With physics texts at least, they usually have an absurd amount of typos, primarily in the formulae and definitions of values - ie, the math parts. In most of the cases I've seen, new editions are primarily about trying to correct these typos, though they tend to only correct a small portion of them each time.

I'm still trying to figure out what category 'traditional gamepad/controller' falls under.

* "Standard 97-Button Controller", poking at the ever-growing number of buttons, pads, bumpers, sensors, and what-have-you on controllers? Or is that a reference to a standard keyboard, acknowledging that some buttons are often un-mappable (or are a many-to-one mapping, such as games that can't distinguish left modifiers from right modifiers)?
* "Plastic Instruments", since they're essentially specialized plastic contraptions? or is that supposed to be about the Guitar Hero-esque 'instruments' that accompany many modern offerings, along with the classic 'here's a steering wheel to go with your driving game, a yoke for your flight sim, and a wrap-around station for your mech pilot' specialized controllers?
* "Joystick", referencing the classic style of input from some older generations, like Atari cartriges that typically expected a hand-held or palm-of-your-hand joystick with one or two buttons - the D-pad-and-buttons controllers could be considered descended from that lineage, and thus inheritors of this category? Or is this for the modern joysticks, the mount-to-your-desk creatures sprawling with buttons and sliders and thumb controls?

I'd vote for 'classic controller', but I have no idea what option that is ...

That's basically a scam. The law should be changed, or they should basically admit that 'anything goes' and the casino can always weasel out of any situation. (Maybe in big neon letters above the door).

Most of them have that. The sign reads "casino".

The second link confirms that there still will be no LAN support - the 'offline' mode is for the single-player only. Any networked game, including on a LAN, has to go through Battle.net 2.

Isn't that probably part of the point? If you can't replay the (old) library you already have, you (might) be more likely to buy popular_new_game instead. Or at least, so I'm guessing the theory goes ...

We don't accept that [...] that human sacrifice improves crop yield,

It does if you fertilize the fields with the dead and/or their byproducts.

They're not really thinking of the children.

Since when does "Think of the children!" rationale have anything to do with actually attempting to help children?

In my own undergraduate experience at least, students *did* cheat more in CS courses than in other classes, regardless of major. In part this was due to the different 'honor code' for the CS department than elsewhere (any form of collaboration whatsoever was cheating, unless otherwise specified by the professor), but it was also in the nature of the work. "Copying" someone else's homework in, say, physics or math, a student typically attempts to make their writeup distinct from the original, which involves reprocessing the math and requires some actual understanding of the techniques involved. As a result, they actually did gain some level of learning from the assignment, even if no where near as much as if they'd done it 'properly'. In CS, most people would go for a straight carbon-copy, resulting in zero learning.

To me, that's the largest distinction - the way in which students leech off each other in CS is different, and results in less learning; combined with more draconian cheating regulations (which, by making any collaboration cheating, encourage people to either work in solitude or go all-out on the cheating, rather than actually trying to work together), it leads to a much worse cheating problem.

This was my biggest frustration in college CS. We got zero feedback on our code - you got a numerical grade, and that was it, most of the time. Rarely, you got back a categorical breakdown of that number (the points for 'correctness', 'comments', etc), and only a handful of times in the entire major did I actually get back comments (usually a relatively useless one-liner, such as "good comments", or my favorite, "this is so almost wrong, but not"). Then, as since, I've relied on my highschool experience for external suggestions and feedback - my highschool CS teacher went through and marked up every assignment turned in, giving you huge amounts of feedback on your coding practices. College CS was a huge waste on that front, which was a major dissappointment.

A figured I'd better google some numbers. Wikipedia says $60 million or $1.3 billion per launch, depending on how you calculate it. Nasa says $450 million per launch. NASA's figure is more expensive than Soyuz for 6 astronauts. Wikipedia's low end figure is obviously a lot cheaper (and kind of hard to believe).

Part of the premise of the shuttle system was a very low per-launch cost, with a high cost-of-ownership, providing an economic way to support a very high launch rate. We've never even come close to the launch rate that this premise was based on, and thus been unable to reap the magnitude of savings it was intended to provide - instead, we've just been "stuck" with that high cost-of-ownership. But given that intent behind its design, an incremental launch cost of ~$60 million (which is what that Wikipedia number claimed to be - the cost to add/remove a launch, ignoring all cost-of-ownership factors) seems believable.

(the $1.3 billion number attempted to include the system's total cost, including design, construction, maintenance, facilities, etc, divided evenly across all missions flown, making it likely a more useful number)

It's only secure if you can still use sufficiently strong passwords, and sufficiently varied passwords between applications. If you store the passwords in your head, but wind up weakening the passwords in order to keep them rememberable, then I'd argue that's less secure than a cryptographically strong password that is written and stored securely somewhere.

(admittedly, some people can keep a large number of cryptographically strong passwords memorized, but as a general principle, merely not writing down passwords does not in-and-of-itself make for a solid password scheme)

Your scenario removes scarcity from the equation. While you can copy digital_file for nearly-free, the creator of digital_file still needs to buy food and other costly goods. Under your example, the *only* thing that costs time is development of initial copies - *everything* is copyable for free, which means that the creator of something does need to buy anything.

That's a fundamental shift, that makes your example unrelated to the case you're trying to prove.

A half-hour of half-hearted PE can make a surprising difference. I remember in highschool, PE was mandatory in 9th and 10th grades and only rarely taken electives (like weightlifting) for the 11th and 12th grades. I was truly surprised by the difference not having PE made in the way I felt overall. Not being a particularly sporty person, most of the activity on my own time was limited to long walks, so PE was the main source of "vigorous" activity. Even if it wasn't perfect, it still seemed to make an important difference, and ironically made its best educational point when it 'suddenly' went away.


I know this is a purely subjective account, but at the time it felt like the most likely culprit by far, given the details of how things felt (muscles, etc), how much of the rest of my lifestyle had stayed constant, and the way random exercise temporarily alleviated the new symptoms.

Then you'll wind up with a population of sneezing soldiers, with very few monks. So how do you design content for that game? If you design content to need a strong mix of soldiers and monks, it will be railed against as too hard (since there aren't monks to fill the monk aspects of the encounter) or it will be ignored. If you design content to be doable by a mostly- or all-soldier force, then you're just reenforcing the bias against monks, and so why bother including monks at all?

It comes down to questions of diversity, complexity, and time. Diversity in an MMO is usually seen as a good thing - a variety of classes or skills, a variety of roles, etc. Diversity also gives you more ways to do the same thing, adding potential for more variety and complexity to content. And arguably most importantly, there is the finite amount of development time - in a perfect world, there would be content designed for every concievable playstyle and group/raid makeup, but in the real world you can only design for a tiny fraction of that space. By (attempting to) create content that, in general, requires that diversity of skills/classes, you hit the broadest swath of players and encourage players to take advantage of the diversity.

But all these things require balance to be meaningful - if soldiers are superior to monks in most or all ways that most players find significant, then the player population will probably be heavily biased towards soldiers instead of monks, and there will be real trouble trying to create content that works for your population without destroying what little diversity you have.

That's my personal gripe with overly easy transportation in MMOs. The best example I have is Everquest, when they introduced the Plane of Knowledge - suddenly everyone had access to instantaneous transportation to places all over the world, granting undreamed of ease of movement ... and changing what had been a large, sprawling world into something that felt relatively small, a series of arbitrary locales rather than cohesive continents and islands.

PoK fundamentally changed things, and really taught me the value of travel-that-takes-time. It's one of the many parts of an MMO where 'listening to the players' will yield a bad game, in that players (people, really) often want things that will ultimately undercut the enjoyment/value of their experience.

That's not to say that there's no such thing as excessive travel time - taking 3 hours to get from Newbieville to Hunting_Grounds_of_the_Newbies is a problem. The sweet spot is in the middle somewhere, and my point is simply that non-trivial travel is important, and that the sweet spot is likely higher (more travel) than most people seek or would ask for.