not a fan then?
Pokemon NO! Hospital demands ban on virtual creatures after addicts invade private wards
An American hospital is behind one of 72 complaints lodged with a US watchdog over Pokémon Go – the game in which people with nothing better to do with their lives try to track down virtual animals using smartphones. “We are a small hospital in Oregon and Nintendo Pokemon Go players are descending on our halls and asking to go …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 29th September 2016 08:35 GMT JDX
I think this was supposed to be tagged as Bootnotes but it got through as a serious piece. It's almost like reading the Daily Mail.
A slightly higher standard of journalism might be hoped for... sure make the joke but do you really need to hammer it so crassly? And I don't even like Pokemon!
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Thursday 29th September 2016 07:35 GMT AndyS
Re: Kids wandering into unsuitable places, particularly roads. Without looking
Weren't the people running the museum in Auschwitz also in the news recently, complaining that pretend digital monsters appearing in nazi gas chambers was a bit... insensitive?
I think the onus should equally be on players to know better than to be using their phones in places like that, but that doesn't excuse the game's manufacturer.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 08:37 GMT JDX
Re: Kids wandering into unsuitable places, particularly roads. Without looking
Kids have always loved getting into places they shouldn't be, even before the days of smartphones. I don't think placing an onus on kids to act like mature adults is realistic or indeed desirable. How many times did we have adventures which looking back, were a hair's breadth away from being very dangerous?
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Thursday 29th September 2016 09:29 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Kids wandering into unsuitable places, particularly roads. Without looking
I've got plenty of scars from being adventurous, one of them an inch away from being paralyzed but I don't recall ever crossing a road without looking. There's a world of difference between taking a calculated risk at doing something dangerous even with a brain not yet capable of fully understanding that risk and walking blindly into a stream of traffic.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 20:55 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
Re: Kids wandering into unsuitable places, particularly roads. Without looking
While boarding a DeHavilland Dash-8 (one of those tiny 30-seater planes that require you to go out on the tarmac to board) a teenage passenger wandered right out of the cordoned loading area and managed to get to the edge of the taxi-way before they realized where they were and ran back to safety, apparently there was some Pokemon creature in the grass between the taxiway and the runway... Would've ended pretty badly since there were a couple wide-body trans-oceanic jets operating along the taxiway and the runway.
Ground crew was too busy dealing with a passenger that didn't want to give up their carry-on suitcase to notice the kid wandering away until the kid was too far away to do anything safely.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 16:59 GMT Tom 38
There is no way in the game to see the distance nor direction of Pokemon listed as "nearby sightings". It's not like there is a radar that says "Walk this direction to see an Onix". If you can see one on the map, then you can already catch it from your current location.
So I really don't understand this argument. Are they wandering into gardens on the off chance there is a pokemon there?
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Friday 30th September 2016 08:31 GMT Aqua Marina
@Tom 38
"There is no way in the game to see the distance nor direction of Pokemon listed as "nearby sightings""
Almost right, there is a direction you can infer from the nearby sightings using a process of elimination, but you are correct that there is no distance scale.
The sightings tab is a 3X3 grid in the same format as a telephone keypad, 1 to 9. 1 is the closest, 9 is the furthest away. If you walk in a particular direction, and see the pokemon in position 5 move to position 3, then you know you are walking in the right direction towards the pokemon now in position 3. It's very easy by simply walking in 50 yards in each direction to work out the approximate location of pokemon, and even easier if you have a friend with you walking in the opposite direction from your starting point you can confer with.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 18:32 GMT Stoneshop
won't be a canyon very long when the bodies start piling up
According to the US National Park Service, the volume of the Grand Canyon is 16.6*10e9 Olympic Swimming Pools. Taking the volume of an average human as 39.9 micropools, you can easily calculate that you need 416*10e12 humans to fill the Grand Canyon to the rim, discounting any squishing of the lowermost layers
Given that the Earth's population is about 7*10e9 humans, the Grand Canyon will be filled to about 1/50000th of its capacity if you dump them all in.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 21:20 GMT Crazy Operations Guy
Re: won't be a canyon very long when the bodies start piling up
Of course there is also the fact that the game is predominately played by children, which take up a smaller volume. Then you have to factor in the difference of volume between a living human and a dead one (Due to off-gases during putrefaction). Also, humans are mostly liquid, which would spill out and get washed down the river in short order. You could easily put twice as many humans in there..
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Friday 30th September 2016 08:48 GMT Stoneshop
Meteor Crater
is just 23852.8* Olympic Swimming Pools, with a capacity of 597803.3 Average Humans**.
If we allow putting a cone with a 30 deg slope on top, we then get an additional 50253.7 pools (frozen), or 1257784.4 AHs, resulting in a total of 1855587.7 AHs, which is 0.0265% of the world's population; not even half of Los Angeles will fit in.
* assuming the crater to be cylindrical for ease of calculation, so discounting the sides being tapered.
** rough estimate, with 400-pound lardarses offsetting kids
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Thursday 29th September 2016 08:54 GMT Graham Cunningham
Re: Sad dull
You don't know me or anything about me, and are therefore not entitled to have an opinion of me.
As you say, "f*ck off".
I would contend that playing a harmless game which all of a family can enjoy while getting some fresh air and exercise is a rather better use of time and money than sitting in front of the googlebox getting pissed.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:21 GMT Jimmy2Cows
Mostly harmless
I would contend that playing a harmless game ...
Indeed, so harmless that players unwittingly yet willingly walk into traffic, private property, radiation exclusion zones...
However, I contend this is neither the game nor the publishers' fault, more the result of society getting progressively more stupid. An effect which seems to be accelerating.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 12:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Mostly harmless
However, I contend this is neither the game nor the publishers' fault, more the result of society getting progressively more stupid. An effect which seems to be accelerating.
Common sense should be considered a super power these days.
Pedestrian 1 - "Look at that man, he's actually using the crosswalk properly instead of blindly walking into traffic!"
Pedestrian 2 - "Don't you know who that is? That's no ordinary human being, it's Common Sense Man!"
I hear JJ Abrhams is going to direct the inevitable superhero film...
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:50 GMT David Pollard
Re: Sad dull
better use of time and money than sitting in front of the googlebox
I wonder how many Reg commentards have been stuck in front of a monitor re-loading a broken Windows box when they would much rather have been playing outside; or even paying a visit to a congenial hostelry and quaffing a gentle jar or two. Notwithstanding its benefits, the unwanted side-effects of computer technology are not negligible.
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Friday 30th September 2016 04:34 GMT MrDamage
Re: Sad dull
>"I wonder how many Reg commentards have been stuck in front of a monitor re-loading a broken Windows box when they would much rather have been playing outside"
I'll give it to you, the graphics for The Outside World are great, but the plot sucks, and I dont think it was beta-tested as much as it should have been.
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Thursday 29th September 2016 10:20 GMT Destroy All Monsters
"Help Dr Kuhlman / San Cristobal Medical Facility - Intensive care unit"
So, who is that "Geiger" guy?
Even Wikipedia gets it right: H.R. Giger
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:19 GMT DNTP
Nature of existence
A few months ago I convinced my younger brother, who was just picking up the Go craze, to go for a walk in the woods because there might be "nature pokemon" there. Halfway through he says, "There are no pokemon here." This is actually an interesting statement because depending on your viewpoint, it can be either subjectively or absolutely true.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 11:39 GMT Anonymous South African Coward
How long before a serious accident occur on a freeway/highway due to somebody having the pokemon app open and got a notification of a new and rare pokemon?
Surely this will rank with vulnerable/pwned IoT spamming/nuking other sites...
Not waiting with bated breath for accidents of this kind to happen.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 12:03 GMT CowardlyLion
That sort of thing has already happened...
" I crashed my car playing Pokémon Go
"I saw this Lapras was close. As it’s a water-type creature I assumed it must be down by the nearby lake. I jumped into my younger brother’s car
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/aug/05/playing-pokemon-go-crashed-car-experience
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Thursday 29th September 2016 16:04 GMT heyrick
So planet earth is good for pokemon?
Rather than whitelisting a number of suitable places, these bastards[1] can turn up anywhere? Hospitals, dead nuclear reactors, my back garden...? How does that go with regards laws on trespassing, people in countries where trespassers are met with bullets, anywhere with guard dogs? I know we crusties refer to this as the entitled generation, but a game encouraging people to just go wherever the hell they please is really taking the piss.
Maybe Anonymous ought to hack the thing and put all the digital critters where they belong - Area 51. Let all the hunters trespass there and, well, the problem will kind of take care of itself, right?
1 - I'm referring to the smartphone wielding numpties, not the pokemon.
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Thursday 29th September 2016 21:47 GMT JLV
evolution in action
Well, we had two morons go onto a live subway track here.
And I almost collided with 3 nitwits crossing a bike path unexpectedly while staring at their 4.5 inchers. Well, that's not true, I was expecting stupidity so slowed down.
I suggest Pokemon instead spawn 5% of its creatures right past the end of our local piers.
P.S. if the Reg stopped reporting on Pokemon, then the problem would likely fix itself as well - user numbers are already dropping massively and we can just wait on the next dumb digital fad.