What the hell are you talking about? Now, I'm no fan of PATRIOT by far, but how on Earth do you draw the conclusion that "civil liberties are eroding" from "the department of homeland security's computers are as secure as a wet paper bag"? There is no connection there. None. Just... I can't even...
Do you people even THINK before you post or do you just have random spasms in your fingers that cause that sort of illogical garbage to fly out?
A much more plausible and less utterly ridiculous conclusion you could've drawn without bothering to back it up would be that "taxes are going up" because "the department of homeland security's computers are as secure as a wet paper bag and they want more money to buy gadgets". It could still be patently false, but at least it's not so utterly ludicrous, especially since Homeland Security had barely been alive a month before PATRIOT finished rushing through Congress.
Unfortunately, you have a good point. Up until recently the U.S. had a good deal of trust from the rest of the world and, while some people might have complained, few would have been so uncomfortable with the idea that they'd openly oppose it. Until Iraq, we didn't go galloping around starting wars without good reason to (I will NOT argue this point with any trolls who respond - like it or not, much of the world sees it this way and THAT is the point of the statement) and, as a result, people didn't have much reason to be suspicious of things like this.
I don't know that too many people (except maybe China) would have much of a problem with Japan doing it. They've proven to be relatively trustworthy since they're previously psychotic gov't got wrecked and replaced in/after WWII. OTOH, Iran and China, for example, have proven time and again that they can't be trusted because they're more than willing to take aggressive action without justification (as far as everyone else is concerned).
Unfortunately, we've done a lot of political damage with our haphazard approach to the rest of the planet in the last 4 years. It makes me sad that we've destroyed all this trust because it comes back to bite us later in things like this. Yeah, you and I might not think that we have nasty ulterior motives, but that doesn't mean a lot of other countries don't. I can only hope that by 2011 we've managed to rebuild the world's trust so that we can move forward with things like this without even having to consider this kind of discussion.
Light can penetrate far deeper than a typical scuba diver can. It's just that at around 70m (40m is about the limit for general scuba diving, IIRC) the amount of light necessary for minimal photosynthesis drops off and plant life starts getting hard to come by. Light, in small amounts, still goes deeper than that though barring abnormal contamination by dirt, minerals, waste, etc.
You have to get out of The Hive to start to enjoy it and, even then, you have to get out of Sigil before it all REALLY starts to come together. The "quests" in the Hive are kind of dull. I get the impression that the whole point of the first 5 available screens is just to build XP, coppers, and items.
Unfortunately, you're right on the puzzles. There's not much challenge there - it's basically just running around and talking to the right people in order. But, the game really rides on the storyline more than anything.
And, actually, you can get some interesting battles going and even wind up having to use some crazy tactics. In Carceri the first time, I didn't realize that there were a lot of guards in the jail. I wound up getting 4 characters backed up at the end of a hallway facing about 20 incoming guards and I was running low on healing. Through some creative shifting of characters, and spellcasting, I managed to get everybody out of the mess in one piece (barely). THAT was a very satisfying battle to come out of (better than the time I beat a 1200 unit standing army with my 300 leftover stragglers in LOTR2 by splitting the enemy on a patch of trees and cutting them up with my archers and pikemen).
Interestingly enough, firearms are only used in about 60% of murders.
Ummm... not that I want to get into the middle of a pro/anti gun debate because it's offtopic and pointless, but that struck me as a really odd piece of support to put up so I have to comment on it.
You listed 18 different potentially fatal weapons, yet only 1 of them (which comprises 5.5% of the list) accounts for 60% of the fatalities? What point are you arguing, exactly?
That's really a pointless debate. You're arguing that guns are more humane killing devices than a knife or a bat. However, I can imagine that getting shot in the stomach would be an extremely painful exercise for a potentially long period of time whereas getting your throat slit would be less likely to leave you bleeding and dying for as long. In the hands of a skilled attacker, a sharp knife can be an almost instantly deadly weapon. With the right strokes, you can literally gut a full grown man in seconds. In the hands of an idiot, I might just get my kneecaps blown off by a gun and slowly bleed to death. The level of humanity of the kill rests more on the skill than the weapon - especially since a single, sharp blow to the bottom of the neck between the shoulders from a bat can be instantly fatal.
There's really no argument on any of the other points, so I refer to this one:
You are changing your tune. You brough the Crusades up earlier as a justification for the current problems.
I'm not changing my tune at all. Although I took a bit of a willing sidetrip into the problems of the Middle East between the Jews and, well, almost everyone else (at your instigation, I might add), the point remains grounded with this statement you made to start this portion of the thread:
That is the root of their hatred.
That refers to three points you made above and, I'm telling you, the "root of their hatred" is not those three points because we were "at war" with this fundamentalist set (whether we knew / admitted it or not) long before the U.S. and modern Western culture even came into existance. The root of their hatred can be reliably traced to the beginning of the Crusades that Urban instigated which has little or nothing to due with the issues surrounding the constant warring between Israeli and Arab states. The other issues are merely supplementary reasons to hate, not a root cause.
Eeeerrgh! That's why I hate the abuse of AC posts. It's too hard to tell whether the ACs in a single thread are all the same or different (plus, sarcasm doesn't travel well on the web - that's what emoticons are for, people!).
Blech... I can't believe I wasted all that time responding to a joke I didn't get.
Yea, blind emotional reaction divorced from careful, intelligent research and rational thought has proven to be an effective way of treating social issues in the past. It's done all sorts of wonderful things like:
Cause violent rioting in L.A.
lynchings
zero-tolerance policies that kick kids out of school for pointing their fingers in the shape of a gun
put Japanese descended American citizens in internment camps.
unleash blind violence against anyone who "looks Arab".
the "three stikes" law.
start groups like the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church.
Cause stupid kids to pull guns during Counter Strike tournaments.
Yep, blind, stupid reactionary measures are the sort of thing I'D want to be associated with, that's for sure. I'd be interested to hear your knee-jerk "solutions" to other social ills like drug abuse, single-parent households, and declining test scores.
I guess it's easy to "solve" problems if you don't bother to take the time to understand them.
Seriously.. I waltzed through the game without trouble (well, the Fiend from Morridor's box gave me a bit of a hassle) only reaching Level 17 / Mage and Level 2 Warrior. I can't imagine how much time it would require to build that kind of a character up.
You're out of your mind. First of all, even if you get cut, as long as you're not stupid enough to expose tender areas (like... don't block stabbing motions with your stomach and slashing motions with your wrist...), you have a much better shot at survival than if someone puts a bullet between your eyes.
Second, deflecting a shot from a bat coming in at your head with your arm, though I'm sure it's exceptionally painful, isn't even likely to break a significant bone, much less cause any serious injury. Hell, the human skull is obnoxiously hard. It probably wouldn't even crack it on the first swing. I took a baseball bat to the side of the head once at full swing (by accident - guy taking practice swings). Fucking thing sent me sprawling in the dirt, made me throw up, and I couldn't see for a few minutes (but, amazingly, no concussion), but it didn't do any serious damage.
Third, I'm willing to bet I'm a pretty speedy guy if someone is looking to cut my throat or bash my skull in. I'm also willing to bet that, no matter how speedy I am, I can't outrun a bullet if someone is looking to take a headshot at me.
Note, however, I'm not arguing a personal position on guns. Just saying I'd much rather face a guy with a sharp or blunt object than a.44
And the ultimate nullifier to this pointless, tired argument:
Prove it.
One incident every now and then does not prove anything. More people pull guns outside of nightclubs than video game tournaments. Maybe nightclubs are the cause of all the world's ills? Heck, while we're jumping to conclusions with absolutely no evidence, maybe DRIVING is the cause of increased violence? I've heard of lots of incidents where drivers pulled guns and other weapons on fellow motorists. A guy here at work just went to jail because he chased some guy down and stabbed him half a dozen times for honking a horn. Maybe car horns are the cause of all the world's ills?
Until credible studies appear that consumers of violent media have a statistically higher tendency to violence than the rest of society, you and all the "parent" and "family" groups are just blowing smoke and looking for convenient scapegoats for what is more easily attributed to failed parenting. All the studies so far are biased in one direction of the other, so the net result is that the entire thing is unknown. If you want to form a hypothesis based on empirical evidence and invesitgate, that's fine, but don't try to treat it like a theory until you've got proof. That's exactly what you're doing and what parent and family groups do, and that's exactly why I treat it like the wash it is. I'm willing to consider the possibility that you and the groups are right, but don't start saying you actually are until you have some evidence to back it up.
Oops, again, my little AC. You've taken it back TOO far and your talking about something completely different now (how convenient it is to try and quietly change the subject when you realize you've had your shit wrecked because you can't tell your own bigoted personal views from reality). If you can provide any compelling evidence that suggests which of the warring parties (Jewish or Muslim) actually started the fight you're referring to (since I'm talking about the Crusades, not the Middle Eastern problems in the general area of Israel that are continuing to this day), myself and a whoooole lot of other people would love to see it. While you're at it, why not use your incredible powers of psychic deduction to determine who fired the first shot of the revolutionary war?
You see, unlike Urban's bloodthirsty Crusade where a bunch of European fanatics charged into Turkish territory (and got their asses soundly whipped the first time, I might add) with no goal other than arbitrary slaughter, the Jews (who I had not mentioned prior to this) and the Muslims were bitchslapping each other back and forth the same way they do now. See, whoever has the power just steps on the other guys toes. Sorry, but your personal, ignorant interpretations of a historical era that's not well understood don't count to anyone buy you and people like Jerry Falwell. Go argue that with someone else. No matter how far you push it back, someone will point to some other "atrocity" that the "other side" committed that required a response. Eventually, you'll hit some murky area where nobody can really tell who did what.
It's fun to watch people like you squirm when they're confronted with facts because, for whatever idiotic reason, you can't come to grips with the fact that religion doesn't equate to morality and you don't have to have religion to be moral. Let me give you a clue - Christianity has, historically, been one of the single bloodiest major religions in history. The Jews had the mantle before that and the Muslims are taking it up now. I guess it's easy to cast stones at individual beliefs based on what a well-known group of fanatics is doing while ignoring the fact that well-known groups of fanatics within your own individual beliefs are just as bad.
This took place in the modern-day Israel area, right?
And, incidentally, no. It took place in modern day Turkey and pushed East as the fights wore on. Eventually, the Crusaders pushed as far as Jerusalem, but they got their asses kicked after awhile and got sent home whimpering (excepting a large group that got trapped in the area).
I don't. Spam eats up bandwidth just being delivered, even if it gets filtered at the end anyway. Then, you have the idiots that sit and open it and wait for images to load in their HTML-enabled mail clients. Despite this, from a technological standpoint, although it chews up and wastes valuable resources, it won't bring the Internet to a complete screeching halt.
However, look at all the time and money AOL puts out trying to block incoming spam. People always talk about making spam unprofitable for the spammers and someone invariably bitches about the ideas put forth, but how long will it be until there's so much and so varied spam that it's unprofitable to allow users to use e-mail? Eventually, we may well need so many people and tools that it will chew away profits just fighting spam.
That's why I think spammers need to be treated exactly for what they are - a parasitic infection. They just chew up resources but provide nothing in return. They must be inoculated. Make sending unsolicited e-mail a crime (our illustrous guvmint morons took a step in the totally OPPOSITE direction with their "yea, let's legitamize spamming" bill yesterday). If you're convicted of sending mass, unsolicited messages (that is, you can't prove that you were given EXPLICIT permission to send them), make it a felony and make one of the required sentences that you're not allowed to ever tough a computer again. The trick after that, of course, is to get all the spammy Asian and S. American countries to go along and punish spammers as well.
I'll bite, but only because you've been modded +2 Insightful instead of -1 Troll like you should've been.
Care to share your damning evidence of all this rampant piracy with the rest of us? I just built a Windoze box for gaming and I own 2 Black Isle titles right now that I purchased at full price: Planscape: Torment and Baldur's Gate. I also owned Fallout, again, purchased at full price, at one time, but have since traded it to someone else. I own exactly 0 titles that I've copied - legally or otherwise (though, I threw out my jewel case for Starcraft which had my CD Key on it, so I had to get a keygen for it - but I still own the actual CD and manual). I've never copied a game for anyone else.
Planescape: Torment was an incredible game. The whole thing revolved around story, not combat, and you didn't directly interact in combat unless you were casting spell or using an item. You were lucky if you got to Level 15 with the Nameless One by the end of the game. While it was important to level up and boost traits, it was not your driving motivation.
Compare this to Diablo 2. Diablo 2 has one objective - go kill monsters. There's a hair-thin storyline to move you from wilderness to wilderness, but the whole point was to get more gold, new stuff, and higher levels. It was certainly fun, but it was far less satisfying to get another level up because you had killed yet another wraith of some sort than the P:T way of doing things where you could get huge exp through intelligent (and sometimes very bizarre) discussions. The game was so beautfully imaginative that it almost seemed like combat wasn't even necessary at times.
Incidentally, to see some pretty cool fireworks in P:T, launch Level 1 magic missiles, Ignus's tongues of flame, and Dak'kon's reign of anger all at the same time. That'll take down almost any normal enemy without resistances in a heartbeat (it's great against the Carceri guards), plus it looks really cool.
Why is this modded Insightful and not Troll or Offtopic?
They're legislating the same bullshit any legislator of any party legislates - something that looks good to the ignorant public but really satisfies the desires of big shot campaign contributors.
They know damn well that the general public isn't going to take a closer look at this legislation. It will go into the paper and people will think "oh good, my elected officials are finally doing something". When spam doesn't die down, they'll just forget about it. Re-election material for the morons in Congress and a nod that legitamizes spamming for big business interests in the marketing sector. It's just a typical day on Capitol Hill. Doesn't matter which party's in charge.
... being written and passed solely through back-room compromises and with the input of the marketing industry and Internet Service Provider lobbies, but with scant regard for the interests of America's consumers and business Internet users.
First of all, why doesn't THAT surprise me in the least? In other words, "legitimate" marketers, like them or not, get free fun of your inbox the way they do your mailbox. Except, of course, it costs next to nothing to spam people so it will be like them jamming 1000 unwanted credit card apps, catalogs, and other miscellaneous garbage into your mailbox everyday.
Now, some of you might think that "legitimate" businesses won't try to abuse this. For you poor, naive fools, let me tell you that I work in a "legitimate" direct mail company and we junk mail the shit out of people. They ask us to stop? Ok - we stop selling their name and address and then we stop sending them stuff. Of course, if they do business with us again, the whole thing starts over. Yahoo!, in fact, appears to have already caught onto this idea within the realm of spam. Expect to see changes in "privacy policies" to be used more frequently as excuses to override requests not to spam.
In short, expect your spam count to rise. It will just be a little more "honest", as the CAUCE release notes, not a better situation in general. Go Congress. I'm just sooooooo proud of my government at times like this.
You're an idiot. I'd be more respectful of your lack of knowledge on the subject, but, apparently, you're posting AC becuase you're an idiot. So, you're an idiot.
The "root" of their hatred goes back a millenium. "They" - these Muslim terrorists that you are mistakenly assuming make up all terrorists on earth, have been at war with Western cultures since the Crusades began in 1095 when Pope Urban got tired of Christian infighting, as it were, and redirected masses of Christian crusaders at Turkish Muslims.
Oops! The truth hurts, doesn't it? Christians, not some dirty Muslims, started this mess 1000 years ago.
Amusingly (or, frighteningly) enough, Pope Urban offered a "Papal Indulgence" to those who participated in the assault. That's right! Kill a dirty Muslim and you're assured a place in heaven! Sound familiar? Beyond that, they had an interesting battle cry:
Dieu li volt!
God wills it!
Gee, does that sound like anyone you've seen on tapes running on CNN for the last 2 years?
Of course, now that I'm done thoroughly thrashing your idiotic post on that front, I'll have to point out that large numbers of terrorists are not Muslim. Arguably, in fact, the United States has engaged in numerous terrorist activities including, by a minor interpretative effort of the term "terrorism", the "Shock and Awe" campaign used in Iraq. Though many terrorists are Muslims, by no means would you be doing justice to people who try to fight them to stupidly and stubbornly assume that they all are as you are seemingly hinting at.
Maybe you ought to get your terminology and your history straight before you post stupid bullshit like that again.
that our whole notion of IP us unfair, and we should be giving out the fruits of our work for free. I disagree. Moreover, if they don't like the price, they should invent their own. Stop mucking with natural selection. We need it.
Funny that you think we should be able to impose OUR version of IP but not accept theirs. You want to sell in THEIR country, you play by THEIR rules. Nobody says you have to go sell anything you make in Asia - a region that, largely, finds it perfectly acceptable to duplicate others' works whether patented, copyrighted, or otherwise. Just because you WANT to sell something somewhere else doesn't mean you get to impose your views. If they want to accept these views, they will. It may work out nicely to threaten them with sanctions and penalties now to get them to sign things they don't want to, but, again, we're not going to be in that position forever, so it's not real bright to go about abusing people who may well be more powerful than you in the future. Incidentally, WE'RE the ones "mucking with natural selection" since we're preventing people from doing what comes naturally - copying something they need or want. Of course, I suppose your suggestion about "natural selection" could be far more sinister, but I'm hoping not.
Don't like the current patent laws and time periods? Work to change them, but meanwhile leave alone those who are playing by the rules and making money. Profit != evil, you know.
Nobody said profit is evil. However, people aren't "playing by the rules" on this point, they're buying rules that suit their own greedy ends. If that's how you think things should be, fine. You'll get your knife in the back eventually and then we'll see how you like it when nobody comes to help you. I'll not discuss the point further because that's a whole new issue about big business in bed with corrupt officials.
Religion. Duh.
Nice to know you really DON'T have any clue what happens outside U.S. borders. Show me where the actual definition of "terrorist" requires a person to have any connection at all to religion and I'll shut up and concede the entire discussion to you.
Slashdot Mirror
For the love of God!
You're talking about Osirusoft, monkeys.com, and compu.net!
Sheesh... I'm glad at least ONE of us spends way too much time on Slashdot and can actually remember this crap.
-1, Painfully Obvious.
I dub you the "Uncreative Troll".
What the hell are you talking about? Now, I'm no fan of PATRIOT by far, but how on Earth do you draw the conclusion that "civil liberties are eroding" from "the department of homeland security's computers are as secure as a wet paper bag"? There is no connection there. None. Just... I can't even...
Do you people even THINK before you post or do you just have random spasms in your fingers that cause that sort of illogical garbage to fly out?
A much more plausible and less utterly ridiculous conclusion you could've drawn without bothering to back it up would be that "taxes are going up" because "the department of homeland security's computers are as secure as a wet paper bag and they want more money to buy gadgets". It could still be patently false, but at least it's not so utterly ludicrous, especially since Homeland Security had barely been alive a month before PATRIOT finished rushing through Congress.
Unfortunately, you have a good point. Up until recently the U.S. had a good deal of trust from the rest of the world and, while some people might have complained, few would have been so uncomfortable with the idea that they'd openly oppose it. Until Iraq, we didn't go galloping around starting wars without good reason to (I will NOT argue this point with any trolls who respond - like it or not, much of the world sees it this way and THAT is the point of the statement) and, as a result, people didn't have much reason to be suspicious of things like this.
I don't know that too many people (except maybe China) would have much of a problem with Japan doing it. They've proven to be relatively trustworthy since they're previously psychotic gov't got wrecked and replaced in/after WWII. OTOH, Iran and China, for example, have proven time and again that they can't be trusted because they're more than willing to take aggressive action without justification (as far as everyone else is concerned).
Unfortunately, we've done a lot of political damage with our haphazard approach to the rest of the planet in the last 4 years. It makes me sad that we've destroyed all this trust because it comes back to bite us later in things like this. Yeah, you and I might not think that we have nasty ulterior motives, but that doesn't mean a lot of other countries don't. I can only hope that by 2011 we've managed to rebuild the world's trust so that we can move forward with things like this without even having to consider this kind of discussion.
Light can penetrate far deeper than a typical scuba diver can. It's just that at around 70m (40m is about the limit for general scuba diving, IIRC) the amount of light necessary for minimal photosynthesis drops off and plant life starts getting hard to come by. Light, in small amounts, still goes deeper than that though barring abnormal contamination by dirt, minerals, waste, etc.
Doesn't scare me in the least. I'm not sharing anything from the RIAA. Hell, I'm not even downloading anything that has to do with the RIAA.
Cripes. I'm not BUYING anything that has to do with the RIAA.
You have to get out of The Hive to start to enjoy it and, even then, you have to get out of Sigil before it all REALLY starts to come together. The "quests" in the Hive are kind of dull. I get the impression that the whole point of the first 5 available screens is just to build XP, coppers, and items.
Unfortunately, you're right on the puzzles. There's not much challenge there - it's basically just running around and talking to the right people in order. But, the game really rides on the storyline more than anything.
And, actually, you can get some interesting battles going and even wind up having to use some crazy tactics. In Carceri the first time, I didn't realize that there were a lot of guards in the jail. I wound up getting 4 characters backed up at the end of a hallway facing about 20 incoming guards and I was running low on healing. Through some creative shifting of characters, and spellcasting, I managed to get everybody out of the mess in one piece (barely). THAT was a very satisfying battle to come out of (better than the time I beat a 1200 unit standing army with my 300 leftover stragglers in LOTR2 by splitting the enemy on a patch of trees and cutting them up with my archers and pikemen).
Smartass. Gotcha beat anyway: I'm WRITING a book.
Interestingly enough, firearms are only used in about 60% of murders.
Ummm... not that I want to get into the middle of a pro/anti gun debate because it's offtopic and pointless, but that struck me as a really odd piece of support to put up so I have to comment on it.
You listed 18 different potentially fatal weapons, yet only 1 of them (which comprises 5.5% of the list) accounts for 60% of the fatalities? What point are you arguing, exactly?
That's really a pointless debate. You're arguing that guns are more humane killing devices than a knife or a bat. However, I can imagine that getting shot in the stomach would be an extremely painful exercise for a potentially long period of time whereas getting your throat slit would be less likely to leave you bleeding and dying for as long. In the hands of a skilled attacker, a sharp knife can be an almost instantly deadly weapon. With the right strokes, you can literally gut a full grown man in seconds. In the hands of an idiot, I might just get my kneecaps blown off by a gun and slowly bleed to death. The level of humanity of the kill rests more on the skill than the weapon - especially since a single, sharp blow to the bottom of the neck between the shoulders from a bat can be instantly fatal.
There's really no argument on any of the other points, so I refer to this one:
You are changing your tune. You brough the Crusades up earlier as a justification for the current problems.
I'm not changing my tune at all. Although I took a bit of a willing sidetrip into the problems of the Middle East between the Jews and, well, almost everyone else (at your instigation, I might add), the point remains grounded with this statement you made to start this portion of the thread:
That is the root of their hatred.
That refers to three points you made above and, I'm telling you, the "root of their hatred" is not those three points because we were "at war" with this fundamentalist set (whether we knew / admitted it or not) long before the U.S. and modern Western culture even came into existance. The root of their hatred can be reliably traced to the beginning of the Crusades that Urban instigated which has little or nothing to due with the issues surrounding the constant warring between Israeli and Arab states. The other issues are merely supplementary reasons to hate, not a root cause.
Eeeerrgh! That's why I hate the abuse of AC posts. It's too hard to tell whether the ACs in a single thread are all the same or different (plus, sarcasm doesn't travel well on the web - that's what emoticons are for, people!).
Blech... I can't believe I wasted all that time responding to a joke I didn't get.
Yea, blind emotional reaction divorced from careful, intelligent research and rational thought has proven to be an effective way of treating social issues in the past. It's done all sorts of wonderful things like:
- Cause violent rioting in L.A.
- lynchings
- zero-tolerance policies that kick kids out of school for pointing their fingers in the shape of a gun
- put Japanese descended American citizens in internment camps.
- unleash blind violence against anyone who "looks Arab".
- the "three stikes" law.
- start groups like the KKK or the Westboro Baptist Church.
- Cause stupid kids to pull guns during Counter Strike tournaments.
Yep, blind, stupid reactionary measures are the sort of thing I'D want to be associated with, that's for sure. I'd be interested to hear your knee-jerk "solutions" to other social ills like drug abuse, single-parent households, and declining test scores.I guess it's easy to "solve" problems if you don't bother to take the time to understand them.
Dude... just drop the mouse and back away. :)
Seriously.. I waltzed through the game without trouble (well, the Fiend from Morridor's box gave me a bit of a hassle) only reaching Level 17 / Mage and Level 2 Warrior. I can't imagine how much time it would require to build that kind of a character up.
You're out of your mind. First of all, even if you get cut, as long as you're not stupid enough to expose tender areas (like... don't block stabbing motions with your stomach and slashing motions with your wrist...), you have a much better shot at survival than if someone puts a bullet between your eyes.
Second, deflecting a shot from a bat coming in at your head with your arm, though I'm sure it's exceptionally painful, isn't even likely to break a significant bone, much less cause any serious injury. Hell, the human skull is obnoxiously hard. It probably wouldn't even crack it on the first swing. I took a baseball bat to the side of the head once at full swing (by accident - guy taking practice swings). Fucking thing sent me sprawling in the dirt, made me throw up, and I couldn't see for a few minutes (but, amazingly, no concussion), but it didn't do any serious damage.
Third, I'm willing to bet I'm a pretty speedy guy if someone is looking to cut my throat or bash my skull in. I'm also willing to bet that, no matter how speedy I am, I can't outrun a bullet if someone is looking to take a headshot at me.
Note, however, I'm not arguing a personal position on guns. Just saying I'd much rather face a guy with a sharp or blunt object than a .44
And the ultimate nullifier to this pointless, tired argument:
Prove it.
One incident every now and then does not prove anything. More people pull guns outside of nightclubs than video game tournaments. Maybe nightclubs are the cause of all the world's ills? Heck, while we're jumping to conclusions with absolutely no evidence, maybe DRIVING is the cause of increased violence? I've heard of lots of incidents where drivers pulled guns and other weapons on fellow motorists. A guy here at work just went to jail because he chased some guy down and stabbed him half a dozen times for honking a horn. Maybe car horns are the cause of all the world's ills?
Until credible studies appear that consumers of violent media have a statistically higher tendency to violence than the rest of society, you and all the "parent" and "family" groups are just blowing smoke and looking for convenient scapegoats for what is more easily attributed to failed parenting. All the studies so far are biased in one direction of the other, so the net result is that the entire thing is unknown. If you want to form a hypothesis based on empirical evidence and invesitgate, that's fine, but don't try to treat it like a theory until you've got proof. That's exactly what you're doing and what parent and family groups do, and that's exactly why I treat it like the wash it is. I'm willing to consider the possibility that you and the groups are right, but don't start saying you actually are until you have some evidence to back it up.
Oops, again, my little AC. You've taken it back TOO far and your talking about something completely different now (how convenient it is to try and quietly change the subject when you realize you've had your shit wrecked because you can't tell your own bigoted personal views from reality). If you can provide any compelling evidence that suggests which of the warring parties (Jewish or Muslim) actually started the fight you're referring to (since I'm talking about the Crusades, not the Middle Eastern problems in the general area of Israel that are continuing to this day), myself and a whoooole lot of other people would love to see it. While you're at it, why not use your incredible powers of psychic deduction to determine who fired the first shot of the revolutionary war?
You see, unlike Urban's bloodthirsty Crusade where a bunch of European fanatics charged into Turkish territory (and got their asses soundly whipped the first time, I might add) with no goal other than arbitrary slaughter, the Jews (who I had not mentioned prior to this) and the Muslims were bitchslapping each other back and forth the same way they do now. See, whoever has the power just steps on the other guys toes. Sorry, but your personal, ignorant interpretations of a historical era that's not well understood don't count to anyone buy you and people like Jerry Falwell. Go argue that with someone else. No matter how far you push it back, someone will point to some other "atrocity" that the "other side" committed that required a response. Eventually, you'll hit some murky area where nobody can really tell who did what.
It's fun to watch people like you squirm when they're confronted with facts because, for whatever idiotic reason, you can't come to grips with the fact that religion doesn't equate to morality and you don't have to have religion to be moral. Let me give you a clue - Christianity has, historically, been one of the single bloodiest major religions in history. The Jews had the mantle before that and the Muslims are taking it up now. I guess it's easy to cast stones at individual beliefs based on what a well-known group of fanatics is doing while ignoring the fact that well-known groups of fanatics within your own individual beliefs are just as bad.
This took place in the modern-day Israel area, right?
And, incidentally, no. It took place in modern day Turkey and pushed East as the fights wore on. Eventually, the Crusaders pushed as far as Jerusalem, but they got their asses kicked after awhile and got sent home whimpering (excepting a large group that got trapped in the area).
Doubt if its as bad as all that...
I don't. Spam eats up bandwidth just being delivered, even if it gets filtered at the end anyway. Then, you have the idiots that sit and open it and wait for images to load in their HTML-enabled mail clients. Despite this, from a technological standpoint, although it chews up and wastes valuable resources, it won't bring the Internet to a complete screeching halt.
However, look at all the time and money AOL puts out trying to block incoming spam. People always talk about making spam unprofitable for the spammers and someone invariably bitches about the ideas put forth, but how long will it be until there's so much and so varied spam that it's unprofitable to allow users to use e-mail? Eventually, we may well need so many people and tools that it will chew away profits just fighting spam.
That's why I think spammers need to be treated exactly for what they are - a parasitic infection. They just chew up resources but provide nothing in return. They must be inoculated. Make sending unsolicited e-mail a crime (our illustrous guvmint morons took a step in the totally OPPOSITE direction with their "yea, let's legitamize spamming" bill yesterday). If you're convicted of sending mass, unsolicited messages (that is, you can't prove that you were given EXPLICIT permission to send them), make it a felony and make one of the required sentences that you're not allowed to ever tough a computer again. The trick after that, of course, is to get all the spammy Asian and S. American countries to go along and punish spammers as well.
I'll bite, but only because you've been modded +2 Insightful instead of -1 Troll like you should've been.
Care to share your damning evidence of all this rampant piracy with the rest of us? I just built a Windoze box for gaming and I own 2 Black Isle titles right now that I purchased at full price: Planscape: Torment and Baldur's Gate. I also owned Fallout, again, purchased at full price, at one time, but have since traded it to someone else. I own exactly 0 titles that I've copied - legally or otherwise (though, I threw out my jewel case for Starcraft which had my CD Key on it, so I had to get a keygen for it - but I still own the actual CD and manual). I've never copied a game for anyone else.
Too true, unfortunately.
Planescape: Torment was an incredible game. The whole thing revolved around story, not combat, and you didn't directly interact in combat unless you were casting spell or using an item. You were lucky if you got to Level 15 with the Nameless One by the end of the game. While it was important to level up and boost traits, it was not your driving motivation.
Compare this to Diablo 2. Diablo 2 has one objective - go kill monsters. There's a hair-thin storyline to move you from wilderness to wilderness, but the whole point was to get more gold, new stuff, and higher levels. It was certainly fun, but it was far less satisfying to get another level up because you had killed yet another wraith of some sort than the P:T way of doing things where you could get huge exp through intelligent (and sometimes very bizarre) discussions. The game was so beautfully imaginative that it almost seemed like combat wasn't even necessary at times.
Incidentally, to see some pretty cool fireworks in P:T, launch Level 1 magic missiles, Ignus's tongues of flame, and Dak'kon's reign of anger all at the same time. That'll take down almost any normal enemy without resistances in a heartbeat (it's great against the Carceri guards), plus it looks really cool.
Except, the only reasonable way to make it unprofitable is to stop the idiots that insist on responding.
Why is this modded Insightful and not Troll or Offtopic?
They're legislating the same bullshit any legislator of any party legislates - something that looks good to the ignorant public but really satisfies the desires of big shot campaign contributors.
They know damn well that the general public isn't going to take a closer look at this legislation. It will go into the paper and people will think "oh good, my elected officials are finally doing something". When spam doesn't die down, they'll just forget about it. Re-election material for the morons in Congress and a nod that legitamizes spamming for big business interests in the marketing sector. It's just a typical day on Capitol Hill. Doesn't matter which party's in charge.
First of all, why doesn't THAT surprise me in the least? In other words, "legitimate" marketers, like them or not, get free fun of your inbox the way they do your mailbox. Except, of course, it costs next to nothing to spam people so it will be like them jamming 1000 unwanted credit card apps, catalogs, and other miscellaneous garbage into your mailbox everyday.
Now, some of you might think that "legitimate" businesses won't try to abuse this. For you poor, naive fools, let me tell you that I work in a "legitimate" direct mail company and we junk mail the shit out of people. They ask us to stop? Ok - we stop selling their name and address and then we stop sending them stuff. Of course, if they do business with us again, the whole thing starts over. Yahoo!, in fact, appears to have already caught onto this idea within the realm of spam. Expect to see changes in "privacy policies" to be used more frequently as excuses to override requests not to spam.
In short, expect your spam count to rise. It will just be a little more "honest", as the CAUCE release notes, not a better situation in general. Go Congress. I'm just sooooooo proud of my government at times like this.
You're an idiot. I'd be more respectful of your lack of knowledge on the subject, but, apparently, you're posting AC becuase you're an idiot. So, you're an idiot.
The "root" of their hatred goes back a millenium. "They" - these Muslim terrorists that you are mistakenly assuming make up all terrorists on earth, have been at war with Western cultures since the Crusades began in 1095 when Pope Urban got tired of Christian infighting, as it were, and redirected masses of Christian crusaders at Turkish Muslims.
Oops! The truth hurts, doesn't it? Christians, not some dirty Muslims, started this mess 1000 years ago.
Amusingly (or, frighteningly) enough, Pope Urban offered a "Papal Indulgence" to those who participated in the assault. That's right! Kill a dirty Muslim and you're assured a place in heaven! Sound familiar? Beyond that, they had an interesting battle cry:
Dieu li volt!
God wills it!
Gee, does that sound like anyone you've seen on tapes running on CNN for the last 2 years?
Of course, now that I'm done thoroughly thrashing your idiotic post on that front, I'll have to point out that large numbers of terrorists are not Muslim. Arguably, in fact, the United States has engaged in numerous terrorist activities including, by a minor interpretative effort of the term "terrorism", the "Shock and Awe" campaign used in Iraq. Though many terrorists are Muslims, by no means would you be doing justice to people who try to fight them to stupidly and stubbornly assume that they all are as you are seemingly hinting at.
Maybe you ought to get your terminology and your history straight before you post stupid bullshit like that again.
that our whole notion of IP us unfair, and we should be giving out the fruits of our work for free. I disagree. Moreover, if they don't like the price, they should invent their own. Stop mucking with natural selection. We need it.
Funny that you think we should be able to impose OUR version of IP but not accept theirs. You want to sell in THEIR country, you play by THEIR rules. Nobody says you have to go sell anything you make in Asia - a region that, largely, finds it perfectly acceptable to duplicate others' works whether patented, copyrighted, or otherwise. Just because you WANT to sell something somewhere else doesn't mean you get to impose your views. If they want to accept these views, they will. It may work out nicely to threaten them with sanctions and penalties now to get them to sign things they don't want to, but, again, we're not going to be in that position forever, so it's not real bright to go about abusing people who may well be more powerful than you in the future. Incidentally, WE'RE the ones "mucking with natural selection" since we're preventing people from doing what comes naturally - copying something they need or want. Of course, I suppose your suggestion about "natural selection" could be far more sinister, but I'm hoping not.
Don't like the current patent laws and time periods? Work to change them, but meanwhile leave alone those who are playing by the rules and making money. Profit != evil, you know.
Nobody said profit is evil. However, people aren't "playing by the rules" on this point, they're buying rules that suit their own greedy ends. If that's how you think things should be, fine. You'll get your knife in the back eventually and then we'll see how you like it when nobody comes to help you. I'll not discuss the point further because that's a whole new issue about big business in bed with corrupt officials.
Religion. Duh.
Nice to know you really DON'T have any clue what happens outside U.S. borders. Show me where the actual definition of "terrorist" requires a person to have any connection at all to religion and I'll shut up and concede the entire discussion to you.