So, because you haven't observed Oil form in less than a thousand years, it can't possibly form in such a short time frame?
No, actually, it's possible to form useful fuel in much less time... if you use unrealistic temperatures and pressures with carefully-chosen starting materials. However, that oil doesn't have the same isotopic fractions as what we find in the ground, different proportions of hydrocarbon chains of different lengths, etc. Plus the chemistry of the oil we find is tied into the geologic history of the reservoir it's found in. See, for example, here. "The value of such a compilation is to show how common patterns start to emerge in basins that share common tectonic environments: even though those environments are separated by thousands of kilometers or tens of millions of years. What appears initially as a hopelessly tangled geologic history starts to become simpler and more understandable once you fully mine the regional geologic databases and reconstruct the basin at the time of the giants' formation."
In other words, yeah, the oil that we find couldn't have formed in that way, in that place, that fast. In other words, "about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could". If you've got a new branch of chemistry that predicts otherwise, publish. I'm pretty sure there's a Nobel in it for you.
Now, the other part of your response:
To which I respond, have you ever observed a member of a species born with a mutation, sexually incompatible with the rest of the species, yet robust enough to survive, and actually better adapted than the rest of the species so that it outlives and out reproduces the remainder of the population? No? Then I taunt you, "you're crazy! no one has ever seen it!"
No, I've not seen that. Fortunately, that's not how evolution predicts that species form.
For an example of gradual changes leading to the creation of new, separate species, we have several examples of so-called "ring species". Consider the Herring Gull around Great Britan. It can interbreed with the American Herring Gull. Going further west, the American version can interbreed with the Vega Herring Gull on Pacific coast of Russia. Moving west again, the Vega can interbreed with Birula's Gull, and so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull, which is found in Scandanavia but also Great Britan too. The Lesser Black-Backed Gull cannot interbreed with the Herring Gull.
Are they really the same species now? No one particular monumental change has happened to render them infertile with each other, just the gradual accumulation of small changes. But they look different, sound different, and have slightly different lifestyles. Now, what if one of the intermediate links, e.g. the Vega Gull, were to go extinct for whatever reason? Would they be the same species then? If there were no gene flow at all between the populations, what could possibly stop even more changes accumulating?
These changes were accumulated gradually, due to radiation of an ancestral population gradually spreading across diverging environments. Fortunately in the case of ring species those environments still exist and we can still see (and cross-breed) all the intermediate steps. When environments change over time, it's harder to see (you need fossils and so forth) but the principle is exactly the same. You need to actually read about evolution - individuals don't evolve, populations do.
Might I suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution for Everyone"? Lucid, straightforward, and covers exactly the ground I suspect you want covered.
But young-Earth geologists who actually look at seismological data don't stay young-Earth geologists. As Henri Poincaré said, "Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house".
How can we know? Because they don't put their money where their mouth is.
Take oil companies. Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for them. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars are riding on it. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't fundamentalists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why don't they do this?
PS3 owners are buying massively more multiplatform games relative to 360 owners
Actually, that's not a completely unreasonable prospect. There's been more exclusives for the 360 in the past couple of years. (No, I'mnotanxbot, just being honest.) That being said, the 360's hardware issues seem likely to be the bigger contributor, at least IMHO. (Oh, and this year's looking pretty good for the PS3, game-wise. I'm pretty hopeful about inFamous.)
Seriously, if you really believe that conventional geology is... er... catastrophically wrong, and that you have a better theory, then that means a major investment opportunity for you and your fellow-travelers. Yet, I have run across very few creationists that are actually willing to put their money where there mouth is. Why is that?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some ve
ry interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't fundamentalists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
You could check the hyperlink. It spells it out pretty well. I just didn't make the whole reply a hyperlink, because I assumed I was communicating with adult humans who could notice things like that. It tends to annoy people when you make a whole paragraph a hyperlink.:->
"Then the one called Raltariki is really a demon?" asked Tak.
"Yes - and no," said Yama."If by 'demon' you mean a malefic, supernatural creature, possessed of great powers, life span and the ability to temporarily assume virtually any shape - then the answer is no. This is the generally accepted definition, but it is untrue in one respect."
"Oh? And what may that be?"
"It is not a supernatural creature."
"But it is all those other things?"
"Yes."
"Then I fail to see what difference it makes whether it be supernatural or not - so long as it is malefic, possesses great powers and life span and has the ability to change its shape at will."
"Ah, but it makes a great deal of difference, you see. It is the difference between the unknown and the unknowable, between science and fantasy - it is a matter of essence."
Dawkins supports the idea of creationism, so long as lifeforms myseriously grew on the back of a fucking crystal, or an intergalactic bukkake fertilized the planet.
I'm sure that most people will see the difference when trying to install a game, sync their PDA... or try to open the crappy humor Powerpoint filling their mailboxes.
What do people do when they have similar problems on Windows?
They go ask their geek spouse/cousin/friend.
Same with Linux. And for the most common tasks, there's nothing really needed. My niece spent a couple nights over this week, and used our Ubuntu 8.10 laptop for her websurfing and chatting needs. She is decidedly not a geek, but had no problems. She could do what she needed to do, she didn't even really need to ask me for anything.
Space is the ultimate high ground. Just having something up there you can drop is a heck of a weapon. More and more countries are moving into space, and several of them are unfriendly to the U.S. (Some for understandable reasons.) At least being able to defend the satellites we critically depend on is necessary.
But we can do it right. Stick some money into nuclear propulsion (not Orion, try a closed cycle gas core nuclear rocket). If we're not limited to chemical power we can lift a lot more weight. Make solar-power satellites, a real space station, and so forth. Open up whole new industries...
According to wikipedia, "Prospective studies using very sensitive early pregnancy tests have found that 25% of pregnancies are miscarried by the sixth week LMP (since the woman's Last Menstrual Period). Clinical miscarriages (those occurring after the sixth week LMP) occur in 8% of pregnancies." And that's with all-human cells and genes, in an effectively optimal environment for the embryo to grow.
More-or-less haphazardly mixing up nonhuman cells/genes with human ones (which is, at present, all we're technically equipped to do) is almost certain to fail.
Technology begets technology. It seems obvious that tech change will accelerate faster and faster, until we develop machines that have trillions of times our own intelligence and cognitive capacity
In the real world, exponential growth always hits limits. Why should technological progress be any different?
There are several plausible candidates for the Great Filter, as it's been called. Maybe life really is unlikely to arise. Maybe multicellularity (or endosymbiosis) is unlikely to evolve. Maybe intelligence is unlikely to evolve.
We can hope, anyway, that we're past the filter. Finding life elsewhere in the solar system would be undeniably cool... but for the above reason, it would also be unsettling.
...it means that civilizations that spread out and last longer than 1K years are exceedingly rare. Which would mean that our odds of achieving any meaningful interstellar travel are quite low. (We might make a space probe or two, but like how we got to the moon but haven't done anything with it, apparently nobody puts out space colonies.)
There are other posible theories, though.
If you want more than 10GB of space, you can do it two ways. First, you can set up the PS3 so that the "Game OS" gets 10GB and Linux gets the rest - or you can hook up a USB2 drive.
You don't get access to the GPU, but you do get access to the GPU's memory, and they've come up with a way to use that VRAM as a fast swap device, bumping the effective memory close to 512MB. Still not spectacular, but certainly quite workable.
And if you can't build stuff from source, oh well. It's not that hard. (To those who would say they shouldn't have to build from source... sure, on a PC. Going off the beaten path to install Linux on a console, yeah, you should expect to have to roll up your sleeves a little. If you don't want to do that... then you're not a member of the intended audience.)
On my Treo, I use NVBackup, but there's also Red Feline Backup, both of which are free and open source, not even getting into the numerous for-pay options. They can be run off of SD card so if you've got a card reader you don't even need to use HotSync to install them.
Of course, I haven't had the problems syncing you have. I can't recall a time I lost data from it. Of course, I mostly use Linux (pilot-xfer, JPilot), so perhaps they're more reliable about that.
None of this applies to the new phone, of course, since it's not running Palm OS. Still, while PalmOS has many faults, I've never see the sync as one of them.
Okay, one more, but only 'cause the straight line was so good.
You'd think that jumping at the very bottom when the springs are most compressed would provide the biggest boost, since you'd send the springs down with the most energy, building up the energy stored in the springs... Instead you need to time your jump just before the spring reaches the top. You need to do it early enough that you're still "on" the platform (can't jump on air) but late enough that you'll gain height so that your higher fall will compress the spring more.
Well, Isaac Newton you're not. Not even a Robert Hooke.
If the energy is stored in the springs, it's not available to you. How does the energy come out of the spring? By contracting. Exactly analogous situation: playground swing. If you're going for horizontal distance, when should you jump off? If you're going for vertical distance, when should you jump off?
Not how actual physics work, but, well, that's my entire point, isn't it?
I can see why you're posting anonymously.
As to the rest, at least you took one bit of my advice and attacked the removal of PS2 compatibility... though it was like pulling teeth to get you that far. That's a definite downside, though the 360 hasn't always done that much better.
Yup, troll. Ignore any point I make, make stuff up if necessary. Ah, well, I've got a few minutes while the virtual machine boots up.
First off, nothing bounces... jumping doesn't send things down.
Ah, I knew it - you haven't actually played the game. One of the most frustrating points for me was those dang spring-mounted platforms that you have to bounce on to get launched higher. For some reason I have a hard time getting the rythm right, but my kids go flying around with abandon. Oh yes, I assure you, jumping does send things down.
In Rock Band's case, you lose out on basically all the online stuff that you get through Live on the Xbox 360 since the PS3 doesn't have an online service.
I'll grant that apparently some of the songs take as long as a week or so to become available on the PS3 compared to the 360 version... I guess that's the 'content... after the main version' bit. That's rough, I know. But as to 'online stuff'? Um... nope. Not true. Basically, with the PS3 version you get a wireless guitar, but with the 360 version, you get achievements. That's the only online difference I'm aware of - got anything else?
(Of course, all this ignores that the original troll was about someone noting that the PS3 had games other than "generic, rehashed FPS games played with shitty controls", and the list was examples of other games. Me, I actually like flOw and High Velocity Bowling and Echochrome and Monsters and Eden... not an FPS in the bunch. Motorstorm isn't a perfect game, but it's still a lot of fun, and impressed my 360-owning friend.)
Dude, if you want to attack the PS3, note things like the 360 getting more exclusive content (though much of that is because Microsoft can afford to essentially bribe developers for that) or the higher up-front price (though once you add in wifi and a hard drive, let alone a Live subscription, the price difference vanishes). Attack Home for being useless (it certainly is, for now at the very least, possibly forever). Attack the questionable decision to remove PS2 backward compatibility. Don't just make stuff up.
Overstated points or invented points ("long load times and shitty online play") by an Anonymous Coward? How could it notbe? Normally I don't respond to trolls, but you managed to get upmodded and an educational opportunity is at hand.
LBP is a lot more than atechdemo. You don't get praise and scores like that from tech demos. I play it regularly, and so do my kids, and it's fun. And no, the physics is quite good. As to user-made levels - sure, there's a lot of crap, but since there's already more than 100,000 user-created levels, only a tiny percentage need to be good to make it worthwhile... and in my experience the percentage isn't all that tiny, plus the ranking system's gotten to the point where it's easy to find good levels. (My 8-year-old loved "Little Dead Space".:-> ) People who have no affection or affinity for side-scrollers won't like it. But then, people who don't like FPS won't like Halo. Oy. Of course, there's been a concerted effort by fanboys of other platforms to slam it, so at least you're not alone.
Mirror's Edge? I found the demo fresh and interesting, but again, ultimately not my cup of tea. And yes, like Rock Band it's available for more than one platform... but if you have a PS3, why not?
Let's give you full credit and state that the PS3 version of Rock Band is a "port". Heaven forfend! What problems, exactly and specifically, does this lead to? You only mentioned PS2 and Wii issues, and while I'm sure they're fascinating and all, they're kind of irrelevant to the PS3.
I've got Singstar 'cause my wife likes to sing and she's good at it. Now the PS2 discs work with the PS3, too, and we can buy songs off the "Singstore". Sure, there's "Lips", which is apparently all right, but if you're worried about ports, then clones should terrify you...
The 360's initially cheaper than the PS3 (though that's in both senses of the term, unfortunately) and has a bigger library. No question. The Wii outsells both, and is more open to casual gamers than either. There are reasons why the PS3 might not be the best choice for everyone, but neither you nor the parent hit on any of 'em.
Overall I think the PS3 is a great box that never caught on
Yup. Maybe it still will, as the graphics start to get better than the 360 and developers have an easier time working with it, but the window for that is closing.
For my purposes it's a really good fit. It's more expensive to start, but it's all-inclusive (no extra $100 for wifi, etc.) and there's no ongoing costs like XBox Live. It plays media well, Blu-ray is nice (for F/X heavy movies), on a nice big screen (and with the keypad) it's actually a pretty good web browser, etc. I bumped mine from 40GB to 80GB essentially for free, as I had a laptop SATA drive laying around. And I haven't had any disc scratches or RROD-style issues.
And then it plays games, too. My kids and I have been having a lot of fun with LittleBigPlanet in particular, and there's already more levels out there than anyone could ever play.
Slashdot Mirror
No, actually, it's possible to form useful fuel in much less time... if you use unrealistic temperatures and pressures with carefully-chosen starting materials. However, that oil doesn't have the same isotopic fractions as what we find in the ground, different proportions of hydrocarbon chains of different lengths, etc. Plus the chemistry of the oil we find is tied into the geologic history of the reservoir it's found in. See, for example, here. "The value of such a compilation is to show how common patterns start to emerge in basins that share common tectonic environments: even though those environments are separated by thousands of kilometers or tens of millions of years. What appears initially as a hopelessly tangled geologic history starts to become simpler and more understandable once you fully mine the regional geologic databases and reconstruct the basin at the time of the giants' formation."
In other words, yeah, the oil that we find couldn't have formed in that way, in that place, that fast. In other words, "about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could". If you've got a new branch of chemistry that predicts otherwise, publish. I'm pretty sure there's a Nobel in it for you.
Now, the other part of your response:
No, I've not seen that. Fortunately, that's not how evolution predicts that species form.
For an example of gradual changes leading to the creation of new, separate species, we have several examples of so-called "ring species". Consider the Herring Gull around Great Britan. It can interbreed with the American Herring Gull. Going further west, the American version can interbreed with the Vega Herring Gull on Pacific coast of Russia. Moving west again, the Vega can interbreed with Birula's Gull, and so on, until you come to the Lesser Black-Backed Gull, which is found in Scandanavia but also Great Britan too. The Lesser Black-Backed Gull cannot interbreed with the Herring Gull.
Are they really the same species now? No one particular monumental change has happened to render them infertile with each other, just the gradual accumulation of small changes. But they look different, sound different, and have slightly different lifestyles. Now, what if one of the intermediate links, e.g. the Vega Gull, were to go extinct for whatever reason? Would they be the same species then? If there were no gene flow at all between the populations, what could possibly stop even more changes accumulating?
These changes were accumulated gradually, due to radiation of an ancestral population gradually spreading across diverging environments. Fortunately in the case of ring species those environments still exist and we can still see (and cross-breed) all the intermediate steps. When environments change over time, it's harder to see (you need fossils and so forth) but the principle is exactly the same. You need to actually read about evolution - individuals don't evolve, populations do.
Might I suggest David Sloan Wilson's "Evolution for Everyone"? Lucid, straightforward, and covers exactly the ground I suspect you want covered.
But young-Earth geologists who actually look at seismological data don't stay young-Earth geologists. As Henri Poincaré said, "Science is built up with facts, as a house is with stones. But a collection of facts is no more a science than a heap of stones is a house".
Take oil companies. Finding oil is a very important and high-stakes issue for them. Literally hundreds of billions of dollars are riding on it. When the chips are down and they need to find the most likely spots to drill - what kind of geology do they use? Flood geology, or mainstream? Which one actually delivers the goods?
Let's assume the Earth is only a few thousand years old. Where did the oil come from? Was it created in the ground with the rest of the Earth? If so, is there a way to predict where it might be found? Or perhaps it really did form from plants and dinosaurs, but about 10,000 times faster than any chemist believes it could? Any way you look at it, a young Earth and a Flood would imply some very interesting scientific questions to ask, some interesting (and potentially extremely valuable) research programs to start. How come nobody's actually pursuing such research programs?
Why don't fundamentalists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why don't they do this?
(It turns out some people actually are doing this - or, at least, claiming too. But it appears that deeply-held beliefs are easier to exploit than deeply-held oil reserves.)
Actually, that's not a completely unreasonable prospect. There's been more exclusives for the 360 in the past couple of years. (No, I'm not an xbot, just being honest.) That being said, the 360's hardware issues seem likely to be the bigger contributor, at least IMHO. (Oh, and this year's looking pretty good for the PS3, game-wise. I'm pretty hopeful about inFamous.)
Seriously, if you really believe that conventional geology is... er... catastrophically wrong, and that you have a better theory, then that means a major investment opportunity for you and your fellow-travelers. Yet, I have run across very few creationists that are actually willing to put their money where there mouth is. Why is that?
Why don't fundamentalists put together an investment fund, where people pay in and the stake is used as venture capital for things like oil and mineral rights? If "Flood geology" is really a better theory, then it should make better predictions about where raw materials are than standard geology does. The profits from such a venture could pay for a lot of evangelism. Why isn't anyone doing this?
If I have free will, I don't need to worry about it. If I don't have free will, there's no point in worrying about it. :->
You could check the hyperlink. It spells it out pretty well. I just didn't make the whole reply a hyperlink, because I assumed I was communicating with adult humans who could notice things like that. It tends to annoy people when you make a whole paragraph a hyperlink. :->
Actually, nope.
From "Lord of Light" by Roger Zelazny:
So the guy I was responding to couldn't miss the fact that it was a hyperlink. He's apparently missed obvious things before.
Um... no.
Toward the end of his interview with me, Stein asked whether I could think of any circumstances whatsoever under which intelligent design might have occurred. It's the kind of challenge I relish, and I set myself the task of imagining the most plausible scenario I could. I wanted to give ID its best shot, however poor that best shot might be. I must have been feeling magnanimous that day, because I was aware that the leading advocates of Intelligent Design are very fond of protesting that they are not talking about God as the designer, but about some unnamed and unspecified intelligence, which might even be an alien from another planet. Indeed, this is the only way they differentiate themselves from fundamentalist creationists, and they do it only when they need to, in order to weasel their way around church/state separation laws. So, bending over backwards to accommodate the IDiots ("oh NOOOOO, of course we aren't talking about God, this is SCIENCE") and bending over backwards to make the best case I could for intelligent design, I constructed a science fiction scenario. Like Michael Ruse (as I surmise) I still hadn't rumbled Stein, and I was charitable enough to think he was an honestly stupid man, sincerely seeking enlightenment from a scientist. I patiently explained to him that life could conceivably have been seeded on Earth by an alien intelligence from another planet (Francis Crick and Leslie Orgel suggested something similar -- semi tongue-in-cheek). The conclusion I was heading towards was that, even in the highly unlikely event that some such 'Directed Panspermia' was responsible for designing life on this planet, the alien beings would THEMSELVES have to have evolved, if not by Darwinian selection, by some equivalent 'crane' (to quote Dan Dennett). My point here was that design can never be an ULTIMATE explanation for organized complexity. Even if life on Earth was seeded by intelligent designers on another planet, and even if the alien life form was itself seeded four billion years earlier, the regress must ultimately be terminated (and we have only some 13 billion years to play with because of the finite age of the universe). Organized complexity cannot just spontaneously happen. That, for goodness sake, is the creationists' whole point, when they bang on about eyes and bacterial flagella! Evolution by natural selection is the only known process whereby organized complexity can ultimately come into being. Organized complexity -- and that includes everything capable of designing anything intelligently -- comes LATE into the universe. It cannot exist at the beginning, as I have explained again and again in my writings.
I know I got my current job because I had some code in the Linux kernel. Being able to show your code to prospective employers is good advertising.
Go read "Evolution For Everyone" by David Sloan Wilson. It'll help you.
What do people do when they have similar problems on Windows?
They go ask their geek spouse/cousin/friend.
Same with Linux. And for the most common tasks, there's nothing really needed. My niece spent a couple nights over this week, and used our Ubuntu 8.10 laptop for her websurfing and chatting needs. She is decidedly not a geek, but had no problems. She could do what she needed to do, she didn't even really need to ask me for anything.
But we can do it right. Stick some money into nuclear propulsion (not Orion, try a closed cycle gas core nuclear rocket). If we're not limited to chemical power we can lift a lot more weight. Make solar-power satellites, a real space station, and so forth. Open up whole new industries...
More-or-less haphazardly mixing up nonhuman cells/genes with human ones (which is, at present, all we're technically equipped to do) is almost certain to fail.
In the real world, exponential growth always hits limits. Why should technological progress be any different?
We can hope, anyway, that we're past the filter. Finding life elsewhere in the solar system would be undeniably cool... but for the above reason, it would also be unsettling.
...it means that civilizations that spread out and last longer than 1K years are exceedingly rare. Which would mean that our odds of achieving any meaningful interstellar travel are quite low. (We might make a space probe or two, but like how we got to the moon but haven't done anything with it, apparently nobody puts out space colonies.) There are other posible theories, though.
If you want more than 10GB of space, you can do it two ways. First, you can set up the PS3 so that the "Game OS" gets 10GB and Linux gets the rest - or you can hook up a USB2 drive.
You don't get access to the GPU, but you do get access to the GPU's memory, and they've come up with a way to use that VRAM as a fast swap device, bumping the effective memory close to 512MB. Still not spectacular, but certainly quite workable.
And if you can't build stuff from source, oh well. It's not that hard. (To those who would say they shouldn't have to build from source... sure, on a PC. Going off the beaten path to install Linux on a console, yeah, you should expect to have to roll up your sleeves a little. If you don't want to do that... then you're not a member of the intended audience.)
Of course, I haven't had the problems syncing you have. I can't recall a time I lost data from it. Of course, I mostly use Linux (pilot-xfer, JPilot), so perhaps they're more reliable about that.
None of this applies to the new phone, of course, since it's not running Palm OS. Still, while PalmOS has many faults, I've never see the sync as one of them.
Well, Isaac Newton you're not. Not even a Robert Hooke.
If the energy is stored in the springs, it's not available to you. How does the energy come out of the spring? By contracting. Exactly analogous situation: playground swing. If you're going for horizontal distance, when should you jump off? If you're going for vertical distance, when should you jump off?
I can see why you're posting anonymously.
As to the rest, at least you took one bit of my advice and attacked the removal of PS2 compatibility... though it was like pulling teeth to get you that far. That's a definite downside, though the 360 hasn't always done that much better.
Ah, I knew it - you haven't actually played the game. One of the most frustrating points for me was those dang spring-mounted platforms that you have to bounce on to get launched higher. For some reason I have a hard time getting the rythm right, but my kids go flying around with abandon. Oh yes, I assure you, jumping does send things down.
I'll grant that apparently some of the songs take as long as a week or so to become available on the PS3 compared to the 360 version... I guess that's the 'content... after the main version' bit. That's rough, I know. But as to 'online stuff'? Um... nope. Not true. Basically, with the PS3 version you get a wireless guitar, but with the 360 version, you get achievements. That's the only online difference I'm aware of - got anything else?
(Of course, all this ignores that the original troll was about someone noting that the PS3 had games other than "generic, rehashed FPS games played with shitty controls", and the list was examples of other games. Me, I actually like flOw and High Velocity Bowling and Echochrome and Monsters and Eden... not an FPS in the bunch. Motorstorm isn't a perfect game, but it's still a lot of fun, and impressed my 360-owning friend.)
Dude, if you want to attack the PS3, note things like the 360 getting more exclusive content (though much of that is because Microsoft can afford to essentially bribe developers for that) or the higher up-front price (though once you add in wifi and a hard drive, let alone a Live subscription, the price difference vanishes). Attack Home for being useless (it certainly is, for now at the very least, possibly forever). Attack the questionable decision to remove PS2 backward compatibility. Don't just make stuff up.
Overstated points or invented points ("long load times and shitty online play") by an Anonymous Coward? How could it notbe? Normally I don't respond to trolls, but you managed to get upmodded and an educational opportunity is at hand.
LBP is a lot more than a tech demo. You don't get praise and scores like that from tech demos. I play it regularly, and so do my kids, and it's fun. And no, the physics is quite good. As to user-made levels - sure, there's a lot of crap, but since there's already more than 100,000 user-created levels, only a tiny percentage need to be good to make it worthwhile... and in my experience the percentage isn't all that tiny, plus the ranking system's gotten to the point where it's easy to find good levels. (My 8-year-old loved "Little Dead Space". :-> ) People who have no affection or affinity for side-scrollers won't like it. But then, people who don't like FPS won't like Halo. Oy. Of course, there's been a concerted effort by fanboys of other platforms to slam it, so at least you're not alone.
I'm not an RPG guy, so I can't comment on Valkyria Chronicles, but a lotta people seem to like it, though it's also not everyone's cup of tea.
Mirror's Edge? I found the demo fresh and interesting, but again, ultimately not my cup of tea. And yes, like Rock Band it's available for more than one platform... but if you have a PS3, why not?
Let's give you full credit and state that the PS3 version of Rock Band is a "port". Heaven forfend! What problems, exactly and specifically, does this lead to? You only mentioned PS2 and Wii issues, and while I'm sure they're fascinating and all, they're kind of irrelevant to the PS3.
I've got Singstar 'cause my wife likes to sing and she's good at it. Now the PS2 discs work with the PS3, too, and we can buy songs off the "Singstore". Sure, there's "Lips", which is apparently all right, but if you're worried about ports, then clones should terrify you...
The 360's initially cheaper than the PS3 (though that's in both senses of the term, unfortunately) and has a bigger library. No question. The Wii outsells both, and is more open to casual gamers than either. There are reasons why the PS3 might not be the best choice for everyone, but neither you nor the parent hit on any of 'em.
Yup. Maybe it still will, as the graphics start to get better than the 360 and developers have an easier time working with it, but the window for that is closing.
For my purposes it's a really good fit. It's more expensive to start, but it's all-inclusive (no extra $100 for wifi, etc.) and there's no ongoing costs like XBox Live. It plays media well, Blu-ray is nice (for F/X heavy movies), on a nice big screen (and with the keypad) it's actually a pretty good web browser, etc. I bumped mine from 40GB to 80GB essentially for free, as I had a laptop SATA drive laying around. And I haven't had any disc scratches or RROD-style issues.
And then it plays games, too. My kids and I have been having a lot of fun with LittleBigPlanet in particular, and there's already more levels out there than anyone could ever play.