The Great Chain of Being is an idea that we inherited from Christian times. It describes a hierarchy of matter and life forms, with rocks at the bottom, then plants, animals, humans, and above them, angels, and finally, God at the top. Each spot is 'better' than the one below it.
So if you wanted a quick term for something humans might become as technology makes it possible to change the species, "angels" would be a pretty descriptive one. I guess that's part of being a writer: using common myths to effectively communicate ideas.
The second Old Idea that Clark's prognostication rests on is linear progress. That there is a one-dimensional measure of 'goodness' or 'progress', and as time goes on, the value always goes up. In other words, things are always getting better -- we know more, we have more things, society advances.
Thus far, for the whole of human history and prehistory, it has held. In fact, by all indications, it has held for the entire history of the Universe: what began as hot hydrogen gas has turned into this fine computer I'm typing this message with, which at least I find considerably more advanced. It also shows no indications of stopping.
Contrast that with an idea of cycles of good and bad times, like you might see in Hindu thought, or of balance and homeostatis, like you might find in Greek or Native American thought.
Both Hindus and Indians advanced, just slower than Europeans. Given enough time, the Aztec empire or it's nth successor could had reached where we are now. And the Greek, of course, were busy inventing and advancing mathematics, logic, philosophy, democracy, etc., thus disproving any notion of homeostasis.
Well, what about finding jellyfish? Jellyfish have been around the Earth's oceans for millions of years, and their basic body plan and way of making a living hasn't changed that much. Sounds like a fairly successful homeostasis, if you ask me. I'll bet there will be jellyfish as long as there are temperate oceans on Earth.
Yes, of course, just like it still has apes. Clarke is merely referring to the most powerful life form on the planet.
Oh, and jellyfishes have only existed some few hundred million years. These multi-cellular newcomers - it's the bacteria that you should be referring to.
So I think if you put this reasoning in light of those two ideas, it becomes apparent that even one of our greatest 'science'-fiction minds is unaware that they are rooted in very old, religious cosmologies that are culturally based. We in the west are still in the Dark Ages of imagination, living under the tyranny of ancient, jealous, despotic Gods.
Nah, it's just your own mind reacting to the word "angels" and missing the point of the argument. For your benefit, here's the same thing in a less poetic form:
Given a planet where a technological civilization occurs sometime during its existence, it is very unlikely that any random visitor would encounter the civilization in its industrial age, since that time only lasts a few hundred years after which the civilization either evolves into something else or collapses from resource exhaustion or infighting. This "something else" was what Clarke referred to as "angels", since a post-industrial civilization is powerful enough to appear divine to less powerful civilizations, such as our own.
In that case we would kill the aliens immediately, and hunker down in silent mode while reverse-engineering their transport, weapons, communications, etc. To do anything else would be irrational and irresponsible.
Well, obviously. The aliens are stupid enough land their ship. They're stupid enough to put all their crew on shore leave in an unexplored world. And no one home knows where they went. And you could reverse-engineer the whole of modern technology from, say, a cargo ship, so clearly you can do so from a spaceship. Brilliant strategy.
We really don't want to be in the position of "primitive" tribes encountering high tech "civilization" - we know how that works out from our own history.
Yeah. Now suppose the Aztecs had, by some miracle, managed to defeat Cortez and taken his equipment; would that had allowed them to reach technological parity with European powers? Or, for that matter, had they reached that parity, would that had given them actual power parity - miraculously making infrastructure and the larger population it supported appearing from thin air?
When you encounter a more advanced civilization, you don't attack them. You can't win a war; an attempt to do so will only give them an excuse to kill you all. You make the case that you are more useful alive than dead, and that killing you would be immoral, and hope that they're nice.
So you're saying the first things the Alien Overlords will do when they arrive is immediately convert our environment into one which suits them better, one which would almost certainly be instant death to us and all the Earths current inhabitants.
Why not convert one of the other planets instead, and use us as an outsourced manufacturing base to get the colony going?
How does my copyright on the code that I write harm the public, culture and future history?
Any attempt to enforce that copyright requires monitoring and censoring communications between third parties, which means that any would-be dictator has ready-made tools of surveillance and censorship waiting for him, thus harming the public. Furthermore, limiting the number of copies in existence decreases the chances that at least one of them survives, thus making future historian's job that much harder. Finally, human culture evolves by taking ideas from other people, combining them and adding your own, and then passing the result onward to be used as raw material for the next iteration of the cycle. Copyright forbids this creation of derived works, which slows down the evolution of our culture.
how do the people who produce anything creative pay the bills? with space dust?
Commissions. You advertize that you'll paint/write/compose a piece for a price. You know, a bit like plumbers do it, or barbers, or any service providers. In the case of music, you might also be able to raise money with live performances.
Of course it's possible that you aren't good enough that anyone would pay you to produce content. In that case, get a day job, just like everyone else.
Its scares me that people think bullshit like yours makes sense.
Strange how that bullshit works in every other area of life. Are creative people really doing such a worthless job that they can't get paid for it?
Now lets apply the same logic to this rape game. If you play a game with the objective of capturing and raping young girls you may want to look a little deeper inside yourself, and think about what your own objective is and consider why you would buy a game in the first place, then get professional help.
So the objective of mass murder is fine, but the objective of rape is not. Great logic.
Out of curiosity: if you made RapeLay into a mini-game in GTA4, would it then be okay? Say, you could grab someone in the street, drag them into an alley and rape there; would that still be "exploring the boundaries of the game", or would it be a cause to get professional help? What if you could kidnap your victim and "train" her, like you can in RapeLay? Would that count as achievement? What about selling trained slaves? Protecting your sex slave operations from rival gangs? Setting up brothels with them?
-Also a very strong supporter of free speech.
Except when you happen to disagree with the speech in question. Just like the parent poster.
I hope I'm not the only one honestly disturbed that rape games have customers. Funny, as I'm a big fan of GTA4.
Hypocrisy isn't really all that funny.
Violent video games are rather cathartic, and serve that need pretty well. Going around a fake city in a tank and blowing up every douchey car is just wholesome fun. But what does rape simulation appease? It's not sex, that's what porn is for.
A rape simulation is pornography, obviously.
Apart from that, your post seems to boil down to murder simulators being wholesome fun while rape simulators not being wholesome fun. You don't offer any evidence or reasoning to back this up, you simply assert it. Then you go on to make a mockery of free speech.
Normally I'm a blind attack-dog in favor of free speech. But here, no, I can't be.
I find it funny, in a darkly cynical way, when people state how they're all for free speech, as long as said speech happens to be to their liking.
"I'll defend to the death your right to say whatever I happen to agree with."
If free speech means anything more than "just let everyone talk," it has to have a purpose behind it -- such as letting different ideas being heard, or letting the truth be heard, then there has to be a some sorts of speech it encourages, and others it's agnostic to.
The purpose of free speech is to let everyone have their say. Encouraging the speech you happen to agree with and censoring the rest is pretty much the antithesis of free speech; claiming to do this in the name of promoting free speech would make any politician proud.
I can't think of any case for free speech helped by defending a rape simulator.
It helps set a precedence where something can't be banned just because someone finds it disturbing. This, then, is something you can appeal to when Muslims want to ban criticizing Islam, Jews want to ban criticizing Israel, or your government wants to ban criticizing itself.
Basically, you either have free speech for everyone, including people who you find disturbing, or you don't have it for anyone. Choose one or the other; but don't delude yourself about what you've chosen and pretend to be an "attack dog" for free speech when you're trying to censor others. Either have balls to tolerate speech you find disgusting, or the spine to admit you're against free speech; but having neither makes you just plain pitiful.
And your justification to include the makers of RapeLay to this category would be... that the game disturbs you?
Also, would you let me go through your stuff and destroy whatever I deemed deserving? In fact, would you let me destroy you if I find you disturbing (which I do)? If not, then perhaps you should accept that the bar should be a bit higher than that. Unless, of course, you wish to suggest that you're deserving to make this judgement and I'm not, in which case I'd hazard to guess that you're a politician.
Depressing as this may sound, I'm inclined to suspect that such a game would succeed on this side of the pacific.
As a warning to the police as to who to look for first when someone gets raped..
I believe you meant a clue rather than warning.
Anyway, you are quite wrong. Lots of pornography contains violence and depictions of rape. Owning a particular piece doesn't say anything about the guilt of the owner.
Demand for perverse behaviour" isn't a Japanese thing, it's a human one.
Moral equivalence in action. You suck.
He's correct, actually. Do a quick search on the Web, and you'll have no trouble coming up with sick things from any continent. That's because human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.
You might be wiser to ask why there is no such backlash in Japan,
Because Japan is sick?
Or just more capable of admitting their own fantasies. Remember the whole "Hot Coffee" scandal in GTA:SA? It was a game where you played a gangster who stole cars and killed lots of people - and yet one lousy sex scene was what got the moral guardians up in arms. Now that was sick.
Go to any AA or Narcotics Anonymous or women's shelter and see how many of them were sexually abused as children.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that all of them were, what is your point? We aren't talking about abusing actual children, but drawn images and computer-generated graphics.
Anyway, how many Japanese eroge (porn) games are there that don't contain rape? Because the only one I can think of is Brave Soul. And that's really just an action game with some optional porn scenes thrown in for good measure.
Rape is popular in Japanese porn. So are child-looking characters; and in fact most porn actors around the world are sold on their young looks. Look at almost any porn mag or movie and it's teens this and teens that, with some barely legal teens thrown in for good measure. Is it any wonder then that you end up with porn that depicts teens being raped? And when you do, does it make much sense to cry about the depravity of the stuff? It's not like anyone actually got hurt in the production of these games, unless some programmer spilled coffee on himself.
As a side note, AFAIK it is quite legal to possess drawn or computer-generated child pornography in the US, so what is the US ambassador getting his panties in a bunch about?
The surface area of the sphere at the altitude the planes are traveling at is a lot larger too. So although the meteor is bigger, the odds of it passing through the same space occupied by the plane are somewhat diminished. You'd have to have good statistics on the size of meteors at different altitudes to determine which, if any, of the two effects would predominate at a given altitude.
According to Google, the radius of Earth is 6 378.1 kilometers. The radius of a sphere where airplanes fly is 10 kilometers more, or 6 388.1 kilometers, or 0.16 percent larger. Since the surface of a sphere is 4*pi*r^2, it follows that the surface of the larger sphere is 0.3 percent larger than the Earth's surface (512 806 210 square kilometers vs. 511 201 962 square kilometers).
In other words, the effect of the increased radius is insignificant.
If meteors can be so dangerous to airoplanes, why we don't see them hitting cars or buildings more often?
Because most of the atmosphere sits between the airplane and the car. 10 kilometres of thick air is a pretty efficient shield; there are far fewer meteors hitting the ground than making it within 10 kilometres of it.
Besides, if you find a wrecked car by the roadside, do you speculate that it was hit by a meteor, or do you conclude that the driver must have dozed off? Airplane crashes get a lot more intense study than car accidents, and buildings getting some cement chipped off is almost universally blamed on weather or bad construction.
Let's suppose owned a prime piece of real estate right next to an interstate exit ramp. So far nobody's offered anything, but if an Exxon or McDonalds approached me, am I "scum" because I ask for a lot of money to sell my real estate? No it's kind opportunity cost. If they want to setup show in a highly-visible location, then they'll have to pay for it.
Are you scum? That depends: did you buy that prime estate because you figured you would get to collect a tax on anyone trying to set up a business or do anything else actually useful with the land? Because if you did, then yes: you are scum, and vile parasitic scum the world would be better off without at that.
It's nothing personal; just business.
Protip: making excuses means that you're doing something wrong.
While making it VERY difficult on companies to hide tax money offshore, at the same time, why don't we cut corportate taxes severely. That way, you attract more businesses back to the US, and there is less reason to try to 'hide' the monies.
I have an even better idea: make the corporate tax progressive - that is, the bigger the corporation as measured by total income, the higher the tax rate on said income. This would make it more profitable to split large multi-discipline corporations into smaller ones, which would be good for democracy - since no corporation would be big enough to threaten the elected government - capitalism - since no corporation would be too big to fail - and free markets - since no corporation would be big enough to dominate the markets.
Comments?
Besides, IMHO...corporate tax is useless, it is just a hidden tax on the consumer, since a corporation just passes this off onto the consumer as part of their cost of a product.
I keep hearing this, and it strikes me as odd. Surely, a corporation is already taking as much money as it can, by maximizing the price*sales formula. If it asked any more, the decrease in sales would actually lower its income; and it doesn't seem likely that this could be affected by the corporation being taxed more.
Well, that's interesting. Certainly if we're picking a format designed to be on a hard disk (or SSD), I'd implement it today with something like zip, with some xml files inside it. That's right, un-mux'd, as muxing is completely unnecessary pretty much anywhere except optical storage.
I guess we should all be thankful that you're not implementing a format then. Nothing but unnecessary disk seeks to put the slower systems in their place, right? And Heaven forbid someone might have something running in the background while watching video - we don't do any of that fancy multitasking stuff here, no sir!
Designers like you are the reason why a gigahertz machine can take several seconds to bring up a simple dialog box.
There's active work going on with underwater radio. It's really tough to do in salt water. But it's not quite impossible. There's considerable interest in making something that can push data through 100 meters of water depth. Oil industry operations would like to talk to their stuff on the ocean floor.
Since salt ware is conductive, couldn't you simply use electric discharge? Put a metal rod on the water and discharge an electric pulse through it; it'll expand in a spherical manner (or half-sphere if it originated on the surface). The other end receives it by measuring the potential along its outer surface.
Or just use the good old sound communication. A loudspeaker capable of making clicks and a microphone capable of picking them up aren't exactly expensive, and lag is going to be negligible within 300 meters - in fact it would be just a few seconds to the bottom of any ocean, and certainly within tolerable limits.
Why use radio when it's the least efficient communication method imaginable underwater?
You can't make laws as clear as technical documents.
Of course you can. Rule #1: Follow the intent, not the letter, And then make the intent as clear as humanly possible.
Oh goody. Rather than having complicated laws, we'll have judges settling cases by their gut feelings. That's such an improvement.
BTW. I have never once in my life read a clear technical document that was also complete. Oh sure, you can get the gist of it clear; but then you start nailing down corner cases, at which point it becomes a rat's nest of horrifying pedantry.
Laws are like program code: they are horrendously complicated, because each and every bugfix introduces more complexity, and you feel like you should just dump the whole mess and start over, but all you receive that way is code that's not been debugged yet. You think you can do better, fine: write me a Web browser that has feature parity with Firefox, has no bugs whatsoever, and has a small and elegant codebase, and then I'll consider it.
Not all of us happen to believe that it's a proper role of Government to take money from people who aren't impoverished and use it to provide for those who are.
And some of us do happen to believe that it's precisely the point of Government to run the society so that all may benefit, rather than just a few. And yes, that amounts to taking money or future earnings from the rich and giving it to the poor.
There are better ways to address poverty than by taking money away from those who aren't poor at gunpoint and giving it to those who are.
Well then, what are they? And do you simply presume that they'll work, or have they actually been tested? Because, to the best of my knowledge, prior to modern social security systems, people begging in the streets and dying from hunger in the gutter was an everyday and commonplace occurrence, and I really wouldn't want to return to that - even if that means (the horror!) paying taxes.
Money for nothing! You mean I don't have to pay for any of this? Some other sucker will? Great, sign me up!
Sure, you'll pay. You'll likely pay much less than you do now, thought. That's because socialized health care is more efficient.
There are only two ways socialized health care can save money:
Actually, there are more:
3)Medical problems get fixed when they're still small and it's cheap to treat them, rather than after they've escalated to emergency room level.
4)There is no shareholder profits to pay.
5)Less bureaucracy. You don't have to drown the insurance company's resistance to paying in paperwork.
If you think #2 is going to happen, it's a fair bet you still believe in Santa Claus too.
Oh yes, the evil communist twin of the Invisible Hand.
It's funny how people who mock the irrational beliefs or behaviour of others are willing to pay more than anyone else on the planet for sub-standard health care just so no one else can get it cheap either. I believe there was a saying about that kind of behaviour - something about cutting off your nose out of spite?
I wonder if you get over that particular artefact of Cold War propaganda before the US collapses from the inefficiencies of ideology-based economy... Now that would be irony at its finest;).
No, the mercury is in the CFL bulbs. Incandescents, so far as I know, don't contain significant amounts of mercury -- or at least, they shouldn't.
True. I had a brain fart. It must have been all that teleporting mercury;).
And as another poster pointed out... bulbs break.
I've never once in my life broken a lightbulb or a fluorescent tube. Not even once.
Kids are clumsy, and break things. Lamp falls over, CFL breaks, mercury spills all over the carpet.
Ah, that must be it. Almost all my lights are either bolted to the wall or ceiling or some object too heavy to be easily moved or upturned. The few free-standing lights are placed in tight places where it's pretty much impossible for them to fall over.
It's not always a simple matter of communication skills. Some ideas require a foundation of knowledge, without which, the idea is nearly impossible to conceptualize.
This amounts to a form of inadvertant snobbery.
No, it amounts to stating the obvious. Of course you need to have background knowledge to understand complicated ideas.
If you can't effectively summarize the functional or foundational knowledge of your discipline then that is your failure to communicate. You don't need to explain ideas to the nth degree before someone can get on board with them.
Yes, you do. I've seen so many instances of Quantum Mysticism I'm thoroughly convinced that modern physics is genuinely difficult to conceptualize. It's not because the scientists lack communication skills, it's because the subject matter is so far outside the realm of everyday experiences of most people, and in fact often appears to be in direct contradiction to common sense.
"Negative Bias Temperature Instability (NBTI) is a key reliability issue that is of immediate concern in p-channel MOS devices stressed with negative gate voltages. NBTI manifests as an increase in the threshold voltage and consequent decrease in drain current and transconductance." from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBTI
I don't have any background in this stuff, and that summary makes a lot of sense to me.
Without background knowledge the summary is utter gibberish, since it's not possible to even know what field it's referring to. You do have that background knowledge, at least enough to recognize some of the terms and have some idea what the heck it's talking about, you're just comparing your level to that of an expert.
Production costs. You only need one manufacturing line pushing out one kind of chip, rather than needing one line for each chip type.
Flexibility. You don't need to retool your production line when you come up with a new product or discontinue your old one.
If you produce the chips yourself, you could probably make a nice extra profit by selling them to your competitors. If you don't, you can likely get generic chips from multiple manufacturers, rather than being held hostage to a single one.
In a contest of MASS production vs. mass production, the former always wins for efficiency:).
To me the pathology springs from wanting to have 6000 ROMs, when there is no chance in hell that you could ever enjoy a significant percentage of them, I horde DVDs, but I have managed to watch all of them (sans a few crappy gifts).
6000 SNES ROMs take a few gigabytes at maximum, so it makes sense to grab a "complete SNES collection" torrent rather than hunt the few dozen games you actually want one by one. And it makes sense to also keep the 5976 remaining games, even if you never play them, just in case you happen to hear of a cool SNES game and want to try it, or just so you can go digging around randomly when you're bored. After all, it's just a few gigabytes - pocket change, as far as hard disks are concerned.
So no, hoarding SNES ROMs is not pathological, it's simply practical.
Slashdot Mirror
So if you wanted a quick term for something humans might become as technology makes it possible to change the species, "angels" would be a pretty descriptive one. I guess that's part of being a writer: using common myths to effectively communicate ideas.
Thus far, for the whole of human history and prehistory, it has held. In fact, by all indications, it has held for the entire history of the Universe: what began as hot hydrogen gas has turned into this fine computer I'm typing this message with, which at least I find considerably more advanced. It also shows no indications of stopping.
Both Hindus and Indians advanced, just slower than Europeans. Given enough time, the Aztec empire or it's nth successor could had reached where we are now. And the Greek, of course, were busy inventing and advancing mathematics, logic, philosophy, democracy, etc., thus disproving any notion of homeostasis.
Yes, of course, just like it still has apes. Clarke is merely referring to the most powerful life form on the planet.
Oh, and jellyfishes have only existed some few hundred million years. These multi-cellular newcomers - it's the bacteria that you should be referring to.
Nah, it's just your own mind reacting to the word "angels" and missing the point of the argument. For your benefit, here's the same thing in a less poetic form:
Given a planet where a technological civilization occurs sometime during its existence, it is very unlikely that any random visitor would encounter the civilization in its industrial age, since that time only lasts a few hundred years after which the civilization either evolves into something else or collapses from resource exhaustion or infighting. This "something else" was what Clarke referred to as "angels", since a post-industrial civilization is powerful enough to appear divine to less powerful civilizations, such as our own.
Well, obviously. The aliens are stupid enough land their ship. They're stupid enough to put all their crew on shore leave in an unexplored world. And no one home knows where they went. And you could reverse-engineer the whole of modern technology from, say, a cargo ship, so clearly you can do so from a spaceship. Brilliant strategy.
Yeah. Now suppose the Aztecs had, by some miracle, managed to defeat Cortez and taken his equipment; would that had allowed them to reach technological parity with European powers? Or, for that matter, had they reached that parity, would that had given them actual power parity - miraculously making infrastructure and the larger population it supported appearing from thin air?
When you encounter a more advanced civilization, you don't attack them. You can't win a war; an attempt to do so will only give them an excuse to kill you all. You make the case that you are more useful alive than dead, and that killing you would be immoral, and hope that they're nice.
Why not convert one of the other planets instead, and use us as an outsourced manufacturing base to get the colony going?
Any attempt to enforce that copyright requires monitoring and censoring communications between third parties, which means that any would-be dictator has ready-made tools of surveillance and censorship waiting for him, thus harming the public. Furthermore, limiting the number of copies in existence decreases the chances that at least one of them survives, thus making future historian's job that much harder. Finally, human culture evolves by taking ideas from other people, combining them and adding your own, and then passing the result onward to be used as raw material for the next iteration of the cycle. Copyright forbids this creation of derived works, which slows down the evolution of our culture.
Commissions. You advertize that you'll paint/write/compose a piece for a price. You know, a bit like plumbers do it, or barbers, or any service providers. In the case of music, you might also be able to raise money with live performances.
Of course it's possible that you aren't good enough that anyone would pay you to produce content. In that case, get a day job, just like everyone else.
Strange how that bullshit works in every other area of life. Are creative people really doing such a worthless job that they can't get paid for it?
Funny, it doesn't concern me at all that if I give apples to someone they might use the seeds to plan their own trees.
The same way I justify planting those seeds: they're mine to do with as I please, even if the seed the tree was grown from was given to me by you.
Sure. You have the right to keep the your ideas to yourself. You also have the right to use it as you see fit, or to tell it to anyone you please.
Or did you mean that you should be able to deprave me of my rights to use and spread the ideas I know?
So the objective of mass murder is fine, but the objective of rape is not. Great logic.
Out of curiosity: if you made RapeLay into a mini-game in GTA4, would it then be okay? Say, you could grab someone in the street, drag them into an alley and rape there; would that still be "exploring the boundaries of the game", or would it be a cause to get professional help? What if you could kidnap your victim and "train" her, like you can in RapeLay? Would that count as achievement? What about selling trained slaves? Protecting your sex slave operations from rival gangs? Setting up brothels with them?
Except when you happen to disagree with the speech in question. Just like the parent poster.
Hypocrisy isn't really all that funny.
A rape simulation is pornography, obviously.
Apart from that, your post seems to boil down to murder simulators being wholesome fun while rape simulators not being wholesome fun. You don't offer any evidence or reasoning to back this up, you simply assert it. Then you go on to make a mockery of free speech.
I find it funny, in a darkly cynical way, when people state how they're all for free speech, as long as said speech happens to be to their liking.
"I'll defend to the death your right to say whatever I happen to agree with."
The purpose of free speech is to let everyone have their say. Encouraging the speech you happen to agree with and censoring the rest is pretty much the antithesis of free speech; claiming to do this in the name of promoting free speech would make any politician proud.
It helps set a precedence where something can't be banned just because someone finds it disturbing. This, then, is something you can appeal to when Muslims want to ban criticizing Islam, Jews want to ban criticizing Israel, or your government wants to ban criticizing itself.
Basically, you either have free speech for everyone, including people who you find disturbing, or you don't have it for anyone. Choose one or the other; but don't delude yourself about what you've chosen and pretend to be an "attack dog" for free speech when you're trying to censor others. Either have balls to tolerate speech you find disgusting, or the spine to admit you're against free speech; but having neither makes you just plain pitiful.
And your justification to include the makers of RapeLay to this category would be... that the game disturbs you?
Also, would you let me go through your stuff and destroy whatever I deemed deserving? In fact, would you let me destroy you if I find you disturbing (which I do)? If not, then perhaps you should accept that the bar should be a bit higher than that. Unless, of course, you wish to suggest that you're deserving to make this judgement and I'm not, in which case I'd hazard to guess that you're a politician.
I believe you meant a clue rather than warning.
Anyway, you are quite wrong. Lots of pornography contains violence and depictions of rape. Owning a particular piece doesn't say anything about the guilt of the owner.
He's correct, actually. Do a quick search on the Web, and you'll have no trouble coming up with sick things from any continent. That's because human nature is pretty much the same everywhere.
Or just more capable of admitting their own fantasies. Remember the whole "Hot Coffee" scandal in GTA:SA? It was a game where you played a gangster who stole cars and killed lots of people - and yet one lousy sex scene was what got the moral guardians up in arms. Now that was sick.
Assuming, for the sake of argument, that all of them were, what is your point? We aren't talking about abusing actual children, but drawn images and computer-generated graphics.
Isn't that what they're trying to ban here?
Anyway, how many Japanese eroge (porn) games are there that don't contain rape? Because the only one I can think of is Brave Soul. And that's really just an action game with some optional porn scenes thrown in for good measure.
Rape is popular in Japanese porn. So are child-looking characters; and in fact most porn actors around the world are sold on their young looks. Look at almost any porn mag or movie and it's teens this and teens that, with some barely legal teens thrown in for good measure. Is it any wonder then that you end up with porn that depicts teens being raped? And when you do, does it make much sense to cry about the depravity of the stuff? It's not like anyone actually got hurt in the production of these games, unless some programmer spilled coffee on himself.
As a side note, AFAIK it is quite legal to possess drawn or computer-generated child pornography in the US, so what is the US ambassador getting his panties in a bunch about?
What kind of pervert would consider these sexual in nature, thought? Wisty, you sicko!
According to Google, the radius of Earth is 6 378.1 kilometers. The radius of a sphere where airplanes fly is 10 kilometers more, or 6 388.1 kilometers, or 0.16 percent larger. Since the surface of a sphere is 4*pi*r^2, it follows that the surface of the larger sphere is 0.3 percent larger than the Earth's surface (512 806 210 square kilometers vs. 511 201 962 square kilometers).
In other words, the effect of the increased radius is insignificant.
Because most of the atmosphere sits between the airplane and the car. 10 kilometres of thick air is a pretty efficient shield; there are far fewer meteors hitting the ground than making it within 10 kilometres of it.
Besides, if you find a wrecked car by the roadside, do you speculate that it was hit by a meteor, or do you conclude that the driver must have dozed off? Airplane crashes get a lot more intense study than car accidents, and buildings getting some cement chipped off is almost universally blamed on weather or bad construction.
He wrote a strongly worded complaint on Slashdot. If it's good enough for the FTC, it's good enough for him ;).
Are you scum? That depends: did you buy that prime estate because you figured you would get to collect a tax on anyone trying to set up a business or do anything else actually useful with the land? Because if you did, then yes: you are scum, and vile parasitic scum the world would be better off without at that.
Protip: making excuses means that you're doing something wrong.
I have an even better idea: make the corporate tax progressive - that is, the bigger the corporation as measured by total income, the higher the tax rate on said income. This would make it more profitable to split large multi-discipline corporations into smaller ones, which would be good for democracy - since no corporation would be big enough to threaten the elected government - capitalism - since no corporation would be too big to fail - and free markets - since no corporation would be big enough to dominate the markets.
Comments?
I keep hearing this, and it strikes me as odd. Surely, a corporation is already taking as much money as it can, by maximizing the price*sales formula. If it asked any more, the decrease in sales would actually lower its income; and it doesn't seem likely that this could be affected by the corporation being taxed more.
I guess we should all be thankful that you're not implementing a format then. Nothing but unnecessary disk seeks to put the slower systems in their place, right? And Heaven forbid someone might have something running in the background while watching video - we don't do any of that fancy multitasking stuff here, no sir!
Designers like you are the reason why a gigahertz machine can take several seconds to bring up a simple dialog box.
Since salt ware is conductive, couldn't you simply use electric discharge? Put a metal rod on the water and discharge an electric pulse through it; it'll expand in a spherical manner (or half-sphere if it originated on the surface). The other end receives it by measuring the potential along its outer surface.
Or just use the good old sound communication. A loudspeaker capable of making clicks and a microphone capable of picking them up aren't exactly expensive, and lag is going to be negligible within 300 meters - in fact it would be just a few seconds to the bottom of any ocean, and certainly within tolerable limits.
Why use radio when it's the least efficient communication method imaginable underwater?
Oh goody. Rather than having complicated laws, we'll have judges settling cases by their gut feelings. That's such an improvement.
BTW. I have never once in my life read a clear technical document that was also complete. Oh sure, you can get the gist of it clear; but then you start nailing down corner cases, at which point it becomes a rat's nest of horrifying pedantry.
Laws are like program code: they are horrendously complicated, because each and every bugfix introduces more complexity, and you feel like you should just dump the whole mess and start over, but all you receive that way is code that's not been debugged yet. You think you can do better, fine: write me a Web browser that has feature parity with Firefox, has no bugs whatsoever, and has a small and elegant codebase, and then I'll consider it.
And some of us do happen to believe that it's precisely the point of Government to run the society so that all may benefit, rather than just a few. And yes, that amounts to taking money or future earnings from the rich and giving it to the poor.
Well then, what are they? And do you simply presume that they'll work, or have they actually been tested? Because, to the best of my knowledge, prior to modern social security systems, people begging in the streets and dying from hunger in the gutter was an everyday and commonplace occurrence, and I really wouldn't want to return to that - even if that means (the horror!) paying taxes.
Sure, you'll pay. You'll likely pay much less than you do now, thought. That's because socialized health care is more efficient.
Actually, there are more:
3)Medical problems get fixed when they're still small and it's cheap to treat them, rather than after they've escalated to emergency room level.
4)There is no shareholder profits to pay.
5)Less bureaucracy. You don't have to drown the insurance company's resistance to paying in paperwork.
Oh yes, the evil communist twin of the Invisible Hand.
It's funny how people who mock the irrational beliefs or behaviour of others are willing to pay more than anyone else on the planet for sub-standard health care just so no one else can get it cheap either. I believe there was a saying about that kind of behaviour - something about cutting off your nose out of spite?
I wonder if you get over that particular artefact of Cold War propaganda before the US collapses from the inefficiencies of ideology-based economy... Now that would be irony at its finest ;).
True. I had a brain fart. It must have been all that teleporting mercury ;).
I've never once in my life broken a lightbulb or a fluorescent tube. Not even once.
Ah, that must be it. Almost all my lights are either bolted to the wall or ceiling or some object too heavy to be easily moved or upturned. The few free-standing lights are placed in tight places where it's pretty much impossible for them to fall over.
No, it amounts to stating the obvious. Of course you need to have background knowledge to understand complicated ideas.
Yes, you do. I've seen so many instances of Quantum Mysticism I'm thoroughly convinced that modern physics is genuinely difficult to conceptualize. It's not because the scientists lack communication skills, it's because the subject matter is so far outside the realm of everyday experiences of most people, and in fact often appears to be in direct contradiction to common sense.
Without background knowledge the summary is utter gibberish, since it's not possible to even know what field it's referring to. You do have that background knowledge, at least enough to recognize some of the terms and have some idea what the heck it's talking about, you're just comparing your level to that of an expert.
In a contest of MASS production vs. mass production, the former always wins for efficiency :).
6000 SNES ROMs take a few gigabytes at maximum, so it makes sense to grab a "complete SNES collection" torrent rather than hunt the few dozen games you actually want one by one. And it makes sense to also keep the 5976 remaining games, even if you never play them, just in case you happen to hear of a cool SNES game and want to try it, or just so you can go digging around randomly when you're bored. After all, it's just a few gigabytes - pocket change, as far as hard disks are concerned.
So no, hoarding SNES ROMs is not pathological, it's simply practical.