Unpopular Opinions V6 You know maybe fascism wasn't all that it was cracked up to be - General

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50991407]Skype > Discord Any day of the week. I love how people say "Discord has 1 on 1 chats with friends" as if Skype doesn't already do that somehow[/QUOTE]How about neither im forced to use both occasionally and hate both. Mumble is best for just general voice chat, and if you need video google hangouts works well without a trash interface. [sp]jitsi and tox are also promising but no one is nerdy enough to try them with me[/sp]

[QUOTE=TheFilmSlacker;50991746]I don't get people who don't let their pets on the couch. If you're afraid of a bit of fur, maybe you shouldn't have gotten a pet in the first place. I care more about my pets than some couch.[/QUOTE] I'm slightly allergic to my cats, not so much where I can't own them and even hold them and stuff, but if they leave their hair on my shit it'll fuck me up. So it can be that situation for some people. Also just cleanliness, it's not like it'll hurt their pets to not be on the couch.

the bar for creating a good yet casual VoIP program is amazingly low if you wanted to make a better version of skype, all you need to do is remake skype from 2010

[QUOTE=Sector 7;50991768]the bar for creating a good yet casual VoIP program is amazingly low if you wanted to make a better version of skype, all you need to do is remake skype from 2010[/QUOTE] The only problem is the biggest obstacle for a new, better piece of software is an already established good-enough piece of software. Skype is adequate for most people, they don't care. There's already lots of skype alternatives but none of really overtaken it because of that.

I think Battleborn looks fun. The only reason I played it yet is because of a mixture of its price and playerbase size.

I'm against the death penalty, but I don't have a problem inherently with the idea of state sanctioned killing. Some peoples continued existence is detrimental to a healthy society, and death or life in prison serves no real functional difference. Do whichever is cheaper. It happens that life in prison is cheaper, but that's purely incidental to why I'm against it. As I see it, there's two real reasons why I don't like the death penalty. The first is pretty obvious, and straight forward. People have repeatedly shown to be falsely convicted. Someone in jail can be released. A dead person cannot. The numbers are low enough that it's not the end of the world type scenario, but the fact that there are non zero numbers is enough to raise the issue. This is a well covered argument and it's simple enough that I don't feel the need to elaborate further. The second point is a lot more nuanced, and I feel it is a much bigger deal, as it directly affects more people, and that's before you even get to the ramifications across the justice system as a whole. It has been repeatedly shown that the existence of the death penalty is used by prosecutors as a cudgel to leverage people into taking plea deals, even when they are innocent. Most people cannot afford competent legal council, and the threat of death is a motivator that can make them make what would otherwise be irrational decisions. That is a singularly disgusting perversion of the core tenants of what justice is supposed to be, and it's becoming systemic. Everything is pushing to be harsh on criminals, and the system as it currently stands actively rewards prosecutors who go out of their way to behave unethically, so you see this behavior across the board. Prosecutors consistently threaten people with absolutely absurd charges on farcical cases that would never see the light of day if even the worst public defender could spend more than 20 minutes reviewing them before being 5 shots of whiskey under the table on any given work day. The system is about clearance rates, not about justice. To that end the removal of the death penalty simply eliminates a powerful and frequently mishandled tool from the worst abusers of the criminal justice system, barring them from attempting to push objectively horseshit cases in the name of their numbers game. You cannot force ethical behavior, but you can remove many of the tools of the unethical.

I don't like the death penalty because I think people deserve life

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;50992588]I don't like the death penalty because I think people deserve life[/QUOTE] For many, a life of solitary is worse than death. To society at large, it functionally makes no difference if someone is dead or spends life rotting in a cell. I do have issues with how the death penalty is carried out, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea. Inert gas asphyxiation is cheap, absolutely effective, and humane. Shooting people is more humane than current methods.

i like cod mp sometimes it's dumb silly fun and i love shutting my brain off for an hour or two and just shootin' dudes

[QUOTE=Zephyrs;50992681]For many, a life of solitary is worse than death. To society at large, it functionally makes no difference if someone is dead or spends life rotting in a cell. I do have issues with how the death penalty is carried out, but that has nothing to do with whether or not it's a good idea. Inert gas asphyxiation is cheap, absolutely effective, and humane. Shooting people is more humane than current methods.[/QUOTE] I'm one for rehabilitation and counselling

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;50992946]I'm one for rehabilitation and counselling[/QUOTE] You can't turn any bad seed good with a bit of rehab and therapy. Some people are beyond help.

1. What knowledge do you actually have about this too say that they are 2. That doesn't mean they don't deserve help

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;50993465]1. What knowledge do you actually have about this too say that they are 2. That doesn't mean they don't deserve help[/QUOTE] Well what knowledge can you have to know when someone has actually been successfully rehabilitated? Psychology is no exact science. Can you ever take the risk of releasing a guy like Breivik back into society?

[QUOTE=SIRIUS;50992946]I'm one for rehabilitation and counselling[/QUOTE] For some people that's just a waste of public resources. Some people are just so fucked in the head that they will never be able to integrate into society, let alone contribute to it. That's why I don't care about the death penalty itself. I see nothing morally wrong with eliminating seriously violent individuals who are nothing but an economic tax on society. The burdens of the proof need to be high obviously. It just so happens that those burdens of proof make it economically cheaper to keep them alive in a tiny box for 50 years than going through the effort of doing the paperwork justifying their death, so there's no valid economic incentive to seek the death penalty. Hell, lets take this a step further. Assuming you could guarantee guilt (impossible to be absolute, even when on camera with dozens of eyewitnesses), and weren't dealing with the already mentioned perversions of the legal system (also impossible without top to bottom structural reform, and even then), I frankly would have no issues donating them to science. This situation is impossible, but let's play the what if game for just a minute here. Their violence and destruction incurred a debt owed to society. Make them repay that debt with their life instead of simply discarding it and writing off the loss through mere execution. They chose not just to not contribute, but to be an active detriment. As punishment, force their contribution. Do something to make them brain dead, or something of that sort in order to keep it humane, and use them for drug trials, horrific experiments, or simple tissue donations. We could probably learn a lot about various diseases doing something like this. Like it or not, the Nazis brought about substantial advancements in medical technology and understanding through their terrible experiments, and so did the Japanese with Unit 731. We could maybe come up with a late stage cure for stuff like Rabies. Right now the [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milwaukee_protocol]Milwaukee Protocol[/url] is more or less putting them into a coma so deep that they are only a step away from death, and hope that the seizures and other brain complications can be mitigated sufficiently for long enough that your body can fight the disease off and prevent damage to your brain. 5 of 36 people have survived that treatment, which is 5 people that survived rabies when nobody else in history has survived it after contracting it. With something as simple as a few donors under extremely carefully controlled conditions with years of prep work, we could slingshot that research ahead and save many other lives over the next century. And that's just rabies; a disease that we have very reliable and effective vaccines for. Imagine what you could do for things like overexposure to radiation, cancer treatments or treating toxic buildups like mercury, arsenic and lead. I see nothing morally wrong with relegating the most irredeemable and violent criminals to a fate like that in and of itself. It's just the wider ramifications and unintended negative consequences of giving a government that level of power over an individual make it a seriously bad idea. In a world where there was no corruption, or abuse of power, it would be wonderful, but such a world probably not have anyone abhorrent enough to meet the criteria in the first place. Regardless, it's a moot point. We don't live in that world. No matter whether you feel the death penalty is inherently morally good or bad, it has negative consequences for the rest of society, most of whom are innocents, so I do not see how any reasonable individual could support it. [editline]3rd September 2016[/editline] [QUOTE=SIRIUS;50993465]1. What knowledge do you actually have about this too say that they are 2. That doesn't mean they don't deserve help[/QUOTE] Please watch some videos of interviews with Charles Manson. He is someone who is certifiably stone cold batshit crazy. We have no capacity to even attempt to understand the depth of his madness, let alone begin to fathom a method for treatment.

[QUOTE=Fapplejack;50993410]You can't turn any bad seed good with a bit of rehab and therapy. Some people are beyond help.[/QUOTE] Obviously, but just because some people can't be helped doesn't really mean focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment isn't a bad idea.

[QUOTE=Zillamaster55;50991407]Skype > Discord [/QUOTE] This. Unless you're the quirky gamer type you ain't gonna have fuckin discord in the first place. Most people I talk with online have skype, and it's a lot quicker to turn on and call someone there than in discord. I use discord as a text based program for groups, primarily.

[QUOTE=Jarokwa;50992635]i've been replaying the splinter cell series and while chaos theory and blacklist are the best, double agent and conviction really aren't as bad as people like to pretend they are. double agent took it in an interesting direction storywise and i liked how they kinda took away the cheesy ''hide in the dark and they'll never find you'' mechanic which made the previous games way too easy, conviction is a really solid game with a new gameplay style, a good one too, you can still sneak, but you can also just shoot if you wish, people don't realize that the previous splinter cells had the same options aswell, you could sneak through it, or you could just sit in the dark and pop every guard in the head, in most missions atleast. people should stop pretending anything pre-double agent was deep or hard gameplay wise.[/QUOTE] Alright, I'm going to call bullshit on this. Double Agent was a crap game, it was a buggy mess with shitty levels. Hiding in the dark wasn't cheap, it was the main fucking mechanic of the series. Double Agent's lighting system is completely retarded, especially that traffic light system. Fuck subtlety and nuance, enemies can see you or they can't, no in betweens! That bullshit has continued on through all the subsequent games and it's fucking garbage. It also had those fucking awful full colour NVGs which were significantly worse than regular NVGs. Conviction is also a shit game. The story is garbage and the mechanics have been stripped back to be part baby's first stealth game and part generic third person shooter. You can't sneak through most of Conviction because the game forces you to fight enemies, it causes automatic alerts for fake tension, and is floods rooms with enemies who act like they're on alert from the beginning. There's also the changes to the control scheme which only remove player control, who needs a fucking jump button anyway, let's just have E do fucking everything. Conviction was lead by the same director who did Rainbow Six Vegas, a man who has openly stated that he doesn't like stealth games. Why the fuck would you put someone who doesn't like stealth games as the creative director of a stealth game?

[QUOTE=Blazedol;50993954]Obviously, but just because some people can't be helped doesn't really mean focusing on rehabilitation rather than punishment isn't a bad idea.[/QUOTE] Definitely. This is one of the core things that needs to change with our criminal justice system. We are one of the worst western nations when it comes to prison. There are still people that cannot be rehabilitated, but they are a very small minority. The bigger problem is that there are people that simply require too much money and effort to properly rehabilitate. If we are forced to choose, I'd rather help several people barely making ends meet before dumping hundreds of thousands on treatment for one completely deranged person, particularly if they have a good chance at relapsing once they are stable enough to be released. It's not 'right'; it's just practical. The world doesn't run on hopes and dreams. Setting up these complex systems is not something that can be done overnight. Hell, look at the mess that was rolling out Obamacare.

But in the long run, we're already wasting probably even more money with the system we have now. It's been proven numerous times that more often than not it simply doesn't work, yet we still throw quite a bit of money at it every year, and it's not getting any better. You are right in that it won't happen over night, and it will be pretty dang expensive to get set up, but honestly I think it'll still end up being worth it. At least it has a higher chance of working.

[QUOTE=Jarokwa;50994139]hiding in the dark became cheap the second it became the solution to EVERYTHING, i understand its a stealth game but there's more to stealth than ''hide in this dark corner for a while'' atleast Double Agent had you taking chances with sneaking past shit instead of just camping in the dark till you could shoot Guard #5 in the head, it also really isnt THAT buggy unless i guess you got a funky pc and the levels were honestly fine, i especially liked the JBA aspect. Conviction's story was fine, again, the story was never that deep anyway. sure they forced you to fight enemies sometimes but you could still take a stealthy approach to it, besides that i really dont think that some action sequences are a bad thing, it changes things up a little and to be honest the splinter cell series really needed that. also i really dont see the issue with them mashing every action into E, in the previous games every contextual action was done with the same key with the exception of jump being its separate key for no real reason, jumping in itself was worthless anyway and was only valuable if you could climb something, which is the exact same thing the E key does, there's no need to have separate keys for things that are all just contextual anyway. the only thing i didnt like about Double Agent was the multiplayer, which just felt off, but conviction's multiplayer options were really cool despite the lack of Spies vs Mercs[/QUOTE] You don't see the problem with having everything on one key? How about the fact that whenever you want to interact with something that's next to another interactable it's basically a crap shoot on which one you'll actually do. I've had so many perfect stealth mission ruined because Sam decided that he'd rather jump through a closed window than open it like I wanted. The contextual menu in the first 3 games wasn't great, but it at least gave you control over what you were doing. Hiding in the shadows and shooting guys in the head is how you play Splintercell if you're terrible at stealth games. It's possible to complete the first 3 games only killing people who you are specifically ordered to kill. Double Agent had good ideas for levels, I won't deny that, it just executed most of them terribly. The big problem with Double Agent is they made all the cover incredibly obvious, like most room had cover all around the outside in a ring and enemies stuck to the centre of the room. That and the catroonishly high ceilings they had to have because the levels were so bright you couldn't hide in the dark during mandatory eavesdropping scenes. As for Conviction and the stupid combat encounters. The problem isn't that combat was possible, it's that it was mandatory. When I play a stealth game, if I'm good enough, I should be able to complete the entire game without fighting anyone. Adding shitty, mandatory fights to a stealth game isn't 'changing things up a little', it's bolting on an unwanted and unnecessary feature from a completely different genre. It's exactly the same as shitty forced stealth sections in action games. A game can be a stealth game and allow you to just murder everyone in combat and still be a good stealth game. It just has to do it without compromising the stealth aspects, which is something Conviction does every chance it gets. The same way an action game can allow a player to use stealth and still be a good action game. Look at Black List, it controls similarly to Conviction (which I hate) but the levels and encounters are designed to let you sneak past basically everything. You can go in and get into firefights if you want, and there are parts where enemies flood the area, but you're never [i]forced[/i] to fight. The thing which made me absolutely loath Conviction was a part where the game expects you to fight a group of guys. I managed to sneak past them all, and when I got to the exit the game forced my camera the other way as if to say "No, you're going to murder all these men and you're not leaving until you do." It only happens once but I fucking hated the game for that. I'm going to be honest here, I don't see how anyone can look at Conviction ad say "Yeah, this is a good Splinter Cell game. This is how stealth should be." The game doesn't even allow you to fucking knock people out, you have to kill everyone. You can't move bodies to hide them. Enemies are deliberately placed in such a way that you can't sneak past them. You can't throw things or whistle to distract guards. If you turn the lights off guards don't investigate and try to turn them back of, they just go on alert and try to find you. Guards are fucking brain dead too, if they spot you can you get away they lock on to you're 'ghost' and shoot that for a while, even if they can see that there's nothing there. There's no casual guard behaviour, they just patrol around constantly or stand in place until there's an alert. Speaking of alerts, there are no alert levels any more because the levels are all narrow corridors, and having a consequence for being seen in a stealth game is a no-no. Conviction isn't even a stealth game, it's a bad third person shooter where the enemies are brain dead, and you can occasionally pretend you're sneaking past people because their reactions are delayed you can be clearly seen as long as it takes less than 1 whole second.

[QUOTE=TheFilmSlacker;50991746]I don't get people who don't let their pets on the couch. If you're afraid of a bit of fur, maybe you shouldn't have gotten a pet in the first place. I care more about my pets than some couch.[/QUOTE] what if you care about your pets but don't want a dirty couch

[QUOTE=Fapplejack;50993410]You can't turn any bad seed good with a bit of rehab and therapy. Some people are beyond help.[/QUOTE] I feel like this should only be an argument for specific cases, not against rehabilitation as a whole, which is what you're making it sound like. Surely the number of people who have some form of socio/psychopathy, some other disorder, or have had an experience so traumatic that they absolutely [I]can't[/I] be rehabilitated makes up a very small part of the population?

[QUOTE=Zukriuchen;50994826]I feel like this should only be an argument for specific cases, not against rehabilitation as a whole, which is what you're making it sound like. Surely the number of people who have some form of socio/psychopathy, some other disorder, or have had an experience so traumatic that they absolutely [I]can't[/I] be rehabilitated makes up a very small part of the population?[/QUOTE] IIRC the prevalence of psychopathy/sociopathy is actually about 2%, which would mean there are more than 6 million psycopaths in the US the rate among prisoners is, of course, much higher - per [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder#Epidemiology]wikipedia,[/url] [quote]A 2002 literature review of studies on mental disorders in prisoners stated that 47% of male prisoners and 21% of female prisoners had ASPD.[/quote] and I'd be willing to bet money that the prevalence of psychopathy among guilty death row prisoners is above 95%. Normal people don't serially rape, torture, and murder. In my opinion, psychopathy et al have played a massively understated role in the shaping of modern human society. Psychopaths aren't awful people by default, but criminally violent psychopaths seem to be completely unworth the effort of rehabilitation - you will NEVER be able to trust them, no matter what paths their lives take. They don't live by the same rules that normal people do.

[QUOTE=SirJon;50994373]what if you care about your pets but don't want a dirty couch[/QUOTE] put a throw over the sofa or just clean your sofa better.

[QUOTE=Sector 7;50995125]IIRC the prevalence of psychopathy/sociopathy is actually about 2%, which would mean there are more than 6 million psycopaths in the US the rate among prisoners is, of course, much higher - per [url=https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antisocial_personality_disorder#Epidemiology]wikipedia,[/url] and I'd be willing to bet money that the prevalence of psychopathy among guilty death row prisoners is above 95%. Normal people don't serially rape, torture, and murder. In my opinion, psychopathy et al have played a massively understated role in the shaping of modern human society. Psychopaths aren't awful people by default, but criminally violent psychopaths seem to be completely unworth the effort of rehabilitation - you will NEVER be able to trust them, no matter what paths their lives take. They don't live by the same rules that normal people do.[/QUOTE] while many death row inmates suffer from mental illness, saying 95% of them are psychopaths is pushing it a bit (or at least saying that's mostly why they do what they do, if anything, it's more how they get away with them). while they show symptoms, they show even more symptoms for other illnesses, some that just so happened to be shared with psychopathy. there's more illnesses out that, one people seem to forget is [URL="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadistic_personality_disorder"]sadistic personality disorder.[/URL] there's also stuff like mentally harmful drugs, which can cause people to do some pretty awful shit

The ability to discard useless information is an understated ability in today's world - and perhaps now more important than ever.

[QUOTE=PsiSoldier;50995213]put a throw over the sofa or just clean your sofa better.[/QUOTE] But a throw makes the sofa loose it's design features and I can't clean my sofa every day

[QUOTE=SirJon;50995662]But a throw makes the sofa loose it's design features and I can't clean my sofa every day[/QUOTE] if your dog is regularly dirty enough to mess up your sofa in a single day you should probably clean it before letting it back in the house, let alone onto the sofa.

[QUOTE=PsiSoldier;50995799]if your dog is regularly dirty enough to mess up your sofa in a single day you should probably clean it before letting it back in the house, let alone onto the sofa.[/QUOTE] But what if it's about hair and spit and not literal dirt

the presence of "quests" makes every video game worse