They used it on paying off all the workers they told to get lost or get rehired by Lockheed Martin for the exact same job at the cost of getting their retirements pushed back.
This is a public service announcement from the office of *insert lawyer's name here*.
*******Do you rely on your cellphone in order to receive calls? You should then consider suing cell phone companies for not existing in the past. You potentially missed hundreds of emergency calls, and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in business opportunities because cell phone companies did not exist to provide you the means to receive them! That's where the office of *insert lawyer's name here* can help! Call 555-8282. Once again, 555-8282.********
{/Tongue in cheek} You do prove a valid point. Warning signs will be required, because as annoying as people find them in some situations, cellular telephones have become for many people a necessary part of life. As a college student, I actually have no other line aside from my cellular phone.
Has anyone done any research into how well the brain retains information written down with pen and paper as opposed to typed on a keyboard? In my experience, any class in which is focused on me writing notes I perform better in. My brain remembers a lot simply from the act of writing it down.
I have mixed feelings about technology in the classroom. PowerPoint presentations encourage lazier students like me to just sit back and watch the PowerPoint, instead of actively taking notes. It certainly encourages half of my class to leave in the middle because they think they could just download the notes later instead. Also, I can guarantee that if I was given a laptop, I would use it to play games and surf the net.
Anyway, all this is relatively moot to me, because I believe the majority of learning is done through homework assignments, which in my area of study, civil engineering, takes the form of hand-written problem-solving and analysis.
I played Ragnarok Online a while back on a private server with about a few thousand players. On this server, MP potions (a.k.a. grape juice) were sold dirt cheap, so magic such as healing spells and special attacks could be used indefinitely and levelling runs could go on for a long time. This was good because levelling went relatively quickly.
Unfortunately, this was problematic for the economy. The problem was that every enemy in Ragnarok drops at least some sort of trivial item that can be sold to NPC vendors, so when a player amasses hundreds of these items, their stash of gold gets pretty high. Since a lot of the trade in the game goes through player characters of the merchant class, and large sums of money were being collected, the merchants could continually raise prices to maximize their returns; inflation went through the roof. All the while, grape juice was held at low prices because they were easily fabricated by merchants and flooded the market unlike rare weapons, armors, and other items.
The adminstrators of the servers eventually had to institute a money wipe, where every player's fortune was cut by 90%. I stopped playing at this point.
Where I went to elementary school in California, we had a GATE (gifted and talented education) program which was used to ensure any kid with decent grades from becoming disinterested and totally clocking out of school (which I guess was considered a rational fear at the time). The three activities I remember us doing the most in our one hour of separation from other students were working on logic puzzles, playing Oregon Trail, and playing Sim City. Those were wonderful days.
While I don't imagine I'll be trekking westward anytime soon, I do have bouts of wanderlust. I also like to solve problems, and I'm a few years off from being a licensed civil engineer. Imagine, computer games in school may have had an influence on who I have become!
I received Super Metroid as a Christmas gift way back when it came out. Now the year is 2006, and I'm 5 months from graduating college, and yet I still find myself on slow nights and weekend mornings trying to get 100% as fast as I can with ZSNES (SNES is way back at home). Super Metroid is a game that is easy to play over and over again, just like many of the action and RPG titles for the SNES.
My roommate just finished playing Indigo Prophecy, and that game had a lot more adult situations right in the intended story of the game. As of yet, I have heard no big-time lawyer complaining about that game not being rated AO. (Indigo Prophecy was a really cool game actually).
Based on GTA's popularity versus Indigo Prophecy's popularity, I would argue that anti-gaming legislators are just looking for some more headline space to boost their political stance rather than honestly wanting to make any meaningful change......Wait, that's all inferred by the title "politician," isn't it?
Soil bacteria is responsible for cleaning a lot of the water we dump onto the ground. Any organic solids in the water are digested by the bacteria, and the water recharges aquifers. It's drawn out again years later as clean as can be.
This process is recreated by tertiary wastewater treatment plants where bacteria is added to sewer water to digest all the solids. The bacteria are then coagulated with a chemical such as alum and they are allowed to settle out of the water. This treated water is then disinfected by chlorine, chloramine, UV light, or some other method, and is then reused as irrigation water. It's actually clean enough to be used as drinking water, but safety concerns and common sense advise against this.
Just like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, James D. Rockefeller, and Leland Stanford did i the past, Claria is trying to do good to pave over all the ill deeds they performed to get them to where they are now.
If the effort to change their ways is sincere, then they can be forgiven. As comments thus far have shown, proving that can be pretty hard to do.
...but I find his opinion in this case uninformed. I imagine he made this comment as a reaction to the scores of horrific movies adapted from video games that been released over the past decade. Ebert has a soft spot for movies that introduces and envelopes the viewer to a new world (think Dark City, Equilibrium, or Star Wars), and will even rate undeserving movies a little higher if that world is enveloping enough. Had he truly invested enough time in video games to actually make an informed judgment, I imagine he would enjoy many games a great deal for this reason.
I must admit though, video games feel most like art to me when they are imitating or combining other media. Games like Valkyrie Profile and Killer 7 are combinations of graphical style, music,and gameplay. Graphical style is pretty much a derivative of what is called "cinematography" in film. Music is music, plain and simple, and gameplay does not qualify as art, just as excellent games like Risk and Clue do not either.
While video games cannot be considered a unique medium, does this preclude them from being art?
Peter Moore admits it. The shortage is not a result of a malicious (but effective) marketing strategy by Microsoft. Xbox 360s are in shortage because the company can't get their act enough together to fill their pre-orders.
This is a good point, especially considering that their most successful division (don't quote me) is SCEA. Content released for Playstation 2 is far from inventive or original; instead, it invests a lot of money in polishing current popular genres, (most of which were pioneered by other companies, read: Nintendo) and they reap the profits. The games they make are may not be new and exciting, but they are certainly worth every penny of their price due to the high production value.
I am reminded of this old proverb: It takes a village to raise a child. Whoever said that must not have believed a child was fully the parents' responsibility.
The law is a regulation on content deemed inappropriate for certain age groups by the ESRB. As was commented before, I don't see why this shouldn't be enforced in the same manner as tobacco/alcohol sales, or in a more applicable sense, movie ticket sales.
Honestly, the way kids are and always will be, parents need all the help they can get.
I don't believe anyone will be rediscovering these games you mentioned because 20 years of "piggy-backed enhancements" have reformed and polished games like Missile Command et cetera. However, at a fundamental level the games still retain the same gameplay concepts. People can play the same damn game, but with loud noises and semi-realistic graphics.
In short, there are only so many genres that can be made. That's why I think the industry has reached a point where nothing is new.
Seven or eight years ago, My brother, our two friends across the street, and I would often play 2vs2 laser tag, and it was always great fun.
Besides, I would consider Super Soakers much too ample a training tool for more sinful, solitary activites...
Maybe EA will learn a few things about online implementation from Valve, rather than stick to this GameSpy travesty that haunts Battlefield 2 at the moment.
Favorite servers, history, friends network...even though some of these don't work at all, they are features sorely missed in BF2.
Re:I don't know if this has been pointed out...
on
The GBA's Last Stand
·
· Score: 1
I have to correct myself here. I investigated the profile of the article's author on 1up, and it would seem he is a fan primarily of the GBA. I retract my previous suspicion of bias.
Slashdot Mirror
I disagree. I think whoever came up with Wonderswan was intending to fail.
http://www.gcn.com/online/vol1_no1/34950-1.html
Did Lockheed Martin's takeover of FAA operations centers have anything to do with this switch?
This is the biggest marketing blunder since "Coca-Cola" in China.
This is a public service announcement from the office of *insert lawyer's name here*.
*******Do you rely on your cellphone in order to receive calls? You should then consider suing cell phone companies for not existing in the past. You potentially missed hundreds of emergency calls, and lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in business opportunities because cell phone companies did not exist to provide you the means to receive them! That's where the office of *insert lawyer's name here* can help! Call 555-8282. Once again, 555-8282.********
{/Tongue in cheek}
You do prove a valid point. Warning signs will be required, because as annoying as people find them in some situations, cellular telephones have become for many people a necessary part of life. As a college student, I actually have no other line aside from my cellular phone.
Has anyone done any research into how well the brain retains information written down with pen and paper as opposed to typed on a keyboard? In my experience, any class in which is focused on me writing notes I perform better in. My brain remembers a lot simply from the act of writing it down.
I have mixed feelings about technology in the classroom. PowerPoint presentations encourage lazier students like me to just sit back and watch the PowerPoint, instead of actively taking notes. It certainly encourages half of my class to leave in the middle because they think they could just download the notes later instead. Also, I can guarantee that if I was given a laptop, I would use it to play games and surf the net.
Anyway, all this is relatively moot to me, because I believe the majority of learning is done through homework assignments, which in my area of study, civil engineering, takes the form of hand-written problem-solving and analysis.
I played Ragnarok Online a while back on a private server with about a few thousand players. On this server, MP potions (a.k.a. grape juice) were sold dirt cheap, so magic such as healing spells and special attacks could be used indefinitely and levelling runs could go on for a long time. This was good because levelling went relatively quickly.
Unfortunately, this was problematic for the economy. The problem was that every enemy in Ragnarok drops at least some sort of trivial item that can be sold to NPC vendors, so when a player amasses hundreds of these items, their stash of gold gets pretty high. Since a lot of the trade in the game goes through player characters of the merchant class, and large sums of money were being collected, the merchants could continually raise prices to maximize their returns; inflation went through the roof. All the while, grape juice was held at low prices because they were easily fabricated by merchants and flooded the market unlike rare weapons, armors, and other items.
The adminstrators of the servers eventually had to institute a money wipe, where every player's fortune was cut by 90%. I stopped playing at this point.
Where I went to elementary school in California, we had a GATE (gifted and talented education) program which was used to ensure any kid with decent grades from becoming disinterested and totally clocking out of school (which I guess was considered a rational fear at the time). The three activities I remember us doing the most in our one hour of separation from other students were working on logic puzzles, playing Oregon Trail, and playing Sim City. Those were wonderful days.
While I don't imagine I'll be trekking westward anytime soon, I do have bouts of wanderlust. I also like to solve problems, and I'm a few years off from being a licensed civil engineer. Imagine, computer games in school may have had an influence on who I have become!
I received Super Metroid as a Christmas gift way back when it came out. Now the year is 2006, and I'm 5 months from graduating college, and yet I still find myself on slow nights and weekend mornings trying to get 100% as fast as I can with ZSNES (SNES is way back at home). Super Metroid is a game that is easy to play over and over again, just like many of the action and RPG titles for the SNES.
My roommate just finished playing Indigo Prophecy, and that game had a lot more adult situations right in the intended story of the game. As of yet, I have heard no big-time lawyer complaining about that game not being rated AO. (Indigo Prophecy was a really cool game actually).
...Wait, that's all inferred by the title "politician," isn't it?
Based on GTA's popularity versus Indigo Prophecy's popularity, I would argue that anti-gaming legislators are just looking for some more headline space to boost their political stance rather than honestly wanting to make any meaningful change...
Soil bacteria is responsible for cleaning a lot of the water we dump onto the ground. Any organic solids in the water are digested by the bacteria, and the water recharges aquifers. It's drawn out again years later as clean as can be.
This process is recreated by tertiary wastewater treatment plants where bacteria is added to sewer water to digest all the solids. The bacteria are then coagulated with a chemical such as alum and they are allowed to settle out of the water. This treated water is then disinfected by chlorine, chloramine, UV light, or some other method, and is then reused as irrigation water. It's actually clean enough to be used as drinking water, but safety concerns and common sense advise against this.
I swear.
I can stop playing video games whenever I want. I just don't want to...
Just like Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, James D. Rockefeller, and Leland Stanford did i the past, Claria is trying to do good to pave over all the ill deeds they performed to get them to where they are now.
If the effort to change their ways is sincere, then they can be forgiven. As comments thus far have shown, proving that can be pretty hard to do.
...but I find his opinion in this case uninformed. I imagine he made this comment as a reaction to the scores of horrific movies adapted from video games that been released over the past decade. Ebert has a soft spot for movies that introduces and envelopes the viewer to a new world (think Dark City, Equilibrium, or Star Wars), and will even rate undeserving movies a little higher if that world is enveloping enough. Had he truly invested enough time in video games to actually make an informed judgment, I imagine he would enjoy many games a great deal for this reason.
I must admit though, video games feel most like art to me when they are imitating or combining other media. Games like Valkyrie Profile and Killer 7 are combinations of graphical style, music,and gameplay. Graphical style is pretty much a derivative of what is called "cinematography" in film. Music is music, plain and simple, and gameplay does not qualify as art, just as excellent games like Risk and Clue do not either.
While video games cannot be considered a unique medium, does this preclude them from being art?
My GIMP can wear a bunch of black leather and hide in a box in the backroom of my store.
And now the foot comes out...
I would fire this person, and hire someone to rewrite the code from scratch.
But making sense is the last of a person's priorities when they are trying to make first post!
Peter Moore admits it. The shortage is not a result of a malicious (but effective) marketing strategy by Microsoft. Xbox 360s are in shortage because the company can't get their act enough together to fill their pre-orders.
I'm suddenly reminded of that Anandtech article from a couple months back about how developers were:
1) Not enthusiastic about using multiple threads and
2) Very disappointed in both the 360's and the PS3's single-threaded CPU performance.
It was pulled pretty quickly, and the story is that the article was pulled to protect the anonymous source.
This is a good point, especially considering that their most successful division (don't quote me) is SCEA. Content released for Playstation 2 is far from inventive or original; instead, it invests a lot of money in polishing current popular genres, (most of which were pioneered by other companies, read: Nintendo) and they reap the profits. The games they make are may not be new and exciting, but they are certainly worth every penny of their price due to the high production value.
I am reminded of this old proverb: It takes a village to raise a child. Whoever said that must not have believed a child was fully the parents' responsibility. The law is a regulation on content deemed inappropriate for certain age groups by the ESRB. As was commented before, I don't see why this shouldn't be enforced in the same manner as tobacco/alcohol sales, or in a more applicable sense, movie ticket sales. Honestly, the way kids are and always will be, parents need all the help they can get.
I don't believe anyone will be rediscovering these games you mentioned because 20 years of "piggy-backed enhancements" have reformed and polished games like Missile Command et cetera. However, at a fundamental level the games still retain the same gameplay concepts. People can play the same damn game, but with loud noises and semi-realistic graphics. In short, there are only so many genres that can be made. That's why I think the industry has reached a point where nothing is new.
Seven or eight years ago, My brother, our two friends across the street, and I would often play 2vs2 laser tag, and it was always great fun. Besides, I would consider Super Soakers much too ample a training tool for more sinful, solitary activites...
Maybe EA will learn a few things about online implementation from Valve, rather than stick to this GameSpy travesty that haunts Battlefield 2 at the moment. Favorite servers, history, friends network...even though some of these don't work at all, they are features sorely missed in BF2.
I have to correct myself here. I investigated the profile of the article's author on 1up, and it would seem he is a fan primarily of the GBA. I retract my previous suspicion of bias.