2- Spoken as a true westerner. Some of the victims interviewed on TV said they'd rather have been killed. Interview of people in the Iraqi street I saw this morning was saying that forcing people to have simulated sex was in fact far worse than killing them.
The emphasis is mine. What exactly is your idea of "western" thinking. I happen to live in the U.S. Am I a typical "westerner". I can tell you that the people who are trying to excuse the prison abuse are not conservatives, but republicans trying to dodge this political bullet. The people who are owning up to and looking for the best solution are the conservatives (who are trying to conserve the pricipal of humane treatment for thy enemy) and the liberals (who are fighting for the rule of law worldwide).
The definition of western thought that you portray is an advocacy and/or excusement of the abuse of prisoners for the aquisition of intel. While this thinking is not unamerican (aka. Michael Savage), it does more to expose your assumed steroetypes of America than it describes what the majority of Americas thinks.
Who can possibly say that, all Americans share any particular opinion when we are installed with the right to disagree, the right to voice our disagreement, and use those rights as much as possible. But I think that most of agree that Saddam was a Tyrant and a murderer and that his removal, in itself, is a good thing. Now we have to do our best to give the Iragis their country back.
E3 is a week away and they pull this. I was anticipating to follow Tech TVs coverage of the event. I hope this doesn't mean that they won't be covering it.
I recently re-played Final Fantasy X for the PS2. Still a pretty game to watch. The CG sequences are excellent. But the one thing that stuck out like sore thumb was the spotty delivery of dialouge in that game. From a critical perspective, you can see how this game could have been so much more immersive and intresting if the characters didn't pause during are in between sentences, sound synch was perfected, and maybe a bit of touchup for the script. The speech pausing in particular destroys the mood and frustrates the gamer.
Overall, FFX as a story was pretty good, with some obvious problems. Those problems could be solved if the developers concentrated more on story delivery than making superior graphics. But we all know what sells mass volumes of games.
I am optimistic that gamers will begin to demand better story-telling from the game makers after playing games that do an exceptionally good job of it (example: Sly Cooper, Jax and Daxter 2, Onimusha 3).
EXTRA: Onimusha 3: Can you belive that opening sequence! Dear Lord, that ROBOT team is good.
I've written in my journal about their proclaimed timeline. Excert here:
"The Space Shuttle took less than ten years to design and build, from 1972 to 1981. The atomic bomb took only three years, from 1942 to 1945. Both of these programs involved more new science research and more development of new technologies and techniques than an assembler program would likely require. As analyzed above, they probably cost more too. The main question in estimating a timeline for fabricator development, then, is when it will be technically and politically feasible. There are probably five or more nations, and perhaps several large companies, that could finance a molecular fabricator effort starting in this decade. The technical feasibility depends on the enabling technologies. Even a single present-day technology, dip-pen nanolithography, may be able to fabricate an entire proto-fabricator with sufficient effort. At this point, we have not seen anything to make us believe that a five-year $10 billion fabricator project, starting today, would be infeasible, though we don't yet know enough to estimate its chance of success. Five years from now, we expect that a five-year project will be obviously feasible, and its cost may be well under $5 billion."
I am of two minds with next generation of consoles. 1. PS3 technology sounds really cool. I've chosen the playstation and PS2 during previous generations of consoles. I am comfortable with the PS2's controller and am adverse to changing consoles.
2. I don't belive that it is a good thing to have one company dominate the gaming market (ex. Nintendo of the 1980's). Monopolistic motives drive more than just MS. I also believe that MS's development tools will make Xbox games easier to program. That may be the X factor for many developers.
So I'm willing to sit back and evaluate which next generation console offers the best technology, best games, for the best price. Since I don't have the money to waste on more than one console I'
in the states HDTV plasma screens are a huge selling point for Electronics stores. As the market addresses this demand they will be motivated to offer better quality products. As each generation of products hit the market the previous generation will dip in price. As the system progresses, we are bound to have low cost / descent quality products for sale that meet your needs.
We just need a few more iterations of this process for it to become economical. So not now, but soon.
On the other hand, I do think certain games (Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and other strategy games) allow players to exercise political thoughts. Players can ask questions such as How does Democracy effect my bottom line?; You mean I can't attack the annoying puny little country that just attacked my level 25 city without congress's permission?; and why does communism suck so much?
Wow, Gamers are all libertarian's? Huh, I didn't know that. Watch out before the thought police spiders into this site. You'll be first on thier list.
Seriously, I don't think you can make sweeping generalizations about a minority group of people without expelling a certain amount of common scense. You know that little voice that says, "Technically, there may exist those that do not conform to your model."
On the other hand, I do certain games (Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and other strategy games) allow players to exercise political thoughts. Players can ask questions such as How does Democracy effect my bottom line? You mean I can't attack the annoying puny little country that just attacked my level 25 city without congress's permission? and why does communism suck so much?
I believe this is what Terminal Services is designed for. If you are fortunate enough to have a terminal Serivices Server around you could also configure your home directory and things like that. For an El Cheapo version of this Find a Windows XP machine and turn desktop sharing on.
The only downside to using the XP machine instead of the TS Server is that it seems to limit you to one connection at a time.
I don't know if they were running MAME or not but I've seen small game kits sold in malls that have a lot of early generation Atari, Nintendo and Sega games (for example: Duck Hunt-->with laser gun, Super Mario Bros., Altered Beast, Joust, Hogan's Ally, etc.). I think it was selling for around $25-$30, but I'm probably wrong about that.
The coolest thing about it was that the games were all stored in the controller. The light gun plugged into one of the controllers to work. They had a genesis-like controller and a NES looking controller.
The light gun games were fun to play again. I never really had the chance to play Hogan's Alley when it was out. NEway, its a pretty good waste of time.
The price tag of ~ $150 is still not low enough for me to buy a second console. In fact, for someone like me who has already invested in "This generation" of consoles, anything over a hundred is too much. Its not a casual buy whenever you see three digits in front of the price tag's decimal point. I don't see what they intend to gain from this manuever.
Am I the only one who read this and thought, "Yeah, more job opprotunties for me."
I do see the downside of people not taking Computer Science and Engineering seriously. But the law economics states that with decrease supply the remaining demand can be spread across fewer applicants.
That is most certainly true. I don't know about you, but I've had my fair share of difficulties getting Samba 3 to work with Suse 9 and easily as Samba 2 does. I'm hoping that this new version has solved the problems I was having getting my W2k Server authenticating my Linux machines.
I realize now that my best option is to not use Suse's custom tools (that I assume was written to work with Samba 2) and do everything from scratch.
If I were to guess, I'd say it is due to competition between market forces. Here in the midwest (specifically St. Louis), Juno/Netzero is a popular option for cost savers. While gamers either decide to pay the Charter titan, or the SBC titan for high speed access.
For me, my college life was redefined by high speed internet access. When we moved down here it was hard to adjust to not haveing interent access. Nearly all of my communication with family memebers is done by cell phones or IM now.
I agree that throwing money at the problem of building a carbon nanotube cord to come close to the required strength would not be a good idea. But there are many other problems to solve. There are few risks in the construction and deployment phases. Political factors, site candidates, and power generators and delivery systems need to be invented (to name a few). These projects could be farmed out colleges and university as competitive grant awards or to companies as competitively bided contracts. In doing so, the current cost of the program would be the cost of those NASA funded grants and contracts. It could be price limited to 20 Million a year and still make an impact.
Sounds familar to Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars. The Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars is a good trilogy about mars terraforming. I'd recommend it if this topic intrests you.
Slashdot Mirror
2- Spoken as a true westerner. Some of the victims interviewed on TV said they'd rather have been killed. Interview of people in the Iraqi street I saw this morning was saying that forcing people to have simulated sex was in fact far worse than killing them.
The emphasis is mine. What exactly is your idea of "western" thinking. I happen to live in the U.S. Am I a typical "westerner". I can tell you that the people who are trying to excuse the prison abuse are not conservatives, but republicans trying to dodge this political bullet. The people who are owning up to and looking for the best solution are the conservatives (who are trying to conserve the pricipal of humane treatment for thy enemy) and the liberals (who are fighting for the rule of law worldwide).
The definition of western thought that you portray is an advocacy and/or excusement of the abuse of prisoners for the aquisition of intel. While this thinking is not unamerican (aka. Michael Savage), it does more to expose your assumed steroetypes of America than it describes what the majority of Americas thinks.
Who can possibly say that, all Americans share any particular opinion when we are installed with the right to disagree, the right to voice our disagreement, and use those rights as much as possible. But I think that most of agree that Saddam was a Tyrant and a murderer and that his removal, in itself, is a good thing. Now we have to do our best to give the Iragis their country back.
Sorry for the double-post. Please excuse my stupidity.
Here's an open-ended poll for this topic. How much would you pay for either the Sony's PSP or Nintendo's DS?
Here's an open-ended poll for this topic. How much would you pay for either the Sony's PSP or Nintendo's DS.
E3 is a week away and they pull this. I was anticipating to follow Tech TVs coverage of the event. I hope this doesn't mean that they won't be covering it.
I recently re-played Final Fantasy X for the PS2. Still a pretty game to watch. The CG sequences are excellent. But the one thing that stuck out like sore thumb was the spotty delivery of dialouge in that game. From a critical perspective, you can see how this game could have been so much more immersive and intresting if the characters didn't pause during are in between sentences, sound synch was perfected, and maybe a bit of touchup for the script. The speech pausing in particular destroys the mood and frustrates the gamer.
Overall, FFX as a story was pretty good, with some obvious problems. Those problems could be solved if the developers concentrated more on story delivery than making superior graphics. But we all know what sells mass volumes of games.
I am optimistic that gamers will begin to demand better story-telling from the game makers after playing games that do an exceptionally good job of it (example: Sly Cooper, Jax and Daxter 2, Onimusha 3).
EXTRA: Onimusha 3: Can you belive that opening sequence! Dear Lord, that ROBOT team is good.
I've written in my journal about their proclaimed timeline. Excert here:
"The Space Shuttle took less than ten years to design and build, from 1972 to 1981. The atomic bomb took only three years, from 1942 to 1945. Both of these programs involved more new science research and more development of new technologies and techniques than an assembler program would likely require. As analyzed above, they probably cost more too. The main question in estimating a timeline for fabricator development, then, is when it will be technically and politically feasible. There are probably five or more nations, and perhaps several large companies, that could finance a molecular fabricator effort starting in this decade. The technical feasibility depends on the enabling technologies. Even a single present-day technology, dip-pen nanolithography, may be able to fabricate an entire proto-fabricator with sufficient effort. At this point, we have not seen anything to make us believe that a five-year $10 billion fabricator project, starting today, would be infeasible, though we don't yet know enough to estimate its chance of success. Five years from now, we expect that a five-year project will be obviously feasible, and its cost may be well under $5 billion."
source
Journal
I am of two minds with next generation of consoles. 1. PS3 technology sounds really cool. I've chosen the playstation and PS2 during previous generations of consoles. I am comfortable with the PS2's controller and am adverse to changing consoles.
2. I don't belive that it is a good thing to have one company dominate the gaming market (ex. Nintendo of the 1980's). Monopolistic motives drive more than just MS. I also believe that MS's development tools will make Xbox games easier to program. That may be the X factor for many developers.
So I'm willing to sit back and evaluate which next generation console offers the best technology, best games, for the best price. Since I don't have the money to waste on more than one console I'
in the states HDTV plasma screens are a huge selling point for Electronics stores. As the market addresses this demand they will be motivated to offer better quality products. As each generation of products hit the market the previous generation will dip in price. As the system progresses, we are bound to have low cost / descent quality products for sale that meet your needs.
We just need a few more iterations of this process for it to become economical. So not now, but soon.
An acutal real world example! Excellent
Man did I need to read this one. My day is a whole lot better now.
sorry for the typos, I meant to say:
On the other hand, I do think certain games (Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and other strategy games) allow players to exercise political thoughts. Players can ask questions such as How does Democracy effect my bottom line?; You mean I can't attack the annoying puny little country that just attacked my level 25 city without congress's permission?; and why does communism suck so much?
Wow, Gamers are all libertarian's? Huh, I didn't know that. Watch out before the thought police spiders into this site. You'll be first on thier list.
Seriously, I don't think you can make sweeping generalizations about a minority group of people without expelling a certain amount of common scense. You know that little voice that says, "Technically, there may exist those that do not conform to your model."
On the other hand, I do certain games (Civ, Railroad Tycoon, and other strategy games) allow players to exercise political thoughts. Players can ask questions such as How does Democracy effect my bottom line? You mean I can't attack the annoying puny little country that just attacked my level 25 city without congress's permission? and why does communism suck so much?
I believe this is what Terminal Services is designed for. If you are fortunate enough to have a terminal Serivices Server around you could also configure your home directory and things like that. For an El Cheapo version of this Find a Windows XP machine and turn desktop sharing on.
The only downside to using the XP machine instead of the TS Server is that it seems to limit you to one connection at a time.
A British Tax on Linux? Oh, the folks in Boston are not going to like the sound of that.
I don't know if they were running MAME or not but I've seen small game kits sold in malls that have a lot of early generation Atari, Nintendo and Sega games (for example: Duck Hunt-->with laser gun, Super Mario Bros., Altered Beast, Joust, Hogan's Ally, etc.). I think it was selling for around $25-$30, but I'm probably wrong about that.
The coolest thing about it was that the games were all stored in the controller. The light gun plugged into one of the controllers to work. They had a genesis-like controller and a NES looking controller.
The light gun games were fun to play again. I never really had the chance to play Hogan's Alley when it was out. NEway, its a pretty good waste of time.
The price tag of ~ $150 is still not low enough for me to buy a second console. In fact, for someone like me who has already invested in "This generation" of consoles, anything over a hundred is too much. Its not a casual buy whenever you see three digits in front of the price tag's decimal point. I don't see what they intend to gain from this manuever.
Am I the only one who read this and thought, "Yeah, more job opprotunties for me."
I do see the downside of people not taking Computer Science and Engineering seriously. But the law economics states that with decrease supply the remaining demand can be spread across fewer applicants.
What are they projecting the actual cost of this mission to be?
That is most certainly true. I don't know about you, but I've had my fair share of difficulties getting Samba 3 to work with Suse 9 and easily as Samba 2 does. I'm hoping that this new version has solved the problems I was having getting my W2k Server authenticating my Linux machines.
I realize now that my best option is to not use Suse's custom tools (that I assume was written to work with Samba 2) and do everything from scratch.
If I were to guess, I'd say it is due to competition between market forces. Here in the midwest (specifically St. Louis), Juno/Netzero is a popular option for cost savers. While gamers either decide to pay the Charter titan, or the SBC titan for high speed access.
For me, my college life was redefined by high speed internet access. When we moved down here it was hard to adjust to not haveing interent access. Nearly all of my communication with family memebers is done by cell phones or IM now.
I like Suse 9, but I'd rather have Samba 3 instead of Samba 2.whatever. Having Samba 3 is reason enough for me to upgrade.
Did anyone play this game? What was your impression of it. Which parts of its potential was realized, which parts weren't?
I agree that throwing money at the problem of building a carbon nanotube cord to come close to the required strength would not be a good idea. But there are many other problems to solve. There are few risks in the construction and deployment phases. Political factors, site candidates, and power generators and delivery systems need to be invented (to name a few). These projects could be farmed out colleges and university as competitive grant awards or to companies as competitively bided contracts. In doing so, the current cost of the program would be the cost of those NASA funded grants and contracts. It could be price limited to 20 Million a year and still make an impact.
Sounds familar to Kim Stanley Robinson's Green Mars. The Red Mars/Green Mars/Blue Mars is a good trilogy about mars terraforming. I'd recommend it if this topic intrests you.