Ahh...beat me too it. Daniel Jackson is the king of comic book deaths, deaths where the character is back after a short delay. I mean, he once died, ascended, and descended in a single episode unless my memory fails me (it may have been a 2 parter), that's when you know you're the king of dying and coming back:P.
One of my friends once counted 13 separate deaths for good old Daniel, and him being a huge stargate fan (he gets the DVDs on their release date, and has since it started) I believe him.
Agreed. There are many problems with the/. moderation system (not the least of them being the all too common 'I'm modding you down because I disagree') however for the most part it works well enough, junk and spam posts get sent to the bottom, good well thought out posts get sent to the top. No system is perfect, and there may be better way to do moderation than/.'s system, but it works just fine for what it's supposed to be doing.
An Interesting article. I would, however, disagree with a couple, particularly #21. I've yet to see a good Voice Recognition game, they all seem to be iffy at best and rarely fun because you have to repeat the command 6 or 7 times before it's properly heard. When was the last time you saw a game with voice recognition (and I mean actually recognizing it as a word, not Boogie's system) on the shelves? I haven't seen any in years, the last one I heard good reviews for was Bridge Commander, and the Voice Recognition was a side thing (and a poorly working one).
#45 isn't really that innovative either. Games for Girls tend to take old engines, modify them, and tack on some 'girly' graphics, then release the game (that isn't worth more than a couple of bucks) for the same price as a brand new, high quality game. The majority of girl gamers I know avoid them like the plague because they tend to be so awful, and because they usually borrow their game mechanics from better mainstream games, which means you can get the same gameplay, with better graphics and polish, and without the advertising and horrible dialog, for about the same price.
The rest are actually pretty accurate. I was plesantly surprised to see so many good ideas listed, and even more surprised to see a good old game I had completely forgotten (PaRapper) mentioned.
What Record did this break? The number of planets detected in a single (extrasolar) system record? That shouldn't be too hard considering we're probably missing over half of the extrasolar planets with our current detection threshold. I mean, this is certainly interesting, but by no means surprising. We should be detecting systems with more and more planets every year as we begin to detect smaller and smaller planets.
I've never heard of the Mercury orbit precession before, but I don't see how Dark Matter could have anything to do with Mercury's orbit considering how little there would be between Mercury and the sun (too much and the Earth would fall in). Of course I could be wrong, so feel free to point out to me if I am.
As for Lensing, what's the problem? If Dark Matter causes additional lensing then so will MOND because it will increase gravity's power slightly. Frame Dragging is a property of Einsteinian gravity if I'm not mistaken, and so it shouldn't be affected by the Dark Matter vs. MOND issue either. Same goes for time-dilation.
All MOND states (last time I checked) is that gravities falloff rate is slower at long distances. With only a minor decrease in the falloff rate the gravity needed from Dark Matter goes away, while everything we know about gravity from experiments near Earth stays the same because we're within the range at which the falloff rate can be treated as a constant (no extra distance variable) expression 1/r^2.
Precisely. I know you've gotten a lot of poor responses but I've always thought this was a good theory (from when I first heard of the idea in MOND Modified Newtonian Gravity). Science has made a lot of assumptions about the universe, and this is one of them. Whether gravity falls off at a slightly slower rate or there is a large volume of unknown matter in the universe the end result will be the same, so why do people so quickly call others idiots when they suggest an alternate explanation?
Mod Parent Up. Every time I hear about a debate with Jack Thompson I cringe. Not because I particularly dislike the man, he's completely insane in an amusing way, but because every time something like that happens a bunch of crazies who think the man is Satan incarnate are always there making the rest of us gamers look like lunatics.
It's the same problem that happens with most groups, the overly fanatical ones become the ones that everyone associates with that group and so the moderate ones are thought of as crazy because of them. As soon as gamers stop lambasting Thompson and start treating him like an intelligent human being (evidence to the contrary though there may be:P) is the day gamers stop being thought of as all crazy.
I've never used, or even seen one of these things, though if they're ever made legal I would definitely be picking one up. I have, however, asked a few people who were being overly obnoxious on their cells to please keep it down, now it is only anecdotal evidence, but so is your evidence that people will oblige, but of the 4 times I've done that only once did the person actually apologize and start being less obnoxious. One person ignored me completely, not even turning to acknowledge me (I can't rule out that they were unable to hear me over their conversation, but I tried a couple of times and they never even looked around) and the other 2 just gave me funny looks and then went right back to their conversations, one getting a little louder after I asked.
There are many decent people in the world who would apologize profusely if you informed them that they were being annoying. Few of these people are the ones likely to be the worst annoyances as they're self conscious of how much they're annoying others already. The truly annoying people, the ones who are loud enough to get me to overcome my desire not to make a fuss out of things tend to be the ones who either think their conversation is more important than whatever others think of them or that everyone wants to hear what they're talking about. Those type of people don't respond well to be asked to keep it down, and in cases where I'm stuck with those kind of people I'd love to have one of these Jammers so I could get some work done. One person on a cellphone being obnoxious is enough to distract me enough that I can't get anything done until they stop talking and if I could force them to stop I would, after trying the polite route of course.
I would argue that the 3 paragraph blurb at the beginning counts for something, it's not entirely a photo gallery. On the other hand it is far too short for a normal sized article.
"Think Adolph Hitler -- he might have been totally nuts"
First, nice Godwin:P.
Second...unlikely, I don't think any historians really think Hitler was completely insane, perhaps a small deviation from the norm, but it's quite difficult for a truly insane person to convince others to follow them. How many people in the loony bins were even decent leaders before getting there? Probably very few, course I'm neither a historian nor a psychologist so that's just my basic knowledge.
"I just don't agree with you. The statement is pretty clear. If they wanted to say what you said, they could use phrases like "is correlated with". They did not. They wanted to show that P2P increases CD sales, and that's the claim they made."
"The segment of the sample which downloads X + 1 times per month was observed to purchase 0.44 CDs per year more than the segment of the sample which downloads X times per month."
Dude...I want some of what you're on. If it lets you interpret someone saying they observed a statistical behavior as making a claim then it must be really good stuff. Saying that a correlation was observed (even if you don't say the word correlation) is far from making a claim, that's like me saying 'I've noticed that Teenager's cars tend to be.34% dirtier than Adults' and you getting mad at me from claiming that Teenagers are slobs, not the same. Stating that 1 group was observed to do something more than another group is far from making a claim.
As for the rest of your post, I agree. This really doesn't prove anything, and it likely wasn't meant to. What it does do, however, is disprove the RIAA's findings (if we can even call them that) that p2p sharers don't buy any music.
There are still 100-in-1's out there, they're no less common (where I am) than they were when I was kid and first got one of them. Boy was that a lot of fun.
Chemistry kits can be a lot more dangerous than a lot of other toys, give one of those old ones to a kid who doesn't know what they're doing and whose parents are too busy to spend any time with the kid and they're liable to injure themselves. That's the main reason they've been going out of style, it's pretty hard for little Johnny to hurt himself with a My First (Plastic with rubber spring tip) Hammer, or Pong, the Board Game (Seriously, can anyone here tell me they wouldn't buy that if it was a reasonable price?), but with a Chemistry kit there's probably a few ways they can injure themselves at min, and the law of probabilities shows how, no matter how low the probability of any kid hurting themselves is, some kid will, and some parent will sue.
I mean, just look at what the article itself says, the author admits to having to evacuate his house because he was making free chlorine gas. Now tell me, what are the odds that any modern parent would just let something like that slide vs. suing the company for damages?
Home Chemistry kits are going away, but not because of Anti-Terrorism laws. There are plenty of chemicals that you can get without a background check that will do some fun things, but they can also be quite harmful to you and since every toy has to be made so that little Johnny slow can use it without any chance of hurting themselves. I mean, you can make Thermite without using a single background-check needed ingredient (my friend did it once for fun, pretty cool), so why isn't that in the 'pathetic' chemistry kits? Oh right, because no parent would trust their kid with Thermite and would most certainly sue if their kid could make it and hurt themselves.
It's the number one way to fight for something that the facts tend to be against. If you're on the wrong side of the facts you can't exactly make an Argument from Logos. You may or may not be able to make an argument from Ethos, depending on how well known you are, patent trolls tend to be unknown or disliked, so they can't use that.
They're left with just Pathos, trying to get people emotionally rallied behind an argument by asking them to think about what effect (insert strawman that's highly unlikely to happen but sounds like what the other side is arguing for) will have on (insert group that looks small and poor, someone whose life depends on the current system).
It's the same system the RIAA uses, some argue the government does the same thing (I happen to agree), it's the last argument of those unable to argue from reason, as such it's used a lot by groups who are heavily disliked as they have nothing else to turn to.
"In that regards, I would say games should be rated as "buy it!", "rent it/demo it!", "stay away". (rent for console / Demo for PC games). Guitar Hero games are "buy it" games while something like Zelda:Twilight Princesses might be a "rent it" kind of game (I bought it, I'm a fan of Zelda, but still feel money better spent on a rental. I would not have given it 100/100 as some reviews did). World of Warcraft? "Buy it"."
And this part of your comment shows what's already broken with the game rating system. The userbase is far too diverse for any single number to properly represent them all. I would rate Guitar Hero as a 3.5, either buy or rent, Twilight as a 4, buy, and WOW as stay away (I'm not a big fantasy or MMO fan). Everyone's different, for a movie the differences are smaller because it's cheaper and shorter but when you're talking a 10+ hour $50 game then you don't want to be lumping them 'This game looks okay' in with the 'This game looks awesome!' in your ratings, which is what they all are.
I just stopped listening to reviewers a while ago. I still check out what they say, but I listen to their commentary a lot more than their numbers (I love a review I found of Galactic Civilizations, the person talks about how much fun they had, that they loved the game and couldn't get enough, then gives it a 3/5 because it's graphics are mediocre and it didn't have multiplayer. He gave it a 3/5 while talking about how he was going to keep playing it and had to tear himself away from the game to write the review...that showed me clearly that game reviews are messed up)
Exactly. I've had people tell me that me reference to a Wikipedia article was wrong and that it wasn't in the article before (never for a school paper because they won't accept Wiki, of course) and just checked the revision history. Almost always a fact was simply removed with no explanation so I can link to the history and say "This is what it looked like when I saw it".
If the real problem with Wikipedia is that it changes then teachers (who knew more about it than 'Oh noes! Wikipedia is teh evil') would simply request that the students cite the history page so it won't change. That's not the real problem with Wikipedia, though.
Up, in the normal human reference frame, is away from the most powerful source of gravity detectable. Seeing as how the ISS isn't far enough away to be in true microgravity (less than 50% difference) there's very little ground to stand upon if you're claiming there's no detectable source of gravity nearby, about as much as claiming that there's no Up in an elevator. Just thought I'd point that out, physics does allow you to have an opinion about up and down, but common sense doesn't and in this case common sense still applies.
That's what we should most certainly do, post the addresses of these control servers as links in/. stories about a new Linux device, or Apple product, and watch as the network dissolves.
Ocham's Razor would doesn't apply here as there are an infinite many possible things that could affect the crime rate, it could be linked to Global warming making more hotheads for all we know. Lead poisoning is dangerous, but there are a lot of other things that were going on back then that could be linked to crime rate (and the computer gaming one has a correlation btw). It's extremely easy to find something that might be related, you could say it's Birth rate (lower rate -> less kids to be violent), culture (gangster culture takes the kids who would be doing really bad crimes and gets them doing simply vandalism), the internet (allowing you to be verbally violent without repercussions since Al Gore invented it), etc. Ocham's razor simply says that the simplest correlation of two possible is the correct one, the simplest correlation is most likely either Culture or Birth rate, not lead poisoning.
As for the testable theory, having a theory that can be tested in 10 years doesn't do anything for the factuality of it today. Yes it does make it a testable theory, but it doesn't make it true which is the problem.
"Other than (well moderated) chat rooms, it is difficult to be social online. Communicate online? Yes. Extensive real-time conversation in a meaningful way? Not really."
This right here shows me that you're on the fringe of modern gaming. There are far superior ways to be social while playing a game, Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Playing a game with friends while talking to them over Ventrilo is, to me, a much more meaningful form of real-time communication than, say, talking to them on the phone (which I hate by the way, can't stand phones).
"Just like modern versions of Windows have. Just like modern versions of most software have (e.g. Office, anti-virus, etc.) The reason is quite simple -- how do you improve on something that is at an optimum level?"
Honestly I think you're just being silly here, are you really going to claim that '98 was better than XP? Sure Vista isn't all that great for a lot of people but if Windows peaked it was with XP, which is still pretty modern, especially compared to the OS's around at the same time as these early games. Office I agree with, it pretty much peaked with 2003, before that there were too many bugs, after that there's nothing new. Anti-Virus is hard to tell because it can be very difficult to see if you're infected.
To use another quote (since another of my favorite ones happens to fit very well here, not because I'm obsessed with quotes or anything:P), one from Scott Adams this time (didn't notice that he and Douglas Adams shared the same last name till now...huh)
"Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?"
The way I see if those of the Pong generation think that gameplay peaked about where their favorite game was, because after that games became less fun for them. This can be extended to every generation, I really do tend to believe that BF1942 was the best FPS I've every played because I had (and still have) more fun playing it then more modern games (2142, Halo 3 etc). So would it be safe for me to assume that the quality of games has gone down since BF1942? No, not really. It would be safe to assume that the fun I have playing games has gone down (in the FPS realm at least, RTS's have gotten more fun) since BF1942, but I can't extrapolate that out to say that games in general have gotten worse.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. One man's horribly complex and not fun video game is another man's favorite game (except Superman 64 and E.T. of course:P)
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Ahh...beat me too it. Daniel Jackson is the king of comic book deaths, deaths where the character is back after a short delay. I mean, he once died, ascended, and descended in a single episode unless my memory fails me (it may have been a 2 parter), that's when you know you're the king of dying and coming back :P.
One of my friends once counted 13 separate deaths for good old Daniel, and him being a huge stargate fan (he gets the DVDs on their release date, and has since it started) I believe him.
Agreed. There are many problems with the /. moderation system (not the least of them being the all too common 'I'm modding you down because I disagree') however for the most part it works well enough, junk and spam posts get sent to the bottom, good well thought out posts get sent to the top. No system is perfect, and there may be better way to do moderation than /.'s system, but it works just fine for what it's supposed to be doing.
It's far from the least creative...
Just remember, Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!
Mod Parent Up. Very good example, it's not about getting better access, it's about getting access at all.
An Interesting article. I would, however, disagree with a couple, particularly #21. I've yet to see a good Voice Recognition game, they all seem to be iffy at best and rarely fun because you have to repeat the command 6 or 7 times before it's properly heard. When was the last time you saw a game with voice recognition (and I mean actually recognizing it as a word, not Boogie's system) on the shelves? I haven't seen any in years, the last one I heard good reviews for was Bridge Commander, and the Voice Recognition was a side thing (and a poorly working one).
#45 isn't really that innovative either. Games for Girls tend to take old engines, modify them, and tack on some 'girly' graphics, then release the game (that isn't worth more than a couple of bucks) for the same price as a brand new, high quality game. The majority of girl gamers I know avoid them like the plague because they tend to be so awful, and because they usually borrow their game mechanics from better mainstream games, which means you can get the same gameplay, with better graphics and polish, and without the advertising and horrible dialog, for about the same price.
The rest are actually pretty accurate. I was plesantly surprised to see so many good ideas listed, and even more surprised to see a good old game I had completely forgotten (PaRapper) mentioned.
Touche, you out pedanted me very well :P.
What Record did this break? The number of planets detected in a single (extrasolar) system record? That shouldn't be too hard considering we're probably missing over half of the extrasolar planets with our current detection threshold. I mean, this is certainly interesting, but by no means surprising. We should be detecting systems with more and more planets every year as we begin to detect smaller and smaller planets.
I've never heard of the Mercury orbit precession before, but I don't see how Dark Matter could have anything to do with Mercury's orbit considering how little there would be between Mercury and the sun (too much and the Earth would fall in). Of course I could be wrong, so feel free to point out to me if I am.
As for Lensing, what's the problem? If Dark Matter causes additional lensing then so will MOND because it will increase gravity's power slightly. Frame Dragging is a property of Einsteinian gravity if I'm not mistaken, and so it shouldn't be affected by the Dark Matter vs. MOND issue either. Same goes for time-dilation.
All MOND states (last time I checked) is that gravities falloff rate is slower at long distances. With only a minor decrease in the falloff rate the gravity needed from Dark Matter goes away, while everything we know about gravity from experiments near Earth stays the same because we're within the range at which the falloff rate can be treated as a constant (no extra distance variable) expression 1/r^2.
Precisely. I know you've gotten a lot of poor responses but I've always thought this was a good theory (from when I first heard of the idea in MOND Modified Newtonian Gravity). Science has made a lot of assumptions about the universe, and this is one of them. Whether gravity falls off at a slightly slower rate or there is a large volume of unknown matter in the universe the end result will be the same, so why do people so quickly call others idiots when they suggest an alternate explanation?
Mod Parent Up. Every time I hear about a debate with Jack Thompson I cringe. Not because I particularly dislike the man, he's completely insane in an amusing way, but because every time something like that happens a bunch of crazies who think the man is Satan incarnate are always there making the rest of us gamers look like lunatics.
:P) is the day gamers stop being thought of as all crazy.
It's the same problem that happens with most groups, the overly fanatical ones become the ones that everyone associates with that group and so the moderate ones are thought of as crazy because of them. As soon as gamers stop lambasting Thompson and start treating him like an intelligent human being (evidence to the contrary though there may be
I've never used, or even seen one of these things, though if they're ever made legal I would definitely be picking one up. I have, however, asked a few people who were being overly obnoxious on their cells to please keep it down, now it is only anecdotal evidence, but so is your evidence that people will oblige, but of the 4 times I've done that only once did the person actually apologize and start being less obnoxious. One person ignored me completely, not even turning to acknowledge me (I can't rule out that they were unable to hear me over their conversation, but I tried a couple of times and they never even looked around) and the other 2 just gave me funny looks and then went right back to their conversations, one getting a little louder after I asked.
There are many decent people in the world who would apologize profusely if you informed them that they were being annoying. Few of these people are the ones likely to be the worst annoyances as they're self conscious of how much they're annoying others already. The truly annoying people, the ones who are loud enough to get me to overcome my desire not to make a fuss out of things tend to be the ones who either think their conversation is more important than whatever others think of them or that everyone wants to hear what they're talking about. Those type of people don't respond well to be asked to keep it down, and in cases where I'm stuck with those kind of people I'd love to have one of these Jammers so I could get some work done. One person on a cellphone being obnoxious is enough to distract me enough that I can't get anything done until they stop talking and if I could force them to stop I would, after trying the polite route of course.
I would argue that the 3 paragraph blurb at the beginning counts for something, it's not entirely a photo gallery. On the other hand it is far too short for a normal sized article.
"Think Adolph Hitler -- he might have been totally nuts"
:P.
First, nice Godwin
Second...unlikely, I don't think any historians really think Hitler was completely insane, perhaps a small deviation from the norm, but it's quite difficult for a truly insane person to convince others to follow them. How many people in the loony bins were even decent leaders before getting there? Probably very few, course I'm neither a historian nor a psychologist so that's just my basic knowledge.
"I just don't agree with you. The statement is pretty clear. If they wanted to say what you said, they could use phrases like "is correlated with". They did not. They wanted to show that P2P increases CD sales, and that's the claim they made."
.34% dirtier than Adults' and you getting mad at me from claiming that Teenagers are slobs, not the same. Stating that 1 group was observed to do something more than another group is far from making a claim.
"The segment of the sample which downloads X + 1 times per month was observed to purchase 0.44 CDs per year more than the segment of the sample which downloads X times per month."
Dude...I want some of what you're on. If it lets you interpret someone saying they observed a statistical behavior as making a claim then it must be really good stuff. Saying that a correlation was observed (even if you don't say the word correlation) is far from making a claim, that's like me saying 'I've noticed that Teenager's cars tend to be
As for the rest of your post, I agree. This really doesn't prove anything, and it likely wasn't meant to. What it does do, however, is disprove the RIAA's findings (if we can even call them that) that p2p sharers don't buy any music.
There are still 100-in-1's out there, they're no less common (where I am) than they were when I was kid and first got one of them. Boy was that a lot of fun.
Chemistry kits can be a lot more dangerous than a lot of other toys, give one of those old ones to a kid who doesn't know what they're doing and whose parents are too busy to spend any time with the kid and they're liable to injure themselves. That's the main reason they've been going out of style, it's pretty hard for little Johnny to hurt himself with a My First (Plastic with rubber spring tip) Hammer, or Pong, the Board Game (Seriously, can anyone here tell me they wouldn't buy that if it was a reasonable price?), but with a Chemistry kit there's probably a few ways they can injure themselves at min, and the law of probabilities shows how, no matter how low the probability of any kid hurting themselves is, some kid will, and some parent will sue.
I mean, just look at what the article itself says, the author admits to having to evacuate his house because he was making free chlorine gas. Now tell me, what are the odds that any modern parent would just let something like that slide vs. suing the company for damages?
Home Chemistry kits are going away, but not because of Anti-Terrorism laws. There are plenty of chemicals that you can get without a background check that will do some fun things, but they can also be quite harmful to you and since every toy has to be made so that little Johnny slow can use it without any chance of hurting themselves. I mean, you can make Thermite without using a single background-check needed ingredient (my friend did it once for fun, pretty cool), so why isn't that in the 'pathetic' chemistry kits? Oh right, because no parent would trust their kid with Thermite and would most certainly sue if their kid could make it and hurt themselves.
It's the number one way to fight for something that the facts tend to be against. If you're on the wrong side of the facts you can't exactly make an Argument from Logos. You may or may not be able to make an argument from Ethos, depending on how well known you are, patent trolls tend to be unknown or disliked, so they can't use that.
They're left with just Pathos, trying to get people emotionally rallied behind an argument by asking them to think about what effect (insert strawman that's highly unlikely to happen but sounds like what the other side is arguing for) will have on (insert group that looks small and poor, someone whose life depends on the current system).
It's the same system the RIAA uses, some argue the government does the same thing (I happen to agree), it's the last argument of those unable to argue from reason, as such it's used a lot by groups who are heavily disliked as they have nothing else to turn to.
"In that regards, I would say games should be rated as "buy it!", "rent it/demo it!", "stay away". (rent for console / Demo for PC games). Guitar Hero games are "buy it" games while something like Zelda:Twilight Princesses might be a "rent it" kind of game (I bought it, I'm a fan of Zelda, but still feel money better spent on a rental. I would not have given it 100/100 as some reviews did). World of Warcraft? "Buy it"."
And this part of your comment shows what's already broken with the game rating system. The userbase is far too diverse for any single number to properly represent them all. I would rate Guitar Hero as a 3.5, either buy or rent, Twilight as a 4, buy, and WOW as stay away (I'm not a big fantasy or MMO fan). Everyone's different, for a movie the differences are smaller because it's cheaper and shorter but when you're talking a 10+ hour $50 game then you don't want to be lumping them 'This game looks okay' in with the 'This game looks awesome!' in your ratings, which is what they all are.
I just stopped listening to reviewers a while ago. I still check out what they say, but I listen to their commentary a lot more than their numbers (I love a review I found of Galactic Civilizations, the person talks about how much fun they had, that they loved the game and couldn't get enough, then gives it a 3/5 because it's graphics are mediocre and it didn't have multiplayer. He gave it a 3/5 while talking about how he was going to keep playing it and had to tear himself away from the game to write the review...that showed me clearly that game reviews are messed up)
Exactly. I've had people tell me that me reference to a Wikipedia article was wrong and that it wasn't in the article before (never for a school paper because they won't accept Wiki, of course) and just checked the revision history. Almost always a fact was simply removed with no explanation so I can link to the history and say "This is what it looked like when I saw it".
If the real problem with Wikipedia is that it changes then teachers (who knew more about it than 'Oh noes! Wikipedia is teh evil') would simply request that the students cite the history page so it won't change. That's not the real problem with Wikipedia, though.
Up, in the normal human reference frame, is away from the most powerful source of gravity detectable. Seeing as how the ISS isn't far enough away to be in true microgravity (less than 50% difference) there's very little ground to stand upon if you're claiming there's no detectable source of gravity nearby, about as much as claiming that there's no Up in an elevator. Just thought I'd point that out, physics does allow you to have an opinion about up and down, but common sense doesn't and in this case common sense still applies.
Christopher Pike was the original Captain, Kirk was second
*Notes what he just wrote, and what it implies about his social life...*
That's what we should most certainly do, post the addresses of these control servers as links in /. stories about a new Linux device, or Apple product, and watch as the network dissolves.
Ocham's Razor would doesn't apply here as there are an infinite many possible things that could affect the crime rate, it could be linked to Global warming making more hotheads for all we know. Lead poisoning is dangerous, but there are a lot of other things that were going on back then that could be linked to crime rate (and the computer gaming one has a correlation btw). It's extremely easy to find something that might be related, you could say it's Birth rate (lower rate -> less kids to be violent), culture (gangster culture takes the kids who would be doing really bad crimes and gets them doing simply vandalism), the internet (allowing you to be verbally violent without repercussions since Al Gore invented it), etc. Ocham's razor simply says that the simplest correlation of two possible is the correct one, the simplest correlation is most likely either Culture or Birth rate, not lead poisoning.
As for the testable theory, having a theory that can be tested in 10 years doesn't do anything for the factuality of it today. Yes it does make it a testable theory, but it doesn't make it true which is the problem.
And just before Nuclear Fusion, approximately 7 month away. Don't forget the flying cars coming in 8 months.
I hereby predict and welcome our '6 Month's later' Overlords will arrive in approximately 1 years time, if we're lucky, in Soviet Russia.
Why, why can I never have mod points when such an epic post is made?
"Other than (well moderated) chat rooms, it is difficult to be social online. Communicate online? Yes. Extensive real-time conversation in a meaningful way? Not really."
:P), one from Scott Adams this time (didn't notice that he and Douglas Adams shared the same last name till now...huh)
:P)
This right here shows me that you're on the fringe of modern gaming. There are far superior ways to be social while playing a game, Teamspeak and Ventrilo. Playing a game with friends while talking to them over Ventrilo is, to me, a much more meaningful form of real-time communication than, say, talking to them on the phone (which I hate by the way, can't stand phones).
"Just like modern versions of Windows have. Just like modern versions of most software have (e.g. Office, anti-virus, etc.) The reason is quite simple -- how do you improve on something that is at an optimum level?"
Honestly I think you're just being silly here, are you really going to claim that '98 was better than XP? Sure Vista isn't all that great for a lot of people but if Windows peaked it was with XP, which is still pretty modern, especially compared to the OS's around at the same time as these early games. Office I agree with, it pretty much peaked with 2003, before that there were too many bugs, after that there's nothing new. Anti-Virus is hard to tell because it can be very difficult to see if you're infected.
To use another quote (since another of my favorite ones happens to fit very well here, not because I'm obsessed with quotes or anything
"Every generation of humans believed it had all the answers it needed, except for a few mysteries they assumed would be solved at any moment. And they all believed their ancestors were simplistic and deluded. What are the odds that you are the first generation of humans who will understand reality?"
The way I see if those of the Pong generation think that gameplay peaked about where their favorite game was, because after that games became less fun for them. This can be extended to every generation, I really do tend to believe that BF1942 was the best FPS I've every played because I had (and still have) more fun playing it then more modern games (2142, Halo 3 etc). So would it be safe for me to assume that the quality of games has gone down since BF1942? No, not really. It would be safe to assume that the fun I have playing games has gone down (in the FPS realm at least, RTS's have gotten more fun) since BF1942, but I can't extrapolate that out to say that games in general have gotten worse.
One man's trash is another man's treasure. One man's horribly complex and not fun video game is another man's favorite game (except Superman 64 and E.T. of course