After the party convention, candidates are barred from using ANY of the money they got before it, IF they take the federal cash.
That's one of the reasons that Kerry's handling of the Swiftboat ads and other attacks in the same time frame seemed so inept; the Democratic convention was about a month, IIRC, before the Republican one, and guess when the worst of the attack ads hit. Heh. This meant that he'd be burning through the federal dollars if he fought them, and would have less later in the race, while Bush was still on his pre-convention money (to say nothing of the impact of rules regarding 527s on the whole mess, which includes the Swiftboat folks in particular).
OTOH, individual contribution limits apply the whole time, so you can't take more than a given amount from a single individual or corporation.
What if companies move production to Thailand and pay $1/hr wages to get their product made, then sell them in the U.S. and Europe at rates only slightly lower than those of companies paying U.S. and European wages?
Globalization has to be for producers and consumers, or it's plutocratic bullshit.
How many industries outside of gaming, movies, and the like, can get away with offering products in one country at a price that is significantly different from that in others (i.e. no more difference than the cost of shipping from one country to the other)?
There seem to be entry level jobs, still, but they're all at small companies that offer very, very low pay (even for entry level), little or no opportunity for advancement ("we have five tech guys, so I guess you can aspire to be tech guy #1, who makes $2/hour more than you other four"), may well expect insane hours from you (if part of the job description is "support", especially), and these companies will not be using the same stuff that the big guys do, so you still won't get the specific experience you need to break in to the higher-paying market.
As a soon-to-be college grad, I'm fully expecting to spend the next 10 years of my life doing php coding and working with mysql/postgresql. Maybe I'll end up with a job doing Java or Python or some light or mid-level admin work, I guess. The only way out of that appears to be to get a lucky break and have a "right place at the right time" kind of moment; working one's way out of it is unlikely to be a successful strategy right now, as far as I can tell.
(although, when you think about it, those paying higher levels of income tax really don't get anything extra for their money either).
Looks like the got rich off the system and its (public) infrastructure.
I'd say that's something.
To say nothing of the fact that if we shifted enough of the tax burden to the lower classes to compensate for equalizing the rich/poor tax rate, those rich people would be the first against the wall in the inevitable revolution that would follow.
Preventing an uprising is probably in their best interest, and worth a few $ to them.
There's also that whole "marginal utility" thing, but whatever.
Shit, I bet I use string concatenation more often than I use all mathematical operators combined (not counting comparisons and other logical operations).
What percentage of programming jobs consist primarily of moving bits of data around in a database, making that database talk to some other in another company and on a different platform, and putting said data on the screen in a way that makes it useful to the user? Aside from the occasional simple graph, there's not going to be much math in a job like that. Very few of us are doing low-level audio or 3D graphics coding, or working with real, actual scientists.
Even more disgusting in my opinion is that the general policy in every school system she has encountered seems to be that the most expirenced teachers get the best behaved, highest achiving students in their classes. While the least expirenced newest teachers are assigned the classes of poorest behaved and worst achiving students, with the worst emotional behavioral problems.
Not to mention the worst tech. Got smart boards for 3 of 5 classrooms? They'll go to the 3 most senior teachers, even if they don't have a clue how to use them. They'll want it anyway. Young teacher fresh out of college gets hired, and is up to date on all that kind of stuff? Screw her, she won't even be able to borrow it from the teachers who can't use it.
Have very many of the other countries with free public education and a similar economic situation to that of the U.S. had these kinds of problems? Do they still? If not, how did they solve them?
The problem is that, as with most groups of people, school administrators will take the shortest path to get a given reward and/or avoid a given punishment. So much is tied to the testing now that they will throw common sense and what's best for the children out the window in the name of keeping the scores up or raising them.
Recess? Get rid of it! Even for Kindergarten! We need all the time for math (practicing for the test, with cheat sheets for the lower-level math that the kids never actually learned, which they'll be allowed to use on the tests, but it would be counterproductive from a test-score point of view to go back and re-teach that stuff) and reading (look out Timmy, that book that you so badly want to read is.1 of an AR level below yours and will get you fewer points when you do the Accelerated Reading test over it, better go pick another that you don't have any desire to read at all)! Kid failed class? Can't have that bad indicator for the school, test scores (which may or may not have been fudged) were reasonably good, send him on or we'll lose funding!
Whatever its intentions, NCLB has brought out the worst in the often-incompetent administrations across the country. For the (exceedingly rare) competent ones, I doubt it's had much effect at all, aside from annoying them to no end.
I cannot express to you in words how fucked up some of the stories my currently-student-teaching wife has brought home, and her school is not an anomaly.
Don't play outside much? Not only does every elementary school have recess (when the kids go *gasp* outside)
My wife is in her semester of student teaching before she graduates with a degree in elementary education.
The is NO recess at the school she's in. None. For ANY grade. Severely reducing or, more rarely, eliminating recess has been a popular way to get more time for subjects that will be on the NCLB-mandated tests.
I'm Serious. Yeah, I was shocked, too. But it's happening.
I don't really have anything to say about whether they're getting more, less, or the same amount of total physical activity. I have no idea. But, in fact, some kids do not have recess anymore.
Until the people and their government say, "sorry, we're changing the rules". Not like it hasn't happened before.
I never said that employers were acting irrationally. I'm saying that rational workers who want a better balance between work and the rest of their lives are not doomed to whine and ultimately fail to get what they want when faced with "harsh reality". They can and should exercise the power that they have to change the rules in their favor--change the axioms that are the basis of corporate logic through legislation.
This won't necessarily happen. I'm just saying it's entirely possible that, should enough people decide they're entitled to a different kind of relationship with their employers, it can become reality.
I think that a lot of motherboads will freak out, disable the CPU, and stick at the BIOS screen making pissed-off noises if you leave the CPU fan power unplugged, too:)
Maybe part of the reduction in the perceived eloquence and intelligence of today's politicians has something to do with the increase in specialization required to excel in nearly every field of human endeavor. Maybe a specialized politician has turned out to have an advantage over the polymath who writes his own speeches, writes poetry, translates Greek, corresponds intelligently with mathematicians, performs scientific experiments that actually contribute to humanity's body of knowledge, etc. Maybe the bar for being such a polymath (to a point where one can actually contribute to more than one field) has been raised so high that many people who would have been one have specialized in some specific thing, and can't draw on a broad range of knowledge to aid them in seeking office.
I'm just speculating, here. I have no idea if this is true. It does seem to me, however, that a greater percentage of our truly talented and intelligent individuals would tend toward specialization rather than generalization these days, by necessity. One could reach the level of education held by the polymaths of the 18th and 19th centuries and still be years of study away from being able to actually add anything interesting to the modern intellectual conversation taking place in any one field, so that specialization becomes more desirable.
We may not see as many learned, highly-educated statesmen because many of the people who had the potential to be one have instead devoted their time to genetics or advanced engineering or high-level math, with little time left to become well-rounded and electable.
My wife's doing her semester of student teaching before she graduates with a degree in elementary education, and some of her stories are horrifying.
These 5th graders (5th graders!) have to have cheat sheets for single-digit multiplication. Apparently it's getting common to have such sheets available in high school math classes, too. Yet, they're trying to teach them about fractions, and soon enough they'll be doing factoring and all kinds of other things that will require proficiency in the most basic of mathematical tasks... but they have none! Some of them still count on their fingers! To make it worse, the teachers can't spend time going back over the earlier things, because that's not making progress toward passing the god damned tests, so they just plow ahead with the new material hoping that the students will be able to bluff their way through it (and usually, it seems, they can) but the students don't really know what they're doing at all.
These 12-year-olds can't figure out how much money they'll need to buy 7 bags of candy at 4 dollars a piece without looking it up, and no-one's likely to teach it to them between now and graduation. But the school's scoring well above average on the fucking tests, so everything's great. Ugh, and don't even get me started on the other stuff. No recess (NO! RECESS!) for ANY grade, because they have to work toward passing the tests ALL THE TIME, drastically reduced science and history (social studies, whatever you want to call it) because math and reading are the two big topics for the tests, never mind the externalities of learning science and history (like vocabulary-building! even the "high" level readers, 7th to 12th grade reading levels, have shockingly limited vocabularies!).
Grrrr....
Bastards.
It's not just NCLB, I'll admit. Too many administrations are lazy as hell, or too eager to try out some damned fad they read about, and so they are changing things up every year (or even more frequently). Too few of them understand enough about science and research to be able to intelligently evaluate and apply new findings in the field of education to their schools, and a lot of what gets accepted as "science" in the science of education is ridiculous crap with glaring method problems, but it doesn't get weeded out by these incompetents running the schools. Some of it's lazy or inept teaching. But NCLB plays to the worst parts of these pre-existing problems.
This sense of entitlement, that the world needs to adjust to 'my' lifestyle and needs.
Thankfully, in America the people decide how our system runs. We can adjust the world to our lifestyle. We can impose it on the business world, should we so choose. Europe does--maybe they've gone too far, but I think a few steps in their direction would be a good thing, and if enough other people do too, then business will no longer be "entitled" to dictate quite as many terms of employment as they were before.
It's not even so much a matter of reducing choice, as changing the available choices. Few people here can get 4+ weeks of vacation, long and flexible lunch hours, etc., even if they want them, without taking a disproportionately large drop in pay and giving up promotions to the go-getter with no life outside of work, so for many it's just not a real option. In Europe, you may not be able to work over X hours, but that's been traded for the ability to do things that most people in the U.S. are not free to do. Should America decide to make such a trade, we can and will.
Question: from the ending of Ep.2, do you get the impression that we'll have at least one more game (HL3?) after Ep.3? I ask because of this line from the review:
Unlike that trilogy, though, the end of Gordon Freeman's tale has yet to be told. Just one more game to go before we find out the ultimate fate of the Freeman.
"ultimate fate"? More like a stepping stone on the way to
*SPOILERS*
An assault on the Combine overworld, which will likely be facilitated by the events of Ep.3.
My video card (nvidia 6600GT) has a bit of an overheating problem (I think it's mostly the ram, not the GPU). Usually it's OK, but sometimes I have to crank settings down to keep it from overheating and causing weird triangular shapes to appear in the middle of the screen.
The particle effects in Portal REALLY pissed it off (HL2 and its episodes never have, though). Crazy artifacts the second I'd so much as look at a portal or one of the blue end gates. Ended up having to point a box fan (!) into the side of my PC to finish the game.
So, warning to others: watch out, the particle effects are apparently unusually taxing.
Also, when you get to the last wave with (IIRC) 4 striders, consider knocking out maybe one and then falling back to the area near the rocket and waiting for the others to come to you. You'll have lots of friends there to help you kill the hunters, readily accessible ammo and health, and a couple of teleporter things right there. Like I said, take out at least one (2 if you can) farther out or you may get overwhelmed, but don't be afraid to fall back to the rocket if you have to. Doesn't hurt to go around nailing some of the hunters with your car first, either:)
IMHO, having just finished Portal and HL2:EP2, the Half Life-universe games have nailed the pure FPS genre in a way that no one had before (mind you, I've not yet played Bioshock). EP1 represented a slight drop in quality, as did Blue Shift (I loved both, mind you, and think that they're still well above average) but HL, HL:Opposing Forces, HL2, Portal, and HL2:EP2 are all stellar games, with a story and characters that are interesting and immersive but rarely feel forced.
As far as I see, there are still plenty of great games coming out, at least a couple a year that are really, REALLY good, and I don't even play games from every genre (notably sports and racing I skip, and I don't play as many (j)RPGs as many people do, though I do play and have played some).
Pong as the pinnacle of gaming? Heh. There's a similar vein of thought in the realm of literature and science. Mortimer Adler was a big proponent of this--he was one of the editors of the Great Books of the Western World series, bits of which can be found in almost any used book store--and expounded on it in one of his books, How to Read a Book. He said that we should learn about great discoveries from the people who did the discovering--that is, read Newton and Leibniz to learn Calculus, read Galileo and Einstein to learn about astronomy and physics, etc. "Original Communications", I believe he called them. Anything else was secondhand and thus inferior to communicating directly with a the genius who discovered whatever-it-is.
Some of the books that make lists of great fiction are there for similar reasons, I think. Because they "did it first". First story with X type of narrative style, first story with a character who goes through Y, things like that.
The problem with both of these is that first does not equal best. The quickest way to get a good understanding of a topic may not be by reading the "original communication", because the discoverer may have been a piss poor communicator. Plato and Aristotle? Quite accessible, especially the former, and Aristotle can be dry but he's rarely hard to understand. Hume? HAH! Good fucking luck. You're much better off at least starting with someone who's not Hume, and maybe working your way back to him if you're really that interested. It gets even worse in the realm math and science.
Then with lit, you've got old but legitimately GREAT works. Shakespeare really is as good as his reputation suggests. The Odyssey kicks all kinds of ass, as does The Iliad--though, oddly enough, it's much better if you skim/skip most of the fight scenes. Sometimes, though? Not so much. A good example from my recent reading is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It's one of the first (THE first?) books to do the whole, "maybe the main character's crazy, maybe there are actually ghosts, YOU WILL NEVER KNOW WHICH IT IS!" thing. Is it the best? Not at all. It's clunky and the characters are shallow as hell. The pacing falls apart several times. Certainly books after it have done better (even some by authors who are not and will never be as well regarded as James) and if we count movies then James' case gets much worse. Hell, IMO it's not even one of James' best books of any kind. Yet, this is the famous one when it comes to that sort of thing, and makes all kinds of "great books" lists, and if only two out of his many novels are included, it's usually the second one (Portrait of a Lady being the other). Why? Because it's the first, not because it's the best.
My point is this: I think that we've got a tendency to bias toward older works because they were there first, and/or because they did a certain thing before anyone else did. I question this bias, for the reasons elaborated above. Some people do this with games, and I think that it's silly. Sure, Pong was good, and it's still one of the best games to play if you are on a limited d
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I find it odd that you call my wanting a freer market "socialism".
It's a frighteningly common mistake, for whatever reason.
After the party convention, candidates are barred from using ANY of the money they got before it, IF they take the federal cash.
That's one of the reasons that Kerry's handling of the Swiftboat ads and other attacks in the same time frame seemed so inept; the Democratic convention was about a month, IIRC, before the Republican one, and guess when the worst of the attack ads hit. Heh. This meant that he'd be burning through the federal dollars if he fought them, and would have less later in the race, while Bush was still on his pre-convention money (to say nothing of the impact of rules regarding 527s on the whole mess, which includes the Swiftboat folks in particular).
OTOH, individual contribution limits apply the whole time, so you can't take more than a given amount from a single individual or corporation.
What if companies move production to Thailand and pay $1/hr wages to get their product made, then sell them in the U.S. and Europe at rates only slightly lower than those of companies paying U.S. and European wages?
Globalization has to be for producers and consumers, or it's plutocratic bullshit.
How many industries outside of gaming, movies, and the like, can get away with offering products in one country at a price that is significantly different from that in others (i.e. no more difference than the cost of shipping from one country to the other)?
Haha, awesome.
Both Ajaxes (Ajaxen?) in that book kicked serious ass, and deserve more recognition.
There seem to be entry level jobs, still, but they're all at small companies that offer very, very low pay (even for entry level), little or no opportunity for advancement ("we have five tech guys, so I guess you can aspire to be tech guy #1, who makes $2/hour more than you other four"), may well expect insane hours from you (if part of the job description is "support", especially), and these companies will not be using the same stuff that the big guys do, so you still won't get the specific experience you need to break in to the higher-paying market.
As a soon-to-be college grad, I'm fully expecting to spend the next 10 years of my life doing php coding and working with mysql/postgresql. Maybe I'll end up with a job doing Java or Python or some light or mid-level admin work, I guess. The only way out of that appears to be to get a lucky break and have a "right place at the right time" kind of moment; working one's way out of it is unlikely to be a successful strategy right now, as far as I can tell.
Looks like the got rich off the system and its (public) infrastructure.
I'd say that's something.
To say nothing of the fact that if we shifted enough of the tax burden to the lower classes to compensate for equalizing the rich/poor tax rate, those rich people would be the first against the wall in the inevitable revolution that would follow.
Preventing an uprising is probably in their best interest, and worth a few $ to them.
There's also that whole "marginal utility" thing, but whatever.
Shit, I bet I use string concatenation more often than I use all mathematical operators combined (not counting comparisons and other logical operations).
What percentage of programming jobs consist primarily of moving bits of data around in a database, making that database talk to some other in another company and on a different platform, and putting said data on the screen in a way that makes it useful to the user? Aside from the occasional simple graph, there's not going to be much math in a job like that. Very few of us are doing low-level audio or 3D graphics coding, or working with real, actual scientists.
Which window managers support tabbing?
Not to mention the worst tech. Got smart boards for 3 of 5 classrooms? They'll go to the 3 most senior teachers, even if they don't have a clue how to use them. They'll want it anyway. Young teacher fresh out of college gets hired, and is up to date on all that kind of stuff? Screw her, she won't even be able to borrow it from the teachers who can't use it.
Have very many of the other countries with free public education and a similar economic situation to that of the U.S. had these kinds of problems? Do they still? If not, how did they solve them?
The problem is that, as with most groups of people, school administrators will take the shortest path to get a given reward and/or avoid a given punishment. So much is tied to the testing now that they will throw common sense and what's best for the children out the window in the name of keeping the scores up or raising them.
.1 of an AR level below yours and will get you fewer points when you do the Accelerated Reading test over it, better go pick another that you don't have any desire to read at all)! Kid failed class? Can't have that bad indicator for the school, test scores (which may or may not have been fudged) were reasonably good, send him on or we'll lose funding!
Recess? Get rid of it! Even for Kindergarten! We need all the time for math (practicing for the test, with cheat sheets for the lower-level math that the kids never actually learned, which they'll be allowed to use on the tests, but it would be counterproductive from a test-score point of view to go back and re-teach that stuff) and reading (look out Timmy, that book that you so badly want to read is
Whatever its intentions, NCLB has brought out the worst in the often-incompetent administrations across the country. For the (exceedingly rare) competent ones, I doubt it's had much effect at all, aside from annoying them to no end.
I cannot express to you in words how fucked up some of the stories my currently-student-teaching wife has brought home, and her school is not an anomaly.
My wife is in her semester of student teaching before she graduates with a degree in elementary education.
The is NO recess at the school she's in. None. For ANY grade. Severely reducing or, more rarely, eliminating recess has been a popular way to get more time for subjects that will be on the NCLB-mandated tests.
I'm Serious. Yeah, I was shocked, too. But it's happening.
I don't really have anything to say about whether they're getting more, less, or the same amount of total physical activity. I have no idea. But, in fact, some kids do not have recess anymore.
Until the people and their government say, "sorry, we're changing the rules". Not like it hasn't happened before.
I never said that employers were acting irrationally. I'm saying that rational workers who want a better balance between work and the rest of their lives are not doomed to whine and ultimately fail to get what they want when faced with "harsh reality". They can and should exercise the power that they have to change the rules in their favor--change the axioms that are the basis of corporate logic through legislation.
This won't necessarily happen. I'm just saying it's entirely possible that, should enough people decide they're entitled to a different kind of relationship with their employers, it can become reality.
I think that a lot of motherboads will freak out, disable the CPU, and stick at the BIOS screen making pissed-off noises if you leave the CPU fan power unplugged, too :)
Maybe part of the reduction in the perceived eloquence and intelligence of today's politicians has something to do with the increase in specialization required to excel in nearly every field of human endeavor. Maybe a specialized politician has turned out to have an advantage over the polymath who writes his own speeches, writes poetry, translates Greek, corresponds intelligently with mathematicians, performs scientific experiments that actually contribute to humanity's body of knowledge, etc. Maybe the bar for being such a polymath (to a point where one can actually contribute to more than one field) has been raised so high that many people who would have been one have specialized in some specific thing, and can't draw on a broad range of knowledge to aid them in seeking office.
I'm just speculating, here. I have no idea if this is true. It does seem to me, however, that a greater percentage of our truly talented and intelligent individuals would tend toward specialization rather than generalization these days, by necessity. One could reach the level of education held by the polymaths of the 18th and 19th centuries and still be years of study away from being able to actually add anything interesting to the modern intellectual conversation taking place in any one field, so that specialization becomes more desirable.
We may not see as many learned, highly-educated statesmen because many of the people who had the potential to be one have instead devoted their time to genetics or advanced engineering or high-level math, with little time left to become well-rounded and electable.
Got a link (assuming it was/is online)? My Google-fu is weak today, it seems, and that sounds interesting.
NCLB is definitely a big problem.
My wife's doing her semester of student teaching before she graduates with a degree in elementary education, and some of her stories are horrifying.
These 5th graders (5th graders!) have to have cheat sheets for single-digit multiplication. Apparently it's getting common to have such sheets available in high school math classes, too. Yet, they're trying to teach them about fractions, and soon enough they'll be doing factoring and all kinds of other things that will require proficiency in the most basic of mathematical tasks... but they have none! Some of them still count on their fingers! To make it worse, the teachers can't spend time going back over the earlier things, because that's not making progress toward passing the god damned tests, so they just plow ahead with the new material hoping that the students will be able to bluff their way through it (and usually, it seems, they can) but the students don't really know what they're doing at all.
These 12-year-olds can't figure out how much money they'll need to buy 7 bags of candy at 4 dollars a piece without looking it up, and no-one's likely to teach it to them between now and graduation. But the school's scoring well above average on the fucking tests, so everything's great. Ugh, and don't even get me started on the other stuff. No recess (NO! RECESS!) for ANY grade, because they have to work toward passing the tests ALL THE TIME, drastically reduced science and history (social studies, whatever you want to call it) because math and reading are the two big topics for the tests, never mind the externalities of learning science and history (like vocabulary-building! even the "high" level readers, 7th to 12th grade reading levels, have shockingly limited vocabularies!).
Grrrr....
Bastards.
It's not just NCLB, I'll admit. Too many administrations are lazy as hell, or too eager to try out some damned fad they read about, and so they are changing things up every year (or even more frequently). Too few of them understand enough about science and research to be able to intelligently evaluate and apply new findings in the field of education to their schools, and a lot of what gets accepted as "science" in the science of education is ridiculous crap with glaring method problems, but it doesn't get weeded out by these incompetents running the schools. Some of it's lazy or inept teaching. But NCLB plays to the worst parts of these pre-existing problems.
Thankfully, in America the people decide how our system runs. We can adjust the world to our lifestyle. We can impose it on the business world, should we so choose. Europe does--maybe they've gone too far, but I think a few steps in their direction would be a good thing, and if enough other people do too, then business will no longer be "entitled" to dictate quite as many terms of employment as they were before.
It's not even so much a matter of reducing choice, as changing the available choices. Few people here can get 4+ weeks of vacation, long and flexible lunch hours, etc., even if they want them, without taking a disproportionately large drop in pay and giving up promotions to the go-getter with no life outside of work, so for many it's just not a real option. In Europe, you may not be able to work over X hours, but that's been traded for the ability to do things that most people in the U.S. are not free to do. Should America decide to make such a trade, we can and will.
"ultimate fate"? More like a stepping stone on the way to
*SPOILERS*
An assault on the Combine overworld, which will likely be facilitated by the events of Ep.3.
My video card (nvidia 6600GT) has a bit of an overheating problem (I think it's mostly the ram, not the GPU). Usually it's OK, but sometimes I have to crank settings down to keep it from overheating and causing weird triangular shapes to appear in the middle of the screen.
The particle effects in Portal REALLY pissed it off (HL2 and its episodes never have, though). Crazy artifacts the second I'd so much as look at a portal or one of the blue end gates. Ended up having to point a box fan (!) into the side of my PC to finish the game.
So, warning to others: watch out, the particle effects are apparently unusually taxing.
Also, when you get to the last wave with (IIRC) 4 striders, consider knocking out maybe one and then falling back to the area near the rocket and waiting for the others to come to you. You'll have lots of friends there to help you kill the hunters, readily accessible ammo and health, and a couple of teleporter things right there. Like I said, take out at least one (2 if you can) farther out or you may get overwhelmed, but don't be afraid to fall back to the rocket if you have to. Doesn't hurt to go around nailing some of the hunters with your car first, either :)
Collection of sounds, including the song "Still Alive"
Gamefaqs thread from which I got the above link, with more sound clips if you want them.
Why have you not played portal yet?
There's cake!
IMHO, having just finished Portal and HL2:EP2, the Half Life-universe games have nailed the pure FPS genre in a way that no one had before (mind you, I've not yet played Bioshock). EP1 represented a slight drop in quality, as did Blue Shift (I loved both, mind you, and think that they're still well above average) but HL, HL:Opposing Forces, HL2, Portal, and HL2:EP2 are all stellar games, with a story and characters that are interesting and immersive but rarely feel forced.
As far as I see, there are still plenty of great games coming out, at least a couple a year that are really, REALLY good, and I don't even play games from every genre (notably sports and racing I skip, and I don't play as many (j)RPGs as many people do, though I do play and have played some).
Pong as the pinnacle of gaming? Heh. There's a similar vein of thought in the realm of literature and science. Mortimer Adler was a big proponent of this--he was one of the editors of the Great Books of the Western World series, bits of which can be found in almost any used book store--and expounded on it in one of his books, How to Read a Book . He said that we should learn about great discoveries from the people who did the discovering--that is, read Newton and Leibniz to learn Calculus, read Galileo and Einstein to learn about astronomy and physics, etc. "Original Communications", I believe he called them. Anything else was secondhand and thus inferior to communicating directly with a the genius who discovered whatever-it-is.
Some of the books that make lists of great fiction are there for similar reasons, I think. Because they "did it first". First story with X type of narrative style, first story with a character who goes through Y, things like that.
The problem with both of these is that first does not equal best. The quickest way to get a good understanding of a topic may not be by reading the "original communication", because the discoverer may have been a piss poor communicator. Plato and Aristotle? Quite accessible, especially the former, and Aristotle can be dry but he's rarely hard to understand. Hume? HAH! Good fucking luck. You're much better off at least starting with someone who's not Hume, and maybe working your way back to him if you're really that interested. It gets even worse in the realm math and science.
Then with lit, you've got old but legitimately GREAT works. Shakespeare really is as good as his reputation suggests. The Odyssey kicks all kinds of ass, as does The Iliad--though, oddly enough, it's much better if you skim/skip most of the fight scenes. Sometimes, though? Not so much. A good example from my recent reading is The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. It's one of the first (THE first?) books to do the whole, "maybe the main character's crazy, maybe there are actually ghosts, YOU WILL NEVER KNOW WHICH IT IS!" thing. Is it the best? Not at all. It's clunky and the characters are shallow as hell. The pacing falls apart several times. Certainly books after it have done better (even some by authors who are not and will never be as well regarded as James) and if we count movies then James' case gets much worse. Hell, IMO it's not even one of James' best books of any kind. Yet, this is the famous one when it comes to that sort of thing, and makes all kinds of "great books" lists, and if only two out of his many novels are included, it's usually the second one (Portrait of a Lady being the other). Why? Because it's the first, not because it's the best.
My point is this: I think that we've got a tendency to bias toward older works because they were there first, and/or because they did a certain thing before anyone else did. I question this bias, for the reasons elaborated above. Some people do this with games, and I think that it's silly. Sure, Pong was good, and it's still one of the best games to play if you are on a limited d