Well, posting on Slashdot has very little to do with being "manly" in the traditional sense. Quite the opposite, which is probably why we see nonsensical posts of rage through the veil of anonymity. *grin*
Do some homework, and find some organizations that focus on prevention of disease rather than cures. Prevention, far and away, is the best way to keep most of those nasty diseases (and most of those benign ones, too) at bay. Promote healthy eating choices (obesity being the big epidemic problem in the US), help out at blood drives (donating or otherwise), teach kids to use condoms if they really can't keep their hormones in check, those sort of things (which, by the way, includes screening for Breast Cancer *cough*). It really makes more of a difference than anything else.
The numbers don't lie, but they don't often say the message that you may be hearing. First of all, Breast Cancer has come a long way in so-called "Awareness" and education, such that early screening detects cases earlier and thus are more easily treatable. While I'm not sure how many women do self-exams monthly at home, I'm fairly certain that it's more than the population of people who dig around in their stool looking for blood after every bowel movement. On the higher end, both mammograms and colonoscopies are uncomfortable, but people are much less likely to put off getting a mammogram than they are to put off getting a colonoscopy. Advances in both chemotherapy and surgery have reduced morbidity and mortality, and lumpectomies (vs. mastectomies) are far less disfiguring, reducing the stigma of treatment. It's not perfect; it's not as remarkable as, say, the reduction of cervical cancer cases and deaths after the introduction of the Pap smear. But the priority on Breast Cancer is justified, and a good use of medical resources and publicity.
A comparable example for men is testicular cancer. In my training (I Am Really A Doctor), I've noticed that men will let all sorts of crazy medical stuff slide, but when the jimmy sack is in trouble, they'll go to the hospital right away. It scares the beejezus out of men to find a "lump on a nut".
The big "daddy, as far as cancer is Lung Cancer, for both sexes. But no matter how many times you tell someone to quit smoking, it's a tough cookie to crack. The average smoker will attempt to quit smoking about 7 times before succeeding, using a variety of methods. And most people quit after it's too late, and they are on the Emphysema wagon.
But the real killer is cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Far and away the highest cause of morbidity and mortality in these United States.
Apparently, it's light blue for Prostate Cancer, and Prostate Cancer awareness month is September (at least it was last year).
Breast Cancer strikes fear in the heart of many women despite being one of the most treatable cancers. I'm sure TFA has his/her heart in the right place, even though I can't see how making pink websites would make a difference.
Now here's a useful entertainment robot - the MotoMan RoboBar This is a two-armed industrial robot bartender. For real.
The MotoMan RoboBar is from the leading robotics company from Japan, Yaskawa Electric. Over 120,000 robots installed. Their slogan is intimidating: "We already make your car. Let us make your drink". While CMU is making toys, Yaskawa is automating the world.
Wait, wait... so if you combine Quasi with MotoMan, do you get a Quasimodo Man of your own? It would be an ugly design, to be sure, but I think my friend Esmerelda would dig it.
Gilette is releasing a new shaver called the "Plutonium Mach80", a razor with 80 blades. Each blade has a separate distinct function, and you can get even closer shaves with the synergistic cuisinart action. Also comes in a "For Women" model for "sensitive areas". "Basically, 5 blades isn't enough. I mean, really, more is better, right?", says Gilette CEO James Kilts. Schick is reportedly working on a competitor blade that may exceed the legendary "100 blade barrier".
I wonder if this mouse could have reasonable application in environments which require a higher than normal level of sterilization. For example, there are many biology labs that culture cells of some sort that need to be kept sterile. Just from anecdotal evidence (i.e. walking around and going "ugh" at the sight of those mice), the average office mouse in almost all environments is pretty darn filthy.
Well, aside from the obvious playful semantics, those who are supposedly "disabled" can easily thrive in computerized environments (including games) if they are given the tools to do so. This isn't about giving aim-bots to people who can't twitch as well as the next caffeine-addled professional gamer. This is about giving them access to a great and enjoyable hobby that is right up their alley. I'm sure people with disability can be asshole cheaters online, and I'm not suggesting that we should give them license to do so because of their condition, whatever it may be. My original post (parent) isn't about rights of people with disability or aging gamers to "perform" as well as the regular gaming public... I simply feel that the gaming industry has reached a level of sophistication and technical excellence where they can easily provide services for accessibility, tapping into a ripe market for which their products are well-suited.
While the "filter" of anonymity allows people to associate and congregate who might otherwise not (due to race, culture, religion, political inclination, gender, sexual orientation, whatever), it also serves to dissociate you from your online avatar. You play someone else online, but you are still pretty much the same person when you leave the computer. Just because your characters and avatars online can fight side by side or even competitively in a friendly manner does not mean that you are a more tolerant and compassionate person when you stop playing and go back to "real life". You'll still be relatively the same person, with the same prejudices, same cultural upbringing, and same outlook on life. I'm not claiming that personal change can't happen due to gaming, and I think it can bridge the gap to understanding one another in a few extraordinary cases, but so can any other means of communications with a level of anonymity and neutrality.
It's a pretty good literature review on the various studies done on Reaction Time and the various factors relating to it. Some pearls:
Many researchers have confirmed that reaction to sound is faster than reaction to light, with mean auditory reaction times being 140-160 msec and visual reaction times being 180-200 msec (Galton, 1899; Woodworth and Schlosberg, 1954; Fieandt et al., 1956; Welford, 1980; Brebner and Welford, 1980). Perhaps this is because an auditory stimulus only takes 8-10 msec to reach the brain (Kemp et al., 1973), but a visual stimulus takes 20-40 msec (Marshall et al., 1943).
Simple reaction time shortens from infancy into the late 20s, then increases slowly until the 50s and 60s, and then lengthens faster as the person gets into his 70s and beyond (Welford, 1977; Jevas and Yan, 2001; Luchies et al., 2002; Rose et al., 2002; Der and Deary, 2006). Luchies et al.(2002) also reported that this age effect was more marked for complex reaction time tasks, and Der and Deary (2006) concurred. Reaction time also becomes more variable with age (Hultsch et al., 2002). Welford (1980) speculates on the reason for slowing reaction time with age. It is not just simple mechanical factors like the speed of nervous conduction. It may be the tendency of older people to be more careful and monitor their responses more thoroughly (Botwinick, 1966). When troubled by a distraction, older people also tend to devote their exclusive attention to one stimulus, and ignore another stimulus, more completely than younger people (Redfern et al., 2002).
At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006).
The authors concluded that left-handed people have an inherent reaction time advantage. In an experiment using a computer mouse, Peters and Ivanoff (1999) found that right-handed people were faster with their right hand (as expected), but left-handed people were equally fast with both hands. The preferred hand was generally faster. However, the reaction time advantage of the preferred over the non-preferred hands was so small that they recommended alternating hands when using a mouse. Bryden (2002), using right-handed people only, found that task difficulty did not affect the reaction time difference between the left and right hands.
There are a lot more good summaries in that article. I also remember being in a Science Museum and one of the exhibits claimed that the best reaction times on their particular exhibit in traditional studies were seasoned Aircraft Pilots.
Accessibility is an issue that affects millions of Americans (and worldwide) with disability, not just disability due to aging. While the implications of aging will affect a lot of contemporary games and the current "gamer" population, there are quite a few youngsters with disability who are disenfranchised from the enjoyment of video games due to access issues. I remember hearing an article on NPR about the blind being able to play text adventures through text-to-speech. While I doubt the feasibility of statements like "Blind people should be able to play XBox 360", I think that the gaming industry, especially consoles, has matured in sophistication enough to start adding accessibility features to their games. I can think of several off-the-shelf solutions for consoles right now (using one-handed controllers or a Dance Dance Revolution pad for playing RPGs or tactical strategy games, in folks with manual dexterity problems, alternate input devices for consoles, etc.), but it would be nice to see more effort on the software side. After all, gaming is a great hobby for those who may be wheelchair-bound or have to stay indoors for one reason or another.
The double major in Physics and Math is a pretty smart choice, if I were to "twink" my college education like that. Most institutions allow AP credit to qualify for non-major related prerequisites (so you can focus on the "good stuff" instead of all that well-rounded stuff) and thus most of his high school AP credits may apply. A typical Math and/or Physics degree focuses on multiple subdisciplines that can be studied concurrently rather than in sequence. And, of course, a person with an aptitude in Math will find the coursework easy to digest and easy to take tests for (which inevitably involve solving problems rehashed in the coursework rather than coming up with novel solutions or proofs). In other words, if I was powerleveling through college (which is what he did), that's probably the route I would have taken.
Of course, with this current toon, I took the other route and only had 12 credit hour semesters and took a lot of extra-curricular cultural classes in music, literature, and sociology. Sometimes life is better when you stop and smell the roses.
Toss in an automatic Term Paper writer extension, and I'm in! Wait, crap, I'm not in school anymore. *sigh* I always felt that I was born a decade too early.
And all of those old vinyl records sitting in your parents' attics? You can sell them on eBay to teenagers with disposable incomes! This is probably simply yet-another-Retro movement. Just like all of us geeks, when we brag about our Pac-Man scores or our prowess with COBOL or using the word "grok".
This is old news. Quite a few games have blatant product placements (and some games are virtual ads all by themselves... I know of more than one cereal that has their own labeled game in specially-marked boxes). In one relatively recent example, Anarchy Online has rotating ad billboards all over the place, although if you are a subscriber then you can turn them off... it's a great way to subsidize the "fr00bs", or the free-to-play accounts. America's Army is one big PR ad for the US military. I'm sure the/.ers can come up with many other examples.
If I'm not paying for something, I'm happy to support a game through slightly-obtrusive ads (The price of "free"-dom, hah). If I am paying for something, though, then there had better be a good reason that the ads are there.
Well, as far as chess and scrabble, one can easily have computerized assistance to gain an edge over his/her competitors, especially in an online setting. However, as with many cheats, that would defeat the purpose of the game.
I've used cheats before in single player computer/video games to accelerate my progress through a game if the gameplay that I'm bypassing isn't what I'm interested in. For example, I may use cheats to augment health or cash or ammunition when I'm more interested in progressing through the story of the game rather than relishing the challenge of the gameplay (although, isn't that what difficulty levels are for?). However, these cheats are often built into the game by the developers for debugging and playtesting purposes. Thus using these cheats for similar purposes is in-line with how the game is meant to be played.
The main problem with cheaters is not that they are seeking personal gain or that they have augmented their playing experience. It is the fact that they often ruin the experience for others. Games are very much a social activity for many folks who play online, and the presence of cheaters degrades their competitive experience. And while the casual online games aren't of much consequence, as more games are played competitively for money and/or status, cheating will become a more serious issue in the future.
Unfortunately, far too mamy players are argueing about the wrong thing, usually the red herring of realism. If you favor realism over abstraction, you have a simulator, not a game.
Although it's easy to point to the "fun" litmus test to determine whether or not a game is reviewed, fun is a subjective and abstract concept. For some folks, realism IS fun... there are many hobbies which take pride in the details (model ships, amateur rocketry, etc.) and gaming is broad enough to encompass the realism and attention to detail that these people seek (Gran Turismo, Microsoft Flight Simulator). There are even games that skirt the line of realism and fun... certainly, the Sims franchise isn't real life, but it is meant to simulate real life with a close attention to detail, and it's the bestselling non-subscription PC game of all time. It is also broad enough to encompass the "pick-up-and-play" fun that comes with Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, or any other so-called "fun" games.
In other words, the "I like playing it, therefore it's fun" works if you want to look at it that way, but it doesn't necessarily work for everyone. I find myself playing different games for different reasons. A game of Incredible Machine appeals to me in a much different way than a game of online Unreal Tournament.
On another note, pursuing this elusive "fun factor" has been the downfall of many game companies. You can't code it, and there's no way to really express it consistently.
The human brain does a fair amount of interpolating and "interlacing" to the images received by the optic nerve. This is evident in the "blind spot" that we all have. So while the actual visual field may be finite, the resolving power of the post-processed image can be much higher. One can argue that the resolution offered by the human eye is not additive, but redundant (both eyes see virtually the same content). One can also argue that it is synergistic (allows for depth perception).
The Mail client may look pretty and do a good job at organizing, but it carries a lot of baggage (ads, slow to load, doesn't work on all browsers). I wonder if it has mobile support (like Gmail).
I think I'll be sticking to Gmail. Unobtrusive text ads, lots of space, organizes my mail the way I want it to be organized (by labels and filters, not by folders), and it loads quickly on most browsers. The mobile support is just icing on the cake.
Personally, I'd like to see some abandonware on Steam. Or perhaps some of those old Sierra adventure games. Not that you couldn't get these off of eBay or something, but it would expose a new audience to games that they might not have been old enough to remember.
Remember Half-Life 2? This is a game that was massively delayed and clearly over-hyped, but it turned out to be as critically acclaimed and joyfully accepted as the original Half-Life. Sometimes a game can be over-hyped, but the amount of hype is not inversely proportional to the quality of the game.
This is one of those news stories that can be easily spun to be pro- and anti-Military, pro- and anti-American, pro- and anti-Democracy, etc. Is it really such a big deal? There are many forms of non-lethal measures out on the market already being used by law enforcement and even civilian populations. There are FAR more lethal measures both in use by law enforcement and civilians (everything from kitchen knives to a Honda Accord). After spending many years using science to develop new and exciting ways to kill each other, it's odd that there would be a controversial story about using science to develop new and exciting ways to NOT kill each other. Being hit by a Thomas A Swift Electric Raygun isn't fun, but at least I know I have a good chance of surviving it.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, posting on Slashdot has very little to do with being "manly" in the traditional sense. Quite the opposite, which is probably why we see nonsensical posts of rage through the veil of anonymity. *grin*
Do some homework, and find some organizations that focus on prevention of disease rather than cures. Prevention, far and away, is the best way to keep most of those nasty diseases (and most of those benign ones, too) at bay. Promote healthy eating choices (obesity being the big epidemic problem in the US), help out at blood drives (donating or otherwise), teach kids to use condoms if they really can't keep their hormones in check, those sort of things (which, by the way, includes screening for Breast Cancer *cough*). It really makes more of a difference than anything else.
The numbers don't lie, but they don't often say the message that you may be hearing. First of all, Breast Cancer has come a long way in so-called "Awareness" and education, such that early screening detects cases earlier and thus are more easily treatable. While I'm not sure how many women do self-exams monthly at home, I'm fairly certain that it's more than the population of people who dig around in their stool looking for blood after every bowel movement. On the higher end, both mammograms and colonoscopies are uncomfortable, but people are much less likely to put off getting a mammogram than they are to put off getting a colonoscopy. Advances in both chemotherapy and surgery have reduced morbidity and mortality, and lumpectomies (vs. mastectomies) are far less disfiguring, reducing the stigma of treatment. It's not perfect; it's not as remarkable as, say, the reduction of cervical cancer cases and deaths after the introduction of the Pap smear. But the priority on Breast Cancer is justified, and a good use of medical resources and publicity.
A comparable example for men is testicular cancer. In my training (I Am Really A Doctor), I've noticed that men will let all sorts of crazy medical stuff slide, but when the jimmy sack is in trouble, they'll go to the hospital right away. It scares the beejezus out of men to find a "lump on a nut".
The big "daddy, as far as cancer is Lung Cancer, for both sexes. But no matter how many times you tell someone to quit smoking, it's a tough cookie to crack. The average smoker will attempt to quit smoking about 7 times before succeeding, using a variety of methods. And most people quit after it's too late, and they are on the Emphysema wagon.
But the real killer is cardiovascular disease and diabetes. Far and away the highest cause of morbidity and mortality in these United States.
Apparently, it's light blue for Prostate Cancer, and Prostate Cancer awareness month is September (at least it was last year).
Breast Cancer strikes fear in the heart of many women despite being one of the most treatable cancers. I'm sure TFA has his/her heart in the right place, even though I can't see how making pink websites would make a difference.
Now here's a useful entertainment robot - the MotoMan RoboBar This is a two-armed industrial robot bartender. For real.
The MotoMan RoboBar is from the leading robotics company from Japan, Yaskawa Electric. Over 120,000 robots installed. Their slogan is intimidating: "We already make your car. Let us make your drink". While CMU is making toys, Yaskawa is automating the world.
Wait, wait... so if you combine Quasi with MotoMan, do you get a Quasimodo Man of your own? It would be an ugly design, to be sure, but I think my friend Esmerelda would dig it.
Gilette is releasing a new shaver called the "Plutonium Mach80", a razor with 80 blades. Each blade has a separate distinct function, and you can get even closer shaves with the synergistic cuisinart action. Also comes in a "For Women" model for "sensitive areas". "Basically, 5 blades isn't enough. I mean, really, more is better, right?", says Gilette CEO James Kilts. Schick is reportedly working on a competitor blade that may exceed the legendary "100 blade barrier".
I wonder if this mouse could have reasonable application in environments which require a higher than normal level of sterilization. For example, there are many biology labs that culture cells of some sort that need to be kept sterile. Just from anecdotal evidence (i.e. walking around and going "ugh" at the sight of those mice), the average office mouse in almost all environments is pretty darn filthy.
Well, aside from the obvious playful semantics, those who are supposedly "disabled" can easily thrive in computerized environments (including games) if they are given the tools to do so. This isn't about giving aim-bots to people who can't twitch as well as the next caffeine-addled professional gamer. This is about giving them access to a great and enjoyable hobby that is right up their alley. I'm sure people with disability can be asshole cheaters online, and I'm not suggesting that we should give them license to do so because of their condition, whatever it may be. My original post (parent) isn't about rights of people with disability or aging gamers to "perform" as well as the regular gaming public... I simply feel that the gaming industry has reached a level of sophistication and technical excellence where they can easily provide services for accessibility, tapping into a ripe market for which their products are well-suited.
Now if there was only a way to import this information into my SimCity game. Or any other Sim franchise game. Hell, any game, for that matter.
While the "filter" of anonymity allows people to associate and congregate who might otherwise not (due to race, culture, religion, political inclination, gender, sexual orientation, whatever), it also serves to dissociate you from your online avatar. You play someone else online, but you are still pretty much the same person when you leave the computer. Just because your characters and avatars online can fight side by side or even competitively in a friendly manner does not mean that you are a more tolerant and compassionate person when you stop playing and go back to "real life". You'll still be relatively the same person, with the same prejudices, same cultural upbringing, and same outlook on life. I'm not claiming that personal change can't happen due to gaming, and I think it can bridge the gap to understanding one another in a few extraordinary cases, but so can any other means of communications with a level of anonymity and neutrality.
I can't stand the smell of Orcs.
You obviously haven't been to a LAN party. *grin*
While researching a bit on reaction times, I stumbled upon this link from Clemson's biology department:n .htm
http://biology.clemson.edu/bpc/bp/Lab/110/reactio
It's a pretty good literature review on the various studies done on Reaction Time and the various factors relating to it. Some pearls:
Many researchers have confirmed that reaction to sound is faster than reaction to light, with mean auditory reaction times being 140-160 msec and visual reaction times being 180-200 msec (Galton, 1899; Woodworth and Schlosberg, 1954; Fieandt et al., 1956; Welford, 1980; Brebner and Welford, 1980). Perhaps this is because an auditory stimulus only takes 8-10 msec to reach the brain (Kemp et al., 1973), but a visual stimulus takes 20-40 msec (Marshall et al., 1943).
Simple reaction time shortens from infancy into the late 20s, then increases slowly until the 50s and 60s, and then lengthens faster as the person gets into his 70s and beyond (Welford, 1977; Jevas and Yan, 2001; Luchies et al., 2002; Rose et al., 2002; Der and Deary, 2006). Luchies et al.(2002) also reported that this age effect was more marked for complex reaction time tasks, and Der and Deary (2006) concurred. Reaction time also becomes more variable with age (Hultsch et al., 2002). Welford (1980) speculates on the reason for slowing reaction time with age. It is not just simple mechanical factors like the speed of nervous conduction. It may be the tendency of older people to be more careful and monitor their responses more thoroughly (Botwinick, 1966). When troubled by a distraction, older people also tend to devote their exclusive attention to one stimulus, and ignore another stimulus, more completely than younger people (Redfern et al., 2002).
At the risk of being politically incorrect, in almost every age group, males have faster reaction times than females, and female disadvantage is not reduced by practice (Noble et al., 1964; Welford, 1980; Adam et al., 1999; Dane and Erzurumlugoglu, 2003; Der and Deary, 2006).
The authors concluded that left-handed people have an inherent reaction time advantage. In an experiment using a computer mouse, Peters and Ivanoff (1999) found that right-handed people were faster with their right hand (as expected), but left-handed people were equally fast with both hands. The preferred hand was generally faster. However, the reaction time advantage of the preferred over the non-preferred hands was so small that they recommended alternating hands when using a mouse. Bryden (2002), using right-handed people only, found that task difficulty did not affect the reaction time difference between the left and right hands.
There are a lot more good summaries in that article. I also remember being in a Science Museum and one of the exhibits claimed that the best reaction times on their particular exhibit in traditional studies were seasoned Aircraft Pilots.
Accessibility is an issue that affects millions of Americans (and worldwide) with disability, not just disability due to aging. While the implications of aging will affect a lot of contemporary games and the current "gamer" population, there are quite a few youngsters with disability who are disenfranchised from the enjoyment of video games due to access issues. I remember hearing an article on NPR about the blind being able to play text adventures through text-to-speech. While I doubt the feasibility of statements like "Blind people should be able to play XBox 360", I think that the gaming industry, especially consoles, has matured in sophistication enough to start adding accessibility features to their games. I can think of several off-the-shelf solutions for consoles right now (using one-handed controllers or a Dance Dance Revolution pad for playing RPGs or tactical strategy games, in folks with manual dexterity problems, alternate input devices for consoles, etc.), but it would be nice to see more effort on the software side. After all, gaming is a great hobby for those who may be wheelchair-bound or have to stay indoors for one reason or another.
The double major in Physics and Math is a pretty smart choice, if I were to "twink" my college education like that. Most institutions allow AP credit to qualify for non-major related prerequisites (so you can focus on the "good stuff" instead of all that well-rounded stuff) and thus most of his high school AP credits may apply. A typical Math and/or Physics degree focuses on multiple subdisciplines that can be studied concurrently rather than in sequence. And, of course, a person with an aptitude in Math will find the coursework easy to digest and easy to take tests for (which inevitably involve solving problems rehashed in the coursework rather than coming up with novel solutions or proofs). In other words, if I was powerleveling through college (which is what he did), that's probably the route I would have taken.
Of course, with this current toon, I took the other route and only had 12 credit hour semesters and took a lot of extra-curricular cultural classes in music, literature, and sociology. Sometimes life is better when you stop and smell the roses.
Toss in an automatic Term Paper writer extension, and I'm in! Wait, crap, I'm not in school anymore. *sigh* I always felt that I was born a decade too early.
And all of those old vinyl records sitting in your parents' attics? You can sell them on eBay to teenagers with disposable incomes! This is probably simply yet-another-Retro movement. Just like all of us geeks, when we brag about our Pac-Man scores or our prowess with COBOL or using the word "grok".
This is old news. Quite a few games have blatant product placements (and some games are virtual ads all by themselves... I know of more than one cereal that has their own labeled game in specially-marked boxes). In one relatively recent example, Anarchy Online has rotating ad billboards all over the place, although if you are a subscriber then you can turn them off... it's a great way to subsidize the "fr00bs", or the free-to-play accounts. America's Army is one big PR ad for the US military. I'm sure the /.ers can come up with many other examples.
If I'm not paying for something, I'm happy to support a game through slightly-obtrusive ads (The price of "free"-dom, hah). If I am paying for something, though, then there had better be a good reason that the ads are there.
Well, as far as chess and scrabble, one can easily have computerized assistance to gain an edge over his/her competitors, especially in an online setting. However, as with many cheats, that would defeat the purpose of the game.
I've used cheats before in single player computer/video games to accelerate my progress through a game if the gameplay that I'm bypassing isn't what I'm interested in. For example, I may use cheats to augment health or cash or ammunition when I'm more interested in progressing through the story of the game rather than relishing the challenge of the gameplay (although, isn't that what difficulty levels are for?). However, these cheats are often built into the game by the developers for debugging and playtesting purposes. Thus using these cheats for similar purposes is in-line with how the game is meant to be played.
The main problem with cheaters is not that they are seeking personal gain or that they have augmented their playing experience. It is the fact that they often ruin the experience for others. Games are very much a social activity for many folks who play online, and the presence of cheaters degrades their competitive experience. And while the casual online games aren't of much consequence, as more games are played competitively for money and/or status, cheating will become a more serious issue in the future.
Unfortunately, far too mamy players are argueing about the wrong thing, usually the red herring of realism. If you favor realism over abstraction, you have a simulator, not a game.
Although it's easy to point to the "fun" litmus test to determine whether or not a game is reviewed, fun is a subjective and abstract concept. For some folks, realism IS fun... there are many hobbies which take pride in the details (model ships, amateur rocketry, etc.) and gaming is broad enough to encompass the realism and attention to detail that these people seek (Gran Turismo, Microsoft Flight Simulator). There are even games that skirt the line of realism and fun... certainly, the Sims franchise isn't real life, but it is meant to simulate real life with a close attention to detail, and it's the bestselling non-subscription PC game of all time. It is also broad enough to encompass the "pick-up-and-play" fun that comes with Pac-Man, Katamari Damacy, or any other so-called "fun" games.
In other words, the "I like playing it, therefore it's fun" works if you want to look at it that way, but it doesn't necessarily work for everyone. I find myself playing different games for different reasons. A game of Incredible Machine appeals to me in a much different way than a game of online Unreal Tournament.
On another note, pursuing this elusive "fun factor" has been the downfall of many game companies. You can't code it, and there's no way to really express it consistently.
The human brain does a fair amount of interpolating and "interlacing" to the images received by the optic nerve. This is evident in the "blind spot" that we all have. So while the actual visual field may be finite, the resolving power of the post-processed image can be much higher. One can argue that the resolution offered by the human eye is not additive, but redundant (both eyes see virtually the same content). One can also argue that it is synergistic (allows for depth perception).
The Mail client may look pretty and do a good job at organizing, but it carries a lot of baggage (ads, slow to load, doesn't work on all browsers). I wonder if it has mobile support (like Gmail).
I think I'll be sticking to Gmail. Unobtrusive text ads, lots of space, organizes my mail the way I want it to be organized (by labels and filters, not by folders), and it loads quickly on most browsers. The mobile support is just icing on the cake.
Personally, I'd like to see some abandonware on Steam. Or perhaps some of those old Sierra adventure games. Not that you couldn't get these off of eBay or something, but it would expose a new audience to games that they might not have been old enough to remember.
Remember Half-Life 2? This is a game that was massively delayed and clearly over-hyped, but it turned out to be as critically acclaimed and joyfully accepted as the original Half-Life. Sometimes a game can be over-hyped, but the amount of hype is not inversely proportional to the quality of the game.
Always have a backup. It's not about mistrust, it's about being prepared for when the brown stuff really hits the fan.
This is one of those news stories that can be easily spun to be pro- and anti-Military, pro- and anti-American, pro- and anti-Democracy, etc. Is it really such a big deal? There are many forms of non-lethal measures out on the market already being used by law enforcement and even civilian populations. There are FAR more lethal measures both in use by law enforcement and civilians (everything from kitchen knives to a Honda Accord). After spending many years using science to develop new and exciting ways to kill each other, it's odd that there would be a controversial story about using science to develop new and exciting ways to NOT kill each other. Being hit by a Thomas A Swift Electric Raygun isn't fun, but at least I know I have a good chance of surviving it.