you think it's ignored? It's only been just over a year since release, granted, but there's a relatively limited selection of DS games out so far. 152 is the official library count last I checked, and a lot of those are titles that are yet to be due out. Also, looking in stores, I'm finding mostly the same 5-20 games (average display I've found is about 10) everywhere I go, versus the typical selection of about 25 GBA games. Yes, nintendo players can go online to order them, but whatever happened to instant gratification?:P If the DS ignored GBA games entirely, there'd be surprisingly little to play on it. It doesn't seem like something people would ignore, but maybe I'm wrong.
If they didn't put in a link port, why not include wireless support? If they didn't want to build it in, how about putting out a DS cart that handles the connection details, and accesses the GBA port to play the game? A DS cart "link port simulator" sort of thing. Maybe that's in the works, but I doubt it.
Yes, they've stated it's not intending to replace the GBA, I know that. That doesn't mean it has to be crippled. If it's going to support advance games at all, why be half-ass sbout it? Why not take full advantage of the potential capabilities of your products? If they wanted to say "DS is for DS games and not a replacement, go buy a GBA if you want GBA stuff", why include the support at all? For that matter, it's sure not listed on the DS packaging anywhere that GBA compatibility is not 100% and multiplayer is NOT actually supported. It's a cock-tease by nintendo.
my love/hate with nintendo and the DS
on
Nintendo's Busy Week
·
· Score: 0, Flamebait
i discovered something about the DS in the past couple days that makes me seriously irked. Though it can play GBA games, and quite well, there's a catch - you can't play them multiplayer. _At all_. You can't use a wire, and you can't use the DS' inherent 802.11b support to connect between DS units for GBA games. Apparently, though the hardware is there, they've only got layer 1 and 2 protocol support, and rely on the cartridge manufacturers to include their own further protocol support (tcp/ip, etc). Absolutely fucking unbelievable that they'd cripple the unit like that. Un-fucking-believable. The unit is not, in short, a full replacement for a GBA, just sort of a way to get your fix of maybe your favorite GBA single-player games. Also, while playing GBA games, the DS part shuts off entirely, leaving one screen black - why the hell doesn't it have an option to keep alive to let you take game notes, or turn on the built-in wireless and search for pictochat sessions? That wifi harwdare is just -sitting- there while I'm playing GBA, not even -pretending- to do anything useful. What a waste.
Nintendo always does this kind of shit. They think that someone else is going to do it, and surprise, there are right now only 4 carts that support internet play. Granted, the system is only a little over a year old, but still. Is this part of some genius marketing strategy? No, sadly, I really don't think so, or Nintendo wouldn't be hurting the way it has been in the past six or more years. If they don't straighten up, they'll lose the handheld market, too. Though the PSP is far too expensive, and that's good. But what they've potentially got is a relatively cheap device with instant-on capability (if only they'd put an option to get rid of the 'don't have a seizure' nag screen) with a great cheap form of media (the DS cartridge is small and cheap, but holds a good amount of data from what I can tell). It's got a touch-screen and stylus for quick input and simple, easy to understand and mostly universally recognized controls and an intuitive software interface.
Let me interject for a moment to say that I've always had a weak spot for nintendo. I have high hopes for them always, because of the fun I had in my young days playing Gameboy and NES; I've been a video gamer since I was old enough to be held up to pac-man machines by my mother and beat the scores of the teenagers around me. Games, and Nintendo, are in my blood. Now that I'm older, I see what Nintendo -could- be doing and it shakes me to the very core. Toys not just for kids, but for everyone, with the easy to use features that appeal to kids and the complexity that appeals to adults - and you don't even have to be too geeky to like or use the stuff.
The thing could be about 1000 times what it is now, if only they'd put some guts behind it. Imagine a GPS cart for it, or doing data analysis on it. Writable cartridges and a text reader with the ability to annotate and take notes via stylus. Home control via wifi on this thing. A remake of the Japanese-only Gameboy Sonar unit, with a sonar bobber made by nissan. Gameboy camera with a real camera, not the innovative but weak piece of trash that was the old GBCam. Doodle on your friends' faces.
You name it, the unit could do it - if they'd pull their heads out of their asses. Yes, there are some independent projects to do these things, but they'll never see the open market - nintendo tends to require a hefty financial backing and lots of previous games development experience before they'll even think of licensing to you, then SELLING their development kits to you.
Fuck you Nintendo, fuck you. You've been doing this with the gameboy since day one. Ok, the original I can let go - it was beautiful and unique. But now, technology has changed, and demand has changed. I'm not asking for a nintendo cellphone or anything. I'm just asking that you take your ideas and really be willing to stand behind them and make them into something great. Do you even _ask_ gamers what kind of features would be
outnumbered by people, say, from one of the mega-corps that you don't want to join, who have the cash to buy a hundred spare ships so even if you do blow one up it means nothing; meanwhile, they swarm you at a gate and pop the one ship (be it a transport or attack class, doesn't matter) that you spent a day or two or three irl working on?
that was a constant experience for me, my friends, and other new players that I talked to. Might makes right in EVE, thanks to the free for all PvP and the cash problem. Yes, yes, there are protected zones where you can, in theory, "make money". But to make a decent living and accumulate capital with ANY speed, you have to go outside of them - and you often have to cross PvP zones to get to other "safe" zones, as well.
and skills are everything in EVE, and not money, right? heh. heheh. heheh eheh ehehehhhe hehe.
NOT.
The guy who plays 16 hours a day in EVE will school your ass, because he's got the money to buy the equipment, and in EVE, equipment is damn near -everything-. He with the biggest, most expensive gun wins, pretty much hands down. The game is in my opinion horribly, horribly biased in this respect. It is, at its heart, an intergalactic capitalism simulator. Probably banned in China it's so capitalistic.
Then again, they may love it. Log on sometime and try to make it your own way without joining a mega-corp or mega-pirate-corp with big bucks to front to you. Watch the Evil Capitalists crush you!!
since the six apart acquisition and the moving of the data center from seattle to san francisco, livejournal has actually had perpetual technical issues. User pictures being jumbled, comment notification emails broken(this has been a reoccuring one), problems during peak load hours, community comments, and the like. Every day I look on in greater dismay as admin messages telling me something else is broken or having troubles. I like the service enough to pay for it, so I can keep in touch with old friends I've moved away from. But the 6apart and data center swap were terrible, terrible ideas that are degrading service quality inch by emo little inch.
Of course they didn't intend to take that away, ffs. But it's nice of them to offer that kind of patch.
My point was more about designing things properly from the get-go - it just makes sense to simplify interfaces and such as much as possible. Sometimes things simply can't be reduced - but generally, if they can, they should be. Don't consider it "designing for disabled people" - though it has that as a great side-effect - consider it as "designing for ease of use and simplicity". It's why we like the ALT tag and Lynx as a web browser. You don't have to be disabled to use it, but it just so happens that the two things combined make browsing the web when you're blind a whole lot easier. Efficiency.
You -should- blame people for not making more accessible pathways for you, anyways, at least in government buildings and public businesses!
Why does a computer have to be designed for two hands? Bicycles don't have to be designed for two feet, nor cars either. I'm not saying that all cars and bicycles should only have hand controls, either. The ability to customize and retrofit to specific needs, however, is excellent. How about chording keyboards, or the frog pad? All one-handed.
Who is it that decides forevermore that "this thing is made for X, and not Y", anyways? Isn't finding new and alternative purposes and uses to something a core aspect of being a thinking being?
Shit, I don't give a fuck about the game, myself, but I do care about accessibility and getting rid of retarded interfaces.
wow. the comments and the moderations here really suck. I see a lot of folk who seem to basically just say "deal with it, you're DIS-abled, that means you can't do stuff". That's fucked up, you shitheads.
I don't think anybody is calling for the game to be shut down for this; but an optional patch that allows for customizing the controls better, as is mentioned is in the works, seems like just the thing.
Meanwhile, more broadly speaking, do you assholes know what designing for disability does? It puts _simply usability_ into your product, shit that we bitch about all the time - godawful GUI's, jackoff interfaces and stupid periphreals that result in trying to play a game looking like you're being raped by a wire-tentacle monster while playing twister at the console.
My personal favorite toys are the DEAD BODIES of the WEB DEVELOPERS responsible for godawful ad-infested ugly-ass "slide shows" with shitty controls and no real content within.
I saw the new onion the other day, and I just checked the new salon.com.
jesus fucking christ, somebody beat this guy up and take away his keyboard. Mr. Vinh - I address you directly - please stop fucking up websites that had perfectly good design. Your obsession with blinding amounts of whitespace and no borders to differentiate between information sources FUCKING HURTS.
Oh god dammit. If I hear the Mozilla/Adobe/Microsoft/Java/Darwin type of argument on here again I am seriousl going to GNU/Vomit.
Hypothetically, remove Photoshop from your computer. Congratulations, now you can no longer paint nipples onto the breasts of clothed actresses and giggle to yourself. You could still stop jerking off and do something else with the computer, like write an email, browse the web, work on your thesis (about breast photoshopping), or sort your porn collection.
So, now go remove the gnu-utilities from your Linux box, and try to do something, anything, without using what was provided, or anything that was built on the gnu utilities set.
Yes, RMS is.. Snippy and weird.. but really he's got a pretty good case for wanting GNU to be recognized. It is a good part of his entire life's work. I'm not saying he's wrong or right for wanting it, but I'm certainly saying he's justified.
I'll say that I tried the stuff just for the Shiny Factor ("Oooh! Shiny!"), and shockingly, it's not tremendously bad. I've had much, much worse cups of candy-coffee crap fresh from the spouts of the art wankers and the pimply-faced youths manning coffee machines at various coffeehouses and restaurants across the nation. For candy-coffee crap in a can, well, it's what you get, you know?
I had the mocha latte, and, well, it tasted like coffee, cream, sugar, and chocolate stuff made by some jackass college kid with a bad haircut.
But yeah, so, now - the next step is to figure out how to recycle the fucking things. They're like ten pounds each and the size of my left testicle - freaking huge. Feels kinda wrong to just toss them away.
great, just what i need... a way to have a non-dedicated readership. i -want- people to visit my site. more than that, i want people to want to visit my site, in its entirety.
i've used amphetadesk before, myself, and it's not bad, if a bit clunky. and i like the idea of being able to have other site headlines on mine... it's sort of a catch-22. cool tech, can help spread the word of my site and bring new content without much effort - at the expense of someone else being able to do the same with -my- content.
for it to work, maybe it'll require rethinking the way we do things on the web. maybe it'll go the way of entirely custom pages on the user side, and they pull -everything- via RSS or something similar in the future. of course.
allow me to ring your buzzword bell: subscription-based modality for just such a thing. or, via micropayment - if you click a headline and pull the full story, a penny or two is sent to the originating site. though i'm not sure i like either of those options, particularly - it'd be far to easy to fritter away a good chunk of money per month just browsing. then again, by only paying for the stories i want to read entirely, it may not amount to too terribly much.
'round these parts we call them 'lazy pains' - when you've been sitting on your ass for so long it hurts.
for example, i threw my back out the other day by not moving from the couch with the laptop on a chair in front of me for many, many hours.
see also 'atrophy', and 'fucking lazy'.
fuck it, i work 52 hours a week monday through friday, I should be able to veg out, right? But now even my couch is trying to kill me! no rest for the, uh, lazy, i guess..
you know, OSHA (i think it was, maybe Nuclear Regulatory Commission instead) has mandated that the yearly occupational exposure limit for astronauts is five times the normal 5000 mrems/yearly, to clock in at 25,000 mrem/yr. if the gubbernment says they're safe, they're safe, right? RIGHT?
by comparison, the data i've found says that at 400,000 mrems of exposure you have about a 50% chance of survival, and at 600,000+ you're dead meat. hell, i guess an irradiated iodine treatment for the thyroid dumps 20k mrems at your body... and TWO MILLION AT YOUR THYROID, and people make it out of that ok... Medicine is weird like that, isn't it?
on the up side, during the storm the astronauts can just leave their frozen pizza on the counter for a couple minutes, instead of messing with the oven...
i agree with you in one sense; i use some limited ad-blocking(mostly just popups, though). but ads may help keep some of the smaller sites going - those people that feel they have the time and dedication to make their contribution to a global medium, but don't have as many resources as, say, CNN.com. if the infrastructure was there, then micropayments wouldn't be a bad idea instead of ads, but paypal just doesn't cut it. i do like/.'s subscriber model, myself - $$ per XX pageviews. Of course, if everyone started going to that pay model, then we're still going to have a lot of sites cut out - i personally tend to browse a -lot- of sites throughout the day and the week. if i had to toss $5 at each one, I'd be bankrupt, and missing out on a lot of information that i'd otherwise not be able to get.
obviously libraries and other institutions need to pay the poor, abused owners of this intellectual property right away.
libraries, who have to beg for funding because there still aren't enough bombs in the world yet.
libraries, who sell off stocks of books to pay expenses, because oops! your funding was appropriated to pay for a couple bolts on an F-16, or a toilet seat for a general.
for the cost of just one Giant Hulking War-Machine(TM) - one advanced figher or bomber, one M1-A1 Abrams tank, do you realise how many public institutions could be revitalized? Christ, $300 million goes a long way when it's not used for blowing stuff up, you know that?
Slashdot Mirror
you think it's ignored? It's only been just over a year since release, granted, but there's a relatively limited selection of DS games out so far. 152 is the official library count last I checked, and a lot of those are titles that are yet to be due out. Also, looking in stores, I'm finding mostly the same 5-20 games (average display I've found is about 10) everywhere I go, versus the typical selection of about 25 GBA games. Yes, nintendo players can go online to order them, but whatever happened to instant gratification? :P If the DS ignored GBA games entirely, there'd be surprisingly little to play on it. It doesn't seem like something people would ignore, but maybe I'm wrong.
If they didn't put in a link port, why not include wireless support? If they didn't want to build it in, how about putting out a DS cart that handles the connection details, and accesses the GBA port to play the game? A DS cart "link port simulator" sort of thing. Maybe that's in the works, but I doubt it.
Yes, they've stated it's not intending to replace the GBA, I know that. That doesn't mean it has to be crippled. If it's going to support advance games at all, why be half-ass sbout it? Why not take full advantage of the potential capabilities of your products? If they wanted to say "DS is for DS games and not a replacement, go buy a GBA if you want GBA stuff", why include the support at all? For that matter, it's sure not listed on the DS packaging anywhere that GBA compatibility is not 100% and multiplayer is NOT actually supported. It's a cock-tease by nintendo.
i discovered something about the DS in the past couple days that makes me seriously irked. Though it can play GBA games, and quite well, there's a catch - you can't play them multiplayer. _At all_. You can't use a wire, and you can't use the DS' inherent 802.11b support to connect between DS units for GBA games. Apparently, though the hardware is there, they've only got layer 1 and 2 protocol support, and rely on the cartridge manufacturers to include their own further protocol support (tcp/ip, etc). Absolutely fucking unbelievable that they'd cripple the unit like that. Un-fucking-believable. The unit is not, in short, a full replacement for a GBA, just sort of a way to get your fix of maybe your favorite GBA single-player games. Also, while playing GBA games, the DS part shuts off entirely, leaving one screen black - why the hell doesn't it have an option to keep alive to let you take game notes, or turn on the built-in wireless and search for pictochat sessions? That wifi harwdare is just -sitting- there while I'm playing GBA, not even -pretending- to do anything useful. What a waste.
Nintendo always does this kind of shit. They think that someone else is going to do it, and surprise, there are right now only 4 carts that support internet play. Granted, the system is only a little over a year old, but still. Is this part of some genius marketing strategy? No, sadly, I really don't think so, or Nintendo wouldn't be hurting the way it has been in the past six or more years. If they don't straighten up, they'll lose the handheld market, too. Though the PSP is far too expensive, and that's good. But what they've potentially got is a relatively cheap device with instant-on capability (if only they'd put an option to get rid of the 'don't have a seizure' nag screen) with a great cheap form of media (the DS cartridge is small and cheap, but holds a good amount of data from what I can tell). It's got a touch-screen and stylus for quick input and simple, easy to understand and mostly universally recognized controls and an intuitive software interface.
Let me interject for a moment to say that I've always had a weak spot for nintendo. I have high hopes for them always, because of the fun I had in my young days playing Gameboy and NES; I've been a video gamer since I was old enough to be held up to pac-man machines by my mother and beat the scores of the teenagers around me. Games, and Nintendo, are in my blood. Now that I'm older, I see what Nintendo -could- be doing and it shakes me to the very core. Toys not just for kids, but for everyone, with the easy to use features that appeal to kids and the complexity that appeals to adults - and you don't even have to be too geeky to like or use the stuff.
The thing could be about 1000 times what it is now, if only they'd put some guts behind it.
Imagine a GPS cart for it, or doing data analysis on it. Writable cartridges and a text reader with the ability to annotate and take notes via stylus. Home control via wifi on this thing. A remake of the Japanese-only Gameboy Sonar unit, with a sonar bobber made by nissan. Gameboy camera with a real camera, not the innovative but weak piece of trash that was the old GBCam. Doodle on your friends' faces.
You name it, the unit could do it - if they'd pull their heads out of their asses. Yes, there are some independent projects to do these things, but they'll never see the open market - nintendo tends to require a hefty financial backing and lots of previous games development experience before they'll even think of licensing to you, then SELLING their development kits to you.
Fuck you Nintendo, fuck you. You've been doing this with the gameboy since day one. Ok, the original I can let go - it was beautiful and unique. But now, technology has changed, and demand has changed. I'm not asking for a nintendo cellphone or anything. I'm just asking that you take your ideas and really be willing to stand behind them and make them into something great. Do you even _ask_ gamers what kind of features would be
"cheap, throwaway ships" paid and piloted by you and thirty other corp members, you mean.
Which helps illustrate my point that you can't get by without financial backing and a megacorp in EVE. Thanks!
outnumbered by people, say, from one of the mega-corps that you don't want to join, who have the cash to buy a hundred spare ships so even if you do blow one up it means nothing; meanwhile, they swarm you at a gate and pop the one ship (be it a transport or attack class, doesn't matter) that you spent a day or two or three irl working on?
that was a constant experience for me, my friends, and other new players that I talked to. Might makes right in EVE, thanks to the free for all PvP and the cash problem. Yes, yes, there are protected zones where you can, in theory, "make money". But to make a decent living and accumulate capital with ANY speed, you have to go outside of them - and you often have to cross PvP zones to get to other "safe" zones, as well.
and skills are everything in EVE, and not money, right? heh. heheh. heheh eheh ehehehhhe hehe.
NOT.
The guy who plays 16 hours a day in EVE will school your ass, because he's got the money to buy the equipment, and in EVE, equipment is damn near -everything-. He with the biggest, most expensive gun wins, pretty much hands down. The game is in my opinion horribly, horribly biased in this respect. It is, at its heart, an intergalactic capitalism simulator. Probably banned in China it's so capitalistic.
Then again, they may love it. Log on sometime and try to make it your own way without joining a mega-corp or mega-pirate-corp with big bucks to front to you. Watch the Evil Capitalists crush you!!
Meh. Pretty game, but unchecked capitalism blows.
i almost flipped a shit when i read in the newscientist article:
"To view a video of the parasite and grasshopper in action, which includes a brief interview, in French..."
An interview with a parasite-infected grasshopper moments before death? in FRENCH? Now THAT is journalism, my friends!
since the six apart acquisition and the moving of the data center from seattle to san francisco, livejournal has actually had perpetual technical issues. User pictures being jumbled, comment notification emails broken(this has been a reoccuring one), problems during peak load hours, community comments, and the like. Every day I look on in greater dismay as admin messages telling me something else is broken or having troubles. I like the service enough to pay for it, so I can keep in touch with old friends I've moved away from. But the 6apart and data center swap were terrible, terrible ideas that are degrading service quality inch by emo little inch.
Of course they didn't intend to take that away, ffs. But it's nice of them to offer that kind of patch.
My point was more about designing things properly from the get-go - it just makes sense to simplify interfaces and such as much as possible. Sometimes things simply can't be reduced - but generally, if they can, they should be. Don't consider it "designing for disabled people" - though it has that as a great side-effect - consider it as "designing for ease of use and simplicity". It's why we like the ALT tag and Lynx as a web browser. You don't have to be disabled to use it, but it just so happens that the two things combined make browsing the web when you're blind a whole lot easier. Efficiency.
You -should- blame people for not making more accessible pathways for you, anyways, at least in government buildings and public businesses!
Why does a computer have to be designed for two hands? Bicycles don't have to be designed for two feet, nor cars either. I'm not saying that all cars and bicycles should only have hand controls, either. The ability to customize and retrofit to specific needs, however, is excellent. How about chording keyboards, or the frog pad? All one-handed.
Who is it that decides forevermore that "this thing is made for X, and not Y", anyways? Isn't finding new and alternative purposes and uses to something a core aspect of being a thinking being?
Shit, I don't give a fuck about the game, myself, but I do care about accessibility and getting rid of retarded interfaces.
"mother-shitter! son of a ass!"
no, just pissed off at people taking their functioning bodies for granted. not everyone is so lucky.
wow. the comments and the moderations here really suck. I see a lot of folk who seem to basically just say "deal with it, you're DIS-abled, that means you can't do stuff". That's fucked up, you shitheads.
I don't think anybody is calling for the game to be shut down for this; but an optional patch that allows for customizing the controls better, as is mentioned is in the works, seems like just the thing.
Meanwhile, more broadly speaking, do you assholes know what designing for disability does? It puts _simply usability_ into your product, shit that we bitch about all the time - godawful GUI's, jackoff interfaces and stupid periphreals that result in trying to play a game looking like you're being raped by a wire-tentacle monster while playing twister at the console.
I hope all of you lose an arm. Or two.
Fuckers.
My personal favorite toys are the DEAD BODIES of the WEB DEVELOPERS responsible for godawful ad-infested ugly-ass "slide shows" with shitty controls and no real content within.
Well, that, and dreidels.
oh. my. fucking. god.
I saw the new onion the other day, and I just checked the new salon.com.
jesus fucking christ, somebody beat this guy up and take away his keyboard. Mr. Vinh - I address you directly - please stop fucking up websites that had perfectly good design. Your obsession with blinding amounts of whitespace and no borders to differentiate between information sources FUCKING HURTS.
Dick.
Oh god dammit. If I hear the Mozilla/Adobe/Microsoft/Java/Darwin type of argument on here again I am seriousl going to GNU/Vomit.
Hypothetically, remove Photoshop from your computer. Congratulations, now you can no longer paint nipples onto the breasts of clothed actresses and giggle to yourself. You could still stop jerking off and do something else with the computer, like write an email, browse the web, work on your thesis (about breast photoshopping), or sort your porn collection.
So, now go remove the gnu-utilities from your Linux box, and try to do something, anything, without using what was provided, or anything that was built on the gnu utilities set.
Yes, RMS is.. Snippy and weird.. but really he's got a pretty good case for wanting GNU to be recognized. It is a good part of his entire life's work. I'm not saying he's wrong or right for wanting it, but I'm certainly saying he's justified.
jesus, not hot coffee, anything but hot coffee.
What do you expect? Just don't put it on your nuts and you'll be fine.
I'll say that I tried the stuff just for the Shiny Factor ("Oooh! Shiny!"), and shockingly, it's not tremendously bad. I've had much, much worse cups of candy-coffee crap fresh from the spouts of the art wankers and the pimply-faced youths manning coffee machines at various coffeehouses and restaurants across the nation. For candy-coffee crap in a can, well, it's what you get, you know?
I had the mocha latte, and, well, it tasted like coffee, cream, sugar, and chocolate stuff made by some jackass college kid with a bad haircut.
But yeah, so, now - the next step is to figure out how to recycle the fucking things. They're like ten pounds each and the size of my left testicle - freaking huge. Feels kinda wrong to just toss them away.
The cans too, I mean.
Yeah, but did you ever find the head of vecna?
man, that thing ruled.
great, just what i need... a way to have a non-dedicated readership. i -want- people to visit my site. more than that, i want people to want to visit my site, in its entirety.
i've used amphetadesk before, myself, and it's not bad, if a bit clunky. and i like the idea of being able to have other site headlines on mine... it's sort of a catch-22. cool tech, can help spread the word of my site and bring new content without much effort - at the expense of someone else being able to do the same with -my- content.
for it to work, maybe it'll require rethinking the way we do things on the web. maybe it'll go the way of entirely custom pages on the user side, and they pull -everything- via RSS or something similar in the future. of course.
allow me to ring your buzzword bell: subscription-based modality for just such a thing. or, via micropayment - if you click a headline and pull the full story, a penny or two is sent to the originating site. though i'm not sure i like either of those options, particularly - it'd be far to easy to fritter away a good chunk of money per month just browsing. then again, by only paying for the stories i want to read entirely, it may not amount to too terribly much.
it's not nice to talk about us that way.
we.. know.. where.. you.. live.
anonymous coward, you are anonymous hero in my eyes.
wait, what? I think you've just used up your comma quota for a decade!
:)
there's a great one that's almost exactly the same just to the right of it, but without the little dangly thing. it kind of looks like this - .
'round these parts we call them 'lazy pains' - when you've been sitting on your ass for so long it hurts.
for example, i threw my back out the other day by not moving from the couch with the laptop on a chair in front of me for many, many hours.
see also 'atrophy', and 'fucking lazy'.
fuck it, i work 52 hours a week monday through friday, I should be able to veg out, right? But now even my couch is trying to kill me! no rest for the, uh, lazy, i guess..
you know, OSHA (i think it was, maybe Nuclear Regulatory Commission instead) has mandated that the yearly occupational exposure limit for astronauts is five times the normal 5000 mrems/yearly, to clock in at 25,000 mrem/yr. if the gubbernment says they're safe, they're safe, right? RIGHT?
by comparison, the data i've found says that at 400,000 mrems of exposure you have about a 50% chance of survival, and at 600,000+ you're dead meat. hell, i guess an irradiated iodine treatment for the thyroid dumps 20k mrems at your body... and TWO MILLION AT YOUR THYROID, and people make it out of that ok... Medicine is weird like that, isn't it?
on the up side, during the storm the astronauts can just leave their frozen pizza on the counter for a couple minutes, instead of messing with the oven...
i agree with you in one sense; i use some limited ad-blocking(mostly just popups, though). but ads may help keep some of the smaller sites going - those people that feel they have the time and dedication to make their contribution to a global medium, but don't have as many resources as, say, CNN.com. if the infrastructure was there, then micropayments wouldn't be a bad idea instead of ads, but paypal just doesn't cut it. i do like /.'s subscriber model, myself - $$ per XX pageviews.
Of course, if everyone started going to that pay model, then we're still going to have a lot of sites cut out - i personally tend to browse a -lot- of sites throughout the day and the week. if i had to toss $5 at each one, I'd be bankrupt, and missing out on a lot of information that i'd otherwise not be able to get.
obviously libraries and other institutions need to pay the poor, abused owners of this intellectual property right away.
libraries, who have to beg for funding because there still aren't enough bombs in the world yet.
libraries, who sell off stocks of books to pay expenses, because oops! your funding was appropriated to pay for a couple bolts on an F-16, or a toilet seat for a general.
for the cost of just one Giant Hulking War-Machine(TM) - one advanced figher or bomber, one M1-A1 Abrams tank, do you realise how many public institutions could be revitalized? Christ, $300 million goes a long way when it's not used for blowing stuff up, you know that?