I like socializing, engaging in intelligence and counter-intelligence operations, and organizing networks of allies and battle groups from time to time... but then again I study psychology and economics at university because that's what I find interesting, and I'm a big chess player. Maybe we just have a different idea of what fun and entertainment is;-)
The truth is, I enjoy lots of different games. MMO's are fun and I like the social meta-game but they tend to take up too much of my time (which would be better spent on projects from work or with my girlfriend). Lately I've been playing quite a bit of Day of Defeat: Source because it's quick to pick up and easy to put down, and despite the auto-organized teams and typically casual nature of the game, VOIP chatting with the other players is still a fun social experience. Team Fortress 2 is also a lot of fun for the same reasons.
Free world PVP also satisfied social gamers. Part of the game is generating and organizing a large social network. If you want to be safe from attack, you need to be bigger and more organized than the next guy. You need military equipment, training and organization. This is how warfare works in the real world and when it works that way in an MMO, it can be fun.
When you have "arena" PVP where the teams are automatically generated by the game itself, it removes the social part of the game. The part of the game where you have to network with other people and organize an army to take control of the free world PVP situation. You might even organize a blockade of critical end-game zones or a siege of a starting city.
EVE online has this sort of spontaneous organization amongst players who are attempting to succeed in free world PVP and obviously the game is quite successful with a niche group at least.
Personally, I love the freedom of free world PVP. In fact, I'd love to play a game with free world PVP and permanent character death... hardcore Diablo 2 on battle.net was one of the most satisfying experiences ever.
Thats another thing to figure out; how can the school punish when the police cannot find any evidence to make a case?
The school is not required to use the same burden of proof that the police are required to use in order to convict in a criminal case. Criminal cases usually require evidence proving the crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." Civil cases usually require evidence to prove the wrong-doing beyond a "preponderance of the evidence," meaning there must be a 51% or greater chance that the wrong-doing occurred. This is why O.J. Simpson was convicted in civil court of killing his wife, but not in criminal court.
At my school, the school punishes infractions of the student code if the Dean feels that a "preponderance of the evidence" supports to disciplinary action. Your school probably has a similar standard, and although it could be more or less than a preponderance, it is most assuredly a lower standard than that required to convict someone of a crime in a court of law.
IANAL, but I did do competition Mock Trial in high school, and this stuff is basically common knowledge.
Good eye! I would point out however that some of the scenes are probably green screened. For example there is a scene showing the arcade moving down the hallway in a grocery store. No way they got the cabinet or a car in there.
This is about an underground gambling ring that fixed Starcraft matches in order to make money off of the bets on those matches. There was no hacking involved, just social engineering. Various pro gamers have been accused of throwing matches as a part of what basically amounts to a conspiracy.
You know, if we legalized, people growing it wouldn't trap it with landmines and junkies wouldn't run around killing people looking for their next fix. Most of the deaths and violence caused by these illegal drugs are caused BECAUSE they are illegal. How can you not see that? Why do you keep making arguments that drugs are dangerous and therefore they should be illegal when all of the reasons you come up with to try and show that they're dangerous are caused BECAUSE they're illegal? You're not thinking this through very intelligently at all.
I'll never OD on marijuana, thanks, so I'll live long enough to annoy you for decades to come. I'll also live long enough to finish my BS in psychology and economics and go on to graduate school.
We should really kill everybody who smokes tobacco too if we go through with this little plan of yours, since it causes lung cancer and all.
Wow, you really showed him. He's surely going to agree with your proposition to execute all drug users now.
Alcohol isn't fundamentally different from other drugs that are currently illegal. It's addictive, it's incapacitating, and you can die of a lethal overdose. It's more harmful to the body than marijuana, and yet you think putting a bullet in the head of everybody who smokes pot is the answer to this social problem? How is that any different from the idea of putting a bullet in the head of everybody who drinks beer, other than the fact that beer happens to be arbitrarily legal at the moment and those other drugs aren't?
You're a fucking moron, but then again I guess that's why you drive a bus for a living instead of doing something meaningful. Thank god you're not in politics. Violence only begets more violence and Americans will fight back against this sort of tyranny. You'll have a civil war on your hands if by some miracle a thin majority of morons who agree with your views manage to pass a law institutionalizing that sort of barbarism.
You forgot the part where there are legions of addicts who can't work because places where they could get jobs test for drugs and deny those who test positive any employment at all. They're forced to turn to crime because we don't allow them to work legitimate jobs.
Furthermore, the drugs they buy from the black market are more dangerous and more expensive than they would be if they were legalized, so the total cost would be less, and they could realistically pay for their habit by mopping the floors at McDonald's or whatever other sorts of jobs those people are likely to have.
I'd write more but I should be working instead of debating this issue with idiots. Do you have any more straw man arguments that rely on circular logic or are you getting tired yet?
Legalization would reduce crime, unemployment, and drug-related violence. The drug cartels would have no source of income and you wouldn't hear about any "mexican drug war." We wouldn't throw away billions of dollars on enforcement agencies, wasting police officers' time chasing pot smokers, etc. -- tax revenues would increase even without a sin tax as the corporations and jobs that would spring up to cultivate cannabis and coca plants would generate tons of income. We'd get out of the recession and stop throwing away money on a fruitless effort. Please do yourself the favor of reading the excellent essay on drug prohibition that is published on the main page of LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. It does a great job of explaining why prohibition is counter-productive; and no, executing everyone who smokes pot in this country will not be a good decision.
I welcome you to try though, that's why the founding fathers left us with the 2nd amendment. To stop assholes like you.
Why don't we kill everyone who drinks beer or sells beer while we're at it? Prohibition doesn't work and it causes much more harm to society than legalization does.
So she's too frail and innocent to learn about the stuff you learned about at her age? How incredibly stupid.
When she ends up pregnant 'cause you didn't educate her, remember that I told you so. If she's horny, keeping her out of sex ed isn't going to keep her from having sex.
I don't want to selectively breed to improve human genetics. I just want to reduce the world's population gradually and naturally by encouraging people to voluntarily reduce the birth rate. Abstinence, condoms, birth control pills, and abortions all have a contribution to offer towards that noble goal.
I'm pretty sure your logic is faulty in thinking that saving the "life" of an unborn fetus is more important than maintaining and improving the quality of life for those who are already born, and developing a sustainable society.
You seem to think that the morning after pill is tantamount to infanticide. We're talking about a group of cells that doesn't even have a brain yet. Killing a fly is more of a sin, at least a fly has a fully developed consciousness.
I'm sorry, there must be some miscommunication here. Access to birth control and education is tantamount to eugenics and "killing less developed nations?" You know, by "no need to contribute to the problem," I meant that there's no reason for us to continue breeding like rabbits.
There are many starving and homeless people right now who would suggest that overpopulation isn't a myth. Even if we can hypothetically sustain infinitely large populations with proper advances in technology, that doesn't change the fact that the cost of things like food, housing, education, cars, and so on increases every time more babies are born and more people start demanding those things. Imagine the utopia we would live in if the earth only sustained 25% of the population it does today.
Yeah, if third-worlders living in poverty were better educated and had more resources to things like condoms, birth control pills and abortion procedures, they probably wouldn't breed so much. However, the reality is that they aren't and they don't, and we've got to deal with it in the present. You don't have to feel like you have to fight against them. It's not a race war, nobody is being "overtaken," but the global economy as a whole is suffering from a scarcity of supply and an abundance of demand. There's no need to contribute to the problem just because we aren't the ones "causing" it.
I feel like abortion causes more good than harm. What's worse, killing an unborn fetus or allowing a child to grow up in poverty or with abusive parents, eventually leading them into alcoholism and a dead-end job mopping floors, or into a "gangster life" where they rob, kill and steal to survive?
The guys over at VHEMT have some pretty sound points that you might consider reading. I don't really advocate the idea of voluntarily wiping out the ENTIRE human race, but I get what they are saying and we need to seriously reconsider how we think about reproductive responsibility and what we want for our lives and what we want to make life like in the future.
What is surreal is that people still feel the need to have children in this day and age. Overpopulation is the world's most serious economic crisis; every other economic problem is simply a symptom of overpopulation. We should be encouraging citizens to sterilize themselves and perform as many abortions as possible so that the human race as a whole may have a higher quality of life.
That's a total straw man. Just because some people still commit crimes when there are punishments doesn't mean that the punishments aren't deterring anyone. For some people, say those who are starving to death, or those who believe they're invincible, no amount of deterrent will keep them from committing crimes. For the average person, however, I would hypothesize that lengthy prison sentences and the stigma of a criminal record are quite effective deterrents.
The only way to definitively settle the debate would be to conduct some experiments or do some sort of meta-analysis on past data regarding crime rates and severity of criminal punishments. Anything else is just armchair filibustering.
Maybe you should consider the methodology of the study and the literature review and previous research it was built on. You don't conduct a psychological study by surveying psychologists.
I can't tell if you're just nitpicking at the headline or ignorant of the scientific method.
Slashdot Mirror
I like socializing, engaging in intelligence and counter-intelligence operations, and organizing networks of allies and battle groups from time to time ... but then again I study psychology and economics at university because that's what I find interesting, and I'm a big chess player. Maybe we just have a different idea of what fun and entertainment is ;-)
The truth is, I enjoy lots of different games. MMO's are fun and I like the social meta-game but they tend to take up too much of my time (which would be better spent on projects from work or with my girlfriend). Lately I've been playing quite a bit of Day of Defeat: Source because it's quick to pick up and easy to put down, and despite the auto-organized teams and typically casual nature of the game, VOIP chatting with the other players is still a fun social experience. Team Fortress 2 is also a lot of fun for the same reasons.
I am in the same boat. Fascinating read, but man, so long.
Free world PVP also satisfied social gamers. Part of the game is generating and organizing a large social network. If you want to be safe from attack, you need to be bigger and more organized than the next guy. You need military equipment, training and organization. This is how warfare works in the real world and when it works that way in an MMO, it can be fun.
When you have "arena" PVP where the teams are automatically generated by the game itself, it removes the social part of the game. The part of the game where you have to network with other people and organize an army to take control of the free world PVP situation. You might even organize a blockade of critical end-game zones or a siege of a starting city.
EVE online has this sort of spontaneous organization amongst players who are attempting to succeed in free world PVP and obviously the game is quite successful with a niche group at least.
Personally, I love the freedom of free world PVP. In fact, I'd love to play a game with free world PVP and permanent character death ... hardcore Diablo 2 on battle.net was one of the most satisfying experiences ever.
THIS is the saddest thing ...
Thats another thing to figure out; how can the school punish when the police cannot find any evidence to make a case?
The school is not required to use the same burden of proof that the police are required to use in order to convict in a criminal case. Criminal cases usually require evidence proving the crime "beyond a reasonable doubt." Civil cases usually require evidence to prove the wrong-doing beyond a "preponderance of the evidence," meaning there must be a 51% or greater chance that the wrong-doing occurred. This is why O.J. Simpson was convicted in civil court of killing his wife, but not in criminal court.
At my school, the school punishes infractions of the student code if the Dean feels that a "preponderance of the evidence" supports to disciplinary action. Your school probably has a similar standard, and although it could be more or less than a preponderance, it is most assuredly a lower standard than that required to convict someone of a crime in a court of law.
IANAL, but I did do competition Mock Trial in high school, and this stuff is basically common knowledge.
Maybe now Idle will get some respect. This may or may not be a "good thing."
Give it a chance, you'll laugh.
Good eye! I would point out however that some of the scenes are probably green screened. For example there is a scene showing the arcade moving down the hallway in a grocery store. No way they got the cabinet or a car in there.
This is about an underground gambling ring that fixed Starcraft matches in order to make money off of the bets on those matches. There was no hacking involved, just social engineering. Various pro gamers have been accused of throwing matches as a part of what basically amounts to a conspiracy.
I too am interested.
You know, if we legalized, people growing it wouldn't trap it with landmines and junkies wouldn't run around killing people looking for their next fix. Most of the deaths and violence caused by these illegal drugs are caused BECAUSE they are illegal. How can you not see that? Why do you keep making arguments that drugs are dangerous and therefore they should be illegal when all of the reasons you come up with to try and show that they're dangerous are caused BECAUSE they're illegal? You're not thinking this through very intelligently at all.
I'll never OD on marijuana, thanks, so I'll live long enough to annoy you for decades to come. I'll also live long enough to finish my BS in psychology and economics and go on to graduate school.
We should really kill everybody who smokes tobacco too if we go through with this little plan of yours, since it causes lung cancer and all.
Wow, you really showed him. He's surely going to agree with your proposition to execute all drug users now.
Alcohol isn't fundamentally different from other drugs that are currently illegal. It's addictive, it's incapacitating, and you can die of a lethal overdose. It's more harmful to the body than marijuana, and yet you think putting a bullet in the head of everybody who smokes pot is the answer to this social problem? How is that any different from the idea of putting a bullet in the head of everybody who drinks beer, other than the fact that beer happens to be arbitrarily legal at the moment and those other drugs aren't?
You're a fucking moron, but then again I guess that's why you drive a bus for a living instead of doing something meaningful. Thank god you're not in politics. Violence only begets more violence and Americans will fight back against this sort of tyranny. You'll have a civil war on your hands if by some miracle a thin majority of morons who agree with your views manage to pass a law institutionalizing that sort of barbarism.
You forgot the part where there are legions of addicts who can't work because places where they could get jobs test for drugs and deny those who test positive any employment at all. They're forced to turn to crime because we don't allow them to work legitimate jobs.
Furthermore, the drugs they buy from the black market are more dangerous and more expensive than they would be if they were legalized, so the total cost would be less, and they could realistically pay for their habit by mopping the floors at McDonald's or whatever other sorts of jobs those people are likely to have.
I'd write more but I should be working instead of debating this issue with idiots. Do you have any more straw man arguments that rely on circular logic or are you getting tired yet?
Legalization would reduce crime, unemployment, and drug-related violence. The drug cartels would have no source of income and you wouldn't hear about any "mexican drug war." We wouldn't throw away billions of dollars on enforcement agencies, wasting police officers' time chasing pot smokers, etc. -- tax revenues would increase even without a sin tax as the corporations and jobs that would spring up to cultivate cannabis and coca plants would generate tons of income. We'd get out of the recession and stop throwing away money on a fruitless effort. Please do yourself the favor of reading the excellent essay on drug prohibition that is published on the main page of LEAP, or Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. It does a great job of explaining why prohibition is counter-productive; and no, executing everyone who smokes pot in this country will not be a good decision.
I welcome you to try though, that's why the founding fathers left us with the 2nd amendment. To stop assholes like you.
No, it doesn't. You're a nut job.
Why don't we kill everyone who drinks beer or sells beer while we're at it? Prohibition doesn't work and it causes much more harm to society than legalization does.
So she's too frail and innocent to learn about the stuff you learned about at her age? How incredibly stupid.
When she ends up pregnant 'cause you didn't educate her, remember that I told you so. If she's horny, keeping her out of sex ed isn't going to keep her from having sex.
If that was a WOOSH! then disregard this.
I don't want to selectively breed to improve human genetics. I just want to reduce the world's population gradually and naturally by encouraging people to voluntarily reduce the birth rate. Abstinence, condoms, birth control pills, and abortions all have a contribution to offer towards that noble goal.
I'm pretty sure your logic is faulty in thinking that saving the "life" of an unborn fetus is more important than maintaining and improving the quality of life for those who are already born, and developing a sustainable society.
You seem to think that the morning after pill is tantamount to infanticide. We're talking about a group of cells that doesn't even have a brain yet. Killing a fly is more of a sin, at least a fly has a fully developed consciousness.
I'm sorry, there must be some miscommunication here. Access to birth control and education is tantamount to eugenics and "killing less developed nations?" You know, by "no need to contribute to the problem," I meant that there's no reason for us to continue breeding like rabbits.
Your post is riddled with so many subtle hypocrisies that it blows my mind.
There are many starving and homeless people right now who would suggest that overpopulation isn't a myth. Even if we can hypothetically sustain infinitely large populations with proper advances in technology, that doesn't change the fact that the cost of things like food, housing, education, cars, and so on increases every time more babies are born and more people start demanding those things. Imagine the utopia we would live in if the earth only sustained 25% of the population it does today.
Yeah, if third-worlders living in poverty were better educated and had more resources to things like condoms, birth control pills and abortion procedures, they probably wouldn't breed so much. However, the reality is that they aren't and they don't, and we've got to deal with it in the present. You don't have to feel like you have to fight against them. It's not a race war, nobody is being "overtaken," but the global economy as a whole is suffering from a scarcity of supply and an abundance of demand. There's no need to contribute to the problem just because we aren't the ones "causing" it.
I feel like abortion causes more good than harm. What's worse, killing an unborn fetus or allowing a child to grow up in poverty or with abusive parents, eventually leading them into alcoholism and a dead-end job mopping floors, or into a "gangster life" where they rob, kill and steal to survive?
The guys over at VHEMT have some pretty sound points that you might consider reading. I don't really advocate the idea of voluntarily wiping out the ENTIRE human race, but I get what they are saying and we need to seriously reconsider how we think about reproductive responsibility and what we want for our lives and what we want to make life like in the future.
What is surreal is that people still feel the need to have children in this day and age. Overpopulation is the world's most serious economic crisis; every other economic problem is simply a symptom of overpopulation. We should be encouraging citizens to sterilize themselves and perform as many abortions as possible so that the human race as a whole may have a higher quality of life.
That's a total straw man. Just because some people still commit crimes when there are punishments doesn't mean that the punishments aren't deterring anyone. For some people, say those who are starving to death, or those who believe they're invincible, no amount of deterrent will keep them from committing crimes. For the average person, however, I would hypothesize that lengthy prison sentences and the stigma of a criminal record are quite effective deterrents.
The only way to definitively settle the debate would be to conduct some experiments or do some sort of meta-analysis on past data regarding crime rates and severity of criminal punishments. Anything else is just armchair filibustering.
Maybe you should consider the methodology of the study and the literature review and previous research it was built on. You don't conduct a psychological study by surveying psychologists.
I can't tell if you're just nitpicking at the headline or ignorant of the scientific method.