1) Yes, the Muslims calling for violence REALLY ARE a minority. Even though they are a minority that make for better TV than a bunch of people sitting around complaining that rightwing tabloids are being gratuitously offensive again on the grounds that it sells to racists.
2) Next time you want to talk about Christian extremists not being violent people, you might want to check with someone who has been nailbombed for drinking in a 'gay' pub, had their car torched for working in an abortion clinic, or lived in a village vaguely near where the US Government suspected an Al Qaeda operative might be hiding.
Personally, I rather liked GTA2. But I don't think it sold particularly well, because the fictional SF cars didn't have anything like the character of the 60s stuff.
So I agree, going back is better than forwards. I still maintain that San Andreas should have been set in the late 60s hippie era.
The problem is that it wasn't the scientists who made the attempt to mix religion with the science. The ID proponents did that all on their own.
They made a pretty major mistake when they tried to turn creationist religious statements into pseudoscientific statements, however. Because religion pretty much depends on being non-falsifiable - I can't disprove God, because He has the omnipotent power over reality to make it look however He wants it to, as you point out. I've no problem at all with faith-based belief.
But we CAN disprove the specific "scientific" claims of ID. And do, on a pretty regular basis, as you were describing. The Wedge Strategy members should realise that if they pretend to play by science's rules, they're going to get schooled by people who know what they're doing.
Quoth the modded-down AC (sadly, I think it's mildly amusing): "There's no real incentive to use iTunes, in any case, if you're not running Windows or a Mac, and even less so if you don't have an iPod."
Well, um, no. In other news, there is very little incentive to buy fuel if you don't own a car to put it in, barely a point to buying DVDs without a player of some kind, and deaf people don't buy very many CDs.
Quite what this insight has to offer the debate, I'm not sure, however.
Conversely, the current Doom 3 patch removes the CD checks, rather than adding new ones. Which is a complete Godsend, as I seem to have lost my Disc 1 (probably by sticking it somewhere random when I had to eject it in order to put something else in the DVD drive). I've still got my discs 2 and 3, but of course that doesn't help very much.
Rather than make an obvious comment about your advert for Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, I just thought I'd point out that you're missing out on some great fun.
I was initially against the whole in-game advertising trend myself. I've still got misgivings about individual poor examples of advertising that detract from the gameplay, and I'm generally suspicious of product placement.
But then I remembered that Super Monkey Ball, WipEout 2097 and Crazy Taxi are three of my favorite games of all time, and feature product placement. Pikmin 2 is fairly brilliant as well. In fact, I'd seriously consider that my top 5 games featuring product placement might be better than a top 5 without.
From my experience with my old-fashioned iPod Mini, I'd imagine that the limitations on the 1Gb Shuffle of a single playlist and no screen for track selection make it a somewhat difficult size to work with.
My guess is that they'll kill off the 1Gb Shuffle, but keep the 512Mb as a low price, low features option for the gym.
You're getting a list at Last.fm based on what other people who like that band listen to. The fact that more people also listen to popular music than obscure stuff is hardly surprising, then.
Not that this invalidates your point, obviously. It's just that I'm glad they don't fudge the numbers to achieve your preferred result, as that way lie all sorts on well-meaning mistakes.
What works a hell of a lot better, however, is to install the plugin for your music-player, listen to stuff for a little while, and then see what it recommends to you as a whole; it gets a much better picture of your taste than just one band, that way.
Which would be absolutely wonderful, if they ever fix the bug that means you need to turn off all hardware acceleration if you don't want you wmv9 files playing with rainbow colours.
There is, however, no evidence that StarForce are planning to actually sue for libel. Instead, what they've done is threaten that they have informed an American criminal investigation bureau about what a Canadian living in Britain has been writing.
So not only are they baseless threats, they're pretty bloody stupid ones.
Since it seems such a popular game, I'd vaguely considered giving it a go. But if it's official policy that there are just too many homophobic morons in the game to do anything about it, then I'm glad I've not bought it.
Great. Any argument that starts with "shut the fuck up if you're in the 87% market share that owns an iPod" is bound to be compelling. Well done there.
Because it's shiny. Shiny new technology. Why wouldn't you want to have the most technologically advanced passport possible? Don't you know that all thoroughly modern, untested tech is inherently more attractive to tech obsessed governments than older, more reliable stuff.
Aaah, I'm based in the UK, you see, where we don't have these 'seperation of church and state' laws that made the Supremes outlaw Creationism teaching. Just as well, when the Queen is the head of the Church of England.
So we have 'Religious Education' classes in schools that are supposed to not, absolutely not, be about indoctrination or evangelism, but (and they generally manage to) provide children with knowledge about the world's main religions, what their beliefs and traditions are, and so on. Which is pretty useful info to have, really.
Wheras I merely took the comment to mean that the individuals have sufficient education to see that ID is a pile of crock from a scientific standpoint.
If you're a well-educated Creationist, I'm not surprised you're aware that the two are entirely faith-based questions with no relation to science whatsoever. I just find it bizarre that people want to teach these faith matters in a science classroom. No-one insists that religious education classes should give over equal time to teaching the Big Bang alongside Genesis.
Yours isn't the first comment I've seen suggesting that people wait before buying a laptop.
The thing is, I don't know of a time when it's _ever_ been a good idea to buy a laptop this year in order to use it next year. If people are buying them now, they probably want a laptop now, and waiting 12 months means they'll be doing what they want with them 12 months late.
I'm _hoping_ that people are thinking like I did, which is that a $10,000 tax on abortions will mean that a few people will cross state borders once.
People don't tend to get abortions terribly often, and $10,000 is such a ludicrous amount that he's just forcing people to go out-of-state in a piece of legislation that wouldn't last five minutes, it's so obviously an anti-abortion law by the backdoor.
However, an extra $25 on the price of a game is going to either get paid, or just make Amazon a shedload of cash as everyone orders online - it's not exactly worth a trip to Louisiana each time you want one there.
Who, after those loveable Scots at RockStar North is probably the world's best known/infamous developer of violent videogames?
Why, that would be the guys at id.
Add them to all the other developers based in the Austin and Houston areas, and he's talking about driving a pretty reasonable amount of taxpaying out of the area. Is this even vaguely a good idea for the state economy?
I wouldn't say that Apple have Borgified Pixar. Pixar wasn't even Pixar when Jobs bought it off Lucas (who, amusingly, sold it because he didn't see any future in CG-based film-making) around the time he was originally kicked out of Apple.
So, you might say that it's really NeXT/Pixar who Borgified Apple before moving onto Disney.
Why can't those(like me) who believe in God think that, "Yes, God put everything in motion, but he gave everything in that creation 'free will' (for lack of a better term for chemical processes, motion of atoms, bacteria, virus co-mingling) to evolve into the universe we know today?"
You're quite welcome to believe that. But doing so means you don't support Intelligent Design. For that matter, the mere fact that you said that it's what you think, rather than claiming to have some sort of backwards proof to your claim that really boils down to the standard argument from incredulity makes you stand out as someone who isn't arguing for ID.
If you go and read the Wedge Strategy document, or indeed much of the writing from the primary people behind the ID movement, the "whatever it takes to get it into the classroom" slur looks pretty accurate.
I agree, and fail to see why this even needs to be questioned, really. The iPod is just a fancy hard drive for this purpose. What chance do you think you'd have if you tried selling a bare 60Gb hard drive on eBay that was full of music and video files you didn't own distribution rights to?
Well, you'd probably find that eBay turn just as much a blind eye as they have here, to be honest, but I don't think the MPAA and RIAA are particularly keen.
The DS and PSP have both only been out for roughly a year. So this is really saying that the DS is ahead of the PSP here in reality-land, but some random analyst predicts that the PSP will win in America in the end.
Based on? Well, based on the fact that they refuse to believe that Sony could lose, it would seem.
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If we're going to do jokes about Fundamentalist Muslims boycotting Danish products, can we mention Bacon again?
1) Yes, the Muslims calling for violence REALLY ARE a minority. Even though they are a minority that make for better TV than a bunch of people sitting around complaining that rightwing tabloids are being gratuitously offensive again on the grounds that it sells to racists.
2) Next time you want to talk about Christian extremists not being violent people, you might want to check with someone who has been nailbombed for drinking in a 'gay' pub, had their car torched for working in an abortion clinic, or lived in a village vaguely near where the US Government suspected an Al Qaeda operative might be hiding.
Just a suggestion.
Personally, I rather liked GTA2. But I don't think it sold particularly well, because the fictional SF cars didn't have anything like the character of the 60s stuff.
So I agree, going back is better than forwards. I still maintain that San Andreas should have been set in the late 60s hippie era.
The problem is that it wasn't the scientists who made the attempt to mix religion with the science. The ID proponents did that all on their own.
They made a pretty major mistake when they tried to turn creationist religious statements into pseudoscientific statements, however. Because religion pretty much depends on being non-falsifiable - I can't disprove God, because He has the omnipotent power over reality to make it look however He wants it to, as you point out. I've no problem at all with faith-based belief.
But we CAN disprove the specific "scientific" claims of ID. And do, on a pretty regular basis, as you were describing. The Wedge Strategy members should realise that if they pretend to play by science's rules, they're going to get schooled by people who know what they're doing.
Quoth the modded-down AC (sadly, I think it's mildly amusing): "There's no real incentive to use iTunes, in any case, if you're not running Windows or a Mac, and even less so if you don't have an iPod."
Well, um, no. In other news, there is very little incentive to buy fuel if you don't own a car to put it in, barely a point to buying DVDs without a player of some kind, and deaf people don't buy very many CDs.
Quite what this insight has to offer the debate, I'm not sure, however.
Conversely, the current Doom 3 patch removes the CD checks, rather than adding new ones. Which is a complete Godsend, as I seem to have lost my Disc 1 (probably by sticking it somewhere random when I had to eject it in order to put something else in the DVD drive). I've still got my discs 2 and 3, but of course that doesn't help very much.
Rather than make an obvious comment about your advert for Irvine Welsh's Trainspotting, I just thought I'd point out that you're missing out on some great fun.
I was initially against the whole in-game advertising trend myself. I've still got misgivings about individual poor examples of advertising that detract from the gameplay, and I'm generally suspicious of product placement.
But then I remembered that Super Monkey Ball, WipEout 2097 and Crazy Taxi are three of my favorite games of all time, and feature product placement. Pikmin 2 is fairly brilliant as well. In fact, I'd seriously consider that my top 5 games featuring product placement might be better than a top 5 without.
What's the requirement for you to contact your local chimney sweep by email, however?
From my experience with my old-fashioned iPod Mini, I'd imagine that the limitations on the 1Gb Shuffle of a single playlist and no screen for track selection make it a somewhat difficult size to work with.
My guess is that they'll kill off the 1Gb Shuffle, but keep the 512Mb as a low price, low features option for the gym.
You're getting a list at Last.fm based on what other people who like that band listen to. The fact that more people also listen to popular music than obscure stuff is hardly surprising, then.
Not that this invalidates your point, obviously. It's just that I'm glad they don't fudge the numbers to achieve your preferred result, as that way lie all sorts on well-meaning mistakes.
What works a hell of a lot better, however, is to install the plugin for your music-player, listen to stuff for a little while, and then see what it recommends to you as a whole; it gets a much better picture of your taste than just one band, that way.
Which would be absolutely wonderful, if they ever fix the bug that means you need to turn off all hardware acceleration if you don't want you wmv9 files playing with rainbow colours.
Sorry, but that one really bugs me.
There is, however, no evidence that StarForce are planning to actually sue for libel. Instead, what they've done is threaten that they have informed an American criminal investigation bureau about what a Canadian living in Britain has been writing.
So not only are they baseless threats, they're pretty bloody stupid ones.
Since it seems such a popular game, I'd vaguely considered giving it a go. But if it's official policy that there are just too many homophobic morons in the game to do anything about it, then I'm glad I've not bought it.
Great. Any argument that starts with "shut the fuck up if you're in the 87% market share that owns an iPod" is bound to be compelling. Well done there.
"Why do we need RFID for passports anyway?"
Because it's shiny. Shiny new technology. Why wouldn't you want to have the most technologically advanced passport possible? Don't you know that all thoroughly modern, untested tech is inherently more attractive to tech obsessed governments than older, more reliable stuff.
Aaah, I'm based in the UK, you see, where we don't have these 'seperation of church and state' laws that made the Supremes outlaw Creationism teaching. Just as well, when the Queen is the head of the Church of England.
So we have 'Religious Education' classes in schools that are supposed to not, absolutely not, be about indoctrination or evangelism, but (and they generally manage to) provide children with knowledge about the world's main religions, what their beliefs and traditions are, and so on. Which is pretty useful info to have, really.
Wheras I merely took the comment to mean that the individuals have sufficient education to see that ID is a pile of crock from a scientific standpoint.
If you're a well-educated Creationist, I'm not surprised you're aware that the two are entirely faith-based questions with no relation to science whatsoever. I just find it bizarre that people want to teach these faith matters in a science classroom. No-one insists that religious education classes should give over equal time to teaching the Big Bang alongside Genesis.
Yours isn't the first comment I've seen suggesting that people wait before buying a laptop.
The thing is, I don't know of a time when it's _ever_ been a good idea to buy a laptop this year in order to use it next year. If people are buying them now, they probably want a laptop now, and waiting 12 months means they'll be doing what they want with them 12 months late.
I was running a web browser on my A1200 in '96, if that helps.
I'm _hoping_ that people are thinking like I did, which is that a $10,000 tax on abortions will mean that a few people will cross state borders once.
People don't tend to get abortions terribly often, and $10,000 is such a ludicrous amount that he's just forcing people to go out-of-state in a piece of legislation that wouldn't last five minutes, it's so obviously an anti-abortion law by the backdoor.
However, an extra $25 on the price of a game is going to either get paid, or just make Amazon a shedload of cash as everyone orders online - it's not exactly worth a trip to Louisiana each time you want one there.
Who, after those loveable Scots at RockStar North is probably the world's best known/infamous developer of violent videogames?
Why, that would be the guys at id.
Add them to all the other developers based in the Austin and Houston areas, and he's talking about driving a pretty reasonable amount of taxpaying out of the area. Is this even vaguely a good idea for the state economy?
I wouldn't say that Apple have Borgified Pixar. Pixar wasn't even Pixar when Jobs bought it off Lucas (who, amusingly, sold it because he didn't see any future in CG-based film-making) around the time he was originally kicked out of Apple.
So, you might say that it's really NeXT/Pixar who Borgified Apple before moving onto Disney.
Why can't those(like me) who believe in God think that, "Yes, God put everything in motion, but he gave everything in that creation 'free will' (for lack of a better term for chemical processes, motion of atoms, bacteria, virus co-mingling) to evolve into the universe we know today?"
You're quite welcome to believe that. But doing so means you don't support Intelligent Design. For that matter, the mere fact that you said that it's what you think, rather than claiming to have some sort of backwards proof to your claim that really boils down to the standard argument from incredulity makes you stand out as someone who isn't arguing for ID.
If you go and read the Wedge Strategy document, or indeed much of the writing from the primary people behind the ID movement, the "whatever it takes to get it into the classroom" slur looks pretty accurate.
I agree, and fail to see why this even needs to be questioned, really. The iPod is just a fancy hard drive for this purpose. What chance do you think you'd have if you tried selling a bare 60Gb hard drive on eBay that was full of music and video files you didn't own distribution rights to?
Well, you'd probably find that eBay turn just as much a blind eye as they have here, to be honest, but I don't think the MPAA and RIAA are particularly keen.
The DS and PSP have both only been out for roughly a year. So this is really saying that the DS is ahead of the PSP here in reality-land, but some random analyst predicts that the PSP will win in America in the end.
Based on? Well, based on the fact that they refuse to believe that Sony could lose, it would seem.