If you allow teleporting from anywhere to anywhere it doesn't matter how big you make your world, because to everyone it will feel small.
That's my personal gripe with overly easy transportation in MMOs. The best example I have is Everquest, when they introduced the Plane of Knowledge - suddenly everyone had access to instantaneous transportation to places all over the world, granting undreamed of ease of movement... and changing what had been a large, sprawling world into something that felt relatively small, a series of arbitrary locales rather than cohesive continents and islands.
PoK fundamentally changed things, and really taught me the value of travel-that-takes-time. It's one of the many parts of an MMO where 'listening to the players' will yield a bad game, in that players (people, really) often want things that will ultimately undercut the enjoyment/value of their experience.
That's not to say that there's no such thing as excessive travel time - taking 3 hours to get from Newbieville to Hunting_Grounds_of_the_Newbies is a problem. The sweet spot is in the middle somewhere, and my point is simply that non-trivial travel is important, and that the sweet spot is likely higher (more travel) than most people seek or would ask for.
Square (as in SquareEnix), famed for their CG in the Final Fantasy games, tried making a movie... and the product, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, didn't turn out so well for them.
You cannot do your quests because your gear does not provide enough influence (that dictates whether you can at all engage in a diplomacy contest with an NPC) to do any of your quests. Yet you only get new gear from quests, as rather rare drops or crafted from even rarer resources (and again, the crafted gear can't hold a candle to the drops). The drops in turn drop from the mob you cannot engage in diplomacy with. How this hen-and-egg problem is solved?
Civic diplomacy was the pure-diplomacy mechanism to get newer gear - one of its rewards is items called "information", which are turned in for random gear. The newbie quests originally would give you at least enough Presence to do some civic diplomacy, and the enhanced newbie quests that went in about 6-8 months after launch yielded a _very_ nice set of gear that covered the core Presences, allowing you to do most or all low-level civic.
What is civic diplomacy? It's parleying with the inhabitants of cities. In addition to the "information" rewards, it also leads to city-wide buffs that were rather nice. The buffs were triggered, essentially, by doing the same 'kind' of conversation with enough NPCs of the same profession (Academic, Clergy, Merchant, etc). The conversations altered "levers", and buffs were activated when certain levers passed various thresholds - over time, all levers decayed back to their starting state. In principle diplomats could keep cities perpetually offering a suite of really nice buffs, but in practice server resets would undo it, so buffs typically only stayed up for a couple hours (ie, the time it took a maxed out lever to decay below the trigger level)
And, of course, as in most MMOs, the Broker/Bazaar/AuctionHouse equivalent is another avenue for gear. Just how useful varied, as diplomacy gear was becoming less and less tradeable with time - hopefully buying diplomacy gear is still an option, as it was incredibly useful and relatively necessary given the random nature of most diplomacy gear rewards.
I'm out-of-date, as I played for the first 8 months of live (started 2 weeks before the Feb launch, and quit in October/November), so things might have changed since then. But this was the way things worked back then - you could certainly do diplomacy without having to Adventure or Craft for gear. It was a practical option, too.
The BlogPost is first of all presented with colours that make it hard for some of us to read. White on Black text causes me, and others like me, physical discomfort and can lead to migraines. Something several websites have yet to acknowledge. But be that as it may.
I'm in the reverse camp - black-on-white text leads to eyestrain and headaches. To deal with the dark-on-light design of most websites, I need to keep the brightness/contrast of a moniter very low, which makes it hard to see any finer detail that may be present and leads to a different kind of eyestrain. Light-on-dark designs I can read without the discomfort, so I'm grateful to the web designers that use such colorschemes.
(as a side note, that's also the benefit for me of the "e-paper" initiatives - they tend to be non-lit/backlit surfaces, so the background brightness is controlled by the ambient environment ala a book or newspaper, which is FAR easier on my eyes than these CRT/LCD eyestrain devices)
Not nearly as nice as watching it on TV (lower quality signal, etc), but far better than nothing:) Plus, that web page lets you pick which channel (Public, Media, Education) whereas cable only carries the Public channel (at least in my area). So with the webcast, you can watch events only broadcast on the others (such as a congressional hearing on the Media channel while the Public channel is live shuttle coverage, or Media channel showing a Post-MMT press briefing while Public channel is still covering an EVA, etc)
When EA shut down Earth & Beyond, there were the typical calls for the server software to be released. Amazingly enough, they actually did get a response: that the code for the backend of an MMO represents a huge investment by a company, and that they (EA) would not release the code for two basic reasons. One, access to the code (source, libraries, decompilable libraries, whatever) for a fully functional MMO would be a huge leg-up for competitors attempting to enter the field. Two, the code represents a base that can be used for other projects, and releasing a version of that base could be a liability to those future projects. For those two reasons, the chances of EA in any way supporting community-run servers would be nil.
Not stellar news (nor surprising), but the one pseudo-official response I have ever actually seen. And it does make sense, to me at least.
Currently, it looks like Meta-Moderation has been reduced to simple +/-... and there seems to be no "moderation" to be metamoderating. When I click the MetaMod link now, it sends me to a page full of 1-score posts, each with the poster's username visible. Since I have the default, and signed-in users get +1 score by default... all the comments it asked me to "metamoderate" _hadn't_been_moderated_!
And instead of the old ()Fair ()Unfair () Neither, now my options are just "+" or "-". At least the header does make it clear what those mean:
Below are a number of random user comments in our system. You are asked to decide if these are good or bad. Clicking the + and - indicates that you think that a comment is good or bad. You are welcome to skip any comment that you are unsure about. What is most important is that you are objective and honest- a comment that you mark with the '+' means that you think that other Slashdot readers would benefit from this comment.
So "+" means "good comment". Note that the directions don't even refer to meta-moderating the moderation anymore... they just talk about moderating the comment.
Not that every first in an RPG series to go 3D is great (I'm not a huge fan of FF7 when compared to the games on either side of it, for instance), but there's no reason why 3D should hinder that genre.
FF7 seemed like an example of 3D graphics, not of 3D gameplay, imo. The movement environments were all essentially 2D, but instead of sprites with a top-down or isometric view, we had polygon-based models and a viewpoint that varied between scenes (isometric, "behind the head", angled, etc) without feeling jarring. The movement space was all things that can be done in 2D, from what I remember - it's not like having a ladder is a 3D revelation, and running in a circle with spokes is likewise a 2D movement arena that can just look more interesting when a 3D perspective is used.
But overall, FF7 was 2D gameplay with 3D artwork. Was there anything specific in the gameplay that I'm just forgetting that actually used the 3D nature?
(I contrast this with something like Mario64 or even Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars (isometric SNES game), where the extra degree is used for movement and does functionally impact gameplay elements (more difficult jumps, more places to look/consider/track, etc).
That's the point. The lost small bag was supposed to be tethered inside of the larger bag which was being cleaned. That attachment failed, because either a) wasn't done properly b) had bad hardware c) was aversely affected by the grease.
I think that's the point of the text next to the rating. The rating is for the person willing to put zero effort into judging the game; the text, which tends to point out the basic categories you mention (language use, substance use, sex-related material) in an extremely concise format, letting you know if that M game is most likely M because of violence, sex, profanity, or what-have-you. It's not perfect, but it helps deal with the limitations of the simple rating without discarding it.
You could also add Matrix Online to the list, however SOE is willing to maintain MMO's that lose user base and move no where. This includes:
Matrix Online
EQ/EQ2
SWG
FFXI
EQ2 has actually had its subscriber numbers going up with the last two expansions, a rarity for a game of its age.
Either "lose user base and move no where" == "increase subscriptions" in your language, or someone's just making wild accusations.
(plus, as others have pointed out, FFXI isn't an SOE game)
I interned in an office for two summers where the company culture was to play Quake. It was a small company, ~11 people. Most days during/after lunch, the entire office would engage in a deathmatch (usually about 20-30 minutes). For stress reliever / brain refresher / break, people would engage in smaller deathmatchs throughout the day (typically 1 or 2 people, in the afternoon). Sometimes people would have a game in the evening.
It didn't tank productivity, it helped productivity. It gave people a simple, easily accessible, well-accepted method to take a break in the small, cramped office, and provided a way for people to bond over something besides shop-talk. People made sure to put in at least an 8-hour day aside from the Quake play (ie play an hour of quake, stay an extra hour late, etc) and it would often lead to very long days for some, in a good way - that "evening deathmatch" tended to result in people thinking of ways to solve problems they'd been dealing with, and so they'd go back to work afterward to either note down the idea or to implement it.
I only ever saw the system abused by one other person, another intern the second summer. They were there to pay back a debt (broke something of someone's), and had little interest in the job, so they played Quake single-player all day for a while. They got some firm talks from the boss a couple times and things improved a little, but....
The point is, this kind of system only works if you have employees that will 1) benefit from it and 2) not abuse it. When it's good, it's great. But if it's a bad match, it can tank the office. Just make sure it's a good match.
As I understand it, the rationale behind this is twofold and actually rather simple:
1) Hard vs Soft landing: The sensitive equipment is hard/expensive to make able to endure the shocks of a hard landing, like the Spirit/Opportunity "Airbag" landing. MSL will be a "soft" landing, like the Viking landers and Phoenix, putting less strain on its equipment and therefore letting them get more delicate instruments to the surface. (you can do this without a SkyCrane, obviously, but this is the reason for not using a landing system like the Mars Exploration Rovers)
2) Location: Landing on a boulder = bad thing. That's always one of the dangers of landing - even if you aim for a gigantic open field, you still might hit that one single protrusion that could destroy your lander. The SkyCrane lets you pick your landing spot to a minor degree, meaning that you can even potentially land in a boulder-strewn area (which might be the kind of geology you want to target) and have a dramatically reduced danger of your lander becoming uselessly stuck or destroyed by what it lands on.
Overall, I do agree that this seems like an excessively complicated system to add-on, and an 'easy' way to add lots of new ways to fail. That said, I can at least sympathize with the rationale for wanting something like this (the above two reasons).
(There is a third reason they've cited, but this one I don't really understand the logic of - how is the SkyCrane "deploy" any 'better' than egressing a lander?)
3) "You haven't really landed yet" - with the MER, once they'd "landed" they hadn't really landed - the rover wasn't yet on the surface. When you land on a platform like MER did, you still have a complicated, 'dangerous' process of getting the rover extracted from the lander and onto the surface. By using SkyCrane, this step is removed - once you get to the surface, you're on the surface "for real", and can begin your checkout and setup of the rover proper.
The parent is correct. Their games do require you to run their Impulse client to download game updates.
But that's the point. You have to run the pseudo-DRM software to download updates, not to play the game as-is. That's the compromise that Stardock has advertised on repeatedly - there's no DRM to restrict you from playing the game, just DRM-like mechanisms to control updating the game.
Personally, I find that many orders of magnitude better than things like SecuROM or StarForce, and somewhere around the level of a input-once CD Key. A background 'quicklaunch' service would be annoying (I haven't had to update my Stardock stuff in a few months, so I've only used the Impusle-predecessor "Stardock Central", which didn't have the background service), but usually mechanisms to disable those don't take too long to come out... I hope.
It costs money and does not generate any revenue (unlike college sports, which the colleges are now so dependent on for income that not even a 12-step program could help them).
I don't know about the schools you've looked at, but the highschools in my hometown were heavily dependent on the sports program for income. Sure, the sports program got a huge chunk of the official budget, but it reliably made it all back and yielded a net 'profit' to be used to fund other things at the school. Cutting the sports program would've *cost* the school money, not gained any money back.
(I worked as part of the student technical theatre / auditorium / soundcrew, so we were more aware of budgetting (as we had to request money for gear replacement/maintenance, for theatre production supplies, balance cost-vs-income when someone rented a space for an event, etc) and used a lot of sports facilities (gym, stadium, storage, etc) - so we got plenty of chances to talk to the principles and sports admins about resource utilization and funding sinks/sources)
Differential test scores. Rating/paying schools by an absolute score just means schools get students who know the end result. Rating/paying schools by how much they've improved, relative to how much you'd expect them to improve given where they were at the start of the year, would tell you how much you've actually taught them versus expectation. Expect the results to be very different.
...
DO NOT teach to the exam, teach the subject. Teaching to the exam just tells you how good students are at tests, and any student who is any good doesn't give a damn about what the exam needs you to know, they want to know what the subject requires you to know. The exam is merely a device to let you progress further or get a better job. The crap students want you to teach to the exam, because it means they don't need to understand anything, they just need to be able to recite the day after they pull an all-night crammer.
The problem is, these two goals are often conflicting and contradictory. Quality- or results-based funding means that you have to have some way to quantitatively measure quality/results, which translates into some form of standardized testing. Teaching only the aspects of the subject covered in the exam, to the extent needed for the exam, in the style of the exam, will have students on average perform better on the exam than if they spent equivalent time on the subject in general (which would involve material, concepts, ideas, etc not relevant to the exam, and thus "waste" time). Thus, the pressure to teach to the exam is immense - your school is competing with the other schools in the district/county/state/nation for funding, and so you wind up doing everything possible to raise those scores. Given that so many public schools are cash-strapped as it is, threats to their funding get taken *very* seriously, and I can't blame them.
I got to see some of this first-hand. When I started highschool, the state didn't have meaningful standardize tests used as school metrics. In my junior and senior year, we were the guinea pigs, providing the baseline data, and the exams would "count" starting the year after I graduated. Comparing my freshman/sophmore and junior/senior years, curriculums *definitely* changed. Material was shifted and reorganized, and substantial amounts of class time was given toward pure test preparation (the style of the test questions, the kind of information they'd require, the usual "good test-taking techniques", mock exams (separate from usual grade-impacting tests), which details were more likely to show up, etc). Most of that test-prep class time was acquired by cutting subjects and material that the state exams didn't require.
I was truly amazed at just how much changed. The nature of the classes I was taking changed, but that could've just been a normal 1st/2nd vs 3rd/4th year divide. But talking with freshmen and sophomores about their classes, and discussing the curriculum with the math department, there were major changes made to all of the classes teaching subjects covered by the new exams, and even some programs had to be redesigned so material would sync with state testing.
I'm glad I (mostly) got through the system before those standardized tests re-wrote the curriculum. Their acronym, SOL, was all too apt.
(Officially, SOL = Standards Of Learning, yielding "SOL exams")
The kids are the team that won "this year's Kindergarten through Third Grade National Championship." The commentary on the US Chess site mentions that the kids favor "classical patterns" - I'd guess part of their training involves learning many of the well-known scenarios and techniques.
Also given the timescales involved (the vote's open for a week, the station crew member is aiming for a minimum of about 1 move/week on his end), the kids likely have a chance to think it through and discuss - it's not like they have to come up with 4 moves constrained by a 2-hour speedchess match clock.
Speed-writing, of one form or another, is still useful for note-taking (in meetings, lectures/seminars, classes, etc). You can't have your laptop everywhere.
(and in some circumstances the keyboard clicking is loud enough to be considered disruptive - true, there are loud pens & pencils, but I run into far more loud laptops than scratching handwriting implements).
I thought the airlock was removable? While there currently is no reason to be removing them (since it's all ISS missions or this EVA-intensive mission), my understanding that they were one of the 'many' pressurized cargo bay attachments, like SpaceLab, SpaceHab, etc, which were able to be included or removed as missions required. Or did the SSPTS upgrade remove that option?
Laundered? The former occupant's bloodstains might come out, but I'd think the phaser burns / acidic ooze / claw marks might be a bit harder to get out.
There have been a handful of enlisted men in the series, but they are rare. They also seem to be in the engineering fields, as the two main examples are O'Brien (Transporter Chief in TNG, and Chief Engineer in DS9) and at least some of the Defiant's engineering crew (in one episode, O'Brien was telling Worf that the engineers he was commanding were enlisted men and hadn't been through Starfleet Academy, and therefore needed to be handled differently than the Officers he's used to dealing with). In TNG, O'Brien's rank usually came up because of the confusion it caused - he was "Chief", but because of the title of his position and not because of his rank. In DS9, it was usually referenced as why he was not participating in formal occasions - that was an officer duty.
So it's been clear since TNG at least that enlisted personel *exist*, but are simply very rare in the show. They seem to be growing more common, slowly, as other posters have pointed out.
Waste hydrogen? I would have expected them to have some use for that.
I believe the stated reason is that the hydrogen was deemed too dangerous to store. The risks associated exceeded the benefits gained.
(note that this electrolysis-generated hydrogen is likely a very different risk profile from the ground-loaded (cryogenic) liquid hydrogen used on the space shuttle)
A positive result says "we were right" - which isn't very useful as far as going forward and doing more theory development. A negative result implies we were wrong about *this* prediction, but (especially if the theory is well established) the theory 'correctly' predicts a multitude of other phenomena with a plethora of experiments to back it. Now theoreticians have a puzzle to solve, to find a theoretical description that still fits all the old experimental evidence but also fits the new one. Such impetus and pursuit tends to be viewed as doing more to refine our understanding of reality than a simple "we were right" result, which gives little direction for how to "move forward" (presuming our current theory is not the ultimate truth already, and thus needs refinement).
Presuming, of course, that the negative result is interpretted as an issue with the theory, rather than an issue with the experiment/equipment.
it's called money. JAXA would get cold, hard cash in return for HTV (which still hasn't flown)
Most NASA ISS deals are "No Exchange of Funds". It's all barters - you build it, I'll fly it; I'll maintain it, you give me some cargo room; I'll let you use it, you'll give me a crew member slot; etc. Some deals are using money (most notably some of the deals with Russia, and I think Italy (not ESA)), but the majority of them are barters.
Plus, it was the internal target date that slipped, from Summer 2013 to NET August 2014... which is still about a year before the official, public target in 2015.
That's *why* the public date is further out than the internal date in the first place... to give the schedule some slack because, inevitably, there will be delays and overruns of one kind or another.
Slashdot Mirror
If you allow teleporting from anywhere to anywhere it doesn't matter how big you make your world, because to everyone it will feel small.
That's my personal gripe with overly easy transportation in MMOs. The best example I have is Everquest, when they introduced the Plane of Knowledge - suddenly everyone had access to instantaneous transportation to places all over the world, granting undreamed of ease of movement ... and changing what had been a large, sprawling world into something that felt relatively small, a series of arbitrary locales rather than cohesive continents and islands.
PoK fundamentally changed things, and really taught me the value of travel-that-takes-time. It's one of the many parts of an MMO where 'listening to the players' will yield a bad game, in that players (people, really) often want things that will ultimately undercut the enjoyment/value of their experience.
That's not to say that there's no such thing as excessive travel time - taking 3 hours to get from Newbieville to Hunting_Grounds_of_the_Newbies is a problem. The sweet spot is in the middle somewhere, and my point is simply that non-trivial travel is important, and that the sweet spot is likely higher (more travel) than most people seek or would ask for.
Square (as in SquareEnix), famed for their CG in the Final Fantasy games, tried making a movie ... and the product, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, didn't turn out so well for them.
Civic diplomacy was the pure-diplomacy mechanism to get newer gear - one of its rewards is items called "information", which are turned in for random gear. The newbie quests originally would give you at least enough Presence to do some civic diplomacy, and the enhanced newbie quests that went in about 6-8 months after launch yielded a _very_ nice set of gear that covered the core Presences, allowing you to do most or all low-level civic.
What is civic diplomacy? It's parleying with the inhabitants of cities. In addition to the "information" rewards, it also leads to city-wide buffs that were rather nice. The buffs were triggered, essentially, by doing the same 'kind' of conversation with enough NPCs of the same profession (Academic, Clergy, Merchant, etc). The conversations altered "levers", and buffs were activated when certain levers passed various thresholds - over time, all levers decayed back to their starting state. In principle diplomats could keep cities perpetually offering a suite of really nice buffs, but in practice server resets would undo it, so buffs typically only stayed up for a couple hours (ie, the time it took a maxed out lever to decay below the trigger level)
And, of course, as in most MMOs, the Broker/Bazaar/AuctionHouse equivalent is another avenue for gear. Just how useful varied, as diplomacy gear was becoming less and less tradeable with time - hopefully buying diplomacy gear is still an option, as it was incredibly useful and relatively necessary given the random nature of most diplomacy gear rewards.
I'm out-of-date, as I played for the first 8 months of live (started 2 weeks before the Feb launch, and quit in October/November), so things might have changed since then. But this was the way things worked back then - you could certainly do diplomacy without having to Adventure or Craft for gear. It was a practical option, too.
I'm in the reverse camp - black-on-white text leads to eyestrain and headaches. To deal with the dark-on-light design of most websites, I need to keep the brightness/contrast of a moniter very low, which makes it hard to see any finer detail that may be present and leads to a different kind of eyestrain. Light-on-dark designs I can read without the discomfort, so I'm grateful to the web designers that use such colorschemes.
(as a side note, that's also the benefit for me of the "e-paper" initiatives - they tend to be non-lit/backlit surfaces, so the background brightness is controlled by the ambient environment ala a book or newspaper, which is FAR easier on my eyes than these CRT/LCD eyestrain devices)
NASA TV is available on the web as well:
:) Plus, that web page lets you pick which channel (Public, Media, Education) whereas cable only carries the Public channel (at least in my area). So with the webcast, you can watch events only broadcast on the others (such as a congressional hearing on the Media channel while the Public channel is live shuttle coverage, or Media channel showing a Post-MMT press briefing while Public channel is still covering an EVA, etc)
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html
Not nearly as nice as watching it on TV (lower quality signal, etc), but far better than nothing
When EA shut down Earth & Beyond, there were the typical calls for the server software to be released. Amazingly enough, they actually did get a response: that the code for the backend of an MMO represents a huge investment by a company, and that they (EA) would not release the code for two basic reasons. One, access to the code (source, libraries, decompilable libraries, whatever) for a fully functional MMO would be a huge leg-up for competitors attempting to enter the field. Two, the code represents a base that can be used for other projects, and releasing a version of that base could be a liability to those future projects. For those two reasons, the chances of EA in any way supporting community-run servers would be nil.
Not stellar news (nor surprising), but the one pseudo-official response I have ever actually seen. And it does make sense, to me at least.
And instead of the old ()Fair ()Unfair () Neither, now my options are just "+" or "-". At least the header does make it clear what those mean:
So "+" means "good comment". Note that the directions don't even refer to meta-moderating the moderation anymore ... they just talk about moderating the comment.
./mourn meta-moderation system
FF7 seemed like an example of 3D graphics, not of 3D gameplay, imo. The movement environments were all essentially 2D, but instead of sprites with a top-down or isometric view, we had polygon-based models and a viewpoint that varied between scenes (isometric, "behind the head", angled, etc) without feeling jarring. The movement space was all things that can be done in 2D, from what I remember - it's not like having a ladder is a 3D revelation, and running in a circle with spokes is likewise a 2D movement arena that can just look more interesting when a 3D perspective is used.
But overall, FF7 was 2D gameplay with 3D artwork. Was there anything specific in the gameplay that I'm just forgetting that actually used the 3D nature?
(I contrast this with something like Mario64 or even Super Mario RPG: The Legend of the Seven Stars (isometric SNES game), where the extra degree is used for movement and does functionally impact gameplay elements (more difficult jumps, more places to look/consider/track, etc).
That's the point. The lost small bag was supposed to be tethered inside of the larger bag which was being cleaned. That attachment failed, because either a) wasn't done properly b) had bad hardware c) was aversely affected by the grease.
I think that's the point of the text next to the rating. The rating is for the person willing to put zero effort into judging the game; the text, which tends to point out the basic categories you mention (language use, substance use, sex-related material) in an extremely concise format, letting you know if that M game is most likely M because of violence, sex, profanity, or what-have-you. It's not perfect, but it helps deal with the limitations of the simple rating without discarding it.
EQ2 has actually had its subscriber numbers going up with the last two expansions, a rarity for a game of its age.
Either "lose user base and move no where" == "increase subscriptions" in your language, or someone's just making wild accusations.
(plus, as others have pointed out, FFXI isn't an SOE game)
I interned in an office for two summers where the company culture was to play Quake. It was a small company, ~11 people. Most days during/after lunch, the entire office would engage in a deathmatch (usually about 20-30 minutes). For stress reliever / brain refresher / break, people would engage in smaller deathmatchs throughout the day (typically 1 or 2 people, in the afternoon). Sometimes people would have a game in the evening. It didn't tank productivity, it helped productivity. It gave people a simple, easily accessible, well-accepted method to take a break in the small, cramped office, and provided a way for people to bond over something besides shop-talk. People made sure to put in at least an 8-hour day aside from the Quake play (ie play an hour of quake, stay an extra hour late, etc) and it would often lead to very long days for some, in a good way - that "evening deathmatch" tended to result in people thinking of ways to solve problems they'd been dealing with, and so they'd go back to work afterward to either note down the idea or to implement it. I only ever saw the system abused by one other person, another intern the second summer. They were there to pay back a debt (broke something of someone's), and had little interest in the job, so they played Quake single-player all day for a while. They got some firm talks from the boss a couple times and things improved a little, but ....
The point is, this kind of system only works if you have employees that will 1) benefit from it and 2) not abuse it. When it's good, it's great. But if it's a bad match, it can tank the office. Just make sure it's a good match.
As I understand it, the rationale behind this is twofold and actually rather simple:
1) Hard vs Soft landing: The sensitive equipment is hard/expensive to make able to endure the shocks of a hard landing, like the Spirit/Opportunity "Airbag" landing. MSL will be a "soft" landing, like the Viking landers and Phoenix, putting less strain on its equipment and therefore letting them get more delicate instruments to the surface. (you can do this without a SkyCrane, obviously, but this is the reason for not using a landing system like the Mars Exploration Rovers)
2) Location: Landing on a boulder = bad thing. That's always one of the dangers of landing - even if you aim for a gigantic open field, you still might hit that one single protrusion that could destroy your lander. The SkyCrane lets you pick your landing spot to a minor degree, meaning that you can even potentially land in a boulder-strewn area (which might be the kind of geology you want to target) and have a dramatically reduced danger of your lander becoming uselessly stuck or destroyed by what it lands on.
Overall, I do agree that this seems like an excessively complicated system to add-on, and an 'easy' way to add lots of new ways to fail. That said, I can at least sympathize with the rationale for wanting something like this (the above two reasons).
(There is a third reason they've cited, but this one I don't really understand the logic of - how is the SkyCrane "deploy" any 'better' than egressing a lander?)
3) "You haven't really landed yet" - with the MER, once they'd "landed" they hadn't really landed - the rover wasn't yet on the surface. When you land on a platform like MER did, you still have a complicated, 'dangerous' process of getting the rover extracted from the lander and onto the surface. By using SkyCrane, this step is removed - once you get to the surface, you're on the surface "for real", and can begin your checkout and setup of the rover proper.
But that's the point. You have to run the pseudo-DRM software to download updates, not to play the game as-is. That's the compromise that Stardock has advertised on repeatedly - there's no DRM to restrict you from playing the game, just DRM-like mechanisms to control updating the game.
... I hope.
Personally, I find that many orders of magnitude better than things like SecuROM or StarForce, and somewhere around the level of a input-once CD Key. A background 'quicklaunch' service would be annoying (I haven't had to update my Stardock stuff in a few months, so I've only used the Impusle-predecessor "Stardock Central", which didn't have the background service), but usually mechanisms to disable those don't take too long to come out
I don't know about the schools you've looked at, but the highschools in my hometown were heavily dependent on the sports program for income. Sure, the sports program got a huge chunk of the official budget, but it reliably made it all back and yielded a net 'profit' to be used to fund other things at the school. Cutting the sports program would've *cost* the school money, not gained any money back.
(I worked as part of the student technical theatre / auditorium / soundcrew, so we were more aware of budgetting (as we had to request money for gear replacement/maintenance, for theatre production supplies, balance cost-vs-income when someone rented a space for an event, etc) and used a lot of sports facilities (gym, stadium, storage, etc) - so we got plenty of chances to talk to the principles and sports admins about resource utilization and funding sinks/sources)
The problem is, these two goals are often conflicting and contradictory. Quality- or results-based funding means that you have to have some way to quantitatively measure quality/results, which translates into some form of standardized testing. Teaching only the aspects of the subject covered in the exam, to the extent needed for the exam, in the style of the exam, will have students on average perform better on the exam than if they spent equivalent time on the subject in general (which would involve material, concepts, ideas, etc not relevant to the exam, and thus "waste" time). Thus, the pressure to teach to the exam is immense - your school is competing with the other schools in the district/county/state/nation for funding, and so you wind up doing everything possible to raise those scores. Given that so many public schools are cash-strapped as it is, threats to their funding get taken *very* seriously, and I can't blame them.
I got to see some of this first-hand. When I started highschool, the state didn't have meaningful standardize tests used as school metrics. In my junior and senior year, we were the guinea pigs, providing the baseline data, and the exams would "count" starting the year after I graduated. Comparing my freshman/sophmore and junior/senior years, curriculums *definitely* changed. Material was shifted and reorganized, and substantial amounts of class time was given toward pure test preparation (the style of the test questions, the kind of information they'd require, the usual "good test-taking techniques", mock exams (separate from usual grade-impacting tests), which details were more likely to show up, etc). Most of that test-prep class time was acquired by cutting subjects and material that the state exams didn't require.
I was truly amazed at just how much changed. The nature of the classes I was taking changed, but that could've just been a normal 1st/2nd vs 3rd/4th year divide. But talking with freshmen and sophomores about their classes, and discussing the curriculum with the math department, there were major changes made to all of the classes teaching subjects covered by the new exams, and even some programs had to be redesigned so material would sync with state testing.
I'm glad I (mostly) got through the system before those standardized tests re-wrote the curriculum. Their acronym, SOL, was all too apt.
(Officially, SOL = Standards Of Learning, yielding "SOL exams")
The kids are the team that won "this year's Kindergarten through Third Grade National Championship." The commentary on the US Chess site mentions that the kids favor "classical patterns" - I'd guess part of their training involves learning many of the well-known scenarios and techniques.
Also given the timescales involved (the vote's open for a week, the station crew member is aiming for a minimum of about 1 move/week on his end), the kids likely have a chance to think it through and discuss - it's not like they have to come up with 4 moves constrained by a 2-hour speedchess match clock.
Speed-writing, of one form or another, is still useful for note-taking (in meetings, lectures/seminars, classes, etc). You can't have your laptop everywhere.
(and in some circumstances the keyboard clicking is loud enough to be considered disruptive - true, there are loud pens & pencils, but I run into far more loud laptops than scratching handwriting implements).
I thought the airlock was removable? While there currently is no reason to be removing them (since it's all ISS missions or this EVA-intensive mission), my understanding that they were one of the 'many' pressurized cargo bay attachments, like SpaceLab, SpaceHab, etc, which were able to be included or removed as missions required. Or did the SSPTS upgrade remove that option?
Laundered? The former occupant's bloodstains might come out, but I'd think the phaser burns / acidic ooze / claw marks might be a bit harder to get out.
There have been a handful of enlisted men in the series, but they are rare. They also seem to be in the engineering fields, as the two main examples are O'Brien (Transporter Chief in TNG, and Chief Engineer in DS9) and at least some of the Defiant's engineering crew (in one episode, O'Brien was telling Worf that the engineers he was commanding were enlisted men and hadn't been through Starfleet Academy, and therefore needed to be handled differently than the Officers he's used to dealing with). In TNG, O'Brien's rank usually came up because of the confusion it caused - he was "Chief", but because of the title of his position and not because of his rank. In DS9, it was usually referenced as why he was not participating in formal occasions - that was an officer duty.
So it's been clear since TNG at least that enlisted personel *exist*, but are simply very rare in the show. They seem to be growing more common, slowly, as other posters have pointed out.
Waste hydrogen? I would have expected them to have some use for that.
I believe the stated reason is that the hydrogen was deemed too dangerous to store. The risks associated exceeded the benefits gained. (note that this electrolysis-generated hydrogen is likely a very different risk profile from the ground-loaded (cryogenic) liquid hydrogen used on the space shuttle)
A positive result says "we were right" - which isn't very useful as far as going forward and doing more theory development. A negative result implies we were wrong about *this* prediction, but (especially if the theory is well established) the theory 'correctly' predicts a multitude of other phenomena with a plethora of experiments to back it. Now theoreticians have a puzzle to solve, to find a theoretical description that still fits all the old experimental evidence but also fits the new one. Such impetus and pursuit tends to be viewed as doing more to refine our understanding of reality than a simple "we were right" result, which gives little direction for how to "move forward" (presuming our current theory is not the ultimate truth already, and thus needs refinement).
Presuming, of course, that the negative result is interpretted as an issue with the theory, rather than an issue with the experiment/equipment.
it's called money. JAXA would get cold, hard cash in return for HTV (which still hasn't flown)
Most NASA ISS deals are "No Exchange of Funds". It's all barters - you build it, I'll fly it; I'll maintain it, you give me some cargo room; I'll let you use it, you'll give me a crew member slot; etc. Some deals are using money (most notably some of the deals with Russia, and I think Italy (not ESA)), but the majority of them are barters.
Plus, it was the internal target date that slipped, from Summer 2013 to NET August 2014 ... which is still about a year before the official, public target in 2015.
... to give the schedule some slack because, inevitably, there will be delays and overruns of one kind or another.
That's *why* the public date is further out than the internal date in the first place