It's only pathetic that people can't understand the difference between "An apple is good for your diet" and "An apple is bad for your teeth."
Both can be true at the same time. No contradiction, just lousy reporting or lousy reading comprehension.
Perhaps instead of throwing your hands up and whining about science contradicting itself, you could instead make the logical conclusion from those two statements that you should eat an apple now and then and brush your teeth afterward.
I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, since you replied to me but referenced other posts discussing moderation-- but I was not suggesting that moderation was the key. I was simply saying that what people perceieve as conflicting results are often not conflicting at all. In some of my examples, it is a question of quantity making the difference, but I did not suggest that that was the case here.
In this particular case, it is specifically not a moderation issue, it is an issue of a particular genetic susceptibility.
Blame the media's lousy science reporting or poor reading comprehension skills, but what people see as conflicting results are often nothing of the kind, they just miss the details.
I saw one study that said a single cup of coffee a day was good for athletic training, and another that said that the more coffee you drink, the lower the risk of heart disease.
This study says that more than four cups of coffee a day are bad for you if you have a particular gene.
None of these things are contradictory-- just like how a glass of wine may be beneficial, but 10 glasses may cause liver disease. Or how some types of cholesterol are good, but others are bad.
I'm in complete agreement that the *tone* is the difference. That was my entire point-- the players of both games carry out nearly identical acts of violence (like firing a huge missile at eachother) yet we consider one violent because it shows the death graphically, and the other nonviolent because it hides the consequences.
Your example of the railgun is exactly what I was talking about in my first posts-- in one game, you can shoot a guy and he gibs all over the place. In the other game, you can shoot a guy, and he's charred, blown into the air, and tumbles back to the ground-- but it's cartoony, and that somehow changes our perception of the fact that in both instances, you shot somebody with a considerable weapon.
Note: I'm not advocating censorship either-- in fact, I think these sorts of arbitrary distinctions are what's so goofy about it. Like why Halo gets an "M" rating, but Baldur's Gate gets the lesser "T" even though both consist entirely of you mowing down the bad guys. Using Mario Kart as an example exaggerates this, but the fact remains that these distinctions are often arbitrary and pointless.
The rating system:
E: Shooting people is fine, as long as the resulting 40' blast radius doesn't actually kill them and they don't bleed. T: Shooting and stabbing people is okay, as long as they don't bleed. M: Shooting and bleeding are fine.
The only difference between the death/respawn in an FPS and the miraculous survival after getting shoved into lava or being crushed flat by another driver is that one of them actually calls the intervening period prior to your resurrection "death." The effect is the same. Would quake cease to be violent if instead of calling it dying, you fell over and were then towed back to an upright position by a little dude in a cloud?
I think it's the gore, not the actual violence, that makes us think the game is less violent.
This whole line of thinking makes me want a quake mod with mario kart weapons. The blue shell, in particular, would be spectacular.
Not that this justifies her horrible mistreatment at the hands of the police and government, but she should have stopped. It's not any more optional for cyclists than it is for cars. Clearly, the punishment did not fit the crime, but she deserves a ticket every time she blows a stop sign.
I'm a cyclist. I stop. Drivers (myself included) hate cyclists because so many don't obey the rules.
games like Mariocart, Super Monkey Ball and Nintendogs
I'll give you the last two, but what is it about mario kart's guided missiles, fireballs, running over and crushing your shrunken enemies, and generally dealing death and destruction to those all around you that somehow makes it not the same as quake?
If you don't want to actually play the game, why pretend to be a player?
I think that the problem is that a lot of people want to play a game that doesn't exist. One that, unlike real life, lets them go on huge adventurous quests without having to spend a decade to learn how to use a sword or actually find a place with castles and dragons to do it.
Some people want a game that is a challenge, that requires hard work and gradually accumulated wealth, power, and skill. Other people want escapist entertainment that they can sit down and enjoy, without a years' work to reach the sort of imaginary, powerful, hero character they want to pretend to be.
There is validity to both viewpoints, but there isn't much in the way of games (there are a few) for the folk who don't want the grind.
According to this survey, reading a printed map held up to the steering wheel was less dangerous than using the in-dash GPS unit.
That is definitely surprising, but I suppose perhaps the greater distraction of moving pictures outweighs the loss of control from keeping your hands on the map? Who knows?
I would like to see more in-depth results, particularly on US units that can't be twiddled while moving. I'm after safety first, but I had always thought using a GPS would be less dangerous than a map to help me find my way. On the plus side, maps are cheap.
A 2006 model car (note that I said car, not masquerading truck) will get better mileage, comfort and performance than it's 1996 equivalent. Again, how does that lower the standard of living?
If only that were true!! Sadly, vehicle fuel economy seems headed in the wrong direction. Take the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla:
Does this look like we're moving in the right direction? This year's Civic Hybrid costs significantly more and uses more gas than a car from 1986. And the Corolla looks pretty stagnant, although it has improved slightly.
I'm all for the hybrids, but because we keep making the cars bigger and more powerful year after year, we're not getting anywhere on economy.
This is a good point. The segway may not be popular or make much sense to anyone, but it's basically a cheaper, simpler version of the tech in the wheelchair. I wouldn't be surprised if it was mostly off-the-shelf, considering that the wheelchair came first-- and *any* additional volume of sales he gets will help him make the wheelchair more inexpensive through economies of scale.
I wonder if he's sold more segways than wheelchairs? I have at least seen a handful of segways out and about, but I've yet to see one of the wheelchairs.
Wow, the AU prices are significantly higher. I buy my CF bulbs in five-packs for $12 US. I have dozens, and in a decade, I've only had two burn out. The oldest of them have survived six moves.
They're way beyond break-even for me-- every one of those I install saves me a LOT of money over their lifetimes.
If they only last 1000 hours for you, they need to cost less than $3.84 each at $.08/kwh to break even. Since mine cost $2.40 each, I'm breaking even well under 1000 hours. Everything from then on is gravy. You might see about finding some cheaper ones-- surely they're not THAT much more expensive everywhere, are they?
It's clear they're getting large, as given by the wide variety of anecdotes in the comments. My experience is opposite yours:
-Ordered a video card, fan died after about two months. Despite being outside the 30-day window, newegg handled the RMA with no questions asked, and shipped me a better card because they were out of the one that needed replacing.
-Ordered another video card, design or firmware bug prevented it from working properly with component output. Newegg swapped for a similar but more expensive card from another manufacturer without charging me the difference.
-Computer case banged up in either packing or shipping was immediately replaced, no questions asked.
They've handled everything above and beyond what I'd expect-- I was a little surprised to see the trouble people are having. But I suppose it's what you get when any company gets large enough. It's impossible to maintain identical standards when there's hundreds of people handling the RMAs.
Since Catholics consider suicide "unforgivable," which I assume means the bouncer will toss you from the Pearly Gates, do they get a free pass on this?
I'm not sure what turning-speed limit you're referring to. By its nature, a mouse-kb adapter setup emulating a controller that has a max turn speed is going to have a maximum turn speed-- but Halo's sensitivity (this directly changes turning speed) defaults to 2 and is adjustable up to 10. At 10, it's not quite as twitchy-fast as I prefer in PC FPSes, but it's close enough that I don't care.
I tried playing with the controller at sensitivity 10, and it was ridiculously fast for use with a controller-- although I'm sure someone with better fingers than mine will post pointing out that they have no problem with it. I have a clear turn-speed advantage over anybody I've played.
I'm lazy, although I'm curious. You have a link to the controller pinout you use for this? Does a setup like that allow you to adjust the sensitivity on the fly via the keyboard? Can I remap the keys without resoldering?
I got one of those kb/m adapter thingies, and they work surprisingly well. It's about 90% as good as the "real thing" in Halo 2. I have the "Max Shooter," although the "Smartjoy Frag" is pretty common, too.
I'd still rather play FPSes on the PC. Better graphics, better controls. It's a crying shame there's no way to natively connect a keyboard and mouse for gaming on the 360-- it would have been spectacular to have everybody choose the controllers they want. I have nothing against playing with the controller-- I just prefer the mouse and keyboard.
Resistive electric heat is, as you say, pretty much interchangeable with heat produced by anything else running on electricity in your house-- as long as you're in the season where you heat the house.
An electric heat pump, however, can move 3 or 4 watts of heat into the house for each watt of energy consumed. Much more efficient than incandescent lights or your PC for warming up the house.
That's just a nitpick, though, and he probably meant resistive heating. The real clincher, as you point out, is that it only works this way when you're having to heat your house. You might as well reduce the amount of waste heat you produce anyway, since you're going to have to deal with it in the summer if you're trying to save energy. On the other hand, making 200W worth of heat by doing useful computations during the winter is a better use of the power than warming up the element in your resistive heater.
They'll pay a couple hundred bucks to whoever recycles the pack, as an incentive for owners, mechanics, and junkyards to do so. It's like the bottle deposit some states have, only much, much larger.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the dose that matters here, it's whether or not you have a particular gene that slows the metabolism of caffeine.
For folks with the gene, even two cups was harmful. For those without, the more the merrier. Please read more carefully.
Just making sure. Intent in internet posts can be notoriously hard to decipher sometimes.
Science must be even harder to decipher, given the difficulty people seem to be having.
It's only pathetic that people can't understand the difference between "An apple is good for your diet" and "An apple is bad for your teeth."
Both can be true at the same time. No contradiction, just lousy reporting or lousy reading comprehension.
Perhaps instead of throwing your hands up and whining about science contradicting itself, you could instead make the logical conclusion from those two statements that you should eat an apple now and then and brush your teeth afterward.
I can't tell if you're agreeing with me or disagreeing with me, since you replied to me but referenced other posts discussing moderation-- but I was not suggesting that moderation was the key. I was simply saying that what people perceieve as conflicting results are often not conflicting at all. In some of my examples, it is a question of quantity making the difference, but I did not suggest that that was the case here.
In this particular case, it is specifically not a moderation issue, it is an issue of a particular genetic susceptibility.
Blame the media's lousy science reporting or poor reading comprehension skills, but what people see as conflicting results are often nothing of the kind, they just miss the details.
I saw one study that said a single cup of coffee a day was good for athletic training, and another that said that the more coffee you drink, the lower the risk of heart disease.
This study says that more than four cups of coffee a day are bad for you if you have a particular gene.
None of these things are contradictory-- just like how a glass of wine may be beneficial, but 10 glasses may cause liver disease. Or how some types of cholesterol are good, but others are bad.
I'm in complete agreement that the *tone* is the difference. That was my entire point-- the players of both games carry out nearly identical acts of violence (like firing a huge missile at eachother) yet we consider one violent because it shows the death graphically, and the other nonviolent because it hides the consequences.
Your example of the railgun is exactly what I was talking about in my first posts-- in one game, you can shoot a guy and he gibs all over the place. In the other game, you can shoot a guy, and he's charred, blown into the air, and tumbles back to the ground-- but it's cartoony, and that somehow changes our perception of the fact that in both instances, you shot somebody with a considerable weapon.
Note: I'm not advocating censorship either-- in fact, I think these sorts of arbitrary distinctions are what's so goofy about it. Like why Halo gets an "M" rating, but Baldur's Gate gets the lesser "T" even though both consist entirely of you mowing down the bad guys. Using Mario Kart as an example exaggerates this, but the fact remains that these distinctions are often arbitrary and pointless.
The rating system:
E: Shooting people is fine, as long as the resulting 40' blast radius doesn't actually kill them and they don't bleed.
T: Shooting and stabbing people is okay, as long as they don't bleed.
M: Shooting and bleeding are fine.
Unless the voice acting ruins the mood, which happens too often...
"I see the president has equipped his daughter with ballistics!"
The only difference between the death/respawn in an FPS and the miraculous survival after getting shoved into lava or being crushed flat by another driver is that one of them actually calls the intervening period prior to your resurrection "death." The effect is the same. Would quake cease to be violent if instead of calling it dying, you fell over and were then towed back to an upright position by a little dude in a cloud?
I think it's the gore, not the actual violence, that makes us think the game is less violent.
This whole line of thinking makes me want a quake mod with mario kart weapons. The blue shell, in particular, would be spectacular.
Not that this justifies her horrible mistreatment at the hands of the police and government, but she should have stopped. It's not any more optional for cyclists than it is for cars. Clearly, the punishment did not fit the crime, but she deserves a ticket every time she blows a stop sign.
I'm a cyclist. I stop. Drivers (myself included) hate cyclists because so many don't obey the rules.
games like Mariocart, Super Monkey Ball and Nintendogs
I'll give you the last two, but what is it about mario kart's guided missiles, fireballs, running over and crushing your shrunken enemies, and generally dealing death and destruction to those all around you that somehow makes it not the same as quake?
Is it just the lack of gibs?
If you don't want to actually play the game, why pretend to be a player?
I think that the problem is that a lot of people want to play a game that doesn't exist. One that, unlike real life, lets them go on huge adventurous quests without having to spend a decade to learn how to use a sword or actually find a place with castles and dragons to do it.
Some people want a game that is a challenge, that requires hard work and gradually accumulated wealth, power, and skill. Other people want escapist entertainment that they can sit down and enjoy, without a years' work to reach the sort of imaginary, powerful, hero character they want to pretend to be.
There is validity to both viewpoints, but there isn't much in the way of games (there are a few) for the folk who don't want the grind.
Agreed-- I'd definitely like to see results for a system that wasn't adjusted while in use.
According to this survey, reading a printed map held up to the steering wheel was less dangerous than using the in-dash GPS unit.
That is definitely surprising, but I suppose perhaps the greater distraction of moving pictures outweighs the loss of control from keeping your hands on the map? Who knows?
I would like to see more in-depth results, particularly on US units that can't be twiddled while moving. I'm after safety first, but I had always thought using a GPS would be less dangerous than a map to help me find my way. On the plus side, maps are cheap.
Agreed-- my not-even-remotely-high-end digicam takes 2.5MB photos in jpeg and ~15MB photos in tiff. Seems like a fair estimate.
A 2006 model car (note that I said car, not masquerading truck) will get better mileage, comfort and performance than it's 1996 equivalent. Again, how does that lower the standard of living?
If only that were true!! Sadly, vehicle fuel economy seems headed in the wrong direction. Take the Honda Civic and Toyota Corolla:
1986 Civic HF Manual: 52/57mpg (non-hybrid)
1996 Civic HX Manual: 39/45mpg (non-hybrid)
2006 Civic Manual: 30/38mpg (non-hybrid)
2006 Civic Hybrid: 49/51mpg (hybrid!!)
1986 Corolla Manual: 31/37mpg
1996 Corolla Manual: 31/35mpg
2006 Corolla Manual: 32/41mpg
Does this look like we're moving in the right direction? This year's Civic Hybrid costs significantly more and uses more gas than a car from 1986. And the Corolla looks pretty stagnant, although it has improved slightly.
I'm all for the hybrids, but because we keep making the cars bigger and more powerful year after year, we're not getting anywhere on economy.
This is a good point. The segway may not be popular or make much sense to anyone, but it's basically a cheaper, simpler version of the tech in the wheelchair. I wouldn't be surprised if it was mostly off-the-shelf, considering that the wheelchair came first-- and *any* additional volume of sales he gets will help him make the wheelchair more inexpensive through economies of scale.
I wonder if he's sold more segways than wheelchairs? I have at least seen a handful of segways out and about, but I've yet to see one of the wheelchairs.
Wow, the AU prices are significantly higher. I buy my CF bulbs in five-packs for $12 US. I have dozens, and in a decade, I've only had two burn out. The oldest of them have survived six moves.
They're way beyond break-even for me-- every one of those I install saves me a LOT of money over their lifetimes.
If they only last 1000 hours for you, they need to cost less than $3.84 each at $.08/kwh to break even. Since mine cost $2.40 each, I'm breaking even well under 1000 hours. Everything from then on is gravy. You might see about finding some cheaper ones-- surely they're not THAT much more expensive everywhere, are they?
It's clear they're getting large, as given by the wide variety of anecdotes in the comments. My experience is opposite yours:
-Ordered a video card, fan died after about two months. Despite being outside the 30-day window, newegg handled the RMA with no questions asked, and shipped me a better card because they were out of the one that needed replacing.
-Ordered another video card, design or firmware bug prevented it from working properly with component output. Newegg swapped for a similar but more expensive card from another manufacturer without charging me the difference.
-Computer case banged up in either packing or shipping was immediately replaced, no questions asked.
They've handled everything above and beyond what I'd expect-- I was a little surprised to see the trouble people are having. But I suppose it's what you get when any company gets large enough. It's impossible to maintain identical standards when there's hundreds of people handling the RMAs.
Since Catholics consider suicide "unforgivable," which I assume means the bouncer will toss you from the Pearly Gates, do they get a free pass on this?
I'm not sure what turning-speed limit you're referring to. By its nature, a mouse-kb adapter setup emulating a controller that has a max turn speed is going to have a maximum turn speed-- but Halo's sensitivity (this directly changes turning speed) defaults to 2 and is adjustable up to 10. At 10, it's not quite as twitchy-fast as I prefer in PC FPSes, but it's close enough that I don't care.
I tried playing with the controller at sensitivity 10, and it was ridiculously fast for use with a controller-- although I'm sure someone with better fingers than mine will post pointing out that they have no problem with it. I have a clear turn-speed advantage over anybody I've played.
I'm lazy, although I'm curious. You have a link to the controller pinout you use for this? Does a setup like that allow you to adjust the sensitivity on the fly via the keyboard? Can I remap the keys without resoldering?
I got one of those kb/m adapter thingies, and they work surprisingly well. It's about 90% as good as the "real thing" in Halo 2. I have the "Max Shooter," although the "Smartjoy Frag" is pretty common, too.
I'd still rather play FPSes on the PC. Better graphics, better controls. It's a crying shame there's no way to natively connect a keyboard and mouse for gaming on the 360-- it would have been spectacular to have everybody choose the controllers they want. I have nothing against playing with the controller-- I just prefer the mouse and keyboard.
Haven't been to Home Depot in a while, but Lowes carries the 60w-equivalent CF bulbs in 5-packs for $12 at the store, or about $2.40 each.
I have only had one CF bulb burn out since 1996. Toss in the power savings, and it's an easy choice.
Ahem. Engineer here. (it's fun to be pompous!)
Resistive electric heat is, as you say, pretty much interchangeable with heat produced by anything else running on electricity in your house-- as long as you're in the season where you heat the house.
An electric heat pump, however, can move 3 or 4 watts of heat into the house for each watt of energy consumed. Much more efficient than incandescent lights or your PC for warming up the house.
That's just a nitpick, though, and he probably meant resistive heating. The real clincher, as you point out, is that it only works this way when you're having to heat your house. You might as well reduce the amount of waste heat you produce anyway, since you're going to have to deal with it in the summer if you're trying to save energy. On the other hand, making 200W worth of heat by doing useful computations during the winter is a better use of the power than warming up the element in your resistive heater.
They'll pay a couple hundred bucks to whoever recycles the pack, as an incentive for owners, mechanics, and junkyards to do so. It's like the bottle deposit some states have, only much, much larger.