Which, incidentally, is essentially what MyCloud is. I have a Western Digital MyCloud sitting at home and I never even noticed the outage. If you don't bother trying to access it from outside your home network, it's basically just a little NAS device.

Yeah, this deserves reiteration. I'm not sure where the hell Yoshida got the idea that part of the problem was they were "stuck focusing on lessons from XI" from given that XIV basically ignored everything that made XI good, but it's his claim.

The scary thought is that he may be right, that XIV really did represent what they learned from XI, which, honestly, really does explain quite a bit about Square Enix's recent releases.

Well, it wasn't so much that you couldn't figure it out, is that it was entirely random.

OK, first off, I have to explain that you have two levels: your character level and your class level. Your character level would slowly go up by getting regular old XP. Your class level involved getting "SP" and SP was randomly rewarded by doing actions related to the class.

And I mean that literally. Using a class's action had a random chance of gaining SP, depending on the level of the target the action was being used on.

Now you might assume based on what I just described that "character level" was like a traditional RPG level and that "class level" would be used to unlock skills or something. Nope. All the "character level" did was unlock attribute points you can use to increase attributes whose meaning was never explained. The "class level" was your traditional RPG level - increasing it would increase all your attributes on a set growth curve. (In addition to being used to unlock skills.) And leveling that up was, quite literally, random.

The random factor was what was patched out a few months after release, they changed it so that killing enemies always generated SP. As far as I know, they never got rid of the "character" level, whose sole purpose was granting "bonus" attribute points.

I agree, I'm not sure I understand Yoshida's comment about them being "too focused on FFXI" because if anything the problem was that they essentially looked at FFXI and decided they were going to try and be as different as possible from it. (Well, at least in some aspects, considering they wholesale lifted things like the various player races from XI.)

People were looking for an updated XI for the then-next gen consoles, and instead of doing that, they did everything they could to distance the mechanics for XIV from XI, and it just didn't work.

Imagine instead of being a long series of hallways that you were linearly lead down, you were instead dumped into a large maze of nearly identical hallways and given absolutely no direction...

The federal regulations required to allow people to receive subsidies under Obamacare. In order for people to fall under Obamacare, they had to re-signup using a website that had to be rewritten from the ground-up to use the new Obamacare subsidies. Basically, none of the existing site could be used because it was state-only, and they had to remake the entire thing to work with the new fed system.

And, when making this decision a year ago, who better to do that than the people building the Healthcare.gov site? Oops!

Really? Really? Try again.

This is a Massachusetts-specific issue. Massachusetts has only just getting around to firing CGI for their incompetence. The website still doesn't work.

You do in Massachusetts! The alternative ways involve having someone plug the information into the website for you. The website that still doesn't work.

And almost all of them have been trying since October. (I know my brother has!) It doesn't matter, because the Massachusetts website doesn't work. The alternative methods don't work, to the point where the state government has resorted to doing it by paper and are slowly working through the paper application backlog because the website doesn't work at all. The backend doesn't work, they simply can't process applications by computer at all. They're going to miss the deadline and have had to ask Obama to extend it.

The ironic thing is that since Obamacare is Romneycare, there was an old website that did work. But unfortunately Obamacare forced Massachusetts to build a brand new site to replace it and forced people to sign up again to meet the new federal requirements. And it's this process that's absolutely broken.

Nothing to do with Healthcare.gov, other than being built by the same chucklefucks who had to be replaced before other people could get Healthcare.gov into its current "sort of almost working" state. Remember, just like Oregon in this story, since Massachusetts has its own site, if you're a Massachusetts resident, you have to sign up using the Massachusetts site. Which still doesn't work.

Well, yeah, you could have just looked at Massachusetts and known this would happen.

Fun fact: the amount of emergency room treatment went up in Massachusetts when Romneycare passed. Fewer people were seeing their doctors than prior. I personally know people who moved to other states because the health insurance requirement meant that they lost their job.

The hugely ironic thing is that, thanks to Obamacare, there are something like 100,000 people in Massachusetts who are going to lose their Romneycare because of the new Obamacare healthcare connector requirements. And because the new Massachusetts website was made by the same people who made Healthcare.gov, it still doesn't work and the people on Romneycare (like my brother) are flat-out screwed. By the end of the month, they still won't have insurance, and the deadline to sign up will pass.

Ah, hope and change.

That's a term that they define earlier in the law, and they're quite clear:

Well, maybe not "quite clear" but it's not like "sexual or other intimate parts" is the phrase that determines the meaning of the law.

Meh, I'm not sure that really applies in this case. The law that was passed is basically a patch. And, like so many laws, I mean that quite literally: it's a list of insertions and deletions into the existing legal code.

Basically the Supreme Judicial Court said that a certain activity that was clearly intended to fall under the law didn't, because of the way the law was written. So the legislature fixed the wording of the law.

All the public debate had already happened, this was just a "bug fix," so to speak.

So while I'm not going to claim that there are definite issues of legislatures ignoring their constituents and sneaking laws through as rapidly as possible to avoid public debate on them (hi, Obamacare!), this really isn't a case of that.

Considering that apparently they didn't actually discover the "real" Satoshi Nakamoto after all, I'd have to go with "no, they shouldn't have revealed anything."