It wasn't until I'd consumed it that I realized what was happening. Tom heartily recommended the new bread-disc, imploring I buy it with gusto:
"Pete this triple layer, cheese, anchovy, jalapeno, ape and pepperoni monster will be the takeaway of your life. They put cayenne in the tomato puree and man...just buy it. Gotta be tasted to be believed."
It's hardly common for that man to grant such an endorsement, and the next day I phoned up and got a jumbo 14" , the guy over the phone even said; 'We think you're gonna love it' - nobody ever said that to me in my illustrious history of calling up for food to my door! My heart did a little jump of the sort you get when for just a moment you swear you found a premium Ron Jeremy classic clip, or Heaven 17's 'Temptation' starting to play at a club as you instinctly haul your drunken, middle-aged self onto the dance floor for some old school self-embarassment for you and those around you - quality heartjumping you know?
I wasn't letting this occasion pass me by without making it memorable. I pulled out my deceased grandmother's candlelabra and stuck it onto the table together with purple wax scented candles I'd gotten from some hippy place in Camden years back. As I lit them and the lavender hit my nostrils it only accentuated the splendid truth that the pizza would soon arrive...
I texted Tom and a few other friends on my HTC Android, saying that some detailed pics of my consuming the bread mass and topping would follow. A simple smiley emoticon from Tom was the reply, but Tim from sports desk said...
"Pete I don't even wans to think abut your wrinkled visage and yellow-teeth digging into some pizza some guy told you was legendary. Get a grip or just put the pic on Facebook like any other conceited moron would. Or Digg...you'd probably get dugg 300 times minimum."
Bastard. Trying to rain on the parade - but there was the doorbell! I answered it, and a smiling young chap at the door said 'Hi that'll be £11.99 and here's a free bottle of Coke'.
I eagerly took the box and cola, handed over the exact change which was already prepared at the porch. The thought of the spicy clash of cayenne, jalapeno, salted ape and more was becoming less pleasent anticipation and more torture. I took my time putting the box by the table...relishing the prospect of chomping it down with abandon.
Then I opened the box......there was a 14 inch pizza but it was mere cheese and tomato! Cheese and tomato! That was it - bog-standard bullshit that I only bought in my student years due to financial stress!! An insult! Insult!
Like Tommy Wiseau in The Room I cried out a terrible and gargly cry and began a slow-paced trashing of my living room. The TV, a lovely Toshiba, went out of the window - my signed picture of Steven Jobs was smashed (later received a new frame), and I smeared the pizza over my sofa to devastating effect. The anger subsided...and although I managed to put together an omelette that night, these pizza woes will never leave me...I left a one-star review for the London Hell Pizza branch, and threatened legal action should my Android number ever find its way into some pranker's greasy mitts.
So rather than post a few snarky sentences of hyperbole verbiage would you like to actually question my 'running stream of condemnation' and say why it's incorrect?
Factually it isn't; Assange was a black hat hacker who has admitted an illegal act and was fined for that accordingly. He admitted to it. He was also suspected in several other incidents (including one suspicion of inserting the letters 'WANK' onto NASA computers) but due to insufficient evidence he was never charged. That's ambiguous; but his undertaking of hacking in the past is certainly not.
So go on, why aren't the events I just mentioned that are recorded on a multitude of credible sources not 'truth'?
Agreed! It doesn't make this particular event less laudable.
But as he promotes his website, travelling about at seminars and elsewhere it's assumed that he's inevitably promoting the more spurious or outright fabricated 'leaks' that also manifest as content on the website.
Anyone who is determined enough, and certainly an office of paid employees fit for purpose, can just flood Wikileaks to the point where doubt descends on a lot of what arrives on the site. This has likely begun already: What's to say Wikileaks won't become to leaking websites what 4chan is to message boards?
But I'm sure Assange will be out there still prostrating before the media who then portrays him as either a rogue or a grand old servant to liberty right up to the last moment that it's viable.
This is why he isn't laudable; because he's knowingly riding on the back of something he knows isn't credible and whose credibility will worsen over time - same as any other newspaper editor, media presenter, or spurious PR producing entity would.
The fact this guy is the man of the hour over the Afghan leaks that caused such a hubbub two days ago does not mean he isn't flawed despite unduly positive portrayals on Slashdot and elsewhere.
A big criticism of Julian Assange is his constant courting of the media to the point of being a prolific PR man - Slashdot did a post on him some months ago with the grandoise assertion that he was an 'Interational Man of Mystery'.
Truth is that his past, which is hardly whiter than white given all the suspected hacking he has done, makes him out to be much less of a virtuous crusader and more an occasionally maverick human being like quite a few people who once embarked on black hat attempts are. I agree with Wikileaks and enjoy the prospect that authority will be questioned a lot more as a result...but Assange isn't angel or particularly 'moral' .
The only thing which seperates him from older, more seasoned leaking website owners is that he is talented at courting PR and media, is decent at public speaking, and functions well as the recognisable 'face' of Wikileaks - nobody else in the leaking business has talent in the important matter of image, promotion and driving attention to his site. Were Assange lacking in that, Wikileaks would be nowhere near as famous/infamous as it is at the moment.
But the fact is that in 3 or 4 years 12 core technology could well be in place on standard home PCs, where the most strain possible is a newly released videogame.
The niche market of video renderers and other early adopters are only the first stage of buyers for this hardware - other customers will buy into it as the tech proliferates. History has shown we've seen widely marketed multi-cores aimed at everybody; and that's really what my beef is with AMD/Intel and others - they sell their stuff with the implied pretence that a big speed increase will result from more cores: It doesn't.
That is why I felt the need to point that out above. Many will buy a 12-core CPU in ~2014, just as people who don't do CPU-heavy tasking are buying 6-core Thubans now with the anticipation of a processing power gain far greater than really happens.
As others have noted here in the past, the number of processing cores do not a powerful computer make. A lot of the time with both laptops and PCs the cores are entirely unused. You could get a finely made quad-core which is standard fare nowadays, and have it work much faster than a six or dozen core system like these Mac pros.
Since processing is largely a duopoly of AMD and Intel, both have been guilty of marketing their hardware by highlighting the core numbers. Yet it's the architecture, pressure under strain, among other things that actually equate to performance.
I guess it began back in the Walmart when I was much younger...a sale was on: 'Hand-exercising kits' and weights of 0.5, 1, and 2.5 kilos were all extremely low priced as if Arnie Schwarz had had a yard sale in which Sam Walton's ghost had apparated and instantaniously snapped up most of the stuff. So I got back in my parent's Corolla with my thin, wimpy arms straining to carry roughly 15kg in squeezy torsion handles and weights. I wasn't unattractive, infact later in life I became pretty popular with the la...that's another story.
It was around that time that a now-old MMOG was out - I remember sitting on the lawn listening to that cool English band Oasis on my Walkman with those raspily melodic vocals as electric in my ear canal when a large shape eclipsed the sunlight, causing me to instinctivly look up. It was Brandon, an extremely obese but affable and eccentric nerd who lived two doors down from us in our leafy suburban middle-class mediocrity-filled neighbourhood. 'Peter' he began, his face lighting up with a proud smile 'I have PK'ed eight people in Fel today and I plan on reaching a dozen by midnight...coffee permitting.'
Back then I was naive to it all...it could have meant anything. Being a guy who didn't miss much Brendon cut off my predictable question with: "PK is player killing - you chase down some guy and ice him and then take all his stuff! I have 56k and they're all on 28.8k so the connection to the UO server is so, so much better dude. Evisceration with my indy/fort double axe!"
I still didn't comprehend, but I knew it was a long haul explanatory time so my hand flicked instinctively to the Walkman, turning it off. It was then that Brandon and I went into his home, where his PC with its new fangled Pentium and Win 95 with Weezer playing Buddy Holly on the CD. That was special then...Buddy Holly; I could pull that up on youtube in seconds now, but seeing that cheesy vid was such a novelty then - yet I digress.
I learnt UO, and fast became a PK master with Brandon and I training intensely - it was here that the weights and hand-exercise came in. For awhile my fitness in real life and my avatar UO life balanced out so well. My arms became more toned with time, and this actually helped with reflexes as I zipped around those pixelated trees on the Brit path hunting down people. It was merciless because you could destroy hours of work in a few swings of an axe plus deft lootage...yet bizarrely I felt no regret over it all. This academic theory has to be hopeless when it comes to UO; which was toned down bit by bit until people could stay in a 'safe' realm and a 'danger' realm where murder was possible. The nostalgia that haunted me for nearly a decade after I quit in late 1998 was the worst; you wanted to recapture these 'good old days', but it was just frigid within an hour of play when you tried to.
Brandon went to some new-fangled MMOG called 'Everquest' - and I never saw him after that...except for one time in 2004 at a Taco Bell. He was at the counter anxiously enquiring about freezing the products - he sounded different, on edge, and I actually thought I heard him say he wanted 100 tacos and a burrito 'for the road'. Gone was his whimsy and charm and his breathing was heavier...I quietly slinked out of the place to avoid talking to him and soon after moved to Europe.
I guess there's something spurious about taking an interaction study and using it with games where anonymity and cartoonish avatars are the 'interactable' things rather than flesh, flab, blood and bone humans. But when you think about it...the greatest 'interactors' in MMOGs can also be the poorest interactors in life. It's in life where you are a human not an avatar, so this theory is kind of stupid since I could go at pains to achieve 'human stress' that leads to community in a videogame...but be a complete flat-out stunted 'human' nowhere near the theory's assertions in life - I mean getting to the point where you live on welfare and try to get three full bags of Taco Bell? That is too far.
I found myself having fainted for dehydration outside a small village in Uttar Pradesh. I came to but was apparantly delirious, blathering wildly about my deadlines - but it was my gestures which were to change my life from there on. My hands, so used to typing out at the desk, had begun to reanact keystrokes in the same manner as the fellow who plays Mozart's hands dash across the pianoforte keys in Amadeus.
A peasent stumbled across my slumped corpse; he last asked me what I was doing in a business suit in the glaring heat of the northern hemisphere in late June (this was about a month ago) . Fortunately he had water, and was able to drag me in to a nearby village. I apparantly spoke about all sorts of computing stuff. I even confessed I dreamt I left comments on tech sites but woke up of course to find none - sombrely the young man, a mere kid in his 20s, got up and left without even a word.
The man knew what was up; after my delirium had passed and I was coherant - a small, $35 Indian Tablet Computer lay infront of me. 'It is the best thing we can do instead of a keyboard' - said Ranvir, who had taken the exact funds from my wallet in exchange for it in the local tech market close to the Ganges. It was then my capitalist attitude morphed into a centre-left smorgasbord from a simple act of kindness. Of course it didn't make economic sense to rescue my incapicitated husk...it did not square with the Rand stuff I'd worshipped so libertarianistically.
Upon squaring together an Internet connection with mere gaffer tape and a mini-co axial carefully hammered into the 3.5mm audio jack...I was on. The world opened up, and as I sat in that little squalid shack which was my temporary home...blogging became something completely new. The egoistic, day-to-day mundane became the selfless and vivid recollection of events in the village who had granted me honorary citizen status. I got to know what broadband would feel like at 56k speed, but not due to poor latency...but instead economy components. Upon blogging my experience with the good samaritan and the villagers, a commenter posted:
"Hey man you should be like the chieftain or leader or some crap? Lead these folks into a revolutionary tech thing! -- Lance"
It was that night that I near-emptied my bank account buying 200 Tablets at $35 - that's $7000 bucks. I gave a tablet to every villager bar a few spares. It was then I set about making speeches about online rights. Having educated the villagers to open source rights, technology issues, we set about changing the world. Our first stop was a pilgrimage to the Nepalese steppes to sabotage a Dalai Lama press conference for publicity, but as about fifty of us packed up to go I received a call from David in editorial back home - my HTC Android! It was still on!
"Pete? Pete. Hi we need you back here in England as soon as possible there's a few urgents things to cover. Can you fly back tomorrow afternoon?"
A tear had already dropped from my face to the Tablet on the nearby bed. Two villagers had entered and were looking at me intently as I had my conversation in English: "Yeah, yeah I can make it...can you wire some cash over; I had some unexpected expenses and..."
Dave was in a hurry and brusque: "Okay, money will be in your account within a few hours. Be back here Tuesday morning - deadlines to fill and all that. Your computer has been pining for you I swear....later man."
Tablet PCs in India changed my life, and though my plans to become the head of a village failed and the depression built upon leaving...the experience shall never leave me.
This article states a truth which has existed for the better part of a generation. University for journalism is closer to an arts course than a science one; you can get through it with a good grade easier relative to other subjects like math or science which require a specific mind to get through and even then can prove challenging and time consuming.
As such graduates - which were never really 'taught' in a direct subject 100 years ago - emerge from university to a tough jobs market. Often they need work experience, plus a series of publications before say...a local newspaper will take them in as a low-level staff member. Due to constricting markets wages have fallen; graduates here in Britain are known to begin a job on as low a salary £11-12K (about $15-16K) per year with a slight rise when we enter the London Metropolitan borough.
Assuming you're 22, talented, and have enjoyed much of your degree and the possibilities it presents (perhaps being a young idealist you picture yourself as a roving reporter, or a foreign correspondant in exotic locales etc) - the reality is that you will, for years, have to sit in an office all day long and basically reword stuff coming in on the AP/PA/Reuters wire - all day long. Far cry from your modules which presented you with an adventurous trade. That's perfectly true; you can be sodding Tintin in this business but if you're like that then you aren't young because you wouldn't have the money to travel or do in-depth investigative stuff; not to mention that geniune investigative work is rare in the ink and paper side of the trade.
After a few months of copying out the wire, bored out of your mind, you've probably lost a lot of passion for the trade. You want out. The rose-tinted specs are off; and you are basically in a job where you are confined all day to an office with a huge workload that never ends because editors want the paper packed to the gills with stuff that's appearing in 10 other rags at minimum. If you have a bullying subeditor and/or editor it can be worse; the scare stories I've heard of breakdowns or young hacks in tears thanks to a dressing down in the ed's office are too numerous to all be fabrication.
I saw this crap early on, and was able to take up other work to supplement my freelancing which is a labour of love. I was saying to a Guardian journo the other day...I smile whilst out getting a story in the July sunshine and cool breeze, the greenery and ordinary folks going about their day - and then contrast it to vigil at the PA wire, lukewarm coffee and petty office politics that haunt young 'churnalists' whose talent is squandered under a constant flow of drudgery.
Would I trade my even-lower paid freelance job for £12 grand per year in the local press doing that? Not in this life.
Just spend most of the time sleeping in a room of the futuristic 'green home' which is at the museum. It'd rob much of the novelty but still get you the bragging rights and one month of your life rent-free not to mention ten grand and the gadgetry and t-shirt.
For bonus points get two sandals made mostly out of carbon to emphasize your greenness by having a good carbon footprint. Also grow a beard beforehand and spend time giving tours to guests, slipping in green slogans and propaganda. Demand access to the website and change tidbits like this...
"More than just a body, you are a complex blend of your choices, your personality, and your environment. Who you are depends on how you care for yourself and enjoy your life."
To this: "More than just a body, you are a complex blend of your choices, your personality, and your environment. Environment. Who you are depends on what you eat, how you dress, and whether you drive a car. Through choosing a low-mpg, economical vehicle and spinning your own cloth plus having an allotment for vegetable and plant-matter growth whilst not private jetting around the world each week to promote your environmentalism straight-faced and with no sense of irony...you can become a true child of the planet.'
Upon the conclusion of the month you can then speak about how shockingly un-green the museum was, except for the house which was 'viable if expensive'. State that the lifetime membership means you will be the self-anointed Enviromaster of Chicago Museum of Science; this means you can consult with them for a lifetime for cash on the side. It's nice to get a bit whilst you save the planet man!
Even I did that it would be purely my opinion. To one guy 50% correct would constitute the border between 'success' and 'failure', to another 20%, and some on our diverse globe believe that if any crucial intelligence is incorrect then regardless of anything else it's a failure.
Not to mention how complex intelligence gathering is, how it applies to countless things. In the end you can't just do 'a ratio' and draw conclusions from everything because the quantity of important stuff is irrelevant to the sheer diversity of it: You could have a majority wrong, but still have enough right to allow those on the ground to pull something off with a resounding success and vice versa. Even whether something went well or not is up for debate. Simple ratio is just not a way to analyze such an intricate thing as this.
If you consider back in 2002/3 the 'intelligence' gained turned out spurious in crucial places - this, during one of the fastest periods of 'top secret america's' growth - then no I'd say it isn't serving us ordinaries in the West very well at all. Info gathering for matters as big as what Colin Powell put forth at that time was pitiful, but did serve the ulterior motives that have been discussed at length here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Since intelligence gathering was tied in with those two conflicts which still are ongoing, expect intel to be more along the lines of PR in favour of a given government's goals rather than anything factual or geniune. Assuming more wars follow, those employed want to keep it their paycheques coming: If you knew your government was angling to begin a war...does it make sense to trust most or even a fraction of the work that the intelligence community they pay and control produces?
If this is what the community involved with top secret work gives us in public and it on such an egregiously poor level in terms of wrongness, then all that points to is the possibility that the work that is kept secret is all the more unsavory, ethically questionable and downright terrifying whether it be torture, war crimes, kidnapping, assassination or anything other illegal practice the agencies in 'top secret America' have historically carried out or encouraged. These agencies do do good work at times, but I think this pace of growth, or growth at all, isn't necessary
Yeah I used to play Nethack a lot some time ago; learning a roguelike game gives one enough insight to spot any other game of the sort easily. Infact any young nerd who creates a game like XONG is very, very likely to have experience with a rogue-type game dating to the 1980s.
Nethack is common among nerds - and if you tire of the ASCII stuff you can commit a mild act of sacrilige and play a version more conventional in appearance one of which is included with the standard Nethack package that one can download at www.nethack.org . There have even been versions that are three dimensional in view perspective, but those haven't gotten too popular.
This game at first glance appears to be a take on an early roguetype; however in truth it's less adventureish, gear-based or as rich with chance taking. It's quirky though:
You control a vulnerable white square attempting to infiltrate a semi-randomly generated abstract color field environment infested with robots. You are armed with a paint-absorbent hockey puck that can pick up color and transfer it to other objects. If you lose your puck, you have to find another; these are scattered through the environment and look like the letter P. There are no hit points; any hit kills you, and completely ends your game. You cannot shoot enemies; instead you drop direction-changing arrows called "chevrons" to guide them to their doom in one of XONG's many black holes. But your puck will also follow the arrows, so be careful where you fire; otherwise you'll lose it down a black hole.
I can imagine any number of possibilities for this game so here are my suggestions...
You could attach a consistently looping 8-bit track, and perhaps add a purple 'M' character that changes said track between a selection of five inbetween your fight for survival. XONG: SONG Edition.
You could append a boss enemy with a brown capital 'K' - this will spawn periodically in the game to increase the challenge difficulty. However you can destroy him by luring him to the red 'M' which insta-deaths the K. XONG: KONG Edition.
You could attach an RPG element with a short text preamble which says you're a stoner who's attempting to work his way up the hockey league and must find a bong in under 200 move intervals to survive - upon 10,000 moves (progressive difficulty) and then you win hockey stardom...it could be called XONG: BONG Hockey Master Edition.
Not only this, but they also have scaled back on the single player game compared to the 1998 Starcraft.
Being a gamer massively inclined to single player for nearly anything multiplayer bar Monster Hunter via Wii it's a bit of a let down when only the Terrans can be played. I liked the story of the original which was well tied in with all three factions explored, and the add-ons that followed expanded substantially but not crucially to the plot and universe.
I mean, you've spent a sum well over an order of magnitude more expensive than its predecessor...and can't help but release Protoss and Zerg campaigns in expansion packs? I guess for people who are willing to spend $80+ to hear the whole saga will buy into it, but anyone with economy in mind should just wait until 2015 or so when Wings of Liberty and the other two campaigns are selling for a cheap $30 combi-pack.
If it's anything like the first one, Battle.net should still have hordes of players five years from now - standing the test of time to use a stale phrase.
When heading into the States not long ago I had to transfer through Chicago O'Hare to a smaller, provincial airport. American Airlines unsurprisingly lost my luggage, but thanks to a tag it was located as being with the handlers back at Chicago. The friendly woman at the check-in desk where I'd arrived after the second flight gave me a complimentary kit that included a toothbrush, toothpaste, mini-haircomb and so on.
The expedient service was what struck me most though; the next day a guy in a van drove up to where I stayed and dropped it off needing a signature and ID to confirm. All this was free, all of it was worked out and the lady at the desk looked astonished at me if I asked there was a fee to expedite getting my suitcase back - it contained mostly clothing that I could buy at a mall or whatever, but also a few items somewhat more important.
AA must have yearly meetings where this baggage issue is brought up; remember that scene from Fight Club where the anti-hero played by Ed Norton opposes the cost of keeping a shoddy system with unhappy customers that might kick up an occasionally costly issue to fixing everything and performing a good service. If the good service is more expensive than paying customers off, and in the case of improving baggage loss rates it likely is, then AA keep the crappy service to the inconvience of customers.
As cynically compelling as that movie was, this principle is applied rigorously behind closed doors in many firms who simply seek to maximize profits by definition of what they are. If it means a person losing something valuable or otherwise getting aggrieved (crashing a shoddy car and being injured), then let's cast that aside and keep the margin at an acceptable level. Unethical? Sure, but that's business.
That airlines are now charging seperate fees for this service without presumably making a marked improvement could be harmful to them in the long term; if passengers know they're paying X for luggage carriage for every piece inclusive of the first then they can more directly demand a refund. Something which isn't quite as easy to do if its bundled in and you get chucked a cheap kit of goods to clean up that they manufacture in quantity. So this all could be a good move with respect to luggage, as it might make firms like Delta or AA or anybody else with high passenger volume improve somewhat.
Ah this topic reminds me of when Bart Simpson gets bought, by Marge, a golf game named "Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge" instead of the hip and happening "Bonestorm" which is a Mortal Kombat style beat em' up that all the kids play.
It's obvious that propaganda happens; but if you read my post you'd gather that I used an example and invented a quotation to show a subtle principle of propaganda in action rather than simply state that it goes on. So don't be facetious about your own misunderstanding as it simply isn't a good way to start a critique of what's written in the OP.
How many times do you hear someone (not a media persona/pundit) discussing a war, be it this one or one in the past, take the waffle of a politician and quickly translate it into a plain piece of speech that actually expresses better what was meant in the original statement? That's rare, because the means of expressing policy aren't 'obvious' to the public though most know what propaganda is and that it happens.
A common aim of propaganda is for it to conduct itself whilst not being overt to most who live in society.
As to the rest of your post; that you observe my first example as 'verbally antagonistic' yet don't appear to oppose the second which is 'covertly antagonistic' , would you like to explain why that is? Is it any better for the population to say these things nicely than it is to say them plainly when they happen anyway?
For the purposes of appearances, sure - consciously or unconsciously that is the whole idea. Yet I don't think either one is better than the other when it comes to justifying war, or torture, oppression or anything else abhorrent that has been and is perpetrated by governments the world over. That even now in 2010 governments aren't even close to speaking plainly on uncomfortable things tells us a lot about why authority needs to be grilled by questions, and often.
The abbreviation, which could mean any number of things, is telling of the military habit to name destructive, harmful things with innocuous sounding phrases that do not imply damage "Active Denial System" could just as easily have been a web term or a feature of an antivirus program. Imagine a TV ad: "Norton's Active-Denial-System or ADS is proven to..." This is shared by government which will often use formal, even flowery language to cover up a practice which is morally or ethically contentious:
For instance, a military spokeman or officer or a high-up politician cannot very well come out and say this without coming off badly from it: "We believe that as we kill off our opponents in the Taliban a number of civilian casualties are necessary to allow our victory."
Therefore you get pretentious, padded-out diction like this: "We concede that the Taliban are a formidable foe who possess a humanitarian record that we can only describe as deplorable. However if we are to restore and preserve the freedoms of the Afghan people, and we think you'd agree with us on this, that a certain number of hazards for those present in the field are bound up in these transitional times are justified in the context of the achievement of the coalition's greater goals: We're in the sphere of granting those formerly under oppression a life of liberty, free of oppression and terrorism."
This sort of puffed out prose is a long-time euphemism which has only proliferated over the 100 and more years - masses of Latin words lengthen a point, and those who do listen can't be bothered digging out the true meaning which was basically that civilian deaths can't be avoided and are actually needed for the coalition to win. The end justifies the means. But in our hypothetical wording up there this was disguised: The great enemy of clear writing is insincerity. A well-known author named George Orwell wrote much on this and his essays are recommended.
That's mainly true - back in the 19th century before all these degrees and educational programmes...journalists sprang up and founded the beginnings of what are now establishment publications. They were mostly middle class, literate and educated at first, but the spirit of journalism began from people who only had common sense rather than formal education to guide them. Yes the world and tech has changed it all a lot; but many of the core principles of going out there and finding a good story were are true then as they are now.
Remember that whilst it is easy to do something...it's usually hard to do stuff well. Journalism done well requires a marriage of motivation, talent and willingless to enter upon it as a regular activity or method of generating a living for oneself. Not everyone can write engagingly...infact it's quite rare to find a writer that captures your interest and keeps his audience coming back for more for a span of years by sheer excellence of his work.
Not falling prey to laziness is important else you can begin churning out bad content and stay inside the office all day long till you clock off. That's a temptation a lot of talented but lazy people fall prey to. One can learn a lot by reading books and also asking for tales about the press within press circles; this is the news for the news-makers...because it helps you realize the pitfalls you might end up in to were you ignorant of past circumstances of other journos.
Any journalism-inclined blog which has an eye at launch to introducing even the most modest adverts in the first 12 months is unduly optimistic, unless we're including blogs with massive capital behind them - and those aren't usually old school journalism of the proper sort that's needed now anyhow.
Yes I noted in the last paragraph of my post that there are indeed good offerings to be found online. The red-tops never were quality; my post was aimed at those that do bill themselves as quality but are anything but. The paywalling is just an appalling, but oddly logical, end to the mentality of those who've turned journalism away from principle and towards profit.
You're spot on about the regurgitation - there are journalists, often younger ones who actually were interested and optimistic as they learned contextual stuff in university who are now employed to recycle stuff from the Press Association/Associated Press/Reuters wire all day long. It is the most boring, efficient way a young person can kill off any geniune like for the job; for them the trade is defined by repetitive soul destroying work rather than creativity or satisfaction. It isn't anything approaching passion after a year or two of suffering that.
Frankly I wouldn't blame any graduate now to avoid fixed employment altogether and make his or her chief aim to build a reputation as a competant, talented freelancer. Blogging and online journalism is one way to do this; getting out there and doing your own stories unique to you, making calls and getting a few contacts in the local press offices can be a good start.
Highest renown often goes to the talented; journalism has a history of awarding talent with recognition. Don't bother going into it unless you were told by your teachers, family, friends etc that you had a knack for words and you personally feel you could make it. If you feel your personality squares with journalism then by all means enter the profession with all the individualism you can muster as that trait is always needed. Don't expect to make much money in the formative years; it takes time until you can command a fair income.
Good books to read to clue in are Andrew Marr's 'My Trade' and Nick Davies's 'Flat Earth News' , if you like humour look up Benji the binman on Google. Nick's book is brutally honest and far closer to how it works today than Marr's nostalgic, historical, professorish work which is nevertheless decent.
If its one thing I've learned in a few years of being involved in the journalistic trade...it's that so many people in it are pigheaded to the point of doing themselves a lot of damage to their potential success and reputation. This is true from editors, to rank and file columnists...and new graduates convert alarmingly to this mentality with a dissapointing number of exceptions.
Murdoch aside, the overriding truth of modern journalist both here in the UK and in the US is that quantity rules over quality. That's why every Saturday and Sunday we Britons cannot buy a 'quality broadsheet' without having to acquire a book's worth of text in supplements along with the actual newspaper itself. That one has to shell over £1.20 or so for a compendium of tripe that you mostly won't get around to reading is why journalism is failing.
Simply put there are too many people employed who may have begun with some talent, but have lapsed into a state of passive drudgery writing filler columns about inane topics most readers could not care less about. You can actually tell with a lot of them that the author wasn't really thinking as he or she typed it out. In short the 'news' of newspaper is absent in a woefully high proportion; yes there's room for editorials and quirky opinion pieces...but the proportions are way off right now.
This is true of all Murdoch rags, most starkly The Times which was a pioneer of supplements in the 1990s. Once, decades ago (pre-Murdoch), the Times led some of the most intriguing investigative departments in journalistic history - they spent months to break a story that would spread across what? Four pages or so of print? This level of work for that amount of journalism is unheard of today - that's because today it's all about cheap, easy stories that can be summed up mostly as: 'Churnalism' (a term coined by Guardian journo Nick Davies) . It began in earnest in the 1980s with Andrew Neil's Times, and the trend away from reportage which took effort, talent, dedication and downright brilliance to pull off is almost entirely absent in The Times of 2010.
There is hope for the profession, as wracked by disease as it is; online journalism has some good offerings where journalists actually leave the office and do some old school reporting. That Murdoch and a few others see their awful, soulless content as worthy of paying for online rather than just going for what's worked since the beginning (advertisements) is telling of their wrongheaded approach which led so many publications to become so degraded in quality.
Will gamers who use OnLive ever represent such a large chunk of a typical ISPs' customer base as to make a massively expensive upgrade in capacity worthwhile financially?
Good post. I'd like to add that OnLive is not out in Britain until the end of 2011...so about 16-17 months. That said, the sluggishness in UK broadband compared with services offered in parts of the European continent is well documented, and the lacklustre broadband situation is likely to stay as such for Britons: We are charged about £35 GBP/40 Euro monthly for a connection not even half as good as say...a Swedish ISP or an ISP located in a 'less rich' country like Turkey that is cheaper meg for meg.
The one thing which struck me as the initial hype of this OnLive service happened was my thinking: 'Well what's wrong with Steam?' - OnLive doesn't offer anymore freedom from DRM than Steam. It doesn't offer enough titles to merit using alongside Steam. Like you said the economics of buying games there are non-existant...just walk into a shop and buy one for cheaper. I also bet that despite this initial demand they won't be able to match the frequency and allure of Valve's offers that happen every couple of weeks.
Steam is great mostly for cheap games that they have on offer, classic games hard to come by in the stores, and also the simplistic, hassle-free purchase and browsing interface. OnLive embodies none of these key principles except partly the latter one...and these principles are a big part of Steam's success that keeps gamers checking the store often.
Remember those sequences in Spielberg's take on 'Minority Report' in which advertisements would actually call out names of passers-by or customers entering shops - how that would work with groups of people (or whether it would just default to a generic pitch) I do not know. The technology around this sort of thing looks pretty attainable by 2052 which was the year that movie was set. Same as a few other things in the film. Infact it seemed quite a prudent take on the future except for all the precognition stuff which veered a bit far into the paranormal/ESP realm for my liking.
Can't really say that the existence of this tech necessarily makes it use exclusively predilected towards authoritarian regime and control...I mean we could say the same of multitudes of inventions that could be adapted just as these advertisements could. For instance closer analysis on demographics deemed likelier to be 'subversive' etc; but given the point I just made there's no need to single this particular invention out with couple of 1984 quotes. Remember that the big surveillance tool in 1984 was an adapted television screen (telescreen) - you don't get much by way of that criticism when Toshiba or Samsung announces a massive new screen; no mentions of Fahrenheit 451 either which would be more astute in any case.
I haven't read PKD's short story for a long, long time...maybe 8 or 9 years but I remember when I mentally compared the film to it after seeing it in a theatre that it wasn't all that similar to the blockbuster which had massive exposure. More like bits and pieces were there, with the screenwriters building a different shell and appending entirely new characters to progress the movie. So I was wondering if somebody would clarify if this technology was actually in the short story as opposed to merely the film?
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It wasn't until I'd consumed it that I realized what was happening. Tom heartily recommended the new bread-disc, imploring I buy it with gusto:
"Pete this triple layer, cheese, anchovy, jalapeno, ape and pepperoni monster will be the takeaway of your life. They put cayenne in the tomato puree and man...just buy it. Gotta be tasted to be believed."
It's hardly common for that man to grant such an endorsement, and the next day I phoned up and got a jumbo 14" , the guy over the phone even said; 'We think you're gonna love it' - nobody ever said that to me in my illustrious history of calling up for food to my door! My heart did a little jump of the sort you get when for just a moment you swear you found a premium Ron Jeremy classic clip, or Heaven 17's 'Temptation' starting to play at a club as you instinctly haul your drunken, middle-aged self onto the dance floor for some old school self-embarassment for you and those around you - quality heartjumping you know?
I wasn't letting this occasion pass me by without making it memorable. I pulled out my deceased grandmother's candlelabra and stuck it onto the table together with purple wax scented candles I'd gotten from some hippy place in Camden years back. As I lit them and the lavender hit my nostrils it only accentuated the splendid truth that the pizza would soon arrive...
I texted Tom and a few other friends on my HTC Android, saying that some detailed pics of my consuming the bread mass and topping would follow. A simple smiley emoticon from Tom was the reply, but Tim from sports desk said...
"Pete I don't even wans to think abut your wrinkled visage and yellow-teeth digging into some pizza some guy told you was legendary. Get a grip or just put the pic on Facebook like any other conceited moron would. Or Digg...you'd probably get dugg 300 times minimum."
Bastard. Trying to rain on the parade - but there was the doorbell! I answered it, and a smiling young chap at the door said 'Hi that'll be £11.99 and here's a free bottle of Coke'.
I eagerly took the box and cola, handed over the exact change which was already prepared at the porch. The thought of the spicy clash of cayenne, jalapeno, salted ape and more was becoming less pleasent anticipation and more torture. I took my time putting the box by the table...relishing the prospect of chomping it down with abandon.
Then I opened the box......there was a 14 inch pizza but it was mere cheese and tomato! Cheese and tomato! That was it - bog-standard bullshit that I only bought in my student years due to financial stress!! An insult! Insult!
Like Tommy Wiseau in The Room I cried out a terrible and gargly cry and began a slow-paced trashing of my living room. The TV, a lovely Toshiba, went out of the window - my signed picture of Steven Jobs was smashed (later received a new frame), and I smeared the pizza over my sofa to devastating effect. The anger subsided...and although I managed to put together an omelette that night, these pizza woes will never leave me...I left a one-star review for the London Hell Pizza branch, and threatened legal action should my Android number ever find its way into some pranker's greasy mitts.
So rather than post a few snarky sentences of hyperbole verbiage would you like to actually question my 'running stream of condemnation' and say why it's incorrect?
Factually it isn't; Assange was a black hat hacker who has admitted an illegal act and was fined for that accordingly. He admitted to it. He was also suspected in several other incidents (including one suspicion of inserting the letters 'WANK' onto NASA computers) but due to insufficient evidence he was never charged. That's ambiguous; but his undertaking of hacking in the past is certainly not.
So go on, why aren't the events I just mentioned that are recorded on a multitude of credible sources not 'truth'?
Agreed! It doesn't make this particular event less laudable.
But as he promotes his website, travelling about at seminars and elsewhere it's assumed that he's inevitably promoting the more spurious or outright fabricated 'leaks' that also manifest as content on the website.
Anyone who is determined enough, and certainly an office of paid employees fit for purpose, can just flood Wikileaks to the point where doubt descends on a lot of what arrives on the site. This has likely begun already: What's to say Wikileaks won't become to leaking websites what 4chan is to message boards?
But I'm sure Assange will be out there still prostrating before the media who then portrays him as either a rogue or a grand old servant to liberty right up to the last moment that it's viable.
This is why he isn't laudable; because he's knowingly riding on the back of something he knows isn't credible and whose credibility will worsen over time - same as any other newspaper editor, media presenter, or spurious PR producing entity would.
The fact this guy is the man of the hour over the Afghan leaks that caused such a hubbub two days ago does not mean he isn't flawed despite unduly positive portrayals on Slashdot and elsewhere.
A big criticism of Julian Assange is his constant courting of the media to the point of being a prolific PR man - Slashdot did a post on him some months ago with the grandoise assertion that he was an 'Interational Man of Mystery'.
Truth is that his past, which is hardly whiter than white given all the suspected hacking he has done, makes him out to be much less of a virtuous crusader and more an occasionally maverick human being like quite a few people who once embarked on black hat attempts are. I agree with Wikileaks and enjoy the prospect that authority will be questioned a lot more as a result...but Assange isn't angel or particularly 'moral' .
The only thing which seperates him from older, more seasoned leaking website owners is that he is talented at courting PR and media, is decent at public speaking, and functions well as the recognisable 'face' of Wikileaks - nobody else in the leaking business has talent in the important matter of image, promotion and driving attention to his site. Were Assange lacking in that, Wikileaks would be nowhere near as famous/infamous as it is at the moment.
That's true and the OP never denied that.
But the fact is that in 3 or 4 years 12 core technology could well be in place on standard home PCs, where the most strain possible is a newly released videogame.
The niche market of video renderers and other early adopters are only the first stage of buyers for this hardware - other customers will buy into it as the tech proliferates. History has shown we've seen widely marketed multi-cores aimed at everybody; and that's really what my beef is with AMD/Intel and others - they sell their stuff with the implied pretence that a big speed increase will result from more cores: It doesn't.
That is why I felt the need to point that out above. Many will buy a 12-core CPU in ~2014, just as people who don't do CPU-heavy tasking are buying 6-core Thubans now with the anticipation of a processing power gain far greater than really happens.
As others have noted here in the past, the number of processing cores do not a powerful computer make. A lot of the time with both laptops and PCs the cores are entirely unused. You could get a finely made quad-core which is standard fare nowadays, and have it work much faster than a six or dozen core system like these Mac pros.
Since processing is largely a duopoly of AMD and Intel, both have been guilty of marketing their hardware by highlighting the core numbers. Yet it's the architecture, pressure under strain, among other things that actually equate to performance.
I guess it began back in the Walmart when I was much younger...a sale was on: 'Hand-exercising kits' and weights of 0.5, 1, and 2.5 kilos were all extremely low priced as if Arnie Schwarz had had a yard sale in which Sam Walton's ghost had apparated and instantaniously snapped up most of the stuff. So I got back in my parent's Corolla with my thin, wimpy arms straining to carry roughly 15kg in squeezy torsion handles and weights. I wasn't unattractive, infact later in life I became pretty popular with the la...that's another story.
It was around that time that a now-old MMOG was out - I remember sitting on the lawn listening to that cool English band Oasis on my Walkman with those raspily melodic vocals as electric in my ear canal when a large shape eclipsed the sunlight, causing me to instinctivly look up. It was Brandon, an extremely obese but affable and eccentric nerd who lived two doors down from us in our leafy suburban middle-class mediocrity-filled neighbourhood. 'Peter' he began, his face lighting up with a proud smile 'I have PK'ed eight people in Fel today and I plan on reaching a dozen by midnight...coffee permitting.'
Back then I was naive to it all...it could have meant anything. Being a guy who didn't miss much Brendon cut off my predictable question with: "PK is player killing - you chase down some guy and ice him and then take all his stuff! I have 56k and they're all on 28.8k so the connection to the UO server is so, so much better dude. Evisceration with my indy/fort double axe!"
I still didn't comprehend, but I knew it was a long haul explanatory time so my hand flicked instinctively to the Walkman, turning it off. It was then that Brandon and I went into his home, where his PC with its new fangled Pentium and Win 95 with Weezer playing Buddy Holly on the CD. That was special then...Buddy Holly; I could pull that up on youtube in seconds now, but seeing that cheesy vid was such a novelty then - yet I digress.
I learnt UO, and fast became a PK master with Brandon and I training intensely - it was here that the weights and hand-exercise came in. For awhile my fitness in real life and my avatar UO life balanced out so well. My arms became more toned with time, and this actually helped with reflexes as I zipped around those pixelated trees on the Brit path hunting down people. It was merciless because you could destroy hours of work in a few swings of an axe plus deft lootage...yet bizarrely I felt no regret over it all. This academic theory has to be hopeless when it comes to UO; which was toned down bit by bit until people could stay in a 'safe' realm and a 'danger' realm where murder was possible. The nostalgia that haunted me for nearly a decade after I quit in late 1998 was the worst; you wanted to recapture these 'good old days', but it was just frigid within an hour of play when you tried to.
Brandon went to some new-fangled MMOG called 'Everquest' - and I never saw him after that...except for one time in 2004 at a Taco Bell. He was at the counter anxiously enquiring about freezing the products - he sounded different, on edge, and I actually thought I heard him say he wanted 100 tacos and a burrito 'for the road'. Gone was his whimsy and charm and his breathing was heavier...I quietly slinked out of the place to avoid talking to him and soon after moved to Europe.
I guess there's something spurious about taking an interaction study and using it with games where anonymity and cartoonish avatars are the 'interactable' things rather than flesh, flab, blood and bone humans. But when you think about it...the greatest 'interactors' in MMOGs can also be the poorest interactors in life. It's in life where you are a human not an avatar, so this theory is kind of stupid since I could go at pains to achieve 'human stress' that leads to community in a videogame...but be a complete flat-out stunted 'human' nowhere near the theory's assertions in life - I mean getting to the point where you live on welfare and try to get three full bags of Taco Bell? That is too far.
I found myself having fainted for dehydration outside a small village in Uttar Pradesh. I came to but was apparantly delirious, blathering wildly about my deadlines - but it was my gestures which were to change my life from there on. My hands, so used to typing out at the desk, had begun to reanact keystrokes in the same manner as the fellow who plays Mozart's hands dash across the pianoforte keys in Amadeus.
A peasent stumbled across my slumped corpse; he last asked me what I was doing in a business suit in the glaring heat of the northern hemisphere in late June (this was about a month ago) . Fortunately he had water, and was able to drag me in to a nearby village. I apparantly spoke about all sorts of computing stuff. I even confessed I dreamt I left comments on tech sites but woke up of course to find none - sombrely the young man, a mere kid in his 20s, got up and left without even a word.
The man knew what was up; after my delirium had passed and I was coherant - a small, $35 Indian Tablet Computer lay infront of me. 'It is the best thing we can do instead of a keyboard' - said Ranvir, who had taken the exact funds from my wallet in exchange for it in the local tech market close to the Ganges. It was then my capitalist attitude morphed into a centre-left smorgasbord from a simple act of kindness. Of course it didn't make economic sense to rescue my incapicitated husk...it did not square with the Rand stuff I'd worshipped so libertarianistically.
Upon squaring together an Internet connection with mere gaffer tape and a mini-co axial carefully hammered into the 3.5mm audio jack...I was on. The world opened up, and as I sat in that little squalid shack which was my temporary home...blogging became something completely new. The egoistic, day-to-day mundane became the selfless and vivid recollection of events in the village who had granted me honorary citizen status. I got to know what broadband would feel like at 56k speed, but not due to poor latency...but instead economy components. Upon blogging my experience with the good samaritan and the villagers, a commenter posted:
"Hey man you should be like the chieftain or leader or some crap? Lead these folks into a revolutionary tech thing! -- Lance"
It was that night that I near-emptied my bank account buying 200 Tablets at $35 - that's $7000 bucks. I gave a tablet to every villager bar a few spares. It was then I set about making speeches about online rights. Having educated the villagers to open source rights, technology issues, we set about changing the world. Our first stop was a pilgrimage to the Nepalese steppes to sabotage a Dalai Lama press conference for publicity, but as about fifty of us packed up to go I received a call from David in editorial back home - my HTC Android! It was still on!
"Pete? Pete. Hi we need you back here in England as soon as possible there's a few urgents things to cover. Can you fly back tomorrow afternoon?"
A tear had already dropped from my face to the Tablet on the nearby bed. Two villagers had entered and were looking at me intently as I had my conversation in English: "Yeah, yeah I can make it...can you wire some cash over; I had some unexpected expenses and..."
Dave was in a hurry and brusque: "Okay, money will be in your account within a few hours. Be back here Tuesday morning - deadlines to fill and all that. Your computer has been pining for you I swear....later man."
Tablet PCs in India changed my life, and though my plans to become the head of a village failed and the depression built upon leaving...the experience shall never leave me.
This article states a truth which has existed for the better part of a generation. University for journalism is closer to an arts course than a science one; you can get through it with a good grade easier relative to other subjects like math or science which require a specific mind to get through and even then can prove challenging and time consuming.
As such graduates - which were never really 'taught' in a direct subject 100 years ago - emerge from university to a tough jobs market. Often they need work experience, plus a series of publications before say...a local newspaper will take them in as a low-level staff member. Due to constricting markets wages have fallen; graduates here in Britain are known to begin a job on as low a salary £11-12K (about $15-16K) per year with a slight rise when we enter the London Metropolitan borough.
Assuming you're 22, talented, and have enjoyed much of your degree and the possibilities it presents (perhaps being a young idealist you picture yourself as a roving reporter, or a foreign correspondant in exotic locales etc) - the reality is that you will, for years, have to sit in an office all day long and basically reword stuff coming in on the AP/PA/Reuters wire - all day long. Far cry from your modules which presented you with an adventurous trade. That's perfectly true; you can be sodding Tintin in this business but if you're like that then you aren't young because you wouldn't have the money to travel or do in-depth investigative stuff; not to mention that geniune investigative work is rare in the ink and paper side of the trade.
After a few months of copying out the wire, bored out of your mind, you've probably lost a lot of passion for the trade. You want out. The rose-tinted specs are off; and you are basically in a job where you are confined all day to an office with a huge workload that never ends because editors want the paper packed to the gills with stuff that's appearing in 10 other rags at minimum. If you have a bullying subeditor and/or editor it can be worse; the scare stories I've heard of breakdowns or young hacks in tears thanks to a dressing down in the ed's office are too numerous to all be fabrication.
I saw this crap early on, and was able to take up other work to supplement my freelancing which is a labour of love. I was saying to a Guardian journo the other day...I smile whilst out getting a story in the July sunshine and cool breeze, the greenery and ordinary folks going about their day - and then contrast it to vigil at the PA wire, lukewarm coffee and petty office politics that haunt young 'churnalists' whose talent is squandered under a constant flow of drudgery.
Would I trade my even-lower paid freelance job for £12 grand per year in the local press doing that? Not in this life.
Just spend most of the time sleeping in a room of the futuristic 'green home' which is at the museum. It'd rob much of the novelty but still get you the bragging rights and one month of your life rent-free not to mention ten grand and the gadgetry and t-shirt.
For bonus points get two sandals made mostly out of carbon to emphasize your greenness by having a good carbon footprint. Also grow a beard beforehand and spend time giving tours to guests, slipping in green slogans and propaganda. Demand access to the website and change tidbits like this...
"More than just a body, you are a complex blend of your choices, your personality, and your environment. Who you are depends on how you care for yourself and enjoy your life."
To this: "More than just a body, you are a complex blend of your choices, your personality, and your environment. Environment. Who you are depends on what you eat, how you dress, and whether you drive a car. Through choosing a low-mpg, economical vehicle and spinning your own cloth plus having an allotment for vegetable and plant-matter growth whilst not private jetting around the world each week to promote your environmentalism straight-faced and with no sense of irony...you can become a true child of the planet.'
Upon the conclusion of the month you can then speak about how shockingly un-green the museum was, except for the house which was 'viable if expensive'. State that the lifetime membership means you will be the self-anointed Enviromaster of Chicago Museum of Science; this means you can consult with them for a lifetime for cash on the side. It's nice to get a bit whilst you save the planet man!
With respect, you're talking out of your arse:
Even I did that it would be purely my opinion. To one guy 50% correct would constitute the border between 'success' and 'failure', to another 20%, and some on our diverse globe believe that if any crucial intelligence is incorrect then regardless of anything else it's a failure.
Not to mention how complex intelligence gathering is, how it applies to countless things. In the end you can't just do 'a ratio' and draw conclusions from everything because the quantity of important stuff is irrelevant to the sheer diversity of it: You could have a majority wrong, but still have enough right to allow those on the ground to pull something off with a resounding success and vice versa. Even whether something went well or not is up for debate. Simple ratio is just not a way to analyze such an intricate thing as this.
If you consider back in 2002/3 the 'intelligence' gained turned out spurious in crucial places - this, during one of the fastest periods of 'top secret america's' growth - then no I'd say it isn't serving us ordinaries in the West very well at all. Info gathering for matters as big as what Colin Powell put forth at that time was pitiful, but did serve the ulterior motives that have been discussed at length here on Slashdot and elsewhere.
Since intelligence gathering was tied in with those two conflicts which still are ongoing, expect intel to be more along the lines of PR in favour of a given government's goals rather than anything factual or geniune. Assuming more wars follow, those employed want to keep it their paycheques coming: If you knew your government was angling to begin a war...does it make sense to trust most or even a fraction of the work that the intelligence community they pay and control produces?
If this is what the community involved with top secret work gives us in public and it on such an egregiously poor level in terms of wrongness, then all that points to is the possibility that the work that is kept secret is all the more unsavory, ethically questionable and downright terrifying whether it be torture, war crimes, kidnapping, assassination or anything other illegal practice the agencies in 'top secret America' have historically carried out or encouraged. These agencies do do good work at times, but I think this pace of growth, or growth at all, isn't necessary
Yeah I used to play Nethack a lot some time ago; learning a roguelike game gives one enough insight to spot any other game of the sort easily. Infact any young nerd who creates a game like XONG is very, very likely to have experience with a rogue-type game dating to the 1980s.
Nethack is common among nerds - and if you tire of the ASCII stuff you can commit a mild act of sacrilige and play a version more conventional in appearance one of which is included with the standard Nethack package that one can download at www.nethack.org . There have even been versions that are three dimensional in view perspective, but those haven't gotten too popular.
This game at first glance appears to be a take on an early roguetype; however in truth it's less adventureish, gear-based or as rich with chance taking. It's quirky though:
You control a vulnerable white square attempting to infiltrate a semi-randomly generated abstract color field environment infested with robots. You are armed with a paint-absorbent hockey puck that can pick up color and transfer it to other objects. If you lose your puck, you have to find another; these are scattered through the environment and look like the letter P. There are no hit points; any hit kills you, and completely ends your game. You cannot shoot enemies; instead you drop direction-changing arrows called "chevrons" to guide them to their doom in one of XONG's many black holes. But your puck will also follow the arrows, so be careful where you fire; otherwise you'll lose it down a black hole.
I can imagine any number of possibilities for this game so here are my suggestions...
You could attach a consistently looping 8-bit track, and perhaps add a purple 'M' character that changes said track between a selection of five inbetween your fight for survival. XONG: SONG Edition.
You could append a boss enemy with a brown capital 'K' - this will spawn periodically in the game to increase the challenge difficulty. However you can destroy him by luring him to the red 'M' which insta-deaths the K. XONG: KONG Edition.
You could attach an RPG element with a short text preamble which says you're a stoner who's attempting to work his way up the hockey league and must find a bong in under 200 move intervals to survive - upon 10,000 moves (progressive difficulty) and then you win hockey stardom...it could be called XONG: BONG Hockey Master Edition.
Not only this, but they also have scaled back on the single player game compared to the 1998 Starcraft.
Being a gamer massively inclined to single player for nearly anything multiplayer bar Monster Hunter via Wii it's a bit of a let down when only the Terrans can be played. I liked the story of the original which was well tied in with all three factions explored, and the add-ons that followed expanded substantially but not crucially to the plot and universe.
I mean, you've spent a sum well over an order of magnitude more expensive than its predecessor...and can't help but release Protoss and Zerg campaigns in expansion packs? I guess for people who are willing to spend $80+ to hear the whole saga will buy into it, but anyone with economy in mind should just wait until 2015 or so when Wings of Liberty and the other two campaigns are selling for a cheap $30 combi-pack.
If it's anything like the first one, Battle.net should still have hordes of players five years from now - standing the test of time to use a stale phrase.
When heading into the States not long ago I had to transfer through Chicago O'Hare to a smaller, provincial airport. American Airlines unsurprisingly lost my luggage, but thanks to a tag it was located as being with the handlers back at Chicago. The friendly woman at the check-in desk where I'd arrived after the second flight gave me a complimentary kit that included a toothbrush, toothpaste, mini-haircomb and so on.
The expedient service was what struck me most though; the next day a guy in a van drove up to where I stayed and dropped it off needing a signature and ID to confirm. All this was free, all of it was worked out and the lady at the desk looked astonished at me if I asked there was a fee to expedite getting my suitcase back - it contained mostly clothing that I could buy at a mall or whatever, but also a few items somewhat more important.
AA must have yearly meetings where this baggage issue is brought up; remember that scene from Fight Club where the anti-hero played by Ed Norton opposes the cost of keeping a shoddy system with unhappy customers that might kick up an occasionally costly issue to fixing everything and performing a good service. If the good service is more expensive than paying customers off, and in the case of improving baggage loss rates it likely is, then AA keep the crappy service to the inconvience of customers.
As cynically compelling as that movie was, this principle is applied rigorously behind closed doors in many firms who simply seek to maximize profits by definition of what they are. If it means a person losing something valuable or otherwise getting aggrieved (crashing a shoddy car and being injured), then let's cast that aside and keep the margin at an acceptable level. Unethical? Sure, but that's business.
That airlines are now charging seperate fees for this service without presumably making a marked improvement could be harmful to them in the long term; if passengers know they're paying X for luggage carriage for every piece inclusive of the first then they can more directly demand a refund. Something which isn't quite as easy to do if its bundled in and you get chucked a cheap kit of goods to clean up that they manufacture in quantity. So this all could be a good move with respect to luggage, as it might make firms like Delta or AA or anybody else with high passenger volume improve somewhat.
Ah this topic reminds me of when Bart Simpson gets bought, by Marge, a golf game named "Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge" instead of the hip and happening "Bonestorm" which is a Mortal Kombat style beat em' up that all the kids play.
It's obvious that propaganda happens; but if you read my post you'd gather that I used an example and invented a quotation to show a subtle principle of propaganda in action rather than simply state that it goes on. So don't be facetious about your own misunderstanding as it simply isn't a good way to start a critique of what's written in the OP.
How many times do you hear someone (not a media persona/pundit) discussing a war, be it this one or one in the past, take the waffle of a politician and quickly translate it into a plain piece of speech that actually expresses better what was meant in the original statement? That's rare, because the means of expressing policy aren't 'obvious' to the public though most know what propaganda is and that it happens.
A common aim of propaganda is for it to conduct itself whilst not being overt to most who live in society.
As to the rest of your post; that you observe my first example as 'verbally antagonistic' yet don't appear to oppose the second which is 'covertly antagonistic' , would you like to explain why that is? Is it any better for the population to say these things nicely than it is to say them plainly when they happen anyway?
For the purposes of appearances, sure - consciously or unconsciously that is the whole idea. Yet I don't think either one is better than the other when it comes to justifying war, or torture, oppression or anything else abhorrent that has been and is perpetrated by governments the world over. That even now in 2010 governments aren't even close to speaking plainly on uncomfortable things tells us a lot about why authority needs to be grilled by questions, and often.
The abbreviation, which could mean any number of things, is telling of the military habit to name destructive, harmful things with innocuous sounding phrases that do not imply damage "Active Denial System" could just as easily have been a web term or a feature of an antivirus program. Imagine a TV ad: "Norton's Active-Denial-System or ADS is proven to..." This is shared by government which will often use formal, even flowery language to cover up a practice which is morally or ethically contentious:
For instance, a military spokeman or officer or a high-up politician cannot very well come out and say this without coming off badly from it: "We believe that as we kill off our opponents in the Taliban a number of civilian casualties are necessary to allow our victory."
Therefore you get pretentious, padded-out diction like this: "We concede that the Taliban are a formidable foe who possess a humanitarian record that we can only describe as deplorable. However if we are to restore and preserve the freedoms of the Afghan people, and we think you'd agree with us on this, that a certain number of hazards for those present in the field are bound up in these transitional times are justified in the context of the achievement of the coalition's greater goals: We're in the sphere of granting those formerly under oppression a life of liberty, free of oppression and terrorism."
This sort of puffed out prose is a long-time euphemism which has only proliferated over the 100 and more years - masses of Latin words lengthen a point, and those who do listen can't be bothered digging out the true meaning which was basically that civilian deaths can't be avoided and are actually needed for the coalition to win. The end justifies the means. But in our hypothetical wording up there this was disguised: The great enemy of clear writing is insincerity. A well-known author named George Orwell wrote much on this and his essays are recommended.
That's mainly true - back in the 19th century before all these degrees and educational programmes...journalists sprang up and founded the beginnings of what are now establishment publications. They were mostly middle class, literate and educated at first, but the spirit of journalism began from people who only had common sense rather than formal education to guide them. Yes the world and tech has changed it all a lot; but many of the core principles of going out there and finding a good story were are true then as they are now.
Remember that whilst it is easy to do something...it's usually hard to do stuff well. Journalism done well requires a marriage of motivation, talent and willingless to enter upon it as a regular activity or method of generating a living for oneself. Not everyone can write engagingly...infact it's quite rare to find a writer that captures your interest and keeps his audience coming back for more for a span of years by sheer excellence of his work.
Not falling prey to laziness is important else you can begin churning out bad content and stay inside the office all day long till you clock off. That's a temptation a lot of talented but lazy people fall prey to. One can learn a lot by reading books and also asking for tales about the press within press circles; this is the news for the news-makers...because it helps you realize the pitfalls you might end up in to were you ignorant of past circumstances of other journos.
Any journalism-inclined blog which has an eye at launch to introducing even the most modest adverts in the first 12 months is unduly optimistic, unless we're including blogs with massive capital behind them - and those aren't usually old school journalism of the proper sort that's needed now anyhow.
Yes I noted in the last paragraph of my post that there are indeed good offerings to be found online. The red-tops never were quality; my post was aimed at those that do bill themselves as quality but are anything but. The paywalling is just an appalling, but oddly logical, end to the mentality of those who've turned journalism away from principle and towards profit.
You're spot on about the regurgitation - there are journalists, often younger ones who actually were interested and optimistic as they learned contextual stuff in university who are now employed to recycle stuff from the Press Association/Associated Press/Reuters wire all day long. It is the most boring, efficient way a young person can kill off any geniune like for the job; for them the trade is defined by repetitive soul destroying work rather than creativity or satisfaction. It isn't anything approaching passion after a year or two of suffering that.
Frankly I wouldn't blame any graduate now to avoid fixed employment altogether and make his or her chief aim to build a reputation as a competant, talented freelancer. Blogging and online journalism is one way to do this; getting out there and doing your own stories unique to you, making calls and getting a few contacts in the local press offices can be a good start.
Highest renown often goes to the talented; journalism has a history of awarding talent with recognition. Don't bother going into it unless you were told by your teachers, family, friends etc that you had a knack for words and you personally feel you could make it. If you feel your personality squares with journalism then by all means enter the profession with all the individualism you can muster as that trait is always needed. Don't expect to make much money in the formative years; it takes time until you can command a fair income.
Good books to read to clue in are Andrew Marr's 'My Trade' and Nick Davies's 'Flat Earth News' , if you like humour look up Benji the binman on Google. Nick's book is brutally honest and far closer to how it works today than Marr's nostalgic, historical, professorish work which is nevertheless decent.
If its one thing I've learned in a few years of being involved in the journalistic trade...it's that so many people in it are pigheaded to the point of doing themselves a lot of damage to their potential success and reputation. This is true from editors, to rank and file columnists...and new graduates convert alarmingly to this mentality with a dissapointing number of exceptions.
Murdoch aside, the overriding truth of modern journalist both here in the UK and in the US is that quantity rules over quality. That's why every Saturday and Sunday we Britons cannot buy a 'quality broadsheet' without having to acquire a book's worth of text in supplements along with the actual newspaper itself. That one has to shell over £1.20 or so for a compendium of tripe that you mostly won't get around to reading is why journalism is failing.
Simply put there are too many people employed who may have begun with some talent, but have lapsed into a state of passive drudgery writing filler columns about inane topics most readers could not care less about. You can actually tell with a lot of them that the author wasn't really thinking as he or she typed it out. In short the 'news' of newspaper is absent in a woefully high proportion; yes there's room for editorials and quirky opinion pieces...but the proportions are way off right now.
This is true of all Murdoch rags, most starkly The Times which was a pioneer of supplements in the 1990s. Once, decades ago (pre-Murdoch), the Times led some of the most intriguing investigative departments in journalistic history - they spent months to break a story that would spread across what? Four pages or so of print? This level of work for that amount of journalism is unheard of today - that's because today it's all about cheap, easy stories that can be summed up mostly as: 'Churnalism' (a term coined by Guardian journo Nick Davies) . It began in earnest in the 1980s with Andrew Neil's Times, and the trend away from reportage which took effort, talent, dedication and downright brilliance to pull off is almost entirely absent in The Times of 2010.
There is hope for the profession, as wracked by disease as it is; online journalism has some good offerings where journalists actually leave the office and do some old school reporting. That Murdoch and a few others see their awful, soulless content as worthy of paying for online rather than just going for what's worked since the beginning (advertisements) is telling of their wrongheaded approach which led so many publications to become so degraded in quality.
Will gamers who use OnLive ever represent such a large chunk of a typical ISPs' customer base as to make a massively expensive upgrade in capacity worthwhile financially?
Good post. I'd like to add that OnLive is not out in Britain until the end of 2011...so about 16-17 months. That said, the sluggishness in UK broadband compared with services offered in parts of the European continent is well documented, and the lacklustre broadband situation is likely to stay as such for Britons: We are charged about £35 GBP/40 Euro monthly for a connection not even half as good as say...a Swedish ISP or an ISP located in a 'less rich' country like Turkey that is cheaper meg for meg.
The one thing which struck me as the initial hype of this OnLive service happened was my thinking: 'Well what's wrong with Steam?' - OnLive doesn't offer anymore freedom from DRM than Steam. It doesn't offer enough titles to merit using alongside Steam. Like you said the economics of buying games there are non-existant...just walk into a shop and buy one for cheaper. I also bet that despite this initial demand they won't be able to match the frequency and allure of Valve's offers that happen every couple of weeks.
Steam is great mostly for cheap games that they have on offer, classic games hard to come by in the stores, and also the simplistic, hassle-free purchase and browsing interface. OnLive embodies none of these key principles except partly the latter one...and these principles are a big part of Steam's success that keeps gamers checking the store often.
Remember those sequences in Spielberg's take on 'Minority Report' in which advertisements would actually call out names of passers-by or customers entering shops - how that would work with groups of people (or whether it would just default to a generic pitch) I do not know. The technology around this sort of thing looks pretty attainable by 2052 which was the year that movie was set. Same as a few other things in the film. Infact it seemed quite a prudent take on the future except for all the precognition stuff which veered a bit far into the paranormal/ESP realm for my liking.
Can't really say that the existence of this tech necessarily makes it use exclusively predilected towards authoritarian regime and control...I mean we could say the same of multitudes of inventions that could be adapted just as these advertisements could. For instance closer analysis on demographics deemed likelier to be 'subversive' etc; but given the point I just made there's no need to single this particular invention out with couple of 1984 quotes. Remember that the big surveillance tool in 1984 was an adapted television screen (telescreen) - you don't get much by way of that criticism when Toshiba or Samsung announces a massive new screen; no mentions of Fahrenheit 451 either which would be more astute in any case.
I haven't read PKD's short story for a long, long time...maybe 8 or 9 years but I remember when I mentally compared the film to it after seeing it in a theatre that it wasn't all that similar to the blockbuster which had massive exposure. More like bits and pieces were there, with the screenwriters building a different shell and appending entirely new characters to progress the movie. So I was wondering if somebody would clarify if this technology was actually in the short story as opposed to merely the film?