Azarkon

Not a rejoinder, but a question: how do you feel about the death penalty for aggravated assault in general? I ask because the basis for your argument relies on two factors: repulsiveness (a highly subjective and therefore suspicious motivation) and the wastefulness of rehabilitation. I won't say much about the former, but the latter can really be argued for any criminal act. Thieves, by your argument, should also be executed, if a certain degree of "repulsiveness" can be argued. Furthermore, the notion that society has not the right to mercy because we have not suffered at the criminal's hands seems to imply that the basis for mercy should depend on the victim. In other words, vengeance is the best form of justice - a notion I find quite chililng given how vengeful some people can be. At any case, it's this "unsaid" criteria of severity that most interests me: most of us would agree that there are people in the world who, as best as we can tell, "deserves" death because of repeated violations, irredeemability, etc. But is the criteria we use objective or subjective, emotional or rational? Does it matter? That's what's hard for me to distinguish.

Absolutely. It creates a different kind of experience and requires a different mindset from the audience, really, and I'm sure that even when emergent depth becomes a reality some games would opt to have more, and some games would opt to have less. Actually, RPGs constitute a genre where I estimate more utility (or a new sub-genre emerging entirely), since playthrough branching factor is such a big deal here from a production point of view. Non-linearity could then have its cake and eat it too.

Centuries, even, but it seems a viable direction, and that's what's important.

Emergent gameplay that's deep Examples: 1. Complex, believable, and interesting NPC reactions that aren't scripted, but which arise from the interactions between the player and the NPC's AI. Non-scripted gives you emergent gameplay, and complexity/believability gives you depth. Would require (at the minimum): natural language processing and generation, emotional modeling, machine learning, robustness (a very challenging problem for this sort of AI systems) 2. Embedded "game master" AI that procedurally generates content based on the world's physical laws and structures. Kind of like the roguelike dungeon generator, but much more sophisticated and capable of far greater complexity and adaptability (to player demands). Would require (at the minimum): machine learning, procedural graphics generation, natural simulation, robustness Etc.

Realistic or, if you prefer, "immersive" AI is an interesting concept, and I think there are already people moving in that direction with a specific eye towards simulated environment applications. While the prognosis for AI in the next few years is, indeed, terrible, I don't think that this line of thought is hopeless unless synthetic biology takes over electronic gaming as the next paradigm for mass entertainment (think living toys). Assuming that doesn't happen, it seems inevitable that electronic gaming will have to turn to AI in order to tackle the big hurdle of emergent depth in environments and mobiles. Otherwise, we will quickly reach a limit in what can be done, as graphics technology is, as you say, heading towards a ceiling. I guess full body immersion is also an alternative path for advancement, and probably the more likely, but that is probably as far away as good AI in terms of actual application.

Ah, but that way we'll run out of room on earth. The moon is, however, a fine place... Tanstaafl

One last complication in this whole affair is the status of statutory rape. I have no idea whether, in people's minds, this should factor into the decision of whether a child rapist should be executed or not, but it's something to think about.

Life experience has a way of getting to a person. I'm sure that if I lived in a crime-heavy area where innocents die each day to people who just don't care, I'd feel the same way: a murderer is not a person, just a disease to be eradicated. It's easy to feel this way - after all, we all want to protect ourselves, and those who threaten us and those around us, should be given no quarter whatsoever. It's the same at an individual level, as it is on a national level. Unfortunately, it's not that simple. As people have pointed out, for every ancedote in favor of the DP, there is one not in favor, and when pro-DP people pull out the old "well I'm only in favor of DP if the evidence was absolutely clear, damning, and there was no doubt whatsoever" card, it usually means that they're thinking in an idealistic sense. The real world doesn't operate by idealism - while there are definitely irredeemable sickos out there for whom the only solution possible would be either death or life in prison without parole, most criminals fall somewhere in-between. Worse, while morality has certain absolutes, there are also gray areas for which precedents are dangerous. For example, China currently has the death penalty for fiscal corruption. Fiscal corruption can easily be argued, from Guard Dog's point of view, to be a plague upon society, and it's easy to come up with an anecdote for why corrupt politicians should be executed (ie if the money stolen could've saved lives). Yet, would we accept such a rationale in the West? Would you condemn people to death because they stole money from the government? Would something like executing the top echelon of Enron for the suffering that they caused ever fly in the US? I don't know, but I suspect that the answer is no - there are limits to what Christian morality allows for fiscal corruption. Finally, if no criminal can ever be redeemed, the answer would seem simple: off with their heads, or at least imprison them for life. But redemption, alas, is a deal breaker, and forces us to think about the question in broader terms than what would be best for society. That's when issues such as deterrence and payback take center stage.

I've never had an easy time with crime and punishment concepts, and it's never been obvious to me what should be done in each situation, so I won't venture to pass judgment here. Instead, I'll state what I think are some key factors to the argument: 1. What purpose does punishment serve? How much of it is deterrence (ie: if child rape meant death, less pedos would try it; alternatively, if child rape meant life in prison with no parole, that particular criminal would never again harm children), how much of it is payback (ie: for the financial/emotional losses of the victims, or just because it's "justice"), and how much of it is rehabilitation (ie: for the purpose of correction)? 2. How do you gauge severity in crime? I mean, we consider rape and murder to be the ultimate capital crimes, but their effects on a person are very different. Rape victims are psychologically damaged (children even moreso); murder victims are dead. How does that even compare? 3. How should the law tread between vengeance and justice? This is really a rephrasing of #1, but it does bring into question the meaning of justice, which we'd like to think is equivalent to the law, but which often isn't, for many people (one extreme result of which is vigilantism). How does the concept of justice compare to the concept of crime and punishment? It seems obvious that justice doesn't care about deterrence and rehabilitation - it's only concerned about what is "wrong" and what constitutes the "right" amount of payback; so what does that say about how our crime and punishment system should be, if we hold justice to be its highest priority? Answers to these three questions form, I think, the basis of a crime-and-punishment philosophy, and a good system of crime-and-punishment probably has answers to all three questions. The problem lies with being objective about it.

So long as it has a decent storyline and goes further into the Xel'Naga/Protoss-Zerg hybrid plot threads, I'm there.

What a terrible thing to say! At any case, Madeleine has a better chance of being saved than the vast majority of kidnapped children. There are places in the world where events like these are everyday occurences, and where even the authorities wouldn't give a damn, much less news reporters. Alas.

Not if the "person" in question was not considered a person at all.

They've made movies about Jack the Ripper. They've made movies about the Zodiac killer. One day, if Cho isn't one-upped by someone else, they'd probably make something about him. All the ingredients are in place - signs of an abusive childhood, the resulting psychosis, deep depression, disturbing symbols in his writings, a martyr complex... You know, this whole event almost seems it came straight out of a horror movie, if not for the fact that 30+ people actually died. Tragic, tragic event. Mad, mad world.

That's certainly a good point. We can only argue from what we know, and what we know tends to be colored - significantly so - by the history of our environments. You certainly wouldn't expect a Chinese or Iranian to praise the practice of Western intervention, and it's perfectly reasonable that African intellectuals are very gung-ho about neo-colonialism. Americans, though, have the luxury of being able to see it either way. The US has never really depended on anyone else for its survival, and its interventions have produced both good (ie WW2) and evil (ie Iran). With such a background, whether someone supports one or the other is thus more dependent on other factors, such as upbringing or partisan bias. Hmm, I suppose from this perspective internet debates are really more useful in revealing the backgrounds of the debaters, than they are in convincing anybody that they might be wrong

Remember that post earlier where someone said the gunman was a 24-year old Chinese student? That came from an early "rumor" circulating around the net, and which was picked up by media sources as reliable as FOX News and the Chicago Sun Times. I think some of these sources even posted this guy's pictures online as that of the potential culprit, based on the fact that he was 1) Asian 2) in his 20's 3) a Virginia tech student and 4) apparently had photos where he poses with guns. He then received a multitude of death threats and phone calls from people who believed that he was the criminal in question - all because of the rumor. Read the blog - you'll get it.

A bit of black comedy and proof that people & the media are too quick to point fingers when the perpetrator isn't white: http://wanusmaximus.livejournal.com/

Well, you might find it interesting then that reports claim Rumsfeld had been trying to end his reliance on the CIA by creating a new espionage branch within the Pentagon... And that the new Secretary of Defense was the Director of Central Intelligence within the CIA. Coincidence? Who knows.

Sure, Rumsfeld is easy to blame, but most of his policies were right in line with the neocon philosophy of US hegemony. I wouldn't be surprised if Gates was cut from the same fabric.

I do think that since an expansion was ok'd, one thing that could really help the community in general is to dramatically improve the user-friendliness of the toolset and to optimize the game. I realize that the NWN 2 toolset is alot more powerful, but power doesn't necessarily have to come at the cost of simplicity. Outdoors terrain being harder to build is one thing (though even that could be helped by including a terrain generator), but the sort of loops you have to go through in order to make items, NPCs, etc. should just be fixed, period.

There's that. This wouldn't be the first time "protecting the homeland" has led to "invading someone else's land." Far from it. Ultimately, I think it comes down to a question of competence. I find it difficult to assign the sort of moustache-twirling evil that one would have to do if they assumed a cunning, cognizant, and most importantly *successful* power behind recent events. The neocons are not, I believe, psychopaths - the thought that they deliberated all that had occured just to benefit their oil buddies and geopolitical goals is a bit of a stretch. More likely they, in their hubris, underestimated the resistance they'd face and the sheer chaos of Saddam's fall. They thought that the job could be done in a clean and relatively painless manner, with minimal casualties resulting from maximum "shock and awe." They probably expected some risks and surprises - always possibilities during war - but nothing that'd endanger their long-term goals. After all, what could possibly stand against the peerless US war machine? Unfortunately, arrogance has always been a key flaw of Americans. The neocons even moreso than the rest.

Karma shall strike you mods for steering the thread off-topic

Hmm, my present view is that gun control doesn't do much to prevent these sorts of major massacres, but probably does cut down on the number of fatalities due to violent crimes in general.

Do things like this happen in Europe?

It's pretty close to how they imagine it, except you have to realize that helping people is a secondary concern for the "surgeon" in the picture. The neocons want, foremost, to the rule the world, which in less extravagant terms means that they want the US to dominate in every sphere of power and never be told "no." They want nothing less than full spectrum dominance on this earth and beyond - and that's straight from the horse's mouth. Inherently, there's nothing special about what they want. The Romans and the Persians wanted the same thing. So did the European powers. And in the process of achieving what each empire imagined to be its destiny, they accomplished great things that are instrumental to modern history. The Romans did build roads through barbarian lands, and the Persians did bring a sophisticated culture. The European powers did force the world to modernize, and science did become the sway of day. If we were to bracket the evils each empire committed and focus only on the good, why, we'd all be imperialists. My problem with the neocons is not, thus, that their imperial ambitions are unusual - but that as imperialists they are incompetent and cruel. Not only have they failed to achieve their geopolitical quest, but they have dragged down millions of lives and a nation's reputation with them. Worse, they are apathetic and show no remorse, believing that the ends will justify the means, even when the ends are out of reach. As politicians they are closer to the bureaucratic Mandarins than the popular Caesars, and while Mandarins are practical for the rule of an empire, they cannot bring it about. That requires people with greater charisma and force of character than is currently present in the Bush administration. It also requires a clear and realistic vision of peace amidst the shock and awe of war, which again the current administration lacks with its constant backpedalling on what the job "is" and when it will be "done." History remembers the great conquerors, sometimes as heroes - but history has only scorn for the great failures, who in their ineptitude and ignorance of their ineptitude have caused atrocities such that the world trembles beneath. Power in hands that do not deserve to wield them is the cause of true villainly. But my grief is not reserved for the neocons and their tragedy. No, what's more tragic is the nation they've tricked to do their bidding, which must bear the consequences of their failures. I'm also frustrated that society itself has become apathetic, of which political apathy is but a part - that's a different topic, however.

Depends on what sort of war we're talking about. All-out? US. Half-assed attempt at policing? China.