Both analogies ignore the obivous: firing up your high-powered workstation to type letters or running auto-cad once a month doesn't represent an increased safety threat to Bob with his new $499 budget PC from Best Buy. The substantial increase in SUVs and the super-sized "light trucks" (what an oxymoron!) in the 1990s now represents at least 40% of the vehicles on the road. It may a represent a "choice" for those who can affford them, but collectively it is a very selfish choich as it makes driving substantially more dangerous for those who can't afford them or are philosophically opposed to owning one.
Likewise you both ignore the environmental impact, and I don't mean the mediocre fuel economy and increased emissions, but rather how the trend is now necessitating the need for bigger parking areas, larger garages, and making our bleak, sprawling, car dependent "cities" more forboding and obscene than ever.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not against such vehicles for people who have a legitimate need for them, such as ranchers/farmers, or rural residents in areas of poor roads and steep terrain that have a legitimate need for 4 Wheel Drive. However as we all know most such vehicles, especially the recent luxury SUVs, are gold plated penises designed to show the world how "successful" and "cool" you really are. Engineering wise they are little more than your standard pickup truck with a fancy cab grafted on and thus extremely profitable (and overpriced) due to an irrational, gullible public that puts fashion and "keeping up with the Joneses" before such matters as practicality, sustainability, and personal safety.
For a family of four a mini-van or station wagon is a marginally better choice. The real choice, that we're so lacking in most of our cities, is the choice not to drive at all. Transportation costs are now the #2 expense for most individuals and families behind the need for housing, represent from 15% to 20% of income for outlays suchs as car payments, insurance, maintainance, taxes, and fuel.
Isn't it a little ridiculous to design an environment that forces people to own a car in order to fully function as a citizen? Unlike a house a automobile eventually full depreciates to nothing, much like a personal computer, though much more expensive considering that PCs are basically commodities these days. If you do the math you'll see that a typical family a four will spend as much or more on automotive ownerships costs over than mortgage payments in the 30 years it takes to payoff a house. And all of this so we can live in a bland, polluted, cookie cutter landscape with no sense of community or place.
Ahhh but doesn't this sorta defeat the purpose of the whole game since it's kinda difficult to create the shape of a cat, much less a microwave oven, with one hand?
Yeah and the massacre by the SS at Oradour Sur Glane, in retaliation for French Resistance action, never happened.
Oh and this was four days AFTER the D-day invasion.
http://www.oradour.info/ruined/summary.htm
Re:Nine weeks more work? That's good!
on
Take Back Your Time!
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Oh please! Quit being such a free market fanboy and
stop viewing "quality of life" in terms of raw GDP.
This article from the Economist which pretty much
debunks the notion that Americans are so much better off than
Europeans.
The simple fact is a lot of the stuff we spend money
on, such as excessive prisons and gold plated highways that foster urban
sprawl, raises our GDP output, but not our general
welfare.
Chasing the leader
Feb 6th 2003 From The Economist print edition
Are Europeans really
so much worse off than Americans?
AMERICA has been the world's economic leader for over a century. Economic
theory suggests that western Europe should be catching up. Yet average GDP per
head in the European Union, measured at purchasing-power parity, is only
three-quarters of that in the United States. A popular explanation is that
European firms are less productive because they are hampered by labour- and
product-market regulation. But European productivity, measured by output per
hour worked, has in fact almost caught up with America's. If Europeans are so
productive, though, why are they apparently so much poorer than
Americans?
America's much-trumpeted "productivity miracle" in the late 1990s created the
misleading impression that Europe significantly lags America in the productivity
league. It is true that, since 1995, American GDP per hour worked has risen by
an annual average of 1.9%, compared with only 1.3% in the European Union.
However, over any longer period, up to half a century, Europe's productivity
growth has outpaced America's. Since 1990 American productivity has risen by
1.6% a year; the EU's has risen by 1.8%. Since 1950 America's productivity
growth has averaged 2%, Europe's 3.3%. According to figures from the Conference
Board, an American business group, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the
Netherlands all now boast higher output per hour than the United States. Average
productivity in the EU is still 7% less, largely because of lower productivity
in Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal--but the gap has continued to close over
the past decade.
The narrowing of the productivity gap has not, however, been reflected in
living standards, as measured by GDP per head. The chart, taken from an
analysis* by
Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, shows how Europe's
productivity and GDP per head fell relative to America's from the mid-19th
century until around 1950. Productivity has since rebounded, almost reaching
American levels. GDP per head, on the other hand, rose sharply until 1970, but
then flattened off at 77% of America's.
The surge in Europe's productivity since 1950 is largely explained by
reconstruction after the war and the belated exploitation of electricity and the
mass production of cars--40 years after America. The puzzle is why Europe's GDP
per head has lagged so far behind productivity. Germany's GDP per man-hour is 1%
higher than in America, but its GDP per person is 25% lower. The main reason is
that average hours worked in Europe have fallen so sharply. In part, this
reflects an increase in unemployment and withdrawals from the labour force; but
it also reflects a preference for shorter working weeks and longer holidays.
A broader analysis of living standards, based on economic welfare rather than
crude GDP, argues Mr Gordon, would place some value on Europeans' greater
leisure time. But how much of the depressing effect of shorter hours on Europe's
GDP per head should be ascribed to people's free choice to take longer holidays
than overworked Americans, and how much to union pressure or government policies
that try to spread jobs by compulsory limits on hours of work? Mr Gordon guesses
that one-third of the discrepancy between Europe's productivity and its GDP per
head, relative to America's, represents freely chosen leisure. Corrected for
this, Europe's income per
'Dear CEO: Is this really what you want?'
on
U.S. Jobs Jumping Ship
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I'm sure I'll get flamed by the libertarian free-market fanatics for posting this, but this is the truth and it needs to be heard.
Ernest Partridge: 'Dear CEO: Is this really what you
want?'
An open letter to the Chief
Executive Officers of the Fortune 500 companies, and of the major commercial
media.
Dear CEO,
Congratulations! You have won, decisively
and overwhelmingly.
Your favored politicians and political party are now
in control of all three branches of the United States government. Your political
and economic ideologies, preached virtually without rebuttal in your media, have
been enacted by law, executive order and judicial decree. And those ideologies
are destined to be solidified as federal judges who endorse these ideologies
come to dominate the federal judiciary.
As a result of your victory, the
Congress of the United States now follows the dictates of its corporate
"sponsors," and is thus no longer responsive to the wishes and interests of its
constituents. The Federal regulatory agencies the EPA, the FCC, the SEC, the
FDA, etc. have become the captives, and virtual subsidiaries, of the industries
that they were intended to regulate.
Thanks to "your" Administration and
Congress, and the unchallenged political message of "your" media, the fortunate
wealthy few, like yourself, are the beneficiaries of "tax reform" legislation
which accelerates the flow of national wealth from the vast majority of our
population which produces that wealth, to those of you who own and control that
wealth. That same tax policy is producing enormous deficits in the federal
budget and an increase in the national debt that will likely bankrupt the Social
Security and Medicare trust funds, and burden our children and grandchildren
essentially forever. But, of course, none of that directly affects you and
yours.
All in all, you have received from the incumbent Administration
and Congress, an overwhelmingly favorable return on your investment in campaign
funds.
However, I must wonder if you have carefully assessed the larger
return on this investment, the full consequences of your complete political
victory.
If you do, I suspect that you may discover that yours has been a
pyrrhic victory. You might, on reflection, decide that you do not really want
the prize that you have won. You may in fact have reaped a whirlwind so dreadful
that you may wish, while there is still time, to make corrections or even, dare
I say, reparations.
One might urge you to reassess your "victory" and
your continuing course of political action on grounds of morality, of religion,
or of political tradition. Instead, I would ask you to assess the current
political condition in the United States from the perspective of that central
principle of the dominant economic theory: the principle of
self-interest.
From the perspective of self-interest alone, I would
submit that all that you have won may be much less than meets the eye, and that
this accomplishment might even contains the seeds of its own destruction, and of
your ruin.
The Economy:At the Democratic convention of
2000, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the finest Republican mind in the Democratic
Party, quoted Harry Truman: "to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat."
This is more than a partisan slogan, it is history. Mark Hulbert reports, in CBS Market
Watch[smirkingchimp.com] that "since 1901, the Dow Jones Industrial
Averages average annual gain, after inflation, has been nearly twice as high
when a Democrat has occupied the White House."
But if the history of the
last century is unconvincing, just think back to the past decade. While its
true that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have given you
Prey! Anyone else remember this much vaunted/hyped fps from
3D Realms? It was first promoted back in '96 right before the original Quake was
released.
Googled this bit of info from IGN.. http://pc.ign.com/articles/355/355382p1.html March 12, 2002 - Prey, its very name is the
definition of vaporware, and is even perhaps responsible for a lot of the Duke
Nukem nay saying. You see, Prey was to be 3D Realms' grand first-person shooting
triumph. What it promised to sport in 1997 was a new engine with better than
Unreal looks, Max Payne radiosity lighting, and Red Faction environmental
interactivity.
It was only after sometime that the reality of lacking
technology sunk in and Prey, along with its Turok reminiscent story of a Native
American gone alien abductee superhero was axed. From then, DNF was put in full
swing, and has still yet to arrive, leading conspiracy theorist gamers with way
too much time on their hands to always expect the worst. However, in 1999, 3D Realm's George Broussard
made it abundantly clear that the title was still in some way, shape, or form
being developed, but that it should not be expected anytime soon. Despite this,
and all the other hype surrounding the title, it seemed Prey eventually wound up
on the dreaded backburner (insert Prey falling prey pun here).
That was then... This is now.
Web rumor (as wonderfully reliable as it is)
suggests the game has perhaps risen from the dead by the helping hand of Rune's
own Human Head Studios. Further speculation cites the latest in Doom technology
to be the likely power behind this prey's second wind. All parties rumored to be involved are
obviously tightlipped (the terribly sad norm in this industry). We'll be back
with more details if further information arises substantiating or debunking this
rumor.
Regarding the "knock" argument, ethyl alcohol was widely known in the 20s to be a safe alternative to tetraethyl alcohol, though it cost a bit more. There's also a myth that leaded gasoline was easier on valves but in fact the opposite is true and only through the introduction of chemical "scavengers" into the fuel which swept the lead out the back of the tailpipe were they able to eliminate this problem.
Folks this is nothing more than a classic cost/benefit analysis made by the automobile and petroleum companies back in the 1920s. They chose profits at the expense of public healthand the environment. They got away with it for nearly 50 years until the early 70s when the scientific evidence against leaded gasoline was too overwhelming to ignore.
From http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Lead-History.ht m#cars
While they were busy glossing over its perilous shortcomings for the public health, tetraethyl lead's boosters almost forgot that their "gift of God" posed some serious problems for cars. Instead of benefitting, engines were getting destroyed by lead deposits. GM researchers had noted this early in TEL's life, but Charles Kettering was anxious to get the new product to market. Problems, he argued, could be worked out with real-life experience to guide them. But necessary changes were slow in coming.
In May 1926, three years after leaded fuel went on sale, GM's Alfred Sloan wrote Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, to express concern that valve corrosion with Ethyl gas was so bad after 2,000-3,000 miles that it rendered cars "inoperative." Rather late in the day, one would have thought, he urged further development of the product. Referring to Ethyl's decision to re-enter the market, he wrote, "Now that we are back in again and are considering pushing the sale [of Ethyl] to the utmost, I think we ought to be concerned with this question."
So the additive that Standard, GM, Du Pont and the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation defended so vigorously before the Surgeon General and the nation wasn't even any good yet--it junked people's second-largest investment, after their homes. Incredibly, in spite of the near-magical claims being made for TEL, GM's own car divisions were at this very time bitterly resisting engine modifications to take advantage of it. In fact, GM's Buick, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac divisions would not recommend it to their customers until 1927, when they circulated bulletins to their dealers calling on them to withdraw any objections to leaded fuel. This was six years after TEL's invention and a full year and a half after a fractious national debate on TEL at the high-profile Public Health Service conference in Washington. Tellingly, support for TEL was forever lacking in the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, the automotive engineering community's leading organ.
The damaging effects to which Sloan referred necessitated the introduction of chemical "scavengers," which would cause the residue of the spent ethyl fluid to leave the engine along with the car's exhaust gases, thus preventing lead buildup. After a little trial-and-error experimentation proved the destructiveness of chlorine, ethylene dibromide (EDB), a byproduct of bromine invented by Dow Chemical in the twenties, was selected as the scavenger of choice.
Proving the old maxim that you only make things worse when you tell a lie, Ethyl's adoption of EDB and its widespread use have created several waves of secondary environmental disaster. In more recent times, EDB combustion has been linked to halogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in exhaust, believed to be cancer risks. Also, when EDB is burned in the engine, it creates methyl bromide, which as a component of automobile exhaust the World Meteorological Organization has termed one of "three potentially major sources of atmospheric methyl bromide," which harms the ozone layer.
With the eventual demise of the US market for leaded fuel written on the wall, Ethyl had to find a new market for its lead scavenger EDB, and in 1972 it did--as a pesticide. Twelve years later, EDB would be banned by the EPA in this application following a 1974 finding that it was a powerful cancer-causing agent in animals; a 1977 finding of "strong evidence" that it caused cancer in humans; and a 1981 determination that it was "a potent mutagen"--a carcinogen with especially damaging consequences for human reproductive systems, powerful enough that it should be removed immediately from the food chain. This was bad news, as the United States was by now putting 20 million pounds of EDB into its soils annually, and it had begun to show up in cake mixes and cereal. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would also act to restrict EDB exposure, and the EPA would cite its reduction in the atmosphere as an additional benefit of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
Today the mechanical benefits of unleaded gasoline are obvious. Ever wonder why your new car goes longer than your old one between spark-plug changes? Or why exhaust systems last longer? Or why oil changes don't need to be as frequent? Try unleaded fuel. In a report delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers, lead-free fuel was shown to significantly reduce engine rusting, piston-ring wear and sludge and varnish deposits, as well as to reduce camshaft wear. In 1985 an EPA report concluded that reduced lead levels reduced piston-ring and cylinder-bore wear, preventing engine failure and improving fuel economy. Estimated maintenance savings exceeded the maintenance costs associated with recession of exhaust valves, which is caused by the use of unleaded gasoline.
Gary Smith, an English Ford engineer working in the area of fuel economy and quality/vehicle/environmental engineering, told The Nation: "The higher the lead content, the more it messes the engine oil up, and we wanted to get longer intervals between engine oil changes, so that's a negative for lead as well.... [The scavengers used in leaded gasoline] or combustion of anything with chlorine or bromine will make hydrochloric and hydrobromic acid, so the actual muffler systems get corroded. They end up on--and affect--the spark plugs. Because we're trying to keep warranty costs down and [lower] costs for customers, we found ourselves going away from lead."
True, but Lucas has writing credits on all of the movies in the series, since after all it is his baby. Brin implied that the "shoot the reactor and then run" plot scheme was a result of Lucas' role as director of certain films in the series when its really due to his role as grand poobah of the Star Wars universe.
Lucas is not and never was a great director or writer. The best movie in the series, The Empire Strikes Back, is great precisely because he stepped aside to let Irvin Kershner direct, and Leigh Brackett/Lawrence Kasdan write the screenplay. Lucas strengths are his grand vision of the Star Wars universe and grasp of epic storytelling, not as a jack of all trades who wears the hat of director, writer, and producer.
You only need to look at the banal dialogue and wooden performances of episode I or the lame 'douche commercial' attempt at romance in episode II to come to the conclusion that he would best serve the series as executive producer.
And -- to my delighted shock! -- for the very first time, an action-plot
twist! Out of the four Star Wars films that Lucas has directed, for the first
time he did not resolve the action by having someone fly a teeny ship into a
great big ship, shoot the 'reactor' and then run away real fast from a
slow-motion explosion! At last.
Ummmm.. Lucas only directed 3 of the 5 films currently in
release: Episodes I, II, and IV. Return of the Jedi, which featured the
second version of the shoot the 'reactor' and then run away real fast scheme was
directed by Richard Marquand, not
Lucas.
If I remember correctly one of the big exploits in Ultima II was to pickpocket(i.e. rob) the McDonalds employee via the drive thru entrance. By the time the guards caught on and headed your way, all it took was a quick dash to the zone exit to escape.
Of course the guards had "no memory", so once you re-entered the zone all was forgotten and you were free to pilfer the McDonalds again.
IIRC, such game behavior was the major inspiration for the "virtues" of Ultima IV, since Richard felt the series should inspire players to be something more than a common thief.
A first I thought putting McDonald's in the game was a terrible idea, but then I realized the great potential it has for 'culture jamming'.
Just imagine what sort of things people will be able to do to McDonalds - dress up in a clown costume while serving food, decorate the restaurant with a medieval S&M theme or just set the place on fire and watch it burn down.
Most likely air resistance due to the density and shape of the rock resulted in a relatively low terminal velocity, which would explain why it didn't go through her shoe into her foot. The girl also claimed that she "saw it fall from above roof height", which is very telling as it means the velocity was slow enough that the object could be easily seen.
Ever heard the urban legend about how a penny falling off the top of the Empire State building could kill someone if it landed on their head?
Believe it or not a penny has a terminal velocity somewhere between that of a ping pong ball and a basketball, and while it would certainlly sting if it hit you on the head, its highly unlikely it would kill you.
The Penny Problem http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~macklem/paper. html
I went there about four years ago when I attended SIGGRAPH '98 in Orlando. I was quite disappointed with their claim to be the 'World's Largest McDonalds'. I was expecting something along the lines of the Varsity drive in Atlanta, but what I saw was a unremarkable bastardized two story version of the standard mansard roof restaurant.
From the article you linked to: "The word "automat" comes from the Greek
automatos, meaning "self-acting." But Automats weren't truly automatic.
They were heavily staffed. As a customer removed a compartment's contents, a
behind-the-machine human quickly slipped another sandwich, salad, piece of pie
or coffee cake into the vacated chamber".
This is hardly what I would consider automatic, so
I'd say this new machine is a bit more than just "slapping a credit card
reader on an Automat". The Automat has about as much in common with this
vending machine as the pedal powered bamboo vehicle on Gilligan's Island does
with an automobile.
Still as others have pointed out this type of vending technology isn't
anything new, only new to the U.S, as the Europeans and the Japanese
have had it for quite some time.
Substitute 'Everquest' for 'Gambling' and 'Time' for 'Money' and we get...
Twenty Questions
Did you ever lose time from work or school due to Everquest? Has playing Everquest ever made your home life unhappy? Did playing Everquest affect your reputation in the real world? Have you ever felt remorse after playing Everquest? Did you ever play Everquest to farm items which you could sell on eBay to pay debts or otherwise solve financial difficulties? Did playing Everquest cause a decrease in your ambition or efficiency? After a particularly bad series of deaths in Everquest did you feel you must return as soon as possible and win back your XP? After you won a rare item did you have a strong urge to return and win more? Did you often play Everquest until your free time was gone? Did you ever cancel social activities to obtain more time for playing? Have you ever skipped work to play Everquest? Were you reluctant to spend your free time doing normal, non-EQ related activities? Did playing make you careless of the welfare of yourself or your family? Did you ever play longer than you had planned? Have you ever played to escape worry or trouble? Have you ever committed, or considered lying or skipping work to obtain more play time? Did playing Everquest cause you to have difficulty in sleeping? Do arguments, disappointments or frustrations in the real world create within you an urge to play Everquest? Did you ever have an urge to celebrate any good fortune by a few hours of playing Everquest? Have you ever considered self destruction or suicide as a result of your playing Everquest?
Most compulsive Everquest players will answer yes to at least seven of these questions.
http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/20questions.htm l
"First of all, a person who isn't addicted to Evercrack and can play it 30 minutes a day and go on with his/her life won't suffer any physical/mental/emotional side effects"
From that statement alone I can see that you've never played Everquest. It takes 1-2 *hours* just to get in a group most times, not to mention that time spent waiting for a camp to open.
It's the time sucking nature of the game that creates most of this 'addiction' problems, precisely because Verant designed in numerous timesinks to draw out the experience and keep player paying the monthly subscription fee. Everything from the formula for leveling that created 'hell levels' to the ridiculous amount of time spent on camping a rare spawn for a piece for an epic weapon are proof that Verant is a company that doesn't care about that value of their customer's time.
You can't *win* the game or even be modestly successful without 'investing' a ridiculously large amount of time. After 2.5 years of playing as a moderate addict(when compared to the hardcore junkie of power guilds like Afterlife) I wasn't anywhere near being considered "uber", yet in those 2.5 years I probably spent 3,000+ hours in the game. Most of that time was spent levelling, which in EQ is nothing more than an endless game of 'Bop the Mole' in a quest to get XP. There wasn't anything inherently exciting or challenging in the combat, it was the quest for 'golden carrot dangling from the stick' that kept you playing the game.
In that respect, playing Everquest is much like playing a slot machine. You continue doing the same thing over and over again ad nauseum in hopes of a big payoff(i.e. phat lootz!) and the painfully slow increase in experience that let's you play 'bop the mole' on bigger things.
So I think a much better analogy would be to compare it to gambling, which we all know to be as destructive as any addiction to drugs or alcohol.
There's a 'Gamblers Anonymous', and yes there's an 'Everquest Addicts Anonymous'.
Taken in that light your comment that "Evercrack presents no such danger" is pure hooey.
Is regulation the answer? I doubt it. Regulation of the casino industry is very weak and largely ineffective. Aside from an minimum age requirement of 21, there's nothing to prevent someone from pissing their life savings away.
Yes ultimately it all comes down to personal responsibility, but responsibility is a two way street. Unfortunately the idea that Verant has a responsibility to their customers to design a product that can be enjoyed in a reasonable amount of time is rather unfashionable in an era of extreme Laissez-faire capitalism in which anything goes.
You're right about EQ being terribly unfun to anybody not hooked to it and how it's like crack to most of the regular players.
My personal addiction to EQ lasted 2.5 years - from launch in March of '99 to 9/11 of last year. Yes 9/11 was the event that made me realize what EQ really is: a banal, empty escape from reality.
I played on Mithaniel Marr, which is home to 'Afterlife', one of the most powerful guilds in the game. I wasn't in AL, but I used to visit Afterlife's website just to check out their accomplishments.
Afterlife is for hardcore addicts only, the degree of their addiction must be mind boggling considering most of them play every single day 6 to 8 hours a day(or more). They literally have thousands of hours 'invested' in addiction, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of their characters had a 'played' time of 300 real world days or more.
True to form they held a raid on the evening of 9/11, as nothing was going to keep them from their addiction, not evening the most horrifying attack on this country since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 12/7/41.
Something about that really disgusted me, as it made it painfully clear for once and for all that EQ is an addiction that's just as harmful as an addiction to alcohol or drugs.
I never mentioned this to anyone on the discussion boards. I just quietly came to the conclusion that for the sake of my own health and welfare I needed to leave the game.
Initially I considered just taking a break for a couple of weeks, but I never played EQ again after 9/11. In early October I logged on for the last time and gave all of my items and wealth to a couple of my closest in game friends. Once my characters were stripped I said my goodbyes and bid the world of Norrath farewell. I immediately camped out and deleted my characters(56 War, 56 Shm, 46 Mnk) to make sure I wouldn't be tempted to come back.
It wasn't easy, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.
Its been nearly a year since I left behind the world of Norrath. I don't have too many regrets since I always had a love/hate relationship with the game. In the end I decided the negative aspects outweighed the positive and that it just wasn't worth wasting my time.
Since then I still occasionally play computer games, like Civ III, Medal of Honor, or RTCW, but they don't take over my life like the way EQ did. I started riding my bike again in March for fun/exercise, which helped my lose about 30 lbs of mush that I put on while playing EQ. I'm generally much more social with my friends in the real world, and I've even started dating again. I read a lot more and find it much easier to think clearly now that my mind isn't in a constant EQ induced haze.
Being away from EQ has made me realize that reality is infinitely much more interesting and bizarre than anything I ever did in Norrath. Addictive MMORPGS such as EQ are ultiamtely a poor substitute for 'reality', 'community' or 'relationships'.
This more than anything is the reason why I think MMORPGS will always be a niche category. Americans are already overworked and suffering from a society fraying at the seams. The last thing we need is a mass escape from reality that encourages people to once and for all drop out from society.
Will most people will realize that it just isn't worth it?
Simple. Money spent in a local economy is spent 5-6 times before it leaves town. Each time that money is respent, it generates another dollar's worth of local employment while generating additional sales tax revenue at each step. In the case of Wal-Mart a majority of the money spent there leaves the community immediately.
Wal-Mart cares little for the economic/social concerns of the community and therefore does not reinvest their profits there. Indeed all you have to do is look the design of your local Wal-Mart to see what low regard they have for communities. Disposable, windowsless, air conditioned, cinder block boxes sitting in a sea of asphalt are the product of a company who believes the greatest good is making money for their shareholders. Investing in a structure that is aesthetically pleasing and adds cultural/social value to a community is a seen a frivolous since the needs of the community are seen as irrelevant next to the needs of shareholders.
I see you're resorting the classic libertarian argurment: "No one is forcing them to work those jobs!". When unemployment is high, which is almost always this case among unskilled lower classes, workers become desperate for jobs as the alternative to no work is starvation and destitution.
For every 2 low payings jobs that Wal-Mart creates, 3 better paying jobs in the community are elimated either as a result of Wal-Mart predatory business practices against competing retailers or their buying policies which have resulted in domestic manufacturing jobs moving overseas(thus forcing more unskilled workers to rely on the low paying service sector for employment). In case you haven't noticed, back in the mid 90s Wal-Mart dropped their 'Made in America' slogan. Nowadays that don't even pretend to support industries that manufacture consumer goods domestically. While job creation is welcome, Wal-Mart's abuse of its economic power to lower wages and standards of living across the board isn't.
"What makes you think that a locally-owned shop would be willing to pay workers more than Wal-Mart does?"
From http://www.walmartyrs.com/myth/
Myth: Wal-Mart pays "competitive wages." Fact: Wal-Mart Lowers Wages.
Wal-Mart workers make an average of $3 per hour less than union supermarket jobs, $2 per hour less than all supermarket jobs, and $1 per hour less than the average retail wage. An average Wal-Mart employee makes about $11,700 a year (working 30 hour weeks which is the national average in discount stores) -- nearly $2,000 below the poverty line for a single mother with two children. A 40-hour week--which most Wal-Mart employees don't work--would figure out to $15,000 a year, which is the government's poverty level for a family of 4.
"Or is your real problem with Wal-Mart the fact that Robson Walton is rich, and it's just not fair?"
No my real problem is that Americans as a whole since the Reagan era seemed to have tossed their social consciousness out the window. Everything about the 80s and 90s was based on the Gordon Gecko philosophy that 'Greed is Good'. Nevermind the econmoic statistics that indicate economic disparity and inequality not seen since the 1920s, or the obscene increase in CEO compensation over the last 20 years from 45 times the average employee wage in the 1970s to more than 450 times today.
The really scary part is people like you who will never admit, no matter how bad things get, that there is something terribly wrong with this system. Your only concern is for your short term personal welfare and as long as things are going great for you, you could basically care less about anyone else.
Well from the way the economy is going it looks like America is about to experience another harsh lesson in economic reality. The Dow is down to 8300 today nearing the post 9/11 sell off levels while the NASDAQ is down to what it was in '97. Meanwhile the Euro has surpassed the dollar in value meaning that the foreign investment capital that was propping up the dollar from the imbalances of our vast trade deficit is now disappearing.
And finally its now becoming painfully obvious to all that the boom years of the 90s were fueled by the irrational exuberance of foolish consumer spending habits(i.e. consumers living off their credit cards and six year payment plans for SUVs). So the credit cards are maxed out, the bills are due now, and whatever disposable income most people have is being used to pay them off.
So go ahead shop at Wal-Mart.. Shop to you lierally drop, as that's all anyone in America seems to care about these days. Nevermind the $150 billion deficit that the government is expected to have this year. We're at war for FREEDOM! The freedom to shop at Wal-Mart at live in consumer la la land! God Bless America!
I live in the armpit of East Tennessee: the Tri-Cities area about an hour north of Asheville, NC. Indeed the company I work for is located *behind* the local Sprawl-Mart Supercenter. So everyday I'm treated to legions of shoppers who believe the epitome of the American Dream(tm) is the right to buy 25-foot-long garden hoses, all-cotton shirts, clock-radios, and stainless-steel frypans all for $9.99 each - all made in China.
Nevermind, the cost externalities of this relationship: the phenomenal rates of environmental destruction/pollution, and systems of factory wage-slavery in China or in America the resulting elimination of the working middle class that is turning small towns across the country into rural ghettos where the only opportunity for employment for blue collar laborers is working for $6.50 an hour at, you guessed it, Wal-Mart!
The simple fact of the matter is when someone shops at Wal-Mart they're voting with their dollars about the type of society they want to live in. 70 cents of every dollar that Wal-Mart takes in goes back to the parent corporation in Bentonville, Arkansas. That's money leaving the community that under a local business would've been reinvested in the community - money used to maintain a historic commercial building, to sponsor a little league team, or pay their employees a "living wage".
So don't think for one second that just because Wal-Mart.com offers machines pre-installed with Linux that they're any less of a threat than Microsoft. Indeed Wal-Mart is now number #1 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest private employer in the U.S. providing over one million low paying service jobs. 5 of the 10 richest people in the world are heirs of Sam Walton. S. Robson Walton, with an estimated new worth more than $65 billion, surpassed Bill Gates in 2001 as the richest man in the world.
How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12962
You mean the Domesday Project, created in 1986 on the 900th anniversary of the creation of the Domesday book.
http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html
Re:E-nough is *enough*!
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the vast majority will join the great consumer-base that is the
foundation of American society and culture.
Oh yes... Geeks for all their quirks and mistrust of
corporations are some of the biggest consumers of American
culture.
The sad part is that Americans areincreasingly referred
to by the politicians and media as being consumers instead of
citizens. Citizenship, along with its rights
and privileges, implies that individuals have a responsibility to
their community on the local and national level. Being a
consumer on the otherhand implies no responsibility whatsoever,
as the only thing that matters is an individuals right to freedom of choice
when it comes to acquiring goods or services.
I'm curious how many readers of Slashdot get involved in the community where
they live. The stereotypical impression of most geeks is that they prefer
to live their lives online and avoid dealing with the real world at all
costs. I was certainly that way when I was younger when I preferred the
escape that computer games offered over the difficulties and challenges of
dealing with the real world. However, I've noticed that the
older I get, how empty the constructs of the geek world seem to be.
Thus my passion in life has slowly turned from computers and the virtual world
to building real places worth caring about in the physical world.
I'm not knocking people who like to play videogames for fun, but c'mon you
have to admit they're an escape from reality for far too many people in
this country(Evercrack being the best example). But then again its easy to
see why so many Americans want an escape, whether its through computer/video
games, alcohol/drugs/pr0n, or the mind numbing infotainment beamed out by the
corporate media machine. The simple fact
is that when we abandoned our cities, we trashed our local generators of
history and culture in favor of a discount priced corporate monoculture.
We created a whole nation of places not worth caring about, a landscape
that at best has all the charm of an office park and at worst is a national
automobile slum.
Now just imagine for a second that all of the geeks decided to focus
their talents on improving the physical world.. Imagine if
we really built fantastical cities and landscapes instead of relegating them to
the world of movies and videogames.
"Ok, that Iranian civilian passenger (747 sized btw) airplane that was shotdown by the USA? Sorry, American extremists again."
It was an Airbus A300B2 fully loaded with 290 passengers. Not quite a 747(which holds around 450-500 fully loaded), more like a 767.
At the time President Reagan in a statement said he was "saddened to report" that the Vincennes "in a proper defensive action" had shot down the jetliner."
All the evidence I've read points to a massive cover up on the part of the U.S. navy since the 'We thought it was an F-14 making an attack run' argument just doesn't fly(no pun intended). An incompetent trigger happy captain and a green crew largely unfamiliar with computer warfare were most likely the cause.
The resulting cover up did nothing but further enrage the Iranians who were most likely responsible for the Pan Am 103 disaster at Lockerbie.
But then again that's another cover up..
Sea of Lies http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5260/vi nce.ht ml
It must have been around 1975 or so. I was six at the time and I remember they had a pong machine in the bar at a club where my dad played bridge in Atlanta(he was a professional bridge player, bridge being the gaming addiction of choice for many people in his generation). Space Invaders was still a few years away, but damn we kids were glad to have pong and we liked it!
Shortly thereafter my brother and I got one of those radio shack home pong TV things for Xmas - sort of a precursor to the whole home console boom.
After that.. Well the rest is history: pong console -> Intellivision --> Atari 400 --> Atari 800 --> C64 --> 286/10Mhz --> 486 25Mhz --> Pentium 90Mhz --> P2 333Mhz --> Athlon 650Mhz --> Athlon 1.4Ghz(which is where I am today).
Slashdot Mirror
Both analogies ignore the obivous: firing up your high-powered workstation to type letters or running auto-cad once a month doesn't represent an increased safety threat to Bob with his new $499 budget PC from Best Buy. The substantial increase in SUVs and the super-sized "light trucks" (what an oxymoron!) in the 1990s now represents at least 40% of the vehicles on the road. It may a represent a "choice" for those who can affford them, but collectively it is a very selfish choich as it makes driving substantially more dangerous for those who can't afford them or are philosophically opposed to owning one.
Likewise you both ignore the environmental impact, and I don't mean the mediocre fuel economy and increased emissions, but rather how the trend is now necessitating the need for bigger parking areas, larger garages, and making our bleak, sprawling, car dependent "cities" more forboding and obscene than ever.
Don't get me wrong - I'm not against such vehicles for people who have a legitimate need for them, such as ranchers/farmers, or rural residents in areas of poor roads and steep terrain that have a legitimate need for 4 Wheel Drive. However as we all know most such vehicles, especially the recent luxury SUVs, are gold plated penises designed to show the world how "successful" and "cool" you really are. Engineering wise they are little more than your standard pickup truck with a fancy cab grafted on and thus extremely profitable (and overpriced) due to an irrational, gullible public that puts fashion and "keeping up with the Joneses" before such matters as practicality, sustainability, and personal safety.
For a family of four a mini-van or station wagon is a marginally better choice. The real choice, that we're so lacking in most of our cities, is the choice not to drive at all. Transportation costs are now the #2 expense for most individuals and families behind the need for housing, represent from 15% to 20% of income for outlays suchs as car payments, insurance, maintainance, taxes, and fuel.
Isn't it a little ridiculous to design an environment that forces people to own a car in order to fully function as a citizen? Unlike a house a automobile eventually full depreciates to nothing, much like a personal computer, though much more expensive considering that PCs are basically commodities these days. If you do the math you'll see that a typical family a four will spend as much or more on automotive ownerships costs over than mortgage payments in the 30 years it takes to payoff a house. And all of this so we can live in a bland, polluted, cookie cutter landscape with no sense of community or place.
Reductionist
Ahhh but doesn't this sorta defeat the purpose of the whole game since it's kinda difficult to create the shape of a cat, much less a microwave oven, with one hand?
Yeah and the massacre by the SS at Oradour Sur Glane, in retaliation for French Resistance action, never happened.
Oh and this was four days AFTER the D-day invasion.
http://www.oradour.info/ruined/summary.htm
Oh please! Quit being such a free market fanboy and stop viewing "quality of life" in terms of raw GDP.
This article from the Economist which pretty much debunks the notion that Americans are so much better off than Europeans.
The simple fact is a lot of the stuff we spend money on, such as excessive prisons and gold plated highways that foster urban sprawl, raises our GDP output, but not our general welfare.
Chasing the leader
Feb 6th 2003
From The Economist print edition
Are Europeans really so much worse off than Americans?
AMERICA has been the world's economic leader for over a century. Economic theory suggests that western Europe should be catching up. Yet average GDP per head in the European Union, measured at purchasing-power parity, is only three-quarters of that in the United States. A popular explanation is that European firms are less productive because they are hampered by labour- and product-market regulation. But European productivity, measured by output per hour worked, has in fact almost caught up with America's. If Europeans are so productive, though, why are they apparently so much poorer than Americans?
America's much-trumpeted "productivity miracle" in the late 1990s created the misleading impression that Europe significantly lags America in the productivity league. It is true that, since 1995, American GDP per hour worked has risen by an annual average of 1.9%, compared with only 1.3% in the European Union. However, over any longer period, up to half a century, Europe's productivity growth has outpaced America's. Since 1990 American productivity has risen by 1.6% a year; the EU's has risen by 1.8%. Since 1950 America's productivity growth has averaged 2%, Europe's 3.3%. According to figures from the Conference Board, an American business group, Belgium, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands all now boast higher output per hour than the United States. Average productivity in the EU is still 7% less, largely because of lower productivity in Britain, Spain, Greece and Portugal--but the gap has continued to close over the past decade.
The narrowing of the productivity gap has not, however, been reflected in living standards, as measured by GDP per head. The chart, taken from an analysis* by Robert Gordon, an economist at Northwestern University, shows how Europe's productivity and GDP per head fell relative to America's from the mid-19th century until around 1950. Productivity has since rebounded, almost reaching American levels. GDP per head, on the other hand, rose sharply until 1970, but then flattened off at 77% of America's.
The surge in Europe's productivity since 1950 is largely explained by reconstruction after the war and the belated exploitation of electricity and the mass production of cars--40 years after America. The puzzle is why Europe's GDP per head has lagged so far behind productivity. Germany's GDP per man-hour is 1% higher than in America, but its GDP per person is 25% lower. The main reason is that average hours worked in Europe have fallen so sharply. In part, this reflects an increase in unemployment and withdrawals from the labour force; but it also reflects a preference for shorter working weeks and longer holidays.
A broader analysis of living standards, based on economic welfare rather than crude GDP, argues Mr Gordon, would place some value on Europeans' greater leisure time. But how much of the depressing effect of shorter hours on Europe's GDP per head should be ascribed to people's free choice to take longer holidays than overworked Americans, and how much to union pressure or government policies that try to spread jobs by compulsory limits on hours of work? Mr Gordon guesses that one-third of the discrepancy between Europe's productivity and its GDP per head, relative to America's, represents freely chosen leisure. Corrected for this, Europe's income per
I'm sure I'll get flamed by the libertarian free-market fanatics for posting this, but this is the truth and it needs to be heard.
Ernest Partridge: 'Dear CEO: Is this really what you want?'
By Ernest Partridge, The Crisis Papers [crisispapers.org]
An open letter to the Chief Executive Officers of the Fortune 500 companies, and of the major commercial media.
Dear CEO,
Congratulations! You have won, decisively and overwhelmingly.
Your favored politicians and political party are now in control of all three branches of the United States government. Your political and economic ideologies, preached virtually without rebuttal in your media, have been enacted by law, executive order and judicial decree. And those ideologies are destined to be solidified as federal judges who endorse these ideologies come to dominate the federal judiciary.
As a result of your victory, the Congress of the United States now follows the dictates of its corporate "sponsors," and is thus no longer responsive to the wishes and interests of its constituents. The Federal regulatory agencies the EPA, the FCC, the SEC, the FDA, etc. have become the captives, and virtual subsidiaries, of the industries that they were intended to regulate.
Thanks to "your" Administration and Congress, and the unchallenged political message of "your" media, the fortunate wealthy few, like yourself, are the beneficiaries of "tax reform" legislation which accelerates the flow of national wealth from the vast majority of our population which produces that wealth, to those of you who own and control that wealth. That same tax policy is producing enormous deficits in the federal budget and an increase in the national debt that will likely bankrupt the Social Security and Medicare trust funds, and burden our children and grandchildren essentially forever. But, of course, none of that directly affects you and yours.
All in all, you have received from the incumbent Administration and Congress, an overwhelmingly favorable return on your investment in campaign funds.
However, I must wonder if you have carefully assessed the larger return on this investment, the full consequences of your complete political victory.
If you do, I suspect that you may discover that yours has been a pyrrhic victory. You might, on reflection, decide that you do not really want the prize that you have won. You may in fact have reaped a whirlwind so dreadful that you may wish, while there is still time, to make corrections or even, dare I say, reparations.
One might urge you to reassess your "victory" and your continuing course of political action on grounds of morality, of religion, or of political tradition. Instead, I would ask you to assess the current political condition in the United States from the perspective of that central principle of the dominant economic theory: the principle of self-interest.
From the perspective of self-interest alone, I would submit that all that you have won may be much less than meets the eye, and that this accomplishment might even contains the seeds of its own destruction, and of your ruin.
The Economy: At the Democratic convention of 2000, Senator Joseph Lieberman, the finest Republican mind in the Democratic Party, quoted Harry Truman: "to live like a Republican, vote like a Democrat." This is more than a partisan slogan, it is history. Mark Hulbert reports, in CBS Market Watch [smirkingchimp.com] that "since 1901, the Dow Jones Industrial Averages average annual gain, after inflation, has been nearly twice as high when a Democrat has occupied the White House."
But if the history of the last century is unconvincing, just think back to the past decade. While its true that the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress have given you
Prey! Anyone else remember this much vaunted/hyped fps from 3D Realms? It was first promoted back in '96 right before the original Quake was released.
Googled this bit of info from IGN..
http://pc.ign.com/articles/355/355382p1.html
March 12, 2002 - Prey, its very name is the definition of vaporware, and is even perhaps responsible for a lot of the Duke Nukem nay saying. You see, Prey was to be 3D Realms' grand first-person shooting triumph. What it promised to sport in 1997 was a new engine with better than Unreal looks, Max Payne radiosity lighting, and Red Faction environmental interactivity.
It was only after sometime that the reality of lacking technology sunk in and Prey, along with its Turok reminiscent story of a Native American gone alien abductee superhero was axed. From then, DNF was put in full swing, and has still yet to arrive, leading conspiracy theorist gamers with way too much time on their hands to always expect the worst.
However, in 1999, 3D Realm's George Broussard made it abundantly clear that the title was still in some way, shape, or form being developed, but that it should not be expected anytime soon. Despite this, and all the other hype surrounding the title, it seemed Prey eventually wound up on the dreaded backburner (insert Prey falling prey pun here).
That was then... This is now.
Web rumor (as wonderfully reliable as it is) suggests the game has perhaps risen from the dead by the helping hand of Rune's own Human Head Studios. Further speculation cites the latest in Doom technology to be the likely power behind this prey's second wind.
All parties rumored to be involved are obviously tightlipped (the terribly sad norm in this industry). We'll be back with more details if further information arises substantiating or debunking this rumor.
Regarding the "knock" argument, ethyl alcohol was widely known in the 20s to be a safe alternative to tetraethyl alcohol, though it cost a bit more. There's also a myth that leaded gasoline was easier on valves but in fact the opposite is true and only through the introduction of chemical "scavengers" into the fuel which swept the lead out the back of the tailpipe were they able to eliminate this problem.
t m#cars
Folks this is nothing more than a classic cost/benefit analysis made by the automobile and petroleum companies back in the 1920s. They chose profits at the expense of public healthand the environment. They got away with it for nearly 50 years until the early 70s when the scientific evidence against leaded gasoline was too overwhelming to ignore.
From http://www.mindfully.org/Pesticide/Lead-History.h
While they were busy glossing over its perilous shortcomings for the public health, tetraethyl lead's boosters almost forgot that their "gift of God" posed some serious problems for cars. Instead of benefitting, engines were getting destroyed by lead deposits. GM researchers had noted this early in TEL's life, but Charles Kettering was anxious to get the new product to market. Problems, he argued, could be worked out with real-life experience to guide them. But necessary changes were slow in coming.
In May 1926, three years after leaded fuel went on sale, GM's Alfred Sloan wrote Ethyl's new president, Earle Webb, to express concern that valve corrosion with Ethyl gas was so bad after 2,000-3,000 miles that it rendered cars "inoperative." Rather late in the day, one would have thought, he urged further development of the product. Referring to Ethyl's decision to re-enter the market, he wrote, "Now that we are back in again and are considering pushing the sale [of Ethyl] to the utmost, I think we ought to be concerned with this question."
So the additive that Standard, GM, Du Pont and the Ethyl Gasoline Corporation defended so vigorously before the Surgeon General and the nation wasn't even any good yet--it junked people's second-largest investment, after their homes. Incredibly, in spite of the near-magical claims being made for TEL, GM's own car divisions were at this very time bitterly resisting engine modifications to take advantage of it. In fact, GM's Buick, Chevrolet, Pontiac, Oldsmobile, Oakland and Cadillac divisions would not recommend it to their customers until 1927, when they circulated bulletins to their dealers calling on them to withdraw any objections to leaded fuel. This was six years after TEL's invention and a full year and a half after a fractious national debate on TEL at the high-profile Public Health Service conference in Washington. Tellingly, support for TEL was forever lacking in the Society of Automotive Engineers Journal, the automotive engineering community's leading organ.
The damaging effects to which Sloan referred necessitated the introduction of chemical "scavengers," which would cause the residue of the spent ethyl fluid to leave the engine along with the car's exhaust gases, thus preventing lead buildup. After a little trial-and-error experimentation proved the destructiveness of chlorine, ethylene dibromide (EDB), a byproduct of bromine invented by Dow Chemical in the twenties, was selected as the scavenger of choice.
Proving the old maxim that you only make things worse when you tell a lie, Ethyl's adoption of EDB and its widespread use have created several waves of secondary environmental disaster. In more recent times, EDB combustion has been linked to halogenated dibenzo-p-dioxins and dibenzofurans in exhaust, believed to be cancer risks. Also, when EDB is burned in the engine, it creates methyl bromide, which as a component of automobile exhaust the World Meteorological Organization has termed one of "three potentially major sources of atmospheric methyl bromide," which harms the ozone layer.
With the eventual demise of the US market for leaded fuel written on the wall, Ethyl had to find a new market for its lead scavenger EDB, and in 1972 it did--as a pesticide. Twelve years later, EDB would be banned by the EPA in this application following a 1974 finding that it was a powerful cancer-causing agent in animals; a 1977 finding of "strong evidence" that it caused cancer in humans; and a 1981 determination that it was "a potent mutagen"--a carcinogen with especially damaging consequences for human reproductive systems, powerful enough that it should be removed immediately from the food chain. This was bad news, as the United States was by now putting 20 million pounds of EDB into its soils annually, and it had begun to show up in cake mixes and cereal. The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) would also act to restrict EDB exposure, and the EPA would cite its reduction in the atmosphere as an additional benefit of the leaded gasoline phaseout.
Today the mechanical benefits of unleaded gasoline are obvious. Ever wonder why your new car goes longer than your old one between spark-plug changes? Or why exhaust systems last longer? Or why oil changes don't need to be as frequent? Try unleaded fuel. In a report delivered to the Society of Automotive Engineers, lead-free fuel was shown to significantly reduce engine rusting, piston-ring wear and sludge and varnish deposits, as well as to reduce camshaft wear. In 1985 an EPA report concluded that reduced lead levels reduced piston-ring and cylinder-bore wear, preventing engine failure and improving fuel economy. Estimated maintenance savings exceeded the maintenance costs associated with recession of exhaust valves, which is caused by the use of unleaded gasoline.
Gary Smith, an English Ford engineer working in the area of fuel economy and quality/vehicle/environmental engineering, told The Nation: "The higher the lead content, the more it messes the engine oil up, and we wanted to get longer intervals between engine oil changes, so that's a negative for lead as well.... [The scavengers used in leaded gasoline] or combustion of anything with chlorine or bromine will make hydrochloric and hydrobromic acid, so the actual muffler systems get corroded. They end up on--and affect--the spark plugs. Because we're trying to keep warranty costs down and [lower] costs for customers, we found ourselves going away from lead."
True, but Lucas has writing credits on all of the movies in the series, since after all it is his baby. Brin implied that the "shoot the reactor and then run" plot scheme was a result of Lucas' role as director of certain films in the series when its really due to his role as grand poobah of the Star Wars universe.
Lucas is not and never was a great director or writer. The best movie in the series, The Empire Strikes Back, is great precisely because he stepped aside to let Irvin Kershner direct, and Leigh Brackett/Lawrence Kasdan write the screenplay. Lucas strengths are his grand vision of the Star Wars universe and grasp of epic storytelling, not as a jack of all trades who wears the hat of director, writer, and producer.
You only need to look at the banal dialogue and wooden performances of episode I or the lame 'douche commercial' attempt at romance in episode II to come to the conclusion that he would best serve the series as executive producer.
And -- to my delighted shock! -- for the very first time, an action-plot twist! Out of the four Star Wars films that Lucas has directed, for the first time he did not resolve the action by having someone fly a teeny ship into a great big ship, shoot the 'reactor' and then run away real fast from a slow-motion explosion! At last.
Ummmm.. Lucas only directed 3 of the 5 films currently in release: Episodes I, II, and IV. Return of the Jedi, which featured the second version of the shoot the 'reactor' and then run away real fast scheme was directed by Richard Marquand, not Lucas.
If I remember correctly one of the big exploits in Ultima II was to pickpocket(i.e. rob) the McDonalds employee via the drive thru entrance. By the time the guards caught on and headed your way, all it took was a quick dash to the zone exit to escape. Of course the guards had "no memory", so once you re-entered the zone all was forgotten and you were free to pilfer the McDonalds again. IIRC, such game behavior was the major inspiration for the "virtues" of Ultima IV, since Richard felt the series should inspire players to be something more than a common thief.
A first I thought putting McDonald's in the game was a terrible idea, but then I realized the great potential it has for 'culture jamming'.
Just imagine what sort of things people will be able to do to McDonalds - dress up in a clown costume while serving food, decorate the restaurant with a medieval S&M theme or just set the place on fire and watch it burn down.
Most likely air resistance due to the density and shape of the rock resulted in a relatively low terminal velocity, which would explain why it didn't go through her shoe into her foot. The girl also claimed that she "saw it fall from above roof height", which is very telling as it means the velocity was slow enough that the object could be easily seen.
. html
Ever heard the urban legend about how a penny falling off the top of the Empire State building could kill someone if it landed on their head?
Believe it or not a penny has a terminal velocity somewhere between that of a ping pong ball and a basketball, and while it would certainlly sting if it hit you on the head, its highly unlikely it would kill you.
The Penny Problem
http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~macklem/paper
I went there about four years ago when I attended SIGGRAPH '98 in Orlando. I was quite disappointed with their claim to be the 'World's Largest McDonalds'. I was expecting something along the lines of the Varsity drive in Atlanta, but what I saw was a unremarkable bastardized two story version of the standard mansard roof restaurant.
From the article you linked to: "The word "automat" comes from the Greek automatos, meaning "self-acting." But Automats weren't truly automatic. They were heavily staffed. As a customer removed a compartment's contents, a behind-the-machine human quickly slipped another sandwich, salad, piece of pie or coffee cake into the vacated chamber".
This is hardly what I would consider automatic, so I'd say this new machine is a bit more than just "slapping a credit card reader on an Automat". The Automat has about as much in common with this vending machine as the pedal powered bamboo vehicle on Gilligan's Island does with an automobile.
Still as others have pointed out this type of vending technology isn't anything new, only new to the U.S, as the Europeans and the Japanese have had it for quite some time.
Substitute 'Everquest' for 'Gambling' and 'Time' for 'Money' and we get...
m l
Twenty Questions
Did you ever lose time from work or school due to Everquest?
Has playing Everquest ever made your home life unhappy?
Did playing Everquest affect your reputation in the real world?
Have you ever felt remorse after playing Everquest?
Did you ever play Everquest to farm items which you could sell on eBay to pay debts or otherwise solve financial difficulties?
Did playing Everquest cause a decrease in your ambition or efficiency?
After a particularly bad series of deaths in Everquest did you feel you must return as soon as possible and win back your XP?
After you won a rare item did you have a strong urge to return and win more?
Did you often play Everquest until your free time was gone?
Did you ever cancel social activities to obtain more time for playing?
Have you ever skipped work to play Everquest?
Were you reluctant to spend your free time doing normal, non-EQ related activities?
Did playing make you careless of the welfare of yourself or your family?
Did you ever play longer than you had planned?
Have you ever played to escape worry or trouble?
Have you ever committed, or considered lying or skipping work to obtain more play time?
Did playing Everquest cause you to have difficulty in sleeping?
Do arguments, disappointments or frustrations in the real world create within you an urge to play Everquest?
Did you ever have an urge to celebrate any good fortune by a few hours of playing Everquest?
Have you ever considered self destruction or suicide as a result of your playing Everquest?
Most compulsive Everquest players will answer yes to at least seven of these questions.
http://www.gamblersanonymous.org/20questions.ht
"First of all, a person who isn't addicted to Evercrack and can play it 30 minutes a day and go on with his/her life won't suffer any physical/mental/emotional side effects"
From that statement alone I can see that you've never played Everquest. It takes 1-2 *hours* just to get in a group most times, not to mention that time spent waiting for a camp to open.
It's the time sucking nature of the game that creates most of this 'addiction' problems, precisely because Verant designed in numerous timesinks to draw out the experience and keep player paying the monthly subscription fee. Everything from the formula for leveling that created 'hell levels' to the ridiculous amount of time spent on camping a rare spawn for a piece for an epic weapon are proof that Verant is a company that doesn't care about that value of their customer's time.
You can't *win* the game or even be modestly successful without 'investing' a ridiculously large amount of time. After 2.5 years of playing as a moderate addict(when compared to the hardcore junkie of power guilds like Afterlife) I wasn't anywhere near being considered "uber", yet in those 2.5 years I probably spent 3,000+ hours in the game. Most of that time was spent levelling, which in EQ is nothing more than an endless game of 'Bop the Mole' in a quest to get XP. There wasn't anything inherently exciting or challenging in the combat, it was the quest for 'golden carrot dangling from the stick' that kept you playing the game.
In that respect, playing Everquest is much like playing a slot machine. You continue doing the same thing over and over again ad nauseum in hopes of a big payoff(i.e. phat lootz!) and the painfully slow increase in experience that let's you play 'bop the mole' on bigger things.
So I think a much better analogy would be to compare it to gambling, which we all know to be as destructive as any addiction to drugs or alcohol.
There's a 'Gamblers Anonymous', and yes there's an 'Everquest Addicts Anonymous'.
Taken in that light your comment that "Evercrack presents no such danger" is pure hooey.
Is regulation the answer? I doubt it. Regulation of the casino industry is very weak and largely ineffective. Aside from an minimum age requirement of 21, there's nothing to prevent someone from pissing their life savings away.
Yes ultimately it all comes down to personal responsibility, but responsibility is a two way street. Unfortunately the idea that Verant has a responsibility to their customers to design a product that can be enjoyed in a reasonable amount of time is rather unfashionable in an era of extreme Laissez-faire capitalism in which anything goes.
You're right about EQ being terribly unfun to anybody not hooked to it and how it's like crack to most of the regular players.
My personal addiction to EQ lasted 2.5 years - from launch in March of '99 to 9/11 of last year. Yes 9/11 was the event that made me realize what EQ really is: a banal, empty escape from reality.
I played on Mithaniel Marr, which is home to 'Afterlife', one of the most powerful guilds in the game. I wasn't in AL, but I used to visit Afterlife's website just to check out their accomplishments.
Afterlife is for hardcore addicts only, the degree of their addiction must be mind boggling considering most of them play every single day 6 to 8 hours a day(or more). They literally have thousands of hours 'invested' in addiction, and it wouldn't surprise me if some of their characters had a 'played' time of 300 real world days or more.
True to form they held a raid on the evening of 9/11, as nothing was going to keep them from their addiction, not evening the most horrifying attack on this country since Japan attacked Pearl Harbor on 12/7/41.
Something about that really disgusted me, as it made it painfully clear for once and for all that EQ is an addiction that's just as harmful as an addiction to alcohol or drugs.
I never mentioned this to anyone on the discussion boards. I just quietly came to the conclusion that for the sake of my own health and welfare I needed to leave the game.
Initially I considered just taking a break for a couple of weeks, but I never played EQ again after 9/11. In early October I logged on for the last time and gave all of my items and wealth to a couple of my closest in game friends. Once my characters were stripped I said my goodbyes and bid the world of Norrath farewell. I immediately camped out and deleted my characters(56 War, 56 Shm, 46 Mnk) to make sure I wouldn't be tempted to come back.
It wasn't easy, but it turned out to be one of the best decisions I ever made.
Its been nearly a year since I left behind the world of Norrath. I don't have too many regrets since I always had a love/hate relationship with the game. In the end I decided the negative aspects outweighed the positive and that it just wasn't worth wasting my time.
Since then I still occasionally play computer games, like Civ III, Medal of Honor, or RTCW, but they don't take over my life like the way EQ did. I started riding my bike again in March for fun/exercise, which helped my lose about 30 lbs of mush that I put on while playing EQ. I'm generally much more social with my friends in the real world, and I've even started dating again. I read a lot more and find it much easier to think clearly now that my mind isn't in a constant EQ induced haze.
Being away from EQ has made me realize that reality is infinitely much more interesting and bizarre than anything I ever did in Norrath. Addictive MMORPGS such as EQ are ultiamtely a poor substitute for 'reality', 'community' or 'relationships'.
This more than anything is the reason why I think MMORPGS will always be a niche category. Americans are already overworked and suffering from a society fraying at the seams. The last thing we need is a mass escape from reality that encourages people to once and for all drop out from society.
Will most people will realize that it just isn't worth it?
I'm not so sure..
Simple. Money spent in a local economy is spent 5-6 times before it leaves town. Each time that money is respent, it generates another dollar's worth of local employment while generating additional sales tax revenue at each step. In the case of Wal-Mart a majority of the money spent there leaves the community immediately.
Wal-Mart cares little for the economic/social concerns of the community and therefore does not reinvest their profits there. Indeed all you have to do is look the design of your local Wal-Mart to see what low regard they have for communities. Disposable, windowsless, air conditioned, cinder block boxes sitting in a sea of asphalt are the product of a company who believes the greatest good is making money for their shareholders. Investing in a structure that is aesthetically pleasing and adds cultural/social value to a community is a seen a frivolous since the needs of the community are seen as irrelevant next to the needs of shareholders.
I see you're resorting the classic libertarian argurment: "No one is forcing them to work those jobs!". When unemployment is high, which is almost always this case among unskilled lower classes, workers become desperate for jobs as the alternative to no work is starvation and destitution.
For every 2 low payings jobs that Wal-Mart creates, 3 better paying jobs in the community are elimated either as a result of Wal-Mart predatory business practices against competing retailers or their buying policies which have resulted in domestic manufacturing jobs moving overseas(thus forcing more unskilled workers to rely on the low paying service sector for employment). In case you haven't noticed, back in the mid 90s Wal-Mart dropped their 'Made in America' slogan. Nowadays that don't even pretend to support industries that manufacture consumer goods domestically. While job creation is welcome, Wal-Mart's abuse of its economic power to lower wages and standards of living across the board isn't.
"What makes you think that a locally-owned shop would be willing to pay workers more than Wal-Mart does?"
From http://www.walmartyrs.com/myth/
Myth: Wal-Mart pays "competitive wages."
Fact: Wal-Mart Lowers Wages.
Wal-Mart workers make an average of $3 per hour less than union supermarket jobs, $2 per hour less than all supermarket jobs, and $1 per hour less than the average retail wage. An average Wal-Mart employee makes about $11,700 a year (working 30 hour weeks which is the national average in discount stores) -- nearly $2,000 below the poverty line for a single mother with two children. A 40-hour week--which most Wal-Mart employees don't work--would figure out to $15,000 a year, which is the government's poverty level for a family of 4.
"Or is your real problem with Wal-Mart the fact that Robson Walton is rich, and it's just not fair?"
No my real problem is that Americans as a whole since the Reagan era seemed to have tossed their social consciousness out the window. Everything about the 80s and 90s was based on the Gordon Gecko philosophy that 'Greed is Good'. Nevermind the econmoic statistics that indicate economic disparity and inequality not seen since the 1920s, or the obscene increase in CEO compensation over the last 20 years from 45 times the average employee wage in the 1970s to more than 450 times today.
The really scary part is people like you who will never admit, no matter how bad things get, that there is something terribly wrong with this system. Your only concern is for your short term personal welfare and as long as things are going great for you, you could basically care less about anyone else.
Well from the way the economy is going it looks like America is about to experience another harsh lesson in economic reality. The Dow is down to 8300 today nearing the post 9/11 sell off levels while the NASDAQ is down to what it was in '97. Meanwhile the Euro has surpassed the dollar in value meaning that the foreign investment capital that was propping up the dollar from the imbalances of our vast trade deficit is now disappearing.
And finally its now becoming painfully obvious to all that the boom years of the 90s were fueled by the irrational exuberance of foolish consumer spending habits(i.e. consumers living off their credit cards and six year payment plans for SUVs). So the credit cards are maxed out, the bills are due now, and whatever disposable income most people have is being used to pay them off.
So go ahead shop at Wal-Mart.. Shop to you lierally drop, as that's all anyone in America seems to care about these days. Nevermind the $150 billion deficit that the government is expected to have this year. We're at war for FREEDOM! The freedom to shop at Wal-Mart at live in consumer la la land! God Bless America!
I live in the armpit of East Tennessee: the Tri-Cities area about an hour north of Asheville, NC. Indeed the company I work for is located *behind* the local Sprawl-Mart Supercenter. So everyday I'm treated to legions of shoppers who believe the epitome of the American Dream(tm) is the right to buy 25-foot-long garden hoses, all-cotton shirts, clock-radios, and stainless-steel frypans all for $9.99 each - all made in China.
2
Nevermind, the cost externalities of this relationship: the phenomenal rates of environmental destruction/pollution, and systems of factory wage-slavery in China or in America the resulting elimination of the working middle class that is turning small towns across the country into rural ghettos where the only opportunity for employment for blue collar laborers is working for $6.50 an hour at, you guessed it, Wal-Mart!
The simple fact of the matter is when someone shops at Wal-Mart they're voting with their dollars about the type of society they want to live in. 70 cents of every dollar that Wal-Mart takes in goes back to the parent corporation in Bentonville, Arkansas. That's money leaving the community that under a local business would've been reinvested in the community - money used to maintain a historic commercial building, to sponsor a little league team, or pay their employees a "living wage".
So don't think for one second that just because Wal-Mart.com offers machines pre-installed with Linux that they're any less of a threat than Microsoft. Indeed Wal-Mart is now number #1 on the Fortune 500 and is the largest private employer in the U.S. providing over one million low paying service jobs. 5 of the 10 richest people in the world are heirs of Sam Walton. S. Robson Walton, with an estimated new worth more than $65 billion, surpassed Bill Gates in 2001 as the richest man in the world.
How Wal-Mart is Remaking our World
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=1296
You mean the Domesday Project, created in 1986 on the 900th anniversary of the creation of the Domesday book.
http://www.atsf.co.uk/dottext/domesday.html
the vast majority will join the great consumer-base that is the foundation of American society and culture.
Oh yes... Geeks for all their quirks and mistrust of corporations are some of the biggest consumers of American culture.
The sad part is that Americans areincreasingly referred to by the politicians and media as being consumers instead of citizens. Citizenship, along with its rights and privileges, implies that individuals have a responsibility to their community on the local and national level. Being a consumer on the otherhand implies no responsibility whatsoever, as the only thing that matters is an individuals right to freedom of choice when it comes to acquiring goods or services.
I'm curious how many readers of Slashdot get involved in the community where they live. The stereotypical impression of most geeks is that they prefer to live their lives online and avoid dealing with the real world at all costs. I was certainly that way when I was younger when I preferred the escape that computer games offered over the difficulties and challenges of dealing with the real world. However, I've noticed that the older I get, how empty the constructs of the geek world seem to be. Thus my passion in life has slowly turned from computers and the virtual world to building real places worth caring about in the physical world.
I'm not knocking people who like to play videogames for fun, but c'mon you have to admit they're an escape from reality for far too many people in this country(Evercrack being the best example). But then again its easy to see why so many Americans want an escape, whether its through computer/video games, alcohol/drugs/pr0n, or the mind numbing infotainment beamed out by the corporate media machine. The simple fact is that when we abandoned our cities, we trashed our local generators of history and culture in favor of a discount priced corporate monoculture. We created a whole nation of places not worth caring about, a landscape that at best has all the charm of an office park and at worst is a national automobile slum.
Now just imagine for a second that all of the geeks decided to focus their talents on improving the physical world.. Imagine if we really built fantastical cities and landscapes instead of relegating them to the world of movies and videogames.
Just imagine..
"Ok, that Iranian civilian passenger (747 sized btw) airplane that was shotdown by the USA? Sorry, American extremists again."
i nce.ht ml
It was an Airbus A300B2 fully loaded with 290 passengers. Not quite a 747(which holds around 450-500 fully loaded), more like a 767.
At the time President Reagan in a statement said he was "saddened to report" that the Vincennes "in a proper defensive action" had shot down the jetliner."
All the evidence I've read points to a massive cover up on the part of the U.S. navy since the 'We thought it was an F-14 making an attack run' argument just doesn't fly(no pun intended). An incompetent trigger happy captain and a green crew largely unfamiliar with computer warfare were most likely the cause.
The resulting cover up did nothing but further enrage the Iranians who were most likely responsible for the Pan Am 103 disaster at Lockerbie.
But then again that's another cover up..
Sea of Lies
http://www.geocities.com/CapitolHill/5260/v
Be sure to read all about Ronnie's brief usenet posting history. Not only is Ronnie a moron, he's an illiterate moron.
o rs =rscelson%40aol.com
http://groups.google.com/groups?oi=djq&as_uauth
/raises hand
It must have been around 1975 or so. I was six at the time and I remember they had a pong machine in the bar at a club where my dad played bridge in Atlanta(he was a professional bridge player, bridge being the gaming addiction of choice for many people in his generation). Space Invaders was still a few years away, but damn we kids were glad to have pong and we liked it!
Shortly thereafter my brother and I got one of those radio shack home pong TV things for Xmas - sort of a precursor to the whole home console boom.
After that.. Well the rest is history: pong console -> Intellivision --> Atari 400 --> Atari 800 --> C64 --> 286/10Mhz --> 486 25Mhz --> Pentium 90Mhz --> P2 333Mhz --> Athlon 650Mhz --> Athlon 1.4Ghz(which is where I am today).