Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere...It's an argumentative blackhole, a solipsim. It's not testable...his "testable" experiments are like the sort of thing you see an idiot do to try and demonstrate that they have free will
Its actually simple to prove to yourself, but very hard to prove to others.
1. Get a gun 2. Attempt to kill yourself*
If you die, then you have just proven the Free Will to be true and VR to be false. If you are unable to kill yourself, either because you are mentally unable or something keeps interfering then you have proven Free Will to be false and VR to be true. (I'm thinking a VR would not allow you to die)
Now the problem with this is that:
A. Only you can preform the experiment. B. If it turns out you had free will, you'll be dead and unable to tell anyone else. C. Since it appears humans kill themselves on a regular basis you have no way to confirm if they are simulations or persons with free will.
Personally, I have seriously thought about this because I have walked away from near death on occasion, but usually people attribute this as a miracle or the handy work as God, Fate, or dumb luck.
Don't try this because I'm pretty sure from my perspective, I am the universes observer so regardless of your success, from my perspective you will die either way leaving me with a lawsuit.
What, you don't like profanity laced rants aimed at you and your employees, from someone who obviously believes his and only his opinion matters?
Based on the writing on his site, I wouldn't hire him for anything.
Don't worry. Chances are he'll land a job in upper management before he can do anymore damage as a coder.
Oh wait...
But seriously... His personality type would get reminds of of all the psychotic people who freak out and happen to be in position of power in the company. The problem is that upper management does attract the 1 out of 100 persons who are socio-paths and even though a company should be run by people who don't fly off the handle with potty mouths at the most minor things, it often happens.
Truth be told I have lots of dreams about actually being in a FPS games like Day of Defeat or Team Fortress 2 and the next day I'll have a moment of zen which I'm just bringing down the hammer on everyone on the server.
So no... Its not really helping out in real life per se, but perhaps it makes me a better gamer since my brain sees that more important than going to work naked.
I'm all for giving RIAA a good gut punch, I just don't want to screw over the musicians I love in the process. I'm no IP / copyright lawyer so I'm looking for some insight here!
Write the artist and ask them what they would prefer. Most would prefer you to buy their T-shirts since they don't make any money off their CDs, but even then some artists always accept alcohol as forms of payment. It differs between artists so why not ask them directly.
who put 3d desktops on the list? what a waste of cpu time.
I think the idea was offload the desktop onto the GPU (who wouldn't be doing anything anyways until a game is loaded), which in theory would free up more CPU cycles for the regular old processor.
Secondly, you can supposedly get better vector graphics and quicker response with a 3d engine for a desktop. The best example of this is of course not Linux for the Nintendo DS. Most 2d looking games for it are actually using a 3d engine because its easier to code for and less intensive on the CPU.
That and it looks just as good at any resolution and screen DPI. It wasn't as big of an issue, but if you have a 30" monitor with an unreasonably high resolution and try to increase the size of your icons on a 2d desktop that doesn't use vectoring... You will notice how pixelated everything looks.
Now, I can wait a day - even a week, for my election results,
So if they can't count the votes in a week, its OK to have someone in power who stole the election? And to top it off, how about someone who puts lives in harms way because they are the commander in chief?
Seriously, I'd be fine waiting for a month or two and maybe even longer to determine who is correctly elected president of the United States.
Secondly, if it was done by hand you have to remember only 50,000,000 people voted in 2004 for the presidential election. If you were to hand count the votes by an official. If an official was responsible for counting 1000 votes then you would only need 50,000 people nation wide helping out.
Which means you'd only need 1,000 officials per state which is a drop in the bucket.
Of course it wouldn't work exactly like that... California, NY, and Texas would need a great deal of vote counters and RI and Alaska would not, but vote counting by hand would not be that difficult if you distributed it correctly. You wouldn't need a month, but at the most 2 weeks and I think the wait is worth it.
The problem is that most Americans are impatient, but don't realize the election affects them for the next four years.
If you cannot detect something at all with light or gravity effects, then it very likely isn't there.
Are you so sure there aren't other spectrum's yet to be discovered? We just might not have the technological know how to detect certain things. Doesn't mean they aren't there.
Take radiation for example. You can't see it, can't taste it, can't feel it and without the proper tools you'd never know you're sitting in it.
Same thing for "dark matter". Yes it could be a bunch of baloney, but its the only thing that somehow makes the model of everything else work on a astronomical scale. Eventually, we might find some other explation but we can't discount anything until we can prove it false.
Currently we don't have the means to prove it false so its just a big assumption. Hopefully the LHC will shed more light this spring on how matter works so we can stack the evidence for and against dark matter in general.
I am no expert in this area, but if all the functions of sleep are so easily replaceable
Actually many animals hunt or graze at certain times of the time. It would be rather wasteful for them to up all the time moving about when conditions aren't right for their normal eating habits.
Imagine a bat unable to sleep during the day or a bear unable to sleep during hibernation.
Its not intended to replace sleep. Secondly DARPA usually doesn't do research for public consumption. Eventually it would get there, but for now its going straight to the military. My bet would be this is aimed for fighter/bomber pilots running 48 hour shifts. Currently one of the most proscribed drugs in the Airforce is of course the same drugs narcoleptic people use.
Actually, this is straight of a sci-fi military book about war in 2020 I read once. Can't remember the name but the one of the key elements of the story was that soldiers would take a pill that would keep them up for 72 hours straight so they could constantly fight during that time without the need for sleep. However, the fall back is they needed to crash hard afterwards because if they took another pill it would cause permanent damage to their bodies.
I'm sure the same thing would apply to users of this drug. Chances are its not intended to replace long term sleep but rather keep the user active for short period of times when being awake and alert is critical.
Which is why I'd recommend against hiring employees that can't focus.
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire 5 incompetent employees from geek squad on contract, outsource the technical question to India, and fire you?;)
In all seriousness, contract and outsourced labor would trump full time employees because they only get paid when there is work to be done. Of course they'll probaly won't be able to focus, but when someone wants a profit for the quarterly report at upper echelon of management, its easier for them to justify it.
However, if a company cared about quality (and could afford it) they would have devoted your job into separate positions in which there was a full time sales person and a full time repair person. About 10 years ago, I worked for a small time PC repair shop with maybe 4 employees but I still didn't do sales and only did two computers at a time.
When you force people to focus on multiple things at once, even if they can do it right it will lead to burnout fairly quickly. Interruptions do cause unexpected stress to a work environment and can really hamper things over long term.
Secondly, if you suggested this to the someone who codes in software development world they would start warming up a barrel of tar and start ripping up feather pillows.
Personally in my current job (neither PC repair nor Coding), I ignore interruptions and do not respond to IMs or emails due to the fact it would be rude to the client. In between conversations, I'll respond but otherwise I just have to shut it out due to the nature of the job.
Yes it is instant but does it find the right one. Now I've noticed (IMO) Google has gotten better lately, but often if you are searching certain topics it is very painful to find one that is really what you were looking for.
And back to the original topic of email... If you had hundreds or even thousands of emails back and forth between the same people over again with the same subject or similar subjects over the course of a year, it makes it hard to search for one in particular since searching by subject or person doesn't help you.
Do traditional drives fail if the same sector is written to over and over again as well?
No, but they'll fail either reading or writing over time regardless if you are writing or just reading just because the drive is moving. Even if you cool your standard drive, eventually it could just fail because it was left on for 10 years (since an active drive is constantly spinning).
Now its not guaranteed to fail, but the chances of a standard HDD failing that you only read from and don't write it is far greater than a SSD that you put files on it one time and don't write further.
I think SSD shine in archival types of things that you don't plan on trashing and rewriting that often such as image collections, movies, and MP3s. That said, swap disks, scratch disk, and cache file directories would logically still have better performance on your spinning platter drives and if that drive goes belly up you haven't lost much.
With no human crew on board, the ability to improvise and solve new problems is seriously hampered.
We aren't talking about the Mars mission. You can always fly a helicopter out there if you had to within a few hours.
Most of the time, when something major goes wrong on a tower they don't try to fix it other than shut everything down and abandon the tower. Chances are, if they couldn't shut it down remotely they couldn't do it in person which puts lives in danger anyways.
Watch a season of Deadliest Catch and get back to us with your revised automation estimate. Granted the ship size is different, but when things go Charlie Foxtrot on the high seas you need not so automatic-able judgement call decisions made - and good luck getting a helo on a pitching and rolling ship.
Actually, when I watched "Deadliest Catch" and "Ice Road Truckers" I wondered to myself when they are going to fully automate both tasks.
For one, an automated fishing boat no longer needs any cabins or space for human living. Hence, they can be water tight sealed like a submarine before leaving the docks and could simply capsize and not sink. Hopefully it would be designed to right itself automatically through buoyancy The trawling part of the ship could be separate which could store the catch and still not interfere with the water tight part of the ship.
Heck, the things could work 24/7 and automated cow ships could refuel them in the open waters.
As far as "Ice Road Truckers" the argument against would most likley be what about the live truckers. Well, if they were all automated then the trucks could talk with each other about accidents and slow downs etc etc.
The lobbyist, the bureaucrat, and committee staff become all the more powerful.
The simpler solution would be take the power and money out of the Federal government and put it back in the hands of the states. Hell, maybe even reinstate the senators being chosen by state governments again.
Not an elegant solution, but now the lobbyists have to spend 50x the money they would have before in bribes to get what they want. The problem with centralized government we have now is that yes it can get things done better and faster, but that also opens up bribes and corruption since its easier to focus on a handful of people compared to the thousands of individuals it would take to bribe all state governments.
We need people in war because it helps keep us out of it - well that's the theory anyway
Actually, if you look at the past 5,000 years of human history, I'm pretty sure that fact doesn't help one bit.
In fact, I would argue that humans are the perpetrators of all atrocities so far because they were in the war in the first place.
Would an AI or a guy sitting in an air conditioned bunker freak out like the US troops did during the My Lai Massacre and start shooting everyone in sight?
No my friend, history has shown that war is never gruesome enough for man and if you take away people's guns, tanks, and jets they'll murder each other with their bare hands.
The neocortex is incredibly complex; not even small neuronal networks are well understood. To suggest that a computer can accurately simulate them is ridiculous.
Are you saying that the brain is so complex that its run by magic? Or maybe humors? Or angels pushing little buttons on mini-calculators?
I don't know about you, but I live in a logical universe where things can be explained by physics, chemistry, biology and all sorts of things that make sense.
A brain is made of atoms, chemicals, and biological parts so I'm pretty sure we could explain it eventually. It may take 50 more years of research, but saying its too complex to ever understand is like the Church telling Galileo there is no need to study astronomy further since we didn't need to understand it.
Why on earth should all kids be allowed to go and buy GTA IV, Soldier of Fortune or any similar game?
Why not if the parents approve?
If your legal guardian feels that you are old enough and responsible to enjoy said entertainment then it should be their right. It should also be their right to prevent their child from playing such things if they so desire by not giving the money to their kids in the first place and/or monitoring their internet activities.
If you bring up tobacco and alcohol, those things are of course dangerous and have been scientifically proven to cause harm. That said, once you are 18 then I believe you should be able to put whatever into your body you feel like, but a parent giving his kids cigarettes is about as negligent as giving them some mercury or cyanide to play with.
Video games and even content of pornographic nature has never been conclusively shown to cause physical or mental harm to the average human. Yes, there are cases where people play a video game and flip out (like kids jumping out of windows because they thought they could fly like in Pokemon), but the same thing could be said about a psycho who reads the Bible or Koran and kills someone because he claims god told him to do it.
Again, if a parent feels their child can handle it or just don't care, they'll buy it for them anyways. Its kind of just stupid to have more laws on an issue that in reality is a moot point.
This single issue is so important that I will vote for Gulianni. His policies may include 1984 type directives, but at least he will not make GTA V illegal.
Truth be told (which I am rather embarrassed about now), I voted for Bush in 2000 because and only because of Tipper Gore and Lieberman's stance on video games.
Of course in my defense, not in my wildest dreams would I ever think Bush would pass something like the PATRIOT Act, get us embroiled in a war, and keep the budget in check instead of giving us a 9 trillion dollar deficit.
So to be fair, given the choice between Clinton and Gulianni, I'd vote for Clinton mostly because Gulianni scares me because it appears that he believes in what he says and what he says is that he doesn't mind torture and the removal of very critical things like haebus corpus.
So given the choice of the possibility ending up being in prison for crimes I didn't commit but was forced to confess through torture or not having Grand Theft Auto V... I'll go with the choice that causes me and the rest of the citizens (who would be more likley to be in prison than I would) to suffer least.
I don't like the idea, but you have to have priorities.
Truth be told, I'd like to see Ron Paul as President just because he and congress would be fighting, vetoing, and 2/3s over ruling over everything and there wouldn't be enough free time for little things like these video game laws.
And since Ron did vote against the PATRIOT Act, I'd hope he veto such a thing. I really don't think his benefit as a libertarian As for gutting the Federal Government, he wouldn't have the power since Congress would be opposed to such a thing so at least it would result in Congress not being able to pass stuff willy nilly and we might even get a shut down like we did with Clinton and Gingrich.
Since there's no corresponding personal downside for bad performance, the CEO is financially motivated to "go long,"
If the corporations got smart, they'd hire CEOs at only 10% higher than the lowest paid employee but give him massive stock options that he can only cash in in 10 years that will make him more money than he would if they paid him upfront. Hence, if he totally destroys the company he'll loose the money. If he is successful, he can retire early.
Someone who believes that the government should be sold off in a fire sale because corporations with a profit-motive can provide those services cheaper and better is naive at best.
Here's the deal. I support Ron Paul not because he would do any of that (He couldn't even if he wanted to because of congress) but he would most likley veto everything and cause a government shut down.
The problem is that congress simply passes laws non-stop without much reading or thinking about what they are passing. Doesn't matter which side of aisle you are on because generally its much of the same from both sides. If we could have some sort of delay in the law creation process it would at least give the nation some breathing room before the next DMCA, Patriot Act, and whatever law that takes away more rights or makes the economic system more complicated.
Remember, when Gingrich and Clinton shutdown the government. Sort of the same thing will happen and things actually improved because of that for a while.
Even if we could have just 4 years of this, I really think we will at least postpone a massive influx of laws.
Slashdot Mirror
Philosophers have been pondering this nonsense for centuries, and have gotten nowhere...It's an argumentative blackhole, a solipsim. It's not testable...his "testable" experiments are like the sort of thing you see an idiot do to try and demonstrate that they have free will
Its actually simple to prove to yourself, but very hard to prove to others.
1. Get a gun
2. Attempt to kill yourself*
If you die, then you have just proven the Free Will to be true and VR to be false.
If you are unable to kill yourself, either because you are mentally unable or something keeps interfering then you have proven Free Will to be false and VR to be true. (I'm thinking a VR would not allow you to die)
Now the problem with this is that:
A. Only you can preform the experiment.
B. If it turns out you had free will, you'll be dead and unable to tell anyone else.
C. Since it appears humans kill themselves on a regular basis you have no way to confirm if they are simulations or persons with free will.
Personally, I have seriously thought about this because I have walked away from near death on occasion, but usually people attribute this as a miracle or the handy work as God, Fate, or dumb luck.
Don't try this because I'm pretty sure from my perspective, I am the universes observer so regardless of your success, from my perspective you will die either way leaving me with a lawsuit.
What, you don't like profanity laced rants aimed at you and your employees, from someone who obviously believes his and only his opinion matters?
Based on the writing on his site, I wouldn't hire him for anything.
Don't worry. Chances are he'll land a job in upper management before he can do anymore damage as a coder.
Oh wait...
But seriously... His personality type would get reminds of of all the psychotic people who freak out and happen to be in position of power in the company. The problem is that upper management does attract the 1 out of 100 persons who are socio-paths and even though a company should be run by people who don't fly off the handle with potty mouths at the most minor things, it often happens.
If the smart should be allowed to scam the stupid, why shouldn't the strong be allowed to steal from the the weak?
Actually, if one looks at the Stock Market or the IRS, you can see legal examples of both.
I feel far better prepared for life now.
Truth be told I have lots of dreams about actually being in a FPS games like Day of Defeat or Team Fortress 2 and the next day I'll have a moment of zen which I'm just bringing down the hammer on everyone on the server.
So no... Its not really helping out in real life per se, but perhaps it makes me a better gamer since my brain sees that more important than going to work naked.
I'm all for giving RIAA a good gut punch, I just don't want to screw over the musicians I love in the process. I'm no IP / copyright lawyer so I'm looking for some insight here!
Write the artist and ask them what they would prefer. Most would prefer you to buy their T-shirts since they don't make any money off their CDs, but even then some artists always accept alcohol as forms of payment. It differs between artists so why not ask them directly.
Technically you can do ANYTHING with your pc - if anything is what you want to do.
I can't use a Wii controller on my PC.
Well at least without a soldering iron.
who put 3d desktops on the list? what a waste of cpu time.
I think the idea was offload the desktop onto the GPU (who wouldn't be doing anything anyways until a game is loaded), which in theory would free up more CPU cycles for the regular old processor.
Secondly, you can supposedly get better vector graphics and quicker response with a 3d engine for a desktop. The best example of this is of course not Linux for the Nintendo DS. Most 2d looking games for it are actually using a 3d engine because its easier to code for and less intensive on the CPU.
That and it looks just as good at any resolution and screen DPI. It wasn't as big of an issue, but if you have a 30" monitor with an unreasonably high resolution and try to increase the size of your icons on a 2d desktop that doesn't use vectoring... You will notice how pixelated everything looks.
Now, I can wait a day - even a week, for my election results,
So if they can't count the votes in a week, its OK to have someone in power who stole the election? And to top it off, how about someone who puts lives in harms way because they are the commander in chief?
Seriously, I'd be fine waiting for a month or two and maybe even longer to determine who is correctly elected president of the United States.
Secondly, if it was done by hand you have to remember only 50,000,000 people voted in 2004 for the presidential election. If you were to hand count the votes by an official. If an official was responsible for counting 1000 votes then you would only need 50,000 people nation wide helping out.
Which means you'd only need 1,000 officials per state which is a drop in the bucket.
Of course it wouldn't work exactly like that... California, NY, and Texas would need a great deal of vote counters and RI and Alaska would not, but vote counting by hand would not be that difficult if you distributed it correctly. You wouldn't need a month, but at the most 2 weeks and I think the wait is worth it.
The problem is that most Americans are impatient, but don't realize the election affects them for the next four years.
Anyone with a (personal) firewall can control this "phone home" behavior.
And everyone should have locks on their doors.
But its still going to piss me off if I come home and forgot to lock my doors and you're sitting on my couch eating my milk and cookies.
If you cannot detect something at all with light or gravity effects, then it very likely isn't there.
Are you so sure there aren't other spectrum's yet to be discovered? We just might not have the technological know how to detect certain things. Doesn't mean they aren't there.
Take radiation for example. You can't see it, can't taste it, can't feel it and without the proper tools you'd never know you're sitting in it.
Same thing for "dark matter". Yes it could be a bunch of baloney, but its the only thing that somehow makes the model of everything else work on a astronomical scale. Eventually, we might find some other explation but we can't discount anything until we can prove it false.
Currently we don't have the means to prove it false so its just a big assumption. Hopefully the LHC will shed more light this spring on how matter works so we can stack the evidence for and against dark matter in general.
I am no expert in this area, but if all the functions of sleep are so easily replaceable
Actually many animals hunt or graze at certain times of the time. It would be rather wasteful for them to up all the time moving about when conditions aren't right for their normal eating habits.
Imagine a bat unable to sleep during the day or a bear unable to sleep during hibernation.
How can this replace sleep?
Its not intended to replace sleep.
Secondly DARPA usually doesn't do research for public consumption. Eventually it would get there, but for now its going straight to the military.
My bet would be this is aimed for fighter/bomber pilots running 48 hour shifts.
Currently one of the most proscribed drugs in the Airforce is of course the same drugs narcoleptic people use.
Actually, this is straight of a sci-fi military book about war in 2020 I read once. Can't remember the name but the one of the key elements of the story was that soldiers would take a pill that would keep them up for 72 hours straight so they could constantly fight during that time without the need for sleep. However, the fall back is they needed to crash hard afterwards because if they took another pill it would cause permanent damage to their bodies.
I'm sure the same thing would apply to users of this drug. Chances are its not intended to replace long term sleep but rather keep the user active for short period of times when being awake and alert is critical.
Which is why I'd recommend against hiring employees that can't focus.
;)
Wouldn't it be cheaper to just hire 5 incompetent employees from geek squad on contract, outsource the technical question to India, and fire you?
In all seriousness, contract and outsourced labor would trump full time employees because they only get paid when there is work to be done. Of course they'll probaly won't be able to focus, but when someone wants a profit for the quarterly report at upper echelon of management, its easier for them to justify it.
However, if a company cared about quality (and could afford it) they would have devoted your job into separate positions in which there was a full time sales person and a full time repair person. About 10 years ago, I worked for a small time PC repair shop with maybe 4 employees but I still didn't do sales and only did two computers at a time.
When you force people to focus on multiple things at once, even if they can do it right it will lead to burnout fairly quickly. Interruptions do cause unexpected stress to a work environment and can really hamper things over long term.
Secondly, if you suggested this to the someone who codes in software development world they would start warming up a barrel of tar and start ripping up feather pillows.
Personally in my current job (neither PC repair nor Coding), I ignore interruptions and do not respond to IMs or emails due to the fact it would be rude to the client. In between conversations, I'll respond but otherwise I just have to shut it out due to the nature of the job.
Yes it is instant but does it find the right one. Now I've noticed (IMO) Google has gotten better lately, but often if you are searching certain topics it is very painful to find one that is really what you were looking for.
And back to the original topic of email... If you had hundreds or even thousands of emails back and forth between the same people over again with the same subject or similar subjects over the course of a year, it makes it hard to search for one in particular since searching by subject or person doesn't help you.
Do traditional drives fail if the same sector is written to over and over again as well?
No, but they'll fail either reading or writing over time regardless if you are writing or just reading just because the drive is moving. Even if you cool your standard drive, eventually it could just fail because it was left on for 10 years (since an active drive is constantly spinning).
Now its not guaranteed to fail, but the chances of a standard HDD failing that you only read from and don't write it is far greater than a SSD that you put files on it one time and don't write further.
I think SSD shine in archival types of things that you don't plan on trashing and rewriting that often such as image collections, movies, and MP3s. That said, swap disks, scratch disk, and cache file directories would logically still have better performance on your spinning platter drives and if that drive goes belly up you haven't lost much.
With no human crew on board, the ability to improvise and solve new problems is seriously hampered.
We aren't talking about the Mars mission. You can always fly a helicopter out there if you had to within a few hours.
Most of the time, when something major goes wrong on a tower they don't try to fix it other than shut everything down and abandon the tower. Chances are, if they couldn't shut it down remotely they couldn't do it in person which puts lives in danger anyways.
Watch a season of Deadliest Catch and get back to us with your revised automation estimate. Granted the ship size is different, but when things go Charlie Foxtrot on the high seas you need not so automatic-able judgement call decisions made - and good luck getting a helo on a pitching and rolling ship.
Actually, when I watched "Deadliest Catch" and "Ice Road Truckers" I wondered to myself when they are going to fully automate both tasks.
For one, an automated fishing boat no longer needs any cabins or space for human living. Hence, they can be water tight sealed like a submarine before leaving the docks and could simply capsize and not sink. Hopefully it would be designed to right itself automatically through buoyancy The trawling part of the ship could be separate which could store the catch and still not interfere with the water tight part of the ship.
Heck, the things could work 24/7 and automated cow ships could refuel them in the open waters.
As far as "Ice Road Truckers" the argument against would most likley be what about the live truckers. Well, if they were all automated then the trucks could talk with each other about accidents and slow downs etc etc.
The lobbyist, the bureaucrat, and committee staff become all the more powerful.
The simpler solution would be take the power and money out of the Federal government and put it back in the hands of the states. Hell, maybe even reinstate the senators being chosen by state governments again.
Not an elegant solution, but now the lobbyists have to spend 50x the money they would have before in bribes to get what they want. The problem with centralized government we have now is that yes it can get things done better and faster, but that also opens up bribes and corruption since its easier to focus on a handful of people compared to the thousands of individuals it would take to bribe all state governments.
We need people in war because it helps keep us out of it - well that's the theory anyway
Actually, if you look at the past 5,000 years of human history, I'm pretty sure that fact doesn't help one bit.
In fact, I would argue that humans are the perpetrators of all atrocities so far because they were in the war in the first place.
Would an AI or a guy sitting in an air conditioned bunker freak out like the US troops did during the My Lai Massacre and start shooting everyone in sight?
No my friend, history has shown that war is never gruesome enough for man and if you take away people's guns, tanks, and jets they'll murder each other with their bare hands.
The neocortex is incredibly complex; not even small neuronal networks are well understood. To suggest that a computer can accurately simulate them is ridiculous.
Are you saying that the brain is so complex that its run by magic? Or maybe humors? Or angels pushing little buttons on mini-calculators?
I don't know about you, but I live in a logical universe where things can be explained by physics, chemistry, biology and all sorts of things that make sense.
A brain is made of atoms, chemicals, and biological parts so I'm pretty sure we could explain it eventually. It may take 50 more years of research, but saying its too complex to ever understand is like the Church telling Galileo there is no need to study astronomy further since we didn't need to understand it.
Uh, if you are old enough to vote then no one is suggesting making it illegal for you to buy GTA.
Directly no, I could still get it, but its the chilling effect on the industry that I would be more concerned about. So they next time they decide to make such a game, the publisher might be less inclined to not support a developer creating it. Hence, even though it would still be legal for me to buy the game, it just would be less likley to be even created in such an environment.
Why on earth should all kids be allowed to go and buy GTA IV, Soldier of Fortune or any similar game?
Why not if the parents approve?
If your legal guardian feels that you are old enough and responsible to enjoy said entertainment then it should be their right. It should also be their right to prevent their child from playing such things if they so desire by not giving the money to their kids in the first place and/or monitoring their internet activities.
If you bring up tobacco and alcohol, those things are of course dangerous and have been scientifically proven to cause harm. That said, once you are 18 then I believe you should be able to put whatever into your body you feel like, but a parent giving his kids cigarettes is about as negligent as giving them some mercury or cyanide to play with.
Video games and even content of pornographic nature has never been conclusively shown to cause physical or mental harm to the average human. Yes, there are cases where people play a video game and flip out (like kids jumping out of windows because they thought they could fly like in Pokemon), but the same thing could be said about a psycho who reads the Bible or Koran and kills someone because he claims god told him to do it.
Again, if a parent feels their child can handle it or just don't care, they'll buy it for them anyways. Its kind of just stupid to have more laws on an issue that in reality is a moot point.
This single issue is so important that I will vote for Gulianni. His policies may include 1984 type directives, but at least he will not make GTA V illegal.
Truth be told (which I am rather embarrassed about now), I voted for Bush in 2000 because and only because of Tipper Gore and Lieberman's stance on video games.
Of course in my defense, not in my wildest dreams would I ever think Bush would pass something like the PATRIOT Act, get us embroiled in a war, and keep the budget in check instead of giving us a 9 trillion dollar deficit.
So to be fair, given the choice between Clinton and Gulianni, I'd vote for Clinton mostly because Gulianni scares me because it appears that he believes in what he says and what he says is that he doesn't mind torture and the removal of very critical things like haebus corpus.
So given the choice of the possibility ending up being in prison for crimes I didn't commit but was forced to confess through torture or not having Grand Theft Auto V... I'll go with the choice that causes me and the rest of the citizens (who would be more likley to be in prison than I would) to suffer least.
I don't like the idea, but you have to have priorities.
Truth be told, I'd like to see Ron Paul as President just because he and congress would be fighting, vetoing, and 2/3s over ruling over everything and there wouldn't be enough free time for little things like these video game laws.
And since Ron did vote against the PATRIOT Act, I'd hope he veto such a thing. I really don't think his benefit as a libertarian As for gutting the Federal Government, he wouldn't have the power since Congress would be opposed to such a thing so at least it would result in Congress not being able to pass stuff willy nilly and we might even get a shut down like we did with Clinton and Gingrich.
Since there's no corresponding personal downside for bad performance, the CEO is financially motivated to "go long,"
If the corporations got smart, they'd hire CEOs at only 10% higher than the lowest paid employee but give him massive stock options that he can only cash in in 10 years that will make him more money than he would if they paid him upfront. Hence, if he totally destroys the company he'll loose the money. If he is successful, he can retire early.
Someone who believes that the government should be sold off in a fire sale because corporations with a profit-motive can provide those services cheaper and better is naive at best.
Here's the deal. I support Ron Paul not because he would do any of that (He couldn't even if he wanted to because of congress) but he would most likley veto everything and cause a government shut down.
The problem is that congress simply passes laws non-stop without much reading or thinking about what they are passing. Doesn't matter which side of aisle you are on because generally its much of the same from both sides. If we could have some sort of delay in the law creation process it would at least give the nation some breathing room before the next DMCA, Patriot Act, and whatever law that takes away more rights or makes the economic system more complicated.
Remember, when Gingrich and Clinton shutdown the government. Sort of the same thing will happen and things actually improved because of that for a while.
Even if we could have just 4 years of this, I really think we will at least postpone a massive influx of laws.