White House condemns Egyptian military crackdown

A member of the Muslim Brotherhood and supporter of deposed Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi walks near a huge poster of Mursi, after late night clashes, at the entrance to their campsite near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, close to Rabaa Adawiya Square, in Nasr city area, east of Cairo July 28, 2013.

Credit: Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh

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Editorial: Stop threatening game developers ? One Of Swords

This morning a title update went through on Black Ops II on Xbox 360, and I expect this patch will propogate to other platforms soon as well. Here?s what I found on Twitter this morning:?

Okay, so I head off to read the patch notes. Most of it involves some needed tweaks to Buried, but apparently this is the part that has people violently angry:

Multiplayer Game Balancing

• AN-94:? Damage slightly reduced.

• DSR 50:? Rate of fire reduced.

• Ballista:? Rate of fire slightly reduced

That?s an assault rifle and two snipers that have, according to players who hadn?t even tried it yet, been ?messed up.? The negativity that followed is as melodramatic as you might expect.

So are the weapons truly messed up, or balanced? They are clearly altered, but to what degree? Vahn explains:

You know what? They are not.

One of Vahn?s many responsibilities is to keep the game as balanced as possible. Weapons are designed with pros and cons; they perform in specific ways for specific reasons. But if, in the course of millions of hours of gameplay and the data to go with it, weapons are found to be more effective or less effective than they should be to keep that performance balanced, they are adjusted. This has happened with every Call of Duty game that?s come out for the last few years, and it will continue to happen ? a gun?s stats being adjusted should not be a surprise to anybody at this point.

Yet Vahn often gets told he should die in a fire or kill himself or is a horrible person. If anybody thinks for a second that this is okay, it is not. But if the loudest voices in the Call of Duty ?community? act like an angry mob instead, guess how the entire world views Call of Duty? Now consider that these Internet Tough Guy rants and demands are not unique to COD, but exist everywhere, in many gaming communities. This is why the world often does not take gaming seriously; this is why gamers are assumed to be immature, whiny assholes. Because the immature, whiny assholes are louder.

Take a look at Vahn?s Twitter stream today; look at how he has responded to the people who found issues and sent him calm, useful feedback. It?s clear that many gamers understand basic human communication, and it?s doubly clear that developers respond positively and gratefully to this kind of feedback. Maybe Vahn is super patient. Maybe Vahn is super human. Maybe Vahn is heavily sedated. But the fact that he focuses on the useful feedback, puts that intel to good use fixing the problem, and doesn?t irrationally lash out at the immature, whiny assholes is amazing.

Role-play this for a second. When you make a mistake ? because you do, we all do ? or someone finds something wrong with something that you created, whether it be a meal or driving instructions or even a blog post, how would you prefer to find out that there is an issue? Would you like someone to just say ?hey, I noticed this and I think it?s not quite right; are you seeing what I see?? Or would you react better to having someone scream in your face that since your mother didn?t have an abortion, you should commit suicide instead? This is not the way to show a developer that what they do matters to you. Not at all.

If you enjoy your games, have a little respect for the people who make them ? and stop threatening them with bodily harm every time they do their job.

Source: http://oneofswords.com/2013/07/editorial-stop-threatening-game-developers/

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Cuba seminary rises from near-extinction (with Southwestern, 'a genuine church p...

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China quake death toll more than doubles to 54, hundreds hurt

By Megha Rajagopalan

BEIJING (Reuters) - The death toll from a 6.6 magnitude earthquake in China's western Gansu province on Monday more than doubled to 54 people, the municipal government said, with hundreds injured as many homes in affected areas collapsed.

The quake hit Minxian and Zhangxian counties, about 170 km (105 miles) southeast of the provincial capital of Lanzhou, at 7.45 on Monday morning (7.45 p.m. ET Sunday), the official Xinhua news agency said.

It put the number of people seriously injured at 296. Earlier reports by the official Xinhua news agency said 22 people had died.

Eight towns in the remote, mountainous area sustained serious damage in the quake and subsequent flooding and mudslides, state media said.

There were also power outages, while cell phone and Internet coverage was disrupted, residents and state media reported. The Red Cross Society of China said it had sent relief supplies to the affected areas, including jackets and tents.

"Many have been injured by collapsed houses," said a Minxian county doctor surnamed Du. "Many villagers have gone to local hospitals along the roads."

Photos posted on Chinese social media showed roads on the sides of riverbanks that had subsided and farmhouses reduced to piles of red bricks.

About 380 buildings had collapsed and 5,600 sustained damaged in Zhangxian county, the Dingxi municipal government said in a microblog post.

A school building in Minxian county was also damaged, a teacher in the area said, although he said he didn't believe any students were injured because they were away on summer holidays.

Heavy rain is also forecast for the areas hit by the quake, which officials fear would compound the damage by causing more landslides and flooding.

A second 5.6 earthquake struck the same region about 90 minutes after the first, Xinhua said, the most significant of several aftershocks. The United States Geological Survey said the first quake had a magnitude of 5.9.

Gansu abuts Sichuan province, where a 6.6 quake in April killed 164 people and injured more than 6,700, China's worst quake in three years.

That quake hit close to where a devastating 7.9 temblor killed some 70,000 people in May 2008.

Among those killed in the 2008 quake were thousands of children, raising suspicions that the schools that had collapsed on them had been poorly constructed, in part due to corruption.

(Additional reporting by Michael Martina, Ben Blanchard and the Shanghai Newsroom; Editing by Paul Tait)

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/strong-earthquake-strikes-central-china-usgs-001746877.html

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