The AI running your squadmates, however, is significantly less than ideal (Dom, in particular, often does some crazy-ass shit that gets him killed and forces you to run out of cover to revive him).
The game is around ten hours (or so) on low difficulty, and there isn't much presented in the way of choices as you go through. The combat mechanics are interesting enough, though, that I'm very interested in going through it again on higher difficulty settings (something I seldom bother with).
In one sense yes, it is short - but in another, it's simply matching what seems to be a pretty standard length for these titles on consoles. It certainly isn't outlandishly short compared to Prey, CoD2, or Halo 2.
It certainly does leave you wishing it was longer, though, I'll admit that. But I also think that is, in large part, due to how polished and fun the game is.
The visuals are, indeed, stunning. The only things that don't look practically raytraced are splashing liquids - and, unfortunately, the contrast between the blood spray graphics and the rest of the game make the blood spray stand out as disappointing. That being said, I'm unaware of any other title that does such particle effects better. One other caveat, it has some of the "shininess" to it that is characteristic of the UT enginge (IMHO), and which will certainly be familiar to JRPG fans.
At the same time, the allied AI is mind-bogglingly bad. Perhaps this can be offset by issuing squad commands; that's a game mechanic I haven't really exploited at all. But watching Dom race from off screen behind you into your rifle fire to go hand-to-hand with a Grub is a singularly frustrating experience, right up there with following Isabela in Dead Rising.
The story itself isn't real thoroughly developed (it falls short of Halo, and certainly of HL), but the exposition of the setting is fantastic. You really get the grittiness of the world, the futility of the war, and the deep-seated cynicism of the soldiers who have managed to survive this long. It does the best job I've seen since FreeSpace 1 of putting you on the losing side of a war.
Unfortunately, it does suffer from what all console FPSes that I've played suffer from: pretty much complete linearity. It's not that I look to the FPS genre for massive environments to free-form explore, but it doesn't even bother having significant alternate and/or dead-end paths. You miss out on the worry of deciding which way to go, trying to figure out which way is the way into the level, and which way is the way to the powerup. Again, though, that's hardly unique to this game (or even limited entirely to consoles - it's just that the only FPSes I've seen that don't have you on rails are on the PC).
Collecting the COG tags seems a tacked-on afterthought; the game isn't exploration-oriented enough for me to find it entertaining to try to track them all down.
It's worth noting that this is also the only FPS I actually wouldn't rather play with a KB+M setup - but then, I'm not one of the KB+M jihadists that are running around, either. Rather than trying to replicate the KB+M interface on the console as so many shooters do (and always lose in the translation), the game is designed from the ground up with the controller in mind.
But the game does what it does very, very well - in my opinion, this is, without a doubt, the high-water mark for campaign-mode FPS titles on the console, and rivals some of the best campaign-mode FPS titles on the PC (with the caveat that I haven't played Resistance: Fall of Man). If you have any interest at all in single player/co-op FPSes on a console, you're doing yourself a grave disservice if you don't play this game. By the same token, of course, if you have no interest whatsoever in that style of game (if you only play FPSes for multiplayer, for example, or if you don't like the FPS genre at all), then there's nothing here to interest you.
I believe they are, though I'm not a lawyer - but the difference is that letters to the editor are, of necessity, read and vetted by the editorial staff. This means the decision to publish them is an implicit stamp of approval. Posts on the internet are not necessarily even seen by the people nominally "publishing" them.
Really, the issue is what "publishing" means. Traditionally, publishing requires the publisher to select and edit stories which would then be pushed out to readers. The internet is different; a site like/., for example, is not analogous to a traditional publisher. Holding slashdot liable for things said in comments would be more analogous to holding the paperboy liable for things said in the paper.
My argument would be that the new publishers are the people hitting "submit" on the web form, since they're the ones selecting stories, validating them for truth (I crack me up), editing them for typos, and making the decision to make them public (i.e., "publish" them). Which is what this court decision seems to be in agreement with.
Hyperbolic Chamber, which sounds oddly shaped, but unremarkable
Are you kidding? I made a Hyperbolic Chamber, and it's the greatest thing ever! Its better than a baseball player batting TWO thousand!! No one has ever even imagined anything as phenomenally revolutionary as my Hyperbolic Chamber!!! I can guarantee that my Hperbolic Chamber will solve world hunger and instantiate world peace!!!! It's as hot as the center of the sun, and as cool as intergalactic space!!!!!
That's simply not a conclusion you can draw from the information the GP presented. The fact that Wii prices are dropping doesn't necessarily indicate anything about demand or supply, it only tells you something about the intersection of quantity demanded and quantity supplied.
By your argument, if Sony shipped and sold 10 million units at launch, so the prices on ebay auctions weren't significantly higher than MSRP, the conclusion would be "no one wants a PS3." When, in fact, selling out 10 million consoles at launch would be an unprecedented statement that 10 million people wanted a PS3.
Really, the only relevant conclusion you can draw from the ebay prices at this point is that quantity demanded for the Wii exceeded quantity supplied for the Wii less than quantity demanded for the PS3 exceeded quantity supplied for the PS3. Which could easily be explained by there being anywhere from 2 to 5 times as many Wiis available at launch as PS3s, depending on who you ask. Drawing any conclusions about the absolute demand for either console at this point based on this information is simply bad thinking.
By which you mean problems with extremely old HDTVs supporting 1080i (not even 720p) being treated as 480p (well duh) and an assortment of minor issues that could be corrected by a firmware update. Does the Wii upscale anything? Do existing XBox 360 games upscale to 1080p?
If, by "extremely old," you mean "around 3 years old," then sure. But that isn't really the issue; every other HD outputting device I know of can up/downscale its signal to whatever you tell it to. Why must the PS3 be different? And yes, the 360 does upscale to 1080p.
Online system is fine and more importantly free
The PS2's online system was also free, does that mean it was comparable to Live? Moreover, the console's only been released (if you can call these quantities a release) for four days. I think we've yet to see how the online system fares. What I've read so far indicates that it leaves something to be desired (such as no background downloading, for example).
3 words. Blame the developers.
Fair enough, but at the end of the day, does it really matter who's to blame when the games you paid $60+ for on the console you paid $580+ for don't look good?
Wasn't it meant to be something like 10 million by now?
Yes, it was. Still, million is a hell of a lot more than even 400,000 - and that's if you even begin to believe that Sony actually shipped that many.
Your second point is equally as absurd. Nobody buys a $600 system and only 1 game to go with it ever.
Except for people who buy the system solely to resell it. But yes, those systems will end up in the hands of a gamer eventually, who will (presumably) buy more than one game for it. But when we're talking about launch numbers, the attach rate at launch is significant.
All that being said, I don't think we've anywhere near enough information to call the PS3 a "disaster" yet. I might be willing to call the launch itself a far cry from ideal, but we won't know if the PS3 is a disaster until it really launches - which is looking like circa March '07.
This, unfortunately, doesn't answer my most pressing question - when can we expect a restock?
As someone who elected not to stand in line Saturday night, I don't have my Wii yet, and this depresses me. I keep hearing rumors that there should be more in stores before this Friday, but they're all completely unsubstantiated.
So consider this an open letter (or at least, an open comment among dozens to a category-specific post on a blog that comprises an insignificant percentage of Nintendo's fan base) to Nintendo: when will there be more? When can I get my hot little hands on a Wii?
OK - I'll grant that I'm just as victim to self-reporting errors as the next guy, so you may be right. But by the same token, I don't see any evidence that using the analog sticks as D-pads is the norm, either. In my experience, it isn't. In yours, it is. All I can say is, after playing games like Marble Blast, PGR3, and NFS:MW online, I would be positively stunned if "most" of those people weren't using gradual pressure on the sticks.
This, however, is not a fair sample selection, since analog use in those games is heavily rewarded, while digital use is heavily penalized.
While I can't speak to the 360 (as I don't own any sports titles for it, and therefore have no experience), on the original XBox, similar selection occurred in baseball and golf games. Throwing a pitch through the strike zone, for example, required you to hold the stick short of 100% over. Hitting a ball required you to aim the bat, again by holding the stick short of 100% over. Madden rewarded analog use in precision passing. If your character ever wants to sneak in Oblivion, it requires analog use of the stick.
I mention these specific games because they represent popular titles which all heavily reward analog use of the sticks. I find it a difficult claim to credit without evidence that "most" of the people playing them handicapped themselves by using the sticks as D-pads. Again, I admit that I also don't have evidence that people didn't; it just seems more reasonable to me.
That being said, there are plenty of games that don't discriminate against digital use. Geometry Wars, for example. Wik, DOA4, Enchanted Arms, to name a few that I own. I'm deliberately ignoring, here, FPS's - I could believe that analog use in most FPSes isn't advantageous enough to force it for successful play. Personally, I couldn't get by without it - but the difference is certainly less pronounced than other titles I've mentioned.
All that being said:
My real point is that using the whole controller is better
This may be true; I haven't used either the SixAxis or the Wiimote as yet. I can say (without even anecdotal or experiential evidence, this is grain-of-salt time) that I am more interested in the Wiimote than the Sixaxis for motion sensing: if motion sensing is going to be how I control a game, I don't care for the traditional, two-handed, controller style to do it. Assuming that the thumb controls are still used, I suspect that it will be difficult to accurately use a thumbstick while cranking the whole controller over in my hands. This is why I gradually broke the habit of sympathetic controller movement while playing, I don't relish having to take it back up again. By breaking the controls up into two independent items, the Wiimote + nunchuk addresses this concern.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and it's possible the Sixaxis will make me change my mind if/when I get a chance to use it. But I admit to being dubious. I'm (somewhat guardedly) excited about the Wiimote, though - here's hoping there's a restock this week that I can snag a console out of.
First the number of consoles actually shipped to NA appears to be dramatically lower than promised. Nintendo gave out new estimates for NA shipment plans for up to middle of January and they sound about half of what was promised. Only about 2 million units instead of 4.
Huh? 2,000,000 is, like, six orders of magnitude bigger than 4.
Um...I use the analog nature of the control sticks all the time. It's how you walk instead of run or turn your head slowly to aim in FPSes,it's how you turn smoothly in racers, it's how you control your speed in Marble Blast, and it's how you pan the camera around at the right speed to evaluate the area in 3rd-person games. The analog stick, in fact, is the one thing in FPSes that's better than KB+M; you can move at speeds other than stop/walk/run.
In fact, the only game I can think of that I don't use the analog sticks that way in is DOA4 - that's pretty much just using the stick like a D-pad. Of course, I'd just use the D-pad in that game if the 360s D-pad wasn't so craptacular.
Ah - I somehow misread your post to mean pretty much the opposite of what it does. My fault, not yours; upon rereading, I have no idea what I was thinking.
Still, for the same reason you ask how much heating it would take to raise the temperature of the air, I wonder how much the air temperature really matters. The scant atmosphere on Mars just doesn't have the thermal capacity to be real problem or benefit, I wouldn't think (I could be wrong, of course).
I doubt this would be a problem. The atmosphere is so thin that I suspect its cooling effects are minimal. IIRC, when a test chamber to model Martian dust storms was set up, the biggest hurdle they faced was trying to actually get any dust storms to form - even at hundreds of kph, there was so little atmosphere that no dust was being picked up.
Combine this with Kim Stanley Robinson's* deep hole, and you might have a comparatively easily maintained environment on Mars: dig a big, deep hole for much of the atmosphere to fall into, thereby increasing atmospheric pressure; use this array of mirrors suggestion to heat it up, and you've "solved" a couple of the more pressing problems with trying to live on Mars. With sufficient "natural" pressure, heat, and light, building structures in which to grow things becomes easier. This doesn't really address the lack of water, of course...
*I call this Robinson's idea only because Red Mars is where I encountered it - I have no idea who actually came up with it.
Electrical heating may or may not be the most efficient available, but if it is, it's not for the reason you state. You're ignoring the initial conversion of chemical energy -> thermal energy -> electricity that takes place before the electricity even makes it to your heater (i.e., at the power plant).
Heating your house via chemical energy -> thermal energy drops the last transformation in that sequence, and this would certainly seem to be a possible net increase in efficiency.
Now, if you're on nuclear power, the difference isn't as obvious, certainly, since you can't (or at least, probably shouldn't) heat your home via nuclear energy -> thermal energy. But still, the power plant is using nuclear energy -> thermal energy -> electricity; using chemical energy -> thermal energy in your home may still be more efficient.
You just need to find the right porn. My fiancee and I have been known to watch porn together on occasion, and this has yet to result in masturbation. The trick is to find stuff that caters to women, also - which means there has to be significant psychological eroticism along with the normal visual stimuli.
A fire in the fireplace, some decent wine, a spacious couch, and some artsy porn make for a real nice evening.
I would love to know what they're counting. Are they talking about 1% of IPs? 1% of registered domain names? 1% of Google's cache? I've got a not-so-sneaking suspicion that the result would be significantly different depending on which of those you measured.
And, as other posters have indicated, what they ought to be measuring is the percentage of internet traffic that comprises porn, which would be (to me) a more valid metric for what impact porn has on the internet.
Stuff had damn well better come down the cable, or the thing will deorbit itself. Angular momentum isn't free, and the outbound payload gains it by leeching it off the cable. Downbound payloads, however, give up their angular momentum to the cable. One of the tricks of the whole idea is to pretty much balance mass going up with mass going down, so as to minimize the amount of extra "station keeping" thrust you have to apply to the cable.
Slashdot Mirror
The enemy AI is, generally, pretty damn good.
The AI running your squadmates, however, is significantly less than ideal (Dom, in particular, often does some crazy-ass shit that gets him killed and forces you to run out of cover to revive him).
The game is around ten hours (or so) on low difficulty, and there isn't much presented in the way of choices as you go through. The combat mechanics are interesting enough, though, that I'm very interested in going through it again on higher difficulty settings (something I seldom bother with).
In one sense yes, it is short - but in another, it's simply matching what seems to be a pretty standard length for these titles on consoles. It certainly isn't outlandishly short compared to Prey, CoD2, or Halo 2.
It certainly does leave you wishing it was longer, though, I'll admit that. But I also think that is, in large part, due to how polished and fun the game is.
The visuals are, indeed, stunning. The only things that don't look practically raytraced are splashing liquids - and, unfortunately, the contrast between the blood spray graphics and the rest of the game make the blood spray stand out as disappointing. That being said, I'm unaware of any other title that does such particle effects better. One other caveat, it has some of the "shininess" to it that is characteristic of the UT enginge (IMHO), and which will certainly be familiar to JRPG fans.
At the same time, the allied AI is mind-bogglingly bad. Perhaps this can be offset by issuing squad commands; that's a game mechanic I haven't really exploited at all. But watching Dom race from off screen behind you into your rifle fire to go hand-to-hand with a Grub is a singularly frustrating experience, right up there with following Isabela in Dead Rising.
The story itself isn't real thoroughly developed (it falls short of Halo, and certainly of HL), but the exposition of the setting is fantastic. You really get the grittiness of the world, the futility of the war, and the deep-seated cynicism of the soldiers who have managed to survive this long. It does the best job I've seen since FreeSpace 1 of putting you on the losing side of a war.
Unfortunately, it does suffer from what all console FPSes that I've played suffer from: pretty much complete linearity. It's not that I look to the FPS genre for massive environments to free-form explore, but it doesn't even bother having significant alternate and/or dead-end paths. You miss out on the worry of deciding which way to go, trying to figure out which way is the way into the level, and which way is the way to the powerup. Again, though, that's hardly unique to this game (or even limited entirely to consoles - it's just that the only FPSes I've seen that don't have you on rails are on the PC).
Collecting the COG tags seems a tacked-on afterthought; the game isn't exploration-oriented enough for me to find it entertaining to try to track them all down.
It's worth noting that this is also the only FPS I actually wouldn't rather play with a KB+M setup - but then, I'm not one of the KB+M jihadists that are running around, either. Rather than trying to replicate the KB+M interface on the console as so many shooters do (and always lose in the translation), the game is designed from the ground up with the controller in mind.
But the game does what it does very, very well - in my opinion, this is, without a doubt, the high-water mark for campaign-mode FPS titles on the console, and rivals some of the best campaign-mode FPS titles on the PC (with the caveat that I haven't played Resistance: Fall of Man). If you have any interest at all in single player/co-op FPSes on a console, you're doing yourself a grave disservice if you don't play this game. By the same token, of course, if you have no interest whatsoever in that style of game (if you only play FPSes for multiplayer, for example, or if you don't like the FPS genre at all), then there's nothing here to interest you.
I believe they are, though I'm not a lawyer - but the difference is that letters to the editor are, of necessity, read and vetted by the editorial staff. This means the decision to publish them is an implicit stamp of approval. Posts on the internet are not necessarily even seen by the people nominally "publishing" them.
/., for example, is not analogous to a traditional publisher. Holding slashdot liable for things said in comments would be more analogous to holding the paperboy liable for things said in the paper.
Really, the issue is what "publishing" means. Traditionally, publishing requires the publisher to select and edit stories which would then be pushed out to readers. The internet is different; a site like
My argument would be that the new publishers are the people hitting "submit" on the web form, since they're the ones selecting stories, validating them for truth (I crack me up), editing them for typos, and making the decision to make them public (i.e., "publish" them). Which is what this court decision seems to be in agreement with.
You wouldn't happen to be related to Rufus, would you?
Hyperbolic Chamber, which sounds oddly shaped, but unremarkable
Are you kidding? I made a Hyperbolic Chamber, and it's the greatest thing ever! Its better than a baseball player batting TWO thousand!! No one has ever even imagined anything as phenomenally revolutionary as my Hyperbolic Chamber!!! I can guarantee that my Hperbolic Chamber will solve world hunger and instantiate world peace!!!! It's as hot as the center of the sun, and as cool as intergalactic space!!!!!
Supply and demand. No one wants a wii.
That's simply not a conclusion you can draw from the information the GP presented. The fact that Wii prices are dropping doesn't necessarily indicate anything about demand or supply, it only tells you something about the intersection of quantity demanded and quantity supplied.
By your argument, if Sony shipped and sold 10 million units at launch, so the prices on ebay auctions weren't significantly higher than MSRP, the conclusion would be "no one wants a PS3." When, in fact, selling out 10 million consoles at launch would be an unprecedented statement that 10 million people wanted a PS3.
Really, the only relevant conclusion you can draw from the ebay prices at this point is that quantity demanded for the Wii exceeded quantity supplied for the Wii less than quantity demanded for the PS3 exceeded quantity supplied for the PS3. Which could easily be explained by there being anywhere from 2 to 5 times as many Wiis available at launch as PS3s, depending on who you ask. Drawing any conclusions about the absolute demand for either console at this point based on this information is simply bad thinking.
By which you mean problems with extremely old HDTVs supporting 1080i (not even 720p) being treated as 480p (well duh) and an assortment of minor issues that could be corrected by a firmware update. Does the Wii upscale anything? Do existing XBox 360 games upscale to 1080p?
If, by "extremely old," you mean "around 3 years old," then sure. But that isn't really the issue; every other HD outputting device I know of can up/downscale its signal to whatever you tell it to. Why must the PS3 be different? And yes, the 360 does upscale to 1080p.
Online system is fine and more importantly free
The PS2's online system was also free, does that mean it was comparable to Live? Moreover, the console's only been released (if you can call these quantities a release) for four days. I think we've yet to see how the online system fares. What I've read so far indicates that it leaves something to be desired (such as no background downloading, for example).
3 words. Blame the developers.
Fair enough, but at the end of the day, does it really matter who's to blame when the games you paid $60+ for on the console you paid $580+ for don't look good?
Wasn't it meant to be something like 10 million by now?
Yes, it was. Still, million is a hell of a lot more than even 400,000 - and that's if you even begin to believe that Sony actually shipped that many.
Your second point is equally as absurd. Nobody buys a $600 system and only 1 game to go with it ever.
Except for people who buy the system solely to resell it. But yes, those systems will end up in the hands of a gamer eventually, who will (presumably) buy more than one game for it. But when we're talking about launch numbers, the attach rate at launch is significant.
All that being said, I don't think we've anywhere near enough information to call the PS3 a "disaster" yet. I might be willing to call the launch itself a far cry from ideal, but we won't know if the PS3 is a disaster until it really launches - which is looking like circa March '07.
Inbreeding is rarely a good thing in in the long run
Actually, since it will magnify harmful genes much faster, inbreeding is the best way to optimize a gene pool.
Unless you're one of the culls, of course, then it kind of sucks.
I suggest you look up the meanings of "exaggeration," "poetic license," and "dramatic effect."
This, unfortunately, doesn't answer my most pressing question - when can we expect a restock?
As someone who elected not to stand in line Saturday night, I don't have my Wii yet, and this depresses me. I keep hearing rumors that there should be more in stores before this Friday, but they're all completely unsubstantiated.
So consider this an open letter (or at least, an open comment among dozens to a category-specific post on a blog that comprises an insignificant percentage of Nintendo's fan base) to Nintendo: when will there be more? When can I get my hot little hands on a Wii?
...and the chance for a new EA or Ubisoft to emerge.
Whoa, whoa...back up the wagon train, Hoss, I think we missed a turn - it would be a good thing to have another EA?!?
OK - I'll grant that I'm just as victim to self-reporting errors as the next guy, so you may be right. But by the same token, I don't see any evidence that using the analog sticks as D-pads is the norm, either. In my experience, it isn't. In yours, it is. All I can say is, after playing games like Marble Blast, PGR3, and NFS:MW online, I would be positively stunned if "most" of those people weren't using gradual pressure on the sticks.
This, however, is not a fair sample selection, since analog use in those games is heavily rewarded, while digital use is heavily penalized.
While I can't speak to the 360 (as I don't own any sports titles for it, and therefore have no experience), on the original XBox, similar selection occurred in baseball and golf games. Throwing a pitch through the strike zone, for example, required you to hold the stick short of 100% over. Hitting a ball required you to aim the bat, again by holding the stick short of 100% over. Madden rewarded analog use in precision passing. If your character ever wants to sneak in Oblivion, it requires analog use of the stick.
I mention these specific games because they represent popular titles which all heavily reward analog use of the sticks. I find it a difficult claim to credit without evidence that "most" of the people playing them handicapped themselves by using the sticks as D-pads. Again, I admit that I also don't have evidence that people didn't; it just seems more reasonable to me.
That being said, there are plenty of games that don't discriminate against digital use. Geometry Wars, for example. Wik, DOA4, Enchanted Arms, to name a few that I own. I'm deliberately ignoring, here, FPS's - I could believe that analog use in most FPSes isn't advantageous enough to force it for successful play. Personally, I couldn't get by without it - but the difference is certainly less pronounced than other titles I've mentioned.
All that being said:
My real point is that using the whole controller is better
This may be true; I haven't used either the SixAxis or the Wiimote as yet. I can say (without even anecdotal or experiential evidence, this is grain-of-salt time) that I am more interested in the Wiimote than the Sixaxis for motion sensing: if motion sensing is going to be how I control a game, I don't care for the traditional, two-handed, controller style to do it. Assuming that the thumb controls are still used, I suspect that it will be difficult to accurately use a thumbstick while cranking the whole controller over in my hands. This is why I gradually broke the habit of sympathetic controller movement while playing, I don't relish having to take it back up again. By breaking the controls up into two independent items, the Wiimote + nunchuk addresses this concern.
Of course, the proof is in the pudding, as they say, and it's possible the Sixaxis will make me change my mind if/when I get a chance to use it. But I admit to being dubious. I'm (somewhat guardedly) excited about the Wiimote, though - here's hoping there's a restock this week that I can snag a console out of.
First the number of consoles actually shipped to NA appears to be dramatically lower than promised. Nintendo gave out new estimates for NA shipment plans for up to middle of January and they sound about half of what was promised. Only about 2 million units instead of 4.
Huh? 2,000,000 is, like, six orders of magnitude bigger than 4.
Um...I use the analog nature of the control sticks all the time. It's how you walk instead of run or turn your head slowly to aim in FPSes,it's how you turn smoothly in racers, it's how you control your speed in Marble Blast, and it's how you pan the camera around at the right speed to evaluate the area in 3rd-person games. The analog stick, in fact, is the one thing in FPSes that's better than KB+M; you can move at speeds other than stop/walk/run.
In fact, the only game I can think of that I don't use the analog sticks that way in is DOA4 - that's pretty much just using the stick like a D-pad. Of course, I'd just use the D-pad in that game if the 360s D-pad wasn't so craptacular.
Really, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Ah - I somehow misread your post to mean pretty much the opposite of what it does. My fault, not yours; upon rereading, I have no idea what I was thinking.
Still, for the same reason you ask how much heating it would take to raise the temperature of the air, I wonder how much the air temperature really matters. The scant atmosphere on Mars just doesn't have the thermal capacity to be real problem or benefit, I wouldn't think (I could be wrong, of course).
I doubt this would be a problem. The atmosphere is so thin that I suspect its cooling effects are minimal. IIRC, when a test chamber to model Martian dust storms was set up, the biggest hurdle they faced was trying to actually get any dust storms to form - even at hundreds of kph, there was so little atmosphere that no dust was being picked up.
Combine this with Kim Stanley Robinson's* deep hole, and you might have a comparatively easily maintained environment on Mars: dig a big, deep hole for much of the atmosphere to fall into, thereby increasing atmospheric pressure; use this array of mirrors suggestion to heat it up, and you've "solved" a couple of the more pressing problems with trying to live on Mars. With sufficient "natural" pressure, heat, and light, building structures in which to grow things becomes easier. This doesn't really address the lack of water, of course...
*I call this Robinson's idea only because Red Mars is where I encountered it - I have no idea who actually came up with it.
Electrical heating may or may not be the most efficient available, but if it is, it's not for the reason you state. You're ignoring the initial conversion of chemical energy -> thermal energy -> electricity that takes place before the electricity even makes it to your heater (i.e., at the power plant).
Heating your house via chemical energy -> thermal energy drops the last transformation in that sequence, and this would certainly seem to be a possible net increase in efficiency.
Now, if you're on nuclear power, the difference isn't as obvious, certainly, since you can't (or at least, probably shouldn't) heat your home via nuclear energy -> thermal energy. But still, the power plant is using nuclear energy -> thermal energy -> electricity; using chemical energy -> thermal energy in your home may still be more efficient.
You just need to find the right porn. My fiancee and I have been known to watch porn together on occasion, and this has yet to result in masturbation. The trick is to find stuff that caters to women, also - which means there has to be significant psychological eroticism along with the normal visual stimuli.
A fire in the fireplace, some decent wine, a spacious couch, and some artsy porn make for a real nice evening.
I would love to know what they're counting. Are they talking about 1% of IPs? 1% of registered domain names? 1% of Google's cache? I've got a not-so-sneaking suspicion that the result would be significantly different depending on which of those you measured.
And, as other posters have indicated, what they ought to be measuring is the percentage of internet traffic that comprises porn, which would be (to me) a more valid metric for what impact porn has on the internet.
So basically, your post is just the long way of saying: "I HAVE LOTS OF SEX"
Whoops - my reply to the GP was supposed to go here. I refer you to that comment.
Stuff had damn well better come down the cable, or the thing will deorbit itself. Angular momentum isn't free, and the outbound payload gains it by leeching it off the cable. Downbound payloads, however, give up their angular momentum to the cable. One of the tricks of the whole idea is to pretty much balance mass going up with mass going down, so as to minimize the amount of extra "station keeping" thrust you have to apply to the cable.
...area rapist decries the right to bear arms, saying "the ability of a woman to defend herself is in danger of losing its meaning and value."