You underestimate the world if you think only.1% of people have serious pyschological problems. There's a great deal many more then that with major problems, some estimates are that one in four people in the USA are depressed, have bi-polar disorder, or some other form of mental issues. Throw them in front of amazingly detailed (and distorted) virtual realities and you've got a recipe for more social problems then just guys with heart problems forgetting to "unplug from the net".
I think your point is totally valid. The problem is that you need BOTH the neuroscience research done as well as the sociological and cultural reflecting. The former can produce drugs which can produce money which is how the global society operates right now (everything for money). The latter would produce books and papers which very few people would fully read and comprehend and many more would misquote and use to their political advantage.
Come to think of it, I think the best solution is to just keep all the humans caged up and staring at screens.
In other words - the few people who it works for have simply replaced a chemical addiction with a social addiction (going to meetings everyday). Is that better? Sure it's better, cleaner, and gets people living again. Does it work for everyone or is it even CLOSE to a comprehensive solution to addiction? Not by a looooooooooooooooong shot.
Actually it's quite simple. The primary symptom of having an addiction (to anything as you pointed out) is the withdraw effects.
Two examples: The Golfer and the Gamer. The Golfer plays three times a week, has golf art all over his home, owns a golf cart, and has a peer group of golfing buddies. Then there is the Gamer. He's got all the consoles, plus a fat gaming PC, he plays all the major games and his peer groups are gamers too.
How can you tell if either are addicted? You can't. You could only infer from the amount of time they spend that they have taken a keen interest in each subject. However, the moment that one of them starts to experience withdraw symptoms when they don't get their "fix" is the moment when you can now say "OK this is looking like addictive behavior"
There's still a huge range of degrees here. The cocaine addict is doing major damage to his nose and probably entire social life, while the golfer addict is just getting a sore shoulder and glares from his wife for watching too much TV on Sunday.
It's well documented (across tens of thousands of forum posts) that addicted gamers suffer from withdraw effects. Are they severe enough to negatively effect that persons life? For the average "addicted gamer" probably not, but for the more extreme cases (weekly 36 hour MMO sessions without eating, etc.) I'm sure the feeling of withdraw they get is so intense they HAVE to get back to gaming ASAP.
Seriously folks, anything which can stimulate ones mind in such a dramatic fashion as video games can will become addictive to people whose brains are susceptible to chemical addiction. Playing a video game releases chemicals in your brain, tons of them. I believe it's the same exact endorphins or whatever (I'm not a neuroscientist) that get released when you get 777 on the slots as it is when you get a purple epic drop in World of Warcraft. At least my therapist tells me so and she's got a PhD in this stuff.
Addiction science needs a lot of work though. As it stands right now they seem to be quite good at saying "look here, the brain starts to behave this way when a person gets addicted to a specific behavior or chemical"... However they then tell you "Give up your problems to god and go to a spiritual advisor at a Generic Anonymous support group." I'm sorry but after all your science and reasoning you're telling me the only cure to my excessive Molten Core raiding (or drinking, or drugging, or gambling, etc.) is to talk it over with my peers and let God sort out the details? A higher power is the only one who can re-balance my out of whack brain chemistry???
I'm sure a good amount of people here might fire right back at this response and say "There is no proof of addictive nature of games etc. etc." but reports like this are becoming more common and I think anyone with 25+ years of gaming experience would just answer the question "Are games addictive?" with a resounding "Duh!"
What we do need is a better way to help people who suffer from ALL addictions. If guys like Jack Thompson get their way then they'll just use the banner of video game addiction to push a Christian cultural agenda - not to improve anyones health or lifestyle. Way too much of the "solution" to addiction right now is based on some mystical guardian of your spirit who only comes to your aide if you follow twelve specific steps put together by two midwestern americans nearly a century ago...
I can very easily see a scenario five years from now where Blu-Ray is the dominant format but consumers call it HD-DVD because to them (as another poster pointed out) it's all HD.
Does anyone remember five years ago when it took Congress stepping in and getting the special royalty rates for small broadcasters? How did that go down? Are we at the last stage of the fight or can a senator step in and try and save us? I've done everything I can, written letters, told all my friends.... this is so frustrating.
First, Turntables with digital outputs are nothing new. They've been around at least 5 years now. Any audiophile would avoid them because you're stuck with the sound of the built in analog-to-digital converter. Specifically I'm talking about SPDIF, I don't know when the first USB turntable showed up.
Now the subject above is slightly misleading but I wanted to get your attention. I've been a DJ for 17 years and have always loved both the feel and the sound of vinyl. Many years ago I realized that I was destroying the sound of my records within 10-20 plays, particularly when taking them to the brutal conditions at the average rave. I looked around various audiophile forums and found a product called LAST.
This stuff is simply amazing, take a look at the link and the microscopic photos of the record groove after 200 plays. I have records that I treated with LAST that sound just as good today as they did 10 years ago and after dozens of plays.
Anyways, I'm not affiliated with the company but I wanted to let the vinyl addicts and audiophiles here know how to clean and preserve their collection - screw playing that MP3 recording of your vinyl, PLAY DA WAX! But it ain't cheap compared to other products, and it takes a while to apply to each record, but it really does seem like magic what it can do to your LPs.
STALKER was also developed in the Ukraine by people who had a passion for the catastrophic nuclear disaster that happened in their back yard 21 years ago. They also spent 6 long years developing the title.
I don't think the staff of Bethesda which lives in the nice suburbs of Maryland is going to connect with the concepts of radioactive fallout and nuclear disasters in the same way. I fully expect Bethesda to put in 1/5th the passion and 1/2 the development time compared to GSC (developers of STALKER).
You know... the merging of Software and Hardware.. SoHardware...?
But seriously this sounds like a bad idea for stuff like x86 CPUs and 3D GPUs. The whole beauty of hardware is that it's fixed. You know it won't change and so do the engineers, hence they spend more time making the systems reliable and bug-free. Self patching hardware just sounds like a bad idea for consumers.
On the other hand, it could do well for what will become legacy systems in the future. Chips that are used in machines which need to operate for 10-25 years could definitely benefit from a system like this.
Commercial businesses provide a ton of licensable and even public domain content for developers to use. It's like stock photography but for things that game developers need like textures, bump maps, sound effects, etc.
It's also possible being that HL2 and Doom3 are highly moddable games that an individual on the STALKER team borrowed assets because they needed quick place holders but then they forgot to replace them - or it's also possible the assets they borrowed are in the public domain.
Still, I've seen this getting a lot of coverage on the web and some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal". It's quite ridiculous considering the artists clearly spent thousands of hours designing unique assets for this title. It's like harping on three or four words used in a novel that also appear somewhere else.
Even if this was flat out stealing assets from one game to use in another, it appears to me not unlike stealing a high-hat from one song to complete your song. It's such a small piece of the artists work that it seems silly to consider it a stolen asset used to get rich quick - so sue the crap out of them. What is more likely is the asset was just "the right one" and the artist used what worked best in that situation.
Still, if the files in question are actually (c) to a specific company, I still think it's unlikely they'd take much legal recourse over it. It'd be hard to prove it has caused major damages or that it's been the sole reason STALKER is making money.
oh and for reference, I understand what it's like to have your violated. my music is all over russian mp3 websites being sold and I don't see a penny. But hey it's getting out there!:D
1. Form the "Birth of Silicon" foundation 501c(3). Mission: To share with future generations the magical birth of the Silicon Valley.
2. Build two replicas in Second Life, one of an active and equipped lab and the second of the fruit stand.
3. Contact Wired and just tell them you used Second Life to do something cool.
4. The embedded Second Life employee at Wired writes an article about it - the article gets on/.
5. non-PROFIT!!!
I am an audio professional and am rather hardcore when it comes to my gaming. Over the last few years I have built several gaming rigs and they've always had the top of the line Creative cards. Each and every time I have thought to myself how piss-poor the drivers were, how god-awful the customer service was, and how fantastic the sound quality and EAX effects were in my games.
With the latest line of Creative products they have introduced X-FI and these cards, when used with great speakers and properly tuned THX settings, sound even better then the Creative cards from a few years ago. Infact it's hard to tell the difference playing a.wav file through my X-FI rig versus my Pro-Tools setup using an M-Audio ProjectMix board - though I would never want to use the Creative stuff for any professional projects.
Still, looking forward, why do I have to buy a card at all? Creative should put all their basic features needed for surround gaming and 24bit96khz audio on a chip and let mobo designers license the technology. Write up a simple and unified control panel and again let the mobo manufacturers put as little or as much bloatware in as they want.
At the end of the day I don't care who makes the product, my demands as an audophile and gamer are for:
1. 24bit/96khz distortion and noise free audio.
2. 3D Surround processing for gaming - pitch shifting 32 individual bullets and having multiple reverbs for different acoustic zones IS rather CPU intensive (say 5-20% I would guesstimate) and is best offloaded onto specialty audio hardware.
3. Unified control panel for setting basic features, input levels, output levels, EQ, etc.
4. Support for multiple output formats. (coaxial, optical, multi-channel analog)
Creative does most of that right, and with no competition right now... If someone else can step up to the plate and deliver... I will glaaaaadly avoid Creative products for the rest of their existence.
Following the money on this one does not lead straight to the RIAA. The people who are threatened by internet radio are the traditional FM broadcasters and now Sirius and XM in the satellite radio industry.
FM is fueled by big corporate advertising dollars and payola. Satellite radio is fueled by subscriptions.
Internet radio has a mix of the above and an abundance of free stations sponsored voluntarily by their listeners. Now close your eyes and imagine a world where every car is able to connect to internet radio. The brews big trouble for the traditional and satellite broadcasters.
Having NPR step up to this is good news indeed - while NPR is faaaar from a perfect organization this move certainly wins then some brownie points with me.
"Finally, other disclosures decreased over time. Information can be disclosed in ways that
make it too ambiguous to be useful. For example, in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy"
, aliens create a supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate the meaning of
life, the universe, and everything. After calculating for ages, Deep Thought discloses that
the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everthing is "42." Just "42." This
disclosure does not really illuminate the meaning of life."
Not to jump on the side of the patent office or their lawyers, but this report is clearly going after unintentional file-sharing as a result of application settings that users either don't understand or are duped into sharing files. This applies heavily to the national security threat because even smart people can make mistakes if the software is written to encourage (or dupe in the eyes of this report) making folders/files shared which shouldn't be or which the user doesn't realize are being shared.
This story is over eight years old... There wasn't anything else slightly more recent that could be dug up for us to read in our eggnog induced drunkeness?
Slashdot Mirror
You underestimate the world if you think only .1% of people have serious pyschological problems. There's a great deal many more then that with major problems, some estimates are that one in four people in the USA are depressed, have bi-polar disorder, or some other form of mental issues. Throw them in front of amazingly detailed (and distorted) virtual realities and you've got a recipe for more social problems then just guys with heart problems forgetting to "unplug from the net".
I think your point is totally valid. The problem is that you need BOTH the neuroscience research done as well as the sociological and cultural reflecting. The former can produce drugs which can produce money which is how the global society operates right now (everything for money). The latter would produce books and papers which very few people would fully read and comprehend and many more would misquote and use to their political advantage.
Come to think of it, I think the best solution is to just keep all the humans caged up and staring at screens.
I've been in a 12 step program before and they told me that it was better to believe in a ROCK then to stick with REASON.
. html
The success rate of a year in AA is equal to the success rate of a year not in AA. http://www.orange-papers.org/orange-effectiveness
In other words - the few people who it works for have simply replaced a chemical addiction with a social addiction (going to meetings everyday). Is that better? Sure it's better, cleaner, and gets people living again. Does it work for everyone or is it even CLOSE to a comprehensive solution to addiction? Not by a looooooooooooooooong shot.
TheRaven64 said "No game is so much fun that the average person will play them to the exclusion of all else,"
i -platform/August-2005/man-dies-50-game-marathon.ht m
The Freshmayka points Raven to this link - Yes some people game themselves TO DEATH! http://www.armchairempire.com/videogame-news/mult
Actually it's quite simple. The primary symptom of having an addiction (to anything as you pointed out) is the withdraw effects.
Two examples: The Golfer and the Gamer. The Golfer plays three times a week, has golf art all over his home, owns a golf cart, and has a peer group of golfing buddies. Then there is the Gamer. He's got all the consoles, plus a fat gaming PC, he plays all the major games and his peer groups are gamers too.
How can you tell if either are addicted? You can't. You could only infer from the amount of time they spend that they have taken a keen interest in each subject. However, the moment that one of them starts to experience withdraw symptoms when they don't get their "fix" is the moment when you can now say "OK this is looking like addictive behavior"
There's still a huge range of degrees here. The cocaine addict is doing major damage to his nose and probably entire social life, while the golfer addict is just getting a sore shoulder and glares from his wife for watching too much TV on Sunday.
It's well documented (across tens of thousands of forum posts) that addicted gamers suffer from withdraw effects. Are they severe enough to negatively effect that persons life? For the average "addicted gamer" probably not, but for the more extreme cases (weekly 36 hour MMO sessions without eating, etc.) I'm sure the feeling of withdraw they get is so intense they HAVE to get back to gaming ASAP.
Seriously folks, anything which can stimulate ones mind in such a dramatic fashion as video games can will become addictive to people whose brains are susceptible to chemical addiction. Playing a video game releases chemicals in your brain, tons of them. I believe it's the same exact endorphins or whatever (I'm not a neuroscientist) that get released when you get 777 on the slots as it is when you get a purple epic drop in World of Warcraft. At least my therapist tells me so and she's got a PhD in this stuff.
... However they then tell you "Give up your problems to god and go to a spiritual advisor at a Generic Anonymous support group." I'm sorry but after all your science and reasoning you're telling me the only cure to my excessive Molten Core raiding (or drinking, or drugging, or gambling, etc.) is to talk it over with my peers and let God sort out the details? A higher power is the only one who can re-balance my out of whack brain chemistry???
Addiction science needs a lot of work though. As it stands right now they seem to be quite good at saying "look here, the brain starts to behave this way when a person gets addicted to a specific behavior or chemical"
I'm sure a good amount of people here might fire right back at this response and say "There is no proof of addictive nature of games etc. etc." but reports like this are becoming more common and I think anyone with 25+ years of gaming experience would just answer the question "Are games addictive?" with a resounding "Duh!"
What we do need is a better way to help people who suffer from ALL addictions. If guys like Jack Thompson get their way then they'll just use the banner of video game addiction to push a Christian cultural agenda - not to improve anyones health or lifestyle. Way too much of the "solution" to addiction right now is based on some mystical guardian of your spirit who only comes to your aide if you follow twelve specific steps put together by two midwestern americans nearly a century ago...
I can very easily see a scenario five years from now where Blu-Ray is the dominant format but consumers call it HD-DVD because to them (as another poster pointed out) it's all HD.
Does anyone remember five years ago when it took Congress stepping in and getting the special royalty rates for small broadcasters? How did that go down? Are we at the last stage of the fight or can a senator step in and try and save us? I've done everything I can, written letters, told all my friends.... this is so frustrating.
First, Turntables with digital outputs are nothing new. They've been around at least 5 years now. Any audiophile would avoid them because you're stuck with the sound of the built in analog-to-digital converter. Specifically I'm talking about SPDIF, I don't know when the first USB turntable showed up.
Now the subject above is slightly misleading but I wanted to get your attention. I've been a DJ for 17 years and have always loved both the feel and the sound of vinyl. Many years ago I realized that I was destroying the sound of my records within 10-20 plays, particularly when taking them to the brutal conditions at the average rave. I looked around various audiophile forums and found a product called LAST.
This stuff is simply amazing, take a look at the link and the microscopic photos of the record groove after 200 plays. I have records that I treated with LAST that sound just as good today as they did 10 years ago and after dozens of plays.
Anyways, I'm not affiliated with the company but I wanted to let the vinyl addicts and audiophiles here know how to clean and preserve their collection - screw playing that MP3 recording of your vinyl, PLAY DA WAX! But it ain't cheap compared to other products, and it takes a while to apply to each record, but it really does seem like magic what it can do to your LPs.
STALKER was also developed in the Ukraine by people who had a passion for the catastrophic nuclear disaster that happened in their back yard 21 years ago. They also spent 6 long years developing the title.
I don't think the staff of Bethesda which lives in the nice suburbs of Maryland is going to connect with the concepts of radioactive fallout and nuclear disasters in the same way. I fully expect Bethesda to put in 1/5th the passion and 1/2 the development time compared to GSC (developers of STALKER).
You know... the merging of Software and Hardware.. SoHardware...?
But seriously this sounds like a bad idea for stuff like x86 CPUs and 3D GPUs. The whole beauty of hardware is that it's fixed. You know it won't change and so do the engineers, hence they spend more time making the systems reliable and bug-free. Self patching hardware just sounds like a bad idea for consumers.
On the other hand, it could do well for what will become legacy systems in the future. Chips that are used in machines which need to operate for 10-25 years could definitely benefit from a system like this.
Commercial businesses provide a ton of licensable and even public domain content for developers to use. It's like stock photography but for things that game developers need like textures, bump maps, sound effects, etc.
:D
It's also possible being that HL2 and Doom3 are highly moddable games that an individual on the STALKER team borrowed assets because they needed quick place holders but then they forgot to replace them - or it's also possible the assets they borrowed are in the public domain.
Still, I've seen this getting a lot of coverage on the web and some people even insulting the developers saying things like "only russians steal". It's quite ridiculous considering the artists clearly spent thousands of hours designing unique assets for this title. It's like harping on three or four words used in a novel that also appear somewhere else.
Even if this was flat out stealing assets from one game to use in another, it appears to me not unlike stealing a high-hat from one song to complete your song. It's such a small piece of the artists work that it seems silly to consider it a stolen asset used to get rich quick - so sue the crap out of them. What is more likely is the asset was just "the right one" and the artist used what worked best in that situation.
Still, if the files in question are actually (c) to a specific company, I still think it's unlikely they'd take much legal recourse over it. It'd be hard to prove it has caused major damages or that it's been the sole reason STALKER is making money.
oh and for reference, I understand what it's like to have your violated. my music is all over russian mp3 websites being sold and I don't see a penny. But hey it's getting out there!
1. Form the "Birth of Silicon" foundation 501c(3). Mission: To share with future generations the magical birth of the Silicon Valley. 2. Build two replicas in Second Life, one of an active and equipped lab and the second of the fruit stand. 3. Contact Wired and just tell them you used Second Life to do something cool. 4. The embedded Second Life employee at Wired writes an article about it - the article gets on /.
5. non-PROFIT!!!
I am an audio professional and am rather hardcore when it comes to my gaming. Over the last few years I have built several gaming rigs and they've always had the top of the line Creative cards. Each and every time I have thought to myself how piss-poor the drivers were, how god-awful the customer service was, and how fantastic the sound quality and EAX effects were in my games.
.wav file through my X-FI rig versus my Pro-Tools setup using an M-Audio ProjectMix board - though I would never want to use the Creative stuff for any professional projects.
With the latest line of Creative products they have introduced X-FI and these cards, when used with great speakers and properly tuned THX settings, sound even better then the Creative cards from a few years ago. Infact it's hard to tell the difference playing a
Still, looking forward, why do I have to buy a card at all? Creative should put all their basic features needed for surround gaming and 24bit96khz audio on a chip and let mobo designers license the technology. Write up a simple and unified control panel and again let the mobo manufacturers put as little or as much bloatware in as they want.
At the end of the day I don't care who makes the product, my demands as an audophile and gamer are for:
1. 24bit/96khz distortion and noise free audio.
2. 3D Surround processing for gaming - pitch shifting 32 individual bullets and having multiple reverbs for different acoustic zones IS rather CPU intensive (say 5-20% I would guesstimate) and is best offloaded onto specialty audio hardware.
3. Unified control panel for setting basic features, input levels, output levels, EQ, etc.
4. Support for multiple output formats. (coaxial, optical, multi-channel analog)
Creative does most of that right, and with no competition right now... If someone else can step up to the plate and deliver... I will glaaaaadly avoid Creative products for the rest of their existence.
Following the money on this one does not lead straight to the RIAA. The people who are threatened by internet radio are the traditional FM broadcasters and now Sirius and XM in the satellite radio industry.
FM is fueled by big corporate advertising dollars and payola.
Satellite radio is fueled by subscriptions.
Internet radio has a mix of the above and an abundance of free stations sponsored voluntarily by their listeners. Now close your eyes and imagine a world where every car is able to connect to internet radio. The brews big trouble for the traditional and satellite broadcasters.
Having NPR step up to this is good news indeed - while NPR is faaaar from a perfect organization this move certainly wins then some brownie points with me.
"Finally, other disclosures decreased over time. Information can be disclosed in ways that make it too ambiguous to be useful. For example, in The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy" , aliens create a supercomputer called Deep Thought to calculate the meaning of life, the universe, and everything. After calculating for ages, Deep Thought discloses that the answer to the meaning of life, the universe and everthing is "42." Just "42." This disclosure does not really illuminate the meaning of life." Not to jump on the side of the patent office or their lawyers, but this report is clearly going after unintentional file-sharing as a result of application settings that users either don't understand or are duped into sharing files. This applies heavily to the national security threat because even smart people can make mistakes if the software is written to encourage (or dupe in the eyes of this report) making folders/files shared which shouldn't be or which the user doesn't realize are being shared.
This story is over eight years old... There wasn't anything else slightly more recent that could be dug up for us to read in our eggnog induced drunkeness?