I'm still pretty young, (21 right now) so I feel that I have a bit more first-hand accounts of what is happening to us.

The one thing that I've noticed that I have that the children born about a decade or two before me is that my computer now does my creativity for me.

Many people are talking about how children to play with models and learn the basics of being creative. This just isn't really a choice anymore. Most of our bright young minds are drawn early into computer focused fields, and have a natural interest in technology, because it's neat, it challenges us, and we don't fully understand it.

Everything is so visually amazing now with the advent of advanced animation techniques, I'm not sure the last time I saw a movie with people actually acting on a set that wasn't just a blue room. Who needs imagination when James Cameron has already captured the coolest looking thing that a team of professional writers could dream up and made it available on my magic light screen for me to call up at any point. (and if I don't mind crossing a few legal gray areas, it's free to boot! Can't say that about a new Lego set)

But now comes current day, where I'm basically locked ball and chain to this damn machine. I was one of those kids who was diagnosed with ADD/ADHD, but honestly, I was just a normal "wiz kid". But playing Real Time Strategy games when I was young built up my ability to micromanage multiple tasks, and the internet could answer any question I had in fractions of a second. And that's always how it's been. The real world just doesn't move as fast as the eWorld, and those of us who grew up on constant instant satisfaction just don't think to take time and figure out a problem for ourselves. I simply never learned the patience that creativity requires. If a solution is not readily apparent, I've learned to instead of trusting in my own intuition, to merely find the answer online.

Technology is wonderful, but it has bred some little monsters. I'm one of them.

Technically you could drive one into the other one while pulling into your garage.

I'd prefer Conan O'Brien in a barbarian adventure.

If someone gets your dorm/LAN IP banned, the whole building can get banned off a server. In my dorm at Arizona State, the whole first floor could not connect to Steam due to a ban that someone had gotten the year before.

In Soviet Canada, moose watches you.

"Shipping is responsible for 3.5% to 4% of all climate change emissions" from same article

It's not the carbon emissions that are the real problem with cargo ships, but the NO and SO pollution. As far as I can tell, these are not greenhouse gases so much as carcinogens. While, yes, they do need to be reduced, your post was very misleading in implying that the majority of air pollution and climate change comes from cargo ships. It doesn't.

Someone is really trying to make trolling illegal?

Don't they realize that acknowledging trolls just makes them worse?

Chupathingy, how 'bout that?
I like it, got a ring to it.

You say this like it's a bad thing.

Any online provider worth their salt still supports their aging games. Steam still hosts original Halflife, and all it's mods, though I think we can agree they're quited dated by now. Blizzard has kept Starcraft up, running, and even occasionally patched it. If the big players of the industry pick this idea up, there's a very small chance of any game that's any good 'losing support' in today's online, cheap-to-store-data world.

The worst thing that would happen would be the end of new patches for the content.

Damnit, I meant to say 4000 BC, not 4000 years ago.

You'd be surprised that this thought is actually far into the minority. The fact is, that while yes, you can't argue about the color of the sky, because that is observable currently, the 'religious scientists' will keep sticking with the point that 4000 BC is not observable currently, and has not been recorded in any true scientific manner. The basic fact that we've never seen macro-evolution actually occur allows the idea that God could have created the Earth 6000 years ago to still stand. Long jump, I realize. Even the basic idea of macro-evolution actually is defeated in scientific method, due to the fact that it can't be recreated, and has never been observed directly. On the other hand, you wouldn't even have to break the fundamental laws of physics to describe why things can be dated beyond 6000 years though if you include God's touch. Most of our aging processes come from dating things based of percent compositions of isotopes that we know the half-lives of. If you believe in a God with some forethought, which an all-knowing God would of course have, you could reasonably see him creating fossils that were already lacking in specific isotopes, knowing that man would discover the science of half-lives. Now as for why, well, I'll let a real theologian discuss that.

I personally, am anything BUT a Young Earth Creationist, but I do talk to a devote one, and this is the basis for his argument. And it frightens me when I see polls that say that people like him actually far outnumber people like me. From a online poll (linked below), 44% of Americans still believe in YEC. 38% believe in Old Earth Creationism (God-guided evolution basically). Only 14% of Americans believe in true atheistic evolution.

The bottom line is we don't have visual or even second-hand evidence of anything before the invention of alphabet and writing leaves a lot of people in disbelief of evolution and an old earth. And the invention of true alphabets, when prehistory became history, is, strangely enough, about 4000 years old.

http://www.pollingreport.com/science.htm

Just like most other games whose sole claim to fame is a writer/writer team that was overhyped from previous games (John Romero - Daikatana, The Original Diablo Team - Hellgate London, Richard Gariott - Tabula Rasa) this game was doomed to fail. Just because you did something right once, doesn't mean you can do it again. Sequels are usually almost always worse than the original.
I don't even consider games, where the main selling factor is that the creator created something else I enjoyed, for purchase anymore. I mean, a game should sell itself, not the guy who thought of it.

My major issue with the Mac line was the relative difficulty (or impossibility in most cases) to create homebrews. PC lines have always had much greater support for personal customization, and the price of labor, frankly, I don't see how an hour or two of my time could possibly be worth more than the hundreds of dollars I'd spend otherwise.
I've just also never been a fan of declaring my entire case a blackbox either.

This is exactly the attitude that people need to take on video gaming. Videogaming may or may not increase violent tednencies, but it does allow a way for those who already have to them to revel in them.

GTA is a great example, due to the fact that there is so much to do in the game, that what a player chooses to do, can reveal alot about them. I've played all GTA titles since 2, and to be honest, I've never really gone out and just killed hookers and shot random bystanders. It doesn't really amuse me to do that, I would much prefer to actually do the missions and progressive content that the game offers. The larger the scale of the game, the more chances there are for a player to be able to reenact or partake in some sick fantasy, but hardly no game REQUIRE you do this. The thoughts are your own, and you're acting out what you've really wanted to do in the first place. The watch should really be put on the players, not the game itself, and in some cases, the games could be used to identify early aggressive tendencies in children. If Johnny does beat up hookers for 16 hours a day, maybe you should think about why Johnny thinks this is so much fun and reevaluate what morals you've instilled in him.

Most of the biggest video game scandal moments are things players had to actively search out to find. The Mass Effect sex scene, I played through the game twice, and never found that, but that was because I never cared to try to create a relationship with any of the female characters on my team. The Hot Coffee mod, you had to know a good deal about modding your system, and had to go and download yourself.

Overall, parents really need to watch what their kid DOES do on their video games, not what they are CAPABLE of doing. I mean, I