The trick isn't to just find a friend with a prescription, but to find a friend who doesn't need his/her prescription. I had a friend who was diagnosed with ADD but was prescribed more adderall than was necessary... much more.
What he didn't use ended up going to his friends who wanted it. I know its not really the point of the article, but I worry more about the kids who crush it up and snort it over the kids who take it to study for a test. I've never really bought into the idea of most "gateway drugs", but I've seen a lot of people make the leap from snorting adderall to snorting coke.
Google making firefox extensions? Maybe I'm retarded, but this is the first I've seen.
Maybe I'm retarded, but that didn't seem sarcastic to me, so here are some other firefox extensions from google. The "beta" (yeah, google loves the beta) version of google toolbar for firefox was released on July 7th, 2005.
Most things, when *not* done in moderation, can be dangerous to your health while small doses would actually be beneficial. Its actually healthy to get 10-15 minutes of sun everyday, but if you tan for 3 hours every day, you're significantly increasing your chance for skin cancer. Eating food, drinking alcohol, sleeping, excersizing, and plenty of other activities work the same way. I always thought it would stand to reason that moderation is important for whatever you do.
It drives me crazy when people start to insinuate that video games are some how in their own category, or even worse, on the same level as drug addiction. People can try to compare drugs and video games if they want, but consider how many people in the United States are addicted to fatty foods. Obesity is approaching the leading cause of death in the US. 400,000 died in 2000 due to obesity in the US, yet we are worrying about video game addiction that caused 10 deaths in Korea? I'm not trying to say that people shouldn't be educated about it, but don't try to tell me that playing WoW ruins lives the same way drugs do.
Wow do I agree. I got over the high price and have been trying to look past the rootkit fiasco since Sony-BMG is *technically* a different part of Sony, but this move is just taking things too far. All that's left is to station Sony employee's in every store that sells a PS3 so they can kick you in the ass after you purchase one.
I failed to account for a lot of things because there are so many things to take into account, and I didn't want to write a thesis on the buying habits of gamers, the influences of game development, Wal-mart's affect on violent games, Xbox's struggle in the Asian market, pirating, how PC's will affect the console wars, etc, etc. I was basing my post on some hard information I could take from the past instead of speculation of what will happen in the future. In the past, Sony will has had what most people would consider a wider range of games than the other consoles. It is speculation to say whether that will or will not happen in the future (although you make a good point). It is also speculation to say that the PS3 games will cost $60 while the Wii games will cost less (although I also agree with you there). I'm not saying that making assumptions, like I did, was much better, just that it is another way to look at some of the trends. I think you're point is a good one, but not one that invalidates mine.
Let me "re-do" my math. If I buy just 20 games for a system at $50 a game, that comes out to be $1000. Wait, that's the same answer I came up with before... strange how math works like that.
Also, I said that I have about 50 PS2 games (I'm saying PS2 because you brought up PS2). If I buy 20 PS2 games at $50 out of the 50, then that is about (notice the word "about", don't want to get called out on my poor math again) the same percentage as you buying 6 full priced games out of 20.
Either way, I had to make a lot of assumptions in that post, and in a lot of place I pointed out that I was making assumptions. I can't take into account people who only buy from bargain bins or people who only buy full priced games the day they are released. Well, I could, but it would take a hell of a lot of math and a few pages to do so. The major point I was trying to make is that as a gamer buys more games, the initial cost of the console is overshadowed by the money spent on games. The converse is also true: if you only buy one game, the price of the console overshadows the money spent on the game. I'm working under the assumption that most people buy more than one game.
Again, as I alluded to in the first place, it gets really difficult to take into account the buying habits of each individual as I'm sure there are other people with different buying habits who neither of us would ever hvae thought existed.
Most people who buy the Wii will do so because of the controller, not the price. In the case of the PS3, most people will buy it because it will have the widest selection of games out of the new consoles. A lot of people bought the 360 because it was the first next-gen console to be released.
This isn't to say that plenty of people will buy one or more of the consoles because they like the brand or own the previous generations of it or that some people will make their decisions based on price. IMO, price is not the driving factor behind purchasing a console.
I own well over 50 PS2 games (I really don't know how many, but that is a low estimate), 20 Nintendo 64 games, 20 Xbox games, 50 PSOne games, 50 SNES games, and I probably have 20 or so NES games stuffed in a box somewhere. If I buy just 20 games for a system at $50 a game, that comes out to be $1000. For the PS3's low model, the system plus 20 games comes out to be $1500, while the Wii, assuming the price for the system will be $200, with 20 games will be around $1200. I'm only paying 25% more for the PS3 with 20 games as opposed to paying 200% more if you just consider the systems without games. Yes, a $500 or $600 pricetag seems like a lot compared to $200, but as you buy more games, that initial investment means so much less. At 50 games for each console, the PS3 only costs 11% more.
All those games that I own add up to (assuming the average game cost me $30) $6300 where the consoles cost me no more than $1400. The consoles cost me roughly 18% of the money I have spent on video games, with the estimates I have provided (even though I didn't consider controllers, adapters, TVs, electricity, and anything else that might be related). Since I know the initial price of a console isn't a major factor in the long run, I don't think that it will affect people that much in the beginning either.
This sounds exactly like something I, a 22 year old CS major, would love. I mean, being a CS major, I love Microsoft, and who in the right mind doesn't want to have all sorts of restrictions put on their music? Combine that with MusicTV, who is just so popular with everyone over the age of 13, and you've got a recipe for for some great sales. I can't wait to get episodes of Yo' Mamma for a monthly fee. I'm not sure why everyone else is talking about music or competing with iTunes since MTV hasn't played any music in years, but at least we can look forward to Date My Mom on our computers.
With the faster than light part, the key word here is "information". Quantum tunnelling achieved faster than light travel of particles, but the information is lost, where information can be a bit pattern or the hotly debated signal with Beethoven's 5th. As far as I know, they never really managed to send Beethoven's 5th and then receive it on the other side.
Why is the light travelling faster than light? It has to do with quantum probabilities, where the particles sometimes appear on the other side of the barrier as if the barrier wasn't there. Its like the space where the barrier was is just removed, so the particle actually travels a shorter distance than would be measured from the reference of the observer. The particles are actually moving at the same velocity on both sides of the barrier, but since they skip through the barrier, they actually arrive before regular light would.... or at least that was how I understood it.
Since the particles end up on the other side of the barrier only sometimes (depending on the probability) the researchers haven't found a way to send any relavent information that can withstand the randomization.
Maybe I don't understand how easy this must be to implement. I thought that this would take a good amount of work to get working, but then again I don't know.
Again, this comes down to how your interpretation of "hastily tacked on". To me, adding a wireless network card a week ago would fit the bill, but designing a technology, implementing it, and creating the controllers (assembly lines already?) takes a fair amount of work and time... but that's just me
I thought it was obvious that I was talking about the feature in the controller, not in the game. Whether or not it was "hastily tacked on" depends on whether you are talking about the game or the system, where I was speaking about the latter. I guess the article is a little ambiguous as to whether they are talking about the feature in the controller or in the game. As far as the game goes, its pretty obvious that it was hastily added on, but that isn't necessarily the case for the controller as I explained. Something that has been in development for months (although we don't know how long they've been working on it) isn't "hastily tacking on". However, I'd say "completed at the last minute" would be appropriate.
Just because the game developers found out about the motion sensing functionality within the last few weeks doesn't mean it was "hastily tacked on." To me, "hastily tacked on" means that the decision to add the feature came late in development and was then added at the last minute.
How long have we known about Nintendo's controllers? It was debuted September 15, 2005. So if Sony started working on this technology as soon as Nintendo announced the controller, they would have been working on it for over 7 months before releasing it to developers. They could have waited a while to start working on it, but from all the praise it got at E3 in Japan, I would think they would have started research right away, assuming that they weren't already working on such a feature. The recent release of the technology to developers doesn't seem like something that was "hastily tacked on", but more like something that took a while to develop and perfect before it could be implemented.
...with that said, it definitely seems like they stole the idea from Nintendo and wanted to take the hype away from the Wii.
First off, I think the PS3 is overpriced. However, most consoles are more expensive than the previous generation of consoles, depending on how you define a generation. Demand in a growing market and inflation both affect the price here. RIP for overpricing? How about RIP for only have 4 million consoles in the first month.
And I hope it erodes the ratings systems. If Oblivion gets an M rating for this nonsense, forget about what it means for Bethesda for a minute and think about what it says about the M rating? It sure changes the way I look at M rated games. Will this just shift all of the ratings up a level? If it does, then how much will these ratings mean to people if a game based on Sesame Street gets bumped up to a Teen rating because it depicts Oscar as homeless (or some better analogy that I can't think of, but you get the point)?
There was a really good article in Wired, that I couldn't find by searching Wired but popped right up in google, called something like Click fraud could swallow the internet.
It's an interesting article, but the main reason I bring it up is because sometimes, as they say in the article, competitors are actually the ones going to sites and committing click fraud just to get the site kicked off AdSense.
True, these issues have been discussed before, but this is news because Marvel is doing it, and many more people know about Marvel than they do Watchmen. It's a lot like all the publicity around Brokeback Mountain. That theme has been done independently, but never in a major motion picture.
People expect independents to make controversial subject matter. They don't expect to see it in the mainstream, and when they do, it raises eyebrows.
It doesn't matter how much teens (or anyone else) like online gaming communities if they have a 56k modem. Playing Counterstrike:Source on a 56k isn't playing Counterstrike... I wouldn't even call it Duck Hunt. Consoles will work the same way unless you are playing turn based games. This really applies to the US because we still have such poor broadband coverage. MySpace, on the other hand, doesn't require a good connection.
On a related topic, if Microsoft really wants to increase the percentage of xBox Live users (which is 50% of 360 owners, taken from this slashdot article) then maybe they should consider spreading broadband instead of offering free upgraded service for a week.
That sounds like a great strategy. Promise a technology that doesn't exist, and then just delay it until the technology is actually invented! Since you were the first to claim you were would provide it, its only natural to think that people will want to buy your product.
In other news, my company is developing faster-than-light travel which will be released in the near future...
Just like the last few articles from Next Generation, these are the games that Next Gen hopes to see at E3 from Sony, not the games that Sony will be displaying. The disclaimer is at the bottom of the article.
Slashdot Mirror
The trick isn't to just find a friend with a prescription, but to find a friend who doesn't need his/her prescription. I had a friend who was diagnosed with ADD but was prescribed more adderall than was necessary... much more.
What he didn't use ended up going to his friends who wanted it. I know its not really the point of the article, but I worry more about the kids who crush it up and snort it over the kids who take it to study for a test. I've never really bought into the idea of most "gateway drugs", but I've seen a lot of people make the leap from snorting adderall to snorting coke.
Google making firefox extensions? Maybe I'm retarded, but this is the first I've seen.
Maybe I'm retarded, but that didn't seem sarcastic to me, so here are some other firefox extensions from google. The "beta" (yeah, google loves the beta) version of google toolbar for firefox was released on July 7th, 2005.
in moderation
Most things, when *not* done in moderation, can be dangerous to your health while small doses would actually be beneficial. Its actually healthy to get 10-15 minutes of sun everyday, but if you tan for 3 hours every day, you're significantly increasing your chance for skin cancer. Eating food, drinking alcohol, sleeping, excersizing, and plenty of other activities work the same way. I always thought it would stand to reason that moderation is important for whatever you do.
It drives me crazy when people start to insinuate that video games are some how in their own category, or even worse, on the same level as drug addiction. People can try to compare drugs and video games if they want, but consider how many people in the United States are addicted to fatty foods. Obesity is approaching the leading cause of death in the US. 400,000 died in 2000 due to obesity in the US, yet we are worrying about video game addiction that caused 10 deaths in Korea? I'm not trying to say that people shouldn't be educated about it, but don't try to tell me that playing WoW ruins lives the same way drugs do.
Wow do I agree. I got over the high price and have been trying to look past the rootkit fiasco since Sony-BMG is *technically* a different part of Sony, but this move is just taking things too far. All that's left is to station Sony employee's in every store that sells a PS3 so they can kick you in the ass after you purchase one.
I failed to account for a lot of things because there are so many things to take into account, and I didn't want to write a thesis on the buying habits of gamers, the influences of game development, Wal-mart's affect on violent games, Xbox's struggle in the Asian market, pirating, how PC's will affect the console wars, etc, etc. I was basing my post on some hard information I could take from the past instead of speculation of what will happen in the future. In the past, Sony will has had what most people would consider a wider range of games than the other consoles. It is speculation to say whether that will or will not happen in the future (although you make a good point). It is also speculation to say that the PS3 games will cost $60 while the Wii games will cost less (although I also agree with you there). I'm not saying that making assumptions, like I did, was much better, just that it is another way to look at some of the trends. I think you're point is a good one, but not one that invalidates mine.
Let me "re-do" my math. If I buy just 20 games for a system at $50 a game, that comes out to be $1000. Wait, that's the same answer I came up with before... strange how math works like that.
Also, I said that I have about 50 PS2 games (I'm saying PS2 because you brought up PS2). If I buy 20 PS2 games at $50 out of the 50, then that is about (notice the word "about", don't want to get called out on my poor math again) the same percentage as you buying 6 full priced games out of 20.
Either way, I had to make a lot of assumptions in that post, and in a lot of place I pointed out that I was making assumptions. I can't take into account people who only buy from bargain bins or people who only buy full priced games the day they are released. Well, I could, but it would take a hell of a lot of math and a few pages to do so. The major point I was trying to make is that as a gamer buys more games, the initial cost of the console is overshadowed by the money spent on games. The converse is also true: if you only buy one game, the price of the console overshadows the money spent on the game. I'm working under the assumption that most people buy more than one game.
Again, as I alluded to in the first place, it gets really difficult to take into account the buying habits of each individual as I'm sure there are other people with different buying habits who neither of us would ever hvae thought existed.
Most people who buy the Wii will do so because of the controller, not the price. In the case of the PS3, most people will buy it because it will have the widest selection of games out of the new consoles. A lot of people bought the 360 because it was the first next-gen console to be released.
This isn't to say that plenty of people will buy one or more of the consoles because they like the brand or own the previous generations of it or that some people will make their decisions based on price. IMO, price is not the driving factor behind purchasing a console.
I own well over 50 PS2 games (I really don't know how many, but that is a low estimate), 20 Nintendo 64 games, 20 Xbox games, 50 PSOne games, 50 SNES games, and I probably have 20 or so NES games stuffed in a box somewhere. If I buy just 20 games for a system at $50 a game, that comes out to be $1000. For the PS3's low model, the system plus 20 games comes out to be $1500, while the Wii, assuming the price for the system will be $200, with 20 games will be around $1200. I'm only paying 25% more for the PS3 with 20 games as opposed to paying 200% more if you just consider the systems without games. Yes, a $500 or $600 pricetag seems like a lot compared to $200, but as you buy more games, that initial investment means so much less. At 50 games for each console, the PS3 only costs 11% more.
All those games that I own add up to (assuming the average game cost me $30) $6300 where the consoles cost me no more than $1400. The consoles cost me roughly 18% of the money I have spent on video games, with the estimates I have provided (even though I didn't consider controllers, adapters, TVs, electricity, and anything else that might be related). Since I know the initial price of a console isn't a major factor in the long run, I don't think that it will affect people that much in the beginning either.
This sounds exactly like something I, a 22 year old CS major, would love. I mean, being a CS major, I love Microsoft, and who in the right mind doesn't want to have all sorts of restrictions put on their music? Combine that with MusicTV, who is just so popular with everyone over the age of 13, and you've got a recipe for for some great sales. I can't wait to get episodes of Yo' Mamma for a monthly fee. I'm not sure why everyone else is talking about music or competing with iTunes since MTV hasn't played any music in years, but at least we can look forward to Date My Mom on our computers.
With the faster than light part, the key word here is "information". Quantum tunnelling achieved faster than light travel of particles, but the information is lost, where information can be a bit pattern or the hotly debated signal with Beethoven's 5th. As far as I know, they never really managed to send Beethoven's 5th and then receive it on the other side.
Why is the light travelling faster than light? It has to do with quantum probabilities, where the particles sometimes appear on the other side of the barrier as if the barrier wasn't there. Its like the space where the barrier was is just removed, so the particle actually travels a shorter distance than would be measured from the reference of the observer. The particles are actually moving at the same velocity on both sides of the barrier, but since they skip through the barrier, they actually arrive before regular light would.... or at least that was how I understood it.
Since the particles end up on the other side of the barrier only sometimes (depending on the probability) the researchers haven't found a way to send any relavent information that can withstand the randomization.
Maybe I don't understand how easy this must be to implement. I thought that this would take a good amount of work to get working, but then again I don't know. Again, this comes down to how your interpretation of "hastily tacked on". To me, adding a wireless network card a week ago would fit the bill, but designing a technology, implementing it, and creating the controllers (assembly lines already?) takes a fair amount of work and time... but that's just me
I thought it was obvious that I was talking about the feature in the controller, not in the game. Whether or not it was "hastily tacked on" depends on whether you are talking about the game or the system, where I was speaking about the latter. I guess the article is a little ambiguous as to whether they are talking about the feature in the controller or in the game. As far as the game goes, its pretty obvious that it was hastily added on, but that isn't necessarily the case for the controller as I explained. Something that has been in development for months (although we don't know how long they've been working on it) isn't "hastily tacking on". However, I'd say "completed at the last minute" would be appropriate.
yup, my mistake
Just because the game developers found out about the motion sensing functionality within the last few weeks doesn't mean it was "hastily tacked on." To me, "hastily tacked on" means that the decision to add the feature came late in development and was then added at the last minute.
...with that said, it definitely seems like they stole the idea from Nintendo and wanted to take the hype away from the Wii.
How long have we known about Nintendo's controllers? It was debuted September 15, 2005. So if Sony started working on this technology as soon as Nintendo announced the controller, they would have been working on it for over 7 months before releasing it to developers. They could have waited a while to start working on it, but from all the praise it got at E3 in Japan, I would think they would have started research right away, assuming that they weren't already working on such a feature. The recent release of the technology to developers doesn't seem like something that was "hastily tacked on", but more like something that took a while to develop and perfect before it could be implemented.
...the buttons on the PS2 controller were pressure sensitive? Wow, the things you learn reading /.
RIP sony
First off, I think the PS3 is overpriced. However, most consoles are more expensive than the previous generation of consoles, depending on how you define a generation. Demand in a growing market and inflation both affect the price here. RIP for overpricing? How about RIP for only have 4 million consoles in the first month.
FTA: Mechanisms exist that would allow the Constant to decrease incrementally through time.
So, its not a constant...
And I hope it erodes the ratings systems. If Oblivion gets an M rating for this nonsense, forget about what it means for Bethesda for a minute and think about what it says about the M rating? It sure changes the way I look at M rated games. Will this just shift all of the ratings up a level? If it does, then how much will these ratings mean to people if a game based on Sesame Street gets bumped up to a Teen rating because it depicts Oscar as homeless (or some better analogy that I can't think of, but you get the point)?
It's past time for the cities in America to start providing low or no cost bandwidth as a service just as we have low cost water and sewage service.
I totally agree, and I just hope that in the long run, WiFi doesn't go the way of bottled water...
There was a really good article in Wired, that I couldn't find by searching Wired but popped right up in google, called something like Click fraud could swallow the internet.
It's an interesting article, but the main reason I bring it up is because sometimes, as they say in the article, competitors are actually the ones going to sites and committing click fraud just to get the site kicked off AdSense.
True, these issues have been discussed before, but this is news because Marvel is doing it, and many more people know about Marvel than they do Watchmen. It's a lot like all the publicity around Brokeback Mountain. That theme has been done independently, but never in a major motion picture.
People expect independents to make controversial subject matter. They don't expect to see it in the mainstream, and when they do, it raises eyebrows.
It doesn't matter how much teens (or anyone else) like online gaming communities if they have a 56k modem. Playing Counterstrike:Source on a 56k isn't playing Counterstrike... I wouldn't even call it Duck Hunt. Consoles will work the same way unless you are playing turn based games. This really applies to the US because we still have such poor broadband coverage. MySpace, on the other hand, doesn't require a good connection.
On a related topic, if Microsoft really wants to increase the percentage of xBox Live users (which is 50% of 360 owners, taken from this slashdot article) then maybe they should consider spreading broadband instead of offering free upgraded service for a week.
Good thing you only filed for "patient application". My patent is already in the system.
That sounds like a great strategy. Promise a technology that doesn't exist, and then just delay it until the technology is actually invented! Since you were the first to claim you were would provide it, its only natural to think that people will want to buy your product.
In other news, my company is developing faster-than-light travel which will be released in the near future...
Just like the last few articles from Next Generation, these are the games that Next Gen hopes to see at E3 from Sony, not the games that Sony will be displaying. The disclaimer is at the bottom of the article.
There is a difference between saying that a name is stupid and saying that a system is stupid.