I think it's more likely that they realize that these fan generated graphics are ugly, would probably look even worse in motion than they do in photoshopped screenshots, and wouldn't play very well because they're so muddled. But they're dealing with some obviously hardcore fans, and they're probably thrilled that there are people out there who care enough to go through all this trouble, so they don't really want to come out and call those fans untalented hack artists.
So rather than call their fanbase stupid, they call themselves stupid. At the end of the day, they'll release the game they want to make, and judging from Blizzard's track record it will be a well made game that will sell very well. These people who are spending hours photoshopping screenshots will switch to spending hours playing the game, and everyone will be happy.
I wouldn't say that people are turning on Google as much as Google has just stopped being all that interesting. Many people are of the opinion that their search has become increasingly less useful as of late as the spammers have become better at gaming their ranking system. But even if that's not actually true, at the end of the day, it's primarily just a search engine, which is important, but not particularly glamorous.
People still use it, but it's not like it's a fun game or something, it's just a tool. And once it becomes familiar and part of your routine, it's hard to get excited about it. Google has done a pretty good job of at least keeping their brand exciting by releasing their take on other things (maps, mail, etc.) and their IPO and the huge piles of money kept them in the news. But there hasn't been anything really interesting as of late.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it shouldn't be a surprise if the media starts pushing other headlines. Because that's what the media does, and if there's no good headlines out there, they'll make one out of something insignificant.
That little toy is java, but it points us in the right direction. A lot of this stuff has moved to the web. There are approximately 8 trillion little flash puzzle games. Some of them are very clever and fun. There's a lot of variety, and various levels of quality and polish. But either way, there's plenty to choose from.
One of the coolest things about the internet makes it really easy for anyone to be a critic, so there's lots of sources out there for information. I don't need to go to a website about movies and hope that the critic who wrote their review isn't a jackass. Instead I just read the nerdy blogs of nerdy people that write about random nerdy things that amuse me. Having read many of those blogs for months or years, I have a pretty good idea how the author's tastes parallel mine, and which of their opinions I should consider useful. So if one of them happens to have seen a movie that was either good or bad enough that it's worth mentioning, I'll read about it.
I don't endlessly read blogs all day, but over the course of a week or so I hit enough different ones that I'll see at least a post or two about any most movies that I've got any interest in.
Re:Yes, but with a twist
on
Apple After Jobs
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Agreed. For a company like Apple, a CEO needs to provide a few specific things, all of which can be summed up as a "vision". But when you break it down, there's a few main aspects of it. There's the quality control issue that you mentioned, having someone who has the authority to overrule the accountants and marketing and not rush a product.
Also important is having a public figurehead for the company. It's extra important when you've got a company that's as secretive as Apple. If a new CEO was a more open about what was going on, then it'd be less of an issue, but if you're going to continue to severely limit the flow of information out, you've got to make sure that the person who does do the occasional talking does it well.
And the final thing, which I think was the single most important thing that Jobs brought to Apple when he returned as CEO, is focus. When you've got a building full of a bunch of great designers and engineers, there's going to be a zillion ideas and independent thought processes going on all the time. And while that helps great ideas get born, it doesn't help them mature into something useable. Someone's got to be the filter, choosing not only the ideas that are most likely to work, but also that fit into some overall direction for the company. That means someone who's got the will and ability to make smart people ignore their own pet ideas and pour their energy into someone else's idea. In the mid-90's Apple was selling gazillions of products, from a large range of desktop models to printers, digital cameras, etc. When Jobs got back, one of the first big things that happened was that a lot of those projects went away, the product lineup was massively simplified, and those fewer products were more carefully designed. And since them, the product lineup has slowly grown, but in a very controlled and methodical manner.
It's fairly useless but less useless at pattern recognition than it is for anything else. To make it work we have to make it really really cold. It won't get cancer from cell phones. We won't make any money off of this particular machine.
I'm pretty neutral on Howard Stern in general, but why should anyone give a rats ass what he thinks about something like this? He's done very well for himself as a guy who will say controversial things on the radio, good for him. Why that makes his opinion useful or worthwhile on something like government regulation and potential monopoly issues...I just don't see it.
But regardless of how well informed he is on the issue, someone stating that they're going to discount something as broad as an entire political party over something as minor as two merging radio stations is someone who's not using their whole brain.
This isn't a copyright issue. There are a number of reasons why various organizations want to keep track of who's potentially photographing them from space, but it's not because any of them believe that they have some sort of inherent IP ownership of pictures of the planet.
There are lots of different directions that you could criticize the applicable laws from and have a valid argument, but you're not going to get very far yelling about coyprighting the Earth, because that's not the issue.
The reality is that for better or worse, cultural boundaries can often be drawn right alongside racial boundries. There's generally a long set of historical circumstances that have created those conditions.
Acknowledging that those boundaries exist is in no way inherently racist, that's just how the world works. It's just important to remember that the specifics of a culture are primarily result of the circumstances that it was formed in, and not a result of the genetic makeup of the particular race that constitutes that culture. Race and Culture are very strongly correlated, but neither one is a result of the other. They're both results of the same large scale issues.
The correlation between race and culture is not surprising, but it is unfortunate. There are perfectly valid criticisms to be made about any culture you care to look at. It's a shame that it's so hard to separate race out of it. The connection allows the critic to fall into the trap of blaming race which isn't helpful and just leads to real racism. It also allows the criticized to deflect criticism of their culture by calling it racism, basically invalidating the message by invalidating the messenger.
You're correct in that the recent rise in oil prices isn't primarily driven by supply/demand issues. It has far more to do with the fact that the dollar is drastically falling in value, in a large part due to the fed's idea to "save" the economy by giving away hundreds of billions of dollars that it doesn't have. On the bright side, if this continues, then the price of gasoline will stop being important to the majority of americans. Instead they'll get to worry about affording food and housing.
Long term, however, supply and demand is a serious issue. The amount of oil being pumped is not growing at the same pace that consumption is.
I tie it to people's experience with the iPod and OSX. People got excited about the iPhone because they liked their iPods. They figured that since Apple figured out how to make one really nice consumer device that they really enjoyed, they'd probably do a good job on a phone as well. The iPhone isn't a perfect device, and it certainly wouldn't make an acceptable phone replacement for everyone, but it's a pretty damn good phone, and it does a number of things better than any other phones out there.
Some people have a hard time accepting that there are companies out there who can design a product for a market new to them and on their first try get things right that the traditional companies still haven't figured out. Apple's turned out to be pretty good at that. Trying to dismiss it just as a product of hype and "cool factor" is silly.
I don't understand the insistence on this idea that Apple is all hype. You could've made a reasonable argument maybe back in 2002-2003 when the iPod was really starting to tear up the market. But now it's 2008 and the iPod is still the best selling music player by a mile. Fads don't last for seven years, especially not ones related to technology.
I won't argue that Apple doesn't have very slick and effective marketing, but brand will only get you so far. People are fickle. Everyone's got an iPod now, it doesn't make you special or cool anymore. Yet they're still having no problem selling them.
Even with the iPhone it's become pretty clear that there's more to it than just "the cool factor". Why else would people be so excited about a new version that looks almost exactly the same as the old version, and costs less? There's some real value there for many people, and they're willing to pay for it.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who want to spend a few hundred dollars on an operating system. If you asked the average person on the street, they'd probably tell you that they didn't even have to buy an operating system, it came for free on their computer.
As for Apple licensing OSX to dell, HP, etc; It'd be foolish for them to expect to get a few hundred dollars per OEM copy of their OS. They'd have to be price competitive with Windows. A non-geek going to dell's website and pricing out two machines identical except for the operating system is going to think that's ridiculous. Looking on Newegg real quick, Vista home Premium OEM is $109. Dell likely pays significantly less. And if MS felt like they were being threatened by Apple, they could lower their prices even more, and Apple would have to follow.
Apple's moving more hardware than they ever have before, and they're doing it with profit margins that the rest of the industry can barely dream of. Why would they want to change their strategy?
There's a connection, albeit an indirect one, and a slow acting one. The connection has less to do with MacOS itself, and more to do with lessening Windows' grip on the industry.
Part of it is just pyschological. To many people, there's never really been any alternative OS to choose. There's just Windows. Getting people to agree that there are viable alternatives is the first step towards directing them towards a particular alternative.
But there are more practical aspects to it as well. A significant userbase outside of windows will accelerate the adoption of things like web standards, file format standards, etc..., which makes moving away from Windows more viable in general. And if you want to take it even further, if a company feels that it makes sense to write cross-platform software for Windows and MacOS instead of just focusing on Windows, then hopefully that means their code is more portable, which lowers the barrier to an eventual linux version.
Nothing's certain of course, and Linux desktop developers can't just sit back and expect Apple to solve all their problems somehow, but anything that chips away at the inertia of Windows makes things easier for everyone.
I'd certainly agree that you could make a monopoly argument about something more restrictive than OS's in general, but is it really reasonable to say that it's a monopoly issue that one company is the only one that can distribute their own product? I guess I don't see what the smaller market could be in this case? I guess you could say computers capable of running the MacOS, but I'm thinking that Apple's case is less about the Psystar hardware and more about the fact that they're distributing it with a modified copy of OS X. If they were just selling empty hardware that happened to be capable of running OSX, I'm not sure Apple would have much legal footing to go after them with. Of course they'd probably just break that compatibility in the next OS update.
I'd imagine that the cost of tearing out and replacing all the urinals in a bunch of big buildings does not compare favorably to the cost of handing out a bunch of plastic bottles.
It's depressing to me that things like viagra spam are still profitable enough to make spamming them financially useful. Sure, the way the economics of it work out you only need a really low response rate to break even, but hasn't everyone already gotten enough of those emails? I'd imagine that whatever market there is for sketch viagra distributors would be saturated by now.
At least with phishing spam I get to see new scams on a regular basis (some quite cleverly disgused too). But some of the more vanilla spam just seems pointless.
I hope the astronauts living there after 2010 appreciate it, because there will be a window there where the US won't have any spacecraft capable of taking people to the ISS. They'll be relying on the russians for transportation.
No, this is perfect! Ship thousands of astronauts there, and let natural selection weed out the ones less adapted to the harsh environment of space. Once we have a bunch of human beings adapted to cosmic ray bombardment, we can start shoving them out the airlock until we evolve humans capable of surviving exposure to vacuum.
What's the matter, are you one of those evolution-denying ID'ers or something?
Regarding your first bullet point, the proposal suggests using ion engines, which are actually very low thrust. They would accelerate the ISS very slowly, so the issue of structural integrity wouldn't be much of a problem. I'm too lazy too look up how the current orbit boosting works, but if it's a more conventional system then it probably creates much more stress on the station than ion engines would.
The rest of your points are valid, although I think the bigger issue with the solar panels is that the moon spends large periods of time in the earth's shadow. I guess they'd have to seriously beef up the batteries or something.
While I'll agree that in the context of expanding humanity's abilities in space, the shuttle didn't live up to the hype, I don't think it's fair to say that the only thing we learned from it was that it was a bad idea. The shuttle is made up of a bunch of very well engineered components, they're just all stuck together into an overall package that isn't that useful. Sure, the next generation of spacecraft doesn't need wings. But that doesn't mean that technology developed for the shuttle's engines isn't better than Apollo era engines.
Sometimes through great design you can end up with an end product that's greater than the sum of its parts. The flip side of that is that you can take all of the nicest parts in the world and still make a piece of junk out of it. There's lots of good technology in the shuttle, stuff that's well designed and heavily tested. I'm sure there's plenty of value in there.
There's nothing that a small group of programmers could do back then that they can't do now. It might be a little harder to stand out amongst the crowd, particularly if the crowd that you're most worried about is the big gaming magazines/websites. But you can still throw together a good game if you've got the time and the talent.
The tools do seem to lag behind the hardware potential a good bit, but they continue to improve and even individuals who dabble in this sort of stuff as a hobby can have access to some pretty cool stuff to help them make a game. Sure, it's probably not feasible to build your entire game ground up from scratch, but I doubt even the biggest companies really do that anymore.
There is plenty of room in the market for smaller games. If they're fun, word will get out, and people will play them.
Buzzbombs were basically just missiles, which are pretty cool, but lack some of the features that an aircraft (piloted or UAV) can provide. One being the ability to loiter over the target and do surveillance instead of attacking, another being the ability to fly back home and land safely if the target unreachable for whatever reason.
I guess there's the potential for a middle ground, sort of like a kamikaze UAV, but that sounds unnecessarily expensive.
I've wondered if that limitation in the boxing was more to do with the wiimote itself, or something that they just coded into the game to make that wild flailing less effective. You certainly couldn't really fight effectively like that, your punches would have nothing behind them.
More than 50% of New Orleans is above sea level, including many of the parts that flooded. You know nothing about which you speak.
And thanks for linking it to the ridiculous ID nonsense that is entirely irrelevant. NOLA is one of the most liberal cities in the USA, it had nothing to do with that.
Slashdot Mirror
I think it's more likely that they realize that these fan generated graphics are ugly, would probably look even worse in motion than they do in photoshopped screenshots, and wouldn't play very well because they're so muddled. But they're dealing with some obviously hardcore fans, and they're probably thrilled that there are people out there who care enough to go through all this trouble, so they don't really want to come out and call those fans untalented hack artists.
So rather than call their fanbase stupid, they call themselves stupid. At the end of the day, they'll release the game they want to make, and judging from Blizzard's track record it will be a well made game that will sell very well. These people who are spending hours photoshopping screenshots will switch to spending hours playing the game, and everyone will be happy.
I wouldn't say that people are turning on Google as much as Google has just stopped being all that interesting. Many people are of the opinion that their search has become increasingly less useful as of late as the spammers have become better at gaming their ranking system. But even if that's not actually true, at the end of the day, it's primarily just a search engine, which is important, but not particularly glamorous.
People still use it, but it's not like it's a fun game or something, it's just a tool. And once it becomes familiar and part of your routine, it's hard to get excited about it. Google has done a pretty good job of at least keeping their brand exciting by releasing their take on other things (maps, mail, etc.) and their IPO and the huge piles of money kept them in the news. But there hasn't been anything really interesting as of late.
Not that there's anything wrong with that. But it shouldn't be a surprise if the media starts pushing other headlines. Because that's what the media does, and if there's no good headlines out there, they'll make one out of something insignificant.
That little toy is java, but it points us in the right direction. A lot of this stuff has moved to the web. There are approximately 8 trillion little flash puzzle games. Some of them are very clever and fun. There's a lot of variety, and various levels of quality and polish. But either way, there's plenty to choose from.
One of the coolest things about the internet makes it really easy for anyone to be a critic, so there's lots of sources out there for information. I don't need to go to a website about movies and hope that the critic who wrote their review isn't a jackass. Instead I just read the nerdy blogs of nerdy people that write about random nerdy things that amuse me. Having read many of those blogs for months or years, I have a pretty good idea how the author's tastes parallel mine, and which of their opinions I should consider useful. So if one of them happens to have seen a movie that was either good or bad enough that it's worth mentioning, I'll read about it.
I don't endlessly read blogs all day, but over the course of a week or so I hit enough different ones that I'll see at least a post or two about any most movies that I've got any interest in.
Agreed. For a company like Apple, a CEO needs to provide a few specific things, all of which can be summed up as a "vision". But when you break it down, there's a few main aspects of it. There's the quality control issue that you mentioned, having someone who has the authority to overrule the accountants and marketing and not rush a product.
Also important is having a public figurehead for the company. It's extra important when you've got a company that's as secretive as Apple. If a new CEO was a more open about what was going on, then it'd be less of an issue, but if you're going to continue to severely limit the flow of information out, you've got to make sure that the person who does do the occasional talking does it well.
And the final thing, which I think was the single most important thing that Jobs brought to Apple when he returned as CEO, is focus. When you've got a building full of a bunch of great designers and engineers, there's going to be a zillion ideas and independent thought processes going on all the time. And while that helps great ideas get born, it doesn't help them mature into something useable. Someone's got to be the filter, choosing not only the ideas that are most likely to work, but also that fit into some overall direction for the company. That means someone who's got the will and ability to make smart people ignore their own pet ideas and pour their energy into someone else's idea. In the mid-90's Apple was selling gazillions of products, from a large range of desktop models to printers, digital cameras, etc. When Jobs got back, one of the first big things that happened was that a lot of those projects went away, the product lineup was massively simplified, and those fewer products were more carefully designed. And since them, the product lineup has slowly grown, but in a very controlled and methodical manner.
I'll translate for you:
It's fairly useless but less useless at pattern recognition than it is for anything else. To make it work we have to make it really really cold. It won't get cancer from cell phones. We won't make any money off of this particular machine.
I'm pretty neutral on Howard Stern in general, but why should anyone give a rats ass what he thinks about something like this? He's done very well for himself as a guy who will say controversial things on the radio, good for him. Why that makes his opinion useful or worthwhile on something like government regulation and potential monopoly issues...I just don't see it.
But regardless of how well informed he is on the issue, someone stating that they're going to discount something as broad as an entire political party over something as minor as two merging radio stations is someone who's not using their whole brain.
This isn't a copyright issue. There are a number of reasons why various organizations want to keep track of who's potentially photographing them from space, but it's not because any of them believe that they have some sort of inherent IP ownership of pictures of the planet.
There are lots of different directions that you could criticize the applicable laws from and have a valid argument, but you're not going to get very far yelling about coyprighting the Earth, because that's not the issue.
The reality is that for better or worse, cultural boundaries can often be drawn right alongside racial boundries. There's generally a long set of historical circumstances that have created those conditions.
Acknowledging that those boundaries exist is in no way inherently racist, that's just how the world works. It's just important to remember that the specifics of a culture are primarily result of the circumstances that it was formed in, and not a result of the genetic makeup of the particular race that constitutes that culture. Race and Culture are very strongly correlated, but neither one is a result of the other. They're both results of the same large scale issues.
The correlation between race and culture is not surprising, but it is unfortunate. There are perfectly valid criticisms to be made about any culture you care to look at. It's a shame that it's so hard to separate race out of it. The connection allows the critic to fall into the trap of blaming race which isn't helpful and just leads to real racism. It also allows the criticized to deflect criticism of their culture by calling it racism, basically invalidating the message by invalidating the messenger.
You're correct in that the recent rise in oil prices isn't primarily driven by supply/demand issues. It has far more to do with the fact that the dollar is drastically falling in value, in a large part due to the fed's idea to "save" the economy by giving away hundreds of billions of dollars that it doesn't have. On the bright side, if this continues, then the price of gasoline will stop being important to the majority of americans. Instead they'll get to worry about affording food and housing.
Long term, however, supply and demand is a serious issue. The amount of oil being pumped is not growing at the same pace that consumption is.
I tie it to people's experience with the iPod and OSX. People got excited about the iPhone because they liked their iPods. They figured that since Apple figured out how to make one really nice consumer device that they really enjoyed, they'd probably do a good job on a phone as well. The iPhone isn't a perfect device, and it certainly wouldn't make an acceptable phone replacement for everyone, but it's a pretty damn good phone, and it does a number of things better than any other phones out there.
Some people have a hard time accepting that there are companies out there who can design a product for a market new to them and on their first try get things right that the traditional companies still haven't figured out. Apple's turned out to be pretty good at that. Trying to dismiss it just as a product of hype and "cool factor" is silly.
I don't understand the insistence on this idea that Apple is all hype. You could've made a reasonable argument maybe back in 2002-2003 when the iPod was really starting to tear up the market. But now it's 2008 and the iPod is still the best selling music player by a mile. Fads don't last for seven years, especially not ones related to technology.
I won't argue that Apple doesn't have very slick and effective marketing, but brand will only get you so far. People are fickle. Everyone's got an iPod now, it doesn't make you special or cool anymore. Yet they're still having no problem selling them.
Even with the iPhone it's become pretty clear that there's more to it than just "the cool factor". Why else would people be so excited about a new version that looks almost exactly the same as the old version, and costs less? There's some real value there for many people, and they're willing to pay for it.
I think you vastly overestimate the number of people who want to spend a few hundred dollars on an operating system. If you asked the average person on the street, they'd probably tell you that they didn't even have to buy an operating system, it came for free on their computer.
As for Apple licensing OSX to dell, HP, etc; It'd be foolish for them to expect to get a few hundred dollars per OEM copy of their OS. They'd have to be price competitive with Windows. A non-geek going to dell's website and pricing out two machines identical except for the operating system is going to think that's ridiculous. Looking on Newegg real quick, Vista home Premium OEM is $109. Dell likely pays significantly less. And if MS felt like they were being threatened by Apple, they could lower their prices even more, and Apple would have to follow.
Apple's moving more hardware than they ever have before, and they're doing it with profit margins that the rest of the industry can barely dream of. Why would they want to change their strategy?
There's a connection, albeit an indirect one, and a slow acting one. The connection has less to do with MacOS itself, and more to do with lessening Windows' grip on the industry.
Part of it is just pyschological. To many people, there's never really been any alternative OS to choose. There's just Windows. Getting people to agree that there are viable alternatives is the first step towards directing them towards a particular alternative.
But there are more practical aspects to it as well. A significant userbase outside of windows will accelerate the adoption of things like web standards, file format standards, etc..., which makes moving away from Windows more viable in general. And if you want to take it even further, if a company feels that it makes sense to write cross-platform software for Windows and MacOS instead of just focusing on Windows, then hopefully that means their code is more portable, which lowers the barrier to an eventual linux version.
Nothing's certain of course, and Linux desktop developers can't just sit back and expect Apple to solve all their problems somehow, but anything that chips away at the inertia of Windows makes things easier for everyone.
I'd certainly agree that you could make a monopoly argument about something more restrictive than OS's in general, but is it really reasonable to say that it's a monopoly issue that one company is the only one that can distribute their own product? I guess I don't see what the smaller market could be in this case? I guess you could say computers capable of running the MacOS, but I'm thinking that Apple's case is less about the Psystar hardware and more about the fact that they're distributing it with a modified copy of OS X. If they were just selling empty hardware that happened to be capable of running OSX, I'm not sure Apple would have much legal footing to go after them with. Of course they'd probably just break that compatibility in the next OS update.
I'd imagine that the cost of tearing out and replacing all the urinals in a bunch of big buildings does not compare favorably to the cost of handing out a bunch of plastic bottles.
It's depressing to me that things like viagra spam are still profitable enough to make spamming them financially useful. Sure, the way the economics of it work out you only need a really low response rate to break even, but hasn't everyone already gotten enough of those emails? I'd imagine that whatever market there is for sketch viagra distributors would be saturated by now.
At least with phishing spam I get to see new scams on a regular basis (some quite cleverly disgused too). But some of the more vanilla spam just seems pointless.
I hope the astronauts living there after 2010 appreciate it, because there will be a window there where the US won't have any spacecraft capable of taking people to the ISS. They'll be relying on the russians for transportation.
No, this is perfect! Ship thousands of astronauts there, and let natural selection weed out the ones less adapted to the harsh environment of space. Once we have a bunch of human beings adapted to cosmic ray bombardment, we can start shoving them out the airlock until we evolve humans capable of surviving exposure to vacuum.
What's the matter, are you one of those evolution-denying ID'ers or something?
Regarding your first bullet point, the proposal suggests using ion engines, which are actually very low thrust. They would accelerate the ISS very slowly, so the issue of structural integrity wouldn't be much of a problem. I'm too lazy too look up how the current orbit boosting works, but if it's a more conventional system then it probably creates much more stress on the station than ion engines would.
The rest of your points are valid, although I think the bigger issue with the solar panels is that the moon spends large periods of time in the earth's shadow. I guess they'd have to seriously beef up the batteries or something.
While I'll agree that in the context of expanding humanity's abilities in space, the shuttle didn't live up to the hype, I don't think it's fair to say that the only thing we learned from it was that it was a bad idea. The shuttle is made up of a bunch of very well engineered components, they're just all stuck together into an overall package that isn't that useful. Sure, the next generation of spacecraft doesn't need wings. But that doesn't mean that technology developed for the shuttle's engines isn't better than Apollo era engines.
Sometimes through great design you can end up with an end product that's greater than the sum of its parts. The flip side of that is that you can take all of the nicest parts in the world and still make a piece of junk out of it. There's lots of good technology in the shuttle, stuff that's well designed and heavily tested. I'm sure there's plenty of value in there.
There's nothing that a small group of programmers could do back then that they can't do now. It might be a little harder to stand out amongst the crowd, particularly if the crowd that you're most worried about is the big gaming magazines/websites. But you can still throw together a good game if you've got the time and the talent.
The tools do seem to lag behind the hardware potential a good bit, but they continue to improve and even individuals who dabble in this sort of stuff as a hobby can have access to some pretty cool stuff to help them make a game. Sure, it's probably not feasible to build your entire game ground up from scratch, but I doubt even the biggest companies really do that anymore.
There is plenty of room in the market for smaller games. If they're fun, word will get out, and people will play them.
Buzzbombs were basically just missiles, which are pretty cool, but lack some of the features that an aircraft (piloted or UAV) can provide. One being the ability to loiter over the target and do surveillance instead of attacking, another being the ability to fly back home and land safely if the target unreachable for whatever reason.
I guess there's the potential for a middle ground, sort of like a kamikaze UAV, but that sounds unnecessarily expensive.
I've wondered if that limitation in the boxing was more to do with the wiimote itself, or something that they just coded into the game to make that wild flailing less effective. You certainly couldn't really fight effectively like that, your punches would have nothing behind them.
More than 50% of New Orleans is above sea level, including many of the parts that flooded. You know nothing about which you speak.
And thanks for linking it to the ridiculous ID nonsense that is entirely irrelevant. NOLA is one of the most liberal cities in the USA, it had nothing to do with that.