No, there are ten reactors in use in this country.
Oh wait, you just assumed that anyone with access to a computer, an internet connection and reading slashdot was from the US, I'm so sorry, your bad (no, I wasn't the one who screwed up, you did).
I've never seen tax lawyers at work but I have seen economists, upper management and accountants do their thing and for most of them they're either just following a recipe handed down to them from someone above them to the letter (and get confused when something doesn't fit into it) or repeating something that they got hammered into their heads in college (not that geeks are immune to this but I haven't met many coders who have actually chosen software development as their job who didn't at least try to figure new and unknown things out or who didn't question things they "learned" in college that just seemed wrong (as in, personal opinions of the professor being taught as absolute truth)).
Interestingly enough my experience is that a lot of companies would rather hire some guy in a suit who's got a "used car salesman smile" and next no skills over someone who's got actual skills. At least that's how it was a few years ago after the economists had created the dot-bomb and thus most businesses were distrustful of geeks because the economists fucked everything up (of course, most people seem to think the ones doing all the hyping and investing in insane companies were the geeks).
(Yes, the above "economists -> failure means geeks can't be trusted" bit isn't supposed to make sense since it doesn't but that's how a lot of businesses seemed to react)
I don't think the parent poster meant answering "Did you have sex with your aide?" with "I think you meant to ask me about the trade deficit..." but rather answering a question that when "properly parsed" would mean something other than what the person asking meant it to ask.
"Are you sure you meant to ask me if I like drinking ketchup or were you attempting to asking me of I wanted ketchup on my fries or something to drink?"
The problem, for admirers of this system such as yourself, anyway, is that Europe itself is starting to question such an arrangement. People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures. They're starting to wonder just why it's necessary to be paying so much in taxes. They're starting to wonder why starting a business has to be a bureaucratic nightmare. And they're starting to vote appropriately.
While politics here in Sweden have slowly become more right-wing (despite claims from the right that politics have shifted toward communism(!)) most people are perfectly happy with "socialized" health care and fairly high taxes. That's not to say that the right-wing parties don't pull populist "teh commie govarnments are stealings yuor monies!!" crap every now and then (and occasionally get elected (only to get voted out after the next election because they never bothered to fulfill their "sound bite promises" they kept talking about on TV, instead focusing on ideological issues like selling anything the government owns)).
Yeah, I'm expecting the next election here in Sweden to get very interesting, seems a lot of people who voted for the right-wing alliance last time around aren't too happy about the way the country is being run now that they're in power (they're pulling their old "omg we have four years before the pissed off populace kicks us out because we acted like a bunch of zealots! better hurry and get some extra free market zealotry in before then!").
Well, when it comes to wanting to kill a product, service or business division the answer is usually "power struggles", a former employer of mine merged with another company, in a grab for power the old upper management from the company that I worked for before the merger started forcing the closure of various offices and business divisions (plus a lot of other changes that affected the power of the "other company" negatively), then the old upper management from the other company struck back and managed to get "their" guy hired as CEO and started re-opening "their" divisions and offices while closing "my company's" offices. This struggle has now been going on for several years and they're still not done...
All it takes is a couple of guys high enough in the corporate hierarchy who dislike something enough, they may not have the power to just nuke the show but they sure can mess with it enough to get it cancelled "naturally".
Of course, I don't have any insight into Fox so I don't really know, just saying stranger things have happened.
Because clearly no one could ever grow vegetables for any other reason than profit?
I love how whenever I forget that there are people who see money as the purpose of life for all humans I can just go to/. and read a few comments to realize that there are plenty of people who don't even consider other reasons than money when trying to figure out why someone would do something. I'm still waiting for someone to claim Aristotle only cared about philosophy because he was trying to get a research grant though...
My perception of Fox's treatment of Firefly (as a european who had to download it to see it and thus ended up getting the episodes in the right order (pilot = S01E01)) was that they seemed to pull the old trick of trying to kill it based on phony ratings (by moving it around, promoting it to the wrong demographic and all that).
As for the movie, well, it wasn't even shown in theaters around here and since they (Fox) effectively killed a lot potential interest in both the show and the movie by messing with the show there would obviously be a lot of potential fans who missed the show or never "got it", combine that with those who saw the movie early stating exactly what the post you replied to stated, that "The movie's plot was half a retelling of some of the tv series and half a completely new story, so it ended up being a mashup that failed to truly cater to either." and you've got a failed movie.
To emphasize my first point, you even said it yourself: "the viewership failed to rise when it was on TV, and didn't bother to see the movie". The question here isn't IF this happened but WHY, if Fox was deliberately trying to kill the show ("Sci-fi is out these days or some junk, kill it") or just stupid ("sports fans love sci-fi, right?"). Also, in your previous post you felt the need to point out that Fox made the show and Universal the movie, like that somehow rid Fox of all guilt for setting up a box-office failure, if anything that reeks of "Fox wasn't interested in Firefly" which ties in nicely with the whole "they killed the show deliberately" theory.
As I understand it the whole "Jedis make their own lightsabers" bit is quite well established in Star Wars canon or at least that's what one of my cow-orkers who is obsessed with Star Wars says, I've never really had much interest in Star Wars myself as it always seemed to me that while Star Trek often plays it fast and loose with tech and science in order to advance the story Star Wars just turns it up to eleven by using the "Lucas got high and just made a bunch of shit up" method of fitting technobabble into the storyline (and it would be a little easier to at least attempt to excuse this if it wasn't for the fact that the plots in the Star Wars universe are often completely insane and senseless as well).
Seconded on "normal" being best when it's a little easy, I always get annoyed at games that are too easy on "very easy", still too easy on "easy" and way too hard on "normal" (especially when they pull tricks like making specific parts harder, like having the enemy in an RTS suddenly get reinforcements right next to your base on "normal" but not on "easy".
There's also the issue of "normal" being playable but still too hard (as in, having to replay every level a whole bunch of times before beating the game after way too much time). The difficulty levels I'm most happy with are (I mostly play RTS and "god" (Civ-like) games):
Very easy - Almost sandbox, computer is inept and makes stupid mistakes.
Easy - Playable by just about anyone although a few people may find it a bit hard
Normal - Anyone with some experience of the genre should be able to play through the game without too much trouble, may have to replay a few levels once or twice.
Hard - This should be pretty hard, as in, most people who beat the game on Normal should have some difficulty but it shouldn't be impossible.
Very hard - Like playing against one of those guys who sit around playing Starcraft every day, really tough even for those who beat Normal easily and Hard without too much trouble.
That said, when it comes to RTS games I always get infuriated when I see the computer clearly giving orders to several groups of units at the same time, while also placing buildings in its base, the computer should be forced to act as a human "commander", one command at a time with each command taking a certain amount of time (with the time being shorter for higher difficulty levels).
Actually, I'm a Mac user, I like macs and outside of work I haven't had a Windows machine in a long time (used Linux/*BSD/Solaris/IRIX almost exclusively since 1997) and I have had several serious issues with my macs. That said, in general I have found macs to be a lot less troublesome than the average *nix workstation.
My biggest issue with macs at the moment is a Safari 4 bug that only seems to manifest itself when using more than one monitor; when scrolling a page the color saturation keeps increasing until I switch to another window, hit cmd-a to select everything on the page or manually select a portion of the page (only selected parts get their saturation reset). Only the visible parts of a page have their saturation increased and hitting space - shift-space to scroll down and up will clear it but it's still highly annoying.
Another bug I encountered was the Filevault issue when upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5, basically the first time you logged in after upgrading the Filevault volume worked as always but when you logged in the second time it would become unmountable, since I had been using an admin account (with a filevault volume for its home dir) during the whole "upgrade and clean shit up" phase I ended up being locked out to the point where I had to use the console to convert the filevault volume into a sparse disk image so I could transfer some important files off it before doing an "archive and install" of Leopard.
So yeah, us mac users are well aware of there being issues with our favorite operating system, but just like Linux users and Gamers (read: Windows fanboys) we are willing to overlook these issues because we still consider the operating system we use the one that best suits our needs.
Of course that would be a stupid implementation. The OS should clear the Guest at login time. Note, I'm not saying this is how Apple did it, I have no idea and don't own a any apple hardware anyway.
That doesn't sound like such a good idea, if for some reason the Guest user has managed to leave a nasty process running it would make sense to restore the account on logout. The way I'd implement it would probably be something like:
Make sure the "delete and restore account" feature can only be used for the "Guest" account or accounts that are members of the "Guest" group (can't remember what the group "Guest" is a member of).
Set a "account has been modified" flag on login.
Always wipe the Guest account on logout.
Wipe Guest account on login if the "account has been modified" flag has been set.
But that's just how I'd do it, how Apple has done it I don't know (although I hope they fix it soon since I'm one of those who actually use the Guest account (When you have a bunch of friends over it makes sense to use a modified Guest account for playing music and letting people check their email, especially when people are drinking, and yes, you can modify the Guest account defaults so you can have your entire iTunes library available on login)).
Cringe: To shrink or recoil, as in fear, disgust or embarrassment.
Someone who reacts this way to another person simply because they dislike the other person's choice of clothing or hairstyle is not reacting in exactly the same way as someone who reacts this way when noticing dress codes enforced on employees by an employer.
In the first case it's a reaction to personal choices made by an individual which have little to no impact on the person reacting, in the second case it's a reaction to choices made by other people that impact a third party (and which are intended to impact said third party).
Seeing as how I actually shower and wash my hair I sincerely doubt there's some weird smell I'm not noticing, at least nothing that compares to the smell of a lot of the suit-claden folk I run into on a daily basis (seriously, there are a lot of people who seem to pay a lot of attention to what they wear but not how they smell).
Also, even if I did smell that wouldn't explain why people shoot me the same looks from across the street...
Why? It's for one of the reasons you stated. Identification purposes.
True, it's definitely an advantage to be able to tell store employees apart from customers. I suppose I should have clarified that I was talking more about those places where everyone wears identical shirts, shoes, pants and possibly hats as well as name tags with the company logo. This just seems a bit excessive to me, at least when dealing with stores that may only have three or four employees working at one time, IMHO they should be able to work with "shirt in this color and always wear your name tag", if anything it makes the employees seem less like robots and is less likely to make the employer come off as a giant corporation that demands total conformity.
Not to mention stores that disallow all piercings and tattoos that could possibly be visible in any way, this may reflect what the general public felt about piercings and tattoos decades ago but these days you'd think people (including those dreaming up corporate dress codes) would be a bit more accustomed to seeing the occasional tattoo or piercing (no, I don't have any tattoos or piercings myself).
I actually have a habit of wearing clothes that get me dirty looks from people who see me on the street (my dreadlocks probably don't help this (and most people who look at me like I'm worthless scum are the typical "gray suit and tie" Volvo drivers)) and I wear the same clothes to work. But yeah, a speedo may be a hard sell in an office environment.
That said, unless the job requires special clothing (either for identification purposes such as with police officers or firemen or for safety or hygiene reasons) I see no reason for people not to wear whatever they feel like but then I tend to cringe when I enter a store and notice all the employees wearing identical clothing...
And that's why there's a saying among those of us who remember when NAT was something a handful of Linux users did with their 56k connections (and called "IP Masquerading") "NAT is not packet filtering". Just stick a real firewall between the big bad internet and your network, most NAT routers even have one of these (duh!) it's just that to most people "firewall == NAT" which just isn't true.
The fact that they manipulate what customer feedback they are willing to show in order to increase sales is enough for me to take my business elsewhere, and there are plenty of trustworthy businesses that don't censor user reviews.
Unfortunately a lot of retailers do this, this is one of many very good reasons not to use a retailer. If there are no "1/10 - This --- fucking sucks, it broke after a week and was barely usable before that" reviews then you know they're screening (or just sell great products but that isn't very likely).
It seems you're assuming that I'm one of those "stop wasting money on pointless research" nutjobs, I'm not.
All I'm saying is that this isn't really news, and it sure isn't "news for nerds" just because the research involved video games. I'm actually fairly certain that, just like with lots of other seemingly boring and uninteresting research projects, these results will be very useful to a small set of researchers but it just isn't very newsworthy (there are tons of studies like this where the results are basically "yup, just as we expected from previous research" and I for one would rather hear about exciting basic research that could be described as "Controversial theory regarding the formation of stars shown to be accurate" but instead we get "psychologists get further proof of previous theory holding water, also here's a story about a phone that you can water your plants with!").
/Mikael (a bit cynical about science/geek news lately)
I suspect that while no one has studied gamers for this reason before there have likely been studies showing that among many mammals (including humans) these responses exist in similar situations, just not when playing WoW/Quake/CS/Whatever, and I believe this is what's making everyone "How is this news?".
The look you described as being good for getting the attention of the "girls" sounds more like something that would get my grandmother's attention than something that would get the attention of any girl I'm interested in (age 20-30 and in possession of actual personality as opposed to the zombie hordes found in most clubs and bars (who would most likely love a guy in expensive clothing who looks like he could sponsor them with drinks)).
So how do I look? Well, mangy-looking dreadlocks, beard, baggy clothing and generally "relaxed". I do shower regularly though. My point is that you're mixing in style, the perception of which is highly relative to your "target market".
You really only use iSync directly if syncing non-iPhone phones, with an iPhone it doesn't launch separately (as in: iSync window pops up showing a phone icon and a sync button that you have to click). When you plug your iPhone in iTunes will launch and handle the syncing, this is because of the whole "music, video and apps managed by iTunes" thing you may have heard of.
Slashdot Mirror
There are 104 nuclear reactors in this country.
No, there are ten reactors in use in this country.
Oh wait, you just assumed that anyone with access to a computer, an internet connection and reading slashdot was from the US, I'm so sorry, your bad (no, I wasn't the one who screwed up, you did).
/Mikael
I've never seen tax lawyers at work but I have seen economists, upper management and accountants do their thing and for most of them they're either just following a recipe handed down to them from someone above them to the letter (and get confused when something doesn't fit into it) or repeating something that they got hammered into their heads in college (not that geeks are immune to this but I haven't met many coders who have actually chosen software development as their job who didn't at least try to figure new and unknown things out or who didn't question things they "learned" in college that just seemed wrong (as in, personal opinions of the professor being taught as absolute truth)).
/Mikael
Interestingly enough my experience is that a lot of companies would rather hire some guy in a suit who's got a "used car salesman smile" and next no skills over someone who's got actual skills. At least that's how it was a few years ago after the economists had created the dot-bomb and thus most businesses were distrustful of geeks because the economists fucked everything up (of course, most people seem to think the ones doing all the hyping and investing in insane companies were the geeks).
(Yes, the above "economists -> failure means geeks can't be trusted" bit isn't supposed to make sense since it doesn't but that's how a lot of businesses seemed to react)
/Mikael
I don't think the parent poster meant answering "Did you have sex with your aide?" with "I think you meant to ask me about the trade deficit..." but rather answering a question that when "properly parsed" would mean something other than what the person asking meant it to ask.
"Are you sure you meant to ask me if I like drinking ketchup or were you attempting to asking me of I wanted ketchup on my fries or something to drink?"
/Mikael
The problem, for admirers of this system such as yourself, anyway, is that Europe itself is starting to question such an arrangement. People are beginning to wonder why they can't have a good medical care system without massive government expenditures. They're starting to wonder just why it's necessary to be paying so much in taxes. They're starting to wonder why starting a business has to be a bureaucratic nightmare. And they're starting to vote appropriately.
While politics here in Sweden have slowly become more right-wing (despite claims from the right that politics have shifted toward communism(!)) most people are perfectly happy with "socialized" health care and fairly high taxes. That's not to say that the right-wing parties don't pull populist "teh commie govarnments are stealings yuor monies!!" crap every now and then (and occasionally get elected (only to get voted out after the next election because they never bothered to fulfill their "sound bite promises" they kept talking about on TV, instead focusing on ideological issues like selling anything the government owns)).
Yeah, I'm expecting the next election here in Sweden to get very interesting, seems a lot of people who voted for the right-wing alliance last time around aren't too happy about the way the country is being run now that they're in power (they're pulling their old "omg we have four years before the pissed off populace kicks us out because we acted like a bunch of zealots! better hurry and get some extra free market zealotry in before then!").
/Mikael
Well, when it comes to wanting to kill a product, service or business division the answer is usually "power struggles", a former employer of mine merged with another company, in a grab for power the old upper management from the company that I worked for before the merger started forcing the closure of various offices and business divisions (plus a lot of other changes that affected the power of the "other company" negatively), then the old upper management from the other company struck back and managed to get "their" guy hired as CEO and started re-opening "their" divisions and offices while closing "my company's" offices. This struggle has now been going on for several years and they're still not done...
All it takes is a couple of guys high enough in the corporate hierarchy who dislike something enough, they may not have the power to just nuke the show but they sure can mess with it enough to get it cancelled "naturally".
Of course, I don't have any insight into Fox so I don't really know, just saying stranger things have happened.
/Mikael
Because clearly no one could ever grow vegetables for any other reason than profit?
I love how whenever I forget that there are people who see money as the purpose of life for all humans I can just go to /. and read a few comments to realize that there are plenty of people who don't even consider other reasons than money when trying to figure out why someone would do something. I'm still waiting for someone to claim Aristotle only cared about philosophy because he was trying to get a research grant though...
/Mikael
My perception of Fox's treatment of Firefly (as a european who had to download it to see it and thus ended up getting the episodes in the right order (pilot = S01E01)) was that they seemed to pull the old trick of trying to kill it based on phony ratings (by moving it around, promoting it to the wrong demographic and all that).
As for the movie, well, it wasn't even shown in theaters around here and since they (Fox) effectively killed a lot potential interest in both the show and the movie by messing with the show there would obviously be a lot of potential fans who missed the show or never "got it", combine that with those who saw the movie early stating exactly what the post you replied to stated, that "The movie's plot was half a retelling of some of the tv series and half a completely new story, so it ended up being a mashup that failed to truly cater to either." and you've got a failed movie.
To emphasize my first point, you even said it yourself: "the viewership failed to rise when it was on TV, and didn't bother to see the movie". The question here isn't IF this happened but WHY, if Fox was deliberately trying to kill the show ("Sci-fi is out these days or some junk, kill it") or just stupid ("sports fans love sci-fi, right?"). Also, in your previous post you felt the need to point out that Fox made the show and Universal the movie, like that somehow rid Fox of all guilt for setting up a box-office failure, if anything that reeks of "Fox wasn't interested in Firefly" which ties in nicely with the whole "they killed the show deliberately" theory.
/Mikael
As I understand it the whole "Jedis make their own lightsabers" bit is quite well established in Star Wars canon or at least that's what one of my cow-orkers who is obsessed with Star Wars says, I've never really had much interest in Star Wars myself as it always seemed to me that while Star Trek often plays it fast and loose with tech and science in order to advance the story Star Wars just turns it up to eleven by using the "Lucas got high and just made a bunch of shit up" method of fitting technobabble into the storyline (and it would be a little easier to at least attempt to excuse this if it wasn't for the fact that the plots in the Star Wars universe are often completely insane and senseless as well).
/Mikael
Seconded on "normal" being best when it's a little easy, I always get annoyed at games that are too easy on "very easy", still too easy on "easy" and way too hard on "normal" (especially when they pull tricks like making specific parts harder, like having the enemy in an RTS suddenly get reinforcements right next to your base on "normal" but not on "easy".
There's also the issue of "normal" being playable but still too hard (as in, having to replay every level a whole bunch of times before beating the game after way too much time). The difficulty levels I'm most happy with are (I mostly play RTS and "god" (Civ-like) games):
That said, when it comes to RTS games I always get infuriated when I see the computer clearly giving orders to several groups of units at the same time, while also placing buildings in its base, the computer should be forced to act as a human "commander", one command at a time with each command taking a certain amount of time (with the time being shorter for higher difficulty levels).
/Mikael
Actually, I'm a Mac user, I like macs and outside of work I haven't had a Windows machine in a long time (used Linux/*BSD/Solaris/IRIX almost exclusively since 1997) and I have had several serious issues with my macs. That said, in general I have found macs to be a lot less troublesome than the average *nix workstation.
My biggest issue with macs at the moment is a Safari 4 bug that only seems to manifest itself when using more than one monitor; when scrolling a page the color saturation keeps increasing until I switch to another window, hit cmd-a to select everything on the page or manually select a portion of the page (only selected parts get their saturation reset). Only the visible parts of a page have their saturation increased and hitting space - shift-space to scroll down and up will clear it but it's still highly annoying.
Another bug I encountered was the Filevault issue when upgrading from 10.4 to 10.5, basically the first time you logged in after upgrading the Filevault volume worked as always but when you logged in the second time it would become unmountable, since I had been using an admin account (with a filevault volume for its home dir) during the whole "upgrade and clean shit up" phase I ended up being locked out to the point where I had to use the console to convert the filevault volume into a sparse disk image so I could transfer some important files off it before doing an "archive and install" of Leopard.
So yeah, us mac users are well aware of there being issues with our favorite operating system, but just like Linux users and Gamers (read: Windows fanboys) we are willing to overlook these issues because we still consider the operating system we use the one that best suits our needs.
/Mikael
Of course that would be a stupid implementation. The OS should clear the Guest at login time. Note, I'm not saying this is how Apple did it, I have no idea and don't own a any apple hardware anyway.
That doesn't sound like such a good idea, if for some reason the Guest user has managed to leave a nasty process running it would make sense to restore the account on logout. The way I'd implement it would probably be something like:
But that's just how I'd do it, how Apple has done it I don't know (although I hope they fix it soon since I'm one of those who actually use the Guest account (When you have a bunch of friends over it makes sense to use a modified Guest account for playing music and letting people check their email, especially when people are drinking, and yes, you can modify the Guest account defaults so you can have your entire iTunes library available on login)).
/Mikael
I you go to slashdot.org/~username/comments you should still get the "classic" view.
/Mikael
Cringe: To shrink or recoil, as in fear, disgust or embarrassment.
Someone who reacts this way to another person simply because they dislike the other person's choice of clothing or hairstyle is not reacting in exactly the same way as someone who reacts this way when noticing dress codes enforced on employees by an employer.
In the first case it's a reaction to personal choices made by an individual which have little to no impact on the person reacting, in the second case it's a reaction to choices made by other people that impact a third party (and which are intended to impact said third party).
/Mikael
Seeing as how I actually shower and wash my hair I sincerely doubt there's some weird smell I'm not noticing, at least nothing that compares to the smell of a lot of the suit-claden folk I run into on a daily basis (seriously, there are a lot of people who seem to pay a lot of attention to what they wear but not how they smell).
Also, even if I did smell that wouldn't explain why people shoot me the same looks from across the street...
/Mikael
Why? It's for one of the reasons you stated. Identification purposes.
True, it's definitely an advantage to be able to tell store employees apart from customers. I suppose I should have clarified that I was talking more about those places where everyone wears identical shirts, shoes, pants and possibly hats as well as name tags with the company logo. This just seems a bit excessive to me, at least when dealing with stores that may only have three or four employees working at one time, IMHO they should be able to work with "shirt in this color and always wear your name tag", if anything it makes the employees seem less like robots and is less likely to make the employer come off as a giant corporation that demands total conformity.
Not to mention stores that disallow all piercings and tattoos that could possibly be visible in any way, this may reflect what the general public felt about piercings and tattoos decades ago but these days you'd think people (including those dreaming up corporate dress codes) would be a bit more accustomed to seeing the occasional tattoo or piercing (no, I don't have any tattoos or piercings myself).
/Mikael
I actually have a habit of wearing clothes that get me dirty looks from people who see me on the street (my dreadlocks probably don't help this (and most people who look at me like I'm worthless scum are the typical "gray suit and tie" Volvo drivers)) and I wear the same clothes to work. But yeah, a speedo may be a hard sell in an office environment.
That said, unless the job requires special clothing (either for identification purposes such as with police officers or firemen or for safety or hygiene reasons) I see no reason for people not to wear whatever they feel like but then I tend to cringe when I enter a store and notice all the employees wearing identical clothing...
/Mikael
And that's why there's a saying among those of us who remember when NAT was something a handful of Linux users did with their 56k connections (and called "IP Masquerading") "NAT is not packet filtering". Just stick a real firewall between the big bad internet and your network, most NAT routers even have one of these (duh!) it's just that to most people "firewall == NAT" which just isn't true.
/Mikael
I find that unlikely, and if you want to avoid such retailers just go for the ones that have both negative reviews and no review spam about "V1AGR4".
/Mikael
The fact that they manipulate what customer feedback they are willing to show in order to increase sales is enough for me to take my business elsewhere, and there are plenty of trustworthy businesses that don't censor user reviews.
/Mikael
Unfortunately a lot of retailers do this, this is one of many very good reasons not to use a retailer. If there are no "1/10 - This --- fucking sucks, it broke after a week and was barely usable before that" reviews then you know they're screening (or just sell great products but that isn't very likely).
/Mikael
It seems you're assuming that I'm one of those "stop wasting money on pointless research" nutjobs, I'm not.
All I'm saying is that this isn't really news, and it sure isn't "news for nerds" just because the research involved video games. I'm actually fairly certain that, just like with lots of other seemingly boring and uninteresting research projects, these results will be very useful to a small set of researchers but it just isn't very newsworthy (there are tons of studies like this where the results are basically "yup, just as we expected from previous research" and I for one would rather hear about exciting basic research that could be described as "Controversial theory regarding the formation of stars shown to be accurate" but instead we get "psychologists get further proof of previous theory holding water, also here's a story about a phone that you can water your plants with!").
/Mikael (a bit cynical about science/geek news lately)
I suspect that while no one has studied gamers for this reason before there have likely been studies showing that among many mammals (including humans) these responses exist in similar situations, just not when playing WoW/Quake/CS/Whatever, and I believe this is what's making everyone "How is this news?".
/Mikael
The look you described as being good for getting the attention of the "girls" sounds more like something that would get my grandmother's attention than something that would get the attention of any girl I'm interested in (age 20-30 and in possession of actual personality as opposed to the zombie hordes found in most clubs and bars (who would most likely love a guy in expensive clothing who looks like he could sponsor them with drinks)).
So how do I look? Well, mangy-looking dreadlocks, beard, baggy clothing and generally "relaxed". I do shower regularly though. My point is that you're mixing in style, the perception of which is highly relative to your "target market".
/Mikael
You really only use iSync directly if syncing non-iPhone phones, with an iPhone it doesn't launch separately (as in: iSync window pops up showing a phone icon and a sync button that you have to click). When you plug your iPhone in iTunes will launch and handle the syncing, this is because of the whole "music, video and apps managed by iTunes" thing you may have heard of.
/Mikael