So many problems and yet it's still a very fun game to play!
Not only did the latest patch introduce login and disconnect problems, it's also created so much lag that the game is virtually unplayable about half the time now. I never had any lag problems whatsoever before the patch. This is the first time i've seriously considered giving it up, but if i can't play when i want to play, it's just not worth the money to me.
I'm not even mad about it anymore, just disappointed and slowly tipping over towards giving up on it.
Some people use religion as source material for their morals but there are many different places to get morals from, religion being only one of them. Children develop morals by watching their parents and by being disciplined by their parents way before they can even begin to understand religion.
I agree that religion is only one source for morality, but the nature of the morality does not change because the source changes. When i talk about a connection to the divine i'm not necessarily talking about a traditional god-based religion, though i admit that the phrasing of it certainly does cause confusion in that direction. Such a connection can be to one's own most deeply internalized beliefs, whatever the source of those beliefs may be. "The divine" can be an external godhead or your own most idealized sense of self.
(BTW: children do not have morals - they learn behavior that approximates the morals of their parents. The development of a real moral sense is part of the transition to adulthood.)
"goodness or badness of human action and character" "conscience...the sense of right and wrong" It's interesting that i read your definition and see support for my statements about morality in it - a sign of the muddled way in which ethics and morality are generally confused in our culture, i think.
At any rate, when an argument has devolved into the quoting of dictionary defnitions it's usually all but over. What about my argument do you disagree with? If it's entirely based on my definition of morality then we are at an impasse and should go our separate ways. If you want to get back on topic and discuss why artists don't have moral (or ethical, or whatever word/definition you want to use) obligations, then please do so.
I believe that everyone has a duty to act with moral and ethical responsibility in all things. I do not believe that this responsibility is to anyone but oneself and that to try to impose one's own ethics and morals on someone else without very good cause is itself both immoral (in my sense of the word) and unethical.
I think you are the one that is confused about ethics and morality. Ethics and laws are really more about keeping a society running smoothly. Morals are about one's relationship with the divine - right and wrong, sacrament and sin and all that.
Morals are not all self-imposed and they are not purely individual. We do not have morals classes in public schools because morality is traditionally the province of religion and spirituality. Religions are all about providing a consistent moral framework for groups of people. Every individual within a religion interprets that framework differently, but for the most part they all accept a core set of moral beliefs - that's what makes them a religion.
Moral responsibility is entirely about individual responsibility to oneself and to the divine. Something is not immoral because it hurts someone else - it is immoral because it is wrong in some universal sense.
It is quite possible for me to argue that making violent video games is immoral, but that does not make it a moral responsibility for all game designers to only make non-violent games. If the game designer's moral system tells him that glorifying violence is immoral then he can choose for himself how to follow that moral responsibility. It would be unethical for anyone else to try and impose their own morals upon him.
The biggest problems arise when one individual or group decides that it is their moral responsibility to impose their morals on an individual or group that does not share the same beliefs. The thing about morals is that everybody has them but it's tough to get people to agree about which ones are the right ones.
What you and most of the other people here are talking about is ethics and social responsibility. A moral responsibility is not something that can be imposed from the outside, nor is it something you can choose not to have. Whether or not you behave in accordance with those morals is where free will comes into play.
Do artists have a moral responsibility? Do authors have a moral responsibility? Do writers have a moral responsibility? They do if they choose to have one. Period. End of story.
Not the end of story, not even correct.
Yes, they all have a moral responsibility, as do game creators. Everyone has moral responsibility. You can't choose to have a moral responsibility or not have it - whether you want it or not, it's yours. You can only choose to act according to it or to ignore it.
However, neither game developers nor any of those others should be held accountable for presenting anyone's morality but their own, nor should they be held to a higher moral standard than accountants, factory workers, Presidents, or garbage collectors.
That is what ALL government legislators do when they pass laws. Laws are nothing more than government telling you what is and what is not wrong.
Not exactly. Legal and moral are two different things. Laws may be immoral, moral obligations may be illegal.
The theoretical purpose of laws is to provide guidelines for behavior (and punishments for transgression) in order to keep a society from breaking down into dysfunction.
Take traffic laws for instance. There is no moral obligation to stop when you see a red light, but imagine if there were no traffic laws. People going as fast or slow as they want to. Driving in any direction they want to on any street or any lane of the highway. No slowing down for intersections or crosswalks.
Traffic laws exist to promote safety and to enable maximum efficiency for all drivers. Most laws are written with the same goals in mind. Murder is not illegal because it's a sin to kill someone. Murder is illegal because allowing people to kill whomever they want whenever they feel like it is not beneficial to the majority of people and it results in a lot of wasted time and effort.
Laws exist not to tell you what is wrong, but rather to prevent a small group of people from disrupting the lives of a larger group. You could argue of course that all of this is based upon a moral value, or that in practice many laws do exist to regulate morality, but your initial statement is still incorrect. Not that i agree with the original poster either, but that's a different argument.
Human torch character:
FF: Check
Incredibles: Negative
Super speed character:
FF: Negative
Incredibles Check
Switching around the age and sex of which characters have which powers does not constitute creativity. Luckily, the Incredibles had plenty of creativity in other places. I suspect that the Incredibles have the powers they do precisely because they are such staples of the super-hero genre. The Incredibles are the average-joes of the super-hero world. Their powers set them apart from most of humanity but their teamwork (love for each other, family) is what makes them great and links them to the rest of the world. So yes, it sort of is a rip-off, but its intentional and not indicative of a lack of creativity.
The Incredibles is, bar-none, the best super-hero movie to date.
And yet some of the best car chases in recent years were in The Bourne movies, where he drives a mini (not one of the new cool ones) and a crappy old Russian taxi.
I think your comment is indicative of the thinking in most of Hollywood, which is one example of why the Bourne movies were a step above the typical hollywood action movie.
In this example, the value of i (0) gets reassigned to i and then gets incremented (but not stored).
To get 1, you would write it like this:
int i=0; i=++i;
That way it gets incremented before being reassigned.
Personally, i think it's a stupid feature of the language that's just begging to be used in buggy code. (Critics will say that about all of Java, but to each their own.)
This post is complete BS. Total troll. Think about it: how could anyone run a "free server" for an mmorpg unless they had the source code? There has been no source code theft. There are no free servers.
Even if there were, what would it matter? You can't port a character or items from one server to another, so what would be the point of running a free server? You'd have a vast, empty world for you and your 31337 friends to play in with nothing but NPCs for interaction. Wow. Fun.
The only hacks that have existed in the game are the typical speedhacks and bots and Blizzard has dealty with those very quickly and very aggressively.
Perspective? You just flamed someone for using the common (albeit incorrect) plural term for a bunch of plastic toys. Are you under a lot of stress or something? Did it make you feel better?
Without the dampening effect of a reelection campaign, i'd expect his second four years to be even worse than the first. (I can only imagine how bad it will get after he declares martial law and appoints himself President for Life. Kidding. Sort of. I hope.)
A real pedantic twit would tell you all about the Visigoths in some strange knowledge-based pecker-measuring attempt. He would affect superiority to the inferior beings who use a term's well-accepted alternate meaning, while everyone who read his post would pitty him and think he should really get out more.
It doesn't matter whether the Goth subculture has anything in common with the Visigoths or with Gothic art and architecture. That's what they're called. Learn to recognize irony and humor and get over it.
How sad is it that i have to quote to you the post to which you are responding?
"This report may or may not be accurate, but the problem (if it exists) is not with the sample size."
Inaccurate reporting of the numbers is not a problem with sample size. Anti-US bias is not a problem with sample size. In a larger or smaller sample those same problems would exist in approximately the same proportion.
Do i really need to remind you that you are a faceless anonymous person on the internet? For all anyone here knows, you're a dog with an excellent vocabulary.
I believe Saddam was a bad man and i believe the mass graves exist. I've seen sources that back that up. I have seen nothing to prove to me that this study was politically motivated or that their statistical sampling is less accurate than they claim it to be.
Surely some of the intelligence you read has been declassified and made public, or at least leaked to the media so that you could provide us with a link to a reality-based news organization that backs you up?
Are you trying to dispute the number of people killed in the Iran-Iraq war, or the ones in this study? The numbers i quoted were in response to the grandparent claim (mostly typo, i think) of 900,000,000 dead in the Iran-Iraq war.
The Iran-Iraq figures are pretty well accepted given that they're 20 years old. This new study certainly should be looked at with skepticism, but that doesn't immediately make it false. Let's take it as an early eastimate and go from there.
People often use claims "common sense" to cover lies or ignorance. Why should i believe you aren't doing that? BTW, are you talking about faith-based reality or reality-based reality?
Perhaps i should have been more specific. Mass graves do exist and Saddam was a bad man. I'll give you those. I was more interested in the source for the claims about who is behind this study and why they did it.
Yeah, there's a few extra zeros there and a multiplier. Iraq claimed to have killed 800,000 Iranians, Iran claimed to have lost 200,000. Experts put the number at around 300,000 give or take 100,000.
Thanks to their superior military and intelligence (courtesy of US backing) Iraq's body count was estimated at 1/2 of Iran's.
I don't think anyone really believes him when he says this. He's just trying to appear less evil to uninformed undecided voters. His base knows he's with them in sending gays to hell and his opponents know he's just saying whatever it will take to get him re-installed in office.
Incidentally, being against LGBT rights now is like being against Civil Rights in the 50's. I'm looking forward to the time when we can all look back on this as another shameful hurdle we overcame.
Slashdot Mirror
So many problems and yet it's still a very fun game to play!
Not only did the latest patch introduce login and disconnect problems, it's also created so much lag that the game is virtually unplayable about half the time now. I never had any lag problems whatsoever before the patch. This is the first time i've seriously considered giving it up, but if i can't play when i want to play, it's just not worth the money to me.
I'm not even mad about it anymore, just disappointed and slowly tipping over towards giving up on it.
so that the fundies actually have something interesting to complain about!
Some people use religion as source material for their morals but there are many different places to get morals from, religion being only one of them. Children develop morals by watching their parents and by being disciplined by their parents way before they can even begin to understand religion.
I agree that religion is only one source for morality, but the nature of the morality does not change because the source changes. When i talk about a connection to the divine i'm not necessarily talking about a traditional god-based religion, though i admit that the phrasing of it certainly does cause confusion in that direction. Such a connection can be to one's own most deeply internalized beliefs, whatever the source of those beliefs may be. "The divine" can be an external godhead or your own most idealized sense of self.
(BTW: children do not have morals - they learn behavior that approximates the morals of their parents. The development of a real moral sense is part of the transition to adulthood.)
"goodness or badness of human action and character" "conscience...the sense of right and wrong" It's interesting that i read your definition and see support for my statements about morality in it - a sign of the muddled way in which ethics and morality are generally confused in our culture, i think.
At any rate, when an argument has devolved into the quoting of dictionary defnitions it's usually all but over. What about my argument do you disagree with? If it's entirely based on my definition of morality then we are at an impasse and should go our separate ways. If you want to get back on topic and discuss why artists don't have moral (or ethical, or whatever word/definition you want to use) obligations, then please do so.
I believe that everyone has a duty to act with moral and ethical responsibility in all things. I do not believe that this responsibility is to anyone but oneself and that to try to impose one's own ethics and morals on someone else without very good cause is itself both immoral (in my sense of the word) and unethical.
I think you are the one that is confused about ethics and morality. Ethics and laws are really more about keeping a society running smoothly. Morals are about one's relationship with the divine - right and wrong, sacrament and sin and all that.
Morals are not all self-imposed and they are not purely individual. We do not have morals classes in public schools because morality is traditionally the province of religion and spirituality. Religions are all about providing a consistent moral framework for groups of people. Every individual within a religion interprets that framework differently, but for the most part they all accept a core set of moral beliefs - that's what makes them a religion.
Moral responsibility is entirely about individual responsibility to oneself and to the divine. Something is not immoral because it hurts someone else - it is immoral because it is wrong in some universal sense.
It is quite possible for me to argue that making violent video games is immoral, but that does not make it a moral responsibility for all game designers to only make non-violent games. If the game designer's moral system tells him that glorifying violence is immoral then he can choose for himself how to follow that moral responsibility. It would be unethical for anyone else to try and impose their own morals upon him.
The biggest problems arise when one individual or group decides that it is their moral responsibility to impose their morals on an individual or group that does not share the same beliefs. The thing about morals is that everybody has them but it's tough to get people to agree about which ones are the right ones.
What you and most of the other people here are talking about is ethics and social responsibility. A moral responsibility is not something that can be imposed from the outside, nor is it something you can choose not to have. Whether or not you behave in accordance with those morals is where free will comes into play.
Do artists have a moral responsibility?
Do authors have a moral responsibility?
Do writers have a moral responsibility?
They do if they choose to have one. Period. End of story.
Not the end of story, not even correct.
Yes, they all have a moral responsibility, as do game creators. Everyone has moral responsibility. You can't choose to have a moral responsibility or not have it - whether you want it or not, it's yours. You can only choose to act according to it or to ignore it.
However, neither game developers nor any of those others should be held accountable for presenting anyone's morality but their own, nor should they be held to a higher moral standard than accountants, factory workers, Presidents, or garbage collectors.
That is what ALL government legislators do when they pass laws. Laws are nothing more than government telling you what is and what is not wrong.
Not exactly. Legal and moral are two different things. Laws may be immoral, moral obligations may be illegal.
The theoretical purpose of laws is to provide guidelines for behavior (and punishments for transgression) in order to keep a society from breaking down into dysfunction.
Take traffic laws for instance. There is no moral obligation to stop when you see a red light, but imagine if there were no traffic laws. People going as fast or slow as they want to. Driving in any direction they want to on any street or any lane of the highway. No slowing down for intersections or crosswalks.
Traffic laws exist to promote safety and to enable maximum efficiency for all drivers. Most laws are written with the same goals in mind. Murder is not illegal because it's a sin to kill someone. Murder is illegal because allowing people to kill whomever they want whenever they feel like it is not beneficial to the majority of people and it results in a lot of wasted time and effort.
Laws exist not to tell you what is wrong, but rather to prevent a small group of people from disrupting the lives of a larger group. You could argue of course that all of this is based upon a moral value, or that in practice many laws do exist to regulate morality, but your initial statement is still incorrect. Not that i agree with the original poster either, but that's a different argument.
Stretchy, smart character:
FF: Check
Incredibles: Check
Super-strong, tough character:
FF: Check
Incredibles: Check
Invisible character:
FF: Check
Incredibles: Check
Human torch character:
FF: Check
Incredibles: Negative
Super speed character:
FF: Negative
Incredibles Check
Switching around the age and sex of which characters have which powers does not constitute creativity. Luckily, the Incredibles had plenty of creativity in other places. I suspect that the Incredibles have the powers they do precisely because they are such staples of the super-hero genre. The Incredibles are the average-joes of the super-hero world. Their powers set them apart from most of humanity but their teamwork (love for each other, family) is what makes them great and links them to the rest of the world. So yes, it sort of is a rip-off, but its intentional and not indicative of a lack of creativity.
The Incredibles is, bar-none, the best super-hero movie to date.
And yet some of the best car chases in recent years were in The Bourne movies, where he drives a mini (not one of the new cool ones) and a crappy old Russian taxi.
I think your comment is indicative of the thinking in most of Hollywood, which is one example of why the Bourne movies were a step above the typical hollywood action movie.
int i=0;
i=i++;
In this example, the value of i (0) gets reassigned to i and then gets incremented (but not stored).
To get 1, you would write it like this:
int i=0;
i=++i;
That way it gets incremented before being reassigned.
Personally, i think it's a stupid feature of the language that's just begging to be used in buggy code. (Critics will say that about all of Java, but to each their own.)
This post is complete BS. Total troll. Think about it: how could anyone run a "free server" for an mmorpg unless they had the source code? There has been no source code theft. There are no free servers.
Even if there were, what would it matter? You can't port a character or items from one server to another, so what would be the point of running a free server? You'd have a vast, empty world for you and your 31337 friends to play in with nothing but NPCs for interaction. Wow. Fun.
The only hacks that have existed in the game are the typical speedhacks and bots and Blizzard has dealty with those very quickly and very aggressively.
Perspective? You just flamed someone for using the common (albeit incorrect) plural term for a bunch of plastic toys. Are you under a lot of stress or something? Did it make you feel better?
It's possible to keep it secret (sleeves and folding, etc.) if you want to, but it's not required.
Without the dampening effect of a reelection campaign, i'd expect his second four years to be even worse than the first. (I can only imagine how bad it will get after he declares martial law and appoints himself President for Life. Kidding. Sort of. I hope.)
A real pedantic twit would tell you all about the Visigoths in some strange knowledge-based pecker-measuring attempt. He would affect superiority to the inferior beings who use a term's well-accepted alternate meaning, while everyone who read his post would pitty him and think he should really get out more.
It doesn't matter whether the Goth subculture has anything in common with the Visigoths or with Gothic art and architecture. That's what they're called. Learn to recognize irony and humor and get over it.
How sad is it that i have to quote to you the post to which you are responding?
"This report may or may not be accurate, but the problem (if it exists) is not with the sample size."
Inaccurate reporting of the numbers is not a problem with sample size. Anti-US bias is not a problem with sample size. In a larger or smaller sample those same problems would exist in approximately the same proportion.
Polls in the US (Population 294 million)regularly use a sample size of 1000 and get a margin of error of only 3%.
This report may or may not be accurate, but the problem (if it exists) is not with the sample size.
Do i really need to remind you that you are a faceless anonymous person on the internet? For all anyone here knows, you're a dog with an excellent vocabulary.
I believe Saddam was a bad man and i believe the mass graves exist. I've seen sources that back that up. I have seen nothing to prove to me that this study was politically motivated or that their statistical sampling is less accurate than they claim it to be.
Surely some of the intelligence you read has been declassified and made public, or at least leaked to the media so that you could provide us with a link to a reality-based news organization that backs you up?
Woof?
Are you trying to dispute the number of people killed in the Iran-Iraq war, or the ones in this study? The numbers i quoted were in response to the grandparent claim (mostly typo, i think) of 900,000,000 dead in the Iran-Iraq war.
The Iran-Iraq figures are pretty well accepted given that they're 20 years old. This new study certainly should be looked at with skepticism, but that doesn't immediately make it false. Let's take it as an early eastimate and go from there.
People often use claims "common sense" to cover lies or ignorance. Why should i believe you aren't doing that? BTW, are you talking about faith-based reality or reality-based reality?
Perhaps i should have been more specific. Mass graves do exist and Saddam was a bad man. I'll give you those. I was more interested in the source for the claims about who is behind this study and why they did it.
I don't think their count is accurate either, but at least they trying to back up their claims. Where's your source?
September 12
Yeah, there's a few extra zeros there and a multiplier. Iraq claimed to have killed 800,000 Iranians, Iran claimed to have lost 200,000. Experts put the number at around 300,000 give or take 100,000.
Thanks to their superior military and intelligence (courtesy of US backing) Iraq's body count was estimated at 1/2 of Iran's.
RTFA
The most common cause of death is as a direct result of violence, mostly caused by coalition air strikes...
I don't think anyone really believes him when he says this. He's just trying to appear less evil to uninformed undecided voters. His base knows he's with them in sending gays to hell and his opponents know he's just saying whatever it will take to get him re-installed in office.
Incidentally, being against LGBT rights now is like being against Civil Rights in the 50's. I'm looking forward to the time when we can all look back on this as another shameful hurdle we overcame.