Ok, then I withdraw my original objection. The second part (avoiding it), is a separate point we can debate, but if you think it's not appropriate to intentionally target innocent third parties to achieve your objectives, then we don't disagree.
Why would I say "Sorry" to anyone?
I didn't take part in the DDoS in any way. Last time I checked I have no obligation to appologise to people I've never harmed.
Ugh. Let's cut through the BS. Do you think they should regret collateral damage or do you think they should embrace and pursue it? That's all this is about. If the former, we are not in disagreement and I misunderstood you earlier. If the latter, then *that's* where we disagree.
As for the meaning of Legitimate protest?It's pretty much an open debate.
Of course protesters aim to disrupt things.
That's a big aspect of effective protests.
Only a couply of years back truck drivers protested raised fuel taxes here by rolling round and around a few small sections of busy road to disrupt traffic and slow everything down with signs all over their trucks.
Yet it was a legit protest.
They protested high fuel by driving their vehicles around for no other purpose than to protest? And they inconvenienced other drivers. And for this to be analogous, they must also have been intentionally inconveniencing those drivers as a way of blackmailing them into the cause, which it doesn't sound like they were doing. Also, if you were just looking for an example of a protest that you would say targeted the incidental bystanders, look no further than the topic of this thread. Even if the trucking one *were* a good example, it just takes us into pointlessly throwing real world examples back and forth, which ultimately proves nothing.
And finally, you keep using the term "legit" to describe protests. I'm not sure what you mean by that.
If you disrupt people doing buisness with a protest you by nececity disrupt both the cusomers and the providers.
One side effect of this is that it encourages people to go with providers who don't attract so much public outrage and hence disruption which only makes the protest more effective.
The *difference* is that you are callous to the collateral damage and, in fact, seem to see it as a positive thing. I never said that collateral damage could be utterly avoided, but I *did* say that we should not make innocent people our targets. I mean, your answer to the hypothetical mom and pop who lost a day of business was not "Sorry, that was not our intent, but it's a necessary consequence of our pursuit of this worthy cause." It was "Good, maybe you won't do business with them in the future."
And with football games for that matter. It's beside the point. In the examples, you're giving, the denial of service is a consequence and not the *aim*. Sites are brought down via slashdotting all the time, but the intent is not to bring the website down. Clogging the highways and doing collateral damage to area businesses is not the intent of your typical large protest.
Furthermore, I read your earlier post as condoning the strategy of *targeting* the business's customers as a way of hurting the business. Not that it was unfortunate collateral damage for which we should feel regret, but that it was calculated damage that indicates a job well done.
Actually, I've not noticed him saying that the kids who were arrested shouldn't be punished. He's making the distinction -- and I agree with him -- that there are degrees of severity of a crime. No analogies here, but we have Murder in the Third, Second, and First degrees: each carries a higher punishment than the last. A DDoS attack is certainly against the law, but it would pale in comparison to, say, firebombing Visa's headquarters, or assassinating their board of directors. All three are still crimes, but you're not going to -- or shouldn't -- punish the kids doing the DDoS the same way you would punish the guy putting lead into peoples' heads.
Oh? And it's important to write a post to make that point? Punishing the kids as though they had shot people or firebombed buildings was never on the table anyway. If that's what we were arguing about, I feel my time has been wasted.
They were protesting what they see as something that's wrong. Bully on them. And they got arrested for it. That's what happens when you protest and you do something illegal. They didn't start flinging Molotov Snapples, though, so they shouldn't be treated like they were.
I think there's some equivocation going on here. We're equivocating severity of a crime with its moral justifiability. Even a severe crime like lobbing molitov cocktails could be justifiable in the right circumstances. The two things are not inextricably linked. What I'm getting in this debate is a sense of "Yeah, they broke the law, so we technically have to punish them, but we shouldn't pass moral judgment on them." But you see, I think we're well within our rights to do so. They protested what they saw as wrong, but they did it in a way that I can not at all condone or accept. A company acted within its rights, and they stepped outside of theirs in order to fight it. What they did was wrong. I don't give a rat's ass if they didn't break any windows in the process. Violence would have been worse, but in my eyes, not fundamentally so. Only worse in magnitude.
As an aside, "And deciding not to do business with them is the only right we should exercise in protest." Well, I have to disagree. I feel corporations have far too much immunity for the wrong they commit. Mind you, I'm... ambivalent to their actions in this case. I think they were wrong, but I don't think they were illegal. Still, when corporations do all manner of unethical things, I feel there isn't enough means for people in general to, shall we say, legally influence said corporations to behave in a proper and ethical manner. What those legal means beyond 'voting with your wallet' (which has proven to not have any effect except on the smallest consumer-related businesses) might be would make for an interesting discussion.
Of course all this posturing goes to shit when it comes out that these kids were just doing it for the lulz.
I can't call PayPal's actions wrong. I can say that I don't approve. I can say that I find them troubling or even upsetting. But PayPal is within its rights legally *and* morally to choose its business partners. We are within our rights legally and morally to choose ours as well, and we are under no obligation to do business with PayPal. The fact that others do is their choice, and you, as an individual, do not have some special right that supersedes the rights of others who wish to continue doing business with PayPal.
There's a pretty massive line between violent murderous attack and totally non-violent political protest.
comparing it to a sit-in isn't reductio ad absurdum, it's an almost 1:1 comparison on almost every point.
If you prefer the sit-in analogy, I'll oblige you. I believe sit-ins can be wrong. I believe a sit-in in response to what PayPal did would be wrong (if such a thing made practical sense, which, of course, it doesn't, since PayPal does their business online). I'm not sure what you think you're gaining by re-framing the debate in that way.
yet again and again and again people keep on hammering away talking about shooting this or firbombing that or blowing up something else.
it's totally non-violent political protest which I tend to view in a vastly better light even when it involves breaking the law in some way than most other crimes.(call me crazy if you like)
Blah. It's arbitrary. Every 4th of July, we here in the US celebrate the epitome of violent protest. Sometimes violence is appropriate. My point was never about the violence, but don't let that stop you from completely misreading my point and calling me an idiot.
It's not about the violence. It's about it being not ok to target the bus company's passengers when your beef is with the bus company. I think you're overly fixated on violence vs nonviolence here. The former is not categorically wrong and the latter is not automatically justifiable.
I'm seeing a theme in your posts. As long as a protest is non-violent, it's A-OK. This doesn't make sense to me. Violence is just another of the four boxes (you know, from soap to ammo). In some situations, violent uprising *is* appropriate. And in some situations, extreme forms of non-violent protest like sit-ins or even DDoS attacks *could* be appropriate. But not here. These businesses did nothing wrong. They did something *unpopular* with people who appreciate what Wikileaks does. But they are well within their rights to decide with whom they do business. And deciding not to do business with them is the only right we should exercise in protest. Essentially, if the rules (i.e. laws) are fair in this matter, and they are playing by the rules, so should we.
I personally thought you were arguing that they shouldn't be treated as criminals (i.e. should be let off the hook). If you just don't want them to be treated as violent offenders... *shrug*, ok. For all the analogies being thrown about, I don't think anyone actually advocated treating them as violent offenders.
I just get sick of all the idiots in this thread comparing it to firebombing/ram raiding the store because they want to make it sound scary.
I would find this objection compelling if the problem were just one of magnitude, but I find it more one of principle. Firebombing a store is *worse* than organizing a DDoS against PayPal. But both are wrong. And depending on how the analogy is constructed, they could even be wrong for some of the same reasons. Ultimately, people are doing reductio ad absurdum. Try to justify Anonymous's action via an argument and people carry that to an absurd conclusion where you can use analogous arguments to justify vastly less acceptable actions.
So the idea is to hurt PayPal's customers so they'll go elsewhere? All this time, I admired the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its positive impact for civil rights. I didn't realize until now that they had the wrong idea. They should have been *bombing* the buses in order to terrorize the public into avoiding using them.
And how, exactly, do you know that? The fact that it went in for human review meant that this was a borderline case.
How exactly do you know that? It could be their policy that all challenges are reviewed by a human. Or it could be that this got enough attention that they felt it warranted a human response to quash it before the outrage reached a fever pitch.
+ There is, of course, absolutely no correlation between violent movies, music, games, books, art and actual acts of violence, which makes the legislation even more idiotic.
Actually, there is.
[...]
There even has been shown pretty conclusively that people who play the games tend to feel more aggressive (I can't recall if it was in general or just for a period of time afterward).
Don't you think that's a tad important? But he didn't say "more aggressive". He said "actual acts of violence".
The key was, though, that it wasn't enough. It was the equivalent of screwing up an exam you thought you did well on, or having your parents tell you to go to your room because you didn't finish your broccoli. Sure, you're "angrier" or "more aggressive" from those things, but it isn't enough to cause extreme behavioral changes.
So no correlation to actual violence?
Something else has to be present first. Combine violent video games with years of bullying and an abusive parent and you might end up with a reaction, but video games by themselves are not enough, nor are violent movies, violent music, anything like that.
What about the abusive parent or years of bullying? Are those enough? If so, what do video games have to do with it? That's like saying "combine dynamite with a lemon cream pie and you have a deadly explosive". If all video games do is cause short term aggression (wish you could remember.....), I fail to see how you could draw a meaningful correlation to actual violence. If a person has the background for violence, the thing that pisses them off could be anything that heightens your emotion.
The group of people that think video games are not just for children or that geeks are cool is a very limited one and the impression that it is a generally accepted feeling is an inaccuracy merely reinforced by our own ranks. Kind of like if you spend all your time swinging, you might start to think that swinging is something far more accepted by society than it really is, because -- of course -- you're around a subset that is into it all the time.
On what are you basing this? Surely not personal experience.
I remember a very specific incident with a girl who is a good friend of mine.
Oh.
While most gamers are adults and the average age of gamers is around 35 years old, most adults are not gamers.
Could you be more specific? Are you counting all adults? When you say "most" do you mean greater than 50%? What's a gamer exactly? What if a person plays Wii tennis? Do they not count?
If you're an adult - especially once you're out of your 20s, you are bordering on being a pathetic curiosity to the rest of the grown-ups around you, who see you as less responsible and less mature merely for what you spend your recreational time doing.
Maybe to the grownups around *you*. My boss perked up with interest when I talked about getting a Kinect, and he had been interested in a Wii a few years back. And I discover all the time that coworkers and clients are interested in games.
Imagine if you spent your childhood reading a lot of great books or maybe hiking and you said "I'll probably stop reading books and going on hikes when I'm 23".
And yet I can't help but feel some skepticism here. I've never met anyone who said they planned to altogether stop playing games at a certain age. So that sounds *just* as hard to imagine to me as this (which is to say I can imagine both, but they both sound strange). I can't help the sneaking suspicion that your entire perception of this is founded on atypical personal experiences.
Wish I had mod points. This is my biggest problem with even the most compelling studies I've seen. My own personal experience suggests that yes, trivially, video games can contribute to aggressive feelings. I myself feel more aggressive after playing some games. But am I more aggressive 4 hours after playing those games? I really don't think so. I'm not the most reliable source of unbiased information about myself, but that personal experience makes me skeptical of the value of investigating the short term impact.
some are intervetional and show a causative link between video games and aggressive behavior.
Let's accept that this is true, for sake of argument. Who is to say that the violence in the video games is the cause? I know that I personally can get aggressive shortly after playing a video game, but it's tied strongly to my sense of excitement or frustration. A violent video game where everything is a big joke (like Saints Row 2, for example), and almost nothing is terribly challenging or frustrating makes me feel far less aggressive than, say, a nonviolent game like Mario Kart. Competitive games in general massively ramp up my aggression regardless of the violence factor. Games that evoke fear or tension tend to make me more aggressive as well (like the celebratory "how you like that mothafucka!?" I might shout after killing a guy in Gears of War). In general, the games are entertaining because they provoke these emotions, and it's absurd to think that will not be linked to some short term aggressiveness, but I don't see violence as the primary deciding factor, and I'm not seeing the long term impact.
Incidentally, I'd like to see aggression similarly correlated with competitive sports. Maybe soccer balls should carry this warning as well.
Really? You think you'd have the same opinion if your kid got knifed or caught a stray bullet due to an escalated situation caused by some other child's aggressive behavior?
And *you* think that if that happened I'd immediately go hunting for a scapegoat? I hate these kinds of arguments. Whenever someone says "What if X happened to YOUR child?" it's equivalent to saying "I think that you're either a complete hypocrite or that you've given no thought whatsoever to your point of view."
Now people are too lazy to type emoticons, which are used by people who are too lazy to express their emotion with words.
The same could be said of vocal intonation. People speaking to one another are far too lazy to speak in an inscrutable monotone and meticulously clarify the emotional context of every comment they make. (Note that this is meant sarcastically)
It's a tool to help bring text messaging into greater parity with spoken conversation. It's a *good* thing.
Well the question is how much of the brain is really part of "self". Obviously a congresswoman has a bullet pass through her brain and she is still herself but at what point does that change.
So does that mean lung cancer victims who've had parts of their lungs removed have higher pitched voices? Also, it doesn't seem to properly explain voice changes in puberty, which are enormous in males, and comparably very small in females. And then of course we have singers. Do tenors have lower lung capacity than, say, baritones? I'm not very familiar with singing techniques, but the big name soloists all seem to have really great lung capacity. On the other hand, you did refer to "comfortable speaking range"
But despite all that skepticism, I wouldn't want to give the impression of being argumentative... it just seems a remarkable statement to make, and one I'd be interested in hearing explained.
Well, technically, he didn't even insult their sexuality. He misidentified it. That's my favorite part about people calling each other gay. They seem to think it is self-evidently an insult when it is actually no more an insult than telling a person he's redheaded when he happens to be blonde.
Seriously, you read that post and thought it was appropriate to type a nitpicky diatribe against his use of a popular phrase? And you're not even right. Sure, it *can* be used sarcastically, but the only consequence for not doing so is that jackasses like you will come in spouting arbitrary bullshit to try to bring the speaker down a peg.
This is highly speculative on your part, but it ultimately doesn't matter. If you had a sample of 3 people, and none of them could hack the PS3, you'd say that doesn't mean anything. If you had a sample of a million people, and none of them could hack the PS3, maybe you'd say that meant something. But if there's one person who can hack the PS3 and does, it doesn't matter if he's in the first sample, the second sample, or both. The PS3 is just as hacked, and the security was just as ineffective. And if he did it because they removed Other OS, then it is safe to conclude that the only reason the system was not hacked earlier was that it had the Other OS functionality.
So where you're speculating that there's this shadowy horde of frustrated hackers who were foiled by the PS3's spectacular security measures, everyone else is pointing to the very real individuals who hacked it in about the same time as it took for the other consoles to be hacked, and only did it because Sony removed core functionality.
Slashdot Mirror
Ok, then I withdraw my original objection. The second part (avoiding it), is a separate point we can debate, but if you think it's not appropriate to intentionally target innocent third parties to achieve your objectives, then we don't disagree.
Why would I say "Sorry" to anyone? I didn't take part in the DDoS in any way. Last time I checked I have no obligation to appologise to people I've never harmed.
Ugh. Let's cut through the BS. Do you think they should regret collateral damage or do you think they should embrace and pursue it? That's all this is about. If the former, we are not in disagreement and I misunderstood you earlier. If the latter, then *that's* where we disagree.
As for the meaning of Legitimate protest?It's pretty much an open debate.
http://www.democracyandsociety.com/blog/2011/01/27/what-makes-a-protest-legitimate/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/may/31/kingsnorth-six-environmental-activists
http://dir.groups.yahoo.com/group/okbcwf/message/5458
Actually, I wasn't asking what makes a protest legitimate. I was asking what it means to you to say that a protest is legitimate.
Of course protesters aim to disrupt things. That's a big aspect of effective protests.
Only a couply of years back truck drivers protested raised fuel taxes here by rolling round and around a few small sections of busy road to disrupt traffic and slow everything down with signs all over their trucks. Yet it was a legit protest.
They protested high fuel by driving their vehicles around for no other purpose than to protest? And they inconvenienced other drivers. And for this to be analogous, they must also have been intentionally inconveniencing those drivers as a way of blackmailing them into the cause, which it doesn't sound like they were doing. Also, if you were just looking for an example of a protest that you would say targeted the incidental bystanders, look no further than the topic of this thread. Even if the trucking one *were* a good example, it just takes us into pointlessly throwing real world examples back and forth, which ultimately proves nothing.
And finally, you keep using the term "legit" to describe protests. I'm not sure what you mean by that.
If you disrupt people doing buisness with a protest you by nececity disrupt both the cusomers and the providers. One side effect of this is that it encourages people to go with providers who don't attract so much public outrage and hence disruption which only makes the protest more effective.
The *difference* is that you are callous to the collateral damage and, in fact, seem to see it as a positive thing. I never said that collateral damage could be utterly avoided, but I *did* say that we should not make innocent people our targets. I mean, your answer to the hypothetical mom and pop who lost a day of business was not "Sorry, that was not our intent, but it's a necessary consequence of our pursuit of this worthy cause." It was "Good, maybe you won't do business with them in the future."
And with football games for that matter. It's beside the point. In the examples, you're giving, the denial of service is a consequence and not the *aim*. Sites are brought down via slashdotting all the time, but the intent is not to bring the website down. Clogging the highways and doing collateral damage to area businesses is not the intent of your typical large protest.
Furthermore, I read your earlier post as condoning the strategy of *targeting* the business's customers as a way of hurting the business. Not that it was unfortunate collateral damage for which we should feel regret, but that it was calculated damage that indicates a job well done.
Actually, I've not noticed him saying that the kids who were arrested shouldn't be punished. He's making the distinction -- and I agree with him -- that there are degrees of severity of a crime. No analogies here, but we have Murder in the Third, Second, and First degrees: each carries a higher punishment than the last. A DDoS attack is certainly against the law, but it would pale in comparison to, say, firebombing Visa's headquarters, or assassinating their board of directors. All three are still crimes, but you're not going to -- or shouldn't -- punish the kids doing the DDoS the same way you would punish the guy putting lead into peoples' heads.
Oh? And it's important to write a post to make that point? Punishing the kids as though they had shot people or firebombed buildings was never on the table anyway. If that's what we were arguing about, I feel my time has been wasted.
They were protesting what they see as something that's wrong. Bully on them. And they got arrested for it. That's what happens when you protest and you do something illegal. They didn't start flinging Molotov Snapples, though, so they shouldn't be treated like they were.
I think there's some equivocation going on here. We're equivocating severity of a crime with its moral justifiability. Even a severe crime like lobbing molitov cocktails could be justifiable in the right circumstances. The two things are not inextricably linked. What I'm getting in this debate is a sense of "Yeah, they broke the law, so we technically have to punish them, but we shouldn't pass moral judgment on them." But you see, I think we're well within our rights to do so. They protested what they saw as wrong, but they did it in a way that I can not at all condone or accept. A company acted within its rights, and they stepped outside of theirs in order to fight it. What they did was wrong. I don't give a rat's ass if they didn't break any windows in the process. Violence would have been worse, but in my eyes, not fundamentally so. Only worse in magnitude.
As an aside, "And deciding not to do business with them is the only right we should exercise in protest." Well, I have to disagree. I feel corporations have far too much immunity for the wrong they commit. Mind you, I'm... ambivalent to their actions in this case. I think they were wrong, but I don't think they were illegal. Still, when corporations do all manner of unethical things, I feel there isn't enough means for people in general to, shall we say, legally influence said corporations to behave in a proper and ethical manner. What those legal means beyond 'voting with your wallet' (which has proven to not have any effect except on the smallest consumer-related businesses) might be would make for an interesting discussion.
Of course all this posturing goes to shit when it comes out that these kids were just doing it for the lulz.
I can't call PayPal's actions wrong. I can say that I don't approve. I can say that I find them troubling or even upsetting. But PayPal is within its rights legally *and* morally to choose its business partners. We are within our rights legally and morally to choose ours as well, and we are under no obligation to do business with PayPal. The fact that others do is their choice, and you, as an individual, do not have some special right that supersedes the rights of others who wish to continue doing business with PayPal.
In your eyes, what's the difference? Specifically, what's the difference in how we should treat them?
There's a pretty massive line between violent murderous attack and totally non-violent political protest.
comparing it to a sit-in isn't reductio ad absurdum, it's an almost 1:1 comparison on almost every point.
If you prefer the sit-in analogy, I'll oblige you. I believe sit-ins can be wrong. I believe a sit-in in response to what PayPal did would be wrong (if such a thing made practical sense, which, of course, it doesn't, since PayPal does their business online). I'm not sure what you think you're gaining by re-framing the debate in that way.
yet again and again and again people keep on hammering away talking about shooting this or firbombing that or blowing up something else.
it's totally non-violent political protest which I tend to view in a vastly better light even when it involves breaking the law in some way than most other crimes.(call me crazy if you like)
Blah. It's arbitrary. Every 4th of July, we here in the US celebrate the epitome of violent protest. Sometimes violence is appropriate. My point was never about the violence, but don't let that stop you from completely misreading my point and calling me an idiot.
It's not about the violence. It's about it being not ok to target the bus company's passengers when your beef is with the bus company. I think you're overly fixated on violence vs nonviolence here. The former is not categorically wrong and the latter is not automatically justifiable.
I'm seeing a theme in your posts. As long as a protest is non-violent, it's A-OK. This doesn't make sense to me. Violence is just another of the four boxes (you know, from soap to ammo). In some situations, violent uprising *is* appropriate. And in some situations, extreme forms of non-violent protest like sit-ins or even DDoS attacks *could* be appropriate. But not here. These businesses did nothing wrong. They did something *unpopular* with people who appreciate what Wikileaks does. But they are well within their rights to decide with whom they do business. And deciding not to do business with them is the only right we should exercise in protest. Essentially, if the rules (i.e. laws) are fair in this matter, and they are playing by the rules, so should we.
I personally thought you were arguing that they shouldn't be treated as criminals (i.e. should be let off the hook). If you just don't want them to be treated as violent offenders... *shrug*, ok. For all the analogies being thrown about, I don't think anyone actually advocated treating them as violent offenders.
I just get sick of all the idiots in this thread comparing it to firebombing/ram raiding the store because they want to make it sound scary.
I would find this objection compelling if the problem were just one of magnitude, but I find it more one of principle. Firebombing a store is *worse* than organizing a DDoS against PayPal. But both are wrong. And depending on how the analogy is constructed, they could even be wrong for some of the same reasons. Ultimately, people are doing reductio ad absurdum. Try to justify Anonymous's action via an argument and people carry that to an absurd conclusion where you can use analogous arguments to justify vastly less acceptable actions.
Nor can I. Believe me, I'd love to. Fucking unicorns.
So the idea is to hurt PayPal's customers so they'll go elsewhere? All this time, I admired the Montgomery Bus Boycott and its positive impact for civil rights. I didn't realize until now that they had the wrong idea. They should have been *bombing* the buses in order to terrorize the public into avoiding using them.
And how, exactly, do you know that? The fact that it went in for human review meant that this was a borderline case.
How exactly do you know that? It could be their policy that all challenges are reviewed by a human. Or it could be that this got enough attention that they felt it warranted a human response to quash it before the outrage reached a fever pitch.
+ There is, of course, absolutely no correlation between violent movies, music, games, books, art and actual acts of violence, which makes the legislation even more idiotic.
Actually, there is.
[...]
There even has been shown pretty conclusively that people who play the games tend to feel more aggressive (I can't recall if it was in general or just for a period of time afterward).
Don't you think that's a tad important? But he didn't say "more aggressive". He said "actual acts of violence".
The key was, though, that it wasn't enough. It was the equivalent of screwing up an exam you thought you did well on, or having your parents tell you to go to your room because you didn't finish your broccoli. Sure, you're "angrier" or "more aggressive" from those things, but it isn't enough to cause extreme behavioral changes.
So no correlation to actual violence?
Something else has to be present first. Combine violent video games with years of bullying and an abusive parent and you might end up with a reaction, but video games by themselves are not enough, nor are violent movies, violent music, anything like that.
What about the abusive parent or years of bullying? Are those enough? If so, what do video games have to do with it? That's like saying "combine dynamite with a lemon cream pie and you have a deadly explosive". If all video games do is cause short term aggression (wish you could remember.....), I fail to see how you could draw a meaningful correlation to actual violence. If a person has the background for violence, the thing that pisses them off could be anything that heightens your emotion.
The group of people that think video games are not just for children or that geeks are cool is a very limited one and the impression that it is a generally accepted feeling is an inaccuracy merely reinforced by our own ranks. Kind of like if you spend all your time swinging, you might start to think that swinging is something far more accepted by society than it really is, because -- of course -- you're around a subset that is into it all the time.
On what are you basing this? Surely not personal experience.
I remember a very specific incident with a girl who is a good friend of mine.
Oh.
While most gamers are adults and the average age of gamers is around 35 years old, most adults are not gamers.
Could you be more specific? Are you counting all adults? When you say "most" do you mean greater than 50%? What's a gamer exactly? What if a person plays Wii tennis? Do they not count?
If you're an adult - especially once you're out of your 20s, you are bordering on being a pathetic curiosity to the rest of the grown-ups around you, who see you as less responsible and less mature merely for what you spend your recreational time doing.
Maybe to the grownups around *you*. My boss perked up with interest when I talked about getting a Kinect, and he had been interested in a Wii a few years back. And I discover all the time that coworkers and clients are interested in games.
Imagine if you spent your childhood reading a lot of great books or maybe hiking and you said "I'll probably stop reading books and going on hikes when I'm 23".
And yet I can't help but feel some skepticism here. I've never met anyone who said they planned to altogether stop playing games at a certain age. So that sounds *just* as hard to imagine to me as this (which is to say I can imagine both, but they both sound strange). I can't help the sneaking suspicion that your entire perception of this is founded on atypical personal experiences.
Wish I had mod points. This is my biggest problem with even the most compelling studies I've seen. My own personal experience suggests that yes, trivially, video games can contribute to aggressive feelings. I myself feel more aggressive after playing some games. But am I more aggressive 4 hours after playing those games? I really don't think so. I'm not the most reliable source of unbiased information about myself, but that personal experience makes me skeptical of the value of investigating the short term impact.
some are intervetional and show a causative link between video games and aggressive behavior.
Let's accept that this is true, for sake of argument. Who is to say that the violence in the video games is the cause? I know that I personally can get aggressive shortly after playing a video game, but it's tied strongly to my sense of excitement or frustration. A violent video game where everything is a big joke (like Saints Row 2, for example), and almost nothing is terribly challenging or frustrating makes me feel far less aggressive than, say, a nonviolent game like Mario Kart. Competitive games in general massively ramp up my aggression regardless of the violence factor. Games that evoke fear or tension tend to make me more aggressive as well (like the celebratory "how you like that mothafucka!?" I might shout after killing a guy in Gears of War). In general, the games are entertaining because they provoke these emotions, and it's absurd to think that will not be linked to some short term aggressiveness, but I don't see violence as the primary deciding factor, and I'm not seeing the long term impact.
Incidentally, I'd like to see aggression similarly correlated with competitive sports. Maybe soccer balls should carry this warning as well.
Really? You think you'd have the same opinion if your kid got knifed or caught a stray bullet due to an escalated situation caused by some other child's aggressive behavior?
And *you* think that if that happened I'd immediately go hunting for a scapegoat? I hate these kinds of arguments. Whenever someone says "What if X happened to YOUR child?" it's equivalent to saying "I think that you're either a complete hypocrite or that you've given no thought whatsoever to your point of view."
Now people are too lazy to type emoticons, which are used by people who are too lazy to express their emotion with words.
The same could be said of vocal intonation. People speaking to one another are far too lazy to speak in an inscrutable monotone and meticulously clarify the emotional context of every comment they make. (Note that this is meant sarcastically)
It's a tool to help bring text messaging into greater parity with spoken conversation. It's a *good* thing.
Well the question is how much of the brain is really part of "self". Obviously a congresswoman has a bullet pass through her brain and she is still herself but at what point does that change.
Good question. At the time, some said here.
I'm curious. How does that work, exactly?
So does that mean lung cancer victims who've had parts of their lungs removed have higher pitched voices? Also, it doesn't seem to properly explain voice changes in puberty, which are enormous in males, and comparably very small in females. And then of course we have singers. Do tenors have lower lung capacity than, say, baritones? I'm not very familiar with singing techniques, but the big name soloists all seem to have really great lung capacity. On the other hand, you did refer to "comfortable speaking range"
But despite all that skepticism, I wouldn't want to give the impression of being argumentative... it just seems a remarkable statement to make, and one I'd be interested in hearing explained.
Well, technically, he didn't even insult their sexuality. He misidentified it. That's my favorite part about people calling each other gay. They seem to think it is self-evidently an insult when it is actually no more an insult than telling a person he's redheaded when he happens to be blonde.
....
Oh I get it; you're a douchebag.
Seriously, you read that post and thought it was appropriate to type a nitpicky diatribe against his use of a popular phrase? And you're not even right. Sure, it *can* be used sarcastically, but the only consequence for not doing so is that jackasses like you will come in spouting arbitrary bullshit to try to bring the speaker down a peg.
This is highly speculative on your part, but it ultimately doesn't matter. If you had a sample of 3 people, and none of them could hack the PS3, you'd say that doesn't mean anything. If you had a sample of a million people, and none of them could hack the PS3, maybe you'd say that meant something. But if there's one person who can hack the PS3 and does, it doesn't matter if he's in the first sample, the second sample, or both. The PS3 is just as hacked, and the security was just as ineffective. And if he did it because they removed Other OS, then it is safe to conclude that the only reason the system was not hacked earlier was that it had the Other OS functionality.
So where you're speculating that there's this shadowy horde of frustrated hackers who were foiled by the PS3's spectacular security measures, everyone else is pointing to the very real individuals who hacked it in about the same time as it took for the other consoles to be hacked, and only did it because Sony removed core functionality.