20 million is a bit low. You have to consider: what if my life is completely ruined by a doctor's bumbling error? First of all, in the damages phase, you're not going to get anything near what your earnings would be worth, nor know what your long term medical costs are really going to look like. Plus your lawyers will get a cut... you need a lot of padding to compensate for those issues. Plus, who can really measure the cost of having children run away from you screaming, or to never be able to hike through yosemite again.
Honestly, a $20 million cap sounds ridiculously low for the worst case scenario.
Most people actually argue in favor of taking better care of the children of the poor, rather than the poor themselves. That's why federal and state aid is usually tied to the number of children. The hope is that by giving those children a better start than their parents had (for example, keeping them in school, and with enough money for lunch) that they get an education that helps them not be poor in the next generation. What bad choices do you think children living in poverty made, exactly? Didn't cry loudly enough when they were taken home from the hospital?
Assuming of course you pay for the expensive option where you get a special phone number to call, and where they guarantee to send a technician out within 24 hours. I paid $300 to get 3 years of that, and I was sooooooo glad I did so when it turned out the laptop I bought was defective. Obviously, I'd prefer never to get defective merchandise, but having them come to me, instead of having to do any shipping or whatever was great.
Of course it should be their responsibility, who else's would it be??
As to having access to equally bad content, aren't those what parental controls made for? It's unlikely parental controls would deny a user access to hacking tools.
It's the combined responsibility of whoever creates, and whoever uses the hacking tool. Why wouldn't parental controls prevent you from getting access to hacking tools? It certainly seems like they should. Such tools fall squarely within the purview of what parental controls are meant to restrict. If the parental control tools can filter the one, why not the other?
2) Making a legally enforcable system for game ratings is tough due to the wide latitude granted to freedom of speech in this country. A voluntary system is much more likely to work, such as the one that we have for movies, which everyone seems relatively comfortable with. The movie theater system has had the result that comparatively few R and NC-17 rated movies are made. If WalMart were to refuse to stock AO titles at all, that would pretty much be the end of AO titles. On the other hand, if WalMart and others would aggressively enforce just the sales of the titles, that would probably work as well as the theater system. The problem is that it would require training all the clerks on the proper sales enforcement of video game titles, and that is poorly motivated for the retailers right now because it a) costs more in training for the sales clerks and b) decreases total sales, with essentially no upside. The way the movie theaters got forced to enforce their movie ratings system was public protest and boycott, but a widespread boycott of WalMart over this issue seems unlikely. Legal compliance with a law restricting the sales would be an upside that would be sufficiently motivating, which unfortunately brings us right around to where I started this response.
Okay, playing devil's advocate, allow me to get informedly up in arms:
Isn't this game just encouraging another columbine style anti-bullying deadly incident by encouraging kids to respond to bullying and malicious kids with retaliation rather than informing the appropriate authority?
It's important to remember: Columbine was an anti-bullying incident. This game is (presumably) about becoming a more and more effective anti-bully. So you could say that this game is going to encourage more and better columbine type incidents in impressionable bullied kids. Not that I'm in favor of the censorship, just pointing it out so we can be ready for the real censorship argument.
I think the problem is that everyone is focused on the industry, when they should be focused on the retailer and parents. The games are rated. But if the retailers don't restrict sales, the ratings are meaningless. Demand that your local stores not sell M/AO titles to minors. Would you permit a local movie theater to get away with admitting children to R, or NC-17 titles?
Hidden content that requires hacking the game with an internet downloaded tool shouldn't be the responsibility of the game developer either, after all, if you are allowed to download such tools, you have access to other equally bad content, and it is the access that is the problem, not the existence of the hidden content. Fully removing hidden content can be a significant burden on a developer, often disabling is the reasonable path to reducing your rating from AO to M, and people who want the game ratings to be effective should be encouraging developer compliance at low cost.
That's what statistics are for. You take a large enough sample, expose one side to more violent video games than the other group, and use statistics to rule out any other cause if the exposure group turns out more violent. It doesn't have to make a massive change, if the exposure group commits just 10% more murders, and you have a large enough sample size, you can blame the video games for those 10% more murders. The change you're measuring is an increased likelyhood to commit murder.
Likewise, just because some self righteous officiant at the BWM thought that doing everything in multiples of 10 would be a great idea doesn't make it 'right' either. No side is 'right' on this issue, it's all opinion.
Absolutely. With Intel sitting on a huge wad of cash, and AMD sitting on a huge wad of debt, hurting sales for both companies hurts AMD more than intel. And intel has the advantage of knowing that anyone who plays it safe buying dell will still be getting intel.
The baffling question is: did the article submitter get it wrong, slashdot get it wrong, IBM get it wrong, did you mean 1024 tebibytes, or possible 1024 terabytes, or.... ?????
The plethora of SI prefixes gets more and more confusing. And remember, not everyone has or is in any way bound to adopt the NIST convention, after all megabyte = 1024 kilobyte was around and in use long before nist got into the act!
They are talking about using flash to cache hard drives. A large flash cache can load game data faster and with less latency than the hard drive. For laptop users this has an additional advantage of using much less energy, and so extending battery life.
Well, they've shown they can beat an overclocked X2 running at the clock speed that AMD predicts they'll have in their own roadmap in 6 months by more than 20%, running at the low end of their (intel's) expected clock range, using 6 month early hardware. This suggests that they'll be delivering a significant performance advantage over amd in 6 months, barring amd delivering a new architecture, which is not on the amd roadmap right now. AMD will deliver DDR2 at that time, which may have some small performance advantage, but they've said nothing to suggest that DDR2 will deliver more than a 5% performance advantage, if any (it may even be a slight performance disadvantage early on, but will cost less).
Of course, you run a longitudinal study, in which one group is exposed to violent video games, and one is not. If the violent games group commits more acts of violence than the non-games group, and your study size is sufficient to rule out other differences as causes (probably requires n in the range of 1k), then you can conclude that violent video games are the most likely cause of the additional violent behavior. This is straightforward statistical research, of which many comparable studies have already been done and peer reviewed. This is not hard stuff to do, it mostly just takes money and time. If the effect size of the additional violence is sufficient, then you have cause to want to consider legislation to protect society, much like we require motorcycle riders to wear helmets, not to protect them from their stupidity, but to protect us from the costs of their stupidity.
Slashdot Mirror
This change wouldn't make it any harder to generate 99% of the applications that run on windows. Just the 1% that are dangerous to certain monopolies.
20 million is a bit low. You have to consider: what if my life is completely ruined by a doctor's bumbling error? First of all, in the damages phase, you're not going to get anything near what your earnings would be worth, nor know what your long term medical costs are really going to look like. Plus your lawyers will get a cut ... you need a lot of padding to compensate for those issues. Plus, who can really measure the cost of having children run away from you screaming, or to never be able to hike through yosemite again.
Honestly, a $20 million cap sounds ridiculously low for the worst case scenario.
Most people actually argue in favor of taking better care of the children of the poor, rather than the poor themselves. That's why federal and state aid is usually tied to the number of children. The hope is that by giving those children a better start than their parents had (for example, keeping them in school, and with enough money for lunch) that they get an education that helps them not be poor in the next generation. What bad choices do you think children living in poverty made, exactly? Didn't cry loudly enough when they were taken home from the hospital?
I took a shot at that sig about a month ago, I doubt it is going to get changed.
Gambling is a game of luck, NYSE is a game of skill. NASDAQ I guess would probably have to go though.
Realism and fun in games rarely prove compatible.
Dell support is great.
Assuming of course you pay for the expensive option where you get a special phone number to call, and where they guarantee to send a technician out within 24 hours. I paid $300 to get 3 years of that, and I was sooooooo glad I did so when it turned out the laptop I bought was defective. Obviously, I'd prefer never to get defective merchandise, but having them come to me, instead of having to do any shipping or whatever was great.
You suck!
... who ever thought that would make for a funny, on-topic post!)
(wow
Of course it should be their responsibility, who else's would it be??
As to having access to equally bad content, aren't those what parental controls made for? It's unlikely parental controls would deny a user access to hacking tools.
It's the combined responsibility of whoever creates, and whoever uses the hacking tool. Why wouldn't parental controls prevent you from getting access to hacking tools? It certainly seems like they should. Such tools fall squarely within the purview of what parental controls are meant to restrict. If the parental control tools can filter the one, why not the other?
So the question is: were the Columbine shooters right?
The authorities didn't resolve their problems, and physically they weren't capable of standing up to their attackers without the leverage of weapons.
To give you the US point of view in response to your points:
l _massacre
1) Playing as the acting-out victim of bullying will make people worry that the title is encouraging another columbine style incident.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Columbine_High_Schoo
2) Making a legally enforcable system for game ratings is tough due to the wide latitude granted to freedom of speech in this country. A voluntary system is much more likely to work, such as the one that we have for movies, which everyone seems relatively comfortable with. The movie theater system has had the result that comparatively few R and NC-17 rated movies are made. If WalMart were to refuse to stock AO titles at all, that would pretty much be the end of AO titles. On the other hand, if WalMart and others would aggressively enforce just the sales of the titles, that would probably work as well as the theater system. The problem is that it would require training all the clerks on the proper sales enforcement of video game titles, and that is poorly motivated for the retailers right now because it a) costs more in training for the sales clerks and b) decreases total sales, with essentially no upside. The way the movie theaters got forced to enforce their movie ratings system was public protest and boycott, but a widespread boycott of WalMart over this issue seems unlikely. Legal compliance with a law restricting the sales would be an upside that would be sufficiently motivating, which unfortunately brings us right around to where I started this response.
Okay, playing devil's advocate, allow me to get informedly up in arms:
Isn't this game just encouraging another columbine style anti-bullying deadly incident by encouraging kids to respond to bullying and malicious kids with retaliation rather than informing the appropriate authority?
It's important to remember: Columbine was an anti-bullying incident. This game is (presumably) about becoming a more and more effective anti-bully. So you could say that this game is going to encourage more and better columbine type incidents in impressionable bullied kids.
Not that I'm in favor of the censorship, just pointing it out so we can be ready for the real censorship argument.
I think the problem is that everyone is focused on the industry, when they should be focused on the retailer and parents. The games are rated. But if the retailers don't restrict sales, the ratings are meaningless. Demand that your local stores not sell M/AO titles to minors. Would you permit a local movie theater to get away with admitting children to R, or NC-17 titles?
Hidden content that requires hacking the game with an internet downloaded tool shouldn't be the responsibility of the game developer either, after all, if you are allowed to download such tools, you have access to other equally bad content, and it is the access that is the problem, not the existence of the hidden content. Fully removing hidden content can be a significant burden on a developer, often disabling is the reasonable path to reducing your rating from AO to M, and people who want the game ratings to be effective should be encouraging developer compliance at low cost.
Couldn't find squish, my little web game, even given the hint that it was on ptth. Google finds 4 pages of relevant hits.
w c&charset=utf-8&la=en
0 &ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozill a:en-US:official
http://ptth.net/squish/
http://accoona.com/search.jsp?qt=squish+ptth&col=
http://www.google.com/search?q=squish+ptth&start=
I remember when newspapers were facing extinction from the internet 8 years ago.
They have a unique lock on push delivery of local advertisements. That will keep them alive.
It's thirty days hath september, april, june, and november. All the rest have thirty-one, except for february, because Caesar was a jerk.
That's what statistics are for. You take a large enough sample, expose one side to more violent video games than the other group, and use statistics to rule out any other cause if the exposure group turns out more violent. It doesn't have to make a massive change, if the exposure group commits just 10% more murders, and you have a large enough sample size, you can blame the video games for those 10% more murders. The change you're measuring is an increased likelyhood to commit murder.
Likewise, just because some self righteous officiant at the BWM thought that doing everything in multiples of 10 would be a great idea doesn't make it 'right' either. No side is 'right' on this issue, it's all opinion.
Absolutely. With Intel sitting on a huge wad of cash, and AMD sitting on a huge wad of debt, hurting sales for both companies hurts AMD more than intel. And intel has the advantage of knowing that anyone who plays it safe buying dell will still be getting intel.
The baffling question is: did the article submitter get it wrong, slashdot get it wrong, IBM get it wrong, did you mean 1024 tebibytes, or possible 1024 terabytes, or .... ?????
The plethora of SI prefixes gets more and more confusing. And remember, not everyone has or is in any way bound to adopt the NIST convention, after all megabyte = 1024 kilobyte was around and in use long before nist got into the act!
They are talking about using flash to cache hard drives. A large flash cache can load game data faster and with less latency than the hard drive. For laptop users this has an additional advantage of using much less energy, and so extending battery life.
The solution to the cocaine comedown is a heavy dose of LSD. For the LSD comedown, X. For the X comedown, cocaine. Problem solved.
Well, they've shown they can beat an overclocked X2 running at the clock speed that AMD predicts they'll have in their own roadmap in 6 months by more than 20%, running at the low end of their (intel's) expected clock range, using 6 month early hardware. This suggests that they'll be delivering a significant performance advantage over amd in 6 months, barring amd delivering a new architecture, which is not on the amd roadmap right now. AMD will deliver DDR2 at that time, which may have some small performance advantage, but they've said nothing to suggest that DDR2 will deliver more than a 5% performance advantage, if any (it may even be a slight performance disadvantage early on, but will cost less).
Of course, you run a longitudinal study, in which one group is exposed to violent video games, and one is not. If the violent games group commits more acts of violence than the non-games group, and your study size is sufficient to rule out other differences as causes (probably requires n in the range of 1k), then you can conclude that violent video games are the most likely cause of the additional violent behavior. This is straightforward statistical research, of which many comparable studies have already been done and peer reviewed. This is not hard stuff to do, it mostly just takes money and time. If the effect size of the additional violence is sufficient, then you have cause to want to consider legislation to protect society, much like we require motorcycle riders to wear helmets, not to protect them from their stupidity, but to protect us from the costs of their stupidity.