I don't disagree with you on this at all - the design of the game is one in which time investment is rewarded. The reason behind this is, of course, money. More time investment required to "win" = longer subscribed time and more return on the investment of developing and offering the game. To a point, of course. An mmo designed to be simple and allow instant success would have players run through the content almost immediately and would have low retention. An mmo that was mind-numbingly tedious and impossible to advance in would have players throw up their hands and walk off after realizing that their only hope of progress is if they give up their lives for the game.
WoW, for all its faults, seems to have hit a fairly sweet spot between ease and tedium. For the most part, players *can* avoid repetitive grindathons - they just have to give up the idea of having some of the "best" stuff in the game. Or, if they want to have the best stuff, they can do that, too.
Ditto about there being a sweet-spot for the number of farmers and the level of gold-selling that goes on. At some lower bound, the number of customers who are lost because they can't just buy gold exceeds the number of customers lost because they get pissed that people are buying gold. At some higher bound, the number of customers who quit because the game has been compromised by rampant gold-selling exceeds the number of customers retained as buyers of gold or accounts bought to farm for gold.
Now, getting back to your point - the design of the game - it's the nature of MMO's and capitalism. For single-player or console games or other games where there's no on-going revenue stream to be had, no time-throttles are necessary, and in fact will tend to turn people off. I remember playing Bard's Tale 3 and finding the game impossibly difficult because I was expected - in a single player game! - to keep grinding out xp in areas I had already played and quested through - before I would be capable of surviving the next area. I suspect this was put in so that they could boast on the box about the "hundreds of hours of game play" or something. Contrast BT3 with Fallout - where you didn't have to grind, and character progression was pretty much synched with the storyline.
I'd love to see an MMO that was so innovative and interesting and addictive and fun that it could retain people long enough to be profitable but without requiring timesinks, but I'm going to suspect that it'll be a loooooong time coming. If WoW has shown one thing, it's that getting the balance between grind and fun right will make a game profitable despite it not being particularly innovative in any way.
The point was to make the viewers feel, if only for a few moments, the way Tony Soprano feels every single moment of his life.
The absolute paranoia. The focus on every single little detail. The search for the smallest scrap of meaning in anything as if our lives depended on it because they do.
I watched it with a bunch of friends and every single one of us was on the edge of our seats, every single one of us was muttering something along the lines of "oh, no, here it comes," and every single one of us jumped when it went to black, just completely confused.
As endings go, Six Feet Under was *closure* and it was brilliant. The Sopranos wasn't closure, not by a long shot, but it left me with something just as satisfying - I got it. I finally understood, just for a minute, how Tony Soprano works and I felt sympathy for this monster.
I'll go ahead and non-anonymously disagree and see what it does to my karma, too:)
This is at least as interesting to me, a nerd, as, say, yet another article about Final Fantasy n+1 being maybe exclusive maybe not exclusive maybe coming out this year maybe not coming out this year. Or another article in which someone who was very influential at one point in time but is now completely irrelevant babbles about how they think Apple/Unix/Windows/Whatever is alive/dead/goingup/goingdown/slamdancing. Or another askslashdot in which someone comes up with a completely fabricated question about "which distro of Linux should I run on my new fridge." Or dupe of a dupe. Or... well, you get the point.
It appeals to me because, like many nerds out there, I've been shut down when discussing something I found neat because non-nerds don't seem to enjoy conversations that involve thinking too hard. But this guy - he said fuck it, and basically co-opted the Harvard Commencement just to do it. Rock on, Harvard nerd, rock on.
From a different angle, has this story making the front page in any way taken anything away from more "deserving" stories? Anything that's really super-duper relevant is gonna hit the front page eventually, even if there are fluff pieces like this one up there.
So I guess I just don't see that it would even be worth posting a comment asking why it was put up in the first place - on several levels it has at least as much, if not more, merit than much of the other content on/.
In theory, my laptop only needs to handle web surfing, word processing/spreadsheets/presentations, IM and Skype, and a few popcap type games when I'm bored.
In practice, my laptop must be small, light-weight, low-maintenance and easy to work on when I do need to do maintenance.
In an ideal situation, my laptop should not make me hate it - little things that annoy the piss out of me should not happen. Such as it getting dragged off a table because someone snags the power cord. Such as it being instantly on or off when I simply close the lid, without having to go to any menu options, and it should write it's state to HD when it starts to run out of power so that it turns back on EXACTLY the way it was when I plug it back in. And it shouldn't annoy the fuck out of me with little pop-ups every time I start it up saying that I may not be secure, or that my antivirus needs updating or any of that other shit. It should just do what I want, when I want, how I want.
I could buy a $500 laptop that would let me surf the web, do word processing/spreadsheets/presentations, IM and Skype and a few popcap games. But it wouldn't be small or light-weight, and if it was running Windows it damn sure wouldn't be low maintenance. If it ran Linux it would likely be low maintenance, but there's a learning curve to using and tweaking with Linux, and it's more of a learning curve than I care to conquer. And that $500 laptop would not have a clever power-cord that pops right off when tugged, it wouldn't have an elegant hibernation feature and if it were a Windows machine, it would have all those annoying little pop-ups and demands to be fed new anti-virus stuff.
Or I could buy an $1100 MacBook that could do all the stuff I want AND be small and well made AND not be a pain in the ass to use. If I keep it for 3 years, that's $200 extra a year or about 55 cents a day. Given that I use my computer every day, I'd say that extra 55 cents to avoid a bunch of frustration is quite worth it. I used to not might arguing with my appliances to get them to do stuff, but I'm old now and life is too short. I want stuff that just works.
Hardware specs aren't everything. You can have the fastest processor, the most memory, the biggest hard-drive and all the gosh-golly-gee-whiz graphics in the world, but if it's a pain in the ass to work with that computer, it's a waste of money.
They get pissed off when "unused" frozen human embryos are being used for stem-cell experiments - surely a frozen human embryo would require human intervention to develop? Hell, frozen human embryos require human intervention to exist in the first place.
Not all anti-abortion people are really, really, really stupid, but many of the ones picking the particular issues to fight about surely are.
I want my tools to work for me, not me for them. I like gadgets, but I don't want to do battle with my appliances to get them to do their thing.
Apple is very, very good at figuring out what people want their gadgets to do and making it very easy. The iPod is a perfect example - Apple's design team got that people want to listen to music on a small device that has adequate to good sound, they want to listen to music NOW, not have to struggle to find a song, and they don't want to have a lot of buttons. Oh, and if it's cute, so much the better.
I'm writing this from a MacBook that I picked up thanks to an incredible discount. I've owned half a dozen laptops in my life, and this one is the first one that deals with some frustrations that I'd always had but never even considered might be fixable. I use it a lot when I travel, and sometimes I forget I've got it plugged in, or someone walks into the power cord - doesn't bother me since it just detatches and doesn't drop the computer on the floor. And when I'm using it I often have to move - shutting it or opening it puts it to sleep or wakes it up nearly instantly. And if I leave it shut and forget to charge it for a week, well, it writes its state to the hard drive and takes an extra 10 seconds (if that) to get going again once I plug it in an open it. And of course OSX is quite spiffy and I've got it tweaked out just-so where all kinds of things that were annoying to do (but I did them without complaining for years on other laptops) but necessary are easy.
The iPhone is a bit more than I want to spend on a phone, and the HD space is lacking for my needs, and the provider is not one I'd be thrilled about using, but despite that, given Apple's track record, I can assume that one thing that WON'T be broken will be the interface. Once they come out with a 20+ GB version, I'll probably be all over it.
The click-wheel on the iPod was what was "revolutionary," IMO. MUCH easier and quicker to use than any of the other interfaces I've seen on any player before or since.
What sold me on an iPod was when my friend, who is a DJ and has rips of every bit of music he owns on his iPod and has filled up the 80GB version, was able to get to *any* song I mentioned within 30 seconds of my mentioning it, and usually quicker than that. On the other players I've owned, it was a fucking chore to find a specific track, and I don't have a collection even a third the size of my friend's.
Yeah, I don't get the fixation on dailing thing. If I am in a circumstance where I cannot look at the keypad to dial, that means I have my headset on. If I have my headset on, I can just say "Call ____" and it dials. At least, my phone does this, and I have a "free" RAZR and use a bare-bones provider. It looks through my contact list and gets me whomever. I am assuming that Apple would make something that works as well if not better.
Are you people complaining about a lack of tactile feedback making calls while driving? I'm trying to think of situations where one absolutely cannot look at the phone but needs to make a call.
If it's something like a "mute ringer" button - like the phone is in your pocket and you want to kill it without taking it out, well, I will say that I am pretty sure Apple's designers have taken that kind of stuff into consideration. I mean, you know, they seem to be pretty on the ball when it comes to interfaces...
I believe I read something from the powers that be on that show before the s3 finale that we would be "rethinking what a cylon is" based on the reveal of 4 of the final 5 in that finale.
I'm prepared to withold judgment until they finish the show. If they are just regular toasters, then yeah - that'll suck. But I am betting it'll be something a bit more interesting.
Point out where I said "OMG What if they kill MILLIONS!!!" please.
Point out where I said "We have to support the President, unless you love terrorists!" please.
You can't and you won't be able to because I never said them.
I made a reasonable statement in a reasonable tone that it is reasonable to believe in the future that individuals with limited funds but a grudge might be able to create and deploy weapons that could kill quite a few people. I also made a reasonable statement in a reasonable tone that spending some small amount of resources thinking of such things and coming up with plans to deal with them is a good idea.
The only person injecting hysterics and drama into this exchange is you. Think about that for a moment - you claim to be sick of hype and fear mongering and rabble-rousing to make political hay, and yet you just did it in the guise of accusing someone who did nothing of the sort of being that sort of person.
If you want to throw a hissy-fit and get dramatic that is certainly your right, but I'm not going to let you pretend like I'm the one doing it. If you really don't want people thinking you're saying to stop ALL investigaton of terror cells, then perhaps you might try amping down your rhetoric by using more qualified statements than "I'm sick of it taking up every waking moment of our intellectual lives." It doesn't. Don't be a drama-queen, or, if you can't handle that, at least attempt to stop assuming everyone else is.
3000 people to terrorism vs. 15000 to the flu sure sounds like we're making terrorists into a bigger deal than they are, right?
But what happens when they get weapons able to kill 30,000 people? Or 300,000? Or 3,000,000? I'm thinking of biological weaponry. "Simple" scenario is some random lethal (but not immediately) virus being released in key areas and able to spread quickly across the globe. "Complicated" case would be something like a virus designed to become active only in people with certain genetic markers.
Is that sci-fi? I dunno. 50 years ago, it was thought by some in the know that there'd be a world need for 5 or 6 computers, yet now I personally own 2 very powerful ones and dozens of simple (by today's standards) ones. Right now, I imagine it would be very expensive to create a virus capable of spreading widely before suddenly going lethal - maybe too expensive for a terrorist organization. But 10 years from now? 20?
I'm in favor of perspective and proportion, as you say, but I'm also, when the possible outcome is incredibly dire, in favor of at least spending a bit of effort trying to think about possible big-bads and maybe ways to counter them. It isn't like we can't afford it, and it isn't like everyone really is really spending "every waking moment of [their] intellectual lives" on the problem.
Uh, no, actually. There have been several hijackings since 9/11 and they haven't resulted in planes crashing into buildings. They've resulted in planes being diverted to wherever the hell the hijackers wanted, if I remember correctly. Oh, and no "passenger revolt" either.
Granted, these haven't been US flights or US airline flights that have been hijacked, but "hijacking == planes crashing into buildings" is simply not true.
So, basically, they should have added a feature that appeals to the "expatriot PhD candidate with very little spare time to socialize with real people, but aparrently enough time to get good enough at video game tennis that when they do get together with their friends they don't find a challenge, and also has a very immature signature on slashdot" demographic.
Yeah... people like you probably make up a huge market that Nintendo foolishly ignored.
Yes, I know, internet play is fun, but I can easily see how the Nintendo marketeers would see that the VAST majority of their potential market wouldn't give a shit.
I am a member of the "wii-owning, PhD candidate, not-expatriot but moved to a different city, has little spare time but desperately loves to spend it socializing with real people rather than sitting alone in my apartment swinging a wiimote and hopefully inoffensive slashdot sig having" demographic, just for the record.
I commute via bus or train for about 2 hours a day. I also like TV but prefer to watch it when I cannot be doing something else. I also can't concentrate on a book, newspaper or magazine in a noisy environment such as a bus. I also carry about 20 lbs. of textbooks, notebooks and a laptop on most days or a purse crammed with stuff other times. That 2" screen you mock? It's perfect for me and the literally millions of other people just like me. HAHA, that stupid Apple, making a small (I CANNOT emphasize that enough), easy to use and generally robust device that does exactly what I want, how I want, and where I want! Dummies!
Everything I have from my DVR is already formatted for the iPod or I can run a pig-simple conversion app while I sleep and synch when I get ready in the morning. I am such an idiot for getting an easy to use, featured enough for my needs and cheap device that does whst I need easily! I could kick myself!
I just flew for about 20 hours to get to Asia from the US midwest. My iPod ran out of juice after the 3.5 hr flight from Chicago to San Francisco and 4 episodes of The Shield. Upon landing, I popped into a Brookstone and snagged a $20 accessory and $20 worth of AA batteries and was able to entertain myself through turbulence until I got to my final destination. 2" screen wasn't a problem - I am farsighted and have glasses.
If I want a big screen to catch all the visual detail, I have a TV or can go to the movies. If I want something good enough to keep me entertained when I'm in transit that isn't cumbersome, you bet your ass a 2" screen is a compelling feature.
You assume that Blizzard wants to stop gold selling/buying entirely. This is NOT the case: Blizzard wants to maximize profits.
Gold-farmers and sellers buy copies of the games and pay monthly fees. That's $10 (original game) + $20 (BC expansion) + $25 (monthly fees if they keep the account going for about 4 months) = $55, some portion of which is profit for Blizzard.
Gold-buyers buy copies of the games and pay monthly fees. They might actually quit out of boredom if they can't get gold more easily/less boringly than grinding. That's another $55+whatever longer-term monthly fees - expenses.
Spam haters and regular players who don't buy/farm/sell gold buy copies of the games and pay monthly fees. Figure whatever profits there.
At some point, there is a maximum return for Blizzard by balancing the needs and desires of each group.
Make gold farming and selling impossible, and the revenues from those accounts and the accounts of those who would quit from boredom of grinding gold are lost while some amount of player accounts who might quit because of the spam are saved. Make it too easy and lots of legit players may quit. But hit it just right...
Given the numbers for WoW, this kind of min-maxing by Blizzard makes perfect sense. If it was an MMO with "only" a million players, it might not be worth it. But 5-10 million? Yeah, that turns into serious money.
I have no idea who runs this site, but I wanted to see how legit they were. So I sent them a small amount of money through paypal and, lo and behold, 30 minutes later, the gold was in my mailbox. I figure at least they aren't just scamming people completely.
Will it be worth losing your account in the next purge? I just assumed that gold-buying is the WoW-equivalent of playing Russian-roulette with a semi-automatic pistol: even if you get your gold you're still screwed thanks to the ban sweeps.
I agree with you, but I still found the Danish cartoons to be very tacky. The reason they were created and run is one I can agree with - they were saying "Let's tip a sacred cow." But the subject is what I found offensive - tipping your own culture's sacred cows is bravely speaking out. Tipping the other guy's is just being a dick. Had they done the cartoons and included things that the Danes take seriously, that would have salvaged the whole thing for me.
I'm just a fan of being an equal opportunity asshole.
After 15 years in IT, going from entry-level code/design monkey to high-middle/lower-upper management, I was done. I loved the problem solving, I loved keeping up with new ideas/tech/trends, but I was really really REALLY just not feeling any sort of real fulfillment from the work. I got a lot of people contact, but, come on - it was with techies and so it was kinda cold. I was productive, but I didn't really feel like I made a difference in the world.
I decided to talk to a "career psychologist" - I know the kinds of things I'm interested in and have a rough idea of my aptitudes, but I wanted to get a more objective perspective and fresher ideas. The two strongest fits were education and counselling. I've taught before, and enjoyed it - never really thought of it as a career for me, more of a sideline. I'm the "go to girl" amongst my circle of friends for discussing problems, life in general, etc. - so counselling wasn't a bad idea, either.
Anyway, long story short, I went back to school and am now in progress towards a PsyD (the clinical psychologist version of a PhD), helping to teach classes, working in a counselling center and loving every minute of it. I get to work on REAL problems, I get to be challenged by a constantly evolving field, I get to feel like I make a difference. And the money won't be bad either, eventually.
That's what worked for me. I'd definitely recommend talking to a career psychologist - I mean, they can't just give you tests and say "This is what you will enjoy and be good at" but they can maybe help you explore your interests, aptitudes, find things that maybe you hadn't really considered or thought about before.
I can guarantee that the first time I experienced getting home and popping in a DVD that had not been activated would be the last time I buy a DVD from a brick and mortar store. Possibly the last time I bought a DVD, period.
I'm an honest person - I don't steal. I'm tired of being treated like a criminal, tired of being inconvenienced because some people are criminals, tired of the assumption being that I'm guilty. I'm tired of that fucking alarm going off when I walk out of a store and everyone looking at me like I'm a thief because the security tag wasn't deactivated. I'm tired of security guards at stores thinking they have a right to look through my bags. I'm tired of ruining my nails and cutting my fingers thanks to clamshell packaging.
Wanna know how to reduce theft, increase sales and all without making people feel like scumbags? Change your fucking business model to one that addresses the needs consumers actually have. The fact that your store security is for shit is *NOT* *MY* *PROBLEM*. Will Best Buy give me a new stereo if someone breaks into my home and steals mine? No. So why should I pay when they get robbed?
Here's an idea: Have machines at stores that hold spindles and spindles of DVDs and CDs. Have the customer swipe their credit card at the machine and select the movie they want, and then a pre-made DVD (for a "hot" new release) can be spit out, or, if it's something that's a little more obscure/rarely needed, it can be burnt on the spot. Don't have or want to use a credit card? No problem - just take a voucher from a display, go to the check-out line, pay with cash and the clerk can activate the code on the voucher - then the machine will give you what you want when you scan your ticket in.
This would even let there be less packaging and waste. If someone wanted a special collector's edition with all the goodies, keep those in a secure spot and get them when needed.
For small electronics, why not have vending machines like they do for iPods and cellphones now? It annoys me that I have to waste time getting a clerk to open up a cabinet just to get some $30 item I want - and it's a waste of their time, too.
In most instances, I'd say that a teacher being asked to not get involved is a bad thing - but in most instances, the teachers in question have an understanding of what appropriate behavior and boundaries are. In this case, the teacher in question may very well not have that understanding.
So, generally, yeah - you're definitely right. In this case... Well, we have a shortage of teachers, and she wants to be a teacher - maybe letting her teach but suggesting she should keep the relationship strictly schoolroom is a better approach.
Growing up in rural Maine (not that there's really any other kind of Maine:-P) we were all very friendly with our teachers, they would regularly invite our classes to their houses for cookouts and such, we didn't turn out so bad.
There's a difference between that kind of interaction and the kind where you direct your students to photos of you drunk on the web. Aparrently she had been directing students to her myspace page where photos other than the one in the article were hosted, had been asked to stop doing so, and kept refusing.
I agree that there can be a great benefit in personal relationships between students and teachers, but there are boundaries of appropriateness. Crossing those boundaries can greatly reduce the ability of a teacher to be effective at their job.
That's exactly the kind of unthinking and uncritical knee-jerk reaction we need! Because, obviously, there couldn't possibly be any more to the story!
That photo isn't the only one. And there is some history here - aparrently she was directing students to her homepage that had the other photos on it, had been asked to stop, and refused to do so. It wasn't "Oh, you have pictures on your myspace and students found them" it was "please stop directing children to inappropriate and unprofessional photos of yourself that will compromise your ability to do your job."
An individual behaving in an unprofessional manner may be subject to having professional credentials held hostage.
There is, indeed, more to the Libertarian party than free marketeerism. The problem is, the most outspoken Libertarians - or, at least, the ones that get the attention - are the crazies.
Montana - a state one would think would have plenty of viable libertarian candidates for Senate to choose from - ran a guy who turned himself into a smurf because he was afraid of Y2K. In and of itself, this isn't a big deal, but it demonstrates the incredible political naivete of the Libertarian party leadership. And this isn't only a problem with Libertarians. It is a problem for ANY third party that wants to get taken seriously.
For a third party to become viable, they have to run a smoother, more professional campaign with a figurehead that is MUCH more charismatic than anyone the Dems or Repubs can run - because they have to overcome the "haha, you're independent which is a synonym for loooooony" stigma that has come about, in part, because people run Papa Smurf for Senate or go off about how Socialism is The Answer and maybe Stalin wasn't such a bad guy or whatever.
Anyone who could be a viable candidate for a national office will feel a great pressure to go Democrat or Republican because, while those parties may not be aligned with their views very well, they are still going to be less of a hindrance than any independent party.
We would have had a good shot at a third party being able to get funding with Perot - but he sabotaged it with is on-again-off-again decision to run. The Green party might be viable if someone like Gore were to go over to it and they shut assholes like Michael Moore up. Once we get one viable new party, then there would be a chance for others to come along.
That said, my views do line up more libertarian than anything else - but I'm realistic enough to know that until the party gets their shit together and stops with the Blue Man Group nonsense, nothing good will happen.
I'd run for something under the Libertarian party, but I'm an openly gay Jewish woman, and I don't live in New York - no way I'm getting anywhere.
Or imagine that you hear gunshots, you go to the area, and when you get there you see someone who has a gun who says "the shooter is wearing a red-hoodie, jeans, I think he's a white guy, and he went that way" (pointing to a direction you didn't come from).
Is the guy with the gun the shooter trying to trick you? Is the guy just another person responding as you did?
Or imagine that it's a week after this kind of incident. People are on high alert, suspicious of everything. A car backfires in the campus parking lot. All it takes is one person to draw their gun at that point for the probability of tragedy to increase dramatically.
Yes, people are supposedly going to be well trained, but then again, police are supposedly well-trained and there are any number of completely bogus police shootings that happen. People in the armed forces are well-trained, but friendly fire incidents happen.
Who do you think is going to be more likely to keep their cool: a trained police officer, a trained soldier, or a trained college student? My money's on the people who do it for a living, and even then there is still a chance of error.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't disagree with you on this at all - the design of the game is one in which time investment is rewarded. The reason behind this is, of course, money. More time investment required to "win" = longer subscribed time and more return on the investment of developing and offering the game. To a point, of course. An mmo designed to be simple and allow instant success would have players run through the content almost immediately and would have low retention. An mmo that was mind-numbingly tedious and impossible to advance in would have players throw up their hands and walk off after realizing that their only hope of progress is if they give up their lives for the game.
WoW, for all its faults, seems to have hit a fairly sweet spot between ease and tedium. For the most part, players *can* avoid repetitive grindathons - they just have to give up the idea of having some of the "best" stuff in the game. Or, if they want to have the best stuff, they can do that, too.
Ditto about there being a sweet-spot for the number of farmers and the level of gold-selling that goes on. At some lower bound, the number of customers who are lost because they can't just buy gold exceeds the number of customers lost because they get pissed that people are buying gold. At some higher bound, the number of customers who quit because the game has been compromised by rampant gold-selling exceeds the number of customers retained as buyers of gold or accounts bought to farm for gold.
Now, getting back to your point - the design of the game - it's the nature of MMO's and capitalism. For single-player or console games or other games where there's no on-going revenue stream to be had, no time-throttles are necessary, and in fact will tend to turn people off. I remember playing Bard's Tale 3 and finding the game impossibly difficult because I was expected - in a single player game! - to keep grinding out xp in areas I had already played and quested through - before I would be capable of surviving the next area. I suspect this was put in so that they could boast on the box about the "hundreds of hours of game play" or something. Contrast BT3 with Fallout - where you didn't have to grind, and character progression was pretty much synched with the storyline.
I'd love to see an MMO that was so innovative and interesting and addictive and fun that it could retain people long enough to be profitable but without requiring timesinks, but I'm going to suspect that it'll be a loooooong time coming. If WoW has shown one thing, it's that getting the balance between grind and fun right will make a game profitable despite it not being particularly innovative in any way.
The point was to make the viewers feel, if only for a few moments, the way Tony Soprano feels every single moment of his life.
The absolute paranoia. The focus on every single little detail. The search for the smallest scrap of meaning in anything as if our lives depended on it because they do.
I watched it with a bunch of friends and every single one of us was on the edge of our seats, every single one of us was muttering something along the lines of "oh, no, here it comes," and every single one of us jumped when it went to black, just completely confused.
As endings go, Six Feet Under was *closure* and it was brilliant. The Sopranos wasn't closure, not by a long shot, but it left me with something just as satisfying - I got it. I finally understood, just for a minute, how Tony Soprano works and I felt sympathy for this monster.
That's pretty good in my book!
I'll go ahead and non-anonymously disagree and see what it does to my karma, too :)
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This is at least as interesting to me, a nerd, as, say, yet another article about Final Fantasy n+1 being maybe exclusive maybe not exclusive maybe coming out this year maybe not coming out this year. Or another article in which someone who was very influential at one point in time but is now completely irrelevant babbles about how they think Apple/Unix/Windows/Whatever is alive/dead/goingup/goingdown/slamdancing. Or another askslashdot in which someone comes up with a completely fabricated question about "which distro of Linux should I run on my new fridge." Or dupe of a dupe. Or... well, you get the point.
It appeals to me because, like many nerds out there, I've been shut down when discussing something I found neat because non-nerds don't seem to enjoy conversations that involve thinking too hard. But this guy - he said fuck it, and basically co-opted the Harvard Commencement just to do it. Rock on, Harvard nerd, rock on.
From a different angle, has this story making the front page in any way taken anything away from more "deserving" stories? Anything that's really super-duper relevant is gonna hit the front page eventually, even if there are fluff pieces like this one up there.
So I guess I just don't see that it would even be worth posting a comment asking why it was put up in the first place - on several levels it has at least as much, if not more, merit than much of the other content on
What you said.
In theory, my laptop only needs to handle web surfing, word processing/spreadsheets/presentations, IM and Skype, and a few popcap type games when I'm bored.
In practice, my laptop must be small, light-weight, low-maintenance and easy to work on when I do need to do maintenance.
In an ideal situation, my laptop should not make me hate it - little things that annoy the piss out of me should not happen. Such as it getting dragged off a table because someone snags the power cord. Such as it being instantly on or off when I simply close the lid, without having to go to any menu options, and it should write it's state to HD when it starts to run out of power so that it turns back on EXACTLY the way it was when I plug it back in. And it shouldn't annoy the fuck out of me with little pop-ups every time I start it up saying that I may not be secure, or that my antivirus needs updating or any of that other shit. It should just do what I want, when I want, how I want.
I could buy a $500 laptop that would let me surf the web, do word processing/spreadsheets/presentations, IM and Skype and a few popcap games. But it wouldn't be small or light-weight, and if it was running Windows it damn sure wouldn't be low maintenance. If it ran Linux it would likely be low maintenance, but there's a learning curve to using and tweaking with Linux, and it's more of a learning curve than I care to conquer. And that $500 laptop would not have a clever power-cord that pops right off when tugged, it wouldn't have an elegant hibernation feature and if it were a Windows machine, it would have all those annoying little pop-ups and demands to be fed new anti-virus stuff.
Or I could buy an $1100 MacBook that could do all the stuff I want AND be small and well made AND not be a pain in the ass to use. If I keep it for 3 years, that's $200 extra a year or about 55 cents a day. Given that I use my computer every day, I'd say that extra 55 cents to avoid a bunch of frustration is quite worth it. I used to not might arguing with my appliances to get them to do stuff, but I'm old now and life is too short. I want stuff that just works.
Hardware specs aren't everything. You can have the fastest processor, the most memory, the biggest hard-drive and all the gosh-golly-gee-whiz graphics in the world, but if it's a pain in the ass to work with that computer, it's a waste of money.
They get pissed off when "unused" frozen human embryos are being used for stem-cell experiments - surely a frozen human embryo would require human intervention to develop? Hell, frozen human embryos require human intervention to exist in the first place.
Not all anti-abortion people are really, really, really stupid, but many of the ones picking the particular issues to fight about surely are.
This is Lord Kelvin speaking, and I agree: all that remains of physics is a few more decimal places.
What you said.
I want my tools to work for me, not me for them. I like gadgets, but I don't want to do battle with my appliances to get them to do their thing.
Apple is very, very good at figuring out what people want their gadgets to do and making it very easy. The iPod is a perfect example - Apple's design team got that people want to listen to music on a small device that has adequate to good sound, they want to listen to music NOW, not have to struggle to find a song, and they don't want to have a lot of buttons. Oh, and if it's cute, so much the better.
I'm writing this from a MacBook that I picked up thanks to an incredible discount. I've owned half a dozen laptops in my life, and this one is the first one that deals with some frustrations that I'd always had but never even considered might be fixable. I use it a lot when I travel, and sometimes I forget I've got it plugged in, or someone walks into the power cord - doesn't bother me since it just detatches and doesn't drop the computer on the floor. And when I'm using it I often have to move - shutting it or opening it puts it to sleep or wakes it up nearly instantly. And if I leave it shut and forget to charge it for a week, well, it writes its state to the hard drive and takes an extra 10 seconds (if that) to get going again once I plug it in an open it. And of course OSX is quite spiffy and I've got it tweaked out just-so where all kinds of things that were annoying to do (but I did them without complaining for years on other laptops) but necessary are easy.
The iPhone is a bit more than I want to spend on a phone, and the HD space is lacking for my needs, and the provider is not one I'd be thrilled about using, but despite that, given Apple's track record, I can assume that one thing that WON'T be broken will be the interface. Once they come out with a 20+ GB version, I'll probably be all over it.
The click-wheel on the iPod was what was "revolutionary," IMO. MUCH easier and quicker to use than any of the other interfaces I've seen on any player before or since.
What sold me on an iPod was when my friend, who is a DJ and has rips of every bit of music he owns on his iPod and has filled up the 80GB version, was able to get to *any* song I mentioned within 30 seconds of my mentioning it, and usually quicker than that. On the other players I've owned, it was a fucking chore to find a specific track, and I don't have a collection even a third the size of my friend's.
Yeah, I don't get the fixation on dailing thing. If I am in a circumstance where I cannot look at the keypad to dial, that means I have my headset on. If I have my headset on, I can just say "Call ____" and it dials. At least, my phone does this, and I have a "free" RAZR and use a bare-bones provider. It looks through my contact list and gets me whomever. I am assuming that Apple would make something that works as well if not better.
Are you people complaining about a lack of tactile feedback making calls while driving? I'm trying to think of situations where one absolutely cannot look at the phone but needs to make a call.
If it's something like a "mute ringer" button - like the phone is in your pocket and you want to kill it without taking it out, well, I will say that I am pretty sure Apple's designers have taken that kind of stuff into consideration. I mean, you know, they seem to be pretty on the ball when it comes to interfaces...
I believe I read something from the powers that be on that show before the s3 finale that we would be "rethinking what a cylon is" based on the reveal of 4 of the final 5 in that finale.
I'm prepared to withold judgment until they finish the show. If they are just regular toasters, then yeah - that'll suck. But I am betting it'll be something a bit more interesting.
Point out where I said "OMG What if they kill MILLIONS!!!" please.
Point out where I said "We have to support the President, unless you love terrorists!" please.
You can't and you won't be able to because I never said them.
I made a reasonable statement in a reasonable tone that it is reasonable to believe in the future that individuals with limited funds but a grudge might be able to create and deploy weapons that could kill quite a few people. I also made a reasonable statement in a reasonable tone that spending some small amount of resources thinking of such things and coming up with plans to deal with them is a good idea.
The only person injecting hysterics and drama into this exchange is you. Think about that for a moment - you claim to be sick of hype and fear mongering and rabble-rousing to make political hay, and yet you just did it in the guise of accusing someone who did nothing of the sort of being that sort of person.
If you want to throw a hissy-fit and get dramatic that is certainly your right, but I'm not going to let you pretend like I'm the one doing it. If you really don't want people thinking you're saying to stop ALL investigaton of terror cells, then perhaps you might try amping down your rhetoric by using more qualified statements than "I'm sick of it taking up every waking moment of our intellectual lives." It doesn't. Don't be a drama-queen, or, if you can't handle that, at least attempt to stop assuming everyone else is.
I have a question.
3000 people to terrorism vs. 15000 to the flu sure sounds like we're making terrorists into a bigger deal than they are, right?
But what happens when they get weapons able to kill 30,000 people? Or 300,000? Or 3,000,000? I'm thinking of biological weaponry. "Simple" scenario is some random lethal (but not immediately) virus being released in key areas and able to spread quickly across the globe. "Complicated" case would be something like a virus designed to become active only in people with certain genetic markers.
Is that sci-fi? I dunno. 50 years ago, it was thought by some in the know that there'd be a world need for 5 or 6 computers, yet now I personally own 2 very powerful ones and dozens of simple (by today's standards) ones. Right now, I imagine it would be very expensive to create a virus capable of spreading widely before suddenly going lethal - maybe too expensive for a terrorist organization. But 10 years from now? 20?
I'm in favor of perspective and proportion, as you say, but I'm also, when the possible outcome is incredibly dire, in favor of at least spending a bit of effort trying to think about possible big-bads and maybe ways to counter them. It isn't like we can't afford it, and it isn't like everyone really is really spending "every waking moment of [their] intellectual lives" on the problem.
Uh, no, actually. There have been several hijackings since 9/11 and they haven't resulted in planes crashing into buildings. They've resulted in planes being diverted to wherever the hell the hijackers wanted, if I remember correctly. Oh, and no "passenger revolt" either.
Granted, these haven't been US flights or US airline flights that have been hijacked, but "hijacking == planes crashing into buildings" is simply not true.
So, basically, they should have added a feature that appeals to the "expatriot PhD candidate with very little spare time to socialize with real people, but aparrently enough time to get good enough at video game tennis that when they do get together with their friends they don't find a challenge, and also has a very immature signature on slashdot" demographic.
Yeah... people like you probably make up a huge market that Nintendo foolishly ignored.
Yes, I know, internet play is fun, but I can easily see how the Nintendo marketeers would see that the VAST majority of their potential market wouldn't give a shit.
I am a member of the "wii-owning, PhD candidate, not-expatriot but moved to a different city, has little spare time but desperately loves to spend it socializing with real people rather than sitting alone in my apartment swinging a wiimote and hopefully inoffensive slashdot sig having" demographic, just for the record.
I commute via bus or train for about 2 hours a day. I also like TV but prefer to watch it when I cannot be doing something else. I also can't concentrate on a book, newspaper or magazine in a noisy environment such as a bus. I also carry about 20 lbs. of textbooks, notebooks and a laptop on most days or a purse crammed with stuff other times. That 2" screen you mock? It's perfect for me and the literally millions of other people just like me. HAHA, that stupid Apple, making a small (I CANNOT emphasize that enough), easy to use and generally robust device that does exactly what I want, how I want, and where I want! Dummies!
Everything I have from my DVR is already formatted for the iPod or I can run a pig-simple conversion app while I sleep and synch when I get ready in the morning. I am such an idiot for getting an easy to use, featured enough for my needs and cheap device that does whst I need easily! I could kick myself!
I just flew for about 20 hours to get to Asia from the US midwest. My iPod ran out of juice after the 3.5 hr flight from Chicago to San Francisco and 4 episodes of The Shield. Upon landing, I popped into a Brookstone and snagged a $20 accessory and $20 worth of AA batteries and was able to entertain myself through turbulence until I got to my final destination. 2" screen wasn't a problem - I am farsighted and have glasses.
If I want a big screen to catch all the visual detail, I have a TV or can go to the movies. If I want something good enough to keep me entertained when I'm in transit that isn't cumbersome, you bet your ass a 2" screen is a compelling feature.
You assume that Blizzard wants to stop gold selling/buying entirely. This is NOT the case: Blizzard wants to maximize profits.
Gold-farmers and sellers buy copies of the games and pay monthly fees. That's $10 (original game) + $20 (BC expansion) + $25 (monthly fees if they keep the account going for about 4 months) = $55, some portion of which is profit for Blizzard.
Gold-buyers buy copies of the games and pay monthly fees. They might actually quit out of boredom if they can't get gold more easily/less boringly than grinding. That's another $55+whatever longer-term monthly fees - expenses.
Spam haters and regular players who don't buy/farm/sell gold buy copies of the games and pay monthly fees. Figure whatever profits there.
At some point, there is a maximum return for Blizzard by balancing the needs and desires of each group.
Make gold farming and selling impossible, and the revenues from those accounts and the accounts of those who would quit from boredom of grinding gold are lost while some amount of player accounts who might quit because of the spam are saved. Make it too easy and lots of legit players may quit. But hit it just right...
Given the numbers for WoW, this kind of min-maxing by Blizzard makes perfect sense. If it was an MMO with "only" a million players, it might not be worth it. But 5-10 million? Yeah, that turns into serious money.
I have no idea who runs this site, but I wanted to see how legit they were. So I sent them a small amount of money through paypal and, lo and behold, 30 minutes later, the gold was in my mailbox. I figure at least they aren't just scamming people completely.
Will it be worth losing your account in the next purge? I just assumed that gold-buying is the WoW-equivalent of playing Russian-roulette with a semi-automatic pistol: even if you get your gold you're still screwed thanks to the ban sweeps.
I agree with you, but I still found the Danish cartoons to be very tacky. The reason they were created and run is one I can agree with - they were saying "Let's tip a sacred cow." But the subject is what I found offensive - tipping your own culture's sacred cows is bravely speaking out. Tipping the other guy's is just being a dick. Had they done the cartoons and included things that the Danes take seriously, that would have salvaged the whole thing for me.
I'm just a fan of being an equal opportunity asshole.
After 15 years in IT, going from entry-level code/design monkey to high-middle/lower-upper management, I was done. I loved the problem solving, I loved keeping up with new ideas/tech/trends, but I was really really REALLY just not feeling any sort of real fulfillment from the work. I got a lot of people contact, but, come on - it was with techies and so it was kinda cold. I was productive, but I didn't really feel like I made a difference in the world.
I decided to talk to a "career psychologist" - I know the kinds of things I'm interested in and have a rough idea of my aptitudes, but I wanted to get a more objective perspective and fresher ideas. The two strongest fits were education and counselling. I've taught before, and enjoyed it - never really thought of it as a career for me, more of a sideline. I'm the "go to girl" amongst my circle of friends for discussing problems, life in general, etc. - so counselling wasn't a bad idea, either.
Anyway, long story short, I went back to school and am now in progress towards a PsyD (the clinical psychologist version of a PhD), helping to teach classes, working in a counselling center and loving every minute of it. I get to work on REAL problems, I get to be challenged by a constantly evolving field, I get to feel like I make a difference. And the money won't be bad either, eventually.
That's what worked for me. I'd definitely recommend talking to a career psychologist - I mean, they can't just give you tests and say "This is what you will enjoy and be good at" but they can maybe help you explore your interests, aptitudes, find things that maybe you hadn't really considered or thought about before.
Good luck!
I can guarantee that the first time I experienced getting home and popping in a DVD that had not been activated would be the last time I buy a DVD from a brick and mortar store. Possibly the last time I bought a DVD, period.
I'm an honest person - I don't steal. I'm tired of being treated like a criminal, tired of being inconvenienced because some people are criminals, tired of the assumption being that I'm guilty. I'm tired of that fucking alarm going off when I walk out of a store and everyone looking at me like I'm a thief because the security tag wasn't deactivated. I'm tired of security guards at stores thinking they have a right to look through my bags. I'm tired of ruining my nails and cutting my fingers thanks to clamshell packaging.
Wanna know how to reduce theft, increase sales and all without making people feel like scumbags? Change your fucking business model to one that addresses the needs consumers actually have. The fact that your store security is for shit is *NOT* *MY* *PROBLEM*. Will Best Buy give me a new stereo if someone breaks into my home and steals mine? No. So why should I pay when they get robbed?
Here's an idea: Have machines at stores that hold spindles and spindles of DVDs and CDs. Have the customer swipe their credit card at the machine and select the movie they want, and then a pre-made DVD (for a "hot" new release) can be spit out, or, if it's something that's a little more obscure/rarely needed, it can be burnt on the spot. Don't have or want to use a credit card? No problem - just take a voucher from a display, go to the check-out line, pay with cash and the clerk can activate the code on the voucher - then the machine will give you what you want when you scan your ticket in.
This would even let there be less packaging and waste. If someone wanted a special collector's edition with all the goodies, keep those in a secure spot and get them when needed.
For small electronics, why not have vending machines like they do for iPods and cellphones now? It annoys me that I have to waste time getting a clerk to open up a cabinet just to get some $30 item I want - and it's a waste of their time, too.
In most instances, I'd say that a teacher being asked to not get involved is a bad thing - but in most instances, the teachers in question have an understanding of what appropriate behavior and boundaries are. In this case, the teacher in question may very well not have that understanding.
So, generally, yeah - you're definitely right. In this case... Well, we have a shortage of teachers, and she wants to be a teacher - maybe letting her teach but suggesting she should keep the relationship strictly schoolroom is a better approach.
Growing up in rural Maine (not that there's really any other kind of Maine :-P) we were all very friendly with our teachers, they would regularly invite our classes to their houses for cookouts and such, we didn't turn out so bad.
There's a difference between that kind of interaction and the kind where you direct your students to photos of you drunk on the web. Aparrently she had been directing students to her myspace page where photos other than the one in the article were hosted, had been asked to stop doing so, and kept refusing.
I agree that there can be a great benefit in personal relationships between students and teachers, but there are boundaries of appropriateness. Crossing those boundaries can greatly reduce the ability of a teacher to be effective at their job.
That's exactly the kind of unthinking and uncritical knee-jerk reaction we need! Because, obviously, there couldn't possibly be any more to the story!
That photo isn't the only one. And there is some history here - aparrently she was directing students to her homepage that had the other photos on it, had been asked to stop, and refused to do so. It wasn't "Oh, you have pictures on your myspace and students found them" it was "please stop directing children to inappropriate and unprofessional photos of yourself that will compromise your ability to do your job."
An individual behaving in an unprofessional manner may be subject to having professional credentials held hostage.
There is, indeed, more to the Libertarian party than free marketeerism. The problem is, the most outspoken Libertarians - or, at least, the ones that get the attention - are the crazies.
Montana - a state one would think would have plenty of viable libertarian candidates for Senate to choose from - ran a guy who turned himself into a smurf because he was afraid of Y2K. In and of itself, this isn't a big deal, but it demonstrates the incredible political naivete of the Libertarian party leadership. And this isn't only a problem with Libertarians. It is a problem for ANY third party that wants to get taken seriously.
For a third party to become viable, they have to run a smoother, more professional campaign with a figurehead that is MUCH more charismatic than anyone the Dems or Repubs can run - because they have to overcome the "haha, you're independent which is a synonym for loooooony" stigma that has come about, in part, because people run Papa Smurf for Senate or go off about how Socialism is The Answer and maybe Stalin wasn't such a bad guy or whatever.
Anyone who could be a viable candidate for a national office will feel a great pressure to go Democrat or Republican because, while those parties may not be aligned with their views very well, they are still going to be less of a hindrance than any independent party.
We would have had a good shot at a third party being able to get funding with Perot - but he sabotaged it with is on-again-off-again decision to run. The Green party might be viable if someone like Gore were to go over to it and they shut assholes like Michael Moore up. Once we get one viable new party, then there would be a chance for others to come along.
That said, my views do line up more libertarian than anything else - but I'm realistic enough to know that until the party gets their shit together and stops with the Blue Man Group nonsense, nothing good will happen.
I'd run for something under the Libertarian party, but I'm an openly gay Jewish woman, and I don't live in New York - no way I'm getting anywhere.
Or imagine that you hear gunshots, you go to the area, and when you get there you see someone who has a gun who says "the shooter is wearing a red-hoodie, jeans, I think he's a white guy, and he went that way" (pointing to a direction you didn't come from).
Is the guy with the gun the shooter trying to trick you? Is the guy just another person responding as you did?
Or imagine that it's a week after this kind of incident. People are on high alert, suspicious of everything. A car backfires in the campus parking lot. All it takes is one person to draw their gun at that point for the probability of tragedy to increase dramatically.
Yes, people are supposedly going to be well trained, but then again, police are supposedly well-trained and there are any number of completely bogus police shootings that happen. People in the armed forces are well-trained, but friendly fire incidents happen.
Who do you think is going to be more likely to keep their cool: a trained police officer, a trained soldier, or a trained college student? My money's on the people who do it for a living, and even then there is still a chance of error.