"The current global warming trend is caused by human activity, primarily the use of fossil fuels. That is an absolute fact. It's about as well established as Newtonian physics at this point."
This is precisely what is being debated. Simply stating in a/. post that it is certain does not make it so. It is precisely this certainty which, which questioned by scientists, is apparently leading to death threats and the like.
(1) There is debate as to whether or not the "current global warming trend", as you put it, even exists. You might not like that, you might even hate it and threaten people who say it (who knows...), but *there is debate*. There are many scientists who question that there is a warming trend at all, if the trend will continue, and if the trend is caused by any human activity. Variations in studies of the global temperature have shown conflicting results.
(2) If we assume that there is a trend of steadily increasing temperatures on the planet, it is still uncertain if this is caused by human activity or is an indication of natural processes at work in extremely long and hard-to-predict (let alone measure) geological cycles.
Please do not claim things which are not true, just by stating them with a lot of conviction and assuming others will not question them. It is exactly this practice which is hurting the global warming cause with reputable and skeptical scientists.
Come to think of it, ignore that request.
Do this as often as possible! It will bring about the revolution of thinking and increase the level of scientific skepticism of global warming theory all that must faster. Continue, by all means!
Good one. Pretty damn true.
I would qualify it, which will reduce its power and elegance aesthetically speaking:
When you are young you want things to change as fast as possible. When you are older, you realize things are generally pretty complicated, and forcing change usually means violence is involved. "Small steps, Ellie, small steps."
Wow, you'll have to explain that one to me. That game bit into my LAN crew and would not let go for over a year. We had more LAN parties dedicated to that specific game than any other game before or since...
Are you insane? Have you never watched a single episode of "Behind the Music"? Who do you think pays for all those colloseum rentals, the roadies, the trucks, the speakers, the instruments, the studio time, the engineers, the truck drivers, the electricians, the contractors, the carpenters, the architects, etc. etc. etc. etc. necessary to keep tours, studios, bands all in operation? The member companies of the RIAA spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars to promote and allow artists to make the music everyone seems to think just magically comes out of studios and concert vendues for free. Something like 80% of that cost is swallowed up by bands who never make back more than the studio spent on them. They are total losses -- and we still have artists whining "Why don't I have any money?..."
I'm frustrated with this impression people have of artists being these saints of creation saddled with recording studios (RIAA) who are nothing but parasites. In fact, 80 - 90% of the time, it's exactly the other way around. Music creation, promotion, distribution, marketing and manufacturing is a *business*, nothing more. The only artists creating for the sake of creation are those sitting in their garages, having spent all their own money on all their own equipment, playing for their 6 stoned friends on the couch. If tickets are being sold, or CDs are on sale at a retail outlet, the business is in full effect, and the members of the RIAA are a critical part of that -- more important than the thousands of artists whining and complaining they can't get a record deal. That's right, they can't, because they won't earn back the money spent on marketing and promoting and producing and recording and touring them -- 90% of the time!
Hey, I'm with this Raven Shield LAN party comment. The problem as I see it, Trepalium, is this:
CS has a huge installed user base
It is very stable after about 14 million patches and such incredibly extensive user game play
It is free (bingo!)
It genuinely is a lot of fun, still to this day
People who play a lot of it continue to find ways to become better (grenade tricks, different qualities for guns, *scripting*, map knowledge coupled with such a massive number of maps out there)
That's a lot going in its favor. Piled on top of that is the fact that it's very fast paced, and people don't have to wait too long for the game to recycle if they're killed, if they die early. Unless, of course, there's some camper in which case that camper sucks and everyone tends to make that clear quickly. Raven Shield is very *slow*-paced, you can wait a very long time if you die early depending on the map, a lot less people own it, it is NOT free, it has a large learning curve with motion, keys, etc. It has a lot of strikes against it. Again, with that said, I think it kicks CS's ass for multiplayer co-op play. So far it provides the most satisfying anti-terrorist FPS multiplayer game play I've experienced. So, I sympathize with you, but I also think there's some compelling reasons why the world is the way it is...
This was a good post. However, I respectfully disagree. Much of the love (ok, slight obsession, but that's really none of your business) with Half-Life that kept me playing that game far longer than was sane, were the sound effects, the sound map laid over the entire game experience. It really doesn't make any difference to me what level of Dolby SurroundSound is used. I use headphones, and I use them exclusively. What matters to me is, does the sound in the game enhance the game play, or is it tacked on because, well, players need to hear _something_ when their gun goes off?
I'll never forget the yap-yaps of the exploding dogs, the hollow metal pounding of the massive claw stalks, the splats from the mutant crocs, the chirping of the homing rodents. All the sounds in HL1 were exceptional. There have been other games with similar levels of sound quality (Baldur's Gate II being one of them) and I for one consider the sound of a game extremely important to its overall effect as an immersive environment. That's what it's all about, right? Immersion? Imagine a movie with crappy sound and no soundtrack. Basically, you've just imagined about 75% of the games out there.
Now, I will be forthright here and tell you all I am a DJ and electronica music producer in my spare time, so I am very biased towards good music, good sound effects, and environmental soundpainting. But I'm no tech junkie, a pair of good headphones and a good quality soundcard is good enough -- provided the game designers spent the time necessary to do the sound right. That seems to be what's missing most often. Visuals have definitely taken the lion's share of development dollars, and I think that's a shame. Music and environmental sound is such a crucial element of life -- we do a lot in our lives based on what we hear, including our emotional responses.
With that said, I'll whip out the soapbox and bring up the topic raised above somewhere about onboard sound cards being the crappiest the manufacturer can get away with. My Alienware laptop is a good example. The onboard sound has to be the worst I've ever heard from a PC, some Avance card that's probably worth about $10. I promptly went out and got an external USB Creative card (forget the exact name) for some additional inputs and to take the pressure off the clearly non-performing Avance. Battlefield:DesertCombat was absolutely crashing because of the soundcard. The Creative USB (card? box? SPU?) took care of that, and made the sound in general on the machine smooth as silk rubbing against satin.
Don't be afraid to demand more from your computer manufacturers in terms of sound! Your ears provide a huge part of the emotional response in your life through music and other environmental sounds, as new fathers know hearing their babies coo. (Yeah, OK, and cry, too.) Your soundcard may not need to be the ATI 9800 of audio, but don't make it the 16 meg GForce 1 either.
You also argue in a way conducive to defensiveness, agression and antipathy. As feedback to you, I think you should know it has the effect of making others reticent to continue enlightened debate with you in a polite, respectful way. You can convey your message in a much more effective method without calling others' opinions and thoughts "absurd", not providing any indication you found their thoughts of value or interest, and using such a derogatory tone in the debate. People will be much more willing to listen to you and engage you in friendly, empassioned and convivial discussion if you use more honey and less vinegar.
You should look into the origins of the word "justice", especially the Greek and Latin origins. It will enlighten you quite a bit. You have made a tautological argument using "injustice" to mean what I consider "theft".
-Laetor
I'm afraid I cannot agree here. You require physical substance in order for theft to occur. There are quite intangible assets, just as "rights" and "justice" and "choice" and "freedom" which can be stolen from you very easily. It might come down to sematics, because you left the loophole open that "it's some other crime" if pictures are taken of you without your consent. But it could be argued (and often is through the use of the idiom "the government is taking our rights away") that taking pictures without someone's consent does take away their right to privacy, essentially stealing their privacy from them. Intellectual property exists in terms of the law. What someone knows has value, can affect things, can be implemented, can be turned (sometimes) into physical objects. It is intangible, because it resides (in theory) in a specific configuration of neural tissue which cannot be replicated easily or without effort. So, if someone takes that intellectual capital (via bits, or pieces of paper it's written down on, or whatever) no matter if a copy is left the intellectual property has been stolen. A person who was not supposed to know it or possess it (there's that idiom again) now does. And that is theft -- theft of an idea, theft of an intangible asset.
All these posts are missing something...logic. These companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars seeking markets and figuring out customer segmentation. You all actually think they don't know that truly elite gamers build their own systems? This market is a tiny friggin' niche in the greater scheme of things. "Gamers" does not equal "l33t". Gamers = PC enthusiasts who also probably own Xboxs or PS2s or somesuch, you know, the person who likes to play games, not lose their lives pretending to be some 12th level Elvish rogue mage while cybring some hottie online. It's amazing how many dorks are on here at/. hearing "gamer" and thinking "l33t CS scripter." That is not the market here. People like me, with families and other obligations eating up vast amounts of time, but with an l33t background (yes, I once had skillz, but since have gotten pwned by 2 babies) are the market. We don't have time to screw around building systems -- we're willing to spend money to save time. We also like warrantees so we can return things when the mobo fails or the WIFI card won't work with other components.
There are a ton of once-l33t gamers now growing into adults (gasp!) with much less time to solve component-conflicts and video driver problems. We're looking for the silver bullet solution, and willing to pay extra for it. And our numbers grow with each birth.
Unlikely. Horses are built very differently depending on latitude, breed, use, feeding and other genetic and environmental factors. In an era where tools and materials had no industrial manufacturing or standards, and artisans created their own tools to build with themselves for the most part, it is highly unlikely that two chariots even built by two artisans living next door to each other would come within 10% of the same range of sizes, especially taking into consideration the different horses and uses to which chariots could be put. A wagon to haul materials would require horses and dimensions of a radically different size than a war chariot using fast, sprinter breeds. Plus, wheel ruts do not stay in roads. With the first spring rains or winter freezes and thaws roads are completely torn asunder and reformed. The wheel ruts would never have dictated wagon wheel distances, espeically over the course of hundreds of years and varying manufacturing methods.
Totally disagree here. This is exactly what the Homeland Security office's response is to international and domestic terrorism -- harsher controls, clamping down on any type of non-identifiable interaction. Basically, everyone who speaks, reads, types, looks, smells, or hears anything needs to have a tattoo on their forehead with a barcode in it for easy ID by the Feds.
In a marketplace, these controls make even less sense than in the legal realm. Once again, I will state what others before me (and will after me) have stated for years. It will be in caps, not as a shout, but as an attention getter:
THE BEST RESPONSE TO CHEATERS IN THE ONLINE VIDEO GAME ARENA IS TO IMMEDIATELY LEAVE THE SERVER WHERE THE CHEATER IS CURRENTLY CHEATING. Ignore them, leave them. For some reason, it appears there were few people like me who had the shit kicked out of them by bullies in grade school. It took a very long time before I believed my parents and ignored the bullies by walking away and removing myself from the location. The bullies get bored and stop -- or go bug someone else not hip to the trick yet.
Cheaters will get really bored if everytime they pull some stunt, every single player who sees it immediately logs off that server, dissapears instantly, poof gone into the bit-aether. They're left playing with themselves, which is nothing new to them, right? >-) Just leave. Vote with your connection. Go to another server. Yeah, you'll be moving quite a bit for say 3 months or so, but then the cheaters (I guarantee it) will get bored and move on to some new activity -- or they'll stick to servers where people are too stupid to leave. This will leave your servers clean and fun. Try it! It works!
You know, I cannot understand the massive hype around de_dust. I mean, what's the deal? It was ok, it didn't suck, and the little hallway close to the terrorist spawn wasn't bad for grenade fests, but still, I wasn't creaming my pants every time it loaded on a server. Can someone please explain to me the industry and consumer hypnotism de_dust was responsible for? Sure, some maps are better than others, but I still have yet to play a map that just entrances me and makes me think the map editor is some sort of genius. Right now, Call of Duty has a pretty good one called pavlov for close combat. 1942 has Monte Cristo which didn't suck. Any other maps out there people found themselves dreaming about when passing out after a LAN weekend?...
What the hell are you smoking? That girl's hot! I'd buy her dinner any day, no matter what she was wearing. Reminds me of Tank Girl with all the middle-finger pointing. Not that that gets me hot. Being flipped off, I mean. Tank Girl gets me hot. Oh yeah, baby. OK, that's enough, I think.
Mercatur, you're smokin'! Don't listen to these idiots.
You've made my argument for me. Because this system is so easily simulated (being an incredibly simple simulation itself) the phenomena are not emergent. What happens in Life is exactly what's put in -- nothing about the game of Life is greater than the sum of its parts (or application of its very simple rules). The term "emergent phenomena" is misused in this case -- emergent phenomena are phenomena that cannot be explained by the sum of the parts of the system, their existence is not reducible to the system that they came from, the rules of the system they come from cannot explain the phenomena themselves. This is not true of things like sliders, collapsers, eaters, propellers, and other "creatures" in the game of Life.
In the Game of Life, simple rules of cooperation with what's nearby lead to unexpected, even startling complexities that you could not have predicted from the rules (emergent phenomena).
Don't think so. The rules behind the simple game of Life are very easily enumerated. Every single "phenomenon" that arises is not emergent, it is clearly and totally predictable from the rules. Emergent phenomena are those that cannot be predicted. It's even better when they violate the rules that start them in motion to begin with.
Just because some things happen that are really cool when you smear a bunch of bits to "on" and start the game up, does not mean you're witnessing emergent phenomena. It just means you lack the brainpower or patience to follow the rules through and predict the outcome of your smears or shapes, before starting the game up.
Slashdot Mirror
"The current global warming trend is caused by human activity, primarily the use of fossil fuels. That is an absolute fact. It's about as well established as Newtonian physics at this point." This is precisely what is being debated. Simply stating in a /. post that it is certain does not make it so. It is precisely this certainty which, which questioned by scientists, is apparently leading to death threats and the like.
(1) There is debate as to whether or not the "current global warming trend", as you put it, even exists. You might not like that, you might even hate it and threaten people who say it (who knows...), but *there is debate*. There are many scientists who question that there is a warming trend at all, if the trend will continue, and if the trend is caused by any human activity. Variations in studies of the global temperature have shown conflicting results.
(2) If we assume that there is a trend of steadily increasing temperatures on the planet, it is still uncertain if this is caused by human activity or is an indication of natural processes at work in extremely long and hard-to-predict (let alone measure) geological cycles.
Please do not claim things which are not true, just by stating them with a lot of conviction and assuming others will not question them. It is exactly this practice which is hurting the global warming cause with reputable and skeptical scientists.
Come to think of it, ignore that request.
Do this as often as possible! It will bring about the revolution of thinking and increase the level of scientific skepticism of global warming theory all that must faster. Continue, by all means!
Good one. Pretty damn true. I would qualify it, which will reduce its power and elegance aesthetically speaking: When you are young you want things to change as fast as possible. When you are older, you realize things are generally pretty complicated, and forcing change usually means violence is involved. "Small steps, Ellie, small steps."
Man, this discussion is out of control! Awesome! It would take me approximately 6.7 hours to read the entire thread at my current rate of reading...
Wow, you'll have to explain that one to me. That game bit into my LAN crew and would not let go for over a year. We had more LAN parties dedicated to that specific game than any other game before or since...
Are you insane? Have you never watched a single episode of "Behind the Music"? Who do you think pays for all those colloseum rentals, the roadies, the trucks, the speakers, the instruments, the studio time, the engineers, the truck drivers, the electricians, the contractors, the carpenters, the architects, etc. etc. etc. etc. necessary to keep tours, studios, bands all in operation? The member companies of the RIAA spend literally hundreds of millions of dollars to promote and allow artists to make the music everyone seems to think just magically comes out of studios and concert vendues for free. Something like 80% of that cost is swallowed up by bands who never make back more than the studio spent on them. They are total losses -- and we still have artists whining "Why don't I have any money?..." I'm frustrated with this impression people have of artists being these saints of creation saddled with recording studios (RIAA) who are nothing but parasites. In fact, 80 - 90% of the time, it's exactly the other way around. Music creation, promotion, distribution, marketing and manufacturing is a *business*, nothing more. The only artists creating for the sake of creation are those sitting in their garages, having spent all their own money on all their own equipment, playing for their 6 stoned friends on the couch. If tickets are being sold, or CDs are on sale at a retail outlet, the business is in full effect, and the members of the RIAA are a critical part of that -- more important than the thousands of artists whining and complaining they can't get a record deal. That's right, they can't, because they won't earn back the money spent on marketing and promoting and producing and recording and touring them -- 90% of the time!
Hey, I'm with this Raven Shield LAN party comment. The problem as I see it, Trepalium, is this:
CS has a huge installed user base
It is very stable after about 14 million patches and such incredibly extensive user game play
It is free (bingo!)
It genuinely is a lot of fun, still to this day
People who play a lot of it continue to find ways to become better (grenade tricks, different qualities for guns, *scripting*, map knowledge coupled with such a massive number of maps out there)
That's a lot going in its favor. Piled on top of that is the fact that it's very fast paced, and people don't have to wait too long for the game to recycle if they're killed, if they die early. Unless, of course, there's some camper in which case that camper sucks and everyone tends to make that clear quickly. Raven Shield is very *slow*-paced, you can wait a very long time if you die early depending on the map, a lot less people own it, it is NOT free, it has a large learning curve with motion, keys, etc. It has a lot of strikes against it. Again, with that said, I think it kicks CS's ass for multiplayer co-op play. So far it provides the most satisfying anti-terrorist FPS multiplayer game play I've experienced. So, I sympathize with you, but I also think there's some compelling reasons why the world is the way it is...
This was a good post. However, I respectfully disagree. Much of the love (ok, slight obsession, but that's really none of your business) with Half-Life that kept me playing that game far longer than was sane, were the sound effects, the sound map laid over the entire game experience. It really doesn't make any difference to me what level of Dolby SurroundSound is used. I use headphones, and I use them exclusively. What matters to me is, does the sound in the game enhance the game play, or is it tacked on because, well, players need to hear _something_ when their gun goes off?
I'll never forget the yap-yaps of the exploding dogs, the hollow metal pounding of the massive claw stalks, the splats from the mutant crocs, the chirping of the homing rodents. All the sounds in HL1 were exceptional. There have been other games with similar levels of sound quality (Baldur's Gate II being one of them) and I for one consider the sound of a game extremely important to its overall effect as an immersive environment. That's what it's all about, right? Immersion? Imagine a movie with crappy sound and no soundtrack. Basically, you've just imagined about 75% of the games out there.
Now, I will be forthright here and tell you all I am a DJ and electronica music producer in my spare time, so I am very biased towards good music, good sound effects, and environmental soundpainting. But I'm no tech junkie, a pair of good headphones and a good quality soundcard is good enough -- provided the game designers spent the time necessary to do the sound right. That seems to be what's missing most often. Visuals have definitely taken the lion's share of development dollars, and I think that's a shame. Music and environmental sound is such a crucial element of life -- we do a lot in our lives based on what we hear, including our emotional responses.
With that said, I'll whip out the soapbox and bring up the topic raised above somewhere about onboard sound cards being the crappiest the manufacturer can get away with. My Alienware laptop is a good example. The onboard sound has to be the worst I've ever heard from a PC, some Avance card that's probably worth about $10. I promptly went out and got an external USB Creative card (forget the exact name) for some additional inputs and to take the pressure off the clearly non-performing Avance. Battlefield:DesertCombat was absolutely crashing because of the soundcard. The Creative USB (card? box? SPU?) took care of that, and made the sound in general on the machine smooth as silk rubbing against satin.
Don't be afraid to demand more from your computer manufacturers in terms of sound! Your ears provide a huge part of the emotional response in your life through music and other environmental sounds, as new fathers know hearing their babies coo. (Yeah, OK, and cry, too.) Your soundcard may not need to be the ATI 9800 of audio, but don't make it the 16 meg GForce 1 either.
You also argue in a way conducive to defensiveness, agression and antipathy. As feedback to you, I think you should know it has the effect of making others reticent to continue enlightened debate with you in a polite, respectful way. You can convey your message in a much more effective method without calling others' opinions and thoughts "absurd", not providing any indication you found their thoughts of value or interest, and using such a derogatory tone in the debate. People will be much more willing to listen to you and engage you in friendly, empassioned and convivial discussion if you use more honey and less vinegar.
You should look into the origins of the word "justice", especially the Greek and Latin origins. It will enlighten you quite a bit. You have made a tautological argument using "injustice" to mean what I consider "theft". -Laetor
I'm afraid I cannot agree here. You require physical substance in order for theft to occur. There are quite intangible assets, just as "rights" and "justice" and "choice" and "freedom" which can be stolen from you very easily. It might come down to sematics, because you left the loophole open that "it's some other crime" if pictures are taken of you without your consent. But it could be argued (and often is through the use of the idiom "the government is taking our rights away") that taking pictures without someone's consent does take away their right to privacy, essentially stealing their privacy from them. Intellectual property exists in terms of the law. What someone knows has value, can affect things, can be implemented, can be turned (sometimes) into physical objects. It is intangible, because it resides (in theory) in a specific configuration of neural tissue which cannot be replicated easily or without effort. So, if someone takes that intellectual capital (via bits, or pieces of paper it's written down on, or whatever) no matter if a copy is left the intellectual property has been stolen. A person who was not supposed to know it or possess it (there's that idiom again) now does. And that is theft -- theft of an idea, theft of an intangible asset.
That's about the very last thing you want to do, at least for their mobile systems.
All these posts are missing something...logic. These companies spend hundreds of thousands of dollars seeking markets and figuring out customer segmentation. You all actually think they don't know that truly elite gamers build their own systems? This market is a tiny friggin' niche in the greater scheme of things. "Gamers" does not equal "l33t". Gamers = PC enthusiasts who also probably own Xboxs or PS2s or somesuch, you know, the person who likes to play games, not lose their lives pretending to be some 12th level Elvish rogue mage while cybring some hottie online. It's amazing how many dorks are on here at /. hearing "gamer" and thinking "l33t CS scripter." That is not the market here. People like me, with families and other obligations eating up vast amounts of time, but with an l33t background (yes, I once had skillz, but since have gotten pwned by 2 babies) are the market. We don't have time to screw around building systems -- we're willing to spend money to save time. We also like warrantees so we can return things when the mobo fails or the WIFI card won't work with other components.
There are a ton of once-l33t gamers now growing into adults (gasp!) with much less time to solve component-conflicts and video driver problems. We're looking for the silver bullet solution, and willing to pay extra for it. And our numbers grow with each birth.
-Laetor
Unlikely. Horses are built very differently depending on latitude, breed, use, feeding and other genetic and environmental factors. In an era where tools and materials had no industrial manufacturing or standards, and artisans created their own tools to build with themselves for the most part, it is highly unlikely that two chariots even built by two artisans living next door to each other would come within 10% of the same range of sizes, especially taking into consideration the different horses and uses to which chariots could be put. A wagon to haul materials would require horses and dimensions of a radically different size than a war chariot using fast, sprinter breeds. Plus, wheel ruts do not stay in roads. With the first spring rains or winter freezes and thaws roads are completely torn asunder and reformed. The wheel ruts would never have dictated wagon wheel distances, espeically over the course of hundreds of years and varying manufacturing methods.
Totally disagree here. This is exactly what the Homeland Security office's response is to international and domestic terrorism -- harsher controls, clamping down on any type of non-identifiable interaction. Basically, everyone who speaks, reads, types, looks, smells, or hears anything needs to have a tattoo on their forehead with a barcode in it for easy ID by the Feds. In a marketplace, these controls make even less sense than in the legal realm. Once again, I will state what others before me (and will after me) have stated for years. It will be in caps, not as a shout, but as an attention getter: THE BEST RESPONSE TO CHEATERS IN THE ONLINE VIDEO GAME ARENA IS TO IMMEDIATELY LEAVE THE SERVER WHERE THE CHEATER IS CURRENTLY CHEATING. Ignore them, leave them. For some reason, it appears there were few people like me who had the shit kicked out of them by bullies in grade school. It took a very long time before I believed my parents and ignored the bullies by walking away and removing myself from the location. The bullies get bored and stop -- or go bug someone else not hip to the trick yet. Cheaters will get really bored if everytime they pull some stunt, every single player who sees it immediately logs off that server, dissapears instantly, poof gone into the bit-aether. They're left playing with themselves, which is nothing new to them, right? >-) Just leave. Vote with your connection. Go to another server. Yeah, you'll be moving quite a bit for say 3 months or so, but then the cheaters (I guarantee it) will get bored and move on to some new activity -- or they'll stick to servers where people are too stupid to leave. This will leave your servers clean and fun. Try it! It works!
You know, I cannot understand the massive hype around de_dust. I mean, what's the deal? It was ok, it didn't suck, and the little hallway close to the terrorist spawn wasn't bad for grenade fests, but still, I wasn't creaming my pants every time it loaded on a server. Can someone please explain to me the industry and consumer hypnotism de_dust was responsible for? Sure, some maps are better than others, but I still have yet to play a map that just entrances me and makes me think the map editor is some sort of genius. Right now, Call of Duty has a pretty good one called pavlov for close combat. 1942 has Monte Cristo which didn't suck. Any other maps out there people found themselves dreaming about when passing out after a LAN weekend?...
High-larious. Excellent post.
-Laetor
Mercatur, you're smokin'! Don't listen to these idiots.
You've made my argument for me. Because this system is so easily simulated (being an incredibly simple simulation itself) the phenomena are not emergent. What happens in Life is exactly what's put in -- nothing about the game of Life is greater than the sum of its parts (or application of its very simple rules). The term "emergent phenomena" is misused in this case -- emergent phenomena are phenomena that cannot be explained by the sum of the parts of the system, their existence is not reducible to the system that they came from, the rules of the system they come from cannot explain the phenomena themselves. This is not true of things like sliders, collapsers, eaters, propellers, and other "creatures" in the game of Life.
Don't think so. The rules behind the simple game of Life are very easily enumerated. Every single "phenomenon" that arises is not emergent, it is clearly and totally predictable from the rules. Emergent phenomena are those that cannot be predicted. It's even better when they violate the rules that start them in motion to begin with.
Just because some things happen that are really cool when you smear a bunch of bits to "on" and start the game up, does not mean you're witnessing emergent phenomena. It just means you lack the brainpower or patience to follow the rules through and predict the outcome of your smears or shapes, before starting the game up.