To make sure you'll sell your game, just make sure that the official game packaging is so INCREDIBLE AMAZING AND COOL that the gamer will miss having the experience of owning it. Include a fantastic shining printed manual in full color with high-quality paper (a detailed manual, by the way), a CD whose cover has bright 3D effects, a futuristic or medievalistic box, one or more game character miniatures, coupons with codes allowing a gamer to obtain things he would love (such as game magazine subscriptions, calendars, official strategy guide etc.) at noticeable discounts as well as coupons to access ultra cool sections of the official website, such as, let's say, one where the buyer would be able to register his name and have the chance to win a trip to know the game developers with everything paid, and so on and so forth.
In short, add value to your official package by offering things a pirate would never be able to provide and people will simply prefer buying from you.
The virtual host provider where the domain of the company I work for is located uses SpamCop's services. Recently I noticed e-mail addresses from a regional free ISP started being blocked. As this could cause us to lose sales, I asked them to remove the SpamCop service from our domain. They weren't happy with this, but I insisted, after all, one potential customer's e-mail lost is a potential sale lost. For non-destructive spam management I think locally running POPFile or some other kind of bayesian filter is always the best solution.
Let's put this stright. If company/service/whatever A is big and company/service/whatever B is small, and one thinks this difference to be "unjust", thus asking the government to help, the said "injustice" doesn't go away, because then you end up having company/service/whatever B plus Gov. as the big guy, and the original company/service/whatever A Alone as the small one.
Actually, anything that gets the status plus Gov. will always, without exception, be bigger and more powerful than anything what hasn't this status. So, either you give up in thinking that the difference in size is by itself unjust, or you'll have an unsolvable problem in hand. Why? Because you'll then have to start making decisions on HOW MUCH of the plug Gov. status you have to add to each and every company/service/whatever so that A plus X% Gov. perfectly balances out B plus Y% Gov., both perfectly balancing out C plus Z% Gov., and so on and so forth, with X%, Y%, Z% etc. having to be constantly (almost in real time really) reevaluated and redistributed. After all, neither A, nor B, nor C etc. are static and unchangeable.
And that's not to mention the problems arising from new players entering the market and old players leaving it, or the even worse problems arising from external governments also backing their global companies/services/whatevers to counter-compensate the local governments backing of their local companies/services/whatevers...
Weren't they also addicted to magic? And didn't they almost, you know, destroy the entire world once?
No, those were the Highborne, a magic-practicing disliked faction inside the anti-magic Night Elven society of the Azshara kingdom. They moved away from the Azshara kingdom after the disaster, becoming the High Elves with a magic-addicted kingdom entirely for themselves. After having been almost wiped out by the Burning Legion they renamed themselves Blood Elves. Their way of fighting the Burning Legion was distrusted by the Alliance, and thus they became members of the Horde.
They also enslaved an entire race (orcs), and gave birth to the scourge due to their own corruptability.
Regarding the enslavement, it happened only after the Orcs failed in exterminating the entirety of the Human race. So, notice this: instead of killing the Orcs as the Orcs tried killing them, the Humans held them prisioners. And, curiously enough, it was this enslavement, cruel as it might have been, that allowed these Orcs to free themselves from the Burning Legion, and only then from the Humans.
And regarding the Scourge, no, who created it was the Lich King (an undead Orc) under the direct orders of the Burning Legion. He had some human agents, but this isn't the same as having the human kingdoms en masse helping him. The humans who became the Scourge were victims of a magical plague launched by the Lich King, and this is far from being the same as an entire race (the Orcs) accepting demonic powers in a (perceived) advantageous deal.
Neither of these are the political entity "the humans" which is a member of "the Alliance". Its actual name is Kingdom of Stormwind, comprising the capital city, the surrounding forest territory and nearby vassal powers and territories. Calling them "the Humans" is just an alias, as much as talking about "the Night Elves" is more directly understood than saying "Darnassus", etc.
In reality, according to the lore nothing prevents a character from being a Darnassian Human or a Stormwindian Night Elf. The game mechanic is what requires all Human characters to be Stormwindian, all Night Elves to be Darnassian, all Dwarves to be Ironforgian, all Gnomes to be Gnomeragan Exiles etc.
WoW doesn't have static alignments. A priest, for example, can be of the Discipline persuasion (more or less what would be the Neutral alignment in D&D), pure Holy (Good), pure Shadow (Evil), or a mixture of two or of the three. Furthermore, you can change your distribution of talents anytime by spending some gold. So, at least in theory, you could be a Schizophrenic Priest too: good one day, evil the next, good AND evil in the 3rd, neither in the four...
When the "Enterprise" series was first announced as a prequel for TOS with a much lower technological level and almost no contact with other species, I thought: "OMG! Cool! This will be Star Trek before all the 'easiness' of the teleporter! Niiiice!!!"
Then, when I watched the very first episodes, what had they to show me? The captain being teleported out out of a crumbling space station...
Needless to say, I stopped watching the series at that exact moment, which was it's jumping the shark for me. A good decision, by the way, for from what I've hear it got even worse afterwards.
I beg to differ. While the Horde isn't clearly Evil, it's nonetheless slightly "more evil" than the Alliance.
Take the Orcs, for example: they allowed themselves to be near completely corrupted by demonic powers. They are now free from this corruption, sure, but in the end they lose in comparison to the Alliance, for the member races of the Alliance did not become corrupt, they fought against the Burning Legion's corruption so fiercely that they managed to avoid the corruption.
Now, look at the Undead (Forsaken): they, like the Orcs, managed to become free from the corruption. But a lot of the evil influence from the Burning Legion remains, just look at the biological experiments they do.
The new Blood Elves are addicted to magic, and their culture revolves around the idea that totaliarianism is A Good ThingTM. For instance, see how did they manage to get Paladins: they captured and enslaved a holy entity that would have given holy powers to them had they simply asked! But no, Blood Elves don't ask, Blood Elves take!
And the Trolls were cannibals that only gave up on cannibalism because the Orcs told them that they wouldn't be allowed to join the Horde if they kept doing that.
From the entire Horde, the only race that is clearly and plainly good are the Tauren. They're with the Horde due to their sense of duty, because the Orcs for having saved them, but that's it.
Now, let's look at the Alliance:
The villest thing the Night Elves did was to go around in a killing spree against Furbolgs, thinking all of them were corrupted and thus killing the minority that wasn't. They also built a new giant tree when their gods told them "no" (the shock! the horror!).
The Gnomes messed up badly and ended poisoning their own capital after being invaded by trolls. Now they have to live with the Dwarves.
The Dwarves dig big holes, what the Night Elves think violates "Mother Azeroth" (or something like that).
The Draenei had bad luck and ended in a forced landing in Azeroth while fighting the Burning Legion.
And the Humans, ah, the Humans! The most horrendous thing they did was not to pay the masons that rebuilt their capital, these masons now being pretty revolted with the nobles...
So, all things considered, I don't think both are equal in the moral level. The Horde is clearly, at least, a "bad neighbour". Were not for the existence of the much more evil Burning Legion, in comparison to which the Horde is made of saints, and the moral difference between the Alliance and the Horde would be really undisputable.
You shouldn't have rushed to get to level 60. I played for 4 hours a day at a slow pace, enjoying the storyline, getting to know the game world, learning (and changing!) professions, participating in roleplay events and PvP, helping other players inside and outside my guild, doing lots of non-experience rewarding quests (the gray ones) etc., and by doing so I reached level 60 after eight (yes, eight) months. It was much, much more enjoyable than going the "power leveling" path.
And since I reached 60 I'm still playing the same character, slowly acquiring gold to purchase my epic mount, trying to get some end game gear but not being obsessed with it, going in some raids with my guild, fine-tuning my addon collection, and so on and so forth.
So, I'd say that WoW is kinda like a Mac: an integral experience. If you focus on a single aspect of the game it gets boring pretty fast. If you try to do all it allows you to do, then there's almost no limit to what you get from it. I am very far from getting bored, that's for sure.:)
The blurb on the site for Science magazine is less circumspect about the findings: "The acceptance of evolution is lower in the United States than in Japan or Europe, largely because of widespread fundamentalism and the politicization of science in the United States."
This isn't only lack of circumspection. It's also a symptom of the exactly same problem that's being denounced. Why? Because it's pure rhetorics. This is easy to see if you keep the structure but change some key words. Here's an example:
"The acceptance of evolution is higher in Iceland than in the United States, largely because of widespread scientism and the politicization of science in the Europe."
In short, statements as these two are utterly useless and damaging to both science and religion.
If you has a right 'x', then someone has a duty to provide you 'x'. That someone can be either: a) someone else; or b) yourself. In case it's someone else, then he will fulfill that duty either: i) voluntarily; or ii) forced. And finally, if he's doing it voluntarily, he'll either do it: 1) by charity; or 2) by profit.
It's not sad if what happens is "a.i.1", "a.i.2" or "b". It's sad if what happens is "a.ii".
For those that know medieval history and related subjects (Church history, Christian symbolism etc.), The da Vinci Code offers the same experience. You see where he got it wrong and that makes reading the book not much fun. The same applies to Humberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
By the way, I've read that some people that have a really hard time keeping suspension of disbelief with historical movies are typographic experts. That's because it's common for these movies to show signs, letters and the like with fonts that didn't yet exist at the time. Go figure...
I guess this is due to the fact that spambots running on hijacked computers send e-mails to randomly generated addresses. So, if for some reason the spammers don't have enough control over their zombies to block them in a timely manner from sending e-mails to a given list of addresses, they'll end up having to pay fines due to they not being compliant with the law if such a randomly generated address happened to be a no-spam signed one. Easiest solution for them would be no law at all.
There's an excelent article related to this question of reality vs. virtual life, Surviving the Fall of the State, by William S. Lind, an anti-war, anti-Bush, and anti-neo-con conservative specialized in war theory that writes regularly on LewRockwell.com. Here's an excerpt:
I am not talking about "survivalism" here (...) [but about] an understanding of how to live in reality for the time when all the virtual realities collapse.
Virtual realities lie at the heart of Brave New World, aka the New World Order, "globalism," "democratic capitalism" (as the neo-cons define it), etc. The bargain Brave New World offers is this: if you will only do as Marcuse advises and trade the Reality Principle for the Pleasure Principle, we will enmesh you in virtual realities that will make you happy. True, you will lose your free will, because our virtual realities will condition you to think as we want you to. But they will also give you anything and everything you want. So what if none of it is real? All that matters is that you feel happy, right now.
(...) all of them [virtual realities], without exception, eventually collapse. The complex structures and vast resources required to sustain them are evanescent. (...) answers to the Fourth Generation [of modern war] and to Brave New World, false images both, can only be found at the individual and family level, because that is where the decision to live by the Reality Principle must be made.
Here's TWO! Why I Am Not A Christian [drew.edu] and The Age Of Reason [thomaspaine.org] are both philosophical classics. The Secular Web's Library [infidels.org] has plenty of other examples of atheists mulling over the ideas presented by theists. And that's just what I know of off the top of my head.
No, they aren't. The first choose a very small subset of conclusions of arguments, then refuted those conclusions based on axioms from a different philosophical framework. This isn't a summa by any means. An actual summa would first deal with these philosophical axioms themselves and only after having cleared things in this domain would proceed to analyse problems of a higher order. The scope of subjects the author try dealing with would require a multi-volume book to be fairly dealth with. As he doesn't do that, the character of the text as a rethorical work, not a philosophical one, becomes clear.
Paine's work goes a little further (I enjoyed a lot this book when I read it some years ago), but also fails in dealing with the whole set of previous works done on these fields. Most of what Paine talks about are arguments that christian philosophers had they themselves devised and refuted centuries earlier. For example, Saint Augustine had gone much further than him on the question of the validity of sacred texts. He not only said that there was no reason for one to accept what's in the Bible (not only the supernatural parts, but even the plain historical ones), but that even if God himself appeared in front of him saying that each word in the book is literally true, that he still would have no reason whatsoever to believe it. Paine's skepticism seems much like a kids' joke when compared to Augustine's skepticism. The actual difference between them is that Paine goes only half-way both in his skepticism as well as in the development of his work. You could cut out Augustine's own skeptic texts from his works, put Paine's text in its place, and Augustine would still complement them by deepening his criticism and by developing a solution out of it.
Why didn't Paine answer to the augustinian solution, prefering to reuse arguments that where refuted in the IV century? Because the didn't care to know better. This is the same behaviour I've found in all the documents I've read in infidels.org over the years: argue agains the weak argument so that you don't have to argue against the strong one. But this is for a very solid reason: the few atheists I know that gave themselves the trouble of deepening their studies ended up giving up their atheism. Once you cross a certain delimiting level you're no longer an "infidel" and your text isn't eligible to the archive anymore.;)
If religion worked as you say it does, then after this much time there would be at least a few things that were beyond contestation. But religion hasn't even proved that the things it talks about (god, souls, reincarnation, supernatural things in general) exist. If biology was in the same state, there would be some people that have strong, reasonable arguments that suggest that living things don't exist!
Believe it or not, there're such arguments. German Idealism comes to mind, and no amount of lab research is strong enough to refute its reasoning. You need other tools. Without them, try as best as you can to wave a Nature article in front of Kant to see what happens! The most ironic of all this? Kant is the father of present-day scientific methodology. Popper's falseabilism is little more than applied kantism...
You surely never heard about, much less read, Saint Augustine and/or Saint Thomas Aquinas, nor the whole bunch of religious sages in between both. Or, to take an Eastern approach, the work of people like Nagarjuna or Shankaracarya. Otherwise you'd know that religions (actual ones, not this thing Americans usually take as such) follow the first pattern, not the second.
Example: do you know how you write a summa? (Summa is the name of the scientific literary genre developed in the Middle Age.) This is how:
1) Define the subject you'll be talking about, and put it the the form of a question;
2) Collect all (and I mean ALL) that has been said on that subject, and list them, one by one;
3) After writing down the list, add your own solution to the problem;
4) Answer each one of the items your list in step 3, proving your solution is better that each one of those.
Example:
Question: Is X a kind of Y?
First section: What has already been said.
A and B say yes, because of this and this and this.
C and D say no, because of this and that and such.
E says the question is imprecise, because of that and that.
F and G say...
Second section: The author's opinion.
In contrast, I answer that... And, based on this, I reply to A, B, C, D, E, F and G thus:
Third section: Replies to previous thinkers.
A and B are correct in saying yes, but not for the reason they used. Actually...
C and D are partially correct in the reasoning they used to say no, but...
In regards to E saying that the question is imprecise, I've elaborated this as an independent question, see page 'n'.
F and G's reasoning forgets that X...
By the way, I know of no atheist willing to do such a thing when attacking religion. It's easier, it seems, to act based on prejudices than to seek good information and answer it point by point. When will we see a "Summa Against God"? Never, I bet.
Because he is mixing two different concepts of evolution: the biological and the social. Modern biology departed with that, but earlier evolutionists used to indulge in it a lot. Darwin himself used to take natural selection as a process of complexification, and you can find in old biology textbooks charts of the evolutionary tree that show more complex organism at the top, and simpler ones at the bottom, as a way to illustrate the concept.
By the way, the concept of social evolution is also taken as bogus nowadays. One might talk about technological progress and call this "evolution", but this is hardly the same as taking one society as more evolved than another.
The text is misleading in the way it defines the word "evolution". It equates "more evolved" with "complex", and "less evolved" with "simple". This isn't correct. "Evolution", at least in biology, which is the topic here, is a concept almost synonym to "adaptation". Any life form able to survive in a given habitat is as much "evolved" as any other life form that is also able to survive in that habitat. The amount of cells it's composed of has no meaning to this. If algae are able to survive in the new oceans, and other complex life forms aren't, the that algae is by definition more "evolved" than those complex organisms. We, humans, are as much "evolved" as the bacteria that live inside us and as the amoeba that float in the air around us. And this same amoeba is more "evolved" than a Tiranossaurus Rex, because it is alive, and the TRex is dead. That's all there is to it.
There's a mod out there that allows you to unlock the romances in Baldur's Gate 2 no matter what you are. With it you can not only have your female character romancing with the other female characters (as well as with the guy whose name I forgot), but have all the romances running simultaneously. Talk harem...
Many good RPGs have this effect on me. It's easier in cut scenes, but I guess those would count more as movies. Anyway, although much rarer it has already happened to me at in game content.
By the way, one scene I think I should have cried was Aeris death in FFVII. The problem there was that the game mechanics contradicted the whole "death is once and for all" thing, so the suspension of disbelief didn't happen. All I could think about was "why aren't they using a Phoenix Down in her?". Same happened in FFVI with the death of that knight I don't remember the name. BTW, when I see a DC Comics or Marvel character die these days, my reaction is to start laughing...
Rule of thumb: if you wanna a sad death scene to work in your game (or fiction work, or whatever), do not allow your characters to "ressurrect" by any mean other than a game reload. Death, to be taken seriously, must be a serious business.
"These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations."
Now, go slowly over all the other articles, one by one, mentally appending to each one this nice sentence: "provided it doesn't go contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." See what you get...
Computers operate from logic, be it the simple boolean one or the highly abstracted contemporary mathematical logic in its many forms (heuristic, fuzzy, even paraconsistent) that in the end get translated into boolean anyway. Humans, on the other hand, do logic as one among many function which aren't themselves logical.
Of course you can try to emulate the non-logical functions inside a logical framework, but by doing so the machine gets trapped inside a kind of "Gödel paradox", forever unable to explain itself for lack of sufficient axioms ("sufficient" meaning "infinite"). Self-consciousness is then literally impossible.
This isn't so bad as it seems. It only means that machines, no matter how advanced, are and will always be extensios of human faculties. In other words, we are their conscience, in the exact same sense that we're the conscience "behind" our hands and feet. Or, if you like to see it this way, machines and humans are already a single thing, as they have always been, since the instant our first ancestor decided to throw his first rock.
The day humanity ends is the day all machines die. Some of them can of course keep working after that, more or less as some of our body organs sometimes stay working after our brain dies. But death is already there, unavoidable, only waiting for the power source to shut down. Death is the only real human-machine "singularity", that point after which we know nothing about. Any other is mere fiction.
Slashdot Mirror
To make sure you'll sell your game, just make sure that the official game packaging is so INCREDIBLE AMAZING AND COOL that the gamer will miss having the experience of owning it. Include a fantastic shining printed manual in full color with high-quality paper (a detailed manual, by the way), a CD whose cover has bright 3D effects, a futuristic or medievalistic box, one or more game character miniatures, coupons with codes allowing a gamer to obtain things he would love (such as game magazine subscriptions, calendars, official strategy guide etc.) at noticeable discounts as well as coupons to access ultra cool sections of the official website, such as, let's say, one where the buyer would be able to register his name and have the chance to win a trip to know the game developers with everything paid, and so on and so forth.
In short, add value to your official package by offering things a pirate would never be able to provide and people will simply prefer buying from you.
The virtual host provider where the domain of the company I work for is located uses SpamCop's services. Recently I noticed e-mail addresses from a regional free ISP started being blocked. As this could cause us to lose sales, I asked them to remove the SpamCop service from our domain. They weren't happy with this, but I insisted, after all, one potential customer's e-mail lost is a potential sale lost. For non-destructive spam management I think locally running POPFile or some other kind of bayesian filter is always the best solution.
Let's put this stright. If company/service/whatever A is big and company/service/whatever B is small, and one thinks this difference to be "unjust", thus asking the government to help, the said "injustice" doesn't go away, because then you end up having company/service/whatever B plus Gov. as the big guy, and the original company/service/whatever A Alone as the small one.
Actually, anything that gets the status plus Gov. will always, without exception, be bigger and more powerful than anything what hasn't this status. So, either you give up in thinking that the difference in size is by itself unjust, or you'll have an unsolvable problem in hand. Why? Because you'll then have to start making decisions on HOW MUCH of the plug Gov. status you have to add to each and every company/service/whatever so that A plus X% Gov. perfectly balances out B plus Y% Gov., both perfectly balancing out C plus Z% Gov., and so on and so forth, with X%, Y%, Z% etc. having to be constantly (almost in real time really) reevaluated and redistributed. After all, neither A, nor B, nor C etc. are static and unchangeable.
And that's not to mention the problems arising from new players entering the market and old players leaving it, or the even worse problems arising from external governments also backing their global companies/services/whatevers to counter-compensate the local governments backing of their local companies/services/whatevers...
Regarding the enslavement, it happened only after the Orcs failed in exterminating the entirety of the Human race. So, notice this: instead of killing the Orcs as the Orcs tried killing them, the Humans held them prisioners. And, curiously enough, it was this enslavement, cruel as it might have been, that allowed these Orcs to free themselves from the Burning Legion, and only then from the Humans.
And regarding the Scourge, no, who created it was the Lich King (an undead Orc) under the direct orders of the Burning Legion. He had some human agents, but this isn't the same as having the human kingdoms en masse helping him. The humans who became the Scourge were victims of a magical plague launched by the Lich King, and this is far from being the same as an entire race (the Orcs) accepting demonic powers in a (perceived) advantageous deal.
Neither of these are the political entity "the humans" which is a member of "the Alliance". Its actual name is Kingdom of Stormwind, comprising the capital city, the surrounding forest territory and nearby vassal powers and territories. Calling them "the Humans" is just an alias, as much as talking about "the Night Elves" is more directly understood than saying "Darnassus", etc.
In reality, according to the lore nothing prevents a character from being a Darnassian Human or a Stormwindian Night Elf. The game mechanic is what requires all Human characters to be Stormwindian, all Night Elves to be Darnassian, all Dwarves to be Ironforgian, all Gnomes to be Gnomeragan Exiles etc.
WoW doesn't have static alignments. A priest, for example, can be of the Discipline persuasion (more or less what would be the Neutral alignment in D&D), pure Holy (Good), pure Shadow (Evil), or a mixture of two or of the three. Furthermore, you can change your distribution of talents anytime by spending some gold. So, at least in theory, you could be a Schizophrenic Priest too: good one day, evil the next, good AND evil in the 3rd, neither in the four...
When the "Enterprise" series was first announced as a prequel for TOS with a much lower technological level and almost no contact with other species, I thought: "OMG! Cool! This will be Star Trek before all the 'easiness' of the teleporter! Niiiice!!!"
Then, when I watched the very first episodes, what had they to show me? The captain being teleported out out of a crumbling space station...
Needless to say, I stopped watching the series at that exact moment, which was it's jumping the shark for me. A good decision, by the way, for from what I've hear it got even worse afterwards.
I beg to differ. While the Horde isn't clearly Evil, it's nonetheless slightly "more evil" than the Alliance.
Take the Orcs, for example: they allowed themselves to be near completely corrupted by demonic powers. They are now free from this corruption, sure, but in the end they lose in comparison to the Alliance, for the member races of the Alliance did not become corrupt, they fought against the Burning Legion's corruption so fiercely that they managed to avoid the corruption.
Now, look at the Undead (Forsaken): they, like the Orcs, managed to become free from the corruption. But a lot of the evil influence from the Burning Legion remains, just look at the biological experiments they do.
The new Blood Elves are addicted to magic, and their culture revolves around the idea that totaliarianism is A Good ThingTM. For instance, see how did they manage to get Paladins: they captured and enslaved a holy entity that would have given holy powers to them had they simply asked! But no, Blood Elves don't ask, Blood Elves take!
And the Trolls were cannibals that only gave up on cannibalism because the Orcs told them that they wouldn't be allowed to join the Horde if they kept doing that.
From the entire Horde, the only race that is clearly and plainly good are the Tauren. They're with the Horde due to their sense of duty, because the Orcs for having saved them, but that's it.
Now, let's look at the Alliance:
The villest thing the Night Elves did was to go around in a killing spree against Furbolgs, thinking all of them were corrupted and thus killing the minority that wasn't. They also built a new giant tree when their gods told them "no" (the shock! the horror!).
The Gnomes messed up badly and ended poisoning their own capital after being invaded by trolls. Now they have to live with the Dwarves.
The Dwarves dig big holes, what the Night Elves think violates "Mother Azeroth" (or something like that).
The Draenei had bad luck and ended in a forced landing in Azeroth while fighting the Burning Legion.
And the Humans, ah, the Humans! The most horrendous thing they did was not to pay the masons that rebuilt their capital, these masons now being pretty revolted with the nobles...
So, all things considered, I don't think both are equal in the moral level. The Horde is clearly, at least, a "bad neighbour". Were not for the existence of the much more evil Burning Legion, in comparison to which the Horde is made of saints, and the moral difference between the Alliance and the Horde would be really undisputable.
You shouldn't have rushed to get to level 60. I played for 4 hours a day at a slow pace, enjoying the storyline, getting to know the game world, learning (and changing!) professions, participating in roleplay events and PvP, helping other players inside and outside my guild, doing lots of non-experience rewarding quests (the gray ones) etc., and by doing so I reached level 60 after eight (yes, eight) months. It was much, much more enjoyable than going the "power leveling" path.
:)
And since I reached 60 I'm still playing the same character, slowly acquiring gold to purchase my epic mount, trying to get some end game gear but not being obsessed with it, going in some raids with my guild, fine-tuning my addon collection, and so on and so forth.
So, I'd say that WoW is kinda like a Mac: an integral experience. If you focus on a single aspect of the game it gets boring pretty fast. If you try to do all it allows you to do, then there's almost no limit to what you get from it. I am very far from getting bored, that's for sure.
In short, statements as these two are utterly useless and damaging to both science and religion.
If you has a right 'x', then someone has a duty to provide you 'x'. That someone can be either: a) someone else; or b) yourself. In case it's someone else, then he will fulfill that duty either: i) voluntarily; or ii) forced. And finally, if he's doing it voluntarily, he'll either do it: 1) by charity; or 2) by profit.
It's not sad if what happens is "a.i.1", "a.i.2" or "b". It's sad if what happens is "a.ii".
I don't think the "PayPal - Click Here to Donate" buttons would suddenly disappear. Quite the opposite.
For those that know medieval history and related subjects (Church history, Christian symbolism etc.), The da Vinci Code offers the same experience. You see where he got it wrong and that makes reading the book not much fun. The same applies to Humberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.
By the way, I've read that some people that have a really hard time keeping suspension of disbelief with historical movies are typographic experts. That's because it's common for these movies to show signs, letters and the like with fonts that didn't yet exist at the time. Go figure...
Exactly! That's why Bill Gates is still as poor as he was when he founded Microsoft.
Oh, wait...
I guess this is due to the fact that spambots running on hijacked computers send e-mails to randomly generated addresses. So, if for some reason the spammers don't have enough control over their zombies to block them in a timely manner from sending e-mails to a given list of addresses, they'll end up having to pay fines due to they not being compliant with the law if such a randomly generated address happened to be a no-spam signed one. Easiest solution for them would be no law at all.
Paine's work goes a little further (I enjoyed a lot this book when I read it some years ago), but also fails in dealing with the whole set of previous works done on these fields. Most of what Paine talks about are arguments that christian philosophers had they themselves devised and refuted centuries earlier. For example, Saint Augustine had gone much further than him on the question of the validity of sacred texts. He not only said that there was no reason for one to accept what's in the Bible (not only the supernatural parts, but even the plain historical ones), but that even if God himself appeared in front of him saying that each word in the book is literally true, that he still would have no reason whatsoever to believe it. Paine's skepticism seems much like a kids' joke when compared to Augustine's skepticism. The actual difference between them is that Paine goes only half-way both in his skepticism as well as in the development of his work. You could cut out Augustine's own skeptic texts from his works, put Paine's text in its place, and Augustine would still complement them by deepening his criticism and by developing a solution out of it.
Why didn't Paine answer to the augustinian solution, prefering to reuse arguments that where refuted in the IV century? Because the didn't care to know better. This is the same behaviour I've found in all the documents I've read in infidels.org over the years: argue agains the weak argument so that you don't have to argue against the strong one. But this is for a very solid reason: the few atheists I know that gave themselves the trouble of deepening their studies ended up giving up their atheism. Once you cross a certain delimiting level you're no longer an "infidel" and your text isn't eligible to the archive anymore.
Believe it or not, there're such arguments. German Idealism comes to mind, and no amount of lab research is strong enough to refute its reasoning. You need other tools. Without them, try as best as you can to wave a Nature article in front of Kant to see what happens! The most ironic of all this? Kant is the father of present-day scientific methodology. Popper's falseabilism is little more than applied kantism...
Example: do you know how you write a summa? (Summa is the name of the scientific literary genre developed in the Middle Age.) This is how:
1) Define the subject you'll be talking about, and put it the the form of a question;
2) Collect all (and I mean ALL) that has been said on that subject, and list them, one by one;
3) After writing down the list, add your own solution to the problem;
4) Answer each one of the items your list in step 3, proving your solution is better that each one of those.
Example:
By the way, I know of no atheist willing to do such a thing when attacking religion. It's easier, it seems, to act based on prejudices than to seek good information and answer it point by point. When will we see a "Summa Against God"? Never, I bet.
Because he is mixing two different concepts of evolution: the biological and the social. Modern biology departed with that, but earlier evolutionists used to indulge in it a lot. Darwin himself used to take natural selection as a process of complexification, and you can find in old biology textbooks charts of the evolutionary tree that show more complex organism at the top, and simpler ones at the bottom, as a way to illustrate the concept.
By the way, the concept of social evolution is also taken as bogus nowadays. One might talk about technological progress and call this "evolution", but this is hardly the same as taking one society as more evolved than another.
The text is misleading in the way it defines the word "evolution". It equates "more evolved" with "complex", and "less evolved" with "simple". This isn't correct. "Evolution", at least in biology, which is the topic here, is a concept almost synonym to "adaptation". Any life form able to survive in a given habitat is as much "evolved" as any other life form that is also able to survive in that habitat. The amount of cells it's composed of has no meaning to this. If algae are able to survive in the new oceans, and other complex life forms aren't, the that algae is by definition more "evolved" than those complex organisms. We, humans, are as much "evolved" as the bacteria that live inside us and as the amoeba that float in the air around us. And this same amoeba is more "evolved" than a Tiranossaurus Rex, because it is alive, and the TRex is dead. That's all there is to it.
There's a mod out there that allows you to unlock the romances in Baldur's Gate 2 no matter what you are. With it you can not only have your female character romancing with the other female characters (as well as with the guy whose name I forgot), but have all the romances running simultaneously. Talk harem...
Yes, we have! See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heretic_(computer_gam e).
Many good RPGs have this effect on me. It's easier in cut scenes, but I guess those would count more as movies. Anyway, although much rarer it has already happened to me at in game content.
By the way, one scene I think I should have cried was Aeris death in FFVII. The problem there was that the game mechanics contradicted the whole "death is once and for all" thing, so the suspension of disbelief didn't happen. All I could think about was "why aren't they using a Phoenix Down in her?". Same happened in FFVI with the death of that knight I don't remember the name. BTW, when I see a DC Comics or Marvel character die these days, my reaction is to start laughing...
Rule of thumb: if you wanna a sad death scene to work in your game (or fiction work, or whatever), do not allow your characters to "ressurrect" by any mean other than a game reload. Death, to be taken seriously, must be a serious business.
Now, go slowly over all the other articles, one by one, mentally appending to each one this nice sentence: "provided it doesn't go contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations." See what you get...
Computers operate from logic, be it the simple boolean one or the highly abstracted contemporary mathematical logic in its many forms (heuristic, fuzzy, even paraconsistent) that in the end get translated into boolean anyway. Humans, on the other hand, do logic as one among many function which aren't themselves logical.
Of course you can try to emulate the non-logical functions inside a logical framework, but by doing so the machine gets trapped inside a kind of "Gödel paradox", forever unable to explain itself for lack of sufficient axioms ("sufficient" meaning "infinite"). Self-consciousness is then literally impossible.
This isn't so bad as it seems. It only means that machines, no matter how advanced, are and will always be extensios of human faculties. In other words, we are their conscience, in the exact same sense that we're the conscience "behind" our hands and feet. Or, if you like to see it this way, machines and humans are already a single thing, as they have always been, since the instant our first ancestor decided to throw his first rock.
The day humanity ends is the day all machines die. Some of them can of course keep working after that, more or less as some of our body organs sometimes stay working after our brain dies. But death is already there, unavoidable, only waiting for the power source to shut down. Death is the only real human-machine "singularity", that point after which we know nothing about. Any other is mere fiction.