Reminds me a lot of back when ISPs used to sell more slots then they had available and during peak hours you would play the game of knocking eachother out of slots. It was a glorious fun game. Getting disconnected in the middle of a download or game. That was back before they had resume too, which means you had to start alll 4mb all over again. Analogy could be made between Black Tuesday and banks overloaning what they don't have. It's not hard to see what will happen.
This is a stupid roundabout game. ISPs are definitely dumb as bricks for the most part unless they're forced to do something that takes money. I hope the FCC is smart enough to make a connection between what happened and what has happened.
First open source video game that will have no paid-dlc, microtransactions, or a monthly fee and will be made to be good.
I think that everyone has a right to dream as does the person in the opening article, but I doubt it will be well received by the community. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say people who work with the Mozilla foundation do so because they enjoy what they're working on. Shifting from a browser to a video game probably wont carry along many of those same people that make FF great. I mean it's a great idea and obviously shows the corporate america ideology that you can simpy shift resources (that are usually paid for) from one area to another, but doesn't really work when people volunteer their time.
I've often wondered after hearing about all the dark fiber google is laying why they don't act like a ISP for gamers? Net neutrality only applies if you're intentionally throttling traffic or messing with it, but what happens if that's all the network is used for? Of course this is extremely niche, but game traffic doesn't take up a lot of bandwidth and you'll never truly get really low latencies with all the crap flying around the normal net. However, if Google just offered a 'gamer package' which would only allow for gaming network traffic, it would hardly even register, and they could charge a modest fee for it all the while profiting off of what they already have laid without really having it interrupted plus creating a new untouched market.
I do think what this ISP is doing is BS unless they have spare lines they're using specifically for it though, which I highly doubt.
This experiment that the parent is noting is actually part of childhood development - Object Permanence. Children past a certain age will still perceive the toy is still there and still go after it. This is part of Piagets development theory. The parent just chose to cherry pick and take it out of context.
Unfortunately children grow out of this stage and they realize there is something behind the wall even if they can't see it.
So, developers are starting to realize that they nickle and dimed the hell out of everyone to the point where no one has enough spare change or simply cares enough to buy better games. The gaming industry is literally hanging itself with its own rope.
Indies are never going to make a huge impression because for the most part they simply don't have the 'wow' factor to add to their games, even if they're good concepts. So they're stuck making good little games, which don't really account for something more then a 'cool little experience', but the gamers where the money is don't want just that. So indies end up needing investment anyways to make anything really great.
That aside, I'm pretty sure a AAA game WILL make oodles of money. It will not be a regurgitated game from Blizzard which now just excels at milking people, it'll be made by a little no name company that was able to pitch their idea to the right people. Too bad Relic botched DoW2.
And yes, sometimes unheard of games are really sweet. I still have not played a game so far that beat the experience I had playing Tribes 2.
You know, this has been why I've been giving a lot of game developers shit the last few years wherever I go. I ridicule them as far as I can because they've gotten lazy and simply covered up good game design with graphics. Immersion is a very, very, very strong element in any game and game developers can't even seem to see the benefit of adding completely destructible environments to a game. Of course that means that game has to be less structured. IE you can't just run one guy through a bunch of carefully shaped alleyways against a never ending stream of bad guys they have to fight upstream against. Games such as CoD make you feel like you're a trout swimming up river. That's all it ever felt like. Being able to blow up buildings, crush your camping opponent with rubble, or shoot through the floor...
There are so many really, really cool things they could do with games and yet they're still stuck making the same crap and regurgitating it because it had good sales or imitating a game that had good sales. It's really quite sad.
I know this is almost completely left field for game developers, but they should take a few classes in psychology to learn about the people they're making games for. The term the opening post is referring to is called 'Flow' in psychology. It's really quite a easy thing to understand and I'm sure almost everyone has felt it. It's part of what makes up a good game as well. Being able to lose yourself in something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Honestly though, past game developers didn't need science to coin terms for them to find out the right things a game needed. They simply created what they thought would be amazing and fun rather then look for a magic recipe. I don't know if it is because people are now going into programming just for a job instead of being passionate about it or the people who actually control what games are being made no longer care about making good games.
Either way this is something I feel quite passionately about and it's really quite sad games have been relegated to such a sorry state. They're just soups with the proper ingredients (MSG) to sell well rather then all around wholesome. It's been a really long time since I've seen a new one that was really just 'good'. I don't say that simply from the point of reminiscing about what I once played, rather because games have went down hill.
I honestly think this is worse then leaving nuclear missiles commissioned. Nuclear missiles are a last line of defense and a deterrent. Basically when we're screwed, we screw them too. They aren't supposed to be used and wont be until the world decides it doesn't want to exist. Instead we're installing missiles we can actually use and people think are alright. It's like crossing into a gray area as phosphorous is to napalm. They're just looking for a scapegoat if other countries call foul on us when all of a sudden we annihilate an entire country with 'smaller' arms.
I don't think other countries or people will understand the power of the new devices till someone gets leveled with them. The fear of nuclear arms is well known and it's something people with very little intellectual capacity can understand. So not only do we escape into a morally gray area, but at the same time we lose the 'deterrent' value of our massive weapons. It's just a very bad idea IMHO.
See, I'm on the other side of the bridge with this one. I came from one of the new campuses that provide notebooks to all their students. They do hand off MPAA and RIAA letters to students and I, as well as other friends of mine, have gotten at least one. It goes from 'we shut off your connection' to 'we will put you on academic probation' to 'we will actually kick you out' based on media influences outside of the school. They actually have a scanner on campus that scans open SMB directories for infringing material and shut off your connection and they have a eMule server that sends out random bad data... right on campus.
Coming from a more tech oriented campus they decided to be on the bleeding edge of copyright protection as well. Even though I was well aware of file sharing on campus, we never had anything on the scale of DC servers everyone knew about... at least outside of little circles that no one knows about except for a handful of people. Maybe everyone on a floor in a dorm, but it never got bigger then that. Our local LAN club also had copious amounts of sharing going on during actual events, but that usually ended when the event ended.
Our network admins are either retarded, confident they're doing the right thing, or more then likely they're receiving fringe benefits through large copyright holders for making sure the campus is 'free' of bad stuff.
I'm going to be the heathen here and outright suggest Visual Basic. Even if it's far from the best coding language and it has it's quirks, you get to SEE and INTERACT with what you make. It's not a bunch of gibberish on the screen and that's something a lot of people need to learn in the beginning.
A lot of you need to keep in mind that people who like to code are a very select group. You have to be interested in things you can't actually touch and that require mind numbing amounts of logical work. That isn't something a whole lot of people can handle. A language that is easy to code in by a coders standards still doesn't mean it's good for a beginner. More then likely the OP brother will have no interest in coding at all.
This is BS. CoH is all about point griefing. It turns into a giant battle of running around and uncapping the other persons strategic points, then running away before they can do anything about it. Thats what the entire game is. You strangle the enemy without any sort of big battle. Dawn of War 2 is exactly the same way.
If you want a good anti-rush RTS, check out Dawn of War (not 2). Strategic points are not only 'not' a hinderance, but are also a valuable asset for a battle as they can provide plenty of cover fire and bonuses depending on your race.
This is putting aside all the different ways to play and win the game in addition to basic tactics. All the races are different, all the commander units are unique and powerful in their own way, the AI by default is pretty good, the cover system which you mentioned originated from this game, and of course it ISN'T balanced in the stereo-typical rock-paper-scissors fashion as is almost every other RTS in existence.
Oh yeah, CoH is all about tanks and paratroopers too.
I dunno about the implied use for the device, but I could see this as a very interesting device to measure mob responses. Put these on quite a few people who are trading and compare them to the flows in the market. I wonder what sort of correlations would pop up.
Too bad the meters weren't replaced with small units that could sense if a car is parked in it, then check for a RFID tag and bill whoever is parked there accordingly. Alternatively have the person who is parked there just swipe a tag against the meter. Have the meters wirlelessly communicate with one of those stations they have all over the place. It would be convenient cause it wouldn't overcharge and your time would never run out. Each month the person gets a bill for their meter usage. If a person doesn't pay the meters easily alerts meter maids to come write tickets. Pressure pads or smart sensors could be used.
It's win win for both the government and the people, although you don't get all the overpay from people buying too much time, but then again no one likes that.
Everyone is up in arms against the LAN play decision, as well as the decision to split the original game into three parts and rightly so, my opinion aside. My friends both offline and online as well as me have hypothsized that this move isn't only fueled by the desire to eliminate pirates, but to eventually turn B.Net into a premium service for which players will have to pay to use. Will B.Net always operate for free as long as a person purchases Blizzard games? Or will it eventually become a premium service, one of which you'll be limited and restricted to the point which you can rationalize the 15 dollars a month to pay for it's premium services?
Perhaps before we turn it back on, we should figure out why it was shut off in the first place. There has to be a reason we evolved in a way that it's now off.
The least I consider is another iteration of Rise of Legends/Nations. I loved how they took a RTS to a new level and made it a world of fun on top of it. I was a huge fan of both the games.
My second favorite series of all time is Mechwarrior. However this is currently getting a rework in a official form and an unofficial one. The unofficial one, Mechwarrior: Living Legends looks a heck of a lot more promising then the official version to (it's almost in beta as well!). http://www.mechlivinglegends.net/
However, the game that shaped my views on the gaming industry and my expectations for the future of gaming the most would be the one that had a crappy last iteration and hasn't been seen for years. That would be the Tribes series, which I haven't seen mentioned here once. It is extremely sad that one of the most influential and far ahead of it's time series died out when Sierra handed over rights to the franchise to a third rate developer at the time, which basically made a unreal tournament style mod called Tribes: Vengeance.
Tribes1/2 had vehicles, it had infantry, it had aircraft, it had deployables, it had dynamic armor changing, it had command over views for players to look, see, and diagnose situations on the battlefield from a live feed. The Command Circuit even had a camera feed from live players at any given time. You could control turrets, issue orders to players who could then accept/deny/reassign themselves based on their current conditions. It had a ridiculously robust voice bind system of a lot of helpful as well as fun voice messages. It had in game chat which was unheard of at the time and is barely starting to catch on now. The battles were ridiculously massive and expansive. It had ridiculous net code that played extremely well on 56k modems with 64 people and up to 128. It was extraordinarily moddable as well as having ridiculously good security against hacking. You could literally join mods with changed content without having to download anything new unless they changed models. It also had a extremely unique movement system called skiing, along with freeflight with a jetpack, neither of which I have seen in another game to date (I personally have to say being able to fly add an entirely new level to a game). The game play was extremely immersive, not to mention it had good eye candy at the time (graphics/sound).
The game was ridiculously far ahead of it's time and we're barely starting to see what was in it in modern games. The game mechanics were ridiculously inventive and just plain ingenious. Anyone who ever played that game for any length of time loved it and will speak very fondly and longingly about it. It was an experience that shaped my, and alot of other people's, lives as far as gaming and expectations for them goes. It raised a bar so high that I've merely been settling for whats less crappy since.
The game company at the time that was in charge of things was called Dynamix. A lot of the developers from there went and made their own company, Garagegames, and started selling a very powerful, but not so well known engine called the Torque Shader Engine (which I would even say is above the levels of the UT3 engine).
I'm sure everyone remembers spawn copies so only one person needed a disk to play on a LAN? Whatever happened to that line of thought?
Blizzard is no longer the company I once knew them to be and worshiped, they got sunk by the fat WoW cow.
Now I look to companies like Stardock/Ironclad who seem to have gotten the right idea about how to treat it's users. IE giving people what they pay for.
Some people find meaning in their life, even if it's leading a tiny group of people in a virtual environment.
I would say he's more prodcutive then a lot of people who grind away at their lives in the same way.
If he's hungry, he'll feed himself. If he's tired, he'll sleep. If he wants sex, he'll get a girlfriend or just sex.
It's all about wants, desires, and motivation. He'll do what he enjoys the most and what he doesn't mind doing for the rest of his life. There is no reason to force what you believe on top of him.
This is comming from someone who has lived both sides. People on the outside always look in and say it's wrong. People on the inside don't care enough to look out because they went there to escape from the outside in the first place. Believe it or not, there is actually social environments online too!
Just live with it. This is going to sound cynical, but perhaps you got addicted to him and are sad now that he found something better to do with his time? Anything can be classified as a addiction if you spread the term wide enough.
I'm currently at a university that deployed a laptop program and there is sooo much more you can do with 200 dollars worth of electronics more.
I guess I come from somewhere where we don't have so much disposable income that we can get a Kindle in addition to our normal Laptop which students inevitably have.
Anyone find this odd that the Land Warrior program has pretty much been ditched and ran into all sorts of problems, yet they can do a lot of what they wanted to do on a iPod?
I always thought it was odd that it took such a extremely long time to develop something in house that seems to be commercially available already.
I believe most people are forgetting that nuclear weapons are deterents, not actual weapons.
We have them so they don't nuke us, not that we can actually use them to nuke anyone. You nuke us, we nuke you sort of thing. They pass eachother in mid air and we all go boom. It doesn't matter where you hide, if you fire off enough of them no part of a country will be liveable and that scares anyone that cares about what they have.
Nukes will never be a viable solution till WW3 when one country gets backed into a corner and has nothing left to lose and its citizens agree or a defense is made against them (that actually works) along with a method to clean up the radiation afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me a lot of back when ISPs used to sell more slots then they had available and during peak hours you would play the game of knocking eachother out of slots. It was a glorious fun game. Getting disconnected in the middle of a download or game. That was back before they had resume too, which means you had to start alll 4mb all over again. Analogy could be made between Black Tuesday and banks overloaning what they don't have. It's not hard to see what will happen.
This is a stupid roundabout game. ISPs are definitely dumb as bricks for the most part unless they're forced to do something that takes money. I hope the FCC is smart enough to make a connection between what happened and what has happened.
First open source video game that will have no paid-dlc, microtransactions, or a monthly fee and will be made to be good.
I think that everyone has a right to dream as does the person in the opening article, but I doubt it will be well received by the community. I'm going to take a wild guess here and say people who work with the Mozilla foundation do so because they enjoy what they're working on. Shifting from a browser to a video game probably wont carry along many of those same people that make FF great. I mean it's a great idea and obviously shows the corporate america ideology that you can simpy shift resources (that are usually paid for) from one area to another, but doesn't really work when people volunteer their time.
I've often wondered after hearing about all the dark fiber google is laying why they don't act like a ISP for gamers? Net neutrality only applies if you're intentionally throttling traffic or messing with it, but what happens if that's all the network is used for? Of course this is extremely niche, but game traffic doesn't take up a lot of bandwidth and you'll never truly get really low latencies with all the crap flying around the normal net. However, if Google just offered a 'gamer package' which would only allow for gaming network traffic, it would hardly even register, and they could charge a modest fee for it all the while profiting off of what they already have laid without really having it interrupted plus creating a new untouched market.
I do think what this ISP is doing is BS unless they have spare lines they're using specifically for it though, which I highly doubt.
This experiment that the parent is noting is actually part of childhood development - Object Permanence. Children past a certain age will still perceive the toy is still there and still go after it. This is part of Piagets development theory. The parent just chose to cherry pick and take it out of context.
Unfortunately children grow out of this stage and they realize there is something behind the wall even if they can't see it.
Atlantis. Wonder why the first one sunk.
So, developers are starting to realize that they nickle and dimed the hell out of everyone to the point where no one has enough spare change or simply cares enough to buy better games. The gaming industry is literally hanging itself with its own rope.
Indies are never going to make a huge impression because for the most part they simply don't have the 'wow' factor to add to their games, even if they're good concepts. So they're stuck making good little games, which don't really account for something more then a 'cool little experience', but the gamers where the money is don't want just that. So indies end up needing investment anyways to make anything really great.
That aside, I'm pretty sure a AAA game WILL make oodles of money. It will not be a regurgitated game from Blizzard which now just excels at milking people, it'll be made by a little no name company that was able to pitch their idea to the right people. Too bad Relic botched DoW2.
And yes, sometimes unheard of games are really sweet. I still have not played a game so far that beat the experience I had playing Tribes 2.
You know, this has been why I've been giving a lot of game developers shit the last few years wherever I go. I ridicule them as far as I can because they've gotten lazy and simply covered up good game design with graphics. Immersion is a very, very, very strong element in any game and game developers can't even seem to see the benefit of adding completely destructible environments to a game. Of course that means that game has to be less structured. IE you can't just run one guy through a bunch of carefully shaped alleyways against a never ending stream of bad guys they have to fight upstream against. Games such as CoD make you feel like you're a trout swimming up river. That's all it ever felt like. Being able to blow up buildings, crush your camping opponent with rubble, or shoot through the floor...
There are so many really, really cool things they could do with games and yet they're still stuck making the same crap and regurgitating it because it had good sales or imitating a game that had good sales. It's really quite sad.
I know this is almost completely left field for game developers, but they should take a few classes in psychology to learn about the people they're making games for. The term the opening post is referring to is called 'Flow' in psychology. It's really quite a easy thing to understand and I'm sure almost everyone has felt it. It's part of what makes up a good game as well. Being able to lose yourself in something.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flow_(psychology)
Honestly though, past game developers didn't need science to coin terms for them to find out the right things a game needed. They simply created what they thought would be amazing and fun rather then look for a magic recipe. I don't know if it is because people are now going into programming just for a job instead of being passionate about it or the people who actually control what games are being made no longer care about making good games.
Either way this is something I feel quite passionately about and it's really quite sad games have been relegated to such a sorry state. They're just soups with the proper ingredients (MSG) to sell well rather then all around wholesome. It's been a really long time since I've seen a new one that was really just 'good'. I don't say that simply from the point of reminiscing about what I once played, rather because games have went down hill.
I honestly think this is worse then leaving nuclear missiles commissioned. Nuclear missiles are a last line of defense and a deterrent. Basically when we're screwed, we screw them too. They aren't supposed to be used and wont be until the world decides it doesn't want to exist. Instead we're installing missiles we can actually use and people think are alright. It's like crossing into a gray area as phosphorous is to napalm. They're just looking for a scapegoat if other countries call foul on us when all of a sudden we annihilate an entire country with 'smaller' arms.
I don't think other countries or people will understand the power of the new devices till someone gets leveled with them. The fear of nuclear arms is well known and it's something people with very little intellectual capacity can understand. So not only do we escape into a morally gray area, but at the same time we lose the 'deterrent' value of our massive weapons. It's just a very bad idea IMHO.
See, I'm on the other side of the bridge with this one. I came from one of the new campuses that provide notebooks to all their students. They do hand off MPAA and RIAA letters to students and I, as well as other friends of mine, have gotten at least one. It goes from 'we shut off your connection' to 'we will put you on academic probation' to 'we will actually kick you out' based on media influences outside of the school. They actually have a scanner on campus that scans open SMB directories for infringing material and shut off your connection and they have a eMule server that sends out random bad data... right on campus.
Coming from a more tech oriented campus they decided to be on the bleeding edge of copyright protection as well. Even though I was well aware of file sharing on campus, we never had anything on the scale of DC servers everyone knew about... at least outside of little circles that no one knows about except for a handful of people. Maybe everyone on a floor in a dorm, but it never got bigger then that. Our local LAN club also had copious amounts of sharing going on during actual events, but that usually ended when the event ended.
Our network admins are either retarded, confident they're doing the right thing, or more then likely they're receiving fringe benefits through large copyright holders for making sure the campus is 'free' of bad stuff.
I'm going to be the heathen here and outright suggest Visual Basic. Even if it's far from the best coding language and it has it's quirks, you get to SEE and INTERACT with what you make. It's not a bunch of gibberish on the screen and that's something a lot of people need to learn in the beginning.
A lot of you need to keep in mind that people who like to code are a very select group. You have to be interested in things you can't actually touch and that require mind numbing amounts of logical work. That isn't something a whole lot of people can handle. A language that is easy to code in by a coders standards still doesn't mean it's good for a beginner. More then likely the OP brother will have no interest in coding at all.
This is BS. CoH is all about point griefing. It turns into a giant battle of running around and uncapping the other persons strategic points, then running away before they can do anything about it. Thats what the entire game is. You strangle the enemy without any sort of big battle. Dawn of War 2 is exactly the same way.
If you want a good anti-rush RTS, check out Dawn of War (not 2). Strategic points are not only 'not' a hinderance, but are also a valuable asset for a battle as they can provide plenty of cover fire and bonuses depending on your race.
This is putting aside all the different ways to play and win the game in addition to basic tactics. All the races are different, all the commander units are unique and powerful in their own way, the AI by default is pretty good, the cover system which you mentioned originated from this game, and of course it ISN'T balanced in the stereo-typical rock-paper-scissors fashion as is almost every other RTS in existence.
Oh yeah, CoH is all about tanks and paratroopers too.
I dunno about the implied use for the device, but I could see this as a very interesting device to measure mob responses. Put these on quite a few people who are trading and compare them to the flows in the market. I wonder what sort of correlations would pop up.
Too bad the meters weren't replaced with small units that could sense if a car is parked in it, then check for a RFID tag and bill whoever is parked there accordingly. Alternatively have the person who is parked there just swipe a tag against the meter. Have the meters wirlelessly communicate with one of those stations they have all over the place. It would be convenient cause it wouldn't overcharge and your time would never run out. Each month the person gets a bill for their meter usage. If a person doesn't pay the meters easily alerts meter maids to come write tickets. Pressure pads or smart sensors could be used.
It's win win for both the government and the people, although you don't get all the overpay from people buying too much time, but then again no one likes that.
A lot of people would rate -1: Stupid for things they don't agree with regardless of the content of what is being posted.
Everyone is up in arms against the LAN play decision, as well as the decision to split the original game into three parts and rightly so, my opinion aside. My friends both offline and online as well as me have hypothsized that this move isn't only fueled by the desire to eliminate pirates, but to eventually turn B.Net into a premium service for which players will have to pay to use. Will B.Net always operate for free as long as a person purchases Blizzard games? Or will it eventually become a premium service, one of which you'll be limited and restricted to the point which you can rationalize the 15 dollars a month to pay for it's premium services?
Perhaps before we turn it back on, we should figure out why it was shut off in the first place. There has to be a reason we evolved in a way that it's now off.
I have three game series I'd like to see renewed.
The least I consider is another iteration of Rise of Legends/Nations. I loved how they took a RTS to a new level and made it a world of fun on top of it. I was a huge fan of both the games.
My second favorite series of all time is Mechwarrior. However this is currently getting a rework in a official form and an unofficial one. The unofficial one, Mechwarrior: Living Legends looks a heck of a lot more promising then the official version to (it's almost in beta as well!). http://www.mechlivinglegends.net/
However, the game that shaped my views on the gaming industry and my expectations for the future of gaming the most would be the one that had a crappy last iteration and hasn't been seen for years. That would be the Tribes series, which I haven't seen mentioned here once. It is extremely sad that one of the most influential and far ahead of it's time series died out when Sierra handed over rights to the franchise to a third rate developer at the time, which basically made a unreal tournament style mod called Tribes: Vengeance.
Tribes1/2 had vehicles, it had infantry, it had aircraft, it had deployables, it had dynamic armor changing, it had command over views for players to look, see, and diagnose situations on the battlefield from a live feed. The Command Circuit even had a camera feed from live players at any given time. You could control turrets, issue orders to players who could then accept/deny/reassign themselves based on their current conditions. It had a ridiculously robust voice bind system of a lot of helpful as well as fun voice messages. It had in game chat which was unheard of at the time and is barely starting to catch on now. The battles were ridiculously massive and expansive. It had ridiculous net code that played extremely well on 56k modems with 64 people and up to 128. It was extraordinarily moddable as well as having ridiculously good security against hacking. You could literally join mods with changed content without having to download anything new unless they changed models. It also had a extremely unique movement system called skiing, along with freeflight with a jetpack, neither of which I have seen in another game to date (I personally have to say being able to fly add an entirely new level to a game). The game play was extremely immersive, not to mention it had good eye candy at the time (graphics/sound).
The game was ridiculously far ahead of it's time and we're barely starting to see what was in it in modern games. The game mechanics were ridiculously inventive and just plain ingenious. Anyone who ever played that game for any length of time loved it and will speak very fondly and longingly about it. It was an experience that shaped my, and alot of other people's, lives as far as gaming and expectations for them goes. It raised a bar so high that I've merely been settling for whats less crappy since.
The game company at the time that was in charge of things was called Dynamix. A lot of the developers from there went and made their own company, Garagegames, and started selling a very powerful, but not so well known engine called the Torque Shader Engine (which I would even say is above the levels of the UT3 engine).
I'm sure everyone remembers spawn copies so only one person needed a disk to play on a LAN? Whatever happened to that line of thought?
Blizzard is no longer the company I once knew them to be and worshiped, they got sunk by the fat WoW cow.
Now I look to companies like Stardock/Ironclad who seem to have gotten the right idea about how to treat it's users. IE giving people what they pay for.
Some people find meaning in their life, even if it's leading a tiny group of people in a virtual environment.
I would say he's more prodcutive then a lot of people who grind away at their lives in the same way.
If he's hungry, he'll feed himself. If he's tired, he'll sleep. If he wants sex, he'll get a girlfriend or just sex.
It's all about wants, desires, and motivation. He'll do what he enjoys the most and what he doesn't mind doing for the rest of his life. There is no reason to force what you believe on top of him.
This is comming from someone who has lived both sides. People on the outside always look in and say it's wrong. People on the inside don't care enough to look out because they went there to escape from the outside in the first place. Believe it or not, there is actually social environments online too!
Just live with it. This is going to sound cynical, but perhaps you got addicted to him and are sad now that he found something better to do with his time? Anything can be classified as a addiction if you spread the term wide enough.
In Soviet Russia, things outlast you!
Is going to a two year community college and getting two years of experience better then going to a four year university?
After spending time in the real world, I'd say the experience is a crock of shit. There are somethings the daily grind can't make up for.
You'll get those two years of experience after you graduate anyway, ontop of your education.
Buy the students a laptop or tablet instead.
I'm currently at a university that deployed a laptop program and there is sooo much more you can do with 200 dollars worth of electronics more.
I guess I come from somewhere where we don't have so much disposable income that we can get a Kindle in addition to our normal Laptop which students inevitably have.
Anyone find this odd that the Land Warrior program has pretty much been ditched and ran into all sorts of problems, yet they can do a lot of what they wanted to do on a iPod?
I always thought it was odd that it took such a extremely long time to develop something in house that seems to be commercially available already.
Options > Interface > Start > Display Vuze UI Chooser
It's hidden under a lot of options, but bam old Azureus client.
I believe most people are forgetting that nuclear weapons are deterents, not actual weapons.
We have them so they don't nuke us, not that we can actually use them to nuke anyone. You nuke us, we nuke you sort of thing. They pass eachother in mid air and we all go boom. It doesn't matter where you hide, if you fire off enough of them no part of a country will be liveable and that scares anyone that cares about what they have.
Nukes will never be a viable solution till WW3 when one country gets backed into a corner and has nothing left to lose and its citizens agree or a defense is made against them (that actually works) along with a method to clean up the radiation afterwards.