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No, I'm reading just fine. It was the "personally", in your sentence that rubbed me the wrong way. Why would you expect the Soviets to repay Germany's crimes with some atrocities of their own? Nah, I'm fine with people having different opinions; it'd be too boring otherwise. It's your tendency to pass your opinion as fact and pontificate about your highly refined tastes and educated understanding of all things artistic that riles me. Painting, as a whole, is considered art. Music, as a whole, is considered art. Games as a whole are not considered art, save for the cases in which RPGMasterBoo I issues a bull decreeing an exception - for no apparent reason other than the occurrence that he seems to like a particular title quite a lot. See the inconsistency yet? Bah.

Yeah, because war crimes justify war crimes, obviously. LOL So, essentially, we must bow to your mostly arbitrary criteria to tell us peons what is ART and what is just a trivial pastime. Thanks for the laugh.

As I suspected, that went way over my head. After a bit of research though, it seems that Christian's work hasn't been published in any peer-reviewed journals yet. It may be that they are pulling a Galileo on the poor guy, but it also may be that he's simply wrong. Calling that evidence against a well established theory to support determinism is stretching it a bit, methinks. At any rate, a counterexample to a theorem doesn't exclude the possibility that a version of the theorem with revised premises (as the theorem itself cannot be disproven, and it's the interpretation of EPR's topology that the paper attacks) can be formulated, no? The jury's still out on this one, it seems. Nice read anyway, thanks.

Wait, games are now "trivial"? I thought they were ART. Which one is it?

Excuse me? In other news: politicians appoint and sack scientific advisors based on anything but competence. More after the break.

Pics?

No, I don't think I can "easily" read up on advanced algebra, lol. I can read summaries and hopefully gain a superficial understanding of how one concept relates to another, but don't expect much more. I knew sooner or later I'd wish I had finished either of my degrees! Oh well. What exactly do you want to discuss, anyway? Yes. Statistics can describe the behaviour of complex systems, but that's still far from the classical concept of determinism.

Hehe, I thought so at first. But the stuff they sell isn't original, only the clothes that produced the patterns to manufacture the merchandise they sell is. Still, depending on the quality of the leather, $400 for a trenchcoat isn't bad.

Seriously dude, where can you buy one of those? Feeling a bit like annexing Poland, are we? Dunno how much it would cost to import, or even if they'll ship overseas... http://www.totls.com/index.php?option=com_...3&Itemid=44

So, they missed the 3 photons that stopped by last year and probably wont even look at the delayed one that is due next year. They are getting sloppy... Hmm, the idea is that since there is a huge energy difference between the two photons, and given the very short life of the GRB that emitted them (~2s), the high energy photon would need to have a substantial head start to reach us (almost) simultaneously, according to predictions that energy density affects the speed of light. What I want to know is whether c is a constant no matter what, or the variations are too small to lend credibility to this "foam void medium" theory (but they exist and explain this 9/10 of a second difference) - or the difference is due to other causes.

Hey, do enemies level with you like in the flash game? That sucked.

Your source sure seems well informed. Some of the references are from subscription-only journals, shame. Knowledge should be free! Thanks man - I have some serious reading to do.

Quite a few people in academia are challenging the traditional notions of free will. It appears that unconscious memory plays a huge role in decision-making, and an experiment showed that the process can begin as early as a full ten seconds before we actually get the impression we are making a decision... which would mean that the sensation or thought train we experience when making choices is actually a consequence of a hidden process we have no control over. I read that in Germany there are initiatives to change the penal code based on these findings, on the premise that culpability rests on the concept of free will, but the page I where read it is an interview in Spanish and lacks references. Fun, fun. @ lof: Can you give some references to the Con game thing you posted? Looks interesting.

Only when discussing Amerika, child rape, and the World Cup. Otherwise I go from "mild idiocy" to "retardo land" in the blink of an eye, tbh. It's just that I'm not amused by old internet memes anywhere near as much as I used to be. And Godwin's is one of the most lame. Find something fresh. Heh. The second sentence suggests to me that you didn't fully read my first post in this thread. I don't propose anything either way, I'm not really bothered by this - I don't have any "problems", and I actually see this as a good thing for games in general. But that doesn't mean I'm going to start ridiculing those who think that games or the media in general shouldn't go there. As long as they don't push for censorship, that is. But so far they haven't, have they? Are you saying that things should be banned because they break those, so called, "taboos"? If so, I disagree with you. Quite an imagination you got there buddy, quite an imagination.

Yeah, it's UNTHINKABLE that in this day and age, societies still have taboos! omg noes etc... That's what I was thinking.

The context is different, and the context is everything. FO3 has no relation to present or past events, and the game doesn't focus on murdering civilians so it cannot be attacked as anything but random violence. The segment in MW2 is about the player taking an active part in a terrorist attack. You'd have to be really dense not to see how the two are only superficially similar. Is that it? I'm disappointed in you. Are you sure you don't want to post a link to an inane tvtropes article or one of those retarded gifs instead? Those are way better at creating a diversion from the fact that you have nothing relevant to say!

No, the concept is completely different. The only similarity is that you have innocent fictional characters dying by the player's actions. This has nothing to do with censorship either - works that promote, for example, holocaust denial needn't be banned, but they are generally frowned upon all the same. The concern here is that the game may be understood as an apology of terrorism. And depending on how the game deals with it, it could easily be interpreted that way. It's the verosimilitude to recent events that makes this controversy possible at all. I don't agree with folks up in arms over this, but I understand where they are coming from. Personally, I think it's a good thing that devs dare do things like this every now and then. It's a step in the right direction towards games becoming a more serious medium.

You seem to have a deeply held belief that there isn't a choice component in crime, or that the influence of that choice is of almost negligible weight anyway. Do we have to believe that all criminals have some sort of excuse in the shape of an abusive father or a depressed neighborhood? Why this urge to suppress accountability and embrace the idea that all human beings are fundamentally powerless and mere products of the circumstances surrounding them? I see how this thinking makes justifying a nanny state so much easier, but please, I'd like to see some hard evidence (as opposed to mere belief) before I accept I'm just a puppet of fate without a shred of free will. Further, I'd like to know what you mean exactly by "learn how to become a productive member of society", because that sounds awfully vague and bordering the clich

Says the guy whose strongest rebuttal is "ZOMG ur dumb!". Pure comedy. It's not my fault that the only times you aren't setting up straw men is when you're using other types of fallacies to cover up your rather embarassing ignorance. "The best defense is a good offense", right?

Seriously, you guys need to read up on what "proof" means.

It is. The 'scare factor' of harsh punishment does not work, as has been proven time and time again (look it up). No, it hasn't. For something to be deemed "proof", certain criteria must be met. The studies you probably refer to don't meet those. You'd need to understand the logic and semantics behind "proof" to realize this. Being the sad eurocommie tool you are, you can't be reasonably expected to do anything more complicated than regurgitate the prepared propaganda you're spoon-fed by your welfare gurus. Sweet dreams. Slippery slope. Look it up.

Short of cheating, it wasn't possible to game the system. To me, that's a successfully implemented design idea. The hunger IS the drive of the story, and a gameplay mechanic intended to put pressure on the player is tailored around that drive. How is that "annoying at best"? The tragedy of blind idealism... I thought you guys liked "dark" stories?

I miss tarna.

On the other hand, spending the rest of his miserable life digging holes might have. Or perhaps you're right and more time will do no good, but he'll be too tired to try anything funny, anyway. Yup. Punishment is antiquated. Accoutability is antiquated. Effort is antiquated. Good and evil are antiquated. War is antiquated. We are, after all, so much smarter than those barbarians who thought that threatening bodily harm to potential wrongdoers might *gasp* make them think twice - we invented Facebook! Honestly, I'm scared ****less by the pervasion of this kind of neo-hippie-pseudo-intellectualoid discourse based essentially on blissful fantasies where all men respect the law and the thought of harming or killing others not only doesn't exist, but cannot exist - if it does, it's only in the alien mind of some freak of nature (which, perplexingly, isn't beyond "rehabilitation"). For, who would want to do that in this modern-day broadband Garden of Eden we've built?! Blasphemy! Madness. You may be on to something, though. Chemical castration should be mandatory in rape cases, once they serve their time. What IS rehabilitation? How do you rehabilitate somebody whose mind, save for the fact that he has no compunctions against killing, cheating and raping, works just fine? How do you rehabilitate somebody who thinks the law isn't made for him simply because he's found a way around it? There is no cure for psychopaths, alas. If anything, the penalty IS the rehabilitation. Further measures are redundant and undermine the intended effect.