The second shows a dramatic increase in modern Video Game consoles from 2000-2003.
The first modern game consoles (consoles capable of displaying 3D graphics such as are required for first person shooting games) were the Sony Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn, and the Nintendo N64, all of which are omitted from the graph. The Playstation 1, released in 1994, enjoyed particularly massive sales, selling over 100 million consoles. The Playstation 2 sold only about 20% more than this as of 2007.
While the graph does not prove that video games reduce crime, what it does prove is that any supposed crime-inducing or violence-inducing effect of videogames must be so small that it is completely swamped by other social and demographic factors influencing crime rates.
Despite its undenied visual brilliance, Kubrick's film misses a key element that is responsible for much of the novel's power. In the book, there is considerable suspense as to whether or not the father will succumb to the influence of the hotel. In Kubrick's version, Jack Nicolson is directed as so nearly crazed from the outset that there is never any doubt how things will go.
I agree that the more faithful TV miniseries is not as strong a film as Kubrick's version, but few directors have the visual power of Kubrick.
Nobody said that it was. But while correlation does not imply causation, causation does imply correlation. So while the statistical data does not prove that videogames reduce crime (although it is at least consistent with that hypothesis), it does prove that any supposed crime-inducing effect of videogames is so small that it is completely swamped by other social and demographic factors influencing crime rates.
Your claim that all parents have played NES and thus understand computers and games perfectly doesn't quite hold water. If it did, there would be no coffee cup holder problems.
This is kind of a stupid argument. "Cup holder problems" get a lot of press precisely because they reflect an unusual level of ignorance, not because they are all that common. The "cup holder" tray was a peculiarity of some CD/DVD drives, so even some people who have used CD/DVD-based systems have never encountered them. I don't think any video game system has used them.
Believe me, Joe Average is not a computer expert. And Joe Average is the father of the kids we're talking about.
This is like arguing that somebody whose VCR is flashing "12:00" doesn't know anything about movies. Playing videogames does not require you to be a computer expert, or make you one, just familiar with videogames. And you don't have to be any kind of expert to look over your kid's shoulder to see what he's doing.
And Joe Average doesn't know of the parental settings or if he does, he finds them too complicated to use.
Then isn't the obvious solution to educate Joe, rather than imposing criminal penalties on store clerks?
Talking to video game store clerks doesn't really help, because games are anyway mostly bought from some hypermarkets where they are cheaper.
Games are not appreciably cheaper at hypermarkets--there just isn't enough margin to make much difference. People looking to save money go to game shops, where you'll find a big stock of remaindered and used titles.
And even the video game store clerks probably have just played NES games in their childhood and might not really take into account that games are now quite different from the cruelty of Zero Wing.
Again, I can tell that you've never actually spoken to a videogame clerk. Most will happily give you a detailed description of the latest games and their relative merits. Do you seriously believe that they lose interest in games when they can get them with an employee discount?
The idea of it costing something for the shop or causing bureaucracy to check the children's age is quite weird. Please explain the mechanism that would cause that to happen in USA.
In the USA, people are not required to carry identity cards. So if a customer walks into a store and you demand some sort of ID that they don't have, they walk out. Lost sale.
Then about that censorship thought. You seem to be thinking that it is okay shaping children's minds into accepting violence as a part of everyday life, but not okay shaping them into keeping to think severe violence is something sick that should be avoided.
I'm thinking that the government should not be in the business of usurping the parental role of shaping children's minds.
Since most parents forbid their children from watching very violent or mentally disturbing movies anyway, I don't think their existence as for itself should be visible in the statistics.
In my experience, kids manage to see the movies they want to see. Every kid knows that at the multiplex, you can pay for "Shrek" and slip across the hall to see "Saw." And of course, there is cable TV. Modern TV sets come with "V-chips" to restrict what the kids get to wash, but only 15% of parents bother to use them--who wants to have to enter a code every time you want to watch a non-kiddie show?
However, should that protection system somehow fail - as is beginning to happen right now - we will be seeing results within ten to twenty years time. Not before the children grow adult and move away from their parents. Maybe when they're 18, maybe when they're 25. I don't really know how it goes over there.
Keep in mind that every game system comes with a parental setting to limit the ratings the kids can play. So there is not really any need for additional controls at the game counter. Moreover, these games retail for $50 or so. So young children are not likely to be buying games on their own--their parents buy them for them. GTA III, the game most commonly viewed with alarm, came out in 2001. So a kid who started playing it at 15 would be 21 now--a prime age for violent behavior. Yet there is no indication of any spike in youth violence.
The important difference to television is that while TV was brought to public by adults, things related to computers arrive through children. Children are actually teaching their parents how to use computers. I have seen it and since you're a slashdot reader, I know that you have, too. Parents don't understand the depth of feeling a computer game can produce.
The popularity of videogames predates widespread use home computers. The Atari 2600 was released 30 years ago. The Nintendo NES came out 22 years ago. The Sony Playstation came out 11 years ago. So most of the parents with young children today played video game systems themselves. And any parent who pays attention sees what effect playing a game has on their own children, and is probably better equipped to judge what their kids should be playing than the government.
The adults' inability to protect the children from extreme video game violence also has its effect on how the stores work. The store clerks often know nothing at all about computer games and the idea that some of them might be dangerous to a very young mind might never cross their mind.
Walk into a video game store and talk to the clerks sometime. You'll find out that most of them are avid gamers, with an encyclopedic knowledge of what the games are like. But you may be right that they probably don't believe that games are likely to be dangerous to a young mind--after all, most of them played those games when they were young, and here they are, gainfully employed, not out mugging people.
The only way this can be changed is by making it compulsory obeying the limits. In other words, a shop selling a K-18 game to a child should get fined. With the current system that is apparently not possible. I don't care if it's federal or state legislation that gets carried in, as long as eventually everybody has that law. Because that's a "think of the children" law that has no effect at all for adults.
If you believe that laws that add additional bureaucracy, legal costs, force small shops out of business (are they really expected to demand IDs?) somehow come for free.
And then, back to the statistics. Even when the effect will hit in, it will not hit in as violence. It will become visible as mental problems that surface once the kids are no kids more. It will become visible as people being immune to violence and caring less of all the suffering caused
Individual criminal penalties for a mistake? A fine of $1000 could be disastrous for the owner of a small shop. Seems pretty draconian, considering that there is no actual evidence that video games are harmful.
This single issue is so important that I will vote for Gulianni. His policies may include 1984 type directives, but at least he will not make GTA V illegal.
I like Hillary in many respects, and think that she has many of the qualities of a good President. But I agree that this is an important issue, so it looks like I'll be voting for Obama in the primary.
Why on earth should all kids be allowed to go and buy GTA IV, Soldier of Fortune or any similar game? The good thing in games is that they let you in their world a lot tighter than movies. (of course this depends on the skill of the director just like in movies) Since games have this thing, their violence or sexualism is even worse for children than those of movies.
Except of course that there is no actual evidence that violence in either movies are games is harmful. In fact, the statistical evidence goes the opposite way. As movies have gotten increasingly violent, and games have become more realistically violent, rates of violent crimes have dropped--and dropped most sharply in the very demographic that is the primary consumers of such games.
That doesn't prove that games reduce violence (although the evidence is more consistent with that than with a harmful effect). But it does prove that any supposed violence-inducing effect of movies and games must be so small as to be swamped by other social and demographic factors. Or maybe parents are simply already doing a pretty good job of regulating what their own children play and watch--in which case why do we need the "nanny state" stepping in? And at the Federal level, no less?
Why should anybody pay attention when it is over a year away? The prices on digital TVs are only going to drop. At the present time, the incentive for buying a digital TV is quality, not a shift that won't be for many months. Publicity will take care of itself; I can guarantee that by next Christmas, every other retailer will be running big ads saying, "Don't let your TV go dark! Digital TVs and converters on Sale!" while Comcast and DirecTV will be running TV spots at every commercial saying "Don't let your TV go dark! Take advantage of our introductory rates on crystal clear cable/satellite TV!"
Ummm, price fixing is setting an artificially high price. If anything, Nintendo is dumping (selling below cost to gain market share).
One is not required to sell a product at the maximum price the market will bear. It is also acceptable to sell below cost to build demand (although by all accounts, Nintendo is not doing this). "Dumping" is offering a product in a foreign market at a price lower than you charge in the domestic market.
Considering that the XBox 360 is an internet device and supports gaming over wireless, Microsoft obviously had to design the controllers to play well with wireless signals. And presumably there is some mechanism to prevent two nearby 360's from interfering with each other. But did they anticipate the situation in a college dorm where maybe every other room has a 360? Perhaps there is some critical density of controllers at which whatever algorithm MS is using to avoid collisions breaks down?
It was in reference to the previous post suggesting that the Nazi version of eugenics was somehow inspired by "Darwinism." Selective breeding has nothing to do with natural selection.
The point of eugenics is not merely to breed individuals who can survive, but individuals who can better accomplish a given task. This is the goal of all selective breeding.
Correct. But this is selective breeding, i.e. "artificial selection." This is an old technique, which long predates Darwin's theory of natural selection. The point of natural selection is that the environment, without directed human intervention (i.e. "natural" rather than artificial) exerts a selective pressure that drives change.
Honestly, what is the benefit to our species as a whole to continue to create genetically wrong humans, that can't survive without depending on society the rest of their life? Other animals leave the unfittest behind because otherwise the ENTIRE group will perish. Empathy in any other species would spell the end of that species.
This is idiotic. "Fitness" does not exist apart from an environment. Natural selection tends to maximize fitness in our current environment, which happens to be a technological and medically sophisticated one. We don't need to do anything to help it--it happens automatically. There is no benefit to the species of interfering with the process in order to enhance fitness in an environment (e.g. a pretechnological one) different from the one that we actually life in.
The capacity for empathy is itself subject to natural selection. The fact that it is so widespread strongly suggests that it has benefits for fitness. It is worth noting, that we--with our capacity for empathy--have exhibited population growth unparalleled by any of the other species that you seem to think that we should model ourselves upon.
Sure, these are all good from the emotional point of view of keeping people alive and making childless couples happy etc, but does it really help the human gene pool?
Who cares? We do not exist for the benefit of our "gene pool," and our gene pool is not something that exists in isolation from human technology. Natural selections still works--it just favors the genes that increase fitness in our actual environment, not some pre-technological environment without access to modern medicine. Doubtless there are many genes that increase fitness in the modern technological world that would reduce fitness in a pretechnological environment, and others that are more benign than they would be in the absence of modern technology. Sure, if there were a radical change, such as some kind of global catastrophe that wiped out technology, then many of those genes would decrease in frequency. But we don't need to weed out those "harmful" (in an environment different from the one we actually live in) genes; that will happen automatically if the circumstances arise. All our gene pool needs for evolution to work is genetic diversity. And considering the size of the human population, we have more diversity than ever.
Nature determines that various people should die by heart failure etc, but drugs keep them alive.
Again, who cares? You can't just substitute "Nature" for "God." You can really mislead yourself by anthropomorphizing nature. "Nature" is not a sentient entity. It does not "determine" anything. It does not have our best interests at heart--it quite literally does not, cannot, care about us. There is no reason to expect that natural selection will favor human survival, much less human quality of life. It is more like gravity. Yet nobody seems to complain that gravity "determines" that people "should" die by falling, yet airplanes and parachutes keep them alive.
It is also interesting to note that both Nazis and Ayn Rand Libertarians both get hard over Darwinism for exactly the same reasons. The only difference is that Hitler uses the State to enforce survival of the fittest
However, this is ridiculous, because in the theory of natural selection, fitness is defined by survival (more accurately, propagation of one's genes). So it doesn't have to be "enforced"--it happens automatically. So eugenics is actually an attempt to override evolution by applying principles of selective breeding (which of course long predate Darwin) in order to prevent those who are the fittest in an evolutionary sense from predominating. This is probably why the Nazi's banned "Darwinism."--because an understanding of evolution undermines the Nazi's entire "master race" doctrine.
Al Gore is trying to save the planet but not at an inconvenience to him, he uses far more energy than the average person does.
That's right! If we want to save the planet, we should all be using less energy than the average person!
These "if Al Gore was serious, he'd be living in a hollow log" slanders are a sneaky way of trying to shut Al Gore up, since it is next to impossible to be a public spokesman and use less energy than the average person. And in reality, it turns out that Gore is doing exactly what he advocates (which has never been a back-to-nature, use-little-or-no-energy position). He favors using carbon neutral energy where possible, buying carbon offsets where it is not, and making one's home as energy efficient as possible. And he is doing all of those things.
...who is going to pay to take care of the waste for the next 100,000 years? No human institution has ever lasted that long and yet we build reactors that can only work for 40 years or so but have this waste that is hot and nasty for at least 100,000.
It's worth noting that all of that radiation came out of the ground in the first place. Running a reactor actually "uses up" radioactivity at an accelerated rate, essentially making it safer in the long term. Anything that comes out of a reactor "hotter" than it was to begin with also has a shorter half-life, which means less time until it becomes essentially safe. While there is certainly room fro improvement, it's likely that modern waste storage leaves that stuff at least as safe as it was before it came out of the ground. After all, there are known cases in which natural radioactive deposits fissioned in the ground. We certainly know enough about waste storage to prevent that.
Dvorak is an odd guy. He seems to have made a career of being wrong about pretty much everything that matters about the computer industry, yet people still read him. Still, this attains a height of idiocy unusual even for him.
The fundamental basis of Dvorak's complaint seems to be his inability to see past his prejudiced view that people in the third world are just too stupid and ignorant to figure out how to use computers for their own benefit. How else to explain his conviction that they won't be able to use computers because their literacy rate is so low--overlooking the rather obvious fact that one reason why literacy rates are so low in the third world is lack of access to anything worth reading, while computers and the internet will provide them with access to much of the world's literature (MIT has recently put the teaching materials for all of its courses online), not to mention a vehicle for delivering literacy teaching tools.
For another perspective, I recently received the following from a friend who is with the US forces in Iraq:
A few months ago, we gave a small grant, $2500, to a guy in town who wanted to open up an internet cafe. These $2500 grants are things we can give out pretty easily to businessmen in order to jumpstart the local economy, and we've been giving them out as fast as we can (which is still surprisingly not-fast, but it gets out there eventually). Since we gave him the grant, his business has taken off by leaps and bounds. Everyone knows internet is good, so although there was never internat service here before, Mohammed almost immediately had multiple subscribers in the town. And then one of the US Army guys living in the police station heard about it, and asked Mohammed if he could provide internet service for him too. When the police station got wired for internet, suddenly word spread to the local patrol base, and another 150 subscribers clamored for internet access. To be honest, I was a little skeptical that the internet would actually work here, and if it did, it would probably be interminably slow. In fact, however, it is not only faster than the military internet, it is even faster than the cable access I had in the US! And, as a bonus, it is uncensored by the military. Means I can now go freely to such subversive sites as the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. And Yahoo! So with a single little $2500 grant, this guy has turned around and is now selling his internet back to us, and pulling in $30/month on almost every soldier in the area! And we're all happy. Capitalism at its best.
They are still popping up
on
Where are Wii?
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I saw them for sale in a mall videogame store (not a major chain) in Houston the day after Thanksgiving--list price, no bundle. They were soled out in few hours. I bought mine a couple of months ago online from ToysRUs, after seeing on WiiTracker that they were in stock.
I agree with your general take on this, but I can absolutely see that an individual would run into trouble at a different stage in life, while still exhibiting signs of problems. I have no horse in this race -- I really don't have any kind of preconceived notion regarding this issue. But you can't dismiss the possibility that there is no problem that's difficult to see in statistical samples until people exposed to the violence grow to a certain age simply on the basis that it's preposterous is not especially scientific. If we had better long term studies, it'd be a different matter, but such studies are nearly non-existent.
Certainly not. For that matter, I can't "dismiss the possibility" that it could have delayed effects in the second or third generation down the line, I just think that it's pretty improbable.
A lot of things are possible. Once you are willing to accept notions that are not supported by any kind of scientific data, the worries become virtually endless. Obviously, this applies not merely to violent games, but pretty much everything in the modern world. How about light pollution in cities messing up sleep cycles? Additives in food? 60 cycle noise from electrical wiring interfering with brain rhythms? Choose anything about the modern world that you personally don't like. Sure, we see no evidence of any serious harm now, but maybe it's just about to happen. Can you dismiss the possibility?
Frankly, I think that we have enough to deal with worrying about things where there is some evidence of harm before we start worrying about things where the statistical evidence is going in the opposite direction from that predicted by the doomsayers.
Why is it improbable? PTSD can have delayed manifestations. Why not this?
Post-traumatic stress symptoms may persist for years, but symptoms typically manifest a few months after the trauma, so for there to be no effect at all for a decade or more, and for effects to conveniently pop up just late enough to be beyond the horizon of the violence statistics is very contrived. Moreover, it seems quite unlikely that there would be no increase in violent behavior during the time of life when people are most susceptible to committing violent crimes, with a propensity for violence suddenly popping up later at an age when people are less susceptible to engaging in violence.
Needless to say, there is no evidence whatsoever for any such "time bomb" effect. Even the studies that purport to show a pro-violence effect do so in the relatively short term, not after a delay of many years.
Slashdot Mirror
The first modern game consoles (consoles capable of displaying 3D graphics such as are required for first person shooting games) were the Sony Playstation 1, the Sega Saturn, and the Nintendo N64, all of which are omitted from the graph. The Playstation 1, released in 1994, enjoyed particularly massive sales, selling over 100 million consoles. The Playstation 2 sold only about 20% more than this as of 2007.
While the graph does not prove that video games reduce crime, what it does prove is that any supposed crime-inducing or violence-inducing effect of videogames must be so small that it is completely swamped by other social and demographic factors influencing crime rates.
Despite its undenied visual brilliance, Kubrick's film misses a key element that is responsible for much of the novel's power. In the book, there is considerable suspense as to whether or not the father will succumb to the influence of the hotel. In Kubrick's version, Jack Nicolson is directed as so nearly crazed from the outset that there is never any doubt how things will go.
I agree that the more faithful TV miniseries is not as strong a film as Kubrick's version, but few directors have the visual power of Kubrick.
Nobody said that it was. But while correlation does not imply causation, causation does imply correlation. So while the statistical data does not prove that videogames reduce crime (although it is at least consistent with that hypothesis), it does prove that any supposed crime-inducing effect of videogames is so small that it is completely swamped by other social and demographic factors influencing crime rates.
This is kind of a stupid argument. "Cup holder problems" get a lot of press precisely because they reflect an unusual level of ignorance, not because they are all that common. The "cup holder" tray was a peculiarity of some CD/DVD drives, so even some people who have used CD/DVD-based systems have never encountered them. I don't think any video game system has used them.
This is like arguing that somebody whose VCR is flashing "12:00" doesn't know anything about movies. Playing videogames does not require you to be a computer expert, or make you one, just familiar with videogames. And you don't have to be any kind of expert to look over your kid's shoulder to see what he's doing.
Then isn't the obvious solution to educate Joe, rather than imposing criminal penalties on store clerks?
Games are not appreciably cheaper at hypermarkets--there just isn't enough margin to make much difference. People looking to save money go to game shops, where you'll find a big stock of remaindered and used titles.
Again, I can tell that you've never actually spoken to a videogame clerk. Most will happily give you a detailed description of the latest games and their relative merits. Do you seriously believe that they lose interest in games when they can get them with an employee discount?
In the USA, people are not required to carry identity cards. So if a customer walks into a store and you demand some sort of ID that they don't have, they walk out. Lost sale.
I'm thinking that the government should not be in the business of usurping the parental role of shaping children's minds.
Never mind that rates of nonviolent crimes, just like violent crime, have dropped steadily as videogames have become increasingly popular.
In my experience, kids manage to see the movies they want to see. Every kid knows that at the multiplex, you can pay for "Shrek" and slip across the hall to see "Saw." And of course, there is cable TV. Modern TV sets come with "V-chips" to restrict what the kids get to wash, but only 15% of parents bother to use them--who wants to have to enter a code every time you want to watch a non-kiddie show?
Keep in mind that every game system comes with a parental setting to limit the ratings the kids can play. So there is not really any need for additional controls at the game counter. Moreover, these games retail for $50 or so. So young children are not likely to be buying games on their own--their parents buy them for them. GTA III, the game most commonly viewed with alarm, came out in 2001. So a kid who started playing it at 15 would be 21 now--a prime age for violent behavior. Yet there is no indication of any spike in youth violence.
The popularity of videogames predates widespread use home computers. The Atari 2600 was released 30 years ago. The Nintendo NES came out 22 years ago. The Sony Playstation came out 11 years ago. So most of the parents with young children today played video game systems themselves. And any parent who pays attention sees what effect playing a game has on their own children, and is probably better equipped to judge what their kids should be playing than the government.
Walk into a video game store and talk to the clerks sometime. You'll find out that most of them are avid gamers, with an encyclopedic knowledge of what the games are like. But you may be right that they probably don't believe that games are likely to be dangerous to a young mind--after all, most of them played those games when they were young, and here they are, gainfully employed, not out mugging people.
If you believe that laws that add additional bureaucracy, legal costs, force small shops out of business (are they really expected to demand IDs?) somehow come for free.
Individual criminal penalties for a mistake? A fine of $1000 could be disastrous for the owner of a small shop. Seems pretty draconian, considering that there is no actual evidence that video games are harmful.
As the OP noted, neither will Obama
I like Hillary in many respects, and think that she has many of the qualities of a good President. But I agree that this is an important issue, so it looks like I'll be voting for Obama in the primary.
Except of course that there is no actual evidence that violence in either movies are games is harmful. In fact, the statistical evidence goes the opposite way. As movies have gotten increasingly violent, and games have become more realistically violent, rates of violent crimes have dropped--and dropped most sharply in the very demographic that is the primary consumers of such games.
That doesn't prove that games reduce violence (although the evidence is more consistent with that than with a harmful effect). But it does prove that any supposed violence-inducing effect of movies and games must be so small as to be swamped by other social and demographic factors. Or maybe parents are simply already doing a pretty good job of regulating what their own children play and watch--in which case why do we need the "nanny state" stepping in? And at the Federal level, no less?
Why should anybody pay attention when it is over a year away? The prices on digital TVs are only going to drop. At the present time, the incentive for buying a digital TV is quality, not a shift that won't be for many months. Publicity will take care of itself; I can guarantee that by next Christmas, every other retailer will be running big ads saying, "Don't let your TV go dark! Digital TVs and converters on Sale!" while Comcast and DirecTV will be running TV spots at every commercial saying "Don't let your TV go dark! Take advantage of our introductory rates on crystal clear cable/satellite TV!"
One is not required to sell a product at the maximum price the market will bear. It is also acceptable to sell below cost to build demand (although by all accounts, Nintendo is not doing this). "Dumping" is offering a product in a foreign market at a price lower than you charge in the domestic market.
Considering that the XBox 360 is an internet device and supports gaming over wireless, Microsoft obviously had to design the controllers to play well with wireless signals. And presumably there is some mechanism to prevent two nearby 360's from interfering with each other. But did they anticipate the situation in a college dorm where maybe every other room has a 360? Perhaps there is some critical density of controllers at which whatever algorithm MS is using to avoid collisions breaks down?
It was in reference to the previous post suggesting that the Nazi version of eugenics was somehow inspired by "Darwinism." Selective breeding has nothing to do with natural selection.
Correct. But this is selective breeding, i.e. "artificial selection." This is an old technique, which long predates Darwin's theory of natural selection. The point of natural selection is that the environment, without directed human intervention (i.e. "natural" rather than artificial) exerts a selective pressure that drives change.
This is idiotic. "Fitness" does not exist apart from an environment. Natural selection tends to maximize fitness in our current environment, which happens to be a technological and medically sophisticated one. We don't need to do anything to help it--it happens automatically. There is no benefit to the species of interfering with the process in order to enhance fitness in an environment (e.g. a pretechnological one) different from the one that we actually life in.
The capacity for empathy is itself subject to natural selection. The fact that it is so widespread strongly suggests that it has benefits for fitness. It is worth noting, that we--with our capacity for empathy--have exhibited population growth unparalleled by any of the other species that you seem to think that we should model ourselves upon.
Who cares? We do not exist for the benefit of our "gene pool," and our gene pool is not something that exists in isolation from human technology. Natural selections still works--it just favors the genes that increase fitness in our actual environment, not some pre-technological environment without access to modern medicine. Doubtless there are many genes that increase fitness in the modern technological world that would reduce fitness in a pretechnological environment, and others that are more benign than they would be in the absence of modern technology. Sure, if there were a radical change, such as some kind of global catastrophe that wiped out technology, then many of those genes would decrease in frequency. But we don't need to weed out those "harmful" (in an environment different from the one we actually live in) genes; that will happen automatically if the circumstances arise. All our gene pool needs for evolution to work is genetic diversity. And considering the size of the human population, we have more diversity than ever.
Again, who cares? You can't just substitute "Nature" for "God." You can really mislead yourself by anthropomorphizing nature. "Nature" is not a sentient entity. It does not "determine" anything. It does not have our best interests at heart--it quite literally does not, cannot, care about us. There is no reason to expect that natural selection will favor human survival, much less human quality of life. It is more like gravity. Yet nobody seems to complain that gravity "determines" that people "should" die by falling, yet airplanes and parachutes keep them alive.
However, this is ridiculous, because in the theory of natural selection, fitness is defined by survival (more accurately, propagation of one's genes). So it doesn't have to be "enforced"--it happens automatically. So eugenics is actually an attempt to override evolution by applying principles of selective breeding (which of course long predate Darwin) in order to prevent those who are the fittest in an evolutionary sense from predominating. This is probably why the Nazi's banned "Darwinism."--because an understanding of evolution undermines the Nazi's entire "master race" doctrine.
That's right! If we want to save the planet, we should all be using less energy than the average person!
These "if Al Gore was serious, he'd be living in a hollow log" slanders are a sneaky way of trying to shut Al Gore up, since it is next to impossible to be a public spokesman and use less energy than the average person. And in reality, it turns out that Gore is doing exactly what he advocates (which has never been a back-to-nature, use-little-or-no-energy position). He favors using carbon neutral energy where possible, buying carbon offsets where it is not, and making one's home as energy efficient as possible. And he is doing all of those things.
That number is actually consistent with a recent UN Report
It's worth noting that all of that radiation came out of the ground in the first place. Running a reactor actually "uses up" radioactivity at an accelerated rate, essentially making it safer in the long term. Anything that comes out of a reactor "hotter" than it was to begin with also has a shorter half-life, which means less time until it becomes essentially safe. While there is certainly room fro improvement, it's likely that modern waste storage leaves that stuff at least as safe as it was before it came out of the ground. After all, there are known cases in which natural radioactive deposits fissioned in the ground. We certainly know enough about waste storage to prevent that.
The fundamental basis of Dvorak's complaint seems to be his inability to see past his prejudiced view that people in the third world are just too stupid and ignorant to figure out how to use computers for their own benefit. How else to explain his conviction that they won't be able to use computers because their literacy rate is so low--overlooking the rather obvious fact that one reason why literacy rates are so low in the third world is lack of access to anything worth reading, while computers and the internet will provide them with access to much of the world's literature (MIT has recently put the teaching materials for all of its courses online), not to mention a vehicle for delivering literacy teaching tools.
For another perspective, I recently received the following from a friend who is with the US forces in Iraq:
I saw them for sale in a mall videogame store (not a major chain) in Houston the day after Thanksgiving--list price, no bundle. They were soled out in few hours. I bought mine a couple of months ago online from ToysRUs, after seeing on WiiTracker that they were in stock.
Certainly not. For that matter, I can't "dismiss the possibility" that it could have delayed effects in the second or third generation down the line, I just think that it's pretty improbable.
A lot of things are possible. Once you are willing to accept notions that are not supported by any kind of scientific data, the worries become virtually endless. Obviously, this applies not merely to violent games, but pretty much everything in the modern world. How about light pollution in cities messing up sleep cycles? Additives in food? 60 cycle noise from electrical wiring interfering with brain rhythms? Choose anything about the modern world that you personally don't like. Sure, we see no evidence of any serious harm now, but maybe it's just about to happen. Can you dismiss the possibility?
Frankly, I think that we have enough to deal with worrying about things where there is some evidence of harm before we start worrying about things where the statistical evidence is going in the opposite direction from that predicted by the doomsayers.
Post-traumatic stress symptoms may persist for years, but symptoms typically manifest a few months after the trauma, so for there to be no effect at all for a decade or more, and for effects to conveniently pop up just late enough to be beyond the horizon of the violence statistics is very contrived. Moreover, it seems quite unlikely that there would be no increase in violent behavior during the time of life when people are most susceptible to committing violent crimes, with a propensity for violence suddenly popping up later at an age when people are less susceptible to engaging in violence.
Needless to say, there is no evidence whatsoever for any such "time bomb" effect. Even the studies that purport to show a pro-violence effect do so in the relatively short term, not after a delay of many years.