The relevant question is not how common the test is.
The relevant question is, would it have made any difference?
Or, rather, what the chances are that it would make a difference, considering the fact that we live in a world where medical professionals (and the tools of their trade) are a finite resource that can be allocated in different ways -- some more effective, overall, than others. If routine PSA tests save 1 man out of 1,000,000, is it worth it? Maybe, it all depends on whether or not the time/resources of the physician could be better spent in other ways that might save more lives.
Most patients are going to want the most thorough care and will want to hold their doctor accountable if he doesn't catch something that the next guy would have, but there will always be a more careful doctor than yours. If you wanted to be super safe, you could get a thorough examination for all sorts of rare and common maladies every 3 months, but it'd be very time-consuming, inconvenient and expensive. Unless there's something in your medical history that calls for such frequent examinations, they would only offer only a negligible chance at improving your state of health compared to less frequent and thorough regular checkups.
Doctors are charged with the task of finding a responsible balance. It seems to me that if the doctor was acting in good faith, neither he nor his school should be held liable for the consequences suffered by an outlier -- at least not if there is strong evidence to suggest that, on average, his technique is more effective at treating patients and saving lives.
I think this is quite a valid strategy. It's liek Visual Basic, it turns application development into a drag and drop excercise. Anyone can do it, even people who don't really understand programming! However that results in Visual Basic getting a bad reputation because anything that's written by bad programmers is going to end up a bit shoddy. Sony don't want their console associated with shoddy games. They'd prefer that only decent programmers create games for their system.
Does have a large number of poor quality games really hurt a console's sales, though? I suppose it's conceivable (an ignorant gamer buys the console, doesn't bother to research games before buying, and then tells all of his friends that PS3 games suck because he's only picked mediocre titles), but most people that I know judge a system based not on how good the average game on the system is, but instead based on the quality and quantity of top-tier/highly-rated games on the system.
Making the system more difficult to develop may reduce the quantity of shovelware/crapware that exists, but it also reduces the quality/quantity of top-tier games as well. Since those games probably drive sales more than crappy games hurt sales, it seems to me there is a good chance that the strategy is not only frustrating and cynical, but ineffective.
It's not an argument for the morality of homosexuality, but rather a rebuttal of the erroneous claim that homosexuality is unnatural (and therefore bad). Of course it might be better to make the argument that to claim that something unnatural must be bad (or that something natural must be good) is also wrong, but either approach effectively undermines a critical premise in that particular anti-gay line of "reasoning."
perhaps they are intelligent, but if you talk to it for days, it can be just a split-second for the rock; and if the rock want's to tell you something, it won't finish the first word before you die of old age (or boredom).
The good: they're only studying health services, they've set a reasonable deadline, and all health technology systems should be open source anyway to make auditing simpler. The bad: This is debt-financed spending.
I see it more as a debt-financed investment. Which isn't to say all of this deficit spending isn't scary and possibly quite unwise, but it is encouraging to see at least a portion of the money is being used in ways that might ultimately save the government money and allow the economy to work more efficiently.
The autism scare doesn't really have anything to do with how medical professionals and scientists in the United States treat mental disorders. Instead it has to do with how the media does business.
It goes like this: some crackpot with a MD or phD (or sometimes not even that) makes a crackpot claim which nonetheless might appear credible to the layperson. If the crackpot claim plays on the emotions, biases and greed of the public (wanting someone to blame, distrust of big pharmaceutical companies, desire for large cash settlements) and the media, always hungry for a sensational new story, picks it up and relays it to a credulous public, and the movement builds momentum. Occasionally the media will host talking head debates where experts on both sides of the issues duke it on in sound-bite interview-exchanges. The result is that both sides appear equally credible (or whoever has the more charismatic expert appears more credible) and the public goes on thinking the crackpot theory may be/is probably true, in spite of whatever the evidence is, or overwhelming consensus that the crackpot theory is just that.
And I believe the who autism scare was kicked off by a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield, and was picked up and spread by the UK media, so it's not a purely American phenomenon.
Howver far into the future the mainstay resources will shift. Currently oil literally drives us. It used to be food(people, horses,etc). It will probably be the element that enables FTL.
FTL may not even be possible. I think our likely "far future" will be shaped by the development of strong artificial intelligence and the realization of a technological singularity. It's hard to predict what will follow that, almost by definition... but it's hard for me to imagine that it will involve humans fighting wars over material resources. Which is not to say such conflict won't be replaced by something even more appalling.
It was a cliched and unimaginative way of opening my post, but it's true. Also, wasn't really my aim to praise Sony, but I do lament the fact that the Wii lacks a couple of the big features that its competitors sport in this generation of consoles, and I hope that in the next generation of consoles, Nintendo tries harder to compete head-to-head with MS and Sony, while continuing to support the Wii as an inexpensive toy for old folks and casual gamers.
Conclusion: Nintendo no longer catering to their traditional demographic may be sad, but it isn't bad -- someone else will pick up the slack if there is demand.
It's bad in the sense that someone else pointed out -- it means you have to spend $300 (plus accessories) on a console if you want access to Nintendo's traditional franchise titles, but doesn't get many of the big AAA cross-platform games like Fallout 3 (maybe a bad example, because I'd prefer to play it on the PC anyway).
Also, I'm someone who enjoys casual titles as well as the more hardcore ones, and it seems to me that Nintendo is getting a little lazy in this regard too. One of the first things that got me excited about the Wii upon reading about WiiConnect24 and the motion controls was the next Animal Crossing game -- but it turns out that Animal Crossing: City Folk is just an unimaginative rehash of the previous AC titles that doesn't even try to use many of the Wii's best features to its advantage. That may be fine for folks who didn't own the GameCube version of the game, but for me it was a big letdown. I'm not even going to bother to buy one of the games that had me most psyched-up about the console in the first place.
They're catering to a more casual audience, but also a less critical and demanding audience, which means they can afford to cut corners and let quality decline and innovation lapse. Nintendo's strategy is smart, but from my own selfish perspective, I think their success may end up being a bad thing for gaming in the long run, if Nintendo (and other companies) learn the wrong lessons.
I'm a Nintendo fanboy, camped out for my Wii on launch day, don't own a PS3 or 360, but I have to say that I think some of the criticisms against the Wii here are spot-on. The idea of motion-controlled games is nice, but I think the implementation leaves something to be desired, and the lack of a hard drive and strong graphical capabilities (compared to the other consoles) really does limit the system's potential.
As for the casual gamers... a friend of mine with all three systems regularly hosts game nights for his church and guess what system we end up playing the most? The PS3 for Rock Band/Rock Band 2 and, more recently, Little Big World. Of course, Rock Band is available on the Wii as well, but the fact that new songs are released every week has helped keep the game fresh, while the novelty of the wiimote faded a long time ago.
The Wii may have broader appeal than the other systems, but that doesn't mean it's a better system. That's why I'm with the parent in hoping that the next Nintendo system is packing some horsepower. Your grandparents will presumably still be happy with GameCube-level graphics two years from now Nintendo can keep releasing new controllers and relatively simple, inexpensive games to keep that segment of the market happy.
But as for me, I want the next generation of Zelda, Mario and Metroid games to push the envelope, not only in terms of game-play and controls, but also when it comes to scope, graphics, etc. and enjoy every major multiplatform release on my Nintendo without the game losing any major features or visual appeal.
I can go out and buy a car and learn to drive it in a few minutes... at most an hour if it were a REALLY complicated car. Sure you may not be an expert at it, but you CAN drive it. Maybe the future makes all ships so different from each other that it requires special degrees from a major university to teach you how to drive each one. The same applies to weapons, and pretty much everything in the game.
I can understand your frustration from the game-play side of things, but in terms of game lore, this makes a fair amount of sense. Comparing an automobile to a space ship is pretty silly. Consumer autos are designed with a fairly standard set of controls and features, and don't vary to a huge degree in terms of capability. And I think it might take more than an hour to learn how to safely drive, say, an F1 racer.
In EVE we are talking about talking about ships far more sophisticated than the space shuttle and are generally built with very specialized functions in mind. Pretty much all of the ships are larger than the Eiffel tower (even the lowly frigate) and most are bigger the the Enterprise-D. Also keep in mind that the pod pilot replaces the entire bridge crew.
Add that to the fact that you can never "catch up" seems to remove the skill of advancing your character faster/slower than someone else.
While it's essentially impossible to "catch up" to someone who's been playing longer than you (providing that he is good about remembering to have a skill in training at all times) it's not necessary to have an equal number of skill points to effectively compete with him in different circumstances. A manufacturing-focused character may have no advantage over you in combat, and the opposite is also true. Also, skills are subject to diminishing returns compared to the amount of time that is invested in them. Achieving Level V in a skill may yield a 5% improvement in one area, but take months to train. Most people don't bother. If you have the skills to fly the same type of ship and the same type of modules, generally speaking you can stand toe-to-toe with someone who's been playing for years longer than you.
Also, the advantage to this style of skill advancement is that your character's capabilities isn't connected so directly with how much time you can spend playing the game. It's more casual-friendly, in that sense.
Oh, and it feels like they already plotted out how much money (real life) it is going to take for anyone to play the game. They know exactly how much time you've invested in the game and how much money you've given them. It just feels like it's "on rails" too much.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. EVE-Online is probably the most open-ended MMO out there. More than any other game, it is left up to the player to decide what his goals will be, and how best to fulfill them. The game gives you relatively direction, but there are many directions that you can decide to take. Yes, you will need to play for a certain minimum length of time before certain aspects of the game become fully available to you, but that's no different from other MMOs -- in EVE, at least you don't have to run on the treadmill for hours on end to get there.
If people are willing to pay them that much, then yes, they should make that much money.
They "should" make that much money according to free market supply/demand principles, but getting rid of (or paring down) copyright law would alter the supply/demand dynamic. If fewer government-enforced restrictions on the copying of content reduced revenues for the film/TV industries and actors had to accept much smaller salaries for similar work, you'd have a new, legitimate estimation of the value of their services.
I see far more first amendment attacks from the American Left than I do the American Right.
I take it you're from the Sarah Palin school of Constitutional interpretation, where extremely vocal criticism by the press or private citizens/organizations amounts to a violation of the first amendment. Or you're just throwing this statement out there, without offering any support for it.
The reverse is not true. Most of the Atheist bashing I see is confined to odd little corners of the Internet, such as forums dedicated to fundamentalist worship of one flavor or another, or the 42nd page of the newspaper.
You might have heard recently about how Elizabeth Dole called out Kay Hagan for attending an event hosted by a group called Godless Americans (among others, but none of the other groups were mentioned in Dole's attack ads). The implicit message here is that atheism is so horrible that having any association with an atheist group is counts as a black mark against a person's character and suitability as a member of Congress.
This is the Elizabeth Dole campaign, an sitting congresswoman. She's the wife of a former major party candidate for the presidency of the United States, not a "fringe group on the Internet."
Reaching back a bit, there is the infamous quote from George H. W. Bush when he was campaigning for the presidency: "... I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
People campaigning for public office today usually have a little more tact than that, but anti-atheist sentiment is not at all a fringe phenomenon, on the Internet or elsewhere. It's not uncommon at all for people to make comments about atheists, that if were said about Jews, would be called out by everyone as rank bigotry.
I wouldn't expect a non-atheist to see it though. We've been conditioned as a society to recognize the injustice faced by certain minority groups, but atheists usually aren't such a group, so a lot of the derogatory commentary about atheists might not even register as something potentially offensive. But it's definitely out there.
Who says that an MMO has to be extremely difficult/complicated?
I think the defining characteristics of an MMO are 1) large, online playerbase (it's in the name, after all) and 2) persistence.
It doesn't have to be an RPG, it doesn't have to be centered around questing/raiding.
Though I agree that for the current model of MMO, a keyboard/mouse combo is really the only way to go. However, this can be addressed on consoles via peripherals.
The main weakness of a console-based MMO, I think, would be a lack of user-interface customizability (at least to the degree seen in games like WoW). Heck, this is a showstopper for me on PC MMOs that lack interfaces that can't be extensively modified, such as EVE-Online.
It is a fact that artists, nerds and techies tend to be more mentally shall I say, weird, than the rest of the population.
Yes, but that's only a subset of the left, and a more extreme subset at that.
Ask yourself how mentally "weird" the people on the extreme right tend to be. Think of the hardcore fundamentalist Christians, alcoholic rednecks, etc. In my (anecdotal) experience, such folks tend to be more likely to exhibit signs of extreme narcissism or borderline sociopathy and psychopathy.
So consider the possibility that both of our anecdotal observations are accurate, and consider it along with jbeach's point about the unreliability of polls that depend on self-reported data. Which group do you think is more likely to acknowledge that they have a mental problem? The group with the redneck who beats his dog, or the one with the goth chick who cuts on herself? The "crazy Jesus lady" or the schizophrenic artist?
Granted, none of my speculations here are what you'd call scientific, but then neither are yours, and the Gallup poll wasn't either for the reason jbeach pointed out. All it tells you is that more conservative people claim, when polled, claim to have better mental health, compared to the claims of liberals.
It's a fairly standard measurement for mass, though. Transformers have mass, so it's perfectly applicable, especially when you are trying to underscore the massiveness of the piece of equipment in question, rather than its functional capability. If the person writing the article/summary wanted to underscore the cost of the unit, he might have measured it in US dollars. That's what journalists do: describe things in terms their readers might understand or care about. And most of their readers aren't pedantic electrical engineers.
Sorry, I thought you'd understand my meaning when I used the phrase "can't imagine" by the context; it was hyperbole. If scientists consider even the best theories as being at least nominally subject to revision/falsification, then of course they can "imagine" scenarios in which those theories are proven utterly wrong. It's just that such a scenarios are so implausible/unlikely that they're not worth taking seriously, or even mentioning.
Carl Sagan got the two intertwined in many of his videos. I think this guy was suffeciently up on evolutionary theory and yet he hopped from the big bang to evolution with no transition and presented everything as fact not "Scientists believe".
This seems unlikely to me, but then I haven't seen every Sagan video. I know he's done a narrative of our origins that describes the events of the Big Bang and the evolution of life (sometimes without even explicitly naming either theory), but in the videos I've seen, you'd have to misinterpret it pretty badly to come away thinking the Big Bang and the theory of evolution are the same thing. From the videos I've seen, it is clear that he understands the distinction between the two.
As for not prefacing explanations of evolution or the Big Bang with "scientists believe," I don't see anything wrong with that. That sort of qualifier is largely unnecessary unless you're talking about some sort of fringe hypothesis or an area where there are significant differences of opinion about which model to favor. Sprinkling "scientists believe" about just dilutes and drags down the dialog. For all intents and purposes, the chief features of a legitimate theory can and should be presented as fact. In concept, those theories are all provisional in nature, and are subject to falsification, but in reality we're confident enough in them that we can't imagine ever overturning them completely.
The learning curve could be smoothed out a bit. I think there's a reason why it's like this though: multiplayer/newbies. They made it so someone who's just started playing the game can have a reasonable shot at playing the entire set list, instead of the first 10 songs or so, that way the host doesn't get completely sick of hearing guests play the same songs over and over, and the guests are more likely to find something that appeals to them (which in turn makes them more likely to go out and buy the game for themselves).
There's no way to make the introduction of the 5th fret completely trivial, which is the main step-up in difficult to Hard. I think Mother is actually a reasonably gentle introduction though, since it's very repetitive, has some pretty simple and reasonably paced scales, and there are long notes that you don't have to hold the whole time to get credit for hitting (which gives you some time to reposition your hand), and the star power flows pretty freely. It took me about an hour to get through my first time, and I didn't get anywhere near 99-100% on Freebird on Medium.
Keep at it though, the game gets much more fun once you become accustomed to the 5th fret and begin to get the hang of hammer-ons and pull-offs.
The big bang was a theological idea used to give scientists a starting point.
I think it's interesting that you complain that the Big Bang, the origin of DNA, etc. get muddled up with evolution, and yet you are the one who has introduced these subjects to a discussion about about the theory of evolution. I think this is part of the reason these subjects get mingled together in the first place (besides the fact that they're all fascinating science that offers an explanation of our origins, albeit at different levels), somehow or another, these issues all get invoked beside each other, even if it's by someone who brings up the subject to make the point that we shouldn't do that!
In any event, I think you're off the mark with this statement. The Big Bang developed out of Einstein's discoveries and astronomical observations -- the physics, mathematics and stars all seemed to indicate that the universe was/is expanding. If you follow that discovery out to its logical conclusion, you figure out the universe was once much smaller and more dense. Theology had nothing to do with it, even if "sudden creation" is an idea the world was already familiar with thanks to religion. If anything, it just paved the way of acceptance of the theory among the public. Also, "sudden creation" isn't the same as "rapid expansion," which is what the Big Bang theory is really about. Further, many people/scientists, for a long time, didn't presume either rapid expansion or sudden creation, but instead believed the universe was something eternal and relatively stable -- that's the "starting point" they were working from.
As for "evolutionists" overapplying the concept of evolution, I see that much less than you apparently do, and when it does happen, I think you can attribute it to scientific illiteracy in general. If by "evolutionist" you mean "a person who subscribes to the theory of evolution," most evolutionists are ignorant about the nuts and bolts of evolution, as are most non-evolutionists. It shouldn't be surprising if they get abiogenesis and the theory of evolution mixed up. It is creationists who I see really get things confused by connecting the Big Bang with the theory of evolution though.
Also, evolution, in the broadest sense, just means "change over time." That makes it a word applicable to pretty much anything in the world. You can speak of the evolution of the cosmos or DNA, and you're not wrong to do so. What might make you wrong is if you get into the specifics of that evolution.
Even when we're dealing with specific mechanisms though, it may be fair to draw from the theory of evolution to seek explanations (or new perspectives) on other phenomenon. The law of natural selection is probably the mechanism that is most often invoked, since it can be applied to anything which replicates, can be modified, and is acted on by some sort of selection pressure (how many non-living entities like that exist is a matter that's up for debate). Probably the most common extension of natural selection outside the domain of biology is memetics, a way of looking at the evolution of ideas/culture. Memetics doesn't give you a grand, overarching "theory of culture," but it may be a piece of the puzzle, and gives us an interesting alternative perspective on things.
As for the origins of DNA, this is an area where natural selection may be applicable. For the scientists engaging this issue, given the relevance of natural selection in the post-DNA world, I think it would be stupid for them not to ask, "Can we explain any of this with natural selection?" Some people may be overconfident that the answer is "yes." This likely stems mostly from ignorance among people who don't understand the distinction between abiogenesis and the theory of evolution, but a few more knowledgeable "evolutionists" do like the theory of evolution so much that they don't see any reason to make such a distinction.
This is how I envision an ultra-persistent world working. Have an extremely large world (one that makes WoW look tiny by comparison) with a massive amount of procedurally generated content, which is constantly in flux due to player/AI action. The drawback to this approach is that much of the game could have a very generic feel, and that the quality of computer-generated content will likely not have the same polish as that created by a skilled human level-designer. Another problem is that if you make the world too big, players won't run into each other "at random" too often, giving the world an empty feeling (though, I'm not so sure that this is really too much of a problem).
It's definitely an approach worth exploring, and one of the main reasons why Spore excited me so much initially. The better we get at letting AI make passable/quality content, the more large, living virtual worlds become. Even if AI can't produce results that match that of a good game designer, that doesn't matter too much if the novelty of the game comes from sandbox and cooperative/competitive play with other players (like Eve Online, writ large).
On a vaguely related note - this is why to me, exploration in some areas of science should be discouraged till humans are ready (in terms of tech, medical, culture, society, religion - religion isn't going away any time soon whether you want it or not) for the implications. It's like the "Civ" game, where you do some stuff first, then only other stuff.
What is why we should discourage exploration in some areas of science? You haven't really offered a reason, just a vaguely articulated fear.
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Or, rather, what the chances are that it would make a difference, considering the fact that we live in a world where medical professionals (and the tools of their trade) are a finite resource that can be allocated in different ways -- some more effective, overall, than others. If routine PSA tests save 1 man out of 1,000,000, is it worth it? Maybe, it all depends on whether or not the time/resources of the physician could be better spent in other ways that might save more lives.
Most patients are going to want the most thorough care and will want to hold their doctor accountable if he doesn't catch something that the next guy would have, but there will always be a more careful doctor than yours. If you wanted to be super safe, you could get a thorough examination for all sorts of rare and common maladies every 3 months, but it'd be very time-consuming, inconvenient and expensive. Unless there's something in your medical history that calls for such frequent examinations, they would only offer only a negligible chance at improving your state of health compared to less frequent and thorough regular checkups.
Doctors are charged with the task of finding a responsible balance. It seems to me that if the doctor was acting in good faith, neither he nor his school should be held liable for the consequences suffered by an outlier -- at least not if there is strong evidence to suggest that, on average, his technique is more effective at treating patients and saving lives.
Does have a large number of poor quality games really hurt a console's sales, though? I suppose it's conceivable (an ignorant gamer buys the console, doesn't bother to research games before buying, and then tells all of his friends that PS3 games suck because he's only picked mediocre titles), but most people that I know judge a system based not on how good the average game on the system is, but instead based on the quality and quantity of top-tier/highly-rated games on the system.
Making the system more difficult to develop may reduce the quantity of shovelware/crapware that exists, but it also reduces the quality/quantity of top-tier games as well. Since those games probably drive sales more than crappy games hurt sales, it seems to me there is a good chance that the strategy is not only frustrating and cynical, but ineffective.
It's not an argument for the morality of homosexuality, but rather a rebuttal of the erroneous claim that homosexuality is unnatural (and therefore bad). Of course it might be better to make the argument that to claim that something unnatural must be bad (or that something natural must be good) is also wrong, but either approach effectively undermines a critical premise in that particular anti-gay line of "reasoning."
It's called endurium.
I see it more as a debt-financed investment. Which isn't to say all of this deficit spending isn't scary and possibly quite unwise, but it is encouraging to see at least a portion of the money is being used in ways that might ultimately save the government money and allow the economy to work more efficiently.
The autism scare doesn't really have anything to do with how medical professionals and scientists in the United States treat mental disorders. Instead it has to do with how the media does business.
It goes like this: some crackpot with a MD or phD (or sometimes not even that) makes a crackpot claim which nonetheless might appear credible to the layperson. If the crackpot claim plays on the emotions, biases and greed of the public (wanting someone to blame, distrust of big pharmaceutical companies, desire for large cash settlements) and the media, always hungry for a sensational new story, picks it up and relays it to a credulous public, and the movement builds momentum. Occasionally the media will host talking head debates where experts on both sides of the issues duke it on in sound-bite interview-exchanges. The result is that both sides appear equally credible (or whoever has the more charismatic expert appears more credible) and the public goes on thinking the crackpot theory may be/is probably true, in spite of whatever the evidence is, or overwhelming consensus that the crackpot theory is just that.
And I believe the who autism scare was kicked off by a British doctor named Andrew Wakefield, and was picked up and spread by the UK media, so it's not a purely American phenomenon.
FTL may not even be possible. I think our likely "far future" will be shaped by the development of strong artificial intelligence and the realization of a technological singularity. It's hard to predict what will follow that, almost by definition ... but it's hard for me to imagine that it will involve humans fighting wars over material resources. Which is not to say such conflict won't be replaced by something even more appalling.
OK, I'll feed the troll.
It was a cliched and unimaginative way of opening my post, but it's true. Also, wasn't really my aim to praise Sony, but I do lament the fact that the Wii lacks a couple of the big features that its competitors sport in this generation of consoles, and I hope that in the next generation of consoles, Nintendo tries harder to compete head-to-head with MS and Sony, while continuing to support the Wii as an inexpensive toy for old folks and casual gamers.
It's bad in the sense that someone else pointed out -- it means you have to spend $300 (plus accessories) on a console if you want access to Nintendo's traditional franchise titles, but doesn't get many of the big AAA cross-platform games like Fallout 3 (maybe a bad example, because I'd prefer to play it on the PC anyway).
Also, I'm someone who enjoys casual titles as well as the more hardcore ones, and it seems to me that Nintendo is getting a little lazy in this regard too. One of the first things that got me excited about the Wii upon reading about WiiConnect24 and the motion controls was the next Animal Crossing game -- but it turns out that Animal Crossing: City Folk is just an unimaginative rehash of the previous AC titles that doesn't even try to use many of the Wii's best features to its advantage. That may be fine for folks who didn't own the GameCube version of the game, but for me it was a big letdown. I'm not even going to bother to buy one of the games that had me most psyched-up about the console in the first place.
They're catering to a more casual audience, but also a less critical and demanding audience, which means they can afford to cut corners and let quality decline and innovation lapse. Nintendo's strategy is smart, but from my own selfish perspective, I think their success may end up being a bad thing for gaming in the long run, if Nintendo (and other companies) learn the wrong lessons.
I'm a Nintendo fanboy, camped out for my Wii on launch day, don't own a PS3 or 360, but I have to say that I think some of the criticisms against the Wii here are spot-on. The idea of motion-controlled games is nice, but I think the implementation leaves something to be desired, and the lack of a hard drive and strong graphical capabilities (compared to the other consoles) really does limit the system's potential.
As for the casual gamers ... a friend of mine with all three systems regularly hosts game nights for his church and guess what system we end up playing the most? The PS3 for Rock Band/Rock Band 2 and, more recently, Little Big World. Of course, Rock Band is available on the Wii as well, but the fact that new songs are released every week has helped keep the game fresh, while the novelty of the wiimote faded a long time ago.
The Wii may have broader appeal than the other systems, but that doesn't mean it's a better system. That's why I'm with the parent in hoping that the next Nintendo system is packing some horsepower. Your grandparents will presumably still be happy with GameCube-level graphics two years from now Nintendo can keep releasing new controllers and relatively simple, inexpensive games to keep that segment of the market happy.
But as for me, I want the next generation of Zelda, Mario and Metroid games to push the envelope, not only in terms of game-play and controls, but also when it comes to scope, graphics, etc. and enjoy every major multiplatform release on my Nintendo without the game losing any major features or visual appeal.
I can understand your frustration from the game-play side of things, but in terms of game lore, this makes a fair amount of sense. Comparing an automobile to a space ship is pretty silly. Consumer autos are designed with a fairly standard set of controls and features, and don't vary to a huge degree in terms of capability. And I think it might take more than an hour to learn how to safely drive, say, an F1 racer.
In EVE we are talking about talking about ships far more sophisticated than the space shuttle and are generally built with very specialized functions in mind. Pretty much all of the ships are larger than the Eiffel tower (even the lowly frigate) and most are bigger the the Enterprise-D. Also keep in mind that the pod pilot replaces the entire bridge crew.
While it's essentially impossible to "catch up" to someone who's been playing longer than you (providing that he is good about remembering to have a skill in training at all times) it's not necessary to have an equal number of skill points to effectively compete with him in different circumstances. A manufacturing-focused character may have no advantage over you in combat, and the opposite is also true. Also, skills are subject to diminishing returns compared to the amount of time that is invested in them. Achieving Level V in a skill may yield a 5% improvement in one area, but take months to train. Most people don't bother. If you have the skills to fly the same type of ship and the same type of modules, generally speaking you can stand toe-to-toe with someone who's been playing for years longer than you.
Also, the advantage to this style of skill advancement is that your character's capabilities isn't connected so directly with how much time you can spend playing the game. It's more casual-friendly, in that sense.
I'm not sure what you're talking about here. EVE-Online is probably the most open-ended MMO out there. More than any other game, it is left up to the player to decide what his goals will be, and how best to fulfill them. The game gives you relatively direction, but there are many directions that you can decide to take. Yes, you will need to play for a certain minimum length of time before certain aspects of the game become fully available to you, but that's no different from other MMOs -- in EVE, at least you don't have to run on the treadmill for hours on end to get there.
They "should" make that much money according to free market supply/demand principles, but getting rid of (or paring down) copyright law would alter the supply/demand dynamic. If fewer government-enforced restrictions on the copying of content reduced revenues for the film/TV industries and actors had to accept much smaller salaries for similar work, you'd have a new, legitimate estimation of the value of their services.
I take it you're from the Sarah Palin school of Constitutional interpretation, where extremely vocal criticism by the press or private citizens/organizations amounts to a violation of the first amendment. Or you're just throwing this statement out there, without offering any support for it.
You might have heard recently about how Elizabeth Dole called out Kay Hagan for attending an event hosted by a group called Godless Americans (among others, but none of the other groups were mentioned in Dole's attack ads). The implicit message here is that atheism is so horrible that having any association with an atheist group is counts as a black mark against a person's character and suitability as a member of Congress.
This is the Elizabeth Dole campaign, an sitting congresswoman. She's the wife of a former major party candidate for the presidency of the United States, not a "fringe group on the Internet."
Reaching back a bit, there is the infamous quote from George H. W. Bush when he was campaigning for the presidency: "... I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
People campaigning for public office today usually have a little more tact than that, but anti-atheist sentiment is not at all a fringe phenomenon, on the Internet or elsewhere. It's not uncommon at all for people to make comments about atheists, that if were said about Jews, would be called out by everyone as rank bigotry.
I wouldn't expect a non-atheist to see it though. We've been conditioned as a society to recognize the injustice faced by certain minority groups, but atheists usually aren't such a group, so a lot of the derogatory commentary about atheists might not even register as something potentially offensive. But it's definitely out there.
Yeah, that's credible.
http://img156.imageshack.us/img156/9544/1163485357430nk2.gif
Who says that an MMO has to be extremely difficult/complicated?
I think the defining characteristics of an MMO are 1) large, online playerbase (it's in the name, after all) and 2) persistence.
It doesn't have to be an RPG, it doesn't have to be centered around questing/raiding.
Though I agree that for the current model of MMO, a keyboard/mouse combo is really the only way to go. However, this can be addressed on consoles via peripherals.
The main weakness of a console-based MMO, I think, would be a lack of user-interface customizability (at least to the degree seen in games like WoW). Heck, this is a showstopper for me on PC MMOs that lack interfaces that can't be extensively modified, such as EVE-Online.
Yes, but that's only a subset of the left, and a more extreme subset at that.
Ask yourself how mentally "weird" the people on the extreme right tend to be. Think of the hardcore fundamentalist Christians, alcoholic rednecks, etc. In my (anecdotal) experience, such folks tend to be more likely to exhibit signs of extreme narcissism or borderline sociopathy and psychopathy.
So consider the possibility that both of our anecdotal observations are accurate, and consider it along with jbeach's point about the unreliability of polls that depend on self-reported data. Which group do you think is more likely to acknowledge that they have a mental problem? The group with the redneck who beats his dog, or the one with the goth chick who cuts on herself? The "crazy Jesus lady" or the schizophrenic artist?
Granted, none of my speculations here are what you'd call scientific, but then neither are yours, and the Gallup poll wasn't either for the reason jbeach pointed out. All it tells you is that more conservative people claim, when polled, claim to have better mental health, compared to the claims of liberals.
It's a fairly standard measurement for mass, though. Transformers have mass, so it's perfectly applicable, especially when you are trying to underscore the massiveness of the piece of equipment in question, rather than its functional capability. If the person writing the article/summary wanted to underscore the cost of the unit, he might have measured it in US dollars. That's what journalists do: describe things in terms their readers might understand or care about. And most of their readers aren't pedantic electrical engineers.
Sorry, I thought you'd understand my meaning when I used the phrase "can't imagine" by the context; it was hyperbole. If scientists consider even the best theories as being at least nominally subject to revision/falsification, then of course they can "imagine" scenarios in which those theories are proven utterly wrong. It's just that such a scenarios are so implausible/unlikely that they're not worth taking seriously, or even mentioning.
This seems unlikely to me, but then I haven't seen every Sagan video. I know he's done a narrative of our origins that describes the events of the Big Bang and the evolution of life (sometimes without even explicitly naming either theory), but in the videos I've seen, you'd have to misinterpret it pretty badly to come away thinking the Big Bang and the theory of evolution are the same thing. From the videos I've seen, it is clear that he understands the distinction between the two.
As for not prefacing explanations of evolution or the Big Bang with "scientists believe," I don't see anything wrong with that. That sort of qualifier is largely unnecessary unless you're talking about some sort of fringe hypothesis or an area where there are significant differences of opinion about which model to favor. Sprinkling "scientists believe" about just dilutes and drags down the dialog. For all intents and purposes, the chief features of a legitimate theory can and should be presented as fact. In concept, those theories are all provisional in nature, and are subject to falsification, but in reality we're confident enough in them that we can't imagine ever overturning them completely.
The learning curve could be smoothed out a bit. I think there's a reason why it's like this though: multiplayer/newbies. They made it so someone who's just started playing the game can have a reasonable shot at playing the entire set list, instead of the first 10 songs or so, that way the host doesn't get completely sick of hearing guests play the same songs over and over, and the guests are more likely to find something that appeals to them (which in turn makes them more likely to go out and buy the game for themselves).
There's no way to make the introduction of the 5th fret completely trivial, which is the main step-up in difficult to Hard. I think Mother is actually a reasonably gentle introduction though, since it's very repetitive, has some pretty simple and reasonably paced scales, and there are long notes that you don't have to hold the whole time to get credit for hitting (which gives you some time to reposition your hand), and the star power flows pretty freely. It took me about an hour to get through my first time, and I didn't get anywhere near 99-100% on Freebird on Medium.
Keep at it though, the game gets much more fun once you become accustomed to the 5th fret and begin to get the hang of hammer-ons and pull-offs.
I think it's interesting that you complain that the Big Bang, the origin of DNA, etc. get muddled up with evolution, and yet you are the one who has introduced these subjects to a discussion about about the theory of evolution. I think this is part of the reason these subjects get mingled together in the first place (besides the fact that they're all fascinating science that offers an explanation of our origins, albeit at different levels), somehow or another, these issues all get invoked beside each other, even if it's by someone who brings up the subject to make the point that we shouldn't do that!
In any event, I think you're off the mark with this statement. The Big Bang developed out of Einstein's discoveries and astronomical observations -- the physics, mathematics and stars all seemed to indicate that the universe was/is expanding. If you follow that discovery out to its logical conclusion, you figure out the universe was once much smaller and more dense. Theology had nothing to do with it, even if "sudden creation" is an idea the world was already familiar with thanks to religion. If anything, it just paved the way of acceptance of the theory among the public. Also, "sudden creation" isn't the same as "rapid expansion," which is what the Big Bang theory is really about. Further, many people/scientists, for a long time, didn't presume either rapid expansion or sudden creation, but instead believed the universe was something eternal and relatively stable -- that's the "starting point" they were working from.
As for "evolutionists" overapplying the concept of evolution, I see that much less than you apparently do, and when it does happen, I think you can attribute it to scientific illiteracy in general. If by "evolutionist" you mean "a person who subscribes to the theory of evolution," most evolutionists are ignorant about the nuts and bolts of evolution, as are most non-evolutionists. It shouldn't be surprising if they get abiogenesis and the theory of evolution mixed up. It is creationists who I see really get things confused by connecting the Big Bang with the theory of evolution though.
Also, evolution, in the broadest sense, just means "change over time." That makes it a word applicable to pretty much anything in the world. You can speak of the evolution of the cosmos or DNA, and you're not wrong to do so. What might make you wrong is if you get into the specifics of that evolution.
Even when we're dealing with specific mechanisms though, it may be fair to draw from the theory of evolution to seek explanations (or new perspectives) on other phenomenon. The law of natural selection is probably the mechanism that is most often invoked, since it can be applied to anything which replicates, can be modified, and is acted on by some sort of selection pressure (how many non-living entities like that exist is a matter that's up for debate). Probably the most common extension of natural selection outside the domain of biology is memetics, a way of looking at the evolution of ideas/culture. Memetics doesn't give you a grand, overarching "theory of culture," but it may be a piece of the puzzle, and gives us an interesting alternative perspective on things.
As for the origins of DNA, this is an area where natural selection may be applicable. For the scientists engaging this issue, given the relevance of natural selection in the post-DNA world, I think it would be stupid for them not to ask, "Can we explain any of this with natural selection?" Some people may be overconfident that the answer is "yes." This likely stems mostly from ignorance among people who don't understand the distinction between abiogenesis and the theory of evolution, but a few more knowledgeable "evolutionists" do like the theory of evolution so much that they don't see any reason to make such a distinction.
On the origin of matter, I know of very, very few
Maybe because you didn't RTA? The very first paragraph addresses your point.
Mammals have been around a lot longer than 1 million years.
This is how I envision an ultra-persistent world working. Have an extremely large world (one that makes WoW look tiny by comparison) with a massive amount of procedurally generated content, which is constantly in flux due to player/AI action. The drawback to this approach is that much of the game could have a very generic feel, and that the quality of computer-generated content will likely not have the same polish as that created by a skilled human level-designer. Another problem is that if you make the world too big, players won't run into each other "at random" too often, giving the world an empty feeling (though, I'm not so sure that this is really too much of a problem).
It's definitely an approach worth exploring, and one of the main reasons why Spore excited me so much initially. The better we get at letting AI make passable/quality content, the more large, living virtual worlds become. Even if AI can't produce results that match that of a good game designer, that doesn't matter too much if the novelty of the game comes from sandbox and cooperative/competitive play with other players (like Eve Online, writ large).
What is why we should discourage exploration in some areas of science? You haven't really offered a reason, just a vaguely articulated fear.