They're still selling every single Wii they ship, often within minutes of it leaving the box, but the problem is that Nintendo isn't shipping quite as many as they had originally said they'd like to. They haven't offered any reasons for this.
The project was accessing data that Google did not own, only licensed, in a way that was not covered by Google's license. If Google hadn't shut them down, the owners of the data would likely have gone after this project (and possibly gone straight to a lawsuit) as well as tried to force Google to make it harder for other people to do this in the future, thus limiting what Google itself can do with the data.
It sucks, but that's what happens when you're dealing with licensed data.
You're missing the point. He's not saying that the species is worse off for having physically flawed individuals. He's simply pointing out that the human race is no longer improving through natural selection.
As a specimen, ignoring our education and technology, are the humans of today any better off than we were ten thousand years ago? Almost certainly not. Survival of the species has shifted from genetic legacies to a technological legacy, which is not part of the definition of natural selection.
Sure, some people may end up downloading pirated games instead of buying them from Nintendo, but as iTunes shows, people are perfectly willing to pay reasonable prices for things they can get free elsewhere.
And since the Wii hardware itself is actually profitable for Nintendo (as opposed to the PS3), they're still going to make money from people who buy a Wii with no intention of ever buying a legit Virtual Console game or even a real Wii game. And maybe once these hackers have a Wii they'll buy some games after all.
Freedb only exists because people built it from scratch after CDDB started charging. What would you say if Freedb suddenly locked down and started charging? When people contributed to CDDB in the first place, it was with the understanding that they were contributing to a free service that would help them, their friends, and everybody. Gracenote took advantage of them.
Actually, we know a great deal about how swordplay will be handled in Red Steel. Gamespot has a video of someone playing through the first level or so, with extensive commentary on how both the gun and swordplay work. That game probably has the depth you're looking for.
You're dropped onto an alien planet. There's absolutely no dialog (except that between aliens which is incomprehensible), but the emotional content is huge.
There's also an updated version that runs fine under XP if you want to experience it for the first time.
1 meter resolution is actually four times as good as 2 meter resolution. We're dealing with areas here, so a pixel should be one square meter as opposed to four square meters.
If you read the entirety of the original website, he claims at the bottom to have gotten in touch with the scammer through another alias, gotten the name and contact info of the artist, and confirmed that the artist was paid for the pieces (though he wasn't able to find out how much).
The problem is that, while they're making it as inexpensive as possible, it probably still costs more than $100 to make. I don't know this for sure, but I imagine some of the hardware manufacturers are offering special discounts specifically for its purpose as a charity device. If you were to just walk up and try to buy one, you'd then be demanding to benefit from their charity.
It's important to remember that the game isn't so much about the song as a whole. It's not about the lyrics or even the drums, keyboard, or whatever else. The game is all about the guitar, and Van Halen is all about the guitar. The Kinks version just wouldn't have what it takes to be included in the game.
All the stuff other people have replied with is great, so I'd like to add a couple of reccomendations of my own.
Bone, by Jeff Smith, is fantastic. It's black & white, and a little bit lighter (though not all the time) than a lot of the other stuff being pushed. The entire run is available in TPBs or in one giant phone-book sized volume.
Mike Mignola's Hellboy is great fun. The art is beautiful and it's got a very pulp-action feel with good writing and good stories. A number of the stories are lifted directly from myths and legends, but it's got a nice modernizing touch to it. It's not Shakespeare, but it's very well done. Available in a number of TPBs, each of which has a pretty much complete storyline.
Fables, by Bill Willingham, is still a monthly comic through DC's Vertigo imprint. Characters from legends and stories (Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, King Cole, Prince Charming, Rose Red, etc) have fled a conqueror in their homelands and established a community in New York City. I can't reccomend this enough.
This snake, with the sacrum, had to come before modern snakes. But evolution isn't a process of an entire species becoming an entire new species.
A group of these snakes could have been geographically isolated, during which time they evolved further, losing the sacrum. Meanwhile, others of this species were still happily breeding elsewhere.
So it could be possible to find a sacrum-less fossil older (though probably not by much) than this one.
I played this game back in the day on my Amiga 500. In the past couple years I discovered it was released for SNES, so I was able to play an emu version on my current PC.
It's one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, and the graphics style helps it look great even today, when most old games look old and crappy now.
But it was also the hardest game ever. Each and every scene required precise timing to get through, and you'd have to play several scenes over and over and over. I never even got halfway through until I discovered some cheat codes to skip ahead.
This really could be cool if they decided to do it.
I think it'd work better as a MMFPS, though. Something like Planetside, but with the different races and then some factions within those races. Terrans fighting Terrans, Protoss teaming up with one Zerg hive to hold off another hive, etc. Make the whole thing built around PVP instead of PVE.
I liked Morrowind and the advance shots of Oblivion looked great, so I picked it up the other day. Now I just wish I could play. My system's a little behind the curve, but it runs stuff like WoW and HL2 on around medium settings with no problems at all. However, I can't even get through the character generator in Oblivion on absolutely minimal graphics settings without crashing.
Athlon XP 3200+ 1 Gig DDR RAM GeForce FX 5700 w/ 256 RAM etc and sundry.
The worst part is my motherboard was of the last generation before PCI Express became standard, so all I've got is AGP. My CPU should still be able to handle it, but going to a GeForce 6800 on AGP seems like a waste of time.
The nice bit about the HUD in Metroid Prime and Prime 2 is that it actually adds to the immersion instead of taking away from it.
The HUD isn't fixed, and moves a little as you twist and turn. It fogs up in some situations, gets wet in others, and lets you see Samus' reflection. It really helps to make you feel like you're running around in a high-tech power suit, instead of something like the purely functional HUDs in Unreal and its cousins.
Like others have said, GPS works on time (distance), not position. In the end that's not what matters. The real reason we don't have a system like this on Mars is that there's just no call for it yet.
We've only got two active surface rovers over there. Most of our stuff is in orbit, and in various ways these are already helping us to keep track of the rovers.
At some point we may have dozens of little semi-autonomous rovers exploring Mars or maybe even preparing equipment and material for human visitors. With any luck, there will one day be humans there. At that point we might want to put a GPS-like system in place. But until then there's just no reason to justify the cost. Getting things into orbit around another planet is incredibly more difficult than getting them into orbit around our own.
First, I have to say that I loved the original Black & White. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was a lot of fun. One day I spent something like an hour throwing flaming rocks at an opposing city that was out of reach of my normal spells.
I understand what they're trying to accomplish with their avoidance of menus, and I think it's a noble goal. They just need to remember that there's two types of menus in a game (three counting options and all, but you can't do without those):
First is boxes telling you what's happening in the game world. How much money you have, how many people you have, etc. Getting rid of these is great if they can make it easy to get the same information across through the game. If it's easy for me to glance across my domain and see I've got lots of really big houses, cool. If I can look at my creature and guage his health and happiness in a glance, awesome. I'm all for doing away with these.
Second is menus telling you what you can do. These are the ones where you'd select a spell to cast, and things like that. They tried to replace these with mouse gestures (that I mostly liked), but this was a very imperfect system. You can easily come up with something simple and unobtrusive to replace this that doesn't make things difficult for people. The radial menus from NWN are a great example - I use a similar thing for Firefox through a plugin, and love it. As long as there aren't too many options to choose from, it can become as quick and intuitive as mouse gestures without all the haphazardness of those.
In the US Constitution? Not explicitly. Many states do have privacy rights outlined. Here's the relevant text from the Florida state constitution:
SECTION 23. Right of privacy.--Every natural person has the right to be let alone and free from governmental intrusion into the person's private life except as otherwise provided herein. This section shall not be construed to limit the public's right of access to public records and meetings as provided by law.
This is a remarkably difficult word to define correctly.
Webster's Online Dictionary defines it as "not scientifically explainable; supernatural", and it defines "supernatural" as, "of or relating to an order of existence beyond the visible observable universe; departing from what is usual or normal especially so as to appear to transcend the laws of nature; attributed to an invisible agent (as a ghost or spirit)".
Past JREF Challenge rulings have shown that certain events which deviate from what is usual or normal aren't always considered paranormal by the Challenge administrators. Potential applicants are free to inquire (prior to submitting an application) as to whether or not their claim would be acceptable under the Challenge rules. The rules must be followed strictly, so don't waste your time arguing about them. They will not be changed or altered in any way.
2.3. Does (this) qualify as paranormal?
The best way to answer this is to examine this list of things that people commonly apply for.
The following things are paranormal by definition:
Dowsing. ESP. Precognition. Remote Viewing. Communicating with the Dead and/or "Channeling". Violations of Newton's Laws of Motion (Perpetual Motion Devices). Homeopathy. Chiropractic Healing (beyond back/joint problems). Faith Healing. Psychic Surgery. Astrology. Therapeutic Touch (aka "TT"). Qi Gong. Psychokinesis (aka "PK"). The Existence of Ghosts. Precognition & Prophecy. Levitation. Physiognomy. Psychometry. Pyramid Power. Reflexology. Acupuncture. Applied Kinesiology (aka "AK"). Clairvoyance. The Existence of Auras. Graphology. Numerology. Palmistry. Phrenology.
The following things have been ruled NOT paranormal and/or NOT eligible for the Challenge in the past:
UFOs. "Bigfoot" & "Yeti" (or other legendary creatures). Anything that is likely to cause injury. "Cloud-busting". Claims of a Religious or Spiritual nature. Exorcism and/or Demonic Possession. The Existence of Chakras. The Existence of God[5]. Reincarnation. The Existence of the Soul or "Astral Bodies".
There are some claims that are far too implausible to warrant any serious examination, such as the "Breatharian" claims in which the applicant states that he can survive without food or water. Science conclusively tells us all we need to know about such matters, and the JREF feels no obligation to engage applicants in such delusions.
Many of the NOT PARANORMAL claims are listed as such solely because they cannot be properly tested for. For example, in order to prove that Exorcism is real, one must first establish the existence of demons. The JREF is unaware of a manner in which it might be proven that demons exist (or god, or angels or "elementals", for that matter), while remaining open to any suggestions that might change their opinion in this regard.
So, if someone can suggest a test protocol that would conclusively verify such things, the JREF would be willing to hear about it.
Other claims, such as "Crop Circles" and UFO's are rejected because they have been definitively proven to be the result of hoaxes or mass hysteria. Claims involving "Cloud-Busting", for example, are rejected because Science (along with keen observation) tells us conclusively that clouds will move and disperse despite the efforts of humankind to move them according to their wishes. The phenomenon behind Oujia boards, for example, is attributed to ideo-motor reflexes, and not to anything paranormal.
The JREF will also not waste its time (or the applicant's safety and well being) with claims from applicants who exhibit clear signs of paranoid delusions, schizophrenia or other mental illness, feeling strongly that it is their moral responsibility to avoid the furthering of such delusions in the minds of those who may be in need of immediate psychiatric attention. What this means is tha
Any real, physical product that I purchase and own becomes mine to modify at will, unless I explicitly enter into an agreement preventing that (as you might when purchasing a piece of art).
I can buy a car and mod it however I want.
I can then use that car however I want, as long as I'm just using it on my fifty-acre property in Montana.
The problems with car modifications enter in when I walk down to the DMV and want to register the vehicle. At that point, you're signing a piece of paper that says you will not do all those things and then attempt to drive it on public roadways.
Show me the government agreement I sign when I buy a video game console, and you'll have a valid point.
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They're still selling every single Wii they ship, often within minutes of it leaving the box, but the problem is that Nintendo isn't shipping quite as many as they had originally said they'd like to. They haven't offered any reasons for this.
The project was accessing data that Google did not own, only licensed, in a way that was not covered by Google's license. If Google hadn't shut them down, the owners of the data would likely have gone after this project (and possibly gone straight to a lawsuit) as well as tried to force Google to make it harder for other people to do this in the future, thus limiting what Google itself can do with the data.
It sucks, but that's what happens when you're dealing with licensed data.
You're missing the point. He's not saying that the species is worse off for having physically flawed individuals. He's simply pointing out that the human race is no longer improving through natural selection.
As a specimen, ignoring our education and technology, are the humans of today any better off than we were ten thousand years ago? Almost certainly not. Survival of the species has shifted from genetic legacies to a technological legacy, which is not part of the definition of natural selection.
Is this really such a terrible thing for the Wii?
Sure, some people may end up downloading pirated games instead of buying them from Nintendo, but as iTunes shows, people are perfectly willing to pay reasonable prices for things they can get free elsewhere.
And since the Wii hardware itself is actually profitable for Nintendo (as opposed to the PS3), they're still going to make money from people who buy a Wii with no intention of ever buying a legit Virtual Console game or even a real Wii game. And maybe once these hackers have a Wii they'll buy some games after all.
Freedb only exists because people built it from scratch after CDDB started charging. What would you say if Freedb suddenly locked down and started charging? When people contributed to CDDB in the first place, it was with the understanding that they were contributing to a free service that would help them, their friends, and everybody. Gracenote took advantage of them.
Actually, we know a great deal about how swordplay will be handled in Red Steel. Gamespot has a video of someone playing through the first level or so, with extensive commentary on how both the gun and swordplay work. That game probably has the depth you're looking for.
Another World, aka Out of This World really deserves to be on the list.
You're dropped onto an alien planet. There's absolutely no dialog (except that between aliens which is incomprehensible), but the emotional content is huge.
There's also an updated version that runs fine under XP if you want to experience it for the first time.
1 meter resolution is actually four times as good as 2 meter resolution. We're dealing with areas here, so a pixel should be one square meter as opposed to four square meters.
Because the narrator's actually Australian, and (as I understand) actually does his work from Australia.
If you read the entirety of the original website, he claims at the bottom to have gotten in touch with the scammer through another alias, gotten the name and contact info of the artist, and confirmed that the artist was paid for the pieces (though he wasn't able to find out how much).
The problem is that, while they're making it as inexpensive as possible, it probably still costs more than $100 to make. I don't know this for sure, but I imagine some of the hardware manufacturers are offering special discounts specifically for its purpose as a charity device. If you were to just walk up and try to buy one, you'd then be demanding to benefit from their charity.
They played two matches. Miyamoto and Dyer swept the first (each match is only three points) and won the second by one point.
It's important to remember that the game isn't so much about the song as a whole. It's not about the lyrics or even the drums, keyboard, or whatever else. The game is all about the guitar, and Van Halen is all about the guitar. The Kinks version just wouldn't have what it takes to be included in the game.
All the stuff other people have replied with is great, so I'd like to add a couple of reccomendations of my own.
Bone, by Jeff Smith, is fantastic. It's black & white, and a little bit lighter (though not all the time) than a lot of the other stuff being pushed. The entire run is available in TPBs or in one giant phone-book sized volume.
Mike Mignola's Hellboy is great fun. The art is beautiful and it's got a very pulp-action feel with good writing and good stories. A number of the stories are lifted directly from myths and legends, but it's got a nice modernizing touch to it. It's not Shakespeare, but it's very well done. Available in a number of TPBs, each of which has a pretty much complete storyline.
Fables, by Bill Willingham, is still a monthly comic through DC's Vertigo imprint. Characters from legends and stories (Snow White, the Big Bad Wolf, King Cole, Prince Charming, Rose Red, etc) have fled a conqueror in their homelands and established a community in New York City. I can't reccomend this enough.
Yes and no.
This snake, with the sacrum, had to come before modern snakes. But evolution isn't a process of an entire species becoming an entire new species.
A group of these snakes could have been geographically isolated, during which time they evolved further, losing the sacrum. Meanwhile, others of this species were still happily breeding elsewhere.
So it could be possible to find a sacrum-less fossil older (though probably not by much) than this one.
I played this game back in the day on my Amiga 500. In the past couple years I discovered it was released for SNES, so I was able to play an emu version on my current PC.
It's one of the most beautiful games I've ever played, and the graphics style helps it look great even today, when most old games look old and crappy now.
But it was also the hardest game ever. Each and every scene required precise timing to get through, and you'd have to play several scenes over and over and over. I never even got halfway through until I discovered some cheat codes to skip ahead.
Beautifully frustrating.
This really could be cool if they decided to do it.
I think it'd work better as a MMFPS, though. Something like Planetside, but with the different races and then some factions within those races. Terrans fighting Terrans, Protoss teaming up with one Zerg hive to hold off another hive, etc. Make the whole thing built around PVP instead of PVE.
Oh, well.
I liked Morrowind and the advance shots of Oblivion looked great, so I picked it up the other day. Now I just wish I could play. My system's a little behind the curve, but it runs stuff like WoW and HL2 on around medium settings with no problems at all. However, I can't even get through the character generator in Oblivion on absolutely minimal graphics settings without crashing.
Athlon XP 3200+
1 Gig DDR RAM
GeForce FX 5700 w/ 256 RAM
etc and sundry.
The worst part is my motherboard was of the last generation before PCI Express became standard, so all I've got is AGP. My CPU should still be able to handle it, but going to a GeForce 6800 on AGP seems like a waste of time.
The nice bit about the HUD in Metroid Prime and Prime 2 is that it actually adds to the immersion instead of taking away from it.
The HUD isn't fixed, and moves a little as you twist and turn. It fogs up in some situations, gets wet in others, and lets you see Samus' reflection. It really helps to make you feel like you're running around in a high-tech power suit, instead of something like the purely functional HUDs in Unreal and its cousins.
Like others have said, GPS works on time (distance), not position. In the end that's not what matters. The real reason we don't have a system like this on Mars is that there's just no call for it yet.
We've only got two active surface rovers over there. Most of our stuff is in orbit, and in various ways these are already helping us to keep track of the rovers.
At some point we may have dozens of little semi-autonomous rovers exploring Mars or maybe even preparing equipment and material for human visitors. With any luck, there will one day be humans there. At that point we might want to put a GPS-like system in place. But until then there's just no reason to justify the cost. Getting things into orbit around another planet is incredibly more difficult than getting them into orbit around our own.
First, I have to say that I loved the original Black & White. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but it was a lot of fun. One day I spent something like an hour throwing flaming rocks at an opposing city that was out of reach of my normal spells.
I understand what they're trying to accomplish with their avoidance of menus, and I think it's a noble goal. They just need to remember that there's two types of menus in a game (three counting options and all, but you can't do without those):
First is boxes telling you what's happening in the game world. How much money you have, how many people you have, etc. Getting rid of these is great if they can make it easy to get the same information across through the game. If it's easy for me to glance across my domain and see I've got lots of really big houses, cool. If I can look at my creature and guage his health and happiness in a glance, awesome. I'm all for doing away with these.
Second is menus telling you what you can do. These are the ones where you'd select a spell to cast, and things like that. They tried to replace these with mouse gestures (that I mostly liked), but this was a very imperfect system. You can easily come up with something simple and unobtrusive to replace this that doesn't make things difficult for people. The radial menus from NWN are a great example - I use a similar thing for Firefox through a plugin, and love it. As long as there aren't too many options to choose from, it can become as quick and intuitive as mouse gestures without all the haphazardness of those.
Reading comprehension for the win!
Sedna was discovered back in 2004. It's just an object of similar size in a similar area. This object is not Sedna.
Sorry, but your point is crap.
Any real, physical product that I purchase and own becomes mine to modify at will, unless I explicitly enter into an agreement preventing that (as you might when purchasing a piece of art).
I can buy a car and mod it however I want.
I can then use that car however I want, as long as I'm just using it on my fifty-acre property in Montana.
The problems with car modifications enter in when I walk down to the DMV and want to register the vehicle. At that point, you're signing a piece of paper that says you will not do all those things and then attempt to drive it on public roadways.
Show me the government agreement I sign when I buy a video game console, and you'll have a valid point.