Who knows? This is the problem with this medium. As long as people demand "fun" in the trivial sense, we'll always be stuck with the same immature games we've always had. Now maybe this game wouldn't have been a masterpiece, but someone needs to step up and take this medium seriously--and maybe they would have. You seem to think that, perhaps, the game would never have been able to deal with difficulties of the subject matter. But I'd rather see the game attempt it, letting others learn from their mistakes, then to simply censor any attempt at a potentially mature, challenging portrayal of war--as Konami has done.

So right! The only question is if people will realize that they can voice their opinion on this matter, and not buy stuff from these jerks. They hurt the consumers and the artists...so why are we paying their salaries?

Normally I'd agree, and really I'm still not trusting them... But I gotta agree with this.

"To ensure that the work on such a project is open, transparent and complete, we feel strongly that any "manifesto" should be created, from its inception, through an open mechanism like a Wiki, for public debate and comment, all available through a Creative Commons license."

As long as no one party has more power over the process, this would be preferrable to any "organic" choice or this manifesto, as far as I see.

Simple answer: Yes.

And if that fails, we'll GPL the Middle East itself.

All of that paranoia sounds exhausting...

...why not just license everything you create under the GPL!

Everyone knows the GPL is the solution to at least 7/16th of the world's problems.

No end user who is interested in flashing debian onto their G1 would be concerned about getting support from Google.

I've only just begun my CS degree, but that sounds, to me, like a great idea. The ideas ought to be to get the students thinking about problems in terms of fundamentals rather than specifics.

Also, why would having to learn a "fake assembly language" or make a "fake kernel" be bad? I keep hearing people talk about needing to have languages to put on their resumes. Maybe I'm mistaken, but it seems to me that languages are the easiest things to learn. Anyone can plop down with some materials and learn Java, or C++, or whatever language, if they try hard enough. By asking for them to focus on languages that are marketable, you're ignoring that the goal of computer science should be to understand computing and programming in general. A CS degree should equip you to be able to learn and work in any language. A CS degree shouldn't, instead, pump out popular language X programmers, because the popular language X will always be different year-to-year and job-to-job. Maybe Java or C++ or PHP is sexy now, but it won't be sexy later. If that held true, we'd all be programming in COBOL, FORTRAN, and PASCAL.

At least in my opinion.

You're right that they should be honest, but no ads are. Yet most of the arguments against the ad being banned are that everyone is doing the same thing. Well maybe I'm an idiot but doesn't that then make the point that we ought to enforce such a standard on all ads then? If they're all lying then they all should be punished, rather than allowing everyone to lie as much as they want.

The "they're doing it too" excuse is just weak overall. Maybe you could argue that the standards are applied unevenly, but still that's only a good argument for applying the standard evenly rather than dropping all standards whatsoever.