Ok I follow that; it makes sense. My question really is: why do the consequences have to exist? Why can't God give us the free will to choose to love him or reject him, and then regardless of our choice still love us and accept us into Heaven? Why does he choose to punish us for rejecting him?
Love is not something you should ever pay in return for something; nor is it something that someone else should ever expect in return for some reward.
There is a difference between limiting you child's free will, and forced control
That was part of my point. The other part being that there is also a difference between complete unrestricted free will and limiting free will. That's what you seem to be forgetting.
You're post makes no sense because you spend most of it elaborating on that one statement, but then when it comes to God you contradict yourself by only recognizing the two extremes: complete free will, or 'puppet master'. What about something in the middle?
Sounds to me like that's exactly what he's doing. You don't have to give him a hard time about it. He's just posting to vent and to warn others. A little off topic though, I guess.
You missed the logic slightly. I'll try and clarify.
He gave you free will so you could choose to love him or not, and you have used that free will to reject him.
I follow that. The question then is: what's next? Are we dammed to hell and eternal suffering for rejecting him? If that's true then here's the question: I limit my child's free will for her own safety, why does God not do the same?. Throughout this thread that question of 'why' has been avoided; all you say (paraphrased) is : 'that's the way it is'. I'll state it another way:
Why does God give us the free will to reject him if doing so leads us to eternal suffering?
You don't have to answer that. It's a rhetorical question. It's been asked for hundreds of years. There's no answer. You might say 'he's testing our faith' or something, but any answer can be countered with another 'why' and in the end the answer is 'that's the way it is'.
"You need to be kind and welcoming to people even when you acknowledge what is and is not a sin." Jesus did this
But God doesn't. I find this to be one of the more amusing ironies of Christianity.
He has the power to forgive all of us and accept us all into Heaven, but He doesn't. He only accepts those who acknowledge Him and ask for forgivness. The rest He sends (or allows to go) to hell. If I saw a person drowning in a lake and knew (in some omnipotent way) that my help was the only way they would survive I wouldn't be waiting for them to ask for it, even if they're oblivious and don't think they need help. A god that acts this way is not a god I want to worship, thanks very much.
Actually you've got it sort of half-backwards. Programmers are excempt from the labor laws so EA is 'leagally' allowed to exploit them. And they do. The artists, however, aren't exempt from the overtime laws but they're being treated the same way, which is the basis for the suit.
He went into the game with the intent to try and play only the space sim stuff and stay away from as much of the rest of the game as possible. That's silly.
You can't play only half a game and then base a review on it. He considered it bad that he had to stop flying around and actually do some land quests to earn enough money to buy better ships. It would be neat if a newbie could earn all his cash in space, but not being able to shouldn't be as big a detractor as he implies.
The point of JTL was to add space combat to the game; it's not a completely new game that you can play instead of the old one, which is the way he was reviewing it. There may be a lot of people in his exact shoes (who want a pure space sim), and for them this review is useful, but it shouldn't be labeled as a standard review.
You think retailers would actually prefer that system?? Bidding for early shipment? That's crazy; that would just drive the price up and everything would be chaotic.
If I were a retailer, I would much rather prefer to know for a fact that my competition isn't going to be allowed to sell a game until a specific date. And I would know for sure that on that date I will have just as many copies on my shelf as he does. Then the real compeition is in selling pre-orders. Pre-orders are much easier to sell because they're cheap and I can't run out (usually). Customers know weeks or months in advance when the game is comming out and everyone is happy.
The author is assuming that there exists the concept of some 'ideal universal mmorpg' that everything should be compared against. The entire article is biased based on what his defintion of this 'ideal mmorpg' is. He then goes on to explain why the features that players like drive the market away from this 'ideal'.
I suspect that if anyone suggested that maybe we don't want to compare our games to his 'ideal mmorpg'; that maybe the _players_ should decide what games are good and bad, that he would gasp and cry hearsay.
He didn't come right out and say what his 'ideal' was, but his primary measuring stick was 'how long will a player continue to play'. The longer they play, then the "better" the game. That's certainly a valid metric for the quality of a game, but it's definitely not the only one, and debatably not even the most important one either.
If you want to require Microsoft to warranty their product for a "reasonable" timeframe then you have to be willing to pay more for your XBox
That's insane. Customers expect a product to work propery for a reasonable amount of time. That's what they're paying for. I'm not buying a decorative black box for my living room.
So are you saying that if I go and buy a toaster and it works for a week and then stops then I'm out of luck if I didn't buy some stupid 'extended warranty'? I hope not because that would be asinine.
The only difference, and the only real debatable point here, is what is a 'reasonable amount of time' to expect the product to work. The 'extended warranty' is supposed to extend beyond that basic amount of time.
90 days (I think that's Microsoft's warranty period) is NOT a reasonable amount of time for a console. It should be at least 3 years.
Is the value of a thought to be judged by the words that express it?
First of all, don't confuse the issue. Nobody is judging the 'thought' itself. Just the words. You yourself argue that thoughts and words aren't the same ('a rose by any other name...') but then you flip 180 and assume that someone who is offended by the words is somehow judging the 'thought'. I think your entire opinion was biased by this confusion.
Sorry, but I just cannot understand how people can be offended by words without considering context at all.
It's simple. People are different. The speaker and the listener have different meanings for those words.
The meaning a person assigns to words comes not only from the dictionary but also from his own personality and culture. You're of the belief that the listener should abondon his own interpretation of the word and use the speaker's. People can do that to a degree, but there is often a limit. A person is who he is; and that defines the meaning of those words for him. You can't change that.
Criticizing someone for being offended by those words is not so very different from criticizing someone for folowing a religion that you think is stupid. It's a attack on who they are and what they believe in beacuse it's different from you.
Cultures are not always compatible. Some cultures offend other cultures. Neither is wrong. Get used to it.
The IRV system is only broken in unlikely circumstances. Also, don't forget that 1st preference votes should be more valuable than 2nd preference votes, so the candidate that polls the least by 1st preference _should_ be penalized, and vice-versa
You obviously didn't read that page I linked to. At least not in any detail. If you actually did and you still think IRV is a good system then you must have some response to those arguments. I'd be interested in hearing it.
In this case the D and R parties are aligned, and most of the voters want one of those two candidates to win.
What makes you assume the parties are aligned? Just because the majority votes for one of those two? That's because we are effectively in a two party duopoly; there's no other practical choices. They are most certainly not aligned.
But I digress.
The purpose of a voting system is to determine the majority preference. If the majority prefer X but the system elects Y then the system is broken. The politics of the parties is irrelevant. IRV is one such broken system.
All you're saying is that the parties can try and adapt to the broken voting system by modifying thier politics. That doesn't change the fact that the system is broken. An effective democracy needs an accurate election process. IRV isn't it. It produces erratic and unpredictible results. You really should read this page for an analysis of different methods. Out of all the different methods, IRV comes last. There's no real point in me reproducing that content of that site here.
I think there is a case you're missing. I'll use three American parties for this example (Rep, Dem, Green)
The counts get screwd up by the group of centrist voters who may (for example) vote for Democrat as the first choice and Republican as the second. You claim that this is 'rare' because these voters are not voting 'along party lines'. I don't think that's true at all. I think it would be a very common occurance.
Here's an example. Let's start with the results as they might be in the current system (very simplified):
45% Republican
55% Democrat
0% Green
Democrats have the majority. Let's say that there are a large number of Democrat voters who would rather vote Green but they don't because of the 'spoiler' effect.
IRV proponents say that IRV doesn't have that problem; they can vote how they like with no worries. Here's an example of what would happen in IRV election if a large number of the Dem voters jumped to Green as thier first choice. Let's assume the Dem voters who stayed are more centrist and vote Republican as thier second.:
So Republican wins with 70%. What the hell? Why did that happen?? As a Green supporter I thought I could vote Green,Democrat without risking giving a spoiler the vote to the Republicans. I was wrong. That's exactly what happend.
The reason is because IRV is ignoring the Green voters second choice. The Democrats should get 30%+25% but IRV is messing up the voter preferences.
I wouldn't call this an 'exceptional circumstance'.
Nonsense. I read the entire article and then when I saw that comment I burst out laughing. It's funny.
I usually don't bother to explain jokes to people who don't get them, but for some reason I'm about to.
Within the context of the article the quote is not stating the obvious and isn't funny. The AC knew that. When you take the quote out of the context of the article it becomes an extreme example of stating the obvious. This contrast is what makes the joke funny.
It makes a big difference if your messed up words use common letter patterns (what, in the article he called 'Psuedowords'), or not.
Example:
'uesdnatnrd' wasn't to hard to recognize beacuase 'uesd' and 'tnrd' aren't letter patterns that exist in real words. So the mind works quicker to rearrange the letters to find a real word.
'aulaclty' was much harder because it's almost pronouncable. 'lac' and 'lty' are common patterns from real words, and 'aul' might not be common but it's pronouncable.
The Chinese don't use Kanji. That's a Japanese thing.
But, regardless, how would google be able to find anything using a search query 'encoded' in leet-speek anyway? We're not talking about person to person communications here. These are google searches they're filtering.
Yeah, but how much do these 'experts' know about how secure paper ballots really are? They should also interview a third group: those who are experts in the paper system.
If your computer could use this technology, with a web cam, to figure out what part of the screen you were looking at that would be really cool! No more mouse; the cursor just moves around with your eyes! Or an FPS where you can aim using your eyes without changing the direction that you are moving. That'd be sweet.:)
Slashdot Mirror
They gave her reasonable suggestions on how & why feature requests may go unfulfilled
Which basically amounted to 'the devs don't feel like implementing them'
They gave her reasons why her idea for an official poll would not work
Because the devs might ignore the poll which would make the users upset and create a conflict.
I think her complaints have merit. Seems to me that the devs are insisting on having absolutely zero commitment to considering user requests.
Ok. I now understand a bit. Thank's for the condensed explanation.
If you can't reject him, you can't love him
Ok I follow that; it makes sense. My question really is: why do the consequences have to exist? Why can't God give us the free will to choose to love him or reject him, and then regardless of our choice still love us and accept us into Heaven? Why does he choose to punish us for rejecting him?
Love is not something you should ever pay in return for something; nor is it something that someone else should ever expect in return for some reward.
There is a difference between limiting you child's free will, and forced control
That was part of my point. The other part being that there is also a difference between complete unrestricted free will and limiting free will. That's what you seem to be forgetting.
You're post makes no sense because you spend most of it elaborating on that one statement, but then when it comes to God you contradict yourself by only recognizing the two extremes: complete free will, or 'puppet master'. What about something in the middle?
Sounds to me like that's exactly what he's doing. You don't have to give him a hard time about it. He's just posting to vent and to warn others. A little off topic though, I guess.
You missed the logic slightly. I'll try and clarify.
He gave you free will so you could choose to love him or not, and you have used that free will to reject him.
I follow that. The question then is: what's next? Are we dammed to hell and eternal suffering for rejecting him? If that's true then here's the question: I limit my child's free will for her own safety, why does God not do the same?. Throughout this thread that question of 'why' has been avoided; all you say (paraphrased) is : 'that's the way it is'. I'll state it another way:
Why does God give us the free will to reject him if doing so leads us to eternal suffering?
You don't have to answer that. It's a rhetorical question. It's been asked for hundreds of years. There's no answer. You might say 'he's testing our faith' or something, but any answer can be countered with another 'why' and in the end the answer is 'that's the way it is'.
"You need to be kind and welcoming to people even when you acknowledge what is and is not a sin." Jesus did this
But God doesn't. I find this to be one of the more amusing ironies of Christianity.
He has the power to forgive all of us and accept us all into Heaven, but He doesn't. He only accepts those who acknowledge Him and ask for forgivness. The rest He sends (or allows to go) to hell. If I saw a person drowning in a lake and knew (in some omnipotent way) that my help was the only way they would survive I wouldn't be waiting for them to ask for it, even if they're oblivious and don't think they need help. A god that acts this way is not a god I want to worship, thanks very much.
nt
Actually you've got it sort of half-backwards. Programmers are excempt from the labor laws so EA is 'leagally' allowed to exploit them. And they do. The artists, however, aren't exempt from the overtime laws but they're being treated the same way, which is the basis for the suit.
He went into the game with the intent to try and play only the space sim stuff and stay away from as much of the rest of the game as possible. That's silly.
You can't play only half a game and then base a review on it. He considered it bad that he had to stop flying around and actually do some land quests to earn enough money to buy better ships. It would be neat if a newbie could earn all his cash in space, but not being able to shouldn't be as big a detractor as he implies.
The point of JTL was to add space combat to the game; it's not a completely new game that you can play instead of the old one, which is the way he was reviewing it. There may be a lot of people in his exact shoes (who want a pure space sim), and for them this review is useful, but it shouldn't be labeled as a standard review.
You think retailers would actually prefer that system?? Bidding for early shipment? That's crazy; that would just drive the price up and everything would be chaotic.
If I were a retailer, I would much rather prefer to know for a fact that my competition isn't going to be allowed to sell a game until a specific date. And I would know for sure that on that date I will have just as many copies on my shelf as he does. Then the real compeition is in selling pre-orders. Pre-orders are much easier to sell because they're cheap and I can't run out (usually). Customers know weeks or months in advance when the game is comming out and everyone is happy.
Here's a summary:
Players prefer features that are "bad".
Seriously. That's the article.
The author is assuming that there exists the concept of some 'ideal universal mmorpg' that everything should be compared against. The entire article is biased based on what his defintion of this 'ideal mmorpg' is. He then goes on to explain why the features that players like drive the market away from this 'ideal'.
I suspect that if anyone suggested that maybe we don't want to compare our games to his 'ideal mmorpg'; that maybe the _players_ should decide what games are good and bad, that he would gasp and cry hearsay.
He didn't come right out and say what his 'ideal' was, but his primary measuring stick was 'how long will a player continue to play'. The longer they play, then the "better" the game. That's certainly a valid metric for the quality of a game, but it's definitely not the only one, and debatably not even the most important one either.
If you want to require Microsoft to warranty their product for a "reasonable" timeframe then you have to be willing to pay more for your XBox
That's insane. Customers expect a product to work propery for a reasonable amount of time. That's what they're paying for. I'm not buying a decorative black box for my living room.
So are you saying that if I go and buy a toaster and it works for a week and then stops then I'm out of luck if I didn't buy some stupid 'extended warranty'? I hope not because that would be asinine.
The only difference, and the only real debatable point here, is what is a 'reasonable amount of time' to expect the product to work. The 'extended warranty' is supposed to extend beyond that basic amount of time.
90 days (I think that's Microsoft's warranty period) is NOT a reasonable amount of time for a console. It should be at least 3 years.
The Millenium Falcon can make .5 past light speed.
Is the value of a thought to be judged by the words that express it?
First of all, don't confuse the issue. Nobody is judging the 'thought' itself. Just the words. You yourself argue that thoughts and words aren't the same ('a rose by any other name...') but then you flip 180 and assume that someone who is offended by the words is somehow judging the 'thought'. I think your entire opinion was biased by this confusion.
Sorry, but I just cannot understand how people can be offended by words without considering context at all.
It's simple. People are different. The speaker and the listener have different meanings for those words.
The meaning a person assigns to words comes not only from the dictionary but also from his own personality and culture. You're of the belief that the listener should abondon his own interpretation of the word and use the speaker's. People can do that to a degree, but there is often a limit. A person is who he is; and that defines the meaning of those words for him. You can't change that.
Criticizing someone for being offended by those words is not so very different from criticizing someone for folowing a religion that you think is stupid. It's a attack on who they are and what they believe in beacuse it's different from you.
Cultures are not always compatible. Some cultures offend other cultures. Neither is wrong. Get used to it.
a farmer who could lose his farm
Lose his farm? In what situation would he lose his farm?
The IRV system is only broken in unlikely circumstances. Also, don't forget that 1st preference votes should be more valuable than 2nd preference votes, so the candidate that polls the least by 1st preference _should_ be penalized, and vice-versa
You obviously didn't read that page I linked to. At least not in any detail. If you actually did and you still think IRV is a good system then you must have some response to those arguments. I'd be interested in hearing it.
In this case the D and R parties are aligned, and most of the voters want one of those two candidates to win.
What makes you assume the parties are aligned? Just because the majority votes for one of those two? That's because we are effectively in a two party duopoly; there's no other practical choices. They are most certainly not aligned.
But I digress.
The purpose of a voting system is to determine the majority preference. If the majority prefer X but the system elects Y then the system is broken. The politics of the parties is irrelevant. IRV is one such broken system.
All you're saying is that the parties can try and adapt to the broken voting system by modifying thier politics. That doesn't change the fact that the system is broken. An effective democracy needs an accurate election process. IRV isn't it. It produces erratic and unpredictible results. You really should read this page for an analysis of different methods. Out of all the different methods, IRV comes last. There's no real point in me reproducing that content of that site here.
I think there is a case you're missing. I'll use three American parties for this example (Rep, Dem, Green)
The counts get screwd up by the group of centrist voters who may (for example) vote for Democrat as the first choice and Republican as the second. You claim that this is 'rare' because these voters are not voting 'along party lines'. I don't think that's true at all. I think it would be a very common occurance.
Here's an example. Let's start with the results as they might be in the current system (very simplified):
45% Republican
55% Democrat
0% Green
Democrats have the majority. Let's say that there are a large number of Democrat voters who would rather vote Green but they don't because of the 'spoiler' effect.
IRV proponents say that IRV doesn't have that problem; they can vote how they like with no worries. Here's an example of what would happen in IRV election if a large number of the Dem voters jumped to Green as thier first choice. Let's assume the Dem voters who stayed are more centrist and vote Republican as thier second.:
A: 45% : Republican, _, _
B: 30% : Green, Democrat, _
C: 25% : Democrat, Republican, _
After 1st count:
A: 45% : Republican, _, _
B: 30% : Green, Democrat, _
C: 25% : X, Republican, _
So Republican wins with 70%. What the hell? Why did that happen?? As a Green supporter I thought I could vote Green,Democrat without risking giving a spoiler the vote to the Republicans. I was wrong. That's exactly what happend.
The reason is because IRV is ignoring the Green voters second choice. The Democrats should get 30%+25% but IRV is messing up the voter preferences.
I wouldn't call this an 'exceptional circumstance'.
You still haven't explained why it's "self evident".
After a few decades contamination will have advanced to a level were there are no "clean" crops anymore.
So? Why is that bad?
it's about giving people a choice wether they want to eat them or not.
Why would anyone choose not to?
This isn't a flame btw. I'm genuinely interested in understanding your opinion. Please elaborate a bit.
Nonsense. I read the entire article and then when I saw that comment I burst out laughing. It's funny.
I usually don't bother to explain jokes to people who don't get them, but for some reason I'm about to.
Within the context of the article the quote is not stating the obvious and isn't funny. The AC knew that. When you take the quote out of the context of the article it becomes an extreme example of stating the obvious. This contrast is what makes the joke funny.
It makes a big difference if your messed up words use common letter patterns (what, in the article he called 'Psuedowords'), or not.
Example:
'uesdnatnrd' wasn't to hard to recognize beacuase 'uesd' and 'tnrd' aren't letter patterns that exist in real words. So the mind works quicker to rearrange the letters to find a real word.
'aulaclty' was much harder because it's almost pronouncable. 'lac' and 'lty' are common patterns from real words, and 'aul' might not be common but it's pronouncable.
Just an observation.
The Chinese don't use Kanji. That's a Japanese thing.
But, regardless, how would google be able to find anything using a search query 'encoded' in leet-speek anyway? We're not talking about person to person communications here. These are google searches they're filtering.
Yeah, but how much do these 'experts' know about how secure paper ballots really are? They should also interview a third group: those who are experts in the paper system.
If your computer could use this technology, with a web cam, to figure out what part of the screen you were looking at that would be really cool! No more mouse; the cursor just moves around with your eyes! Or an FPS where you can aim using your eyes without changing the direction that you are moving. That'd be sweet. :)