There are reasons for the different standards with video games than other media. Not good reasons, but reasons nonetheless.
Movies don't get hit as hard anymore because that's played out. There were an army of Jack Thompson types after Hollywood and they all fizzled out. Nobody managed to get a big settlement out of the studios, and the attempts were abandoned. Investment without return, basically. They never got that one key victory that would give them a free ticket to suck every studio dry.
Music is a different matter. Nearly all the highly offensive content in music is now in rap. Ever heard a femenist complain about rap degrading women? Very rare. Rap has gained a sort of "racial sheild" since it's seen as a primarily black art - most rappers are black, and a large portion of their audience is too. Thusly, an attack on rap can be turned into a racist action. Other music so pales in comparison to gansta rap about bangin' hos and shootin' bros that it falls under the radar.
Books, now, can get away with absolutely anything. Write a book about demons invading Mars and see how many eyebrows you raise. Now make a game about the same thing, and see how many people sue you. Books get this protection because those who attack video games, movies, or music universally invoke reading as superior storytelling. We're a century past the days when the novel was openly called the decay and end of enlightened civilization. Every attack on a book only hurts attacks on other artforms.
Without grinding I have an income of 4 gold per day, and that's with a fucking level 24 character on a PVP server. Running Scarlet Monastery on my level 60 warrior, I can pull 30 gold in a run, taking about two hours (Bypassing some areas that are a pain without a healer or puller), which I usually do twice on weekends before going to gank people in Ashenvale with my level 60 epic equipment. All of which I got without the need for grinding, wow.
You obviously didn't click the NPCs with the exclamation points on their heads?
At level 56, I've only twice spent an hour killing the same monsters, and both times were for quests. You can get to level 60 and never spend a minute doing the traditional grind.
At no point have I ever had an empty quest log, and more than half of my total experience is from quests.
What about Mt. Hyjal? I've seen videos of the inside, and I have to say it's the coolest of the closed zones. At the very center, you can even see the skeleton of Archimonde.
There are, but they're many patches behind the live servers. I tried one out. It wasn't even as complete as it was when I played in Beta. Nearly every class was broken horribly, some weren't even playable (No weapons for hunters, no spells for shamans). Basically you could be a Paladin, a Warrior, or useless.
1. Having been in enough WoW parties, many people DO NOT know this. Level 60's - hell, one person in my guild has three level 60's in different classes - don't all realize simple facts and get entire parties annihilated.
2. Yes, unless you're in a casual and friendly guild and don't like to let your friends get gangraped by dragons.
3. I've found divine intervention to be pretty useful. Anything that can keep an engineer alive long enough to break out the jumper cables and you can save the whole raid. Fein Death works better, but not all engineers are hunters (and not all hunters are engineers).
4. The fight was in a confined room, so feared mobs aren't going anywhere. The whole room aggros when you start fighting anyway, so no point in worrying about adds.
Yes, it was definitely staged, but for other reasons. Never underestimate the capacity for stupidity in players of any game, especially when leveling is fairly easy.
The left/right bias isn't even the real question though, I don't think. The "defacement" question isn't about somebody editing a liberal opinion and replacing it with a conservative one, it's about somebody doing this to opinions they disagree with.
It was an empty office. A PO box wouldn't be all that unusual. A lot of businesses use PO boxes rather than post their address online. There are a lot of reasons, but they all come down to keeping people from snooping around, which is exactly what HardOCP did.
I guess that's the advantage of WoW separating regional versions. If it comes to that, they can censor the Chinese version without changing it for American or European players.
The honor system is actually a system now. You lose honor for dishonorable kills, instead of only gaining for honorable kills. It didn't make sense to me that this wasn't part of the system to begin with, since the honor system was touted as a means to punish people who slaughter players 20 levels below them.
You used to be able to build cheaper than you can buy, but I've noticed that getting very hard lately. OEM's finegle all sorts of bulk deals, so they pay a lot less for their components than you're likely to pay wholesale, and they get all sorts of freebies. For $350, I got a Dell that has a graphics card that would set me back $150 separate, plus XP Pro, 512 megs of RAM after the free upgrade, and a choice between a $100 palm Zire and a Lexmark printer for free (I think the printer option was about $125). That's not counting the processor, motherboard, etc. It's not a great system, but it was dirt cheap, and I couldn't buy half of the parts myself for the price.
You can't build cheaper anymore, but you can build much, MUCH better, which I always saw as the point in building your own systems.
There's a reason he's working with a conspiracy theory: They're invincible. Notice how he throws the terrorism card in the deck as well.
When you're operating under a conspiracy theory, all opposition from any quarter is a part of the conspiracy, or controlled by the conspiracy. If the judge rules against him, he's in cahoots. If the jury doesn't give him a verdict, they were paid off.
With most reasonable theories, counter evidence is counter evidence. With conspiracy theories, counter evidence, in fact, becomes proof only of the coverup to hide the supporting facts.
I think it's definitely important on the "murder simulation" point to bring to bear America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior, and particularly their use by the military.
The army's looked at the usefullness of video games as training simulations, we've seen it on slashdot time and again. Overall, however, they've found that they don't work. At least not games in the way we get them as consumers. They have more immersive simulations that involve functional firearms with projections of targets, which are basically an advanced shooting gallery where the targets move, hide, and even return fire.
There was a special show on Tech TV (it still shows up on G4 occasionally) about AA, FSW, and a couple other games that were developed in partership with the army, which even had interviews with the army consultants who worked on them. AA is purely a recruitment and public relations tool, not a "testing ground" or training system. "Playing a game, no matter how real we try to make it, isn't going to make you any better when we actually put a gun in your hands."
Game's teach the entirely wrong reflexes to make people better killers. Just about everybody who uses a computer is familiar with the "Undo" effect. You make a mistake, you immediately reach for the mouse to hit undo. After a while, that reflex can get to the point that you try to hit undo in programs that don't have it, and even when you're not at the computer (I once spilled a glass of water, and it hadn't even fallen over and I caught myself thinking, "Damnit, undo."). You're not going to be any better at shooting people when all of your gun reflexes are centered on the analog thumbsticks.
They will continue to do what makes them money, even if it is illegal, until they feel that the odds of the government/class action lawsuits catching up with them are too great to risk the action.
Even then, they may not stop. A professor of mine had developed a system that could prevent airbags from firing if the passenger was in a position that would make firing dangerous (like leaning over with their head near the airbag compartment), or if a child was in the seat.
When he first showed it to Ford and GM, it would cost around $400-600 per car, however (He says it'd cost closer to $200 now, though, and it'll be even cheaper in another year or two).
The man he talked to at Ford *litterally* walked him through the math to show him how much it would cost to put this $500 device into however many million vehicles they made that year, and then showed him how much it cost them to settle lawsuits when people were injured or even killed by firing airbags. It was twice as expensive to fix the problem as to just pay people off when the problem caused damage, so they didn't fix it.
What will we run out of? SPACE. Every person takes up a certain amount of space, and furthurmore, an additional amount of space is required to support that person in terms of manufacturing of goods, growth of food, and housing. Housing can be minimized by putting most people into skyscraper cities, but agriculture is still very much 2 dimentional, and results in space that people can't live in.
You need to expand industry, housing, and food production faster than the population expands. All this expansion results in developed land that then can't be used to gather those supposedly infinite resources.
I see it more as the opposite situation: Maybe more powerful, maybe not (I expect the 360 and PS3 will be on fairly even terms), and it's not that it won't be able to keep up, it's that it's starting out in the less popular position. The PS2 dominated the Xbox and the Gamecube, which ran at fairly simmilar prices. To undercut the PS3 with a $270 price against, for the sake of argument let's say $300 PS3 is just what it looks like: Undercutting. Even all things equal, the Playstation name is just more popular than the Xbox name, so if they're going at the same price, then the'll fall into pretty much the same pattern they did with the PS2 and Xbox.
I like blaming religion for stuff too, but in this case, you can't really pin it on them.
A lot of monks basically spent their lives copying and recopying texts. There wasn't anything else to do with them, really. Without them, a lot more information would have been lost. ALL of Archimedes works would probably be gone. With them would likely go Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, etc. etc. Only the rich Arab kingdoms preserved more knowledge through the Middle Ages than Christian Monks, and even there, it was religion at work, not society in general.
A lot was lost in that time. Libraries and monastaries burned down, taking God knows how much knowledge with them. Some books were lost, damaged by accident, and some were even destroyed intentionally, but imagine how much survived, and remember that it would all have been gone without the Christian and Muslim clergy that preserved them. The Rennaisance would have been a blank slate without them. We'd be lucky to have rediscovered all of it by now. Heck, we probably wouldn't even have realized it was lost yet.
I think this situation comes down to pure carelessness. A monk needed parchment, and the only way to get it was to erase something. Because they spend their lives copying text, many monasteries would have multiple copies of any given text on hand. I think it most likely that the monk assumed another copy existed, and that one could be sacrificed for the need at hand, and be replaced later when paper was available.
Think of it sort of like back in the old days when floppy disks served most people's removable storage needs, and there never seemed to be enough of them around. You needed an extra 250 kb on your hard drive (back when that was a lot of space), and you noticed an old document you hadn't touched in months. "Oh, yeah, I've got that backed up on a floppy disk, I can delete that." So you do. What happens later when you realize that you didn't have it backed up, but that you'd erased the disk you'd stored it on in order to back up some other file? You've just lost that file.
As I posted above (and got modded flamebait somehow), there's quite a few explanations for this.
A. The monk may not have realized it was something special at all. If you don't understand the material at hand, two papers on the same subject tend to look an awful lot alike. B. He may have assumed more than one copy existed, and for that matter he may have been right at the time, and only afterwards were the other copies lost. It's really not an unreasonable assumtion to make - most of the monks in medieval Europe spent their whole lives copying and recopying various texts. You'd expect any book to find its way into a monastery would end up being duplicated many times over, and sent to other monasteries where it would be duplicated furthur. This didn't always happen, of course, and I personally suspect that simple carelessness like this is responsible for a great deal of lost writings, and not mindless book burning and censorship that gets blamed so often.
Much as I'd love to make one of the jokes forming up in my mind, I have to say this may have been something less than intentionally stifling percieved heresy. The paper was erased and reused to make a prayer book. The usual way of treating heresy was to burn it. The fact that it was erased and reused suggests it wasn't considered heresy, which in turn suggests to me one of a few likely scenarios:
A. The monk who erased it didn't know there was any significance in the paper to make it worth preservation. B. The monk thought there were other copies in existence (and there well could have been at the time, only to be lost later), and thus the one he had was expendable C. The monk just wasn't that bright.
Really big givaway is the DVD-RW. The "leaks" before the first X-Box release suggested that you could put games on the hard drive for faster load times, but that wasn't there in the final product. Console makers are having a hard enough time trying to thwart piracy without using drives that crap out a month after you buy them that I doubt they'll build the tools to do so into the console.
That's basically the point. I said it would be an earth-sized comet. A ball of snow and dirt. That's also what Pluto is, by the way - it has the same composition of other large comets.
Luke also used his father's light saber on Tatooine without force training. If it were force-activated, he would hav eno clue as to its use.
From everything I've read, seen, etc, a lightsaber needs special training to safely wield. The only people who offer such training, however, are force users themselves, and only offer it as a part of force training, which limits their use to Jedi.
There are set guidelines, but not everybody uses the same ones.
One of the common things I've seen used (still not universal, though) is using orbit to define what something is, and not size, not composition, not even satellites (I've seen this from both those who consider Pluto a planet and a comet, as well, even though it definitely excludes Pluto from planethood).
For moons, it's mainly a matter of wether or not it's the dominant thing in its orbit. Ring material isn't considered moons, because no single object dominates any particular orbit, but there are also small objects which orbit in gaps in Saturn's rings that are otherwise empty. They're the primary thing in their orbit, so they're considered moons.
In the case of planets, orbital domination is used, but also orbital shape and spacing is used. All the major planets (Mercury out to Neptune) are effectively alone in their orbits. Small objects cross their orbits, others orbit them, but the planets comprise the vast majority of material in their orbit. Earth is the only exception, since a considerable portion of the mass in our orbit is also tied up in our moon, which is what is what brings the "double planet" opinion - when taken together, the rest of the material along their orbit can be statistically discounted, since it's only an invisible fraction of the Earth and Moon's combined mass. Jupiter is the only planet that actually shares an orbit with objects that don't orbit it (as opposed to simply having its orbit intersected by them), but even the trojan asteroids' movements are controlled by Jupiter. Everything else in that orbital area has been cleared out long ago.
In addition, all the planets orbit inside the approximate plane of the solar system, and have fairly circular orbits, and their average distances from the sun follow a pattern.
Ceres doesn't get planetary status in this system. It fits into the pattern of orbinearlyts, it's in the plane, and it has a circular orbit, but it's not the dominant mass in its orbit due to Jupiter's influence. It hasn't cleared the other asteroids the way other planets in the solar system did in their own orbits. Ceres may be a considerable fraction of the asteroid belt's total mass, but not to such an extent that the rest of the belt can be discounted for mass purposes.
In this definition, Pluto doesn't meet any of the requirements. It doesn't fit the orbital pattern, it has a classical trans-Neptunian cometary orbit and not a planetary one (far from circular, tilted dramatically out of the solar disk), and it's not unique in its orbit due to other large comets with simmilar orbis and even comparable size, like Sedna.
Getting caught up on size and composition clouds the issue, really. If a comet the size of earth were to come in from deep space, loop just inside the orbit of mercury, then zip back out into space not to return for thousands of years, I don't think there'd be any argument. Despite it's size, it has the orbit of a comet, so it's a comet. Pluto's orbit shares many things in common with trans-neptunian comets - it's eccentric, tilted out of the plane of the planets' orbits. It's size doesn't really matter, since many asteroids and comets in the outer solar system are much larger than those that pass through the inner solar system. They're beyond the grip of Jupiter's gravity, so many of the largest objects have survived where ones in the inner solar system were eventually sucked up by the major planets, and comets that pass through the inner solar system loose mass on every orbit, comets that don't approach the sun keep all of their material, instead increasing in size from collisions with other objects.
Slashdot Mirror
There are reasons for the different standards with video games than other media. Not good reasons, but reasons nonetheless.
Movies don't get hit as hard anymore because that's played out. There were an army of Jack Thompson types after Hollywood and they all fizzled out. Nobody managed to get a big settlement out of the studios, and the attempts were abandoned. Investment without return, basically. They never got that one key victory that would give them a free ticket to suck every studio dry.
Music is a different matter. Nearly all the highly offensive content in music is now in rap. Ever heard a femenist complain about rap degrading women? Very rare. Rap has gained a sort of "racial sheild" since it's seen as a primarily black art - most rappers are black, and a large portion of their audience is too. Thusly, an attack on rap can be turned into a racist action. Other music so pales in comparison to gansta rap about bangin' hos and shootin' bros that it falls under the radar.
Books, now, can get away with absolutely anything. Write a book about demons invading Mars and see how many eyebrows you raise. Now make a game about the same thing, and see how many people sue you. Books get this protection because those who attack video games, movies, or music universally invoke reading as superior storytelling. We're a century past the days when the novel was openly called the decay and end of enlightened civilization. Every attack on a book only hurts attacks on other artforms.
Without grinding I have an income of 4 gold per day, and that's with a fucking level 24 character on a PVP server. Running Scarlet Monastery on my level 60 warrior, I can pull 30 gold in a run, taking about two hours (Bypassing some areas that are a pain without a healer or puller), which I usually do twice on weekends before going to gank people in Ashenvale with my level 60 epic equipment. All of which I got without the need for grinding, wow.
You obviously didn't click the NPCs with the exclamation points on their heads? At level 56, I've only twice spent an hour killing the same monsters, and both times were for quests. You can get to level 60 and never spend a minute doing the traditional grind. At no point have I ever had an empty quest log, and more than half of my total experience is from quests.
What about Mt. Hyjal? I've seen videos of the inside, and I have to say it's the coolest of the closed zones. At the very center, you can even see the skeleton of Archimonde.
There are, but they're many patches behind the live servers. I tried one out. It wasn't even as complete as it was when I played in Beta. Nearly every class was broken horribly, some weren't even playable (No weapons for hunters, no spells for shamans). Basically you could be a Paladin, a Warrior, or useless.
1. Having been in enough WoW parties, many people DO NOT know this. Level 60's - hell, one person in my guild has three level 60's in different classes - don't all realize simple facts and get entire parties annihilated. 2. Yes, unless you're in a casual and friendly guild and don't like to let your friends get gangraped by dragons. 3. I've found divine intervention to be pretty useful. Anything that can keep an engineer alive long enough to break out the jumper cables and you can save the whole raid. Fein Death works better, but not all engineers are hunters (and not all hunters are engineers). 4. The fight was in a confined room, so feared mobs aren't going anywhere. The whole room aggros when you start fighting anyway, so no point in worrying about adds. Yes, it was definitely staged, but for other reasons. Never underestimate the capacity for stupidity in players of any game, especially when leveling is fairly easy.
Not really. Note that he never said the word human.
The left/right bias isn't even the real question though, I don't think. The "defacement" question isn't about somebody editing a liberal opinion and replacing it with a conservative one, it's about somebody doing this to opinions they disagree with.
Impressive I must say. Four posts at 3:56 PM, three of which had the same link, then one more at 3:57. I think we just broke the coincidence meter.
It was an empty office. A PO box wouldn't be all that unusual. A lot of businesses use PO boxes rather than post their address online. There are a lot of reasons, but they all come down to keeping people from snooping around, which is exactly what HardOCP did.
I guess that's the advantage of WoW separating regional versions. If it comes to that, they can censor the Chinese version without changing it for American or European players.
The honor system is actually a system now. You lose honor for dishonorable kills, instead of only gaining for honorable kills. It didn't make sense to me that this wasn't part of the system to begin with, since the honor system was touted as a means to punish people who slaughter players 20 levels below them.
You used to be able to build cheaper than you can buy, but I've noticed that getting very hard lately. OEM's finegle all sorts of bulk deals, so they pay a lot less for their components than you're likely to pay wholesale, and they get all sorts of freebies. For $350, I got a Dell that has a graphics card that would set me back $150 separate, plus XP Pro, 512 megs of RAM after the free upgrade, and a choice between a $100 palm Zire and a Lexmark printer for free (I think the printer option was about $125). That's not counting the processor, motherboard, etc. It's not a great system, but it was dirt cheap, and I couldn't buy half of the parts myself for the price.
You can't build cheaper anymore, but you can build much, MUCH better, which I always saw as the point in building your own systems.
There's a reason he's working with a conspiracy theory: They're invincible. Notice how he throws the terrorism card in the deck as well.
When you're operating under a conspiracy theory, all opposition from any quarter is a part of the conspiracy, or controlled by the conspiracy. If the judge rules against him, he's in cahoots. If the jury doesn't give him a verdict, they were paid off.
With most reasonable theories, counter evidence is counter evidence. With conspiracy theories, counter evidence, in fact, becomes proof only of the coverup to hide the supporting facts.
I think it's definitely important on the "murder simulation" point to bring to bear America's Army and Full Spectrum Warrior, and particularly their use by the military.
The army's looked at the usefullness of video games as training simulations, we've seen it on slashdot time and again. Overall, however, they've found that they don't work. At least not games in the way we get them as consumers. They have more immersive simulations that involve functional firearms with projections of targets, which are basically an advanced shooting gallery where the targets move, hide, and even return fire.
There was a special show on Tech TV (it still shows up on G4 occasionally) about AA, FSW, and a couple other games that were developed in partership with the army, which even had interviews with the army consultants who worked on them. AA is purely a recruitment and public relations tool, not a "testing ground" or training system. "Playing a game, no matter how real we try to make it, isn't going to make you any better when we actually put a gun in your hands."
Game's teach the entirely wrong reflexes to make people better killers. Just about everybody who uses a computer is familiar with the "Undo" effect. You make a mistake, you immediately reach for the mouse to hit undo. After a while, that reflex can get to the point that you try to hit undo in programs that don't have it, and even when you're not at the computer (I once spilled a glass of water, and it hadn't even fallen over and I caught myself thinking, "Damnit, undo."). You're not going to be any better at shooting people when all of your gun reflexes are centered on the analog thumbsticks.
They will continue to do what makes them money, even if it is illegal, until they feel that the odds of the government/class action lawsuits catching up with them are too great to risk the action.
Even then, they may not stop. A professor of mine had developed a system that could prevent airbags from firing if the passenger was in a position that would make firing dangerous (like leaning over with their head near the airbag compartment), or if a child was in the seat.
When he first showed it to Ford and GM, it would cost around $400-600 per car, however (He says it'd cost closer to $200 now, though, and it'll be even cheaper in another year or two).
The man he talked to at Ford *litterally* walked him through the math to show him how much it would cost to put this $500 device into however many million vehicles they made that year, and then showed him how much it cost them to settle lawsuits when people were injured or even killed by firing airbags. It was twice as expensive to fix the problem as to just pay people off when the problem caused damage, so they didn't fix it.
What will we run out of? SPACE. Every person takes up a certain amount of space, and furthurmore, an additional amount of space is required to support that person in terms of manufacturing of goods, growth of food, and housing. Housing can be minimized by putting most people into skyscraper cities, but agriculture is still very much 2 dimentional, and results in space that people can't live in.
You need to expand industry, housing, and food production faster than the population expands. All this expansion results in developed land that then can't be used to gather those supposedly infinite resources.
I see it more as the opposite situation: Maybe more powerful, maybe not (I expect the 360 and PS3 will be on fairly even terms), and it's not that it won't be able to keep up, it's that it's starting out in the less popular position. The PS2 dominated the Xbox and the Gamecube, which ran at fairly simmilar prices. To undercut the PS3 with a $270 price against, for the sake of argument let's say $300 PS3 is just what it looks like: Undercutting. Even all things equal, the Playstation name is just more popular than the Xbox name, so if they're going at the same price, then the'll fall into pretty much the same pattern they did with the PS2 and Xbox.
I like blaming religion for stuff too, but in this case, you can't really pin it on them.
A lot of monks basically spent their lives copying and recopying texts. There wasn't anything else to do with them, really. Without them, a lot more information would have been lost. ALL of Archimedes works would probably be gone. With them would likely go Socrates, Aristotle, Plato, Homer, etc. etc. Only the rich Arab kingdoms preserved more knowledge through the Middle Ages than Christian Monks, and even there, it was religion at work, not society in general.
A lot was lost in that time. Libraries and monastaries burned down, taking God knows how much knowledge with them. Some books were lost, damaged by accident, and some were even destroyed intentionally, but imagine how much survived, and remember that it would all have been gone without the Christian and Muslim clergy that preserved them. The Rennaisance would have been a blank slate without them. We'd be lucky to have rediscovered all of it by now. Heck, we probably wouldn't even have realized it was lost yet.
I think this situation comes down to pure carelessness. A monk needed parchment, and the only way to get it was to erase something. Because they spend their lives copying text, many monasteries would have multiple copies of any given text on hand. I think it most likely that the monk assumed another copy existed, and that one could be sacrificed for the need at hand, and be replaced later when paper was available.
Think of it sort of like back in the old days when floppy disks served most people's removable storage needs, and there never seemed to be enough of them around. You needed an extra 250 kb on your hard drive (back when that was a lot of space), and you noticed an old document you hadn't touched in months. "Oh, yeah, I've got that backed up on a floppy disk, I can delete that." So you do. What happens later when you realize that you didn't have it backed up, but that you'd erased the disk you'd stored it on in order to back up some other file? You've just lost that file.
As I posted above (and got modded flamebait somehow), there's quite a few explanations for this.
A. The monk may not have realized it was something special at all. If you don't understand the material at hand, two papers on the same subject tend to look an awful lot alike.
B. He may have assumed more than one copy existed, and for that matter he may have been right at the time, and only afterwards were the other copies lost. It's really not an unreasonable assumtion to make - most of the monks in medieval Europe spent their whole lives copying and recopying various texts. You'd expect any book to find its way into a monastery would end up being duplicated many times over, and sent to other monasteries where it would be duplicated furthur. This didn't always happen, of course, and I personally suspect that simple carelessness like this is responsible for a great deal of lost writings, and not mindless book burning and censorship that gets blamed so often.
Much as I'd love to make one of the jokes forming up in my mind, I have to say this may have been something less than intentionally stifling percieved heresy. The paper was erased and reused to make a prayer book. The usual way of treating heresy was to burn it. The fact that it was erased and reused suggests it wasn't considered heresy, which in turn suggests to me one of a few likely scenarios:
A. The monk who erased it didn't know there was any significance in the paper to make it worth preservation.
B. The monk thought there were other copies in existence (and there well could have been at the time, only to be lost later), and thus the one he had was expendable
C. The monk just wasn't that bright.
Really big givaway is the DVD-RW. The "leaks" before the first X-Box release suggested that you could put games on the hard drive for faster load times, but that wasn't there in the final product. Console makers are having a hard enough time trying to thwart piracy without using drives that crap out a month after you buy them that I doubt they'll build the tools to do so into the console.
That's basically the point. I said it would be an earth-sized comet. A ball of snow and dirt. That's also what Pluto is, by the way - it has the same composition of other large comets.
Luke also used his father's light saber on Tatooine without force training. If it were force-activated, he would hav eno clue as to its use.
From everything I've read, seen, etc, a lightsaber needs special training to safely wield. The only people who offer such training, however, are force users themselves, and only offer it as a part of force training, which limits their use to Jedi.
There are set guidelines, but not everybody uses the same ones.
One of the common things I've seen used (still not universal, though) is using orbit to define what something is, and not size, not composition, not even satellites (I've seen this from both those who consider Pluto a planet and a comet, as well, even though it definitely excludes Pluto from planethood).
For moons, it's mainly a matter of wether or not it's the dominant thing in its orbit. Ring material isn't considered moons, because no single object dominates any particular orbit, but there are also small objects which orbit in gaps in Saturn's rings that are otherwise empty. They're the primary thing in their orbit, so they're considered moons.
In the case of planets, orbital domination is used, but also orbital shape and spacing is used. All the major planets (Mercury out to Neptune) are effectively alone in their orbits. Small objects cross their orbits, others orbit them, but the planets comprise the vast majority of material in their orbit. Earth is the only exception, since a considerable portion of the mass in our orbit is also tied up in our moon, which is what is what brings the "double planet" opinion - when taken together, the rest of the material along their orbit can be statistically discounted, since it's only an invisible fraction of the Earth and Moon's combined mass. Jupiter is the only planet that actually shares an orbit with objects that don't orbit it (as opposed to simply having its orbit intersected by them), but even the trojan asteroids' movements are controlled by Jupiter. Everything else in that orbital area has been cleared out long ago.
In addition, all the planets orbit inside the approximate plane of the solar system, and have fairly circular orbits, and their average distances from the sun follow a pattern.
Ceres doesn't get planetary status in this system. It fits into the pattern of orbinearlyts, it's in the plane, and it has a circular orbit, but it's not the dominant mass in its orbit due to Jupiter's influence. It hasn't cleared the other asteroids the way other planets in the solar system did in their own orbits. Ceres may be a considerable fraction of the asteroid belt's total mass, but not to such an extent that the rest of the belt can be discounted for mass purposes.
In this definition, Pluto doesn't meet any of the requirements. It doesn't fit the orbital pattern, it has a classical trans-Neptunian cometary orbit and not a planetary one (far from circular, tilted dramatically out of the solar disk), and it's not unique in its orbit due to other large comets with simmilar orbis and even comparable size, like Sedna.
Getting caught up on size and composition clouds the issue, really. If a comet the size of earth were to come in from deep space, loop just inside the orbit of mercury, then zip back out into space not to return for thousands of years, I don't think there'd be any argument. Despite it's size, it has the orbit of a comet, so it's a comet. Pluto's orbit shares many things in common with trans-neptunian comets - it's eccentric, tilted out of the plane of the planets' orbits. It's size doesn't really matter, since many asteroids and comets in the outer solar system are much larger than those that pass through the inner solar system. They're beyond the grip of Jupiter's gravity, so many of the largest objects have survived where ones in the inner solar system were eventually sucked up by the major planets, and comets that pass through the inner solar system loose mass on every orbit, comets that don't approach the sun keep all of their material, instead increasing in size from collisions with other objects.