I'll repeat to you what I said to the other guy: you *clearly* underestimate how stupid kids can be.
Correct. How stupid some kids can be. And right now, we're letting those stupid kids ruin educational opportunities for the three generations surrounding them. But really the fault is with us, not the stupid kids; Their only fault is being jackasses. We're the ones who are collectively punishing others who aren't at fault in any way.
Why are brain-dead companies trying to push this Real ID crap like they're drug dealers.
Ironically, the reason is that their customers are actually paying 15 a month for WoW, etc, and would probably be treated a lot better if they weren't paying anything at all.
The companies receiving this money view you as a regular source of income and treat you accordingly--monetizing their cash cows to the fullest, and generally treating them like bovine chattels instead of paying customers. Such is modern business.
However, for some of us still play games at home, offline, by ourselves. Sure it doesn't really pop up on the radar of big corporations, but we're still here. And our gaming really is an escape, in the same sense as reading a book or a walk in the park; a private activity which we can enjoy without the maligning effects of commercialisation.
The essential irony here is that by choosing to pay for a regular service, online gamers are actually setting themselves up for worse treatment that offline/freeplay gamers who simply make one of purchases at a shop and don't participate in (paid) multiplayer. By paying with credit cards, etc, they enter willingly--if unwittingly--into a commercialised sphere where they are viewed as company assets to be controlled, protected and exploited. It's the philosophy of modern business, and as the company running the largest paid MMO in the world Blizzard are following it to the letter.
Contrast Blizzard's behaviour with Real ID and their paying customers, to Valve's attitude to their non-paying Steam customers. Steam is even larger than Battle.net, yet nothing like RealID exists or was even proposed by Valve at any stage. The relationship between Valve and Steam users is far more informal (and indeed healthier) and I would argue that this stems from the lack of paid subscription in Valve's flagship multiplayer titles. If you cheat in WoW, you get banned. Cheat in TF2, and they take away your hats. Another good pair to compare and contrast here is Xbox live and PSN.
So, if you want Blizzard to treat you better, the long term solution is to stop paying them a regular subscription, and change your online relationship with them back to that of an informal "fan", rather than a formal "customer". Gaming should be a fun pastime, and not a commercial relationship.
And yes, that will break a few applications, which will have to find ways around it. NAT issues have been worked around in consumer software since the mid 90's. It's not a deal breaker. I haven't had a real IP at home in about 10 years.
That great; great that that's workin' out for ya'. Some of us though, think that NAT is the fucking devil, and would prefer an alternative solution. Preferably one that doesn't involve custom exceptions for every second application on our networks.
...ended up tethering the U.S. to low earth orbit for decades instead of moving on like we should have to a permanent moon settlement and Mars.
I'll take the Hubble Space Telescope and the myriad of other LEO scientific/communication satellites over your pie-in-the-sky Buck Rogers fantasies any day of the week.
As long as those ISPs follow the law regarding the disclosure of this personal data, I have nothing against it.
You know, legality and morality are two different things. Ethicality is a third. Just because something is legal, that doesn't make it the right, correct or civic thing to do.
So, even if the ISPs are following the law to the letter in this, I think selling customer data this way is wrong--massively wrong. This is a huge breach of customer trust, and for nothing but greed besides. The corporate model fails society yet again.
I wouldn't be too sure of that mine reopening. If China's state run economy has proved one thing it's that the free-market unmanaged economies of the West will time and again fail to even comprehend the forces arrayed against them. Narrow minded "Market Based" thinking is exactly what got us into this single supplier problem and naively thinking it will get us out is well... naive.
Whatever you think the "free-market" will do to get us out of this mess, the Chinese economic mega-complex has already considered three moves in advance and is working to counter it. People don't seem to understand that China-Inc is essentially the world greatest ever hyper-corporation: millions of companies, thousands of major corporations, and hundreds of banks all working under one overall direction and policy. Just about every trick you'd expect a major-corporation to pull can and has been considered, strategised and implemented by the this acutely self aware market entity.
Before anyone begins, this isn't some kind of bigoted post. What's really going on here is that the Chinese Communist Party has developed(invented really) a state controlled, capitalism driven, centrally managed and wholly unified economy; and it's as powerful an apparatus as you'd expect. It's one of the biggest civil and economic developments in world history. And if you expect this electric dragon--a vast, powerful and above all self aware economy under the control of a central brain--to act like your traditionally lauded free market fungus-like economies--efficient, large or small, but hopelessly undirected and prone to bottom feeding-- you are mistaken from the very outset. The Communist Party does not wait for startups, demand, financiers, or any other "market forces" to act. They order entire economic sectors to be created, dismantled and transformed overnight. And it has made them the richest country in the world.
That's what the Japanese are facing here, and that's what the rest of the world is going to have to face up to as well. If you think a little mine in a mountain pass is going to change things, then you're just another free market crazy barking at the invisible hand of the moon.
Sounds to me like they're contentious people who can't bring themselves to write HTML improperly..... Then again they are engaged in a bout of negative advertising.
Yes; like a cheap whore, the average Slashdot editor will accept just about any sentence in a submission, no matter how mangled. Doesn't Taco understand the needs of his audience. Nothing says "sexy" to the average Grammar-Trooper like a sultry "World's most Horny" in a headline.
Can someone explain this to me? Do insulators have some kind of shape or feature or position that awakens some kind of primal instinct or something? Are people somehow compelled to shoot them down? Should they be painted a special colour or something, because it seems that people cannot be relied upon to resist the urge to shoot them down.
This is Slashdot and I'm prefectly comfortable with having a discussion, but there is a lot of blind hatred that came out in this thread against gun owners that was being modded very high and was really rather vitriolic.
Gun control is an American Culture Wars sub-topic. For any such topics: Religion/Science, status of women/minorities, drugs, health care, military policy, race, abortion, guns, etc, etc, in any public forum, there is going to be a bitter, hyperbolic, and heated flame war in threads of any significant size. Often these discussions will diverge considerably from the main topic--in this case the damaged cables.
There are two cause for this. The first and most obvious is that American's are a deeply divided nation, having two rival Culture War camps who have been bickering endlessly since at least the 1960s on just about every topic. The second reason is that many--often non-Americans--try to debate these sub-topics independently of the wider Culture War, which only heats things up even more as to the most heated debaters, they are simply avoiding the real issues and presenting irrelevant academic disquisitions.
Unfortunately, these kinds of discussions are a chronic problem on most English speaking boards. American sites like Slashdot are obvious, but what's worse is how these pointless tit-for-tat squabbles have caught on outside the US. Reading Non-USian discussions on gun-control/abortion/religion these days is a lot like watching young children discuss sex. Whatever conclusions they reach are likely naive and/or useless as fundamentally they have no real understanding or even conception of the true issues giving rise to these debates; namely the deep domestic divisions in a foreign country.
Basically, my point is that these backwards and forwards bickerings on gun-control or the like are pointless without discussing the elephants in the room: American race relations, religious tensions, and socio-sexual culture (wow I feel like a humanities student), among other things. Talking about the individual rights, crime, home defense or any other such sophistry is just chaff to cover the real underlying problems in US society.
So if you're not from the US--and even if you are--be aware that discussions like these are really just discussions of very sensitive issues by proxy; and so should be expected to be heated, and should not be surprised when they become so.
Whatever. You try digging hundreds of kilometers of trenches for cabling in sparsely populated regions to reach perhaps only a few thousand houses or less. Try maintaining those trenches too. Then come back to us.
At the end of the day, poles are surprisingly more robust and resilient and cost effective than people give them credit for. Yes power cuts occur, but they can be fixed promptly if the right systems are in place. I've lived in rural areas for years and while power outages happen (~1 every 2 years), they are usually fixed within a day or perhaps two. Even following nationwide gale-force winds and 100,000 homes without power, the juice is usually back on for almost everyone within a few days. Meanwhile, the state has saved itself billions over the years by not digging expensive trenches under every boreen up and down the country.
This is in Ireland. A small but sparsely populated country on the whole. I cannot fathom what herculean labours North American network engineers have to perform to keep their systems up and running. But even despite the tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and hunting parties, given the scale of the continent I doubt they've given up on poles just yet.
How many PC military style FPS games does America crank out a year? The gameplay is exactly the same in every one. You have a walking camera with an arm (you may or may not have feet) run around a map, shoot pistols/rifles/sniper rifles/rockets randomly at various opponents, shoot them until you eventually get killed and respawn. Then resume running around.
I swear in one of these games, you were attacking these... these 12 YEAR OLDS. Sure they were better than you, but to me this type of game summarizes the classic American PC game. My friend has probably played about 20 of these and every one looks exactly the same except the soldiers are slightly different, the guns have a different names and your main character is a bald unshaven dude instead of a cropped unshaven dude.
In one of the games it simulated a MMO Fight as you had to check an ingame orders list and an in game command structure to get tips and new orders. But other than that, back to the grind, running around getting frags and XP....
What is this? Was this study commissioned by the "Get Off My Lawn Association" or is the US mobile telecom industry really that far behind the rest of the world? This news really is a decade old; I can recall similar numbers coming out in Ireland and the UK back in 2000.
Despite the absurdity of US telecoms pricing schemes, I still can't believe that texting is still some kind of novel phenomena in the US at this late stage. There are kids in deepest Africa, darkest Peru and the wilds of Connemara who know what a text message is by now. The US baby boomers can't possibly still be ignorant of it can they?
Wikipedia is completely different. There, you submit your work in whole and anonymous "referees" proceed to secularly mutate your effort into an intellectual monstrosity of its former self. Nothing is sacred. Some ignoramus actually removed all chemical equations from the Smelting article. At least in peer review, referees simply make suggestions which you yourself implement.
You forgot to add Sentai show. This applies both to the Covenant forces in single player, and the general livery seen in multiplayer.
Personally I think this is the secret sauce. Disparage it all you like, but Halo is one of the few major shooter titles to really flood the screen with a striking spectrum of colour. It's an under-appreciated design choice; Colour is visually interesting element and most modern games are disgracefully desaturated.
Difficulty without frustration is hard to achieve, but modern games do better at it.
I disagree. There can be no real difficulty without some degree of frustration. In order for a game to be truly enjoyable, the player needs to be challenged; forced to improve their gameplay and overcome the obstacle. This can't be done with infinite re-spawns/liberal checkpoints. If you take that route, the game becomes a forgettable "story" experiencing and you've lost the essence of the medium.
Which isn't to say that masochism for its own sake makes for a better game either--Ninja Gaiden is one of the worst offenders in modern times. You see, there's a difference between a Hard Game and a Stupidly Hard Game. Many designers miss this point.
In a Stupidly Hard Game, the computer is incredibly cheap and can essentially hit/kill you at virtually any time no matter what you do. Your fate is largely up to luck. In a simply Hard Game--while things might be difficult--every time you are hit/killed, it will be clear to the player that this occurred because they made a mistake/omission which could have been (reasonably) avoided. The difference is that in one game the difficulty is an ever present obstacle, and the game becomes an exercise in flagellation; in the other, the player is afforded the control and freedom to overcome and ultimately master the difficulty, opening up the true potential of the game.
A good example of a hard game which forced players to improve themselves was Devil May Cry 3. In the beginning, the player had their ass handed to them at every turn, and faced seemingly impossible odds. However, by improving their play and rising to the challenge, the game allows players to complete entire levels on the highest difficulty setting without even being hit, and indeed requires them to in order to obtain the highest level rank. This is a game which was designed to force the player to improve, and it is a better game for it.
Super Mario is such a game, particularly if you consider the Lost Levels. The player faces ever more challenging levels which force them to improve their gameplay, all while staying within the relatively simple initial framework. Though composed of simple elements, the gameplay is in fact quite deep and forcing the player to improve themselves and explore this depth improves the game immensely. Consider for example the Star and Special levels in Super Mario World. Without these (at times nigh impossible) levels, the game would not hold the charm it does for many, and unofficial expansions like Kazio and Infinite Mario would probably not exist because people would be unaware of the depth on offer in the game.
But open up such depth, the player must be challenged, and that means they must place themselves at risk and yes, experience some degree of frustration. There's a balancing act here, but lean too far away from frustration and you end up with a game like Dead Space which, while technically difficult, gave checkpoints so freely that it could conceivably be reduced to a game of trial and error.
He's perfectly free to say it. But he has to deal with the consequences. The government isn't saying a word about it. It's his peers and employer that are upset. And he'll face their wrath, as it should be.
Nice idea. But if you look into the history of--just for the sake of argument--Nazi Germany, you'll find that especially in the early days the government itself rarely interfered or intervened against dissenters. If you tried to exercise your freedom of speech, you would simply have a squad of SA goons or the like accost you on the street or at your house. Government officialdom was rarely directly involved.
And yes, many of them would be your peers or indeed employers. In fact, that's probably the point of your post. Social and financial control can and should be exerted to stifle dissent. You are only as free as far as you can face the unpleasant consequences of being so. Funny how majorities and those with money never seem to have faces such repercussions isn't it?
There must be other ways to transmit TV these days, so they should free a lot of those frequencies for use by wireless networks.
Well, as long as you're not too concerned about signal range, graceful degradation, patents, and codec artefacts, then yes digital TV is another method of transmitting television signals. In addition, all those shiny new wireless networks will be leased out by the government for big cash payments to private companies who will in turn gouge you and your neighbours for the use of those formerly public radio bands. And on top of all that, to compensate you for the loss of your old TV stations, other private companies can charge you even more money for providing you with your old channels--at a lesser, encoded quality of course--plus hundreds of other awful channels you never even wanted in the first place. And in addition, because of all the new channel competition, you can look forwards to longer, louder ads on every channel you watch as well as reduced program quality in an effort to keep costs down.
So there are "other" methods of transmitting television these days. I'm not sure I would call them "better" except perhaps in a loose technical sense, However, I'm sure most companies and governments who will reap handsome management bonuses would naturally disagree with my assessment. And that's before we even get to the usual Geek technical/religious debates. With respect to these parties, my current position is that our national TV broadcasting regime(I'm not in the US) is perfectly satisfactory and does not require anything like the kind of technical and organizational upheaval that is being proposed.
Then again, if you live in a country without a national broadcaster, I suppose your mileage really would vary.
On French motorways at least, the speed limit changes for different weather conditions. 130kph in clear weather vs 110kph in wet conditions if I remember correctly.
Slashdot Mirror
If I has a book like this in my youth, I have little doubt that I'd be a chemist today.
As it turns out, all I had were videogames and spirographs sets, so I became a mathematician.
Correct. How stupid some kids can be. And right now, we're letting those stupid kids ruin educational opportunities for the three generations surrounding them. But really the fault is with us, not the stupid kids; Their only fault is being jackasses. We're the ones who are collectively punishing others who aren't at fault in any way.
Ironically, the reason is that their customers are actually paying 15 a month for WoW, etc, and would probably be treated a lot better if they weren't paying anything at all.
The companies receiving this money view you as a regular source of income and treat you accordingly--monetizing their cash cows to the fullest, and generally treating them like bovine chattels instead of paying customers. Such is modern business.
However, for some of us still play games at home, offline, by ourselves. Sure it doesn't really pop up on the radar of big corporations, but we're still here. And our gaming really is an escape, in the same sense as reading a book or a walk in the park; a private activity which we can enjoy without the maligning effects of commercialisation.
The essential irony here is that by choosing to pay for a regular service, online gamers are actually setting themselves up for worse treatment that offline/freeplay gamers who simply make one of purchases at a shop and don't participate in (paid) multiplayer. By paying with credit cards, etc, they enter willingly--if unwittingly--into a commercialised sphere where they are viewed as company assets to be controlled, protected and exploited. It's the philosophy of modern business, and as the company running the largest paid MMO in the world Blizzard are following it to the letter.
Contrast Blizzard's behaviour with Real ID and their paying customers, to Valve's attitude to their non-paying Steam customers. Steam is even larger than Battle.net, yet nothing like RealID exists or was even proposed by Valve at any stage. The relationship between Valve and Steam users is far more informal (and indeed healthier) and I would argue that this stems from the lack of paid subscription in Valve's flagship multiplayer titles. If you cheat in WoW, you get banned. Cheat in TF2, and they take away your hats. Another good pair to compare and contrast here is Xbox live and PSN.
So, if you want Blizzard to treat you better, the long term solution is to stop paying them a regular subscription, and change your online relationship with them back to that of an informal "fan", rather than a formal "customer". Gaming should be a fun pastime, and not a commercial relationship.
Behold!; The West.
With Convict-225 as his Chewbacca.
That great; great that that's workin' out for ya'. Some of us though, think that NAT is the fucking devil, and would prefer an alternative solution. Preferably one that doesn't involve custom exceptions for every second application on our networks.
I'll take the Hubble Space Telescope and the myriad of other LEO scientific/communication satellites over your pie-in-the-sky Buck Rogers fantasies any day of the week.
You know, legality and morality are two different things. Ethicality is a third. Just because something is legal, that doesn't make it the right, correct or civic thing to do.
So, even if the ISPs are following the law to the letter in this, I think selling customer data this way is wrong--massively wrong. This is a huge breach of customer trust, and for nothing but greed besides. The corporate model fails society yet again.
I don't think NoScipt works in IE.
That elitist! Even people who want to give up their freedoms are still entitled to them! Unless they get what they want, in which case no-one is.
But what's important is that everyone is equal... and safe. That's what matters.
I wouldn't be too sure of that mine reopening. If China's state run economy has proved one thing it's that the free-market unmanaged economies of the West will time and again fail to even comprehend the forces arrayed against them. Narrow minded "Market Based" thinking is exactly what got us into this single supplier problem and naively thinking it will get us out is well... naive.
Whatever you think the "free-market" will do to get us out of this mess, the Chinese economic mega-complex has already considered three moves in advance and is working to counter it. People don't seem to understand that China-Inc is essentially the world greatest ever hyper-corporation: millions of companies, thousands of major corporations, and hundreds of banks all working under one overall direction and policy. Just about every trick you'd expect a major-corporation to pull can and has been considered, strategised and implemented by the this acutely self aware market entity.
Before anyone begins, this isn't some kind of bigoted post. What's really going on here is that the Chinese Communist Party has developed(invented really) a state controlled, capitalism driven, centrally managed and wholly unified economy; and it's as powerful an apparatus as you'd expect. It's one of the biggest civil and economic developments in world history. And if you expect this electric dragon--a vast, powerful and above all self aware economy under the control of a central brain--to act like your traditionally lauded free market fungus-like economies--efficient, large or small, but hopelessly undirected and prone to bottom feeding-- you are mistaken from the very outset. The Communist Party does not wait for startups, demand, financiers, or any other "market forces" to act. They order entire economic sectors to be created, dismantled and transformed overnight. And it has made them the richest country in the world.
That's what the Japanese are facing here, and that's what the rest of the world is going to have to face up to as well. If you think a little mine in a mountain pass is going to change things, then you're just another free market crazy barking at the invisible hand of the moon.
Sounds to me like they're contentious people who can't bring themselves to write HTML improperly. .... Then again they are engaged in a bout of negative advertising.
Yes; like a cheap whore, the average Slashdot editor will accept just about any sentence in a submission, no matter how mangled. Doesn't Taco understand the needs of his audience. Nothing says "sexy" to the average Grammar-Trooper like a sultry "World's most Horny" in a headline.
Can someone explain this to me? Do insulators have some kind of shape or feature or position that awakens some kind of primal instinct or something? Are people somehow compelled to shoot them down? Should they be painted a special colour or something, because it seems that people cannot be relied upon to resist the urge to shoot them down.
Gun control is an American Culture Wars sub-topic. For any such topics: Religion/Science, status of women/minorities, drugs, health care, military policy, race, abortion, guns, etc, etc, in any public forum, there is going to be a bitter, hyperbolic, and heated flame war in threads of any significant size. Often these discussions will diverge considerably from the main topic--in this case the damaged cables.
There are two cause for this. The first and most obvious is that American's are a deeply divided nation, having two rival Culture War camps who have been bickering endlessly since at least the 1960s on just about every topic. The second reason is that many--often non-Americans--try to debate these sub-topics independently of the wider Culture War, which only heats things up even more as to the most heated debaters, they are simply avoiding the real issues and presenting irrelevant academic disquisitions.
Unfortunately, these kinds of discussions are a chronic problem on most English speaking boards. American sites like Slashdot are obvious, but what's worse is how these pointless tit-for-tat squabbles have caught on outside the US. Reading Non-USian discussions on gun-control/abortion/religion these days is a lot like watching young children discuss sex. Whatever conclusions they reach are likely naive and/or useless as fundamentally they have no real understanding or even conception of the true issues giving rise to these debates; namely the deep domestic divisions in a foreign country.
Basically, my point is that these backwards and forwards bickerings on gun-control or the like are pointless without discussing the elephants in the room: American race relations, religious tensions, and socio-sexual culture (wow I feel like a humanities student), among other things. Talking about the individual rights, crime, home defense or any other such sophistry is just chaff to cover the real underlying problems in US society.
So if you're not from the US--and even if you are--be aware that discussions like these are really just discussions of very sensitive issues by proxy; and so should be expected to be heated, and should not be surprised when they become so.
Whatever. You try digging hundreds of kilometers of trenches for cabling in sparsely populated regions to reach perhaps only a few thousand houses or less. Try maintaining those trenches too. Then come back to us.
At the end of the day, poles are surprisingly more robust and resilient and cost effective than people give them credit for. Yes power cuts occur, but they can be fixed promptly if the right systems are in place. I've lived in rural areas for years and while power outages happen (~1 every 2 years), they are usually fixed within a day or perhaps two. Even following nationwide gale-force winds and 100,000 homes without power, the juice is usually back on for almost everyone within a few days. Meanwhile, the state has saved itself billions over the years by not digging expensive trenches under every boreen up and down the country.
This is in Ireland. A small but sparsely populated country on the whole. I cannot fathom what herculean labours North American network engineers have to perform to keep their systems up and running. But even despite the tornados, earthquakes, hurricanes, floods and hunting parties, given the scale of the continent I doubt they've given up on poles just yet.
How many PC military style FPS games does America crank out a year? The gameplay is exactly the same in every one. You have a walking camera with an arm (you may or may not have feet) run around a map, shoot pistols/rifles/sniper rifles/rockets randomly at various opponents, shoot them until you eventually get killed and respawn. Then resume running around.
I swear in one of these games, you were attacking these... these 12 YEAR OLDS. Sure they were better than you, but to me this type of game summarizes the classic American PC game. My friend has probably played about 20 of these and every one looks exactly the same except the soldiers are slightly different, the guns have a different names and your main character is a bald unshaven dude instead of a cropped unshaven dude.
In one of the games it simulated a MMO Fight as you had to check an ingame orders list and an in game command structure to get tips and new orders. But other than that, back to the grind, running around getting frags and XP....
You need to make them out of Steel--or Bauxite.
What is this? Was this study commissioned by the "Get Off My Lawn Association" or is the US mobile telecom industry really that far behind the rest of the world? This news really is a decade old; I can recall similar numbers coming out in Ireland and the UK back in 2000.
Despite the absurdity of US telecoms pricing schemes, I still can't believe that texting is still some kind of novel phenomena in the US at this late stage. There are kids in deepest Africa, darkest Peru and the wilds of Connemara who know what a text message is by now. The US baby boomers can't possibly still be ignorant of it can they?
Wikipedia is completely different. There, you submit your work in whole and anonymous "referees" proceed to secularly mutate your effort into an intellectual monstrosity of its former self. Nothing is sacred. Some ignoramus actually removed all chemical equations from the Smelting article. At least in peer review, referees simply make suggestions which you yourself implement.
You forgot to add Sentai show. This applies both to the Covenant forces in single player, and the general livery seen in multiplayer.
Personally I think this is the secret sauce. Disparage it all you like, but Halo is one of the few major shooter titles to really flood the screen with a striking spectrum of colour. It's an under-appreciated design choice; Colour is visually interesting element and most modern games are disgracefully desaturated.
I disagree. There can be no real difficulty without some degree of frustration. In order for a game to be truly enjoyable, the player needs to be challenged; forced to improve their gameplay and overcome the obstacle. This can't be done with infinite re-spawns/liberal checkpoints. If you take that route, the game becomes a forgettable "story" experiencing and you've lost the essence of the medium.
Which isn't to say that masochism for its own sake makes for a better game either--Ninja Gaiden is one of the worst offenders in modern times. You see, there's a difference between a Hard Game and a Stupidly Hard Game. Many designers miss this point.
In a Stupidly Hard Game, the computer is incredibly cheap and can essentially hit/kill you at virtually any time no matter what you do. Your fate is largely up to luck. In a simply Hard Game--while things might be difficult--every time you are hit/killed, it will be clear to the player that this occurred because they made a mistake/omission which could have been (reasonably) avoided. The difference is that in one game the difficulty is an ever present obstacle, and the game becomes an exercise in flagellation; in the other, the player is afforded the control and freedom to overcome and ultimately master the difficulty, opening up the true potential of the game.
A good example of a hard game which forced players to improve themselves was Devil May Cry 3. In the beginning, the player had their ass handed to them at every turn, and faced seemingly impossible odds. However, by improving their play and rising to the challenge, the game allows players to complete entire levels on the highest difficulty setting without even being hit, and indeed requires them to in order to obtain the highest level rank. This is a game which was designed to force the player to improve, and it is a better game for it.
Super Mario is such a game, particularly if you consider the Lost Levels. The player faces ever more challenging levels which force them to improve their gameplay, all while staying within the relatively simple initial framework. Though composed of simple elements, the gameplay is in fact quite deep and forcing the player to improve themselves and explore this depth improves the game immensely. Consider for example the Star and Special levels in Super Mario World. Without these (at times nigh impossible) levels, the game would not hold the charm it does for many, and unofficial expansions like Kazio and Infinite Mario would probably not exist because people would be unaware of the depth on offer in the game.
But open up such depth, the player must be challenged, and that means they must place themselves at risk and yes, experience some degree of frustration. There's a balancing act here, but lean too far away from frustration and you end up with a game like Dead Space which, while technically difficult, gave checkpoints so freely that it could conceivably be reduced to a game of trial and error.
Nice idea. But if you look into the history of--just for the sake of argument--Nazi Germany, you'll find that especially in the early days the government itself rarely interfered or intervened against dissenters. If you tried to exercise your freedom of speech, you would simply have a squad of SA goons or the like accost you on the street or at your house. Government officialdom was rarely directly involved.
And yes, many of them would be your peers or indeed employers. In fact, that's probably the point of your post. Social and financial control can and should be exerted to stifle dissent. You are only as free as far as you can face the unpleasant consequences of being so. Funny how majorities and those with money never seem to have faces such repercussions isn't it?
Well, as long as you're not too concerned about signal range, graceful degradation, patents, and codec artefacts, then yes digital TV is another method of transmitting television signals. In addition, all those shiny new wireless networks will be leased out by the government for big cash payments to private companies who will in turn gouge you and your neighbours for the use of those formerly public radio bands. And on top of all that, to compensate you for the loss of your old TV stations, other private companies can charge you even more money for providing you with your old channels--at a lesser, encoded quality of course--plus hundreds of other awful channels you never even wanted in the first place. And in addition, because of all the new channel competition, you can look forwards to longer, louder ads on every channel you watch as well as reduced program quality in an effort to keep costs down.
So there are "other" methods of transmitting television these days. I'm not sure I would call them "better" except perhaps in a loose technical sense, However, I'm sure most companies and governments who will reap handsome management bonuses would naturally disagree with my assessment. And that's before we even get to the usual Geek technical/religious debates. With respect to these parties, my current position is that our national TV broadcasting regime(I'm not in the US) is perfectly satisfactory and does not require anything like the kind of technical and organizational upheaval that is being proposed.
Then again, if you live in a country without a national broadcaster, I suppose your mileage really would vary.
On French motorways at least, the speed limit changes for different weather conditions. 130kph in clear weather vs 110kph in wet conditions if I remember correctly.