Basically, he's assuming that we are all mindless zombies with no choice but to imitate anything we see on a screen You know, I generally agree with most of your post, but have you been outside anytime in the last 30 years or so? Most people are mindless zombies that imitate everything they see on a screen. Advertisers (among others) count on it.
I think Thompson severely overstates the effect of video games relative to other influences, but insofar as they're part of a culture that associates violence with joy, yeah, they probably have some effect. People are produced by a culture as much as they produce it. Where Thompson becomes an insufferable jerk is that he doesn't consider any other influences. He takes a cop killer and reduces their lives to one factor: they played GTA. It's ridiculous.
I do think it's weird, though, that people who get the most out of video games, people who will talk glowingly of the immersive qualities of video games, who will spend hours playing them, who develop fond memories of events that occured inside the game, nonetheless reject the notion that those experiences could also affect them in a negative way. I think video games have tremendous positive potential to help us reconceptualize who we are and frankly, our place in the world. But, I think we should recognize that there's a negative potential as well.
Regardless, while this is private information, it's not exactly SENSITIVE private information. There's really nothing in these files that isn't a matter of public record (when you applied, where you lived when you applied, name, birthdate) or isn't going to be terribly interesting for any political reason (SS#). Actually, that's not true. There was a news story yesterday that said that passport records also contain the results of any background checks the government runs when deciding whether to issue you a passport. Why dig up dirt on someone yourself when you can have the government do it for you?
You don't need to wait for Richard Stallman to publish a fully-worked philosophical system. I almost hesitate to say this because of the knee-jerk reactions of most people, but both of those points come from, and are explained in great detail, by Karl Marx. If you can get past the fact that I just used the words "Karl" and "Marx", and would genuinely like to learn where Stallman is coming from with those two points, pick up Karx Marx: Selected Readings and read the excerpts from "The German Ideology" and the "Preface to a Critique of Political Economy". Read them as philosophy and an attempt to explain human history (which they are) and not as a recipe for a totalitarian society (which they are not) and you'll be fine.
I realize this is besides the point, but what the heck. For the record, MS Flight Simulator is absolutely nothing like flying a real airplane (at least the 172 isn't - I've never flown an airliner). The throttle settings are incorrect, the roll rate is wrong, the view is wrong, it doesn't behave or feel anything like the real thing. The idea that you could use MS Flight Simulator to learn to fly or to train to do anything is ludicrous. If you've used flight simulators before learning to fly you have a small advantage in that you know what the controls do in theory - that's it. I suppose you could figure out that the WTC was at the southern tip of Manhattan island using FS, but you could figure that out from any reasonably large scale map just as easily.
Except that's not a very good joke is it? "Look! You were all stupid enough to believe that these people were stupid! HAHAHA!"
Big deal. In fact, it seems like an exceptionally weak punch line to me. Would even a single viewer feel stupid for mistakenly believing that someone else is stupid? I don't think so. The whole point of a prank is to get someone to believe something crazy. Is it crazy to think that a bunch of strangers are stupid?
I can think of a much better joke: find a bunch of people so stupid they think they've been launched into space. Now that's funny.
While I admire the ACLU for taking on some contentious issues which are nasty, but have to be defended, most of their stuff seems to be things like forcing a nativity scene out of a city park or trying to make it possible for someone to mask their face in a driver's license photo.
Isn't there value in a debate over the limits of religious freedom? I don't agree that someone should be allowed to cover their face in a driver's license photo either, but I don't begrudge the ACLU for bringing the case. One of the biggest dangers we face as a society, hell, as humans, is that we tend to believe that certain ideas like "religious freedom" are unchanging and self-evident; they're not. In fact, they're sources of constant contestation and both shape and are shaped by society. Insofar as the ACLU's driver's license lawsuit forces us to think about the limits of religious freedom, and furthermore just what we mean by "religious freedom", I say it's worthwhile; we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation otherwise. The idea that it's wrong to even ask those questions is, in my opinion, a much bigger threat than any possible outcome of the lawsuit.
Hurricanes can't form within about 5 degrees of the equator, but in theory they can cross the equator. That said, there's never been an observed case of a hurricane crossing the equator as the coriolis force also tends to cause hurricanes travel to the northwest.
They will just claim, as they have in the past, that they are understaffed and overwhelmed by the number of patents that they have to deal with.
That's a load of crap. I'm sure they are understaffed, but come on: they're too understaffed and overwhelmed to glance down at the "Start" button that's at the bottom of their computer screen and think "Hmmm, that seems to have some nested menus...". It's the same damn thing with that "keyboard with multimedia keys" patent they granted a week or two ago. The inspectors are too overworked to glance down at the keyboard under their fingers and notice the function keys?
The problem isn't that they're understaffed and overworked, it's that they're morons.
It appears the article may be mistaken about that. Another article states that the bar is simply at a 45 degree angle relative to our position from the core. In other words, where we are in relation to the bar.
I feel your pain - wireless connectivity is a major pain in the ass with linux. Much of the blame lies with the manufacturers switching chipsets all the time, but it's compounded by the fact that about half of the howtos out there tell you to "ignore the drivers in the kernel that was released last week! Compile the ones on this website!" Alsa suffers from this too - I don't know why it has to be such a kludge and can't be better documented.
I'd get the cheapest handheld you can find, and not worry to much about the features. That way, you won't feel bad four months from now when you realize you haven't touched the thing in two months. You might also want to get one that comes in some kind of rubber sheath so it won't be badly damaged when you throw it against the wall. At the very least, if you go cheap you'll have more money to spend on the paperclips you'll need to perform the resets required after the constant crashes.
Seriously, I know you want one, but PDAs are the single most unnecessary and most overrated piece of crap ever foisted upon the geek. Just wait till it locks up solid while you're on travel and you need to perform a hard reset, thereby losing all your data. Ahh the memories...
You could build a pretty good operating system from all the stuff that's been pulled out out Vista. Maybe Microsoft could take all that extra stuff and come out with a "Platinum" version of Vista; call it "Longhorn" or something.
It's funny - the phone company told me that too when I switched from DSL to cable. However, I've had cable for 4 years at home and 2 at work, and everytime I've tested it, it's been exactly at the quoted rate. Cox, in fact, guarantees that you'll get the rate you signed up for.
I can't comment on the wireless service, but I've never had a problem with Cox overselling the line.
Interesting - That's almost exactly what I remember reading about Ms. Pacman. I wonder if the improvment to the AI in Ms. Pacman that I'm remembering was simply adding some variability to the ghosts' actions.
I found this paper with an interview with the creator that bears out what you're saying. It's pretty cool, actually, that they gave the ghosts different personalities; I stand corrected.
It's a small point, anyway. I distinctly remember, however, buying a "Beat Ms. Pacman" strategy guide in elementary school and reading that the patterns given in the book wouldn't work 100% of the time like the older patterns for Pacman did. I felt ripped off.
AI? I thought the ghosts in Pacman followed predetermined paths irrespective of what the player is doing, hence the ability of the player to "cheat" and use a predefined pattern to successfully complete the maze. I don't think the ghosts actually reacted to the player until Ms. Pacman.
You won't get any argument from me that the ratings system, and American values in general, aren't broken. However, it's disengenuous to suggest that until the Hot Coffee scandal Jack Thompson and all the politicians weighing in recently were "OK" with the level of violence. They weren't, and furthermore, I don't see anyone here saying thank God for Jack Thompson standing up against ludicrous ultra-violence in video games. Instead, there's a bunch of accusations of hypocracy, and all I'm saying is that they're not hypocrites. They'd like to ban video games both for sex and for violence.
Also, I'm not sure I'd call sex between two fully clothed people "normal".;)
Speaking of which, I just have to plug this review. I don't know how they managed it, but our little free weekly rag has one of the best reviewers I've ever read.
Why does this keep getting posted? Are you seriously telling us that you aren't aware of the insane amount of criticism the violence in the GTA games has received these last few years from grandstanding politicians and self-appointed cultural guardians? You and I probably agree that the government should stop wasting its time legislating taste, but you can't call them hypocrites. They openly want to control what you see and hear, and that includes violence as well as sex. These are the same people who have been braying about violence in video games since the beginning of time; I'm sure they haven't changed their minds.
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
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NASA's Shuttle Plans
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· Score: 1
The booster rockets (1st stage) would be reusable. Also, the "reusable" shuttle is tremendously more expensive then a simple "disposable" rocket like Soyuz. I've seen numbers like 30-50 million per Soyuz launch; compare that to the (according to the article) 1 billion per shuttle launch. Sounds to me like it's the reusable approach that's the huge waste of money.
Lol - fair enough. I'll even concede the point if someone can come up with a statistic showing 0 annual suicides among Mormons.
How about this: the states with the highest suicide rates are in the West, which also happen to be the states with the highest Mormon populations. There's a high positive correlation between suicide rate and % LDS adherents. Just kidding.
First off, the parent said that Mormons don't commit suicide. Obviously, if suicide is the leading cause of death for males under 40, they do and you're criticism is immaterial.
Secondly, if you had bothered to look up the statistics, you'd see that Utah's suicide rate is, in fact, above the national average and has been at least since the early 90's. Too much trouble? Take a look at this. Or how about this?
Actually, Utah consistently ranks above the national average for suicides. In the 1990's, for instance, suicide was the #1 cause of death for males 24-40 and the #2 cause of death for males 15-24.
I'd also like to point out that the first suicide was apparently commited in front of the man's wife. Can we resist accusing Darl McBride of murder, until there's at least a shred of evidence to support it?
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I think Thompson severely overstates the effect of video games relative to other influences, but insofar as they're part of a culture that associates violence with joy, yeah, they probably have some effect. People are produced by a culture as much as they produce it. Where Thompson becomes an insufferable jerk is that he doesn't consider any other influences. He takes a cop killer and reduces their lives to one factor: they played GTA. It's ridiculous.
I do think it's weird, though, that people who get the most out of video games, people who will talk glowingly of the immersive qualities of video games, who will spend hours playing them, who develop fond memories of events that occured inside the game, nonetheless reject the notion that those experiences could also affect them in a negative way. I think video games have tremendous positive potential to help us reconceptualize who we are and frankly, our place in the world. But, I think we should recognize that there's a negative potential as well.
Actually, that's not true. There was a news story yesterday that said that passport records also contain the results of any background checks the government runs when deciding whether to issue you a passport. Why dig up dirt on someone yourself when you can have the government do it for you?
...nor should I expect much privacy in my public movements.Well, not anymore, anyway.
You don't need to wait for Richard Stallman to publish a fully-worked philosophical system. I almost hesitate to say this because of the knee-jerk reactions of most people, but both of those points come from, and are explained in great detail, by Karl Marx. If you can get past the fact that I just used the words "Karl" and "Marx", and would genuinely like to learn where Stallman is coming from with those two points, pick up Karx Marx: Selected Readings and read the excerpts from "The German Ideology" and the "Preface to a Critique of Political Economy". Read them as philosophy and an attempt to explain human history (which they are) and not as a recipe for a totalitarian society (which they are not) and you'll be fine.
I realize this is besides the point, but what the heck. For the record, MS Flight Simulator is absolutely nothing like flying a real airplane (at least the 172 isn't - I've never flown an airliner). The throttle settings are incorrect, the roll rate is wrong, the view is wrong, it doesn't behave or feel anything like the real thing. The idea that you could use MS Flight Simulator to learn to fly or to train to do anything is ludicrous. If you've used flight simulators before learning to fly you have a small advantage in that you know what the controls do in theory - that's it. I suppose you could figure out that the WTC was at the southern tip of Manhattan island using FS, but you could figure that out from any reasonably large scale map just as easily.
Big deal. In fact, it seems like an exceptionally weak punch line to me. Would even a single viewer feel stupid for mistakenly believing that someone else is stupid? I don't think so. The whole point of a prank is to get someone to believe something crazy. Is it crazy to think that a bunch of strangers are stupid?
I can think of a much better joke: find a bunch of people so stupid they think they've been launched into space. Now that's funny.
Isn't there value in a debate over the limits of religious freedom? I don't agree that someone should be allowed to cover their face in a driver's license photo either, but I don't begrudge the ACLU for bringing the case. One of the biggest dangers we face as a society, hell, as humans, is that we tend to believe that certain ideas like "religious freedom" are unchanging and self-evident; they're not. In fact, they're sources of constant contestation and both shape and are shaped by society. Insofar as the ACLU's driver's license lawsuit forces us to think about the limits of religious freedom, and furthermore just what we mean by "religious freedom", I say it's worthwhile; we certainly wouldn't be having this conversation otherwise. The idea that it's wrong to even ask those questions is, in my opinion, a much bigger threat than any possible outcome of the lawsuit.
Hurricanes can't form within about 5 degrees of the equator, but in theory they can cross the equator. That said, there's never been an observed case of a hurricane crossing the equator as the coriolis force also tends to cause hurricanes travel to the northwest.
That's a load of crap. I'm sure they are understaffed, but come on: they're too understaffed and overwhelmed to glance down at the "Start" button that's at the bottom of their computer screen and think "Hmmm, that seems to have some nested menus...". It's the same damn thing with that "keyboard with multimedia keys" patent they granted a week or two ago. The inspectors are too overworked to glance down at the keyboard under their fingers and notice the function keys?
The problem isn't that they're understaffed and overworked, it's that they're morons.
It appears the article may be mistaken about that. Another article states that the bar is simply at a 45 degree angle relative to our position from the core. In other words, where we are in relation to the bar.
I feel your pain - wireless connectivity is a major pain in the ass with linux. Much of the blame lies with the manufacturers switching chipsets all the time, but it's compounded by the fact that about half of the howtos out there tell you to "ignore the drivers in the kernel that was released last week! Compile the ones on this website!" Alsa suffers from this too - I don't know why it has to be such a kludge and can't be better documented.
Seriously, I know you want one, but PDAs are the single most unnecessary and most overrated piece of crap ever foisted upon the geek. Just wait till it locks up solid while you're on travel and you need to perform a hard reset, thereby losing all your data. Ahh the memories...
You could build a pretty good operating system from all the stuff that's been pulled out out Vista. Maybe Microsoft could take all that extra stuff and come out with a "Platinum" version of Vista; call it "Longhorn" or something.
I can't comment on the wireless service, but I've never had a problem with Cox overselling the line.
I found this paper with an interview with the creator that bears out what you're saying. It's pretty cool, actually, that they gave the ghosts different personalities; I stand corrected.
LOL - I thought about the dual meaning while I was typing that.
It's a small point, anyway. I distinctly remember, however, buying a "Beat Ms. Pacman" strategy guide in elementary school and reading that the patterns given in the book wouldn't work 100% of the time like the older patterns for Pacman did. I felt ripped off.
AI? I thought the ghosts in Pacman followed predetermined paths irrespective of what the player is doing, hence the ability of the player to "cheat" and use a predefined pattern to successfully complete the maze. I don't think the ghosts actually reacted to the player until Ms. Pacman.
Also, I'm not sure I'd call sex between two fully clothed people "normal". ;)
Speaking of which, I just have to plug this review. I don't know how they managed it, but our little free weekly rag has one of the best reviewers I've ever read.
Why does this keep getting posted? Are you seriously telling us that you aren't aware of the insane amount of criticism the violence in the GTA games has received these last few years from grandstanding politicians and self-appointed cultural guardians? You and I probably agree that the government should stop wasting its time legislating taste, but you can't call them hypocrites. They openly want to control what you see and hear, and that includes violence as well as sex. These are the same people who have been braying about violence in video games since the beginning of time; I'm sure they haven't changed their minds.
The booster rockets (1st stage) would be reusable. Also, the "reusable" shuttle is tremendously more expensive then a simple "disposable" rocket like Soyuz. I've seen numbers like 30-50 million per Soyuz launch; compare that to the (according to the article) 1 billion per shuttle launch. Sounds to me like it's the reusable approach that's the huge waste of money.
How about this: the states with the highest suicide rates are in the West, which also happen to be the states with the highest Mormon populations. There's a high positive correlation between suicide rate and % LDS adherents. Just kidding.
Secondly, if you had bothered to look up the statistics, you'd see that Utah's suicide rate is, in fact, above the national average and has been at least since the early 90's. Too much trouble? Take a look at this. Or how about this?
I'd also like to point out that the first suicide was apparently commited in front of the man's wife. Can we resist accusing Darl McBride of murder, until there's at least a shred of evidence to support it?