This is where Nikon has been the past few years, investing in decent high-ISO abilities. Now ISO 1600 on crop and ISO 6400 on full-frame Nikon cameras is clean enough to use for large prints. Out of curiosity, is it real ISO levels that high, or faked, hacked ISO levels that high? My camera does up to ISO400, and a couple months after it came out, they released a new model that does ISO800. The sensor is identical - it was just a slight firmware adjustment that allowed it to run in noisy-as-hell mode. I think it's native ISO is either 50 or 100.
In other words, uber-ISO numbers don't matter unless they really have improved the light sensitivity of the sensors.
# Convicted "psychopaths" have an identifiable abnormality in their brain. # "Normal" people don't have this abnormality.
Actually, about 5% of people have the reduced neural ability to empathize with others. Most of them live normal lives because they buy into society, even if they don't personally feel other people are "real" or deserving of respect. A lot of these people can live very successful lives as businessmen or government workers.
On the issue of correlation and causation - correlation is not causation, but what you're talking about is a causal link. Lack of empathy for others is a direct causative factor in sociopathy - it's part of the definition of it.
>>However, it's my belief that ultimately, there is no real choice
That's nice. However, since nothing we say or do makes any sense unless we preserve the illusion of free will, we're forced to believe in free will. Ironic, isn't it?
But this isn't new information. It's long been known that psychopaths suffer from markedly lower neural functioning in areas such as mirror neurons that reflect what other people are doing and feeling. They literally can't perceive other individuals as feeling entities, which is why it is so easy for them to inflict harm on animals and people. Only the threat of legal sanction stops them - and what you're proposing is essentially giving them a way out of that, so... yeah, that's a bad idea.
Something like 5% of people have limited or severely limited functioning in their mirror neurons. Just food for thought.
Playing pirated games on any device is and should be illegal. Modifying the device in a way that makes it possible to play pirated games should NOT be illegal.
If you admit the one, you admit the other. Look up tortious interference some time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference). If you admit playing pirated games are illegal, and you help others do so (presumably in violation of the EULA they have from using their Xbox) then you are helping them break their contract and are guilty of such. It's how they beat the WoWGlider (who should have restricted sales only to people who avowed they had never clicked on the EULA, IMO).
Of course, I think the entire notion is an entire steaming pile of crap - first sale doctrine should take precedence, and EULAs should basically be taken out back and chainsawed to death with a Lancer.
Plato states quite clearly that there is no true justice, but the appearance of it is what matters in society. The lower classes of society must believe there is justice else the upper classes may lose their power.
Bzzt.
Plato states quite clearly that he considers justice to be *the harmonious functioning of all parts in order to accomplish its telos*. So there is justice inside of a dog when all of the parts are working together to help the dog track some prey, for example. Justice in society is when all components of society are working together harmoniously as well.
It's an odd concept, and rather different from what we consider justice today. I think you just picked up on Glaucon's argument, or one of the other alternative views Plato writes about in the Republic.
I don't claim its impossible to create an ergonomic disaster... but that does not prove the impossibility of a well designed workstation where its perfectly comfortable to read, watch videos, etc, off a screen, all day, every day. It all boils down to "I admit I live in an ergonomic disaster, therefore an ergonomic non-disaster cannot exist for anyone else".
I obviously read a lot of stuff on my computer (I'm in a forum, natch). However, I just can't stand reading books on my computer. I have electronic copies of a number of novels on here that I've always meant to read, but I can't do it. I think it more has to do with the unending scroll of hundreds of pages inside of Word/Acrobat that is the issue, rather than the ergonomics of it.
I can't stand Kindles either, but that has more to do with how they actually function in practice (the flash and lag between page turns).
For any long amounts of reading, give me dead trees.
My wife is the opposite though - she reads all of her novels electronically, in a web browser, and has been doing so since I met her back in 2001.
>>I don't have to dig through menu items to accept/reject changes to see a clean version of the final product.
What? There's a review toolbar. You have that always on, so it's actually a lot more usable than the fucktarded ribbon menu that you need to click to every time you want to switch between accepting/rejecting changes and working on the document.
I think the only people that actually like Office 2007 (and complain about having to click through nested menus) were the people that didn't know that you almost never had to do so.
>>MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die.
They used to, yeah. Then Office 2007 happened. I give tech workshops, and at every single one I see the people fumbling around in Office 2007 (which they all use, at least at work) stuff they knew how to find without thinking in previous versions.
Some of it really is counterintuitive, like a pull-handle on a door under a "Push" sign (there's a restaurant like that, and it's fun to watch every single person try the door the wrong way, even people that have been eating there for 15 years) - for example "Insert New Slide" in PP2007 is NOT under the insert ribbon. Guess where everyone goes when they try to insert a new slide? I just hit ctrl-m, since it doesn't make much sense to me either to go to the Home ribbon.
There's some nice things about the ribbon bars, but they suck overall from a usability standpoint.
Slashdot: the only place where people can complain that the social sciences aren't mathematically rigorous enough, only to follow up by countering a survey of all games with anecdotal evidence of the games *you've* played. Did I claim statistical rigor?
I said it was "a quick survey of the games I've played this year". It had the appropriate amount of qualification on it.
I do think, though, that there's been a strong trend in recent years for games to allow setting your own gender and race.
>>Also, do you *really* think we should count Tauren as being representative of Native Americans when they're half-ton 8 foot tall monsters?
Yes. They use iconic Native American symbology in their cities and camps. They're not monsters, either.
I know I want to pay $6,500 dollars for a laptop with a 5" screen!
Damn, I don't know how this company possibly could have gone out of business with idiots like that. OLEDs aren't *that* great. Take a look at your cell phone and ask yourself if you want that in a monitor. Mine has screen burn in and flickers if I look at it out of the corner of my eye. (Sure, they may have resolved these issues, but they don't look better than, say, an LED TV).
It's been a while since I read that paper. I'll see if I can find my notes on what was wrong with it.
>>Mind you, I would question these results. However, it's because I think there's a sampling error of this particular study rather than a categorical dismissal of the entire field.
I actually work in the social sciences, conducting scientific evaluations of education programs, attempting to assess using statistics if the programs are effective or not at improving student or teacher history content knowledge. I do it legitimately as possible, and *I* wouldn't accept my own results as being scientifically valid. There's just no way to isolate the millions of variables that go into learning and then come to the conclusion "Therefore we conclude (p 0.01) that the program had a positive impact on student history content knowledge".
With other evaluators, it's even more sketchy. I went to the national TAH conference last year and sat in on evaluation workshops all week, with the following gems: 1) Having the experimental group write the test that the experimental group and control group would then take. 2) Only basing "overall content knowledge gains" on post-workshop tests that were then also given to a control group, and not on an annual pre- post-test based on overall American history standards. 3) Having no controls in the program at all, or conducting significantly different evaluation efforts with the controls than the experimental group.
And remember, these were presenters.
But even if you could magically wave a wand and have a perfectly randomized experimental/control setup, where everyone complied with the test-taking (control group teachers that lose the lottery to join the program tend to tell you to go to hell), I'd still not be satisfied that it was the program causing any measured gains, though I would dutifully report the statistical analysis reports back, and demonstrate the differences in gains between the experimental and control groups. There's still too many uncontrolled factors for my tastes. But unless we can lock kids in little cubicles for a year and only do instruction via carefully-controlled prerecorded video (which might raise some ethical concerns) I doubt we'll ever be able to do better than what we're currently doing, which is a lot stats mixed with hand-waving.
>>Dude. Listen to yourself. People who are not white are supposed to identify with game characters who are "less traditionally humanoid"? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
For heaven's sake, I'd rather identify with an Orc or a Tauren than with a Blood Elf!
>>I don't assume you have any advanced studies in sociology or the like, so why do you assume that you know what they're doing and that they're making things up? >>Do you honestly think that social scientists just sit at a typewriter (computer nowadays) and make shit up?
Yes. Though they disguise it with stats to make it look scientific, and may even believe it themselves.
You don't need an "advanced degree" in a social science to see the profound methodological errors in their studies. For example, consider the article posted on here that claimed that road rage is derived evolutionarily from territorial behavior protection. Ok, fair enough. Except the article didn't examine the different rates of road rage between men and women, or between cultures, etc. It made a claim, posted some numbers, and said that it had proved the hypothesis without doing, as Feynman said, the necessary checks or legwork needed to really know if their claim was right or not.
>>Now where do the Draenei with blue skin and all the accessories fit in?
Yeah. I was trying to come up with some sort of analogy or joke for the blue skinned people (maybe a Star Trek reference or something), but I got nothing.
I think they identify most with Indian (as in India) or arabic cultures. At least based on their dances. And they do kind of look like the genie from Aladdin.
From TFA: "The study only included visible characters that were clearly human."
Clearly a methodological error if they throw out dark skinned or native American humanoids like drow and orcs simply because they're not "clearly human". Tauren should also count as native American, though they're less traditionally humanoid.
Just a quick survey of my current games I have played this year: Total War: Empire. I played as French, so I guess I'm a white male. But you can play as an Indian as well, though no Asians or sub-saharan Africans are playable. Native Americans are in the game, but not a playable country (though you can recruit them). Mass Effect. Pick your own race and gender. Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires. Pick your own race and gender, though most are going to look like they're Chinese drawn by a Japanese artist. Halo 3: Who knows what Master Chief is? Oblivion: Pick your own race and gender. Fallout 3: Pick your own race (and gender too, I think). Left4Dead: One white chick, one black guy, two white guys. L4D2 will feature undead black people as the primary enemies (progress?) TF2: Predominantly white, though there's a black Scottsman and who knows what Pyro is? HL2: White guy and African-American chick. CoD4 - Modern Warfare: 5 white guys + one arab guy are the playable characters (IIRC) WoW: Pick your own gender. As aforementioned, the horde has 2 native American-esque, one white/asian, one afro-Caribbean, and one white-ish race. Gears of War 2: Main characters are white and Hispanic men. There's also a pacific islander, a white guy, a black guy, a Korean guy, and some other people of indeterminate race. Like in Halo and other games, their dispatcher is a female.
So, all in all, there's a predominant trend towards male characters in action games, but there's quite a bit of flexibility these days in picking race and gender, and there's a fairly widespread mix of ethnicities in games these days.
Yeah, the social "sciences" love to pretend they're scientific, but they really aren't. I think Feynman put it best when he talked about them: "Because of the success of science, there's a kind of pseudoscience - social science. They don't do scientific research, they don't find any laws, they haven't found anythinig yet. They give you experts that sound sort of scientific, they sit at a typewriter and type something like organic fertilizer is better for you - maybe it's true, maybe it's not true. They haven't proved it... I've realized how hard it is to actually find out something. I know what it means to know something. So when I see how they get their information and see that they haven't done the work necessary..."
SAIC is "secretive"? Uh, ok, sure they do some military work, and a couple floors of their office building have security checkpoints you have to pass through since they work on various classified stuff, but they're hardly secretive. They do a lot of different stuff, and a number of my friends worked their over the years. Hell, when I was working on VR arcade games back in the day, they invited my dad and I over to their complex in La Jolla to try out a new VR racing game they'd developed.
Looking back on that, it's really hard for my brain to associate the word secretive to them. But who knows - maybe Umbrella Corp would develop video games, too.
I can understand his frustration. I've walked-away as well from various clubs. You volunteer hundreds of hours of your time, without pay, and all you hear from the members is complaint-after-complaint-after-complaint.
Yep. Happens in every sort of social network (real life social networks as well as virtual). People have an amazing ability to be ungrateful. I've organized roleplaying conventions with 100 tables going off smoothly, and people bitch. I've spend hundreds of hours working on open source code, and people bitch. Etc., etc.
To be fair, some complaints are valid, so I carefully listen to everything people say. Sometimes they're right (and I'll admit it) and sometimes they're idiots (which I also point out). My skin is tough enough to deal with most of it, except the roleplaying convention stuff -- took way too many hours out of my life for the abuse. Plus I got tired of calling on my 10 closest friends over and over to volunteer because everyone else was too lazy to step up to the fucking plate.
People like the FTEQuake folks have integrated Quake1-3 together, which allows you to play any map from Quake 1 through 3, or to incorporate things like shaders into the Quake 1 experience. It's actually kind of neat. Take a look at the screenshots at http://www.fteqw.com/ - it's all I use nowadays when I play FPSes. I'll play some Gears cooperatively with my friends, but nothing yet has beaten the original quake experience for FPS fun.
The euphoria engine looks pretty interesting. I've been doing some work with motion analysis, and so the work they've done on it really impresses me - apparently you can code animations using it without keyframes or motion capture, which is pretty neat (if it works). The tech demo video is here - http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm
My approach isn't stupid in regards to that. Free? That's a "pretty good price", wouldn't YOU say? And, you're also FREE to customize it, & thus, YOUR PERSONALIZED VERSION OF A CUSTOM HOSTS FILE, JUST GOES ALONG WITH YOUR PERSONALIZED SPED UP & SAFER VERSION OF THE INTERNET... &, just as YOU see fit & like, easily. Notepad.exe for instance? My gosh - lol, just "does wonders" here, on this account... lol!
Well I don't know where you live but in the part of Canada I live in teachers are very well paid. They start at about $45K and move up quickly and that's for working less than 10 months of the year. And, I have to say this, at the universities I attended the education students weren't considered the brightest lights.
Interesting. I think we might have a differing opinion on what very well paid means.
My roommate in college quit his software engineering job to become a teacher in Anaheim a few years back. He started at around $60k and is now making closer to $70k.
It's more than he was making doing software engineering. He also gets 3 months off per year, guaranteed unemployment during the 3 months off, full health and dental for himself and his wife, and various other amusing perks as the result of teachers' union negotiations. If you factor all of this in, it's worth well over $100k a year. Not bad for a guy who has been teaching for about 4 years, eh?
Teachers in the district still complain about being underpaid though. While, yes, they do provide a valuable service, I personally don't think that they "are underpaid" by any stretch of the imagination.
Most people with decent hearing find TV aisles uncomfortable - it's either too many random TVs putting out the same audio minutely out of synch, or the high-pitched squeal that comes from any CRT being multiplied by a couple dozen. The EMF signals are hardly the most irritating thing that a TV can put out.
As the only person in my family that could hear the squeal from CRTs, believe me when I say I feel sympathetic to the guys who claim they are allergic to Wi-Fi (even though it's probably entirely psychosomatic). When you claim you can sense something that other's can't, "crazy" is the default label you pick up.
Fortunately I was able to demonstrate my superpowers by detecting when a TV was on (but muted) behind closed cabinets, quite reliably.
Uh, no. I hate it because it's a horribly designed piece of crap. I love giving a tech workshop, saving a file, and then having to either scroll up a couple pages of crap in order to get to the desktop level of the file browser, or to resize the file browser menu in order to reveal the desktop link. In XP, the Desktop and My computer buttons are large, and always easily accessible on the left side of a file browser dialog. Different? Yes. Progress? Hardly. It's much less usable than before.
The windows explorer replaced the address bar with the associated up arrow with the breadcrumbs navigation. Open a folder on the desktop. Now try to go up a level. (What's that? You can't? Ahh, Vista, you joker! You got me again!) Or just try using breadcrumbs from within a long pathname. It doesn't work. By contrast, an up arrow button (shortcut - backspace) always works, and also allows you to quickly move up a number of levels quickly. With breadcrumbs, you have to move your mouse each time. If you don't believe me, go 10 folder levels deep on a laptop and see how long it takes you to up-arrow to My Computer on Vista vs XP using a touchpad. It'll take you about 10 times as long, if not more. We're talking basic functionality here that they broke. And even when used under normal circumstances, it takes longer to mouse to a small breadcrumb than it does to an up-arrow button.
But, okay, yeah. I hate it because it's new. Not because it's a horribly broken, less functional, piece of crap UI.
Slashdot Mirror
This is where Nikon has been the past few years, investing in decent high-ISO abilities. Now ISO 1600 on crop and ISO 6400 on full-frame Nikon cameras is clean enough to use for large prints.
Out of curiosity, is it real ISO levels that high, or faked, hacked ISO levels that high? My camera does up to ISO400, and a couple months after it came out, they released a new model that does ISO800. The sensor is identical - it was just a slight firmware adjustment that allowed it to run in noisy-as-hell mode. I think it's native ISO is either 50 or 100.
In other words, uber-ISO numbers don't matter unless they really have improved the light sensitivity of the sensors.
# Convicted "psychopaths" have an identifiable abnormality in their brain.
# "Normal" people don't have this abnormality.
Actually, about 5% of people have the reduced neural ability to empathize with others. Most of them live normal lives because they buy into society, even if they don't personally feel other people are "real" or deserving of respect. A lot of these people can live very successful lives as businessmen or government workers.
On the issue of correlation and causation - correlation is not causation, but what you're talking about is a causal link. Lack of empathy for others is a direct causative factor in sociopathy - it's part of the definition of it.
>>However, it's my belief that ultimately, there is no real choice
That's nice. However, since nothing we say or do makes any sense unless we preserve the illusion of free will, we're forced to believe in free will. Ironic, isn't it?
But this isn't new information. It's long been known that psychopaths suffer from markedly lower neural functioning in areas such as mirror neurons that reflect what other people are doing and feeling. They literally can't perceive other individuals as feeling entities, which is why it is so easy for them to inflict harm on animals and people. Only the threat of legal sanction stops them - and what you're proposing is essentially giving them a way out of that, so... yeah, that's a bad idea.
Something like 5% of people have limited or severely limited functioning in their mirror neurons. Just food for thought.
Playing pirated games on any device is and should be illegal. Modifying the device in a way that makes it possible to play pirated games should NOT be illegal.
If you admit the one, you admit the other. Look up tortious interference some time (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference). If you admit playing pirated games are illegal, and you help others do so (presumably in violation of the EULA they have from using their Xbox) then you are helping them break their contract and are guilty of such. It's how they beat the WoWGlider (who should have restricted sales only to people who avowed they had never clicked on the EULA, IMO).
Of course, I think the entire notion is an entire steaming pile of crap - first sale doctrine should take precedence, and EULAs should basically be taken out back and chainsawed to death with a Lancer.
Plato states quite clearly that there is no true justice, but the appearance of it is what matters in society. The lower classes of society must believe there is justice else the upper classes may lose their power.
Bzzt.
Plato states quite clearly that he considers justice to be *the harmonious functioning of all parts in order to accomplish its telos*. So there is justice inside of a dog when all of the parts are working together to help the dog track some prey, for example. Justice in society is when all components of society are working together harmoniously as well.
It's an odd concept, and rather different from what we consider justice today. I think you just picked up on Glaucon's argument, or one of the other alternative views Plato writes about in the Republic.
I don't claim its impossible to create an ergonomic disaster... but that does not prove the impossibility of a well designed workstation where its perfectly comfortable to read, watch videos, etc, off a screen, all day, every day. It all boils down to "I admit I live in an ergonomic disaster, therefore an ergonomic non-disaster cannot exist for anyone else".
I obviously read a lot of stuff on my computer (I'm in a forum, natch). However, I just can't stand reading books on my computer. I have electronic copies of a number of novels on here that I've always meant to read, but I can't do it. I think it more has to do with the unending scroll of hundreds of pages inside of Word/Acrobat that is the issue, rather than the ergonomics of it.
I can't stand Kindles either, but that has more to do with how they actually function in practice (the flash and lag between page turns).
For any long amounts of reading, give me dead trees.
My wife is the opposite though - she reads all of her novels electronically, in a web browser, and has been doing so since I met her back in 2001.
>>I don't have to dig through menu items to accept/reject changes to see a clean version of the final product.
What? There's a review toolbar. You have that always on, so it's actually a lot more usable than the fucktarded ribbon menu that you need to click to every time you want to switch between accepting/rejecting changes and working on the document.
I think the only people that actually like Office 2007 (and complain about having to click through nested menus) were the people that didn't know that you almost never had to do so.
>>MsWord has too large an installed base and there is too much inertia for people to change. Somewhere near 600 million to 1 billion people know how to use MsWord. It might not die.
They used to, yeah. Then Office 2007 happened. I give tech workshops, and at every single one I see the people fumbling around in Office 2007 (which they all use, at least at work) stuff they knew how to find without thinking in previous versions.
Some of it really is counterintuitive, like a pull-handle on a door under a "Push" sign (there's a restaurant like that, and it's fun to watch every single person try the door the wrong way, even people that have been eating there for 15 years) - for example "Insert New Slide" in PP2007 is NOT under the insert ribbon. Guess where everyone goes when they try to insert a new slide? I just hit ctrl-m, since it doesn't make much sense to me either to go to the Home ribbon.
There's some nice things about the ribbon bars, but they suck overall from a usability standpoint.
>>Most OLEDs are used in cell phones. But, most cell phones do not use OLEDs. So he probably thinks his iPhone has an OLED dislpay.
Right. Because I'm a douchebag that needs a trendy iPhone?
No, my cell phone does have an OLED. I read my tech specs, jackass.
Slashdot: the only place where people can complain that the social sciences aren't mathematically rigorous enough, only to follow up by countering a survey of all games with anecdotal evidence of the games *you've* played.
Did I claim statistical rigor?
I said it was "a quick survey of the games I've played this year". It had the appropriate amount of qualification on it.
I do think, though, that there's been a strong trend in recent years for games to allow setting your own gender and race.
>>Also, do you *really* think we should count Tauren as being representative of Native Americans when they're half-ton 8 foot tall monsters?
Yes. They use iconic Native American symbology in their cities and camps. They're not monsters, either.
I know I want to pay $6,500 dollars for a laptop with a 5" screen!
Damn, I don't know how this company possibly could have gone out of business with idiots like that. OLEDs aren't *that* great. Take a look at your cell phone and ask yourself if you want that in a monitor. Mine has screen burn in and flickers if I look at it out of the corner of my eye. (Sure, they may have resolved these issues, but they don't look better than, say, an LED TV).
It's been a while since I read that paper. I'll see if I can find my notes on what was wrong with it.
>>Mind you, I would question these results. However, it's because I think there's a sampling error of this particular study rather than a categorical dismissal of the entire field.
I actually work in the social sciences, conducting scientific evaluations of education programs, attempting to assess using statistics if the programs are effective or not at improving student or teacher history content knowledge. I do it legitimately as possible, and *I* wouldn't accept my own results as being scientifically valid. There's just no way to isolate the millions of variables that go into learning and then come to the conclusion "Therefore we conclude (p 0.01) that the program had a positive impact on student history content knowledge".
With other evaluators, it's even more sketchy. I went to the national TAH conference last year and sat in on evaluation workshops all week, with the following gems:
1) Having the experimental group write the test that the experimental group and control group would then take.
2) Only basing "overall content knowledge gains" on post-workshop tests that were then also given to a control group, and not on an annual pre- post-test based on overall American history standards.
3) Having no controls in the program at all, or conducting significantly different evaluation efforts with the controls than the experimental group.
And remember, these were presenters.
But even if you could magically wave a wand and have a perfectly randomized experimental/control setup, where everyone complied with the test-taking (control group teachers that lose the lottery to join the program tend to tell you to go to hell), I'd still not be satisfied that it was the program causing any measured gains, though I would dutifully report the statistical analysis reports back, and demonstrate the differences in gains between the experimental and control groups. There's still too many uncontrolled factors for my tastes. But unless we can lock kids in little cubicles for a year and only do instruction via carefully-controlled prerecorded video (which might raise some ethical concerns) I doubt we'll ever be able to do better than what we're currently doing, which is a lot stats mixed with hand-waving.
>>Dude. Listen to yourself. People who are not white are supposed to identify with game characters who are "less traditionally humanoid"? Whiskey. Tango. Foxtrot.
For heaven's sake, I'd rather identify with an Orc or a Tauren than with a Blood Elf!
>>I don't assume you have any advanced studies in sociology or the like, so why do you assume that you know what they're doing and that they're making things up?
>>Do you honestly think that social scientists just sit at a typewriter (computer nowadays) and make shit up?
Yes. Though they disguise it with stats to make it look scientific, and may even believe it themselves.
You don't need an "advanced degree" in a social science to see the profound methodological errors in their studies. For example, consider the article posted on here that claimed that road rage is derived evolutionarily from territorial behavior protection. Ok, fair enough. Except the article didn't examine the different rates of road rage between men and women, or between cultures, etc. It made a claim, posted some numbers, and said that it had proved the hypothesis without doing, as Feynman said, the necessary checks or legwork needed to really know if their claim was right or not.
>>Now where do the Draenei with blue skin and all the accessories fit in?
Yeah. I was trying to come up with some sort of analogy or joke for the blue skinned people (maybe a Star Trek reference or something), but I got nothing.
I think they identify most with Indian (as in India) or arabic cultures. At least based on their dances. And they do kind of look like the genie from Aladdin.
From TFA: "The study only included visible characters that were clearly human."
Clearly a methodological error if they throw out dark skinned or native American humanoids like drow and orcs simply because they're not "clearly human". Tauren should also count as native American, though they're less traditionally humanoid.
Just a quick survey of my current games I have played this year:
Total War: Empire. I played as French, so I guess I'm a white male. But you can play as an Indian as well, though no Asians or sub-saharan Africans are playable. Native Americans are in the game, but not a playable country (though you can recruit them).
Mass Effect. Pick your own race and gender.
Dynasty Warriors 6: Empires. Pick your own race and gender, though most are going to look like they're Chinese drawn by a Japanese artist.
Halo 3: Who knows what Master Chief is?
Oblivion: Pick your own race and gender.
Fallout 3: Pick your own race (and gender too, I think).
Left4Dead: One white chick, one black guy, two white guys. L4D2 will feature undead black people as the primary enemies (progress?)
TF2: Predominantly white, though there's a black Scottsman and who knows what Pyro is?
HL2: White guy and African-American chick.
CoD4 - Modern Warfare: 5 white guys + one arab guy are the playable characters (IIRC)
WoW: Pick your own gender. As aforementioned, the horde has 2 native American-esque, one white/asian, one afro-Caribbean, and one white-ish race.
Gears of War 2: Main characters are white and Hispanic men. There's also a pacific islander, a white guy, a black guy, a Korean guy, and some other people of indeterminate race. Like in Halo and other games, their dispatcher is a female.
So, all in all, there's a predominant trend towards male characters in action games, but there's quite a bit of flexibility these days in picking race and gender, and there's a fairly widespread mix of ethnicities in games these days.
Yeah, the social "sciences" love to pretend they're scientific, but they really aren't. I think Feynman put it best when he talked about them:
"Because of the success of science, there's a kind of pseudoscience - social science. They don't do scientific research, they don't find any laws, they haven't found anythinig yet. They give you experts that sound sort of scientific, they sit at a typewriter and type something like organic fertilizer is better for you - maybe it's true, maybe it's not true. They haven't proved it... I've realized how hard it is to actually find out something. I know what it means to know something. So when I see how they get their information and see that they haven't done the work necessary..."
Awesome rant, and still true today.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EZcpTTjjXY
SAIC is "secretive"? Uh, ok, sure they do some military work, and a couple floors of their office building have security checkpoints you have to pass through since they work on various classified stuff, but they're hardly secretive. They do a lot of different stuff, and a number of my friends worked their over the years. Hell, when I was working on VR arcade games back in the day, they invited my dad and I over to their complex in La Jolla to try out a new VR racing game they'd developed.
Looking back on that, it's really hard for my brain to associate the word secretive to them. But who knows - maybe Umbrella Corp would develop video games, too.
I can understand his frustration. I've walked-away as well from various clubs. You volunteer hundreds of hours of your time, without pay, and all you hear from the members is complaint-after-complaint-after-complaint.
Yep. Happens in every sort of social network (real life social networks as well as virtual). People have an amazing ability to be ungrateful. I've organized roleplaying conventions with 100 tables going off smoothly, and people bitch. I've spend hundreds of hours working on open source code, and people bitch. Etc., etc.
To be fair, some complaints are valid, so I carefully listen to everything people say. Sometimes they're right (and I'll admit it) and sometimes they're idiots (which I also point out). My skin is tough enough to deal with most of it, except the roleplaying convention stuff -- took way too many hours out of my life for the abuse. Plus I got tired of calling on my 10 closest friends over and over to volunteer because everyone else was too lazy to step up to the fucking plate.
People like the FTEQuake folks have integrated Quake1-3 together, which allows you to play any map from Quake 1 through 3, or to incorporate things like shaders into the Quake 1 experience. It's actually kind of neat. Take a look at the screenshots at http://www.fteqw.com/ - it's all I use nowadays when I play FPSes. I'll play some Gears cooperatively with my friends, but nothing yet has beaten the original quake experience for FPS fun.
The euphoria engine looks pretty interesting. I've been doing some work with motion analysis, and so the work they've done on it really impresses me - apparently you can code animations using it without keyframes or motion capture, which is pretty neat (if it works). The tech demo video is here - http://www.naturalmotion.com/euphoria.htm
My approach isn't stupid in regards to that. Free? That's a "pretty good price", wouldn't YOU say? And, you're also FREE to customize it, & thus, YOUR PERSONALIZED VERSION OF A CUSTOM HOSTS FILE, JUST GOES ALONG WITH YOUR PERSONALIZED SPED UP & SAFER VERSION OF THE INTERNET... &, just as YOU see fit & like, easily. Notepad.exe for instance? My gosh - lol, just "does wonders" here, on this account... lol!
Are you the ghost of Billy Mays?
Your post reads like you'll ask for $20 to show people how THEY TOO CAN SET UP A .HOSTS FILE.
Just saying.
Also, your approach is stupid because I like to use the internet.
Well I don't know where you live but in the part of Canada I live in teachers are very well paid. They start at about $45K and move up quickly and that's for working less than 10 months of the year. And, I have to say this, at the universities I attended the education students weren't considered the brightest lights.
Interesting. I think we might have a differing opinion on what very well paid means.
My roommate in college quit his software engineering job to become a teacher in Anaheim a few years back. He started at around $60k and is now making closer to $70k.
You can look at the pay scales here: http://www.auhsd.k12.ca.us/ourpages/salary/teachers//Teacher%20Salary%20Schedule%2007-08.pdf?rn=4671590
It's more than he was making doing software engineering. He also gets 3 months off per year, guaranteed unemployment during the 3 months off, full health and dental for himself and his wife, and various other amusing perks as the result of teachers' union negotiations. If you factor all of this in, it's worth well over $100k a year. Not bad for a guy who has been teaching for about 4 years, eh?
Teachers in the district still complain about being underpaid though. While, yes, they do provide a valuable service, I personally don't think that they "are underpaid" by any stretch of the imagination.
Most people with decent hearing find TV aisles uncomfortable - it's either too many random TVs putting out the same audio minutely out of synch, or the high-pitched squeal that comes from any CRT being multiplied by a couple dozen. The EMF signals are hardly the most irritating thing that a TV can put out.
As the only person in my family that could hear the squeal from CRTs, believe me when I say I feel sympathetic to the guys who claim they are allergic to Wi-Fi (even though it's probably entirely psychosomatic). When you claim you can sense something that other's can't, "crazy" is the default label you pick up.
Fortunately I was able to demonstrate my superpowers by detecting when a TV was on (but muted) behind closed cabinets, quite reliably.
Wait... you think the Vista UI is broken?
I actually think it's a bit better than XP was.
Oh, you must dislike it because it's different!
Uh, no. I hate it because it's a horribly designed piece of crap. I love giving a tech workshop, saving a file, and then having to either scroll up a couple pages of crap in order to get to the desktop level of the file browser, or to resize the file browser menu in order to reveal the desktop link. In XP, the Desktop and My computer buttons are large, and always easily accessible on the left side of a file browser dialog. Different? Yes. Progress? Hardly. It's much less usable than before.
The windows explorer replaced the address bar with the associated up arrow with the breadcrumbs navigation. Open a folder on the desktop. Now try to go up a level. (What's that? You can't? Ahh, Vista, you joker! You got me again!) Or just try using breadcrumbs from within a long pathname. It doesn't work. By contrast, an up arrow button (shortcut - backspace) always works, and also allows you to quickly move up a number of levels quickly. With breadcrumbs, you have to move your mouse each time. If you don't believe me, go 10 folder levels deep on a laptop and see how long it takes you to up-arrow to My Computer on Vista vs XP using a touchpad. It'll take you about 10 times as long, if not more. We're talking basic functionality here that they broke. And even when used under normal circumstances, it takes longer to mouse to a small breadcrumb than it does to an up-arrow button.
But, okay, yeah. I hate it because it's new. Not because it's a horribly broken, less functional, piece of crap UI.
Jackass.