Free speech areas aren't new, they're just getting a lot of attention these days. I lived on a campus that had a huge fracas over their long-standing speech zones back in 2000-2003 and may have sparked this entire issue, and I'm inclined to say this problem is a non-starter.
The reason these areas were created, and the reason a lot of campuses still maintain them, is that in most cases the "speech" we're talking about is recruiting/issue advocacy by a student organization that wants to set up tables with a staff of a few people - at the smallest. Sometimes we're talking about something bigger, like a jump castle, a blood donations bus, or even - in one memorable instance - a giant plyboard cube that students were encouraged to graffiti. Really what we're talking about is a logistics issue, not some speech fascism on the part of the college. Trust me, other forms of organized speech - flyering especially - aren't restricted at all.
Hell, I remember more than a few war protests that began AND ended outside the "free speech area".
Ah, I disagree. As a casual gamer who really likes MP3:C (that's me in the AC comment below), I believe that the split is only inevitable in simpler games. Big releases should be able to incorporate both. Just look at Ocarina of Time and you'll see a game that was (and still is!) popular with people on both ends of the the leetness scale; any game that has the resources to build in that much optional exploration a can be designed to appeal to everyone.
Right now, we're so insistent on the difference because casual has just recently emerged as a design/marketing strategy, and because we use the term "hardcore" as a cultural delineator. Even the Variety reviewer defined the hardcore gamer as a "13 year old boy"; our definition of the term hinges on that image, just like our definition of "mature" games used to be. (Thankfully, that meme is finally dissipating.) We're ignoring the obvious here, which is that while the packaging and the graphics on Metroid Prime 3 scream "hardcore," it's also casual - as evidenced by the fact that I can actually play it.
For me, at least, it was never a question of "interesting" or "relevant" but of "correct" and "complete." I hated my two final science courses in high school. In one, the teacher didn't know why ice was less dense than water, and in the other, my teacher claimed that candle wax doesn't burn. Before I got to college, I don't know if I'd ever heard a teacher answer a student question themselves without royally screwing it up.
Our biology classes were by far the worst. No matter how many times you go over Mendelian inheritance, you're still stuck with a 19th-century understanding of life if you can't teach anything related to evolution, which we apparently couldn't. And when you treat evolutionary theory like a diseased idea, well, biology is going to be really hard for anyone who doesn't have a knack for memorizing things. I could've at least done with quick explanation of what makes a gene recessive, God knows we were all wondering that exact thing and whenever anyone brought it up, our teachers would brush it away with an "it's complicated" and draw yet another fucking Punnett square.
I realize that the theories that unify scientific understanding are complicated. Spacetime is a mind fuck and speciation is no walk in the park. But every time I've got hold of a teacher willing to cover those unifying ideas, I've come away thinking, "oh, of course, that all makes sense now" and everything has been easier from then on.
you don't see too many things of nature pushed as "art."
Natural objects and their shapes are HUGE in the art world. Other than that, I agree with you.
Art is something that moves you emotionally. It doesn't have to be complex - a truth most young artists take years to understand - and it doesn't have to lead you to a personal revelation or change your life or endear millions of fans. It just has to move you. I think, even though many of us won't admit it - that we've all been moved by video games at one time or another. So that's it. End of debate.
Or, if you prefer, lets define Art as something that can be evaluated for quality. If there is quality, then there can be excellence, and where there is excellence, there is High Art. Maybe games have not achieved perfect excellence yet, but if we can agree that Ocarina of Time is better than most other games, then there is the potential for excellence. (Actually, we don't need to agree! The argument itself proves that quality can be seen and evaluated; those stupid Top Ten lists are proof that Art in Games exists!) So that's it. End of debate.
Honestly, its difficult to believe that saying, "x will never be Art" is any different than saying, "a woman will never be President." Both are absurd.
I wish you wouldn't define hardcore gaming with a demographic. That implies that mindless gore-fest button mashers and Leisure Suit Larry - or worse yet, Halo - are hardcore, just because their content appeals to young men. They are not. Or, to put it another way, there's a reason Resident Evil is more hardcore than House of the Dead, and it has nothing to do with the target audience.
Not my words, but my sentiments exactly. The Napster debacle should have been a sign to the music industry to start working on a ubiquitous, secure, legal digital distribution system, stat. They could have done it, too - they were in the position to offer faster downloads than the average Napter user would experience- ergo,value. Instead, they ran away from the internet entirely, and look where it got them. Without their close relationship with the federal government, the big RIAA labels would have been replaced by hip, tech-savvy indies in two years; thank god for lobbyists, eh, Paramount?
Frankly, I'm glad to see CD sales finally going south, the music labels beholden to Apple, and interest in manufactured music tanking. I'm just surprised it took this long.
I said it back then, and I'll say it again now: the recording industry should have been making huge inroads into digital delivery way back in the Napster era. Now sales for their main medium are collapsing and they don't have enough control over the new delivery system to milk it for enough of a profit. (They did try to control the new system - pity they didn't realize that the best way to control it was to provide the best digital delivery system on the planet and make it ubiquitous. The solution was not to try to rein in the technology, and certainly NOT to haunt their potential buyers with the constant threat of lawsuit.)
I'm not making a defense of piracy here, I'm just saying that RIAA members made some really BAD business decisions back in the day, the main result being that they now have to rely on a computer manufacturer to give them the digital release portal they should have built for themselves. Serves the idiots right.
I think you have your motivations wrong. The AMA had homosexuality on the books as a mental abnormality because it had been considered an abnormality from the inception of Psychology as an academic field, never mind Psychology as a medical service. The evangelical Christians had nothing to do with it, especially because that movement didn't even become politically notable until the 1950s. We think of homosexual stigma/homophobia as a far right Christian thing these days, but the truth is even 30 years ago it was almost entirely universal.
True, Psychologists in other countries may have been in favor of declassifying homosexuality, but we're talking about policy set out by the American Medical Association.
It depends on the game. Some games focus on communications scattered across many web sites or multiple media, which is more realistic but takes time to follow. Others are easier; imagine if Slashdot only updated once a week, but you had to solve puzzles to get into about 1/2 of the stories, and solutions were readily available. That would be the casual ARGers experience of a standard commercial game.
As for Perplex City, it had many levels of participation available. You could go to one of their live events and compete with other players, collect cards en masse and try to solve the big meta-puzzle for a prize, or you could simply buy a pack and waste a little time solving the individual puzzles. The community for PPC1 kept exhaustive records of everything that went on in-game, so you could use their message boards and wikis to keep up on the action. (In fact, most ARG designers will tell you that the player-run forums aren't just tools; they're half of the game.)
I don't think we would have a problem here if Best Buy just didn't honor their online prices; many stores do that. The problem is, they pretend the store does honor online prices, and to that end they've rigged up an elaborate false web site to force the "web" price and the "store" price into line. That's fraud.
I'm afraid the spread of creationist, anti-birth control, narrowly defined evangelical Christianity is not as cancerous as you'd think. They proselytize so heavily because their faith has a very poor retention rate. 1/3rd of evangelicals leave the religion by the time they graduate high school, and half by middle age. Moreover poor Evangelicals, who make up the bulk of the market for televangelism, radio evangelism and other broad-base strategies, will have more children, but less chance of having a successful child - just like all poor people, their children will have poor education and job opportunities, and are more likely to commit crime. Poor children also die sooner - I wish this were not so, but it is statistically true. The evangelical movement, despite its claims to generate Providence for its members, tends to make them poorer, not richer - partly thanks to money spent directly on worship, but also because it encourages parents to produce more children than they can realistically support.
On the other hand, mothers over 30 are highly likely to raise children who become financially, academically, and socially successful, but more likely to raise fewer children. Since these women almost certainly use birth control to delay having children, they are almost certainly not evangelicals.
These are two entirely different strategies for procreation. One procreates quickly and abundantly, the other builds up resources and invests them in a few offspring. Both of these are valid strategies. But when you combine the high mortality rate of poor children with the low retention rate of Evangelism in general, you can see why the faith recruits so vigorously; the chances of a middle-class Evangelical family producing one adult offspring who will pass their beliefs and practices on to the grandchildren is not so high; probably about as high as in a middle class non-Evangelical family. Evangelicals do create more offspring in numbers, but in terms of the movement replicating itself, it doesn't work so well.
For those wondering where I get all these statistics and assertions, they come partly from Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and partly from Levitt and Dubner's excellent book Freakonomics, although Chris Hedges' American Fascists also adds some context to Altemeyer's numbers. I also used a little bit of logical glue here and there, but I hope that will be acceptable.
Good god, where are my mod points? This is right on the nose.
In the same vein, most people are against social support for teenage mothers (which would keep the family out of poverty, improve the childs chances of success on all fronts and lessen the number of teen births in the next generation), simply because they don't want to reward the immorality of teen sex. Many American families would disown a daughter who had a baby in her teens, and many would disown a daughter who had an abortion. Some would do both. Neither of these stances is in any way conducive to solving any social problems.
I'm going to break character for a sec and do some heavy product evangelism, so you might want to avert your eyes or something.
If you have a Wii and have not yet bought Super Paper Mario, get it. If you don't have a Wii, you'll want to pick it up when you get yours. This game is fantastic. It's the full-featured Wii exclusive people have been pining for these past six months, the kind of game you can really sink your teeth into. I haven't enjoyed an RPG so much since the first Paper Mario, and thats saying quite a lot.
Short review: Remember all the cool shit you could do in the last two Paper Marios while you were exploring between battles? They decided to make an entire game out of just that. You earn experience points for stomping enemies old-school Mario style, but you still have an inventory and hit points, and you still go back to town to stock up and do side quests. The fact that you can flip yourself into 3D, effectively revealing a second level behind (or in front of!) the one you're playing, is effectively trippy. And the story, even with its holes and inconsistencies, is much, much better than most RPG plots. I mean, it starts with Bowser and Princess Peach getting married, and then follows that. It has ambiguous villains. In a Mario game. It has a poignant ending. Square couldn't write this stuff if they tried.
Is anyone else unnerved by the constant comparisons to the Columbine shootings? Not to say that Virginia Tech isn't a school, or that this wasn't a shooting, but we are talking about university students, not high schoolers or postgraduates who didn't go on to college (like the Columbine shooters). These people are adults, vastly more independent than primary school students. Shouldn't we be looking at this as a different kind of event?
The video game connection is one example of how terribly wrong we can be when we start filling in the Virginia Tech story with bits of the Columbine story. How are we ever going to get to the truth about this story if everyone - even the media - are off pursuing a different one?
But if buying an item priced much lower than usual is immoral, wouldn't that make it immoral to buy a product at an intentional discount?
The truth is, you don't know the vendor's reasoning for selling at that particular price. And if you shop at most big stores, the vendor gets their inventory and pricing from a corporate office, so they don't know either. Most stores offer discounted items to bring customers in and to build loyalty. If you assume that all non-standard prices are mistakes, and that it would be unethical to take advantage of them, you're invalidating the tools that companies use to win your business. Competition cannot work in a market full of consumers with these morals.
No kidding. The bookstore down the street sells books and a music store-quality selection of CDs, but I never buy CDs there. I can buy a good book there for $5-7, but even the bargain bin CDs start at $10. If I want a CD, I go to the used bookstore further down the road, where they sell CDs for $5-7. I do prefer brand new CDs, but I can't bring myself to buy more than one unused CD a year. If CDs were in the same price range as books, I would buy both my books and CDs new.
Maybe this is why so many people my age are turning back to reading for entertainment. Everything else (except television, and possibly weed) is far more expensive.
For the most part, gamers think of their games as completely hermetic fantasy worlds that don't interact with reality. Of course, in hindsight we see that there are many real world influences on the content of our games - just like when we look back at the Science Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. So for the most part, people don't see race in games because they're usually treated the same way we treat race in the real world. In 20 years, when we have different opinions and habits with regard to race, a racial message will probably be far more evident.
On the other hand, when we see a game that approaches race differently from us - for example, the Left Behind game that gives evil/"unsaved" characters Arabic names - we see a clear message. So most people here will claim that, while some games certainly have racial elements, their games don't.
I would check out Fry's then. They actually have a habit of knocking a few bucks off the price of games the week they come out. (Don't ask me why, I just know it happens.)
Japan's population is roughly equal to half that of the United States. Last year, Japanese consumers bought almost twice as many DS units (the best-selling handheld on the market) as American consumers did. And when I say American consumers, I mean the US and Canada. So your answer would be, no.
For the moment, I'm going to guess that 1 in 10 hard core liberals regularly watch Kieth Olbermann. He overdoes his presentation far too much, and often skips over very important points in favor of outright bashing. He uses Murrow's famous sign-off phrase, but in my opinion he hasn't truly earned it. His show is only a tiny bit more elegant in its presentation than Bill O'Reilly's, and only because Olbermann knows how to make a rant sound like a speech. Olbermann appeals most to people who have spent a long time listening to Rush and O'Reilly and are looking for more of the same, in a different ideological package.
Now, talk about Stephen Colbert. There's a guy with the liberal media in his palm! Every night he goes out and proves, for one, that you can use the word "liberal" to insult just about anyone.
"To gesticulate wildly" is an idiom indicating urgent and frantic communication, and usually implies that the thing communicated is not as important as the speaker implies, or just plain doesn't exist.
Testosterone DOES play a big part in sex selection. The Y chromosome only has one gene on it - the gene that tells the fetus to produce a lot of testosterone. Testosterone is the signal that tells the fetus to develop male traits. Every fetus is capable of becoming male, depending on this signal. The testosterone used in this stage of development comes from the fetus itself. The mother's testosterone level does not influence the sex of her child, because her blood does not enter the womb. I think it goes without saying that the father's testosterone levels make no difference at all, since his bloodstream is in a different body.
Some fetuses have a testosterone insensitivity that keeps the fetus from fully developing into a male child. This does not appear to be a complete immunity to testosterone, since the resulting child does not have completely female traits either. Again, this testosterone is being created by the fetus itself, not by either parent.
Is it just me, or does having a teacher sue a student completely invalidate the in loco parentis state of the school regarding that matter? Students have limited free speech (and other) rights while at school because the school is acting in place of their guardian. If the school recognizes that the parent, not the school, is responsible for the childs behavior, they are admitting that these restrictions did not apply when the offending remarks were made. Therefore the student has complete First Amendment speech rights - the school handbook (for example) has no bearing on the case.
Slashdot Mirror
Free speech areas aren't new, they're just getting a lot of attention these days. I lived on a campus that had a huge fracas over their long-standing speech zones back in 2000-2003 and may have sparked this entire issue, and I'm inclined to say this problem is a non-starter.
The reason these areas were created, and the reason a lot of campuses still maintain them, is that in most cases the "speech" we're talking about is recruiting/issue advocacy by a student organization that wants to set up tables with a staff of a few people - at the smallest. Sometimes we're talking about something bigger, like a jump castle, a blood donations bus, or even - in one memorable instance - a giant plyboard cube that students were encouraged to graffiti. Really what we're talking about is a logistics issue, not some speech fascism on the part of the college. Trust me, other forms of organized speech - flyering especially - aren't restricted at all.
Hell, I remember more than a few war protests that began AND ended outside the "free speech area".
Split - hardcore vs. casual - is inevitable.
Ah, I disagree. As a casual gamer who really likes MP3:C (that's me in the AC comment below), I believe that the split is only inevitable in simpler games. Big releases should be able to incorporate both. Just look at Ocarina of Time and you'll see a game that was (and still is!) popular with people on both ends of the the leetness scale; any game that has the resources to build in that much optional exploration a can be designed to appeal to everyone.
Right now, we're so insistent on the difference because casual has just recently emerged as a design/marketing strategy, and because we use the term "hardcore" as a cultural delineator. Even the Variety reviewer defined the hardcore gamer as a "13 year old boy"; our definition of the term hinges on that image, just like our definition of "mature" games used to be. (Thankfully, that meme is finally dissipating.) We're ignoring the obvious here, which is that while the packaging and the graphics on Metroid Prime 3 scream "hardcore," it's also casual - as evidenced by the fact that I can actually play it.
For the record, I would totally play that gardening game.
For me, at least, it was never a question of "interesting" or "relevant" but of "correct" and "complete." I hated my two final science courses in high school. In one, the teacher didn't know why ice was less dense than water, and in the other, my teacher claimed that candle wax doesn't burn. Before I got to college, I don't know if I'd ever heard a teacher answer a student question themselves without royally screwing it up. Our biology classes were by far the worst. No matter how many times you go over Mendelian inheritance, you're still stuck with a 19th-century understanding of life if you can't teach anything related to evolution, which we apparently couldn't. And when you treat evolutionary theory like a diseased idea, well, biology is going to be really hard for anyone who doesn't have a knack for memorizing things. I could've at least done with quick explanation of what makes a gene recessive, God knows we were all wondering that exact thing and whenever anyone brought it up, our teachers would brush it away with an "it's complicated" and draw yet another fucking Punnett square. I realize that the theories that unify scientific understanding are complicated. Spacetime is a mind fuck and speciation is no walk in the park. But every time I've got hold of a teacher willing to cover those unifying ideas, I've come away thinking, "oh, of course, that all makes sense now" and everything has been easier from then on.
you don't see too many things of nature pushed as "art."
Natural objects and their shapes are HUGE in the art world. Other than that, I agree with you.
Art is something that moves you emotionally. It doesn't have to be complex - a truth most young artists take years to understand - and it doesn't have to lead you to a personal revelation or change your life or endear millions of fans. It just has to move you. I think, even though many of us won't admit it - that we've all been moved by video games at one time or another. So that's it. End of debate.
Or, if you prefer, lets define Art as something that can be evaluated for quality. If there is quality, then there can be excellence, and where there is excellence, there is High Art. Maybe games have not achieved perfect excellence yet, but if we can agree that Ocarina of Time is better than most other games, then there is the potential for excellence. (Actually, we don't need to agree! The argument itself proves that quality can be seen and evaluated; those stupid Top Ten lists are proof that Art in Games exists!) So that's it. End of debate.
Honestly, its difficult to believe that saying, "x will never be Art" is any different than saying, "a woman will never be President." Both are absurd.
I wish you wouldn't define hardcore gaming with a demographic. That implies that mindless gore-fest button mashers and Leisure Suit Larry - or worse yet, Halo - are hardcore, just because their content appeals to young men. They are not. Or, to put it another way, there's a reason Resident Evil is more hardcore than House of the Dead, and it has nothing to do with the target audience.
Not my words, but my sentiments exactly. The Napster debacle should have been a sign to the music industry to start working on a ubiquitous, secure, legal digital distribution system, stat. They could have done it, too - they were in the position to offer faster downloads than the average Napter user would experience- ergo,value. Instead, they ran away from the internet entirely, and look where it got them. Without their close relationship with the federal government, the big RIAA labels would have been replaced by hip, tech-savvy indies in two years; thank god for lobbyists, eh, Paramount?
Frankly, I'm glad to see CD sales finally going south, the music labels beholden to Apple, and interest in manufactured music tanking. I'm just surprised it took this long.
I said it back then, and I'll say it again now: the recording industry should have been making huge inroads into digital delivery way back in the Napster era. Now sales for their main medium are collapsing and they don't have enough control over the new delivery system to milk it for enough of a profit. (They did try to control the new system - pity they didn't realize that the best way to control it was to provide the best digital delivery system on the planet and make it ubiquitous. The solution was not to try to rein in the technology, and certainly NOT to haunt their potential buyers with the constant threat of lawsuit.)
I'm not making a defense of piracy here, I'm just saying that RIAA members made some really BAD business decisions back in the day, the main result being that they now have to rely on a computer manufacturer to give them the digital release portal they should have built for themselves. Serves the idiots right.
I think you have your motivations wrong. The AMA had homosexuality on the books as a mental abnormality because it had been considered an abnormality from the inception of Psychology as an academic field, never mind Psychology as a medical service. The evangelical Christians had nothing to do with it, especially because that movement didn't even become politically notable until the 1950s. We think of homosexual stigma/homophobia as a far right Christian thing these days, but the truth is even 30 years ago it was almost entirely universal.
True, Psychologists in other countries may have been in favor of declassifying homosexuality, but we're talking about policy set out by the American Medical Association.
It depends on the game. Some games focus on communications scattered across many web sites or multiple media, which is more realistic but takes time to follow. Others are easier; imagine if Slashdot only updated once a week, but you had to solve puzzles to get into about 1/2 of the stories, and solutions were readily available. That would be the casual ARGers experience of a standard commercial game.
Independent ARGs run the gamut - some are incredibly accesible, others require a lot of dedication. Most fall somewhere in between.
As for Perplex City, it had many levels of participation available. You could go to one of their live events and compete with other players, collect cards en masse and try to solve the big meta-puzzle for a prize, or you could simply buy a pack and waste a little time solving the individual puzzles. The community for PPC1 kept exhaustive records of everything that went on in-game, so you could use their message boards and wikis to keep up on the action. (In fact, most ARG designers will tell you that the player-run forums aren't just tools; they're half of the game.)
I don't think we would have a problem here if Best Buy just didn't honor their online prices; many stores do that. The problem is, they pretend the store does honor online prices, and to that end they've rigged up an elaborate false web site to force the "web" price and the "store" price into line. That's fraud.
I'm afraid the spread of creationist, anti-birth control, narrowly defined evangelical Christianity is not as cancerous as you'd think. They proselytize so heavily because their faith has a very poor retention rate. 1/3rd of evangelicals leave the religion by the time they graduate high school, and half by middle age. Moreover poor Evangelicals, who make up the bulk of the market for televangelism, radio evangelism and other broad-base strategies, will have more children, but less chance of having a successful child - just like all poor people, their children will have poor education and job opportunities, and are more likely to commit crime. Poor children also die sooner - I wish this were not so, but it is statistically true. The evangelical movement, despite its claims to generate Providence for its members, tends to make them poorer, not richer - partly thanks to money spent directly on worship, but also because it encourages parents to produce more children than they can realistically support.
On the other hand, mothers over 30 are highly likely to raise children who become financially, academically, and socially successful, but more likely to raise fewer children. Since these women almost certainly use birth control to delay having children, they are almost certainly not evangelicals.
These are two entirely different strategies for procreation. One procreates quickly and abundantly, the other builds up resources and invests them in a few offspring. Both of these are valid strategies. But when you combine the high mortality rate of poor children with the low retention rate of Evangelism in general, you can see why the faith recruits so vigorously; the chances of a middle-class Evangelical family producing one adult offspring who will pass their beliefs and practices on to the grandchildren is not so high; probably about as high as in a middle class non-Evangelical family. Evangelicals do create more offspring in numbers, but in terms of the movement replicating itself, it doesn't work so well.
For those wondering where I get all these statistics and assertions, they come partly from Bob Altemeyer's The Authoritarians, and partly from Levitt and Dubner's excellent book Freakonomics, although Chris Hedges' American Fascists also adds some context to Altemeyer's numbers. I also used a little bit of logical glue here and there, but I hope that will be acceptable.
Good god, where are my mod points? This is right on the nose.
In the same vein, most people are against social support for teenage mothers (which would keep the family out of poverty, improve the childs chances of success on all fronts and lessen the number of teen births in the next generation), simply because they don't want to reward the immorality of teen sex. Many American families would disown a daughter who had a baby in her teens, and many would disown a daughter who had an abortion. Some would do both. Neither of these stances is in any way conducive to solving any social problems.
I'm going to break character for a sec and do some heavy product evangelism, so you might want to avert your eyes or something.
If you have a Wii and have not yet bought Super Paper Mario, get it. If you don't have a Wii, you'll want to pick it up when you get yours. This game is fantastic. It's the full-featured Wii exclusive people have been pining for these past six months, the kind of game you can really sink your teeth into. I haven't enjoyed an RPG so much since the first Paper Mario, and thats saying quite a lot.
Short review: Remember all the cool shit you could do in the last two Paper Marios while you were exploring between battles? They decided to make an entire game out of just that. You earn experience points for stomping enemies old-school Mario style, but you still have an inventory and hit points, and you still go back to town to stock up and do side quests. The fact that you can flip yourself into 3D, effectively revealing a second level behind (or in front of!) the one you're playing, is effectively trippy. And the story, even with its holes and inconsistencies, is much, much better than most RPG plots. I mean, it starts with Bowser and Princess Peach getting married, and then follows that. It has ambiguous villains. In a Mario game. It has a poignant ending. Square couldn't write this stuff if they tried.
Is anyone else unnerved by the constant comparisons to the Columbine shootings? Not to say that Virginia Tech isn't a school, or that this wasn't a shooting, but we are talking about university students, not high schoolers or postgraduates who didn't go on to college (like the Columbine shooters). These people are adults, vastly more independent than primary school students. Shouldn't we be looking at this as a different kind of event?
The video game connection is one example of how terribly wrong we can be when we start filling in the Virginia Tech story with bits of the Columbine story. How are we ever going to get to the truth about this story if everyone - even the media - are off pursuing a different one?
But if buying an item priced much lower than usual is immoral, wouldn't that make it immoral to buy a product at an intentional discount?
The truth is, you don't know the vendor's reasoning for selling at that particular price. And if you shop at most big stores, the vendor gets their inventory and pricing from a corporate office, so they don't know either. Most stores offer discounted items to bring customers in and to build loyalty. If you assume that all non-standard prices are mistakes, and that it would be unethical to take advantage of them, you're invalidating the tools that companies use to win your business. Competition cannot work in a market full of consumers with these morals.
No kidding. The bookstore down the street sells books and a music store-quality selection of CDs, but I never buy CDs there. I can buy a good book there for $5-7, but even the bargain bin CDs start at $10. If I want a CD, I go to the used bookstore further down the road, where they sell CDs for $5-7. I do prefer brand new CDs, but I can't bring myself to buy more than one unused CD a year. If CDs were in the same price range as books, I would buy both my books and CDs new.
Maybe this is why so many people my age are turning back to reading for entertainment. Everything else (except television, and possibly weed) is far more expensive.
For the most part, gamers think of their games as completely hermetic fantasy worlds that don't interact with reality. Of course, in hindsight we see that there are many real world influences on the content of our games - just like when we look back at the Science Fiction of the 1950s and 1960s. So for the most part, people don't see race in games because they're usually treated the same way we treat race in the real world. In 20 years, when we have different opinions and habits with regard to race, a racial message will probably be far more evident.
On the other hand, when we see a game that approaches race differently from us - for example, the Left Behind game that gives evil/"unsaved" characters Arabic names - we see a clear message. So most people here will claim that, while some games certainly have racial elements, their games don't.
I would check out Fry's then. They actually have a habit of knocking a few bucks off the price of games the week they come out. (Don't ask me why, I just know it happens.)
Japan's population is roughly equal to half that of the United States. Last year, Japanese consumers bought almost twice as many DS units (the best-selling handheld on the market) as American consumers did. And when I say American consumers, I mean the US and Canada. So your answer would be, no.
Sounds like Boston has a healthy appreciation of the arts.
For the moment, I'm going to guess that 1 in 10 hard core liberals regularly watch Kieth Olbermann. He overdoes his presentation far too much, and often skips over very important points in favor of outright bashing. He uses Murrow's famous sign-off phrase, but in my opinion he hasn't truly earned it. His show is only a tiny bit more elegant in its presentation than Bill O'Reilly's, and only because Olbermann knows how to make a rant sound like a speech. Olbermann appeals most to people who have spent a long time listening to Rush and O'Reilly and are looking for more of the same, in a different ideological package.
Now, talk about Stephen Colbert. There's a guy with the liberal media in his palm! Every night he goes out and proves, for one, that you can use the word "liberal" to insult just about anyone.
"To gesticulate wildly" is an idiom indicating urgent and frantic communication, and usually implies that the thing communicated is not as important as the speaker implies, or just plain doesn't exist.
Gah, this is getting confusing.
Testosterone DOES play a big part in sex selection. The Y chromosome only has one gene on it - the gene that tells the fetus to produce a lot of testosterone. Testosterone is the signal that tells the fetus to develop male traits. Every fetus is capable of becoming male, depending on this signal. The testosterone used in this stage of development comes from the fetus itself. The mother's testosterone level does not influence the sex of her child, because her blood does not enter the womb. I think it goes without saying that the father's testosterone levels make no difference at all, since his bloodstream is in a different body.
Some fetuses have a testosterone insensitivity that keeps the fetus from fully developing into a male child. This does not appear to be a complete immunity to testosterone, since the resulting child does not have completely female traits either. Again, this testosterone is being created by the fetus itself, not by either parent.
Is it just me, or does having a teacher sue a student completely invalidate the in loco parentis state of the school regarding that matter? Students have limited free speech (and other) rights while at school because the school is acting in place of their guardian. If the school recognizes that the parent, not the school, is responsible for the childs behavior, they are admitting that these restrictions did not apply when the offending remarks were made. Therefore the student has complete First Amendment speech rights - the school handbook (for example) has no bearing on the case.