If you come at it assuming that someone who has an abortion is akin to a rapist then your analogy makes perfect sense.
If we come to it from the assumption that someone who has an abortion is in a difficult situation and needs help, then the same analogy would look like this:
I just want to make sure that people who are raped don't feel shame over what happened to them.
Which one is closer to the truth? Perhaps neither one.
That's the problem with analogies - they're almost never a perfect fit for the actual topic at hand.
I hate to have a battle of wits with an unarmed person, but that's most of the entertainment available on slashdot.
If you keep going down this road just because you're getting your ass handed to you in a debate then we aren't going to have a debate at all, we're going to have a flame war. And if that old retread "battle of wits with an unarmed person" is the best you've got to offer, you're going to get your ass handed to you there too.
Now that that's out of the way...
The fact of the matter is that your position is untenable. You can try to lump everyone in as pro-abortion or anti-abortion and say that there is no middle ground, but that is not an accurate reflection of reality.
There are people who work to provide contraceptives and sex education in order to ensure that there are fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions. Many of those same people are also pro-choice. They vote and protest to keep abortion legal. Your whole argument falls apart in the face of this plain fact.
If your theory doesn't match reality, then who is wrong: you, or reality?
As much as you may be in love with the truthiness of your belief that people who are pro-choice are pro-abortion, that observation is ultimately useless because it ignores what they are actually doing and saying and does not give us any insight into the dilemma. Most pro-choice people know what an abortion really is. They understand the physical, emotional, societal, and spiritual repercussions of abortion. Implying that they are deluding themselves into ignoring the facts of abortion by using the term "pro-choice" is condescending and, for the most part, false.
The fact of the matter is that the terms we are discussing are situationally accurate. In the context of the abortion debate, "pro-life" means protecting the life of the foetus. It does not have to mean that they want to protect bacteria from being killed just becasue some pedantic nitpicker has a twig up his butt about the term. By the same token, in the same context, "pro-choice" does not have to mean you want to allow people to choose to kill any baby at any time.
The terms are as accurate as short catchphrases that encompass diverse groups of people can be.
On that note, just how do others feel about someone who makes a decision to leave, accepting another job offer, but then changes his mind when cash is thrown on the table? I guess it depends on the reason you are leaving. Is it for career development? To get away from a bad boss? To find something more interesting? Or just pay?
Accepting a counter-offer is almost always a bad idea. If the sole reason that you were leaving because they weren't paying you enough then maybe it's worthwhile, but... If you were worth that amount to them why weren't they paying you that to start with? Is that counter-offer going to come back to haunt you later? E.G. "We love your work, but you're not getting raise this year because you got that big one when you threatened to leave." or "Now that you're making more money we're going to expect a lot more out of you."
If money was not the only issue then more money isn't going to change the other issues.
You are wrong. He's taking your own argument and showing its inherent weakness by extrapolating it to its logical extreme. Once you accept that only actions and results matter, you're not too far from "the ends justify the means" and i don't think you really want to go there.
If you are working to help people be able to get an abortion, then you are quite simply pro-abortion.
I'm not going to argue that this statement is false (though i do believe that argument could be made), but it does miss the point. Pro-choice activist are not, for the most part, helping women get abortions. They are helping women maintain their right to choose to have an abortion if the need arises. Hence, even by your definition, they are pro-choice. Health-care workers help people get abortions, and for the most part, i would call them pro-helping-people.
But I am carrying on the fight against political correctness. Both the terms "pro-choice" and "pro-life" are PC terms and as such they are both abhorrent to anyone who loves accuracy.
They're not PC terms - they're PR terms. Pro-lifers want to be seen as up-with-people do-gooders instead of authoritarian meddlers. Pro-choicers want to be seen as defenders of freedom instead of baby killers. The fact that the pro-choice term happens to fit what they actually do and believe just means that sometimes there is truth in advertising. The fight against political correctness is all too often just the fight to be a dick.
No, "pro-abortion" is not the correct label. "Pro-choice" is. The vast majority people who are pro-choice do not promote abortion, they want to promote the woman's right to choose, hence they are "pro-choice." The most strident "pro-choice" activist i ever met didn't promote abortion itself although she did work to combat the culture of shame that surrounds the decision to have an abortion. Her attitude was that even though having an abortion is never a good choice, sometimes it's the best choice available and women shouldn't be made to feel like criminals for making it.
I do believe that "anti-abortion" is a more accurate term for the other side than "pro-life," but if one side can make semantic distinctions about what their term means then the other side gets to as well. "Pro-life?" If you say so.
Is it just me or does Second Life seem more and more irrelevant every day. I've never tried it, but my perception of it is that it's pretty much just another dork clique. The only people who seem to care about it at all are the people who are really into it already - to the rest of the world it's a non-entity.* It's not the Metaverse. Hell, it's not even as interesting as WoW or EVE because of the entry barriers and the learning curve associated with content development as well as just the overall amateur/capitalist sheen of it.
Is there any chance that it will ever become something more than a playground for for a very minute minority, or is it just going to slowly cannibalize itself into oblivion.
(* That's just my perception - maybe i've missed something?)
It became a protest as soon as the kid decided to stand up for himself and not submit to what he thought was racial profiling. The fact that the officers overreacted so badly gives credence to the need for such a protest.
You don't seem to comprehend that the officers' choice was not simply:
A) taser B) walk away
There were many other options that involved resolving the situation with less disruption and less violence. Getting tasered is not the inescapable consequence of not showing your ID when an officer asks to see it. The kid made a choice and should probably have been arrested for it. The officer made a choice and should probably be in jail for it.
Ignoring whether or not they should have been hassling this kid in the first place, the whole problem with your analysis is that you are assuming that it is the cops' job to give the student "what he deserved".
It's not. Their job is to investigate crimes, arrest suspects, and deliver them to trial. The courts take care of deciding guilt or innocence and handing out appropriate punishment. The taser is a less-than-lethal weapon should be used to subdue suspects, not to punish them.
The kid they tasered was not being violent or threatening, he was simply not cooperating and being very vocal about it, which is entirely within his rights. (You are not legally required to help the police arrest you - you just can't fight them when they try to do so.) At any time the cops could have handcuffed him and carried him out, but instead they tasered him repeatedly and after each tasering they demanded that he stand up and walk out. It looks like these cops got pissed off at a mouthy kid and instead of doing their jobs they decided to teach him a lesson.
You can talk about what a good little pussy-boy you would have been, and what a little punk the kid they tasered was, but that doesn't change the fact that the cops abused their power.
And by the way... "He deserves to feel pain for wasting MY tax dollars." So what's the going rate for $ to pain conversions you sick, arrogant, sadistick fuck?
It is bullshit. He makes up something out of thin air to be the solution for the problem and then claims to have solved the problem.
Aside from getting a cool new symbol instead of "Error" when you try to divide by 0, how is this useful? Personally, I could already put error-handling code in to take care of divide-by-zero errors and now i would just need to put in code to handle Nullity, so i've gained nothing.
In order to win an anonymous argument on the internet you just wished (perhaps hypothetically) for your opponent, his friends, and all the innocent bystanders near them to be killed. Think about what that says about you.
Regardless of the validity of your claims, you have lost all credibility because you have proven that you don't have a sense of perspective.
And since this is an article about (primarily) mmos...
I have a problem with the methodology of using graduate students and research assistants as "experts". A graduate student is someone who is in the process of becoming an expert, but speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time around graduate students in the humanities and behavioral sciences, i would not classify the vast majority of them as experts in their chosen field of study. They're usually chock full of opinions, but woefully short on actual expertise.
My dog could get into grad schoo, but that doesn't make him an expert...except on the internet.
I think you're delusional. It was all about the bad press. Either that or one of their server admins took it up as a special project on his own. Blizzard provides pretty minimal customer service to their millions of Mac/Win players - they certainly don't care enough about Linux to make it any kind of priority.
If he was not under arrest then they had no authority to taser him. If he was under arrest and simply being uncooperative then they had no reason to taser him - they should have handcuffed him and carried him out.
Maybe the guy deserved to be arrested (for failure to produce student id - problematic), but i've heard no reports (and seen nothing in the video to indicate) that he was violent or physically threatening in any way towards the officers, so there is no reason to use the taser. The taser is a non-lethal defensive weapon, not a tool for encouraging compliance. It may be similar to a cattle prod, but we are not cattle. A bad attitude is not a sufficent reason to use the taser.
Sounds like a lot of work for very little actual improvement in the game. Seriously - what's the significant difference between a new village sprouting up with NPCs who meet the same needs the old NPCs did and the old village simply respawning? It might give you a slightly better illusion of a dynamic world, but it's really going to come down to a semi-random name generator and a few algorithms. Even worse, it's open to horrible abuse unless the algorithms are so tightly controlled that it's almost like having the original NPCs respawn.
Areas are designed very carefully. When you add randomness you start losing balance and convenience. When its unbalanced and a hassle to play then people stop playing. Maybe you think that with a sufficiently robust system you could avoid all that, but that's when you have to ask yourself "Is it worth it?" A few thousand hard-core players will praise your dynamic content up and down, high and low. A few million potential customers will quit your game (or not pick it up in the first place) because it seems confusing and too much like work.
Maybe you're in the camp of the game artistes who say that they'd rather have 10 quality customers than be the McDonals's of gaming, but if that's you then you're never going to get the funding it would require to pull off such an ambitious project.
Robust, dynamic, realistec, deep - meh. Fun is what counts.
1) With magic (or a sufficiently advanced technology yada yada) it certainly is possible that one ubersword could be a bajillion times better than another plain, well-made sword.
but...
2) That's beside the point. "Realistic" is not a sufficient justification for any element of game design because realistic is not a suficient condition for fun. In fact, realistic is quite often not fun at all. Many table-top RPGs sacrifice fun in the name of realism. They toss out convoluted systems where every move in combat has to be rolled on three different tables with modifiers for each roll based on the prevailing atmospheric conditions, sunspot activity, and the quality of the bed the pc slept in the night before. They allow the totally realistic outcome of a goatherder with a sling taking down the high-warlord, dragonslaying, barbarian king with a single shot. Fun if you're the goatherder, not fun if you're the barbarian, and only fun for the goatherder until his eyes gets scratched out by a small rabid housecat - another totally realistic possibility.
and finally...
3) Rewarding time invested and encouraging unhealthy amounts of play is a whole separate issue. It is possible to enjoy these games without sacrificing your life to them. You will get farther faster if you prostrate yourself to the game, but it's not the only way to play.
You're right on both counts: i am being an ass and i am enjoying it.
If you want to post off-topic pedantry that's fine, but when you post off-topic pedantry that's factually incorrect, you pretty much open yourself to a cheap shot or two. As far as public rebukes go, my first comment was pretty tame. At any rate what exactly was the point he was trying to make? If it's so minor as to be inconsequential, why bother picking that nit at all? If it's worth commenting, why isn't it worth doing the 30-seconds of research it would take to make sure you know what you're talking about?
Read my third comment (http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=203485& cid=16642589) for why i chose to respond the way i did the second time. The first time he was just wrong, the second time he was just being a condescending prick.
At any rate, i'd rather be a well-informed asshole than a polite idiot, even when it comes to discussing something as pointless as this, but that's just me. To each their own.
What i really think is that it burns you up to have been publicly called-out for being wrong. Because of that you have to pick an issue to be right on and apparently that issue is politeness and decorum. I suppose we should just be thankful that it's not grammar and spelling.
So in the interest of making you feel better about yourself: You win - you're right, i'm a dick. I will no longer go around correcting people and making snide comments. Congratulations and thanks for teaching me the lesson in manners i so desperately needed. You have singlehandedly made the world a better place. Bravo. Well done.
You think less of me. Oh the shame. Somehow i'll just have to try and pick up the pieces of my shattered life and go on. I'm sure it'll be a hollow shell of an existence, full of misery and regret, but maybe, just maybe, some day i can redeem myself and earn back your favor. Oh wait, nevermind. I cared there for a second, but i'm over it now.
Welcome to the internet Virg. Bring along a sense of humor next time you visit.
WoW isn't the most popular by a long shot. Take a look at the numbers for Lineage, and you'll see what I mean.
Latest numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ put Lineage and Lineage II combined at about 3 million subscribers. WoW is at about 6.5 million and on their website they recently claimed to be over 7 million. That sounds like a pretty big lead to me.
Ain't it a shame when facts get in the way of making a point? What was your point anyway?
Slashdot Mirror
If you come at it assuming that someone who has an abortion is akin to a rapist then your analogy makes perfect sense.
If we come to it from the assumption that someone who has an abortion is in a difficult situation and needs help, then the same analogy would look like this:
I just want to make sure that people who are raped don't feel shame over what happened to them.
Which one is closer to the truth? Perhaps neither one.
That's the problem with analogies - they're almost never a perfect fit for the actual topic at hand.
Now that that's out of the way...
The fact of the matter is that your position is untenable. You can try to lump everyone in as pro-abortion or anti-abortion and say that there is no middle ground, but that is not an accurate reflection of reality.
There are people who work to provide contraceptives and sex education in order to ensure that there are fewer unwanted pregnancies and fewer abortions. Many of those same people are also pro-choice. They vote and protest to keep abortion legal. Your whole argument falls apart in the face of this plain fact.
If your theory doesn't match reality, then who is wrong: you, or reality?
As much as you may be in love with the truthiness of your belief that people who are pro-choice are pro-abortion, that observation is ultimately useless because it ignores what they are actually doing and saying and does not give us any insight into the dilemma. Most pro-choice people know what an abortion really is. They understand the physical, emotional, societal, and spiritual repercussions of abortion. Implying that they are deluding themselves into ignoring the facts of abortion by using the term "pro-choice" is condescending and, for the most part, false.
The fact of the matter is that the terms we are discussing are situationally accurate. In the context of the abortion debate, "pro-life" means protecting the life of the foetus. It does not have to mean that they want to protect bacteria from being killed just becasue some pedantic nitpicker has a twig up his butt about the term. By the same token, in the same context, "pro-choice" does not have to mean you want to allow people to choose to kill any baby at any time.
The terms are as accurate as short catchphrases that encompass diverse groups of people can be.
If you were worth that amount to them why weren't they paying you that to start with?
Is that counter-offer going to come back to haunt you later? E.G. "We love your work, but you're not getting raise this year because you got that big one when you threatened to leave." or "Now that you're making more money we're going to expect a lot more out of you."
If money was not the only issue then more money isn't going to change the other issues.
You are wrong. He's taking your own argument and showing its inherent weakness by extrapolating it to its logical extreme. Once you accept that only actions and results matter, you're not too far from "the ends justify the means" and i don't think you really want to go there.
No, "pro-abortion" is not the correct label. "Pro-choice" is. The vast majority people who are pro-choice do not promote abortion, they want to promote the woman's right to choose, hence they are "pro-choice." The most strident "pro-choice" activist i ever met didn't promote abortion itself although she did work to combat the culture of shame that surrounds the decision to have an abortion. Her attitude was that even though having an abortion is never a good choice, sometimes it's the best choice available and women shouldn't be made to feel like criminals for making it.
I do believe that "anti-abortion" is a more accurate term for the other side than "pro-life," but if one side can make semantic distinctions about what their term means then the other side gets to as well. "Pro-life?" If you say so.
Is it just me or does Second Life seem more and more irrelevant every day. I've never tried it, but my perception of it is that it's pretty much just another dork clique. The only people who seem to care about it at all are the people who are really into it already - to the rest of the world it's a non-entity.* It's not the Metaverse. Hell, it's not even as interesting as WoW or EVE because of the entry barriers and the learning curve associated with content development as well as just the overall amateur/capitalist sheen of it.
Is there any chance that it will ever become something more than a playground for for a very minute minority, or is it just going to slowly cannibalize itself into oblivion.
(* That's just my perception - maybe i've missed something?)
"obviously they had trouble carrying him"
From where do you infer this? Every source i have read says they never tried to carry him and he took no violent or threatening action.
Carry him is exactly the suggestion i would have made. It's so obvious that even you figured it out. Stop creating excuses for the cops.
It became a protest as soon as the kid decided to stand up for himself and not submit to what he thought was racial profiling. The fact that the officers overreacted so badly gives credence to the need for such a protest.
You don't seem to comprehend that the officers' choice was not simply:
A) taser
B) walk away
There were many other options that involved resolving the situation with less disruption and less violence. Getting tasered is not the inescapable consequence of not showing your ID when an officer asks to see it. The kid made a choice and should probably have been arrested for it. The officer made a choice and should probably be in jail for it.
If the bus driver could stop or swerve to avoid you but didn't then the bus driver should be prosecuted for what he did.
These cops could have stopped or chosen some other course of action. They should be held responsible.
Ignoring whether or not they should have been hassling this kid in the first place, the whole problem with your analysis is that you are assuming that it is the cops' job to give the student "what he deserved".
It's not. Their job is to investigate crimes, arrest suspects, and deliver them to trial. The courts take care of deciding guilt or innocence and handing out appropriate punishment. The taser is a less-than-lethal weapon should be used to subdue suspects, not to punish them.
The kid they tasered was not being violent or threatening, he was simply not cooperating and being very vocal about it, which is entirely within his rights. (You are not legally required to help the police arrest you - you just can't fight them when they try to do so.) At any time the cops could have handcuffed him and carried him out, but instead they tasered him repeatedly and after each tasering they demanded that he stand up and walk out. It looks like these cops got pissed off at a mouthy kid and instead of doing their jobs they decided to teach him a lesson.
You can talk about what a good little pussy-boy you would have been, and what a little punk the kid they tasered was, but that doesn't change the fact that the cops abused their power.
And by the way... "He deserves to feel pain for wasting MY tax dollars." So what's the going rate for $ to pain conversions you sick, arrogant, sadistick fuck?
It is bullshit. He makes up something out of thin air to be the solution for the problem and then claims to have solved the problem.
Aside from getting a cool new symbol instead of "Error" when you try to divide by 0, how is this useful? Personally, I could already put error-handling code in to take care of divide-by-zero errors and now i would just need to put in code to handle Nullity, so i've gained nothing.
In order to win an anonymous argument on the internet you just wished (perhaps hypothetically) for your opponent, his friends, and all the innocent bystanders near them to be killed. Think about what that says about you.
Regardless of the validity of your claims, you have lost all credibility because you have proven that you don't have a sense of perspective.
And since this is an article about (primarily) mmos...
GG L2Argue Nub. Pwnt!
In the spirit of the source article...
Screenshots or it didn't happen.
I have a problem with the methodology of using graduate students and research assistants as "experts". A graduate student is someone who is in the process of becoming an expert, but speaking as someone who has spent a lot of time around graduate students in the humanities and behavioral sciences, i would not classify the vast majority of them as experts in their chosen field of study. They're usually chock full of opinions, but woefully short on actual expertise.
My dog could get into grad schoo, but that doesn't make him an expert...except on the internet.
I think you're delusional. It was all about the bad press. Either that or one of their server admins took it up as a special project on his own. Blizzard provides pretty minimal customer service to their millions of Mac/Win players - they certainly don't care enough about Linux to make it any kind of priority.
If he was not under arrest then they had no authority to taser him.
If he was under arrest and simply being uncooperative then they had no reason to taser him - they should have handcuffed him and carried him out.
Maybe the guy deserved to be arrested (for failure to produce student id - problematic), but i've heard no reports (and seen nothing in the video to indicate) that he was violent or physically threatening in any way towards the officers, so there is no reason to use the taser. The taser is a non-lethal defensive weapon, not a tool for encouraging compliance. It may be similar to a cattle prod, but we are not cattle. A bad attitude is not a sufficent reason to use the taser.
This was abuse of power cut and dried.
Sounds like a lot of work for very little actual improvement in the game. Seriously - what's the significant difference between a new village sprouting up with NPCs who meet the same needs the old NPCs did and the old village simply respawning? It might give you a slightly better illusion of a dynamic world, but it's really going to come down to a semi-random name generator and a few algorithms. Even worse, it's open to horrible abuse unless the algorithms are so tightly controlled that it's almost like having the original NPCs respawn.
Areas are designed very carefully. When you add randomness you start losing balance and convenience. When its unbalanced and a hassle to play then people stop playing. Maybe you think that with a sufficiently robust system you could avoid all that, but that's when you have to ask yourself "Is it worth it?" A few thousand hard-core players will praise your dynamic content up and down, high and low. A few million potential customers will quit your game (or not pick it up in the first place) because it seems confusing and too much like work.
Maybe you're in the camp of the game artistes who say that they'd rather have 10 quality customers than be the McDonals's of gaming, but if that's you then you're never going to get the funding it would require to pull off such an ambitious project.
Robust, dynamic, realistec, deep - meh. Fun is what counts.
1) With magic (or a sufficiently advanced technology yada yada) it certainly is possible that one ubersword could be a bajillion times better than another plain, well-made sword.
but...
2) That's beside the point. "Realistic" is not a sufficient justification for any element of game design because realistic is not a suficient condition for fun. In fact, realistic is quite often not fun at all. Many table-top RPGs sacrifice fun in the name of realism. They toss out convoluted systems where every move in combat has to be rolled on three different tables with modifiers for each roll based on the prevailing atmospheric conditions, sunspot activity, and the quality of the bed the pc slept in the night before. They allow the totally realistic outcome of a goatherder with a sling taking down the high-warlord, dragonslaying, barbarian king with a single shot. Fun if you're the goatherder, not fun if you're the barbarian, and only fun for the goatherder until his eyes gets scratched out by a small rabid housecat - another totally realistic possibility.
and finally...
3) Rewarding time invested and encouraging unhealthy amounts of play is a whole separate issue. It is possible to enjoy these games without sacrificing your life to them. You will get farther faster if you prostrate yourself to the game, but it's not the only way to play.
Ooooh! Rebuke me again! I've been a naughty slashdotter!
You're right on both counts: i am being an ass and i am enjoying it.
& cid=16642589) for why i chose to respond the way i did the second time. The first time he was just wrong, the second time he was just being a condescending prick.
If you want to post off-topic pedantry that's fine, but when you post off-topic pedantry that's factually incorrect, you pretty much open yourself to a cheap shot or two. As far as public rebukes go, my first comment was pretty tame. At any rate what exactly was the point he was trying to make? If it's so minor as to be inconsequential, why bother picking that nit at all? If it's worth commenting, why isn't it worth doing the 30-seconds of research it would take to make sure you know what you're talking about?
Read my third comment (http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=203485
At any rate, i'd rather be a well-informed asshole than a polite idiot, even when it comes to discussing something as pointless as this, but that's just me. To each their own.
What i really think is that it burns you up to have been publicly called-out for being wrong. Because of that you have to pick an issue to be right on and apparently that issue is politeness and decorum. I suppose we should just be thankful that it's not grammar and spelling.
So in the interest of making you feel better about yourself: You win - you're right, i'm a dick. I will no longer go around correcting people and making snide comments. Congratulations and thanks for teaching me the lesson in manners i so desperately needed. You have singlehandedly made the world a better place. Bravo. Well done.
You think less of me. Oh the shame. Somehow i'll just have to try and pick up the pieces of my shattered life and go on. I'm sure it'll be a hollow shell of an existence, full of misery and regret, but maybe, just maybe, some day i can redeem myself and earn back your favor. Oh wait, nevermind. I cared there for a second, but i'm over it now.
Welcome to the internet Virg. Bring along a sense of humor next time you visit.
WoW isn't the most popular by a long shot. Take a look at the numbers for Lineage, and you'll see what I mean.
Latest numbers from http://www.mmogchart.com/ put Lineage and Lineage II combined at about 3 million subscribers. WoW is at about 6.5 million and on their website they recently claimed to be over 7 million. That sounds like a pretty big lead to me.
Ain't it a shame when facts get in the way of making a point? What was your point anyway?
It's been done: http://www.columbinegame.com/