I agree, it can be considered, at least in the public eye, as a tacit admission of guilt. But his resignation is all but executed the moment something like this comes out this close to an election. He could have been caught stealing staples from the office and have to resign. Nonetheless, it's not a legal admission of guilt.
Both conservative and liberal media have gone a little too far with this. I laughed at the Daily Show and Colbert Report, to be sure, but I almost felt guilty myself doing so.
I don't want to defend the guy, but at this point we can't convict him and say "Foley may have thought his IMs were disappearing into the ether as soon as they cleared his computer screen. Instead, the messages were saved, and his career was ruined, and the House leadership is left to fight for survival." IMs can be forged, and the younger generation certainly knows how to forge an IM log. And the idea that multiple pages are reporting this says nothing of whether or not they collaborated on this, perhaps because they just didn't like the guy, or found him creepy.
Obviously his admissions so far don't bode well for him being innocent of the charges, but the media (and people in general) need to tone down the pre-guilt.
My hopes are that these simulations will actually be used as therapy after a solider has shot and killed someone, and is perhaps feeling a form of post-traumatic stress disorder.
For example, let us say that a soldier is psychologically damaged from directly being responsible for the deaths of civilians. Being able to replay the situation in a virtual world, where they could make the alternate choice of not throwing that grenade or spreading the gunfire, could be, under the right conditions, rather valuable.
If only these games allowed you the choice of not pulling the trigger at the moment of truth. Of going AWOL instead. Of making 'moral' choices instead of choices-by-orders.
This is clearly God's warmth and sunshine raining down on us. He likes us, he like what we're doing with the world, and he wants to give us something back. It's a litle glimpse of heaven. Soon everywhere will be 72 and sunny, like San Diego.
I agree, and I used to play on MUSHes and MUXes all the time (which were even more player-extensible; I wish there was a mainstream game that encompassed that much control).
But to say these are just MUDs with a new face belittles the complexity involved in creating and managing not only the gameplay mechanics and graphical engines (not to mention server architecture and fragmentation), but the social, economic, and psychological upkeep of such systems. MUDs never had the playerbase MMORPGs have. MUDs rarely had a corporate backing. There was rarely any accountability, there were no dollars being spent, no players expecting any more out of them than was already there or that they couldn't add themselves.
All any of these games are are experiments, and they're going to make mistakes that a lot of the playerbase is going to reject, and a lot of the playerbase will embrace. Just because you paid money doesn't mean it belongs to you. Your $14.95, when added into the hundreds of thousands of other $14.95s means very, very little.
I apologize for how incomprehensible my first post was, though, after re-reading it.
Give them a fucking break. The game came out in the early days of MMORPGs and they bit off more than they could chew at the time. There isn't a single MMO right now that isn't plagued with problems, but the early ones (UO, SWG, AO) all had the uphill battle of defining the genre. SWG, while I haven't even played it (yet), seems to have tried to offer an experience that was much larger and more involved than any of the others at its time.
Given that they've had an attrition of players due to some mismanagement of the game--which they've fessed up to--, the logical budget they can even allocate to managing the game and its various fixes, necessary adjustments in reaction to the way players play the game, and other philosophical concerns, it was imperative that they make some changes to the original structure of the game, or let it die. Which doesn't make an sound business sense.
There will be another Star Wars MMORPG after SWG. It's inevitable. LucasArts is probably already drawing up the plans for it; it'll take place in a different time period, perhaps even a different world of the universe. The implementation will be much different. But Sony's efforts at making and managing this game will set a precedent for what the new game will accomplish, what it will fix, and the limitations they set on the world.
As much as the process of this might suck-- it does open up an opportunity, in terms of gameplay. Your character was once someone else. At one moment that identity ceases to exist-- and becomes someone else! What do you do with that? How do you explain that in the game? Will people still recognize you? Just because the game mechanics put your name over your head, does that mean 'characters' actually see that name over your head? Of course, players do.
But this opens up gameplay that the GMs and designers didn't have in mind. How does a player explain their character's transformation? Perhaps, like in Tron, they become aware of their User; their personal God. Perhaps they become angry at the god of the game, or feel like they got a glimpse of "the real world", and that starts to seep into this fantasy world.
Could an organized in-game revolt of players who've been 'Violated' disrupt the game? If, say, all of those player's characters banded together and formed a religion around the experience of losing their identity?
I understand what you're saying, from that point of view, and how your account standing, credit history, and other factors come into the picture. These are financial systems, though. There should be some sort of communications standard that speeds up this process. The government has compelled the medical industry with its HIPPA regulations, and the ABA and similar governmental institutions-- at least in regards to American financial institutions-- should be requiring a similar level of interoptability by some deadline.
I don't trust the twenty-something bank clerk to verify anyone's signature, much less enter data properly. Funds availability and stop-payment evaluations should be performed on the fly; holds should be placed in the event of a systems failure, not as a rule. Hopefully we'll have something in place in the next ten years.
Screw this security/privacy enhancement. Why do we still have anything more than 24 hour holds on deposited checks? There should be no holds. Why hasn't the government compelled the banking industry to update their infrastructure to enable instant check processing? The amount of money that consumers would save (and banks would lose) in processing fees, overdraft charges is outstanding. Is this because checks are processed and signatures compared by hand? Is this really a sustainable system?
A journalist is someone who makes a bona-fide attempt to report news reasonably seen as in the public interest. For example, reporting or commentary on politics, religion, Tara Reid's breasts is all news. Reposting an article from the Times is not.
*wakes up*
What, huh? Is there something new about Tara Reid's breasts that I haven't heard? Are you withholding information from the public?
Of course, this is probably the same person who would complain if Microsoft, outside of bundled WMP, built CD ripping into the operating system, thusly 'stifling competition' for the third-party products. It's okay for it to be bundled in your linux distribution because it's free, but it's not okay for it to be bundled in MS's because you have to pay for it. And we won't bring OSX into this at all, since it breaks both models.
On another point, "installing and configuring" something can be a very important psychological step in computer use. By the act of installation a user is making a conscious choice to put that software on their computer. Their awareness of it being available for use is amplified and reinforced by the now-familiar process of installation. Ask most laptop uses if they are aware of and use the majority of preinstalled applications, save for those that announce themselves at boot (please oh please will people quit using MusicMatch just because it was installed?). Or, as I call it, "Windows comes with a calculator?"
Theoretically, the output from the component video is "lesser" than the DVI or HDMI. The DVI will carry your video signal digitally from the input device to the projector, and the only analog conversion will occur while its outputted. On the other hand, the component video's analog conversion happens at the source device, and may be subject to signal degregation on its way to the projector.
Not surprisingly, the results are really dependent on the quality of the hardware, the decoders, and the digital to analog/analog to digital converters. Some cable boxes and DVD players manage to transmit a better signal over component video and some televisions/projectors have better DVI processing than they do component.
I'll be picking up a 1080i HDMI upconverting DVD player before too long to test this on my Sony 51" HDTV.
Relativity strikes again. Microsoft, at least, attempts to try some new things, even if they stole them. New ways of manipulating your documents, preparing them. OpenOffice seems to just try to play catch up and implement the necessary barebones. Which is great for tech people (and good for some less-than-tech people who just need to get some stuff done).
The Mozilla projects are fairly straight forward, especially Firefox. Thunderbird has a long way to go in terms of features and functionality, integration with Sunbird, and all of that; but overall I use it over Outlook.
Open Office is missing functionality, some ease of use.
My gripes aren't with those so much as "once we get those, we'll get the OS in place", since Linux, I don't care which flavor, suffers from a case of the uglies.
Once you get the back office off of Exchange, you can move the front office to OOo and Mozilla, followed by a switch out of the OS from Windows to Linux or BSD.
And gosh, that'll be great! All we need now are some non-technical developers who can craft intuitive front-ends to all the open source crap.
But don't worry. With the proliferation of cell phones as a primary means of communication, this law is sure to be lobbied and repealed in the next few years. You'll see a $5.00 savings on your phone bill with the line item "Consumer Notification Credit" every month.
Severance packages are often built into the original contract as the tradeoff for not going straight to work for the competition. He's getting "paid" to not do this, during his hiatus, probably to the tune of $70,000 to millions, depending on how important he was.
I may reiterate some responses of people below, here, but that's nothing new.
1. What does the number of valedictorians have to do with grade inflation? I don't doubt that some of those 47 top-of-the-class people may have been less than deserving than others, but it's a poor argument to say that that proves grade inflation. The idea of 'one valedictorian to rule them all' has got to go.
2. As someone who had a hard time with mathematics in school, I can agree here. I refused to memorize multiplication tables in grade school. However, it has made me more creative in my mental math solutions. I don't want tables memorized in my brain, I want methods and formulas.
3. The CNN News crawler is a bad example. They are attempting to squeeze the most information in the smallest place. Grammar suffers, people get the basic idea. You want the full, grammatically correct story? Check the web. Watch the newscast. Yes, language skills are important in school. I'm still miffed that I was never told to open my grammar book in Junior High. They handed them out, but we were never assigned anything from them.
4. I can agree here. But there are wider social implications, as you pointed out. What happens to the kids who get held back, who don't get the trophy? Should we disregard social welfare to promote educational superiority?
There's even more to unpack here. "Kids more than ever need to understand rewards and accountability."
Why is that? Why now more than before? This is very conservative. What if the models for rewards and accountability change because up-and-coming adults have a new perspective on their value? This may be true in a world that stays the same year in and year out, but these are the very things that are catalysts for change. This goes back to the "one man to rule them all" theory.
If you ask me, the primary problem is this: (and it relates to "get rid of MTV"): Everyone wants to be number one. Everyone wants to be rich, be an actress, make lots of money, be a software engineer, be a musician. This stems from the "you can be anything you want to be" mantra that's been drilled into my generation since kindergarten (an unfortunate side-affect of the 60s). Not everyone gets to be what they want to be. The world only has so much room. But look- the business models for music are changing with technology: now everyone CAN be a musician. And then when the market is oversaturated and no one is making money at it, they'll have to figure out what else they can be.
Slashdot Mirror
Both conservative and liberal media have gone a little too far with this. I laughed at the Daily Show and Colbert Report, to be sure, but I almost felt guilty myself doing so.
Obviously his admissions so far don't bode well for him being innocent of the charges, but the media (and people in general) need to tone down the pre-guilt.
For example, let us say that a soldier is psychologically damaged from directly being responsible for the deaths of civilians. Being able to replay the situation in a virtual world, where they could make the alternate choice of not throwing that grenade or spreading the gunfire, could be, under the right conditions, rather valuable.
If only these games allowed you the choice of not pulling the trigger at the moment of truth. Of going AWOL instead. Of making 'moral' choices instead of choices-by-orders.
This is clearly God's warmth and sunshine raining down on us. He likes us, he like what we're doing with the world, and he wants to give us something back. It's a litle glimpse of heaven. Soon everywhere will be 72 and sunny, like San Diego.
Man: "No, listen."
Woman: "No, no, I won't hear it."
Man: "Look into my eyes. I'm dying."
Woman: "No! It's diabetes, I can see it!"
But to say these are just MUDs with a new face belittles the complexity involved in creating and managing not only the gameplay mechanics and graphical engines (not to mention server architecture and fragmentation), but the social, economic, and psychological upkeep of such systems. MUDs never had the playerbase MMORPGs have. MUDs rarely had a corporate backing. There was rarely any accountability, there were no dollars being spent, no players expecting any more out of them than was already there or that they couldn't add themselves.
All any of these games are are experiments, and they're going to make mistakes that a lot of the playerbase is going to reject, and a lot of the playerbase will embrace. Just because you paid money doesn't mean it belongs to you. Your $14.95, when added into the hundreds of thousands of other $14.95s means very, very little.
I apologize for how incomprehensible my first post was, though, after re-reading it.
Given that they've had an attrition of players due to some mismanagement of the game--which they've fessed up to--, the logical budget they can even allocate to managing the game and its various fixes, necessary adjustments in reaction to the way players play the game, and other philosophical concerns, it was imperative that they make some changes to the original structure of the game, or let it die. Which doesn't make an sound business sense.
There will be another Star Wars MMORPG after SWG. It's inevitable. LucasArts is probably already drawing up the plans for it; it'll take place in a different time period, perhaps even a different world of the universe. The implementation will be much different. But Sony's efforts at making and managing this game will set a precedent for what the new game will accomplish, what it will fix, and the limitations they set on the world.
#200 - Compiling and publishing data on what the worst jobs in science are.
But this opens up gameplay that the GMs and designers didn't have in mind. How does a player explain their character's transformation? Perhaps, like in Tron, they become aware of their User; their personal God. Perhaps they become angry at the god of the game, or feel like they got a glimpse of "the real world", and that starts to seep into this fantasy world.
Could an organized in-game revolt of players who've been 'Violated' disrupt the game? If, say, all of those player's characters banded together and formed a religion around the experience of losing their identity?
I don't trust the twenty-something bank clerk to verify anyone's signature, much less enter data properly. Funds availability and stop-payment evaluations should be performed on the fly; holds should be placed in the event of a systems failure, not as a rule. Hopefully we'll have something in place in the next ten years.
What, huh? Is there something new about Tara Reid's breasts that I haven't heard? Are you withholding information from the public?
On another point, "installing and configuring" something can be a very important psychological step in computer use. By the act of installation a user is making a conscious choice to put that software on their computer. Their awareness of it being available for use is amplified and reinforced by the now-familiar process of installation. Ask most laptop uses if they are aware of and use the majority of preinstalled applications, save for those that announce themselves at boot (please oh please will people quit using MusicMatch just because it was installed?). Or, as I call it, "Windows comes with a calculator?"
Not surprisingly, the results are really dependent on the quality of the hardware, the decoders, and the digital to analog/analog to digital converters. Some cable boxes and DVD players manage to transmit a better signal over component video and some televisions/projectors have better DVI processing than they do component.
I'll be picking up a 1080i HDMI upconverting DVD player before too long to test this on my Sony 51" HDTV.
Relativity strikes again. Microsoft, at least, attempts to try some new things, even if they stole them. New ways of manipulating your documents, preparing them. OpenOffice seems to just try to play catch up and implement the necessary barebones. Which is great for tech people (and good for some less-than-tech people who just need to get some stuff done).
The Mozilla projects are fairly straight forward, especially Firefox. Thunderbird has a long way to go in terms of features and functionality, integration with Sunbird, and all of that; but overall I use it over Outlook. Open Office is missing functionality, some ease of use. My gripes aren't with those so much as "once we get those, we'll get the OS in place", since Linux, I don't care which flavor, suffers from a case of the uglies.
And gosh, that'll be great! All we need now are some non-technical developers who can craft intuitive front-ends to all the open source crap.
But don't worry. With the proliferation of cell phones as a primary means of communication, this law is sure to be lobbied and repealed in the next few years. You'll see a $5.00 savings on your phone bill with the line item "Consumer Notification Credit" every month.
Severance packages are often built into the original contract as the tradeoff for not going straight to work for the competition. He's getting "paid" to not do this, during his hiatus, probably to the tune of $70,000 to millions, depending on how important he was.
1. What does the number of valedictorians have to do with grade inflation? I don't doubt that some of those 47 top-of-the-class people may have been less than deserving than others, but it's a poor argument to say that that proves grade inflation. The idea of 'one valedictorian to rule them all' has got to go.
2. As someone who had a hard time with mathematics in school, I can agree here. I refused to memorize multiplication tables in grade school. However, it has made me more creative in my mental math solutions. I don't want tables memorized in my brain, I want methods and formulas.
3. The CNN News crawler is a bad example. They are attempting to squeeze the most information in the smallest place. Grammar suffers, people get the basic idea. You want the full, grammatically correct story? Check the web. Watch the newscast. Yes, language skills are important in school. I'm still miffed that I was never told to open my grammar book in Junior High. They handed them out, but we were never assigned anything from them.
4. I can agree here. But there are wider social implications, as you pointed out. What happens to the kids who get held back, who don't get the trophy? Should we disregard social welfare to promote educational superiority?
There's even more to unpack here. "Kids more than ever need to understand rewards and accountability." Why is that? Why now more than before? This is very conservative. What if the models for rewards and accountability change because up-and-coming adults have a new perspective on their value? This may be true in a world that stays the same year in and year out, but these are the very things that are catalysts for change. This goes back to the "one man to rule them all" theory.
If you ask me, the primary problem is this: (and it relates to "get rid of MTV"): Everyone wants to be number one. Everyone wants to be rich, be an actress, make lots of money, be a software engineer, be a musician. This stems from the "you can be anything you want to be" mantra that's been drilled into my generation since kindergarten (an unfortunate side-affect of the 60s). Not everyone gets to be what they want to be. The world only has so much room. But look- the business models for music are changing with technology: now everyone CAN be a musician. And then when the market is oversaturated and no one is making money at it, they'll have to figure out what else they can be.