"I won't play or watch anything modern that Toriyama's involved with simply because I just can't stand to look at it."
See, I don't mind the drawing; I'm not a rabid fanboy of it or anything, but I'm not against it. What does bug me about Toriyama, though, are his female characters: almost without exception, they're all useless, whining dead weight. Be it something from DragonBall or characters from DQ games past, I want to strangle them.
The women in Chrono Trigger were OK, but I think that's less Toriyama expanding his abilities and more the influence of Squaresoft on the game.
(Of course, Squaresoft gave us Yuffie and Rikku...)
"The U.S. first saw the series on the Nintendo Entertainment System as Dragon Warrior, and some of the most hardcore elements were dumbed down for our squishy American palates."
You seem to be confusing this with the Final Fantasy series. The only changes made to the first Dragon Warrior was an improvement in graphics to make it look as pretty as Dragon Quest II ("ZOMG, I can face in four directions! Look, a shoreline!"). Later games had you dragging along ghosts instead of coffins when somebody died, but Enix didn't pull any of that EasyType crap on us like Squaresoft.
Which is why it didn't sell. Dragon Quest never apologized for being Dragon Quest.
"If there's no sparkplug to ignite anything, how does it start moving? Does the starter just turn the engine enough to compress the fuel till it exploads?"
Electric starter, same as for Otto Engines. They often have glowplugs to help warm the chambers a little before cranking it (especially on a cold day), but for the most part the electric starter just turns the enigne until the engine starts turning itself.
It's actually less complicated than starting an Otto Engine. Spark plugs aren't on all the time, they only fire at the proper time (hence distributors). The electric starter doesn't just fire all the sparkplugs at once and hope it starts moving (that would be Bad), it simply uses the battery to turn the engine while still using the battery to supply power to the sparkplugs at the proper point in the cycle. With Diesels, the fuel ignites all by itself immediately after being injected into the compressed cylinder, so that's one less thing to time and one less load on the batteries.
Or you could use a hand crank or a pull cord or pop the clutch, etc, same as for Otto Engines. Turn the engine until it starts to want to turn by itself.
Actually, that's a good point. As much as you may want to leave negative feedback, you know that you'll almost always get the same in return from a vindictive, disreputable seller.
"And of course you could make a highly efficient diesel external combustion engine, you'd just need to pressurise the combustion chamber."
So not only would you have to pay more for refined diesel fuel, but also for the added materials and required maintenance of a pressurized firebox? Heck, you'd have to keep the water going through the boiler at an even higher pressure or Bad Things will happen when a leak occurs.
It might be efficient in a mass-of-fuel/energy-put-out sense, but certainly not in the $$$ sense.
"A good engineer weighs up having to take on more water vs having to condense it and chooses."
A good engineer knows that you do not want to take on your expansion medium from random sources. Modern steam turbines require a purity of steam unheard of in any other manufactured substance, and it's enough work to clean the liquid water and superheated steam when you recycle it as it is.
"Umm, I'm not sure you understand. I actually own a Nintendo made Japanese prototype Gameboy that came with a backlight in it. They are rare, this isn;t some mod I did to a Gameboy."
You don't understand: it wasn't a prototype. The Game Boy Light was sold in Japan. They're moderately rare, but only really rare outside of Japan.
"Also I own a collection of almost every game from Atari 2600 through PS1 COMPLETE! Meaning NES, SNES, Gameboy, GBA, and Genesis."
We're not talking about people who collect published games, we're talking about people collecting unpublished games, the ones that never made it out of R&D. We're talking about people who try to get their hands on the Final Fantasy N64 tech demo there was a submission on yesterday.
"On at least 10 occasions I had to go to the pawn shop with police and get my stuff back during the course of my freshman year."
You should have called the police. Pawn shops aren't supposed to be involved in fencing stolen goods, and wouldn't have dealt with your roommate if you involved law enforcement.
"However, to use the Antarctica analogy, people can own things within the space. There are various research stations owned by governments on Antarctica. They don't own the land, but they do own the station."
As far as they're concerned, they do own the land. It's just that the United States doesn't recognize any claims. This doesn't prevent countries like Argentina and Norway from making expansive claims to the continent.
The power curve put out by an internal combustion engine isn't linear; it prefers to stay at a particular range of RPMs for maximum efficiency. This is why cars have transmisisons to change gears, trying to keep the engine at that preferred RPM range no matter what RPM the wheels are turning at.
Electical motors, on the other hand, are linear: turn up the juice, and the thing turns faster.
The philosophy of using a diesel with electric drive is to keep the diesel engine turning at exactly the right RPMs to maximize efficiency, supplying power to the electrical drive as needed. This way, the locomotive gets the same efficiency moving slowly as it does at speed (as opposed to cars, which would really rather be in 5th gear going 80 km/h).
" I think you are confusing fuel and engine form. Diesel is just a fuel, it doesn't dictate the engine type."
Oh yes it does! Just try putting diesel fuel into your Otto Cycle automobile!
The Diesel Cycle is inherently different from the Otto Cycle in that there are no sparkplugs. As opposed to an external ignition source, diesel engines use nothing but the compression in the cylinder to ignite the air-fuel mixture. Overgenerallizing a little, diesel engines operate entirely on what you would call "knock."
I could go on about temperature vs. entropy comparisons between the Diesel and Otto cycles, but your eyes would glaze over.
For the same compression ratio, the Otto Cycle is more efficient than the Diesel Cycle. However, when engineering comes into play, you can have much, much greater compression ratios with a Diesel engine than an Otto engine. The source of ignition in a Diesel Engine is the pressure in the cylinder, and the pressure is uniform throughout the chamber, ensuring uniform combustion and uniform expansion of the cylinder. You can get away with building cylinders, say, 1 m in diameter. With the Otto Cycle, because you need an ignition source (sparkplugs), combustion in the chamber will be non-uniform and there will be more energy lost because of it, so F-1 and GPX cars use many, many cylinders that are very long but very slender. Only a fool would use an Otto Cycle engine to power a locomotive, let alone a ship.
"So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine."
No. Diesel means internal combustion. If you want external combustion, you build a steam turbine (far fewer moving parts), and they don't care what you burn. There's no reason to burn something as expensive as refined diesel fuel. Modern steamships burn whatever it is the refineries can't sell to anybody else.
You could try a gas turbine, but, again, diesel fuel isn't designed for that; it will ignite when you don't want it to, and not ignite when you need it to. Go with kerosene.
"So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine."
Not a mechanical engineer, are we?
"If the water runs out,"
Then you take it back to the dealer. The water isn't supposed to come out, you put your superheated steam through the preheater, getting it back down to saturation before you put it back into the boiler again. You should no less run out of water than you would run out of motor oil or transmission fluid (with similar Very Bad Things happening to your engine if you do).
But you still need a warrant and you still need to convince a (relatively) third party that you need one. You can't say "ZOMG, maybe they're of terroist descent!" and start tapping phones at your whim.
"look at all the Chinese immigrants and china towns in NA"
Yeah, a whopping 0.8% of the population of the United States.
"most people in China would die to go to North America,"
To live here permanently or to work here for a period to earn some money before going home? A relatively easy part of the United States that Chinese often immigrate to is Saipan, and from what I understand most of them go to Saipan to work for a few years and then go home.
(Not that I'm all that fond of the sweatshops in CNMI, mind you.)
"20 year ago the people who learned japanese had the oppertunity to profit big from the growing econemy there. the same applies for China, the business oppertunities you get if you can speak chinese is huge."
Yes, but as we both mentioned, the desire to learn Japanese for "business opportunities" was 20 years ago, and today most people outside of Japan who want to study the language are preteen girls wanting to read manga. Will being able to speak a Chinese dialect really be worthwhile to the general population in 2025, or will the bottom drop out from under the economic powerhouse of the moment and everybody will be scrambling to learn some other obscure language?
"Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer."
"like my fairly rare original backlit Japanese Gameboy."
No, we're not talking about the kind of people who import a Game Boy Light, we're talking about the kind of people who managed to get their hands on Nintendo's official (and unreleased) English translation of the Famicom game Mother (now known to the internet as "EarthBound Zero").
"Players of the massively multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies are feeling a bit like the films' besieged rebel army these days. To them, LucasArts is the evil Empire, raining down terror in their alternate universe."
No, the rebels weren't supporting the evil empire with monthly fees. The players aren't the rebels, they are the imperial peons upon which the empire is built. If they really wanted to harm the empire, they'd stop paying those fees and find some other MMORPG.
With all the rabid talk of "the market" and other anarcho-capitalist tripe on Slashdot, you'd think some of these players would be good little capitalist consumers and take their money elsewhere.
"It is a relatively modern Idea that Freedom is equal to Privacy."
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated(.)
The only thing "new" is this new definition of "reasonable." Or I can play everybody's favorite catch-all:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
I can't speak for European philosophy, but over here, it is believed that in a republican form of government, all rights stem from the people, and it is for they, and not the governments who work for them, to decide what is and is not a right.
Except this covers all of Europe. Everybody has all their communications logged. Everyone.
"Thats why so many drug dealers and makers in the U.S. live in rural or suburban areas"
No, they do that because that's where their customers live. City folk get involved in selling drugs becuse they can't afford to buy the product themselves.
"I'm guessing FF2 & 3 (if it was completed) will never be released."
I'm willing to bet that S-E didn't reinvent the wheel when they brought FFII over here on the PlayStation and GBA. I don't think they ever tried translating III before, but I'd wager that any translation work done for the Famicom version is already out in the wild on other platforms.
As for an English version of the Famicom game proper, there's pratically zero risk involved in publishing a ROM onto the Revolution's online service. There might be a good chance it could happen (and maybe a few Enix games as well; I think so far DQV for the SFC was at least partially translated before Enix fled North America).
Slashdot Mirror
"Israel will take the threat seriously and bomb the hell out of Iran's caches of missiles and nuclear weapons facilities."
But if they fly over Iraq on their way to Iran without getting shot down, the US gets dragged into it more than usual.
"I won't play or watch anything modern that Toriyama's involved with simply because I just can't stand to look at it."
See, I don't mind the drawing; I'm not a rabid fanboy of it or anything, but I'm not against it. What does bug me about Toriyama, though, are his female characters: almost without exception, they're all useless, whining dead weight. Be it something from DragonBall or characters from DQ games past, I want to strangle them.
The women in Chrono Trigger were OK, but I think that's less Toriyama expanding his abilities and more the influence of Squaresoft on the game.
(Of course, Squaresoft gave us Yuffie and Rikku...)
"The better analogy would have been fighting Wyverns in a swamp while carrying Princess Gwaelin back to King Lorik..."
After getting my ass roasted by that damned dragon, the least the bitch could have done is walked herself.
"The U.S. first saw the series on the Nintendo Entertainment System as Dragon Warrior, and some of the most hardcore elements were dumbed down for our squishy American palates."
You seem to be confusing this with the Final Fantasy series. The only changes made to the first Dragon Warrior was an improvement in graphics to make it look as pretty as Dragon Quest II ("ZOMG, I can face in four directions! Look, a shoreline!"). Later games had you dragging along ghosts instead of coffins when somebody died, but Enix didn't pull any of that EasyType crap on us like Squaresoft.
Which is why it didn't sell. Dragon Quest never apologized for being Dragon Quest.
"If there's no sparkplug to ignite anything, how does it start moving? Does the starter just turn the engine enough to compress the fuel till it exploads?"
Electric starter, same as for Otto Engines. They often have glowplugs to help warm the chambers a little before cranking it (especially on a cold day), but for the most part the electric starter just turns the enigne until the engine starts turning itself.
It's actually less complicated than starting an Otto Engine. Spark plugs aren't on all the time, they only fire at the proper time (hence distributors). The electric starter doesn't just fire all the sparkplugs at once and hope it starts moving (that would be Bad), it simply uses the battery to turn the engine while still using the battery to supply power to the sparkplugs at the proper point in the cycle. With Diesels, the fuel ignites all by itself immediately after being injected into the compressed cylinder, so that's one less thing to time and one less load on the batteries.
Or you could use a hand crank or a pull cord or pop the clutch, etc, same as for Otto Engines. Turn the engine until it starts to want to turn by itself.
"or I'll leave you with negative feedback!"
Actually, that's a good point. As much as you may want to leave negative feedback, you know that you'll almost always get the same in return from a vindictive, disreputable seller.
Chargebacks are your friend! If you paid with a credit card, make the fraud eBay/PayPal's problem, not yours.
If you paid through the mail, there's these friendly people. Nobody knows they exist until it's too late.
"Fils = Sons
Aime = Like"
According to Google's langauge tools, fils = wire (like filament). So... um... he likes electronics? Solder junkie?
"And of course you could make a highly efficient diesel external combustion engine, you'd just need to pressurise the combustion chamber."
So not only would you have to pay more for refined diesel fuel, but also for the added materials and required maintenance of a pressurized firebox? Heck, you'd have to keep the water going through the boiler at an even higher pressure or Bad Things will happen when a leak occurs.
It might be efficient in a mass-of-fuel/energy-put-out sense, but certainly not in the $$$ sense.
"A good engineer weighs up having to take on more water vs having to condense it and chooses."
A good engineer knows that you do not want to take on your expansion medium from random sources. Modern steam turbines require a purity of steam unheard of in any other manufactured substance, and it's enough work to clean the liquid water and superheated steam when you recycle it as it is.
"(Have you ever seen a steam locomotive?)"
Do you know why they're not used any more?
Have you seen a modern steam turbine?
"Umm, I'm not sure you understand. I actually own a Nintendo made Japanese prototype Gameboy that came with a backlight in it. They are rare, this isn;t some mod I did to a Gameboy."
You don't understand: it wasn't a prototype. The Game Boy Light was sold in Japan. They're moderately rare, but only really rare outside of Japan.
"Also I own a collection of almost every game from Atari 2600 through PS1 COMPLETE! Meaning NES, SNES, Gameboy, GBA, and Genesis."
We're not talking about people who collect published games, we're talking about people collecting unpublished games, the ones that never made it out of R&D. We're talking about people who try to get their hands on the Final Fantasy N64 tech demo there was a submission on yesterday.
"On at least 10 occasions I had to go to the pawn shop with police and get my stuff back during the course of my freshman year."
You should have called the police. Pawn shops aren't supposed to be involved in fencing stolen goods, and wouldn't have dealt with your roommate if you involved law enforcement.
"However, to use the Antarctica analogy, people can own things within the space. There are various research stations owned by governments on Antarctica. They don't own the land, but they do own the station."
As far as they're concerned, they do own the land. It's just that the United States doesn't recognize any claims. This doesn't prevent countries like Argentina and Norway from making expansive claims to the continent.
The power curve put out by an internal combustion engine isn't linear; it prefers to stay at a particular range of RPMs for maximum efficiency. This is why cars have transmisisons to change gears, trying to keep the engine at that preferred RPM range no matter what RPM the wheels are turning at.
Electical motors, on the other hand, are linear: turn up the juice, and the thing turns faster.
The philosophy of using a diesel with electric drive is to keep the diesel engine turning at exactly the right RPMs to maximize efficiency, supplying power to the electrical drive as needed. This way, the locomotive gets the same efficiency moving slowly as it does at speed (as opposed to cars, which would really rather be in 5th gear going 80 km/h).
" I think you are confusing fuel and engine form. Diesel is just a fuel, it doesn't dictate the engine type."
Oh yes it does! Just try putting diesel fuel into your Otto Cycle automobile!
The Diesel Cycle is inherently different from the Otto Cycle in that there are no sparkplugs. As opposed to an external ignition source, diesel engines use nothing but the compression in the cylinder to ignite the air-fuel mixture. Overgenerallizing a little, diesel engines operate entirely on what you would call "knock."
I could go on about temperature vs. entropy comparisons between the Diesel and Otto cycles, but your eyes would glaze over.
For the same compression ratio, the Otto Cycle is more efficient than the Diesel Cycle. However, when engineering comes into play, you can have much, much greater compression ratios with a Diesel engine than an Otto engine. The source of ignition in a Diesel Engine is the pressure in the cylinder, and the pressure is uniform throughout the chamber, ensuring uniform combustion and uniform expansion of the cylinder. You can get away with building cylinders, say, 1 m in diameter. With the Otto Cycle, because you need an ignition source (sparkplugs), combustion in the chamber will be non-uniform and there will be more energy lost because of it, so F-1 and GPX cars use many, many cylinders that are very long but very slender. Only a fool would use an Otto Cycle engine to power a locomotive, let alone a ship.
"So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine."
No. Diesel means internal combustion. If you want external combustion, you build a steam turbine (far fewer moving parts), and they don't care what you burn. There's no reason to burn something as expensive as refined diesel fuel. Modern steamships burn whatever it is the refineries can't sell to anybody else.
You could try a gas turbine, but, again, diesel fuel isn't designed for that; it will ignite when you don't want it to, and not ignite when you need it to. Go with kerosene.
"So... there's no reason you couldn't make a highly efficient diesel external combustion (probably steam) engine."
Not a mechanical engineer, are we?
"If the water runs out,"
Then you take it back to the dealer. The water isn't supposed to come out, you put your superheated steam through the preheater, getting it back down to saturation before you put it back into the boiler again. You should no less run out of water than you would run out of motor oil or transmission fluid (with similar Very Bad Things happening to your engine if you do).
But you still need a warrant and you still need to convince a (relatively) third party that you need one. You can't say "ZOMG, maybe they're of terroist descent!" and start tapping phones at your whim.
"look at all the Chinese immigrants and china towns in NA"
Yeah, a whopping 0.8% of the population of the United States.
"most people in China would die to go to North America,"
To live here permanently or to work here for a period to earn some money before going home? A relatively easy part of the United States that Chinese often immigrate to is Saipan, and from what I understand most of them go to Saipan to work for a few years and then go home.
(Not that I'm all that fond of the sweatshops in CNMI, mind you.)
"20 year ago the people who learned japanese had the oppertunity to profit big from the growing econemy there. the same applies for China, the business oppertunities you get if you can speak chinese is huge."
Yes, but as we both mentioned, the desire to learn Japanese for "business opportunities" was 20 years ago, and today most people outside of Japan who want to study the language are preteen girls wanting to read manga. Will being able to speak a Chinese dialect really be worthwhile to the general population in 2025, or will the bottom drop out from under the economic powerhouse of the moment and everybody will be scrambling to learn some other obscure language?
"Have towns and areas around the town as common areas and then quests be instanced. To me this is something that no one has tried yet and could be the real answer."
Phantasy Star Online.
"like my fairly rare original backlit Japanese Gameboy."
No, we're not talking about the kind of people who import a Game Boy Light, we're talking about the kind of people who managed to get their hands on Nintendo's official (and unreleased) English translation of the Famicom game Mother (now known to the internet as "EarthBound Zero").
"Players of the massively multiplayer online game Star Wars Galaxies are feeling a bit like the films' besieged rebel army these days. To them, LucasArts is the evil Empire, raining down terror in their alternate universe."
No, the rebels weren't supporting the evil empire with monthly fees. The players aren't the rebels, they are the imperial peons upon which the empire is built. If they really wanted to harm the empire, they'd stop paying those fees and find some other MMORPG.
With all the rabid talk of "the market" and other anarcho-capitalist tripe on Slashdot, you'd think some of these players would be good little capitalist consumers and take their money elsewhere.
"Buy it for one of the other three current consoles, preferably all three."
(N)o Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause(.)
With all the businesses incorporating there, they must have some attractive privacy laws.
"Just move to a semi-populated rural area"
Except this covers all of Europe. Everybody has all their communications logged. Everyone.
"Thats why so many drug dealers and makers in the U.S. live in rural or suburban areas"
No, they do that because that's where their customers live. City folk get involved in selling drugs becuse they can't afford to buy the product themselves.
"I'm guessing FF2 & 3 (if it was completed) will never be released."
I'm willing to bet that S-E didn't reinvent the wheel when they brought FFII over here on the PlayStation and GBA. I don't think they ever tried translating III before, but I'd wager that any translation work done for the Famicom version is already out in the wild on other platforms.
As for an English version of the Famicom game proper, there's pratically zero risk involved in publishing a ROM onto the Revolution's online service. There might be a good chance it could happen (and maybe a few Enix games as well; I think so far DQV for the SFC was at least partially translated before Enix fled North America).
"Ultimately the TPM itself isn't inherently evil or good."
But not giving the computer use an off switch is inherently evil.