Has anyone else seen the Microsoft commercial, where Bill Gates talks about how his company is "innovating" the computer industry, and is focusing on "innovation"? Like he's so desperate to convince everyone his company is likable that he's running campaign ads or something. I'm not a blind Microsoft hater, but even I was able to percieve the extreme cheesiness of the commercial, with kids using computers pictured behind friendly ol' innovator Bill, just to make him seem nicer. Just thought it was funny, but sad.
Are you just a stupid fuck? Half the discussion on this board is about how this system can (and probably will) be abused. I could anonymously turn you in for being different. This doesn't frighten you at all? C'mon, this is dangerous.
Alrighty! I'll be walking with my friend who owns a knife, and some criminal comes up and bashes him on the head. He's out cold. I reach over and pull out my friend's knife. I'm thinking, "Holy shit, if I only had a gun, that way I wouldn't have to physically struggle with this guy who's going to fucking kill me! GODDAMN the gun ban!" I get to face the fact that I'm going to have to engage in a knife fight with some mugger (who's probably had MUCH more knife-fighting experience than me) while my friend's down, bleeding on the street next to me! Woo-hoo! We circle each other, he takes a swing, I avoid it and attempt a stab, but he dodges it and thrusts his knife down into my back. I go down. He stabs me some more times, and my vision begins to get blurry as I bleed all over the street. He stands up, takes my knife, and then pulls out his illegally-obtained gun from Mexico and shoots me in the head for good measure. My last vision is of the poster on the alley wall that is a promotional poster for the current administration's gun ban. The criminal then thinks, chuckling to himself, that he should take up knife-throwing to make killing easier. A week later he does.
You dumbass--you think a fucking cold-blooded CRIMINAL is going to care about blood or physically fighting someone? YOU'RE the ignorant fool. Geez, what would you people do if I wasn't here to keep you in line?
What if my friend has a gun and a "gun-ring" on him, and a criminal comes up to us and knocks my friend unconscious. He falls to the ground. I grab my friend's gun and point it at the criminal as he comes at me, but, alas, the trigger is useless, I don't have the ring! Frantically, I struggle to pull my friend's limp hand with the ring up to the gun to try to get the damn thing to work, but it's been designed where he has to be holding it! At this point in time, the criminal bashes me over the head with a crowbar and I lay bleeding on the ground. He then pulls out his illegally-imported gun from Mexico that requires no special "gun-ring" and shoots me in the head. Then he takes my friend's gun and his gun-ring to add to his collection of guns with accompanying gun-rings that he can use in other crimes or sell on the black gun market. Maybe he'll even try to reverse-engineer the technology so that he can use any gun with just one special gun-ring. Just hypothetically speaking here...
Well, applying a liberal constructionist viewpoint to the Constitution can be dangerous, as you can just interpret the document to be anything you need it to be at anytime to serve your own agendas. The Constitution was constructed as a skeletal work; it was intended that Congress provide the flesh through legislation, so "the right to bear arms" is a general phrase in the Constitution accepted to mean the right to arm ourselves with weapons of defense, and Congress, through legislation, determines what we can arm ourselves with. Simply because we aren't allowed to own a tank or surface-to-air missile does not mean our right to bear arms is being stepped on; we could still own a handgun and arm ourselves. I for one believe the Constitution/Bill of Rights is fine the way it is at this point in time, at least with regards to our rights.
int rant() { What you dumbasses don't seem to realize is that criminals are criminals--they'll get guns no matter what, legally or illegally. Remember Prohibition? I'd rather have criminals with guns and homeowners with guns than criminals with illegal guns and homeowners defenseless. If a homeowner accidentally shoots a family member, you think that's the fucking GUN's fault?!? It's up to the homeowner to make sure before he shoots; in the meantime, guns provide a means of defense against criminals, and I feel safer owning a gun and knowing that I can defend myself with it, instead of me being defenseless when some burglars are breaking in carrying some illegally-imported guns from Mexico. The days of keeping a bat by the bedside are over; criminals will get guns, knives, anything they can use, whether they're legal or not. Besides, you people are addressing a symptom and not the cause, the problem isn't guns but the criminals themselves! Why do you people seem to forget that violence and crimes are down anyway, so you're whole argument that guns are creating a worse society don't make sense in the first place? And by keeping guns legal, we can at least regulate the damn things to the best of our ability (whether we're doing that or not at the moment is a whole other argument). Geez, what would you people do without me here to keep you in line.
Actually, Romero has come into IRC #doom2 (Efnet, I think) several times, and it was proven to be him. The times I've been there when he was there too, I don't remember him answering any Daikatana questions specifically. The chat logs are somewhere at www.doomworld.com, maybe he's said a thing or two. Actually, I think he comes in there more to soak up the worship from the Doom geeks than anything else, but since he helped create Doom, he still has a certain level of respect from me, I suppose.
ME TOO, MAN!!! I can't believe this fucking bullshit! I checked the box, too, and yet, here is this story, and it's Rob's fault that I clicked on "Read More", read it with my own eyes, went down and typed in a whole message myself and clicked "Submit" and participated in the discussion! I can't believe this! It's everybody else's fault for making me click on and read this story! I'm a fucking zombie and can't avoid the story by myself, so I need a whole new Slashbox to do it for me because I'm mentally retarded! SHIT!!! Someone wipe my ass for me...
Just a random thought--what about piracy of live shows? Bootlegs are already a problem. Concert shows aren't the end-all answers to everything. I wouldn't be surprised if in 30 years there were pirate concert shows you could download and view, due to some fan coming to the show somehow sneaking in a small camera and microphone. Who knows? I guess we'll find out how this affects the music industry in the coming decades.
Prove that God doesn't exist? How can one prove a negative like that? Here--prove the tooth fairy doesn't exist. You can't offer any proof the tooth fairy isn't fluttering around somewhere, leaving quarters under pillows, so therefore, according to your reasoning, the tooth fairy exists.
Basically, the proof I can offer that God doesn't exist is his nonexistence here. I never see him, I never hear him--I never SENSE or PERCEIVE him. His absence is my proof. If you're going to take the stance that he exists if no one can prove he doesn't exist, well that means I can conjure up absolutely ANY wacky god I'd like and say my proof my being exists is your lack of proof it doesn't exist. See what I mean?
If Adam and Eve had kids, and they were the only people existing at the time, that would mean that the kids would had to have sex with their mother to further the human race. That pretty much invalidates any truth of "Adam and Eve" for me, sorry.
I'm not a scientist or anything, so I might be talking out my ass, but I always wondered if the universe actually was expanding still, since it takes so long for the red-shifted light from the stars to reach us. Maybe it's not expanding, at least not as fast, and we don't know it since the light from those stars is just reaching us. I don't know, just a thought.
I honestly don't think the appeal of simulated music by a computer will ever completely diminish the desire to see a group of humans play in sync, putting their emotions and feelings into their music, or to hear their creations and feel the composers' emotions at the time of their works' conception. In fact, if simulated music ever did rise to popularity, I wouldn't be surprised if there was suddenly a backlash against it in the next decade after it--somewhat like the grunge movement of the 90's that emphasized emotion and feel instead of the technical virtuosity of the 80's shred players. There would probably be a movement of live, human players that would diminish the popularity of music generated by a box.
It's like sports. Even if in the far future when we could build cyborgs to simulate humans, do you think we would go to watch a football game played entirely by robots? I don't think so. The mere fact of knowing that the players aren't real humans disconnects spectators from the players. Part of watching football is relating to the struggle of the players to win, their emotions due to a win or loss, their personalities, etc. Knowing that they are emotionless robots following algorithms and formulas to perform their plays would suck the human emotion out of the game. Could you imagine the classic shirtless beer-bellied fan with the team logo painted on his stomach cheering for a team of soulless robots like he does a team of humans? I couldn't. Sure, there will always be that coolness factor of seeing robots battle each other, but it's just not the same as a real battle between humans.
Or how about art. If a computer was advanced enought to produce art, it would be appealing for that novelty factor of knowing it was produced by a computer and some smart programmers, but the fact will remain that there will always be the expressive, creative artist painting his moods, thoughts, emotions, and feelings. The viewer of the painting can look at the painter's work and feel what he was feeling at the time of the painting. Knowing a painting was made by a box will take away that appeal.
I think the same goes for simulated music. There will always be that appeal of hearing music created by a computer, that novelty factor. But a live concert is a live concert...anyone who's been to a good one knows that a computer won't replace a damn good live performance, especially when the human players really put on a show. And there will always be that human appeal...the emotional connection of knowing that humans, with feelings, emotions, and souls, are putting their hearts into the music, and expressing their innermost thoughts and perceptions. Trust me--if anything, live concerts and performances will keep human players as popular, if not more so, than computer players. The ability of the listener to relate to the performer will keep musicians in business. Groupies will always exist to love and adore the human musician, as will mosh pits to smash into each other at the musician's big laser-lighted concert. Computers won't get those.:)
It goes beyond emotional connection as well...there is just something cool about seeing another human being perform an awesome slam-dunk over his opponents heads, or watching an artist draw a realistic human face using dots, or seeing a guitar player wiggle his fingers at lightning-speed then watching him slam his guitar into the stage floor at the end of the show. That has always been the appeal of sports, art, music, or any performing arts--human beings doing cool things. Whether you like wrestling or not, you have to admit that its appeal to viewers is its vast collection of personalities, attitudes, and muscular human beings doing cool moves on each other. Robot wrestling wouldn't be as popular--beside the loss of emotional connection with the spectator, how could they trash-talk each other between matches and seem like they mean it with us knowing they're programmed to say it?:)
I've strayed from where I started, but to sum it all up, computers will never completely replace humans--athletically, musically, whatever. They will have some novelty value, but the big appeal will always be humans doing cool things. I am a musician, programmer, and comic book artist, and I am not worried about losing any profession to a box (well, maybe the programming thing...:) (but really, though, could a box create a new, never-before-done type of 3d engine or write an RPG with a good story? Even programmers will exist, I think...computers may do a lot of the boring repetive donkey work but the real genius stuff will still be done by human beings...which is basically like using an already-existing library to do the boring stuff so you can get on with the creative stuff...no big difference, really)
Really, though, all this kind of stuff is probably WAY off in the far, far future, so I don't need to worry about it anyway. Just my $0.02. Multiplied several times over.:)
I'd really like to know about this "onslaught" of Christian evidence, other than the so-called truths that Christians have been raised to simply believe without question. The Bible itself won't suffice for me, because it is full of holes and inconsistencies. An easy one would be Adam and Eve's child--for the human race to continue, the child would have had to have sex with another female, but the only other one, according to the Bible, was Eve. So does the Bible encourage sex with your mother? I suppose I should believe that the entire human race is based upon an incident of incest. I could literally find hundreds of other mistakes and holes in the Bible. Which causes me to believe that the Bible is either simply not true, or is true, but on a highly symbolic level. The latter is what I choose to believe. I don't think the Bible was meant to be taken literally.
Personally, I believe there is a higher being of some sort, and that he used evolution to create all living things here on our little planet. And I just don't understand Christians who rejoice when other viewpoints and ideas are discouraged. How is your belief in Creationism any better than another's belief in evolution? Both are just beliefs attempting to explain why we're here. Why should we drop ours just to believe yours? Because you think it's true? That is the biggest beef I have with a lot of Christians I talk to about this subject--they are very close-minded, because they are often raised from birth to believe everything about Christianity and the Bible without question.
If there was an "onslaught" of evidence supporting Christianity, I would probably be a Christian. However, there is not enough evidence supporting Christianity for me to consider it at all.
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To bad they made "Risk". Even Friedman didn't want anything to do with Megadeth after that.
Has anyone else seen the Microsoft commercial, where Bill Gates talks about how his company is "innovating" the computer industry, and is focusing on "innovation"? Like he's so desperate to convince everyone his company is likable that he's running campaign ads or something. I'm not a blind Microsoft hater, but even I was able to percieve the extreme cheesiness of the commercial, with kids using computers pictured behind friendly ol' innovator Bill, just to make him seem nicer. Just thought it was funny, but sad.
You are exactly right; these have been my feelings all along. It's SOCIETY'S fault, not guns.
Goddammit, I've been saying that same thing for years. People treat the symptoms and not the cause. It's time to stop doing that already.
Are you just a stupid fuck? Half the discussion on this board is about how this system can (and probably will) be abused. I could anonymously turn you in for being different. This doesn't frighten you at all? C'mon, this is dangerous.
Alrighty! I'll be walking with my friend who owns a knife, and some criminal comes up and bashes him on the head. He's out cold. I reach over and pull out my friend's knife. I'm thinking, "Holy shit, if I only had a gun, that way I wouldn't have to physically struggle with this guy who's going to fucking kill me! GODDAMN the gun ban!" I get to face the fact that I'm going to have to engage in a knife fight with some mugger (who's probably had MUCH more knife-fighting experience than me) while my friend's down, bleeding on the street next to me! Woo-hoo! We circle each other, he takes a swing, I avoid it and attempt a stab, but he dodges it and thrusts his knife down into my back. I go down. He stabs me some more times, and my vision begins to get blurry as I bleed all over the street. He stands up, takes my knife, and then pulls out his illegally-obtained gun from Mexico and shoots me in the head for good measure. My last vision is of the poster on the alley wall that is a promotional poster for the current administration's gun ban. The criminal then thinks, chuckling to himself, that he should take up knife-throwing to make killing easier. A week later he does.
You dumbass--you think a fucking cold-blooded CRIMINAL is going to care about blood or physically fighting someone? YOU'RE the ignorant fool. Geez, what would you people do if I wasn't here to keep you in line?
What if my friend has a gun and a "gun-ring" on him, and a criminal comes up to us and knocks my friend unconscious. He falls to the ground. I grab my friend's gun and point it at the criminal as he comes at me, but, alas, the trigger is useless, I don't have the ring! Frantically, I struggle to pull my friend's limp hand with the ring up to the gun to try to get the damn thing to work, but it's been designed where he has to be holding it! At this point in time, the criminal bashes me over the head with a crowbar and I lay bleeding on the ground. He then pulls out his illegally-imported gun from Mexico that requires no special "gun-ring" and shoots me in the head. Then he takes my friend's gun and his gun-ring to add to his collection of guns with accompanying gun-rings that he can use in other crimes or sell on the black gun market. Maybe he'll even try to reverse-engineer the technology so that he can use any gun with just one special gun-ring. Just hypothetically speaking here...
Well, applying a liberal constructionist viewpoint to the Constitution can be dangerous, as you can just interpret the document to be anything you need it to be at anytime to serve your own agendas. The Constitution was constructed as a skeletal work; it was intended that Congress provide the flesh through legislation, so "the right to bear arms" is a general phrase in the Constitution accepted to mean the right to arm ourselves with weapons of defense, and Congress, through legislation, determines what we can arm ourselves with. Simply because we aren't allowed to own a tank or surface-to-air missile does not mean our right to bear arms is being stepped on; we could still own a handgun and arm ourselves. I for one believe the Constitution/Bill of Rights is fine the way it is at this point in time, at least with regards to our rights.
int rant()
{
What you dumbasses don't seem to realize is that criminals are criminals--they'll get guns no matter what, legally or illegally. Remember Prohibition? I'd rather have criminals with guns and homeowners with guns than criminals with illegal guns and homeowners defenseless. If a homeowner accidentally shoots a family member, you think that's the fucking GUN's fault?!? It's up to the homeowner to make sure before he shoots; in the meantime, guns provide a means of defense against criminals, and I feel safer owning a gun and knowing that I can defend myself with it, instead of me being defenseless when some burglars are breaking in carrying some illegally-imported guns from Mexico. The days of keeping a bat by the bedside are over; criminals will get guns, knives, anything they can use, whether they're legal or not. Besides, you people are addressing a symptom and not the cause, the problem isn't guns but the criminals themselves! Why do you people seem to forget that violence and crimes are down anyway, so you're whole argument that guns are creating a worse society don't make sense in the first place? And by keeping guns legal, we can at least regulate the damn things to the best of our ability (whether we're doing that or not at the moment is a whole other argument). Geez, what would you people do without me here to keep you in line.
return (1);
}
Actually, Romero has come into IRC #doom2 (Efnet, I think) several times, and it was proven to be him. The times I've been there when he was there too, I don't remember him answering any Daikatana questions specifically. The chat logs are somewhere at www.doomworld.com, maybe he's said a thing or two. Actually, I think he comes in there more to soak up the worship from the Doom geeks than anything else, but since he helped create Doom, he still has a certain level of respect from me, I suppose.
- bonch
Why is this post scored a 0, Flamebait? Jesus Christ, there really are insane moderators out there.
http://www.empireeden.tsx.org
ME TOO, MAN!!! I can't believe this fucking bullshit! I checked the box, too, and yet, here is this story, and it's Rob's fault that I clicked on "Read More", read it with my own eyes, went down and typed in a whole message myself and clicked "Submit" and participated in the discussion! I can't believe this! It's everybody else's fault for making me click on and read this story! I'm a fucking zombie and can't avoid the story by myself, so I need a whole new Slashbox to do it for me because I'm mentally retarded! SHIT!!! Someone wipe my ass for me...
Someone moderate this up, it's funny.
Just a random thought--what about piracy of live shows? Bootlegs are already a problem. Concert shows aren't the end-all answers to everything. I wouldn't be surprised if in 30 years there were pirate concert shows you could download and view, due to some fan coming to the show somehow sneaking in a small camera and microphone. Who knows? I guess we'll find out how this affects the music industry in the coming decades.
Me, too.
Prove that God doesn't exist? How can one prove a negative like that? Here--prove the tooth fairy doesn't exist. You can't offer any proof the tooth fairy isn't fluttering around somewhere, leaving quarters under pillows, so therefore, according to your reasoning, the tooth fairy exists.
Basically, the proof I can offer that God doesn't exist is his nonexistence here. I never see him, I never hear him--I never SENSE or PERCEIVE him. His absence is my proof. If you're going to take the stance that he exists if no one can prove he doesn't exist, well that means I can conjure up absolutely ANY wacky god I'd like and say my proof my being exists is your lack of proof it doesn't exist. See what I mean?
If Adam and Eve had kids, and they were the only people existing at the time, that would mean that the kids would had to have sex with their mother to further the human race. That pretty much invalidates any truth of "Adam and Eve" for me, sorry.
Actually, the Church of Satan doesn't believe in being tax exempt. They pay like everyone else.
I'm not a scientist or anything, so I might be talking out my ass, but I always wondered if the universe actually was expanding still, since it takes so long for the red-shifted light from the stars to reach us. Maybe it's not expanding, at least not as fast, and we don't know it since the light from those stars is just reaching us. I don't know, just a thought.
I thought this was actually funny. Moderate it likewise, please.
I honestly don't think the appeal of simulated music by a computer will ever completely diminish the desire to see a group of humans play in sync, putting their emotions and feelings into their music, or to hear their creations and feel the composers' emotions at the time of their works' conception. In fact, if simulated music ever did rise to popularity, I wouldn't be surprised if there was suddenly a backlash against it in the next decade after it--somewhat like the grunge movement of the 90's that emphasized emotion and feel instead of the technical virtuosity of the 80's shred players. There would probably be a movement of live, human players that would diminish the popularity of music generated by a box.
It's like sports. Even if in the far future when we could build cyborgs to simulate humans, do you think we would go to watch a football game played entirely by robots? I don't think so. The mere fact of knowing that the players aren't real humans disconnects spectators from the players. Part of watching football is relating to the struggle of the players to win, their emotions due to a win or loss, their personalities, etc. Knowing that they are emotionless robots following algorithms and formulas to perform their plays would suck the human emotion out of the game. Could you imagine the classic shirtless beer-bellied fan with the team logo painted on his stomach cheering for a team of soulless robots like he does a team of humans? I couldn't. Sure, there will always be that coolness factor of seeing robots battle each other, but it's just not the same as a real battle between humans.
Or how about art. If a computer was advanced enought to produce art, it would be appealing for that novelty factor of knowing it was produced by a computer and some smart programmers, but the fact will remain that there will always be the expressive, creative artist painting his moods, thoughts, emotions, and feelings. The viewer of the painting can look at the painter's work and feel what he was feeling at the time of the painting. Knowing a painting was made by a box will take away that appeal.
I think the same goes for simulated music. There will always be that appeal of hearing music created by a computer, that novelty factor. But a live concert is a live concert...anyone who's been to a good one knows that a computer won't replace a damn good live performance, especially when the human players really put on a show. And there will always be that human appeal...the emotional connection of knowing that humans, with feelings, emotions, and souls, are putting their hearts into the music, and expressing their innermost thoughts and perceptions. Trust me--if anything, live concerts and performances will keep human players as popular, if not more so, than computer players. The ability of the listener to relate to the performer will keep musicians in business. Groupies will always exist to love and adore the human musician, as will mosh pits to smash into each other at the musician's big laser-lighted concert. Computers won't get those. :)
It goes beyond emotional connection as well...there is just something cool about seeing another human being perform an awesome slam-dunk over his opponents heads, or watching an artist draw a realistic human face using dots, or seeing a guitar player wiggle his fingers at lightning-speed then watching him slam his guitar into the stage floor at the end of the show. That has always been the appeal of sports, art, music, or any performing arts--human beings doing cool things. Whether you like wrestling or not, you have to admit that its appeal to viewers is its vast collection of personalities, attitudes, and muscular human beings doing cool moves on each other. Robot wrestling wouldn't be as popular--beside the loss of emotional connection with the spectator, how could they trash-talk each other between matches and seem like they mean it with us knowing they're programmed to say it? :)
I've strayed from where I started, but to sum it all up, computers will never completely replace humans--athletically, musically, whatever. They will have some novelty value, but the big appeal will always be humans doing cool things. I am a musician, programmer, and comic book artist, and I am not worried about losing any profession to a box (well, maybe the programming thing... :) (but really, though, could a box create a new, never-before-done type of 3d engine or write an RPG with a good story? Even programmers will exist, I think...computers may do a lot of the boring repetive donkey work but the real genius stuff will still be done by human beings...which is basically like using an already-existing library to do the boring stuff so you can get on with the creative stuff...no big difference, really)
Really, though, all this kind of stuff is probably WAY off in the far, far future, so I don't need to worry about it anyway. Just my $0.02. Multiplied several times over. :)
Where is the evidence for Creationism?
I'd really like to know about this "onslaught" of Christian evidence, other than the so-called truths that Christians have been raised to simply believe without question. The Bible itself won't suffice for me, because it is full of holes and inconsistencies. An easy one would be Adam and Eve's child--for the human race to continue, the child would have had to have sex with another female, but the only other one, according to the Bible, was Eve. So does the Bible encourage sex with your mother? I suppose I should believe that the entire human race is based upon an incident of incest. I could literally find hundreds of other mistakes and holes in the Bible. Which causes me to believe that the Bible is either simply not true, or is true, but on a highly symbolic level. The latter is what I choose to believe. I don't think the Bible was meant to be taken literally.
Personally, I believe there is a higher being of some sort, and that he used evolution to create all living things here on our little planet. And I just don't understand Christians who rejoice when other viewpoints and ideas are discouraged. How is your belief in Creationism any better than another's belief in evolution? Both are just beliefs attempting to explain why we're here. Why should we drop ours just to believe yours? Because you think it's true? That is the biggest beef I have with a lot of Christians I talk to about this subject--they are very close-minded, because they are often raised from birth to believe everything about Christianity and the Bible without question.
If there was an "onslaught" of evidence supporting Christianity, I would probably be a Christian. However, there is not enough evidence supporting Christianity for me to consider it at all.
For a list of issues on Bible errancy, check out http://members.aol.com/ckbloomfld/
You just don't get it.
Rush kicks ass.