Radiation doesn't kill things off that well. Look at Chernobyl or the Savannah river plant...Both shut down, both radioactive, both experiencing a resurgence of pretty healthy wildlife across the board.
Lot of the things we assumed about radiation back in the day (e.g. mutants and Godzilla) have turned out to not really happen so much. DNA isn't as fragile as we assumed, and while the extra rads may kill you quicker (only live to 60 instead of 80), it's not quick enough to keep you from reproducing.
We're not talking some kind of galactic nuke here...It's just a significant upswing in radiation. Hell, the fact that we've had these historically is maybe why the ecosystem tolerates increases in radiation so well.
What else is it going to be, genius? Theory is the last step. You think it's going to grow up and be the "Truth of Evolution" or something?
A truth is a fact, and facts are trivial. You need a Theory to link all those facts together into something useful, something testable, with predictive power.
Just a theory. Jesus. Is it troll day or something?
It's not every species that lasts 7 million years. It's just as likely we won't be here at all, and this event will only bother the emerging rat civilization.
I'd be surprised if we haven't shot our bolt one way or the other in the next ten thousand years, and that's a conservative estimate.
Heh. If we caught enough radiation to turn the surface of the earth black every 62 million years, we wouldn't be here talking about it now. Anyway, the K-T boundary doesn't intersect with this, it's off by about 10 million years.
This would be a period of significant problems, affecting pretty much all living things, but clearly it's not the end of the world, just a period of environmental hard times.
Only 7 million years from now, for all you long range planners. Better stock up on beans, bottled water and relocate your house 1 kilometer underground.
It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, though it'll be a while before we can test it. It's always a little weird though, to think of extra-solar events as relevant on a "local" scale. I mean, in the same way that Earth is endangered by rogue meteorites and asteroids, the whole solar system is vulnerable to a rogue star or brown dwarf. Anyone ever read Jack McDevitt? He's obsessed with that sort of disaster (pun intended).
Hard to get your mind around it...The odds are so long...
Says someone who has never been innocently picking an herb and then an instant later been dead after some random rogue nailed you with a crit that did twice your hitpoints in damage.
Say a lot of things about rogues in WoW, but you can't throw down on their combat and stealth skills (the rest of their skills, YES)...They are extremely solid. The main tactic against a rogue is to "outlast" his initial damage rush...If you can do that, you have a chance to counterattack while he is gathering energy for another couple rounds of damage spam, assuming he doesn't just use the vanish skill and jump back into stealth.
It's also interesting in that you have more than one valid path for rogue combat. You can be super stealthy, with the bulk of you skills dedicated to stealth and sneak attacks, or you can be more toe-to-toe combat oriented, with high speed attacks and nasty damage.
Yup. The the stuff that makes the internet cool is the simplicity of the implementation, and the anonymity. The first step with all "new" internets is to break both of those things in the name of making it "better".
Stupid. All the privacy/identity stuff they want can be implemented in the existing framework using encryption and personal certificates, but start encrypting everything, and the government will shit its pants, so that never happens.
As for upgrading the protocols, etc, the fact is that simple protocols usually work better than complex protocols...Witness TCP/IP vs Token Ring. Wouldn't mind seeing some more robust networking to improve stability, but that's about it, and that can be accomplished within the current framework.
I had the same experience. I bought a trackball to reduce my "normal" carpal and within a month the trackball had made it 100 times worse. I switched back, and pawned off my fancy new trackball on some other poor joker.
I'll never use one again. My wrists hurt just thinking about it.
The lemming attack exists because it's a no-cost scenario, so everyone involved is willing to go for it, no matter how stupid the plan.
A suicide bomber, on the other hand, may not care about their life, but they care about spending it well, not just throwing it away. Additionally, not everyone has it in them to be a suicide bomber...You have to be willing, not just to kill yourself, but to kill yourself and take a bunch of people with you at the same time. You have to be able to overcome all kinds of fear and stress, or you have to be completely without hope of any kind. That is nothing you're going to get out of a video game.
The first one. It's hard not to over-think relationships when you're prone to using your brain a lot. On top of that, you're better at projecting long range consequences, so you have a natural inhibition toward casual sex. On top of that there is the Marshmallow test which has been correlated with intellect, and which bears directly on "To schtup or not to schtup."
I was pretty active as a teen, but full on "all the way" sex bothered me enough that I avoided it until I was in college. I always worried about commitment issues, and pregnancy, and all kinds of crap.
As for the second option, I think it's been substantially proven that lack of sex makes you less intelligent, not more, because so much of your brain is taken up with thinking about the sex you're not getting.
You laugh, but it's been done before...panem et circenses. Or we could work to remove their motivations for attacking us in the first place, but food and free cable/internet would probably work better.
As long as they've got motivation, they'll find a way to do us damage. We've got to reduce or redirect that motivation.
Pointless. A good game of soccer or dodgeball would be equally good "training". Improves coordination both personal and group, builds muscle and cardiovascular strength.
It's impossible to ban enough stuff to make it impossible for them to train themselves. The only way to win is to make them not want to train.
But WoW would be useless for that, as compared to a game of "Capture the Flag" played out in the sticks, or even in the cities. It teaches you nothing about real-world communications problems, nothing about the real fear and uncertainty of being in the world, waiting for something to happen, nothing about tactics against humans.
WoW tactics boil down to tactics vs mobs, and tactics vs mobs. In the first you're fighting a bunch of simplistic AI, and in the second you're fighting a bunch of people who know they're not going to lose anything if they die, so they just do the lemming over and over until one side wins...It's a joke.
I can think of a thousand "games" that you could play in the real world that would actually get you useful skills, and useful training. Playing WoW, on the other hand, gives you the wrong kind of reflexes, zero physical conditioning, and no actual experience with moving around in the world.
Hey, stop with your "facts" and "logic"! Didn't you hear? There are terrorists in WoW and Second Life! Do you know what this means?!?
This countries supply of WoW gold and online poontang is in jeopardy! They are attacking our very way of life! We must mobilize for action! It's not going to be easy. I've heard that the terrorists are employing epic mounts, and exploding sheep technology, as well as second generation teledildonics, but we must not let them prevail!
We will fight them in the empty casinos! We will fight them in the level 60 raid instances that no one does anymore! We shall overcome!
Yea, wiretapping WoW would get you awesome intel. I wonder how you say "Wait for sunders!" in Arabic? Wonder if the terrorists play Alliance or Horde? On the one hand they want to be scary, but on the other hand, I think deep down they feel pretty, oh so pretty.
No seriously, I think I saw a video of them training once(nsfw). They're in yer raids, ninjaing your epic loots.
Some people are so damn stupid. What bearing could this possibly have on real life? The only thing I can think of is that you're increasing the fat, out of shape, cheetoes consuming segment of the terrorist population...Scary stuff. They do enough of this "training", we could neutralize them with a gift of free broadband and some jolt cola.
The only way I'll believe that this is real is if we start getting evidence of terrorist attacks on gold farmers.
I actually do admin work on a machine that still does this (it's a financials machine, so it has triple log redundancy). God help you if you ever need to check the hardcopy log, because no one else will. There is no easy way to audit it, the physical storage requirements are obscene, and anyone with the right level of access can probably just turn off the terminal echo for a minute or two, or hell, even just turn off the printer.
It was the thing a few decades ago, but these days, no way.
Shrug. I imagine you could get away with it if you were a security expert, but you'd look like an idiot...I mean, unless you have a dozen machines lying around, it seems pretty likely that you'd notice that your computer is suddenly full of porn.
At any rate, it would be the opposing lawyers that would have that inserted into the record. The judge would allow it, as your computer habits are clearly germane. Then they'd call other experts to the stand who would say that there was no possible way you wouldn't know there was porn on your computer. Then you could put up your own experts or make your case. If you've got a good case, you might get off.
That's true of a lot of things. Coal fired power plants produce a certain amount of mercury. The mercury precipitates and ends up in the water, and is concentrated by fish through bioaccumulation. People eat the fish, and mostly nothing happens. Your cancer risk goes up. If you're pregnant your child has an increased risk of mental defects. You could miscarry.
But nothing that could be proven, really. Despite that, there are regulations about mercury emissions because we know it's a bad idea, even though there really isn't any way to establish a causal chain below certain concentrations.
The same goes for particulates. They're not good for anyone, and they're pretty bad for a decent sized subset of the population. So why not increase the standard? I don't have asthma, but I don't like breathing that crap either.
Makes sense. Even in Fable 1, if you took a good hit to the face without armor, it'd leave marks which you'd have to look at every time the camera cut to your face...God forbid you wore cloth, because you'd look like a surgery fetishist before you finished the game, with gashes, scratches, etc all over. If they allow you to bring your character online, would you rather look like a badass, or like everyone's favorite prison bitch? Or, conversely, would you want to look 100 times as abused as everyone else?
IIRC "My computer was infected with a worm/trojan" has been used as a successful defense before. It's always going to be on a case by case basis though. If my computer illiterate grandma had 80gigs of kiddy porn on her computer, the judge would be far more likely to buy that excuse than if it was the computer of someone like myself, who has "computer security specialist" on his CV.
The real kicker is whether or not you actually have a worm or trojan on your machine that would be capable of doing that. You can't just claim "A virus must have done it" without any evidence of a virus actually existing at some point.
In this case, it would be a poor argument for a bachelor who lives alone to say, "Someone else must have set it up in my name" but not a poor argument for a guy who lives in group housing, assuming no virus/worm is present.
You have to understand that they're crapping their pants at the potential loss of the bulk of their revenue generation. Digital distribution is the end of the gravy train for them; no more surge of customers buying the same content every time they change the format.
So what do they do? They try to kill it, whether it's trying to shut down web radio through massive fee increases, trying to stifle online music sales through use of restrictive DRM schemes, trying to prevent CD copying through hugely invasive software installs, or trying to stifle "free" file sharing by intimidation through massive lawsuits.
Their goal isn't to protect their content, their goal is to protect their revenue stream, which means intimidate the bulk of the sheep to the point where they'll go out and buy the content...preferably more than once so they can listen to it on multiple devices.
Particulate pollution is common. If you live in a big city, you know what I'm talking about, just by seeing the crap that accumulates on your clothes after walking around for a few hours.
This study says nothing that isn't trivially obvious. Does airborne toner represent a particular health threat above and beyond the whole "breathing particles into your lungs" thing, or is this just another "ZOMG! Stuff in the air!" study with no actual facts to back it up. Doubly annoying for them to compare it to smoking, because the least problem with smoking is the particulates.
"Unknowing possession" is the argument put forth by every sneak thief and druggie who ever got caught with something illegal on their person. The courts are used to trying cases where that is used as an argument. In this case, if the computer really was commonly left unattended in a place accessible by a large number of people, it will be difficult to fix legal responsibility on the titular owner.
I think the fact that they intentionally put out images of content that they don't own the rights to, and have no legal standing to sue regarding, does put them in an actionable position, especially given the nature of the content. Their whole information gathering process is pretty shady already, but if they're routinely scanning content that they don't actually have rights to, that's much shadier.
Then why genre hop? I wouldn't take literary criticism coming from him. I wouldn't take art criticism from him (outside of his narrow focus). He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time spouting off about these, so it would seem that he's aware of his shortcomings in those areas. But video games, now that's something he knows a lot about! He played Myst once, you know.
I read his "rebuttal" of Barker's defense of gaming, and frankly, that was enough for me. He didn't address the points, he used repeated rhetorical cheap shots and snippy nitpicking. Frankly it was embarrassing to read an accomplished critic write something so petty. His health is irrelevant to the discussion. I don't wish him ill, but I'm not going to go soft on him just because he's not feeling well.
And as for gaming takiong itself seriously...It doesn't have to take itself seriously at this point. It's still emergent. Nothing that actually has the potential to be taken seriously, starts off taking itself seriously! Only pretentious crap does that. Barker wasn't arguing that games are art...he was arguing that it's not impossible that they're not art. This is perfectly reasonable, even self-evident.
If Ebert disagrees (in an offensive manner) with a non-offensive statement like that, in a situation where he clearly has no real knowledge, it makes me wonder where else he's just spouting off without any experience to back up his assertion. Thumbs down, way down.
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Radiation doesn't kill things off that well. Look at Chernobyl or the Savannah river plant...Both shut down, both radioactive, both experiencing a resurgence of pretty healthy wildlife across the board.
Lot of the things we assumed about radiation back in the day (e.g. mutants and Godzilla) have turned out to not really happen so much. DNA isn't as fragile as we assumed, and while the extra rads may kill you quicker (only live to 60 instead of 80), it's not quick enough to keep you from reproducing.
We're not talking some kind of galactic nuke here...It's just a significant upswing in radiation. Hell, the fact that we've had these historically is maybe why the ecosystem tolerates increases in radiation so well.
What else is it going to be, genius? Theory is the last step. You think it's going to grow up and be the "Truth of Evolution" or something?
A truth is a fact, and facts are trivial. You need a Theory to link all those facts together into something useful, something testable, with predictive power.
Just a theory. Jesus. Is it troll day or something?
It's not every species that lasts 7 million years. It's just as likely we won't be here at all, and this event will only bother the emerging rat civilization.
I'd be surprised if we haven't shot our bolt one way or the other in the next ten thousand years, and that's a conservative estimate.
Heh. If we caught enough radiation to turn the surface of the earth black every 62 million years, we wouldn't be here talking about it now. Anyway, the K-T boundary doesn't intersect with this, it's off by about 10 million years.
This would be a period of significant problems, affecting pretty much all living things, but clearly it's not the end of the world, just a period of environmental hard times.
Only 7 million years from now, for all you long range planners. Better stock up on beans, bottled water and relocate your house 1 kilometer underground.
It's a perfectly reasonable hypothesis, though it'll be a while before we can test it. It's always a little weird though, to think of extra-solar events as relevant on a "local" scale. I mean, in the same way that Earth is endangered by rogue meteorites and asteroids, the whole solar system is vulnerable to a rogue star or brown dwarf. Anyone ever read Jack McDevitt? He's obsessed with that sort of disaster (pun intended).
Hard to get your mind around it...The odds are so long...
Says someone who has never been innocently picking an herb and then an instant later been dead after some random rogue nailed you with a crit that did twice your hitpoints in damage.
Say a lot of things about rogues in WoW, but you can't throw down on their combat and stealth skills (the rest of their skills, YES)...They are extremely solid. The main tactic against a rogue is to "outlast" his initial damage rush...If you can do that, you have a chance to counterattack while he is gathering energy for another couple rounds of damage spam, assuming he doesn't just use the vanish skill and jump back into stealth.
It's also interesting in that you have more than one valid path for rogue combat. You can be super stealthy, with the bulk of you skills dedicated to stealth and sneak attacks, or you can be more toe-to-toe combat oriented, with high speed attacks and nasty damage.
Yup. The the stuff that makes the internet cool is the simplicity of the implementation, and the anonymity. The first step with all "new" internets is to break both of those things in the name of making it "better".
Stupid. All the privacy/identity stuff they want can be implemented in the existing framework using encryption and personal certificates, but start encrypting everything, and the government will shit its pants, so that never happens.
As for upgrading the protocols, etc, the fact is that simple protocols usually work better than complex protocols...Witness TCP/IP vs Token Ring. Wouldn't mind seeing some more robust networking to improve stability, but that's about it, and that can be accomplished within the current framework.
I had the same experience. I bought a trackball to reduce my "normal" carpal and within a month the trackball had made it 100 times worse. I switched back, and pawned off my fancy new trackball on some other poor joker.
I'll never use one again. My wrists hurt just thinking about it.
The lemming attack exists because it's a no-cost scenario, so everyone involved is willing to go for it, no matter how stupid the plan.
A suicide bomber, on the other hand, may not care about their life, but they care about spending it well, not just throwing it away. Additionally, not everyone has it in them to be a suicide bomber...You have to be willing, not just to kill yourself, but to kill yourself and take a bunch of people with you at the same time. You have to be able to overcome all kinds of fear and stress, or you have to be completely without hope of any kind. That is nothing you're going to get out of a video game.
The first one. It's hard not to over-think relationships when you're prone to using your brain a lot. On top of that, you're better at projecting long range consequences, so you have a natural inhibition toward casual sex. On top of that there is the Marshmallow test which has been correlated with intellect, and which bears directly on "To schtup or not to schtup."
I was pretty active as a teen, but full on "all the way" sex bothered me enough that I avoided it until I was in college. I always worried about commitment issues, and pregnancy, and all kinds of crap.
As for the second option, I think it's been substantially proven that lack of sex makes you less intelligent, not more, because so much of your brain is taken up with thinking about the sex you're not getting.
You laugh, but it's been done before... panem et circenses . Or we could work to remove their motivations for attacking us in the first place, but food and free cable/internet would probably work better.
As long as they've got motivation, they'll find a way to do us damage. We've got to reduce or redirect that motivation.
Pointless. A good game of soccer or dodgeball would be equally good "training". Improves coordination both personal and group, builds muscle and cardiovascular strength.
It's impossible to ban enough stuff to make it impossible for them to train themselves. The only way to win is to make them not want to train.
But WoW would be useless for that, as compared to a game of "Capture the Flag" played out in the sticks, or even in the cities. It teaches you nothing about real-world communications problems, nothing about the real fear and uncertainty of being in the world, waiting for something to happen, nothing about tactics against humans.
WoW tactics boil down to tactics vs mobs, and tactics vs mobs. In the first you're fighting a bunch of simplistic AI, and in the second you're fighting a bunch of people who know they're not going to lose anything if they die, so they just do the lemming over and over until one side wins...It's a joke.
I can think of a thousand "games" that you could play in the real world that would actually get you useful skills, and useful training. Playing WoW, on the other hand, gives you the wrong kind of reflexes, zero physical conditioning, and no actual experience with moving around in the world.
Hey, stop with your "facts" and "logic"! Didn't you hear? There are terrorists in WoW and Second Life! Do you know what this means?!?
This countries supply of WoW gold and online poontang is in jeopardy! They are attacking our very way of life! We must mobilize for action! It's not going to be easy. I've heard that the terrorists are employing epic mounts, and exploding sheep technology, as well as second generation teledildonics, but we must not let them prevail!
We will fight them in the empty casinos! We will fight them in the level 60 raid instances that no one does anymore! We shall overcome!
Yea, wiretapping WoW would get you awesome intel. I wonder how you say "Wait for sunders!" in Arabic? Wonder if the terrorists play Alliance or Horde? On the one hand they want to be scary, but on the other hand, I think deep down they feel pretty, oh so pretty.
Oh noes!
How do you kill...that which has no life?
No seriously, I think I saw a video of them training once(nsfw). They're in yer raids, ninjaing your epic loots.
Some people are so damn stupid. What bearing could this possibly have on real life? The only thing I can think of is that you're increasing the fat, out of shape, cheetoes consuming segment of the terrorist population...Scary stuff. They do enough of this "training", we could neutralize them with a gift of free broadband and some jolt cola.
The only way I'll believe that this is real is if we start getting evidence of terrorist attacks on gold farmers.
I actually do admin work on a machine that still does this (it's a financials machine, so it has triple log redundancy). God help you if you ever need to check the hardcopy log, because no one else will. There is no easy way to audit it, the physical storage requirements are obscene, and anyone with the right level of access can probably just turn off the terminal echo for a minute or two, or hell, even just turn off the printer.
It was the thing a few decades ago, but these days, no way.
Shrug. I imagine you could get away with it if you were a security expert, but you'd look like an idiot...I mean, unless you have a dozen machines lying around, it seems pretty likely that you'd notice that your computer is suddenly full of porn.
At any rate, it would be the opposing lawyers that would have that inserted into the record. The judge would allow it, as your computer habits are clearly germane. Then they'd call other experts to the stand who would say that there was no possible way you wouldn't know there was porn on your computer. Then you could put up your own experts or make your case. If you've got a good case, you might get off.
That's just the way the legal system works.
That's true of a lot of things. Coal fired power plants produce a certain amount of mercury. The mercury precipitates and ends up in the water, and is concentrated by fish through bioaccumulation. People eat the fish, and mostly nothing happens. Your cancer risk goes up. If you're pregnant your child has an increased risk of mental defects. You could miscarry.
But nothing that could be proven, really. Despite that, there are regulations about mercury emissions because we know it's a bad idea, even though there really isn't any way to establish a causal chain below certain concentrations.
The same goes for particulates. They're not good for anyone, and they're pretty bad for a decent sized subset of the population. So why not increase the standard? I don't have asthma, but I don't like breathing that crap either.
Makes sense. Even in Fable 1, if you took a good hit to the face without armor, it'd leave marks which you'd have to look at every time the camera cut to your face...God forbid you wore cloth, because you'd look like a surgery fetishist before you finished the game, with gashes, scratches, etc all over. If they allow you to bring your character online, would you rather look like a badass, or like everyone's favorite prison bitch? Or, conversely, would you want to look 100 times as abused as everyone else?
IIRC "My computer was infected with a worm/trojan" has been used as a successful defense before. It's always going to be on a case by case basis though. If my computer illiterate grandma had 80gigs of kiddy porn on her computer, the judge would be far more likely to buy that excuse than if it was the computer of someone like myself, who has "computer security specialist" on his CV.
The real kicker is whether or not you actually have a worm or trojan on your machine that would be capable of doing that. You can't just claim "A virus must have done it" without any evidence of a virus actually existing at some point.
In this case, it would be a poor argument for a bachelor who lives alone to say, "Someone else must have set it up in my name" but not a poor argument for a guy who lives in group housing, assuming no virus/worm is present.
You have to understand that they're crapping their pants at the potential loss of the bulk of their revenue generation. Digital distribution is the end of the gravy train for them; no more surge of customers buying the same content every time they change the format.
So what do they do? They try to kill it, whether it's trying to shut down web radio through massive fee increases, trying to stifle online music sales through use of restrictive DRM schemes, trying to prevent CD copying through hugely invasive software installs, or trying to stifle "free" file sharing by intimidation through massive lawsuits.
Their goal isn't to protect their content, their goal is to protect their revenue stream, which means intimidate the bulk of the sheep to the point where they'll go out and buy the content...preferably more than once so they can listen to it on multiple devices.
Particulate pollution is common. If you live in a big city, you know what I'm talking about, just by seeing the crap that accumulates on your clothes after walking around for a few hours.
This study says nothing that isn't trivially obvious. Does airborne toner represent a particular health threat above and beyond the whole "breathing particles into your lungs" thing, or is this just another "ZOMG! Stuff in the air!" study with no actual facts to back it up. Doubly annoying for them to compare it to smoking, because the least problem with smoking is the particulates.
"Unknowing possession" is the argument put forth by every sneak thief and druggie who ever got caught with something illegal on their person. The courts are used to trying cases where that is used as an argument. In this case, if the computer really was commonly left unattended in a place accessible by a large number of people, it will be difficult to fix legal responsibility on the titular owner.
I think the fact that they intentionally put out images of content that they don't own the rights to, and have no legal standing to sue regarding, does put them in an actionable position, especially given the nature of the content. Their whole information gathering process is pretty shady already, but if they're routinely scanning content that they don't actually have rights to, that's much shadier.
Then why genre hop? I wouldn't take literary criticism coming from him. I wouldn't take art criticism from him (outside of his narrow focus). He doesn't seem to spend a lot of time spouting off about these, so it would seem that he's aware of his shortcomings in those areas. But video games, now that's something he knows a lot about! He played Myst once, you know.
I read his "rebuttal" of Barker's defense of gaming, and frankly, that was enough for me. He didn't address the points, he used repeated rhetorical cheap shots and snippy nitpicking. Frankly it was embarrassing to read an accomplished critic write something so petty. His health is irrelevant to the discussion. I don't wish him ill, but I'm not going to go soft on him just because he's not feeling well.
And as for gaming takiong itself seriously...It doesn't have to take itself seriously at this point. It's still emergent. Nothing that actually has the potential to be taken seriously, starts off taking itself seriously! Only pretentious crap does that. Barker wasn't arguing that games are art...he was arguing that it's not impossible that they're not art. This is perfectly reasonable, even self-evident.
If Ebert disagrees (in an offensive manner) with a non-offensive statement like that, in a situation where he clearly has no real knowledge, it makes me wonder where else he's just spouting off without any experience to back up his assertion. Thumbs down, way down.