"So now that this is over, when will these players be getting back the $60 they forked over for the game initially?"
About five minutes after Sega gives out rebates for people who bought the Dreamcast version of Phantasy Star Online (at least version 2, which was pay-for-play).
You have yet to take either statics or dynamics, have you?
Your answer is valid only if the animal is standing still, all four feet are on the ground, and the animal's center of mass is exactly centered between all four feet. In other words, the "animal" you're talking about is a table.
"Right. Because nobody would be interested in cheap electricity for heating... (You say the prices of fuel oil and natural gas have gone up how much?!)"
Lower the price per joule of heat for electric heaters and you may have a market, assuming you can get people to buy a heat pump. But generally speaking, there are a whole host of reasons why nobody north of Florida uses electric heat.
"Thiefs are the only class who can pick locks though about everyone could disarm a trap."
FFXI? What locks? What traps? The only locked things are chests and coffers, and I've yet to hear of anybody opening those things without a corresponding key.
"I'd have bought the GBA-SP, but the lack of standard batteries and lack of standard headphone port precludes me from getting one."
The Nintendo DS and the Game Boy Micro both play GBA games and have a standard headphone port (though you can still use the SP headphone dongle on the DS if you really want).
However, you'll need a new link cable for the Micro (much as you did when the Game Boy Pocket came out) and the DS doesn't support GBA linking at all.
"And yet, strangely, in France and Germany, ecologists want to revert to coal plants to prevent nuclear pollution."
First off, you're confusing nuke-happy France with the United States. They're continally building new nuclear power plants while I don't believe the United States has built a new one (outside of Newport News, at least) since the 1970's. We're the ones that want coal*.
Secondly, I was under the impression that the Germans had already devised the greenest option yet: buy electricity from France.
*(Actually, we don't seem to want either. Both coal and nuke plants are intended for putting out a steady amount of energy for long periods of time without variation, while electricity use spikes in the summer when we all turn on our air conditioners and plummets in the winter when we turn on our fossil fuel furnaces. Unlike coal or nuclear plants, natural gas plants can be turned on and off at a moments notice and seem to be the power source of choice in today's US market, at least until the coal and/or nuclear people find something to do with excess electricity during the winter, such as making hydrogen.)
"A pair of alkaline AA cells gives 3.0 volts. A pair of NiCd or NiMH AA cells gives 2.4 volts."
And rechargable alkalines also give 3.0 volts, but it doesn't look like Rayovac makes them any more because most digital devices are more interested in greater current throughput rather than a higher voltage. We're not talking about a flashlight.
Besides, most electronics have their own voltage regulator on board. A Sega Game Gear took 6 AAs, do you really think the circuits ran at 9 V? If the original Game Boy required 6 V, how could all other Game Boys from Pocket onward could run the cartridges with only 3 V? Odds are, only one battery (whether it's 1.5 V or 1.2 V) would be sufficient for operating voltages and the second battery is there only to put in more coulombs (i. e. a higher current for a longer amount of time).
When was the last time you saw such a warning on any DVD or CD player designed to sit on a shelf? Why are you insisting on a higher standard for Microsoft?
And whoever claimed that Microsoft was aiming at children with the Xbox line? I'm sick of people claiming that of Nintendo, but you're the first one I've heard try to say it of Microsoft.
"It's only a matter of time. Either Wales is going to have to turn to ads to generate some revenue, or look into getting a grant from a University or the Feds."
This made my head hurt until I realized you were talking about a person named "Wales," not the country.
"And they think this will make the dollar more stable?"
The stability of the value of gold depends on fusion and spaceflight continuing to be expensive. Physicists are already using supercolliders to create gold in the laboratory and the presence of gold in the asteroid belt is fairly well known, it's only a matter of time for the expense of the technology to come down, and then you'll be stuck with a bunch of shiney yellow paperweights.
(It may seem farfetched now, but so were manmade diamonds once.)
You also seem to be forgetting about how a precious metal standard puts the value of the currency into the hands of the individuals who are able to horde enough of the stuff (inflate the value of gold by keeping it, lower it by selling/spending it, whichever was to your advantage at the time). In order to protect the gold-based dollar from rampant inflation or deflation, the US government needed to hold on to incredibly large gold reserves (such as the one that was famously kept at Fort Knox) as well as implement laws about how much gold an individual could own (which weren't repealed until the Ford adminstration). If anything, you should be happier with paper money: it's easier to smuggle gold in from out of the country than to counterfeit greenbacks (protecting the value of your money from hostile intent) and there are no regulations about how many paper dollars you can stuff into your mattress.
Whether it does is moot. The PS2 has the larger installed base and numerically (though probably not percentage-wise) would cause the greatest number of scratched disks.
I already have it for the PS2 and I enjoy it. My only interest in getting an X360 to play it in would be to see what it looks like on an HDTV (I've been meaning to get one once prices become reasonable if only to play progressive-scan GCN games on), but the way they're trying to combine both PlayOnline and Xbox Live the prospects of me getting the system looks dim.
"Yeah, but the fact that they'll clear your 360 request queue and the fact that the machine has only been out 2 months makes this a big deal."
Is there any indication they don't have a similar policy in place for PS2 games that come back scratched? Is there any indication that the Xbox 360 is the first console they've ever had such a policy for?
What of it? Unless you have a very poorly manufactured disk, the moment of intertia of the disk is on the spindle no matter its orientation.
"The game was bought new and only played in the new PS2."
Only one PS2 does not a proper statistical sample make. If a vertical orientation was generally bad for the disks, Sony (who has to pay for warranty repairs) wouldn't still be telling you that you can set your PS2 on its side. Instead, the only changes they've made is "If you put in a hard drive, get a stand because it becomes top-heavy."
It doesn't matter what angle the unit is at so long as you're not moving between horizonal and veritcal while the disk is spinning. The potential for damage is when the disc is spinning fast enough for gyroscopic physics to try to torqe the disk at a right angle from the direction the console is moving, pushing the disk into things it really shouldn't come into contact with.
Otherwise, gravity pulling from one direction instead of another in and of itself wouldn't cause damage to the disk. If anything, having the console horizonal would be worse as gravity would be pulling the data surface (rather than the edge) down onto the disk tray.
You're telling me that there are not only enough Xbox 360s out there, but there are enough of those 360 owners that are also GameFly subscribers and that enough of those people who have both a 360 and a GameFly subscription also have a disk-eating machine that they instituted this new policy specifically for 360 games?
That's what, six people?
If anything, this policy is a continuation of a standing policy for all consoles, and they probably deal with far more disk-eating PS2s than disk-eating 360s, simply because of the installed base.
And before I'm accused of being a Microsoft apologist, I am a foaming-at-the-mouth Nintendo fanboy who would only get an Xbox 360 for Final Fantasy XI.
Intercepting radio communications isn't illegal (at least in the US). However, discharging a firearm within city limits is illegal in just about every city I can think of. If you're worried about Big Brother, the last thing you want to do is give him a perfecty valid reason to lock you up for a while.
"People who work on systems that can't afford a 1 second discontinuity (such as the GPS system) use a continuous counting of the SI second."
The leap second is an SI second, as are all the other seconds in UTC. The only difference between UTC and TAI is the method those seconds are counted in. It's SI minutes that UTC doesn't always go by.
And just because it is "more important" for you to use TAI doesn't mean there isn't somebody else for whom it is more important to use UTC. But if you insist on having a hissy fit over a change that can be accounted for automatically if you were willing to prepare for it (leap second information is broadcast in machine-readable code on longwave radio frequencies by NIST), then stop trying to count minutes, hours, days and years entirely and start talking about hectoseconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds instead. Pick a convenient epoch and start counting, and then you don't even have to worry about the changes that have even been done in TAI over the years.
"In fact, it's such a minor one, it doesn't even get a mention in the basic framework of the Constitution -OR- the Declaration of Independence."
It's not in the Constitution because the document was intented not to describe rights but to give form to the federal government. The Declaration of Independence was never intended to be a Bill of Rights, rather an indictment of King George and His Parliament (or have you not read the whole thing?).
However, you are conveniently ignoring that every state constitution since 1776 has had provisions to protect speech in their respective bills of rights. Among other reasons, the framers saw no reason to put into the federal constitution that which was already protected by the state constitutions (federalism and all that).
"Your core civil liberties - the ones your ancestors fought for in the Revolutionary Wars - were "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Nothing about speech there."
And which article of the federal consitution, exactly, protects those? Prior to the Bill of Rights, the only things the federal constitution explicitly guaranteed the people was a republican form of state government.
"That would seem to violate all three of the core civil liberties on which the Constitution is built."
The federal constitution was not built upon civil liberties, you're confusing it with the state constitutions. The federal constitution exists only to protect the individual states from external (which includes interstate) pressures and threats. It is not the Alpha and Omega of rights in the United States, nor was it ever intended to be.
"I see nothing about a person's telecommunications."
Wrong answer. If it's not covered by the Fourth, then it's covered by the Ninth:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The people are being forgiving by allowing federal law enforcement to tap communications with a warrant from a judge as described by the Fourth Amendment, otherwise the Ninth Amendment would prevent wiretapping with or without a warrant, at least based on your "I don't see telecommunications" reading.
"I have never expected that I was safe from eavesdropping when I used a phone or sent an unencrypted email."
Whether you expect a right or not, it is protected by the Ninth Amendment (at least). The federal government may infringe only on those rights explicitly mentioned by the constitution, and only in the prescribed manner.
"safe from intrusion of my person, my house, my papers, or my personal effects."
So you do not consider the contents of your telephone bill to be a part of "my papers?" Where exactly do you draw the line?
"I've heard that some people read the constitution and see things that aren't there."
You yourself fit into that description, because if it's not there then the federal government can't do it. That's the way the document has always been since 1787, but instead you're reading a non-existent "The people have only those rights listed in this constitution" into it.
You missed the last twelve words of the preamble, "do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." It is the duty of the constitution, the governnment it creates, and the federal officials who swear an oath to the document to protect the civil liberties of the people of the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
"So now that this is over, when will these players be getting back the $60 they forked over for the game initially?"
About five minutes after Sega gives out rebates for people who bought the Dreamcast version of Phantasy Star Online (at least version 2, which was pay-for-play).
You have yet to take either statics or dynamics, have you?
Your answer is valid only if the animal is standing still, all four feet are on the ground, and the animal's center of mass is exactly centered between all four feet. In other words, the "animal" you're talking about is a table.
In Soviet Russia, Einstein is an old person in Korea.
"Right. Because nobody would be interested in cheap electricity for heating...
(You say the prices of fuel oil and natural gas have gone up how much?!)"
Lower the price per joule of heat for electric heaters and you may have a market, assuming you can get people to buy a heat pump. But generally speaking, there are a whole host of reasons why nobody north of Florida uses electric heat.
"Thiefs are the only class who can pick locks though about everyone could disarm a trap."
FFXI? What locks? What traps? The only locked things are chests and coffers, and I've yet to hear of anybody opening those things without a corresponding key.
"I'd have bought the GBA-SP, but the lack of standard batteries and lack of standard headphone port precludes me from getting one."
The Nintendo DS and the Game Boy Micro both play GBA games and have a standard headphone port (though you can still use the SP headphone dongle on the DS if you really want).
However, you'll need a new link cable for the Micro (much as you did when the Game Boy Pocket came out) and the DS doesn't support GBA linking at all.
"And yet, strangely, in France and Germany, ecologists want to revert to coal plants to prevent nuclear pollution."
First off, you're confusing nuke-happy France with the United States. They're continally building new nuclear power plants while I don't believe the United States has built a new one (outside of Newport News, at least) since the 1970's. We're the ones that want coal*.
Secondly, I was under the impression that the Germans had already devised the greenest option yet: buy electricity from France.
*(Actually, we don't seem to want either. Both coal and nuke plants are intended for putting out a steady amount of energy for long periods of time without variation, while electricity use spikes in the summer when we all turn on our air conditioners and plummets in the winter when we turn on our fossil fuel furnaces. Unlike coal or nuclear plants, natural gas plants can be turned on and off at a moments notice and seem to be the power source of choice in today's US market, at least until the coal and/or nuclear people find something to do with excess electricity during the winter, such as making hydrogen.)
"A pair of alkaline AA cells gives 3.0 volts. A pair of NiCd or NiMH AA cells gives 2.4 volts."
And rechargable alkalines also give 3.0 volts, but it doesn't look like Rayovac makes them any more because most digital devices are more interested in greater current throughput rather than a higher voltage. We're not talking about a flashlight.
Besides, most electronics have their own voltage regulator on board. A Sega Game Gear took 6 AAs, do you really think the circuits ran at 9 V? If the original Game Boy required 6 V, how could all other Game Boys from Pocket onward could run the cartridges with only 3 V? Odds are, only one battery (whether it's 1.5 V or 1.2 V) would be sufficient for operating voltages and the second battery is there only to put in more coulombs (i. e. a higher current for a longer amount of time).
When was the last time you saw such a warning on any DVD or CD player designed to sit on a shelf? Why are you insisting on a higher standard for Microsoft?
And whoever claimed that Microsoft was aiming at children with the Xbox line? I'm sick of people claiming that of Nintendo, but you're the first one I've heard try to say it of Microsoft.
"It's only a matter of time. Either Wales is going to have to turn to ads to generate some revenue, or look into getting a grant from a University or the Feds."
This made my head hurt until I realized you were talking about a person named "Wales," not the country.
"And they think this will make the dollar more stable?"
The stability of the value of gold depends on fusion and spaceflight continuing to be expensive. Physicists are already using supercolliders to create gold in the laboratory and the presence of gold in the asteroid belt is fairly well known, it's only a matter of time for the expense of the technology to come down, and then you'll be stuck with a bunch of shiney yellow paperweights.
(It may seem farfetched now, but so were manmade diamonds once.)
You also seem to be forgetting about how a precious metal standard puts the value of the currency into the hands of the individuals who are able to horde enough of the stuff (inflate the value of gold by keeping it, lower it by selling/spending it, whichever was to your advantage at the time). In order to protect the gold-based dollar from rampant inflation or deflation, the US government needed to hold on to incredibly large gold reserves (such as the one that was famously kept at Fort Knox) as well as implement laws about how much gold an individual could own (which weren't repealed until the Ford adminstration). If anything, you should be happier with paper money: it's easier to smuggle gold in from out of the country than to counterfeit greenbacks (protecting the value of your money from hostile intent) and there are no regulations about how many paper dollars you can stuff into your mattress.
Whether it does is moot. The PS2 has the larger installed base and numerically (though probably not percentage-wise) would cause the greatest number of scratched disks.
"If Final Fantasy XI is as good as X was,"
I already have it for the PS2 and I enjoy it. My only interest in getting an X360 to play it in would be to see what it looks like on an HDTV (I've been meaning to get one once prices become reasonable if only to play progressive-scan GCN games on), but the way they're trying to combine both PlayOnline and Xbox Live the prospects of me getting the system looks dim.
"Yeah, but the fact that they'll clear your 360 request queue and the fact that the machine has only been out 2 months makes this a big deal."
Is there any indication they don't have a similar policy in place for PS2 games that come back scratched? Is there any indication that the Xbox 360 is the first console they've ever had such a policy for?
"What about spin up and spin down?"
What of it? Unless you have a very poorly manufactured disk, the moment of intertia of the disk is on the spindle no matter its orientation.
"The game was bought new and only played in the new PS2."
Only one PS2 does not a proper statistical sample make. If a vertical orientation was generally bad for the disks, Sony (who has to pay for warranty repairs) wouldn't still be telling you that you can set your PS2 on its side. Instead, the only changes they've made is "If you put in a hard drive, get a stand because it becomes top-heavy."
"What truly sets D&DO apart from the competition is the need to find and disarm various traps, snares, and pitfalls."
It's been done in Phantasy Star Online, if I remember correctly.
Insightful?
It doesn't matter what angle the unit is at so long as you're not moving between horizonal and veritcal while the disk is spinning. The potential for damage is when the disc is spinning fast enough for gyroscopic physics to try to torqe the disk at a right angle from the direction the console is moving, pushing the disk into things it really shouldn't come into contact with.
Otherwise, gravity pulling from one direction instead of another in and of itself wouldn't cause damage to the disk. If anything, having the console horizonal would be worse as gravity would be pulling the data surface (rather than the edge) down onto the disk tray.
You're telling me that there are not only enough Xbox 360s out there, but there are enough of those 360 owners that are also GameFly subscribers and that enough of those people who have both a 360 and a GameFly subscription also have a disk-eating machine that they instituted this new policy specifically for 360 games?
That's what, six people?
If anything, this policy is a continuation of a standing policy for all consoles, and they probably deal with far more disk-eating PS2s than disk-eating 360s, simply because of the installed base.
And before I'm accused of being a Microsoft apologist, I am a foaming-at-the-mouth Nintendo fanboy who would only get an Xbox 360 for Final Fantasy XI.
"like a shotgun."
Intercepting radio communications isn't illegal (at least in the US). However, discharging a firearm within city limits is illegal in just about every city I can think of. If you're worried about Big Brother, the last thing you want to do is give him a perfecty valid reason to lock you up for a while.
"People who work on systems that can't afford a 1 second discontinuity (such as the GPS system) use a continuous counting of the SI second."
The leap second is an SI second, as are all the other seconds in UTC. The only difference between UTC and TAI is the method those seconds are counted in. It's SI minutes that UTC doesn't always go by.
And just because it is "more important" for you to use TAI doesn't mean there isn't somebody else for whom it is more important to use UTC. But if you insist on having a hissy fit over a change that can be accounted for automatically if you were willing to prepare for it (leap second information is broadcast in machine-readable code on longwave radio frequencies by NIST), then stop trying to count minutes, hours, days and years entirely and start talking about hectoseconds, kiloseconds and megaseconds instead. Pick a convenient epoch and start counting, and then you don't even have to worry about the changes that have even been done in TAI over the years.
But how much of it was on the all-important "Cyber Monday?"
"In fact, it's such a minor one, it doesn't even get a mention in the basic framework of the Constitution -OR- the Declaration of Independence."
It's not in the Constitution because the document was intented not to describe rights but to give form to the federal government. The Declaration of Independence was never intended to be a Bill of Rights, rather an indictment of King George and His Parliament (or have you not read the whole thing?).
However, you are conveniently ignoring that every state constitution since 1776 has had provisions to protect speech in their respective bills of rights. Among other reasons, the framers saw no reason to put into the federal constitution that which was already protected by the state constitutions (federalism and all that).
"Your core civil liberties - the ones your ancestors fought for in the Revolutionary Wars - were "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". Nothing about speech there."
And which article of the federal consitution, exactly, protects those? Prior to the Bill of Rights, the only things the federal constitution explicitly guaranteed the people was a republican form of state government.
"That would seem to violate all three of the core civil liberties on which the Constitution is built."
The federal constitution was not built upon civil liberties, you're confusing it with the state constitutions. The federal constitution exists only to protect the individual states from external (which includes interstate) pressures and threats. It is not the Alpha and Omega of rights in the United States, nor was it ever intended to be.
Wrong answer. If it's not covered by the Fourth, then it's covered by the Ninth:The people are being forgiving by allowing federal law enforcement to tap communications with a warrant from a judge as described by the Fourth Amendment, otherwise the Ninth Amendment would prevent wiretapping with or without a warrant, at least based on your "I don't see telecommunications" reading.
"I have never expected that I was safe from eavesdropping when I used a phone or sent an unencrypted email."
Whether you expect a right or not, it is protected by the Ninth Amendment (at least). The federal government may infringe only on those rights explicitly mentioned by the constitution, and only in the prescribed manner.
"safe from intrusion of my person, my house, my papers, or my personal effects."
So you do not consider the contents of your telephone bill to be a part of "my papers?" Where exactly do you draw the line?
"I've heard that some people read the constitution and see things that aren't there."
You yourself fit into that description, because if it's not there then the federal government can't do it. That's the way the document has always been since 1787, but instead you're reading a non-existent "The people have only those rights listed in this constitution" into it.
"Not the states, not your nanny, YOU."
You missed the last twelve words of the preamble, "do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." It is the duty of the constitution, the governnment it creates, and the federal officials who swear an oath to the document to protect the civil liberties of the people of the United States.
Depends. Does the child arrive requiring assembly and packaged with an Allen wrench?