ImperatorLunae
I disagree. At first glance, I thought this was another zombo.com. I'm guessing it's a text adventure, but the site spends more time bragging about its legacy, not explaining what the game is, as if the legendary status of this game should be obvious to us mere mortals. The design is good from an aesthetic point of view, but not from a "getting your point across" view.
I know it's obvious but... It's not obvious. What if those tax dollars were reinvested in universal health care? A small business wouldn't have to incur the cost of insuring its full-time employees. That would help stimulate growth, as it would cost less to hire each employee.
The premise that your argument stems from--lower taxes means more jobs--has been, time and time again, false in practice. Trickle-down economics are theoretically sound, but in 30 years of attempted trickle, nothing statistically significant has come down.
so, you don't tax people to sustain jobs, yet you don't cut jobs to lower spending. That is paradoxical.
Of course, when that started, the garment caught on fire.
That's just what paper newspapers look like. I don't think that's an accident, either.
It would <i>seem</i> that this is illegal, but I've never heard of a law protecting one's right to be listed in a search engine.
Perhaps, if this process requires you to be the owner, it qualifies as fraud?
I don't know where these critics have been, but that description sums up most of my math instruction in school.
In that case, the publicity could translate into dollars.
But I already do this on Google Docs, and I don't have to buy a Mac to do it. In fact, I don't have to buy anything to do it; I already have a desktop/laptop/phone, and Google Docs is free of charge. Plus, most people I know already have Google Accounts, so sharing is already implemented.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richmond,_Virginia : Richmond was ranked overall as the 5th most dangerous city and the 12th-most dangerous metropolitan area in the United States for the year of 2005.
You haven't seen Minecraft then, have you? The users, in fact, can build the environments on their own, and the game loads and runs at a playable speed.
Perhaps Minecraft has greater "video gameness" than Second Life, but couldn't the designers of Second Life have focused on user experience instead of delivering laissez-faire, polygon jungle? Although Second Life wouldn't fare well reverting to voxels, there are other approaches to optimize a user-developed game experience and maintain flexibility; it seems the developers aren't looking hard enough, if at all.
Then I actually thought about unlocking my door with my phone. This is a great idea.
Really? This seems a little stringent. High school teachers are busy teaching high school; PhD's are busy conducting research or teaching their own classes. Of course, some of them are going to pick up tutoring on the side for some extra money, but you're screening out huge portions of the available pool of tutors.
Consider my position; I have a BS in Physics and currently tutor a few students--mostly in calculus and geometry. Of course, I don't have "classroom experience," but I've been tutoring students for a while. I know my stuff, and I know when my students don't. I know how to read their math, catch mistakes, and work through their errors with them. I know how to identify recurring mistakes students make and prescribe problems to remedy those errors. I'm not an educator, but I know the subjects I'm teaching. That's as good as any grad student working as a TA, and they're teaching at the university level.
Why the high requirements? I understand the need for quality, but I sense, more often than not, students are looking for someone who knows the material to correct and guide them. You don't need a PhD to do that.
Take, for example, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/poll/2008... http://www.noozhawk.com/mark_shields/article/1109_mark_shiel...
These predictions have clearly proven false; they are mere protractions of two recent events glued together.
When a social network starts, its membership is sparse. Not everyone uses it, and the odds that your best friends will all pick up and use it off the bat are improbable. Therefore, in the lonely wasteland of a newly colonized social network, people tend to make friends with acquaintances. Of course, you're not super good friends with these people, but it would be rude to deny their requests as well.
What do you do when your real friends finally show up? Frump your acquaintances? Sure, you weren't really good friends with these people, but you don't want to isolate yourself from them either. Frumping/defriending/depathing actively demonstrates to them that the budding friendship you could have had is not there. People in real life move on, but they also get back in touch too. Having to squeeze back into someone's "path" is unnatural. Sure, it happens in real life, but to have to actively mimic that on a website--what if you are overestimating the value another person sees in you? That could have disastrous consequences. I don't maintain 500+ friendships at once, but I wouldn't want to tell 500 people "sorry, we're not friendly enough to be pathed."
Path really seems to have a flawed premise. Considering the hype, they've probably got quite a big chunk of funding too. I see it degenerating into a popularity contest--social groups have an ebb and flow, but they rarely have official declarations. What happens when people wander apart? Do you declare, "our friendship is not important enough to be in my path anymore?" I could never imagine doing that to anyone. What if you have forty relatives you'd like to keep in touch with? Can you only have ten friends?
I don't think they want to, either. Every grocery store, I'm sure, calculates how much they can discount some items to draw you into the store so you pay exorbitant prices for others. In the end, they profit. If all prices were accessible online, it would be possible to write an application to minimize consumer spending, but this would cause the whole system to collapse. If all consumers could get all the deals everywhere--throughout their whole shopping list--the grocery stores wouldn't profit.
I read an article once about elevators ( http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/04/21/080421fa_fact_... ). It was spun-off the "man getting stuck in an elevator for 41 hours" story.
In the article, the writer cites a particular anecdote about an elevator company installing faster elevators in a particular building. Patrons of the building, however, complained that the elevators were now slower. The company was confused--how was this possible? It turns out, the new elevators lacked mirrors. People couldn't straighten their hair and pick their teeth while standing in it, so the ride felt longer.
People perceive time in odd ways. Google's taking a stab at this perception; the illusion of speed in the eyes of the user counts more than physical speed. The user is the yard stick, not engineers with stopwatches.
The author here casts aside illusion like it's meaningless, but that's far from the truth. Look at the Parthenon, whose columns are tapered to make it look bigger, or magicians, who stun audiences with clever distraction. Casting aside illusion is on par with casting aside mathematics; it may be difficult to understand at times and require a large amount of labor to learn, but neither can be avoided without losing some room to maneuver.
One of our other roommates suggested that they play the game to have fun. They liked the suggestion and, as they began playing again, started to compete over who was having the most fun. My other roommate's comments had completely missed them.
This though, this is a good idea. I've already made the website, and I'd have to sign up if I wanted to save it. I have something invested in it; it's now worth my time to save the site.
It's intuitive, easy, and useful. You guys have a good shot at survival.