I imagine there's more than one geek here who's using, or has tried to use, a PC as the core of their entertainment system. DVD player is good, but the CD jukebox is better. TV output isn't ideal on any PC (unless you have a newer LCD television), but dropping the resolution can help that.
The biggest problem is input, though. You don't need a keyboard unless you're entering new data, and a wireless keyboard can help with that. But a wireless mouse still requires a pad, and a trackball needs a flat surface on which to rest.
IR remote controls for PCs do exist, but they're slightly limited in what they can and can't control. Something like this wireless mouse, OTOH, can be used to control an entertainment PC just like a television remote, and could make it much easier for someone to make build a PC into a home entertainment system.
I for one would love to see someone like Sony use this to market a PC specifically for this purpose -- CD/DVD player (and burner, for an upgrade), MP3/WMA/OGG audio/video jukebox preinstalled, and a TV/video in/out card to make it all happen, together with a flat stereo-component-sized case and a wireless flying mouse and keyboard. 25" flat LCD television costs extra. Could be the next big thing.
The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to a single state of the U.S. to secure there a free society. We will accomplish this by first reforming state law, opting out of federal mandates, and finally negotiating directly with the federal government for appropriate political autonomy. We will be a community of freedom-loving individuals and families, and create a shining example of liberty for the rest of the nation and the world....they'll be broke, owing to the fact that they'll be spending so much time on business-hours activism that they won't have any time to actually work and maintain a useful economy, but at least they'll be shining.
Don't you think for the money you're spending to go see a first-run movie three, four times with the entire family in tow, paying for parking to drive them, and buying everyone popcorn and soda, you could afford a pretty sweet home setup after a couple months saving?
The movie trip costs $20 at a second-run theater, $30 at the first-run. $120 max for four visits, and there's no way we'd do that more than about once a month. The parking lot is free. The home theater setup, in contrast, costs a couple thousand dollars minimum, and that's assuming we could find the room in our house to set it up.
Not everyone lives in the middle of a metropolis, you know.
Now we need to start comparing mac users to terrorists?
That's "Nation of Islam," as in the African-American Malcolm X. Not "national religion of Islam," as in Iraq and Iran. You're following the entirely wrong train of thought.
It's not the "theater experience" that attracts me. It's not the first-viewer opportunity. It's certainly not the overpriced popcorn and soda or the need to drive fifteen minutes across town with my entire family in tow. And it's not, nor will it ever be, the ability to recreate sounds in 6.1 speakers around the entire three-dimensional room.
No, it's the big screen I like. Mitsubishi electronics' best efforts notwithstanding, home theater will never be as impressive as a screen the size of an auditorium wall with all the characters projected in incredible detail. The movies I really love I go to see three, four times on those big screens, just because I prefer to watch a movie "up there" than "down here".
When I can afford to outfit an entire room of my house for darkened projected DVD movie experiences, I may reconsider. For now it's easier just to spend $3 apiece at the cheapie theater.
How is this worse than just embedding the image into the webpage, possibly with height=0 width=0?
Because (a) height=0 and width=0 are not well-supported -- they'll probably display the image as 1x1 pixel or at full size; (b) presumably prefetching can be turned off on the client side if one so desires.
I wanted the same thing with Windows 2000 at work, but it wouldn't let me. I came close by opening my Display control panel and, under the "Effects" tab, replaced all my desktop icons with the tiny shortcut arrow. (I suppose I could have found an icon file which was completely blank, but I haven't bothered yet.)
All that was left was the text and those tiny icons, which I arranged in a single row and gave a silver background color in the "Appearance" tab. I then set my desktop background image to a screengrab of my code editor.
Now, whenever the boss is coming while I'm busy playing "Bejeweled", I just hit Win-D to hide all open windows, and casual passers-by think I'm terribly busy working on something very difficult.
Canon also offers a color scanner cartridge which is compatible with their twoportable bubble jet printers. Not an ideal solution, perhaps, but very portable and apparently Mac-compatible up to OS 9 (which might include Classic under OS X).
Otherwise, according to Apple's own site, Canon's LiDE 30 is the most portable flatbed scanner I can think of with OS X support. Now, a flatbed isn't good for travel, because it's easy to bump around the components and damage it internally. The printer cartridge might be your best bet.
Zero-Gee sex will have millions throwing $$$$ in the direction of the Russians.
Up until people actually watch it. Take a minute to try and visualize sex in an environment where there's no "up" or "down" and where astronauts/cosmonauts actually have to be strapped to a wall in a sleeping bag in order to get a good night's rest.
This is approximately what would happen: they'd get naked. Some fawning over the appearance of zero-gee boobs and thingies. Oral sex to start things off, natch. The sixty-nine position is interestingly easy when you're both floating, but they're not watching where they're drifting, and the two partners keep banging their feet and backs into walls and boxes while they float through the compartment. Plus they have to hold each other's legs tightly the whole time, because there's no gravity to keep them pressed against each other.
Then they actually try intercourse, missionary position to start, and quickly discover the woman has to wrap her arms and legs around her partner to do anything more, because the least brush causes the two floating bodies to drift away from each other.
So they've got that worked out, but after a few minutes the woman's legs are getting tired from doing all the work. And the audience wants to see different positions, right? So the man tries to get on top -- no good, there's no "top" or "bottom" in space and he keeps pushing her hips away.
He tries doggy style. Same problem. He tries it again, this time holding her hips in a death grip, which kind of works except that her legs keep bouncing away from his, causing her torso to drift upward and away. So doggy style with his legs wrapped around hers again, except that makes it impossible for him to get any decent leverage.
The video camera focuses on her zero-gee boobs. It has to, there's nothing else interesting to watch. Finally it's determined that if she grabs ahold of two straps on one wall with her hands, wraps her ankles in another strap on the floor, she can keep herself at a kind of ninety-degree position so that he can take her from behind, albeit twisted ninety degrees to the left.
They finish the act in that position, too frustrated to try and figure out any others right now. The ratings have already plummeted anyhow, seeing as MTV offers more action in any given half-hour of programming than this.
Yes, analog has high resolution, but it's limited by the quality of the camera. If you have a disposable camera with crummy plastic lenses and 200-speed generic film, you'll never get the high-quality detail you would from a $500 SLR camera with professional 1000-speed film.
Yes, there are and will always be some people who need that kind of detail, but they're spending the money for the cameras and film to get it. Consumers are the real question here, since Kodak makes far more money off of family snapshots than they ever will from professional photographers.
Pardon me, but the battle won't be "lost" until the local supermarket starts selling disposable 3M-pixel digital cameras.
Photographic film is by its nature disposable -- you can only shoot a roll up once. The whole point of digital film is that you can reuse it endlessly. Even if the technology were that cheap, you wouldn't buy disposable digital cameras because it defeats the point.
Your point about cost is valid, though. The whole reason we still use pads of paper and pens is because tablet PCs aren't economically viable as an alternative -- yet. On the other hand, you hardly ever see people buying or selling typewriters anymore because the advantages of a word processor and printer, even ones that aren't PC-based, far outweigh the added cost of typing digitally.
Polaroid has (or had) a digital camera that bypasses the PC by including a digital photo printer attached to the camera itself, mimicking their longtime instant film while adding the advantages of digital film. Other digital camera makers like Canon have developed small portable printers that can connect to the camera directly for printing 3x5 or 4x6 shots without a PC. Alternatively, commercial digital film developing (and CD-R backups) will become more and more common for people who either want long-lasting film and ink for their photos or don't want to spend the money on their own photo printers.
As these devices come down in price, they'll displace reusable consumer film cameras more and more. Small, cheap digital cameras are $50 and lower today. Most consumers are more interested in quick and dirty snapshots of their friends and family than in high resolutions. Disposable film cameras can't catch enough quality to justify 8x10 blowups of your photos anyhow.
Bottom line: disposable 3M digital cameras aren't necessary to displace film. All that's needed is widespread sales of a 2M, 20-shot digital flash camera for less than $50 and the ability to plug it into a USB cable at Walgreens and get them printed, burned to CD and flushed from the camera's memory for $9.99. If Joe Consumer had access to that, the only thing holding him to film cameras would be the ones he already owns.
My bet, or at least opinion, would be the way IP address have been allocated in chunks to certain holders, forcing the proposal of IPv6 far sooner than it should have needed to be. I doubt there was any way the shortage of IPv4 addresses could have been foreseen way back when every household on earth still only needed one telephone line.
Scanning outer space for the remote possibility of advanced alien life, which may or may not have any interest in even contacting us... versus the very real and present problem of testing the security of a widely-used encryption algorithm.
Yeah, sure, that's a much more "worthwhile" pursuit.
If the consoles take over the game market from Windows, then there will be no real reason for new users to use Windows over Linux.
Of course there will be. Joe Consumer buys a Playstation instead of a PC because it's less work to configure and because there's more software available for it -- the exact same reason why he'll buy a Windows OS instead of Linux.
Linux would already have a stronghold in the market if all anyone wanted to do with a PC was surf the 'Net, rip MP3s and send e-mail. But eventually, sooner or later, everyone wants to install Quicken or Deer Hunter, or buy a webcam which says right on the box that WinXP drivers are included.
Mod me as a troll, but it's still true. The very things that are moving game developers from PCs to consoles have always kept software and hardware developers from focusing on the Linux market.
I don't think he's missed the point at all. What's he's saying is analagous to the frog leaving a dummy of himself in the pot, made of broccoli and lettuce leaves, while he jumps out and heads back to the pond. After enjoying a nice warm bath and a cup of Earl Grey, of course.
Short list, huh. Not much is there yet because there's the wall problem.
Which is kind of a killer, isn't it? At least I can turn off my microwave and hang up my cordless phone. The walls are a bit more difficult to disable. What's the possible point of having wireless net access if I still need to have line-of-sight connectivity?
But broadband is a chicken - egg problem. You won't get people signing up until they see a reason, and you won't get compelling reasons until more people have signed up.
This is just false. I'm about as close to a hard-core Web addict as you can get, and I see no compelling reason to get broadband at home. I'd like to, no question -- the speed is a big deal when you like downloading files and music like I do. But I don't need it (I can get those at work if I really crave them) because Web surfing still isn't that high-speed.
Most all Web pages except for the high-density Flash presentations and high-res photo galleries work fine over dial-up. E-mail, which is still far and away the #1 reason most people go online, might as well have been designed for dial-up users. I download files and software upgrades at home, but rarely enough that I can wait the half-hour to an hour needed for them.
Why would I really need high-speed access at home? Online game playing, which no one in my family does. Photo or video sharing, but we don't own the cameras yet. Massive music downloading, which isn't that important to me anyways (and I'd rather not get my kids addicted to it, or I'd never get the keyboard back myself). Sure, those might be nice, but we either rarely need those goodies or not at all.
The WWW and e-mail work fine over dial-up. That's all most people want or need. Half the time, it's all their two- or three-year-old computers can handle anyhow.
There's no chicken-and-egg problem here. Broadband is like money: you always find a way to use up whatever you've got, but if you don't have it, you find you don't really need the things you'd spend it on anyway. Supply and demand is the issue -- there's just not enough demand in most households to justify tripling their monthly bill from $15-25 to $50-60 a month.
Spider-Man's been cloned at least once, maybe twice. One clone of Cable. Two of Marvel Girl (if you count Phoenix). The villain Carnage had, I think, six "spawns" with basically identical powers. If you need to re-use the same Marvel character more than once at a time, it's insanely easy. The technology's there.:)
I foresee two big problems with a Marvel MMPORG, though. First, the resurrection factor -- it's impossible to keep ANY Marvel character dead, whether he be good, evil or civilian. So there's no danger to the player, right? Get killed, come back a few days later, repeat ad nauseam. Want to fight? Just run in, guns or powers blazing, and expect to get resurrected next week if it turns out to be fatal.
The second is the power-upgrade factor. This is a corollary of the death factor -- ninety-nine percent of the time, in the Marvel Universe, a super-hero's resurrection is ALWAYS accompanied by an amplification of his powers, if not a completely new set of them. So there's actually an INCENTIVE for players to rush in and get killed -- they'll increase their level status that much more quickly, possibly taking entire quantum leaps with each successive death.
I'd like nothing better than to play a Marvel mutant super-hero online, myself. By skillfully employing the above tactics, I'd be at god-level powers in a month, no sweat.
We look back on the original three films with rose-tinted glasses, when really the dialogue sucked, the plots were generic, and acting not up to scratch.
True, but recognize that "Star Wars" was superior to almost any other science fiction/space opera out at that time. The special effects alone deserved accolades, and some of them still do. The concept of the Force was something the non-book-reading public had yet to encounter in sci-fi.
Up until then, sci-fi in tv and movies was almost all about robots, aliens, spaceships, invasions, monsters and laboratory experiments gone awry. All the general public had to know about sci-fi was the original "Star Trek", "Battlestar Galactica", "Space 1999", "Buck Rogers". Nothing too cerebral there.
The Force was a good concept to add to an otherwise pretty, but ordinary movie like "Star Wars", and "The Empire Strikes Back" made it even better with some clever plot twists and delightful character development that was ten times deeper than what "Star Wars" had bothered with. "Return of the Jedi" tied it all up with by far the best F/X of the trilogy and lots of great action.
We expected too much from the new trilogy, is the problem -- the basic story is good, but the acting just isn't there and the digital special effects have overwhelmed the characters completely. Plus there's been a decade and a half with some really good science fiction since then. "The Matrix" alone, which opened mere weeks before "The Phantom Menace," showed everyone that sci-fi didn't have to be about spaceships and aliens in order to kick butt.
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I imagine there's more than one geek here who's using, or has tried to use, a PC as the core of their entertainment system. DVD player is good, but the CD jukebox is better. TV output isn't ideal on any PC (unless you have a newer LCD television), but dropping the resolution can help that.
The biggest problem is input, though. You don't need a keyboard unless you're entering new data, and a wireless keyboard can help with that. But a wireless mouse still requires a pad, and a trackball needs a flat surface on which to rest.
IR remote controls for PCs do exist, but they're slightly limited in what they can and can't control. Something like this wireless mouse, OTOH, can be used to control an entertainment PC just like a television remote, and could make it much easier for someone to make build a PC into a home entertainment system.
I for one would love to see someone like Sony use this to market a PC specifically for this purpose -- CD/DVD player (and burner, for an upgrade), MP3/WMA/OGG audio/video jukebox preinstalled, and a TV/video in/out card to make it all happen, together with a flat stereo-component-sized case and a wireless flying mouse and keyboard. 25" flat LCD television costs extra. Could be the next big thing.
Should we start saving now to have a pig with our replacement liver (for beer) and heart (fried chicken & ribs)?
In a pig's eye!
Wait a minute....
The Free State Project is a plan in which 20,000 or more liberty-oriented people will move to a single state of the U.S. to secure there a free society. We will accomplish this by first reforming state law, opting out of federal mandates, and finally negotiating directly with the federal government for appropriate political autonomy. We will be a community of freedom-loving individuals and families, and create a shining example of liberty for the rest of the nation and the world. ...they'll be broke, owing to the fact that they'll be spending so much time on business-hours activism that they won't have any time to actually work and maintain a useful economy, but at least they'll be shining.
I think Don Marti was also the one who thought the geeks should do this by moving en masse to North Dakota.
I thought that was intended as more of a refugee camp type of thing.
Don't you think for the money you're spending to go see a first-run movie three, four times with the entire family in tow, paying for parking to drive them, and buying everyone popcorn and soda, you could afford a pretty sweet home setup after a couple months saving?
The movie trip costs $20 at a second-run theater, $30 at the first-run. $120 max for four visits, and there's no way we'd do that more than about once a month. The parking lot is free. The home theater setup, in contrast, costs a couple thousand dollars minimum, and that's assuming we could find the room in our house to set it up.
Not everyone lives in the middle of a metropolis, you know.
Now we need to start comparing mac users to terrorists?
That's "Nation of Islam," as in the African-American Malcolm X. Not "national religion of Islam," as in Iraq and Iran. You're following the entirely wrong train of thought.
It's not the "theater experience" that attracts me. It's not the first-viewer opportunity. It's certainly not the overpriced popcorn and soda or the need to drive fifteen minutes across town with my entire family in tow. And it's not, nor will it ever be, the ability to recreate sounds in 6.1 speakers around the entire three-dimensional room.
No, it's the big screen I like. Mitsubishi electronics' best efforts notwithstanding, home theater will never be as impressive as a screen the size of an auditorium wall with all the characters projected in incredible detail. The movies I really love I go to see three, four times on those big screens, just because I prefer to watch a movie "up there" than "down here".
When I can afford to outfit an entire room of my house for darkened projected DVD movie experiences, I may reconsider. For now it's easier just to spend $3 apiece at the cheapie theater.
How is this worse than just embedding the image into the webpage, possibly with height=0 width=0?
Because (a) height=0 and width=0 are not well-supported -- they'll probably display the image as 1x1 pixel or at full size; (b) presumably prefetching can be turned off on the client side if one so desires.
I wanted the same thing with Windows 2000 at work, but it wouldn't let me. I came close by opening my Display control panel and, under the "Effects" tab, replaced all my desktop icons with the tiny shortcut arrow. (I suppose I could have found an icon file which was completely blank, but I haven't bothered yet.)
All that was left was the text and those tiny icons, which I arranged in a single row and gave a silver background color in the "Appearance" tab. I then set my desktop background image to a screengrab of my code editor.
Now, whenever the boss is coming while I'm busy playing "Bejeweled", I just hit Win-D to hide all open windows, and casual passers-by think I'm terribly busy working on something very difficult.
Canon also offers a color scanner cartridge which is compatible with their two portable bubble jet printers. Not an ideal solution, perhaps, but very portable and apparently Mac-compatible up to OS 9 (which might include Classic under OS X).
Otherwise, according to Apple's own site, Canon's LiDE 30 is the most portable flatbed scanner I can think of with OS X support. Now, a flatbed isn't good for travel, because it's easy to bump around the components and damage it internally. The printer cartridge might be your best bet.
Zero-Gee sex will have millions throwing $$$$ in the direction of the Russians.
Up until people actually watch it. Take a minute to try and visualize sex in an environment where there's no "up" or "down" and where astronauts/cosmonauts actually have to be strapped to a wall in a sleeping bag in order to get a good night's rest.
This is approximately what would happen: they'd get naked. Some fawning over the appearance of zero-gee boobs and thingies. Oral sex to start things off, natch. The sixty-nine position is interestingly easy when you're both floating, but they're not watching where they're drifting, and the two partners keep banging their feet and backs into walls and boxes while they float through the compartment. Plus they have to hold each other's legs tightly the whole time, because there's no gravity to keep them pressed against each other.
Then they actually try intercourse, missionary position to start, and quickly discover the woman has to wrap her arms and legs around her partner to do anything more, because the least brush causes the two floating bodies to drift away from each other.
So they've got that worked out, but after a few minutes the woman's legs are getting tired from doing all the work. And the audience wants to see different positions, right? So the man tries to get on top -- no good, there's no "top" or "bottom" in space and he keeps pushing her hips away.
He tries doggy style. Same problem. He tries it again, this time holding her hips in a death grip, which kind of works except that her legs keep bouncing away from his, causing her torso to drift upward and away. So doggy style with his legs wrapped around hers again, except that makes it impossible for him to get any decent leverage.
The video camera focuses on her zero-gee boobs. It has to, there's nothing else interesting to watch. Finally it's determined that if she grabs ahold of two straps on one wall with her hands, wraps her ankles in another strap on the floor, she can keep herself at a kind of ninety-degree position so that he can take her from behind, albeit twisted ninety degrees to the left.
They finish the act in that position, too frustrated to try and figure out any others right now. The ratings have already plummeted anyhow, seeing as MTV offers more action in any given half-hour of programming than this.
Yes, analog has high resolution, but it's limited by the quality of the camera. If you have a disposable camera with crummy plastic lenses and 200-speed generic film, you'll never get the high-quality detail you would from a $500 SLR camera with professional 1000-speed film.
Yes, there are and will always be some people who need that kind of detail, but they're spending the money for the cameras and film to get it. Consumers are the real question here, since Kodak makes far more money off of family snapshots than they ever will from professional photographers.
Pardon me, but the battle won't be "lost" until the local supermarket starts selling disposable 3M-pixel digital cameras.
Photographic film is by its nature disposable -- you can only shoot a roll up once. The whole point of digital film is that you can reuse it endlessly. Even if the technology were that cheap, you wouldn't buy disposable digital cameras because it defeats the point.
Your point about cost is valid, though. The whole reason we still use pads of paper and pens is because tablet PCs aren't economically viable as an alternative -- yet. On the other hand, you hardly ever see people buying or selling typewriters anymore because the advantages of a word processor and printer, even ones that aren't PC-based, far outweigh the added cost of typing digitally.
Polaroid has (or had) a digital camera that bypasses the PC by including a digital photo printer attached to the camera itself, mimicking their longtime instant film while adding the advantages of digital film. Other digital camera makers like Canon have developed small portable printers that can connect to the camera directly for printing 3x5 or 4x6 shots without a PC. Alternatively, commercial digital film developing (and CD-R backups) will become more and more common for people who either want long-lasting film and ink for their photos or don't want to spend the money on their own photo printers.
As these devices come down in price, they'll displace reusable consumer film cameras more and more. Small, cheap digital cameras are $50 and lower today. Most consumers are more interested in quick and dirty snapshots of their friends and family than in high resolutions. Disposable film cameras can't catch enough quality to justify 8x10 blowups of your photos anyhow.
Bottom line: disposable 3M digital cameras aren't necessary to displace film. All that's needed is widespread sales of a 2M, 20-shot digital flash camera for less than $50 and the ability to plug it into a USB cable at Walgreens and get them printed, burned to CD and flushed from the camera's memory for $9.99. If Joe Consumer had access to that, the only thing holding him to film cameras would be the ones he already owns.
Anyone know any software for windows that will play either of those formats without installing a whole load of junk as well?
I've never heard of Windows software that will do anything without installing a whole load of additional junk.
My bet, or at least opinion, would be the way IP address have been allocated in chunks to certain holders, forcing the proposal of IPv6 far sooner than it should have needed to be. I doubt there was any way the shortage of IPv4 addresses could have been foreseen way back when every household on earth still only needed one telephone line.
Scanning outer space for the remote possibility of advanced alien life, which may or may not have any interest in even contacting us... versus the very real and present problem of testing the security of a widely-used encryption algorithm.
Yeah, sure, that's a much more "worthwhile" pursuit.
If the consoles take over the game market from Windows, then there will be no real reason for new users to use Windows over Linux.
Of course there will be. Joe Consumer buys a Playstation instead of a PC because it's less work to configure and because there's more software available for it -- the exact same reason why he'll buy a Windows OS instead of Linux.
Linux would already have a stronghold in the market if all anyone wanted to do with a PC was surf the 'Net, rip MP3s and send e-mail. But eventually, sooner or later, everyone wants to install Quicken or Deer Hunter, or buy a webcam which says right on the box that WinXP drivers are included.
Mod me as a troll, but it's still true. The very things that are moving game developers from PCs to consoles have always kept software and hardware developers from focusing on the Linux market.
Does anyone know of a tool that can reliably test a CD to see if it meets any of the various *book standards published for CDs.
Yep. Stick it in your non-PC audio CD player and see if it plays correctly.
I don't think he's missed the point at all. What's he's saying is analagous to the frog leaving a dummy of himself in the pot, made of broccoli and lettuce leaves, while he jumps out and heads back to the pond. After enjoying a nice warm bath and a cup of Earl Grey, of course.
Short list, huh. Not much is there yet because there's the wall problem.
Which is kind of a killer, isn't it? At least I can turn off my microwave and hang up my cordless phone. The walls are a bit more difficult to disable. What's the possible point of having wireless net access if I still need to have line-of-sight connectivity?
But broadband is a chicken - egg problem. You won't get people signing up until they see a reason, and you won't get compelling reasons until more people have signed up.
This is just false. I'm about as close to a hard-core Web addict as you can get, and I see no compelling reason to get broadband at home. I'd like to, no question -- the speed is a big deal when you like downloading files and music like I do. But I don't need it (I can get those at work if I really crave them) because Web surfing still isn't that high-speed.
Most all Web pages except for the high-density Flash presentations and high-res photo galleries work fine over dial-up. E-mail, which is still far and away the #1 reason most people go online, might as well have been designed for dial-up users. I download files and software upgrades at home, but rarely enough that I can wait the half-hour to an hour needed for them.
Why would I really need high-speed access at home? Online game playing, which no one in my family does. Photo or video sharing, but we don't own the cameras yet. Massive music downloading, which isn't that important to me anyways (and I'd rather not get my kids addicted to it, or I'd never get the keyboard back myself). Sure, those might be nice, but we either rarely need those goodies or not at all.
The WWW and e-mail work fine over dial-up. That's all most people want or need. Half the time, it's all their two- or three-year-old computers can handle anyhow.
There's no chicken-and-egg problem here. Broadband is like money: you always find a way to use up whatever you've got, but if you don't have it, you find you don't really need the things you'd spend it on anyway. Supply and demand is the issue -- there's just not enough demand in most households to justify tripling their monthly bill from $15-25 to $50-60 a month.
Or at least don't blatantly cut-and-paste them from other linked stories.
Spider-Man's been cloned at least once, maybe twice. One clone of Cable. Two of Marvel Girl (if you count Phoenix). The villain Carnage had, I think, six "spawns" with basically identical powers. If you need to re-use the same Marvel character more than once at a time, it's insanely easy. The technology's there. :)
I foresee two big problems with a Marvel MMPORG, though. First, the resurrection factor -- it's impossible to keep ANY Marvel character dead, whether he be good, evil or civilian. So there's no danger to the player, right? Get killed, come back a few days later, repeat ad nauseam. Want to fight? Just run in, guns or powers blazing, and expect to get resurrected next week if it turns out to be fatal.
The second is the power-upgrade factor. This is a corollary of the death factor -- ninety-nine percent of the time, in the Marvel Universe, a super-hero's resurrection is ALWAYS accompanied by an amplification of his powers, if not a completely new set of them. So there's actually an INCENTIVE for players to rush in and get killed -- they'll increase their level status that much more quickly, possibly taking entire quantum leaps with each successive death.
I'd like nothing better than to play a Marvel mutant super-hero online, myself. By skillfully employing the above tactics, I'd be at god-level powers in a month, no sweat.
But THIS being hard to use? A fucking 10 year old could use it.
Usually, the ten-year-olds are the only ones in the family who can use it.
We look back on the original three films with rose-tinted glasses, when really the dialogue sucked, the plots were generic, and acting not up to scratch.
True, but recognize that "Star Wars" was superior to almost any other science fiction/space opera out at that time. The special effects alone deserved accolades, and some of them still do. The concept of the Force was something the non-book-reading public had yet to encounter in sci-fi.
Up until then, sci-fi in tv and movies was almost all about robots, aliens, spaceships, invasions, monsters and laboratory experiments gone awry. All the general public had to know about sci-fi was the original "Star Trek", "Battlestar Galactica", "Space 1999", "Buck Rogers". Nothing too cerebral there.
The Force was a good concept to add to an otherwise pretty, but ordinary movie like "Star Wars", and "The Empire Strikes Back" made it even better with some clever plot twists and delightful character development that was ten times deeper than what "Star Wars" had bothered with. "Return of the Jedi" tied it all up with by far the best F/X of the trilogy and lots of great action.
We expected too much from the new trilogy, is the problem -- the basic story is good, but the acting just isn't there and the digital special effects have overwhelmed the characters completely. Plus there's been a decade and a half with some really good science fiction since then. "The Matrix" alone, which opened mere weeks before "The Phantom Menace," showed everyone that sci-fi didn't have to be about spaceships and aliens in order to kick butt.