TV has been around for quite some time now. And violence on TV has been around for almost as long (somewhere during the 70's, maybe even earlier). Society did become more violent during the 70's. Probably not -only- because of TV, but maybe it participated. Now, as you say, violent videogames (which have been around for almost 20 years now) have not demonstrably increased violence. Maybe because TV is already promoting violence, maybe because videogames are not as effective a promoting violent rolemodels, maybe something else ??
Its always about video games. Video games this, video games that. But what about TV?
I have kids, and honestly, the content of most young programs are just shocking, when you think twice about it. They have removed all sexual innuendo because that would make fundamentalist Christians choke on their breakfast, but the thing is full of ninjas slicing one another with blades of all sort, beating up, etc. Violence is always the solution to pretty much every problem thrown at the characters.
And if we just consider Hollywood production and its love affair with gun and explosions...
But then, it must be the video games fault. Mmmkay.
And to further my anecdotal experience, contrarily to all people that say that you need "good gear" to hear the difference. I found that on the contrary, an excellent source would render ok-ish on bad gear, while a bad source will just vomit mashed potato through the speakers.
I cannot hear the flaws of high bitrate MP3. Listening to them on decent (not the best, but not some crap computer speakers) gear reveals no defect to me (except for the Xing encoder, that has so many defects that it is painful).
However, the difference between that perfectly adequate MP3 and a real 48kHZ master is stunning. The clarity is just another world. Ironically, I found that the difference is even more marked in a noisy environment, where the music competes with background noise. It is more or less impossible to identify the overtones on the MP3 in such environment, while they remain very audible with the uncompressed format.
I am not an expert, certainly not a superhuman (I have very average scores on blind tests), but to me the difference is like a nose in the middle of the face, even though the MP3s are "plenty enough" quality, already.
Not all consumer are perfectly informed and rational agents. Actually, a very slim minority is.
In practice, decent reviews are seldom, as most magazines are bed and toothbrush with the game editors. In practice, people do things that harm themselves in the long run to get instant gratification. That includes doing drugs at the extreme, but spending money on a videogame that looks cool to discover later that it is crippled by DRMs is pretty common.
That being said, I stopped buying DRM games a long time ago, after Starforce destroyed my computer, more or less.
I would certainly trust a robot to serve me a beer. I'm sure it can be very efficient at it. I would still prefer to have a bartender.
For the same reasons, an elderly that already see very little human interactions, being taken care by a robot. That is depressing solitude in a tin can.
A balanced budget is -not- a sound economic policy. Your budget must have a deficit approximately equal to growth rate. For some retarded reason, this is the way money is created (fed buys treasury bonds, emit money as a result), and available money needs to be commensurate with the size of the economy.
Now the trick is that bonds have an interest rate. Hu ho. Creating money costs money. The second trick is that growth rate is notoriously difficult to predict accurately, in particular because growth rate strongly depends on public spending. Hence it is somewhat easy to "overestimate" the deficit that should be dialed in to result in best economic output (and it could be argued that being conservative would have direr economic results that overspending, by shrinking the economy today instead of creating a potential problem later, maybe never). Anyway, both issues result in permanent deficit increase, even in % of GDP, which is bad, but is somewhat the result of how "the system" works, independently of politicians ideas.
The study defuses the idea that "foreign student that graduate from US universities are brighter". The (obvious) conclusion is nop, they are not.
Now, what a surprise. People that go to the same school are in average the same level of skills. Unbelievable.
H1B are not distributed to students though. They are distributed to professionals. Many of whom have graduated from a foreign university. Some of whom have exclusive skill sets that are not taught at US universities. Not to shock you, but there are a substantial number of universities that perform better at forming students than US ones -at least on a particular domain (don't pull a Shangai report on me, there are also so many methodology biases in this thing that I'm not even sure what it measures, although it does measure something at which US universities are better. Besides, even if top tier universities are very good indeed, not all US universities are top tier.)
So my opinion here is that the study wanted to show something, found a bias that result in the something.
Responding to your description of "stopping in a long downhill from 80mph using the handbrake". This is a dangerous practice and you should refrain from encouraging others to do it.
Lift off over steer is what's going to provoke a spin. If you turn the wheel while applying rear brakes only, the rear wheel can lock very quickly and you end up doing a full spin. At high speed, good chances you'll end up on the roof. In a real life setting, the road is not perfectly straight and applying the handbrake just enough to not lock the rear wheels and provoke over steer is difficult, and failure catastrophic.
Pulling the handbrake when moving is dangerous. It applies brakes only to the rear wheel and can easily result in a spin if you are not a pro-driver (almost nobody is). This is bad advice that can kill people.
Besides, you can stop your car with the handbrake when the engine is not pulling. But the engine can easily pull the car from a stop when the handbrake is fully pulled. Take your conclusions on the case at hand.
I NEED my work to be attributed to me, for prestige and ego, but most importantly because my paycheck and ability to put food in my children's plate depends on it.
I certainly do not want somebody to change the paper I carefully crafted to be scientifically accurate, adding BS to it, making it a pile of crap, and then attribute this to ME. That would be detrimental to my career and reputation.
If you want to write BS, make it in your own paper where you will be responsible for it, not in mine. Feel free to cite my work when extending it (even if your interpretation of the work is wrong, interested people can refer to the ORIGINAL material, w/o the BS, to judge), but don't modify it.
Society doesn't value lying, cheating and deceptive practices for political carriers. At least not openly. Be careful of what you want. It's not because it's all commonplace behind the scene, that you want it to become the new normal, as it will just make it another grade worse.
Indeed, scientific progress continues, and important discoveries are made. But none where "groundbreaking" in the sense that they completely changed scientific paradigm or the way we live. Refined it, improved it, sure. Completely changed it, not really. I'm talking about something like inventing chemistry, integral calculus, genetics (which might well be the latest one in that list). Before chemistry was invented, we were struggling in subsitance agriculture, after, we run surplus with 2% of the population working the plow. That is groundbreaking. The science I do improves simulation speed by 50%, its important, but its a farcry from putting food on the plate of everybody.
The most significant innovation in the last 3 decades is the Internet. In itself, it is changing the way we relate to information, but it is not revolutionary in terms of science, it is the consequence of IT, which derives from work on information theory in the 30's, 40's; that was groundbreaking science to me, since then, we improve on it. The latest groundbreaking thing is DNA, we are still harvesting the fruits of it.
Now, I have difficulties seeing some other field of science that will return immense benefits like these discoveries have. However, one must remember that it is the nature of groundbreaking discoveries to open new fields that have not been foreseen. I don't see it coming from physics, chemistry or information theory. It may be that there are gamechanging discoveries to be made in genetics and life science.
On top of that, which is very true, the US is very well known to be a "brain sink", taking the brightest of all over the world, whom have been educated at (foreign) taxpayers' expense.
H1B is not free (application is quite expensive actually), and the employer doesn't get to set the salary as pleases him. Usually, immigration will return a "ok, but a 20% more than proposed". I definitely don't think that applying to a position and saying the recruiter that you'll need a H visa (and all the associated cost) helps your case.
Sometime, local workforce is not available without retraining. Now since everybody bright in the US gets a law or MD degree, there is a shortage of bright IT/tech people that needs to be filled with foreigners. If you remove H1B, you'll have to ease on the green card, but I'm not sure it's the intended purpose ?
You can play almost everything from last year with quality visuals with an old CPU teamed with a new GPU. But here are the tricks: * You need at least 2GB of memory. If you don't have this, don't even try. * The CPU must be dual-code, at least. Single core CPU don't work anymore (tried both on the same machine, difference is night and day, it just happened that I could access a compatible dual-core CPU for free, otherwise it would have been impractical). If the CPU is not dual core, it does prevent decent performance, even with a top notch GPU. * Upgrade the HDD to SSD. The older HD that comes with your 10 y/o rig will slow everything down. This is the second most beneficial upgrade beside the video card.
You can still get syphilis. It does not kill you if you receive proper treatment in time, but it makes silent damages for years before you know you have it and by then it is often too late.
Or the contrary, the lower price point will trick people (which are not perfectly informed and rational, and therefore make choices that go against their own interest -all the time- ), and the lack of safety features will become pervasive in the industry because if you do things right, you are not cost effective (and even if you remain profitable, you eventually get bought by some other company that is more profitable and can cash you out).
Unions are like communism, it sounds good in theory but is impossible to get it to work in practice. I used to be deputy FOC of a print union so I do have some background with them.
Disclaimer
The above comment is bollox.
It is bollox, indeed. The particular implementation in the us seems defective, it does work very well in many other places (unlike communism, see).
Lending money to a company that is already bankrupt takes a risk premium. According to Greece bonds interest rates, a 8% premium for high risk bankrupt assets is not a large premium. Beside, many bad assets have been bought from AIG by the treasury, assets that had no real value, but were still paid for so that AIG doesn't go under mechanically. These people should just STFU.
You are talking about -military- precision shooting. Indeed, for military purpose, you want an heavy supersonic bullet that can pierce through armors and have an excellent precision at very long range.
I'm talking about pistol/rifle shooting in Pentathlon or Olympics style range shooting, that mostly uses airguns (not all categories, but most). Distance is lower than military usage, but its just as challenging and fun, without presenting all the hazards associated with widespread availability of military grade weaponry.
Yeah, like cars serve no purpose and having a handgun is a necessity of modern life... So you see, a useless entertainment cause 1/3 of the most useful piece of machinery invented in the last 100 years, and that's just making it ok?
" people who would use guns to kill them, would not think twice about using an illegally obtained gun "
Have you ever though were illegally obtained guns come from ? Hint, they have been legally purchased at some point, and then stolen from law abiding citizens to be used against said law abiding citizens. If guns are generally hard to procure, they are hard to procure illegally too. Not impossible, but you don't want to make it impossible, impractical is enough.
Slashdot Mirror
TV has been around for quite some time now. And violence on TV has been around for almost as long (somewhere during the 70's, maybe even earlier). Society did become more violent during the 70's. Probably not -only- because of TV, but maybe it participated. Now, as you say, violent videogames (which have been around for almost 20 years now) have not demonstrably increased violence. Maybe because TV is already promoting violence, maybe because videogames are not as effective a promoting violent rolemodels, maybe something else ??
Its always about video games. Video games this, video games that. But what about TV?
I have kids, and honestly, the content of most young programs are just shocking, when you think twice about it. They have removed all sexual innuendo because that would make fundamentalist Christians choke on their breakfast, but the thing is full of ninjas slicing one another with blades of all sort, beating up, etc. Violence is always the solution to pretty much every problem thrown at the characters.
And if we just consider Hollywood production and its love affair with gun and explosions...
But then, it must be the video games fault. Mmmkay.
And to further my anecdotal experience, contrarily to all people that say that you need "good gear" to hear the difference. I found that on the contrary, an excellent source would render ok-ish on bad gear, while a bad source will just vomit mashed potato through the speakers.
I cannot hear the flaws of high bitrate MP3. Listening to them on decent (not the best, but not some crap computer speakers) gear reveals no defect to me (except for the Xing encoder, that has so many defects that it is painful).
However, the difference between that perfectly adequate MP3 and a real 48kHZ master is stunning. The clarity is just another world. Ironically, I found that the difference is even more marked in a noisy environment, where the music competes with background noise. It is more or less impossible to identify the overtones on the MP3 in such environment, while they remain very audible with the uncompressed format.
I am not an expert, certainly not a superhuman (I have very average scores on blind tests), but to me the difference is like a nose in the middle of the face, even though the MP3s are "plenty enough" quality, already.
Not all consumer are perfectly informed and rational agents. Actually, a very slim minority is.
In practice, decent reviews are seldom, as most magazines are bed and toothbrush with the game editors.
In practice, people do things that harm themselves in the long run to get instant gratification. That includes doing drugs at the extreme, but spending money on a videogame that looks cool to discover later that it is crippled by DRMs is pretty common.
That being said, I stopped buying DRM games a long time ago, after Starforce destroyed my computer, more or less.
I would certainly trust a robot to serve me a beer. I'm sure it can be very efficient at it. I would still prefer to have a bartender.
For the same reasons, an elderly that already see very little human interactions, being taken care by a robot. That is depressing solitude in a tin can.
A balanced budget is -not- a sound economic policy. Your budget must have a deficit approximately equal to growth rate. For some retarded reason, this is the way money is created (fed buys treasury bonds, emit money as a result), and available money needs to be commensurate with the size of the economy.
Now the trick is that bonds have an interest rate. Hu ho. Creating money costs money. The second trick is that growth rate is notoriously difficult to predict accurately, in particular because growth rate strongly depends on public spending. Hence it is somewhat easy to "overestimate" the deficit that should be dialed in to result in best economic output (and it could be argued that being conservative would have direr economic results that overspending, by shrinking the economy today instead of creating a potential problem later, maybe never). Anyway, both issues result in permanent deficit increase, even in % of GDP, which is bad, but is somewhat the result of how "the system" works, independently of politicians ideas.
The study defuses the idea that "foreign student that graduate from US universities are brighter". The (obvious) conclusion is nop, they are not.
Now, what a surprise. People that go to the same school are in average the same level of skills. Unbelievable.
H1B are not distributed to students though. They are distributed to professionals. Many of whom have graduated from a foreign university. Some of whom have exclusive skill sets that are not taught at US universities. Not to shock you, but there are a substantial number of universities that perform better at forming students than US ones -at least on a particular domain (don't pull a Shangai report on me, there are also so many methodology biases in this thing that I'm not even sure what it measures, although it does measure something at which US universities are better. Besides, even if top tier universities are very good indeed, not all US universities are top tier.)
So my opinion here is that the study wanted to show something, found a bias that result in the something.
You should enjoy your snork of plutonium, it has million years half life should be just safe right ?
Responding to your description of "stopping in a long downhill from 80mph using the handbrake". This is a dangerous practice and you should refrain from encouraging others to do it.
Lift off over steer is what's going to provoke a spin. If you turn the wheel while applying rear brakes only, the rear wheel can lock very quickly and you end up doing a full spin. At high speed, good chances you'll end up on the roof. In a real life setting, the road is not perfectly straight and applying the handbrake just enough to not lock the rear wheels and provoke over steer is difficult, and failure catastrophic.
Pulling the handbrake when moving is dangerous. It applies brakes only to the rear wheel and can easily result in a spin if you are not a pro-driver (almost nobody is). This is bad advice that can kill people.
Besides, you can stop your car with the handbrake when the engine is not pulling. But the engine can easily pull the car from a stop when the handbrake is fully pulled. Take your conclusions on the case at hand.
I NEED my work to be attributed to me, for prestige and ego, but most importantly because my paycheck and ability to put food in my children's plate depends on it.
I certainly do not want somebody to change the paper I carefully crafted to be scientifically accurate, adding BS to it, making it a pile of crap, and then attribute this to ME. That would be detrimental to my career and reputation.
If you want to write BS, make it in your own paper where you will be responsible for it, not in mine. Feel free to cite my work when extending it (even if your interpretation of the work is wrong, interested people can refer to the ORIGINAL material, w/o the BS, to judge), but don't modify it.
Society doesn't value lying, cheating and deceptive practices for political carriers. At least not openly. Be careful of what you want. It's not because it's all commonplace behind the scene, that you want it to become the new normal, as it will just make it another grade worse.
Well, yes and no.
Indeed, scientific progress continues, and important discoveries are made. But none where "groundbreaking" in the sense that they completely changed scientific paradigm or the way we live. Refined it, improved it, sure. Completely changed it, not really. I'm talking about something like inventing chemistry, integral calculus, genetics (which might well be the latest one in that list). Before chemistry was invented, we were struggling in subsitance agriculture, after, we run surplus with 2% of the population working the plow. That is groundbreaking. The science I do improves simulation speed by 50%, its important, but its a farcry from putting food on the plate of everybody.
The most significant innovation in the last 3 decades is the Internet. In itself, it is changing the way we relate to information, but it is not revolutionary in terms of science, it is the consequence of IT, which derives from work on information theory in the 30's, 40's; that was groundbreaking science to me, since then, we improve on it. The latest groundbreaking thing is DNA, we are still harvesting the fruits of it.
Now, I have difficulties seeing some other field of science that will return immense benefits like these discoveries have. However, one must remember that it is the nature of groundbreaking discoveries to open new fields that have not been foreseen. I don't see it coming from physics, chemistry or information theory. It may be that there are gamechanging discoveries to be made in genetics and life science.
On top of that, which is very true, the US is very well known to be a "brain sink", taking the brightest of all over the world, whom have been educated at (foreign) taxpayers' expense.
H1B is not free (application is quite expensive actually), and the employer doesn't get to set the salary as pleases him. Usually, immigration will return a "ok, but a 20% more than proposed". I definitely don't think that applying to a position and saying the recruiter that you'll need a H visa (and all the associated cost) helps your case.
Sometime, local workforce is not available without retraining. Now since everybody bright in the US gets a law or MD degree, there is a shortage of bright IT/tech people that needs to be filled with foreigners. If you remove H1B, you'll have to ease on the green card, but I'm not sure it's the intended purpose ?
You can play almost everything from last year with quality visuals with an old CPU teamed with a new GPU. But here are the tricks:
* You need at least 2GB of memory. If you don't have this, don't even try.
* The CPU must be dual-code, at least. Single core CPU don't work anymore (tried both on the same machine, difference is night and day, it just happened that I could access a compatible dual-core CPU for free, otherwise it would have been impractical). If the CPU is not dual core, it does prevent decent performance, even with a top notch GPU.
* Upgrade the HDD to SSD. The older HD that comes with your 10 y/o rig will slow everything down. This is the second most beneficial upgrade beside the video card.
HPV gives cancer, it can certainly kill you.
You can still get syphilis. It does not kill you if you receive proper treatment in time, but it makes silent damages for years before you know you have it and by then it is often too late.
Or the contrary, the lower price point will trick people (which are not perfectly informed and rational, and therefore make choices that go against their own interest -all the time- ), and the lack of safety features will become pervasive in the industry because if you do things right, you are not cost effective (and even if you remain profitable, you eventually get bought by some other company that is more profitable and can cash you out).
Unions are like communism, it sounds good in theory but is impossible to get it to work in practice. I used to be deputy FOC of a print union so I do have some background with them.
Disclaimer
The above comment is bollox.
It is bollox, indeed. The particular implementation in the us seems defective, it does work very well in many other places (unlike communism, see).
Lending money to a company that is already bankrupt takes a risk premium. According to Greece bonds interest rates, a 8% premium for high risk bankrupt assets is not a large premium.
Beside, many bad assets have been bought from AIG by the treasury, assets that had no real value, but were still paid for so that AIG doesn't go under mechanically. These people should just STFU.
You are talking about -military- precision shooting. Indeed, for military purpose, you want an heavy supersonic bullet that can pierce through armors and have an excellent precision at very long range.
I'm talking about pistol/rifle shooting in Pentathlon or Olympics style range shooting, that mostly uses airguns (not all categories, but most). Distance is lower than military usage, but its just as challenging and fun, without presenting all the hazards associated with widespread availability of military grade weaponry.
Yeah, like cars serve no purpose and having a handgun is a necessity of modern life... So you see, a useless entertainment cause 1/3 of the most useful piece of machinery invented in the last 100 years, and that's just making it ok?
" people who would use guns to kill them, would not think twice about using an illegally obtained gun "
Have you ever though were illegally obtained guns come from ? Hint, they have been legally purchased at some point, and then stolen from law abiding citizens to be used against said law abiding citizens. If guns are generally hard to procure, they are hard to procure illegally too. Not impossible, but you don't want to make it impossible, impractical is enough.