Those things are worthless for practical life or career (voting with stuff on interactive thingy) or simply pointless (teachers blog, really?), so i am afraid you do not have much point. It belongs more into elementary school where you teach 10 year olds about wikis and thats about it.
Best teachers that I met were passionate about their subjects, could sell that passion and had at least some charisma and practical experinece to round it all up. Nothing beats making students dig deep into subject because you convinced them that it is cool. And that is something you can not really put into blog post.
In fact, technology stands in way of that and as it adds layers into communication.
Problem with Achievments is that they are poor extension of gameplay.
Sometimes it feels that developers count on achievments to become substantial part of gameplay and driving force behind players instead of gameplay and/or story.
That achievments are used to pad and extend gameplay very cheaply with little benefit to player: 10 hour adition to content can either consist of 10 hours of solid new content or it can consist of 10 hours worth of achievments over existing content (in extreme case, counter that takes 10 hours to max). Guess what is cheaper to develop and hecnes developed.
I mostly comment on this from perspective of ex-MMO player to whom Achievments serve and naked demonstration of grind and pointlessness and where Achievments bring singleplayer way too close to MMO in their gameplay extension structure for my tastes.
Seccond problem is that achievments are poor extension of player drive.
Why do people need excuse to play game they like? Why they, for example, need number of zombies they kill or disco balls they use tracked and presented? Shouldn't doing whatever they do be fun enough for them to continue doing that without being guided by developers?
Guiding players through playthrought is okay, but guiding them through their OCD/Grind is somewhat questionable (same vein of questionable as mmos which are thinly veiled skinners boxes.).
----
Simply, Achievments: MMO evil in my Single Player.
It is basically same thing that most big companies do to each other: Before you sue us because of patent issues, remember that we hold quite a bit of patents too. Patents that you use. MAD doctrine minus nukes, plus patents.
Chances are, it would be content and not code. If they have good tools and people experienced at using them, it really can be that fast (week is ample time to create modest quest chain in Bethesda engine for example, and i do not expect moroe than modest half an hour mission for each weekly episode).
It is differece between adding new feature to CMS and writing new article.
Furthemore, chances are that they have several team working on different episodes and alternating in releasing. They could as well have two-three-month release cycle.
("most eco friendly", see coal power plant for exact opposite)
Nuclear waste is, unlike other waste
a) Overrrated danger. b) Potentionally valuable fuel.
There are problems with its storage because people are scared of it, hence few want it anywhere near their homes and safety precautions are expensive.
Avaialability is always concern, but unless you have better idea what to do with it... Not to mention that this does not have much to do with ecology.
---
Anyhow, all other options are way less eco friendly. Yeah, lets burn some carbon and ejoy smog. Or no, lets build dams and flood valleys. Maybe solar cells are safe...
Nuclear has yet to do some lasting enviromental damage, and in fact location of worst accident is now better of than ever (thanks to humans moving avay and letting nature take over 20km radius).
Yes, but how else are brittish going to "donate" money to ipod developer nephew of director?
He has to make living, you know... what better way to provide him that giving him project that no-one will really use (and thus noone will complain about if it goes horribly wrong.).
Even with just cities, simila implications are still valid because there are going to be quite a few mechanic changes:
Culture is said to be working differetly -> new borders? Religion is going to be removed -> what about religion buildings and political ties? What about general building not found in new versions?
Somehow, I just can not get excited about this feature at all: Why would I want to play old Civ4 map in brand new Civ 5 instead of starting new game?
Internet "semi expert" is just a myth and self-dellusion.
In order to make meaningfull contribution to any field, you need comperehensive knowledge of subject or else you will fall into traps many have already fallen and walk into dead ends. Not to mention constant need of aditional info that slows you down.
You can obtain skills easily and they will serve you good, but only for shallow usage. You can confuse reading few wikipedia articles with becoming semi-expert, as in truth you just added few bits of trivia to your repertoire.
You can read tutorial for new programing language and start coding small fry utility in less than hour, but small chat with veteran will quickly reveal how much you still have to learn to play with "big boys"
You can become familiar with some historial event in order to understant it causes, impact and context, you will just not be able to hold conversation about it with someone who knows.
In university, our teacher explicitly allowed internet access during exams (as well as cheat sheets and book and notes). He was confident that it would be useless for students and he was true - his tests required understanding of subject rather than memorized facts; anyone who attempted to pass it with google and empty head failed it.
It demostrated rather well what happens when your knowledge of subject is lacking and that applying books/internet to patch it is doomed to fail.
People become zen masters of useless trivia rather than knowledge with net.
This reminds me of "How to bluff about X" (X being classical music or physics or wines) series of pocket books: Quick surge of useless knowledge. Paper form of internet. Anyone wanting more than few keywords and bullet points simply needs to study subject comprehensivelly.
Ain't this fate of most bullied nerds? They get attractive... jobs later. (And opportunity for "lolno, not dating you" to what where popular girls at school)
I can tell you few lines of memorized dialogue which you can remember and repeat to someone else. You can also hear diferent pieces from different people to make your own mental image of screenplay (aka, leech from swarm).
P2P sharing is only different volume and accuracy.
In fact, this sounds like cool experiment: give 100 people each piece of screenplay and let them complete it, p2p style.
Ah, survival eh? Well, I guess if survival is enough for you, goof for you! What exactly do you consider survival anyway? at least one human left? You are guanrateed that.:)
I already mentioned Easter Island. Yeah, they did survive.
When was last time you are food exported from Fertile Crescent? Well, pretty much nothing grows there nowadays. Funny thing, soil. Compeletelly depleted, pretty much worthless and one of poorest areas in world. Those most powerfull contries of world sure survived intact.
Also, Greenland colony says hi, they has no problem for thousand years and were doing just five 500 yeats ago when they overgrazed what little grass they had. (they died out btw)
Henderson Island inhabiants actually did not suvive depletion of their reneweble resources.
Ever heard of Anasazi?
Wonder how come Mayans evacuated their cities? They were kinda hungry...
Hint: Haiti is one of poorest countris in world while Dominican Republic prospers. Haiti cut down all forests and let soil erode. Dominican republic didn't.
You might also be interested in Rwanda Genocide and food production link.
was not exactly great time either. Five years of broken agriculture were enough to have 50 million death consequence. USSR had similar thing to happen too.
There is simply levels of "survival" unacceptable. It is not typical doomsday and unlike doomsday stuff it actually happened, we have eough examples in history to know that damaged enviroment impairs food production. Impaired food production leads to... well... it is not exactly pretty.
Yes, because every single time our ass is in danger, miracle/breaktrough will happen. Right.
In related news, Easter Island had quite a lot of success with "new resource will come along that made all the worrying about the dwindling resource irrelevant." strategy.
There are more examples of this: in Collapse by Jared Diamond, such examples are for Iceland (deforestation & soil degradation, only reason it did not die out was proximity of europe) and Greenland (where farmers simply killed their soil by overgrazing and made wrong choice of meat producing animals).
It is also path Australia is currently heading to (salinized worthless soil).
Curiously eough, there is story of small island that is so far completelly renewable: natives figured out that perfect population is 1007 people and they keep it that way.
* OS security is depended on white hats finding exploits faster than black hats. That is not guaranteed feature and shifts it back to security thou obscurity, even if obscure is in plain sight.
* Most people download OS binaries and not source that they examine and compile themselves. Binary can of course contain evil stuff. There were few issues with forks of p2p clients that included malware but which had sanitized source online. Again, obscurity and illusion of peer-reviewed software.
Remember: ALL security is throught obscurity (you hope attacker does not have knowledge of how to crack system) and is illusion (because you are never guaranteed that he does not have it).
basically, same la-la-la-land of having secure system.
Then you have edonkey family of p2p networks which can work just fine with servers as well as decentralized p2p.
You still need decent link repository to avoid fake poisoning for pretty much every p2p network. Which is vulnurelable target: It can go down, reducing user comfort of network and opening gates to poisoning.
Why don't they then just quit? I mean, you can hunt carrot only for so long before realizing that, yep, i am hunting carrot and i will always be hunting carrot because that is how company turns profit.
I find it amazing that people are taking it so well: First round of quests in first wow expansion basically undone all precious work players did in vanilla by giving up "kill 10 boars" quest rewards beter than stuff that took months to grind. Knowing that once developers release new content, you will be kicked down to average joe level should feel pretty shitty.
---
Anyhow, you can theoretically play Guild Wars as single player, but but us not really average MMO, which coincidentally peaks character power about ~ 10% into game storyline, making it a bit more dependant on "having fun" than "boosting ego"
So, you say that mmos are played by sad people who need constant validation from others and feeling of superiority not to quit?
Hint: There are thousands, maybe million of people who play the same game. If you play it to feel special, well, though luck. You will never be special, but one of crowd. Always one of crowd. Your equipment? The way you play? Achievments? They are being cloned over and over by others. The more hardcore you are, the more cookie cutter ("optimized") you will be even.
Grind is always "do something you have now so that you can do something you find fun later". Of course people are going to value it. People are always in denial over time wasted and it feels better to say they value what they did. You are never going to hear basement dweller say that he raids because he does not have anything better than that to do. And of course you are going to value that sword of epeness because noone would ever want to loose it and regrind it over again.
Simply put, it feels that hardcore-ish mmo players are full of shit when they say how they feel about their achievments or what they do.
Just... accept playing mmo will not make you special. Whatever happened to playing game because it is fun?
Slashdot Mirror
I prefer narrow coridor filled with weapon traps. Most thieves and baby snatchers do not make it past first trap usually.
Those things are worthless for practical life or career (voting with stuff on interactive thingy) or simply pointless (teachers blog, really?), so i am afraid you do not have much point. It belongs more into elementary school where you teach 10 year olds about wikis and thats about it.
Best teachers that I met were passionate about their subjects, could sell that passion and had at least some charisma and practical experinece to round it all up. Nothing beats making students dig deep into subject because you convinced them that it is cool. And that is something you can not really put into blog post.
In fact, technology stands in way of that and as it adds layers into communication.
Problem with Achievments is that they are poor extension of gameplay.
Sometimes it feels that developers count on achievments to become substantial part of gameplay and driving force behind players instead of gameplay and/or story.
That achievments are used to pad and extend gameplay very cheaply with little benefit to player: 10 hour adition to content can either consist of 10 hours of solid new content or it can consist of 10 hours worth of achievments over existing content (in extreme case, counter that takes 10 hours to max). Guess what is cheaper to develop and hecnes developed.
I mostly comment on this from perspective of ex-MMO player to whom Achievments serve and naked demonstration of grind and pointlessness and where Achievments bring singleplayer way too close to MMO in their gameplay extension structure for my tastes.
Seccond problem is that achievments are poor extension of player drive.
Why do people need excuse to play game they like? Why they, for example, need number of zombies they kill or disco balls they use tracked and presented? Shouldn't doing whatever they do be fun enough for them to continue doing that without being guided by developers?
Guiding players through playthrought is okay, but guiding them through their OCD/Grind is somewhat questionable (same vein of questionable as mmos which are thinly veiled skinners boxes.).
----
Simply, Achievments: MMO evil in my Single Player.
It is basically same thing that most big companies do to each other: Before you sue us because of patent issues, remember that we hold quite a bit of patents too. Patents that you use. MAD doctrine minus nukes, plus patents.
Chances are, it would be content and not code. If they have good tools and people experienced at using them, it really can be that fast (week is ample time to create modest quest chain in Bethesda engine for example, and i do not expect moroe than modest half an hour mission for each weekly episode).
It is differece between adding new feature to CMS and writing new article.
Furthemore, chances are that they have several team working on different episodes and alternating in releasing. They could as well have two-three-month release cycle.
("most eco friendly", see coal power plant for exact opposite)
Nuclear waste is, unlike other waste
a) Overrrated danger.
b) Potentionally valuable fuel.
There are problems with its storage because people are scared of it, hence few want it anywhere near their homes and safety precautions are expensive.
Avaialability is always concern, but unless you have better idea what to do with it ... Not to mention that this does not have much to do with ecology.
---
Anyhow, all other options are way less eco friendly. Yeah, lets burn some carbon and ejoy smog. Or no, lets build dams and flood valleys. Maybe solar cells are safe ...
Nuclear has yet to do some lasting enviromental damage, and in fact location of worst accident is now better of than ever (thanks to humans moving avay and letting nature take over 20km radius).
... currently most eco-friendly power source we have actually used instead of being ignored and feared.
Yes, but how else are brittish going to "donate" money to ipod developer nephew of director?
He has to make living, you know ... what better way to provide him that giving him project that no-one will really use (and thus noone will complain about if it goes horribly wrong.).
Well, compared to loved-ones name, tramp mark, tribal nonsense and game character tatoos, this is kind of sane and possibly everlasting.
Still tasteless, mark of sub-average intellect and generally lame, but it is the one least likely to be source of regret.
Even with just cities, simila implications are still valid because there are going to be quite a few mechanic changes:
Culture is said to be working differetly -> new borders?
Religion is going to be removed -> what about religion buildings and political ties?
What about general building not found in new versions?
Somehow, I just can not get excited about this feature at all: Why would I want to play old Civ4 map in brand new Civ 5 instead of starting new game?
And it won't help him. It is just as easy to abduct & trial him regardless of location.
Pretty much every country will either ignore that or will even cooperate.
It is reall shame you can not choose fallout:bos
You might be interested in this: http://fonline2238.blogspot.com/
Internet "semi expert" is just a myth and self-dellusion.
In order to make meaningfull contribution to any field, you need comperehensive knowledge of subject or else you will fall into traps many have already fallen and walk into dead ends. Not to mention constant need of aditional info that slows you down.
You can obtain skills easily and they will serve you good, but only for shallow usage. You can confuse reading few wikipedia articles with becoming semi-expert, as in truth you just added few bits of trivia to your repertoire.
You can read tutorial for new programing language and start coding small fry utility in less than hour, but small chat with veteran will quickly reveal how much you still have to learn to play with "big boys"
You can become familiar with some historial event in order to understant it causes, impact and context, you will just not be able to hold conversation about it with someone who knows.
In university, our teacher explicitly allowed internet access during exams (as well as cheat sheets and book and notes). He was confident that it would be useless for students and he was true - his tests required understanding of subject rather than memorized facts; anyone who attempted to pass it with google and empty head failed it.
It demostrated rather well what happens when your knowledge of subject is lacking and that applying books/internet to patch it is doomed to fail.
People become zen masters of useless trivia rather than knowledge with net.
This reminds me of "How to bluff about X" (X being classical music or physics or wines) series of pocket books: Quick surge of useless knowledge. Paper form of internet. Anyone wanting more than few keywords and bullet points simply needs to study subject comprehensivelly.
Of course, he is lawyer now.
Ain't this fate of most bullied nerds? They get attractive ... jobs later. (And opportunity for "lolno, not dating you" to what where popular girls at school)
Silly. Of course it has: Verbal Communication.
I can tell you few lines of memorized dialogue which you can remember and repeat to someone else. You can also hear diferent pieces from different people to make your own mental image of screenplay (aka, leech from swarm).
P2P sharing is only different volume and accuracy.
In fact, this sounds like cool experiment: give 100 people each piece of screenplay and let them complete it, p2p style.
Lat time I read about it was how some "patients" were beaten to death. One wonders what will happen to escapees ...
Ah, survival eh? Well, I guess if survival is enough for you, goof for you! What exactly do you consider survival anyway? at least one human left? You are guanrateed that. :)
I already mentioned Easter Island. Yeah, they did survive.
When was last time you are food exported from Fertile Crescent? Well, pretty much nothing grows there nowadays. Funny thing, soil. Compeletelly depleted, pretty much worthless and one of poorest areas in world. Those most powerfull contries of world sure survived intact.
Also, Greenland colony says hi, they has no problem for thousand years and were doing just five 500 yeats ago when they overgrazed what little grass they had. (they died out btw)
Henderson Island inhabiants actually did not suvive depletion of their reneweble resources.
Ever heard of Anasazi?
Wonder how come Mayans evacuated their cities? They were kinda hungry...
Hint: Haiti is one of poorest countris in world while Dominican Republic prospers. Haiti cut down all forests and let soil erode. Dominican republic didn't.
You might also be interested in Rwanda Genocide and food production link.
was not exactly great time either. Five years of broken agriculture were enough to have 50 million death consequence. USSR had similar thing to happen too.
There is simply levels of "survival" unacceptable. It is not typical doomsday and unlike doomsday stuff it actually happened, we have eough examples in history to know that damaged enviroment impairs food production. Impaired food production leads to ... well ... it is not exactly pretty.
Yeah, I am agriculture geek. Rarest of kind.
Yes, because every single time our ass is in danger, miracle/breaktrough will happen. Right.
In related news, Easter Island had quite a lot of success with "new resource will come along that made all the worrying about the dwindling resource irrelevant." strategy.
There are more examples of this: in Collapse by Jared Diamond, such examples are for Iceland (deforestation & soil degradation, only reason it did not die out was proximity of europe) and Greenland (where farmers simply killed their soil by overgrazing and made wrong choice of meat producing animals).
It is also path Australia is currently heading to (salinized worthless soil).
Curiously eough, there is story of small island that is so far completelly renewable: natives figured out that perfect population is 1007 people and they keep it that way.
Two points:
* OS security is depended on white hats finding exploits faster than black hats. That is not guaranteed feature and shifts it back to security thou obscurity, even if obscure is in plain sight.
* Most people download OS binaries and not source that they examine and compile themselves. Binary can of course contain evil stuff. There were few issues with forks of p2p clients that included malware but which had sanitized source online. Again, obscurity and illusion of peer-reviewed software.
Remember: ALL security is throught obscurity (you hope attacker does not have knowledge of how to crack system) and is illusion (because you are never guaranteed that he does not have it).
basically, same la-la-la-land of having secure system.
Then you have edonkey family of p2p networks which can work just fine with servers as well as decentralized p2p.
You still need decent link repository to avoid fake poisoning for pretty much every p2p network. Which is vulnurelable target: It can go down, reducing user comfort of network and opening gates to poisoning.
Why don't they then just quit? I mean, you can hunt carrot only for so long before realizing that, yep, i am hunting carrot and i will always be hunting carrot because that is how company turns profit.
I find it amazing that people are taking it so well: First round of quests in first wow expansion basically undone all precious work players did in vanilla by giving up "kill 10 boars" quest rewards beter than stuff that took months to grind. Knowing that once developers release new content, you will be kicked down to average joe level should feel pretty shitty.
---
Anyhow, you can theoretically play Guild Wars as single player, but but us not really average MMO, which coincidentally peaks character power about ~ 10% into game storyline, making it a bit more dependant on "having fun" than "boosting ego"
So, you say that mmos are played by sad people who need constant validation from others and feeling of superiority not to quit?
Hint: There are thousands, maybe million of people who play the same game. If you play it to feel special, well, though luck. You will never be special, but one of crowd. Always one of crowd. Your equipment? The way you play? Achievments? They are being cloned over and over by others. The more hardcore you are, the more cookie cutter ("optimized") you will be even.
Grind is always "do something you have now so that you can do something you find fun later". Of course people are going to value it. People are always in denial over time wasted and it feels better to say they value what they did. You are never going to hear basement dweller say that he raids because he does not have anything better than that to do. And of course you are going to value that sword of epeness because noone would ever want to loose it and regrind it over again.
Simply put, it feels that hardcore-ish mmo players are full of shit when they say how they feel about their achievments or what they do.
Just ... accept playing mmo will not make you special. Whatever happened to playing game because it is fun?
Obligatory version of video that is actually cool: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HePWBNcugf8&feature=related