Isn't the direct CPU-CPU connections and the direct CPU-Memory connections an evolution of the EVA architecture AMD licensed from DEC? Sure would seem like their long range strategy is starting to pay off (and that they had the vision to see where they needed to go to inovate in the PC field).
BTW, The most striking thing I learned I my first day of OS design (a while ago), was how the computer industry keep re-inventing the wheel.
If they licensed it from DEC, I don't think that counts as reinventing the wheel. It's more like finally dragging the x86 architecture kicking and screaming into the age of the wheel.
That got my attention because the current configuration of the court has a near majority of people who view the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution in general, as limiting rights, not expanding rights. I know Scalia in particular thinks that the Constitution is not a living document but says what it says and should never be interpreted otherwise.
Indeed there are far too many folks who are either ignorant of, or intentionally ignore the 9th Amendment:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
However, as a strong believer in the 9th Amendment I would be loath to take up the banner of the Living Document crowd. "Living Documentists" are word twisters and shades-of-gray, "it depends of what you think the word means" semanticists. They're intellectually bankrupt in that they seem to think the constitution is a rubbery, flexible thing that can be molded into whatever their "modern vision of society" requires. The classic example is the attempt to recast the 2nd Amendment as only assurance that states are allowed to have a [militia/National Guard], rather than a guarantee that the check against tyranny of an armed populace remains.
No, Strict Constructionists (or rather, Originalists) have the right idea, but the current crop of conservative ones we have around display a maddening tendency towards specific, selective blindness. I believe the founding fathers meant exactly what they wrote in the constitution, and that it only requires that you actually read it for it to be effective.
Is it? I always consider Christianity a religion of death
It is. That's why I said "religion" rather than specifically christianity. Christianity does indeed have a bit of a death fetish, but it still has as its core basis the same "rules to live by" theme as all other religions.
I never figured out why they don't all kill themselves. I mean, don't they want to go see Jesus?
Religion is about how live your life. Living properly is supposedly a way of guaranteeing you get a good reward when you die, but nobody actually wants to die.
Sample size = 1 (I can't read the article at work, just based off of the teaser here). Good conclusion.
There are so many things to disprove this (Daikana). Numerous games that waddled through development hell to end up terrible or medioctre.
Yeah, Master of Orion 3 took YEARS, and turned out to be as fun as an Excel spreadsheet.
You can find 2500 square foot houses here with basements and nice yards in a convenant community (usually with community tennis courts and pool) for $200,000, and that's just a few miles outside of the 285 perimeter. Try that in Seattle.:-)
Tell me about it. My grandmother lives in a dilapidated "house" (really detached servant's quarters for a long-gone 1920's "villa" next door) on a tiny lot on the edge of South Los Angeles (AKA "South Central"), and it's been appraised at $300K. Insanity.
Penn and Teller are famous for revealing how they do most of their tricks, and the freely admitted to using shills for some of them.
Thing is, there are enough people who've been selected for the "bullet catch" trick that have said "I'm no shill", or "I know the guy they picked, and he says he's no shill" that it's unlikely all these people have been paid off and not one of them has admitted complicity. So either P&T have some extremely convincing and ironclad method of keeping people quiet...or they've figured out a way to do the trick without shills.
By the same reasoning, we should never upgrade any infrastructure or technology if it would require an investment of money to happen. What I'm talking about could very easily be integrated into newly built buildings, and gradually over time, devices could be released to work with the new standard, while still providing adapters for those who are only wired for AC. Eventually, nearly everyone would have buildings wired with DC power distribution systems, and devices would no longer need to be designed to run on 120 V AC power. Similar large scale changes have been implemented in nearly all areas of technology.
Thing is, infrastructure doesn't drive innovation, it follows it. High voltage electricity distribution infrastructure didn't come about until after industry started saying "we want to use these electric machines, but we don't have the [money|space|know-how] to install an on-site generator". Unshielded twisted pair ethernet wire didn't get pulled into walls before there were 10baseT cards and hubs to plug it into. With hardware requirements driving infrastructure requirements, there has to be a significant advantage to and general availability of the new hardware before end users will demand the infrastructure. Being that going from cheap wall warts to expensive DC-Dc converters will cost money, manufacturers won't offer compliance with some arbitrary DC standard unless it's a concrete selling point. There's simply no significant advantage to low-voltage DC out of the wall to drive demand, and no one's going to spend thousands of dollars on a system in the hopes that it'll be adopted in the future.
However, more than once I've turned up phone installs that had incorrect ANI. Either wrong numbers, which often list wrong company names, or at least wrong addresses. It's not as if you can "order" messed up ANI or change it, but if you had one of these circuits, I don't know how easily, or even if, the telco could back track it.
Yeah, I've seen that too. Thing is, the whole thing is keyed to the circuit ID, which is usually a physical port at the CO. The rest is just database links. If dialing the number rings that circuit, they can find it. It's just a matter of matching the number/circuit ID to the correct billing record. Usually that's just a matter of getting a low-paid data entry clerk to do a database search. Mis-linked billing data causes big problems with things like 911, though, because generally the caller doesn't have 7-10 days for the telco to put in and complete a fix order...
No, I'm suggesting a single voltage distribution system, most probably either 12 V or 24 V, or possibly dual rail (±12V). Using relatively large gauge wiring, resistive losses in a single smallish building would not be particularly bad. Wall warts are only multiple voltages because current devices are not engineered with any requirement for operation on a standard voltage. Based on the number of products that have been designed to be powered off of USB ports, it is quite clear that there are few technical reasons for so many different voltages. Engineers who need a different voltage would be free to use an internal regulator.
OK....so what you're saying is that all we need to do to get rid of wall-warts is put in a 12VDC system and either A) replace every single device that uses something other than 12VDC, or B) replave those devices' wall warts with DC-DC converters. With the amount of money you'd save by putting one big 10:1 transformer in the basement instead of a hundred little ones, it would take YEARS to make back the expense of just replacing the existing equipment, much less the cost of installing the wiring infrastructure.
Just think about getting rid of all the wall warts and power supplies that we currently have to deal with and instead just having regular straight cables to plug DC-powered electronics in to the wall.
Are you seriously suggesting a separate DC power system with power jacks for 3v,5v,7.5v,9v,12v,15v,18v,and 20v? That's what it'd take to eliminate wall warts.
resistive loss would be ridiculous for 5v anyway. forget it
The real question is : what happens to wire taps ? Does this invalidate the wire taps, or this just another hinderance that wire taps can look past ?
Caller ID is really little more than a "toy" service, designed for the convenience of consumers. All the real call identification-- such as for billing, or wiretaps, or traces-- is via the ANI (Automatic Number Identification) system. ANI is completely separate from the Caller ID system, and is linked directly to your circuit ID rather than being defined by the last digital channel bank on the circuit. ANI is totally and completely inaccessible to anyone outside the telco.
Actually, weren't ISDN customers fooling ANI in the past, because the service essentially jacks your circuit directly in to the telco switch? I seem to recall people spoofing caller ID info by feeding false ANI data through one of the carrier "D" channels on ISDN?
No, ANI and CID exist totally separate from one another. ANI is keyed directly to your circuit ID and is utterly beyond your reach there at the end of the pipe, be it POTS, ISDN, T1, or whatever. ANI is used for billing, and is basis for what law enforcement gets when they ask for call info. CID, though, is nothing more than a a consumer product. If you have a T1 channel bank, you can essentially define your caller ID name and number at will, as it originates from the channel bank.
It was rumored that during Gulf war, Saddam's army fired the scuds, and saw on CNN if they hit the targets.
Saddam maybe, but the guys firing the scuds didn't see shit. Scuds are fired from a mobile TEL (Transporter-Erector-Launcher) vehicle. No TV in those, nor the support vehicles that rolled with them. They operated pretty much by driving out into the desert at night and firing essentially at random. The scud is only slightly more advanced than the old german V-2. In fact, the soviet engineers who designed the Scunner and its successor the SS-1 Scud did little more than crib from captured V-2's on TELs the germans made.
Yes, and a climate that happens to include a significant portion of time well below freezing. IANA Astronomer, but temperatures that cold would probably have an impact on the mechanics of a telescope.
Hubble, being in orbit, sees lower temperatures (and greater variations of temperature) than anything at the south pole ever would. There's nothing in terms of engineering that prevents the building of a telescope in sub-zero temperatures.
This actually can be traced back to WWI, which has been said to have had an incredible traumatic effect on the culture. The innocent sense of civilization they had before the war was fairly well shattered with the death of millions of men in modern warfare
I think that period of having an "innocent sense of civilization" was a short-lived result of Victorian idealism. Society imagined itself free of the baser drives of animal instinct, and then was horribly surprised to find it was only imagination. The 19th century was hardly a shining example of civilized peace and harmony.
hear things in the news like extending terms of duty, and, quite frankly, it disturbs me that soldiers would be treated that way, although, as you explained in your note, sometimes it is necessary.
Yeah, that's a bum deal, but unfortunately it's in the contract. When you sign for military duty, you sign for eight years. The active duty portion of 2, 3, or 4 years gets all the attention, but you're basically wagering that your active duty time will end at a time when they don't need you and they'll let you do the remainder of the eight years as inactive reserve. Complaining is probably the number one pastime of anyone on active duty, and your term being extended is really rich complaint fodder. I got "held over" more than 60 days after my enlistment ended because my unit was in Bosnia. (shrug) Nothing to do but gripe about it to anyone who'll listen-- but then also just suck it up and do the job, 'cause that's all part of the deal.
The thought of voilence video games having an impact on someone seemed quite evident with the story slashdot did a little while ago in wish a soldier said something similar to "It's just like halo" when talking about being in the military....
That actually says more about what a soldier brings to the game, rather than what the game brings to people in general. The game Halo is an artificial environment wherein that soldier noticed that he could apply a noteworthy amount of his training-- training that, I might add, came largely from classroom lecture and stomping around in full gear on exercises. The reverse, that your average Joe off the street is going to learn military tactics from Halo, does not logically follow.
Really? What about those that they joined so they could get an education that they otherwise couldn't afford?
Money for education is a benefit of joining, and not the reason the military exists. The first couple months of military training disabuse everyone who joins of the notion that it's about anything other than killing people and breaking stuff. There are very few who make it through training without having it driven home to them that the military deals in DEATH. Those that can't accept that are free to leave at any time during their first 6 months of service with absolutely no black mark on their record. There's no draft. The military has no mandate to keep people who don't want to be there. There are a few who get through training by convincing themselves that it's all play-acting, and then go AWOL or claim "I only signed up for the college money" when they get deployed, but they're relatively rare.
Exactly my point. Most video games contain "techniques" that we should NOT want to teach and reinforce.
No, technique is learned outside the game. The game is simply an arena for practicing the technique. As any infantryman who's played America's Army can attest, the way kids work in that simulation shows very little knowledge of real-life technique. Again, it all comes down to intent. "Gamers" play in a way that's essentially optimized to gain points or advance in the game. This manner of playing is very different from training for real-life situations. There is no real-life analog to "gaining points" or "advancing in the game". This self-training simply has no bearing on reality.
So why not let people leave the military whenever they want, at least outside of an operation, without anything other than a financial penalty?
Like I said, you can pretty much just walk into your commander's office during the first 180 days and say "I can't take it" and, probably after imploring you for a while to not give up, they'll essentially say "seeya" and give you an Entry Level Separation. Beyond that, they keep you for a very simple reason: being in the military is a hard, underpaid, often unpleasant job. If people could leave any time they felt put upon, they'd end up not being able to issue any orders without cajoling, wheedling, or bribing those under their "command".
I suppose then their wouldn't be enough meat in the grinder.
Exactly. Joining the military is a promise to march into the meat grinder should the order come down to do so. Anyone who joins thinking it's something else is a fool. That's not to say that I never met any such fools, but they were the exception. Those of us who saw our job for what it very obviously was generally regarded them with contempt and were glad to see them gone. A guy who thinks it's all just a game will get you killed in combat because he'll be the one in a fetal position with his hands over his ears shouting "this isn't happening" instead of watching the flank.
It is ironic that the people charged with protecting freedom have no freedom themselves.
Indeed, we often joked about that. It is, however, a very necessary part of a properly functioning military. In a philosophical sense, the military is society's armor. In order to protect the soft and flexible inside, it must itself be hard and inflexible. Ironic to be sure, but not at all negotiable. It simply must be that way to work.
Life is precious, soldier's lives are precious too.
Damn straight.
Perhaps your comments say more about military brainwashing than I ever could.
Perhaps. Maybe your comments say more about "anti-military brainwashing" from the worldwide hippy and Quaker conspiracy. I couldn't say. I can only speak from personal experience.
The military uses video games to train soldiers, flight simulators have been around for a very long time to train pilots. Obviously these types of technology have an impact on a person's behavior and the video games do too.
Nice job. You have completely tossed aside the notion of intent. You apparently believe the harebrained notion that the military uses brainwashing to turn "normal" people into mindless killing machines. Video games and flight simulators aren't used by the military to turn people into killers. The people who join the military have already made the conscious, intentional decision to become killers. Simulations and exercises are used merely to teach and reinforce technique. No one becomes a trained killer against their will.
I find it very interesting how much value Slashdotter's place on science and established scientific thinking when it comes to ID and Evolution debates, but when it applies to video gaming you're so willing to suspend it. Classical Conditioning is basic psychology, folks. Pavlov demonstrated this.
In the separate cases of violent games and real life violence, I ask only where is Pavlov's bell? You suspend established scientific thinking yourself when you beg the question by assuming the conditioning of playing a violent game transfers directly to real life. This is the presumption that most of us dispute.
Despite the large body of evidence that supports a link between playing violent videogames and aggression
The problem we have here is the basic premise that the baseline, the "normal" person they define for the control group, is the ridiculous fantasy of a peaceful human being. Humans are social in nature and tend towards cooperation, but we are at heart competitive and cooperate out of a desire for personal gain. This is by no means a bad thing. Indeed, modern society has gotten to where it is because, due to abundance of basic survival resources and lack of natural dangers, "personal gain" can be something as simple as getting a warm fuzzy feeling from helping out a stranger. But when you get right down to it, when you strip away the thin veneer of civilization, we are simply savages living in upholstered caves. The handwringers don't realize this. They have an unrealistic view of humanity based upon idealism that totally ignores our status, which is nothing more than smartest animal on the planet. Violent games appeal to our very basic organic drive to survive. For some people, for any of a number of possible reasons, this drive overwhelms their sense of civilization and leads them to commit violent acts. These people's increased enjoyment of violent video games could, at the very most, be considered a symptom of the problem, not the cause.
Slashdot Mirror
If they licensed it from DEC, I don't think that counts as reinventing the wheel. It's more like finally dragging the x86 architecture kicking and screaming into the age of the wheel.
Indeed there are far too many folks who are either ignorant of, or intentionally ignore the 9th Amendment:
However, as a strong believer in the 9th Amendment I would be loath to take up the banner of the Living Document crowd. "Living Documentists" are word twisters and shades-of-gray, "it depends of what you think the word means" semanticists. They're intellectually bankrupt in that they seem to think the constitution is a rubbery, flexible thing that can be molded into whatever their "modern vision of society" requires. The classic example is the attempt to recast the 2nd Amendment as only assurance that states are allowed to have a [militia/National Guard], rather than a guarantee that the check against tyranny of an armed populace remains.
No, Strict Constructionists (or rather, Originalists) have the right idea, but the current crop of conservative ones we have around display a maddening tendency towards specific, selective blindness. I believe the founding fathers meant exactly what they wrote in the constitution, and that it only requires that you actually read it for it to be effective.
It is. That's why I said "religion" rather than specifically christianity. Christianity does indeed have a bit of a death fetish, but it still has as its core basis the same "rules to live by" theme as all other religions.
Religion is about how live your life. Living properly is supposedly a way of guaranteeing you get a good reward when you die, but nobody actually wants to die.
No, because Skype's "cripple test" has nothing to do with copyright. It's the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Yeah, Master of Orion 3 took YEARS, and turned out to be as fun as an Excel spreadsheet.
Tell me about it. My grandmother lives in a dilapidated "house" (really detached servant's quarters for a long-gone 1920's "villa" next door) on a tiny lot on the edge of South Los Angeles (AKA "South Central"), and it's been appraised at $300K. Insanity.
Thing is, there are enough people who've been selected for the "bullet catch" trick that have said "I'm no shill", or "I know the guy they picked, and he says he's no shill" that it's unlikely all these people have been paid off and not one of them has admitted complicity. So either P&T have some extremely convincing and ironclad method of keeping people quiet...or they've figured out a way to do the trick without shills.
Thing is, infrastructure doesn't drive innovation, it follows it. High voltage electricity distribution infrastructure didn't come about until after industry started saying "we want to use these electric machines, but we don't have the [money|space|know-how] to install an on-site generator". Unshielded twisted pair ethernet wire didn't get pulled into walls before there were 10baseT cards and hubs to plug it into. With hardware requirements driving infrastructure requirements, there has to be a significant advantage to and general availability of the new hardware before end users will demand the infrastructure. Being that going from cheap wall warts to expensive DC-Dc converters will cost money, manufacturers won't offer compliance with some arbitrary DC standard unless it's a concrete selling point. There's simply no significant advantage to low-voltage DC out of the wall to drive demand, and no one's going to spend thousands of dollars on a system in the hopes that it'll be adopted in the future.
Yeah, I've seen that too. Thing is, the whole thing is keyed to the circuit ID, which is usually a physical port at the CO. The rest is just database links. If dialing the number rings that circuit, they can find it. It's just a matter of matching the number/circuit ID to the correct billing record. Usually that's just a matter of getting a low-paid data entry clerk to do a database search. Mis-linked billing data causes big problems with things like 911, though, because generally the caller doesn't have 7-10 days for the telco to put in and complete a fix order...
OK....so what you're saying is that all we need to do to get rid of wall-warts is put in a 12VDC system and either A) replace every single device that uses something other than 12VDC, or B) replave those devices' wall warts with DC-DC converters. With the amount of money you'd save by putting one big 10:1 transformer in the basement instead of a hundred little ones, it would take YEARS to make back the expense of just replacing the existing equipment, much less the cost of installing the wiring infrastructure.
Are you seriously suggesting a separate DC power system with power jacks for 3v,5v,7.5v,9v,12v,15v,18v,and 20v? That's what it'd take to eliminate wall warts.
resistive loss would be ridiculous for 5v anyway. forget it
Caller ID is really little more than a "toy" service, designed for the convenience of consumers. All the real call identification-- such as for billing, or wiretaps, or traces-- is via the ANI (Automatic Number Identification) system. ANI is completely separate from the Caller ID system, and is linked directly to your circuit ID rather than being defined by the last digital channel bank on the circuit. ANI is totally and completely inaccessible to anyone outside the telco.
No, ANI and CID exist totally separate from one another. ANI is keyed directly to your circuit ID and is utterly beyond your reach there at the end of the pipe, be it POTS, ISDN, T1, or whatever. ANI is used for billing, and is basis for what law enforcement gets when they ask for call info. CID, though, is nothing more than a a consumer product. If you have a T1 channel bank, you can essentially define your caller ID name and number at will, as it originates from the channel bank.
Saddam maybe, but the guys firing the scuds didn't see shit. Scuds are fired from a mobile TEL (Transporter-Erector-Launcher) vehicle. No TV in those, nor the support vehicles that rolled with them. They operated pretty much by driving out into the desert at night and firing essentially at random. The scud is only slightly more advanced than the old german V-2. In fact, the soviet engineers who designed the Scunner and its successor the SS-1 Scud did little more than crib from captured V-2's on TELs the germans made.
Hubble, being in orbit, sees lower temperatures (and greater variations of temperature) than anything at the south pole ever would. There's nothing in terms of engineering that prevents the building of a telescope in sub-zero temperatures.
Paid shills are too obvious and inevitably the word gets out. Here's a more likely explanation: http://www.foreworks.com/bullet2.html
I think that period of having an "innocent sense of civilization" was a short-lived result of Victorian idealism. Society imagined itself free of the baser drives of animal instinct, and then was horribly surprised to find it was only imagination. The 19th century was hardly a shining example of civilized peace and harmony.
Yeah, that's a bum deal, but unfortunately it's in the contract. When you sign for military duty, you sign for eight years. The active duty portion of 2, 3, or 4 years gets all the attention, but you're basically wagering that your active duty time will end at a time when they don't need you and they'll let you do the remainder of the eight years as inactive reserve. Complaining is probably the number one pastime of anyone on active duty, and your term being extended is really rich complaint fodder. I got "held over" more than 60 days after my enlistment ended because my unit was in Bosnia. (shrug) Nothing to do but gripe about it to anyone who'll listen-- but then also just suck it up and do the job, 'cause that's all part of the deal.
That actually says more about what a soldier brings to the game, rather than what the game brings to people in general. The game Halo is an artificial environment wherein that soldier noticed that he could apply a noteworthy amount of his training-- training that, I might add, came largely from classroom lecture and stomping around in full gear on exercises. The reverse, that your average Joe off the street is going to learn military tactics from Halo, does not logically follow.
Money for education is a benefit of joining, and not the reason the military exists. The first couple months of military training disabuse everyone who joins of the notion that it's about anything other than killing people and breaking stuff. There are very few who make it through training without having it driven home to them that the military deals in DEATH. Those that can't accept that are free to leave at any time during their first 6 months of service with absolutely no black mark on their record. There's no draft. The military has no mandate to keep people who don't want to be there. There are a few who get through training by convincing themselves that it's all play-acting, and then go AWOL or claim "I only signed up for the college money" when they get deployed, but they're relatively rare.
Exactly my point. Most video games contain "techniques" that we should NOT want to teach and reinforce.
No, technique is learned outside the game. The game is simply an arena for practicing the technique. As any infantryman who's played America's Army can attest, the way kids work in that simulation shows very little knowledge of real-life technique. Again, it all comes down to intent. "Gamers" play in a way that's essentially optimized to gain points or advance in the game. This manner of playing is very different from training for real-life situations. There is no real-life analog to "gaining points" or "advancing in the game". This self-training simply has no bearing on reality.
So why not let people leave the military whenever they want, at least outside of an operation, without anything other than a financial penalty?
Like I said, you can pretty much just walk into your commander's office during the first 180 days and say "I can't take it" and, probably after imploring you for a while to not give up, they'll essentially say "seeya" and give you an Entry Level Separation. Beyond that, they keep you for a very simple reason: being in the military is a hard, underpaid, often unpleasant job. If people could leave any time they felt put upon, they'd end up not being able to issue any orders without cajoling, wheedling, or bribing those under their "command".
I suppose then their wouldn't be enough meat in the grinder.
Exactly. Joining the military is a promise to march into the meat grinder should the order come down to do so. Anyone who joins thinking it's something else is a fool. That's not to say that I never met any such fools, but they were the exception. Those of us who saw our job for what it very obviously was generally regarded them with contempt and were glad to see them gone. A guy who thinks it's all just a game will get you killed in combat because he'll be the one in a fetal position with his hands over his ears shouting "this isn't happening" instead of watching the flank.
It is ironic that the people charged with protecting freedom have no freedom themselves.
Indeed, we often joked about that. It is, however, a very necessary part of a properly functioning military. In a philosophical sense, the military is society's armor. In order to protect the soft and flexible inside, it must itself be hard and inflexible. Ironic to be sure, but not at all negotiable. It simply must be that way to work.
Life is precious, soldier's lives are precious too.
Damn straight. Perhaps your comments say more about military brainwashing than I ever could.
Perhaps. Maybe your comments say more about "anti-military brainwashing" from the worldwide hippy and Quaker conspiracy. I couldn't say. I can only speak from personal experience.
Nice job. You have completely tossed aside the notion of intent. You apparently believe the harebrained notion that the military uses brainwashing to turn "normal" people into mindless killing machines. Video games and flight simulators aren't used by the military to turn people into killers. The people who join the military have already made the conscious, intentional decision to become killers. Simulations and exercises are used merely to teach and reinforce technique. No one becomes a trained killer against their will.
(speaking from experiece as a former infantryman)
In the separate cases of violent games and real life violence, I ask only where is Pavlov's bell? You suspend established scientific thinking yourself when you beg the question by assuming the conditioning of playing a violent game transfers directly to real life. This is the presumption that most of us dispute.
I thought it was "...until someone draws Mohammed."
The problem we have here is the basic premise that the baseline, the "normal" person they define for the control group, is the ridiculous fantasy of a peaceful human being. Humans are social in nature and tend towards cooperation, but we are at heart competitive and cooperate out of a desire for personal gain. This is by no means a bad thing. Indeed, modern society has gotten to where it is because, due to abundance of basic survival resources and lack of natural dangers, "personal gain" can be something as simple as getting a warm fuzzy feeling from helping out a stranger. But when you get right down to it, when you strip away the thin veneer of civilization, we are simply savages living in upholstered caves. The handwringers don't realize this. They have an unrealistic view of humanity based upon idealism that totally ignores our status, which is nothing more than smartest animal on the planet. Violent games appeal to our very basic organic drive to survive. For some people, for any of a number of possible reasons, this drive overwhelms their sense of civilization and leads them to commit violent acts. These people's increased enjoyment of violent video games could, at the very most, be considered a symptom of the problem, not the cause.