Yeah, someone predicted this and wrote some bio-punk pseudo post-apocolyse stories in a world ruled by IP law to go with it.
The Calorie Man universe by Paolo Bacigalupi.
The key to having a pay-walled site is that you have content that people cannot live with.
That's a fascinating business model. Putting up atrocious content that people absolutely cannot live with. People would log in, read, and rage. The slogan could be "Rage a day, keeps the sanity at bay."
Or maybe people pay to see it so they demand it be taken down?
1) Provably sterile out of the box. If the patient has an open foot ulcer, and some Chinese dude sneezed on the board before he wrapped it up, and then the patient dies of infection...
So spray it down the first time you use it. Just like you're supposed to spray it down every time you use it.
2) Bodily fluid proof, if not disposable or autoclave-able. The board is too expensive to toss and too weak to autoclave, furthermore god only knows what it'll do electrically when a patient pees on it. Or if not pee, some highly conductive cleaning fluid. Or blood.
Too expensive to toss? You can get 180 wii boards for the price of a medical one. If the things gets doused in bodily fluid, sure, toss it. If someone just pisses on it, I suggest you spray it down. I imagine the worst that will happen electrically will be that it stops working.
It's not that I want to promote an unsterilized hospital, but take a dose of practicality. If there are biological organisms in the same air-space as the device, it's no longer perfectly sterile. So just clean the damn thing.
3) Intrinsically safe. In the unlikely event of using or storing the board in an atmosphere contaminated by flammable anesthetics, it won't blow up. Closely related to oxygen proof plastics. No great achievement to make a plastic that does not support combustion in plain ole air, but I have no idea what plastics (if any) will not continue to burn in pure oxygen. And you know some heart patient is going to drop their oxy mask on the wii board and the batteries will spark at the same time. Also if the patient collapses and you need to use the crash cart, you don't want the electronics inside to catch fire. Would be unfortunate to restart a patients heart only to have the patient die of infected burns.
uh..... yeah. If you've got a room filling with explosive anesthetics you've got bigger problems. As for oxygen proof plastics, sure, that could be bad, I guess. But it's kind of an example of "medical" quality being impractical. Yes, there will be a few fires for every million times this device is used. Deal with it.
4) Proven EMC/EMI compatibility. Last thing you want is for the board to interfere with the patients portable EKG machine or whatever.
Well, getting some buggy readings on an EKG machine wouldn't kill them. At worse, you'd have some false alarms with the nurses. Interfering with their pacemaker would suck, but if it's that the case then they're doomed anyway when little billy visits with a cell phone or ds or whatever.
5) There are all kinds of allergen related issues. For example, no latex (rubber bands) used internally for any part at any time during construction. Peanut oil sounds like a "green" lubricant for metal machining, etc, until you run into someone with an allergy.
The board is plastic. That's the part patients stand on. Tell your patients with peanut allergies to stop putting their penis into the internal gears of the wii board.
6) Connected. It needs to be sold by the current collection of booth-babe saleswomen with open purchase order accounts at the hospital. Its possible the hospital has no pre-existing relationship with any place that sells wii balance boards... Literally no way for purchasing to buy one...
Literally, they will drive to the game store, put some cash on the counter, and walk away with a $100 alternative to a $18,000 medical device. Point out the fact that they don't have the bureaucratic process for buying it is a really piss-poor argument. It just highlights the level of stubbornness in the medical industry. You do not need to buy it from booth babes at a convention. If any part of you believes this to be true, then kindly GTFO of any sort of purchasing authority position.
7) Software licensing which probably prohibits this kind of activity, al
Morality IS relative and is the sum of all moral judgment.
Comparing DMCA censorship and China's censorship is not ridiculous, but equating them is. Sorry for the semantic nitpicking.
China's censorship of political dissent IS worse to me because I judge it to be. I'm only one American but I imagine that most Americans would agree with me. As would the dissenters. And so the grandparent can say that since the communist party leaders have different views and priorities that censoring dissent is not wrong to them. But I don't give a shit what they think. I view it as morally worse then the DMCA. So it is wrong to me.
That's moral relativism. It doesn't make all moral decisions meaningless.
And when you put those moral judgments through the bullshit filter, the self-checker, quantize it into options, correct for self-interest, factor in the I-need-to-eat constant, run it past the shoulder committee, and actually DO something about your moral judgments, that's called politics. And when it comes down to it, I'm still going to purchase cheaper Chinese goods.
I don't think that "having fanatics" is a good litmus test for religion. That would include most of the pop stars, a few operating systems, halo, and harry potter. It really cheapens religion. But this particular debate always kind of struck me as mere semantics and a pointless waste of time.
Fanatic atheists are as bad as religious fanatics? really? Sure, sure, there are plenty of asshole atheists and a few stupid ones. I suppose there must be some actual fanatical atheists out there, but I haven't heard about their jihad, those who they excommunicated from the secular world, or their murdering ways.
Here I thought the media giants hated that ISPs were just dump pipes and wanted control over what tier of internet service was provided.
Basic: Google (plus the top 10 results!), wikipedia's main page, and now including our business partner and friend(ESPN!)
Silver: amazon, craigslist, Wikipedia, facebook, Disney, and other out-of-network sites.
Gold: Unlimited* connections to anywhere in the world*
Ultraviolet, pay-out-yer-ass: Slashdot and other such subversive sites
Or in short: They want to break network neutrality to turn the internet in cable television networks.
Well, you could have a second ISP/account for that. It is a worry that once the preferred packed for ISPs becomes tiered, non-neutral, or otherwise funky that the telcom companies would offer only a minor discount for low quality connections and bend you over and rape you for high-quality connections similar to the "standard" internet service we have now. And if the pricing structure for text messeging is any example, then I wouldn't trust the telcom companies with any power at all. In a perfect world, charging different rates for different quality isn't a bad thing, but the culteral setup of those in power makes this a terrifying prospect.
But ideally, I'd like 3 different accounts:
1. Cheap-ass, slow, flaky, interpretable, but uncapped connection for my casual downloading. Stuff I set up and let run overnight. Pay scales per gig over a set period of time.
2. Quick response, high priority, no dropped packets, with a bandwidth of... whatever I need at the time for gaming and voip. Paid per byte per level of bandwidth. And I limited to X bytes every minute.
3. High bandwidth, intermittent connection for burst communications. ie, web-browsing. I don't want the connection all that often, but when I ask for it I want it all right now.
But as I said, this is an ideal scenario where we accurately pay for what we need. But this model wouldn't encourage telcom companies to lay down more lines. It would encourage them to limit supply so people pay extra.
I would like some sort of quality metrics and contractual agreements instead of the vuage promise to get something between 0Mps and 5Mos I have now.
But I understand your original message that Comcast throttled ALL P2P connections over their lines regardless of who paid for what and so all of this entirely beside the point.
Your post intrigues me. Others have torn apart your argument and spread it to the winds and yet you still have a +5 insightful mod. Exactly where do I sign up with microsoft to convert mod points into cash?
Also, 4) Xbox support is indeed relevant and I imagine that MS will always give DX and edge there. But the point is that MS is abusing it's power to give DX that edge. MS is influencing the market on the whole (beyond consoles) to choose it's crappy alternative to an open and free and SUPERIOR option. And how could they not do this you may ask? They could support openGL on their consoles better. Yes, it doesn't generate them profit, but it's the right thing to do.
So, they don;t have a blanket pass on traffic laws, but they can break them at their discretion, as long as they feel it is safe to do so, with consequences if they cause an accident.
Only if they cause an accident? That's a problem.
How many cops have you seen casually speeding? or turning their lights on just to run a red? (which is rampant in Lincoln apparently). And have you EVER heard of a cop writing themselves a ticket? The whole traffic laws thing is to promote a safety on the roads, because apparently the threat of injury and vast financial loss isn't enough. And cops look after their own when push comes to shove and they actually do cause an accident.
So while you may be more or less correct legally, on paper, here in the real world with the implementation, the government is slightly above the law. And they have to really screw up big time (or slight the wrong person) before the process actually applies to them.
Because slashdot is the place for nitpicking, if you're a software development company, then developing software is more production and less R&D. Yes, even though it has "development" in the name, R&D is working on new and crazy stuff. Sure, you could consider every piece of software to be new and crazy (hence why you have to write it), but if you have a client paying for it, then it's not R&D.
Could that possibly be because the title calls it a tariff?
This could an example of sensationalist reporting, or Minnesota is just playing semantics.
You can point to an platypus behind people and say "hey look at that duck" and depending how knowledgeable and gullible they are, they'll believe it's a duck. Nothing exists in a vacuum and this is why the article is filed under politics. This is also the reason Fox News throws out a lot of blips like "will Obama eat your children? more at 11."
Or if you take his red stapler, or force him to fill out tps reports, or promote your brother over him, or any of the multitude of stupid things that happen in the business world. These are things where his amazing technical skill doesn't help at all, and the businessman with the $50 haircut will look out for his own ass, and hang the engineer out to dry.
Well it looks like there are $50 infrared thermometers that have a 12:1 distance to spot ratio. So at 120' it would take an average temperature of a 10' circular area. There's also a max range of 100 feet depending on fog and such. I'd say that about how far most houses are set back from the street, but I'd hope that the cops could hit the broad side of a house's roof. And it takes like half a second to register.
No, I'm not sure that using a device to peer into someone's home and making a guess that the image infers some illegal activity constitutes probable cause either.
Furthermore, thermal imagers don't magically see through walls. If you have lamps in the attic then the roof is going to be hot. You're not going to get a silhouette of 5 heat lamps with a shadow of cannabis being tended by the distinct heat signiture that only mexican slaves give off. No, you're going to be able to sweep it over a neighborhood and tell whose carpenter skimped on the insulation, or maybe they've got a heat lamp.
This kind of raises the question of why the cops needed a $3K device when they really just wanted to know when a roof was >120F. Sure, the thermal imager is more fun to play with, but a $30 kitchen tool, you know the kind with the targeting laser, would work just about as well for a hundredth of the cost. I think our generals use the same logic as these guys.
Well the Romans tried something like that bu the vandals kept messing stuff up and the goths got all emo. While it did have some local balancing effects, from what I hear, everyone generally complained about the poor lighting.
I'm pretty sure the economic dip after 9/11 was due more to the psychological impact on average Americans then the death of 3000 office workers, the loss of some sky scrapers, and a horrible commute for new yorkers for a few years. These weren't nobodies, but their loss shouldn't have had that great an impact. So the reason for the dip is because we were afraid, which goes back to grandparent's main point. The best way to fight terrorism is to not be terrified.
You are not wrong. Pi is irrational and goes on forever, and it does contain every combination possible. Those images will appear in addition to a sequence of 60 1024x800 full-color raster images that show goaste furiously thrusting when you flip through them.
Well, since pi is an irrational number it has an infinite amount of decimal places which would convert into an infinite number of characters. Presumably with a random distribution. Chaos theory tells us that given an infinite supply of chaotic events, no matter the odds, every combination WILL occur.
So there is no "probably", somewhere in the digits of pi it does read "Help! I'm being held prisoner in a universe factory!".
Forsooth! A beholder is upon us! I shall smite it with my high powered rail gun weaponry! ...What do you mean I don't have one? it's right here on my character sheet.
Rules, shmulze it's a fantasy game right? So it's my fantasy to have a rail gun.
Listen, if fatso here can kill things with a word while wearing a bathrobe I don't see why I can't point and click things into oblivion.
Of course it doesn't make sense, neither does wearing a bathrobe to a gunfight!
Ah. So what you're telling me is that this game allows us to break from reality with a narrowly defined set of rules that remains internally consistent while generating scenarios that wouldn't be available to us in real life.
Well that makes sense. One sec, lemme roll up a human fighter. 3D6 in a row, right?
this sounds religion-motivated, but that's hardly a drawback of an argument...
Well, actually, yes it is. Or at the very least it's cause to re-examine the argument and question it at a more fundamental level. Religions are often stuck in their ways and see tradition as a viture in and of itself. These systems are good when things are static, but they suffer when new technology changes how society functions, and they often fight back against that change. Religions aren't necessarily wrong about everything, indeed they're mostly right, but often for the wrong reason. So instead of taking religious dogma and thumping that, you should examine the dogma, use it to form an argument, and use that instead. And when an argument is whittled away and the only thing that remains is "butbutbut Religion!" that is indeed a sign that your argument is bad.
Stopping unmarried youths from having kids is a good idea. Family stability and all that. But the church didn't fight for family stability, they fought against sex. And not just unmarried sex. In their attempt to save the children (tm), they worked against every and all aspect of sex in society that the unmarried could come into contact with. That included the public and hence the effort to make sex taboo.
the intense pleasure most participants derive from it is the reward for the excruciating pains of childbirth and hardships of the childrearing
I'm a dude and I enjoy sex. I don't really expect childbirth to hurt all that much. And I've yet to enjoy raising children, but I hope they turn out better then your apparently satanic hellspawn.
Now, what is the justification for a cocaine-user's pleasure?
Well, he paid for it. That's the same justification I use when I play a game or enjoy a candy bar. Whatever floats you boat, right?
I have to agree with you that this could be abused. And there's plenty of sci-fi works to use as examples. But anything can be abused. Caffeine, trinkets, cats, power, religious fervor, food, fasting, gaming, isolation, social life, ANYTHING! And if someone takes part in/of a phenomena to an extent that it has negative consequences, THAT is the point to be concerned. And it's usually well before that point at which the person realizes the negative consequences and limits him/herself. But this is not a job I want delegated to the church and priests.
So take your right-wing-conservative-religious sense of morals and shove it.
Slashdot Mirror
no one said that +5 informative means +5 truthful. In this case we are pleasantly informed of something where the majority of it is true.
Yeah, someone predicted this and wrote some bio-punk pseudo post-apocolyse stories in a world ruled by IP law to go with it. The Calorie Man universe by Paolo Bacigalupi.
The key to having a pay-walled site is that you have content that people cannot live with.
That's a fascinating business model. Putting up atrocious content that people absolutely cannot live with. People would log in, read, and rage. The slogan could be "Rage a day, keeps the sanity at bay."
Or maybe people pay to see it so they demand it be taken down?
1) Provably sterile out of the box. If the patient has an open foot ulcer, and some Chinese dude sneezed on the board before he wrapped it up, and then the patient dies of infection...
So spray it down the first time you use it. Just like you're supposed to spray it down every time you use it.
2) Bodily fluid proof, if not disposable or autoclave-able. The board is too expensive to toss and too weak to autoclave, furthermore god only knows what it'll do electrically when a patient pees on it. Or if not pee, some highly conductive cleaning fluid. Or blood.
Too expensive to toss? You can get 180 wii boards for the price of a medical one. If the things gets doused in bodily fluid, sure, toss it. If someone just pisses on it, I suggest you spray it down. I imagine the worst that will happen electrically will be that it stops working.
It's not that I want to promote an unsterilized hospital, but take a dose of practicality. If there are biological organisms in the same air-space as the device, it's no longer perfectly sterile. So just clean the damn thing.
3) Intrinsically safe. In the unlikely event of using or storing the board in an atmosphere contaminated by flammable anesthetics, it won't blow up. Closely related to oxygen proof plastics. No great achievement to make a plastic that does not support combustion in plain ole air, but I have no idea what plastics (if any) will not continue to burn in pure oxygen. And you know some heart patient is going to drop their oxy mask on the wii board and the batteries will spark at the same time. Also if the patient collapses and you need to use the crash cart, you don't want the electronics inside to catch fire. Would be unfortunate to restart a patients heart only to have the patient die of infected burns.
uh..... yeah. If you've got a room filling with explosive anesthetics you've got bigger problems. As for oxygen proof plastics, sure, that could be bad, I guess. But it's kind of an example of "medical" quality being impractical. Yes, there will be a few fires for every million times this device is used. Deal with it.
4) Proven EMC/EMI compatibility. Last thing you want is for the board to interfere with the patients portable EKG machine or whatever.
Well, getting some buggy readings on an EKG machine wouldn't kill them. At worse, you'd have some false alarms with the nurses. Interfering with their pacemaker would suck, but if it's that the case then they're doomed anyway when little billy visits with a cell phone or ds or whatever.
5) There are all kinds of allergen related issues. For example, no latex (rubber bands) used internally for any part at any time during construction. Peanut oil sounds like a "green" lubricant for metal machining, etc, until you run into someone with an allergy.
The board is plastic. That's the part patients stand on. Tell your patients with peanut allergies to stop putting their penis into the internal gears of the wii board.
6) Connected. It needs to be sold by the current collection of booth-babe saleswomen with open purchase order accounts at the hospital. Its possible the hospital has no pre-existing relationship with any place that sells wii balance boards... Literally no way for purchasing to buy one...
Literally, they will drive to the game store, put some cash on the counter, and walk away with a $100 alternative to a $18,000 medical device. Point out the fact that they don't have the bureaucratic process for buying it is a really piss-poor argument. It just highlights the level of stubbornness in the medical industry. You do not need to buy it from booth babes at a convention. If any part of you believes this to be true, then kindly GTFO of any sort of purchasing authority position.
7) Software licensing which probably prohibits this kind of activity, al
Morality IS relative and is the sum of all moral judgment.
Comparing DMCA censorship and China's censorship is not ridiculous, but equating them is. Sorry for the semantic nitpicking.
China's censorship of political dissent IS worse to me because I judge it to be. I'm only one American but I imagine that most Americans would agree with me. As would the dissenters. And so the grandparent can say that since the communist party leaders have different views and priorities that censoring dissent is not wrong to them. But I don't give a shit what they think. I view it as morally worse then the DMCA. So it is wrong to me.
That's moral relativism. It doesn't make all moral decisions meaningless.
And when you put those moral judgments through the bullshit filter, the self-checker, quantize it into options, correct for self-interest, factor in the I-need-to-eat constant, run it past the shoulder committee, and actually DO something about your moral judgments, that's called politics. And when it comes down to it, I'm still going to purchase cheaper Chinese goods.
I don't think that "having fanatics" is a good litmus test for religion. That would include most of the pop stars, a few operating systems, halo, and harry potter. It really cheapens religion. But this particular debate always kind of struck me as mere semantics and a pointless waste of time.
Fanatic atheists are as bad as religious fanatics? really? Sure, sure, there are plenty of asshole atheists and a few stupid ones. I suppose there must be some actual fanatical atheists out there, but I haven't heard about their jihad, those who they excommunicated from the secular world, or their murdering ways.
Here I thought the media giants hated that ISPs were just dump pipes and wanted control over what tier of internet service was provided.
Basic: Google (plus the top 10 results!), wikipedia's main page, and now including our business partner and friend(ESPN!)
Silver: amazon, craigslist, Wikipedia, facebook, Disney, and other out-of-network sites.
Gold: Unlimited* connections to anywhere in the world*
Ultraviolet, pay-out-yer-ass: Slashdot and other such subversive sites
Or in short: They want to break network neutrality to turn the internet in cable television networks.
Well, you could have a second ISP/account for that. It is a worry that once the preferred packed for ISPs becomes tiered, non-neutral, or otherwise funky that the telcom companies would offer only a minor discount for low quality connections and bend you over and rape you for high-quality connections similar to the "standard" internet service we have now. And if the pricing structure for text messeging is any example, then I wouldn't trust the telcom companies with any power at all. In a perfect world, charging different rates for different quality isn't a bad thing, but the culteral setup of those in power makes this a terrifying prospect.
But ideally, I'd like 3 different accounts:
1. Cheap-ass, slow, flaky, interpretable, but uncapped connection for my casual downloading. Stuff I set up and let run overnight. Pay scales per gig over a set period of time.
2. Quick response, high priority, no dropped packets, with a bandwidth of... whatever I need at the time for gaming and voip. Paid per byte per level of bandwidth. And I limited to X bytes every minute.
3. High bandwidth, intermittent connection for burst communications. ie, web-browsing. I don't want the connection all that often, but when I ask for it I want it all right now.
But as I said, this is an ideal scenario where we accurately pay for what we need. But this model wouldn't encourage telcom companies to lay down more lines. It would encourage them to limit supply so people pay extra.
I would like some sort of quality metrics and contractual agreements instead of the vuage promise to get something between 0Mps and 5Mos I have now.
But I understand your original message that Comcast throttled ALL P2P connections over their lines regardless of who paid for what and so all of this entirely beside the point.
Your post intrigues me. Others have torn apart your argument and spread it to the winds and yet you still have a +5 insightful mod. Exactly where do I sign up with microsoft to convert mod points into cash?
Also, 4) Xbox support is indeed relevant and I imagine that MS will always give DX and edge there. But the point is that MS is abusing it's power to give DX that edge. MS is influencing the market on the whole (beyond consoles) to choose it's crappy alternative to an open and free and SUPERIOR option. And how could they not do this you may ask? They could support openGL on their consoles better. Yes, it doesn't generate them profit, but it's the right thing to do.
FINALLY Microsoft reaches out to embrace, extend, and extinguish DRM.
So, they don;t have a blanket pass on traffic laws, but they can break them at their discretion, as long as they feel it is safe to do so, with consequences if they cause an accident.
Only if they cause an accident? That's a problem.
How many cops have you seen casually speeding? or turning their lights on just to run a red? (which is rampant in Lincoln apparently). And have you EVER heard of a cop writing themselves a ticket? The whole traffic laws thing is to promote a safety on the roads, because apparently the threat of injury and vast financial loss isn't enough. And cops look after their own when push comes to shove and they actually do cause an accident.
So while you may be more or less correct legally, on paper, here in the real world with the implementation, the government is slightly above the law. And they have to really screw up big time (or slight the wrong person) before the process actually applies to them.
Because slashdot is the place for nitpicking, if you're a software development company, then developing software is more production and less R&D. Yes, even though it has "development" in the name, R&D is working on new and crazy stuff. Sure, you could consider every piece of software to be new and crazy (hence why you have to write it), but if you have a client paying for it, then it's not R&D.
Could that possibly be because the title calls it a tariff?
This could an example of sensationalist reporting, or Minnesota is just playing semantics.
You can point to an platypus behind people and say "hey look at that duck" and depending how knowledgeable and gullible they are, they'll believe it's a duck. Nothing exists in a vacuum and this is why the article is filed under politics. This is also the reason Fox News throws out a lot of blips like "will Obama eat your children? more at 11."
Or if you take his red stapler, or force him to fill out tps reports, or promote your brother over him, or any of the multitude of stupid things that happen in the business world. These are things where his amazing technical skill doesn't help at all, and the businessman with the $50 haircut will look out for his own ass, and hang the engineer out to dry.
Welcome to corporate America.
Well it looks like there are $50 infrared thermometers that have a 12:1 distance to spot ratio. So at 120' it would take an average temperature of a 10' circular area. There's also a max range of 100 feet depending on fog and such. I'd say that about how far most houses are set back from the street, but I'd hope that the cops could hit the broad side of a house's roof. And it takes like half a second to register.
No, I'm not sure that using a device to peer into someone's home and making a guess that the image infers some illegal activity constitutes probable cause either.
Furthermore, thermal imagers don't magically see through walls. If you have lamps in the attic then the roof is going to be hot. You're not going to get a silhouette of 5 heat lamps with a shadow of cannabis being tended by the distinct heat signiture that only mexican slaves give off. No, you're going to be able to sweep it over a neighborhood and tell whose carpenter skimped on the insulation, or maybe they've got a heat lamp.
This kind of raises the question of why the cops needed a $3K device when they really just wanted to know when a roof was >120F. Sure, the thermal imager is more fun to play with, but a $30 kitchen tool, you know the kind with the targeting laser, would work just about as well for a hundredth of the cost. I think our generals use the same logic as these guys.
Well the Romans tried something like that bu the vandals kept messing stuff up and the goths got all emo. While it did have some local balancing effects, from what I hear, everyone generally complained about the poor lighting.
I'm pretty sure the economic dip after 9/11 was due more to the psychological impact on average Americans then the death of 3000 office workers, the loss of some sky scrapers, and a horrible commute for new yorkers for a few years. These weren't nobodies, but their loss shouldn't have had that great an impact. So the reason for the dip is because we were afraid, which goes back to grandparent's main point. The best way to fight terrorism is to not be terrified.
You are not wrong. Pi is irrational and goes on forever, and it does contain every combination possible. Those images will appear in addition to a sequence of 60 1024x800 full-color raster images that show goaste furiously thrusting when you flip through them.
Well, since pi is an irrational number it has an infinite amount of decimal places which would convert into an infinite number of characters. Presumably with a random distribution. Chaos theory tells us that given an infinite supply of chaotic events, no matter the odds, every combination WILL occur.
So there is no "probably", somewhere in the digits of pi it does read "Help! I'm being held prisoner in a universe factory!".
Libraries.
Because I for one was expecting that hand to rip out that girl's throat at the end of that video.
Forsooth! A beholder is upon us! I shall smite it with my high powered rail gun weaponry!
...What do you mean I don't have one? it's right here on my character sheet.
Rules, shmulze it's a fantasy game right? So it's my fantasy to have a rail gun.
Listen, if fatso here can kill things with a word while wearing a bathrobe I don't see why I can't point and click things into oblivion.
Of course it doesn't make sense, neither does wearing a bathrobe to a gunfight!
Ah. So what you're telling me is that this game allows us to break from reality with a narrowly defined set of rules that remains internally consistent while generating scenarios that wouldn't be available to us in real life.
Well that makes sense. One sec, lemme roll up a human fighter. 3D6 in a row, right?
this sounds religion-motivated, but that's hardly a drawback of an argument...
Well, actually, yes it is. Or at the very least it's cause to re-examine the argument and question it at a more fundamental level. Religions are often stuck in their ways and see tradition as a viture in and of itself. These systems are good when things are static, but they suffer when new technology changes how society functions, and they often fight back against that change. Religions aren't necessarily wrong about everything, indeed they're mostly right, but often for the wrong reason. So instead of taking religious dogma and thumping that, you should examine the dogma, use it to form an argument, and use that instead. And when an argument is whittled away and the only thing that remains is "butbutbut Religion!" that is indeed a sign that your argument is bad.
Stopping unmarried youths from having kids is a good idea. Family stability and all that. But the church didn't fight for family stability, they fought against sex. And not just unmarried sex. In their attempt to save the children (tm), they worked against every and all aspect of sex in society that the unmarried could come into contact with. That included the public and hence the effort to make sex taboo.
the intense pleasure most participants derive from it is the reward for the excruciating pains of childbirth and hardships of the childrearing
I'm a dude and I enjoy sex. I don't really expect childbirth to hurt all that much. And I've yet to enjoy raising children, but I hope they turn out better then your apparently satanic hellspawn.
Now, what is the justification for a cocaine-user's pleasure?
Well, he paid for it. That's the same justification I use when I play a game or enjoy a candy bar. Whatever floats you boat, right?
I have to agree with you that this could be abused. And there's plenty of sci-fi works to use as examples. But anything can be abused. Caffeine, trinkets, cats, power, religious fervor, food, fasting, gaming, isolation, social life, ANYTHING! And if someone takes part in/of a phenomena to an extent that it has negative consequences, THAT is the point to be concerned. And it's usually well before that point at which the person realizes the negative consequences and limits him/herself. But this is not a job I want delegated to the church and priests.
So take your right-wing-conservative-religious sense of morals and shove it.