I don't remember anybody caring about doing the same exact thing to hordes of Hispanic zombies/evil mutations in RE4. And, naturally, killing hordes of white zombies in all of the RE games before that was perfectly acceptable.
Stay focused: the OP was saying something about real differences between races, I was saying that's not what the RE5 controversey was about at all.
I do have to say on your point that there is, in fact, a difference between a white guy shooting a crowd of white/ european zombies and a white guy shooting a crowd of black zombies. Kids are idiots, I don't think it's that far out there that if a kid plays games where he's shooting black people and doesn't run into many in real life, he's going to think less of them. Note that is just a hypothesis, one I don't agree with just that it's not as simple and absurd as you're making it out to be.
As for Jack Thompson and censorship, are you really worried about that? Jack Thompson is making sure that videogames never get censored, and that censorship will continue to be seen as ridiculous. Furthermore, I don't think it's at all realistic that videogames are going to be censored or banned, there's too much money at stake. Anyway, what they're talking about is age-restrictions. At the risk of being modded down, I'm going to say that's an acceptable compromise compared to censorship, though probably I'd object to it more if I were younger.
...you can never think about the differences between real races.
What's that got to do with anything? I was under the impression that RE5 was under attack because you were firing shotgun blasts into herds of zombies who happened to look a lot like black people.
What about someone who is carrying a weapon without their knowledge? That won't show up on the scans.
For guns and knives, that obviously wouldn't be a security risk. Unless you happen to have a terrorist taking a plane ride he didn't intend to hijack because he didn't think he could smuggle a gun on baord.
A timed bomb would be a bigger issue, but that would probably be detectable with the usual measures. Also, have terrorists even tried this before? It seems to me they have more willing suicide bombers than they have people who know how to make good bombs. Lets not forget that most terrorist attacks so far have been really low-tech and relied on a lot of luck in finding the gaping holes in security systems. They haven't been very sophisticated.
I think this system will be defeated not by terrorists slipping a bomb into Grandma's bag while she isn't watching, it will be defeated because the guy in charge of watching the monitors was drunk, or the (windows) computer controlling the system crashes. Assuming of course that it ever works in the first place.
Yet another worthless security measure being sold to worthless security organizations.
Let's capitalize on that. We could go into the buisness of selling "anti-terrorism rocks" to the government and airports. I'll get the rocks, you sell it to the security orgs.
Polygraphs are not admissible in a court of law due to the inherit unreliability of polygraph test examiners to accurately determine if the subject is being truthful.
Fortunately for those more concerned with "security" than rights (or real security for that matter) court standards are much much higher than what is used in airports.
Yeah, more than half were touch screen stuff of various flavors. I guess everyone at MS bought an iphone touch and is totally in love with it.
Sidenote, the best codename was the project to develop a robotic receptionist, "Codename: Robotic Receptionist." I really wish more codenames were more accurate like that.
Operation: invade Iraq and replace Saddam's government with a puppet government in 2 weeks. That is less pompus than "Operation: Enduring freedom" or whatever was.
Maybe because a pardon could be seen as admitting something illegal happened. Bush has always seemed hellbent on elevating the executive branch. Early on I assumed it was because it meant more power for him, but even now he's just out to vindicate another terrible republican president who said "...when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."
are we talking about the same halo? a strong plot? what the fuck did you smoke before you played it?
Look, of course not everyone is going to like any given plot. I'm assuming you didn't. You have to admit though that Halo had more plot than say, Doom, Super mario bros, or metroid. There was an actual story. Characters. Stuff happened. Literary devices even. That's not the case for many games, current games included. Even the newest Mario and Metroid games had almost zero plot.
If Halo had little plot, then theres really no way for an FPS to have much of a plot and still be a game.
Well, that would be the multiplayer plot I guess, I was talking about the single player "story" mode.
What you said was like saying "I just watched the 'citizen kane' dvd. What a terrible movie! It was just text saying 'DVD menu: Play, Options, and Directors commentary!'"
I'm sick of all the vague and useless FUD coming out of the scientific community.
I too am sick of waiting around! Lets just skip right to the end where we cure alzheimers using MAGIC!
There is not a single thing that they can discover or will discover that will change the fact that we will die. Regardless of the novel intent, the underlying message, that we should be in constant fear, of what we eat, breath, and drink is really no improvement of where we were 200 years ago, before there were even scientists.
Look at life expectancy increases over the last few decades. Also realize that we've only been serious about biomedical research relatively recently. Evolution went on for much longer and is still far ahead of us.
Oh, before I forget, the Wright brothers just called and said you naysaying types were right, that man probably will never fly.
Well, specific links tend to be better for research. And, were the study to find the opposite, that would be quite informative too. If diet and general health did NOT contribute at all to onset of alzheimers, that could be an indication that somethign suprisingly specific was to blame, rather than a huge list of fairly generic causes.
I'm not an expert specifically, but I'd wager that many people think/ thought there would be a genetic component in 100% of the cases of alzheimers. As far as I know, that's not been proven true, although it doesn't rule out extremely complicated genetics or something we've totally missed the boat on.
Anyway, if the study were to prove that diet could not increase your risk, that would simplify the search for causes dramatically.
Well, not really. You want to be sure something is actually correlated with an increase in risk before you assume it to be true and waste research money. "Oh, fast food and sugar don't actually have a statistical correlation with alzheimers? So all those billions of dollars and research time investigating how diet affects alzheimers onset were completely wasted and we probably could have come up with a good cure by now? Well, ain't that always the way."
Stats tend to be quite useless when it comes to these things... Correlation is NOT causation!
Where exactly would you have us start? Complete guesswork? "Hey, maybe carrots cause alzheimers? Here's what we're going to do: I'm going to have a kid, and he's never going to eat carrots, and we'll see if he get's alzheimers."
Identifying factors that increase your risk (IE those "useless" stats) of alzheimers is an essential step to understanding how the disease is caused, which is the first step towards preventing it and treating it. All we really know at this point is that nothing seems to be responsible for it 100% of the time, not even genetics.
So there remains nothing that is the absolute cause of altzheimers. Fast food joins genetics, aluminum, and all manners of early symptoms in that category.
It's already been blindingly clear for some time that alzheimers is a complex disease requiring many different factors to produce the disease. A little like cancer, in fact. Lung cancer almost certainly existed before smoking, and non-smokers can get it. Does that mean that smoking does not cause lung cancer? Only to complete simpletons.
It's important to identify risk factors for alzheimers to be able to prevent the disease and possibly even understand the mechanisms behind the cause.
Don't know what FPS games you've been playing, but there have been some great ones or at least well fleshed out ones. Halo has a strong plot that I found interesting. The half life games as well. I'll give you that most FPSes have little plot, but most games of all genres are crap that should not be purchased or played.
Also, I have issues with saying final fantasy games have great plots. They seem to be nonsensical japanese poetry about an apocalypse revolving around androgenous bad guys with liberal translation errors and vagueness giving the impression there's more going on than there actually is.
find it interesting that science based Phd students are able to be this creative - they are dealing with very intangible things, and correlating them to a form of communication that they are traditionally not known to be able to identify with.
Creativity is an essential part of being a scientist (in most cases). There are at least 3 places it's essential. You often have to be creative with your methods, coming up with new ways to test your hypotheses, and you usually have to be creative when coming up with hypotheses in the first place. The third need, and probably most related here, is that we do have to talk to people who have very little background in our fields. When describing these highly abstract phenomena to people, it can be helpful to describe it in other ways. You often want to put an image of what's going on in people's heads of what you're dealing with, and most of those times you don't have an animation handy.
If others needed a faster computer for other things, then the majority would be holding the technology back for the fewer people...
See, that's what's backwards. It's not everyone else's fault your needs are higher than theirs. You can't expect everyone else to buy faster computers they don't need just so yours will be cheaper. Same with the picture quality: you want something they don't, that's your issue to deal with, not theirs.
I agree that most people could see the difference, I certainly can. Having said that, I think that a lot of people are like me and would not be willing to pay very much for that increase in quality. It's really not that important to me. If it were free, sure, but I'm not going to spend money on it that needs to be going to rent or into savings.
About your question why I get irritated. The answer may be similar to why you would want a faster processor, but where everyone is happy with slow 300Mhz CPUs (which obviously isn't the case).
Well, if the users can't tell a difference, it would be pretty damn stupid of them to demand it. If I only needed a computer for MS word 2003, and never used it for ANYTHING else, then yeah, it would be idiotic of me to get a faster CPU than I needed.
From your post it sounds like you're irritated with people who can't tell a difference rather than irritiated that you do. That just seems backwards to me.
My 12 year old kid sister has been fed a steady diet of these "positive self-esteem" books, videos, and games... And then mom (and other parents from Generation "Precious Snowflake") wonders why she has no inclination to read, write, do her homework, clean up after herself, or even brush her teeth...
Well, duh... it's because she's being fed sanitized crap that is the electronic equivalent of valium every day!
Maybe a car analogy, a tradition on/., will help here. Out of spite you want to "teach" a tailgater, and brake hard on a tight turn. The tailgater overreacts, spins off the road and into a wall, and dies. Your car has not a scratch on it. Are you responsible in any way? After all, the tailgater lost control all by himself.
We're of course talking about degrees here. That car analogy was a more direct example: the outcome was extremely clear that the tailgater was going to have an accident if you set up a physical barrier going at high speeds like that, yes you were responsible.
To go in the other direction: lets say your coworker is a mentally unstable person, you read an article about Bush doing something stupid and say "Man, the world is going to hell in a handbasket!" Your coworker hears it, decides that is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and shoots everyone in the office. You're clearly not responsible for that: you were technically the tipping point. But you had no way of knowing that would be the reaction.
In this case, Drew was being a jerk (like the case in the tailgating example). I don't know if she actually told the victim to kill herself, I did look but not very hard, so I'm going to assume tentatively that she didn't say "Megan, kill yourself." Either way, she didn't know that if she took this course of action, she was going to commit suicide: you can't say she is responsible for the suicide, only that her actions drove this person to suicide.
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I don't remember anybody caring about doing the same exact thing to hordes of Hispanic zombies/evil mutations in RE4. And, naturally, killing hordes of white zombies in all of the RE games before that was perfectly acceptable.
Stay focused: the OP was saying something about real differences between races, I was saying that's not what the RE5 controversey was about at all.
I do have to say on your point that there is, in fact, a difference between a white guy shooting a crowd of white/ european zombies and a white guy shooting a crowd of black zombies. Kids are idiots, I don't think it's that far out there that if a kid plays games where he's shooting black people and doesn't run into many in real life, he's going to think less of them. Note that is just a hypothesis, one I don't agree with just that it's not as simple and absurd as you're making it out to be.
As for Jack Thompson and censorship, are you really worried about that? Jack Thompson is making sure that videogames never get censored, and that censorship will continue to be seen as ridiculous. Furthermore, I don't think it's at all realistic that videogames are going to be censored or banned, there's too much money at stake. Anyway, what they're talking about is age-restrictions. At the risk of being modded down, I'm going to say that's an acceptable compromise compared to censorship, though probably I'd object to it more if I were younger.
...you can never think about the differences between real races.
What's that got to do with anything? I was under the impression that RE5 was under attack because you were firing shotgun blasts into herds of zombies who happened to look a lot like black people.
If you'll excuse my French: bullshit!
I would, but that's not french.
What about someone who is carrying a weapon without their knowledge? That won't show up on the scans.
For guns and knives, that obviously wouldn't be a security risk. Unless you happen to have a terrorist taking a plane ride he didn't intend to hijack because he didn't think he could smuggle a gun on baord.
A timed bomb would be a bigger issue, but that would probably be detectable with the usual measures. Also, have terrorists even tried this before? It seems to me they have more willing suicide bombers than they have people who know how to make good bombs. Lets not forget that most terrorist attacks so far have been really low-tech and relied on a lot of luck in finding the gaping holes in security systems. They haven't been very sophisticated.
I think this system will be defeated not by terrorists slipping a bomb into Grandma's bag while she isn't watching, it will be defeated because the guy in charge of watching the monitors was drunk, or the (windows) computer controlling the system crashes. Assuming of course that it ever works in the first place.
Yet another worthless security measure being sold to worthless security organizations.
Let's capitalize on that. We could go into the buisness of selling "anti-terrorism rocks" to the government and airports. I'll get the rocks, you sell it to the security orgs.
Polygraphs are not admissible in a court of law due to the inherit unreliability of polygraph test examiners to accurately determine if the subject is being truthful.
Fortunately for those more concerned with "security" than rights (or real security for that matter) court standards are much much higher than what is used in airports.
Yeah, more than half were touch screen stuff of various flavors. I guess everyone at MS bought an iphone touch and is totally in love with it.
Sidenote, the best codename was the project to develop a robotic receptionist, "Codename: Robotic Receptionist." I really wish more codenames were more accurate like that.
Operation: invade Iraq and replace Saddam's government with a puppet government in 2 weeks. That is less pompus than "Operation: Enduring freedom" or whatever was.
...why doesn't he just issue a blanket pardon?
Maybe because a pardon could be seen as admitting something illegal happened. Bush has always seemed hellbent on elevating the executive branch. Early on I assumed it was because it meant more power for him, but even now he's just out to vindicate another terrible republican president who said "...when the president does it that means that it is not illegal."
are we talking about the same halo? a strong plot? what the fuck did you smoke before you played it?
Look, of course not everyone is going to like any given plot. I'm assuming you didn't. You have to admit though that Halo had more plot than say, Doom, Super mario bros, or metroid. There was an actual story. Characters. Stuff happened. Literary devices even. That's not the case for many games, current games included. Even the newest Mario and Metroid games had almost zero plot.
If Halo had little plot, then theres really no way for an FPS to have much of a plot and still be a game.
Well, that would be the multiplayer plot I guess, I was talking about the single player "story" mode.
What you said was like saying "I just watched the 'citizen kane' dvd. What a terrible movie! It was just text saying 'DVD menu: Play, Options, and Directors commentary!'"
I'm sick of all the vague and useless FUD coming out of the scientific community.
I too am sick of waiting around! Lets just skip right to the end where we cure alzheimers using MAGIC!
There is not a single thing that they can discover or will discover that will change the fact that we will die. Regardless of the novel intent, the underlying message, that we should be in constant fear, of what we eat, breath, and drink is really no improvement of where we were 200 years ago, before there were even scientists.
Look at life expectancy increases over the last few decades. Also realize that we've only been serious about biomedical research relatively recently. Evolution went on for much longer and is still far ahead of us.
Oh, before I forget, the Wright brothers just called and said you naysaying types were right, that man probably will never fly.
Well, specific links tend to be better for research. And, were the study to find the opposite, that would be quite informative too. If diet and general health did NOT contribute at all to onset of alzheimers, that could be an indication that somethign suprisingly specific was to blame, rather than a huge list of fairly generic causes.
I'm not an expert specifically, but I'd wager that many people think/ thought there would be a genetic component in 100% of the cases of alzheimers. As far as I know, that's not been proven true, although it doesn't rule out extremely complicated genetics or something we've totally missed the boat on.
Anyway, if the study were to prove that diet could not increase your risk, that would simplify the search for causes dramatically.
Well, not really. You want to be sure something is actually correlated with an increase in risk before you assume it to be true and waste research money. "Oh, fast food and sugar don't actually have a statistical correlation with alzheimers? So all those billions of dollars and research time investigating how diet affects alzheimers onset were completely wasted and we probably could have come up with a good cure by now? Well, ain't that always the way."
Stats tend to be quite useless when it comes to these things... Correlation is NOT causation!
Where exactly would you have us start? Complete guesswork? "Hey, maybe carrots cause alzheimers? Here's what we're going to do: I'm going to have a kid, and he's never going to eat carrots, and we'll see if he get's alzheimers."
Identifying factors that increase your risk (IE those "useless" stats) of alzheimers is an essential step to understanding how the disease is caused, which is the first step towards preventing it and treating it. All we really know at this point is that nothing seems to be responsible for it 100% of the time, not even genetics.
So there remains nothing that is the absolute cause of altzheimers. Fast food joins genetics, aluminum, and all manners of early symptoms in that category.
It's already been blindingly clear for some time that alzheimers is a complex disease requiring many different factors to produce the disease. A little like cancer, in fact. Lung cancer almost certainly existed before smoking, and non-smokers can get it. Does that mean that smoking does not cause lung cancer? Only to complete simpletons.
It's important to identify risk factors for alzheimers to be able to prevent the disease and possibly even understand the mechanisms behind the cause.
Counterpoint: Yes, we should be bailing them out.
This has been "completely unjustified point-counterpoint" theater. Tune in next week when we look at whether or not global warming is real. A preview
Point: Yes, it is.
Counterpoint: No, it's not.
As a scientist, I have to say I'm already poised with a knife to my throat in the event that that happens.
Don't know what FPS games you've been playing, but there have been some great ones or at least well fleshed out ones. Halo has a strong plot that I found interesting. The half life games as well. I'll give you that most FPSes have little plot, but most games of all genres are crap that should not be purchased or played.
Also, I have issues with saying final fantasy games have great plots. They seem to be nonsensical japanese poetry about an apocalypse revolving around androgenous bad guys with liberal translation errors and vagueness giving the impression there's more going on than there actually is.
Oh god! I think I have that [citation needed].
find it interesting that science based Phd students are able to be this creative - they are dealing with very intangible things, and correlating them to a form of communication that they are traditionally not known to be able to identify with.
Creativity is an essential part of being a scientist (in most cases). There are at least 3 places it's essential. You often have to be creative with your methods, coming up with new ways to test your hypotheses, and you usually have to be creative when coming up with hypotheses in the first place. The third need, and probably most related here, is that we do have to talk to people who have very little background in our fields. When describing these highly abstract phenomena to people, it can be helpful to describe it in other ways. You often want to put an image of what's going on in people's heads of what you're dealing with, and most of those times you don't have an animation handy.
Do researchers have too much free time, and do they waste time which is paid for using taxpayers money?"
Do the president and congress count as researchers? Oooh, burn!
If others needed a faster computer for other things, then the majority would be holding the technology back for the fewer people...
See, that's what's backwards. It's not everyone else's fault your needs are higher than theirs. You can't expect everyone else to buy faster computers they don't need just so yours will be cheaper. Same with the picture quality: you want something they don't, that's your issue to deal with, not theirs.
I agree that most people could see the difference, I certainly can. Having said that, I think that a lot of people are like me and would not be willing to pay very much for that increase in quality. It's really not that important to me. If it were free, sure, but I'm not going to spend money on it that needs to be going to rent or into savings.
About your question why I get irritated. The answer may be similar to why you would want a faster processor, but where everyone is happy with slow 300Mhz CPUs (which obviously isn't the case).
Well, if the users can't tell a difference, it would be pretty damn stupid of them to demand it. If I only needed a computer for MS word 2003, and never used it for ANYTHING else, then yeah, it would be idiotic of me to get a faster CPU than I needed.
From your post it sounds like you're irritated with people who can't tell a difference rather than irritiated that you do. That just seems backwards to me.
My 12 year old kid sister has been fed a steady diet of these "positive self-esteem" books, videos, and games... And then mom (and other parents from Generation "Precious Snowflake") wonders why she has no inclination to read, write, do her homework, clean up after herself, or even brush her teeth...
Well, duh... it's because she's being fed sanitized crap that is the electronic equivalent of valium every day!
Or, maybe it's because she is 12.
Maybe a car analogy, a tradition on /., will help here. Out of spite you want to "teach" a tailgater, and brake hard on a tight turn. The tailgater overreacts, spins off the road and into a wall, and dies. Your car has not a scratch on it. Are you responsible in any way? After all, the tailgater lost control all by himself.
We're of course talking about degrees here. That car analogy was a more direct example: the outcome was extremely clear that the tailgater was going to have an accident if you set up a physical barrier going at high speeds like that, yes you were responsible.
To go in the other direction: lets say your coworker is a mentally unstable person, you read an article about Bush doing something stupid and say "Man, the world is going to hell in a handbasket!" Your coworker hears it, decides that is the straw that breaks the camel's back, and shoots everyone in the office. You're clearly not responsible for that: you were technically the tipping point. But you had no way of knowing that would be the reaction.
In this case, Drew was being a jerk (like the case in the tailgating example). I don't know if she actually told the victim to kill herself, I did look but not very hard, so I'm going to assume tentatively that she didn't say "Megan, kill yourself." Either way, she didn't know that if she took this course of action, she was going to commit suicide: you can't say she is responsible for the suicide, only that her actions drove this person to suicide.