For all the other innovations that Valve pushes, they don't have these basic features that most modern FPSes have.
Valve has taken the approach that they are great at making fun action shooters, and others are great at making various types of plugins and mods, especially for the servers. They created the marketplace for those and over time the better software has more or less won out. There's nothing wrong with this model any more than there is with a model like Bungie's, where everything is strictly controlled. They both make heaps of money and legions of dedicated players.
I'm not saying you're wrong for being displeased with them not including more features, just trying to shed light.
What a crock of BS. 'it downscaled it'? OMGWTF BBQ??? You can play full HD content shot on your home HD camcorder for all you choose. If you don't have a HDCP monitor, only the protected ones that have a flag set(don't think this flag is set on ANY media yet?) will not play. Simply stay away and watch the non protected full HD to your heart's content.
You know that law that says any cop that stops you is allowed to rape your mouth, and you have to comply? Someone told me they were concerned about getting raped in the mouth and didn't think it was a good law.
What a crock of BS. 'raped in the mouth'? OMGWTF BBQ??? You can walk down the street or sit in your home without getting raped in the mouth for all you choose. If you don't bother a cop that rapes people in the mouth (don't think ANY cops have decided to start raping yet?), you won't get raped in the mouth. Simply stay away from cops and enjoy not getting raped in the mouth to your heart's content.
When faced with a new programming task, the first thing they do is fire up Google.
Heavens to Betsy, I've seen this happen so many times it's insane. There was even this one time when someone on my team was working on a problem, and the guy picked up a book. That's right, a fucking BOOK. I cringed, but that's just how some people were made.
After seeing that I wrote out my resignation on vellum, sealed it with wax, and left it for my boss. If that's the kind of shop they wanted to run, they could do it without me.
You posted an eloquent reply, but we'll have to agree to disagree on it. While it's true that survival means more than just short-term, your claim that "sustainable living is only a short term solution" is wrong, and here's why. Sustainable living is, by its very nature, sustainable indefinitely (look it up), and living in such a way provided over three million years of security for humans and their direct ancestors. That is, in your words, "medium to long term (thousands of years to billions of years)" survival. To wit, this was through a number of disasters and climate changes with pre-technological societies (herein lies the "effortless" part).
Given that, in your words, we have a readily available means to keep our species alive for the medium to long term, the focus should be on making Earth more hospitable for us, not on space exploration. Focusing on making space hospitable is akin to trying to develop an iPod before the record player. Certainly there's some benefit to be had, but if the long-term survival of the species is truly important than the order of operations is important, and wasting resources now on making space hospitable is just that: wasteful.
I think you may agree with me on principle with this: you said the only way to ensure our survival is to be sure a world catastrophe doesn't kill all humans. Given the size and resiliency of Earth, the access to materials, and the known working environment, making a sustainable and hospitable environment here that would withstand catastrophe is a far easier plan than making one that would survive catastrophe outside Earth.
This is true even with your asteroid example. Like I said in my first post, Earth's worst day in the last billion years was a picnic compared to Mars' best day. People consistently underestimate Earth as a hospitable place, and underestimate space as a hostile place.
The absolutely best path is to make sure we can survive on Earth before we try to survive out there.
space travel and investigation is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species
I'm calling bullshit on this. What is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species is figuring out how to live sustainably on Earth. There's nothing wrong with Earth. It has some bad spots, sure, but it's a good planet and the best one anyone has ever found.
People who think the only way we can survive is to get off this rock are absolutely blind--this planet has effortlessly supported life for four billion years, and has done so on its worst days (Permian-Triassic, Ordovician-Silurian). Walk outside on Mars' best day in the last ten million years and you have zero chance of living. Who is more likely to survive: the most clever species from Earth with all the resources that Earth has to offer, or the most clever species from Earth without any of the resources that Earth has to offer?
Because of this requirement: How many people live in the house (so far as the world can tell, it's one). With NAT, do I have one IP-enabled device or twenty in my house? Which devices are the chattiest? The least chatty? Which one is always doing SMTP, and which one is always doing web browsing? And what if I need to work with multiple subnets, or with DHCP servers? Like the other person that replied to you said, I don't have control over the network in the same manner I do with NAT.
NAT is a very clear demarcation: that side is your side, this side is my side, and I can do anything I want on my side, without anyone knowing what I'm doing.
I guess it comes from a particular ideology. Just as no one needs to know what's going on in my physical house, no one needs to know what's going on in my network. Some people will talk to census takers, because what's the harm in telling the government how many people live in your house and what their ages are and other demographic information? Other people, like me, fail to see how someone else having that knowledge is worth giving up that privacy.
This assumes that I would want everything to Just Work When I Plug It In. For the same reason my house is enclosed by walls with a door, I use NAT. Anyone that comes knocking at my door won't know:
How many people live in the house (so far as the world can tell, it's one)
Who is currently home and who is out
Any personally identifying information about anyone inside
How to navigate the halls of my home
Similarly, if my kids want to leave the house they have to come to me specifically for permission. Finally, the rest of the world terminates at my door. The rules of my house are mine, and my little sandbox can be bent and twisted and manipulated in any way I like, and thanks to the walls and the door, no one will be the wiser.
I agree with you for most of this, but Tivo loses to Windows Media Center with me for one reason: if you want to do anything with the Tivo while watching a program, you have to stop watching the program to do it. Windows Media Center ALWAYS keeps the video running and displayed, and is viewable no matter what part of the application you're using. But with Tivo... want to see what programs you have recorded? Stop watching what you're watching first. Want to see what will record next? Ditto. Want to schedule another recording? Ditto. Want to browse a remote computer for videos to watch? Ditto. Want to switch back to what you were watching before you did any of these things? A jarring two second delay.
I rip on Microsoft as much as the next person, but the people who made Windows Media Center did a really stand-up job and deserve credit for getting right the things Tivo fucks up (and continues to fuck up, years later).
DVDs are way more sensitive to damage than CDs, which were not that robust in the first place. It seems to me that every new optical format will be progressively more sensitive to scratches and other kinds of surface damage/warping.
A Blu-Ray disk can be 50 GB in size. That's 429,496,729,600 bits of data. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty impressed that I can throw 429 billion individual pieces of data across the room like a frisbee, bounce it off the wall, then drop it in a player and still watch the movie on it. I can't do that with a VHS tape. Or a hard drive. Or a computer processor. I find that of low-entropy high-complexity items, optical media is pretty durable.
And if no one can get through the terminal to get to the airplanes, those big bucks sit on the ground without passengers. To the aggressor it's far more valuable to shut down an airport full of planes, disrupting all inbound and outbound air travel, than it is to shut down one plane.
What had a bigger financial impact: the FAA shutting down all flights for two days after 9/11, or the destruction of four planes?
ICBMs operate against units with a death roll--either the ICBM kills the unit or the unit survives unscathed. Better to soften them up with a cruise missile.
For what it's worth, I use Twitter so I can update my girlfriend about what I'm doing (for example, if I'm going to be playing Civilization I'll tweet as much so she knows I can't hear the phone and that I'll be busy for a few hours). Not all of us are self-absorbed assholes who feel everything about us is important enough for everyone else to know.
two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII
Except that the myth of a protracted war with Japan if Hiroshima and Nagasaki hadn't been bombed is only a myth.
"During the days before that fateful August 6, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. "We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily," one of his staff members recalled."
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." (as stated by Dwight Eisenhower)
I fail to see why someones criminal record should be accessible to all after they have paid their debt to soceity.
According to the law they have not yet repaid their debt to society. Their debt to society has been determined by the legislature and approved by the executive to include public registration as a sex offender after release from prison.
This is entirely common; for example, persons released on parole are still subject to specific restrictions like checking in, curfews, searches, and no travel outside certain areas. Probation is another such example.
The number of Vista users primarily is determined by the number of computers that come preinstalled with Vista. Windows 95's release, when people lined up and charged into the stores like it was Black Friday, is the appropriate contrast.
Windows Vista's sales numbers to people with computers that can run it but already run XP are low, and that's what's being discussed.
How many minutes of video on average (per day) are watched by internet users? I don't have any exact numbers, but I know some people who watch hours of video per day, but the majority of people do not watch any. Let's settle on 3 minutes.
So what you're saying is, "You're wrong and here's why: let x equal a number I've just made up, and let y equal a number I've just made up that is < x. Therefore x > y, therefore you're wrong. QED."
For what it's worth, Valve occasionally pops up a notice in Steam asking users if they'd like to participate in a hardware survey, so while it's true that the stats can be reported when running the CSS stress test it is not true that that is the only way they receive information for their surveys.
I agree that using Valve surveys alone is a poor metric, but they're a leader for this type of poll and offer popular, high-end games like The Orange Box (Half Life 2 Episode 2, Portal, TF2), Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Quake Wars, Lost Planet (the first DX10 game), STALKER, and they're the sole purveyor of the entire Half Life franchise, so it's not like they're polling only a niche of CSS players.
from a consumer point of view I would've thought that just selling the phone as a standalone device in the Apple stores and allowing the customer to choose their provider... would be perfectly acceptable
Apple doesn't do this for the same reason they don't sell iPods without iTunes and Macs without OS X; they're providing the user with an end-to-end experience. To whit:
You walk into an Apple store, buy an iPhone, and go home
You connect it to your computer by USB
iTunes opens, walks you through the two minute activation process over the web, and links your new phone and AT&T account to your Apple ID
In addition:
Every iPhone has the same available plans (everyone will always have unlimited data)
Every iPhone has the same feature set (e.g., visual voicemail, unlimited data gives you unrestricted use of Safari, YouTube and Mail)
Every iPhone has the same reception
If people could use the iPhone with any provider Apple (and the person) would lose the cohesiveness of the activation, there would be discontinuity among the user-base, and there would be a lot of angry people who didn't realize that putting their T-Mobile SIM into their iPhone and opening MySpace on Safari would get them a 10 cent per kilobyte charge for a $4000 bill at the end of the month. The people that would have the technical understanding ahead of time not to fuck this up don't seem to be in the majority (based on my personal experience with the average person).
By restricting the options available to purchasers of iPhones Apple is containing the user's experience. It allows Apple and the user to have certain expectations and limits confusion and support problems. They do the same thing with Macs and OS X, which was the genesis of "It Just Works." As it is, iPhones "just work."
Therefore I would counter that allowing people to choose their provider is not perfectly acceptable but instead has a number of problems. There is no perfectly acceptable solution to make everyone happy, and Apple has done what they've always done by trying to make it "just work" for the crowd that wants it to "just work."
U of CA may be more comprehensible, but its NAME is UCSD. You call something by its name, not its descriptor. People don't call you "Human slashdot poster from outside America," or "the letter m followed by chanaud," they call you mchanaud. I have no idea what an mchanaud is, but it's incumbent upon me to learn what one is if I'm interested in a story about you.
It is never, ever referred to as "U of CA," and calling it "U of CA" is confusing to people who actually know what the University of California is, so forgive me if I seem unsympathetic to the Human Slashdot Poster from Outside America Who Uses Descriptors Instead of Names When Identifying Things to Avoid Confusion for Those of Us Who Care About non-American Readers.
It would have cost NASA about ten bucks to include a little brush to sweep over the solar panels. A tiny little push broom that just pushes the dust off over the edge would have solved this problem--how the fuck do you build a billion dollar robot without asking a third grader how to keep them clean?
A lobbyist - the most evil profession next to advertising executives
for Dow Chemical - a most evil company
"nearly died" when they got a $70 charge - to have "nearly died" over a $70 fee when you're a well paid lobbyist is insulting; being uninsured, breaking your leg on the job, getting fired from your minimum wage position because you can't work, then getting a $16,000 hospital bill is cause to have "nearly died" upon opening a bill
for their 20-year old daughter - who needs to get a job to buy some fucking scissors to cut the fucking umbilical cord
As for "it is their business - not yours," I would respectfully disagree. It became our business the moment they let themselves be interviewed and have the information published.
the statement of "medically unnecessary genital mutilation of infants." is just simply wrong
Pancreatic cancer has a 97% mortality rate for patients within five years of diagnosis (source). Therefore it is appropriate by your reasoning to remove the pancreas at birth.
Just because something can happen doesn't mean it is medically necessary to do something about it.
Hi, I'd like to cut off part of your dick. May I? What do you mean, no? How do you know it isn't better until you've lived both ways? I promise I will only cut off an insignificant part of your dick.
We're talking about involuntary and medically unnecessary genital mutilation of infants. We're talking about cutting off part of your dick. That bears repeating: We're talking about taking a knife to your dick and cutting off part of your dick. The fact that you're not on your way to your nearest Rabbi right now to have part of your dick cut off entirely invalidates and undermines your position.
Not only that, but you say You can't complain without having experienced it both ways. Oh, and if you are one of the few men that have lived both ways, your opinion doesn't matter. QED.
What amazes me is people who say "What's the big deal?" If it's no big deal for it to happen (which requires time and effort and has no logical or medical basis) then it's certainly less of a deal not to do it at all (which requires neither time nor effort, and doing nothing does not require a reason), therefore the logical choice is not to do it. When someone is old enough to make a conscious decision to have their genitals mutilated they can feel free (can't you hear the stampede of men rushing to have it done?).
Just remember, your lack of knowledge and understanding of the issue of male genital mutilation does not make your position the right one. You clearly demonstrate your dearth of insight (bifurcation, believing the issue is only about the possession or not of a foreskin, logical self-contradiction), so before you so quickly dismiss and insult people passionate about the topic perhaps you should try learning a thing or two first.
Slashdot Mirror
Valve has taken the approach that they are great at making fun action shooters, and others are great at making various types of plugins and mods, especially for the servers. They created the marketplace for those and over time the better software has more or less won out. There's nothing wrong with this model any more than there is with a model like Bungie's, where everything is strictly controlled. They both make heaps of money and legions of dedicated players.
I'm not saying you're wrong for being displeased with them not including more features, just trying to shed light.
You know that law that says any cop that stops you is allowed to rape your mouth, and you have to comply? Someone told me they were concerned about getting raped in the mouth and didn't think it was a good law.
What a crock of BS. 'raped in the mouth'? OMGWTF BBQ??? You can walk down the street or sit in your home without getting raped in the mouth for all you choose. If you don't bother a cop that rapes people in the mouth (don't think ANY cops have decided to start raping yet?), you won't get raped in the mouth. Simply stay away from cops and enjoy not getting raped in the mouth to your heart's content.
Heavens to Betsy, I've seen this happen so many times it's insane. There was even this one time when someone on my team was working on a problem, and the guy picked up a book. That's right, a fucking BOOK. I cringed, but that's just how some people were made.
After seeing that I wrote out my resignation on vellum, sealed it with wax, and left it for my boss. If that's the kind of shop they wanted to run, they could do it without me.
You posted an eloquent reply, but we'll have to agree to disagree on it. While it's true that survival means more than just short-term, your claim that "sustainable living is only a short term solution" is wrong, and here's why. Sustainable living is, by its very nature, sustainable indefinitely (look it up), and living in such a way provided over three million years of security for humans and their direct ancestors. That is, in your words, "medium to long term (thousands of years to billions of years)" survival. To wit, this was through a number of disasters and climate changes with pre-technological societies (herein lies the "effortless" part).
Given that, in your words, we have a readily available means to keep our species alive for the medium to long term, the focus should be on making Earth more hospitable for us, not on space exploration. Focusing on making space hospitable is akin to trying to develop an iPod before the record player. Certainly there's some benefit to be had, but if the long-term survival of the species is truly important than the order of operations is important, and wasting resources now on making space hospitable is just that: wasteful.
I think you may agree with me on principle with this: you said the only way to ensure our survival is to be sure a world catastrophe doesn't kill all humans. Given the size and resiliency of Earth, the access to materials, and the known working environment, making a sustainable and hospitable environment here that would withstand catastrophe is a far easier plan than making one that would survive catastrophe outside Earth.
This is true even with your asteroid example. Like I said in my first post, Earth's worst day in the last billion years was a picnic compared to Mars' best day. People consistently underestimate Earth as a hospitable place, and underestimate space as a hostile place.
The absolutely best path is to make sure we can survive on Earth before we try to survive out there.
I'm calling bullshit on this. What is absolutely fundamental for our survival as a species is figuring out how to live sustainably on Earth. There's nothing wrong with Earth. It has some bad spots, sure, but it's a good planet and the best one anyone has ever found.
People who think the only way we can survive is to get off this rock are absolutely blind--this planet has effortlessly supported life for four billion years, and has done so on its worst days (Permian-Triassic, Ordovician-Silurian). Walk outside on Mars' best day in the last ten million years and you have zero chance of living. Who is more likely to survive: the most clever species from Earth with all the resources that Earth has to offer, or the most clever species from Earth without any of the resources that Earth has to offer?
Because of this requirement: How many people live in the house (so far as the world can tell, it's one). With NAT, do I have one IP-enabled device or twenty in my house? Which devices are the chattiest? The least chatty? Which one is always doing SMTP, and which one is always doing web browsing? And what if I need to work with multiple subnets, or with DHCP servers? Like the other person that replied to you said, I don't have control over the network in the same manner I do with NAT.
NAT is a very clear demarcation: that side is your side, this side is my side, and I can do anything I want on my side, without anyone knowing what I'm doing.
I guess it comes from a particular ideology. Just as no one needs to know what's going on in my physical house, no one needs to know what's going on in my network. Some people will talk to census takers, because what's the harm in telling the government how many people live in your house and what their ages are and other demographic information? Other people, like me, fail to see how someone else having that knowledge is worth giving up that privacy.
Similarly, if my kids want to leave the house they have to come to me specifically for permission. Finally, the rest of the world terminates at my door. The rules of my house are mine, and my little sandbox can be bent and twisted and manipulated in any way I like, and thanks to the walls and the door, no one will be the wiser.
I agree with you for most of this, but Tivo loses to Windows Media Center with me for one reason: if you want to do anything with the Tivo while watching a program, you have to stop watching the program to do it. Windows Media Center ALWAYS keeps the video running and displayed, and is viewable no matter what part of the application you're using. But with Tivo... want to see what programs you have recorded? Stop watching what you're watching first. Want to see what will record next? Ditto. Want to schedule another recording? Ditto. Want to browse a remote computer for videos to watch? Ditto. Want to switch back to what you were watching before you did any of these things? A jarring two second delay.
I rip on Microsoft as much as the next person, but the people who made Windows Media Center did a really stand-up job and deserve credit for getting right the things Tivo fucks up (and continues to fuck up, years later).
And if no one can get through the terminal to get to the airplanes, those big bucks sit on the ground without passengers. To the aggressor it's far more valuable to shut down an airport full of planes, disrupting all inbound and outbound air travel, than it is to shut down one plane.
What had a bigger financial impact: the FAA shutting down all flights for two days after 9/11, or the destruction of four planes?
ICBMs operate against units with a death roll--either the ICBM kills the unit or the unit survives unscathed. Better to soften them up with a cruise missile.
For what it's worth, I use Twitter so I can update my girlfriend about what I'm doing (for example, if I'm going to be playing Civilization I'll tweet as much so she knows I can't hear the phone and that I'll be busy for a few hours). Not all of us are self-absorbed assholes who feel everything about us is important enough for everyone else to know.
This is entirely common; for example, persons released on parole are still subject to specific restrictions like checking in, curfews, searches, and no travel outside certain areas. Probation is another such example.
The number of Vista users primarily is determined by the number of computers that come preinstalled with Vista. Windows 95's release, when people lined up and charged into the stores like it was Black Friday, is the appropriate contrast.
Windows Vista's sales numbers to people with computers that can run it but already run XP are low, and that's what's being discussed.
For what it's worth, Valve occasionally pops up a notice in Steam asking users if they'd like to participate in a hardware survey, so while it's true that the stats can be reported when running the CSS stress test it is not true that that is the only way they receive information for their surveys.
I agree that using Valve surveys alone is a poor metric, but they're a leader for this type of poll and offer popular, high-end games like The Orange Box (Half Life 2 Episode 2, Portal, TF2), Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Quake Wars, Lost Planet (the first DX10 game), STALKER, and they're the sole purveyor of the entire Half Life franchise, so it's not like they're polling only a niche of CSS players.
Don't let something pesky like the first amendment get in the way of corporate economic productivity.
- You walk into an Apple store, buy an iPhone, and go home
- You connect it to your computer by USB
- iTunes opens, walks you through the two minute activation process over the web, and links your new phone and AT&T account to your Apple ID
In addition:- Every iPhone has the same available plans (everyone will always have unlimited data)
- Every iPhone has the same feature set (e.g., visual voicemail, unlimited data gives you unrestricted use of Safari, YouTube and Mail)
- Every iPhone has the same reception
If people could use the iPhone with any provider Apple (and the person) would lose the cohesiveness of the activation, there would be discontinuity among the user-base, and there would be a lot of angry people who didn't realize that putting their T-Mobile SIM into their iPhone and opening MySpace on Safari would get them a 10 cent per kilobyte charge for a $4000 bill at the end of the month. The people that would have the technical understanding ahead of time not to fuck this up don't seem to be in the majority (based on my personal experience with the average person).By restricting the options available to purchasers of iPhones Apple is containing the user's experience. It allows Apple and the user to have certain expectations and limits confusion and support problems. They do the same thing with Macs and OS X, which was the genesis of "It Just Works." As it is, iPhones "just work."
Therefore I would counter that allowing people to choose their provider is not perfectly acceptable but instead has a number of problems. There is no perfectly acceptable solution to make everyone happy, and Apple has done what they've always done by trying to make it "just work" for the crowd that wants it to "just work."
Reminds me of Family Guy, when Meg learned some boys she liked were eunuchs:
Boy 1: Hey, do you think that girl is hot?
Boy 2: No!
Boy 1: Me neither.
(high five)
Castrate your kids; save them from Internet porn.
U of CA may be more comprehensible, but its NAME is UCSD. You call something by its name, not its descriptor. People don't call you "Human slashdot poster from outside America," or "the letter m followed by chanaud," they call you mchanaud. I have no idea what an mchanaud is, but it's incumbent upon me to learn what one is if I'm interested in a story about you.
c id=8871818784+0+0+0&waisaction=retrieve) which specifically names it as "The University of California." This name is protected by California statute and the associated campus nicknames, e.g., UCSF, UCSD, UCLA, are protected trademarks (http://www.ucop.edu/ucophome/coordrev/ucpolicies/ trademarks/ucname_bg.html).
The University of California is a public trust defined by the California Constitution (article 9, section 9, http://www.leginfo.ca.gov/cgi-bin/waisgate?waisdo
It is never, ever referred to as "U of CA," and calling it "U of CA" is confusing to people who actually know what the University of California is, so forgive me if I seem unsympathetic to the Human Slashdot Poster from Outside America Who Uses Descriptors Instead of Names When Identifying Things to Avoid Confusion for Those of Us Who Care About non-American Readers.
It would have cost NASA about ten bucks to include a little brush to sweep over the solar panels. A tiny little push broom that just pushes the dust off over the edge would have solved this problem--how the fuck do you build a billion dollar robot without asking a third grader how to keep them clean?
- A lobbyist - the most evil profession next to advertising executives
- for Dow Chemical - a most evil company
- "nearly died" when they got a $70 charge - to have "nearly died" over a $70 fee when you're a well paid lobbyist is insulting; being uninsured, breaking your leg on the job, getting fired from your minimum wage position because you can't work, then getting a $16,000 hospital bill is cause to have "nearly died" upon opening a bill
- for their 20-year old daughter - who needs to get a job to buy some fucking scissors to cut the fucking umbilical cord
As for "it is their business - not yours," I would respectfully disagree. It became our business the moment they let themselves be interviewed and have the information published.Just because something can happen doesn't mean it is medically necessary to do something about it.
Hi, I'd like to cut off part of your dick. May I? What do you mean, no? How do you know it isn't better until you've lived both ways? I promise I will only cut off an insignificant part of your dick.
We're talking about involuntary and medically unnecessary genital mutilation of infants. We're talking about cutting off part of your dick. That bears repeating: We're talking about taking a knife to your dick and cutting off part of your dick. The fact that you're not on your way to your nearest Rabbi right now to have part of your dick cut off entirely invalidates and undermines your position.
Not only that, but you say You can't complain without having experienced it both ways. Oh, and if you are one of the few men that have lived both ways, your opinion doesn't matter. QED.
What amazes me is people who say "What's the big deal?" If it's no big deal for it to happen (which requires time and effort and has no logical or medical basis) then it's certainly less of a deal not to do it at all (which requires neither time nor effort, and doing nothing does not require a reason), therefore the logical choice is not to do it. When someone is old enough to make a conscious decision to have their genitals mutilated they can feel free (can't you hear the stampede of men rushing to have it done?).
Just remember, your lack of knowledge and understanding of the issue of male genital mutilation does not make your position the right one. You clearly demonstrate your dearth of insight (bifurcation, believing the issue is only about the possession or not of a foreskin, logical self-contradiction), so before you so quickly dismiss and insult people passionate about the topic perhaps you should try learning a thing or two first.