Talk-Buzz...

Should GTA Be Banned ?

2008-08-08T09:53:00.000-07:00

Do You Think GTA Should Be Banned Because Of This...

Distributors of Grand Theft Auto yesterday suspended sales in Thailand after a teenager allegedly killed a taxi driver in a bloody frenzy, re-enacting scenes from the blockbuster video game.

Police who caught the 18-year-old at the scene said he confessed to having planned the attack to find out if robbery was as easy as depicted in the violent game.

Phalawat Chinno, who played the game obsessively for hours every day, bought two knives and chose his 54-year-old victim carefully as he believed he would be too old to fight back, police said.

The secondary school student said the killing was a robbery that went wrong. New Era Interactive Media, the Thai distributors of Grand Theft Auto, which recently launched its fourth edition, has asked shops to withdraw copies from sale and video arcades to suspend the game.

"We are sending out requests ... to outlets and shops to pull the games off their shelves and we will replace them with other games," said Sakchai Chotikachinda, the marketing director of New Era.

Three years ago the families of two police officers and a police switchboard operator gunned down in the US filed a multi-million pound lawsuit in Alabama against the game's makers and distributors. The victims were shot by an 18-year-old who played the game constantly.

Thai investigators said that Phalawat - who allegedly spent eight hours choosing the pair of knives for the attack - had confessed to being inspired by Grand Theft Auto, which allows players to adopt the role of an urban criminal and engage in often violent and destructive, and sometimes murderous, crime sprees.

"He said he wanted to find out if it was as easy in real life to rob a taxi as it was in the game," the chief investigating officer, Veeravit Pipattanasak, told Reuters.

Late on Saturday night Phalawat flagged down one cab, but backed out of attempting to rob the driver as there were too many people around. But he hailed another taxi and then held a knife to the throat of its driver, Khuan Phokaeng, and tried to rob him when they reached their destination in a Bangkok suburb.

When Khuan tried to fight off his attacker with an iron bar concealed beneath his seat, Phalawat is alleged to have stabbed him at least 10 Times

Abortion Right or Wrong?

2008-08-07T11:30:00.000-07:00

An Abortion is the removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus from the uterus, resulting in or caused by its death. The spontaneous expulsion of a fetus or embryo before the 20th week is commonly known as a miscarriage. Induced abortion is the removal or expulsion of an embryo or fetus by medical, surgical, or other means at any point during human pregnancy for therapeutic or elective reasons. The approximate number of induced abortions performed worldwide in 2003 was 42 million.

Throughout recorded history, abortion has been induced by various traditional medicine methods, including botanical abortifacients, the use of sharpened tools, and abdominal pressure.

The moral and legal aspects of abortion are subject to intense social debate in many parts of the world. Aspects of this debate can include the public health impact of unsafe or illegal abortion as well as legal abortion's effect upon crime rates, and the ramifications of sex-selective practices. Other debates may include suggested but unproven effects of abortion including the abortion-breast cancer hypothesis, post-abortion syndrome, and fetal pain.

Modern Western abortion laws can be traced back to English common law, which allowed abortion before the "quickening" of the fetus. Currently, abortion law varies from country to country, with regard to religious, moral, and cultural sensibilities. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abortion

Yes, I think abortion is murder. An embryo is a human being, how small and unfinished it may be. We humans should protect the weak ones, those who cannot defend themselves, but we do the opposite. I think that abortion out of personal reasons is very, very egoistic, and therefore equal to murder. For medical reasons, e.g. when the mother will die when she would give birth, I think it's the mother who should be free to decide.

ATi and nVidia - The Next War

2008-06-13T10:06:00.000-07:00

Next week shall see the release of nVidia's new cards - the DX 280 & 260

Already to proven to knock the 9800GTX and GX2 out of the arena, how will they wage against ATi's introduction of GDDR5 in their new 4800 series?

What do you think is going to happen?

A point worth mentioning, is that the DX 280 is likely to cost around $650

whilst the 4870 will cost only ~$349