Meshugger

I have become very jaded through out the years. I only react that the number is high, but i feel little to none emotion about it. Maybe i simply fail to have an emotional connection to haitians. I do know however, on an intellectual and rational level, that catastrophes such as these are one the worst things that could happen to mankind as a whole.

That pretty much sums it up. The chinese 'boom' interests me greatly though. Having an artificially low currency in order keep the exports high while trying to become a consumer society is something that will not work in the long run. Adding a gigantic stimuluspackage to stateowned companies with a history of having shady businesspractices to the mix doesn't sound like a good business practice to me. Oh, did i forget to mention that there's a surplus of 24 million men in China? Think of the social implications for a minute.

So, people at large think Avatar is better than Blade Runner or Ghost in the Shell. Well that settles it, people really are idiots. The evidence is undeniable. Well, idiots is kind of pushing it. I would prefer simple-minded and uncultivated savages. At best ignorant, at worst deliberately ignorant. Like the Na'Vi.

Blade Runner wasn't ahead in technology (there are no particularly new special effects in Blade Runner) it was ahead in vision. That's completely different. Scratch Blade Runner then (awesome movie though, one of my favourites). At least Ghost in the Shell however, had new technology.

Do we even have enough material for a FAQ yet?

Apocalypse Now is one of the best movies ever made. Probably the best movie ever done about war.

Guys, guys, guys. You can literally make a good movie out of anything. Even Roger Ebert agrees with me on this. How the movie does play out is a completely different matter. Besides, lets compare Avatar to another sci-fi movies that were ahead of their times in terms of technology, namely Blade Runner and Ghost in the Shell(japanese dub). Which one of those is better or of better quality? Before you answer, remember that Avatar outranks them both by a mile at imdb.com.

Compared to Bush though, i have to give it Reagan. He was good at giving speeches/writing them.

"White Messiah"-racism. You learn something new everyday.

Got any research on the subject? This covers CNN, FOX News and MSNBC as well. I am actually interested in this kind of stuff, but i can't find any numbers. I haven't seen much of the "News"-segment of Fox, but their commentator-shows are incredibly unprofessional and devoid of any taste.

True, that song gave a nice wibe of being completely else. Most of the songs before Hong Kong were very Blade Runner-esque.

Mongrels and plebs should not reply when their feeble minds can not even begin to comprehend something of fine culture. Begone, shoo. Back to simple porn and racecars with you.

Two Gentlemen of Lebowski - The Knave abideth ^The link includes the original somethingawful.com-entry, the site itself and mirrors, since it is getting hammered, badly. It is simply the movie "The Big Lebowski" written completely in shakespearian dialogue as a play. It is simply amazing, this guy is going to create a phenomenon. It is that great.

Hippie? He is on record as saying simulated murder gives him a hard on and he cares nothing for any casualties on the victorious road to socialist heaven. I know hippies. My parents were hippies. Mr Meshugger, LoF is no hippie. Eh, read again. I was talking about Jesus I refer him to hippiepants since he was way more liberal than most people during those days.

I haven't bothered to read the thread, but didn't mr. hippiepants once say: "Render to Caesar what belongs to Caesar, and to God what belongs to God"? Thus, Christianity doesn't give a sh*t about ecomonic models, only your soul

I would still like to find data on homicide by guns in Finland where the killer did know/didn't know the victim. I heard of "bad" neighbourhoods where you can get robbed or beat up, like the Helsinki trainstation (Somali gangs), or other parts of Vanda (alcoholics and other dregs) but i have never heard about areas where guns are shot against strangers. Take the albanian guy who shot 5 five to death in Espoo (near Helsinki) on new years eve. They all knew each other, one of the was his ex-wife.

What were the most important factors for the fall of the caliphate? I am curious about that.

Thank you

Of course there's culture behind that plays a significant role as well. But no matter, since we can't determine whether if guns have created a culture to shoot people more often, or if the culture makes people to shoot each other more often. Oh, and that figure chart does not take into consideration whether if homicides were directly related to suicides. A known fact in Finland is that you are never afraid of strangers shooting you, it is your close family and friends that you have to be afraid of, because they will more likely shoot you. I can almost bet that 90% of those "homicides" are close family to the ones who committed suicide.

I spent some of my christmas-money and bought this: Judging by the looks of it, it probably made out of the blood of a thousand virgin angels or something.

I have been tempted to go for 10 years. But every year it is either money, or like this year, it is getting a vacatation from work. Meh.

A firearm is just a tool. If a person hellbent on murder didn't have a firearm he would use a different tool. A bat, a knife, or even a spork if needed. Do not blame the tool. Blame the one using the tool. Bats, knives, and sporks are not designed for the purpose of killing people. A gun is. Why should you have a right to own something which is intended to kill other people if you don't have the right to kill other people? To give some perspective of things, while i was serving in the military, we were always instructed on "incapacitating" the enemy when training with our assault rifles and machine guns. Not once did any superior officer say that we should kill, murder or slaughter the enemy. To put it more frankly, our objectives as soldiers were to render the enemy incapable to do more fighting. If we happen to kill the enemy soldier in battle, then we do. The same could be achieved by shooting his arms, legs or him simply giving up. Let me generalize it further: Why should you have the right to own something which is intended to harm other people when you don't have the right to harm other people? There is no definitive answer to that, and you know it. Who should decide what is "intended for harm"? There's no absolute in that, only relative and compromise. That's why you don't see Toyotas with turrets on the roof or burglaralarms that fire rocketpropelled grenades. Laws have been created to reflect on that, societies and civilizations has thriwed on those compromises. The question however, lies in changing the nature of man(hurrr). Warfare is an extreme form conflict that is extrapolated from our desire to compete, win and pass on our genes for the next generation.

A firearm is just a tool. If a person hellbent on murder didn't have a firearm he would use a different tool. A bat, a knife, or even a spork if needed. Do not blame the tool. Blame the one using the tool. Bats, knives, and sporks are not designed for the purpose of killing people. A gun is. Why should you have a right to own something which is intended to kill other people if you don't have the right to kill other people? To give some perspective of things, while i was serving in the military, we were always instructed on "incapacitating" the enemy when training with our assault rifles and machine guns. Not once did any superior officer say that we should kill, murder or slaughter the enemy. To put it more frankly, our objectives as soldiers were to render the enemy incapable to do more fighting. If we happen to kill the enemy soldier in battle, then we do. The same could be achieved by shooting his arms, legs or him simply giving up.

LOL! What sort of conference? Don't worry, it's worth the wait. I hope that it will be worth the wait. I loved FFX, while i have an irrational hatred towards FFXII. It's been 8 years since i have played a good Final Fantasy-game, goddammit! As for the conference, I work for an international engineering firm and my job is to handle administrative tasks surrounding our engineering tools; such as collaborative project management, development and licensing (some coding as well, if some of our customers want their projects to become custom-designed for them). Each year, we are invited to attend the conferences that the distributors hold for their clients. It just happened to be in Munich this year for this engineering tool. One of us will have to go to Knoxville in the US in middle of summer for a similar one. Good luck with humidity, i say. Back to topic: The link to Gamasutra can be compared to modern day Hollywood as well. For example, all these superhero-movies, Keanu Reeves starring in the upcoming live-action version of the Cowboy Bebop-anime, and finally Steven Spielberg doing a live-action adaption of one of the most important movies of any medium: Ghost in the Shell (which will suck donkeyballs ofcourse).

In the spirit of this thread, if Churchill would have adopted the tenets of socialism as a domestic and foreign policy, would great britain have won the war earlier and made it even more prosperous? Or even better, would this potential agenda have unmade nationalsocialism and the war as a whole? And Churchill being fond of Mussolini would've made him liberal by the standards of those days. Other "great" men of that time we're quite fond eugenics, nationalism, racism and even nordicisim. Like Lovecraft and Charles Lindbergh. We should actually thank Hitler and nationalsocialism for making racism something for the fringe groups of society.