Bungie IS NOT a big name. They got 1 game and that is it.
One game can make you a big name if that game is big enough. Ask Id.
Bungie has never been prolific, but they have been at the forefront of science-fiction based first-person-shooter titles from the very beginning, with the Marathon series on the Mac (which was comparable to Doom graphically, with a better plot). The two Halo games have been widely acclaimed as console FPS milestones. There is reportedly a Halo movie coming out.
I think that qualifies them as a big name.
As for the graphics being amazing. Oh please. I already play at higher resolutions on my now 2yr old PC. Richer friends won't accept anything less then 1600x1200 while sony's own games like eq2 can already make use of 512mb video cards despite the fact they were not even out. Other recent games to can make use of hardware features that even top of the range pc's don't have let alone these weak consoles.
This is really apples and oranges. Like a lot of people who work at a computer screen all day, I don't care to sit at a desk to play games when I go home; I want to lounge back with a controller. And since I'm not sitting 18 inches from my TV, ultra-high resolution is not a huge selling point for me. HD resolution is plenty.
If they were smart, wouldn't one of them - if they were in fact in cahoots - offer a slightler lower price than the other to induce the customer to perhaps purchase the VCR from one of the retailers?
That would encourage the customer to try to start a bidding war by going back to the first retailer, and saying, "So-and-so down the street offered me a lower price, can you beat it?" (this is New York, remember) This way, the customer is more likely to figure, "I guess that's just the best price I'm going to get," and buy it.
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over PS3?
The XBox360 is (sort of) available now. The PS3 currently is nothing more than a haze of promises.
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over the original Xbox aside from graphical performance?
No, and probably not for PS3 over PS2, either. Don't expect a quantum leap in game design, just prettier graphics and more "stuff" on the screen at once.
PS3 will have better graphical performance, up to 2x.
According to Sony, whose advance claims for every previous console have turned out to be widely exaggerated.
High definition.
Also on the XBox360. HD is OK, but I'm actually more interested in the fact that widescreen will now be standard.
Blu-ray.
Every new Sony console seems to have some new, fancy drive design. And they always break down a lot. Be sure to get the extended warranty.
Up to 7 wireless controllers - those actually mean something.
If you can actually get 7 people around your TV. Maybe good for people with big-screen media rooms.
PS3 will come out with games that are just as good, perhaps better.
Perhaps. But the XBox360 games are coming out now. The PS3 won't be competing with XBox360 launch games, but with XBox360 2nd generation games. And the PS3 looks to be more of a programming challenge, so even if the hardware has the potential to match or surpass the XBox360, it may take years for that to happen.
5: PS3 will have better graphics in high definition. Maybe during it's lifetime, High Definition prices will drop sharply, just like LCDs have.
This has already happened. Walmart has rows of HD TVs in the $500-600 range. Many of them even have built-in tuners. If you don't demand a huge screen, HD is only a bit more expensive than SD, with a much better picture.
Yeah you can get it now, but you're basically just getting a graphical upgrade to your existing Xbox.
This is a bit silly. The XBox360 has a completely different processor and architecture than the XBox I, as well as a different graphics system. The PS3 is closer to the PS2 than the XBox360 is to the XBox I--that's why Microsoft has been unable to provide full backward-compatibility.
If you desperately need to buy something now, I'd buy a GameCube. It's dirt cheap, less than $100, and you can always pass it off to your kids, or younger siblings, cousins after you're done with it and decide what you want to buy next year when all 3 next-gen consoles are out.
Just-launched systems are for enthusiasts. The launch games typically barely scratch the surface of what the system is capable of. If you don't already have a game system, I'd recommend a PS2. Lots of games, fairly cheap used (but be sure to get an extended warranty). And promised backwards compatibility of PS3 means developers aren't going to be in a big hurry to switch to PS3 development. GameCube is more for people who appreciate Nintendo's unique game design strengths (I'm actually looking forward to Nintendo Revolution more than PS3).
Probably not very. Games have different design constraints from general purpose computers. Part of Apple's reason for jumping ship to Intel seems to have been IBM's recent focus on these game-oriented CPUs.
Mod me down if you must, but the inference that two 'foreigners' at different stores were in cahoots against the shopper - only evidenced by one's use of a walkie-talkie and a language the shopper didn't understand - smacks of racism. I could be wrong, but that's certainly what it seems like based on what was posted.
Paranoid, possibly, but not necessarily racist. The question is whether he would have jumped to the same conclusion that he was not dealing with two independent retailers if the clerk at the first store was the same race as himself, and the clerk at the second store was as well, but bore what might have been a family resemblance to the first clerk, and spoke quietly into the walkie-talkie so that he couldn't hear. I suspect that he would have reacted exactly the same way. Not everything has to be about race.
I think because it eats into sales of songbooks (music & lyrics). Go into any Guitar Center and you'll see racks and racks of songbooks.
I don't think that it is anything so well thought-out. I think that it is a kneejerk response: "The info is ours, somebody else is using it, and we aren't getting paid."
It is irrelevant that lyrics sell records (like many people, I often hear a snatch of song, find it on a lyrics site, and buy the album). It is irrelevant that they don't actually at the moment have any way to make money on lyrics--they can always think maybe they will in the future. Perhaps someday they'll want to have an authorized lyrics website and use it to advertise the albums (in which case search utilities that show the lyrics without showing the ads will be a problem). They may not actually be planning to do any such thing, but even the vague possibility is enough of an excuse to generate a letter from their legal department.
Things have changed. The phosphor half-life of the current generation is 60,000 hours. I think that's 20 years of 8 hours a day operation.
I'll believe this when I see plasma displays that have been in use for ten years or so and still work fine. But I have the suspicion that nobody will even be selling plasma by then.
Couldn't the same argument be made for anything? Movies? Porn? If you get specific about what constitutes imminent violence even guns qualify. In essence, you cannot stop someone from selling anything to anyone because you cannot prove it creates or produces an immanent threat to anyone.
People do get angry, go get a gun, and shoot somebody. It happens rather frequently. So the "imminent harm" argument can be made. Another argument made in this case is the ability of parents to supervise videogame playing is generally adequate, so there is not a compelling need for government intervention. A similar argument would have to be made for use of porn and guns. Of course, the evidence of harm, or the type of harm, are different, so each type of item would have to be considered separately. I don't doubt that porn sellers have tried to make the same kind case, and failed, so the restrictions against porn are supported by settled case law, and it would be hard to get the issue re-opened.
You need a NAME to survey the person. Even if the data are later compiled and all identifiers removed, someone has to do the interviews. Besides, if you read the survey, this is not a survey of crime victims. It is a survey of people, asing aobut their experience over a certain period of time. Most are NOT crime victims.
Of course not! Think about it for a moment. If you want to do a survey on crime incidence, the only valid way is to pick people at random and ask them if they have experienced a crime. A survey that selected out crime victims for questioning would be completely useless for estimating crime incidence.
The reason they do it this way - because they have no legal way of doing it otherwise.
On the contrary, the same methodology is used to estimate frequency of crimes such as burglary where the privacy concerns of rape do not arise. It is done this way because it is the only valid method for tracking changes in crime incidence.
The survey would be cast as "junk science" in any other field.
I've noticed that the term "junk science" is almost never used by people who are actually qualified to evaluate the science in question. So far, you have failed utterly to raise even a single valid objection to the study. As a biomedical scientist with considerable experience in the evaluation of statistical methods, the study looks perfectly valid to me. The approach used is an epidemiological strategy that has been used successfully in investigating questions of disease incidence and drug safety.
Its not a question of clutching at straws. Its a fact that most employees don't have access to that data.
And they don't need it, because these numbers are based upon anonymous statistical surveys, not upon access to confidential data on crimes reported to the police (which wouldn't be much use, anyway, since many crimes in this category are never reported). There are no legal restrictions on the ability of employees to conduct such surveys.
A "survey" is only as good as its methodology, and a big part of that is choosing the sample. We know the sample is flawed - ergo, so is the survey. Idem that a survey can't replace actual stats. This is "feel-good" stuff from the DoJ.
We don't know the sample is flawed. You haven't identified any flaws in the sample. It's a large sample, so it should be statistically robust. For crimes that often aren't reported such as simple assault or rape, a survey is far superior to police records. Clearly, in the population that is being sampled, the frequency of violent crime has been decreasing for over a decade. If you want to argue that the sampling has missed some subpopulation in which crime is increasing--which would have to be a pretty large fraction of the total population to make a significant impact on the national statistics--then you are left with the problem of explaining why it is that the murder statistics, which are not subject to the same sampling bias, show the same downward trend.
For most people, you're right. But that's because they've become dependent - addicted - to TV, many to the point where it interferes with their daily lives, and their relationships with the people around them. We don't bother about it because we're so used to it.
Being able to watch the shows you prefer when you choose to do so rather than when they are broadcast reduces rather than increases the interference of TV with other aspects of daily life. TV becomes more like reading a book or listening to music--you do it when you have the leisure time for it and it doesn't interfere with other activities that are important to you. Some people enjoy watching TV with their families, and find that shared enjoyment of an entertainment enhances rather than harming their relationships. That is, after all, why people often go together to movies, concerts, and plays.
People tend to be a bit too ready to use the pejorative word "addicted" when somebody else happens to like something that they don't appreciate. I have tastes and interests; you have addictions. I think that equating enthusiasm for hobbies and entertainments with drug addiction minimizes and obscures the very real problems of addictive substances.
Dude, these are surveys. They're NOT conducted by official police agents gathering facts. they're conducted by civilians, who have no need or right to access rape victims names. Those files are usually sealed by the courts. Same with paedophiles - the names of the victims are expurgiated from all public docs.
You are really clutching at straws at this point. Do you even bother to look at the references? The surveys are carried out by the US Dept of Justice. I guess that you should say that they are civilians, in the same sense that the Attorney General is a civilian, but I don't see why you imagine that is relevant to anything. Surveys of victims are the most accurate method of determining crime frequency because not all crimes are reported. modern sampling methods are highly robust and have been validated by years of research. You have provided no basis for suggesting that these results are biased. And since we are talking about trends rather than absolute levels, you cannot explain this result even if people tend to be reluctant to report being victims of certain types of crimes-- you would need to find some reason why people would be becoming, year by year, more reluctant to report their personal experience of crime on an anonymous survey. Note that the trend applies to every form of violent crime, including burglary, not merely those that some people might reasonably be particularly reluctant to report, such as rape. Note also that the same trend applies to murder, which is not based on survey results.
My initial point which we've gone well away from, was that I didn't see any real need for anyone to buy a PVR because there is so much drek out there.
This also makes no sense at all. The purpose of a PVR is to be able to have a selection of the shows that you enjoy available at the time when you want to watch TV. If there is a lot of "drek" out there, such that it is hard to find the type of show that you enjoy--nonviolent documentaries on science or history, perhaps--then you have a greater reason to want a PVR, which will select those rare shows for you, even if they air while you are at work or asleep, and make them available for you to watch at your leisure.
Do you really believe that people were all that upset about Watergate on its own? It was because it was just more of the same. People were fed up. They wanted Nixon gone, and they were going to seize on anything to do it.
Nixon resigned because he was about to be impeached. And all of the articles of impeachment concerned the Watergate coverup, not the conduct of the war. Twice, Americans were offered a clear choice at the polls between a candidate who favored continuing the war and one who favored prompt withdrawal: Nixon vs. Humphrey and Nixon vs. McGovern. In both cases, they chose Nixon.
Actually, the decline in murder rates corresponds to increased economic performance under Clinton.
You can't really prove anything by correlation. Quite a few things changed over that tiime period. Levitt and Dubner, in "Freakonomics" make a pretty persuasive case that the decline in crime is due to easier access to abortion.
What we can say, however, is that if violent TV, movies, and videogames do not actually reduce real-world violence, then any pro-violence effect of these influences must be small relative to other social, economic, and demographic factors
Mixing violent TV shows with a culture of guns is dangerous. The stats show it - 3x the murder rate.
So are you claiming that the US did not have a higher murder rate than Canada prior to violent US TV shows? It's a bit risky to compare statistics collected with different methodology, but this chart doesn't seem to support the notion that a greater crime rate in the US than Canada is a particularly modern phenomenon. Looking at these data, one would tend to ascribe the difference in crime rates to long-standing cultural differences rather than to modern entertainments.
If you looked further down on the page you linked to, they say the following about the rape stats: Sources: Rape (excluding sexual assault), robbery,... They have no way of including those stats in a survey because its illegal to divulge the victim's name, even for the purpose of collecting stats.
Are you seriously trying to argue that it is legal to collect statistics on rape, but not on sexual assaults that do not culminate in rape? That is about the most foolish thing that I have ever heard. Note that none of these statistics divulge anybody's name, so that is quite irrelevant. I challenge you to produce the law that makes it illegal to collect such statistics.
Most likely, they are not including non-rape sexual assaults under rape because they are already counting them as assaults, and it would bias the statistics to count them right.
Another thing left out (in addition to the 9/11 killings) was the continuing death and injury rate to US GI forces.
And how, specifically, do you conceive this as being a consequence of TV violence? If people didn't watch TV, they wouldn't join the army?
Do people feel safer today? No. Are there more incidents of stupidity like road rage? Definitely - the term didn't even exist 20 years ago.
Again, this is pretty foolish. The fact that the buzzword "road rage" hadn't been coined doesn't mean that people didn't get angry over being cut off on the highway 20 years ago. As somebody who actually was around, and driving, 20 years ago, I can assure you that they did.
20 years ago, the government would have fallen on news of officially sanctioned torture, or knowingly misleading the public in a bullshit war.
Have they quit teaching history in the schools? We fought a bullshit war in Viet Nam, with its own atrocities, 20 years ago, and fought it for considerably longer than we have been fighting this one. People today are upset about white phosphorous? Back then, we had that and napalm, too. The government didn't fall. The antiwar candidate, George McGovern was defeated in one of the greatest political landslides in recent memory.
Now, because of the administration's continuing advertising campaign against its own people, they've got everyone too scared to say anything, for fear of being seen as disloyal.
Oh, and that never happened before? I won't even try to educate you, but you might find it informative to see the movie "Good night and good luck."
Facts: there has been no change in the murder rate in the last 5 years - it hasn't gone down.
I suppose that might be a valid argument if violent TV and games appeared suddenly 5 years ago. But they didn't. So let's expand our time base back 10 or 15 years, which better correlates with the increased trend of violence in the media, and we find that the 5 year period that you are selectively choosing to focus on represents a stabilization after a steep decline, and that overall murder rates are holding at the lowest level since the 1960's.
The murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, were not included in this table. Why? because it would screw up the stats. Awwwww.
So your argument is what? That the terrorist attacks of September 11 occurred due to Muslim extremists watching too much American TV?
Those are not the actual crime stats - they're a SURVEY of 75,000 people.
That is a huge survey, so the statistics should be quite accurate. This is of course the only reliable way to do it (that's why the Bureau of Justice uses this method), because it allows for determination of the rate of unreported as well as reported crimes. Since these are anonymous surveys of victims of crime, people have no incentive to minimize their experience of crime
Also, all rapes were excluded
Wrong again. From the same reference:
The violent crimes included are rape, robbery, aggravated and simple assault, and homicide
My figures stand, because they're not from a survey, where people report what they want - they're based on actual convictions and people being thrown in jail.
You haven't presented any figures at all for violent crime. People get thrown in jail for all kinds of reasons. In any case, incarceration rates have more to do with sentencing policy than with crime rates. All measures show violent crime rates declining. Homicide rates (which are not based on survey) show exactly the same trend (they are now at the lowest level in 40 years).
Correction: the rates shown are per 1,000 population. In any case, there has been a steady decrease in violent crime rates, coinciding rather well with the increased popularity of violent entertainments, and steepest precisely among the age groups who are the greatest consumers of such entertainments.
The page you show misquotes the source. (Use the source, Luke): What it says is that the RATE OF INCREASE of offenders, not that the rate is lower. The fucktard who wrote the game page can't read, or is lying on purpose
Wrong. Here's the source. As you can see it is not the rate of increase, but the actual rate per 100,000 population. So there may be a "fucktard" who can't read or who is lying on purpose, but it is not my source.
Remember, I'm talking specifically about the incidence of violent crime, not incarceration, which includes a lot of nonviolent offenses and also is sensitive to things like changes in sentencing standards.
Those kids don't magically disappear when they turn 18 - they internalize it - then they grow up and act on it. Rmember, the US, which is the source of most of the drek, has the highest proportion of murders of any country in the world, and the highest proportion of people in jail, and the highest proportion of people under various legal orders.
I don't know anyone who would get cable for things like the history or comedy channels, which are usually included even in the most basic channel packages as filler.
Your circle of acquaintances is clearly limited. I've known a number of people who never watched any cable-only channel other than the History Channel and Weather Channel.
I don't know anyone who would get cable for things like the history or comedy channels, which are usually included even in the most basic channel packages as filler. I don't think you understand why people actually get cable. 'Better reception' is not even statistically close to what people put down as their primary reason. The reason people get cable is for the programming on channels like HBO, FX, SKY, STAR and misc. movie and music channels.
I also know quite a few people who have only basic cable and watch local network channels almost exclusively.
Given a show run length of 45 minutes (even though in reality most have episodes of only 30 minutes) and a standard 24 episodes per season at the average cost of 30-40 USD per season box set, your looking at 1400 USD or more in series DVD's a year for a similar amount of programmin (and that's being reasonably generous to the DVD model).
Many dvd rental stores and services offer a monthly plan. For example, Netflix's premium (3 disks out at a time, unlimited number of disks per month) plan is $18/month. Cheaper plans are available for those who watch less, but even this premium plan is much cheaper than a cable subscription with premium channels. Blockbusters offers a similar deal, both for mail and walk-in customers. And of course you get all the extras on the DVDs, if you are into that.
Uh, programming that isn't available w/ over the air transmission?
If you are a history channel or comedy channel fanatic, cable is worth it. But a lot of people end up getting cable just to get decent reception of network programming. And once you have a DVR, the problem tends to be finding enough time to watch the stuff you like, not finding good stuff to watch, even if you are limited to the broadcast channels. And a lot of the good cable stuff shows up on DVD pretty quickly, anyway.
Sorry guys, this is nothing but another geek masturbatory fantasy. Cheap, good-enough DVRs from the cable company already beat down Tivo, and now, rather than buy a $200 Tivo, you expect me to pay $500 for a DVR mini? And you expect me to use this on my SDTV? Not everyone has HDTV yet.
If everybody was happy with "good enough" then Apple would have gone out of business years ago. As for HD, I'm seeing rows of cheap ($500-600) HD TVs at Walmart. In a lot of areas, all it takes is a cheap roof antenna or even rabbit ears to bring in perfect HD, so why pay for cable, anyway?
The cosmological constant emerges naturally from the derivation of relativity as an arbitrary constant of integration. Such constants cannot be derived theoretically--they have to be determined from the boundary conditions--i.e. by observation.
What Einstein's referred to as "his greatest mistake" was not adding the constant--it was already there, and in fact was unavoidable--but not assuming that it had a value of zero. There was at the time no actual basis for making such an arbitrary assumption, except that it simplified the equations and made them a bit more elegant. A cosmological constant of zero predicts an expanding universe, so if Einstein had assumed a value of zero, he could have predicted the expanding universe prior to Hubble's observations.
Instead, Einstein chose a value that fit the then-current view of a static universe. Strictly speaking, this is the scientifically rigorous way of determining the value of such a constant--by observation. Unfortunately, the observations were wrong. So Einstein's "mistake" was choosing to make his model fit the conventional scientific wisdom instead of his intuition.
The "Einstein's mistake wasn't a mistake" spin is misleading also, since the value of the cosmological constant now being selected is different from Einstein's value--Einstein chose a value to prevent the universe from expanding; the more recent evidence suggests that the value of the constant is such as to accelerate the expansion.
This just proves that the XBox360 is finally a real computer. Console game makers used to go crazy trying to find every bug, because once the game was manufactured, that was it--if it was buggy, nobody wanted to buy it, and you lost your money.
Computer games are different--release something that sort of works, get the money rolling in, then you can issue patches as needed. The XBox360 is designed to be online all of the time. So why bother to get it right the first time?
Then one day I decided it was pointless to spend all day talking to virtual people, btter to do something productive. Like play computer games.
This is a key distinction. People may be consumed by an activity, do it at every opportunity, to the point that people say that they are "addicted." But then, at some point, they've simply had enough. They may abandon it entirely, or it may recede to become only an occasional behavior. With normal behaviors, there seems to be some sort of brain mechanism that ultimately puts the brakes on. In behavioral terms, the activity no longer has the reward value that it used to.
But people don't seem to to get bored with cocaine, perhaps because it activates brain reward mechanisms directly, rather than through the normal circuitry. If people quit cocaine, they do so with great difficulty, not because they've had enough, but because the consequences for their health and life are so devastating.
Slashdot Mirror
Bungie IS NOT a big name. They got 1 game and that is it.
One game can make you a big name if that game is big enough. Ask Id.
Bungie has never been prolific, but they have been at the forefront of science-fiction based first-person-shooter titles from the very beginning, with the Marathon series on the Mac (which was comparable to Doom graphically, with a better plot). The two Halo games have been widely acclaimed as console FPS milestones. There is reportedly a Halo movie coming out.
I think that qualifies them as a big name.
As for the graphics being amazing. Oh please. I already play at higher resolutions on my now 2yr old PC. Richer friends won't accept anything less then 1600x1200 while sony's own games like eq2 can already make use of 512mb video cards despite the fact they were not even out. Other recent games to can make use of hardware features that even top of the range pc's don't have let alone these weak consoles.
This is really apples and oranges. Like a lot of people who work at a computer screen all day, I don't care to sit at a desk to play games when I go home; I want to lounge back with a controller. And since I'm not sitting 18 inches from my TV, ultra-high resolution is not a huge selling point for me. HD resolution is plenty.
If they were smart, wouldn't one of them - if they were in fact in cahoots - offer a slightler lower price than the other to induce the customer to perhaps purchase the VCR from one of the retailers?
That would encourage the customer to try to start a bidding war by going back to the first retailer, and saying, "So-and-so down the street offered me a lower price, can you beat it?" (this is New York, remember) This way, the customer is more likely to figure, "I guess that's just the best price I'm going to get," and buy it.
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over PS3?
The XBox360 is (sort of) available now. The PS3 currently is nothing more than a haze of promises.
Are there any reasons to get an Xbox 360 over the original Xbox aside from graphical performance?
No, and probably not for PS3 over PS2, either. Don't expect a quantum leap in game design, just prettier graphics and more "stuff" on the screen at once.
PS3 will have better graphical performance, up to 2x.
According to Sony, whose advance claims for every previous console have turned out to be widely exaggerated.
High definition.
Also on the XBox360. HD is OK, but I'm actually more interested in the fact that widescreen will now be standard.
Blu-ray.
Every new Sony console seems to have some new, fancy drive design. And they always break down a lot. Be sure to get the extended warranty.
Up to 7 wireless controllers - those actually mean something.
If you can actually get 7 people around your TV. Maybe good for people with big-screen media rooms.
PS3 will come out with games that are just as good, perhaps better.
Perhaps. But the XBox360 games are coming out now. The PS3 won't be competing with XBox360 launch games, but with XBox360 2nd generation games. And the PS3 looks to be more of a programming challenge, so even if the hardware has the potential to match or surpass the XBox360, it may take years for that to happen.
5: PS3 will have better graphics in high definition. Maybe during it's lifetime, High Definition prices will drop sharply, just like LCDs have.
This has already happened. Walmart has rows of HD TVs in the $500-600 range. Many of them even have built-in tuners. If you don't demand a huge screen, HD is only a bit more expensive than SD, with a much better picture.
Yeah you can get it now, but you're basically just getting a graphical upgrade to your existing Xbox.
This is a bit silly. The XBox360 has a completely different processor and architecture than the XBox I, as well as a different graphics system. The PS3 is closer to the PS2 than the XBox360 is to the XBox I--that's why Microsoft has been unable to provide full backward-compatibility.
If you desperately need to buy something now, I'd buy a GameCube. It's dirt cheap, less than $100, and you can always pass it off to your kids, or younger siblings, cousins after you're done with it and decide what you want to buy next year when all 3 next-gen consoles are out.
Just-launched systems are for enthusiasts. The launch games typically barely scratch the surface of what the system is capable of. If you don't already have a game system, I'd recommend a PS2. Lots of games, fairly cheap used (but be sure to get an extended warranty). And promised backwards compatibility of PS3 means developers aren't going to be in a big hurry to switch to PS3 development. GameCube is more for people who appreciate Nintendo's unique game design strengths (I'm actually looking forward to Nintendo Revolution more than PS3).
Probably not very. Games have different design constraints from general purpose computers. Part of Apple's reason for jumping ship to Intel seems to have been IBM's recent focus on these game-oriented CPUs.
Mod me down if you must, but the inference that two 'foreigners' at different stores were in cahoots against the shopper - only evidenced by one's use of a walkie-talkie and a language the shopper didn't understand - smacks of racism. I could be wrong, but that's certainly what it seems like based on what was posted.
Paranoid, possibly, but not necessarily racist. The question is whether he would have jumped to the same conclusion that he was not dealing with two independent retailers if the clerk at the first store was the same race as himself, and the clerk at the second store was as well, but bore what might have been a family resemblance to the first clerk, and spoke quietly into the walkie-talkie so that he couldn't hear. I suspect that he would have reacted exactly the same way. Not everything has to be about race.
I think because it eats into sales of songbooks (music & lyrics). Go into any Guitar Center and you'll see racks and racks of songbooks.
I don't think that it is anything so well thought-out. I think that it is a kneejerk response: "The info is ours, somebody else is using it, and we aren't getting paid."
It is irrelevant that lyrics sell records (like many people, I often hear a snatch of song, find it on a lyrics site, and buy the album). It is irrelevant that they don't actually at the moment have any way to make money on lyrics--they can always think maybe they will in the future. Perhaps someday they'll want to have an authorized lyrics website and use it to advertise the albums (in which case search utilities that show the lyrics without showing the ads will be a problem). They may not actually be planning to do any such thing, but even the vague possibility is enough of an excuse to generate a letter from their legal department.
Things have changed. The phosphor half-life of the current generation is 60,000 hours. I think that's 20 years of 8 hours a day operation.
I'll believe this when I see plasma displays that have been in use for ten years or so and still work fine. But I have the suspicion that nobody will even be selling plasma by then.
Couldn't the same argument be made for anything? Movies? Porn? If you get specific about what constitutes imminent violence even guns qualify. In essence, you cannot stop someone from selling anything to anyone because you cannot prove it creates or produces an immanent threat to anyone.
People do get angry, go get a gun, and shoot somebody. It happens rather frequently. So the "imminent harm" argument can be made. Another argument made in this case is the ability of parents to supervise videogame playing is generally adequate, so there is not a compelling need for government intervention. A similar argument would have to be made for use of porn and guns. Of course, the evidence of harm, or the type of harm, are different, so each type of item would have to be considered separately. I don't doubt that porn sellers have tried to make the same kind case, and failed, so the restrictions against porn are supported by settled case law, and it would be hard to get the issue re-opened.
You need a NAME to survey the person. Even if the data are later compiled and all identifiers removed, someone has to do the interviews. Besides, if you read the survey, this is not a survey of crime victims. It is a survey of people, asing aobut their experience over a certain period of time. Most are NOT crime victims.
Of course not! Think about it for a moment. If you want to do a survey on crime incidence, the only valid way is to pick people at random and ask them if they have experienced a crime. A survey that selected out crime victims for questioning would be completely useless for estimating crime incidence.
The reason they do it this way - because they have no legal way of doing it otherwise.
On the contrary, the same methodology is used to estimate frequency of crimes such as burglary where the privacy concerns of rape do not arise. It is done this way because it is the only valid method for tracking changes in crime incidence.
The survey would be cast as "junk science" in any other field.
I've noticed that the term "junk science" is almost never used by people who are actually qualified to evaluate the science in question. So far, you have failed utterly to raise even a single valid objection to the study. As a biomedical scientist with considerable experience in the evaluation of statistical methods, the study looks perfectly valid to me. The approach used is an epidemiological strategy that has been used successfully in investigating questions of disease incidence and drug safety.
Its not a question of clutching at straws. Its a fact that most employees don't have access to that data.
And they don't need it, because these numbers are based upon anonymous statistical surveys, not upon access to confidential data on crimes reported to the police (which wouldn't be much use, anyway, since many crimes in this category are never reported). There are no legal restrictions on the ability of employees to conduct such surveys.
A "survey" is only as good as its methodology, and a big part of that is choosing the sample. We know the sample is flawed - ergo, so is the survey. Idem that a survey can't replace actual stats. This is "feel-good" stuff from the DoJ.
We don't know the sample is flawed. You haven't identified any flaws in the sample. It's a large sample, so it should be statistically robust. For crimes that often aren't reported such as simple assault or rape, a survey is far superior to police records. Clearly, in the population that is being sampled, the frequency of violent crime has been decreasing for over a decade. If you want to argue that the sampling has missed some subpopulation in which crime is increasing--which would have to be a pretty large fraction of the total population to make a significant impact on the national statistics--then you are left with the problem of explaining why it is that the murder statistics, which are not subject to the same sampling bias, show the same downward trend.
For most people, you're right. But that's because they've become dependent - addicted - to TV, many to the point where it interferes with their daily lives, and their relationships with the people around them. We don't bother about it because we're so used to it.
Being able to watch the shows you prefer when you choose to do so rather than when they are broadcast reduces rather than increases the interference of TV with other aspects of daily life. TV becomes more like reading a book or listening to music--you do it when you have the leisure time for it and it doesn't interfere with other activities that are important to you. Some people enjoy watching TV with their families, and find that shared enjoyment of an entertainment enhances rather than harming their relationships. That is, after all, why people often go together to movies, concerts, and plays.
People tend to be a bit too ready to use the pejorative word "addicted" when somebody else happens to like something that they don't appreciate. I have tastes and interests; you have addictions. I think that equating enthusiasm for hobbies and entertainments with drug addiction minimizes and obscures the very real problems of addictive substances.
Dude, these are surveys. They're NOT conducted by official police agents gathering facts. they're conducted by civilians, who have no need or right to access rape victims names. Those files are usually sealed by the courts. Same with paedophiles - the names of the victims are expurgiated from all public docs.
You are really clutching at straws at this point. Do you even bother to look at the references? The surveys are carried out by the US Dept of Justice. I guess that you should say that they are civilians, in the same sense that the Attorney General is a civilian, but I don't see why you imagine that is relevant to anything. Surveys of victims are the most accurate method of determining crime frequency because not all crimes are reported. modern sampling methods are highly robust and have been validated by years of research. You have provided no basis for suggesting that these results are biased. And since we are talking about trends rather than absolute levels, you cannot explain this result even if people tend to be reluctant to report being victims of certain types of crimes-- you would need to find some reason why people would be becoming, year by year, more reluctant to report their personal experience of crime on an anonymous survey. Note that the trend applies to every form of violent crime, including burglary, not merely those that some people might reasonably be particularly reluctant to report, such as rape. Note also that the same trend applies to murder, which is not based on survey results.
My initial point which we've gone well away from, was that I didn't see any real need for anyone to buy a PVR because there is so much drek out there.
This also makes no sense at all. The purpose of a PVR is to be able to have a selection of the shows that you enjoy available at the time when you want to watch TV. If there is a lot of "drek" out there, such that it is hard to find the type of show that you enjoy--nonviolent documentaries on science or history, perhaps--then you have a greater reason to want a PVR, which will select those rare shows for you, even if they air while you are at work or asleep, and make them available for you to watch at your leisure.
Do you really believe that people were all that upset about Watergate on its own? It was because it was just more of the same. People were fed up. They wanted Nixon gone, and they were going to seize on anything to do it.
Nixon resigned because he was about to be impeached. And all of the articles of impeachment concerned the Watergate coverup, not the conduct of the war. Twice, Americans were offered a clear choice at the polls between a candidate who favored continuing the war and one who favored prompt withdrawal: Nixon vs. Humphrey and Nixon vs. McGovern. In both cases, they chose Nixon.
Actually, the decline in murder rates corresponds to increased economic performance under Clinton.
You can't really prove anything by correlation. Quite a few things changed over that tiime period. Levitt and Dubner, in "Freakonomics" make a pretty persuasive case that the decline in crime is due to easier access to abortion.
What we can say, however, is that if violent TV, movies, and videogames do not actually reduce real-world violence, then any pro-violence effect of these influences must be small relative to other social, economic, and demographic factors
Mixing violent TV shows with a culture of guns is dangerous. The stats show it - 3x the murder rate.
So are you claiming that the US did not have a higher murder rate than Canada prior to violent US TV shows? It's a bit risky to compare statistics collected with different methodology, but this chart doesn't seem to support the notion that a greater crime rate in the US than Canada is a particularly modern phenomenon. Looking at these data, one would tend to ascribe the difference in crime rates to long-standing cultural differences rather than to modern entertainments.
If you looked further down on the page you linked to, they say the following about the rape stats: ...
Sources: Rape (excluding sexual assault), robbery,
They have no way of including those stats in a survey because its illegal to divulge the victim's name, even for the purpose of collecting stats.
Are you seriously trying to argue that it is legal to collect statistics on rape, but not on sexual assaults that do not culminate in rape? That is about the most foolish thing that I have ever heard. Note that none of these statistics divulge anybody's name, so that is quite irrelevant. I challenge you to produce the law that makes it illegal to collect such statistics.
Most likely, they are not including non-rape sexual assaults under rape because they are already counting them as assaults, and it would bias the statistics to count them right.
Another thing left out (in addition to the 9/11 killings) was the continuing death and injury rate to US GI forces.
And how, specifically, do you conceive this as being a consequence of TV violence? If people didn't watch TV, they wouldn't join the army?
Do people feel safer today? No. Are there more incidents of stupidity like road rage? Definitely - the term didn't even exist 20 years ago.
Again, this is pretty foolish. The fact that the buzzword "road rage" hadn't been coined doesn't mean that people didn't get angry over being cut off on the highway 20 years ago. As somebody who actually was around, and driving, 20 years ago, I can assure you that they did.
20 years ago, the government would have fallen on news of officially sanctioned torture, or knowingly misleading the public in a bullshit war.
Have they quit teaching history in the schools? We fought a bullshit war in Viet Nam, with its own atrocities, 20 years ago, and fought it for considerably longer than we have been fighting this one. People today are upset about white phosphorous? Back then, we had that and napalm, too. The government didn't fall. The antiwar candidate, George McGovern was defeated in one of the greatest political landslides in recent memory.
Now, because of the administration's continuing advertising campaign against its own people, they've got everyone too scared to say anything, for fear of being seen as disloyal.
Oh, and that never happened before? I won't even try to educate you, but you might find it informative to see the movie "Good night and good luck."
Facts: there has been no change in the murder rate in the last 5 years - it hasn't gone down.
I suppose that might be a valid argument if violent TV and games appeared suddenly 5 years ago. But they didn't. So let's expand our time base back 10 or 15 years, which better correlates with the increased trend of violence in the media, and we find that the 5 year period that you are selectively choosing to focus on represents a stabilization after a steep decline, and that overall murder rates are holding at the lowest level since the 1960's.
The murder and nonnegligent homicides that occurred as a result of the events of September 11, 2001, were not included in this table. Why? because it would screw up the stats. Awwwww.
So your argument is what? That the terrorist attacks of September 11 occurred due to Muslim extremists watching too much American TV?
That is a huge survey, so the statistics should be quite accurate. This is of course the only reliable way to do it (that's why the Bureau of Justice uses this method), because it allows for determination of the rate of unreported as well as reported crimes. Since these are anonymous surveys of victims of crime, people have no incentive to minimize their experience of crime
Also, all rapes were excluded
Wrong again. From the same reference:
Here's a chart showing the steep decline in rape incidence
My figures stand, because they're not from a survey, where people report what they want - they're based on actual convictions and people being thrown in jail.
You haven't presented any figures at all for violent crime. People get thrown in jail for all kinds of reasons. In any case, incarceration rates have more to do with sentencing policy than with crime rates. All measures show violent crime rates declining. Homicide rates (which are not based on survey) show exactly the same trend (they are now at the lowest level in 40 years).
Correction: the rates shown are per 1,000 population. In any case, there has been a steady decrease in violent crime rates, coinciding rather well with the increased popularity of violent entertainments, and steepest precisely among the age groups who are the greatest consumers of such entertainments.
The page you show misquotes the source. (Use the source, Luke): What it says is that the RATE OF INCREASE of offenders, not that the rate is lower. The fucktard who wrote the game page can't read, or is lying on purpose
Wrong. Here's the source. As you can see it is not the rate of increase, but the actual rate per 100,000 population. So there may be a "fucktard" who can't read or who is lying on purpose, but it is not my source.
Remember, I'm talking specifically about the incidence of violent crime, not incarceration, which includes a lot of nonviolent offenses and also is sensitive to things like changes in sentencing standards.
Those kids don't magically disappear when they turn 18 - they internalize it - then they grow up and act on it. Rmember, the US, which is the source of most of the drek, has the highest proportion of murders of any country in the world, and the highest proportion of people in jail, and the highest proportion of people under various legal orders.
However, the murder rate, and violence in general, have dropped steadily as violent movies and other entertainments (e.g. videogames) have become more popular. It has dropped in all age groups, but fastest for the younger demographic who are the biggest consumers of such entertainments. So perhaps we need more violence on TV, not less.
I don't know anyone who would get cable for things like the history or comedy channels, which are usually included even in the most basic channel packages as filler.
Your circle of acquaintances is clearly limited. I've known a number of people who never watched any cable-only channel other than the History Channel and Weather Channel.
I don't know anyone who would get cable for things like the history or comedy channels, which are usually included even in the most basic channel packages as filler. I don't think you understand why people actually get cable. 'Better reception' is not even statistically close to what people put down as their primary reason. The reason people get cable is for the programming on channels like HBO, FX, SKY, STAR and misc. movie and music channels.
I also know quite a few people who have only basic cable and watch local network channels almost exclusively.
Given a show run length of 45 minutes (even though in reality most have episodes of only 30 minutes) and a standard 24 episodes per season at the average cost of 30-40 USD per season box set, your looking at 1400 USD or more in series DVD's a year for a similar amount of programmin (and that's being reasonably generous to the DVD model).
Many dvd rental stores and services offer a monthly plan. For example, Netflix's premium (3 disks out at a time, unlimited number of disks per month) plan is $18/month. Cheaper plans are available for those who watch less, but even this premium plan is much cheaper than a cable subscription with premium channels. Blockbusters offers a similar deal, both for mail and walk-in customers. And of course you get all the extras on the DVDs, if you are into that.
The AMA says that the average teenager will have seen 18,000 murders and 200,000 violent acts on TV by the time they turn 18
So do you think that is why youth violence has dropped steadily year after year as violent programming on TV has increased?
Uh, programming that isn't available w/ over the air transmission?
If you are a history channel or comedy channel fanatic, cable is worth it. But a lot of people end up getting cable just to get decent reception of network programming. And once you have a DVR, the problem tends to be finding enough time to watch the stuff you like, not finding good stuff to watch, even if you are limited to the broadcast channels. And a lot of the good cable stuff shows up on DVD pretty quickly, anyway.
Sorry guys, this is nothing but another geek masturbatory fantasy. Cheap, good-enough DVRs from the cable company already beat down Tivo, and now, rather than buy a $200 Tivo, you expect me to pay $500 for a DVR mini? And you expect me to use this on my SDTV? Not everyone has HDTV yet.
If everybody was happy with "good enough" then Apple would have gone out of business years ago. As for HD, I'm seeing rows of cheap ($500-600) HD TVs at Walmart. In a lot of areas, all it takes is a cheap roof antenna or even rabbit ears to bring in perfect HD, so why pay for cable, anyway?
The cosmological constant emerges naturally from the derivation of relativity as an arbitrary constant of integration. Such constants cannot be derived theoretically--they have to be determined from the boundary conditions--i.e. by observation.
What Einstein's referred to as "his greatest mistake" was not adding the constant--it was already there, and in fact was unavoidable--but not assuming that it had a value of zero. There was at the time no actual basis for making such an arbitrary assumption, except that it simplified the equations and made them a bit more elegant. A cosmological constant of zero predicts an expanding universe, so if Einstein had assumed a value of zero, he could have predicted the expanding universe prior to Hubble's observations.
Instead, Einstein chose a value that fit the then-current view of a static universe. Strictly speaking, this is the scientifically rigorous way of determining the value of such a constant--by observation. Unfortunately, the observations were wrong. So Einstein's "mistake" was choosing to make his model fit the conventional scientific wisdom instead of his intuition.
The "Einstein's mistake wasn't a mistake" spin is misleading also, since the value of the cosmological constant now being selected is different from Einstein's value--Einstein chose a value to prevent the universe from expanding; the more recent evidence suggests that the value of the constant is such as to accelerate the expansion.
This just proves that the XBox360 is finally a real computer. Console game makers used to go crazy trying to find every bug, because once the game was manufactured, that was it--if it was buggy, nobody wanted to buy it, and you lost your money.
Computer games are different--release something that sort of works, get the money rolling in, then you can issue patches as needed. The XBox360 is designed to be online all of the time. So why bother to get it right the first time?
Then one day I decided it was pointless to spend all day talking to virtual people, btter to do something productive. Like play computer games.
This is a key distinction. People may be consumed by an activity, do it at every opportunity, to the point that people say that they are "addicted." But then, at some point, they've simply had enough. They may abandon it entirely, or it may recede to become only an occasional behavior. With normal behaviors, there seems to be some sort of brain mechanism that ultimately puts the brakes on. In behavioral terms, the activity no longer has the reward value that it used to.
But people don't seem to to get bored with cocaine, perhaps because it activates brain reward mechanisms directly, rather than through the normal circuitry. If people quit cocaine, they do so with great difficulty, not because they've had enough, but because the consequences for their health and life are so devastating.