So the fun of the game is having to run across the world when you're too high level, stocking up on drinks and waiting for mana to regen, stupid clerical crap like tossing around who's leader so they can mark stuff?

Damn skippy I would, yes it would suck to lose people and there'd probably be some depression and disorientation and culture shock, but you'd be alive and vital to experience a whole new world instead of dead and rotting. Then again I don't assign special meaning to life beyond its experience, if I was very spiritual my answer might be different.

The problem is that no matter what you or I do there will always be people out there sharing files in large quantities. The data on how many will always be ambiguous and pretty easy to manipulate. If the record or music industry take a big blow, they will pretty much always be able to spin it as losses caused by pirating as they're doing now.

I had good teachers but I did find that the administrators and most especially the "lunch ladies" were fantastic at marginalizing the fringe students. I had a bit of a temper as a kid and when people would try to start shit with me I'd give it to them right back. Invariably I'd find myself sitting on the time out hill or in the principal's office while little Johnny whose mom was on the school board or whatever got to go back to recess. They even pulled me out of class occasionally to play a fruity board game with some school psychologist about my feelings and emotions.

The funny thing is as an adult if another adult was throwing punches at me or punting kickballs hard into my head people wouldn't look at me with bug eyes if I got up in their faces, but as a kid they put me under a microscope since I was reacting in kind. I can't particularly blame the other kids either since, well, they're kids. The people in charge should know better.

Science is a method for ascertaining properties of the universe by making physical observations. It certainly does not explain everything. It is, however, the best tool that we have. There are things that we as humans may never know or could never know but that doesn't mean we need to just make shit up to fill in the gaps. I don't know who made the lunch I ordered today but that doesn't mean god conjured me a sandwich.

If you join a casual pickup basketball game and start getting real physical and slamming the ball out of bounds people might get upset and decide you're an asshole too. Technically you might not even be committing a foul but that's just not the way they want to play ball. This is much the same thing, only since it's online there's no real way to gauge reactions and you might be doing it to some teenager that has a harder time keeping cool.

Basically just find a group of people that play the way you want to or be prepared to be disliked. In games like Jedi Knight especially it's easy to find a server that does what you want. There's servers that emphasize teamwork, servers for no-holds-barred 1337 kids, servers where people just want to pretend they're jedi and play act lightsaber duels or whatever. No real reason to linger on one when you can just head to another.

Human life should prevail over trivia. Knowing that this specific person has been taken hostage has very little import outside of his circle of friends and family. People die for the ability to say things, not to make publishing every bit of information compulsory. I'd imagine most of the people doing the dying think publishing information that doesn't really have any urgent value but can be linked to deaths in a pretty clear cause-and-effect chain is supremely offensive.

Am I saying this should be codified? No. The point of free speech in America is that my trivia might be your important facts. But withholding information like this voluntarily is both prudent and ethical. I'd go so far as to say publishing it is unethical. You lose nothing by sitting on this story until the kidnapping is over.

Alarm bells start going off in my head whenever someone claims that they are going to use math to prove the power of teamwork, friendship, love, god, or bagels :P

I agree completely with you, part of the beauty of math for me is taking vague ideas and turning them into a concrete mathematical objects that you can work with.

In particular the notation required by basic Euclidean geometry is very, very intuitive. If you take the very small step of learning the notation, you can make very concise and precise statements. I honestly can't see where it obscures anything for students, either.

I think that logic and, more broadly, philosophy would be absolutely excellent additions to the high school curriculum, but you really do not need any formal knowledge of mathematical logic to do Euclidean geometry. It's a great introduction to the basic idea of math, starting with a set of facts and deducing a conclusion. People have intuition about geometry in the plane, and introducing more formalism would just obscure everything.

The temptation once you know a lot of math is that math should be a sequential subject where you build up from axioms. If you actually try to teach using this method, by which I mean heaping formalism on students before they need it, you'll find out that it just doesn't stick. That isn't even really how mathematicians do math. Usually the intuition leads to the formalism. People were working with the natural numbers for thousands of years before we decided to nail it down with ZFC.

Our high school's copy of A Tale of Two Cities was worse, you were reading through it and boom halfway through the book they inserted pictures from one of the movie versions including the final scene. Bastards.

I was a bright kid and it went from soaking it in and being an attention magnet when I was a little kid to getting bored with all the praise sometimes around middle school. Do you find it interesting to sit around talking about how awesome you did on a test? Downplaying everything becomes instinctual to deflect the shitstream of mostly unwarranted praise that adults lavish upon kids with a little aptitude. At some point it starts to seem disingenuous even and the kid writes it off entirely as empty.

I know someone who was a high schooler doing PhD level research mathematics, won lots of awards and scholarships, etc. We all knew he was amazing, he knew we knew, but he enjoyed just hanging out with the rest of us college kids so we didn't harp on it too much. He was incredibly confident and secure in himself, really enjoyed the math he was doing, but just didn't get off on asserting it. When we actually praised him for his work he knew that it was because his work was good and we honestly appreciated it on a mathematical level, not just that he was a Doogie Howser curio.

My guess would be L4D content is more intensive to produce than TF2 content. Creating a four map campaign with attention to detail and crescendo/finale events with a good flow of zombies and hordes is a non-trivial task. If they add new weapons or new infected they probably have to retrofit them into previous maps to be able to use the terrain appropriately for instance.

Some of this is just lack of foresight, I think they got to a certain point and realized that doing the things they wanted to do with the base L4D game was just not economically feasible. They decided to throw in all the bells and whistles and make a full fledged sequel. L4D2 is its own content tax.

I was happy with what I paid for with L4D though, most games when you play the hell out of them for a month end up pretty stale outside of multiplayer. It was something new and different. If L4D2 is significantly better I'll put down the cash. If I don't think it's worth my time then I won't pay for it. It's not a big deal, I've put down money for four Valve games that have lasted me a combined total of a decade. Through Steam I've got great deals on the last couple of games I've played from other developers as well.

The active word in the sentence was harm. He is not damaging your body with second hand smoke. He is not driving recklessly with you on the road. He is not pushing joints on your kids. He's not even using a drug that ups aggressive tendencies. It has a pretty mild withdrawal. He's not likely to be sucking cocks or turn to a life of crime solely to fund his pot habit.

There are things it makes sense to ban just because the potential harm is just that egregious -- for instance, having a personal nuclear weapon -- but if your kid becoming a burn-out was one of them, we'd also have to outlaw TV, video games, skateboarding and Dora the Explorer.

Or assuming they can't restore his account (unlikely) he'll start grinding again from the beginning and get paranoid about account security, and you've given him a justification to sever his last links with humanity and retreat further into his little virtual world. People in MMOs roll alts continually starting from square one just to have something to do. I deleted my own characters once to "get away" and six months later I was back and spending extra time to work to where I was originally. An MMO is incredibly cheap, WoW runs on almost any computer, costs $15 a month and you can bum wireless off a neighbor. It's hard to cut someone off unless you completely control their life.

Two things have gotten me away from MMOs. The first was getting to the "end" and realizing how artificial it all was. When it really sinks in that you're paying them to work ten hour days hitting buttons like some trained monkey to earn bits of code a developer could gift you with in seconds for the purpose of inflating a DPS number, the magic sorta disappears. Deleting his character might trigger that response but it burns all bridges if it fails. Someone had a much better suggestion about getting him to try a private server where you can give yourself all the stuff you'd normally pour hours in for. That really underlines how artificial it is.

The second thing that got me away is just being away from the computer. He probably doesn't actually enjoy the MMO more than real life, it's just easier than actually going outside. If you can lure him away from the internet for a couple days with a vacation or maybe even manufacture some technical difficulty with the connection, once you've got that initial wedge in he'll probably be a lot more pliable.

Really though you can try a couple things but if he adamantly wants to live through the internet there is not much you can do to stop him. I know plenty of people who pissed away money by failing out of college for all sorts of stupid reasons that had nothing to do with MMOs. If he can pay the bills to support himself it's just an unfortunate choice he's making, but he's an adult. It might hurt your feelings and he might look back on his life and feel it's wasted, but at least it's pretty innocuous as far as "life problems" go. Otherwise let him live in a tent in the backyard with no internet for a couple weeks, that's pretty good at convincing moochers :P