Combat and damage mechanics in any of these games are an abstraction. In Team Fortress 2, different classes have varying amounts of hit points. What this really measures is how likely that character class (all things being equal) is to survive for x minutes compared to a different class. So, a medic is less likely to survive for 5 minutes than, say, a soldier, if we only consider the hit points number. Incoming damage answers the question "how likely was that shot to kill me" and the answer is represented by a reduction of your hit points. At any given time during the game, your likelihood of being killed can be assigned a number, and that's what you see in your hit point display. This translates pretty well to other games that use a numerical hit point mechanic.
So, it's not so much that a bit of body armor can render Batman nigh invulnerable. It's that, since this is batman, being in an area with small arms fire directed at him is less likely to kill him than it is you or me, and hiding for a period of time makes the likelihood of being killed taper off.
I could be way off base here, but is it possible to create an account that only has access to the types of information your provider wants? That way, they could access your log files without you giving them rights you don't want them to have.
I don't know if this is technically possible in the situation, but it seems like a good solution if it is.
There are issues of religion brought up behind a thin veil in Dragon Age. The different countries of medieval Europe are represented, as well as shoddy treatment of Jews (read: elves.) In addition to this, there is a powerful church organization that some people think is too oppressive. There's even the legacy of the Roman empire and I think the Babylonian captivity is mentioned.
I didn't see Dragon Age in the article, but this is because the game isn't really about these things. They are incidental, and can occupy as much or as little time as you like. Your NPC companions in the game sometimes get into religious debates with each other, depending on your squad selection.
That depends less on the cost and more on the effect. If the Army was trying to make a popular online FPS, then yeah I guess. One wonders if this is a valid goal for the Army. The game is supposed to be a recruitment tool, right? Is there data on how effective it has been in that role?
If this is new information for game developers, they need to take a fresh look at what constitutes a challenge. In MMO games, this has typically been a grind. I played Aion recently for about 8 weeks and discovered that the game slows to a crawl at some point. This point varies with the player, since "crawl" is subjective. So I dropped my subscription. However, this is not because the challenge was too great - being better at the game wouldn't have made it go any faster. Having better gear for my level also wouldn't have done anything. I'm assuming here that NCSoft views its leveling process as a challenge. In the examples in the summary, the two guys are both happy when they've completed an easy puzzle. There's nothing in there about the guy who gets fatigued after completing a long series of easy puzzles.
Many teachers I know (I teach high school) are stuck in a fallback position. That is: it's too hard to get kids interested in thinking and even harder to get abstractions across to kids. Therefore, let's teach them a list of steps to complete specific problems. It's all very stimulus-response. Kids eat this up, which is part of the problem as well. The current frenzy over measurement and data collection in education also feeds this, as stimulus-response is what you need to do well on the types of tests I've seen at least in my state. I teach math but this is certainly not confined to math.
If you look at the state standards or the Principles and Standards generated by NCTM, they are not written to promote a view of mathematics as a bag of tricks (or tools if you prefer.) However, a poorly designed assessment can surely give the impression that students have a deep understanding when they really are just good at stimulus-response. One of my brightest students asked me today (in Calculus 1) if the radius and the radian were at all related. When I taught trig, that was the first thing we talked about in relation to radians, but this girl had no concept. How does that happen?
From the fallback position, it's very easy to produce this kind of student. This year I've introduced a new policy: unlimited retakes on in-class quizzes. Students keep the most recent grade (whether it's higher or lower) and can retake things multiple times if they want to. In the past I found that I designed assessments to be easier than I'd like, out of a desire to be "fair" to students. This year I've come to a different decision, which is that it's unfair to lead students to believe that they're doing well by dumbing things down. The quizzes this year are as difficult as I've ever made them, and some kids are still getting A's and B's. But the real success of this policy is the student who gets a D the first time or fails and then retakes and gets a B. It's more work but it does make the rest of the year easier (for them and consequently me) when kids don't have these lingering skill deficits.
The way to maintain high standards is to increase the number and quality of opportunities for students to meet them. Students who believe they can do well and that they will not be penalized for simply taking longer to meet the standard have that intrinsic motivation that we all want to see.
I don't know I'm about as far left as it gets and I want innovation and self sufficiency for my students. I'm not sure where you're getting all this.
Empty meaningless platitudes are not limited to the left. See also: "We don't torture." Besides that, the actual left (as opposed to your fantasy version) is only disappointed insofar as Mr. Obama has not gone far enough to repudiate the transgressions of the previous administration as re: state secrets privilege, multi-tier justice system, national security theater.
The unions, on the other hand, are out of touch with the classroom and mostly interested in their own survival.
This is interesting because I find that description applies mostly to school administrator types. Not so much building-level administrators, but people closer to the central office or at the central office.
These are the same personnel who, if we just untied their hands from the big bad teachers' unions, could solve all the problems in education. And apparently most problems in education can be solved by requiring no cause for firing. Amirite?
I think this depends on when these lesson plans are created. If they are produced, as you say, at government funded public schools, they ought to become public property as a matter of course. If, instead, they are developed outside of work hours as an aid to doing the job, I don't think the public can make a claim on them.
are you including the supplemental funds that Mr. Bush requested to pay for the war(s) that were not included in the submitted budget? I don't know if Mr. Obama has included those monies in his submitted budget.
Actually, there are places where a school's faculty and staff have written off a segment of their population as worthless. Maybe some of you can live with that, but for a school faculty this is an unacceptable condition. NCLB has the laudable selling point of being about not letting schools disenfranchise students. However, I think it's more about getting so much federal government into schooling that education becomes impossible. Then we can have the vouchers that the people behind the act really want. It's like some kind of twisted Seldon plan.
People somehow believe that all the former phys ed teachers who become administrators would be magically able to solve the problems of education if their hands were untied by the big bad fucking teachers' union. Things like age discrimination and pressure on women to leave when they lose that certain something that they used to have before their 40th birthday? That shit would disappear if management were allowed a free hand. Schools would no longer work to eliminate their highest paid employees regardless of effectiveness. Here's a pro tip: management in education is no more or less competent than management in the private sector. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job? I'll wager the answer is no. h/t Cringely for that tidbit.
So, when the middle school fills up, what do you do? Wait for kids to age out? We actually had a kid at my old school who aged out of middle school by turning 16. You can't drive to middle school. Our guidance department had a little procedure for what to do when a child failed your class for the year. Add 10 points and see if they're still failing. If they are, add ten points and see if they're still failing. Eventually the problem solves itself. That year was, incidentally, the year that the entire guidance department transferred out.
Get extracurricular sports out of there and you may be onto something. Schools start early (at my high school, it's 7:25. 6 am???) because there has to be time for sports practice later in the day before it gets dark. In places where school starts later (as research shows is good for this age,) it's so that kids can have practice before school and after school too.
Disclaimer: I think a school ought to offer as great a variety of courses as possible.
Let's say 16 of your school's students are interested in AP Music Theory. You're the principal and such a small number triggers the decision making process:
run the class with 16
cancel the class and get those kids to choose something else
schedule that class in with a different course for the same teacher at the same time (like you often see with French IV, German IV, etc)
I'm not an administrator so I'm sure I'm oversimplifying
So which is it? If you run a class at 16 and your class average size is 30, those "extra" 14 kids get spread out among more popular courses.
Optimizing the time spent in school is hardly simple and cannot be done for every student. Perhaps this is a fundamental problem of public education, but I defy any private school to do what we do (i.e. take all comers) and actually solve this.
Well, it was a crazy time in weeks and months after the 11th. The crazy time didn't last for 6 more years.
I was all enraged for this post before I got to your line about not believing in punishment as deterrent. I tend not to see a relationship between punishment and deterrent either. However, I'm curious what you think will deter companies from accepting illegal government orders in the future? Enact new laws which are more specific? Not being held to the current laws seems to render that action toothless.
I just want to emphasize your first point. I had some dick tell me the other day that he could see where the government was coming from by interning Japanese and Japanese American (why not just "American"?) folks in camps back in the 40's. And that the actual internees should also appreciate the government's position and go quietly. That is, if such a thing were to happen today with Muslims, he would back it, and thinks that everyone, including Muslims should reasonably back it as well.
Moreover (I'm from India) he said that if I got on a plane with him, he'd try to first get off that plane and second see about requesting some kind of surveillance of me.
I agree, this is no different from the beeping added to large trucks when they are in reverse. An earlier poster quoted from the article that the sound will shut off after a certain speed since the car will then be making enough sound on its own.
Slashdot Mirror
Combat and damage mechanics in any of these games are an abstraction. In Team Fortress 2, different classes have varying amounts of hit points. What this really measures is how likely that character class (all things being equal) is to survive for x minutes compared to a different class. So, a medic is less likely to survive for 5 minutes than, say, a soldier, if we only consider the hit points number. Incoming damage answers the question "how likely was that shot to kill me" and the answer is represented by a reduction of your hit points. At any given time during the game, your likelihood of being killed can be assigned a number, and that's what you see in your hit point display. This translates pretty well to other games that use a numerical hit point mechanic.
So, it's not so much that a bit of body armor can render Batman nigh invulnerable. It's that, since this is batman, being in an area with small arms fire directed at him is less likely to kill him than it is you or me, and hiding for a period of time makes the likelihood of being killed taper off.
OK after reading some more of hacker's posts, I see that while it may be technically possible, the provider isn't having it. Please disregard.
I could be way off base here, but is it possible to create an account that only has access to the types of information your provider wants? That way, they could access your log files without you giving them rights you don't want them to have.
I don't know if this is technically possible in the situation, but it seems like a good solution if it is.
There are issues of religion brought up behind a thin veil in Dragon Age. The different countries of medieval Europe are represented, as well as shoddy treatment of Jews (read: elves.) In addition to this, there is a powerful church organization that some people think is too oppressive. There's even the legacy of the Roman empire and I think the Babylonian captivity is mentioned.
I didn't see Dragon Age in the article, but this is because the game isn't really about these things. They are incidental, and can occupy as much or as little time as you like. Your NPC companions in the game sometimes get into religious debates with each other, depending on your squad selection.
That depends less on the cost and more on the effect. If the Army was trying to make a popular online FPS, then yeah I guess. One wonders if this is a valid goal for the Army. The game is supposed to be a recruitment tool, right? Is there data on how effective it has been in that role?
Of course they're better: they're newer
Duh.
If this is new information for game developers, they need to take a fresh look at what constitutes a challenge. In MMO games, this has typically been a grind. I played Aion recently for about 8 weeks and discovered that the game slows to a crawl at some point. This point varies with the player, since "crawl" is subjective. So I dropped my subscription. However, this is not because the challenge was too great - being better at the game wouldn't have made it go any faster. Having better gear for my level also wouldn't have done anything. I'm assuming here that NCSoft views its leveling process as a challenge. In the examples in the summary, the two guys are both happy when they've completed an easy puzzle. There's nothing in there about the guy who gets fatigued after completing a long series of easy puzzles.
Many teachers I know (I teach high school) are stuck in a fallback position. That is: it's too hard to get kids interested in thinking and even harder to get abstractions across to kids. Therefore, let's teach them a list of steps to complete specific problems. It's all very stimulus-response. Kids eat this up, which is part of the problem as well. The current frenzy over measurement and data collection in education also feeds this, as stimulus-response is what you need to do well on the types of tests I've seen at least in my state. I teach math but this is certainly not confined to math.
If you look at the state standards or the Principles and Standards generated by NCTM, they are not written to promote a view of mathematics as a bag of tricks (or tools if you prefer.) However, a poorly designed assessment can surely give the impression that students have a deep understanding when they really are just good at stimulus-response. One of my brightest students asked me today (in Calculus 1) if the radius and the radian were at all related. When I taught trig, that was the first thing we talked about in relation to radians, but this girl had no concept. How does that happen?
From the fallback position, it's very easy to produce this kind of student. This year I've introduced a new policy: unlimited retakes on in-class quizzes. Students keep the most recent grade (whether it's higher or lower) and can retake things multiple times if they want to. In the past I found that I designed assessments to be easier than I'd like, out of a desire to be "fair" to students. This year I've come to a different decision, which is that it's unfair to lead students to believe that they're doing well by dumbing things down. The quizzes this year are as difficult as I've ever made them, and some kids are still getting A's and B's. But the real success of this policy is the student who gets a D the first time or fails and then retakes and gets a B. It's more work but it does make the rest of the year easier (for them and consequently me) when kids don't have these lingering skill deficits.
The way to maintain high standards is to increase the number and quality of opportunities for students to meet them. Students who believe they can do well and that they will not be penalized for simply taking longer to meet the standard have that intrinsic motivation that we all want to see.
I don't know I'm about as far left as it gets and I want innovation and self sufficiency for my students. I'm not sure where you're getting all this.
Empty meaningless platitudes are not limited to the left. See also: "We don't torture." Besides that, the actual left (as opposed to your fantasy version) is only disappointed insofar as Mr. Obama has not gone far enough to repudiate the transgressions of the previous administration as re: state secrets privilege, multi-tier justice system, national security theater.
The unions, on the other hand, are out of touch with the classroom and mostly interested in their own survival.
This is interesting because I find that description applies mostly to school administrator types. Not so much building-level administrators, but people closer to the central office or at the central office.
These are the same personnel who, if we just untied their hands from the big bad teachers' unions, could solve all the problems in education. And apparently most problems in education can be solved by requiring no cause for firing. Amirite?
I think this depends on when these lesson plans are created. If they are produced, as you say, at government funded public schools, they ought to become public property as a matter of course. If, instead, they are developed outside of work hours as an aid to doing the job, I don't think the public can make a claim on them.
Or more recently watch "In The Loop" if you can find it outside the UK.
And the flying-shattering event would have probably made more visual sense than the movie too.
are you including the supplemental funds that Mr. Bush requested to pay for the war(s) that were not included in the submitted budget? I don't know if Mr. Obama has included those monies in his submitted budget.
And bone density, no?
Actually, there are places where a school's faculty and staff have written off a segment of their population as worthless. Maybe some of you can live with that, but for a school faculty this is an unacceptable condition. NCLB has the laudable selling point of being about not letting schools disenfranchise students. However, I think it's more about getting so much federal government into schooling that education becomes impossible. Then we can have the vouchers that the people behind the act really want. It's like some kind of twisted Seldon plan.
People somehow believe that all the former phys ed teachers who become administrators would be magically able to solve the problems of education if their hands were untied by the big bad fucking teachers' union. Things like age discrimination and pressure on women to leave when they lose that certain something that they used to have before their 40th birthday? That shit would disappear if management were allowed a free hand. Schools would no longer work to eliminate their highest paid employees regardless of effectiveness. Here's a pro tip: management in education is no more or less competent than management in the private sector. If you were hit by a bus tomorrow, could your boss do your job? I'll wager the answer is no. h/t Cringely for that tidbit.
So, when the middle school fills up, what do you do? Wait for kids to age out? We actually had a kid at my old school who aged out of middle school by turning 16. You can't drive to middle school. Our guidance department had a little procedure for what to do when a child failed your class for the year. Add 10 points and see if they're still failing. If they are, add ten points and see if they're still failing. Eventually the problem solves itself. That year was, incidentally, the year that the entire guidance department transferred out.
Get extracurricular sports out of there and you may be onto something. Schools start early (at my high school, it's 7:25. 6 am???) because there has to be time for sports practice later in the day before it gets dark. In places where school starts later (as research shows is good for this age,) it's so that kids can have practice before school and after school too.
Disclaimer: I think a school ought to offer as great a variety of courses as possible.
Let's say 16 of your school's students are interested in AP Music Theory. You're the principal and such a small number triggers the decision making process:
So which is it? If you run a class at 16 and your class average size is 30, those "extra" 14 kids get spread out among more popular courses.
Optimizing the time spent in school is hardly simple and cannot be done for every student. Perhaps this is a fundamental problem of public education, but I defy any private school to do what we do (i.e. take all comers) and actually solve this.
Well, it was a crazy time in weeks and months after the 11th. The crazy time didn't last for 6 more years.
I was all enraged for this post before I got to your line about not believing in punishment as deterrent. I tend not to see a relationship between punishment and deterrent either. However, I'm curious what you think will deter companies from accepting illegal government orders in the future? Enact new laws which are more specific? Not being held to the current laws seems to render that action toothless.
I just want to emphasize your first point. I had some dick tell me the other day that he could see where the government was coming from by interning Japanese and Japanese American (why not just "American"?) folks in camps back in the 40's. And that the actual internees should also appreciate the government's position and go quietly. That is, if such a thing were to happen today with Muslims, he would back it, and thinks that everyone, including Muslims should reasonably back it as well.
Moreover (I'm from India) he said that if I got on a plane with him, he'd try to first get off that plane and second see about requesting some kind of surveillance of me.
Minors have money too. Those with lots of it tend not to have as many impediments to spending like actual expenses.
I agree, this is no different from the beeping added to large trucks when they are in reverse. An earlier poster quoted from the article that the sound will shut off after a certain speed since the car will then be making enough sound on its own.