Well, it caused a larger zone of serious radiation spread than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. Some of the tests in the pacific, Australia, and continental US contaminated very large areas but like the nuclear bombings it is mostly light isotopes that decayed very quickly. The nuclear bombings of Japan, or some other incident, might have been a more serious nuclear disaster (at least for the Japanese) but I would give Chernobyl the credit as largest.
There is no contradiction. Large swathes of Africa is populated by dirt farmers who have less technology than the Amish. But Africa still has cities and modern technology so some Africans writing a game is hardly surprising (Nigerian spammers don't use carry pigeon). The problem is that due to incompetent leaders and continuing western exploitation the continent isn't really progressing like China or India is. Africa has too many people for them to survive without western agricultural technology, which is why nearly every year there is a famine threatening millions of Africans. The obscenity is while hundreds of thousands starve huge tracts of land are farmed by foreign corporations and the food shipped out of Africa.
The starvation wouldn't have happened if Stalin's cronies hadn't killed off the guys who are capable of running large organisations and trying to make reality match their dogma instead of allowing it to guide their dogma. If it hadn't been for the Nazi invasion which forced the Soviets to pull their heads out of their asses (and start being pragmatic) they would probably have collapsed in a few decades.
And what Stalin and his cronies did was to kill off upper management for being "class enemies" or "counter revolutionaries" and then put peasants and street sweepers with little to no technical or managerial skills in charge. I wasn't attacking communism but the specific policies that caused disasters for the Soviets early on, and which got repeated in Zimbabwe.
Do people really think Africa is only peopled by savage tribesmen running around with grass skirts and spears? They have cities with computers and nearly everyone has a cell phone (copper landlines tend to get stolen).
Africa's problem over the last several decades has been loss of intellectual and managerial power in the transition from white colonial rule to self-rule. The continent had a fair bit of light industry and a decent agricultural industry but those have largely failed due to the previous white owners either fleeing or being thrown out*. As the Soviets showed in the 20's and 30's you can't just kick out upper management and expect the shop floor worker to do as good a job. African countries needs non-corrupt leadership and properly trained upper and middle managers to create self-sustaining economies based on agriculture and light and heavy industry. Not fickle industries like tourism or app development. The latter produces money but the former produces wealth.
Training thousands of Africans in western management styles would help them more than all the food and monetary aid we currently give them.
It is a a travesty that African countries are leasing huge swathes of land for foreign countries to farm, and sells mineral rights to foreign corporations to plunder and pollute.
* Which is why Zimbabwe is a joke and South Africa is teetering on the precipice.
What is the detection rate and false positive rate? I can't think a 10 minute check is that accurate considering how long the current methods take. With a disease that still has such a massive stigma as AIDS there could be serious consequences from someone receiving a false positive reading. In developing countries people just need to be taught to use condoms* and otherwise not swap bodily fluids as a general rule. Trying to get the infected in particular to not engage in infection spreading activities is futile as we can't even prevent that in the West (where most people are educated in germ theory). Oh, and also voiding drug patents on AIDS treatments so those millions of people can afford treatment would be an idea.
* And no it isn't the Catholics who are responsible for people not using condoms. The Catholics also tell people not to engage in extra-marital sex, so if someone violates that rule they don't have much excuse to claim that their religious beliefs prevent them wearing a condom..
Nothing stops parents sending their kids to public school AND convincing the kid that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old*. Also if you don't think all the other values instilled through things like history lessons aren't indoctrination** that is only because they agree with your indoctrination. As public schools don't teach kids critical thinking they offer no value in generating minds that can question this indoctrination from authority figures.
* I think most public school science education is of such poor quality that it creates the gaps that "creation scientists" use to promulgate their message. I attribute the rise in atheism to a fall in church attendance not due to the quality of science education.
** Like "Our country uber alles", "obey authority figures because they are authority figures", and "there are only two political parties and which ever isn't the teachers favourite are a bunch of baby eating nazis".
The problem isn't the absent minded driver it is that humans don't multi-task. We have limited capacities and task switch just like a conventional CPU, and just convince our selves that this is multi-tasking. For example I can play (aka farm) an MMO and listen to a podcast, but if something important happens in the game I will blank out the podcast (and vice versa). This is because playing the MMO is just running on muscle memory and requires very little attention. However I can't really listen to a podcast and read because they are both using the same systems. Similarly you can't be paying attention to driving at the level needed to react quickly to an emergency AND be talking on the phone.
There is plenty of research out there that backs this up.
This is why radio, AC etc, all need to be in the drivers dash and controls need to be on the steering wheel. Drivers still get distracted but that setup minimises it and reduces the chance their eyes will be completely off the road.
P.S. If you think you can multi-task you are dangerously deluded and need to be kept off the road.
iTunes isn't the web. And I would also rather avoid giving Apple a slice of the money I am trying to give to someone else, just as I avoid giving a large slice to PayPal.
For these business models to work there needs to be a decent micro-payment system. I don't want to get out my credit card for every single website, especially for small amounts, and don't want to pay a subscription for a service I don't know if I will regularly use. Paypal is currently the only real player, and in my opinion they are a bunch of crooks who are playing legal games to avoid having banking regulations applied to them and subsequently having their dirty laundry aired.
National and international banking systems need to get together and figure out a proper micro-payment system (with amount limits so dodgy websites can't drain your account) before this sort of business model will take off. I might be tempted to pay 10 cents to read an article, but not if I have to pull out my credit card on the spot or sign up for a subscription first. Instead what will happen is regular users will sign up and everyone else will go to the free sites. The results being the regulars pay more to cover the running costs and possibly the failure of the website to sustain itself due to loss of ad revenue.
No the moral argument is from some of these "defectives" that don't feel they are "defective", and in fact don't want to be "like everybody else". This line of thought is quite strong in segments of the autistic, and congenitally blind or deaf communities.
Ultimately this kind of treatment will be performed in utero and so autistic's or congenitally deaf people may cease to be born. To these people that is like saying "we are going to fix racial discrimination by changing all black babies into white babies".
1) People who get into special forces normally have scientifically provable higher tolerances to physiological stress. The whole point of special force selection is to weed out those who aren't gifted so. 2) Everyone "cracks" under waterboarding (by which I mean feels extreme terror and experiences a panic attack). It is a physiological reaction that makes your body think you are drowning while in reality you can't actually drown. 3) The training that special forces get is more like a taster and they aren't expected to last longer then a day. They are taught how to delay being broken so that what information they give is out of date by the time it is extracted. 4) Saying that torture requires physiological damage (burns, bruises etc) is just silly. Torture is just inflicting pain to make a subject willing to talk, as the sensation of pain only occurs within the brain there is no requirement that damage need be caused to generate the pain signal.
Soldiers in the US have the VA so do get preferential medical treatment over your average non-insured person. Also in any kind of large scale medical emergency (epidemics etc) first responders and those necessary for maintaining essential infrastructure do get preferential treatment. And even on organ waiting lists most of them are hardly first come first served, there are a whole host of subjective factors that alter your place on the list (eg if you are an old fat smoking alcoholic enjoy never getting an organ). Steve Jobs essentially bought himself an organ by shifting residence to get on a much shorter list. Rich people can just go to India and buy a kidney with no legal repercussion in a lot of place (and other organs are available, ones that are essential for life).
This shows how intellectually bankrupt Chavez is... stealing this idea from the Australian government. Next he will be stealing from America and giving billions in untraceable loans to mismanaged corporations.
Any "Christian" who says they are better than a non-Christian isn't a Christian. The fundamental divergence between Judaism and Christianity is that Christians believe that following moral laws doesn't save you. Even St Paul who had a massive influence on early Christianity decried himself as the worst of all sinners. Everyone is a sinner, any Christian who says they aren't or holds themselves as being morally superior is even further from God than Richard Dawkins.
The reason for the massive screw ups in American "Christianity" is because people want to be superior and giving them a way to work towards it (and constantly fail because they are sinners) is a great way to extract lots of money from them. L. Ron. Hubbard probably would have never figured this out if he had been born in another country.
What does it matter if it was a mockup or the real thing? Last I checked using "UI elements" was not protected by copyright or patents. This is the same as the Microsoft and Apple "Look-and-feel" lawsuit from last century. The original complaint was about mockups using straight copied images which could be a copyright infraction but the final product even if it looked nearly identical would be non-infringing. KDE and GNOME both have UI themes that completely rip off various versions of Windows and MacOS. The design (and arts in general) community is so deeply incestuous that to complain about this sort of thing just makes you look like a punk. I looked at their "UI elements"I that Google ripped off and it is absolutely nothing special that hasn't been done before. With a color change and slight adjustment there would be no reasonable grounds for claims of infringement.
Anyone who remembers when VisualBasic was heavily used knows BASIC doesn't teach people to be better programs. Even C or any other "good" functional language doesn't teach you what not to do. As the saying goes C++ will not only let you shoot yourself in the foot it will load the gun and cock it. I don't think you even realise most of the major programming pitfalls until you have done a major project or gone back years later to maintain your own code (and spent more time trying to figure out your logic than it took you to write it in the first place). I started off with BASIC* (on Win 3.1 machines) but that was only because it was the only programming language that nearly every computer had. These days there are so many easier, more powerful, and just plain better "teaching" languages and toolkits.
If you just want to teach a kids the real raw mechanics of what a computer does let them lose with an ASM-like language and a simple CPU simulator (there are various robot simulators out there, or you could even invest in a real robotics platform). If you want them to learn to program there are much better tools out there to achieve that than BASIC.
* And only learned how to really program when I got my hands on Pascal.
You appear to have mistaken "logic" for naturalism. Logic is a method for arriving at a consistent response to a given set of data assuming certain axioms. That you believe that religious people even exists is a logical conclusion based on certain axioms. For example that the data from your senses is reliable and that what others tell you of their beliefs is true or can be inferred from their behaviour.
There are libraries of theological works that can not be attacked on the logic of their arguments but only on the strengths of the axioms they assume and the data they use.
I can see why you have failed in your attempts to convince religious people if you are that ignorant about the tool you are attempting to use.
Unless you are raising kids in controlled environments the best you can get out of these types of experiments (and analyses of them) is that violent stimulus can elicit temporary violent responses. The literature regarding TV is fairly certain of this conclusion but as TV isn't a hot button issue any more those researchers don't overhype it like video game researchers have been doing. Without full control of a humans environment you can't make conclusive judgements that a media stimulus is the cause of violent behaviour. The other problem is that what the researchers measure as "violence" would be dismissed as rough play by most parents. I spent my childhood wrestling with my friends and playing "violent" games (like samurai vs ninjas) even though my mother had a psych degree and had studied media violence in the 80's and so heavily limited my exposure to violent media.
What most of these researchers are actually trying to show is that media violence leads to real, curb stompings at 2am outside a bar, violence. Which as previous posters have noticed is unlikely given that such violence has fallen as children have gained access to these sorts of entertainments (that keep them inside and not bored, the two factors associated with severe youth violence).
What has been shown: Media violence causes temporary increases in "violent" behaviour. Kids also act out scenarios from violent media they have seen in play situations.
What hasn't been shown: Consuming lots of violent media will turn a sweet little angel into a psychopath that will tie other kids to a railway track (Many of the researchers in this area have noted that violent people consume lots of violent media and tried to show that link is causative.).
What are people supposed to do? No politician is going to get elected on the platform of allowing an R18+ category or doing away with censorship. Australian isn't the US, we have a different culture and people in general are quite happy for the government to "protect" us from certain things. There isn't much support for the lack of R18+ category in gaming (or refusing classification for merely having factual information about drugs in a game) but the pollies can stir up enough talk back radio rants to stop anyone who actually tries to rectify it.
And frankly my state and federal governments are so jacked up that lack of an R18+ rating is waaaaaay down my list of priorities.
How did they dispute it? Did they just edit the wiki article about editors leaving?
But seriously wikipedia started dying the second they handed out enhanced powers for being a no lifer trolling Wikipedia all day. Later on top management showed no interest in reigning in abusive admins, and even rewarded several who were shown to be taking part in out right fraud and lying.
Isn't the editorial a non sequitur? Using gaming based examples instead of Hello World or business based problems in a traditional CS course is not anything like a game design course. I have a problem with doing this though as while it may be good for the university it is bad for the students who get suckered into a career thinking they will be making games (or that working in the games industry is like making a game for an assignment). This is actually a problem infesting nearly all of modern teaching where "student involvement" is increased by making it fun at the expense of helping kids develop a work ethic*. Being able to work even while bored and disinterested with the task is a much higher predictor of future success than getting good grades because the topic was interesting.
The problem with this is that real world work is often rarely fun unless you are lucky enough to be able to achieve a dream job. Most of us have jobs that while they may be fulfilling have substantial portions that are not fun, and indeed are often gruelling*. This kind of tactic seems like a bait and switch to me. If you don't enjoy the maths and problem solving involved in CS it is not the career for you, no matter what kind of shiny veneer they put on it.
* There is a balance to be had. But I find that too often in early schooling the teachers are using this method instead of instilling in kids a desire to learn and to work hard for future reward. ** I enjoy playing games and analysing movies, but doing that as a job would not be the same as doing it for fun.
You live in a delusion created by far right commentators. The TSA profiles (compare how often "suspicious looking" passengers get searched per trip vs white grandmas). The police profile (compare rates of "random searches" and imprisonment for minor offences by race and socio-economic status). Only focusing on "suspicious people" and leaving your honest wholesome law abiding white picket fence self alone only tells the bad people how to get past the gate keepers. There are Muslims of European descent. There are Muslims that can pass for Italian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans. Not to mention that exclusively harassing one group of people, a sub-set of who are criminals, only engenders favor and support for the criminals amongst them. Or the fact that militant Muslims weren't the first people to blow up planes, nor will they be the last.
Given the current tensions over Obama the next terrorist attack in America is likely to be another McVeigh. Possibly carried out by a white grandmother. Or it could be a college aged female animal liberationist who has decided that direct action is the answer.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it caused a larger zone of serious radiation spread than the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki did. Some of the tests in the pacific, Australia, and continental US contaminated very large areas but like the nuclear bombings it is mostly light isotopes that decayed very quickly. The nuclear bombings of Japan, or some other incident, might have been a more serious nuclear disaster (at least for the Japanese) but I would give Chernobyl the credit as largest.
There is no contradiction. Large swathes of Africa is populated by dirt farmers who have less technology than the Amish. But Africa still has cities and modern technology so some Africans writing a game is hardly surprising (Nigerian spammers don't use carry pigeon). The problem is that due to incompetent leaders and continuing western exploitation the continent isn't really progressing like China or India is. Africa has too many people for them to survive without western agricultural technology, which is why nearly every year there is a famine threatening millions of Africans. The obscenity is while hundreds of thousands starve huge tracts of land are farmed by foreign corporations and the food shipped out of Africa.
The starvation wouldn't have happened if Stalin's cronies hadn't killed off the guys who are capable of running large organisations and trying to make reality match their dogma instead of allowing it to guide their dogma. If it hadn't been for the Nazi invasion which forced the Soviets to pull their heads out of their asses (and start being pragmatic) they would probably have collapsed in a few decades.
And what Stalin and his cronies did was to kill off upper management for being "class enemies" or "counter revolutionaries" and then put peasants and street sweepers with little to no technical or managerial skills in charge. I wasn't attacking communism but the specific policies that caused disasters for the Soviets early on, and which got repeated in Zimbabwe.
Do people really think Africa is only peopled by savage tribesmen running around with grass skirts and spears? They have cities with computers and nearly everyone has a cell phone (copper landlines tend to get stolen).
Africa's problem over the last several decades has been loss of intellectual and managerial power in the transition from white colonial rule to self-rule. The continent had a fair bit of light industry and a decent agricultural industry but those have largely failed due to the previous white owners either fleeing or being thrown out*. As the Soviets showed in the 20's and 30's you can't just kick out upper management and expect the shop floor worker to do as good a job. African countries needs non-corrupt leadership and properly trained upper and middle managers to create self-sustaining economies based on agriculture and light and heavy industry. Not fickle industries like tourism or app development. The latter produces money but the former produces wealth.
Training thousands of Africans in western management styles would help them more than all the food and monetary aid we currently give them.
It is a a travesty that African countries are leasing huge swathes of land for foreign countries to farm, and sells mineral rights to foreign corporations to plunder and pollute.
* Which is why Zimbabwe is a joke and South Africa is teetering on the precipice.
Wikipedia citing a newspaper that was citing wikipedia has already happened, and been discussed on /.
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/10/2211220
What is the detection rate and false positive rate? I can't think a 10 minute check is that accurate considering how long the current methods take. With a disease that still has such a massive stigma as AIDS there could be serious consequences from someone receiving a false positive reading. In developing countries people just need to be taught to use condoms* and otherwise not swap bodily fluids as a general rule. Trying to get the infected in particular to not engage in infection spreading activities is futile as we can't even prevent that in the West (where most people are educated in germ theory). Oh, and also voiding drug patents on AIDS treatments so those millions of people can afford treatment would be an idea.
* And no it isn't the Catholics who are responsible for people not using condoms. The Catholics also tell people not to engage in extra-marital sex, so if someone violates that rule they don't have much excuse to claim that their religious beliefs prevent them wearing a condom..
Nothing stops parents sending their kids to public school AND convincing the kid that evolution is a lie from the devil and that the world is 6000 years old*. Also if you don't think all the other values instilled through things like history lessons aren't indoctrination** that is only because they agree with your indoctrination. As public schools don't teach kids critical thinking they offer no value in generating minds that can question this indoctrination from authority figures.
* I think most public school science education is of such poor quality that it creates the gaps that "creation scientists" use to promulgate their message. I attribute the rise in atheism to a fall in church attendance not due to the quality of science education.
** Like "Our country uber alles", "obey authority figures because they are authority figures", and "there are only two political parties and which ever isn't the teachers favourite are a bunch of baby eating nazis".
all that fascist propaganda about how humans are evil, civilisation is a bad thing, and we should all go back to living in the trees...
That word you keep using. I don't think it means what you think it means.
The problem isn't the absent minded driver it is that humans don't multi-task. We have limited capacities and task switch just like a conventional CPU, and just convince our selves that this is multi-tasking. For example I can play (aka farm) an MMO and listen to a podcast, but if something important happens in the game I will blank out the podcast (and vice versa). This is because playing the MMO is just running on muscle memory and requires very little attention. However I can't really listen to a podcast and read because they are both using the same systems. Similarly you can't be paying attention to driving at the level needed to react quickly to an emergency AND be talking on the phone.
There is plenty of research out there that backs this up.
This is why radio, AC etc, all need to be in the drivers dash and controls need to be on the steering wheel. Drivers still get distracted but that setup minimises it and reduces the chance their eyes will be completely off the road.
P.S. If you think you can multi-task you are dangerously deluded and need to be kept off the road.
YIAAPS
iTunes isn't the web. And I would also rather avoid giving Apple a slice of the money I am trying to give to someone else, just as I avoid giving a large slice to PayPal.
For these business models to work there needs to be a decent micro-payment system. I don't want to get out my credit card for every single website, especially for small amounts, and don't want to pay a subscription for a service I don't know if I will regularly use. Paypal is currently the only real player, and in my opinion they are a bunch of crooks who are playing legal games to avoid having banking regulations applied to them and subsequently having their dirty laundry aired.
National and international banking systems need to get together and figure out a proper micro-payment system (with amount limits so dodgy websites can't drain your account) before this sort of business model will take off. I might be tempted to pay 10 cents to read an article, but not if I have to pull out my credit card on the spot or sign up for a subscription first. Instead what will happen is regular users will sign up and everyone else will go to the free sites. The results being the regulars pay more to cover the running costs and possibly the failure of the website to sustain itself due to loss of ad revenue.
No the moral argument is from some of these "defectives" that don't feel they are "defective", and in fact don't want to be "like everybody else". This line of thought is quite strong in segments of the autistic, and congenitally blind or deaf communities.
Ultimately this kind of treatment will be performed in utero and so autistic's or congenitally deaf people may cease to be born. To these people that is like saying "we are going to fix racial discrimination by changing all black babies into white babies".
1) People who get into special forces normally have scientifically provable higher tolerances to physiological stress. The whole point of special force selection is to weed out those who aren't gifted so.
2) Everyone "cracks" under waterboarding (by which I mean feels extreme terror and experiences a panic attack). It is a physiological reaction that makes your body think you are drowning while in reality you can't actually drown.
3) The training that special forces get is more like a taster and they aren't expected to last longer then a day. They are taught how to delay being broken so that what information they give is out of date by the time it is extracted.
4) Saying that torture requires physiological damage (burns, bruises etc) is just silly. Torture is just inflicting pain to make a subject willing to talk, as the sensation of pain only occurs within the brain there is no requirement that damage need be caused to generate the pain signal.
Soldiers in the US have the VA so do get preferential medical treatment over your average non-insured person. Also in any kind of large scale medical emergency (epidemics etc) first responders and those necessary for maintaining essential infrastructure do get preferential treatment. And even on organ waiting lists most of them are hardly first come first served, there are a whole host of subjective factors that alter your place on the list (eg if you are an old fat smoking alcoholic enjoy never getting an organ). Steve Jobs essentially bought himself an organ by shifting residence to get on a much shorter list. Rich people can just go to India and buy a kidney with no legal repercussion in a lot of place (and other organs are available, ones that are essential for life).
This shows how intellectually bankrupt Chavez is ... stealing this idea from the Australian government. Next he will be stealing from America and giving billions in untraceable loans to mismanaged corporations.
Any "Christian" who says they are better than a non-Christian isn't a Christian. The fundamental divergence between Judaism and Christianity is that Christians believe that following moral laws doesn't save you. Even St Paul who had a massive influence on early Christianity decried himself as the worst of all sinners. Everyone is a sinner, any Christian who says they aren't or holds themselves as being morally superior is even further from God than Richard Dawkins.
The reason for the massive screw ups in American "Christianity" is because people want to be superior and giving them a way to work towards it (and constantly fail because they are sinners) is a great way to extract lots of money from them. L. Ron. Hubbard probably would have never figured this out if he had been born in another country.
What does it matter if it was a mockup or the real thing? Last I checked using "UI elements" was not protected by copyright or patents. This is the same as the Microsoft and Apple "Look-and-feel" lawsuit from last century. The original complaint was about mockups using straight copied images which could be a copyright infraction but the final product even if it looked nearly identical would be non-infringing. KDE and GNOME both have UI themes that completely rip off various versions of Windows and MacOS. The design (and arts in general) community is so deeply incestuous that to complain about this sort of thing just makes you look like a punk. I looked at their "UI elements"I that Google ripped off and it is absolutely nothing special that hasn't been done before. With a color change and slight adjustment there would be no reasonable grounds for claims of infringement.
Anyone who remembers when VisualBasic was heavily used knows BASIC doesn't teach people to be better programs. Even C or any other "good" functional language doesn't teach you what not to do. As the saying goes C++ will not only let you shoot yourself in the foot it will load the gun and cock it. I don't think you even realise most of the major programming pitfalls until you have done a major project or gone back years later to maintain your own code (and spent more time trying to figure out your logic than it took you to write it in the first place). I started off with BASIC* (on Win 3.1 machines) but that was only because it was the only programming language that nearly every computer had. These days there are so many easier, more powerful, and just plain better "teaching" languages and toolkits.
If you just want to teach a kids the real raw mechanics of what a computer does let them lose with an ASM-like language and a simple CPU simulator (there are various robot simulators out there, or you could even invest in a real robotics platform). If you want them to learn to program there are much better tools out there to achieve that than BASIC.
* And only learned how to really program when I got my hands on Pascal.
You appear to have mistaken "logic" for naturalism. Logic is a method for arriving at a consistent response to a given set of data assuming certain axioms. That you believe that religious people even exists is a logical conclusion based on certain axioms. For example that the data from your senses is reliable and that what others tell you of their beliefs is true or can be inferred from their behaviour.
There are libraries of theological works that can not be attacked on the logic of their arguments but only on the strengths of the axioms they assume and the data they use.
I can see why you have failed in your attempts to convince religious people if you are that ignorant about the tool you are attempting to use.
.. and this guys results are garbage.
Unless you are raising kids in controlled environments the best you can get out of these types of experiments (and analyses of them) is that violent stimulus can elicit temporary violent responses. The literature regarding TV is fairly certain of this conclusion but as TV isn't a hot button issue any more those researchers don't overhype it like video game researchers have been doing. Without full control of a humans environment you can't make conclusive judgements that a media stimulus is the cause of violent behaviour. The other problem is that what the researchers measure as "violence" would be dismissed as rough play by most parents. I spent my childhood wrestling with my friends and playing "violent" games (like samurai vs ninjas) even though my mother had a psych degree and had studied media violence in the 80's and so heavily limited my exposure to violent media.
What most of these researchers are actually trying to show is that media violence leads to real, curb stompings at 2am outside a bar, violence. Which as previous posters have noticed is unlikely given that such violence has fallen as children have gained access to these sorts of entertainments (that keep them inside and not bored, the two factors associated with severe youth violence).
What has been shown:
Media violence causes temporary increases in "violent" behaviour. Kids also act out scenarios from violent media they have seen in play situations.
What hasn't been shown:
Consuming lots of violent media will turn a sweet little angel into a psychopath that will tie other kids to a railway track (Many of the researchers in this area have noted that violent people consume lots of violent media and tried to show that link is causative.).
What are people supposed to do? No politician is going to get elected on the platform of allowing an R18+ category or doing away with censorship. Australian isn't the US, we have a different culture and people in general are quite happy for the government to "protect" us from certain things. There isn't much support for the lack of R18+ category in gaming (or refusing classification for merely having factual information about drugs in a game) but the pollies can stir up enough talk back radio rants to stop anyone who actually tries to rectify it.
And frankly my state and federal governments are so jacked up that lack of an R18+ rating is waaaaaay down my list of priorities.
How did they dispute it? Did they just edit the wiki article about editors leaving?
But seriously wikipedia started dying the second they handed out enhanced powers for being a no lifer trolling Wikipedia all day. Later on top management showed no interest in reigning in abusive admins, and even rewarded several who were shown to be taking part in out right fraud and lying.
Isn't the editorial a non sequitur? Using gaming based examples instead of Hello World or business based problems in a traditional CS course is not anything like a game design course. I have a problem with doing this though as while it may be good for the university it is bad for the students who get suckered into a career thinking they will be making games (or that working in the games industry is like making a game for an assignment). This is actually a problem infesting nearly all of modern teaching where "student involvement" is increased by making it fun at the expense of helping kids develop a work ethic*. Being able to work even while bored and disinterested with the task is a much higher predictor of future success than getting good grades because the topic was interesting.
The problem with this is that real world work is often rarely fun unless you are lucky enough to be able to achieve a dream job. Most of us have jobs that while they may be fulfilling have substantial portions that are not fun, and indeed are often gruelling*. This kind of tactic seems like a bait and switch to me. If you don't enjoy the maths and problem solving involved in CS it is not the career for you, no matter what kind of shiny veneer they put on it.
* There is a balance to be had. But I find that too often in early schooling the teachers are using this method instead of instilling in kids a desire to learn and to work hard for future reward.
** I enjoy playing games and analysing movies, but doing that as a job would not be the same as doing it for fun.
You live in a delusion created by far right commentators. The TSA profiles (compare how often "suspicious looking" passengers get searched per trip vs white grandmas). The police profile (compare rates of "random searches" and imprisonment for minor offences by race and socio-economic status). Only focusing on "suspicious people" and leaving your honest wholesome law abiding white picket fence self alone only tells the bad people how to get past the gate keepers. There are Muslims of European descent. There are Muslims that can pass for Italian-Americans or Hispanic-Americans. Not to mention that exclusively harassing one group of people, a sub-set of who are criminals, only engenders favor and support for the criminals amongst them. Or the fact that militant Muslims weren't the first people to blow up planes, nor will they be the last.
Given the current tensions over Obama the next terrorist attack in America is likely to be another McVeigh. Possibly carried out by a white grandmother. Or it could be a college aged female animal liberationist who has decided that direct action is the answer.