That depends on what you mean by older. I don't think I have any games made within the last year, although Plants vs. Zombies might have been, but many of them were made within the last few years.
Most books are digital devices. It just uses a base 28 or something close to it. While in day to day life, I wouldn't go out of my way to point this out to people, in this case, we are talking about the affects of digital devices, and my suspicion is that the people who conducted this 'study' don't really understand what they are saying.
Did you really not read his whole post before responding? I mean, you can disagree with him if you want, but you don't do much for your argument when you say:
According to you, humans don't sleep, but even limited observation suggests otherwise.
after he says:
Hell when we sleep we dont even have brain downtime.
It's not like he wrote pages of stuff for you to sift through to get to that part.
You are not really trying to say that there isn't a large faction of the population that hates technology, and are actively trying to get people to use less because they have some misguided belief that it is bad are you? Have you never seen the 'Kill Your TV' bumper stickers? Have you not heard about the studies that try to point out the evils of video games? Sometimes people do things for money. Sometimes people do things for morals (whether we consider them good or bad), and sometimes people do things for money because other people will pay them to do it for morals.
Right of the bat, you can tell that this report (or at least the summary) is bogus based on the word 'Digital' in it. There is nothing magical about 'digital' information that would make you less able to concentrate. It sounds like they are really complaining about the fact that many people are always doing something. I know that staying busy offends many people, but it has nothing to do with 'digital'.
My guess is that they don't actually know what digital means, because I seriously doubt that they would argue that there is a difference in concentration levels between someone listening to a cassette tape vs. a CD vs. an MP3. Are they arguing that getting anolog phone calls every 5 minutes is less distracting than getting the same calls every 5 minutes over VOIP? What about the digital transmission done at the phone company. Does a phone call that originates on an analog phone, gets transmitted from one phone company office to another digitally, and then gets delivered via an analog phone count as digital or analog.
What about sitting in a quite room and reading a paper book? Most grown up books are digital. Does that count?
Every computer I have bought in the last 2 years has come with HDMI out, and except for the Acer Revo (nettop), they have all come with two video outputs. I understand that not everyone has HDMI on their TVs, but it is becoming less and less common to have those TVs. I would guess that the two reasons you mention are going to apply to a pretty small minority of people, as the kinds of people that will want TV out and multi-monitor support will likely have a computer newer than a couple of years old. If they do have an older computer, they generally will have already made that upgrade.
There might be a slightly higher rate of accidents. Just as there is no doubt a slightly higher rate of accidents because cars don't run a sprinkler system on top, so that you can get a cue from the sense of feel without getting hit by the car. Sound is used by people to identify cars, but it is a very poor way to do it. It is extremely unreliable, as it is both a secondary source of input, and it is unreliable, as there are too many factors that can interfere with it working. From the personal choice of using a walkman, to the car's engine being below the ambient levels of noise.
The door analogy is not off. It may not kill you, but people get injured, sometimes seriously by doors opening on them all the time. We don't solve that because no one wants to live in a world where every door is dumping large amounts of noise into the environment, and we used them for a long time before the tech was available to make them have warning bells.
The noise off of a car is a bug, not a feature. You may have started to rely on that bug in cars, but it is still a bug. If the nature of cars were to be silent from the time they were first created, this conversation wouldn't happen. Everyone would think that the idea of dumping noise into our lives because people don't want to watch for cars was ridiculous. Heck, right now, the loudest noise in the room I am sitting in is from cars at least 3 blocks away. I don't think most people realize just how much noise cars dump into our environments.
Funny, same could be said about your entire "argument". Everything makes noise, bike chimes, shopping carts rattle, golf carts shake with golf clubs in them, food stands have people talking, people don't always wear silent foot wear, ect, ect, ect... should we demand for everyone and everything to be silent to prevent this noise pollution? Seriously, take a walk around anywhere and you'll hear sounds that aren't just car sounds. Its a normal part of life.
This comment is an obvious attempt by you to lie. You are clearly not interested in an actual discussion on the subject, so the rest is not worth commenting on.
Are these cars driving up into the lobby of buildings? Or are you just not looking both ways when you cross the street? Wanting cars to make noise so that you don't have to look both ways when crossing the street makes about as much sense as requiring proximity sensor, so that doors can start honking when someone gets close to the handle, because your "ears are useful at identifying SOMETHING GETTING CLOSE REALLY FAST GET OUT OF THE WAY." Just in case you are on the other side when it opens.
Unless you are prepared to suggest that everything that can run into you and injure you must also have constant noise emitted from it, you are making a double standard. Are you prepared to add the noise to bikes, shopping carts, golf carts, movable food stands, people walking, baseballs, golf balls, etc, etc, etc...?
People regularly walk around without the ability to hear cars around them. They do pretty well. Also, if we are going to start requiring flashing lights on every car because deaf people might not hear them coming? The argument that cars have sucked in the past, so we shouldn't fix them now that we can is just plain silly.
That is absolute BS. Buying equipment to keep yourself safe is hardly an unfair "fee". My suggestion already splits the cost of the safety equipment between the people that need it and those that don't. Yes, being handicapped has some extra cost to it. Making everyone else run around loudly announcing their presence because a blind person does not want to buy the safety equipment to protect themselves from an incident that is a direct result of their handicap, is not reasonable. Your unreasonable insistence that everyone must suffer through unneeded noise pollution because a blind person might want to be a burden on society is why so many people hate the ADA.
If you want to argue that this isn't about the blind, that is fine, but the ongoing support in this forum for this is by far using the blind as a reason to dump noise pollution onto out streets. I gave a very good solution that would give everyone a working solution. Since the same solution that works for the blind would also work for those that can see. Insisting that noise you want to hear must also be heard by everybody else around you is no better than the guys running around with huge bass speakers in their cars. You don't need a boombox on the bus, a walkman will do just fine.
How about they just broadcast a ping on a very small radio bandwidth. A receiver could be installed in the car to indicate that the transmitter is working every time the car starts, much like the engine light does. Then any blind people that are concerned for their safety could simply have a receiver that indicated a silent car was approaching. This way, the blind could cross the street, and both the blind AND everybody else wouldn't have to live with pointless noise pollution for the rare time that they might be in the vicinity of the blind crossing traffic.
For the most part, I feel like we already are there. Out of the 9 computers running in my home, only 1 has a discreet graphics card, and I am toying with the idea of removing it because it increases the watts used by the computer over the integrated solution. While we don't play a lot of games that are just released, there are at least 40 man hours of PC games played in my house each week, so it isn't like we don't play games.
That is a good point. It is why the excuses made by the school board in my community about how the brand new stadiums built in every school in the city didn't take any money from honest to goodness education because they had booster clubs is such obvious BS.
I think that a lack of Linux focus is short sighted for these gaming companies. Doubly so for Steam. There is no reason that a PC cannot be exactly as easy to use as a game system. If Valve were to port Steam to Linux, their best bet would be to release an ISO that is the official "Steam Console Distribution". This would boot directly (live or installed) into the Steam UI that is designed to be navigated via keyboard, joystick, or remote control on a known distribution. This way, getting up and running would be dead simple, AND it could be tested for compatibility on new computers without an install. Then they would also let people do a manual install on their own system in a mostly unsupported way for those that want to run it on a multi-purpose computer.
The only things that consoles really had from a technical standpoint over PCs in the past were better controllers, connectors for TVs, and simpler UI for loading games. USB controllers solves the first part. HDMI as a standard PC interface solves the second, and the third is just a matter of somebody wanting it enough to write it, or a company seeing a profit in it.
We all know that companies like to repackage old software and sell it again. With Pac-Man, they just need an emulator. Dos games, they have DosBox, and they don't need to even have the source. With Windows games, they will be stuck. Even if they could get a license to the old versions of Windows, it will cost them on a per unit basis.
Really, this even more of a non-issue than that. Even if the people are in places that don't require these tools, they will still do something stupid. I just passed through Yellowstone. There were signs everywhere making it absolutely clear that approaching buffalo is dangerous. What do we see? A buffalo on the side of the road with people taking their small children out to see just how close they can get to the animal. People are stupid, and they will do stupid things.
Of course, there is also the debate as to what is stupid and what isn't. I'm sure that we can all agree that taking your 5 year old up to a dangerous wild animal is stupid, but what about the motorcycle rider that went down a couple of dozen miles up the road? Was he stupid? We all know that when it comes to riding, it isn't a matter of if you will go down, but when. So, does riding a motorcycle down the road in a national forest count as using technology to do something stupid?
Really, the documents are obviously still available, and the highest count I have heard is that one wasn't innocent, one was already dead, and the third is unknown (so we should assume innocent). It seems that given the information that was leaked, the net total of deaths would be less with the documents leaked than if they remained hidden. Speculation of course, but I haven't heard anything credible that would even indicate otherwise.
The problem is that you used the word obese, and the government, health, and insurance industries have defined that term to include people with 6% body fat. They have also defined it to not include people that were 30% body fat. The government, health and insurance industries are considered the experts, so the vast majority of the population takes their definition as the correct one. It gets worse in that fat people who the 'experts' declare to be 'normal' weight will viciously attack people who are truly normal, or maybe a little overweight because the 'experts' have declared them 'obese'.
Your claim that 99% of it can be controlled, misses the fact that people with high lean body mass are expected to control their weight, often down to 5 or 6% body fat, while people that have no lean body mass get a free ride to make 'fatty' jokes.
The worse part is that for possibly MOST of the people that could control their body fat via behavioral changes would have to completely dismiss what all of the 'experts' are telling them, since the same people that can't accurately define what obese is, also are unable to comprehend that their standard advice for losing weight does exactly the opposite. I think it is a little unrealistic to expect the general public to start ignoring the constant bombardment they get from the government, insurance, and health industries.
Becoming a rock star is a little like winning a fixed boxing match. If the big pile of money that was used to fix the fight were to stop being used, someone is still going to win. It might not be the guy that would win with the fix. Instead it would be the better boxer.
It is going to be useful in the EXACT same way that a keyboard with letters printed on it is useful. Certainly, anyone willing to learn would learn a product well enough to be good at it, will just learn where all the letters are on the keyboard without them being printed. Ok, that was a little snarky, but it is still true. Printing on keyboards is there for those that are not typing by muscle memory. While you will not be better with Vi, I might give Vi a chance if I don't have to have a manual next to me to figure out what the key combination are for. I can tell you that an immediate use I would have for that keyboard is for playing with all of the emulators that I like to use. While I usually remember that the " key for the C-64 is mapped to the ] key on my PC keyboard, and the * key is mapped to the @ key, I don't always, and less used key combination are even harder to remember. I still don't use a bunch of the key combos on my Mac because they are different than on my PC, and I can never remember which of the Mac alternative keys are mapped to the PC alternative keys on the keyboard.
That logo on that car is designed to fool people, and it is for the purpose of offering services. In a best case scenario, the priest is hoping that people will see it, think it is 'Geek Squad', then do a double take and realize that it isn't. In a worst case scenario, some people may think there is an actual connection. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of large businesses that have an open religious connection. Chick-fil-a and In and Out Burger both have corporate policy surrounding religion. The first closes on Sundays, and the second puts bible verses on the bottoms of their cups.
The priest was intentionally trying to sell his services by associating them with Geek Squad. This is kind of what trademark is intended for. I know if I owned Best Buy, I wouldn't it want to be associated with what is frequently considered an international child molestation ring.
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That depends on what you mean by older. I don't think I have any games made within the last year, although Plants vs. Zombies might have been, but many of them were made within the last few years.
Most books are digital devices. It just uses a base 28 or something close to it. While in day to day life, I wouldn't go out of my way to point this out to people, in this case, we are talking about the affects of digital devices, and my suspicion is that the people who conducted this 'study' don't really understand what they are saying.
According to you, humans don't sleep, but even limited observation suggests otherwise.
after he says:
Hell when we sleep we dont even have brain downtime.
It's not like he wrote pages of stuff for you to sift through to get to that part.
You are not really trying to say that there isn't a large faction of the population that hates technology, and are actively trying to get people to use less because they have some misguided belief that it is bad are you? Have you never seen the 'Kill Your TV' bumper stickers? Have you not heard about the studies that try to point out the evils of video games? Sometimes people do things for money. Sometimes people do things for morals (whether we consider them good or bad), and sometimes people do things for money because other people will pay them to do it for morals.
Right of the bat, you can tell that this report (or at least the summary) is bogus based on the word 'Digital' in it. There is nothing magical about 'digital' information that would make you less able to concentrate. It sounds like they are really complaining about the fact that many people are always doing something. I know that staying busy offends many people, but it has nothing to do with 'digital'.
My guess is that they don't actually know what digital means, because I seriously doubt that they would argue that there is a difference in concentration levels between someone listening to a cassette tape vs. a CD vs. an MP3. Are they arguing that getting anolog phone calls every 5 minutes is less distracting than getting the same calls every 5 minutes over VOIP? What about the digital transmission done at the phone company. Does a phone call that originates on an analog phone, gets transmitted from one phone company office to another digitally, and then gets delivered via an analog phone count as digital or analog.
What about sitting in a quite room and reading a paper book? Most grown up books are digital. Does that count?
Every computer I have bought in the last 2 years has come with HDMI out, and except for the Acer Revo (nettop), they have all come with two video outputs. I understand that not everyone has HDMI on their TVs, but it is becoming less and less common to have those TVs. I would guess that the two reasons you mention are going to apply to a pretty small minority of people, as the kinds of people that will want TV out and multi-monitor support will likely have a computer newer than a couple of years old. If they do have an older computer, they generally will have already made that upgrade.
There might be a slightly higher rate of accidents. Just as there is no doubt a slightly higher rate of accidents because cars don't run a sprinkler system on top, so that you can get a cue from the sense of feel without getting hit by the car. Sound is used by people to identify cars, but it is a very poor way to do it. It is extremely unreliable, as it is both a secondary source of input, and it is unreliable, as there are too many factors that can interfere with it working. From the personal choice of using a walkman, to the car's engine being below the ambient levels of noise.
The door analogy is not off. It may not kill you, but people get injured, sometimes seriously by doors opening on them all the time. We don't solve that because no one wants to live in a world where every door is dumping large amounts of noise into the environment, and we used them for a long time before the tech was available to make them have warning bells.
The noise off of a car is a bug, not a feature. You may have started to rely on that bug in cars, but it is still a bug. If the nature of cars were to be silent from the time they were first created, this conversation wouldn't happen. Everyone would think that the idea of dumping noise into our lives because people don't want to watch for cars was ridiculous. Heck, right now, the loudest noise in the room I am sitting in is from cars at least 3 blocks away. I don't think most people realize just how much noise cars dump into our environments.
Funny, same could be said about your entire "argument". Everything makes noise, bike chimes, shopping carts rattle, golf carts shake with golf clubs in them, food stands have people talking, people don't always wear silent foot wear, ect, ect, ect... should we demand for everyone and everything to be silent to prevent this noise pollution? Seriously, take a walk around anywhere and you'll hear sounds that aren't just car sounds. Its a normal part of life.
This comment is an obvious attempt by you to lie. You are clearly not interested in an actual discussion on the subject, so the rest is not worth commenting on.
Are these cars driving up into the lobby of buildings? Or are you just not looking both ways when you cross the street? Wanting cars to make noise so that you don't have to look both ways when crossing the street makes about as much sense as requiring proximity sensor, so that doors can start honking when someone gets close to the handle, because your "ears are useful at identifying SOMETHING GETTING CLOSE REALLY FAST GET OUT OF THE WAY." Just in case you are on the other side when it opens.
Unless you are prepared to suggest that everything that can run into you and injure you must also have constant noise emitted from it, you are making a double standard. Are you prepared to add the noise to bikes, shopping carts, golf carts, movable food stands, people walking, baseballs, golf balls, etc, etc, etc...?
People regularly walk around without the ability to hear cars around them. They do pretty well. Also, if we are going to start requiring flashing lights on every car because deaf people might not hear them coming? The argument that cars have sucked in the past, so we shouldn't fix them now that we can is just plain silly.
That is absolute BS. Buying equipment to keep yourself safe is hardly an unfair "fee". My suggestion already splits the cost of the safety equipment between the people that need it and those that don't. Yes, being handicapped has some extra cost to it. Making everyone else run around loudly announcing their presence because a blind person does not want to buy the safety equipment to protect themselves from an incident that is a direct result of their handicap, is not reasonable. Your unreasonable insistence that everyone must suffer through unneeded noise pollution because a blind person might want to be a burden on society is why so many people hate the ADA.
If you want to argue that this isn't about the blind, that is fine, but the ongoing support in this forum for this is by far using the blind as a reason to dump noise pollution onto out streets. I gave a very good solution that would give everyone a working solution. Since the same solution that works for the blind would also work for those that can see. Insisting that noise you want to hear must also be heard by everybody else around you is no better than the guys running around with huge bass speakers in their cars. You don't need a boombox on the bus, a walkman will do just fine.
Thinking that a background check is going to protect you is naive at best.
How about they just broadcast a ping on a very small radio bandwidth. A receiver could be installed in the car to indicate that the transmitter is working every time the car starts, much like the engine light does. Then any blind people that are concerned for their safety could simply have a receiver that indicated a silent car was approaching. This way, the blind could cross the street, and both the blind AND everybody else wouldn't have to live with pointless noise pollution for the rare time that they might be in the vicinity of the blind crossing traffic.
For the most part, I feel like we already are there. Out of the 9 computers running in my home, only 1 has a discreet graphics card, and I am toying with the idea of removing it because it increases the watts used by the computer over the integrated solution. While we don't play a lot of games that are just released, there are at least 40 man hours of PC games played in my house each week, so it isn't like we don't play games.
I don't get all of the ET hate. I'm not saying it was a Kaboom!, but as Atari games go, it was pretty much standard fare.
That is a good point. It is why the excuses made by the school board in my community about how the brand new stadiums built in every school in the city didn't take any money from honest to goodness education because they had booster clubs is such obvious BS.
I think that a lack of Linux focus is short sighted for these gaming companies. Doubly so for Steam. There is no reason that a PC cannot be exactly as easy to use as a game system. If Valve were to port Steam to Linux, their best bet would be to release an ISO that is the official "Steam Console Distribution". This would boot directly (live or installed) into the Steam UI that is designed to be navigated via keyboard, joystick, or remote control on a known distribution. This way, getting up and running would be dead simple, AND it could be tested for compatibility on new computers without an install. Then they would also let people do a manual install on their own system in a mostly unsupported way for those that want to run it on a multi-purpose computer.
The only things that consoles really had from a technical standpoint over PCs in the past were better controllers, connectors for TVs, and simpler UI for loading games. USB controllers solves the first part. HDMI as a standard PC interface solves the second, and the third is just a matter of somebody wanting it enough to write it, or a company seeing a profit in it.
We all know that companies like to repackage old software and sell it again. With Pac-Man, they just need an emulator. Dos games, they have DosBox, and they don't need to even have the source. With Windows games, they will be stuck. Even if they could get a license to the old versions of Windows, it will cost them on a per unit basis.
Really, this even more of a non-issue than that. Even if the people are in places that don't require these tools, they will still do something stupid. I just passed through Yellowstone. There were signs everywhere making it absolutely clear that approaching buffalo is dangerous. What do we see? A buffalo on the side of the road with people taking their small children out to see just how close they can get to the animal. People are stupid, and they will do stupid things.
Of course, there is also the debate as to what is stupid and what isn't. I'm sure that we can all agree that taking your 5 year old up to a dangerous wild animal is stupid, but what about the motorcycle rider that went down a couple of dozen miles up the road? Was he stupid? We all know that when it comes to riding, it isn't a matter of if you will go down, but when. So, does riding a motorcycle down the road in a national forest count as using technology to do something stupid?
So, basically, you won't be able to get your data that 'last' mile to actually make it useful? Heck, that doesn't sound so good.
Really, the documents are obviously still available, and the highest count I have heard is that one wasn't innocent, one was already dead, and the third is unknown (so we should assume innocent). It seems that given the information that was leaked, the net total of deaths would be less with the documents leaked than if they remained hidden. Speculation of course, but I haven't heard anything credible that would even indicate otherwise.
The problem is that you used the word obese, and the government, health, and insurance industries have defined that term to include people with 6% body fat. They have also defined it to not include people that were 30% body fat. The government, health and insurance industries are considered the experts, so the vast majority of the population takes their definition as the correct one. It gets worse in that fat people who the 'experts' declare to be 'normal' weight will viciously attack people who are truly normal, or maybe a little overweight because the 'experts' have declared them 'obese'.
Your claim that 99% of it can be controlled, misses the fact that people with high lean body mass are expected to control their weight, often down to 5 or 6% body fat, while people that have no lean body mass get a free ride to make 'fatty' jokes.
The worse part is that for possibly MOST of the people that could control their body fat via behavioral changes would have to completely dismiss what all of the 'experts' are telling them, since the same people that can't accurately define what obese is, also are unable to comprehend that their standard advice for losing weight does exactly the opposite. I think it is a little unrealistic to expect the general public to start ignoring the constant bombardment they get from the government, insurance, and health industries.
This is how they have been building them around here for the last few decades. Clearly it works.
Bingo!
Becoming a rock star is a little like winning a fixed boxing match. If the big pile of money that was used to fix the fight were to stop being used, someone is still going to win. It might not be the guy that would win with the fix. Instead it would be the better boxer.
It is going to be useful in the EXACT same way that a keyboard with letters printed on it is useful. Certainly, anyone willing to learn would learn a product well enough to be good at it, will just learn where all the letters are on the keyboard without them being printed. Ok, that was a little snarky, but it is still true. Printing on keyboards is there for those that are not typing by muscle memory. While you will not be better with Vi, I might give Vi a chance if I don't have to have a manual next to me to figure out what the key combination are for. I can tell you that an immediate use I would have for that keyboard is for playing with all of the emulators that I like to use. While I usually remember that the " key for the C-64 is mapped to the ] key on my PC keyboard, and the * key is mapped to the @ key, I don't always, and less used key combination are even harder to remember. I still don't use a bunch of the key combos on my Mac because they are different than on my PC, and I can never remember which of the Mac alternative keys are mapped to the PC alternative keys on the keyboard.
That logo on that car is designed to fool people, and it is for the purpose of offering services. In a best case scenario, the priest is hoping that people will see it, think it is 'Geek Squad', then do a double take and realize that it isn't. In a worst case scenario, some people may think there is an actual connection. Off the top of my head, I can think of a couple of large businesses that have an open religious connection. Chick-fil-a and In and Out Burger both have corporate policy surrounding religion. The first closes on Sundays, and the second puts bible verses on the bottoms of their cups.
The priest was intentionally trying to sell his services by associating them with Geek Squad. This is kind of what trademark is intended for. I know if I owned Best Buy, I wouldn't it want to be associated with what is frequently considered an international child molestation ring.