I have also seen the same argument used on Comic Books. The idea that comic books are "just for kids" has not been true since the late 60's.
The days of moral panic about the contents of comics seem to be long gone, though. 2000AD used to upset our moral guardians back in the eighties, when kids started coming home with Judge Dredd instead of Desperate Dan. But since then... Well, there's been Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, Lucifer, and God knows what else. These make the old 'Tales from the Crypt' comics that caused so much upset look feeble, but nobody minds because they're plainly intended for adults, and that idea's more or less got through now.
Well, that or the perception is now that comics are for geeks instead of for children.
The Nintendo generation is now in its late twenties or early thirties. We're a major demographic, but we're not the ones in power yet.
So there's still a general assumption in the establishment power centres that games are toys for children and therefore need to be regulated more closely than other media. This will change, but probably only when the Prime Minister is a man who grew up playing Super Mario Bros.
Mind you, there is a counterpoint that interactivity heightens the intensity of the experience considerably. I've watched endless horrific violence on film and it doesn't bother me. But in a game it's not some villain doing the dirty deed - it's you. And with modern control technology - say, The Godfather: Blackhand Edition - it feels like it, too. Watching a guy get pummelled on screen is less real than watching a guy get pummelled on screen, while pressing buttons to dictate the manner of the pummelling. Neither is anywhere near watching a guy get pummelled on screen while swinging your own fist repeatedly to dictate the manner of the pummelling. All are equally fictional, but that last one... it feels good, in a very bad way indeed.
leaving starving scientists at each others' throats while the biosphere around them came to a cataclysmic collapse.
Absolutely. I mean, it got pretty hairy on Citadel, and things on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker went all to hell, but seriously, this one was a plain nightmare from beginning to end.
My younger brother and I played (and beat) games like... Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers
That game was annoying. Most co-op games get Gauntletitis: one player gets too far ahead and the screen jams until they catch up. Cue negotiations over exactly what route to take to clear the blockage.
Not Chip 'n' Dale, though. No. Player 1 gets too far ahead, Player 2 drops off the bottom of the screen and dies.
For us, that game quickly degenerated into a wrestling match. Pick up the other player, throw him into a monster or an environment hazard:-)
Zombies Ate My Neighbours, though, that was a good co-op game. Mainly because it was so damn hard. You just had to help each other, or you were stuffed...
My guess is they haven't gone extinct, we are just not aware of them.
So you propose that there exists, even today, a race of apparent humans who are in fact children of Satan, inherently and genetically evil, and so vile that it is good and righteous to slay all you find, even the children, Old Testament style?
Interesting. Is there any particular genetic lineage you have in mind for this holy extermination?
"were the result of Satan's repeated tinkering" repeated being the key word. Satan by no means ran out of fallen angels after this, he didn't pack up his bags after the flood and say oh well I tried.
So, when did he stop, and why? When did Satan's filthy monstrous evil rat-people finally go into extinction, and the true human pure-blooded master race come into its inheritance?
actually It is my understanding that the cause of Noahs flood and the call for the execution were the result of Satan's repeated tinkering with the genetic blood line of Humans. a very over looked and misunderstood "People" of the bible were the nephilim which were fallen angels which had children with human women. creating Titans such as Goliath and perhaps most likely even the Greek Titans... One allusion to why Noah was saved was that he was clean or pure in his generations, indicating that his family was one of the last humans not bred out of the nephilm.
So. Satan's genetic engineering project takes place. Soon almost the whole human race consists of hybrid mutant thingies of some kind. Except Noah and his family. God saves them, wipes out every other living thing on the planet. All subsequent humans are descended from Noah.
Q: how does any of this justify the genocide once the Hebrews arrived in their Promised Land? Surely Satan's mutant monster men all drowned? Unless I suppose they were amphibious - a mutation presumably not beyond the capacity of Satan's laboratories - but doesn't that mean that the Flood was a pointless act of mass destruction that did not even succeed in its stated aims?
Turin of Turanbar (i know it's misspelled, don't have my Silmarillion handy)
The spelling is entirely forgivable, but the 'of'? He was Túrin Turambar, meaning Túrin, Master of Doom. He wasn't 'of' Turambar, he came from Dor-lómin.
The step I skipped here (but remembered elsewhere) is that the God of the Bible is defined as being unbound by time. This means that He has fully manipulative abilities on 4 dimensions. There is nothing defined in the Bible about any dimensional upper limit of God's manipulative abilities, but being unbound by time is defined in the Bible as a characteristic of God.
Reasonable enough.
This being the case, it would follow, both mathematically and physically, that it is impossible to disprove His existence using tools that are bound by time (unidirectionally manipulative about the fourth dimension) unless those tools measured at all times from negative infinity to infinity.
Is abstract logic not such a tool? If it is not, why are we using it to define God in the first place?
And all that said: can God self-destruct, or do any of those other awkward things proposed upthread? Create a square circle? A rock so heavy he can't lift it? Any of that?
They succumbed to the corrosive taint of Chaos, and even now in the cubicles, the hideous bloated beasts that were once developers stalk and hunt each other in a vicious battle for supremacy in the loathsome hive of corruption that was once their office. In time one of these abominations of nature will establish itself as the master, and under its appalling leadership a ghastly crew of mutant horrors will stream forth from their lairs to bring woe and misery to the peaceful human lands.
Otherwise I just created the linux kernel and several clones of Jenna Jameson.
Several pictures of Jenna Jameson, I think you'll find, though if I'm wrong I'd like to get hold of your technology. But the Linux kernel you created is very similar to a current derivative form of one Linus Torvalds created, and according to the government you can't copy it except under the terms he demands (in this case, the GPL). Nonetheless, you did create the kernel on your hard disk. Linus didn't, unless he came around and set up your computer for you. The Linux kernel on your hard disk is a distinct physical entity, separate from the one on the kernel.org FTP server, and you created it.
It's only that government edict about 'copyright' that (at least theoretically) prevents us creating and sharing all the music we like. Sure, all the music we create is a copy of music someone else once recorded, but that's a separate issue.
When you attempt to measure a 5th dimensional object, assuming one of those dimensions is temporal (i.e., time), with a 3 dimensional measuring device, you would find the object appearing to exist intermittently over time (moving out of the 3 dimensions and moving back in at a different location), or existing in two places at once (curving in such away that the object is connected on the 5th dimension but not on the 3 being measured), or any number of other possibilities. It is literally impossible to measure the limits of such an object unless it is somehow limited to the 3 dimensions being measured, assuming that such an act is even possible for such an object (it could be a 4 or 5 dimensional object).
Either you cough up for several gigs of flash media (hassle), or they have an external USB mass storage drive (expensive)
Flash media is expensive, USB drives aren't. 250GB for £44. For comparison, Microsoft are charging £70 for a 20GB disk (the price difference between Premium and Core 360's).
Not the kind of game I would normally be interested in, but this ban makes me want to obtain this by other means, and donate a fair price to Rockstar (if this is somehow possible).
The Dutch have ok'd it, and they're the same region as the UK. A solution presents itself.
... Over here, there's a standard form for contemptuous replies to legal bluster. It goes:
"I refer you to the reply in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram".
As I understood it, the police lied about him running from them, and about him having jumped the ticket barrier (he paid with his Oyster card like anyone else), but he did run once he reached the platform and saw the train there.
I think the equivalent would be like telling people to make their own music and distribute it for free.
But we are making our own music and distributing it for free. I create an mp3 file on a hard disk, I have made some music, in the sense that where none existed before music now exists. It happens to be identical to music also made by record companies, and traces back to the same original recording as theirs. But theirs is legal, and mine illegal, because the government says so.
How is this different from Gandhi's salt, which was identical to the British salt, but was illegal because the government said so?
another film that bridges the roughly 60 years between the end of the Hobbit and the start of the Lord of the Rings
What exactly happens, of any interest, in that period? Bilbo uses the Ring a few times to avoid the Sackville-Bagginses. Writes memoirs. Lends mithril armour to the Michel Delving Mathom-house. Wow, riveting stuff.
In the wider world, Sauron has returned to Mordor and is rebuilding Barad-dur. Three hours on an Orcish construction site, then?
The only excitement you might get is following Aragorn incognito in the guard of Minas Tirith. But to what end?
Now of you have these access points, how would an ordinary (usually incompetent) policeman know it is being used by people not "stealing"? Or someone could put up a logo of the scheme outside a home and then point the police that they are not stealing bandwidth - when they actually are. Who's going to know?
Is it BT's business to make the police's job easier?
As it stands, the assumption is that an open wireless network is not an invitation to use it freely. Hence the recent decision. If BT fill the country with genuinely open access points, the assumption no longer holds, as there are reasonable grounds to believe that an access point is intentionally open to all. That makes it harder for the police, but why should BT care about that?
Tell me, if the man you referred to running towards an underground train with a backpack on shortly after severeal suicide bombings had been a suicide bomber too, would you like to explain to the hundreds of casualties, deaths and relatives why the armed police there to protect them didn't shoot? The percentages say, it was better for that man to die than to risk the hundreds, and as a result we also live a more concious society of these incidents which in itself helps protect us.
You are fucking joking, right?
Percentages, is it? OK. How many people wear backpacks in London? Millions. How many people run for a train? Millions. Of those, how many are suicide bombers? Four so far. So, shoot anyone wearing a backpack who is running for a train, on the off-chance they might be a bomber?
Moreover, despite the initial lies put about by the police, de Menezes was not carrying a bag of any kind. Nor was he wearing a heavy coat.
TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.
No, that's a £1bn loss to the music industry. If I download an album, and allowing for the sake of argument that I would otherwise have bought it rather than just doing without, I'm not going to put that money under the bed. I'll spend it on something else. The country loses no retail spend at all, it just shifts to a sector that sells real products rather than just artificially-scarce information.
Slashdot Mirror
The days of moral panic about the contents of comics seem to be long gone, though. 2000AD used to upset our moral guardians back in the eighties, when kids started coming home with Judge Dredd instead of Desperate Dan. But since then... Well, there's been Sandman, Preacher, Hellblazer, Lucifer, and God knows what else. These make the old 'Tales from the Crypt' comics that caused so much upset look feeble, but nobody minds because they're plainly intended for adults, and that idea's more or less got through now.
Well, that or the perception is now that comics are for geeks instead of for children.
So there's still a general assumption in the establishment power centres that games are toys for children and therefore need to be regulated more closely than other media. This will change, but probably only when the Prime Minister is a man who grew up playing Super Mario Bros.
Mind you, there is a counterpoint that interactivity heightens the intensity of the experience considerably. I've watched endless horrific violence on film and it doesn't bother me. But in a game it's not some villain doing the dirty deed - it's you. And with modern control technology - say, The Godfather: Blackhand Edition - it feels like it, too. Watching a guy get pummelled on screen is less real than watching a guy get pummelled on screen, while pressing buttons to dictate the manner of the pummelling. Neither is anywhere near watching a guy get pummelled on screen while swinging your own fist repeatedly to dictate the manner of the pummelling. All are equally fictional, but that last one... it feels good, in a very bad way indeed.
Absolutely. I mean, it got pretty hairy on Citadel, and things on the Von Braun and the Rickenbacker went all to hell, but seriously, this one was a plain nightmare from beginning to end.
Oh, wait... Biosphere. My mistake. Sorry.
That game was annoying. Most co-op games get Gauntletitis: one player gets too far ahead and the screen jams until they catch up. Cue negotiations over exactly what route to take to clear the blockage.
Not Chip 'n' Dale, though. No. Player 1 gets too far ahead, Player 2 drops off the bottom of the screen and dies.
For us, that game quickly degenerated into a wrestling match. Pick up the other player, throw him into a monster or an environment hazard :-)
Zombies Ate My Neighbours, though, that was a good co-op game. Mainly because it was so damn hard. You just had to help each other, or you were stuffed...
So you propose that there exists, even today, a race of apparent humans who are in fact children of Satan, inherently and genetically evil, and so vile that it is good and righteous to slay all you find, even the children, Old Testament style?
Interesting. Is there any particular genetic lineage you have in mind for this holy extermination?
So, when did he stop, and why? When did Satan's filthy monstrous evil rat-people finally go into extinction, and the true human pure-blooded master race come into its inheritance?
So. Satan's genetic engineering project takes place. Soon almost the whole human race consists of hybrid mutant thingies of some kind. Except Noah and his family. God saves them, wipes out every other living thing on the planet. All subsequent humans are descended from Noah.
Q: how does any of this justify the genocide once the Hebrews arrived in their Promised Land? Surely Satan's mutant monster men all drowned? Unless I suppose they were amphibious - a mutation presumably not beyond the capacity of Satan's laboratories - but doesn't that mean that the Flood was a pointless act of mass destruction that did not even succeed in its stated aims?
The spelling is entirely forgivable, but the 'of'? He was Túrin Turambar, meaning Túrin, Master of Doom. He wasn't 'of' Turambar, he came from Dor-lómin.
Reasonable enough. This being the case, it would follow, both mathematically and physically, that it is impossible to disprove His existence using tools that are bound by time (unidirectionally manipulative about the fourth dimension) unless those tools measured at all times from negative infinity to infinity.
Is abstract logic not such a tool? If it is not, why are we using it to define God in the first place?
And all that said: can God self-destruct, or do any of those other awkward things proposed upthread? Create a square circle? A rock so heavy he can't lift it? Any of that?
To be fair, this is what testing is for. They've done their testing, decided some stuff's not right, now they're off to fix it for a couple of months.
At a guess, it turned out that absolutely everyone wanted to be Chaos, and they've had to go away and rebalance the races a bit.
No. This is Warhammer, not D&D.
They succumbed to the corrosive taint of Chaos, and even now in the cubicles, the hideous bloated beasts that were once developers stalk and hunt each other in a vicious battle for supremacy in the loathsome hive of corruption that was once their office. In time one of these abominations of nature will establish itself as the master, and under its appalling leadership a ghastly crew of mutant horrors will stream forth from their lairs to bring woe and misery to the peaceful human lands.
Several pictures of Jenna Jameson, I think you'll find, though if I'm wrong I'd like to get hold of your technology. But the Linux kernel you created is very similar to a current derivative form of one Linus Torvalds created, and according to the government you can't copy it except under the terms he demands (in this case, the GPL). Nonetheless, you did create the kernel on your hard disk. Linus didn't, unless he came around and set up your computer for you. The Linux kernel on your hard disk is a distinct physical entity, separate from the one on the kernel.org FTP server, and you created it.
It's only that government edict about 'copyright' that (at least theoretically) prevents us creating and sharing all the music we like. Sure, all the music we create is a copy of music someone else once recorded, but that's a separate issue.
Truly, you have a dizzying intellect.
Now, how is this relevant to the question of whether God, as conventionally defined, could self-destruct?
Because the BBFC are a government body whose job it is to tell adults which films they're allowed to watch and which games they're allowed to play.
Flash media is expensive, USB drives aren't. 250GB for £44. For comparison, Microsoft are charging £70 for a 20GB disk (the price difference between Premium and Core 360's).
The Dutch have ok'd it, and they're the same region as the UK. A solution presents itself.
... Over here, there's a standard form for contemptuous replies to legal bluster. It goes: "I refer you to the reply in the case of Arkell v. Pressdram".
As I understood it, the police lied about him running from them, and about him having jumped the ticket barrier (he paid with his Oyster card like anyone else), but he did run once he reached the platform and saw the train there.
But we are making our own music and distributing it for free. I create an mp3 file on a hard disk, I have made some music, in the sense that where none existed before music now exists. It happens to be identical to music also made by record companies, and traces back to the same original recording as theirs. But theirs is legal, and mine illegal, because the government says so.
How is this different from Gandhi's salt, which was identical to the British salt, but was illegal because the government said so?
What exactly happens, of any interest, in that period? Bilbo uses the Ring a few times to avoid the Sackville-Bagginses. Writes memoirs. Lends mithril armour to the Michel Delving Mathom-house. Wow, riveting stuff.
In the wider world, Sauron has returned to Mordor and is rebuilding Barad-dur. Three hours on an Orcish construction site, then?
The only excitement you might get is following Aragorn incognito in the guard of Minas Tirith. But to what end?
Is it BT's business to make the police's job easier?
As it stands, the assumption is that an open wireless network is not an invitation to use it freely. Hence the recent decision. If BT fill the country with genuinely open access points, the assumption no longer holds, as there are reasonable grounds to believe that an access point is intentionally open to all. That makes it harder for the police, but why should BT care about that?
You are fucking joking, right?
Percentages, is it? OK. How many people wear backpacks in London? Millions. How many people run for a train? Millions. Of those, how many are suicide bombers? Four so far. So, shoot anyone wearing a backpack who is running for a train, on the off-chance they might be a bomber?
Moreover, despite the initial lies put about by the police, de Menezes was not carrying a bag of any kind. Nor was he wearing a heavy coat.
So. The NSA, whose job it is to create and to crack strong encryption, are interested in computers and in mathematics. Big surprise there, guys.
From?
TNS, the market researcher, looked at the spending habits of file-sharers between 2003 and 2005 and estimated a £1bn loss to the country in retail spend.
No, that's a £1bn loss to the music industry. If I download an album, and allowing for the sake of argument that I would otherwise have bought it rather than just doing without, I'm not going to put that money under the bed. I'll spend it on something else. The country loses no retail spend at all, it just shifts to a sector that sells real products rather than just artificially-scarce information.