I'm not saying that the program "Powerpoint" alone has some intrinsic evil that makes a slide bad by itself. I'm referring to the over-reliance on and mis-use of slide-shows generally, regardless of how they're made (Powerpoint, Open Office, MS Paint, by hand, etc) and how they're presented (computer and beamer, overhead projector, flip-charts, etc).
And especially to the bad idea that ploughing through 2-3 times more content per hour (e.g., via slide-shows) somehow means you learn more. It might well mean you actually learn _less_ and lose whatever motivation and interest you have to start with.
Yes, I've had classes and good teachers that used slides (e.g., via overhead projectors), but here's the thing: they weren't used instead of writing on the blackboard, they were used when an illustration was absolutely needed that one couldn't do as well on the blackboard. E.g., we've had them to show us cell structure and such in biology classes, or some mollecule stuff in Geography.
But more important is what the good teachers didn't use them for. They were definitely not used to flip through maths or physics proofs faster than writing on the blackboard.
Basically that's the thing I am against: the cult of the slide-show, just for slide-show's sake, not against the individual program "Powerpoint". Powerpoint is probably the most used (or "abused") program in that slideshow fetishism, which is why I've used it as a synonym for slide-shows. But, yes, the real problem is precisely that kind of slide-show fetishism, not the actual tool used to produce them.
You seem to assume that they want to improve their site. In which case, yes, anonymous trends and anonymous user movement grouped by session id suffices. (E.g., to see if users give up and leave your site half-way through the marketting bullshit pages, before even reaching the product pages.)
But that's not the problem.
Whenever you see someone going on about how the _need_ to track and identify each user, and they _need_ accurate numbers and even personal details... that's your clue that it's purely an ad money problem. They couldn't care less about the site design or trends as such, they just need some bullshit in numbers to shaft the ad providers with, or viceversa for the ad providers to shaft you with.
The internet started as a pretty clean and ad-friendly place, but it quickly went downhill. The initial ad rates were basically for sites with 1 ad on the main page, that a lot of people actually looked at. But from there it went downhill with site operators trying to shaft the ad providers. (E.g., by trying to collect those rates per ad... for pages that had wall-to-wall ads on each page, scripts that clicked on an ad 1000 times a second, etc.) The ad providers in turn went on to not only try to defend themselves from this kind of fraud, but also to try to commit the exact kind of fraud on the companies paying to advertise.
Welcome to the War Of The Bullshit Metrics. Because that's basically what it is.
All this ranting and raving about unique trackable ids and such, is just the search of the perfect metric so an ad provider can (A) say to the site operator carrying the ads "nah, we're not paying you that much, because while you had users clicking, it wasn't all UNIQUE users", while at the same time (B) telling some clueless company advertising with you "our marketting campain was a huge success because X thousand unique users saw it, and Y thousand clicked on it, and <insert other bogus metrics used often just as a Chewbacca defense>, so you owe us a big wad of money."
The problem with these bullshit metrics is that not only they mis-represent, but often lead to counter-productive campaigns aimed at inflating the metric even if they cause _less_ sales. E.g., once you define the "click" as a metric of success, as opposed to a "sale", you get bullshit fake-UI ads, punch-the-monkey ads, and outright redirects that simulate a click. That's all stuff that isn't aimed at actually raising awareness/interest in a product, but at gaming a sick irrelevant metric.
And the problem is that bogus metrics be damned, the companies paying for it aren't seeing results out of it. They just see some metrics by which the ad campaign should have been a huge success, except the expected blip in sale tends to be missing completely.
The ad provider's solution? Trying to make that bullshit sound more credible. All this talk about uniquely identifying users and accurately counting everything, is mostly trying to make something sound like a science, when it's just bullshit. They want to present something like they have some solid scientific proof that for your X thousand dollars, you're accurately and guaranteed getting Y thousand whatever, within Z% accuracy.
And it's partially "Chewbacca defense". They deflect the attention from whether their service actually works, to how accurately they measured some bullshit irrelevant metric. And then dazzle your with some equally irrelevant pseudo-science bullshit as to why and how their measurements are so accurate. But again, completely avoiding the question of what it will do for _your_ _product_.
And the same kind of a war of the bullshit metrics sometimes also goes on inside a company. When marketting departments need to justify their budgets, what do you think they reach for? I'll tell you what. The exact same kind of bullshit metrics that show how accurately and scientiffically they got you X thousand hits. and Y thousand unique tracked users, and whatever.
So the next time you see such a "the sky is falling if we
Just being able to cram more material in a bunch of bulletted lists, and flip pages quickly, doesn't mean people will understand more.
1. Humans aren't like a hard drive, that you can just dump megabytes per second into. The human mind has actually very limited bandwidth, as such, but is actually a sort of a pipeline, with buffers behind buffers. Any one overflowing will mean information being discarded.
Wisecracks like "but then I suppose most students aren't going to complain about courses having less content" are good and fine, but miss the point by a mile. It's lazy students complaining about too much content, it's students leaving the class with actually _less_ content they actually assimilated if you just overflow them. And I think it's a _very_ valid complaint if I wasted an hour and ended up none the wiser.
When giving someone new information, they also have to assimilate it in some (preliminary) form. The speed limit for writing on a blackboard and the mere exercise of their transcribing it by hand into a notebook serves just that purpose: gives them a chance to at least move that stuff into the medium term buffer before more stuff is dumped upon them.
Just flipping through lists after lists is just a way to overflow their short term buffer, at which point almost everything after that is just wasted. You could just as well call it a day after that point and let them go home, because they'll be just as wise at the end of it.
That doesn't just apply to classrooms, btw. Even when studying at home, the best thing you can learn about _how_ to learn, is to recognize when you're having a full buffer and take a 10 second break. My grandma taught me that, and frankly, it's been the best advice I've ever got by far.
2. Teaching/learning is also a question of motivation and attention. How much you're left with after class isn't just a function of how fast the teacher could plough through bulleted lists, but how well he/she could hold your attention.
If just giving you the maximum content in the minimum of the teacher's time, all classes would consist of a 10 second, "Read chapters 3, 4 and 5 until next week." Heck, you could even dispense with that. Just give 'em a big list of books at the beginning of the year, don't see them again until the exam. There is a reason why schools and universities don't work like that.
The teacher's role is in a sense also a social one. He/she is there not just as someone to regurgitate information which you could have gotten just as well from a book, but also (or even more importantly) as someone to keep your attention through that.
3. Look at the effect Powerpoint presentations serve at work. Much as management _loves_ colourful powerpoint slides, I've yet to be even in a single meeting where they actually helped. You either end up with far more questions and basically get slowed down to the actual bandwidth that people can digest, and even lower (losing all that speed advantage), or you end up with everyone forgetting everything that was in those slides before even the meeting is over.
I don't know exactly _what_ it is about Powerpoint slides, presumably the 1 and 2 effects, but maybe something else too. But they seem to act more like attention dissipators than something to help focus and memorize and understand. Things that would have been (and occasionally _have_ been) by having someone doing it interactively at the blackboard, seem to go in one ear and out the other when a Powerpoint slideshow is involved.
"I highly doubt anyone is THAT stupid to put THAT big of a security flaw into a system."
Read the article, and the guy is proposing to build exactly that kind of a security flaw into the system.
Flash can use, basically, some local shared storage on your hard drive. This isn't really designed as cookie storage, and doesn't have even the meager safeguards that cookies have. (E.g., being tied only to a domain.) It's really a space that _any_ flash applet can read and write, and currently noone (with half a clue) puts any important data there.
This guy's idea? Basically, "I know, let's store cookies there, precisely _because_ any other flash applet, e.g., our own again from a different page, can read that back again."
Caveat: so can everyone else. I could make a simple flash game that grabs everything stored there, just as you described, and sends it back to me. Including, yes, your session id (so, yes, I can take over your session in any site you were logged in, including any e-commerce sites or your bank) and anything else they stored there.
Since it's used to track your movements through sites, depending how clueless that's programmed, I may (or may not) also be able gather all sorts of other information about you.
So in a nutshell his miracle solution is to build _exactly_ that kind of a vulnerability (not to mention privacy leak) into the system.
So, well, that's the problem with assuming that "noone could be THAT stupid". Invariably when I say that, someone kindly offers himself as living proof that I'm wrong. Soneone CAN be that stupid.
"Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem."
Well, I don't know about him, but let me tell you that _I_ don't even have my email address stored anywhere on my computer. I don't actually use any email client or address book there that a bot could scan. The only access I use is web access through HTTPS, and with Mozilla not IE.
So not only I've never had a bot on my machine, but even if (ad absurdum) one managed to get on it, it wouldn't actually find that email address anywhere on it. Did that stop me from getting spam? Nope.
I also have co-workers that are on various flavours of BSD and still get spam. (Tangent: you know Linux must be making some nice progress, when you see some people moving _away_ from Linux because it's getting too mainstream for them.)
But let's get back to a piece of that quote which is the real problem:
"do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows?"
So there's this miracle solution that would work only if everyone in the world switched to another OS. Heh. Then it's just not a solution, is it?
So I'd need to do... what, to stop receiving spam? Convince at least two different corporations to 100% migrate to Linux, plus get a whole bunch of people converted even though they have _zero_ use or need for Linux? It's just not a realistic goal, and frankly is an even worse waste of my time than spam is.
"'legitimate' spam is still pretty much the same as other advertising mediums."
Bullshit. There is no such thing as "legitimate spam". Now maybe it's the same as junk mail, but sure as hell not as normal advertising.
Normal advertising works in that it pays for some service provided to me, and which I (individually or some group I belong to) opted in for. E.g., if I visit a web site with advertising banners, I've explicitly made a choice to tolerate those in exchange for the content they pay for. E.g., if I watch a TV station and get 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes, again, I've decided to tolerate those in exchange for the content they pay for. In either case I can turn the TV off or close the browser, and stop getting those right there and then.
Even with billboards, the community basically decided to use those for funds instead of extra taxes. If enough people decided that they don't want those -- like the people of NZ decided they don't want spam -- they could get the mayor's office to remove them.
Spam doesn't pay for anything, and there was no such "opt-in" involved in getting it in the first place.
Saying that that's like normal advertising, is like saying that picking someone's pocket is no different from normal commerce. Well, no. Normal commerce included other key elements, like being consentual, and like not being a unilateral affair. Normal commerce isn't just me giving money to someone, it's also getting something in return, and having the free choice whether I want to do it or not. The moment you take those key elements away, it just becomes something else.
The same applies to spam. I can see why spammers try to muddy the distinction, but a distinction it still is. If it's sorta like normal advertising... except it's not consensual, and doesn't give you anything in return for tolerating it, then it's just _not_ normal advertising.
It's especially that part about allowing them to send notifications for "new" stuff, regardless of whether you opted out before or not, that's especially worrying me. It's a free license to spam.
Think about it. It doesn't say new _categories_, so it doesn't even have to mean they'd have drop penis enlargement pills once you've opted out. They can make you opt out of _one_ _product_ at a time, then rename it or call it a new version, and spam you some more.
E.g., spam advertising porn, could spam you with a different combination of web site and category in each batch of mails, and opting out of one wouldn't prevent them from sending the next batch. They could just make a bogus "hosted site" for each batch, which just redirects to the main one, but hey, it's for a "new" service (site) you haven't yet opted out of. So they're allowed.
In fact, it makes it worse than no opt-out at all. To actually unsubscribe from all that, you'd have to actually open the message and look for the unsubscribe link for that product, then email the spammer. From a spammer's perspective it's actually better: they made you open and read his spam instead of just looking at the message and deleting it.
So seeing MS back such a license to spam with impunity, makes me really worry.
"Why should they change their web sites because of idiots?"
Yes, because their higher level managers were idiots who wanted to spam in the first place. Otherwise they wouldn't have "opted you in" by default. (Read: shanghaied into a spam database. Being added by default is _not_ "opt in".)
At any rate, I fail to see why I'd have to protect them from their own idiocy. If they were idiotic enough to spam in the first place, just having to change their web site isn't even much of a punishment. So they can just get to it.
"remember they are out to make a profit and not to force you into some moral high ground."
Yes, and thieves, muggers and burglars are out to make a profit too, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate them. And throwing bricks through people's windows would be an outstanding way to make a profit for someone selling glass panes, but we sure as hell don't have to tolerate that. And scratching people's cars would be an outstanding way to drum up business for shops that can paint them back, but we don't allow that. And dumping chemicals into rivers is a _great_ way to bump up your profits, by not needing to buy filters and/or safely store toxic stuff. Needless to say, we don't allow that. Etc.
So the "but they're out to make a profit" isn't a blanket excuse for any sociopathic behaviour. If someone's making a profit comes at the expense of annoying millions of others, _and_ polluting a common resource, it is perfectly reasonable to ask them to stop.
And if they don't want to, we'll vote laws that make them stop. Believe it or not, most of us live in a "democracy". (Well, except for the USA, which seems mostly run by corporations and getting the laws that the corporations want. E.g., CAN-SPAM. I'm not sure what the term for that is. "Oligarhy" maybe?)
There is no ammendment that says a corporation has a sacred right to make a profit, by whatever means they can think of, no matter how detrimental to the country or people. And if there was, we'd repel it.
A corporation has to live by the rules set by society, and hopefully for the good of society. If one turns into a predator that causes only harm in its quest for more profits, then it no longer fits the reason why we let it exist in the first place, and it should be stopped. It's that simple.
1. If it's a different study, they should have kept it as a different study. It's however presented implicitly as proof of that causation they wave around. And the whole proof part is in fact just missing.
2. It's precisely that "or" that bothers me, and even more importantly the other "or", the implicit one in the "involved in physical altercations" semantics sleight-of-hand. It's basically saying that someone was either _aggressor_ (which is the implicit meaning in "games cause violence) or _victim_ (which is a whole other thing.)
Anything based on sweeping the difference between aggressor and victim under the carpet, is just bullshit.
E.g., by the exact same semantics sleight of hand, you could say that roughly equal numbers of men and women were "involved in a rape" (I'm assuming that most of them are one-on-one), therefore women are roughly as inclined as men to rape someone. Or that equal numbers of men and women are involved in a spouse-beating incident (it's equal numbers by default since it's one spouse beating the other), hence women are just as inclined as men to beat up their spouse.
In practice both are the same kind of verbal fallacy as that commited here.
3. I don't care whose seal of approval it has, the whole thing is partisan and profoundly unscientific.
Compare it to the Illinois university one, because that one is how real scientists work: that one goes above and beyond the call of duty to tell you what it is _not_, what was really measured, _how_ it was measured, and what are the limitations and potential sources of errors in that.
Whereas this one is a PR hack doing all sorts of political speech tricks, including sneaking in a study as "proof" of something it isn't. It skips over every single thing that a real science experiment _must_ include, in their rush to take a running jump at the conclusion you want to hear.
Even as high school science goes, if I handed in a physics experiment in this form, completely skipping any details and estimated error calculations, I'd have gotten a failing grade. If some major national association's standards are even lower than that, I just can't take them seriously.
4. It's not as much whether they're bought or not, it's that everything I've seen from them so far is more like political whoring than anything even vaguely resembling science. They've been behind anything that looks like a populist enough cause, or what might get them a government grant. If I look back as far as the 50's, for example in the "comics are evil and make kids violent" bullshit that was eerily similar to today's gaming scare, what do you know? They had some political whole psychologist providing those "proofs" and "correlations" too.
It's not acting and it's not sounding like a scientific association, but like the high-school prom queen of Washington associations and lobbies.
Because that too was the subject of a "waah, think of the CHILDREN" bullshit, complete with government investigations and all, long before Rock and Roll, horror movies, D&D, and now games got the end of that exact same stick.
Thing is, back then most people didn't even believe that comic-books were to blame. They had a survey which already pretty much told you what the surveyor wants to hear (a known factor in getting skewed results: people tend to give the answers that they subconsciously think you'd like.) And in this case they wanted to hear, among other things, which juvenile crimes can you blame on comics, if you try really hard to make a connection.
Yet about 60% felt that there was no link, and about 70% that regulating comics would have no effect on crime.
Not that something like that would stop a bullshit politician from making even more noise about it.
Disclaimer: This post too is backed by nothing more than my unqualified opinion.
"Football just happens to attract alpha males who have inferiority complexes and decide to take out their aggression on others to hide that complex."
I won't disaggree with that assessment, because it closely mirrors my observations in computer games. Games based on conflict and aggression tend to attract a lot more people who are, basically, aggressive.
E.g., going from CS to Sega's Phantasy Star Online (a strictly coop game) on the Dreamcast, or later revisiting UO's strictly non-PK facets after they were re-introduced, was like going to a whole different world. It's not just that it wasn't the same "ur a faggot" crowd, that people were really _nice_.
I've had perfect strangers stop by and lend my newbie character their magic sword on UO so I can finish an ogre I was fighting, or taking my newbie character to their castle so I can get water from their fountain to bake bread. The "going above and beyond the call of duty to help a total stranger" kind of nice. (I guess I see why PK-ers call us "carebears", and wth, I'll wear that badge with pride.)
Still, football does attract a _lot_ of assholes. And I mean also among the most rabid fans, not just among the players. A football player might be a hard-working athlete who supports charities, but a thousand of his fans will go beat someone up (e.g., their wives) to either celebrate a victory or to vent frustration for a defeat.
Presumably because it's _based_ on conflict, and tries to hype its fans like for a war. E.g., my brother was remarking a couple of months ago about how here they use the word "kampf", i.e., "fight", for any football event. They don't say "team A _played_ a _game_ against team B", they say quite literally "team A _fought_ team B". And that's just one of the combat metaphors used. Some days, if you deleted all names, it would be hard to tell if you're reading about a football game or another offensive in Iraq.
I'm not saying that all football fans are assholes, nor that football made them so. But if you took an already violent and complexed guy, chances are he'll be more attracted to football than to, say, chess.
So basically correlation could be made between football and violence, that's vastly better than the one between video games and violence. Yet noone tries to ban football.
""Research indicates exposure to violence in video games increases aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior and angry feelings among youth, the association said in a statement issued Wednesday. In addition, the APA statement said, this exposure reduces helpful behavior and increases physiological arousal in children and adolescents."
So:
A) While they might have measured _some_ correlation (more about that later), what they present it as is causation. Sorry, there's no other way to read that.
It doesn't say "we found some correlation between violence in school and the fact that some people involved were playing games." It goes on and on about how it _makes_ you violent, makes you think violent thoughts (although even as a correlation, that appears nowhere in their actual study), makes you refuse to help other people, teaches you that violence is _the_ solution, teaches you that violence doesn't have consequences, etc. That's all one big lump that's presented as a clear cut cause-effect issue, not just as a correlation to base future studies on.
B) Even as a correlation, they just didn't measure that, any way you want to slice it.
If you look at what they measured, it's not even measuring one variable, it's lumping together such disparate issues as being an aggressor, being a _victim_, and questioning authority. E.g., if you're a gaming nerd and a jock (who doesn't play games) beats you up in school, congrats, according to them you're part of the "games cause violence" sample.
The whole thing is a textbook example of a Verbal Fallacy: they switch between two very different meanings of "violence". They use one definition in their sample (basically "any kind of physical conflict"), and another definition in their conclusion (basically "aggressor"). _And_ if that wasn't enough, they include stuff in the sample that doesn't fit either one.
"In any event, that variable could interact in that it enabled the relationship or made the relationship stronger, but it cannot somehow unmake this correlation as some people seem to think."
Again, you miss some points:
1) Again, it was presented as causation, not correlation. They presented it as: games _make_ you violent, less helpful, etc. And that can very well be "unmade", if another issue is the dominant cause.
2) In fact there isn't even that much to "unmake", since there was no "make" to start with. They haven't made a point, they just took a big leap of faith that isn't supported by _any_ logic or data. So there isn't anything to "unmake".
Even if I was to accept that correlation (although it's bullshit anyway), from there to the causation they present, it's just one big leap of faith. There's a whole big pile of work to be done in between finding a correlation between A and B, and concluding that A _causes_ B. Work which involves precisely separating all those other variables and their own influence on the measured result.
It's the kind of leap of faith like starting from "I've noticed a correlation between being thin and tall and being a maths nerd" (hey, that's the kind of maths nerds I've met in school), and extrapolating that going on a diet will improve your maths grades. Sorry, no. There is nothing to "unmake" there, since the whole "make" part between that correlation and the conclusion is just completely missing.
"So why bother doing studies at all?"
Definitely not to take them as more than just that: one correlational study, which says nothing about cause-effect. The study does raise some questions and can serve as a base for further studies on the topic, yes. But that's about it. It's not something that's become the One Truth, to be carved in stone, and that noone should dare question.
"This study presumably was peer reviewed, by the way."
I'd be interested by whom. The tobacco companies "there's no correlation between smoking and lung diseases" stud
1. Which kind of physical altercations? No, seriously. There is a _major_ difference between being the aggressor and the victim.
Children get bullied for being "nerds" and "dorks" every day. So any study that just takes a blanket "involved in physical altercations" category, is from the start including the victims in that category.
Can you really say that games made someone violent, when they were the one beat up? By WTF of a definition of becoming violent? "Yeah, he violently had his face in front of someone's fist."
2. In the rare cases when a nerd does attack, in how many cases they were in fact provoked? Because that's the more common link that the politicians love to ignore: someone was tormented every day, and finally _that_ is what made them snap and fight back.
E.g., Columbine, as an extreme case, was not just a case of two happy kids that just got corrupted by video games and turned into killers. We're talking people who got bullied day after day, into desperation and beyond. And they finally snapped. Happens to non-gaming adults too: you give someone continuous stress, they eventually snap. Look up "postal" on wikipedia someday.
So if you bully someone every day, and they finally fight back, by WTF of a definition it's the games alone that caused that?
3. Arguing with "authority figures" instead of being sheep is already a different category, so I'm not even sure by WTF of a stretch of the meaning it's lumped together with "violence". Disobedience is quite different from beating someone up.
4. On the "autority figures" topic again: what is the cause and what is the effect there?
Because for example a common group that's having problems with authority figures _and_ with bullies, which is what gets them often bullied, are Asperger's Syndrome sufferers. The inability to distinguish body language can get one in all sorts of trouble of exactly that kind.
Incidentally Asperger's Syndrom also makes one more likely to like computers instead. Either programming or video games, stuff that's on a computer tends to be stuff that you can do/play on logic alone.
So what is the cause and what is the effect there? Are games _really_ the cause there, or are we talking two different effects of autism. Until they actually separate those in a different category, for a segment of their study they're basically pulling a "A => B and A => C, therefore B => C".
Even then, you can actually string together something that at least looks (semi)intelligent as an explanation.
E.g., the UK produces more games and sells more copies than the USA. That's a bit surprising, but it's a fact. So one could explain it as, basically, with the rise in video game popularity, more money were earned from games, which meant bigger budgets for games (again, it's a fact: a game today has a much bigger budget than in '95), which means more people employed in the game industry.
So while video games obviously can't account for _all_ the jobs created in that interval, they did however create a few of those.
The "games cause violence" can't even show that kind of effect. You'd expect to see _some_ correlation before proclaiming causation like they do.
Unlike game employment in the UK, with games we're talking a major population segment. There _millions_ of people playing games, and increasing each year. We're talking some tens of millions of current-generation game consoles alone sold in the USA, so a _major_ segment of their youth has at least one of those. Even poorer people have those: a recent study linked-to on Slashdot said that blacks and hispanics actually play more.
So if such a large segment of the population, maybe even the majority, were subject to such a constant pressure towards violence, I'd expect to see _some_ correlation. Maybe not a nation-wide increase, but ffs, then show me something else, like that areas/groups who play more showed less of a decline in violence.
"Sports games MUST exhibit a growth in visual relaity, or gameplay reality. They have no other way to grow."
And, without contradicting what you've said, but rather as a tangent, that's a path of diminishing returns. Going from 300 to 1000 polygons per character is a much bigger visual improvement than going from 3000 to 10,000.
And I already know one game that's at 30,000 polygons per character (The Singles). While you can see occasional places for improvement if you really zoom in ("hmm, that sweater's neck kinda looks like a dodecagon instead of round") I just can't see how going 100,000 polygons would make more than a subtle difference.
That's not limited to sports games. In any game the graphics alone make less and less of a difference between last year's game and this year's. (E.g., I'm playing PSO Blue Burst ATM, and while you can tell that the old Dreamcast graphics they reused are low polygon count, they're not visually offensive.) Sports games just have this problem more because, in your words, they don't have much else to improve.
Worse yet, going ultra-high resolution and polycount becomes really a handicap to overcome, because when you give people that detail level, they start noticing details that don't match or don't animate exactly like the real thing. So the work to make the magic still happen increases a lot.
Again, that's not limited to sports games. E.g., EQ2 went the ultra-realistic graphics route and just created the criticism that the graphics look "sterile". They're high polygon count and all, but that just encourages you to expect more details to match RL... and notice that they just don't. By comparison, WoW's slightly cartoonish look generated a lot less criticism, and (surprisingly) a lot of people find it easier to suspend disbelief in that.
Sports games don't really have that escape either, and in any case it would be a one-shot affair.
Well, that's good and insightful, but I can't see what's preventing online comics from doing stuff in advance too.
Still, all I'm saying is that Sexy Losers has produced a total of 2 strips or so this year. They're high quality and all, but I think it's a fairly safe bet that it's just not enough for a magazine. Now I'm not whining about it or anything, just saying that at a wild guess that seems a more likely explanation than censorship.
Mitnick is, simply put, a psychopath. The white collar kind, not the chainsaw murderer type. As described here and linked to on Slashdot today.
Read that link, in case you haven't, and see how he has _all_ the traits described there. In spades. (Including reinventing his past as he sees fit, and the social engineering part, and generally everything.)
More than that, he's worked hard at proving to the judge that he's just that: a psychopath with zero empathy or remorse. In fact he still works at it.
So let me get this straight: so basically you're condemning a judge for keeping a _psychopath_ in custody?
Dunno, it seems to me like presenting yourself as a clear-cut psychopath to a judge is... anything but smart. That's just the kind of personality that justice is supposed to keep off the streets.
Seems to me like anyone making that case to a judge is _asking_ to be kept locked with no bail.
Looking through your list, you seem more to be going by the popular myth that "psychopath == axe murderer" rather than the "lacks empathy and is entertained by power games" definition and profile that TFA gave you.
Stalin for example was brutal and certainly responsible for more deaths than Hitler. And I do not only in WW2. Pre-WW2 he starved the peasants (ask any ucrainian about that, because they got the shit end of the stick the worst) and executed his own officers.
But it's very arguable if he fits _any_ of the personality traits of a psychopath. He wasn't some charismatic leader that manipulated people, he was a paranoid asshole surrounded literally by yes-men.
For that matter it's hard to even judge whether he had any empathy or not, because _any_ kind of information that could trigger an empathic response was filtered before it got to him. Don't assume that anyone went and told him "but, comrade, we're executing innocent people" or "but, comrade, millions of ukrainian people have already _literally_ starved to _death_." The information he got were more like "yes, comrade Stalin, we're taking care of the conspirators as you ordered" or "yes, comrade Stalin, we'll levy more grains as you ordered. The peasants have plenty. It's only, uh, some traitors paid by the enemy agencies that hoard their grain to sabotage your enlightened leadership. Yes, we'll take care of them." Yes-men tend to have that filtering effect.
Also you may notice that the USSR as a whole was essentially run like a corporation, rather than as Karl Marx's idealistic communist utopia. For a long while Stalin cared only about profits (e.g., exported grain) and investments (e.g., into factories and machineries.)
So even _if_ he were a psychopath, then you've basically just showed me a corporation run by a psychopath. I don't think it invalidates the point.
I've actually worked with nice people in management positions. Even from the bad managers I've seen, the ways in which one can be "bad" at one's job are more diverse than being a psychopath or sociopath. Psychopaths do exist, they're not a majority.
Also, for a start, I don't think that berating someone is necessarily bad (much less a sign of being a psychopath). People make mistakes, or do something wrong, or whatever. _I_ make mistakes. I like to think a good manager would tell me when that's the case. (But don't blow it out of proportion, and don't forget the positive feedback too when/if that's deserved.)
I also don't think that "exploiting" someone is a crime. For better or worse, selling my work to a company is the way the economy works. A manager is there to manage and organize that process.
You can think of it as a necessary evil. Personally I don't even consider it "evil". If the boss is doing a good job of organizing things, that's less chaos for me to deal with, so that's actually improving my life.
And, anyway, if they do their job well, I see no problem with them earning a living out of that.
There _are_ ways to be an asshole about it, and yes I've seen awful assholes in management positions. But there are also ways of doing that job without being an asshole.
Well, look, I'm not saying I'm for gang rape as such or anything. It's not like I've singled that out as the only punishment fit for him or anything.
I just want the guy to suffer, that's all. I want the next one who gets such an idea to cringe at the very thought.
Yeah, ok, thinking logically and on a general level, I'll even aggree that we should abolish prison rape. Seems like a reasonable thing to expect from a civilized country, after all.
But nevertheless, a little nasty part of me wants the spammers to suffer for the large scale damage they're doing, even in some other way. That's all I'm saying.
To be honest, I don't really care in which way he suffers. Put him in solitary confinement for 15 months, for all I care. (Which would also prevent any kind of rape, right?) Make him hand-write an apology to each and every single person in those 25 million accounts he's sold, like someone else suggested. At 10 seconds per apology, if he writes reasonably fast, and a (humane) 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, schedule, he should be done with it in about 23 years and 9 months. Whatever, really.
See, the point isn't that we want him to have an orgasmic good time in prison. Everyone who's wishing ass rape upon him, well, that's just the point. We want him to suffer as horribly as possible.
In fact, personally I'd even wish for a death sentence for that kind of thing. Does it seem disproportionate compared to the crime? Let's do some maths.
We're talking a scumbag who's caused 7 _billion_ spam mails to be sent. Even assuming it takes only a second to delete a spam mail (it takes more, but ok), then 7 billion seconds is 221.8 years he's stolen out of other people's lives.
Again, that's on a _very_ conservative 1-second-a-spam-mail rate. A more realistic estimate (including the unholy amounts of time spent configuring filters, dealing with false positives, help relatives clean their computer after they got 0wn3d by clicking on some spam link, etc, because of that spam) would be in the thousands of years range.
By comparison a murderer deprives someone of how many years? 20? 40? And we can hang someone for that.
What these spam/virus/phishing/whatever fucktards are doing is, if you will, the difference between stealing 1000$ from someone, and stealing 1$ each from 100,000 people. The collective time wasted and the damages done each year are in the same range as murdering several hundreds of people per year.
So why is everyone that horrified when one goes to jail for that? (Or when in this case we wish really horrible things happening to them there.)
Even leaving that kind of maths out, their deed against society isn't some mild victimless mis-demeanor. It's outright plundering and laying waste to a valuable resource, on a scale that makes the pirates of the Carribean look like mild mannered gentlemen. _And_ causing a _major_ waste of time and money to everyone, for a far lesser gain to themselves.
We're talking the kind of looter and pillager that causes billions in losses to gain maybe 1/1000 of that.
And so far I haven't even counted indirect damage, such as the fact that the resource as a whole has become a lot less useful or used. We're at the point where an email from a stranger, and doubly so one with an attachment or from another country, is more likely to get deleted than read, and some people argue for mass-blocking whole countries off the net. We had a valuable communication resource, and these fucks polluted it until it became all but useless.
So why is it that wrong to want bad things to happen to them? I know, it's not nice, it's not humanitarian, etc. But they _are_ doing very bad things to all of us as a whole, so, well, it's not hard to end up wishing some nasty things would happen to them in return.
I'll kindly point your attention to one of the definitions you yourself have highlighted: "1. The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems."
You may notice certain words in there like "scientific" or "mathematical". So, sad to say, an ex-burger-flipper who faked a resume and copies-and-pastes from tutorials he doesn't even _understand_, doesn't fit that definition any way you want to stretch it.
I've worked with people who know their trade and spent two decades learning to do a solid engineering job even without a university degree, yes. But the vast majority of ex-burger-flippers turned VB "engineers" just because it paid better, nope, sorry, are not doing anything even _vaguely_ resembling engineering. (Software or otherwise.)
The vast majority don't even understand the most elementary _basics_ of the science or mathematics behind it. And show no sign of even trying to learn. They'll just do a copy-and-paste job (sometimes via memory, but copy-and-paste job nevertheless) from some tutorial they've seen somewhere, without even understanding what or why happened there.
I fondly call it "cargo cult programming."
The story behind "cargo cults" is that in WW2 airplanes dropped food and supplies on various islands to support their troops there. A lot missed the mark and were found by natives instead. Who never understood what happened there, but some proceeded to pray to the mysterious metal birds to come drop more stuff. And when that didn't happen, they carved statues of airplanes and prayed to them some more.
Well, that's the kind of code I see every day. Code written by someone who never even understood wtf _is_ a factory, or a singleton, or whatever (and much less _mathematical_ stuff like why an algorithm is "O(n*log n)" and another is "O(n*n)" and why the heck that matters. Or even what that funny "O" notation means.) But they proceeded to dutifully make their own mental cult around them, and carve statues to those all over the code.
For bonus points, when the statue they carve isn't even of a pattern that makes sense. Nah, it's of some stupid "optimization" that actually worked only in Java 1.0 or only with a very specific C compiler on some obscure platform, and only under very specific circumstances. But they never understood all that, so they'll faithfully carve statues of it all over the place, in the _awfully_ wrong places.
If that's applying scientific or mathematical principles... eh, I rest my case.
Much as I enjoy reading a good online comic, there are more reasons for them not being in print than some establishment conspiracy to censor them and generally keep them down.
E.g., since you've mentioned Sexy Losers, he's had how many strips in the last year? 1? Maybe 2?
There are plenty of porn comic books (e.g., hentai), and comic strips in adult magazines (e.g., when I last read a Playboy magazine, a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I seem to remember a comic strip in there too.) So there is no real reason to assume that _the_ reason Sexy Losers isn't in print is the sex-related content. There _are_ places that publish just that kind of thing.
On the other hand, a magazine might want to see a comic from you every day or week. It doesn't matter if today you have a hangover, or you've been lan-partying all night and slept all day, or you're at a comic convention and can't be arsed to draw yours.
Look at Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes or, better yet, at the one that got attacked by both PvP Online and Penny Arcade: Non Sequitur. I'm not saying the individual comics are better, but I'm saying that they've produced one comic a day for years straight. No "shirt-guy stick-figures" filler strips, no "today (or this month) I don't have time to draw one", no "I forgot I was supposed to draw one in colour for today", no other excuses.
_Some_ online comics (i.e., ignoring the ones which are just crap) are better if you take the individual strips, but can't seem to keep any predictable schedule. Much as I like them, if I had a newspaper, even _I_ wouldn't print them.
That's just one of the problems. I could go on with others (e.g., the fine difference between appealing to a niche, and the kind of appeal needed in a major newspaper), but methinks you've got the idea by now. Sometimes the reason you aren't in print has _nothing_ to do with censorship and being oppressed by the establishment,
"Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either"
False. Windows XP runs great in 512 MB RAM.
"as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp."
How about comparing apples to apples? You're comparing an 192 MB RAM machine with XP, to a 512 MB RAM machine with Tiger. We're talking more that 2.5 times difference in memory size. _If_ that's the kind of difference needed to make Windows XP swap like Tiger, then you're just telling me that Tiger is a horrible memory hog.
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I'm not saying that the program "Powerpoint" alone has some intrinsic evil that makes a slide bad by itself. I'm referring to the over-reliance on and mis-use of slide-shows generally, regardless of how they're made (Powerpoint, Open Office, MS Paint, by hand, etc) and how they're presented (computer and beamer, overhead projector, flip-charts, etc).
And especially to the bad idea that ploughing through 2-3 times more content per hour (e.g., via slide-shows) somehow means you learn more. It might well mean you actually learn _less_ and lose whatever motivation and interest you have to start with.
Yes, I've had classes and good teachers that used slides (e.g., via overhead projectors), but here's the thing: they weren't used instead of writing on the blackboard, they were used when an illustration was absolutely needed that one couldn't do as well on the blackboard. E.g., we've had them to show us cell structure and such in biology classes, or some mollecule stuff in Geography.
But more important is what the good teachers didn't use them for. They were definitely not used to flip through maths or physics proofs faster than writing on the blackboard.
Basically that's the thing I am against: the cult of the slide-show, just for slide-show's sake, not against the individual program "Powerpoint". Powerpoint is probably the most used (or "abused") program in that slideshow fetishism, which is why I've used it as a synonym for slide-shows. But, yes, the real problem is precisely that kind of slide-show fetishism, not the actual tool used to produce them.
"In fact, if I were Google, I would be working on Google Browser. Then they could deliver ads whenever someone was browsing the Internet!"
You mean Opera? That's what it does. Serves Google ads as soon as you open the browser, and then for each page you visit.
You seem to assume that they want to improve their site. In which case, yes, anonymous trends and anonymous user movement grouped by session id suffices. (E.g., to see if users give up and leave your site half-way through the marketting bullshit pages, before even reaching the product pages.)
But that's not the problem.
Whenever you see someone going on about how the _need_ to track and identify each user, and they _need_ accurate numbers and even personal details... that's your clue that it's purely an ad money problem. They couldn't care less about the site design or trends as such, they just need some bullshit in numbers to shaft the ad providers with, or viceversa for the ad providers to shaft you with.
The internet started as a pretty clean and ad-friendly place, but it quickly went downhill. The initial ad rates were basically for sites with 1 ad on the main page, that a lot of people actually looked at. But from there it went downhill with site operators trying to shaft the ad providers. (E.g., by trying to collect those rates per ad... for pages that had wall-to-wall ads on each page, scripts that clicked on an ad 1000 times a second, etc.) The ad providers in turn went on to not only try to defend themselves from this kind of fraud, but also to try to commit the exact kind of fraud on the companies paying to advertise.
Welcome to the War Of The Bullshit Metrics. Because that's basically what it is.
All this ranting and raving about unique trackable ids and such, is just the search of the perfect metric so an ad provider can (A) say to the site operator carrying the ads "nah, we're not paying you that much, because while you had users clicking, it wasn't all UNIQUE users", while at the same time (B) telling some clueless company advertising with you "our marketting campain was a huge success because X thousand unique users saw it, and Y thousand clicked on it, and <insert other bogus metrics used often just as a Chewbacca defense>, so you owe us a big wad of money."
The problem with these bullshit metrics is that not only they mis-represent, but often lead to counter-productive campaigns aimed at inflating the metric even if they cause _less_ sales. E.g., once you define the "click" as a metric of success, as opposed to a "sale", you get bullshit fake-UI ads, punch-the-monkey ads, and outright redirects that simulate a click. That's all stuff that isn't aimed at actually raising awareness/interest in a product, but at gaming a sick irrelevant metric.
And the problem is that bogus metrics be damned, the companies paying for it aren't seeing results out of it. They just see some metrics by which the ad campaign should have been a huge success, except the expected blip in sale tends to be missing completely.
The ad provider's solution? Trying to make that bullshit sound more credible. All this talk about uniquely identifying users and accurately counting everything, is mostly trying to make something sound like a science, when it's just bullshit. They want to present something like they have some solid scientific proof that for your X thousand dollars, you're accurately and guaranteed getting Y thousand whatever, within Z% accuracy.
And it's partially "Chewbacca defense". They deflect the attention from whether their service actually works, to how accurately they measured some bullshit irrelevant metric. And then dazzle your with some equally irrelevant pseudo-science bullshit as to why and how their measurements are so accurate. But again, completely avoiding the question of what it will do for _your_ _product_.
And the same kind of a war of the bullshit metrics sometimes also goes on inside a company. When marketting departments need to justify their budgets, what do you think they reach for? I'll tell you what. The exact same kind of bullshit metrics that show how accurately and scientiffically they got you X thousand hits. and Y thousand unique tracked users, and whatever.
So the next time you see such a "the sky is falling if we
Just being able to cram more material in a bunch of bulletted lists, and flip pages quickly, doesn't mean people will understand more.
1. Humans aren't like a hard drive, that you can just dump megabytes per second into. The human mind has actually very limited bandwidth, as such, but is actually a sort of a pipeline, with buffers behind buffers. Any one overflowing will mean information being discarded.
Wisecracks like "but then I suppose most students aren't going to complain about courses having less content" are good and fine, but miss the point by a mile. It's lazy students complaining about too much content, it's students leaving the class with actually _less_ content they actually assimilated if you just overflow them. And I think it's a _very_ valid complaint if I wasted an hour and ended up none the wiser.
When giving someone new information, they also have to assimilate it in some (preliminary) form. The speed limit for writing on a blackboard and the mere exercise of their transcribing it by hand into a notebook serves just that purpose: gives them a chance to at least move that stuff into the medium term buffer before more stuff is dumped upon them.
Just flipping through lists after lists is just a way to overflow their short term buffer, at which point almost everything after that is just wasted. You could just as well call it a day after that point and let them go home, because they'll be just as wise at the end of it.
That doesn't just apply to classrooms, btw. Even when studying at home, the best thing you can learn about _how_ to learn, is to recognize when you're having a full buffer and take a 10 second break. My grandma taught me that, and frankly, it's been the best advice I've ever got by far.
2. Teaching/learning is also a question of motivation and attention. How much you're left with after class isn't just a function of how fast the teacher could plough through bulleted lists, but how well he/she could hold your attention.
If just giving you the maximum content in the minimum of the teacher's time, all classes would consist of a 10 second, "Read chapters 3, 4 and 5 until next week." Heck, you could even dispense with that. Just give 'em a big list of books at the beginning of the year, don't see them again until the exam. There is a reason why schools and universities don't work like that.
The teacher's role is in a sense also a social one. He/she is there not just as someone to regurgitate information which you could have gotten just as well from a book, but also (or even more importantly) as someone to keep your attention through that.
3. Look at the effect Powerpoint presentations serve at work. Much as management _loves_ colourful powerpoint slides, I've yet to be even in a single meeting where they actually helped. You either end up with far more questions and basically get slowed down to the actual bandwidth that people can digest, and even lower (losing all that speed advantage), or you end up with everyone forgetting everything that was in those slides before even the meeting is over.
I don't know exactly _what_ it is about Powerpoint slides, presumably the 1 and 2 effects, but maybe something else too. But they seem to act more like attention dissipators than something to help focus and memorize and understand. Things that would have been (and occasionally _have_ been) by having someone doing it interactively at the blackboard, seem to go in one ear and out the other when a Powerpoint slideshow is involved.
"I highly doubt anyone is THAT stupid to put THAT big of a security flaw into a system."
Read the article, and the guy is proposing to build exactly that kind of a security flaw into the system.
Flash can use, basically, some local shared storage on your hard drive. This isn't really designed as cookie storage, and doesn't have even the meager safeguards that cookies have. (E.g., being tied only to a domain.) It's really a space that _any_ flash applet can read and write, and currently noone (with half a clue) puts any important data there.
This guy's idea? Basically, "I know, let's store cookies there, precisely _because_ any other flash applet, e.g., our own again from a different page, can read that back again."
Caveat: so can everyone else. I could make a simple flash game that grabs everything stored there, just as you described, and sends it back to me. Including, yes, your session id (so, yes, I can take over your session in any site you were logged in, including any e-commerce sites or your bank) and anything else they stored there.
Since it's used to track your movements through sites, depending how clueless that's programmed, I may (or may not) also be able gather all sorts of other information about you.
So in a nutshell his miracle solution is to build _exactly_ that kind of a vulnerability (not to mention privacy leak) into the system.
So, well, that's the problem with assuming that "noone could be THAT stupid". Invariably when I say that, someone kindly offers himself as living proof that I'm wrong. Soneone CAN be that stupid.
"Do you run Windows? do you or have you ever have a bot using your email address, do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows? Security holes in Windows + baggage may be part of your problem."
Well, I don't know about him, but let me tell you that _I_ don't even have my email address stored anywhere on my computer. I don't actually use any email client or address book there that a bot could scan. The only access I use is web access through HTTPS, and with Mozilla not IE.
So not only I've never had a bot on my machine, but even if (ad absurdum) one managed to get on it, it wouldn't actually find that email address anywhere on it. Did that stop me from getting spam? Nope.
I also have co-workers that are on various flavours of BSD and still get spam. (Tangent: you know Linux must be making some nice progress, when you see some people moving _away_ from Linux because it's getting too mainstream for them.)
But let's get back to a piece of that quote which is the real problem:
"do friends that you have given you email address to run Windows?"
So there's this miracle solution that would work only if everyone in the world switched to another OS. Heh. Then it's just not a solution, is it?
So I'd need to do... what, to stop receiving spam? Convince at least two different corporations to 100% migrate to Linux, plus get a whole bunch of people converted even though they have _zero_ use or need for Linux? It's just not a realistic goal, and frankly is an even worse waste of my time than spam is.
"'legitimate' spam is still pretty much the same as other advertising mediums."
Bullshit. There is no such thing as "legitimate spam". Now maybe it's the same as junk mail, but sure as hell not as normal advertising.
Normal advertising works in that it pays for some service provided to me, and which I (individually or some group I belong to) opted in for. E.g., if I visit a web site with advertising banners, I've explicitly made a choice to tolerate those in exchange for the content they pay for. E.g., if I watch a TV station and get 5 minutes of ads every 15 minutes, again, I've decided to tolerate those in exchange for the content they pay for. In either case I can turn the TV off or close the browser, and stop getting those right there and then.
Even with billboards, the community basically decided to use those for funds instead of extra taxes. If enough people decided that they don't want those -- like the people of NZ decided they don't want spam -- they could get the mayor's office to remove them.
Spam doesn't pay for anything, and there was no such "opt-in" involved in getting it in the first place.
Saying that that's like normal advertising, is like saying that picking someone's pocket is no different from normal commerce. Well, no. Normal commerce included other key elements, like being consentual, and like not being a unilateral affair. Normal commerce isn't just me giving money to someone, it's also getting something in return, and having the free choice whether I want to do it or not. The moment you take those key elements away, it just becomes something else.
The same applies to spam. I can see why spammers try to muddy the distinction, but a distinction it still is. If it's sorta like normal advertising... except it's not consensual, and doesn't give you anything in return for tolerating it, then it's just _not_ normal advertising.
It's especially that part about allowing them to send notifications for "new" stuff, regardless of whether you opted out before or not, that's especially worrying me. It's a free license to spam.
Think about it. It doesn't say new _categories_, so it doesn't even have to mean they'd have drop penis enlargement pills once you've opted out. They can make you opt out of _one_ _product_ at a time, then rename it or call it a new version, and spam you some more.
E.g., spam advertising porn, could spam you with a different combination of web site and category in each batch of mails, and opting out of one wouldn't prevent them from sending the next batch. They could just make a bogus "hosted site" for each batch, which just redirects to the main one, but hey, it's for a "new" service (site) you haven't yet opted out of. So they're allowed.
In fact, it makes it worse than no opt-out at all. To actually unsubscribe from all that, you'd have to actually open the message and look for the unsubscribe link for that product, then email the spammer. From a spammer's perspective it's actually better: they made you open and read his spam instead of just looking at the message and deleting it.
So seeing MS back such a license to spam with impunity, makes me really worry.
"Why should they change their web sites because of idiots?"
Yes, because their higher level managers were idiots who wanted to spam in the first place. Otherwise they wouldn't have "opted you in" by default. (Read: shanghaied into a spam database. Being added by default is _not_ "opt in".)
At any rate, I fail to see why I'd have to protect them from their own idiocy. If they were idiotic enough to spam in the first place, just having to change their web site isn't even much of a punishment. So they can just get to it.
"remember they are out to make a profit and not to force you into some moral high ground."
Yes, and thieves, muggers and burglars are out to make a profit too, but that doesn't mean we have to tolerate them. And throwing bricks through people's windows would be an outstanding way to make a profit for someone selling glass panes, but we sure as hell don't have to tolerate that. And scratching people's cars would be an outstanding way to drum up business for shops that can paint them back, but we don't allow that. And dumping chemicals into rivers is a _great_ way to bump up your profits, by not needing to buy filters and/or safely store toxic stuff. Needless to say, we don't allow that. Etc.
So the "but they're out to make a profit" isn't a blanket excuse for any sociopathic behaviour. If someone's making a profit comes at the expense of annoying millions of others, _and_ polluting a common resource, it is perfectly reasonable to ask them to stop.
And if they don't want to, we'll vote laws that make them stop. Believe it or not, most of us live in a "democracy". (Well, except for the USA, which seems mostly run by corporations and getting the laws that the corporations want. E.g., CAN-SPAM. I'm not sure what the term for that is. "Oligarhy" maybe?)
There is no ammendment that says a corporation has a sacred right to make a profit, by whatever means they can think of, no matter how detrimental to the country or people. And if there was, we'd repel it.
A corporation has to live by the rules set by society, and hopefully for the good of society. If one turns into a predator that causes only harm in its quest for more profits, then it no longer fits the reason why we let it exist in the first place, and it should be stopped. It's that simple.
"Opt out or quit bitching."
Get a fucking clue _and_ quit bitching.
1. If it's a different study, they should have kept it as a different study. It's however presented implicitly as proof of that causation they wave around. And the whole proof part is in fact just missing.
2. It's precisely that "or" that bothers me, and even more importantly the other "or", the implicit one in the "involved in physical altercations" semantics sleight-of-hand. It's basically saying that someone was either _aggressor_ (which is the implicit meaning in "games cause violence) or _victim_ (which is a whole other thing.)
Anything based on sweeping the difference between aggressor and victim under the carpet, is just bullshit.
E.g., by the exact same semantics sleight of hand, you could say that roughly equal numbers of men and women were "involved in a rape" (I'm assuming that most of them are one-on-one), therefore women are roughly as inclined as men to rape someone. Or that equal numbers of men and women are involved in a spouse-beating incident (it's equal numbers by default since it's one spouse beating the other), hence women are just as inclined as men to beat up their spouse.
In practice both are the same kind of verbal fallacy as that commited here.
3. I don't care whose seal of approval it has, the whole thing is partisan and profoundly unscientific.
Compare it to the Illinois university one, because that one is how real scientists work: that one goes above and beyond the call of duty to tell you what it is _not_, what was really measured, _how_ it was measured, and what are the limitations and potential sources of errors in that.
Whereas this one is a PR hack doing all sorts of political speech tricks, including sneaking in a study as "proof" of something it isn't. It skips over every single thing that a real science experiment _must_ include, in their rush to take a running jump at the conclusion you want to hear.
Even as high school science goes, if I handed in a physics experiment in this form, completely skipping any details and estimated error calculations, I'd have gotten a failing grade. If some major national association's standards are even lower than that, I just can't take them seriously.
4. It's not as much whether they're bought or not, it's that everything I've seen from them so far is more like political whoring than anything even vaguely resembling science. They've been behind anything that looks like a populist enough cause, or what might get them a government grant. If I look back as far as the 50's, for example in the "comics are evil and make kids violent" bullshit that was eerily similar to today's gaming scare, what do you know? They had some political whole psychologist providing those "proofs" and "correlations" too.
It's not acting and it's not sounding like a scientific association, but like the high-school prom queen of Washington associations and lobbies.
Because that too was the subject of a "waah, think of the CHILDREN" bullshit, complete with government investigations and all, long before Rock and Roll, horror movies, D&D, and now games got the end of that exact same stick.
Thing is, back then most people didn't even believe that comic-books were to blame. They had a survey which already pretty much told you what the surveyor wants to hear (a known factor in getting skewed results: people tend to give the answers that they subconsciously think you'd like.) And in this case they wanted to hear, among other things, which juvenile crimes can you blame on comics, if you try really hard to make a connection.
Yet about 60% felt that there was no link, and about 70% that regulating comics would have no effect on crime.
Not that something like that would stop a bullshit politician from making even more noise about it.
Disclaimer: This post too is backed by nothing more than my unqualified opinion.
"Football just happens to attract alpha males who have inferiority complexes and decide to take out their aggression on others to hide that complex."
I won't disaggree with that assessment, because it closely mirrors my observations in computer games. Games based on conflict and aggression tend to attract a lot more people who are, basically, aggressive.
E.g., going from CS to Sega's Phantasy Star Online (a strictly coop game) on the Dreamcast, or later revisiting UO's strictly non-PK facets after they were re-introduced, was like going to a whole different world. It's not just that it wasn't the same "ur a faggot" crowd, that people were really _nice_.
I've had perfect strangers stop by and lend my newbie character their magic sword on UO so I can finish an ogre I was fighting, or taking my newbie character to their castle so I can get water from their fountain to bake bread. The "going above and beyond the call of duty to help a total stranger" kind of nice. (I guess I see why PK-ers call us "carebears", and wth, I'll wear that badge with pride.)
Still, football does attract a _lot_ of assholes. And I mean also among the most rabid fans, not just among the players. A football player might be a hard-working athlete who supports charities, but a thousand of his fans will go beat someone up (e.g., their wives) to either celebrate a victory or to vent frustration for a defeat.
Presumably because it's _based_ on conflict, and tries to hype its fans like for a war. E.g., my brother was remarking a couple of months ago about how here they use the word "kampf", i.e., "fight", for any football event. They don't say "team A _played_ a _game_ against team B", they say quite literally "team A _fought_ team B". And that's just one of the combat metaphors used. Some days, if you deleted all names, it would be hard to tell if you're reading about a football game or another offensive in Iraq.
I'm not saying that all football fans are assholes, nor that football made them so. But if you took an already violent and complexed guy, chances are he'll be more attracted to football than to, say, chess.
So basically correlation could be made between football and violence, that's vastly better than the one between video games and violence. Yet noone tries to ban football.
From TFA:
" "Research indicates exposure to violence in video games increases aggressive thoughts, aggressive behavior and angry feelings among youth, the association said in a statement issued Wednesday. In addition, the APA statement said, this exposure reduces helpful behavior and increases physiological arousal in children and adolescents. "
So:
A) While they might have measured _some_ correlation (more about that later), what they present it as is causation. Sorry, there's no other way to read that.
It doesn't say "we found some correlation between violence in school and the fact that some people involved were playing games." It goes on and on about how it _makes_ you violent, makes you think violent thoughts (although even as a correlation, that appears nowhere in their actual study), makes you refuse to help other people, teaches you that violence is _the_ solution, teaches you that violence doesn't have consequences, etc. That's all one big lump that's presented as a clear cut cause-effect issue, not just as a correlation to base future studies on.
B) Even as a correlation, they just didn't measure that, any way you want to slice it.
If you look at what they measured, it's not even measuring one variable, it's lumping together such disparate issues as being an aggressor, being a _victim_, and questioning authority. E.g., if you're a gaming nerd and a jock (who doesn't play games) beats you up in school, congrats, according to them you're part of the "games cause violence" sample.
The whole thing is a textbook example of a Verbal Fallacy: they switch between two very different meanings of "violence". They use one definition in their sample (basically "any kind of physical conflict"), and another definition in their conclusion (basically "aggressor"). _And_ if that wasn't enough, they include stuff in the sample that doesn't fit either one.
"In any event, that variable could interact in that it enabled the relationship or made the relationship stronger, but it cannot somehow unmake this correlation as some people seem to think."
Again, you miss some points:
1) Again, it was presented as causation, not correlation. They presented it as: games _make_ you violent, less helpful, etc. And that can very well be "unmade", if another issue is the dominant cause.
2) In fact there isn't even that much to "unmake", since there was no "make" to start with. They haven't made a point, they just took a big leap of faith that isn't supported by _any_ logic or data. So there isn't anything to "unmake".
Even if I was to accept that correlation (although it's bullshit anyway), from there to the causation they present, it's just one big leap of faith. There's a whole big pile of work to be done in between finding a correlation between A and B, and concluding that A _causes_ B. Work which involves precisely separating all those other variables and their own influence on the measured result.
It's the kind of leap of faith like starting from "I've noticed a correlation between being thin and tall and being a maths nerd" (hey, that's the kind of maths nerds I've met in school), and extrapolating that going on a diet will improve your maths grades. Sorry, no. There is nothing to "unmake" there, since the whole "make" part between that correlation and the conclusion is just completely missing.
"So why bother doing studies at all?"
Definitely not to take them as more than just that: one correlational study, which says nothing about cause-effect. The study does raise some questions and can serve as a base for further studies on the topic, yes. But that's about it. It's not something that's become the One Truth, to be carved in stone, and that noone should dare question.
"This study presumably was peer reviewed, by the way."
I'd be interested by whom. The tobacco companies "there's no correlation between smoking and lung diseases" stud
My own questions are:
1. Which kind of physical altercations? No, seriously. There is a _major_ difference between being the aggressor and the victim.
Children get bullied for being "nerds" and "dorks" every day. So any study that just takes a blanket "involved in physical altercations" category, is from the start including the victims in that category.
Can you really say that games made someone violent, when they were the one beat up? By WTF of a definition of becoming violent? "Yeah, he violently had his face in front of someone's fist."
2. In the rare cases when a nerd does attack, in how many cases they were in fact provoked? Because that's the more common link that the politicians love to ignore: someone was tormented every day, and finally _that_ is what made them snap and fight back.
E.g., Columbine, as an extreme case, was not just a case of two happy kids that just got corrupted by video games and turned into killers. We're talking people who got bullied day after day, into desperation and beyond. And they finally snapped. Happens to non-gaming adults too: you give someone continuous stress, they eventually snap. Look up "postal" on wikipedia someday.
So if you bully someone every day, and they finally fight back, by WTF of a definition it's the games alone that caused that?
3. Arguing with "authority figures" instead of being sheep is already a different category, so I'm not even sure by WTF of a stretch of the meaning it's lumped together with "violence". Disobedience is quite different from beating someone up.
4. On the "autority figures" topic again: what is the cause and what is the effect there?
Because for example a common group that's having problems with authority figures _and_ with bullies, which is what gets them often bullied, are Asperger's Syndrome sufferers. The inability to distinguish body language can get one in all sorts of trouble of exactly that kind.
Incidentally Asperger's Syndrom also makes one more likely to like computers instead. Either programming or video games, stuff that's on a computer tends to be stuff that you can do/play on logic alone.
So what is the cause and what is the effect there? Are games _really_ the cause there, or are we talking two different effects of autism. Until they actually separate those in a different category, for a segment of their study they're basically pulling a "A => B and A => C, therefore B => C".
Even then, you can actually string together something that at least looks (semi)intelligent as an explanation.
E.g., the UK produces more games and sells more copies than the USA. That's a bit surprising, but it's a fact. So one could explain it as, basically, with the rise in video game popularity, more money were earned from games, which meant bigger budgets for games (again, it's a fact: a game today has a much bigger budget than in '95), which means more people employed in the game industry.
So while video games obviously can't account for _all_ the jobs created in that interval, they did however create a few of those.
The "games cause violence" can't even show that kind of effect. You'd expect to see _some_ correlation before proclaiming causation like they do.
Unlike game employment in the UK, with games we're talking a major population segment. There _millions_ of people playing games, and increasing each year. We're talking some tens of millions of current-generation game consoles alone sold in the USA, so a _major_ segment of their youth has at least one of those. Even poorer people have those: a recent study linked-to on Slashdot said that blacks and hispanics actually play more.
So if such a large segment of the population, maybe even the majority, were subject to such a constant pressure towards violence, I'd expect to see _some_ correlation. Maybe not a nation-wide increase, but ffs, then show me something else, like that areas/groups who play more showed less of a decline in violence.
"Sports games MUST exhibit a growth in visual relaity, or gameplay reality. They have no other way to grow."
And, without contradicting what you've said, but rather as a tangent, that's a path of diminishing returns. Going from 300 to 1000 polygons per character is a much bigger visual improvement than going from 3000 to 10,000.
And I already know one game that's at 30,000 polygons per character (The Singles). While you can see occasional places for improvement if you really zoom in ("hmm, that sweater's neck kinda looks like a dodecagon instead of round") I just can't see how going 100,000 polygons would make more than a subtle difference.
That's not limited to sports games. In any game the graphics alone make less and less of a difference between last year's game and this year's. (E.g., I'm playing PSO Blue Burst ATM, and while you can tell that the old Dreamcast graphics they reused are low polygon count, they're not visually offensive.) Sports games just have this problem more because, in your words, they don't have much else to improve.
Worse yet, going ultra-high resolution and polycount becomes really a handicap to overcome, because when you give people that detail level, they start noticing details that don't match or don't animate exactly like the real thing. So the work to make the magic still happen increases a lot.
Again, that's not limited to sports games. E.g., EQ2 went the ultra-realistic graphics route and just created the criticism that the graphics look "sterile". They're high polygon count and all, but that just encourages you to expect more details to match RL... and notice that they just don't. By comparison, WoW's slightly cartoonish look generated a lot less criticism, and (surprisingly) a lot of people find it easier to suspend disbelief in that.
Sports games don't really have that escape either, and in any case it would be a one-shot affair.
Well, that's good and insightful, but I can't see what's preventing online comics from doing stuff in advance too.
Still, all I'm saying is that Sexy Losers has produced a total of 2 strips or so this year. They're high quality and all, but I think it's a fairly safe bet that it's just not enough for a magazine. Now I'm not whining about it or anything, just saying that at a wild guess that seems a more likely explanation than censorship.
Mitnick is, simply put, a psychopath. The white collar kind, not the chainsaw murderer type. As described here and linked to on Slashdot today.
Read that link, in case you haven't, and see how he has _all_ the traits described there. In spades. (Including reinventing his past as he sees fit, and the social engineering part, and generally everything.)
More than that, he's worked hard at proving to the judge that he's just that: a psychopath with zero empathy or remorse. In fact he still works at it.
So let me get this straight: so basically you're condemning a judge for keeping a _psychopath_ in custody?
Dunno, it seems to me like presenting yourself as a clear-cut psychopath to a judge is... anything but smart. That's just the kind of personality that justice is supposed to keep off the streets.
Seems to me like anyone making that case to a judge is _asking_ to be kept locked with no bail.
Looking through your list, you seem more to be going by the popular myth that "psychopath == axe murderer" rather than the "lacks empathy and is entertained by power games" definition and profile that TFA gave you.
Stalin for example was brutal and certainly responsible for more deaths than Hitler. And I do not only in WW2. Pre-WW2 he starved the peasants (ask any ucrainian about that, because they got the shit end of the stick the worst) and executed his own officers.
But it's very arguable if he fits _any_ of the personality traits of a psychopath. He wasn't some charismatic leader that manipulated people, he was a paranoid asshole surrounded literally by yes-men.
For that matter it's hard to even judge whether he had any empathy or not, because _any_ kind of information that could trigger an empathic response was filtered before it got to him. Don't assume that anyone went and told him "but, comrade, we're executing innocent people" or "but, comrade, millions of ukrainian people have already _literally_ starved to _death_." The information he got were more like "yes, comrade Stalin, we're taking care of the conspirators as you ordered" or "yes, comrade Stalin, we'll levy more grains as you ordered. The peasants have plenty. It's only, uh, some traitors paid by the enemy agencies that hoard their grain to sabotage your enlightened leadership. Yes, we'll take care of them." Yes-men tend to have that filtering effect.
Also you may notice that the USSR as a whole was essentially run like a corporation, rather than as Karl Marx's idealistic communist utopia. For a long while Stalin cared only about profits (e.g., exported grain) and investments (e.g., into factories and machineries.)
So even _if_ he were a psychopath, then you've basically just showed me a corporation run by a psychopath. I don't think it invalidates the point.
I've actually worked with nice people in management positions. Even from the bad managers I've seen, the ways in which one can be "bad" at one's job are more diverse than being a psychopath or sociopath. Psychopaths do exist, they're not a majority.
Also, for a start, I don't think that berating someone is necessarily bad (much less a sign of being a psychopath). People make mistakes, or do something wrong, or whatever. _I_ make mistakes. I like to think a good manager would tell me when that's the case. (But don't blow it out of proportion, and don't forget the positive feedback too when/if that's deserved.)
I also don't think that "exploiting" someone is a crime. For better or worse, selling my work to a company is the way the economy works. A manager is there to manage and organize that process.
You can think of it as a necessary evil. Personally I don't even consider it "evil". If the boss is doing a good job of organizing things, that's less chaos for me to deal with, so that's actually improving my life.
And, anyway, if they do their job well, I see no problem with them earning a living out of that.
There _are_ ways to be an asshole about it, and yes I've seen awful assholes in management positions. But there are also ways of doing that job without being an asshole.
Well, look, I'm not saying I'm for gang rape as such or anything. It's not like I've singled that out as the only punishment fit for him or anything.
I just want the guy to suffer, that's all. I want the next one who gets such an idea to cringe at the very thought.
Yeah, ok, thinking logically and on a general level, I'll even aggree that we should abolish prison rape. Seems like a reasonable thing to expect from a civilized country, after all.
But nevertheless, a little nasty part of me wants the spammers to suffer for the large scale damage they're doing, even in some other way. That's all I'm saying.
To be honest, I don't really care in which way he suffers. Put him in solitary confinement for 15 months, for all I care. (Which would also prevent any kind of rape, right?) Make him hand-write an apology to each and every single person in those 25 million accounts he's sold, like someone else suggested. At 10 seconds per apology, if he writes reasonably fast, and a (humane) 8 hours a day, 7 days a week, schedule, he should be done with it in about 23 years and 9 months. Whatever, really.
What, my asking to actually learn the basics of the job you're _paid_ to do makes me "elitist"? Heh.
See, the point isn't that we want him to have an orgasmic good time in prison. Everyone who's wishing ass rape upon him, well, that's just the point. We want him to suffer as horribly as possible.
In fact, personally I'd even wish for a death sentence for that kind of thing. Does it seem disproportionate compared to the crime? Let's do some maths.
We're talking a scumbag who's caused 7 _billion_ spam mails to be sent. Even assuming it takes only a second to delete a spam mail (it takes more, but ok), then 7 billion seconds is 221.8 years he's stolen out of other people's lives.
Again, that's on a _very_ conservative 1-second-a-spam-mail rate. A more realistic estimate (including the unholy amounts of time spent configuring filters, dealing with false positives, help relatives clean their computer after they got 0wn3d by clicking on some spam link, etc, because of that spam) would be in the thousands of years range.
By comparison a murderer deprives someone of how many years? 20? 40? And we can hang someone for that.
What these spam/virus/phishing/whatever fucktards are doing is, if you will, the difference between stealing 1000$ from someone, and stealing 1$ each from 100,000 people. The collective time wasted and the damages done each year are in the same range as murdering several hundreds of people per year.
So why is everyone that horrified when one goes to jail for that? (Or when in this case we wish really horrible things happening to them there.)
Even leaving that kind of maths out, their deed against society isn't some mild victimless mis-demeanor. It's outright plundering and laying waste to a valuable resource, on a scale that makes the pirates of the Carribean look like mild mannered gentlemen. _And_ causing a _major_ waste of time and money to everyone, for a far lesser gain to themselves.
We're talking the kind of looter and pillager that causes billions in losses to gain maybe 1/1000 of that.
And so far I haven't even counted indirect damage, such as the fact that the resource as a whole has become a lot less useful or used. We're at the point where an email from a stranger, and doubly so one with an attachment or from another country, is more likely to get deleted than read, and some people argue for mass-blocking whole countries off the net. We had a valuable communication resource, and these fucks polluted it until it became all but useless.
So why is it that wrong to want bad things to happen to them? I know, it's not nice, it's not humanitarian, etc. But they _are_ doing very bad things to all of us as a whole, so, well, it's not hard to end up wishing some nasty things would happen to them in return.
I'll kindly point your attention to one of the definitions you yourself have highlighted: " 1. The application of scientific and mathematical principles to practical ends such as the design, manufacture, and operation of efficient and economical structures, machines, processes, and systems. "
You may notice certain words in there like "scientific" or "mathematical". So, sad to say, an ex-burger-flipper who faked a resume and copies-and-pastes from tutorials he doesn't even _understand_, doesn't fit that definition any way you want to stretch it.
I've worked with people who know their trade and spent two decades learning to do a solid engineering job even without a university degree, yes. But the vast majority of ex-burger-flippers turned VB "engineers" just because it paid better, nope, sorry, are not doing anything even _vaguely_ resembling engineering. (Software or otherwise.)
The vast majority don't even understand the most elementary _basics_ of the science or mathematics behind it. And show no sign of even trying to learn. They'll just do a copy-and-paste job (sometimes via memory, but copy-and-paste job nevertheless) from some tutorial they've seen somewhere, without even understanding what or why happened there.
I fondly call it "cargo cult programming."
The story behind "cargo cults" is that in WW2 airplanes dropped food and supplies on various islands to support their troops there. A lot missed the mark and were found by natives instead. Who never understood what happened there, but some proceeded to pray to the mysterious metal birds to come drop more stuff. And when that didn't happen, they carved statues of airplanes and prayed to them some more.
Well, that's the kind of code I see every day. Code written by someone who never even understood wtf _is_ a factory, or a singleton, or whatever (and much less _mathematical_ stuff like why an algorithm is "O(n*log n)" and another is "O(n*n)" and why the heck that matters. Or even what that funny "O" notation means.) But they proceeded to dutifully make their own mental cult around them, and carve statues to those all over the code.
For bonus points, when the statue they carve isn't even of a pattern that makes sense. Nah, it's of some stupid "optimization" that actually worked only in Java 1.0 or only with a very specific C compiler on some obscure platform, and only under very specific circumstances. But they never understood all that, so they'll faithfully carve statues of it all over the place, in the _awfully_ wrong places.
If that's applying scientific or mathematical principles... eh, I rest my case.
Much as I enjoy reading a good online comic, there are more reasons for them not being in print than some establishment conspiracy to censor them and generally keep them down.
E.g., since you've mentioned Sexy Losers, he's had how many strips in the last year? 1? Maybe 2?
There are plenty of porn comic books (e.g., hentai), and comic strips in adult magazines (e.g., when I last read a Playboy magazine, a long time ago, in a galaxy far away, I seem to remember a comic strip in there too.) So there is no real reason to assume that _the_ reason Sexy Losers isn't in print is the sex-related content. There _are_ places that publish just that kind of thing.
On the other hand, a magazine might want to see a comic from you every day or week. It doesn't matter if today you have a hangover, or you've been lan-partying all night and slept all day, or you're at a comic convention and can't be arsed to draw yours.
Look at Dilbert or Calvin and Hobbes or, better yet, at the one that got attacked by both PvP Online and Penny Arcade: Non Sequitur. I'm not saying the individual comics are better, but I'm saying that they've produced one comic a day for years straight. No "shirt-guy stick-figures" filler strips, no "today (or this month) I don't have time to draw one", no "I forgot I was supposed to draw one in colour for today", no other excuses.
_Some_ online comics (i.e., ignoring the ones which are just crap) are better if you take the individual strips, but can't seem to keep any predictable schedule. Much as I like them, if I had a newspaper, even _I_ wouldn't print them.
That's just one of the problems. I could go on with others (e.g., the fine difference between appealing to a niche, and the kind of appeal needed in a major newspaper), but methinks you've got the idea by now. Sometimes the reason you aren't in print has _nothing_ to do with censorship and being oppressed by the establishment,
"Well, half a gig is what I'd call the bare minimum for an operating system like OS X anyways. People might cry foul, but Windows XP isn't really usable at under that notch either"
False. Windows XP runs great in 512 MB RAM.
"as I can currently tell you, running Windows XP on a box with 192 megs of ram and crying every time I try to close winamp."
How about comparing apples to apples? You're comparing an 192 MB RAM machine with XP, to a 512 MB RAM machine with Tiger. We're talking more that 2.5 times difference in memory size. _If_ that's the kind of difference needed to make Windows XP swap like Tiger, then you're just telling me that Tiger is a horrible memory hog.