TheMightyEthan

What is this from?

Fuck you Steam sales!

I don't even see that pack.

Did you buy one of the packs?

Just think of it as an investment in next year's Shameless Gaming Month.

I'd agree that on average private schools are no better than public schools. The advantage of sending your kid to a private school is that you get to select the school though, so you can pick a better one. I think one problem with the education system in the US, particularly as it relates to student debt, is that a lot of people go to college just because it's what you do after high school and ultimately end up working in jobs that don't actually need a degree. Education for its own sake is certainly a worthy cause, and going to college can be a great life experience, but it creates economic problems that I don't know are justified. I think a lot of this though is a product of our parents' and grandparents' generations, when sending your kids to college first became an attainable goal for the average family and everyone knew that sending your kids to college is how they could get the Good Jobs ™ like doctor, lawyer, etc. The problem is, you can't have a society composed entirely of doctors and lawyers, and people go get these expensive degrees and there aren't enough jobs in those fields to go around. (Just using doctor and lawyer as examples, but really it encompasses a lot more than that.) Related to that problem is that it seems that most high schools focus almost exclusively on college prep, and don't provide a practical education. The problem with that is three-fold: one, I believe it encourages drop-outs because kids who know they aren't going to college don't see any benefit in finishing high school; two, the kids who DO finish but don't go to college haven't been taught anything useful; and three, it reinforces the idea that college is just what you do after high school, encouraging people to go who don't need to. High schools should definitely provide college prep, because some people are going to go to college and they need to be prepared, but that shouldn't be all they provide; they should also provide courses to prepare kids for careers that don't involve a college degree. I mentioned welding before: that's a highly skilled task that requires training, but you don't need a college degree to be a welder, and you should be able to learn to weld in high school. Even a middle ground, with better preparation for kids going to technical schools to learn to be auto mechanics or whatever. I don't even think my high school had an auto shop... Anyway, that's my rambling. I'm just going to trail off here cause I've kind of run out of things to say.

What badges? Explain immediately!

We have vocational schools here (often called vocational or technical colleges), which I assume are more or less the same thing as your vocational schools. They typically offer 1-to-2-year programs and don't usually give you a degree (though I believe some will give you an associates degree), but you get a certificate in some specialized field, like welding or auto repair or computer repair or whatever. They also tend to, but don't always, focus on one specific area. *Edit* - Community colleges, on the other hand, are kind of like mini-universities: they tend to give you more "academic" education, as opposed to the practical education from vocational/technical schools, and offer a wide variety of courses.

Season 2 could be about her developing spiritually and learning to airbend. She made a few puffs of air but she hasn't exactly mastered it yet.

KZ2's narrative was not one of the highlights of the game for me; it just took itself way too seriously but didn't do a good job of being serious. I spent a lot of the game laughing at things that I don't think the writers intended me to laugh at. Good gameplay is all I'm after with this one.

I thought KZ2 took itself way too seriously. Like when whats-his-name died and Sev was losing his mind, it just made me laugh. Like I get that you'd be very upset in that situation, but the way they portrayed it was just cheesetastic and OTT. From a gameplay perspective though I thought it was really good, with the exception of a couple of parts that I've mentioned in other threads.

21 pictures to restore your faith in humanity.

From what I've read AC:B and AC:R were developed by a side team, and AC3 has been in development by the main team since AC2 released, so I don't think it will suffer the same problems as AC:R. I do own a Sharpshooter, and am quite looking forward to using it.

I agree that this should go in General Gaming Chat.

UC = University of California. There are a bunch of them, so it's referred to as the "UC system" CSU = California State University. Same as above with the system. CC = Community College. It's probably the most analogous thing we have to what you call "college". You can usually get a 2-year degree at one (as opposed to a 4-year degree), and a lot of your classes will transfer credit to 4-year universities if you end up going to one. They're also a lot cheaper than 4-year universities. A lot of people with less money but who want to go to a university will go to a community college first and knock out as many of the required classes for whatever they want to do as they can and then transfer to a 4-year university to finish up. Sometimes universities will give special tuition rates to transfer students too, so it can help lower the cost of getting your degree quite a bit.

Let's not doomsay until we know what the future seasons are about.

I liked it quite a bit, enough that I'll probably get Killzone 3 at some point. I'm excited to have something to play with the Move, assuming the lightgun controls work as intended.

Finished Killzone 2 today, now I'm working on inFAMOUS. I liked Killzone 2 quite a bit, but there were a few parts where OH MY GOD, just give me another fucking checkpoint. I'm okay with games being hard, but I don't like it when failure at one part means I have to redo a long period before that part, over and over and over again. There was also one difficulty spike on the train involving a tank that made me want to stab someone, but other than that I really liked it. The train one wouldn't have been too bad if my ally was even remotely competent, but oh well.

I actually wouldn't mind seeing a proliferation of Android consoles. I've thought for some time that it would be nice for consoles to be kind of like PCs or DVD players where everybody may have a different one but they can still run (most of) the same content. *Edit* - Though I understand that part of the benefit of consoles is that it's a set-spec platform so you know every one's the same and don't have to worry about compatibility issues.

Most bad jokes are puns.

There's no way to future-proof a console. Moore's law is still holding strong, and there's simply no way to protect against it for more than a couple of years without making your hardware ridiculously expensive.

Yeah, one way they could easily do it is just make the bundles exclusive to the PSN versions. Buy the game in-store for $60 and get just the PS3 version, or buy it on PSN for $70 and get both.

In the US it really varies by state, but the federal government does provide some assistance, mostly in terms of loans, though there are grants as well. Federal loans can be either subsidized or unsubsidized, which basically means you don't have to pay interest on the subsidized ones until 6 months after you graduate whereas unsubsidized loans interest starts accruing immediately (although usually you don't actually have to start making payments until 6 months after you graduate). Otherwise they're pretty much like normal loans in that you're obligated to pay back a certain amount each month regardless of your income (there is talk of forgiving a whole bunch of federally held student debt, but it's unlikely to happen and would be a special case regardless). Most colleges/universities also offer scholarships and grants, some need-based, some merit-based, and some just based on whatever the person who donated the money to start it wants it to be based on. There isn't really enough money to go around though.