Rou

Mass Effect.

It's a big hit. People love it. It got very good reviews across the board.

It's a fairly well done RPG universe, with a number of unique species and wide ranges of planets to work with. Interface is good. Story telling is pretty well done with some realistic scripting and well conceived plot points. The scripting surrounding the romantic relationships is actually the worst in the entire game, but what do you expect from sci-fi video game writers? Seriously. Even considering that, it's probably the best RPG I've played in a while.

The game's rated M for mature for "Blood, Language, Partial Nudity, Sexual Themes, Violence". Now, guess which part is causing people to get their panties in a bunch? Yeah, we all know blood and violence is ok. Language isn't a problem either. It's all about the sex.

There are people who are really upset that in the course of role playing, you can build a relationship with NPCs and actually get a sex scene. OH NOES! SEX! RUN AWAY! Look, it's not that bad. You can have sex with one of the 2 female NPCs. You'll get a cut screen (same scene with different skin tone depending on which girl you're in bed with) that shows a semi-erotic scene with a little bit of one of the chicks ass. Honestly, while it probably wouldn't make it onto network TV without a few seconds cut out, it's actually pretty tame for movies. In fact, watch it yourself.

Youtube link here

See, not that bad really. Like I said, not TV, but fine for movies. You knwo the difference between the two, right? One is regulated broadcast, and the other is pu5rchased by the consumer willingly.

Anyway, that was it. Ready for what the other side has to say?

It's called "Mass Effect" and it allows its players - universally male no doubt - to engage in the most realistic sex acts ever conceived. One can custom design the shape, form, bodies, race, hair style, breast size of the images they wish to "engage" and then watch in crystal clear, LCD, 54 inch screen, HD clarity as the video game "persons" hump in every form, format, multiple, gender-oriented possibility they can think of.

...

If a pre-teen, teen, young adult, or adult male plays such a game in which the women DO submit without choice, are made to appear as Barbie streetwalkers, and perform whatever act can be imagined, what's to stop that same male from assuming that the women in his "other world" shouldn't be forced to do the same.

....

As technology continues to push the limits of imagination and interaction more and more the brain, the emotions, the feelings will integrate with physical responses in reality. And while the makers of such trash seem to be pushing our next generation of young men through the gates of hell as fast as is humanly possible, it needn't be that way.

Here's hoping that as the next President will be forced to deal with this continual emerging reality - and enemy that has set its site to our destruction from within - that we will have elected a man of such character that he will have precision in the clarity of his response.

Painful, eh? It hurt my brain, that's for sure. This guy really see this game as a gateway to hell. You can't argue with people like that. They're incapable of reason or logic. So, I'm not going to bother cutting his arguments down, or mentioning again the fact that the game's rated M. Not much point in saying if his child is playing this game it's his failure as a parent. Instead, I'm just going to file him into the crazification factor

Gotta love it. Rudy came out and made a big push to court conservatives with a English as a national language idea. It's a decent policy for Rudy. Helps endear him with those deeply patriotic, America-Fuck-yeah!, jingoistic types. Falls right in line with his constant repetition of the words 'nine-eleven'.

Of course, like any politician, he's a two-faced sack of horse shit. How do I know? Because his ads in Florida are in Spanish. You can't win down there without the Cuban vote. And you can't do that without ads in Spanish.

Somehow, I bet that before he says "Soy Rudy Giuliani y apruebo este mensaje", he doesn't mention that he wants them to all be forced to learn English.

I don't care if you think it's a good program or not. Doesn't fucking matter. If you can't stand up for your own programs, why the fuck would we consider you to be a good leader for our country? You're a pandering little limp-dick, piece of political hackery Rudy.

Die in a fire Rudy. And have a nice day.

So, we have this server. Actually we have lots and lots of them. But I don't care about them right now. I care about this one.

This one is a Linux box. And this Linux box has mirrored raid array.

So one day, one of our techs walks by the server rack and notices a little yellow light. Like a dedicated employee he reports it. Which is good because that little yellow light means something important. It means one of the drives has gone bad and has been removed from the array.

YAY for technology seeing a fault and isolating it!

So, we call up the support company and say "Hey you. Yellow light bad, RMA me a new drive so we can replace it."

You'd think they'd ship one out. But you'd be wrong. What they told us is that we needed to run a diagnostic program on the system to verify that the little yellow light was accurate. We rolled our eyes, but we tried to do as they said.

Of course, they sent us the instructions for a different model of server, so the first attempt to do this failed. But eventually we got it done and sent the logs off thinking that now they would give us a new drive

No. Of course not. I should have known. They told us that the next step for diagnosing the problem would be to rebuild the drive array from scratch and re-image the server.

....

No no, you read that right. In order to test to see if my raid drive is broke, I have to blow away the server. I ask you... what is the point of having raid if I have to blow away the server in order to test a raid failure? At that point, raid has ceased to be useful. I mean, I suppose it kept the server up until we could schedule an outage, but the failure still caused an outage.

So, we roll our eyes some more and schedule some downtime to rebuild the server.

First step, reboot and log into the BIOS to reset it to factory defaults. And that's where we get the problem. The server no longer understands the bad drive. The raid controller craps out and says that it has an unrecoverable drive error. Server won't boot. Remove the drive with the little yellow light and the server boots up fine.

So, we call up the support company. They're going to ship out a replacement drive.

It took us 10-15 man hours, 2 separate change approvals which involve dozens of groups signing off on our tests and a rather large conference call. This takes about 3 weeks to get everything set up. All to tell us exactly what the little yellow light told us in the first damn place.