I was at one of these seminars, and I've got to say, I was quite offended that someone which worked a total of eight hours on a game wants profit sharing when developers who work thousands of hours aren't getting it.
These guys are getting hundreds of dollars an hour to talk into a mic. Grow up. The people who put the building together aren't getting a share either.
This just isn't true. If you read the developer site, Nintendo has a series of very clear rules about what they will accept in terms of third party publishing. Nintendo does not accept any second party work. At all. Ever. They never have.
Please do not confuse manufacture for publishing. The role of the publisher is to provide advertising, market research, user testing, software quality assurance, to maintain relationships with retailers, provide a distribution chain, to fund production, frequently to partially or wholly fund development, and generally to get in the way of making a fun game. All Nintendo did was to throttle the game rate from individual publishers so that there was no temptation to flood the market with crap, because at the time they remembered how that killed the 2600 and very nearly killed video gaming as a whole (yeah yeah, it would have been reinvented, but the point is that retailers stopped carrying the things for an entire year; read up on why they invented Robbie the Robot.)
Tengen, by the way, was not Nintendo approved. Nintendo tried many times and eventually succeeded in stopping Tengen from manufactury. Those black carts were eventually ruled by US court as pirate carts. Wisdom Tree, who made the Jesus games in the sky-blue carts, had the same problem, but Tengen fought back for longer because they had all that money from stealing Tetris from Elorg.
Camerica had the gold cartridges with the extra connector on the back of the cart.
Yeah, those were just gold plated EA sports extension carts. Ninny manufactured those.
In any event, If Nintendo chose to do so, they could probably force Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) to allow those games to be sold on a Nintendo-branded service. It's surely a clause in the "Seal of Approval" publishing contract.
Uh. No publisher in their right mind would sign a contract like that. You know, the seal of approval isn't actually a contract at all, let alone a publishing contract. The Seal of Approval is just a marketing mechanism. It carries no weight at all, and a Nintendo-licensed game is not actually required to display said seal.
The contract that Nintendo does require people to sign is publically available on their website, and has been for about ten years. It's generally a good idea to look things up before announcing that they surely contain language which gives one party huge control over another. It's human nature to resist those contracts, and I think you have an inflated view of Nintendo's importance in Square Enix' life. Remember, Square Enix has been away from Nintendo as Square for ten years and as Enix for eight; they've only recently returned, and the profits aren't yet a big deal. Square Enix controls all five of the most popular RPG franchises on Earth, the very category in which Nintendo is hurting the worst on both sides of the ocean.
Do you really honestly believe it's Nintendo bending Square over the barrel, and not the other way around?
The bulk of the games I want aren't available anymore. If you're not looking for a major game like Super Mario 3, it can be surprisingly difficult to track something down, even with eBay. Just try nabbing a copy of North and South, Megaman 4, Marble Madness, Ninja Gaiden 3, Adventures of Lolo 2, Kid Icarus, Strider, Bionic Commando, et cetera. Hell, those aren't even the games that were rare back then; I imagine that if you want Deja Vu, Dragon Warrior 4, Paperboy 2, Zoda's Revenge or Taboo, you're probably SOL.
Besides, the rarities often command $50 or more at specialty shops (I'm too angry at those greedy bastards to give them any free advertising by naming them.) If I could get a legal copy of Little Nemo, Super C or Kid Icarus for five bucks, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Hell, I bought the modern Metroid just to get at the perfect port of the original inside.
As far as what they're bringing in right now, um, that'd not actually the case; the licenses are frequently optionned and then not developed. The rate in the game industry is something like 12:1, which seems bad until you learn that Hollywood buys more than 500 scripts for every script which is actually developed. It's just the nature of the business. Believe it or not, the people that run these game studios aren't idiots, and if there was this easy way to make money and build a strong community which would adore you forever for bringing their childhood back, virtually for free, they'd do it. There are dozens of reasons it's not happening, and ignorance isn't on the list.
Do give the industry credit; we caught up to film profits in under 30 years. We do understand money.
As a game developer, I applaud what you're saying. As an old hand gamer, I lament however that many very good games have been lost to the ether as their holding companies dissolved. There are in fact a number of games which many companies want to remake and re-release which we simply cannot, because there is no-one to purchase the IP from. (Contrary to popular belief, this does not make the IP suddenly invalid, and we cannot simply deploy it because we want to; we actually have to wait for the various protections to expire.)
Of course, there is actually a fairly good reason for this, which is as regards the protection of a copyright holder's interests to hold a franchise quietly; just because you don't want to announce that you own something doesn't mean you own it any less, and as silly as that might sound, there's a good economic reason to do that from time to time. Lemmings is a great example: it's a lost property, but the way in which DMA Design nee Psygnosis nee Rockstar morphed over the years leaves it unclear whether anyone actually picked the property up during the transitions. Lemmings would not have sold well after the Lemmings 3D mess, but if someone re-released today, now that L3D is forgotten, we'd all remember the good old days where the worst thing they did was theme the whole game as winter.
By contrast with television, whose flops are much better remembered in popular culture and therefore which make better examples to the mass market, consider Battlestar Galactica, which is currently enjoying critical acclaim, the laudings of a fanbase which thinks it's been clamoring for a return for 25 years, and bucket after bucket after bucket of money - not to mention Edward James Olmos. Still, that's not actually what happened; Battlestar Galactica didn't really get its underground cult status back until about ten years ago, when remakes again became vogue, and SciFi began airing the show to the national market again.
Remember, Galactica 1980 killed Galactica dead. Galactica was already limping along, cancelled at the end of its first season, but that remake... that remake is now cause for cultural amnesia, and for good reason.
Video games are no different. People forget the travesties which were Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero, and start clamoring for a return to the Frobozzes, Palantirs and grues we'd much rather remember from Zork 1-3 and (to some of us) Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Consider what would have happened if someone tried to buy up the defunct Infocom properties right after Nemesis - the people which remembered Infocom for LGP and Planetfall and H2G2 would have shyed away in disgust. But, if you did it today, people might say "oh my god, ZORK."
It makes big money sense. Unfortunately, the ramification of this setup is that a lot of really good pastophenalia can't be legally distributed over iTunes, either because the IP is lost or being hidden.
Me, I emulate what I believe to be abandonware. I'm a game developer; it makes me feel creepy, and I'm certainly toeing a line. OTOH, if it's still a valid license, and I can't buy old editions, I actually go the SOL route. I would/kill/ to be able to play some old NES games which have current resurrections; Ninja Gaiden is a good example, and if it wasn't for the PC version, Prince of Persia would be too. Lord knows I'd love to pick up a copy of Bill Blass' Pinball Construction Kit, but for god only knows what reason, EA maintains control of that license, even though it's been two and a half decades since they've done anything with it (it's one of their first two dozen or so games, IIRC.) So, shit out of luck.
See also: everything Koei made before Playstation, when they forgot how to make games.
As a side note, there isn't nearly as much of a market as you seem to believe. It's been tried many times; they all fail. Remember Sega Channel? The unfortunate truth is that people which play games on nostalgia value simply are n
No, but WinCE is. Oh, and the Mac. (Well, and actually, yeah, DOS-core Winders and NT-core Winders are pretty different. That list may not be six platforms, but it definately is two, and the argument can be legitimately made for three.)
Uh. This has always been the case. In fact, that was one of the big deals about IDE drives, was that new bad sectors forming had become rare enough that the manufacturer's original bad sector table was deemed good enough forever.
If you were older, you'd remember the phrase "low level format," and how awful it was the first time you found out you couldn't do that to an IDE drive.
The 'need' to use the '1000 byte' definition was created by marketing, not computer people.
No, it was needed in order for a rational uniform standard, which is the entire point of the metric system in the first place. That marketers are right and you are wrong doesn't make the actions of the SI a giant advertising plot.
1) Bytes vary in size, whereas bits do not. 2) Not all data streams are byte or even fixed-unit oriented. 3) It's really a remnant from baud vs bps, where baud was once a useful measurement but became less and then not so.
For classic gaming maybe, for portable gaming sure. but you'll never get the price of solid state memory below the cost of optical storage.
You know, it's funny: I remember someone saying exactly the converse of this to me about fifteen years ago, when NeXT adopted the laserdisc as a standard storage mechanism for the Cube, back when ROM was considered cheap.
The older you get, the less likely you are to use the word never, especially in regards to the future.
Anyone remember the console design [slashdot.org] I suggested? Well, if these chips are cheap enough, it may actually make sense to go back to cartriges!
I told you then and I'm telling you now: this is the brand of FROM that the Nintendo DS uses.
Sure there is. Disallow player->player trades and exchanges.
Granted that's a brutal and severe way, but it also works. The real question is, is there a good way which doesn't harm the game as seriously as what I just suggested would?
Many people say no, but then again, many people have said "this can't be done" about dozens of things in gaming; there aren't really very many MMOs (maybe 100 in history,) so there's a lot of room for novel behavior.
This is the kind of thing that makes designers rich. Someone might just find it yet. Hell, I have a system I think would work, and I've been implementing it in a small-scale online game over the last two months, testing the water for a larger deployment.
I don't know how Turbine does it. That's like their 3rd or 4th round of VC funding for the company, and AC1 and AC2 were mediocre at best.
They're obscenely profitable. The money doesn't go to the good games, it goes to the games which sell well. Generally those are one and the same, but in the case of strong franchises sometimes they differ. AD&D is such a case; there are others (witness the Risk family of software atrocities.)
they actually discuss what is wrong with igniting it by a tesla coil (tesla coils channel *huge* amounts of power
Actually, I have. Did you bother to stop and think that a tesla coil's power stops seeming huge when we're talking about 1/10th of a lightning bolt's amperage, which I had previously pointed out to you?
Just because they address something doesn't mean they address it accurately.
Go back, read the whole thing, then come back here.
I could say the same to you.
The facts are that cellulose acetate is *not* very flammable at all (search for cellulose acetate on google - check out the MSDS),
When hit with lightning, some kinds of stone catch fire. Cellulose acetate can be lit with a blowtorch, which is in the neighborhood of 400 to 600 degrees fahrenheit. A lightning bolt is often two orders of magnitude hotter than that.
Look, when exposed to fourty thousand degrees of heat, granite melts. Do you really think that the cellulose acetate might not have even been melted out of the way of the canvas?
Besides, if you know what a material safety data sheet is, you should know that cellulose acetate and cellulose acetate butyrate aren't significantly related. By comparison, remember that both sodium and chlorine are lethal, but together they're not only vital to life, but to the flavor of a potato chip.
Cellulose Acetate Butyrate has a flash point of three hundred ninety five degrees celsius, meaning that without any other flame even present it will spontaneously burst into flame at that temperature. That is less than one percent the temperature of a lightning bolt, approximately the temperature of the air a foot and a half away from a lightning bolt. That means that even in the unlikely event that a lightning bolt went close to the canvas, it would burst into flame.
and 5:1 aluminum to iron oxide, in separate layers, is distinctly *NOT* thermite
5:1 aluminum to iron oxide isn't that far from thermite, which ranges from 1:1 to 4:1.
(thermite burns by stealing oxygen from iron oxide for aluminum combustion).
Which is why when you want it to burn longer you increase the amount of iron, and when you want it to burn hotter you increase the amount of aluminum. I fail to see what point you're trying to make - you could mix it 16:1 in either ratio and it'd still burn a hole through the hood of your car, or set off (even with two tiny flakes, one of which had worked its way through the canvas with its sticky gel coating) the acetate.
The craft was *not* coated in thermite
What I said was that it was coated in something similar. That remains correct, no matter how many words you want to place in capitals framed by asterisks.
and *not* coated by guncotton.
I never said anything like this.
In short, read the whole thing, and then we can actually discuss.
You've ignored nearly everything I had to say, instead focussing on a distorted version of one tiny point I made, ignorant entirely of the remainder. Even given that I've read it, something tells me from the tone of your voice that I could read it thrice more, build my own zeppelin, force a lightning fire, and you still wouldn't be willing to give any credence to anything that chafed against your precious planetarium paper.
Why, he looks at saturn through a telescope; surely he knows more about rocket fuel than a NASA rocket fuel expert.
I suppose I should be a bit more complete in my response. Another way to address the issue of direction in the word facile is to look at its synonyms. You'll notice that they tend to be listed as things like apt, felicitous or ready.
In my prior example of a tic tac toe board, then, the tense becomes obvious: to evaluate a tic tac to board is any of those three things, but the evaluation had of a particular board is else described.
Facile also means [answers.com] : "Arrived at without due care, effort, or examination; superficial". and "Readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth".
This is why one shouldn't attempt to learn words from dictionaries. The tense in which you're interpreting that is incorrect. Evaluating a tic tac toe board is facile, because a decision can be arrived at without care, effort, or significant examination. One particular evaluation of a tic tac toe board, however, cannot be facile. Facile is said of abstract topics, not concrete instances.
Slashdot Mirror
If you'd read the article, you'd know that they'd been done.
Did you really just ask if pornography was profitable, and whether people actually buy porn?
Sometimes it amazes me of what people are unaware.
In all seriousness though, whatstops wifi users from sitting in a car outside? or in the shop nextdoor?
On a well run hotspot, a username and password on your coffee reciept, good for (say) an hour for every five dollars or so.
Did you really just say that $1200 isn't a lot of money for one day's work?
Also, try $200 * 8 again.
So, all "silicon inside" jokes notwithstanding, does that mean that a dual-cpu system would be a Pentium Double D?
I was at one of these seminars, and I've got to say, I was quite offended that someone which worked a total of eight hours on a game wants profit sharing when developers who work thousands of hours aren't getting it.
These guys are getting hundreds of dollars an hour to talk into a mic. Grow up. The people who put the building together aren't getting a share either.
This just isn't true. If you read the developer site, Nintendo has a series of very clear rules about what they will accept in terms of third party publishing. Nintendo does not accept any second party work. At all. Ever. They never have.
Please do not confuse manufacture for publishing. The role of the publisher is to provide advertising, market research, user testing, software quality assurance, to maintain relationships with retailers, provide a distribution chain, to fund production, frequently to partially or wholly fund development, and generally to get in the way of making a fun game. All Nintendo did was to throttle the game rate from individual publishers so that there was no temptation to flood the market with crap, because at the time they remembered how that killed the 2600 and very nearly killed video gaming as a whole (yeah yeah, it would have been reinvented, but the point is that retailers stopped carrying the things for an entire year; read up on why they invented Robbie the Robot.)
Tengen, by the way, was not Nintendo approved. Nintendo tried many times and eventually succeeded in stopping Tengen from manufactury. Those black carts were eventually ruled by US court as pirate carts. Wisdom Tree, who made the Jesus games in the sky-blue carts, had the same problem, but Tengen fought back for longer because they had all that money from stealing Tetris from Elorg.
Camerica had the gold cartridges with the extra connector on the back of the cart.
Yeah, those were just gold plated EA sports extension carts. Ninny manufactured those.
In any event, If Nintendo chose to do so, they could probably force Squaresoft (now Square-Enix) to allow those games to be sold on a Nintendo-branded service. It's surely a clause in the "Seal of Approval" publishing contract.
Uh. No publisher in their right mind would sign a contract like that. You know, the seal of approval isn't actually a contract at all, let alone a publishing contract. The Seal of Approval is just a marketing mechanism. It carries no weight at all, and a Nintendo-licensed game is not actually required to display said seal.
The contract that Nintendo does require people to sign is publically available on their website, and has been for about ten years. It's generally a good idea to look things up before announcing that they surely contain language which gives one party huge control over another. It's human nature to resist those contracts, and I think you have an inflated view of Nintendo's importance in Square Enix' life. Remember, Square Enix has been away from Nintendo as Square for ten years and as Enix for eight; they've only recently returned, and the profits aren't yet a big deal. Square Enix controls all five of the most popular RPG franchises on Earth, the very category in which Nintendo is hurting the worst on both sides of the ocean.
Do you really honestly believe it's Nintendo bending Square over the barrel, and not the other way around?
The bulk of the games I want aren't available anymore. If you're not looking for a major game like Super Mario 3, it can be surprisingly difficult to track something down, even with eBay. Just try nabbing a copy of North and South, Megaman 4, Marble Madness, Ninja Gaiden 3, Adventures of Lolo 2, Kid Icarus, Strider, Bionic Commando, et cetera. Hell, those aren't even the games that were rare back then; I imagine that if you want Deja Vu, Dragon Warrior 4, Paperboy 2, Zoda's Revenge or Taboo, you're probably SOL.
Besides, the rarities often command $50 or more at specialty shops (I'm too angry at those greedy bastards to give them any free advertising by naming them.) If I could get a legal copy of Little Nemo, Super C or Kid Icarus for five bucks, I'd be all over it in a heartbeat. Hell, I bought the modern Metroid just to get at the perfect port of the original inside.
As far as what they're bringing in right now, um, that'd not actually the case; the licenses are frequently optionned and then not developed. The rate in the game industry is something like 12:1, which seems bad until you learn that Hollywood buys more than 500 scripts for every script which is actually developed. It's just the nature of the business. Believe it or not, the people that run these game studios aren't idiots, and if there was this easy way to make money and build a strong community which would adore you forever for bringing their childhood back, virtually for free, they'd do it. There are dozens of reasons it's not happening, and ignorance isn't on the list.
Do give the industry credit; we caught up to film profits in under 30 years. We do understand money.
As a game developer, I applaud what you're saying. As an old hand gamer, I lament however that many very good games have been lost to the ether as their holding companies dissolved. There are in fact a number of games which many companies want to remake and re-release which we simply cannot, because there is no-one to purchase the IP from. (Contrary to popular belief, this does not make the IP suddenly invalid, and we cannot simply deploy it because we want to; we actually have to wait for the various protections to expire.)
... that remake is now cause for cultural amnesia, and for good reason.
/kill/ to be able to play some old NES games which have current resurrections; Ninja Gaiden is a good example, and if it wasn't for the PC version, Prince of Persia would be too. Lord knows I'd love to pick up a copy of Bill Blass' Pinball Construction Kit, but for god only knows what reason, EA maintains control of that license, even though it's been two and a half decades since they've done anything with it (it's one of their first two dozen or so games, IIRC.) So, shit out of luck.
Of course, there is actually a fairly good reason for this, which is as regards the protection of a copyright holder's interests to hold a franchise quietly; just because you don't want to announce that you own something doesn't mean you own it any less, and as silly as that might sound, there's a good economic reason to do that from time to time. Lemmings is a great example: it's a lost property, but the way in which DMA Design nee Psygnosis nee Rockstar morphed over the years leaves it unclear whether anyone actually picked the property up during the transitions. Lemmings would not have sold well after the Lemmings 3D mess, but if someone re-released today, now that L3D is forgotten, we'd all remember the good old days where the worst thing they did was theme the whole game as winter.
By contrast with television, whose flops are much better remembered in popular culture and therefore which make better examples to the mass market, consider Battlestar Galactica, which is currently enjoying critical acclaim, the laudings of a fanbase which thinks it's been clamoring for a return for 25 years, and bucket after bucket after bucket of money - not to mention Edward James Olmos. Still, that's not actually what happened; Battlestar Galactica didn't really get its underground cult status back until about ten years ago, when remakes again became vogue, and SciFi began airing the show to the national market again.
Remember, Galactica 1980 killed Galactica dead. Galactica was already limping along, cancelled at the end of its first season, but that remake
Video games are no different. People forget the travesties which were Return to Zork, Zork Nemesis, Beyond Zork and Zork Zero, and start clamoring for a return to the Frobozzes, Palantirs and grues we'd much rather remember from Zork 1-3 and (to some of us) Zork: Grand Inquisitor. Consider what would have happened if someone tried to buy up the defunct Infocom properties right after Nemesis - the people which remembered Infocom for LGP and Planetfall and H2G2 would have shyed away in disgust. But, if you did it today, people might say "oh my god, ZORK."
It makes big money sense. Unfortunately, the ramification of this setup is that a lot of really good pastophenalia can't be legally distributed over iTunes, either because the IP is lost or being hidden.
Me, I emulate what I believe to be abandonware. I'm a game developer; it makes me feel creepy, and I'm certainly toeing a line. OTOH, if it's still a valid license, and I can't buy old editions, I actually go the SOL route. I would
See also: everything Koei made before Playstation, when they forgot how to make games.
As a side note, there isn't nearly as much of a market as you seem to believe. It's been tried many times; they all fail. Remember Sega Channel? The unfortunate truth is that people which play games on nostalgia value simply are n
No, but WinCE is. Oh, and the Mac. (Well, and actually, yeah, DOS-core Winders and NT-core Winders are pretty different. That list may not be six platforms, but it definately is two, and the argument can be legitimately made for three.)
Uh. This has always been the case. In fact, that was one of the big deals about IDE drives, was that new bad sectors forming had become rare enough that the manufacturer's original bad sector table was deemed good enough forever.
If you were older, you'd remember the phrase "low level format," and how awful it was the first time you found out you couldn't do that to an IDE drive.
New to 1971, perhaps.
The 'need' to use the '1000 byte' definition was created by marketing, not computer people.
No, it was needed in order for a rational uniform standard, which is the entire point of the metric system in the first place. That marketers are right and you are wrong doesn't make the actions of the SI a giant advertising plot.
1 billion bytes equals 1 gigabyte - since when?
1971. Look up a mebibyte.
1) Bytes vary in size, whereas bits do not.
2) Not all data streams are byte or even fixed-unit oriented.
3) It's really a remnant from baud vs bps, where baud was once a useful measurement but became less and then not so.
Yeah, um, this is what Nintendo currently uses in the DS, actually.
For classic gaming maybe, for portable gaming sure. but you'll never get the price of solid state memory below the cost of optical storage.
You know, it's funny: I remember someone saying exactly the converse of this to me about fifteen years ago, when NeXT adopted the laserdisc as a standard storage mechanism for the Cube, back when ROM was considered cheap.
The older you get, the less likely you are to use the word never, especially in regards to the future.
Anyone remember the console design [slashdot.org] I suggested? Well, if these chips are cheap enough, it may actually make sense to go back to cartriges!
I told you then and I'm telling you now: this is the brand of FROM that the Nintendo DS uses.
Sure there is. Disallow player->player trades and exchanges.
Granted that's a brutal and severe way, but it also works. The real question is, is there a good way which doesn't harm the game as seriously as what I just suggested would?
Many people say no, but then again, many people have said "this can't be done" about dozens of things in gaming; there aren't really very many MMOs (maybe 100 in history,) so there's a lot of room for novel behavior.
This is the kind of thing that makes designers rich. Someone might just find it yet. Hell, I have a system I think would work, and I've been implementing it in a small-scale online game over the last two months, testing the water for a larger deployment.
That's not what irony means.
I don't know how Turbine does it. That's like their 3rd or 4th round of VC funding for the company, and AC1 and AC2 were mediocre at best.
They're obscenely profitable. The money doesn't go to the good games, it goes to the games which sell well. Generally those are one and the same, but in the case of strong franchises sometimes they differ. AD&D is such a case; there are others (witness the Risk family of software atrocities.)
they actually discuss what is wrong with igniting it by a tesla coil (tesla coils channel *huge* amounts of power
Actually, I have. Did you bother to stop and think that a tesla coil's power stops seeming huge when we're talking about 1/10th of a lightning bolt's amperage, which I had previously pointed out to you?
Just because they address something doesn't mean they address it accurately.
Go back, read the whole thing, then come back here.
I could say the same to you.
The facts are that cellulose acetate is *not* very flammable at all (search for cellulose acetate on google - check out the MSDS),
When hit with lightning, some kinds of stone catch fire. Cellulose acetate can be lit with a blowtorch, which is in the neighborhood of 400 to 600 degrees fahrenheit. A lightning bolt is often two orders of magnitude hotter than that.
Look, when exposed to fourty thousand degrees of heat, granite melts. Do you really think that the cellulose acetate might not have even been melted out of the way of the canvas?
Besides, if you know what a material safety data sheet is, you should know that cellulose acetate and cellulose acetate butyrate aren't significantly related. By comparison, remember that both sodium and chlorine are lethal, but together they're not only vital to life, but to the flavor of a potato chip.
Cellulose Acetate Butyrate has a flash point of three hundred ninety five degrees celsius, meaning that without any other flame even present it will spontaneously burst into flame at that temperature. That is less than one percent the temperature of a lightning bolt, approximately the temperature of the air a foot and a half away from a lightning bolt. That means that even in the unlikely event that a lightning bolt went close to the canvas, it would burst into flame.
and 5:1 aluminum to iron oxide, in separate layers, is distinctly *NOT* thermite
5:1 aluminum to iron oxide isn't that far from thermite, which ranges from 1:1 to 4:1.
(thermite burns by stealing oxygen from iron oxide for aluminum combustion).
Which is why when you want it to burn longer you increase the amount of iron, and when you want it to burn hotter you increase the amount of aluminum. I fail to see what point you're trying to make - you could mix it 16:1 in either ratio and it'd still burn a hole through the hood of your car, or set off (even with two tiny flakes, one of which had worked its way through the canvas with its sticky gel coating) the acetate.
The craft was *not* coated in thermite
What I said was that it was coated in something similar. That remains correct, no matter how many words you want to place in capitals framed by asterisks.
and *not* coated by guncotton.
I never said anything like this.
In short, read the whole thing, and then we can actually discuss.
You've ignored nearly everything I had to say, instead focussing on a distorted version of one tiny point I made, ignorant entirely of the remainder. Even given that I've read it, something tells me from the tone of your voice that I could read it thrice more, build my own zeppelin, force a lightning fire, and you still wouldn't be willing to give any credence to anything that chafed against your precious planetarium paper.
Why, he looks at saturn through a telescope; surely he knows more about rocket fuel than a NASA rocket fuel expert.
Aw, someone's angry that his attempt at correcting someone else failed? (sniffle)
I bet you'll be even angrier when you find out what Hesiod's name actually means.
I suppose I should be a bit more complete in my response. Another way to address the issue of direction in the word facile is to look at its synonyms. You'll notice that they tend to be listed as things like apt, felicitous or ready.
In my prior example of a tic tac toe board, then, the tense becomes obvious: to evaluate a tic tac to board is any of those three things, but the evaluation had of a particular board is else described.
Facile also means [answers.com] : "Arrived at without due care, effort, or examination; superficial". and "Readily manifested, together with an aura of insincerity and lack of depth".
This is why one shouldn't attempt to learn words from dictionaries. The tense in which you're interpreting that is incorrect. Evaluating a tic tac toe board is facile, because a decision can be arrived at without care, effort, or significant examination. One particular evaluation of a tic tac toe board, however, cannot be facile. Facile is said of abstract topics, not concrete instances.