I like the part where he complained about kindergarten teachers bootstrapping kids into the unnatural, abstract world of mathematics with *gasp* addition of one pile of apples to another.
He's clearly never tried to teach a 5-year-old about math. Kids can get stuck at very low levels of understanding if you don't guide them up the ladder of abstraction a bit, and examples like that are key.
It would be cool if the original Doom could also benefit from such a treatment.
I'd rather see more-or-less faithful recreations of Deus Ex and the two System Shock games.
I've seen projects that claim they're working on them, but I'm pretty sure none of them will ever finish:(
Hell, I'd pay $50 for a professional modern remake of any one of those games, especially if they got some better voice acting for certain parts of Deus Ex.
Yeah, and I addressed that, but gaining a significant (at least double-digits percentage) of the market share on the home desktop would still be the easiest (and probably only) way to get gaming companies to start releasing on Linux.
I think there's a critical mass where those things would start to happen, and after that Linux would naturally edge out Microsoft in a relatively short period of time. I mean, if everything that ran on Windows ran on Linux, too, who the hell would even go to the trouble of pirating Windows, let alone buying it?
However, that's all just incidental to me. All I want is to be able to play all (or very nearly all) newly-released PC games on Linux.
SS? Social Security? Very low overhead, actually. Tiny. Nearly all of their spending is in the form of checks to citizens, which is the whole point. They even bring in more money than they spend--at least for now.
The problem is that they'll stop bringing in that surplus and start spending from savings in a couple of years, due to demographic shifts (the baby boomers). This means that they'll run out of money around 2040. SS can't spend money that isn't from the special tax that's set aside just for it (FICA) so it's unclear what would happen in such an event.
It's a bit misleading to compare SS spending to other government spending, in fact, since its funding is from that sole source and it does not and cannot take money from the general budget. In fact, the very large surplus from SS is used to as a source to borrow for spending in the general budget, so its presence makes our deficit look artificially lower than it is.
To summarize: SS is among the most efficiently-run government programs, and actually props up the general budget rather than dragging it down, at least for the next 30 years or so.
OK, not to sound like one of "those people" (you know the ones) but...
Did you try NDISWrapper? It's very easy to use (yes, it's command line... oh, god, I am one of those people!) and all you need is the Windows driver (unpacked, not an installer, as it needs to be able to see the.inf file).
If you've got NDISWrapper installed (if it's not, just go find it in Synaptic and install it like any other software) all you need to do is:
That's it. The first command installs the Windows driver, the second makes it load at boot. It's not "out of the box", but it's not a whole lot harder than installing the driver in Windows (assuming you know how to do it:) )
Mind you, not every driver will work this way, but it's how I got wireless working on the laptop I'm typing this from.
(oh, and this advice is not to be construed as disagreement with the view that Linux needs better vendor support)
If Linux beat Microsoft, it would probably mean Adobe programs and most or all commercial games would be released for Linux, which would mean I could stop dual-booting.
Consequently, the single greatest "feature" that Linux could work toward in terms of improving my experience as a user would be to "beat" Microsoft. Really, everything else works fine for me; I can't think of anything else I want. It's better for me than Microsoft products in every other way except those. Oh, wireless drivers I guess. More and better wireless drivers. And you know what? That's another problem that would solve itself if Linux took over as the market leader.
Games. Adobe programs. Working 100% at release. That's what I want, and it likely means beating Microsoft. Or, beating Adobe to become the industry standard in its arena(s), then still beating Microsoft to bring in gaming. Either way.
(I understand and respect your sentiment, just giving one perspective on why it can be reasonable to want Linux to "win" for reasons other than "M$ is teh suxor!")
As long as any non-trivial proportion of HR departments throw resumés with anything less than a 4-year degree on them in the round file without even looking at them, we'll have the kind of demand for for bachelors degrees that we have now. If they stopped that practice, I bet the number of CS students nationwide would drop considerably, and community college enrollment would go up.
Chicken/Egg problem, I guess. Should be interesting to see what the "credit crunch" does to all of this.
Yes, I know. Neither are quite a lot of coders. There are tons of jobs coding things that aren't meaningful, by your definition. Are such jobs advancing the state of computing? No. Are they likely to yield any cool breakthroughs in theory? Of course not. But companies seem to be willing to pay for it.
People doing these jobs are the carpenters of the tech world. To carry the metaphor a bit farther: yes, it's great that some people are paid to invent new planers and levels, and those guys deserve all the respect they get, but there are plenty of jobs to be had simply using those tools, especially if you can be a bit creative about it without being inefficient.
To clarify, because I think there might have been some misunderstanding: I meant not a lot stuff reliant on deeper computing theory or some of the "tougher" math. Algebra, geometry, trig, basic calculus, maybe some very specific PDEs that you can just look up and certainly don't need to have memorized, sure, that kind of thing crops up a lot. What percentage of coders are paid to design new encryption algorithms, though? Or create low-level parts of an operating sytem? Now, how many write or maintain relatively simple financial software or something like that? How many people with CS degrees end up as network admins or sysadmins, and, further, only wanted the degree because it helps to get them in to that sort of job? My opinion is that it's a waste of resources to encourage people wanting to do carpentry to get engineering degrees, even if they don't really like the engineering and just want to do the carpentry. That's all I'm saying.
4 euro a person = a large pizza EACH (from a chain pizza joint) plus some change left over (depending on where you go) here in the US.
4 euro would get you an all-you-can-eat pizza or fried chicken buffet, possibly with an unlimited-refills drink, here in the 'States.
4 euro = what, like 6 things off the McDonalds dollar menu? Two burgers, 2 small fries, hash browns and a small soda? Something like that?
I take it your fast food is much more expensive in Europe. Here, it really is cheaper, and when it isn't, the difference doesn't justify the time spent at the store + time spent making the food. A really strong desire to eat healthy can overcome this, but the path of least resistance, in every way, is fast food.
Large pizza from Little Caesars: $5. With breadsticks, add $2.
Dinner for 2 or 3 people, for $5-7, no waiting, no prep. It's pretty damn hard to beat that. Will it be good? Well, the one here is actually decent, for a chain pizza place, though I've certainly had inedible pizza from others. Will it be good for you? Oh, hell no.
Chinese takeout: notoriously cheap.
KFC: good luck making a chicken meal for significantly less. Worse, if you want chicken, a biscuit, and some mashed potatoes, and you want to make them so that they're actually different from the crap you buy at KFC (so, fresh) you'll be investing quite a bit of time, and spending even more money.
Why is this? We subsidize fast food with corn subsidies, transportation subsidies (you think the gas taxes are to pay for the damage your tiny little car does to the roads, or that truckers pay anywhere near the actual cost of the damage their trucks do in diesel taxes? HA!) etc. Shit food is cheap because our taxes have already paid for part of it.
That's to say nothing of the inconvenience of having to go to the store more frequently to buy small quantities (paying more in the process) so I don't have tons of produce go bad because my wife and I got sick of eating the same damn veggie every day, so we skip a couple days, and surprise, it's all gone bad now! Eating fresh food means frequent shopping, which is a huge pain in the ass since we don't have neighborhood produce/bakery stores any more. Supermarkets are inconvenient in my opinion, and I'd rather pay 15% more to buy my food every other day on the way home from work than have to make a special trip by car.
Personally, I think that 90+% of "IT" jobs (not even counting help desk) are more of a trade than a science.
I'm never, ever going to be writing deep, math-theory-heavy code. I just won't. I don't want to, and there are other people who would be better at it, even if I studied it pretty damn hard. "Computer Science" is a wasted concept on me and on the vast majority of coders.
What I do have is a feel for problems. I know what's broken before other people, and I know what do to (or, more often, where to find what to do) to fix it. I write clean code. I learn new systems quickly. These are the skills that are truly useful to most people in IT. I'll probably never have to do a do a Fourier transform, or implement my own sort algorithm. I do need to be able to grok new libraries, languages, and technologies quickly.
I'm not saying that there's not any overlap between what's taught in a CS program and these skills--I am saying that it's inefficient to put as many people as we do through that program, when we could do much more useful things with those 4 years.
That said, I take an interest in math and computer science. I read on those topics, and seek to make myself better at mathematical thinking. I do so, however, knowing that only a tiny fraction of what I read will ever be useful to me in a money-making sense, and none of it will ever go on a resumé. I treat it the same way as I do reading classical literature: valuable to me in a personal sense, but of little worth otherwise.
In fact, the "meeting cool people" is the most important part in pretty much any business-oriented degree.
You can teach yourself the stuff from a business or CIS degree in way less than 4 years, if you are actually interested in it. It's the contacts you make that matter. It's pretty much the entire purpose of Ivy League business programs, but even at lesser universities it's the biggest benefit of getting that paper.
If you've got family or friends or contacts from some other setting who can get you in to a corporation, though, you can probably skip the full-time-student thing and just let the corp pay for you to do night classes or something.
There is no reason for this crap to be on the Steam version.
Bingo.
Game I want on Steam with no extra DRM? I'll buy it, 100% of the time. Even if I don't buy it at launch, I will when it comes down in price or has a weekend special or something. I've purchased Left 4 Dead, Overlord ($10 special), and Fallout 3 this way, just in the last month and a half or so. I bought the ID collection on a whim when it was a featured weekend deal. I buy tons of games on there, so it's not that I'm simply unwilling to pay for anything. I've not pirated games on there that play by the rules, but that I consider too expensive; I'll get them when they're cheaper.
Game I want on Steam but with extra DRM? Piratebay, 100% of the time.
Stop putting shitty DRM on top of the best DRM in the industry. Doing so means you're a complete moron, so I'd rather trust the piracy "scene" with my machine than you. Seriously.
The worst part, IMO, was how common enchanted weapons were by level 6-8 or so.
Every damn bandit glowed head to toe and had an enchanted weapon, it seemed. In Morrowind, enchanted weapons were relatively rare and only a few were really powerful, making Enchanting a useful skill. In Oblivion, why bother enchanting when you'll be at 100% chameleon with +5 strength and night eye just from armor you pick up off no-name enemies by level 10-12 anyway?
Hell, by level 12, you could go out naked with no weapons but a bow and be fully outfitted with great armor and weapons after your first encounter with a human enemy (aside from wizards, I guess). Worse was the sting of getting some great unique armor from completing a major quest early on or something like that, only to find that any random cave-dwelling bandit is has better armor just 3-4 levels later. Leveled unique items for quest rewards. WTF?
And Morrowind: sure the NPCs were lifeless, the combat sucked, et cetera.. but at the time, had you ever played such a vast and hand-detailed game, with so much freedom? At least Morrowind's main quest was actually interesting (it had a ton of back story at every turn if you were willing to read) and took you through all sorts of places and trials, unlike most of Oblivion's and half of Fallout 3's. Although, you're right: in Morrowind even, Bethesda managed to make the ending feel half-assed, among other things.
oh, Morrowind was great, no question about it. I've probably logged more hours in that game than any other I own--I've even got a copy of the installed program folder backed up, with 50 or so mods in place (such a pain to get them all playing nice together, don't ever want to do that again). And the main story wasn't really bad, but simply a bit less complete than it could have been. It's still my favorite game they've made; exploring the land's geography, finding awesome treasures hidden away in creepy caves, digging around in memorable and haunting (haunted?) Dwemer ruins, seeing the Ghost Fence for the first time... just a great experience all around.
Regardless, Morrowind still ranks as my favorite game of all time, just for the initial 250 hours or so of amazement as I explored every little nook and cranny of that world. And Fallout 3 is still a game I keep installed now, because it's so much more FUN (if you don't do the main quest after a certain point) to just explore and kill things. And Oblivion, well, I loved it at one point, but Fallout 3 has totally eclipsed it, since it is essentially a better version of Oblivion.
I recently returned to Oblivion (when I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run no matter what I tried--I eventually solved that problem by just putting it on my laptop instead) but with a large set of mods that I found via some of the excellent categorized mod lists online. The experience is infinitely better. Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul can't be praised enough, and the Unique Landscapes packages have finally given me a reason not to just fast-travel everywhere. I've spent as much time messing around with a regional quest involving some elf scouting parties and some enchanted armour off in the western 1/5 of the map as I did on the entire main quest in my first play through (I think Oscuro's added that one, and there seem to be others hinted at in other cities, so I think I've only scratched the surface of the new content). Finally, a reason to visit all of those mind-numbingly-similar dungeons they put in the game! Rewarding, non-leveled loot doesn't hurt, either. I've still not played the Shivering Isles, though my wife assures me that its main quest is better than the one in Oblivion proper, so I'm looking forward to it, though it may be a few... I don't know, months before I finish with all this new stuff added by the mods.
Writing? fucked. Combat? fucked. Quests? oh boy. Character progression? there isn't any, thanks to that ridiculously stupid difficulty scaling. In fact, I propose a trade. How about you, Bethesda, get to keep your DLC, and in exchange you stay the fuck away from decent, god-fearing franchises like Fallout. Thanks guys.
Heh, maybe they'll somehow manage to get the rights to do System Shock 3 next. *shudder* Or Thief (screw the critics, I even liked 3).
Thankfully they do release very capable modding tools, and a lot of problems can probably be fixed, but they left a number of holes that just can't be filled by anyone other than a professional team without seeming out-of-place or of inferior quality, largely due to the ubiquitous voice acting in the game.
I wish they could find the people who generate the good ideas at Bethesda (they do generate a lot of those, which is what keeps me coming back to their half-finished games), give them all raises, and then fire the ones who push unfinished products out the door and create or approve totally goddamned stupid things. They could replace them with some fresh blood, and, oh, I don't know, maybe start running their games by some playtesters and paying attention to what they say, so they'll spot things like, "huh, it's weird that I can't actually join the Sixth House, when the story and a few specific bits of dialogue seem to indicate that I can. I bet those quests would be fun!" or, "Jesus, these Ayleid ruins are boring, can't you give them some variety and/or create some free-form quests to make them worth visiting?", or "wow, that was dumb, why the hell did my dad just do that? I don't feel sad, I feel confused and irritated."
Would have been nice to have some "and this is what happened in such-and-such town due to your actions" scenes, as we've seen in prior installments. I probably wouldn't have done nearly as many side quests if I hadn't expected some of those. I mean, I really thought I'd get one for helping the Crater side Supply chick with her book. Some of those quests were just boring.
Given how much other great stuff they cut (you can't even go through the game in "dumbass" mode; there are just regular options and [intelligence] options, no penalties or humor for low-int characters) it seems like they could have at least managed to do a bit more with the ending. Since 90% of my time was in non-main-quest activities (and, frankly, I didn't give a damn about the main quest past a certain, kind of silly, plot twist) I'd have liked to see some payoff for that.
Typical Bethesda laziness, I guess. Morrowind and Oblivion both felt incomplete in many ways, and were only made (somewhat) whole when the community stepped in. I'm glad they create what they do, and I love the Elder Scrolls world, but I wish they'd take just a bit more time and money to finish their games before they release them. I went in to this expecting something better, since they were building on a graphics engine that was already functional and that they'd played with extensively in Oblivion, but they still managed to screw up several big things.
I'd love to sit in on a few of their meetings at various points in the development process and see whether anyone in the company brings these things up, or they really all think they're releasing a finished, well-crafted product.
Hm... maybe it could be arranged for Valve or Blizzard to buy Bethesda... *goes to work planning and plotting*
No to DLC. Since nearly all of it for Oblivion sucked horribly, I don't think anyone familiar with that game will be buying any for Fallout 3. Please just release expansion packs, Bethesda, especially since you have an odd habit of making ones that have better main story lines than the game that they're expanding.
Now if the community can just get some money together to have the narrator do some more lines for a better, more varied, truer-to-the-series ending, we might be on the way to making this decent-but-not-great game worthy of the name it bears.
Yeah, no hazing and barely anything that I would call "bullying", and I ran with the second-geekiest (and easily the smartest) crowd in our high school (the geekiest were the weird-ass Wicca/LARP/OMG-no-really-guys-I-can-do-magic-with-crystals folks--seriously, WTF is up with those people?)
We did cross-associate with a couple groups that were both non-jock but also non-geek, so maybe that helped. I dunno, it's not like we went out of our way to avoid it; it just didn't happen.
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I like the part where he complained about kindergarten teachers bootstrapping kids into the unnatural, abstract world of mathematics with *gasp* addition of one pile of apples to another.
He's clearly never tried to teach a 5-year-old about math. Kids can get stuck at very low levels of understanding if you don't guide them up the ladder of abstraction a bit, and examples like that are key.
Ha, agreed. I love the whole trilogy (yes, even the much-hated 3)
I'd rather see more-or-less faithful recreations of Deus Ex and the two System Shock games.
I've seen projects that claim they're working on them, but I'm pretty sure none of them will ever finish :(
Hell, I'd pay $50 for a professional modern remake of any one of those games, especially if they got some better voice acting for certain parts of Deus Ex.
Yeah, and I addressed that, but gaining a significant (at least double-digits percentage) of the market share on the home desktop would still be the easiest (and probably only) way to get gaming companies to start releasing on Linux.
I think there's a critical mass where those things would start to happen, and after that Linux would naturally edge out Microsoft in a relatively short period of time. I mean, if everything that ran on Windows ran on Linux, too, who the hell would even go to the trouble of pirating Windows, let alone buying it?
However, that's all just incidental to me. All I want is to be able to play all (or very nearly all) newly-released PC games on Linux.
Yes, I know all too well from my recent experience with Fallout 3. Ugh.
Of course, I meant 100% as much as software ever works at launch :)
SS? Social Security? Very low overhead, actually. Tiny. Nearly all of their spending is in the form of checks to citizens, which is the whole point. They even bring in more money than they spend--at least for now.
The problem is that they'll stop bringing in that surplus and start spending from savings in a couple of years, due to demographic shifts (the baby boomers). This means that they'll run out of money around 2040. SS can't spend money that isn't from the special tax that's set aside just for it (FICA) so it's unclear what would happen in such an event.
It's a bit misleading to compare SS spending to other government spending, in fact, since its funding is from that sole source and it does not and cannot take money from the general budget. In fact, the very large surplus from SS is used to as a source to borrow for spending in the general budget, so its presence makes our deficit look artificially lower than it is.
To summarize: SS is among the most efficiently-run government programs, and actually props up the general budget rather than dragging it down, at least for the next 30 years or so.
OK, not to sound like one of "those people" (you know the ones) but...
Did you try NDISWrapper? It's very easy to use (yes, it's command line... oh, god, I am one of those people!) and all you need is the Windows driver (unpacked, not an installer, as it needs to be able to see the .inf file).
If you've got NDISWrapper installed (if it's not, just go find it in Synaptic and install it like any other software) all you need to do is:
ndiswrapper -i /your/path/here/driver.inf
ndiswrapper -m
That's it. The first command installs the Windows driver, the second makes it load at boot. It's not "out of the box", but it's not a whole lot harder than installing the driver in Windows (assuming you know how to do it :) )
Mind you, not every driver will work this way, but it's how I got wireless working on the laptop I'm typing this from.
(oh, and this advice is not to be construed as disagreement with the view that Linux needs better vendor support)
If Linux beat Microsoft, it would probably mean Adobe programs and most or all commercial games would be released for Linux, which would mean I could stop dual-booting.
Consequently, the single greatest "feature" that Linux could work toward in terms of improving my experience as a user would be to "beat" Microsoft. Really, everything else works fine for me; I can't think of anything else I want. It's better for me than Microsoft products in every other way except those. Oh, wireless drivers I guess. More and better wireless drivers. And you know what? That's another problem that would solve itself if Linux took over as the market leader.
Games. Adobe programs. Working 100% at release. That's what I want, and it likely means beating Microsoft. Or, beating Adobe to become the industry standard in its arena(s), then still beating Microsoft to bring in gaming. Either way.
(I understand and respect your sentiment, just giving one perspective on why it can be reasonable to want Linux to "win" for reasons other than "M$ is teh suxor!")
Install/Fix WinME: My own brewery, a poppy field, and a hooker factory.
As long as any non-trivial proportion of HR departments throw resumés with anything less than a 4-year degree on them in the round file without even looking at them, we'll have the kind of demand for for bachelors degrees that we have now. If they stopped that practice, I bet the number of CS students nationwide would drop considerably, and community college enrollment would go up.
Chicken/Egg problem, I guess. Should be interesting to see what the "credit crunch" does to all of this.
Yes, I know. Neither are quite a lot of coders. There are tons of jobs coding things that aren't meaningful, by your definition. Are such jobs advancing the state of computing? No. Are they likely to yield any cool breakthroughs in theory? Of course not. But companies seem to be willing to pay for it.
People doing these jobs are the carpenters of the tech world. To carry the metaphor a bit farther: yes, it's great that some people are paid to invent new planers and levels, and those guys deserve all the respect they get, but there are plenty of jobs to be had simply using those tools, especially if you can be a bit creative about it without being inefficient.
To clarify, because I think there might have been some misunderstanding: I meant not a lot stuff reliant on deeper computing theory or some of the "tougher" math. Algebra, geometry, trig, basic calculus, maybe some very specific PDEs that you can just look up and certainly don't need to have memorized, sure, that kind of thing crops up a lot. What percentage of coders are paid to design new encryption algorithms, though? Or create low-level parts of an operating sytem? Now, how many write or maintain relatively simple financial software or something like that? How many people with CS degrees end up as network admins or sysadmins, and, further, only wanted the degree because it helps to get them in to that sort of job? My opinion is that it's a waste of resources to encourage people wanting to do carpentry to get engineering degrees, even if they don't really like the engineering and just want to do the carpentry. That's all I'm saying.
I'd be depressed, too, if I'd eaten enough brussel sprouts to gain 40 lbs :(
Exactly.
If processed food cost more than fresh, McDonalds would use fresh ingredients.
4 euro a person = a large pizza EACH (from a chain pizza joint) plus some change left over (depending on where you go) here in the US.
4 euro would get you an all-you-can-eat pizza or fried chicken buffet, possibly with an unlimited-refills drink, here in the 'States.
4 euro = what, like 6 things off the McDonalds dollar menu? Two burgers, 2 small fries, hash browns and a small soda? Something like that?
I take it your fast food is much more expensive in Europe. Here, it really is cheaper, and when it isn't, the difference doesn't justify the time spent at the store + time spent making the food. A really strong desire to eat healthy can overcome this, but the path of least resistance, in every way, is fast food.
Large pizza from Little Caesars: $5. With breadsticks, add $2.
Dinner for 2 or 3 people, for $5-7, no waiting, no prep. It's pretty damn hard to beat that. Will it be good? Well, the one here is actually decent, for a chain pizza place, though I've certainly had inedible pizza from others. Will it be good for you? Oh, hell no.
Chinese takeout: notoriously cheap.
KFC: good luck making a chicken meal for significantly less. Worse, if you want chicken, a biscuit, and some mashed potatoes, and you want to make them so that they're actually different from the crap you buy at KFC (so, fresh) you'll be investing quite a bit of time, and spending even more money.
Why is this? We subsidize fast food with corn subsidies, transportation subsidies (you think the gas taxes are to pay for the damage your tiny little car does to the roads, or that truckers pay anywhere near the actual cost of the damage their trucks do in diesel taxes? HA!) etc. Shit food is cheap because our taxes have already paid for part of it.
That's to say nothing of the inconvenience of having to go to the store more frequently to buy small quantities (paying more in the process) so I don't have tons of produce go bad because my wife and I got sick of eating the same damn veggie every day, so we skip a couple days, and surprise, it's all gone bad now! Eating fresh food means frequent shopping, which is a huge pain in the ass since we don't have neighborhood produce/bakery stores any more. Supermarkets are inconvenient in my opinion, and I'd rather pay 15% more to buy my food every other day on the way home from work than have to make a special trip by car.
Personally, I think that 90+% of "IT" jobs (not even counting help desk) are more of a trade than a science.
I'm never, ever going to be writing deep, math-theory-heavy code. I just won't. I don't want to, and there are other people who would be better at it, even if I studied it pretty damn hard. "Computer Science" is a wasted concept on me and on the vast majority of coders.
What I do have is a feel for problems. I know what's broken before other people, and I know what do to (or, more often, where to find what to do) to fix it. I write clean code. I learn new systems quickly. These are the skills that are truly useful to most people in IT. I'll probably never have to do a do a Fourier transform, or implement my own sort algorithm. I do need to be able to grok new libraries, languages, and technologies quickly.
I'm not saying that there's not any overlap between what's taught in a CS program and these skills--I am saying that it's inefficient to put as many people as we do through that program, when we could do much more useful things with those 4 years.
That said, I take an interest in math and computer science. I read on those topics, and seek to make myself better at mathematical thinking. I do so, however, knowing that only a tiny fraction of what I read will ever be useful to me in a money-making sense, and none of it will ever go on a resumé. I treat it the same way as I do reading classical literature: valuable to me in a personal sense, but of little worth otherwise.
In fact, the "meeting cool people" is the most important part in pretty much any business-oriented degree.
You can teach yourself the stuff from a business or CIS degree in way less than 4 years, if you are actually interested in it. It's the contacts you make that matter. It's pretty much the entire purpose of Ivy League business programs, but even at lesser universities it's the biggest benefit of getting that paper.
If you've got family or friends or contacts from some other setting who can get you in to a corporation, though, you can probably skip the full-time-student thing and just let the corp pay for you to do night classes or something.
The US, generally speaking, has far weaker consumer protection laws than most of the rest of the developed world. So that's one possible place.
Bingo.
Game I want on Steam with no extra DRM? I'll buy it, 100% of the time. Even if I don't buy it at launch, I will when it comes down in price or has a weekend special or something. I've purchased Left 4 Dead, Overlord ($10 special), and Fallout 3 this way, just in the last month and a half or so. I bought the ID collection on a whim when it was a featured weekend deal. I buy tons of games on there, so it's not that I'm simply unwilling to pay for anything. I've not pirated games on there that play by the rules, but that I consider too expensive; I'll get them when they're cheaper.
Game I want on Steam but with extra DRM? Piratebay, 100% of the time.
Stop putting shitty DRM on top of the best DRM in the industry. Doing so means you're a complete moron, so I'd rather trust the piracy "scene" with my machine than you. Seriously.
The worst part, IMO, was how common enchanted weapons were by level 6-8 or so.
Every damn bandit glowed head to toe and had an enchanted weapon, it seemed. In Morrowind, enchanted weapons were relatively rare and only a few were really powerful, making Enchanting a useful skill. In Oblivion, why bother enchanting when you'll be at 100% chameleon with +5 strength and night eye just from armor you pick up off no-name enemies by level 10-12 anyway?
Hell, by level 12, you could go out naked with no weapons but a bow and be fully outfitted with great armor and weapons after your first encounter with a human enemy (aside from wizards, I guess). Worse was the sting of getting some great unique armor from completing a major quest early on or something like that, only to find that any random cave-dwelling bandit is has better armor just 3-4 levels later. Leveled unique items for quest rewards. WTF?
oh, Morrowind was great, no question about it. I've probably logged more hours in that game than any other I own--I've even got a copy of the installed program folder backed up, with 50 or so mods in place (such a pain to get them all playing nice together, don't ever want to do that again). And the main story wasn't really bad, but simply a bit less complete than it could have been. It's still my favorite game they've made; exploring the land's geography, finding awesome treasures hidden away in creepy caves, digging around in memorable and haunting (haunted?) Dwemer ruins, seeing the Ghost Fence for the first time... just a great experience all around.
I recently returned to Oblivion (when I couldn't get Fallout 3 to run no matter what I tried--I eventually solved that problem by just putting it on my laptop instead) but with a large set of mods that I found via some of the excellent categorized mod lists online. The experience is infinitely better. Oscuro's Oblivion Overhaul can't be praised enough, and the Unique Landscapes packages have finally given me a reason not to just fast-travel everywhere. I've spent as much time messing around with a regional quest involving some elf scouting parties and some enchanted armour off in the western 1/5 of the map as I did on the entire main quest in my first play through (I think Oscuro's added that one, and there seem to be others hinted at in other cities, so I think I've only scratched the surface of the new content). Finally, a reason to visit all of those mind-numbingly-similar dungeons they put in the game! Rewarding, non-leveled loot doesn't hurt, either. I've still not played the Shivering Isles, though my wife assures me that its main quest is better than the one in Oblivion proper, so I'm looking forward to it, though it may be a few... I don't know, months before I finish with all this new stuff added by the mods.
Heh, maybe they'll somehow manage to get the rights to do System Shock 3 next. *shudder* Or Thief (screw the critics, I even liked 3).
Thankfully they do release very capable modding tools, and a lot of problems can probably be fixed, but they left a number of holes that just can't be filled by anyone other than a professional team without seeming out-of-place or of inferior quality, largely due to the ubiquitous voice acting in the game.
I wish they could find the people who generate the good ideas at Bethesda (they do generate a lot of those, which is what keeps me coming back to their half-finished games), give them all raises, and then fire the ones who push unfinished products out the door and create or approve totally goddamned stupid things. They could replace them with some fresh blood, and, oh, I don't know, maybe start running their games by some playtesters and paying attention to what they say, so they'll spot things like, "huh, it's weird that I can't actually join the Sixth House, when the story and a few specific bits of dialogue seem to indicate that I can. I bet those quests would be fun!" or, "Jesus, these Ayleid ruins are boring, can't you give them some variety and/or create some free-form quests to make them worth visiting?", or "wow, that was dumb, why the hell did my dad just do that? I don't feel sad, I feel confused and irritated."
Would have been nice to have some "and this is what happened in such-and-such town due to your actions" scenes, as we've seen in prior installments. I probably wouldn't have done nearly as many side quests if I hadn't expected some of those. I mean, I really thought I'd get one for helping the Crater side Supply chick with her book. Some of those quests were just boring.
Given how much other great stuff they cut (you can't even go through the game in "dumbass" mode; there are just regular options and [intelligence] options, no penalties or humor for low-int characters) it seems like they could have at least managed to do a bit more with the ending. Since 90% of my time was in non-main-quest activities (and, frankly, I didn't give a damn about the main quest past a certain, kind of silly, plot twist) I'd have liked to see some payoff for that.
Typical Bethesda laziness, I guess. Morrowind and Oblivion both felt incomplete in many ways, and were only made (somewhat) whole when the community stepped in. I'm glad they create what they do, and I love the Elder Scrolls world, but I wish they'd take just a bit more time and money to finish their games before they release them. I went in to this expecting something better, since they were building on a graphics engine that was already functional and that they'd played with extensively in Oblivion, but they still managed to screw up several big things.
I'd love to sit in on a few of their meetings at various points in the development process and see whether anyone in the company brings these things up, or they really all think they're releasing a finished, well-crafted product.
Hm... maybe it could be arranged for Valve or Blizzard to buy Bethesda... *goes to work planning and plotting*
Yes to a construction set. Thank god.
No to DLC. Since nearly all of it for Oblivion sucked horribly, I don't think anyone familiar with that game will be buying any for Fallout 3. Please just release expansion packs, Bethesda, especially since you have an odd habit of making ones that have better main story lines than the game that they're expanding.
Now if the community can just get some money together to have the narrator do some more lines for a better, more varied, truer-to-the-series ending, we might be on the way to making this decent-but-not-great game worthy of the name it bears.
Yeah, no hazing and barely anything that I would call "bullying", and I ran with the second-geekiest (and easily the smartest) crowd in our high school (the geekiest were the weird-ass Wicca/LARP/OMG-no-really-guys-I-can-do-magic-with-crystals folks--seriously, WTF is up with those people?)
We did cross-associate with a couple groups that were both non-jock but also non-geek, so maybe that helped. I dunno, it's not like we went out of our way to avoid it; it just didn't happen.