What if you run the audio through a 50 Hz (60Hz in America) band reject filter and then add some hum from another time? Then the recording has a different time fingerprint.
When I click the link on my android phone, it redirects to the mobile site, from there back to the normal site, again to the mobile site and on and on, until my browser barfs out. Nice. Engineering at its best.
They have some pretty shitty concepts of digital security. Try all your personal details (everything needed to steal your identity) sent in the clear (or on PDF) over email as practice.
You're overgeneralizing. This never ever happened to me. There are obviously different banks out there. Whenever any bank sends me an email, they mention my name, nothing else. Not even the account number. They don't even send me the URL of their secure web site. It would look suspicious (to me, at least) if they did.
Any sensitive stuff comes either by snail mail (like TANs; this is apparently where other banks save money), or I download it actively from their site.
I haven't worked anywhere this century where the office phones have not been VOIP.
They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.
And no matter how much people twiddle with QOS parameters, if the underlying conncection is s**t then QOS just means "what quality of s**t gets assigned to phone".
In my company the desk phones are VoIP, too. The good part is, they are also IP routers. All IP traffic of workplace PCs goes through them, so the phone decides about priority. AFAIK the phones are meshed into a magic routing network which ensures QoS pretty well. I work in a multinational company where only we in Germany have this kind of phone. All the others use soft phones. And you can tell the difference. The desk phone users' voices are always 100% crisp and clear, while everybody else turns into a robot or disconnects every once in a while. That's pretty annoying, especially in conferences with a dozen participants, so I wish they'd all switch.
I only use ball pens that I abduct from hotel lobbies etc. They are usually quite good, much better than the official office supply at work. Plus they make a nice souvenir. The wooden ones from Scandic are beautiful, too. They suffer from a very short ink tube, but the unlimited supply compensates that.
A simple cross on a paper ballot counted by people is much less error-prone.
Maybe, but then it's slower to count, and recounts are dubious.
Nah! German elections (1/4 of US population) use only paper ballots where you mark one (or more) circle(s) with a cross. Reliable projections are usually available less than 1 hour after the voting has closed; the official result takes around 6 hours. I wouldn't call that slow. But why do you find that the recount is dubious? Just have different people recount the same paper sheets (which is usually done anyway). But even if it were: If you use voting machines, even the *original* count is dubious.
What I didn't understand in the 2000 US election is that Gore was urged to concede defeat quickly, even though it was such a close call. And I understand even less that he actually did. As if pride is more important than a fair election. And then they stopped counting the votes. Which IMHO was against the law and common sense.
Here, the would-be loser would say "Let's wait until all votes are counted." And everyone would agree. It's an important election, so a few hours wait is acceptable.
IMHO feedom of speech should come with responsibility. It is hard to ignore that Fox (ab)uses their power to support a certain political direction. A news channel should try to be unbiased.
Should it? I would prefer it, but then the market wants biased news, which is why you have the opposite of Fox News in MSNBC. The conservative right charges that the mainstream media is biased to the left, and I tend to agree with them. This isn't something I want to see regulated.
I admit that everyone is biased. But the general practice in Germany is that news channels provide only facts by default. Whenever someone expresses their opinion, it is usually marked as such. That's a self-imposed convention AFAICT. With American TV (especially Fox) I have the impression that the separation is not always that clear. It seems that the selection and presentation of news always serves an agenda. (But that could just be my biased POV.)
Disagree. If you can't be bothered to vote, then your voice doesn't count. Seems fair to me. Also, if you aren't going to educate yourself on the choices, I'd rather you didn't vote.
I agree that compulsory voting is problematic. But at least there shouldn't be obstacles to voting. It strikes me as odd that you must register to vote, and in the process you are required to say which party you support (correct me if I'm wrong). This is hardly a secret ballot. In most civilized countries everybody registered citzen above 18 is automagically registered to vote and IMHO this is how it should be.
4. Paper ballots.
Back in 2000 in Bush vs. Gore, paper ballots took center stage at the controversy and prompted the move to electronic.
Not quite. Voting machines were the problem, which were unable to count votes due to hanging chads.
A simple cross on a paper ballot counted by people is much less error-prone. Humans make errors, too, but are better at correcting them.
Disagree. I have a libertarian bent, and freedom to associate and spend money on a common political cause fits in with that.
I have the impression that money is more important than votes in the US electoral system. This doesn't seem right. My spider sense tingles when I read that the quality of a candidate is measured by the amount of donations he receives. This is obvious bribery.
Wow, fuck off. I'm not a fan of Fox News, but I'm not a fan of MSNBC either, and freedom of speech and the press is paramount.
IMHO feedom of speech should come with responsibility. It is hard to ignore that Fox (ab)uses their power to support a certain political direction. A news channel should try to be unbiased.
Well strictly speaking remote processing isn't necessary nor is it always present. Remote storage with redundancy and backup managed by others (Skydrive, dropbox) is really what most people see. If you get any remote processing (aka amazon, Azure) its probably more akin to scalable hosting.
Lumping all those different capabilities under one name helps no-one.
Well, strictly strictly speaking, the cloud doesn't have to be remote at all.
Here is the NIST definition of the cloud, which we use to avoid cloudy wording when it comes to clouds. It doesn't even contain the word remote. It speaks only of availabilty, scalability and the likes.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
Maybe it has to do with the way the discovery of quantum mechanics totally changed science (at least physics). I once read an anecdote about Max Planck. When he started studying physics, his professor told him: "It is nice that you are interested in science, young man, but unfortunately you are a bit late. We have uncovered almost everything. All we need to do is fill the last little corners here and there. So there won't be much interesting left for you." (quoted from my memory..) He couldn't have been more wrong.
Since then, physics as a whole has acquired a more humble stance. From "we know it all" to "we are slowly learning". I think that most physicists share this view, which shows also in the motto on my Exploratorium mug: Where the right answer is a question.
Maybe other fields of science still need to make this discovery by themselves.
I used to disassemble the BASIC interpreter for fun. My favourite part was the one which executes a BASIC command. It pushes the address of the subroutine minus one on the stack, and then calls it with RTS (return from subroutine). Poor man's indexed jump.
Try "I Robot" by Isaac Asimov (1950). Some Science fiction writings dating back to the nineteenth century also covered robots however I am not sure they demanded their own Olympics, although some writers had them trying to take over the earth.
Precisely on the topic of technical enhancements for humans in sports is the novel "Limbo" by Bernard Wolfe from 1952. Well worth a read. It starts with small enhancements for small advantages in sport competitions. In the end of the novel, as far as I can recall, it was highly fashionable (even for couch potatoes) to replace every limb, and those who preferred to keep their bodies unchanged were so old-skool. I remember that it was quite disturbing when I read it.
I found the book in a drawer when they gave me a desk at the university. Thanks to the unknown donator.
The whole idea of "register to vote" is, IMHO, a scam meant to reduce the number of voters.
That's pretty obvious. Maybe it wasn't intended as such, but it is quite convenient for the existing political class. I never understood why there is no broad movement against this in the US.
There is a very good reason for that, back in the early 1900's voter registration did not exist. If a dirty politician wanted to win an election he simply had his friend from the army bring the soldiers he commanded to go vote on the day of election. Registration is used to ensure things like this don't happen, verifying residency is now possible because of registration.
There are two issues with voter registration: First, it creates an obstacle to voting. If voting requires 2 steps, fewer people will vote. Second, (if I understood this correctly; forgive me if I didn't, I don't live in the US) you must publicly register for a party. In other words, voting is not secret. Secret elections areis a prerequisite for democracy). Here in Germany everybody is registered anyway. You might find this problematic for some reason or the other, but at least it ensures that everybody is registered to vote excatly once.
Another thing which disturbs me about the US presidential elections is the winner-takes-all system for a state's members of the electoral committee. This essentially ensures that democrats and republicans remain the only parties, because it makes it hard for a smaller party to win even a small number of seats in the electoral committee. In some cases, running for president even helps the political opponent: In 2000, the votes cast for Ralph Nader who is (arguably) politically closer to the democrats, made Al Gore (arguably) lose Florida, which led to GW Bush's victory.
The whole idea of "register to vote" is, IMHO, a scam meant to reduce the number of voters.
That's pretty obvious. Maybe it wasn't intended as such, but it is quite convenient for the existing political class. I never understood why there is no broad movement against this in the US.
If Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had been American, they would both have been denied both a right to vote and a right to run for office.
But here's the kicker: it's NOT real. [...] And I won't have to deal with Voldemort, either. Kind of a fair trade.
DON'T mention his name!
And BTW, magic IS real, it's just applied maths, see e.g. Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives.
I used to have unrealistic fears involving everything from bogeymen and supernatural beings. I'd have constant nightmares, ones that would ruin my entire day after waking up. That was when I was religious.
Smoking pot can get you into that state, even if you are usually perfectly rational. (Except that you don't remember much of it the next day.) Maybe religious people are naturally stoned.
If it happened here in Germany, everyone would be outraged, and the company would be knee-deep in trouble.
The interesting bit is, it did happen there, but you got over it (with a little help from your friends:-).
Indeed, and I am honestly grateful. We were full of shit back then, and it is invaluable that someone (a lot of people actually) went through hell to beat it out of us. (Talking to my grandparents I learned that it took a generation to appreciate it.)
It is nice, too, that we were given a second chance (in terms of Marshall vs. Morgenthau plan).
I am totally stunned by the fact that it is possible at all for employers do this in the US.
If it happened here in Germany, everyone would be outraged, and the company would be knee-deep in trouble. It would be in the news front pages and on prime-time TV. The employer's reputation would be damaged for a long time. IANAL but I am sure this level of threatening someone's privacy is a criminal offense here.
We went through all the pros and cons of storing cord blood when our kids were born. Finally we decided against it. It looked too much like a rip-off. We felt that the companies that offered services make a big business out of people's fears. IIRC, it's highly unlikely that your kid will be in a condition to benefit from its stem cells. There was no public service at that time in Germany or I would have considered donating it.
Incidentally, we tried it last weekend, after my wife read about it on the web. We called it Darkness Experiment, because the kids love experiments. We did it only 2 days, and with somewhat stricter rules (no electricity at all except fridge/dishwasher/laundry and answering phone calls). Initially my kids wanted to kill me but eventually we played board games under candle light and even *gasp* talked. It was really quite nice, some kind of togetherness which is not usually there. And we all agreed to repeat it some day, but not too soon:-)
If your sig applies to you, and your children inherited it and are aspies, that would explain what is going on perfectly, no need to blame video games at all.
Touché.
Maybe we can meet in the middle and blame being an aspie AND video games. I guess they (the games) precisely hit the trigger which makes susceptible people go bezerk.
My sons (7 and 9) have been exposed to video games for a good year now, mainly Wii and Nintendo DS ("The Tendo").
My tentative summary: All is fine as long as they play short duration games, like Sports or Mario Kart, where a games lasts only a few minutes.
But it's different when they play games with a story that swallows them, like Zelda or Lego Star Wars. I'm convinced that these games do mess with their minds. Sometimes it takes them the rest of the day to get back out of the game. They don't respond any more. OK, this is probably normal between kids and their parents, but there's more: After a game they are overexcited and hyperactive, they can't focus on a single thought, they have headaches, they scream and shout, they tell us that they hate us and they look as if they mean it. Sometimes I can almost see fangs grow on them.
I guess it's because we take away their super powers when we tell them it's time to switch off. And the worst part is they realize how they are (namely aggressive) and they're obviously not happy about it. But of course they want to play again ASAP. This is highly unsettling form a parent's pov.
You can argue whether this is really as bad as it looks from my perspective, but IMHO these are clear symptoms of addiction and negative side-effects. I have come to believe that video games are unhealthy (to some extent) at a young age and would have liked to keep them away from gaming for a bit longer, and feed them football, hide-and-seek and some healthy mud-digging instead. The kids appear much more sane (and happy, and human) after some real-world activity. But of course you can't help them gaming if daddy owns a Wii, and everybody else in school boasts with their elder brother's gadgets.
In order to mitigate the symptoms we have agreed never to play longer than 30 minutes per day in our family. This has helped a bit, but only quantitatively. The outbursts of aggression have become rarer but not less harsh.
Slashdot Mirror
What if you run the audio through a 50 Hz (60Hz in America) band reject filter and then add some hum from another time? Then the recording has a different time fingerprint.
Short version, instinct and intelligence are wildly different things, and humans are far more creatures of the latter than the former.
Sure. Except slashdotters. Missing Option: Breasts!
When I click the link on my android phone, it redirects to the mobile site, from there back to the normal site, again to the mobile site and on and on, until my browser barfs out. Nice. Engineering at its best.
You've obviously never dealt with banks.
They have some pretty shitty concepts of digital security. Try all your personal details (everything needed to steal your identity) sent in the clear (or on PDF) over email as practice.
You're overgeneralizing. This never ever happened to me. There are obviously different banks out there. Whenever any bank sends me an email, they mention my name, nothing else. Not even the account number. They don't even send me the URL of their secure web site. It would look suspicious (to me, at least) if they did.
Any sensitive stuff comes either by snail mail (like TANs; this is apparently where other banks save money), or I download it actively from their site.
I haven't worked anywhere this century where the office phones have not been VOIP.
They are subject to exactly the same issues as the office internet connection, if that happens to be s**t then the phone dammed well does go down (or reverts to unusable quality) when 500 people hit youtube.
And no matter how much people twiddle with QOS parameters, if the underlying conncection is s**t then QOS just means "what quality of s**t gets assigned to phone".
In my company the desk phones are VoIP, too. The good part is, they are also IP routers. All IP traffic of workplace PCs goes through them, so the phone decides about priority. AFAIK the phones are meshed into a magic routing network which ensures QoS pretty well. I work in a multinational company where only we in Germany have this kind of phone. All the others use soft phones. And you can tell the difference. The desk phone users' voices are always 100% crisp and clear, while everybody else turns into a robot or disconnects every once in a while. That's pretty annoying, especially in conferences with a dozen participants, so I wish they'd all switch.
29: I am not very good at remembering phone numbers.
Don't use the phone if I can possibly avoid it
[...]
So add a couple of points to my score.
Subtract a point. As an Apie you'd remember phone numbers EVEN THOUGH you hate using the phone. I do. Score: 39.
I only use ball pens that I abduct from hotel lobbies etc. They are usually quite good, much better than the official office supply at work. Plus they make a nice souvenir. The wooden ones from Scandic are beautiful, too. They suffer from a very short ink tube, but the unlimited supply compensates that.
Why not display images on them? Start with this one, you bent-wristed neckwetter.
The dude has an excuse: he is Dutch, and they legally use apostrophe's for plural's (for some word's).
A simple cross on a paper ballot counted by people is much less error-prone.
Maybe, but then it's slower to count, and recounts are dubious.
Nah! German elections (1/4 of US population) use only paper ballots where you mark one (or more) circle(s) with a cross. Reliable projections are usually available less than 1 hour after the voting has closed; the official result takes around 6 hours. I wouldn't call that slow. But why do you find that the recount is dubious? Just have different people recount the same paper sheets (which is usually done anyway). But even if it were: If you use voting machines, even the *original* count is dubious.
What I didn't understand in the 2000 US election is that Gore was urged to concede defeat quickly, even though it was such a close call. And I understand even less that he actually did. As if pride is more important than a fair election. And then they stopped counting the votes. Which IMHO was against the law and common sense.
Here, the would-be loser would say "Let's wait until all votes are counted." And everyone would agree. It's an important election, so a few hours wait is acceptable.
IMHO feedom of speech should come with responsibility. It is hard to ignore that Fox (ab)uses their power to support a certain political direction. A news channel should try to be unbiased.
Should it? I would prefer it, but then the market wants biased news, which is why you have the opposite of Fox News in MSNBC. The conservative right charges that the mainstream media is biased to the left, and I tend to agree with them. This isn't something I want to see regulated.
I admit that everyone is biased. But the general practice in Germany is that news channels provide only facts by default. Whenever someone expresses their opinion, it is usually marked as such. That's a self-imposed convention AFAICT. With American TV (especially Fox) I have the impression that the separation is not always that clear. It seems that the selection and presentation of news always serves an agenda. (But that could just be my biased POV.)
1. Compulsory voting.
Disagree. If you can't be bothered to vote, then your voice doesn't count. Seems fair to me. Also, if you aren't going to educate yourself on the choices, I'd rather you didn't vote.
I agree that compulsory voting is problematic. But at least there shouldn't be obstacles to voting. It strikes me as odd that you must register to vote, and in the process you are required to say which party you support (correct me if I'm wrong). This is hardly a secret ballot. In most civilized countries everybody registered citzen above 18 is automagically registered to vote and IMHO this is how it should be.
4. Paper ballots.
Back in 2000 in Bush vs. Gore, paper ballots took center stage at the controversy and prompted the move to electronic.
Not quite. Voting machines were the problem, which were unable to count votes due to hanging chads.
A simple cross on a paper ballot counted by people is much less error-prone. Humans make errors, too, but are better at correcting them.
Disagree. I have a libertarian bent, and freedom to associate and spend money on a common political cause fits in with that.
I have the impression that money is more important than votes in the US electoral system. This doesn't seem right. My spider sense tingles when I read that the quality of a candidate is measured by the amount of donations he receives. This is obvious bribery.
Wow, fuck off. I'm not a fan of Fox News, but I'm not a fan of MSNBC either, and freedom of speech and the press is paramount.
IMHO feedom of speech should come with responsibility. It is hard to ignore that Fox (ab)uses their power to support a certain political direction. A news channel should try to be unbiased.
Well strictly speaking remote processing isn't necessary nor is it always present. Remote storage with redundancy and backup managed by others (Skydrive, dropbox) is really what most people see. If you get any remote processing (aka amazon, Azure) its probably more akin to scalable hosting.
Lumping all those different capabilities under one name helps no-one.
Well, strictly strictly speaking, the cloud doesn't have to be remote at all. Here is the NIST definition of the cloud, which we use to avoid cloudy wording when it comes to clouds. It doesn't even contain the word remote. It speaks only of availabilty, scalability and the likes.
It's OK as long you're not seen by two cameras at the same time.
As a physicist, I would like to read a book on why people outside the field consistently refer to large things as quantum. It means 'the smallest discrete amount possible,' not large, composite chunks.
Maybe it has to do with the way the discovery of quantum mechanics totally changed science (at least physics). I once read an anecdote about Max Planck. When he started studying physics, his professor told him: "It is nice that you are interested in science, young man, but unfortunately you are a bit late. We have uncovered almost everything. All we need to do is fill the last little corners here and there. So there won't be much interesting left for you." (quoted from my memory..) He couldn't have been more wrong.
Since then, physics as a whole has acquired a more humble stance. From "we know it all" to "we are slowly learning". I think that most physicists share this view, which shows also in the motto on my Exploratorium mug: Where the right answer is a question.
Maybe other fields of science still need to make this discovery by themselves.
I used to disassemble the BASIC interpreter for fun. My favourite part was the one which executes a BASIC command. It pushes the address of the subroutine minus one on the stack, and then calls it with RTS (return from subroutine). Poor man's indexed jump.
Try "I Robot" by Isaac Asimov (1950). Some Science fiction writings dating back to the nineteenth century also covered robots however I am not sure they demanded their own Olympics, although some writers had them trying to take over the earth.
Precisely on the topic of technical enhancements for humans in sports is the novel "Limbo" by Bernard Wolfe from 1952. Well worth a read. It starts with small enhancements for small advantages in sport competitions. In the end of the novel, as far as I can recall, it was highly fashionable (even for couch potatoes) to replace every limb, and those who preferred to keep their bodies unchanged were so old-skool. I remember that it was quite disturbing when I read it.
I found the book in a drawer when they gave me a desk at the university. Thanks to the unknown donator.
The whole idea of "register to vote" is, IMHO, a scam meant to reduce the number of voters.
That's pretty obvious. Maybe it wasn't intended as such, but it is quite convenient for the existing political class. I never understood why there is no broad movement against this in the US.
There is a very good reason for that, back in the early 1900's voter registration did not exist. If a dirty politician wanted to win an election he simply had his friend from the army bring the soldiers he commanded to go vote on the day of election. Registration is used to ensure things like this don't happen, verifying residency is now possible because of registration.
There are two issues with voter registration: First, it creates an obstacle to voting. If voting requires 2 steps, fewer people will vote. Second, (if I understood this correctly; forgive me if I didn't, I don't live in the US) you must publicly register for a party. In other words, voting is not secret. Secret elections areis a prerequisite for democracy). Here in Germany everybody is registered anyway. You might find this problematic for some reason or the other, but at least it ensures that everybody is registered to vote excatly once.
Another thing which disturbs me about the US presidential elections is the winner-takes-all system for a state's members of the electoral committee. This essentially ensures that democrats and republicans remain the only parties, because it makes it hard for a smaller party to win even a small number of seats in the electoral committee. In some cases, running for president even helps the political opponent: In 2000, the votes cast for Ralph Nader who is (arguably) politically closer to the democrats, made Al Gore (arguably) lose Florida, which led to GW Bush's victory.
The whole idea of "register to vote" is, IMHO, a scam meant to reduce the number of voters.
That's pretty obvious. Maybe it wasn't intended as such, but it is quite convenient for the existing political class. I never understood why there is no broad movement against this in the US.
If Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela had been American, they would both have been denied both a right to vote and a right to run for office.
It did happen to both of them in South Africa.
kW/h on slashdot's front page. What's wrong with this world?
But here's the kicker: it's NOT real. [...] And I won't have to deal with Voldemort, either. Kind of a fair trade.
DON'T mention his name!
And BTW, magic IS real, it's just applied maths, see e.g. Charles Stross: The Atrocity Archives.
I used to have unrealistic fears involving everything from bogeymen and supernatural beings. I'd have constant nightmares, ones that would ruin my entire day after waking up. That was when I was religious.
Smoking pot can get you into that state, even if you are usually perfectly rational. (Except that you don't remember much of it the next day.) Maybe religious people are naturally stoned.
If it happened here in Germany, everyone would be outraged, and the company would be knee-deep in trouble.
The interesting bit is, it did happen there, but you got over it (with a little help from your friends :-).
Indeed, and I am honestly grateful. We were full of shit back then, and it is invaluable that someone (a lot of people actually) went through hell to beat it out of us. (Talking to my grandparents I learned that it took a generation to appreciate it.)
It is nice, too, that we were given a second chance (in terms of Marshall vs. Morgenthau plan).
I am totally stunned by the fact that it is possible at all for employers do this in the US.
If it happened here in Germany, everyone would be outraged, and the company would be knee-deep in trouble. It would be in the news front pages and on prime-time TV. The employer's reputation would be damaged for a long time. IANAL but I am sure this level of threatening someone's privacy is a criminal offense here.
We went through all the pros and cons of storing cord blood when our kids were born. Finally we decided against it. It looked too much like a rip-off. We felt that the companies that offered services make a big business out of people's fears. IIRC, it's highly unlikely that your kid will be in a condition to benefit from its stem cells. There was no public service at that time in Germany or I would have considered donating it.
One suggestion - Blackout Weeks.
Incidentally, we tried it last weekend, after my wife read about it on the web. We called it Darkness Experiment, because the kids love experiments. We did it only 2 days, and with somewhat stricter rules (no electricity at all except fridge/dishwasher/laundry and answering phone calls). Initially my kids wanted to kill me but eventually we played board games under candle light and even *gasp* talked. It was really quite nice, some kind of togetherness which is not usually there. And we all agreed to repeat it some day, but not too soon :-)
If your sig applies to you, and your children inherited it and are aspies, that would explain what is going on perfectly, no need to blame video games at all.
Touché.
Maybe we can meet in the middle and blame being an aspie AND video games. I guess they (the games) precisely hit the trigger which makes susceptible people go bezerk.
My sons (7 and 9) have been exposed to video games for a good year now, mainly Wii and Nintendo DS ("The Tendo").
My tentative summary: All is fine as long as they play short duration games, like Sports or Mario Kart, where a games lasts only a few minutes.
But it's different when they play games with a story that swallows them, like Zelda or Lego Star Wars. I'm convinced that these games do mess with their minds. Sometimes it takes them the rest of the day to get back out of the game. They don't respond any more. OK, this is probably normal between kids and their parents, but there's more: After a game they are overexcited and hyperactive, they can't focus on a single thought, they have headaches, they scream and shout, they tell us that they hate us and they look as if they mean it. Sometimes I can almost see fangs grow on them.
I guess it's because we take away their super powers when we tell them it's time to switch off. And the worst part is they realize how they are (namely aggressive) and they're obviously not happy about it. But of course they want to play again ASAP. This is highly unsettling form a parent's pov.
You can argue whether this is really as bad as it looks from my perspective, but IMHO these are clear symptoms of addiction and negative side-effects. I have come to believe that video games are unhealthy (to some extent) at a young age and would have liked to keep them away from gaming for a bit longer, and feed them football, hide-and-seek and some healthy mud-digging instead. The kids appear much more sane (and happy, and human) after some real-world activity. But of course you can't help them gaming if daddy owns a Wii, and everybody else in school boasts with their elder brother's gadgets.
In order to mitigate the symptoms we have agreed never to play longer than 30 minutes per day in our family. This has helped a bit, but only quantitatively. The outbursts of aggression have become rarer but not less harsh.