Have never worked for IBM but I have worked with IBMers on various projects mostly at Sterling Forest.

Best wishes to all of them.

None of the cities in the Atlanta area could be considered technologically advanced. Most of them are actually just suburbs, and not well-off suburbs at that. Sandy Springs would be the only well-off exception.

As an example, the cities of College Park, Hapeville and East Point don't have a single Walmart between them, One is about to open soon and the residents are thrilled to finally have a shopping option. Compare that to a more typical suburb which might have several stores and protesters blocking more.

What those three cities DO have is plenty of dark fiber and railroad ROW to lay in more, and local governments who would probably welcome Google with open arms.

This is my first MMO and I found it because of the calendar art pages that were circulating last year. It wasn't even the titillating nature of the game -I had no idea about that. Just liked the art.

Found out there was a game attached to it and that I could play it within my own abilities and within what my PC could handle, and ended up playing my first MMO ever. That was 8 months ago. I am currently the head for two different guilds and manage to have fun with the game nearly every day. I've made friends in game who helped me through a nasty crisis last summer, just by giving me an outlet and a refuge from the real world chaos.

The sexy aspect that is the game's notorious point fades after a while. It's not actually as in your face as some of the videos make it look and the only players who get really fixated on that are the brand new ones. Most of them get over it after a while, or they quit. Those of us who have been there a long time don't really notice it any more. I play as a girl because I am fine being a guy in real life. It seems fine to me to game as a fantasy, same as if it was a troll or something equally impossible. What's the difference?

The game is not perfect. Early on, gold-trading was more or less tolerated so early players were able amass huge wealth for not much cash. Buying gold is now banned but the gold purchased before is still in play. This means the early players basically dominate everybody else because they can afford to buy the best gear which they resell primarily to their own levels. This leaves everybody else at something of a disadvantage.

The game has a mix of quests and PvP but the game all but says PvP is the purpose. The game wants you to spend money to compete on the battlefield. The questing is mostly just a way to gain basic skills and level up to a point. And then you are expected to be good enough to go kill other players. If you don't want to kill players, you can continue grinding out repeat quests but it's boring and slow. And eventually, you will have to go PvP. Surprisingly, this game seems to attract a lot of first-time MMO players who don't want to do PvP. It's fine to kill a monster but different to take on somebody with the power to kill you.

One problem with the game is that leveling up starts easy and happens fast. Literally, you can level from 1 to 10 in about half an hour. And new players get hooked on that easy leveling. 10 to 20 takes hours, probably over several days for most people. 20-25 is going to take days, easy. And slower and longer after that. My first level 30 character took a month of playing every day just to do level 30 alone.

This huge increase in difficulty and time starts becoming apparently around level 20 which is also when the supply of quests starts to run out before the level ends. Once players realize they have to grind, and that they will have to do a LOT of it, well, it tends to burn players like crazy. The attrition rate is probably around 90% at level 20. Net result is that only the good, or patient, or determined players hang on after that which is again what the game wants. Those top players represent another brick wall for new players who do manage to come up. You will be facing players who can eat you for dinner, and will do so.

From the game's perspective this is fine. The top players have an incentive to keep spending money to maintain their status. Perhaps a lot of money. It doesn't matter financially if hundreds of free-players drop out for every one player dropping hundreds of dollars a month.

I do pay to play. Spent money tonight on virtual warehouse space to store my game goods. Go me.

The Freshnews.org link to this article on /. links not to /. at all but instead directly to the Network World article. Which, as we all know, nobody needs to RTFA.

The Japanese anime Might Gaine (c. 1991?) explored this simulation possibility. At the end of the series, it was revealed that the villain of the series was in fact a 2-D animation character representation of a being from 3-D space, that is to say, a real human or at least some sort of real creature. The entire world of the anime was merely this being's casual game, and all the characters in it were its pawns which it intended to kill.

This ultimate evil concept was created in part because the show animators and the toy company sponsor had gotten into deep disagreement over various things. The animators represented the meddling toy company as a terribly menacing and evil being from beyond who was the shadow in control of the world of the anime.)

While basically just a plot device, it does bring the question of what happens if you find out you really are just a pawn for some other being? And how do you know if you want to do it, or if the the sim simply wants you to think you want to do it? And what it the sim master wants to pull the plug? What do you do? This is what the hero of the show has to face. A flaw in the game master's strategy ultimately leads to victory for the 2-D world and a defeat for the 3-D being.

Carrying on the concept. the final camera shot of the Might Gaine series was an external camera view of an animation cel sheet, representing a view from our 3-D world into the animes 2-D world.

For what was a kids show, the series peered very deeply into itself at times. It is highly recommended, if it's understood the slow beginning of the show is just a setup for various plots that come together in the end. It takes time to put all the pieces into play. Would perhaps be worth watching the start of the final episode to see just how much is at stake (a desperate end-of-the-world scenario) and then begin from episode 1. This would make the stakes much clearer.

A 2-D vision created by 3-D beings who themselves exist in a simulation would entirely makes sense.

Look around, human. There are currently around 8.7 million different kinds of life on Earth. Only a handful of them look like YOU, and yet they are as alive as you are. Some of them are in your gut right now ensuring you can digest the dinner you will have tonight.

Out there in the vast universe, the odds are whatever life is there almost certainly looks even less like you than the 8.7 million kinds that are actually from the same planet. And yet there is this persistence to look only for life we know. We should be looking for what we do not know, which is oddly enough what most of science is supposed to be about. Except this one niche, where they only want to find what they know. Makes no sense to me.

It may be all we are capable of looking for, but then we should say that and understand our lack of ability to recognize life IS probably going to screw up any results we might get.

Phone OSs are quickly approaching the same plateau already reached by desktop OSs: the underlying OS doesn't actually matter. What users and customers want to DO is provided not by the OS but by apps they run. When they want to check email, tweet, update Facebook or play a game, they don't _care_ what OS supports it. They only care that they can, or cannot, do the things they want to do.

The problem for Microsoft and Blackberry is that they have the OS but they do not have the stuff to run on it. The quick way to fix this problem is to take the stuff people want and allow/make it run on your OS, and generally hope the public buys it.

This has not helped Blackberry because Blackberry is not cool, because nobody carries it so there's no peer envy, because the company reeks of instability and that scares customers, and because the US carriers don't do much to support it. And BB itself does not seem to actually bother to promote this compatibility. What good is a superpower you never use or talk about?

Windows Phone has other issues, one of which is the name Windows, which I insist in my own way is a terrible brand name for a product that has nothing to do with the "windows and manila file folders" concept, and it ties it to the desktop OS, which is used but not exactly beloved. They should have called it something else. The other problems are similar to Blackberry. Lack of peer envy, lack of carrier support, lack of OEM support (buying Nokia did not help this), and lack of any sexy reason to choose Windows Phone over Android or iPhone. Windows Phone fans say it runs better, does this or that better. They miss that "better than" means nothing when most people will never see it, much less compare it to their iPhone or Galaxy.

Getting people to think about Windows Phone means giving them a reason to bother getting closer than 40 feet away. A big campaign "We run Android's million+ apps!" is better than nothing. It removes an objection. It may add an enticement. Maybe. It beats a empty app store and developer issues.

A translation, by definition, is not the same as the original, Words get changed, meanings change, stuff gets made up when the translator gets fed up and wants to go to lunch early.

King James' translators were no better than any of them. Your faith isn't so much in God as you may think it is. Your faith is actually in those translators, that they did a correct and accurate job. Because you have no idea what the original works actually said, do you? Somebody has told you what it says. Perhaps many somebodies.

When average people talk you about... weather, politics, the best dog food to buy, or whether Pizza Hut, Papa Johns, or Dominos has the best pizza, do you take what they say at face value and believe it? No, probably not. You know how people are full of crap, make stuff up, or are simply delusional. Being wacko is almost normal.

But you trust your faith, the most important thing there is for many people, in the words translated by people hundreds of years ago. Whom you cannot talk to about pizza or anything else. You have no idea whether they were the best scholars ever, or merely humans who thought the same wacko things you find everywhere. I bet the latter because people are people, and most of them are wacko.

Stuff like that scares the crap out of me. I know how much people make stuff up. Some more than others. There is no way I can base something like faith on a book like that. If you can, good for you.

Well, of course you can and you will believe it. Because the alternative, that even a small part of what you believe might be wrong, is impossible to accept. It could not possibly be wrong, so it will never be wrong. You are safe.

Disagree with wikipedia's snub of first hand info. Who better to know facts, sometimes, than the people who work at a given place?

I worked for a small volunteer group which eventually got a wikipedia page. A lot of it was bullshit because it was posted by people who were not actually involved and had no idea what the hell they were talking about. The org in question existed before most people had internet access, and even before you could just go get a .com domain name. Those early years have NO citable online links. They didn't exist. There was no WWW.whatever.org.

So I posted a lot of historical corrections, because I was fucking there. I know the early history. I know the later history. I know stuff the head people have forgotten.

After posting some useful corrections, Wikipedia crapped all over it, you know, because there are no citations for stuff that happened before the WWW was open for general public use. And a lot of it happened offline in meatspace. Even if there were online elements, all the early stuff was on servers that no longer exist. There is no longer a there there. But I still have all the old ugly HTML cause I wrote most of it. Before I got jaded and burned out and began hating. I was nice once. And naive.

Their editorial reversion and shootdown of actual facts ended whatever effort I'll ever make to contribute to wikipedia. If they think they know better, they can just cope with citable but factually incorrect garbage and that's fine. I won't donate a used fingernail to their fund raisers and won't feel sad if they collapse into a heap of dung for lack of cash.

Nothing they've got matters if facts don't matter. And without facts, they're just another blog. Funny, but can't be trusted.

This was mainly talking about private pilots, who are not getting poached by anyone except their own twin-tail doctor killers.

The ATP issue is a whole other problem.

No, they know EXACTLY who the existing audience is. The thing is, they don't WANT us. They want a generic everyday people audience, the sort of people you attract with the Yahoo homepage and the godawful new NBC News website.

We old slashdotters don't matter for shit.

Heck, as they relaunch that new site design they will probably launch a whole new name too. And then where will we be? That's how much we are valued.

Well, since Mr. Clarke is dead, they'd probably sell a lot of copies if they managed to interview him again.

But nah, I subscribe to that mag to support the industry that manages to coerce women out of their clothes. Sure I could just sit back and consume free porn off the net, but those bunny ears and that bunny costume do something to me. Tossing $12 a year at them is cheap fun.

The big, bad armed forces can drool over sci fi toys and drop billions on hypersonic (and I might add, unproven) missiles, but the average ground pounding militia (aren't they always militia?) will still manage to make a lot of cheap and effective missiles out of stuff they can buy at the local Mosque Depot or Al Lowes.

I'd like to think Americans would be as resourceful if there was a war on our soil.

The core, loyal, long time users need to be generating some revenue, because that's all that matters to sites like this. Sure, they may have core, loyal, long time users. But companies would cash in all of them for some knitting forums if that would bring in revenue somehow.

Or to use a more relevant example, the news site Newsvine once had many core, loyal, long time users who contributed stories to the site much as we have editors here submitting stories (several times over in most cases). The community at Newsvine thrived on the discussion model and generally had a good time even when there was disagreement.

Then MSNBC bought Newsvine, let it become a festering cesspool of political attacks -imagine if EVERY story on /. became red state versus blue, and insightful posts were reduced to the commentary version of apes flinging poo. Sure Slashdot has some of that. But imagine it ALL like that. That's what Newsvine became. And then, they used it to develop what is now the current NBC news website. You need to see it. Oh golly you should see it.

All of that crap was done in the name of generating revenue. That's what happens when dollar signs become the most important thing. Dice is already heading that way with Slashdot. Eventually they will push the button and flush Slashdot. Cash is king. And we don't generate enough. I don't think we ever could either because no matter WHAT we do, there will always be this thought in their heads that they can get more money, if only... if only they do THIS or sell THAT.

As of Monday evening, half the local weather people were predicting we'd get what we got. The other half were pooh-poohing it and predicted we'd get nothing to worry about. As I went to bed Monday night, the pooh-pooh parade was full on. Nobody was planning to be closed on Tuesday. Had there been consensus at that moment, things would have been fine.

Since it was not unanimous, the bosses and agencies and schools all said, heck yeah we will be open normal on Tuesday. And everybody went to bed thinking that.

Sometime in the middle of the night, the NWS reaffirmed the snowfall and pretty much agreed with the locals who were saying watch out. But by then it was already too late. The notice needed to have been given four or five hours earlier.

Meanwhile the city and state, both of whom suck at normal maintenance and utterly fail at emergencies, both sat on their hands and hoped for nothing. They did nearly no prep work even though they had from 3:30AM until about 1:00PM to lay down salt or sand. They didn't do it.

And by the time they realized they actually needed to do it, it was already too late. The governor and mayor were off at event slapping each other on the back.

Kasim Reed always has been a bit of a doofus. This is just par for him. Nathan Deal is a country boy befuddled in the big city. His answer to most things is to get back on a horse and ride home asking what the problem is, if his horse can make it just fine.