I'd really hesitate to denote myself an "expert" in anything related to my career, which is where most people probably center their expertise. I mean think about it: I send my credentials in, whatever they may be, and I'm putting myself on the line for zero gain. Wiki is already enough of a self-sacrifice in that regard.
It also doesn't stop the most problematic areas. Who is an expert in Middle Eastern politics? Israelis? Palestinians? Iranians? Iraqis? A polisci prof in midwest America? Who's an expert on the famous person that keeps getting their page defaced? What credentials do I need to decide what the valuable sources are in an article about The Hulk?
I don't want to say it's working well enough and I'd hate to mess with a good thing, but that's sort of how I feel. There's already enough bickering on Talk pages that it's hard to sort out interpersonal conflicts from legitimate disputes. I think an "expert" designation would only raise the ire of more non-experts who get off on challenging them. Look at all the trolls that arise whenever the "establishment" surpresses their whacko, uninformed viewpoints. Those tend to be the guys that get into revert wars.
And even so, I don't really see that I'd read an entry differently even if it was by someone labelled by an expert. I'm still gonna verify it if it's important, and if it's not, the accuracy of Wikipedia is good enough for me right now.
Hehe, wow, glad to see people are getting on board with Freespace 2. It actually can cost a good amount of money for a used box copy depending on where you get it. I've seen some cheap on Ebay but generally it can be a little pricy since it's out-of-print.
I don't want to put any undue attention on specific links for both Slashdotting reasons and because hosting it for anonymous users on the web isn't kosher yet, but given the legal situation, it's not too far off from it. It's only 100% legitimate if you're friends with the person that lets you download the game, so if you want to follow the letter of the law, introduce yourself at a forum and ask if anyone has a download for ya. Ethically and by the spirit of the EULA and open-sourcing, I think at this point it's pretty much open season no matter if you make friends with the server host or not. If you briefly search around the major player-made forums and abandonware sites, you'll come up with download links and torrents very quick. Some include the open source project with it, for others you'll need to download it separately. Some also include the cutscenes, which I'd recommend just for completeness. I've also caught wind of Linux and Mac versions, but I have absolutely no idea how far along they are.
Freespace 1, by the way, is still pretty good. It's not OS and doesn't have a graphics update project like FS2, but I enjoyed it just for the sake of having another campaign to play through.
Man, I'm going to have to go back and replay it now:P
I think the space sim is a genre that hasn't seen much action in the last seven years because it's already been perfected by Freespace 2. Let's talk about a game where you have a little fighter flying amid literally miles-long capital ships firing giant beam weapons at each other. Where there's gameplay moments and mid-mission plot surprises that just bowl you over. Where you have complete control over three squads of wingmen and you can see (and target) every subsystem on every ship. Where you actually have to make targeted strikes on these subsystems using bombers and covering fire to take down big targets. Where you fly into the middle of really awesome nebulae that do crazy things to your ship's sensors.
And most notably, where the devs were pimp enough to put a clause allowing completely free redistribution to friends and acquaintances in the EULA, and it's now legitly open-source. Leading to the creation of beautiful graphics packages that breathe new life into it. (video). Anyone who thinks they might enjoy this game and hasn't tried it yet, you owe it to yourself:P
I game almost 100% on the PC and I've bought two boxes in the past two years, both from a non-gaming store. PC games have a greater lifespan due to modding, they're available for digital download, etc, etc. With digital downloads, lots of times you keep the key pretty much indefinitely, too, so you don't have to worry about scratching a CD or losing an install. The current crop of games-dedicated stores that are all owned by that one conglomerate (I forget which, exactly) also have their PC games jacked up to ludicrous prices. You'd figure they'd know better, being a store devoted to gaming, but why would I pay $50 for a box I can walk across the street and get for $20 at Walmart?
Maybe you can explain to me why the console shops I walk into are always empty except for teenagers hanging out at the mall and helpless mothers looking for a gift:P
This is my new favorite thing, like the McDonald's coffee lawsuit and a couple other things. Bottom line is that it's easy to feel smart when you assume everyone else is stupid. The good part is that the first time you point out that their facts are 100% wrong, they usually take the time to wise up.
We're talking about "tricking" 13 year old kids to tell the truth about their age. It shouldn't be that hard.
You kidding me? Have you seen the amount of 999 year old people from Ishkabible, Alaskor on Yahoo? You get burned once, you don't do it again. These are kids trying to get access to whatever popular social site is out there right now... a simple age check isn't going to stop them from tracking down the most important things in their little pubescent lives, hehe.
That is the definition of indefinitely, sorta. There's no hard rule that "excessive vandalism means protection for X days". It's completely on the whim of an administrator to unprotect the page, which takes a non-definite length of time.
That's true, and you could make some sort of bureaucracy on admin protection to make it seem like everyone's getting a say or to give the pedantic editors a couple more rules to throw in your face at every possible moment, but let's face it, in the end it boils down to an admin action. If someone's threatening a lawsuit, or there's something crazy like military secrets posted, or there's a page that's constantly under war, it's going to get locked down, and there might not be a definite date of reopening. I prefer the honesty of letting the people with power that are going to wield it also have the appearance of power.
One reason is because the "state of the art" can move faster than books are published. At least when I was an undergraduate, for the course I was doing, we needed to be up to speed on the work that was currently in research journals.
Teh internets are taking care of that one pretty quick. At least in mathematics, most schools have a subscription to an online journal archive that allows you to search pretty much every journal and even pull some articles off the online. For those you can't, typically you can have another institution photocopy and fax them over within the day. A professor who was prepared a couple days in advance would only need a small amount of prep time to make the articles available to his class, and then lecture could be used as a group discussion about what people don't understand. It also encourages students to develop technical reading skills in the field and to at least attempt an unfamiliar topic without an instructor walking them through step by step.
Don't get me wrong, I can see lectures being useful in a situation like that, but most of the time when we're talking cutting edge stuff it's very challenging material, usually a small class, and also much more collaborative. That kind of stuff makes up a small portion of most people's undergrad experience, while a disproportionate amount is covered by attendance policies and pop quizes.
It really depends. Be witty, be vibrant, offer a unique perspective, or be a minor academic celebrity and your lectures are worth attending. Teach a subject that's difficult for me and present it in a more comprehensible way using more than just your verbatim lecture notes, and I'll come. Foster debate and discussion on all sorts of interesting topics? I'm there.
Read off your lecture notes in monotone with your back to the classroom? Nope, sorry, not worth it. Teach a 40-minute lecture on something I can learn in two? Not worth my time. Asking questions and stopping for details can be done via e-mail, office hours, or even better some sort of class discussion board. Nine times out of ten it's not an effective use of everyone's time.
I'm speaking as a grad student in math who, in undergrad, took a year of abstract algebra with a damn near perfect record and then got a C in Linear because the professor wasn't down with me skipping his classes on matrix multiplication. Now in grad school, when the grades don't matter and the professors don't care one way or the other, I'm doing the work and attending classes out of sheer desire to learn. It's not a change in my attitude, it's a change in the material. And I appreciate that you might be an awesome engineering instructor who's just bursting at the seams with valuable insight to offer his classes during lecture, but for every one of you there's two Psych 101 guys reading their notes off the projector. Unless it's a 100% integral part of each and every one of their personal learning processes or you need the students there on a regular basis to evaluate their progress, I say just lay off the mandatory attendance.
Re:With all due respect to the man ...
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 1
Thanks. It's something I'm legitimately interested in, and I don't feel too bad about discussing it in one thread twice-removed from the topic on Slashdot of all places.
I don't think that badly of Bush, at least not to the point where I'm irrationally blaming him for everything, but he has huge control over our international image. It is not by accident when a sizeable chunk of the world views us in a negative light for those qualities which our chief-of-state embodies, yet a large portion of our country does not. I don't think people who are totally on board with him really dispute his embodiment of those qualities, either; from what I've seen, they like his defiance of international opinion and doctrine of preemptive warfare.
If it makes everyone feel better, I don't blame our national obesity on G.W., hehe. Though I think the rest of the developed countries are going to get a taste of that themselves over the next couple generations.
Re:With all due respect to the man ...
on
Steve Irwin Dead
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
As an American, I can only wish people identified my nationality with someone as sincerely pleasant and frank as Steve Irwin. You could do a lot worse.
This is true. Americans, even from our own media, are labelled obese, violent, culturally insensitive lackwits. We're identified with a jingoist leader that 50% of us opposed. Even those of us who challenge the stereotypes and work to change things (though I am a fatass, so I guess one strike) get to deal with the constant barrage of negative images.
Of course, living in the wealthiest center of power in the western world certainly has advantages, so I can't complain, but I've never really found it possible to take pride in my country the same way others do. I wouldn't be upset at all if we were identified with a loveably corny and passionate conservationist and educator. I know Steve Irwin represented a stereotype, but I've never thought of it as a particularly negative one.
In this case, it seems that the civil registry is designed to be very different from a criminal registry, so let us not assume it would deprive civil registrants of the same rights and liberties as criminal registrants.
The issue isn't a right or liberty so much as an extreme black mark on their record. It says their picture, name, and address would be added to a publicly searchable database. Good luck getting a decent job for the next six years. And, oh, the fun when one of your neighbors decides to take a peek and it gets around to everyone in the area. All based on the decision of one judge.
I mean, what's anyone supposed to do with "by the way, this guy 'might' be a sexual offender" coming from the government? Either you are or you aren't, and if the court can't build a case as per our constitutional legal system, even to civil standards (it says in the article it doesn't require a successful civil or criminal verdict), it can't publish an official "maybe."
I'm sure someone involved in this process had the best of intentions seeing cases fall apart on technicalities or something, but just... no. This can't be the way to fix it.
I agree with ya, I was just pointing out that your vision of the school's liability or lack thereof of letting students on Myspace is a bit idealistic for today's world.
As far as in the classroom, there's potential for lots of good stuff. I took a Supreme Court class that Findlaw or the Cornell law project could've easily replaced the textbooks for. A lot of public domain short stories, poems, and books are available online. For all the use we got out of the actual math texts, we might as well just have had problem sets posted online. Maple or Mathematica could easily replace a graphing calc (and teach a useful skill for people entering math, engineering, science). Wolfram and Wiki have some neat stuff. And it'd be nice to be able to SSH in to use CAD from home for a course or something, though I'm probably dreaming there.
Teachers could be allowed to add whatever sites they wanted to the whitelist for both individual and class purposes -- they could make a blackboard-esque compendium of information and links necessary for the course. A discussion board where students are required to post thoughtful questions or debate on topics covered in the course (this actually works surprisingly well). If you really wanted to get fancy, you could tune the filtering software to the student's schedule and block stuff if the teacher of the current class thinks there's no need for it.
Not that most of this specifically requires a laptop in the classroom during instruction, but I guess you can't add it to the curriculum until you make sure everyone's jacked in.
Hehe, someone linked to a video the other day where someone had that for their ringtone. I wanted to reach through the monitor and break the phone after the first ring. I have to say, it'd probably make the ultimate alarm clock, though.
Right now, NWN 1 has piracy protection done right. After patch 1.66, NWN doesn't need the CD. However if you want to play multiplayer online (and possibly automatic update, not sure), you need to have a valid CD key stored on Bioware/Gamespy's servers. Pirated CD key? It gets disabled in their database. Keygens? Yes, they fool the client, but because Bioware's servers have a list of genuine keys, it won't get far when going online.
That's actually a model more and more companies are using, partially because of the move towards downloadable games instead of retail boxes for convenience on both sides with less distribution overhead. You get a lot more impulse buys that way as well.
Also, with episodic gaming and subscription models, someone losing their CD means less money for you. I know that back in the day, one of my NWN disks got scratched beyond repair, a new expansion came out, my PW upgraded to the new expansion... if I had my NWN install I would've bought the expansion, but as it was I just let it go and moved on.
However, if kids are hitting Myspace AT THOSE SAME TIMES (lunch, between classes, study hall, before and after school... essentially outside the classroom) then who gives a flying truck.
Lots of people. Parents, administrators, the school board, hell, one of my old friends from high school joined some sort of FBI sexual crimes unit and said that the single most important thing you can do to keep your kids safe is to keep them off Myspace. Personally, I disagree, but hey, schools don't have the luxury of using rational thought, they have to bow to the will of teh taxpayers!
I don't think it's MxO in specific you're attracted to, but the long-running MMO. I hate SWG with a passion, but when I logged back in to try a free trial just for shits and giggles, I found a ton of RP and people willing to help -- generally the people that stick with it forever are pretty good members of the community, and they also have shit else to do.
It's fun to play one of the newer games, you get to explore places before they've been 100% charted and the strategies are set in granite, but I've also found some good fun playing one of the older releases.
The Wii, with it's groundbreaking controllers, is going to *own* at least 2 of those markets.
But wait, there's more! If we broke it down by gender, ethnicity, nationality, eye color, and left- and right-handedness, the Wii would have cornered a whopping SIX BILLION TEN QUINTILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND AND FIFTY TWO POINT FIVE markets! Score.
I tend to see this more and more nowadays. Yes, there's networked games like MMORPGs and FPS'ers but I think it goes beyond that. We're talking gaming as a spectator sport where a group of friends gather 'round some guy playing GTA solo.
This isn't new, I mean since arcades have been around people have gathered around the guy pulling off crazy shit, and back in the early 90's me and my friends used to sit around for a couple hours every once in a while playing a one-player CRPG.
One reason is that some games are very cinematic and story-based, making for decent viewing. Another is that some games are very strategy oriented and require almost no skill, so you don't lose much by not being at the controls. Think puzzle games, adventure games, turn-based strategy, CRPG... you don't lose much by not being at the controls, so it can become like a group effort. Shadow of the Colossus is a recent example like this, once you figure out the strategies they're not hard to pull off. A third is that if a game is skill-based, it's neat to see what other people can pull off.
It's important because it's a civil rights issue that's been gone over on the internet in a bunch of different countries already. It affects the livelihood of one of the biggest industries on the internet. And tech nerds are quick becoming some of the most well-versed in free speech issues because of all the heavy-handed internet legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd really hesitate to denote myself an "expert" in anything related to my career, which is where most people probably center their expertise. I mean think about it: I send my credentials in, whatever they may be, and I'm putting myself on the line for zero gain. Wiki is already enough of a self-sacrifice in that regard.
It also doesn't stop the most problematic areas. Who is an expert in Middle Eastern politics? Israelis? Palestinians? Iranians? Iraqis? A polisci prof in midwest America? Who's an expert on the famous person that keeps getting their page defaced? What credentials do I need to decide what the valuable sources are in an article about The Hulk?
I don't want to say it's working well enough and I'd hate to mess with a good thing, but that's sort of how I feel. There's already enough bickering on Talk pages that it's hard to sort out interpersonal conflicts from legitimate disputes. I think an "expert" designation would only raise the ire of more non-experts who get off on challenging them. Look at all the trolls that arise whenever the "establishment" surpresses their whacko, uninformed viewpoints. Those tend to be the guys that get into revert wars.
And even so, I don't really see that I'd read an entry differently even if it was by someone labelled by an expert. I'm still gonna verify it if it's important, and if it's not, the accuracy of Wikipedia is good enough for me right now.
This space sim appears to have trouble simulating the propagation of sound in vacuum.
:P
Naw, ya see, you're in this ship, and the computer automatically takes a visual feed and translates it into noisy shots and explosions.
*shifty eyes*
And WTF good is a giant ship killing beam if it doesn't make a big ship killing noise
Hehe, wow, glad to see people are getting on board with Freespace 2. It actually can cost a good amount of money for a used box copy depending on where you get it. I've seen some cheap on Ebay but generally it can be a little pricy since it's out-of-print.
:P
I don't want to put any undue attention on specific links for both Slashdotting reasons and because hosting it for anonymous users on the web isn't kosher yet, but given the legal situation, it's not too far off from it. It's only 100% legitimate if you're friends with the person that lets you download the game, so if you want to follow the letter of the law, introduce yourself at a forum and ask if anyone has a download for ya. Ethically and by the spirit of the EULA and open-sourcing, I think at this point it's pretty much open season no matter if you make friends with the server host or not. If you briefly search around the major player-made forums and abandonware sites, you'll come up with download links and torrents very quick. Some include the open source project with it, for others you'll need to download it separately. Some also include the cutscenes, which I'd recommend just for completeness. I've also caught wind of Linux and Mac versions, but I have absolutely no idea how far along they are.
Freespace 1, by the way, is still pretty good. It's not OS and doesn't have a graphics update project like FS2, but I enjoyed it just for the sake of having another campaign to play through.
Man, I'm going to have to go back and replay it now
I think the space sim is a genre that hasn't seen much action in the last seven years because it's already been perfected by Freespace 2. Let's talk about a game where you have a little fighter flying amid literally miles-long capital ships firing giant beam weapons at each other. Where there's gameplay moments and mid-mission plot surprises that just bowl you over. Where you have complete control over three squads of wingmen and you can see (and target) every subsystem on every ship. Where you actually have to make targeted strikes on these subsystems using bombers and covering fire to take down big targets. Where you fly into the middle of really awesome nebulae that do crazy things to your ship's sensors.
:P
And most notably, where the devs were pimp enough to put a clause allowing completely free redistribution to friends and acquaintances in the EULA, and it's now legitly open-source. Leading to the creation of beautiful graphics packages that breathe new life into it. (video). Anyone who thinks they might enjoy this game and hasn't tried it yet, you owe it to yourself
I game almost 100% on the PC and I've bought two boxes in the past two years, both from a non-gaming store. PC games have a greater lifespan due to modding, they're available for digital download, etc, etc. With digital downloads, lots of times you keep the key pretty much indefinitely, too, so you don't have to worry about scratching a CD or losing an install. The current crop of games-dedicated stores that are all owned by that one conglomerate (I forget which, exactly) also have their PC games jacked up to ludicrous prices. You'd figure they'd know better, being a store devoted to gaming, but why would I pay $50 for a box I can walk across the street and get for $20 at Walmart?
:P
Maybe you can explain to me why the console shops I walk into are always empty except for teenagers hanging out at the mall and helpless mothers looking for a gift
Killed Archimedes?
This is my new favorite thing, like the McDonald's coffee lawsuit and a couple other things. Bottom line is that it's easy to feel smart when you assume everyone else is stupid. The good part is that the first time you point out that their facts are 100% wrong, they usually take the time to wise up.
We're talking about "tricking" 13 year old kids to tell the truth about their age. It shouldn't be that hard.
You kidding me? Have you seen the amount of 999 year old people from Ishkabible, Alaskor on Yahoo? You get burned once, you don't do it again. These are kids trying to get access to whatever popular social site is out there right now... a simple age check isn't going to stop them from tracking down the most important things in their little pubescent lives, hehe.
That is the definition of indefinitely, sorta. There's no hard rule that "excessive vandalism means protection for X days". It's completely on the whim of an administrator to unprotect the page, which takes a non-definite length of time.
That's true, and you could make some sort of bureaucracy on admin protection to make it seem like everyone's getting a say or to give the pedantic editors a couple more rules to throw in your face at every possible moment, but let's face it, in the end it boils down to an admin action. If someone's threatening a lawsuit, or there's something crazy like military secrets posted, or there's a page that's constantly under war, it's going to get locked down, and there might not be a definite date of reopening. I prefer the honesty of letting the people with power that are going to wield it also have the appearance of power.
One reason is because the "state of the art" can move faster than books are published. At least when I was an undergraduate, for the course I was doing, we needed to be up to speed on the work that was currently in research journals.
Teh internets are taking care of that one pretty quick. At least in mathematics, most schools have a subscription to an online journal archive that allows you to search pretty much every journal and even pull some articles off the online. For those you can't, typically you can have another institution photocopy and fax them over within the day. A professor who was prepared a couple days in advance would only need a small amount of prep time to make the articles available to his class, and then lecture could be used as a group discussion about what people don't understand. It also encourages students to develop technical reading skills in the field and to at least attempt an unfamiliar topic without an instructor walking them through step by step.
Don't get me wrong, I can see lectures being useful in a situation like that, but most of the time when we're talking cutting edge stuff it's very challenging material, usually a small class, and also much more collaborative. That kind of stuff makes up a small portion of most people's undergrad experience, while a disproportionate amount is covered by attendance policies and pop quizes.
It really depends. Be witty, be vibrant, offer a unique perspective, or be a minor academic celebrity and your lectures are worth attending. Teach a subject that's difficult for me and present it in a more comprehensible way using more than just your verbatim lecture notes, and I'll come. Foster debate and discussion on all sorts of interesting topics? I'm there.
Read off your lecture notes in monotone with your back to the classroom? Nope, sorry, not worth it. Teach a 40-minute lecture on something I can learn in two? Not worth my time. Asking questions and stopping for details can be done via e-mail, office hours, or even better some sort of class discussion board. Nine times out of ten it's not an effective use of everyone's time.
I'm speaking as a grad student in math who, in undergrad, took a year of abstract algebra with a damn near perfect record and then got a C in Linear because the professor wasn't down with me skipping his classes on matrix multiplication. Now in grad school, when the grades don't matter and the professors don't care one way or the other, I'm doing the work and attending classes out of sheer desire to learn. It's not a change in my attitude, it's a change in the material. And I appreciate that you might be an awesome engineering instructor who's just bursting at the seams with valuable insight to offer his classes during lecture, but for every one of you there's two Psych 101 guys reading their notes off the projector. Unless it's a 100% integral part of each and every one of their personal learning processes or you need the students there on a regular basis to evaluate their progress, I say just lay off the mandatory attendance.
Thanks. It's something I'm legitimately interested in, and I don't feel too bad about discussing it in one thread twice-removed from the topic on Slashdot of all places.
I don't think that badly of Bush, at least not to the point where I'm irrationally blaming him for everything, but he has huge control over our international image. It is not by accident when a sizeable chunk of the world views us in a negative light for those qualities which our chief-of-state embodies, yet a large portion of our country does not. I don't think people who are totally on board with him really dispute his embodiment of those qualities, either; from what I've seen, they like his defiance of international opinion and doctrine of preemptive warfare.
If it makes everyone feel better, I don't blame our national obesity on G.W., hehe. Though I think the rest of the developed countries are going to get a taste of that themselves over the next couple generations.
As an American, I can only wish people identified my nationality with someone as sincerely pleasant and frank as Steve Irwin. You could do a lot worse.
This is true. Americans, even from our own media, are labelled obese, violent, culturally insensitive lackwits. We're identified with a jingoist leader that 50% of us opposed. Even those of us who challenge the stereotypes and work to change things (though I am a fatass, so I guess one strike) get to deal with the constant barrage of negative images.
Of course, living in the wealthiest center of power in the western world certainly has advantages, so I can't complain, but I've never really found it possible to take pride in my country the same way others do. I wouldn't be upset at all if we were identified with a loveably corny and passionate conservationist and educator. I know Steve Irwin represented a stereotype, but I've never thought of it as a particularly negative one.
I gotta say, that thing about you getting homicidal on someone with a stinger is sorta funny.
In this case, it seems that the civil registry is designed to be very different from a criminal registry, so let us not assume it would deprive civil registrants of the same rights and liberties as criminal registrants.
The issue isn't a right or liberty so much as an extreme black mark on their record. It says their picture, name, and address would be added to a publicly searchable database. Good luck getting a decent job for the next six years. And, oh, the fun when one of your neighbors decides to take a peek and it gets around to everyone in the area. All based on the decision of one judge.
I mean, what's anyone supposed to do with "by the way, this guy 'might' be a sexual offender" coming from the government? Either you are or you aren't, and if the court can't build a case as per our constitutional legal system, even to civil standards (it says in the article it doesn't require a successful civil or criminal verdict), it can't publish an official "maybe."
I'm sure someone involved in this process had the best of intentions seeing cases fall apart on technicalities or something, but just... no. This can't be the way to fix it.
I agree with ya, I was just pointing out that your vision of the school's liability or lack thereof of letting students on Myspace is a bit idealistic for today's world.
As far as in the classroom, there's potential for lots of good stuff. I took a Supreme Court class that Findlaw or the Cornell law project could've easily replaced the textbooks for. A lot of public domain short stories, poems, and books are available online. For all the use we got out of the actual math texts, we might as well just have had problem sets posted online. Maple or Mathematica could easily replace a graphing calc (and teach a useful skill for people entering math, engineering, science). Wolfram and Wiki have some neat stuff. And it'd be nice to be able to SSH in to use CAD from home for a course or something, though I'm probably dreaming there.
Teachers could be allowed to add whatever sites they wanted to the whitelist for both individual and class purposes -- they could make a blackboard-esque compendium of information and links necessary for the course. A discussion board where students are required to post thoughtful questions or debate on topics covered in the course (this actually works surprisingly well). If you really wanted to get fancy, you could tune the filtering software to the student's schedule and block stuff if the teacher of the current class thinks there's no need for it.
Not that most of this specifically requires a laptop in the classroom during instruction, but I guess you can't add it to the curriculum until you make sure everyone's jacked in.
Hehe, someone linked to a video the other day where someone had that for their ringtone. I wanted to reach through the monitor and break the phone after the first ring. I have to say, it'd probably make the ultimate alarm clock, though.
Right now, NWN 1 has piracy protection done right. After patch 1.66, NWN doesn't need the CD. However if you want to play multiplayer online (and possibly automatic update, not sure), you need to have a valid CD key stored on Bioware/Gamespy's servers. Pirated CD key? It gets disabled in their database. Keygens? Yes, they fool the client, but because Bioware's servers have a list of genuine keys, it won't get far when going online.
That's actually a model more and more companies are using, partially because of the move towards downloadable games instead of retail boxes for convenience on both sides with less distribution overhead. You get a lot more impulse buys that way as well.
Also, with episodic gaming and subscription models, someone losing their CD means less money for you. I know that back in the day, one of my NWN disks got scratched beyond repair, a new expansion came out, my PW upgraded to the new expansion... if I had my NWN install I would've bought the expansion, but as it was I just let it go and moved on.
However, if kids are hitting Myspace AT THOSE SAME TIMES (lunch, between classes, study hall, before and after school... essentially outside the classroom) then who gives a flying truck.
Lots of people. Parents, administrators, the school board, hell, one of my old friends from high school joined some sort of FBI sexual crimes unit and said that the single most important thing you can do to keep your kids safe is to keep them off Myspace. Personally, I disagree, but hey, schools don't have the luxury of using rational thought, they have to bow to the will of teh taxpayers!
I don't think it's MxO in specific you're attracted to, but the long-running MMO. I hate SWG with a passion, but when I logged back in to try a free trial just for shits and giggles, I found a ton of RP and people willing to help -- generally the people that stick with it forever are pretty good members of the community, and they also have shit else to do.
It's fun to play one of the newer games, you get to explore places before they've been 100% charted and the strategies are set in granite, but I've also found some good fun playing one of the older releases.
The Wii, with it's groundbreaking controllers, is going to *own* at least 2 of those markets.
But wait, there's more! If we broke it down by gender, ethnicity, nationality, eye color, and left- and right-handedness, the Wii would have cornered a whopping SIX BILLION TEN QUINTILLION FIVE HUNDRED THOUSAND AND FIFTY TWO POINT FIVE markets! Score.
I tend to see this more and more nowadays. Yes, there's networked games like MMORPGs and FPS'ers but I think it goes beyond that. We're talking gaming as a spectator sport where a group of friends gather 'round some guy playing GTA solo.
This isn't new, I mean since arcades have been around people have gathered around the guy pulling off crazy shit, and back in the early 90's me and my friends used to sit around for a couple hours every once in a while playing a one-player CRPG.
One reason is that some games are very cinematic and story-based, making for decent viewing. Another is that some games are very strategy oriented and require almost no skill, so you don't lose much by not being at the controls. Think puzzle games, adventure games, turn-based strategy, CRPG... you don't lose much by not being at the controls, so it can become like a group effort. Shadow of the Colossus is a recent example like this, once you figure out the strategies they're not hard to pull off. A third is that if a game is skill-based, it's neat to see what other people can pull off.
Just out of curiosity, are consenting adults in the UK allowed to engage in violent sexual roleplay?
It's important because it's a civil rights issue that's been gone over on the internet in a bunch of different countries already. It affects the livelihood of one of the biggest industries on the internet. And tech nerds are quick becoming some of the most well-versed in free speech issues because of all the heavy-handed internet legislation.
We already ran into this one in the U.S. And I think an episode of Law and Order SVU too :P