You have bunch of computer nerds and star trek nerds making a demo female for display, how did you think she was going to look?
In any case, I'd imagine that during the real game, players will have the option to make their own body type for their character. Something like city of heroes where the character creator can make an "Incredible Hulk" type character just as easily as it can make a "Joe from Accounting" type character. It would ultimately be up to the player to decide how well endowed or "Ensign McKnightish" they make their character.
Can this work? The entire request to dismiss the case was one paragraph, with only one sentence stating that the defendant never used a computer. Wouldn't some investigation or proof be required in order for a case to be dismissed?
I suppose when you're young, replayability is an important part of the gaming experience. When you get older, you don't have time to play most of the games you want, so it's hard enough to find time for old games, let alone new ones. I'm not old really (24), but I don't have time to play most of the games I have. The only system I have is a gamecube, but medical school doesn't even allow me to play all the games I want to. Metroid Prime is still on my list of games I want to finish, let alone getting to Metroid Prime II. Ah, to be young and in college again. Stupid medical school, I can't believe I ever felt pressed for time as an engineering double major (sigh).
The food replicators actually make sense, even if they are more energy intensive than cooking your own food. The replicators mean you don't have to keep large food stores on the ship which can rot. I don't know for certain what the stock material for the food replication is, but I'd imagine it's easily stored in small areas, and with the same material can be used to make steaks or self-sealing-stembolts, so it's very utilitarian. You also get a large variety of meals that can be prepared, which can help keep morale up on long missions, compared to how the crew would feel about having their selection of 6 flavors of rehyrdated gruel 3 times a day. There's also the part of not needing kitchen facilities or cooking personel on the ship. We've all seen how the Enterprise is a ship full of officers and no enlisted personel. Consider that most of the menial tasks on the Enterprise are automated; cooking, cleaning (The enterprise has been called a "self cleaning ship" in a few episodes), probably other things like laundry and stuff too. I'm don't have any experience with naval operations, but I think that modern ships have mainly enlisted men doing all the drugdery necessary for ship operations like cooking cleaning, and the like. With the enterprise having those things automated, they need fewer enlisted and thus have room for more officers for things like the dozen or so science departments on the enterprise.
The Enterprise would be a very insular environment and probaby wouldn't be representative of life in the federation. Starfleet vessels are on the front lines of the scientific, diplomatic, and military frontiers in the galaxy, so it makes sense that they would be given vast resources by the federation to carry out their mission. For example, transporting takes a great deal of energy to accomplish, which is why the transporter room is used whenever possible, since a "site to site" transport is basically two different transport cycles. Now the Enterprise uses the transporter all the time, because it's to their advantage to be able to quickly and efficiently move people around. There hasn't really been an instance where they say "We've used the transporter too much, let's use a shuttle" or anything to that effect. Compare this to earth citizens. In DS9, Sisko once talked about his academy days when he was feeling homesick, and thus during his first week, transported from the academy to his home every night for dinner. He commented on how he "must have used a month's worth of transporter credits in a week" to do that. From this, we can assume that people not on official starfleet or federation business have limits on how much technology they can use.
Consider it a different way. Imagine you were an alien and you were studying human culture based on what you observed on an aircraft carrier. You might make such conclusions like "Everyone gets free health care" or "Airplanes are the main vehicle of transport that humans use for daily travel" or "These people don't need money as their society provides all the basics for daily life". We've seen a very narrow, very unique part of the federation through Star Trek. We don't know much about Federation life. We don't even know much about starships that aren't the flagship of the fleet. We've seen that there are fairly unactractive postings in the federation, like in one episode where two officers were stationed for months at a time on a subspace relay station. The Enterprise is for the most part the Ivory Tower of the federation; they're into some pretty important stuff, but for the most part they're removed from the daily grind of normal stuff.
This happens a lot already. Introductory general biology was taught by only one professor, and this course was a requirement for all biology majors so everyone was in it. I wouldn't say he was fanatical about evolution, but it was definately on the far side of being energetic about it and thus a large part of the course was about plants and animals evolving. I was enjoying the class, but apparently other students weren't appreciating it as much, and they would convey their feelings to their parents. One day I was walking by the prof's office and he had posted an E-Mail from an angry parent (Who didn't use their name and used a hotmail account to protect the child's from retaliation) about how it was inappropriate of him to be teaching an unsubstantiated theory which doesn't explain why monkeys still exist and why a rock won't come to life even if you look at it for a billion years (These were actual arguments used by the parent). I forget if God was mentioned, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. The parent also complained about how her child didn't have any alternative to this mandatory class and was thus impinging on her rights and such. The prof posted was his reply in which he stated that this was a science class and he was going to present the facts that are currently accepted in the scientific community. He also stated that whether or not the students believed the material from a theological perspective was irrelevant, since as biologists they would be expected to be well versed in the currently accepted theories regarding the progression of life. He finished by saying that if the material was truly offensive to her, the child is welcome to drop the class, and the prof would sign all of the required papers without any issue. So I'd imagine that all biology professors who teach evolution already get a lot of grief.
People are far too dependent on prescription and over-the-counter medications these days
To which over the counter medications are you refering to? For the most part OTCs don't directly affect infections, only our response to them. NyQuill is just anelgesics, cough supressors, and decongestants, nothing meant to kill bacteria. Over the counter medications just make us feel less miserable while sick.
Then you lose said fake finger and somebody can sneak into the secure area. If they thought that a simple lock and key security mechanism was suitable, they would have done it. The fingerprint system probably isn't meant as an inconvenience to be circumvented, but to make sure that only the proper people can get in, and the key can't be accidentally lost or fall into the wrong hands, at least not without a great deal of trouble.
I was once given some advice by an IT friend of mine. He said that everyone who goes camping or hiking should keep a foot of network cable in their pocket. If they ever get lost and can't find their way back, they should dig a shallow hole and bury the cable. When the backhoe comes to dig it up, you can ask the driver how to get back to civilazation.
If the poor are eliminated, then who's buying the stuff that the rich are selling thus making them rich? I think there would have to be some kind of middle ground somewhere in there, or the rich will become poor too.
While you're probably trolling, I think they did a good job of fleshing this myth out. The found that being restrained and blindfolded on an uncomfortable table made the torture worse than just water alone. Adam did the torture while sitting comfortably on a Barcalounger, and while he did last fairly long, he did eventually give it up (he claimed it was because he had to pee). The myth crew had the tough senarios, being chaned down and such. On the deleted clips, one of them (the non chineese dude) bet Adam and Jaime $20 each that he could go a total of 3 hours blindfolded, chained, and dripped on. As I recall, he didn't last more than half an hour, and this was in the security that he could stop the test anytime he wanted. I'd imagine it'd be much tougher when chained up in some chineese dungeon.
With ping pong balls, you don't have to worry about the thousands of microcracks in the hull which would allow regular air to seep through. You only have to secure the hull so that there aren't any cracks bigger than 10 or 15 millimeters, since the pingpong balls make it so that you basically have air "molecules" that are ping pong ball sized and won't escape at any tiny hole.
I've seen 3 of the 5 episodes that you've described, I'll describe what I can remember from them.
Water Torture - Chineese water torture myth. Basically the idea that if you restrain someone to a chair and constantly drip water at a slow rate (1-2 drops per second or so) it'll cause them to crack. It's an elegant torture in that all it requires is time, it's easy to set up, and you don't need an interrogator to administer it, and it's insidious in that nobody would expect that a little harmless dripping would cause to to break. They did show that the torture was effective against the myth crew in about an hour or 2, though you have to wonder how a hardened navy seal might react differently.
Otter Ping Pong - They were testing the myth that you could raise a sunken ship by pumping thousands of ping pong balls into the hull. During the myth, an otter swam down to the hull and stole a ping pong ball and started playing with it, which caused everyone to worry that it might choke on it if it tried to swallow it. The myth was eventually proved successful.
Cement Build Up - They tested the myth that the inside of a cement mixer could be cleaned of all the dried cement build up that accumulates on the inside of the drum during normal use by exploding a stick of dynamite in the drum, a much more efficient method than the usual method of having to chissel the surface by hand. The clip in the video showed a snafu that occured with the first truck when they accidentally filled it up with cement rather than just having enough for a thin coat. It lead up to a spectacular event where they blew up the enture truck with 850 pounds of TNT.
Being able to do high resolution scans of the body has been one of the biggest reasons of the recent drop in cancer mortality. Cancer treatments have improved over the years, sure, but the biggest reason that fewer people are dying from breast and colon cancer is that we can find tumors when they're small and treatable, and we don't have to wait until they're large and metastasized to 3 different organ systems before finding out that a person has cancer. Same with skin cancer. Finding a carcinoma before it invades past the basement membrane has a much better prognosis than if it becomes invasive.
Could this be a result of Nintendo's loss of monopoly on the gaming market? Back when Big N was the only dominant force in the video game market, they could probably take their time in developing solid and uncrashable games. As the summary points out, how many times did Zelda or Super Mario crash or Punch Out crash? These days though, there's always the push to release games faster and faster at an unprecidented level of graphical and technical sophistication to beat out not only competing systems, but other 3rd party providers. Just recently when Nintendo announced that Twilight Princess was pushed back, the general reaction was "OMG, Nintendo is teh suck. We want it now!!" but I'm guessing that it'll have impecable programming and few if any technical errors. It seems like the creedo these days is that it's better to release more games at 90% rather than fewer games at 100%.
Funny as it sounds, sex is one area that doesn't stand out on its own in video gaming. Think of the prime gaming demographic of males age 10-30. The nerds have RPGs, the jocks have sports games, the antisocials have violent games, but where are the games specifically marketed to the horndogs? Yeah, hot girls are abundant in video games, but they're the character as part of a larger story, and not primarily the main focus. History has shown us how games built solely around T&A (BMXXX, DOA beach volleyball) don't sell very well, even though all logic says they should. This conference could go a long way into exploring one of the uncracked parts of the teenage psyche. Teenagers want hot girls with large boobies, so why aren't they buying those games?
I'm pro-nuclear, but the way you phrased the choices is fairly biased towards presenting nuclear in a positive light. What's to keep someone from reversing your your argument against nuclear power. Something like -
A) Would you rather risk building Chernobyl in every county or...
Just for clarification, who is "I" and "They"? You said "I checked my eyes", but does that mean you had your eyes checked by an opthamologist, or did you simply look at a snellen chart and make your own diagnosis? And when "they" said it wasn't a problem, was that a doctor's diagnosis, or the guy working behind the counter at LensCrafters? Decreases in visual acuity can be due to genetics, aging, or long hours in front of a computer, but there are also a number of pathologcal conditions that can cause it too. One of the early manifestations of type II diabetes is a decrease in visual acuity. Your problem could very well be attributed to poor working conditions with your computer, but you should be certain that it is that, and not a more serious underlying pathologic cause.
Convenient Voice: Thank you for calling the parking violations bureau. To plea `not guilty,' press `one' now.
[Homer dials `one']
Thank you. Your plea has been...
Male rough voice: Rejected.
Convenient voice: You will be assessed the full fine plus a small...
Male rough voice: Large lateness fee.
Convenient Voice: Please wait by your vehicle between 9 AM and 5 PM for parking officer Steve...
As a fan of Steve Jackson Games, I can say that they need to do more advertising. I didn't even learn about Chez Geek until 2003. It was some random friday night, and having viewed one of my friend's IM profile, I saw he had added a link to dorktower.com so I was reading the comics. As I was doing so, one of my drunk fraternity mates stumbled by my room drunk and saw what I was reading and exclaimed "Hey, those are the Chez Geek guys!!" and I was like "Chez what now?" and he told me about this awesome card game. Now I'm the other of Chez Geek and 4 different expansion packs, as well as several other different SJ games. Apeaking as a member of SJ games target audience (AKA, ubernerds who've never had a date that didn't grow on a tree), they need to expand their advertising a bit more to reach us.
They have to offer different elements now...
on
The U.S. Arcade is Dead?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I think arcades can be saved once they realize that they need to have content that can't be reproduced at home. Why would I want to spend money at the arcade to play Teken or Mortal Kombat when it's available on my home console. The advantage arcades used to have was they could offer games that needed more powerful hardware than what was available on computer or on home consoles. I remember having Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II for Nintendo, but I would still play TMNT at the arcade because the quality was so much better. Now with MAME, we see that PCs have more than enough processing and graphics capability to play arcade games. Couple that with unlimited quarters on the emulator and the draw for traditional arcade games goes way down. Arcades can still draw people though. These days, when I go to an arcade, it isn't to play regular games. I play skiball, because I don't have a skiball machine at home. I play pinball because I don't have a pinnball machine at home. I play gun games like Police 911 because that game uses hardware that I wouldn't have at home. That's where an arcade's strength lies, offering access to hardware and games that aren't practical for people to personally own. Just because the era of the arcade's dominance in computing ability is over, doesn't mean it doesn't have other elements to it.
Slashdot Mirror
You have bunch of computer nerds and star trek nerds making a demo female for display, how did you think she was going to look?
In any case, I'd imagine that during the real game, players will have the option to make their own body type for their character. Something like city of heroes where the character creator can make an "Incredible Hulk" type character just as easily as it can make a "Joe from Accounting" type character. It would ultimately be up to the player to decide how well endowed or "Ensign McKnightish" they make their character.
Can this work? The entire request to dismiss the case was one paragraph, with only one sentence stating that the defendant never used a computer. Wouldn't some investigation or proof be required in order for a case to be dismissed?
I suppose when you're young, replayability is an important part of the gaming experience. When you get older, you don't have time to play most of the games you want, so it's hard enough to find time for old games, let alone new ones. I'm not old really (24), but I don't have time to play most of the games I have. The only system I have is a gamecube, but medical school doesn't even allow me to play all the games I want to. Metroid Prime is still on my list of games I want to finish, let alone getting to Metroid Prime II. Ah, to be young and in college again. Stupid medical school, I can't believe I ever felt pressed for time as an engineering double major (sigh).
The food replicators actually make sense, even if they are more energy intensive than cooking your own food. The replicators mean you don't have to keep large food stores on the ship which can rot. I don't know for certain what the stock material for the food replication is, but I'd imagine it's easily stored in small areas, and with the same material can be used to make steaks or self-sealing-stembolts, so it's very utilitarian. You also get a large variety of meals that can be prepared, which can help keep morale up on long missions, compared to how the crew would feel about having their selection of 6 flavors of rehyrdated gruel 3 times a day. There's also the part of not needing kitchen facilities or cooking personel on the ship. We've all seen how the Enterprise is a ship full of officers and no enlisted personel. Consider that most of the menial tasks on the Enterprise are automated; cooking, cleaning (The enterprise has been called a "self cleaning ship" in a few episodes), probably other things like laundry and stuff too. I'm don't have any experience with naval operations, but I think that modern ships have mainly enlisted men doing all the drugdery necessary for ship operations like cooking cleaning, and the like. With the enterprise having those things automated, they need fewer enlisted and thus have room for more officers for things like the dozen or so science departments on the enterprise.
The Enterprise would be a very insular environment and probaby wouldn't be representative of life in the federation. Starfleet vessels are on the front lines of the scientific, diplomatic, and military frontiers in the galaxy, so it makes sense that they would be given vast resources by the federation to carry out their mission. For example, transporting takes a great deal of energy to accomplish, which is why the transporter room is used whenever possible, since a "site to site" transport is basically two different transport cycles. Now the Enterprise uses the transporter all the time, because it's to their advantage to be able to quickly and efficiently move people around. There hasn't really been an instance where they say "We've used the transporter too much, let's use a shuttle" or anything to that effect. Compare this to earth citizens. In DS9, Sisko once talked about his academy days when he was feeling homesick, and thus during his first week, transported from the academy to his home every night for dinner. He commented on how he "must have used a month's worth of transporter credits in a week" to do that. From this, we can assume that people not on official starfleet or federation business have limits on how much technology they can use.
Consider it a different way. Imagine you were an alien and you were studying human culture based on what you observed on an aircraft carrier. You might make such conclusions like "Everyone gets free health care" or "Airplanes are the main vehicle of transport that humans use for daily travel" or "These people don't need money as their society provides all the basics for daily life". We've seen a very narrow, very unique part of the federation through Star Trek. We don't know much about Federation life. We don't even know much about starships that aren't the flagship of the fleet. We've seen that there are fairly unactractive postings in the federation, like in one episode where two officers were stationed for months at a time on a subspace relay station. The Enterprise is for the most part the Ivory Tower of the federation; they're into some pretty important stuff, but for the most part they're removed from the daily grind of normal stuff.
This happens a lot already. Introductory general biology was taught by only one professor, and this course was a requirement for all biology majors so everyone was in it. I wouldn't say he was fanatical about evolution, but it was definately on the far side of being energetic about it and thus a large part of the course was about plants and animals evolving. I was enjoying the class, but apparently other students weren't appreciating it as much, and they would convey their feelings to their parents. One day I was walking by the prof's office and he had posted an E-Mail from an angry parent (Who didn't use their name and used a hotmail account to protect the child's from retaliation) about how it was inappropriate of him to be teaching an unsubstantiated theory which doesn't explain why monkeys still exist and why a rock won't come to life even if you look at it for a billion years (These were actual arguments used by the parent). I forget if God was mentioned, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did. The parent also complained about how her child didn't have any alternative to this mandatory class and was thus impinging on her rights and such. The prof posted was his reply in which he stated that this was a science class and he was going to present the facts that are currently accepted in the scientific community. He also stated that whether or not the students believed the material from a theological perspective was irrelevant, since as biologists they would be expected to be well versed in the currently accepted theories regarding the progression of life. He finished by saying that if the material was truly offensive to her, the child is welcome to drop the class, and the prof would sign all of the required papers without any issue. So I'd imagine that all biology professors who teach evolution already get a lot of grief.
People are far too dependent on prescription and over-the-counter medications these days
To which over the counter medications are you refering to? For the most part OTCs don't directly affect infections, only our response to them. NyQuill is just anelgesics, cough supressors, and decongestants, nothing meant to kill bacteria. Over the counter medications just make us feel less miserable while sick.
Then you lose said fake finger and somebody can sneak into the secure area. If they thought that a simple lock and key security mechanism was suitable, they would have done it. The fingerprint system probably isn't meant as an inconvenience to be circumvented, but to make sure that only the proper people can get in, and the key can't be accidentally lost or fall into the wrong hands, at least not without a great deal of trouble.
I was once given some advice by an IT friend of mine. He said that everyone who goes camping or hiking should keep a foot of network cable in their pocket. If they ever get lost and can't find their way back, they should dig a shallow hole and bury the cable. When the backhoe comes to dig it up, you can ask the driver how to get back to civilazation.
If the poor are eliminated, then who's buying the stuff that the rich are selling thus making them rich? I think there would have to be some kind of middle ground somewhere in there, or the rich will become poor too.
Please put down your weapon. You have 20 seconds to comply.
While you're probably trolling, I think they did a good job of fleshing this myth out. The found that being restrained and blindfolded on an uncomfortable table made the torture worse than just water alone. Adam did the torture while sitting comfortably on a Barcalounger, and while he did last fairly long, he did eventually give it up (he claimed it was because he had to pee). The myth crew had the tough senarios, being chaned down and such. On the deleted clips, one of them (the non chineese dude) bet Adam and Jaime $20 each that he could go a total of 3 hours blindfolded, chained, and dripped on. As I recall, he didn't last more than half an hour, and this was in the security that he could stop the test anytime he wanted. I'd imagine it'd be much tougher when chained up in some chineese dungeon.
With ping pong balls, you don't have to worry about the thousands of microcracks in the hull which would allow regular air to seep through. You only have to secure the hull so that there aren't any cracks bigger than 10 or 15 millimeters, since the pingpong balls make it so that you basically have air "molecules" that are ping pong ball sized and won't escape at any tiny hole.
I've seen 3 of the 5 episodes that you've described, I'll describe what I can remember from them.
Water Torture - Chineese water torture myth. Basically the idea that if you restrain someone to a chair and constantly drip water at a slow rate (1-2 drops per second or so) it'll cause them to crack. It's an elegant torture in that all it requires is time, it's easy to set up, and you don't need an interrogator to administer it, and it's insidious in that nobody would expect that a little harmless dripping would cause to to break. They did show that the torture was effective against the myth crew in about an hour or 2, though you have to wonder how a hardened navy seal might react differently.
Otter Ping Pong - They were testing the myth that you could raise a sunken ship by pumping thousands of ping pong balls into the hull. During the myth, an otter swam down to the hull and stole a ping pong ball and started playing with it, which caused everyone to worry that it might choke on it if it tried to swallow it. The myth was eventually proved successful.
Cement Build Up - They tested the myth that the inside of a cement mixer could be cleaned of all the dried cement build up that accumulates on the inside of the drum during normal use by exploding a stick of dynamite in the drum, a much more efficient method than the usual method of having to chissel the surface by hand. The clip in the video showed a snafu that occured with the first truck when they accidentally filled it up with cement rather than just having enough for a thin coat. It lead up to a spectacular event where they blew up the enture truck with 850 pounds of TNT.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure
Being able to do high resolution scans of the body has been one of the biggest reasons of the recent drop in cancer mortality. Cancer treatments have improved over the years, sure, but the biggest reason that fewer people are dying from breast and colon cancer is that we can find tumors when they're small and treatable, and we don't have to wait until they're large and metastasized to 3 different organ systems before finding out that a person has cancer. Same with skin cancer. Finding a carcinoma before it invades past the basement membrane has a much better prognosis than if it becomes invasive.
Just deal with only being able to download half as much porn for one day and you can get this easily. Geez, complain complain complain....
Could this be a result of Nintendo's loss of monopoly on the gaming market? Back when Big N was the only dominant force in the video game market, they could probably take their time in developing solid and uncrashable games. As the summary points out, how many times did Zelda or Super Mario crash or Punch Out crash? These days though, there's always the push to release games faster and faster at an unprecidented level of graphical and technical sophistication to beat out not only competing systems, but other 3rd party providers. Just recently when Nintendo announced that Twilight Princess was pushed back, the general reaction was "OMG, Nintendo is teh suck. We want it now!!" but I'm guessing that it'll have impecable programming and few if any technical errors. It seems like the creedo these days is that it's better to release more games at 90% rather than fewer games at 100%.
Funny as it sounds, sex is one area that doesn't stand out on its own in video gaming. Think of the prime gaming demographic of males age 10-30. The nerds have RPGs, the jocks have sports games, the antisocials have violent games, but where are the games specifically marketed to the horndogs? Yeah, hot girls are abundant in video games, but they're the character as part of a larger story, and not primarily the main focus. History has shown us how games built solely around T&A (BMXXX, DOA beach volleyball) don't sell very well, even though all logic says they should. This conference could go a long way into exploring one of the uncracked parts of the teenage psyche. Teenagers want hot girls with large boobies, so why aren't they buying those games?
I pine for the day that this kind of energy production becomes poplar.
I'm pro-nuclear, but the way you phrased the choices is fairly biased towards presenting nuclear in a positive light. What's to keep someone from reversing your your argument against nuclear power. Something like -
A) Would you rather risk building Chernobyl in every county or...
B) Have reasonably safe fossil fuel plants.
Just for clarification, who is "I" and "They"? You said "I checked my eyes", but does that mean you had your eyes checked by an opthamologist, or did you simply look at a snellen chart and make your own diagnosis? And when "they" said it wasn't a problem, was that a doctor's diagnosis, or the guy working behind the counter at LensCrafters? Decreases in visual acuity can be due to genetics, aging, or long hours in front of a computer, but there are also a number of pathologcal conditions that can cause it too. One of the early manifestations of type II diabetes is a decrease in visual acuity. Your problem could very well be attributed to poor working conditions with your computer, but you should be certain that it is that, and not a more serious underlying pathologic cause.
Convenient Voice: Thank you for calling the parking violations bureau. To plea `not guilty,' press `one' now.
[Homer dials `one']
Thank you. Your plea has been...
Male rough voice: Rejected.
Convenient voice: You will be assessed the full fine plus a small...
Male rough voice: Large lateness fee.
Convenient Voice: Please wait by your vehicle between 9 AM and 5 PM for parking officer Steve...
Male rough voice: Grabowski.
Woah, there's a lot of typos in that post. Rum will do that to a guy I guess :-)
As a fan of Steve Jackson Games, I can say that they need to do more advertising. I didn't even learn about Chez Geek until 2003. It was some random friday night, and having viewed one of my friend's IM profile, I saw he had added a link to dorktower.com so I was reading the comics. As I was doing so, one of my drunk fraternity mates stumbled by my room drunk and saw what I was reading and exclaimed "Hey, those are the Chez Geek guys!!" and I was like "Chez what now?" and he told me about this awesome card game. Now I'm the other of Chez Geek and 4 different expansion packs, as well as several other different SJ games. Apeaking as a member of SJ games target audience (AKA, ubernerds who've never had a date that didn't grow on a tree), they need to expand their advertising a bit more to reach us.
I think arcades can be saved once they realize that they need to have content that can't be reproduced at home. Why would I want to spend money at the arcade to play Teken or Mortal Kombat when it's available on my home console. The advantage arcades used to have was they could offer games that needed more powerful hardware than what was available on computer or on home consoles. I remember having Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II for Nintendo, but I would still play TMNT at the arcade because the quality was so much better. Now with MAME, we see that PCs have more than enough processing and graphics capability to play arcade games. Couple that with unlimited quarters on the emulator and the draw for traditional arcade games goes way down. Arcades can still draw people though. These days, when I go to an arcade, it isn't to play regular games. I play skiball, because I don't have a skiball machine at home. I play pinball because I don't have a pinnball machine at home. I play gun games like Police 911 because that game uses hardware that I wouldn't have at home. That's where an arcade's strength lies, offering access to hardware and games that aren't practical for people to personally own. Just because the era of the arcade's dominance in computing ability is over, doesn't mean it doesn't have other elements to it.