That was what I would have thought as well, but apparently shuffle reduces battery life. I would need to run my own test of this to confirm it, but the annecdotcal evidence states it to be the case.
I'm certainly curious about what this means to the market for iPod accessories. When the 3G came out third-party manufacturers immediately dropped support for 1G and 2G iPods in most cases. Apple as well decided to more or less drop support of the older models up to and including the lack of firmware updates to provide many of the same features as present in the new models (I am told that it would be possible to add such things as on the go playlists and such, but Apple merely chooses not to). As the owner of a 2G I was, of course, upset by the idea that my iPod no longer seemed to exist.
While this design seems to be much more in line with the non-3G what with the return to the wheel as opposed to the independent buttons I'm curious as to where the compatibility will lie. Will earlier models suddenly be supported once again (probably unlikely, the wheel looks to be sized differently and the cutouts for the various ports are different, it might work as a kludge at best)? Will 3G-style products suddenly drop out of sight just like what happened when the design was last changed significantly?
There are some valid questions here that I don't think Apple or many others are bothering to consider. Yes there are advantages to making improved designs, but Apple doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the benefits of a consistent design with only functional improvements.
That eight hours is only for perfect use and just like birth control perfect use is rarely what you end up with.
In reality the iPod (and I'm talking about the 2G here) tends to last around 4-6 hours depending on use. I personally keep mine on shuffle and skip through songs at a rate of perhaps one skip for every 5 songs or so. This gives me about this range of total battery power. This is all because the only way it gets 8 hours out of the battery is by spinning the hard drive up as little as possible and instead only feeding data into the cache every 20 minutes or so. Thus the often erroneous claim of 20 minutes of skip protection, in particular if the hard drive is set to spin again there is absolutely no skip protection in my experience. Anything you do to make the hard drive spin up (e.g. skip songs, thus running through the buffer faster, randomize songs, etc.) will lower your listening time.
Don't forget that it constantly loses power (albeit in a low-power sleep state) no matter what you do as there is no way to turn it off. I doubt this is ever a significant factor although you'll probably find it dead or close after a week or so without charging.
Overall though the battery is, I've found, good enough that if you start fully charged in the morning you can carry it around all day without incident.
Of course a proper manual would help solve many of these problems as well. When I got my 2g iPod it was still a matter of at least a month or so before I managed to figure or find out about everything.
Then again, I've always been the sort to read completely through the manual before doing anything with a new piece of equipment. Video games, computer stuff, vaccuum cleaners. Hell, I even read the full manual for the blender before plugging it in.
It's not because you can't figure things out on your own, but because you shouldn't have to. Not communicating the features of a product and how to use them properly is just sloppy, not a sign of how supposedly easy to use it is.
You make a reasonable argument, but I do think you're a bit too heavy into the upgrade cycle as I've noticed many tend to be these days. Personally I just completed a major overhaul of my computer and it has been the first one in 5 years. At the same time I've managed to stay more or less on top of recent games without problems. Every year or so I might add something in. Last year it was another hard drive as the old 10 gig drive wasn't cutting it anymore. Year before that I added in some extra RAM. It's all a matter of slow, incremental changes over time. Thus, while a console sits relatively stagnant, a PC will slowly, but surely outpace it.
I personally don't see spending $2,000 on a new PC, but only because I rarely need to. A few hundred is often more than enough to bring whatever lagging component I have back up to speed.
Different things satisfy different people though. Glad to know that some people find what I see as flaws to be assets.
Yes, but I already have the computer you see. In fact, I'm willing to bet that a great deal of people who have an XBox also have a computer that would be suitable for gaming. In my mind this is simply spending money to buy a dedicated system to play games that I could already be playing with better controls, graphics and many other improvements in most cases.
GTA3, while not available for the GameCube is available for the PC where I've played and enjoyed both the original and Vice City. Quite frankly I can't even contemplate playing them with a console due to the control scheme used there.
As to the games listed... well, that was exactly the point. Nintendo-made games will only be on a Nintendo system. I personally feel that Nintendo has some of the best exclusive games and the ones that will never, ever be ported off to another system.
Just recently I decided to go out and get a current generation console. Now, I haven't owned a console system since the SNES, but I've kept abreast of the market and played plenty of games with friends. In that time I've largely moved over to the PC for most of my gaming and, quite frankly, I haven't really looked back. I don't really want to turn this into some sort of PC vs. Console flame war, mind you, just setting the picture.
When I bought a console system I was thinking about all the stuff I wasn't getting on the PC: being able to play a game with my friends in the same room on the same screen, making gaming a bit more of a group activity. Having a fun system to play around with some stuff that consoles actually do pretty well, and playing exclusive titles that I'm not going to get a chance to play on the PC. Given all this and considering that I already have a solid PC for gaming the XBox isn't really that great. My final decision was actually a Gamecube.
Why? Well, the 'cube has a strong library of very good games that simply won't ever be ported to another system because they're Nintendo properties. If I want to play Legend of Zelda, Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros., Eternal Darkness, Mario Kart, etc. there's only one system that's going to fill that need. As for multi-platform, but console only games (e.g. Starcraft: Ghost) almost all of them are made available for the Gamecube and with graphics that are often better than the PS2. The PS2 drew me with its large library of games, but nothing really stood out. Many of the best PS2 games (e.g. GTA3) are eventually ported to the PC or to the Gamecube. Online play is nice, but again, most of the games that involve online play are often ports of PC games or sports games that I have no interest in. The XBox, in its favor, often has the best graphics and sound of any of the consoles. It has the very nice feature of an integrated hard drive. Ultimately though any of the games I'd really want to play on it are really just PC games. KOTOR, Thief 3, Splinter Cell... I can't imagine wanting to play these on a console system when I could play them on an upgradable, typically more powerful computer with the added bonus of free online play, easy patching and all the other things that computer gaming means.
Ultimately this is where I see the XBox. Microsoft wanted to make a console that was more or less a computer and that's pretty much what they've done. The problem with this is that if you already have a computer you probably don't have much need for the XBox.
The problem is that in many games it really isn't a relevant issue. Often this becomes more of an issue in role-playing games or other games where the storyline may involve romantic subplots and such, but much of the time it's irrelevant.
Quite frankly I think that this is probably the preferable option as well. It's far more realistic whereas making a character explicitly homosexual would make that a central aspect of the character. Does it matter whether the commandos in Contra were homosexual or heterosexual? It just isn't an issue as far as the game is concerned and either option would be equally acceptable. The majority of the population, however, simply assumes that anyone not explicitly stated to be homosexual is heterosexual.
In my mind the best of those was the guy who finished Fallout (or was it 2?) without killing a single enemy, but killing every single child in the game.
To keep you there buying it. While it depends on the store retail employees are often given the ability to lower the price on items in various cases.
For instance, I spent about a month and a half during summer break working at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Even though I was working after the store had closed helping with a renovation I still got a few days of very basic customer service training. One of the things I was instructed in was the proper form and the proper way to enter discounts into the computer. This was because I was authorized to discount any item in the store by either $5 or 10% of the purchase price, whichever was lower (I highly suspect that Best Buy and other stores may offer merely 10% discounts). This was in case the customer complained about almost anything: cheaper prices elsewhere, damaged packaging, chips or dings, even if they just start screaming and being abusive it was considered to be worth it just to calm them down and get them to buy something.
Now considering that a temporary employee is allowed to do this from day one working at the store I'm highly certain that this isn't really an isolated situation and other retail stores also give their employees this kind of price cut power. Likely they just try to keep it quiet and assume that any abuse isn't likely to be large enough to make a huge difference.
Now, the store I worked at once where you could make returns without a product or a receipt (in extreme cases, but we were told to always take returns in the case of product, but no receipt) and get your refund in cash? Heh... that one I'm keeping quiet about.
Going off topic a bit, but unless you yourself are an ISF certified expert you really should have your brightness/contrast/etc. and indeed your entire system calibrated by an expert. This can be an expensive process lasting many hours, but if you've got the money for it and a display worth spending that kind of money on calibrating it really is the correct thing to do.
The fundamental flaw to me has always been that there's really that much out there that children over 13 don't already know.
"Oh no! There might be swearing somewhere!" Trust me, most kids are probably using those same exact words on their own when you're not around. "Well... maybe, but the sex!" Yeah, well, they're likely to be talking about that too. The answer there is more likely to provide them with a way to find out the truth about sex rather than rumour and idle speculation. "But they surely shouldn't be seeing pornography, right?" Do they have older siblings? Friends with older siblings? Parents with a porn collection? Once again kids are going to get access to porn and it's probably going to be at a younger age than you think. Now, admittedly this is more likely to be your average softcore Playboy centerfold. Nothing that shocking really and quite another thing from goatse.cx or some of the fetishes that can be found more easily on the internet than in the past when we relied mainly on print and Cinemax.
Ultimately though parents tend to delude themselves a bit into thinking that their kids are completely ignorant. Kids already know about pretty much any thing you're going to try and "protect them from". Think about when you first learned much of this.
As for active parenting, part of the problem with that is that kids need time on their own to explore and become their own person. If a parent is sitting over them all the time checking out what they're watching and reading then the chance that the child will grow up to be an independent person with thoughts and feelings of their own is much less than the chance that they will grow up to believe in much the same things are their parent. Part of being a good parent is letting kids explore on their own and do and see things that while not dangerous to them might be things that you don't approve of.
The Persians are Scientific/Industrious and incidentally my typical choice although I've recently been branching out into the Greeks (Scientific/Commercial, the special greek unit, the Hoplite, is essentially a Pikeman who shows up in place of the Spearman) and will occasionally play the Scientific/Militaristic Germans (Their Panzer units get an extra point of movement for some very nasty blitzkriegs).
I find it rather interesting that E3 doesn't apparently show any effect on pricing. Perhaps this pricing change is more commonly shown in hardware though, but I would nonetheless expect games to drop in price.
The lack of PC data though is rather odd. PC games and console games are increasingly existing in the same space. The major difference being that the used market for console games seems to be rather large while the PC used market is much smaller. As well PC stock tends to be available longer. From my own informal observations (i.e. I just bought a Gamecube a few weeks ago) console games seem to hit the shelves, sell, and are then either discounted down, start showing up used (possibly forcing a decrease in price?), or re-released at a cheaper price (e.g. Nintendo's "Player's Choice" line). I really wonder what the effect of the used market is on new game prices. Some, more recent titles, show very little change (perhaps $5 cheaper for the used product) while older games are offered either at modest or serious discounts depending on total price and general popularity. Super Smash Bros. Melee is still around $25 with the new title selling close to the $30 mark, while the slightly newer (and critically acclaimed) Eternal Darkness has dropped in price to ~$13 or so. I was unable to even find new copies for sale.
Demand thus seems to be the likely factor that drives many of these price cuts. Yes, popular games will drop with time or in order to snare the last few holdouts by making a popular game available at a lower price. On the other hand older games that are still popular command relatively high prices in comparison (IIRC I paid $40 for the Diablo II Battle Chest about a year ago, a relatively high price for a game that's four years old).
Because I don't use iTunes and I don't want to. I'd rather just buy a cd, often used. Using iTMS is a complete non-solution for me. It would require me to use a proprietary mp3 player that I dislike and also forcing me to use it to handle my iPod (though I believe my preference, ephPod, actually can work at the same time) and then listen to my music using that player alone. I don't have a cd burner so I'm also locked into listening to it on the computer alone. Let alone what would happen if something ever happened to the highly fragile data stored on this hard drive.
iTMS really isn't making itself a good way to buy a cd. Especially if I'd just be doing it so I can listen to it on my iPod.
"Pentagon officials say the exemption would not affect civil liberties"
Because, of course, if it was going to infringe on civil liberties they'd just tell us.
"Yeah, this is pretty much going to fuck you all up the ass. Frankly, we don't even really need this, we just want to be able to come into your house in the middle of the night and rape your pets for the hell of it. Just because we can."
In a more abstract sense it is an infrigement of our rights because we've decided that it is. We don't want this and are not agreeing to it. The social contract ceases to properly exist when the government starts telling you what rights you're going to give up in exchange for what they're going to decide to give you. So long as Americans feel that this is a violation of their rights in significant numbers it starts being a violation of their rights.
It is also, as people often fail to recall, highly dependent on the field you're talking about. Try taking that line out in one of the hard science departments sometimes. After all, not a hell of a lot of places for people to go around doing fundamental research.
Yeah, nobody would actually want to listen to music in the mornings. Instead the only station worth listening to that comes in well where I live plays this terrible syndicated "Bob and Tom Show" crap. It certainly gives me plenty of incentive to get up ASAP so I can turn it off and be done with it.
I don't listen to a particular radio station for a talk format. If I wanted that I'd be listening to talk radio. Instead I want the same format I get the rest of the time.
Assume that it costs a dollar to press a CD and ship it to your local music store. Say it costs two dollars to produce a custom compact disc and art, and ship it to an individual's home.
Back of the envelope math says that the record company makes fourteen dollars per disc under the first pricing scheme, and two dollars per disc under the second. Will they sell seven times as many discs under the new model? No? Then they're not going to change.
Well, part of the reason they might not sell more is because you're pricing it so low as to be an impulse item. Impulse sales, however, rely on fast and convenient. If a user has to be online, go to the site, select the tracks or album, etc. it no longer becomes a fast, convenient thing. Will they buy more albums? Definitely. They'll practically fly off the shelves I bet. The real money though is in making music an impulse item. Heard that catchy new single? Get the album for $4-5 near the checkout counter. The recent plans to make concert recordings available immediately after the show go right along with this in the same way as buying a cd for $10 off the merch table because you liked the band.
This is already sort of being done with DVDs. Go into almost any Best Buy or other big box electronics retailer and you'll see a rack of $10 DVDs by the checkout just begging you to think about that one movie that you sort of like or haven't seen in a long time. It's not fully there yet because it's not quite as cheap, but it's a step in the right direction.
When my girlfriend and I had just started dating we spent plenty of time playing Bubble Bobble on the NES at her house. The only problem is that it's only somewhat of a good game for this. Girlfriends hate it when you steal their last life in order to keep yourself alive:)
I've seen them rather often, but off-hand the only brand I can think of is L.L. Bean. I've always been a fan of their backpacks and I suspect that their laptop pouch equipped model is equally good.
Pretty much any luggage store or college bookstore that sells backpacks will have a few that are designed specifically with a pouch for laptops.
Support? I build my computers myself. Quite frankly I think I provide rather excellent support to myself on them. Very rarely do I ever get placed on hold or have some idiot trying to describe something to me that he barely understands.
Frankly I can't really imagine needing or wanting "support" on most products. If I really need to fix a perplexing problem... well... that's what the internet is for.
Frankly Finding Nemo seemed so vapidly childish to me that I could be bothered to see it. A fish travels to find his missing son. *Yawn* I'm sure it might have had some adult-oriented content, but honestly most of what I saw in previews and such didn't really inspire me to have any interest that it would be much beyond the formulaic nature of such an enterprise.
One of the very, very few films that was successfully aimed at children and adults equally in my mind was The Princess Bride. Neither talking down to kids or adults it can be enjoyed by both at the exact same level for an entire lifetime.
Part of the reason for the scientific community using metric (aside from, well, the simple logic of it, the ease of conversion and necessity of this, and using a valid international system) is because often the units involved are very, very small. Much more than Standard units would be fit to deal with without making things into a huge mess or making up new measurements.
In my lab I typically work with microliters down to the level of.5 microliters or so. I honestly can't think of a Standard measurement designed to measure something that small without simply taking on a long string of zeroes between it and the decimal point.
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That was what I would have thought as well, but apparently shuffle reduces battery life. I would need to run my own test of this to confirm it, but the annecdotcal evidence states it to be the case.
I'm certainly curious about what this means to the market for iPod accessories. When the 3G came out third-party manufacturers immediately dropped support for 1G and 2G iPods in most cases. Apple as well decided to more or less drop support of the older models up to and including the lack of firmware updates to provide many of the same features as present in the new models (I am told that it would be possible to add such things as on the go playlists and such, but Apple merely chooses not to). As the owner of a 2G I was, of course, upset by the idea that my iPod no longer seemed to exist.
While this design seems to be much more in line with the non-3G what with the return to the wheel as opposed to the independent buttons I'm curious as to where the compatibility will lie. Will earlier models suddenly be supported once again (probably unlikely, the wheel looks to be sized differently and the cutouts for the various ports are different, it might work as a kludge at best)? Will 3G-style products suddenly drop out of sight just like what happened when the design was last changed significantly?
There are some valid questions here that I don't think Apple or many others are bothering to consider. Yes there are advantages to making improved designs, but Apple doesn't seem to be paying any attention to the benefits of a consistent design with only functional improvements.
That eight hours is only for perfect use and just like birth control perfect use is rarely what you end up with.
In reality the iPod (and I'm talking about the 2G here) tends to last around 4-6 hours depending on use. I personally keep mine on shuffle and skip through songs at a rate of perhaps one skip for every 5 songs or so. This gives me about this range of total battery power. This is all because the only way it gets 8 hours out of the battery is by spinning the hard drive up as little as possible and instead only feeding data into the cache every 20 minutes or so. Thus the often erroneous claim of 20 minutes of skip protection, in particular if the hard drive is set to spin again there is absolutely no skip protection in my experience. Anything you do to make the hard drive spin up (e.g. skip songs, thus running through the buffer faster, randomize songs, etc.) will lower your listening time.
Don't forget that it constantly loses power (albeit in a low-power sleep state) no matter what you do as there is no way to turn it off. I doubt this is ever a significant factor although you'll probably find it dead or close after a week or so without charging.
Overall though the battery is, I've found, good enough that if you start fully charged in the morning you can carry it around all day without incident.
Of course a proper manual would help solve many of these problems as well. When I got my 2g iPod it was still a matter of at least a month or so before I managed to figure or find out about everything.
Then again, I've always been the sort to read completely through the manual before doing anything with a new piece of equipment. Video games, computer stuff, vaccuum cleaners. Hell, I even read the full manual for the blender before plugging it in.
It's not because you can't figure things out on your own, but because you shouldn't have to. Not communicating the features of a product and how to use them properly is just sloppy, not a sign of how supposedly easy to use it is.
You make a reasonable argument, but I do think you're a bit too heavy into the upgrade cycle as I've noticed many tend to be these days. Personally I just completed a major overhaul of my computer and it has been the first one in 5 years. At the same time I've managed to stay more or less on top of recent games without problems. Every year or so I might add something in. Last year it was another hard drive as the old 10 gig drive wasn't cutting it anymore. Year before that I added in some extra RAM. It's all a matter of slow, incremental changes over time. Thus, while a console sits relatively stagnant, a PC will slowly, but surely outpace it.
I personally don't see spending $2,000 on a new PC, but only because I rarely need to. A few hundred is often more than enough to bring whatever lagging component I have back up to speed.
Different things satisfy different people though. Glad to know that some people find what I see as flaws to be assets.
Yes, but I already have the computer you see. In fact, I'm willing to bet that a great deal of people who have an XBox also have a computer that would be suitable for gaming. In my mind this is simply spending money to buy a dedicated system to play games that I could already be playing with better controls, graphics and many other improvements in most cases.
GTA3, while not available for the GameCube is available for the PC where I've played and enjoyed both the original and Vice City. Quite frankly I can't even contemplate playing them with a console due to the control scheme used there.
As to the games listed... well, that was exactly the point. Nintendo-made games will only be on a Nintendo system. I personally feel that Nintendo has some of the best exclusive games and the ones that will never, ever be ported off to another system.
Just recently I decided to go out and get a current generation console. Now, I haven't owned a console system since the SNES, but I've kept abreast of the market and played plenty of games with friends. In that time I've largely moved over to the PC for most of my gaming and, quite frankly, I haven't really looked back. I don't really want to turn this into some sort of PC vs. Console flame war, mind you, just setting the picture.
When I bought a console system I was thinking about all the stuff I wasn't getting on the PC: being able to play a game with my friends in the same room on the same screen, making gaming a bit more of a group activity. Having a fun system to play around with some stuff that consoles actually do pretty well, and playing exclusive titles that I'm not going to get a chance to play on the PC. Given all this and considering that I already have a solid PC for gaming the XBox isn't really that great. My final decision was actually a Gamecube.
Why? Well, the 'cube has a strong library of very good games that simply won't ever be ported to another system because they're Nintendo properties. If I want to play Legend of Zelda, Metroid Prime, Super Smash Bros., Eternal Darkness, Mario Kart, etc. there's only one system that's going to fill that need. As for multi-platform, but console only games (e.g. Starcraft: Ghost) almost all of them are made available for the Gamecube and with graphics that are often better than the PS2. The PS2 drew me with its large library of games, but nothing really stood out. Many of the best PS2 games (e.g. GTA3) are eventually ported to the PC or to the Gamecube. Online play is nice, but again, most of the games that involve online play are often ports of PC games or sports games that I have no interest in. The XBox, in its favor, often has the best graphics and sound of any of the consoles. It has the very nice feature of an integrated hard drive. Ultimately though any of the games I'd really want to play on it are really just PC games. KOTOR, Thief 3, Splinter Cell... I can't imagine wanting to play these on a console system when I could play them on an upgradable, typically more powerful computer with the added bonus of free online play, easy patching and all the other things that computer gaming means.
Ultimately this is where I see the XBox. Microsoft wanted to make a console that was more or less a computer and that's pretty much what they've done. The problem with this is that if you already have a computer you probably don't have much need for the XBox.
The problem is that in many games it really isn't a relevant issue. Often this becomes more of an issue in role-playing games or other games where the storyline may involve romantic subplots and such, but much of the time it's irrelevant.
Quite frankly I think that this is probably the preferable option as well. It's far more realistic whereas making a character explicitly homosexual would make that a central aspect of the character. Does it matter whether the commandos in Contra were homosexual or heterosexual? It just isn't an issue as far as the game is concerned and either option would be equally acceptable. The majority of the population, however, simply assumes that anyone not explicitly stated to be homosexual is heterosexual.
In my mind the best of those was the guy who finished Fallout (or was it 2?) without killing a single enemy, but killing every single child in the game.
To keep you there buying it. While it depends on the store retail employees are often given the ability to lower the price on items in various cases.
For instance, I spent about a month and a half during summer break working at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. Even though I was working after the store had closed helping with a renovation I still got a few days of very basic customer service training. One of the things I was instructed in was the proper form and the proper way to enter discounts into the computer. This was because I was authorized to discount any item in the store by either $5 or 10% of the purchase price, whichever was lower (I highly suspect that Best Buy and other stores may offer merely 10% discounts). This was in case the customer complained about almost anything: cheaper prices elsewhere, damaged packaging, chips or dings, even if they just start screaming and being abusive it was considered to be worth it just to calm them down and get them to buy something.
Now considering that a temporary employee is allowed to do this from day one working at the store I'm highly certain that this isn't really an isolated situation and other retail stores also give their employees this kind of price cut power. Likely they just try to keep it quiet and assume that any abuse isn't likely to be large enough to make a huge difference.
Now, the store I worked at once where you could make returns without a product or a receipt (in extreme cases, but we were told to always take returns in the case of product, but no receipt) and get your refund in cash? Heh... that one I'm keeping quiet about.
Going off topic a bit, but unless you yourself are an ISF certified expert you really should have your brightness/contrast/etc. and indeed your entire system calibrated by an expert. This can be an expensive process lasting many hours, but if you've got the money for it and a display worth spending that kind of money on calibrating it really is the correct thing to do.
The fundamental flaw to me has always been that there's really that much out there that children over 13 don't already know.
"Oh no! There might be swearing somewhere!" Trust me, most kids are probably using those same exact words on their own when you're not around. "Well... maybe, but the sex!" Yeah, well, they're likely to be talking about that too. The answer there is more likely to provide them with a way to find out the truth about sex rather than rumour and idle speculation.
"But they surely shouldn't be seeing pornography, right?" Do they have older siblings? Friends with older siblings? Parents with a porn collection? Once again kids are going to get access to porn and it's probably going to be at a younger age than you think. Now, admittedly this is more likely to be your average softcore Playboy centerfold. Nothing that shocking really and quite another thing from goatse.cx or some of the fetishes that can be found more easily on the internet than in the past when we relied mainly on print and Cinemax.
Ultimately though parents tend to delude themselves a bit into thinking that their kids are completely ignorant. Kids already know about pretty much any thing you're going to try and "protect them from". Think about when you first learned much of this.
As for active parenting, part of the problem with that is that kids need time on their own to explore and become their own person. If a parent is sitting over them all the time checking out what they're watching and reading then the chance that the child will grow up to be an independent person with thoughts and feelings of their own is much less than the chance that they will grow up to believe in much the same things are their parent. Part of being a good parent is letting kids explore on their own and do and see things that while not dangerous to them might be things that you don't approve of.
The Persians are Scientific/Industrious and incidentally my typical choice although I've recently been branching out into the Greeks (Scientific/Commercial, the special greek unit, the Hoplite, is essentially a Pikeman who shows up in place of the Spearman) and will occasionally play the Scientific/Militaristic Germans (Their Panzer units get an extra point of movement for some very nasty blitzkriegs).
I find it rather interesting that E3 doesn't apparently show any effect on pricing. Perhaps this pricing change is more commonly shown in hardware though, but I would nonetheless expect games to drop in price.
The lack of PC data though is rather odd. PC games and console games are increasingly existing in the same space. The major difference being that the used market for console games seems to be rather large while the PC used market is much smaller. As well PC stock tends to be available longer. From my own informal observations (i.e. I just bought a Gamecube a few weeks ago) console games seem to hit the shelves, sell, and are then either discounted down, start showing up used (possibly forcing a decrease in price?), or re-released at a cheaper price (e.g. Nintendo's "Player's Choice" line). I really wonder what the effect of the used market is on new game prices. Some, more recent titles, show very little change (perhaps $5 cheaper for the used product) while older games are offered either at modest or serious discounts depending on total price and general popularity. Super Smash Bros. Melee is still around $25 with the new title selling close to the $30 mark, while the slightly newer (and critically acclaimed) Eternal Darkness has dropped in price to ~$13 or so. I was unable to even find new copies for sale.
Demand thus seems to be the likely factor that drives many of these price cuts. Yes, popular games will drop with time or in order to snare the last few holdouts by making a popular game available at a lower price. On the other hand older games that are still popular command relatively high prices in comparison (IIRC I paid $40 for the Diablo II Battle Chest about a year ago, a relatively high price for a game that's four years old).
Because I don't use iTunes and I don't want to. I'd rather just buy a cd, often used. Using iTMS is a complete non-solution for me. It would require me to use a proprietary mp3 player that I dislike and also forcing me to use it to handle my iPod (though I believe my preference, ephPod, actually can work at the same time) and then listen to my music using that player alone. I don't have a cd burner so I'm also locked into listening to it on the computer alone. Let alone what would happen if something ever happened to the highly fragile data stored on this hard drive.
iTMS really isn't making itself a good way to buy a cd. Especially if I'd just be doing it so I can listen to it on my iPod.
"Pentagon officials say the exemption would not affect civil liberties"
Because, of course, if it was going to infringe on civil liberties they'd just tell us.
"Yeah, this is pretty much going to fuck you all up the ass. Frankly, we don't even really need this, we just want to be able to come into your house in the middle of the night and rape your pets for the hell of it. Just because we can."
In a more abstract sense it is an infrigement of our rights because we've decided that it is. We don't want this and are not agreeing to it. The social contract ceases to properly exist when the government starts telling you what rights you're going to give up in exchange for what they're going to decide to give you. So long as Americans feel that this is a violation of their rights in significant numbers it starts being a violation of their rights.
It is also, as people often fail to recall, highly dependent on the field you're talking about. Try taking that line out in one of the hard science departments sometimes. After all, not a hell of a lot of places for people to go around doing fundamental research.
Yeah, nobody would actually want to listen to music in the mornings. Instead the only station worth listening to that comes in well where I live plays this terrible syndicated "Bob and Tom Show" crap. It certainly gives me plenty of incentive to get up ASAP so I can turn it off and be done with it.
I don't listen to a particular radio station for a talk format. If I wanted that I'd be listening to talk radio. Instead I want the same format I get the rest of the time.
Assume that it costs a dollar to press a CD and ship it to your local music store. Say it costs two dollars to produce a custom compact disc and art, and ship it to an individual's home.
Back of the envelope math says that the record company makes fourteen dollars per disc under the first pricing scheme, and two dollars per disc under the second. Will they sell seven times as many discs under the new model? No? Then they're not going to change.
Well, part of the reason they might not sell more is because you're pricing it so low as to be an impulse item. Impulse sales, however, rely on fast and convenient. If a user has to be online, go to the site, select the tracks or album, etc. it no longer becomes a fast, convenient thing. Will they buy more albums? Definitely. They'll practically fly off the shelves I bet. The real money though is in making music an impulse item. Heard that catchy new single? Get the album for $4-5 near the checkout counter. The recent plans to make concert recordings available immediately after the show go right along with this in the same way as buying a cd for $10 off the merch table because you liked the band.
This is already sort of being done with DVDs. Go into almost any Best Buy or other big box electronics retailer and you'll see a rack of $10 DVDs by the checkout just begging you to think about that one movie that you sort of like or haven't seen in a long time. It's not fully there yet because it's not quite as cheap, but it's a step in the right direction.
When my girlfriend and I had just started dating we spent plenty of time playing Bubble Bobble on the NES at her house. The only problem is that it's only somewhat of a good game for this. Girlfriends hate it when you steal their last life in order to keep yourself alive :)
I've seen them rather often, but off-hand the only brand I can think of is L.L. Bean. I've always been a fan of their backpacks and I suspect that their laptop pouch equipped model is equally good.
Pretty much any luggage store or college bookstore that sells backpacks will have a few that are designed specifically with a pouch for laptops.
Support? I build my computers myself. Quite frankly I think I provide rather excellent support to myself on them. Very rarely do I ever get placed on hold or have some idiot trying to describe something to me that he barely understands.
Frankly I can't really imagine needing or wanting "support" on most products. If I really need to fix a perplexing problem... well... that's what the internet is for.
Hank Asher or Hank Scorpio!
Frankly Finding Nemo seemed so vapidly childish to me that I could be bothered to see it. A fish travels to find his missing son. *Yawn* I'm sure it might have had some adult-oriented content, but honestly most of what I saw in previews and such didn't really inspire me to have any interest that it would be much beyond the formulaic nature of such an enterprise.
One of the very, very few films that was successfully aimed at children and adults equally in my mind was The Princess Bride. Neither talking down to kids or adults it can be enjoyed by both at the exact same level for an entire lifetime.
Part of the reason for the scientific community using metric (aside from, well, the simple logic of it, the ease of conversion and necessity of this, and using a valid international system) is because often the units involved are very, very small. Much more than Standard units would be fit to deal with without making things into a huge mess or making up new measurements.
.5 microliters or so. I honestly can't think of a Standard measurement designed to measure something that small without simply taking on a long string of zeroes between it and the decimal point.
In my lab I typically work with microliters down to the level of