No they don't. Only neutrons have that honor.

Humanity does not, in the end, grow exponentially. Wealthy developed nations hit a minimal/no growth point, and in some cases contract to achieve that. The earth's population is predicted to peak at 9 billion around 2050, and then pretty much hang there. Developed country after developed country keeps hitting this wall, where the birthrate drops to or below maintenance rate. America stands apart from this, for the time, due largely to immigration. However, a good extreme example of this trend is Japan.

I recently was struck by a broader instance of this, in relation to popular media in general. Outside of targeted forms of media (television shows or movies that focus on a specific demographic), I think this trend is as present in TV and film as well. Its as if we've gotten used to a mode of depiction, despite what we see daily at work, on the street, and in our neighborhoods. American is well on the path to be, by around 2040, a "minority majority" country, where the majority of citizens are not white. Despite this, I agree that entertainment media do not currently reflect this.

I work in the video game industry, and to be honest, the games I have worked on don't even reflect the ethnic or lifestyle-minority makeup of my office, let alone the country at large (the presence of females in my offics vs. the games we have produced, on the other hand, is a different story).

Speaking for myself and where I work, this isn't any conscious method of producing entertainment - its just a weird (and, I feel, unfortunate) habit of depicting people in games. It reflects work yet to be done, I think, that popular media often has to make a conscious effort to more accurately depict the world around us, and its unfortunate that it takes a conscious effort to do so.

Yeah. Good to know we can find out where the people who took a piss in the woods live.

As the original gamer generation(s) age, they have an ever expanding sense of what a videogame can acceptably look like. While a gamer of a more recent generation may (tho not always, of course, god bless them) find it difficult to make the visual transition to ye olde games, older gamers in particular often find they are as happy with decades-old depictions of a gameplay evironment as some more cutting edge.

With that in mind, may I recommend a brief smattering of games from genres or eras that we often forget:

The good old days of insane fast paced simple, straightforward multiplayer FPS, Sauerbraten: http://www.sauerbraten.org/
Incredibly deep dungeon creation/management simulation, in glorious ANSI, Dwarf Fortress: http://www.bay12games.com/dwarves/
Straight-up honed turn-based hack-n-slash roguelike, Angband: http://rephial.org/
Kooky realtime multiplayer roguelike dungeon crawl (yes, multiplayer and realtime) MAngband: http://www.mangband.org/


After decades of gaming, I think many of us come to realize that its the quality of gameplay that matter far more than fidelity of depiction. ASCII kobolds and twitch rocketlauncher firing FTW!

This is the second time someone has brought up the whole Baptist thing (that I've seen).

You do remember your history, right? You know what the Louisiana Purchase is, and where we bought that land from, right? You know the people settled there were French, and most French people (even in the New World) are Catholic, right?

Here are two sources for demographic data: Wikipedia's Louisiana article and this blog entry summarizing a survey. If you believe Wikipedia, then 30% of Louisiana is Catholic overall, and 38% is Baptist -- not that this is all Baptist groups, not just one group calling itself Baptist. If you believe the survey, then 28% of the state's population is Catholic, and 31% is "evangelical," which includes Baptists -- again, this category is a catch-all, and isn't just one group calling itself Baptist.

So while the Catholic Church is considered one monolithic organization, the Baptists are not. That's another thing to consider when looking at those numbers.

As the person to whom you responded wrote, the Catholic population is heavy in the south of the state... which should be no big surprise, as that's where New Orleans is.

Not sure why you'd conflate Creole and Baptist. Creole could just as likely mean a practitioner of Voodoo (seriously) as a member of any other religion. That said, most Creole who practice Voodoo are also nominally Catholics.

Again, the relevance here is that the Catholic Church is very obviously sponsoring this legislation. The Archbishop specifically petitioned for it, as did the Conference of Catholic Bishops.

Your "out of touch" comments are spot-on. This is really just pandering to a particular religious group. I suspect if this passes, someone in Louisiana is going to get convicted for violating this law in a way that nobody foresaw... causing a great outcry from some quarters to either repeal or modify the law. But by that point, it'll be too late.

Yep, X is my second favorite too, with VI being the third.

The worst thing about IX is the bleeping Playonline integration in the strategy guide. Followed by non-fun Tetra Master (not as much fun as FFVIII's Triple Triad), and the fact that the game seemed to be designed with the PS2's ability to Fast Load and Texture smooth PSone games. Load times on a PS1 are a litle on the slow side.

But each Final Fantasy has it's own annoyances.

Sorry man, don't ever link anything X11, especially compiz or DEs like KDE4 to a Linux kernel. There's only a ton more OSs that use compiz, KDE and X11 as well. I can list off the BSDs and Open and retail Solaris, that's enough to prove the point.

I've worked for an ISP, telecom in B2B sales and financial services. I've made it an occasional habit to browse the web (after work hours) and look at customer complaints. There's always two sides of the story. After looking at said complaints, I've looked at some of the accounts in the computer system(s) used. Some were quite fair. Others were total exaggerations, lies or very deceitful.

Companies take PR hits unfairly in some cases because of this. The one thing I will say: customers use a lot of energy to vent and complain. They were very rarely write to say the situation was resolved, to apologize that they were in the wrong, or that the company did everything in its power to resolve the situation reasonably and both mutually agreed it could not be.

This has been on my mind over the last year, so I'm curious what insight others might have:

I've noticed a growing trend of people replacing the word "bug" with "glitch," in ever increasingly frequency. Anyone else noticed this? I am active in an open source fps (http://sauerbraten.org/), and paying attention to questions and comments by new users has really highlighted this trend. What's the cause in this shift? World of Warcraft? (Don't laugh - a game with that kind of userbase can have an impact, at the scale they operate at).