You don't have to block ALL spam from the beggining. You just have to lock-out spam-mail after a certain treshold, after serious amounts of users have reported e-mail from that domain as "spam".
If the "enemy" spammer keeps changing domains, it wouldn't be so hard to link IPs/MACs with domains if they just keep registering new mail domains on same machine to override it (hard enough), let alone having to switch machines for new domains.
Ihe ideea is to REDUCE spam significantly, not downright eliminate it... What bothers you more? "You have 5 new messages, 5691 in bulk mail" or "You have 5696 new messages"?
1. Make self-replicating nanobots that can do various other tasks 2. ??? 3. PROFIT!!!
Now seriously, step "2" would be something like "now these nanobots should build NON-replicating nanobots that can perform various tasks". Obvious, isn't it?
Imagine a holo 3D banner-ad like the following:
Wellcome to http://nano.box.sk, the one and only site on the WorldNet to bring you crackz and hackz for the latest nanoware...
LMAO
Could be...
Phisics 101... "It needs to travel that fast to get out of Earth's grav-field" simply means that it needs that much speed initially to get out of it at almost zero speed... duh. Coming closer to Mars will accelerate the craft (obviously) back to higher speeds. And now, take into account extra thrust on route.
So, actually, it's the time we are willing to wait until the probes reach Mars that's setting the tempo (and the various other things like thruster power, fuel reserves, etc)
There ARE ways to do this "softer", they ARE "economically feasable"... but they're time-consuming.
MY TAKE on this? Aerobraking with a twist: use a "aerobrake blade" instead of "punch aerobrake" methods -> put the craft in a blade-like sheath that will take it several times through Mars' atmosphere "bending" the trajectory while slowing down, going in and out of the thin atmosphere at three-two-one weeks intervals, then when it slowed down enough it can land by GLIDING instead of CRASHING. It takes at least an extra two months per landing, but is a lot "easier" for the craft...
What's wrong with the "folder in folder in folder" approach I use? I don't really need a "system" for that... just make your "root" folders explicit enough, then file everything where it should go. I even have a "temp" dir for every category. I don't really see the need for such a tool, IF you can spare a few seconds to browse&dump...
Ooops, to be serious, I never looked at it this way. You might be 95% or more correct in your assumption.
Reading this... and considering how American politicians behave (?lately?), it might be the "next best thing since sliced bread"...
That is, if somebody doesn't get the bright ideea to (warning: semi-offtopic) have personal implanted RFID tags signaling birthdate and only allowing children of appropriate age to play it... ouch.
Umm, you have the correct ideea yet you take it a bit too far... We all tend to UNDERESTIMATE the power of understanding of a child.
For your example on the holocaust and the 8-year-old... my approach would be something like this (and I am talking about an eastern-european kid, my presumptive kid):
"Daddy, what's the Holocaust?" "Well, some time ago, about when your grand-dad was born, in the war, there was an insane man who could not suffer some other people and he tried to kill them all... it was not something you would want to see, even I feel sick when I see what happened then" "What happened then?" "Umm... he is responsable for ordering many to die, and in horrible ways..."...and you can pretty much imagine the rest of the conversation... If he, the kid, would specifically TELL me he wants to SEE what happened, yes, I would show him what happened, try to explain to him how and why it happened, and why it's important this should NEVER happend again.
As I said, never underestimate your kid. He might not take it well then, even be scared for a while... but in the long run, he's had his "violence flu-shot" and won't be curious to find all the sordid details.
This is much like giving your 8-year-old a cigarette and lighting it up for him if he wants to, AFTER you have explained what a cigarette is and why people smoke, etc. I guarantee you, that kid will NOT WANT to touch cigarettes until a much older age, and would even convince kids around him it was a bad thing.
Modern children's psychiatry is bullcrap.
NEVER obstruct knowledge for children... FOCUS it in the right direction. He's bound to knock on it anyway in the future... when you're NOT around. Who's going to guide him then?
Establish a moral base, teach him values, show him anything he wants to find out... and by age 12, be sure you can let him do pretty much anything he likes or wants, as you can trust his judgement.
I used to LAUGH (as a late-teenager) at gross stuff such games had in them instead of actually playing them for that. But... it's the curiosity that will make a 10-year-old play it. The fact that is "restricted" makes it only more desirable. And nobody will make him *not* play it if he sets his mind on it.
Me, I would rather let kids play this game and forbid them to watch the evening news... the problem nowadays is DE-sensitivisation. People are subjected from a younger age to information about violence, crime in general and all sorts of stuff that would gross an adult out... then you wonder how some kids see nothing wrong in picking up a machine gun and killing their classmates.
IF and only IF you would have severe punishments even in-game for "criminal behaviour", I would let kids play it JUST for that: to feel first-hand what happends to you when you break the law (or generally do harm to others). You can't expect anybody to know much more than he was thought... even if he thought much himself.
Argh, I lost focus (hey, it's 5 AM and at 7 AM I need to be in the office, lol). What I wanted to say is... NO amount of violence or gore is too big to be over the "hey, I can offset that" when it comes to a child's mind. And you don't even need much effort put into it. "Purists" would probably forbid their kids from watching anything "sordid" or "horrid", but that's not the way to go: exposure to it won't hurt (quite the contrary)... subjecting one to "constant onslaught" (of anything), without something there to counter-balance it WILL hurt in the long run.
So, again, we just turn back to the source of the problem: parents should pay attention to their children, even if work seems to be gaining the upper hand lest they want to have a dysfunctional child (like most these days) in spite of their apparent "quick-judgement efforts" to shelter him.
*bah* I'm getting too young/old/wrong-aged for this *grr* Sleep time...
I mean, your kid comes running and says "dad, dad, I want this new game, it's awesome". Do you just buy it by looking at the E-something rating, or do you at least have the decency to read the darn package first?
And anyway... as a previous poster said: there is no "irreparable damage" dealt to any kid for seing something... the damage comes if you LET him play that game for too long and have no ideea later why he starts poking people's eyes out or something like that.
Hey, it's not *that* long ago since I was a kid (I'm 26 now), I have a pretty clear recollection of what I have played and when (*cough* agreed, the violence level of PacMan, Nether Earth and Chuckie Egg I was subjected to at a pretty young age doesn't scale to today's titles *cough*). Still, I DID have younger friends meddling with Doom when it came out (the kids I was talking about were 7-9 years old then), playing it like crazy... still, they *COULD* make a difference between real-life and a computer game, and even very well.
In pre-conclusion: buy your kid just about anything he can play... but look at him the first times he plays it... then again in about one week, etc (ok, I'm *NOT* going to start a child-psychology lecture here).
And (finally...) in conclusion: don't judge a book by its cover, or a game by its rating. If your kid wants something and you can very well afford it, give it to him, NO FEAR of not being able to take it away later if he does stupid (not defining what stupid in this context means) things with it... (if you fear that you can't take it away later, you might have already a spoiled brat and it's too late for education anyway).
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed, or numbered... my life is my own."
The italics part is the only part that holds a bit of truth in it... The day you are born, you ARE pushed, then filed by your parents (birth certificate, which is... umm... stamped?), you are breiefed by the said parents (usually) until a certain age... the de-briefing part is usually done by your spouse each day you come from work (assuming you're a man)... and I won't even start talking about "numbered"...
It is said the average IQ of the human race is 100 (at least that was the ideea when they came up with). Under 80 and you're "too dumb for school" and anything above 120 and you're a intelligence beast... anyway, it's distributed as a "gaussian bell curve"... in case you don't know what that is, google it. No really, this was necessary.
The world's population is almost 7 billion. The population having access to computers is (let's go out on a limb with assumptions) about half, let's say 4 billion. People that USUALLY buy games (or have games bought for them) are somewhere between 15 and 30 years old. The closer you get to the 18-22 zone, the more games they "consume". So we can safely say, that out of all people using computers, only about 10% purchase games once a year, even less. So, that leaves us with about 400 million people in the "I'll buy one game this year" pool (yeah, some buy more, but really only Japan and USA persons buy more than 2 games a year on an average).
The number of titles showing up that are worth buying are about 200 each year. So that leaves us with about 2 million possible buyers for a certain game.
Now, look for some tool/graph anywhere that can integrate (as in the mathematical function) the bell curve distribution surface right-side of a certain number. Play with it for a while. You will see something startling come up...
IQ=100 required to play and enjoy a game = 1 million copies sold IQ=105 required to play and enjoy = 800 thousand copies sold IQ=110 required to play and enjoy = 500 thousand copies sold (and that goes exactly the same the other way around)
Except for extremely aggresive marketing campaigns and/or "heavy brand name recognition" and/or an "exclusive niche" in a genre... the above rule pretty much holds true.
Do you still wonder WHY games are intentionally "dumbed down"??? It's just the allmighty dollar at work here.
Move along, nothing to see... DISCLAIMER: 1. The numbers, the logic and pretty much anything except the basic ideea followed in this post... were intentionally exagerated (to prove a point). 2. No mathematician was seriously hurt while making these calculations 3. If you use these numbers to compare best-sellers with their gameplay-IQ, I should not be liable for anything that the lawyers throw at you later:P
The article was about kids in I-Cafes (no valid "adult ID") not being able to play games after 10pm. For this matter, and this matter alone, YES, IT IS the govt's job to handle this.
Let's have a (?quick?) logic & comparation here:
What kind of kid stays after 10pm to play games in a i-cafe? The kind of kid parents got out of hand already, the kind of kid parents don't know for sure where he is, etc. No, I am not a parent, but I was such a problem-kid (right up 'till university, and even now, one year and a bit after, I can't stop in some days to just chat, read forums or play some online game).
Next, let's compare games to cigarettes or alcohol... they're both addictive in some sort of way. Do you sell cigarettes or inhebriants to kids under 18? Then don't sell game service to kids after their "supposed" bed-time.
Those kids could as well play from home (assuming they do have a computer there)... oh, but wait, home mom&dad see him and don't let him play... what a shame... so he runs to the new-age arcade: the i-cafe. And with this new rule: SURPRISE! You can't play here if you're under 18... go home and ask your parents...
Well, look at it this way... they say "an UPS is good enough, if power goes out it will go out a few seconds or maybe a half hour", and don't plan for a "worse-case" scenario, in which you have a few hours of "power outage"... so instead of saving everything, commiting caches and so on, they just keep on hoping "in a few seconds power will be back on"... I just hope they DID learn their lesson now, and cut back on cutbacks (lol).
Quote from one of the links (people should read before they comment, shouldn't they?):
[...]And then there are the companies that have decided to go for a piece of the action themselves. Last September, Origin, the Electronic Arts subsidiary that runs Ultima Online, dismayed veteran players and delighted noobs by announcing it would now be selling advanced characters custom-built at $29.95 a pop. Wisely, Origin set the fee roughly in line with auction prices for characters generally, thus avoiding the impression that they?re out to undercut and overtake Ultima?s unusually robust auction market[...]
Well, it will largely depend on what those GM yeasts "eat" and how many usefull/useless/harmless/harmfull "byproducts" these GM yeasts make... Think about it: a small "bulge" of half a pound yeast culture, eat it once (warning: various antibiotics will kill them, so you'll have to make a "refill")... then eat all sorts of cheap stuff (raw cereals, treebarks, grass or even paper) and never be hungry again: the GM yeast cultures in your digestive tract will take those "useless" (for normal humans) balasts and turn them into a nutritious meal... Say hello to the newest restaurants in town: a stack of hay for the lady, fresh oak tree barks for the sir... coming up:) Yummy!
The study monitored brain-wave activity in 240 Japanese men and women, ranging from six to 29 years old, as they played games for differing amounts of time. The test subjects that spent the least amount of time on video games exhibited large amounts of beta waves, indicating strong prefrontal cortex activity. People that played games from one to three hours a day three or four days a week had beta levels about on par with alpha levels, indicating reduced activity in the cortex, while those that played every day for over two hours at a time had nearly zero cortex activity at all.
[...]hypothesized that most games only exercise players' reflexive and perceptive abilities, leaving the rest of the brain idle in the process. "Many games strive to instigate feelings of nervousness or terror, leading to fears that they could affect the autonomous behavior of players," cautioned Mori in the report. "[Parents] should pay close attention to the type of games they let their children play and how much time they spend playing them."
Well, what they're NOT saying yet is WHAT kind of video games have been used when they made this test... playing something like "space invaders" or "tetris" can cause that reflex-response only... whereas increasingly complex games often make you think a lot more than react...(yeah, not always... Dungeon Siege, Diablo and other "real-time-RPGs" are the perfect examples of complex games inducing highly repetitive behaviour) I would really love to see that "tester" using some of the games I enjoyed playing while growing up to "test" his assumptions... for instance the X-Wing/TIE-fighter series (for the level of strategy and positioning involved, besides the actual shooting), several (actually... almost) all quest-type-games that were made before the mid-90's, single-player no-economy real-time-strategy game type missions (some missions in Warcraft 1 are the first that come to my mind)... and I bet all readers here *do* have some *really old* games they can relate with in this aspect...
And how about the "main article" quote:
The governmental ministry's study plans to study the development of one thousand children over the next ten years, as they mature from newborns to toddlers and grammar-school students. The study will record their basic lifestyle patterns, including how much TV they watch and how many games they play, and the ministry will gauge their mental health and emotional personality through neural scans and questionnaires sent to their parents. Using the information from the study, the ministry hopes to gain insight into the effects of entertainment choices on a young child's brain development. The results could also be used to improve educational methodology in Japan's public schools.
Games have also been implicated in the case of Shun Tanemoto, a four-year-old boy who was kidnapped and thrown off a multistory parking garage July 1 in the city of Nagasaki. The alleged assailant, a 12-year-old student whose name has been withheld by police, was reportedly an avid gamer who repeatedly abused the victim over the past few months. "This is a crime carried out by a child who played with nothing but video games, never with other people"
Well, yeah, can't blame them for doing that. Actually, quite a GOOD ideea. What they left out though is the fact that they should ALSO record exactly WHAT games a kid plays... not only the kind, but how much time (s)he spends playing a certain game, and with whom, what they do and say, etc. Myeah, "The Big Brother" syndrome at work...
I just hope they don't butcher the results of this test to please the people in power at the moment...
Incompatible Changes:
Hash Randomisation (The added randomness may affect applications[...]) Unsafe signals again available(from safe to unsafe then back to safe then back again and so on and so forth until your head explodes)
...and that's just quoting *some* small portion of it... Makes you wonder"why bother upgrading when they'll change it back again in a few and I'll have to re-check my code"...
There are "out there" a lot of other scripting/programming/other-something languages... ...so excuse me if I deem this not news-worthy:( Well, if you told me python comes out with a "reads your mind and writes the code you actually wanted" feature... man, that would be news:P
Of course I was kidding... in the end... slightly. But seriously, the first few seconds when I saw it spelled "DPI" instead of "dpi" I was perplexed... and still not convinced it's not also "option 5", lol. Then, tried to take it from the "general user's" point of view... the one that IF (s)he doesn't understand sumething, it goes "googling". And you see what happends if you try to do that...
Slashdot Mirror
You don't have to block ALL spam from the beggining.
;)
You just have to lock-out spam-mail after a certain treshold, after serious amounts of users have reported e-mail from that domain as "spam".
If the "enemy" spammer keeps changing domains, it wouldn't be so hard to link IPs/MACs with domains if they just keep registering new mail domains on same machine to override it (hard enough), let alone having to switch machines for new domains.
Ihe ideea is to REDUCE spam significantly, not downright eliminate it...
What bothers you more?
"You have 5 new messages, 5691 in bulk mail"
or
"You have 5696 new messages"?
hehe
Nanotech 101 + Economics 101
1. Make self-replicating nanobots that can do various other tasks
2. ???
3. PROFIT!!!
Now seriously, step "2" would be something like "now these nanobots should build NON-replicating nanobots that can perform various tasks".
Obvious, isn't it?
Imagine a holo 3D banner-ad like the following: Wellcome to http://nano.box.sk, the one and only site on the WorldNet to bring you crackz and hackz for the latest nanoware... LMAO Could be...
Phisics 101...
"It needs to travel that fast to get out of Earth's grav-field" simply means that it needs that much speed initially to get out of it at almost zero speed... duh.
Coming closer to Mars will accelerate the craft (obviously) back to higher speeds.
And now, take into account extra thrust on route.
So, actually, it's the time we are willing to wait until the probes reach Mars that's setting the tempo (and the various other things like thruster power, fuel reserves, etc)
There ARE ways to do this "softer", they ARE "economically feasable"... but they're time-consuming.
MY TAKE on this?
Aerobraking with a twist: use a "aerobrake blade" instead of "punch aerobrake" methods -> put the craft in a blade-like sheath that will take it several times through Mars' atmosphere "bending" the trajectory while slowing down, going in and out of the thin atmosphere at three-two-one weeks intervals, then when it slowed down enough it can land by GLIDING instead of CRASHING.
It takes at least an extra two months per landing, but is a lot "easier" for the craft...
What's wrong with the "folder in folder in folder" approach I use?
I don't really need a "system" for that... just make your "root" folders explicit enough, then file everything where it should go.
I even have a "temp" dir for every category.
I don't really see the need for such a tool, IF you can spare a few seconds to browse&dump...
But still, who cares?
Kids still drink beer bought by bums for 5$ extra.
What makes it so hard to get an "illegal" game then?
Grr, now REALLY I have to go to bed...
;)
But a small correction first... didn't you want to say instead: "I, for one, welcome our ESRB-ratED overlords!" ???
Ooops, to be serious, I never looked at it this way. You might be 95% or more correct in your assumption.
Reading this... and considering how American politicians behave (?lately?), it might be the "next best thing since sliced bread"...
That is, if somebody doesn't get the bright ideea to (warning: semi-offtopic) have personal implanted RFID tags signaling birthdate and only allowing children of appropriate age to play it... ouch.
Umm, you have the correct ideea yet you take it a bit too far... We all tend to UNDERESTIMATE the power of understanding of a child.
...and you can pretty much imagine the rest of the conversation...
For your example on the holocaust and the 8-year-old... my approach would be something like this (and I am talking about an eastern-european kid, my presumptive kid):
"Daddy, what's the Holocaust?"
"Well, some time ago, about when your grand-dad was born, in the war, there was an insane man who could not suffer some other people and he tried to kill them all... it was not something you would want to see, even I feel sick when I see what happened then"
"What happened then?"
"Umm... he is responsable for ordering many to die, and in horrible ways..."
If he, the kid, would specifically TELL me he wants to SEE what happened, yes, I would show him what happened, try to explain to him how and why it happened, and why it's important this should NEVER happend again.
As I said, never underestimate your kid.
He might not take it well then, even be scared for a while... but in the long run, he's had his "violence flu-shot" and won't be curious to find all the sordid details.
This is much like giving your 8-year-old a cigarette and lighting it up for him if he wants to, AFTER you have explained what a cigarette is and why people smoke, etc.
I guarantee you, that kid will NOT WANT to touch cigarettes until a much older age, and would even convince kids around him it was a bad thing.
Modern children's psychiatry is bullcrap.
NEVER obstruct knowledge for children... FOCUS it in the right direction. He's bound to knock on it anyway in the future... when you're NOT around. Who's going to guide him then?
Establish a moral base, teach him values, show him anything he wants to find out... and by age 12, be sure you can let him do pretty much anything he likes or wants, as you can trust his judgement.
probably going to be modded either troll or funny, don't know, don't care, way past my bedtime anyway... so here it fies:
...and imagine a Beowulf cluster of those (ESBR-ratings-tags) on every game package...
Nighty night...
I used to LAUGH (as a late-teenager) at gross stuff such games had in them instead of actually playing them for that.
But... it's the curiosity that will make a 10-year-old play it. The fact that is "restricted" makes it only more desirable. And nobody will make him *not* play it if he sets his mind on it.
Me, I would rather let kids play this game and forbid them to watch the evening news... the problem nowadays is DE-sensitivisation.
People are subjected from a younger age to information about violence, crime in general and all sorts of stuff that would gross an adult out... then you wonder how some kids see nothing wrong in picking up a machine gun and killing their classmates.
IF and only IF you would have severe punishments even in-game for "criminal behaviour", I would let kids play it JUST for that: to feel first-hand what happends to you when you break the law (or generally do harm to others).
You can't expect anybody to know much more than he was thought... even if he thought much himself.
Argh, I lost focus (hey, it's 5 AM and at 7 AM I need to be in the office, lol). What I wanted to say is... NO amount of violence or gore is too big to be over the "hey, I can offset that" when it comes to a child's mind. And you don't even need much effort put into it.
"Purists" would probably forbid their kids from watching anything "sordid" or "horrid", but that's not the way to go: exposure to it won't hurt (quite the contrary)... subjecting one to "constant onslaught" (of anything), without something there to counter-balance it WILL hurt in the long run.
So, again, we just turn back to the source of the problem: parents should pay attention to their children, even if work seems to be gaining the upper hand lest they want to have a dysfunctional child (like most these days) in spite of their apparent "quick-judgement efforts" to shelter him.
*bah* I'm getting too young/old/wrong-aged for this *grr*
Sleep time...
I mean, your kid comes running and says "dad, dad, I want this new game, it's awesome".
Do you just buy it by looking at the E-something rating, or do you at least have the decency to read the darn package first?
And anyway... as a previous poster said: there is no "irreparable damage" dealt to any kid for seing something... the damage comes if you LET him play that game for too long and have no ideea later why he starts poking people's eyes out or something like that.
Hey, it's not *that* long ago since I was a kid (I'm 26 now), I have a pretty clear recollection of what I have played and when (*cough* agreed, the violence level of PacMan, Nether Earth and Chuckie Egg I was subjected to at a pretty young age doesn't scale to today's titles *cough*).
Still, I DID have younger friends meddling with Doom when it came out (the kids I was talking about were 7-9 years old then), playing it like crazy... still, they *COULD* make a difference between real-life and a computer game, and even very well.
In pre-conclusion: buy your kid just about anything he can play... but look at him the first times he plays it... then again in about one week, etc (ok, I'm *NOT* going to start a child-psychology lecture here).
And (finally...) in conclusion: don't judge a book by its cover, or a game by its rating. If your kid wants something and you can very well afford it, give it to him, NO FEAR of not being able to take it away later if he does stupid (not defining what stupid in this context means) things with it... (if you fear that you can't take it away later, you might have already a spoiled brat and it's too late for education anyway).
"I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, de-briefed, or numbered... my life is my own."
:P
The italics part is the only part that holds a bit of truth in it...
The day you are born, you ARE pushed, then filed by your parents (birth certificate, which is... umm... stamped?), you are breiefed by the said parents (usually) until a certain age... the de-briefing part is usually done by your spouse each day you come from work (assuming you're a man)... and I won't even start talking about "numbered"...
Get back in line, number 7567610 !
Well, facts seem to contradict common sense here ;)
It is said the average IQ of the human race is 100 (at least that was the ideea when they came up with). Under 80 and you're "too dumb for school" and anything above 120 and you're a intelligence beast... anyway, it's distributed as a "gaussian bell curve"... in case you don't know what that is, google it.
:P
No really, this was necessary.
The world's population is almost 7 billion.
The population having access to computers is (let's go out on a limb with assumptions) about half, let's say 4 billion.
People that USUALLY buy games (or have games bought for them) are somewhere between 15 and 30 years old. The closer you get to the 18-22 zone, the more games they "consume".
So we can safely say, that out of all people using computers, only about 10% purchase games once a year, even less.
So, that leaves us with about 400 million people in the "I'll buy one game this year" pool (yeah, some buy more, but really only Japan and USA persons buy more than 2 games a year on an average).
The number of titles showing up that are worth buying are about 200 each year. So that leaves us with about 2 million possible buyers for a certain game.
Now, look for some tool/graph anywhere that can integrate (as in the mathematical function) the bell curve distribution surface right-side of a certain number. Play with it for a while.
You will see something startling come up...
IQ=100 required to play and enjoy a game = 1 million copies sold
IQ=105 required to play and enjoy = 800 thousand copies sold
IQ=110 required to play and enjoy = 500 thousand copies sold
(and that goes exactly the same the other way around)
Except for extremely aggresive marketing campaigns and/or "heavy brand name recognition" and/or an "exclusive niche" in a genre... the above rule pretty much holds true.
Do you still wonder WHY games are intentionally "dumbed down"???
It's just the allmighty dollar at work here.
Move along, nothing to see...
DISCLAIMER:
1. The numbers, the logic and pretty much anything except the basic ideea followed in this post... were intentionally exagerated (to prove a point).
2. No mathematician was seriously hurt while making these calculations
3. If you use these numbers to compare best-sellers with their gameplay-IQ, I should not be liable for anything that the lawyers throw at you later
He just said the game mechanics is "Pac-Man"-like, and what differs is the level of complexity...
The article was about kids in I-Cafes (no valid "adult ID") not being able to play games after 10pm.
For this matter, and this matter alone, YES, IT IS the govt's job to handle this.
Let's have a (?quick?) logic & comparation here:
What kind of kid stays after 10pm to play games in a i-cafe? The kind of kid parents got out of hand already, the kind of kid parents don't know for sure where he is, etc.
No, I am not a parent, but I was such a problem-kid (right up 'till university, and even now, one year and a bit after, I can't stop in some days to just chat, read forums or play some online game).
Next, let's compare games to cigarettes or alcohol... they're both addictive in some sort of way. Do you sell cigarettes or inhebriants to kids under 18? Then don't sell game service to kids after their "supposed" bed-time.
Those kids could as well play from home (assuming they do have a computer there)... oh, but wait, home mom&dad see him and don't let him play... what a shame... so he runs to the new-age arcade: the i-cafe.
And with this new rule: SURPRISE! You can't play here if you're under 18... go home and ask your parents...
Seems almost too good to be true.
Well, look at it this way... they say "an UPS is good enough, if power goes out it will go out a few seconds or maybe a half hour", and don't plan for a "worse-case" scenario, in which you have a few hours of "power outage"... so instead of saving everything, commiting caches and so on, they just keep on hoping "in a few seconds power will be back on"... I just hope they DID learn their lesson now, and cut back on cutbacks (lol).
Quote from one of the links (people should read before they comment, shouldn't they?):
[...]And then there are the companies that have decided to go for a piece of the action themselves. Last September, Origin, the Electronic Arts subsidiary that runs Ultima Online, dismayed veteran players and delighted noobs by announcing it would now be selling advanced characters custom-built at $29.95 a pop. Wisely, Origin set the fee roughly in line with auction prices for characters generally, thus avoiding the impression that they?re out to undercut and overtake Ultima?s unusually robust auction market[...]
Miscosoft forgets to wash hands after using the toilet?
:)
Well, it will largely depend on what those GM yeasts "eat" and how many usefull/useless/harmless/harmfull "byproducts" these GM yeasts make... :)
Think about it: a small "bulge" of half a pound yeast culture, eat it once (warning: various antibiotics will kill them, so you'll have to make a "refill")... then eat all sorts of cheap stuff (raw cereals, treebarks, grass or even paper) and never be hungry again: the GM yeast cultures in your digestive tract will take those "useless" (for normal humans) balasts and turn them into a nutritious meal...
Say hello to the newest restaurants in town: a stack of hay for the lady, fresh oak tree barks for the sir... coming up
Yummy!
Well, what they're NOT saying yet is WHAT kind of video games have been used when they made this test... playing something like "space invaders" or "tetris" can cause that reflex-response only... whereas increasingly complex games often make you think a lot more than react...(yeah, not always... Dungeon Siege, Diablo and other "real-time-RPGs" are the perfect examples of complex games inducing highly repetitive behaviour) I would really love to see that "tester" using some of the games I enjoyed playing while growing up to "test" his assumptions... for instance the X-Wing/TIE-fighter series (for the level of strategy and positioning involved, besides the actual shooting), several (actually... almost) all quest-type-games that were made before the mid-90's, single-player no-economy real-time-strategy game type missions (some missions in Warcraft 1 are the first that come to my mind)... and I bet all readers here *do* have some *really old* games they can relate with in this aspect...
And how about the "main article" quote:
Well, yeah, can't blame them for doing that. Actually, quite a GOOD ideea.
What they left out though is the fact that they should ALSO record exactly WHAT games a kid plays... not only the kind, but how much time (s)he spends playing a certain game, and with whom, what they do and say, etc.
Myeah, "The Big Brother" syndrome at work...
I just hope they don't butcher the results of this test to please the people in power at the moment...
Quoting from their "delta":
...and that's just quoting *some* small portion of it...
Makes you wonder "why bother upgrading when they'll change it back again in a few and I'll have to re-check my code"...
Well, PERL is over-hyped IMHO.
:( :P
There are "out there" a lot of other scripting/programming/other-something languages...
...so excuse me if I deem this not news-worthy
Well, if you told me python comes out with a "reads your mind and writes the code you actually wanted" feature... man, that would be news
Of course I was kidding... in the end... slightly.
But seriously, the first few seconds when I saw it spelled "DPI" instead of "dpi" I was perplexed... and still not convinced it's not also "option 5", lol.
Then, tried to take it from the "general user's" point of view... the one that IF (s)he doesn't understand sumething, it goes "googling". And you see what happends if you try to do that...