Perhaps this article is merely trying to be ironic. I know a lot of people who are working on their masters because they can't find a job, and/or want to put off paying their student loans. I know a lot less people who were getting a masters because they needed one, and even less who got one and said it made a major difference in their overall skills.

As a side note, you could probably create a rough metric for measuring time based solely on the frequency of posts about why the US doesn't fully embrace the metric system. I swear these posts are like clockwork.

We cling to three things in America. Our guns, our religion, and our system of weights and measures. Come and take them, you commie bastard.

I guess we're on that part of the cycle now. I think a few years ago PC gaming was dead. Pretty sure that a while before that, console gaming was dead (before the last time PC gaming was dead).

In the end some people like having general purpose gaming systems, some people like having dedicated gaming systems, and some people like both. The next generation of consoles will have capabilities that your PC won't, until they do, albeit at a much higher cost of entry. The consoles are out of date.. hell, they've been out of date for a couple of years, and in the Wii's case, the graphics have been out of date since it launched.

The game was actually really fun up to a point. They did a great job with the low level experience. Once the game got to the high end, and especially once keep runs or city seiges were the norm, the game became as much fun as actually pursuing an extended siege on a castle. Not so much RvR as RvDoor. I think most of their gameplay systems were great -- expanding tactics slots, passive vs. active talent points, etc. The problem was with the content, largely devoid of alternatives to RvR at the high end, repetitive PQs and their strange and arcane reward systems which turned into a grind for gear that ended up being just really bad compared to stuff you could get just as easily from other places. In the end, once they started flailing wildly in patch after patch to try and make their content fun, I knew it was probably over.

By the time WoW came out, basically everyone I knew who had played EverQuest were really interested in jumping ship. EverQuest was dated, people were pissed at the direction the game had taken (more hardcore) and basically the game had begun to really strain and break under the weight of all the baggage of a billion expansions. There were whole classes that just didn't have a unique place in the game. Not even marginally unique. There were whole zones, whole continents, almost, that were just deserted. Not because people weren't playing, but because there were a dozen zones for the same level range and the old ones were uniformly worse, not fun, etc. WoW's launch was basically like what Warhammer or Age of Conan was for WoW PvPers, except that the game worked for more than 6 months.

WoW is doing something smart with cataclysm by removing a lot of baggage they've created for themselves and getting the game back to a more simple, core fun experience that has optional depth. This seems to be something they learned well from EverQuest's wanderings in the desert of shitty expansions after Velious. Major change now will piss some people off, but if designed with the right mix of fun, simplicity, and optional depth, it will probably set the stage for further dominance in the genre.

Wahhh why can't I copy stuff and put it out on the Internet for free?

You can code up pretty much any copyrighted works you'd like. Once you start becoming a distributor of that software then you run into other companies and their work and they can get pretty upset with you stealing something they've worked to cultivate and promote into a viable source of income. So yes, sure, you can code up space invaders and pacman and whatever when you're learning to code. Don't 1.) Try and distribute it and definitely don't 2.) Fail to acknowledge the sources. Rewriting a clone of something and then distributing it for free isn't "Fair Use", it's just dumb.

Anyway, you're not learning much about writing code from putting your code up on a website anyway, are you? If you want to do that maybe you should just take a few days, add a banana cream pie that lets "Cap-Nam" shoot lasers at the little ghosts or alter the terrain, some other random additions and modifications that change the game from being a "clone" to being a "-like", and there ya go. Learning how to copy things that exist is probably half the goodness of programming. The other half is dreaming up new ideas.

Recap: Code, yes. Distribute, no.

The truth is out there, and once science gets its game together and figures out what that happens to be for some topic, I'm sure people will be happy and be glad for the info.

If everyone including scientists are wrong, then what's the point of everyone keeping up with their wrong answers? Some might take new answers that are supposedly better on a regular basis, but for most people that theoretical science isn't too useful and whether they have a good or bad set of beliefs about it is a lot less important than just about anything else in their lives.

A belief is just an assertion that may or may not be backed up by good facts. There's nothing about a belief itself that would inhibit someone from discarding it, or force someone to reject all contradictory conclusions.

Positioning "Science" and "Belief" as opposites is interesting. Science requires you to believe things. For instance, science requires that you believe in the usefulness of science. I think you're just trying to drag "Belief" through the mud by assigning it some sort of evil meaning.

Science doesn't speak with one voice on pretty much anything. Ask a group of paleontologists what happened to the Neanderthals or the Dinosaurs. Then run out, lock the door and come back two days later to let the survivor out.

Even when science does speak with one voice, it takes years for consensus to filter down because people who are not exposed to the debate (non-scientists) will continue to support things which have been proven wrong. Why? Well, because that's what they heard, and your new theory probably doesn't have a laundry list of "Here's how all previous theories were proven wrong" attached to it. You're telling people that the Celtics won the championship when they never found out that the Lakers had been eliminated in the second round. I can still pull up scientific articles that contain conjectures that are known to be wrong - yet they don't have that information about their legacy attached to them, so maybe I just assume that that's the "best" science.

"Science" is also known to be highly influenced by money. Scientists, like artists, need financial backing. The works they produce are sometimes tainted by that. Instead of doing pure, unbiased research, they are simply out with a mission from a master with an axe to grind on some issue.

Long story short: Science is done by people. And you can't trust people.