Even among cattle, where it is *most* common, it is still rare. The entire North American herd has only had, I believe, 2 confirmed cases of BSE in something close to 50 years. I would hardly call that common.
True, though to be fair, there hasn't really been much *testing* of the North American herd.
The Dept of Agriculture is still trying to figure out what the criteria for testing should be, so it isn't really being done at all systematically yet.
And remember, the cow here in Washington state that was found to be BSE positive, was essentially tested by accident. It was not a "downer cow" as originally reported. The person who slaughtered it had just been a hurry, and killed it outside the slaughterhouse proper for his own convenience. If not for that, it would have never been tested at all.
I have no opinion on whether any of the meat is actually dangerous to humans. But the testing regime is a joke, that is just designed to make people feel better, not to actually catch anything.
Protectionism is always self-defeating in the end, be in trade or in labour. If you want foreign companies to stop investing in the USA and creating jobs for Americans, what better way than to take protectionist measures that will instantly invite retaliation?
Just checking here. Are you saying that the only thing wrong with protectionist measures is that they invite retaliation from other countries? If so, the obvious thing to do would be to pass measures which are primarily meant for another purpose (ie national security) but which have a secondary effect of protecting our workers from outsourcing. Put another way: if the only problems are PR problems, then we just need to do better PR.
Companies that could make components on their own account choose to sub-contract work out to smaller suppliers because they can do the same work cheaper and better.
I know this is just conventional wisdom, but I've never been able to figure out why this would be true. The buzzwords I here talk about the "efficiency" and "innovation" that a smaller nimbler company can bring to the process. But really, how can adding another layer of profit-taking bring component costs down?
Understand, I am speaking as an accountant in a manufacturing environment. As such, I've been involved in bringing outsourced work back in-house. What my experience is, is that outsourcing is cheaper for the first year or so, while they get you sucked in, but that soon after, either the price goes up or the quality goes down.
I am also very leery, of paying someone else to learn how to be my competitor. Once another company can build my product for me, why do my customers need me anymore, when they can cut out the middleman and save money? A non-compete contract? That might work domestically, but there are plenty of countries (yes, I'm looking at you, China), who aren't all that vigorous at helping enforce those.
Does outsourcing sometimes make sense? Yes. Has it been extended to situations where it doesn't make sense? Yes. Who ends up being the losers from this? The workers and shareholders of the company doing the outsourcing.
The reason why Dune will never have the same following as LoTR is because, well, the sequels sucked.
OK, that's too strong. But each additional book *diminished* the universe, both because the quality wasn't as good, and because they kept changing the essential nature of the universe.
In Tolkien, you could, at a gut level, feel how the whole history of Middle-Earth had gone (and would go), just from reading the Fellowship of the Ring. You couldn't do that with Dune. And everytime the nature of the universe changes, the reader loses a bit of the emotional connection.
That said, the original Dune was amazing. The Lynch movie was interesting, but incomprehesible. (I saw it when it was first released, and you know it's a bad sign when they are handing out a program in the lobby, so that you have a prayer of following it.) I actually really liked the SF miniseries. But the best adaptation of it is still the Avalon Hills board game.
The thing about Tolkien's work is that he was more interested in building the world than he was in telling the story. All the long-winded asides describing the countryside, or telling about how such-and-such happened here two thousand years ago; those weren't extra bits, that was the *point*. That style of putting things together works for some people, and doesn't for others. I find that the type of people who really enjoy Tolkien are the kind of people who would sit down and read just about *any* well-written history text for pleasure.
I always tell people to keep slogging through the book until they get to Moria, which is when the plot really picks up. If it still doesn't interest them then, it's not going to.
The low-price article may have individual identifying RFID data that must NOT be scanned at the checkout counter, not even after you and maybe your helper have left the store (Remember the security cameras, they could potentially match up your face at the automatic checkout with the article!). Also, again if the RFID data uniquely identifies the article another customer could take it to the automatic checkout and the system could mark the article as already sold in its database meaning you can't purchase it in lieu of the cam-corder. You must disable / destroy the low-price article's RFID tag either physically or with the forger.
How many stores are going to use a system that robust, though? It sounds like you would just be asking for false positives if you had the cashier disallow any sale that showed as a duplicate. I say that, not knowing anything much about RFID, but knowing a bit about inventory control. Maybe flash the cashier a warning to double-check the item, but no more than that--you're much more likely to piss off a good customer than catch a thief.
But really, just like anything else, the real danger here is from employees or ex-employees. They are the ones who will know what the security measures are, or will have access to the appropriate equipment for that store. Or the master database.
The Democratic party at that time was a very mixed party in a way that neither party could be today. The Northern Democrats tended to be rather liberal. The Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats) tended to vote like Republicans. *BUT* many white Southerners had such visceral reactions against the Republican party (because of Reconstruction) and for the Democratic party (because of FDR), that they didn't care about the politics. They voted for Democrats because Republicans were scoundrels and bad people, not because of their "stands" on the "issues".
So I think that it is more true that "the people who ran the South called themselves Democrats," then that "the Democrats ruled the South". Because the national party didn't have much say in how the Democrats ran the South. (And why should they, they were Damn Yankees, after all.)
It was Reagan that finally gave Southerners "permission" to vote Republican. And then in the mid-80s, many of those Southern Democrats changed parties and became Republicans. (For example, I distinctly remember campaigning for Phil Gramm when he was running as a Democrat--rather difficult to believe now.)
So trying to attach any "legacy" to the parties is really silly--they're not the same as they were 20 years ago, let alone 40 years or more.
That's right, I'd repressed that. And our city wasn't even that big before they fixed that.
What I remember is trying to clear out the shops ahead of a seige, when you could only remove one item at a (laggy) time. I never had to deal with thieves around while I was doing that, but I know others did.
That's kind of how "tradeskills" work in Shadowbane. I put in in quotes because characters don't have tradeskills of their own, but what you are able to do is use gold to build shops and hire crafters. You then order the crafters to build what you want them to, and it takes a set amount of time (from 2 min to 4 hours, depending on the item, and their level) to finish the item. (And they can work on up to 7 items simultaneously, too, at no penalty.)
The main problem is that to work at maximum efficiency (which you need to, to be able to pay your weekly rent, wages, and material cost) you have to log in about every 4 hours, or even more often. (If you have every kind of shop, it can take an hour just to go through all of them and issue build orders.). So what you really need is a group of people to do this for you. And you sure better trust those other people, cause by giving them permission to create items, you're also giving them permission to empty out the cashbox, or take any of the items. (And if you're not careful with permissions, to steal or destroy the shop and hireling.) This is why most crafting in Shadowbane is done by guilds rather than individuals. Which means that most people don't end up ever getting to use the crafting system in the game at all.
It also means that crafting objects to keep the city going gets to be a chore, that you typically spend half your playtime on.
Well, I think that the 2000 election *should* have been a wake-up call to the Democratic party that they were starting to lose their base and needed to shift a bit more to the left. But 9/11 so changed the political landscape that that message became irrelevant. (Or, IMO, *seemed* to become irrelevant.)
There is an amount that the D's could move to coopt the Greens policies, and so win them back those voters. However, that would also lose them some more mainstream voters. Where exactly the balance is, is the billion dollar question. After the election, we'll know if they moved the right distance, too far, or not far enough. (Or we won't know, but we'll just argue about it.)
As for Perot's candidacy injecting fiscal sanity back into the Republican party, I think you're making the obvious mistake. IMO, it was the *Democrats* who learned fiscal discipline. To my mind, the thing that Clinton deserves praise for is that he pretty much gave up most of his domestic agenda in the service of balancing the budget, lowering the deficit, and keeping interest rates low. (Yes, the Republican congress had a lot to do with that, too. But Clinton became a true believer to the cause.)
There's still this meme out there that Republicans are the party of fiscal sanity, but I don't see that as true anymore. Sometime around in Clinton's second term, when the long-time Republican Congressmen started retiring, the ones who replaced them weren't as interested in prudent fiscal management, they were more interested in just cutting taxes for their own sake. And they didn't have to earn the mantle of "fiscally responsible", because everyone just assumed that they were. Whereas the new Democrats who were being elected actually had to *practice* fiscal prudence in order to get any credit for it. Objectively, right now, you have to call the Democrats the more disciplined financial managers. (Which is always easier for the party out of power, of course.) It will be interesting to see how much longer they have to be better before they will actually get the reputation for it.
As an accountant, I can tell you that there isn't another spreadsheet program that can compare to Excel. I ended up buying Office for my Mac, just so I could do spreadsheets on my own time.
I use Appleworks for word processing, but Escel is the king.
I think that there is nothing to be gained by Microsoft emulating the PS1/PS2 on the XBox 2.
But as far as feasibility goes, Microsoft does own Connectix, which developed the Virtual Play Station for the Macintosh. So I think that if they wanted to, they should be able to put something together pretty easily (at least for the PS1), given that they already know how to do it.
True, but Michael Flatley wasn't the one to put Riverdance together, he was just the one they cast as the lead dancer. It was either an Irish or a UK company (I know, big difference, but I don't remember for sure) who wrote the show.
Now, Lord of the Dance/Feet of Flames, yeah, that we can all blame on Michael Flatley.
If people are watching less TV, then why are they still getting fatter?
Wasn't there a study that just came out that correlated obesity very closely with the amount of time spent in a car?
I think you've confused Ted Turner with Rupert Murdoch.
Ted's a liberal guy. His hero was Jacques Cousteau, and he's been heavily into environmental causes. (To the point of stupidity--remember Capt Planet and the Planeteers?)
Irish musicians who became widely popular off the top of my head:
Sinead O'Connor
Enya
Nina Hynes (OK, she's not broken out yet, but seems to be on the cusp)
Actually didn't care much for Sinead O'Connor much when she was popular, but damn if I didn't play one of her albums the other day and I was amazed. She'd have fit in perfectly around 2000, she was just a bit ahead of her time.
There's also all the Riverdance-inspired crap, but let's not talk about that.
Being obese and out of shape is much worse for your health than being underweight.
That's actually untrue. Until you get to the stage of being morbidly obese (~300+ pounds) it is healthier to be overweight than underweight.
Eating disorders are not caused by wanting to lose weight, but by not knowing how to do it.
Actually, an *eating disorder* really has nothing to do with losing weight. The person with the eating disorder thinks that it does, but that's really just a symptom of a different problem. For anorexics and bulemics, it's often about control, and for compulsive overeaters its often an addiction like any other. (I used to think that that addiction claim was overblown, by the way, but the biochemistry on it is really very convincing. Some people's chemistry is such that they have intense endorphin reactions to extremely simple carbohydrates like processed sugar or white flour.) I think what you're really talking about is the kind of stupid dieting that women's magazines write articles about.
There should be considerably more emphasis on exercise and less on removing fat from your diet (because eating fat does not make you fat, calories make you fat, and you can eat a lot more carbohydrate calories than fat calories)
I'm repeating this part just cause I agree with it so intensely. Americans obsess too much about food and diets, when we should really be paying attention to exercise.
But they should be. Yes, I know you are being sarcastic, but it is far better for women (and men, for that matter) to have a trim and fit body for a goal than to be "content" with all those jiggling extra pounds.
Half right. Having a fit body is important. Having a trim body isn't. What most people think of as an "ideal" body is actually underweight. We're designed to carry some fat. As long as you're getting enough exercise (which most people aren't), carrying some "extra" weight is fine. How much is okay varies widely; everyone has to figure it out for themselves.
Here's the problem that I see with your analysis, though.
Dean wasn't Far Left.
Everyone said he was (on the left and the right), but as far as I can tell, the only issue that he was considerably to the left on was the War in Iraq. (OK, maybe gay rights too, but I don't think he was particularly left of the *Democratic* mainstream on that.)
To my mind, he was a fiscal conservative, and a social moderate, and the fact that the Republicans were successful in tarring him with the "Liberal" brush just meant that they didn't know what the word meant anymore.
If the DNC wanted to torpedo him, I think it was as simple as he wasn't theirs, not because of any particular one of his policies.
Well, you can always do what we did, which was move the car from her garage and park it in front of the house. Since she was in early stages of Alzheimer's, she didn't recognize it any more once it was out of the garage. I ended up getting that car. (Course, she'd already wrecked it twice.)
Or, you can do what we did with my other grandmother, which is tell the cops that she is no longer capable of driving safely, and told them when and where she would be on the road. They followed her, pulled her over when she made her first mistake, and talked with her about whether she should be driving. She decided that maybe she didn't need to anymore. Hey, I got that car, too! Which was good, cause the car from my other grandmother was 13 years old by then.
Of course it helped that they lived in a small town, and we were friends with the police officer. But still, give it a try. Just think of all the vehicles you're missing out on.
Yes, I know you're just presenting the cynical point of view the decision-makers are using, but that logic is flawed, and not employed by all major corporations.
Disclosing a security vulnerability like that will probably cause a temporary drop in profits. *Not* disclosing it, and having it found out afterwards, can kill a company.
Tylenol was not even touched over the long term by its product tampering problems, because they were completely open about what was going on. Pepsi, the same way.
Was Clinton impeached for having sex with an intern? No, for lying about it afterwards.
If the names of these websites come out, no one (who is informed) will do business with them, not because of this security vulnerability, but because they don't know how many *other* vulnerabilities that there might be.
The history of crisis management has proven that the worst thing for profits is *not* disclosing.
I think you make a lot of good points. To my mind, the biggest factor is a combination of high system requirements for new games and the inexpensive cost/high performance of current consoles. When a Gamecube costs the same as a new video card, which is the better purchase for gaming? (Spoken as someone who was always a PC gaming snob, until my kids got a Gamecube for their birthday.) Add to that the fact that for most computers, gaming is almost the *only* reason to upgrade, and I think it's natural to see PC gaming go into a bit of a lull for awhile.
It's all cyclical though. What will probably happen is computer game sales will either "dip" or "crash" (depending on how far they fall), which will mean that there will be less money available for new game development. That will mean that the games that *are* developed will have to be stronger, and will probably be made more slowly with fewer people, which *ought* to improve quality. PC games will then be ready for a resurgence about a year after the next generation of consoles come out--after the early adopters have gotten them, but before the price drops enough for them to become too widespread.
Or, I could be completely wrong. But that's my guess.
Slashdot Mirror
True, though to be fair, there hasn't really been much *testing* of the North American herd.
The Dept of Agriculture is still trying to figure out what the criteria for testing should be, so it isn't really being done at all systematically yet.
And remember, the cow here in Washington state that was found to be BSE positive, was essentially tested by accident. It was not a "downer cow" as originally reported. The person who slaughtered it had just been a hurry, and killed it outside the slaughterhouse proper for his own convenience. If not for that, it would have never been tested at all.
I have no opinion on whether any of the meat is actually dangerous to humans. But the testing regime is a joke, that is just designed to make people feel better, not to actually catch anything.
Just checking here. Are you saying that the only thing wrong with protectionist measures is that they invite retaliation from other countries? If so, the obvious thing to do would be to pass measures which are primarily meant for another purpose (ie national security) but which have a secondary effect of protecting our workers from outsourcing. Put another way: if the only problems are PR problems, then we just need to do better PR.
Companies that could make components on their own account choose to sub-contract work out to smaller suppliers because they can do the same work cheaper and better.
I know this is just conventional wisdom, but I've never been able to figure out why this would be true. The buzzwords I here talk about the "efficiency" and "innovation" that a smaller nimbler company can bring to the process. But really, how can adding another layer of profit-taking bring component costs down?
Understand, I am speaking as an accountant in a manufacturing environment. As such, I've been involved in bringing outsourced work back in-house. What my experience is, is that outsourcing is cheaper for the first year or so, while they get you sucked in, but that soon after, either the price goes up or the quality goes down.
I am also very leery, of paying someone else to learn how to be my competitor. Once another company can build my product for me, why do my customers need me anymore, when they can cut out the middleman and save money? A non-compete contract? That might work domestically, but there are plenty of countries (yes, I'm looking at you, China), who aren't all that vigorous at helping enforce those.
Does outsourcing sometimes make sense? Yes. Has it been extended to situations where it doesn't make sense? Yes. Who ends up being the losers from this? The workers and shareholders of the company doing the outsourcing.
And it's not purple. It's most definitely blue. Not even a particularly garish blue.
But I'll agree with the OP--the beige IT color scheme is horrid.
OK, that's too strong. But each additional book *diminished* the universe, both because the quality wasn't as good, and because they kept changing the essential nature of the universe.
In Tolkien, you could, at a gut level, feel how the whole history of Middle-Earth had gone (and would go), just from reading the Fellowship of the Ring. You couldn't do that with Dune. And everytime the nature of the universe changes, the reader loses a bit of the emotional connection.
That said, the original Dune was amazing. The Lynch movie was interesting, but incomprehesible. (I saw it when it was first released, and you know it's a bad sign when they are handing out a program in the lobby, so that you have a prayer of following it.) I actually really liked the SF miniseries. But the best adaptation of it is still the Avalon Hills board game.
I always tell people to keep slogging through the book until they get to Moria, which is when the plot really picks up. If it still doesn't interest them then, it's not going to.
How many stores are going to use a system that robust, though? It sounds like you would just be asking for false positives if you had the cashier disallow any sale that showed as a duplicate. I say that, not knowing anything much about RFID, but knowing a bit about inventory control. Maybe flash the cashier a warning to double-check the item, but no more than that--you're much more likely to piss off a good customer than catch a thief.
But really, just like anything else, the real danger here is from employees or ex-employees. They are the ones who will know what the security measures are, or will have access to the appropriate equipment for that store. Or the master database.
The Democratic party at that time was a very mixed party in a way that neither party could be today. The Northern Democrats tended to be rather liberal. The Southern Democrats (or Dixiecrats) tended to vote like Republicans. *BUT* many white Southerners had such visceral reactions against the Republican party (because of Reconstruction) and for the Democratic party (because of FDR), that they didn't care about the politics. They voted for Democrats because Republicans were scoundrels and bad people, not because of their "stands" on the "issues".
So I think that it is more true that "the people who ran the South called themselves Democrats," then that "the Democrats ruled the South". Because the national party didn't have much say in how the Democrats ran the South. (And why should they, they were Damn Yankees, after all.)
It was Reagan that finally gave Southerners "permission" to vote Republican. And then in the mid-80s, many of those Southern Democrats changed parties and became Republicans. (For example, I distinctly remember campaigning for Phil Gramm when he was running as a Democrat--rather difficult to believe now.)
So trying to attach any "legacy" to the parties is really silly--they're not the same as they were 20 years ago, let alone 40 years or more.
That's right, I'd repressed that. And our city wasn't even that big before they fixed that.
What I remember is trying to clear out the shops ahead of a seige, when you could only remove one item at a (laggy) time. I never had to deal with thieves around while I was doing that, but I know others did.
The main problem is that to work at maximum efficiency (which you need to, to be able to pay your weekly rent, wages, and material cost) you have to log in about every 4 hours, or even more often. (If you have every kind of shop, it can take an hour just to go through all of them and issue build orders.). So what you really need is a group of people to do this for you. And you sure better trust those other people, cause by giving them permission to create items, you're also giving them permission to empty out the cashbox, or take any of the items. (And if you're not careful with permissions, to steal or destroy the shop and hireling.) This is why most crafting in Shadowbane is done by guilds rather than individuals. Which means that most people don't end up ever getting to use the crafting system in the game at all.
It also means that crafting objects to keep the city going gets to be a chore, that you typically spend half your playtime on.
There is an amount that the D's could move to coopt the Greens policies, and so win them back those voters. However, that would also lose them some more mainstream voters. Where exactly the balance is, is the billion dollar question. After the election, we'll know if they moved the right distance, too far, or not far enough. (Or we won't know, but we'll just argue about it.)
As for Perot's candidacy injecting fiscal sanity back into the Republican party, I think you're making the obvious mistake. IMO, it was the *Democrats* who learned fiscal discipline. To my mind, the thing that Clinton deserves praise for is that he pretty much gave up most of his domestic agenda in the service of balancing the budget, lowering the deficit, and keeping interest rates low. (Yes, the Republican congress had a lot to do with that, too. But Clinton became a true believer to the cause.)
There's still this meme out there that Republicans are the party of fiscal sanity, but I don't see that as true anymore. Sometime around in Clinton's second term, when the long-time Republican Congressmen started retiring, the ones who replaced them weren't as interested in prudent fiscal management, they were more interested in just cutting taxes for their own sake. And they didn't have to earn the mantle of "fiscally responsible", because everyone just assumed that they were. Whereas the new Democrats who were being elected actually had to *practice* fiscal prudence in order to get any credit for it. Objectively, right now, you have to call the Democrats the more disciplined financial managers. (Which is always easier for the party out of power, of course.) It will be interesting to see how much longer they have to be better before they will actually get the reputation for it.
I use Appleworks for word processing, but Escel is the king.
Now Hasbro owns both of them, and publishes almost nothing. I'd love to get some of their back-catalog.
But yes, Dune is an *excellent* game. It's almost as good as Titan. But unlike Titan, it will actually end before 3AM.
But as far as feasibility goes, Microsoft does own Connectix, which developed the Virtual Play Station for the Macintosh. So I think that if they wanted to, they should be able to put something together pretty easily (at least for the PS1), given that they already know how to do it.
Now, Lord of the Dance/Feet of Flames, yeah, that we can all blame on Michael Flatley.
Ted's a liberal guy. His hero was Jacques Cousteau, and he's been heavily into environmental causes. (To the point of stupidity--remember Capt Planet and the Planeteers?)
Sinead O'Connor
Enya
Nina Hynes (OK, she's not broken out yet, but seems to be on the cusp)
Actually didn't care much for Sinead O'Connor much when she was popular, but damn if I didn't play one of her albums the other day and I was amazed. She'd have fit in perfectly around 2000, she was just a bit ahead of her time.
There's also all the Riverdance-inspired crap, but let's not talk about that.
That's actually untrue. Until you get to the stage of being morbidly obese (~300+ pounds) it is healthier to be overweight than underweight.
Eating disorders are not caused by wanting to lose weight, but by not knowing how to do it.
Actually, an *eating disorder* really has nothing to do with losing weight. The person with the eating disorder thinks that it does, but that's really just a symptom of a different problem. For anorexics and bulemics, it's often about control, and for compulsive overeaters its often an addiction like any other. (I used to think that that addiction claim was overblown, by the way, but the biochemistry on it is really very convincing. Some people's chemistry is such that they have intense endorphin reactions to extremely simple carbohydrates like processed sugar or white flour.) I think what you're really talking about is the kind of stupid dieting that women's magazines write articles about.
There should be considerably more emphasis on exercise and less on removing fat from your diet (because eating fat does not make you fat, calories make you fat, and you can eat a lot more carbohydrate calories than fat calories)
I'm repeating this part just cause I agree with it so intensely. Americans obsess too much about food and diets, when we should really be paying attention to exercise.
But they should be. Yes, I know you are being sarcastic, but it is far better for women (and men, for that matter) to have a trim and fit body for a goal than to be "content" with all those jiggling extra pounds.
Half right. Having a fit body is important. Having a trim body isn't. What most people think of as an "ideal" body is actually underweight. We're designed to carry some fat. As long as you're getting enough exercise (which most people aren't), carrying some "extra" weight is fine. How much is okay varies widely; everyone has to figure it out for themselves.
Dean wasn't Far Left.
Everyone said he was (on the left and the right), but as far as I can tell, the only issue that he was considerably to the left on was the War in Iraq. (OK, maybe gay rights too, but I don't think he was particularly left of the *Democratic* mainstream on that.)
To my mind, he was a fiscal conservative, and a social moderate, and the fact that the Republicans were successful in tarring him with the "Liberal" brush just meant that they didn't know what the word meant anymore.
If the DNC wanted to torpedo him, I think it was as simple as he wasn't theirs, not because of any particular one of his policies.
Or, you can do what we did with my other grandmother, which is tell the cops that she is no longer capable of driving safely, and told them when and where she would be on the road. They followed her, pulled her over when she made her first mistake, and talked with her about whether she should be driving. She decided that maybe she didn't need to anymore. Hey, I got that car, too! Which was good, cause the car from my other grandmother was 13 years old by then.
Of course it helped that they lived in a small town, and we were friends with the police officer. But still, give it a try. Just think of all the vehicles you're missing out on.
Disclosing a security vulnerability like that will probably cause a temporary drop in profits. *Not* disclosing it, and having it found out afterwards, can kill a company.
Tylenol was not even touched over the long term by its product tampering problems, because they were completely open about what was going on. Pepsi, the same way.
Was Clinton impeached for having sex with an intern? No, for lying about it afterwards.
If the names of these websites come out, no one (who is informed) will do business with them, not because of this security vulnerability, but because they don't know how many *other* vulnerabilities that there might be.
The history of crisis management has proven that the worst thing for profits is *not* disclosing.
Heh. I recently replayed Deus Ex on a *Mac* (read: one-button) trackpad. It certainly adds degree of difficulty.
It's all cyclical though. What will probably happen is computer game sales will either "dip" or "crash" (depending on how far they fall), which will mean that there will be less money available for new game development. That will mean that the games that *are* developed will have to be stronger, and will probably be made more slowly with fewer people, which *ought* to improve quality. PC games will then be ready for a resurgence about a year after the next generation of consoles come out--after the early adopters have gotten them, but before the price drops enough for them to become too widespread.
Or, I could be completely wrong. But that's my guess.