The Chinese are in many ways a very proud people. (I suppose that they have a few millennia of encouraging imperial history to lean on.) In their mind they are the best - and if they aren't already the best in some minor area they will soon be, thanks to their economic progress.
That's true of pretty much every country, although the specific reason of economic progress is different in each case. It's definitely true of the US. Reminds me of a great quote by David Sedaris:
"Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are bown between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!'"
Why do you spend so much time and effort coming up with excuses and reasons why you failed on X game but not Y game? Make good games, offer them at a reasonable price, and don't mess up our computers/consoles to run it, and we will give you MONEY for it. Seriously. The other factors like "do demos hurt or help" are trivial at best, you still haven't learned the most important lesson that quality products = sales.
There are plenty of examples of this, it boggles the mind that you consistently look for alternative explanations. "Generic minigame collection 5 didn't sell too well. Maybe it was because people don't like games that have 5s or a multiple of 5 in the title!" No, it was because generic minigames 5 was crap and no one wanted to own it (as opposed to generic minigame collection 4.) THAT'S why you don't have as much money as you wanted.
If you find yourself not having as much money after making a game as you expected, don't immediately jump to blaming things like weather patterns in florida, first determine if it was a good game. Then ask yourself if your expectations were at all reasonable. AFTER that you can ask yourself what went wrong.
I also bought mirror's edge because of the demo. I heard about it in the magazines, but wouldn't have ever invested $60 just because reviewers gave it kudos for being unique. The game sounded like there was a good chance I wouldn't like it.
Castle crashers was the same way, highly rated but I would not have bought it without a taste. It didn't exactly sound like something I would enjoy.
I agree that the game is a great one, but the failure he was talking about was presumably that LBP may not have sold as many copies as they were expecting. This may have had something to do with the PS3 not selling as many as they were expecting. If they had expected to sell LBP to 50% of the PS3 users for a total of... uh, I have no idea what the real numbers are, so lets say 1 million... but only 0.6 million people own PS3s, then it's going to be impossible for LBP to sell their goal no matter how great it is.
(note that that number was just something I made up on the spot, PS3 fanatics feel free to get upset if that number is too low but know I will be laughing at you.)
What I don't understand is that if there are so many damn people in China why they don't just overthrow their government... it wouldn't be difficult.
Well, a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on, at least enough to put up with it. I'm sure a lot of people around the world were probably wondering why Americans didn't overthrow Bush. I personally hated the guy from before day one, but I wouldn't want to overthrow the government even if we were facing 8 more years of Bush. Probably similar in China, they don't agree with everything, but the government does reflect a lot of their values, an overthrow would be damaging, and they don't see a lot of other people willing to rise up.
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Chinese porn stars have a habit of yelling out antigovernment slogans as they finish. Sounds weird to us, but consider some of the foul words they use in American porn, it's not that strange.
It's way past time for patent reform, these patent trolls are way out of hand.
Why is this not happening? Seems like the companies who actually produce stuff have a major economic interest in this, that usually translates into lobbyists and shortly, political action. Seems like the only time big buisness doesn't get it's way on issues like this is when there's another big buisness interest opposing it.
What exactly is keeping patent law open to trolling like this? Big powerful patent troll association I've never heard of? Or is it more that the buisnesses hurt by abuses don't have the imagination to come up with a way to throw the bathwater out while keeping the baby (in this case, defending their own products against patent infringements)? Seems like one possible solution has been tossed around here forever and has just been mentioned: if you don't have a product that uses your patent, you can't defend it.
There are going to be problems with such legislation that will need to be worked out, but that's never stopped them before.
Not only that, but as recent news has taught us, kids these days are so dumb that they'll kill their parents and expect them to respawn.
Clearly there is no way to make smarter kids, and there's a lot more political opposition to banning certain people from having kids than to censoring games, so banning videogames is the only way.
The current study, with its "facts" just makes the only option more difficult.
Well, to be honest I didn't understand any of that paper, but did get the sense that I was seriously misunderstanding what was being proposed, and jumped to conclusions. Thank you exp(pi*sqrt(163)) for helping me see the light.
I have to note that ID proponents spend years behind their "theories" and that doesn't make them any less ridiculous. Again though, I realize now that's comparing apples to oranges, ID is not scientific while holographic hypothesis appears to be.
You know, you've packed a lot of irony into that post. Here you are, taking something you know almost nothing about, and declaring it to be preposterous simply because it's outside your ordinary experience.
You know, I did say quite explicitly I was not a physicist and could well be missing a testable hypothesis. I did not call it preposterous at all. Learn to read before you get offended at nothing.
What's wrong with keanu is that this is not "bill and ted's excellent adventures" and there won't be enough special effects/ crazy bullet time movies to distract from the robot on screen.
This is going to be a bigger travesty than when Alanis Morissete played God in Dogma. Cowboy Bebop has about as many hardcore devoted fans as God does, and so the outrage is going to be just as bad. On top of that, it's a good series, and Keanu is not a good actor.
My predictions as to the rest of the cast:
Jet - Eddie Murphy Ed - Hermione from Harry potter Faye - Brittney Murphy Vicious - James VanderBeek
They give children far less credit than I thought.
I think that's giving children MORE credit than they're due. Kids today are all fat, they wouldn't be able to pull off 1% of the stuff they see in videogames! Stupid too, the guy who shot his parents and blamed halo 3? He couldn't come up with a better defense than "I played a lot of halo?" At least blame a twinkie and the devil!
It sounds like your nutritionist was insane, and I wouldn't put ANY stock in what he said about caffine. First of all, that's just just one guy's opinion, and not someone who studies alzheimers or the effects of caffine. Second, although the coffee probably didn't help, the nutritionist told him not to worry about quitting smoking? You'd be hard pressed to find many professionals who would tell you that. The coffee likely didn't cause the emphysema, the years of smoking did. Lastly, the word of the nutritionist doesn't hold much water against the current study.
The tags really are annoying. They seem to exist only to make knee-jerk statements and stupid jokes. Something dealing in some way with genetics? It will be tagged iamlegend and whatcouldpossiblygowrong within seconds, even if it's not manipulation of DNA but just a study showing a normal state of DNA.
If there is a typo or math error in the summary or title, that will be tagged 5 times. !Important.
Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design? "We can't explain why animals are the way they are because an intelligent creator that we don't understand has made them this way," to me sounds a lot like "We've gotten to the highest possible resolution of the nanoscale universe, because it's a hologram and that's it's highest resolution. It's okay that we can't see what we want to see, because it's not actually there."
I'm not a physicist so I might be missing the real testable hypothesis here, and I don't think the thought should be suppressed just because it's not scientific, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we're departing the realm of science here and moving towards a cop-out.
I don't know much about breathalyzers besides what they do. Is the source code really the limiting factor to you making a competing line of breathalyzers? I would think the sensor that measures the alchohol on your breath would be the most expensive and most difficult to manufacture part of the whole thing. Perhaps wrongly I would have assumed the source code would be the third easiest thing to make, behind the case for the thing and the hose you breathe into. In other words, I would have assumed that the source code would have been nothing too secret, while the actual sensor was what they spent a lot of money developing.
Of course, if the source code were very simple, I guess the company probably would have released it rather than facing the 2 mil fines. Or maybe that's just typical corporate arrogance.
Can someone explain this to me (hopefully keeping in mind that I have no background in coding)?
I agree it's nothing to be concerned about. Consider some of the more ridiculous legislation that has faced state legislatures. There was a story on here a while ago about how Indiana tried to legislate the value of pi. And not to the correct value either. This is less dangerous than, say, the McArthy trials. This is less ridiculous than the ban on contraceptives. This is more rational and less dangerous than the attempts to ban the teaching of evolution that are still going on. Considering South Carolina's role in the Civil war, this is much much better (not saying much.) And as mighty martian said, if it does pass, it will be extremely short lived. This is a story for Idle, not real news.
Don't think it can't get worse. Ask yourself instead, why should you expect it to get any better?
Because I think Bush/Rove/Cheney politics have peaked for a while. I know plenty of people, especially 3rd party supporters and republicans will say Obama and the dems are just as bad*, but I don't and the question was why -I- expect things to get better.
* I'm not going to argue with you, and I assure you I've heard the reasons several times and still don't buy them, but you're free to restate them.
No I'm not. The molehill/mountain was about the question of whether it was corruption or just poor staffing. The 9 billion was not the issue. It's a significant amount of money, but not what I was talking about.
Slashdot Mirror
The Chinese are in many ways a very proud people. (I suppose that they have a few millennia of encouraging imperial history to lean on.) In their mind they are the best - and if they aren't already the best in some minor area they will soon be, thanks to their economic progress.
That's true of pretty much every country, although the specific reason of economic progress is different in each case. It's definitely true of the US. Reminds me of a great quote by David Sedaris:
"Every day we're told that we live in the greatest country on earth. And it's always stated as an undeniable fact: Leos are bown between July 23 and August 22, fitted queen-size sheets measure sixty by eighty inches, and America is the greatest country on earth. Having grown up with this in our ears, it's startling to realize that other countries have nationalistic slogans of their own, none of which are 'We're number two!'"
Second that. I was just going to ask why it was assumed that the chinese were the ones brainwashed instead of us, or more realistically, both.
Dear videogame industry,
Why do you spend so much time and effort coming up with excuses and reasons why you failed on X game but not Y game? Make good games, offer them at a reasonable price, and don't mess up our computers/consoles to run it, and we will give you MONEY for it. Seriously. The other factors like "do demos hurt or help" are trivial at best, you still haven't learned the most important lesson that quality products = sales.
There are plenty of examples of this, it boggles the mind that you consistently look for alternative explanations. "Generic minigame collection 5 didn't sell too well. Maybe it was because people don't like games that have 5s or a multiple of 5 in the title!" No, it was because generic minigames 5 was crap and no one wanted to own it (as opposed to generic minigame collection 4.) THAT'S why you don't have as much money as you wanted.
If you find yourself not having as much money after making a game as you expected, don't immediately jump to blaming things like weather patterns in florida, first determine if it was a good game. Then ask yourself if your expectations were at all reasonable. AFTER that you can ask yourself what went wrong.
I also bought mirror's edge because of the demo. I heard about it in the magazines, but wouldn't have ever invested $60 just because reviewers gave it kudos for being unique. The game sounded like there was a good chance I wouldn't like it.
Castle crashers was the same way, highly rated but I would not have bought it without a taste. It didn't exactly sound like something I would enjoy.
I agree that the game is a great one, but the failure he was talking about was presumably that LBP may not have sold as many copies as they were expecting. This may have had something to do with the PS3 not selling as many as they were expecting. If they had expected to sell LBP to 50% of the PS3 users for a total of... uh, I have no idea what the real numbers are, so lets say 1 million... but only 0.6 million people own PS3s, then it's going to be impossible for LBP to sell their goal no matter how great it is.
(note that that number was just something I made up on the spot, PS3 fanatics feel free to get upset if that number is too low but know I will be laughing at you.)
What I don't understand is that if there are so many damn people in China why they don't just overthrow their government... it wouldn't be difficult.
Well, a lot of chinese people happen to like the chinese government and approve of what's going on, at least enough to put up with it. I'm sure a lot of people around the world were probably wondering why Americans didn't overthrow Bush. I personally hated the guy from before day one, but I wouldn't want to overthrow the government even if we were facing 8 more years of Bush. Probably similar in China, they don't agree with everything, but the government does reflect a lot of their values, an overthrow would be damaging, and they don't see a lot of other people willing to rise up.
It's not like the government holds on to power entirely by force, in other words.
Chinese porn stars have a habit of yelling out antigovernment slogans as they finish. Sounds weird to us, but consider some of the foul words they use in American porn, it's not that strange.
It's way past time for patent reform, these patent trolls are way out of hand.
Why is this not happening? Seems like the companies who actually produce stuff have a major economic interest in this, that usually translates into lobbyists and shortly, political action. Seems like the only time big buisness doesn't get it's way on issues like this is when there's another big buisness interest opposing it.
What exactly is keeping patent law open to trolling like this? Big powerful patent troll association I've never heard of? Or is it more that the buisnesses hurt by abuses don't have the imagination to come up with a way to throw the bathwater out while keeping the baby (in this case, defending their own products against patent infringements)? Seems like one possible solution has been tossed around here forever and has just been mentioned: if you don't have a product that uses your patent, you can't defend it.
There are going to be problems with such legislation that will need to be worked out, but that's never stopped them before.
Not only that, but as recent news has taught us, kids these days are so dumb that they'll kill their parents and expect them to respawn.
Clearly there is no way to make smarter kids, and there's a lot more political opposition to banning certain people from having kids than to censoring games, so banning videogames is the only way.
The current study, with its "facts" just makes the only option more difficult.
Well, to be honest I didn't understand any of that paper, but did get the sense that I was seriously misunderstanding what was being proposed, and jumped to conclusions. Thank you exp(pi*sqrt(163)) for helping me see the light.
I have to note that ID proponents spend years behind their "theories" and that doesn't make them any less ridiculous. Again though, I realize now that's comparing apples to oranges, ID is not scientific while holographic hypothesis appears to be.
You know, you've packed a lot of irony into that post. Here you are, taking something you know almost nothing about, and declaring it to be preposterous simply because it's outside your ordinary experience.
You know, I did say quite explicitly I was not a physicist and could well be missing a testable hypothesis. I did not call it preposterous at all. Learn to read before you get offended at nothing.
What's wrong with keanu is that this is not "bill and ted's excellent adventures" and there won't be enough special effects/ crazy bullet time movies to distract from the robot on screen.
This is going to be a bigger travesty than when Alanis Morissete played God in Dogma. Cowboy Bebop has about as many hardcore devoted fans as God does, and so the outrage is going to be just as bad. On top of that, it's a good series, and Keanu is not a good actor.
My predictions as to the rest of the cast:
Jet - Eddie Murphy
Ed - Hermione from Harry potter
Faye - Brittney Murphy
Vicious - James VanderBeek
They give children far less credit than I thought.
I think that's giving children MORE credit than they're due. Kids today are all fat, they wouldn't be able to pull off 1% of the stuff they see in videogames! Stupid too, the guy who shot his parents and blamed halo 3? He couldn't come up with a better defense than "I played a lot of halo?" At least blame a twinkie and the devil!
It sounds like your nutritionist was insane, and I wouldn't put ANY stock in what he said about caffine. First of all, that's just just one guy's opinion, and not someone who studies alzheimers or the effects of caffine. Second, although the coffee probably didn't help, the nutritionist told him not to worry about quitting smoking? You'd be hard pressed to find many professionals who would tell you that. The coffee likely didn't cause the emphysema, the years of smoking did. Lastly, the word of the nutritionist doesn't hold much water against the current study.
The tags really are annoying. They seem to exist only to make knee-jerk statements and stupid jokes. Something dealing in some way with genetics? It will be tagged iamlegend and whatcouldpossiblygowrong within seconds, even if it's not manipulation of DNA but just a study showing a normal state of DNA.
If there is a typo or math error in the summary or title, that will be tagged 5 times. !Important.
You forgot sex and rock and roll. Oh shit! You're already showing symptoms!
Does this sound to anyone a little like the argument for intelligent design? "We can't explain why animals are the way they are because an intelligent creator that we don't understand has made them this way," to me sounds a lot like "We've gotten to the highest possible resolution of the nanoscale universe, because it's a hologram and that's it's highest resolution. It's okay that we can't see what we want to see, because it's not actually there."
I'm not a physicist so I might be missing the real testable hypothesis here, and I don't think the thought should be suppressed just because it's not scientific, but I think it's important to keep in mind that we're departing the realm of science here and moving towards a cop-out.
What do you mean, could?
The tube blowing is the part that won't definitely be happening.
Tests for that are fairly standard, It's probably not that costly.
Still too rich for my blood.
Yes, but wouldn't that "research" just involve getting drunk and blowing into a tube? Hell, I could do that this weekend!
(Kidding of course, I realize you would have to actually measure BAC to make a standard and do other costly things)
I don't know much about breathalyzers besides what they do. Is the source code really the limiting factor to you making a competing line of breathalyzers? I would think the sensor that measures the alchohol on your breath would be the most expensive and most difficult to manufacture part of the whole thing. Perhaps wrongly I would have assumed the source code would be the third easiest thing to make, behind the case for the thing and the hose you breathe into. In other words, I would have assumed that the source code would have been nothing too secret, while the actual sensor was what they spent a lot of money developing.
Of course, if the source code were very simple, I guess the company probably would have released it rather than facing the 2 mil fines. Or maybe that's just typical corporate arrogance.
Can someone explain this to me (hopefully keeping in mind that I have no background in coding)?
I agree it's nothing to be concerned about. Consider some of the more ridiculous legislation that has faced state legislatures. There was a story on here a while ago about how Indiana tried to legislate the value of pi. And not to the correct value either. This is less dangerous than, say, the McArthy trials. This is less ridiculous than the ban on contraceptives. This is more rational and less dangerous than the attempts to ban the teaching of evolution that are still going on. Considering South Carolina's role in the Civil war, this is much much better (not saying much.) And as mighty martian said, if it does pass, it will be extremely short lived. This is a story for Idle, not real news.
Don't think it can't get worse. Ask yourself instead, why should you expect it to get any better?
Because I think Bush/Rove/Cheney politics have peaked for a while. I know plenty of people, especially 3rd party supporters and republicans will say Obama and the dems are just as bad*, but I don't and the question was why -I- expect things to get better.
* I'm not going to argue with you, and I assure you I've heard the reasons several times and still don't buy them, but you're free to restate them.
No I'm not. The molehill/mountain was about the question of whether it was corruption or just poor staffing. The 9 billion was not the issue. It's a significant amount of money, but not what I was talking about.
Uh, just to clarify that first bit, I've recieved the calls on my cell phone several times now.