Couldn't the science community just not update the firmware?
Only until the PS3's they are running break. Which is scarily looking like it will start occurring soon; the community of users with early PS3's have been seeing early warning signs and ramped-up failure rates for some time now.
What they need, and probably will look for now, is a way to get "behind" hypervisor, install an alternate bootloader or some other method of loading Linux up, and go that route. And the moment that happens, the "pirates" (yarr harr fiddle de dee) will get hold of it and we're off to the races...
but as the horrible control mechanisms of Mass Effect 2 and others showed
We learned this long ago about the time Deus Ex:Invisible War came out. Dumbing that game down for consoles just about killed the franchise.
Hell, dumping Mechwarrior 5 for MechInsult and MechInsult 2 DID kill the Mechwarrior franchise, and Crimson Skies: MechInsult In Biplanes did the same for that franchise. Someone at Microsoft needs a beating with a cluestick.
I disagree with the idea of "a few truly great games" however. The problem for PC games is that they have to play to a "lowest common denominator." You can release something with major graphical ability, BUT it has to be able to scale back to a PC at least 4 years old to have a decent purchasing market while still looking good on those PCs. And you have to contend with the army of Dell/HP/etc users who bought a PC with an Intel "Extreme Shittiness" on-motherboard graphics card that can't even run games that were 7 years old when the PC was bought, too.
This kind of flamebaitery got labeled "insightful"?
Joe "ban video games" Lieberman is a democrat. Obama's White House has actually been worse for civil liberties and worse for consumers in the arena of things like Net Neutrality and reform of IP law than the republicans were. They've rejected more FOIA requests on "national security" grounds than Bush and his cronies ever had the temerity to, probably because Bush and his cronies knew the media were watching like hawks while the media is still simping and fawning over Obama.
Neither party is good for technology, neither party realizes the limitations of technology, and neither party gives a flaming crap about "justice."
So what are you saying? That lactose is like the Silver Surfer of food sources, bringing with it great peril and warning?;)
Personally, what I found most interesting about the study is that they tested with normal soda-levels of table sugar, but the HFCS-water they fed the rats had only HALF the saturation of your average soda pop... and yet they STILL found that the rats were making little pigs of themselves.
Biochemically... is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.
I don't think it is the biochemical absorption that matters in the equation. I believe the point was being made that there is an effect, unstudied, in how either the imbalance or the fact that the HFCS sugar comes "pre-separated" and thus causes a failure in the normal saitety reflex.
When I think about reading the labels on various foods and seeing how HFCS is practically fucking everywhere except for freshly picked fruits/veg and freshly chopped meats straight from the butcher (seriously, have you noticed there is even HFCS in prepackaged DELI MEATS and canned vegetables???), it scares the crap out of me.
Or if you're like a lot of "jack of all trades, master of none" sorts, you'll get EXACTLY what you should expect of the first try from someone who really didn't, despite convincing themselves otherwise, know what the hell they were doing.
A lot more goes into many of these tables than you'd think. Personally, I have a 43"x93" table, that expands out all the way to 134" with both leaves in. The largest either the Sultan or Emissary come is 4'x6', or 48"x72", non-expandable. Since my dining/gaming room is narrower, 48" would actually be a bit tighter than I'd like, and the ability to go all the way to 132 inches is great for large gatherings (holidays, family, parties) where we have to bust out larger or "no upper player limit" games (card games like Apples to Apples, or team-ish games like Trivial Pursuit) or a smorgasbord of food.
Heck, mine is big enough to let loose a FULL Arkham Horror set with room for drinks and player cards still. 4'x6', forget it, you're out of luck.
The Insurance lobby PAID FOR THIS LEGISLATION, giving to the PARTY IN POWER. The Democrats can lie about being "against" the insurance companies all day long, but they got the contributions, and did precisely what the lobbyists paying them off wanted: they created a mandate requiring everyone to buy something that was previously an item you had the choice not to buy.
In other words, our freedoms just got fucked because the Party In Power was paid off. This time around, it was the Democrats. Anyone who goes "but waah evil republicans paid off by the insurance industry to fight health care" is just a kool-aid drinking partisan dickweed.
Take a look at the biggest Insurance industry recipients - the majority are DEMOCRATS. Who do you think paid for this bill?
Fuck, they WANTED a "everybody must buy" mandate. Premiums will rise because it's a required-purchase item. Same shit happened with Auto insurance, premium costs went up, not down when they made it mandatory. My home state used to say you could either have the insurance or maintain "proof of ability to pay", till the car insurance crooks paid off the legislature to get rid of that second part; uncoincidentally, premiums got universally jacked up by 10% the next year, and kept going up after that.
Watch and learn. Mandated "you must buy X" means that the cost of X will go up, not down.
Medicare's full of "hidden" costs. When they say that "only 3%" of Medicare's costs are administrative, this is misleading in two ways.
The first is that the majority of Medicare's administrative paperwork is done by the doctor/hospital staff. This means that they spend extra money just to keep someone on their staff to do the paperwork, and the cost of having this person is billed out in the form of higher medical costs to non-Medicare patients since Medicare "price controls" everything and doesn't pay nearly enough to cover it.
The second is that since the majority of Medicare patients are by definition high-risk (elderly, infirm, preexisting congenital/disability conditions, etc), they are more likely than the normal patient pool to be using more expensive care. The end result is that by counting as a "percentage" rather than per-person, Medicare's numbers are naturally skewed. Expressing "percentage of total budget" is a great way of determining whether a charity is ripping you off when you donate between competing charities, but it's a lousy way to determine the "efficiency" of a medical system when used as a standalone metric that doesn't account for differing risk pools and the dishonest way much of Medicare's administrative cost is hidden and charged to everyone else that so much goes in for a doctor's visit.
Now, do we need reforms in the medical insurance industry in order to get rid of some serious abuses? Damn straight. That's why I was a supporter of the alternative bills put forth by the Republicans (oh, you didn't hear about those? Not surprising, given the jamming of the airwaves with the false "party of no, they have no alternatives" rhetoric). At the same time, do we need an incredibly bloated, insane bill like the Senate one? Sorry, absolutely not.
Yeah but if you say it like that you don't get a ton of money from the Joe Lieberman types and a bunch of press whores clamoring to give you free airtime...
Sadly true. Waledac might have been a "mature and no longer really expanding" botnet. Botnets do have a certain shelf-life before they start to die through attrition; either the maker comes up with a new propagation method (virus/etc), or it hits a point and stops really expanding, followed by the slow inevitable decline as machines die, or get reformatted, or get overwritten by a newer botnet. There have been botnets that targeted other botnets for invasion/absorption quite a few times.
If this can help catch and destroy botnets earlier on, it might be more effective.
The better goal should, of course, be to make systems (and users) more spam-proof. User education would be a good start, as would home ISP's putting everyone's computers behind a proper NAT rather than using cable modems that expose the user to the naked wild. I've seen more home users who "just put up with" what would seem to be obvious virus/problem behavior merely because they were terrified of having to back up their data or reformat...
"No Split-Screen" for co-op mode = fuck you, developers.
I'm getting tired of the "multiplayer co-op" games I have buddies come over to enjoy, only to find out they would have needed to drag over three extra 360s and an extra set of TV's.
Fuck that shit. If you can't do split-screen, there needs to be a big, box-sized sticker obscuring the cover art saying NO ACTUAL MULTIPLAYER JUST PAY-TO-PLAY ONLINE BULLCRAP.
So at least until one or the other party gets a clue, this isn't an issue upon which we can really base our voting choices.
Still, it's funny looking back on Slashdot comments from 2008 and realizing how Obama's supporters had bamboozled themselves into thinking he was going to be "different" about this issue...
A good upsampling DVD player - functionally, giving you 720p quality on a "50 1080p" screen - at a normal couch distance of 10 feet will be nearly indistinguishable from putting the blu-ray disc in. That's reality.
Add on to that the crappy "own but don't really own" DRM attached to this, and the fact that it will only play on your PS3 and can't be traded/gifted/loaned to anyone else? Fuck it, just buy the goddamn movie on a real disc.
Any title older than 6 months, can be had for $8 or less off Amazon Used. Sure that's the DVD and not Blu-ray, but you also have to factor in that a decent upsampling DVD player versus "blu-ray" isn't noticeably different on anything less than a 72" tv at couch distance.
But hey, Sony doesn't care I suppose. If you were dumb enough to shell out the cash for the PS3, you're probably dumb enough to pay those prices for movies you don't even get to really own.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
As odd as it may sound, the fact that the bright students are stuck in classes with the "slowest learners" is a handicapping of their abilities.
By all means, work to assist those with troubles, but inflicting them on those who perform well is not helpful. By the contrary, it's a dead weight tied right round their neck.
yes but the trick is to raise the bottom to a higher level
While you're at it, have you a plan to raise the sea floor of the Mariana Trench?
For an example lets say that a school has a range of scores from 94% to say 50% (or some A work and some F work) Now a Partnership of IBM and several big medical Companies decides to run a test of their new Computer Brain Interface (which allows the "data" parts of education to simply be downloaded).
The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. Knowledge, left unapplied, is worthless. In many cases it is actually worse than worthless.
Now yes there will be 50% of the students in the bottom 50 percentile but that bottom 50% NOW PASSES THE STANDARDIZED TESTS
They're not measuring whether the kids pass standardized tests.
They're measuring by straight percentile.
They're also using the old, broken metric of evaluating the teacher by the successes of his students. And let's face it, whenever you get into this, confounding variables enter the mix and they are NEVER negligible. Given the sample sizes, you usually can't even control for them properly.
Do I believe there are bad teachers? Hell yes. Do I believe every "bad teacher" story? No. A "bad teacher" story often turns out to be a "bad student" story - and one bad student can disrupt and hold back an entire class, even moreso in the "class shall move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot" mentality of schools since the mid-70s.
Charles Murray, referenced in the Slashdot post above (rather out of context up there too, jesus christ!), has also said the following:
"Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough."
Also:
"On the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95."
The confounding variable is, and always will be, the random chucking-around of problem children into classrooms that was prevalent even 3 decades before "No Child Left Behind."
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster. - Carl Sagan
The "standardized tests" we need today, are a far cry from what was required even 20 years ago. Unfortunately, society is comprised primarily of "twelve o'clock flashers" (those idiots who, in the 80s, would have an analog clock on the wall and a VCR, microwave oven, and stove all flashing 12:00 because they could never figure out how to set the clock.
Developers and franchise holders need to learn not to sign with Activision. Or at the very least, avoid letting their franchise get locked in and their companies bought out.
Look at the list of franchises Activision has "run into the fucking ground" over the years.
Tony Hawk and the O2 Sports line? Check. And sadly, two of the best games in that line - Shaun Palmer Pro Snowboarding, Mat Hoffman Pro BMX - weren't skateboarding, and were probably better for not surviving since they existed in the merits of the sport rather than the "yeah skateboarders are a bunch of vandals and criminals and you can be thieves and thugs just like them" crap message of the later games.
Spider-Man games? Oh good fucking grief. Just when we thought they had learned their lesson, since Spidey 2 for PS2/Xbox was stellar (exception made for the really crappy DS and PSP ports that still used the old Spidey-1 engine), out comes Spidey 3 and it's a completely retarded title with psychotic, seizure-looking "fighting" and "press X to not die" boss battles. Sigh. Then they went and tried to redeem the engine with "Prototype"... good concept, poor execution.
In fact, their games based on Marvel in general have been crappier and crappier. The "storyline" of Ultimate Alliance 2 was pure turdburger, and the gameplay is just so much recycled crap. We lost a great fighting game franchise when Marvel went "Activision exclusive" and Marvel vs Capcom died, but what did they replace it with? Stinker after stinker of X-men "fighting game" titles, Baldurs-Gate-Lite beat-em-up "RPG" titles, and more stinky steaming turdburger movie tie-in titles than you can think of.
Their James Bond "let's rip off the CoD engine and try to make a spy game" titles? Oh god. Especially the Quantum of Solace "Well we never finished the Casino Royale game so we'll just stick the levels in this one" crap.
Guitar Hero? Let's see. Guitar Hero 1-4, "World Tour", 5, Aerosmith, Van Halen, Metallica, "Smash Hits", Band Hero, DJ Hero, "Rocks the 80s", "Greatest Hits", Guitar Hero Mobile, Guitar Hero On Tour, Guitar Hero On Tour Decades, Guitar Hero "Backstage Pass", "Guitar Hero Game Trivia Quiz for iPhone", "Guitar Hero Carabiner" for mobile phones... Can we say franchise fatigue? Yes, I'm pretty sure we can.
It's no surprise why Harmonix picked up, said "fuck it" to their brand name, and just started over with Rock Band. Plus, Activision's online store for music is crap beyond crap, trying to force you to buy everything as album packs with no previews. With Rock Band, I mostly grab the tracks I want one at a time, unless I find a real reason to buy the "pack" or album set, and I listen to the preview first (got burned once by one of their really crap-ass David Bowie covers, never again will I purchase unlistened... but that was my own damn fault for not previewing). And as much as I hate supporting EA over anyone, in the case of Rock Band vs Guitar Hero, EA is the lesser of two evils by far.
Enough is enough... Activision needs to either kick Kotick out, preferably skidding on his face rather than just landing on his fat ass, or else die so the good companies they bought up (Blizzard?) can go back out and be independent and innovative once more.
In particular, sitting on all access and passwords and refusing to share or divulge them is effectively the last refuge of someone who's on a power trip, or about to get let go and is trying to delay that.
Except that the policy of SanFran (quoted in a response to previous article on Slashdot, so I'm going to be lazy and let you do your own damn research for once) SPECIFICALLY required that he not reveal the passwords to anyone but the mayor, and certainly not to someone on an open fucking conference call to which anyone else, especially the "spy girl" who he had turned in when he caught her rummaging through shit after hours, might have been party.
He delivered the passwords, AS PER WRITTEN SANFRAN POLICY, to the Mayor in a face-to-face meeting. That is what was required of him by SanFran code. The people who tried to get him to break that policy are the idiots who should lose their jobs and be on trial.
May I also point out this and this. The first is a more responsibly done metastudy, the second focuses on what I've been speaking of: there are multiple possible reactions to "violent" games (in this case, Quake II) dependent on preexisting personality conditions.
When you wer "working with violent video games", by which you mean you made a dishonest ass of yourself misrepresenting my position. Your so-called "simplification" was nothing of the sort.
My analogy, and that of the person you also misrepresented before, here for you again:
Moryath: Normal sane people will enjoy a reasonable amount of cake with no ill effects. People who are predisposed to excess will overindulge on a regular basis and receive ill effects. Hatta: Overeating cake on a regular basis will cause someone to be fat, but this does not mean we should ban all cake.
In other words, normal, sane people will engage in what people may consider "violent" play behavior - be it full-contact sports, martial arts, American Gladiators, watching UFC, watching pro wrestling, playing first-person shooter video games or rail shooters or beat-em-ups or "fighting" games, with no major ill effect. There are social and nonsocial versions of these games, and they may be enjoyed in turn.
People with a predisposition towards violence, meanwhile, will specifically seek violent play out for a different manner of enjoyment, and will probably grow in general towards more violent acts, but they will do so no matter what media or activity they get involved in.
We get the same distorted logic around the beginning of hunting season every year. "Animal rights" groups come out screaming about how hunters are "killing Bambi." My usual response is "fuck Bambi, they're basically giant rats running around eating everyone's gardens, a bunch of 'em freeze every year when the food supply gets low, and the only predator around here other than people with rifles/bows culling the herd is the occasional car."
I suppose you'd call me "violent" for that. Meh. I enjoy playing FPS titles for the same reason I enjoy puzzle titles, I like trying to break the system and do the occasional speedrun. I enjoy the Hitman and Thief titles not for the idea of killing everything in sight, but rather for the idea that you can puzzle out the levels, go through and complete your objective, and then walk out the building with nobody the wiser. It's a puzzle, and that's what makes it fun.
Then again, my favorite board game is Arkham Horror. The reason why is simple: it's a cooperative game, with players working together, rather than an "every player for themselves" type game. And that's a welcome change from the absolute ton of boardgames out there that are all about players trying to out-compete each other. It's nice to get together with people, throw back a few beers, and have a boardgame where you can pat each other on the back and help each other out instead of wondering how you can get that slight advantage over everyone else at the table.
All you have shown is that you are disrespectful, dishonest asshole who enjoys misrepresenting positions.
Allow me to fix that which you have so clearly altered.
Moryath: Normal sane people will enjoy a reasonable amount of cake with no ill effects. People who are predisposed to excess will overindulge on a regular basis and receive ill effects. Hatta: Overeating cake on a regular basis will cause someone to be fat, but this does not mean we should ban all cake.
Unfortunately for you, since you are a dishonest asshole who misrepresented the positions above, your subsequent "argument" shall hereby be laughed away. Try again.
What kind of study, with what kind of results, would convince you that this statement was true?
To start with, you need to be sure you correctly define "violent" video games. Many studies have stretched the definition so far as to be useless.
Then, you need to be very, precisely careful about your study. Given the number of competing influences which might cause people to be "tolerant" of violence, you need to be very careful and clearly explain your methodology and how you control for them. No child exists in a vacuum; short of taking kids and sticking them into a bio-dome with teachers for five years, monitored 24/7 by camera to ensure they get "precisely" the education you want, and then controlling as best you can for innate traits as well (genetic/hormonal development), differences will occur.
Your study also needs to control for all so-called "violent" media and fantasy play. If a book or movie or TV show includes fight scenes? Sorry, that's out. One imagines most fairy tales or pseudo-fairy tales (Princess Bride? Stardust? Narnia?)would need to be cut off. Cops and Robbers? Cowboys and Indians? Something resembling this that we used to do all the time as kids?
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't the science community just not update the firmware?
Only until the PS3's they are running break. Which is scarily looking like it will start occurring soon; the community of users with early PS3's have been seeing early warning signs and ramped-up failure rates for some time now.
What they need, and probably will look for now, is a way to get "behind" hypervisor, install an alternate bootloader or some other method of loading Linux up, and go that route. And the moment that happens, the "pirates" (yarr harr fiddle de dee) will get hold of it and we're off to the races...
but as the horrible control mechanisms of Mass Effect 2 and others showed
We learned this long ago about the time Deus Ex:Invisible War came out. Dumbing that game down for consoles just about killed the franchise.
Hell, dumping Mechwarrior 5 for MechInsult and MechInsult 2 DID kill the Mechwarrior franchise, and Crimson Skies: MechInsult In Biplanes did the same for that franchise. Someone at Microsoft needs a beating with a cluestick.
I disagree with the idea of "a few truly great games" however. The problem for PC games is that they have to play to a "lowest common denominator." You can release something with major graphical ability, BUT it has to be able to scale back to a PC at least 4 years old to have a decent purchasing market while still looking good on those PCs. And you have to contend with the army of Dell/HP/etc users who bought a PC with an Intel "Extreme Shittiness" on-motherboard graphics card that can't even run games that were 7 years old when the PC was bought, too.
This kind of flamebaitery got labeled "insightful"?
Joe "ban video games" Lieberman is a democrat. Obama's White House has actually been worse for civil liberties and worse for consumers in the arena of things like Net Neutrality and reform of IP law than the republicans were. They've rejected more FOIA requests on "national security" grounds than Bush and his cronies ever had the temerity to, probably because Bush and his cronies knew the media were watching like hawks while the media is still simping and fawning over Obama.
Neither party is good for technology, neither party realizes the limitations of technology, and neither party gives a flaming crap about "justice."
galactose
So what are you saying? That lactose is like the Silver Surfer of food sources, bringing with it great peril and warning? ;)
Personally, what I found most interesting about the study is that they tested with normal soda-levels of table sugar, but the HFCS-water they fed the rats had only HALF the saturation of your average soda pop... and yet they STILL found that the rats were making little pigs of themselves.
Biochemically ... is rapidly metabolized in much the same way as glucose.
I don't think it is the biochemical absorption that matters in the equation. I believe the point was being made that there is an effect, unstudied, in how either the imbalance or the fact that the HFCS sugar comes "pre-separated" and thus causes a failure in the normal saitety reflex.
When I think about reading the labels on various foods and seeing how HFCS is practically fucking everywhere except for freshly picked fruits/veg and freshly chopped meats straight from the butcher (seriously, have you noticed there is even HFCS in prepackaged DELI MEATS and canned vegetables???), it scares the crap out of me.
Or if you're like a lot of "jack of all trades, master of none" sorts, you'll get EXACTLY what you should expect of the first try from someone who really didn't, despite convincing themselves otherwise, know what the hell they were doing.
A lot more goes into many of these tables than you'd think. Personally, I have a 43"x93" table, that expands out all the way to 134" with both leaves in. The largest either the Sultan or Emissary come is 4'x6', or 48"x72", non-expandable. Since my dining/gaming room is narrower, 48" would actually be a bit tighter than I'd like, and the ability to go all the way to 132 inches is great for large gatherings (holidays, family, parties) where we have to bust out larger or "no upper player limit" games (card games like Apples to Apples, or team-ish games like Trivial Pursuit) or a smorgasbord of food.
Heck, mine is big enough to let loose a FULL Arkham Horror set with room for drinks and player cards still. 4'x6', forget it, you're out of luck.
How does this invalidate the point, precisely?
The Insurance lobby PAID FOR THIS LEGISLATION, giving to the PARTY IN POWER. The Democrats can lie about being "against" the insurance companies all day long, but they got the contributions, and did precisely what the lobbyists paying them off wanted: they created a mandate requiring everyone to buy something that was previously an item you had the choice not to buy.
In other words, our freedoms just got fucked because the Party In Power was paid off. This time around, it was the Democrats. Anyone who goes "but waah evil republicans paid off by the insurance industry to fight health care" is just a kool-aid drinking partisan dickweed.
Lie much?
A quick trip to Opensecrets.org tags you for a liar.
Wait, what?
Take a look at the biggest Insurance industry recipients - the majority are DEMOCRATS. Who do you think paid for this bill?
Fuck, they WANTED a "everybody must buy" mandate. Premiums will rise because it's a required-purchase item. Same shit happened with Auto insurance, premium costs went up, not down when they made it mandatory. My home state used to say you could either have the insurance or maintain "proof of ability to pay", till the car insurance crooks paid off the legislature to get rid of that second part; uncoincidentally, premiums got universally jacked up by 10% the next year, and kept going up after that.
Watch and learn. Mandated "you must buy X" means that the cost of X will go up, not down.
Buying in to Medicare is bad, ok.
Medicare's full of "hidden" costs. When they say that "only 3%" of Medicare's costs are administrative, this is misleading in two ways.
The first is that the majority of Medicare's administrative paperwork is done by the doctor/hospital staff. This means that they spend extra money just to keep someone on their staff to do the paperwork, and the cost of having this person is billed out in the form of higher medical costs to non-Medicare patients since Medicare "price controls" everything and doesn't pay nearly enough to cover it.
The second is that since the majority of Medicare patients are by definition high-risk (elderly, infirm, preexisting congenital/disability conditions, etc), they are more likely than the normal patient pool to be using more expensive care. The end result is that by counting as a "percentage" rather than per-person, Medicare's numbers are naturally skewed. Expressing "percentage of total budget" is a great way of determining whether a charity is ripping you off when you donate between competing charities, but it's a lousy way to determine the "efficiency" of a medical system when used as a standalone metric that doesn't account for differing risk pools and the dishonest way much of Medicare's administrative cost is hidden and charged to everyone else that so much goes in for a doctor's visit.
Now, do we need reforms in the medical insurance industry in order to get rid of some serious abuses? Damn straight. That's why I was a supporter of the alternative bills put forth by the Republicans (oh, you didn't hear about those? Not surprising, given the jamming of the airwaves with the false "party of no, they have no alternatives" rhetoric). At the same time, do we need an incredibly bloated, insane bill like the Senate one? Sorry, absolutely not.
Yeah but if you say it like that you don't get a ton of money from the Joe Lieberman types and a bunch of press whores clamoring to give you free airtime...
Sadly true. Waledac might have been a "mature and no longer really expanding" botnet. Botnets do have a certain shelf-life before they start to die through attrition; either the maker comes up with a new propagation method (virus/etc), or it hits a point and stops really expanding, followed by the slow inevitable decline as machines die, or get reformatted, or get overwritten by a newer botnet. There have been botnets that targeted other botnets for invasion/absorption quite a few times.
If this can help catch and destroy botnets earlier on, it might be more effective.
The better goal should, of course, be to make systems (and users) more spam-proof. User education would be a good start, as would home ISP's putting everyone's computers behind a proper NAT rather than using cable modems that expose the user to the naked wild. I've seen more home users who "just put up with" what would seem to be obvious virus/problem behavior merely because they were terrified of having to back up their data or reformat...
"No Split-Screen" for co-op mode = fuck you, developers.
I'm getting tired of the "multiplayer co-op" games I have buddies come over to enjoy, only to find out they would have needed to drag over three extra 360s and an extra set of TV's.
Fuck that shit. If you can't do split-screen, there needs to be a big, box-sized sticker obscuring the cover art saying NO ACTUAL MULTIPLAYER JUST PAY-TO-PLAY ONLINE BULLCRAP.
So at least until one or the other party gets a clue, this isn't an issue upon which we can really base our voting choices.
Still, it's funny looking back on Slashdot comments from 2008 and realizing how Obama's supporters had bamboozled themselves into thinking he was going to be "different" about this issue...
You are spending way too much time trying to convince yourself of things that aren't true.
A common thing for people who don't want to admit they were ripped off.
Sigh.
Trying to convince yourself you didn't get ripped off? Don't let me stop you with those inconvenient facts.
Inverse Square Law applies.
A good upsampling DVD player - functionally, giving you 720p quality on a "50 1080p" screen - at a normal couch distance of 10 feet will be nearly indistinguishable from putting the blu-ray disc in. That's reality.
Add on to that the crappy "own but don't really own" DRM attached to this, and the fact that it will only play on your PS3 and can't be traded/gifted/loaned to anyone else? Fuck it, just buy the goddamn movie on a real disc.
Any title older than 6 months, can be had for $8 or less off Amazon Used. Sure that's the DVD and not Blu-ray, but you also have to factor in that a decent upsampling DVD player versus "blu-ray" isn't noticeably different on anything less than a 72" tv at couch distance.
But hey, Sony doesn't care I suppose. If you were dumb enough to shell out the cash for the PS3, you're probably dumb enough to pay those prices for movies you don't even get to really own.
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
As odd as it may sound, the fact that the bright students are stuck in classes with the "slowest learners" is a handicapping of their abilities.
By all means, work to assist those with troubles, but inflicting them on those who perform well is not helpful. By the contrary, it's a dead weight tied right round their neck.
yes but the trick is to raise the bottom to a higher level
While you're at it, have you a plan to raise the sea floor of the Mariana Trench?
For an example lets say that a school has a range of scores from 94% to say 50% (or some A work and some F work)
Now a Partnership of IBM and several big medical Companies decides to run a test of their new Computer Brain Interface (which allows the "data" parts of education to simply be downloaded).
The problem is that the dumb kids lack the mental function necessary to comprehend what they have just downloaded. Knowledge, left unapplied, is worthless. In many cases it is actually worse than worthless.
Now yes there will be 50% of the students in the bottom 50 percentile but that bottom 50% NOW PASSES THE STANDARDIZED TESTS
They're not measuring whether the kids pass standardized tests.
They're measuring by straight percentile.
They're also using the old, broken metric of evaluating the teacher by the successes of his students. And let's face it, whenever you get into this, confounding variables enter the mix and they are NEVER negligible. Given the sample sizes, you usually can't even control for them properly.
Do I believe there are bad teachers? Hell yes. Do I believe every "bad teacher" story? No. A "bad teacher" story often turns out to be a "bad student" story - and one bad student can disrupt and hold back an entire class, even moreso in the "class shall move at the pace of the slowest fucking idiot" mentality of schools since the mid-70s.
Charles Murray, referenced in the Slashdot post above (rather out of context up there too, jesus christ!), has also said the following:
"Our ability to improve the academic accomplishment of students in the lower half of the distribution of intelligence is severely limited. It is a matter of ceilings. Suppose a girl in the 99th percentile of intelligence, corresponding to an IQ of 135, is getting a C in English. She is underachieving, and someone who sets out to raise her performance might be able to get a spectacular result. Now suppose the boy sitting behind her is getting a D, but his IQ is a bit below 100, at the 49th percentile.
We can hope to raise his grade. But teaching him more vocabulary words or drilling him on the parts of speech will not open up new vistas for him. It is not within his power to learn to follow an exposition written beyond a limited level of complexity, any more than it is within my power to follow a proof in the American Journal of Mathematics. In both cases, the problem is not that we have not been taught enough, but that we are not smart enough."
Also:
"On the 2005 round of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), 36% of all fourth-graders were below the NAEP's "basic achievement" score in reading. It sounds like a terrible record. But we know from the mathematics of the normal distribution that 36% of fourth-graders also have IQs lower than 95."
The confounding variable is, and always will be, the random chucking-around of problem children into classrooms that was prevalent even 3 decades before "No Child Left Behind."
We have designed our civilization based on science and technology and at the same time arranged things so that almost no one understands anything at all about science and technology. This is a clear prescription for disaster. - Carl Sagan
The "standardized tests" we need today, are a far cry from what was required even 20 years ago. Unfortunately, society is comprised primarily of "twelve o'clock flashers" (those idiots who, in the 80s, would have an analog clock on the wall and a VCR, microwave oven, and stove all flashing 12:00 because they could never figure out how to set the clock.
Right Here.
Developers and franchise holders need to learn not to sign with Activision. Or at the very least, avoid letting their franchise get locked in and their companies bought out.
Look at the list of franchises Activision has "run into the fucking ground" over the years.
Tony Hawk and the O2 Sports line? Check. And sadly, two of the best games in that line - Shaun Palmer Pro Snowboarding, Mat Hoffman Pro BMX - weren't skateboarding, and were probably better for not surviving since they existed in the merits of the sport rather than the "yeah skateboarders are a bunch of vandals and criminals and you can be thieves and thugs just like them" crap message of the later games.
Spider-Man games? Oh good fucking grief. Just when we thought they had learned their lesson, since Spidey 2 for PS2/Xbox was stellar (exception made for the really crappy DS and PSP ports that still used the old Spidey-1 engine), out comes Spidey 3 and it's a completely retarded title with psychotic, seizure-looking "fighting" and "press X to not die" boss battles. Sigh. Then they went and tried to redeem the engine with "Prototype"... good concept, poor execution.
In fact, their games based on Marvel in general have been crappier and crappier. The "storyline" of Ultimate Alliance 2 was pure turdburger, and the gameplay is just so much recycled crap. We lost a great fighting game franchise when Marvel went "Activision exclusive" and Marvel vs Capcom died, but what did they replace it with? Stinker after stinker of X-men "fighting game" titles, Baldurs-Gate-Lite beat-em-up "RPG" titles, and more stinky steaming turdburger movie tie-in titles than you can think of.
Their James Bond "let's rip off the CoD engine and try to make a spy game" titles? Oh god. Especially the Quantum of Solace "Well we never finished the Casino Royale game so we'll just stick the levels in this one" crap.
Guitar Hero? Let's see. Guitar Hero 1-4, "World Tour", 5, Aerosmith, Van Halen, Metallica, "Smash Hits", Band Hero, DJ Hero, "Rocks the 80s", "Greatest Hits", Guitar Hero Mobile, Guitar Hero On Tour, Guitar Hero On Tour Decades, Guitar Hero "Backstage Pass", "Guitar Hero Game Trivia Quiz for iPhone", "Guitar Hero Carabiner" for mobile phones... Can we say franchise fatigue? Yes, I'm pretty sure we can.
It's no surprise why Harmonix picked up, said "fuck it" to their brand name, and just started over with Rock Band. Plus, Activision's online store for music is crap beyond crap, trying to force you to buy everything as album packs with no previews. With Rock Band, I mostly grab the tracks I want one at a time, unless I find a real reason to buy the "pack" or album set, and I listen to the preview first (got burned once by one of their really crap-ass David Bowie covers, never again will I purchase unlistened... but that was my own damn fault for not previewing). And as much as I hate supporting EA over anyone, in the case of Rock Band vs Guitar Hero, EA is the lesser of two evils by far.
Enough is enough... Activision needs to either kick Kotick out, preferably skidding on his face rather than just landing on his fat ass, or else die so the good companies they bought up (Blizzard?) can go back out and be independent and innovative once more.
In particular, sitting on all access and passwords and refusing to share or divulge them is effectively the last refuge of someone who's on a power trip, or about to get let go and is trying to delay that.
Except that the policy of SanFran (quoted in a response to previous article on Slashdot, so I'm going to be lazy and let you do your own damn research for once) SPECIFICALLY required that he not reveal the passwords to anyone but the mayor, and certainly not to someone on an open fucking conference call to which anyone else, especially the "spy girl" who he had turned in when he caught her rummaging through shit after hours, might have been party.
He delivered the passwords, AS PER WRITTEN SANFRAN POLICY, to the Mayor in a face-to-face meeting. That is what was required of him by SanFran code. The people who tried to get him to break that policy are the idiots who should lose their jobs and be on trial.
May I also point out this and this. The first is a more responsibly done metastudy, the second focuses on what I've been speaking of: there are multiple possible reactions to "violent" games (in this case, Quake II) dependent on preexisting personality conditions.
When you wer "working with violent video games", by which you mean you made a dishonest ass of yourself misrepresenting my position. Your so-called "simplification" was nothing of the sort.
My analogy, and that of the person you also misrepresented before, here for you again:
Moryath: Normal sane people will enjoy a reasonable amount of cake with no ill effects. People who are predisposed to excess will overindulge on a regular basis and receive ill effects.
Hatta: Overeating cake on a regular basis will cause someone to be fat, but this does not mean we should ban all cake.
In other words, normal, sane people will engage in what people may consider "violent" play behavior - be it full-contact sports, martial arts, American Gladiators, watching UFC, watching pro wrestling, playing first-person shooter video games or rail shooters or beat-em-ups or "fighting" games, with no major ill effect. There are social and nonsocial versions of these games, and they may be enjoyed in turn.
People with a predisposition towards violence, meanwhile, will specifically seek violent play out for a different manner of enjoyment, and will probably grow in general towards more violent acts, but they will do so no matter what media or activity they get involved in.
We get the same distorted logic around the beginning of hunting season every year. "Animal rights" groups come out screaming about how hunters are "killing Bambi." My usual response is "fuck Bambi, they're basically giant rats running around eating everyone's gardens, a bunch of 'em freeze every year when the food supply gets low, and the only predator around here other than people with rifles/bows culling the herd is the occasional car."
I suppose you'd call me "violent" for that. Meh. I enjoy playing FPS titles for the same reason I enjoy puzzle titles, I like trying to break the system and do the occasional speedrun. I enjoy the Hitman and Thief titles not for the idea of killing everything in sight, but rather for the idea that you can puzzle out the levels, go through and complete your objective, and then walk out the building with nobody the wiser. It's a puzzle, and that's what makes it fun.
Then again, my favorite board game is Arkham Horror. The reason why is simple: it's a cooperative game, with players working together, rather than an "every player for themselves" type game. And that's a welcome change from the absolute ton of boardgames out there that are all about players trying to out-compete each other. It's nice to get together with people, throw back a few beers, and have a boardgame where you can pat each other on the back and help each other out instead of wondering how you can get that slight advantage over everyone else at the table.
I'm still waiting for you to come up with a valid argument and stop misrepresenting my position.
Keep wriggling...
Keep trying.
All you have shown is that you are disrespectful, dishonest asshole who enjoys misrepresenting positions.
Allow me to fix that which you have so clearly altered.
Moryath: Normal sane people will enjoy a reasonable amount of cake with no ill effects. People who are predisposed to excess will overindulge on a regular basis and receive ill effects.
Hatta: Overeating cake on a regular basis will cause someone to be fat, but this does not mean we should ban all cake.
Unfortunately for you, since you are a dishonest asshole who misrepresented the positions above, your subsequent "argument" shall hereby be laughed away. Try again.
What kind of study, with what kind of results, would convince you that this statement was true?
To start with, you need to be sure you correctly define "violent" video games. Many studies have stretched the definition so far as to be useless.
Then, you need to be very, precisely careful about your study. Given the number of competing influences which might cause people to be "tolerant" of violence, you need to be very careful and clearly explain your methodology and how you control for them. No child exists in a vacuum; short of taking kids and sticking them into a bio-dome with teachers for five years, monitored 24/7 by camera to ensure they get "precisely" the education you want, and then controlling as best you can for innate traits as well (genetic/hormonal development), differences will occur.
Your study also needs to control for all so-called "violent" media and fantasy play. If a book or movie or TV show includes fight scenes? Sorry, that's out. One imagines most fairy tales or pseudo-fairy tales (Princess Bride? Stardust? Narnia?)would need to be cut off. Cops and Robbers? Cowboys and Indians? Something resembling this that we used to do all the time as kids?
I invite you to read this article by MIT Professor Henry Jenkins on the matter.