betajames

the same rationale used by all governments to conceal evidence of their wrongdoing:   we need to suppress our activities for your own good.  WikiLeaks is devoted to subverting that mentality and, relatively speaking, has been quite successful in doing so. 

For that reason, numerous governments and private groups would like to see them destroyed.  Corporations have sued to have the site shut down.  And in addition to this 2008 Pentagon report, WikiLeaks has acquired, though not yet posted, other U.S. Government classified reports on its activities, including a U.S. Marine Intelligence Report and an analysis prepared by the U.S. military base in Germany, both of which speak of WikiLeaks as a threat.  Moreover, the FBI has refused to provide any information about its investigations and other activities aimed at WikiLeaks, citing, in response to FOIA requests, national security and other excuses for concealing it.

Once a trend like that becomes established, it's hard to stop. Put yourself in the position of a bored browser in front of a supermarket wire-rack, contemplating novels by two authors you've never read. They both cost the same, and you have enough pocket money to buy one. The year is 1980; LibraryThing or other internet resources aren't available. How do you make your mind up? Well, you remember what you've heard about the authors, and you look at the cover painting, and you read the back flap blurb. Assuming all of these are equal ... you probably buy on weight, because you subconsciously anticipate a longer reading experience and, all things considered, good experiences that last longer are better than short ones. Remember that the actual cost of the paper and ink is only a small component of the retail price of a book — around 10-15%. Increasing a book block's size from 150 pages to 180 pages is cheap. And so, from the 1960s to the 1990s, publishers unconsciously trained readers to expect longer novels.

If the manifesto looks fearlessly to the future, seeking to replace the established order with something alto­gether new, the jeremiad is at once jittery and nostalgic, looking anxiously over its shoulder at a prelapsarian past. The American jeremiad, Bercovitch observed, “made anxiety its end as well as its means. Crisis was the social norm it sought to inculcate.” Whether “denouncing or affirming,” its vision “fed on the distance between promise and fact.” Aware that the present fails to measure up to past ideals, the jeremiad nonetheless can’t imagine a future on any other terms. It yearns to repair the breach.

We miss out on some of the great potential of this medium if we focus too heavily on the real. We have the power to create entire worlds—isn’t using this power to create a shadow of reality a bit of a cop-out? And really, it’s only a conceptual cop-out. In practice, reality is quite hard to recreate. This is why the lushly-detailed world of Avatar’s Pandora is so compelling to people. It’s new, but recognizable. It’s compellingly different, but not alienating. This is the potential that exists within games.

During the subprime bubble, banks and brokers sold one another bad debt — debt that couldn't be made good on. Today, "social" media is trading in low-quality connections — linkages that are unlikely to yield meaningful, lasting relationships.

Call it relationship inflation. Nominally, you have a lot more relationships — but in reality, few, if any, are actually valuable. Just as currency inflation debases money, so social inflation debases relationships. The very word "relationship" is being cheapened. It used to mean someone you could count on. Today, it means someone you can swap bits with.

Go right from the inspiration -- the vision -- to actually making it. Don't think it through. Don't talk about it. Don't plan it. Dive in and start making it happen. If you do that -- if you can start rocking -- you'll get some momentum, and when you have some momentum then the project has a chance, because now you're into it. It's going somewhere, it's tangible. Sure, you'll still run up against problems to solve and decisions to make, but you'll approach these in the moment and solve them in the moment. You'll solve them so you can keep moving.

2) The syllabus is broken into quests. Solo quests are completed by individual students. Pick-up Group quests are completed by pairs of students, each from a different guild. Guild quests are completed by all guild members and the guilds are responsible for dividing up the work among themselves (so it sounds like he won't directly penalize a guild for forcing one member to do a whole assignment themselves).

Instead of dealing only with historical data, in virtual worlds "you have the power to experiment in real time," Segerstrale says. What happens to demand if you add a 5 percent tax to a product? What if you apply a 5 percent tax to one half of a group and a 7 percent tax to the other half? "You can conduct any experiment you want," he says. "You might discover that women over 35 have a higher tolerance to a tax than males aged 15 to 20—stuff that's just not possible to discover in the real world."

Many children who want to believe their tastes are adult will bravely try coffee, find it to be undeniably awful, but recognise something that could one day, conceivably, be enjoyed. Once our tastes as adults are fully developed, it is easy to forget the effort that went into them. Adult taste can be demanding work – so hard, in fact, that some of us, when we become adults, selectively take up a few childish things, as though in defeated acknowledgment that adult taste, with its many bewilderments, is frequently more trouble than it is worth. Few games have more to tell us about this adult retreat into childishness than the Grand Theft Auto series.

Boiling down the first book of the Divine Comedy to its surface elements is a bit trickier than it sounds because you either think the poems are about three stages of the afterlife or that they’re about Dante’s spiritual transformation as he grapples with accepting God’s authority. Dante himself wrote in a letter to Can Grande della Scala, “The subject…of the whole work, taken literally, is the condition of souls after death, simply considered…But if the work be taken allegorically, the subject is man, how by actions of merit or demerit, through freedom of the will, he justly deserves reward or punishment.” (172) Given that the game re-imagines Dante as a Crusader who wields Death’s scythe, who can absolve damned souls to Heaven, and who can shoot super spirit crosses using a crucifix, it seems safe to say that the game is not taking the literal approach to the poem.