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.

so many have pushed linux on n00bs claiming its ready for mainstream. these folks have done such a disservice to both the os and the folks they hoisted this upon. until such basics are worked out, its just not ready for grandma

"In the first, they were tested for their ability to ignore irrelevant information. They were briefly shown a screen with two red rectangles and either 0, 2, 4 or 6 blue rectangles." things like this are not equivalent to listening to music and doing things that are interesting to the user. multitasking involves filtering out unnecessary information..sometimes skipping bits all together. perhaps your brain misses part of a song when you have to concentrate harder on some message you are writing, but thats just fine. its completely different that trying to juggle two arbitrary tasks which are far more demanding of attention than doing two things which you've become so used to that you just flow.

have you seen pc/netbook prices recently? the prices are cutthroat and margins are low as ever. there is no incentive to develop such a desktop. the cells is oversold, if you want such power just get a pc with a modern gpu and use that, and thats what people who do need such power do. anyways why would you want to throw your lot behind sony, even if they did build a desktop you'd have to be ready to be abandoned, look at how they went back on their word on backwards compatibility, and now linux support. there is no incentive to support sony on this. they will @%# you in the end. thats for sure.

there are tons of drives out there for scammers to read...from donated/recycle pcs that get sent over seas etc. the supply is vast enough that i doubt they are worried. unless you have national secrets or some extremely valuable data its all over kill. just overwrite once and be done. but its a good way to make your boss think you are doing something very "good" if you promise to destroy their data with extreme techniques... 35 pass etc always sounds impressive.

blaming america is nonsense, you pay more across the board. just look at fuel prices;) if all the companies including yours are making you pay more there are probably obstacles in your system that make it inherently more costly to do business. anyways you have health care, so stop complaining.

excellent that worked:) wget to the rescue..