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Letters to the Editor

The truth from Teplitsky, The obligation to vote,
Aaron Teplitsky, Liam Arbetman -

The truth from Teplitsky

I thoroughly enjoyed the feature on video games. I spend way too much of my time playing them! However, it is due to the sheer amount of time I’ve spent on them that I feel compelled to correct the few minor errors.

The “Konami Code” granted a Contra player 30 lives, not 100.

The “Sega Sports” name wasn’t heavily used until the later years of Sega Genesis. The sports dynasty that really began on Genesis was that of EA (Electronic Arts) Sports. “Bulls vs. Celtics” was in fact an EA game.

The Neo-Geo console actually consisted of arcade hardware and was therefore very expensive. The console cost over $600 (not $300), and the cartridge games – identical to their arcade-version counterparts – were originally a whopping $200 each!

PlayStation’s “graphical edge” over Nintendo 64 is something of an opinion. While PS’s CD-ROM enabled more graphics to be used in a game, the cartridge-based N64 used technologies such as texture filtering and graphical advantages with the ability to display more polygons per second. So basically, neither system had a definite “graphical edge”.

While PlayStation2 will remain at $300, Xbox also retails for $300 (not $500) and GameCube costs $200 (not $400). We’re college students, we’re not that rich!

Aaron Teplitsky

senior, computer science

The obligation to vote

In your November 9 editorial, aside from the fact that “parking” tops your list of pressing student concerns, you seem to have a complete ignorance of the American political process. A vote is a tool. If we as students truly were to organize and vote, we could have our voices heard. The reason we have triples and overcrowding is because we don’t vote.

Allow me to give you a lesson in state politics. While SUNY Binghamton is a fairly well regarded school, the SUNY system overall is consistently ranked near the bottom of all of the nation’s state university systems. States such as Texas, California and Florida, all with populations that are about equal to ours, have state universities that are gloriously more well-funded and ranked. So why are we treated so poorly by New York? Many New York politicians, state assembly members, and state senators, as well as Governor Pataki, believe that SUNY does not benefit New York State. They believe that it does not draw business into the state, and that people who graduate from SUNY will flee New York and benefit other parts of the country.

Well, how can you blame us, after the way we are treated? They re-organize the SUNY funding system, raise tuition, cut tuition assistance and opportunity programs and even cut childcare. Rather than getting a flat amount from Albany, the school receives more money for more students. Therefore it is in the administration’s economic and organizational interests to cram as many students onto this campus as possible. Furthermore, the administration is looking to distance itself from this poorly regarded system by renaming our school “Binghamton University at the State University of New York” (which seems an amazing feat of garbled and repetitive English, and worthy of pipedream)

My point is this: if students throughout the state turned out to vote in town board, county council, state assembly, state senate, gubernatorial elections and others of their kind, state officials would realize that they can’t continuously hurt students as they have done now for nearly 20 years.

Liam Arbetman

Student Assembly Rep.