Look at the cost per kilowatt hour for nuclear. It includes decommissioning fees (unlike all other power plants), and is still on-par with, or cheaper than, oil and gas. With rising gas prices, it'll probably become even more cost efficient.
40% of all CO2 produced in the US is produced by power plants. (http://www.cleanair.org/Air/clearTheAir.html) Switching to nuclear will save more CO2 emissions than any carbon-trading or carbon-offset plan. If you're any kind of environmentalist, you should be giving nuclear power your wholehearted support, like the founder of Greenpeace did
Personally, the lower gas prices and less vulnerability to foreign energy suppliers are the two best reasons to switch to nuclear.
If you're a peace activist, who doesn't like "Blood for Oil", again you should be giving your wholehearted support to nuclear energy.
It's not an artificial distinction. It's actually very important. What differentiates a game from a novel? The fact that you (the living human behind a computer) gets to do stuff. It's that stuff that you do that needs to have a compelling story and development. There's a difference between doing cool stuff (like in PST), and reading a novel of a backstory and then shooting aliens (like in Halo).
Or in other words, suppose you copied the backstory to Halo to Space Invaders. Evil covenant thingamabobs are invading Earth, and you have to kill them. You still couldn't say that Space Invaders had a great story.
It's about time we started building new nuclear reactors. Anyone who wants to seriously reduce our oil addiction must look at nuclear -- it's really the only cost effective alternative, and it's safe, all the FUD aside.
Ironically, the FUD comes from greens, that should be supporting the things. But then again they've protested hydroelectric (kills fish), wind (kills birds), geothermal (OMG, it is cooling our crusts), so/shrug.
My girlfriend asked me, when I was playing Bioshock last month, which video games had a truly great story. Not a backstory, but the game itself tells a great story. Bioshock doesn't count, since while it has an awesome backstory (which is revealed in a nonlinear fashion) the story of the main character himself in the game could be expressed in about two sentences (which I won't do, for spoiler reasons).
While the Final Fantasy series are often lauded as having great stories, I consider them pretty trite.
I kind of liked the stories in Marathon, System Shock, and Halo, but again, most of the richness was in the backstory. The actual story of the character revolved around running around and shooting things.
After about 15 minutes, I decided that Planescape Torment was the only game I could really think of that had a great story. And I still haven't thought of another game, now almost a month later.
You're acting like there's anyway to avoid Long Yang Lu. You may not realize it because you weren't paying attention, or maybe because you can't read Chinese, but if you take a cab from the airport you go right by Long Yang Lu in any case. The only difference is it takes 5 times as long (literally) and costs you twice as much (or more) if you're alone to get to the same place.
I've taken two years of Chinese, so I can read some Chinese. I'm more concerned about getting to the airport than coming back, and I guess taking a cab to get to a metro station is just an odd idea when you have a metro station nearby.
My main complaint, as I said before, is that they attached the maglev to the ass-end of the metro system, which means that it takes a long time to get anywhere, especially since you'll have to transfer once or twice (with the attendant delays with each transfer). The maglev station is almost outside of the city -- if they had run it to a more central location (like the Shiji station), it would have been a lot more useful. Most of the Shanghai people I talked to considered it an impractical boondoggle.
And, importantly, it's not a matter of "whatever universe you can imagine is out there somewhere!"--the possibilities are strictly limited by deterministic evolution of the wavefunction and the initial conditions of the universe.
There may be no married bachelors in any branch of the multiverse, but there's one right now where all the atoms of oxygen in my room spontaneously moved into a corner and I'm suffocating to death. That's a lot of possibilities.
There certainly could be a dimension without shrimp.
The Shanghai maglev is a great deal of fun to ride (if not very expensive), but it's poorly thought out. Since it's not well connected to the public transit system, it takes longer (and costs more) to get to Pudong International by the train than by a cab.
Of course, I may be especially bitter since the lady at the ticket window lied to me. =) When I got to the maglev station, I realized I hadn't checked if the plane ticket I'd bought in Shanghai was for Pudong or Hongqiao. I know the characters for Pudong, and I couldn't find them on my ticket, so I asked the ticket lady (in Chinese) if the characters for airport were for Pudong. She said yes. I said, *are you sure this ticket is for Pudong Airport?* She said yes. So I bought a ticket, had a fun ride on the maglevl, and promptly missed my flight from Hongqiao.
At 2.2 billion for a short hop, the German maglev seems very overpriced compared with comparable train systems. Linking all the major cities in California on a high speed rail network is only $30B by comparison.
I liked how the Night's Fall series ended, really... "Deus Ex Machina" is actually printed on the back cover, and it's not like it hasn't been set up (slowly) over the course of the series. The main problem with Deus Ex Machina endings is that they're sudden. Frodo and his manservant are sitting there on the side of a volcano, waiting to die, all hope gone, when Gandalf suddenly appears without any setup, and everything is magically all right. When you actively go hunting down a god to help you out, IMO, it's a different paradigm at work.
He didn't give in to marketing drones. According to Ryan Dancey, Jordan pitches the series as a "neverending saga" that would result in unbounded book sales to the publishing house.
I think the series shows this, as it starts running out of steam around book 3 or 4, and limps along through book 11 and a prequel.
I met the guy in 2004, and I'm certainly sad he died, but he definitely dropped the ball on the series.
I'm finishing up the Night's Fall series by Peter Hamilton right now, who does follow as many characters as Jordan, but does a damn good job telling the stories and weaving the characters' plot lines together. Great, great trilogy (or 6-book-ology if you buy the softcovers).
This isn't a friend of a friend. This was my roommate's house that was thrashed by Saddam's army. If you knew anything, you'd know that such behavior was basically by the book for their army.
One of my roommates in college was a Palestinian guy who grew up in Kuwait. His family was in vacation (thank heavens) in America when Saddam invaded. They broke into his house, pissed on the carpet, stole his TV and anything else valuable, and lived in it for the duration of the occuptation. His family's bank accounts got frozen, which he never got back. Fortunately, his father was a big believer in cash when going on vacation and had two hundred thousand dollars *on hand* in LA, with which they bought a 7-11, a car, and a down payment on a house. Unfortunately the 7-11 was in Northridge, but everything eventually worked out all right for him. No thanks to Saddam.
The piracy charges against China are true. When I was in Shanghai I could have picked up copies of any Microsoft product for $10 or so. They have kids hustling CDs on the streets, containing everything from movies to software to porn. Of course, whenever the 8 year old kids saw a big white dude, they always offered the porn first. We must have a great reputation for being lechers over there.
You can use the TK plasmid to pick up things to use as a damage shield. You can also use it in a lot of creative ways, like plucking the arrow of a trap bolt out of a wall and hurling it at an enemy, or just holding a corpse in front of you and using that to disarm the trap bolts. The game is actually very flexible in what you can do with the plasmids. Just for fun, I fought one of the big daddy encounters three different ways, trying different things every time... enraging splicers to take it on, hacking turrets, hiding and sniping, using TK to hurl objects at it will catching the grenades it shoots, etc.
Looking at how one of the guides recommended that I kill the first boss (the doctor) was completely different from how I went about it.
The XP systems (ADAM and Research) are a little too simplistic for my taste, but I like the flexibility in being able to design a character. It's not as hard set as your character was in SS2. I also wish there were more decisions to be made in the game rather than just killing or saving the girls (and realistically, most people are going to pick to save them... the ADAM difference is modest, but the special abilities you pick up can't be gotten any other way).
Like other people, I think the copy protection is nonsense. Requiring an internet connection to play a single player game should be a capital offense. =) And the vita chambers do make the game too easy if you want to just suicide over and over on an enemy... but I refuse to use them, like most people. By the time you get trap bolts, you shouldn't even be taking damage in a big daddy fight... just rig up 5 or 6 traps and lure it through it, done.
It doesn't run at all, just tells you to look for a system update at some point. Kind of mind boggling, really, since it's such a pre-eminent title for them.
A friend of mine brought over Singstar -- their new flagship product (they're even releasing a new PS2 colored like Singstar) -- last night. Doesn't work on the 80GB version, only the 60GB. I had to pull my PS2 out of mothball.
Kind of annoying, since the saved playbacks are like 1MB each, so the PS2 memory cards can only hold a few of them, compared with the 80GB hard drive...
Yeah, I handle all the rebates for our company, and even with all the correct documentation, the return rate on rebates is around 50%. When you call, they magically start processing it.
I think the entire industry is a scam, though I have a friend that works in it, and says that they, like casinos, don't need to cheat to make money.
What's worse was the old UNIX problem with anyone able to access the microphone and speakers on a remote machine. Had a lot of fun in the office with that one, back in the day. Also, since you could by default run apps on the local console in X, we'd throw up screensavers and xview -display 0:0 various images (like Mike Tyson biting the ear off).
There's nothing better to do with a $300,000 SGI Onyx than to have it meow at you every once in a while.
>>I'm sorry, but games drive console sales, not brand names.
I just bought a PS3. Not because there's a title I want to play on it (there's not), but because Sony offered a $150 discount to anyone who signs up for the Sony Style credit card (which will be promptly cancelled when the refund comes in) at the same time, and because they offered $100 of blue-ray movies for free. If you pick up the 60GB at 100$ or the 80GB with a 50$ game for free (Motorstorm), you're looking at a total 'cost' of $250-$300. Which was finally the right ballpark for me to buy a PS3. You can google for the offer.
I wanted to see what FF12 and some of the other PS2 games looked at in higher resolution (the 1.8 patch for the PS3 enabled this, which was a big selling point to me), and wanted a blue-ray player. Everything else (like all the Media Center and WebTVish crap) was just extras on top. I'll probably pick up Little Big Planet when it comes out.
Slashdot Mirror
Look at the cost per kilowatt hour for nuclear. It includes decommissioning fees (unlike all other power plants), and is still on-par with, or cheaper than, oil and gas. With rising gas prices, it'll probably become even more cost efficient.
40% of all CO2 produced in the US is produced by power plants. (http://www.cleanair.org/Air/clearTheAir.html) Switching to nuclear will save more CO2 emissions than any carbon-trading or carbon-offset plan. If you're any kind of environmentalist, you should be giving nuclear power your wholehearted support, like the founder of Greenpeace did
Personally, the lower gas prices and less vulnerability to foreign energy suppliers are the two best reasons to switch to nuclear.
If you're a peace activist, who doesn't like "Blood for Oil", again you should be giving your wholehearted support to nuclear energy.
actually most of oil-addiction comes from cars,
Sorry, I should have said, "An alternative to oil that Americans would actually fucking accept."
There's no replacement to the car in American society at this point in time, eco-whatever thoughts aside.
Lawyers. The 'subsidy' (if it's the same one in Bush's energy bill) is nothing less than lawsuit insurance.
It's not an artificial distinction. It's actually very important. What differentiates a game from a novel? The fact that you (the living human behind a computer) gets to do stuff. It's that stuff that you do that needs to have a compelling story and development. There's a difference between doing cool stuff (like in PST), and reading a novel of a backstory and then shooting aliens (like in Halo).
Or in other words, suppose you copied the backstory to Halo to Space Invaders. Evil covenant thingamabobs are invading Earth, and you have to kill them. You still couldn't say that Space Invaders had a great story.
Yeah, I liked Deus Ex's story a lot, but not quite enough to label it "great". It was actually the runner-up, as it were, to PST in my mind. =)
It's about time we started building new nuclear reactors. Anyone who wants to seriously reduce our oil addiction must look at nuclear -- it's really the only cost effective alternative, and it's safe, all the FUD aside.
/shrug.
Ironically, the FUD comes from greens, that should be supporting the things. But then again they've protested hydroelectric (kills fish), wind (kills birds), geothermal (OMG, it is cooling our crusts), so
My girlfriend asked me, when I was playing Bioshock last month, which video games had a truly great story. Not a backstory, but the game itself tells a great story. Bioshock doesn't count, since while it has an awesome backstory (which is revealed in a nonlinear fashion) the story of the main character himself in the game could be expressed in about two sentences (which I won't do, for spoiler reasons).
While the Final Fantasy series are often lauded as having great stories, I consider them pretty trite.
I kind of liked the stories in Marathon, System Shock, and Halo, but again, most of the richness was in the backstory. The actual story of the character revolved around running around and shooting things.
After about 15 minutes, I decided that Planescape Torment was the only game I could really think of that had a great story. And I still haven't thought of another game, now almost a month later.
You're acting like there's anyway to avoid Long Yang Lu. You may not realize it because you weren't paying attention, or maybe because you can't read Chinese, but if you take a cab from the airport you go right by Long Yang Lu in any case. The only difference is it takes 5 times as long (literally) and costs you twice as much (or more) if you're alone to get to the same place.
I've taken two years of Chinese, so I can read some Chinese. I'm more concerned about getting to the airport than coming back, and I guess taking a cab to get to a metro station is just an odd idea when you have a metro station nearby.
My main complaint, as I said before, is that they attached the maglev to the ass-end of the metro system, which means that it takes a long time to get anywhere, especially since you'll have to transfer once or twice (with the attendant delays with each transfer). The maglev station is almost outside of the city -- if they had run it to a more central location (like the Shiji station), it would have been a lot more useful. Most of the Shanghai people I talked to considered it an impractical boondoggle.
(8 minutes + the time to get to the end station by metro and connections), which will be for most people longer than a cab ride.
If you live at the end metro station, then sure, the maglev is great. It's just inconvenient to get to the station that serves the maglev.
And, importantly, it's not a matter of "whatever universe you can imagine is out there somewhere!"--the possibilities are strictly limited by deterministic evolution of the wavefunction and the initial conditions of the universe.
There may be no married bachelors in any branch of the multiverse, but there's one right now where all the atoms of oxygen in my room spontaneously moved into a corner and I'm suffocating to death. That's a lot of possibilities.
There certainly could be a dimension without shrimp.
The Shanghai maglev is a great deal of fun to ride (if not very expensive), but it's poorly thought out. Since it's not well connected to the public transit system, it takes longer (and costs more) to get to Pudong International by the train than by a cab.
Of course, I may be especially bitter since the lady at the ticket window lied to me. =) When I got to the maglev station, I realized I hadn't checked if the plane ticket I'd bought in Shanghai was for Pudong or Hongqiao. I know the characters for Pudong, and I couldn't find them on my ticket, so I asked the ticket lady (in Chinese) if the characters for airport were for Pudong. She said yes. I said, *are you sure this ticket is for Pudong Airport?* She said yes. So I bought a ticket, had a fun ride on the maglevl, and promptly missed my flight from Hongqiao.
At 2.2 billion for a short hop, the German maglev seems very overpriced compared with comparable train systems. Linking all the major cities in California on a high speed rail network is only $30B by comparison.
I liked how the Night's Fall series ended, really... "Deus Ex Machina" is actually printed on the back cover, and it's not like it hasn't been set up (slowly) over the course of the series. The main problem with Deus Ex Machina endings is that they're sudden. Frodo and his manservant are sitting there on the side of a volcano, waiting to die, all hope gone, when Gandalf suddenly appears without any setup, and everything is magically all right. When you actively go hunting down a god to help you out, IMO, it's a different paradigm at work.
He didn't give in to marketing drones. According to Ryan Dancey, Jordan pitches the series as a "neverending saga" that would result in unbounded book sales to the publishing house.
I think the series shows this, as it starts running out of steam around book 3 or 4, and limps along through book 11 and a prequel.
I met the guy in 2004, and I'm certainly sad he died, but he definitely dropped the ball on the series.
I'm finishing up the Night's Fall series by Peter Hamilton right now, who does follow as many characters as Jordan, but does a damn good job telling the stories and weaving the characters' plot lines together. Great, great trilogy (or 6-book-ology if you buy the softcovers).
This isn't a friend of a friend. This was my roommate's house that was thrashed by Saddam's army. If you knew anything, you'd know that such behavior was basically by the book for their army.
Huh, really?
One of my roommates in college was a Palestinian guy who grew up in Kuwait. His family was in vacation (thank heavens) in America when Saddam invaded. They broke into his house, pissed on the carpet, stole his TV and anything else valuable, and lived in it for the duration of the occuptation. His family's bank accounts got frozen, which he never got back. Fortunately, his father was a big believer in cash when going on vacation and had two hundred thousand dollars *on hand* in LA, with which they bought a 7-11, a car, and a down payment on a house. Unfortunately the 7-11 was in Northridge, but everything eventually worked out all right for him. No thanks to Saddam.
The piracy charges against China are true. When I was in Shanghai I could have picked up copies of any Microsoft product for $10 or so. They have kids hustling CDs on the streets, containing everything from movies to software to porn. Of course, whenever the 8 year old kids saw a big white dude, they always offered the porn first. We must have a great reputation for being lechers over there.
You can use the TK plasmid to pick up things to use as a damage shield. You can also use it in a lot of creative ways, like plucking the arrow of a trap bolt out of a wall and hurling it at an enemy, or just holding a corpse in front of you and using that to disarm the trap bolts. The game is actually very flexible in what you can do with the plasmids. Just for fun, I fought one of the big daddy encounters three different ways, trying different things every time... enraging splicers to take it on, hacking turrets, hiding and sniping, using TK to hurl objects at it will catching the grenades it shoots, etc.
Looking at how one of the guides recommended that I kill the first boss (the doctor) was completely different from how I went about it.
The XP systems (ADAM and Research) are a little too simplistic for my taste, but I like the flexibility in being able to design a character. It's not as hard set as your character was in SS2. I also wish there were more decisions to be made in the game rather than just killing or saving the girls (and realistically, most people are going to pick to save them... the ADAM difference is modest, but the special abilities you pick up can't be gotten any other way).
Like other people, I think the copy protection is nonsense. Requiring an internet connection to play a single player game should be a capital offense. =) And the vita chambers do make the game too easy if you want to just suicide over and over on an enemy... but I refuse to use them, like most people. By the time you get trap bolts, you shouldn't even be taking damage in a big daddy fight... just rig up 5 or 6 traps and lure it through it, done.
It doesn't run at all, just tells you to look for a system update at some point. Kind of mind boggling, really, since it's such a pre-eminent title for them.
A friend of mine brought over Singstar -- their new flagship product (they're even releasing a new PS2 colored like Singstar) -- last night. Doesn't work on the 80GB version, only the 60GB. I had to pull my PS2 out of mothball.
Kind of annoying, since the saved playbacks are like 1MB each, so the PS2 memory cards can only hold a few of them, compared with the 80GB hard drive...
Just got the 80GB -- no HDMI cable. Still comes with a composite AV cable, of all things.
"a few percent more of the rebates"
^few^50
=)
Yeah, I handle all the rebates for our company, and even with all the correct documentation, the return rate on rebates is around 50%. When you call, they magically start processing it.
I think the entire industry is a scam, though I have a friend that works in it, and says that they, like casinos, don't need to cheat to make money.
Wow, first good question I've heard asked on Slashdot in a long time.
Very interesting idea.
What's worse was the old UNIX problem with anyone able to access the microphone and speakers on a remote machine. Had a lot of fun in the office with that one, back in the day. Also, since you could by default run apps on the local console in X, we'd throw up screensavers and xview -display 0:0 various images (like Mike Tyson biting the ear off).
There's nothing better to do with a $300,000 SGI Onyx than to have it meow at you every once in a while.
The quiz in question was rigged to make everyone a "Libertarian".
The questions are indeed rather horribly worded, though in that case it might be forcing the user into the non-Libertarian position.
>>I'm sorry, but games drive console sales, not brand names.
I just bought a PS3. Not because there's a title I want to play on it (there's not), but because Sony offered a $150 discount to anyone who signs up for the Sony Style credit card (which will be promptly cancelled when the refund comes in) at the same time, and because they offered $100 of blue-ray movies for free. If you pick up the 60GB at 100$ or the 80GB with a 50$ game for free (Motorstorm), you're looking at a total 'cost' of $250-$300. Which was finally the right ballpark for me to buy a PS3. You can google for the offer.
I wanted to see what FF12 and some of the other PS2 games looked at in higher resolution (the 1.8 patch for the PS3 enabled this, which was a big selling point to me), and wanted a blue-ray player. Everything else (like all the Media Center and WebTVish crap) was just extras on top. I'll probably pick up Little Big Planet when it comes out.