How often does your computer get so overloaded with adware, spyware, trojans and all other kinds of malicious software that it slows to a snail's pace? Yet that happened regularly with my younger siblings, my high school friends, and pretty much every shared family computer I've ever run into. It happened enough that people just assumed that's how computers went and they needed to buy a new computer because their old one was outdated.
If you blindly search for more popular terms you are likely to get a lot of seedy stuff popping up. You are not searching for Jonas Brothers ringtones, and if you were you have a better sense for what sites are malicious to begin with.
Or just boot up Dawn of War, Starcraft, Warcraft, Civ, TF2, Counter-Strike, Natural-Selection, Call of Duty, etc, etc, and go head-to-head with people on an equal footing and without all the timesink bullshit or the monthly fees. EVE or Planetside if you need an MMO fix truly designed for PvP. I never understood the PvP-or-die people that have nothing but disdain for "carebears" but insist on playing games where their main playstyle is a hastily cobbled together mishmosh of 80% "carebear" bullshit, 15% gank squad, 5% interesting combat.
I left it on in the background while I was messing around on the computer the other weekend and the shows were literally the Bible Code, endtime prophecy, in search of the Loch Ness monster, something that managed to combine UFOs and Hitler... the closest thing they had to factual content was a documentary on modern day gangs that played like an episode of COPS. At one point some guy was walking around Stonehenge with a divining rod talking about how he could feel the pull of magnetic fields or something.
I guess it's easier to find crazies and just make shit up instead of actual historical content, but damn!
Mostly people who value exploration and timesink accomplishment I think. The classes seemed pretty good to me after the revamps and I've heard the one raid zone they did eventually open was pretty fun although I never got near enough to try it out. They're in extreme danger of losing those people anyway now since an interesting dungeon that was available at launch and always broken was finally slated to be "released" in a completely revamped form last summer accompanying a level cap increase to 55... was delayed until the absolutely final deadline of March 1... no word has been received on it and then this announcement was made.
Besides all these delays, imagine the only content that is trickling out is one buggy dungeon per year. It's been up on test server for ten days and zero people have tried it out. Then imagine all that lag you experienced and multiply it by nine thousand when they raise the level cap to 55 and open up one group dungeon with a small raid area in the back as new tier content. Not to mention the fact that in Vanguard all of this is contested. Welcome back to EQ1 waiting on lines to experience this anemic content with nowhere else to go. The servers can still muster up enough people to ruin the experience.
Sorry to make another post but there's a graph illustrating their server score algorithm applied to the last week of TF2 games across all servers. I'm betting they generated a couple different versions of this with different algorithms until they settled on their current one. The graph confused me a bit initially, it's just a distribution of the server scores compared to the total number of connections on those servers. The point was to demonstrate that on really "bad" servers that sham you there are a high number of connections because they gussy up the numbers to look attractive, which is Valve's impetus for solving the problem. The orange area on the right is how bad you have to get before they actively filter you out. Notice how relatively few of the servers are in the negative at all.
According to their FAQ on the official forums they're adding it to *all* Vanguard servers, which is actually more problematic than in EQ2, which opened up specific new servers. Although I guess if you want to milk the cash cow and you only have four servers there's not much you can do.
I think this is a really poor move on Sony's part though, what little playerbase they have in VG tends to be the "hardcore" gamers that care about "accomplishments" and all that kind of time investment in the game. Especially considering Sony thought their RMT servers underperformed in EQ2 compared to their expectations.
There's not going to be enough kicks and bans versus active users in that situation to be significant. If you attract a consistent playerbase the score will be high. Just by the nature of TF2 I've seen vanishingly few cheaters able to make a noticeable impact on gameplay and you can't really screw up your own team short of just sitting in spawn to deny them a player.
Anyway I doubt "score" will become favored over ping and player count in terms of players choosing where to get in a quick game of TF2, it's mostly an effort to weed out the servers that are especially terrible. You don't really need to worry unless you're booting more people than stick around to play, in which case there really is something wrong.
I honestly don't think a lot of these shows are any worse than the ones on your list. I think we're in a very good era for TV. I find myself watching more shows than I ever have. Look at what we have on the air now: Lost, Psych, Burn Notice, Fringe, BSG, The Daily Show, The Office, House, Big Love, Flight of the Conchords, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Damages, 30 Rock. Watched the Castle pilot the other night and thought it was excellent entertainment, pure cheese but with a heart and a brain. I'm sure there's shows I've included or not included that you disagree with, but there is a lot of quality stuff on the air these days in terms of production value and writing.
I watched the old Charlie Rose with Conan from a couple years back and he commented that we were in a golden age of TV and he didn't even know if he could get a job writing today with how good and competitive the TV writers are. I'd have to agree. There's a *ton* of good stuff on these days. In the nineties everyone would have been going gaga over Fringe and even relative stinkers like Dollhouse.
It could develop into something good but right now it's really a waste of time. Everyone from the fanboys to the lead actress is saying "give it a couple episodes" because the first few have been heartless mediocre action with about two minutes of plot development. I'd check back in a month or two before spending any effort getting a hold of it.
Fringe got quite a bit better over the course of the season. I had stopped watching for a while too since the only things that were grabbing me were the cold opens (which were damn fine) and the interaction between the Bishops. I really enjoyed the finale though. Looking forward to the next season.
Oddly enough another one of my favorite shows right now, Burn Notice, really turned me off in the first couple episodes but eventually hit its stride and this season's finale ranks up there as one of the best hours of TV ever in my opinion.
The problem is with Dollhouse, I really can't see the potential. The "mission of the week" format is a bit lame because of the lack of a grounding character to keep it together, and the lead actress is really not good enough to pull it off. The Whedon shows I've seen so far have had actors that weren't necessarily great but were great for their role. The way they're running the show right now it lives or dies off the dolls acting like they're completely different people every week, and they just haven't sold that.
Obviously you are not teaching these students about allocating memory in C or some other arcane task dealing with the nuts and bolts of a specific language. You would want to use a simple language and focus on using logical steps to write algorithms. Algorithms are one of the most basic and general things you can study. They were around long before computers, but computers happen to be an ideal playground on which to implement and test them. They are logic and problem solving in their purest form and completely deterministic; you put in an input, you get an output. Either it functions properly or it doesn't, giving the student immediate feedback. Thus useful as a teaching tool the same way studying Euclidean geometry or a whole other host of things in high school are, except much more hands-on and likely to engage students.
On a practical level, computers are ubiquitous these days and we interact with them via algorithms, making basic programming knowledge an incredibly broad and useful skill to have. Hell, high school math is almost entirely just learning algorithms. Implementing them on a computer is an ultimate test of mastery. We used to write simple programs on our graphing calculators that performed computations for us in physics and chemistry. A large number of interesting jobs today benefit a lot from rudimentary programming knowledge, from manipulating statistical data to just comprehending a snippet of javascript your boss wants to put on his webpage. Being knowledgeable about X field but also proficient in programming opens a lot of doors that, say, also knowing a crapload about asphalt, circuit boards and metallurgy wouldn't.
I actually... two weeks ago reactivated my CoH account, and I strongly agree that the new players experience needs some serious work.
Hero side, I'm duoing with my friend and we hit level 4. Neither of our contacts in AP had any more missions for us. They didn't send us to the new and improved Hollows, no generic door missions, no other contacts in our range to talk to, nadda. We were both referred to Kings Row where after running across the zone the contacts said whoops, must be level 5! All told we spent about a half hour running around the city before we realized we were just going to have to street sweep. Sure, big deal, ten minutes of grinding, but just leaving a complete newbie floating when you could easily refer them to an appropriate contact is very very poor design.
We finally hit level 5 and get a radio mission for Vahz. We are getting just knocked around and finally die on the second spawn. She is an inv/dark tanker and I am an ill/TA controller. My character doesn't have much flexibility at level 4 and I notice that she's taken three attacks and only RPD out of the inv set. I had to mentor my higher level defender in so that she could finish a mission without getting completely discouraged right out of the gate (she's a complete newbie to the game). Granted my character was not a fantastic early game choice and hers made one bad power decision, but how many games can you torpedo yourself so thoroughly at level 4? How many people will read the forums to figure out what they're doing "wrong" and stick with it? DDO is the only other example I can think of and it's not exactly thriving.
Then I logged into my old level 32 tanker and remembered why I thought the game was fun. He basically jumps into the middle of a crowd of ten enemies and starts smashing. There needs to be something to make the leveling process smoother towards the beginning. I think recommended newbie level templates would be nice, along with a newbie temp attack power like you suggested to let people have a decent early attack chain. Also something to make enhancements less opaque. I think a free generic IO every level up to 30 would be a nice way to get people started on slotting things and understand their power.
Well, even a decade ago when I was in high school (and ritalin was going out like candy as a sidebar, I think more than 50% of my friends were hopped up on some behavioral modification) we were seeing the beginning of it with Columbine used as a justification for putting our school on lockdown and adding an on-site police officer. The campus was completely closed (previously, at least juniors and seniors had been allowed to leave for lunch), all the doors were locked, teachers were stationed at every corner of the hallway to look for hall passes and there were teachers patrolling the parking lot just in case you managed to slip by. This was in liberal whitebread suburbia, so we were not worried about gang violence, people weren't carrying guns around, there were no incidents to my knowledge of creepy strangers on campus. There weren't even really fights at school. The biggest event I can remember was some former student, a sadly depressed drug addict, that wrote some crap emo poetry that sympathized with the Columbine shooters (no mention of our school made, he was detained on 4/20 pretty much at the behest of the PTA, that was a pretty big civil rights travesty right there).
We have to look back to where all this started though, and you could trace almost everything to the PTA and valid concerns about liability from the school administration. I am positive that our school district would rather not have had to organize the teachers into a hall monitor militia. It's more work for them. But there were very real cases popping up where little Johnny manages to drive out for lunch, gets into a fender bender and mommy successfully sues the school or politics in the PTA for the school "allowing" Johnny to do so. It wasn't just the school either, I remember that's when movie theaters started getting anal about letting us into R-rated movies. They wouldn't even let our parents buy the tickets for us, they checked at the entrance to the theater itself to make sure us 16-year-olds had our hands held by an adult. It's to the point where kids coming into college have to be coddled like infants to make the transition from this high school environment because they had no freedom there.
It's a shitty state of affairs with kids trapped in the middle of all these "well-meaning" adults, but I am sympathetic to the reason why schools are turning more to the authorities than resolving matters internally these days.
That is a standard practice on Amazon though, pulling reviews that aren't actually reviews of the book but reviews of the author or the circumstances around it. Not to say that Amazon doesn't delve into the shady area as well.
Mostly the only games I buy at launch these days are multiplayer games. There's a difference in the communities of a game that is just starting out compared to after they've been established for a year or two.
Not on their face, but if the allegation is disorderly conduct, the tool that is used to commit the disorderly conduct is evidence. A more extreme and compelling example would be if someone was blasting an air horn continually so that class could not even proceed. The teacher cannot locate the device in the classroom but you notice this girl looking mighty uncomfortable and when she stands up she has a canister poking out her ass. Owning or operating an air horn is not a crime, but the search would be legally justified because it is evidence that she committed the disorderly conduct.
Of course this all depends on the premise that the texting was disorderly conduct. This is where we get into guessing at the details of the situation and I'd rather not. I agree with you that the posted police report could be more compelling, but I think there is probably more to it.
Not really, the whole game is very linear. There is no real free exploration, you get led by the nose from checkpoint to checkpoint and predictably at every juncture something goes wrong that you need to finish a sidequest to solve. The story is okay, but I didn't find it that interesting. The people that sold it as a successor to System Shock were pretty far off-base. Atmospherically though I found it very compelling, and there are some moments and characters that really stick out. I guess it depends on what you're looking to get from it.
Well, we're given limited information about her prior interactions with the administration and police in the report. Maybe there's other separate reports detailing those. Maybe this was just a shoddy report, maybe the police officer is really just on a power trip. I don't know, on Slashdot we have a heavily filtered version of the facts. What we deal with is half-hypothetical.
My point is that if someone is following a pattern of being willfully disruptive eventually you reach an end to what you can accomplish without putting yourself in legal jeopardy. She was arrested and cited for disorderly conduct then let go until her trial date. She violated her week-long suspension not once, but twice and got two more citations for trespassing. My read of the situation is this was not someone quietly texting in class and not an isolated incident, but one of a long string of events where the school's measures against her had proved ineffective and she was detracting from the learning environment. It's not just frustration but the end of the road for what the school can do (short of expulsion I guess, dunno what the policy on that is). As far as I'm aware something doesn't have to be contraband either to initiate a search if it is evidence of a crime as long as there is probable cause that it is on her person.
I don't know about strip searching but if you get to the point where you have to be physically removed from the premises and refuse, yes, your boss can call the police on you.
Yeah, I think these being "out in the open" is terrible if they do indeed have the chat logs. People definitely have motivation to get at these any way they can. There is a forum more or less specifically devoted to trashing EQ2 where there are a ton of people who would love to see these files both for the drama and to generate ad income from viewership discussing it. I also know more than a few jilted lovers whose entire wretched entangled relationship web played out in EQ2; someone who left her husband for her raid leader, for instance. Letting the psychos have a crack at these files would be bad mojo.
And then there's the ordinary run-of-the-mill people just looking for interesting cyb0rz or checking up on what crazy stuff their friends have been talking about behind the scenes. Not the end of the world, but not very cool either to have the contents of private chat exposed.
I suppose there is no legal expectation of privacy from Sony given their ToS and everything, but if these files do ever make it out of a researcher's hands they can say bye-bye to a lot of their last subscribers. I also think that the player information on weight and such came from the surveys, of which they sent out quite a few. I'm not sure how they got mental health from that, I'd be interested in seeing their algorithm, but I don't doubt that the role players are at the bottom of the stack from my time in heavy roleplaying communities in EQ2.
So you tend to leave briefly and come back for new content. Most people tend to go back to the first MMO they enjoyed. I don't know what makes it so but it seems to be a rule. A ton of my old EQ buddies still even swing back through the game, and the others are in EQ2 or Vanguard. It makes me think that you don't win much by making WoW Jr. You're already four years behind on content and hojillions of funding, you'll just be the game people switch to for a month to remind them why they enjoy WoW more. People will do that anyway whether you clone WoW or not.
Also, the "anti-WoW specialization" you seem to be talking about sound like the same old alternate advancement/talent systems that even WoW itself has. Dunno what the stink is about, Vanguard has been working on streamlining things, making them less intimidating, and dropping its "hardcore only" reputation.
I don't see specialization as being that terrible either. In WoW my prot warrior can solo just fine but you're not going to be mistaking him for a DPS class and if he's not in front of the mob you can forget about DPS entirely. Basically if he's not tanking people are going to want him to respec arms or fury. In Vanguard you get what you get, I rolled my warrior to tank and he's a tank all the way. I sort of prefer that to being able to completely change what your character does on a whim, because then I won't be expected to do that. Yet in a lot of ways he solos better than my WoW warrior, and the mechanics are a lot more fun. Fuck spamming heroic strike. Vanguard class design after they revamped and fixed all the bugs is really pretty great. Honestly I'd probably be playing it if I didn't think most of the content was a steaming pile.
Yeah I think it's bullshit too. Maybe the advertising model is not going to work anymore but I'm not a big fan of leaching until the well runs dry. At some point there has to be some give and take if you want the programming to continue. There is not going to be a mystical service that is free, without advertising, without interruption, without subscription fees, streaming high quality with an option to download in any format with no DRM that still makes money for the content providers.
Overwhelming probability is literally all that we have to go on. The only way absolute proof is possible is with faith, but that's not the kind of proof that we can agree on via physical evidence. Even mathematics has the possibility of human error in proof and some systems that cannot be proven internally consistent on top of that.
Second of all, the cartoon characters. It looks like a children's game.
Newsflash boyo, you've always been playing children's games. It just happens that some of them are fun to play as adults too. Don't take yourself too seriously.
Slashdot Mirror
How often does your computer get so overloaded with adware, spyware, trojans and all other kinds of malicious software that it slows to a snail's pace? Yet that happened regularly with my younger siblings, my high school friends, and pretty much every shared family computer I've ever run into. It happened enough that people just assumed that's how computers went and they needed to buy a new computer because their old one was outdated.
If you blindly search for more popular terms you are likely to get a lot of seedy stuff popping up. You are not searching for Jonas Brothers ringtones, and if you were you have a better sense for what sites are malicious to begin with.
Or just boot up Dawn of War, Starcraft, Warcraft, Civ, TF2, Counter-Strike, Natural-Selection, Call of Duty, etc, etc, and go head-to-head with people on an equal footing and without all the timesink bullshit or the monthly fees. EVE or Planetside if you need an MMO fix truly designed for PvP. I never understood the PvP-or-die people that have nothing but disdain for "carebears" but insist on playing games where their main playstyle is a hastily cobbled together mishmosh of 80% "carebear" bullshit, 15% gank squad, 5% interesting combat.
I left it on in the background while I was messing around on the computer the other weekend and the shows were literally the Bible Code, endtime prophecy, in search of the Loch Ness monster, something that managed to combine UFOs and Hitler... the closest thing they had to factual content was a documentary on modern day gangs that played like an episode of COPS. At one point some guy was walking around Stonehenge with a divining rod talking about how he could feel the pull of magnetic fields or something.
I guess it's easier to find crazies and just make shit up instead of actual historical content, but damn!
Mostly people who value exploration and timesink accomplishment I think. The classes seemed pretty good to me after the revamps and I've heard the one raid zone they did eventually open was pretty fun although I never got near enough to try it out. They're in extreme danger of losing those people anyway now since an interesting dungeon that was available at launch and always broken was finally slated to be "released" in a completely revamped form last summer accompanying a level cap increase to 55... was delayed until the absolutely final deadline of March 1... no word has been received on it and then this announcement was made.
Besides all these delays, imagine the only content that is trickling out is one buggy dungeon per year. It's been up on test server for ten days and zero people have tried it out. Then imagine all that lag you experienced and multiply it by nine thousand when they raise the level cap to 55 and open up one group dungeon with a small raid area in the back as new tier content. Not to mention the fact that in Vanguard all of this is contested. Welcome back to EQ1 waiting on lines to experience this anemic content with nowhere else to go. The servers can still muster up enough people to ruin the experience.
Sorry to make another post but there's a graph illustrating their server score algorithm applied to the last week of TF2 games across all servers. I'm betting they generated a couple different versions of this with different algorithms until they settled on their current one. The graph confused me a bit initially, it's just a distribution of the server scores compared to the total number of connections on those servers. The point was to demonstrate that on really "bad" servers that sham you there are a high number of connections because they gussy up the numbers to look attractive, which is Valve's impetus for solving the problem. The orange area on the right is how bad you have to get before they actively filter you out. Notice how relatively few of the servers are in the negative at all.
According to their FAQ on the official forums they're adding it to *all* Vanguard servers, which is actually more problematic than in EQ2, which opened up specific new servers. Although I guess if you want to milk the cash cow and you only have four servers there's not much you can do.
I think this is a really poor move on Sony's part though, what little playerbase they have in VG tends to be the "hardcore" gamers that care about "accomplishments" and all that kind of time investment in the game. Especially considering Sony thought their RMT servers underperformed in EQ2 compared to their expectations.
There's not going to be enough kicks and bans versus active users in that situation to be significant. If you attract a consistent playerbase the score will be high. Just by the nature of TF2 I've seen vanishingly few cheaters able to make a noticeable impact on gameplay and you can't really screw up your own team short of just sitting in spawn to deny them a player.
Anyway I doubt "score" will become favored over ping and player count in terms of players choosing where to get in a quick game of TF2, it's mostly an effort to weed out the servers that are especially terrible. You don't really need to worry unless you're booting more people than stick around to play, in which case there really is something wrong.
I honestly don't think a lot of these shows are any worse than the ones on your list. I think we're in a very good era for TV. I find myself watching more shows than I ever have. Look at what we have on the air now: Lost, Psych, Burn Notice, Fringe, BSG, The Daily Show, The Office, House, Big Love, Flight of the Conchords, Dexter, Breaking Bad, Damages, 30 Rock. Watched the Castle pilot the other night and thought it was excellent entertainment, pure cheese but with a heart and a brain. I'm sure there's shows I've included or not included that you disagree with, but there is a lot of quality stuff on the air these days in terms of production value and writing.
I watched the old Charlie Rose with Conan from a couple years back and he commented that we were in a golden age of TV and he didn't even know if he could get a job writing today with how good and competitive the TV writers are. I'd have to agree. There's a *ton* of good stuff on these days. In the nineties everyone would have been going gaga over Fringe and even relative stinkers like Dollhouse.
It could develop into something good but right now it's really a waste of time. Everyone from the fanboys to the lead actress is saying "give it a couple episodes" because the first few have been heartless mediocre action with about two minutes of plot development. I'd check back in a month or two before spending any effort getting a hold of it.
Fringe got quite a bit better over the course of the season. I had stopped watching for a while too since the only things that were grabbing me were the cold opens (which were damn fine) and the interaction between the Bishops. I really enjoyed the finale though. Looking forward to the next season.
Oddly enough another one of my favorite shows right now, Burn Notice, really turned me off in the first couple episodes but eventually hit its stride and this season's finale ranks up there as one of the best hours of TV ever in my opinion.
The problem is with Dollhouse, I really can't see the potential. The "mission of the week" format is a bit lame because of the lack of a grounding character to keep it together, and the lead actress is really not good enough to pull it off. The Whedon shows I've seen so far have had actors that weren't necessarily great but were great for their role. The way they're running the show right now it lives or dies off the dolls acting like they're completely different people every week, and they just haven't sold that.
Obviously you are not teaching these students about allocating memory in C or some other arcane task dealing with the nuts and bolts of a specific language. You would want to use a simple language and focus on using logical steps to write algorithms. Algorithms are one of the most basic and general things you can study. They were around long before computers, but computers happen to be an ideal playground on which to implement and test them. They are logic and problem solving in their purest form and completely deterministic; you put in an input, you get an output. Either it functions properly or it doesn't, giving the student immediate feedback. Thus useful as a teaching tool the same way studying Euclidean geometry or a whole other host of things in high school are, except much more hands-on and likely to engage students.
On a practical level, computers are ubiquitous these days and we interact with them via algorithms, making basic programming knowledge an incredibly broad and useful skill to have. Hell, high school math is almost entirely just learning algorithms. Implementing them on a computer is an ultimate test of mastery. We used to write simple programs on our graphing calculators that performed computations for us in physics and chemistry. A large number of interesting jobs today benefit a lot from rudimentary programming knowledge, from manipulating statistical data to just comprehending a snippet of javascript your boss wants to put on his webpage. Being knowledgeable about X field but also proficient in programming opens a lot of doors that, say, also knowing a crapload about asphalt, circuit boards and metallurgy wouldn't.
You'd get funding from the people that actually want the information kept up-to-date in that case.
I actually... two weeks ago reactivated my CoH account, and I strongly agree that the new players experience needs some serious work.
Hero side, I'm duoing with my friend and we hit level 4. Neither of our contacts in AP had any more missions for us. They didn't send us to the new and improved Hollows, no generic door missions, no other contacts in our range to talk to, nadda. We were both referred to Kings Row where after running across the zone the contacts said whoops, must be level 5! All told we spent about a half hour running around the city before we realized we were just going to have to street sweep. Sure, big deal, ten minutes of grinding, but just leaving a complete newbie floating when you could easily refer them to an appropriate contact is very very poor design.
We finally hit level 5 and get a radio mission for Vahz. We are getting just knocked around and finally die on the second spawn. She is an inv/dark tanker and I am an ill/TA controller. My character doesn't have much flexibility at level 4 and I notice that she's taken three attacks and only RPD out of the inv set. I had to mentor my higher level defender in so that she could finish a mission without getting completely discouraged right out of the gate (she's a complete newbie to the game). Granted my character was not a fantastic early game choice and hers made one bad power decision, but how many games can you torpedo yourself so thoroughly at level 4? How many people will read the forums to figure out what they're doing "wrong" and stick with it? DDO is the only other example I can think of and it's not exactly thriving.
Then I logged into my old level 32 tanker and remembered why I thought the game was fun. He basically jumps into the middle of a crowd of ten enemies and starts smashing. There needs to be something to make the leveling process smoother towards the beginning. I think recommended newbie level templates would be nice, along with a newbie temp attack power like you suggested to let people have a decent early attack chain. Also something to make enhancements less opaque. I think a free generic IO every level up to 30 would be a nice way to get people started on slotting things and understand their power.
Well, even a decade ago when I was in high school (and ritalin was going out like candy as a sidebar, I think more than 50% of my friends were hopped up on some behavioral modification) we were seeing the beginning of it with Columbine used as a justification for putting our school on lockdown and adding an on-site police officer. The campus was completely closed (previously, at least juniors and seniors had been allowed to leave for lunch), all the doors were locked, teachers were stationed at every corner of the hallway to look for hall passes and there were teachers patrolling the parking lot just in case you managed to slip by. This was in liberal whitebread suburbia, so we were not worried about gang violence, people weren't carrying guns around, there were no incidents to my knowledge of creepy strangers on campus. There weren't even really fights at school. The biggest event I can remember was some former student, a sadly depressed drug addict, that wrote some crap emo poetry that sympathized with the Columbine shooters (no mention of our school made, he was detained on 4/20 pretty much at the behest of the PTA, that was a pretty big civil rights travesty right there).
We have to look back to where all this started though, and you could trace almost everything to the PTA and valid concerns about liability from the school administration. I am positive that our school district would rather not have had to organize the teachers into a hall monitor militia. It's more work for them. But there were very real cases popping up where little Johnny manages to drive out for lunch, gets into a fender bender and mommy successfully sues the school or politics in the PTA for the school "allowing" Johnny to do so. It wasn't just the school either, I remember that's when movie theaters started getting anal about letting us into R-rated movies. They wouldn't even let our parents buy the tickets for us, they checked at the entrance to the theater itself to make sure us 16-year-olds had our hands held by an adult. It's to the point where kids coming into college have to be coddled like infants to make the transition from this high school environment because they had no freedom there.
It's a shitty state of affairs with kids trapped in the middle of all these "well-meaning" adults, but I am sympathetic to the reason why schools are turning more to the authorities than resolving matters internally these days.
That is a standard practice on Amazon though, pulling reviews that aren't actually reviews of the book but reviews of the author or the circumstances around it. Not to say that Amazon doesn't delve into the shady area as well.
Mostly the only games I buy at launch these days are multiplayer games. There's a difference in the communities of a game that is just starting out compared to after they've been established for a year or two.
Not on their face, but if the allegation is disorderly conduct, the tool that is used to commit the disorderly conduct is evidence. A more extreme and compelling example would be if someone was blasting an air horn continually so that class could not even proceed. The teacher cannot locate the device in the classroom but you notice this girl looking mighty uncomfortable and when she stands up she has a canister poking out her ass. Owning or operating an air horn is not a crime, but the search would be legally justified because it is evidence that she committed the disorderly conduct.
Of course this all depends on the premise that the texting was disorderly conduct. This is where we get into guessing at the details of the situation and I'd rather not. I agree with you that the posted police report could be more compelling, but I think there is probably more to it.
Not really, the whole game is very linear. There is no real free exploration, you get led by the nose from checkpoint to checkpoint and predictably at every juncture something goes wrong that you need to finish a sidequest to solve. The story is okay, but I didn't find it that interesting. The people that sold it as a successor to System Shock were pretty far off-base. Atmospherically though I found it very compelling, and there are some moments and characters that really stick out. I guess it depends on what you're looking to get from it.
Well, we're given limited information about her prior interactions with the administration and police in the report. Maybe there's other separate reports detailing those. Maybe this was just a shoddy report, maybe the police officer is really just on a power trip. I don't know, on Slashdot we have a heavily filtered version of the facts. What we deal with is half-hypothetical.
My point is that if someone is following a pattern of being willfully disruptive eventually you reach an end to what you can accomplish without putting yourself in legal jeopardy. She was arrested and cited for disorderly conduct then let go until her trial date. She violated her week-long suspension not once, but twice and got two more citations for trespassing. My read of the situation is this was not someone quietly texting in class and not an isolated incident, but one of a long string of events where the school's measures against her had proved ineffective and she was detracting from the learning environment. It's not just frustration but the end of the road for what the school can do (short of expulsion I guess, dunno what the policy on that is). As far as I'm aware something doesn't have to be contraband either to initiate a search if it is evidence of a crime as long as there is probable cause that it is on her person.
I don't know about strip searching but if you get to the point where you have to be physically removed from the premises and refuse, yes, your boss can call the police on you.
Yeah, I think these being "out in the open" is terrible if they do indeed have the chat logs. People definitely have motivation to get at these any way they can. There is a forum more or less specifically devoted to trashing EQ2 where there are a ton of people who would love to see these files both for the drama and to generate ad income from viewership discussing it. I also know more than a few jilted lovers whose entire wretched entangled relationship web played out in EQ2; someone who left her husband for her raid leader, for instance. Letting the psychos have a crack at these files would be bad mojo.
And then there's the ordinary run-of-the-mill people just looking for interesting cyb0rz or checking up on what crazy stuff their friends have been talking about behind the scenes. Not the end of the world, but not very cool either to have the contents of private chat exposed.
I suppose there is no legal expectation of privacy from Sony given their ToS and everything, but if these files do ever make it out of a researcher's hands they can say bye-bye to a lot of their last subscribers. I also think that the player information on weight and such came from the surveys, of which they sent out quite a few. I'm not sure how they got mental health from that, I'd be interested in seeing their algorithm, but I don't doubt that the role players are at the bottom of the stack from my time in heavy roleplaying communities in EQ2.
So you tend to leave briefly and come back for new content. Most people tend to go back to the first MMO they enjoyed. I don't know what makes it so but it seems to be a rule. A ton of my old EQ buddies still even swing back through the game, and the others are in EQ2 or Vanguard. It makes me think that you don't win much by making WoW Jr. You're already four years behind on content and hojillions of funding, you'll just be the game people switch to for a month to remind them why they enjoy WoW more. People will do that anyway whether you clone WoW or not.
Also, the "anti-WoW specialization" you seem to be talking about sound like the same old alternate advancement/talent systems that even WoW itself has. Dunno what the stink is about, Vanguard has been working on streamlining things, making them less intimidating, and dropping its "hardcore only" reputation.
I don't see specialization as being that terrible either. In WoW my prot warrior can solo just fine but you're not going to be mistaking him for a DPS class and if he's not in front of the mob you can forget about DPS entirely. Basically if he's not tanking people are going to want him to respec arms or fury. In Vanguard you get what you get, I rolled my warrior to tank and he's a tank all the way. I sort of prefer that to being able to completely change what your character does on a whim, because then I won't be expected to do that. Yet in a lot of ways he solos better than my WoW warrior, and the mechanics are a lot more fun. Fuck spamming heroic strike. Vanguard class design after they revamped and fixed all the bugs is really pretty great. Honestly I'd probably be playing it if I didn't think most of the content was a steaming pile.
Yeah I think it's bullshit too. Maybe the advertising model is not going to work anymore but I'm not a big fan of leaching until the well runs dry. At some point there has to be some give and take if you want the programming to continue. There is not going to be a mystical service that is free, without advertising, without interruption, without subscription fees, streaming high quality with an option to download in any format with no DRM that still makes money for the content providers.
Overwhelming probability is literally all that we have to go on. The only way absolute proof is possible is with faith, but that's not the kind of proof that we can agree on via physical evidence. Even mathematics has the possibility of human error in proof and some systems that cannot be proven internally consistent on top of that.
Second of all, the cartoon characters. It looks like a children's game.
Newsflash boyo, you've always been playing children's games. It just happens that some of them are fun to play as adults too. Don't take yourself too seriously.