Books and movies that portray less violent or sexually explicit material than is found in many modern games are already age limited.
This is a tool for the parents. The government isn't forbidding children access to this stuff (like they do with alcohol), they are giving parents a tool to help them limit their child's access. No minor is being denied anything that their parents don't consent to.
And for people who can afford to hire a sitter for their kids, or who can afford to stay at home with them, then your fantasy world works great.
Not everyone has this luxury; there's such a thing as latch key kids. I was one because my parents were working overtime to keep food on the table, and a roof over our heads.
Immagination is internal stimulus, while video games are external stimulus. From a developmental perspective the latter has a much more pronounced affect on the end psyche. Adolsecent Psychology 101.
There is reason, and in fact significant evidence, to suggest that imagining a violent act, seeing a violent act, roleplaying a violent act, and finally performing a violent act each have a more significant impact than their predecessor in that list on long term behavioral patterns.
Government regulations like this are so far unnecessary for movies, since the MPAA already voluntarily enforces limiting minor access to violent or sexually explicit material. At 25, I was carded trying to see a rated R movie. At 17, I was denied access to a rated R movie.
This is true only for an emotionally/developmentally mature mind.
Kids who have abusive fathers (even adopted kids, eliminating genetics as a factor) have a significantly higher than average incidence of continuing this abusive behavior when they become fathers. (See here, though there's plenty of other sources on this)
There is no reason to suspect that this same characteristic will not manifest in children who are exposed to, and permitted to roleplay violence at a young age.
You're probably right, since we can't protect kids from everything that might be harmful, we might as well not protect them from anything.
While we're at it, we might as well not have any laws since people are only going to break them. Might as well not put airbags or seatbelts in our cars either since some people will die in car accidents anyhow.
Trying to pretend we live in a kinder world, one that doesn't have as much violence, is about as sensible as...
There's a difference between letting children know violence exists in the world (the news), and letting children roleplay that violence (GTA).
Look, all they're saying is that minors should have adult supervision when acquiring material that could be damaging to young minds.
Whether you like it or not, and whether or not you agree with the specific cutoffs or punnishments present in this bill, young minds are impressionable.
I'm not saying that every kid who plays Grand Theft Auto is going to go out and relive those experiences on the street, but I assert there are some kids who have not yet developed a sense of right and wrong, and for whom, exposure to this sort of material may establish certain Antisocial (in the psychological sense, follow the link before disagreeing with me) patterns in the developing mind.
I don't agree that this should be a felony offense (as this law seems to make it? This article says so, but I can't cooberate since the article doesn't include any text from the bill, nor a link to the bill). But there are kids for whom this stuff would be damaging until they have a better sense of the world established. I know; my wife works with them, and she also works with the kids who got access to violent and/or highly pornographic content at the wrong stage of their psychological development.
All this law is saying (and those proposed which are like it), is that kids need adult oversight to get access to this material.
The biggest problem with schools in the U.S. is that they don't have enough authority. There is very little they can do to punnish a student who has done wrong that isn't actually rewarding them. Detentions are nothing more than after school study hall, in-school suspension is a chance to sit there and not be bothered by teachers, out-of-school suspension is a vacation, and expulsion means you go to a different school where they aren't yet on to your schenanigans. Students know this, and they exploit it by indulging in behaviors that toe the line of whatever punnishment level they are willing to accept to be able to participate in that behavior. Sometimes they cross the threshold, do their time, and go right back to doing whatever they had been doing.
Students need to learn that when dealing with people in a position of authority, you need to respect not just the letter of what they say, but also the spirit of what they say. You can't expect to just find some loop hole and not get punnished. If I bypassed the filtering proxy at work like this, and kept changing where my external proxy was located every time they caught onto me, I would be out of a job even though I technically didn't do anything wrong.
Barriers exist not to make undesirable behavior impossible (which would remind me of 1984's New Speak anyhow), but rather to establish the parameters of what sorts of behavior are acceptable. The fact is that this was an act of defiance, whether or not he was able to technically figure out how to manage it, and whether or not that defiance happened on his own time. Further, this act of defiance was specifically targeted at enabling him to defy his administration during times when he was under their influence, even though he had to set it up while he was outside their authority. Acts of defiance over authority figures need to be punnished in children, and this helps to establish their ability to engage civilly with other human beings once they're adults.
Children need to learn lessons, schools need to teach children these lessons, and they need to be proffered punnishments that they identify as actually being undesirable, not just another suspension-vacation.
Even with "perfect" caching, in a traditional web app model, you still have to build the product list again (web server load), and you have to re-send all that data to the customer (network load). With a smart ajax application, when the user clicks back on the product list, they're shown the list immediately, without even a web request having to go out to your server.
So even with the best possible server-side caching scenario set up, using ajax and related techniques to implement client-side caching can be even more effective.
That's why you actually do better with light comedy (side splitters are funny for a much shorter time than casual chuckle jokes).
I'd wager that one of the major reasons my game (http://lotgd.net) has been as successful as it has been has been the tongue-in-cheek approach it took to itself. Of course, being text-based, you are also able to just skip over the jokes you've already seen, and focus more on the game and finding new places.
In general, I'm actually in support of limiting the sale of a variety of products (including excessively violent or sexually explicit) products to minors.
However, this law, as apparently written, is absurd. You cannot make it illegal to do something as a judgement call of what the community would think. This is far too open to interpretation, and is more than likely to land some kid behind the counter in a game store in jail when it's discovered he sold Mario Kart to the next columbine kids.
It needs to set a threshold, such as games marked as mature by the ESRB. There needs to be a great big binary value: YES or NO, can you sell this game to kids or not, not "Do you think other people might not like it if you sold this to kids."
AA rendering only does multiple renders for polygon edges since there's little to no advantage to rendering multiple pixels for a dot that's on the middle of a poly. It actually doesn't affect framerate very much typically (certainly not 2-8 times slower), as long as you have a card with support for this feature. Shooting from the hip, I'd say I expect 26-28 FPS from a scene with 4x AA turned on, vs 30 FPS w/o AA.
The serifs are actually your browser's default font. If you change the browser default font, you'll change the Slashdot font. I've always considered this to be an excellent and very positive feature.
I bet US airlines are already giving this information, and there's nothing here that would stop US airlines from continuing to carry passengers to Europe.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're sticking up for personal privacy! But I'm not convinced this will really hurt anyone but EU airlines. US airlines will probably see a nice profit out of this in fact.
One form of irony involves word play. Another form has no reference to word play:
1.
a. The use of words to express something different from and often opposite to their literal meaning.
b. An expression or utterance marked by a deliberate contrast between apparent and intended meaning.
c. A literary style employing such contrasts for humorous or rhetorical effect. See Synonyms at wit1.
2.
a. Incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs: "Hyde noted the irony of Ireland's copying the nation she most hated" (Richard Kain).
b. An occurrence, result, or circumstance notable for such incongruity. See Usage Note at ironic.
3. Dramatic irony.
4. Socratic irony.
That doesn't make this case ironic, it is merely a self-fulfilled statement, but you can have irony without words.
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding the abuses of Flash; rarely is it used for its real purposes. Adobcromedia in fact is actually encouraging this abuse of Flash by striving to replace HTML with Flex (roughly, data driven dynamically generated Flash) for their contribution to Web 2.0. In the next 2-3 years, they expect to abandon support for ColdFusion, their server-side HTML engine, in favor of Flex, according to our Adobe sales rep.
However, that does not make it a bad technology, just a misused technology. Flex in fact, as well as regular Flash, has very real uses that are served by no other technologies.
That does make it a straw man argument, because you focus on misuses of a technology, declaring the technology as a whole to be bad as a result. Cars kill people, cars have even been used to intentionally kill people, but that doesn't make cars bad (whether they are bad or not should include this in its discussion, but the argument cannot be based solely on this fact).
Disclaimer: I do know ColdFusion, Flash, and Flex -- all three quite well in fact -- but my real love is PHP; see the link in my signature, I'm the first name in that copyright.
You're right, maybe I'm too close to this situation =). I glanced at the article and assumed vaccine. We don't deal with antivirals, so I was not thinking along the right lines.
There are several companies which have been developing H5N1 (bird flu) vaccine for a while. The (unnamed) company I work for is one. We actually have a massive stockpile of the stuff, but there are a couple of problems with developing H5N1 vaccine at this stage of its pandemic (FYI, it's Pandemic Stage 4, out of 6 possible stages, with 6 being a global catastrophe).
First, the H5N1 virus we know today is not a serious threat to humans. In order to progress to Pandemic 5, it must mutate so that it is contagious human-to-human. That is the criteria for stage 5. It might no longer even be H5N1 (these represent the proteins which are present of the surface of the virus, by the way). With that mutation comes the uncertainty of whether current H5N1 vaccines will have reduced, or even zero efficacy against the new virus.
Further, there is no good way to test even current H5N1 vaccines in humans. We know they do a decent good job of protecting birds and livestock, but that doesn't mean that they are really able to protect humans. I don't see many people signing up for a clinical trial to be exposed to a virus that, if the clinical trial is unsuccessful, would kill the majority of the people in the trial (people who are otherwise healthy).
We honestly can only hope that what we have today will be both effective in humans, and also effective against the mutated virus that represents stage 5.
The problem is not producing enough vaccine, we can mass produce it now. This company having some new approach is nothing more than a press release stating that they caught up with the rest of the vaccine industry.
Guild Wars uses a totally different model. They instance everything everywhere. That means that when one zone is performing badly, they can just put more hardware in place to handle that zone. Non-instanced you can't do that. Only one physical box can handle Ironforge, you can't just magically put more computers together to make it run better.
There's a lot more going on on Blizzards servers than data transactions; data transactions are just a part of the pie. But even looking at the data transactions, there's also probably several orders of magnitude more transactions per user account made on a daily basis than with a financial institution. I for one don't transfer $1 into my account 300 times a day, while each time a user loots something, a transaction has to be performed. If they kill a mob with 7 silver on it, a gray item, a quest item, some runecloth, and a bit of cheese, and that mob also satisfies a quest count, right there is 6 transactions that the user expects to all happen within 1 second. It is the exception if I generate 6 financial transactions in one day at my bank. Further, many banks even go so far as to limit the number of transactions you're permitted in some interval (sometimes it's X per day, sometimes it's X per month) without being penalized.
Bank transactions are focused more on the transactional nature of their operations than they are on the timeliness of their operations. Yes, you expect bank transactions to occur relatively quickly, but if it takes 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, it is not actually that big of a deal. You expect MMO transactions to happen in half a second. Quality of Service (in the sense of response time -- lag) is way more important in an MMO.
So let's play with some conservative numbers. Let's assume that a large banking institution has 500 million accounts, and let's assume that that banking institution has very busy customers who generate an average of 5 transactions each daily. You have 2.5 billion transactions a day. Blizzard has conservatively 5 million customers. Let's assume that on average each customer kills 100 mobs a day. Let's assume that each mob drops some money, and an average of 2 items (whether it's quest, gray, green, etc). Not counting in the separate transactions that are required to update quest progress, reputation gain, or exp gain, that's 2.5 billion transactions there as well (note that each item gain is actually two transactions since there's one for acquiring the item, and one for later unacquiring it, when it's merchanted, turned in for a quest, put up for sale in the AH, or just destroyed). Then there's the reputation gains, exp gains, quest progress tracking, etc to put on top of that. 5 million MMO customers can easily generate more transactional data than 500 million bank customers.
On top of that yet, the servers in the MMO data center have to make a lot more decisions than a financial server does. They have to handle logic of character positioning, mob positioning, make decisions about mob loot tables, mob aggro radius, spell casting, etc. They also have a lot of safeguard checks in place for things like, did you finish casting your hearthstone half a second after you started casting it? Did you just move through a wall in 3d space that you shouldn't have been able to? Are you in line of sight with this mob? What path should this mob take to reach you? What path should your pet take to reach that mob? What about once you or the mob has moved?
No, Blizzard's data needs cannot so easily be shrugged off, there's a lot more going on here than that.
Google's searches are non-transactional, and their data collection is neither transactional nor time sensitive, meaning if it takes 4 hours to index a website, no big deal. Basically every action that happens in an MMO is both transactional and time-sensitive.
It's a very different type of data C.R.U.D. operations which allow you to focus on making the R. aspect insanely efficient while the others can complete whenever they complete. Also, even the R. aspect is not accuracy sensitive, if two people from different IP's do the same search, they'll usually get a widely different set of results after the first page or two.
This'll probably cost me karma, but I feel like I need to say it anyway.
People are really willing to demonize Blizzard for things like server performance. Lots of claims about how I would just fix the code, or how I would buy more servers, or how I would do this or that.
The fact of the matter is that Blizzard is running one of the single largest scale applications in the world period. Their database requirements are way more than anyone reading Slashdot (who doesn't also work for Blizzard or Google) has ever had any experience with.
No matter how much experience you think you have, all the rules change when you cross certain thresholds, and even if you're a really good enterprise architect, unless you have a single data-drive heavily-transactional application with many millions of users, and many billions of records, you don't know what they're going through.
No matter how sinister you might think Blizzard is, they're still a for-profit company (actually, the more sinister you think Blizzard is, the more this applies). For-profit companies don't do things (like be lax about fixing their network problems) if they can help it, since they do lose customers for that sort of thing, and that obviously directly correlates to lost income.
I guarantee that there's tremendous pressure from on top to fix these issues, and if they're not fixed yet, then it's because your php website that supports 20 SIMULTANEOUS users(!!!) was a little easier to fix.
Consider things like common complaints, "Why don't they just throw more hardware at it," maybe their data centers have consumed their floor space, air conditioning capacity, or available power supply. They have 5 independant data centers in the U.S., and each data center can support up to 40 realms. That means, yes, data centers have limited capacity, and if you're full, you have no option to put another server in without begining to risk bringing the entire data center down. You can add more capacity when you physically enlarge the building, buy bigger air conditioners, and also get the power company to run bigger power lines, each of which can take many months to complete.
Not all things are easily fixed with brute force, and people's jobs are on the line here guaranteed, the guys who are in charge of this stuff are more interested in it working than you, since you can turn your computer off and go outside; they can't just ignore their jobs.
I see it as more of the government giving concerned parents a tool to help them to manage their child's access to such content.
Let me cover the traditional major objections that Slashdotters have raised to this sort of legislation: 1) It impinges on the rights of the minor. Minors have significantly fewer rights than adults; playing video games is not a right that minors possess. It should rightly be up to the parents to decide whether or not their child is mature enough to handle explicit content. Further the law does not say minors are not permitted access to this material period (like states say regarding alcohol), just that they need an adult to make the purchase on their behalf.
2) Involved parents should be able to control their kids' access to this soft of material without such legislation Too true, though not every parent has enough time to set up a police state within their house; some are too busy making sure their child is able to eat. And not every parent believes that a police state is a healthy environment. These same parents are not hypocritical to also think their child is not mature enough for some sorts of content, and this provides the means for them to establish certain perimeters at the same time the parent expands other perimeters.
3) Kids will get access to the material anyway Although this is certainly true for some kids, erecting a barrier of this nature means that there is no question on the kid's part as to whether or not this is something their parents want them doing. This sort of specious reasoning is on different from saying that you might as well not establish limits for your child since they will just exceed those limits anyhow. Believe it or not, psychological barriers of this nature do influence behavior. A parent is able to remove the barrier for their child if they feel it is inappropriate in the case of their own child.
It is another tool for parents to help control access to materials. It is not a slippery slope in the direction of censorship; in fact it's an attempt to avoid a slippery slope where our children are exposed to more and more content before they are ready for it.
4) It violates free speech on the part of game manufacturers No one is saying that game manufacturers aren't allowed to make explicit content, they're just saying a certain group of individuals, who have a high incidence of emotional immaturity, should first get consent from a parent, guardian, or other adult who knows more about their psyche and its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Your right to perform free speech is not greater than my right to not hear your free speech, nor is it greater than my right as a parent to not permit my children to hear it.
5) This is just a conservatist attempt at stifling modern forms of art that they personally find objectionable Maybe this is a factor in such a law, I don't know, I'm not the people who passed it. But that doesn't change the fact that it is a useful tool for me to permit my child to begin exploring the world outside of my supervision, without having to worry as much about what sort of smut they're getting into. I've known 8-year-olds who were more emotionally ready for explicit content than some 21-year-olds. The point is that if I can control access, then I can do a better job of managing access to material that my child might not be mentally ready to accept without it distorting his or her perception of reality.
It's my personal belief that very very few kids are half so mature as they think they are, and that games like the GTA series will have a more significant impact on their world view than they would be willing to believe. I can remember as a kid wondering why I was treated like a kid so much when I always acted so mature. I now look back and see the behaviors I was engaging in, and lo and behold, I was a kid, and it turns out I was more impressionable than I would believe.
Slashdot Mirror
Books and movies that portray less violent or sexually explicit material than is found in many modern games are already age limited.
This is a tool for the parents. The government isn't forbidding children access to this stuff (like they do with alcohol), they are giving parents a tool to help them limit their child's access. No minor is being denied anything that their parents don't consent to.
And for people who can afford to hire a sitter for their kids, or who can afford to stay at home with them, then your fantasy world works great.
Not everyone has this luxury; there's such a thing as latch key kids. I was one because my parents were working overtime to keep food on the table, and a roof over our heads.
Immagination is internal stimulus, while video games are external stimulus. From a developmental perspective the latter has a much more pronounced affect on the end psyche. Adolsecent Psychology 101.
There is reason, and in fact significant evidence, to suggest that imagining a violent act, seeing a violent act, roleplaying a violent act, and finally performing a violent act each have a more significant impact than their predecessor in that list on long term behavioral patterns.
Government regulations like this are so far unnecessary for movies, since the MPAA already voluntarily enforces limiting minor access to violent or sexually explicit material. At 25, I was carded trying to see a rated R movie. At 17, I was denied access to a rated R movie.
This is true only for an emotionally/developmentally mature mind.
Kids who have abusive fathers (even adopted kids, eliminating genetics as a factor) have a significantly higher than average incidence of continuing this abusive behavior when they become fathers. (See here, though there's plenty of other sources on this)
There is no reason to suspect that this same characteristic will not manifest in children who are exposed to, and permitted to roleplay violence at a young age.
Wow, that's a really bad Photoshop job.
You're probably right, since we can't protect kids from everything that might be harmful, we might as well not protect them from anything.
While we're at it, we might as well not have any laws since people are only going to break them. Might as well not put airbags or seatbelts in our cars either since some people will die in car accidents anyhow.
Trying to pretend we live in a kinder world, one that doesn't have as much violence, is about as sensible as...
There's a difference between letting children know violence exists in the world (the news), and letting children roleplay that violence (GTA).
Look, all they're saying is that minors should have adult supervision when acquiring material that could be damaging to young minds.
Whether you like it or not, and whether or not you agree with the specific cutoffs or punnishments present in this bill, young minds are impressionable.
I'm not saying that every kid who plays Grand Theft Auto is going to go out and relive those experiences on the street, but I assert there are some kids who have not yet developed a sense of right and wrong, and for whom, exposure to this sort of material may establish certain Antisocial (in the psychological sense, follow the link before disagreeing with me) patterns in the developing mind.
I don't agree that this should be a felony offense (as this law seems to make it? This article says so, but I can't cooberate since the article doesn't include any text from the bill, nor a link to the bill). But there are kids for whom this stuff would be damaging until they have a better sense of the world established. I know; my wife works with them, and she also works with the kids who got access to violent and/or highly pornographic content at the wrong stage of their psychological development.
All this law is saying (and those proposed which are like it), is that kids need adult oversight to get access to this material.
The biggest problem with schools in the U.S. is that they don't have enough authority. There is very little they can do to punnish a student who has done wrong that isn't actually rewarding them. Detentions are nothing more than after school study hall, in-school suspension is a chance to sit there and not be bothered by teachers, out-of-school suspension is a vacation, and expulsion means you go to a different school where they aren't yet on to your schenanigans. Students know this, and they exploit it by indulging in behaviors that toe the line of whatever punnishment level they are willing to accept to be able to participate in that behavior. Sometimes they cross the threshold, do their time, and go right back to doing whatever they had been doing.
Students need to learn that when dealing with people in a position of authority, you need to respect not just the letter of what they say, but also the spirit of what they say. You can't expect to just find some loop hole and not get punnished. If I bypassed the filtering proxy at work like this, and kept changing where my external proxy was located every time they caught onto me, I would be out of a job even though I technically didn't do anything wrong.
Barriers exist not to make undesirable behavior impossible (which would remind me of 1984's New Speak anyhow), but rather to establish the parameters of what sorts of behavior are acceptable. The fact is that this was an act of defiance, whether or not he was able to technically figure out how to manage it, and whether or not that defiance happened on his own time. Further, this act of defiance was specifically targeted at enabling him to defy his administration during times when he was under their influence, even though he had to set it up while he was outside their authority. Acts of defiance over authority figures need to be punnished in children, and this helps to establish their ability to engage civilly with other human beings once they're adults.
Children need to learn lessons, schools need to teach children these lessons, and they need to be proffered punnishments that they identify as actually being undesirable, not just another suspension-vacation.
Even with "perfect" caching, in a traditional web app model, you still have to build the product list again (web server load), and you have to re-send all that data to the customer (network load). With a smart ajax application, when the user clicks back on the product list, they're shown the list immediately, without even a web request having to go out to your server.
So even with the best possible server-side caching scenario set up, using ajax and related techniques to implement client-side caching can be even more effective.
That's why you actually do better with light comedy (side splitters are funny for a much shorter time than casual chuckle jokes).
I'd wager that one of the major reasons my game (http://lotgd.net) has been as successful as it has been has been the tongue-in-cheek approach it took to itself. Of course, being text-based, you are also able to just skip over the jokes you've already seen, and focus more on the game and finding new places.
In general, I'm actually in support of limiting the sale of a variety of products (including excessively violent or sexually explicit) products to minors.
However, this law, as apparently written, is absurd. You cannot make it illegal to do something as a judgement call of what the community would think. This is far too open to interpretation, and is more than likely to land some kid behind the counter in a game store in jail when it's discovered he sold Mario Kart to the next columbine kids.
It needs to set a threshold, such as games marked as mature by the ESRB. There needs to be a great big binary value: YES or NO, can you sell this game to kids or not, not "Do you think other people might not like it if you sold this to kids."
AA rendering only does multiple renders for polygon edges since there's little to no advantage to rendering multiple pixels for a dot that's on the middle of a poly. It actually doesn't affect framerate very much typically (certainly not 2-8 times slower), as long as you have a card with support for this feature. Shooting from the hip, I'd say I expect 26-28 FPS from a scene with 4x AA turned on, vs 30 FPS w/o AA.
Because it is sometimes meaningful to know whether an assignment was successful:
...
...
while ($x = $file->readLine()){
}
while ($x = $iterator->next()){
}
And I'm sure they're already supplying the information that the EU airlines won't.
The serifs are actually your browser's default font. If you change the browser default font, you'll change the Slashdot font. I've always considered this to be an excellent and very positive feature.
I bet US airlines are already giving this information, and there's nothing here that would stop US airlines from continuing to carry passengers to Europe.
Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they're sticking up for personal privacy! But I'm not convinced this will really hurt anyone but EU airlines. US airlines will probably see a nice profit out of this in fact.
That doesn't make this case ironic, it is merely a self-fulfilled statement, but you can have irony without words.
I agree with you wholeheartedly regarding the abuses of Flash; rarely is it used for its real purposes. Adobcromedia in fact is actually encouraging this abuse of Flash by striving to replace HTML with Flex (roughly, data driven dynamically generated Flash) for their contribution to Web 2.0. In the next 2-3 years, they expect to abandon support for ColdFusion, their server-side HTML engine, in favor of Flex, according to our Adobe sales rep.
However, that does not make it a bad technology, just a misused technology. Flex in fact, as well as regular Flash, has very real uses that are served by no other technologies.
That does make it a straw man argument, because you focus on misuses of a technology, declaring the technology as a whole to be bad as a result. Cars kill people, cars have even been used to intentionally kill people, but that doesn't make cars bad (whether they are bad or not should include this in its discussion, but the argument cannot be based solely on this fact).
Disclaimer: I do know ColdFusion, Flash, and Flex -- all three quite well in fact -- but my real love is PHP; see the link in my signature, I'm the first name in that copyright.
You're right, maybe I'm too close to this situation =). I glanced at the article and assumed vaccine. We don't deal with antivirals, so I was not thinking along the right lines.
There are several companies which have been developing H5N1 (bird flu) vaccine for a while. The (unnamed) company I work for is one. We actually have a massive stockpile of the stuff, but there are a couple of problems with developing H5N1 vaccine at this stage of its pandemic (FYI, it's Pandemic Stage 4, out of 6 possible stages, with 6 being a global catastrophe).
First, the H5N1 virus we know today is not a serious threat to humans. In order to progress to Pandemic 5, it must mutate so that it is contagious human-to-human. That is the criteria for stage 5. It might no longer even be H5N1 (these represent the proteins which are present of the surface of the virus, by the way). With that mutation comes the uncertainty of whether current H5N1 vaccines will have reduced, or even zero efficacy against the new virus.
Further, there is no good way to test even current H5N1 vaccines in humans. We know they do a decent good job of protecting birds and livestock, but that doesn't mean that they are really able to protect humans. I don't see many people signing up for a clinical trial to be exposed to a virus that, if the clinical trial is unsuccessful, would kill the majority of the people in the trial (people who are otherwise healthy).
We honestly can only hope that what we have today will be both effective in humans, and also effective against the mutated virus that represents stage 5.
The problem is not producing enough vaccine, we can mass produce it now. This company having some new approach is nothing more than a press release stating that they caught up with the rest of the vaccine industry.
Guild Wars uses a totally different model. They instance everything everywhere. That means that when one zone is performing badly, they can just put more hardware in place to handle that zone. Non-instanced you can't do that. Only one physical box can handle Ironforge, you can't just magically put more computers together to make it run better.
There's a lot more going on on Blizzards servers than data transactions; data transactions are just a part of the pie. But even looking at the data transactions, there's also probably several orders of magnitude more transactions per user account made on a daily basis than with a financial institution. I for one don't transfer $1 into my account 300 times a day, while each time a user loots something, a transaction has to be performed. If they kill a mob with 7 silver on it, a gray item, a quest item, some runecloth, and a bit of cheese, and that mob also satisfies a quest count, right there is 6 transactions that the user expects to all happen within 1 second. It is the exception if I generate 6 financial transactions in one day at my bank. Further, many banks even go so far as to limit the number of transactions you're permitted in some interval (sometimes it's X per day, sometimes it's X per month) without being penalized.
Bank transactions are focused more on the transactional nature of their operations than they are on the timeliness of their operations. Yes, you expect bank transactions to occur relatively quickly, but if it takes 10 seconds, or 30 seconds, it is not actually that big of a deal. You expect MMO transactions to happen in half a second. Quality of Service (in the sense of response time -- lag) is way more important in an MMO.
So let's play with some conservative numbers. Let's assume that a large banking institution has 500 million accounts, and let's assume that that banking institution has very busy customers who generate an average of 5 transactions each daily. You have 2.5 billion transactions a day. Blizzard has conservatively 5 million customers. Let's assume that on average each customer kills 100 mobs a day. Let's assume that each mob drops some money, and an average of 2 items (whether it's quest, gray, green, etc). Not counting in the separate transactions that are required to update quest progress, reputation gain, or exp gain, that's 2.5 billion transactions there as well (note that each item gain is actually two transactions since there's one for acquiring the item, and one for later unacquiring it, when it's merchanted, turned in for a quest, put up for sale in the AH, or just destroyed). Then there's the reputation gains, exp gains, quest progress tracking, etc to put on top of that. 5 million MMO customers can easily generate more transactional data than 500 million bank customers.
On top of that yet, the servers in the MMO data center have to make a lot more decisions than a financial server does. They have to handle logic of character positioning, mob positioning, make decisions about mob loot tables, mob aggro radius, spell casting, etc. They also have a lot of safeguard checks in place for things like, did you finish casting your hearthstone half a second after you started casting it? Did you just move through a wall in 3d space that you shouldn't have been able to? Are you in line of sight with this mob? What path should this mob take to reach you? What path should your pet take to reach that mob? What about once you or the mob has moved?
No, Blizzard's data needs cannot so easily be shrugged off, there's a lot more going on here than that.
Google's searches are non-transactional, and their data collection is neither transactional nor time sensitive, meaning if it takes 4 hours to index a website, no big deal. Basically every action that happens in an MMO is both transactional and time-sensitive.
It's a very different type of data C.R.U.D. operations which allow you to focus on making the R. aspect insanely efficient while the others can complete whenever they complete. Also, even the R. aspect is not accuracy sensitive, if two people from different IP's do the same search, they'll usually get a widely different set of results after the first page or two.
This'll probably cost me karma, but I feel like I need to say it anyway.
People are really willing to demonize Blizzard for things like server performance. Lots of claims about how I would just fix the code, or how I would buy more servers, or how I would do this or that.
The fact of the matter is that Blizzard is running one of the single largest scale applications in the world period. Their database requirements are way more than anyone reading Slashdot (who doesn't also work for Blizzard or Google) has ever had any experience with.
No matter how much experience you think you have, all the rules change when you cross certain thresholds, and even if you're a really good enterprise architect, unless you have a single data-drive heavily-transactional application with many millions of users, and many billions of records, you don't know what they're going through.
No matter how sinister you might think Blizzard is, they're still a for-profit company (actually, the more sinister you think Blizzard is, the more this applies). For-profit companies don't do things (like be lax about fixing their network problems) if they can help it, since they do lose customers for that sort of thing, and that obviously directly correlates to lost income.
I guarantee that there's tremendous pressure from on top to fix these issues, and if they're not fixed yet, then it's because your php website that supports 20 SIMULTANEOUS users(!!!) was a little easier to fix.
Consider things like common complaints, "Why don't they just throw more hardware at it," maybe their data centers have consumed their floor space, air conditioning capacity, or available power supply. They have 5 independant data centers in the U.S., and each data center can support up to 40 realms. That means, yes, data centers have limited capacity, and if you're full, you have no option to put another server in without begining to risk bringing the entire data center down. You can add more capacity when you physically enlarge the building, buy bigger air conditioners, and also get the power company to run bigger power lines, each of which can take many months to complete.
Not all things are easily fixed with brute force, and people's jobs are on the line here guaranteed, the guys who are in charge of this stuff are more interested in it working than you, since you can turn your computer off and go outside; they can't just ignore their jobs.
I see it as more of the government giving concerned parents a tool to help them to manage their child's access to such content.
Let me cover the traditional major objections that Slashdotters have raised to this sort of legislation:
1) It impinges on the rights of the minor.
Minors have significantly fewer rights than adults; playing video games is not a right that minors possess. It should rightly be up to the parents to decide whether or not their child is mature enough to handle explicit content. Further the law does not say minors are not permitted access to this material period (like states say regarding alcohol), just that they need an adult to make the purchase on their behalf.
2) Involved parents should be able to control their kids' access to this soft of material without such legislation
Too true, though not every parent has enough time to set up a police state within their house; some are too busy making sure their child is able to eat. And not every parent believes that a police state is a healthy environment. These same parents are not hypocritical to also think their child is not mature enough for some sorts of content, and this provides the means for them to establish certain perimeters at the same time the parent expands other perimeters.
3) Kids will get access to the material anyway
Although this is certainly true for some kids, erecting a barrier of this nature means that there is no question on the kid's part as to whether or not this is something their parents want them doing. This sort of specious reasoning is on different from saying that you might as well not establish limits for your child since they will just exceed those limits anyhow. Believe it or not, psychological barriers of this nature do influence behavior. A parent is able to remove the barrier for their child if they feel it is inappropriate in the case of their own child.
It is another tool for parents to help control access to materials. It is not a slippery slope in the direction of censorship; in fact it's an attempt to avoid a slippery slope where our children are exposed to more and more content before they are ready for it.
4) It violates free speech on the part of game manufacturers
No one is saying that game manufacturers aren't allowed to make explicit content, they're just saying a certain group of individuals, who have a high incidence of emotional immaturity, should first get consent from a parent, guardian, or other adult who knows more about their psyche and its ability to distinguish reality from fantasy. Your right to perform free speech is not greater than my right to not hear your free speech, nor is it greater than my right as a parent to not permit my children to hear it.
5) This is just a conservatist attempt at stifling modern forms of art that they personally find objectionable
Maybe this is a factor in such a law, I don't know, I'm not the people who passed it. But that doesn't change the fact that it is a useful tool for me to permit my child to begin exploring the world outside of my supervision, without having to worry as much about what sort of smut they're getting into. I've known 8-year-olds who were more emotionally ready for explicit content than some 21-year-olds. The point is that if I can control access, then I can do a better job of managing access to material that my child might not be mentally ready to accept without it distorting his or her perception of reality.
It's my personal belief that very very few kids are half so mature as they think they are, and that games like the GTA series will have a more significant impact on their world view than they would be willing to believe. I can remember as a kid wondering why I was treated like a kid so much when I always acted so mature. I now look back and see the behaviors I was engaging in, and lo and behold, I was a kid, and it turns out I was more impressionable than I would believe.
Really, if you think you're at a certain leve