People already have no qualms with putting things off until tomorrow with their sadly short lives. This isn't going to make it go away, and I doubt that the first productive, explorative years of human nature are going to go away either. Don't the young generally want to go out and leave a mark on the world, despite having 50+ more years to do so? It's because they haven't yet, not because they don't have much time to do so.
Maybe the excitement will diminish with time, but I don't see the excitement I take from my life as being enhanced because I only have so much time to do things. I want more. I want to visit more parts of the globe. I want to be alive when we finally start moving off this earth. I want to experience the coming waves and generations of advancement. Imagine the untold mysteries we've yet to discover.
And I hope that as people near their 500s or however old that they take the time to reflect on the might of their experience and make good choices the first time around. Imagine the boon that hundreds of years of living experience could grant us if we'd listen to it. Imagine the mistakes that could be avoided.
Anybody have a link to a respected medical journal that's running the findings of this research?
I really, really hope that what's being reported is true, but I'd really like to see it in a peer reviewed journal and have the findings reproduced before getting too excited. Because things like cold fusion have been announced via press release before, with no journal paper forthcoming. Without it being reproducable it's just another faith healing.
That said, please, please be good, reproducable research.
You said it right in your first sentence the cd's were put to a different use. That's reuse. They did not go through a new life cycle as raw materials turned into a product. That's recycling.
Recycling means taking a product, converting it to raw stock, and using the converted material towards a new product, i.e. a new product lifecycle for the same material.
I can reuse a milk carton to hold my used motor oil. The carton was meant to hold milk, now it's holding filthy oil. That's no different than reusing cd's as a chair. I didn't melt the milk jug down to base plastic, and make a special oil container. I didn't have to. Just like this guy didn't melt down the cd's, make a mold, and form a chair. (I assume, I can't see the page.)
There are benefits to recycling though. First, it delays the exhaustion of virgin materials in the case of non-renewable resources. Second, it reduces the amount of waste that's produced.
The downside is the energy that it takes to do this. If we're burning more oil to recycle plastic than we could get new plastic out of same said oil, it'd better be worth the space of not tossing or stockpiling that plastic. If not, then there's waste.
Isn't turning a slew of AOL CDs into a throne more in the category of reuse instead of recycling? Recycling implies that the plastic from the CDs is somehow melted down and used in a new product.
There's a reason the slogan was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They're listed in order of decreasing positve impact.
It's called turnabout, it's fair play, and I'm simply applying the same lines of argument that the politicos and moral censors are applying to video games in this instance. I don't actually want government and politics to not be discussed in schools. It's an argument through adopting the opposing logic and applying it to absurdity. But thanks for taking everything you read literally.
Honestly, while I'd like to see systems of government and how our own government is designed to work taught in schools, I'm not sure the Machiavellian maneuvering, the personal quests for power, the scandal and kickback needs to be shown to third graders. But that's not even taught about in most high schools. It's just taken as a granted that most politicians are crooked. Why don't we teach young adults to blame the adults and the politicians that allow things to carry on this way?
I would like to blame all the politicians for the corruption of children in their personal quests for power. The politicians display their win at any cost attitudes openly, shamelessly slander those who oppose them, and are more scandalous than any executive at Rockstar Games could ever be when raking in cash. We should prevent children from seeing anything political, and censor CSpan too, the language used is hideous. Politics must be banned. We cannot have children learning these lessons.
I'd also like to lay a thick layer of blame on all the moral and religious groups which feel that repressing feelings instead of openly discussing them is the proper way to handle them. I'd like to make a call to remove all children from churches until priests can stop molesting them. Please, think of the children. Further, the lessons in the bible are too graphic, depicting things like brothers slaying each other. What is this world coming to? How about reading Sesame Street books on Sunday instead, those are wholesome. I'd like to further blame religious figures who lambast the teaching of sexual education, though most parents will never bring up the topic until it's too late and their childrens' curiosity provides the lessons. How many children's lives must be ruined because adults are too embarassed to speak about sexuality? Can't we for once actually think of the children?
Finally, I'd like to thank the video game industry, for providing children with an outlet for excess energy that doesn't involve killing people. Sports games, platformers, puzzle games, there are all sorts of interactive outlets for children apart from just watching after school cartoons. I'd like to yell at parents that give overly young, impressionable children mature games. What's wrong with you? I'd like to thank all parents that have decided their 16 year olds are or are not mature enough to play GTA, and took the trouble to, you know, actually think about their child instead of blaming others for their poor parenting.
What's the last well parallelized game you played? I had a dual Pentium 3 setup and while it was certainly nice for other things, any gaming I did was only really helped by being able to run system processes on the second cpu.
I would absolutely love to have a dual desktop again, but mostly just because it was more responsive and handled multitasking under load so much more gracefully. Little better in computing than having a processor running at 100% and still having a usable desktop running on the other processor.
There's a single player version of the game you just described. It's called Nethack.
And no, Nethack addiction is not easy to deal with. There's a reason I don't install it on my machine unless I see a period of months with nothing to do.
I don't know about HL2 nor do I intend to buy it. However, I seem to recall Civ 3 not only requiring the CD, but constantly spinning it too. This made playing it on a laptop a real drain on the battery, as the CD was constantly in motion. It just isn't necessary.
If there was some reason to actually need the CD apart from implying all your customers are criminals, maybe people wouldn't be so upset about it. Since hard disks exist, however, and games can easily be installed on them without further need of the CD, maybe it's an inconvenience. If my game boy could store dozens of games on it, but required me to put in the cart each time to play, I'd whine about the inconvenience there too. As it is, it's already a pain to bring any sizable game boy library with you.
A receipt? You could buy the game, not open it, scan the receipt, return the game for a full refund, and pirate away. Doesn't work.
Credit card statement? It won't show what you bought, just where. Doesn't work.
Copy of the check. Again, where and not what. Doesn't work.
A picture of the paper and the original game CDs. Might work if the CD key was involved. I'm sure that could be altered if you really wanted to get tricky though. Best idea so far.
So we pretend you have proof. What then, you're just going to slap a stamp on it, mail it to Valve, and wait for them to email you some sort of recourse? Scanners and digital cameras may be common, but they aren't in every house. Maybe you could go to Kinkos and pay some more money to be able to play your game sooner. Why not just break down and buy another copy hoping the new CD key works?
Who knows how long some of these legit customers who've had their key guessed and stolen have had to wait to play a game they purchased properly. Or, how long they'll have to spend hassling with Valve to get their accounts in order now. That's the problem with all the active piracy protection I've seen so far. It hurts legitimate consumers while merely inconveniencing pirates.
The poor people who did purchase the game and got an already used CD key should just take Valve to small claims court. I bet they could get more than just what the game cost in damages.
Last I checked I was speaking about why I prefer my MD player to an iPod, not why everybody else should. I even had the specific disclaimer to laugh at me, as in my opinion. Should somebody see my reasons as decent ones then they can pick up an MD player, no problem, right? Personally, I think the battery life alone makes a decent argument, but I like listening to music for long periods of time.
Since many of the people I know have MD devices it makes swapping MDs easy. It's a local and relatively small sample, but the one that I, in particular, care about. I'm not attempting to say that everybody else's milage will be the same. But in that line of thought, I don't give half a care that x% of people have an iPod when I don't deal with them. At any rate, a person with an MD player will have no more difficult a time getting music to a friend than somebody with an iPod.
Many people don't use recording. For many with an iPod it's a feature that wouldn't matter. I happen to have on a few occasions and am personally glad the option was available to me. But you may need to follow your own advice about larger samples for the usefulness of recording. And due to the mic/line in/optical in of the MD, you don't even need a computer to get music on it. I could record directly from an iPod if I wanted. Or from radio, or 8-track, or records, or any source at all.
Oh, and why you'd lend a personan MD who doesn't know what an MD is, well, is beyond me. Anybody whom I'd lend an MD to has an MD player, and knows how to use it. But even assuming one did put an MD in the floppy drive, my money is on the floppy drive breaking before the MD.
Ha ha, you made a joke about few people having minidisc players. You're so clever. Strangely enough, though, about 50% of the local ACM group has one, and there's one in their meeting room. I can bring a MD and play. Aside from the ACM, I'd guess about 20% of other people I know that I could care enough about to loan music to have an MD player. About the same number have some form of MP3 player. The rest still have CDs. I could care less about national demographics considering that.
'Loaning' somebody MP3s via the net can be a real beast if you're dealing with non-technical people. Most of the time, the best hope seems to be praying they have broadband because they know how to work with email. Actually, pray they have broadband in any case. 'Loaning' somebody an album over 56k isn't so quick. Or you could just put them on a CD-R and give them it. Anyway, I can do any of this despite having an MD player just as easily as you can with the iPod. The iPod certainly isn't better in that regard. It's just that in many cases I can hand over an MD right then and there. No need for my friends to pester me to send files later when I forget.
You can record on the iPod, but you've obviously never researched it. There isn't a single good word written about the iPod's recording that I've ever seen, aside from fanboy ranting that it exists and is so cool, but they've never used it and never will. All I've seen discusses a mono voice quality input. You aren't going to record anything but interviews or mumbling to yourself on that. My MD recorder will record full stereo and at the same quality I can drop music onto it. I can record live sets or whatever else I hear. The iPod looks to be the clear loser in the recording arena if you want anything but what a $20 voice recorder could do for you. But that's okay, most people don't want to record anyway. If they want something to do that with they can get something that does it better.
It comes with a built-in record mode, but it's kind of hard to activate it.
At least the iPod's interface is clear and award winning for playback.
The dreamcast ended up not being in competition with much due to it's launch date. However, it was Sega's generation that fell in line with the N64 and PS1, even if it was late. Thus the comparison.
Okay, a Goldeneye player. Give me any, yes any, FPS on a PC over Goldeneye. Wolf3d is a hands down winner vs. Goldeneye in my book. It's merely preference. If it makes you feel any better, I don't care much for Halo either. Console FPS just never hit it off with me. However, it is proven fact that people who rave about Goldeneye will say anything in defense of the N64.
Playstation 1 graphics weren't stellar, but the only thing that looked better at the time was a PC or the Dreamcast. I liked the Dreamcast better than PS1 or N64 honestly, but oh well. Lots of early games for any moderately recent (ie 3d) platform don't make full use of the graphics. They improve over time. N64's capabilities weren't so hot themselves.
My problem with the N64 controller was there was never a comfortable way to hold it, there was a de facto button usage scheme for most games that neglected the left half of the controller. Sometimes a game would make you use the directionals. It was mad. It was uncomfortable. It made me pull a "trigger" with my non-shooting hand. It's the worst controller ever. Maybe it'd have been less awkward if I was 5.
The cube's controller is indeed comfortable, and I've never had problems with the playstation controllers, though the ones with analog sticks are certainly better. Xbox is huge, we all know it, but the Xbox S controller is pretty comfy.
Hardware-wise I was completely unimpressed by the N64. I don't own one. I won't own one.
Most of my MDs cost roughly $1.10 each. They're also have the raccoon factor of being different colors and shiny. Oh, and did you know I can put them through the wash and still have them work? They're next to impossible to break, and tiny to boot. Never once had one skip.
I can easily lend somebody one of my MDs without worrying about the condition I will get it back in. I can hand them off a mix I've been listening to so they can take it home. That's rather tough to do with the iPod. You don't exactly say, here, take my iPod. Don't even pretend that nobody's gotten a CD back scratched to hell either.
Finally, I can record onto MDs on the go. Is a $1.10 worth being able to plug in a mic and record anything around me? You bet it is. I still get good battery life while doing so too. Haven't heard much about portable hard drive players supporting any sort of recording. And the ever popular discman won't do it either. So what's left, cassettes? No thanks.
I have to agree. There's no reason that news that's reported over 80 years ago should be protected under copyright law. That's completely insane.
Copyright law is provided to protect the authors of a work from unauthorized redistribution of their work. Mainly, it's was brought about because some unethical printers were making obscene profit off of other people's works a long time ago. While I agree that some protection should be given to newspapers so that The Daily Bugle doesn't pick up a story word for word from The Bugle Press, how long should that protection last?
My thoughts are that a few years would be sufficient. It gives newspapers more than enough time to follow up on a story for quite some time, and allowing reprinting of their own works, but disallowing another newspaper from copying the introductory story wholesale. But it seems the current cuckiroo is to keep extending copyright for all media to a period longer than our lifetime. All this protection to prevent us from damaging newspaper publishers from finding out what heppened on our birthdays 80 years ago? Are any of the authors still alive? Is any newspaper going to run a followup on an 80 year old story and not use bits of the original? Would it hurt the media to share our collective history?
Surely there can't be too much business in reselling news from 80 years ago. It isn't of such striking monetary value that I think many would consider paying for it. But it does have value in that it's the history of our culture. It's a source of knowledge and a link to our past. Having never lived through WWII, I'd be interested in killing some time some evening reading through what the newspapers had to say about it. To get that raw feeling of the atmosphere that likely isn't captured to the same degree as in textbooks. There comes a point where it is culture, history, and our nation that's in print, not something to have every last penny wrung out for profit. That point is way sooner than is currently written in law.
I don't know. I don't get that same weird feeling about the DS as I do about the N64. Sure, maybe Nintendo will continue to flog the horse of bringing back older games to the portables. That's fine with me as long as they keep releasing new, innovative, and good titles.
I think they've made some new room to work with, and so long as the second screen interface doesn't suck half as bad as the N64 controller I don't see much change in N's domination.
But, it's all rampant speculation. We'll see how the world responds.
Except now Apple's launching the photo iPod so people can look at thumbnails on screen, or find a TV to display them to. Who wants to bet there's a video iPod released before too long to take on the emerging Portable Video market? Apple will abandon one thing and one thing well too. After that, how long until the classic iPod is no longer sold because it's too expensive to maintain multiple product lines?
That's not to say that the current iPod is affected in any way. If it fits your aesthetic, great. I don't think it looks remotely like a million bucks, but that's my taste. You can all laugh as I stick with my MD player and it's 48 hour battery life. The only pain there is getting songs onto the discs, a one time trade I'm willing to make.
Fantastic points. The problem I, and everybody else, probably even Sony, sees with the convergence bit, is that it doesn't do much good if it only stays powered on for a couple hours at a time. I mean, I like my Sony Minidisc player because of good sound quality (at best ATRAC encoding) and it has a ~48 hour battery life on 1 AA. I can grab it and run without really worrying if the battery I have in it has a full charge. Even with a quarter charge it'll play all day.
I'm also personally anti-converged devices. I sometimes get the feeling I'm fairly alone in liking my devices to do one thing and do it exceptionally well, opposed to doing all sorts of stuff in a mediocre fashion. Don't forget Nokia's N-Gage game phone thing. It hasn't exactly done so well.
Nintendo has also historically released a camera at some point for each Game Boy. I've always seen them as silly niche things, but now they could be networked silly niche things. I can't attest for the desire for this sort of thing. I'd bet most employers won't see a PSP/Video conferencing solution as a win. Who'll use it from either company?
Form factor I have to agree with hands down, but I'm hoping the pictures of the DS just make it look bigger than it is. The PSP has a design win on its hands though. The second screen on the DS, I'm hesitant to comment. It could rock if used properly. The worst I see is it being used for a map, or extra information, reducing clutter from the screens of some games. I don't think it'll be anything like the migrane inducing virtual boy. Except the damn N64 controller, Nintendo's typically been good about making their interface easy. We'll see soon I guess.
*Raises hand* I didn't doubt it for a second when I first played an N64. The first playstation was a decent system. The N64 is the nintendo system I don't own because everything about it sucked. The graphics sucked. The controller was the most awkward thing in the world. The only thing I'll give it is the lack of need for a multi-tap, but four player games didn't seem that common. Sony brought new and good things to the table with the playstation, Nintendo failed to do so with the N64.
Look at the PS2, it has backwards compatibility with a huge and successful playstation library, and improves on what was good about the first playstation. The hardware doesn't suck. The controllers are decent. There's a good set of games.
Now, turn it around and look at the game boy and the PSP. The PSP hardware looks like it's going to eat batteries in no time flat. Remember the Game Gear? The PSP has no library. It's PS2 vs. Game Cube with the big N on the winning side this time. The PSP is just another Sega Game Gear or Atari Lynx. Nothing special, plain old portable with fancy graphics and no battery life. The DS brings fantastic innovation, like the wireless networking. We'll see about the second screen, but it's at least a move towards something creative.
No, I think Sony's going to stick their hand into the portable market with the PSP and pull back a bloody stump this first go around. They may go back for more, but I think it's going to take a while for them to gain any critical mass. The only hope that Sony has right now of quick entry and dominance is for Nintendo to put out another N64 into the handheld market. I don't think that's going to happen this generation.
Most recent message, so I'm responding to you. It's intended for everybody that's responding to me telling me that it's a breeder reactor to do this. I know what breeder reactors are. I know that they've been banned in the US. I think they're a great idea.
The question why we don't was rhetorical. I'm just pointing out it's silly to store more waste than necessary, and not to use the resources we have. <rhetorical>Do I need to start putting rhetorical tags around said questions?</rhetorical>
Because Uranium and Plutonium are so light it'd be easy to fire them into the sun. It certainly wouldn't take, I don't know, a massive amount of energy to do that, would it?
Launching a relatively light satelite is hideously expensive. I don't want to know the cost of getting nuclear waste off the planet. I think your easy solution is completely ignoring the hard part of your solution.
How about we refine the waste, make it further useful, and save on the amount of waste we create?
Really, if this waste is so awful, why don't we try to create as little waste as possible by using everything we reasonably can? You'd think people would be clammoring to cut down the number of times waste (and live fuel) needs to be shipped, and cut down the quantities that need to be stored away for extended periods of time. Though it isn't like there's that much volume of waste. If I remember correctly, one of WI's biggest, Point Beach, produces something like a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume per year and provides a heck of a lot of power.
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Maybe the excitement will diminish with time, but I don't see the excitement I take from my life as being enhanced because I only have so much time to do things. I want more. I want to visit more parts of the globe. I want to be alive when we finally start moving off this earth. I want to experience the coming waves and generations of advancement. Imagine the untold mysteries we've yet to discover.
And I hope that as people near their 500s or however old that they take the time to reflect on the might of their experience and make good choices the first time around. Imagine the boon that hundreds of years of living experience could grant us if we'd listen to it. Imagine the mistakes that could be avoided.
I really, really hope that what's being reported is true, but I'd really like to see it in a peer reviewed journal and have the findings reproduced before getting too excited. Because things like cold fusion have been announced via press release before, with no journal paper forthcoming. Without it being reproducable it's just another faith healing.
That said, please, please be good, reproducable research.
Recycling means taking a product, converting it to raw stock, and using the converted material towards a new product, i.e. a new product lifecycle for the same material.
I can reuse a milk carton to hold my used motor oil. The carton was meant to hold milk, now it's holding filthy oil. That's no different than reusing cd's as a chair. I didn't melt the milk jug down to base plastic, and make a special oil container. I didn't have to. Just like this guy didn't melt down the cd's, make a mold, and form a chair. (I assume, I can't see the page.)
The downside is the energy that it takes to do this. If we're burning more oil to recycle plastic than we could get new plastic out of same said oil, it'd better be worth the space of not tossing or stockpiling that plastic. If not, then there's waste.
There's a reason the slogan was Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. They're listed in order of decreasing positve impact.
Honestly, while I'd like to see systems of government and how our own government is designed to work taught in schools, I'm not sure the Machiavellian maneuvering, the personal quests for power, the scandal and kickback needs to be shown to third graders. But that's not even taught about in most high schools. It's just taken as a granted that most politicians are crooked. Why don't we teach young adults to blame the adults and the politicians that allow things to carry on this way?
I'd also like to lay a thick layer of blame on all the moral and religious groups which feel that repressing feelings instead of openly discussing them is the proper way to handle them. I'd like to make a call to remove all children from churches until priests can stop molesting them. Please, think of the children. Further, the lessons in the bible are too graphic, depicting things like brothers slaying each other. What is this world coming to? How about reading Sesame Street books on Sunday instead, those are wholesome. I'd like to further blame religious figures who lambast the teaching of sexual education, though most parents will never bring up the topic until it's too late and their childrens' curiosity provides the lessons. How many children's lives must be ruined because adults are too embarassed to speak about sexuality? Can't we for once actually think of the children?
Finally, I'd like to thank the video game industry, for providing children with an outlet for excess energy that doesn't involve killing people. Sports games, platformers, puzzle games, there are all sorts of interactive outlets for children apart from just watching after school cartoons. I'd like to yell at parents that give overly young, impressionable children mature games. What's wrong with you? I'd like to thank all parents that have decided their 16 year olds are or are not mature enough to play GTA, and took the trouble to, you know, actually think about their child instead of blaming others for their poor parenting.
I would absolutely love to have a dual desktop again, but mostly just because it was more responsive and handled multitasking under load so much more gracefully. Little better in computing than having a processor running at 100% and still having a usable desktop running on the other processor.
And no, Nethack addiction is not easy to deal with. There's a reason I don't install it on my machine unless I see a period of months with nothing to do.
If there was some reason to actually need the CD apart from implying all your customers are criminals, maybe people wouldn't be so upset about it. Since hard disks exist, however, and games can easily be installed on them without further need of the CD, maybe it's an inconvenience. If my game boy could store dozens of games on it, but required me to put in the cart each time to play, I'd whine about the inconvenience there too. As it is, it's already a pain to bring any sizable game boy library with you.
Credit card statement? It won't show what you bought, just where. Doesn't work.
Copy of the check. Again, where and not what. Doesn't work.
A picture of the paper and the original game CDs. Might work if the CD key was involved. I'm sure that could be altered if you really wanted to get tricky though. Best idea so far.
So we pretend you have proof. What then, you're just going to slap a stamp on it, mail it to Valve, and wait for them to email you some sort of recourse? Scanners and digital cameras may be common, but they aren't in every house. Maybe you could go to Kinkos and pay some more money to be able to play your game sooner. Why not just break down and buy another copy hoping the new CD key works?
Who knows how long some of these legit customers who've had their key guessed and stolen have had to wait to play a game they purchased properly. Or, how long they'll have to spend hassling with Valve to get their accounts in order now. That's the problem with all the active piracy protection I've seen so far. It hurts legitimate consumers while merely inconveniencing pirates.
The poor people who did purchase the game and got an already used CD key should just take Valve to small claims court. I bet they could get more than just what the game cost in damages.
Since many of the people I know have MD devices it makes swapping MDs easy. It's a local and relatively small sample, but the one that I, in particular, care about. I'm not attempting to say that everybody else's milage will be the same. But in that line of thought, I don't give half a care that x% of people have an iPod when I don't deal with them. At any rate, a person with an MD player will have no more difficult a time getting music to a friend than somebody with an iPod.
Many people don't use recording. For many with an iPod it's a feature that wouldn't matter. I happen to have on a few occasions and am personally glad the option was available to me. But you may need to follow your own advice about larger samples for the usefulness of recording. And due to the mic/line in/optical in of the MD, you don't even need a computer to get music on it. I could record directly from an iPod if I wanted. Or from radio, or 8-track, or records, or any source at all.
Oh, and why you'd lend a personan MD who doesn't know what an MD is, well, is beyond me. Anybody whom I'd lend an MD to has an MD player, and knows how to use it. But even assuming one did put an MD in the floppy drive, my money is on the floppy drive breaking before the MD.
'Loaning' somebody MP3s via the net can be a real beast if you're dealing with non-technical people. Most of the time, the best hope seems to be praying they have broadband because they know how to work with email. Actually, pray they have broadband in any case. 'Loaning' somebody an album over 56k isn't so quick. Or you could just put them on a CD-R and give them it. Anyway, I can do any of this despite having an MD player just as easily as you can with the iPod. The iPod certainly isn't better in that regard. It's just that in many cases I can hand over an MD right then and there. No need for my friends to pester me to send files later when I forget.
You can record on the iPod, but you've obviously never researched it. There isn't a single good word written about the iPod's recording that I've ever seen, aside from fanboy ranting that it exists and is so cool, but they've never used it and never will. All I've seen discusses a mono voice quality input. You aren't going to record anything but interviews or mumbling to yourself on that. My MD recorder will record full stereo and at the same quality I can drop music onto it. I can record live sets or whatever else I hear. The iPod looks to be the clear loser in the recording arena if you want anything but what a $20 voice recorder could do for you. But that's okay, most people don't want to record anyway. If they want something to do that with they can get something that does it better.
It comes with a built-in record mode, but it's kind of hard to activate it.
At least the iPod's interface is clear and award winning for playback.
The dreamcast ended up not being in competition with much due to it's launch date. However, it was Sega's generation that fell in line with the N64 and PS1, even if it was late. Thus the comparison.
Playstation 1 graphics weren't stellar, but the only thing that looked better at the time was a PC or the Dreamcast. I liked the Dreamcast better than PS1 or N64 honestly, but oh well. Lots of early games for any moderately recent (ie 3d) platform don't make full use of the graphics. They improve over time. N64's capabilities weren't so hot themselves.
My problem with the N64 controller was there was never a comfortable way to hold it, there was a de facto button usage scheme for most games that neglected the left half of the controller. Sometimes a game would make you use the directionals. It was mad. It was uncomfortable. It made me pull a "trigger" with my non-shooting hand. It's the worst controller ever. Maybe it'd have been less awkward if I was 5.
The cube's controller is indeed comfortable, and I've never had problems with the playstation controllers, though the ones with analog sticks are certainly better. Xbox is huge, we all know it, but the Xbox S controller is pretty comfy.
Hardware-wise I was completely unimpressed by the N64. I don't own one. I won't own one.
I can easily lend somebody one of my MDs without worrying about the condition I will get it back in. I can hand them off a mix I've been listening to so they can take it home. That's rather tough to do with the iPod. You don't exactly say, here, take my iPod. Don't even pretend that nobody's gotten a CD back scratched to hell either.
Finally, I can record onto MDs on the go. Is a $1.10 worth being able to plug in a mic and record anything around me? You bet it is. I still get good battery life while doing so too. Haven't heard much about portable hard drive players supporting any sort of recording. And the ever popular discman won't do it either. So what's left, cassettes? No thanks.
Copyright law is provided to protect the authors of a work from unauthorized redistribution of their work. Mainly, it's was brought about because some unethical printers were making obscene profit off of other people's works a long time ago. While I agree that some protection should be given to newspapers so that The Daily Bugle doesn't pick up a story word for word from The Bugle Press, how long should that protection last?
My thoughts are that a few years would be sufficient. It gives newspapers more than enough time to follow up on a story for quite some time, and allowing reprinting of their own works, but disallowing another newspaper from copying the introductory story wholesale. But it seems the current cuckiroo is to keep extending copyright for all media to a period longer than our lifetime. All this protection to prevent us from damaging newspaper publishers from finding out what heppened on our birthdays 80 years ago? Are any of the authors still alive? Is any newspaper going to run a followup on an 80 year old story and not use bits of the original? Would it hurt the media to share our collective history?
Surely there can't be too much business in reselling news from 80 years ago. It isn't of such striking monetary value that I think many would consider paying for it. But it does have value in that it's the history of our culture. It's a source of knowledge and a link to our past. Having never lived through WWII, I'd be interested in killing some time some evening reading through what the newspapers had to say about it. To get that raw feeling of the atmosphere that likely isn't captured to the same degree as in textbooks. There comes a point where it is culture, history, and our nation that's in print, not something to have every last penny wrung out for profit. That point is way sooner than is currently written in law.
I think they've made some new room to work with, and so long as the second screen interface doesn't suck half as bad as the N64 controller I don't see much change in N's domination.
But, it's all rampant speculation. We'll see how the world responds.
That's not to say that the current iPod is affected in any way. If it fits your aesthetic, great. I don't think it looks remotely like a million bucks, but that's my taste. You can all laugh as I stick with my MD player and it's 48 hour battery life. The only pain there is getting songs onto the discs, a one time trade I'm willing to make.
I'm also personally anti-converged devices. I sometimes get the feeling I'm fairly alone in liking my devices to do one thing and do it exceptionally well, opposed to doing all sorts of stuff in a mediocre fashion. Don't forget Nokia's N-Gage game phone thing. It hasn't exactly done so well.
Nintendo has also historically released a camera at some point for each Game Boy. I've always seen them as silly niche things, but now they could be networked silly niche things. I can't attest for the desire for this sort of thing. I'd bet most employers won't see a PSP/Video conferencing solution as a win. Who'll use it from either company?
Form factor I have to agree with hands down, but I'm hoping the pictures of the DS just make it look bigger than it is. The PSP has a design win on its hands though. The second screen on the DS, I'm hesitant to comment. It could rock if used properly. The worst I see is it being used for a map, or extra information, reducing clutter from the screens of some games. I don't think it'll be anything like the migrane inducing virtual boy. Except the damn N64 controller, Nintendo's typically been good about making their interface easy. We'll see soon I guess.
Look at the PS2, it has backwards compatibility with a huge and successful playstation library, and improves on what was good about the first playstation. The hardware doesn't suck. The controllers are decent. There's a good set of games.
Now, turn it around and look at the game boy and the PSP. The PSP hardware looks like it's going to eat batteries in no time flat. Remember the Game Gear? The PSP has no library. It's PS2 vs. Game Cube with the big N on the winning side this time. The PSP is just another Sega Game Gear or Atari Lynx. Nothing special, plain old portable with fancy graphics and no battery life. The DS brings fantastic innovation, like the wireless networking. We'll see about the second screen, but it's at least a move towards something creative.
No, I think Sony's going to stick their hand into the portable market with the PSP and pull back a bloody stump this first go around. They may go back for more, but I think it's going to take a while for them to gain any critical mass. The only hope that Sony has right now of quick entry and dominance is for Nintendo to put out another N64 into the handheld market. I don't think that's going to happen this generation.
The question why we don't was rhetorical. I'm just pointing out it's silly to store more waste than necessary, and not to use the resources we have. <rhetorical>Do I need to start putting rhetorical tags around said questions?</rhetorical>
Sadly, Google doesn't seem to convert units of "phone booths of nuclear waste" into "burning Libraries of Congress", so I'm not certain.
Because Uranium and Plutonium are so light it'd be easy to fire them into the sun. It certainly wouldn't take, I don't know, a massive amount of energy to do that, would it?
Launching a relatively light satelite is hideously expensive. I don't want to know the cost of getting nuclear waste off the planet. I think your easy solution is completely ignoring the hard part of your solution.
Really, if this waste is so awful, why don't we try to create as little waste as possible by using everything we reasonably can? You'd think people would be clammoring to cut down the number of times waste (and live fuel) needs to be shipped, and cut down the quantities that need to be stored away for extended periods of time. Though it isn't like there's that much volume of waste. If I remember correctly, one of WI's biggest, Point Beach, produces something like a quarter of a phone booth's worth of waste in volume per year and provides a heck of a lot of power.