And crime in terms of human rights violations to produce them would continue unabated, and possibly worsen. Or were you under the impression that coca leaves are harvested by happy campesinos working in shady groves for huge paychecks? Or that opium poppies are harvested and processed by smiling farmers who are well-treated, well-fed, and get four weeks of vacation a year?
Plenty of legal products have a production chain that begins under conditions that range from hostile to just plain illegal. Nike sweatshops, for example. Coke, with its huge investments in apartheid South Africa. Coltan miners in South America (coltan is an integral part of the capactirs found in pretty much any piece of electronic equipment on the market today). ANYTHING made in China or Indonesia.
I'm not saying that these things should be made illegal, just that in this age when people want to boycott Nike for using slave labor, and argue that buying Nike products is an implicit endorsement of the system Nike uses, those same people shouldn't then turn around and claim that drug use is a "victimless crime".
Frankly, I was hoping that there'd be an opportunity for those of us who are old and/or out of shape to do something more to help the war effort than just giving blood. I can't shoot for beans, but I can run cables and configure routers and code and so on and so on. I'd love to do something meaningful.
Yeah, you better lay down some disclaimers for posting an article that is as blatantly racist as this one. I mean, come on:
Just before leaving office, Clinton, quietly sent Congress a request for an additional
US$800 million in military aid for Israel, a gift no doubt aimed at securing his future in publishing and Hollywood. Soon after, in a startling
coincidence, Clinton received a book contract for $12 million.
The "Jews run Hollywood and New York" stuff is old, tired, and disgusting. What's next? An article that says "America is mobilizing its black citizens, who are better athletes and more savage fighters"?
Articles like this one perpetuate the kinds of attitudes that caused this thing in the first place.
"Debt of Honor" ended with a Japanese pilot slamming a 747 into the Capitol; "Executive Orders" began in the immediate aftermath of that attack and dealt with a subsequent BioWar against the US.
Airliners, it is sadly true, make extremely effective weapons. A single SAM hit will not take one out, and it would take a few Sparrowhawks to do the job. Or so I've heard.
I think the more accurate question might be "who played Oregon Trail just for the hunting". I know I did--and that was as an adult, mind you, when I was working for a School District that had OT installed on several computers.
What counts as violence? Does the hunting "sim" in Oregon Trail and Oregon Trail II count as violence? Seriously, because I always liked Oregon Trail.
Otherwise...SimCity (SimAnything, really), the Sims, RollerCoaster Tycoon. Whatever the new version of "Disney's Coaster" is called. (I always loved that game.)
Anyway, I think we need to know what the definition of violence is in this case, because some games that none of us would consider violent (like the aforementioned Oregon Trail) might not qualify.
The thing is, it's not up to a computer to determine where the strike zone is. It's up to the umpire. Different umps call the zone more tightly or more loosely than other umps. What's going to happen when this thing throws a fastball to the outside corner and the ump calls it a ball? Who wins, computer or umpire?
I remember the first time somebody ever accused me of cheating (mostly because it was only a few months ago). Since I wasn't, it made me feel pretty good--a kind of perverse acknowledgement that I was playing well.
Thanks, Jon. I was going to ask about this same thing, since I saw Hidden Fortress a while ago, and don't recall it being anything like Star Wars. Whenever I hear this comparison I just have to go "huh?".
Doesn't InkLink (that Shockwave pictionary game) already do this?
Yeah, it does. And everybody hates the ads and routinely mocks them. I really miss the little Shockwave tic-tac-toe game that you could play while InkLink loaded (not that I played it a lot--gotta love the T1), which they have since replaced with an advertisement.
I thought the Brits showed ads between shows only, for like ten minutes. Guess I was wrong.
Religious arguments against RPGs usually take the form of "thought equals deed", i.e. if you conceive of it, it is tantamount to having done it. Often, people point to the Bible verse that says, and here I paraphrase, that if you lust after a woman in your heart you have committed adultery.
The problem with this kind of argument, and the argument presented in the post above, is twofold. First, it is based on what I believe to be a flawed reading of the Bible. Second, it ignores the extremely important doctrine of free will.
A lot of the Bible is misinterpreted. Because it is a received text, and the time during which it was written is long, long gone, people who take a literalist approach to the Bible are saddled with a lot of things that simply do not hold. Christians who point to teachings from Leviticus and Deutoronomy are attempting to follow rules that Christ himself mocked. They read the Bible, but do not understand it--Christ mocked the Pharisees for excessively strict adherence to Temple law. See The Humor of Christ by Elton Trueblood. It is entirely possible, even probable, that Christ was making fun of Pharisees in the verse on adultery that I paraphrase above.
But I think the real argument against the AC's post, troll though it may be, is that it completely ignores the doctrine of free will, specifically as it relates to RPGs.
If you accept that man has free will, which most branches of Christianity do, then you accept that God gave man free will so that mankind would freely choose to be in relationship with God, because God loved mankind enough that he would not force us into a relationship with him. People give lip service to this idea, but rarely follow it to its logical conclusion, which is this: in order to make a choice, you must be cognizant of the fact that there IS a choice, and you must know what you are choosing between. You must be able to imagine the consequences of making a wrong choice: "If I punch this jerk in the face, he'll hit me back and we'll probably end up getting arrested." Clearly, the Lord gave us our imaginations to USE, not to shut away. Just as clearly, thought CANNOT equal deed--if it did, then you would suffer spiritual consequences every time you made a decision of any kind, no matter what your ultimate choice.
I strongly believe that using your imagination is not and cannot be wrong, even from a spiritual point of view. It is patently obvious that you do not cast magic spells when you play an RPG that has magic, just as you do not actually shoot the border guards in a spy RPG, or pilot a spaceship in a sci-fi RPG. Satan does not lurk between the covers of RPGs. Satan hides behind those who twist the word of God into a message of hatred and intolerance. Remember this: John 3:16 says "For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life," and John 3:17 doesn't say "unless you're gay or not white or a woman." That's the word of man, my friends. That's what you have to watch out for.
So I guess you consider Bill Shatner as a *good* actor?
I don't know about the AC, but I would. People who say he's not have never given a good objective look at his 'Star Trek' performances. Like every actor, he has things he's good in and things he's not good in (viz. Marlon Brando in 'The Godfather' vs. Marlon Brando in 'The Island of Dr. Moreau; Robert DeNiro in 'Taxi Driver' vs. Robert DeNiro in 'The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle'). He's very, very good as Captain Kirk, in pretty much anything. Shatner's performances as Kirk are much more varied and nuanced than Stewart's as Picard. Stewart is a much more horrendous scenery-chewer, and he seems to be all about stentorian bombast.
The same is true for Elvis. A couple of his movies--the ones he *wanted* to do, the more serious, dramatic ones--are great in every sense of the word. People are finally starting to realize that Elvis could have been a great actor if the studios had given him a chance to be something other than "that long-haired freak who sings". He should have gotten the breaks that Sinatra did--and Sinatra became a great dramatic actor (witness "The Manchurian Candidate") because he refused to be cast as "the singer" all the time.
Shatner will get his due someday, just like Stallone and Elvis and everyone else that snobs like to shit all over.
ps I love it when people pull out the "classical training" crap in defense of Stewart; Shatner gained fame first as a Shakespearean actor too--it's meaningless.
pps For proof, if I say "Star Trek V", what's your reaction? I thought so. But if you watch it, really, seriously watch it, and compare it to "Insurrection"--it holds up well. Especially the part where Kirk denies Sybok and snarls out "I NEED my pain!"
You've got to unfold the thing to climb in, and it's like a fighter cockpit. No wonder it's got such great acceleration--the damn thing is about the size of a go-kart! Put some skinny guy at the wheel and watch him take off.
This thing is smaller and lighter than the F355 (or whatever they used, I forget). It doesn't have to lug around the weight of that huge 12-cylinder engine. The t-zero is an "engineer's car", as they say--every scrap of weight savings they could take, they did. Hell, it pretty much *is* a go-kart. I bet they saved on weight by severely limiting the size and number of batteries.
Call me when they get an electric car that can do this (or even close to it) with me at the wheel. I'm six-four, 375--a big fat bastard.
If my name were also Bruce Springsteen, and I had a personal web site at www.brucespringsteen.com, would "the" Bruce Springsteen be able to take it away from me?
If brucespringsteen.com is a legit fan site (which it appears to be) and isn't making money (which it appears not to be) then "the" Bruce Springsteen shouldn't be able to do anything about it. Billy Joel notwithstanding, most musicians don't have their names trademarked.
Re:How about a remake of Star Trek V?
on
ST:TMP Fixer Upper
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· Score: 1
I don't know...I saw ST5 again just recently and sat down to really watch it for the first time since I saw it in theaters. It somehow didn't seem that bad anymore. I would certainly see it again before I would watch any piece of anything having to do with Next Generation.
I mean, the whole thing is worth watching to see Kirk snarl "I need my pain!" at Sybok.
How can you truely tell me that these WIPO rules aren't a direct violation of the first amendment??
The WIPO is not an organization of the government of the United States, and is therefore not bound by the Constitution of the United States. If the WIPO were a U.S. government agency, you'd have a point. The first amendment doesn't really apply here.
There are several real advantages to colonizing the ocean first, but primary among them is this: if anything goes wrong, the colonists can be evacuated quickly (unless, of course, it's a really huge disaster). Assuming that ocean colonists could get to relative safety, it would be fairly easy (as these things go) to dispatch an underwater rescue mission.
When that Russian sub went down, for example, if the Russians hadn't been such idiots about it, the sailors probably could have been rescued. Or am I remembering incorrectly?
Moon colonists would be completely screwed. Unless things have completely changed, you can't scramble for a shuttle launch the way you can scramble a sub.
But I've said it before and I'll say it again: we should be on the moon *now*, dammit. We should be celebrating the 20th (if not the 25th!) anniversary of the Lunar colonies, we should be reading articles in Time magazine about the first generation of children born on the moon, we should be hearing about how the moon was used as a staging area for the launch of our Mars expedition, "now in its tenth year and still making incredible discoveries every day". We are so far behind where we should be...what the hell happened?
Instead of "go fever" NASA is petrified of *anything* going wrong. Not that they shouldn't be, but there has to be a happy medium somewhere, between too bold and too frightened.
And we should be back on the moon, for crying out loud.
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And crime in terms of human rights violations to produce them would continue unabated, and possibly worsen. Or were you under the impression that coca leaves are harvested by happy campesinos working in shady groves for huge paychecks? Or that opium poppies are harvested and processed by smiling farmers who are well-treated, well-fed, and get four weeks of vacation a year?
Plenty of legal products have a production chain that begins under conditions that range from hostile to just plain illegal. Nike sweatshops, for example. Coke, with its huge investments in apartheid South Africa. Coltan miners in South America (coltan is an integral part of the capactirs found in pretty much any piece of electronic equipment on the market today). ANYTHING made in China or Indonesia.
I'm not saying that these things should be made illegal, just that in this age when people want to boycott Nike for using slave labor, and argue that buying Nike products is an implicit endorsement of the system Nike uses, those same people shouldn't then turn around and claim that drug use is a "victimless crime".
I never got it to work with my Palm VII. YMMV. Try the demo first.
Frankly, I was hoping that there'd be an opportunity for those of us who are old and/or out of shape to do something more to help the war effort than just giving blood. I can't shoot for beans, but I can run cables and configure routers and code and so on and so on. I'd love to do something meaningful.
The DVD version definitely has that scene. I just played it a couple weeks ago.
No, it guarantees that the government will not restrict your ability to say what you want. The First Amendment doesn't apply to corporations.
Just before leaving office, Clinton, quietly sent Congress a request for an additional
US$800 million in military aid for Israel, a gift no doubt aimed at securing his future in publishing and Hollywood. Soon after, in a startling
coincidence, Clinton received a book contract for $12 million.
The "Jews run Hollywood and New York" stuff is old, tired, and disgusting. What's next? An article that says "America is mobilizing its black citizens, who are better athletes and more savage fighters"?
Articles like this one perpetuate the kinds of attitudes that caused this thing in the first place.
Airliners, it is sadly true, make extremely effective weapons. A single SAM hit will not take one out, and it would take a few Sparrowhawks to do the job. Or so I've heard.
:)
Otherwise...SimCity (SimAnything, really), the Sims, RollerCoaster Tycoon. Whatever the new version of "Disney's Coaster" is called. (I always loved that game.)
Anyway, I think we need to know what the definition of violence is in this case, because some games that none of us would consider violent (like the aforementioned Oregon Trail) might not qualify.
The thing is, it's not up to a computer to determine where the strike zone is. It's up to the umpire. Different umps call the zone more tightly or more loosely than other umps. What's going to happen when this thing throws a fastball to the outside corner and the ump calls it a ball? Who wins, computer or umpire?
I remember the first time somebody ever accused me of cheating (mostly because it was only a few months ago). Since I wasn't, it made me feel pretty good--a kind of perverse acknowledgement that I was playing well.
Thanks, Jon. I was going to ask about this same thing, since I saw Hidden Fortress a while ago, and don't recall it being anything like Star Wars. Whenever I hear this comparison I just have to go "huh?".
Amen to that.
Yeah, it does. And everybody hates the ads and routinely mocks them. I really miss the little Shockwave tic-tac-toe game that you could play while InkLink loaded (not that I played it a lot--gotta love the T1), which they have since replaced with an advertisement.
I thought the Brits showed ads between shows only, for like ten minutes. Guess I was wrong.
I don't think Purdy actually had anything to do with this review (other than having written the book).
The problem with this kind of argument, and the argument presented in the post above, is twofold. First, it is based on what I believe to be a flawed reading of the Bible. Second, it ignores the extremely important doctrine of free will.
A lot of the Bible is misinterpreted. Because it is a received text, and the time during which it was written is long, long gone, people who take a literalist approach to the Bible are saddled with a lot of things that simply do not hold. Christians who point to teachings from Leviticus and Deutoronomy are attempting to follow rules that Christ himself mocked. They read the Bible, but do not understand it--Christ mocked the Pharisees for excessively strict adherence to Temple law. See The Humor of Christ by Elton Trueblood. It is entirely possible, even probable, that Christ was making fun of Pharisees in the verse on adultery that I paraphrase above.
But I think the real argument against the AC's post, troll though it may be, is that it completely ignores the doctrine of free will, specifically as it relates to RPGs.
If you accept that man has free will, which most branches of Christianity do, then you accept that God gave man free will so that mankind would freely choose to be in relationship with God, because God loved mankind enough that he would not force us into a relationship with him. People give lip service to this idea, but rarely follow it to its logical conclusion, which is this: in order to make a choice, you must be cognizant of the fact that there IS a choice, and you must know what you are choosing between. You must be able to imagine the consequences of making a wrong choice: "If I punch this jerk in the face, he'll hit me back and we'll probably end up getting arrested." Clearly, the Lord gave us our imaginations to USE, not to shut away. Just as clearly, thought CANNOT equal deed--if it did, then you would suffer spiritual consequences every time you made a decision of any kind, no matter what your ultimate choice.
I strongly believe that using your imagination is not and cannot be wrong, even from a spiritual point of view. It is patently obvious that you do not cast magic spells when you play an RPG that has magic, just as you do not actually shoot the border guards in a spy RPG, or pilot a spaceship in a sci-fi RPG. Satan does not lurk between the covers of RPGs. Satan hides behind those who twist the word of God into a message of hatred and intolerance. Remember this: John 3:16 says "For God so loved the world, he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him shall not perish but shall have everlasting life," and John 3:17 doesn't say "unless you're gay or not white or a woman." That's the word of man, my friends. That's what you have to watch out for.
I don't know about the AC, but I would. People who say he's not have never given a good objective look at his 'Star Trek' performances. Like every actor, he has things he's good in and things he's not good in (viz. Marlon Brando in 'The Godfather' vs. Marlon Brando in 'The Island of Dr. Moreau; Robert DeNiro in 'Taxi Driver' vs. Robert DeNiro in 'The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle'). He's very, very good as Captain Kirk, in pretty much anything. Shatner's performances as Kirk are much more varied and nuanced than Stewart's as Picard. Stewart is a much more horrendous scenery-chewer, and he seems to be all about stentorian bombast.
The same is true for Elvis. A couple of his movies--the ones he *wanted* to do, the more serious, dramatic ones--are great in every sense of the word. People are finally starting to realize that Elvis could have been a great actor if the studios had given him a chance to be something other than "that long-haired freak who sings". He should have gotten the breaks that Sinatra did--and Sinatra became a great dramatic actor (witness "The Manchurian Candidate") because he refused to be cast as "the singer" all the time.
Shatner will get his due someday, just like Stallone and Elvis and everyone else that snobs like to shit all over.
ps I love it when people pull out the "classical training" crap in defense of Stewart; Shatner gained fame first as a Shakespearean actor too--it's meaningless.
pps For proof, if I say "Star Trek V", what's your reaction? I thought so. But if you watch it, really, seriously watch it, and compare it to "Insurrection"--it holds up well. Especially the part where Kirk denies Sybok and snarls out "I NEED my pain!"
Duh, dude, it says "F550" right in the title of the article!
This thing is smaller and lighter than the F355 (or whatever they used, I forget). It doesn't have to lug around the weight of that huge 12-cylinder engine. The t-zero is an "engineer's car", as they say--every scrap of weight savings they could take, they did. Hell, it pretty much *is* a go-kart. I bet they saved on weight by severely limiting the size and number of batteries.
Call me when they get an electric car that can do this (or even close to it) with me at the wheel. I'm six-four, 375--a big fat bastard.
If brucespringsteen.com is a legit fan site (which it appears to be) and isn't making money (which it appears not to be) then "the" Bruce Springsteen shouldn't be able to do anything about it. Billy Joel notwithstanding, most musicians don't have their names trademarked.
I mean, the whole thing is worth watching to see Kirk snarl "I need my pain!" at Sybok.
The WIPO is not an organization of the government of the United States, and is therefore not bound by the Constitution of the United States. If the WIPO were a U.S. government agency, you'd have a point. The first amendment doesn't really apply here.
Well, the cassette decks are already obsolete. :)
When that Russian sub went down, for example, if the Russians hadn't been such idiots about it, the sailors probably could have been rescued. Or am I remembering incorrectly?
Moon colonists would be completely screwed. Unless things have completely changed, you can't scramble for a shuttle launch the way you can scramble a sub.
But I've said it before and I'll say it again: we should be on the moon *now*, dammit. We should be celebrating the 20th (if not the 25th!) anniversary of the Lunar colonies, we should be reading articles in Time magazine about the first generation of children born on the moon, we should be hearing about how the moon was used as a staging area for the launch of our Mars expedition, "now in its tenth year and still making incredible discoveries every day". We are so far behind where we should be...what the hell happened?
And we should be back on the moon, for crying out loud.