Being one who works in the gaming press, I have experienced just this problem. I often have to moderate or edit my team's writeups and articles to line up with publisher's expectations and to avoid receiving letters about reviews that are 'overly negative'. This often makes it difficult to give anything much below about 70% if you want to hear from the publisher ever again... we made that mistake with Codemasters and they're not very co-operative.
There are very few companies who will actually continue to co-operate with you after a negative review towards one of their products. I tend to find that reviewing products by dividing reviews up into two 'categories' of target audience, you achieve better results. By saying
This game is brilliant for those who don't care about the details of , but just want to kick back and relax with friends on a Friday night
you make it look good... and then simply follow it by
For those who are addicted to their games, you might want to wait until it hits the bargain bins.
That tends to mean you can average up your rating a bit... and no-one tends to notice - and your readers get to know your strategy after a while, resulting in 'accurate' reviews whilst keeping publishers happy.
It'll be mighty fun when, in court, there can be found no evidence that the weapon was abused... simply because it doesn't actually 'do' anything. Roll on even more police abuse of 'non-lethal' weaponry.
Once again we find ourselves looking at a group of lawmakers who have the situation the totally wrong way around. You can argue and argue and try and prove that violent games cause people to commit crimes like this - but there are far too many cases to the contrary for that to be conclusively true. I'm sure many Slashdotters play violent games, and I doubt that the majority (is it too presumptuous to say 'any'?) of members have ever seriously considered shooting up a school, or such - let alone gone and done it.
Violent video games *do* have an effect on people, let's not bypass the issue, but they people they tend to have this "devastating" effect on are people that already have a tendancy towards violence or exhibit a sufficient lack of discipline.
Surely the key to ensuring that people don't take stuff in video games too seriously, is to ensure that children are disciplined and educated enough to understand that the simulated world != real life? I'm sure that the majority of the population understand this - but once again people are looking to penalise the masses for the actions of a few, rather than spend the time to inform, educate and discipline those few.
These are great, I have a few of them. They're thin, simple, come in a range of colours, and just work if you want to keep things safe, but don't need paper inserts, or spines, to identify things by. They also do a great job of protecting CDs from when you end up sitting on one...
This may sound like a somewhat strange theory... but stick with me for a moment.
As water becomes warmer, as eldavojohn pointed out, it is more prone to evaporation. As evaporation increases in speed, so does the formation of clouds, and the size of aforementioned clouds. Quicker formation of clouds means greater cloud cover and density. Greater cloud density means an increase in precipitation. Precipitation in the higher latitudes (arctic latitudes in this case) frequently results in snowfall. Snowfall onto glaciers and ice caps slowly increases the aforementioned in size at a similar rate to which water was lost from the same region due to evaporation.
So, could it be, that warming seas leads to BIGGER ice caps, not smaller ones?
I'm quite open to have my theory rubbished with good reason. Just a thought.
Slashdot Mirror
There are very few companies who will actually continue to co-operate with you after a negative review towards one of their products. I tend to find that reviewing products by dividing reviews up into two 'categories' of target audience, you achieve better results. By saying
you make it look good... and then simply follow it by
That tends to mean you can average up your rating a bit... and no-one tends to notice - and your readers get to know your strategy after a while, resulting in 'accurate' reviews whilst keeping publishers happy.
It'll be mighty fun when, in court, there can be found no evidence that the weapon was abused... simply because it doesn't actually 'do' anything. Roll on even more police abuse of 'non-lethal' weaponry.
Once again we find ourselves looking at a group of lawmakers who have the situation the totally wrong way around. You can argue and argue and try and prove that violent games cause people to commit crimes like this - but there are far too many cases to the contrary for that to be conclusively true. I'm sure many Slashdotters play violent games, and I doubt that the majority (is it too presumptuous to say 'any'?) of members have ever seriously considered shooting up a school, or such - let alone gone and done it.
Violent video games *do* have an effect on people, let's not bypass the issue, but they people they tend to have this "devastating" effect on are people that already have a tendancy towards violence or exhibit a sufficient lack of discipline.
Surely the key to ensuring that people don't take stuff in video games too seriously, is to ensure that children are disciplined and educated enough to understand that the simulated world != real life? I'm sure that the majority of the population understand this - but once again people are looking to penalise the masses for the actions of a few, rather than spend the time to inform, educate and discipline those few.
http://www.variopac.de/english/Products/variopac.h tml
These are great, I have a few of them. They're thin, simple, come in a range of colours, and just work if you want to keep things safe, but don't need paper inserts, or spines, to identify things by. They also do a great job of protecting CDs from when you end up sitting on one...
Microsoft claim that this is the most secure OS to date... but they also claim that it's incredibly stable. I don't get how that works.
If you want security, use Windows 95... A crashed computer is incredibly secure - far more secure than Vista.
This may sound like a somewhat strange theory... but stick with me for a moment. As water becomes warmer, as eldavojohn pointed out, it is more prone to evaporation. As evaporation increases in speed, so does the formation of clouds, and the size of aforementioned clouds. Quicker formation of clouds means greater cloud cover and density. Greater cloud density means an increase in precipitation. Precipitation in the higher latitudes (arctic latitudes in this case) frequently results in snowfall. Snowfall onto glaciers and ice caps slowly increases the aforementioned in size at a similar rate to which water was lost from the same region due to evaporation. So, could it be, that warming seas leads to BIGGER ice caps, not smaller ones? I'm quite open to have my theory rubbished with good reason. Just a thought.
Let's think about this for a second... What should Venus be like...
~ Not a lot of water.
~ Extreme temperatures.
~ No sign of intelligent life.
Does that ring a bell? Oh wait, it's exactly like the rest of the planets in our solar system...
And we just wasted *how* much money on finding that out?