I'm fortunate in that there is quite good public transport in my city, Edmonton Alberta Canada. I live a mere 10 minute bus ride from work so I find it very convenient and Bus Passes run me ~$870 a year, which are also tax deductable. Assuming a fully paid off car operating it would be $2-5,000 a year in insurance (depending on car/premiums etc.), add gas, regular maintenane, winter tires (its Canada afterall), and any potential repairs and the estimates don't seem unreasonable.
The real issue is that for many people public transit is not convenient or worth their time. For me, 10 mins to work and I can basically get to anywhere I need to in the city in short order. This has a lot to do with me carefully planning where I moved so everything is either within walking distance or one bus ride. This only works because I am able to live in close proximity to almost everything I need. Many other people simply do not have that that degree of flexibility.
If someone is in the situation where public transportation is significantly more time consuming than driving, or some other mode of transportation, I would completely understand why they would opt out. I value my time highly and if my bus ride was longer than say 30 minutes each way and a drive was only 5-10 minutes, its possible I would be driving instead.
Being one of the 'lower' ID# people on the website it has been very interesting to see how the site has evolved over time.
In my eyes, the most interesting change has been the increasing politicization of/. Some people have recently complained about how Slashdot is less about tech news than it is about politics, but personally I think its a good thing. While the quality of some discussion has definitely decreased during these ten years, I still find that there is good and heated discussions to be had about fundamentally important issues whose impact extends far beyond the boundaries of this site.
I'm looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years bring.
Its far more complicated in Canada than it is in the United States because 'generally' Members of Parliament (MPs) do not vote independently - they follow party lines. This makes it difficult to effectively lobby individual MPs. This situation is exacerbated because we currently have a Minority government, where the ruling party's legislation can be overridden by the opposition, so party discipline is far stricter than it would be in a majority situation. Additionally, there are significant restrictions on political contributions and its not as easy to skirt these kinds of things within Canada like you can in the United States with PACs and the like.
The key if you want to influence the process is to follow the relevant committees and try and influence those specific members during the hearing process through letter writing, phone calls, etc. Alternatively, you can hope you, your company, or your issue appears on the Prime Minister's radar, or if you are speaking about a party not in power - whomever the head of the party is - and/or the Party whip, who works to ensure the MPs vote the party line. That's probably unlikely as an individual citizen, but for the telecommunications industry in Canada... its another matter.
"U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile."
The only time a laser is mentioned in the entire article is
"Neither the Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense nor Air Force Space Command would comment on the attack, which followed by several months the alleged illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser."
So the only laser involved here is one that is capable of illuminating, target painting, targets - not destroying them. The title is more than a little misleading - can we get an adjustment on it perhaps? Something like "Chinese successfully test anti-satellite weapon"?
This is an area I've been involved in researching as a graduate student so I'd like to answer some questions and direct some people to research about this issue if they would like some further information.
First, on causality. Determining causation is incredibly difficult, and I would argue, not even remotely possible within the social sciences. I'm sure there are people who will disagree with me, but when we are talking about life and all the forces that impact it how can you possibly narrow things down sufficiently to determine a causal connection? Your statistical tools can't help you, nor can your models, you have to accept that you cannot determine causality, make some generalizations/abstractions (and qualify them) and move forward with the research. So really the best we can hope for here is high degrees of correlation.
Second, Income Inequality is one of the http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/Social Determinants of Health which suggests that the distribution of income has a significant impact upon the health of populations. A good place to start when looking at Income Inequality is http://www.democraticdialogue.org/documents/picket twilkinson.pdfIncome Inequality and Population Health: A Review of the Evidence. This article, published last year in a major peer reviwed Journal, examines basically every study that has been done on income inequality to determine what level the strongest correlations between health and income inequality exist. In a nutshell, the strongest relationship was discovered at the national level.
Third, there is a difference between the health impacts of 'absolute' variations in income (poverty) and relative variations in income (income inequality). Much of the discussion here has focused upon how if you are poor you can't afford: a good house, good food, good education, so you're forced to live in a poorer neighborhood and on and on. This is true and legitimate. The difference with income inequality is that the pathway for the health impact is psychosocial. You 'might' have enough income to have a decent house, live in an ok neighborhood, and eat decent food - but that's not the issue. The issue is how you are impacted by your relative social position within a society, essentially a class debate.
I hope those links are somewhat informative and if anyone wants some more links to books about these issues I'm happy to provide them,
As some other comments have already touched upon this listing of the top 10 isn't that useful by itself. Its just a measure of what's 'popular' on one photo site, and nothing more. Perhaps if you could use this list to browse shots taken by those cameras it would be useful... which brings me to http://www.pbase.com/. PBase lets you search by camera model and then view all the photos stored on that site taken by the camera model you have chosen. This is incredibly useful in evaluating the quality of the output of cameras you may be considering.
Additionally if one is looking for a 'better' way to narrow down digital cameras during their research process you would be better served relying on a high quality review site. Here are the two best review sites I know of for digital cameras. http://www.dpreview.com/ http://www.dcresource.com/
"The old-timer - These posters, who hang around slashdot land, have forgotten to move on. They post just to show off their low slashdot id. This makes some druel, and others comment that low id does not mean more intelligent. However, they're all wrong anyway."
The story that you are citing is from May 2005 based upon initial speculation about these CPUs back at that time. I would suggest the following would be more appropriate starting points for information. There are many more articles available, of course, but these are current, relevant, and informative.
"Of course, Hillary believes it takes a community to raise a child. I, on the other hand, believe it takes parents."
Your absolutely right, and your absolutely wrong. Yes it takes parents to raise a child, assuming you have parents which hundreds of thousands of orphans from the AIDS crisis and other crises around the world do not.
The point that was being made by the author was that the role of the community in its own development, and the development of its members, is important and significant. How that community is structured, is it inclusive? is it a positive environment? is it safe? does it have the resources necessary to promote growth? (economic environmental and social)
There are so many factors that are beyond the control of parents. You want to look at drug abuse, violence, exclusion, poverty, whatever, all of them are incredibly linked to the community. The individual, and certainly not the parents, do not control the context in which they live their lives. If our communities degenerate, or continue to degenerate as many authors have suggested, it won't matter what kind of parent you are - you can only teach your child so much and shield them from so much. Beyond that the responsibility lies with your child, and the environment they interact within, namely 'the community' on whatever plan you choose to identify it (municipality -> nation -> nation-state -> continent, etc)
As a grad student in Political Science and Population Health researcher (but I am not an expert in either field), and a 26 year old gamer, the suggestion that the CDC explore the link between Gaming and Health is not as ludicrious as you suggest. What concerns me is that the kind of study likely to come out of the CDC, perhaps a focus upon individual, rather than social, impacts.
I.e. Gaming can promote sleep deprivation, alteration of tradition behaviour, exposure to violent material in a form that may (or may not) be more negatively impactful due to its interactivity, which may negatively impact individual health.
BUT, We've seen a few recent studies, and stories on slashdot, regarding the possible benefits of guild participation, and perhaps online gaming in general. In population health this may be linked to the concepts of social cohesion (or social capital depending upon your background) which have strong correlations to health status.
I.e. Individuals may not feel particularly attached to their physical communities, you may not feel you have much in common with your neighbor or trust them (social exclusion), and compensate for that by interacting within virtual communities with positive health benefits (due to possible reductions in stress, social inclusion, feelings of personal achievment/respect).
As long as they are balanced and take a look at both the social and physical determinants of health, although physical determinants which are the terms most people conceive of health are likely to be the focus, it is not necessarily a bad thing. The CDC is a reputable institution, and I would like to see additional research in this area, and I'm not alone.
If you are interested, some important authors in the field include: Kawachi, Marmot, Syme, Wilkinson, Putnam, Lavis, McCracken, Labonte, Feinstein, and many more.
"They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users."
I think they meant to say that the CURRENT record for concurrent users is 23,178 for EVE Online - not a record for All MMOs. I'm sure that Lineage has had a higher concurrency and WoW's concurrency is reported to exceed the population of Chicago.
"(repressive Muslim countries have a *far* lower AIDS incidence rate than their economic class would suggest, and indeed places like Afghanistan and Iran have lower rates than developed nations like the United States)."
First I would like to say that blaming HIV/AIDS transmission on infidelity is incredibly short sighted and flat out wrong. Is it a component? Certainly, but the degree to which it is a factor is radically different in different countries. Looking at Pakistan, who you give as an example... From UNAIDS.
"Of the reported cases with known transmission routes, the most predominant during the quarter ending June 2004 was injecting drug use (73.72%), followed by heterosexual relations(22.18%), men who have sex with men (4.0 %) and mother-to-child transmission (0.1%). " http://www.unaids.org/en/Regions_Countries/Countri es/pakistan.asp
Furthermore there is some debate about the quality of the data coming out of regions where these issues are very highly stigmatized. I would suggest to you that the challenges of dealing with a disease that has a religious and social stigmatization, as HIV/AIDS does through most of the world, makes estimates difficult as people are going to be very unwilling to report that they have it. Looking at the UN Epidemiological Fact Sheets on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections on Pakistan http://data.unaids.org/Publications/Fact-Sheets01/ pakistan_EN.pdf We see that in total only 210 cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported (Page 6) but estimates of prevalance are between 24,000-150,000.(Page 1)
Regarding Afganistan. UNAIDS http://www.unaids.org/en/Regions_Countries/Countri es/afghanistan.asp doesn't even have an estimate in place for the infection rate so I don't think you can accurately make any sort of argument about HIV/AIDS prevalence in that country based upon punishments surrounding infidelity.
From the World Health Organization report on Iran: "Based on the reported data, the HIV epidemic in the Islamic Republic of Iran appears to be accelerating at an alarming trend. According to reports by the National AIDS programme , the number, 1159 of newly diagnosed HIV infections and AIDS cases in 2001 shows a three-fold increase in comparison to both years 2000 and 1999.
This considerable increase may indicate another outbreak The previous dramatic increase had occurred in 1997, when the number of HIV/AIDS cases had reached 815 new infections.
Injecting drug use drives the epidemic in the I.R.of Iran. In 2001, 64% of all AIDS cases were injecting drug users. The data on HIV seroprevalence among IDUs shows the highest rates of infection compared to all other tested groups. IDU have tested positive in 1996 and a prevalence was found of 5.7% of cases in 1996 , 1.7% in 1997. 8.5% in 2002 and 29% in 2002 among clients of counseling centers. The data is variable as it r
"I also emailed Transgaming about Cedega, but so far they still have nothing useful to say."
I just wanted to highlight what you have linked to as its something that has been very intriguing to me since the announcement of the transition to Intel processors. From http://www.transgaming.com/cedega_faq.php#8
"[8)] Does Cedega work on the Mac? Cedega does not run on the PowerPC Mac OSX due to differences in the underlying architecture between PowerPC computers and x86 based computers."
"It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has implemented some kind of unique encrypted handshaking between the OS X installer and the hardware so that only Apple's OS can be installed on it, so that they can avoid receiving support calls from people who put Windows on Apple hardware."
I have no doubt it will be a headache to put Windows on a Mac. At the same time - the kinds of users who are going to be attempting this are not beginner or ever intermediate ones but rather advanced users who will probably be able to figure it out on their own or find a FAQ to help them on the internet.
That being said the kind of 'desktop' product being released at the moment (Imac) probably appeals less to the 'enthusiast user'. It may very well be that the products targetted more towards beginner/intermediate consumers have these restrictions while products like the PowerMac's might not.
Three major factors in MMOs, combat, finance and stats, are the three most boring and time consuming parts of RPGs.
"MMOs just take the monster-smashing, stick the monsters in random areas and make you fight them 200 times before you get to move on."
The dungeons in World of Warcraft, having been in all of them, are often meticulously structured and certainly not randomly placed.
"RPGs make you earn your gold and treasure and then go back to town and reap your rewards with cool weapons and armor and spells. That's fun."
Sort of like questing and then having to come out of the dungeon to move onto the next step and be progressively introduced to new elements within the dungeon your exploring? (Stratholm in WoW comes to mind)
"MMOs are so boring in the treasure-grabbing department that people are willing to pay actual money for in-game credits. We're not going to even get into "town runs""
Any time an economy has been structured to be 'separated' from the larger international (or in this case real) economy people find a way to bridge that gap. Its not just an MMO thing, look at countries who have closed internal currencies (China.. for now) its a HUMAN thing.
"MMOs make you constantly min-max. They have plenty of items, but they're all the same. A spear works the same as a short sword works the same as a mace. Boring."
You could look at Dark Age of Camelot where certain weapons work more effectively against certain types of armor. It radically changes the PVP experience, I would argue, and the targets you choose if you are (for example) Blunt (Mace) vs Pierce spec on a class like a Blademaster or Warrior.
"RPGs make you sort out your own stats, which is necessary. But once you get your equipment set up, you're good to go until you level up or get something cool, in which case you're more than glad to fiddle with the rules. It makes math fun."
I've always enjoyed rolling characters but the actual math aspect of is is to each there own. Either way in MMOs as well as RPGs you are also "good to go until you level up or get something cool"
I'm not sure which MMOs you've played but I've provided a counter example to each of your points, perhaps you are playing the wrong ones? Don't get me wrong - there are significant flaws to MMOs. Being in a raiding guild in WoW I've seen my fair share of Zul'Grub, Molten Core, and Black Wing Lair. The game is now, in a word, fairly mundane. A point you failed to stress, and should have, is that the real problem with MMOs at end game is that more often or not it becomes all about the gear and that either motivates you or it doesn't.
I feel Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC) balanced this better than most with their absolutely superb RVR (PVP) structure. Atleast when you hit 50 you still could go out and defend the realm and feel that you were actually part of a greater cause. Battle grounds in Guild Wars / World of Warcraft just don't do that for me. I can't speak on Shadowbane as I only played it briefly but Shadowbane and DAOC seem to have done a pretty good job of the end game balance, but no matter what - eventually the game gets old.
"Melanie Wyne explains how open source and open standards will lead to the downfall of IP and hurt competition rather than aid it."
Can Open Source hurt competition? If you define competition as only existing between corporations pushing their own product then I suppose so. However, if you do not use such a narrow definition, corporations will have to compete against open source in some sense or embrace it.
No one is going to argue that Open Source prevents innovation, I would agrue it stimulates it. However it is innovation and not competition that is the real issue. Competition without innovation is meaningless. We've seen it for years in the car industry. I'm not arguing that individual technologies used in automobiles haven't occured, but the essential reasons for purchasing vehicles (the user experience) are largely linked to asthetics and utility, and now with hybrids perhaps enviromental sensibility.
One could reasonably argue that Windows 9x-XP didn't really face a lot of external competition and didn't really innovate significantly either. Why has Longhorn been scrapped so many times? Pressure from Linux/OS X. I still don't consider Linux ready for primetime on the desktop (as in I wouldn't install it on my sister or grand parent's computers) but to Microsoft, and most of us, we can see it getting to the point where it will be a significant competitor on the desktop. This is forcing Microsoft to evolve and innovate. The real issue is NOT competition - it is INNOVATION. Would Microsoft have to innovate if it didn't believe that reasonable alternatives exist, or would exist shortly?
Innovation is linked to competition, or atleast it should be, and Open Source enhances, not reduces this.
"Where are the first person shooters and Adventure/RPG games? Or better yet something completely diffrent. Are there going to be any launch titles like that?"
Kameo is an Action Adventure Game Gun is an Action Adventure Game Quake 4 is an FPS Perfect Dark is an FPS Call of Duty 2 is an FPS Condemned: Criminal Origins is a First Person (Action Adventure?)
As well if you look at the list of Xbox titles, including the very new ones, which will be playable on the 360 fully scaled up and antialiased @ 720P or 1080i... there are quite a variety of good looking games going to be playable at launch on this system. The launch list isn't perfect, but its a big step up from the Xbox's launch.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm fortunate in that there is quite good public transport in my city, Edmonton Alberta Canada.
I live a mere 10 minute bus ride from work so I find it very convenient and Bus Passes run me ~$870 a year, which are also tax deductable.
Assuming a fully paid off car operating it would be $2-5,000 a year in insurance (depending on car/premiums etc.), add gas, regular maintenane, winter tires (its Canada afterall), and any potential repairs and the estimates don't seem unreasonable.
The real issue is that for many people public transit is not convenient or worth their time.
For me, 10 mins to work and I can basically get to anywhere I need to in the city in short order.
This has a lot to do with me carefully planning where I moved so everything is either within walking distance or one bus ride.
This only works because I am able to live in close proximity to almost everything I need.
Many other people simply do not have that that degree of flexibility.
If someone is in the situation where public transportation is significantly more time consuming than driving, or some other mode of transportation, I would completely understand why they would opt out.
I value my time highly and if my bus ride was longer than say 30 minutes each way and a drive was only 5-10 minutes, its possible I would be driving instead.
That is much more detailed than the one linked in the article summary. It can be found here.
Being one of the 'lower' ID# people on the website it has been very interesting to see how the site has evolved over time.
/. Some people have recently complained about how Slashdot is less about tech news than it is about politics, but personally I think its a good thing. While the quality of some discussion has definitely decreased during these ten years, I still find that there is good and heated discussions to be had about fundamentally important issues whose impact extends far beyond the boundaries of this site.
In my eyes, the most interesting change has been the increasing politicization of
I'm looking forward to seeing what the next 10 years bring.
- Nathan Klassen
Well I should say that High Sierra introduced me to Derek
:)
o/ to the Scrap heap
Deren Thaldrel
P.S. this will make sense to a really small portion of the EVE community
Its far more complicated in Canada than it is in the United States because 'generally' Members of Parliament (MPs) do not vote independently - they follow party lines. This makes it difficult to effectively lobby individual MPs. This situation is exacerbated because we currently have a Minority government, where the ruling party's legislation can be overridden by the opposition, so party discipline is far stricter than it would be in a majority situation. Additionally, there are significant restrictions on political contributions and its not as easy to skirt these kinds of things within Canada like you can in the United States with PACs and the like.
The key if you want to influence the process is to follow the relevant committees and try and influence those specific members during the hearing process through letter writing, phone calls, etc. Alternatively, you can hope you, your company, or your issue appears on the Prime Minister's radar, or if you are speaking about a party not in power - whomever the head of the party is - and/or the Party whip, who works to ensure the MPs vote the party line. That's probably unlikely as an individual citizen, but for the telecommunications industry in Canada... its another matter.
- NK
Seriously - did anyone even read the story?
"U. S. intelligence agencies believe China performed a successful anti-satellite (asat) weapons test at more than 500 mi. altitude Jan. 11 destroying an aging Chinese weather satellite target with a kinetic kill vehicle launched on board a ballistic missile."
The only time a laser is mentioned in the entire article is
"Neither the Office of the U. S. Secretary of Defense nor Air Force Space Command would comment on the attack, which followed by several months the alleged illumination of a U. S. military spacecraft by a Chinese ground based laser."
So the only laser involved here is one that is capable of illuminating, target painting, targets - not destroying them. The title is more than a little misleading - can we get an adjustment on it perhaps? Something like "Chinese successfully test anti-satellite weapon"?
This is an area I've been involved in researching as a graduate student so I'd like to answer some questions and direct some people to research about this issue if they would like some further information.
t twilkinson.pdfIncome Inequality and Population Health: A Review of the Evidence. This article, published last year in a major peer reviwed Journal, examines basically every study that has been done on income inequality to determine what level the strongest correlations between health and income inequality exist. In a nutshell, the strongest relationship was discovered at the national level.
First, on causality. Determining causation is incredibly difficult, and I would argue, not even remotely possible within the social sciences. I'm sure there are people who will disagree with me, but when we are talking about life and all the forces that impact it how can you possibly narrow things down sufficiently to determine a causal connection? Your statistical tools can't help you, nor can your models, you have to accept that you cannot determine causality, make some generalizations/abstractions (and qualify them) and move forward with the research. So really the best we can hope for here is high degrees of correlation.
Second, Income Inequality is one of the http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/Social Determinants of Health which suggests that the distribution of income has a significant impact upon the health of populations. A good place to start when looking at Income Inequality is http://www.democraticdialogue.org/documents/picke
Third, there is a difference between the health impacts of 'absolute' variations in income (poverty) and relative variations in income (income inequality). Much of the discussion here has focused upon how if you are poor you can't afford: a good house, good food, good education, so you're forced to live in a poorer neighborhood and on and on. This is true and legitimate. The difference with income inequality is that the pathway for the health impact is psychosocial. You 'might' have enough income to have a decent house, live in an ok neighborhood, and eat decent food - but that's not the issue. The issue is how you are impacted by your relative social position within a society, essentially a class debate.
I hope those links are somewhat informative and if anyone wants some more links to books about these issues I'm happy to provide them,
Nathan Klassen
As some other comments have already touched upon this listing of the top 10 isn't that useful by itself. Its just a measure of what's 'popular' on one photo site, and nothing more. Perhaps if you could use this list to browse shots taken by those cameras it would be useful... which brings me to http://www.pbase.com/. PBase lets you search by camera model and then view all the photos stored on that site taken by the camera model you have chosen. This is incredibly useful in evaluating the quality of the output of cameras you may be considering.
Additionally if one is looking for a 'better' way to narrow down digital cameras during their research process you would be better served relying on a high quality review site. Here are the two best review sites I know of for digital cameras.
http://www.dpreview.com/
http://www.dcresource.com/
"The old-timer - These posters, who hang around slashdot land, have forgotten to move on. They post just to show off their low slashdot id. This makes some druel, and others comment that low id does not mean more intelligent. However, they're all wrong anyway."
Crap someone has figured us out.
The story that you are citing is from May 2005 based upon initial speculation about these CPUs back at that time. I would suggest the following would be more appropriate starting points for information. There are many more articles available, of course, but these are current, relevant, and informative.
? i=2795 Intel's Core 2 Extreme & Core 2 Duo: The Empire Strikes Back0 0 Conroe vs. AM2: Memory & Performance
2 duo-preview.html Getting Ready to Meet Intel Core 2 Duo: Core Microarchitecture Unleashed2 duo-e6300.html Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 + ASUS P5W DH Deluxe: Ideal Mainstream Platform?2 duo-shootout.html Contemporary Dual-Core2 duo-64bit.html Conroe and EM64T: Is There a
2 842US government unit throws Intel out over RAID problems2 818Conroe shows dodgy RAID performance anomalies3 102Intel Merom to launch early3 229Intel 965GM is considerably hotter than its predecessor
From Anandtech:
http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=28
http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.aspx?i=2797 Conroe Buying Guide
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2793 Intel Woodcrest: the Birth of a New King
http://www.anandtech.com/IT/showdoc.aspx?i=2772 Intel Woodcrest, AMD's Opteron and Sun's UltraSparc T1: Server CPU Shoot-out
From XBit Labs:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core
Desktop Processors Shootout
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core
Problem?
From The Inquirer:
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=3
Comic entitled 'Whence Wii'
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2006/04/28
"Of course, Hillary believes it takes a community to raise a child. I, on the other hand, believe it takes parents."
Your absolutely right, and your absolutely wrong. Yes it takes parents to raise a child, assuming you have parents which hundreds of thousands of orphans from the AIDS crisis and other crises around the world do not.
The point that was being made by the author was that the role of the community in its own development, and the development of its members, is important and significant. How that community is structured, is it inclusive? is it a positive environment? is it safe? does it have the resources necessary to promote growth? (economic environmental and social)
There are so many factors that are beyond the control of parents. You want to look at drug abuse, violence, exclusion, poverty, whatever, all of them are incredibly linked to the community. The individual, and certainly not the parents, do not control the context in which they live their lives. If our communities degenerate, or continue to degenerate as many authors have suggested, it won't matter what kind of parent you are - you can only teach your child so much and shield them from so much. Beyond that the responsibility lies with your child, and the environment they interact within, namely 'the community' on whatever plan you choose to identify it (municipality -> nation -> nation-state -> continent, etc)
As a grad student in Political Science and Population Health researcher (but I am not an expert in either field), and a 26 year old gamer, the suggestion that the CDC explore the link between Gaming and Health is not as ludicrious as you suggest. What concerns me is that the kind of study likely to come out of the CDC, perhaps a focus upon individual, rather than social, impacts.
I.e. Gaming can promote sleep deprivation, alteration of tradition behaviour, exposure to violent material in a form that may (or may not) be more negatively impactful due to its interactivity, which may negatively impact individual health.
BUT, We've seen a few recent studies, and stories on slashdot, regarding the possible benefits of guild participation, and perhaps online gaming in general. In population health this may be linked to the concepts of social cohesion (or social capital depending upon your background) which have strong correlations to health status.
I.e. Individuals may not feel particularly attached to their physical communities, you may not feel you have much in common with your neighbor or trust them (social exclusion), and compensate for that by interacting within virtual communities with positive health benefits (due to possible reductions in stress, social inclusion, feelings of personal achievment/respect).
As long as they are balanced and take a look at both the social and physical determinants of health, although physical determinants which are the terms most people conceive of health are likely to be the focus, it is not necessarily a bad thing. The CDC is a reputable institution, and I would like to see additional research in this area, and I'm not alone.
If your interested in learning more about the Social Determinants of Health check out: The World Health Organization's Commission on the Social Determinants of Health. http://www.who.int/social_determinants/en/ This summary report on the Social Determinants themselves http://www.who.dk/document/e81384.pdf.
If you are interested, some important authors in the field include: Kawachi, Marmot, Syme, Wilkinson, Putnam, Lavis, McCracken, Labonte, Feinstein, and many more.
"They currently hold the record for most concurrent users, set at 23,178 simultaneous users."
I think they meant to say that the CURRENT record for concurrent users is 23,178 for EVE Online - not a record for All MMOs. I'm sure that Lineage has had a higher concurrency and WoW's concurrency is reported to exceed the population of Chicago.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/1999/11/22Funny All by Itself.
"(repressive Muslim countries have a *far* lower AIDS incidence rate than their economic class would suggest, and indeed places like Afghanistan and Iran have lower rates than developed nations like the United States)."
First I would like to say that blaming HIV/AIDS transmission on infidelity is incredibly short sighted and flat out wrong. Is it a component? Certainly, but the degree to which it is a factor is radically different in different countries. Looking at Pakistan, who you give as an example... From UNAIDS.
"Of the reported cases with known transmission routes, the most predominant during the quarter ending June 2004 was injecting drug use (73.72%), followed by heterosexual relations(22.18%), men who have sex with men (4.0 %) and mother-to-child transmission (0.1%). " http://www.unaids.org/en/Regions_Countries/Countri es/pakistan.asp
Furthermore there is some debate about the quality of the data coming out of regions where these issues are very highly stigmatized. I would suggest to you that the challenges of dealing with a disease that has a religious and social stigmatization, as HIV/AIDS does through most of the world, makes estimates difficult as people are going to be very unwilling to report that they have it. Looking at the UN Epidemiological Fact Sheets on HIV/AIDS and Sexually Transmitted Infections on Pakistan http://data.unaids.org/Publications/Fact-Sheets01/ pakistan_EN.pdf We see that in total only 210 cases of HIV/AIDS have been reported (Page 6) but estimates of prevalance are between 24,000-150,000.(Page 1)
Regarding Afganistan. UNAIDS http://www.unaids.org/en/Regions_Countries/Countri es/afghanistan.asp doesn't even have an estimate in place for the infection rate so I don't think you can accurately make any sort of argument about HIV/AIDS prevalence in that country based upon punishments surrounding infidelity.
Regarding your comment that Iran has a lower HIV/AIDS incidence than the United States. First, is that a reasonable and fair comparison? Treatment programs are much more likely to exist within the United States. As well it is likely that HIV/AIDS is more likely to be diagnosed, and sooner, within the USA than in less developed countries due to less social stigma, better technology, etc.
USA: Between 470,000 and 1,600,000. (0.3% - 1.1%)
http://www.unaids.org/en/Regions_Countries/Countri es/united_states_of_america.asp
IRAN: Between 10,000 and 61,000. (0.0-0.2%)
http://www.who.int/GlobalAtlas/predefinedReports/E FS2004/EFS_PDFs/EFS2004_IR.pdf
From the World Health Organization report on Iran:
"Based on the reported data, the HIV epidemic in the Islamic Republic of Iran appears to be accelerating at an alarming trend. According to reports by the National AIDS programme , the number, 1159 of newly diagnosed HIV infections and AIDS cases in 2001 shows a three-fold increase in comparison to both years 2000 and 1999.
This considerable increase may indicate another outbreak The previous dramatic increase had occurred in 1997, when the number of HIV/AIDS cases had reached 815 new infections.
Injecting drug use drives the epidemic in the I.R.of Iran. In 2001, 64% of all AIDS cases were injecting drug users. The data on HIV seroprevalence among IDUs shows the highest rates of infection compared to all other tested groups. IDU have tested positive in 1996 and a prevalence was found of 5.7% of cases in 1996 , 1.7% in 1997. 8.5% in 2002 and 29% in 2002 among clients of counseling centers. The data is variable as it r
"I also emailed Transgaming about Cedega, but so far they still have nothing useful to say."
I just wanted to highlight what you have linked to as its something that has been very intriguing to me since the announcement of the transition to Intel processors. From http://www.transgaming.com/cedega_faq.php#8
"[8)] Does Cedega work on the Mac?
Cedega does not run on the PowerPC Mac OSX due to differences in the underlying architecture between PowerPC computers and x86 based computers."
There is an incredible opportunity here...
"It wouldn't surprise me if Apple has implemented some kind of unique encrypted handshaking between the OS X installer and the hardware so that only Apple's OS can be installed on it, so that they can avoid receiving support calls from people who put Windows on Apple hardware."
I have no doubt it will be a headache to put Windows on a Mac. At the same time - the kinds of users who are going to be attempting this are not beginner or ever intermediate ones but rather advanced users who will probably be able to figure it out on their own or find a FAQ to help them on the internet.
That being said the kind of 'desktop' product being released at the moment (Imac) probably appeals less to the 'enthusiast user'. It may very well be that the products targetted more towards beginner/intermediate consumers have these restrictions while products like the PowerMac's might not.
for a full year before they published it and they have admitted to witholding certain elements of the story from publication.
t s_it_held_1215.html
Details @ http://rawstory.com/news/2005/New_York_Times_admi
I believe he is referring to his personal spending money not his monetary income.
Three major factors in MMOs, combat, finance and stats, are the three most boring and time consuming parts of RPGs.
"MMOs just take the monster-smashing, stick the monsters in random areas and make you fight them 200 times before you get to move on."
The dungeons in World of Warcraft, having been in all of them, are often meticulously structured and certainly not randomly placed.
"RPGs make you earn your gold and treasure and then go back to town and reap your rewards with cool weapons and armor and spells. That's fun."
Sort of like questing and then having to come out of the dungeon to move onto the next step and be progressively introduced to new elements within the dungeon your exploring? (Stratholm in WoW comes to mind)
"MMOs are so boring in the treasure-grabbing department that people are willing to pay actual money for in-game credits. We're not going to even get into "town runs""
Any time an economy has been structured to be 'separated' from the larger international (or in this case real) economy people find a way to bridge that gap. Its not just an MMO thing, look at countries who have closed internal currencies (China.. for now) its a HUMAN thing.
"MMOs make you constantly min-max. They have plenty of items, but they're all the same. A spear works the same as a short sword works the same as a mace. Boring."
You could look at Dark Age of Camelot where certain weapons work more effectively against certain types of armor. It radically changes the PVP experience, I would argue, and the targets you choose if you are (for example) Blunt (Mace) vs Pierce spec on a class like a Blademaster or Warrior.
"RPGs make you sort out your own stats, which is necessary. But once you get your equipment set up, you're good to go until you level up or get something cool, in which case you're more than glad to fiddle with the rules. It makes math fun."
I've always enjoyed rolling characters but the actual math aspect of is is to each there own. Either way in MMOs as well as RPGs you are also "good to go until you level up or get something cool"
I'm not sure which MMOs you've played but I've provided a counter example to each of your points, perhaps you are playing the wrong ones? Don't get me wrong - there are significant flaws to MMOs. Being in a raiding guild in WoW I've seen my fair share of Zul'Grub, Molten Core, and Black Wing Lair. The game is now, in a word, fairly mundane. A point you failed to stress, and should have, is that the real problem with MMOs at end game is that more often or not it becomes all about the gear and that either motivates you or it doesn't.
I feel Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC) balanced this better than most with their absolutely superb RVR (PVP) structure. Atleast when you hit 50 you still could go out and defend the realm and feel that you were actually part of a greater cause. Battle grounds in Guild Wars / World of Warcraft just don't do that for me. I can't speak on Shadowbane as I only played it briefly but Shadowbane and DAOC seem to have done a pretty good job of the end game balance, but no matter what - eventually the game gets old.
"Melanie Wyne explains how open source and open standards will lead to the downfall of IP and hurt competition rather than aid it."
Can Open Source hurt competition? If you define competition as only existing between corporations pushing their own product then I suppose so. However, if you do not use such a narrow definition, corporations will have to compete against open source in some sense or embrace it.
No one is going to argue that Open Source prevents innovation, I would agrue it stimulates it. However it is innovation and not competition that is the real issue. Competition without innovation is meaningless. We've seen it for years in the car industry. I'm not arguing that individual technologies used in automobiles haven't occured, but the essential reasons for purchasing vehicles (the user experience) are largely linked to asthetics and utility, and now with hybrids perhaps enviromental sensibility.
One could reasonably argue that Windows 9x-XP didn't really face a lot of external competition and didn't really innovate significantly either. Why has Longhorn been scrapped so many times? Pressure from Linux/OS X. I still don't consider Linux ready for primetime on the desktop (as in I wouldn't install it on my sister or grand parent's computers) but to Microsoft, and most of us, we can see it getting to the point where it will be a significant competitor on the desktop. This is forcing Microsoft to evolve and innovate.
The real issue is NOT competition - it is INNOVATION. Would Microsoft have to innovate if it didn't believe that reasonable alternatives exist, or would exist shortly?
Innovation is linked to competition, or atleast it should be, and Open Source enhances, not reduces this.
"...the puppy's on fire.
;)
How are they going to cool these things?"
They are using Opterons not Xeons it won't be a problem
"Where are the first person shooters and Adventure/RPG games? Or better yet something completely diffrent. Are there going to be any launch titles like that?"
Kameo is an Action Adventure Game
Gun is an Action Adventure Game
Quake 4 is an FPS
Perfect Dark is an FPS
Call of Duty 2 is an FPS
Condemned: Criminal Origins is a First Person (Action Adventure?)
As well if you look at the list of Xbox titles, including the very new ones, which will be playable on the 360 fully scaled up and antialiased @ 720P or 1080i... there are quite a variety of good looking games going to be playable at launch on this system. The launch list isn't perfect, but its a big step up from the Xbox's launch.
Lets see how many CSSS Members from the U of R we can get into one thread then ;) /wave Jeff.
- Nathan Klassen