First of all, I think it should be pretty clear that I think ideas like the ones this defense attorney is arguing are dangerous, authoritarian bunk. They've been relegated to the minor leagues these days, with things like PATRIOT, TIA, and Camp Delta being far scarier, but they still qualify as small-scale villainy.
I'm sure many so-called conservatives will love the whole "video game violence" drove him to do it thing. However, they should think about something. This defense is being used to try to get this murderer a lighter sentence. It isn't a civil case against the video game manufacturers as so many in the past were.
This is an attempt to make sure that video games are used as an excuse to get this murderer back on the streets sooner. He stabbed and bludgeoned a young girl to death, I don't know why he isn't up for the death penalty (it is Florida, after all, famous for giving people the chair) but I do not want him back on the streets.
So, by all means, support anti-videogame legislation or civil lawsuits to your heart's content. But remember, this thug isn't going to be magically cured of his violent tendencies just because his defense lawyer wins on the "GTA made me do it" defense. He's still going to be a particularly sadistic murderer. He should never be let out of prison for any reason at all.
Even if you believe that video games made him do it, why would you want him back on the streets? I mean if his psyche was so damaged by Final Fantasy X, how would he be cured by simple recognition of this? I remember "Son of Sam," claimed to have been influenced by his neighbor's talking, satanic dog, would you want him freed too?
They aren't talking about putting him in a lunatic asylum, after all. They are saying he'll be rehabilitated after a few years in juvenal prison. Does any person believe that? I don't, I think he'll commit rapes, murders and other brutal crimes after his short time in America's juvenal prison system.
I think Yu Suzuki took these criticisms to heart with the sequel. Whereas the fist one had a lot of pointless wandering and talking to people, the sequel had a lot more fighting and high stakes gambling and was more fun. Even the boring job that you would get so you could blow all your money playing dice was more fun than the forklift job in the original, and if you didn't like it you could get a job working at a lucky hit stand.
I didn't even finish the original, but I couldn't stop playing the sequel until I did. I played both on my Dreamcast (of course!) so I don't know how the X-Box version stacks up.
My taste is not like everyone, but try renting it... maybe you'll like it.
According to Amazon, there are "25 Used and New from $4.75". I don't think that the PC keyboard adaptors work with Homebrew games, at least the one I bought didn't, but it should be easy enough to get an official DC keyboard (I have two for two player Typing of the Dead).
However, aren't they late to the party with Vietcong, being on the market already? As for me, last night, I downloaded the Tour of Duty, Vietnam Halflife Mod, which should be good enough for me, if I can tweak my computer enough to get it running correctly.
Basically, the robot has a "belly" full of the E-coli virus which is used to generate electricity (ala The Matrix). Now we only need to figure out how to create an "ant-Matrix" to power our PCs...
At my old DotCom, the company had put up a huge billboard advertising for some kind of IT Professional (I think it was a Web Developer) which was co-branded with one of the job search Websites (it wasn't Monster is all I can remember, at least I don't think it was).
Trouble was that they had no intention of hiring anyone, the sign was just there to attract venture capital. To make it look like we were a "company on the grow." (Note, I don't mangle English that way, normally, it's corporate speak.) No one who wasted their time applying for that job would get anywhere, just the runaround. It was sort of like the company was playing a cruel practical joke on anyone who fell for the sign.
This was just before the crash, when people were starting to see the whole rotten edifice come down around them. Thankfully, I wasn't as badly cheated as some other people.
One thing I like about Gator is their commitment to "truth in advertising," they are a vicious, predatory company named after a vicious, predatory animal. Their software hides itself in your computer (or your friends computer, or you parents computer) and gators hide themselves in swamps waiting for unsuspecting victims. It's almost as good as the old TIA logo.
Imagine if Microsoft had a name that suited them as well....
Yes, Nintendo should follow Sega. Let's look at the recent history of Sega:
1. Sega drops out of the hardware business to focus on software. Makes a lot of noise about being the biggest third party developer and unseating the Electronic Arts. (Or, as I like to call them, the evil Electronic Arts.)
2. Sega fails abjectly, and gets into talks to merge with some other company. Of course, merging is not an easy thing to do. So far it doesn't look good.
Possible Future:Sega ends up in a take over by Electronic Arts or Microsoft, has its development teams broken up, and its few high name recognition brands slapped onto inferior products. Ultimately it goes the way of Origin Systems. This much seems certain, no chance of Shenmue III. I'm just going to pretend that Lan Di ultimately triumphed. I find it oddly comforting...
There is still some hope that this will not happen. But if I were Nintendo, I wouldn't follow this path. I'd probably consider dropping TV consoles and going purely into handhelds (I hope not... but it could happen), but why become a software development company with Sega's example before you?
I always felt that Sacrifice was a sort of a version of Archon II: Adept, as it had a lot of the same basic ideas. (I always like Adept better than Archon, anyway.)
"You're my savior man, my own personal Jesus Christ." says the guy buying the bootleg disks off of Neo in the beginning.
So, that's supposed to be a well hidden subtext?
The symbolism is about as subtle as a sledgehammer hitting a fly, not that this makes it a bad movie. (The messiah symbolism in Dune is also not a "hidden subtext.")
Neo is more like David than Jesus, if you look at the Bible, anyway.
The game is re-invigorating the Net Cafe sector, increasing computer literacy, and scaring adults who are on the other side of the generation gap. Oh, and some irresposible kinds are playing the game instead of concentrating on their studies.
The more likely scenario is that an Islamic republic will be formed after an election (much to the chagrin of the US), and Western music will be banned outright.
Donald Rumsfeld has said there will be no Islamic government in Iraq, so as long as the Republicans are in power in the United States, there won't be.
I'll agree that right now an election would probably produce such a result, but no election will be allowed to take place that would produce such a result. (I.e. either no election at all or a rigged election will be allowed.)
I'm ambivalent about this, civilized Iraqi's are terrified of being driven into a dark age of Sharia law from the relatively (compared to an Islamic republic) enlightened society they had under the old regime. Sure the old regime was horrible and repressive, but the Muslim fanatics who want to take charge have the added problem of being insane. However, the US will have quite a task in creating and propping up a new secular dictator to replace Hussein, and of course that will make the US complicit in the inevitable repression that will occur under the new regime.
Of course, no one in the US seems to be concerned that the US was complicit in Hussein's torture and repression when we created him and propped him up. Besides that, people don't seem to understand why Hussein was propped up in the first place by the US and why he wasn't forcibly removed by George Bush I. It's because everyone then in power was well aware of the nightmare scenario in which Iraq becomes part of a Shi'ite empire which also includes Iran, run by fanatics under an Islamic Republic. Realpolitick seems to have gone out the window, though, it would actually be more comforting to believe that the lunatics in charge of the current administration intended for Iraq to be an actual American colony rather than the idea that the Iraqi Thomas Jefferson was waiting in the wings for the fall of Hussein. Not that the people in charge would like what this fanciful Iraqi Enlightenment Liberal would have to say about their intentions toward his country.
Look, I know that appealing to Darwin as if he were some sort of demigod leading humanity to perfection is fashionable here on Slashdot, but from what I learned in my physical anthropology classes, "survival of the fittest" just isn't the reality. Closer would be, "survival of that which is most likely to procreate."
Follow me here. In Africa, they have a disease called malaria, which has lead to the sickle cell trait being passed down and becoming common among populations in Africa. Sickle-cell blood is unhealthy blood which causes all kinds of health problems, and can lead to death, but which is unpalatable to the malaria disease. So while a person with sickle cells is more likely to survive to produce children, a person with sickle cells is not really healthy.
At some point, people discoved that the bark of a Cinchona tree could cure malaria. If the population that eventually developed the sickle cell trait as a common trait had had access to quinine, most of those people would now have healthy blood, instead of suffering the ravages of sickle cell anemia.
So, the idea that letting people die natually of disease is somehow "culling the herd" is a false one. If you believe that a trait leads to fitness, nature might not decide to back you up. The people who had access to medicine were less likely in the above example to transmit unpleasant traits to their offspring.
I just want to highlight one of the cool quotes from the article:
Berger and his team have taken nearly 10 years to develop the chip. They are about to test it on slices of rat brain kept alive in cerebrospinal fluid, they will tell a neural engineering conference in Capri, Italy, next week.
Sigh... the biological sciences are so wonderful, first spider-goats and now slices of rat brain artificially kept alive in cerebrospinal fluid. Can Donovan's Brain (or for MiSTies, The Brain That Wouldn't Die) be that far off?
Sure, you won't get a chance to work on the latest 3D hardware, but you could create a viable commercial product. And the GP 32 isn't a dream, it's here and anyone can fool around with it and do innovative things.
(This also goes for PalmOS devices, PCs and the like.)
Sure, it isn't Indrema, but I like the fact that soon after I heard this new, innovative console hyped up, I could actually buy one.
In 1987 they didn't have Dungeon Keeper, but I suppose Spinnaker's Adventure Creator was sort of similar. I liked making endless looping rooms where people would get trapped....
Slashdot Mirror
First They Take Vice City, Then They Take Berlin: Video Game Legislation Offers Hard Lessons For Comic Books
(You might want to make sure your pop-up blocker is working before clicking...)
Are you a Red Dupe?
Oh, and this may inspire donations to the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund.
I'm sure many so-called conservatives will love the whole "video game violence" drove him to do it thing. However, they should think about something. This defense is being used to try to get this murderer a lighter sentence. It isn't a civil case against the video game manufacturers as so many in the past were.
This is an attempt to make sure that video games are used as an excuse to get this murderer back on the streets sooner. He stabbed and bludgeoned a young girl to death, I don't know why he isn't up for the death penalty (it is Florida, after all, famous for giving people the chair) but I do not want him back on the streets.
So, by all means, support anti-videogame legislation or civil lawsuits to your heart's content. But remember, this thug isn't going to be magically cured of his violent tendencies just because his defense lawyer wins on the "GTA made me do it" defense. He's still going to be a particularly sadistic murderer. He should never be let out of prison for any reason at all.
Even if you believe that video games made him do it, why would you want him back on the streets? I mean if his psyche was so damaged by Final Fantasy X, how would he be cured by simple recognition of this? I remember "Son of Sam," claimed to have been influenced by his neighbor's talking, satanic dog, would you want him freed too?
They aren't talking about putting him in a lunatic asylum, after all. They are saying he'll be rehabilitated after a few years in juvenal prison. Does any person believe that? I don't, I think he'll commit rapes, murders and other brutal crimes after his short time in America's juvenal prison system.
I didn't even finish the original, but I couldn't stop playing the sequel until I did. I played both on my Dreamcast (of course!) so I don't know how the X-Box version stacks up.
My taste is not like everyone, but try renting it... maybe you'll like it.
According to Amazon, there are "25 Used and New from $4.75". I don't think that the PC keyboard adaptors work with Homebrew games, at least the one I bought didn't, but it should be easy enough to get an official DC keyboard (I have two for two player Typing of the Dead).
If not, I'll have enough fun with the "Aliens versus Marines" Natural Selection Halflife Mod, I think. It runs really well on my machine and I think being an Alien is almost as much fun as being Charlie.
Gastrobotics
There was a previous Slashdot article on it:
A Robot That Runs On A Sugar High
The link in there no longer works, but this one does:
Meat-eating robot has (g)astronomic potential
Basically, the robot has a "belly" full of the E-coli virus which is used to generate electricity (ala The Matrix). Now we only need to figure out how to create an "ant-Matrix" to power our PCs...
Trouble was that they had no intention of hiring anyone, the sign was just there to attract venture capital. To make it look like we were a "company on the grow." (Note, I don't mangle English that way, normally, it's corporate speak.) No one who wasted their time applying for that job would get anywhere, just the runaround. It was sort of like the company was playing a cruel practical joke on anyone who fell for the sign.
This was just before the crash, when people were starting to see the whole rotten edifice come down around them. Thankfully, I wasn't as badly cheated as some other people.
Imagine if Microsoft had a name that suited them as well....
1. Sega drops out of the hardware business to focus on software. Makes a lot of noise about being the biggest third party developer and unseating the Electronic Arts. (Or, as I like to call them, the evil Electronic Arts.)
2. Sega fails abjectly, and gets into talks to merge with some other company. Of course, merging is not an easy thing to do. So far it doesn't look good.
Possible Future: Sega ends up in a take over by Electronic Arts or Microsoft, has its development teams broken up, and its few high name recognition brands slapped onto inferior products. Ultimately it goes the way of Origin Systems. This much seems certain, no chance of Shenmue III. I'm just going to pretend that Lan Di ultimately triumphed. I find it oddly comforting...
There is still some hope that this will not happen. But if I were Nintendo, I wouldn't follow this path. I'd probably consider dropping TV consoles and going purely into handhelds (I hope not... but it could happen), but why become a software development company with Sega's example before you?
I always felt that Sacrifice was a sort of a version of Archon II: Adept, as it had a lot of the same basic ideas. (I always like Adept better than Archon, anyway.)
So, that's supposed to be a well hidden subtext?
The symbolism is about as subtle as a sledgehammer hitting a fly, not that this makes it a bad movie. (The messiah symbolism in Dune is also not a "hidden subtext.")
Neo is more like David than Jesus, if you look at the Bible, anyway.
RAGNAROK: FRIEND OR FOE?
The game is re-invigorating the Net Cafe sector, increasing computer literacy, and scaring adults who are on the other side of the generation gap. Oh, and some irresposible kinds are playing the game instead of concentrating on their studies.
Actually, it would make a good sequel to Tropico....
I know people will dismiss it because it was in the Mirror, but there are a lot of stories like this...
I'll agree that right now an election would probably produce such a result, but no election will be allowed to take place that would produce such a result. (I.e. either no election at all or a rigged election will be allowed.)
I'm ambivalent about this, civilized Iraqi's are terrified of being driven into a dark age of Sharia law from the relatively (compared to an Islamic republic) enlightened society they had under the old regime. Sure the old regime was horrible and repressive, but the Muslim fanatics who want to take charge have the added problem of being insane. However, the US will have quite a task in creating and propping up a new secular dictator to replace Hussein, and of course that will make the US complicit in the inevitable repression that will occur under the new regime.
Of course, no one in the US seems to be concerned that the US was complicit in Hussein's torture and repression when we created him and propped him up. Besides that, people don't seem to understand why Hussein was propped up in the first place by the US and why he wasn't forcibly removed by George Bush I. It's because everyone then in power was well aware of the nightmare scenario in which Iraq becomes part of a Shi'ite empire which also includes Iran, run by fanatics under an Islamic Republic. Realpolitick seems to have gone out the window, though, it would actually be more comforting to believe that the lunatics in charge of the current administration intended for Iraq to be an actual American colony rather than the idea that the Iraqi Thomas Jefferson was waiting in the wings for the fall of Hussein. Not that the people in charge would like what this fanciful Iraqi Enlightenment Liberal would have to say about their intentions toward his country.
Something terrible happened on Highway 8
A Little History Can Be a Dangerous Thing\
He mentions it again here:
Bring Back America
There is a reason why the "War to End All Wars" is not taught very well in American schools, it might teach American children that war is a bad thing.
The Mercury Theater radio play, starring Orson Wells, is pretty good too.
Follow me here. In Africa, they have a disease called malaria, which has lead to the sickle cell trait being passed down and becoming common among populations in Africa. Sickle-cell blood is unhealthy blood which causes all kinds of health problems, and can lead to death, but which is unpalatable to the malaria disease. So while a person with sickle cells is more likely to survive to produce children, a person with sickle cells is not really healthy.
At some point, people discoved that the bark of a Cinchona tree could cure malaria. If the population that eventually developed the sickle cell trait as a common trait had had access to quinine, most of those people would now have healthy blood, instead of suffering the ravages of sickle cell anemia.
So, the idea that letting people die natually of disease is somehow "culling the herd" is a false one. If you believe that a trait leads to fitness, nature might not decide to back you up. The people who had access to medicine were less likely in the above example to transmit unpleasant traits to their offspring.
Evolution is a kludge.
Snow White for GP32
Sure, you won't get a chance to work on the latest 3D hardware, but you could create a viable commercial product. And the GP 32 isn't a dream, it's here and anyone can fool around with it and do innovative things.
(This also goes for PalmOS devices, PCs and the like.)
Sure, it isn't Indrema, but I like the fact that soon after I heard this new, innovative console hyped up, I could actually buy one.
In 1987 they didn't have Dungeon Keeper, but I suppose Spinnaker's Adventure Creator was sort of similar. I liked making endless looping rooms where people would get trapped....