Yes, they have like 22 native languages in India in total, not counting dialects, if I remember correctly. Having a common and easy to learn language does make sense.
From a technical viewpoint: In information technology we don't use the most complicated 'languages' to transmit messages, where errors are more likely to happen. For human communication Esperanto never gained enough popularity, so English is currently the best choice.
Perhaps. But English already is an official, although not primary, language in India. You can assume that more and more people will most likely learn to speak English rather than to expect the rest of the world to learn their over 20 different native languages. Indians also shouldn't have a hard time to grasp English since their languages are still part of the Indo-European languages and share similarities.
In general:
It will be a sad day for international communication when Chinese languages becomes the language of trade, English is fairly easy to learn and doesn't require a large vocabulary of speaker and listener to get their points across. The Chinese language on the other hand... well, lets say it rises the barrier for communication on an entirely different level.
Capacitors much like batteries don't store "voltage" they store electrical charge (basically electrons), ampere seconds.
Regular cell phone batteries have a charge of about 2Ah, assuming this super-capacitor will have a similar charge and remembering that a capacitor can be discharged at least as fast as it can be charged, in 20 seconds or less, this could create an average current of 360 ampere, give or take a few ampere. Given the nature of the current flow when discharging a capacitor the current will be twice as high in the first few seconds of discharging at about at least 700 ampere.
And that's no laughing matter anymore.
This article says that' their cell voltage is between 2.3 and 2.75V. Lets assume a value in the middle of 2.5V.
-> Capacity: C=Q/U=(7200As)/(2.5V)=2800F (!!!)
-> Electrical Energy: E=0.5*C*U=.5*2800F*(2.5V)=1400(As/V)*6.25V=8750AVs=8750J
Granted, these numbers are quite speculative because I lack the exact specifications, but it should give you a rough estimate of the numbers we're dealing with here.
Perhaps they should rename it into "man-made acceleration of global warming/climate change", that might calm down the "climate change is always natural"-crowd a little bit down.
The question isn't any more if global warming is true or even if it's man made, the question is rather what is the best thing 'man' can do to keep a comfortable climate, before it is is getting too uncomfortable for us. Life on earth will adapt, if it's not entirely wiped out, but the time frame and the outcome of this adaptation most likely won't suit humanity as it is now. Stop the current perversion of our consumer market and all the pollution which is caused by it, would be the obvious start.
Even though I'm still a sceptic on various degrees of human contribution that doesn't mean at all that I welcome the climate change at all. I still encourage people to pollute less, try and buy longer lasting products that don't have to be replaced after few years, even though those are more expensive, and to gradually become vegetarians for various reasons. Burning more and more fossil fuels and holding back on alternative and regenerative energy sources will lead to problems in the future anyway, even if we could reverse the changes to our climate.
It can't be good to cut down more and more forests, especially rain forests, even though the mayor part of biological CO2 reduction is done by algae. It also can't be good to consume as much meat as we do, build more and more cattle farms and provide food and water for these, where also a lot of fossil fuels are wastes for logistics.
Even climate change deniers have to realize that this will cause problems in the future.
The geological and magnetic poles of the earth aren't the same though.
A compass can only point towards a magnetic north, not even the magnetic north pole and also not towards the geological pole. The latter is mostly determined by the spin of earth which is obviously influenced by the distribution of mass on our planet, while the magnetic field is influenced by a lot more factors like different materials which have different ferromagnetic properties.
[quote]Scientists have long known that the locations of Earth’s geographic poles are not fixed. Over the course of the year, they shift seasonally as Earth’s distributions of snow, rain and humidity change. “Usually [the shift] is circular, with a wobble,” says Chen.
But underlying the seasonal motion is a yearly motion that is thought to be driven in part by continental drift. It was the change in that motion that caught the attention of Chen and his colleagues, who used data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to determine whether ice loss had shifted and accelerated the yearly polar drift.[/quote]
Source
As you see there are 'natural' causes for this. But according to this article the scientists are concerned of the differences from the 'natural' patterns of these changes and link these to the 'accelerated' climate change we're currently experiencing.
No matter the number of digits in your bank account, in the end you're still human... A very complex and wonderful piece of evolution, way above the complexity that we understand. Kudos for funding research, and all the best for this man...
With that I can agree. The term 'engineering' implies some kind of intent.
Even if there isn't any deeper intrinsic meaning in our existence it doesn't make make the effects evolution caused less fascinating.
It's always a good sign that neural interfaces become more popular and most likely cheaper as they enter the consumer market. Although I don't see these as viable input devices for the "core gaming" industry, as conservative input devices still have the advantage of accuracy due to decades of engineering, these interfaces become highly interested for disabled people. But there are already a few projects where EEG headsets are used to control motorized wheelchairs, virtual keyboards and similar applications.
As for the fears of a mind police and thought crimes.
There are already plenty of options to create statistics of gaming behaviour, EEG readings could make this easier but will they show different things? For example if a player enjoys killing civilians in a video game, where he thinks nobody can observe him, do we need EEG readings to confirm this or is it enough to count the amount of civilians he killed, in which time frame and in which frequency? Functional MRI already seem to be successful in measuring racial bias in a better way than traditional tests. To my knowledge EEGs haven't been able to get the required neural responses to make these measurements so far.
Should we be afraid of a 1984 scenario or look forward to Google's Brain-Leech, which might be able to tell us what we want even before we know it even faster?
Most photographs I've seen in the recent years were digitally altered in some way.
Especially automatically applied High-dynamic-range Imaging is a quite popular "effect" in current cameras. A side effect of this is that many hobby photographers don't know how to adjust this method properly, or their camera doesn't offer that much options and as a result the colours on their photos seem to be unreal.
But this doesn't mean that the photographs are photoshopped. Digitally altered, yes; photoshopped in the sense of altered content, no.
Everything alive that isn't a photosynthesis driven plant produces greenhouse gases while it is alive in some way. Arthropods, invertebrates, vertebrates like birds, reptilians, mammals, bacteria and even fungi produce greenhouse gases in their metabolism.
Carbon besides of hydrogen is they key element in organic chemistry. Carbon and hydrogen can form methane, which is a greenhouse gas by itself, it reacts in the earth's atmosphere to CO2, which is another greenhouse gas. Carbon itself can react pretty easily with oxygen to carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide. Aerobic organisms require oxygen and will emit CO2, anaerobic microbes like in the case of methanogesis microbes will consume CO2 but emit methane on the other hand. Even plants release methane and CO2 via decomposition after they die, due to microbes.
No matter how you want to look at it, greenhouse gases are part of life on this planet and you can't get rid of them that easily. Far more important is to control the rates at which these are emitted by our population.
You're right, it wasn't my intention to devalue makeshift solutions, because those often represent the best thing we can do at the present time to adapt to the circumstances.
These are makeshift solutions. With an ever growing population all solution we come up with, besides of reducing population and consumption, is rather temporary.
Veganism would even be better since vast parts of the milk and egg supplies are provided by intensive livestock farming, but the problem is to motivate people for this change.
Even given the proper environment with plenty of food sources from vegetables, to fruit, berries and mushrooms and grain products, from my experience abrupt changes are often deemed to fail. It's better to convince people to become a vegetarian gradually by reducing the amounts of meat they consume until they realized that besides of the taste of animal fat and protein our tastebuds seem to enjoy, meat isn't really necessary to live 'healthy'. I myself had to make this change gradually because I was just that much used to the taste of meat. And to be completely honest I might not even refuse to eat a steak once in a month that originated from a local farm where the animals were treated properly and if I can be sure of this.
Yeah, the corn that is fed to cattle might not be the best food for us, but it might still be a better overall food source than beef on a global scale:).
I'm not saying that CO2 is an insignificant factor in our global climate.
Consider this: CO2 lasts 1000s of years in the atmosphere, where-as methane less than a decade. The CO2 is effectively permanent, and it *builds* over time. See the difference?
Consider this: We as a species emit more and more methane each year because livestock is increased each year. Something can't be good combined with all those other environmental influences that come along with intensive livestock farming, if we want to maintain a 'convenient' environment on this planet.
And as you already pointed out that natural methane sinks work far more effectively than CO2 sinks, but this should help to get quicker results from changes. The 2007 IPCC report states that the effects of methane reduction aren't well understood, perhaps we know more by now, but I have yet to find this 2013 IPCC report.
Under the pretext that there doesn't exist enough research in this field, why not start here? We should be able to get results within a decade. Why always put the emphasis on CO2 and not something that might yield convincing results within a time period that more people would be able to comprehend? There are also plenty of CO2 emissions produced by the meat industry, for example in logistics, that could be reduced along with methane. Might this approach be even more inconvenient?
Random Slashdotter has said so. No need for the PhD's and such.
Weep for the future, folks.
Well, I think it would be prudent to widen the field of research to other factors in climate change than only CO2. Perhaps there are such studies, but nobody in journalism seems to care about writing articles about those.
By now I've seen plenty of documentaries, which had renowned scientists in them, based on studies that debunk some of the popular CO2 theories and yet introduce other theories that were debunked in more recent studies or discoveries, and also show that papers were falsified to promote the public image of CO2 theories. For me enough reason to become a sceptic of these "everything revolves around CO2"-theories.
This might be one of the most popular "documentaries".
They speak about sun activity in this documentary, and I've already seen studies denying the link of sun activity with the recent increase in global temperature, but the rest is still quite interesting to listen to.
Yes, global warming is true. But how much did humanity actually contribute to it by emitting CO2?
In my eyes there are far worse things like methane released from massive cattle farms which also take a lot of space and require corn or other plants which could be also fed to humans, but tis is very important because we can't live without a cheeseburger at 3 am.
And there's a lot more to be really concerned about which is far worse than the small CO2 contribution humanity adds by burning fossil fuels.
For years it seems like people look for an excuse to leave WoW. They'll try other games awhile and then drift back to WoW again because that's where people they know are. If they don't go back to WoW there's a good chance they just drift to the next new game that's overhyped every few months. When they say why they return to WoW they often say that they miss being high level and geared up, or they hate seeing few people logged in than they're used to, etc. I've never heard them say that they missed the world background or the game play.
Yes, the vast majority of players seems to be this way, but not everyone is. I liked to call the majority you mentioned 'locusts', because they would move on to the next best new MMO, brutally hype it as the holy grail of salvation before it is released, then after release play it until they're done with the linear part of the game. After "they're done" they leave multiple empty game servers behind them as they leave again, which causes a lot of other players to leave to, since empty servers are no fun. These servers are usually doomed to be closed or merged with other servers servers in conjunction with character transfers, because they won't recover on their own.
Other reasons I've heard from players to go back to WoW is that the new game was essentially the same but with a major lack of content a lot more bugs and less 'friends', which is a problem indeed when you compare a 7 year old game with a freshly released game. I can't blame them though, because I too would dislike it if my new car would come without a car radio and without an air conditioning, which the manufacturer promised to implement in an unset time frame. Certainly when it comes to software you won't ever get a finished product at the release date, but from the perspective of the consumer I can understand their reasons.
I rarely heard of players that moved to games that are very similar to WoW, like StarWars: The old Republic or GuildWars 2 and then stuck with it. It's more often games that can distinguish themselves better from WoW than other games and perhaps offer a different experience, if the 'community' wasn't the main reason for them to play WoW.
A question that is often asked as if players would quit one game to play another, playing at least one video game on a mandatory basis.
From my experience with online gamers there isn't really a limit to the number of online games they play especially when not every single one of those games has monthly fees, they don't commit to a single one game like they might do in a social relationship. I know players that play World of Warcraft, EVE Online and PlanetSide 2 for example, they have their schedule for gaming. On Tuesday and Friday they have their raid in WoW, otherwise they would be playing EVE Online and when EVE Online is getting too slow for their mood they log into PlanetSide 2 or Battlefield 3 and get some "instant action". Gamers will play what is entertaining to them or at least what is effective in killing time. These players usually only quit a game for another one when there is a substitute that can replace every aspect of the 'old' game.
On the other hand I know "casual Gamers" who started with an online game like WoW because all their friends did. These players often tend to leave the game and won't look for a substitute when their friends are leaving the game, and the social aspect of the game has declined to a level where it is not worth spending time in this virtual world. Remember that WoW attracted not only people who were already gamers but introduced people to online gaming or even video games in the first place. These players usually will use their newly gained time for other hobbies, which may not even involve interactive electronics.
Personally I'm still surprised how Blizzard managed to keep such a large player base, to maintain an intake of new players while losing more and more "gamers" over the time. So far they did a really good job on maintaining their player base, a far better job than most online game developers and providers ever did. The only other game company that seems to do fine with a steady increase of players, although a few magnitudes smaller than WoW's playerbase, is CCP with their EVE Online and now DUST 514 online games.
The German state already intrudes deeply into people's personal lives. On the other hand, in the guise of protecting "privacy", it prevents private organizations from verifying or monitoring its data collection, and it refuses to disclose what it has, how it is using it, or how it is operating.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, they have like 22 native languages in India in total, not counting dialects, if I remember correctly. Having a common and easy to learn language does make sense.
From a technical viewpoint: In information technology we don't use the most complicated 'languages' to transmit messages, where errors are more likely to happen. For human communication Esperanto never gained enough popularity, so English is currently the best choice.
Perhaps. But English already is an official, although not primary, language in India. You can assume that more and more people will most likely learn to speak English rather than to expect the rest of the world to learn their over 20 different native languages. Indians also shouldn't have a hard time to grasp English since their languages are still part of the Indo-European languages and share similarities.
... well, lets say it rises the barrier for communication on an entirely different level.
In general: It will be a sad day for international communication when Chinese languages becomes the language of trade, English is fairly easy to learn and doesn't require a large vocabulary of speaker and listener to get their points across. The Chinese language on the other hand
Capacitors much like batteries don't store "voltage" they store electrical charge (basically electrons), ampere seconds.
Regular cell phone batteries have a charge of about 2Ah, assuming this super-capacitor will have a similar charge and remembering that a capacitor can be discharged at least as fast as it can be charged, in 20 seconds or less, this could create an average current of 360 ampere, give or take a few ampere. Given the nature of the current flow when discharging a capacitor the current will be twice as high in the first few seconds of discharging at about at least 700 ampere.
And that's no laughing matter anymore.
This article says that' their cell voltage is between 2.3 and 2.75V. Lets assume a value in the middle of 2.5V.
-> Capacity: C=Q/U=(7200As)/(2.5V)=2800F (!!!)
-> Electrical Energy: E=0.5*C*U=.5*2800F*(2.5V)=1400(As/V)*6.25V=8750AVs=8750J
Granted, these numbers are quite speculative because I lack the exact specifications, but it should give you a rough estimate of the numbers we're dealing with here.
What about the decommission of a nuclear power plant? That's still a pretty messy business for uranium reactors.
Perhaps they should rename it into "man-made acceleration of global warming/climate change", that might calm down the "climate change is always natural"-crowd a little bit down.
The question isn't any more if global warming is true or even if it's man made, the question is rather what is the best thing 'man' can do to keep a comfortable climate, before it is is getting too uncomfortable for us. Life on earth will adapt, if it's not entirely wiped out, but the time frame and the outcome of this adaptation most likely won't suit humanity as it is now. Stop the current perversion of our consumer market and all the pollution which is caused by it, would be the obvious start.
Even though I'm still a sceptic on various degrees of human contribution that doesn't mean at all that I welcome the climate change at all. I still encourage people to pollute less, try and buy longer lasting products that don't have to be replaced after few years, even though those are more expensive, and to gradually become vegetarians for various reasons. Burning more and more fossil fuels and holding back on alternative and regenerative energy sources will lead to problems in the future anyway, even if we could reverse the changes to our climate.
It can't be good to cut down more and more forests, especially rain forests, even though the mayor part of biological CO2 reduction is done by algae. It also can't be good to consume as much meat as we do, build more and more cattle farms and provide food and water for these, where also a lot of fossil fuels are wastes for logistics.
Even climate change deniers have to realize that this will cause problems in the future.
Similar to Terry Pratchett's famous: "Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
The geological and magnetic poles of the earth aren't the same though.
A compass can only point towards a magnetic north, not even the magnetic north pole and also not towards the geological pole. The latter is mostly determined by the spin of earth which is obviously influenced by the distribution of mass on our planet, while the magnetic field is influenced by a lot more factors like different materials which have different ferromagnetic properties.
[quote]Scientists have long known that the locations of Earth’s geographic poles are not fixed. Over the course of the year, they shift seasonally as Earth’s distributions of snow, rain and humidity change. “Usually [the shift] is circular, with a wobble,” says Chen.
But underlying the seasonal motion is a yearly motion that is thought to be driven in part by continental drift. It was the change in that motion that caught the attention of Chen and his colleagues, who used data collected by NASA’s Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment (GRACE) to determine whether ice loss had shifted and accelerated the yearly polar drift.[/quote] Source
As you see there are 'natural' causes for this. But according to this article the scientists are concerned of the differences from the 'natural' patterns of these changes and link these to the 'accelerated' climate change we're currently experiencing.
No matter the number of digits in your bank account, in the end you're still human... A very complex and wonderful piece of evolution, way above the complexity that we understand. Kudos for funding research, and all the best for this man...
With that I can agree. The term 'engineering' implies some kind of intent.
Even if there isn't any deeper intrinsic meaning in our existence it doesn't make make the effects evolution caused less fascinating.
It's always a good sign that neural interfaces become more popular and most likely cheaper as they enter the consumer market. Although I don't see these as viable input devices for the "core gaming" industry, as conservative input devices still have the advantage of accuracy due to decades of engineering, these interfaces become highly interested for disabled people. But there are already a few projects where EEG headsets are used to control motorized wheelchairs, virtual keyboards and similar applications.
As for the fears of a mind police and thought crimes.
There are already plenty of options to create statistics of gaming behaviour, EEG readings could make this easier but will they show different things? For example if a player enjoys killing civilians in a video game, where he thinks nobody can observe him, do we need EEG readings to confirm this or is it enough to count the amount of civilians he killed, in which time frame and in which frequency? Functional MRI already seem to be successful in measuring racial bias in a better way than traditional tests. To my knowledge EEGs haven't been able to get the required neural responses to make these measurements so far.
Should we be afraid of a 1984 scenario or look forward to Google's Brain-Leech, which might be able to tell us what we want even before we know it even faster?
Most photographs I've seen in the recent years were digitally altered in some way.
Especially automatically applied High-dynamic-range Imaging is a quite popular "effect" in current cameras. A side effect of this is that many hobby photographers don't know how to adjust this method properly, or their camera doesn't offer that much options and as a result the colours on their photos seem to be unreal.
But this doesn't mean that the photographs are photoshopped. Digitally altered, yes; photoshopped in the sense of altered content, no.
Everything alive that isn't a photosynthesis driven plant produces greenhouse gases while it is alive in some way. Arthropods, invertebrates, vertebrates like birds, reptilians, mammals, bacteria and even fungi produce greenhouse gases in their metabolism.
Carbon besides of hydrogen is they key element in organic chemistry. Carbon and hydrogen can form methane, which is a greenhouse gas by itself, it reacts in the earth's atmosphere to CO2, which is another greenhouse gas. Carbon itself can react pretty easily with oxygen to carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide.
Aerobic organisms require oxygen and will emit CO2, anaerobic microbes like in the case of methanogesis microbes will consume CO2 but emit methane on the other hand. Even plants release methane and CO2 via decomposition after they die, due to microbes.
No matter how you want to look at it, greenhouse gases are part of life on this planet and you can't get rid of them that easily. Far more important is to control the rates at which these are emitted by our population.
You're right, it wasn't my intention to devalue makeshift solutions, because those often represent the best thing we can do at the present time to adapt to the circumstances.
That sounds good. I hope that education levels continue to rise everywhere.
These are makeshift solutions. With an ever growing population all solution we come up with, besides of reducing population and consumption, is rather temporary.
Veganism would even be better since vast parts of the milk and egg supplies are provided by intensive livestock farming, but the problem is to motivate people for this change.
Even given the proper environment with plenty of food sources from vegetables, to fruit, berries and mushrooms and grain products, from my experience abrupt changes are often deemed to fail. It's better to convince people to become a vegetarian gradually by reducing the amounts of meat they consume until they realized that besides of the taste of animal fat and protein our tastebuds seem to enjoy, meat isn't really necessary to live 'healthy'. I myself had to make this change gradually because I was just that much used to the taste of meat. And to be completely honest I might not even refuse to eat a steak once in a month that originated from a local farm where the animals were treated properly and if I can be sure of this.
I actually like the idea. Insects are already a popular protein source in parts of the world.
This reminds me on how some Japanese try to deal with their Nomura's jellyfish problem - starting to eat them.
Yeah, the corn that is fed to cattle might not be the best food for us, but it might still be a better overall food source than beef on a global scale :).
Consider this: We as a species emit more and more methane each year because livestock is increased each year. Something can't be good combined with all those other environmental influences that come along with intensive livestock farming, if we want to maintain a 'convenient' environment on this planet.
And as you already pointed out that natural methane sinks work far more effectively than CO2 sinks, but this should help to get quicker results from changes. The 2007 IPCC report states that the effects of methane reduction aren't well understood, perhaps we know more by now, but I have yet to find this 2013 IPCC report.
Under the pretext that there doesn't exist enough research in this field, why not start here? We should be able to get results within a decade. Why always put the emphasis on CO2 and not something that might yield convincing results within a time period that more people would be able to comprehend? There are also plenty of CO2 emissions produced by the meat industry, for example in logistics, that could be reduced along with methane. Might this approach be even more inconvenient?
Well, I think it would be prudent to widen the field of research to other factors in climate change than only CO2. Perhaps there are such studies, but nobody in journalism seems to care about writing articles about those.
By now I've seen plenty of documentaries, which had renowned scientists in them, based on studies that debunk some of the popular CO2 theories and yet introduce other theories that were debunked in more recent studies or discoveries, and also show that papers were falsified to promote the public image of CO2 theories. For me enough reason to become a sceptic of these "everything revolves around CO2"-theories.
This might be one of the most popular "documentaries".
They speak about sun activity in this documentary, and I've already seen studies denying the link of sun activity with the recent increase in global temperature, but the rest is still quite interesting to listen to.
Yes, global warming is true. But how much did humanity actually contribute to it by emitting CO2?
In my eyes there are far worse things like methane released from massive cattle farms which also take a lot of space and require corn or other plants which could be also fed to humans, but tis is very important because we can't live without a cheeseburger at 3 am.
And there's a lot more to be really concerned about which is far worse than the small CO2 contribution humanity adds by burning fossil fuels.
Yeah, again the evil molecule of carbon dioxide the most vicious poison known to man for plants, animals and man alike, endangers our all well being.
It should be banned, right now, before it kills even more plants!
Yes, the vast majority of players seems to be this way, but not everyone is. I liked to call the majority you mentioned 'locusts', because they would move on to the next best new MMO, brutally hype it as the holy grail of salvation before it is released, then after release play it until they're done with the linear part of the game. After "they're done" they leave multiple empty game servers behind them as they leave again, which causes a lot of other players to leave to, since empty servers are no fun. These servers are usually doomed to be closed or merged with other servers servers in conjunction with character transfers, because they won't recover on their own.
Other reasons I've heard from players to go back to WoW is that the new game was essentially the same but with a major lack of content a lot more bugs and less 'friends', which is a problem indeed when you compare a 7 year old game with a freshly released game. I can't blame them though, because I too would dislike it if my new car would come without a car radio and without an air conditioning, which the manufacturer promised to implement in an unset time frame. Certainly when it comes to software you won't ever get a finished product at the release date, but from the perspective of the consumer I can understand their reasons.
I rarely heard of players that moved to games that are very similar to WoW, like StarWars: The old Republic or GuildWars 2 and then stuck with it. It's more often games that can distinguish themselves better from WoW than other games and perhaps offer a different experience, if the 'community' wasn't the main reason for them to play WoW.
A question that is often asked as if players would quit one game to play another, playing at least one video game on a mandatory basis.
From my experience with online gamers there isn't really a limit to the number of online games they play especially when not every single one of those games has monthly fees, they don't commit to a single one game like they might do in a social relationship. I know players that play World of Warcraft, EVE Online and PlanetSide 2 for example, they have their schedule for gaming. On Tuesday and Friday they have their raid in WoW, otherwise they would be playing EVE Online and when EVE Online is getting too slow for their mood they log into PlanetSide 2 or Battlefield 3 and get some "instant action". Gamers will play what is entertaining to them or at least what is effective in killing time. These players usually only quit a game for another one when there is a substitute that can replace every aspect of the 'old' game.
On the other hand I know "casual Gamers" who started with an online game like WoW because all their friends did. These players often tend to leave the game and won't look for a substitute when their friends are leaving the game, and the social aspect of the game has declined to a level where it is not worth spending time in this virtual world. Remember that WoW attracted not only people who were already gamers but introduced people to online gaming or even video games in the first place. These players usually will use their newly gained time for other hobbies, which may not even involve interactive electronics.
Personally I'm still surprised how Blizzard managed to keep such a large player base, to maintain an intake of new players while losing more and more "gamers" over the time. So far they did a really good job on maintaining their player base, a far better job than most online game developers and providers ever did. The only other game company that seems to do fine with a steady increase of players, although a few magnitudes smaller than WoW's playerbase, is CCP with their EVE Online and now DUST 514 online games.
Please elaborate.