Actually Intelligent Design simply stipulates that the universe was created by an intelligent being (say, God) in some state not equivalent to total chaos and/or guided by that benefactor through its existence to keep things running smoothly.
There are very few intelligent ID proponents in the world (don't stop reading here) who don't believe in what would be called 'micro-evolution' or evolution within a species/genus, but they would happily argue that birds, fish and beasts of the land did not evolve from each other or a common ancestry.
Nobody said it was a good or a bad thing, simply that it isn't a game about "evolution" as the game has always claimed to be.
Taking EA's claims and refuting them is perfectly legitimate.
If a game came out claiming to be about Ghandi and it had him hacking kids' heads off in the temple, people would probably discuss how inaccurate that was too.
Actually sex with minors in Japan as I understand it was always considered non-taboo until they had trade issues with western countries to work out. Sexualizing minors in Japan is still very common and I believe not illegal in the "you'd actually be arrested" sense.
Just an FYI on the "everyone, everywhere" stuff.
The ancient greeks believed it was acceptable to have sex with young boys, there are other examples. Do I think its okay? No. Is mass hysteria and stereotyping and hypothesizing without the facts a good idea? No.
Actually some studies have shown that a sexual attraction to children occurs in something like 2-10% of the population at large (depending on the study) and attraction to minors would be a much larger subset than that.
If you disagree, I'm assuming you think everyone who thought Britney Spears was sexy at 17 is a pervert. Ditto for those who watched Rihanna's sexy videos at 16-17 yrs old. Not to mention the age of most models you see in magazines (stop assuming, look it up).
I don't believe I've ever come across a good study showing any link between an attraction to minors and child abuse in the same person in any consistent way. Sure, it may happen, but it isn't the norm. In fact, many child sex crime perpetrators are NOT sexually attracted to children.
Also note that Pedophilia is a very small subset of what's illegal in many western countries. Looking at sexual photos of some hot pop star at 17 will get you put in jail but is not pedophilia.
No they're not. They're interested in taking actions that appear to be correct in the short term to win votes, not in doing what's necessary to correct problems in the long term.
Elected governments are rarely into long-term planning, especially in crime and punishment.
The very few studies I've seen about child porn users/viewers is that there's no link between that habit and their personal likelihood to abuse actual children.
That said, they'll find their taste in porn somewhere, its just very unlikely according to current data that they'd go abuse children to get it.
The majority of console/computer/card/board gamers are people under 30. This is not even worth refuting as you can simply ask any retail worker in any store. Anywhere.
You have numbers to back that up? These studies show again and again that those presuppositions are NOT in fact true, that gaming is not any longer a pre-college thing so much as an adult pass-time.
And the games cost over $50 a piece, that's a luxury to most people. I can take my wife out for dinner, or buy a video game, both for $65 or so but its at the expense of other luxuries.
I didn't care much, personally. Sure, I recognized the brands, but its not like they go to McDonald's to have business lunches in the movie.
I find it more entertaining that Stargate employees all use Dell XPS notebooks (the lights make it kinda obvious) but without the big Dell logo on them.
I dare you to poll some high level kernel coders on what they use to write code with.
You'll probably get a lot of vim and emacs answers, and not a whole lot of Visual Studio ones;-)
As quaint as I personally find IDEs in general, they often annoy me more than they help me and a good editor is much more important than the integrated extras.
Humiliating bikers is not something I would do with my spare time, personally. But best of luck to the officers involved -- I hope their covers were well-established.
Oh I'll bite... I said compared to the size of the American economy, not your debt.
Look up the annual GDP of the United States of America next time, which would be nearly 14 trillion dollars in 2007. That's right, they're trying to shore up enough liquidity to keep 14 trillion dollars worth of GDP alive. The amount of cash that moves through the banks to keep that economy alive is staggering.
A one-time assistance package of $0.8 trillion is a drop in the bucket, compared to the size of the US economy.
You, my friend, are a troll or a moron. No recognized historian disputes the biblical stories of Jesus, they're the most accurately preserved historical writings we have.
As one Christian author pointed out, there's more well-preserved writing to support Jesus' rising from the dead than that Pilate who condemned him ever existed.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed or has an agenda.
GPL'd products are Copyright. In fact, the GPL requires Copyright to work properly. Without Copyright, companies could steal GPL'd software and incorporate it without giving back the freedoms they enjoyed themselves.
I don't have time to read the rest of your message but consider this: those states didn't _exist_ before colonization. Those lines on the map were invented by western white societies, not by African nations themselves and often drawn in a way so ignorant of local politics that future wars were almost guaranteed.
If by 'better off' you mean a flush toilet in between people getting their arms cut off, maybe you're right.
$800 billion to shore up the faltering American economy is a drop in the bucket. Look up the numbers sometime.
Dispensing that same $800 billion to the people of America directly would result in everyone being able to make a payment or two on their mortgages, maybe.
How do you think business operates, exactly? Many many businesses operate on short-term loans to stay afloat, and without credit availability, they'd simply go bankrupt. The trickle-down effect of having no liquidity in the market is very scary and while I'd love to see the bankers who were in charge jailed, keeping the system liquid is much more important in the short term.
PS, I'm canadian and we have neither problem with our heavily regulated banking industry.
By killing local multiplayer you mean "didn't allow multiple local accounts access to the software." Local 'multiplayer' works just fine (I play split-screen regularly with friends over).
And yes, that feature annoys me, but its also in the terms of service for the download ("can only be used by...")
Yes, it should have been spelled out clearer, and I even sent Sony several E-mails sharing my distaste for that reality, but in my home, nobody but me plays Warhawk anyway, so it works out fine.
I always run the dishwasher and/or dryer just before going to sleep if possible (which is typically after midnight), just to try to offset peak usage slightly. Locally we don't directly pay more for peak usage, but if the local utility goes over certain peak values, the rate goes up across the board for everyone, so its an incentive, if only slight.
It seems they're now considering actually doing off-peak discounted rates, and they're presently selling those single-socket power meters and letting you borrow them on a trial basis in order to measure your per-socket usage.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually Intelligent Design simply stipulates that the universe was created by an intelligent being (say, God) in some state not equivalent to total chaos and/or guided by that benefactor through its existence to keep things running smoothly.
There are very few intelligent ID proponents in the world (don't stop reading here) who don't believe in what would be called 'micro-evolution' or evolution within a species/genus, but they would happily argue that birds, fish and beasts of the land did not evolve from each other or a common ancestry.
Nobody said it was a good or a bad thing, simply that it isn't a game about "evolution" as the game has always claimed to be.
Taking EA's claims and refuting them is perfectly legitimate.
If a game came out claiming to be about Ghandi and it had him hacking kids' heads off in the temple, people would probably discuss how inaccurate that was too.
Actually sex with minors in Japan as I understand it was always considered non-taboo until they had trade issues with western countries to work out. Sexualizing minors in Japan is still very common and I believe not illegal in the "you'd actually be arrested" sense.
Just an FYI on the "everyone, everywhere" stuff.
The ancient greeks believed it was acceptable to have sex with young boys, there are other examples. Do I think its okay? No. Is mass hysteria and stereotyping and hypothesizing without the facts a good idea? No.
Actually some studies have shown that a sexual attraction to children occurs in something like 2-10% of the population at large (depending on the study) and attraction to minors would be a much larger subset than that.
If you disagree, I'm assuming you think everyone who thought Britney Spears was sexy at 17 is a pervert. Ditto for those who watched Rihanna's sexy videos at 16-17 yrs old. Not to mention the age of most models you see in magazines (stop assuming, look it up).
I don't believe I've ever come across a good study showing any link between an attraction to minors and child abuse in the same person in any consistent way. Sure, it may happen, but it isn't the norm. In fact, many child sex crime perpetrators are NOT sexually attracted to children.
Also note that Pedophilia is a very small subset of what's illegal in many western countries. Looking at sexual photos of some hot pop star at 17 will get you put in jail but is not pedophilia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pedophilia is an interesting article too.
No they're not. They're interested in taking actions that appear to be correct in the short term to win votes, not in doing what's necessary to correct problems in the long term.
Elected governments are rarely into long-term planning, especially in crime and punishment.
The very few studies I've seen about child porn users/viewers is that there's no link between that habit and their personal likelihood to abuse actual children.
That said, they'll find their taste in porn somewhere, its just very unlikely according to current data that they'd go abuse children to get it.
Those private defense contractors are still making a boat load of cash off the Iraq invasion. Good luck claiming nobody made money off Iraq.
You have numbers to back that up? These studies show again and again that those presuppositions are NOT in fact true, that gaming is not any longer a pre-college thing so much as an adult pass-time.
And the games cost over $50 a piece, that's a luxury to most people. I can take my wife out for dinner, or buy a video game, both for $65 or so but its at the expense of other luxuries.
Aww jeez, you mean this isn't the scientology planet? I was sure Earth featured prominently in that delusion.
I didn't care much, personally. Sure, I recognized the brands, but its not like they go to McDonald's to have business lunches in the movie.
I find it more entertaining that Stargate employees all use Dell XPS notebooks (the lights make it kinda obvious) but without the big Dell logo on them.
I dare you to poll some high level kernel coders on what they use to write code with.
You'll probably get a lot of vim and emacs answers, and not a whole lot of Visual Studio ones ;-)
As quaint as I personally find IDEs in general, they often annoy me more than they help me and a good editor is much more important than the integrated extras.
*snicker*
Humiliating bikers is not something I would do with my spare time, personally. But best of luck to the officers involved -- I hope their covers were well-established.
Automated sentry turrets :-)
Oh I'll bite ... I said compared to the size of the American economy, not your debt.
Look up the annual GDP of the United States of America next time, which would be nearly 14 trillion dollars in 2007. That's right, they're trying to shore up enough liquidity to keep 14 trillion dollars worth of GDP alive. The amount of cash that moves through the banks to keep that economy alive is staggering.
A one-time assistance package of $0.8 trillion is a drop in the bucket, compared to the size of the US economy.
No, hardcore would be someone else downloading his free version, adding DRM to it and selling it for $20 a copy on Ebay.
You, my friend, are a troll or a moron. No recognized historian disputes the biblical stories of Jesus, they're the most accurately preserved historical writings we have.
As one Christian author pointed out, there's more well-preserved writing to support Jesus' rising from the dead than that Pilate who condemned him ever existed.
Anyone who tells you otherwise is misinformed or has an agenda.
GPL'd products are Copyright. In fact, the GPL requires Copyright to work properly. Without Copyright, companies could steal GPL'd software and incorporate it without giving back the freedoms they enjoyed themselves.
You didn't notice the Cadillacs in The Matrix or Ford's dominant placement in I Am Legend?
Product placement has been around for a long long time, and I have no problem with it so long as it doesn't distract from the immersion of the story.
And not everyone drove an Audi in Iron Man, but most of the nice cars were Audis.
I don't have time to read the rest of your message but consider this: those states didn't _exist_ before colonization. Those lines on the map were invented by western white societies, not by African nations themselves and often drawn in a way so ignorant of local politics that future wars were almost guaranteed.
If by 'better off' you mean a flush toilet in between people getting their arms cut off, maybe you're right.
$800 billion to shore up the faltering American economy is a drop in the bucket. Look up the numbers sometime.
Dispensing that same $800 billion to the people of America directly would result in everyone being able to make a payment or two on their mortgages, maybe.
How do you think business operates, exactly? Many many businesses operate on short-term loans to stay afloat, and without credit availability, they'd simply go bankrupt. The trickle-down effect of having no liquidity in the market is very scary and while I'd love to see the bankers who were in charge jailed, keeping the system liquid is much more important in the short term.
PS, I'm canadian and we have neither problem with our heavily regulated banking industry.
By killing local multiplayer you mean "didn't allow multiple local accounts access to the software." Local 'multiplayer' works just fine (I play split-screen regularly with friends over).
And yes, that feature annoys me, but its also in the terms of service for the download ("can only be used by ...")
Yes, it should have been spelled out clearer, and I even sent Sony several E-mails sharing my distaste for that reality, but in my home, nobody but me plays Warhawk anyway, so it works out fine.
I always run the dishwasher and/or dryer just before going to sleep if possible (which is typically after midnight), just to try to offset peak usage slightly. Locally we don't directly pay more for peak usage, but if the local utility goes over certain peak values, the rate goes up across the board for everyone, so its an incentive, if only slight.
It seems they're now considering actually doing off-peak discounted rates, and they're presently selling those single-socket power meters and letting you borrow them on a trial basis in order to measure your per-socket usage.