> Blizzard should NOT be marketing their game as > a shrink wrap product you buy at a store (like > a toaster, or a pork loin) but rather as a > SERVICE like EverQuest, WarBirds, Anarchy > Online, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, etc.
Feces. I only play with local friends on LANs. I wouldn't buy an online-only game. In fact, I haven't: I have never owned any MMORPG, nor any of the similar things listed.
Why? Because I like to play games with my friends. If Blizzard limited their game to people who want to play against those they find at random on the 'net, they'd lose a lot of their gaming populace. It's teh right thing to do to allow the player to choose.
And before you tell me that I could get to my friends through battle.net, consider the a) unnessecary load on battle.net, b) the unnessecary extra time spent waiting for a connection, finding the room my friends are in, and getting the network connections, and c) that there's just no benefit at all to doing it that way.
> Why is it that Americans/Slashdotters keep > saying "Squash" when what they really mean > is "Quash" [dictionary.com]?
My. How quaintly arrogant of you to suggest that because you do not use a word as slang in a particular format, it's wrong.
The phrase is used much in the way that one would describe what happens to an insect when stepped upon: it is squashed. Bugs in software picked the term up easily: when one kills a software bug, one makes a joke about it as an insect which was squashed. Language being the mutable thing that it is, that's gotten out into the wild.
Why is it that Britons insist on using a 'u' in colo(u)r, when the country with the most english speakers on earth doesn't?
(Just waiting for him to whine that English belongs to Britain and not America; then I'll be able to point out that I meant China.)
This ain't the king's english anymore, bub. Get over it. You lost control of the lexicon by not having enough kids. Now either go out and screw, or make up another language. It's squash. Get used to it.
That is absolute bullshit. Mutation by radiation is literally hit and miss.
Good morning, clown. Mutation by radiation is hit-and-miss. Gonads are very fragile things, especially in animals as small as a fly.
It's bad to call this mutation, because it's really not. This is the using of large amounts of radiation to kill the flies' nuts. Then, you sift out the dead ones, and let the remainder into the wild.
It's been done a ton of times, and is a fairly common Pennsylvania High-school Biology experiment.
I *love* it when the misinformed call others misinformed...
I once had three strands of Christmas Tree lights, all the same brand, using the same neato-geewhize-ooo-aaa blinking controller. I set them to the same type of blinking, but they obviously started out of phase. The next morning they were all blinking exactly together, in phase, all three strands. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.
I have tried to repeat this each Christmas since and have yet to see it again.
Any explanations anyone?
Yeah. A power outage happened in the middle of the night. When the power came back on, the difference in the time at which each christmas light recieved power was limited only by the speed of electricity and the length of the cords involved.
> I think you're missing the point. Privacy is
> one thing. Hiding your lawbreaking behavior
> from the government and your shareholders is a
> whole different ballgame.
Oh, and obviously, email that's been hidden is law-breaking. That's why we're taking your TiVo - we don't care what's actually *on* the harddrive - we know it's for illegally duplicating movies.
God, this gets old. But, then again, so does whining about the signal to noise ratio of the slashdot community declining. Maybe it's the species?
> The real dangerous thing is the way many people
> advocate privacy while their intent is to
> shield criminal activity.
Arguably, the real danger is those who try to infer illegal behavior from the desire for privacy. Wait until you see the red hands, there, Chachi.
>... but first of all, this will only work
> really close to the sun, maybe within the five
> inner planets, as the wind pressure decreases
> with the inverse square of the distance to the
> sun.
What, are you going to lose speed from all that air friction in space? Dillhole. You build up to.95 c by Jupiter, and then fly on past.
By the way, you're arguing against a RamJet, not a Light Sail (which is what a Solar Sail is *really* called). RamJets operate on the hydrogen resident in solar wind being collected by a magnetic field and fused; solar sails extend a huge "sail" as a magnetic field and allow light pressure from some source to accelerate them. If they manage to stay accurately enough on-course, a laser from home should work to fuel it all the way just fine, as long as the ship doesn't hit C (which it's just not going to).
Sure, the faster the ship goes, the less pressure the ship gets, but just build a bigger laser. Texas will do it eventually. That's how they "think".
> Think about it: an independent developer would
> HAVE to employ a lawyer to deal with licensing
> schemes like Borland's Enterprise license.
Unless, of course, you thik about the following: the enterprise license is not intended for individual developers.
Get your head out of your ass. Even Borland is allowed to screw up once in a while. That's a normal corporate contract facet. Borland just forgot to take it out of the stuff they're giving away for free.
Or did you forget about the "giving away free" part, too?
> IE will not launch any file with a.EXE extension without first asking for permission.
No, but up until version 5, it would run with quite a few other inderect executables.
My favorite was always.SCR - teh screensaver extension - because under Windows, screensavers are just executables with a specific command line argument format.
> First off, if anybody out there actually reads this, congratulations for wanting to read what I have to say even though slashdot thinks what I have to say isn't important because I don't want to make an account to say it.
> Give me a break. Try writing something like BLOX [blox.com] for use in Netscape.
(sighs)
Have we forgotten that the web is supposed to be browser-blind?
But, look, if you really need to use a web browser to do things that a web browser just wasn't meant to do, you ought to consider funky little things like Java.
Java works on many platforms, including the PlayStation Fucking Two. And it can do everything blox will be doing until its shutdown in a few weeks.
There's a reason IE is breaking the web. It's in Microsoft's best interest. Quit being another one of MS' brainwashed sheepole and wake up.
(I don't mindlessly MS bash, by the way. It's quite planned. Now I'm going to go pretend like I don't use office.)
Well, I was going to post, but I kept hitting the lameness filter for too many junk characters (don't know what character's throwing it, though, so of course I can't fix it. What characters trip the filter aren't in the FAQ, either. Guys: make it a ratio, not a count. Long posts get screwed. And make it tell you what character is getting tripped.)
A link to my rebuttal, and a hope that people will still respond.
This remains funny right up and until you envision yourself on IRC, trying to explain the difference between megaTits and megaTeats to an idiot 15-year-old who thinks his cable modem gets more handwidth than your T1.
It starts being funny again when you try to figure out which image compression format bets more Tits per megaTit.
Well, when I read through my limited scope of the first half of comments, browsing at four, I saw people focussing on RTS-style games: StarCraft, WarCraft, Total Annhialation, Dune 2, etc. For one, I'm happy to see that my original prediction that Command and Conquer would largely be forgotten as the best of the "me-too" games seems to be happening. I've also noticed a single, lone comment about "go", one of the best strategy games in history.
What I don't see are people pulling anything more obscure than chess. This is disheartening: we have tons of games whose strategy is essentially the only real game component.
Take, for example, Stars! (and the soon-upcoming sequel, Stars! Supernova). TURN BASED GAME. Quite a strategy monster, too - you have the opportounity to customize your race on something silly like 125 axes, and then to pursue a strategy to which your species is tailored. Leads to some very weird, very complex plans.
Or take something more mundane. There are elements of strategy in Backgammon, Poker, and Blackjack. There are elements of strategy in sports. In craps. In Tetrinet. Even in Magic: The Gathering.
For that matter, I saw quote that the last time someone-or-another had seen strategy in StarCraft was "never", bemoaning that some mid-level units and a few high-level units were all he ever saw. Well, either my house is much better or much worse than you guys are, because every time someone here tries that, they get stomped flat - either we can beat that tactic, or nobody here uses that tactic well. But StarCraft, in this house, is pure attrition: we cannot penetrate one another's defenses until someone's out of resource X.
In my not-so-humble opinion, all you need to founder strategy are two elements: a game wherein thinking players do better than nonthinking players, and players who think. If you've ever played Chess in a park, you'll know that even the western ideal of the strategy game (I still prefer Go, myself) can be player utterly without strategy - nearly invariably to disasterous results.
Why aren't more commercial games being developed where strategy is the only direction a player can take? Oh, well, look how many people play chess actively. Not how many people play it once a year, but how many would buy it for $40 at Babbage's.
In the meantime, how do we make more heavily strategic games?
This one's a little more difficult, and what I'm going to say is by no means the only set of ways. In fact, I'm knowingly cloaking certain ideas, as I'm trying to use those ideas to break into the publishing market as we speak. But:
When creating your tokens (to RTSes, "units"), try to ensure that there are multiple significant strengths and weaknesses to each. Try to see that foreseeable groups of units share at least one weakness, and make some weaknesses difficult to address.
Try to ensure many paths to success. Searching this discussion will give you many such: attrition, overwhelming (this is a *valid* technique - see blitzkrieg), outproducing (see why the US won despite blitzkrieg), diplomacy, cultural infusion, and so on.
Balance is critical. A multiplayer game where one path wins much faster than others generally has one path in use.
Things like shifting ties between players can complicate games. Allies who aren't allies anymore can prevent certain tactics based on knowledge of prior secrets. Alliances can outweigh heavyweight players.
There are a bunch of resources which will lead aspiring designers to good extant game mechanics (which may in turn spur development of new mechanics). Long-time game companies such as Avalon Hill are a great target. Tom Jolly games (WIZWAR! WIZWAR!) is another awesome resource. Mailing lists (go look at Yahoo) are also a good place to start, but the people there generally don't want to talk to newbies - just the old-heads who know what's already been said. Try that if you're good at lurking, and are patient.
What's most important to making a strategy game? Playtesting. If everyone's doing one thing, try getting in there and donig something else. If you can't win, then something's unbalanced, and you need to either trim it back or weight other things, or maybe jsut give alternatives. Play for three months. If you don't see a ton of strategies emerging, you haven't been successful.
Yeah, I mean, two failures in a year? It's not like you have to be a rocket scientist to run something like NASA...
There's a reason for that phrase, BTW.
Cheers to NASA for having the skill to take into account as much as they do and still come out with a comparatively very high success rate. I'm reasonably secure in the notion that, granted all of their money and all of their experimental data, I could probably get a rocket to... fall over.
3. FireWire. This technology will be the fiasco of the decade if it doesn't appear soon on something other than a Macintosh and a camcorder.
You mean like the playstation two, or my high-end Dell? Or maybe something like a computer belonging to someone who wants really neato toys? SCSI didn't die either, and that wasn't for lack of competition. Good lord, man, how long do you need to work in an industry to learn that standards that cost an end-user more than a buck fifty american don't spring up overnight?
BTW, that that camcorder supports FireWire is one of my main reasons for considering buying it. If I can use a FireWire hard drive and camcorder to connect to my PlayStation, which has more than enough graphic horsepower to do realtime video editing, I think I might just be a fairly happy man. 'Specially since I can then just pump it out through S-Video to my S-Video capable VCR, and tape something right cleanly.
This, of course, after I have enough money to buy myself a disposable razor, but that's another story.
I'm surprised at this message, and actually fairly pleased. I think maybe this man wants to take it further than I would personally (remember that if there's anything that'll get someone expelled that's as subjective as bullying, it's gonig to be a great way for a smaller clique of kids to get an innocent bigger kid evicted, etc etc etc), I think maybe something along these lines might work remarkably well.
For some substantiation, I went to a high-school in an extremely economically depressed region. There was a fairly large contingent of people who made life there akin to a bad episode of a high-school kung fu cartoon, but with significantly less class. Speaking as a hockey playing bad tempered 6'4" semi-capable fighter, I find it worrying to be able to say that I was beaten up regularly. I'm imposing and mean.
When the school staff shifted, they changed the security contingent around a lot (there were 25 guards for 900 kids, metal detectors, magnetic locks on the exit doors, the whole nine yards; surprised that they didn't have attack dogs or like flying monkeys or something), and as a result a different person was in charge of the policings of the halls.
Ms. Mary was able to tame the place, by striking at the root of the problem - she got some rather surprisingly big people on staff, and she had them harass the school bullies. It was under the table, borderline inappropriate, and fairly brutal besides. The school, for a few kids, became rather like incarceration - the guards were more dangerous than the companions.
You know what? Bullies only exist at the top. There aren't really strata (which I would have never realized). They can't be semi-bullies. It's boolean - you are or you aren't.
When there were badder asses than their bad asses, they just became asses, and faded back into malcontents.
On the other hand, though, though there's something to be said for not fueling the explosion, there's equal justification for these things to be worked on at the level of the kid themself. As I choose to believe about the core of humanity, one simply does not snap into a murderous rampage. The current low rate suggests a pattern of damaged individuals rather than a tendency (though I'm an amateur and am flying on common sense rather than geniune grokking) for this sort of behavior.
Yes, we can starve the explosion. Is that any reason for us not to do everything we can to help these kids? I mean, I was fucked up, too. I shouldn't have been locked away. I should have had help.
Sure, institutionalization of mental health care and assistance by schools is going to be shredded by everyone that reads it, but the reason is beacuse it doesn't work, not because it's the wrong idea. It's just been not working so thoroughly for so long that we don't make the differentiation anymore.
We need to find a real way to help our kids. Mental health research is being cut at a time where we're finally making breakthroughs. Any other science is judged on statistics, but people seem to forget that analysis is really curing people now, and that the rates are going up very quickly.
With things like this going on, can we afford to wait any longer to geniunely understand how to help these kids heal before one of these policies really does turn Orwell? It's not a question of whether it'll happen. It's a question of when. Things change, and a hole will develop someday.
Think about it. How do we stop persecuting the kids, their bullies, their teachers, their parents, and everyone else who contributed to the problem or that didn't help solve it, and start finding a way to just get it fixed?
Slashdot Mirror
> Does "not a bank" mean "not insured by FDIC"?
Cluestick: bank doesn't mean insured by FDIC, either. If it did, would they advertise it everywhere?
Just because every reputable bank you've ever heard of does FDIC doesn't mean your favorite b-gname ecommerce tragedy waiting to happen does...
> Blizzard should NOT be marketing their game as
> a shrink wrap product you buy at a store (like
> a toaster, or a pork loin) but rather as a
> SERVICE like EverQuest, WarBirds, Anarchy
> Online, Ultima Online, Dark Age of Camelot, etc.
Feces. I only play with local friends on LANs. I wouldn't buy an online-only game. In fact, I haven't: I have never owned any MMORPG, nor any of the similar things listed.
Why? Because I like to play games with my friends. If Blizzard limited their game to people who want to play against those they find at random on the 'net, they'd lose a lot of their gaming populace. It's teh right thing to do to allow the player to choose.
And before you tell me that I could get to my friends through battle.net, consider the a) unnessecary load on battle.net, b) the unnessecary extra time spent waiting for a connection, finding the room my friends are in, and getting the network connections, and c) that there's just no benefit at all to doing it that way.
> Why is it that Americans/Slashdotters keep
> saying "Squash" when what they really mean
> is "Quash" [dictionary.com]?
My. How quaintly arrogant of you to suggest that because you do not use a word as slang in a particular format, it's wrong.
The phrase is used much in the way that one would describe what happens to an insect when stepped upon: it is squashed. Bugs in software picked the term up easily: when one kills a software bug, one makes a joke about it as an insect which was squashed. Language being the mutable thing that it is, that's gotten out into the wild.
Why is it that Britons insist on using a 'u' in colo(u)r, when the country with the most english speakers on earth doesn't?
(Just waiting for him to whine that English belongs to Britain and not America; then I'll be able to point out that I meant China.)
This ain't the king's english anymore, bub. Get over it. You lost control of the lexicon by not having enough kids. Now either go out and screw, or make up another language. It's squash. Get used to it.
That is absolute bullshit. Mutation by radiation is literally hit and miss.
Good morning, clown. Mutation by radiation is hit-and-miss. Gonads are very fragile things, especially in animals as small as a fly.
It's bad to call this mutation, because it's really not. This is the using of large amounts of radiation to kill the flies' nuts. Then, you sift out the dead ones, and let the remainder into the wild.
It's been done a ton of times, and is a fairly common Pennsylvania High-school Biology experiment.
I *love* it when the misinformed call others misinformed...
I once had three strands of Christmas Tree lights, all the same brand, using the same neato-geewhize-ooo-aaa blinking controller. I set them to the same type of blinking, but they obviously started out of phase. The next morning they were all blinking exactly together, in phase, all three strands. And they stayed that way until I turned them off.
I have tried to repeat this each Christmas since and have yet to see it again.
Any explanations anyone?
Yeah. A power outage happened in the middle of the night. When the power came back on, the difference in the time at which each christmas light recieved power was limited only by the speed of electricity and the length of the cords involved.
> I think you're missing the point. Privacy is
> one thing. Hiding your lawbreaking behavior
> from the government and your shareholders is a
> whole different ballgame.
Oh, and obviously, email that's been hidden is law-breaking. That's why we're taking your TiVo - we don't care what's actually *on* the harddrive - we know it's for illegally duplicating movies.
God, this gets old. But, then again, so does whining about the signal to noise ratio of the slashdot community declining. Maybe it's the species?
> The real dangerous thing is the way many people
> advocate privacy while their intent is to
> shield criminal activity.
Arguably, the real danger is those who try to infer illegal behavior from the desire for privacy. Wait until you see the red hands, there, Chachi.
> ... but first of all, this will only work
.95 c by Jupiter, and then fly on past.
> really close to the sun, maybe within the five
> inner planets, as the wind pressure decreases
> with the inverse square of the distance to the
> sun.
What, are you going to lose speed from all that air friction in space? Dillhole. You build up to
By the way, you're arguing against a RamJet, not a Light Sail (which is what a Solar Sail is *really* called). RamJets operate on the hydrogen resident in solar wind being collected by a magnetic field and fused; solar sails extend a huge "sail" as a magnetic field and allow light pressure from some source to accelerate them. If they manage to stay accurately enough on-course, a laser from home should work to fuel it all the way just fine, as long as the ship doesn't hit C (which it's just not going to).
Sure, the faster the ship goes, the less pressure the ship gets, but just build a bigger laser. Texas will do it eventually. That's how they "think".
> Think about it: an independent developer would
> HAVE to employ a lawyer to deal with licensing
> schemes like Borland's Enterprise license.
Unless, of course, you thik about the following: the enterprise license is not intended for individual developers.
Get your head out of your ass. Even Borland is allowed to screw up once in a while. That's a normal corporate contract facet. Borland just forgot to take it out of the stuff they're giving away for free.
Or did you forget about the "giving away free" part, too?
> IE will not launch any file with a .EXE extension without first asking for permission.
.SCR - teh screensaver extension - because under Windows, screensavers are just executables with a specific command line argument format.
No, but up until version 5, it would run with quite a few other inderect executables.
My favorite was always
> First off, if anybody out there actually reads this, congratulations for wanting to read what I have to say even though slashdot thinks what I have to say isn't important because I don't want to make an account to say it.
I got about that far.
> Give me a break. Try writing something like BLOX [blox.com] for use in Netscape.
(sighs)
Have we forgotten that the web is supposed to be browser-blind?
But, look, if you really need to use a web browser to do things that a web browser just wasn't meant to do, you ought to consider funky little things like Java.
Java works on many platforms, including the PlayStation Fucking Two. And it can do everything blox will be doing until its shutdown in a few weeks.
There's a reason IE is breaking the web. It's in Microsoft's best interest. Quit being another one of MS' brainwashed sheepole and wake up.
(I don't mindlessly MS bash, by the way. It's quite planned. Now I'm going to go pretend like I don't use office.)
Well, I was going to post, but I kept hitting the lameness filter for too many junk characters (don't know what character's throwing it, though, so of course I can't fix it. What characters trip the filter aren't in the FAQ, either. Guys: make it a ratio, not a count. Long posts get screwed. And make it tell you what character is getting tripped.)
A link to my rebuttal, and a hope that people will still respond.
Warning: that rebuttal is *long*.
This remains funny right up and until you envision yourself on IRC, trying to explain the difference between megaTits and megaTeats to an idiot 15-year-old who thinks his cable modem gets more handwidth than your T1.
It starts being funny again when you try to figure out which image compression format bets more Tits per megaTit.
Etc.
- Fatzilla
What I don't see are people pulling anything more obscure than chess. This is disheartening: we have tons of games whose strategy is essentially the only real game component.
Take, for example, Stars! (and the soon-upcoming sequel, Stars! Supernova). TURN BASED GAME. Quite a strategy monster, too - you have the opportounity to customize your race on something silly like 125 axes, and then to pursue a strategy to which your species is tailored. Leads to some very weird, very complex plans.
Or take something more mundane. There are elements of strategy in Backgammon, Poker, and Blackjack. There are elements of strategy in sports. In craps. In Tetrinet. Even in Magic: The Gathering.
For that matter, I saw quote that the last time someone-or-another had seen strategy in StarCraft was "never", bemoaning that some mid-level units and a few high-level units were all he ever saw. Well, either my house is much better or much worse than you guys are, because every time someone here tries that, they get stomped flat - either we can beat that tactic, or nobody here uses that tactic well. But StarCraft, in this house, is pure attrition: we cannot penetrate one another's defenses until someone's out of resource X.
In my not-so-humble opinion, all you need to founder strategy are two elements: a game wherein thinking players do better than nonthinking players, and players who think. If you've ever played Chess in a park, you'll know that even the western ideal of the strategy game (I still prefer Go, myself) can be player utterly without strategy - nearly invariably to disasterous results.
Why aren't more commercial games being developed where strategy is the only direction a player can take? Oh, well, look how many people play chess actively. Not how many people play it once a year, but how many would buy it for $40 at Babbage's.
In the meantime, how do we make more heavily strategic games?
This one's a little more difficult, and what I'm going to say is by no means the only set of ways. In fact, I'm knowingly cloaking certain ideas, as I'm trying to use those ideas to break into the publishing market as we speak. But:
There are a bunch of resources which will lead aspiring designers to good extant game mechanics (which may in turn spur development of new mechanics). Long-time game companies such as Avalon Hill are a great target. Tom Jolly games (WIZWAR! WIZWAR!) is another awesome resource. Mailing lists (go look at Yahoo) are also a good place to start, but the people there generally don't want to talk to newbies - just the old-heads who know what's already been said. Try that if you're good at lurking, and are patient.
What's most important to making a strategy game? Playtesting. If everyone's doing one thing, try getting in there and donig something else. If you can't win, then something's unbalanced, and you need to either trim it back or weight other things, or maybe jsut give alternatives. Play for three months. If you don't see a ton of strategies emerging, you haven't been successful.
Good luck. I want more strategy out there, too.
- Fatzilla
You mean like Bacteriorhodepsin drives?
(I mean, even Scientific American magazine had that one a few years ago.)
See also: fluorescent multilayer, distructural polycodrone.
Yay! Big words!
Yeah, I mean, two failures in a year? It's not like you have to be a rocket scientist to run something like NASA...
... fall over.
There's a reason for that phrase, BTW.
Cheers to NASA for having the skill to take into account as much as they do and still come out with a comparatively very high success rate. I'm reasonably secure in the notion that, granted all of their money and all of their experimental data, I could probably get a rocket to
3. FireWire. This technology will be the fiasco of the decade if it doesn't appear soon on something other than a Macintosh and a camcorder.
You mean like the playstation two, or my high-end Dell? Or maybe something like a computer belonging to someone who wants really neato toys? SCSI didn't die either, and that wasn't for lack of competition. Good lord, man, how long do you need to work in an industry to learn that standards that cost an end-user more than a buck fifty american don't spring up overnight?
BTW, that that camcorder supports FireWire is one of my main reasons for considering buying it. If I can use a FireWire hard drive and camcorder to connect to my PlayStation, which has more than enough graphic horsepower to do realtime video editing, I think I might just be a fairly happy man. 'Specially since I can then just pump it out through S-Video to my S-Video capable VCR, and tape something right cleanly.
This, of course, after I have enough money to buy myself a disposable razor, but that's another story.
I'm surprised at this message, and actually fairly pleased. I think maybe this man wants to take it further than I would personally (remember that if there's anything that'll get someone expelled that's as subjective as bullying, it's gonig to be a great way for a smaller clique of kids to get an innocent bigger kid evicted, etc etc etc), I think maybe something along these lines might work remarkably well.
For some substantiation, I went to a high-school in an extremely economically depressed region. There was a fairly large contingent of people who made life there akin to a bad episode of a high-school kung fu cartoon, but with significantly less class. Speaking as a hockey playing bad tempered 6'4" semi-capable fighter, I find it worrying to be able to say that I was beaten up regularly. I'm imposing and mean.
When the school staff shifted, they changed the security contingent around a lot (there were 25 guards for 900 kids, metal detectors, magnetic locks on the exit doors, the whole nine yards; surprised that they didn't have attack dogs or like flying monkeys or something), and as a result a different person was in charge of the policings of the halls.
Ms. Mary was able to tame the place, by striking at the root of the problem - she got some rather surprisingly big people on staff, and she had them harass the school bullies. It was under the table, borderline inappropriate, and fairly brutal besides. The school, for a few kids, became rather like incarceration - the guards were more dangerous than the companions.
You know what? Bullies only exist at the top. There aren't really strata (which I would have never realized). They can't be semi-bullies. It's boolean - you are or you aren't.
When there were badder asses than their bad asses, they just became asses, and faded back into malcontents.
On the other hand, though, though there's something to be said for not fueling the explosion, there's equal justification for these things to be worked on at the level of the kid themself. As I choose to believe about the core of humanity, one simply does not snap into a murderous rampage. The current low rate suggests a pattern of damaged individuals rather than a tendency (though I'm an amateur and am flying on common sense rather than geniune grokking) for this sort of behavior.
Yes, we can starve the explosion. Is that any reason for us not to do everything we can to help these kids? I mean, I was fucked up, too. I shouldn't have been locked away. I should have had help.
Sure, institutionalization of mental health care and assistance by schools is going to be shredded by everyone that reads it, but the reason is beacuse it doesn't work, not because it's the wrong idea. It's just been not working so thoroughly for so long that we don't make the differentiation anymore.
We need to find a real way to help our kids. Mental health research is being cut at a time where we're finally making breakthroughs. Any other science is judged on statistics, but people seem to forget that analysis is really curing people now, and that the rates are going up very quickly.
With things like this going on, can we afford to wait any longer to geniunely understand how to help these kids heal before one of these policies really does turn Orwell? It's not a question of whether it'll happen. It's a question of when. Things change, and a hole will develop someday.
Think about it. How do we stop persecuting the kids, their bullies, their teachers, their parents, and everyone else who contributed to the problem or that didn't help solve it , and start finding a way to just get it fixed?