this i've long been surprised at how removed such benchmarks are from real world use. chrome bogs down horribly many tabs open. its "ability" to save memory seems to mean it pages out rather eagerly or whatever and if i leave it minimized for a while it just gets awful slow to restore anything back on screen when brought back up. firefox doesn't have this issue. plus with all my no script and such extensions, managing many tabs open at once is a breeze, and runs quickly. chrome just loses all functionality after a dozen tabs are open. but of course in benchmarks its faster!!! load of bs.

griefers aren't conservative, they go against the system for crisake. calling people on bullsh*t is hardly conservative.

bingo, the falseness of the avatar puts a wall in all interactions. even facial motion capture wouldn't be enough really, they would need to webcam capture your face and map it to the avatar for it to not be completely lame. and even then there are limits to what that achieves...probably mostly a remote creepiness. simple webcam stream gets around all this. adding interactive white boards and a system for controlled chat etc is frankly all you need. sometimes all this fuss over vr is simply an incredibly horribly complicated way of doing something simple. like how in films where computer interfaces are horribly complicated and 3d, most memorable example was the 3d gui in jurassic park where the little girl had to slowly move from building to building in a 3d world when frankly a couple clicks on a well made gui page would have been so much more efficient. google doesn't dominate because it spends its efforts on 3d interactive webpages. most things are better done simply getting to the point. seeing furry avatars around you is simply not anything of value in a teaching environment. sure some educational institutions jumped on the band wagon, but thats how it is with bandwagons eh? popularity has nothing to do with validity.

thats what people like to say though, but if you think about it, it really doesn't add up either. there is no advantage to meeting in a fake room to watch a fake stone faced "teacher" polygon doll try to teach you. it would be so much better done in some kind of interactive real time private teleconferencing web page where the teacher was on a webcam and the students could chat back as needed. fundamentally most interaction is done teacher to student, not student to teacher esp during lectures. any personal feed back can be easily done on interactive white boards and such. second life is just an additional layer of fluff that would add nothing to such interactions.

unless its a place where everyone else is already in uniform it only screams that the it staff are of low social position within the company and are basically on the level of janitorial staff or the cable guy:P its a visual separation from the "normal" workers which is simply unnecessary. unless its a specific service business like a store or restaurant uniforms only are there to differentiate the help from everyone else. lunch ladies and janitors wear uniforms, not the teachers.

basically yes, control is fundamentally too limited for this idea to work. it requires full virtual control which is lacking. the only way i see any possible value is if they match the users actual face movements to the avatars face. aka emotional capture project natal style i guess. still avatars are a creepy false face for the most part and their actual purpose and result is to distance/protect. its just no good if that hot poly babe you are talking to might be some fat slob, it just ruins everything. anything where real interaction is required is better done in teleconference solutions really.

its not simply about disparaging sl folk as losers. it was the simply unreality aka bubble mentality of those pushing it as the next coming, pushing all kinds of patently ridiculous nonsense trying to justify its existence. not a bit of rational skepticism over the years for the vast majority of the stores. it took quite a while before a decently mainstream publication like wired did a story on the marketing sham that was second life. before that it was mostly a few blogs knocking holes in its false population figures. the fundamental issue is that it was pushed as a virtual reality. when in fact it was a very poorly implemented video game universe comprised of degenerates and lonely people puppeteering stone faced dolls. the most artificial and limiting controls kept you from any real interaction. the fundamental false face of avatars meant social interaction was simply creepy and impossible and so it was limited to the most base activities like virtual sex where such limitations were tolerated. there could be no virtual social interaction worth having, it fundamentally lacked the technology to allow for this. it was nothing more than a bad chat room with a polygon figure for "walking around". and all the claimed uses were false on their face. as if people would want to hang around mcdonalds headquarters in second life. why? the bubble years and the stupid lack of any skepticism allowed for this, whether bernie madoff or second life. no one called bullsh*t when they should have. any claimed use was inferior in second life. its like asking why people wouldn't want to go into second life to use a search engine when google.com was so bare. sometimes the simple is best already. shopping in second life? why? amazon works so much better. teaching? video conferencing and other techs like that work so much better than trying play around with polygon puppets to "teach". chat is better done in chat and forums. beyond its technical limitations it was simply a poor solution to most anything you could think of.

i don't care about how far i can jump. i hate jump puzzle games. empathize? i don't care either. the reality is you play a game for the game mechanic, if it doesn't have a fun one the story can't save it. as for wii type controllers, those all fail at immersion. there is no force feedback, no real interaction with the environment, you are waving your arm in space, no resistance, no impact. so it has no connection with the reality in the game, that you have to make such extreme motions only emphasises how NOT immersed you are. its not like button pushing where you can disconnect from your controller, it becoming the unconscious connection. the motion controllers "motion" being so disconnected from reality becomes nothing more than gesture control, which is not immersive at all, but just a chore, and a rather phony one at that. perhaps gimmicks like wii controls bring in the casual gaming punters for a go before they let the dust cover the console, but that short term gain in market/sales has no meaning on the deeper understanding of making games immersive.

simply said, douchbaggery shouldnt be a crime. telling someone to go f**king jump off a bridge shouldn't mean you are responsible for it if they do. you cannot go around assuming everyone is mentally delicate. esp in a country that values free speech. i don't care if shes' 12, if she had murdered someone she would still be responsible. and in any case, it was a ridiculous waste of tax money processing this case. what should happen is the prosecutors involved should be fired for wasting public money.

i think the cameras encourage hoodie wearing, its a strange phenomenon in the uk with children always covering their faces.

I heard this "researcher" talk more about his study on kqed forum program. His tests don't have anything to do with how people actually multitask, which is based on a level of comfort that naturally leads to such behavior. he talked about flashing letters and having the people try to remember letters 3 letters back while multitasking. this is a nonsense task that has nothing to do with how people are actually working. he claims that since people couldn't remember the letters that means that they were totally failing, but that makes no sense at all. if people were failing to remember what they were talking about when switching between chat windows and other media then they would naturally be so confused that multitasking would become impossible. clearly conversing and surfing the web using media is not equivalent to ridiculous tasks like remembering flashed letters that people have no interest in.

yup, when someone else can charge a premium and still beat you over the head its not good to go into conspiracy mongering. the problem with open source folks sometimes is they rarely ask themselves why something else succeeds. its never their platforms fault because they always believe their way is fundamentally better in all ways, as a given. apple gets away with bs like app filtering because of all the other advantages.

or to get to the point, open source users can be cheapskates. there goes your incentive to develop anything really innovative right there.

True, gun crimes gone up as they clamped down on hand guns, taking them away from law abiding citizens. The pattern is clear, in the uk, people give up their rights, then when they are disarmed the criminals get ever more brazen and empowered, the fear spreads, and then more police powers are given. The police powers do nothing, whether its random stop and search or ridiculous police state camera systems, so more money and power is dumped on the police state...and the cycle just keeps repeating. The criminals don't care, and theres just no way for there to be enough police on the ground to protect everyone. The ugly truth the uk folk seem to be denying is that unless you have a personal body guard, the job of the police is to avenge your death or try to catch the criminal after you've been violated. They cant really protect you. good article from reason magazine on gun controls twisted outcome in the uk http://www.reason.com/news/show/28582.html

Yup, the truth is past generations were either barely literate, or just yacked away endlessly on the telephone. Thats what recent generation children did, yack yack yack. thats the least enriching intellectually, you are limited to the knowledge of your circle of friends and that tends to be a shallow pool indeed, a boring yackfest online doesn't happen much since you can easily find more interesting information just a few clicks away.