I fail to understand why this is such a difficult concept. For instance, by definition, when your browser reads this webpage, it copies the text of my comment into your cache.
If I put --
Copyright (2003) by Ieshan - any system designed to copy this post without my express permission is using my intellectual property illegally.
-- this doesn't give me the right to sue slashdot because they've made a system to copy my posts to your browser.
Likewise, you cannot sue for other frivolous copyright.
An *interesting* application would be to encrypt names of files with a system put in place by Kazaa, an End User Agreement which stated that no information gained from use of the Kazaa System was admissible in the court of law as they cannot control names of files or encryption schemes, and a bunch of users. In this case, the only way to sue would be to jump the DMCA hurdle.
While those are good points, they weren't at all the point of the post, which was that the researchers don't use an arbitrary measurement that applies only to himself or to an overly broad audience, and instead use more subtle measures of violence.:)
In the latest survey, 771 elementary school children from the suburbs of Kanto district were questioned over how long they spent playing computer games. The games included both strongly violent and normal ones. Results of the study were announced at a meeting of the International Simulation and Gaming Association in Kisarazu, Chiba Prefecture, on Aug. 29.
Students who played games the longest tended to affirm violence the most when asked such questions as, "Do you get irritated?" and "Do you sometimes unexpectedly want to hit people?" The difference in verbal aggressiveness was not made clear.
You've suggested a great way to study videogame violence. But you haven't stated the one they used. Read the posted article.
In most clinical drug trials, the drug doesn't affect everyone. You happen to be someone who hasn't had a physical reaction to doing something you've been doing for quite some time.
In fact, since the number of murders in Japan is relatively low, if we use murdering someone as the standard for influence, than videogames probably have little to no effect on this statistic, and you'd be right.
But we're not. The psychologists who measure violent tendancies after exposure to violent video-games use scales and measurements that probably have little to do with actual life experiences. Fill in the blank questionaires. Analyses of thousands of juveniles for a small statistical trend.
Claiming that your actions are in no way influenced by your choice entertainment is just as absurd as saying that videogames turn people into mindless killing zombies. The research clearly shows a pattern that videogames affect children much as other violent entertainment does - by desensitizing them to other violent episodes and by predisposing them to aggressive means of solving problems.
You're not a figment of your imagination, you're an N of 1. Don't assume that the world's scientific findings neccessarily apply to you. In most cases, findings are proven to be statistically significant, not scientific law.
A major factor that's often overlooked when talking about drugs vs. computer games, is, in my opinion, ease of use.
Pleasure is, most of the time, a pleasure vs. pain equation. For instance, Heroin requires that one buys heroin (illegal) and injects it into his bloodstream via needle. This is a very painful and difficult procedure. It's also an extremely pleasurable one (or, so it appears).
Everquest takes extremely little effort to play. This makes it's smaller pleasures "more" rewarding.
Think about it: How many people take recreational drugs in suppository form?:)
FreeCraft was a Warcraft2 clone. Blizzard owns Wacraft2, and makes money off of it.
You own your computer because you make money from some company. If some other company offered your company's product for free and you lost your job, it would be *no different*.
Blizzard keeps it's competitive edge by offering a gaming service that is unique to it's own compnay. People copying their work without their consent doesn't help Open Source, it makes us look like nothing more than thieves.
Academia is an industry just like everything else. It has competition. It's difficult to find a grant. It's hard to win over peer support on a tough theory. Most professors never make the cover of Science.
I work in a lab where Visual Basic is the programming language of choice. Why? Two reasons: a) It's easy. The guy I work for is a *rarity* - a programmer in a non-programming field. Understand that most people don't know how to code, and most people never will, and for people to learn how to code at all is better than for people to hold microsoft in distain. b) It's cost-effective. For what comes out to be cheap in the end, you get quite a lot. Visual Studio is a damn nice environment for doing the things we need to do.
Do I run linux at home? Yep. Posting from Mozilla in Redhat. Am I being influenced by my use of VB in the lab? Maybe, as I find myself typing the wrong commands while shell scripting and using the wrong stupid syntax while coding up some PHP for a website. Do I neccessarily care, since I'm not a computer science major and never intended myself to be? Not at all.
I think your post is too critical of the mainstream american student. Most of us who program without a CS major don't really care one way or the other - it's a tool that transcends language and operating system. I picked up VB almost immediately; it certainly didn't over-write any previous programming knowledge. =P
Sort of, but since we have no direct fate on AOL, there's no real assumed outcome. If the US Courts decided to Fine AOL and then go to trial, keeping in line with their guilty-until-proven-innocent spam blocking, now *that* would be ironic.:)
Exploits are hard to stop without patches. Get enough unpatched systems, and your virus spreads. There are a lot of guilty linux users here, I'm sure: people download software all the time without checking it's security. People run software daily without bothering to check for updates. It happens.
Social engineering, however, is by far the most widely used virus tactic. It's easier to fool a user than to fool a well-secured computer, says this adage. The basic premise fails under linux: it's really, really hard to get someone to run malicious code that you want them to run. Most linux users are above-average on the computer-tech-savvy curve - I would say that the mean computing knowledge for an average linux-desktop user is above the 90% mark on a curve of all computer users.
This means linux users don't do stupid things as readily. The subject line RE: DOWNLOAD MY NEW SCREENSAVER with the attached.tar.gz isn't likely to fool many people. I have a hard time believing that most SoBig victims are those who know what Bayesian filtering is; actually, I have a hard time believing that most SoBig victims know what Inbox means.
Furthermore, it's tough to write code that will run without a hitch on everyone's system, as there's so few distro standards. Also, as email virii work, with linux being a small desktop percentage, it's tough to get emails into the boxes of most Linux users.
Last but not least: There are few people who want to see Linux die. The rivalry doesn't work in both directions. There are thousands of anti-MS'ers, but a sad few anti-Linux'ers (SCO not included. =P). What would the protests be? "Hey, assholes! Keep your free operating systems off of our clean hardware! You're ruining good pentium chips by corrupting them with something non-proprietary!" etc.
Just a few points. I'm sure there are better ones.
If you're interested, 'The Anthropologist on Mars' by Oliver Sacks (a neurologist who's very famous for writing case studies) has a very detailed and informative description of sight restoration.
His novel focuses heavily on the neurological basis for the phenomenon and it's possible failure as an effective cure. Read on, it's great stuff, and available in paperback.:)
In this case, if you owned the rights to your particular type of fruit juice, say, Pickle-Strawberry Blast, your competitors couldn't sell it with the same formula, even if they could make it for a lower price.
This eliminates companies like Microsoft (who have an extremely large amount of money to work with) from undercutting the market - making extremely comparable products at a large loss and driving competitors out of business.
The RIAA owns the rights to these songs, which prevents other people from copying them without paying a fee to the RIAA for it.
The UN offered the Palestinian people the same land which they're now complaining about not having back when Israel was formed. In response, the arab states convinced the Palestinian people to vacate their land (which they did - there was no Israeli policy which stated they had to leave and no occupied land was destroyed) and attack Israel to regain control. They lost the war.
Just so you remember, Israel is given that large defense budget because they've been attacked more times than any other nation in the last 55 years, all by their surrounding neighbors. People like to bring up the fact that Israel has an enormous US defense grant while at the same time failing to realize that Israel has never once started one of the wars that it has participated in.
Your point is well taken - Israelis have killed Palestinians in the violence. However, it should be noted that there has never been a strike against an unimportant figure. Never do you see in the news: Israel kills busload of Palestinian schoolchildren. Why? It doesn't happen. Also remember that there have been many failed suicide bombing attemps - many - which are all recorded as Palestinian fatalities.
I don't support killing anyone, but before you talk out of your ass, do it with some background in the subject.
1) Player Smith has an average skill level, which can't be measured in any way but by observing his in-game performance. (Practices, Games, Contests, etc.)
2) Given all the statistics for all of the players in his sport, Player Smith is most likely to appear in the middle of a normalized curve.
3) Player Smith has a fantastic Rookie year and is placed very high on this normalized curve.
4) Exceptional seasons are caused by both player skill and variables swaying in the player's favor. For instance, Smith might strike out 325 batters, but 75 of them might be opposing hitters catching the sun in their eyes.
5) Player Smith has performed well outside the mean. From this, we can expect two things: a) Player Smith will continue to show talent for his game and b) Smith will perform closer to the mean after his exceptional season, being that his sport is a variable game.
I'm not saying that anyone's season is a fluke, I'm just saying that on the whole, all players, including the Rookie of the Year, are likely to experience regression to the mean. Because of this, it appears as if they're in some slump of some kind. Instead, they're really just performing closer to what they might have done without the variables going their way.
There's an average player performance in football. We can pick out an "average" football player.
We can also pick out exceptional ones - people so exceptional that we ought to put on the covers of video games. By the nature of the sport, that person is likely to not have as exceptional season as the year before. Since he was on the cover of Madden, instead of attributing his decline in performance to regression (Football player X is likely to perform as a non-exceptional player, all things taken into account), we attribute the decline to something unrelated (Player X was on the cover of Madden).
Year to year regression is very common - people often say things about Rookie of the Year, and how that Rookie performs less well in his next season. Well, no wonder! He did as good as was possible the season before, there's nowhere to go but down!
No. It appears as though this is a classic example of regression.
Players who make the Madden cover have amazing, exceptional years. The next year, we look at their play to see that (most of the time) it isn't as good as the previous year. Why?
Well, these players have an average performance. The year before they made the cover, they were way above their average performance. The next year, it should follow that their performance isn't as good as this amazing season (two of these incredible seasons in a row is unlikely). Whether we claim it's because of injury, bad luck, or the Madden cover, either way, it's usually just a decent example of Regression.
We could point out that players who perform extremely poorly and therefore have terrible stats in Madden games go on to improve wildly in their next year. This is the same statistical phenomenon.:)
No, but if you hear on the street that my house has an invisible flag that can only bee seen by special glasses mounted atop it which signals it to be hit by thieves and you kindly remove the flag without my knowledge, I'll be happy and none the wiser.:)
It's not quite correct, but basically, they're saying that these other things don't exist unless we try really hard to make them exist in a laboratory.
For instance, gold, mercury, hydrogen: these are all examples of elements that exist in nature (as well as Lithium, Helium, etc, down the line).
Yes, they've existed in very small quantities (sometimes not at all, there have been disputes over this), and under very controlled conditions.
No, of course it's not inconcievable. But remember, elements are created by making a stable (or not so stable) configuration of protons in a little ball. This leaves one to question what is natural: are nuclear explosions and the weapons of the future a "natural" setting?
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe Apple will use this G5 cluster against a single-processor itanium to show that, yes, they ARE the fastest personal computer!
The only problem will be finding a desk big enough to fit the guys...
This isn't legal, it's abuse of copyright.
I fail to understand why this is such a difficult concept. For instance, by definition, when your browser reads this webpage, it copies the text of my comment into your cache.
If I put --
Copyright (2003) by Ieshan - any system designed to copy this post without my express permission is using my intellectual property illegally.
-- this doesn't give me the right to sue slashdot because they've made a system to copy my posts to your browser.
Likewise, you cannot sue for other frivolous copyright.
An *interesting* application would be to encrypt names of files with a system put in place by Kazaa, an End User Agreement which stated that no information gained from use of the Kazaa System was admissible in the court of law as they cannot control names of files or encryption schemes, and a bunch of users. In this case, the only way to sue would be to jump the DMCA hurdle.
If every one of those 60 million filesharers had this much, it would equal:
150,000,000,000,000,000
150 Quadrillion dollars. Supposing they can sue for this much money, they could purchase the earth. =P
Theorems are reptitions of testable hypotheses that uphold the same result.
Laws are correlates of facts.
Theorems can be wrong. They simply haven't proven that way, yet.
Yeah, but if they brought you into the store and gave you a computer to sign your name with, think of the ink we could save!
While those are good points, they weren't at all the point of the post, which was that the researchers don't use an arbitrary measurement that applies only to himself or to an overly broad audience, and instead use more subtle measures of violence. :)
In the latest survey, 771 elementary school children from the suburbs of Kanto district were questioned over how long they spent playing computer games. The games included both strongly violent and normal ones. Results of the study were announced at a meeting of the International Simulation and Gaming Association in Kisarazu, Chiba Prefecture, on Aug. 29.
Students who played games the longest tended to affirm violence the most when asked such questions as, "Do you get irritated?" and "Do you sometimes unexpectedly want to hit people?" The difference in verbal aggressiveness was not made clear.
You've suggested a great way to study videogame violence. But you haven't stated the one they used. Read the posted article.
No, he's saying you're an N of 1.
In most clinical drug trials, the drug doesn't affect everyone. You happen to be someone who hasn't had a physical reaction to doing something you've been doing for quite some time.
In fact, since the number of murders in Japan is relatively low, if we use murdering someone as the standard for influence, than videogames probably have little to no effect on this statistic, and you'd be right.
But we're not. The psychologists who measure violent tendancies after exposure to violent video-games use scales and measurements that probably have little to do with actual life experiences. Fill in the blank questionaires. Analyses of thousands of juveniles for a small statistical trend.
Claiming that your actions are in no way influenced by your choice entertainment is just as absurd as saying that videogames turn people into mindless killing zombies. The research clearly shows a pattern that videogames affect children much as other violent entertainment does - by desensitizing them to other violent episodes and by predisposing them to aggressive means of solving problems.
You're not a figment of your imagination, you're an N of 1. Don't assume that the world's scientific findings neccessarily apply to you. In most cases, findings are proven to be statistically significant, not scientific law.
I can see money, if you're one of the few who made it past the bust with his job intact? But your women?
The parent's promises are worse vaporware than Duke Nukem'...
A major factor that's often overlooked when talking about drugs vs. computer games, is, in my opinion, ease of use.
:)
Pleasure is, most of the time, a pleasure vs. pain equation. For instance, Heroin requires that one buys heroin (illegal) and injects it into his bloodstream via needle. This is a very painful and difficult procedure. It's also an extremely pleasurable one (or, so it appears).
Everquest takes extremely little effort to play. This makes it's smaller pleasures "more" rewarding.
Think about it: How many people take recreational drugs in suppository form?
Why is it so hard to understand?
FreeCraft was a Warcraft2 clone. Blizzard owns Wacraft2, and makes money off of it.
You own your computer because you make money from some company. If some other company offered your company's product for free and you lost your job, it would be *no different*.
Blizzard keeps it's competitive edge by offering a gaming service that is unique to it's own compnay. People copying their work without their consent doesn't help Open Source, it makes us look like nothing more than thieves.
Academia is an industry just like everything else. It has competition. It's difficult to find a grant. It's hard to win over peer support on a tough theory. Most professors never make the cover of Science.
I work in a lab where Visual Basic is the programming language of choice. Why? Two reasons:
a) It's easy. The guy I work for is a *rarity* - a programmer in a non-programming field. Understand that most people don't know how to code, and most people never will, and for people to learn how to code at all is better than for people to hold microsoft in distain.
b) It's cost-effective. For what comes out to be cheap in the end, you get quite a lot. Visual Studio is a damn nice environment for doing the things we need to do.
Do I run linux at home? Yep. Posting from Mozilla in Redhat. Am I being influenced by my use of VB in the lab? Maybe, as I find myself typing the wrong commands while shell scripting and using the wrong stupid syntax while coding up some PHP for a website. Do I neccessarily care, since I'm not a computer science major and never intended myself to be? Not at all.
I think your post is too critical of the mainstream american student. Most of us who program without a CS major don't really care one way or the other - it's a tool that transcends language and operating system. I picked up VB almost immediately; it certainly didn't over-write any previous programming knowledge. =P
Sort of, but since we have no direct fate on AOL, there's no real assumed outcome. If the US Courts decided to Fine AOL and then go to trial, keeping in line with their guilty-until-proven-innocent spam blocking, now *that* would be ironic. :)
Well, if James Bond's right, at least obsolescence won't be a problem. Diamonds are forever!
Modern viruses work by two major routes:
.tar.gz isn't likely to fool many people. I have a hard time believing that most SoBig victims are those who know what Bayesian filtering is; actually, I have a hard time believing that most SoBig victims know what Inbox means.
A) Exploits
B) Social Engineering
Exploits are hard to stop without patches. Get enough unpatched systems, and your virus spreads. There are a lot of guilty linux users here, I'm sure: people download software all the time without checking it's security. People run software daily without bothering to check for updates. It happens.
Social engineering, however, is by far the most widely used virus tactic. It's easier to fool a user than to fool a well-secured computer, says this adage. The basic premise fails under linux: it's really, really hard to get someone to run malicious code that you want them to run. Most linux users are above-average on the computer-tech-savvy curve - I would say that the mean computing knowledge for an average linux-desktop user is above the 90% mark on a curve of all computer users.
This means linux users don't do stupid things as readily. The subject line RE: DOWNLOAD MY NEW SCREENSAVER with the attached
Furthermore, it's tough to write code that will run without a hitch on everyone's system, as there's so few distro standards. Also, as email virii work, with linux being a small desktop percentage, it's tough to get emails into the boxes of most Linux users.
Last but not least: There are few people who want to see Linux die. The rivalry doesn't work in both directions. There are thousands of anti-MS'ers, but a sad few anti-Linux'ers (SCO not included. =P). What would the protests be? "Hey, assholes! Keep your free operating systems off of our clean hardware! You're ruining good pentium chips by corrupting them with something non-proprietary!" etc.
Just a few points. I'm sure there are better ones.
If you're interested, 'The Anthropologist on Mars' by Oliver Sacks (a neurologist who's very famous for writing case studies) has a very detailed and informative description of sight restoration.
:)
His novel focuses heavily on the neurological basis for the phenomenon and it's possible failure as an effective cure. Read on, it's great stuff, and available in paperback.
It has to do with the reuse of their product.
In this case, if you owned the rights to your particular type of fruit juice, say, Pickle-Strawberry Blast, your competitors couldn't sell it with the same formula, even if they could make it for a lower price.
This eliminates companies like Microsoft (who have an extremely large amount of money to work with) from undercutting the market - making extremely comparable products at a large loss and driving competitors out of business.
The RIAA owns the rights to these songs, which prevents other people from copying them without paying a fee to the RIAA for it.
Zionism and Kibbutzim existed before the second world war. Jews were in Palestine far longer than the founding of Israel.
i onal/mi ddleeast/21ISRA.html
Read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/21/internat
Explain how you're justifying that?
Read about how the war was started. The hostile action was started by Egypt.
The UN offered the Palestinian people the same land which they're now complaining about not having back when Israel was formed. In response, the arab states convinced the Palestinian people to vacate their land (which they did - there was no Israeli policy which stated they had to leave and no occupied land was destroyed) and attack Israel to regain control. They lost the war.
Just so you remember, Israel is given that large defense budget because they've been attacked more times than any other nation in the last 55 years, all by their surrounding neighbors. People like to bring up the fact that Israel has an enormous US defense grant while at the same time failing to realize that Israel has never once started one of the wars that it has participated in.
Your point is well taken - Israelis have killed Palestinians in the violence. However, it should be noted that there has never been a strike against an unimportant figure. Never do you see in the news: Israel kills busload of Palestinian schoolchildren. Why? It doesn't happen. Also remember that there have been many failed suicide bombing attemps - many - which are all recorded as Palestinian fatalities.
I don't support killing anyone, but before you talk out of your ass, do it with some background in the subject.
Let me restate my point again.
Given any current player (Smith) of any sport:
1) Player Smith has an average skill level, which can't be measured in any way but by observing his in-game performance. (Practices, Games, Contests, etc.)
2) Given all the statistics for all of the players in his sport, Player Smith is most likely to appear in the middle of a normalized curve.
3) Player Smith has a fantastic Rookie year and is placed very high on this normalized curve.
4) Exceptional seasons are caused by both player skill and variables swaying in the player's favor. For instance, Smith might strike out 325 batters, but 75 of them might be opposing hitters catching the sun in their eyes.
5) Player Smith has performed well outside the mean. From this, we can expect two things: a) Player Smith will continue to show talent for his game and b) Smith will perform closer to the mean after his exceptional season, being that his sport is a variable game.
I'm not saying that anyone's season is a fluke, I'm just saying that on the whole, all players, including the Rookie of the Year, are likely to experience regression to the mean. Because of this, it appears as if they're in some slump of some kind. Instead, they're really just performing closer to what they might have done without the variables going their way.
Of course it could be.
There's an average player performance in football. We can pick out an "average" football player.
We can also pick out exceptional ones - people so exceptional that we ought to put on the covers of video games. By the nature of the sport, that person is likely to not have as exceptional season as the year before. Since he was on the cover of Madden, instead of attributing his decline in performance to regression (Football player X is likely to perform as a non-exceptional player, all things taken into account), we attribute the decline to something unrelated (Player X was on the cover of Madden).
Year to year regression is very common - people often say things about Rookie of the Year, and how that Rookie performs less well in his next season. Well, no wonder! He did as good as was possible the season before, there's nowhere to go but down!
No. It appears as though this is a classic example of regression.
:)
Players who make the Madden cover have amazing, exceptional years. The next year, we look at their play to see that (most of the time) it isn't as good as the previous year. Why?
Well, these players have an average performance. The year before they made the cover, they were way above their average performance. The next year, it should follow that their performance isn't as good as this amazing season (two of these incredible seasons in a row is unlikely). Whether we claim it's because of injury, bad luck, or the Madden cover, either way, it's usually just a decent example of Regression.
We could point out that players who perform extremely poorly and therefore have terrible stats in Madden games go on to improve wildly in their next year. This is the same statistical phenomenon.
No, but if you hear on the street that my house has an invisible flag that can only bee seen by special glasses mounted atop it which signals it to be hit by thieves and you kindly remove the flag without my knowledge, I'll be happy and none the wiser. :)
Natural vs. Not-naturally occuring.
It's not quite correct, but basically, they're saying that these other things don't exist unless we try really hard to make them exist in a laboratory.
For instance, gold, mercury, hydrogen: these are all examples of elements that exist in nature (as well as Lithium, Helium, etc, down the line).
Yes, they've existed in very small quantities (sometimes not at all, there have been disputes over this), and under very controlled conditions.
No, of course it's not inconcievable. But remember, elements are created by making a stable (or not so stable) configuration of protons in a little ball. This leaves one to question what is natural: are nuclear explosions and the weapons of the future a "natural" setting?