It's true! For example, of the many things that bother people about the Star Wars prequels, I know many people mention the idea that going from episode 3 to 4, everything gets LESS shiny and impressive. We may accept the Force, FTL on planet-sized space stations, light sabers and everything else, but we KNOW in our GUT (because it is our experience) that new things are nicer and more impressive. Granted this is not even on the top 20 things to hate about the prequels, but it will always bother many people (or at least me).

And save the argument about rebels and limited resources and all that. All the justifying in the world doesn't change the fact that the prequels are new-school designs and the originals are retro style.

If you know *why* something shouldn't happen, then it bothers you 100 times more. If you don't, you are more likely to accept it and enjoy the explosion or whatever. Since most of us are in fact neither physicists, or mythbusters (though /. obviously has a much higher % than the average), that makes it a lot easier to accept something that physics would not normally allow.

Case in point:
Nothing bothers me more than some hacker logging into a highly encrypted system in 5 seconds and then, having never been in the system, within 15 seconds re-writes the security codes to allow doors to open. Or some other crazy real-life effect. Why? Because I am a programmer, and I know how hard it is to not only get into a system, but to also find the thing you are looking for on that system, and then to make real-life effects occur without undesired side-effects.

But this is a necessary conceit for most tv and movies because generally spending 20 minutes on a montage of poking through someone else's system (assuming you even got in) is not entertaining, and neither is establishing a backstory for a hacker that they somehow know 0-day exploints into every version of every type of server and application ever. So I learn to let it go.

However when it comes to things that I don't fully understand the rules that are being broken, I am much more likely to give leeway, because, again, I just don't know for sure. Sometimes shit happens 1 out of 1000 times, and when it does, it makes for an entertaining movie.

This just in, kids cry and fuss and demand Happy Meals. Parents say that McDonald's is a bad idea but wanting peace and quiet give in and propose a trip to "The Golden Arches" restaurant.

Unless they live in San Francisco, of course.

Where's the survey of Daily Show/Colbert Report viewers? I doubt we score much better than MSNBC on politics but our marks on puns are sky high.

As someone who is unfamiliar with this part of the industry, I appreciate the articles and the clarity it brings to the different issues, including Google's probable interest in ITA Software. With that said, I find the conclusion - that Google is primarily interested in offering personalized ticket prices - is, while at least somewhat plausible and certainly disturbing, pretty unlikely. First, there's the whole thing about how that's illegal (though granted, few in the justice department would be able to decipher the technical aspects and come to that conclusion), and second, while Google is getting its hands into everything, I (at least) have yet to see a situation where it's doing it in an actively malicious way that does not benefit the consumer. Search? Makes $, but provides good service. Gmail? Increases market share, but again provides good service. Android certainly has increased competition and innovation in the mobile arena, say what you want about the fragmenting of the platform. Even the Nexus 1 at least tried to do good things with unlocked phones and service competition, despite its hardware and software flaws, and its use of 2.1 probably accelerated the development of current phones like the latest Droid devices. I find it hard to believe that Google would try to actively and maliciously take advantage of consumers in the process of making a buck better than an existing company makes a buck. Is there $ in it for Google? No doubt, but I also don't doubt that there will be a reason for consumers to use the service-there almost has to be, because anything less would hurt Google's reputation, and that would be far more damaging than the failure of almost any possible product they could put out there.

Well...
$30 for basic (abc, cbs, fox)
$20 for standard (espn, cnn)
$30 for premium (youtube, hulu)
$10 for tech bundle (slashdot, Digg)
$10 for education bundle (anything ending in .edu)
$10 per company for gaming (Blizzard, Activision, EA; say goodbye to anything smaller than Rock*) or $100 for the bundle
$100 for some sanitized and obviously useless branded P2P client
$20 bucks for their version of Google (which just forwards your query to Google and presents the results in a branded window)

Oh, and depending on where you live your ISP may not be able to offer access to some websites due to local rates of use/interest making them less profitable.

You're right, HD-DVD/Blu-Ray is the first time the adult industry didn't decide the next technology format. Of course, they adapted, you can still buy porn on Blu-Ray. The more interesting thing that the adult industry IS deciding is the NEXT format, which is less a format and more a content delivery device, i.e. internet streaming vs. physical device. The reason why the industry is in such financial crisis right now is the plurality of free streaming content. Even if they manage to control that outlet, the majority of their audience will probably never buy physical content again; the market has spoken on how the public likes to have video delivered. This is reflected in sites like Hulu and the various streaming services individual networks make available. DVD/Blu-Ray/etc sales will continue to fall, and eventually the entertainment industry as a whole finds a way to make video on demand as easy to use as the tv (cable services VOD aren't bad but aren't great).

Short version-porn industry has spoken, and streaming video is the next big thing; the first company to do it right will win.

Are you a climate scientist? Or in a related field? If not, then why do we care if YOU specifically verify the science? I'm not saying your process is bad - the data should be published and verified by other climate scientists - but the simple point is that science is hard, which is why we have experts.

I don't ask Steven Hawking to validate Queueing Theory (though I'm sure he could do it), I ask the PhDs who have worked in the field for 20 years. Similarly, you may in fact be a Nobel prize winning Mathematician, but that doesn't mean that something isn't scientifically sound if you can't understand the data and verify the conclusions.

What the report seems to reflect is what happens in every other scientific field-people being dicks to each other to lay claim to being the alpha dog. As we all know, being smart and being egotistical are not two mutually exclusive conditions. The fact that evidence of this behavior has popped up does not invalidate the field; in fact, you could argue that it strengthens it, because it models behavior in established fields.

The point - don't discredit scientific consensus just because you haven't verified it. If you want to discredit it, do the work, become an expert, and prove it.

So when you say "math", it depends on what you are talking about. Is the average programmer going to implement differential equations? Probably not. There are programs that implement higher level math concepts, but they tend to be outside mainstream programming (with of course some notable exceptions). Even if the program needs it, higher level math tends not to be directly sourced from the programmers; if a company is making that complex a program, they probably have the mathematicians/physicists/etc to give you the necessary equations.

With that all said, what is the foundation for all programming? Logic. What is logic? Math. If you're not good at math, you're probably not that great at logic, and then you're probably going to end up coding overly complex programs that have all sorts of exceptional situations that will eventually need to be cleaned up by someone who is in fact good at math.

...and thus destroy society. The end of the world is coming, thanks to violence in video games, just as it came thanks to rap, heavy metal, rock & roll, various forms of art, movies, tv, radio, and virtually any technological innovation over the past 100 years. I bet that when people first figured out how to make bronze they were like "the world is ending, things made of bronze will completely replace everything made of copper, the copper industry will go out of business, people will lose their jobs and starve, and society will be destroyed." (Or something like that, you get the point.)

You know, I don't have any problem with saying that violent video games desensitize people (not just kids) to violence and that may have (some) social impact. In the same way that Jackie Chan movies glorify martial arts and Rage Against the Machine songs can incite anger and discontent. What I (primarily) object to is a complete lack of understanding of the scale and context of the impact. If there was reasoned discourse in this country, I would expect that people would say "well, how Much impact does a particular type of simulation have?" and the result of such discussions would result in some manner of reasoned rating system which, oh wait, we have (the VALUE of said rating system notwithstanding, especially in places like Australia). But despite the at least reasonable attempt at a rating system, which makes sense, we do NOT have reasoned discourse in this country, and the result of this (and every single study, "study", and outright rant before and after it) is OH MY GOD SAVE THE CHILDRENS.

As a result, the world we live in, at least in the mainstream media, promotes that if your child plays video games, he/she/other will become a serial killer. Period, end of sentence. And we don't want that. What we want is for our children to grow up into responsible, socially conscious adults, who would never hurt anyone else, and would, for example, donate millions of dollars for buying toys for sick children on a yearly basis (http://www.childsplaycharity.org/) or disgrace and disbar bombastic lawyers who make fantastic claims without evidence and violate court orders and judicial procedures to back up the false claims (http://kotaku.com/5054772/jack-thompson-disbarred). That sounds like a reasonable thing to want from our current (and future) generations.

Now, again, I don't disagree that someone who had played through the latest Doom/Quake/Unreal/Modern Warfare clone is going to have some differences in they way they perceive violence vs someone who never consumed ANY VIOLENT MEDIA EVER (also known as an embryo), and I also admit that this particular article does not seem to want to raise the panic flag so much as say "there is some impact, how much we can't exactly calculate, but we should account for it in some way". And I think most people on this site will agree with that statement-the problem is agreeing with what should be done. (My impression is that) most people who have been exposed to significant amounts of video games believe that control should be imposed on the parental level. Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know, but what I do know is this-if we were to have reasoned discourse on this, things would be better. Unfortunately, that's really unrealistic these days.

Please note: apparently my ./-fu is not strong, there should be a "less than" between each *_votes variable and 60, which didn't show up due to some formatting thing.