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Comment: Re:US-Europe cultural difference ? (Score 2) 1263

by binkless (#39050523) Attached to: Doctors "Fire" Vaccine Refusers

The choice not to take drugs for your own illnesses is really not equivalent to choosing to skip vaccinations. You only risk your own health when you decline drugs, but the community is put at risk when you turn down immunizations. Further, some of the immunizations for things you may consider minor (chicken pox or rubella for instance) can have a devastating impact when communicated to those with weaker health, or who, in the case of rubella, are not yet born.

Videotaping Law Enforcement Validated by Federal J->

Submitted by jkyrlach
jkyrlach writes "The abuse of the innocent citizen trying merely to document their encounters with law enforcement via videotape have been a frequent topic of /. discussions. Legal precedent may finally be developing to clearly establish the rights of citizenry to monitor their police force with an important victory for freedom that transpired last week in a federal court in Oregon."
Link to Original Source

Comment: Reporters index (Score 1) 427

by binkless (#38838755) Attached to: US Plummets On World Press Freedom Ranking

Reporters without borders is about protecting the special prerogatives of professional journalists. It is their habit to conflate these privileges with freedom of expression. Really this is just an index of how free reporters are to thumb their noses at local law and custom, not the ability of the populace to publish dissenting views. Sometimes the two align, sometimes not.

Games

Balancing Choice With Irreversible Consequences In Games 352

Posted by Soulskill
from the no-takebacks dept.
The Moving Pixels blog has an article about the delicate balance within video games between giving players meaningful choices and consequences that cannot necessarily be changed if the player doesn't like her choice afterward. Quoting: "One of my more visceral experiences in gaming came recently while playing Mass Effect 2, in which a series of events led me to believe that I'd just indirectly murdered most of my crew. When the cutscenes ended, I was rocking in my chair, eyes wide, heart pounding, and as control was given over to me once more, I did the only thing that I thought was reasonable to do: I reset the game. This, of course, only led to the revelation that the event was preordained and the inference that (by BioWare's logic) a high degree of magical charisma and blue-colored decision making meant that I could get everything back to normal. ... Charitably, I could say BioWare at least did a good job of conditioning my expectations in such a way that the game could garner this response, but the fact remains: when confronted with a consequence that I couldn't handle, my immediate player's response was to stop and get a do-over. Inevitability was only something that I could accept once it was directly shown to me."
PC Games (Games)

Game Devs On the Future of PC Gaming 375

Posted by Soulskill
from the all-ubisoft-all-the-time dept.
Shacknews wraps up a developer panel at PAX East discussing the future of gaming on the PC. They cover topics including DRM, digital download platforms and cloud-based gaming services. "Joe Kreiner of Terminal Reality: 'If you look at it from a giant publisher perspective, then the numbers on the PC just really don't make financial sense for you to bother with it. But if you start out with the mindset — you know, you're targeting that group, you make a niched product that's going [to] do well, if you look at a lot of the titles on Steam, Torchlight's a really good example — as long as you know that's your audience to begin with, and you make something inside of a budget that you know you're going to be selling those kinds of numbers, you can be very successful. I think it just takes a targeted developer. ... There is no [PC] platform, really. It's just a mish-mosh of hardware, an operating system that kind of supports games. The problem with that platform is, there's no standards and piracy is rampant, so why would we want to make a video game for that platform unless you had some sort of draconian DRM thing to keep it from being stolen?"
The Military

Indian Military Hopes to Weaponize the Searing "Ghost Pepper" 267

Posted by timothy
from the there's-pepper-spray-and-pepper-spray dept.
coondoggie writes "The military in India is looking to weaponize the world's hottest chili, the bhut jolokia or 'ghost pepper,' according to a number of news outlets. The Bhut Jolokia chili pepper from Assam, India is no ordinary pepper. In tests first conducted by the New Mexico State University in 2008 and subsequently confirmed by Guinness World records and others, the Bhut Jolokia reached over one million Scoville heat units, while the next hottest, the Red Savina Habenero, clocks in at a mere 577,000. Scoville units are a universally accepted measure of chili hotness."

There is nothing more silly than a silly laugh. -- Gaius Valerius Catullus

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