Still, I'm wondering what's going on with Zelda. Getting outsold by Wii Sports and Wii Play either means the series is out of favour, people are waiting for the Cube version, Nintendo didn't make enough discs (are they stupid?) or perhaps even that more casual gamers represent a much bigger demand and most Zelda fans can't find a Wii to buy. You'd expect the Zelda folk to be the ones camping out though.
In another one of my posts, I point out that Zelda isn't that big of a title in Japan:
It sells well, but is not Nintendo's biggest franchise in Japan by a long shot.
The other important thing to consider is that the entire market in Japan has shifted after Nintendo released the DS; I wouldn't be surprised to see that gamers were looking for more unconventional ways to play unconventional games in Japan.
Honestly, there is as much damage done by implementing requested changes from a beta-test as there is from leaving the game it was. Most beta-tests are filled with hardcore fans of the genre (or the series) and are likely going to want features which the majority of users will not care about (or might see as negatives). There is a reason why there are so many games which are loved by the hardcore group that are ignored by the masses; and reasons why hardcore gamers complain that a highly successful game (WoW) is not hardcore enough for them.
Well, if you ship a half million consoles, your company (SCEA) gets 2 spots in the top 25.
Well, technically speaking SECA sold well over 15 Million pieces of hardware (PS2+PSP+PS3) and over 10 Million pieces of sofware this year; Nintendo has sold well over 20 Million pieces of hardware (DS, GBA, GC, Wii) and over 40 Million pieces of software this year. (Both approximate values because of no good european numbers)...
World of Warcraft is an important piece of software, but it hasn't sold that many units in 2006 (being that it was released in 2004) and Blizzard is not even in the same weight class as Nintendo or Sony. Yes WoW probably should have been added (probably in place of Best Buy) but saying that Nintendo or Sony should give up one of their spots for Blizzard is laughable.
.. the fact that the gap between the Wii's graphics and the 360 and PS3's graphics is even greater than that between the PS2 and X-Box 1 makes me think it'll be left behind. Yes, it's innovative, but since when has innovation paid off in the games industry of late?
Yeah, but it is similar to the Gap between the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP (which happens to be when innovation paid off in the games industry of late).
In general though, I think that it is way too early to make any conclusions on the performance of any system (except maybe the XBox 360 in Japan) because almost anything could happen at this point. The fact is that the Wii only sold 110,000 units in its second week of release and about 75% of new users would have had to buy Zelda for it to surpass the sales of Blu-Dragon.
According to http://the-magicbox.com/gaming.htm Blue Dragon outsold Nintendo Wii software for the week with a weekly total of 80 thousand units, in total Wii sports has sold 248,549 units since the Wii has launched, and Hajimete no Wii has sold 237,160 units; The legend of Zelda sold 146,250 units on its opening week and is likely near the 200,000 mark by now.
Next week Blue Dragon will probably drop out of the top ten whereas much of Nintendo's software will remain near the top for quite a while.
And house arrest sounds like a smart option to you?
Jail sentances are not only to keep away people from the rest of us, it's about punishment too.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that after a certain age most people are not motivated by potential (or previous) punishments so I suspect that "punishing" criminals is mostly a pointless act. Now, if your goals are protection of society and rehabilitation of the criminal (and your penal system was properly structured) house arrest would be a smart option; at $65,000+ per year to jail a prisoner it would be far less expensive to have a criminal watched by their own personal parol officer than it would be to hold them in jail and (with the exception of violent and sexual predators) would probably be better for the criminal and society at large.
If there has been deficit spending for 50 years how did the US go from a deficit to a surplus during the 90s? Note that I have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in a discussion of whether it was Clinton's policies, Clinton reaping the rewards of Regan's policies or just a general uptick in the world economy, I am just curious how a half-century of adding -ve numbers together produced a +ve total in the middle. Is the US deficit/surplus total stored in a 43b signed counter or something?
Ultimately, the surplus would have to be credited to the budget being well managed durring the Clinton Admisitration regardless of whether it was the policies of Regan that increased revinue/reduced spending; if Clinton wanted to he could have returned the American Government to deficit spending. I would use the same argument with the Canadian government of the time; the Conservatives in the 80's/90's enacted the policies (GST, NAFTA) which balanced the budget but the Liberals had the sense not to overspend in the 90's/00's.
Since the 90's the Canadian Federal (and Alberta Provincial) Governments have run balanced budgets and paid down the debt; the Alberta government ran balanced budgets when oil was below $20 per barrel and is currently "debt free" (oil royalties make up a large portion of Alberta's government income).
I wonder how much of this is because of "increasing value of precious metals" and how much is "The devaluing of the American dollar" (I recognize that from the perspective of Americans this would be the same thing); if it is based on the dollars value, why wouldn't you attempt to correct the problem with the dollar (by not running a 1/2 trillion dollar deficit) rather than finding cheaper materials?
If you own a Wii (and a computer with Blue Tooth) you can check out WiiLi.org and use your Wiimote on your PC...
On top of that, I think most people know the Wiimote isn't the first motion sensing device (or free hand moust); it is just one of the most complete devices and the only one being pushed by a major coporation. If it wasn't for Nintendo ensuring hundreds of games were being produced for the Wii, it would mostly just end up being a novelty and a piece of triva 10 years from now.
Flash is too restrictive in how many times it can be rewritten to be a viable replacement for a hard disk drive. Nice try though...
I know far too little about flash to comment on whether or not it is adequate to replace a hard-drive, but I do wonder on a modern PC how many times does a hard-drive really need to be rewritten to?
Back in the olden days of computers (as in not that long ago) few people had enough RAM to keep an entire program in memory so the OS was constantly swapping data between Memory and the hard-drive. Being that we can now put 2 or 4 GB of memory in a PC (and in the near future 8-16GB of memory) how much swapping really needs to be done? If you use the sectors of flash reasonably evenly, how long would a flash hard-drive last? 2/5/10 years? How long is it reasonable to expect a hard-drive to last?
The hypothesis of Climate-Scientists is that there is a long term human caused global warming trend, in order to prove it you first must show that the warming trend is long term (something which we can only do by waiting, say, 150 years) then that it is human caused, and finally that it is a global problem none of which can be solved by a thermometer.
It's now hotter than it used to be. This is profoundly obvious. This is measurable, repeatable, observable. All that is left then is for you to demonstrate some evidence, some profound insight to convince us that our repeated observations are wrong.
In the middle ages they were growing grapes in England (something we can not do now), and we're just leaving a period which was called the Little Ice age, so its not necessarily any warmer than it used to be nor is it necessarily a man made event. Once again, for me to be right all I have to do is find some problem with the methodology, data, or conclusions in order for me to be correct.
I'm going to give you a brief lesson in logic, you can't prove the non-existence of something; I can't prove that there is no global warming, there is no god, or there are not gremlins are living among us. This is why the emphasis is on proving that you're correct.
With global warming I can choose which facts I use to discredit a study, say that there is a greater corelation between sunspot activity and global warming (in spite of it not increasing the irradiance of light hitting the earth) then there is to all greenhouse gasses; in order for his theory to be true, it must explain why my counter argument is meaningless.
Essentially, the Scientific Methodology works because your theory can withstand all attacks not that someone couldn't find a counter argument.
Go on then. Quit with the chattering. Show us the money.
I was initially questioning whether it was possible, not that it was a fact...
But you seem to believe in global warming on a level usually reserved for religious zelots, so please find a study which explains why the correlation between sunspot activity and warming cycles for the past 450 years is incorrect and why greenhouse gasses are the correct cause of the current warming trend.
It's funny to me how religious followers are always offended when someone pokes fun at their beliefs
How about you go "poke fun" and Women's Rights groups or Environmental groups and see if they will be 'offended' or not...
The fact is that most people become offended when someone attacks their beliefs in particular when they do so with little or no knowledge or understanding on what they're talking about. When people bring up the Crusades, Persecution, and the Inquisition it just demonstrates that they're not willing to even have an intelligent well thought out conversation.
I'm not a christian, nor am I religious at all, but for some reason whenever Religion is brought up seemingly intelligent people turn into the biggest biggots around; people who argue that no one should be judged because of their lifestyle choice, and that we should tolerate everyone suddenly judge every religious (in particular christian person) and show no tolerance towards anyone.
To be a tolerant person you must respect everyone's right to have their own views, not just the people who agree with you.
If you look at the following many dead (or unpopular) products have recieved you'll see that consumers quite often produce buzz for a product themselves. Star Trek, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Nintendo's Earthbound series all developed cult followings in North America without any encouragement from the companies that produced it; in fact there have been several attempts to get the (already completed) translation of earthbound games released in North America, since Nintendo has been unwilling to people have produced fan translations of these games to be played on emulators.
Why is important to tell people who paid for a political comercial when it was played on TV?
The reason is simple, because it is reasonably simple to mislead people about the source and content of an advertizement. Consider the harm to a political campaign if people started making fake comercials for their opponents in order to make their supporters look stupid ("My name's Dan, and I think all these 'feminists' need is a good ing. I support John Smith because he believes a woman's place is in the kitchen.").
As comercials move away from being in comercial breaks and billboards to product placement and blogs it is important to tell people that they're being advertized to and who is doing the advertizement.
Consider the damage that would be done to the XBox had Sony created a fake blog on how to pick up 12 year old boys on XBox Live (and made sure that this got noticed on major news sites). If Sony got away with it, XBox Live could be killed by people's outrage.
Why? Given the gravity of the situation, surely the sensible position is to objectively examine the evidence, and draw conclusions? It doesn't make sense to me to simply turn your back and say "I don't know what's going on" - sounds like denial.
When given inconclusive evidence it makes sense to stand back and say "I don't know what is going on, but I remain open to arguments."
Why? If you have no opinion, why argue against it? Why do you think "someone has to?" . Must someone argue against the links between smoking and lung cancer? What about mathematical proofs?
You don't know much about Science do you?
In Mathematics every non-trivial proof will be reviewed by hundreds of very capable people who are looking for an error in the proof in order to publish their own paper with the excpetion noted and the "corrected" proof. In the hard-sciences (Physics, Chemestry, Biology) every paper will be reviewed to make sure that the control group was managed correctly, that the statistical analysis demonstrates the conclusion, and that the results are repeatable (yes, in fact many [if not most] results are verified by an independant researcher in another location).
Being that there is no way to verify the hypothesis' of Climate-Scientists, it is important to continue to question their results; we don't have spare planets to test their results on so it is important that "someone" questions their hypothesis.
But plant growth (either more or less) would be calculated by the model, not estimated by the scientist. And the heat coefficient of CO2 is well understood, as is the composition of the atmosphere. As for error, this can be reduced by repeating the experiment. If you wish to assert that the models are wrong, then it is insufficient just to speculate, you need to propose a model which produces a 'more accurate' result. Otherwise, we'll do the sensible thing and accept the science as is.
Once again, it is clear that you don't understand science...
In order to demonstrate a flawed model all I have to do is demonstrate is that their anti-hypothesis "Global-warming is not occuring" is within the margin of error of their model; if this happens their model is invalid and no conclusions can be drawn from its predictions.
I think I phrased my initial comment incorrectly...
Basically, in this type of model you are taking a certain number of measured, predicted and calculated values which each have a certain amount of error in them and feeding them into computer generated models to make predictions about the future climate of the earth (and these models have a certain level of error to them. Now, in order to conclude that "global warming in occuring" you must demonstrate that the anti-hypothesis "global warming in not occuring" is not within the error of the computer model; my point was that we never hear about the estimated error for these models, and we don't know whether the anti-hypotheisis falls within this model's error tollerance.
In other words, is it possible for the computer model to predict global warming when no global warming is occuring?
Even if cows are responsible for the production of more greenhouse gases than "industrialization" and automobiles (doubtful, but I'll argue with it anyway), the fact remains that animal agriculture *is* a man-made industry - thousands of years ago, people did not have mass-production farms that we have today. Regardless whether it's industrialization, cars, or mass-production agribusiness that's causing the problem, the real source is the same: human activity.
Well... Methane is about 23.5 times as potent of a Greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide is and the ammount of Methane produced through digestion and from the rotting of their "leavings" is significant when you consider that the average person in North America eats about 15KG of Beef (of which is usually slaughtered at 2 years old, meaning there is about 30KG of Beef per person alive at any given time); when you include dairy products into the equation there (in theory) could be enough methane produced by cows to have a greater impact than Transportation.
I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to global warming (usually arguing against it because someone has to) and I recently began to wonder what the consequence of a (very small) error would be in a computer simulation. Suppose that you (as a climate researcher) underestimated the effect that a warming trend caused by CO2 would have on plant growth, or overestimated the impact of CO2 on warming; in this situation wouldn't your model come to an equilibrium point much earlier and much higher than would be the case in reality?
As of November 30th, 2006, DS had sold about 26 million units, while the PSP had sold about 22 million units (worldwide, source: Wikipedia) - not that much of a installed base discrepancy.
I could be wrong but I believe those are shipped numbers for the PSP vs. sold numbers for the Nintendo DS. The reason for this is that vgcharts.org tracks North American and Japaneese sales and has the DS at about 21.25 Million sold in these regions (8,497,000[NA] + 12,809,750[J]) with the PSP at about 11 Million units (6,460,500 [NA] + 4,457,000[J]); basically, I doubt 9 Million PSPs were sold in Europe if only 5.75 Million Nintendo DS' were sold being that the PSP launched much later in Europe and has been reported to be far less popular.
Furthermore, the PSP is, at first impression, a more desirable machine - despite the higher cost, it has (by comparison) lovely graphics abilities, and far more storage. Sure, it has loading time issues, but these could certainly be fixable if the developers were willing to address them (of course, I haven't worked for the PSP, so perhaps that's more difficult than I make it sound). Why the strong developer support for the DS, then?
The DS love (from developers) comes largely because of the larger install base [in particular in Japan ~ 3 DS to 1 PSP), the better software tie-in ration [in particular in Japan ~3.5 pieces of software per DS to 1.75 pieces of software per PSP), and the much lower development costs of the Nintendo DS; in essence, if you are developing a game for Japaneese gamers you can spend 1/4 as much developing a DS game and are likely going to sell twice as many copies as a PSP game.
Well, I know of two cable guys who would disagree with that statement. They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods. And by the time 2009 comes around these television sets will be even cheaper, assuming people dont just get adapters. I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set.
Well, there may be plenty of HDTVs in lower income neighborhoods (VISA and Mastercard seem willing to give way more credit than people can actually afford) but I don't think that it is representative of most households in this income range. In general, in North America you can split households into 3 seperate (and inequal) groups of those that are living above their means, living within their means and living below their means. If you're at a low enough income level and live within your means (or you are in the group of people who lives below your means) you will question the need to pay to upgrade your TV when an inexpensive cable box will do the trick.
I'm not going to get into a debate whether it is reasonable for someone who is "poor" to have a flashy TV, but I will say that most people will agree that even if the Digital TV switch happens in 2011 there will still be tens of millions of Analogue TVs still in homes in 2016-2020.
Slashdot Mirror
Still, I'm wondering what's going on with Zelda. Getting outsold by Wii Sports and Wii Play either means the series is out of favour, people are waiting for the Cube version, Nintendo didn't make enough discs (are they stupid?) or perhaps even that more casual gamers represent a much bigger demand and most Zelda fans can't find a Wii to buy. You'd expect the Zelda folk to be the ones camping out though.
c id=17246614
In another one of my posts, I point out that Zelda isn't that big of a title in Japan:
http://games.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=211854&
It sells well, but is not Nintendo's biggest franchise in Japan by a long shot.
The other important thing to consider is that the entire market in Japan has shifted after Nintendo released the DS; I wouldn't be surprised to see that gamers were looking for more unconventional ways to play unconventional games in Japan.
Sales (in Millions)
Honestly, there is as much damage done by implementing requested changes from a beta-test as there is from leaving the game it was. Most beta-tests are filled with hardcore fans of the genre (or the series) and are likely going to want features which the majority of users will not care about (or might see as negatives). There is a reason why there are so many games which are loved by the hardcore group that are ignored by the masses; and reasons why hardcore gamers complain that a highly successful game (WoW) is not hardcore enough for them.
Well, if you ship a half million consoles, your company (SCEA) gets 2 spots in the top 25.
...
Well, technically speaking SECA sold well over 15 Million pieces of hardware (PS2+PSP+PS3) and over 10 Million pieces of sofware this year; Nintendo has sold well over 20 Million pieces of hardware (DS, GBA, GC, Wii) and over 40 Million pieces of software this year. (Both approximate values because of no good european numbers)
World of Warcraft is an important piece of software, but it hasn't sold that many units in 2006 (being that it was released in 2004) and Blizzard is not even in the same weight class as Nintendo or Sony. Yes WoW probably should have been added (probably in place of Best Buy) but saying that Nintendo or Sony should give up one of their spots for Blizzard is laughable.
.. the fact that the gap between the Wii's graphics and the 360 and PS3's graphics is even greater than that between the PS2 and X-Box 1 makes me think it'll be left behind. Yes, it's innovative, but since when has innovation paid off in the games industry of late?
Yeah, but it is similar to the Gap between the Nintendo DS and Sony's PSP (which happens to be when innovation paid off in the games industry of late).
In general though, I think that it is way too early to make any conclusions on the performance of any system (except maybe the XBox 360 in Japan) because almost anything could happen at this point. The fact is that the Wii only sold 110,000 units in its second week of release and about 75% of new users would have had to buy Zelda for it to surpass the sales of Blu-Dragon.
I thought I should clarify the statement:
r +Alive+4r +Alive+Xtreme+2i sing+ Nine+Nights
"Next week Blue Dragon will probably drop out of the top ten"
the Top Selling XBox 360 games in Japan
http://www.vgcharts.org/japgamewk.php?name=Dead+O
http://www.vgcharts.org/japgamewk.php?name=Dead+o
http://www.vgcharts.org/japgamewk.php?name=Dead+R
http://www.vgcharts.org/japgamewk.php?name=Ninety
According to http://the-magicbox.com/gaming.htm Blue Dragon outsold Nintendo Wii software for the week with a weekly total of 80 thousand units, in total Wii sports has sold 248,549 units since the Wii has launched, and Hajimete no Wii has sold 237,160 units; The legend of Zelda sold 146,250 units on its opening week and is likely near the 200,000 mark by now.
Next week Blue Dragon will probably drop out of the top ten whereas much of Nintendo's software will remain near the top for quite a while.
And house arrest sounds like a smart option to you?
Jail sentances are not only to keep away people from the rest of us, it's about punishment too.
I could be wrong, but I suspect that after a certain age most people are not motivated by potential (or previous) punishments so I suspect that "punishing" criminals is mostly a pointless act. Now, if your goals are protection of society and rehabilitation of the criminal (and your penal system was properly structured) house arrest would be a smart option; at $65,000+ per year to jail a prisoner it would be far less expensive to have a criminal watched by their own personal parol officer than it would be to hold them in jail and (with the exception of violent and sexual predators) would probably be better for the criminal and society at large.
Now if only they would arrest the people who were involved in making those movies ...
I was just answering the question ... screwed up on formating though
If there has been deficit spending for 50 years how did the US go from a deficit to a surplus during the 90s? Note that I have ABSOLUTELY NO INTEREST in a discussion of whether it was Clinton's policies, Clinton reaping the rewards of Regan's policies or just a general uptick in the world economy, I am just curious how a half-century of adding -ve numbers together produced a +ve total in the middle. Is the US deficit/surplus total stored in a 43b signed counter or something? Ultimately, the surplus would have to be credited to the budget being well managed durring the Clinton Admisitration regardless of whether it was the policies of Regan that increased revinue/reduced spending; if Clinton wanted to he could have returned the American Government to deficit spending. I would use the same argument with the Canadian government of the time; the Conservatives in the 80's/90's enacted the policies (GST, NAFTA) which balanced the budget but the Liberals had the sense not to overspend in the 90's/00's.
Since the 90's the Canadian Federal (and Alberta Provincial) Governments have run balanced budgets and paid down the debt; the Alberta government ran balanced budgets when oil was below $20 per barrel and is currently "debt free" (oil royalties make up a large portion of Alberta's government income).
...
Saving money is another problem though
I wonder how much of this is because of "increasing value of precious metals" and how much is "The devaluing of the American dollar" (I recognize that from the perspective of Americans this would be the same thing); if it is based on the dollars value, why wouldn't you attempt to correct the problem with the dollar (by not running a 1/2 trillion dollar deficit) rather than finding cheaper materials?
If you own a Wii (and a computer with Blue Tooth) you can check out WiiLi.org and use your Wiimote on your PC ...
On top of that, I think most people know the Wiimote isn't the first motion sensing device (or free hand moust); it is just one of the most complete devices and the only one being pushed by a major coporation. If it wasn't for Nintendo ensuring hundreds of games were being produced for the Wii, it would mostly just end up being a novelty and a piece of triva 10 years from now.
Flash is too restrictive in how many times it can be rewritten to be a viable replacement for a hard disk drive.
Nice try though...
I know far too little about flash to comment on whether or not it is adequate to replace a hard-drive, but I do wonder on a modern PC how many times does a hard-drive really need to be rewritten to?
Back in the olden days of computers (as in not that long ago) few people had enough RAM to keep an entire program in memory so the OS was constantly swapping data between Memory and the hard-drive. Being that we can now put 2 or 4 GB of memory in a PC (and in the near future 8-16GB of memory) how much swapping really needs to be done? If you use the sectors of flash reasonably evenly, how long would a flash hard-drive last? 2/5/10 years? How long is it reasonable to expect a hard-drive to last?
Apart from looking at a thermometer.
The hypothesis of Climate-Scientists is that there is a long term human caused global warming trend, in order to prove it you first must show that the warming trend is long term (something which we can only do by waiting, say, 150 years) then that it is human caused, and finally that it is a global problem none of which can be solved by a thermometer.
It's now hotter than it used to be. This is profoundly obvious. This is measurable, repeatable, observable. All that is left then is for you to demonstrate some evidence, some profound insight to convince us that our repeated observations are wrong.
In the middle ages they were growing grapes in England (something we can not do now), and we're just leaving a period which was called the Little Ice age, so its not necessarily any warmer than it used to be nor is it necessarily a man made event. Once again, for me to be right all I have to do is find some problem with the methodology, data, or conclusions in order for me to be correct.
I'm going to give you a brief lesson in logic, you can't prove the non-existence of something; I can't prove that there is no global warming, there is no god, or there are not gremlins are living among us. This is why the emphasis is on proving that you're correct.
With global warming I can choose which facts I use to discredit a study, say that there is a greater corelation between sunspot activity and global warming (in spite of it not increasing the irradiance of light hitting the earth) then there is to all greenhouse gasses; in order for his theory to be true, it must explain why my counter argument is meaningless.
Essentially, the Scientific Methodology works because your theory can withstand all attacks not that someone couldn't find a counter argument.
Go on then. Quit with the chattering. Show us the money.
I was initially questioning whether it was possible, not that it was a fact...
But you seem to believe in global warming on a level usually reserved for religious zelots, so please find a study which explains why the correlation between sunspot activity and warming cycles for the past 450 years is incorrect and why greenhouse gasses are the correct cause of the current warming trend.
It's funny to me how religious followers are always offended when someone pokes fun at their beliefs
...
How about you go "poke fun" and Women's Rights groups or Environmental groups and see if they will be 'offended' or not
The fact is that most people become offended when someone attacks their beliefs in particular when they do so with little or no knowledge or understanding on what they're talking about. When people bring up the Crusades, Persecution, and the Inquisition it just demonstrates that they're not willing to even have an intelligent well thought out conversation.
I'm not a christian, nor am I religious at all, but for some reason whenever Religion is brought up seemingly intelligent people turn into the biggest biggots around; people who argue that no one should be judged because of their lifestyle choice, and that we should tolerate everyone suddenly judge every religious (in particular christian person) and show no tolerance towards anyone.
To be a tolerant person you must respect everyone's right to have their own views, not just the people who agree with you.
If you look at the following many dead (or unpopular) products have recieved you'll see that consumers quite often produce buzz for a product themselves. Star Trek, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, and Nintendo's Earthbound series all developed cult followings in North America without any encouragement from the companies that produced it; in fact there have been several attempts to get the (already completed) translation of earthbound games released in North America, since Nintendo has been unwilling to people have produced fan translations of these games to be played on emulators.
...
Not all fan buzz is fake, but much of it is
A simple question in response to your question ...
Why is important to tell people who paid for a political comercial when it was played on TV?
The reason is simple, because it is reasonably simple to mislead people about the source and content of an advertizement. Consider the harm to a political campaign if people started making fake comercials for their opponents in order to make their supporters look stupid ("My name's Dan, and I think all these 'feminists' need is a good ing. I support John Smith because he believes a woman's place is in the kitchen.").
As comercials move away from being in comercial breaks and billboards to product placement and blogs it is important to tell people that they're being advertized to and who is doing the advertizement.
Consider the damage that would be done to the XBox had Sony created a fake blog on how to pick up 12 year old boys on XBox Live (and made sure that this got noticed on major news sites). If Sony got away with it, XBox Live could be killed by people's outrage.
Why? Given the gravity of the situation, surely the sensible position is to objectively examine the evidence, and draw conclusions? It doesn't make sense to me to simply turn your back and say "I don't know what's going on" - sounds like denial.
...
When given inconclusive evidence it makes sense to stand back and say "I don't know what is going on, but I remain open to arguments."
Why? If you have no opinion, why argue against it? Why do you think "someone has to?" . Must someone argue against the links between smoking and lung cancer? What about mathematical proofs?
You don't know much about Science do you?
In Mathematics every non-trivial proof will be reviewed by hundreds of very capable people who are looking for an error in the proof in order to publish their own paper with the excpetion noted and the "corrected" proof. In the hard-sciences (Physics, Chemestry, Biology) every paper will be reviewed to make sure that the control group was managed correctly, that the statistical analysis demonstrates the conclusion, and that the results are repeatable (yes, in fact many [if not most] results are verified by an independant researcher in another location).
Being that there is no way to verify the hypothesis' of Climate-Scientists, it is important to continue to question their results; we don't have spare planets to test their results on so it is important that "someone" questions their hypothesis.
But plant growth (either more or less) would be calculated by the model, not estimated by the scientist. And the heat coefficient of CO2 is well understood, as is the composition of the atmosphere. As for error, this can be reduced by repeating the experiment. If you wish to assert that the models are wrong, then it is insufficient just to speculate, you need to propose a model which produces a 'more accurate' result. Otherwise, we'll do the sensible thing and accept the science as is.
Once again, it is clear that you don't understand science
In order to demonstrate a flawed model all I have to do is demonstrate is that their anti-hypothesis "Global-warming is not occuring" is within the margin of error of their model; if this happens their model is invalid and no conclusions can be drawn from its predictions.
I think I phrased my initial comment incorrectly ...
Basically, in this type of model you are taking a certain number of measured, predicted and calculated values which each have a certain amount of error in them and feeding them into computer generated models to make predictions about the future climate of the earth (and these models have a certain level of error to them. Now, in order to conclude that "global warming in occuring" you must demonstrate that the anti-hypothesis "global warming in not occuring" is not within the error of the computer model; my point was that we never hear about the estimated error for these models, and we don't know whether the anti-hypotheisis falls within this model's error tollerance.
In other words, is it possible for the computer model to predict global warming when no global warming is occuring?
Even if cows are responsible for the production of more greenhouse gases than "industrialization" and automobiles (doubtful, but I'll argue with it anyway), the fact remains that animal agriculture *is* a man-made industry - thousands of years ago, people did not have mass-production farms that we have today. Regardless whether it's industrialization, cars, or mass-production agribusiness that's causing the problem, the real source is the same: human activity.
... Methane is about 23.5 times as potent of a Greenhouse gas as carbon dioxide is and the ammount of Methane produced through digestion and from the rotting of their "leavings" is significant when you consider that the average person in North America eats about 15KG of Beef (of which is usually slaughtered at 2 years old, meaning there is about 30KG of Beef per person alive at any given time); when you include dairy products into the equation there (in theory) could be enough methane produced by cows to have a greater impact than Transportation.
Well
I'm pretty agnostic when it comes to global warming (usually arguing against it because someone has to) and I recently began to wonder what the consequence of a (very small) error would be in a computer simulation. Suppose that you (as a climate researcher) underestimated the effect that a warming trend caused by CO2 would have on plant growth, or overestimated the impact of CO2 on warming; in this situation wouldn't your model come to an equilibrium point much earlier and much higher than would be the case in reality?
As of November 30th, 2006, DS had sold about 26 million units, while the PSP had sold about 22 million units (worldwide, source: Wikipedia) - not that much of a installed base discrepancy.
I could be wrong but I believe those are shipped numbers for the PSP vs. sold numbers for the Nintendo DS. The reason for this is that vgcharts.org tracks North American and Japaneese sales and has the DS at about 21.25 Million sold in these regions (8,497,000[NA] + 12,809,750[J]) with the PSP at about 11 Million units (6,460,500 [NA] + 4,457,000[J]); basically, I doubt 9 Million PSPs were sold in Europe if only 5.75 Million Nintendo DS' were sold being that the PSP launched much later in Europe and has been reported to be far less popular.
Furthermore, the PSP is, at first impression, a more desirable machine - despite the higher cost, it has (by comparison) lovely graphics abilities, and far more storage. Sure, it has loading time issues, but these could certainly be fixable if the developers were willing to address them (of course, I haven't worked for the PSP, so perhaps that's more difficult than I make it sound). Why the strong developer support for the DS, then?
The DS love (from developers) comes largely because of the larger install base [in particular in Japan ~ 3 DS to 1 PSP), the better software tie-in ration [in particular in Japan ~3.5 pieces of software per DS to 1.75 pieces of software per PSP), and the much lower development costs of the Nintendo DS; in essence, if you are developing a game for Japaneese gamers you can spend 1/4 as much developing a DS game and are likely going to sell twice as many copies as a PSP game.
Well, I know of two cable guys who would disagree with that statement. They'd point out that there are probably more people who earn less than $25,000 in the inner city who own new HDTVs than you'd find in most middle-class neighborhoods. And by the time 2009 comes around these television sets will be even cheaper, assuming people dont just get adapters. I just hope that in the US we don't start seeing tax dollars go to handouts to provide assistance to people who supposedly can't afford a brand new TV set.
Well, there may be plenty of HDTVs in lower income neighborhoods (VISA and Mastercard seem willing to give way more credit than people can actually afford) but I don't think that it is representative of most households in this income range. In general, in North America you can split households into 3 seperate (and inequal) groups of those that are living above their means, living within their means and living below their means. If you're at a low enough income level and live within your means (or you are in the group of people who lives below your means) you will question the need to pay to upgrade your TV when an inexpensive cable box will do the trick.
I'm not going to get into a debate whether it is reasonable for someone who is "poor" to have a flashy TV, but I will say that most people will agree that even if the Digital TV switch happens in 2011 there will still be tens of millions of Analogue TVs still in homes in 2016-2020.