All that stuff you just linked to is insignificant next to WWI or WWII, or even the Cold War. At the start of WWI, many armies were still made up of calvary. At the end of WWII, you had jet fighters, artillery capable of hitting targets 50 miles away, submarines that did not have to surface for air and of course the atomic bomb.
Because kill ratios mean jack shit when your enemy is infinitely more prepared to die for his cause than you are. This is why we lost in Vietnam, not because we were defeated militarily or because of war protestors, but because the enemy didn't care if they lost 20 men for every one of us they killed, and because the people we were trying to protect were frequently the same people who wanted to kill us.
1) Aero-braking. You can use Mar's atmosphere to slow down your approach, whereas on the Moon it has to be done entirely with rockets. So it's a lot easier to land and take off from Mars than it is from the Moon.
2) Water. Water can be broken down into its base elements and used as fuel, or just used for drinking, plants etc.
3) Gravity much closter to Earths.
So in the long term, a permanent Mars base makes more sense than one for the Moon.
Re:keeping pc gaming alive
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Ask Sid Meier
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· Score: 1
Oh please, it's not that hard to throwin in mouse support as an "extra"
Actually it would be extremely hard, because it would totally hose the balance in both single and multiplayer games. In single player console games, developers compensate for the crappy aiming that comes with a controller by giving the AI really bad aim and slow responce times. Once you, the player, switch to a mouse, your precision and responce times times will improve dramatically. So the "Legendary" difficulty in Halo suddenly turns into "Walk in the Park".
It would get even worse once you started playing online. There's a reason multiplayer PC Halo is totally sperate from XBox Live Halo: great console players would be anally raped by average PC players. Your rail gun gods from Quake II would be untouchable. We're talking about guys who can whip a 180 and fire at a target the size of a pea on the monitor in a twentieth of a second and hit it, and do it consitently.
So developers would have to have totally different difficulty settings in single player games for controllers and mice, and they would have to in some way nerf the responsiveness and precision that you would otherwise get with a mouse when you play with guys using controllers.
It's not even that big. Intel makes a bazillion motherboards, but what optical drive gets used is up to the OEM, and Intel is not an OEM. Microsoft doesn't make any computers either, and while they do have the X-Box, the PS3 will outsell it several times over.
Superior capacity. HD DVD-ROM discs will offer dual-layer 30GB discs at launch, compared with BD-ROM discs, which will be limited to 25GB.
Wasn't that one debunked a month ago? They have to have a dual layer HD-DVD to have a larger size than a single layer Blue Ray, but then the Blue Ray guys came right back and said their disc would have two or more layers as well.
I belive they're called "riders". You take an unpopular piece of legislation and attatch it to a popular bill. Another such rider in this bill will open up ANWR in Alaska to drilling. I'm sure there's all kinds of crazy stuff in there.
Jobs is selling songs artificially low to boost iPod sales. If Microsoft were doing this, everyone would be up in arms.
Only if everyone were really stupid. The record industry already gets 66% of every sale, and does nothing to help run the online store. Let's see...zero physical costs, zero labor costs, 66% profit margin...do you know how many industries would kill to have a business model like that?
The music industry already gets two-thirds of every 99 cent song. Most of the rest goes to credit card compainies, with only a little (about 10 cents) going to Apple. That's enough to run the store and make a small profit, but Apple makes their boko money off of iPod sales, NOT the iTMS. So calling Apple greedy over the iTMS revenue is bullshit.
You seem to be under the impression that "copyright" involves the right to make origional copies, and that copyright law grants privledges to the purchaser normally held by the creator. Niether one is the case. Nothing legally or ethically prevents you from buying a copy of the latest Harry Potter book, scanning it with OCR software and sticking it on your cell phone, for example. It's only if you start putting your scan job on the internet or giving it to friends that you get in trouble.
You're living in a fantasy land, not the USA. You can't take your own purchased copy and sell it, for instance.
The hell are you talking about. There are entire chains of stores devoted to selling used cd's and dvds. Ever hear of a used book store? It is perfectly legal to buy and sell used copies of media in the US, unlike that cheap crack your mom smoked when you were a baby.
Why would you need special authorization to make backup copies if you can do whatever you please with your own copy? Why are there all those restrictions on what you can do with your backups?
First reason: it's not adding new rights, just spelling them out, so an esteemed individual such as yourself can't sue the purchaser. Second reason: so you don't make backups and sell the origional, or sell a game cd on eBay while keeping it installed on your computer. So when you transfer posessesion of the copy, it's really transfered, as in you no longer have it.
The problem with your reasoning is that it requires rationality on the part of the recording industry, which it's always had in short supply. The iTMS is the proverbial goose that laid the first golden eggs...now the RIAA want to kill the goose to get the eggs that must be inside.
If I weren't broke I'd bet vast sums of money that the industry execs are thinking that if they kill off iTunes, Wal-Mart or Buymusic.com or Napster will step right in and take up the slack.
Did most people stop buying Metallica albums when the original Napster was taken out? Answer: no.
Because there wasn't a big price increase at the same time, that's why. Joe Smoe non-Internet user probably never heard of Napster at the time and certainaly didn't care. If the price of a new Metallica album had gone up by 50% or more, you can bet a lot more people would have taken notice.
The answer is simple: copyright law. It gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make copies.
Maybe in your country, but not in the US of A its not. Copyright gives the holder exclusive right to distribute copies, but other than that and restrictions on public performances, what you do with your purchased copy is your own damn business, not theirs.
Like the other guy said, age isn't necessarily a gauge of how good a person is at stfu during the movie. When I was watching Titanic, these two little old ladies spent much of the movie doing play by play commentary of the most obvious sort..."oh he's such a bad guy, mmm hmm, oh you better get off the ship girly, mmm hmm". It was as if John Madden had a sex change operation and became a movie critic.
Movie theaters should have Dr. Evil style chairs with a noise meter...you talk too much, or your cell phone goes off, you get dumped into a room full of flames. Not to kill you, just so you're badly burned.
To change the format of a work, you need to make a copy of it. What gives you that right?
No, the question is, what gives them the right to control what you do with your property once you've bought it, if you aren't distributing copies or using it for public performances? If I want to take my legally purchased cd and make a thousand copies for myself, or sell the origional on eBay for a billion dollars, that's my business, not theirs.
Oh, another thing I was going to add: PC's will always have better graphics than consoles as long as your cheapest monitor has better a better resolution and refresh rate than you rmost expensive HDTV.
There won't be a GPU that can match the ones in the upcoming consoles until some time after the consoles have been released (Microsft demanded this from ATI, and ATI agreed because they'll get a good token to use against Nvidia
That might be true, if ATI were the only game in town. But they're not. Or if ATI had an insurmountable lead in graphics performance. They don't. In fact, they haven't had the lead since the Radeon 9800 ruled the roost; Nvidia has dominated performance since the release of the 6800 family last year.
And yes you do seem to be making the mistake of comparing current hardware to unreleased hardware...i.e. vaporware. It'd hard to tell from all the grandstanding, but the Xbox might be about equivilant to a current 7800 GTX from Nvidia, for about $200 less. But the power of PC graphics doubles about every 9 months, so the consoles will at best be equal to Nvidias offering at the date of the lanch, and will quickly be surpased later.
and ATI agreed because they'll get a good token to use against Nvidia: "buy a computer with an ATI graphics chip and play Xbox games on your PC!"
How is that going to work? The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC chip, not an x86.
This, of course, makes it much easier for them to continually upgrade the hardware of the Xbox, blurring the line between the console generations.
That is pretty much an impossiblity for a console. Yes, there are different Xbox bundles, but those are for accessories - the core hardware will not change. One of the big selling points of consoles is that the hardware DOES NOT change, so developers have just one system from each company to develop for. Any console that starts having system requirements on the back of the game box will kill that console. i.e. no "you must have x much system memory or y graphics card to play this game."
IMO the biggest problem with HL2 is that it was a rat tunnel. The first game was of course a rat tunnel as well, but for most of it you are trapped in a collapsing underground base, so some claustrophobia and limited ways out are to be expected. HL2 took place almost entirely above ground, so having a single path that's about 15 feet wide just doens't cut the mustard.
Far Cry did this much better. The only artificial limits placed on you are the attack helicopters that shoot you down if you try and leave the island area by boat or swiming. Other than that, you were pretty much free to approach your next destination however you wanted.
Or they could have done it like Dues Ex, where there were several levels that you could solve by going one of three different ways, and you could go in quietly or guns blazing.
One thing that wrecks a game for me is an Easter Egg hunt to find the switch that opens the closet that has the key to open the vault that has a lever... But having an artificial rat tunnel is almost as bad.
Slashdot Mirror
All that stuff you just linked to is insignificant next to WWI or WWII, or even the Cold War. At the start of WWI, many armies were still made up of calvary. At the end of WWII, you had jet fighters, artillery capable of hitting targets 50 miles away, submarines that did not have to surface for air and of course the atomic bomb.
Because kill ratios mean jack shit when your enemy is infinitely more prepared to die for his cause than you are. This is why we lost in Vietnam, not because we were defeated militarily or because of war protestors, but because the enemy didn't care if they lost 20 men for every one of us they killed, and because the people we were trying to protect were frequently the same people who wanted to kill us.
1) Aero-braking. You can use Mar's atmosphere to slow down your approach, whereas on the Moon it has to be done entirely with rockets. So it's a lot easier to land and take off from Mars than it is from the Moon.
2) Water. Water can be broken down into its base elements and used as fuel, or just used for drinking, plants etc.
3) Gravity much closter to Earths.
So in the long term, a permanent Mars base makes more sense than one for the Moon.
Oh please, it's not that hard to throwin in mouse support as an "extra"
Actually it would be extremely hard, because it would totally hose the balance in both single and multiplayer games. In single player console games, developers compensate for the crappy aiming that comes with a controller by giving the AI really bad aim and slow responce times. Once you, the player, switch to a mouse, your precision and responce times times will improve dramatically. So the "Legendary" difficulty in Halo suddenly turns into "Walk in the Park".
It would get even worse once you started playing online. There's a reason multiplayer PC Halo is totally sperate from XBox Live Halo: great console players would be anally raped by average PC players. Your rail gun gods from Quake II would be untouchable. We're talking about guys who can whip a 180 and fire at a target the size of a pea on the monitor in a twentieth of a second and hit it, and do it consitently.
So developers would have to have totally different difficulty settings in single player games for controllers and mice, and they would have to in some way nerf the responsiveness and precision that you would otherwise get with a mouse when you play with guys using controllers.
The second Intel issues a new matching-dollars marketing campaign where the specs for the system include HD-DVD
Sure, but unless Intel starts making HD-DVD drives, or the HD-DVD consortium hands them a big fat check, they have zero incentive to do so.
MS is a big crad to play
It's not even that big. Intel makes a bazillion motherboards, but what optical drive gets used is up to the OEM, and Intel is not an OEM. Microsoft doesn't make any computers either, and while they do have the X-Box, the PS3 will outsell it several times over.
Superior capacity. HD DVD-ROM discs will offer dual-layer 30GB discs at launch, compared with BD-ROM discs, which will be limited to 25GB.
Wasn't that one debunked a month ago? They have to have a dual layer HD-DVD to have a larger size than a single layer Blue Ray, but then the Blue Ray guys came right back and said their disc would have two or more layers as well.
I belive they're called "riders". You take an unpopular piece of legislation and attatch it to a popular bill. Another such rider in this bill will open up ANWR in Alaska to drilling. I'm sure there's all kinds of crazy stuff in there.
What? Subtely on the Internet? Are you daft? :)
Nobody "has" to do anything.
They sure will if they lose a class action lawsuit over it.
Jobs is selling songs artificially low to boost iPod sales. If Microsoft were doing this, everyone would be up in arms.
Only if everyone were really stupid. The record industry already gets 66% of every sale, and does nothing to help run the online store. Let's see...zero physical costs, zero labor costs, 66% profit margin...do you know how many industries would kill to have a business model like that?
Jobs is just as greedy, but better at hiding it
The music industry already gets two-thirds of every 99 cent song. Most of the rest goes to credit card compainies, with only a little (about 10 cents) going to Apple. That's enough to run the store and make a small profit, but Apple makes their boko money off of iPod sales, NOT the iTMS. So calling Apple greedy over the iTMS revenue is bullshit.
It must cost manufacturers upwards of 15 - 20 times more to manufacture a CD than it used to cost them.
The price of oil has not gone up 20 times...so no, that has nothing to do with it. It's called "charging what the market will bear".
You seem to be under the impression that "copyright" involves the right to make origional copies, and that copyright law grants privledges to the purchaser normally held by the creator. Niether one is the case. Nothing legally or ethically prevents you from buying a copy of the latest Harry Potter book, scanning it with OCR software and sticking it on your cell phone, for example. It's only if you start putting your scan job on the internet or giving it to friends that you get in trouble.
No, you are the one confused if you think you have to buy a new card every six months.
You're living in a fantasy land, not the USA. You can't take your own purchased copy and sell it, for instance.
The hell are you talking about. There are entire chains of stores devoted to selling used cd's and dvds. Ever hear of a used book store? It is perfectly legal to buy and sell used copies of media in the US, unlike that cheap crack your mom smoked when you were a baby.
Why would you need special authorization to make backup copies if you can do whatever you please with your own copy? Why are there all those restrictions on what you can do with your backups?
First reason: it's not adding new rights, just spelling them out, so an esteemed individual such as yourself can't sue the purchaser. Second reason: so you don't make backups and sell the origional, or sell a game cd on eBay while keeping it installed on your computer. So when you transfer posessesion of the copy, it's really transfered, as in you no longer have it.
The problem with your reasoning is that it requires rationality on the part of the recording industry, which it's always had in short supply. The iTMS is the proverbial goose that laid the first golden eggs...now the RIAA want to kill the goose to get the eggs that must be inside.
If I weren't broke I'd bet vast sums of money that the industry execs are thinking that if they kill off iTunes, Wal-Mart or Buymusic.com or Napster will step right in and take up the slack.
Did most people stop buying Metallica albums when the original Napster was taken out? Answer: no.
Because there wasn't a big price increase at the same time, that's why. Joe Smoe non-Internet user probably never heard of Napster at the time and certainaly didn't care. If the price of a new Metallica album had gone up by 50% or more, you can bet a lot more people would have taken notice.
The answer is simple: copyright law. It gives the copyright holder the exclusive right to make copies.
Maybe in your country, but not in the US of A its not. Copyright gives the holder exclusive right to distribute copies, but other than that and restrictions on public performances, what you do with your purchased copy is your own damn business, not theirs.
Your analogy fails when you realize that not all computers will be vulnerable to the same virus/worm.
So does yours, as not all humans are vunerable to the same viruses/worms.
A good worm can reach every vulnerable host on the Internet within hours.
Not with NAT's and private networks they wont.
Like the other guy said, age isn't necessarily a gauge of how good a person is at stfu during the movie. When I was watching Titanic, these two little old ladies spent much of the movie doing play by play commentary of the most obvious sort..."oh he's such a bad guy, mmm hmm, oh you better get off the ship girly, mmm hmm". It was as if John Madden had a sex change operation and became a movie critic.
Movie theaters should have Dr. Evil style chairs with a noise meter...you talk too much, or your cell phone goes off, you get dumped into a room full of flames. Not to kill you, just so you're badly burned.
Format shifting is different.
Why.
To change the format of a work, you need to make a copy of it. What gives you that right?
No, the question is, what gives them the right to control what you do with your property once you've bought it, if you aren't distributing copies or using it for public performances? If I want to take my legally purchased cd and make a thousand copies for myself, or sell the origional on eBay for a billion dollars, that's my business, not theirs.
Oh, another thing I was going to add: PC's will always have better graphics than consoles as long as your cheapest monitor has better a better resolution and refresh rate than you rmost expensive HDTV.
There won't be a GPU that can match the ones in the upcoming consoles until some time after the consoles have been released (Microsft demanded this from ATI, and ATI agreed because they'll get a good token to use against Nvidia
That might be true, if ATI were the only game in town. But they're not. Or if ATI had an insurmountable lead in graphics performance. They don't. In fact, they haven't had the lead since the Radeon 9800 ruled the roost; Nvidia has dominated performance since the release of the 6800 family last year.
And yes you do seem to be making the mistake of comparing current hardware to unreleased hardware...i.e. vaporware. It'd hard to tell from all the grandstanding, but the Xbox might be about equivilant to a current 7800 GTX from Nvidia, for about $200 less. But the power of PC graphics doubles about every 9 months, so the consoles will at best be equal to Nvidias offering at the date of the lanch, and will quickly be surpased later.
and ATI agreed because they'll get a good token to use against Nvidia: "buy a computer with an ATI graphics chip and play Xbox games on your PC!"
How is that going to work? The Xbox 360 uses a PowerPC chip, not an x86.
This, of course, makes it much easier for them to continually upgrade the hardware of the Xbox, blurring the line between the console generations.
That is pretty much an impossiblity for a console. Yes, there are different Xbox bundles, but those are for accessories - the core hardware will not change. One of the big selling points of consoles is that the hardware DOES NOT change, so developers have just one system from each company to develop for. Any console that starts having system requirements on the back of the game box will kill that console. i.e. no "you must have x much system memory or y graphics card to play this game."
IMO the biggest problem with HL2 is that it was a rat tunnel. The first game was of course a rat tunnel as well, but for most of it you are trapped in a collapsing underground base, so some claustrophobia and limited ways out are to be expected. HL2 took place almost entirely above ground, so having a single path that's about 15 feet wide just doens't cut the mustard.
Far Cry did this much better. The only artificial limits placed on you are the attack helicopters that shoot you down if you try and leave the island area by boat or swiming. Other than that, you were pretty much free to approach your next destination however you wanted.
Or they could have done it like Dues Ex, where there were several levels that you could solve by going one of three different ways, and you could go in quietly or guns blazing.
One thing that wrecks a game for me is an Easter Egg hunt to find the switch that opens the closet that has the key to open the vault that has a lever... But having an artificial rat tunnel is almost as bad.