Sure, it's interesting that there are large, organized networks that employ legions of people willing to spend their days harvesting gold, but what really strikes me is the degree to which gold farmers manipulate a server's entire economy.
I won't disagree with your post, but it's interesting to note that zenith is derived from an Arabic term. Maybe the idea came from this mix of peoples, but the it came to the west packaged in Arabic. Here's the OED etymology entry:
[a. OF. cenit(h (F. zénith) or med.L. cenit (cf. It. zenit, Sp. cenit, Pg. zenith, G. zenith, etc.), obscurely ad. Arab.samt, in samt ar-raslit. way or path over the head (samt way, al the, ras head);...]
I love BBC's entertainment fare, but I just can't stomach its left-of-New Labour newscasts. The Beeb has serious issues with systemic bias and it seems unfair that the entire populace is forced to pay for the relentless promotion of an ideology that most Britons don't subscribe to. Were I a Conservative or a euroskeptic of some stripe, I'd certainly be tired of being taxed in order to hear incessantly about how great Charles Kennedy and the EU are.
Couldn't there be a Third Way (tm) whereby one could opt out of BBC News but keep the rest of the programming? Or maybe they could create separate news broadcasts for each of the UK's major political blocs?
JPL's servers were overwhelmed the day Huygens took the plunge into Titan. Yes, it's a different order of magnitude than a Slashdotting, but even NASA has limits (in terms of serving up webpages).
for the role of burned-out Luke Skywalker. They can build the whole trilogy around him as antagonist!
Carrie Fisher can play the harpy Leia. Billy Dee Williams and Harrison Ford will make great smugglers in dotage. This could be really dark. . .
Not an adjunct to Quicksilver
on
The Unknown Newton
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Neal Stephenson fans may find this article a nice adjunct to Quicksilver.
Quicksilver didn't cover Newton's broader--today we'd call them non-scientific--interests as deeply as The System of the World most likely will. Half-cocked Jack versus Newton The Exchequer ought to be good!
The briny deep is littered with wrecks of ships whose crews starved to death in the doldrums.
When Magellan ran out of food in the middle of the Pacific, his crew--which surely had some fishing expertise given how many of the sailors came from fishing villages--could not pull a single fish from the waters. Becalmed, they were reduced to eating leather -- they would cut up their shoes, bits of rigging, etc into strips, boil them, and tried to get it down.
By time Magellan crossed the Pacific he'd lost 80% of his crew to scurvy and starvation.
Nonsense. Their Left-of-New-Labor editorial lines are strikingly similar. And the BBC has for years recruited almost exclusively from the 'Grauniad'. In American parlance, think of the Guardian as the BBC's farm team.
Granted there's certainly envy of the BBC at the Guardian, but there isn't the ideological opposition to everything the Beeb represents that one finds at the Murdoch papers.
If it's off-world then it's not GEOlogy. Perhaps "areology" would best describe what NASA's doing through those rovers?
Don't worry, plenty of spacefaring species make that mistake when they're taking their first steps. . . though you should be warned that the Martians are rather touchy about semantics.
There was a good discussion, replete with examples, about Chomsky putting ideology ahead of fact on a smaller (but very good) weblog called kuro5hin.org. Here's the link:
... were in the '80s for Richard Garriott and Ultima. That's when games were about gameplay, gamers needed graphpaper, and people whose names were on the boxes still coded. We may scoff at him now, but Lord British was a big deal in those days.
Picture this: it's a Saturday morning in the late '80s and 300 restless geeks are packed into a Georgetown University auditorium waiting with baited breath for Lord British himself to unveil the Ultima V beta.
We were the GameSIG of the Washington Apple Pi, and Richard Garriott was our guest and our friend. He wasn't just showing us a preview of Ultima V, he was showing it to us before anyone else got to see it.
Already, Ultima IV had blown our minds, and we all wanted to see where the series went next. For many of us who were at an impressionable age (I was 11), the Ultima series was a big part of our intellectual lives. Lord British was our guardian in the game and our hero in life.
When Garriott stepped onto the stage wearing armor and carrying a sword and shield, we just went nuts. Better still, he came bearing gifts; he reached into his satchel and threw handfuls of silvery ankhs out to the roaring crowd. I caught one and still treasure it.
Then the lights dimmed and we waited for the moment of truth. Lord British put the 5.25" diskettes into the Apple IIGS (256K). He fiddled with the projection system a bit and them blam: Ultima V blasted onto the screen.
The graphics and sound just blew us away, and Garriott explained each improvement as he took us through an hour-long tour of the game. You could see (and hear!) grass sway in the wind, waves rolled, trees blocked light while windows let it in... And the music!!!
The climax came when he showed us the lighthouse. You could see and hear the surf pounding on the rocks, while a beam of light swept over land and sea, just like a real lighthouse. And all of this before the backdrop of convincingly forboding music. Inside the lighthouse awaited a surprise: the keeper was none other than the don of our GameSIG, Ron Wartow. Somebody we knew was in Ultima V!
After talking to the Wartow character and getting him to crack a few jokes, Garriott looked up at us and then paused for a full ten seconds. Breaking the silence, he asked: "Well, shall we attack Ron?" We yelled back an affirmative reply. 8 turns later, Ron was a bloody pulp and our party was 5 gold and a ham sandwich richer. We were in stitches... the kid next me laughed so hard he puked through his nose.
On his way out, Lord British gave us cloth maps and whispered to us about Easter eggs he'd sprinkled throughout the series. We were on cloud nine, and I was ready to devote my life to becoming a pixelated Avatar. I wanted to grow up to be Lord British. I wanted to make games, I wanted to be in them, and I wanted to live them.
Sadly, I never got to play Ultima V. The game was delayed and the 'rents wouldn't spring for the IIGS. By time I had the resources to play the game, I'd moved onto the PC and was hooked on a series of games by a guy named Sid Meier, but that's another story for another day...
Are Americans supposed to envy this "juggernaut" or is it the product of somebody covetingly looking at somebody else's manned space program?
I kid because I love... the acronym for the American missile shield will probably be just a couple of letters away from spelling "arrogance". It's all very unfortunate...
Good post, ins, but I want to pick one little nit.
coup-de-gras
It's coup-de-grace. "Gras" means fatty or oily in French.
I'm sick of people misusing coup-de-grace. It means "stroke of mercy" and the term was originally associated with executions. For instance, in a firing squad execution the riflemen shoot the victim and then someone finishes off the victim with a coup-de-grace, that is, a pistol shot to the head. So it's not just a fatal blow, it's a humane act too.
The same people who are whining that America is infringing on their rights are now whining that they cannot change the outcome of the US election. I guess it's not the infringement on rights that upsets people but rather whose rights are being jeopardized.
This is bad for Europeans, I think. If they want to us to pay attention to their claims that we are hypocrites it would really help if they would stop being so hypocritical themselves.
In Islam the parents are held responsible for the care and education of their children more so than in Christianity or Judaism.
You have told an outrageous lie.
Christian and Jewish holy books both declare that a parent's number one priority (after obeying God, that is) is the care and upbringing of his/her children. I don't know how one can be held any more responsible than that...
In the Old Testament of the Bible, God judged Eli for his failure to discipline his children:
For I have told him that I will judge his house for ever for the iniquity which he knoweth; because his sons made themselves vile, and he restrained them not. (I Samuel 3:13)
Religious Christians and Jews in the USA are obsessed with "family values". They employ the same rhetoric as Muslims do about removing vice from society.
But know this, infringing on others' rights to clean up a society, whether that society is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, only leads to bad ends. If you look at history, organized religions, fearing sin, have been liberty's chief enemy. When it comes to government, the agnostics and atheists are the ones I want in charge.
Think about that next time you get worked up about the government censoring the amount of blood in a game. Seems kinda insignificant relative to some places.
Yes, the US government censorship of violent games seems mild compared to Malaysia's banning of entire arcades. But that doesn't make American censorship right. Just because someone is relatively worse doesn't make the situation in the US good.
Being complacent about US censorship because it's worse somewhere else is a sure-fire way to end up like that somewhere else in a hurry.
That said, comparing US censorship to Malaysian censorship is unfair. The US has a tradition of free speech and Malaysia does not. Malaysia bans all sorts of stuff:
Homosexuality will land you in prison.
Anything that denigrates Islam or Islamic interests is banned.
Schindler's List was banned for this reason because it "showed Jews in too good a light" and would "arouse sympathy for Zionism."
Anything racist is banned
No pornography allowed
No guns
You'd better not speak out against the government, or else.
I'm pretty sure they'd ban Slashdot if it were based there.
It's not as if Muslims are going to be the next ones there and then decide that since that history was made by a non-muslim and therefore contradicts Allah or something and decide to burn it like the library of Alexandria.
To be fair to the Muslims, they only burned down half of the Library of Alexandria. The other half was burned down two centuries earlier (c. 390 AD) by a Chrisitian mob.
We live in good times. Here's what happened to people interested in science and learning in the 4th century:
The last scientist who worked in the Library [of Alexandria] was a mathematician, astronomer, physicist and the head of the Neoplatonic school of philosophy-an extraordinary range of accomplishments for any individual in any age. Her name was Hypatia. She was born in Alexandria in 370 AD. At a time when women had few options, and were treated as property, Hypatia moved freely and unselfconsciously through traditional male domains. By all accounts she was a great beauty. She had many suitors but rejected all offers of marriage. The Alexandria of Hypatia's time-by then long under Roman rule-was a City under grave strain. Slavery had sapped classical civilization of its vitality. The growing Christian Church was consolidating its power and attempting to eradicate pagan influence and culture. Hypatia stood at the epicenter of these mighty social forces. Cyril, the Archbishop of Alexandria, despised her because of her close friendship with the Roman governor, and because she was a symbol of learning and science, which were largely identified by the early Church with paganism. In great personal danger, she continued to teach and publish, until, in the year 415 A.D., on her way to work she was set upon by a fanatical mob of Cyril's parishioners. They dragged her from her chariot, tore off her clothes, and armed with abalone shells, flayed her flesh from her bones. Her remains were burned, her works obliterated, her name forgotten. Cyril was made a saint.
And what precisely does America's motive for entering the Gulf War have to do with the argument that the US doesn't need a defense shield?
Boy, you believed everything said on CNN or what?
I don't recall CNN ever stating that Iraq threatened the US with missiles; though the London Times and plenty of other sensationalist European papers made exactly such claims.
Saying that Iraq was threatening your country is a paranoid scheme, the same kind that has lead many administrations to use it as a way to justify
not_so_nice actions.
So the UNSCOM thing was paranoid scheme, huh? They proved that Iraq was making a concerted effort to stockpile chemical weapons and to develop and/or purchase nuclear arms and delivery systems. If you believe that there are peacefuly purposes for such weapons or that no such weapons exist, then I invite you to apply for Tariq Aziz's job.
And, for fuck's sake, stop thinking Europeans are a bunch of condescendant colonialists.
I will... just as soon as you stop acting like condescending colonialists.
You guys are the most imperialist people this planet has ever seen,
and we're getting a tad tired of your so-called culture.
Just because America has a more successful empire than anything the Europeans put together doesn't mean that we're imperialist. We got our little empire without even really trying; mainly we have European auto-destructive wars to thank. If you ask me who the most imperialist people on earth are, then I'll reply that it's the self-righteous Germans. They tried twice this century to gain global hegemony and they only reason they aren't doing it again is because we took their guns away.
And yes, I'm trolling and your beer is awful.
Beer is awful, period. Whoops, I just offended your culture. Well, don't worry, there are plenty of other noble aspects of your culture, like, uh, uhhhh.... America bashing! Yeah, that's ticket!
> Man, Russia and China are going to be majorly > pissed off if he makes it, because of that
> missile defense shield. And, for you USians, I
> think your fundamental rights will take the big > dive.
I think Gore will eventually back the missile shield too. We Americans (not USAins: you don't call us USAins when you mock us; even Canadians call us Americans when they talk among themselves) have a lot to gain from the missile shield. Sure, Russia and China will be angry because they won't be able to blackmail the USA anymore, but hey, I'd rather they be a lot angrier than possess the ability to destory us.
You Europeans are upset about the missile shield because it would neutralize the main thing keeping America in check right now. It'll be much tougher to play the US off versus Russian and China, with the missile shield in place. And you're worried that if the US has a missile shield and you don't, then countries that are blackmailing the US will have to blackmail Europe instead. Iraq can't threaten US anymore, so it points the ICBM it bought from some corrupt Russian general at Berlin.
With the above in mind, I think the ultimate goal of European criticism of the US missile shield is to force the US to include its European allies within the shield. They don't care one bit that Russia's and China's "right" to be able destory the US is compromised.
As for Bush being seen as a freak in Europe. Well, King, uhh, I mean President, Jacques Chirac would be seen as a freak here. And so would Jospin.
Broderbund's Wings of Fury was probably the most beautifully programmed game I've seen. It was stable, graphically impressive (even by today's standards), compact (fit on 2 sides of a 5.25" diskette), and much more fun than any 2-D game I've seen since.
This game was so far ahead of its time that it was ported to GameBoy a full 12 years after its original release.
Plot: Your aircraft carrier is passing through Japanese-held territory and you, the brave Hellcat pilot, must make sure your carrier makes it out in piece. You had to bomb barracks, rocket pillboxes, and strafe soldiers as they run around on their islands. Of course, there were also dogfights with Zeros, and winning took skill. And then there were the ships! You had to sink destoyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers, all of which were gigantic compared to your puny fighter plane.
The attention to detail was incredible: bullets kicked up dust, bombs bounced off of camoflage nets, and your carrier (which you had to land on) rolled with the waves.
For those who have played: who can possibly forget your heart pounding as you dove full-throttle straight toward a battleship in a do-it-right-the-first-time-or-die rocket attack? If you slowed down, the guns shredded you; if you got the angle wrong, you missed your target which meant that the guns would get you as you pulled out of the dive.
And who can forget the satisfaction of jumping a Zero as he scrambled to protect his base? If you did it just right, the hapless Zero would cut swathe of destruction through his island as he crashed.
You forgot to mention that Slashdot is an American export, but you seem to like it, so it doesn't count as an imperialist burden thrust upon you by America Inc. What's your country exporting, I mean, other than bad political rhetoric?
Aside: I'm soooo sick of these politically "aware" types who confuse their hatred of the US and Micro$oft with objectivity. No, it's not a troll, the guy really thinks this way...
Every superpower does, has done, and will do the same kinds of things as the US. The European empires did, so did the USSR, and so will the EU and China when they get their acts together. Nobody complains about globalization when European companies spread, do they? Hyprocrites, all.
I think that given the economic, military, and intellectual power that America (yes, the US of A, not fscking Guatamala or Canada) wields, we've been very responsible. The USA may dominate the world, but as an open democracy (albeit with flaws) it provides an excellent role model.
In the case of rockets, why shouldn't the US dominate? A large chunk of my tax $$$ has been spent developing them; it'd be nice to see some return on the investment, and if that means not giving the technology away to Bezerkistan, then so be it.
As for Panama, Teddy Roosevelt broke off a bit of an extremely corrupt Columbia to make something that has benefited the entire world. If you'd actually read the history, you'd know that buying Panama from Columbia was not an option.
And bananas! You're bananas to think that the US is wrong to accuse Europe of unfair trade practices. The WTO can back me up on this...
Slashdot Mirror
On Gold and Gollums, an overview into the Gold Farming and Selling Industry
Sure, it's interesting that there are large, organized networks that employ legions of people willing to spend their days harvesting gold, but what really strikes me is the degree to which gold farmers manipulate a server's entire economy.
Nadir and azimuth are from Arabic too.
Couldn't there be a Third Way (tm) whereby one could opt out of BBC News but keep the rest of the programming? Or maybe they could create separate news broadcasts for each of the UK's major political blocs?
JPL's servers were overwhelmed the day Huygens took the plunge into Titan. Yes, it's a different order of magnitude than a Slashdotting, but even NASA has limits (in terms of serving up webpages).
AR was a damn fine concept and one I'd like to see revisited now that we have so much many resources at our disposal.
You know a game's good when people are inspired to adapt Dickens to it.
Carrie Fisher can play the harpy Leia. Billy Dee Williams and Harrison Ford will make great smugglers in dotage. This could be really dark. . .
Quicksilver didn't cover Newton's broader--today we'd call them non-scientific--interests as deeply as The System of the World most likely will. Half-cocked Jack versus Newton The Exchequer ought to be good!
When Magellan ran out of food in the middle of the Pacific, his crew--which surely had some fishing expertise given how many of the sailors came from fishing villages--could not pull a single fish from the waters. Becalmed, they were reduced to eating leather -- they would cut up their shoes, bits of rigging, etc into strips, boil them, and tried to get it down.
By time Magellan crossed the Pacific he'd lost 80% of his crew to scurvy and starvation.
You obviously can't read charts, because the one you've linked to clearly illustrates that the blimp will be about 15 miles tall.
Nonsense. Their Left-of-New-Labor editorial lines are strikingly similar. And the BBC has for years recruited almost exclusively from the 'Grauniad'. In American parlance, think of the Guardian as the BBC's farm team.
Granted there's certainly envy of the BBC at the Guardian, but there isn't the ideological opposition to everything the Beeb represents that one finds at the Murdoch papers.
Don't worry, plenty of spacefaring species make that mistake when they're taking their first steps. . . though you should be warned that the Martians are rather touchy about semantics.
There was a good discussion, replete with examples, about Chomsky putting ideology ahead of fact on a smaller (but very good) weblog called kuro5hin.org. Here's the link:
3
http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2001/10/19/204933/3
For best results, sort by score.
This post and the throttling the original poster gives to his challenger really undermined my trust in Chomsky's authority.
... were in the '80s for Richard Garriott and Ultima. That's when games were about gameplay, gamers needed graphpaper, and people whose names were on the boxes still coded. We may scoff at him now, but Lord British was a big deal in those days.
Picture this: it's a Saturday morning in the late '80s and 300 restless geeks are packed into a Georgetown University auditorium waiting with baited breath for Lord British himself to unveil the Ultima V beta.
We were the GameSIG of the Washington Apple Pi, and Richard Garriott was our guest and our friend. He wasn't just showing us a preview of Ultima V, he was showing it to us before anyone else got to see it.
Already, Ultima IV had blown our minds, and we all wanted to see where the series went next. For many of us who were at an impressionable age (I was 11), the Ultima series was a big part of our intellectual lives. Lord British was our guardian in the game and our hero in life.
When Garriott stepped onto the stage wearing armor and carrying a sword and shield, we just went nuts. Better still, he came bearing gifts; he reached into his satchel and threw handfuls of silvery ankhs out to the roaring crowd. I caught one and still treasure it.
Then the lights dimmed and we waited for the moment of truth. Lord British put the 5.25" diskettes into the Apple IIGS (256K). He fiddled with the projection system a bit and them blam: Ultima V blasted onto the screen.
The graphics and sound just blew us away, and Garriott explained each improvement as he took us through an hour-long tour of the game. You could see (and hear!) grass sway in the wind, waves rolled, trees blocked light while windows let it in... And the music!!!
The climax came when he showed us the lighthouse. You could see and hear the surf pounding on the rocks, while a beam of light swept over land and sea, just like a real lighthouse. And all of this before the backdrop of convincingly forboding music. Inside the lighthouse awaited a surprise: the keeper was none other than the don of our GameSIG, Ron Wartow. Somebody we knew was in Ultima V!
After talking to the Wartow character and getting him to crack a few jokes, Garriott looked up at us and then paused for a full ten seconds. Breaking the silence, he asked: "Well, shall we attack Ron?" We yelled back an affirmative reply. 8 turns later, Ron was a bloody pulp and our party was 5 gold and a ham sandwich richer. We were in stitches... the kid next me laughed so hard he puked through his nose.
On his way out, Lord British gave us cloth maps and whispered to us about Easter eggs he'd sprinkled throughout the series. We were on cloud nine, and I was ready to devote my life to becoming a pixelated Avatar. I wanted to grow up to be Lord British. I wanted to make games, I wanted to be in them, and I wanted to live them.
Sadly, I never got to play Ultima V. The game was delayed and the 'rents wouldn't spring for the IIGS. By time I had the resources to play the game, I'd moved onto the PC and was hooked on a series of games by a guy named Sid Meier, but that's another story for another day...
Are Americans supposed to envy this "juggernaut" or is it the product of somebody covetingly looking at somebody else's manned space program?
I kid because I love... the acronym for the American missile shield will probably be just a couple of letters away from spelling "arrogance". It's all very unfortunate...
coup-de-gras
It's coup-de-grace. "Gras" means fatty or oily in French.
I'm sick of people misusing coup-de-grace. It means "stroke of mercy" and the term was originally associated with executions. For instance, in a firing squad execution the riflemen shoot the victim and then someone finishes off the victim with a coup-de-grace, that is, a pistol shot to the head. So it's not just a fatal blow, it's a humane act too.
The same people who are whining that America is infringing on their rights are now whining that they cannot change the outcome of the US election. I guess it's not the infringement on rights that upsets people but rather whose rights are being jeopardized.
This is bad for Europeans, I think. If they want to us to pay attention to their claims that we are hypocrites it would really help if they would stop being so hypocritical themselves.
Tu quoque...
You have told an outrageous lie.
Christian and Jewish holy books both declare that a parent's number one priority (after obeying God, that is) is the care and upbringing of his/her children. I don't know how one can be held any more responsible than that...
In the Old Testament of the Bible, God judged Eli for his failure to discipline his children:
Religious Christians and Jews in the USA are obsessed with "family values". They employ the same rhetoric as Muslims do about removing vice from society.
But know this, infringing on others' rights to clean up a society, whether that society is Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, only leads to bad ends. If you look at history, organized religions, fearing sin, have been liberty's chief enemy. When it comes to government, the agnostics and atheists are the ones I want in charge.
Yes, the US government censorship of violent games seems mild compared to Malaysia's banning of entire arcades. But that doesn't make American censorship right. Just because someone is relatively worse doesn't make the situation in the US good.
Being complacent about US censorship because it's worse somewhere else is a sure-fire way to end up like that somewhere else in a hurry.
That said, comparing US censorship to Malaysian censorship is unfair. The US has a tradition of free speech and Malaysia does not. Malaysia bans all sorts of stuff:
I'm pretty sure they'd ban Slashdot if it were based there.
To be fair to the Muslims, they only burned down half of the Library of Alexandria. The other half was burned down two centuries earlier (c. 390 AD) by a Chrisitian mob.
We live in good times. Here's what happened to people interested in science and learning in the 4th century:
For more on the Library of Alexandria, see:
http://www.hamwic.co.uk/lo st_ worlds/alex/library.html
Boy, you believed everything said on CNN or what?
I don't recall CNN ever stating that Iraq threatened the US with missiles; though the London Times and plenty of other sensationalist European papers made exactly such claims.
Saying that Iraq was threatening your country is a paranoid scheme, the same kind that has lead many administrations to use it as a way to justify not_so_nice actions.
So the UNSCOM thing was paranoid scheme, huh? They proved that Iraq was making a concerted effort to stockpile chemical weapons and to develop and/or purchase nuclear arms and delivery systems. If you believe that there are peacefuly purposes for such weapons or that no such weapons exist, then I invite you to apply for Tariq Aziz's job.
And, for fuck's sake, stop thinking Europeans are a bunch of condescendant colonialists.
I will... just as soon as you stop acting like condescending colonialists.
You guys are the most imperialist people this planet has ever seen, and we're getting a tad tired of your so-called culture.
Just because America has a more successful empire than anything the Europeans put together doesn't mean that we're imperialist. We got our little empire without even really trying; mainly we have European auto-destructive wars to thank. If you ask me who the most imperialist people on earth are, then I'll reply that it's the self-righteous Germans. They tried twice this century to gain global hegemony and they only reason they aren't doing it again is because we took their guns away.
And yes, I'm trolling and your beer is awful.
Beer is awful, period. Whoops, I just offended your culture. Well, don't worry, there are plenty of other noble aspects of your culture, like, uh, uhhhh.... America bashing! Yeah, that's ticket!
Those who cannot create criticize...
> pissed off if he makes it, because of that
> missile defense shield. And, for you USians, I
> think your fundamental rights will take the big
> dive.
I think Gore will eventually back the missile shield too. We Americans (not USAins: you don't call us USAins when you mock us; even Canadians call us Americans when they talk among themselves) have a lot to gain from the missile shield. Sure, Russia and China will be angry because they won't be able to blackmail the USA anymore, but hey, I'd rather they be a lot angrier than possess the ability to destory us.
You Europeans are upset about the missile shield because it would neutralize the main thing keeping America in check right now. It'll be much tougher to play the US off versus Russian and China, with the missile shield in place. And you're worried that if the US has a missile shield and you don't, then countries that are blackmailing the US will have to blackmail Europe instead. Iraq can't threaten US anymore, so it points the ICBM it bought from some corrupt Russian general at Berlin.
With the above in mind, I think the ultimate goal of European criticism of the US missile shield is to force the US to include its European allies within the shield. They don't care one bit that Russia's and China's "right" to be able destory the US is compromised.
As for Bush being seen as a freak in Europe. Well, King, uhh, I mean President, Jacques Chirac would be seen as a freak here. And so would Jospin.
And no, I don't plan to vote for Bush.
This game was so far ahead of its time that it was ported to GameBoy a full 12 years after its original release.
Plot: Your aircraft carrier is passing through Japanese-held territory and you, the brave Hellcat pilot, must make sure your carrier makes it out in piece. You had to bomb barracks, rocket pillboxes, and strafe soldiers as they run around on their islands. Of course, there were also dogfights with Zeros, and winning took skill. And then there were the ships! You had to sink destoyers, cruisers, battleships, and carriers, all of which were gigantic compared to your puny fighter plane.
The attention to detail was incredible: bullets kicked up dust, bombs bounced off of camoflage nets, and your carrier (which you had to land on) rolled with the waves.
For those who have played: who can possibly forget your heart pounding as you dove full-throttle straight toward a battleship in a do-it-right-the-first-time-or-die rocket attack? If you slowed down, the guns shredded you; if you got the angle wrong, you missed your target which meant that the guns would get you as you pulled out of the dive.
And who can forget the satisfaction of jumping a Zero as he scrambled to protect his base? If you did it just right, the hapless Zero would cut swathe of destruction through his island as he crashed.
Sounds good, huh? Want it? You can download the Apple ][ ROM!
Aside: I'm soooo sick of these politically "aware" types who confuse their hatred of the US and Micro$oft with objectivity. No, it's not a troll, the guy really thinks this way...
Every superpower does, has done, and will do the same kinds of things as the US. The European empires did, so did the USSR, and so will the EU and China when they get their acts together. Nobody complains about globalization when European companies spread, do they? Hyprocrites, all.
I think that given the economic, military, and intellectual power that America (yes, the US of A, not fscking Guatamala or Canada) wields, we've been very responsible. The USA may dominate the world, but as an open democracy (albeit with flaws) it provides an excellent role model.
In the case of rockets, why shouldn't the US dominate? A large chunk of my tax $$$ has been spent developing them; it'd be nice to see some return on the investment, and if that means not giving the technology away to Bezerkistan, then so be it.
As for Panama, Teddy Roosevelt broke off a bit of an extremely corrupt Columbia to make something that has benefited the entire world. If you'd actually read the history, you'd know that buying Panama from Columbia was not an option.
And bananas! You're bananas to think that the US is wrong to accuse Europe of unfair trade practices. The WTO can back me up on this...