It's running on KDE and on Gnome. Am I naive beyond belief, or does this indicate that it's going to benefit both parties? It'd be wonderful if an app could use a single forms layout database/file/record/XML to create a GUI for all the platforms they've demonstrated.
Gahd. Imagine. The core of your application would be exactly the same on all platforms. Your forms design data would be the same. The only thing that changes is the render engine or interpreter.
And the ocean, you'll note, has areas where there's more or less salt, due to greater/lesser amounts of water.
These areas support distinctly different marine life than other parts.
I'll freely admit I'm talking without a lot of actual factual knowledge. What sort of increases of CO and CO2 are found in cities, compared to countryside? Perhaps 5 or 10%?
So we'd have air with 85-90% nitrogen content. Is that healthy? Certainly the 5-10% extra CO/CO2 isn't.
Maybe I'm just making silly-ass comments. It'd be nice if the responses to my poorly informed commentary weren't even less informed...
Not to mention the problems caused by concentrations of nitrogen. It's not like it's going to instantly dissipate. Our cities will be smogged with nitrogen, while our farms and forests will be starving.
There are already problems with "bubbles" of pollutants over cities already. I think nitrogen would make it even worse.
There's another ecological problem that isn't being addressed: sound pollution in our oceans.
A lot of marine mammals use echolocation to navigate, and all the marine mammals "chatter" to one another in their family/social groups.
Water is a very good medium for sound transmission. Boat propeller noise carries for hundreds of kilometers.
In many areas, the noise from props is loud enough to be the equivalent of a nearby jackhammer. The marine life *literally* can not echolocate or communicate.
This is a growing concern. We humans have it easy: when we're on a noise construction site, we can always use hand signals. Whales, dolphins, sea lions, seals and other marine life don't have that option.
How does this relate to the article? Well, those "tourist icebreakers" are deafening the Beluga and Narwhal populations in the Arctic oceans. There are only a few tens of thousands of Beluga, and they need to echolocate and communicate.
The poor bastards are dying off more quickly than ever before, and prop noise is now being considered a factor in their decline.
Please don't assist in their destruction by participating on icebreaker cruises.
But that's what they're doing. Paul Allen & Co. will own stock in the company, and they'll be paying less than 1/10th of the "retail" price.
Think -- who owns the stocks before they're flogged on the open market?
Right: the insiders. The VCs. The employees who took stocks in lieu of cash.
Who sells the stocks once the IPO happens?
Right, the private investors. For a significant multiple of what they originally paid.
The "people running up the value of the stock" are the people who own pre-IPO shares. It's in their very best interest to hype the company as much as possible!
Paul Allen won't come out hurtin', that's for sure.
--
Re:(clank!) Bring out your dead! (clank!)
on
Voteauction.com
·
· Score: 2
Er, this may be off-topic, but us monolinguists might find the answer very interesting:
Why on *earth* is it called "The Chained Duck"?! Is there some way to explain this in English that would make the least bit of sense? Or is it just one of those inexplicable idioms that has no meaning?
"Does ANYONE honestly believe that a pharmaceutical company, which spends millions or billions of dollars in research and development to produce drugs that YOU ALL USE AND NEED would continue to do this if they were not allowed to make a return on their investment, time, and effort?"
Just thought I'd mention that the big drug companies spend significantly more on marketing than they do on research.
Ever seen the crap that doctors get? Bloody drug companies aren't at all shy about spending tens of dollars *per doctor per promotional sample* to buy their way onto the prescription pad.
It ain't nothing to do with the efficacy of the drugs, nor even their appropriate use: it's about buying the doctor.
It's pretty scary. Next time the doctor prescribes something outside the tried-and-true, one's gotta wonder: is it because this drug really is the best solution... or is it because PharmaGlakCo bought him a hooker at the last convention?
I suspect that the K5 DoS putz is the one who just got thwarted by NewsTrolls (http://www.newstrolls.com/). Just a few days ago, NewsTrolls implemented a sandbox system that allowed the putz to post his crap, without inflicting it on those that didn't care to see it.
Immediately after NT does that, K5 gets swamped.
K5 will resolve the problem, and the putz will target someone else.
It's a cry for help, even if it seems to most of us to be a cry for a bloody good beating. A person has to be pretty damned hard-up to waste so much effort doing something so pointless.
The putz falls into the category of people who deface murals, tip mailboxes, uproot saplings and smear shit in the washroom stalls: they're people who are desperately fucked-up and don't know how to ask for help, so they create situations where they'll have help forced on them.
Children are *NOT* good at distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Geez, the number of times I see wholly ignorant people spewing that line in defense of letting kids have access to FPS, violent movies, etcetera.
Fantasy rules the child's life. The bogy-man under the bed, the magic of the shopping mall Santa, playing house, don't step on the cracks, Bambi dying.
Even a lot of adults don't have the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Look at the number of adults who believe that America grabbed the U571 submarine, or believe that UFOs exist.
It has nothing to do with intelligence and *everything* to do with naivete. Children don't have the life experience necessary to distinguish reality from fantasy.
In adults, it's more tempting to use the word "ignorance," but it's really the same thing: a naive person who hasn't the experience to know historical truth from Hollywood fantasy; or scientific methods versus wishful thinking.
At any rate, the bottom line is that anyone with experience with children or who spends a few minutes looking in a few child psychology books, will certainly understand that fantasy and reality are not easily distinguished by children.
And anyone who thinks otherwise is, at best, naive.
OT Q: Why rewrite the server in C++, when you can continue to use the existing Python server? Profile the code, determine where the real speed issues are, and re-code those passages in C++. That way, you'll get the best of both worlds: the speed of programming in Python with the speed of execution of compiled C++.
It's the Direct Marketing Association, guy. They have some pretty stringent rules, and I believe that there are some laws that require direct marketers to follow the rules.
c/"EMail marketing"/"Junk Mail marketing"/ btw.
It works. I called in and demanded that I be removed from the telemarketing and bulk mail lists. I *do not* receive telemarketing calls from any large businesses any more. The exceedingly few calls I've received have been from local carpet cleaners, and my own bank doing surveys.
I get far less junk mail than I used to. It's not all gone, by any means, but it *is* reduced.
I haven't attempted the EMail opt out. I don't believe it would be at all effective: most of the junk EMail I receive is obviously from nincompoops who wouldn't belong to the DMA.
As long as everyone keeps using non-compliant browsers like MSIE and NS, as long as Mozilla remains a pipe-dream, and as long as people refuse to pay a few bucks for compliant browsing software, web authors are going to continue creating browser-specific pages or using non-compliant tagging.
In my experience, Opera Software has been extraordinarily responsive to user feedback and very dogged in implementing full compliancy in their browser, while at the same time dealing with the crappy tagging that goes as web authoring these days.
Yes, they want a whopping forty bucks for their browser. For a lot of you, that's an hour or less of payola. And it reflects that these people are working at this as full-time professionals -- *QUITE* unlike a lot of the open source/free beer applications out there, that are being developed in people's hobby time.
It's a fair price for a great product that is available *now* and is *very* compliant. Demand better products by putting some money where your mouth is!
Or install a C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS list (not sure whatcha Linux users call it). Not file extension on this one. All the following addresses will be resolved to an invalid address, so you won't be bothered by banners in the least.
Also recommend using Opera v4x, which has superb cookie handling (far better than MSIE!) and other excellent privacy features.
"BTW, the only way we could view pictures was to uudecode (by hand) cat the (usually several) files, and then utter curses if we didn't have the proper viewer installed. I never went through the trouble to decode the picture, I just saw respondants objecting to it."
Shhhhhyyaaa, right!
Problem was, you didn't have that one-handed UUDecoding skill down pat...
...those who have used Usenet using newsreaders, and those who have used it using Dejanews.
The Deja-groupies are, of course, in support of anything Deja does that keeps the site running, because they'd otherwise lose access to Usenet.
The newsreader folk are against the hijinx that Deja does, because they are independent of Deja. Indeed, having Dejanews go belly-up would be A Good Thing, in our view. It'd cut down on the number of crap postings.
IMO, the links Deja wants to insert imply that I have endorsed the link. This offends me: if I wanted my message to contain a link, I'd have put the URL there myself.
I've got no problem with Deja putting contextual links in its presentation -- but the damn things had better be off to the side of my message, not part of my message.
In the end, though, I'm pretty sure this is a tempest in a teacup: Deja will be sued, and they'll rethink their new gimmick.
In Vancouver, BC, three sets of teenagers in seperate high-end sports cars were racing down one of roads at speeds in excess of 200KMH late at night. One struck a pedestrian in a crosswalk, throwing the body several hundred feet.
They snuffed someone's life because their fantasy ("it's okay to race our cars in the city") didn't jive with reality.
They fled the scene, because their fantasy ("we don't have to take responsibility for our actions") didn't jive with reality.
Will "Grand Theft Auto" make children into irresponsible murdering teens like the pack that was racing in Vancouver?
Hell, no. It won't *MAKE* them do these things.
But the question you want to ask yourself is will it make it easier for their brain to *allow* them to behave in such a manner? Will their brain disregard the real risks (the risk of hitting someone because you're moving too fast to see them) because it has been taught by the realistic violence of the game?
Every day, someone in the country is shot to death, deliberately, by a stranger who "made a mistake."
Will playing "SoF" *make* our children want to kill other people? Hell, no, of course not.
But the question you want to ask yourself is: will the realistic violence teach their brain accept that shooting people carries no real consequences? Will repeated depictions of realistic violence teach the brain that violence is acceptable? That it solves problems?
Quite simply, the consequences of our decisions today are going to smack us in the face fifteen years from now. It's going to be a shocking wake-up call... but it's going to be too damn late to do anything about it.
First, for my original posting, c/Albania/Afghanistan/
Second, your response:
I say that the brain habituates to violence, just as it habituates to anything else; and that children's minds are particularly pliable, such that viewing violence will affect their social skills as adults. Read on:
Games are *NOT* just games to children.
When you play "peek-a-boo" with a baby, it's not a game. When you disappear from view, *you do not exist* for the baby. Your repeated coming back teaches the child that out of sight is not out of reality.
When kids play dress-up and house, it's not a game. They are learning about real life, based on the models they experience at their home, others' homes, stories and television. Their play teaches them to become adults.
Children's play wires their brains for adulthood: what they play is, in large part, what they become.
The brain takes a long time to fully develop, if it ever does. Take morality, for instance: there are moral conundrums (is it wrong to steal a drug that will save your dying wife, when you can't afford to buy it?) that children will *reliably* respond to in different ways at different ages.
It's not until *well* into the teenage years that children will provide the same response that most adults provide.
The brain is still struggling even into the late teenage years, trying to develop a moral structure that will allow the child to become a useful and surviving adult.
What is also true is that our brains learn to accept what we frequently experience. It's part of surviving: if we were startled by the sunrise every morning, it'd really make for a long day.
Viewing realistic violence *undoubtedly* builds a tolerance for viewing violence. A lot of people are really squeamish when viewing SoF the first time. Play it for a week, and it just sort of becomes background noise: the violence is acceptable.
Just to make sure you're following me here, let's review:
1) The brain doesn't just automatically know reality from fantasy. (peek-a-boo)
2) Games aren't just play for children: it's how they learn to become adults (playhouse, clubs, teams).
3) The brain is still developing well into teenage years (morality response test).
4) The brain becomes used to what it frequently experiences.
Can you connect the dots now? Can you see how repeated depictions of realistic violence becomes seen as 'normal' by the brain, with the inevitable consequence that, for children, it becomes a model for adult behaviour, seen as acceptable?
Games are *NOT* just games, when it's children playing. Up to a certain brain maturity level; children *can not* distinguish the fantasy from reality (and that age is certainly into the mid-to-high single digits); children *learn* to accept violence as normal, acceptable behaviour; and children *learn* to become adults by what they experience.
And once again, it comes down to this final point:
What kind of society do we want to live in fifteen years from now... because what we get is going to depend a lot on what we do with our children.
Feed them a steady stream of realistic violence, and you can *bet your life* that the daily carnage we see spewed on the newscasts will be getting a whole lot worse.
Myself, I'd prefer to see children taught that human lives are sacrosanct: that there is no greater wrong than to take someone's life without their permission.
That's a touching enough story, but how does it apply?
Here's a real story, too: the Yugoslavian internal war was going on for years before it made the popular press in America. However, one photo did make it out.
In it, three young boys, about aged six to eight, were playing with toy guns, behind the sandbags at the interface zone between the competing factions.
These are children who were watching people being killed. Maimed. Losing family members. Fatherless. Living day in and day out in the most horrific violence.
Is this affecting their lives?
Say, did you see "Saving Private Ryan"? What was your emotional response to the first twenty minutes, as you watched young men being mangled by war? Would you be some fucked up for life if you'd had to experience it for yourself, if you'd been there in the front lines?
I think history speaks for itself. A lot of kids that grow up in Ireland grow up to kill each other in the everlasting Catholic/Protestant war they've been dedicated to for centuries. A lot of kids in Yugoslavia grew up with and became active in its war. The same thing in Angolia. In Rwanda.
The videogames that are causing all this controversy are not the games that we grew up with. Soldier of Fortune is *extremely* realistic, with detailed human characters that have skeletal framework animation that reacts as a human body really would when shot. It is highly realistic gore.
Twelve-year old boys are fighting in some of the African wars. They are children, killing people. Can they *possibly* grow up to be people who would fit into the sort of society that we want to have?
Can *OUR* children grow up to be people who will fit into the sort of society that we want to have, if we let them "kill people" in deeply realistic video games?
The bottom-line is this:
WHAT SORT OF SOCIETY DO WE WANT TO LIVE IN FIFTEEN YEARS FROM NOW?
We get to pick it, by the choices we make in parenting our children today.
IN British Columbia, where the police have photo radar, the average driving speed has probably not significantly dropped -- but the *maximum* speeds certainly have.
We don't have nearly so many fucked-up assholes ripping down the highways at 20+ above the limit and endangering *everyone* with their stupidity.
The roads are safer: more people are driving more the same speed.
We're about to get follow-too-close radar. *THAT* should make for some significant improvements in people's driving habits, too. Thank god.
Now, to my eye, there's more "higher colour" on today's picture (the 14th). The yellow band goes across the ocean, instead of breaking up. The orange patch over Moscow is larger. The purple patches over Indo-China are huge on Friday.
I suspect there was more UV today than would have been without this solar flare.
And I'm now quite pink. If only I'd had my peril sensitive sunglasses: I'd have just *known* that a major astronomical event had happened, and was about to threaten my life!
Slashdot Mirror
It's running on KDE and on Gnome. Am I naive beyond belief, or does this indicate that it's going to benefit both parties? It'd be wonderful if an app could use a single forms layout database/file/record/XML to create a GUI for all the platforms they've demonstrated.
Gahd. Imagine. The core of your application would be exactly the same on all platforms. Your forms design data would be the same. The only thing that changes is the render engine or interpreter.
--
And the ocean, you'll note, has areas where there's more or less salt, due to greater/lesser amounts of water.
These areas support distinctly different marine life than other parts.
I'll freely admit I'm talking without a lot of actual factual knowledge. What sort of increases of CO and CO2 are found in cities, compared to countryside? Perhaps 5 or 10%?
So we'd have air with 85-90% nitrogen content. Is that healthy? Certainly the 5-10% extra CO/CO2 isn't.
Maybe I'm just making silly-ass comments. It'd be nice if the responses to my poorly informed commentary weren't even less informed...
--
Not to mention the problems caused by concentrations of nitrogen. It's not like it's going to instantly dissipate. Our cities will be smogged with nitrogen, while our farms and forests will be starving.
There are already problems with "bubbles" of pollutants over cities already. I think nitrogen would make it even worse.
--
There's another ecological problem that isn't being addressed: sound pollution in our oceans.
A lot of marine mammals use echolocation to navigate, and all the marine mammals "chatter" to one another in their family/social groups.
Water is a very good medium for sound transmission. Boat propeller noise carries for hundreds of kilometers.
In many areas, the noise from props is loud enough to be the equivalent of a nearby jackhammer. The marine life *literally* can not echolocate or communicate.
This is a growing concern. We humans have it easy: when we're on a noise construction site, we can always use hand signals. Whales, dolphins, sea lions, seals and other marine life don't have that option.
How does this relate to the article? Well, those "tourist icebreakers" are deafening the Beluga and Narwhal populations in the Arctic oceans. There are only a few tens of thousands of Beluga, and they need to echolocate and communicate.
The poor bastards are dying off more quickly than ever before, and prop noise is now being considered a factor in their decline.
Please don't assist in their destruction by participating on icebreaker cruises.
--
But that's what they're doing. Paul Allen & Co. will own stock in the company, and they'll be paying less than 1/10th of the "retail" price.
Think -- who owns the stocks before they're flogged on the open market?
Right: the insiders. The VCs. The employees who took stocks in lieu of cash.
Who sells the stocks once the IPO happens?
Right, the private investors. For a significant multiple of what they originally paid.
The "people running up the value of the stock" are the people who own pre-IPO shares. It's in their very best interest to hype the company as much as possible!
Paul Allen won't come out hurtin', that's for sure.
--
Er, this may be off-topic, but us monolinguists might find the answer very interesting:
Why on *earth* is it called "The Chained Duck"?! Is there some way to explain this in English that would make the least bit of sense? Or is it just one of those inexplicable idioms that has no meaning?
Curious Minds Wish To Know!
--
Interesting. You can't access the site without accepting their cookies.
--
Right. And I quote from the Corruption Perception Index, Public Campaign:
Pharmaceutical industry's profit margin in 1999: 18.6%.
Fortune 500 median profit margin the same year: 5%.
Ratio of pharmaceutical industry's marketing and administration expenses to research and development: 2:1.
Number of lobbyists industry hired to work on Medicare prescription drug coverage in 1999: 297.
Amount pharmaceutical industry has spent on campaign contributions since 1993: $33 million.
Got it? A 2:1 spending ratio of admin/marketing to research.
--
To contradict you:
5 08.htm
http://washtimes.com/national/default-200072722
Conclusive is as conclusive does; there are people who believe there's no conclusive evidence that smoking causes cancer. Go figure.
--
"Does ANYONE honestly believe that a pharmaceutical company, which spends millions or billions of dollars in research and development to produce drugs that YOU ALL USE AND NEED would continue to do this if they were not allowed to make a return on their investment, time, and effort?"
Just thought I'd mention that the big drug companies spend significantly more on marketing than they do on research.
Ever seen the crap that doctors get? Bloody drug companies aren't at all shy about spending tens of dollars *per doctor per promotional sample* to buy their way onto the prescription pad.
It ain't nothing to do with the efficacy of the drugs, nor even their appropriate use: it's about buying the doctor.
It's pretty scary. Next time the doctor prescribes something outside the tried-and-true, one's gotta wonder: is it because this drug really is the best solution... or is it because PharmaGlakCo bought him a hooker at the last convention?
--
I suspect that the K5 DoS putz is the one who just got thwarted by NewsTrolls (http://www.newstrolls.com/). Just a few days ago, NewsTrolls implemented a sandbox system that allowed the putz to post his crap, without inflicting it on those that didn't care to see it.
Immediately after NT does that, K5 gets swamped.
K5 will resolve the problem, and the putz will target someone else.
It's a cry for help, even if it seems to most of us to be a cry for a bloody good beating. A person has to be pretty damned hard-up to waste so much effort doing something so pointless.
The putz falls into the category of people who deface murals, tip mailboxes, uproot saplings and smear shit in the washroom stalls: they're people who are desperately fucked-up and don't know how to ask for help, so they create situations where they'll have help forced on them.
--
Children are *NOT* good at distinguishing fantasy from reality.
Geez, the number of times I see wholly ignorant people spewing that line in defense of letting kids have access to FPS, violent movies, etcetera.
Fantasy rules the child's life. The bogy-man under the bed, the magic of the shopping mall Santa, playing house, don't step on the cracks, Bambi dying.
Even a lot of adults don't have the ability to distinguish fantasy from reality. Look at the number of adults who believe that America grabbed the U571 submarine, or believe that UFOs exist.
It has nothing to do with intelligence and *everything* to do with naivete. Children don't have the life experience necessary to distinguish reality from fantasy.
In adults, it's more tempting to use the word "ignorance," but it's really the same thing: a naive person who hasn't the experience to know historical truth from Hollywood fantasy; or scientific methods versus wishful thinking.
At any rate, the bottom line is that anyone with experience with children or who spends a few minutes looking in a few child psychology books, will certainly understand that fantasy and reality are not easily distinguished by children.
And anyone who thinks otherwise is, at best, naive.
--
OT Q: Why rewrite the server in C++, when you can continue to use the existing Python server? Profile the code, determine where the real speed issues are, and re-code those passages in C++. That way, you'll get the best of both worlds: the speed of programming in Python with the speed of execution of compiled C++.
--
It's the Direct Marketing Association, guy. They have some pretty stringent rules, and I believe that there are some laws that require direct marketers to follow the rules.
c/"EMail marketing"/"Junk Mail marketing"/ btw.
It works. I called in and demanded that I be removed from the telemarketing and bulk mail lists. I *do not* receive telemarketing calls from any large businesses any more. The exceedingly few calls I've received have been from local carpet cleaners, and my own bank doing surveys.
I get far less junk mail than I used to. It's not all gone, by any means, but it *is* reduced.
I haven't attempted the EMail opt out. I don't believe it would be at all effective: most of the junk EMail I receive is obviously from nincompoops who wouldn't belong to the DMA.
--
Go to http://www.the-dma.org/ and hunt around -- you'll find that you can OPT OUT of telemarketing, EMail marketing and EMail.
It does work.
--
As long as everyone keeps using non-compliant browsers like MSIE and NS, as long as Mozilla remains a pipe-dream, and as long as people refuse to pay a few bucks for compliant browsing software, web authors are going to continue creating browser-specific pages or using non-compliant tagging.
In my experience, Opera Software has been extraordinarily responsive to user feedback and very dogged in implementing full compliancy in their browser, while at the same time dealing with the crappy tagging that goes as web authoring these days.
Yes, they want a whopping forty bucks for their browser. For a lot of you, that's an hour or less of payola. And it reflects that these people are working at this as full-time professionals -- *QUITE* unlike a lot of the open source/free beer applications out there, that are being developed in people's hobby time.
It's a fair price for a great product that is available *now* and is *very* compliant. Demand better products by putting some money where your mouth is!
--
Or install a C:\WINDOWS\HOSTS list (not sure whatcha Linux users call it). Not file extension on this one. All the following addresses will be resolved to an invalid address, so you won't be bothered by banners in the least.
Also recommend using Opera v4x, which has superb cookie handling (far better than MSIE!) and other excellent privacy features.
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--
The immediate question I ask, when I see big numbers like "$20 Millin" thrown around, is *what are they after?*
IBM isn't doing this out of the goodness of their hearts. They expect payback.
They expect to get their twenty million back PLUS another twenty to sixty million minimum.
So where's the money going to come from?
--
"BTW, the only way we could view pictures was to uudecode (by hand) cat the (usually several) files, and then utter curses if we didn't have the proper viewer installed. I never went through the trouble to decode the picture, I just saw respondants objecting to it."
Shhhhhyyaaa, right!
Problem was, you didn't have that one-handed UUDecoding skill down pat...
--
...those who have used Usenet using newsreaders, and those who have used it using Dejanews.
The Deja-groupies are, of course, in support of anything Deja does that keeps the site running, because they'd otherwise lose access to Usenet.
The newsreader folk are against the hijinx that Deja does, because they are independent of Deja. Indeed, having Dejanews go belly-up would be A Good Thing, in our view. It'd cut down on the number of crap postings.
IMO, the links Deja wants to insert imply that I have endorsed the link. This offends me: if I wanted my message to contain a link, I'd have put the URL there myself.
I've got no problem with Deja putting contextual links in its presentation -- but the damn things had better be off to the side of my message, not part of my message.
In the end, though, I'm pretty sure this is a tempest in a teacup: Deja will be sued, and they'll rethink their new gimmick.
--
And chew on this, also:
In Vancouver, BC, three sets of teenagers in seperate high-end sports cars were racing down one of roads at speeds in excess of 200KMH late at night. One struck a pedestrian in a crosswalk, throwing the body several hundred feet.
They snuffed someone's life because their fantasy ("it's okay to race our cars in the city") didn't jive with reality.
They fled the scene, because their fantasy ("we don't have to take responsibility for our actions") didn't jive with reality.
Will "Grand Theft Auto" make children into irresponsible murdering teens like the pack that was racing in Vancouver?
Hell, no. It won't *MAKE* them do these things.
But the question you want to ask yourself is will it make it easier for their brain to *allow* them to behave in such a manner? Will their brain disregard the real risks (the risk of hitting someone because you're moving too fast to see them) because it has been taught by the realistic violence of the game?
Every day, someone in the country is shot to death, deliberately, by a stranger who "made a mistake."
Will playing "SoF" *make* our children want to kill other people? Hell, no, of course not.
But the question you want to ask yourself is: will the realistic violence teach their brain accept that shooting people carries no real consequences? Will repeated depictions of realistic violence teach the brain that violence is acceptable? That it solves problems?
Quite simply, the consequences of our decisions today are going to smack us in the face fifteen years from now. It's going to be a shocking wake-up call... but it's going to be too damn late to do anything about it.
Let's make the right decisions, right now.
--
First, for my original posting, c/Albania/Afghanistan/
... because what we get is going to depend a lot on what we do with our children.
Second, your response:
I say that the brain habituates to violence, just as it habituates to anything else; and that children's minds are particularly pliable, such that viewing violence will affect their social skills as adults. Read on:
Games are *NOT* just games to children.
When you play "peek-a-boo" with a baby, it's not a game. When you disappear from view, *you do not exist* for the baby. Your repeated coming back teaches the child that out of sight is not out of reality.
When kids play dress-up and house, it's not a game. They are learning about real life, based on the models they experience at their home, others' homes, stories and television. Their play teaches them to become adults.
Children's play wires their brains for adulthood: what they play is, in large part, what they become.
The brain takes a long time to fully develop, if it ever does. Take morality, for instance: there are moral conundrums (is it wrong to steal a drug that will save your dying wife, when you can't afford to buy it?) that children will *reliably* respond to in different ways at different ages.
It's not until *well* into the teenage years that children will provide the same response that most adults provide.
The brain is still struggling even into the late teenage years, trying to develop a moral structure that will allow the child to become a useful and surviving adult.
What is also true is that our brains learn to accept what we frequently experience. It's part of surviving: if we were startled by the sunrise every morning, it'd really make for a long day.
Viewing realistic violence *undoubtedly* builds a tolerance for viewing violence. A lot of people are really squeamish when viewing SoF the first time. Play it for a week, and it just sort of becomes background noise: the violence is acceptable.
Just to make sure you're following me here, let's review:
1) The brain doesn't just automatically know reality from fantasy. (peek-a-boo)
2) Games aren't just play for children: it's how they learn to become adults (playhouse, clubs, teams).
3) The brain is still developing well into teenage years (morality response test).
4) The brain becomes used to what it frequently experiences.
Can you connect the dots now? Can you see how repeated depictions of realistic violence becomes seen as 'normal' by the brain, with the inevitable consequence that, for children, it becomes a model for adult behaviour, seen as acceptable?
Games are *NOT* just games, when it's children playing. Up to a certain brain maturity level; children *can not* distinguish the fantasy from reality (and that age is certainly into the mid-to-high single digits); children *learn* to accept violence as normal, acceptable behaviour; and children *learn* to become adults by what they experience.
And once again, it comes down to this final point:
What kind of society do we want to live in fifteen years from now
Feed them a steady stream of realistic violence, and you can *bet your life* that the daily carnage we see spewed on the newscasts will be getting a whole lot worse.
Myself, I'd prefer to see children taught that human lives are sacrosanct: that there is no greater wrong than to take someone's life without their permission.
--
That's a touching enough story, but how does it apply?
Here's a real story, too: the Yugoslavian internal war was going on for years before it made the popular press in America. However, one photo did make it out.
In it, three young boys, about aged six to eight, were playing with toy guns, behind the sandbags at the interface zone between the competing factions.
These are children who were watching people being killed. Maimed. Losing family members. Fatherless. Living day in and day out in the most horrific violence.
Is this affecting their lives?
Say, did you see "Saving Private Ryan"? What was your emotional response to the first twenty minutes, as you watched young men being mangled by war? Would you be some fucked up for life if you'd had to experience it for yourself, if you'd been there in the front lines?
I think history speaks for itself. A lot of kids that grow up in Ireland grow up to kill each other in the everlasting Catholic/Protestant war they've been dedicated to for centuries. A lot of kids in Yugoslavia grew up with and became active in its war. The same thing in Angolia. In Rwanda.
The videogames that are causing all this controversy are not the games that we grew up with. Soldier of Fortune is *extremely* realistic, with detailed human characters that have skeletal framework animation that reacts as a human body really would when shot. It is highly realistic gore.
Twelve-year old boys are fighting in some of the African wars. They are children, killing people. Can they *possibly* grow up to be people who would fit into the sort of society that we want to have?
Can *OUR* children grow up to be people who will fit into the sort of society that we want to have, if we let them "kill people" in deeply realistic video games?
The bottom-line is this:
WHAT SORT OF SOCIETY DO WE WANT TO LIVE IN FIFTEEN YEARS FROM NOW?
We get to pick it, by the choices we make in parenting our children today.
I hope most of you are picking it wisely.
--
IN British Columbia, where the police have photo radar, the average driving speed has probably not significantly dropped -- but the *maximum* speeds certainly have.
We don't have nearly so many fucked-up assholes ripping down the highways at 20+ above the limit and endangering *everyone* with their stupidity.
The roads are safer: more people are driving more the same speed.
We're about to get follow-too-close radar. *THAT* should make for some significant improvements in people's driving habits, too. Thank god.
--
Well, it took ages, but I found a series of UV measurements. It's from a satellite, so presumably that cuts out the effect of clouds, pollution, etc.
Global UV on the 10th
Global UV on the 11th
Global UV on the 12th
Global UV on the 13th
Global UV on the 14th
Global UV on the 15th (well, it'll be there tomorrow (Saturday))
Now, to my eye, there's more "higher colour" on today's picture (the 14th). The yellow band goes across the ocean, instead of breaking up. The orange patch over Moscow is larger. The purple patches over Indo-China are huge on Friday.
I suspect there was more UV today than would have been without this solar flare.
And I'm now quite pink. If only I'd had my peril sensitive sunglasses: I'd have just *known* that a major astronomical event had happened, and was about to threaten my life!
--