"There is no "state church" in Finland per se... The Lutherian church has a right to collect taxes, but it is not a government institution, although they are linked to each other in some respects.
Other religions do not have a right to collect taxes, but I am not 100% sure about the orthodox church."
Then as per the post directly above yours, why does the church levy a tax upon employers, regardless of who is employed?
"That term suggests that the church is somehow an official organ of the state. In Germany, that is not true. "
State-recognized churches are not state-sponsored churches, which are what we're discussing here. Many countries have state-recognized faith organizations for the purposes of taxes, etc. Much fewer carry the more-political-than-faith relics of state-sponsorship.
I always enjoy the (more extreme, thankfully less common) theists I talk to who lecture me on how atheism leads to rape, murder and all other forms of evil and tragedy. "Well, perhaps if *you* didn't have God..."
"In other words, be free to think but shut the f**k up about which side you think is right. It's immature and assinine to argue about it and counter-intuitive to the notion of "Free thinking." Use reason and respect, people."
Yeah, I don't have a problem with religion, as much as those who either wish to remove choice from the equation, or who wish to change or reinforce beliefs through the actions of the state. Those people are the true enemies of thought and rationality.
Flamebait it may be, but control is certainly at the heart of the kneejerk defense of merging church and state. These people literally don't want to give people a choice of what religion gets espoused, they feel obligated to defend the Euro state churches because they're Protestantism. I guarantee that they would be singing a different tune if this discussion was about forced tithes to Catholicism. "Whore of babylon" and similar.
"A multitude of religious types manage to sell their faith door to door, over the media, and through social pressures. Now these Athiests have decided that they want to play the same game, and get people to move to their beliefs."
A lack of belief is not a positive belief. Don't pretend you can even conceive of what it's like to be an atheist, as you're blurting out ignorance every time people of your opinion talk about an "atheistic religion".
"Sure their riding along on the coattails of seperation of church and state, its what any good opportunist would do, religions arent above it."
I don't even know what you're trying to say that's different than what we try and espouse. STATE SPONSORED RELIGION IS BAD. Otherwise, believe whatever the fuck you want to believe.
"And as for subversion, I kinda think that is a reasonable goal.. They want the church out of the government, therfore undermining the government. Or simply to destroy (with civil/social methods) the state religion."
Yes, all state religions should be destroyed, whether through more civil methods, or kicking and screaming. I don't particularly care which. A government devoted to a particular god and religion *should* be undermined and replaced with a secular one. I apologize that you are so insecure about your personal faith that you require the government to provide strong and unceasing spiritual tummyrubs to feel fulfilled.
It's easy to go through life deciding the "slant" of everything before you actually read it. While I'm unabashedly an atheist, there are plenty of reasons for a theist to bow out of a state-sponsored faith that don't involve "furthering an Atheistic lieberal religion" or whatever you're assuming this is put in place to do.
"People aren't being encouraged to seperate the two, they are being encouraged to abandon religion all together. What are the numbers of new enrollment in other religions besides the state run religion, in Finland? I am just saying that if your desire is to seperate church and state, then create a movement to seperate the two. Don't create a movement to get people to abandon religion. That is just subversive."
So what? There's nothing wrong with that either, if that's their choice. People have been "subversively" trying to missionary for millenia now.
As with lie detectors, I assume that these are used to cause the to usee spontaneously provide a (truthful) confession, not for accuracy. Hey, it's not torture.
"The guys were obviously very solid reverse engineers, but questionable developers and what use does a software house like that have for a reverse engineering team?"
For nonquestionable purposes that have nothing to do with reverse engineering, I would imagine. No sarcasm involved, there's always going to be some kind of coding they can provide SoE.
"Just like whenever some top brass somewhere says "No comment," to a charged question, the forced lack of facebook profiles is just going to lead people to automatically assume that there is some bad stuff going down at Kent State. Can anyone say Ohio National Guard?"
The school's preventing bad publicity in case there's a lacrosse incident, not planning on setting up a massacre for all those on athletic scholarship.
You should probably get back on whatever medication you were prescribed now.
I get your point, but while that's true as well, I also don't think harrassment of those who create shards would end up biting Sony in the ass. This isn't really a bnetd sort of situation we have here.
To be honest, as much as I dislike certain Sony tactics, the target market for this emulator isn't going to affect or influence the PS3-buying demographic significantly.
"Can't really fault the console division for that. A lot of the Genesis/Megadrive launch titles were just near-perfect translations of popular Sega arcade games."
Yeah, he's pulling "very very bad, they were basically technical showcases. No exciting gameplay whatsoever" straight from his ass. I bought the Genesis (as with many others) specifically FOR those titles, I loved the arcade titles and the Genesis did a bang-up job of capturing the gameplay. Nintendo had very little of that arcade-y feel with their SNES games.
I mean, even if the genre isn't your cup of tea, "very very bad" and "no gameplay" sounds as if he never played them at all or played the master system ports and extrapolated.
If all I had to judge with was the reality of the 360 game lineup versus the fantasy of prerendered "ps3 footage", I'm sure I'd come to the same conclusion, but I'm a rational individual.
I'm not arguing that there aren't hacks on bnet, I'm stating that it's specious to claim that a significant number of those exploit-using PCs are zombified and used for the purposes of botnets. Again, you'd need a bit more than "intuition" to be convincing here.
"But the one thing they don't seem to relize is that not only do certain users crave hacks, but certain users who write said hacks use that craving for said hacks to simply exploit millions of peoples computers, with viruses, and many of those trojans are working hacks. and because of that battle.net is host to the largest botnets the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) industry paid hackers run."
Do you have any verification of this? Sounds like something you've pulled straight out of your ass.
Slashdot Mirror
"There is no "state church" in Finland per se... The Lutherian church has a right to collect taxes, but it is not a government institution, although they are linked to each other in some respects.
Other religions do not have a right to collect taxes, but I am not 100% sure about the orthodox church."
Then as per the post directly above yours, why does the church levy a tax upon employers, regardless of who is employed?
"That term suggests that the church is somehow an official organ of the state. In Germany, that is not true. "
State-recognized churches are not state-sponsored churches, which are what we're discussing here. Many countries have state-recognized faith organizations for the purposes of taxes, etc. Much fewer carry the more-political-than-faith relics of state-sponsorship.
I always enjoy the (more extreme, thankfully less common) theists I talk to who lecture me on how atheism leads to rape, murder and all other forms of evil and tragedy. "Well, perhaps if *you* didn't have God..."
"In other words, be free to think but shut the f**k up about which side you think is right. It's immature and assinine to argue about it and counter-intuitive to the notion of "Free thinking." Use reason and respect, people."
Yeah, I don't have a problem with religion, as much as those who either wish to remove choice from the equation, or who wish to change or reinforce beliefs through the actions of the state. Those people are the true enemies of thought and rationality.
Flamebait it may be, but control is certainly at the heart of the kneejerk defense of merging church and state. These people literally don't want to give people a choice of what religion gets espoused, they feel obligated to defend the Euro state churches because they're Protestantism. I guarantee that they would be singing a different tune if this discussion was about forced tithes to Catholicism. "Whore of babylon" and similar.
"A multitude of religious types manage to sell their faith door to door, over the media, and through social pressures. Now these Athiests have decided that they want to play the same game, and get people to move to their beliefs."
A lack of belief is not a positive belief. Don't pretend you can even conceive of what it's like to be an atheist, as you're blurting out ignorance every time people of your opinion talk about an "atheistic religion".
"Sure their riding along on the coattails of seperation of church and state, its what any good opportunist would do, religions arent above it."
I don't even know what you're trying to say that's different than what we try and espouse. STATE SPONSORED RELIGION IS BAD. Otherwise, believe whatever the fuck you want to believe.
"And as for subversion, I kinda think that is a reasonable goal.. They want the church out of the government, therfore undermining the government. Or simply to destroy (with civil/social methods) the state religion."
Yes, all state religions should be destroyed, whether through more civil methods, or kicking and screaming. I don't particularly care which. A government devoted to a particular god and religion *should* be undermined and replaced with a secular one. I apologize that you are so insecure about your personal faith that you require the government to provide strong and unceasing spiritual tummyrubs to feel fulfilled.
It's easy to go through life deciding the "slant" of everything before you actually read it. While I'm unabashedly an atheist, there are plenty of reasons for a theist to bow out of a state-sponsored faith that don't involve "furthering an Atheistic lieberal religion" or whatever you're assuming this is put in place to do.
"People aren't being encouraged to seperate the two, they are being encouraged to abandon religion all together. What are the numbers of new enrollment in other religions besides the state run religion, in Finland? I am just saying that if your desire is to seperate church and state, then create a movement to seperate the two. Don't create a movement to get people to abandon religion. That is just subversive."
So what? There's nothing wrong with that either, if that's their choice. People have been "subversively" trying to missionary for millenia now.
"the usee", sorry :)
As with lie detectors, I assume that these are used to cause the to usee spontaneously provide a (truthful) confession, not for accuracy. Hey, it's not torture.
"The guys were obviously very solid reverse engineers, but questionable developers and what use does a software house like that have for a reverse engineering team?"
For nonquestionable purposes that have nothing to do with reverse engineering, I would imagine. No sarcasm involved, there's always going to be some kind of coding they can provide SoE.
"Just like whenever some top brass somewhere says "No comment," to a charged question, the forced lack of facebook profiles is just going to lead people to automatically assume that there is some bad stuff going down at Kent State. Can anyone say Ohio National Guard?"
The school's preventing bad publicity in case there's a lacrosse incident, not planning on setting up a massacre for all those on athletic scholarship.
You should probably get back on whatever medication you were prescribed now.
I get your point, but while that's true as well, I also don't think harrassment of those who create shards would end up biting Sony in the ass. This isn't really a bnetd sort of situation we have here.
To be honest, as much as I dislike certain Sony tactics, the target market for this emulator isn't going to affect or influence the PS3-buying demographic significantly.
"It doesn't have to be done to correct eyesight."
Permanently, yes it does.
"Can't really fault the console division for that. A lot of the Genesis/Megadrive launch titles were just near-perfect translations of popular Sega arcade games."
Yeah, he's pulling "very very bad, they were basically technical showcases. No exciting gameplay whatsoever" straight from his ass. I bought the Genesis (as with many others) specifically FOR those titles, I loved the arcade titles and the Genesis did a bang-up job of capturing the gameplay. Nintendo had very little of that arcade-y feel with their SNES games.
I mean, even if the genre isn't your cup of tea, "very very bad" and "no gameplay" sounds as if he never played them at all or played the master system ports and extrapolated.
"...i used my eyes to look at the difference. "
If all I had to judge with was the reality of the 360 game lineup versus the fantasy of prerendered "ps3 footage", I'm sure I'd come to the same conclusion, but I'm a rational individual.
"If you look at what is in the PS3 vs the 360 then the 360 seems to be a bit expensive for its hardware."
Care to clarify this statement?
I like how you pick the most boring examples of both western and eastern gaming ;)
Eh, Prey wasn't so much vaporware as much as it disappeared and reappeared with viewable progress. I hope they kept the KMFDM soundtrack intact :D
I also sincerely doubt that 3dr rewrote 90% of the Unreal engine for DNF, regardless of any current boasting.
You don't RC, it's used iterations of the Unreal engine for quite some years now.
Why fire personnel when you can pay them exclusively in magic beans and watch them quit on their own?
"they're going to shell out $15, or whatever Nintendo decides to sell them for, for a Virtual Console Controller"
The Wii controller was designed with a retro look/feel on its own, I don't see why it'd be unwieldy for NES roms and such.
I'm not arguing that there aren't hacks on bnet, I'm stating that it's specious to claim that a significant number of those exploit-using PCs are zombified and used for the purposes of botnets. Again, you'd need a bit more than "intuition" to be convincing here.
"But the one thing they don't seem to relize is that not only do certain users crave hacks, but certain users who write said hacks use that craving for said hacks to simply exploit millions of peoples computers, with viruses, and many of those trojans are working hacks. and because of that battle.net is host to the largest botnets the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial E-mail) industry paid hackers run."
Do you have any verification of this? Sounds like something you've pulled straight out of your ass.