Most Video Game stores do have policies, and most follow them.
I seem to recall all the "investigations" that have been done into this sort of thing it is the big chain stores that sell them most often (against their own policies) to under aged folks.
Also being a Minnesotan gamer, and havign worked in a video game store, I can honestly say this won't help much with the problem of kids getting violent/explicit games.
1) Truely explicit games aren't avaiable at game stores, most retailers do *not* carry AO rated gamers.
2) most parent buy whatever their "perfect little angel" asks them to, and never ask anything abotu the game.
3) most of the parents were annoyed that they had to be bothered to come into my store to pay for the game for their kid becasue it was rated M.
4) most parents are totally clueless about the rating system, or how to read for that matter. I've ruined many, many 12-14 year olds days because they had mom all sold on that new GTA game, even after I mentioned that it was rated M for violence, blood and gore... then I dropped the "P" word on the parents and the game went back on the shelf... It is incredible, killing cops, going on a homocidal rampage, etc. no sweat... pay a woman for sex?! no way!
If anyone is willing to do a study on this, I'd be happy to not do any work and get paid for it... Persoanlly I go to work because I need money to pay for groceries and rent (and Internet!), if I had unlimited money I'd probably play video games all day.
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Yeah but the fact that photos of the guy are still on the laptop lead me to suspect that the laptop was indeed "nonfunctional" at the time of sale.
Unless the buyer went to a godo deal of work to recover the data, or the seller is an idiot and didn't bother erasing his personal stuff from the machine, or the buyer is just making it all up (which should be easy enough to check, do the photos match the seller? are they psoted elsewhere that the buyer could have gotten them from?)
If everything the buyer said is truthful, what rights does the seller retain in terms of the data on the laptop he sold (even assuming it did work)? It is not like the buyer broke into the sellers house for the information, nor that he "hacked" into the sellers computer (since the laptop was now the buyers computer) I'm not sure that there is much that can be legally done about it. If I write up a detailed description of how I am going to do something illegal, then lose/give/sell that write up to another person and they turn it over to the police I can't sue them for releasing my personal information and most likely the police would show up at my house to arrest me, using that as evidence.
The only thing I think the buyer might be in trouble for is pretending to be the seller on his website, which was probably a poor choice of things to do.
Actually I for one, do prefer not to have people cheating when I play them in online games...
Halo 2 used to be fun, running into a guy who shoots you from his flying warthog (and yes I mean the damn thing flew through the air) through walls with automatic headshots is anything but fun, nor is playing capture the flag with a guy who can run across the map in 1 second, capturing your teams flag about the same time the system tells you it has been taken.
And yet somehow people keep buying stuff from them. no-one I know likes it, but a few people have owned up to buying gold off of them because most MMORPGs are time/virtual money sinks, and when you only play a few hours a week it's hard to stockpile gold you need for quests/supplies.
Well the second phone could be there to halve the cooking time, and to make sure the connection stays open (very few systems will allow you to call them and not say anything for an extended period of time, most of them will hang up on you)
I got to hand it to the boys at Infinium, they sure now how to sell people a non existant product. If it hadn't been done before in a movie this would have made a great original plot!
Hmm the article assumes that the person tippign the cow is a mere 147.4 lbs... and it would take 2.07 people... so 1 307 lbs "jock" should be able to do it, in theory according to the article. maybe they assume that noone that size could exist? hmm a quick google search shows that in the indianapolis metro area there were ~50 high school athletes that fit that bill. So the "debunking" may have actually implied that it would be possible.
Well the life cycle of the mouse is 2 years (as stated in the article), let's assume that the mouse can reproduce at 1 year old (probably much earlier). Now lets assume that those mice have been breeding towards self-regeneration since 5 AD. That's around 2000 generations to achieve the mutation. Now the human can reproduce around age 14, those same 2000 generations will take at least 28,000 years to occur, if they occur at the same rate in humans as they did in the mice.
A mouse is a complex creature, and I doubt that regeneration isn't a bonus, unless it has a side effect of making one sterile.
there are three things that have lead to Anime being as popular as it is today: 1) it being concieved 2) DVD 3) the internet.
The first is an obvious one.
The second finally brought the price into the reasonable range for most people. I recall buying Anime at $40 a VHS tape, and not being able to find some shows subtitled 9my preffered method of viewing). Along came DVD making it cheaper to mass produce in small quantities by reducing both the cost to make themedia, and much easier to ship.
The third one has brought many more people into the Anime fan category than anything else I can think of. Word of mouth can get you so far, but you do need to show someone the stuff before some people will get hooked.
I freely admit I DL anime that is not available here, and most places willingly remove the material if it gets a publisher here, but this doesn't stop too many people from buying the DVDs. The article states that they've downloaded more fan subs than they've bought: I can believe that, but I wonder how many anime titles they have bought without having seen them first. I am willing to guess that the number is fairly small. I am also willing to bet that most big anime fans do indeed buy the DVDs, as do I, and have them sitting on their racks despite the fact that they have the entire series sitting on their harddrive (I have bought the first three of the Full Metal Alchemist discs despite the fact that I have the entire series sitting on both DVDs and my HDD in fansub form).
Most of the Anime fanatics I know are used to spendinig obscene amounts of cash on anime, and are very willing to support their hobby. the notion that fansubs and the internet cause sales to plummet is like thinking that radio causes people to not buy CDs. I mean seriously how many people would go to the store and think "hey some band called 'Pissant five' just put out an album, I think I'll buy it." No most people hear a song on a radio and like it then they want to go buy the CD, they don't go out and buy a CD on the first day just becasue it came out! I mean you could end up with something God aweful, like Yanni or Ashlee Simpson!
Everquest II has the/pizza command.
props to Blizzard for not only making a funny April Folls day joke, but taking a shot at their competition at the same time
I have one of these, and the head movement required are quite minimal, especially if wearing a hat with the reflective dot on the brim.
You can easily keep your eyes on the moniter at all times, its more that you move your head to look at the corner/top/bottom/sides of your moniter.
The biggest issues I've had so far is the fact that: 1) the current software is not XP compatible so it occaisionally crashes on me. 2) its USB only and I'm running out of USB ports, even with my hub (it wants a powered hub, or preferably hooked directly to the computer) 3) it's really sensitive. You would be amused by how much you actually move your head while playing video games.
other than those most potential flaws have been addressed; you can recenter the view on the fly with a simple key press, there is a mouse emulation mode, and a track IR mode( tracks based on the position not just relative position like the mouse does)
If one could entangle a pair of atoms in such a way that it would be relatively easy to change the state of one in a simply meassured way instant communications between any two points in the universe would be possible. You want to talk to Uncle Joe stationed on a Mars expedition? No problem, slap your credit card into the video phone, the telecomms link into NASAs Ansible which links into its partner on the far end, a signal is sent to Uncle Joe that he has a call, and viola you are talking to him.
I just realised that if you could pick and choose multiple diffrent states to measure, say frequency and charge it would make it possible to rely huge amounts of data very quickly, limited only by the speed in which the data can be measured on the recieving end.
The distributed computing possibilities are unbelievable too... The ultimate unbreakable damage proof computer because its parts are scattered across the planet/solar system. No single place would contain a significant amount of the system to allow it to be destroyed without massive effort to get all the pieces worldwide.
Actually some of the independant guys like File sharing. Independant = small-fry noone has heard of (in most cases). File on (whatever) = more people know who they are. More people know who they are= more people that will want their CD/Tape/DVD. more people wanting their music= more people wanting to buy their music.
And just for the record I don't use any of the filesharing programs, I do actually buy the few CDs I am interested in (you see I am one of those people they would love to have on filesharing services, I tend to buy CDs because I like single songs)
I mean I can understand why the RIAA is upset at your average joe stealing money away from authors/performers, that's their job. If enough people do it it might put them (RIAA) out of work.
Actually given it is caught early enough it could cure full blown AIDS too. it would just take it a while to catch up to the deadly version to keep it from attacking the antibodies in the body and then long enough for the body to get a set of antibodies again.
But in the time between anti-HIV infection and cure is still a very dangerous time, because other illness can still kill you. (technically AIDS has never killed anyone, it allows other usually nonfatal viruses to kill you by suppressing the bodies ability to fight them off.)
HIV is AIDS. What the "cure" virus (refered to henceforth as Cure)does is to "eat" the HIV virus. It doesn't kill it all, but it does kill enough of it to keep it from adversly affecting the patient. Apparently it is also transmissible as is HIV/AIDS, which means that yes eventually everyone (you know what I mean) would catch it. Making it kind of like a cold, something that gets passed around and the only reason it survives is that it is little more than an annoyance.
The funniest part is I know I read a story that had almost the same principle involved, but instead of being manmade it was a mutation that had evolved on its own. Eventually the entire populace was deliberatly infected with the harmless version of HIV/AIDS in order to keep the deadly version from going nuts. Another good example would be smallpox. Nearly everyone was exposed to it in the last century, and it was so completely destroyed that cases of it are nearly unheard of in the civilized world.
I guess I would say that yes it is a "cure" of a sort, it is a permanent solution to the problem (like setting a broken bone, it doesn't make it perfect like it was before, but once it heals it is fixed without further treatments being needed)
On that note the company would be Gamestop... Since they no longer see fit to employ me I am nolonger bound to not mention who they are, being unemployeed somehow makes me unafraid of them firing me.
I took horrible care of my teeth for a while there myself. I am looking at a $19,000 dentist bill to get it all fixed. Yes that was 3 zeros, I could buy a freaking car for that amount. So I have my choice, buy a car, or get my mouth back into a working order.
Crowns cost on the order of $1500 a piece, throw in a couple of those for teeth that have gotten broken (had a nasty fall when I was younger, thrashed my front 4 and the work I had doen ont hem then is starting to crap out through my previous lack of care).
I have good insurance it covers $1500/year of work.
Actually there is a fundamental faith in Math to. You have to believe that the world is consistent, and that 1+1=2 no matter what else happens. If something changes the way things are Math changes, for example look at the concept of 0 or irrational numbers, or hell Calculus for that matter. In Grade School and Algebra it is drilled into your head that.9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999 !=1, but you get to calculus and they say close enough. you need to take that "close enough" part on faith that it really doesn't matter.
And I thought I was a dork for having an ancient Apple IIC compute Pi for about a month once (The were ancient computers abandoned downstairs in my High School, Noone even looked at the things so me and a friend decided to see how much of Pi it would be able to compute... now if only we had a printer hooked up to that baby;) )
On a scary note: I know of at least one large corporation that has a POS system programmed in QBasic to this day...
Er you may want to rephrase that... especially given which of you is the one who did the "walking". Sorry, I just started laughing when I read your post because of the logic involved.
My question is this:
Why didn't I see anyone complaining about this when Sega did it with the Dreamcast? Yes that was one of the features, you could "update" the hardware with newer discs. My understanding was that it would check the system file version vs the the one on the game, if the game had a newer one it would update your system.
The other potential legal loophole I can see is this:
You did agree to update the system, you isntalled the particular game that the update came on. It could be argued that in order for the game to run,t e update needed to be run to make sure the game itself ran properly. It also has the side benefit for Microsoft that it defeats the Linux, and other, hacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in the XBox hardware/software.
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Most Video Game stores do have policies, and most follow them.
I seem to recall all the "investigations" that have been done into this sort of thing it is the big chain stores that sell them most often (against their own policies) to under aged folks.
Also being a Minnesotan gamer, and havign worked in a video game store, I can honestly say this won't help much with the problem of kids getting violent/explicit games.
1) Truely explicit games aren't avaiable at game stores, most retailers do *not* carry AO rated gamers.
2) most parent buy whatever their "perfect little angel" asks them to, and never ask anything abotu the game.
3) most of the parents were annoyed that they had to be bothered to come into my store to pay for the game for their kid becasue it was rated M.
4) most parents are totally clueless about the rating system, or how to read for that matter. I've ruined many, many 12-14 year olds days because they had mom all sold on that new GTA game, even after I mentioned that it was rated M for violence, blood and gore... then I dropped the "P" word on the parents and the game went back on the shelf... It is incredible, killing cops, going on a homocidal rampage, etc. no sweat... pay a woman for sex?! no way!
If anyone is willing to do a study on this, I'd be happy to not do any work and get paid for it...
Persoanlly I go to work because I need money to pay for groceries and rent (and Internet!), if I had unlimited money I'd probably play video games all day.
Yeah but the fact that photos of the guy are still on the laptop lead me to suspect that the laptop was indeed "nonfunctional" at the time of sale.
Unless the buyer went to a godo deal of work to recover the data, or the seller is an idiot and didn't bother erasing his personal stuff from the machine, or the buyer is just making it all up (which should be easy enough to check, do the photos match the seller? are they psoted elsewhere that the buyer could have gotten them from?)
If everything the buyer said is truthful, what rights does the seller retain in terms of the data on the laptop he sold (even assuming it did work)? It is not like the buyer broke into the sellers house for the information, nor that he "hacked" into the sellers computer (since the laptop was now the buyers computer) I'm not sure that there is much that can be legally done about it. If I write up a detailed description of how I am going to do something illegal, then lose/give/sell that write up to another person and they turn it over to the police I can't sue them for releasing my personal information and most likely the police would show up at my house to arrest me, using that as evidence.
The only thing I think the buyer might be in trouble for is pretending to be the seller on his website, which was probably a poor choice of things to do.
Actually I for one, do prefer not to have people cheating when I play them in online games...
Halo 2 used to be fun, running into a guy who shoots you from his flying warthog (and yes I mean the damn thing flew through the air) through walls with automatic headshots is anything but fun, nor is playing capture the flag with a guy who can run across the map in 1 second, capturing your teams flag about the same time the system tells you it has been taken.
And yet somehow people keep buying stuff from them. no-one I know likes it, but a few people have owned up to buying gold off of them because most MMORPGs are time/virtual money sinks, and when you only play a few hours a week it's hard to stockpile gold you need for quests/supplies.
Well the second phone could be there to halve the cooking time, and to make sure the connection stays open (very few systems will allow you to call them and not say anything for an extended period of time, most of them will hang up on you)
I got to hand it to the boys at Infinium, they sure now how to sell people a non existant product. If it hadn't been done before in a movie this would have made a great original plot!
Hmm the article assumes that the person tippign the cow is a mere 147.4 lbs... and it would take 2.07 people... so 1 307 lbs "jock" should be able to do it, in theory according to the article. maybe they assume that noone that size could exist? hmm a quick google search shows that in the indianapolis metro area there were ~50 high school athletes that fit that bill. So the "debunking" may have actually implied that it would be possible.
Note that none of those religions are major religions today... I think you may have just supported his point.
Well the life cycle of the mouse is 2 years (as stated in the article), let's assume that the mouse can reproduce at 1 year old (probably much earlier). Now lets assume that those mice have been breeding towards self-regeneration since 5 AD. That's around 2000 generations to achieve the mutation. Now the human can reproduce around age 14, those same 2000 generations will take at least 28,000 years to occur, if they occur at the same rate in humans as they did in the mice.
A mouse is a complex creature, and I doubt that regeneration isn't a bonus, unless it has a side effect of making one sterile.
there are three things that have lead to Anime being as popular as it is today:
1) it being concieved
2) DVD
3) the internet.
The first is an obvious one.
The second finally brought the price into the reasonable range for most people. I recall buying Anime at $40 a VHS tape, and not being able to find some shows subtitled 9my preffered method of viewing). Along came DVD making it cheaper to mass produce in small quantities by reducing both the cost to make themedia, and much easier to ship.
The third one has brought many more people into the Anime fan category than anything else I can think of. Word of mouth can get you so far, but you do need to show someone the stuff before some people will get hooked.
I freely admit I DL anime that is not available here, and most places willingly remove the material if it gets a publisher here, but this doesn't stop too many people from buying the DVDs. The article states that they've downloaded more fan subs than they've bought: I can believe that, but I wonder how many anime titles they have bought without having seen them first. I am willing to guess that the number is fairly small. I am also willing to bet that most big anime fans do indeed buy the DVDs, as do I, and have them sitting on their racks despite the fact that they have the entire series sitting on their harddrive (I have bought the first three of the Full Metal Alchemist discs despite the fact that I have the entire series sitting on both DVDs and my HDD in fansub form).
Most of the Anime fanatics I know are used to spendinig obscene amounts of cash on anime, and are very willing to support their hobby. the notion that fansubs and the internet cause sales to plummet is like thinking that radio causes people to not buy CDs. I mean seriously how many people would go to the store and think "hey some band called 'Pissant five' just put out an album, I think I'll buy it." No most people hear a song on a radio and like it then they want to go buy the CD, they don't go out and buy a CD on the first day just becasue it came out! I mean you could end up with something God aweful, like Yanni or Ashlee Simpson!
Everquest II has the /pizza command.
props to Blizzard for not only making a funny April Folls day joke, but taking a shot at their competition at the same time
I have one of these, and the head movement required are quite minimal, especially if wearing a hat with the reflective dot on the brim.
You can easily keep your eyes on the moniter at all times, its more that you move your head to look at the corner/top/bottom/sides of your moniter.
The biggest issues I've had so far is the fact that:
1) the current software is not XP compatible so it occaisionally crashes on me.
2) its USB only and I'm running out of USB ports, even with my hub (it wants a powered hub, or preferably hooked directly to the computer)
3) it's really sensitive. You would be amused by how much you actually move your head while playing video games.
other than those most potential flaws have been addressed; you can recenter the view on the fly with a simple key press, there is a mouse emulation mode, and a track IR mode( tracks based on the position not just relative position like the mouse does)
I've got an idea for some surfaces that might need mapping, for the health of my girlfriend of course.
If one could entangle a pair of atoms in such a way that it would be relatively easy to change the state of one in a simply meassured way instant communications between any two points in the universe would be possible. You want to talk to Uncle Joe stationed on a Mars expedition? No problem, slap your credit card into the video phone, the telecomms link into NASAs Ansible which links into its partner on the far end, a signal is sent to Uncle Joe that he has a call, and viola you are talking to him.
I just realised that if you could pick and choose multiple diffrent states to measure, say frequency and charge it would make it possible to rely huge amounts of data very quickly, limited only by the speed in which the data can be measured on the recieving end.
The distributed computing possibilities are unbelievable too... The ultimate unbreakable damage proof computer because its parts are scattered across the planet/solar system. No single place would contain a significant amount of the system to allow it to be destroyed without massive effort to get all the pieces worldwide.
Actually some of the independant guys like File sharing. Independant = small-fry noone has heard of (in most cases). File on (whatever) = more people know who they are. More people know who they are= more people that will want their CD/Tape/DVD. more people wanting their music= more people wanting to buy their music.
And just for the record I don't use any of the filesharing programs, I do actually buy the few CDs I am interested in (you see I am one of those people they would love to have on filesharing services, I tend to buy CDs because I like single songs)
I mean I can understand why the RIAA is upset at your average joe stealing money away from authors/performers, that's their job. If enough people do it it might put them (RIAA) out of work.
Actually given it is caught early enough it could cure full blown AIDS too. it would just take it a while to catch up to the deadly version to keep it from attacking the antibodies in the body and then long enough for the body to get a set of antibodies again.
But in the time between anti-HIV infection and cure is still a very dangerous time, because other illness can still kill you. (technically AIDS has never killed anyone, it allows other usually nonfatal viruses to kill you by suppressing the bodies ability to fight them off.)
HIV is AIDS. What the "cure" virus (refered to henceforth as Cure)does is to "eat" the HIV virus. It doesn't kill it all, but it does kill enough of it to keep it from adversly affecting the patient. Apparently it is also transmissible as is HIV/AIDS, which means that yes eventually everyone (you know what I mean) would catch it. Making it kind of like a cold, something that gets passed around and the only reason it survives is that it is little more than an annoyance.
The funniest part is I know I read a story that had almost the same principle involved, but instead of being manmade it was a mutation that had evolved on its own. Eventually the entire populace was deliberatly infected with the harmless version of HIV/AIDS in order to keep the deadly version from going nuts. Another good example would be smallpox. Nearly everyone was exposed to it in the last century, and it was so completely destroyed that cases of it are nearly unheard of in the civilized world.
I guess I would say that yes it is a "cure" of a sort, it is a permanent solution to the problem (like setting a broken bone, it doesn't make it perfect like it was before, but once it heals it is fixed without further treatments being needed)
On that note the company would be Gamestop... Since they no longer see fit to employ me I am nolonger bound to not mention who they are, being unemployeed somehow makes me unafraid of them firing me.
I took horrible care of my teeth for a while there myself. I am looking at a $19,000 dentist bill to get it all fixed. Yes that was 3 zeros, I could buy a freaking car for that amount. So I have my choice, buy a car, or get my mouth back into a working order.
Crowns cost on the order of $1500 a piece, throw in a couple of those for teeth that have gotten broken (had a nasty fall when I was younger, thrashed my front 4 and the work I had doen ont hem then is starting to crap out through my previous lack of care).
I have good insurance it covers $1500/year of work.
Actually there is a fundamental faith in Math to. You have to believe that the world is consistent, and that 1+1=2 no matter what else happens. If something changes the way things are Math changes, for example look at the concept of 0 or irrational numbers, or hell Calculus for that matter. In Grade School and Algebra it is drilled into your head that .9999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 99999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999999 9999999 !=1, but you get to calculus and they say close enough. you need to take that "close enough" part on faith that it really doesn't matter.
And I thought I was a dork for having an ancient Apple IIC compute Pi for about a month once (The were ancient computers abandoned downstairs in my High School, Noone even looked at the things so me and a friend decided to see how much of Pi it would be able to compute... now if only we had a printer hooked up to that baby ;) )
On a scary note: I know of at least one large corporation that has a POS system programmed in QBasic to this day...
Er you may want to rephrase that... especially given which of you is the one who did the "walking". Sorry, I just started laughing when I read your post because of the logic involved.
My question is this:
Why didn't I see anyone complaining about this when Sega did it with the Dreamcast? Yes that was one of the features, you could "update" the hardware with newer discs. My understanding was that it would check the system file version vs the the one on the game, if the game had a newer one it would update your system.
The other potential legal loophole I can see is this:
You did agree to update the system, you isntalled the particular game that the update came on. It could be argued that in order for the game to run,t e update needed to be run to make sure the game itself ran properly. It also has the side benefit for Microsoft that it defeats the Linux, and other, hacks that attempt to exploit vulnerabilities in the XBox hardware/software.