While I understand the compelling reasons a police officer might want to react quickly to a perceived threat (his/her life is in danger), one would expect that they perform at a least a minimum level of target scrutiny before pulling the trigger. For example, enough to review whether that's a big, colorful, toy NERF gun vs. a credible-looking real one.
Yes, that means the bad guys get the first shot. That's un-f'ing-avoidable in some cases. We simply cannot have a society where the 'peacekeepers' are able to reflexively draw & shoot at any potential threat.
It's like hunters that shoot cows (or dogs, or people) by accident when hunting deer. If they can't see the target well enough to identify that it's not a deer, they shouldn't be SHOOTING. If a cop can't be clear enough about their target to know that it's not a toy gun (or a harmless civilian, or a child, or whatever) THEY SHOULDN'T BE PULLING THE TRIGGER. It sometimes sucks to be the good guy, but dammit that's their job.
Ironic that quote comes from Left^H^H^H WEST Wing.
Because it's precisely that genetic strain of pantywaists that would look at your list and reverse it: "No one is any better fed because we went to the moon, no one is any warmer and certainly no one is any smarter. Why go to Mars? 'Cause we came out of the cave and we looked over the hill and we saw fire (and immediately began adding to the Carbon burden, eventually causing global warming as we rape the environment to sate our base materialistic lusts). And we crossed the ocean (to exploit the Native Americans, loot their gold, and give them diseases) and we pioneered the West (again, crushing and killing native peoples) and we took to the sky (poisoning the air with our foul jet fumes). The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploitation and this shouldn't be what's next."
I believe that's the line they INTENDED to deliver.
"has has gaming tech progressed any further in this area? "
Depends by what you specifically mean by 'progressed'.
Has gaming graphically improved? Hell yes. Look at the current tech demos for Age of Conan - particularly someone swimming in the water - and you'll be impressed. And this isn't some specifically rendered scene in a single player game. This is an open-activity world meant for hundreds and thousands of simultaneous players.
Has gaming developed substantially better tools in terms of multiple people interacting on the same virtual world? Hell yes. See my point about AoC above. The interactivity of multi user persistent worlds is miles beyond what you mention. (Note - I should mention Second Life. For some reason they get a lot of attention here and the pop-press, but they are at least a *decade* behind what I would say is the minimum standard today for Massively Online Persistent worlds. Don't use what you see there as any sort of benchmark for what is "today".)
Have VR tools advanced substantially? Again, yes. Recently I've seen 360-degree displays in extraordinarily high resolution, along with motion sensor technology that's amazingly precise, even some kludged from the Wii controller. What's really impressed me is that I saw a 'cage' motion simulator that was essentially a hollow-ball of a cage that you could stand in, so that you could MOVE in a VR world, from walking to running, and your avatar would move.
Has the synthesis of these things advanced? Less than you might think. I think the gaming industry has seen that there really isn't much of a market for VR systems. I could speculate on a number of reasons: - most consumers seem to be perfectly happy with the current experience* - most consumers couldn't currently afford even the top-end 2d-computer-vr gear, much less 3d stuff - unsolved human equilibrium problems. If every sense is telling you you're riding in a spinning teacup, but your inner-ear disagrees, that's a recipe for motionsickness. Not many find that an entertaining time.
* because ultimately, it's about suspension of disbelief. Let's say I could have the ultimate home-VR experience - a headset that displays in perfect 3d, with perfect 3d sound, photorealistic resolution, I don't get dizzy, etc. I'm still just sitting there. There's still going to be a requirement for a user-interface that lets me move & function as if I was there. Will the increase in visual/audio realism (only) be worth the increase in price, while VR is hobbled by the need for some sort of human input device? Personally, I don't think so.
I'm sure its ONLY the Bushes who have ever done such a thing, clearly there have never been self-interested rapacious Democrats who've used the White House as their private bordello, and/or leveraged the power of their office for constant personal and familial financial gain. (rolls eyes) And people wonder why our political system is a shambles? That someone could make the comment above mine with a straight face and not immediately question their own objectivity? You expect to make such a comment and be taken seriously? Hello?
Re the OP, I'd find it more useful if there was an investigation into the constant and repeated FAILURES of US intelligence agencies over the last 20 years: - the Soviet Union's collapse was a surprise to them - the failure to find/kill Bin Laden - the entire mess of Iraqi WMDs (no matter what they say NOW, it was a widely accepted fact pre-Bush that Saddam was working on WMDs) - internal political bias - cronyism
Frankly, I wish our intel agencies were even HALF as effective as the tinfoil-hatters presume they are. I'm sure they accomplish a lot of wonderful things for our country that I'll never be privy to, but from here in the cheap seats, it certainly seems like they aren't terribly effective.
"Isn't this all based on something we try to teach children? If you give someone trust then they will do the right thing, but if you're instantly distrustful then they're never going to do the right thing."
Actually, I'd say it's kind of the obverse - what I've learned as an adult: that people who are basically honest assume others are too. If someone immediately assumes you're a lying, cheating, deceitful SOB, that's usually a key clue that THEY are in fact lying, cheating, or simply a deceitful SOB.
I believe psychologists call it transference; I'd simply say it's a matter of seeing the world through your own particular glasses. If you are constantly thinking of lying and ways to cheat people, then you're going to naturally assume others are too.
"Looks like another battle in the right for anonymous free speech"
What RIGHT would that be?
Last time I checked, we (in the US) had a Constitution-enshrined RIGHT to say what we wish. Only the naive and troublemaking would wish it to be 'anonymous'.
Personally, I'd like to see it that everyone's name is on the front, sides, and backs of their cars. I bet people would drive much more nicely generally.
"Before the mouse vs. joystick wars begin....." Too late.
His article isn't attacking the PC as a game system, he's attacking the hyperbolic marketing people of the PC world who cannot admit that System X (despite being a real bargain!) can't play games for shit.
If every car dealership out there said that their cars can compete in LeMans, get 100 mpg, and survive a head-on collision with a train, it would be comparable. Part of it, of course is an ignorant public, which allows these electronic-snakeoil salesmen to pitch their crap effectively.
I can sum up his argument in 2 words: Caveat emptor. And in that sense, the console IS a better gaming machine because it's less variable and thus less vulnerable to be hyped inordinately.
"...thinking someone is stupid because they believe something patently false is stupid"
Seriously? Then how, pray tell, does one divine the stupid from the not-stupid, if not by what they believe? I mean, juveniles are one thing, but a fully-fledged adult (let's say, a presidential candidate) who has had their whole life to review the facts and cogitate on the arguments, and STILL believes that mankind was *poofed* into existence some 6000-odd years ago, and all those fossils, physics, radiocarbon, etc are just a bunch of tricks/practical jokes played by an omnipotent/omniscient deity-thing who is nevertheless insecure enough to constantly TEST his creations to see if they believe him contrary to the evidence?
No, stupid people persist in believing stupid things. Some people are ignorant, but the measure is how readily they discard/defend that ignorance when it's refuted.
And btw this quote kills me: "Women are inundated with astrological nonsense from fashion magazines, so it is normative for them to believe it even if they are otherwise highly logical." So, women are just assumed to be stupid enough to believe what the women's magazines tell them, REGARDLESS of their own intellect, simply because it's repeated?
Let's remember that our ancestors for millions of years have been drinking water with all sorts of NATURAL pollutants, of varying lethality: mud, feces, ungodly numbers of organisms, any soluble mineral that stream or pond happened to contact, etc, etc, etc.
Umpteen thousands of generations later, while not perfect, I daresay that the resulting human (or any animal in 2008) digestive tract and immune system is pretty freaking robust and capable of isolating/filtering/rejecting pollutants and contaminants. Despite these pollutants being in our water systems for probably the last 50 years, people are living longer than ever. QED?
Evolution for the win.
Granted, of COURSE there are pollutants now (such as microtraces of drugs, etc) that we've never encountered before. But I'm pretty confident that my system will handle it.
Either that, or kill me. If I handle it and pass those genes onto offspring, it's a win for the species.
From the moment we stumbled upon the idea of fire, humans have accepted the tradeoffs of technology. We began to cook our food - with a resulting increase of some sort of carcinogen, if my weird vegan hippie friends are right - but what we got was a massive reduction in food poisoning, bacteriological issues, and parasites with eating uncooked meat. The tradeoff was worth it, IMO. We now have electricity, but there are countless effects on the environment and us due to the generation of same....aside from my hippie friends, nobody's advocating banning electricity.
Considering the general life-improvements most of those drugs have given the human species overall, I think the tradeoff has been worth it.
Interesting point: "No more seizing property without due process. No more stifling free speech just because it might offend somebody. No more wiretaps of citizens and legal residents to fight terrorists without a court order signed by a REAL judge. No more government agencies that aren't sanctioned by the Constitution (list to long to put here)."
Aside from your last point (which doesn't really apply) all of those things are utterly forbidden in Cuba. And for #2, somebody = Fidel. In fact, the embargo was emplaced BECAUSE of Fidel's seizure of private property after the revolution.
Um, knowing humans as well as I do, if she looked like that and was indistinguishable from humans yet (within their moral context) could be treated like furniture, I am pretty certain she wouldn't be chained to the floor of a cell....
There seems to be a non-trivial correlation between lack of sleep and overweight. I think I read first about this sometime around the late 90's or early 2000's, and it seems logical: when you're overtired, your body reacts much as it does to starvation - increasing your appetite AND squirreling away calories (as fat) for the anticipated energy shortage.
Experimenting as much as my job & family will allow, I find that if I get sufficient sleep - go to sleep when I'm tired, get up when I wake up, always try to get at LEAST 8 hours (I typically get 5-6 hours)...I've found that I slowly start shedding pounds without significantly changing my eating habits. Not insignificantly, I seem to FEEL better generally (although that of course could be placebo).
But I can never manage that in "real" life for any extended time - hour commute, 9-10 hour work days - so, like most Americans I try to shoehorn in sleep 'when possible' and have to accept that I'll have this tiny 'lack of sleep' headache, and a bit of a gut, forever.
Not quite sure where you got the "niggers" part, but considering that the 'life choices' of (as you so nicely put it) "faggots", "junkies", and "adulterers" are causing people who DIDN'T make those life choices to die? Yeah, I wouldn't be interested in spending my time or money curing them.
I mean, we're banning smoking all over because of 2nd-hand smoke dangers, what about the dangers for the rest of us based on these peoples' life choices?
1) don't stick needles into yourself unless they've been sterilized. 2) don't have casual sex 3) form a longstanding bond with someone to the point where you actually get to know them and what kind of person they are before interpenetrating genetalia with them. 4) treat your sexual partner with love, respect, and faithfulness so they are unlikely to want to seek satisfaction elsewhere. This may actually require you to: do things that you don't want, just because they enjoy them; think of the feelings of another before and as superior to your own in importance; and generally stop being a selfish, hedonistic individual.
I know some of those seem nearly impossible, but trust me, they are doable.
There, pretty much all AIDS is prevented.
Now, can we quit shilly-shallying with a 'disease' that's almost entirely self-inflicted, and move on to diseases that are worth curing?
/seconded. This is a TECH news site, where the readers can be assumed to have a certain minimal technical acumen. The editors MUST have a basic familiarity with the jargon and glossary of technical terms of the computer field. For example, in computerese "ZIP" doesn't specifically mean 'go fast' - it refers to a specific method of data compression or the idea of compressing data generally.
To not understand that suggests a level of editorial competence in this field below that of, oh, say Us magazine. Not that Us is badly edited, not at all. But the audience there accepts a certain level of technical uncertainty that this audience wouldn't.
Yes, his "figures" seem to strongly smell of 'out of one's butt' but there have been 5 significant mass extinctions* in the last HALF MILLION years, so at that rate, 7.6by would be 76 events.
* note, I just read further, and they consider now to be one of those events. Your mileage and interpretations may vary.
It's reasonable to say that with 76 mass extinctions, it's unlikely that we'd dodge every one, even with our big brains and all.
It could be something as simple as the fact that, as one plays a first-person shooter, the tension ratchets up significantly. Particularly the longer you 'last' without dying, there is a performance anxiety.
So finally when you do die and the tension is resolved, it really is quite a relief.
Since even Netflix has now said they're dumping the HD format, it would be nice if they'd just say "hey, when we send you an HD DVD, just keep it, we'll send you the next movie on your list".
I voted with my $ and bought an HD DVD player for Xmas, so I have to console myself with the fact that it is a) an excellent upsampling DVD player b) I wasn't going to be buying HD movies anyway c) HD movies should be firesale cheap for a while, too bad there aren't many of them.
Slashdot Mirror
While I understand the compelling reasons a police officer might want to react quickly to a perceived threat (his/her life is in danger), one would expect that they perform at a least a minimum level of target scrutiny before pulling the trigger. For example, enough to review whether that's a big, colorful, toy NERF gun vs. a credible-looking real one.
Yes, that means the bad guys get the first shot. That's un-f'ing-avoidable in some cases. We simply cannot have a society where the 'peacekeepers' are able to reflexively draw & shoot at any potential threat.
It's like hunters that shoot cows (or dogs, or people) by accident when hunting deer. If they can't see the target well enough to identify that it's not a deer, they shouldn't be SHOOTING. If a cop can't be clear enough about their target to know that it's not a toy gun (or a harmless civilian, or a child, or whatever) THEY SHOULDN'T BE PULLING THE TRIGGER. It sometimes sucks to be the good guy, but dammit that's their job.
Ironic that quote comes from Left^H^H^H WEST Wing.
Because it's precisely that genetic strain of pantywaists that would look at your list and reverse it:
"No one is any better fed because we went to the moon, no one is any warmer and certainly no one is any smarter. Why go to Mars? 'Cause we came out of the cave and we looked over the hill and we saw fire (and immediately began adding to the Carbon burden, eventually causing global warming as we rape the environment to sate our base materialistic lusts). And we crossed the ocean (to exploit the Native Americans, loot their gold, and give them diseases) and we pioneered the West (again, crushing and killing native peoples) and we took to the sky (poisoning the air with our foul jet fumes). The history of man is hung on a timeline of exploitation and this shouldn't be what's next."
I believe that's the line they INTENDED to deliver.
"has has gaming tech progressed any further in this area? "
Depends by what you specifically mean by 'progressed'.
Has gaming graphically improved? Hell yes. Look at the current tech demos for Age of Conan - particularly someone swimming in the water - and you'll be impressed. And this isn't some specifically rendered scene in a single player game. This is an open-activity world meant for hundreds and thousands of simultaneous players.
Has gaming developed substantially better tools in terms of multiple people interacting on the same virtual world? Hell yes. See my point about AoC above. The interactivity of multi user persistent worlds is miles beyond what you mention. (Note - I should mention Second Life. For some reason they get a lot of attention here and the pop-press, but they are at least a *decade* behind what I would say is the minimum standard today for Massively Online Persistent worlds. Don't use what you see there as any sort of benchmark for what is "today".)
Have VR tools advanced substantially? Again, yes. Recently I've seen 360-degree displays in extraordinarily high resolution, along with motion sensor technology that's amazingly precise, even some kludged from the Wii controller. What's really impressed me is that I saw a 'cage' motion simulator that was essentially a hollow-ball of a cage that you could stand in, so that you could MOVE in a VR world, from walking to running, and your avatar would move.
Has the synthesis of these things advanced? Less than you might think. I think the gaming industry has seen that there really isn't much of a market for VR systems. I could speculate on a number of reasons:
- most consumers seem to be perfectly happy with the current experience*
- most consumers couldn't currently afford even the top-end 2d-computer-vr gear, much less 3d stuff
- unsolved human equilibrium problems. If every sense is telling you you're riding in a spinning teacup, but your inner-ear disagrees, that's a recipe for motionsickness. Not many find that an entertaining time.
* because ultimately, it's about suspension of disbelief. Let's say I could have the ultimate home-VR experience - a headset that displays in perfect 3d, with perfect 3d sound, photorealistic resolution, I don't get dizzy, etc. I'm still just sitting there. There's still going to be a requirement for a user-interface that lets me move & function as if I was there. Will the increase in visual/audio realism (only) be worth the increase in price, while VR is hobbled by the need for some sort of human input device? Personally, I don't think so.
Abbot & Costello fan, are we?
...or maybe not: no where that I can see does that site have an address.
It says it's located "...NSA Headquarters, Ft. George G. Meade, Maryland" but nothing you can look up.
Amusingly, the bank watch system was not a result of the Patriot Act or Bush & Co.
It was put into place to catch/prevent the Enron/Tyco/etc. corporate scandals by guess who? Eliot Spitzer, in his role as NY State Atty General.
I'm sure its ONLY the Bushes who have ever done such a thing, clearly there have never been self-interested rapacious Democrats who've used the White House as their private bordello, and/or leveraged the power of their office for constant personal and familial financial gain.
(rolls eyes)
And people wonder why our political system is a shambles? That someone could make the comment above mine with a straight face and not immediately question their own objectivity? You expect to make such a comment and be taken seriously? Hello?
Re the OP, I'd find it more useful if there was an investigation into the constant and repeated FAILURES of US intelligence agencies over the last 20 years:
- the Soviet Union's collapse was a surprise to them
- the failure to find/kill Bin Laden
- the entire mess of Iraqi WMDs (no matter what they say NOW, it was a widely accepted fact pre-Bush that Saddam was working on WMDs)
- internal political bias
- cronyism
Frankly, I wish our intel agencies were even HALF as effective as the tinfoil-hatters presume they are. I'm sure they accomplish a lot of wonderful things for our country that I'll never be privy to, but from here in the cheap seats, it certainly seems like they aren't terribly effective.
"Isn't this all based on something we try to teach children? If you give someone trust then they will do the right thing, but if you're instantly distrustful then they're never going to do the right thing."
Actually, I'd say it's kind of the obverse - what I've learned as an adult: that people who are basically honest assume others are too. If someone immediately assumes you're a lying, cheating, deceitful SOB, that's usually a key clue that THEY are in fact lying, cheating, or simply a deceitful SOB.
I believe psychologists call it transference; I'd simply say it's a matter of seeing the world through your own particular glasses. If you are constantly thinking of lying and ways to cheat people, then you're going to naturally assume others are too.
Wait, is that a game or a linux install?
"Looks like another battle in the right for anonymous free speech"
What RIGHT would that be?
Last time I checked, we (in the US) had a Constitution-enshrined RIGHT to say what we wish.
Only the naive and troublemaking would wish it to be 'anonymous'.
Personally, I'd like to see it that everyone's name is on the front, sides, and backs of their cars. I bet people would drive much more nicely generally.
"....stripped down to your panties and french kissing another sorority sister, and simulating fellatio on a blow up doll..."
So...just as an example, where would those be?
"Before the mouse vs. joystick wars begin....."
Too late.
His article isn't attacking the PC as a game system, he's attacking the hyperbolic marketing people of the PC world who cannot admit that System X (despite being a real bargain!) can't play games for shit.
If every car dealership out there said that their cars can compete in LeMans, get 100 mpg, and survive a head-on collision with a train, it would be comparable. Part of it, of course is an ignorant public, which allows these electronic-snakeoil salesmen to pitch their crap effectively.
I can sum up his argument in 2 words: Caveat emptor.
And in that sense, the console IS a better gaming machine because it's less variable and thus less vulnerable to be hyped inordinately.
"...thinking someone is stupid because they believe something patently false is stupid"
Seriously? Then how, pray tell, does one divine the stupid from the not-stupid, if not by what they believe? I mean, juveniles are one thing, but a fully-fledged adult (let's say, a presidential candidate) who has had their whole life to review the facts and cogitate on the arguments, and STILL believes that mankind was *poofed* into existence some 6000-odd years ago, and all those fossils, physics, radiocarbon, etc are just a bunch of tricks/practical jokes played by an omnipotent/omniscient deity-thing who is nevertheless insecure enough to constantly TEST his creations to see if they believe him contrary to the evidence?
No, stupid people persist in believing stupid things. Some people are ignorant, but the measure is how readily they discard/defend that ignorance when it's refuted.
And btw this quote kills me: "Women are inundated with astrological nonsense from fashion magazines, so it is normative for them to believe it even if they are otherwise highly logical."
So, women are just assumed to be stupid enough to believe what the women's magazines tell them, REGARDLESS of their own intellect, simply because it's repeated?
WOW.
I call FUD.
Let's remember that our ancestors for millions of years have been drinking water with all sorts of NATURAL pollutants, of varying lethality: mud, feces, ungodly numbers of organisms, any soluble mineral that stream or pond happened to contact, etc, etc, etc.
Umpteen thousands of generations later, while not perfect, I daresay that the resulting human (or any animal in 2008) digestive tract and immune system is pretty freaking robust and capable of isolating/filtering/rejecting pollutants and contaminants. Despite these pollutants being in our water systems for probably the last 50 years, people are living longer than ever. QED?
Evolution for the win.
Granted, of COURSE there are pollutants now (such as microtraces of drugs, etc) that we've never encountered before. But I'm pretty confident that my system will handle it.
Either that, or kill me. If I handle it and pass those genes onto offspring, it's a win for the species.
From the moment we stumbled upon the idea of fire, humans have accepted the tradeoffs of technology. We began to cook our food - with a resulting increase of some sort of carcinogen, if my weird vegan hippie friends are right - but what we got was a massive reduction in food poisoning, bacteriological issues, and parasites with eating uncooked meat. The tradeoff was worth it, IMO. We now have electricity, but there are countless effects on the environment and us due to the generation of same....aside from my hippie friends, nobody's advocating banning electricity.
Considering the general life-improvements most of those drugs have given the human species overall, I think the tradeoff has been worth it.
It looks to me like the question isn't IF they do this (they already do on a regular schedule) but the frequency.
So perhaps they really are just trying to do the right thing?
Interesting point:
"No more seizing property without due process.
No more stifling free speech just because it might offend somebody.
No more wiretaps of citizens and legal residents to fight terrorists without a court order signed by a REAL judge.
No more government agencies that aren't sanctioned by the Constitution (list to long to put here)."
Aside from your last point (which doesn't really apply) all of those things are utterly forbidden in Cuba. And for #2, somebody = Fidel. In fact, the embargo was emplaced BECAUSE of Fidel's seizure of private property after the revolution.
Irony, anyone?
Have you seen the Six?
Um, knowing humans as well as I do, if she looked like that and was indistinguishable from humans yet (within their moral context) could be treated like furniture, I am pretty certain she wouldn't be chained to the floor of a cell....
There seems to be a non-trivial correlation between lack of sleep and overweight.
I think I read first about this sometime around the late 90's or early 2000's, and it seems logical: when you're overtired, your body reacts much as it does to starvation - increasing your appetite AND squirreling away calories (as fat) for the anticipated energy shortage.
Experimenting as much as my job & family will allow, I find that if I get sufficient sleep - go to sleep when I'm tired, get up when I wake up, always try to get at LEAST 8 hours (I typically get 5-6 hours)...I've found that I slowly start shedding pounds without significantly changing my eating habits. Not insignificantly, I seem to FEEL better generally (although that of course could be placebo).
But I can never manage that in "real" life for any extended time - hour commute, 9-10 hour work days - so, like most Americans I try to shoehorn in sleep 'when possible' and have to accept that I'll have this tiny 'lack of sleep' headache, and a bit of a gut, forever.
Not quite sure where you got the "niggers" part, but considering that the 'life choices' of (as you so nicely put it) "faggots", "junkies", and "adulterers" are causing people who DIDN'T make those life choices to die? Yeah, I wouldn't be interested in spending my time or money curing them.
I mean, we're banning smoking all over because of 2nd-hand smoke dangers, what about the dangers for the rest of us based on these peoples' life choices?
Tell you what, let's compare statistical prevalence of my vectors to your vectors, and see which comprise the overwhelming majority of cases?
1) don't stick needles into yourself unless they've been sterilized.
2) don't have casual sex
3) form a longstanding bond with someone to the point where you actually get to know them and what kind of person they are before interpenetrating genetalia with them.
4) treat your sexual partner with love, respect, and faithfulness so they are unlikely to want to seek satisfaction elsewhere. This may actually require you to: do things that you don't want, just because they enjoy them; think of the feelings of another before and as superior to your own in importance; and generally stop being a selfish, hedonistic individual.
I know some of those seem nearly impossible, but trust me, they are doable.
There, pretty much all AIDS is prevented.
Now, can we quit shilly-shallying with a 'disease' that's almost entirely self-inflicted, and move on to diseases that are worth curing?
/seconded.
This is a TECH news site, where the readers can be assumed to have a certain minimal technical acumen. The editors MUST have a basic familiarity with the jargon and glossary of technical terms of the computer field. For example, in computerese "ZIP" doesn't specifically mean 'go fast' - it refers to a specific method of data compression or the idea of compressing data generally.
To not understand that suggests a level of editorial competence in this field below that of, oh, say Us magazine. Not that Us is badly edited, not at all. But the audience there accepts a certain level of technical uncertainty that this audience wouldn't.
Yes, his "figures" seem to strongly smell of 'out of one's butt' but there have been 5 significant mass extinctions* in the last HALF MILLION years, so at that rate, 7.6by would be 76 events.
* note, I just read further, and they consider now to be one of those events. Your mileage and interpretations may vary.
It's reasonable to say that with 76 mass extinctions, it's unlikely that we'd dodge every one, even with our big brains and all.
It could be something as simple as the fact that, as one plays a first-person shooter, the tension ratchets up significantly. Particularly the longer you 'last' without dying, there is a performance anxiety.
So finally when you do die and the tension is resolved, it really is quite a relief.
Since even Netflix has now said they're dumping the HD format, it would be nice if they'd just say "hey, when we send you an HD DVD, just keep it, we'll send you the next movie on your list".
I voted with my $ and bought an HD DVD player for Xmas, so I have to console myself with the fact that it is
a) an excellent upsampling DVD player
b) I wasn't going to be buying HD movies anyway
c) HD movies should be firesale cheap for a while, too bad there aren't many of them.