And the results of this study are a surprise...why? Of course children who have the discipline, tenacity and motivation to learn and switch between two languages are going to be better at most things...language is a multifaceted mental effort, one of the highest degree...if they can learn and master two languages its should be a no-brainer they can do most other things better as well.

I guess some people need science to validate things before they actually agree / approve.

I've always thought about this issue, but in a different way I guess.

I was born in the early 80's, grew up on games like Doom, Doom 2 etc. As things began to progress in the gaming world, particularly the FPS arena, I found this element of perceiving the realism of the environment, that was left to the imagination to a certain extent, being slowly wiped away

Let me see if I can say it better...it's like, when I play a game...I know it's not real, it's all virtual reality therefore I don't have expectations of things to try and fool me into thinking overtly so, that's what made a larger part of gaming fun, for me at least. What I see happening now, is the developers trying so hard to make everything look so incredibly real, to make it so you can't tell the difference, which in my opinion won't ever happen. There is a quality to reality that can not be captured and emulated by technological advances in graphics.

To me, this takes away from the game play a great deal. Maybe I'm just a fool or a...what do you call those people who don't like new things? Anyways...this story reminded me of / articulated this thought that has been bouncing around in my head for the last few years.

A corporation is a corporation is a corporation is a corporation.

It's sole purpose is to make an ever-increasing profit for it's stakeholders...seemingly at any cost.

Forgive my cynicism, but I have much more faith in the ability of human greed and maleficence to overcome the human spirit, the larger and more successful a corporation becomes.

There seems to be less legislative incentive for larger companies to simply care, about the end-user. I mean, the prevailing attitude of recent times in the software industry is that, once they see the market likes their shit / trusts them to a degree, they abuse this fact and start doing all kinds of errant, stupid abusive things (see, Microsoft, Macintosh, Google, Ford, GM etc etc etc etc etc) which of course, one can then say "well if you don't like them, don't buy their shit". This is indeed true, but when looking at a product say, a PC operating system, it's a little difficult if you want to compete / thrive / be able to do work on a computer with everyone else around you.

Corporations aren't designed to care...they're designed to make profits. The people in them are supposed to care....but...as I said earlier I have much more faith in the ability of human greed and maleficence to overcome the human spirit, the larger and more successful a corporation becomes.

So valve, in and of itself, isn't evil, it's the key people involved in letting this decision take place, that are.

I do apologize, I didn't realize you were not of American nationality.

When I see posts like this, I can't help but think how much of a coward, the poster is. The founding fathers of this country gathered militias against the british crown, which were in the same position as the US gov is today, from an armaments perspective: they had way more guns, they had much better communication infrastructure, they had ways of suppressing insurgencies. The war for independence still took place.

Newsflash buddy: when something is important and drastically needed as the revolution required to change this current form of government it's not going to be a walk in the park while eating cake and ice cream, people will die in the process, things will get damaged, hard work must be put in

I am an American, and I am so tired of this growing 'American mentality' of pacifism on account of general laziness. This country is falling apart day by day because we're not trying hard enough to stop it. period. no excuses

Stop blaming the shit state of affairs on everything else outside of your own personal lack of involvement in government and political activism, because ultimately, that's where the buck stops.

- It's your job to follow the news and political activities of your local government
- It's your job to educate yourself about the law and keep track of what your representative is voting for in the house / senate
- It's your job to motivate groups of people around you to pay attention to these things and help them realize how crucially important being active is - It's your job not to make excuses and find reasons to just not do anything anymore and wait for it all to fall...if something doesn't work...TRY DOING SOMETHING ELSE.

Thanks for this link.

Just uninstalled skype, installed Jitsi and Will advocate / promote the living hell out of it

Fuck you Microsoft.

They're still just words. Words are not hurtful in and of themselves, they are only symbols of meaning from another individual, like signs on the highway. How you allow them to affect you determines if they are hurtful or not. Parents are responsible for bringing their kids up to be able to manage this for themselves, and not need the law to 'protect' them from words

We have to pass laws because people can't deal with being belittled? Whatever happened to learning how to deal with the real world and the fact that some people are just idiots?

I'm sick to death of all this nanny-state knee jerk legislation because people can't handle words

I have a really big problem with this term 'cyber-bullying'.

They are words on a screen. If you can't deal with words on a screen, if they crush your life, then the real world is going to eat you alive, and the evolutionary process will shit you right out the other end and use you as intellectual fertilizer.

Interfering, and monitoring are two totally different things here.

This article has a sub-issue of 'who is watching the watchers' to it.

So because you're a scientist executing work in the name of science for the FDA there's shouldn't be any supervision, quality control or oversight of what you're doing? Provided that I might be arguing the wrong side of the field here, I'm just failing to see why this could possibly be a problem.

In any large, well establish organization your activities are monitored and reviewed on a consistent basis, when it comes to what you're doing work-wise...why should scientists being employed at the FDA be any different?

I don't feel this is about trying to lock down the openness of science, I feel this is about quality control.

I don't think there is anything shocking about this, especially given the technological climate of the current era when it comes to information systems, data security and patents etc. The tricky part is the managing the human resource of such an operation and dealing with he seemingly infinite intellectual nuances of the human psyche involved in such an operation, at a level like this.

I am prepared to see more and more of these kinds of operations surface, and I am glad to see this kind of quality control is taking place within an organization that is in charge of something as crucial as what they are indeed in charge of securing. The title of this story entry is misleading with it's use of the word 'spied', to me this is just good management / quality control in the information age. When you work for a government agency, there's no way in hell you can expect your activities not to be monitored, especially when you're using government property to perform them.

You know what I do...whenever im on someone's laptop doing something with it, i tape paper over the built in webcam, and if i owned an x-box (which I think qualifies you to suffer all kinds of stupidity for being stupid enough to actually own it) with a kinnect...i'd just unplug it when not using it if i were concerned about privacy

wow...she has really nice hands

...to have a law passed that people be responsible for their own food choices and decisions made in their own lives.

Excuse me Mr. fucking Bloomberg...what if I want to be obese that's the WHOLE POINT OF FREEDOM. I am getting sick to fucking death of all these inane moronic laws being considered / passed to protect people from evolution pruning out the crap from the human gene pool.

The second video clip was totally of a boner deflating...totally.