for tool chains, an OtherOS enabler, and Linux, the ability to even attempt to homebrew dev for the PS3 has only existed for a few weeks now. Those things take time. Again, an FTP server was released today for the PS3. Baby steps.
Technically, the exploit allows the execution of arbitrary code, there's even a fork of PSGroove that's a rewrite to make changing the payload easier. Also, PSGroove doesn't support the backup manager as is (though it's trivial to make it do so), while still allowing the installation of arbitrary PKG files.
Literally, now that homebrew is possible, it's just a matter of time until there's an SDK that produces package files compatible with dev kit mode and thus an unmodified PSJailbreak.
"Beer made from grain grown in this place cures the sick, so let's give beer specifically from here to people who are sick!" is entirely plausible, even though the reasoning for why it helps the sick might be completely unrelated. It would show an understanding that this specific kind of beer contains something that fights disease, and a recognition of that.
You are right though -- a lot of current medicines are derived from analyzing traditional herbal remedies for things and figuring out A) if it really helped and B) what exactly in it caused it to help. That's not to say that some other herbal treatments aren't effective, just that they are either less effective than what we use currently or haven't been tested thoroughly enough. For example there are several herbs that can reduce swelling to various degrees, but most of them aren't as effective (if harsh on your system) as Lasix.
You can service an optical drive, and an optical drive can handle those kinds of capacities. You specifically chose an example that encourages "You can have something effective and tiny, or something accessible and potentially fixable, but not both" while leaving out the accessible, potentially fixable, but not tiny option.
That depends, do I get a 3.5" Floppy drive that can store 8GB of data, so that we're actually talking size/form factor and not asking whether you'd rather have a thimble of distilled water or a gallon of tap to drink for the day?
My families' only real restriction along those lines was no divinatory tools on the property. Normal playing cards were OK, but no tarot cards, and especially no Ouija boards. My sister had at one point or another had possession of two of those, which were both taken and burned. She had no problem with us playing with Ouija boards or tarot cards or what have you, so long as it wasn't in or near the house.
The funny part was that the reasoning was this: We had a lot of "weird" things happening (rocking chairs starting and stopping on their own, repeated heavy thumping sounds going up and down the upstairs hall that sounded uncannily like heavy footsteps, etc) which all conveniently stopped when Mom had every room in the house individually blessed (including closets, mind you) after trying everything else she could think of. Her logic was "It stopped, and I'd really rather it not start up again, so let's not do anything that might potentially encourage it, no matter how silly it sounds."
What I always loved about the rhetoric surrounding school shootings, is there's always some network (I remember even Nickelodeon did this for Columbine) that grabs a panel of "actual students" to talk about it, and why someone would be driven that way. The panel is invariably composed entirely of kids that are as far socially from the perpetrators as possible, and probably can't even imagine the difference between their lives and the kinds of people who do these sorts of things.
"Jane the prom queen and Johnny the captain of the football team, do you have any idea why someone who's a loner that your friends liked to torment for sport might lash out violently against other students after a few years? No? *Clearly* it's because of what music they listened to, or what color outfits they preferred, that *has* to be it."
"We're the nobodies, we wanna be somebodies, when we're dead, they'll know just who we are..." -- amusingly, the radio/MTV edit of the song that line is from bleeped the words "died" and "ratings". =p
Now now, don't you mean that you aren't saying that Glen Beck has an unearthly grasp of reverse psychology, and it's pretty likely that it's not the case that Glen Beck has an unearthly grasp of reverse psychology, but since Glen Beck hasn't *denied* that Glen Beck has an unearthly grasp of reverse psychology, doesn't that make you wonder?
[His] music is made by cretinous goons [signing] sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics. It manages to be the martial music of every...delinquent on the face of the earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear. -Frank Sinatra, speaking about Rock and Roll
His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. -Frank Sinatra, speaking about Elvis Presley
Once when one of my aunts made a condescending jab at the music I was listening to, I responded with those quotes and that pretty much stopped her right there. She was a *huge* Elvis fan, and that more or less put her in perspective. Whatever the younger generation likes on the edgy side, the older generation will demonize in exactly the same way their parents did whatever was "in" when they were young.
Dark Dungeons FTW. It seems to be out of print though, I tried to get a set for my D&D group to get a laugh at.
"Your cleric has reached the 8th level, it's time to learn the real spells."
There was one thing I could never figure out though -- the evil coven of D&D witches met in some massive chamber (no grass/dirt so we're indoors, no walls visible when zoomed out farther than other panels) -- where the hell do you hide a place like that in what otherwise seems to be a typical small town setting? You think you'd notice a 100'x100' (or larger) cathedral to Satan in your neighborhood, right?
In every case, the actions of the politicians in any given party have an obvious and clear motive: to get reelected. That's actually the core reason I've always been in favor of fairly strict campaign finance reform, to restrict the degree to which politicians can be bought. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS has more or less ruled that money = speech and any attempt to restrict spending for a politician is denying a corporation it's first amendment rights. Although my favorite is companies creating a child organization with a more "voter friendly" name (say Citizens for Responsible Energy Policy instead of Massey Coal) to be a mouthpiece for protection their interests from a legislative viewpoint.
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I have some similar anecdotes, if it makes you feel better. I don't get hit on by many teenaged girls though, never have -- mostly because I'm a gargoyle of a human being.
In high school, I knew a bunch of the 14-16 year old girls dating early to mid twenties guys though. All but two of the girls in my social circle were like that. I ended up dating one of those two, and the other one was with the same guy throughout high school and was more than a little repressed. My GF's best friend actually gave her the "You can do what you want, but I wouldn't date a guy under 23" speech about me. Honestly, the girls dating the much older guys were probably healthier from a mental standpoint than either of the other two, but one of them was really, really "there's something not right with that girl" stepford smiling repressed girl (you could tell when she was on the rag, she only showed emotion at all a couple of days per month), and the other had excessively overprotective parents that did things like recording and reviewing all her phone conversations on the "not so invasive" side. So, they might not be the best standards for comparison.
Honestly, my experiences in high school and college make me think that either the age of consent needs dropped a few years in most places, that it needs raised a *lot* based on the girls I knew in college.
Of course, the law should require you to be 18 to purchase explicit digital product as much as it does magazines, but only so long as we're talking the same definitions. The problem is that something like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is in the realm they want to declare explicit and illegal to sell to minors, while the same kind of content as a movie, TV show, comic book, novel, or even magazine (somehow) would not be "explicit" in a manner as to be categorized with the likes of Hustler as far as sale to minors.
There's no reason that laws making it illegal to sell certain categories of content to minors shouldn't be medium-agnostic. That isn't this however, this is a desire to make certain addition kinds of content also "explicit", but only when presented in the form of a video game.
This is literally the "Comic books/rock music/whatever are evil and somehow innately different than all other media" fight all over again but with the next type of media.
If that was meant as a reply to me, then sort of, but the Matrix hadn't come out yet at the time. Apparently the "reality is an illusion and we can sway it with our Wills" thing is a common occurrence in various forms of mysticism.
You did not touch on the possibility of an uninvolved creator, however. As in the deist conception of God, one that creates, but then is uninvolved with his creation.
I'm not sure how that would functionally differ from atheism however, as an uninvolved creator would only differ from no creator in the sense that it might appreciate your worship if it happens to be watching but being uninvolved it would give no sign this was the case anyways.
Amusingly, I've known people who believe in magic (not the stage illusionist kind, but rather the "changing of events in accordance with one's Will" kind) but not deities of any variety. They had a weird kind of "reality is a collective hallucination, so by dissociating ourselves from the events at hand and creating a firm belief in something we can effect events in order to coincide with that belief" sort of belief.
I would enjoy that kinda of spectacle very much, despite a general dislike for the burning of books in the general sense.
Maybe kick it up a notch and go a grand display, lay out a pattern of each book in the shape of it's faith's respective iconography/related sign. Burning a 20 foot wide star of David made of Torahs on one day, a 20 foot cross of assorted translations of the bible the next. Maybe go bigger than that, even. Be careful to utilize exactly the same number of each tome, in an approximately equal distribution of translations. Mix in filler paper if there's not enough to make the symbol required (I can't imagine having enough Wiccan Rede's at 1 Rede/Bible to create a suitably impressive display, for example).
That creates an interesting idea for a monument this Christmas. When the assorted religious types want to put up assorted displays on state property, I wonder how hard it would be to get a permit to put up a small bonfire of religious texts of those faiths who have a holiday at that time of the year.
Would be an interesting combination artistic statement about what commercialism does to faith/militant atheist display.
There are a lot of paedophiles out there who would be offended by that connection.
Bringing up Aisha, huh? There's more to that whole tale than "OMG Mohammad is a pedo!" Also, arranged child marriages like that weren't terrifically rare and were acceptable in that part of the world at that time in history.
Your freedom of X exists only up to the point where it begins to violate someone else's freedom of Y?
Caused me to have a crazy thought though -- someone needs to go all Scientology and create a faith from whole cloth, wherein one of the core tenants/rituals/whatever is something that is otherwise explicitly illegal in the US.
Quick update, there's an open source tool chain now.
http://github.com/ooPo/ps3toolchain/tree/development
So the PSP hacking scene disappeared after the last firmware that had a kernel mode exploit (necessary to get an ISO loader to work), right? Not so much, in fact Sony closes the current homebrew hole every firmware revision (that's all most of them even do) even though since 5.55 (I think that's the one) they only allow for "legit" homebrew.
Also, it's been a few scant weeks since any homebrew could be created for the PS3, and we only have two examples -- one of them installs a game from a legitimate Blu-Ray PS3 disc to the HDD (this is your big piracy app, and it doesn't mount ISOs or anything like that) and an FTP server.
The thing is that while your biggest *market* for a hack to run arbitrary code is always piracy, the producers of the same also tend to be homebrew/tinkerer types. Accordingly, guess what language the hack's distribution is crouched in?
That the "evil piracy" part of it still required you to have an original disc to install from (it's literally just an "Install game from disc completely to HDD" feature) makes it not as bad as it could be.
That the open source implementation of the hack (PSGroove) doesn't support doing even that out of the box (though it's trivial to alter the source to get it to -- you only have to change four values in an array) might suggest something. Yes, PSGroove specifically and explicitly altered the original hack to break the Backup Manager and only the backup manager.
As an aside, a way to get your PS3 to access PSN without patching is already in place, and a homebrew FTP server was also released today.
As for tool chains, an OtherOS enabler, and Linux, the ability to even attempt to homebrew dev for the PS3 has only existed for a few weeks now. Those things take time. Again, an FTP server was released today for the PS3. Baby steps.
Technically, the exploit allows the execution of arbitrary code, there's even a fork of PSGroove that's a rewrite to make changing the payload easier. Also, PSGroove doesn't support the backup manager as is (though it's trivial to make it do so), while still allowing the installation of arbitrary PKG files.
Literally, now that homebrew is possible, it's just a matter of time until there's an SDK that produces package files compatible with dev kit mode and thus an unmodified PSJailbreak.
Just to make a point (if late), an 8GB optical drive is a DVD drive (dual layer) and isn't *that* difficult to fix.
"Beer made from grain grown in this place cures the sick, so let's give beer specifically from here to people who are sick!" is entirely plausible, even though the reasoning for why it helps the sick might be completely unrelated. It would show an understanding that this specific kind of beer contains something that fights disease, and a recognition of that.
You are right though -- a lot of current medicines are derived from analyzing traditional herbal remedies for things and figuring out A) if it really helped and B) what exactly in it caused it to help. That's not to say that some other herbal treatments aren't effective, just that they are either less effective than what we use currently or haven't been tested thoroughly enough. For example there are several herbs that can reduce swelling to various degrees, but most of them aren't as effective (if harsh on your system) as Lasix.
You can service an optical drive, and an optical drive can handle those kinds of capacities. You specifically chose an example that encourages "You can have something effective and tiny, or something accessible and potentially fixable, but not both" while leaving out the accessible, potentially fixable, but not tiny option.
That depends, do I get a 3.5" Floppy drive that can store 8GB of data, so that we're actually talking size/form factor and not asking whether you'd rather have a thimble of distilled water or a gallon of tap to drink for the day?
...but that's more or less the point, he went from homicidal lunatic avatar of chaos with a clown-like visage to goofy, all due to the CCA.
My families' only real restriction along those lines was no divinatory tools on the property. Normal playing cards were OK, but no tarot cards, and especially no Ouija boards. My sister had at one point or another had possession of two of those, which were both taken and burned. She had no problem with us playing with Ouija boards or tarot cards or what have you, so long as it wasn't in or near the house.
The funny part was that the reasoning was this: We had a lot of "weird" things happening (rocking chairs starting and stopping on their own, repeated heavy thumping sounds going up and down the upstairs hall that sounded uncannily like heavy footsteps, etc) which all conveniently stopped when Mom had every room in the house individually blessed (including closets, mind you) after trying everything else she could think of. Her logic was "It stopped, and I'd really rather it not start up again, so let's not do anything that might potentially encourage it, no matter how silly it sounds."
I still want to know exactly where you hide the room in panel 4 in what is apparently a small town, considering the scale and all.
What I always loved about the rhetoric surrounding school shootings, is there's always some network (I remember even Nickelodeon did this for Columbine) that grabs a panel of "actual students" to talk about it, and why someone would be driven that way. The panel is invariably composed entirely of kids that are as far socially from the perpetrators as possible, and probably can't even imagine the difference between their lives and the kinds of people who do these sorts of things.
"Jane the prom queen and Johnny the captain of the football team, do you have any idea why someone who's a loner that your friends liked to torment for sport might lash out violently against other students after a few years? No? *Clearly* it's because of what music they listened to, or what color outfits they preferred, that *has* to be it."
"We're the nobodies, we wanna be somebodies, when we're dead, they'll know just who we are..." -- amusingly, the radio/MTV edit of the song that line is from bleeped the words "died" and "ratings". =p
Now now, don't you mean that you aren't saying that Glen Beck has an unearthly grasp of reverse psychology, and it's pretty likely that it's not the case that Glen Beck has an unearthly grasp of reverse psychology, but since Glen Beck hasn't *denied* that Glen Beck has an unearthly grasp of reverse psychology, doesn't that make you wonder?
[His] music is made by cretinous goons [signing] sly, lewd, in plain fact, dirty lyrics. It manages to be the martial music of every...delinquent on the face of the earth. It is the most brutal, ugly, desperate, vicious form of expression it has been my misfortune to hear. -Frank Sinatra, speaking about Rock and Roll
His kind of music is deplorable, a rancid smelling aphrodisiac. It fosters almost totally negative and destructive reactions in young people. -Frank Sinatra, speaking about Elvis Presley
Once when one of my aunts made a condescending jab at the music I was listening to, I responded with those quotes and that pretty much stopped her right there. She was a *huge* Elvis fan, and that more or less put her in perspective. Whatever the younger generation likes on the edgy side, the older generation will demonize in exactly the same way their parents did whatever was "in" when they were young.
Dark Dungeons FTW. It seems to be out of print though, I tried to get a set for my D&D group to get a laugh at.
"Your cleric has reached the 8th level, it's time to learn the real spells."
There was one thing I could never figure out though -- the evil coven of D&D witches met in some massive chamber (no grass/dirt so we're indoors, no walls visible when zoomed out farther than other panels) -- where the hell do you hide a place like that in what otherwise seems to be a typical small town setting? You think you'd notice a 100'x100' (or larger) cathedral to Satan in your neighborhood, right?
In every case, the actions of the politicians in any given party have an obvious and clear motive: to get reelected. That's actually the core reason I've always been in favor of fairly strict campaign finance reform, to restrict the degree to which politicians can be bought. Unfortunately, the SCOTUS has more or less ruled that money = speech and any attempt to restrict spending for a politician is denying a corporation it's first amendment rights. Although my favorite is companies creating a child organization with a more "voter friendly" name (say Citizens for Responsible Energy Policy instead of Massey Coal) to be a mouthpiece for protection their interests from a legislative viewpoint.