Judge: A Muslim Has The Right to Attack an 'Offensive' Atheist

Muslim Man Attacks Atheist Dressed as Zombie Muhammad for Halloween. Judge Lets Him Off.

Martin further dressed down Perce for his insensitive behavior, going so far as to call him a doofus and telling him that in Muslim societies he could have been put to death for mocking Muhammad.
“Having had the benefit of having spent over 2 and a half years in predominantly Muslim countries I think I know a little bit about the faith of Islam,” Martin said. “In fact I have a copy of the Koran here and I challenge you sir to show me where it says in the Koran that Mohammad arose and walked among the dead. I think you misinterpreted things. Before you start mocking someone else’s religion you may want to find out a little bit more about it. It makes you look like a doofus… In many Arabic speaking countries something like this is definitely against the law there. In their society in fact it can be punishable by death and it frequently is in their society.”
Sgt. Brian Curtis handled the incident aftermath. Curtis explained that Elbayomy admitted to grabbing Perce that October night.

Is this any different than a judge telling a woman that she was "asking for it" due to her chosen manner of dress?

Bioware: Mass Effect 3 is a Shooter

http://gamingbolt.com/mass-effect-3-is-not-a-corridor-shooter-bioware

“There’s definitely been an emphasis on making combat spaces into open battlefields in this game,” he continued. “We’re trying to get away from corridor shooters.”

And now I make my exit.

Shadow Complex Review: Old School, Meet New School

Old School Meets New School

Shadow Complex is a side scrolling shooter with 3D graphics that focuses heavily on map exploration and character progression. This is the game that, as you likely have heard a multitude of times recently, is a downloadable game in the vein of Super Metroid (and a few others). Some go so far as to say this game is a Metroid clone. Either way you look at it, it's definitely very similar. However, for the purposes of this review, I am going to forget Super Metroid et al., and focus merely on this game and its merits. This will be a fairly lengthy review, and I will do my best to describe in detaii what you can expect from this game.

Treatable STD Scarier Than Fatal Flu

http://www.livescience.com/18461-treatable-sti-scarier-fatal-flu.html

Passing someone a sexually transmitted infection is viewed as worse than giving them the flu — even if the flu turns out to be fatal, a new study finds. The stigma surrounding STIs can keep people from getting tested, discussing testing with partners or disclosing to partners that they do have an infection, Moor said. She and her colleagues wanted to understand how much stigma really influences people's perceptions of these diseases. To do so, the researchers gathered 1,158 volunteers via the Internet and had each read a short paragraph about someone transmitting either the H1N1 flu, also called swine flu, or chlamydia to another person. Though H1N1 usually causes nothing more than a few days of misery, people with compromised immune systems, the elderly and the very young can die of it.

In every scenario in the study, "Christina" or "James" feels a little ill, but shrugs off the symptoms, goes to a party and has sex with a fellow partygoer. In some cases, this sexual encounter transmits chlamydia to their partner. In other cases, it transmits H1N1. After reading one of these scenarios, each participant answered a series of questions about how selfish, risky and all-around irresponsible they would rate either Christina or James.

Keeping a sexual mode of transmission constant was meant to control for any automatic "sex is taboo" reactions from participants, Moor said. But despite the fact that the characters James and Christina acted sexually identically in all scenarios, chlamydia seemed to strike extra fear into participants' hearts.When Christina or James were said to have transmitted chlamydia, people judged them harshly, ranking them as almost as selfish and risky as was possible in the survey. When H1N1 was the disease in question, however, people rated the transmitter much more generously. Even when the sexual partner actually died of H1N1, transmitting chlamydia was seen as much more risky and irresponsible than transmitting the flu.

"It's quite confusing," Moor said. "If sex is taboo and that's why people are thinking STIs are so stigmatized, we just nipped that in the bud. We're showing that you can get H1N1 through sex, but it's still not stigmatized."

This is something that I have considered for some time, and I am glad it is finally garnering attention in the scientific community. While the findings seem to concur with my feelings on the subject, I do have one criticism to make: They say that it is inexplicable that people view STI's in a harsher light than they do say the flu, even if both are transmitted sexually. They say that they controlled for the "sex is taboo" factor by making sexual activity the mode of transmission in each scenario. However, I think they are missing one crucial point: STI's are linked, in people's minds, with sex, while the flu is not. And this is quite likely directly resultant of the taboo nature of sex in North American culture.

Thoughts?

Namibia sponge fossils are world's first animals: study

http://news.yahoo.com/namibia-sponge-fossils-worlds-first-animals-study-203340973.html

Scientists digging in a Namibian national park have uncovered sponge-like fossils they say are the first animals, a discovery that would push the emergence of animal life back millions of years.
The tiny vase-shaped creatures' fossils were found in Namibia's Etosha National Park and other sites around the country in rocks between 760 and 550 million years old, a 10-member team of international researchers said in a paper published in the South African Journal of Science.
That means animals, previously thought to have emerged 600 million to 650 million years ago, actually appeared 100 million to 150 million years before that, the authors said.
It also means the hollow globs -- about the size of a dust speck and covered in holes that allowed fluid to pass in and out of their bodies -- were our ancestors, said co-author Tony Prave, a geologist at the University of St Andrews in Scotland.

Read the rest at the link above.

I find this doubly fascinating, as it acts both as a furthering of our knowledge of our origins and a tentative confirmation of the 'molecular clock' method of dating.

COD Black Ops: LEGO Edition

I hate COD and I am sick to death of FPS games but this is fucking brilliant:

The Witcher 2 (Xbox 360): Real In-Game Footage

Socialism in the US; Is America (At Least Partly) Socialist? And Is Socialism '"Bad?"

NOTE: This is an unpublished blog from last year.

So many Americans seem to be up in arms about that ever present enemy, "socialism." Woooooo, "socialism." Scary word down there in the US these days, a word made ever increasingly more hateful by the day courtesy of our friends over at Fox News Channel (and Fox affiliate radio programs, of course. Don't worry Rush Limbaugh, I didn't forget your hateful, lying ass). And yet, this ever increasingly hated enemy is nothing but smoke and mirrors. In fact, the U.S, along with every other developed nation, thrives on semi socialist policies.

Resident Evil: Revelations 3DS Demo Door Puzzle in Seconds (2 Moves) Walkthrough

This video shows you how to complete that initial puzzle (door lock puzzle) found in the RE:R demo in a matter of seconds (once the screws are removed) by making just 2 moves:



If you have played this demo, what do you think of it?

Also, if you answer this, could you add whether or not you consider yourself a fan of the Resident Evil games, and if so, which ones do you prefer? The old school survival horror ones with tank controls, puzzles a-plenty, static camera angles and limited ammo, or the new school ones (Resident Evil 4 and 5).

Personally, RE6 will most likely turn out to be a far better game, technically, than Revelations, but I think Revelations will succeed where RE6 will likely fail: At being a damn RE game! I hope I am wrong, but I think 6 is going to stray even farther from the series' roots than 5 did, and while 5 was a great game in its own right, it was an abomination of an RE game :(

Gaming News I Did NOT Expect: New Neo Geo Portable!

http://andriasang.com/comzr4/neo_geo_pocket_2/

Yes, it's obviously designed by totally unimaginative Apple copycats, but who cares?

There are 20 games pre-loaded onto the 2GB of internal storage (an SD slot allows for expansion if desired):

• 1.WORLD HEROES
• 2.ULTIMETE 11
• 3.TOP PLAYER'S GOLF
• 4.SENGOKU
• 5.NAM-1975
• 6.MUTATION NATION
• 7.LAST RESORT
• 8.KING OF MONSTERS
• 9.FRENZY
• 10.CYBER LIP
• 11.FATAL FURY SPECIAL
• 12.ART OF FIGHTING
• 13.SUPER SIDEKICKS
• 14.LEAGUE BOWLING
• 15.METAL SLUG
• 16.MAGICAL LORD
• 17.BASEBALL STARS PROFESSIONAL
• 18.SAMURAI SHODOWN
• 19.KING OF FIGHTERS '94
• 20.FATAL FURY

It comes out ______ and is priced at _______

(Yes, that means no one yet knows)

No word yet as to whether or not other games will be available for purchase, if applications can be run, etc. 

Did YOU expect this news? I sure as hell didn't!

My Favourite Franchises are being Destroyed

Hear the latest news coming from the people behind the upcoming Resident Evil 6? They're after the Call of Duty market....Seriously:

http://www.computerandvideogames.com/332888/resident-evil-attracting-cod-fans-the-dream-says-capcom-action-route-makes-sense/

First I see that abomination of a trailer and I figure there is no hope left, but then Capcom decided to at least be nice and remove any possibility of me maintaining even the slimmest glimmer of hope by announcing that, nope, you're out of luck, and yes, Resident Evil is not what it once was, aka what you fans  MADE it to begin with.

And btw, Capcom, RE5 was the biggest selling RE game and the most action oriented, but that correlation is just that: a correlation. To infer a causal relationship between the two is fallacious, and when you FAIL to grab a significant portion of the COD fanbase's attention, hopefully you will re-examine your conclusion. Protip: Was it the only RE game simultaneously released on multiple platforms, both with huge install bases in the middle of a gaming explosion in the mainstream? Was it a game that followed a tremendous entry into the series? Don't many franchises grow with time?

Can I be sure that it [i]wasn't[/i] the action orientated nature of the game that drove sales? Nope. They can't be sure it was, though, and when you factor in things like it following RE4, being multiplatform on 2 very successful consoles, etc., one has to wonder if perhaps they are being a bit narrow in their thinking.

And as if this shit wasn't enough, this comes after the bastardization of Ninja fucking Gaiden of all things, PLUS the shooter-ification of Mass Effect, the whatever the fuck you call it they did to Devil May Cry (although I hold out some hope that one may still be good), the abomination that was Dragon Age 2, the rape of Rainbow Six (although the games are still great, for the most part), the pillaging of the spirit of Fable, and on and on.

Not to mention other people's favourites that have been ASSFUCKINGRAPEFUCKED like Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon, Hitman, Metroid, Silent Hill, etc.

This is a pretty fucking sad time to be an 'old school' gamer. Everything classic is being bastardized in favour of being "cinematic," and "accessible," and anything that was stealthy, strategic or required any fucking thought, effort, patience, time or conquering of difficulty has become a fucking joke, with hour long turorials, incredibly obvious exposition, HUD's made for toddlers (breadcrumb trails, really Molyneux?), and someone in your ear at ll fucking times, telling you what to do and where to go (even goddamn motherfucking RYU HAYABUSA has someone chirping in his ear in Ninja Gaiden 3....WHAT THE FUCK?).

ENOUGH OF THIS SHIT!!!  FUCK!!!!

/get off my lawn

Trying Out the New Drums

Geometry Wars 2 Review

Geometry is Fun Again.....Again

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2 is the sequel to the smash hit, Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved, which itself was an expanded version of a mini game found in the game Project Gotham Racing 2 on the original xbox.

Geometry Wars: Retro Evolved 2, just like its predecessor, is a 2D top down shooter, that is essentially a modernized version of Asteroids, without the warping and with dual stick controls added in. You move the ship with the left analog stick, and fire in the direction you point the right one in. Instead of flying saucers and asteroids, your ship shoots at enemies that take several different geometric shapes, are coloured differently, and behave in different ways. There are simple enemies like the blue diamonds that move towards your position in a non aggressive manner, or the purple pinwheels that spin about randomly, not attacking you but causing your demise if you inadvertently make contact with them. There are green squares that hone in on you, and cowardly move away once you turn to fire in their direction.

Rant on PR Speak (Sparked by comments by EA CEO RE: "Online Pass")

NOTE:  Major expletive filled rant here, so consider yourself forewarned. Also, please note that this was written quite some time ago, as you would have ascertained yourself. Just thought I'd fill you in. It's still relevant, but a couple of the things mentioned are now in the past. D'oh!                                                                                                                          

Nintendo 3DS Swapnote Slideshow Demo Video "God Slideshow"