"No, I'm saying that in the past 40 years we've found a new way to accomplish it much more slowly- by destroying the foundation of a nation's economy so that the cities fall apart and anybody who isn't independantly wealthy starves to death trying to pay for fuel and supplies that are reserved for the rich."
That's not war. It doesn't even approach the destruction (economic or otherwise) of war. At worst, economic depression. You cannot change the meaning of the word "war" to suit your whims.
"I call it the revenge of Tojo- since it was McArthur's Japan that started the trend."
Funny, that. Looked at the Japanese banking industry lately? Or their economy in general?
"If we keep going down this path, try finding any buildings that aren't shacks or slums in America that aren't in Bentonville, Alabama where the Chinese are installing their new government in 20 years."
Since the Japanese obviously had a head start, why aren't we all speaking Japanese?
"Actually, during the 30's it was still possible to forage for food- go hunting without a $500 permit or a $20,000 fine."
Wha? In the 1930's you could get a car for $500 and a house for $20,000, and damned nice ones at that.
Of course, it's kinda tough to forage for food in the middle of the Dustbowl.
"Rational is just making up stories to lie about what is really going on."
No, rational is not playing games with terms and accusations as seirous as "war." That's like calling all diseases "cancer."
"But, Chinese is a WRITTEN language, not a spoken dialect."
Second paragraph, words 9 through 16. You need to learn to read anal-retentively before writing anal-retentively.
You're almost as annoying as the "That isn't Spanish, it's Castellano!" langauge Nazis.
"Not to mention OTHER COUNTRIES uses Chinese or part of it in their written language. Taiwanese is a one of them, as well as Japanese (Kanji) and Korean. I do believe some Southeast countries, like Malaysia and Indonesia, speak Mandarin there as well."
In other words, only those countries you can hit with a rock thrown from China. And aside from whether or not you want to call Taiwan a separate country, there is still precious little in common between Japanese or Korean (or Thai or what have you) with Chinese; they aren't related as closely to each other as European languages are (no Romans bringing people civilization by the tip of the sword). The Chinese barely conquered each other, let alone having a meaningful hold on the Korean penninsula or crossing the Sea of Japan.
5 out of 6 populated continents, Chinese won't get you very far at all. You'll probably cover more acreage with Arabic.
Yes, there are some speakers of Chinese dialects in Australia, and there are many more in the United States, but according to the numbers, they don't travel very far from their origins. The big winners are places like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, places where China has been a big regional influence for centuries.
When you start looking at the US (or Australia, probably), the Chinese are still something of a diaspora, and the only ones that still speak their Chinese dialect are the ones stuck in the sweatshops; it's because they don't speak English that they're stuck there. I'd wager it's a similar situation with the Chinese population in France: speak French or keep sewing. The children might speak (for example) Mandarin at home with their family, but rarely outside the house and more rarely with their own chilren. China is too far away from either Australia or the United States to have a strong cultural and lingual influence on them in the same way as Indonesia and Mexico, respectively.
It's as real as the energy required to get the water to the top of the waterfall to begin with. It's a problem with your frame of reference. A differently chosen frame of reference can make kinetic energy fictional (such as one that has the same velocity vector as the moving water).
And it's not just "convenient," it's the First Law of Thermodynamics. Energy is always a zero-sum game (at best, see Second Law), otherwise you're failing to take into account energy suppliers from outside your thermodynamic system (i. e. the system that got the water to the top of the waterfall).
Potential energy comes from changing potentials. Gravitational potential energy is there because you're changing (G*mE)/r^2 (generally rounded to 9.8 m/s^2). Electrical potential energy is there because you're changing (k*q)/r^2 (also known as "voltage").
"What reality were *you* in in 1989? Were you even thought of yet? I mean... I *witnessed* the tanks, I saw the blood - albiet on television."
I saw the same television in Mr. Davis' sixth grade class.
Did you read anything I wrote, let alone what's in Wikipedia? I did not say "nobody was killed," and I did not say "The PRC didn't massacre its own civillians in a desperate bid to retain power," I said "No students were killed in the square." Many many people died at the hands of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing, but they weren't students, and they weren't in the square.
You would think that in an enlightened, republican society, what happened to the man-on-the-street in Beijing would be more important than what did (not) happen to a socialist student protest (in a communist state, go figure). The Party did not gun down the students because everybody was watching, but they did gun down the people nobody paid any attention to, because students are more important, to the Party and apparently to the West.
And it continues to hold true today. The only reason you and the parent and everybody else remember it is because they think that the people they saw on the picture box were the ones killed. The ones that died never got their 15 minutes.
This does not speak well of our society or our values.
"I Would say the majority of FF fans started with FF7 because it was the first PS FF, it had 3D graphics and it had a compelling storyline."
Given the choice between the two, more people bought it because it was 3D than for the story. Tifa's boobs trump everything.
In my opinion, Final Fantasy VII can't compare to the less-glamorous Dragon Quest/Warrior VII. And already I'm worried that DQVIII is stooping to cater to Western tastes and leaving its roots behind.
"are there objects outside the heliopause? would they be considered outside the solar system, or would that push the "edge" further still?"
No, not really. Heliopause marks where the sun's electromagnetic influences are cancelled out by the rest of the galaxy's. In many ways, it's a lot like a planet's magnetic sphere, only orders of magnitude more powerful.
With the relative strength of gravity compared to electromagnetism, it's highly doubtful that the suns gravity would have such a discernible influence. Consider the Jovian moon system and how large it is, then consider that the bowshock of Jupiter's magnetosphere extends about 1/3 AU towards us and the tail end goes out past Saturn.
Voyager 1 is at 90 AU and is only just now entering the heliopause proper, while the object in question is 60 AU tops.
"Did it ever occur to you that war may have changed,"
Ten thousand years of civilization and warfare, and the face of war has always remained the same: people killing people and breaking things en masse, wholesale slaughter. The means and methods may have changed, but the results, the aftermath has always been the same: smouldering cities and bloodsoaked soil. Are you so vain as to believe that humanity is somehow above all that now and things have magically changed in the past hundred months that haven't changed in the past hundred centuries?
And before you start pointing at 9/11, not even that qualifies. The Romans did far worse to Carthage and they didn't have airplanes or the Internet. Try finding something in Atlanta older than 150 years.
"and that there are people starving to death in America due to WWIII already?"
Any more than, say, the Great Depression? Even with the surge of population in the US since the 1930's, I'd still wager the raw numbers are higher from the '30's, and that was peacetime.
Again, you have zero sense of scale.
Starvation during wartime comes because international shipments of food are seized/sunk and domestic food sources are torched, blighted, salted, or otherwise eliminated by human violence, and everybody knows it. You sure as hell don't start talking about a freakin' obesity epidemic. Hell, look at postwar Japan, and that was even after we called off our submarine fleet.
And, again, this is something North America has not seen in almost 150 years. No rational person would even pretend this qualifies as a war.
"I will never forget the images of those young people being shot at, arrested, stampeded out of the square by the Chinese military."
Uh-huh. Sure. What images?
By all accounts, nobody died in Tiananmen Sqauare in 1989. None. Zero. All those student protesters went home with imagines of a concerned government asking, for their own safety, for the students to go back home.
Instead, hundreds died around the square, but almost none of them were students. The students mattered to the government, they were the intelligencia, the future movers and shakers in the Beloved Party, and on top of that many of them had family and such out in the provinces, and news of their deaths would travel far and wide. But the general population of Beijing, the actual proletariat (in the terms of the Beloved Party) were far more expendable, and they were the ones killed.
Maybe they were rising up in support of the students, or maybe they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (guess which side supports which explanation), but "ZOMG all those dead students in the square!" marks you as one of those brianless sheep who believe what they're told, much like those you are trying to deride.
"Chinese outnumbers all other languages in the world."
So? If you read the whole article, you'll notice that they point out that, funny thing is, the vast, vast majority of all Chinese speakers live in one place. China has always believed it is the center of the world and waited for everybody to come to them instead of, say, exporting themselves and their language. Unless you're actually going to China, you will get far more mileage with English, French or Spanish (i. e. the ones who did go out and export people and langauge).
In my own layman's opinion, the obsession with whatever flavor of Chinese dialect you're looking at is little more than a fad. Twenty years ago, "the" langauge for us to all go out and learn would have been Russian or Japanese, two other examples of isolated languages.
IMO, it makes more sense to run out and learn Portuguese. Brazil is closer to the US than China.
"I've been saying all along that China is a threat- and this is really the third front of WWIII."
"World war..." I do not think it means what you think it means.
See, when cities start getting wiped off of the face of the planet and an entire generation of young men gets decimated and then decimated again, then you get to call it a "World War III." Ask Europeans or even Chinese of the proper age group to tell you what a real world war looks like.
Very, very few people in North America have seen what a war actually looks like since the freakin' 1860's (and they had to travel to see it), which is probably why people like tossing around the word "war" without having any fucking clue what it entails ("War on Poverty," "War on Drugs," "War on Terrorism," "War on Christmas," and the silliness of calling the whole Red State vs. Blue State thing the "Second American Civil War).
Sherman said "War is Hell" and went on to aptly demonstrate that fact. This, this isn't even a hissy fit. If you have the liesure time to piss away posting on a website, it ain't war.
"Doing an emulator for something like the SNES is hard."
I imagine it's a lot easier if you have access to the schematics, information on any and all lock-outs, and access to the sourcecode for just about every game ever published for the system.
"Oh well, the real lost Final Fantasies were the translated versions of FF2 and FF3 for the NES that were never released. FF2 from my understanding was completed; however, I'm not sure how far FF3 got. And before you say they were released FF2 and FF3 on the SNES were just renames of FF4 and FF6."
Welcome to the Twenty-First Century! Final Fantasy II is available in "Final Fantasy Origins" for the PlayStation (a port of the WonderSwan Color version with some FMV thrown in) and in "Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls" for the GBA (same WonderSwan Color port, only with new story tacked on after the end of II). Final Fantasy III is being made for the DS, in 3D (kinda like what Enix did to Dragon Quest IV for the PlayStation, I guess).
"...it wasn't welcomed on the PC version, either. Yet there it is, patching itself uselessly every time I played FFXI."
It's there because you're sharing the game with PS2 players.
Consider: you're on a PC. If you want to get together with a few of your online friends, you have various means of communications at your disposal, such as email and IM. You can even get yourself a windower and do these things while playing the game.
However, there are also people playing on the PS2 (such as myself). The PS2 has no inherent email connectivity, no IM, no nothing. If you want to stay in touch with people from the game outside of game time, those tools included with POL are potentially all you have.
In order to foster the hardware-agnostic philosophy of FFXI, S-E has made sure that all players are able to contact all other players, and if that means including the same features in the PC and X360 versions of the games as they have for the PS2, then that's what they'll do. Otherwise you might have trouble finding a particular Tarutaru paladin to tank for you (not to mention what is probably the vast majority of Japanese players).
If people here are going to spout vitriol here about competing online interfaces, why not complain about Microsoft's policy of insisting S-E go through Live to begin with? Are X360 FFXI players going to have to pay twice, like the Phantasy Star Online players did?
"it's still pretty slow at copying data over from DVD to hard disk. "
From the DVD to the what? The Core system doesn't have a hard drive, and because of it I distinctly remember Microsoft saying that no game will actually require the hard drive. Are they now backpedalling?
"This is especially bad for companies that want to do sprite-based games or port obscure Japanese games to the US like Working Designs did.
The really annoying thing is, Sony doesn't seem to mind at all when it is the one publishing the game (Ico and Shadow of the Colossus), or if a cult-hit like Katmari Damacy is an exclusive port."
Uh... last I checked, Ico and Katamari were both 3D. I don't see a double standard.
"Nintendo who don't want to see a sprite on a screen larger than a credit card."
Slashdot Mirror
"No, I'm saying that in the past 40 years we've found a new way to accomplish it much more slowly- by destroying the foundation of a nation's economy so that the cities fall apart and anybody who isn't independantly wealthy starves to death trying to pay for fuel and supplies that are reserved for the rich."
That's not war. It doesn't even approach the destruction (economic or otherwise) of war. At worst, economic depression. You cannot change the meaning of the word "war" to suit your whims.
"I call it the revenge of Tojo- since it was McArthur's Japan that started the trend."
Funny, that. Looked at the Japanese banking industry lately? Or their economy in general?
"If we keep going down this path, try finding any buildings that aren't shacks or slums in America that aren't in Bentonville, Alabama where the Chinese are installing their new government in 20 years."
Since the Japanese obviously had a head start, why aren't we all speaking Japanese?
"Actually, during the 30's it was still possible to forage for food- go hunting without a $500 permit or a $20,000 fine."
Wha? In the 1930's you could get a car for $500 and a house for $20,000, and damned nice ones at that.
Of course, it's kinda tough to forage for food in the middle of the Dustbowl.
"Rational is just making up stories to lie about what is really going on."
No, rational is not playing games with terms and accusations as seirous as "war." That's like calling all diseases "cancer."
"But, Chinese is a WRITTEN language, not a spoken dialect."
Second paragraph, words 9 through 16. You need to learn to read anal-retentively before writing anal-retentively.
You're almost as annoying as the "That isn't Spanish, it's Castellano!" langauge Nazis.
"Not to mention OTHER COUNTRIES uses Chinese or part of it in their written language. Taiwanese is a one of them, as well as Japanese (Kanji) and Korean. I do believe some Southeast countries, like Malaysia and Indonesia, speak Mandarin there as well."
In other words, only those countries you can hit with a rock thrown from China. And aside from whether or not you want to call Taiwan a separate country, there is still precious little in common between Japanese or Korean (or Thai or what have you) with Chinese; they aren't related as closely to each other as European languages are (no Romans bringing people civilization by the tip of the sword). The Chinese barely conquered each other, let alone having a meaningful hold on the Korean penninsula or crossing the Sea of Japan.
5 out of 6 populated continents, Chinese won't get you very far at all. You'll probably cover more acreage with Arabic.
Yes, there are some speakers of Chinese dialects in Australia, and there are many more in the United States, but according to the numbers, they don't travel very far from their origins. The big winners are places like Indonesia, Malaysia and Thailand, places where China has been a big regional influence for centuries.
When you start looking at the US (or Australia, probably), the Chinese are still something of a diaspora, and the only ones that still speak their Chinese dialect are the ones stuck in the sweatshops; it's because they don't speak English that they're stuck there. I'd wager it's a similar situation with the Chinese population in France: speak French or keep sewing. The children might speak (for example) Mandarin at home with their family, but rarely outside the house and more rarely with their own chilren. China is too far away from either Australia or the United States to have a strong cultural and lingual influence on them in the same way as Indonesia and Mexico, respectively.
It's as real as the energy required to get the water to the top of the waterfall to begin with. It's a problem with your frame of reference. A differently chosen frame of reference can make kinetic energy fictional (such as one that has the same velocity vector as the moving water).
And it's not just "convenient," it's the First Law of Thermodynamics. Energy is always a zero-sum game (at best, see Second Law), otherwise you're failing to take into account energy suppliers from outside your thermodynamic system (i. e. the system that got the water to the top of the waterfall).
Potential energy comes from changing potentials. Gravitational potential energy is there because you're changing (G*mE)/r^2 (generally rounded to 9.8 m/s^2). Electrical potential energy is there because you're changing (k*q)/r^2 (also known as "voltage").
"What reality were *you* in in 1989? Were you even thought of yet? I mean... I *witnessed* the tanks, I saw the blood - albiet on television."
I saw the same television in Mr. Davis' sixth grade class.
Did you read anything I wrote, let alone what's in Wikipedia? I did not say "nobody was killed," and I did not say "The PRC didn't massacre its own civillians in a desperate bid to retain power," I said "No students were killed in the square." Many many people died at the hands of the People's Liberation Army in Beijing, but they weren't students, and they weren't in the square.
You would think that in an enlightened, republican society, what happened to the man-on-the-street in Beijing would be more important than what did (not) happen to a socialist student protest (in a communist state, go figure). The Party did not gun down the students because everybody was watching, but they did gun down the people nobody paid any attention to, because students are more important, to the Party and apparently to the West.
And it continues to hold true today. The only reason you and the parent and everybody else remember it is because they think that the people they saw on the picture box were the ones killed. The ones that died never got their 15 minutes.
This does not speak well of our society or our values.
You missed part of my statement:Don't worry, enough rabid Japanese fanboys bought DQVIII to keep S-E in solvency for a long time to come. Look at the pretty picture with the slimes.
"I Would say the majority of FF fans started with FF7 because it was the first PS FF, it had 3D graphics and it had a compelling storyline."
Given the choice between the two, more people bought it because it was 3D than for the story. Tifa's boobs trump everything.
In my opinion, Final Fantasy VII can't compare to the less-glamorous Dragon Quest/Warrior VII. And already I'm worried that DQVIII is stooping to cater to Western tastes and leaving its roots behind.
"are there objects outside the heliopause? would they be considered outside the solar system, or would that push the "edge" further still?"
No, not really. Heliopause marks where the sun's electromagnetic influences are cancelled out by the rest of the galaxy's. In many ways, it's a lot like a planet's magnetic sphere, only orders of magnitude more powerful.
With the relative strength of gravity compared to electromagnetism, it's highly doubtful that the suns gravity would have such a discernible influence. Consider the Jovian moon system and how large it is, then consider that the bowshock of Jupiter's magnetosphere extends about 1/3 AU towards us and the tail end goes out past Saturn.
Voyager 1 is at 90 AU and is only just now entering the heliopause proper, while the object in question is 60 AU tops.
"Stars do not dissapear."
First off, they do. Where do you think the material to make up the sun and the planets (and us) came from?
Secondly, they do move. A lot. Tidal forces could have broken up the pair a long time ago.
""Twin" stars are remarkably identical,"
Explain Algol.
"It's not a new space object,"
I'm surprised nobody's made the obligatory "That's no moon..." post yet.
Neptie, you're doing a heck of a job!
Space Ghost!
Or is this crowd too young to remember those commercials from pre-Adult Swim?
So claiming that they butchered their own civillians is a pro China sentiment? Them playing favorites somehow makes them better?
"The economies are indeed too dependant on each other."
The same was said about Britain and Germany in 1913.
"Did it ever occur to you that war may have changed,"
Ten thousand years of civilization and warfare, and the face of war has always remained the same: people killing people and breaking things en masse, wholesale slaughter. The means and methods may have changed, but the results, the aftermath has always been the same: smouldering cities and bloodsoaked soil. Are you so vain as to believe that humanity is somehow above all that now and things have magically changed in the past hundred months that haven't changed in the past hundred centuries?
And before you start pointing at 9/11, not even that qualifies. The Romans did far worse to Carthage and they didn't have airplanes or the Internet. Try finding something in Atlanta older than 150 years.
"and that there are people starving to death in America due to WWIII already?"
Any more than, say, the Great Depression? Even with the surge of population in the US since the 1930's, I'd still wager the raw numbers are higher from the '30's, and that was peacetime.
Again, you have zero sense of scale.
Starvation during wartime comes because international shipments of food are seized/sunk and domestic food sources are torched, blighted, salted, or otherwise eliminated by human violence, and everybody knows it. You sure as hell don't start talking about a freakin' obesity epidemic. Hell, look at postwar Japan, and that was even after we called off our submarine fleet.
And, again, this is something North America has not seen in almost 150 years. No rational person would even pretend this qualifies as a war.
"I will never forget the images of those young people being shot at, arrested, stampeded out of the square by the Chinese military."
Uh-huh. Sure. What images?
By all accounts, nobody died in Tiananmen Sqauare in 1989. None. Zero. All those student protesters went home with imagines of a concerned government asking, for their own safety, for the students to go back home.
Instead, hundreds died around the square, but almost none of them were students. The students mattered to the government, they were the intelligencia, the future movers and shakers in the Beloved Party, and on top of that many of them had family and such out in the provinces, and news of their deaths would travel far and wide. But the general population of Beijing, the actual proletariat (in the terms of the Beloved Party) were far more expendable, and they were the ones killed.
Maybe they were rising up in support of the students, or maybe they just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time (guess which side supports which explanation), but "ZOMG all those dead students in the square!" marks you as one of those brianless sheep who believe what they're told, much like those you are trying to deride.
"Chinese outnumbers all other languages in the world."
So? If you read the whole article, you'll notice that they point out that, funny thing is, the vast, vast majority of all Chinese speakers live in one place. China has always believed it is the center of the world and waited for everybody to come to them instead of, say, exporting themselves and their language. Unless you're actually going to China, you will get far more mileage with English, French or Spanish (i. e. the ones who did go out and export people and langauge).
In my own layman's opinion, the obsession with whatever flavor of Chinese dialect you're looking at is little more than a fad. Twenty years ago, "the" langauge for us to all go out and learn would have been Russian or Japanese, two other examples of isolated languages.
IMO, it makes more sense to run out and learn Portuguese. Brazil is closer to the US than China.
"I've been saying all along that China is a threat- and this is really the third front of WWIII."
"World war..." I do not think it means what you think it means.
See, when cities start getting wiped off of the face of the planet and an entire generation of young men gets decimated and then decimated again, then you get to call it a "World War III." Ask Europeans or even Chinese of the proper age group to tell you what a real world war looks like.
Very, very few people in North America have seen what a war actually looks like since the freakin' 1860's (and they had to travel to see it), which is probably why people like tossing around the word "war" without having any fucking clue what it entails ("War on Poverty," "War on Drugs," "War on Terrorism," "War on Christmas," and the silliness of calling the whole Red State vs. Blue State thing the "Second American Civil War).
Sherman said "War is Hell" and went on to aptly demonstrate that fact. This, this isn't even a hissy fit. If you have the liesure time to piss away posting on a website, it ain't war.
"Aren't there an awful lot of news stories recently (heck, there've been three on /. in the past few days) villianizing?"
I corrected your question for you.
Bad news sells.
"Doing an emulator for something like the SNES is hard."
I imagine it's a lot easier if you have access to the schematics, information on any and all lock-outs, and access to the sourcecode for just about every game ever published for the system.
"Oh well, the real lost Final Fantasies were the translated versions of FF2 and FF3 for the NES that were never released. FF2 from my understanding was completed; however, I'm not sure how far FF3 got. And before you say they were released FF2 and FF3 on the SNES were just renames of FF4 and FF6."
Welcome to the Twenty-First Century! Final Fantasy II is available in "Final Fantasy Origins" for the PlayStation (a port of the WonderSwan Color version with some FMV thrown in) and in "Final Fantasy I & II: Dawn of Souls" for the GBA (same WonderSwan Color port, only with new story tacked on after the end of II). Final Fantasy III is being made for the DS, in 3D (kinda like what Enix did to Dragon Quest IV for the PlayStation, I guess).
"...it wasn't welcomed on the PC version, either. Yet there it is, patching itself uselessly every time I played FFXI."
It's there because you're sharing the game with PS2 players.
Consider: you're on a PC. If you want to get together with a few of your online friends, you have various means of communications at your disposal, such as email and IM. You can even get yourself a windower and do these things while playing the game.
However, there are also people playing on the PS2 (such as myself). The PS2 has no inherent email connectivity, no IM, no nothing. If you want to stay in touch with people from the game outside of game time, those tools included with POL are potentially all you have.
In order to foster the hardware-agnostic philosophy of FFXI, S-E has made sure that all players are able to contact all other players, and if that means including the same features in the PC and X360 versions of the games as they have for the PS2, then that's what they'll do. Otherwise you might have trouble finding a particular Tarutaru paladin to tank for you (not to mention what is probably the vast majority of Japanese players).
If people here are going to spout vitriol here about competing online interfaces, why not complain about Microsoft's policy of insisting S-E go through Live to begin with? Are X360 FFXI players going to have to pay twice, like the Phantasy Star Online players did?
"And then, of course, there's the nuisance of having to fully log-off in order to exit a game of FFXI."
/shutdown instead of /logoff next time.
Try
"it's still pretty slow at copying data over from DVD to hard disk. "
From the DVD to the what? The Core system doesn't have a hard drive, and because of it I distinctly remember Microsoft saying that no game will actually require the hard drive. Are they now backpedalling?
"This is especially bad for companies that want to do sprite-based games or port obscure Japanese games to the US like Working Designs did.
The really annoying thing is, Sony doesn't seem to mind at all when it is the one publishing the game (Ico and Shadow of the Colossus), or if a cult-hit like Katmari Damacy is an exclusive port."
Uh... last I checked, Ico and Katamari were both 3D. I don't see a double standard.
"Nintendo who don't want to see a sprite on a screen larger than a credit card."
Excuse me?
"ability to escapes AAC lock in for my iPod."
It's called eBay. There are doubtless hundreds that would pay well to be in that AAC lock you're looking to escape.