Slashdot Mirror
How Microsoft Tried To Buy Nintendo
An anonymous reader submits: "A new book, Opening the Xbox: Inside Microsoft's Plan to Unleash an Entertainment Revolution discusses Microsoft's plans to buy Nintendo for $25 billion in late 1999. By January 2000 however, talks dissolved and each company went their seperate way. Makes you wonder how the home entertainment industry would be different if they had gone through with it. Stories are at Gamers and Cube Europe."
@_@
what does this have to do with those cute japanese Gamecube girls. I'm specifically talking about the ones that wear yellow and blue see-through raincoats and silvery-grey underwear. I mean, c'mon, Japan's Nintendo 0wned Microsoft's green-haired women way back in Nintendo 64's Kokiri Forest.
Those Japanese girls; just can't ignore them. Bill gates will be crying that he was too late in the skimpy-exotic japanese girls. Green hair-ed girls is old news. Unless, you try to salvage the idea in OddWorld 3 with a 3-eyed green-haired girl.
Japan's girls, oh how I love thee. Let me count the ways...
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by Veronique de Rugy
Veronique de Rugy, who left France to live in America, is a fiscal policy analyst at the Cato Institute.
Should we laugh or should we cry? The first round of the French presidential elections are over. For months, media and polling agencies predicted that Jacques Chirac (the supposedly conservative president) would face Lionel Jospin (the socialist prime minister) in the runoff for the French presidency next month. Voters, however, decided otherwise. Now the so-called extreme rightist Jean-Marie Le Pen will face Jacques Chirac. Yes, that's correct, the socialists didn't even make it to the second round of the elections. But that does not mean that a free market and a free society will now reign in France under Chirac or Le Pen. For both men are protectionists and neo-socialists in their economic and public policies.
I am, of course, delighted to see the Socialist Party humiliated and yet also shocked by the outcome of the elections. Equally delightful, France's main parties of the left are now calling on voters to vote for President Jacques Chirac in the second round of the presidential elections. Can you imagine Al Gore, Ted Kennedy, or Ralph Nader begging Americans to vote for Bush or Reagan? Certainly this is good news.
But the bad news is that this vote does not signify support for free markets and small government. Neither candidate (Chirac or Le pen) is "libertarian," or even "conservative" in the American sense of the term. Le Pen used to pay lip service to markets. But now he is best known for being an extremely nationalistic opponent of globalization. He also has an unpleasant reputation for being racist. And he got a lot of attention a few years ago for calling the Nazi gas chambers "a detail in history."
On the other hand, Jacques Chirac is hopeless. He was elected seven years ago sounding like the Republicans who took over Congress in 1994. But whereas the GOP at least made some positive steps, Chirac took France further in the wrong direction. The result of his statist policies and large tax increases is an all-time high unemployment rate. That incompetence put the socialists and the communists back in the French Assembly less than 2 years after Chirac's victory in 1995. This time around, Chirac swears that things will be different and that he will cut taxes. He is, however, a bit less daring about reforming France's social security and her 35-hour work week. As he says, "we still have to do things a la Francaise."
If Chirac is elected he will continue to promote big government programs, more regulation, high taxes, and bad policies across the board. That's what he has done for 30 years. And there is no reason for him to do any differently now, especially since at 70 years old he doesn't have a political future. This is why the socialists and communists apparently are comfortable in calling on voters to elect Chirac. They know from experience that Chirac represents no danger to the core values of socialism, and, besides, he won't be around much longer.
In addition to the two candidates chosen-Chirac and Le Pen-the action of French voters shows that they don't really want less government or sound economic policies. If you add the socialist votes, the communist votes, and the other leftist votes you realize that nothing has changed and the French people still overwhelmingly vote on the left side of the spectrum. There was a free-market candidate, Alain Madelin. But his campaign to "give men back liberty and responsibility, give them the chance to blossom and succeed," did not succeed. The 55-year old leader of the Liberal Democracy Party got 3 percent of the votes. The fact that few people voted for him demonstrates that the French still do not get it.
The French have no understanding of why the economic situation there is so bad. They don't realize that big government is why France fell from the fifth richest country in Europe to the twelfth richest country - just ahead of socialist Greece. The French still worship the government.
Voting for Le Pen last week means that people prefer to forget that globalization and free trade have made France the world's sixth biggest foreign trader. Nonetheless, given unemployment and other problems, the French apparently would rather blame immigration instead of years of socialist policies for the economic situation. Will French voters ever learn the importance of freedom and responsibility? There is reason to doubt.
Is there serious sentiment in Germany to ban all violent video games due to the recent tragedy? I know Slashdot readers will not support such a measure, but I am wondering if anyone has insight into the opinions of the general populace.
(Of course this is offtopic, but unless JonKatz posts a story about this I have no where else to ask.)
who gives a FLYING FUCK, you are a retard timothy
Do yourself a favor and check out a new month-old internet site called Serence. Since April 2002 they have had a free / no ads / no spyware download for your Windows desktop called Klipfolio and this thing is great. According to the site statistics 3400+ slashdotters have already downloaded the Slashdot Klip and after joining them today, I can see why. (No, I don't have any personal vested interest in this, I just think it's cool.) The Slashdot Klip stays on your desktop and downloads the XML feed from Andover/Slashdot containing current article headlines, alerting you when there is a new one. Klips from a few dozen other founding news sources with XML newsfeeds are also available in a scrolling, dockable, resizable, skinnable package. In the lower left corner of the previous link you can suggest a new klip feed to Serence you'd like to see - a great thing for you to do, the more sites that use this, the better for all of us. You can even start up your own personal Klip feed! Rack up your favorite sites in one desktop package and you are really in control...click on a headline, up comes the article, click on the site symbol, up comes the home page. Like any dot-com, Serence's success depends on market penetration and this is one idea I think deserves to be slashdotted so it has a shot at succeeding...
Offtopic? Not really, the article I'm posting under went out as a Slashdot Klip headline. And what good is maxed out karma if not to risk it in spreading the word about a cool new Slashdot feature?