I don't disagree with that at all. I'm just confused by the conclusion of the person i responded to, that getting to keep the fees would provide an incentive to the patent office to _issue_ more patents. I can't see how that would work unless the patent office currently has to return the filing fee if the patent isn't approved. Otherwise, if one were to ascribe nefarious purposes to the patent office, it would make more sense for them to encourage everyone to file more patents, but then to reject them all at the first possible step. That would maximize the amount of money coming in compared to the amount of time (and thus money going out) spent processing them.
Wait, you mean that if you file for a patent and they reject it that they also refund the filing fee? I know very little about the patent process but that sounds unbelievably generous for, well, any government or corporate office anywhere!
If the movies didn't appeal to women as much as men you'd expect to see less women than men going to the movies. if books didn't appeal to women as much as men then you'd expect less books to be bought be women.
That one bit is half right, but you're wrong about everything else. I can't see the details of the report since they seem to be obfuscating it, but every reference i've seen to it implies that the numbers they're reporting are strictly how many women "play games" on each console and what genres they prefer. It makes absolutely _no_ claims about how much time they spend gaming or how much money the spend on gaming, especially not in comparison to the male audience.
So it's entirely possible (and in fact seems likely to me) that there _are_ less games being bought by women than by men.
If we lived in some alternate universe where the FPS genre somehow never got invented would you expect to find that less than 50% of the gaming audience was male? Even if their favorite genre didn't exist i suspect that pretty much every gamer would rather be playing _some_ game, especially when they didn't know what it was they were missing out on. But the males would still probably be spending a lot less on games than we see from things like Call of Duty and Halo.
The point you seem willfully blind to is that gaming is not male dominated because 50% of the gamers are already female.
Sorry, but i've worked in the game industry. The game audience may not be male dominated anymore (though i suspect gamer dollars are still male dominated) but the game development industry definitely still is, and that has definitely had an effect on things. I don't even think it's intentional, but when a bunch of people of a certain demographic get together and come up with an idea for some media then if they don't think about it much they tend to come up with something that appeals specifically to their own demographic. That's just natural.
This isnt something that will go away, like it or not. There is a demographic out there that these games are aimed at, and whether or not your demographic gets more representation, games like GTA will have this kind of eye-candy because their primary appeal is teenage boys.
...
I think if youre going to play games that attract a lot of teenage and early-twenties guys, youre going to have to accept that the games will have some features you find distasteful.
I'm guessing that the point wasn't to complain that such games existed, but that they account for so much of certain genres in the industry. I believe she is suggesting that she would like to play those genres of games but not just ones specifically targeted towards teenage and early-twenty guys through the use of (frequently crude and tasteless) objectification of women. Yes there are plenty of more tasteful alternatives out there in other genres, however telling women they have to stay away from the big name games in some of the most popular genres if they don't want to have to put up with the gender biased objectification seems rather cruel to me.
(I can't speak for the OP, but i know more than one woman who's just fine with eye candy as long as it's handled tastefully and both genders are represented, which seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me.)
They probably expect that a number of the members are thinking "they're not on to me. I'm too good at this to get caught".
This. Just look at the number of comments here alleging that the FBI doesn't have a clue and are just saying this to keep everyone from thinking they're totally incompetent. If they named a specific person within the organization at least some of the members would probably crap their pants and start running for cover. As it is LulzSec is probably just laughing it up.
I was just going to moderate the GB poster, but instead i think i shall point out that you seem to be dead set on continuing the original fallacy.
"Many people use X" does not equate to "X is designed optimally for those people."
Do you think if there were no chick flicks that women would just stop going to movies? No, they'd still go to the "broad appeal" movies and a few of the "guy" movies so they'd still be movie consumers, but it's quite likely that total movie revenues would be less. Would women still read if there were no romance novels? Sure they would. Would the publishing industry be missing out on a huge chunk of income without that genre? Definitely! And the recent explosion of the paranormal romance sub-genre shows that there was a need unaddressed by the market, even though most of those people were probably already buying books before that point.
Really this is the best kind of marketing research. They've identified a large group of people who are _already_ customers whose desires they feel can be better addressed. Would you be equally outraged if SyFy did some market research which determined "Our primary audience are geeks who like high quality science fiction television series. Perhaps we should produce some more of those"? After all, by your argument SyFy shouldn't do anything like that because those people are _already_ watching, therefore their needs are already met, right? The possibility that those people are just desperate for any kind of Science Fiction and will settle for the crap that's currently on SyFy because there's not much else available elsewhere doesn't bear consideration does it?
"We've already got the customers, so we don't need to do anything to improve our product/services" is pretty much the antithesis of progress, and it would surprise me to see that attitude on Slashdot if it were being expressed about almost any other topic, but since we're talking about women getting into something that's been traditionally male dominated i guess that's par for the course?
There's no benefit we get from war that we couldn't have gotten just as easily, and a whole lot cheaper, without the war. All war does is provide a psychological motivation to spend the money and make the effort. Do you think the scientific results would have turned out differently if the military (or some other agency) had spent $70 million on this research when there weren't any wars on?
So is war useful as a motivating tool? Yes. Is it really sad that we can't convince ourselves to do a lot of these things without the excuse of war? Also yes. Does the war itself directly provide the benefit? No.
Totally random question, but has she tried audiobooks? I started listening to audiobooks during my commute years ago (when Audible made buying books through their membership program an affordable prospect) and i find it endlessly fascinating the ways in which listening to an audiobook is both like and unlike reading the same book. I'd never thought of it before, but your post suddenly made me realize that audiobooks might be a great way for dyslexic people to get into books for entertainment.
I'm not a big fan of some of the wars and conflicts we've gotten involved in in the past. However unless you've got specific information proving otherwise about some individual, there's no reason to assume that any given soldier signed up for the military for anything but honorable, or at least morally justifiable reasons. A soldier's job is to follow orders as long as those orders aren't clearly illegal. It is the job of "wiser heads", aka the upper echelons of the military chain of command, including the government, to decide what those orders should be.
So if you've got a beef with what our troops are doing, take it out on the government, not the troops. The government may not be making decisions that are actually keeping us safe, but unless proven otherwise i'm willing to believe that that's what the soldiers believed they signed up for. And because of that i'm not going to begrudge them the cost of a few game systems just because the government is doing stuff wrong at an entirely different level.
Please note the "and/or" in the original statement. I don't know how many people flash new ROMs who aren't as computer savy as they think they are (though i suspect it's a non-zero number) but installing "unapproved" apps is pretty easy to do.
The lesson that everyone needs to draw from this is that it's great that Android is open and allows you to do pretty much whatever you want. However if you start flashing your own ROMs and/or using markets other than the official Google one (and possibly Amazon's app store) then you better be REALLY SURE you know what you're doing and not just blindly download any random app from any random source that strikes your fancy.
Of course hopefully this isn't news to people who are already computer savy.
Is there something wrong with Lolz? My impression at least was that "doing it for the lolz" is doing it for fun, while "doing it for the lulz" was doing it for fun at someone else's expense.
"LulzSec might not be as famous as Anonymous â" they're really best known for hacking sites they like, to prove a point about security"
Wait, so is LulzSec known for hacking sites they like? Or is Anonymous known for hacking sites they like? Which one of them actually likes Sony since both groups hacked them? (Even disregarding Sony's claims about the stolen PSN information, Anonymous admitted to being responsible for the prior DDoS attack.) Does Anonymous like the Scientologists or does LulzSec like InfraGard? I'm kinda confused by the claim.
Well that's great for you and your cohorts then. However a lot of the rest of us lack either the talent or the resources for creating real things. Lego and Minecraft are for us.
I knew when I decided not to buy it that it would get boring fast. I've watched a few people play it and all I ever see them do is start fresh, start a "home base", get to the point that they can hide in base during the night and explore during the day, and then close it to play a different game.
I can only think of two possibilities, either the people you watched are completely uncreative, or they've already got some other area of their life in which they are creative so they don't feel the need for another one.
Personally i started the game and built a "home base" and did a bit of exploring, but i didn't like the snowy terrain i'd started in. So i started a new world. Then i built a "home base" in that one. Then i built a fountain. Then i built a farm around the fountain. Then i dug down to the bottom of the world so i could mine cool stuff. Then i saw a giant plateau and wanted to get to the top and spent awhile digging my way up there. Then i built a castle on top of the plateau. Then i dug an underground tunnel to connect the castle with my first home base. Then i dug an underground farm. Then i started crafting decorative items. Then i built a large lava pool.
And then i got distracted watching the Yogscast Minecraft videos on YouTube, and then i decided to try out the Survival Island challenge myself. Then that inspired me to start a new world and build a new type of home base. Then i built a portal to the Netherworld and started collecting stuff there.
Then i got distracted by Gemcraft Labyrinth for awhile, and then got distracted from that by Terraria. However i fully plan to go back to Minecraft and build more cool stuff, especially when the next updates happen. (I haven't even played around with minecarts or redstone at all yet!)
And i am by far not the most creative person out there. You can go on YouTube and find thousands of videos from people a million times more creative than me.
So Minecraft only gets boring fast if you have no interest in building stuff. Perhaps you meant to say "I have no interest in being creative in a building game so i knew it would get boring for me fast"? Because as originally stated your blanket statement is manifestly untrue.
I just closed Firefox. Let's open it back up again. It opens one google tab and is using 120 megs private bytes and 361 megs virtual according to Process Explorer. Not too bad.
After spinning for a bit, Firefox is now at 396 megs private and 717 megs virtual. Let's close 49 of the tabs. After letting it sit for a little bit it drops to 333 megs private and 717 megs virtual. Let's repeat that a few times without closing the window.
So it took 7 iterations (about 350 pages all told) to reach the point where Firefox was consuming over a gig _each_ of private and virtual memory with just a single tab open. Now if i ever reached this point in normal usage of course i'd shut it down to free the memory, but under normal usage after going through that many pages i'd have at least a dozen tabs open to things that i was still using.
And remember that that was just 350 copies of the same page, the main page for Wikipedia, which i wouldn't exactly consider a memory hog.
Would you care to point out how it was a flame? As a proponent of the basic idea i felt it was best to point out what seemed to me as the most glaring flaw in the argument in a neutral manner, rather than letting an opponent try and use it as part of an argument for how the entire premise is flawed. Or alternately they give it a pass for now but then this year turns out to be an outlier (a possibility that we can't accurately judge right at the moment) and when there are a lot fewer tornadoes next year we're suddenly faced with tons of naysayers proclaiming "while you said it was going to cause such-and-such but it didn't so you're a bunch of liars!" (And to a certain extent they would be right, if only by the sin of omission, at least in my case.)
In the long run it's never a good idea to support an argument you believe in with anything less than the most accurate information you have. Doing otherwise will only bite you in the ass eventually.
And i agree with you that having public discussions about this subject which result in anything meaningful is hard, but if you believe that it's absolutely impossible then why are you here discussing it?
Right from the summary: "'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices;'"
Maybe that part wasn't actually meant to be associated with the comment about tornadoes earlier in the summary, but it sure seemed to imply a connection.
It's a little early to include the tornadoes as part of a discussion on global climate change. Just like one hot summer doesn't prove it and one cold winter doesn't disprove it (even ignoring the false notion that global climate change != getting warmer everywhere all the time) we'd need to see evidence of increased storm activity for multiple years in close succession before we could draw any conclusions. In general i'm a "believer" in global climate change, but i'm not in favor of using incorrect data to try and prop up the idea.
Depends on who you ask? It seems the average age of tv viewers hit 50 fairly recently, but that's not the demographic that advertisers like to aim for so that's not the primary age most shows get written for. The average age of movie viewers seems a lot harder to pin down, though a lot of studies state that it's lower than the tv viewer average, but it wouldn't surprise me if the same thing is true in that case to a lesser degree as well.
I don't know if the advertisers and producers have good evidence to indicate the younger demographics respond better to advertising or if they're just prejudiced towards younger viewers for some reason, but whatever the case older tv viewers are relatively irrelevant as far as the production of tv (and possibly movie) media is concerned.
And then look at all the studies showing how large the population of female gamers is, and consider how well the gaming industry has responded in that case...
Stop pretending that all those groups (and even the members within a single group) belong to some kind of monolithic homogenous whole. Anonymous definitely did a DDOS on Sony due to a grudge. They may also have hacked Sony for profit, or some other group may have hacked Sony for profit at the same time. And other people do hack sites just for the lulz or the challenge. It's not clear at this point if that's all LulzSec is in it for, but they certainly didn't get any profit out of devoting effort to taking down the 2600 servers.
Good point, and i just realized a third aspect. Now that Nintendo has been hacked it may even reduce the odds of them getting hacked again in the future. The main reasons for hacking a place are for the prestige/challenge, for profit, because of a grudge, or, well, just for the lulz. Sony seems to be getting hit for profit and for grudges, and possibly for lulz as well (haha, it's funny to kick them when they're down.)
At least from what other people have been saying it sounds like LulzSec hit Nintendo just for the challenge. It's possible someone may want to try and outdo them, but at least Nintendo doesn't have the "never been hacked" target on their back anymore.
I have to say, this is the first time the news of LulzSec hacking has actually made me mad. Everything else they've done could be argued to be altruistic, but this is just pointlessly lashing out at anyone they find. I can't think of anything Nintendo has ever done to justify this.
Actually, i wonder if this was intended as a PR move intended to help Nintendo with the primary intent actually being to further damage Sony. Sony's been in the news for weeks for getting hacked multiple times and losing tons of data about customers. Now Nintendo gets hacked, but it's pretty minor and no customer data was compromised. Doesn't that make Sony look even worse in comparison?
We've already got people in this very thread saying this means Nintendo's way of doing things is better Sony's. I'm not going to take sides on that issue, but if LulzSec's goal was to get people to criticize Sony in comparison to Nintendo then they seem to have succeeded.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree with that at all. I'm just confused by the conclusion of the person i responded to, that getting to keep the fees would provide an incentive to the patent office to _issue_ more patents. I can't see how that would work unless the patent office currently has to return the filing fee if the patent isn't approved. Otherwise, if one were to ascribe nefarious purposes to the patent office, it would make more sense for them to encourage everyone to file more patents, but then to reject them all at the first possible step. That would maximize the amount of money coming in compared to the amount of time (and thus money going out) spent processing them.
Wait, you mean that if you file for a patent and they reject it that they also refund the filing fee? I know very little about the patent process but that sounds unbelievably generous for, well, any government or corporate office anywhere!
If the movies didn't appeal to women as much as men you'd expect to see less women than men going to the movies. if books didn't appeal to women as much as men then you'd expect less books to be bought be women.
That one bit is half right, but you're wrong about everything else. I can't see the details of the report since they seem to be obfuscating it, but every reference i've seen to it implies that the numbers they're reporting are strictly how many women "play games" on each console and what genres they prefer. It makes absolutely _no_ claims about how much time they spend gaming or how much money the spend on gaming, especially not in comparison to the male audience.
So it's entirely possible (and in fact seems likely to me) that there _are_ less games being bought by women than by men.
If we lived in some alternate universe where the FPS genre somehow never got invented would you expect to find that less than 50% of the gaming audience was male? Even if their favorite genre didn't exist i suspect that pretty much every gamer would rather be playing _some_ game, especially when they didn't know what it was they were missing out on. But the males would still probably be spending a lot less on games than we see from things like Call of Duty and Halo.
The point you seem willfully blind to is that gaming is not male dominated because 50% of the gamers are already female.
Sorry, but i've worked in the game industry. The game audience may not be male dominated anymore (though i suspect gamer dollars are still male dominated) but the game development industry definitely still is, and that has definitely had an effect on things. I don't even think it's intentional, but when a bunch of people of a certain demographic get together and come up with an idea for some media then if they don't think about it much they tend to come up with something that appeals specifically to their own demographic. That's just natural.
This isnt something that will go away, like it or not. There is a demographic out there that these games are aimed at, and whether or not your demographic gets more representation, games like GTA will have this kind of eye-candy because their primary appeal is teenage boys.
...
I think if youre going to play games that attract a lot of teenage and early-twenties guys, youre going to have to accept that the games will have some features you find distasteful.
I'm guessing that the point wasn't to complain that such games existed, but that they account for so much of certain genres in the industry. I believe she is suggesting that she would like to play those genres of games but not just ones specifically targeted towards teenage and early-twenty guys through the use of (frequently crude and tasteless) objectification of women. Yes there are plenty of more tasteful alternatives out there in other genres, however telling women they have to stay away from the big name games in some of the most popular genres if they don't want to have to put up with the gender biased objectification seems rather cruel to me.
(I can't speak for the OP, but i know more than one woman who's just fine with eye candy as long as it's handled tastefully and both genders are represented, which seems like a perfectly reasonable compromise to me.)
That sure is a nice non-violent game you have there. It would be a shame if anything happened to it...
They probably expect that a number of the members are thinking "they're not on to me. I'm too good at this to get caught".
This. Just look at the number of comments here alleging that the FBI doesn't have a clue and are just saying this to keep everyone from thinking they're totally incompetent. If they named a specific person within the organization at least some of the members would probably crap their pants and start running for cover. As it is LulzSec is probably just laughing it up.
I was just going to moderate the GB poster, but instead i think i shall point out that you seem to be dead set on continuing the original fallacy.
"Many people use X" does not equate to "X is designed optimally for those people."
Do you think if there were no chick flicks that women would just stop going to movies? No, they'd still go to the "broad appeal" movies and a few of the "guy" movies so they'd still be movie consumers, but it's quite likely that total movie revenues would be less. Would women still read if there were no romance novels? Sure they would. Would the publishing industry be missing out on a huge chunk of income without that genre? Definitely! And the recent explosion of the paranormal romance sub-genre shows that there was a need unaddressed by the market, even though most of those people were probably already buying books before that point.
Really this is the best kind of marketing research. They've identified a large group of people who are _already_ customers whose desires they feel can be better addressed. Would you be equally outraged if SyFy did some market research which determined "Our primary audience are geeks who like high quality science fiction television series. Perhaps we should produce some more of those"? After all, by your argument SyFy shouldn't do anything like that because those people are _already_ watching, therefore their needs are already met, right? The possibility that those people are just desperate for any kind of Science Fiction and will settle for the crap that's currently on SyFy because there's not much else available elsewhere doesn't bear consideration does it?
"We've already got the customers, so we don't need to do anything to improve our product/services" is pretty much the antithesis of progress, and it would surprise me to see that attitude on Slashdot if it were being expressed about almost any other topic, but since we're talking about women getting into something that's been traditionally male dominated i guess that's par for the course?
There's no benefit we get from war that we couldn't have gotten just as easily, and a whole lot cheaper, without the war. All war does is provide a psychological motivation to spend the money and make the effort. Do you think the scientific results would have turned out differently if the military (or some other agency) had spent $70 million on this research when there weren't any wars on?
So is war useful as a motivating tool? Yes. Is it really sad that we can't convince ourselves to do a lot of these things without the excuse of war? Also yes. Does the war itself directly provide the benefit? No.
Totally random question, but has she tried audiobooks? I started listening to audiobooks during my commute years ago (when Audible made buying books through their membership program an affordable prospect) and i find it endlessly fascinating the ways in which listening to an audiobook is both like and unlike reading the same book. I'd never thought of it before, but your post suddenly made me realize that audiobooks might be a great way for dyslexic people to get into books for entertainment.
I'm not a big fan of some of the wars and conflicts we've gotten involved in in the past. However unless you've got specific information proving otherwise about some individual, there's no reason to assume that any given soldier signed up for the military for anything but honorable, or at least morally justifiable reasons. A soldier's job is to follow orders as long as those orders aren't clearly illegal. It is the job of "wiser heads", aka the upper echelons of the military chain of command, including the government, to decide what those orders should be.
So if you've got a beef with what our troops are doing, take it out on the government, not the troops. The government may not be making decisions that are actually keeping us safe, but unless proven otherwise i'm willing to believe that that's what the soldiers believed they signed up for. And because of that i'm not going to begrudge them the cost of a few game systems just because the government is doing stuff wrong at an entirely different level.
Please note the "and/or" in the original statement. I don't know how many people flash new ROMs who aren't as computer savy as they think they are (though i suspect it's a non-zero number) but installing "unapproved" apps is pretty easy to do.
The lesson that everyone needs to draw from this is that it's great that Android is open and allows you to do pretty much whatever you want. However if you start flashing your own ROMs and/or using markets other than the official Google one (and possibly Amazon's app store) then you better be REALLY SURE you know what you're doing and not just blindly download any random app from any random source that strikes your fancy.
Of course hopefully this isn't news to people who are already computer savy.
Is there something wrong with Lolz? My impression at least was that "doing it for the lolz" is doing it for fun, while "doing it for the lulz" was doing it for fun at someone else's expense.
"LulzSec might not be as famous as Anonymous â" they're really best known for hacking sites they like, to prove a point about security"
Wait, so is LulzSec known for hacking sites they like? Or is Anonymous known for hacking sites they like? Which one of them actually likes Sony since both groups hacked them? (Even disregarding Sony's claims about the stolen PSN information, Anonymous admitted to being responsible for the prior DDoS attack.) Does Anonymous like the Scientologists or does LulzSec like InfraGard? I'm kinda confused by the claim.
Yes, but some of us create real things.
Well that's great for you and your cohorts then. However a lot of the rest of us lack either the talent or the resources for creating real things. Lego and Minecraft are for us.
I knew when I decided not to buy it that it would get boring fast. I've watched a few people play it and all I ever see them do is start fresh, start a "home base", get to the point that they can hide in base during the night and explore during the day, and then close it to play a different game.
I can only think of two possibilities, either the people you watched are completely uncreative, or they've already got some other area of their life in which they are creative so they don't feel the need for another one.
Personally i started the game and built a "home base" and did a bit of exploring, but i didn't like the snowy terrain i'd started in. So i started a new world. Then i built a "home base" in that one. Then i built a fountain. Then i built a farm around the fountain. Then i dug down to the bottom of the world so i could mine cool stuff. Then i saw a giant plateau and wanted to get to the top and spent awhile digging my way up there. Then i built a castle on top of the plateau. Then i dug an underground tunnel to connect the castle with my first home base. Then i dug an underground farm. Then i started crafting decorative items. Then i built a large lava pool.
And then i got distracted watching the Yogscast Minecraft videos on YouTube, and then i decided to try out the Survival Island challenge myself. Then that inspired me to start a new world and build a new type of home base. Then i built a portal to the Netherworld and started collecting stuff there.
Then i got distracted by Gemcraft Labyrinth for awhile, and then got distracted from that by Terraria. However i fully plan to go back to Minecraft and build more cool stuff, especially when the next updates happen. (I haven't even played around with minecarts or redstone at all yet!)
And i am by far not the most creative person out there. You can go on YouTube and find thousands of videos from people a million times more creative than me.
So Minecraft only gets boring fast if you have no interest in building stuff. Perhaps you meant to say "I have no interest in being creative in a building game so i knew it would get boring for me fast"? Because as originally stated your blanket statement is manifestly untrue.
I just closed Firefox. Let's open it back up again. It opens one google tab and is using 120 megs private bytes and 361 megs virtual according to Process Explorer. Not too bad.
Now let's open up 50 tabs, all for for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
After spinning for a bit, Firefox is now at 396 megs private and 717 megs virtual. Let's close 49 of the tabs. After letting it sit for a little bit it drops to 333 megs private and 717 megs virtual. Let's repeat that a few times without closing the window.
50 tabs open: 525 megs private, 839 megs virtual.
49 tabs closed: 466 megs private, 846 megs virtual.
50 tabs open: 660 megs private, 1002 megs virtual.
49 tabs closed: 596 megs private, 1001 megs virtual.
50 tabs open: 775 megs private, 1122 megs virtual.
49 tabs closed: 730 megs private, 1123 megs virtual.
50 tabs open: 906 megs private, 1252 megs virtual.
49 tabs closed: 839 megs private, 1253 megs virtual.
50 tabs open: 1002 megs private, 1339 megs virtual.
49 tabs closed: 937 megs private, 1338 megs virtual.
50 tabs open: 1105 megs private, 1438 megs virtual.
49 tabs closed: 1043 megs private, 1438 megs virtual.
So it took 7 iterations (about 350 pages all told) to reach the point where Firefox was consuming over a gig _each_ of private and virtual memory with just a single tab open. Now if i ever reached this point in normal usage of course i'd shut it down to free the memory, but under normal usage after going through that many pages i'd have at least a dozen tabs open to things that i was still using.
And remember that that was just 350 copies of the same page, the main page for Wikipedia, which i wouldn't exactly consider a memory hog.
It's the invent your own disclaimer game!
"(Disclaimer: I'"m someone who will accidentally hit "submit" in the middle of a sentence.)
Would you care to point out how it was a flame? As a proponent of the basic idea i felt it was best to point out what seemed to me as the most glaring flaw in the argument in a neutral manner, rather than letting an opponent try and use it as part of an argument for how the entire premise is flawed. Or alternately they give it a pass for now but then this year turns out to be an outlier (a possibility that we can't accurately judge right at the moment) and when there are a lot fewer tornadoes next year we're suddenly faced with tons of naysayers proclaiming "while you said it was going to cause such-and-such but it didn't so you're a bunch of liars!" (And to a certain extent they would be right, if only by the sin of omission, at least in my case.)
In the long run it's never a good idea to support an argument you believe in with anything less than the most accurate information you have. Doing otherwise will only bite you in the ass eventually.
And i agree with you that having public discussions about this subject which result in anything meaningful is hard, but if you believe that it's absolutely impossible then why are you here discussing it?
Climate change wasn't mentioned at all.
Right from the summary: "'We're currently caught in two loops,' writes Friedman. 'One is that more population growth and more global warming together are pushing up food prices;'"
Maybe that part wasn't actually meant to be associated with the comment about tornadoes earlier in the summary, but it sure seemed to imply a connection.
It's a little early to include the tornadoes as part of a discussion on global climate change. Just like one hot summer doesn't prove it and one cold winter doesn't disprove it (even ignoring the false notion that global climate change != getting warmer everywhere all the time) we'd need to see evidence of increased storm activity for multiple years in close succession before we could draw any conclusions. In general i'm a "believer" in global climate change, but i'm not in favor of using incorrect data to try and prop up the idea.
Depends on who you ask? It seems the average age of tv viewers hit 50 fairly recently, but that's not the demographic that advertisers like to aim for so that's not the primary age most shows get written for. The average age of movie viewers seems a lot harder to pin down, though a lot of studies state that it's lower than the tv viewer average, but it wouldn't surprise me if the same thing is true in that case to a lesser degree as well.
I don't know if the advertisers and producers have good evidence to indicate the younger demographics respond better to advertising or if they're just prejudiced towards younger viewers for some reason, but whatever the case older tv viewers are relatively irrelevant as far as the production of tv (and possibly movie) media is concerned.
And then look at all the studies showing how large the population of female gamers is, and consider how well the gaming industry has responded in that case...
Stop pretending that all those groups (and even the members within a single group) belong to some kind of monolithic homogenous whole. Anonymous definitely did a DDOS on Sony due to a grudge. They may also have hacked Sony for profit, or some other group may have hacked Sony for profit at the same time. And other people do hack sites just for the lulz or the challenge. It's not clear at this point if that's all LulzSec is in it for, but they certainly didn't get any profit out of devoting effort to taking down the 2600 servers.
Good point, and i just realized a third aspect. Now that Nintendo has been hacked it may even reduce the odds of them getting hacked again in the future. The main reasons for hacking a place are for the prestige/challenge, for profit, because of a grudge, or, well, just for the lulz. Sony seems to be getting hit for profit and for grudges, and possibly for lulz as well (haha, it's funny to kick them when they're down.)
At least from what other people have been saying it sounds like LulzSec hit Nintendo just for the challenge. It's possible someone may want to try and outdo them, but at least Nintendo doesn't have the "never been hacked" target on their back anymore.
I have to say, this is the first time the news of LulzSec hacking has actually made me mad. Everything else they've done could be argued to be altruistic, but this is just pointlessly lashing out at anyone they find. I can't think of anything Nintendo has ever done to justify this.
Actually, i wonder if this was intended as a PR move intended to help Nintendo with the primary intent actually being to further damage Sony. Sony's been in the news for weeks for getting hacked multiple times and losing tons of data about customers. Now Nintendo gets hacked, but it's pretty minor and no customer data was compromised. Doesn't that make Sony look even worse in comparison?
We've already got people in this very thread saying this means Nintendo's way of doing things is better Sony's. I'm not going to take sides on that issue, but if LulzSec's goal was to get people to criticize Sony in comparison to Nintendo then they seem to have succeeded.