This is just mindless fear-mongering. She’s supposed to be an expert on this stuff! This is basic science, don’t make people more fearful with ill-founded statements.

Then on top of that, they mention studies that say wifi may be harmful to children. What they fail to point out is the flaws in the methodology. But that would be boring.

They also do not consider the possibility these kids may be suffering a psychosomatic reaction, especially when they see how parents react over one kid that gets momentarily sick. Its happened before, where an entire school of children broke out into hives and started suffering flu-like symptoms. Eventually, it was determined to be a psychosomatic reaction, rather than anything physiological. Children are especially vulnerable to psychosomatic reactions because they cannot reason fully.

A bit of background first. Quebecor applied for a rare “must-carry” license, a Class 1 License, for a specialty all-news channel, Sun TV News, which would make all the cable and satellite providers provide this channel to all customers. Such a license would be massively profitable for Quebecor.

The CRTC denied the license request, stating that there was little to differentiate Sun TV News from its all-news competitors.

Quebecor has confirmed that the proposed Sun TV News channel would have a “straight-talk, conservative” bent to it, allegedly to offer more varied viewpoints in the Canadian media landscape.

There are some serious issues surrounding Sun TV News and the involvement of the current government. Stephen Harper’s former Head of Communications, Kory Teneycke will be Sun TV News’ chief executive. Stephen Harper has also had lunches with the head of Fox News, Rupert Murdoch. He has never had a lunch or meeting with the owners or executives from CNN, MSNBC, or any other media organization.

Stephen Harper has also been on record for enjoying the kind of news Fox News provides the United States of America.

Bringing these facts together, Lawrence Martin, backed up by unnamed sources, speculated Harper may remove Finklestein from power to ensure Sun TV News gets its unprecedented Class 1 License.

This in turn spurred the activist organization Avaaz.org, to setup an online petition asking Harper to not remove Finklestein from of his job. Avaaz.org stated in the petition,

“Prime Minister Harper is pressuring the Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to approve plans for a ‘Fox News North’. If successful, this would bring American-style hate media to Canadian airwaves, and be funded by our license fees!”

While they are correct about the license fees, which every Canadian Taxpayer pays as part of our taxes, the conclusions that Sun TV News will be “hate media” are merely rumors so far, spurred by Lawrence Martin’s column.

However, several news organizations saw fit to print the exact same attack piece, “Anti-Sun TV campaign in US”, criticizing avaaz.org. The organizations that have printed the attack piece are: canoe.ca, The Toronto Sun, London Free Press, The Ottawa Sun, and The Edmonton Sun. All of these media organizations are owned by Quebecor, the same company that stands to make millions if the Class 1 License is approved.

The piece uses language like, “A far left-wing American lobby group funded by U.S. billionaire George Soros wants you to be scared, very scared. There might soon be more competition in the world of TV news.” and “What this petition is about is a group of left-wing Americans supporting interests in Canada that don’t want to see competition in news broadcasting.”

The piece notes that “Part of the campaign to stop SUN TV News Channel from launching focuses on the idea that Canadians could be forced to pay for this venture. Author Margaret Atwood took to Twitter to denounce this.” Upon examining Margaret Atwood’s twitter stream, there is no evidence that she has denounced this claim, or the petition. In fact, she tweeted this: “Free speech does not mean under-the-carpet deals that would force people to pay for Fox out of cable fees.” at 6:51 PM PST Aug 31st.

The attack piece was written by Brian Lilley. He works for Quebecor Media International, which is the owner of the not-yet-approved Sun TV News channel, as a Senior Correspondent.

Since I wrote most of the above, there has been some further information to add to the story. Apparently parties unknown signed up Andrew Coyne(Editor in chief of Macleans), Paul Wells(Correspondent, Macleans), Kady O’Malley(CBC), Stephen Wickery(The Globe and Mail) on Avaaz without their permission. This spurred avaaz.org to post the following apology:
(Except)

Yesterday Avaaz experienced an attack on our “Stop ‘Fox News North’” petition consisting of fraudulent sign-ups of targeted individuals.

There is evidence of a deliberate and illegal effort designed to discredit Avaaz and violate an important form of democratic expression for Canadian citizens. If this is confirmed we will request a full investigation, and help to bring the perpetrators to justice.

It seems likely that the people behind this attack wanted the public to think that Avaaz is a spamming organization. They targeted key journalists in an effort to damage Avaaz’s reputation in the press.

It remains to be seen who(whether singular or in collusion) did this action, or what the intentions were. avaaz.org has no obligation to be fair and balanced in its reporting of facts, unlike the media organizations that run the attack piece.

It should also be pointed out that avaaz.org is campaigning against the use of Canadian tax dollars to fund what many fear will be a “Fox News North”. This reporter has no objection to a Fox News North, as long as it is not paid for with Canadian tax dollars. The attack piece by Brian Lilley says that Sun TV News never asked for Canadian tax dollars, ignoring the fact that they did implicitly ask for them with their request for a Class 1 License.

This works well with an action-unlock system, where investing in skill trees unlock new actions to use. It also allows the player to choose to take the trade-off, of the big action, whether to save themselves, or to finish the fight, while simultaneously not overly punishing them for choosing to do so. That is the issue with mana-based magic systems coupled with no-cost physical actions. It made players conserve their mana until the dungeon boss. Meanwhile, this system allows for players to balance the choice and risk, without a major long-lasting cost.

I would like to have somethings that could only be used once every five rounds or so, maybe, like 4e’s daily attacks.

What do you think?

First: “look” of the game. After a lot of wrangling and debate, I’ve decided on 2d top-down view. This requires some simplification of some of the combat mechanics. Instead of damage per “part”, there will be damage per facing, then core health. I’m debating hex-tiles or square-tiles at the moment.

Other things I’m considering, are energy mechanics, and physical action mechanics. My current ideas are pretty specious at the moment. I’m considering energy flow to individual items, and some items when used or triggered increase their draw on the circuit(like a load current from a motor). You could also redirect some energy from one part to another as needed, but this takes time(affected by skills and items).

Then for physical action, I’m considering maybe a system similar to Champions Online. That would be a morale meter, where you do actions, then, depending on stuff, the morale meter increases, allowing you to do more complex and expensive stuff.

Another possibility is to adapt the D&D 4e system of at-wills, encounter, daily abilities. I actually kind of like that system.

Yet another possibility is a stamina meter, which acts kind of like a capacitor, that gets drained by actions, then charges up over time.

What do you think?

So I’m designing and making a game. The design is the important part I feel. Can I take an idea from conception, figure out all the important details, write up a proper design document, and then, follow it?

So here are the basics of the game design so far.

It will likely be a 2d Mecha game, fantasy-environment. Each mecha will have an energy budget, to supply items, armor, and weapons. In addition, mecha frames will have base stats like mobility, etc, modified by the pilot’s skills. The energy budget is provided by power-cores. There are four “kinds” of energy, white, black, red, and blue. There is no “rock-paper-scissors” advantage provided by any one kind of energy, simply that different effects belong to each kind.

I’m still working this out, for the moment. But basically it goes like so: white: slowly increasing damage strength, effects from only matched sets, and repel effects; black: defensive powers, draining, bonuses for only using black stuff; red: deflecting attacks, random disabling of enemy items, and various miscellanous effects; blue: pulses, knockback effects, manipulate power flow.

I decided to keep to within the remit of that stuff, both to limit what I have to decide on, and because this is fairly easy to balance. Each type has some sort of unique schtick, some way of reducing damage, and something that can make good combos with other kinds of energy.

Mechas will have “slots” to put parts of armor on, weapons, and items, which are stuff that would be like amulets or something that provides an additional unique benefit or effect.

The gameplay will be tactical and positional. You have to try to target the damaged parts of the enemy mecha, while defending your own from attack. If your core gets damaged enough, your whole mecha shuts down.

I am currently considering the skill and stat system. I’m thinking of doing a “cap-and-trade-off” system. There will be a max number of skill points you can spend(the cap), while opposite skills(say speed training vs strength training) will have negative effects on each other(and the trade-off). Ie, if you start to bulk up, that affects your mobility. The more you bulk up, the slower you become.

In addition, there will be the normal range of fantasy-type weapons for the mechas to wield, from long swords to long bows, all appropriately giant-sized. You can train in using these as well, and switch between weapons during combat.

So what do you think so far?

I’ve observed something interesting though. Cryptic has been really stepping up their communication, thanks to people like Rehpic, Falkoren, and Jaguars. This has served to really benefit the game without much of a cost to the company.

Here’s a hypothetical. Say someone asks some questions about personal shields. Falkoren then asks the powers designers how they work, and he tells us in #stoqa. This gives us the knowledge to properly test them, while some of us add this info to places like sto-intel.org

This then serves to enhance the game. Players have more knowledge, players can properly test complex things to ensure they’re working right. For a minimal cost, of a few minutes of discussion between employees and customers, you have tremendously added to the perceived value of the game.

Encouraging communities are an excellent investment for game companies. Supporting them with actual employee interaction and communication is just pure gold.

However, Cryptic isn’t perfect in their communication. For example, the other moderators have a set of new rules they want to add and enforce for the IRC channels, however, its been difficult reaching Rekhan or Phoxe to get approval. In addition, they don’t rarely come in to the IRC channels for us to communicate community issues there are. I am thankful for Wishstone, she has been a good communication pipeline to Cryptic, but she’s the OCR for the German community, not the english community! This needs to change.

I did:

• Finished addition of a command queue, for every modification of the system.
• Fixed a bug with surfaces that happened rarely
• Added filepath checks, to ensure the file exists.
• Made significant improvements in audio/video syncing, but it still desyncs within a minute. This took up the rest of my week.

Unfortunately, I’m having a serious issue with audio/video desyncing. I’m going to be studying the ffmpeg tutorial, and ffplay.c for clues and understanding of where I’ve gone wrong. I will try on either Sunday or Monday to replace the current sound system I use with one similar to ffplay’s and see if that makes a difference. But I suspect it is an issue with the video thread, not the audio, because when the video is turned off, the audio doesn’t stutter at the beginning for one of my test videos. Then after that, I will be working to make my module work on Windows.

Its also the reason I waited to post this. I didn’t want to give any spoilers. So, lets say that the suits realized what an abomination of a movie JJ Abrams made, and so they gave it to me to fix. The requirements would be that I stick with the same general plot as they can’t afford to re-film everything. So, here we go, down the rabbit hole:

We start off with old Spock arguing before the Romulan senate, going from a shot of a CGI wonderland supernova to the senate room. He is arguing that Romulus is under threat of destruction from the Hobus start going supernova. The romulans jeer, and boo old Spock off, and he retains his calm(obviously!). A miner, named Nero, youngish, idealistic, believed in what Spock had to say, and wants to help, especially to save Romulus. And again, we go to a scene of Nero and Spock having just finished their presentation, Nero glowing with passionate pride. The Vulcans say “No. It is simply not logical to expend effort on the behalf of a race of people that have sought to destroy us, and will try to destroy us again.” and they all turn to leave. Nero rails against this proclamation, shouting, calling them cowards, emotion-less computers. Spock sighs and tells Nero to cease, his arguments will have no effect.

This is where Nero shrugs off Spock’s arm, and he turns angrily to Spock, “I’m going back to Romulus, to save my wife and child. You can stay here, with the rest of your despicable kind.” and he spits at the floor, marching off.

Unfortunately, Nero is too late, and he has to watch the death of his home-world, with his wife and child on it before him. He struggles to hold it together, but we can see he has become equal parts anger and sadness. His subordinates tell him they’ve picked up the some of the Romulan Senate. Nero whips his around, and growls ferally. Grabbing a knife from a subordinate, he marches down to the senate, and pretends to welcome them. He kneels before the Praetor, then snarling, stabs upward to kill him. Nero’s subordinates, after a pause, follow his lead and kill the Senate members.

Nero pushes the dead corpse out of the way, and snarls, “Now… let us destroy Vulcan… and the rest of the treacherous Federation.”

Then we see a few months later, the small mining ship Narada noticeably transformed into a sinister and nearly undefeatable warship.

His subordinates tell him that a small ship has managed to somehow prevent the Hobus supernova from destroying the universe. Nero discovers this is Spock, whom had finally gotten a concession from the Vulcan council for the equipment he needed. Nero growls again, and orders the ship to destroy Spock’s ship. Unfortunately, Spock’s ship is being drawn into the singularity he created, and Nero’s revenge-fueled rush to destroy him causes the Narada to be drawn into the singularity as well.

Now we come to the alternate timeline, where the USS Kelvin is responding to reports of a massive singularity wrecking some ships. Then we have the Kelvin scenes almost unaltered, except that George Kirk remembers to use the autopilot and runs to the shuttle. Unfortunately, he dies on the way, on the Com channel with his wife. We see the Narada being pushed back into the singularity by the Enterprise’s bulk.

The next scene, in dramatic contrast with the dark, gloomy, and sad scene previously, is bright and sunny, and we hear someone call “Kirk!” Chris Pine turns around and greets warmly Doctor McCoy. They discuss the Kobayashi Maru test that Kirk is going to take for the third time. McCoy thinks he’s being ridiculous. Kirk insists. He is still cocky, and arrogant, with a knowing swagger to his steps. Then we see the Kobayashi Maru scenes, and then the testimonial scene of Kirk vs Spock. Only this time, the Admirals consider the situation, and order Kirk to perform community service, by helping Spock improve the simulator, and fix the bug that Kirk exploited. As a reward for creative thinking, Kirk is promoted from Cadet to Ensign. We can put in scene in here about how Kirk has the “rubber-neck” mentality, and chases women.

Then we go a few more years later, and Kirk looks a bit older. He’s calmer, settled, and has Lieutenant stripes on his shoulder. He’s boarding the enterprise, having been transferred there. Pretty women in mini-skirts walk by, and in contrast to the scene just before, he checks them out discreetly. He’s still a skirt-chaser, but is a lot less cocky and arrogant, and doesn’t get distracted easily by women anymore. He’s no longer a Frat Boy. He meets Spock again, at the rank of Commander. “Welcome Lieutenant Kirk. Captain Pike sent me to welcome you, since we are already acquainted.”

Lt. Kirk makes it to the bridge, and looks around, smiling at everyone on the bridge. Pike nods, and directs Kirk to the conn. Then they receive a distress message from a Klingon fleet, talking about how some deadly ship appeared from a singularity…which tenses Kirk right up. He turns and tells the captain that this may be what destroyed the USS Kelvin. Every ounce of swagger is gone from Kirk’s demeanor, and he is genuinely worried. Pike takes the recommendation to heart, and exercises caution on arriving at the latest sighting of the mysterious warship, in Vulcan’s system. Everyone pales and becomes noticeably quieter as they see other Starfleet ships’ wreckage scattered around, bouncing off the shields. They scan the system, and find the Narada. They open hailing frequencies, as per standard operating procedure, but at Red Alert status. Nero sees young Spock and smiles, like a cat finding a mouse. “Send over both your captain and first officer or I will destroy Vulcan.” The communication ends there. The science officers confirm that the Narada indeed has such power, and is ready to do it at a moment’s notice. Pike sighs, and nods to Lt. Kirk, “Take command, myself and Mr. Spock will go over there and try to save Vulcan. Keep locked onto our lifesigns, I don’t trust this Romulan bastard.”

Almost as soon as the shuttle with Pike and Spock on it leaves, the Enterprise receives a message from one of Vulcan’s moons. Old Spock appears, and Kirk has a moment of recognition. “Jim old friend, we have not a second to lose. Please beam up myself and someone you will find extremely useful, Mr. Scott.” Kirk demands to know whats going on, “Jim, all I can see is this is an instance of time-travel, and I had to wait till my previous self left the ship. Please, trust me.” Kirk makes a decision, and orders the two people beamed up. “Mr. Spock, if that is who you really are, I would like some explanation now.”

Just that moment, the lifesigns for Pike start becoming erratic, as if he’s being tortured. Spock tilts his head, and narrows his eyes. He strides over to the science station, and with an ease born of familiarity, inputs information and reconfigures the sensors, with Commander Spock’s authentication code. He raises an eyebrow to young Kirk as if to say, “There. I am Spock.” With these changes, they’re able to beam aboard, to try to save Pike and young Spock. Kirk, Sule and a few red shirts go over. They manage to save Pike, and rescue young Spock, but not before Nero presses the button to destroy Vulcan. The blast lances out, piercing the planet, which begins to crumble inwards. Kirk orders the Enterprise to begin beaming up as many survivors as possible as soon as they can. Young Spock waits in the transporter bay for the first batch of survivors, the Vulcan High Council… but as he watches, his mother’s trace disappears, and the young transporter tech is horrified. Spock retains his calm, and hurries back to the bridge. We see a single scene of Spock’s fist tightening, knuckles turning white, hand nearly shaking, but otherwise, he is completely composed.

He reaches the bridge, with Pike sent to the infirmary. Kirk gets up to give Spock his command back, with old Spock having slipped out before young Spock shows up. Spock shakes his head. “I am afraid, Lt. Kirk, that I would not be capable of command in my present state. I am afraid I am emotional, and that these emotions will negatively impact my capabilities. Thus, you must take command, Kirk. Nero said his next target was Earth. Our duty is to stop him.” Kirk nods, and sits back in the chair. “Plot a course to Earth, maximum warp Ensign…” Chekov turns around, “Chekov sir.”

“Fascinating.” Spock says, finding the science station already has information input into it, “With this data, we should be able to beam through the shields of the Narada… but…” Scotty comes over to look, and they confer quietly, as the ship warps to Earth. “Gentlemen, tell me we have a way to stop this ship.” Scotty looks up and gives a trademark grin, “Oh aye, Captain… we do.” Kirk spends some time talking to old Spock in secret, to find out just what is going on. Chekov warps them into the solar system, out of reach of the Narada’s sensors, where Spock and Scotty outline their plan. They’ll need the Enterprise to attack the Narada, to weaken the shields first. They’ve managed to strengthen the shields and power output of the engines thanks to the calculations given by old Spock. Kirk hails the Narada, and tells Nero to let go of his quest for destruction. “What happened to your wife and child was a regrettable tragedy, Nero. One I feel for. But there is no need to do this.” Nero snarls, and says to the viewscreen, “No diplomacy, no peace talks, no negotiations will stop me. I will have my vengeance.” and turns off the communications, yet again.

“Time to try two-fisted diplomacy fellas.” Kirk says, and the crew gets to work. The Enterprise swoops in, rocking the Narada with the force of its blasts. The Enterprise gets hit back, hard, and the shiny uber-Apple bridge begins to get smokey, and filled with sparks. “Keep firing! We’ve got to save Earth!” Kirk holds on for dear life. Finally, the Narada’s shields are weakened, and Kirk, Sulu, Spock, and more red-shirts beam aboard the Narada. This time, they get between Nero and the death beam button. Nero manages to disarm Kirk, while the rest are busy fighting Nero’s crew. Kirk struggles with Nero, and in homage to TOS, uses the infamous Kirk punch. Barely able to stay standing up, Kirk looks almost beaten while the victorious Nero is about to deliver the coup de grace. Spock comes in, and delivers an uncharacteristic punch, knocking Nero over. Kirk yells, “Don’t Spock!” but Spock does it anyway, and vaporizes Nero. He sighs, and turns to Kirk, helping him up. Kirk looks around and tells Spock, “This ship was advanced in its own time, 100 years in the future. We need to keep this technology out of enemy hands.” Spock concurs, and they set about turning on the self-destruct sequence. They escape the ship, and beam back to the Enterprise.

There, everyone is promoted, especially Kirk. However, due to his murder of Nero, Spock receives no promotion, and Kirk is given the command of the Enterprise.

And voila! Took almost 2000 words, but isn’t this a better movie?

What I’ve done since then:

• Fixed video sync issues after pausing and unpausing
• Fixed a bug dealing with overlay and surface releasing and resizing
• Expanded unit tests for all the backends
• Added more commenting, cleaning up code
• Began working on subtitle support but discovered that ffmpeg 0.5 has no demuxers for subtitles so decided to delay this feature for after GSoC
• Worked on various references issues
• Moved audio packet processing to its own thread
• Wrote a more optimized routine for writing data to an SDL_Surface, still slow on large screens
• Added some profiling
• Merged branch with trunk revisions
• Fixed slowdown issues
• Added seeking. No relative seeking yet, it is absolute for now.
• Updated the code to work with older ffmpeg libraries. Only one section is incompatible, and waiting on a response from the libav* mailing thread
• Began working on a command queue to make the module more thread safe.

There are some current issues at the moment.

• If using surfaces, and you resize the window smaller, there ends up being corruption in the bottom of the window. I have no idea why this happens.
• I will be adding relative seeking this next week.
• Found an issue where commands issue from the Python interpreter thread in sequence but with no delay cause a big crash. Thus the necessity of the command queue.
• Code seems a bit slow, and very very rarely, audio and video get desynced.
• No path expansion yet.

And there we go!