Ah but I think Americans also distinguish between criticism of their Government by other Americans and criticism by foreigners. There is also the distinction between criticizing the Government and the System.
Pretty much every American seems willing to accept that their Government is not perfect and needs constant correction to keep to the right path; that its capable of corruption etc.
Pretty much every American I have met or talked with seems to think that in general their government system is the best possible option over other systems - and many seem to assign almost religious overtones to the US Constitution, like it was handed down to them from the hands of Jehovah himself.
If a game came out that portrayed the US Government as a malevolent system that dominated and abused its population, that portrayed the Constitution as a scheme/tool that permitted that domination, and which showed the US Government rounding up civilians both at home and abroad and slaughtering them in concentration camps - and encouraged you to support this view of the US by participating, I think that US gameplayers and the US Government might have some objections (although some would love it of course). I agree that they would likely founder on the rights of free speech mind you, but someone would be speaking up. There is a distinction between portraying individual Americans as evil and portraying the system as evil.
Now, I don't think that the US Government or the US Constitution are in fact evil. I do think that Corporations are inherently immoral, and that they have far too much control over the machinations of the Government (in some ways they appear to be the Government effectively). The truth of the situation is somewhere in between I think.
The US seems to be a complete dichotomy with regards to its Empire. Inside the US, the citizens struggle to maintain democracy and the laws of their constitution against those who want to restrict and change them. They support the rule of law (although of course differ on what that means), and are very concerned with the rights of their individual citizens. Its a fascinating process to watch (I am Canadian).
Outside the US, anything goes and the Munroe Doctrine supports that. While usually US foreign policy is explained away as a desire to spread the virtues of Democracy (and the American Way(tm)) to other nations, the reality is that the US has usually acted to support US companies in other countries, and well, if democracy breaks out, so much the better. So the US has supported a horde of South American dictators who abused their people, supported those who later turned out to be terrorists, and generally run roughshod over the rights of other nations and peoples in a cavalier manner that belies the principles they supposedly hold dear. Right now the US is an Empire, like it or not. Rather than compare it to the British or other Colonial empires though, I think the empire of ancient Athens is a closer match. Athens had the first democracy for its citizens, but relied in many ways on slave labour (nowadays thats third world workers, illegal immigrants) to maintain its strong standard of living, and it controlled city-states all over the Mediterranean (nowadays the largest buildup of foreign military bases ever built by any nation in history) that it could use to suppress rival powers. By and large the actions of the US are directed at securing economic stability and control over resources. If that means they need to invade somewhere to achieve those goals, historically that's what tends to happen. Of course the US has also abrogated to itself the role of the World's Policeman.
Now, don't mistake me, I understand this process I think, and I don't entirely disapprove. I just wish sometimes that you could call a spade a spade and avoid the obfuscation. "We are invading Iraq because we need to secure control over the oil in that area", "We are not stopping the genocide in Rwanda because there are no resources there, and well, the people are black", "We are invading the Dominican Republic because the interests of US Sugar are threatened", etc.
Some of the many conflicts the US has gotten involved in were entirely justified in my opinion of course, Afghanistan where Canada is heavily involved for instance. I think rooting out the Taliban and breaking their control over the people there can only be a good thing for the people of Afghanistan and the world in general.
According to Wikipedia at least: "Progress in decipherment continues at a rapid pace today, and it is generally agreed by scholars that over 90 percent of the Maya texts can now be read with reasonable accuracy."
Its not as evolved as our understanding of Egyptian perhaps but its well on its way. As far as I recall the Mayan languages spoken by present day Maya have not changed a lot either and thus would be of substantial help in deciphering the scripts.
The idea that someone could own the copyright to a piece of music that consists entirely of silence, is an excellent example of just how fucking stupid the copyright/IP situation has gotten. The fact that someone could be successfully sued for a 6-figure damage total over such an issue should be a screaming indicator telling people just how stupid this is.
Its tantamount to my selling an empty paperback novel - all blank pages - and then suing someone because they included whitespace in their book and I am claiming copyright infringement - I can even point to the specific quotes in their work to prove their guilt.
Now, I can see that there was an association with Cage's original work in that this was a track of silence, and Batt had accredited the work to "Batt/Cage", thus bringing up the association, but how is this not considered to be for comedic purposes, ie fair use? It was a stupid thing to do for the band in retrospect but the idea of copyrighting silence is so extremely ridiculous in the first place, I think its understandable.
I wonder how far this can go before even the average person on the street is upset enough to revolt and do something? Or have we reached the point where we are all so comfortable as sheep that nothing will get a reaction?
to look for voters who picked their dummy vote (and thus can't confirm their real vote), and switches their real vote to favour a particular candidate of their choosing. Now we have a specific candidate getting all the votes from those who want to confirm to their bosses (or whoever) that they voted for Candidate X (or Proposition X) actually appearing to vote for that candidate according to the system. The system has to track which you picked doesn't it? It has to know which to display when you enter your hash code.
I like the system we have up here in Canada: vote on a paper slip, stick it in a box. It gets counted and the results are reported in. Its all invigilated by members from various parties to ensure its accuracy - and most important of all, attempting to game the system is extremely difficult because it requires a lot of willing participants scattered over multiple polling stations etc. And of course, you have paper ballots that are physical evidence and much harder to fake. Its not impossible to cheat of course, but it takes more effort. Relying on software to tally votes just means the cheater can focus solely on vulnerabilities in the software - and we are all well aware of just how vulnerable software can be here on/., whether its unintentionally or intentionally on the part of the vendor.
Might it be possible to assign each voter a randomized hash on a strip of sticky tape that gets stuck to each ballot before the user votes? Its not necessary to relate the assigned code to the name in any way, just to give the ability to confirm that the hash code is valid and was assigned to this election. Then when you go to scan the results you can feed the hash codes through a very simple scanner to confirm that the vote is a legal one? Of course, then we are back to software again. Forget it:P
I have tried several different consoles and always ended up selling them (XBox,PS3,Wii) because the gameplay is completely underwhelming overall. This is just another console title, and as such leaves me completely uninterested.
PC Gaming is inherently superior, the games tend to be more challenging and complex (because the interface for them makes that possible) and the idea of MMO gaming on an console is just full of suck IMHO.
Call me a dinosaur or whatever, I really don't understand the attraction to consoles at all. I have played them and the most enjoyable game I can think of (the one that had me playing it the most) was downhill skiing on the Wii. Halo I finished with a friend in 18 hrs of straight gameplay, but having finished it had no desire to ever touch it again. Assassin's Creed I don't think I got past the tutorial. Consoles, meh. I would rather get my teeth cleaned that touch another one.
The Crafting system is definitely the best in any MMO I have seen. Literally anything can be made and sold if you can find other users who want to buy it, and if the item in question doesn't exist, the system is flexible enough to allow you to create it yourself. Some items are banned though, and there can be severe penalties for attempting to produce or sell them - although in some cases if you have secured a position with an in game guild (called a "Corporation" in Nature Online terminology, or a "Government" in some cases (although usually Corporation own Governments, its complex)), you can get away with it due to guilds have superior rights in game over individual player characters. Actually Nature Online is really quite cutting edge with regards to the player created content aspect of the game. Pretty much everything in game is player-created. The PvP system is quite evolved, can be highly stressful, and quite well supported. Perma-death does tend to decrease player willingness to participate in PvP however. The fact that PvP can theoretically break out anywhere at any time does lend a certain frisson to the game for some people, although often the likelihood of such impromptu PvP, or even dueling (which has gone out of fashion amongst players) can be determined by the zone you are in. Oh, yeah, zoning. The Zoning system is perfect, there is literally no noticeable difference when you zone from one area to another. Communications can be a problem. There are great communications tools available (although strangely no universal guild chat of any kind), but while spatial/local chat is free, virtually every other type of chat costs the player "money" (the term for credits/gold in the game). Its quite common for players to complain about the maintenance periods in an MMO. Virtually every MMO requires some downtime to do maintenance on the system, but players often find it extremely annoying that they can't play during this period. NO has solved this with a unique approach - each player character regularly undergoes a downtime for maintenance - often as much as 8 hours per day - but the whole system remains running at all times. This asymmetrical approach to server maintenance means that each individual can choose the time for their downtime maintenance, and its even flexible enough to allow you to break the roughly 8 hours required up into smaller periods stretched out over the day (although this is not recommended) or even to skip nightly maintenance entirely - although this can end up in resulting in a longer maintenance period the following day, and if repeated too many times in a row can result in distorted graphics, lag and lowered response times in many areas of the game. Overall Nature Online is a superior title and one that many MMO players should investigate more (although virtually all of them have one of the free accounts you recieve if you are lucky enough to be invited to the game, many do not participate beyond the minimums required to get started). It does have a long learning curve. It does have permadeath (although as noted above some people believe you do get a new account at a later date, some people believe you end up in new secret projects that are perhaps in beta at the moment. Its all based on wild player speculations, so take it with a grain of salt). It does have the most unique and engaging new player creation system ever devised, which allows 2 players to create a new account that will be handed out to a random recipient. In fact this system is so much fun many players engage in it just for the enjoyment of the process - sometimes even to the degree that they ignore the actual requirement that both players cannot be of the same "gender" (an obscure classification of character sub-type that is one of the things you can't choose when you are spawned). If for no other reason I highly suggest you explore this subsystem of the game, it really is unrivaled by any other system in any other MMO, period. Its even better than PvP for most players! My personal ratings for Nature On
Gotta echo this, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is to my mind his best work, and bound to create a bit of controversy amongst students, paving the way to getting a conversation started on the subject. Its not hard to read, has a lot of good action in it, and raises a lot of interesting points that challenge our current societies' accepted norms.
In the sense that while you have it and pay for it, it feels like a waste of time and money, but when you really need it it, its too late if you didn't get it already:P I am always amazed at the number of places that I have worked that put reasonable security measures in place but then let them be defeated by bad employee practices. The most common would be instances where multiple users share the same password on some machine or application on a machine because it was too difficult to remember the password for multiple people, so they use a common password instead. And the number of places where the password is of course written down on a sticky note stuck to the computer. People view security as a nuisance mostly, and are quite willing to bypass it if it gets in the way of convenience. We need a better solution than username/password combos, because people are unreliable if something is inconvenient.
Before anyone starts snarking on the NGE and what it did to the game, let me start by noting I was there at release (day 2, since no one could log in on day 1), I was there during the CU, and I was there for the horrid NGE experience (just after my birthday too, sigh). I know all about the old game, and the stages it went through after that. The NGE was a horrid idea, pretty much the poster child for how *not* to make changes to your MMO. The person who promulgated it should have been taken outside and shot dead for suggesting it. However, I just wanted to note that the game is still alive, still will have 13 servers *after* they close the other half, still has lots of players (particularly Starsider server) and is still functional. Its not great everywhere, but its functional, and they are still making improvements to it. They have a great team of developers who are producing some neat improvements and fixing a lot of old problems. Its still got a fantastic economic system, a crafting system that is hands-down better than anything in any other MMO I have tried, and its still the most sandboxy game I can think of (other than potentially EVE, which I haven't played). Actually make that the only sandboxy MMO we have left (yes, other than EVE), the rest of them have followed the Way of WOW(tm) like a sad flock of dodos on their way to extinction.
There's very little that's innovative in MMOs these days, but a lot of the more innovative stuff was in the original SWG, and there's still some innovative stuff being added. The game has seen some very good updates added to it (all for free of course) since the NGE hit, and its become a lot more playable. I think someone who had never played the original might enjoy the current version, provided they can get used to the fact that its not quite as hold-yer-hand for you as many modern MMOs are.
The whole look and feel of CO makes it seem like a title designed to be played on a console, not a PC. I was severely disappointed in this title, despite being a big fan of COH/V, because it felt like nothing more than a simplistic console product, aimed at the ADHD crowd. You never seem to stop fighting, everything is a distaster happening now, the whole world is full of a new criminal every 20 feet etc. The simple UI for attacks and blocks was also unimpressive. I am not a console player, I like complex games and I like the control to be had from a mouse and a PC-oriented UI. This game seemed to lack that in spades. It felt like I ought to be using a console controller and I just couldn't shake that.
Now I admit I have a bias against consoles. I have played a lot of them and always lost interest in short order. As a result I lost interest in this game as well, without ever making it out of the tutorial.
I would give it a 3/10 personally. COH was brilliant and I will likely return to playing it at some point, but this simply failed to make the grade.
I think the next big step in MMO design will occur when a company decides to implement a game where there are no levels and there are no classes, just skills you obtain (likely through questing etc). Sure, this already exists in EVE, Planetside (although that's really an MMOFPS and so attracts a different type of user) and likely a few other games, but I haven't seen it in a Fantasy setting, and the Fantasy environment is the 800 lb Gorilla for MMO genres.
Levels as a concept are outdated in my opinion, and now serve only to separate new players from the end-game content reached when you max your character level. Since players are conditioned now to think of that end-game content as the actual focus of the game, they are impatient to get to it. Leveling is thus seen as a "grind" almost universally, regardless of how engaging the gameplay may actually be.
Originally, I think the purpose of levels was two-fold: first, it let a player get used to the game and their class by slowly introducing new skills/powers to them, and letting them combine those powers with their existing ones in a graduated manner; secondly, it served to slow down the character's progress and thus build the "attachment" that is intended to make a player want to continue to subscribe and thus pay the company more. This worked well when the focus of the game was on the leveling process itself, and the end-game (after you have reached the maximum level) was not really much of a focus. Games like EQ with its Raiding at high level and DAOC with its Realm vs Realm PvP at high level changed that, and introduced the concept of the "end-game", and players see that as the primary focus of playing the most games now.
This worked well enough for years, but I think now that players have become generally savvy enough that they can pick up new skills faster than the leveling system allows, and they are focused on the end game as the only viable game, its become time to drop the level (and thus the grind) and introduce a flatter experience curve to MMOs.
EVE's offline learning system is interesting in this regard. You gain skills over time in the real world, as long as you are subscribed. The rest of the time you play the game as best you can given the skills you have. With a good game design (the "end-game" has now become the "game" with a level-less design), this should work quite well, although it does suffer from the problem EVE has: new players can never equal the old players in their skill levels, although diminishing returns should reduce the impact of that.
Planetside's Cert system (described by a player somewhere else in this post), seems to work the same way, if not identically in mechanics (ie its not offline learning). There is a limit to the skills you can pick up, but a new player with Skill X at level Y is the equal of an experienced player with Skill X at level Y. The more experienced player will simply have greater flexibility due to having more skills.
Now, I expect that UO was designed like this based on things I read in the past, and if so it was ahead of its time. Star Wars Galaxies in its original incarnation had the best character design system I can recall, and it worked much this way, with the exception that you could easily ungrind skills and pick up new ones, slowly transforming your character into a different class effectively. This was a very compelling design, and its a shame they tossed it.
From a developer's perspective of course, Levels are a great thing as they ease development and class balancing problems. Same thing with classes, by clearly defining what skills and abilities a character can have at any point in their development, they make it easier for the development staff to create the desired balance. They do nothing for the players outside of this IMHO though. Balancing character skill sets to ensure that the gameplay is fair and equal no matter what skills a player chooses is of course desirable and good game design generally, but to do so at the expense of player enjoyment in game,
I agree, but modern players - awash in the sea of figures concerning WOW's popularity - seem to judge a game's success at launch purely based on the number of subscribers. If that number isn't huge, they condemn the game as having failed. Look at the recent release of Warhammer Online - touted by players to be the next "WOW-killer", even though the publisher stated that was not their focus at all - when it failed to score at least a million subscribers right at release, a lot of players seemed to decide that it had failed completely - based on posts I read in various forums. The game got something like 800k subscribers in the first few weeks. That's a massive success by any rational standards. Yet the reputation it has now is that its dead.
The next title to be tested I think is going to be SWTOR (Star Wars The Old Republic). I am sure it will do very well initially based on impressions in the current SWG forums, and it has an amazing potential given the IP, but if it fails to score literally millions of subscribers when it goes live, it too will be condemned as a failure.
Star Wars Galaxies was considered a massive success when it went live, but reached only 350k or so subscribers at its peak, and has subsequently dropped to about 50k due to a series of disastrous decisions by management and development. Going back further Dark Age of Camelot was a huge success and had a fantastic launch but I don't think it ever broke 300k subscribers.
My point is that the public has gained the perception that any new MMO that doesn't immediately score at least 1m or so subscribers right at launch is completely doomed, and people will abandon it and return to WOW (thus causing what they fortold) regardless of how good the game is in reality, because they don't see the point in investing time and effort into a game that is going to die in the future. That fickleness is contributing to the lack of success for new games in and of itself I think.
Its not success, its not the quality of the game, its not the genre, although all of those things contribute of course as they should - its the perception that the game has failed before its done so that I think will kill new titles. Thats an impossible standard to uphold, and I think represents a huge barrier to any indie MMO title.
Basically, MMO players are sheep - stupid, skittish, and with no memory at all.
No figures to back this up, just my recollection of numbers from reading various posts on the subject, but I believe the game reached a peak of about 350k prior to the NGE (although I have no idea what that was at when the NGE hit), and it has about 50k right now across all servers. For its time it was immensely popular, but the constant inept shifts made by management and designers who really were completely ignorant on the subject of MMO design, decimated the population. The NGE was the single biggest mistake ever made by anyone in MMO design I think. Its the poster child for how to screw your customers, how to alienate them, and how to gain the worst reputation of any company in the industry (probably worse than the folks who failed with Horizons).
All that said, the NGE version is playable, and has improved, and some elements the current dev team have added are truly well designed and implemented. Its still not the game it used to be, but its not bad. And UO aside, its the only Sandbox game on the market I can think of. SWG still has some features that no other game on the market has.
I am not sure I will like SWTOR, as I prefer sandbox style games over having an endless series of quests shoved down my throat like it sounds Bioware is intending, and I am not into the massive raid/loot item scene which I consider a complete waste of time, but I do hope they have the cojones to break with the WOW model and pursue a different game. WOW is poorly designed IMHO (yes, its popular, but primarily because easy is popular to most inexperienced players), and I want to see diversity in design, rather than every company out there "findlandizing" to Blizzard and creating exactly the same game with different art.
"The Computer is your friend! The Computer is always right. The Computer is infallible. Those who challenge the Computer must be exterminated immediately"
[A blue pill pops out of dispenser]
"Please consume the red pill before you, and describe what happens"
I agree. While I see the benefits of a free market economy and Capitalism in general, I think that Corporations being made the equivalent of a citizen (only superior as it turns out) is wrong - primarily because nothing about Capitalism encourages any ethics of any sort - in fact acting unethically is evidently quite rewarding. We need a counter to that, and making those in charge *personally* responsible for the actions of the company is just fine with me.
Its not consistent, its not even well designed I expect, but its a remarkably easy way to learn to manipulate a computer. Learn a bit of HTML first, some CSS, then work on OO PHP and you can accomplish a lot. People will dismiss PHP but there are a lot of very large websites built using it - ones that lots of kids will be familiar with. Follow it up with a second language once you have gotten the basics down pat - Python is likely a very good choice.
Not to put to fine a point on it, companies are supposed to have an established document retention policy that specifies how long they will retain information like email messages. Most email it won't matter but if the contents in any way can be seen as a legal document - i.e. are business related - then destroying them this way might be seen as a deliberate attempt to cover up information by a court. IANAL, but I worked for some in this area, and its remarkably sensitive.
If someone at a company decides to use this tool, unbeknownst to the company and the other party is also using it, then the email becoming garbled and eventually deleted could become a problem should the company ever go to court. The court might require the company to produce a copy of all emails from the company during a given period (say the last 2 years perhaps), and if emails were destroyed in a manner that was not specified by the company retention policy it could cause the court to penalize the company when it fails to produce said emails.
When a company gets sued, its normal for them to place a hold order on the destruction of all documents, so they can't be seen as potentially covering things up. I hope that a tool like Vanish can be toggled to prevent unwarranted destruction, or someone is going to pay big time down the road.
It may seem like a trivial point, until you read of fines in the millions for companies who are unable to produce correspondence they should have preserved legally speaking. Moreover if the garbled email still exists, then the company might be required by the courts to unencrypt it - and if unable to do so, be penalized for that.
Companies *deserve* nothing. After all they are morally completely neutral, and cannot be relied on to have their customer's interests at heart. All they have at heart is their share price, and responsibility to their shareholders.
The person who discovered this hack should have simply warned the company of its existence, providing all the details required to fix the problem, and if after giving them the very generous period of 8 months, nothing has been done, then the whole of the details including the company name and subsidiaries should have been published - preferably somewhere like a full page spread in the NY Times.
As long as companies can continue to shut down embarassing details concerning their irresponsible behaviour, we have a major problem.
I tend to think of corporations - and by extension all of Capitalism - as evil these days. It takes a company going a lot of extra miles to give the impression they wouldn't shoot my grandmother if they thought it would improve their profit margin. Think of all the meaningless deaths and ruined lives that could have been fixed if only some company actually gave a rats flaming ass about public safety.
Perhaps its time to get rid of the Company as a "corporate citizen" and make the CEO's of the company directly responsible and culpable for its actions. Then we might see some responsibility. Oh court costs should have to be paid out of their pockets too:P
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Ah but I think Americans also distinguish between criticism of their Government by other Americans and criticism by foreigners. There is also the distinction between criticizing the Government and the System.
Pretty much every American seems willing to accept that their Government is not perfect and needs constant correction to keep to the right path; that its capable of corruption etc.
Pretty much every American I have met or talked with seems to think that in general their government system is the best possible option over other systems - and many seem to assign almost religious overtones to the US Constitution, like it was handed down to them from the hands of Jehovah himself.
If a game came out that portrayed the US Government as a malevolent system that dominated and abused its population, that portrayed the Constitution as a scheme/tool that permitted that domination, and which showed the US Government rounding up civilians both at home and abroad and slaughtering them in concentration camps - and encouraged you to support this view of the US by participating, I think that US gameplayers and the US Government might have some objections (although some would love it of course). I agree that they would likely founder on the rights of free speech mind you, but someone would be speaking up. There is a distinction between portraying individual Americans as evil and portraying the system as evil.
Now, I don't think that the US Government or the US Constitution are in fact evil. I do think that Corporations are inherently immoral, and that they have far too much control over the machinations of the Government (in some ways they appear to be the Government effectively). The truth of the situation is somewhere in between I think.
And that remaining 10% are going to have a lot of fun before the required exertion kills them :P
See the story of Frank Serpico for what happened in the USA when someone came forth to accuse the system of rampant corruption:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Serpico
The movie with Al Pacino is one of my all time favourite films...
The US seems to be a complete dichotomy with regards to its Empire. Inside the US, the citizens struggle to maintain democracy and the laws of their constitution against those who want to restrict and change them. They support the rule of law (although of course differ on what that means), and are very concerned with the rights of their individual citizens. Its a fascinating process to watch (I am Canadian).
Outside the US, anything goes and the Munroe Doctrine supports that. While usually US foreign policy is explained away as a desire to spread the virtues of Democracy (and the American Way(tm)) to other nations, the reality is that the US has usually acted to support US companies in other countries, and well, if democracy breaks out, so much the better. So the US has supported a horde of South American dictators who abused their people, supported those who later turned out to be terrorists, and generally run roughshod over the rights of other nations and peoples in a cavalier manner that belies the principles they supposedly hold dear.
Right now the US is an Empire, like it or not. Rather than compare it to the British or other Colonial empires though, I think the empire of ancient Athens is a closer match. Athens had the first democracy for its citizens, but relied in many ways on slave labour (nowadays thats third world workers, illegal immigrants) to maintain its strong standard of living, and it controlled city-states all over the Mediterranean (nowadays the largest buildup of foreign military bases ever built by any nation in history) that it could use to suppress rival powers. By and large the actions of the US are directed at securing economic stability and control over resources. If that means they need to invade somewhere to achieve those goals, historically that's what tends to happen. Of course the US has also abrogated to itself the role of the World's Policeman.
Now, don't mistake me, I understand this process I think, and I don't entirely disapprove. I just wish sometimes that you could call a spade a spade and avoid the obfuscation. "We are invading Iraq because we need to secure control over the oil in that area", "We are not stopping the genocide in Rwanda because there are no resources there, and well, the people are black", "We are invading the Dominican Republic because the interests of US Sugar are threatened", etc.
Some of the many conflicts the US has gotten involved in were entirely justified in my opinion of course, Afghanistan where Canada is heavily involved for instance. I think rooting out the Taliban and breaking their control over the people there can only be a good thing for the people of Afghanistan and the world in general.
Not that anyone will read this, or care :P
Actually if you followed the first link in the results you would see its the title of a book for sale on Amazon.
No no, the US is Canada's couch
But who cares about Canada anyway.
Hey! Canada's not a joke, Eh!
Fixed that for you.
Fixed that fix for you, Eh never starts the sentence up here, it ends it. For starting we use "Hey" just like you do down south of the line
According to Wikipedia at least:
"Progress in decipherment continues at a rapid pace today, and it is generally agreed by scholars that over 90 percent of the Maya texts can now be read with reasonable accuracy."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_script
Its not as evolved as our understanding of Egyptian perhaps but its well on its way. As far as I recall the Mayan languages spoken by present day Maya have not changed a lot either and thus would be of substantial help in deciphering the scripts.
The idea that someone could own the copyright to a piece of music that consists entirely of silence, is an excellent example of just how fucking stupid the copyright/IP situation has gotten. The fact that someone could be successfully sued for a 6-figure damage total over such an issue should be a screaming indicator telling people just how stupid this is.
Its tantamount to my selling an empty paperback novel - all blank pages - and then suing someone because they included whitespace in their book and I am claiming copyright infringement - I can even point to the specific quotes in their work to prove their guilt.
Now, I can see that there was an association with Cage's original work in that this was a track of silence, and Batt had accredited the work to "Batt/Cage", thus bringing up the association, but how is this not considered to be for comedic purposes, ie fair use? It was a stupid thing to do for the band in retrospect but the idea of copyrighting silence is so extremely ridiculous in the first place, I think its understandable.
I wonder how far this can go before even the average person on the street is upset enough to revolt and do something? Or have we reached the point where we are all so comfortable as sheep that nothing will get a reaction?
to look for voters who picked their dummy vote (and thus can't confirm their real vote), and switches their real vote to favour a particular candidate of their choosing. Now we have a specific candidate getting all the votes from those who want to confirm to their bosses (or whoever) that they voted for Candidate X (or Proposition X) actually appearing to vote for that candidate according to the system. The system has to track which you picked doesn't it? It has to know which to display when you enter your hash code.
I like the system we have up here in Canada: vote on a paper slip, stick it in a box. It gets counted and the results are reported in. Its all invigilated by members from various parties to ensure its accuracy - and most important of all, attempting to game the system is extremely difficult because it requires a lot of willing participants scattered over multiple polling stations etc. And of course, you have paper ballots that are physical evidence and much harder to fake. Its not impossible to cheat of course, but it takes more effort. Relying on software to tally votes just means the cheater can focus solely on vulnerabilities in the software - and we are all well aware of just how vulnerable software can be here on /., whether its unintentionally or intentionally on the part of the vendor.
Might it be possible to assign each voter a randomized hash on a strip of sticky tape that gets stuck to each ballot before the user votes? Its not necessary to relate the assigned code to the name in any way, just to give the ability to confirm that the hash code is valid and was assigned to this election. Then when you go to scan the results you can feed the hash codes through a very simple scanner to confirm that the vote is a legal one? Of course, then we are back to software again. Forget it :P
I have tried several different consoles and always ended up selling them (XBox,PS3,Wii) because the gameplay is completely underwhelming overall. This is just another console title, and as such leaves me completely uninterested.
PC Gaming is inherently superior, the games tend to be more challenging and complex (because the interface for them makes that possible) and the idea of MMO gaming on an console is just full of suck IMHO.
Call me a dinosaur or whatever, I really don't understand the attraction to consoles at all. I have played them and the most enjoyable game I can think of (the one that had me playing it the most) was downhill skiing on the Wii. Halo I finished with a friend in 18 hrs of straight gameplay, but having finished it had no desire to ever touch it again. Assassin's Creed I don't think I got past the tutorial. Consoles, meh. I would rather get my teeth cleaned that touch another one.
The Crafting system is definitely the best in any MMO I have seen. Literally anything can be made and sold if you can find other users who want to buy it, and if the item in question doesn't exist, the system is flexible enough to allow you to create it yourself. Some items are banned though, and there can be severe penalties for attempting to produce or sell them - although in some cases if you have secured a position with an in game guild (called a "Corporation" in Nature Online terminology, or a "Government" in some cases (although usually Corporation own Governments, its complex)), you can get away with it due to guilds have superior rights in game over individual player characters.
Actually Nature Online is really quite cutting edge with regards to the player created content aspect of the game. Pretty much everything in game is player-created.
The PvP system is quite evolved, can be highly stressful, and quite well supported. Perma-death does tend to decrease player willingness to participate in PvP however. The fact that PvP can theoretically break out anywhere at any time does lend a certain frisson to the game for some people, although often the likelihood of such impromptu PvP, or even dueling (which has gone out of fashion amongst players) can be determined by the zone you are in.
Oh, yeah, zoning. The Zoning system is perfect, there is literally no noticeable difference when you zone from one area to another.
Communications can be a problem. There are great communications tools available (although strangely no universal guild chat of any kind), but while spatial/local chat is free, virtually every other type of chat costs the player "money" (the term for credits/gold in the game).
Its quite common for players to complain about the maintenance periods in an MMO. Virtually every MMO requires some downtime to do maintenance on the system, but players often find it extremely annoying that they can't play during this period. NO has solved this with a unique approach - each player character regularly undergoes a downtime for maintenance - often as much as 8 hours per day - but the whole system remains running at all times. This asymmetrical approach to server maintenance means that each individual can choose the time for their downtime maintenance, and its even flexible enough to allow you to break the roughly 8 hours required up into smaller periods stretched out over the day (although this is not recommended) or even to skip nightly maintenance entirely - although this can end up in resulting in a longer maintenance period the following day, and if repeated too many times in a row can result in distorted graphics, lag and lowered response times in many areas of the game.
Overall Nature Online is a superior title and one that many MMO players should investigate more (although virtually all of them have one of the free accounts you recieve if you are lucky enough to be invited to the game, many do not participate beyond the minimums required to get started). It does have a long learning curve. It does have permadeath (although as noted above some people believe you do get a new account at a later date, some people believe you end up in new secret projects that are perhaps in beta at the moment. Its all based on wild player speculations, so take it with a grain of salt). It does have the most unique and engaging new player creation system ever devised, which allows 2 players to create a new account that will be handed out to a random recipient. In fact this system is so much fun many players engage in it just for the enjoyment of the process - sometimes even to the degree that they ignore the actual requirement that both players cannot be of the same "gender" (an obscure classification of character sub-type that is one of the things you can't choose when you are spawned). If for no other reason I highly suggest you explore this subsystem of the game, it really is unrivaled by any other system in any other MMO, period. Its even better than PvP for most players!
My personal ratings for Nature On
Gotta echo this, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is to my mind his best work, and bound to create a bit of controversy amongst students, paving the way to getting a conversation started on the subject. Its not hard to read, has a lot of good action in it, and raises a lot of interesting points that challenge our current societies' accepted norms.
In the sense that while you have it and pay for it, it feels like a waste of time and money, but when you really need it it, its too late if you didn't get it already :P
I am always amazed at the number of places that I have worked that put reasonable security measures in place but then let them be defeated by bad employee practices. The most common would be instances where multiple users share the same password on some machine or application on a machine because it was too difficult to remember the password for multiple people, so they use a common password instead. And the number of places where the password is of course written down on a sticky note stuck to the computer. People view security as a nuisance mostly, and are quite willing to bypass it if it gets in the way of convenience.
We need a better solution than username/password combos, because people are unreliable if something is inconvenient.
Before anyone starts snarking on the NGE and what it did to the game, let me start by noting I was there at release (day 2, since no one could log in on day 1), I was there during the CU, and I was there for the horrid NGE experience (just after my birthday too, sigh). I know all about the old game, and the stages it went through after that.
The NGE was a horrid idea, pretty much the poster child for how *not* to make changes to your MMO. The person who promulgated it should have been taken outside and shot dead for suggesting it.
However, I just wanted to note that the game is still alive, still will have 13 servers *after* they close the other half, still has lots of players (particularly Starsider server) and is still functional. Its not great everywhere, but its functional, and they are still making improvements to it. They have a great team of developers who are producing some neat improvements and fixing a lot of old problems. Its still got a fantastic economic system, a crafting system that is hands-down better than anything in any other MMO I have tried, and its still the most sandboxy game I can think of (other than potentially EVE, which I haven't played). Actually make that the only sandboxy MMO we have left (yes, other than EVE), the rest of them have followed the Way of WOW(tm) like a sad flock of dodos on their way to extinction.
There's very little that's innovative in MMOs these days, but a lot of the more innovative stuff was in the original SWG, and there's still some innovative stuff being added. The game has seen some very good updates added to it (all for free of course) since the NGE hit, and its become a lot more playable. I think someone who had never played the original might enjoy the current version, provided they can get used to the fact that its not quite as hold-yer-hand for you as many modern MMOs are.
The whole look and feel of CO makes it seem like a title designed to be played on a console, not a PC. I was severely disappointed in this title, despite being a big fan of COH/V, because it felt like nothing more than a simplistic console product, aimed at the ADHD crowd. You never seem to stop fighting, everything is a distaster happening now, the whole world is full of a new criminal every 20 feet etc. The simple UI for attacks and blocks was also unimpressive.
I am not a console player, I like complex games and I like the control to be had from a mouse and a PC-oriented UI. This game seemed to lack that in spades. It felt like I ought to be using a console controller and I just couldn't shake that.
Now I admit I have a bias against consoles. I have played a lot of them and always lost interest in short order. As a result I lost interest in this game as well, without ever making it out of the tutorial.
I would give it a 3/10 personally. COH was brilliant and I will likely return to playing it at some point, but this simply failed to make the grade.
I think the next big step in MMO design will occur when a company decides to implement a game where there are no levels and there are no classes, just skills you obtain (likely through questing etc). Sure, this already exists in EVE, Planetside (although that's really an MMOFPS and so attracts a different type of user) and likely a few other games, but I haven't seen it in a Fantasy setting, and the Fantasy environment is the 800 lb Gorilla for MMO genres.
Levels as a concept are outdated in my opinion, and now serve only to separate new players from the end-game content reached when you max your character level. Since players are conditioned now to think of that end-game content as the actual focus of the game, they are impatient to get to it. Leveling is thus seen as a "grind" almost universally, regardless of how engaging the gameplay may actually be.
Originally, I think the purpose of levels was two-fold: first, it let a player get used to the game and their class by slowly introducing new skills/powers to them, and letting them combine those powers with their existing ones in a graduated manner; secondly, it served to slow down the character's progress and thus build the "attachment" that is intended to make a player want to continue to subscribe and thus pay the company more. This worked well when the focus of the game was on the leveling process itself, and the end-game (after you have reached the maximum level) was not really much of a focus. Games like EQ with its Raiding at high level and DAOC with its Realm vs Realm PvP at high level changed that, and introduced the concept of the "end-game", and players see that as the primary focus of playing the most games now.
This worked well enough for years, but I think now that players have become generally savvy enough that they can pick up new skills faster than the leveling system allows, and they are focused on the end game as the only viable game, its become time to drop the level (and thus the grind) and introduce a flatter experience curve to MMOs.
EVE's offline learning system is interesting in this regard. You gain skills over time in the real world, as long as you are subscribed. The rest of the time you play the game as best you can given the skills you have. With a good game design (the "end-game" has now become the "game" with a level-less design), this should work quite well, although it does suffer from the problem EVE has: new players can never equal the old players in their skill levels, although diminishing returns should reduce the impact of that.
Planetside's Cert system (described by a player somewhere else in this post), seems to work the same way, if not identically in mechanics (ie its not offline learning). There is a limit to the skills you can pick up, but a new player with Skill X at level Y is the equal of an experienced player with Skill X at level Y. The more experienced player will simply have greater flexibility due to having more skills.
Now, I expect that UO was designed like this based on things I read in the past, and if so it was ahead of its time. Star Wars Galaxies in its original incarnation had the best character design system I can recall, and it worked much this way, with the exception that you could easily ungrind skills and pick up new ones, slowly transforming your character into a different class effectively. This was a very compelling design, and its a shame they tossed it.
From a developer's perspective of course, Levels are a great thing as they ease development and class balancing problems. Same thing with classes, by clearly defining what skills and abilities a character can have at any point in their development, they make it easier for the development staff to create the desired balance. They do nothing for the players outside of this IMHO though. Balancing character skill sets to ensure that the gameplay is fair and equal no matter what skills a player chooses is of course desirable and good game design generally, but to do so at the expense of player enjoyment in game,
I agree, but modern players - awash in the sea of figures concerning WOW's popularity - seem to judge a game's success at launch purely based on the number of subscribers. If that number isn't huge, they condemn the game as having failed.
Look at the recent release of Warhammer Online - touted by players to be the next "WOW-killer", even though the publisher stated that was not their focus at all - when it failed to score at least a million subscribers right at release, a lot of players seemed to decide that it had failed completely - based on posts I read in various forums. The game got something like 800k subscribers in the first few weeks. That's a massive success by any rational standards. Yet the reputation it has now is that its dead.
The next title to be tested I think is going to be SWTOR (Star Wars The Old Republic). I am sure it will do very well initially based on impressions in the current SWG forums, and it has an amazing potential given the IP, but if it fails to score literally millions of subscribers when it goes live, it too will be condemned as a failure.
Star Wars Galaxies was considered a massive success when it went live, but reached only 350k or so subscribers at its peak, and has subsequently dropped to about 50k due to a series of disastrous decisions by management and development. Going back further Dark Age of Camelot was a huge success and had a fantastic launch but I don't think it ever broke 300k subscribers.
My point is that the public has gained the perception that any new MMO that doesn't immediately score at least 1m or so subscribers right at launch is completely doomed, and people will abandon it and return to WOW (thus causing what they fortold) regardless of how good the game is in reality, because they don't see the point in investing time and effort into a game that is going to die in the future. That fickleness is contributing to the lack of success for new games in and of itself I think.
Its not success, its not the quality of the game, its not the genre, although all of those things contribute of course as they should - its the perception that the game has failed before its done so that I think will kill new titles. Thats an impossible standard to uphold, and I think represents a huge barrier to any indie MMO title.
Basically, MMO players are sheep - stupid, skittish, and with no memory at all.
No figures to back this up, just my recollection of numbers from reading various posts on the subject, but I believe the game reached a peak of about 350k prior to the NGE (although I have no idea what that was at when the NGE hit), and it has about 50k right now across all servers. For its time it was immensely popular, but the constant inept shifts made by management and designers who really were completely ignorant on the subject of MMO design, decimated the population.
The NGE was the single biggest mistake ever made by anyone in MMO design I think. Its the poster child for how to screw your customers, how to alienate them, and how to gain the worst reputation of any company in the industry (probably worse than the folks who failed with Horizons).
All that said, the NGE version is playable, and has improved, and some elements the current dev team have added are truly well designed and implemented. Its still not the game it used to be, but its not bad. And UO aside, its the only Sandbox game on the market I can think of. SWG still has some features that no other game on the market has.
I am not sure I will like SWTOR, as I prefer sandbox style games over having an endless series of quests shoved down my throat like it sounds Bioware is intending, and I am not into the massive raid/loot item scene which I consider a complete waste of time, but I do hope they have the cojones to break with the WOW model and pursue a different game. WOW is poorly designed IMHO (yes, its popular, but primarily because easy is popular to most inexperienced players), and I want to see diversity in design, rather than every company out there "findlandizing" to Blizzard and creating exactly the same game with different art.
"The Computer is your friend! The Computer is always right. The Computer is infallible. Those who challenge the Computer must be exterminated immediately"
[A blue pill pops out of dispenser]
"Please consume the red pill before you, and describe what happens"
I agree. While I see the benefits of a free market economy and Capitalism in general, I think that Corporations being made the equivalent of a citizen (only superior as it turns out) is wrong - primarily because nothing about Capitalism encourages any ethics of any sort - in fact acting unethically is evidently quite rewarding.
We need a counter to that, and making those in charge *personally* responsible for the actions of the company is just fine with me.
Its not consistent, its not even well designed I expect, but its a remarkably easy way to learn to manipulate a computer. Learn a bit of HTML first, some CSS, then work on OO PHP and you can accomplish a lot. People will dismiss PHP but there are a lot of very large websites built using it - ones that lots of kids will be familiar with.
Follow it up with a second language once you have gotten the basics down pat - Python is likely a very good choice.
Not to put to fine a point on it, companies are supposed to have an established document retention policy that specifies how long they will retain information like email messages. Most email it won't matter but if the contents in any way can be seen as a legal document - i.e. are business related - then destroying them this way might be seen as a deliberate attempt to cover up information by a court. IANAL, but I worked for some in this area, and its remarkably sensitive.
If someone at a company decides to use this tool, unbeknownst to the company and the other party is also using it, then the email becoming garbled and eventually deleted could become a problem should the company ever go to court. The court might require the company to produce a copy of all emails from the company during a given period (say the last 2 years perhaps), and if emails were destroyed in a manner that was not specified by the company retention policy it could cause the court to penalize the company when it fails to produce said emails.
When a company gets sued, its normal for them to place a hold order on the destruction of all documents, so they can't be seen as potentially covering things up. I hope that a tool like Vanish can be toggled to prevent unwarranted destruction, or someone is going to pay big time down the road.
It may seem like a trivial point, until you read of fines in the millions for companies who are unable to produce correspondence they should have preserved legally speaking. Moreover if the garbled email still exists, then the company might be required by the courts to unencrypt it - and if unable to do so, be penalized for that.
Companies *deserve* nothing. After all they are morally completely neutral, and cannot be relied on to have their customer's interests at heart. All they have at heart is their share price, and responsibility to their shareholders.
The person who discovered this hack should have simply warned the company of its existence, providing all the details required to fix the problem, and if after giving them the very generous period of 8 months, nothing has been done, then the whole of the details including the company name and subsidiaries should have been published - preferably somewhere like a full page spread in the NY Times.
As long as companies can continue to shut down embarassing details concerning their irresponsible behaviour, we have a major problem.
I tend to think of corporations - and by extension all of Capitalism - as evil these days. It takes a company going a lot of extra miles to give the impression they wouldn't shoot my grandmother if they thought it would improve their profit margin. Think of all the meaningless deaths and ruined lives that could have been fixed if only some company actually gave a rats flaming ass about public safety.
Perhaps its time to get rid of the Company as a "corporate citizen" and make the CEO's of the company directly responsible and culpable for its actions. Then we might see some responsibility. Oh court costs should have to be paid out of their pockets too :P
I am all for slipping into wenches, but grog can actually hinder that if you don't water it properly