I don't know much about windows, but if a setting in a registry or your VM can screw up specific individual sites I would still call the web site broken.
It's possible to change rendering options in IE through the registry, which could make websites appear to be broken when in fact you have simply disabled the ability to render it properly. If a site uses Flash and you've broken your Flash installation, it's not exactly the site's fault.
Similarly (and since I just recently experienced this) some of Sun's java VMs will do some really odd things on certain sites. A great deal of that is because of Microsoft's VM supporting non-standard things and people writing to that VM, but other times there's no easy explanation as to why it doesn't work in the Sun VM (or they fixed it in a later version).
Personally, I've been pretty upset with NVIDIA ever since they bought out 3dfx and told Voodoo owners to go screw themselves, that they weren't releasing any new drivers or supporting any Voodoo products. I bought a Voodoo5, instead of a Geforce2 - due to the stability of the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 I had owned, and due to reading the complaints about NVIDIA's drivers... and a week later 3dfx went under. D'OH!
nVidia didn't really 'buy out' 3dfx, they just bought up certain portions of their technology when 3dfx went under. As for complaints about nVidia's drivers, I'd be interested to know what they were at that time, since I dumped 3dfx for nVidia when the Voodoo3 made it extremely clear that 3dfx was not going to be able to produce cards comparable to the Voodoo and Voodoo2 on nVidia's timeline. Through the TNT lines and GeForce lines the only problems I've had with drivers have been specific to particular games and particular driver versions, and fixed very quickly in most cases.
and I'm still using a 64MB GeForce2 I bought when they were first released. At this point I'm looking at probably waiting for the next chipset release to drive down the prices on the high-end 128MB GF4 cards before buying one.
On the other hand, most of the people I know that only play games occasionally or that just want the 'best bang for the buck' usually get an MX card, which is more than enough for most people, and far cheaper than the Ti and Radeon cards.
Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers. What they should be doing is to reach an agreement and put it onto opengl.
Developers are already doing it at a lower level by writing code directly to each card to get programmable shaders when they want them. Even if every major card manufacturer makes up their own method of doing things, there's a possibility that programming for each card becomes faster than it currently is.
As far as OpenGL goes, both nVidia and ATI have been working for quite some time to get (their own) programmable shaders into OpenGL and Direct3D. RenderMonkey doesn't even support OpenGL yet, which isn't really surprising given ATI's history of OpenGL support in their drivers.
Isn't Cg open source? Why couldn't ATI just add their modifications to Cg in such a way that at compile time, both Nvidia and ATI cards would get the proper code to do shading properly?
According to nVidia's Cg FAQ they should be able to modify the Cg compiler to do this. Whether or not it would actually make sense to do so I don't know, or if it requires some level of support for nVidia's programmable shader techniques in the first place.
Windows 98 yeah? Frankly I`m suprised you can surf long enough between crashes for security issues to be a problem! Managed to shut down your PC to power-off yet, or do you just turn it off on the `please wait while windows arses about` screen when it hangs and waste 4 mins staring at Scandisk.Exe each morning?
lol, besides the hang on shut down thing having been patched several months (years?) ago, a well-tuned Win98 system just needs a reboot every week or two to clean out the memory if it's heavily used, and on light use can probably go a month without reboot (or longer if it's extremely light use), depending on the amount of RAM in the system.
That being said, 2k or XP will both do a hell of a lot better staying up and cleaning up after themselves.
but if you're just plugging into your home broadband modem, what's the point of having an extra box to do what your computer can do already?
ummm... because your firewall software can't monitor that which it does not see, whereas the OS (or another piece of software) doesn't have too much chance of fooling an external box (whether it's another computer or just a cable router).
At first, every time my dad found a website that didn't work right, he asked me why, and I suggested it might have been designed for a certain browser, and why didn't he try one of the other options. He'd try the same site in IE and Opera and Mozilla and Netscape 4, but nine times out of ten NONE of them would get it right. So I'd tell him that if at least one of those browsers couldn't get it right, the site must just be broken. After a while, he sensed a pattern.
Nice, I wonder how many of those sites simply don't work because of the VM you're using or some setting you've been messing with in the registry, rather than an actual problem with the site (other than the fact that it might use MS-specific code, which is a problem, but not an error in the true sense).
If I were in this position, I'd let the family run whatever they wanted. After all, they're not on my network, they bought their own computers, and they should be able to learn from their own mistakes. I can -suggest- they try Mozilla or Opera instead of just using IE, but alas, that's just my suggestion.
And if they are on my network, I'd just put them all behind an OpenBSD firewall and be fairly secure knowing that I can keep my systems from being compromised if their systems are somehow breached. Then again, it doesn't take much to keep any system relatively safe from harm, even running MS software.
The folks at OpenBSD still haven't explained how that's happened so we've got six theoretical bugs (which will undoubtedly become reality Real Soon Now) versus an unexplained, but very real, hack, which may or may not manifest itself elsewhere.
Also, closer inspection of the MS release shows that IE6 is only vulnerable to 5 of the 6 new items (1 of them only applies to IE5.x). Though, admittedly, 5 vulnerabilities is still not good. I'd rather see patches (of which there have been many since MS announced their 'commitment to security') than wait for someone to release a script that exploits a vulnerability.
Y'know, if Judge Jackson had NOT given interviews, the MS case might have been finalized by now. The appellate courts didn't overturn his Findings of Facts or guilty verdit. They didn't even say that his penalty was inappropriate. They merely said that his penalty *appeared* to be biased, based soley on the fact that he given interviews before the case was over.
Actually, they overturned quite a few of his rulings, but they decided not to throw out the Findings of Fact (which MS asked them to do). They ruled that the DoJ didn't make a strong enough case for several of the 'guilty' verdicts that Jackson handed down, and that the appearance of bias was reason enough to remove him from the case, and they overturned Jackson's Final Judgment. Furthermore, of those portions that were not outright overturned, many portions of the case are 'on remand', meaning that those portions of the case must be reheard before another ruling can be made based on those portions of the case (and as of yet they have not been).
As for the penalty: We vacate the District Court's remedies decree for the additional reason that the court has failed to provide an adequate explanation for the relief it ordered.... The District Court has not explained how its remedies decree would accomplish those objectives. Indeed, the court devoted a mere four paragraphs of its order to explaining its reasons for the remedy.
Followed by Section VI. Judicial Misconduct:... Section 455(a) of the Judicial Code requires judges to recuse themselves when their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned."... All indications are that the District Judge violated each of these ethical precepts by talking about the case with reporters. The violations were deliberate, repeated, egregious, and flagrant.
(emphasis added)
I really wish more people would at least get a good first-hand overview of the 125 page document before they try to state what the court did and did not say. They might also understand why the DoJ changed their tune so quickly after the appeal if they looked over the portions of the case that were thrown out or remanded.
and this court rarely makes any rulings other than 'yes you can tap his phone' or 'no you cant tap her phone'. The Supreme Court would make secret rulings if the ruling and case details would cause concerns of a breach of security, just like many documents entered into any court that can be covered by personal privacy, trade secrets, or national secrets are not made public.
You don't go around telling people you're going to tap their phone, and lesser courts that approve wire taps don't do it in open session either.
yes. Fiber distance depends on the speed, if you have a slow signal it's easier to detect the 0&1's even if they've been spread by distance, but for typical speeds, you can expect to need a repeater about every 2km for multi-mode, and every 10km for single-mode.
Even fiber installs done 5 years ago were done with repeaters spread over much further distances than that (like 45-70km) at high speeds.
Personally, I think the best advancement in CD-R/W technology to date was buffer under-run prevention and reduced CPU usage by CD writing software. Once that was done, it allowed me to do something else while my CDs are burning, so I don't even care (most of the time) whether it takes 45 minutes or 5 minutes to burn a CD. Of course, once it got down to 5 minutes, I just saw no point at all to getting a new drive until my current drive just doesn't work any more.
Still, I'm glad to see they're still improving write speed, so that when I do go to buy a new one it won't just be the same drive again.
The first thing I thought of was 'who in Mortal Kombat had a knife?'. After that it was simply a matter of asking how stupid this kid was, because I certainly didn't kill anyone when I was 13, or even physically harm anyone, despite the fact that I was generally spending a lot of time doing things I wasn't supposed to do, and well aware of the consequences should I get caught.
Well spoken" my ass; if this woman actually gets her nursing degree, I pity the people whose lives she 'touches.'
Personally, I'm glad she's going into nursing, maybe that'll keep her out of schools, since apparently the Music Education degree wasn't enough for her, for whatever reason. Not the kind of person I want teaching kids anything, even music.
games have ratings that classify what age levels should play them. the goverment and parents groups got that done.
The game companies were rating themselves long before the government and parent groups even got into the picture. Once it became obvious that the government and parents might take further steps, the game companies solidified on one rating system (previously there were at least 2 systems in use) before things really hit the fan. Basically, the government and parent groups haven't done anything except bring about increased media coverage, and even ignorance of the very rating system in place (by complaining about the risks of letting children play games without pointing out the games they're talking about are rated M, may as well discuss the risks of childrem watching movies rated R and NC-17).
Unfortunately, it's not just the "conservatives" who are out to push responsibility for violence on video games. As often as its the "liberals".
I find that often the labels just don't make sense, and you have to actually look at what the groups support. The liberals gave us the parental warning stickers on music (though they wanted more, like banning most of the music that has those labels), gun control, anti-tobacco laws and lawsuits (most of California is heavily liberal, and it's illegal to smoke in public places of business now, but medical use of marijuana is legal (though the federal government has cracked down on it anyway)), and have been responsible for recent (in the last few years) Senate hearings on content of video games, music, and television. On the other hand, conservatives give us the 'pro-life'ers and the heavy religious agendas. The problem, of course, is that the extreme religious views can often coincide with the liberal attempts to censor content of music, video games, and other media, so it gets confusing for some people.
Overall, I just end up voting for the person that's least likely to restrict me from doing whatever I want to do. I'd hate to see the choice of whether or not to have an abortion taken out of women's hands (legally anyway, there will always be abortions regardless of federal laws), but since that is an issue which not only has little chance of getting anywhere in our political system, but also has very little influence on my life, I tend to vote more often based on things like gun control, taxation, and censorship. Whether or not the person is a liberal or conservative has little bearing, as the actual opinions they voice and their record in office are far more important than a label.
Another reason the hearings went nowhere was because of expert testimony from the head of the IDSA, a professional lobbying organization representing the video game industry. They also introduced a video game rating system (recently touted by joe lieberman as the entertainment industry's best) a day or two _before_ the hearings, which was incredibly clever.
Just thought I'd point out that the game industry had two forms of rating system in place long before that, but they consolidated on the new one (which has only slight improvements, but is more efficient since it's the same across the board) at that time. Before the change it was often not clear as to either the age group recommended for the game or the content of the game, depending on which rating system that game used. This system also more closely relates to the system that has been in place with films for so long by using roughly the same age groups, making it easier for parents to make the distinctions based on what they know their own children can handle (after all, how many of us never saw an R rated movie with our parents consent before we were 17? or a PG-13 movie before 13).
Many corporations line up every year to pay up to $2,200,000 for 30 seconds of screen time during the Super Bowl. Maybe they have some research you don't know about?
Let's see, advertising is based on exposing your product to the largest possible number of people, and *gasp* the Super Bowl is the most widely broadcast event on television, therefore getting the largest possible number of people to see your advertisement. They also do a lot of research to find out what appeals to their target group, but they also know that if their product isn't viewed as something people want, that no amount of advertising will help. Pets.com advertised during the super bowl, too, after all.
C'mon! We need evidence that media influences behavior like we need evidence that gravity influences behavior. Remember this story [slashdot.org] about the fast and furious influence of TV in Bhutan (the last place on earth to legalize TV)? The fact that TV (a passive medium) profoundly influences people is well established.
There's also something to be said about the way those people were sheltered from the 50 years of TV the US has been exposed to. They're getting blitzed with advertising that's focused primarily at people that are jaded with advertising. The advertising to content ratio has increased just in my lifetime, which doesn't even account for half of the time that TV programming has been on the air, and the advertising has changed over that time to try to appeal to a culture that gets hit with this stuff constantly.
Essentially, a culture that has not had TV until the last year is like a child with no parents at all, and a pocket book to respond to the advertising. In 20 years go back and see how they've adapted to television. Certainly it will have affected their culture, but they should have lost some of the susceptibility to advertising and media in general. The real question is can they preserve the core of their culture when they have television, or will it corrupt their society, and how does their culture determine their susceptibility to that corruption.
Doesn't it make sense that an active medium such as video games would also have a powerful influence (albeit different in some ways)?
No one should be questioning whether or not video games have an influence on people. The question is, instead, whether or not people would do something because of a video game that they wouldn't normally do. The majority of studies show that violent people are violent regardless of the media, and many studies show that violent criminals were most often exposed to less media than the average person.
Finally, I have to ask, what does it say about the society itself when we hype up the violence in a game like GTA3 when the game itself leaves you to do pretty much whatever you want? Let's also not forget that the more violent your actions are in GTA3, the harder the game tries to stop you from committing further violent acts, by sending more and more cops after you. The fact that you end up walking out of jail a few seconds later leaves some with the idea that there's little stopping them from committing violent actions, but in the end there aren't many people that are willing to play a game in which they get to spend the next 1-50 game years in jail.
Most video games are violent, because it's what appeals to the primary market for video games (males 16-25). What the media doesn't focus on, though, is the fact that many in the video game industry are realizing that they're missing a very large market by having the reputation for violence. Ever time a game like Myst or The Sims comes along and smashes the sales records for games like Doom and GTA3 they scramble to try to find a way to market more games like this. The problem is that they don't know that market well enough, and the market itself may not be a market that's willing to buy more than one or two games every year or two. On the other side of the fence they know that they have a market with the violent games that consumes an average of a game a month (and more for a fairly good chunk of the market) for which there's an established formula to produce those games. The most surprising thing, really, is that GTA3 doesn't really fit well into the normal formula, as it's a fairly free-form action game with a 3rd person perspective, as opposed to the more standard FPS, RTS, and RPG games that typically make up the million+ sellers in PC and console games.
Which reminds me of Dennis Miller of course, who always mentions "that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." Often (always?) it seemed like a very sarcastic statement, but the idea that it is shameful to be mistaken, and then admit you're wrong, is one that has always really bothered me.
Of course, with Dennis Miller the whole show usually has a ring of sarcasm to it. You're never really sure which parts are meant to be taken seriously, so it's left to the viewer to make their own decisions. I watched his show(s) quite a bit when I was in high school, usually to get a few good laughs (after all, they usually follow as extended versions of his old SNL skits), but there was a time there where he either got a bit too serious or perhaps just didn't agree with me enough and I stopped watching. Similarly I tend to watch the O'Reilly Factor, which I guess is supposed to be a serious debate show, and the only thing I get from it is comedic value. Frankly, I can see why people hate it, because his style definitely works towards the goal of pissing people off when they don't agree with him, which can just as easily get people to keep watching as when people do agree with him and enjoy watching him 'stick it to' the people holding the opposing view point.
It's all just TV, you just have to take it the way you take things on the internet or in print. You judge the depth of the information presented, the value of the source, and look for other information that will show the same view point or an opposing view point. Very few issues presented in the media are so important that a judgment needs to be made quickly, so one can take time to review any information they might find before making up their minds. The most important thing, though, is to always be open to new ideas, to let your view change when new information is presented. There's nothing wrong with making quick judgments based on limited information, it's the way the human mind is wired to allow us to live (the whole fight or flight thing), but when it's not a life or death situation, we need to remember that the first judgment is not always the most accurate, and is never the most informed.
What you need to learn for the real word, ethics and morality, critical thinking, creativity (helps with problem solving), finance (this is the only math you ever need to learn), reading, writing, and plenty of technology and science classes so you can understand the world as it is in 2002 and not as it was in the 1800s when people used libraries and typewriters
You can't properly teach many forms of science and technology in detail without a solid grounding in Algebra, Trigonometry, and some Calculus. The Chemistry, Biology, and Physics taught in high school are often dumbed down specifically because they can't guarantee that the students have a solid grounding in the math needed for the courses (many of my friends in college had serious problems with our 1st year Chem course because they hadn't taken Calculus before they got to college, so they were learning Calculus while at the same time having to apply it in Chemistry).
Furthermore, ethics and morality tend to have a very limited scope in school because society seems to have found religion as the most acceptable way to teach these things. In order for schools to really be able to teach that to people (which really makes me ask wtf are parents teaching their kids?), they need to first learn to seperate the lessons from the mythology, and possibly even address the religious issues head on, because they will come up if the subject is open to the classroom.
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I don't know much about windows, but if a setting in a registry or your VM can screw up specific individual sites I would still call the web site broken.
It's possible to change rendering options in IE through the registry, which could make websites appear to be broken when in fact you have simply disabled the ability to render it properly. If a site uses Flash and you've broken your Flash installation, it's not exactly the site's fault.
Similarly (and since I just recently experienced this) some of Sun's java VMs will do some really odd things on certain sites. A great deal of that is because of Microsoft's VM supporting non-standard things and people writing to that VM, but other times there's no easy explanation as to why it doesn't work in the Sun VM (or they fixed it in a later version).
Personally, I've been pretty upset with NVIDIA ever since they bought out 3dfx and told Voodoo owners to go screw themselves, that they weren't releasing any new drivers or supporting any Voodoo products. I bought a Voodoo5, instead of a Geforce2 - due to the stability of the Voodoo2 and Voodoo3 I had owned, and due to reading the complaints about NVIDIA's drivers... and a week later 3dfx went under. D'OH!
nVidia didn't really 'buy out' 3dfx, they just bought up certain portions of their technology when 3dfx went under. As for complaints about nVidia's drivers, I'd be interested to know what they were at that time, since I dumped 3dfx for nVidia when the Voodoo3 made it extremely clear that 3dfx was not going to be able to produce cards comparable to the Voodoo and Voodoo2 on nVidia's timeline. Through the TNT lines and GeForce lines the only problems I've had with drivers have been specific to particular games and particular driver versions, and fixed very quickly in most cases.
and I'm still using a 64MB GeForce2 I bought when they were first released. At this point I'm looking at probably waiting for the next chipset release to drive down the prices on the high-end 128MB GF4 cards before buying one.
On the other hand, most of the people I know that only play games occasionally or that just want the 'best bang for the buck' usually get an MX card, which is more than enough for most people, and far cheaper than the Ti and Radeon cards.
Or maybe nobody wins. Maybe three uncompatible ways to do things will hurt developers.
What they should be doing is to reach an agreement and put it onto opengl.
Developers are already doing it at a lower level by writing code directly to each card to get programmable shaders when they want them. Even if every major card manufacturer makes up their own method of doing things, there's a possibility that programming for each card becomes faster than it currently is.
As far as OpenGL goes, both nVidia and ATI have been working for quite some time to get (their own) programmable shaders into OpenGL and Direct3D. RenderMonkey doesn't even support OpenGL yet, which isn't really surprising given ATI's history of OpenGL support in their drivers.
Isn't Cg open source? Why couldn't ATI just add their modifications to Cg in such a way that at compile time, both Nvidia and ATI cards would get the proper code to do shading properly?
According to nVidia's Cg FAQ they should be able to modify the Cg compiler to do this. Whether or not it would actually make sense to do so I don't know, or if it requires some level of support for nVidia's programmable shader techniques in the first place.
Windows 98 yeah? Frankly I`m suprised you can surf long enough between crashes for security issues to be a problem! Managed to shut down your PC to power-off yet, or do you just turn it off on the `please wait while windows arses about` screen when it hangs and waste 4 mins staring at Scandisk.Exe each morning?
lol, besides the hang on shut down thing having been patched several months (years?) ago, a well-tuned Win98 system just needs a reboot every week or two to clean out the memory if it's heavily used, and on light use can probably go a month without reboot (or longer if it's extremely light use), depending on the amount of RAM in the system.
That being said, 2k or XP will both do a hell of a lot better staying up and cleaning up after themselves.
but if you're just plugging into your home broadband modem, what's the point of having an extra box to do what your computer can do already?
ummm... because your firewall software can't monitor that which it does not see, whereas the OS (or another piece of software) doesn't have too much chance of fooling an external box (whether it's another computer or just a cable router).
At first, every time my dad found a website that didn't work
right, he asked me why, and I suggested it might have been
designed for a certain browser, and why didn't he try one of
the other options. He'd try the same site in IE and Opera
and Mozilla and Netscape 4, but nine times out of ten NONE
of them would get it right. So I'd tell him that if at least
one of those browsers couldn't get it right, the site must
just be broken. After a while, he sensed a pattern.
Nice, I wonder how many of those sites simply don't work because of the VM you're using or some setting you've been messing with in the registry, rather than an actual problem with the site (other than the fact that it might use MS-specific code, which is a problem, but not an error in the true sense).
If I were in this position, I'd let the family run whatever they wanted. After all, they're not on my network, they bought their own computers, and they should be able to learn from their own mistakes. I can -suggest- they try Mozilla or Opera instead of just using IE, but alas, that's just my suggestion.
And if they are on my network, I'd just put them all behind an OpenBSD firewall and be fairly secure knowing that I can keep my systems from being compromised if their systems are somehow breached. Then again, it doesn't take much to keep any system relatively safe from harm, even running MS software.
The folks at OpenBSD still haven't explained how that's happened so we've got six theoretical bugs (which will undoubtedly become reality Real Soon Now) versus an unexplained, but very real, hack, which may or may not manifest itself elsewhere.
Also, closer inspection of the MS release shows that IE6 is only vulnerable to 5 of the 6 new items (1 of them only applies to IE5.x). Though, admittedly, 5 vulnerabilities is still not good. I'd rather see patches (of which there have been many since MS announced their 'commitment to security') than wait for someone to release a script that exploits a vulnerability.
Y'know, if Judge Jackson had NOT given interviews, the MS case might have been finalized by now. The appellate courts didn't overturn his Findings of Facts or guilty verdit. They didn't even say that his penalty was inappropriate. They merely said that his penalty *appeared* to be biased, based soley on the fact that he given interviews before the case was over.
...
... Section 455(a) of the Judicial Code requires judges to recuse themselves when their "impartiality might reasonably be questioned." ...
Actually, they overturned quite a few of his rulings, but they decided not to throw out the Findings of Fact (which MS asked them to do). They ruled that the DoJ didn't make a strong enough case for several of the 'guilty' verdicts that Jackson handed down, and that the appearance of bias was reason enough to remove him from the case, and they overturned Jackson's Final Judgment. Furthermore, of those portions that were not outright overturned, many portions of the case are 'on remand', meaning that those portions of the case must be reheard before another ruling can be made based on those portions of the case (and as of yet they have not been).
As for the penalty:
We vacate the District Court's remedies decree for the additional reason that the court has failed to provide an adequate explanation for the relief it ordered.
The District Court has not explained how its remedies decree would accomplish those objectives. Indeed, the court devoted a mere four paragraphs of its order to explaining its reasons for the remedy.
Check for yourself (PDF) It's in section V.
Followed by Section VI. Judicial Misconduct:
All indications are that the District Judge violated each of these ethical precepts by talking about the case with reporters. The violations were deliberate, repeated, egregious, and flagrant.
(emphasis added)
I really wish more people would at least get a good first-hand overview of the 125 page document before they try to state what the court did and did not say. They might also understand why the DoJ changed their tune so quickly after the appeal if they looked over the portions of the case that were thrown out or remanded.
and this court rarely makes any rulings other than 'yes you can tap his phone' or 'no you cant tap her phone'. The Supreme Court would make secret rulings if the ruling and case details would cause concerns of a breach of security, just like many documents entered into any court that can be covered by personal privacy, trade secrets, or national secrets are not made public.
You don't go around telling people you're going to tap their phone, and lesser courts that approve wire taps don't do it in open session either.
yeah, my 31-band EQ has 3 LEDs, so I guess it's just over the limit.
yes. Fiber distance depends on the speed, if you have a slow signal it's easier to detect the 0&1's even if they've been spread by distance, but for typical speeds, you can expect to need a repeater about every 2km for multi-mode, and every 10km for single-mode.
Even fiber installs done 5 years ago were done with repeaters spread over much further distances than that (like 45-70km) at high speeds.
Personally, I think the best advancement in CD-R/W technology to date was buffer under-run prevention and reduced CPU usage by CD writing software. Once that was done, it allowed me to do something else while my CDs are burning, so I don't even care (most of the time) whether it takes 45 minutes or 5 minutes to burn a CD. Of course, once it got down to 5 minutes, I just saw no point at all to getting a new drive until my current drive just doesn't work any more.
Still, I'm glad to see they're still improving write speed, so that when I do go to buy a new one it won't just be the same drive again.
The first thing I thought of was 'who in Mortal Kombat had a knife?'. After that it was simply a matter of asking how stupid this kid was, because I certainly didn't kill anyone when I was 13, or even physically harm anyone, despite the fact that I was generally spending a lot of time doing things I wasn't supposed to do, and well aware of the consequences should I get caught.
The Sims is probably the best selling PC game ever, and is rated T. Realistically, about 5-10% of all games produced make up 90-95% of sales anyway.
Well spoken" my ass; if this woman actually gets her nursing degree, I pity the people whose lives she 'touches.'
Personally, I'm glad she's going into nursing, maybe that'll keep her out of schools, since apparently the Music Education degree wasn't enough for her, for whatever reason. Not the kind of person I want teaching kids anything, even music.
games have ratings that classify what age levels should play them. the goverment and parents groups got that done.
The game companies were rating themselves long before the government and parent groups even got into the picture. Once it became obvious that the government and parents might take further steps, the game companies solidified on one rating system (previously there were at least 2 systems in use) before things really hit the fan. Basically, the government and parent groups haven't done anything except bring about increased media coverage, and even ignorance of the very rating system in place (by complaining about the risks of letting children play games without pointing out the games they're talking about are rated M, may as well discuss the risks of childrem watching movies rated R and NC-17).
Unfortunately, it's not just the "conservatives" who are out to push responsibility for violence on video games. As often as its the "liberals".
I find that often the labels just don't make sense, and you have to actually look at what the groups support. The liberals gave us the parental warning stickers on music (though they wanted more, like banning most of the music that has those labels), gun control, anti-tobacco laws and lawsuits (most of California is heavily liberal, and it's illegal to smoke in public places of business now, but medical use of marijuana is legal (though the federal government has cracked down on it anyway)), and have been responsible for recent (in the last few years) Senate hearings on content of video games, music, and television. On the other hand, conservatives give us the 'pro-life'ers and the heavy religious agendas. The problem, of course, is that the extreme religious views can often coincide with the liberal attempts to censor content of music, video games, and other media, so it gets confusing for some people.
Overall, I just end up voting for the person that's least likely to restrict me from doing whatever I want to do. I'd hate to see the choice of whether or not to have an abortion taken out of women's hands (legally anyway, there will always be abortions regardless of federal laws), but since that is an issue which not only has little chance of getting anywhere in our political system, but also has very little influence on my life, I tend to vote more often based on things like gun control, taxation, and censorship. Whether or not the person is a liberal or conservative has little bearing, as the actual opinions they voice and their record in office are far more important than a label.
Another reason the hearings went nowhere was because of expert testimony from the head of the IDSA, a professional lobbying organization representing the video game industry. They also introduced a video game rating system (recently touted by joe lieberman as the entertainment industry's best) a day or two _before_ the hearings, which was incredibly clever.
Just thought I'd point out that the game industry had two forms of rating system in place long before that, but they consolidated on the new one (which has only slight improvements, but is more efficient since it's the same across the board) at that time. Before the change it was often not clear as to either the age group recommended for the game or the content of the game, depending on which rating system that game used. This system also more closely relates to the system that has been in place with films for so long by using roughly the same age groups, making it easier for parents to make the distinctions based on what they know their own children can handle (after all, how many of us never saw an R rated movie with our parents consent before we were 17? or a PG-13 movie before 13).
Many corporations line up every year to pay up to $2,200,000 for 30 seconds of screen time during the Super Bowl. Maybe they have some research you don't know about?
Let's see, advertising is based on exposing your product to the largest possible number of people, and *gasp* the Super Bowl is the most widely broadcast event on television, therefore getting the largest possible number of people to see your advertisement. They also do a lot of research to find out what appeals to their target group, but they also know that if their product isn't viewed as something people want, that no amount of advertising will help. Pets.com advertised during the super bowl, too, after all.
C'mon! We need evidence that media influences behavior like we need evidence that gravity influences behavior. Remember this story [slashdot.org] about the fast and furious influence of TV in Bhutan (the last place on earth to legalize TV)? The fact that TV (a passive medium) profoundly influences people is well established.
There's also something to be said about the way those people were sheltered from the 50 years of TV the US has been exposed to. They're getting blitzed with advertising that's focused primarily at people that are jaded with advertising. The advertising to content ratio has increased just in my lifetime, which doesn't even account for half of the time that TV programming has been on the air, and the advertising has changed over that time to try to appeal to a culture that gets hit with this stuff constantly.
Essentially, a culture that has not had TV until the last year is like a child with no parents at all, and a pocket book to respond to the advertising. In 20 years go back and see how they've adapted to television. Certainly it will have affected their culture, but they should have lost some of the susceptibility to advertising and media in general. The real question is can they preserve the core of their culture when they have television, or will it corrupt their society, and how does their culture determine their susceptibility to that corruption.
Doesn't it make sense that an active medium such as video games would also have a powerful influence (albeit different in some ways)?
No one should be questioning whether or not video games have an influence on people. The question is, instead, whether or not people would do something because of a video game that they wouldn't normally do. The majority of studies show that violent people are violent regardless of the media, and many studies show that violent criminals were most often exposed to less media than the average person.
Finally, I have to ask, what does it say about the society itself when we hype up the violence in a game like GTA3 when the game itself leaves you to do pretty much whatever you want? Let's also not forget that the more violent your actions are in GTA3, the harder the game tries to stop you from committing further violent acts, by sending more and more cops after you. The fact that you end up walking out of jail a few seconds later leaves some with the idea that there's little stopping them from committing violent actions, but in the end there aren't many people that are willing to play a game in which they get to spend the next 1-50 game years in jail.
Most video games are violent, because it's what appeals to the primary market for video games (males 16-25). What the media doesn't focus on, though, is the fact that many in the video game industry are realizing that they're missing a very large market by having the reputation for violence. Ever time a game like Myst or The Sims comes along and smashes the sales records for games like Doom and GTA3 they scramble to try to find a way to market more games like this. The problem is that they don't know that market well enough, and the market itself may not be a market that's willing to buy more than one or two games every year or two. On the other side of the fence they know that they have a market with the violent games that consumes an average of a game a month (and more for a fairly good chunk of the market) for which there's an established formula to produce those games. The most surprising thing, really, is that GTA3 doesn't really fit well into the normal formula, as it's a fairly free-form action game with a 3rd person perspective, as opposed to the more standard FPS, RTS, and RPG games that typically make up the million+ sellers in PC and console games.
Hey, having caffine in a drink that you can see through is morally wrong.
heh, caffeine itself is translucent in solid form (and transparent in liquid form).
Which reminds me of Dennis Miller of course, who always mentions "that's just my opinion, I could be wrong." Often (always?) it seemed like a very sarcastic statement, but the idea that it is shameful to be mistaken, and then admit you're wrong, is one that has always really bothered me.
Of course, with Dennis Miller the whole show usually has a ring of sarcasm to it. You're never really sure which parts are meant to be taken seriously, so it's left to the viewer to make their own decisions. I watched his show(s) quite a bit when I was in high school, usually to get a few good laughs (after all, they usually follow as extended versions of his old SNL skits), but there was a time there where he either got a bit too serious or perhaps just didn't agree with me enough and I stopped watching. Similarly I tend to watch the O'Reilly Factor, which I guess is supposed to be a serious debate show, and the only thing I get from it is comedic value. Frankly, I can see why people hate it, because his style definitely works towards the goal of pissing people off when they don't agree with him, which can just as easily get people to keep watching as when people do agree with him and enjoy watching him 'stick it to' the people holding the opposing view point.
It's all just TV, you just have to take it the way you take things on the internet or in print. You judge the depth of the information presented, the value of the source, and look for other information that will show the same view point or an opposing view point. Very few issues presented in the media are so important that a judgment needs to be made quickly, so one can take time to review any information they might find before making up their minds. The most important thing, though, is to always be open to new ideas, to let your view change when new information is presented. There's nothing wrong with making quick judgments based on limited information, it's the way the human mind is wired to allow us to live (the whole fight or flight thing), but when it's not a life or death situation, we need to remember that the first judgment is not always the most accurate, and is never the most informed.
What you need to learn for the real word, ethics and morality, critical thinking, creativity (helps with problem solving), finance (this is the only math you ever need to learn), reading, writing, and plenty of technology and science classes so you can understand the world as it is in 2002 and not as it was in the 1800s when people used libraries and typewriters
You can't properly teach many forms of science and technology in detail without a solid grounding in Algebra, Trigonometry, and some Calculus. The Chemistry, Biology, and Physics taught in high school are often dumbed down specifically because they can't guarantee that the students have a solid grounding in the math needed for the courses (many of my friends in college had serious problems with our 1st year Chem course because they hadn't taken Calculus before they got to college, so they were learning Calculus while at the same time having to apply it in Chemistry).
Furthermore, ethics and morality tend to have a very limited scope in school because society seems to have found religion as the most acceptable way to teach these things. In order for schools to really be able to teach that to people (which really makes me ask wtf are parents teaching their kids?), they need to first learn to seperate the lessons from the mythology, and possibly even address the religious issues head on, because they will come up if the subject is open to the classroom.