It would be nice if it really worked that way. But the academic reality is that grad students generally adopt the ideas and positions of their mentors. And there is also a certain scientific social "groupthink" that can get you drum-headed out of your profession and support systems if you challenge certain ideas and the powerful people behind them.
I doubt a climate scientist would even be able to finish a degree these days if he didn't carry the banner of global warming. Have you ever seen someone tell everyone on his dissertation committee "Sorry, you're all wrong"? Challenging certain ideas has become acceptable because there are schools of thought to support (or at least indulge) you. But even when you do that, you had damn sure better make sure that you get the right mentor and committee (if you're going to challenge Einstein, you need to have a mentor who is himself skeptical of Einstein and a committee that is at least open to the idea). The problem with climate science right now is that there are no mentors or place of refuge for someone wanting to challenge the idea of global warming. The entire profession has pretty much adopted this idea as an axiom.
And post-doc? Well, by them time most scientists get their Ph.D.'s they're already published and, therefore, committed to certain ideas (which had to be orthodox in order for them to get through the process of getting the Ph.D.). This makes it very difficult for them to go back and refute themselves even when they do get a small amount of post-doc freedom. Academics are loathe to admit they were wrong--it's an academic taboo. So, by the time you're post-doc you're locked into the orthodoxy. It's very difficult to break out of that cage without losing most of your colleagues and support systems in the process.
I buy a lot of console games used at a considerable discount (if you're willing to wait for the latest and greatest to age a little you can get a huge discount this way). The thing that REALLY worries me is the move towards online distribution, which would destroy the secondary (used) market. I'm just fine with new games costing $60, as long as I can buy it used a year later for $20-$30. I would much rather have it that way than a download system where a new game costs $50, and a year later it still costs $50 because you can't buy it used.
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law. You just pass laws that are impossible or unreasonable to follow and then when you want to come down on someone, you just hit them with a bunch of bullshit charges. So if federal law enforcement kicks down your door on some bogus child porn charge and doesn't find any child porn, they can save face, rather than just admit their mistake, by busting you on all the *other* stuff they found (your marijuana stash, your bootleg mp3's, and now the fact that you weren't keeping 2 years of archived data, and so on).
If you attempt to share a copyrighted file, a group of armed men kick down your door, take you away, and leave a note behind in your handwriting saying "I'm on vacation. Don't look for me." Pretty heavy-handed, but at least the software is free.
I'm pretty sure most other countries now have laws against malicious hacking, and also jails. Or are YOU implying that the U.S. is the only country technologically advanced enough to bust people for such activities?
Yes, as I acknowledged, PC games did a lot of this stuff first. But doing this stuff on a console; and in such a simple, elegant package; was nonetheless a major achievement (no one had ever done it before in that form, after all). PC games will always be cutting edge. But they don't enjoy anywhere near the popular impact of console games (with the exception of World of Warcraft maybe, itself not a particularly ground-breaking original achievement).
Much as I love Pirate Bay, I have to point out the obvious flaw in this analogy. Car rental companies don't encourage their renters to rob banks, don't know their renters are just there to rent getaway cars for bank robberies, and don't have 99.99% of their renters using their cars exclusively for that purpose.
I once worked with an environmental professor who could put the harshest fire-and-brimstone preacher to shame in her millennialist proclamations of doom (her grad students could too). All she was after was grant money, and she wasn't above going to the press and using the Chicken Little routine in order to drum up support for her latest grant proposal. I frequently had to write press releases for her that I was ashamed of (if you even hinted to her that she should tone it down and stick to reasonable statements she would literally freak out like a madwoman). From that moment I met her, I adopted a very skeptical view of the whole global warming "crisis" and its proponents.
Science is nowhere near as "hard" as people think. Too many scientists are way more interested in grant money and in their personal reputations than in the validity of their conclusions.
The harsh fact is that very few game developers have the time or resources to design to the kind of level of realism you're asking for. Something blowing up requires an animation. And you can't do an animation for every conceivable object in a game, or expect a console (or even a top-of-the-line PC) to be able to handle the physics for thousands of objects and parts of objects onscreen at once. To do a game like that in any reasonable amount of time at any reasonable cost, you would have to cut down the number of objects and locations drastically, which would make the game still seem unrealistic, just for completely different reasons.
Ever stop to think that maybe the games aren't getting worse, you're just getting older? Seriously, the same phenomenon happens in music. Everyone thinks the music has gotten worse since they were young (no matter what age they are). My grandfather went to his grave claiming the genius of 40's swing was ruined by rock and roll.
The Beastie Boys ripping a Zepplin off?!?! WTF? I think you managed to simultaneously insult them both with that bizarre statement. Very few bands ripped off Zepplin even back in the day (and Zepplin themselves shamelessly ripped a number of their predecessors, so it would be hard to even tell). The only band I would call a "Led Zepplin ripoff" would be Kingdom Come.
It should make for a great exhibit on Pleistocene-era narcissists. "Kids, meet the mighty Mammoth Media Whore, which lived over 20,000 years ago--but claimed to be much younger."
In Halo's defense it WAS groundbreaking in some respects. Halo 1 looked and played better than any other FPS that had been released on a console at that time. Halo 2 had one of the best online multiplayer systems ever done on a console. And Halo 3 introduced the "Theater" feature, a feature which was never been seen before (or since) on a console (I still have a bunch of great kills and funny happenings in both single and multiplayer that I treasure, preserved forever and shareable thanks to Theater). So, while not entirely original by a long-shot (PC's did most of this stuff first, it's true), it certainly did break a lot of ground for console gaming.
First of all, I was able to get a good one for under $200 now.
Secondly, my new blu-ray player can be actually used with a universal remote (with a nice back-light, unlike the crappy PS3 blutooth remote) without some jerry-rigged patch that doesn't even work with a number of features. That adapter was never meant to be used with a PS3 and only half-ass works.
Thirdly, I no longer have to put up with mandatory system updates when I just want to play a blu-ray. The only way to get around this with the PS3 was to unplug it from the network. If you're connected to the network, even the slightest change in the blu-ray spec REQUIRES you to download and install an entire system update on the PS3 (which can take 20 minutes or more), with no option to skip the update and JUST WATCH MY GODDAMNED BLU-RAY! If you try to skip it one of these updates, it will just take you back to the PS3 menu and refuse to play the blu-ray. Even more annoyingly, doing one of these updates requires me to dig out and charge my PS3 controller because, unlike with the 360, the PS3 will not recognize the remote control during its updates. My new blu-ray player, by contrast, connects to the network and downloads quick firmware updates, but only when I ask it to, not when I JUST WANT TO WATCH MY GODDAMNED MOVIE!
Finally, my new blu-ray player has a nice slim conventional profile and I can sit my other DVD player on top of it. It's not a thick, bulky mess with a rounded top that eats up an entire shelf in my entertainment center and gets hot as Hell when it's on.
If I sound angry it's because I've spent the last 2 1/2 years dealing with the PS3's stubborn way of making something that should have been very simple into something incredibly frustrating and annoying.
Let me preface my comment with this: I've owned both a 360 and PS3 and I've never really liked my PS3. I'm getting ready to sell it, in fact. I bought it for Home, blu-ray playback, and exclusives. But Home was delayed for a long time and sucked when it finally did come out, there are much cheaper blu-ray players now that don't require constant updates and actually work with my universal remote, and the few exclusives the PS3 have gotten (with the slight exceptions of Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4) have been mediocre at best. I'm actually getting ready to sell my launch PS3, as it just gathers dust now that I have a regular blu-ray player. My 360 on the other hand, is invaluable to me. Great exclusives, better quality and downloadable content on even multi-platform games, lets me stream movies from my Netflix account, it let me get in on the brief HD-DVD phase on the cheap (I still treasure my Battlestar Galactica Season 1 boxset, which has never been made available in HD on any other format), better controller for my big hands, etc.
But having said all that, there are still 360 exclusives (even popular ones) that I criticize. There are a lot of mediocre or boring shooter's on the 360 that just don't do it for me. I would give Gears of War 1 & 2 both "meh" scores, the same as some people are giving KZ2. And I just couldn't get into Dead Rising, with it's timed missions. So even a 360 fanboy like me doesn't just slobber over every game just because it's a 360 exclusive.
There is *no* reason for an abuse victim to be contacting their abuser from their real phone other than sheer stupidity--none, zero, zilch. Any custody or kids issues should be done through third-parties, period. And even in the rare emergency where they just HAD to personally get in touch with Prince Charming, they could use a pre-paid cell phone, pay phone, some random business's phone, a third party's phone, etc. If Julie Dumbass just can't bear to let Jimmy Wife-Beater go, then there is nothing you can do to stop her. And why should the rest of us have to suffer just because she's that stupid?
The service doesn't reveal your number if they're calling YOU, only if you're calling THEM. According to the article, the reason that domestic abuse people are concerned is because there are situations where an abused spouse might need to call her abuser (such as calls about their kids) but doesn't want to abuser knowing the number where they're calling from.
Personally, I think this is a pretty flimsy excuse. Abuse victims shouldn't be in contact with their abusers, period. If they need to deal with custody issues, they should be doing it through a third party or from a disposable cell phone or pay phone. And if an abuse victim is stupid enough to be contacting their abuser using their new home phone, then there is nothing you can do to protect them anyway (you can't stop someone from being a dumbass).
Like I said, they could have still continued to authorize coupons without pushing back the timeline for the actual transition. If they want to keep pushing it back until every conceivable person that needs or wants a coupon actually has one in hand, we're still going to be sitting here several years from now waiting for our improved wireless service.
If grandma hasn't upgraded the old Philco black & white by now, she probably never will (until forced). As for the coupons, there was no reason they couldn't have extended the coupon program but still kept the original timeline.
As I thought I made clear in my post, they won't have any way of knowing his actual first name until they've actually hired him. And, at that point, they would probably be past the "let's take a quick google of him" phase (and, even if they did still google him, they'd probably take the time to verify that he's not the pedophile if they were already that far into the hiring process). Lot's of people use their middle names, so no one would have any reason to find this at all suspicious.
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It would be nice if it really worked that way. But the academic reality is that grad students generally adopt the ideas and positions of their mentors. And there is also a certain scientific social "groupthink" that can get you drum-headed out of your profession and support systems if you challenge certain ideas and the powerful people behind them.
I doubt a climate scientist would even be able to finish a degree these days if he didn't carry the banner of global warming. Have you ever seen someone tell everyone on his dissertation committee "Sorry, you're all wrong"? Challenging certain ideas has become acceptable because there are schools of thought to support (or at least indulge) you. But even when you do that, you had damn sure better make sure that you get the right mentor and committee (if you're going to challenge Einstein, you need to have a mentor who is himself skeptical of Einstein and a committee that is at least open to the idea). The problem with climate science right now is that there are no mentors or place of refuge for someone wanting to challenge the idea of global warming. The entire profession has pretty much adopted this idea as an axiom.
And post-doc? Well, by them time most scientists get their Ph.D.'s they're already published and, therefore, committed to certain ideas (which had to be orthodox in order for them to get through the process of getting the Ph.D.). This makes it very difficult for them to go back and refute themselves even when they do get a small amount of post-doc freedom. Academics are loathe to admit they were wrong--it's an academic taboo. So, by the time you're post-doc you're locked into the orthodoxy. It's very difficult to break out of that cage without losing most of your colleagues and support systems in the process.
I buy a lot of console games used at a considerable discount (if you're willing to wait for the latest and greatest to age a little you can get a huge discount this way). The thing that REALLY worries me is the move towards online distribution, which would destroy the secondary (used) market. I'm just fine with new games costing $60, as long as I can buy it used a year later for $20-$30. I would much rather have it that way than a download system where a new game costs $50, and a year later it still costs $50 because you can't buy it used.
The first rule of a police state is that EVERYONE is breaking the law. You just pass laws that are impossible or unreasonable to follow and then when you want to come down on someone, you just hit them with a bunch of bullshit charges. So if federal law enforcement kicks down your door on some bogus child porn charge and doesn't find any child porn, they can save face, rather than just admit their mistake, by busting you on all the *other* stuff they found (your marijuana stash, your bootleg mp3's, and now the fact that you weren't keeping 2 years of archived data, and so on).
If you attempt to share a copyrighted file, a group of armed men kick down your door, take you away, and leave a note behind in your handwriting saying "I'm on vacation. Don't look for me." Pretty heavy-handed, but at least the software is free.
I'm pretty sure most other countries now have laws against malicious hacking, and also jails. Or are YOU implying that the U.S. is the only country technologically advanced enough to bust people for such activities?
In your neighborhood, it's called a prepaid cellphone.
Yes, as I acknowledged, PC games did a lot of this stuff first. But doing this stuff on a console; and in such a simple, elegant package; was nonetheless a major achievement (no one had ever done it before in that form, after all). PC games will always be cutting edge. But they don't enjoy anywhere near the popular impact of console games (with the exception of World of Warcraft maybe, itself not a particularly ground-breaking original achievement).
Much as I love Pirate Bay, I have to point out the obvious flaw in this analogy. Car rental companies don't encourage their renters to rob banks, don't know their renters are just there to rent getaway cars for bank robberies, and don't have 99.99% of their renters using their cars exclusively for that purpose.
I once worked with an environmental professor who could put the harshest fire-and-brimstone preacher to shame in her millennialist proclamations of doom (her grad students could too). All she was after was grant money, and she wasn't above going to the press and using the Chicken Little routine in order to drum up support for her latest grant proposal. I frequently had to write press releases for her that I was ashamed of (if you even hinted to her that she should tone it down and stick to reasonable statements she would literally freak out like a madwoman). From that moment I met her, I adopted a very skeptical view of the whole global warming "crisis" and its proponents.
Science is nowhere near as "hard" as people think. Too many scientists are way more interested in grant money and in their personal reputations than in the validity of their conclusions.
And if yours had been really smart, she might have been able to figure out which one of her strip club regulars she should've asked for child support.
The harsh fact is that very few game developers have the time or resources to design to the kind of level of realism you're asking for. Something blowing up requires an animation. And you can't do an animation for every conceivable object in a game, or expect a console (or even a top-of-the-line PC) to be able to handle the physics for thousands of objects and parts of objects onscreen at once. To do a game like that in any reasonable amount of time at any reasonable cost, you would have to cut down the number of objects and locations drastically, which would make the game still seem unrealistic, just for completely different reasons.
Ever stop to think that maybe the games aren't getting worse, you're just getting older? Seriously, the same phenomenon happens in music. Everyone thinks the music has gotten worse since they were young (no matter what age they are). My grandfather went to his grave claiming the genius of 40's swing was ruined by rock and roll.
The Beastie Boys ripping a Zepplin off?!?! WTF? I think you managed to simultaneously insult them both with that bizarre statement. Very few bands ripped off Zepplin even back in the day (and Zepplin themselves shamelessly ripped a number of their predecessors, so it would be hard to even tell). The only band I would call a "Led Zepplin ripoff" would be Kingdom Come.
It should make for a great exhibit on Pleistocene-era narcissists. "Kids, meet the mighty Mammoth Media Whore, which lived over 20,000 years ago--but claimed to be much younger."
In Halo's defense it WAS groundbreaking in some respects. Halo 1 looked and played better than any other FPS that had been released on a console at that time. Halo 2 had one of the best online multiplayer systems ever done on a console. And Halo 3 introduced the "Theater" feature, a feature which was never been seen before (or since) on a console (I still have a bunch of great kills and funny happenings in both single and multiplayer that I treasure, preserved forever and shareable thanks to Theater). So, while not entirely original by a long-shot (PC's did most of this stuff first, it's true), it certainly did break a lot of ground for console gaming.
Okay, "or Princess Evil-She-Bitch." Happy?
Actually, I grew up with a mother who was abused, you prick. And she was smart enough to call from a fucking pay phone.
For several reasons. Here are just a few.
If I sound angry it's because I've spent the last 2 1/2 years dealing with the PS3's stubborn way of making something that should have been very simple into something incredibly frustrating and annoying.
All part of Apple's plan to ensure that no one can ever use a Mac for gaming.
Let me preface my comment with this: I've owned both a 360 and PS3 and I've never really liked my PS3. I'm getting ready to sell it, in fact. I bought it for Home, blu-ray playback, and exclusives. But Home was delayed for a long time and sucked when it finally did come out, there are much cheaper blu-ray players now that don't require constant updates and actually work with my universal remote, and the few exclusives the PS3 have gotten (with the slight exceptions of Little Big Planet and Metal Gear Solid 4) have been mediocre at best. I'm actually getting ready to sell my launch PS3, as it just gathers dust now that I have a regular blu-ray player. My 360 on the other hand, is invaluable to me. Great exclusives, better quality and downloadable content on even multi-platform games, lets me stream movies from my Netflix account, it let me get in on the brief HD-DVD phase on the cheap (I still treasure my Battlestar Galactica Season 1 boxset, which has never been made available in HD on any other format), better controller for my big hands, etc.
But having said all that, there are still 360 exclusives (even popular ones) that I criticize. There are a lot of mediocre or boring shooter's on the 360 that just don't do it for me. I would give Gears of War 1 & 2 both "meh" scores, the same as some people are giving KZ2. And I just couldn't get into Dead Rising, with it's timed missions. So even a 360 fanboy like me doesn't just slobber over every game just because it's a 360 exclusive.
There is *no* reason for an abuse victim to be contacting their abuser from their real phone other than sheer stupidity--none, zero, zilch. Any custody or kids issues should be done through third-parties, period. And even in the rare emergency where they just HAD to personally get in touch with Prince Charming, they could use a pre-paid cell phone, pay phone, some random business's phone, a third party's phone, etc. If Julie Dumbass just can't bear to let Jimmy Wife-Beater go, then there is nothing you can do to stop her. And why should the rest of us have to suffer just because she's that stupid?
The service doesn't reveal your number if they're calling YOU, only if you're calling THEM. According to the article, the reason that domestic abuse people are concerned is because there are situations where an abused spouse might need to call her abuser (such as calls about their kids) but doesn't want to abuser knowing the number where they're calling from.
Personally, I think this is a pretty flimsy excuse. Abuse victims shouldn't be in contact with their abusers, period. If they need to deal with custody issues, they should be doing it through a third party or from a disposable cell phone or pay phone. And if an abuse victim is stupid enough to be contacting their abuser using their new home phone, then there is nothing you can do to protect them anyway (you can't stop someone from being a dumbass).
Like I said, they could have still continued to authorize coupons without pushing back the timeline for the actual transition. If they want to keep pushing it back until every conceivable person that needs or wants a coupon actually has one in hand, we're still going to be sitting here several years from now waiting for our improved wireless service.
If grandma hasn't upgraded the old Philco black & white by now, she probably never will (until forced). As for the coupons, there was no reason they couldn't have extended the coupon program but still kept the original timeline.
As I thought I made clear in my post, they won't have any way of knowing his actual first name until they've actually hired him. And, at that point, they would probably be past the "let's take a quick google of him" phase (and, even if they did still google him, they'd probably take the time to verify that he's not the pedophile if they were already that far into the hiring process). Lot's of people use their middle names, so no one would have any reason to find this at all suspicious.