One of my good friends was a substance abuse counciler for a number of years, I've also dealt with addictions on both sides of my family. According to what my friend has told me, as well as my own personal experience, you are spot on.
As I understand it, physical addiction is only a small part of the overall addiction for most people, and it's mainly relegated to a few substances. The psychological aspect of addiction is many times more important. What happens is that people tend to use the addiction as a way of fulfilling needs that they are otherwise unable to fulfill. For example, an alcoholic may use alcohol as a way of supressing the need for, say, self-esteem.
In essence, the focus of the addiction becomes an intergal part of the psychological makeup of the addicted person. This is generally called an addictive personality.
In general, any addiction can replace any other. MMORPGs specifically are a likely substitute for a replacement addiction because they are structured to give us the feeling of fulfilling those needs that if we cannot fulfill may otherwise be filled with other addictions.
One good example is Smoking. Although nicotiene itself is chemically addictive, one of the things that makes smoking so difficult to quit is that people learn to socialize around their smoking.
People who smoke often base friendships largely around their smoking. When they quit, they often feel they have lost friends and find it difficult to learn new ways to socialize, since smoking has been at the center of their socializing for however long they have smoked.
Since MMORPGs have (a form of) socializing at their core, someone who quit smoking may find that they use the game as a way to compensate for the gap in the socialization that was taken out by their quitting smoking.
Every time I see a post like this, frankly it scares the hell out of me.
I'm about to graduate from DeVry University (I should graduate next year) with a degree in Computer Information Systems.
I think I'm a fairly skilled developer. While I certainly do not have the experience of someone who has been employeed as a developer for years.
The thing of it is, I'm afraid that the stigma of my "school" is going to mean that I won't be able to find a job, perphaps even when I'm the most skilled candidate.
I'm not going to say DeVry's reputation is completely undeserved, but some times I think DeVry graduates reputations are undeserved.
Using myself as an example, I am a fairly skilled developer, I understand a lot of the theory behind computer science as well as the practical side of developing software. What I didn't understand, and what I really wasn't able to learn on my own- was how businesses operate.
What DeVry really teaches is how to apply analysis/design/programming skills to buisnesses. Granted they advertise as teaching those skills and don't, but for someone who already has a solid basis in the technology, they do teach how to use the knowledge of technology to benefit the buisiness process.
I would personally think that in the business world having someone who understood business as well as technology would be a boon. Perhaps though I've just been brainwashed.
you know, this actually make me think about something. If the ESRB is just given a video with the most extreme content in the game, which I would assume is not all that long, in order to rate the game, why not have the companies who want to sell games provide the retailers with a copy of this video.
The retailer could have a small kiosk that could allow parents to walk up and scan a game and see a video of the content in the game to help them decide if it is or is not appropriate for their children.
It really seems like a somewhat simple and elegant solution to helping parents know what's in a game. It would also probably work in the favor of game companies as well. I know more than a few 17-18 year olds who would be more likely to buy a game if they could scan it and see the extreme amount of gore/sex in the games.
I've personally never found the media's reaction to video games to be suprising at all. Video Games are basically in direct competition with Television for the time and attention of people. The Info-tainment industry wants to play up video games as being bad because they don't want people to grow up getting their daily dose of sex and violence from GTA 237: Let's Kill Some People; they want them to get it from Channel $X News and The $City Times.
Media companies are no more going to sing the praises of video games than Coca Cola is going to come out and say "You know, we like coke, and a lot of other people like coke, but if you like pepsi then that's A-OK with us".
Of course, the reason why this isn't going to work in the long run is that overly dramatic FUD is only entertaining if you don't realize that it's overly dramatic FUD (at least in the case of info-tainment). Most people I think, or at least most of the Gen-X and Gen-Yers have played enough video games to realize that this is FUD, and so they get bored with it- so they stop with the news and pick up video games instead.
I wonder what sort of form this will take if it is indeed SF4.
As other people have mentioned, Arcades are nothing like as big as they used to be, because of this it seems like Capcom seems to keep an eye on console systems. I know that I still play fighting games quite a bit, but I hardly ever go to Arcades.
Anyway, a lot of the current gen systems seem to have problems doing good 2D stuff.
I think that a new street fighter would be a good opportunity to make a fighter that plays like a classic 2D fighter but uses 3D graphics.
just for the sake of argument, not that it matters as this post is really late...
I think that chat can often times be the best way to get information. Say I'm going to go have lunch with Bob. It's 11am and I'm working in my cube, and bob is working in his cube across the office. Now say I'm wanting to know where Bob would like to go for lunch. Obviously I can't just open up google and type in "where would bob like to go for lunch". I could call bob, but I might not know his extension, or maybe I just don't want to interrupt him.
So, the best way to get the information I need is to send bob an IM asking him where he'd like to go for lunch. Then he can answer sometime when he gets a chance, or just ponder it and let me know when it's time for us to leave for lunch.
Granted this might not have much to do with searching, but an organized contact list that is common across an email account and an IM service (gmail, google talk) is a way to organize sources of information. I believe google is not about searching so much as about organizing and providing access to information- or in this case, to people who know the information you need.
I was in a similar situation just this term at school. Althought it wasn't a senior project course, one of my programing courses has a project that basically came down to "do whatever you want, but be sure that you can demonstrate your ability to X, Y, Z and be able to justify design decisions, etc."
I found the best way to chose a project was to think of something that I found interesting, and knew enough about to be able to reasonably finish the project in a term, but that would still offer me an opportunity to learn.
In the end, I settled on writing a GUI frontend for QCL since it allowed me to learn more about Qt, and I got to work with something relalted to Quantum Computing, which I've always found extremely interesting, without having to have a PhD in physics to completely understand what I was doing.
If anybody is wondering, the frontend will eventually be released on sourceforge as kqcl.
I've seen a lot of threads saying that there is no sense in doing something difficult when you can get a good grade by just following the status quo. While it's important to not be so ambitious that you set yourself up to fail, remember that taking on an interesting project that gives you the opportunity to learn something new and contribute back to the community is often it's own reward.
I've seen copies of Earthbound selling for around $25-$30, but never as high as $50. It's definitely worth the money though. If you can find it, pick up a copy of the original guide book that shipped with the game, it's invaluable the first time you play through for a couple of the areas.
For anyone who's never had the chance to play Earthbound, it's really one of the most clever RPGs to have ever been released. It takes place in a modern setting, like the 1990's. It's sort of a sci-fi spoof, it's humor is largely based on parodies and breaking the Fourth Wall. While it does a good job of making fun of itself, it still manages to be a fairly fun game. It's not the most challenging RPG available, though some areas can be a real pain if you don't have a guide.
You can get more information on Earthbound at Starmen.net.
And if you haven't figgured it out, Earthbound is one of my favorite games of all time:)
actually, dumping roms off of NES, SNES, N64, etc. carts is fairly trivial. It's not like ripping a DVD or something where you have to break encryption, rip, un-encode, re-encode, etc. Basically you buy a small piece of hardware that runs about $20. Plug it into your computer, plug the cart in and your good to go.
Strange, I took the test and the ONLY image I was able to identify was the one that followed the "disturbing" image.
I also woke up about 2 minutes ago... the fact that I'm already on slashdot is probably more disturbing than a bloody hand.
Logarithmic growth actually seems fairly reasonable to me. Especially if one is looking at the number of consumers rather than the number of songs consumed.
Exponential growth would say that every day/week/month a lot of new people are starting to use online music stores.
I would guess that more likely there was an inital period of a few quarters where people started hearing about how great iTunes et al was, and started trying it out. After the initial boom, most people who want to buy music from an online music store do, and the people who don't are not interested, meaning that the graph flattens out over time.
I generally pay for every other version of Suse. I do so for a couple of reasons. One is that downloading and burning the iso's or installing via ftp can be a pita compared to just having the disks. I also switch a lot of people over to Linux, and the user manuals can be helpful to people who are just starting with Linux. It's also amazing how far seeing a real retail box can go in convincing someone that Linux is worth trying (strangely enough people seem to be more comfortable with pirating software then with knowing that the software is actually free). I also like to support people who make products that I like. Buying a boxed set is one way of supporting the distro that I like.
perhaps it's because I'm highly sleep deprived, but for some reason your term "mach-very-fast" strikes me as one of the funniest things I've ever read.
thanks for the bit of enjoyment.
I, for one, do not care how well it captures anything. I HATE first person shooters, and I DOUBLE HATEfirst person platformers.
Metroid Prime was, to me, nothing more than Turok with space pirates instead of Dinosaurs.
I suggest "free as in lunch", I think it might really be better than "free as in beer" ever was anyway, because it relates back to "there's no such thing as a free lunch" and basically re-enforces the idea that "free as in speech" = good, "free as in lunch" = be cautious.
I'm going to buy the last generation of Power Mac that's available. This means that I'll have a top-of-the-line G5 system that should run all the applications I'm using right now, and will remain up to date for several years. By which time I'll be ready to upgrade to new software and a new machine without worry that some of the software I use won't be available natively for the intel mac.
The emulation sounds like a good idea, but I doubt that it would be effective for some resource intensive applications like 3D rendering, high resolution image editing and video editing.
I'm also not about to spend another three grand for a new version of Maya just so I can run on an intel mac.
hy is it that they got Metroid Prime so right (twice!)...
this is sort of off topic, but I HATED Metroid Prime. The Metroid series had been one of my favorite game series, and then they RUINED with Prime. The first person element seems like the biggest and most apparent screw up, I really fail to understand why, with the mechanics of the game, they could fail to at least have an option of a third-person mode; personally I can't stand first person games for a number of reasons. (The lock-on system meant that the first-person aiming wasn't a big deal, and the HUD would have worked as well as it did in first person as an overlay to a third-person view). The game also didn't seem to flow as well as the previous games. I also hate being forced to scrub every room with the scanner, and wait while holding the button down for it to "analyze" before it brings up information.
No, I don't think they got Metroid Prime right at all. I think a lot of people were desperate for a Metroid game, and a lot of other people will lap up any piece of crap that is first person.
you know, I read this and I thought at first I agreed with you, but then I realized that really I didn't. It's 4 am and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to verbalize my disagreement, so bear with me.
In abstract, I agree with the idea that a sovergen nation should be able to have it's own laws. Basically, if a bunch of people want to get together and live under whatever waky laws they can come up with like wood should smell different on wednesdays or it's a capitol crime to drink water from a seventeen inch purple curly straw or whatever.
The problem is, I think this only works if all of the people living under the rule of that country are doing so voluntarily. If I want to drink water from a seventeen inch purple curly straw, then I should be able to move to an area were that's allowed.
Along those lines, I should also be able to be informed of other countries, other laws, etc, so that I can go someplace else.
The problem is that, in china, I don't think that either is the case. People can't very well up and move to another country easily, and because of the censorship they don't really know much about where they could move to.
I've read a lot of negative comments about the Harry Potter series here, and even more 12 hours ago when the story was on fark, but for all of you who haven't had a chance or desire to read one of the books, stop by the local library and give one a chance.
The stories are not high-brow literature, nor are they intended to be. They are, however, good fantasy. The storylines are entertaining, and they have a fair bit of depth to them. The world is also deep, and pretty self-consistent. The books are humerous on many levels, and also at times a bit more insiteful than they are perhaps given credit for. A lot of the themes that started to emerge in Order of the Phoenix, and that will likely escellate in Half-blood Prince are especially pertinent today. (Although perhaps the death-eater/nazi comparison is more obvious, there are subtle but interesting parallels between the situation with voldamot and his followers and more modern things such as terrorism.) The books contain interesting moral delimas and gray areas (the position of the house elves, S.P.E.W and the take of the other characters offers interesting parallels to the philosophy of neitzsche for example) and are also just plain a lot of fun.
I think the biggest problem with the Harry Potter series is that a lot of people will overlook it BECAUSE it's so popular. I know that I avoid things that are fairly popular because I think that in general the masses have terrible taste, and if most people like something, then I'll probably think it's crap. Luckily I did check out Harry Potter and found that in this case, the public was right, the books are good, and maybe other people who have avoided it for the same reason might find that they too enjoy the stories.
I have to add if he is half blooded whats the other half
Half-blood in the Harry Potter series refers to a witch or wizard with two wizarding parents, but at least one non-wizarding grandparent.
A witch or wizard who was born to non-wizarding parents (muggles) is called muggle-born (mudblood is "a really foul name for someone who was muggle born"). Most witches or wizards consider a half-blood to be a person with one pure-blood and one muggle-born parent. Some more fanatical witches and wizards take this fruther by saying hat if any of your grandparents were muggle-born then you are a half blood.
Essentially, one is only considered "pureblood" if one can trace their entire bloodline back several centuries at least through entirely wizarding (and presumably pureblood) families. Because of this there is a lot of inbreeding.
yeah, I misworded what I was saying. What I was trying to point out was that if you take a trioxin zombie and cut it up into little peices, all of the little peices will still try to attack you.
There are actually a few possible explanations to your questions.
First of all you must realize that in most portraials of zombies (* of the Dead series, etc) the zombies are not focued on eating brains. The zombie is driven to consume human flesh, but focues primarily on the viscera and later muscle tissue.
If you suscribe to the idea that zombies rise due to an infection of Solanum (see The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks), you would find that destruction of the brain is indeed most efficascious due to the fact that the primary area of reproduction of the solanum virus is in the frontal lobe of the brain. The virus is found in other areas of the body inorder to reanimate it, but it's central location is in the brain.
If you look instead to the Rage virus (see 28 days later), I would remind you that victims of the Rage virus are infact humans and not zombies. In this case the destruction of the brain has the safe effect as it would have in a non-infected human.
If instead you wish to look at zombies who have been revived through the use of Trioxin (Return of the Living Dead series) then I would point out that destruction of the brain is not effective in destroying the body. In fact, there is no known way to destroy a corpse that has been reanimated through the use of Trioxin. The zombies in this case are lead to consume brains (primarily of humans, though they will also consume cow brains, see Return of the Living Dead II) in order to supply themselves with Neurons (see Return of the Living Dead 3). This is said by one zombie to stop the "pain of being dead".
Thinking about the Revolution is fun, but it also somewhat annoys me because everytime I see a Revolution story I spend hours trying to ponder what the revolutionary feature is going to be.
I understand Nintendo's fears that the other companies might try to rip off their ideas, but wouldn't patenting the hell out of everything be just as effective without driving all their potential customers absolutely insane?
Ah well, I guess it probably drums up some excitement. It doesn't really matter to me, I decided I'd be buing a Revolution as soon as I heard about it playing classic games. I'll probably get a PS3 too, but I doubt I'll get an XBOX360 though, if the current generation of games are any indication (and they very well might not be), XBOX seems to get the more mainstream games, which basically seems to me to be nothing but a crapstorm of FPS and Sports games, neither of wich I can stand.
Slashdot Mirror
One of my good friends was a substance abuse counciler for a number of years, I've also dealt with addictions on both sides of my family. According to what my friend has told me, as well as my own personal experience, you are spot on.
As I understand it, physical addiction is only a small part of the overall addiction for most people, and it's mainly relegated to a few substances. The psychological aspect of addiction is many times more important. What happens is that people tend to use the addiction as a way of fulfilling needs that they are otherwise unable to fulfill. For example, an alcoholic may use alcohol as a way of supressing the need for, say, self-esteem.
In essence, the focus of the addiction becomes an intergal part of the psychological makeup of the addicted person. This is generally called an addictive personality.
In general, any addiction can replace any other. MMORPGs specifically are a likely substitute for a replacement addiction because they are structured to give us the feeling of fulfilling those needs that if we cannot fulfill may otherwise be filled with other addictions.
One good example is Smoking. Although nicotiene itself is chemically addictive, one of the things that makes smoking so difficult to quit is that people learn to socialize around their smoking.
People who smoke often base friendships largely around their smoking. When they quit, they often feel they have lost friends and find it difficult to learn new ways to socialize, since smoking has been at the center of their socializing for however long they have smoked.
Since MMORPGs have (a form of) socializing at their core, someone who quit smoking may find that they use the game as a way to compensate for the gap in the socialization that was taken out by their quitting smoking.
Every time I see a post like this, frankly it scares the hell out of me.
I'm about to graduate from DeVry University (I should graduate next year) with a degree in Computer Information Systems.
I think I'm a fairly skilled developer. While I certainly do not have the experience of someone who has been employeed as a developer for years.
The thing of it is, I'm afraid that the stigma of my "school" is going to mean that I won't be able to find a job, perphaps even when I'm the most skilled candidate.
I'm not going to say DeVry's reputation is completely undeserved, but some times I think DeVry graduates reputations are undeserved.
Using myself as an example, I am a fairly skilled developer, I understand a lot of the theory behind computer science as well as the practical side of developing software. What I didn't understand, and what I really wasn't able to learn on my own- was how businesses operate.
What DeVry really teaches is how to apply analysis/design/programming skills to buisnesses. Granted they advertise as teaching those skills and don't, but for someone who already has a solid basis in the technology, they do teach how to use the knowledge of technology to benefit the buisiness process.
I would personally think that in the business world having someone who understood business as well as technology would be a boon. Perhaps though I've just been brainwashed.
you know, this actually make me think about something. If the ESRB is just given a video with the most extreme content in the game, which I would assume is not all that long, in order to rate the game, why not have the companies who want to sell games provide the retailers with a copy of this video.
The retailer could have a small kiosk that could allow parents to walk up and scan a game and see a video of the content in the game to help them decide if it is or is not appropriate for their children.
It really seems like a somewhat simple and elegant solution to helping parents know what's in a game. It would also probably work in the favor of game companies as well. I know more than a few 17-18 year olds who would be more likely to buy a game if they could scan it and see the extreme amount of gore/sex in the games.
I've personally never found the media's reaction to video games to be suprising at all. Video Games are basically in direct competition with Television for the time and attention of people. The Info-tainment industry wants to play up video games as being bad because they don't want people to grow up getting their daily dose of sex and violence from GTA 237: Let's Kill Some People; they want them to get it from Channel $X News and The $City Times.
Media companies are no more going to sing the praises of video games than Coca Cola is going to come out and say "You know, we like coke, and a lot of other people like coke, but if you like pepsi then that's A-OK with us".
Of course, the reason why this isn't going to work in the long run is that overly dramatic FUD is only entertaining if you don't realize that it's overly dramatic FUD (at least in the case of info-tainment). Most people I think, or at least most of the Gen-X and Gen-Yers have played enough video games to realize that this is FUD, and so they get bored with it- so they stop with the news and pick up video games instead.
I wonder what sort of form this will take if it is indeed SF4.
As other people have mentioned, Arcades are nothing like as big as they used to be, because of this it seems like Capcom seems to keep an eye on console systems. I know that I still play fighting games quite a bit, but I hardly ever go to Arcades.
Anyway, a lot of the current gen systems seem to have problems doing good 2D stuff.
I think that a new street fighter would be a good opportunity to make a fighter that plays like a classic 2D fighter but uses 3D graphics.
just for the sake of argument, not that it matters as this post is really late...
I think that chat can often times be the best way to get information. Say I'm going to go have lunch with Bob. It's 11am and I'm working in my cube, and bob is working in his cube across the office. Now say I'm wanting to know where Bob would like to go for lunch. Obviously I can't just open up google and type in "where would bob like to go for lunch". I could call bob, but I might not know his extension, or maybe I just don't want to interrupt him.
So, the best way to get the information I need is to send bob an IM asking him where he'd like to go for lunch. Then he can answer sometime when he gets a chance, or just ponder it and let me know when it's time for us to leave for lunch.
Granted this might not have much to do with searching, but an organized contact list that is common across an email account and an IM service (gmail, google talk) is a way to organize sources of information. I believe google is not about searching so much as about organizing and providing access to information- or in this case, to people who know the information you need.
I was in a similar situation just this term at school. Althought it wasn't a senior project course, one of my programing courses has a project that basically came down to "do whatever you want, but be sure that you can demonstrate your ability to X, Y, Z and be able to justify design decisions, etc."
I found the best way to chose a project was to think of something that I found interesting, and knew enough about to be able to reasonably finish the project in a term, but that would still offer me an opportunity to learn.
In the end, I settled on writing a GUI frontend for QCL since it allowed me to learn more about Qt, and I got to work with something relalted to Quantum Computing, which I've always found extremely interesting, without having to have a PhD in physics to completely understand what I was doing.
If anybody is wondering, the frontend will eventually be released on sourceforge as kqcl.
I've seen a lot of threads saying that there is no sense in doing something difficult when you can get a good grade by just following the status quo. While it's important to not be so ambitious that you set yourself up to fail, remember that taking on an interesting project that gives you the opportunity to learn something new and contribute back to the community is often it's own reward.
I've seen copies of Earthbound selling for around $25-$30, but never as high as $50. It's definitely worth the money though. If you can find it, pick up a copy of the original guide book that shipped with the game, it's invaluable the first time you play through for a couple of the areas. :)
For anyone who's never had the chance to play Earthbound, it's really one of the most clever RPGs to have ever been released. It takes place in a modern setting, like the 1990's. It's sort of a sci-fi spoof, it's humor is largely based on parodies and breaking the Fourth Wall. While it does a good job of making fun of itself, it still manages to be a fairly fun game. It's not the most challenging RPG available, though some areas can be a real pain if you don't have a guide.
You can get more information on Earthbound at Starmen.net.
And if you haven't figgured it out, Earthbound is one of my favorite games of all time
actually, dumping roms off of NES, SNES, N64, etc. carts is fairly trivial. It's not like ripping a DVD or something where you have to break encryption, rip, un-encode, re-encode, etc. Basically you buy a small piece of hardware that runs about $20. Plug it into your computer, plug the cart in and your good to go.
Strange, I took the test and the ONLY image I was able to identify was the one that followed the "disturbing" image.
I also woke up about 2 minutes ago... the fact that I'm already on slashdot is probably more disturbing than a bloody hand.
Logarithmic growth actually seems fairly reasonable to me. Especially if one is looking at the number of consumers rather than the number of songs consumed.
Exponential growth would say that every day/week/month a lot of new people are starting to use online music stores.
I would guess that more likely there was an inital period of a few quarters where people started hearing about how great iTunes et al was, and started trying it out. After the initial boom, most people who want to buy music from an online music store do, and the people who don't are not interested, meaning that the graph flattens out over time.
Hmm, this is just what I need... a mouse with sharp square plastic edges .
I generally pay for every other version of Suse. I do so for a couple of reasons. One is that downloading and burning the iso's or installing via ftp can be a pita compared to just having the disks. I also switch a lot of people over to Linux, and the user manuals can be helpful to people who are just starting with Linux. It's also amazing how far seeing a real retail box can go in convincing someone that Linux is worth trying (strangely enough people seem to be more comfortable with pirating software then with knowing that the software is actually free). I also like to support people who make products that I like. Buying a boxed set is one way of supporting the distro that I like.
perhaps it's because I'm highly sleep deprived, but for some reason your term "mach-very-fast" strikes me as one of the funniest things I've ever read.
thanks for the bit of enjoyment.
I, for one, do not care how well it captures anything. I HATE first person shooters, and I DOUBLE HATEfirst person platformers.
Metroid Prime was, to me, nothing more than Turok with space pirates instead of Dinosaurs.
I suggest "free as in lunch", I think it might really be better than "free as in beer" ever was anyway, because it relates back to "there's no such thing as a free lunch" and basically re-enforces the idea that "free as in speech" = good, "free as in lunch" = be cautious.
yeah, and what about the vampires? We have a right to our nighttime too damnit!
I'm going to buy the last generation of Power Mac that's available. This means that I'll have a top-of-the-line G5 system that should run all the applications I'm using right now, and will remain up to date for several years. By which time I'll be ready to upgrade to new software and a new machine without worry that some of the software I use won't be available natively for the intel mac.
The emulation sounds like a good idea, but I doubt that it would be effective for some resource intensive applications like 3D rendering, high resolution image editing and video editing.
I'm also not about to spend another three grand for a new version of Maya just so I can run on an intel mac.
hy is it that they got Metroid Prime so right (twice!)...
this is sort of off topic, but I HATED Metroid Prime. The Metroid series had been one of my favorite game series, and then they RUINED with Prime. The first person element seems like the biggest and most apparent screw up, I really fail to understand why, with the mechanics of the game, they could fail to at least have an option of a third-person mode; personally I can't stand first person games for a number of reasons. (The lock-on system meant that the first-person aiming wasn't a big deal, and the HUD would have worked as well as it did in first person as an overlay to a third-person view). The game also didn't seem to flow as well as the previous games. I also hate being forced to scrub every room with the scanner, and wait while holding the button down for it to "analyze" before it brings up information.
No, I don't think they got Metroid Prime right at all. I think a lot of people were desperate for a Metroid game, and a lot of other people will lap up any piece of crap that is first person.
you know, I read this and I thought at first I agreed with you, but then I realized that really I didn't. It's 4 am and I'm not sure how well I'll be able to verbalize my disagreement, so bear with me.
In abstract, I agree with the idea that a sovergen nation should be able to have it's own laws. Basically, if a bunch of people want to get together and live under whatever waky laws they can come up with like wood should smell different on wednesdays or it's a capitol crime to drink water from a seventeen inch purple curly straw or whatever.
The problem is, I think this only works if all of the people living under the rule of that country are doing so voluntarily. If I want to drink water from a seventeen inch purple curly straw, then I should be able to move to an area were that's allowed.
Along those lines, I should also be able to be informed of other countries, other laws, etc, so that I can go someplace else.
The problem is that, in china, I don't think that either is the case. People can't very well up and move to another country easily, and because of the censorship they don't really know much about where they could move to.
I've read a lot of negative comments about the Harry Potter series here, and even more 12 hours ago when the story was on fark, but for all of you who haven't had a chance or desire to read one of the books, stop by the local library and give one a chance.
The stories are not high-brow literature, nor are they intended to be. They are, however, good fantasy. The storylines are entertaining, and they have a fair bit of depth to them. The world is also deep, and pretty self-consistent. The books are humerous on many levels, and also at times a bit more insiteful than they are perhaps given credit for. A lot of the themes that started to emerge in Order of the Phoenix, and that will likely escellate in Half-blood Prince are especially pertinent today. (Although perhaps the death-eater/nazi comparison is more obvious, there are subtle but interesting parallels between the situation with voldamot and his followers and more modern things such as terrorism.) The books contain interesting moral delimas and gray areas (the position of the house elves, S.P.E.W and the take of the other characters offers interesting parallels to the philosophy of neitzsche for example) and are also just plain a lot of fun.
I think the biggest problem with the Harry Potter series is that a lot of people will overlook it BECAUSE it's so popular. I know that I avoid things that are fairly popular because I think that in general the masses have terrible taste, and if most people like something, then I'll probably think it's crap. Luckily I did check out Harry Potter and found that in this case, the public was right, the books are good, and maybe other people who have avoided it for the same reason might find that they too enjoy the stories.
I have to add if he is half blooded whats the other half Half-blood in the Harry Potter series refers to a witch or wizard with two wizarding parents, but at least one non-wizarding grandparent.
A witch or wizard who was born to non-wizarding parents (muggles) is called muggle-born (mudblood is "a really foul name for someone who was muggle born"). Most witches or wizards consider a half-blood to be a person with one pure-blood and one muggle-born parent. Some more fanatical witches and wizards take this fruther by saying hat if any of your grandparents were muggle-born then you are a half blood.
Essentially, one is only considered "pureblood" if one can trace their entire bloodline back several centuries at least through entirely wizarding (and presumably pureblood) families. Because of this there is a lot of inbreeding.
yeah, I misworded what I was saying. What I was trying to point out was that if you take a trioxin zombie and cut it up into little peices, all of the little peices will still try to attack you.
There are actually a few possible explanations to your questions.
First of all you must realize that in most portraials of zombies (* of the Dead series, etc) the zombies are not focued on eating brains. The zombie is driven to consume human flesh, but focues primarily on the viscera and later muscle tissue.
If you suscribe to the idea that zombies rise due to an infection of Solanum (see The Zombie Survival Guide by Max Brooks), you would find that destruction of the brain is indeed most efficascious due to the fact that the primary area of reproduction of the solanum virus is in the frontal lobe of the brain. The virus is found in other areas of the body inorder to reanimate it, but it's central location is in the brain.
If you look instead to the Rage virus (see 28 days later), I would remind you that victims of the Rage virus are infact humans and not zombies. In this case the destruction of the brain has the safe effect as it would have in a non-infected human.
If instead you wish to look at zombies who have been revived through the use of Trioxin (Return of the Living Dead series) then I would point out that destruction of the brain is not effective in destroying the body. In fact, there is no known way to destroy a corpse that has been reanimated through the use of Trioxin. The zombies in this case are lead to consume brains (primarily of humans, though they will also consume cow brains, see Return of the Living Dead II) in order to supply themselves with Neurons (see Return of the Living Dead 3). This is said by one zombie to stop the "pain of being dead".
Thinking about the Revolution is fun, but it also somewhat annoys me because everytime I see a Revolution story I spend hours trying to ponder what the revolutionary feature is going to be.
I understand Nintendo's fears that the other companies might try to rip off their ideas, but wouldn't patenting the hell out of everything be just as effective without driving all their potential customers absolutely insane?
Ah well, I guess it probably drums up some excitement. It doesn't really matter to me, I decided I'd be buing a Revolution as soon as I heard about it playing classic games. I'll probably get a PS3 too, but I doubt I'll get an XBOX360 though, if the current generation of games are any indication (and they very well might not be), XBOX seems to get the more mainstream games, which basically seems to me to be nothing but a crapstorm of FPS and Sports games, neither of wich I can stand.