I haven't heard anything compelling about ME what would make me want to install it...
Well, believe me I'm in no rush to switch over, but eventually one or more of the software packages I need to use for work will come out with a new version. It will eventually become standard and if I want to continue a relationship with my clients I'll have to bite the bullet. May not happen with WinME, but perhaps the next iteration...
Ok, does this mean I will be unable to continue to use my legacy dos programs? I have a Random House Unabridged CD-Rom Dictionary that I have been using for years now(Dos 5/Win3.1). Will I have to trash it or will WinME still run it if I run the setup.exe file from the Run window (assuming WinME still has that).
All that aside, though, one conclusion is inescapable: If
you look this list over, and measure each system's number
of vulnerabilities against the number of its customers,
Linux is arguably the worst operating-system product in
history, and Microsoft's the best. As Linux zealots are
beginning to find out, it's a lot easier to masquerade as a
better product than it is to go out and be one. [bold and italics added]
For some reason, I'm having trouble believing he actually posted this. My eyes see it, but still I don't believe...
I agree with jmccay and actually did write a letter 2 days ago. Yesterday I was pleasantly surprised with a response. Who knows if it will ever come to anything, but at least someone read it and took the time to respond to me in person, even if it is a form letter. IMHO the way to get attention is to question the journalistic integrity of not only the writer, but the organization that sponsors the writer. This usually gets someone's attention because there are usually people at news organizations that take their job seriouly. I for one felt insulted by Moody's arrogant disregard for the facts and not his opinion that MS is a better product. Not only does this reflect poorly on Moody, but on ABCNews.com as well.
Response from and letter to ABCNews.com follows:
Hi Michael,
Thank you for contacting us.
We appreciate your comments and your feedback to improve the quality of
our services. We will forward your e-mail to our Technology Section
Producer for review.
Regards,
Alice
ABCNews.com
http://abcnews.go.com/
Original message follows:
-------------------------
attn: Editorial Review Board, abcnews.com
I recently read Fred Moody's article ("Linux Sux Redux") at your
abcnews.com site and was displeased to see that Mr. Moody deliberately
misrepresented the numbers he gathered at www.bugtraq.com in order to
show that Linux is worse than the competing Windows product. I take no
issue with the fact that Mr. Moody believes windows to be a better
product than Linux, but for him to blatantly twist the facts (in order
to come up with his number of 122 bugs, he had to count the Red Hat
distribution bugs TWO times) in order to make his point insults me as a
reader and should raise serious questions about his journalistic
integrity. abcnews.com's toleration of such a violation of ethics
brings into question the integrity and bias of the whole news site. As
such, unless a public clarification of his data is issued, I will no
longer read any content on your site.
I did write ABCNews and this is the response I got:
Hi Michael,
Thank you for contacting us.
We appreciate your comments and your feedback to improve the quality of our services. We will forward your e-mail to our Technology Section Producer for review.
Regards,
Alice ABCNews.com http://abcnews.go.com/
Original message follows: ------------------------- attn: Editorial Review Board, abcnews.com
I recently read Fred Moody's article ("Linux Sux Redux") at your abcnews.com site and was displeased to see that Mr. Moody deliberately misrepresented the numbers he gathered at www.bugtraq.com in order to show that Linux is worse than the competing Windows product. I take no issue with the fact that Mr. Moody believes windows to be a better product than Linux, but for him to blatantly twist the facts (in order to come up with his number of 122 bugs, he had to count the Red Hat distribution bugs TWO times) in order to make his point insults me as a reader and should raise serious questions about his journalistic integrity. abcnews.com's toleration of such a violation of ethics brings into question the integrity and bias of the whole news site. As such, unless a public clarification of his data is issued, I will no longer read any content on your site.
Hey, you know what??? You are half way there...now all you have to do is not post as an anonymous coward. If you are willing to take responsibility for your actions (as you say you are) you need to come out of hiding. Perhaps provide a little contact info. in your sig file.
But, perhaps your admission that you are "lacking moral fortitude" is responsible for the disparity between action and statement.
Homophobia (like racism, sexism, and most "-isms") is the products of ignorance. Slashdot has done a standup job today of outing the collective ignorance of some of its readers. Perhaps the most laughable argument I saw was the often repeated, "it's against nature." Bah! Perhaps it's against "nature" as homophobics wish to see nature...but if they took their blinders off they would be shocked at how many creatures participate in same gender sexual activity. Many of these creatures are higher level primates.
Perhaps more frightening to me is the tolerance the slashdot community has shown for the insipid comments of the homophobic posters. One would think that more people with moderator points would be incensed enough to moderate these things down. Sure they have the right to post their trash, but if as a community we fail to moderate them down, aren't we tacitly condoning their views?
Thanks for clarifying that. I think I am more firmly able to grasp your point now. But again, I have to stick to my guns and suggest that (for me, at least) adding more icons on the monitor is not really a bad solution. I don't have a problem with clicking on an icon in order to log on to the internet. Clicking on an icon does the job well, and is perhaps more efficient than having to run a voice recognition program in the background (especially one that is able to isolate my command from background noise...not to mention one that is able to differentiate between a command I give it and one that is similar to a phrase in the background). I think that there certainly is a use for voice recognition...but I'm not sure that for me it would be a great advance in the situation you describe. Obviously part of this is related to the type of situation I work best in. For me, any time I am forced to speak something I interrupt my train of thought. Part of this might be the fact that in the work I do (writing), I create and manipulate symbols on the computer screen. These symbols are generated in the language section of the brain, so it would be hard to have to have two conversations going simultaneously (a content level conversation and a command level conversation). Interestingly I once thought that voice recognition would increase my ability greatly, but dictating content has proven itself to be inferior to typing it. One way to use voice recognition that might be useful to me might be to use a combination where when I want to underline a portion of text, I use the mouse to highlight it and then say "underline." Sounds interesting and it would reduce the effort (minimal) that I have to devote to pointing at various sections of the screen.
I agree with your suggestion that once we start speaking with our computers it will influence how our language naturally evolves and drifts, assuming that the computers don't have the ability to understand natural/conventional discourse. When we are forced to speak computer-eze in order to interact with them, we will start seeing a greater drift of the computer-eze into mainstream discourse conventions.
Basically you are advocating a new layer of discourse with our computer. Right now we have 2 layers. Keyboard interface and screen interface. Sometimes a keyboard provides a very quick method for doing what you want to do. One keystroke does the job. But obviously, with the limitation of how many keys we can have, vs. how many tasks we might be called upon to do/the number of ideas we want to convey, we have to start using combinations of keystrokes (ctrl-alt-del to force quit something, for instance...or the assembly of letters into words to convey thought). How we interact with a computer is largely based on this model. I can hit a "print" button on my keyboard (back in the days of DOS anyways) or hit the "print" button in MS Word and have a document print. Seems pretty efficient. But to underline a recurring sequence of words in a document (the title of a novel maybe) I have to build a combination of keystrokes and/or mouse movements. To me this seems to be similar to how we build words out of the various letters. This might be seen as a hindrance, but as you pointed out earlier, it is actually a convenience in that we don't need a character/icon for every conceivable action we might want to engage.
I think it is because of this you look towards voice recognition. You suggest that it will move us away from the "alias" of the symbol. Yet, I think that voice recognition will require the same level of building a sequence of symbols (aural/verbal ones in this case) to initiate the desired action. If I have 5 windows open, and I want to close one of them, I select the one I want to close with my mouse and then click the "X" in the upper right hand corner. Assuming that I don't get any dummy windows ("are you sure you want to do this?") I have to do 2 mouse-clicks. Now, with voice recognition, I will have to do the equivalent because there is not a single word that signifies "close word." Because of this, I have to first) select the application I want to act on and second) describe the action I want performed. Things get a little more hairy if all 5 of my windows are Word documents. Now I have to be more descriptive in the voice recognition model whereas the same two mouse-clicks do the job in the other model. Also, it may require even more extensive building in order for the voice recognition software to understand that when I say "close Word" I'm asking it to actually type that into the document and not asking it to perform a command.
I am not suggesting that because of this voice recognition won't have a place in computer technology. I'm just interested in the design implementation of it. Many current voice recognition package contains blurbs about how much more efficient it will make the user. But I think that in some situations that may only work for people who aren't already proficient with working in the current paradigm. For someone who can't type, it may be a godsend for dictating an interoffice memo. But still, because we don't have single words for every conceivable action we will have to build a sequence of words just like we have to build a sequence of letters/words/mouse-clicks currently.
Cavemen couldn't talk, so they would draw pictures on cave walls and point.
How on earth do you reach the conclusion that a culture that paints on the walls of caves is nonverbal?
I'm not sure I can agree with the assertion that having more and different keys is going to lead to the downfall of civilization. I don't think a couple extra keys on a keyboard could be held accountable for that. Face it, it's not a bad thing. The difference between having a button on the keyboard that loads AOL and an icon on your screen that loads AOL is nil. They both allow a user to open an application by clicking on it. This kind of rant reminds me of my grandfather, who always seemed to have it better in the good ol' days: "sure we had to walk to school, barefoot, through 12 feet of snow in the winter...but we liked it. Now a days you kids have it too easy with your modern school buses and your automobiles."
What's the difference between pressing a key to take you to AOL (or your choice) and having it come up as a homepage? Or, what's the difference between typing in a URL and pointing and clicking it from your bookmarks? Your assertion that it would be useful to have keys for bold, italics, underline etc., doesn't seem to be different in kind from having a key for an internet application.
As far as people limiting their vocabularies to what they can "immediately see." Sounds interesting on first reading, but is it fair to suggest this is what happens? Where does discourse revolving around emotions fit into this model? How about two cavemen agreeing to meet at the hunting grounds the next day? Even such a simple conversation is not limited directly to what they see around them. It involves recognition of man's relation to both spatial and temporal elements.
Perhaps it is more a reflection of the communities you associate with that leads you to see this in people (or conversely, perhaps it's a reflection of the people I associate with that I don't see this). As a rule I think people use language to represent a spectrum of experience far greater than what they simply see around them. Consider the difference between your hypothetical troglodyte pointing at a deer and saying "food" and a level of discourse that is limited simply what people see around them. The recognition of deer as food represents a level of symbolic manipulation that we often overlook: the furry animal is not merely a creature, but a potential dinner. Certainly the discourse is related to what he sees around him, but it is not limited to that, as it refers to internal stimuli (hunger, conceptual recognition that the object can be manipulated) and external stimuli (deer as object). Even if your caveman just points to the deer and says "deer," we still have a rather complex manipulation of symbols going on (on the verbal-language level).
It's a mistake to assume that oral cultures and/or oral people are stupid/suffering because they don't have an extensive (or any) written discourse. The same holds true for iconic discourse. "Do you have any idea how many pictures it would take to have a decent conversation now days?" No. But efficiency is a different issue. If you want to talk about efficiency, do you have any ideas how many words it would take for Michelangelo to describe the images portrayed on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel? I don't think the issue is so much about one method of communication being inherently better than another one, so much as it is a question of difference. It is easy to broadly conflate the issues of quality and difference. History is replete with examples of this as Western cultures came into contact with other cultures.
So, if you don't want a keyboard that will take you to the web page of your choice at the click of a button, fine. But don't assume that your decision not to use that option makes you inherently better than someone who does want/use it.
This type of argument kind of cuts to my quick. I'm not convinced that Quake is the reason these kids turn out to be violent. Another likely explanation might be that kids tend to play more Quake (or whatever the shoot-em-up flavor of the month is). Can these "researches" rule out the possibility that people with a proclivity to violence naturally seek out violent games? I haven't read any reasearch that is able to prove which comes first, the psycho killer or the game. Personally, I would rather have the neighborhood psycho play Quake than start torturing the neighborhood cats.
Also, does anyone else see an alarming trend in America to seek out scapegoats? It seems to me like we are engaging in one crusade after another that seeks to lay blame for people's actions on the objects that they use to act. ..blame the guns for murder and ignore the fact that the gun doesn't get up and shoot someone on its own, blame sport-utility vehicles for vehicle fatalities instead of the drivers, blame condoms for letting people have sex. I don't know, as I see it, at some point we all make the decision to behave either more or less responsibly. If someone goes off and shoots up a school full of kiddies, they made the choice to behave that way. The game certainly didn't make them do it.
On another note, I find the argument that these games increse the accuracy of these psychokids to be rather spurious. Anyone (I'm waiting to get flamed for this one)who has actually fired a pistol AND played a game that simulates the firing of a pistol knows that the computer just isn't a substitute and won't improve your accuracy. There is a big difference between holding a rather heavy firearm at (more or less) arm's length and hitting a target AND cradeling a mouse in your hand (or scrolling a trackball, pressing arrow keys, etc) to aim and fire a simulated, weightless, recoilless firearm. I just don't buy the fact that Quake makes for more accurate shooting. I don't shoot anymore, but I know that Castle Wolfenstien (sp?) didn't improve my acuuracy one bit.
But alas, we live in a society that likes easy answers and lets face it, its relatively easy to point our fingers at a computer game and say "there lies the cause of our (your) ills!" But once we take the video games away, we'll be pointing our fingers at something else, violent books perhaps. Eventually we will run out of objects to point at, and we'll see that everyone is left pointing at each other.
I'm glad the the journalist didn't fall for this guy's book because the esteemed Lt.Col. seems to have substituted military credentials for rational thought. Perhaps instead of writing/reading a reactionary book (a book that appears to shamelessly seek to profit off of recent school tragedies)we should all just sit back and invest a little thought in the matter.
Just my.02 cents
Synesthesia
--not sayin' I have all the answers, but I don't trust the ones I've been gettin'--
Might it be possible that in response to this agenda, Austrailians become more security conscious, and thus make it more difficult (impossible??? ha!) for the gov (or anyone else for that matter) to hack their computers? Well, even if the general public doesn't do squat, it seems to me that those who are using computers to commit serious crimes just got a rather public and loud warning to start instituting security measures.
Of course, in this scenario, the gov't responds by instituting even more intrusive laws that attempt to guarantee their access to "private" data, which causes the criminals to increase their security...ad nausium. Unfortunately the average Joe has his rights trampelled on in the process. Any way you cut it, it's a damn scary business.
Foster's, it's Australian for Beer. Intrusive, it's Australian for Government.
Queen Isabella to Chris Columbus: "You want money for WHAT????"
Lewis to Clark: "Man, why do you want to go walking around there??? Nothing but trees and Indians I tell ye!"
I don't know. Maybe I'm in the minority because I see value in exploring precisely because we don't know exactly what we will find. I tend to think that civilizations stagnate when they practice isolationism and don't explore the frontier...
Well, 15 years late, we've finally come to _1984_. While not the first news that's been broken about ECHELON, it's amazing how few people actually know about this program. What's even scarier (to me) is the reaction I get from my students when I tell them what we know of ECHELON so far. 80 percent of them don't really care, and the remaining 20 percent care but don't get upset. I'm just a cranky paranoid prof. in their eyes, and admittedly, I do tend to get cranky when I see my constitutional rights infringed upon. But is it paranoia when there is proof that people are listening to my conversations??? This is the type of government intrustion that the 6th ammendment is supposed to protect us against. (If anyone is unfamiliar with THAT, take a look at: http://www.constitution.org/billofr_.htm )
If anyone else gets stark-raving-fist-pounding-clothes-ripping mad about this type of stuff (or just a little miffed), please take a gander at http://www.aclu.org/action/echelon106.html . There's some info there on ECHELON and an opportunity to fax your congress members and senators about the NSA and their ECHELON program. I wonder what would happen if the slashdot effect went political? Boggles the mind...
Slashdot Mirror
Looks like someone woke up and started trolling from the wrong side of bed afternoon...
Well, believe me I'm in no rush to switch over, but eventually one or more of the software packages I need to use for work will come out with a new version. It will eventually become standard and if I want to continue a relationship with my clients I'll have to bite the bullet. May not happen with WinME, but perhaps the next iteration...
Thanks for everyone's informed response.
Synesthesia
Synesthesia
All that aside, though, one conclusion is inescapable: If you look this list over, and measure each system's number of vulnerabilities against the number of its customers, Linux is arguably the worst operating-system product in history, and Microsoft's the best. As Linux zealots are beginning to find out, it's a lot easier to masquerade as a better product than it is to go out and be one. [bold and italics added]
For some reason, I'm having trouble believing he actually posted this. My eyes see it, but still I don't believe...
comments@abcnews.go.com worked for me. I got a response in just over 24 hours. Cheers!
Response from and letter to ABCNews.com follows:
Hi Michael,
Thank you for contacting us.
We appreciate your comments and your feedback to improve the quality of our services. We will forward your e-mail to our Technology Section Producer for review.
Regards,
Alice
ABCNews.com
http://abcnews.go.com/
Original message follows:
-------------------------
attn: Editorial Review Board, abcnews.com
I recently read Fred Moody's article ("Linux Sux Redux") at your abcnews.com site and was displeased to see that Mr. Moody deliberately misrepresented the numbers he gathered at www.bugtraq.com in order to show that Linux is worse than the competing Windows product. I take no issue with the fact that Mr. Moody believes windows to be a better product than Linux, but for him to blatantly twist the facts (in order to come up with his number of 122 bugs, he had to count the Red Hat distribution bugs TWO times) in order to make his point insults me as a reader and should raise serious questions about his journalistic integrity. abcnews.com's toleration of such a violation of ethics brings into question the integrity and bias of the whole news site. As such, unless a public clarification of his data is issued, I will no longer read any content on your site.
Sincerely,
Michael
Hi Michael,
Thank you for contacting us.
We appreciate your comments and your feedback to improve the quality of our services. We will forward your e-mail to our Technology Section Producer for review.
Regards,
Alice
ABCNews.com
http://abcnews.go.com/
Original message follows:
-------------------------
attn: Editorial Review Board, abcnews.com
I recently read Fred Moody's article ("Linux Sux Redux") at your abcnews.com site and was displeased to see that Mr. Moody deliberately misrepresented the numbers he gathered at www.bugtraq.com in order to show that Linux is worse than the competing Windows product. I take no issue with the fact that Mr. Moody believes windows to be a better product than Linux, but for him to blatantly twist the facts (in order to come up with his number of 122 bugs, he had to count the Red Hat distribution bugs TWO times) in order to make his point insults me as a reader and should raise serious questions about his journalistic integrity. abcnews.com's toleration of such a violation of ethics brings into question the integrity and bias of the whole news site. As such, unless a public clarification of his data is issued, I will no longer read any content on your site.
Sincerely,
Michael
But, perhaps your admission that you are "lacking moral fortitude" is responsible for the disparity between action and statement.
Synesthesia
Perhaps more frightening to me is the tolerance the slashdot community has shown for the insipid comments of the homophobic posters. One would think that more people with moderator points would be incensed enough to moderate these things down. Sure they have the right to post their trash, but if as a community we fail to moderate them down, aren't we tacitly condoning their views?
Synesthesia
I agree with your suggestion that once we start speaking with our computers it will influence how our language naturally evolves and drifts, assuming that the computers don't have the ability to understand natural/conventional discourse. When we are forced to speak computer-eze in order to interact with them, we will start seeing a greater drift of the computer-eze into mainstream discourse conventions.
Basically you are advocating a new layer of discourse with our computer. Right now we have 2 layers. Keyboard interface and screen interface. Sometimes a keyboard provides a very quick method for doing what you want to do. One keystroke does the job. But obviously, with the limitation of how many keys we can have, vs. how many tasks we might be called upon to do/the number of ideas we want to convey, we have to start using combinations of keystrokes (ctrl-alt-del to force quit something, for instance...or the assembly of letters into words to convey thought). How we interact with a computer is largely based on this model. I can hit a "print" button on my keyboard (back in the days of DOS anyways) or hit the "print" button in MS Word and have a document print. Seems pretty efficient. But to underline a recurring sequence of words in a document (the title of a novel maybe) I have to build a combination of keystrokes and/or mouse movements. To me this seems to be similar to how we build words out of the various letters. This might be seen as a hindrance, but as you pointed out earlier, it is actually a convenience in that we don't need a character/icon for every conceivable action we might want to engage.
I think it is because of this you look towards voice recognition. You suggest that it will move us away from the "alias" of the symbol. Yet, I think that voice recognition will require the same level of building a sequence of symbols (aural/verbal ones in this case) to initiate the desired action. If I have 5 windows open, and I want to close one of them, I select the one I want to close with my mouse and then click the "X" in the upper right hand corner. Assuming that I don't get any dummy windows ("are you sure you want to do this?") I have to do 2 mouse-clicks. Now, with voice recognition, I will have to do the equivalent because there is not a single word that signifies "close word." Because of this, I have to first) select the application I want to act on and second) describe the action I want performed. Things get a little more hairy if all 5 of my windows are Word documents. Now I have to be more descriptive in the voice recognition model whereas the same two mouse-clicks do the job in the other model. Also, it may require even more extensive building in order for the voice recognition software to understand that when I say "close Word" I'm asking it to actually type that into the document and not asking it to perform a command.
I am not suggesting that because of this voice recognition won't have a place in computer technology. I'm just interested in the design implementation of it. Many current voice recognition package contains blurbs about how much more efficient it will make the user. But I think that in some situations that may only work for people who aren't already proficient with working in the current paradigm. For someone who can't type, it may be a godsend for dictating an interoffice memo. But still, because we don't have single words for every conceivable action we will have to build a sequence of words just like we have to build a sequence of letters/words/mouse-clicks currently.
synesthesia
"Open the pod bay doors please, Hal."
How on earth do you reach the conclusion that a culture that paints on the walls of caves is nonverbal?
I'm not sure I can agree with the assertion that having more and different keys is going to lead to the downfall of civilization. I don't think a couple extra keys on a keyboard could be held accountable for that. Face it, it's not a bad thing. The difference between having a button on the keyboard that loads AOL and an icon on your screen that loads AOL is nil. They both allow a user to open an application by clicking on it. This kind of rant reminds me of my grandfather, who always seemed to have it better in the good ol' days: "sure we had to walk to school, barefoot, through 12 feet of snow in the winter...but we liked it. Now a days you kids have it too easy with your modern school buses and your automobiles."
What's the difference between pressing a key to take you to AOL (or your choice) and having it come up as a homepage? Or, what's the difference between typing in a URL and pointing and clicking it from your bookmarks? Your assertion that it would be useful to have keys for bold, italics, underline etc., doesn't seem to be different in kind from having a key for an internet application.
As far as people limiting their vocabularies to what they can "immediately see." Sounds interesting on first reading, but is it fair to suggest this is what happens? Where does discourse revolving around emotions fit into this model? How about two cavemen agreeing to meet at the hunting grounds the next day? Even such a simple conversation is not limited directly to what they see around them. It involves recognition of man's relation to both spatial and temporal elements.
Perhaps it is more a reflection of the communities you associate with that leads you to see this in people (or conversely, perhaps it's a reflection of the people I associate with that I don't see this). As a rule I think people use language to represent a spectrum of experience far greater than what they simply see around them. Consider the difference between your hypothetical troglodyte pointing at a deer and saying "food" and a level of discourse that is limited simply what people see around them. The recognition of deer as food represents a level of symbolic manipulation that we often overlook: the furry animal is not merely a creature, but a potential dinner. Certainly the discourse is related to what he sees around him, but it is not limited to that, as it refers to internal stimuli (hunger, conceptual recognition that the object can be manipulated) and external stimuli (deer as object). Even if your caveman just points to the deer and says "deer," we still have a rather complex manipulation of symbols going on (on the verbal-language level).
It's a mistake to assume that oral cultures and/or oral people are stupid/suffering because they don't have an extensive (or any) written discourse. The same holds true for iconic discourse. "Do you have any idea how many pictures it would take to have a decent conversation now days?" No. But efficiency is a different issue. If you want to talk about efficiency, do you have any ideas how many words it would take for Michelangelo to describe the images portrayed on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel? I don't think the issue is so much about one method of communication being inherently better than another one, so much as it is a question of difference. It is easy to broadly conflate the issues of quality and difference. History is replete with examples of this as Western cultures came into contact with other cultures.
So, if you don't want a keyboard that will take you to the web page of your choice at the click of a button, fine. But don't assume that your decision not to use that option makes you inherently better than someone who does want/use it.
Thanks, AC, for the food for thought!
synesthesia
Also, does anyone else see an alarming trend in America to seek out scapegoats? It seems to me like we are engaging in one crusade after another that seeks to lay blame for people's actions on the objects that they use to act. . .blame the guns for murder and ignore the fact that the gun doesn't get up and shoot someone on its own, blame sport-utility vehicles for vehicle fatalities instead of the drivers, blame condoms for letting people have sex. I don't know, as I see it, at some point we all make the decision to behave either more or less responsibly. If someone goes off and shoots up a school full of kiddies, they made the choice to behave that way. The game certainly didn't make them do it.
On another note, I find the argument that these games increse the accuracy of these psychokids to be rather spurious. Anyone (I'm waiting to get flamed for this one)who has actually fired a pistol AND played a game that simulates the firing of a pistol knows that the computer just isn't a substitute and won't improve your accuracy. There is a big difference between holding a rather heavy firearm at (more or less) arm's length and hitting a target AND cradeling a mouse in your hand (or scrolling a trackball, pressing arrow keys, etc) to aim and fire a simulated, weightless, recoilless firearm. I just don't buy the fact that Quake makes for more accurate shooting. I don't shoot anymore, but I know that Castle Wolfenstien (sp?) didn't improve my acuuracy one bit.
But alas, we live in a society that likes easy answers and lets face it, its relatively easy to point our fingers at a computer game and say "there lies the cause of our (your) ills!" But once we take the video games away, we'll be pointing our fingers at something else, violent books perhaps. Eventually we will run out of objects to point at, and we'll see that everyone is left pointing at each other.
I'm glad the the journalist didn't fall for this guy's book because the esteemed Lt.Col. seems to have substituted military credentials for rational thought. Perhaps instead of writing/reading a reactionary book (a book that appears to shamelessly seek to profit off of recent school tragedies)we should all just sit back and invest a little thought in the matter.
Just my .02 cents
Synesthesia
--not sayin' I have all the answers, but I don't trust the ones I've been gettin'--
Of course, in this scenario, the gov't responds by instituting even more intrusive laws that attempt to guarantee their access to "private" data, which causes the criminals to increase their security...ad nausium. Unfortunately the average Joe has his rights trampelled on in the process. Any way you cut it, it's a damn scary business.
Foster's, it's Australian for Beer.
Intrusive, it's Australian for Government.
Lewis to Clark: "Man, why do you want to go walking around there??? Nothing but trees and Indians I tell ye!"
I don't know. Maybe I'm in the minority because I see value in exploring precisely because we don't know exactly what we will find. I tend to think that civilizations stagnate when they practice isolationism and don't explore the frontier...
Manifest Destiny...Manifest Destiny...Manifest Destiny.
If anyone else gets stark-raving-fist-pounding-clothes-ripping mad about this type of stuff (or just a little miffed), please take a gander at http://www.aclu.org/action/echelon106.html . There's some info there on ECHELON and an opportunity to fax your congress members and senators about the NSA and their ECHELON program. I wonder what would happen if the slashdot effect went political? Boggles the mind...