Forums | MacLife

XYZ wrote:

Ooo... a new low in personal attacks for the week.

...and it's only Monday! Maybe later this week, he'll say you're taking an iBubba stance!

Last edited by iBubba (2006-01-30 2:38 pm)

iBubba wrote:

XYZ wrote:

Ooo... a new low in personal attacks for the week.

...and it's only Monday! Maybe later this week, he'll say you're taking an iBubba stance!

It's interesting how noone but me has said anything about Rove and endless war. Isn't anyone concerned, or does everyone feel powerless to do anything about it? That Salon article, from what I recall, basically says the neo-conservative Rovian key to its continuing grip on power is eternal war. It certainly was a good strategy for Bush's re-election for him to be a "wartime President" who could play the fear card. Bush let it slip that the War on Terror is unwinnable, which is of course the case, since it's not a war at all.

XYZ wrote:

It's interesting how noone but me has said anything about Rove and endless war.

You live in your own little world don't you.

iBubba wrote:

Farmerkev wrote:

XYZ wrote:

It's interesting how noone but me has said anything about Rove and endless war.

You live in your own little world don't you.

Don't we all? I mean, seriously, you should talk...

Enlighten me, what reality do I deny? What facts inconvenient do I ignore?

XYZ wrote:

It's interesting how noone but me has said anything about Rove and endless war.

Tallgeese wrote:

XYZ wrote:

It's interesting how noone but me has said anything about Rove and endless war.

http://homepage.mac.com/oatmeal/MAF/maxes/twitch.gif

I mean you get to that point don't you.
Ridiculous.

Washington Post wrote:

One blistering afternoon in Iraq, while fighting insurgents in the northern town of Mosul, Sgt. Sinque Swales opened fire with his .50-cal. That was only the second time, he says, that he ever shot an enemy. A human enemy.

"It felt like I was in a big video game. It didn't even faze me, shooting back. It was just natural instinct. Boom! Boom! Boom! Boom! " remembers Swales, a fast-talking, deep-voiced, barrel-chested 29-year-old from Chesterfield, Va. He was a combat engineer in Iraq for nearly a year.

Like many soldiers in the 276th Engineer Battalion, whose PlayStations and Xboxes crowded the trailers that served as their barracks, he played games during his downtime. "Halo 2," the sequel to the best-selling first-person shooter game, was a favorite. So was "Full Spectrum Warrior," a military-themed title developed with help from the U.S. Army.

"The insurgents were firing from the other side of the bridge. . . . We called in a helicopter for an airstrike. . . . I couldn't believe I was seeing this. It was like 'Halo.' It didn't even seem real, but it was real."

This is the video game generation of soldiers. " 'Ctrl+Alt+Del,' " the U.S. Army noted in a recent study, "is as basic as 'ABC.' " And computer simulations -- as military officials prefer to call them -- have transformed the way the United States military fights wars, as well as soldiers' ways of killing.
....
Lt. Col. Scott Sutton, director of the technology division at Quantico Marine Base, where the mock-up M16s are used, says soldiers in this generation "probably feel less inhibited, down in their primal level, pointing their weapons at somebody." That, in effect, "provides a better foundation for us to work with," he adds.

Retired Marine Col. Gary W. Anderson, former chief of staff of the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab, agrees: Today's soldiers, having grown up with first-person shooter games long before they joined the military, are the new Spartans, he says.

"America's Army," a free online game with more than 6.5 million registered players, is being used by the U.S. military as a recruiting tool. "Call of Duty," "Medal of Honor" and "SOCOM," to name just three best-selling military-themed titles, are popular with soldiers, whether they're deployed in Iraq or back home in the States.

"Remember the days of the old Sparta, when everything they did was towards war?" says Anderson, now a defense consultant. "In many ways, the soldiers of this video game generation have replicated that."

Swales, the 29-year-old combat engineer from Chesterfield, joined the National Guard in 1998....To pass the nights, they watched such classic war movies as "Full Metal Jacket" and "Apocalypse Now. "Saving Private Ryan" was their favorite.

"That's gonna be us, man, when they first opened the doors on the boat, when they're hitting the beach, just watching guys get mowed down," Swales, the eldest of the group, the big brother type, would joke.

Even more, though, they played military-themed games, thumbing away into the wee hours of the night. "Sometimes we'd be up till 2 or 3 in the morning, and we gotta get up, like, 0900" to head out for a foot patrol through town, says Crippen.

"We're doing this stuff for real and we're playing it on our spare time," adds Swales. "And yeah, it was ironic. But it was so normal, we didn't think nothing about it."

Nearby, Spec. Idrissa Hill, who was rooming with Jones, had an Xbox and a PlayStation 2. (They can be bought online, as well as at the PX.) Everyone kept busy. Crippen, by far the best gamer in the group, got through the last levels of "Call of Duty" and "Full Spectrum Warrior," both military-themed games.

"The very first time I fired my rifle" -- it was an M249 squad automatic weapon, a machine gun -- "I was scared. I had never shot my gun before at an actual person. But once I pulled the trigger, that was it, I never hesitated," says Crippen, 22.

"All I saw was the street where the RPG [rocket-propelled grenade] came from, and I just fired in that direction, maybe 20 rounds at most, and it felt like I was playing 'Ghost Recon' at home," referring to a Tom Clancy game.

"I've always had access to a shooter game. Ever since I could pick up a controller," he goes on. One of the first games he recalls playing as a little kid was "Commando," a shoot-'em-up game where the player's character, Super Joe, is dropped into a jungle and tries to fight his way out. "And over there in Iraq, I think playing those games helped.

"You just try to block it out, see what you need to do, fire what you need to fire. Think to yourself, This is a game, just do it, just do it, " says Trevino, 20, the baby of the group, recalling his first shot at a human enemy. He's a hard-core gamer like Crippen, plays "anything that races," he says, "anything that shoots."

"Of course, it's not a game. The feel of the actual weapon was more of an adrenaline rush than the feel of the controller," he continues."

article

iBubba wrote:

Duke Stratosphere wrote:

XYZ wrote:

Get a grant. Have a study. Let us know, OK?

:raises hand to be in a subject group:

Ooo! Ooo! Pick me! Pick me!

We do have industrial experience in the field, don't we?

Seriously, XYZ, please explain to the class why the planet has experienced pretty much a constant state of some war being waged somewhere for the 7,000 years or so immediately preceding the invention of video games. Then blame a bunch of damn video games for the fact that there is currently a state of war in various places around the planet. Come on, dude, Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun never even dreamed of Pong, much less that kids all over the Zone and GameRanger would be racing to be the first to get their stupid smurfing usernames. It so happens that Mrs. Stratosphere plays Age of Empires as well ... well, not nearly as well as me ... but she plays it on occasion. She just won't listen to me and go kill all the enemy villagers, though. She sits around and farms her ass off until she has a billion food on the baby level. So I say your hypothesis is highly unlikely. Did video games cause the Jews to invade Jericho? Did video games cause the American Revolution? The Civil War? No, I'm pretty sure they didn't. I get the impression that the most suicidal bombers in the world today have not been playing a lot of Doom lately, although by now they probably are. If anything, the technology that makes video games possible, if followed to its logical conclusion, will lead to the computer program for a replicator, a Star Trek gadget whose existence in real life would actually make the Star Trek system of government possible. Wouldn't matter then if we had the Starship Enterprise or not, we'd have automatic food machines and pretty much all our problems would be solved. The reason for most of the wars the human race has ever fought with itself was just the fact that they were desperate for food (and wood and gold and stone, which is nowadays widely known as uranium and we don't want the Persians to get it).

oatmeal wrote:

Farmerkev might not be happy to be out of a job when you don't need to buy his... his...  Kev, what do you farm, anyway

Short answer, food, for humans and animals.
The ST world glossed over quite a bit of the mechanics of just what happens if...

oatmeal wrote:

Farmerkev wrote:

oatmeal wrote:

Farmerkev might not be happy to be out of a job when you don't need to buy his... his...  Kev, what do you farm, anyway

Short answer, food, for humans and animals.
The ST world glossed over quite a bit of the mechanics of just what happens if...

If you mean that they glossed over what happens to the producers if they're suddenly not needed anymore, no they didn't.  Real meat, real wine -  real food is considered a delicacy, so they're still there.

As for the masses?  A global war wiped out most of humanity. 

Is that what you meant?  Trailing off there was a bit confusing.

Yeah sorta, the whole economy was basically glossed over.

I sort of skipped over the part about how having replicators would make having starships a basic necessity to deal with the population explosion that would no doubt ensue, too, but my point is basically that technology in general is a good thing ... as long as it's used for good things.

Duke Stratosphere wrote:

I sort of skipped over the part about how having replicators would make having starships a basic necessity to deal with the population explosion that would no doubt ensue, too, but my point is basically that technology in general is a good thing ... as long as it's used for good things.

Computer: Tea, Earl Grey, Hot.  While you're at it, I'd also like a metric ton of highly enriched uranium.

XYZ wrote:

You don't have to be Stephen Hawking to understand the Scientific Method and simple logic. A lot of people here either have trouble with simple logic, or disregard it when it isn't convenient.

My conclusion of my recent research:  There are too many situations in which simple logic may be applied.    Therefore, logic soon becomes complicated.  To "fix" this complication, teachers water down the lesson plan.