You honestly think they waited for this to be peer-reviewed and published before they belted out the press releases? That would mean they may be expected to provide some detail, which would be madness!
Seriously though, there's no sign of a citation from any of the people running the story (most of which are nearly identical, so they're probably just copying from the same press release), and there's no sign of it on arXiv or from a quick trawl of journal feeds, so it's a very good chance that it's either unpublished work, or a conference paper somewhere. Not surprising, given how many "most significant discoveries in the history of science" turn out to be much less dramatic under the cold hard light of review than when they're first reported.
I think that people who are talking to western media sources generally talk about dollars (or Euros or pounds or comparable currencies - not much of a difference, as having just one million in assets rarely matches the perceived idea of "millionaires" in modern society). However, I would be surprised if people in India, China, Korea and the like translate everything into a foreign currency when they're speaking to one another about someone's wealth.
I think the issue is that they continue to charge full or near-full price for music which was produced (and whose one-off production costs were likely wholly paid off) years ago. I'm no expert on such things, but I would have thought every instance of these older NIN CDs which are sold now is pure profit (bar the minor production cost the GP cited), and keeping that profit margin so high is what Trent appears to be objecting to in this interview*.
* Disclaimer - I have not watched the interview, and am basing the above off the/. summary. Yes, it's a risky move, but I'm taking that chance. Sorry if I've completely missed the point as a result.
I feel that I should post to this post from Fundies say the Darndest Things in this debate. It's amazing how people can parrot the same things over and over, without ever realising what it is they're saying:
One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn't possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.
The BBC is not the only group who tried to replicate the results - it was done by traditional science groups too, who used an almost identical model, and identified a specific factor in the protocol which they found led to a significant increase in false positives. I think this is the relevent paper, but I don't have access to the journal from here, so I'm not totally sure. If you have access, dig through the papers who cite Ennis, it's there smewhee.
Homeopathic preparations are indistinguishable from water (almost by definition), and the treatments are not statistically different to placebo. What more proof do you require? You seem to accept it's placebo in the next statement, so I take it you don't cling to that idea that tightly.
With regards to the "It's a placebo, but that's ok because some people get better!" line of reasoning - the re-emergence of the acceptance of homeopaths is emboldening them to prescribe their sugar pills for diseases where they are singularly inappropriate - acute illnesses like malaria, or things like cancer - There was a significant case in the netherlands (I think?), where a group of homeopathic doctors were struck off for advising patients with early-stage cancer to avoid traditional treatments altogether, and instead provided their "remedy", leading to numerous deaths from cancers who have a high survival rate for traditional therapy. In cases like this, homeopathy is solely a money-making machine, but moreover one which doesn't offer any meaningful potential for cure and is held to vastly lower standards.
The placebo effect is a tricky one - yes, everyone who it does work for says "This is great, this was half the price and no side effects. Huzzah!". But there are (by definition) a section of the population who do not get better, and so are exposed to prolongd illness or death. This is what is inappropriate about the acceptance of homeopathy.
Also, with regards to your other points: The side-effects of the pill are well established, and publically available in dozens of places. Anyone who denied them was simply lying to you. This is not a criticism of medicine, this is a criticism of the practitioners you were exposed to - and as mentioned above, dubious practitioners exist in all fields.
With regards to NFP: Saying it "doesn't work" is largely a question of how you define "work". If someone said it had no effect on your chance of conception, they were lying. But if they meant worked less effectively than the pill/condoms/etc, then that's certainly quite true - and an 8-month trial is certainly nowhere near evidence to the contrary (hell, i know people who took longer to conceive while they were actively trying).
You seem to be confusing lies and deception with actual science - but this is far from unique to science, and homeopathy and similar treatments being "alternative" does nothing to prevent this.
Re:%75 as effective as a prescription 3% the price
on
Science vs. Homeopathy
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· Score: 2, Informative
I think homeopathy is just a Western equivalent; as long as the person giving it understands that it's bunk, and takes care to ensure that real medicine wouldn't be more effective, it doesn't seem too outrageous to use it. It's a nice idea, but it just won't work - there is a non-trivial fraction of homeopaths who really, really believe in what they're doing (right up to the highest levels of their purported regulatory bodies). One recent example in the UK was a show which found that, out of a dozen or so registered homeopaths asked, none recommended malaria medication for travelling to at risk areas - all offering their delightful little sugar pills instead. This is despite their purported regulatory body explicitly stating that Homeopathy is unsuitable for treatment of ilnesses like malaria.
However, the Society of Homeopaths refused to sanction the people giving this dangerous advice, presumably out of solidarity with their colleagues or whatever. This is just evidence that, if you accept homeopathy, you are validating all the loons as well as anyone who may take part in the dubious placebo-peddling approach (something I pretty thoroughly disapprove of, but which is significantly less bad than the massive levels of delusion which lets people really, truly believe in these things.
Or she could take 5 minutes a day to spend with her kids and talk about what they did on the internet and at school, you know : *PARENTING* "Hey son, looked up much quality porn recently?"
"Yeah mom, you should've seen this shit. That ho was getting banged by seven guys, and that was before the horse showed up! Here, I'll cc you the link!"
Lets face it, while "Parenting" may be a possible solution to this problem, it is in no way the same as asking 2 or 3 questions a day - do you really think a kid would own up in such a situation? And, in reality, is the concept of a young male looking at some boobies really so horrible? There are much more serious things to be concerned about these days.
$181,692 for the Times, http://www.nypost.com/seven/09132007/news/nationalnews/times_gives_lefties_a_hefty_di.htm>apparently*. Of course you'd have to convince them to take it though, since I think Verizon may not appreciate the ad, and may offer the potential for greater profit in the future than a handful of angry technies complaining about something most people are blissfully unaware of.
* - this was just picked as the first result I got for the search for the price. No need to pay too much attention to the content.
There is some evidence that improved street lighting has the potential to improve safety - it's been studied a bit in the UK (often in the context of better lighting vs increased CCTV or the like), and there has been a general positive correlation. One meta-analysis of the studies published by the home office a few years ago can be found here, and I'm sure google scholar can provide oodles of links to the underlying studies if you desire.
What's notable though, is that there is a considerable variation in the result based on where the study was done (and, presumably, the exact difference between the test and control situations, as I haven't went through all the underlying studies myself), with many areas producing negligible changes, or even statistically significant increases in certain types of crime with the introduction of additional lighting. The most simple conclusion is that the lighting has to be sensibly managed: floodlights on every street corner are not necessary, and may even be detrimental. Which means that there is certainly the possibility that the goals of improving the visibility of the sky and the improvement of street lighting (improvement not strictly meaning increase, of course) are not necessarily incompatible.
There is no talk about it, because it seems none of the studies cited in the article actually set out to determine the increase in cancer due to RFID devices, but rather tagged it on, perhaps to grab a few extra citations. Since they were designed as trials of other factors, there was no attempt to introduce a no-RFID control group. From TFA:
Because none of the studies had a control group of animals that did not get chips, the normal rate of tumors cannot be determined and compared to the rate with chips implanted.
Checking over the descriptions of the papers, it looks like they were trialling chips in large numbers of mice for other reasons, and apparently decided to knock out an extra paper with the "omg cancer!" angle to get some extra citations and some more funding in the future. Given the vast variation in results and lack of controls, these studies seem fairly unremarkable. There may be something there, but these studies really don't show anything meaningful.
Of course, you can speculate as much as you want and you can do research into this - but if you do not come up with something which contradicts the known truth, any complication of the model you do is contrary to scientific principles and irrational. There is a simple issue with this statement: What truth? The data points we're extrapolating from are so far removed from the region of interest that there are many models which can fit the data just as well as a linear one (see the graph I noted in response to a sibling post). The LNT is typically posited as the simplest, most straightforward explanation - but this is not the same as truth, especially given that there is clear evidence that we do not fully understand the interplay between radiation and cell death - it's simply not as straightforward as "x DNA double-strand breaks causes y deaths", particularly at low doses. As an example, induced radio-resistance is a well-established phenomenon, and would seem to be in contrast to the simple presumption underlying the LNT model for low-dose, prolonged exposure cases, at least. There also exist effects which potentially cause greater than linear damage with regards to dose.
Given the vast number of effects which seem to contradict the basic reasoning behind the LNT model, I feel that insisting on the LNT as anything more than a precautionary principle is dubious.
The official position is that the LNT model is the "most reasonable", given current what good epidemiological studies are available - but the article cited by wikipedia goes to some length to point out the lack of good evidence there is for very low levels of dose. It notes that the correlation is only reasonable down to ~50mSv, which is still 25 times the mean background, for example.
Consider the graph they show for the different low-dose models:
The data points they're extrapolating to are a country mile from where the interesting biology may be going on, as demonstrated by the vast variety of curves which produce reasonable fits to the data.
I've came into medical physics from a different field, and some of the methods they consider acceptable trouble me a bit, at times. I wouldn't disagree that a linear extrapolation is a reasonable guideline, but that is for a rather broad definition of reasonable, and I would certainly say it's got a long way to go before its proven by the standards of most branches of science.
The problem is there isn't really good evidence that such radiation is dangerous at all. These figures like the "0.5 cases of cancer" all assume the Linear No Threshold model - that is, that any amount of radiation is bad, and extrapolate a straight line from the last "good" data to (0,0). This has never been conclusively proven, given the extremely low cancer rates that would be expected at such low exposure limits. And the naive "it can cause DNA damage, it must be bad!" line of reasoning also doesn't hold, because there is evidence that radioresistance can develop, at least on the level of individual cells.
There are places on earth where background is one hundred times the global average, and people aren't dropping like flies there. A tiny rise in background is a fairly minor issue - significantly smaller than pretty much any accident which could happen in any other business - but because it's from "radiation", it's endlessly repeated as proof of how dangerous these power plants are.
This really does seem to be a lost cause - you've decided you don't enjoy WoW and as a result have concluded nobody can rationally enjoy it, and prefer to argue semantics rather than address the point (to the extent of defining it as "not a game" without any rationale). You keep harping on about the end-game instance running and the grind which can be associated with it, and just refuse to acknowledge the fact that the majority of players simply don't see that as the objective of the game and don't play it in that fashion. But of course, they're all playing the game wrong, aren't they?
I addressed the point that it may have been an unwillingness to spend the time in my next paragraph. But either way, your particular objection it doesn't change the crux of the issue - WoW is not suited for you, but it is for other people.
The true hardcore gamers like the constant stream of high-end content to be played through and defeated. That's what they enjoy. Your argument that there is "only" two months between completing the end-game instances and the next expansion in a sibling post is the exact opposite of the complaints levelled by the hardcore gamers who complete this content and complain that there is nothing left for them to do for months.
Similarly, the really casual players don't care that there's this high-end content that they're missing out on, since they're still enjoying fighting hordies for common quest spots in Stranglethorn Vale and such things. Many of them probably wouldn't know who Illidan was if he came up and bit them on the ass. This group is also almost certainly not going to care that nobody is going to be running MC when they hit 60, or SSC when they hit 70 - if they ever do.
You fall into a gap in between these groups - but why do you think this means that nobody can enjoy WoW, and so around telling people they're wrong to play it the way they enjoy by painting bizzare caricatures of the game?
I have to ask, did someone from Blizzard run over your dog or something? You seem determined to paint the game in as poor a light as possible, with examples which seem to exist only in your own mind.
From your posts, you seem to indicate that you're an experienced gamer, but also one who doesn't have vast amounts of time to dedicate to the game, and thus is incapable of really experiencing most of the end-game instances (although this doesn't strictly hold, and is certainly nothing like the "omg 8 month constant grind" or precisely calibrated gear sets you paint in one of the sibling posts, it's sufficiently true for most people to not be worth arguing). Hence you feel like the game is ripping you off, with all this new content which just streams by and is inaccessible. Roughly correct?
The thing is, you're a particular type of gamer who is rather ill-suited to playing WoW long-term. You don't have the time (or, alternatively, the desire to spend the time) to play through the high-end instances, but you're a sufficiently experienced gamer that you can tear through the single player content pretty quickly and reach that vague limbo between level 70 and the end-game, which isn't particularly compelling, I'll have to agree. Hence you get the impression the game is solely tailored to the hardcore people with lots of time to grind, and express this view with great vigor.
The thing is, WoW's playerbase is not just made up of the "real hardcore" and people like you - there's a non-trivial fraction of players (the GP probably being one of them) who play the game in an extremely casual fashion, ambling through content as the mood strikes them, who would likely take years to get through to level 80 when the next expansion comes out, who don't give a damn that there's some raid instances they're missing out on at levels 60 and 70, because it's simply not part of the way they play the game. And yet, most of these people quite often feel like they're getting their money's worth out of the questing and 5-man instancing available, which is fine, is it not? Particularly on the expansion servers, which have a relatively young population, so there's still an availability of people to instance with and the like. The fact that you want to attack these people for playing the game "wrong" is rather baffling.
I also fail to see why you mentioned that games are less scary because one is more focused on defeating the enemy....um, they do that in movies too! Despite the patronising tone, you're completely missing my point - the problem is not with defeating enemies, it is with defeating the same enemies in the similar fashions over and over again. Most games are forced to recycle content because there is a certain expectation of playtime the developer time needed to create it is typically a rather limited resource. The best most FPS-style games do is to vary the environment you fight the opponents in, with the occasional set piece like the tentacles mentioned earlier. And once you've shot a marine/alien/zombie/ghost/all-of-the-above in the face a few dozen times, they lose their oomph, because you realise that you are much more badass than them, and don't have much to fear.
The fear in horror movies comes from the fact that the antagonist is much better at what they do than the protagonists, and the protagonists keep losing (up until one 'final encounter', perhaps). Imagine a Friday the 13th where Jason repeatedly failed to kill his targets, and even had the snot kicked out of him by them on a regular basis. That's just not going to be a scary movie, and that's the reason most games struggle to maintain an atmosphere of tension and fear successfully.
Actually, I think the blast pit monster is a wonderful example of my point - yes, it shows up and scares the beejesus out of you with its dismembering of scientists and its invulnerability. But once you sit back and actually pay attention to its range of abilities, you see it's confined to a single room and harmless apart from when you attempt to nip across regions it can reach. With that realisation, it's effectively reduced to a slightly more exciting version of the various flame and electricity jets which restrict your movements in other levels.
That said, I agree that the encounter is interesting - but what makes it interesting is the uniqueness of the situation - if you fought the tentacles three, four, five more times in the game, with broadly the same approach to killing it each time, would it remain exciting? I would think not. Fear relies to an extent on the unexpected and the mysterious, games can't sustain that without endless unique set pieces, which places a pretty major demand on developer time.
I really have to agree with you - most games, threats are things to be dealt with. There is rarely something which has a very good chance of catching you and is likely to tear you to little bits - which is understandable, as a game would be rather disheartening if your survival chances were the same as a bit player in a horror movie.
And once you've killed a couple of any given creature, they're no longer scary, as you have established you're more badass than them - Bioshock being the instance du jour, I was quite paranoid in the very beginning of the demo, as I felt rather lost, had no idea where that creature I just saw disembowel a guy was, and was completely defenseless, depending on the intervention of another to have any chance of making it anywhere.
Fast forward a little to even the end of the first level, and it's a whole other kettle of fish - I had a handful of potent firearms, and the ability to electrocute things with a gesture. Suddenly these weird zombie-things aren't much of a threat, so they're not really scary any more - they're now just an obstacle to be overcome with the minimal expenditure of resources.
Humans are much more tolerant to (relatively) small amounts of radiation than people often think. Depending on where you live, your average yearly dose can vary by almost a factor of 1,000 - the relative dose from such events in thunderstorms is much less than this variation in background, given how little is produced by any given event.
Also, while 1GeV is a typical cosmic ray energy, they can go much much higher. The "Oh my god" particle had an energy of around 50 Joules. That's comprable to a well-hit tennisball, which is a whopping amount of energy for a subatomic particle.
The problem with "fixing" quests is that there are only a handful of classes who can actually heal - any healing-oriented quest automatically excludes maybe half the population, and some non-trivial fraction of the healing capable classes will probably give out about it too.
In a game where most skillsets are based around smashing people's faces in, it's hard to do meaningful helping quests, alas.
Would it be too much to have more events that require significant numbers of players to actually dedicate their time to fixing the problem, Dude, last time someone suggested something like that, we got the Ahn'Qiraj war effort. Never again!
This was something that intrigued me when I was talking with an American who was visitng - do you have some way to regulate how you receive texts/who you receive texts from? I can understand the rationale behind paying to receive a phone call (obviously, you can choose to reject the call if you don't want to pay the price). But over here at least, texts just arrive - doesn't this (theoretically) make it possible to bomb someone with vast amounts of texts and drive up their bills without them having a meaningful way to protect themselves?
I'm sure there's a simple solution to this somewhere which I'm overlooking, but having an aspect of a person's billing completely outside their control seems rather bizarre.
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously though, there's no sign of a citation from any of the people running the story (most of which are nearly identical, so they're probably just copying from the same press release), and there's no sign of it on arXiv or from a quick trawl of journal feeds, so it's a very good chance that it's either unpublished work, or a conference paper somewhere. Not surprising, given how many "most significant discoveries in the history of science" turn out to be much less dramatic under the cold hard light of review than when they're first reported.
I think that people who are talking to western media sources generally talk about dollars (or Euros or pounds or comparable currencies - not much of a difference, as having just one million in assets rarely matches the perceived idea of "millionaires" in modern society). However, I would be surprised if people in India, China, Korea and the like translate everything into a foreign currency when they're speaking to one another about someone's wealth.
* Disclaimer - I have not watched the interview, and am basing the above off the /. summary. Yes, it's a risky move, but I'm taking that chance. Sorry if I've completely missed the point as a result.
The BBC is not the only group who tried to replicate the results - it was done by traditional science groups too, who used an almost identical model, and identified a specific factor in the protocol which they found led to a significant increase in false positives. I think this is the relevent paper, but I don't have access to the journal from here, so I'm not totally sure. If you have access, dig through the papers who cite Ennis, it's there smewhee.
With regards to the "It's a placebo, but that's ok because some people get better!" line of reasoning - the re-emergence of the acceptance of homeopaths is emboldening them to prescribe their sugar pills for diseases where they are singularly inappropriate - acute illnesses like malaria, or things like cancer - There was a significant case in the netherlands (I think?), where a group of homeopathic doctors were struck off for advising patients with early-stage cancer to avoid traditional treatments altogether, and instead provided their "remedy", leading to numerous deaths from cancers who have a high survival rate for traditional therapy. In cases like this, homeopathy is solely a money-making machine, but moreover one which doesn't offer any meaningful potential for cure and is held to vastly lower standards.
The placebo effect is a tricky one - yes, everyone who it does work for says "This is great, this was half the price and no side effects. Huzzah!". But there are (by definition) a section of the population who do not get better, and so are exposed to prolongd illness or death. This is what is inappropriate about the acceptance of homeopathy.
Also, with regards to your other points: The side-effects of the pill are well established, and publically available in dozens of places. Anyone who denied them was simply lying to you. This is not a criticism of medicine, this is a criticism of the practitioners you were exposed to - and as mentioned above, dubious practitioners exist in all fields.
With regards to NFP: Saying it "doesn't work" is largely a question of how you define "work". If someone said it had no effect on your chance of conception, they were lying. But if they meant worked less effectively than the pill/condoms/etc, then that's certainly quite true - and an 8-month trial is certainly nowhere near evidence to the contrary (hell, i know people who took longer to conceive while they were actively trying).
You seem to be confusing lies and deception with actual science - but this is far from unique to science, and homeopathy and similar treatments being "alternative" does nothing to prevent this.
However, the Society of Homeopaths refused to sanction the people giving this dangerous advice, presumably out of solidarity with their colleagues or whatever. This is just evidence that, if you accept homeopathy, you are validating all the loons as well as anyone who may take part in the dubious placebo-peddling approach (something I pretty thoroughly disapprove of, but which is significantly less bad than the massive levels of delusion which lets people really, truly believe in these things.
"Yeah mom, you should've seen this shit. That ho was getting banged by seven guys, and that was before the horse showed up! Here, I'll cc you the link!"
Lets face it, while "Parenting" may be a possible solution to this problem, it is in no way the same as asking 2 or 3 questions a day - do you really think a kid would own up in such a situation? And, in reality, is the concept of a young male looking at some boobies really so horrible? There are much more serious things to be concerned about these days.
* - this was just picked as the first result I got for the search for the price. No need to pay too much attention to the content.
What's notable though, is that there is a considerable variation in the result based on where the study was done (and, presumably, the exact difference between the test and control situations, as I haven't went through all the underlying studies myself), with many areas producing negligible changes, or even statistically significant increases in certain types of crime with the introduction of additional lighting. The most simple conclusion is that the lighting has to be sensibly managed: floodlights on every street corner are not necessary, and may even be detrimental. Which means that there is certainly the possibility that the goals of improving the visibility of the sky and the improvement of street lighting (improvement not strictly meaning increase, of course) are not necessarily incompatible.
Checking over the descriptions of the papers, it looks like they were trialling chips in large numbers of mice for other reasons, and apparently decided to knock out an extra paper with the "omg cancer!" angle to get some extra citations and some more funding in the future. Given the vast variation in results and lack of controls, these studies seem fairly unremarkable. There may be something there, but these studies really don't show anything meaningful.
Given the vast number of effects which seem to contradict the basic reasoning behind the LNT model, I feel that insisting on the LNT as anything more than a precautionary principle is dubious.
Consider the graph they show for the different low-dose models:
http://www.pnas.org/content/vol100/issue24/images/ large/pq2235592003.jpeg
The data points they're extrapolating to are a country mile from where the interesting biology may be going on, as demonstrated by the vast variety of curves which produce reasonable fits to the data.
I've came into medical physics from a different field, and some of the methods they consider acceptable trouble me a bit, at times. I wouldn't disagree that a linear extrapolation is a reasonable guideline, but that is for a rather broad definition of reasonable, and I would certainly say it's got a long way to go before its proven by the standards of most branches of science.
There are places on earth where background is one hundred times the global average, and people aren't dropping like flies there. A tiny rise in background is a fairly minor issue - significantly smaller than pretty much any accident which could happen in any other business - but because it's from "radiation", it's endlessly repeated as proof of how dangerous these power plants are.
This really does seem to be a lost cause - you've decided you don't enjoy WoW and as a result have concluded nobody can rationally enjoy it, and prefer to argue semantics rather than address the point (to the extent of defining it as "not a game" without any rationale). You keep harping on about the end-game instance running and the grind which can be associated with it, and just refuse to acknowledge the fact that the majority of players simply don't see that as the objective of the game and don't play it in that fashion. But of course, they're all playing the game wrong, aren't they?
The true hardcore gamers like the constant stream of high-end content to be played through and defeated. That's what they enjoy. Your argument that there is "only" two months between completing the end-game instances and the next expansion in a sibling post is the exact opposite of the complaints levelled by the hardcore gamers who complete this content and complain that there is nothing left for them to do for months.
Similarly, the really casual players don't care that there's this high-end content that they're missing out on, since they're still enjoying fighting hordies for common quest spots in Stranglethorn Vale and such things. Many of them probably wouldn't know who Illidan was if he came up and bit them on the ass. This group is also almost certainly not going to care that nobody is going to be running MC when they hit 60, or SSC when they hit 70 - if they ever do.
You fall into a gap in between these groups - but why do you think this means that nobody can enjoy WoW, and so around telling people they're wrong to play it the way they enjoy by painting bizzare caricatures of the game?
From your posts, you seem to indicate that you're an experienced gamer, but also one who doesn't have vast amounts of time to dedicate to the game, and thus is incapable of really experiencing most of the end-game instances (although this doesn't strictly hold, and is certainly nothing like the "omg 8 month constant grind" or precisely calibrated gear sets you paint in one of the sibling posts, it's sufficiently true for most people to not be worth arguing). Hence you feel like the game is ripping you off, with all this new content which just streams by and is inaccessible. Roughly correct?
The thing is, you're a particular type of gamer who is rather ill-suited to playing WoW long-term. You don't have the time (or, alternatively, the desire to spend the time) to play through the high-end instances, but you're a sufficiently experienced gamer that you can tear through the single player content pretty quickly and reach that vague limbo between level 70 and the end-game, which isn't particularly compelling, I'll have to agree. Hence you get the impression the game is solely tailored to the hardcore people with lots of time to grind, and express this view with great vigor.
The thing is, WoW's playerbase is not just made up of the "real hardcore" and people like you - there's a non-trivial fraction of players (the GP probably being one of them) who play the game in an extremely casual fashion, ambling through content as the mood strikes them, who would likely take years to get through to level 80 when the next expansion comes out, who don't give a damn that there's some raid instances they're missing out on at levels 60 and 70, because it's simply not part of the way they play the game. And yet, most of these people quite often feel like they're getting their money's worth out of the questing and 5-man instancing available, which is fine, is it not? Particularly on the expansion servers, which have a relatively young population, so there's still an availability of people to instance with and the like. The fact that you want to attack these people for playing the game "wrong" is rather baffling.
The fear in horror movies comes from the fact that the antagonist is much better at what they do than the protagonists, and the protagonists keep losing (up until one 'final encounter', perhaps). Imagine a Friday the 13th where Jason repeatedly failed to kill his targets, and even had the snot kicked out of him by them on a regular basis. That's just not going to be a scary movie, and that's the reason most games struggle to maintain an atmosphere of tension and fear successfully.
That said, I agree that the encounter is interesting - but what makes it interesting is the uniqueness of the situation - if you fought the tentacles three, four, five more times in the game, with broadly the same approach to killing it each time, would it remain exciting? I would think not. Fear relies to an extent on the unexpected and the mysterious, games can't sustain that without endless unique set pieces, which places a pretty major demand on developer time.
And once you've killed a couple of any given creature, they're no longer scary, as you have established you're more badass than them - Bioshock being the instance du jour, I was quite paranoid in the very beginning of the demo, as I felt rather lost, had no idea where that creature I just saw disembowel a guy was, and was completely defenseless, depending on the intervention of another to have any chance of making it anywhere.
Fast forward a little to even the end of the first level, and it's a whole other kettle of fish - I had a handful of potent firearms, and the ability to electrocute things with a gesture. Suddenly these weird zombie-things aren't much of a threat, so they're not really scary any more - they're now just an obstacle to be overcome with the minimal expenditure of resources.
Also, while 1GeV is a typical cosmic ray energy, they can go much much higher. The "Oh my god" particle had an energy of around 50 Joules. That's comprable to a well-hit tennisball, which is a whopping amount of energy for a subatomic particle.
In a game where most skillsets are based around smashing people's faces in, it's hard to do meaningful helping quests, alas.
I'm sure there's a simple solution to this somewhere which I'm overlooking, but having an aspect of a person's billing completely outside their control seems rather bizarre.