Pah, spelling and grammar is a holdover from stuffy, old academic rigidity. It has no place in today's classroom. We need to be moving forward as educators and leave all that 'history' behind. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a class on "Group sex: sharing can be caring" to teach to third graders.
It looks like someone should go back to University and gain basic comprehension skills...
You didn't answer my question. Why am I not able to criticize other cultures as well as my own? Why should the East Asians be afforded special protection from scrutiny? Is that because you are East Asian yourself? That would make sense, seeing how you went off on that 'white people' rant for no reason.
That's cute, you call me a redneck, jump to conclusions about someone's race for no reason and blindly assert that my own culture must be worse when it's irrelevant to the topic at hand. If anyone's the racist, it's you. Seriously, the fact that you randomly brought race into the discussion is very telling.
Please don't reply with more illogical, rambling and irrelevant shit, it just wastes all of our time.
Yeah, I respect this notion at the end of my second paragraph here, but you still get my point if you substitute 'all life is sacred' with 'you shouldn't kill anything' in the original post.
It goes without saying that hunting an animal for food and treating it was reverence and respect is far removed from butchering loads of dolphins just for the hell of it.
Are you certain that Westerners try to be humane in their killing ways?
I can not be certain unless I personally observe every piece of meat I eat from birth to consumption. I'm not foolish enough to believe that the meat industry is a loving, caring entity. However, I would welcome any improvements to the process that reduce the suffering of the animals involved. I'm happy to pay a little extra on a half-dozen eggs knowing that the hens could at least move beyond an inch. Infact, I would freely welcome lab-grown meat provided it was both tasty and safe.
And how can you assume that the killing of those dolphins is completely purposeless? Have you talked with the people that did it?
From everything that I've seen and heard about this ritual, the killing of the dolphins is the purpose itself, not the harvest of meat or other products, the protection of other wildlife or population control. If you can prove me wrong, I would care a lot less about this massacre. But as it stands, it just seems like a pathetic display of superiority. That's what gets me, the patheticalness. That grown men are proud of stabbing dolphins with spears. It used to be that hunters would respect their kill, sometimes with spiritual ceremony (some African tribes still do this).
You see, the thing that gets to me is the intent. For all the meat industry's failings, there's at least the semi-valid purpose of obtaining food and the process itself does not take delight in slaughtering animals. The meat companies don't relish the fact that they are killing living things, they just do it because that's their product. They don't whoop and cheer when a cow's throat is cut.
They kill the dolphins in that manner because its efficient. Hunter-gatherer societies often did similar things with herd animals because it was efficient. Industrial farms often treat and kill their animals in the most cost-effective and efficient manners possible, without any regard to being humane.
I'm not sure we disagree here. I don't have any problem with a hunter-gatherer herding animals to kill them so he can feed and clothe himself and his family. It's just that I have to question the moral compass of somebody who, like a kid who feeds a cat to a dog, kill things for kicks.
I'm not apologizing for Japanese culture, but rather that people object to the killing of dolphins at all. Some ways of killing are better than others, and the way those Japanese do it is probably one of the worst, but killing dolphins in and of itself is only wrong if it endangers the survivability of the species.
A kid feeding a live cat to a dog just for fun (which actually happened here in the UK recently) does not endanger the cat population and so by your definition is not wrong. I strongly disagree. And reiterating what I said before, if we are alarmed when a child does such a thing, why shouldn't we be disturbed when adults do it?
Yeah I know of Jainism, and to be honest I admire their principle regarding the equality of life. If you want to live your life by the rules that you don't harm or kill a single thing, then more power to you. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with the notion that can't criticise the frenzied spearing of dolphins because you wash your hands or swat flies that buzz around your face.
But even Jain nuns' immune systems destroy bacteria and viruses on a regular basis;)
Maybe, but that's assuming that development costs will still be a barrier in a situation where such 'perfect' graphics are deeply entrenched and commonplace. One would think that by such a time there would be significant improvements in AI, procedural generation and other such 'time-saving' techniques that would take most of the leg work out of graphical tasks. Also, once there is little room to improve graphically, engine licensors might focus on 'usability' and automation issues to give them a selling point.
Look at sound. Sound in games has pretty much hit its ceiling - high quality, digital surround sound. Back in the days of low-quality beeps and chirps you might have said that, in the future, only a few huge developers would be able to implement 'real-life' sound and music in games, yet the reality is quite the opposite. Now a guy in a basement with some tracking software and a few samples could achieve practically as much as a developer in a studio. He might not have access to a full orchestra in a sound stage but how long are real orchestras going to be necessary? This is perhaps not the best comparison, but you see my point.
What with all the numerous engines available out there on the Internet for free, somebody could currently develop a visually-competent game without hardly getting their feet wet in graphics work. I can't see this as getting anything but better as we progress. Also add community projects such as texture and model repositories and an enthusiast can knock together a reasonable world without spending lots of money or time.
In the 'photo-realistic' future, a single room in a game might contain billions of polygons (or the equivalent method of representing 3d structures) and massively high-resolution textures, but the need to actually compose those polygons or pixels as a developer will likely be severely reduced, if not completely gone. It's not too outlandish to picture a program that can churn out a complex and realistic sofa from your input of 'sofa' and perhaps a few other parameters such as 'style', 'size' and 'colour'. The sofa will also be given all of the necessary physical attributes - flammability, weight, strength, etc. - for use by the physics engine. If you don't fancy that, you could hop onto a model website where there are thousands of similar sofas, uploaded for free by hobbyists, for you to use.
So, once it's that easy to churn out a gorgeous, furnished room that looks like a real movie set, you can't fall back on that gorgeous, furnished room to solely carry your game. You need to populate that room with interesting characters, give that room an interesting purpose.
I'm not denying that I'm perhaps a little wishful in my vision of the future, but I don't think that once we reach the graphical apex that the barrier of entry to those graphics will be as high as you believe, infact I think it will be lower than it is today.
To imply that someone is a hypocrite because they are against mindlessly killing intelligent beings capable of feeling pain and suffering but would also wash their hands of harmful bacteria based on the platform that 'all life is sacred' is ridiculous.
While I agree that too much stock is put in 'cute' animals by anti-cruelty organisations, the absolutist 'kill all or nothing' stance you propose is illogical, unhelpful and only serves to distract from the real acts of barbarism, such as the one discussed here.
The key difference is that us Westerners kill cows for food and other products and we at least try to pretend we're humane about it with our stun-bolts and such. I'd rather the food I eat be borne out of as little pain and suffering as possible. Our methods may not be perfect but at least there's some reasonable purpose behind slaughtering cows and pigs. We don't mindlessly spear them in fields as part of some outdated display of self-doubted masculinity. To compare the two for purposes of apology is asinine.
I don't believe dolphins are magical animals. If you want to eat dolphin, fine, just try to sustain the population and do it humanely. But if you want to butcher thousands of them just to show how dominant you are or because 'granddaddy did it' then you need to get the fuck over yourselves and start acting like you're in the 21st century.
Why is it that when a small child mindlessly tortures animals we say that it is a disturbing indicator of sociopathic behaviour, yet when a group of grown adults do it we are supposed to celebrate their culture?
Slashdot Mirror
Objection, your honor!
On what grounds?
Sexiness!
Sustained, with gusto! Motion to strike clothes from the body.
*bow chikka bow wow*
What has the age of a civilisation or the size of its population got anything to do with it?
Perhaps it was a subtle dig at the true political orientation of New Labour? See Alan B'stard's defection, for example.
You! Yes, you! Stand still laddie!
I think the greater irony is your user-name ;)
Really?
Is it a Thrustmaster?
Your sig seems strangely appropriate...
I'd rather have Quad Damage, if you don't mind.
Yeah. Catholic, naturally.
Pah, spelling and grammar is a holdover from stuffy, old academic rigidity. It has no place in today's classroom. We need to be moving forward as educators and leave all that 'history' behind. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a class on "Group sex: sharing can be caring" to teach to third graders.
A responsible journalist?
;)
Who's the ideologue now?
I have a Deskstar, you insensitive clod!
It looks like someone should go back to University and gain basic comprehension skills...
You didn't answer my question. Why am I not able to criticize other cultures as well as my own? Why should the East Asians be afforded special protection from scrutiny? Is that because you are East Asian yourself? That would make sense, seeing how you went off on that 'white people' rant for no reason.
That's cute, you call me a redneck, jump to conclusions about someone's race for no reason and blindly assert that my own culture must be worse when it's irrelevant to the topic at hand. If anyone's the racist, it's you. Seriously, the fact that you randomly brought race into the discussion is very telling.
Please don't reply with more illogical, rambling and irrelevant shit, it just wastes all of our time.
Yeah, I respect this notion at the end of my second paragraph here, but you still get my point if you substitute 'all life is sacred' with 'you shouldn't kill anything' in the original post.
It goes without saying that hunting an animal for food and treating it was reverence and respect is far removed from butchering loads of dolphins just for the hell of it.
Someone needs a hug.
*Hug*
Are you certain that Westerners try to be humane in their killing ways?
I can not be certain unless I personally observe every piece of meat I eat from birth to consumption. I'm not foolish enough to believe that the meat industry is a loving, caring entity. However, I would welcome any improvements to the process that reduce the suffering of the animals involved. I'm happy to pay a little extra on a half-dozen eggs knowing that the hens could at least move beyond an inch. Infact, I would freely welcome lab-grown meat provided it was both tasty and safe.
And how can you assume that the killing of those dolphins is completely purposeless? Have you talked with the people that did it?
From everything that I've seen and heard about this ritual, the killing of the dolphins is the purpose itself, not the harvest of meat or other products, the protection of other wildlife or population control. If you can prove me wrong, I would care a lot less about this massacre. But as it stands, it just seems like a pathetic display of superiority. That's what gets me, the patheticalness. That grown men are proud of stabbing dolphins with spears. It used to be that hunters would respect their kill, sometimes with spiritual ceremony (some African tribes still do this).
You see, the thing that gets to me is the intent. For all the meat industry's failings, there's at least the semi-valid purpose of obtaining food and the process itself does not take delight in slaughtering animals. The meat companies don't relish the fact that they are killing living things, they just do it because that's their product. They don't whoop and cheer when a cow's throat is cut.
They kill the dolphins in that manner because its efficient. Hunter-gatherer societies often did similar things with herd animals because it was efficient. Industrial farms often treat and kill their animals in the most cost-effective and efficient manners possible, without any regard to being humane.
I'm not sure we disagree here. I don't have any problem with a hunter-gatherer herding animals to kill them so he can feed and clothe himself and his family. It's just that I have to question the moral compass of somebody who, like a kid who feeds a cat to a dog, kill things for kicks.
I'm not apologizing for Japanese culture, but rather that people object to the killing of dolphins at all. Some ways of killing are better than others, and the way those Japanese do it is probably one of the worst, but killing dolphins in and of itself is only wrong if it endangers the survivability of the species.
A kid feeding a live cat to a dog just for fun (which actually happened here in the UK recently) does not endanger the cat population and so by your definition is not wrong. I strongly disagree. And reiterating what I said before, if we are alarmed when a child does such a thing, why shouldn't we be disturbed when adults do it?
Yeah I know of Jainism, and to be honest I admire their principle regarding the equality of life. If you want to live your life by the rules that you don't harm or kill a single thing, then more power to you. I don't have a problem with that. I do have a problem with the notion that can't criticise the frenzied spearing of dolphins because you wash your hands or swat flies that buzz around your face.
;)
But even Jain nuns' immune systems destroy bacteria and viruses on a regular basis
Maybe, but that's assuming that development costs will still be a barrier in a situation where such 'perfect' graphics are deeply entrenched and commonplace. One would think that by such a time there would be significant improvements in AI, procedural generation and other such 'time-saving' techniques that would take most of the leg work out of graphical tasks. Also, once there is little room to improve graphically, engine licensors might focus on 'usability' and automation issues to give them a selling point.
Look at sound. Sound in games has pretty much hit its ceiling - high quality, digital surround sound. Back in the days of low-quality beeps and chirps you might have said that, in the future, only a few huge developers would be able to implement 'real-life' sound and music in games, yet the reality is quite the opposite. Now a guy in a basement with some tracking software and a few samples could achieve practically as much as a developer in a studio. He might not have access to a full orchestra in a sound stage but how long are real orchestras going to be necessary? This is perhaps not the best comparison, but you see my point.
What with all the numerous engines available out there on the Internet for free, somebody could currently develop a visually-competent game without hardly getting their feet wet in graphics work. I can't see this as getting anything but better as we progress. Also add community projects such as texture and model repositories and an enthusiast can knock together a reasonable world without spending lots of money or time.
In the 'photo-realistic' future, a single room in a game might contain billions of polygons (or the equivalent method of representing 3d structures) and massively high-resolution textures, but the need to actually compose those polygons or pixels as a developer will likely be severely reduced, if not completely gone. It's not too outlandish to picture a program that can churn out a complex and realistic sofa from your input of 'sofa' and perhaps a few other parameters such as 'style', 'size' and 'colour'. The sofa will also be given all of the necessary physical attributes - flammability, weight, strength, etc. - for use by the physics engine. If you don't fancy that, you could hop onto a model website where there are thousands of similar sofas, uploaded for free by hobbyists, for you to use.
So, once it's that easy to churn out a gorgeous, furnished room that looks like a real movie set, you can't fall back on that gorgeous, furnished room to solely carry your game. You need to populate that room with interesting characters, give that room an interesting purpose.
I'm not denying that I'm perhaps a little wishful in my vision of the future, but I don't think that once we reach the graphical apex that the barrier of entry to those graphics will be as high as you believe, infact I think it will be lower than it is today.
That's ludicrously quixotic.
To imply that someone is a hypocrite because they are against mindlessly killing intelligent beings capable of feeling pain and suffering but would also wash their hands of harmful bacteria based on the platform that 'all life is sacred' is ridiculous.
While I agree that too much stock is put in 'cute' animals by anti-cruelty organisations, the absolutist 'kill all or nothing' stance you propose is illogical, unhelpful and only serves to distract from the real acts of barbarism, such as the one discussed here.
Why can't I do both? Why can't I criticise the repugnant aspects of my own culture as well criticising the repugnant aspects of others?
Oh I see, it isn't about giving criticism where it's due, it's about dodging it. Yeah, funny that.
The key difference is that us Westerners kill cows for food and other products and we at least try to pretend we're humane about it with our stun-bolts and such. I'd rather the food I eat be borne out of as little pain and suffering as possible. Our methods may not be perfect but at least there's some reasonable purpose behind slaughtering cows and pigs. We don't mindlessly spear them in fields as part of some outdated display of self-doubted masculinity. To compare the two for purposes of apology is asinine.
I don't believe dolphins are magical animals. If you want to eat dolphin, fine, just try to sustain the population and do it humanely. But if you want to butcher thousands of them just to show how dominant you are or because 'granddaddy did it' then you need to get the fuck over yourselves and start acting like you're in the 21st century.
Why is it that when a small child mindlessly tortures animals we say that it is a disturbing indicator of sociopathic behaviour, yet when a group of grown adults do it we are supposed to celebrate their culture?
It's fucking bullshit.
They hear everything.
and Government (Charles de Menezes, for example).
Yeah, that worked really well.
In Democratic Transylvania, they Vote for Counts.