I wouldn't hold out for a much smaller version of the DS. There's really nowhere for the buttons and Dpad to go except on the sides of the screen, so it has to be fairly wide. I'm sure they could find a way to make it more comfortable though. my right thumb hurts like hell after a decent mario kart session, from holding down the gas pedal button.
New Orleans didn't have the money to totally bankroll a project like this before the storm, and they certainly don't have it now. This whole project is being made possible because of donations. Will it be completely free of cost for the city? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. Governments often spend money in order to spur development or otherwise bring economic activity to their areas. How much does the city of New Orleans spend on various things for Mardi Gras? I don't know any exact numbers, but I'm willing to bet it's a pretty sizeable amount. Now that's something that I'd consider less valuable in a lot of ways than a city-wide WiFi connection, but overall, mardi gras brings in a ton of revenue for many businesses and people in the city. So it's all good.
And don't try with the free market economics crap. The phone companies, and most of the other privately owned utilities have basically functioned as government sponsored monopolies for decades. They've got no right to complain about the free market now. Think of this as the government correcting its earlier mistakes. They've tried deregulation, the entrenched companies have lots of little tricks to keep competitors from gaining any traction. This is an easier way for the city to "inspire" Bell South to maybe be a little more innovative, or at least efficient, and the citizens of New Orleans should benefit from this in a number of ways.
They'd just have to be a little more careful about how they did it than a local government would be. They'd have to make sure that the really dense areas only got a taste of it, not enough to not need to subscribe. Keep some of the people happy, so that the the ones that are complaining and motivated can't get a big enough group together to affect change. If a city feels entirely neglected in some way, it's much easier for them to take action than if just some of the people are "suffering".
There's also the whole, the first hit is free mentality. After I got some broadband use at a friend's house, you can be damn sure I would not shut up to my parents about how much we needed a faster connection. There are plenty of people who don't understand that having broadband doesn't just make your email go faster, it can really change how you're able to use the internet in more fundamental ways.
Abstracting things another way, Google gives away a hell of a lot of services for free, yet they're finding ways to make money. Their share price is still vastly overvalued, but they are making money, they're just being a little bit more imaginative with their business plans.
In New Orleans's case, the city can afford this whole thing because a lot of the equipment has been donated. Legally, I think they're justifying it easily because the city is still under a state of emergency or something. Ethically, I see no real problem with New Orleans or any other municipality doing this, because I believe that there can be a real benefit from it, both economically, and in a quality-of-life sense. Similar to roads and fire hydrants and stuff.
Well, a company's PR department will say a lot of things to cover up for something stupid that an exec or marketing decided to do/say. I'm willing to believe that someone did suddenly change his mind about the building in a fit of anger, but the PR about it is going to cause them to quickly backtrack on that.
And yes, offering something and then taking it away is worse than never offering anything in the first place. It goes beyond just getting their hopes up and then disappointing them. The NOPD could have been led to believe that this whole building thing was a done deal, so they would've pretty much stopped looking for another place to set up shop. And the NOPD does not really have the time and the resources to go deal with that right now.
Not to mention the fact that Bell South has pretty much built their business on a monopoly, one offered to them by the government in the past. The phone companies were pretty much given profit for decades, but now times are changing, and many of them are too lazy to change with it. The city is getting a pretty sweet deal, basically a truckload of free Wifi equipment, should they really just ignore that opportunity, just so Bellsouth can continue to have an environment pretty much free of competition?
There's also the fact that screenshots generally tell us zero about how the gameplay will work/feel. And double that when you consider the new control mechanism. If Nintendo puts out screenshots, or even movies probably, then they'll just be playing into that same marketing game about shaders and pixels and textures...all that number crunching stuff that they're trying so hard to convince people isn't the real point of games.
The revolution games will probably be a lot like the DS, in that for the really interesting games, you can't separate the software from the hardware. Looking at screenshots of Kirby: Canvas Curse didn't do much for me until I had spent some time using the DS. Then it seemed more exciting. And it ended up being a great game. I think the exact same thing will happen with the revolution. I imagine most of their advertising will be a little more vague and branding-ish, and they'll use demo units and kiosks in game stores to really demonstrate the games.
Yes, because as we all know, Nintendo is the only one who ships sequels for their big franchises.
And you've got it all wrong. All the mario stuff is the same graphics, but in lots of different games.
I've got all three systems as well, except I've bought the most amount of software for the Gamecube. Go figure.
Oh, and you're conveniently ignoring the whole hardware side of things, which is basically what the parent post was referring to when he mentioned the Revolution. Hard to imagine him considering the software when Nintendo hasn't announced much of anything about the games.
Yeah, one of the "hooks" of a game in a fantasy setting like WOW and most other RPG's is that it lets you play as a "hero". It's all about doing epic things. Real life is generally brief moments of excitement/adventure/stress/challenge seperated by longer periods of mundane activity, not the sort of thing you really want to spend $15 per month to recreate on your computer screen. So people who are playing are going to want to do all the good stuff, and if you make it too hard to do that, then people are going to stop playing. You have to let everyone experience all the good stuff and be the hero, cause that's what they're there for.
But that leads to problems. Like you hinted at, for content to be reuseable, you have to sort of ignore the consequences that an action would have. That sort of breaks the immersion factor a bit, and also detracts from the "epic" nature of it all. Nothing you do can really have too much of a drastic change on the world, because that could obsolete a whole bunch of the content that was already made, and everyone behind you loses out. The real problem is that video games generally aren't as "interactive" as we like to think. We're not directing the world as much as just choosing from a number of prewritten consequences. That doesn't really mesh easily with a whole bunch of people running around on the same server trying to create a virtual "existence".
Yeah, and even if they do hack it or whatever, what ends up happening? The same thing that happens with a normal car nowadays. If the Smart Box became standard on all cars tomorrow, all the old ways of tracking down vehicles and non-payers would still exist.
You can break through a window and unlock the front door of my house from the inside easily enough, but that doesn't mean that putting installing a deadbolt was a bad or worthless idea.
Your post made a lot of sense up till the third paragraph. I think you're reading into it things a bit too much.
Americans are fatter because we have the wealth to be. We've got tons of food, an automobile based society, and plenty of entertainment that caters towards sitting in a chair and not moving. Many of us can make it through the day and earn a living without doing any sort of serious physical activity. And while sports and athletic activity and whatnot is great, there are plenty of more relaxing leisure activities for those to compete with. It's really that simple.
Besides, everyone knows that fat people are jolly, not depressed.
Whatever. Noone would use them. It's too much work for the end user to remember anything more complicated than.com and maybe.net. After that, it's off to Google, which has it all figured out anyways. Technically, it's certainly a cleaner solution, but it just doesn't fit with how people use the internet.
But what about a company like Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Toyota, or heck, just about any company out there big enough to span multiple countries? Which state would Walmart get their TLD through? I believe they have their headquarters in arkansas, but I've never been to one in that state. Trying to figure that out would be a pain in the ass. What state is Amazon.com based in? I don't have to know that, I don't have to look it up, and I like it that way.
When I started my personal website, I lived in Maryland. Now I live in Louisiana. Would I have to get my tld changed? Will I have to pay for it? How much should that cost. What if someone already has it? Can I keep the old one?
There are plenty of other ways to make your local search better. Google is good at a bunch of them. Besides the fact that most business websites tend to have addresses on them, there's lots of other ways to get that information and cross reference it all. Phonebooks for example.
People keep telling us that we should just move everyone up to higher ground. I can't help but wonder where exactly you expect a couple hundred thousand people to move to. Are you going to donate the land? Are you going to build all the infrastructure they'll need? Oh, and by the way, we'd prefer something a little more exciting than a bunch of trailer parks out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
Also, your whole "if a poorly built levee can doom an entire city what good are they?" statement is just about the most retarded thing I've heard all day.. A flat tire can make my whole car not driveable. Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and walk eight miles to work every day. I think the solution for the levee system is pretty obvious, build the stuff correctly. Most of the floodwalls did not break. It's certainly possible to build them so they'll work.
I'm not expecting a quick recovery. We all know that even in the best of circumstances, a lot of this would take time. The problem is, America in general has a rather unimpressive attention span. The gulf coast is already being forgotten and ignored. We haven't gotten nearly enough help yet, and we're not too optimistic that we'll get much more in the future.
Katrina was a category 3 storm when it hit new orleans. There are a few places where floodwalls broke. One broke in Lakeview and that caused most of the flooding in the city, well after the storm was past. Recent testing on the floodwall has shown that the sheetpiling appears to have only been driven down about 10 feet below ground, instead of the 25 feet called for. And so the water basically just washed out under it and it came down.
And anyways, we're beyond bitching about the week after the storm. Today, three months after the storm, large parts of New Orleans still have no power, water, utilities. Many of the streetlights, even in areas that are open and full of traffic, still aren't working. Businesses are wary to come back because no one knows what's going to happen with the levees and floodwalls.
I really can't believe people are still whining about those buses. It was maybe a couple hundred busses, and while it would've been great if they were used to get some people out, even at full capacity, they would've made a hardly noticeable dent in the crowds stuck in town. Well over a million people in the greater new orleans area, plus a bunch of parishes to the south and east evacuated on just a couple days notice. The fact that that many people were able to get out in time is an amazing feat. Although things weren't perfect, and it's a tragedy that many didn't get out in time, the evacuation was overall an amazing success. Much better than the fiasco in Texas for Rita. If Rita had smashed into Houston, a whole lot of people probably would've died on the highways. Texas didn't do a great job with that hurricane, texas mostly got lucky. A whole bunch more of louisiana got flooded in that storm as well.
The local government, and the majority of the citizens did not simply sit on our asses and whine for help. And we're not doing that now. There are lots of people back in town already, cleaning out their homes, trying to save what they can. But it's all done under this cloud of uncertainty, because the feds are waffling on fixing the levees. The city of New Orleans can't do it itself. It's basically bankrupt. And with only a small percentage of its citizens and businesses back, it's not going to have the money to do it anytime soon. The state of Louisiana, well, they're broke too. A sizeable part of the state was underwater a few months ago, many people and businesses were driven away. If the federal government can't help us now, then what are they there for?
The Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA existed before the storm. The citizens of Louisiana have been paying for them via taxes just as long as everyone else in this country. In exchange for those tax dollars, we are supposed to be able to benefit from the services that those organizations provide. We depended on those organizations because that's why they exist. If the federal government didn't want to use the Corps of Engineers to protect New Orleans with levees, then why'd they tell us that they were going to?
Well sorry. There's just a lot of pissed off people down here, because New Orleans is not getting the help it needs because so many people have the same attitude that the parent implied. I've visited a lot of cities in this country, and New Orleans is one of the best, for so many reasons. Yet it's being ignored, lied to, and generally left to die. It's a very sad situation.
I apologize for misunderstanding. We're just desperate to try and remind people how bad things are, and that we really need some serious help.
While it's an interesting comparison you're making, I think it's important to understand that the current situation here in New Orleans is quite different than any water shortages that California is having. Most specifically, We were hit by a hurricane that we're were powerless to prevent, while California could take some easy steps to significantly improve their water situation. And waterless urinals are not the easiest solution. The best solution would be for the suburbanites to stop pretending like they need big plush green lawns, and to fill their yards with native vegetation.
As for your distaste for New Orleans, go fuck yourself. You don't know what you're talking about. When earthquakes hit california, we don't bitch about how it's stupid for you to live there and you deserve whatever you get. New Orleans exists where it does for a lot of practical reasons, and those reasons are very important to the economic workings of this country. You may have heard about the Mississippi river, which provides a good shipping route to a large portion of this country. You've probably also heard something about the gulf of mexico, from which we draw a lot of the oil that keeps our industry and economy running. Then there's seafood, chemicals, all sorts of important stuff. You can pretend all you want that the gulf coast is just a bunch of backwater bayou's, but your ignorance does not make it true. And once you factor in some less quantifiable things, like New Orleans being one of the most culturally unique and productive cities, not to mention whole other parishes(counties) being underwater, and hundreds of thousands of hard working human beings suffering from the consequences. Your selfishness and your greed are pretty indefensible.
You have no sense of the scale of what's happened down here. The local governments are working pretty damn hard. They've all burned through their budgets, and are taking on large amounts of debt, trying to get things running again. I question if any city/state/locality would have the resources to deal with something of this scale. All citizens of the US, via the federal government, end up subsidizing lots of other people. Whether it be farmers, or defense contractors, or lately, the citizens of Iraq. I think there are plenty of other things for you to be bitching about having to pay for, besides helping a few hundred thousand human beings who's lives have been so severely impacted by flooding. Flooding which, by the way, would not have happened if the Army corps of engineers had actually built the system to the tolerances that they had told us they did.
Basically put, we did take steps to try and prevent what happened. And while those steps ultimately failed for a large part of the city and the region, that doesn't make a good excuse for California to keep going about doing what they're doing, especially when there are some much more straightforward answers than dodging hurricanes. The political history of the south west has always had a lot to do with water. California has used its economic power to get what it wants, and other states have been effected by it. And most importantly, it's not sustainable, and when things do come to a head, Cali will probably need help from the rest of the country. I don't know where else you expect to get water from, unless there's some sort of major breakthrough in desalinization technology.
I think that Nintendo actually realizes the opposite of what you're looking for. The reality is that a growing number and proportion of gamers do always have lots of people to play their consoles with. You see, most people live in families, and many of the people who grew up on the NES back in the day are becoming parents nowadays. There's a lot more options now that the adults in the family are already comfortable with video games.
Nintendo does understand the concept of the hardcore gamer, sitting in the basement for 6 hours at a time and just plowing through games. Nintendo also realizes that MS and Sony are throwing money at that market just as fast as they can. I think all three of the console makers also realize that that market isn't going to grow much bigger. Sony and MS's strategy for that realization is to try to completely dominate that market and drive everyone else out. Nintendo's reaction is to go find new markets.
It might be too much to ask for to have it both ways.
Well, I think my grandma is pretty much an impossible target for a video game maker. My mom, however, might end up being a grandma in not all that many years. And she already got a gamecube to play donkey konga. If you take a bigger picture look at where the gamer demographics are going, Nintendo's strategy makes a lot more sense. I'm only 25 but I have a lot less time to invest in video games than I used to. Many of my friends don't really play them anymore, because they don't have the free time to sink into most games. But when people come over to my house, we usually end up in front of the gamecube for at least an hour or so, playing all the goofy party games, 4+ of us at a time, passing the controllers around frequently so everyone gets a turn. The majority of the time I spend playing games is multiplayer stuff.
Making games "simpler" is only one of the important things that Nintendo does. The more important one, in my opinion, is them trying to make gaming more social. Xbox live is cool and all, but I'll have more fun playing mario baseball with 3 friends all in front of the same TV than I will playing Halo with those same 3 people over the internet.
What the game industry has generally considered the "mature" market has consisted of late teens-mid twenties males. But those ages are really just still kids. The true mature market consists of adults, most of which have limited free time, and most of which have houses full of families and such. I just think there's so much potential for games that realize that. Games which don't require me to sit on the couch and tune out everything else for hours at a time. Because, you know what? It's really hard for me to do that. And it's that way for the majority of adults as well.
I think that'd be ok. The amount of urban/developed land, compared to the total land mass of the planet, is pretty damn small. Even if we kicked those bugs out of all the cities, there'd still be plenty of other space for the mosquitos and dependent species to survive.
If this crap works, I vote that New Orleans install some as soon as possible. The mosquitos have always been sort of bad here, and they got a whole lot worse after the hurricanes. All around the city and its suburbs, trucks drive through the streets spraying chemicals into the air to help control the bugs. I can't imagine that that is particularly healthy for anyone, so an alternative would be nice.
I dunno, I'm older and I earn my own money now, but I'm not likely to buy both. You're looking at around $800 for both systems, just including the console hardware. And while I'm living comfortably, and I could afford to get them both, there are plenty of other neat things that I could spend that money on. Factor in the reality that most publishers are leaning towards multiplatform games, and suddenly having two consoles that play 90% of the same games becomes almost silly.
In that case, it comes down to what else the systems bring to the table. MS has talked a lot about online stuff, downloads, media and all that. Sony has said a lot of random things, but for the most part, has been surprisingly unclear about what the PS3 will really offer gamers besides a whole bunch of silicon. I find that surprising, remembering how well they used PS2 hype to wear down the dreamcast.
But for the record, if I had to choose one, I'd probably choose the Xbox360. Sony has done very little to get me excited about their console. But on the other hand, TFA used the term "bodaciously powerful" to describe the Cell processor, so that's pretty damn compelling:P
I was given an Xbox as a gift, but I can tell you that if I had paid for it, I'd be a little bit unhappy with my purchase. I own all three systems, but I don't buy too many games. I don't have time to play all that many. But when I do buy a game, I prefer to get some serious playing time out of it. The Xbox has failed to deliver on that for the most part. I have maybe a dozen games(most of which were bought cheaper well after release), but only one has seen any playtime since the initial few days. Burnout 3 is it.
The gamecube, however, gets a lot more attention, with a much larger number of games. There's maybe 20 gamecube games in the house, and about half of them still get played from time to time. Most of those are first party titles, but not all.
Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence to counter yours. My playing habits may leave me out of the perceived "gamer" market, which is what MS and Sony tries so hard to appeal to. And to be fair, that's where the majority of the money has come from for the industry over the past few decades. But the market that I do represent, a big time gamer that has gotten older and spends most of his time not playing video games anymore, that's a big group of people, and only getting bigger. And I think Nintendo knows how to serve that market very well. The point is, there is a market for a console with fewer, but more consistently quality games. I'll get far less "value" out of any console than a hardcore gamer, mostly because I don't have as many hours to sit down in front of it. But I think that overall with Nintendo, I've gotten consistently more value out of each game that I've bought. And the total cost of all my games exceeeds my initial investment on the hardware.
Man, all that Star Trek all day was awesome during my unemployed stretch. Although it probably helped increase the length of time I was jobless. Who's got time to send out resumes? I still have three seasons of DS9 to catch up on!
Actually, according to the article, making the bubbles colored was hard. It took him years to get that right. Only after he figured that out did he get to the problem of needing a dye that would disappear. And that also proved to be difficult, even for someone with a PhD in dye chemistry.
I realize that movie making, like most things, is easier said than done. I also realize that I'm not likely to be any better or even as good as anyone out in hollywood. Only that if I were going to spend that much money on something, I think I'd be more careful about how I spend it. I mean, how many big high-budget movies are there in a year? Maybe 100? I would think you could find more than 100 competent directors in this country. There are a lot of people to choose from. Same with actors. You have to make sure to not confuse the "best people" with the "most expensive". Despite my general non-interest in the profession, I refuse to think that acting is so hard that only a handful of individuals can do it well. I think if the movie studios were just a little more open minded in their searches, they'd find a couple of things. First, that the talent pool is actually pretty big, and second, a movie does not need an expensive superstar actor to get people out to see it.
I'd think it's more of a case of 100 million dollars just not being that much money for these studios, so it's easier to just keep doing things the way they've been doing them, and just let the numbers work out the way they have been. They wouldn't keep gravitating this way if it wasn't making them money.
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I wouldn't hold out for a much smaller version of the DS. There's really nowhere for the buttons and Dpad to go except on the sides of the screen, so it has to be fairly wide. I'm sure they could find a way to make it more comfortable though. my right thumb hurts like hell after a decent mario kart session, from holding down the gas pedal button.
New Orleans didn't have the money to totally bankroll a project like this before the storm, and they certainly don't have it now. This whole project is being made possible because of donations. Will it be completely free of cost for the city? Probably not, but that doesn't mean it isn't worthwhile. Governments often spend money in order to spur development or otherwise bring economic activity to their areas. How much does the city of New Orleans spend on various things for Mardi Gras? I don't know any exact numbers, but I'm willing to bet it's a pretty sizeable amount. Now that's something that I'd consider less valuable in a lot of ways than a city-wide WiFi connection, but overall, mardi gras brings in a ton of revenue for many businesses and people in the city. So it's all good.
And don't try with the free market economics crap. The phone companies, and most of the other privately owned utilities have basically functioned as government sponsored monopolies for decades. They've got no right to complain about the free market now. Think of this as the government correcting its earlier mistakes. They've tried deregulation, the entrenched companies have lots of little tricks to keep competitors from gaining any traction. This is an easier way for the city to "inspire" Bell South to maybe be a little more innovative, or at least efficient, and the citizens of New Orleans should benefit from this in a number of ways.
They'd just have to be a little more careful about how they did it than a local government would be. They'd have to make sure that the really dense areas only got a taste of it, not enough to not need to subscribe. Keep some of the people happy, so that the the ones that are complaining and motivated can't get a big enough group together to affect change. If a city feels entirely neglected in some way, it's much easier for them to take action than if just some of the people are "suffering".
There's also the whole, the first hit is free mentality. After I got some broadband use at a friend's house, you can be damn sure I would not shut up to my parents about how much we needed a faster connection. There are plenty of people who don't understand that having broadband doesn't just make your email go faster, it can really change how you're able to use the internet in more fundamental ways.
Abstracting things another way, Google gives away a hell of a lot of services for free, yet they're finding ways to make money. Their share price is still vastly overvalued, but they are making money, they're just being a little bit more imaginative with their business plans.
In New Orleans's case, the city can afford this whole thing because a lot of the equipment has been donated. Legally, I think they're justifying it easily because the city is still under a state of emergency or something. Ethically, I see no real problem with New Orleans or any other municipality doing this, because I believe that there can be a real benefit from it, both economically, and in a quality-of-life sense. Similar to roads and fire hydrants and stuff.
Well, a company's PR department will say a lot of things to cover up for something stupid that an exec or marketing decided to do/say. I'm willing to believe that someone did suddenly change his mind about the building in a fit of anger, but the PR about it is going to cause them to quickly backtrack on that.
And yes, offering something and then taking it away is worse than never offering anything in the first place. It goes beyond just getting their hopes up and then disappointing them. The NOPD could have been led to believe that this whole building thing was a done deal, so they would've pretty much stopped looking for another place to set up shop. And the NOPD does not really have the time and the resources to go deal with that right now.
Not to mention the fact that Bell South has pretty much built their business on a monopoly, one offered to them by the government in the past. The phone companies were pretty much given profit for decades, but now times are changing, and many of them are too lazy to change with it. The city is getting a pretty sweet deal, basically a truckload of free Wifi equipment, should they really just ignore that opportunity, just so Bellsouth can continue to have an environment pretty much free of competition?
There's also the fact that screenshots generally tell us zero about how the gameplay will work/feel. And double that when you consider the new control mechanism. If Nintendo puts out screenshots, or even movies probably, then they'll just be playing into that same marketing game about shaders and pixels and textures...all that number crunching stuff that they're trying so hard to convince people isn't the real point of games.
The revolution games will probably be a lot like the DS, in that for the really interesting games, you can't separate the software from the hardware. Looking at screenshots of Kirby: Canvas Curse didn't do much for me until I had spent some time using the DS. Then it seemed more exciting. And it ended up being a great game. I think the exact same thing will happen with the revolution. I imagine most of their advertising will be a little more vague and branding-ish, and they'll use demo units and kiosks in game stores to really demonstrate the games.
Yes, because as we all know, Nintendo is the only one who ships sequels for their big franchises.
And you've got it all wrong. All the mario stuff is the same graphics, but in lots of different games.
I've got all three systems as well, except I've bought the most amount of software for the Gamecube. Go figure.
Oh, and you're conveniently ignoring the whole hardware side of things, which is basically what the parent post was referring to when he mentioned the Revolution. Hard to imagine him considering the software when Nintendo hasn't announced much of anything about the games.
Yeah, one of the "hooks" of a game in a fantasy setting like WOW and most other RPG's is that it lets you play as a "hero". It's all about doing epic things. Real life is generally brief moments of excitement/adventure/stress/challenge seperated by longer periods of mundane activity, not the sort of thing you really want to spend $15 per month to recreate on your computer screen. So people who are playing are going to want to do all the good stuff, and if you make it too hard to do that, then people are going to stop playing. You have to let everyone experience all the good stuff and be the hero, cause that's what they're there for.
But that leads to problems. Like you hinted at, for content to be reuseable, you have to sort of ignore the consequences that an action would have. That sort of breaks the immersion factor a bit, and also detracts from the "epic" nature of it all. Nothing you do can really have too much of a drastic change on the world, because that could obsolete a whole bunch of the content that was already made, and everyone behind you loses out. The real problem is that video games generally aren't as "interactive" as we like to think. We're not directing the world as much as just choosing from a number of prewritten consequences. That doesn't really mesh easily with a whole bunch of people running around on the same server trying to create a virtual "existence".
The solution is to wait a few months after release before you buy a game. It's really not that hard to do.
Yeah, and even if they do hack it or whatever, what ends up happening? The same thing that happens with a normal car nowadays. If the Smart Box became standard on all cars tomorrow, all the old ways of tracking down vehicles and non-payers would still exist.
You can break through a window and unlock the front door of my house from the inside easily enough, but that doesn't mean that putting installing a deadbolt was a bad or worthless idea.
Your post made a lot of sense up till the third paragraph. I think you're reading into it things a bit too much.
Americans are fatter because we have the wealth to be. We've got tons of food, an automobile based society, and plenty of entertainment that caters towards sitting in a chair and not moving. Many of us can make it through the day and earn a living without doing any sort of serious physical activity. And while sports and athletic activity and whatnot is great, there are plenty of more relaxing leisure activities for those to compete with. It's really that simple.
Besides, everyone knows that fat people are jolly, not depressed.
Whatever. Noone would use them. It's too much work for the end user to remember anything more complicated than .com and maybe .net. After that, it's off to Google, which has it all figured out anyways. Technically, it's certainly a cleaner solution, but it just doesn't fit with how people use the internet.
But what about a company like Microsoft, or Apple, or Google, or Toyota, or heck, just about any company out there big enough to span multiple countries? Which state would Walmart get their TLD through? I believe they have their headquarters in arkansas, but I've never been to one in that state. Trying to figure that out would be a pain in the ass. What state is Amazon.com based in? I don't have to know that, I don't have to look it up, and I like it that way.
When I started my personal website, I lived in Maryland. Now I live in Louisiana. Would I have to get my tld changed? Will I have to pay for it? How much should that cost. What if someone already has it? Can I keep the old one?
There are plenty of other ways to make your local search better. Google is good at a bunch of them. Besides the fact that most business websites tend to have addresses on them, there's lots of other ways to get that information and cross reference it all. Phonebooks for example.
People keep telling us that we should just move everyone up to higher ground. I can't help but wonder where exactly you expect a couple hundred thousand people to move to. Are you going to donate the land? Are you going to build all the infrastructure they'll need? Oh, and by the way, we'd prefer something a little more exciting than a bunch of trailer parks out in the middle of the desert somewhere.
Also, your whole "if a poorly built levee can doom an entire city what good are they?" statement is just about the most retarded thing I've heard all day.. A flat tire can make my whole car not driveable. Maybe I should just scrap the whole thing and walk eight miles to work every day. I think the solution for the levee system is pretty obvious, build the stuff correctly. Most of the floodwalls did not break. It's certainly possible to build them so they'll work.
I'm not expecting a quick recovery. We all know that even in the best of circumstances, a lot of this would take time. The problem is, America in general has a rather unimpressive attention span. The gulf coast is already being forgotten and ignored. We haven't gotten nearly enough help yet, and we're not too optimistic that we'll get much more in the future.
Thanks for responding to that jackass for me.
Katrina was a category 3 storm when it hit new orleans. There are a few places where floodwalls broke. One broke in Lakeview and that caused most of the flooding in the city, well after the storm was past. Recent testing on the floodwall has shown that the sheetpiling appears to have only been driven down about 10 feet below ground, instead of the 25 feet called for. And so the water basically just washed out under it and it came down.
And anyways, we're beyond bitching about the week after the storm. Today, three months after the storm, large parts of New Orleans still have no power, water, utilities. Many of the streetlights, even in areas that are open and full of traffic, still aren't working. Businesses are wary to come back because no one knows what's going to happen with the levees and floodwalls.
I really can't believe people are still whining about those buses. It was maybe a couple hundred busses, and while it would've been great if they were used to get some people out, even at full capacity, they would've made a hardly noticeable dent in the crowds stuck in town. Well over a million people in the greater new orleans area, plus a bunch of parishes to the south and east evacuated on just a couple days notice. The fact that that many people were able to get out in time is an amazing feat. Although things weren't perfect, and it's a tragedy that many didn't get out in time, the evacuation was overall an amazing success. Much better than the fiasco in Texas for Rita. If Rita had smashed into Houston, a whole lot of people probably would've died on the highways. Texas didn't do a great job with that hurricane, texas mostly got lucky. A whole bunch more of louisiana got flooded in that storm as well.
The local government, and the majority of the citizens did not simply sit on our asses and whine for help. And we're not doing that now. There are lots of people back in town already, cleaning out their homes, trying to save what they can. But it's all done under this cloud of uncertainty, because the feds are waffling on fixing the levees. The city of New Orleans can't do it itself. It's basically bankrupt. And with only a small percentage of its citizens and businesses back, it's not going to have the money to do it anytime soon. The state of Louisiana, well, they're broke too. A sizeable part of the state was underwater a few months ago, many people and businesses were driven away. If the federal government can't help us now, then what are they there for?
The Army Corps of Engineers and FEMA existed before the storm. The citizens of Louisiana have been paying for them via taxes just as long as everyone else in this country. In exchange for those tax dollars, we are supposed to be able to benefit from the services that those organizations provide. We depended on those organizations because that's why they exist. If the federal government didn't want to use the Corps of Engineers to protect New Orleans with levees, then why'd they tell us that they were going to?
Well sorry. There's just a lot of pissed off people down here, because New Orleans is not getting the help it needs because so many people have the same attitude that the parent implied. I've visited a lot of cities in this country, and New Orleans is one of the best, for so many reasons. Yet it's being ignored, lied to, and generally left to die. It's a very sad situation.
I apologize for misunderstanding. We're just desperate to try and remind people how bad things are, and that we really need some serious help.
While it's an interesting comparison you're making, I think it's important to understand that the current situation here in New Orleans is quite different than any water shortages that California is having. Most specifically, We were hit by a hurricane that we're were powerless to prevent, while California could take some easy steps to significantly improve their water situation. And waterless urinals are not the easiest solution. The best solution would be for the suburbanites to stop pretending like they need big plush green lawns, and to fill their yards with native vegetation.
As for your distaste for New Orleans, go fuck yourself. You don't know what you're talking about. When earthquakes hit california, we don't bitch about how it's stupid for you to live there and you deserve whatever you get. New Orleans exists where it does for a lot of practical reasons, and those reasons are very important to the economic workings of this country. You may have heard about the Mississippi river, which provides a good shipping route to a large portion of this country. You've probably also heard something about the gulf of mexico, from which we draw a lot of the oil that keeps our industry and economy running. Then there's seafood, chemicals, all sorts of important stuff. You can pretend all you want that the gulf coast is just a bunch of backwater bayou's, but your ignorance does not make it true. And once you factor in some less quantifiable things, like New Orleans being one of the most culturally unique and productive cities, not to mention whole other parishes(counties) being underwater, and hundreds of thousands of hard working human beings suffering from the consequences. Your selfishness and your greed are pretty indefensible.
You have no sense of the scale of what's happened down here. The local governments are working pretty damn hard. They've all burned through their budgets, and are taking on large amounts of debt, trying to get things running again. I question if any city/state/locality would have the resources to deal with something of this scale. All citizens of the US, via the federal government, end up subsidizing lots of other people. Whether it be farmers, or defense contractors, or lately, the citizens of Iraq. I think there are plenty of other things for you to be bitching about having to pay for, besides helping a few hundred thousand human beings who's lives have been so severely impacted by flooding. Flooding which, by the way, would not have happened if the Army corps of engineers had actually built the system to the tolerances that they had told us they did.
Basically put, we did take steps to try and prevent what happened. And while those steps ultimately failed for a large part of the city and the region, that doesn't make a good excuse for California to keep going about doing what they're doing, especially when there are some much more straightforward answers than dodging hurricanes. The political history of the south west has always had a lot to do with water. California has used its economic power to get what it wants, and other states have been effected by it. And most importantly, it's not sustainable, and when things do come to a head, Cali will probably need help from the rest of the country. I don't know where else you expect to get water from, unless there's some sort of major breakthrough in desalinization technology.
I think that Nintendo actually realizes the opposite of what you're looking for. The reality is that a growing number and proportion of gamers do always have lots of people to play their consoles with. You see, most people live in families, and many of the people who grew up on the NES back in the day are becoming parents nowadays. There's a lot more options now that the adults in the family are already comfortable with video games.
Nintendo does understand the concept of the hardcore gamer, sitting in the basement for 6 hours at a time and just plowing through games. Nintendo also realizes that MS and Sony are throwing money at that market just as fast as they can. I think all three of the console makers also realize that that market isn't going to grow much bigger. Sony and MS's strategy for that realization is to try to completely dominate that market and drive everyone else out. Nintendo's reaction is to go find new markets.
It might be too much to ask for to have it both ways.
Well, I think my grandma is pretty much an impossible target for a video game maker. My mom, however, might end up being a grandma in not all that many years. And she already got a gamecube to play donkey konga. If you take a bigger picture look at where the gamer demographics are going, Nintendo's strategy makes a lot more sense. I'm only 25 but I have a lot less time to invest in video games than I used to. Many of my friends don't really play them anymore, because they don't have the free time to sink into most games. But when people come over to my house, we usually end up in front of the gamecube for at least an hour or so, playing all the goofy party games, 4+ of us at a time, passing the controllers around frequently so everyone gets a turn. The majority of the time I spend playing games is multiplayer stuff.
Making games "simpler" is only one of the important things that Nintendo does. The more important one, in my opinion, is them trying to make gaming more social. Xbox live is cool and all, but I'll have more fun playing mario baseball with 3 friends all in front of the same TV than I will playing Halo with those same 3 people over the internet.
What the game industry has generally considered the "mature" market has consisted of late teens-mid twenties males. But those ages are really just still kids. The true mature market consists of adults, most of which have limited free time, and most of which have houses full of families and such. I just think there's so much potential for games that realize that. Games which don't require me to sit on the couch and tune out everything else for hours at a time. Because, you know what? It's really hard for me to do that. And it's that way for the majority of adults as well.
I think that'd be ok. The amount of urban/developed land, compared to the total land mass of the planet, is pretty damn small. Even if we kicked those bugs out of all the cities, there'd still be plenty of other space for the mosquitos and dependent species to survive.
If this crap works, I vote that New Orleans install some as soon as possible. The mosquitos have always been sort of bad here, and they got a whole lot worse after the hurricanes. All around the city and its suburbs, trucks drive through the streets spraying chemicals into the air to help control the bugs. I can't imagine that that is particularly healthy for anyone, so an alternative would be nice.
I dunno, I'm older and I earn my own money now, but I'm not likely to buy both. You're looking at around $800 for both systems, just including the console hardware. And while I'm living comfortably, and I could afford to get them both, there are plenty of other neat things that I could spend that money on. Factor in the reality that most publishers are leaning towards multiplatform games, and suddenly having two consoles that play 90% of the same games becomes almost silly.
:P
In that case, it comes down to what else the systems bring to the table. MS has talked a lot about online stuff, downloads, media and all that. Sony has said a lot of random things, but for the most part, has been surprisingly unclear about what the PS3 will really offer gamers besides a whole bunch of silicon. I find that surprising, remembering how well they used PS2 hype to wear down the dreamcast.
But for the record, if I had to choose one, I'd probably choose the Xbox360. Sony has done very little to get me excited about their console. But on the other hand, TFA used the term "bodaciously powerful" to describe the Cell processor, so that's pretty damn compelling
It is.
I was given an Xbox as a gift, but I can tell you that if I had paid for it, I'd be a little bit unhappy with my purchase. I own all three systems, but I don't buy too many games. I don't have time to play all that many. But when I do buy a game, I prefer to get some serious playing time out of it. The Xbox has failed to deliver on that for the most part. I have maybe a dozen games(most of which were bought cheaper well after release), but only one has seen any playtime since the initial few days. Burnout 3 is it.
The gamecube, however, gets a lot more attention, with a much larger number of games. There's maybe 20 gamecube games in the house, and about half of them still get played from time to time. Most of those are first party titles, but not all.
Of course, this is just anecdotal evidence to counter yours. My playing habits may leave me out of the perceived "gamer" market, which is what MS and Sony tries so hard to appeal to. And to be fair, that's where the majority of the money has come from for the industry over the past few decades. But the market that I do represent, a big time gamer that has gotten older and spends most of his time not playing video games anymore, that's a big group of people, and only getting bigger. And I think Nintendo knows how to serve that market very well. The point is, there is a market for a console with fewer, but more consistently quality games. I'll get far less "value" out of any console than a hardcore gamer, mostly because I don't have as many hours to sit down in front of it. But I think that overall with Nintendo, I've gotten consistently more value out of each game that I've bought. And the total cost of all my games exceeeds my initial investment on the hardware.
Man, all that Star Trek all day was awesome during my unemployed stretch. Although it probably helped increase the length of time I was jobless. Who's got time to send out resumes? I still have three seasons of DS9 to catch up on!
Woo, I start a new job on monday as well. Yay us.
Actually, according to the article, making the bubbles colored was hard. It took him years to get that right. Only after he figured that out did he get to the problem of needing a dye that would disappear. And that also proved to be difficult, even for someone with a PhD in dye chemistry.
I realize that movie making, like most things, is easier said than done. I also realize that I'm not likely to be any better or even as good as anyone out in hollywood. Only that if I were going to spend that much money on something, I think I'd be more careful about how I spend it. I mean, how many big high-budget movies are there in a year? Maybe 100? I would think you could find more than 100 competent directors in this country. There are a lot of people to choose from. Same with actors. You have to make sure to not confuse the "best people" with the "most expensive". Despite my general non-interest in the profession, I refuse to think that acting is so hard that only a handful of individuals can do it well. I think if the movie studios were just a little more open minded in their searches, they'd find a couple of things. First, that the talent pool is actually pretty big, and second, a movie does not need an expensive superstar actor to get people out to see it.
I'd think it's more of a case of 100 million dollars just not being that much money for these studios, so it's easier to just keep doing things the way they've been doing them, and just let the numbers work out the way they have been. They wouldn't keep gravitating this way if it wasn't making them money.