That's completely pointless. If the developers are required to 'completely reveal' the contents of the game, why should the ESRB have to play through it at all?
Going along with what you are saying, are you arguing that homosexual marriage is therefore not a sin according to the Bible and the Catholic Church, as long as the two men or the two women do not have sex? This is incorrect.
Not according to the Catholic Church, no. Their logic takes it that way initially but then they kind of change course.
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, what would be considered a marriage between two men or two women is a greatly disordered arrangement, one reason being because the anthropological ability and propensity towards the propagation of mankind is never present in that relationship.
Well, this is false from the very beginning. The ability may not be there, but the propensity certainly is, as illustrated by the many homosexuals who become artificially inseminated or (try to) adopt. And even if that wasn't true, the logic still doesn't hold. As you said, opposite-sex couples who can't or don't want to have children are not barred from marriage. Why would it matter why they can't? They can't, that's the bottom line, you don't have to read into it.
This makes the very relationship forbidden in the eyes of the Church, and, down the line from what I wrote of the above definition, lust, which we all know as a sin, would be the very categorization of any sexual feelings within this relationship, even if no physical act occurs, because the marriage itself would not be valid, and so there would be no context for proper sexual conduct even in ones thoughts.
This is news to me. As far as i knew the Church's feelings on the matter were that you were OK as long as you controlled the urge (they realise that homosexuality itself may not controllable, a surprisingly humane position for them).
I would personally like the US government to completely remove "marriage" from its jurisdiction, and only legally permit "civil unions" of which can be unisexual or male-female in their possible partner combinations. That would solve the gay marriage issue politically.
This i agree with though. Too bad it'll probably never happen.
Marriage actually has a lot to do with intercourse.
Well, right, but that's kind of like saying race has a lot to do with gun violence. The relationship is circumstantial, neither one (intercourse or marriage) begets the other. The only sin (according to the Bible and the logical part of the Church's interpretation of it) is the intercourse -- not the feelings, not the relationship, not the marriage -- so there should be no opposition to the marriage itself.
The difference is that the Bible and the teachings of the Apostles (and natural law, in many cases) explicitly tell us that extramarital sex, homosexual acts, etc. are wrong
The only 'explicit' mention of homosexuality is in Leviticus (that's the 'Law of Moses' that doesn't apply to you anymore, as you point out below), right after the part where it says adulterers should be put to death, and right before the part where it says a man and woman who sleep together during the woman's period ('sickness') should be cut off from their people.
The only mentions of homosexuality in the New Testament (and there are very few) use crazy obscure words that never appear in the literature before-hand and don't really have clear meanings. And most of those references, even if you assume that they are 'explicit' condemnations of homosexuals, are accompanied by similar condemnations of the 'irreligious' and the 'drunkards', neither of which are barred from marriage or military service or spousal benefits or adoption (OK maybe drunkards are there) the way homosexuals are.
Also, even if every single one of those passages is explicit and applicable to modern life, none of them, as the Church itself points out, condemns homosexuality, but rather the practice of homosexual intercourse. If the Church really hates the sin (intercourse) and not the sinner (the person), there is even less arguement for discrimination against homosexuals in marriage and adoption and all that jazz, because those things have little to do with intercourse.
The Catholic Church says, quite literally, "We don't know what happens to unbaptised babies who die... we just assume God does the right thing".
It'd be cool if they applied that line of thought to... anybody else, really.
It's funny how the Church seems to know exactly what God is thinking when it comes to homosexuals and transgendered people and pre-marital sex and all that jazz, but when it turns the subject of babies they're suddenly too humble to speculate.
The article actually says that it was exactly six times more (the software giant has detailed at least 24 Office flaws found by outside researchers in its monthly bulletins, six times the number of Office flaws found in all of 2005), so this isn't really a simple case of wanting 'extra punch'. Either the person who wrote the summary read the article wrong or it's some insidious (yet extremely subtle) attempt at making Microsoft look worse than it really does. Um, probably the former.
Except for the fact that seeing a great wide receiver dash across the field at Olympic-sprinter speeds to catch a ball a split-second before getting drilled in the ribs and hanging on to it is exciting.
Sure isn't exciting to me, i think it's pretty much some of the most boring 'entertainment' out there. I'd rather watch Passions.
As for watching people play cards: There's a reason why those shows are all on tiny cable stations, instead of prime time broadcasts on Monday nights.
Yeah, well, i don't think anybody was really suggesting that video games were destined for prime-time broadcast television.
Re:Don't knock it 'til you've tried it.
on
EVETV - Sport For Nerds
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· Score: 2, Interesting
As opposed to exactly like being the (however many persons in a football game + 1) person to show up at a football game... only you can't talk to the players while you watch them and none of them know you and the only fridge to raid is your own.
I mean it doesn't sound particularly incredible to me either, but it's no different from any other dumb-ass competitive sporting event. Bunch of people you don't really know competing in a game against a bunch of other people you don't really know, and some guy narrating it. Certainly sounds more entertaining than watching people play cards.
And what's this fossil fuel nonsense? That's not a problem. It's called nuclear power. It's WAY cleaner than burning fossil fuels. Even many environmentalists who fought it 30 years ago have started to say they were wrong. Give everyone electric cars (or fuel cell cars), charge them off the grid, and feed the grid with nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and (when available) fusion.
That's certainly a swell plan, but i think you're more than aware that it isn't easily accomplished at all. How long do you guess it would take to convert 80% (i think that's what it is, right) of America's power generation off fossil fuels? Certainly it's going to be decades at the very least, and that's not counting the debate, the legislation, the research, the raising of capital, et cetera.
Want to get off fossil fuels? Go nuclear. No, wait, nuclear is "bad" and "evil". Want to improve cars? Go hybrid. No, wait, all those batteries are "bad" for the environment when they are dead and can't be recharged.
In fact, currently hybrid cars are far more environmentally friendly than fully electric cars when you look at the entire life of the vehicle (including production and disposal of the batteries). CO2-wise, anyway. If you compare the CO2 emissions of a standard gasoline car to the emissions of a fully electric car that uses fossil fuels for production and charging, the electric car barely has any advantage. I mean the decrease in emissions is like a sliver when you graph it out.
A hybrid car using the same fossil fuels, though, produces almost half the CO2 emissions of either the normal car or the fully electric car. The only way a fully electric car can compete with a hybrid, CO2-wise, is if all the electricity that goes into that electric car from production to disposal is provided by hydroelectric/nuclear/wind power.... Which is pretty unlikely in most places.
I dunno how it compares when it comes to other pollutants, though.
'Racism' and 'sexism' have technical definitions and then they have colloquial definitions. If you wanted to be true to the word 'racism' as it was originally defined, you would only apply it to people who believe that one race (generally their own) is inherently superior to another (or all others). But most people don't use 'racism' that way, it's too specific. Instead it's become a broader term to refer to any discrimination based on race. The same goes for sexism.
As far as 'sex blindness' and 'color blindness', i do think that it can be taken too far, but generally it isn't. There's something to be said for, e.g., assuming that women are going to want to shop in the women's clothing section at the store. It's the norm, like it or not. That's just the way it usually works. But, as you said, enforcing that action ('characteristic') as if doing otherwise is somehow wrong or inferior in any way would constitute sexism, because it's implying that somebody is required to do something (and, in this case, something extremely trivial) based on an accident of birth (which obviously they had no control over).
In this case, an organisation is specifically scouting one accident-of-birth demographic over all others based on what i would call an irrelevant observation. I think this constitutes sexism for two reasons:
(1) Lowering standards or raising benefits to squeeze in a few members from a specific group of people, as someone mentioned in another post, promotes mediocrity in that demographic. If a job requires a certain level of skill or some other ability, then... that's what the job requires. It doesn't change just because you have a uterus or because your skin is darker or because you sit in a wheel chair. If you don't have a skill that's crucial to the job, you shouldn't be hired for it, i'm sorry. Acting otherwise implies and institutionalises a sort of inherent inferiority on the part of (in this case) women, which is not only the definition of sexism but is also unfair to those who actually worked hard to meet the requirements.
(2) GNOME has never not included women on its team. It just so happens that no women chose to apply. That isn't racism or inequality, it's just a statistic of a free market. If you survey all the people who work for GNOME, i'm sure you'll find that there are many demographics that aren't represented on the team -- maybe red-heads, the elderly, high-school students, transsexuals, the poor, the deaf, paraplegics. If it was a matter of them actually refusing people from those groups, then you'd have something to talk about. Otherwise, the 'inequality' is by choice (on the part of the unrepresented), and GNOME doesn't need to remedy anything. Anybody is free to sign up; if they don't, it's their own fault, not GNOME's.
If GNOME was simply willing to offer more for a 'woman's perspective' (maybe because that would be beneficial to their product), that would be one thing. But that isn't what they're after -- their stated goal is just to 'fix' some kind of unfair imbalance.
If they believe that women aren't signing up because of some sort of unfairness in childhood, rather than because it's just their choice not to, i think it's fair to say that they should probably put their money towards a programme that aims to fix that. Adding three women to the GNOME team isn't going to do anything constructive, it's just going to make them (GNOME) feel good about themselves because they helped some poor inferior chicks get into the community when they couldn't do it on their own.
A child who was abused or who accidentally smothered himself in his pillow hardly constitutes a 'syndrome' though.
Re:PSP in general was just a huge mistake
on
Everyone Hates UMD
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Could someone tell me why everybody hates Memory Sticks? I mean i'm genuinely curious, i don't really know much about flash memory other than the fact that my camera uses MS.
Is it just the fact that CF and SM and all that jazz already did the job well enough? Or is there like some technical reason or something.
Would it also be "shocking" if a Catholic church only offered mass to Catholics?
I don't know if 'shocking' is the right word, but it certainly would be unusual. I've never heard of a Catholic church that places restrictions on who can attend mass. Uless they're being disruptive or something, obviously.
Please. They never were ignoring him. They were giving the idiot all the attention he could ever want, doing their best to spread his ridiculous flame-baiting message all across the Internet. They continue to argue with him despite the fact that he ignores every rational statement they ever make, that he threatens them with legal action over the most completely ridiculous things, that he insults them for no reason, that he even degerenates into complete lunacy (like telling that VGCats guy that he initiated the conversation they had even though he obviously didn't).
STOP TAKING THIS GUY SERIOUSLY. STOP GIVING HIM THE ATTENTION HE WANTS. STOP ENSURING HIS CELEBRITY STATUS.
HE IS A TROLL. YOU HAVE ALL BEEN TROLLED. YOU HAVE LOST. HAVE A NICE DAY.
FYI, this is a (rather lame) meme that started on Fark a few weeks ago. Basically you post that whole thing, but replace 'I'm from Mars' with whatever is relevant to the subject (i think it started out as 'I work for US Mint').
Slashdot Mirror
Anybody can do that with already-existing GPS technology. The police sometimes use it to track suspects' vehicles.
New Beetle wasn't around in 1980.
That's completely pointless. If the developers are required to 'completely reveal' the contents of the game, why should the ESRB have to play through it at all?
Surprisingly Qwest was, i think, the only Baby Bell descendant that didn't give call information to the government (on privacy grounds).
It's not all good news, though. There are tons of other reasons to hate Qwest.
That is why I said "anthropological ability AND propensity", and not OR.
That does make the difference, never mind i suppose.
The rest i guess i can't really comment on, since ultimately i couldn't care less what the Church thinks anyway.
Going along with what you are saying, are you arguing that homosexual marriage is therefore not a sin according to the Bible and the Catholic Church, as long as the two men or the two women do not have sex? This is incorrect.
Not according to the Catholic Church, no. Their logic takes it that way initially but then they kind of change course.
As far as the Catholic Church is concerned, what would be considered a marriage between two men or two women is a greatly disordered arrangement, one reason being because the anthropological ability and propensity towards the propagation of mankind is never present in that relationship.
Well, this is false from the very beginning. The ability may not be there, but the propensity certainly is, as illustrated by the many homosexuals who become artificially inseminated or (try to) adopt. And even if that wasn't true, the logic still doesn't hold. As you said, opposite-sex couples who can't or don't want to have children are not barred from marriage. Why would it matter why they can't? They can't, that's the bottom line, you don't have to read into it.
This makes the very relationship forbidden in the eyes of the Church, and, down the line from what I wrote of the above definition, lust, which we all know as a sin, would be the very categorization of any sexual feelings within this relationship, even if no physical act occurs, because the marriage itself would not be valid, and so there would be no context for proper sexual conduct even in ones thoughts.
This is news to me. As far as i knew the Church's feelings on the matter were that you were OK as long as you controlled the urge (they realise that homosexuality itself may not controllable, a surprisingly humane position for them).
This i agree with though. Too bad it'll probably never happen.I would personally like the US government to completely remove "marriage" from its jurisdiction, and only legally permit "civil unions" of which can be unisexual or male-female in their possible partner combinations. That would solve the gay marriage issue politically.
Marriage actually has a lot to do with intercourse.
Well, right, but that's kind of like saying race has a lot to do with gun violence. The relationship is circumstantial, neither one (intercourse or marriage) begets the other. The only sin (according to the Bible and the logical part of the Church's interpretation of it) is the intercourse -- not the feelings, not the relationship, not the marriage -- so there should be no opposition to the marriage itself.
Since pederasts tend to be homosexuals
FYI this is false. Heterosexual men are vastly more likely to abuse children (including boys) than homosexual men.
The difference is that the Bible and the teachings of the Apostles (and natural law, in many cases) explicitly tell us that extramarital sex, homosexual acts, etc. are wrong
The only 'explicit' mention of homosexuality is in Leviticus (that's the 'Law of Moses' that doesn't apply to you anymore, as you point out below), right after the part where it says adulterers should be put to death, and right before the part where it says a man and woman who sleep together during the woman's period ('sickness') should be cut off from their people.
The only mentions of homosexuality in the New Testament (and there are very few) use crazy obscure words that never appear in the literature before-hand and don't really have clear meanings. And most of those references, even if you assume that they are 'explicit' condemnations of homosexuals, are accompanied by similar condemnations of the 'irreligious' and the 'drunkards', neither of which are barred from marriage or military service or spousal benefits or adoption (OK maybe drunkards are there) the way homosexuals are.
Also, even if every single one of those passages is explicit and applicable to modern life, none of them, as the Church itself points out, condemns homosexuality, but rather the practice of homosexual intercourse. If the Church really hates the sin (intercourse) and not the sinner (the person), there is even less arguement for discrimination against homosexuals in marriage and adoption and all that jazz, because those things have little to do with intercourse.
The Catholic Church says, quite literally, "We don't know what happens to unbaptised babies who die... we just assume God does the right thing".
It'd be cool if they applied that line of thought to... anybody else, really.
It's funny how the Church seems to know exactly what God is thinking when it comes to homosexuals and transgendered people and pre-marital sex and all that jazz, but when it turns the subject of babies they're suddenly too humble to speculate.
The article actually says that it was exactly six times more (the software giant has detailed at least 24 Office flaws found by outside researchers in its monthly bulletins, six times the number of Office flaws found in all of 2005), so this isn't really a simple case of wanting 'extra punch'. Either the person who wrote the summary read the article wrong or it's some insidious (yet extremely subtle) attempt at making Microsoft look worse than it really does. Um, probably the former.
Except for the fact that seeing a great wide receiver dash across the field at Olympic-sprinter speeds to catch a ball a split-second before getting drilled in the ribs and hanging on to it is exciting.
Sure isn't exciting to me, i think it's pretty much some of the most boring 'entertainment' out there. I'd rather watch Passions.
As for watching people play cards: There's a reason why those shows are all on tiny cable stations, instead of prime time broadcasts on Monday nights.
Yeah, well, i don't think anybody was really suggesting that video games were destined for prime-time broadcast television.
As opposed to exactly like being the (however many persons in a football game + 1) person to show up at a football game... only you can't talk to the players while you watch them and none of them know you and the only fridge to raid is your own.
I mean it doesn't sound particularly incredible to me either, but it's no different from any other dumb-ass competitive sporting event. Bunch of people you don't really know competing in a game against a bunch of other people you don't really know, and some guy narrating it. Certainly sounds more entertaining than watching people play cards.
Why am I forced to use weak passwords
Because some developper somewhere can't figure out how to allow a " or a \ in a string.
My friends on Livejournal don't have this stupid problem.
Neither do my friends on MySpace.
Solution? Uhhh. Don't be friends with fucking idiots?
And what's this fossil fuel nonsense? That's not a problem. It's called nuclear power. It's WAY cleaner than burning fossil fuels. Even many environmentalists who fought it 30 years ago have started to say they were wrong. Give everyone electric cars (or fuel cell cars), charge them off the grid, and feed the grid with nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, hydroelectric, and (when available) fusion.
That's certainly a swell plan, but i think you're more than aware that it isn't easily accomplished at all. How long do you guess it would take to convert 80% (i think that's what it is, right) of America's power generation off fossil fuels? Certainly it's going to be decades at the very least, and that's not counting the debate, the legislation, the research, the raising of capital, et cetera.
Want to get off fossil fuels? Go nuclear. No, wait, nuclear is "bad" and "evil". Want to improve cars? Go hybrid. No, wait, all those batteries are "bad" for the environment when they are dead and can't be recharged.
In fact, currently hybrid cars are far more environmentally friendly than fully electric cars when you look at the entire life of the vehicle (including production and disposal of the batteries). CO2-wise, anyway. If you compare the CO2 emissions of a standard gasoline car to the emissions of a fully electric car that uses fossil fuels for production and charging, the electric car barely has any advantage. I mean the decrease in emissions is like a sliver when you graph it out.
A hybrid car using the same fossil fuels, though, produces almost half the CO2 emissions of either the normal car or the fully electric car. The only way a fully electric car can compete with a hybrid, CO2-wise, is if all the electricity that goes into that electric car from production to disposal is provided by hydroelectric/nuclear/wind power. ... Which is pretty unlikely in most places.
I dunno how it compares when it comes to other pollutants, though.
'Racism' and 'sexism' have technical definitions and then they have colloquial definitions. If you wanted to be true to the word 'racism' as it was originally defined, you would only apply it to people who believe that one race (generally their own) is inherently superior to another (or all others). But most people don't use 'racism' that way, it's too specific. Instead it's become a broader term to refer to any discrimination based on race. The same goes for sexism.
As far as 'sex blindness' and 'color blindness', i do think that it can be taken too far, but generally it isn't. There's something to be said for, e.g., assuming that women are going to want to shop in the women's clothing section at the store. It's the norm, like it or not. That's just the way it usually works. But, as you said, enforcing that action ('characteristic') as if doing otherwise is somehow wrong or inferior in any way would constitute sexism, because it's implying that somebody is required to do something (and, in this case, something extremely trivial) based on an accident of birth (which obviously they had no control over).
In this case, an organisation is specifically scouting one accident-of-birth demographic over all others based on what i would call an irrelevant observation. I think this constitutes sexism for two reasons:
(1) Lowering standards or raising benefits to squeeze in a few members from a specific group of people, as someone mentioned in another post, promotes mediocrity in that demographic. If a job requires a certain level of skill or some other ability, then... that's what the job requires. It doesn't change just because you have a uterus or because your skin is darker or because you sit in a wheel chair. If you don't have a skill that's crucial to the job, you shouldn't be hired for it, i'm sorry. Acting otherwise implies and institutionalises a sort of inherent inferiority on the part of (in this case) women, which is not only the definition of sexism but is also unfair to those who actually worked hard to meet the requirements.
(2) GNOME has never not included women on its team. It just so happens that no women chose to apply. That isn't racism or inequality, it's just a statistic of a free market. If you survey all the people who work for GNOME, i'm sure you'll find that there are many demographics that aren't represented on the team -- maybe red-heads, the elderly, high-school students, transsexuals, the poor, the deaf, paraplegics. If it was a matter of them actually refusing people from those groups, then you'd have something to talk about. Otherwise, the 'inequality' is by choice (on the part of the unrepresented), and GNOME doesn't need to remedy anything. Anybody is free to sign up; if they don't, it's their own fault, not GNOME's.
If GNOME was simply willing to offer more for a 'woman's perspective' (maybe because that would be beneficial to their product), that would be one thing. But that isn't what they're after -- their stated goal is just to 'fix' some kind of unfair imbalance.
If they believe that women aren't signing up because of some sort of unfairness in childhood, rather than because it's just their choice not to, i think it's fair to say that they should probably put their money towards a programme that aims to fix that. Adding three women to the GNOME team isn't going to do anything constructive, it's just going to make them (GNOME) feel good about themselves because they helped some poor inferior chicks get into the community when they couldn't do it on their own.
Their money, though. Whatev.
Yes, i am. That doesn't change my assertion.
A child who was abused or who accidentally smothered himself in his pillow hardly constitutes a 'syndrome' though.
Could someone tell me why everybody hates Memory Sticks? I mean i'm genuinely curious, i don't really know much about flash memory other than the fact that my camera uses MS.
Is it just the fact that CF and SM and all that jazz already did the job well enough? Or is there like some technical reason or something.
I haven't seen the George Clooney one, or read the book, but the Russian film version is one of the longest and most boring movies of all time.
Kick-ass, maybe now we can finally get some of those neato power-meter thingies like in Dragon Ball Z!
Would it also be "shocking" if a Catholic church only offered mass to Catholics?
I don't know if 'shocking' is the right word, but it certainly would be unusual. I've never heard of a Catholic church that places restrictions on who can attend mass. Uless they're being disruptive or something, obviously.
(Not really your point, i know, just saying.)
Please. They never were ignoring him. They were giving the idiot all the attention he could ever want, doing their best to spread his ridiculous flame-baiting message all across the Internet. They continue to argue with him despite the fact that he ignores every rational statement they ever make, that he threatens them with legal action over the most completely ridiculous things, that he insults them for no reason, that he even degerenates into complete lunacy (like telling that VGCats guy that he initiated the conversation they had even though he obviously didn't).
STOP TAKING THIS GUY SERIOUSLY. STOP GIVING HIM THE ATTENTION HE WANTS. STOP ENSURING HIS CELEBRITY STATUS.
HE IS A TROLL. YOU HAVE ALL BEEN TROLLED. YOU HAVE LOST. HAVE A NICE DAY.
FYI, this is a (rather lame) meme that started on Fark a few weeks ago. Basically you post that whole thing, but replace 'I'm from Mars' with whatever is relevant to the subject (i think it started out as 'I work for US Mint').