I think what you meant to say is that the breathalizer is accurate to plus or minus.03% in the reading. Meaning that if you have a BAC of 0.06, it could read anywhere from 0.09 to 0.03.
0.03% isn't a huge margin of error, but plus or minus 0.03% is huge when you are dealing with readings in the first and second decimal place.
I have a friend who is a lawyer that handles DUI cases. He's told me to not concent to the breathalyzer, because it's so wildly inaccurate even under the best of conditions. Worse, a bad reading is accepted as gospel in a trial situation. Even worse, an "under the limit" reading won't nessessarily get you off, because you could have still been impared despite not being legally intoxicated.
I have a big problem with the fact that no one knows what 0.08 really feels like. I have an idea of when I'm ok to drive, but am over or under the 0.08 limit? I have no idea. Considering the incredible legal ramifications for even first time DUI offenders, I have just gone the safe route and I don't drive if I've had anything to drink in the past several hours.
Again, I never said that a novice driver in a Viper would turn slower times than a novice in a Miata. You're still misconstruing my point.
What I did say is that a novice driver in a Miata could find, approach, exceed, and learn the limits of a Miata faster and easier than he could with a Viper. Let me just use some hypothetical numbers that I made up on the spot. Let's assume a course that an expert driver can drive a Miata around in 1:25. He can drive the Viper around at 1:05. Now, let's take the novice driver. In thirty minutes, I could probably have him approaching a few seconds off the pace of the expert driver, say 1:30. Meaning that he is getting very near the limits of the car, and is driving the car quite fast for what it is.
Now, we put that same driver in a Viper, and I don't believe he's going to be turning 1:10 lap times. Maybe he'll turn 1:25 times, which is still faster than the Miata, but still considerably slower than the expert. He's faster in the Viper than in the Miata, but when judged against what the car is capable of, he's actually quite slow.
The Miata is an easy car to drive fast (fast being relative to its limits). This is partially because the limits are lower, but also because the car communicates well what it's doing and what it's about to do, and because it doesn't punish you harshly for making stupid mistakes. The Viper is a hard car to drive fast (being relative again, to it's limits). Not to say that it doesn't communicate, but your margin for error is much less. The car is less forgiving, and things happen much quicker. The Viper tells you plenty, but if you aren't listening, or if you're a little slow figuring out what it's telling you and what to do next, it will rise up and bite you in the ass.
I think you are still misunderstanding my point. I wasn't trying to insinuate that the Miata is a better car than the Viper. It isn't. I wouldn't be that dumb. Maybe I could have chosen a better car for comparison's sake, but I don't remember an early Porsche 911 (severe lift-off oversteer) being available in Gran Turismo (or Sega GT for that matter).
I know how wide the Viper's tread is. I'm aware of its performance capabilities. When I say more forgiving, how much warning does the Viper give you before you land yourself in a heap of trouble? If you do manage to get the back end heading sideways, how easy is it to get things back right again? What I am saying is, how easy is it to push the car right up against the edge of the envelope, and how good of a driver do you need to be to even get close? When you blow past the envelope, does the car turn around and bite you? Or does it cooperate? How forgiving is it of mistakes, really? Like, let's say I really nail the throttle coming out of turn 17 before I've got the car pointed straight? Does it tell me I'm about to do something really stupid, or does it let me do something really stupid and throw me to the wolves?
Please don't tell me that you are saying that a Viper is as easy for a novice driver to drive fast as a Miata. I didn't say that the Miata is faster, but because it is more forgiving and the limits lower, a novice driver can turn times that are reasonably fast for that car. Somehow, I don't believe that's the case with the Viper.
I'm not disputing the Viper's performance, or it's communication of the track. But there's a lot more to a car than it's performance.
Don't know if you'll read this, as the article is old, but anyway...
I wasn't trying to imply that the Viper doesn't handle well. It's a great car for the track. What I am saying is that it does take a good level of skill to know how to drive it correctly. The novice driver / Viper crash rate reminds me of the early Porsche 911s. If I had a Viper, I know I wouldn't let others drive it, simply because it's too much car for an unskilled driver.
On the other hand, I know many cars that won't try to trick you or demand a high skill level from the driver. For instance, the Mazda Miata. It's very easy for a novice driver to hop in one and turn fast lap times. Why? Because the limits aren't so high, the car communicates a little better, and is much more forgiving to mistakes.
Is it possible that one of the problems with the arcade industry is mismanagement of the arcades themselves?
I think it's both.
In the mid 90's, I often drove to Houston (an hour away) just to party at Dave and Buster's. The food was good enough, the drinks good enough and cheap enough, and the arcade was killer. They had games that you just didn't see anywhere else, and they seemingly bought one of every type of machine there was. They also had the special BattleTech MechWarrior setup, the VR games, and many specialized games that took up small rooms just to play.
Today, I go to the one in Austin (where I live), and I can't figure out why I'm spending money there. Granted, the happy hour is good, and the drinks are still good, but everything else is poorly executed. There's a large section devoted to food, when the food really isn't that great. The pool tables are nice, but they are twice as expensive as comparable tables in town. They certainly have a lot of games, but none that I'd call noteworthy. The 'premier' eight car racing game complete with cameras to watch the drivers is still Daytona USA. The game dates back to 1994 or 1995, and it shows. Many of the video displays are sub-par, and the entire machine shows signs of extreme wear. Does it cost any less to play? Hell no.
Is there a DDR machine (which is the most popular arcade machine in our area)? Hell no. Is there any game in the joint that I can't find somewhere else in town? Hell no. Anything truly groundbreaking? Hell no. Do I see new games in the club? Hell no.
It's like a pale imitation of D&B past. If they are going to make me pay extra to play their games, then I want to see something unique for my money. As it is, it's no different from the Sega Gameworks that closed a few months ago -- which hadn't gotten a new game since early 2000 and offered $10 "all you can play" Wendsday nights.
It certainly does. Why do you think the Skyline GT-R is so popular in the United States -- despite the fact that you can't even buy it here? Because it's one of the fastest and most capable cars you can buy in Gran Turismo, along with many other car racing games.
I'm sure that Subaru didn't have to overly market its WRX or Mitsubishi its Lancer Evo when they finally came over here, because the brand recognition was already there. Kids (and adults) had been begging for these cars for years.
Most people don't get to test drive hundreds of different cars before they throw down $30,000 or $50,000 on an automobile. They do in a video game. Maybe it doesn't give you the full feel of the car, but you can definately tell that a Dodge Viper, while being hellaciously fast, is difficult to control, and that a Mazda Miata, while not being fast, handles exceptionally well and is easy to control. You can tell that a mid-engined car, like the Acura NSX, rotates easily, and spins easily if you exceed the limits. You can tell that a large, relatively top heavy car with an antiquated suspension, like the Mustang, can be brutally fast in a straight line, but very reluctant to turn in and gets upset by bumps in turns.
All of these things will weigh on your mind the next time you buy a car, especially after you clock a hundred hours (or more) of playtime. It's impossible for it not to do so. You may have heard of Subaru and you may have heard of Nissan, and you may not be swayed by marketing, but won't you remember that you turned higher track times in the WRX than you did in the Maxima? Is it possible that you drive a car in the game that you would never have considered in real life and say, "wow, this car is actually pretty amazing" and thus, be influenced into looking at it the next time you buy a car? There's also the 'halo' effect, where you might not be in the market for an RX-8, but you remember how well it handled in the game, and thus check out what else Mazda has to offer.
And you've been screaming about it being right around the corner for the past thirty years. Probably more than that, but that's all I can remember. I remember being absolutely terrified as a kid that the Earth was cooling, and we weren't doing a damn thing about it. Now, I hear we're warming, but I really don't see the conclusive evidence. I especially don't see conclusive evidence that humans are causing it, or even that we could stop it from happening, regardless of cause.
Right now, I feel like we're a five year old kid looking at the thermostat on the wall, and thinking if we could just fiddle with it a little bit, then we wouldn't be hot anymore. There's a reason we don't let five year old kids fool with the thermostat -- they don't know how it works. In their ignorance, they are more likely to cause more problems than they are likely to solve. Right now, we really don't understand the global climate, and in our quest to do something, anything, it's very possible to screw things up worse than they were to begin with. Imagine if we'd made a deliberate effort to heat up the Earth in 1970.
Alarmists want to see action, but they don't stop to think about the problems that action can cause.
Same here. I think Lost Vikings has suffered from terminal under-marketing. It's the greatest "puzzle" game that no one has ever played.
I know a fairly hard core group of gamers, and not one had heard of this game before I mentioned it. I hadn't heard of the port to GBA until now.
Why won't they market this game? It's a great game, fun to play, and just challenging enough to be fun without being frustrating. I can't understand why it isn't more popular. The only thing I can come up with is that no one knows about it.
Disney's cut of that was between 10 and 15 percent...[figures follow]
Disney and Pixar share (as in 50/50) profits after Disney takes a 12.5% cut for distributing the movie.
That's a LOT of coin. Disney has been raping Pixar for years, and Eisner's real burning over the Toy Story 2 fiasco (Pixar did the feature movie thinking it would count as a feature, Eisner let them think that while holding them to the original terms of the contract -- sequals don't count toward fulilling the contract) has left a lot of animosity at Pixar.
So, I'm sure that Pixar put Eisner in a real bad situation. Disney simply can't afford to let Pixar (and it's BILLIONS in super-reliable profit) go, and yet Pixar has made a big enough name for themselves and is pissed off enough at Disney that they will make an offer that Disney simply can't afford. At the same time, they can't bury the movies, as they add too much risk-free profit to the bottom line.
Looking back, we see the K-car for exactly what it is, a very mediocre car that has exceptionally bland styling.
It's easy to forget that the K-car single handedly saved Chrysler Corporation. I'm not sure if there's a single car built on that platform that will ever be considered a classic, but they were popular enough in their time, and they sold a metric fuckton of them. They also weren't noticably better or worse than other comparable American products at the time.
If you want to see abomination, look at the Cadillac Cimmaron. It's shameful to see a marque that once was the standard for excellence reduced to selling a thinly rebadged Chevrolet Cavalier.
Though I have fond memories of LEGO Town LEGO bricks, I really think that around 1984 was the beginning of the end. Some specialized bricks aren't bad, wheels are definately nice for something more than just a static structure. Maxi and Mini-figs are nice when you're a kid as well, as it give you a population to build for (or in my case, mutilate with strange weapons of destruction).
But somewhere shortly after the minifigs, it went very, very wrong. Too many special pieces. Too many things that could realistically only be built one way. Too many things that could only be a door or a ship or a motorcycle or a dump truck.
It says he spends about $7,000 a year on LEGO bricks. From the articles, it sounds as if he gets most of them on eBay. $7,000 of used eBay LEGO bricks is a LOT of bricks.
Re:Small Scale Death Star II? As opposed to what?
on
Han Solo in Lego Carbonite
·
· Score: 3, Informative
Capsela. They still [url=http://www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html]sell this stuff[/url].
I can't remember the first I personally downloaded, but I do remember the first I heard.
I was working at an ISP, in late 1996. A friend ushered me into a backroom where he had set up a computer with winamp, and showed me what he had just downloaded -- Alice in Chains' Man in the Box.
I really didn't comprehend what I was seeing. It didn't make much sense to me. I owned the CD, and I could easily listen to it on a computer, and four megabytes was a huge amount of space back then. The drive I had in my computer could have held maybe a hundred MP3s before being filled. I couldn't put it on a floppy, and CD burners weren't common yet. The only way to transfer these things was with a fast connection, like the one the office had and I didn't. Files were hard to find. To say I was underwhelmed was putting it mildly.
All that changed within a year. I ran several web based MP3 sites, and I even got a letter from the RIAA for one of my sites because it was hosting nearly two gigs of Tori Amos mp3s, came up first in altavista for "MP3 AND Tori Amos", and was doing about 10 GB in traffic a day. The letter is almost comical today, because they really didn't know the legality then and didn't know how big MP3s would become. I was lucky. Had I done it just a year later, I probably would have been sued.
If anyone ever downloaded mp3s from oubliette.org or oubliette.ml.org, just wanted to say thanks for the memories!
Because Steve Jobs and Pixar hate Disney right now. Disney screwed Pixar by insinuating one thing and then holding their feet to the fire on their contract. Basically, the Pixar deal reads that they will deliver so many feature movies (meaning, shown at the theatre) to Disney to satisfy the contract, and sequels (which are supposed to be direct to video and lower quality) don't count toward that total.
When they were starting to make Toy Story 2, Pixar went to Disney and said, basically, "We think this has the potential to be a real blockbuster of a feature release, we'd like to do it as a feature movie." Roy Eisner said "fine" and this is where the problems started. Pixar took the extra time and effort to make Toy Story 2 a feature film, assuming from their talks with Eisner that it would count towards the total movies needed to complete the contract. After all, it was a feature film, it was going to be shown in theatres, and would likely gross as much, if not more than a non-sequel, and would be less risk. Basically, a win for everybody. When the film was released, Jobs talked with Eisner about upcoming movies, and that's when he learned that Eisner was going to classify Toy Story 2 as a sequel, and thus, it didn't count. Which means that Eisner suckered Pixar into making an extra feature film for free.
Which is all well and good, but generated a sizable animosity at Pixar. Now that Pixar is solid gold, Eisner is between a rock and a hard place. Disney can't afford to let Pixar go, but at the same time, to get them to stay, they'll have to bend over and take it. This is just one of many poor decisions made by Eisner during his tenure, and is very indicative of his "chase the good money now" attitude.
This is a good point. All LEGO needs to do is go on eBay and see which sets are popular. The 8880 Super Car still routinely sells for as much as it when it was new -- even for models missing boxes and that have already been assembled.
There are plenty of other kits that are popular, classic, and would sell. For the life of me, I can't figure out why LEGO wouldn't sell classic sets -- all the hard work is already done. In today's computerized world, is it really that hard to reprint everything and figure out which pieces need to go in the box?
Hold together better? I don't know, slap a 1/3 height 1x2 plate in the middle of a large brick (3x4 or bigger) and then tell me if there's anything on the planet that sticks more tenaciously. There's a reason LEGO sets come with a special brick seperator.
But thanks for reminding me of Tente. I've been thinking about those bricks for years, and just couldn't remember the name. I remember the big "selling point" was that they were more flexible than LEGO bricks because you could mount pieces in more ways, including upside down. Personally, I didn't care for them much. They weren't as pleasing to the touch as LEGO, they seemed cheap, brittle, and had lots of sharp edges. I also didn't find completed models as interesting, and they didn't have the 'heft' of a comparable LEGO model.
The Star Wars Destroyer Droid set (8002) was an amazing piece of work. Not a single 'classic' LEGO brick in the set, but not one unique piece either. It was all fairly standard non-brick Technic pieces, with a few special standard and Technic bricks thrown in -- but nothing you can't find in another set.
It's one of the most fiendishly difficult kits I've put together, but watching how it all fits together and works is nothing short of incredible.
There were some specialized ship pieces made in the 70's. Think of a front piece, a rear piece, and some middle "spacers". They made all ships look like thin supertankers and didn't float exceptionally well (it's nearly impossible to seal LEGO bricks).
However, they did float, and provided you didn't want them to float for hours on end, or take a trip down the local creek, they floated passably well, and there were still plenty of things you could on top of the basic ship blocks.
Just because LEGO said I shouldn't didn't mean that I didn't. I had many seige machines, most vehicles had nice machine guns and looked like something out of Mad Max.
In fact, after getting a new kit a few years ago, the first thing I did was build a tank. With rotating turret and elevating barrel.
I had the misfortune to be named Jack, and about the time that the commercials came out, I was in sixth grade. Which placed me at that awkward age where I still really enjoyed playing with my LEGO bricks, people remembered that I'd had quite the collection a few years back, and it was completely uncool to be interested in any kid's toy. LEGO bricks included.
For years, I was taunted with "...he's a LEGO maniac". Damn near made me throw out my entire collection. But no worries, I found out years later that my evil stepfather accomplished that task for me shortly after my mother put them in the attic. For 'safekeeping'.
Or Mission to Mars? Maybe they flew Beagle too close that face looking thing? I mean, when all know what happens when you get too close to it and don't send back the right signals.
Slashdot Mirror
0.03% isn't a huge margin of error, but plus or minus 0.03% is huge when you are dealing with readings in the first and second decimal place.
I have a friend who is a lawyer that handles DUI cases. He's told me to not concent to the breathalyzer, because it's so wildly inaccurate even under the best of conditions. Worse, a bad reading is accepted as gospel in a trial situation. Even worse, an "under the limit" reading won't nessessarily get you off, because you could have still been impared despite not being legally intoxicated.
I have a big problem with the fact that no one knows what 0.08 really feels like. I have an idea of when I'm ok to drive, but am over or under the 0.08 limit? I have no idea. Considering the incredible legal ramifications for even first time DUI offenders, I have just gone the safe route and I don't drive if I've had anything to drink in the past several hours.
Again, I never said that a novice driver in a Viper would turn slower times than a novice in a Miata. You're still misconstruing my point.
What I did say is that a novice driver in a Miata could find, approach, exceed, and learn the limits of a Miata faster and easier than he could with a Viper. Let me just use some hypothetical numbers that I made up on the spot. Let's assume a course that an expert driver can drive a Miata around in 1:25. He can drive the Viper around at 1:05. Now, let's take the novice driver. In thirty minutes, I could probably have him approaching a few seconds off the pace of the expert driver, say 1:30. Meaning that he is getting very near the limits of the car, and is driving the car quite fast for what it is.
Now, we put that same driver in a Viper, and I don't believe he's going to be turning 1:10 lap times. Maybe he'll turn 1:25 times, which is still faster than the Miata, but still considerably slower than the expert. He's faster in the Viper than in the Miata, but when judged against what the car is capable of, he's actually quite slow.
The Miata is an easy car to drive fast (fast being relative to its limits). This is partially because the limits are lower, but also because the car communicates well what it's doing and what it's about to do, and because it doesn't punish you harshly for making stupid mistakes. The Viper is a hard car to drive fast (being relative again, to it's limits). Not to say that it doesn't communicate, but your margin for error is much less. The car is less forgiving, and things happen much quicker. The Viper tells you plenty, but if you aren't listening, or if you're a little slow figuring out what it's telling you and what to do next, it will rise up and bite you in the ass.
I know how wide the Viper's tread is. I'm aware of its performance capabilities. When I say more forgiving, how much warning does the Viper give you before you land yourself in a heap of trouble? If you do manage to get the back end heading sideways, how easy is it to get things back right again? What I am saying is, how easy is it to push the car right up against the edge of the envelope, and how good of a driver do you need to be to even get close? When you blow past the envelope, does the car turn around and bite you? Or does it cooperate? How forgiving is it of mistakes, really? Like, let's say I really nail the throttle coming out of turn 17 before I've got the car pointed straight? Does it tell me I'm about to do something really stupid, or does it let me do something really stupid and throw me to the wolves?
Please don't tell me that you are saying that a Viper is as easy for a novice driver to drive fast as a Miata. I didn't say that the Miata is faster, but because it is more forgiving and the limits lower, a novice driver can turn times that are reasonably fast for that car. Somehow, I don't believe that's the case with the Viper.
I'm not disputing the Viper's performance, or it's communication of the track. But there's a lot more to a car than it's performance.
I wasn't trying to imply that the Viper doesn't handle well. It's a great car for the track. What I am saying is that it does take a good level of skill to know how to drive it correctly. The novice driver / Viper crash rate reminds me of the early Porsche 911s. If I had a Viper, I know I wouldn't let others drive it, simply because it's too much car for an unskilled driver.
On the other hand, I know many cars that won't try to trick you or demand a high skill level from the driver. For instance, the Mazda Miata. It's very easy for a novice driver to hop in one and turn fast lap times. Why? Because the limits aren't so high, the car communicates a little better, and is much more forgiving to mistakes.
I think it's both.
In the mid 90's, I often drove to Houston (an hour away) just to party at Dave and Buster's. The food was good enough, the drinks good enough and cheap enough, and the arcade was killer. They had games that you just didn't see anywhere else, and they seemingly bought one of every type of machine there was. They also had the special BattleTech MechWarrior setup, the VR games, and many specialized games that took up small rooms just to play.
Today, I go to the one in Austin (where I live), and I can't figure out why I'm spending money there. Granted, the happy hour is good, and the drinks are still good, but everything else is poorly executed. There's a large section devoted to food, when the food really isn't that great. The pool tables are nice, but they are twice as expensive as comparable tables in town. They certainly have a lot of games, but none that I'd call noteworthy. The 'premier' eight car racing game complete with cameras to watch the drivers is still Daytona USA. The game dates back to 1994 or 1995, and it shows. Many of the video displays are sub-par, and the entire machine shows signs of extreme wear. Does it cost any less to play? Hell no.
Is there a DDR machine (which is the most popular arcade machine in our area)? Hell no. Is there any game in the joint that I can't find somewhere else in town? Hell no. Anything truly groundbreaking? Hell no. Do I see new games in the club? Hell no.
It's like a pale imitation of D&B past. If they are going to make me pay extra to play their games, then I want to see something unique for my money. As it is, it's no different from the Sega Gameworks that closed a few months ago -- which hadn't gotten a new game since early 2000 and offered $10 "all you can play" Wendsday nights.
I'm sure that Subaru didn't have to overly market its WRX or Mitsubishi its Lancer Evo when they finally came over here, because the brand recognition was already there. Kids (and adults) had been begging for these cars for years.
Most people don't get to test drive hundreds of different cars before they throw down $30,000 or $50,000 on an automobile. They do in a video game. Maybe it doesn't give you the full feel of the car, but you can definately tell that a Dodge Viper, while being hellaciously fast, is difficult to control, and that a Mazda Miata, while not being fast, handles exceptionally well and is easy to control. You can tell that a mid-engined car, like the Acura NSX, rotates easily, and spins easily if you exceed the limits. You can tell that a large, relatively top heavy car with an antiquated suspension, like the Mustang, can be brutally fast in a straight line, but very reluctant to turn in and gets upset by bumps in turns.
All of these things will weigh on your mind the next time you buy a car, especially after you clock a hundred hours (or more) of playtime. It's impossible for it not to do so. You may have heard of Subaru and you may have heard of Nissan, and you may not be swayed by marketing, but won't you remember that you turned higher track times in the WRX than you did in the Maxima? Is it possible that you drive a car in the game that you would never have considered in real life and say, "wow, this car is actually pretty amazing" and thus, be influenced into looking at it the next time you buy a car? There's also the 'halo' effect, where you might not be in the market for an RX-8, but you remember how well it handled in the game, and thus check out what else Mazda has to offer.
Right now, I feel like we're a five year old kid looking at the thermostat on the wall, and thinking if we could just fiddle with it a little bit, then we wouldn't be hot anymore. There's a reason we don't let five year old kids fool with the thermostat -- they don't know how it works. In their ignorance, they are more likely to cause more problems than they are likely to solve. Right now, we really don't understand the global climate, and in our quest to do something, anything, it's very possible to screw things up worse than they were to begin with. Imagine if we'd made a deliberate effort to heat up the Earth in 1970.
Alarmists want to see action, but they don't stop to think about the problems that action can cause.
I know a fairly hard core group of gamers, and not one had heard of this game before I mentioned it. I hadn't heard of the port to GBA until now.
Why won't they market this game? It's a great game, fun to play, and just challenging enough to be fun without being frustrating. I can't understand why it isn't more popular. The only thing I can come up with is that no one knows about it.
Is there anything it can't do?
Disney and Pixar share (as in 50/50) profits after Disney takes a 12.5% cut for distributing the movie.
That's a LOT of coin. Disney has been raping Pixar for years, and Eisner's real burning over the Toy Story 2 fiasco (Pixar did the feature movie thinking it would count as a feature, Eisner let them think that while holding them to the original terms of the contract -- sequals don't count toward fulilling the contract) has left a lot of animosity at Pixar.
So, I'm sure that Pixar put Eisner in a real bad situation. Disney simply can't afford to let Pixar (and it's BILLIONS in super-reliable profit) go, and yet Pixar has made a big enough name for themselves and is pissed off enough at Disney that they will make an offer that Disney simply can't afford. At the same time, they can't bury the movies, as they add too much risk-free profit to the bottom line.
In essence, in this deal, Disney is screwed.
Macse.cx ?
Looking back, we see the K-car for exactly what it is, a very mediocre car that has exceptionally bland styling.
It's easy to forget that the K-car single handedly saved Chrysler Corporation. I'm not sure if there's a single car built on that platform that will ever be considered a classic, but they were popular enough in their time, and they sold a metric fuckton of them. They also weren't noticably better or worse than other comparable American products at the time.
If you want to see abomination, look at the Cadillac Cimmaron. It's shameful to see a marque that once was the standard for excellence reduced to selling a thinly rebadged Chevrolet Cavalier.
But somewhere shortly after the minifigs, it went very, very wrong. Too many special pieces. Too many things that could realistically only be built one way. Too many things that could only be a door or a ship or a motorcycle or a dump truck.
It says he spends about $7,000 a year on LEGO bricks. From the articles, it sounds as if he gets most of them on eBay. $7,000 of used eBay LEGO bricks is a LOT of bricks.
Capsela. They still [url=http://www.discoverthis.com/capsela.html]sell this stuff[/url].
I was working at an ISP, in late 1996. A friend ushered me into a backroom where he had set up a computer with winamp, and showed me what he had just downloaded -- Alice in Chains' Man in the Box.
I really didn't comprehend what I was seeing. It didn't make much sense to me. I owned the CD, and I could easily listen to it on a computer, and four megabytes was a huge amount of space back then. The drive I had in my computer could have held maybe a hundred MP3s before being filled. I couldn't put it on a floppy, and CD burners weren't common yet. The only way to transfer these things was with a fast connection, like the one the office had and I didn't. Files were hard to find. To say I was underwhelmed was putting it mildly.
All that changed within a year. I ran several web based MP3 sites, and I even got a letter from the RIAA for one of my sites because it was hosting nearly two gigs of Tori Amos mp3s, came up first in altavista for "MP3 AND Tori Amos", and was doing about 10 GB in traffic a day. The letter is almost comical today, because they really didn't know the legality then and didn't know how big MP3s would become. I was lucky. Had I done it just a year later, I probably would have been sued.
If anyone ever downloaded mp3s from oubliette.org or oubliette.ml.org, just wanted to say thanks for the memories!
Provided of course, that the monkey doesn't die and the typewriter doesn't break....
When they were starting to make Toy Story 2, Pixar went to Disney and said, basically, "We think this has the potential to be a real blockbuster of a feature release, we'd like to do it as a feature movie." Roy Eisner said "fine" and this is where the problems started. Pixar took the extra time and effort to make Toy Story 2 a feature film, assuming from their talks with Eisner that it would count towards the total movies needed to complete the contract. After all, it was a feature film, it was going to be shown in theatres, and would likely gross as much, if not more than a non-sequel, and would be less risk. Basically, a win for everybody. When the film was released, Jobs talked with Eisner about upcoming movies, and that's when he learned that Eisner was going to classify Toy Story 2 as a sequel, and thus, it didn't count. Which means that Eisner suckered Pixar into making an extra feature film for free.
Which is all well and good, but generated a sizable animosity at Pixar. Now that Pixar is solid gold, Eisner is between a rock and a hard place. Disney can't afford to let Pixar go, but at the same time, to get them to stay, they'll have to bend over and take it. This is just one of many poor decisions made by Eisner during his tenure, and is very indicative of his "chase the good money now" attitude.
There are plenty of other kits that are popular, classic, and would sell. For the life of me, I can't figure out why LEGO wouldn't sell classic sets -- all the hard work is already done. In today's computerized world, is it really that hard to reprint everything and figure out which pieces need to go in the box?
But thanks for reminding me of Tente. I've been thinking about those bricks for years, and just couldn't remember the name. I remember the big "selling point" was that they were more flexible than LEGO bricks because you could mount pieces in more ways, including upside down. Personally, I didn't care for them much. They weren't as pleasing to the touch as LEGO, they seemed cheap, brittle, and had lots of sharp edges. I also didn't find completed models as interesting, and they didn't have the 'heft' of a comparable LEGO model.
But, thanks for the memories.
It's one of the most fiendishly difficult kits I've put together, but watching how it all fits together and works is nothing short of incredible.
However, they did float, and provided you didn't want them to float for hours on end, or take a trip down the local creek, they floated passably well, and there were still plenty of things you could on top of the basic ship blocks.
I know I miss mine.
Just because LEGO said I shouldn't didn't mean that I didn't. I had many seige machines, most vehicles had nice machine guns and looked like something out of Mad Max.
In fact, after getting a new kit a few years ago, the first thing I did was build a tank. With rotating turret and elevating barrel.
For years, I was taunted with "...he's a LEGO maniac". Damn near made me throw out my entire collection. But no worries, I found out years later that my evil stepfather accomplished that task for me shortly after my mother put them in the attic. For 'safekeeping'.
Or Mission to Mars? Maybe they flew Beagle too close that face looking thing? I mean, when all know what happens when you get too close to it and don't send back the right signals.