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Also, game demos usually have a tendency to be more "alpha"-versions of the finalize product - in other words, I doubt Irrational decided to make the demo on august 8th and release it on August 13th, so they probably made the demo out of a build they made, say, in February or March, which means that the final product will more-than-likely look better/different.

I would strongly disagree with pretty much that whole paragraph.

The demo is almost certainly created from a near final build of the game by removing all the art/sound/code assets not needed by the demo.  It's a chunk of the whole, not an early version of the whole.  A developer would never release a demo of their soon-to-be-released blockbuster that lacked all the bug squashing, graphical improvements, and general polish that they had done in the past seven months.  The final version that you'll buy in the store will likely be identical to this in every way except for the few ways that they changed it specifically for the demo.

The general public will almost never see a game in it's alpha stage.  Especially since one of the definitions of an alpha release is that it's for internal testing.

Just what research are you purporting hasn't been done, exactly?  Comparing the desire to have sex with someone of the same sex to the desire to have sex with someone very young?

I already mentioned those grey areas, and yes they exist, and that's what a jury of your peers is for.  If you've broken the law (which you haven't in most US states if you're 19 and sleeping with a 17 year old) then you should get the appropriate punishment.  If the law is wrong, suggest how to fix it.

Burning desire for game: Check.

Desire to have Ken Levine's babies: Check.

Spare money to spend on console or better computer and a game: Ummm...

Time to play games: Yeah... no.

Shit.

No, it's not at all similar to homosexuality.  Homosexuality has way more in common with heterosexuality than it does with paedosexuality.

When two people are in a homosexual relationship, they are both consenting adults(or at least of the age where the law considers them an adult) and no one is being taken advantage of who is unable to protect themselves.  And if someone is being taken advantage of, sexually, then it's rape, not a homosexual relationship.  The same could be said for a heterosexual relationship.

When someone is a paedophile, he or she is looking to take advantage of someone who is unable to protect themselves and likely wouldn't know the right choice in these situations.  This is comparable to the rape of an adult, in that someone is taking sexual pleasure from taking advantage of someone weaker than them but even worse because it's happening during that individual's period of growth and development, when serious psychological damage can easily been inflicted.  It's a horrible thing to do to someone, and can not be compared with a healthy homosexual relationship.

lo_res, I don't think any research would be controversial, I think it would find that the negative psychological impact of a consensual heterosexual relationship is similar to that of a consensual homosexual relationship, and that a non-consensual relationship (homosexual or heterosexual) has significantly higher impact, and that a peadosexual relationship (which by law cannot be considered consensual) has even higher impact.

Yes, I realize that there are grey areas like 15 year olds doing it with 19 year olds, which... creepy, but meh...  But in general, taking advantage of someone whose youth prevents them from knowing how or even if they should protect themselves is absolutely horrible, and cannot be compared to two dudes who want to have sex.

[and believe]

Also amusing that all of these convoluted captchas are currently being defeated by a powerful implementation of distributed computing: lying to dumb people.

You know all those dumb people who don't filter spam, and read and believe most of the stuff that comes into their inbox?  You know how they believe those emails that say "go to this webpage and enter in your personal details to get free money," well now those webpages come complete with captchas which are actually filtered in from a bot, so that they're actually filling out captchas for a machine while they dummy over their personal details.  And just imagine "Oops, you must've made a mistake on the last one, now try this one.  Seriously, your money's coming soon." 

Those captchas are actually being used by a bot to, for example, sign up for new Yahoo mail accounts to use to look more friendly while sending out millions of more such emails.

Millions of people fall for those stupid things every day making internet scamming a successful industry, now they're just synergizing!

The problem is that buying such videos or pictures creates a market for such thing, leading to more children being sexually abused.  Child porn is created for profit just like adult porn.  Purchasing these things is definitely a crime, and definitely horrible.

http://movies.ign.com/articles/805/805046p1.html

but also

http://movies.ign.com/articles/784/784059p1.html

You can call them whatever you want.  I was only cautioning against dehumanizing them and their flaws, which at least at the start, are very human in nature, and, I believe, preventable or at least identifiable.  Meaning that if we recognize that what's creating these "monsters" is a societal, psychological, or upbringing problem, we can work to find solutions and help to prevent future atrocities.  Call them monsters if you'd like, but make sure that you don't let that be the explanation for their behavior.

I haven't seen anyone in this thread saying that we need to protect child molesters from punishment or public identification.  On the contrary, it seems that every one is unanimous on the point of publicly identifying past offenders and seeking harsh punishment for such people.  Not exactly a risqué standpoint... or a difficult one to defend.  Too many straw men flying around this thread.

They should be named, shamed, (and maybe even maimed j/k). Not hidden away and protected.

No one is suggesting we protect them.  In most cases, I'm sure most people would agree that they should be punished to the full extent of the law.  You're putting words into people's mouths in order to have something to argue against.

Stu,  what they're trying to say is that if you call someone with a psychological disorder, no matter how bad or how harmful they are to others, non-human, then you're denying the fact that these illnesses exist in humans.  We need to recognize that these people are human, but they are very damaged, and we need to be able to understand the causes and signs of this damage so that we can prevent someone else from receiving similar damage or at the very least see the signs in someone else and prevent that damaged person from hurting someone else.  To blame their deeds on something outside of our control like their inhumanness is to relieve yourself from any responsibility in helping the world deal with the problem.

A close family member of mine was raped when he was twelve years old by his scout master and had some very serious psychological issues later in life because of it.  So I know the kind of damage that can done and have the utmost sympathy for the victims of this kind of criminal.  But treating them as something less than human brings us down, maybe not to their level, but to a level of inhumanity of our own.

If you'd like, you can certainly argue that the current punishment under the law for these people is too light.  But don't blame their psychological issues on something outside our own society.

These people are indeed smart most of the time but they also talk a lot of bollards.  These are the same people who invent new dimension everytime they have a new theory just to make the maths fit.

Before, there were three (four if you include time but I don't)... when they'd spent far too much time trying to get people to believe in string-theory but couldn't get the maths to work so they fabricated [I think it was] 6 or 7 new dimensions and said "they're there, they're just too complicated for the human brain to comprehend".

You're right.  They did make up new dimensions to make the math fit, but you say that like it's a bad thing.

Using existing and proven theories and mathematical techniques, they analyzed our current understanding of our universe and dimensions and found that our current understanding was flawed, and they could prove the flaw with verifiable math.  They found out from that, that there were more dimensions than we were previously aware of, and adding those into the equation, our existing laws and theories all work out, proving the new model and making it a new theory.

What would be ridiculous would be saying, "Well, our way of thinking is wrong, and we can prove it, but it's so much easier to think this way than to have to figure out how things actually are."  Which is kind of what you're doing.

I think that you're under the impressing that if something is a theory, it's just someone's hunch.  A lot of people think that a law is something that has been proven and a theory is something that hasn't been proven.  This is completely wrong.  Laws are not "higher" than theories and a theory can never become a law, even if it can be proven to be 100% true.

A law is a readily observable fact.  Laws describe the things in our universe, but they don't explain them.

Theories take laws into account and attempt to explain the things in our universe and why they interact the way they interact.  Theories, to become scientifically accepted, have been tested and verified again and again.  In a way, theories are stronger than laws.

So don't scoff at something just because of the non-scientific definition of the word theory.  A scientific theory is very proven, and very sound, and very reliable.

Unlike religion, or apparently... you..., if new evidence is discovered (such as that suggesting that there are more dimensions beyond the 3rd or 4th), scientists can reevaluate the things that they previously thought were true and accommodate the new information to create a more accurate view of the universe.  They don't just try to explain the new evidence away so it doesn't rock the currently-understood boat.

Having done the whole breeding thing, I would say that the purpose of life is to eat peanut butter sandwiches.

I'm not saying that your statement is false and mine is right, but I think if people start thinking of the universe as 'everything in space' instead of space being something that is in the universe, then it's a hell of a lot easier to comprehend (for me).

Unfortunately, according to people much smarter than you or I and who have spent far longer contemplating and studying it, this may be easier to comprehend, but it's also wrong.  That singularity wasn't floating in anything.  Before the big bang, there were no dimensions.  Thus, it wasn't floating in anything.  It just wasn't, and then it was.  And then it was bigger.  The universe isn't just matter that is spreading out.  It's matter and the absence of matter.  There was no matter or the absence of matter before the big bang.

Excellent post RickJ!

Don't confuse 'space' and 'universe'.  Space is space... nothingness, and goes on for eternity.  The universe is every material thing that is in that space.

Don't confuse 'space' with 'vacuum' which is a volume of space that is devoid of matter.  But we know that there is no such thing as a perfect vacuum according to quantum theory, meaning that all space contains matter, even if the density is far far lower than the kind of density that we can artificially create here on Earth.  So, vacuum is part of the universe too.

The universe isn't something floating in space.  Space is something floating in the universe.  There is nothing outside of the universe because there is no outside.  The universe is finite and expanding, but while it expands, it's not taking space or volume away from something else, it's creating that volume.

The idea that the universe is bound for a Big Crunch, and eventually, another Big Bang is not a unique one, and while plausible, some recent studies have suggested that the universe's expansion is, in fact, accelerating rather than being slowed by gravity, which would suggest that the universe will not collapse, but will expand forever. 

I for one, can't wait to find out what happens.  I'll make popcorn! 

Sure, they could have set it solely in South Africa, which it's always been my understanding is British-infested and therefore predominately white. Of course I've never been to South Africa or actually seen any statistics so this could be complete bullocks.

Bullocks it is.  You are grossly misinformed.  South Africa is only about 10% white.  Have you heard of Apartheid?

And I may be wrong (perhaps it is I who is grossly misinformed) but I don't think the word black is offensive to anyone except for white people who rail for the over application of political correctness.  You are overstating their sensitivity to the word.  It doesn't even appear on the racial slur databse.  There are ways to use the word offensively, but the word itself, when referring to a person of African decent, is not, I believe, offensive.  So you can relax there.

As for the whole, calling "White" a racist term, you first need to show an example of anyone being upset over the use of the word "black" before that becomes an applicable satire.  And even if you do, mocking cultural sensitivities isn't going to do anything to help alleviate them.

Reverse racism does exist, but let's call a spade a spade.  Reverse racism is racism.  You just haven't pointed out any significant instances of it.

if the big bang did happen what was outside that one...thing that voused the explosion.
you probably think nothing. buthow can there be just empty space with no gas or materia in it?

But that's what space is... empty space with no gas or material in it.  Also known as a vacuum.  Though, most of space isn't perfect vacuum...

So what was outside the big bang?  That's the same as asking what is outside our universe.  The big bang was not an explosion of stuff in the center of the universe, it was the start of the universe.  At some finite point in the past, the universe was an infinite density with and infinite temperature, but it started rapidly expanding and cooling.  Today, the universe is the size that it is, and tomorrow it'll be a little bigger.

As for what is outside of the universe, or what created the point of infinite density and temperature that we named "The Big Bang," that's a question far beyond internet debate, and definitely far beyond a thread about Roswell...  :

"Maybe" is what separates theory from a fact, so your paragraph was quite pointless

This is true, depending on syntax, but a theory is also backed up by evidence and is testable and verifiable, making a theory much stronger than conjecture, which your post was.

Hey, I won't judge you for being fascinated by conspiracies.  You're talking to a guy who had a replica of Mulder's "I want to believe" poster on his bedroom wall. 

"Start them young… fearing, hating, and destroying Black people."

If you replace "Black people" with "zombies" it stops sounding racist, and starts sounding prudent!

Luckily, you can make yourself informed by listening, reading, and questioning.  I'd suggest starting with the link KhrisMUC posted.

Being informed and ignorant is a choice that you make for yourself.

Perhaps all violent games need an option at the beginning where you choose your race.  Then, in the game, you play someone of your race killing only people of your race.  No one could call that racist.  Sexist, however...

Ok, add a gender option too...

And you know the plot of this game is going to be about how the evil Umbrella corporation is doing illegal zombie pharmaceutical testing in Africa, making the greedy white westerners the real enemy anyways.

Side note: hot damn, that trailer looks awesome!