It's cultural progress. Despite the secularization of society, it seems that the moral fabric of our society hasn't grown weaker, but quite the opposite.
Cultural progress, yes... but perhaps not a moral issue. During Milgram's original experiments, it was found that one of the predictive factors for how far someone would go with the experiment was education or information about the particular setup (medical knowledge, educational knowledge, etc.). These results may simply show that we as a society are better-informed overall than we used to be, so we're more inclined to question authority. After all, even if we don't know now, we can always Google it when we get home.;-)
OTOH, it could just be reflective of the experimental setup, where people knew for a fact that it wasn't a real person.
Are you a Nielsen viewer (as in, are you one of the people that Nielsen Media Research surveys to see what people watch on TV)? If no, then whether you watch Heroes on the air or from piracy makes absolutly no difference to NBC.
Actually, Nielsen has set-top boxes in a small fraction of homes all the time, but then does random polling of the general population to supplement and calibrate the data they get from "Nielsen families." So *any* of us might figure into Nielsen's statistics, if we happen to get that phone call or letter.
Also, companies do market research to determine who has seen their advertisements (and what their impression was), so if you happen to have a moment to answer those questions on a streetcorner or in a shopping mall, you may show up as a viewer that way.
So... there's more ways to get "counted" as a viewer than just being signed onto the full-time Nielsen program. (Also, if you want companies to produce products you like, including entertainment, it's a good idea to respond to market research when it's convenient to do so.)
Your mixing them up some. When our kids were babies, we were told to lay them on their stomach so that they wouldn't aspirate their own vomit if they spit up during their sleep. Then suddenly they decided that doing that caused SIDS. It would be nice if they actually came up with a cause rather than just pulling theories out of their ass.
Actually, parents were told to lay kids on their stomachs because they sleep more soundly that way. The vomiting/aspiration thing sounds all doctorly, though, so they piled that on top... but mostly it was easier for mom and dad for baby to sleep more.
They don't know why some babies die of SIDS, but they know what makes it more likely. When the New Zealand study found the correlation with stomach-sleeping, many countries started "back to sleep" campaigns to cut SIDS risk. SIDS deaths dropped anywhere from 50% to 70% in the wake of such campaigns, so even without knowing the cause, they found a factor.
Of course, it makes sense: if some babies die in their sleep because they stop breathing and it doesn't wake them up, then a practice which causes them to sleep deeper would make that more likely. Duh.
It's not as clear cut as you might imagine. Parents get bombarded with all sorts of information, not all of it pratical, and not all of it consistent.
Which is why it's important to check your sources.
For example, you say "sleeping with their kid the first 3 months to help regulate their breathing", yet people like Gina Ford advocate putting your child in it's own room as soon as possible to sort out their sleep cycle.
I had to google Gina Ford to find out who she is. It appears she is a maternity nurse with a cult following. She's someone with experience, but not someone who's done clinical research.
It's true that, the sooner you put a child in their own room, isolated from other people, the sooner they will get used to that situation. That doesn't make it a more natural or healthy way to sleep; the initial assumption is that babies are better off sleeping alone, and the advice stems from that. Question the initial assumption.
Current wisdom also says you shouldn't have a baby in bed with you (for fear of accidentally smothering them), you seem to be suggesting the opposite.
"Current wisdom?" Who is that?
How many times a night do you roll off the edge of your bed? What, you mean to say you don't? It turns out that our internal sense of boundaries that keeps us in bed while we sleep also prevents us from rolling over on our children while they sleep next to us. In situations where that isn't working properly (I have a friend who does roll out of bed in her sleep, so their baby is in a co-sleeper), co-sleeping isn't safe. But most healthy people can co-sleep safely. And most children who are suffocated by overlaying are really fourth-trimester abortions. (Back in the day, the term "smothering nurse" referred to child nurses who, for an extra fee, would "accidentally" overlay your baby while caring for them... it's a very old practice.)
Look; I have no problems if mom and dad want to keep the little one in their bed. Different people, different cultures have different ideas and I'm all for that. I've never heard any credible suggestion about aural therapy to teach kids breathing techniques before - but maybe there's something to it. (and seriously; as a parent, if you've got anything scientific to back that up I'd be genuinely interested.)
Dr. James McKenna is the leading researcher on this issue. Here's an article that discusses his findings on the effects of parental proximity on infant sleep breathing. (For more info about him and his work in general, check out this page.)
Also, I don't think it's mentioned in that article, but most of the recommendations against co-sleeping as SIDS prevention stem from one big New Zealand study (the kiwis have traditionally kept the best statistics on SIDS, so a lot of info comes from their data). That study initially found a statistically significant correlation between co-sleeping and SIDS deaths. However, later re-examination of the data found that, when controlling for maternal smoking (a factor that has been linked to SIDS by several studies), the correlation between co-sleeping and SIDS disappeared. New Zealand has a fairly large Maori population, which both is more likely to smoke and is more likely to co-sleep, and that caused the cross-correlation.
So yes, unless parents have particular health issues which make it unsafe (such as alcohol or drug use, extreme obesity, or certain sleep disorders) co-sleeping is safer than crib-sleeping. Dr. McKenna has found that the beneficial effects of sleeping near Mom extend even to kids in a crib in the same room as their parents, too, so for those with problems that prevent bed-sharing, modified co-sleeping is another way to keep baby safe. The cultural notion that sleep is an intensely private activity that should only be shared with your spouse does interfere with the safety of young children (and not just with SIDS; I remember hearing a story about a two-year-old who woke up in the middle of the night, decided to climb up her dresser, and was found dead in the morning after it toppled onto her... I can't imagine that happening to my two-year-old, since he still sleeps next to us!).
Re:The children will ask themselves
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The Prodigy Puzzle
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· Score: 2, Interesting
All I'm saying is if the kids are so fucking smart they should be able to figure out how to entertain themselves.
Bitter much?
I never had any trouble entertaining myself in school. The trouble I had was stopping entertaining myself and actually doing what someone else expected of me, especially if it was way below my challenge level.
I'll never forget the day I had a sub for math in fourth grade, and when I asked to get my workbook (which was 5th grade level) to work from instead of doing the (stupid) worksheet she'd handed out, she took an attitude with me. So I tossed it right back, and told her the recent results of the IQ test they'd put me through. "Oh! Well you ought to be able to finish this in no time then!" she said, tossing the worksheet back at me.
Guess what? Tedious is tedious. If it's also difficult, then at least there's some thrill of accomplishment, but how many of you do long division for fun just to prove you can these days? I created an impressive doodle on the margin of the paper, and didn't do a single problem. Why should I? The teacher wasn't going to look for my worksheet when she got back, because I wasn't supposed to be in that class. And to this day, I still remember the total lack of respect I had for that sub, who obviously didn't think that it was important for me to actually learn anything.
No, it's not a child's job to both (a) do the tedious busywork the teacher expects them to do and simultaneously (b) come up with their own challenging and fun projects to work on. We have teachers for a reason... because raw intelligence doesn't do you any good without some education. In fact, some careful studies have found that you actually gain IQ from formal education (or lose it by missing out). To control for self-selection bias, they studied the effects of multi-year school closures in a few places, due to disease outbreaks or fear of desegregation. The difference is small, but significant.... I think it totaled to about 10 IQ points over 12 years of school. (Source: What's Going On In There, by Lise Eliot.)
For example, the brain of an average human hasn't learned to control the legs enough to walk until somewhere around 1 year old.
Well, they can control their legs just fine, and in fact until the age of two months have a reflex that causes them to step up if presented with an uneven surface under their feet. And they usually have the strength to support their body with their legs by around two months. But what they don't master until closer to a year (9-16 months is the normal range for first walking) is balance.
Sorry, just nitpicking (as I spend much of my day watching my son try to stand up, and fail).
The EULA expressly gives permission to transfer all rights and priveleges. The service is a privilege or a right. Either one.
*All* rights and privileges? So I can transfer my right to vote in March to someone else, and cite the Blizzard EULA?
It specifically says "You may permanently transfer ownership of the Game and all parts thereof, and all of your rights and obligations under the License Agreement..." and the license agreement does not cover the account. Account creation is a totally separate entity from the software itself. You don't even use the software to create that account, just to access it.
So the service may be a privilege (which actually is *not* mentioned in the EULA), but it's not covered by the licensing agreement, since it's not actually part of the software in the box.
Blizzard grants the right of transfering ownership of the account including any keys.
No, Blizzard specifically *prohibits* transfer of accounts. They grant the right to transfer license to the original software. The license does not include the account. The account is a separate entity, governed by their Terms of Service.
I'm pretty sure that the Authorization Key, in this case, is not even part of the software. It doesn't interact with the software on the CD in any way; it is only used to create an account at a website maintained by Blizzard. I doubt copyright can be applied to semi-random and apparently nonsensical strings of characters. Therefore, the Right of First Sale doesn't apply to the Authorization Key, and therefore, it is not Blizzard's responsibility to make sure it can be resold in a usable condition.
You may be right, this was late-fall 2003 and I quit playing SWG altogether a couple weeks later. I just wanted to play out my acct.
Heh... I had refrained from adding, "But the next question is, why did you even bother reinstalling SWG in the first place?";-)
I'm nearly a master tailor and halfway through creature handling. But my house, shop, and inventory rotted away from abandonment around November of 2003...
Let's pretend they pay the outrageous sum of $1 million per month for facilities, electricity and internet access.
Several years ago, when EQ had a subscriber base of about 200k users, and I think a record of 80k simultaneous connections, their monthly internet bill was about $1.5 million (according to an interview with one o' them bigwigs).
WoW hasn't released much population data, but from running CensusPlus during prime-time, I know that my server has probably around 2500 people on it at once (possibly more; I haven't done a census of Horde players yet, so I'm assuming they're less than 1/3 of the server, but that might be wrong). Granted, it's one of the most populous servers, but there are 88 servers currently available, and if they average only 1500 simultaneous connections during prime time, that's 132k users. Internet bandwidth is cheaper now since the dot-com bust, but we've also had a few years of inflation, so their internet bill could well be $1 million all alone. Besides that, they're using a coloc (anyone know what the heck ipowerweb.com is?) and probably are paying associated fees there.
Office leases in Irvine (where Blizzard is headquartered) run from $0.75-2.00 per square foot. If they have a relatively small location at only 20,000 square feet (less than half the size of your typical supermarket), then just rent is $15,000-40,000 per month. And do you have any idea how much it costs to light up, heat, and cool a space that size? Whew.
Seriously, until you've had to analyze monthly P&L statements for a business, it's really hard to fathom how much it actually costs to run a place.
That doesn't sound right to me. I used a friends CD-key to install SWG a while back after a reformat and I couldn't find my discs. I didn't have any problems.
You didn't use your friend's CD-key. You used your friend's CDs. The key is only used for account creation, not for installation. When you reinstalled, no key was needed, since you (presumably) had already created your account.
The CDs are completely interchangeable and not copy-protected or anything. There's no reason for them to be. The installed game is worthless without an account, and *that's* what they've got a lock on.
Beyond just the EULA, copyright law states that users have the right to transfer their license.
But copyright law doesn't apply to letting someone connect to your server. It only applies to the software on the CD. They allow you to transfer that software license, and allow another user to install it. There is nothing in copyright law that compels them to allow you to connect to their servers or to create an account for you.
The box says on the outside "requires subscription to play." Did the original owner sell the new owner that subscription, too? Did he have the right or ability to do so? Interesting questions, but beyond the scope of copyright.
That doesn't solve the fact that Blizzard has committed fraud already by telling people they could sell their used copies. That only solves it for people who haven't yet bought a used copy from anyone.
How has Blizzard committed fraud? That's like saying Wrigley's would be committing fraud if they let people know that they weren't prohibited (by Wrigley Corp.) from reselling their used chewing gum, provided they put it back in the original wrapper. The difference is, chewing gum has been around long enough that people know it's useless once it's been used, whereas enough people are still new to MMOGs that they don't get the single-use authentication key thing yet.
Re:Is it still only for people without a life?
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Everquest 2 Launches
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· Score: 1
People in the stress test were hitting level 40 in about a week, just FYI.
People in the stress test were competing for a chance to get into the closed beta. Probably quite a few used up vacation time or skipped classes and played every moment possible... which is doable for a week. It's hard to sustain, though.
Re:as one of the beta testers...
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Everquest 2 Launches
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Beta has to be a permanent condition, it is hugely organic process in adaptation of the code to match the players.
The first release will, and can only be, a best guess to how the game will react under such continuous, and unpredictable user behaviour.
Now, I'm the first to say that an MMOG is never finished; if it is, there's something wrong. I basically agree with your statement. BUT...
After being in the EQ Luclin beta, and playing on Test server for 2 years, and playing the last bit of beta and the first several months of release of SWG, and then playing a bit of the WoW beta, I've come to realize that you really, really, REALLY can do better than SOE at creating a game. Yes, it is possible to realize that people are going to exploit something and fix it in advance sometimes. Better yet, it is actually possible that, even when you *didn't* forsee an exploit, you can fix it RIGHT AWAY, rather than simply penalizing people randomly and capriciously for using it for months before breaking the exploited thing as to make it not useful to anyone.
Re:Is it still only for people without a life?
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Everquest 2 Launches
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Where it takes a real time year to get from level 1 to 50? (As opposed to a the month it should take)
"Should" according to...?
A year is probably too long, but a month is way too short, for my satisfaction. I've been playing WoW for a couple months, very casually, because I have a four-month-old baby to take care of;-) and I'm level 25 (almost 26!) which seems about right to me. If I get a solid block of a few hours and a good group, and I have a lot of rested exp saved up, I can get a level or so in one sitting... that feels about right. I make enough progress to feel like I got somewhere even when I can't dedicate a whole lot of time, but it's not so quick as to feel trivial when I get a new level. The pacing is really quite good as far as I'm concerned.
Now, if you have no life, and play 40 hours a week in long uninterrupted blocks, you might make 50 in a month. But I wouldn't want to be you, if that was the case.
Re:So many mmporgs, so little time
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Everquest 2 Launches
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· Score: 4, Interesting
But answer me this: Everquest 2 will, one would assume, appeal to all the EQ addicts already out there. But the EQ addicts are already playing EQ: so whats this trying to achieve? Why should I play this over, say, world of warcraft or city of heros (which ive heard is meant to be excellent)
EQ was amazing when it came out, but the code is just way too kluged together for it to ever be "modernized" sufficiently to compete against newer games. Since they had to rebuild from the ground up anyway, they decided to make it a whole new game (it's at a different time point in the EQ universe), so that hard-core addicts would have to subscribe to *both* games.
That being said, SOE doesn't seem to have learned anything whatsoever from all their long experience, so even though I have 2.5 years in Norrath under my belt, I have no interest at all in EQ2.
I'm chomping at the bit for WoW, though... when my husband started playing the beta back in April or so, it was *already* closer to release-ready than SWG was when I quit playing several months after release.
Part of the fun of online games is doing things for the first time. If you wait a year, yes you may avoid a few bugs but you will be missing out on the most interesting time of the game when everything is new and exciting.
Except that with SOE's tendency toward "supermodel" releases (they look pretty but have no content), you won't miss the opportunity to do all that new stuff until at *least* six months after launch.
You'll just not be sick of staring at the prettiness when you do finally jump in.
In other news, you can finally fly spacecraft in SWG, just 200% longer after release than originally stated...
Their stated mission isn't to provide a fun game for kids to play, it's to maximize advertising revenue.
And this is different from every other business on earth... how? Oh, yeah, some businesses didn't follow the revenue-maximizing model. But they went under.
If they provide games which are not fun, they cannot maximize advertising revenue, so they pretty much have as a mission to do both.
They have marketing studies talking about children as though they're consumers waiting to be advertised to and nothing else.
That's because the company that bought half of Neopets when the original founders were running out of bandwidth and server space *is* a market research firm, after all. They figured that they could collect some interesting data as a side thing.
Now, Neopets is the main business, and the other market research stuff is the people in the corner of the office. Funny, that.
Their "immersive advertising" technique is horrible; most children can't even tell the difference between the ads and the game.
Don't you mean to say, "Their 'immersive advertising' technique is *fantastic*; most children can't even tell the difference..." because, after all, that sounds incredibly successful.
However, the only kids who can't tell the difference between the sponsored games and the non-sponsored games are the ones who can't read the phrase "THIS IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT" across the bottom of the game's splash screen.
In a nutshell, they're a marketing company with a game attached.
They used to be, as mentioned above. But a large majority of the content on the site is sponsor-independent, and *none* of the sponsored games are in the main games listing (i.e. if you go there to play a game, and start looking through the selections, you won't find the sponsored games... you'll only find them from the ads in the little tiny box at the bottom left of your screen, which advertises *all* the games on a rotation, whether sponsored or not).
Sounds like you have a tiny bit of information about the company, which you've blown up into some kind of evil Neopian conspiracy. Did a chia kill your father or something?
It's not BS, and it's not particularly damaging. What I'm talking about is sometimes called "comfort crying". You don't abandon your baby in the room, you go in and out every few minutes, comforting them all the time until they sleep. within a few days they learn to go to sleep very fast and without fuss. For older toddler you have to explain what you are doing and why , but it works just as well.
What do you mean by "works"? They figure out that there's no use crying, no one's going to help them, so eventually they stop trying to communicate?
Babies cry because they need something. End of story. They do not cry for no reason. Sometimes parents just about go nuts trying to figure out the reason;-) but there *always* is one, though sometimes it's just loneliness. Babies who didn't cry when they were left alone got eaten by predators, and didn't pass on their genes... it's basic natural selection.
Some parents don't like their children sleeping with them because it can create a wedge between the parents and because either the parents or the children or both may not sleep very well.
Sometimes my son thrashes around in his sleep, so he goes in the crib. The crib is in our room, however, and I don't just leave him lying there crying without finding out what's wrong and addressing it.
If you become sufficiently sleep deprived that it damages your sanity or threatens your couple you've got to do something. The above works and is recommended by a large number of children specialists.
Yes, I don't doubt that a large number of "children specialists" recommend something that makes life easier for parents (after those first few heartwrenching days of listening to your child cry their eyes out for however long it takes for their system to shut down and put them to sleep). But their recommendations are not based on any sound evidence on what is better for the children in the long run. The idea that addressing your child's needs leads to dependence *is* utter BS, but ignoring those needs can actually lead to a very clingy and dependent child.
As for becoming so sleep deprived that it threatens your sanity... I'd get a lot less sleep if I was doing this "comfort crying" thing instead of changing and nursing my boy when he wakes up. He very rarely has trouble going back to sleep afterward, and when he does, it's usually because for some reason we turned the light on and got him all fully awake (like we were getting ready for bed when he woke up, and were passing him back and forth while the other was getting ready).
If you wait until the kid is out and out crying to even come to them in the first place, that's when they need a lot more settling. Keeping them in the room with you until they're sleeping through the night avoids this problem. You can do it without actually sharing the bed with them, if you don't want to.
Regarding peeing, we don't leave our children to sleep in a wet diaper. However, I do have to say that neither of our children cared much whether their diaper was wet. I think that's because today's diapers are so much better. If you use cloth diapers, you can be pretty much assured that your child will let you know when they are wet.
We do use cloth diapers, and we also potty him when he needs to pee or poop and hasn't done it in his diaper. He's getting more used to that, and prefers not to wet his diaper if he can avoid it, so he'll get pretty insistent when he needs to pee. If he wakes up and starts crying outright, often it means his bladder is very full.
In addition, I can tell you that getting to a crying child within 90 seconds from a sound sleep is not easy to do, so I'm definitely not going to run the risk of slamming into the door frame or the wall while I stumble around in a stupor trying to get to my child before that magic 90 seconds is up.
We're in a two-bedroom apartment, so I could do three laps of the whole place in 90 seconds... getting to him in that amount of time is no problem unless I'm on the john or something.;-) We also don't have a separate bedroom for him (sorry, the computers need more space than he does right now) so in the night there's never an issue with stumbling down the hall or whatever. The most we have to do is go three feet to his cradle, but he's only there if (a) we have had a drink or two, so it's not safe to co-sleep or (b) he's sleeping restlessly, so we can't sleep if he's in the bed.
I can also tell you (in case you haven't reached that point yet), that there is a time when they are toddlers that they decide they don't want to sleep anymore. You can calm them all you want, but when you leave the room, they'll stand up in their crib and start crying again.
That's not a given. For one thing, you don't need to leave the room if they're not separated from you (who knows if we'll have a house by the time he's a toddler, but still, just because he has his own room doesn't dictate that we have to be separated by walls if that's not what the situation requires).
They just don't want to go to sleep.
Sounds more like they just don't want to be alone. Which is perfectly normal... the human race wouldn't have survived very well if we hadn't had babies and toddlers that didn't want to be left by themselves to get eaten by predators. We haven't evolved past that yet.
During that time, if you don't let them learn to get to sleep on their own, you may end up with a five-year-old that can't fall asleep anywhere but in your bed with you.
Tell that to my friends with 4-year-olds that at some point decided they wanted their own beds, and have been in them ever since. They don't actually have to be taught to sleep on their own. They grow into it on their own, at their own pace, if they're allowed to.
On the other hand, if they're forced to do it before they're ready, they may develop lasting negative associations with sleeping alone, and then for the rest of their childhood they'll have times when they just do NOT want to be left alone in the dark, even though they're old enough to rationally understand there's no monsters under the bed or whatever.
Things that usually help greatly during that time are establishing bedtime rituals like story reading / telling, listening to music, singing, etc. The child becomes used to these things, and when that process starts every night, it calms them and gets them ready for bed.
True true. That helps no matter what other sleep habits your family has.
Humm I would caution against the advise of the above it has been proven that of the babies which die due to SIDS the majority of them had spent the night sleeping with their parents.
From the link you posted:
There is a proven risk in bedsharing if you or your partner smoke, have recently drunk alcohol, take drugs or are extremely tired.
The evidence which linked co-sleeping to SIDS was based on data from New Zealand, which more recently was re-evaluated and found not to show a statistically signifiant link between co-sleeping and SIDS. The correlation they had previously noted disappeared when they controlled for maternal smoking.
The article is quite right that you shouldn't share your bed with your baby if you smoke, are drunk, are extremely fatigued, or (as not mentioned in the article) are very obese. But most of us aren't any of those things most of the time.
Many babies cry themselves to sleep, that's how they learn to go to sleep on their own. If you try to avoid them crying at all costs you'll end up having a very dependent child who won't be able to go to sleep if you are not in the room patting them until they are soundly asleep. It can be a little inconvenient if you like to have a life.
Not all children are like that but it happened to us and it's very hard to undo.
Like I said, read "The Baby Book" by Dr. Sears. What you've just posted is a bunch of very damaging BS perpetuated by folks who made it up, rather than basing their "expert" opinions on any actual research.
I know many, many people who have responded to their children consistently, let them co-sleep until they wanted to stop on their own, etc. and have very, very independent kids who set their own boundaries at quite reasonable ages. On the other hand, the "Babywise" method (Frank Ezzo, who came up with a lot of the stuff you're paraphrasing) has led to cases of failure to thrive.
Responding immediately to a cry (unless it is an urgent one) is not usually a good idea because babies tend to cry a little in between sleep cycles (about every 45 minutes) until they get better at settling themselves to sleep.
Maybe yours do... our son doesn't follow this pattern at all. He very occasionally wakes up a little and cries out, then goes back to sleep. He often wakes up, stretches a lot, and then starts making little sounds to let us know he's awake... he won't start crying unless we ignore him. He sometimes wakes up and is immediately crying outright, which sometimes stops as soon as he sees one of us or we put a hand on his chest, but often is due to suddenly realizing he is hungry or needs to pee... so he doesn't stop until that need is addressed.
How long is "long enough" to be sure that attention is required? Babies who are left to cry for more than 90 seconds need lots more time to calm down after mom/whoever starts to soothe them (see The Baby Book by Dr. Sears for the citation). Hope you're not just leaving her to cry herself back to sleep:-/
Slashdot Mirror
OTOH, it could just be reflective of the experimental setup, where people knew for a fact that it wasn't a real person.
Also, companies do market research to determine who has seen their advertisements (and what their impression was), so if you happen to have a moment to answer those questions on a streetcorner or in a shopping mall, you may show up as a viewer that way.
So... there's more ways to get "counted" as a viewer than just being signed onto the full-time Nielsen program. (Also, if you want companies to produce products you like, including entertainment, it's a good idea to respond to market research when it's convenient to do so.)
Actually, parents were told to lay kids on their stomachs because they sleep more soundly that way. The vomiting/aspiration thing sounds all doctorly, though, so they piled that on top... but mostly it was easier for mom and dad for baby to sleep more.
They don't know why some babies die of SIDS, but they know what makes it more likely. When the New Zealand study found the correlation with stomach-sleeping, many countries started "back to sleep" campaigns to cut SIDS risk. SIDS deaths dropped anywhere from 50% to 70% in the wake of such campaigns, so even without knowing the cause, they found a factor.
Of course, it makes sense: if some babies die in their sleep because they stop breathing and it doesn't wake them up, then a practice which causes them to sleep deeper would make that more likely. Duh.
Which is why it's important to check your sources.
I had to google Gina Ford to find out who she is. It appears she is a maternity nurse with a cult following. She's someone with experience, but not someone who's done clinical research.
It's true that, the sooner you put a child in their own room, isolated from other people, the sooner they will get used to that situation. That doesn't make it a more natural or healthy way to sleep; the initial assumption is that babies are better off sleeping alone, and the advice stems from that. Question the initial assumption.
"Current wisdom?" Who is that?
How many times a night do you roll off the edge of your bed? What, you mean to say you don't? It turns out that our internal sense of boundaries that keeps us in bed while we sleep also prevents us from rolling over on our children while they sleep next to us. In situations where that isn't working properly (I have a friend who does roll out of bed in her sleep, so their baby is in a co-sleeper), co-sleeping isn't safe. But most healthy people can co-sleep safely. And most children who are suffocated by overlaying are really fourth-trimester abortions. (Back in the day, the term "smothering nurse" referred to child nurses who, for an extra fee, would "accidentally" overlay your baby while caring for them... it's a very old practice.)
Dr. James McKenna is the leading researcher on this issue. Here's an article that discusses his findings on the effects of parental proximity on infant sleep breathing. (For more info about him and his work in general, check out this page.)
Also, I don't think it's mentioned in that article, but most of the recommendations against co-sleeping as SIDS prevention stem from one big New Zealand study (the kiwis have traditionally kept the best statistics on SIDS, so a lot of info comes from their data). That study initially found a statistically significant correlation between co-sleeping and SIDS deaths. However, later re-examination of the data found that, when controlling for maternal smoking (a factor that has been linked to SIDS by several studies), the correlation between co-sleeping and SIDS disappeared. New Zealand has a fairly large Maori population, which both is more likely to smoke and is more likely to co-sleep, and that caused the cross-correlation.
So yes, unless parents have particular health issues which make it unsafe (such as alcohol or drug use, extreme obesity, or certain sleep disorders) co-sleeping is safer than crib-sleeping. Dr. McKenna has found that the beneficial effects of sleeping near Mom extend even to kids in a crib in the same room as their parents, too, so for those with problems that prevent bed-sharing, modified co-sleeping is another way to keep baby safe. The cultural notion that sleep is an intensely private activity that should only be shared with your spouse does interfere with the safety of young children (and not just with SIDS; I remember hearing a story about a two-year-old who woke up in the middle of the night, decided to climb up her dresser, and was found dead in the morning after it toppled onto her... I can't imagine that happening to my two-year-old, since he still sleeps next to us!).
Bitter much?
I never had any trouble entertaining myself in school. The trouble I had was stopping entertaining myself and actually doing what someone else expected of me, especially if it was way below my challenge level.
I'll never forget the day I had a sub for math in fourth grade, and when I asked to get my workbook (which was 5th grade level) to work from instead of doing the (stupid) worksheet she'd handed out, she took an attitude with me. So I tossed it right back, and told her the recent results of the IQ test they'd put me through. "Oh! Well you ought to be able to finish this in no time then!" she said, tossing the worksheet back at me.
Guess what? Tedious is tedious. If it's also difficult, then at least there's some thrill of accomplishment, but how many of you do long division for fun just to prove you can these days? I created an impressive doodle on the margin of the paper, and didn't do a single problem. Why should I? The teacher wasn't going to look for my worksheet when she got back, because I wasn't supposed to be in that class. And to this day, I still remember the total lack of respect I had for that sub, who obviously didn't think that it was important for me to actually learn anything.
No, it's not a child's job to both (a) do the tedious busywork the teacher expects them to do and simultaneously (b) come up with their own challenging and fun projects to work on. We have teachers for a reason... because raw intelligence doesn't do you any good without some education. In fact, some careful studies have found that you actually gain IQ from formal education (or lose it by missing out). To control for self-selection bias, they studied the effects of multi-year school closures in a few places, due to disease outbreaks or fear of desegregation. The difference is small, but significant.... I think it totaled to about 10 IQ points over 12 years of school. (Source: What's Going On In There , by Lise Eliot.)
For example, the brain of an average human hasn't learned to control the legs enough to walk until somewhere around 1 year old.
Well, they can control their legs just fine, and in fact until the age of two months have a reflex that causes them to step up if presented with an uneven surface under their feet. And they usually have the strength to support their body with their legs by around two months. But what they don't master until closer to a year (9-16 months is the normal range for first walking) is balance.
Sorry, just nitpicking (as I spend much of my day watching my son try to stand up, and fail).
The EULA expressly gives permission to transfer all rights and priveleges. The service is a privilege or a right. Either one.
*All* rights and privileges? So I can transfer my right to vote in March to someone else, and cite the Blizzard EULA?
It specifically says "You may permanently transfer ownership of the Game and all parts thereof, and all of your rights and obligations under the License Agreement..." and the license agreement does not cover the account. Account creation is a totally separate entity from the software itself. You don't even use the software to create that account, just to access it.
So the service may be a privilege (which actually is *not* mentioned in the EULA), but it's not covered by the licensing agreement, since it's not actually part of the software in the box.
Blizzard grants the right of transfering ownership of the account including any keys.
No, Blizzard specifically *prohibits* transfer of accounts. They grant the right to transfer license to the original software. The license does not include the account. The account is a separate entity, governed by their Terms of Service.
I'm pretty sure that the Authorization Key, in this case, is not even part of the software. It doesn't interact with the software on the CD in any way; it is only used to create an account at a website maintained by Blizzard. I doubt copyright can be applied to semi-random and apparently nonsensical strings of characters. Therefore, the Right of First Sale doesn't apply to the Authorization Key, and therefore, it is not Blizzard's responsibility to make sure it can be resold in a usable condition.
You may be right, this was late-fall 2003 and I quit playing SWG altogether a couple weeks later. I just wanted to play out my acct.
;-)
Heh... I had refrained from adding, "But the next question is, why did you even bother reinstalling SWG in the first place?"
I'm nearly a master tailor and halfway through creature handling. But my house, shop, and inventory rotted away from abandonment around November of 2003...
Let's pretend they pay the outrageous sum of $1 million per month for facilities, electricity and internet access.
Several years ago, when EQ had a subscriber base of about 200k users, and I think a record of 80k simultaneous connections, their monthly internet bill was about $1.5 million (according to an interview with one o' them bigwigs).
WoW hasn't released much population data, but from running CensusPlus during prime-time, I know that my server has probably around 2500 people on it at once (possibly more; I haven't done a census of Horde players yet, so I'm assuming they're less than 1/3 of the server, but that might be wrong). Granted, it's one of the most populous servers, but there are 88 servers currently available, and if they average only 1500 simultaneous connections during prime time, that's 132k users. Internet bandwidth is cheaper now since the dot-com bust, but we've also had a few years of inflation, so their internet bill could well be $1 million all alone. Besides that, they're using a coloc (anyone know what the heck ipowerweb.com is?) and probably are paying associated fees there.
Office leases in Irvine (where Blizzard is headquartered) run from $0.75-2.00 per square foot. If they have a relatively small location at only 20,000 square feet (less than half the size of your typical supermarket), then just rent is $15,000-40,000 per month. And do you have any idea how much it costs to light up, heat, and cool a space that size? Whew.
Seriously, until you've had to analyze monthly P&L statements for a business, it's really hard to fathom how much it actually costs to run a place.
That doesn't sound right to me. I used a friends CD-key to install SWG a while back after a reformat and I couldn't find my discs. I didn't have any problems.
You didn't use your friend's CD-key. You used your friend's CDs. The key is only used for account creation, not for installation. When you reinstalled, no key was needed, since you (presumably) had already created your account.
The CDs are completely interchangeable and not copy-protected or anything. There's no reason for them to be. The installed game is worthless without an account, and *that's* what they've got a lock on.
Beyond just the EULA, copyright law states that users have the right to transfer their license.
But copyright law doesn't apply to letting someone connect to your server. It only applies to the software on the CD. They allow you to transfer that software license, and allow another user to install it. There is nothing in copyright law that compels them to allow you to connect to their servers or to create an account for you.
The box says on the outside "requires subscription to play." Did the original owner sell the new owner that subscription, too? Did he have the right or ability to do so? Interesting questions, but beyond the scope of copyright.
That doesn't solve the fact that Blizzard has committed fraud already by telling people they could sell their used copies. That only solves it for people who haven't yet bought a used copy from anyone.
How has Blizzard committed fraud? That's like saying Wrigley's would be committing fraud if they let people know that they weren't prohibited (by Wrigley Corp.) from reselling their used chewing gum, provided they put it back in the original wrapper. The difference is, chewing gum has been around long enough that people know it's useless once it's been used, whereas enough people are still new to MMOGs that they don't get the single-use authentication key thing yet.
People in the stress test were hitting level 40 in about a week, just FYI.
People in the stress test were competing for a chance to get into the closed beta. Probably quite a few used up vacation time or skipped classes and played every moment possible... which is doable for a week. It's hard to sustain, though.
Beta has to be a permanent condition, it is hugely organic process in adaptation of the code to match the players.
The first release will, and can only be, a best guess to how the game will react under such continuous, and unpredictable user behaviour.
Now, I'm the first to say that an MMOG is never finished; if it is, there's something wrong. I basically agree with your statement. BUT...
After being in the EQ Luclin beta, and playing on Test server for 2 years, and playing the last bit of beta and the first several months of release of SWG, and then playing a bit of the WoW beta, I've come to realize that you really, really, REALLY can do better than SOE at creating a game. Yes, it is possible to realize that people are going to exploit something and fix it in advance sometimes. Better yet, it is actually possible that, even when you *didn't* forsee an exploit, you can fix it RIGHT AWAY, rather than simply penalizing people randomly and capriciously for using it for months before breaking the exploited thing as to make it not useful to anyone.
Where it takes a real time year to get from level 1 to 50? (As opposed to a the month it should take)
;-) and I'm level 25 (almost 26!) which seems about right to me. If I get a solid block of a few hours and a good group, and I have a lot of rested exp saved up, I can get a level or so in one sitting... that feels about right. I make enough progress to feel like I got somewhere even when I can't dedicate a whole lot of time, but it's not so quick as to feel trivial when I get a new level. The pacing is really quite good as far as I'm concerned.
"Should" according to...?
A year is probably too long, but a month is way too short, for my satisfaction. I've been playing WoW for a couple months, very casually, because I have a four-month-old baby to take care of
Now, if you have no life, and play 40 hours a week in long uninterrupted blocks, you might make 50 in a month. But I wouldn't want to be you, if that was the case.
But answer me this: Everquest 2 will, one would assume, appeal to all the EQ addicts already out there. But the EQ addicts are already playing EQ: so whats this trying to achieve? Why should I play this over, say, world of warcraft or city of heros (which ive heard is meant to be excellent)
EQ was amazing when it came out, but the code is just way too kluged together for it to ever be "modernized" sufficiently to compete against newer games. Since they had to rebuild from the ground up anyway, they decided to make it a whole new game (it's at a different time point in the EQ universe), so that hard-core addicts would have to subscribe to *both* games.
That being said, SOE doesn't seem to have learned anything whatsoever from all their long experience, so even though I have 2.5 years in Norrath under my belt, I have no interest at all in EQ2.
I'm chomping at the bit for WoW, though... when my husband started playing the beta back in April or so, it was *already* closer to release-ready than SWG was when I quit playing several months after release.
Part of the fun of online games is doing things for the first time. If you wait a year, yes you may avoid a few bugs but you will be missing out on the most interesting time of the game when everything is new and exciting.
Except that with SOE's tendency toward "supermodel" releases (they look pretty but have no content), you won't miss the opportunity to do all that new stuff until at *least* six months after launch.
You'll just not be sick of staring at the prettiness when you do finally jump in.
In other news, you can finally fly spacecraft in SWG, just 200% longer after release than originally stated...
And this is different from every other business on earth... how? Oh, yeah, some businesses didn't follow the revenue-maximizing model. But they went under.
If they provide games which are not fun, they cannot maximize advertising revenue, so they pretty much have as a mission to do both.
That's because the company that bought half of Neopets when the original founders were running out of bandwidth and server space *is* a market research firm, after all. They figured that they could collect some interesting data as a side thing.
Now, Neopets is the main business, and the other market research stuff is the people in the corner of the office. Funny, that.
Don't you mean to say, "Their 'immersive advertising' technique is *fantastic*; most children can't even tell the difference..." because, after all, that sounds incredibly successful.
However, the only kids who can't tell the difference between the sponsored games and the non-sponsored games are the ones who can't read the phrase "THIS IS A PAID ADVERTISEMENT" across the bottom of the game's splash screen.
They used to be, as mentioned above. But a large majority of the content on the site is sponsor-independent, and *none* of the sponsored games are in the main games listing (i.e. if you go there to play a game, and start looking through the selections, you won't find the sponsored games... you'll only find them from the ads in the little tiny box at the bottom left of your screen, which advertises *all* the games on a rotation, whether sponsored or not).
Sounds like you have a tiny bit of information about the company, which you've blown up into some kind of evil Neopian conspiracy. Did a chia kill your father or something?
It's not BS, and it's not particularly damaging. What I'm talking about is sometimes called "comfort crying". You don't abandon your baby in the room, you go in and out every few minutes, comforting them all the time until they sleep. within a few days they learn to go to sleep very fast and without fuss. For older toddler you have to explain what you are doing and why , but it works just as well.
;-) but there *always* is one, though sometimes it's just loneliness. Babies who didn't cry when they were left alone got eaten by predators, and didn't pass on their genes... it's basic natural selection.
What do you mean by "works"? They figure out that there's no use crying, no one's going to help them, so eventually they stop trying to communicate?
Babies cry because they need something. End of story. They do not cry for no reason. Sometimes parents just about go nuts trying to figure out the reason
Some parents don't like their children sleeping with them because it can create a wedge between the parents and because either the parents or the children or both may not sleep very well.
Sometimes my son thrashes around in his sleep, so he goes in the crib. The crib is in our room, however, and I don't just leave him lying there crying without finding out what's wrong and addressing it.
If you become sufficiently sleep deprived that it damages your sanity or threatens your couple you've got to do something. The above works and is recommended by a large number of children specialists.
Yes, I don't doubt that a large number of "children specialists" recommend something that makes life easier for parents (after those first few heartwrenching days of listening to your child cry their eyes out for however long it takes for their system to shut down and put them to sleep). But their recommendations are not based on any sound evidence on what is better for the children in the long run. The idea that addressing your child's needs leads to dependence *is* utter BS, but ignoring those needs can actually lead to a very clingy and dependent child.
As for becoming so sleep deprived that it threatens your sanity... I'd get a lot less sleep if I was doing this "comfort crying" thing instead of changing and nursing my boy when he wakes up. He very rarely has trouble going back to sleep afterward, and when he does, it's usually because for some reason we turned the light on and got him all fully awake (like we were getting ready for bed when he woke up, and were passing him back and forth while the other was getting ready).
If you wait until the kid is out and out crying to even come to them in the first place, that's when they need a lot more settling. Keeping them in the room with you until they're sleeping through the night avoids this problem. You can do it without actually sharing the bed with them, if you don't want to.
Regarding peeing, we don't leave our children to sleep in a wet diaper. However, I do have to say that neither of our children cared much whether their diaper was wet. I think that's because today's diapers are so much better. If you use cloth diapers, you can be pretty much assured that your child will let you know when they are wet.
;-) We also don't have a separate bedroom for him (sorry, the computers need more space than he does right now) so in the night there's never an issue with stumbling down the hall or whatever. The most we have to do is go three feet to his cradle, but he's only there if (a) we have had a drink or two, so it's not safe to co-sleep or (b) he's sleeping restlessly, so we can't sleep if he's in the bed.
We do use cloth diapers, and we also potty him when he needs to pee or poop and hasn't done it in his diaper. He's getting more used to that, and prefers not to wet his diaper if he can avoid it, so he'll get pretty insistent when he needs to pee. If he wakes up and starts crying outright, often it means his bladder is very full.
In addition, I can tell you that getting to a crying child within 90 seconds from a sound sleep is not easy to do, so I'm definitely not going to run the risk of slamming into the door frame or the wall while I stumble around in a stupor trying to get to my child before that magic 90 seconds is up.
We're in a two-bedroom apartment, so I could do three laps of the whole place in 90 seconds... getting to him in that amount of time is no problem unless I'm on the john or something.
I can also tell you (in case you haven't reached that point yet), that there is a time when they are toddlers that they decide they don't want to sleep anymore. You can calm them all you want, but when you leave the room, they'll stand up in their crib and start crying again.
That's not a given. For one thing, you don't need to leave the room if they're not separated from you (who knows if we'll have a house by the time he's a toddler, but still, just because he has his own room doesn't dictate that we have to be separated by walls if that's not what the situation requires).
They just don't want to go to sleep.
Sounds more like they just don't want to be alone. Which is perfectly normal... the human race wouldn't have survived very well if we hadn't had babies and toddlers that didn't want to be left by themselves to get eaten by predators. We haven't evolved past that yet.
During that time, if you don't let them learn to get to sleep on their own, you may end up with a five-year-old that can't fall asleep anywhere but in your bed with you.
Tell that to my friends with 4-year-olds that at some point decided they wanted their own beds, and have been in them ever since. They don't actually have to be taught to sleep on their own. They grow into it on their own, at their own pace, if they're allowed to.
On the other hand, if they're forced to do it before they're ready, they may develop lasting negative associations with sleeping alone, and then for the rest of their childhood they'll have times when they just do NOT want to be left alone in the dark, even though they're old enough to rationally understand there's no monsters under the bed or whatever.
Things that usually help greatly during that time are establishing bedtime rituals like story reading / telling, listening to music, singing, etc. The child becomes used to these things, and when that process starts every night, it calms them and gets them ready for bed.
True true. That helps no matter what other sleep habits your family has.
From the link you posted:
The evidence which linked co-sleeping to SIDS was based on data from New Zealand, which more recently was re-evaluated and found not to show a statistically signifiant link between co-sleeping and SIDS. The correlation they had previously noted disappeared when they controlled for maternal smoking.
The article is quite right that you shouldn't share your bed with your baby if you smoke, are drunk, are extremely fatigued, or (as not mentioned in the article) are very obese. But most of us aren't any of those things most of the time.
Many babies cry themselves to sleep, that's how they learn to go to sleep on their own. If you try to avoid them crying at all costs you'll end up having a very dependent child who won't be able to go to sleep if you are not in the room patting them until they are soundly asleep. It can be a little inconvenient if you like to have a life.
Not all children are like that but it happened to us and it's very hard to undo.
Like I said, read "The Baby Book" by Dr. Sears. What you've just posted is a bunch of very damaging BS perpetuated by folks who made it up, rather than basing their "expert" opinions on any actual research.
I know many, many people who have responded to their children consistently, let them co-sleep until they wanted to stop on their own, etc. and have very, very independent kids who set their own boundaries at quite reasonable ages. On the other hand, the "Babywise" method (Frank Ezzo, who came up with a lot of the stuff you're paraphrasing) has led to cases of failure to thrive.
Responding immediately to a cry (unless it is an urgent one) is not usually a good idea because babies tend to cry a little in between sleep cycles (about every 45 minutes) until they get better at settling themselves to sleep.
:-/
Maybe yours do... our son doesn't follow this pattern at all. He very occasionally wakes up a little and cries out, then goes back to sleep. He often wakes up, stretches a lot, and then starts making little sounds to let us know he's awake... he won't start crying unless we ignore him. He sometimes wakes up and is immediately crying outright, which sometimes stops as soon as he sees one of us or we put a hand on his chest, but often is due to suddenly realizing he is hungry or needs to pee... so he doesn't stop until that need is addressed.
How long is "long enough" to be sure that attention is required? Babies who are left to cry for more than 90 seconds need lots more time to calm down after mom/whoever starts to soothe them (see The Baby Book by Dr. Sears for the citation). Hope you're not just leaving her to cry herself back to sleep