Oh, and forgot to mention, by trying to strike it down, according to Congress, they'll be showing the rampant abuse of power that needs to be taken away by this law...
"Of course they're trying to strike it down!" fumes a congresscritter. "They're just trying to hold on to their power!"
What's wrong with mandatory body cavity searches? Unless you are participating in some criminal activity violating federal rules of contraband and controlled substances, how does this affect you?
Well, it's called 'innocent until proven guilty,' 'due process,' and 'unreasonable search and seizure.'
Not that America cares all that much about the Constitution; just wait until that bill passes which allows Congress to supercede the SCOTUS...
Checks and balances; here's the check, now my balance is bigger. Here's your new law, sir, would you like freedom fries with that?
Aye, Atari wasn't the sole responsible; it might be more accurate to say that the Atari 2600 was almost singlehandedly.....
As to Nintendo, I have no problem with their business tactics; people who played ball with them made money hand over fist. It was a relatively unique time; people were still leery about bundling hardware with software, from the IBM lawsuits.
Nevertheless, Nintendo had some valid points; not flooding the market, keeping the quality level up, and so on. You'll notice, however, that they wern't able to wield their 'monopoly power' to keep Sega, and later Sony, out of the picture, and now Nintendo is just another player.
The system you may or may not like, but most of the World Books are works of genius; most are also designed that the background and creative material are sharpely separated from the GURPS underpinnings, allowing for easy adaptation to other game systems.
Of course, it's the flexibility inherant in the GURPS system that allows them to put out a Conan fantasy game, a Time Travelling book, a 'Robots Took Over The Earth' book, and a book about Bunnies, all on the same shelf.
For those who don't get the reference, Atari single-handledly destroyed the home video game market during this time, mainly by glutting the market with crappy games (E.T. for example; several million unsold cartridges were dumped in a landfill. Pac Man had more cartridges manufactured than there were consoles sold.
The home video market managed to stay destroyed until Nintendo forced their way onto the scene; they were very careful to avoid the sins of the father, so to speak, by retaining the right to not allow crappy games, limiting the amount of titles a licensee could put out in a year, and other such practices.
Yeah, so, like, we're cruising along, and, like, this Romulan Warbird thingy, like, decloaks, and I'm like 'Raise shields!' and the computer goes 'boop boop boop' and the shields didn't raise. Bummer.
DESCRIPTION: Marine Doom is a project of the Marine Corps Modeling and Simulation Management Office (MCMSMO). MCMSMO adapted the game Doom II for training four-man fire teams. The game teaches concepts such as mutual fire team support, protection of the automatic rifleman, proper sequencing of an attack, ammunition discipline and succession of command.
One day, some mates from my CS course and I went paintballing, just for kicks. None of us had gone. One girl brought along her boyfriend, who was formerly of the Austrailian SAS.
It was interesting to note that he either always died first (generally while trying to get the rest of us into some sembalance of a good formation and cover) or died last (generally after singlehandledly annihilating most of the other team.)
It was also interesting to note that we throughly trounced the squadron of 'weekend warriors' who played every week, had their own equipment, and thought themselves pretty bad-assed.
Playing quake isn't going to teach you how to put steel on target. What it IS going to teach you, however, is concepts like fast motion detection and target discrimination.
Are the skills transferable? Yes. It's just a question of which skills.
The US Air Force noted, in the 80s, that recruits who were heavy Nintendo players did 'disproportionately well' in flight training.
Did Super Mario teach them how to fly? No. But it taught them how to use joysticks and what not, rapid response to incoming visual stimuli, and all that crap.
A good baseball pitcher probably doesn't know crap about theoretical Newtonian physics, calculus, 3d geometry and trig, but he knows the practial aspects of all of those, even if he doesn't realize it.
(everybody chimes in, a bored monotone)Crap hardware.
And how do consoles aviod this problem?
(again, a bored chorus)Standardized hardware.
And what's the difference between a PC running Windows XP, some crap video card, crap sound card, and strange Taiwanese motherboard, and Linux distro running the same thing?
(bored chorus)When it comes to games, nothing really.
Nah, it was a wire getting exposed and shorting the electrical system, every so often.
The next time it rained, it was enough to actually trigger the onboard computer.
Re:Buy Transformers DVD
on
Retro Vision
·
· Score: 1
As it was once pointed out, in GI Joe, a soldier standinging still in the middle of an empty field was neigh invulnerable, but if you're in any sort of vehicle, you're getting shot down. Still, you can bail out faster than the explosion can touch you.
I had a problem with my '99 cavalier; the engine would drop it's RPMs by several hundred every once in a while; almost, but not quite, enough to stall.
Took it in to the dealer, they said 'is the check engine light on?'
'Nope,' I replied, 'but here's what it's doing...'
'Sorry,' came the reply. 'If the check light's not on, there's no diagnostic codes for us to look up. We can't fix it unless we know what's wrong.'
And there was nothing more fun then rescuing the first relative, digging up the treasure, finding the 2nd relative, digging up YET ANOTHER inca treasure, and so on....
The other thing is that filename isn't a good enough piece of data to sue on; shades of 'cease and desist sharing Microsoft Office, in the file OpenOffice_Win32_Binaries.zip on your FTP server.'
This goes both ways. No hugging, kissing, touching, terms of endearment. During business hours, you don't discuss the family life (with common sense exceptions) and during family hours, don't discuss business.
That is one of the reasons why the magazine Nintendo Power and the Nintendo License was so mind-boggingly important. It was an assurance of quality...
Nintendo did two interesting things here. One, they declared that they were the only source for carts. You wanted a Nintendo cart, they had to be the ones manufacturing it.
Spin-off of this was also that carts are expensive to make, and they take a while; do you order a few, and risk it selling out, and lose the momentum while it takes three months to make a new batch? Or order a lot and risk having a bunch of unsold merch on your hands?
The second thing they did was limit companies to a few titles a year; five per company, I think, was the number. This forced the companies to make damn sure they released good product.
Compare this to the Playstation model; several hundred thousand CDs could be pressed in a weekend for pennies apieces, and any old pile of crap you can think of, you can shovel onto a PS disc.
Sony, however, picked the right time to move to a non cart based format, as the N64 vs PS1 slaughter showed.
Neat trivia fact: the PS1 was originally supposed to be a addon to the SNES.
This scheme would more than double the traffic of legitimate mail,
Wuh?
220 WELCOME TO MY MAIL SERVER
EHLO mydomain.com
220 blah blah capabilities
MAIL FROM: somebody@mydomain.com
451 Sorry, I don't know you. Try again, though; I like persistance.
[socket closed]
Any of the Citybuilder games from Impressions might fit the bill; Caesar 3 (Ancient Rome, obviously), Pharoah/Cleopatra (Ancient Egypt), Zeus/Poseidon (Mythic Greece), and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (Ancient China).
Yes, there's war, but it's bloodless in depiction.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, and forgot to mention, by trying to strike it down, according to Congress, they'll be showing the rampant abuse of power that needs to be taken away by this law...
"Of course they're trying to strike it down!" fumes a congresscritter. "They're just trying to hold on to their power!"
Aye. Supposed Time Traveller John Titor's predictions about a US Civil War in 2005 don't look so far fetched....
What's wrong with mandatory body cavity searches? Unless you are participating in some criminal activity violating federal rules of contraband and controlled substances, how does this affect you?
Well, it's called 'innocent until proven guilty,' 'due process,' and 'unreasonable search and seizure.'
Not that America cares all that much about the Constitution; just wait until that bill passes which allows Congress to supercede the SCOTUS...
Checks and balances; here's the check, now my balance is bigger. Here's your new law, sir, would you like freedom fries with that?
Aye, Atari wasn't the sole responsible; it might be more accurate to say that the Atari 2600 was almost singlehandedly.....
As to Nintendo, I have no problem with their business tactics; people who played ball with them made money hand over fist. It was a relatively unique time; people were still leery about bundling hardware with software, from the IBM lawsuits.
Nevertheless, Nintendo had some valid points; not flooding the market, keeping the quality level up, and so on. You'll notice, however, that they wern't able to wield their 'monopoly power' to keep Sega, and later Sony, out of the picture, and now Nintendo is just another player.
The system you may or may not like, but most of the World Books are works of genius; most are also designed that the background and creative material are sharpely separated from the GURPS underpinnings, allowing for easy adaptation to other game systems.
Of course, it's the flexibility inherant in the GURPS system that allows them to put out a Conan fantasy game, a Time Travelling book, a 'Robots Took Over The Earth' book, and a book about Bunnies, all on the same shelf.
For those who don't get the reference, Atari single-handledly destroyed the home video game market during this time, mainly by glutting the market with crappy games (E.T. for example; several million unsold cartridges were dumped in a landfill. Pac Man had more cartridges manufactured than there were consoles sold.
The home video market managed to stay destroyed until Nintendo forced their way onto the scene; they were very careful to avoid the sins of the father, so to speak, by retaining the right to not allow crappy games, limiting the amount of titles a licensee could put out in a year, and other such practices.
Yeah, it's a good thing we're not talking about Jupiter, but instead, about one of Jupiter's many satellites.
Or the kind of person who would try to ban that most dangerous of substances, Dihydrogen Monoxide.
Yeah, so, like, we're cruising along, and, like, this Romulan Warbird thingy, like, decloaks, and I'm like 'Raise shields!' and the computer goes 'boop boop boop' and the shields didn't raise. Bummer.
They wern't learning to shoot, they were learning teamwork and not to get shot.
From the army.mil website:
One day, some mates from my CS course and I went paintballing, just for kicks. None of us had gone. One girl brought along her boyfriend, who was formerly of the Austrailian SAS.
It was interesting to note that he either always died first (generally while trying to get the rest of us into some sembalance of a good formation and cover) or died last (generally after singlehandledly annihilating most of the other team.)
It was also interesting to note that we throughly trounced the squadron of 'weekend warriors' who played every week, had their own equipment, and thought themselves pretty bad-assed.
Playing quake isn't going to teach you how to put steel on target. What it IS going to teach you, however, is concepts like fast motion detection and target discrimination.
Are the skills transferable? Yes. It's just a question of which skills.
The US Air Force noted, in the 80s, that recruits who were heavy Nintendo players did 'disproportionately well' in flight training.
Did Super Mario teach them how to fly? No. But it taught them how to use joysticks and what not, rapid response to incoming visual stimuli, and all that crap.
A good baseball pitcher probably doesn't know crap about theoretical Newtonian physics, calculus, 3d geometry and trig, but he knows the practial aspects of all of those, even if he doesn't realize it.
What's the problem with PCs?
(everybody chimes in, a bored monotone)Crap hardware.
And how do consoles aviod this problem?
(again, a bored chorus)Standardized hardware.
And what's the difference between a PC running Windows XP, some crap video card, crap sound card, and strange Taiwanese motherboard, and Linux distro running the same thing?
(bored chorus)When it comes to games, nothing really.
Nah, it was a wire getting exposed and shorting the electrical system, every so often.
The next time it rained, it was enough to actually trigger the onboard computer.
As it was once pointed out, in GI Joe, a soldier standinging still in the middle of an empty field was neigh invulnerable, but if you're in any sort of vehicle, you're getting shot down. Still, you can bail out faster than the explosion can touch you.
I had a problem with my '99 cavalier; the engine would drop it's RPMs by several hundred every once in a while; almost, but not quite, enough to stall.
Took it in to the dealer, they said 'is the check engine light on?'
'Nope,' I replied, 'but here's what it's doing...'
'Sorry,' came the reply. 'If the check light's not on, there's no diagnostic codes for us to look up. We can't fix it unless we know what's wrong.'
But will it have a huge honkin manual, which is more historical primer than anything else, in the classic Microprose style?
And there was nothing more fun then rescuing the first relative, digging up the treasure, finding the 2nd relative, digging up YET ANOTHER inca treasure, and so on....
The other thing is that filename isn't a good enough piece of data to sue on; shades of 'cease and desist sharing Microsoft Office, in the file OpenOffice_Win32_Binaries.zip on your FTP server.'
This goes both ways. No hugging, kissing, touching, terms of endearment. During business hours, you don't discuss the family life (with common sense exceptions) and during family hours, don't discuss business.
The usual trick here is to run a new length of string along with the wires you're pulling.
Nintendo did two interesting things here. One, they declared that they were the only source for carts. You wanted a Nintendo cart, they had to be the ones manufacturing it.
Spin-off of this was also that carts are expensive to make, and they take a while; do you order a few, and risk it selling out, and lose the momentum while it takes three months to make a new batch? Or order a lot and risk having a bunch of unsold merch on your hands?
The second thing they did was limit companies to a few titles a year; five per company, I think, was the number. This forced the companies to make damn sure they released good product.
Compare this to the Playstation model; several hundred thousand CDs could be pressed in a weekend for pennies apieces, and any old pile of crap you can think of, you can shovel onto a PS disc.
Sony, however, picked the right time to move to a non cart based format, as the N64 vs PS1 slaughter showed.
Neat trivia fact: the PS1 was originally supposed to be a addon to the SNES.
Wuh?
220 WELCOME TO MY MAIL SERVER
EHLO mydomain.com
220 blah blah capabilities
MAIL FROM: somebody@mydomain.com
451 Sorry, I don't know you. Try again, though; I like persistance.
[socket closed]
Any of the Citybuilder games from Impressions might fit the bill; Caesar 3 (Ancient Rome, obviously), Pharoah/Cleopatra (Ancient Egypt), Zeus/Poseidon (Mythic Greece), and Emperor: Rise of the Middle Kingdom (Ancient China).
Yes, there's war, but it's bloodless in depiction.
If you want people to be waiting five minutes, sure. But this is the INTERNET! People expect things NOW NOW NOW!