The US doesn't block online Casinos. It has declared them illegal to use and forbidden US companies to deal with them, but you absolutely can get to them via the Intertubes.
I am pretty sure the Antarctic raising further out of the water because it dumped its ice load wouldn't result in the Americans and Eurasia from jumping out of the water too. Whatever the case, who cares? Call me shallow (lol), but any geological actions that takes a few thousand years to happen isn't worth much worry on the part of humans. We can, you know, just move inland. Only fairly rapid sea level changes that cause "quick" evacuations (a few years) are much of a danger as they might kick off mass migration waves that can lead to geopolitical instability. Giving Bengal another meter of water would be a very bad thing.
If a glacier that is already in water breaks off, the sea levels are fine. Hence, pieces of the Arctic breaking up isn't going to result in sea levels rising.
The ANTarctic is a different story. While sections of it are floating ice, it also has a massive land area that is covered in ice. Those can literally slide off into the sea and, like dumping a piece of ice glass of water, the level rises. Some of the ice sheets sitting atop rock are so massive that if they were to build up a little moment, break off, and slide in, they would visible raise the sea level.
Funny you should say that. I actually just bought Alpha Centuari on Amazon. It came all patched up and works like a champ. I don't need to fucking be online to beg EA/Ubi's sever to fucking play it.
You might not be able to download Assassins Creed II, but I, an ass hole who dumps a thousand or so a year on video games have not bought the game despite loving Assassins Creed II. You prevent the 12 year old punk who doesn't have any money from playing your game. Being a fucking moron though, you also made it so that the mid twenty single guy with too much money and time on his hand won't buy your game. Good job Ubi. Good job Ubi. Hey, if you create a dead plague that wipes out humanity that will prevent pirating forever! Get cracking Ubi!
Oh well. I bought Bioshock 2, the new DA:O, the new STALKER, Empire Total War, and Mass Effect 2 instead. But hey, at least I didn't pirate Assassins Creed II. Fucking idiots.
I know OMFG global warming is hip and all, but this almost certainly wasn't a case of rising sea levels. Sea levels are rising REALLY slowly. That isn't to say that a big hunk of the antarctic couldn't melt and slide off into the ocean and give me some beach front property, just that it hasn't happened yet. The island almost certainly simply sunk into the ground. The earth sucks stuff down and pushes other stuff up all the time. It happens.
Eh, I think from that short little preview I am indifferent. I could see how it could be good, but frankly, nothing in that preview really hit on the 'heart' of Civilization.
Who ever played civilization craving more tactical combat? Who cares if the diplomacy screen has the guys walking around instead of just portrait?
The stuff that makes Civilization games either great or suck is in how it deals with culture, expansion, technology, city management, improvements, government types, etc. Frankly, I don't think Civ4 was much of a jump forwards in terms of Civ games. They added some neat futures, but they also managed to dumb down a lot of interesting things from earlier Civs. The civics from Civ4 were especially vapid and uninteresting.
For my money, I personally think that the best "Civ" game ever made was, by leaps and bounds, Alpha Centauri. That game had interesting world events, awesome civics, and each nation had a real sense of personality. I personally hope that they go down that road for Civ5 and give the game more personality, rather than strip it down further like they did with Civ4. Granted, it is really still far too early to make any judgments on the game, I am just not terribly hopeful.
Why would ANYONE charge to be in Rock Band? If you want a sure way to boost your sales, get yourself featured in Rock Band. Thousands of people discovering or re-discovering your music is a pretty fucking obvious way to scare up some sales. Hell, for any game where music is featured a band is only screwing themselves by putting up barriers for being selected. If I had a band, I would murder my way into getting put on a GTA music station. Even for big name stars, reminding hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people that you still rock isn't going to hurt. It is even more important if you are an older band whose original followers are in the process getting jammed into nursing homes. You should be fighting over the privilege to introduce yourself to the younger generations via Rock Band.
The music industry has its head jammed so firmly up their ass that is a minor miracle and a testament to monopoly power that they continue to exist each year.
Well, Toyota is giving hearings on capital hill, they have taken a non-trivial finical hit, and I think their president is one piece of bad news away from sepaku. Yeah, you can probably trust that they did everything in their power not to screw it up. I probably would take a potentially unknown problem on a firmware updates that is being watched by dozens of agencies and internal company auditors over a firmware that is known bad with a questionable dedication to quality. Even if their is a problem, it is a safe bet that it will be detected very early due to the number of eyes on it.
Having been inside of a company that has had to do a recall, I can say that nothing sharpens a company's overzealous safety instincts and risk avoidance mania than a major recall. Recalls, especially the type that Toyota is experiencing, are a complete disaster for the company. They are extremely expensive both in terms of cost and reputation. I am pretty sure that the internal state of Toyota right now is a safety mania that trumps all else that would make a Puppeteer proud. In fact, you can probably rest assured that Toyota is currently wildly overshooting the 'proper' levels of safety. It will probably be a few quarters before they unwind to more reasonable levels.
You need to consider it from the perspective of a manager. If you, as a manager, are in charge of a critical safety component, what is in your best interest? Yeah, you could try and cut a corner and skim an extra 2% profit that your boss might or might not notice, but if it backfires and YOU result in a safety issue, especially in the current environment, you should get a friend with a sword and a basket for your head and save the company the trouble. Right now, kudos in Toyota are earned by being a safety nut and being the one to discover and 'fix' some absurdly low probability safety concern, not for squeezing the budget a little further. Speaking as someone who has been in a company in full recall mode, if there is ever a time to trust that a company really is putting safety first, now is the time.
I'm not sure exactly who you are arguing against. I never argued that for a tablet to work it needs 40 connectors, an OS you can hack, or anything else geeky. I said it needs one thing, and that is to be cheap. Cheap is not a geeky feature.
An iPhone is a different beast. An iPhone, even to the most inexpert user, serves a good four or so functions. It is a phone, an mp3 player, a browser, and a games/apps station. It overlaps with a lot of different devices that most utterly normal non-geeky people have. It offers up a lot, and so you can justify charging as much as you do.
The iPad is an entirely different beast. It costs more than an iPhone in the short term ($100, $200 for a 3GS), and it is much more limited in the scope of what it can do for most users. It can't be your phone or MP3 player. It can't take over the traditional roles of a laptop. It is a big expensive iPod Touch minus the MP3 player.
I'm not saying that is a bad product. I, and most people, would love a tablet that just does internet and light applications that you pick up like a book and can hold while standing in line. The issue is purely price. If you are willing to shell out that kind of money, you are going to get a smart phone and laptop first. Once you have smart phone and laptop, a tablet is almost entirely redundant. To get a non-fanboi to shell out for a mostly redundant device that just does light apps and web browsing, it has to be cheap. That goes double and triple if you are trying to sell an off brand product.
So, will Apple do fine with its tablet? Sure. They have a big enough fan base that any product launched with a little fan-fair is going to do fine. It isn't going to penetrate the vast majority of middle class houses though. In order to do that, it needs to be cheap, and 500+ isn't cheap. The first person to get a simple tablet that is a glorified web browser and apps store under 200 is going to own the market.
Your "geek mind" might want to feel how it is to use something your mother might use, but unless your mother has a lot spare cash, she probably isn't interested at $500+ and a data plan.
Like I said, Apple plays in its own market. It has a loyal base of fanboi's and early adopters that will plunk down pretty much any price that Apple names. Those are the only people who are going to buy an iPad. 500+ is just too damn much for what amounts to a passive media consumption tool. It is WAY too much for a casual user that would find such a gadget nifty, and it costs far too much for most serious users for a device that duplicates the functionality of a good smart phone and computer.
An Android based tablet is playing in the same field with a much smaller base of people willing to buy for the sake of buying. It actually needs to accomplish the promise of a tablet. That means they need something cheap. My mom isn't going to plunk down a 500+ for a little tablet she can read cooking recipes off of or the news with breakfast. She might consider it at $200, and wouldn't think twice at $100.
The iPad is after an entirely different market. At its price, only a fanboi or an early adopter with cash burning a hole through his pocket could love it. At $200 or less, tablets (no matter how makes them) suddenly start making sense for the masses. Tablets are media consumption tools that really only a do limited amount of media well, and they have to be priced as such.
I think a lightweight tablet has a lot of potential if it is cheap enough. The $500+ Apple tablet I think costs WAY too much for any but the fanboys who will buy anything Job's touches. If they could get this tablet down to the $200-$300 range I think they could have a winner. I would love to have a little tablet that lets me browse the web, read e-books, store/play music, maybe watch movies, and do other passive media consumption tasks. It is easier and more ergonomic than a laptop when lounging around the house, is the sort of thing you can take on the subway on the way to work with you, and in general is a decent substitute for a book. I can't pull out my laptop and use it while waiting in line, but I could pull out a tablet.
The real issue is that this IS a limited device. It overlaps with smartphones and computers, and it can't be used for much "real" work beyond reading e-mails. The price has to be such that you can justify getting media consumption tool that is only better than your other tools in its convenience. At $500+, it just costs too much. $200-$300 is, in my opinion, closer to the range you need to be in. If you could get it down to $100-$200 and still turn a profit I think every middle class family and their dog would get one. The real issue in my mind is the price. Price is going to determine if this thing breaks open a new market or if it flops horribly. Apple's price is too high. Their tablet is only going to do well on fanboi'ism, and even then I don't think it will go far. An Android tablet is going to battle it out on price alone. If they try and sell at Apple prices this thing is dead on arrival.
There will never be a "mass migration" from Earth that has any dent on the population. Right now the population is growing at roughly 75 million a year. If you wanted to keep the population steady at the 6.8 billion it is as now, you would need to launch 210,000 people into space EVERY SINGLE DAY. You could ring the world in magic space elevators and still not be able to pull of that feat. If space opens up, it will open up for an extremely small minority of people. It will have no impact on the ground on Earth beyond the resources that space brings to Earth.
Frankly, if you are worried about space to live and resources to consume, the far more reasonable thing to do is the exploit the other 70% of the planet that we basically ignore. Hell, if you include all marginally livable areas on Earth (all of which are a shit ton more friendly than space), than I bet humans cover even a paltry 5%.
If you are lobbing EMP weapons at each other, you are already fucked and fighting WW3. Duck and cover. Emp blasts have very small rangers. With the amount of effort it takes to make a pulse big enough to fry a robot, you might as well just drop a normal bomb on their head and do it the old fashion way. The only time this isn't true is if you start lobbing neutron bombs and nukes. Those are probably worth the price... but if you are lobbing around nukes, you are already completely fucked and fighting the kind of war where cities get vaporized and civilizations collapse.
For your run of the mill insurgent, I am pretty sure your best solution is the old fashion one... explosives.
As dark as the potential for drones can be, I think it actually has the chance to make war a far less indiscriminate and bloody thing.
Right now, if a square of Marines gets fired on, they can return fire. A square of marines has the firepower to flatten a village. Give them access to artillery or air support, and they can literally level a city. In other words, whenever you have a squad of supported marines fight, you are having a group of kids (and they are just kids) holding their finger over enough firepower to take out a small army. Their job is to use as little as that firepower as humanly possible. You might be able to level every building in a half mile radius, but you are not supposed to. When it comes to a firefight though, especially a desperate firefight where soldiers have their lives on the line, they, like most humans, choose life over death, and if that means flattening an entire apartment building to get at one sniper, they do it and hope that no one else was inside. Generally speaking, unless a soldier walks up to a civilian and splatters their brains on the floor, they are let off free. It is war, your life is on the line, you take your risks and respond in the best way possible. If a civilian gets accidentally whacked, that is sad but acceptable. Most soldiers develop a pretty thick "us vs them" mentality that see civilians if not the enemy, as hostile terrain, especially in a guerrilla war.
Drones offer up another possibility. It is true, you can order a drone army to go out and kill civilians and it is probably easier to get a soldier to do it. That said, if you policy is civilian murdering, a nation like the US doesn't need to use drones. You can handily exterminate all life through impersonally aerial bombing. What drones offer is more control over the rules of war. Rules mean little when you are surrounded by gunfire. You do what you have to do to survive. On the other hand, when you are sitting in the US with a military lawyer over one shoulder, a commander over the other, and and every single second and action you take is getting recorded, rules are a lot more enforceable. If the rules call on you to die before you level an apartment complex just to get at one sniper, a drone can simply die. A soldier generally wont.
With drones, you have complete accountability for your actions. You can always go to command before doing something. You never need to make snap judgments. Hell, you can call a damned military lawyer over and get his take on the rules of engagement. Further, every bloody thing you do is being recorded, so if you decide to start murdering civilians you will be caught and tried.
On the balance, I think drones are going to lessen the lives lost. The few potential abuses are pointless to worry about. If someone wants to exterminate another people indiscriminately, you can do it the cheap old fashion way of aerial bombardment. On the other hand, if you are an army that wants to enforce ironclad rules of engagement, drones ensure there is never an excuse for fucking up, and that fuckups get caught.
That might be good growth, but there is more than just than just revenue to consider. I think Google can make a pretty rational argument for getting out is simply a good idea from a bottom line point of view.
1) China is a shitty market. Chinese have an annoying propensity to save. The rush into China has been fueled by people wanting to use it as a factory. As a factory, China is great. As a consumer market, it is more than a little lackluster. I am sure that will change, but right now, the Chinese domestic market frankly sucks.
2) Google is crippled in China. Google is about information sharing and spreading. Google is making a phone not because it wants to make money off of hardware, but because they simply want more people connected all the time. Google always throws its weight behind increasing connectivity. It does this because it wants to be the information hub for anything it can get its sticky little paws on. Chinas limits on free speech and excessive bureaucratic controls even when you play by the rules makes Google's job as information master hard and expensive. China has a government that pretty much directly clashes with Google's business model.
3) China is going to steal from Google and cripple or kick them out anyways. What has really pissed off Google is the IP theft. The Chinese government has stolen IP, and is going to turn around and dump it into its own state owned search engine. China is then going to set up onerous rules to make Google's life a living hell in terms of operations. Why suffer with that just to get crippled access to a few million peasants who hate to spend?
There are decent business arguments for Google to stay, but I think there are a lot of non-trivial financial arguments to bail.
Your argument is nonsense and anyone who has even scratched economic history knows it. The number of times when massive tariffs have lead to anything other than skyrocketing the cost of goods, shortages, rationing, a general decrease in the standard of living and purchasing power, and economic depression can be count on one hand, and each of those involved an economy that was already more or less protected before the tariffs were installed and filled with rural peasents. For the US, a nation wildly dependent upon exports and imports, to declare a 200% tariff on all products from any place that isn't the EU would lead to one of the most devastating trade wars this world has ever seen and make 1929 look like a field day. Unless you are feudal Japan trying to build an industrial base from poor peasantry, protectionism doesn't work.
I don't think you even begin to comprehend how "global" the US economy is. That computer you are staring blankly at was made, at a bare minimum , in 50 countries. The components that make up that computer have crossed national lines literally thousands of times. There are thousands of companies involved in designing, building, and putting all of the components together. The US couldn't build that thing from scratch if it wanted to. We literally don't have enough labor or resources to do it. Only a fool of epic proportions would reach in with some absurd tariff and ensure that the cost of a PC (much less any other device more complex than a stick) would have its cost jump to the levels seen on good old protectionist USSR.
The Knights of the Old Republic setting is set WAY WAY before all of the movies. This was done because Lucas is a moron and they want to stay as far away from that shit as possible. The Star Wars setting is hardly the most awesome setting out there. It has massive gaping planet sized holes in it in terms of coherency. That said, whatever it lacks in terms of being good is made up for the fact that it is extremely recognizable with a large following, and it is a pretty "fun" universe. Who needs consistent technology when you have freaking laser swords and magic?
Personally, I great this MMORPG with a yawn. I am filled to the brim with skepticism that any major production MMORPG is going to be more than a grindfest with gameplay directly ripped off from Everquest 1 and Diku MUDs before that. Woo, killing shit to gain levels to kill more shit. Thanks guys, I'll stick to real drugs. At least those are fun and not so damaging to your social life.
I think at some point someone is going to grow a pair and come up with some innovative MMORPG game play in a major MMORPG production. Star Wars Galaxies was actually pretty close originally in terms trying something different. It failed to be sure, but a few failures are what it will likely take to get out of this mind numbingly dull funk that MMORPGs are in right now where they are all glorified Everquest clones. Yes, I include WoW has a glorified Everquest clone. Don't get me wrong, they do it better than Everquest, but they do it in the same way that Quake did FPS better than Doom. Different cosmetics and refinement of the formula, but they are essentially the same beast. There are other things you can do when you have a few thousand people logged into the world besides grind and do some mini games.
Hear hear! Freespace was the last great space combat game. It is one of the few games where you basically spend the entire game getting your ass kicked and retreating. Not that being a Neo/Frodo/teh one/etc that runs around kicking ass isn't fun, but being a small fry running for your life is a nice change of pace. Freespace 2 was pretty damn awesome in terms of game play, if less engaging in terms of story.
I don't know jack shit about the value of LORAN, that said, your argument about the cost is a poor. If something isn't worth the cost you are dumping into it, it doesn't matter if yesterday you spent one dollar or a billion, it isn't worth the cost. How much you have spent on something in the past does nothing to justify spending more in the future.
Counter measures are fine when they are in proportion to the threat. Installing armored doors between the cockpit and the crew cabin is a good example of a worthy countermeasure. It is cheap, easy, causes minimal disruption, and doesn't strip anyone of their liberty.
Declaring that you can't have anything in your lap an hour before landing on the other hand is amazingly stupid. It is very disruptive, prevents nothing, is costly in that I sure as hell will reconsider flying when it means a 2 hour detention where I can't even read a fucking book, and it prevents nothing so long as the flight is more than two hours long.
Second, look at how inept these attacks have been. The 9/11 hijackers only succeeded under the old boring airline rules because the passengers had been cowed by the government into not resisting hijacking attempts. 9/11 will never work again because now passengers know that if some crazy Arabic speaking dudes take over the airplane you have volunteered yourself for cruise missile duty. All similar attempts to take over a plane in the US has resulted in instant passenger revolt putting the attempt down. The pathetic attempts after 9/11 have all been by the mentally ill who have been too stupid to realize that locking yourself in a bathroom would give you time to detonate the bomb.
These are not serious threats. They are better dealt with by law enforcement than by mass security theater. Our overreaction to their truly pathetic attempts at terrorism are millions of times more damaging than any conceivable damage they could have inflicted had their pathetic attempts worked.
These are not worthy enemies. There are real dangers and killers out there worth dumping some money at. Spending this much time and effort on a few mentally ill social rejects attempting to inflict pin prick losses is stupid beyond comprehension. Lets focus on real dangers, like pool deaths, small choking hazards for children, or god forbid something truly terrifying like overly warm weather, the flu, or teen car accidents.
Nothing could be more true. The damage the 'terrorists' have done is damn near zero. A few busted trains, a few blown up airplanes, and and few buildings? Pfft. It doesn't even rate as pocket change next to one hurricane in terms of costs. In terms of lives lost it doesn't even exist on the same scale as mundane boring shit like cold or warm weather, car accidents, the common cold, and other stupid shit no one gives two shits about. The "terrorist" have done so little damage as to not even register as a cost in terms of lives or cash compared to the normal boring dangers that we face without blinking every single day.
Well, that is true if you don't take into account violent government overreaction. The countless TRILLIONS we have spent in over reacting done VASTLY more damage than any terrorist can even begin to contemplate. We take a mosquito bite and respond by chopping off our own limb. Who to blame? Well, I blame two groups. First, I blame the brain dead masses who can't get it through their thick fucking skulls that they are more likely to be struck dead by a lightening bolt than a terrorist, and who squeal to be striped of liberty and dignity to prevent an absurdly rare way to die. Second, I blame the utterly spineless politicians who play into this fear. I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging and suggesting that the best course of action is to invest in lightening rods, because they are a shit ton cheaper than this mindless security theater and will save more lives with a billionth the cost. Even better, spend one millionth of the cost we were going to spend on stripping every single citizen naked who gets on an airplane and dump it into fighting a real threat, like the common cold, the flu, and choking on medium sized objects.
Anyone who would rather see their wife or daughter get stripped naked in front of machine rather than endure the nearly incalculably small risk of a terrorist attack is a spineless piece of shit. I can't decide who pisses me off more, the wretched spineless cows who whimper to politicians to strip them of their money, liberty, and now their fucking clothes, or the bottom feeding piece of shit politicians who agree to do it.
Bah. This whole 'debate' (if you can call such inarticulate babbling from politicians "debate") pisses me off to no end.
I like Blizzard when it comes to game design, but when it comes to even the pretense of originally they fail on such an epic level you need to have your eyes closed and your head shoved a meter up your own asshole to miss it. The blatant ripping off of Warhammer for both Starcraft and Warcraft was pretty obvious and clear... but seriously, "Yogg-Saron"? Is the expansion going to have "Cthulhu-Voldemort"? Eh, I guess they pay homage to the ideas they raid, pillage, and then watered down and Disney-fy.
I am pretty damn sure that the line between autonomous and remote controlled is pretty blurred on any UAV that is big enough where it takes off from a runway. Hell, the line was blurry even before they took humans out of the cockpit. Telling and airplane to fly to a certain location, perform a pattern while firing off x sensors is pretty damn easy. My guess is that these things are basically autonomous. A human might be staring at the screen intensely when it is performing critical actions, like taking off or landing, but otherwise, no humans needed. I bet people crowd around a few screens when it hits a target area, but unless they see something they find interesting that makes them want to interrupt the mission, they just let it hit its GPS coordinates taking the pictures it was told to take. A human probably only jumps in if they see something and want to investigate further.
This thing clearly was not made to keep tabs on people scrabbling around in the dirt with AK47s who make in a life time what an American beggar makes in a year. It might be doing that for now, but it is really meant to fly over China or Russia, or Iran, states that can make a good go at jamming the signal. I am pretty sure that the UAV was built with the pretty simple feature of an auto pilot that can take the drone to a location, fly a pattern firing its sensors, and go home, even if it has had its signal cut.
Computers are pretty good at flying these days. They are, in fact, arguably better than humans. The only thing you really need a human for targets of opportunity and to check stationary targets before dropping a hundred pounds of explosives on it.
No. We really shouldn't care. A small time struggling corporation making a desperate attempt to boost profits before they go under because their game frankly sucks isn't worth caring over. They are altering their own internal search engine so it costs a few bucks to advertise free junk. Holy shit. Bring out the protest signs. There is nothing to get worked up over. There are no "powerful interests". . Blizzard has more money invested in their urinals than SLs makers have even dared to dream about. There is just a tiny pin prick of a size company that runs this crappy game, and they need money to expand / stay afloat / pay server costs / whatever. They figure they can probably rake in a few extra bucks by charging "merchants" a few bucks to advertise free virtual junk on their wretched game. There is no story here, and certainly nothing to care about unless you happen to be one of the three people playing this game.
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The US doesn't block online Casinos. It has declared them illegal to use and forbidden US companies to deal with them, but you absolutely can get to them via the Intertubes.
I am pretty sure the Antarctic raising further out of the water because it dumped its ice load wouldn't result in the Americans and Eurasia from jumping out of the water too. Whatever the case, who cares? Call me shallow (lol), but any geological actions that takes a few thousand years to happen isn't worth much worry on the part of humans. We can, you know, just move inland. Only fairly rapid sea level changes that cause "quick" evacuations (a few years) are much of a danger as they might kick off mass migration waves that can lead to geopolitical instability. Giving Bengal another meter of water would be a very bad thing.
If a glacier that is already in water breaks off, the sea levels are fine. Hence, pieces of the Arctic breaking up isn't going to result in sea levels rising.
The ANTarctic is a different story. While sections of it are floating ice, it also has a massive land area that is covered in ice. Those can literally slide off into the sea and, like dumping a piece of ice glass of water, the level rises. Some of the ice sheets sitting atop rock are so massive that if they were to build up a little moment, break off, and slide in, they would visible raise the sea level.
Funny you should say that. I actually just bought Alpha Centuari on Amazon. It came all patched up and works like a champ. I don't need to fucking be online to beg EA/Ubi's sever to fucking play it.
You might not be able to download Assassins Creed II, but I, an ass hole who dumps a thousand or so a year on video games have not bought the game despite loving Assassins Creed II. You prevent the 12 year old punk who doesn't have any money from playing your game. Being a fucking moron though, you also made it so that the mid twenty single guy with too much money and time on his hand won't buy your game. Good job Ubi. Good job Ubi. Hey, if you create a dead plague that wipes out humanity that will prevent pirating forever! Get cracking Ubi!
Oh well. I bought Bioshock 2, the new DA:O, the new STALKER, Empire Total War, and Mass Effect 2 instead. But hey, at least I didn't pirate Assassins Creed II. Fucking idiots.
I know OMFG global warming is hip and all, but this almost certainly wasn't a case of rising sea levels. Sea levels are rising REALLY slowly. That isn't to say that a big hunk of the antarctic couldn't melt and slide off into the ocean and give me some beach front property, just that it hasn't happened yet. The island almost certainly simply sunk into the ground. The earth sucks stuff down and pushes other stuff up all the time. It happens.
Eh, I think from that short little preview I am indifferent. I could see how it could be good, but frankly, nothing in that preview really hit on the 'heart' of Civilization.
Who ever played civilization craving more tactical combat? Who cares if the diplomacy screen has the guys walking around instead of just portrait?
The stuff that makes Civilization games either great or suck is in how it deals with culture, expansion, technology, city management, improvements, government types, etc. Frankly, I don't think Civ4 was much of a jump forwards in terms of Civ games. They added some neat futures, but they also managed to dumb down a lot of interesting things from earlier Civs. The civics from Civ4 were especially vapid and uninteresting.
For my money, I personally think that the best "Civ" game ever made was, by leaps and bounds, Alpha Centauri. That game had interesting world events, awesome civics, and each nation had a real sense of personality. I personally hope that they go down that road for Civ5 and give the game more personality, rather than strip it down further like they did with Civ4. Granted, it is really still far too early to make any judgments on the game, I am just not terribly hopeful.
Why would ANYONE charge to be in Rock Band? If you want a sure way to boost your sales, get yourself featured in Rock Band. Thousands of people discovering or re-discovering your music is a pretty fucking obvious way to scare up some sales. Hell, for any game where music is featured a band is only screwing themselves by putting up barriers for being selected. If I had a band, I would murder my way into getting put on a GTA music station. Even for big name stars, reminding hundreds of thousands (millions?) of people that you still rock isn't going to hurt. It is even more important if you are an older band whose original followers are in the process getting jammed into nursing homes. You should be fighting over the privilege to introduce yourself to the younger generations via Rock Band.
The music industry has its head jammed so firmly up their ass that is a minor miracle and a testament to monopoly power that they continue to exist each year.
Well, Toyota is giving hearings on capital hill, they have taken a non-trivial finical hit, and I think their president is one piece of bad news away from sepaku. Yeah, you can probably trust that they did everything in their power not to screw it up. I probably would take a potentially unknown problem on a firmware updates that is being watched by dozens of agencies and internal company auditors over a firmware that is known bad with a questionable dedication to quality. Even if their is a problem, it is a safe bet that it will be detected very early due to the number of eyes on it.
Having been inside of a company that has had to do a recall, I can say that nothing sharpens a company's overzealous safety instincts and risk avoidance mania than a major recall. Recalls, especially the type that Toyota is experiencing, are a complete disaster for the company. They are extremely expensive both in terms of cost and reputation. I am pretty sure that the internal state of Toyota right now is a safety mania that trumps all else that would make a Puppeteer proud. In fact, you can probably rest assured that Toyota is currently wildly overshooting the 'proper' levels of safety. It will probably be a few quarters before they unwind to more reasonable levels.
You need to consider it from the perspective of a manager. If you, as a manager, are in charge of a critical safety component, what is in your best interest? Yeah, you could try and cut a corner and skim an extra 2% profit that your boss might or might not notice, but if it backfires and YOU result in a safety issue, especially in the current environment, you should get a friend with a sword and a basket for your head and save the company the trouble. Right now, kudos in Toyota are earned by being a safety nut and being the one to discover and 'fix' some absurdly low probability safety concern, not for squeezing the budget a little further. Speaking as someone who has been in a company in full recall mode, if there is ever a time to trust that a company really is putting safety first, now is the time.
I'm not sure exactly who you are arguing against. I never argued that for a tablet to work it needs 40 connectors, an OS you can hack, or anything else geeky. I said it needs one thing, and that is to be cheap. Cheap is not a geeky feature.
An iPhone is a different beast. An iPhone, even to the most inexpert user, serves a good four or so functions. It is a phone, an mp3 player, a browser, and a games/apps station. It overlaps with a lot of different devices that most utterly normal non-geeky people have. It offers up a lot, and so you can justify charging as much as you do.
The iPad is an entirely different beast. It costs more than an iPhone in the short term ($100, $200 for a 3GS), and it is much more limited in the scope of what it can do for most users. It can't be your phone or MP3 player. It can't take over the traditional roles of a laptop. It is a big expensive iPod Touch minus the MP3 player.
I'm not saying that is a bad product. I, and most people, would love a tablet that just does internet and light applications that you pick up like a book and can hold while standing in line. The issue is purely price. If you are willing to shell out that kind of money, you are going to get a smart phone and laptop first. Once you have smart phone and laptop, a tablet is almost entirely redundant. To get a non-fanboi to shell out for a mostly redundant device that just does light apps and web browsing, it has to be cheap. That goes double and triple if you are trying to sell an off brand product.
So, will Apple do fine with its tablet? Sure. They have a big enough fan base that any product launched with a little fan-fair is going to do fine. It isn't going to penetrate the vast majority of middle class houses though. In order to do that, it needs to be cheap, and 500+ isn't cheap. The first person to get a simple tablet that is a glorified web browser and apps store under 200 is going to own the market.
Your "geek mind" might want to feel how it is to use something your mother might use, but unless your mother has a lot spare cash, she probably isn't interested at $500+ and a data plan.
Like I said, Apple plays in its own market. It has a loyal base of fanboi's and early adopters that will plunk down pretty much any price that Apple names. Those are the only people who are going to buy an iPad. 500+ is just too damn much for what amounts to a passive media consumption tool. It is WAY too much for a casual user that would find such a gadget nifty, and it costs far too much for most serious users for a device that duplicates the functionality of a good smart phone and computer.
An Android based tablet is playing in the same field with a much smaller base of people willing to buy for the sake of buying. It actually needs to accomplish the promise of a tablet. That means they need something cheap. My mom isn't going to plunk down a 500+ for a little tablet she can read cooking recipes off of or the news with breakfast. She might consider it at $200, and wouldn't think twice at $100.
The iPad is after an entirely different market. At its price, only a fanboi or an early adopter with cash burning a hole through his pocket could love it. At $200 or less, tablets (no matter how makes them) suddenly start making sense for the masses. Tablets are media consumption tools that really only a do limited amount of media well, and they have to be priced as such.
I think a lightweight tablet has a lot of potential if it is cheap enough. The $500+ Apple tablet I think costs WAY too much for any but the fanboys who will buy anything Job's touches. If they could get this tablet down to the $200-$300 range I think they could have a winner. I would love to have a little tablet that lets me browse the web, read e-books, store/play music, maybe watch movies, and do other passive media consumption tasks. It is easier and more ergonomic than a laptop when lounging around the house, is the sort of thing you can take on the subway on the way to work with you, and in general is a decent substitute for a book. I can't pull out my laptop and use it while waiting in line, but I could pull out a tablet.
The real issue is that this IS a limited device. It overlaps with smartphones and computers, and it can't be used for much "real" work beyond reading e-mails. The price has to be such that you can justify getting media consumption tool that is only better than your other tools in its convenience. At $500+, it just costs too much. $200-$300 is, in my opinion, closer to the range you need to be in. If you could get it down to $100-$200 and still turn a profit I think every middle class family and their dog would get one. The real issue in my mind is the price. Price is going to determine if this thing breaks open a new market or if it flops horribly. Apple's price is too high. Their tablet is only going to do well on fanboi'ism, and even then I don't think it will go far. An Android tablet is going to battle it out on price alone. If they try and sell at Apple prices this thing is dead on arrival.
There will never be a "mass migration" from Earth that has any dent on the population. Right now the population is growing at roughly 75 million a year. If you wanted to keep the population steady at the 6.8 billion it is as now, you would need to launch 210,000 people into space EVERY SINGLE DAY. You could ring the world in magic space elevators and still not be able to pull of that feat. If space opens up, it will open up for an extremely small minority of people. It will have no impact on the ground on Earth beyond the resources that space brings to Earth.
Frankly, if you are worried about space to live and resources to consume, the far more reasonable thing to do is the exploit the other 70% of the planet that we basically ignore. Hell, if you include all marginally livable areas on Earth (all of which are a shit ton more friendly than space), than I bet humans cover even a paltry 5%.
If you are lobbing EMP weapons at each other, you are already fucked and fighting WW3. Duck and cover. Emp blasts have very small rangers. With the amount of effort it takes to make a pulse big enough to fry a robot, you might as well just drop a normal bomb on their head and do it the old fashion way. The only time this isn't true is if you start lobbing neutron bombs and nukes. Those are probably worth the price... but if you are lobbing around nukes, you are already completely fucked and fighting the kind of war where cities get vaporized and civilizations collapse.
For your run of the mill insurgent, I am pretty sure your best solution is the old fashion one... explosives.
As dark as the potential for drones can be, I think it actually has the chance to make war a far less indiscriminate and bloody thing.
Right now, if a square of Marines gets fired on, they can return fire. A square of marines has the firepower to flatten a village. Give them access to artillery or air support, and they can literally level a city. In other words, whenever you have a squad of supported marines fight, you are having a group of kids (and they are just kids) holding their finger over enough firepower to take out a small army. Their job is to use as little as that firepower as humanly possible. You might be able to level every building in a half mile radius, but you are not supposed to. When it comes to a firefight though, especially a desperate firefight where soldiers have their lives on the line, they, like most humans, choose life over death, and if that means flattening an entire apartment building to get at one sniper, they do it and hope that no one else was inside. Generally speaking, unless a soldier walks up to a civilian and splatters their brains on the floor, they are let off free. It is war, your life is on the line, you take your risks and respond in the best way possible. If a civilian gets accidentally whacked, that is sad but acceptable. Most soldiers develop a pretty thick "us vs them" mentality that see civilians if not the enemy, as hostile terrain, especially in a guerrilla war.
Drones offer up another possibility. It is true, you can order a drone army to go out and kill civilians and it is probably easier to get a soldier to do it. That said, if you policy is civilian murdering, a nation like the US doesn't need to use drones. You can handily exterminate all life through impersonally aerial bombing. What drones offer is more control over the rules of war. Rules mean little when you are surrounded by gunfire. You do what you have to do to survive. On the other hand, when you are sitting in the US with a military lawyer over one shoulder, a commander over the other, and and every single second and action you take is getting recorded, rules are a lot more enforceable. If the rules call on you to die before you level an apartment complex just to get at one sniper, a drone can simply die. A soldier generally wont.
With drones, you have complete accountability for your actions. You can always go to command before doing something. You never need to make snap judgments. Hell, you can call a damned military lawyer over and get his take on the rules of engagement. Further, every bloody thing you do is being recorded, so if you decide to start murdering civilians you will be caught and tried.
On the balance, I think drones are going to lessen the lives lost. The few potential abuses are pointless to worry about. If someone wants to exterminate another people indiscriminately, you can do it the cheap old fashion way of aerial bombardment. On the other hand, if you are an army that wants to enforce ironclad rules of engagement, drones ensure there is never an excuse for fucking up, and that fuckups get caught.
That might be good growth, but there is more than just than just revenue to consider. I think Google can make a pretty rational argument for getting out is simply a good idea from a bottom line point of view.
1) China is a shitty market. Chinese have an annoying propensity to save. The rush into China has been fueled by people wanting to use it as a factory. As a factory, China is great. As a consumer market, it is more than a little lackluster. I am sure that will change, but right now, the Chinese domestic market frankly sucks.
2) Google is crippled in China. Google is about information sharing and spreading. Google is making a phone not because it wants to make money off of hardware, but because they simply want more people connected all the time. Google always throws its weight behind increasing connectivity. It does this because it wants to be the information hub for anything it can get its sticky little paws on. Chinas limits on free speech and excessive bureaucratic controls even when you play by the rules makes Google's job as information master hard and expensive. China has a government that pretty much directly clashes with Google's business model.
3) China is going to steal from Google and cripple or kick them out anyways. What has really pissed off Google is the IP theft. The Chinese government has stolen IP, and is going to turn around and dump it into its own state owned search engine. China is then going to set up onerous rules to make Google's life a living hell in terms of operations. Why suffer with that just to get crippled access to a few million peasants who hate to spend?
There are decent business arguments for Google to stay, but I think there are a lot of non-trivial financial arguments to bail.
Your argument is nonsense and anyone who has even scratched economic history knows it. The number of times when massive tariffs have lead to anything other than skyrocketing the cost of goods, shortages, rationing, a general decrease in the standard of living and purchasing power, and economic depression can be count on one hand, and each of those involved an economy that was already more or less protected before the tariffs were installed and filled with rural peasents. For the US, a nation wildly dependent upon exports and imports, to declare a 200% tariff on all products from any place that isn't the EU would lead to one of the most devastating trade wars this world has ever seen and make 1929 look like a field day. Unless you are feudal Japan trying to build an industrial base from poor peasantry, protectionism doesn't work.
I don't think you even begin to comprehend how "global" the US economy is. That computer you are staring blankly at was made, at a bare minimum , in 50 countries. The components that make up that computer have crossed national lines literally thousands of times. There are thousands of companies involved in designing, building, and putting all of the components together. The US couldn't build that thing from scratch if it wanted to. We literally don't have enough labor or resources to do it. Only a fool of epic proportions would reach in with some absurd tariff and ensure that the cost of a PC (much less any other device more complex than a stick) would have its cost jump to the levels seen on good old protectionist USSR.
The Knights of the Old Republic setting is set WAY WAY before all of the movies. This was done because Lucas is a moron and they want to stay as far away from that shit as possible. The Star Wars setting is hardly the most awesome setting out there. It has massive gaping planet sized holes in it in terms of coherency. That said, whatever it lacks in terms of being good is made up for the fact that it is extremely recognizable with a large following, and it is a pretty "fun" universe. Who needs consistent technology when you have freaking laser swords and magic?
Personally, I great this MMORPG with a yawn. I am filled to the brim with skepticism that any major production MMORPG is going to be more than a grindfest with gameplay directly ripped off from Everquest 1 and Diku MUDs before that. Woo, killing shit to gain levels to kill more shit. Thanks guys, I'll stick to real drugs. At least those are fun and not so damaging to your social life.
I think at some point someone is going to grow a pair and come up with some innovative MMORPG game play in a major MMORPG production. Star Wars Galaxies was actually pretty close originally in terms trying something different. It failed to be sure, but a few failures are what it will likely take to get out of this mind numbingly dull funk that MMORPGs are in right now where they are all glorified Everquest clones. Yes, I include WoW has a glorified Everquest clone. Don't get me wrong, they do it better than Everquest, but they do it in the same way that Quake did FPS better than Doom. Different cosmetics and refinement of the formula, but they are essentially the same beast. There are other things you can do when you have a few thousand people logged into the world besides grind and do some mini games.
Hear hear! Freespace was the last great space combat game. It is one of the few games where you basically spend the entire game getting your ass kicked and retreating. Not that being a Neo/Frodo/teh one/etc that runs around kicking ass isn't fun, but being a small fry running for your life is a nice change of pace. Freespace 2 was pretty damn awesome in terms of game play, if less engaging in terms of story.
I don't know jack shit about the value of LORAN, that said, your argument about the cost is a poor. If something isn't worth the cost you are dumping into it, it doesn't matter if yesterday you spent one dollar or a billion, it isn't worth the cost. How much you have spent on something in the past does nothing to justify spending more in the future.
Counter measures are fine when they are in proportion to the threat. Installing armored doors between the cockpit and the crew cabin is a good example of a worthy countermeasure. It is cheap, easy, causes minimal disruption, and doesn't strip anyone of their liberty.
Declaring that you can't have anything in your lap an hour before landing on the other hand is amazingly stupid. It is very disruptive, prevents nothing, is costly in that I sure as hell will reconsider flying when it means a 2 hour detention where I can't even read a fucking book, and it prevents nothing so long as the flight is more than two hours long.
Second, look at how inept these attacks have been. The 9/11 hijackers only succeeded under the old boring airline rules because the passengers had been cowed by the government into not resisting hijacking attempts. 9/11 will never work again because now passengers know that if some crazy Arabic speaking dudes take over the airplane you have volunteered yourself for cruise missile duty. All similar attempts to take over a plane in the US has resulted in instant passenger revolt putting the attempt down. The pathetic attempts after 9/11 have all been by the mentally ill who have been too stupid to realize that locking yourself in a bathroom would give you time to detonate the bomb.
These are not serious threats. They are better dealt with by law enforcement than by mass security theater. Our overreaction to their truly pathetic attempts at terrorism are millions of times more damaging than any conceivable damage they could have inflicted had their pathetic attempts worked.
These are not worthy enemies. There are real dangers and killers out there worth dumping some money at. Spending this much time and effort on a few mentally ill social rejects attempting to inflict pin prick losses is stupid beyond comprehension. Lets focus on real dangers, like pool deaths, small choking hazards for children, or god forbid something truly terrifying like overly warm weather, the flu, or teen car accidents.
Nothing could be more true. The damage the 'terrorists' have done is damn near zero. A few busted trains, a few blown up airplanes, and and few buildings? Pfft. It doesn't even rate as pocket change next to one hurricane in terms of costs. In terms of lives lost it doesn't even exist on the same scale as mundane boring shit like cold or warm weather, car accidents, the common cold, and other stupid shit no one gives two shits about. The "terrorist" have done so little damage as to not even register as a cost in terms of lives or cash compared to the normal boring dangers that we face without blinking every single day.
Well, that is true if you don't take into account violent government overreaction. The countless TRILLIONS we have spent in over reacting done VASTLY more damage than any terrorist can even begin to contemplate. We take a mosquito bite and respond by chopping off our own limb. Who to blame? Well, I blame two groups. First, I blame the brain dead masses who can't get it through their thick fucking skulls that they are more likely to be struck dead by a lightening bolt than a terrorist, and who squeal to be striped of liberty and dignity to prevent an absurdly rare way to die. Second, I blame the utterly spineless politicians who play into this fear. I would have had infinite respect for a politician who responded to a terrorist attack by shrugging and suggesting that the best course of action is to invest in lightening rods, because they are a shit ton cheaper than this mindless security theater and will save more lives with a billionth the cost. Even better, spend one millionth of the cost we were going to spend on stripping every single citizen naked who gets on an airplane and dump it into fighting a real threat, like the common cold, the flu, and choking on medium sized objects.
Anyone who would rather see their wife or daughter get stripped naked in front of machine rather than endure the nearly incalculably small risk of a terrorist attack is a spineless piece of shit. I can't decide who pisses me off more, the wretched spineless cows who whimper to politicians to strip them of their money, liberty, and now their fucking clothes, or the bottom feeding piece of shit politicians who agree to do it.
Bah. This whole 'debate' (if you can call such inarticulate babbling from politicians "debate") pisses me off to no end.
I like Blizzard when it comes to game design, but when it comes to even the pretense of originally they fail on such an epic level you need to have your eyes closed and your head shoved a meter up your own asshole to miss it. The blatant ripping off of Warhammer for both Starcraft and Warcraft was pretty obvious and clear... but seriously, "Yogg-Saron"? Is the expansion going to have "Cthulhu-Voldemort"? Eh, I guess they pay homage to the ideas they raid, pillage, and then watered down and Disney-fy.
I am pretty damn sure that the line between autonomous and remote controlled is pretty blurred on any UAV that is big enough where it takes off from a runway. Hell, the line was blurry even before they took humans out of the cockpit. Telling and airplane to fly to a certain location, perform a pattern while firing off x sensors is pretty damn easy. My guess is that these things are basically autonomous. A human might be staring at the screen intensely when it is performing critical actions, like taking off or landing, but otherwise, no humans needed. I bet people crowd around a few screens when it hits a target area, but unless they see something they find interesting that makes them want to interrupt the mission, they just let it hit its GPS coordinates taking the pictures it was told to take. A human probably only jumps in if they see something and want to investigate further.
This thing clearly was not made to keep tabs on people scrabbling around in the dirt with AK47s who make in a life time what an American beggar makes in a year. It might be doing that for now, but it is really meant to fly over China or Russia, or Iran, states that can make a good go at jamming the signal. I am pretty sure that the UAV was built with the pretty simple feature of an auto pilot that can take the drone to a location, fly a pattern firing its sensors, and go home, even if it has had its signal cut.
Computers are pretty good at flying these days. They are, in fact, arguably better than humans. The only thing you really need a human for targets of opportunity and to check stationary targets before dropping a hundred pounds of explosives on it.
No. We really shouldn't care. A small time struggling corporation making a desperate attempt to boost profits before they go under because their game frankly sucks isn't worth caring over. They are altering their own internal search engine so it costs a few bucks to advertise free junk. Holy shit. Bring out the protest signs. There is nothing to get worked up over. There are no "powerful interests". . Blizzard has more money invested in their urinals than SLs makers have even dared to dream about. There is just a tiny pin prick of a size company that runs this crappy game, and they need money to expand / stay afloat / pay server costs / whatever. They figure they can probably rake in a few extra bucks by charging "merchants" a few bucks to advertise free virtual junk on their wretched game. There is no story here, and certainly nothing to care about unless you happen to be one of the three people playing this game.