Now there is this case of a man who was declared by experts to be in a permanent minimally-conscious state waking up after 19 years. Makes me wonder if letting treatment continue wouldn't be such a bad idea. What if you got a second chance to live?
Blow that for a game of soldiers. If I woke up after 19 years in a coma, my first question would be why didn't someone hadn't pulled the plug/ removed the tube yet.
A full recovery never happens, except in movies. People don't just wake up from a coma. The damage affects them for the rest of their lives. After 19 years, the person you knew would be a stranger to you anyway, and there's not much of that person left.
I wouldn't want anyone close to me to waste their lives praying over a vegetable for 19 years in the hope that a half-me will wake up to be taken care of in much the same way. There comes a point when modern medicine stops saving people's lives and is simply prolonging suffering, both for the victim and their family. It's not easy to gauge when that line gets crossed, but when it has been, its time to let go.
Actually, many games attempt to rectify this, and fail miserably. The standard nowadays is an incredibly hackneyed, tacky, cliched and, if voice talent is present, terribly overacted plotline. Most this/next gen storylines are an embarrassment, and generally you want to wear headphones in case anyone happens to overhear the mortifying content that's sold as "compelling story". Usually, it's boisterous californians, complete with modern san francisco mores, transplanted into a sci-fi or medival fantasy world, taking themselves way too seriously and delivering woeful lines with enough sauce to make Plan 9 look like an expertly choreographed space epic.
Look at Super Mario. Classic games, stand the test of time. Games that good don't need a story. Sonic and Knuckles managed to convey all the plot progression it needed to without a single utterance, text or otherwise, and wth one paragraph in the manual. The game did not need anything else. That's how things should be done. I shudder to think about the Sonic Adventure games, and how perfectly playable games were almost ruined by some idiots junior hight attempt at a "compelling storyline".
Metroid Prime is an example of a modern game that got this 100% right. The story is there, but only if you give a damn. It's nice and text based, so no west coast hysterics will bring the whole household in to gawk at the idiocy. I would have gotten rid of the ridiculous V/O, but since it's only a few lines, I'm willing to let that go.
If you want an example of how to put a "compelling story" complete with voice acting and "movie quality" action, then you have to go to Metal Gear Solid. The first one. That's the level you have to go to. If you're not prepared to, please don't have the characters, especially the NPC's speak. It's very irritating.
I use DirectAdmin as a control panel when I need something done quickly, but the simple fact of the matter is, if you want the job done right, you're going to have to log in witha secure shell. There are no real alternatives.
Lets hope the power control software isn't buggy and doesn't run on Windows (okay okay I'm karma whoring now!).
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the hardware industry works these days. To reduce costs, any microprocessing is offloaded to device drivers via USB, and the system implementation is universally on Windows. Expect to hear the XP ditty playing in the background as your dentists tells you to open wide and begins discussing the price.
Traditionally tubes carry more viscous fluids, and hence have a greater tendancy than pipes to develop blockages and generally have a slower flow. It's a careful choice of words. Mark it well.
I've worked as a volunteer to help families of children awaiting transplants at the University Hospitals in Cleveland for the past 14 years since my daughter died while waiting on a heart. As our doctor said, my decision to marry a non-Chinese woman (I'm Chinese and my wife is British) doomed my little girl to death.
In light of recenttechniques, I think your doctor was being rather liberal in his interpretation of the facts.
You might be able to trace your geneology, but the process assumes that all your ancestors were entirely forthcoming when it came to their nuptial reltaions. Makes you wonder why children take the male's family name?
Laws exist to protect the overly stupid, naive and trusting from conmen. Why shouldn't minors be afforded some level of protection from people who ar abusing their trust in a very intimate fashion. Treating teenagers as adults means granting them rights and responsibilities. There might be a few mature ones, but in the main, I would simply be unfair and unjust to hoist full adult responsibilities on the shoulders of someone that young.
To say that the minors "consented" ignores the fact that minors are legally unentitled to consent to just about anything. Minors, in general, cannot set up a business, agree to contracts, marry, buy a house, drive a car, be paid a full wage; yet you argue that they can be treated as adults when it comes to one of the few things that really counts.
My view is that once someone is deemed old enough to consent to sex, the there is nothing else that you can ethically or morally deny them. That includes the right to vote, work, drink, marry, etc, etc. You've deemed them to be full adults and that means they have all the right you have. So the day 14 year olds are voting, driving, drinking, smoking and living in the house they bought next door from me, then you can argue the case of consent.
Well start telling these teens that they got what they deserved for being stupid?
Sometimes I'm tempted to think this. OK, these kids are stupid. They're impulsive. They're too trusting. Too naive. They're fools, there's no doubt about it. But that doesn't mean they deserve to be used like sacks of meat by people who are taking advantage of them for just those reasons.
People who coax out teenagers for sex aren't interested in a relationship or in a future. How could they? Their victims are minors. They choose their targets well, use their weaknesses against them. All for their own, purely sexual gratification. They're conmen, sexual conmen, and their actions are made illegal for a reason. These teens really do suffer.
Some say that these teenagers deserve to be molested for being stupid. But the punishment doesn't fit the crime. We were all young once, and did plenty of stupid things. But being grounded, your parents shouting at you, having your privilages taken away; doesn't even come close to being very young, very naked, alone in a room with a much older stranger who couldn't care less about your happiness, or dignity, or self-respect, as long as they get what they want. That's not a punishment that should be inflicted on anyone, especially for the crime of being young and stupid.
If I've purchased a legitimate copy, and I installed it with a license agreement prior to the release of WGA, by what legal authority can Microsoft disable my operating system?
But when it really comes down to it, having purchased a legitimate copy, what right do you have to continue running it? Which law exactly governs your continued ability to breach copyright over and over by copying Windows binaries into memory?
That may seem a little spurious, but the fact of the matter is that computer software is still, relatively speaking, in a legal no mans lands. It's use and sale is still governed by a hodgepodge of laws originally designed to cover books, newspapers and the selling of hardware gizmos. Software, a massive collection of logical algorithims represented by binary numbers, bears close to no relation with any of these things, either in its sale or use.
Software is still in a legislative Wild West. With little law, and even less legislative oversight, the software industry is largely run by cowboys. They can be found from right at the bottom, with unscrupulous freelance coders holding clients to ransom, to all the way at the top, with Gates, Ballmer & Co screwing over hundreds of millions of customers with rules that are made up by the company, for the company, as they go along. It's an industry crying out for regulation and transparency.
While Open Source software is reintroducing integrity and giving power back to the client, some old cowdogs are finding it hard to change their tune. The Windows Genuine Advantage Boys you paid to guard your Windowy wagon could still turn around in the middle of bandit country and demand hard cash not to leave you stranded there. And there's virtually nothing you can do about it, because it's probably 100% legal.
I pick open source largely for one reason. It's not because of political ideaology, technical superiority, free as in beer effects or ease of use. It's because open source offers one thing that proprietry software rarely if ever puts on the table. Trust. I trust open source apps not to pull dirty trcks and leave me stranded. Anyone who buys proprietry should never be surprised to see their escort nonchalantly trotting back to town as the highwaymen close in for the kill.
Apparantly you're a sheep, but I care enough about my own property that giving somebody the ability to cut off my access to it is Not Acceptable.
Only, you see, Windows isn't your property. It's MicroSoft's. Your "property rights" are no match for the software industry's superior "intellectual property rights".
Say that you invent something truly remarkable, and a large company gets wind of it. They'll have a version of your invention out before you can even get a business up and running. No competition can occur because of the relative sizes of the two organizations.
Let's say I do invent something, patent it, and a large company uses my invention without the patent being licenced. What am I supposed to do? Start a civil action? No legal action is possible on my part because of the relative sizes of the two organisations. I should never have let them get wind of it in the first place, by holding onto my trade secrets.
The myth that patents protect the little genius inventor is one of the great lies dragged out in any patent discussion. They do no such thing. They actively conspire against him. The small inventor stands a better chance with no patent system, as at least his business won't be torpedoed his larger competators' submarine patents.
Patents do not help the little guy. They only help the big guys screw the rest of us over. These scientists won't make a dime out of their patent, unless they sell it off that is.
The USPTO will strike again. Innovation will once again be stifled. This technology will remain overpriced and underdeveloped because all R&D is in effect frozen. Toothaches for all!
What's that you say?! With the encouragement of patents this technology would never have been developed?! But wait! These are "University" researchers. They are, in all likelihood, paid to do their research out of the public purse. Canadians have already paid for this research, and the scientists in question were already motivated to perform it.
Patents are less than useless to society. A competator is copying your ingenius invention? Welcome to the real world. This is what other businesses have to put up with all the time. Competition. Crying to the government for preferential treatment just because you were the first to stitch together some preexisting pieces of technology won't earn you too many brownie points with the people you subsequently gouge.
Patents aren't required. People and business will innovate without them. Don't believe me? Look at the wheel.
I look forward to the day when SVG and other standard technologies becomes more prevalent and Flash is relegated to the technology graveyard.
That is never going to happen, for two reasons.
One, Macromedia has a vested interest in keeping its sticky thumbs in everyones browser via Flash installations. They're not going to allow SVG to usurp the great thing they've got going, not matter how many users it infuriates. Expect a wealth of new Flash upgrades and especially better Flash authoring tools if SVG even look slike it's goign mainstream.
Two, Flash is entrenched. It's not going anywhere fast. It's supported on a huge number of browsers and has no real competator. Even the mighty Google used it as a basis for their video serive. When Google relies on something, you know it's here to stay.
The only way Flash is being replaced, is by a slow, almost imperceptable secular trend in both websites and browsers.
The Executive Branch is unilaterally responsible for engaging in executive functions (including those which invoke the Eminent Domain clause of the Constitution), pursuant to the powers granted to it by the Constitution and those granted in statute by the Legislature. Therefore, if the head of the Executive Branch says in an executive order that his government shall not do X, and X is not otherwise required by legislation, then X will not happen
This is why the executive parliamentary model is so much superior to the executive presidential model. In a parliamentary model, power rests with the prime minister, and he can only pass legislation my a majority vote in the parliament. What's more, if he does something outrageous like spy on the states own citizens, he has to go into parilment the next day and be bawled at by the opposition, something executive presidents never have to do. They live in their own, insulated and detached little world, running the country with hardly any oversight for the length of their term. At least prime ministers have their oppositions, and sometimes their backbenchers, watching their backs all the time, often for a place to stick a knife.
The executive president is simply a holdover from the days of monarchy. Some people simply think that "strong government" needs an eleceted dictator or else it won't be powerful enough to get the job done. Whatever. Time and again the parilimentary model has proved superior, with nearly every jumped up dictator now holding the position of a supreme executive presidency. In some parilentary democracies, that position doesn't even exist.
So the next time the president is revealed to have been breaking the law and violating your rights, remember that this isn't a bug in the system. It's a feature.
Can you not see the problem with someone selling pictures of naked children?
Having seen numerous advertisements for childrens skincare products on primetime television, no, I'm afraid I don't see the inherant problem. Or have unclothed infants become somehow taboo? Then again I don't read tabloids, so I imagine I'm rather behind on the latest child hysteria trends.
Just as the Dreamcast arrived. The Playstation was at its zenith. The boundaries of the 32bit, CD based era were being pushed outwards by developers fully competant with the system. The 64 was producing some of its finest games. Even the PC was churing out some quality games. Not a month went by without a blockbuster title coming out to wow you into submission.
The Ocarina Of Time, Metal Gear Solid, AOE II:Age of Kings, Star Ocean 2, Starcraft, Sonic Adventure, Soul Reaver, Syphon Filter, Driver, Half-Life, Crash Bandicoot Warped. The list goes on. Innovation, innovation, innovation. Quality, quality titles. I don't think there's ever been a higher signal to noise ratio on gameshop shelves.
And in those days, unlike now, when a blockbuster title arrived, you were guaranteed it was worth your money. These days, not even Zelda can reach the heights it once soared to. And speaking of money, games were cheaper back then. By a lot. It's standard nowadays to pay $70 per game.
2000 arrived with a few gems. Vagrant Story, Devil May Cry, to name some of the finest. But the glory days were over. The fresh young studios had been bought out. Monopolies had formed, the clones had begun to arrive. Next gen costs squeezed out the small guy, ensuring less gameplay for more polygons. Innovation screeched to a halt, forever condenmed to languish in handhelds and browser games. From now on games would simply be derivatives of older titles, repackaged in extra polygons and bump mapped textures. And EA saw that it was good, and did profit.
The industry has never recovered from the Next Gen shift in 2000. Sure there've been a few good titles here and there. Games like GTA show the true potential of additional machine power. But overall, the industry has grown more and more tepid as time goes by. Six months can go by without a single game so much as catching your eye. The shelves fill up with the gaming equivalent of B-movies, tired and overused styles proliferate. Sequel is heaped upon sequel. Even the masses have begun to tire of it.
There has never been a time of lower innovation in the games industry than there is now. Back in the days of the Amiga, there was tenfold the level of innovation there is today. I'm playing less and less games. Watching what I once felt was my birthright, my private pastime, whored out to the lowest common denominator. I want to feel the same rush I did when I first rode through Hyrule on horseback, when I first snuck through Shadow Moses Island, when I first fought through Black Mesa. I want to be able to lose myself in a game from Friday evening, till Sunday night, and not regret a second of it.
But the industry today can never deliver this. All it can do is lead us up Omaha beach over and over, put neon lights on the underside of the cars, take us where we've been already and patch the betas we paid good money for. And I'm getting too old to care.
And in lapdancing club stings, officers have to make a very, very throughout report on the goings on in the premise. This can often take several officers, working over many nights. Taxes well spent!
I could see it happening quite easily - send a photo of your kids in the bath to their grandma, AOL system tags it, police come knocking at your door and take your computer and all your archives away......
Bathtime has become a taboo activity, best undergone alone, one child at a time, and if a supervisor must be present, only the child's mother is allowed. Possibly an aunt, but that's pushing it. No fathers allowed. Eyes only. IR goggles preferred.
Yup, pedos are terrible oppressed, every hates them, wahwahwah.
Many pedophiles were themselves sexually abused as children, and it has affected them for life. Many are filled with self loathing. Some have never once abused as child. Yet unlike violent murders, drug abusers, "adult" rapists, thieves, psychotics, necrophiliacs and even zoophiles, these people will never be able to get help, even if they wanted to. They are the modern untermensch, who are either expected to commit a crime so they can be summarily incarcerated or quietly commit suicide.
In either event, their flaws will sell newspapers.
Slashdot Mirror
Now there is this case of a man who was declared by experts to be in a permanent minimally-conscious state waking up after 19 years. Makes me wonder if letting treatment continue wouldn't be such a bad idea. What if you got a second chance to live?
Blow that for a game of soldiers. If I woke up after 19 years in a coma, my first question would be why didn't someone hadn't pulled the plug/ removed the tube yet.
A full recovery never happens, except in movies. People don't just wake up from a coma. The damage affects them for the rest of their lives. After 19 years, the person you knew would be a stranger to you anyway, and there's not much of that person left.
I wouldn't want anyone close to me to waste their lives praying over a vegetable for 19 years in the hope that a half-me will wake up to be taken care of in much the same way. There comes a point when modern medicine stops saving people's lives and is simply prolonging suffering, both for the victim and their family. It's not easy to gauge when that line gets crossed, but when it has been, its time to let go.
Actually, many games attempt to rectify this, and fail miserably. The standard nowadays is an incredibly hackneyed, tacky, cliched and, if voice talent is present, terribly overacted plotline. Most this/next gen storylines are an embarrassment, and generally you want to wear headphones in case anyone happens to overhear the mortifying content that's sold as "compelling story". Usually, it's boisterous californians, complete with modern san francisco mores, transplanted into a sci-fi or medival fantasy world, taking themselves way too seriously and delivering woeful lines with enough sauce to make Plan 9 look like an expertly choreographed space epic.
Look at Super Mario. Classic games, stand the test of time. Games that good don't need a story. Sonic and Knuckles managed to convey all the plot progression it needed to without a single utterance, text or otherwise, and wth one paragraph in the manual. The game did not need anything else. That's how things should be done. I shudder to think about the Sonic Adventure games, and how perfectly playable games were almost ruined by some idiots junior hight attempt at a "compelling storyline".
Metroid Prime is an example of a modern game that got this 100% right. The story is there, but only if you give a damn. It's nice and text based, so no west coast hysterics will bring the whole household in to gawk at the idiocy. I would have gotten rid of the ridiculous V/O, but since it's only a few lines, I'm willing to let that go.
If you want an example of how to put a "compelling story" complete with voice acting and "movie quality" action, then you have to go to Metal Gear Solid. The first one. That's the level you have to go to. If you're not prepared to, please don't have the characters, especially the NPC's speak. It's very irritating.
I use DirectAdmin as a control panel when I need something done quickly, but the simple fact of the matter is, if you want the job done right, you're going to have to log in witha secure shell. There are no real alternatives.
Lets hope the power control software isn't buggy and doesn't run on Windows (okay okay I'm karma whoring now!).
You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the hardware industry works these days. To reduce costs, any microprocessing is offloaded to device drivers via USB, and the system implementation is universally on Windows. Expect to hear the XP ditty playing in the background as your dentists tells you to open wide and begins discussing the price.
Tubes, pipes, same thing no?
Traditionally tubes carry more viscous fluids, and hence have a greater tendancy than pipes to develop blockages and generally have a slower flow. It's a careful choice of words. Mark it well.
I've worked as a volunteer to help families of children awaiting transplants at the University Hospitals in Cleveland for the past 14 years since my daughter died while waiting on a heart. As our doctor said, my decision to marry a non-Chinese woman (I'm Chinese and my wife is British) doomed my little girl to death.
In light of recent techniques, I think your doctor was being rather liberal in his interpretation of the facts.
You might be able to trace your geneology, but the process assumes that all your ancestors were entirely forthcoming when it came to their nuptial reltaions. Makes you wonder why children take the male's family name?
I would only hope the government is trying to see who the bad guys are calling.
Evidently, every law abiding citizen in the United States.
What is your basis for these claims?
Minors are idiots.
Laws exist to protect the overly stupid, naive and trusting from conmen. Why shouldn't minors be afforded some level of protection from people who ar abusing their trust in a very intimate fashion. Treating teenagers as adults means granting them rights and responsibilities. There might be a few mature ones, but in the main, I would simply be unfair and unjust to hoist full adult responsibilities on the shoulders of someone that young.
To say that the minors "consented" ignores the fact that minors are legally unentitled to consent to just about anything. Minors, in general, cannot set up a business, agree to contracts, marry, buy a house, drive a car, be paid a full wage; yet you argue that they can be treated as adults when it comes to one of the few things that really counts.
My view is that once someone is deemed old enough to consent to sex, the there is nothing else that you can ethically or morally deny them. That includes the right to vote, work, drink, marry, etc, etc. You've deemed them to be full adults and that means they have all the right you have. So the day 14 year olds are voting, driving, drinking, smoking and living in the house they bought next door from me, then you can argue the case of consent.
Well start telling these teens that they got what they deserved for being stupid?
Sometimes I'm tempted to think this. OK, these kids are stupid. They're impulsive. They're too trusting. Too naive. They're fools, there's no doubt about it. But that doesn't mean they deserve to be used like sacks of meat by people who are taking advantage of them for just those reasons.
People who coax out teenagers for sex aren't interested in a relationship or in a future. How could they? Their victims are minors. They choose their targets well, use their weaknesses against them. All for their own, purely sexual gratification. They're conmen, sexual conmen, and their actions are made illegal for a reason. These teens really do suffer.
Some say that these teenagers deserve to be molested for being stupid. But the punishment doesn't fit the crime. We were all young once, and did plenty of stupid things. But being grounded, your parents shouting at you, having your privilages taken away; doesn't even come close to being very young, very naked, alone in a room with a much older stranger who couldn't care less about your happiness, or dignity, or self-respect, as long as they get what they want. That's not a punishment that should be inflicted on anyone, especially for the crime of being young and stupid.
If I've purchased a legitimate copy, and I installed it with a license agreement prior to the release of WGA, by what legal authority can Microsoft disable my operating system?
But when it really comes down to it, having purchased a legitimate copy, what right do you have to continue running it? Which law exactly governs your continued ability to breach copyright over and over by copying Windows binaries into memory?
That may seem a little spurious, but the fact of the matter is that computer software is still, relatively speaking, in a legal no mans lands. It's use and sale is still governed by a hodgepodge of laws originally designed to cover books, newspapers and the selling of hardware gizmos. Software, a massive collection of logical algorithims represented by binary numbers, bears close to no relation with any of these things, either in its sale or use.
Software is still in a legislative Wild West. With little law, and even less legislative oversight, the software industry is largely run by cowboys. They can be found from right at the bottom, with unscrupulous freelance coders holding clients to ransom, to all the way at the top, with Gates, Ballmer & Co screwing over hundreds of millions of customers with rules that are made up by the company, for the company, as they go along. It's an industry crying out for regulation and transparency.
While Open Source software is reintroducing integrity and giving power back to the client, some old cowdogs are finding it hard to change their tune. The Windows Genuine Advantage Boys you paid to guard your Windowy wagon could still turn around in the middle of bandit country and demand hard cash not to leave you stranded there. And there's virtually nothing you can do about it, because it's probably 100% legal.
I pick open source largely for one reason. It's not because of political ideaology, technical superiority, free as in beer effects or ease of use. It's because open source offers one thing that proprietry software rarely if ever puts on the table. Trust. I trust open source apps not to pull dirty trcks and leave me stranded. Anyone who buys proprietry should never be surprised to see their escort nonchalantly trotting back to town as the highwaymen close in for the kill.
Apparantly you're a sheep, but I care enough about my own property that giving somebody the ability to cut off my access to it is Not Acceptable.
Only, you see, Windows isn't your property. It's MicroSoft's. Your "property rights" are no match for the software industry's superior "intellectual property rights".
Say that you invent something truly remarkable, and a large company gets wind of it. They'll have a version of your invention out before you can even get a business up and running. No competition can occur because of the relative sizes of the two organizations.
Let's say I do invent something, patent it, and a large company uses my invention without the patent being licenced. What am I supposed to do? Start a civil action? No legal action is possible on my part because of the relative sizes of the two organisations. I should never have let them get wind of it in the first place, by holding onto my trade secrets.
The myth that patents protect the little genius inventor is one of the great lies dragged out in any patent discussion. They do no such thing. They actively conspire against him. The small inventor stands a better chance with no patent system, as at least his business won't be torpedoed his larger competators' submarine patents.
Patents do not help the little guy. They only help the big guys screw the rest of us over. These scientists won't make a dime out of their patent, unless they sell it off that is.
The USPTO will strike again. Innovation will once again be stifled. This technology will remain overpriced and underdeveloped because all R&D is in effect frozen. Toothaches for all!
What's that you say?! With the encouragement of patents this technology would never have been developed?! But wait! These are "University" researchers. They are, in all likelihood, paid to do their research out of the public purse. Canadians have already paid for this research, and the scientists in question were already motivated to perform it.
Patents are less than useless to society. A competator is copying your ingenius invention? Welcome to the real world. This is what other businesses have to put up with all the time. Competition. Crying to the government for preferential treatment just because you were the first to stitch together some preexisting pieces of technology won't earn you too many brownie points with the people you subsequently gouge.
Patents aren't required. People and business will innovate without them. Don't believe me? Look at the wheel.
once you start you'll have to have all your front/visible teeth done, even if they are just discoloured.
Or you could just, you know, brush them..... Oh wait.
I look forward to the day when SVG and other standard technologies becomes more prevalent and Flash is relegated to the technology graveyard.
That is never going to happen, for two reasons.
One, Macromedia has a vested interest in keeping its sticky thumbs in everyones browser via Flash installations. They're not going to allow SVG to usurp the great thing they've got going, not matter how many users it infuriates. Expect a wealth of new Flash upgrades and especially better Flash authoring tools if SVG even look slike it's goign mainstream.
Two, Flash is entrenched. It's not going anywhere fast. It's supported on a huge number of browsers and has no real competator. Even the mighty Google used it as a basis for their video serive. When Google relies on something, you know it's here to stay.
The only way Flash is being replaced, is by a slow, almost imperceptable secular trend in both websites and browsers.
The Executive Branch is unilaterally responsible for engaging in executive functions (including those which invoke the Eminent Domain clause of the Constitution), pursuant to the powers granted to it by the Constitution and those granted in statute by the Legislature. Therefore, if the head of the Executive Branch says in an executive order that his government shall not do X, and X is not otherwise required by legislation, then X will not happen
This is why the executive parliamentary model is so much superior to the executive presidential model. In a parliamentary model, power rests with the prime minister, and he can only pass legislation my a majority vote in the parliament. What's more, if he does something outrageous like spy on the states own citizens, he has to go into parilment the next day and be bawled at by the opposition, something executive presidents never have to do. They live in their own, insulated and detached little world, running the country with hardly any oversight for the length of their term. At least prime ministers have their oppositions, and sometimes their backbenchers, watching their backs all the time, often for a place to stick a knife.
The executive president is simply a holdover from the days of monarchy. Some people simply think that "strong government" needs an eleceted dictator or else it won't be powerful enough to get the job done. Whatever. Time and again the parilimentary model has proved superior, with nearly every jumped up dictator now holding the position of a supreme executive presidency. In some parilentary democracies, that position doesn't even exist.
So the next time the president is revealed to have been breaking the law and violating your rights, remember that this isn't a bug in the system. It's a feature.
Why the "mega"-moderation?
To show that the editors actually read the discussions.
I think the DISA made quite a large freudian slip on page 43. Here's a screenshot. Are they trying to tell us something?
Can you not see the problem with someone selling pictures of naked children?
Having seen numerous advertisements for childrens skincare products on primetime television, no, I'm afraid I don't see the inherant problem. Or have unclothed infants become somehow taboo? Then again I don't read tabloids, so I imagine I'm rather behind on the latest child hysteria trends.
Just as the Dreamcast arrived. The Playstation was at its zenith. The boundaries of the 32bit, CD based era were being pushed outwards by developers fully competant with the system. The 64 was producing some of its finest games. Even the PC was churing out some quality games. Not a month went by without a blockbuster title coming out to wow you into submission.
The Ocarina Of Time, Metal Gear Solid, AOE II:Age of Kings, Star Ocean 2, Starcraft, Sonic Adventure, Soul Reaver, Syphon Filter, Driver, Half-Life, Crash Bandicoot Warped. The list goes on. Innovation, innovation, innovation. Quality, quality titles. I don't think there's ever been a higher signal to noise ratio on gameshop shelves.
And in those days, unlike now, when a blockbuster title arrived, you were guaranteed it was worth your money. These days, not even Zelda can reach the heights it once soared to. And speaking of money, games were cheaper back then. By a lot. It's standard nowadays to pay $70 per game.
2000 arrived with a few gems. Vagrant Story, Devil May Cry, to name some of the finest. But the glory days were over. The fresh young studios had been bought out. Monopolies had formed, the clones had begun to arrive. Next gen costs squeezed out the small guy, ensuring less gameplay for more polygons. Innovation screeched to a halt, forever condenmed to languish in handhelds and browser games. From now on games would simply be derivatives of older titles, repackaged in extra polygons and bump mapped textures. And EA saw that it was good, and did profit.
The industry has never recovered from the Next Gen shift in 2000. Sure there've been a few good titles here and there. Games like GTA show the true potential of additional machine power. But overall, the industry has grown more and more tepid as time goes by. Six months can go by without a single game so much as catching your eye. The shelves fill up with the gaming equivalent of B-movies, tired and overused styles proliferate. Sequel is heaped upon sequel. Even the masses have begun to tire of it.
There has never been a time of lower innovation in the games industry than there is now. Back in the days of the Amiga, there was tenfold the level of innovation there is today. I'm playing less and less games. Watching what I once felt was my birthright, my private pastime, whored out to the lowest common denominator. I want to feel the same rush I did when I first rode through Hyrule on horseback, when I first snuck through Shadow Moses Island, when I first fought through Black Mesa. I want to be able to lose myself in a game from Friday evening, till Sunday night, and not regret a second of it.
But the industry today can never deliver this. All it can do is lead us up Omaha beach over and over, put neon lights on the underside of the cars, take us where we've been already and patch the betas we paid good money for. And I'm getting too old to care.
And in lapdancing club stings, officers have to make a very, very throughout report on the goings on in the premise. This can often take several officers, working over many nights. Taxes well spent!
I could see it happening quite easily - send a photo of your kids in the bath to their grandma, AOL system tags it, police come knocking at your door and take your computer and all your archives away. .....
Why imagine? People already have been condenmed for taking pictures of their kids at bathtime.
Bathtime has become a taboo activity, best undergone alone, one child at a time, and if a supervisor must be present, only the child's mother is allowed. Possibly an aunt, but that's pushing it. No fathers allowed. Eyes only. IR goggles preferred.
God Bless The News Of The World.
I think this is how tinfoil-hatters send email.
Yup, pedos are terrible oppressed, every hates them, wahwahwah.
Many pedophiles were themselves sexually abused as children, and it has affected them for life. Many are filled with self loathing. Some have never once abused as child. Yet unlike violent murders, drug abusers, "adult" rapists, thieves, psychotics, necrophiliacs and even zoophiles, these people will never be able to get help, even if they wanted to. They are the modern untermensch, who are either expected to commit a crime so they can be summarily incarcerated or quietly commit suicide.
In either event, their flaws will sell newspapers.