Okay, as I understand it one county had cable and another didn't. The county with cable had higher autism rates. (yes, I'm overly simplifying)
What OTHER things were different about the counties? Would it be reasonable to assume the one WITH cable was a little less rural and possibly had other, more significant differences than the availability of cable television? Were there smoke-belching factories in one and not the other? Nuclear power plant? Unmonitored government testing?
Perhaps one town was built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground?
Once CS stopped being a relatively obscure mod to an aging game the "community" went to hell. Or, rather, it went to a bad grade school in an even worse part of town.
The two best and worst things to ever happen to gaming were the drop in cost for high-speed internet access and the drop in price for computer hardware to play the games on. Those two things, more than any other, opened gaming up to the great, unwashed masses - the lowest common denominator of human stupidity and immaturity - and for some reason a large number of them gravitated to CS.
As someone who played and loved the VERY early versions of this game I simply refuse to subject myself to the deluge of ignorance that public CS servers became (and seem to have remained).
I'm not a manager and have no desire to be one. Either you've been lucky or I've been unlucky because I could hardly say "all" of the programmers I've worked with have been "adult".
I wrote that "almost all" problems were caused by immature (childish) behaviour. Maybe what I've seen hasn't been "childish", but it's far from "adult". Perhaps "an utter lack of time management skills and an unwillingness to put forth any real effort to learn anything" would be better. The managers I've had to deal with were over-promoted programmers exhibiting the same lack of "adult" behaviour that they did prior to their stint in management. Becoming a manager didn't cause their woeful inadequacy, it just made it more easy to talk trash about.
As I typed this I watched a "programmer" walk from co-worker to co-worker complaining about not having enough time to get their work done and asking for help on things that they should be perfectly capable of discovering on their own in half the time it has taken them to get up and interrupt other people on the team.
Kent Beck hits the proverbial nail on the head with this zinger (which I'm sure is certain to stir up quite a few):
"It's not all about programming. It's not all about programmers. Programmers aren't somehow special and to be protected and coddled. I used to say often that programmers were children. They liked not to be yelled at and to have more toys... I think programmers are, or at least can be, adults and can and should, for the good of development and themselves, act that way."
The above quote sums up almost every problem that I have seen over the past 10 years with the various development shops I've been a part of.
Show me an employer who places indiscriminate blocks on numbers that you can call during the day
900 numbers. Long distance calls.
My employer doesn't limit call lengths or even block long distance but they do log all call lengths and have every right to use that information if they feel an employee is abusing it. The internet should be treated no differently.
For security and legal reasons certain sites SHOULD be blocked from access, that seems too much like common sense to be debateable.
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Okay, as I understand it one county had cable and another didn't. The county with cable had higher autism rates. (yes, I'm overly simplifying)
What OTHER things were different about the counties? Would it be reasonable to assume the one WITH cable was a little less rural and possibly had other, more significant differences than the availability of cable television? Were there smoke-belching factories in one and not the other? Nuclear power plant? Unmonitored government testing?
Perhaps one town was built on top of an ancient Indian burial ground?
Once CS stopped being a relatively obscure mod to an aging game the "community" went to hell. Or, rather, it went to a bad grade school in an even worse part of town.
The two best and worst things to ever happen to gaming were the drop in cost for high-speed internet access and the drop in price for computer hardware to play the games on. Those two things, more than any other, opened gaming up to the great, unwashed masses - the lowest common denominator of human stupidity and immaturity - and for some reason a large number of them gravitated to CS.
As someone who played and loved the VERY early versions of this game I simply refuse to subject myself to the deluge of ignorance that public CS servers became (and seem to have remained).
I'm not a manager and have no desire to be one. Either you've been lucky or I've been unlucky because I could hardly say "all" of the programmers I've worked with have been "adult".
I wrote that "almost all" problems were caused by immature (childish) behaviour. Maybe what I've seen hasn't been "childish", but it's far from "adult". Perhaps "an utter lack of time management skills and an unwillingness to put forth any real effort to learn anything" would be better. The managers I've had to deal with were over-promoted programmers exhibiting the same lack of "adult" behaviour that they did prior to their stint in management. Becoming a manager didn't cause their woeful inadequacy, it just made it more easy to talk trash about.
As I typed this I watched a "programmer" walk from co-worker to co-worker complaining about not having enough time to get their work done and asking for help on things that they should be perfectly capable of discovering on their own in half the time it has taken them to get up and interrupt other people on the team.
Kent Beck hits the proverbial nail on the head with this zinger (which I'm sure is certain to stir up quite a few):
... I think programmers are, or at least can be, adults and can and should, for the good of development and themselves, act that way."
"It's not all about programming. It's not all about programmers. Programmers aren't somehow special and to be protected and coddled. I used to say often that programmers were children. They liked not to be yelled at and to have more toys
The above quote sums up almost every problem that I have seen over the past 10 years with the various development shops I've been a part of.
Show me an employer who places indiscriminate blocks on numbers that you can call during the day
900 numbers. Long distance calls.
My employer doesn't limit call lengths or even block long distance but they do log all call lengths and have every right to use that information if they feel an employee is abusing it. The internet should be treated no differently.
For security and legal reasons certain sites SHOULD be blocked from access, that seems too much like common sense to be debateable.