Yeah, I was kinda thinking the same thing. We could make a perfect super-soldier physically, or go with making us more efficient for modern life.
Less cravings for sugar/fat, less loss of muscle/bone strength when sitting for long periods, remove genetic diseases and disorders, improve resistance to cancer and heart disease, reduce effects of aging, etc. Long-term differences that would greatly reduce cost of health care (well, other than at conception when you'd need to engineer in these things at first).
Eh, but evolution trims things away, too. It's edited down our strength and senses because we didn't absolutely need them for survival in the gene pool thanks to technology, not because they were no longer useful. I mean, our athletes don't get dumber inherently because they move faster or have more efficient muscles, nor do people with better sight and smell suddenly lose IQ points, and the people I've met who can't seem to get fat or gain weight don't spend any mental effort doing so. There may be a trade-off eventually, but I don't think we're quite near that limit.
At some point, I think we'll need to start taking a hold of our genetics and its future direction. Not with eugenics, or any of that crap, but to start weeding out tendencies towards disease and disability at birth via genetic engineering in the womb. We survive better than ever, but it still sucks to have crappier sight, or to know you're going to get Alzheimer's or cancer in the future or die way too young because of inherited disease. Eliminating that suffering in the right way would be perfectly justifiable to me.
I was thinking the same thing, so the obvious unspoken option is to get a bigger brain. I mean, you're already probably increasing chest size with extra lung sacs, so you could just up the entire body size with a proportionally bigger skull cavity and more brain matter to handle the heightened senses.
Of course, this might still mess with the higher brain functions, but it's a possible solution.
Triceratops, which has faces potential reclassification as the adolescent version of a different species of dinosaur, the Torosaurus, instead of being a separate species.
Yeah, I remember reading crappy comments, but I don't note the source of crap comments in most cases, as replying would just promote their crap.
I'm just thinking that even churches which preach love, unity, togetherness and community fall apart based on differing beliefs about the love and togetherness.
Having some basis for sticking together works better than none, basically.
Citizens of democracies usually have to deal with the government and its enacted rules, so there's a motivation to participate.
Who'd want to participate in this? Maybe there are enough agnostics or religious people who don't mind voting on beliefs, but to stick around if the majority swings against you...I don't know that you'd end up with much of a group, but I suspect they'd all splinter back to groups that agree with their core beliefs they held before joining the "religion". Minority beliefs don't magically go away.
Even huge debates (which already happen constantly) with tons of philosophical arguments and citations thrown about don't convince people on matters of faith or even morality most of the time. Voting and smacking down people with a majority isn't going to do it, and it really rubs most people the wrong way to constantly fight about these beliefs or feel like a minority whose values are being diminished in importance by the majority.
Yeah, nothing forces people to stay in other religions, but the people in those religions cohere because of their shared convictions and scriptures and other less-changing dogma. Here...what would do that?
I'm a little confused...if we were to crowd-source a religion, what exactly are you taking as the foundation? Is it just goodness? Then you've just got secular humanism...unless you actually wanted a supernatural element?
What you're describing seems more like a forum of morality or values where people can discuss what is moral and try to come to some sort of consensus through democratic participation. You don't exactly need an actual religion or worship of the supernatural to do that, which makes me think this is less a religion, but rather a method to discuss (and rank) morality. You're discussing mechanics of changing or implementing beliefs rather than what those beliefs are centered on, which seems to dodge religion's purpose.
Unless, of course, you mean applying this kind of gamification to pre-existing religions, which still doesn't seem like it would work. People in religions already constantly debate what's right and what's wrong, and that just leads to split congregations and new sub-species of belief, not unified moral progressiveness.
Even if you somehow start with total participation, you can't force the dissenters or belief minorities to stay in the ranking system, basically; if they're down-rated or low-ranked consistently, they'll just make their own forum or rule/ranking system and split. The pace of these values discussions might increase, but that doesn't inherently make people more malleable to changes in religious belief. Beliefs of that sort are mostly faith based, and part of having real faith is ignoring or straw-manning dissenting opinions (full disclosure: being a former fundamentalist, I have particularly negative views on faith).
Even police and military action has a hard time rooting out bad moral beliefs and actions and divisiveness which are rooted in religious faith (e.g., slavery, child labor, suppression of women's rights, oppression of minorities or other religions); how would an unenforced forum with rules created by a group of strangers do any better?
Basically, Facebook and other social sites (even religious ones) didn't make people suddenly start considering other's beliefs based on popularity or end up unifying religions, so I seriously doubt such a gamification method will do it for current religions, either.
HD systems have longer game production cycles than those older systems, which means that any of the more recent consoles begin with sparse libraries that take a while to build up, unless you're supplementing with games from the previous console generation.
That's why they do backwards compatibility so often nowadays: you extend the life-time profits of software and boost earlier sales of new consoles because they can fully replace old consoles.
Obviously, this disc registration is not mandatory, but it seems like it would have been a smart business choice that also helped customers spend more money sooner, which is a win-win situation.
Personally, I am less likely to buy a Vita near launch now that I know a lot of my disc-library won't be transferable without full-price digital purchases. I was expecting to be able to finish all my PSP RPGs on the Vita, but now I'll have to finish them on the PSP before considering a Vita purchase.
Couldn't you just mess with the focal plane of the HUD, so it's like the info is floating further away even though the lens is close? I'm pretty sure other head-mounted displays already do this; wikipedia calls the technique of making the light seem to converge from further way a manipulation of collimation or distant focus.
The other Tortall books are also pretty good moral stories; I definitely liked the justice and fairness shown by Keladry in the Protector of the Small quartet.
...not sure if serious...
[en.wikipedia.org](exercise)
Eh, and if we're able to change aging, I presume maturation would change as well. If we're all staying younger and fitter for longer, we would be more progressive and able to adapt better for longer, leading to less stagnation of ideas. Sure, a new genius might not get born, but we'd keep our old geniuses and idea people, most of whom still seemed like they contributed up until their deaths.
As it is, people die a LOT, and we're pretty close to culling humans already, without any of the benefits of longer, healthier lives. If we don't start limiting reproduction soon anyway (regardless of if immortality or reduced aging happens), our food/water supply will definitely do it for us.
If we're trying to maximize human happiness, I'm not sure that having billions of non-reproducing and restricted immortals right at our food production limits would necessarily be more unhappy than billions starving and dying in quick (by current standards) mortal lives that have unrestricted reproduction. There's already a lot of unfairness inherent in our world's societies and death rates; adding restrictions with immortality doesn't seem that horrible fairness-wise.
But anyway, there are other possibly scenarios with discovered immortality/reduced mortality, like longer more youth-filled lives that still end, or very limited numbers of people getting immortality that wouldn't really outcrowd the mortals (who knows, maybe it'll be a treatment and not passed down to offspring, or only work with some gene-lines, or just be too expensive/difficult to perform for everyone), or we get into space and immortals have places to go that won't overcrowd.
If we can digitally alter movie stars to look underfed on magazines, we can probably do it for movies too (like Captain America, for example). Or, go real; Christian Bale in Machinist shows some actors are willing to do it mostly as character/story building. The main cast are over 18 (Peeta's almost 20, Katniss is 22) so whatever, they're adults.
But I think the real reason they are ignoring the story accuracy isn't humane-ness. More likely, hollow cheeks and undersized muscles wouldn't look good on the guys, and that's a big problem if they're aiming to attract a following similar to Twilight.
Yeah, this is looking like stick-n-stylus Sin & Punishment, though I'm not sure I understand the controls for the grounded portions of the gameplay...
"Diamond" is just the classic double-diamond grips. I know some versions 1911 might not normally have them, though they're easy to acquire.
Damn it, now I really wanna do it when you break it down and make it sound easy.
I guess it's mostly so cool because Snake is ranting about it; the list of mods really is matched or outdone by most competition guns or custom workhorse guns.
You could story-justify that Snake was just so used to the crappy stock weapons with worn parts and cruddy performance tolerance that he made a mountain out of a mole-hill over a slightly personalized and tuned gun. When you're used to acquiring weapons in-mission, you usually have to make do with crap.
I was just thinking it'd be cooler to show a retuned MGS3 1911. It does sound a lot more challenging.
Yeah, I even remember seeing gun forum posts discussing how to mod a Beretta to look like the Samurai Edge a year or two back, so it's probably one of many similar mods.
Yeah, it's not just the crappy customer service by the company that's to blame (which started before Paul, by the way), it's a consumer who's being lied to by the company and obviously being handled who's to blame, too! Or it's all the pro-consumer celebrity's fault for bringing it to light!
In a word: NO.
To elaborate:
Consumers complain and they have to right to threaten pro-consumer action like bad reviews or going to publications with the story. It's pretty much the only weapon consumers can wield directly, and you encounter it often if you're in customer service.
Customer service people saying the dismissive equivalent of "come at me, little man" is simply not acceptable. That derision and taunting is bullying, and asking for your company's reputation to get dragged through the mud. Well, Paul got the evisceration he asked for.
If you think a taunting and derisive response to those normal consumer actions doesn't constitute the "first swing" in this incident, you're being irrational or don't understand psychological bullying. Dave isn't at fault, it's N-Control that started it with failed promises and Paul who acted like an utterly insufferable ass-hat to ignite the issue.
Mike and the internet quite likely went over the top to crucify the asshole, but you can't blame Dave without coming off as an anti-consumer or just willfully ignorant to the stated realities of the situation.
Way to blame the victim and complain about his justifiably angry tone instead of making a rational argument or empathizing for two seconds about being in Dave's shoes.
Anime can do dark fantasy (Berserk or Claymore for example)...but yeah, Appleseed's CGI style might be a poor choice within anime styles they could've used.
I didn't watch the first anime, but damn, that looks good.
