I remember distinctly that palm OS5 was supposed to be a stopgap measure between the classic OS4 and the modern, BeOS based OS6... Essentially OS5 was OS4 with some badly needed modifications to make it run on faster hardware. And now that we're up to 5.4, the patches keep rolling in and in, as they add more ram and expand the featureset ever towards what OS 6 is supposed to contain, which is supposed to be in parallel development.
When are we getting the real Palm OS 6, with such badly needed features as multiprocessing and a file system?
Oh come on, lets not be hypocritical here. I seriously doubt anyone can say they've done a fresh install of *distro-of-choice* and not spent some time tweaking things to get their system into a fully usable state.
Yes, but generally once you've done an fresh install of *distro-of-choice* you at least have the chance to get it on the network before it is hacked to death. Windows XP's basic install has gotten so far out in terms of security that a fresh XP install is generally compromised within *seconds* of being put on the network... far faster than you can download the patches to make it secure. The only way I can do XP installs these days is by putting it behind another machine that protects it from malicious attacks while it is made secure. Now compare that to Debian, which installs the latest everything by default, or even the likes of Mandrake which keeps a relatively current version for download, the XP install / update process is surprisingly difficult.
You do realize that protecting machines against malicious attacks has always been a red herring, right? Trusted Computing ensures that signed code runs in a protected space which unsigned code cannot effect. However, most computing will still occur outside of the signed code space, and for legacy reasons every feature of today's Windows computing environment will need to remain exposed to unsigned code. In other words, this has no more chance of stopping a someone from hacking into your computer than insulating your house will stop someone from stealing your car.
If they really wanted to reduce the amount of damage malicious code could do, they would create a unix like permissions environment, with an automated way of setting permissions levels. Not only is this the obvious way of reducing malware, it is the proven way. It is a lot like what Trusted Computing proports to be, but with the user retaining full control. But the user having full control is what this is supposed to stop.
No, what Trusted Computing means, and has always meant, was not that you could trust your computer but that the media owners could trust your computer... Creating a sandbox environment where no code can touch any other code or modify its behavior in any way would not function in an environment where your typing enhancement systray app was correcting your spelling in your legacy e-mail client, but rather preventing you from recording a movie as it is written out and watching it later.
Trusted Computing is DRM.
I'm not saying DRM is necessarily a bad thing... Quite frankly if it does open up the floodgates of every movie in IMDB's database available to the public at a moment's notice, I'm all for it, at least in theory. In practice it needs to be defended against, because the industry leaders have shown themselves to use every inch of power they gain over their users to manipulate them and cement their power. While Microsoft may not trust me not to steal movie trailers from their website, I sure as hell don't trust them to let me run SkyOS 5 without interference.
I'm glad that you've brought up what the TCPA is claimed to do, because there are still large swathes of people out there who believe the lies. To be quite frank, if they were more honest about the goals of the platform we might be more inclined to trust them. But when they're trying to smuggle in more control over their users in the guise of protecting them from something they have no hope of protecting them from, there can be no option but resistence.
Did they fix the problem that the last boss is trivial to beat with the soul cube, or that wandering around the mars base with Hell breaking loose is a lot less scary once you have already been trapped in Hell and fought the strongest boss in the game? Or that each section of the game is about 30% too long?
They'd probably save 10 in parts for each part they pulled (starting with the memory card slot), plus a streamlining of the manufacturing process and lower overhead to the tune of about another 20 dollars... plus licensing fees. and don't forget this will reduce the required power inputs and board space, as well as other knock-on benefits. So yes, if they removed the MP3 decoder, the memory stick slot, and reduced the audio and support processors, they could probably get the price down from a suicidal 350 dollars to something like 250 which might stand a chance. I would go as far as recommending slashing primary systems to get down to 200, if necessary / possible.
To answer your question, yes, it's better to redesign something that doesn't stand a chance in hell of selling down into something that people can afford. Why is this so hard to understand?
There's almost always at least one. If you never have to cut features, your design was probably not very ambitious, or you had the luxury of waiting until things were perfect to ship. Sometimes a feature just unbalances, or crashes too frequently at too late a stage in development, or it just doesn't make the game better. Items and characters are also cut frequently, which is a shame but sometimes the plot changes and the character's VO doesn't fit, or the dungeon the object was integral to was pulled, or the thing unbalanced the game, etc.
For another huge one, look up multiplayer network mode in Frequency.
As a follow up to the above post, I'd recommend cutting and slashing like nobody's business. If anything, such as MP3/ATRAC/MPEG playback, requires an independent chipset, kill it. Audio chipset? Nerf it. Proprietary disk standard too costly? Slap a DVD mini in there and call it a day. Memory stick port? Nobody will use that anyway.
Sony needs to get that price down, and fast. While it is an impressive piece of hardware, they would be charging more than twice the current generation hardware costs for a portable, and probably more than the next generation hardware is going to run. That's insane for a handheld. "Cheap" has always been required for the success of a handheld, as they are generally stand-in between times with a full-fledged gaming system. No matter how ludicrously powerful the thing is (it's nuts), it is still going to be second string to a full-fledged system.
Selling at 350 is suicide. If their launch strategy is to start at 350, then when manufacturing ramps up the following month drop that to 250, they might be passably OK, but they'll never get the penetration of the Game Boy.
Why is it things like this are so hard to see for execs and the dev team?
Damn it, they're practically knocking on the door of my secret lair. They probably followed the ethernet cable... Stupid underground wireless restrictions.
Lex Luthor does not equal Bush. I saw Superman 4: Lex can pronounce the word "Nuclear." Luther was also successful in business, good at rallying people behind his cause, surrounded by beautiful women, and capable of executing his schemes with enough follow-through that they come to fruition. In other words, Lex Luthor would be the superior president.
Not to be too hacky, but it is trivial to add a good solar cell to most electronics, especially if they are built for a charger. This one looks like it uses a fairly standard power plug, which means it's probably 2.0 or 1.9 center positive. Anyone with a unit could tell you to required voltage, but I would guess 12v as it has an internal hdd. All that's left to do is find a good 12v solar cell, find a plug of the right size, chop off the end bits of the two and attach them together, and double-check that current is flowing in the right direction. Bing! You're done.
It's very easy. Check these values, of course, with the requirements of the actual hardware before you start plugging things in.
Yes, but you don't bolt on your physics engine late in development, because physics affects so much of the gameplay. It needs to be integrated with the rest of your engine. Game and level design needs to take it into account.
If you're talking 3rd party rigid body and ragdoll physics solutions, you're not talking about how far the character can jump, or gets blasted by rockets, or most of the other things one would normally associate with physics. You're talking about kicking around chairs and tables. In Doom 3 there are roughly four places where you can get bonuses by kicking rigid objects near other objects. Other than that it just serves to increase immersion and make explosions more fantastic... not to mention get in the way of the player and be annoying. The same was true with Max Payne, the hallmark of the Havoc engine: beautiful physical movements with little gameplay relevance. Even Deus Ex 2's physical model was functionally gratuitous, as the game would have worked just as well if the crates didn't have a coefficient of friction
Actual freeform physics with gameplay relevance is pretty rare. 1: They are unpredictable 2: They are computationally expensive 3: QA will find a million ways to break it until you have to completely neuter the process. I don't mean to disagree with you... stronger physics engines allow for a tremendous amount of freedom for the player, and as such should be integral to the design rather than bolted on afterwards. But quite frankly, right now they're not.
I'm not following. Are you saying that civil disobedience is a bad thing because it's causing massive disruptions to normal civil services, or are you saying it is a bad thing because it is having no effect at all? Or are you just feeling disenfranchised because our president has over a 50% approval rating despite massive protests both globally and locally, lying to the public about weapons of mass destruction, digging us deeply into two different hornets nests without a clue as to how to get us out, ciphoning the money from an invaded country to personal business associates on no-bid contracts while cutting servicemen's pay, taking America from world leader to world's enemy, attempting to destroy the EPA, removing all pretext of science from government-sponsored scientific research into global warming, removing support for any overseas family planning groups which even mention the word abortion, attempting to re-merge church and state, failing to act upon intelligence pre 9-11 then attempting to prevent the 9-11 commission from taking place, taking 40% of his first year in office on vacation, stripping as many checks and balances out of government as possible, depowering the world court, making enemies with North Korea, Iran, and Iraq in a speech which served no purpose but to warn all three countries to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, neutering future growth through the largest budget deficit in history by cutting taxes to the wealthiest 1%, calling into question the service record of a man with three purple hearts during a war which he was discharged from National Guard duty because he failed to get a checkup, allowing semi and fully-automatic assault rifles back on the streets, creating a no-child-left-behind act which rewards successful participating schools financially with less money than it costs them to hold the test, undermining the transparency of government by denying more FOIA requests than any other president, re-writing Iraq's report to the UN about destroyed weapons of mass destruction to remove references to weapons of mass destruction purchased from the US and Saudi Arabia, holding an unknown number of US and foriegn citizens indefinitely without a hearing or access to a lawyer, creating a methodology by which a US citizen can be stripped of their citizenship and therefore no longer fall under the protections of the constitution, removing judges' discretion in approving wiretaps to prevent abuse, neutering federal emission standards and attempting to remove California's ability to set independent standards, outing undercover agents as retialiation for speaking out against the administration, in gross violation of international law setting up the nation's first internment camps since the tragedy of the Japanese internment of WW2, and still after all of these years not being able to pronounce the word "Nuclear?" At this point President Bush could start punching babies in anger, shout "Terrorist!" a few times, and his approval rating would probably go up.
This doesn't appear to be a basic game engine, but rather a bolt-on physics and character animation module, Ala Havok. Buying one generally means that they have a game engine to attach it to, and have tried it out and liked it in-game. The rigid-body and ragdoll collision code on the last game I worked on didn't go in until about three months before the end of the project, as it wasn't integral to the gameplay. Very few FPS games have taken their physics model seriously as a gameplay element, and as such I'd (Id?) be surprised if DNF's gameplay had to be reworked for such a thing. If any other game licensed this engine today, I'd put them roughly 6 months from ship. Now with DNF, on the other hand, all bets are off. This won't be the first physics solution they have tried, and it may not be the last.
All humor is a smooth, easy-to-swallow coating around a seed of truth.
Lucas was in love so much with filming the Messiah complex that he acquired one. Same thing with the Wachowskis, though it took them far less time to succomb. Peter Jackson is limited for the time being because he's not working from original material. But if King Kong and his next series of movies don't take off, and he's stuck reworking LotR for the rest of his career, he's going to do some bonehead things too. After all, in the movies Saruman is never killed...
When rent was due, and his kids needed the money, Coppola broke down and made Godfather 3. As the LotR books end with RotK, what is to stop a pennyless and destitute Peter Jackson from having Saruman become the embodyment of a resurrected Sauron, with the hope of mankind falling to a pair of simple-minded Santa Monica time traveling teenagers?
Oh yes, your heroes will fall. And what a mighty Thud it will be.
Upon hearing of this, the FBI and CIA enlisted the help of local SWAT and sniper squads to redirect the state of Washington to an unoccupied portion of Wyoming. Despite protests from geologists complaining that St. Helens has been a US native for thousands of years, she was immediately deported back Switzerland and told never to return again.
"The US will not be lulled into complacency," US Undersecretary for Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson announced Sunday morning, "From here on out, all major regions of geological activity will be monitered closely for any hints of unAmerican activities."
"I'm looking at You, San Andreas," he added meanacingly.
Not true, a teacher could not require you be in a bar, or a strip club regardless of your age or state laws.
If the course were about alcohol sales or the commodification of sexuality they could definitely require students to go to either place. Relevance to the course would be key of course, but if there was a legitimate educational reason to link 19th century American literature (which I assume is ripe with democratic idealism) with the modern interpretation thereof then the requirement of students to study the interworkings of democracy by participating is legitamate.
Remember, these aren't kids. They didn't need parental permission to sign up for the course. These are college students at a private university.
Debates are nice, but debates are "safe" and happen every day anyway. By the time you get to college, you had better know how to debate, or it will be a skill you will pick up quickly in a sink-or-swim scenario. The actual process of voting, sadly, is more arcane than that, and can't be taught... it can only be learned.
Nobody is forcing you to vote. Nobody is forcing you to take the American Literature course at a private school. Nobody can force you to learn a compiler either, but if you take a computer programming course and can't use a compiler no matter how much theory you know you're going to fail. Why would a course on perspectives on American government be any different?
It would be warranted. He is destroying the value of their brand. A certain Beavis and Butthead at the helm of another Sci-Fi epic could use some legal lovin' too.
As a requirement for a sociology course on death and grieving we were required to go to a mortuary and bring back price lists for coffins, burials, etc. For a theater course, we had to see 3 productions external to the campus. For a japanese course, we had to go to Yahoan, a japanese supermarket. A civics course required the participation in a city government town-hall meeting. A course on aging required interviewing the elderly and nursing home attendants.
External requirements for coursework are not at all uncommon, and are generally more useful than in-classroom coursework. If you could choose between two engineers, one of which studied dilligintly in the classroom but had no experience and one of which was required to get an internship in the field, who would you pick?
Requiring students to enter a voting booth is definitely fair, and should pass muster with basically anyone in acadamia. While it is questionable whether or not you can require your students to vote, you can definitely require them to be physically present anywhere they are legally allowed to be. I do wish the requirement were more stringent... I.E. go or have your grade reduced by point five. But the concept of making your students participate in government activities is sound, and I wish more professors (and high-school teachers) would lean this direction.
After all, where are kids going to learn the mechanical, tedious process of signing up to vote, finding their polling station, etc? From 15 second rock-the-vote ads?
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the 9 hour special editions of FotR, TTT, and RotK. In the new editions, Gandalf shoots first, the Ents do a musical number when they destroy Isengard, and Gollum has been replaced with a lovable fruit bat.
Yeah, like Peter Jackson is going to be immune. You just wait and see. Your heros will crumble too!
Actually, I do get a lot of crap. My domain registration e-mail is filtered through POBox.com's spam filter, then my ISP's spam filter, then my local copy of K9, before it hits the hotword killfile filter on my e-mail client. I also give everyone a different e-mail address under one of my domains based upon their name, and simply add those to the killfile when they start spamming up.
So yes, I get a lot of pure crap. But the benefit of having people able to contact me is worth the effort. Of course I would never say that if I had a single box which had to be protected at all times, which I probably should have pointed out.
Sometimes people really do need to contact you. If your domain is causing problems or otherwise interfering with the network, or someone has a dispute with you but would rather not let it escalate to the point of sending nastygrams to the owner of your IP block, it is very convienient to be able to just e-mail someone. That's why it is there. Sending a message out to the larger hosting / access company usually results in absolutely nothing, especially if it is a large hosting company.
Stay a part of the community. Keep your contact information available and up-to-date.
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I remember distinctly that palm OS5 was supposed to be a stopgap measure between the classic OS4 and the modern, BeOS based OS6... Essentially OS5 was OS4 with some badly needed modifications to make it run on faster hardware. And now that we're up to 5.4, the patches keep rolling in and in, as they add more ram and expand the featureset ever towards what OS 6 is supposed to contain, which is supposed to be in parallel development.
When are we getting the real Palm OS 6, with such badly needed features as multiprocessing and a file system?
Oh come on, lets not be hypocritical here. I seriously doubt anyone can say they've done a fresh install of *distro-of-choice* and not spent some time tweaking things to get their system into a fully usable state.
Yes, but generally once you've done an fresh install of *distro-of-choice* you at least have the chance to get it on the network before it is hacked to death. Windows XP's basic install has gotten so far out in terms of security that a fresh XP install is generally compromised within *seconds* of being put on the network... far faster than you can download the patches to make it secure. The only way I can do XP installs these days is by putting it behind another machine that protects it from malicious attacks while it is made secure. Now compare that to Debian, which installs the latest everything by default, or even the likes of Mandrake which keeps a relatively current version for download, the XP install / update process is surprisingly difficult.
You do realize that protecting machines against malicious attacks has always been a red herring, right? Trusted Computing ensures that signed code runs in a protected space which unsigned code cannot effect. However, most computing will still occur outside of the signed code space, and for legacy reasons every feature of today's Windows computing environment will need to remain exposed to unsigned code. In other words, this has no more chance of stopping a someone from hacking into your computer than insulating your house will stop someone from stealing your car.
If they really wanted to reduce the amount of damage malicious code could do, they would create a unix like permissions environment, with an automated way of setting permissions levels. Not only is this the obvious way of reducing malware, it is the proven way. It is a lot like what Trusted Computing proports to be, but with the user retaining full control. But the user having full control is what this is supposed to stop.
No, what Trusted Computing means, and has always meant, was not that you could trust your computer but that the media owners could trust your computer... Creating a sandbox environment where no code can touch any other code or modify its behavior in any way would not function in an environment where your typing enhancement systray app was correcting your spelling in your legacy e-mail client, but rather preventing you from recording a movie as it is written out and watching it later.
Trusted Computing is DRM.
I'm not saying DRM is necessarily a bad thing... Quite frankly if it does open up the floodgates of every movie in IMDB's database available to the public at a moment's notice, I'm all for it, at least in theory. In practice it needs to be defended against, because the industry leaders have shown themselves to use every inch of power they gain over their users to manipulate them and cement their power. While Microsoft may not trust me not to steal movie trailers from their website, I sure as hell don't trust them to let me run SkyOS 5 without interference.
I'm glad that you've brought up what the TCPA is claimed to do, because there are still large swathes of people out there who believe the lies. To be quite frank, if they were more honest about the goals of the platform we might be more inclined to trust them. But when they're trying to smuggle in more control over their users in the guise of protecting them from something they have no hope of protecting them from, there can be no option but resistence.
Did they fix the problem that the last boss is trivial to beat with the soul cube, or that wandering around the mars base with Hell breaking loose is a lot less scary once you have already been trapped in Hell and fought the strongest boss in the game? Or that each section of the game is about 30% too long?
They'd probably save 10 in parts for each part they pulled (starting with the memory card slot), plus a streamlining of the manufacturing process and lower overhead to the tune of about another 20 dollars... plus licensing fees. and don't forget this will reduce the required power inputs and board space, as well as other knock-on benefits. So yes, if they removed the MP3 decoder, the memory stick slot, and reduced the audio and support processors, they could probably get the price down from a suicidal 350 dollars to something like 250 which might stand a chance. I would go as far as recommending slashing primary systems to get down to 200, if necessary / possible.
To answer your question, yes, it's better to redesign something that doesn't stand a chance in hell of selling down into something that people can afford. Why is this so hard to understand?
There's almost always at least one. If you never have to cut features, your design was probably not very ambitious, or you had the luxury of waiting until things were perfect to ship. Sometimes a feature just unbalances, or crashes too frequently at too late a stage in development, or it just doesn't make the game better. Items and characters are also cut frequently, which is a shame but sometimes the plot changes and the character's VO doesn't fit, or the dungeon the object was integral to was pulled, or the thing unbalanced the game, etc.
For another huge one, look up multiplayer network mode in Frequency.
As a follow up to the above post, I'd recommend cutting and slashing like nobody's business. If anything, such as MP3/ATRAC/MPEG playback, requires an independent chipset, kill it. Audio chipset? Nerf it. Proprietary disk standard too costly? Slap a DVD mini in there and call it a day. Memory stick port? Nobody will use that anyway.
Sony needs to get that price down, and fast. While it is an impressive piece of hardware, they would be charging more than twice the current generation hardware costs for a portable, and probably more than the next generation hardware is going to run. That's insane for a handheld. "Cheap" has always been required for the success of a handheld, as they are generally stand-in between times with a full-fledged gaming system. No matter how ludicrously powerful the thing is (it's nuts), it is still going to be second string to a full-fledged system.
Selling at 350 is suicide. If their launch strategy is to start at 350, then when manufacturing ramps up the following month drop that to 250, they might be passably OK, but they'll never get the penetration of the Game Boy.
Why is it things like this are so hard to see for execs and the dev team?
Damn it, they're practically knocking on the door of my secret lair. They probably followed the ethernet cable... Stupid underground wireless restrictions.
Lex Luthor does not equal Bush. I saw Superman 4: Lex can pronounce the word "Nuclear." Luther was also successful in business, good at rallying people behind his cause, surrounded by beautiful women, and capable of executing his schemes with enough follow-through that they come to fruition. In other words, Lex Luthor would be the superior president.
Not to be too hacky, but it is trivial to add a good solar cell to most electronics, especially if they are built for a charger. This one looks like it uses a fairly standard power plug, which means it's probably 2.0 or 1.9 center positive. Anyone with a unit could tell you to required voltage, but I would guess 12v as it has an internal hdd. All that's left to do is find a good 12v solar cell, find a plug of the right size, chop off the end bits of the two and attach them together, and double-check that current is flowing in the right direction. Bing! You're done.
It's very easy. Check these values, of course, with the requirements of the actual hardware before you start plugging things in.
Yes, but you don't bolt on your physics engine late in development, because physics affects so much of the gameplay. It needs to be integrated with the rest of your engine. Game and level design needs to take it into account.
If you're talking 3rd party rigid body and ragdoll physics solutions, you're not talking about how far the character can jump, or gets blasted by rockets, or most of the other things one would normally associate with physics. You're talking about kicking around chairs and tables. In Doom 3 there are roughly four places where you can get bonuses by kicking rigid objects near other objects. Other than that it just serves to increase immersion and make explosions more fantastic... not to mention get in the way of the player and be annoying. The same was true with Max Payne, the hallmark of the Havoc engine: beautiful physical movements with little gameplay relevance. Even Deus Ex 2's physical model was functionally gratuitous, as the game would have worked just as well if the crates didn't have a coefficient of friction
Actual freeform physics with gameplay relevance is pretty rare. 1: They are unpredictable 2: They are computationally expensive 3: QA will find a million ways to break it until you have to completely neuter the process. I don't mean to disagree with you... stronger physics engines allow for a tremendous amount of freedom for the player, and as such should be integral to the design rather than bolted on afterwards. But quite frankly, right now they're not.
I'm not following. Are you saying that civil disobedience is a bad thing because it's causing massive disruptions to normal civil services, or are you saying it is a bad thing because it is having no effect at all? Or are you just feeling disenfranchised because our president has over a 50% approval rating despite massive protests both globally and locally, lying to the public about weapons of mass destruction, digging us deeply into two different hornets nests without a clue as to how to get us out, ciphoning the money from an invaded country to personal business associates on no-bid contracts while cutting servicemen's pay, taking America from world leader to world's enemy, attempting to destroy the EPA, removing all pretext of science from government-sponsored scientific research into global warming, removing support for any overseas family planning groups which even mention the word abortion, attempting to re-merge church and state, failing to act upon intelligence pre 9-11 then attempting to prevent the 9-11 commission from taking place, taking 40% of his first year in office on vacation, stripping as many checks and balances out of government as possible, depowering the world court, making enemies with North Korea, Iran, and Iraq in a speech which served no purpose but to warn all three countries to acquire nuclear weapons as quickly as possible, neutering future growth through the largest budget deficit in history by cutting taxes to the wealthiest 1%, calling into question the service record of a man with three purple hearts during a war which he was discharged from National Guard duty because he failed to get a checkup, allowing semi and fully-automatic assault rifles back on the streets, creating a no-child-left-behind act which rewards successful participating schools financially with less money than it costs them to hold the test, undermining the transparency of government by denying more FOIA requests than any other president, re-writing Iraq's report to the UN about destroyed weapons of mass destruction to remove references to weapons of mass destruction purchased from the US and Saudi Arabia, holding an unknown number of US and foriegn citizens indefinitely without a hearing or access to a lawyer, creating a methodology by which a US citizen can be stripped of their citizenship and therefore no longer fall under the protections of the constitution, removing judges' discretion in approving wiretaps to prevent abuse, neutering federal emission standards and attempting to remove California's ability to set independent standards, outing undercover agents as retialiation for speaking out against the administration, in gross violation of international law setting up the nation's first internment camps since the tragedy of the Japanese internment of WW2, and still after all of these years not being able to pronounce the word "Nuclear?" At this point President Bush could start punching babies in anger, shout "Terrorist!" a few times, and his approval rating would probably go up.
This doesn't appear to be a basic game engine, but rather a bolt-on physics and character animation module, Ala Havok. Buying one generally means that they have a game engine to attach it to, and have tried it out and liked it in-game. The rigid-body and ragdoll collision code on the last game I worked on didn't go in until about three months before the end of the project, as it wasn't integral to the gameplay. Very few FPS games have taken their physics model seriously as a gameplay element, and as such I'd (Id?) be surprised if DNF's gameplay had to be reworked for such a thing. If any other game licensed this engine today, I'd put them roughly 6 months from ship. Now with DNF, on the other hand, all bets are off. This won't be the first physics solution they have tried, and it may not be the last.
All humor is a smooth, easy-to-swallow coating around a seed of truth.
Lucas was in love so much with filming the Messiah complex that he acquired one. Same thing with the Wachowskis, though it took them far less time to succomb. Peter Jackson is limited for the time being because he's not working from original material. But if King Kong and his next series of movies don't take off, and he's stuck reworking LotR for the rest of his career, he's going to do some bonehead things too. After all, in the movies Saruman is never killed...
When rent was due, and his kids needed the money, Coppola broke down and made Godfather 3. As the LotR books end with RotK, what is to stop a pennyless and destitute Peter Jackson from having Saruman become the embodyment of a resurrected Sauron, with the hope of mankind falling to a pair of simple-minded Santa Monica time traveling teenagers?
Oh yes, your heroes will fall. And what a mighty Thud it will be.
Upon hearing of this, the FBI and CIA enlisted the help of local SWAT and sniper squads to redirect the state of Washington to an unoccupied portion of Wyoming. Despite protests from geologists complaining that St. Helens has been a US native for thousands of years, she was immediately deported back Switzerland and told never to return again.
"The US will not be lulled into complacency," US Undersecretary for Homeland Security Asa Hutchinson announced Sunday morning, "From here on out, all major regions of geological activity will be monitered closely for any hints of unAmerican activities."
"I'm looking at You, San Andreas," he added meanacingly.
Not true, a teacher could not require you be in a bar, or a strip club regardless of your age or state laws.
If the course were about alcohol sales or the commodification of sexuality they could definitely require students to go to either place. Relevance to the course would be key of course, but if there was a legitimate educational reason to link 19th century American literature (which I assume is ripe with democratic idealism) with the modern interpretation thereof then the requirement of students to study the interworkings of democracy by participating is legitamate.
Remember, these aren't kids. They didn't need parental permission to sign up for the course. These are college students at a private university.
Debates are nice, but debates are "safe" and happen every day anyway. By the time you get to college, you had better know how to debate, or it will be a skill you will pick up quickly in a sink-or-swim scenario. The actual process of voting, sadly, is more arcane than that, and can't be taught... it can only be learned.
Nobody is forcing you to vote. Nobody is forcing you to take the American Literature course at a private school. Nobody can force you to learn a compiler either, but if you take a computer programming course and can't use a compiler no matter how much theory you know you're going to fail. Why would a course on perspectives on American government be any different?
It would be warranted. He is destroying the value of their brand. A certain Beavis and Butthead at the helm of another Sci-Fi epic could use some legal lovin' too.
As a requirement for a sociology course on death and grieving we were required to go to a mortuary and bring back price lists for coffins, burials, etc. For a theater course, we had to see 3 productions external to the campus. For a japanese course, we had to go to Yahoan, a japanese supermarket. A civics course required the participation in a city government town-hall meeting. A course on aging required interviewing the elderly and nursing home attendants.
External requirements for coursework are not at all uncommon, and are generally more useful than in-classroom coursework. If you could choose between two engineers, one of which studied dilligintly in the classroom but had no experience and one of which was required to get an internship in the field, who would you pick?
Requiring students to enter a voting booth is definitely fair, and should pass muster with basically anyone in acadamia. While it is questionable whether or not you can require your students to vote, you can definitely require them to be physically present anywhere they are legally allowed to be. I do wish the requirement were more stringent... I.E. go or have your grade reduced by point five. But the concept of making your students participate in government activities is sound, and I wish more professors (and high-school teachers) would lean this direction.
After all, where are kids going to learn the mechanical, tedious process of signing up to vote, finding their polling station, etc? From 15 second rock-the-vote ads?
I wouldn't be surprised if we saw the 9 hour special editions of FotR, TTT, and RotK. In the new editions, Gandalf shoots first, the Ents do a musical number when they destroy Isengard, and Gollum has been replaced with a lovable fruit bat.
Yeah, like Peter Jackson is going to be immune. You just wait and see. Your heros will crumble too!
Actually, I do get a lot of crap. My domain registration e-mail is filtered through POBox.com's spam filter, then my ISP's spam filter, then my local copy of K9, before it hits the hotword killfile filter on my e-mail client. I also give everyone a different e-mail address under one of my domains based upon their name, and simply add those to the killfile when they start spamming up.
So yes, I get a lot of pure crap. But the benefit of having people able to contact me is worth the effort. Of course I would never say that if I had a single box which had to be protected at all times, which I probably should have pointed out.
Sometimes people really do need to contact you. If your domain is causing problems or otherwise interfering with the network, or someone has a dispute with you but would rather not let it escalate to the point of sending nastygrams to the owner of your IP block, it is very convienient to be able to just e-mail someone. That's why it is there. Sending a message out to the larger hosting / access company usually results in absolutely nothing, especially if it is a large hosting company.
Stay a part of the community. Keep your contact information available and up-to-date.
Super Turbo Turkey Puncher 3!
You know it's gotten bad when your biggest fans are crying for you to stop making movies.
Don't get mad, they are jokes OK?
Ha. Ha. Ha. Ha.
Goddamnit he's right, isn't he?