But most people prefer automated customer support.
What makes you so certain of that? A poll of yourself and a few friends? Personally, I hate automated support. I can usually get answers from a person, but from a computer, I have to work within a strict set of canned questions and responses. I suspect the reason automated support is popular is that you pay for it once and then pay a minor upkeep fee to keep it running, saving you the need to hire people.
Sounds like you have elements of both types of personalities the article describes. I suspect that's true of most people. Hell, sometimes I even exhibit both traits while playing the same game. I've played RPGs with serious challenges even after you reach the level cap, but I also enjoy fighting easier enemies and obliterating them with the power I earned through little more than time and patience. I don't think there's anyone who wants to have to work hard for positive feedback *all* the time, but I also think that most people will ultimately feel unfulfilled if they never have to take any risks or work for their success.
Consequently, I think his concerns are overblown for the average gamer. However, I do know a person who fits his description perfectly. My younger brother (ironically, his name is actually Paul, like the hypothetical kid in the article... and... mine is actually Matt like the other hypothetical kid in the article....) plays RPGs almost exclusively and is the kind of person who hardly takes any risks or puts any effort into life. He loves those RPGs, presumably because success is a foregone conclusion, which makes them safe and and gives him all the reassuring platitudes he requires to forget about the world around him.
To expand slightly, even in the event that the game is *defined* by the fact that you are always playing it, that does not make it a valid game. You can define something out of existence by contradiction, after all, and if a person can not be playing a game that is defined by everyone playing it, then the game itself is not valid, which is just as reasonable as concluding that the person is playing the game.
Except that they are false rules. You cannot create a fundamental truth simply by asserting it as a rule. "Rule 1: You are playing the game" is no more valid than "Rule 1: I am way better looking than you" even if, by coincidence, it may happen to be true.
Ah, one of those. I've never understood the appeal. What do you get out of killing low level players that you don't get out of killing low level computer enemies? The satisfaction of having inconvenienced a real person and reduced enjoyment of the game? I myself have killed players who were lower level than me in MMOs, but generally only if they had it coming. Otherwise, I really don't see the point. For all I know, there's some nice guy on the other end otherwise enjoying his evening, and I've just made his life a little more difficult for no good reason. Maybe if there were some genuine sport in it, and I had the feeling the other party was up for some healthy competition, but there's nothing particularly sporting or challenging about killing a lowbie. Presumably the low level player had some other thing he was trying to do that didn't involve picking an unwinnable fight. Hurray for misanthropy...
Incidentally, I have played on PvP servers in the past, and I think they're great if you get in at the ground floor. I like the dynamic quality of having to keep an eye out for enemy players and engaging in a little cat and mouse with them sometimes. Inevitably, though, the server ends up overflowing with high level characters, and it becomes harder to capture that for any new characters you roll. Once that happens, often as not, if you encounter someone, they can outrun you to chase you down and then kill you effortlessly if they so choose. No real fun in that.
How many variations of go to X and kill/collect Y of Z are there, I wonder? Granted, I remember a long time ago playing user created campaigns in NWN, and they weren't half bad, but even professional designers seem to have difficulty putting together compelling mssions in MMOs... color me skeptical.
You're right that it's different. Seeing characters safe and sound on a DVD box cover gives it away in a meta sort of way, while having a prequel gives it away in universe.
However, I don't think that's why the Star Wars prequels didn't work. I think that was all about execution. You may not have any familiarity with it, but I think Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII was one of the best games in the Final Fantasy series despite the fact that you go into it knowing exactly how it will end. In some ways, knowing the end makes it much more powerful. Lost also has been showing things that happen in the future, and Babylon 5 made it pretty clear what was going to happen at the end of it all, which, once again, made the ending that much more powerful, knowing what everything was leading toward.
Granted, in most of those cases, the ending has an element of tragedy to it, and knowing the end is akin to knowing the manner of your own death and experiencing the sadness that comes with recognizing its imminent approach. But there is tragedy in the ending of Star Wars, too. It's just not a tragedy I could bring myself to care about.
I'm not sure it's a bad thing to know for sure that characters aren't going to die. I've finally gotten around to watching Farscape after all the years it has been around, and I can plainly see on the later DVD box sets that everyone is still around, for at least a few more seasons. I'm not exactly cursing myself for looking at them, either. That someone is going to live isn't a big spoiler to me. That someone is going to die is a whole different story, though.
Another example: I'm a big fan of Dexter, and, when I was watching season 2, I already knew there was a season 3, so I felt pretty confident he wasn't going to get caught, no matter how close he came. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it in the moment are two very different things. I *felt* like Dexter could be caught, despite knowing he couldn't, and sometimes I *feel* like characters can die, even knowing they can't. Contrast that with, say, children's cartoons, where you never really get the sense that the heroes are in any real danger of losing.
Except Book died off camera and without ever fulfilling the potential of his storyline (who WAS he?) and Wash died in a stroke of abrupt and extreme bad luck that had to be summarily forgotten because of the imminent threat. I felt like the only purpose Wash's death served was to make the audience feel like anyone was fair game at that point. It was effective in that regard, but if that's all there was, I don't think it was worth the trade-off.
However, you bring up an interesting point, that I had not considered. I'd have to watch it again to see for sure if that comes across for me too, but I certainly didn't pick that up on a first run. The fact that he cared about the members of his crew was something I had taken for granted for a long time, and I didn't notice that he had changed appreciably at the end. I suppose he does allow the Operative to live, despite all he has done, and that could be indicative of a change, though I'm not sure that the death of Wash (or Book) was a critical part of that. Ultimately, I felt Wash deserved better than he got. My reaction was less sadness about the death of Wash than irritation with the writers for killing him so off-handedly.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't make a reasonable attempt at minimizing it where it's unnecessary. I may be an atheist, but I would hardly advocate teaching in schools that children should reject god and become atheists. I think it's only fair that, say, Christians politely agree to the same standard. Is the result going to be an education without god? I suppose. Might it occasionally contradict the religious beliefs of some? It might, in fact. But we hardly do ourselves a service by compromising academic principles to appease religious thought. What good is science if we refuse to go where the chase leads us on those occasions where the chase contradicts our beliefs?
While I am a Christian and do not accept atheism, agnosticism, or skepticism... I at least have more respect for an agnostic or skeptic. why? they are wise enough not to assert a universal negative, which is logically indefensible. I would still argue that an agnostic's claim can be disproved and that a skeptic's beliefs are unwise, but I can at least respect the wisdom not to make the leap to atheism.
Others seized on other parts of your post, so I will address this part, which struck me as odd. I disagree with your premises, but let us run with them. To you, an atheist is one who commits to the belief that god does not exist while lacking the ability to prove that belief. A theist, such as yourself, commits to the belief that god does exist, but, presumably, you would agree that you lack the ability to prove that belief correct. You respect the skeptic and the agnostic, however, for their unwillingness to commit to a belief which they cannot prove while, in turn, respecting them less than a theist who would commit to a belief he cannot prove but is compatible with your own. I posit, therefore, that you respect the agnostic and the skeptic not for the soundness of their logic, but rather for proximity of their beliefs to yours. After all, your logic is most similar to your idea of what an atheist is.
Incidentally, I can already see your objection, so let me answer it. I expect you'll draw the atheist's alleged belief of a negative as fundamentally less valid than your belief in a positive because such a negative cannot be proven, while a positive can if evidence is ever found to substantiate it. But the truth value of a statement is orthogonal to its epistemological qualities. That is, god either exists or he doesn't. Whether or not we know or can know the truth of his existence does not impact the truth of his existence or its likelihood. If we were to posit the existence of something that has a 50% chance of existing, the believer has the same chance of being right as the denier. The only difference is that the believer may be proven correct while the denier can never be proven correct. It does not make the denier less rational. And what's more is that you don't even have to deny to be an atheist. You just have to refuse to accept.
What a clever sophistry. It appears insightful at a glance because zero is the number of gods that atheists believe in. And yet whether or not something is a religion is not defined by "believing in a real number of gods". If it were, the only stance a person could take that would not be a religion would be to believe that the number of gods is sqrt(-1) or something similarly absurd. Hell, even that is a number if you expand to include imaginary numbers. So I guess you'd have to answer with a non sequitur. "How many gods are there?" "Hippopotamus"
Distinct in the sense of being orthogonal. It is possible to believe there is no god while admitting that you do not know that there is no god. Knowledge is the intersection of truth and belief, and since the truth value of the god hypothesis can never be conclusively determined, the most we can ever achieve is a strong suspicion. Atheists, by and large, are agnostics. But people who call themselves agnostics are different from atheists, in my experience, in their willingness to entertain the possibility rather than reject it. I agree with the earlier poster who thought this was an odd notion, because there is an uncountably infinite number of unfalsifiable propositions to entertain. What makes the god hypothesis worthy of this special consideration, when we casually reject all the others?
Incidentally, dictionary.com defines disbelief as "the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true" which strikes me more as not believing there is a god than believing there is no god. So, by your definition, you're an atheist if you believe there is no god OR if you merely refuse to believe there is one.
You're still begging the question. Maybe right and wrong are meaningless concepts and are no one's responsibility. Or maybe they are the responsibility of an alien species we have not yet encountered. All atheism truly says is that they aren't the responsibility of a god, but that isn't a positive claim. That's a rejection of a claim, which, incidentally, isn't even core to theism itself. Basically, atheism will, by corollary, reject any claim that depends on the existence of a god, but it makes no claims of its own. In conjunction with other ideas, perhaps you might arrive at the notion that morality is a real thing and that it is man's purview, but that does not deductively follow from the rejection of the god hypothesis.
Formally, atheists do not do the things you describe. They do not assume a premise is false because it cannot be proven true. They reject the truth claim of the premise. As the premise cannot be applied parsimoniously to make meaningful predictions (otherwise we might be able to work toward evaluating its truth value), it's a useless postulate and we just throw it on the heap with all the other useless postulates we might formally reject if asked to.
Informally, it's probably true that many if not most atheists not only reject the god hypothesis, but hold a belief that there is no god. But is that worth calling a religion? I informally believe there is no god. I also informally believe there is no cement truck parked outside my building, mostly because I've never seen one there and it seems unlikely that has changed. I could be wrong, but I can't help my intuition. And sure, in this example, I could go check, but I won't, and if the cement truck is there and subsequently leaves, I'll have no way of knowing if it was there and will persist to the end of my days in the belief it wasn't. But that's hardly a religion, and it's hardly worth criticizing for its deductive shortcomings.
Furthermore the effect on decision making is the same. A person who believes there isn't a god will make decisions indistinguishable from a person who has never entertained the possibility or who fails to accept the truth value of the statement without declaring it false. The statement cannot be proven false, as you say, which means that there are no predictions to be verified that depend on its falseness.
So in summary, formally, atheists have a logical approach to the problem, and any informal inclinations they might have do not serve to alter their behavior appreciably.
The zealous atheists you describe are zealous for other reasons. Atheism is much maligned in the US, atheists are ostracized for their lack of belief. Religion enjoys a privileged status, which bars criticism and grants special consideration. Of course, like anyone else, some atheists are jerks or narcissists who want to feel better than other people. And some atheists just want you to agree in much the same way you would prefer a friend like your favorite movie. But it's hardly fair to generalize atheist points of view as illogical or dogmatic. Stripped of all but the essentials, atheism is nothing if not unfailingly logical, even if atheists themselves are not always logical.
Wait they care about imperiled innocents now? I guess being stupid trumps being innocent. Perhaps if it was a plane full of stupid people, they'd have accepted your submission.
Hmmm.... if I were to tasked with answering the same question, I would probably say "It's a public forum and we might inflict pain on the person's loved ones." It'd be kind of a douche move to walk up to the woman's grieving mother and say "Man, was your daughter stupid, jumping into that creek!" Putting it in a sign on her front lawn would be about as bad. Telling it to a friend of yours in person is pretty low risk. Posting it on the internet is somewhere in between.
For the record, I think the acceptability of it varies by how funny it is vs how much harm it might cause, which makes it awfully subjective. Like jokes about 9/11 or the Challenger. They're offensive unless they're funny.
I mainly had the idea from this part of the article: "Radiation-based weapons that burn out the electronics of a spacecraft sound exotic, but are still potentially achievable. This would be the attraction of nuclear weapons in space: not the explosion, which would affect just about nothing, but the burst of energetic particles and the ensuing electromagnetic storm."
A cursory look at the wikipedia article for electromagnetic pulse defines it as "A broadband, high-intensity, short-duration burst of electromagnetic energy." That definition would seem to apply to what he described.
I agree completely. I was envisioning the missiles the guy describes having a nuclear payload. If you connect, you get the kinetic energy as well as a vast boost of additional energy from the nuclear reaction. If you don't connect, maybe the nuke can go off on proximity and still melt the ship or at least deliver an EMP
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But most people prefer automated customer support.
What makes you so certain of that? A poll of yourself and a few friends? Personally, I hate automated support. I can usually get answers from a person, but from a computer, I have to work within a strict set of canned questions and responses. I suspect the reason automated support is popular is that you pay for it once and then pay a minor upkeep fee to keep it running, saving you the need to hire people.
Sounds like you have elements of both types of personalities the article describes. I suspect that's true of most people. Hell, sometimes I even exhibit both traits while playing the same game. I've played RPGs with serious challenges even after you reach the level cap, but I also enjoy fighting easier enemies and obliterating them with the power I earned through little more than time and patience. I don't think there's anyone who wants to have to work hard for positive feedback *all* the time, but I also think that most people will ultimately feel unfulfilled if they never have to take any risks or work for their success.
Consequently, I think his concerns are overblown for the average gamer. However, I do know a person who fits his description perfectly. My younger brother (ironically, his name is actually Paul, like the hypothetical kid in the article... and... mine is actually Matt like the other hypothetical kid in the article....) plays RPGs almost exclusively and is the kind of person who hardly takes any risks or puts any effort into life. He loves those RPGs, presumably because success is a foregone conclusion, which makes them safe and and gives him all the reassuring platitudes he requires to forget about the world around him.
To expand slightly, even in the event that the game is *defined* by the fact that you are always playing it, that does not make it a valid game. You can define something out of existence by contradiction, after all, and if a person can not be playing a game that is defined by everyone playing it, then the game itself is not valid, which is just as reasonable as concluding that the person is playing the game.
Except that they are false rules. You cannot create a fundamental truth simply by asserting it as a rule. "Rule 1: You are playing the game" is no more valid than "Rule 1: I am way better looking than you" even if, by coincidence, it may happen to be true.
Between this response and Derek's, color me significantly more convinced.
Let me slaughter lower level players
Ah, one of those. I've never understood the appeal. What do you get out of killing low level players that you don't get out of killing low level computer enemies? The satisfaction of having inconvenienced a real person and reduced enjoyment of the game? I myself have killed players who were lower level than me in MMOs, but generally only if they had it coming. Otherwise, I really don't see the point. For all I know, there's some nice guy on the other end otherwise enjoying his evening, and I've just made his life a little more difficult for no good reason. Maybe if there were some genuine sport in it, and I had the feeling the other party was up for some healthy competition, but there's nothing particularly sporting or challenging about killing a lowbie. Presumably the low level player had some other thing he was trying to do that didn't involve picking an unwinnable fight. Hurray for misanthropy...
Incidentally, I have played on PvP servers in the past, and I think they're great if you get in at the ground floor. I like the dynamic quality of having to keep an eye out for enemy players and engaging in a little cat and mouse with them sometimes. Inevitably, though, the server ends up overflowing with high level characters, and it becomes harder to capture that for any new characters you roll. Once that happens, often as not, if you encounter someone, they can outrun you to chase you down and then kill you effortlessly if they so choose. No real fun in that.
How many variations of go to X and kill/collect Y of Z are there, I wonder? Granted, I remember a long time ago playing user created campaigns in NWN, and they weren't half bad, but even professional designers seem to have difficulty putting together compelling mssions in MMOs... color me skeptical.
You're right that it's different. Seeing characters safe and sound on a DVD box cover gives it away in a meta sort of way, while having a prequel gives it away in universe.
However, I don't think that's why the Star Wars prequels didn't work. I think that was all about execution. You may not have any familiarity with it, but I think Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII was one of the best games in the Final Fantasy series despite the fact that you go into it knowing exactly how it will end. In some ways, knowing the end makes it much more powerful. Lost also has been showing things that happen in the future, and Babylon 5 made it pretty clear what was going to happen at the end of it all, which, once again, made the ending that much more powerful, knowing what everything was leading toward.
Granted, in most of those cases, the ending has an element of tragedy to it, and knowing the end is akin to knowing the manner of your own death and experiencing the sadness that comes with recognizing its imminent approach. But there is tragedy in the ending of Star Wars, too. It's just not a tragedy I could bring myself to care about.
I'm not sure it's a bad thing to know for sure that characters aren't going to die. I've finally gotten around to watching Farscape after all the years it has been around, and I can plainly see on the later DVD box sets that everyone is still around, for at least a few more seasons. I'm not exactly cursing myself for looking at them, either. That someone is going to live isn't a big spoiler to me. That someone is going to die is a whole different story, though.
Another example: I'm a big fan of Dexter, and, when I was watching season 2, I already knew there was a season 3, so I felt pretty confident he wasn't going to get caught, no matter how close he came. But knowing something intellectually and feeling it in the moment are two very different things. I *felt* like Dexter could be caught, despite knowing he couldn't, and sometimes I *feel* like characters can die, even knowing they can't. Contrast that with, say, children's cartoons, where you never really get the sense that the heroes are in any real danger of losing.
Except Book died off camera and without ever fulfilling the potential of his storyline (who WAS he?) and Wash died in a stroke of abrupt and extreme bad luck that had to be summarily forgotten because of the imminent threat. I felt like the only purpose Wash's death served was to make the audience feel like anyone was fair game at that point. It was effective in that regard, but if that's all there was, I don't think it was worth the trade-off.
However, you bring up an interesting point, that I had not considered. I'd have to watch it again to see for sure if that comes across for me too, but I certainly didn't pick that up on a first run. The fact that he cared about the members of his crew was something I had taken for granted for a long time, and I didn't notice that he had changed appreciably at the end. I suppose he does allow the Operative to live, despite all he has done, and that could be indicative of a change, though I'm not sure that the death of Wash (or Book) was a critical part of that. Ultimately, I felt Wash deserved better than he got. My reaction was less sadness about the death of Wash than irritation with the writers for killing him so off-handedly.
The population? Maybe. The founders? not so much.
Doesn't mean we shouldn't make a reasonable attempt at minimizing it where it's unnecessary. I may be an atheist, but I would hardly advocate teaching in schools that children should reject god and become atheists. I think it's only fair that, say, Christians politely agree to the same standard. Is the result going to be an education without god? I suppose. Might it occasionally contradict the religious beliefs of some? It might, in fact. But we hardly do ourselves a service by compromising academic principles to appease religious thought. What good is science if we refuse to go where the chase leads us on those occasions where the chase contradicts our beliefs?
So, consequently, it must not be reasonable to believe in the invisible friend. If it were, it would cast doubt of the reasonable variety.
Hmmm, I never knew that atheists didn't believe in dictionaries and encyclopedias. /ducks
While I am a Christian and do not accept atheism, agnosticism, or skepticism... I at least have more respect for an agnostic or skeptic. why? they are wise enough not to assert a universal negative, which is logically indefensible. I would still argue that an agnostic's claim can be disproved and that a skeptic's beliefs are unwise, but I can at least respect the wisdom not to make the leap to atheism.
Others seized on other parts of your post, so I will address this part, which struck me as odd. I disagree with your premises, but let us run with them. To you, an atheist is one who commits to the belief that god does not exist while lacking the ability to prove that belief. A theist, such as yourself, commits to the belief that god does exist, but, presumably, you would agree that you lack the ability to prove that belief correct. You respect the skeptic and the agnostic, however, for their unwillingness to commit to a belief which they cannot prove while, in turn, respecting them less than a theist who would commit to a belief he cannot prove but is compatible with your own. I posit, therefore, that you respect the agnostic and the skeptic not for the soundness of their logic, but rather for proximity of their beliefs to yours. After all, your logic is most similar to your idea of what an atheist is.
Incidentally, I can already see your objection, so let me answer it. I expect you'll draw the atheist's alleged belief of a negative as fundamentally less valid than your belief in a positive because such a negative cannot be proven, while a positive can if evidence is ever found to substantiate it. But the truth value of a statement is orthogonal to its epistemological qualities. That is, god either exists or he doesn't. Whether or not we know or can know the truth of his existence does not impact the truth of his existence or its likelihood. If we were to posit the existence of something that has a 50% chance of existing, the believer has the same chance of being right as the denier. The only difference is that the believer may be proven correct while the denier can never be proven correct. It does not make the denier less rational. And what's more is that you don't even have to deny to be an atheist. You just have to refuse to accept.
What a clever sophistry. It appears insightful at a glance because zero is the number of gods that atheists believe in. And yet whether or not something is a religion is not defined by "believing in a real number of gods". If it were, the only stance a person could take that would not be a religion would be to believe that the number of gods is sqrt(-1) or something similarly absurd. Hell, even that is a number if you expand to include imaginary numbers. So I guess you'd have to answer with a non sequitur. "How many gods are there?" "Hippopotamus"
A crazy person with intent to cause harm? Hey, maybe the person will keep hilariously failing. But I'd get the hell out of there just to be safe.
Distinct in the sense of being orthogonal. It is possible to believe there is no god while admitting that you do not know that there is no god. Knowledge is the intersection of truth and belief, and since the truth value of the god hypothesis can never be conclusively determined, the most we can ever achieve is a strong suspicion. Atheists, by and large, are agnostics. But people who call themselves agnostics are different from atheists, in my experience, in their willingness to entertain the possibility rather than reject it. I agree with the earlier poster who thought this was an odd notion, because there is an uncountably infinite number of unfalsifiable propositions to entertain. What makes the god hypothesis worthy of this special consideration, when we casually reject all the others?
Incidentally, dictionary.com defines disbelief as "the inability or refusal to believe or to accept something as true" which strikes me more as not believing there is a god than believing there is no god. So, by your definition, you're an atheist if you believe there is no god OR if you merely refuse to believe there is one.
You're still begging the question. Maybe right and wrong are meaningless concepts and are no one's responsibility. Or maybe they are the responsibility of an alien species we have not yet encountered. All atheism truly says is that they aren't the responsibility of a god, but that isn't a positive claim. That's a rejection of a claim, which, incidentally, isn't even core to theism itself. Basically, atheism will, by corollary, reject any claim that depends on the existence of a god, but it makes no claims of its own. In conjunction with other ideas, perhaps you might arrive at the notion that morality is a real thing and that it is man's purview, but that does not deductively follow from the rejection of the god hypothesis.
Formally, atheists do not do the things you describe. They do not assume a premise is false because it cannot be proven true. They reject the truth claim of the premise. As the premise cannot be applied parsimoniously to make meaningful predictions (otherwise we might be able to work toward evaluating its truth value), it's a useless postulate and we just throw it on the heap with all the other useless postulates we might formally reject if asked to.
Informally, it's probably true that many if not most atheists not only reject the god hypothesis, but hold a belief that there is no god. But is that worth calling a religion? I informally believe there is no god. I also informally believe there is no cement truck parked outside my building, mostly because I've never seen one there and it seems unlikely that has changed. I could be wrong, but I can't help my intuition. And sure, in this example, I could go check, but I won't, and if the cement truck is there and subsequently leaves, I'll have no way of knowing if it was there and will persist to the end of my days in the belief it wasn't. But that's hardly a religion, and it's hardly worth criticizing for its deductive shortcomings.
Furthermore the effect on decision making is the same. A person who believes there isn't a god will make decisions indistinguishable from a person who has never entertained the possibility or who fails to accept the truth value of the statement without declaring it false. The statement cannot be proven false, as you say, which means that there are no predictions to be verified that depend on its falseness.
So in summary, formally, atheists have a logical approach to the problem, and any informal inclinations they might have do not serve to alter their behavior appreciably.
The zealous atheists you describe are zealous for other reasons. Atheism is much maligned in the US, atheists are ostracized for their lack of belief. Religion enjoys a privileged status, which bars criticism and grants special consideration. Of course, like anyone else, some atheists are jerks or narcissists who want to feel better than other people. And some atheists just want you to agree in much the same way you would prefer a friend like your favorite movie. But it's hardly fair to generalize atheist points of view as illogical or dogmatic. Stripped of all but the essentials, atheism is nothing if not unfailingly logical, even if atheists themselves are not always logical.
Wait they care about imperiled innocents now? I guess being stupid trumps being innocent. Perhaps if it was a plane full of stupid people, they'd have accepted your submission.
Hmmm.... if I were to tasked with answering the same question, I would probably say "It's a public forum and we might inflict pain on the person's loved ones." It'd be kind of a douche move to walk up to the woman's grieving mother and say "Man, was your daughter stupid, jumping into that creek!" Putting it in a sign on her front lawn would be about as bad. Telling it to a friend of yours in person is pretty low risk. Posting it on the internet is somewhere in between.
For the record, I think the acceptability of it varies by how funny it is vs how much harm it might cause, which makes it awfully subjective. Like jokes about 9/11 or the Challenger. They're offensive unless they're funny.
I mainly had the idea from this part of the article: "Radiation-based weapons that burn out the electronics of a spacecraft sound exotic, but are still potentially achievable. This would be the attraction of nuclear weapons in space: not the explosion, which would affect just about nothing, but the burst of energetic particles and the ensuing electromagnetic storm."
A cursory look at the wikipedia article for electromagnetic pulse defines it as "A broadband, high-intensity, short-duration burst of electromagnetic energy." That definition would seem to apply to what he described.
I agree completely. I was envisioning the missiles the guy describes having a nuclear payload. If you connect, you get the kinetic energy as well as a vast boost of additional energy from the nuclear reaction. If you don't connect, maybe the nuke can go off on proximity and still melt the ship or at least deliver an EMP
Think of tilde as bitwise negation.