Slashdot Mirror

I see The Economist occasionally linked from Slashdot -- the Economist is partially owned by FT, and provides deep articles about a broad array of news items. Lots of it is economics/foreign policy, but they've got a lengthy tech survey every few months, and cover tech news occasionally. No reg required, but to view all of the articles you need to subscribe/pay money (free with print subscription -- excellent value). The Economist and the New York Times are the best news sources that I know.

Thankfully, Slashdot posts few time/newsweek/usnwr drivel -- this falls into the same catagory as ABC, CBS, NBC -- for people that don't really like to read hard news/want to be entertained more than informed.

The SF Chronicle used to have some good local/silicon valley stories from time to time. The web version is more infotainment than the print one, though. I haven't seen a slashdot link to there in a while either -- maybe it has gone downhill (haven't read it since I moved away).

The Christian Science Monitor used to be OK as well -- haven't looked at it in years...

Because a large portion of Microsoft's employees benefits are through stock options Microsoft has far lower overhead than the would have if they paid their employees with actual money. That makes their stock look very desirable and guarantees that they a great deal of outside investment (which neatly solves the problem of having stock options that are an employee draw). The Economist, and Warren Buffet say it much better than I do. Here's an excerpt, the link is here.

FASB did, however, manage to make firms include a footnote in their accounts detailing the share options awarded during the year. Smithers & Co., a research firm in London, calculated the cost of these footnoted options and concluded that the American companies granting them overstated their profits by as much as half in the financial year ending in 1998. In some cases, particularly that of high-tech firms (which tend to be generous with options), the disparity is even greater. For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers.

Some maintain that these numbers exaggerate the problem: there is genuine dispute over how best to calculate and account for the cost of executive options. But this is quibbling. Warren Buffett, a well-known American investor, put the case succinctly for tightening the rules on share-option schemes in the recent annual report of his investment company, Berkshire Hathaway. "Accounting principles offer management a choice: pay employees in one form and count the cost, or pay them in another form and ignore the cost. Small wonder then that the use of options has mushroomed," he observes. "If options aren't a form of compensation, what are they? If compensation isn't an expense, what is it? And, if expenses shouldn't go into the calculation of earnings, where in the world should they go?"

It would seem that it's not such faulty logic after all.

Mickey$oft recently shut an Eastern European (Hungarian) production plant because they are haemoraging so much money on the eX-Box... but according to this week's Economist they are in this war for the long term and see the PS/3 vs. X-Box II as the mother of all battles in 2005 as make or break for the company. They are building their own Internet (now where have we heard that before?) to facilitate on-line gaming and will tax every bit that travels over it.

So there you have it, geeks, get Linux running on the X/Box and Micro$not are toast. You've got 3 years.

Death to the Demon, Bill Gates!

David

Mickey$oft recently shut an Eastern European (Hungarian) production plant because they are haemoraging so much money on the eX-Box... but according to this week's Economist they are in this war for the long term and see the PS/3 vs. X-Box II as the mother of all battles in 2005 as make or break for the company. They are building their own Internet (now where have we heard that before?) to facilitate on-line gaming and will tax every bit that travels over it.

So there you have it, geeks, get Linux running on the X/Box and Micro$not are toast. You've got 3 years.

Death to the Demon, Bill Gates!

David

According to an article in the Economist from August 5, 1999 entitled " Share and share unalike."

" For instance, Microsoft, the world's most valuable company, declared a profit of $4.5 billion in 1998; when the cost of options awarded that year, plus the change in the value of outstanding options, is deducted, the firm made a loss of $18 billion, according to Smithers."

Also keep in mind that not only are OpenSource/Free Software breathing down their neck with increasingly viable desktop alternatives, but Oracle, Sun, IBM as well. Plus an increasing number of governments, lately Peru, China and Germany, are getting tired of their busness practices.

Now think about the software situation. Linux, QNX and others have them beat in the embedded OS market. Windows as a server OS is beat by Solaris, Linux, *BSD. Windows as middleware is becoming decreasingly competetive with Gnome and KDE. Aqua has it beat hands down, you can even run legacy apps like Ms-Word, which is about the only thing currently holding GNU/Linux back from the general desktop. However, OpenOffice and others are filling the gaps left by Lotus-123, Borland's Quattro, WordPerfect.

Then there are indications that there is no improvment on the horizon. For example the shift from software, to marketing to legislation. The way MS is working the punishment phase of the antitrust trial it looks that their products are unable to compete in a free market. Even die-hard MS fans cannot refute EWeek's report that "[Allchin] later acknowledged that some Microsoft code was so flawed it could not be safely disclosed." Maybe coincidentally, Bill has been shifting investment money out of Microsoft. If the rest of the top execs are offloading also, (this is speculation and it would be nice to see some real figures, but where can that type of info be looked up) then it would indicate no confidence.

So with out a cash flow or at least investor confidence, all Microsoft's troubles would bite them hard. Death by a thousand small bites, plus a few medium sized ones. Perhaps the SEC backed off to avoid popping Microsoft's baloon like just another overratted dot-com.

Or would it turn out to be a collapse more like Enron's.

This is the famous mistranslation of a the Russian proverb: "The spirit is weak but the flesh is willing." The translation was Russian > English, not English > Russian > English.

For the background on that story and machine translation in general, see this Economist article

One characteristic (but apocryphal) tale tells of an American military system designed to translate Russian into English, which is said to have rendered the famous Russian saying "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" into "The vodka is good but the meat is rotten."

And if you're into such issues check out http://fieldmethods.net

It does a good thing to the nature we are and been a part of and breaks the boundary of our existential level.

Creating remote controlled animals and therefore taking away what them BE, should account for more concern.

Now, remember: there are three prongs to government: the administration (Bush, your friend) is not the same as Congress, the lads who legislate. Bush's input to this is a simple yes or no. It's up to your representatives to decide what gets through to Bush. So it can't really be his fault.

Also, remember - he's there because you voted for him. (you plural, not necessarily you singular). You want him out? then let democracy do its job, or change the system.

The congressmen in question are still at the suggestive stage, not quite ready to decide what level of privacy to offer, so if you've chosen the right representative last time you voted (you DID vote, didn't you?), then your chosen representative will make the right choice for you. If not, you made the wrong choice. Or you are surrounded by people who made the wrong choice. Or gerrymandering has been in operation in your area (see last week's economist article on gerrymandering in the US). Or your representative is corrupt and takes money from lobbyists to give their way, in which case we're back to square one: choose the right representative.

All in all, Bush cannot be fully responsible for whether or not businesses can share your information. That's down to the ethics of the businesses, and the legislation of the representatives that the American people have said they want to run the country. You want privacy? then use democracy.

I read an interesting article touching on this recently. I think, as the article says, a large part of it is anticipated regret: how bad you would feel if you didn't invest any money and it did pay off.

Have a look at this.

http://www.economist.com/agenda/displayStory.cfm?s tory_id=1108992

Below is an excerpt from an article in The Economist about television:

So how is it that commercial American TV can come up with such funny, clever output? The first explanation is HBO. "Sex and the City", "The Sopranos" and "Six Feet Under" are all made by this cable channel, part of AOL Time Warner. "HBO's achievements have had a dramatic impact on the entire media culture; creatively, it's put its rivals to shame," comments Peter Bart, editor of Variety, a Hollywood industry newspaper. HBO owes its achievements to a potent mix: stable management under Jeff Bewkes, who has held one or other of the two top jobs for the past 11 years; savvy, blanket promotion of its shows; and a business model that relies entirely on subscriptions rather than advertising. Curiously, a channel that did not originally chase ratings, because it did not need to, has ended up grabbing them anyway: on Sunday evenings during the summer, "Sex and the City" often beats other network shows. All this enables HBO to take creative risks, which itself draws talent to it. Alan Ball, who writes "Six Feet Under", had previously won an Oscar for the screenplay for "American Beauty", a successful movie. Writers love working there. "On most network TV, once you have a successful formula, you have to stick to it for ten years," says Michael Patrick King, creator of "Sex and the City". "With HBO, we have complete liberty to take the story wherever we want."

The full text of the article is here

There was an article on /. a while back on the potential of cheaper Titanium, "Titanium As Cheap As Aluminum?"

I wonder if there's been any progress since then. The original story is still on The Economist' site.

Here is a color-coded map showing relative levels of corruption in different countries. More specifically, it represents how well the countries' governments control corruption in their country.

In hard data, the US is in the 91st percentile, so it's doing pretty well, although there are other countries that are less corrupt than the US, such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Sweden, etc. Finland has the honor of being the least corrupt country in the world.

The February 28th edition of The Economist had a special report about corruption around the world. It was very interesting reading.

Also a very good article in "The Economist" on the same subject.

There is an article about this in the Economist called "Time travelers" (3/23/02). Unfortunately, you have to pay if you want to read the article online.

I was just reading Bob Young's piece in Open Sources . While it's certainly flush with optimism that now seems naive, he's pretty convincing when he points out that Heinz sells a absolutely replicable product, and still controls 80% of the ketchup market. They've simply built such a strong brand that they define what ketchup should taste like.
I'd say that Microsoft has built one of the strongest brands in the world, mostly by applying clever and well-branded systems integration (a fact the head of Microsoft research makes no bones about in a recent article in the Economist. Short of drastic legislation (which we just are not going to see under this administration), the only thing that would knock MS out of the catbird seat would be weakening of the brand. (one thing that would probably weaken the brand is interoperability and hence less distinguishability between Windows and Linux). What's surprising is that people don't seem to care about brand when it comes to PDAs and embedded devices, but they sure do on the desktop (after all, people spend a lot of money to BUY new versions of Windows, over and over).
There's an object lesson to be learned about tech branding as attention shifts from the OS to the embedded devices and web services, and perhaps us Linux-zealots should be clever enough to try to learn from it.

Todd Dickinson, the PTO's director, admits that there is a problem here. "In software, in particular, we need to develop our sources of prior art. We've been talking about reaching out to the software industry to get access to more databases," he says. Still, he argues, the problem should self-correct as more software is patented.

What will not correct itself, though, is the bias in favour of issuing patents. This arises partly because America does not have the "opposition" system that Europe has, where the competition can put its case against a proposed patent.

What is more, the way patent examiners are paid encourages the issue of patents. They are paid partly through bonuses for "disposals" of patent cases. But as Robert Merges, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, points out in a paper called "Six Impossible Patents Before Breakfast", while a patent issued is always a case disposed of, a rejection may not be, because the inventor can amend his application and try again. Quality, sticking-power and morale among patent examiners is also a problem. The PTO's intake is largely made up of law graduates. Starting salaries are around Dollars 40,000. In east-coast law firms, they are commonly Dollars 140,000.

Here is an anonymous patent examiner on Mr Aharonian's site:

You know what? I'm sick of finding ridiculous patents every time I look [in my files]. Part of the blame goes to the patent corps. We don't fight hard enough against the bull - being shovelled by upper management. And of course, that is where the rest of the blame goes. It's a system that's burning up, and management just keeps adding fuel to the fire. And why should you care? Hey, management pays you for good patents or bad, right? In fact, why should you fight with management? Why reject?

Also check out this article on patent strategies of japanese companies. I do not claim to be a scholar here and freely concede that mmy posts are not scholarly works. That said, they do derive from the cumulative impact of articles I have read in a variety of sources over the years. I invite you to do some more research yourself to dispute my view - indeed, a quick google search reveals plenty of B-school theses fawning over the Japanese tendency towards cross-licensing to the extent that it permits more than one company to extract monopoly rents from a market, though I would dispute (again, admittedly without my own body of scholarly work) the assumption that this is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective. If anything, I think this would reinforce my point, but since nobody (that I've found) has directly studied the impact of cross-licensing on companies excluded from the "club," as it were, I cannot provide you with an online reference directly supporting my proposition wrt stifling of innovation.

-Isaac

Todd Dickinson, the PTO's director, admits that there is a problem here. "In software, in particular, we need to develop our sources of prior art. We've been talking about reaching out to the software industry to get access to more databases," he says. Still, he argues, the problem should self-correct as more software is patented.

What will not correct itself, though, is the bias in favour of issuing patents. This arises partly because America does not have the "opposition" system that Europe has, where the competition can put its case against a proposed patent.

What is more, the way patent examiners are paid encourages the issue of patents. They are paid partly through bonuses for "disposals" of patent cases. But as Robert Merges, professor of law at the University of California at Berkeley, points out in a paper called "Six Impossible Patents Before Breakfast", while a patent issued is always a case disposed of, a rejection may not be, because the inventor can amend his application and try again. Quality, sticking-power and morale among patent examiners is also a problem. The PTO's intake is largely made up of law graduates. Starting salaries are around Dollars 40,000. In east-coast law firms, they are commonly Dollars 140,000.

Here is an anonymous patent examiner on Mr Aharonian's site:

You know what? I'm sick of finding ridiculous patents every time I look [in my files]. Part of the blame goes to the patent corps. We don't fight hard enough against the bull - being shovelled by upper management. And of course, that is where the rest of the blame goes. It's a system that's burning up, and management just keeps adding fuel to the fire. And why should you care? Hey, management pays you for good patents or bad, right? In fact, why should you fight with management? Why reject?

Also check out this article on patent strategies of japanese companies. I do not claim to be a scholar here and freely concede that mmy posts are not scholarly works. That said, they do derive from the cumulative impact of articles I have read in a variety of sources over the years. I invite you to do some more research yourself to dispute my view - indeed, a quick google search reveals plenty of B-school theses fawning over the Japanese tendency towards cross-licensing to the extent that it permits more than one company to extract monopoly rents from a market, though I would dispute (again, admittedly without my own body of scholarly work) the assumption that this is a good thing from a macroeconomic perspective. If anything, I think this would reinforce my point, but since nobody (that I've found) has directly studied the impact of cross-licensing on companies excluded from the "club," as it were, I cannot provide you with an online reference directly supporting my proposition wrt stifling of innovation.

-Isaac

Ok, I'll bite. The Netherlands actually has a very large number of powerfull multinationals. For example: Shell (Royal Dutch Petroleum), Philips (electronics), Unilever (foods, and other), Heineken (beer), Ahold (retail), ABN AMRO (international banking), ING (international banking and insurance), AKZO (chemicals). And I'm sure Switzerland has some nice big banks and pharmaceutical companies to speak for them.

I remember reading somewhere that The Netherlands have the highest number of multinationals per head of the population (no link, sorry). I'm not saying this is a good thing, but that is a different story.

For a nice overview of the strength of the Dutch economy go here. Now pull your head out of the Texas sand and start informing yourself before making ignorant posts.

Ah, yes, but there's a whole world of difference psychologically between paying the television licence fee (approx 120UKP/170USD p.a., IIRC) and a 'top up' fee to recieve extra channels (i.e., the 5 free-to-air analogue, and about 15 extra free-to-air digital terrestrial broadcasts). About 40% (according to The Economist) of the UK's population gets pay-for (digital) TV, through satellite (Sky), cable (NTL and Telewest) or terrestrial (ITV/OnDigital); the government is going to auction the analogue TV bandwidth in 2006, so is hoping everyone will move off analogue reception quickly, or it will have to pay for everyone to get a digital set-top-box or television.

Oh, and the licence fee money isn't collected by the government, but by people contracted out by the BBC (currently Consignia/the Post Office/what-ever-name-change-they've-had-this-week ).

Aside from the new Sun suit, the AOL suit and the two tracks of the Government case, don't forget that MS also has 100 consumer class actions and the European Commission is currently looking at MS and has the power to levy very large fines. Have a look at this article artcile last week from The Economist

Aside from the new Sun suit, the AOL suit and the two tracks of the Government case, don't forget that MS also has 100 consumer class actions and the European Commission is currently looking at MS and has the power to levy very large fines. Have a look at this article artcile last week from The Economist

Andrea

> Um. No. I vehemently disagree with you. Global Warming is bunk.
> We only have about 100 years worth of weather data. HOW IN THE
> WORLD CAN YOU SAY HUMANS CAUSE THIS WITH THIS DATA! It isn't
> enough!

But there is enough data for you to say it's bunk, right?
Wouldn't you say the huge risks involved suggest caution? That we consider something less than a memo from God as grounds for action? All scientific studies contain greater or lesser elements of doubt, the question is how much certainty do we need before we act?

BTW, the original poster is right, it is only in the US that anyone seriously disputes the reality of manmade climate change. Even the Toxic Texan has stopped denying it, even if he doesn't have any serious plans to tackle it, yet.
--
Nick
"Hallo. This is Beel Gates und I say ... WEENdoze"

Given that the book isn't really about computers or the Internet, but about economics, perhaps a more reliable review might be found in a publication more closely aligned with that subject. "The Economist" gives the book a glowing review (available to subscribers only). Some readers may even find The Economist to be a more learned journal than Slashdot and therefore more likely to deliver a balanced review.

Apparently in return for territorial exclusivity dealerships have to provide staff who are qualified enough to provide the relevant after sales service.

It's nasty and produces some truly bizarre pricing differentials which are exaggerated by a lack of tax harmonisation. An article in the economist even quoted an example where Danes near the german border would save money by buying spare parts from german dealerships however the germans would save cash by crossing the border in to Denmark to buy new cars.

The block exemption runs out this september but you can expect the manufacturers to be lobbying for an extension (last granted in 1995).

If Mr Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, is right, his findings constitute the greatest challenge now facing America's political classes. ...[and] the professor is probably right.

If Mr Putnam, a Harvard political scientist, is right, his findings constitute the greatest challenge now facing America's political classes. ...[and] the professor is probably right.

I finally found a better explanation of the new sampling theory. It has to take repeated passes at the same analogue data. First pass is sampled at regular intervals, as usual. This data is analyzed, then on the second pass areas where the data changed fast are sampled at a higher rate. Repeat if needed...

This will usually give results similar to scanning at the maximum sample rate, then "compressing" by throwing out data points where the values are not changing much -- you need less RAM, but the maximum digitizer speed is the same, and you have to replay the analog data somehow. For instance, in an MRI, the multiple scans might mean holding the patient in the machine longer. That's not good, and enough RAM to hold everything isn't going to add much to the cost of the machine. Also, there is one condition where the results could be different -- if a detail such as a hairline fracture is so fine that it might be entirely missed between the points on the first coarse scan. If you scan at maximum resolution first, you won't miss that.

AOL doesn't buy all the cool stuff. Apple bought NeXT. I'm a long time AOL and Mac hater, but I find myself liking some of the stuff they've bought! Time magazine &co. is still crap though. When AOL/TW buys the Economist, the world is about to end.

Everyone here should read the collection of Economist articles, collectively named "Does Inequality Matter"?

Read it critically. Perhaps I'm reading too much into this, but it does seem to me to be saying: "What we've got is incredibly unfair. You, a rich Economist reader, are (rightly, even though wrongly) advantaged. If you want to keep that advantage, you've got to give to charities, because if you don't- well, it sounds like we've got a class war coming soon. We're talking widespread socialist ideas, the return of the Anarchists, and class war. So either the rich wealth keep the people happy, or they're going to try and take it for themselves."

You've got to love these patronizing arguments, adorning the pages: "Hey! Nobody is poor, because even the poor have toilets- something the kings of ages past never had! So, the poor don't really have it bad; They're just complainers." Or another one: "Don't feel so guilty about your riches; None are rich, because no one is content. That means you aren't rich! It's been stressful lately, those poor don't know anything about riches. If only they knew the pain of managing the people."

Drucker suggests it is happening already, and that some of the long term causes of it are the longer term aging of our society (with the attendent problems with SS), and the lack of long term prospects with a single employeer.

I think I'll have to pick up the book, since I really enjoyed Drucker's articles, and as I've indicated, I expect the conclusions to be similar, and likewise interesting.

Drucker suggests it is happening already, and that some of the long term causes of it are the longer term aging of our society (with the attendent problems with SS), and the lack of long term prospects with a single employeer.

I think I'll have to pick up the book, since I really enjoyed Drucker's articles, and as I've indicated, I expect the conclusions to be similar, and likewise interesting.

This "game" sounds like a development of one which I read in The Economist a few years ago.

In that, the idea was a group of people had 10 beans , of which some were added to the pot and the rest were kept by the participant. At the end, the he pot was shared amongst all, and the goal was to maximise the indivuduals holding (with no concept of punishment).

This was carried out at a university (where else?) and it found that while students of most disciplines did the same thing, kept five and shared five, (only) students of economics kept 9 and shared 1. The summary of The Economist wondered whether this was cause or effect of studying economics.

I wonder if people like Linus Torvalds, Alan Cox, ESR et al would keep 1 and share 9, and whether Bill Gates and co would behave more like economists.

this link on CNN has a little more info on what will be "new" for Series2.

look for online games from the Jellyvision, maker of You Don't Know Jack and Smush.

also look for some sort of video on demand by Radiance Technologies Inc.

this is in addition to the Real Networks partnering and the USB support.

not quite the networking capability that i was hoping for but something nonetheless that might be interesting.

They pegged their currency to the U.S. dollar - in all practical terms that means they adopted the U.S. dollar. But the U.S. dollar kept gaining value as the American economy grew, so that Argentinian exports became too expensive and the economy suffered.

Ecuador adopted the U.S. dollar as its national currency in March, 2000, and now, according to the Economist, "Ecuador is now Latin America's fastest-growing economy, its GDP set to expand by over 5% this year. Much of the social unrest of recent years has died down."

When a country can't control its own monetary policy, it is more likely a symptom of a serious problem, not a cause.

You mean like they're doing in the article?

i really like the flash animations here, actually - nice job. but my question is why are the animations coming from the economist site?

Meanwhile the U.S.A. has become the only military superpower, an industrial powerhouse and moral beacon in the world. Why?

Vast natural resources.

This clearly shows you know absolutely nothing about economics. Successful economies are never limited (or created) by their access to raw materials. The availability of natural resources is probably the least important factor in a modern economy. The short answer for the reason that the US is rich: because it 'generates wealth'. The long answer is, well, very long....

As a example of wealth (via productivity), check out the number of robots employed in manufacturing for different countries in this month Economist (you'll need to look at the print edition as it doesn't seem to be online). Think first, post later. Ignorance sucks!

Note, however, that the article was remarkably perceptive about the potential for business efficiency improvements, although it sounds as if there were sufficient existing examples to make such predictions straightforward.

The Economist contains some of the finest reporting and analysis anywhere. I've wanted to subscribe to it for years; with luck, I'll bite the bullet soon.

In the short run the Somali immigrants will be hurt, but in the long run they are better off getting rid of Hawallas and getting a real banking system. If this encourages them to do that, it will, in the long run, be seen as one of the best things we could do for them. Why? Because the Hawalla charges ridiculous cuts just for transferring the money. It's somewhere in the neighborhood of 5 to as much as 15% according to an article I read in the Washington Post.


Western Union doesn't list prices for Somalia but they charge $22 for moving $200 from New York to Yemen. An article in this week's Economist Magazine says charges are more commonly less that 5% by systems.

Hawala systems exist between countries where banks and western Union already operate because they are cheaper and easier for poor people to use to transfer small sums of money.

If banks really were more effecient for Somali then they would have been established ages ago. Argueing that overcharging Hawala transfer is keeping out a "real banking system" is just dumb. Obviously the combination of lawlessness in Somali and better services offered by Hawala is the real reason.

So, not only is Bill Gates a philanthropist, he's the greatest philanthropist ever. Microsoft's business practices notwithstanding, accusing him of avarice is misguided.

Likely the cowed populace will ask for even more disenfranchisements.

Likely the cowed populace will ask for even more disenfranchisements.

Likely the cowed populace will ask for even more disenfranchisements.

Likely the cowed populace will ask for even more disenfranchisements.

Likely the cowed populace will ask for even more disenfranchisements.

You present a few anecdotes about the "danger of video games" to me. This does not stand up to the millions of deaths in America alone due to lung cancer in people that are too addicted to nicotine to quit smoking. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), an umbrella term used to describe chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is the fourth leading cause of human death in the world. 90% of COPD deaths are caused by cigarette smoking, and sixteen million people are diagnosed with COPD each year in the United States alone. This is in addition to the studies I mentioned in my original reply about nicotine being more addictive than crack and heroin.

Millions of people of varying ages play video games on a regular basis, but yet, deaths directly related to video games or found to be psychologically caused by video games are few and far between. This puts the addiction rate among users of video games firmly in the less than one percent margin, and pales in comparison to the 80% addiction rate among nicotine users (yes, that is a repeat link for the purpose of proving my point). In fact, the vast majority of non-biological addictions are firmly in the 1% or less percentage of addicts among users. This includes gambling, gaming, surfing, volleyball, and yes, even ping-pong, as well as all other human activities.

So, to sum it up, not only did you compare a non-biological addiction to a biological one in terms of the ratio between users and addicts, which is a massive piece of bull shit in any discussion in and of itself, but you described a non-biological addiction to what appears to be one of the most addictive drugs out there right now. If that's not ignorant, I wonder what is.

A few anecdotes do not equal a massive addict-to-user ratio. If these stories were examples of how addictive video games are, then there would be MILLIONS of such examples of video game addiction. To be as addictive as nicotene, these examples would have to be repeated among over 80% of players. They are not. These are rare, sensationalized instances. I honestly don't mean to be offensive when I say this, but I think you need to do some reading on the subjects of addiction, statistics, and ESPECIALLY media literacy. The kind of media illiteracy you have shown in your posts is exactly the sort of thing that has given rise to anti-video-game legislation, parents going absolutely ape shit over video games, and a general call for censorship in all sorts of media. Very large numbers of people have been duped into thinking that incidents such as those at the Columbine High School are commonplace among teenagers and video game players, under the assumption that because it is getting so much media attention, it must be a common phenomenon. The truth, however, is that there was such a media frenzy over Columbine because of how RARE the incident was. If more people understood the way the news media worked, they would not have been so easily duped by all of the "experts" that tried to rush in and make a quick buck by selling books and producing TV specials that tell people how evil video games are.

You present a few anecdotes about the "danger of video games" to me. This does not stand up to the millions of deaths in America alone due to lung cancer in people that are too addicted to nicotine to quit smoking. Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), an umbrella term used to describe chronic bronchitis and emphysema, is the fourth leading cause of human death in the world. 90% of COPD deaths are caused by cigarette smoking, and sixteen million people are diagnosed with COPD each year in the United States alone. This is in addition to the studies I mentioned in my original reply about nicotine being more addictive than crack and heroin.

Millions of people of varying ages play video games on a regular basis, but yet, deaths directly related to video games or found to be psychologically caused by video games are few and far between. This puts the addiction rate among users of video games firmly in the less than one percent margin, and pales in comparison to the 80% addiction rate among nicotine users (yes, that is a repeat link for the purpose of proving my point). In fact, the vast majority of non-biological addictions are firmly in the 1% or less percentage of addicts among users. This includes gambling, gaming, surfing, volleyball, and yes, even ping-pong, as well as all other human activities.

So, to sum it up, not only did you compare a non-biological addiction to a biological one in terms of the ratio between users and addicts, which is a massive piece of bull shit in any discussion in and of itself, but you described a non-biological addiction to what appears to be one of the most addictive drugs out there right now. If that's not ignorant, I wonder what is.

A few anecdotes do not equal a massive addict-to-user ratio. If these stories were examples of how addictive video games are, then there would be MILLIONS of such examples of video game addiction. To be as addictive as nicotene, these examples would have to be repeated among over 80% of players. They are not. These are rare, sensationalized instances. I honestly don't mean to be offensive when I say this, but I think you need to do some reading on the subjects of addiction, statistics, and ESPECIALLY media literacy. The kind of media illiteracy you have shown in your posts is exactly the sort of thing that has given rise to anti-video-game legislation, parents going absolutely ape shit over video games, and a general call for censorship in all sorts of media. Very large numbers of people have been duped into thinking that incidents such as those at the Columbine High School are commonplace among teenagers and video game players, under the assumption that because it is getting so much media attention, it must be a common phenomenon. The truth, however, is that there was such a media frenzy over Columbine because of how RARE the incident was. If more people understood the way the news media worked, they would not have been so easily duped by all of the "experts" that tried to rush in and make a quick buck by selling books and producing TV specials that tell people how evil video games are.