I absolutely agree that the fatality you described is completely in bad taste. Horrible taste. No, TASTELESS. Just fucked up beyond belief. I don't want to play that game. I don't ever want to see that. I'm not buying this new Mortal Kombat, and I will enthusiastically try to convince anyone who is buying the game that they shouldn't, mostly on the bad taste and judgement the makers of this game displayed.

And that's how I think it should be.

I think the supreme court decision is still right though. Just because selling MK to a child is not a criminal offense doesn't mean every retailer is falling over themselves to push this violent, idiotic product onto children.

I just don't want people deciding that showing violence to children is illegal. Already after we're completely saturated in it everywhere. If we made showing violent videogames to children a crime, then we HAVE to follow up with movies and books. Then we have this huge "banned for children" media list rolling around, accreting who knows what.

I just don't think it's that dangerous. I don't want people able to sell my child alcohol because it may endanger and harm him. But having him watch that fatality, while EXTREMELY unfavorable, won't kill him. Probably scare and disgust this hell out of him and give him nightmares, which is why I won't ever let him see it, but I don't view it as imminent harm.

I think as a community we can self regulate good taste. Human Centipede was a movie that totally got made, and is totally legal for our children to buy. But I haven't really heard of a rash of kids getting a hold of it and watching it, probably because a decent portion of our community wouldn't even waste their time acquiring that movie.

As for violence versus sex: We've gone overboard for what we consider sexual obscenity. full on closeup hardcore pornography is, a woman breastfeeding isn't. That doesn't matter though because there's a prevailing belief that showing ANY naughty part automatically makes something pornography. See the superbowl wardrobe malfunction. We need to ease up on our definition for sexual obscenity otherwise the arguments against regulating and child-banning media lose credibility

I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and imagine you are not a U.S. citizen, so you have no idea about or past rulings by our highest court, the US Supreme Court.

A minor cannot buy pornography because most pornography is classified as "obscene." And the court has ruled that speech that is obscenity can be regulated by the government, which is oftentimes realized as preventing minors purchase. I guess that explains the legal why to why a minor can't purchase pornography, but I can tell you're more interested in ethical why.

Why is violence more acceptable than sex? Because in our culture...violence is more acceptable than sex. Maybe because we were Puritans, and maybe we were bloodthirsty, but somehow American culture evolved to accept violence more than sex.

But you cannot deny that our social values are changing. Sex is becoming more and more ubiquitous and accepted in American culture as the years roll on. It permeates our advertising and media which is continually pushing the limit. Eventually I can see a day where the two reach parity.

I'm pretty sure this is exactly what is going to happen. I've heard rumors of them building huge datacenters for hosting media files and it looks like they're going to move your itunes library to the cloud. Combine that with the iphone and apple TV and you'll be watching movies on the ride home and then switch to the tv as soon as you get in the door.

That is too real to be funny to me :(

I looked at the diagram and it showed that it needs to be hooked up to a charge and ground? It looks like they are just transferring the charge into capacitors while using the salt as an electrolyte?

I'm sure this works, otherwise we wouldn't be talking about it seriously, but my primitive mind can't see WHERE the net energy is coming from the salt water.

Could someone help me out and explain?

Thanks!

From my experience I can already tell you:

"Good enough product in November (early November!)"

And how do you celebrate something that is sad, tragic and unlucky?
With humor!
http://www.harkavagrant.com/index.php?id=197

As an iPhone developer I have to say THANK YOU! All these patents fall completely under what is going on with the iphone. If you check out most iphone games you can see that they have the option to listen to your iTunes while playing the game. I've been talking to my coworkers about these rumors of an "Apple console, finally" and I have to tell you it already happened, the iPhone touch OS is it.

I know by your handle this is going to fall on deaf ears but:

Your theoretical example is perfectly logical. Unfortunately I'm having a hard time transferring it to a real world example in my company, or other companies.

Now if one person made oranges and the other made gold bars it would make perfect sense. But people don't "make" oranges. They pick them. Or they plant them. Or they tell people when to pick them or plant them. Or they supervise people who tell other people when to pick or plant or water them. A little more complicated now right?

What people produce isn't really goods, it is "work" that is added to things to make them more valuable. Turning a lump of clay into a statue. Turning libraries and code into programs. Turning ore into metal. Turning disparate data into a useful statistical analysis for the rest of the company.

Unless you're talking about yesteryear artisans and craftsmen, you're going to be hard pressed to find a person who completely produces a good with no help. In fact, some would say the whole point of modern industrialization is that we take complicated things and break them down so we can move any person around and still produce the same good.

And when the production isn't an assembly line anymore and becomes this complex web of people who do jobs which effects are near impossible to quantify, well I would say hugely differing salaries are not as defensible. Plus having this "artificial" limit tells the employees that if there is a rising tide, it will raise all ships. People like fairness and equality and the feeling that someone gives a damn about you and if this policy accomplishes that, good for them.

Ah crap I modded you redundant instead of insightful too!

Wow, yeah I think this is a new low for slashdot, not only did he not RTFA he didn't RTFS and apparently only RTFH.

You're the only one I found making a lick of sense here. What the question should be is "Which phone to develop for FIRST?" Why in the world are you going to limit yourself to one phone?

Take this guy's advice: standardize your interface, abstract things into layers and code well. If you do this right you should be able to port your applications over to the other phone platforms and as a byproduct create reuseable code. Trust me, I work for a phone developer and we write our applications to work on our own api. Then we simply implement the libraries for each platform and with some tweaking we get all our applications working.

It's good coding, and it's good practice. If you really have a good idea and it takes off it will make all the future work easier.