Eniitan : This is a slight misquote, but someone once said that trust is giving someone the power to hurt you deeply, and hoping they don't.

It's not easy to learn exactly when you should or shouldn't trust someone. That comes down to your personal judgement. I can say that you get better at it as time goes by. I've been hurt significantly by people I put my trust into, and made the mistake of trusting people to do their job and been hurt by the results when they don't.

Trust is kind of a two-way street, and to apply it effectively you need to know when you can trust people autonomously and when you need to work with them to make your trust worth the investment.

Cloned animals have the same genetic information as the original, barring normal genetic mutations which are inherent in the normal reproduction process. A cloned organism is just as safe as any other, and for proof you need look no further than bananas.

Modern bananas are all cloned. You ever notice how they have tiny, undeveloped seeds? That means bananas can't grow naturally. Every banana that you'll find in a supermarket is grown through a process similar to animal cloning, which is also why they all look, feel, and taste exactly the same, and grow in identical bunches.

The reason why they clone bananas instead of growing them is that natural bananas are significantly harder to eat (kind of like a coconut with meat instead of water inside) and have a much more bitter flavor. The previous generation of bananas were all wiped out by a fungal infection, so modern bananas are carefully controlled to be resistant to that infection. The fungus has since adapted to the new bananas, though, so it's possible we'll have to use a new species of banana in the future.

Now that I've got the word "banana" out of my system, back to the topic of cloned animals. Banana.

Cloning animals allows us to carefully control their genetics, which means that we can breed animals to be more resistant to infections (we'll need fewer antibiotics and hormones in future meat and milk livestock) which is really more of a benefit that humanity provides to the animal kingdom than anything. As previous users have suggested, it also means that we can give the middle finger to natural selection by bringing back extinct animals. Whether or not that's a good idea is a discussion for another time.

I think a lot of the problem is that when people think of "cloning" they envision this kind of science fiction process where we put one animal in a box and two walk out, like in Star Trek. It's more about taking two samples from a species and running it through the natural reproduction process for controlled results. Errors in the genetic process happen, but not nearly as dramatically as making meat magically toxic or having an animal suddenly grow a fifth limb.

As for whether or not we're mocking God, well, if God didn't want us doing this it wouldn't have given us the ability to do so. If any god is in charge of creating life, then cloning is just another method by which it can work to do so. If you believe humanity can create life the same way that god can, then that implies that god is no more powerful than us, so in my opinion it's an ethical moot point.

When I was a kid, my brother and I were babysat by a lovely family down the street with a Nintendo 64. We were watching Rough Necks and someone made a comparison between the characters on the show and the main character from Body Harvest, so that's how we ended up playing that. It really earned its M-rating, too, because it featured people being eaten by giant bugs and a death animation of the character's limbs being blown off as he bleeds to death. It's pretty intense.

Oddly enough in spite of the fact that I was playing games like that in third grade, I haven't gone on any killing sprees recently. It's almost like violence in video games isn't that big of a deal for children.

It's not that either of them take less skill. Certainly manga and comic books would require quite a lot more drawing and writing would require a lot more typing. I think it's that each form of writing has strengths and weaknesses. I find that it's often easier for me to express character and personality in the written word, but I'd challenge any of my fellow writers to write a no-dialogue story without making it into a comic.

play4fun : So basically your argument is "it's okay if I impose my religion on other people and have it institutionalized because I'm right and everyone else is wrong."

I answered your question about hypocrisy in the evolution science community before when I told you that creationism is not rejected in the scientific community for being different to their belief system, but because the evidence doesn't hold it up as a scientific theory. I'm sure there are many scientists who offhandedly rejected the entire theory without considering it, but that's usually because they have to deal with it a lot and are done refuting it over and over again.

play4fun : When I say that your religion is "only true to you," what that means is that your religious group (say Christianity) are the only people who presuppose that your religion is true. In that sense, it is "true to you." If I were to come here and tell you that your religion is wrong, that you should repent of it, and that you're going to Hell if you don't, you would likely find that extremely offensive, probably morally reprehensible, and arguably oppressive depending on how strongly I enforced it. Even if you didn't, I guarantee you there's someone on this site who would. If we took that kind of religious dogma and put it in schools, it would be a big problem, because you're institutionalizing a religion.

This is why the debate becomes scientific rather than religious or political. As I said in the original post, there's no way to justify actually teaching religious dogma in schools, so the creationist hypothesis is passed off as scientific rather than theistic. As I've said to you, it doesn't work that way, and the hypothesis is panned pretty much universally by people who have looked over the evidence.

play4fun : I don't believe that you don't know what I meant when I said that, and I again invite this site's Christian community to vacation in the Middle East where they can be told that their religion is wrong and they're going to Hell for opposing almighty Allah.

magimangr : "I never will understand why so many oppose the true teachings of Christianity."

Because they're only true to you, and it's wrong to impose upon people the laws of a god they don't believe in.

play4fun : Your argument only works if the scientific community hasn't been open to the intelligent design movement and creationism theories, and they have. Plenty of scientists have even attempted to use it to refute the theory of evolution, a long and proud tradition in the scientific community. Ultimately, though, the evidence for creationism theory was refuted and evolution was used instead because it remains the best theory we have. In the significant amount of time I've spent studying both sides of the debate, I see no hypocrisy on the side of evolutionary theory. Perhaps you'd like to enlighten me.

Eirinn : I present opinions as facts when I'm dealing with facts instead of opinions. I've done a significant amount of research and everything I just said can be verified by looking some things up on Wikipedia.

There's nothing disrespectful about correcting someone. It even says so in the Bible.

Eirinn : First of all, no I'm not an atheist.

Second of all, you have no idea what a theory is. A theory is a hypothesis that has been backed up by overwhelming evidence and for which there is not doubt that it is true. In effect, a theory is a fact until otherwise proven to be. Creationism is a hypothesis with no scientific basis.

We teach evolution in schools because it's important for people to understand how the basic functions of life works so that high school students will learn and make good scientists when they get out of college. Failing to do so is like creating a generation of mathematicians that didn't learn algebra, and has significantly slowed scientific progress in the past.

Thirdly, your premise is faulty. Given that it's the intelligent design movement trying to overthrow the theory of evolution, and the creationism movement making claims, the burden of proof falls on them to prove that their hypothesis is a theory worthy of discussion, and they haven't done that. The theory of evolution has been demonstrated time and again, and even observed to be accurate. Therefore, it is the one that is taught in schools. QED.

Additionally, you clearly don't understand atheism, as you believe that it is a religious belief. It is not. Atheism is specifically the lack of a religion, and saying that they "have faith" is an inherently flawed statement. Atheists do not believe in anything that can not be seen, observed, and tested. If you compare what they believe to a religious belief, you are making a mistake.

thenumberone : The common misconception in science classes is that theories, because they have the potential to be proved wrong, are inherently uncertain, which isn't the case. A theory only gets to be a theory if there isn't a single solitary shred of credible evidence that might demonstrate it to be wrong. In this, theories are held in higher esteem than scientific laws, which is really just a term used to describe an axiom, or something taken as true for the purposes of discussion.

I've just remembered a game I played called Destroy The Porn. This story will require a little background. Basically, you've died and gone to Hell, whereupon you realize that your mom is going to go through your stuff and find a torrent of pornography. For the sake of your mother, you go through Hell's labyrinth to return to Earth and destroy all of the porn before she finds it.

At the end of the game, there's a level full of boxes that you have to destroy within the time limit. It's really not that hard; you just walk forward and hold the fire button. Or at least that's what I thought, until my character managed to get under a falling box.

It's the only video game in which I can say I was literally killed by falling porn.

Edited for advertisement. If the original poster of this post is unaware of the advertising rules on Vizzed, please look them up.

zanderlex : Mecha Leo: I have to admit it's pretty damn funny that I've come back with the new Tour de Vizzed thing going on and find out that I'm in the top 5 for the yellow jersey without even knowing what the yellow jersey is for XD It's actually kind of fun.

I'm also writing a lot more in-depth game reviews this time around, so hopefully I might actually be able to help the community out with the Retro Game Room or something.

Please excuse my temporary absence of... four years, but I kind of went through a phase where I got sick of forums. The group of friends who started a forum I was previously a moderator of broke up, and I was starting to feel overwhelmed by the crowd. Unfortunately I forgot what I loved about Vizzed, the community and the opportunity for open discussion with fellow interested parties (read as: geeks)

I'd also like to apologize for some of my conduct when I was here previously. I was pretty rude to a few of you and held strong opinions during a very stressful time in my life, but now I'm back and ready to give being nice to you all another shot. Just don't drink my Viz Cola and we'll be fine. I'm glad to be back :-)

Just a thought, but I think that the key problem with putting free games in the profile is that the profile shows games you "own," i.e. games that you "bought." If you put free games in the profile, it might lead to a problem where people will get the game for free and then "sell" it for a Viz refund. The best solution I can come up with is to find a way to keep track of how much Viz every user spent on their game, which of course means making changes to the database. I don't know how much time David or any of the other developers has to spend on that, but as far as I know that's the best fix.

Tails the Fox : Hmm. Tricky. I think the artist hasn't enabled access to their pictures for non-registered users. Try this link instead:

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/13881292/

zanderlex : Thank you. My first game reviews were written on Newgrounds, and I got a lot of practice giving as much constructive criticism as I can, especially for games that were currently in development. Not that that really works for an Atari game that will probably never see the light of day again ;

It didn't really occur to me to write down my scores for each category, since my reviews are much more fluid than a category-by-category description, and my overall score for a game is often independent of my personal views on individual aspects of the game, but I'll try to keep that in mind in the future.

Txgangsta : ``The fact is that many people are wrong. Where there is a disagreement, one or more is wrong. Either Christianity is true or it is not. Either Islam is true or its not. And certainly, they are not both simultaneously true.''

The way that I generally say it when talking to people who disagree with me is to say "it is equally probably that any religion is true." Scientifically speaking, that's the best that you can do. But yes, I do agree with you.