Another thing is for sure - you have just fed a troll:)
Wish it were so sure. I've seen people with some pretty weird ideas about prisons, and the fact that nothing is being done about federal prisons in the US shows that many people share the view that prisons can't be bad enough.
They forfeit their rights when the commit a crime.
You show a fundamental lack of understanding of how a modern society and modern justice works. In addition to that, your somewhat weird idea that revenge equals justice is harmful to a society as a whole.
I won't go into the first argument about rights which humans inherently have, and about how the state, who has a monopoly on force, needs to be very careful about how he uses said force. However, I will quickly say something about the second argument, namely that revenge is bad for society as a whole.
We can probably all agree that not all crimes should be punished with the death penalty. We can probably also agree that keeping people in prison indefinitely is neither desirable nor practicable due to the costs it creates. This leads to one conclusion: People who go to prison will sooner or later come out of it again.
I think we can also agree that the goal should be a society where as little crime as possible should be committed.
People who went to prison committed a crime. Since we want to have as little crime as possible, it seems a good idea to make as sure as possible that they won't commit another crime. How do you achieve that? There are several options, depending on why they committed the crime in the first place. Maybe they had no job and ended up dealing drugs to make money. Maybe they have mental issues and are just violent. If you want them to not repeat their mistakes, help them find a job. Give them an eductaion. Help them get over their mental problems. Force them to see a shrink. Maybe you disagree with this ideas, but I'm sure you can think of others.
One thing is for sure: If you put them into a violent prison with gangs and rape, they'll come out worse than they went in, and that can't be good for society.
Then I went to GameRankings and was surprised to find that the DS has no games with an average score over 90, and only four over 80.
True, but you need to look at the games. DS games like Elektroplankton, Wario Ware: Touched or Pac Pix aren't going to get really good reviews because they're so subjective. I know many gamers will hate Pac Pix. It's got crappy craphics, it's repetitive, and it's quite short. By console standards, they are hardly real games at all.
The PSP, on the other hand, gets many conversions of PS2 titles. These are "real" console games.
But if you think about it, what would you rather play on a portable console? A quirky, fun, original, quick game of Pac Pix or a hour-long session of a game you already played on the PS2, even if it got better marks?
I think many DS games get rated down for exactly the things that make them great portable games. Most DS games are clearly lacking in the graphics area, but they're making it up in gameplay and originality. Unfortunately, that often won't help their ratings.
As an employee of a major video games retailer, I can state that we sell far more PSP systems, games, and movies than we sell in DS.
Many factors influence the sales of single stores. Maybe your salespeople push the PSP harder? Maybe the people shopping in your store are prepared to spend more money on entertainment than the average American? Maybe the PSP is the in-console to have at your local school?
Eithe rway, in North America, the DS seems to be outselling the PSP, despite what's happening in your store.
Everytime a PSP is sold, Nintendo is giving ground to Sony. Thats how it works when you're coming from ~100% marketshare, which the DS is down to about 66% vs PSPs 33%. And in japan its even closer.
Actually, I think it's more along the lines of "90% GBA, 7% DS, 3% PSP".
I don't know who you are, LKM, but you need to post these useful nuggets of gaming goodness more often.
The only other recently released adventure game which comes to mind is Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars which was released for the PC and consoles, among them the GBA.
However, there are rumors that Cinq and Nintendo are already working on a sequel to Another Code, which hopefully will be a bit longer:-)
And given the success of Another Code, it's quite possible that we'll see more adventures on the DS.
Man, the parent poster longed for old Lucasart adventures, do you think he wants logical puzzles which can be solved by thinking rather than randomly trying to apply items??
Good point:-)
However, I played through Monkey Island again a few months ago when I got ScummVM running on my P800, and I was actually surprised at how logical most puzzles were. They aren't anywhere near Another Code's, but still, it's possible to figure out most problems by listening to what people say and thinking about them.
There are a few puzzles which seem to be somewhat random (okay, totally random), but even so, they can usually be figured out without consulting gamefaqs. The two things you mention don't seem to be particularly bad to me. Using the steps of the dance as a map seemed pretty obvious to me, and it's not like you had to assemble the chicken and the pulley yourself, right? It already had a pulley attached to it, so its use was somewhat obvious, despite the fact that it was a freaking chicken:-)
However, there were parts in Monkey Island where I was stuck for quite a bit before figuring it out. Same applies to Monkey Island 2 and Indy 4. Even Full Throttle had me stumped a few times, although that was mostly during the "action sequences".
I think the problem with those games is that the solutions to the puzzles themselves are often quite weird, but if you talk to people, they'll give you hints how to solve them. Another Code is different: The puzzles are logical themselves, you don't need to talk to people to figure them out.
Don't get me started on Maniac Mansion, though. Now there are some really random puzzles!
Other than that, I will give a slight edge in GUI design to Solaris.
I never noticed it even had GUI design. I assumed it was just randomly slapped together. I mean, to this day, I haven't figured out how to start mozilla other than opening the terminal and starting it that way. And don't get me started on how to kill applications! And the dock! Oh my god! The Dock! How many inconsistencies and weird menus can you possibly put into one interface element? A lot, apparently! Solaris is just random nonsense.
1)I can think of 0 apps that need a menu but not a window
Then you're not thinking hard enough. Most apps that don't have documents don't need windows. Except if you're one of the people who need to click on shiny buttons to execute actions.
2)The mac solution eliminates a multiple window app from being able to have per window menus.
A-ha! This is, of course, utterly wrong. Apple's interface guidelines discourage changing menus in open applications, but even Apple's own apps do it: In AppleWorks, for example, you get different menus depending on what window you've selected. The first two or three menus remain the same (File, Edit,...), but the others change to show the actions applicable to your currently selected window. And it works quite well, too.
Another (in most situation better) way is to enable and disable the functions based on which ones apply to the frontmost window, but having different menus is certainly possible.
3)Its confusing to the user when large parts of the GUI disappear like that
Disappear how? You mean it's confusing if you're in, say, Word, but can't see iTunes' menus? How is that confusing?
4)Its inconvenient when I can't just click directly on the menu of an app when I activate it, but instead nedd to make 2 clicks and a mouse move.
Repeat after me: Clickthrough is bad. Activating windows in Window is often problematic, because you can never be sure when you'll activate some function in addition to activating the window because you just happened to click at some area considered to be part of a button. Bad!
5)Its hard to do tech support when the application needs to be active to have the menu visible.
Huh? Why is that? And how is that different from Windows? If you have Word open, you can't see Excel's menu in Windows, either, because it's below the Word window!
6)I'm not sure what any reference to Frit's law is supposed to mean here.
The size of Apple's menu is infinite. It's easy to hit because you dont' have to aim. Just slam the mouse all the way up and you've hit it. That's Fitt's law: It's easier to hit bigger stuff with the mouse.
Disappearing menus is inconvenient and confusing.
Yeah, well, they disappear on Windows, too. Below other windows. Most people I know run their Windows apps in full-screen mode, anyway, and even if they don't, nodoby has a screen big enough to show all windows besides each other.
I just wish that someone would make something that seemed interesting like they used to.
Get a DS and buy Another Code (may be called "Trace Memory" or something in the US). It's clearly too short (I finished it in under 5 hours), but it's still worth it. The story is amazing, and some of the puzzles are nothing short of astonishing. Also, it has no weird Gabriel Knight style puzzles. The puzzles are all logical and can be solved by thinking rather than randomly trying to apply items.
I always found it to be the worst one I've ever used, including Solaris and HP-UX.
If you think the Mac GUI (even pre Mac OS X) is worse than Solaris, you've got some serious issues:-)
You're very unspecific in your criticism, but just to pick one: The global menu is a huge advantage compared to Windows' window-based menu. First of all, you can easily and consistently have applications without open windows. Second, and more importantly, Fitt's Law applies, making the Mac menu a lot easier and faster to use than the Windows menu, which is way harder to target correctly.
The application menu (I guess that's what you mean by "Finder menu") is gone in Mac OS X, by the way.
Of course, switching always involves learning. However, my girlfriend has switched to a Mac from Windows about three months ago, and it was very easy. I told her how to use the Dock to start applications, and that was basically all she needed to know to get started. Later, she came back to ask about to turn on Trackpad clicking, and that was it. It's not rocket science, really.
Saying that "any OS has problems" is meaningless. Of course every OS has problem. That doesn't mean there's no difference. Every person has money, it's the amount that makes you rich.
Macs are not immune to viruses, we just haven't seen a virus or spyware author take the time to exploit it, yet. Why? Because it isn't profitable RIGHT NOW.
True, Macs aren't immune, but you're missing a few points. It's harder to make a good virus/spyware/trojan for Macs than it is for Windows. Here are a few reasons why that is:
On a Mac, most (all?) services are turned off by default. Ports are closed.
Macs ship with an easy-to-use built-in firewall.
You don't run your Mac as root. Viruses have less access on a Mac than on other OSs.
Mac users use different E-Mail-apps and different Browsers. Mail.app and Safari have pretty good market share, but they're nowere near where Outlook/IE are. Even if Macs were to reach a significant market share, you could only reach a quite small part of them by using, say, an exploit for Mail.app (of two dozen Mac users I know, only about four use Mail.app, about five use Outlook, one uses PowerMail, one uses Mailsmith, some use Mozilla and some use Eudora).
Mac users are less tolerant of bad software. If there's something that even smells like malware or spyware, there's a huge outcry in the community, with news sites posting the info and tons of people analyzing traffic from apps and publishing the news.
There's more open source software in Macs than in Windows. That means less exploits and quicker fixes if there is a problem.
On the other hand, my Dad, whom I've spent countless hours coaxing and helping learn Windows and how to use his computer called the other day and said he had disconnected it, and didn't care to ever use it again.
All my relatives have Macs. Problem solved, and I usually don't even need to wear The Shirt:-)
A mac would be worse. Unless you also have a mac and know how to use one, you won't be able to do tech support for them again.
Yeah, but if they have a Mac, you probably won't have to, either:-)
Seriously, my Mac using friends hardly ever need support, especially compared to Windows using friends. I don't know how normal people cope with Linux, but I suspect it's not a whole lot better than Windows in that regard... As cool as Linux is, it's still not that easy to use, and the last time I used KDE, it had some really weird, uh, "features". Power user stuff might be confusing for normal people, too ("I clicked on this little square thingie in the middle of my, uhm, start bar, and now all my windows are gone! OMG!" "You changed to another virtual desktop, see, that's..." "Virtual desktop? Stop that techno babble! I just want my windows back!").
I recently read a book that included some critical thinking along these lines to explain how benevolent philosophies like Socialism and Communism lead to brutal governments like Nazi Germany or Stalinist Russia.
I was wondering about that myself. I think I'll have to pick up that book. Thanks for the pointer!
Do you think that the terrorism against America and the West will end if we just pull all of our military presence out of the Arab world?
No. Terrorist organisations have an interesting property: They start out fighting for a cause. To do this, they need money. Since they're already doing illegal things, getting the money illegally is the easiest course of action. So they start dealing with drugs, robbing banks, smuggling, whatever. Slowly, they turn from an idealistic organisation into a purely criminal organisation which uses its original cause to get new members.
I bet that by now, Bin Laden isn't interested in his original cause that much anymore. It's probably become purely about power for him.
So, what do you do against an organisation like that? First of all, it would most likely be a good idea to stop helping them gain new members. Something tells me that invading Iraq wasn't the best way to achieve that.
I do have to admit I am starting to wonder if we in Europe are all to willing to give sancuary to extremists that don't like the (general) values of our country.
Awesome! So you figured out how to read people's minds? Great! Now we can differentiate between the 99.99% legitimate refugees who simply seek shelter and the 0.01% who are extremist terrorists!
You mean, other than the fact London has been a major target for terrorists for nigh-on 4 years, and this is the first attack to not have been thwated?
Wow, that's some weird logic! There has never been an islamist terrorist attack on London in this scale. Not before 9/11 and not after it. There's no indication that any of the counter measures had any kind of effect since there are not enough data points to have any kind of statistic. In fact, it's highly unlikely that there's anything you can do to prevent such attacks with a high probability anyway. And it's highly likely that the war on terrorism caused this attack - at least in part.
All we can say with certainty is that the response plans put in place should such an attack occur seemed to have worked pretty well. Evacuations, medical help and such seemed to work out as planned.
Just because you're not under attack on home ground and don't hear people running and screaming is no reason to get so content that you call the guy who kept the attacks from happening for 4 years evil.
Your logic is very wrong. Nothing like 9/11 happened in the 2000 years before it, and it's no wonder nothing like it happened in the 4 years after it.
Bush could have spent those years hunting butterflies on his farm and it would have had the same effect. In fact, America and the rest of the western world would probably have been a lot saver if he had done that.
He had a reason, but it's irrational and insane. He's religious fundamentalist, and the motivations of such people are incomprehensible to reasonable, logical thinkers. He thinks Christians and Jews are abominations and must be exterminated. He hates the West, all of it, regardless of whether or not a given subsection of it is involved in Iraq or not. America is the "Big Satan" and Israel is the "Little Satan" and anybody who isn't actively trying to destroy both nations is the enemy of Islam.
That would be a very convenient explanation. It's quite unfortunate that it has no base in reality whatsoever. Bin Laden is no stupid religious fundamentalist who wants to kill all infidels. That's the rhetorics he often uses in his videos to get his followers rallied up, but his actual goal is to get the western countries out of arabic countries. This whole thing started with the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden wanted them out in order to increase his own influence, and to that effect, he started his campaign against the Americans.
In this speech, Macaulay clearly knows the true meaning of "Pirate" and uses "piratical" to make the booksellers he mentions look evil. He doesn't even use the word "pirates" to refer to them, but instead uses "piratical" - "lika a pirate".
Clearly, he knows the proper meaning of "pirate", and it's not what you think it is.
As far as I can tell, females play all kinds of games, but there are a few genres which females seem to prefer. My current girlfriend loves Pac Pix, Donkey Konga (together with her sister, who thinks it's hilarous) and Yoshi Touch & Go. She gets nervous when she has to play too long at a time. Interestingly, she doesn't like typical "girl games" games like the Urbz or Harvest Moon too much.
My former girlfriend, however, was different. She used to play single player sessions of Mario Party for hours at a time, and she finished Klonoa very quickly. A female friend of mine loves Adventure-style RPGs and Jump-N-Runs, she spent over 70 hours playing through Paper Mario, finishing every possible side-quest and keeping on playing it even after she finished it. She's currently playing Wind Waker and constantly telling me about stuff she's discovered. She also likes Bomberman Generation and Super Mario Sunshine. I even know a girl who loves Sonic Adventure Battle 2. Because it has a great soundtrack.
If you can make a generalization, I'd say that most girls prefer games which aren't too violent (If you want to play games together with your girfriend, get a Nintendo console). Other than that, girls play all kinds of games, just like males.
I've always found it intriguing that a programmer who could master several arcane computer languages (especially since computers are notably intolerant of errors), could fail so utterly to master his own native human language.
That's because programming languages have simple and mostly logical rules. English doesn't. Let me tell you this as a person who learned english only as his fourth language: English is a mess. The spelling rules are pretty much non-existant. You don't know how to pronounce words from how they're written and vice-versa. Names are particularly bad: Different people pronounce the same name differently, and names that are written entirely different are pronounced the same.
English seems to have been designed by a committee where every participant got to create one word's spelling, and they all tried their best to be creative.
German spelling rules, as a contrast, were pretty much put together by one person, Konrad Duden. They're mostly logical, and you can make an educated guess at the spelling of a word if you hear it. If you read a word, it's most often clear how to pronounce it. French and Spanish are similar, and Japanese is very easy in this regard, too.
English spelling rules, on the other hand, are bordering on insanity.
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Wish it were so sure. I've seen people with some pretty weird ideas about prisons, and the fact that nothing is being done about federal prisons in the US shows that many people share the view that prisons can't be bad enough.
You show a fundamental lack of understanding of how a modern society and modern justice works. In addition to that, your somewhat weird idea that revenge equals justice is harmful to a society as a whole.
I won't go into the first argument about rights which humans inherently have, and about how the state, who has a monopoly on force, needs to be very careful about how he uses said force. However, I will quickly say something about the second argument, namely that revenge is bad for society as a whole.
We can probably all agree that not all crimes should be punished with the death penalty. We can probably also agree that keeping people in prison indefinitely is neither desirable nor practicable due to the costs it creates. This leads to one conclusion: People who go to prison will sooner or later come out of it again.
I think we can also agree that the goal should be a society where as little crime as possible should be committed.
People who went to prison committed a crime. Since we want to have as little crime as possible, it seems a good idea to make as sure as possible that they won't commit another crime. How do you achieve that? There are several options, depending on why they committed the crime in the first place. Maybe they had no job and ended up dealing drugs to make money. Maybe they have mental issues and are just violent. If you want them to not repeat their mistakes, help them find a job. Give them an eductaion. Help them get over their mental problems. Force them to see a shrink. Maybe you disagree with this ideas, but I'm sure you can think of others.
One thing is for sure: If you put them into a violent prison with gangs and rape, they'll come out worse than they went in, and that can't be good for society.
True, but you need to look at the games. DS games like Elektroplankton, Wario Ware: Touched or Pac Pix aren't going to get really good reviews because they're so subjective. I know many gamers will hate Pac Pix. It's got crappy craphics, it's repetitive, and it's quite short. By console standards, they are hardly real games at all.
The PSP, on the other hand, gets many conversions of PS2 titles. These are "real" console games.
But if you think about it, what would you rather play on a portable console? A quirky, fun, original, quick game of Pac Pix or a hour-long session of a game you already played on the PS2, even if it got better marks?
I think many DS games get rated down for exactly the things that make them great portable games. Most DS games are clearly lacking in the graphics area, but they're making it up in gameplay and originality. Unfortunately, that often won't help their ratings.
Many factors influence the sales of single stores. Maybe your salespeople push the PSP harder? Maybe the people shopping in your store are prepared to spend more money on entertainment than the average American? Maybe the PSP is the in-console to have at your local school?
Eithe rway, in North America, the DS seems to be outselling the PSP, despite what's happening in your store.
Actually, I think it's more along the lines of "90% GBA, 7% DS, 3% PSP".
I think that was the point of the article.
The only other recently released adventure game which comes to mind is Broken Sword: The Shadow of the Templars which was released for the PC and consoles, among them the GBA.
However, there are rumors that Cinq and Nintendo are already working on a sequel to Another Code, which hopefully will be a bit longer :-)
And given the success of Another Code, it's quite possible that we'll see more adventures on the DS.
Good point :-)
However, I played through Monkey Island again a few months ago when I got ScummVM running on my P800, and I was actually surprised at how logical most puzzles were. They aren't anywhere near Another Code's, but still, it's possible to figure out most problems by listening to what people say and thinking about them.
There are a few puzzles which seem to be somewhat random (okay, totally random), but even so, they can usually be figured out without consulting gamefaqs. The two things you mention don't seem to be particularly bad to me. Using the steps of the dance as a map seemed pretty obvious to me, and it's not like you had to assemble the chicken and the pulley yourself, right? It already had a pulley attached to it, so its use was somewhat obvious, despite the fact that it was a freaking chicken :-)
However, there were parts in Monkey Island where I was stuck for quite a bit before figuring it out. Same applies to Monkey Island 2 and Indy 4. Even Full Throttle had me stumped a few times, although that was mostly during the "action sequences".
I think the problem with those games is that the solutions to the puzzles themselves are often quite weird, but if you talk to people, they'll give you hints how to solve them. Another Code is different: The puzzles are logical themselves, you don't need to talk to people to figure them out.
Don't get me started on Maniac Mansion, though. Now there are some really random puzzles!
I never noticed it even had GUI design. I assumed it was just randomly slapped together. I mean, to this day, I haven't figured out how to start mozilla other than opening the terminal and starting it that way. And don't get me started on how to kill applications! And the dock! Oh my god! The Dock! How many inconsistencies and weird menus can you possibly put into one interface element? A lot, apparently! Solaris is just random nonsense.
Then you're not thinking hard enough. Most apps that don't have documents don't need windows. Except if you're one of the people who need to click on shiny buttons to execute actions.
A-ha! This is, of course, utterly wrong. Apple's interface guidelines discourage changing menus in open applications, but even Apple's own apps do it: In AppleWorks, for example, you get different menus depending on what window you've selected. The first two or three menus remain the same (File, Edit, ...), but the others change to show the actions applicable to your currently selected window. And it works quite well, too.
Another (in most situation better) way is to enable and disable the functions based on which ones apply to the frontmost window, but having different menus is certainly possible.
Disappear how? You mean it's confusing if you're in, say, Word, but can't see iTunes' menus? How is that confusing?
Repeat after me: Clickthrough is bad. Activating windows in Window is often problematic, because you can never be sure when you'll activate some function in addition to activating the window because you just happened to click at some area considered to be part of a button. Bad!
Huh? Why is that? And how is that different from Windows? If you have Word open, you can't see Excel's menu in Windows, either, because it's below the Word window!
The size of Apple's menu is infinite. It's easy to hit because you dont' have to aim. Just slam the mouse all the way up and you've hit it. That's Fitt's law: It's easier to hit bigger stuff with the mouse.
Yeah, well, they disappear on Windows, too. Below other windows. Most people I know run their Windows apps in full-screen mode, anyway, and even if they don't, nodoby has a screen big enough to show all windows besides each other.
Get a DS and buy Another Code (may be called "Trace Memory" or something in the US). It's clearly too short (I finished it in under 5 hours), but it's still worth it. The story is amazing, and some of the puzzles are nothing short of astonishing. Also, it has no weird Gabriel Knight style puzzles. The puzzles are all logical and can be solved by thinking rather than randomly trying to apply items.
If you think the Mac GUI (even pre Mac OS X) is worse than Solaris, you've got some serious issues :-)
You're very unspecific in your criticism, but just to pick one: The global menu is a huge advantage compared to Windows' window-based menu. First of all, you can easily and consistently have applications without open windows. Second, and more importantly, Fitt's Law applies, making the Mac menu a lot easier and faster to use than the Windows menu, which is way harder to target correctly.
The application menu (I guess that's what you mean by "Finder menu") is gone in Mac OS X, by the way.
Of course, switching always involves learning. However, my girlfriend has switched to a Mac from Windows about three months ago, and it was very easy. I told her how to use the Dock to start applications, and that was basically all she needed to know to get started. Later, she came back to ask about to turn on Trackpad clicking, and that was it. It's not rocket science, really.
Saying that "any OS has problems" is meaningless. Of course every OS has problem. That doesn't mean there's no difference. Every person has money, it's the amount that makes you rich.
True, Macs aren't immune, but you're missing a few points. It's harder to make a good virus/spyware/trojan for Macs than it is for Windows. Here are a few reasons why that is:
All my relatives have Macs. Problem solved, and I usually don't even need to wear The Shirt :-)
Yeah, but if they have a Mac, you probably won't have to, either :-)
Seriously, my Mac using friends hardly ever need support, especially compared to Windows using friends. I don't know how normal people cope with Linux, but I suspect it's not a whole lot better than Windows in that regard... As cool as Linux is, it's still not that easy to use, and the last time I used KDE, it had some really weird, uh, "features". Power user stuff might be confusing for normal people, too ("I clicked on this little square thingie in the middle of my, uhm, start bar, and now all my windows are gone! OMG!" "You changed to another virtual desktop, see, that's..." "Virtual desktop? Stop that techno babble! I just want my windows back!").
I was wondering about that myself. I think I'll have to pick up that book. Thanks for the pointer!
No. Terrorist organisations have an interesting property: They start out fighting for a cause. To do this, they need money. Since they're already doing illegal things, getting the money illegally is the easiest course of action. So they start dealing with drugs, robbing banks, smuggling, whatever. Slowly, they turn from an idealistic organisation into a purely criminal organisation which uses its original cause to get new members.
I bet that by now, Bin Laden isn't interested in his original cause that much anymore. It's probably become purely about power for him.
So, what do you do against an organisation like that? First of all, it would most likely be a good idea to stop helping them gain new members. Something tells me that invading Iraq wasn't the best way to achieve that.
Awesome! So you figured out how to read people's minds? Great! Now we can differentiate between the 99.99% legitimate refugees who simply seek shelter and the 0.01% who are extremist terrorists!
Quick, notify our governments!
Wow, that's some weird logic! There has never been an islamist terrorist attack on London in this scale. Not before 9/11 and not after it. There's no indication that any of the counter measures had any kind of effect since there are not enough data points to have any kind of statistic. In fact, it's highly unlikely that there's anything you can do to prevent such attacks with a high probability anyway. And it's highly likely that the war on terrorism caused this attack - at least in part.
All we can say with certainty is that the response plans put in place should such an attack occur seemed to have worked pretty well. Evacuations, medical help and such seemed to work out as planned.
Your logic is very wrong. Nothing like 9/11 happened in the 2000 years before it, and it's no wonder nothing like it happened in the 4 years after it.
Bush could have spent those years hunting butterflies on his farm and it would have had the same effect. In fact, America and the rest of the western world would probably have been a lot saver if he had done that.
That would be a very convenient explanation. It's quite unfortunate that it has no base in reality whatsoever. Bin Laden is no stupid religious fundamentalist who wants to kill all infidels. That's the rhetorics he often uses in his videos to get his followers rallied up, but his actual goal is to get the western countries out of arabic countries. This whole thing started with the presence of U.S. military bases in Saudi Arabia. Bin Laden wanted them out in order to increase his own influence, and to that effect, he started his campaign against the Americans.
This is about power, not religion.
So what you're saying is that not only didn't the war on terrorism not prevent this, it actually caused this?
In this speech, Macaulay clearly knows the true meaning of "Pirate" and uses "piratical" to make the booksellers he mentions look evil. He doesn't even use the word "pirates" to refer to them, but instead uses "piratical" - "lika a pirate".
Clearly, he knows the proper meaning of "pirate", and it's not what you think it is.
As far as I can tell, females play all kinds of games, but there are a few genres which females seem to prefer. My current girlfriend loves Pac Pix, Donkey Konga (together with her sister, who thinks it's hilarous) and Yoshi Touch & Go. She gets nervous when she has to play too long at a time. Interestingly, she doesn't like typical "girl games" games like the Urbz or Harvest Moon too much.
My former girlfriend, however, was different. She used to play single player sessions of Mario Party for hours at a time, and she finished Klonoa very quickly. A female friend of mine loves Adventure-style RPGs and Jump-N-Runs, she spent over 70 hours playing through Paper Mario, finishing every possible side-quest and keeping on playing it even after she finished it. She's currently playing Wind Waker and constantly telling me about stuff she's discovered. She also likes Bomberman Generation and Super Mario Sunshine. I even know a girl who loves Sonic Adventure Battle 2. Because it has a great soundtrack.
If you can make a generalization, I'd say that most girls prefer games which aren't too violent (If you want to play games together with your girfriend, get a Nintendo console). Other than that, girls play all kinds of games, just like males.
That is not logical, but other than that, German is way better than English. Especially spelling rules are very consistent and logical.
That's because programming languages have simple and mostly logical rules. English doesn't. Let me tell you this as a person who learned english only as his fourth language: English is a mess. The spelling rules are pretty much non-existant. You don't know how to pronounce words from how they're written and vice-versa. Names are particularly bad: Different people pronounce the same name differently, and names that are written entirely different are pronounced the same.
English seems to have been designed by a committee where every participant got to create one word's spelling, and they all tried their best to be creative.
German spelling rules, as a contrast, were pretty much put together by one person, Konrad Duden. They're mostly logical, and you can make an educated guess at the spelling of a word if you hear it. If you read a word, it's most often clear how to pronounce it. French and Spanish are similar, and Japanese is very easy in this regard, too.
English spelling rules, on the other hand, are bordering on insanity.