Geneva Convention takes issue with in-game power-ups

By Aleks Krotoski / controversy February 16 09:10

In one of the more bizarre news items that came out in the week I was away, the Canadian Red Cross has taken umbrage with the red cross emblem that emblazons in-game power ups of many first person shooters and action adventures. From an interview with the Red Cross' head of international law from GamesIndustry.biz:

"We would be willing to work with a videogame manufacturer to produce a game which shows the emblem in its correct use, as a symbol of protection during armed conflict, and where the player is rewarded for using the emblem correctly. Such a game could reward the player for respecting the rules of war and thereby, help the Red Cross Movement with its work to promote such respect," Meyer continued.

According to the humanitarian organisation, using its emblem in a combat situation violates a part of the Geneva Convention.

Super Bowl post mortem

Most of the following was written a few hours after Sunday's game:

Pittsburgh deserved the win, but, it was closer than the score indicated.

The Jackson push off was a bad call. Both players had equal contact both ways, and none of it affected the play.

I think Ben did get into the endzone, by a hair's breath.

The holding penalty that brought back the Jerramy Stevens 1st and Goal was bullshit. But if Stevens had caught the passes he shoulda caught, the game also would have been different.

The Randle El / Hines Ward gadget play took advantage of Etric Pruitt, who was playing for the injured Marquand Manuel. If Pruitt had stayed in coverage instead of biting on the trick, he likely would have broken that pass. Excellent play calling by Pittsburgh.

Shaun Alexander can't catch. We knew that. He had a pretty good game overall though.

The time management issue is interesting, I suppose. At the end of the first half, Hasselbeck was audibling out of a bad play. That burned time. Pittsburgh wisely realized Seattle had made adjustments and called a timeout. I suppose the Alexander run seemed odd, but it was also unexpected and gained decent yardage.

They did fall apart a little at the end because they needed two scores and had no time.

Field position / defensive struggles often seem boring to a lot of people.

*sigh*At least it wasn't embarrasing, and it leaves hope for next year. Hopefully they can buck the recent trend of losing Super Bowl teams having losing seasons.

Project

I've been working on a large project for several weeks. We need to order several large carts for the new building, and the lead time is about 5 weeks. We are now very close to the drop dead order date, and are scrambling to meet with the vendor and send the order.

For weeks I've been immersed in a series of meetings regarding the contents of these carts. The assumption was that we needed to know what would go in them before we could order them.

But really, that was a false assumption. We aren't really using that information to determine the type of cart to purchase. We already had a ballpark idea of how many supplies the carts would hold, and we had access to the space and could find out how large a space the carts have to live in.

The lesson learned is to challenge dependencies. Are they perceived or real? We could have ordered those damned carts a month ago, and that would have freed up a lot of our energy and given us time to prepare the carts prior to move in. Now we're going to be up against it. We already are up against it.