It's not the case that every theory is unprovable, we're not talking about god here, we're talking about natural history - a topic for which there is an awful lot of evidence still buried on our planet. It may be that we haven't proven any one theory to any reasonable degree of confidence yet but it doesn't mean it's impossible, we can still fathom an awful lot from the remnants of that era that are still very much on our earth.
It's perfectly possible that fossil records and so forth could demonstrate a failure to evolve relative to the change in geology to a reasonable degree even if we're not there yet.
If you couldn't interpret the meaning of my post then I'm not going to rephrase it for you as it means you're obviously too mentally inept to understand anything much.
Except they can't get to a lot of that money because it's held offshore and if they bring it onshore they'll lose an awful lot of it in taxes.
What use is the $102bn they hold offshore if they refuse to bring whatever is left of it post-tax into the US when there's little of value that makes sense to invest in in the countries they're holding said money?
Unless they plan on moving their HQ and all their talent to Ireland and such or just accept the tax deduction and bring it into the US (or another country) then it's completely useless. There's nothing in Ireland worth spending $46bn on that will also allow them to recoup the cost.
Android was designed with the potential for arbitrary screen resolutions from the outset, in contrast Apple pretended fragmentation was an Android problem rather than accept the reality that fragmentation is a necessary fact of progress (because for progress to occur, hardware has to change).
The net result is that with iOS you often end up with programs where they either just zoom in and create a pixelated wreck of your lovely retina display, or they just use up an absolutely tiny fraction of your total screen space.
That's what he's referring to, Apple's complete lack of foresight and the horrible mess it leads to if developers don't update their app each time Apple has a screen change.
Have any of BAE systems products ever actually been used? I tended to think they were in the business of producing ships, planes and vehicles that don't actually have any relevance in the modern world and were mostly just for show and profit like the F35 that barely even flies, the dogfighting Eurofighter for all that air combat we don't have nowadays and the Type 45 destroyers that don't actually have any weapons yet.
It's because it's one of those things that companies advertise but never actually plan on having to do in practice, so they have no process or procedure in place as to how to file in the accounts that you just gave someone $5k for a referral and admin staff being admin staff figure rather than deal what is to them a relatively complex problem compared to the simple word processing they normally do prefer to make up excuses as to why you can't have it.
I've actually seem companies like this with other policies too, even when it comes to such common place things like bonuses, where they advertise "up to 25% bonus" but don't ever actually pay out bonus regardless of performance simply because they've not bothered to sit down and figure out how it's calculated, how it's paid and what pot it comes out of. The net result being that it's just an advertising scam.
"I realize maybe we could argue about the rate of change, but didn't the previous ice ages... kinda... supposedly happen rather quickly, too?"
This isn't something you can simply write off with "I suppose we could...". There are different scales of quickly. Slow changes in the past have seen changes of a few degrees over many millions of years, some of the faster events have seen changes of a few degrees over tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
We're seeing a few degrees change over hundreds of years. That's a problem and something largely unprecedented in Earth's history without there being an obvious outside factor such as a massive meteor impact or similar. We'd know about it already if one of those were the cause, in fact no, we probably wouldn't know about it because we'd all be dead already. You can see similar events in periods of high volcanic activity and so forth also, or through noticeable solar changes but the problem is we can't find any of these that correlate with the issue either.
So therein lies the problem, the only thing we can find that correlates with the problem is us. Maybe something else is to blame and we don't know what yet, but realistically, given the rate of change, history tells us that whatever causes this much change isn't hard to find, and again, the only easy to find possibility is once more, us.
For this kind of change you need a global event, and what in the world at the moment is the only thing we can see producing measurable releases of gases altering the consistency of the atmosphere which is demonstrably a cause of increase temperature? There are no large chains of volcanos, there are no meteor impacts, the only thing we can find is is us.
The worst part is he seems to miss the obvious with his comment as follows:
"During the warming periods is when biodiversity has exploded and life has bloomed. It is during the cold periods that we've gotten the worst of the great extinctions."
If he stopped and thought about it for a second, he'd ask the obvious question - why, if we're undergoing a period of rapid warming, are we also undergoing one the most rapid extinction events man has known? By his logic we should be seeing an increase in biodiversity not an extremely rapid decrease given that things are getting warmer.
"They may be immoral, but the moment you start legislating morality, you open up a can of worms that can't be unopened."
As others have pointed out that's exactly what laws do, that's kind of the whole point.
The problem is that it's certain vested interests defining what is moral and what is not rather than the populace in general.
For example, the general populace would seem to disagree with the music industry on whether file sharing should be a crime, or if it should how heavily it should be punished.
So therein lies the problem, we already legislate morals, that's exactly what we do, the issue is that we have to legislate in a manner representative of the interests of society in general and in modern western democracy there is no scope for that due to the power of vested corporate and wealthy private interests.
So if Stratfor has done nothing illegal it's irrelevant if by "not illegal" the things they've done are things the general populace think should be legal but the corrupted legislature wont act.
It doesn't really matter what the relative computing power is between the two generations, it's simply a question of what proportion of that was used in single player. Games like Goldeneye on the N64 could've looked better in single player on the hardware available, but didn't precisely because they wanted a uniform experience between single player and split screen, it was built with that very fact in mind.
It's really no different now, major franchises like Halo all the way up to the latest Halo 4, Gears of War upto the latest Judgement and so forth still have split screen but again it's because they've been designed with this in mind - it's true of the Lego games also. They do lag a bit more than single player though so there's still a genuine and obvious cost to getting the balance of visual quality and split screen right. Other games like GRAW as I pointed out simply degrade quality in split screen to cope with it, and others just don't have it.
Even in the N64 days this was true, split screen wasn't uniformly available across every game.
I'm not sure what people like you and tepples are after, you seem to be dying for some imagined fantasy world where every game has split screen and where full visual quality is retained even with it as if it's a zero cost process. This has never been true and never will be, it's absolute fantasy and nothing more. I'd wager there's as many split screen games now as there ever was, but where there isn't, there isn't with damn good reason. Hell, some games aren't even worth playing split screen when it means cramming you into half the size of the TV - Minecraft supports split screen on the 360, but it feels quite horrible being crammed into such a small segment of the screen even on a 46"+ display. It's supported, but it's a painful experience.
"Exceptions don't make the rule. I could name many examples of the opposite: non-hardcore Japanese games in which the west has no equivalent (in kind or in size)."
But you're talking about genres and genres are a single element of the overall market. The fact Japanese games have their own genres, lore, graphical styles and so forth says nothing about whether Japan has hardcore game development studios and casual ones too. It's irrelevant to the discussion.
"Incorrect, and it's easy to prove. In general, more games don't make it out of Japan than the other way around. This isn't new, and again the examples you give are exceptions. When you don't sell to mass international market, you don't get as much money to fund making hardcore games."
Again, your last paragraph was entirely irrelevant and takes the discussion on a complete tangent. Most of the insularity of some Japanese game developers is the language barrier whilst Western studios are generally developing for a common language, or set of languages.
None of this changes the fact though that it's nonsensical to compare western hardcore games market to the Japanese casual games market, rather than comparing the Japanese casual games market to the western casual games market where you find that yes, they both have one, yes they're both a similar relative size and yes, they both have similar experiences of the market. The same goes for western hardcore AAA development vs. Japanese hardcore AAA development.
Rather than just accept it is what it is, you seem desperate to take the conversation of on entirely random tangents to do with differing genres and styles. That's nothing to do with this discussion.
"He is comparing like for like. He's demonstrating that Japanese makers are leaving the "hardcore" market for casual/niche markets (while western ones are staying)"
Did you read my post? I gave some real actual examples of companies in both cases proving that this is absolutely not true. He even pointed out the companies himself - the likes of Capcom, Sega and so forth that are still very much producing hardcore oriented titles.
Similarly every major publisher in the west isn't just sticking with hardcore, they all have a casual games segment now and often quite sizeable ones.
The point is that Japanese or Western, companies in both areas are doing exactly the same - they're still pursuing hardcore, but are becoming more focussed and picky about what they fund because of the heightened risk due to increase cost, but they're also increasing development of casual titles. There's simply no difference between the Japanese and Western industry in this respect, none whatsoever, they're following the exact same path.
Most of the loss of split screen is because it was beginning to get too difficult to afford the processing power.
Even Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter at the start of the generation, a relatively graphically weak game had to dumb down the graphics and controls when you went split screen.
There are still many hundreds of split screen games out there though, it just tends not to be the most graphically latest and greatest.
So fundamentally the point still stands, you can still do everything that doesn't require an internet connection offline.
They're really two different markets though, you can't compare the casual focussed markets in Japan to the hardcore markets in the West - more sensible would be comparison of the casual markets of Japan with the casual markets of the West - the likes of Rovio, Zynga and so forth being the obvious Western examples.
It's no coincidence that the Japanese firms you cited that are still somewhat focussed internationally like Sega and Capcom are the only development studios that produce hardcore games from Japan nowadays.
Ultimately the crux of your argument seems to be that the Japanese developers are smart because they're focussing on the casual market and the Western studios are fighting over scraps because they're only focussed on the hardcore markets. That's only true if you ignore the rather massive mobile gaming revolution that has spawned many successful companies and generated literally many billions of profits in the west too in the last 5 years but I can't fathom on what basis you would ignore that and still draw a meaningful conclusion of comparisons of the Japanese and western studios. It only makes sense to compare like for like and the Japanese studios that do hardcore are struggling as much as the western studios are, whilst similarly the western studios that have taken advantage of the growing casual market are doing as well, arguably even better than the Japanese studios, it's really the same story in both regions.
"Western developers - and any console manufacturer who wants to be an international player - don't have that option. So manufacturers, game developers and retailers are all pretty much locked in a fight to the death with each other for the few shreds of profit left"
It seems a bit meaningless to say they're scrapping over "shreds of profit" given that even Europe overtook Japan in terms of net spending on video games some years back meaning that the US, followed by Europe, followed by Japan are the largest markets in that order, or in other words, those "shreds of profit" are far and away the majority of the pool given that Japan now only accounts for a much smaller proportion of it.
"compared to what? Think about this. An xbox is useless if unconnected to the internet. Same for a PlayStation 3."
What? Why are they useless? They both still function perfectly, just like with a PC you can't enjoy online content like multiplayer gaming or watch things like iPlayer or Netflix that stream video that's all.
Neither the XBox 360 or PS3 have an online requirement for anything other than online content. The only exception I can think of is if you want to download Live Arcade games on, say, a friend's console and then continue to play them after disconnecting from XBox Live.
"Very little games."
There usually never is more than 10 - 30 on release of a console. I think the XBox One said 15 exclusives on release and then presumably a whole bunch of non-exclusives and possibly even some arcade games, so all in it seems about standard for a console release. Not sure about the PS4's launch lineup though.
"Singapore has a far lower crime rate than America."
What an utterly disingenuous argument. It also has a completely different culture. Singapore is by and large a police state where you can be charged $5000 and be given a year in jail simply for importing chewing gum or porn into the country. Caning pretty much always goes hand in hand with jail time there as a punishment for crime so your assertion that it's use as a rehabilitative measure separate from jail is false given that fact.
Saudi Arabia also has lower crime rates than the US so by your logic should the US bring in beheading as a punishment? The chopping off of hands of thieves?
The fact that you think justice systems should be about punishment highlights precisely why you're struggling to understand why more modern, progressive societies have outlawed this kind of physical punishment - because making it about rehabilitation and paying back the victim and society has time and time again shown to be far more successful as difficult as it is to go against the primitive mob mentality of vengeful violence instead.
By all accounts it seems like one of the killers of the soldier in London the other day saw your sort of "justice" when he tried to get into Somalia from Kenya and the Kenya police arrested him and raped him before letting him go. That didn't turn him into a reformed individual, it made him so bitter and full of hatred of society that he went out and killed some guy in cold blood in the middle of the street in the most brutal way possible. Yeah, great job a bit of physical punishment and humiliation did there - thanks to the Kenyan police sharing your views on punishment we ended up with a guy finally losing it on our streets in what was effectively an attempt at murder suicide given that he ran with a machete at armed police to try and die death by cop.
If you think humiliating and harming people is the best way to turn them around then the further you're kept away from ideas of justice the better. It doesn't work and can sometimes have quite the opposite effect. The fact you had to completely misrepresent justice in and use of caning in Singapore as a kind of magical standalone method of justice that cures everything doesn't exactly add weight to your argument.
One of the guys at the top of EA, Peter Moore, was at the top of Microsoft's XBox program for years too, so it's no surprise really to see the level of collaboration.
I don't think there would've had to have been much lobbying in all honesty, I think the MS-EA relationship is extremely cosy.
Remind me how many people died in the boston bombings again? How did or could guns have helped there exactly?
Remind me how well your firearms trained campus cop fared against the two brothers responsible again?
If we had US gun laws then this would've looked a lot less like a random murder and a whole lot more like an Anders Breivik massacre, so no, how about we don't have US style gun laws here.
The fact the most these guys could muster was a rusty pistol that they appeared to have managed to make little use of and a bunch of knives meaning this was only a one victim attack is actually a vindication of the fact that our gun laws are pretty effective. If even determined killers can't get more than a knackered rusty pistol between two of them then great, our laws are working really well.
British politics has no room for scientific method though because of the way our ill thought out democracy is built (FPTP and so forth) it inevitably descends into a war of populist arguments. The US is arguably even more extreme again in this respect because it's also an inevitable result of the two part state - when you have only two parties realistically competing for power the ultimate result is that you have the two sides sliding towards opposing extremes in their arguments because there are no other parties to offer different ideas that would force a degree of moderation.
I know a lot of people aren't keen on the Lib Dems but there rise at the last election was probably one of the healthiest things to happen to British politics in a long time - for all the things they've done wrong there's little question they have moderated the impact of the Tories somewhat at least and it's why I hope for a coalition next election with Labour (as opposed to a Labour or Tory majority that is anyway).
Healthy democracy requires greater plurality than a mere two parties fighting over 100% of the power.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the case that every theory is unprovable, we're not talking about god here, we're talking about natural history - a topic for which there is an awful lot of evidence still buried on our planet. It may be that we haven't proven any one theory to any reasonable degree of confidence yet but it doesn't mean it's impossible, we can still fathom an awful lot from the remnants of that era that are still very much on our earth.
It's perfectly possible that fossil records and so forth could demonstrate a failure to evolve relative to the change in geology to a reasonable degree even if we're not there yet.
If you couldn't interpret the meaning of my post then I'm not going to rephrase it for you as it means you're obviously too mentally inept to understand anything much.
Except they can't get to a lot of that money because it's held offshore and if they bring it onshore they'll lose an awful lot of it in taxes.
What use is the $102bn they hold offshore if they refuse to bring whatever is left of it post-tax into the US when there's little of value that makes sense to invest in in the countries they're holding said money?
Unless they plan on moving their HQ and all their talent to Ireland and such or just accept the tax deduction and bring it into the US (or another country) then it's completely useless. There's nothing in Ireland worth spending $46bn on that will also allow them to recoup the cost.
Android was designed with the potential for arbitrary screen resolutions from the outset, in contrast Apple pretended fragmentation was an Android problem rather than accept the reality that fragmentation is a necessary fact of progress (because for progress to occur, hardware has to change).
The net result is that with iOS you often end up with programs where they either just zoom in and create a pixelated wreck of your lovely retina display, or they just use up an absolutely tiny fraction of your total screen space.
That's what he's referring to, Apple's complete lack of foresight and the horrible mess it leads to if developers don't update their app each time Apple has a screen change.
Have any of BAE systems products ever actually been used? I tended to think they were in the business of producing ships, planes and vehicles that don't actually have any relevance in the modern world and were mostly just for show and profit like the F35 that barely even flies, the dogfighting Eurofighter for all that air combat we don't have nowadays and the Type 45 destroyers that don't actually have any weapons yet.
It's because it's one of those things that companies advertise but never actually plan on having to do in practice, so they have no process or procedure in place as to how to file in the accounts that you just gave someone $5k for a referral and admin staff being admin staff figure rather than deal what is to them a relatively complex problem compared to the simple word processing they normally do prefer to make up excuses as to why you can't have it.
I've actually seem companies like this with other policies too, even when it comes to such common place things like bonuses, where they advertise "up to 25% bonus" but don't ever actually pay out bonus regardless of performance simply because they've not bothered to sit down and figure out how it's calculated, how it's paid and what pot it comes out of. The net result being that it's just an advertising scam.
"I realize maybe we could argue about the rate of change, but didn't the previous ice ages ... kinda ... supposedly happen rather quickly, too?"
This isn't something you can simply write off with "I suppose we could...". There are different scales of quickly. Slow changes in the past have seen changes of a few degrees over many millions of years, some of the faster events have seen changes of a few degrees over tens to hundreds of thousands of years.
We're seeing a few degrees change over hundreds of years. That's a problem and something largely unprecedented in Earth's history without there being an obvious outside factor such as a massive meteor impact or similar. We'd know about it already if one of those were the cause, in fact no, we probably wouldn't know about it because we'd all be dead already. You can see similar events in periods of high volcanic activity and so forth also, or through noticeable solar changes but the problem is we can't find any of these that correlate with the issue either.
So therein lies the problem, the only thing we can find that correlates with the problem is us. Maybe something else is to blame and we don't know what yet, but realistically, given the rate of change, history tells us that whatever causes this much change isn't hard to find, and again, the only easy to find possibility is once more, us.
For this kind of change you need a global event, and what in the world at the moment is the only thing we can see producing measurable releases of gases altering the consistency of the atmosphere which is demonstrably a cause of increase temperature? There are no large chains of volcanos, there are no meteor impacts, the only thing we can find is is us.
Do you have an alternative peer reviewed theory backed up by verifiable evidence that you'd like to share?
The worst part is he seems to miss the obvious with his comment as follows:
"During the warming periods is when biodiversity has exploded and life has bloomed. It is during the cold periods that we've gotten the worst of the great extinctions."
If he stopped and thought about it for a second, he'd ask the obvious question - why, if we're undergoing a period of rapid warming, are we also undergoing one the most rapid extinction events man has known? By his logic we should be seeing an increase in biodiversity not an extremely rapid decrease given that things are getting warmer.
Who is meg and what does she do for $20?
"They may be immoral, but the moment you start legislating morality, you open up a can of worms that can't be unopened."
As others have pointed out that's exactly what laws do, that's kind of the whole point.
The problem is that it's certain vested interests defining what is moral and what is not rather than the populace in general.
For example, the general populace would seem to disagree with the music industry on whether file sharing should be a crime, or if it should how heavily it should be punished.
So therein lies the problem, we already legislate morals, that's exactly what we do, the issue is that we have to legislate in a manner representative of the interests of society in general and in modern western democracy there is no scope for that due to the power of vested corporate and wealthy private interests.
So if Stratfor has done nothing illegal it's irrelevant if by "not illegal" the things they've done are things the general populace think should be legal but the corrupted legislature wont act.
It doesn't really matter what the relative computing power is between the two generations, it's simply a question of what proportion of that was used in single player. Games like Goldeneye on the N64 could've looked better in single player on the hardware available, but didn't precisely because they wanted a uniform experience between single player and split screen, it was built with that very fact in mind.
It's really no different now, major franchises like Halo all the way up to the latest Halo 4, Gears of War upto the latest Judgement and so forth still have split screen but again it's because they've been designed with this in mind - it's true of the Lego games also. They do lag a bit more than single player though so there's still a genuine and obvious cost to getting the balance of visual quality and split screen right. Other games like GRAW as I pointed out simply degrade quality in split screen to cope with it, and others just don't have it.
Even in the N64 days this was true, split screen wasn't uniformly available across every game.
I'm not sure what people like you and tepples are after, you seem to be dying for some imagined fantasy world where every game has split screen and where full visual quality is retained even with it as if it's a zero cost process. This has never been true and never will be, it's absolute fantasy and nothing more. I'd wager there's as many split screen games now as there ever was, but where there isn't, there isn't with damn good reason. Hell, some games aren't even worth playing split screen when it means cramming you into half the size of the TV - Minecraft supports split screen on the 360, but it feels quite horrible being crammed into such a small segment of the screen even on a 46"+ display. It's supported, but it's a painful experience.
Right, and the relevance of that is what? It's still a more profitable market nowadays than Japan however you cut it.
"Exceptions don't make the rule. I could name many examples of the opposite: non-hardcore Japanese games in which the west has no equivalent (in kind or in size)."
But you're talking about genres and genres are a single element of the overall market. The fact Japanese games have their own genres, lore, graphical styles and so forth says nothing about whether Japan has hardcore game development studios and casual ones too. It's irrelevant to the discussion.
"Incorrect, and it's easy to prove. In general, more games don't make it out of Japan than the other way around. This isn't new, and again the examples you give are exceptions. When you don't sell to mass international market, you don't get as much money to fund making hardcore games."
Again, your last paragraph was entirely irrelevant and takes the discussion on a complete tangent. Most of the insularity of some Japanese game developers is the language barrier whilst Western studios are generally developing for a common language, or set of languages.
None of this changes the fact though that it's nonsensical to compare western hardcore games market to the Japanese casual games market, rather than comparing the Japanese casual games market to the western casual games market where you find that yes, they both have one, yes they're both a similar relative size and yes, they both have similar experiences of the market. The same goes for western hardcore AAA development vs. Japanese hardcore AAA development.
Rather than just accept it is what it is, you seem desperate to take the conversation of on entirely random tangents to do with differing genres and styles. That's nothing to do with this discussion.
"He is comparing like for like. He's demonstrating that Japanese makers are leaving the "hardcore" market for casual/niche markets (while western ones are staying)"
Did you read my post? I gave some real actual examples of companies in both cases proving that this is absolutely not true. He even pointed out the companies himself - the likes of Capcom, Sega and so forth that are still very much producing hardcore oriented titles.
Similarly every major publisher in the west isn't just sticking with hardcore, they all have a casual games segment now and often quite sizeable ones.
The point is that Japanese or Western, companies in both areas are doing exactly the same - they're still pursuing hardcore, but are becoming more focussed and picky about what they fund because of the heightened risk due to increase cost, but they're also increasing development of casual titles. There's simply no difference between the Japanese and Western industry in this respect, none whatsoever, they're following the exact same path.
Most of the loss of split screen is because it was beginning to get too difficult to afford the processing power.
Even Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter at the start of the generation, a relatively graphically weak game had to dumb down the graphics and controls when you went split screen.
There are still many hundreds of split screen games out there though, it just tends not to be the most graphically latest and greatest.
So fundamentally the point still stands, you can still do everything that doesn't require an internet connection offline.
They're really two different markets though, you can't compare the casual focussed markets in Japan to the hardcore markets in the West - more sensible would be comparison of the casual markets of Japan with the casual markets of the West - the likes of Rovio, Zynga and so forth being the obvious Western examples.
It's no coincidence that the Japanese firms you cited that are still somewhat focussed internationally like Sega and Capcom are the only development studios that produce hardcore games from Japan nowadays.
Ultimately the crux of your argument seems to be that the Japanese developers are smart because they're focussing on the casual market and the Western studios are fighting over scraps because they're only focussed on the hardcore markets. That's only true if you ignore the rather massive mobile gaming revolution that has spawned many successful companies and generated literally many billions of profits in the west too in the last 5 years but I can't fathom on what basis you would ignore that and still draw a meaningful conclusion of comparisons of the Japanese and western studios. It only makes sense to compare like for like and the Japanese studios that do hardcore are struggling as much as the western studios are, whilst similarly the western studios that have taken advantage of the growing casual market are doing as well, arguably even better than the Japanese studios, it's really the same story in both regions.
"Western developers - and any console manufacturer who wants to be an international player - don't have that option. So manufacturers, game developers and retailers are all pretty much locked in a fight to the death with each other for the few shreds of profit left"
It seems a bit meaningless to say they're scrapping over "shreds of profit" given that even Europe overtook Japan in terms of net spending on video games some years back meaning that the US, followed by Europe, followed by Japan are the largest markets in that order, or in other words, those "shreds of profit" are far and away the majority of the pool given that Japan now only accounts for a much smaller proportion of it.
"compared to what? Think about this. An xbox is useless if unconnected to the internet. Same for a PlayStation 3."
What? Why are they useless? They both still function perfectly, just like with a PC you can't enjoy online content like multiplayer gaming or watch things like iPlayer or Netflix that stream video that's all.
Neither the XBox 360 or PS3 have an online requirement for anything other than online content. The only exception I can think of is if you want to download Live Arcade games on, say, a friend's console and then continue to play them after disconnecting from XBox Live.
"Very little games."
There usually never is more than 10 - 30 on release of a console. I think the XBox One said 15 exclusives on release and then presumably a whole bunch of non-exclusives and possibly even some arcade games, so all in it seems about standard for a console release. Not sure about the PS4's launch lineup though.
"Singapore has a far lower crime rate than America."
What an utterly disingenuous argument. It also has a completely different culture. Singapore is by and large a police state where you can be charged $5000 and be given a year in jail simply for importing chewing gum or porn into the country. Caning pretty much always goes hand in hand with jail time there as a punishment for crime so your assertion that it's use as a rehabilitative measure separate from jail is false given that fact.
Saudi Arabia also has lower crime rates than the US so by your logic should the US bring in beheading as a punishment? The chopping off of hands of thieves?
The fact that you think justice systems should be about punishment highlights precisely why you're struggling to understand why more modern, progressive societies have outlawed this kind of physical punishment - because making it about rehabilitation and paying back the victim and society has time and time again shown to be far more successful as difficult as it is to go against the primitive mob mentality of vengeful violence instead.
By all accounts it seems like one of the killers of the soldier in London the other day saw your sort of "justice" when he tried to get into Somalia from Kenya and the Kenya police arrested him and raped him before letting him go. That didn't turn him into a reformed individual, it made him so bitter and full of hatred of society that he went out and killed some guy in cold blood in the middle of the street in the most brutal way possible. Yeah, great job a bit of physical punishment and humiliation did there - thanks to the Kenyan police sharing your views on punishment we ended up with a guy finally losing it on our streets in what was effectively an attempt at murder suicide given that he ran with a machete at armed police to try and die death by cop.
If you think humiliating and harming people is the best way to turn them around then the further you're kept away from ideas of justice the better. It doesn't work and can sometimes have quite the opposite effect. The fact you had to completely misrepresent justice in and use of caning in Singapore as a kind of magical standalone method of justice that cures everything doesn't exactly add weight to your argument.
Call the doctor! we have a terminal case of success jealousy.
One of the guys at the top of EA, Peter Moore, was at the top of Microsoft's XBox program for years too, so it's no surprise really to see the level of collaboration.
I don't think there would've had to have been much lobbying in all honesty, I think the MS-EA relationship is extremely cosy.
This has totally turned from humour into an actual nerd fight.
I'll get the popcorn.
Remind me how many people died in the boston bombings again? How did or could guns have helped there exactly?
Remind me how well your firearms trained campus cop fared against the two brothers responsible again?
If we had US gun laws then this would've looked a lot less like a random murder and a whole lot more like an Anders Breivik massacre, so no, how about we don't have US style gun laws here.
The fact the most these guys could muster was a rusty pistol that they appeared to have managed to make little use of and a bunch of knives meaning this was only a one victim attack is actually a vindication of the fact that our gun laws are pretty effective. If even determined killers can't get more than a knackered rusty pistol between two of them then great, our laws are working really well.
British politics has no room for scientific method though because of the way our ill thought out democracy is built (FPTP and so forth) it inevitably descends into a war of populist arguments. The US is arguably even more extreme again in this respect because it's also an inevitable result of the two part state - when you have only two parties realistically competing for power the ultimate result is that you have the two sides sliding towards opposing extremes in their arguments because there are no other parties to offer different ideas that would force a degree of moderation.
I know a lot of people aren't keen on the Lib Dems but there rise at the last election was probably one of the healthiest things to happen to British politics in a long time - for all the things they've done wrong there's little question they have moderated the impact of the Tories somewhat at least and it's why I hope for a coalition next election with Labour (as opposed to a Labour or Tory majority that is anyway).
Healthy democracy requires greater plurality than a mere two parties fighting over 100% of the power.