:186229 Is there a multiplayer demo availiable for SCII?

if so, check the lag via that.

Installing...

Restarting browser just for safety...

What's the "we", @Cristina?

@Cristina is the borg

National teams play in the Europa League? News to me :D

Testing...

@Jin do I keep font-weight: bold;?

@Juan battleping

battleping.com

@badp no, you have to manually override bold, to normal

Okay; screenshotting... (preview: it looks fine)

its what I use for playing on korean servers

uploading...

:186276 ouch

:186210 dl.dropbox.com/u/1164414/SO/Jin/…

I wouldn't say no problem, I had to set up a korean account which is hard to do

@badp thanks!

what does everyone think about that font for question titles?

but to play in the US you shouldn't have that problem

You're welcome

I think it looks fine, also renders okay in bold form

You need a Social Security Number to play starcraft in korea

:186298 wat.

different country, different laws

:186298 Also, aren't australian servers clumped with Korea atm? That would be an easy workaround.

Australian are SEA

@juan I live in the US right now

No, they don't block me

So there are 3 asian servers: SEA, Korea, and Taiwan

as far as I know that's true, I haven't tested them all though

:186306 Aaaaah. I was just talking about SC II with someone in my WOW guild whose in Australia last night, and he was saying how it's nothing but koreans.

Either he plays on the Korean server, or he plays on SEA and SEA is full of Chinese people and he doesn't know the difference between Korean and Chinese

Pretty sure it's the latter if thats the case

SEA serves China right now because they don't have their own server

if you go to your bnet account

and go to manage games

it'll put you in a region, click the change region button.

then you can select a different region to buy it in

@Jin want me to try Firefox too?

but here is the thing, if you don't have a residence and SSN in korea they won't let you buy it there

so essentially you have to either know someone there, or lie

...the tough sentimental story of @tzenes, forced to be married to a girl she does not love so he can play Starcraft 2.

:186344 what's your guess? :P

life's tough as a progamer

:186347 and that's not even a typo!

I like how you used both the feminine and masculine pronoun for me.

> married to a girl she does not love

Giving you the benefit of doubt!

life's tough as a hermaphrodite progamer

btw it's amazing how well polling messages every two seconds works

I'm watching my messages come by with a quite noticeable delay on the VM and yet it doesn't affect chatting at all

Ah, I had assumed it was my computer screwing up

:186375 I'm all for fun and games, some people need a serious priority realignment

@badp yes please.

I definitely hate that less than child neglect

that's weird, I didn't uninstall Firefox on this VM

Installing Firebug...

:186436 dl.dropbox.com/u/1164414/SO/Jin/…

There are a number of studies which show that violent video games do increase violence in children, both immediately after playing and over time

There are a number of studies that claim the opposite

citation?

you begin, tzenes :P

no I don't have any

it's just true that for every study claiming x, there's at least one claiming ¬x

Grossman

can't be bothered to go study hunting

I know Doom 3 and Doom 2 and Doom 1 and Quake 4 and Quake 3 and Quake 2 and Quake 1 and Quake Live and Return to Castle Wolfenstain etc. didn't make me a serial killer

@badp thanks a lot, really appreciate it.

:186462 I would call into question the validity of such studies. The number of confounding factors are enormous and poorly understood and our measures of violence imprecise.

OK, so there were a number of studies where they had kids play violent video games and then put them in social situations

the result is that children who played games were much more likely to act violently within 30 minutes of playing the game

:186477 It also is in my interest to have this work well on Linux :)

you can also see this effect if you have them watch violence between two people

or on a TV

its based on the principle of saliency

Sure, at times I have the mental image of unloading a double barrel shotgun onto somebody

now you can't replicate these results in adults

...who doesn't? :D

but you can track the children over time, and you can see that a larger exposure to violence does tend to correlate with the children having violent social interactions

have you tried force-joking instead?

instantrimshot.com

(the above is a real typo)

@tzenes It's the claims of long-term effect that I find dubious. And of course that correlation and causation are not the same.

You can't truly have a control group in broad-based social studies like this.

Dark Vader uses a Mac! I knew it!

well, there are a number of studies which show that the nerons which make up the human brain often work as mimics of the experiences they have

what's more children have a larger number of these (proportionally) than adults

additionally, you can see that saliency plays a long term effect on childhood development

the more you expose a child to something they more likely they are to exhibit that behavior

bad-pun-of-the-day ×2

:186508 7? twitch

here is the thing though, this is true for any sort of social interaction, video games are not an exception

if you're exposed to violence through abusive parents, or through television, its the same as exposure from video games

:186511 the editors were using a certain old Intel fpu...

I'm not sure what you're referring to as the exception here, but just because you have some exposure does not mean you'll exhibit the behavior

that's not the logical implication

:186517 I would claim the magnitude of such an effect from abusive parents is much higher than that of video gaming or movies, etc. (To understate.)

the correct implication is: the more exposure you have, the more likely you are to exhibit the behavior

:186525 you really have no basis for that claim, but I don't know of any study which calculates the correlation in that case

yes, but how much? 8 hours a day? 1 hour a day?

its not like you've been rigged up to a machine which forces you to watch violence for the last 17 years

Clockwork Orange reference

:186530 You're right, I don't have a stack of papers, but I'd be highly surprised if you couldn't find a volume of studies on the effects of abusive parents on child's behavioral development that are far less controversial than those concerning exposure to violent media.

I don't think you'll find any Java, it is very hard to obtain reliable data in that case

you can't easily do studies on children who live with abusive parents

:186540 Well thank you for circling back on my point and agreeing with me: reliable data is very hard to obtain, so any claims about statistics are pretty worthless.

for abusive parents maybe, but not for TV exposure

:186547 They're hard for exactly the same reasons.

you mean the reason that abusive parents often don't let their children participate in psychological studies?

I don't think its the same reason...

People are much more willing to report on the amount of time they (or their children) spend watching TV than they are on the amount of time they spend abusing their partners (or children) in front of their children

@tzenes Don't be obtuse. You can't have a traditional double-blind trial with control experiment in sociological studies. You simply look at case studies and statistics of what is and try to draw conclusions. But you can't isolate one single variable like media exposure when you're looking at a national population. There are just far too many confounding variables which we simply do not understand.

no, but you can do regression analysis

if you couldn't do anything than sociology wouldn't be a science

@tzenes If you understand all the variables. We can't.

I think that's a bit of a broad statement

Just because you can't do double blind studies like in medicine doesn't mean the entire field of sociology is incapable of producing scientific data. There are a number of other tools that can be used for statistical accuracy

But isolating one single variable out of the billions that affect our lives is insanely difficult. I think sociologists are being naive when they claim they can.

And even if you can show a correlation, explaining the correlation is exponentially more difficult.

I'm not sure you really have validity for that claim

it seems like a broad generalization

it reminds me of this: imgs.xkcd.com/comics/purity.png

Well then you're mistaking my claims.

When you have a system that's as complex as society and all you can do is observe it, the conclusions you can draw are limited.

I meant this one:

> even if you can show a correlation, explaining the correlation is exponentially more difficult.

If you were studying bacterial growth and all you could do was wander around until you found some bacteria, watch it for a while, and try to make claims about how the exposure to salt in the rocks affected growth... well your claims wouldn't be very good, would they?

you're making an inductive leap there

its entirely possible they would be good claims

I'm drawing an analogy, yes, but I think it's valid.

I suppose that depends on your definition of a "good" claim. If you mean a true claim, then yes you could stumble onto one. But if you mean a claim well-supported by evidence, then no, it wouldn't be.

I don't think you're going to get me to agree that sociology is incapable of linking actions with developmental factors

I could list a whole large number of trivial examples where the claim would be well-supported by evidence but that's largely unrelated

Our ability to determine bacterial growth based on its circumstances without good controls is not really related to the ontological discussion of sociology as a science

Fair enough. I suppose I've exhausted my ability to try to persuade you. But my position remains that a sociological study attempting to draw conclusions about the affect on the entire span of our lives of one minor factor is fraught with imprecision and thus should all be taken with a grain of salt.

I don't disagree that many studies need to be examined carefully, but I think applying that to sociology as a categorical imperative is really a bit of a leap

I don't think I've made any unsound leaps, but if you believe so it must be my own failure to explain my reasoning.

or mine in understanding

I think its more likely that you've had limited exposure to sociology and formed and opinion based on that

Well I really don't think it would be productive to have a "my science exposure is bigger than yours" contest...

no, probably not

I've got so much science exposure ...</sarcasm>

ROFL

... since we all know that @CRoss would win. ;)

(via jin via kathleencreates via highexpectationsasianfather.tumblr.com)

he has the power of sarcasm ... be hold him with awe

This is my favorite: 25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_l7ug0cSWdd1qakgigo1_500.jpg

:186694 Now I want to find the famous "C Student" foxtrot strip, but Google is not making it the first result like I expect

night

nothing to see there, move along :D

I don't think it is indeed

I expected a onebox when I linked to that room

I guess they'll bring them when every site has their own chat

holy...

...the fuck is that

@ twitter link

unicode art ≫ ascii art

huh, neat

this thread is hours of fun: forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=64234

why is the XKCD forums unblocked here?

BUG REPORT!

wow, APB died already

that was faster than Tabula Rasa or Hellgate London

oh?

wow.

yeah, I'm surprised

I would have expected a F2P phase first at least but damn

shoop down the tubes

their website also is uncerimoniously down

:187057 Well, APB was kind of an unmitigated disaster from a business standpoint.

100 million dollar title sells a 5 digit number of boxes, going F2P isn't going to keep the lights on for another week really.

true

APB had a whole bunch of nonsense going on with the hourly payment garbage, years of delays, and generally just too much goddamned money thrown at it.

That's still a big problem with today's games

The servers go down and you're left with a 10 GB brick

hey @Grace

heya

Hey, @tzenes, @badp

Ever watch a movie called Mongol?

btw -- while tzenes is not the first 10k user in SEs, he should be the first to hit a silver tag badge

is he not?

@badp I have no clue. I haven't researched that

@tzenes No, I'm not a movie buff

Its pretty good, you should check itout

What is it about?

a man named Temudjin

:187273 as far as I know I am the only person to get a silver tag badge on an SE2.0 site

:187294 indeed

tzenes has the only SE 2.0 silver tag badge. We're also one of the only 2 sites that has more than one bronze, and one of about 6 or 7 that even have tag badges

Go Gaming?

Go SC2 craze!

We are a little over specialized

I've spent a bunch of time trying to learn stuff about Halo Reach to help when people start having those questions

It's okay, our site's activity will vary based on what's the game du jour

We're also the only place with a meta site that has 2 Mortarboards, and the only per-site-meta that has a Mortarboard on someone besides Jeff.

There's nothing we can or should do about it

go @grace

Then again some games can give more questions than others, think Portal 2.

Even if it'll be a huge hit, I don't think we'll get many questions about it.

I got it on the second day of the private beta, too, so I am rather proud of it.

I still haven't got 20 upvotes in a single day ever

although I gained 195 rep on 2010-07-15

oh well, w/e

it loses its appeal quickly

:187359 why? You are just 190k rep away from a signed painting of unicorns

once or twice is cool, but after that it feels like playing taxes

I've lost maybe 30% of my potential rep to the repcap

@tzenes But you're just ever closer to SE 2.0's first Epic badge

its a long way aways

I think I'm at 18 or 19

:187387 gaming.stackexchange.com/reputation

20

I've lost 2970 rep to the cap

That's just about how much you expected.

I shudder to think what Jon Skeets is like

Oh, by the way, I hope you didn't mind the ninja star too much, @tzenes, on the creep bug question

hmm?

nite

G'nite, @badp

night @badp

Angry Birds for Blackberry