Re:So it almost seems evolution follows a... desig
on
Is Evolution Predictable?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
The crux of Darwinism is precisely that evolution is undirected, stemming from *random* mutations. Those who say there is a purpose and pattern to evolution are no longer in the Darwinist paradigm.
This is a remarkably stupid objection, confusing randomness with unpredictability. If random events were completely unpredictable, then casinos would not make money. The experiment describes exactly the kind of conditions--very large numbers of bacteria--in which one can make predictions about the outcome.
However, Darwinism insists that natural selection is what creates new species. And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking.
Considering that it has now been shown by genetic sequencing that all of the differences among species can be attributed to the kinds of genetic changes that have been shown to arise by mutation--perhaps the most dramatic example in the history of science of the discovery of evidence confirming a theory--this is also pretty foolish.
The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote....
Ah, the sine qua non of the Creationist/ID crackpot: the quotes taken out of context. The fact that they always seem to regard this as a particular telling point (note that the poster saved it for last, apparently under the delusion that it is some sort of haymaker of argumentation) is illustrative of how little they understand science. I suppose that this sort of textual hair-splitting must make some kind of sense in the context of Biblical interpretation. But science is based on evidence, not the words of the prophets.
I paid a high price for the PS2 with the idea that I'd be saving money by not having to buy a DVD player. And then the PS2 DVD player turned out to be so crappy that I ended up buying a DVD player anyway. But even the PS2's lousy DVD player was a big improvement over the VHS player I had at the time, while HD seems like a pretty modest improvement over the picture from my cheap DVD progressive player.
Frankly after the Vioxx debacle any science from Merck must be viewed with suspicion. The New England Journal of Medicine recently expressed, then re-expressed, well grounded serious concerns about ethics and veracity at Merck, concerns which continue to this day.
It is now clear that the NEJM's "expression of concern" was designed by a public relations consultant to distract the public from the NEJM's own role. For example, it turns out that the NEJM had known for years about the later cases that Merck reported to the FDA, and even rejected a letter that wanted to raise this issue. What's more, the NEJM's implication that the authors of the VIGOR report deleted critical data from the manuscript turned out to be false.
In retrospect, Merck was clearly over optimistic in thinking that the lower incidence of cardiac effects in the naproxen group (in the VIGOR study that compared Vioxx to naproxen) could be entirely attributed to the protective effect of naproxen. Naproxen was known to be protective, but the protective effect would have had to be toward the upper end of plausibility. Nevertheless, it is clear that people at Merck sincerely believed in the safety of Vioxx, and in some cases were taking it themselves and giving it to their families.
I think that some ethical questions may be raised with respect to the way Vioxx was marketed, even if Merck sincerely believed it to be safe. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the NEJM has behaved unethically in the affair.
The question remains as to whether Vioxx is really more dangerous than other similar drugs (COX-2 inhibitors), or more dangerous than the older anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin, naproxen, and ibuprofen, which can cause dangerous bleeding.
Yes, for all the games that use rumble as a sort of generic tactile beep, it is worth it for the ones that really use it to enhance the game experience. One think that I've noticed is that when rumble is used well, it tends to be subliminal--you aren't even particularly aware of it unless you make a point of paying attention to it.
I imagine that effective use of motion sensing will be even more rare than effective use of rumble. The Nintendo controller is clearly designed around its motion and position sensing, and it's wand shape plays well to this kind of application. But a motion sensing Playstation controller is not going to be useful for a lot other than as a steering wheel--and I've used tilt sensitive controllers before, and the control is distinctly inferior to a joystick. I can imagine a few uses for novelty games, like "rolling ball" games, where the awkwardness of the control is part of the appeal--a "Crystal Castles" type game, perhaps.
Perhaps eventually "subliminal" uses of motion sensing will emerge, similar to the better uses of rumble. One could imagine a "smart" controller that learns your body english and uses it to more precisely control your onscreen avatar, for example--but if it happens at all, such sophisticated applications will be slow in coming.
I bought the "PS2 is not so expensive because you don't have to buy a DVD player" argument. And then the DVD playback from the PS2 turned out to suck and I ended up buying a DVD player anyway. I'm not falling for that scam again. Besides, at least DVD was a huge step up from VHS, and I didn't have to worry about some titles being released for a competing standard. On my 34" HDTV, HD is only a small step up from DVD progressive.
every single person I know that owns a PS2 bought a stand alone DVD player after the fact.
I certainly did, and felt gypped that I bought into the "it's not really so expensive because it's a DVD player, too" pitch. I won't fall for that one again. Especially now it seems that there is no way to get digital video output out of the lower-priced model. Sure, Sony is promising not to degrade the composite image on their own HD movies...for now. But for how long? And how about other studios?
I can't remember the last time I watched TV live. Even on the rare occasion that I happen to start a program live, I usually end up putting it on pause for a while for some reason or other, which gives me enough buffer so that I can skip the remaining commercials.
I think perhaps it was. Apple did a good job of marketing it, to be sure, but lots of well-marketed products fail when they don't live up to their hype.
Apple was not the first into the digital music player market, neither were they the cheapest. As a respected, but minor computer manufacturer with no track record in music players, they entered the market with no popular presumption of success.
The iPod succeeded initially because it offered the right combination of features, with a friendly, intuitive user interface, at the right price. It succeeded as much by word of mouth as by Apple's marketing. Today, of course, the iPod has momentum--it has become the de facto standard, and to displace it, a competitor would have to be not merely better or cheaper, but better/cheaper by a wide margin.
I'm waiting for a reverse version of the virus that includes a PTP client that silently stocks your computer's HD with music and videos. "It wasn't me, officer, I can prove that my computer has a virus!"
Tilt sensitive controllers have been available in the past from 3rd party vendors. They never really caught on because the form factor makes them pretty useless for anything other than emulating a steering wheel, and the control isn't as good as with a joystick.
Nintendo is genuinely offering something new, with wand design that can emulate a light gun, a sword, fishing real, fire hose, and probably a lot more. I'll be buying a Wii just to see what developers come up with. As for the PS3...well, maybe it would be nice to have a BluRay player, if it is really any good and not a piece of garbage like the PS's DVD player.
I worry about the quality. I bought the "it's also a DVD player!" argument with the PS2, and then ended up buying a separate player anyway, because the one built into the PS2 turned out to be really crappy.
It is certainly reasonable to check out clusters of cases when the pop up, but it is important to keep in mind the natural human bias toward overestimating the statistical significance of clusters. For example, when asked to write a series of random numbers, people almost always have fewer clusters than chance would predict. Another classic example is the birthday problem, where most people wildly underestimate how big a group you need before you are likely to have two people with the same birthday.
To consider the probability of a suspicious cluster arising by chance, you can't just figure the likelihood of a cluster arising in that particular building--you have to think in terms of the probability of a cluster randomly arising in some building that is in the vicinity of something that might plausibly be blamed.
He sort of redeems himself by saying: If I do that then it won't work. But just asking the question seems to me that he doesn't understand what's happening here, and is far too excited about something rather simple.
This is the difference between an experimentalist and a theorist. A theorist thinks he "understands what's happening" if he understands the theory. But an experimentalist wants to understand reality, and never completely believes any theory. Yes, in one sense it is not exciting, in that the results so far support the theory, but an experimentalist gets excited about finding new ways of testing a theory in the real world.
My sister has a Scientific Atlanta 8000 box. I was amazed by how poorly designed it is. The remote is a disaster. It is covered with buttons, yet does less than the simple TiVo remote manages to do with just a few buttons. For example, to page through screens in the Guide, you need to use separate page up/down buttons. The TiVo simply lets the channel rocker do double-duty as a page command. The SA box needs separate A, B, C buttons (which make it hard to find a good third party remote to replace the crappy manufacturer's remote) to schedule a program; the TiVo handles it all much more efficiently using just the joypad and the select button. On almost any TiVo screen, joypad left backs you out of the current screen, while joypad right gives you more detail on the selected item. And if you get lost, you can always hit the big TiVo button to jump to the main menu. This consistency of interface makes it incredibly intuitive. The TiVo remote has an innovative diamond arrangement of transport keys, with the most used button--pause--large and centrally located, with fast forward and reverse on either side, Play above, and slow motion below. This is the best control arrangement I've found on any remote. And when you fast forward, it automatically corrects for reaction time and jumps back a little when you hit play.
The other big failing I noticed with the SA box was that it had no real search capability, while on the TiVo it is trivial to set it up to automatically capture any show with particular actors, director, title, or specific words in the description.
I wonder if this is related to TiVo's recent patent victory. Cable companies may be figuring that if they are going to be paying royalties to TiVo anyway, perhaps it would be to their advantage to offer their customers the real thing instead of a second-rate clone.
I switched from cable to DirecTV specifically for their dual tuner HD TiVo. I've been happy with it, but DirecTV has done a really lousy job of supporting TiVo, not implementing any of the advances TiVo has made with their stand-alone systems and not providing any TiVo-branded upgrade path for their new MPEG-4 broadcasts.
I'd switch back to cable in a heartbeat if I could get a dual tuner HD TiVo. My experience with non-TiVo PVRs has been fairly negative. I don't have Cox in my area, but I understand that the cable provider who holds the local monopoly (Comcast) will also be supporting TiVo in the future, and I'm also interested in TiVo's new cablecard based HD PVRs.
Considering how much Microsoft is losing on each box sold, Microsoft's strategy is clearly to sell as few actual XBox 360s as possible while preserving the impression of a successful launch. They've been fairly successful at this. Demand clearly greatly exceeded supply over Christmas--hardly surprising considering that a number of retailers told me that they'd only received 2 or 3 units. Indeed, it was late Feb. before stores around here had units for people who had not been on their waiting lists since early Fall or before.
That being said, I've got one, and am enjoying it, although the game that I'm playing most is Robotron (which seems to run perfectly, just as it did on the Playstation 1).
I've been searching with Amazon's A9 for months, but today I was surprised to discover a dramatic decline in quality of search results. Then I saw the Microsoft logo and knew why.
I've reconfigured my browser to default to Google instead of A9
Also, he was a pretty horrible president himself. Forget lying about having sex with an intern. He bombed the only asprin factory in Sudan during the trial to divert the public's attention. And then he lied about that.
At this point in time, it is amazing that anybody would criticize Clinton for possibly being overaggressive in his attempts to get bin Laden and destroy weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Even if it was an error (and US Intelligence still stands by its assessment that the plant was involved in WMD manufacture), it pales next to the damage that has been caused by US attacks in the wake of 9/11.
It is too bad that the Bush administration did not continue the Clinton administrations efforts to attack bin Laden's operations, only belatedly realizing the threat after 9/11
Clinton's approval ratings never dipped throughout the Lewinski scandal because the American public saw through the "perjury is a crime" spin, and realized that it all occurred because an politically-motivated investigation cornered the President into answering improper questions about his personal life. The public correctly realized that it was the witch hunt, not Clinton's attempt to conceal his affair, that was harming the country.
On the other hand, Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet because most of the American public believes that Bush's policies and the fantasies/lies (choose one) of his Administration are harming the country.
There was no courage in this. People have been lampooning presidents since the first joke about wooden teeth. It doesn't take big brassy balls to do this, just some bad jokes. Stop making this out to be some sort of heroic act.
I think that it takes some courage to lampoon the President to his face. And I noticed that Colbert did not look away from Bush as he did so, but on several occasions looked at him and spoke directly to him.
The problem with all of this pontificating about supposed "desensitizing" effects of violence in games and other media is that violent crime has been dropping steadily as both games and movies have become more violent and more realistic. And it has been dropping most sharply in the demographic group--young males--that are the most avid consumers of such legislation.
So any possible pro-violence effect of such entertainments must necessarily be negligible in comparison to other social and demographic factors that influence violent behavior.
This is likely to be a problem when it comes to justifying the law in court. After all, this is necessarily going to harm the business of game dealers, if only because it introduces red tape--people must bring ID or parents to the store to purchase a game. The courts are likely to demand evidence that such games really are harmful--evidence that simply does not exist.
Cross-medium differences play a role, to be sure, but the real problem is that only rarely is the talent hired up to the task of making such a conversion. Rather, the usual sentiment seems to be, "A lot of people will see it/play it because of the name. Making it stand on its own would be expensive, and there's always the risk that we won't be able to carry it off. So let's make up all the money that we spent on the license by going with cheap-ass production."
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The crux of Darwinism is precisely that evolution is undirected, stemming from *random* mutations. Those who say there is a purpose and pattern to evolution are no longer in the Darwinist paradigm.
This is a remarkably stupid objection, confusing randomness with unpredictability. If random events were completely unpredictable, then casinos would not make money. The experiment describes exactly the kind of conditions--very large numbers of bacteria--in which one can make predictions about the outcome.
However, Darwinism insists that natural selection is what creates new species. And the evidence for that happening--for bacteria turning into another life form--is lacking.
Considering that it has now been shown by genetic sequencing that all of the differences among species can be attributed to the kinds of genetic changes that have been shown to arise by mutation--perhaps the most dramatic example in the history of science of the discovery of evidence confirming a theory--this is also pretty foolish.
The late Dr Colin Patterson, senior paleontologist of the British Museum of Natural History, wrote a book, Evolution. In reply to a questioner who asked why he had not included any pictures of transitional forms, he wrote....
Ah, the sine qua non of the Creationist/ID crackpot: the quotes taken out of context. The fact that they always seem to regard this as a particular telling point (note that the poster saved it for last, apparently under the delusion that it is some sort of haymaker of argumentation) is illustrative of how little they understand science. I suppose that this sort of textual hair-splitting must make some kind of sense in the context of Biblical interpretation. But science is based on evidence, not the words of the prophets.
I paid a high price for the PS2 with the idea that I'd be saving money by not having to buy a DVD player. And then the PS2 DVD player turned out to be so crappy that I ended up buying a DVD player anyway. But even the PS2's lousy DVD player was a big improvement over the VHS player I had at the time, while HD seems like a pretty modest improvement over the picture from my cheap DVD progressive player.
Frankly after the Vioxx debacle any science from Merck must be viewed with suspicion. The New England Journal of Medicine recently expressed, then re-expressed, well grounded serious concerns about ethics and veracity at Merck, concerns which continue to this day.
It is now clear that the NEJM's "expression of concern" was designed by a public relations consultant to distract the public from the NEJM's own role. For example, it turns out that the NEJM had known for years about the later cases that Merck reported to the FDA, and even rejected a letter that wanted to raise this issue. What's more, the NEJM's implication that the authors of the VIGOR report deleted critical data from the manuscript turned out to be false.
In retrospect, Merck was clearly over optimistic in thinking that the lower incidence of cardiac effects in the naproxen group (in the VIGOR study that compared Vioxx to naproxen) could be entirely attributed to the protective effect of naproxen. Naproxen was known to be protective, but the protective effect would have had to be toward the upper end of plausibility. Nevertheless, it is clear that people at Merck sincerely believed in the safety of Vioxx, and in some cases were taking it themselves and giving it to their families.
I think that some ethical questions may be raised with respect to the way Vioxx was marketed, even if Merck sincerely believed it to be safe. On the other hand, it is abundantly clear that the NEJM has behaved unethically in the affair.
The question remains as to whether Vioxx is really more dangerous than other similar drugs (COX-2 inhibitors), or more dangerous than the older anti-inflammatory drugs such as aspirin, naproxen, and ibuprofen, which can cause dangerous bleeding.
Yes, for all the games that use rumble as a sort of generic tactile beep, it is worth it for the ones that really use it to enhance the game experience. One think that I've noticed is that when rumble is used well, it tends to be subliminal--you aren't even particularly aware of it unless you make a point of paying attention to it.
I imagine that effective use of motion sensing will be even more rare than effective use of rumble. The Nintendo controller is clearly designed around its motion and position sensing, and it's wand shape plays well to this kind of application. But a motion sensing Playstation controller is not going to be useful for a lot other than as a steering wheel--and I've used tilt sensitive controllers before, and the control is distinctly inferior to a joystick. I can imagine a few uses for novelty games, like "rolling ball" games, where the awkwardness of the control is part of the appeal--a "Crystal Castles" type game, perhaps.
Perhaps eventually "subliminal" uses of motion sensing will emerge, similar to the better uses of rumble. One could imagine a "smart" controller that learns your body english and uses it to more precisely control your onscreen avatar, for example--but if it happens at all, such sophisticated applications will be slow in coming.
I bought the "PS2 is not so expensive because you don't have to buy a DVD player" argument. And then the DVD playback from the PS2 turned out to suck and I ended up buying a DVD player anyway. I'm not falling for that scam again. Besides, at least DVD was a huge step up from VHS, and I didn't have to worry about some titles being released for a competing standard. On my 34" HDTV, HD is only a small step up from DVD progressive.
every single person I know that owns a PS2 bought a stand alone DVD player after the fact.
I certainly did, and felt gypped that I bought into the "it's not really so expensive because it's a DVD player, too" pitch. I won't fall for that one again. Especially now it seems that there is no way to get digital video output out of the lower-priced model. Sure, Sony is promising not to degrade the composite image on their own HD movies...for now. But for how long? And how about other studios?
I can't remember the last time I watched TV live. Even on the rare occasion that I happen to start a program live, I usually end up putting it on pause for a while for some reason or other, which gives me enough buffer so that I can skip the remaining commercials.
The iPod was not sold on it's technical merits.
I think perhaps it was. Apple did a good job of marketing it, to be sure, but lots of well-marketed products fail when they don't live up to their hype.
Apple was not the first into the digital music player market, neither were they the cheapest. As a respected, but minor computer manufacturer with no track record in music players, they entered the market with no popular presumption of success.
The iPod succeeded initially because it offered the right combination of features, with a friendly, intuitive user interface, at the right price. It succeeded as much by word of mouth as by Apple's marketing. Today, of course, the iPod has momentum--it has become the de facto standard, and to displace it, a competitor would have to be not merely better or cheaper, but better/cheaper by a wide margin.
I'm waiting for a reverse version of the virus that includes a PTP client that silently stocks your computer's HD with music and videos. "It wasn't me, officer, I can prove that my computer has a virus!"
Tilt sensitive controllers have been available in the past from 3rd party vendors. They never really caught on because the form factor makes them pretty useless for anything other than emulating a steering wheel, and the control isn't as good as with a joystick.
Nintendo is genuinely offering something new, with wand design that can emulate a light gun, a sword, fishing real, fire hose, and probably a lot more. I'll be buying a Wii just to see what developers come up with. As for the PS3...well, maybe it would be nice to have a BluRay player, if it is really any good and not a piece of garbage like the PS's DVD player.
I worry about the quality. I bought the "it's also a DVD player!" argument with the PS2, and then ended up buying a separate player anyway, because the one built into the PS2 turned out to be really crappy.
Has it actually be confirmed that the low-end system will not have HDMI capability at all, as opposed to merely requiring an extra-cost adapter?
It is certainly reasonable to check out clusters of cases when the pop up, but it is important to keep in mind the natural human bias toward overestimating the statistical significance of clusters. For example, when asked to write a series of random numbers, people almost always have fewer clusters than chance would predict. Another classic example is the birthday problem, where most people wildly underestimate how big a group you need before you are likely to have two people with the same birthday.
To consider the probability of a suspicious cluster arising by chance, you can't just figure the likelihood of a cluster arising in that particular building--you have to think in terms of the probability of a cluster randomly arising in some building that is in the vicinity of something that might plausibly be blamed.
He sort of redeems himself by saying: If I do that then it won't work. But just asking the question seems to me that he doesn't understand what's happening here, and is far too excited about something rather simple.
This is the difference between an experimentalist and a theorist. A theorist thinks he "understands what's happening" if he understands the theory. But an experimentalist wants to understand reality, and never completely believes any theory. Yes, in one sense it is not exciting, in that the results so far support the theory, but an experimentalist gets excited about finding new ways of testing a theory in the real world.
I love the green color and would like to see it retained.
My sister has a Scientific Atlanta 8000 box. I was amazed by how poorly designed it is. The remote is a disaster. It is covered with buttons, yet does less than the simple TiVo remote manages to do with just a few buttons. For example, to page through screens in the Guide, you need to use separate page up/down buttons. The TiVo simply lets the channel rocker do double-duty as a page command. The SA box needs separate A, B, C buttons (which make it hard to find a good third party remote to replace the crappy manufacturer's remote) to schedule a program; the TiVo handles it all much more efficiently using just the joypad and the select button. On almost any TiVo screen, joypad left backs you out of the current screen, while joypad right gives you more detail on the selected item. And if you get lost, you can always hit the big TiVo button to jump to the main menu. This consistency of interface makes it incredibly intuitive. The TiVo remote has an innovative diamond arrangement of transport keys, with the most used button--pause--large and centrally located, with fast forward and reverse on either side, Play above, and slow motion below. This is the best control arrangement I've found on any remote. And when you fast forward, it automatically corrects for reaction time and jumps back a little when you hit play.
The other big failing I noticed with the SA box was that it had no real search capability, while on the TiVo it is trivial to set it up to automatically capture any show with particular actors, director, title, or specific words in the description.
I wonder if this is related to TiVo's recent patent victory. Cable companies may be figuring that if they are going to be paying royalties to TiVo anyway, perhaps it would be to their advantage to offer their customers the real thing instead of a second-rate clone.
I switched from cable to DirecTV specifically for their dual tuner HD TiVo. I've been happy with it, but DirecTV has done a really lousy job of supporting TiVo, not implementing any of the advances TiVo has made with their stand-alone systems and not providing any TiVo-branded upgrade path for their new MPEG-4 broadcasts.
I'd switch back to cable in a heartbeat if I could get a dual tuner HD TiVo. My experience with non-TiVo PVRs has been fairly negative. I don't have Cox in my area, but I understand that the cable provider who holds the local monopoly (Comcast) will also be supporting TiVo in the future, and I'm also interested in TiVo's new cablecard based HD PVRs.
Considering how much Microsoft is losing on each box sold, Microsoft's strategy is clearly to sell as few actual XBox 360s as possible while preserving the impression of a successful launch. They've been fairly successful at this. Demand clearly greatly exceeded supply over Christmas--hardly surprising considering that a number of retailers told me that they'd only received 2 or 3 units. Indeed, it was late Feb. before stores around here had units for people who had not been on their waiting lists since early Fall or before.
That being said, I've got one, and am enjoying it, although the game that I'm playing most is Robotron (which seems to run perfectly, just as it did on the Playstation 1).
I've been searching with Amazon's A9 for months, but today I was surprised to discover a dramatic decline in quality of search results. Then I saw the Microsoft logo and knew why.
I've reconfigured my browser to default to Google instead of A9
Also, he was a pretty horrible president himself. Forget lying about having sex with an intern. He bombed the only asprin factory in Sudan during the trial to divert the public's attention. And then he lied about that.
At this point in time, it is amazing that anybody would criticize Clinton for possibly being overaggressive in his attempts to get bin Laden and destroy weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East. Even if it was an error (and US Intelligence still stands by its assessment that the plant was involved in WMD manufacture), it pales next to the damage that has been caused by US attacks in the wake of 9/11.
It is too bad that the Bush administration did not continue the Clinton administrations efforts to attack bin Laden's operations, only belatedly realizing the threat after 9/11
Clinton's approval ratings never dipped throughout the Lewinski scandal because the American public saw through the "perjury is a crime" spin, and realized that it all occurred because an politically-motivated investigation cornered the President into answering improper questions about his personal life. The public correctly realized that it was the witch hunt, not Clinton's attempt to conceal his affair, that was harming the country.
On the other hand, Bush's approval ratings are in the toilet because most of the American public believes that Bush's policies and the fantasies/lies (choose one) of his Administration are harming the country.
There was no courage in this. People have been lampooning presidents since the first joke about wooden teeth. It doesn't take big brassy balls to do this, just some bad jokes. Stop making this out to be some sort of heroic act.
I think that it takes some courage to lampoon the President to his face. And I noticed that Colbert did not look away from Bush as he did so, but on several occasions looked at him and spoke directly to him.
The problem with all of this pontificating about supposed "desensitizing" effects of violence in games and other media is that violent crime has been dropping steadily as both games and movies have become more violent and more realistic. And it has been dropping most sharply in the demographic group--young males--that are the most avid consumers of such legislation.
So any possible pro-violence effect of such entertainments must necessarily be negligible in comparison to other social and demographic factors that influence violent behavior.
This is likely to be a problem when it comes to justifying the law in court. After all, this is necessarily going to harm the business of game dealers, if only because it introduces red tape--people must bring ID or parents to the store to purchase a game. The courts are likely to demand evidence that such games really are harmful--evidence that simply does not exist.
Cross-medium differences play a role, to be sure, but the real problem is that only rarely is the talent hired up to the task of making such a conversion. Rather, the usual sentiment seems to be, "A lot of people will see it/play it because of the name. Making it stand on its own would be expensive, and there's always the risk that we won't be able to carry it off. So let's make up all the money that we spent on the license by going with cheap-ass production."