"Does it really matter if I wake up at 0000 isntead of 0800?"
You'd be doing neither.
Key moments in solar time today:
Dublin, Ireland 53.4 N, 6.3 W Current time zone: UTC +0 Sunrise: 0438 UTC Noon: 1231 UTC Sunset: 2024 UTC
Vancouver, British Columbia 49.3 N, 123.1 W Current time zone: UTC -8 Sunrise: 1242 UTC Noon: 2019 UTC Sunset: 0355 UTC
Solar time, we're not talking about the difference between 0000 and 0800, we're talking about the difference between 0019 and 0831.
Perhaps it would be "more fair" to use the mean solar time instead of actual solar time. In which case, we're talking about the difference betwen 0012 and 0824.
And I'm being kind here: I'm rounding off to integer minutes.
Now, would you rather remember that the time^H^H^H^H difference in the hours of operation betwen Dublin and Vancouver is 7 hours, 47 minutes and 12 seconds, or would you rather have a global standard that lets you say it's exactly 8 hours?
"However, if there were only one time zone I would have to find out when people work, but after I found out when they work I wouldn't have to do any math to figure out what time that was to me."
Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.
"I also can't figure out why you think businesses would adjust their schedules to local noon, as opposed to adjusting their clocks to matches the businesses that they work with."
Aside from the human health aspects and the transportation safety aspects (always safer to commute in daylight), there will always be businesses in that network you deal with that rely on available sunlight for whatever reason (agriculture, construction, power generation, etc.), something that has little bearing to any manmade time standard. Because their business depends on where the sun is in the sky and not so much on other businesses, they will ultimately be the ones that dictate when the rest of their community operates.
"Companies with nation interests are already open from 8 AM EST to 5 PM PST, because that when they do business with are open. "
Beyond opening offices across multiple time zones for load bearing (since nobody can be working more than 40 hours a week), nobody actually does that. Either they're open 24/7 (and ultimatley have a skeleton staff around when the sun is down and most customers are asleep), or they tell you to please call within certain operating hours, and the time zone those hours are in.
"The 9-5 standard didn't come out of daylight hours. 9-5 came out of daylight hours, but it became standard because there's a distinict economic advantage to being open at the same time as your business partners. I don't see any reason to think that eliminating time zones would change that."
Because, without standardized time zones with integer hour differences, no two meridians agree on where the sun is in the sky. The earth is round. Time zones allow a synchronized window of operations within the zone where the difference in local solar time is acceptable (within 15 degrees). Without this common frame of reference, there is no good reason for two communities 3 degrees apart to not set their operating hours (even if not their clocks) apart by 12 minutes. This is exactly the situation we had before time zones were introduced, and there is no reason to believe it won't revert to that situation. GMT was alive and well (which is how they knew what meridian they were on), but railroad and telegraph lines required that standardized frames of reference be agreed upon and established across the country, then the world. And you're trying to argue that the same technological and economic advancements that required the establishment of time zones would now magically funtion better in their absence?
You're supposed to adapt your frame of reference to suit your purposes, not the other way around, and the less your clock resembles the world around you and your personal experience, the less you're actually going to use it to define your frame of reference. As the original post was referring to the situation in China, without time zones, somebody would just have to invent them. The history of mechanical time has been a history of trying to make a more perfect sundial, and if you are going to abandon the sundial meme, mechanical timepieces become useless for all practical purporses.
But, again, your hypothesis of an easier life is easily testable: here is International Atomic Time, where each and every hour is exactly 3.6 ks (no leap seconds). Set your watch by it and live by it. See how well it works for you.
No, I wont' be around in 500 years when the need to add or subtract such an hour needs to happen, but I will be around next year when this hypothetical new standard might be brought into force, thereby requiring the change in the WWVB signal format now. The standard now tells me not only if/when a leap second change is comign up, but also contains information on the current difference between UTC and UT (the difference that triggers a leap second when it becomes big enough for an integer second change), measured in tenths of a second. There's simly not enough bits in the current code to allow for a difference much greater than 1 s, let alone 3600s s. And because the length of time these bits of information is transmitted is itself part of the time transmission standard, squeezing in more bits would break compatability with current timepieces entirely. So, to take into account the possibilty of a change in time 500 years from now, my watch would break now.
First off, you just missed the entire freaking point of the paragraph you cut and pasted. In the absence of Beijing allowing people to live in separate time zones (ala Russia, Canada, US, etc), the people have chosen to implement their own time zones because that's what they want. A global standard for time like this has little purpose when people rarely cross integer numbers of degrees of longitude throughout the course of the day and would rather have a local, sun-based standard that attempts to divide the day into parts based not on where the sun is in the UK, but where the sun is where you're standing right now.
We're diurnal creatures and we liking having a time standard that takes that into account. You can't wish away biology with some global standard.
"My feeling is that they should simply have a chronometer which keeps ISO standard time. "
You misspelled BIPM.
"An office would set their working hours as 1830-0230 and that would be it. No changing the time in the summer/winter/etc. They could change their hours in the summer/winter though."
So, instead of just having to deal with jet lag when I cross multiple degrees of longitude in a short amount of time, I also have to cope with the fact that the operating hours of businesses I've grown accustomed to where I live have absoluntely no meaning here. Instead of today's world where, upon arriving, I simply press a few buttons on my watch, I now have to constantly apply a mathematical operation to what my watch says ("If I'm used to somethign happening at time X at home, then it must happen at X-Y here..."), that all but elminates the purpose of having a timepiece to begin with. I want to know what part of the day it is for the people around me, the people I have to interract with, and if a timepiece can't do that (indeed, begisn to serve as an obstacle to it), it's lost its purpose. I would literally be better off looking at the position of the sun in the sky, thereby eliminating several centuries of progress.
And where you suggest that businesses change their hours instead of simply changing the frame of reference (which is what DST represents), you're advocating a system that would bree chaos. Changing the frame of reference, by definition, is uniform. Every business continues to be adequately synchronized with the other businesses they must deal with in the course of the day. If everybody has to change their own hours, then all you'd do is introduce confusion until everybody agreed on a regular, synchronized change of hours outside of the so-called standard you're proposing (making the standard useless). And even then it would be less efficient than simply changing the clocks.
Have you ever had a physics class? If a problem is set in an ugly change of reference, would you rather constantly have to apply a long list of ugly transforms, or would you rather save yourself a lot of time and effort and simply change the frame of reference?
"An office on the other side of the country might start work at 1700 instead."
Your system also complicates communications across long distances. Time zones simplifies differences in time between two locations into an integer number of hours, allowing a simple calculation to be done after glancing at a clock set in the local frame of reference. Without time zones, everybody would attempt to set their operating times accoridng to time at the local meridian (again, going back to local solar time and making mechanical time standards worthless), and you'd be lucky if the difference between your times and theirs was an integer number of minutes. Intercontinental communications would require a degree of pre-arrangement (to first learn their hours of operation) to make sure that when you attempt to call them, they're there to answer the phone. On the other hand, today I know that businesses across the country (if not across the world) tend to stick with a "nine to five" work day, and all I would need to know is what state or country my
"Well, this isn't a radical change like decimal time, in that it will have zero effect on John Doe's wrist watch."
My watch and my alarm clock both set themselves from the signal broadcast by WWVB. That signal will tell my clock and watch if it's DST, whether there's a leap-second change coming up, and in what direction that leap second will go. There's no room for leap hours without changin the encoding standard for the radio broadcast. Changing DST has no effect on these timepieces (the radio signal indicates whether it's DST or not), but changing the definition of UTC will break all radio-controlled timepieces.
Additionally, unlike DST, leap seconds are applied globally at once, at 00:00 UTC. Where DST is applied in the middle of the night between Saturday and Sunday, leap seconds would be applied between the hours of 09:00 to 17:00 for literally 1/3 the planet, and at the end of a given month (potentially in the middle of a work week). This simply isn't workable when we're talking about entire hours.
I can support changing DST, and I could support abandoning UTC and just sticking with TAI, but I can't support this.
Deny both Canada and Denmark: have the US annex Greenland. That way we can have the Canadians surrounded on three sides, and it's a long, cold swim to Russia! Mwa-ha-ha!:)
It's all so clear now! Microsoft and Sony are still in Phase Two!
Really, though, the line from the Microsoft rep makes my head hurt. "The fact that we didn't shovel as many Benjamins into the incinerator this quarter really validates our decision to start shovelling Benjamins into the incinerator!" WTF? Are we seeing a setup for a bubble burst for Microsoft and Sony in the next console generation? How much more of this spin will investors continue to put up with before they start taking their money elsewhere?
Meh. IIRC, the Yamauchi family still owns majority interest in the company. All the other investors can do is either buy or sell, having no other influence in the company (like firing people because they're not making enough money).
Nintendo isn't much a day-trading darling, since there's only so much of that 50%-1 to go around and most sane people are hanging on to it because of the company's continued profits. I may not be a professional investor, but personally, if I had yen lying around, I'd look into buying some interest that isn't on the stock market roller coaster and hasn't done anything particularly evil lately.
"The military is still composed of PEOPLE, ordinary Americans who would have to be somehow be persuaded to use that awesome weaponry against their fellow citizens."
People, yes, but people who have opted to support the actions of the government, and those who the government allows to have such deadly force. We're not talking about a broad cross-section of the people, but a "select corps" in the words of the Federalist Papers, "composed of the young and ardent," and described as something to be both respected and feared. It's why we have a constitutional bias against standing armies as well as allowing the states to maintain separate militias for their own defense even while denying them the right to maintain their own armies.
Of course, federal conscription that sidesteps the state militias and federal involvement in the nomination of state militia officers breaks down most of these defenses, while showing the powers of the federal government in cherry-picking who gets to serve in the federal forces.
"The budget has gone up, not down. Further, tax revenues were will above expectations this year."
What's your frame of reference? NASA budget in general, or manned exploration in specific? Up from what point in time? Accounting for inflation or not? Gross gains or net gains?
"The global criticism around US human rights injustices doesn't even exist on the same scale as the Soviet Union."
Stalin could reach across into Mexico to eliminate Trotsky, and we can reach across into Italy and "disappear" undesirables. I'm faling to see a qualitative difference. Sure, we may not be as bad domestically as the USSR was within its own borders, but outside of the 50 states there isn't much difference to what the Soviets did.
"I am not sure what Soviet Union you are talking about, but the one I recall had a rapid INCREASE in freedoms and a rapid DECREASE in governmental power right before it all fell apart."
And the rest of the 90%+ of its time in existance?
"The US still maintains extremely liberal speech and protest laws."
Until you're prosecuted under part of the USA PATRIOT Act. Beyond that, you can say whatever you want so long as it has zero chance of causing any sort of change in the government. Our two major parties, for example, have a long and proud history of working together to silence alternative political viewpoints in the political arena (did either Bush or Kerry ever debate, say, Badnarik or Cobb?).
Plese forgive me for failing to see how a two-party system improves on a one-party system because "these go to eleven!"
"Hell, I was in DC during the height of the anit-war protests,"
Which war? War protests are all fine and dandy so long as the government will allow them? How about anti-war protests in the 1960's and 1970's? When both parties are in agreement, there is no room for dissent in this country, and its damning to point out that the way that anti-war protests were "tolerated" by the federal government during the Vietnam War is actually an improvement over the policies in places during the 1910's. It only took half a century. Yay stability!
"The key difference between the US and all other "empires" is that the US has an extremely stable political system and civil society."
How is that different from any other empire? After all, we are talking about empire here, something that is intrinsicly monolithic and stable. The hallmark of nearly all imperial collapses is that the imperial governments were so "stable" as to be intractable, with so much momentum that nothing less than a bloody overthrow could actually bring about social change.
And no, the US electoral process, with carefully gerrymandered district lines and ballot choices that boil down to "Do you still beat your wife?" do not allow for the fluidity you believe our nation is capable of.
"Hell, it could be argued that the US has one of the MOST stable political systems in the world."
That's a good thing? Would the American Revolution have happened if the British government weren't so stubbornly "stable" in its dealings with its colonies? Several major democratic improvements (both within the UK and in its colonies) didn't happen until (surprise!) there was a bloody overthrow of the government, if only in part of the empire.
The only benefit of this "stability" you tout is the fact that it's a known evil.
"it has one of the worlds longest running continuous governments in the world."
As did Rome.
Even of those original states that ratified the Constitution (as opposed to being added to the Union by way of Congressional fiat), very few of those still operate under the constitution they had in 1789. The continuance of the US constitution could be seen as a sign of its flexibility and open-endedness, allowing it to deal with modern issues. But it could just as easily be seen as a sign of its inability to change with the times, its long life bei
"so I still have something to do on a Friday night."
Your use of the word "still" suggests the imbalance in the dating world today. For most of the male readers here, plans for Friday nights involve network gaming. In this possible future, having a "flesh and blood" woman will probably be something of a status symbol (in other words, not that different from how things are today), and the only diference will be in the social lives of the guys you're already not dating.
Do I want yet another device with a web browser (sans keyboard), or do I want to keep playing Soul Blazer (which I legally own and dumped myself on my SWC) on my PSP?
Perhaps this wouldn't be an issue if we were talking about Square-Enix and not SQUARE-enix (forget Soul Blazer/Gaia/Terranigma, where are the DQ rehashes for GBA? You know, like the FF rehashses?), but as it stands, if the PSP is to replace a device I would have sitting near my TV, I'd rather have it replace my SNES instead of my DVD player or my laptop. The less space I have consumed by older hardware, the more I can devote to newer toys.
Neither did I, but the Triforce hunt that most of us outside Japan saw isn't the way it was in the Japanese version. I've heard that there were twenty-some-odd pieces to find before it was changed for the North American and subsequent versions.
Why not post it as a comment, subject to the moderation mechanism, instead of editorializing as part of the article? After all, other than for reviews, you don't seem to allow article submitters to include such commentary.
"Exclusive" doesn't mean what it used to mean. Consider Resident Evil. I expect to be playing this on my magical purple lunchbox of joy within six months.
Slashdot Mirror
"Does it really matter if I wake up at 0000 isntead of 0800?"
You'd be doing neither.
Key moments in solar time today:
Dublin, Ireland
53.4 N, 6.3 W
Current time zone: UTC +0
Sunrise: 0438 UTC
Noon: 1231 UTC
Sunset: 2024 UTC
Vancouver, British Columbia
49.3 N, 123.1 W
Current time zone: UTC -8
Sunrise: 1242 UTC
Noon: 2019 UTC
Sunset: 0355 UTC
Solar time, we're not talking about the difference between 0000 and 0800, we're talking about the difference between 0019 and 0831.
Perhaps it would be "more fair" to use the mean solar time instead of actual solar time. In which case, we're talking about the difference betwen 0012 and 0824.
And I'm being kind here: I'm rounding off to integer minutes.
Now, would you rather remember that the time^H^H^H^H difference in the hours of operation betwen Dublin and Vancouver is 7 hours, 47 minutes and 12 seconds, or would you rather have a global standard that lets you say it's exactly 8 hours?
"However, if there were only one time zone I would have to find out when people work, but after I found out when they work I wouldn't have to do any math to figure out what time that was to me."
Instead, you'd have to write it down, just as you'd essentially have to do with the operating hours of all businesses you deal with, local or remote. You'd be eliminating anything resembling a rule of thumb for business hours.
"I also can't figure out why you think businesses would adjust their schedules to local noon, as opposed to adjusting their clocks to matches the businesses that they work with."
Aside from the human health aspects and the transportation safety aspects (always safer to commute in daylight), there will always be businesses in that network you deal with that rely on available sunlight for whatever reason (agriculture, construction, power generation, etc.), something that has little bearing to any manmade time standard. Because their business depends on where the sun is in the sky and not so much on other businesses, they will ultimately be the ones that dictate when the rest of their community operates.
"Companies with nation interests are already open from 8 AM EST to 5 PM PST, because that when they do business with are open. "
Beyond opening offices across multiple time zones for load bearing (since nobody can be working more than 40 hours a week), nobody actually does that. Either they're open 24/7 (and ultimatley have a skeleton staff around when the sun is down and most customers are asleep), or they tell you to please call within certain operating hours, and the time zone those hours are in.
"The 9-5 standard didn't come out of daylight hours. 9-5 came out of daylight hours, but it became standard because there's a distinict economic advantage to being open at the same time as your business partners. I don't see any reason to think that eliminating time zones would change that."
Because, without standardized time zones with integer hour differences, no two meridians agree on where the sun is in the sky. The earth is round. Time zones allow a synchronized window of operations within the zone where the difference in local solar time is acceptable (within 15 degrees). Without this common frame of reference, there is no good reason for two communities 3 degrees apart to not set their operating hours (even if not their clocks) apart by 12 minutes. This is exactly the situation we had before time zones were introduced, and there is no reason to believe it won't revert to that situation. GMT was alive and well (which is how they knew what meridian they were on), but railroad and telegraph lines required that standardized frames of reference be agreed upon and established across the country, then the world. And you're trying to argue that the same technological and economic advancements that required the establishment of time zones would now magically funtion better in their absence?
You're supposed to adapt your frame of reference to suit your purposes, not the other way around, and the less your clock resembles the world around you and your personal experience, the less you're actually going to use it to define your frame of reference. As the original post was referring to the situation in China, without time zones, somebody would just have to invent them. The history of mechanical time has been a history of trying to make a more perfect sundial, and if you are going to abandon the sundial meme, mechanical timepieces become useless for all practical purporses.
But, again, your hypothesis of an easier life is easily testable: here is International Atomic Time, where each and every hour is exactly 3.6 ks (no leap seconds). Set your watch by it and live by it. See how well it works for you.
No, I wont' be around in 500 years when the need to add or subtract such an hour needs to happen, but I will be around next year when this hypothetical new standard might be brought into force, thereby requiring the change in the WWVB signal format now. The standard now tells me not only if/when a leap second change is comign up, but also contains information on the current difference between UTC and UT (the difference that triggers a leap second when it becomes big enough for an integer second change), measured in tenths of a second. There's simly not enough bits in the current code to allow for a difference much greater than 1 s, let alone 3600s s. And because the length of time these bits of information is transmitted is itself part of the time transmission standard, squeezing in more bits would break compatability with current timepieces entirely. So, to take into account the possibilty of a change in time 500 years from now, my watch would break now.
First off, you just missed the entire freaking point of the paragraph you cut and pasted. In the absence of Beijing allowing people to live in separate time zones (ala Russia, Canada, US, etc), the people have chosen to implement their own time zones because that's what they want. A global standard for time like this has little purpose when people rarely cross integer numbers of degrees of longitude throughout the course of the day and would rather have a local, sun-based standard that attempts to divide the day into parts based not on where the sun is in the UK, but where the sun is where you're standing right now.
We're diurnal creatures and we liking having a time standard that takes that into account. You can't wish away biology with some global standard.
"My feeling is that they should simply have a chronometer which keeps ISO standard time. "
You misspelled BIPM.
"An office would set their working hours as 1830-0230 and that would be it. No changing the time in the summer/winter/etc. They could change their hours in the summer/winter though."
So, instead of just having to deal with jet lag when I cross multiple degrees of longitude in a short amount of time, I also have to cope with the fact that the operating hours of businesses I've grown accustomed to where I live have absoluntely no meaning here. Instead of today's world where, upon arriving, I simply press a few buttons on my watch, I now have to constantly apply a mathematical operation to what my watch says ("If I'm used to somethign happening at time X at home, then it must happen at X-Y here..."), that all but elminates the purpose of having a timepiece to begin with. I want to know what part of the day it is for the people around me, the people I have to interract with, and if a timepiece can't do that (indeed, begisn to serve as an obstacle to it), it's lost its purpose. I would literally be better off looking at the position of the sun in the sky, thereby eliminating several centuries of progress.
And where you suggest that businesses change their hours instead of simply changing the frame of reference (which is what DST represents), you're advocating a system that would bree chaos. Changing the frame of reference, by definition, is uniform. Every business continues to be adequately synchronized with the other businesses they must deal with in the course of the day. If everybody has to change their own hours, then all you'd do is introduce confusion until everybody agreed on a regular, synchronized change of hours outside of the so-called standard you're proposing (making the standard useless). And even then it would be less efficient than simply changing the clocks.
Have you ever had a physics class? If a problem is set in an ugly change of reference, would you rather constantly have to apply a long list of ugly transforms, or would you rather save yourself a lot of time and effort and simply change the frame of reference?
"An office on the other side of the country might start work at 1700 instead."
Your system also complicates communications across long distances. Time zones simplifies differences in time between two locations into an integer number of hours, allowing a simple calculation to be done after glancing at a clock set in the local frame of reference. Without time zones, everybody would attempt to set their operating times accoridng to time at the local meridian (again, going back to local solar time and making mechanical time standards worthless), and you'd be lucky if the difference between your times and theirs was an integer number of minutes. Intercontinental communications would require a degree of pre-arrangement (to first learn their hours of operation) to make sure that when you attempt to call them, they're there to answer the phone. On the other hand, today I know that businesses across the country (if not across the world) tend to stick with a "nine to five" work day, and all I would need to know is what state or country my
"Well, this isn't a radical change like decimal time, in that it will have zero effect on John Doe's wrist watch."
My watch and my alarm clock both set themselves from the signal broadcast by WWVB. That signal will tell my clock and watch if it's DST, whether there's a leap-second change coming up, and in what direction that leap second will go. There's no room for leap hours without changin the encoding standard for the radio broadcast. Changing DST has no effect on these timepieces (the radio signal indicates whether it's DST or not), but changing the definition of UTC will break all radio-controlled timepieces.
Additionally, unlike DST, leap seconds are applied globally at once, at 00:00 UTC. Where DST is applied in the middle of the night between Saturday and Sunday, leap seconds would be applied between the hours of 09:00 to 17:00 for literally 1/3 the planet, and at the end of a given month (potentially in the middle of a work week). This simply isn't workable when we're talking about entire hours.
I can support changing DST, and I could support abandoning UTC and just sticking with TAI, but I can't support this.
No, in my opinion that title is still held by "Lance Bass Continues to Plague Surface of Earth" (which Google isn't giving me, for some reason).
Deny both Canada and Denmark: have the US annex Greenland. That way we can have the Canadians surrounded on three sides, and it's a long, cold swim to Russia! Mwa-ha-ha! :)
It's all so clear now! Microsoft and Sony are still in Phase Two!
Really, though, the line from the Microsoft rep makes my head hurt. "The fact that we didn't shovel as many Benjamins into the incinerator this quarter really validates our decision to start shovelling Benjamins into the incinerator!" WTF? Are we seeing a setup for a bubble burst for Microsoft and Sony in the next console generation? How much more of this spin will investors continue to put up with before they start taking their money elsewhere?
Meh. IIRC, the Yamauchi family still owns majority interest in the company. All the other investors can do is either buy or sell, having no other influence in the company (like firing people because they're not making enough money).
Nintendo isn't much a day-trading darling, since there's only so much of that 50%-1 to go around and most sane people are hanging on to it because of the company's continued profits. I may not be a professional investor, but personally, if I had yen lying around, I'd look into buying some interest that isn't on the stock market roller coaster and hasn't done anything particularly evil lately.
mozilla.org is a known phishing site! We reccomend claria.com instead.
"All patent applications must be submitted in person, after running the Gauntlet"
RED PATENT LAWYER NEEDS FOOD BADLY!
Many guys I know are more interested in quantity than quality.
"The military is still composed of PEOPLE, ordinary Americans who would have to be somehow be persuaded to use that awesome weaponry against their fellow citizens."
People, yes, but people who have opted to support the actions of the government, and those who the government allows to have such deadly force. We're not talking about a broad cross-section of the people, but a "select corps" in the words of the Federalist Papers, "composed of the young and ardent," and described as something to be both respected and feared. It's why we have a constitutional bias against standing armies as well as allowing the states to maintain separate militias for their own defense even while denying them the right to maintain their own armies.
Of course, federal conscription that sidesteps the state militias and federal involvement in the nomination of state militia officers breaks down most of these defenses, while showing the powers of the federal government in cherry-picking who gets to serve in the federal forces.
"The budget has gone up, not down. Further, tax revenues were will above expectations this year."
What's your frame of reference? NASA budget in general, or manned exploration in specific? Up from what point in time? Accounting for inflation or not? Gross gains or net gains?
"The global criticism around US human rights injustices doesn't even exist on the same scale as the Soviet Union."
Stalin could reach across into Mexico to eliminate Trotsky, and we can reach across into Italy and "disappear" undesirables. I'm faling to see a qualitative difference. Sure, we may not be as bad domestically as the USSR was within its own borders, but outside of the 50 states there isn't much difference to what the Soviets did.
"I am not sure what Soviet Union you are talking about, but the one I recall had a rapid INCREASE in freedoms and a rapid DECREASE in governmental power right before it all fell apart."
And the rest of the 90%+ of its time in existance?
"The US still maintains extremely liberal speech and protest laws."
Until you're prosecuted under part of the USA PATRIOT Act. Beyond that, you can say whatever you want so long as it has zero chance of causing any sort of change in the government. Our two major parties, for example, have a long and proud history of working together to silence alternative political viewpoints in the political arena (did either Bush or Kerry ever debate, say, Badnarik or Cobb?).
Plese forgive me for failing to see how a two-party system improves on a one-party system because "these go to eleven!"
"Hell, I was in DC during the height of the anit-war protests,"
Which war? War protests are all fine and dandy so long as the government will allow them? How about anti-war protests in the 1960's and 1970's? When both parties are in agreement, there is no room for dissent in this country, and its damning to point out that the way that anti-war protests were "tolerated" by the federal government during the Vietnam War is actually an improvement over the policies in places during the 1910's. It only took half a century. Yay stability!
"The key difference between the US and all other "empires" is that the US has an extremely stable political system and civil society."
How is that different from any other empire? After all, we are talking about empire here, something that is intrinsicly monolithic and stable. The hallmark of nearly all imperial collapses is that the imperial governments were so "stable" as to be intractable, with so much momentum that nothing less than a bloody overthrow could actually bring about social change.
And no, the US electoral process, with carefully gerrymandered district lines and ballot choices that boil down to "Do you still beat your wife?" do not allow for the fluidity you believe our nation is capable of.
"Hell, it could be argued that the US has one of the MOST stable political systems in the world."
That's a good thing? Would the American Revolution have happened if the British government weren't so stubbornly "stable" in its dealings with its colonies? Several major democratic improvements (both within the UK and in its colonies) didn't happen until (surprise!) there was a bloody overthrow of the government, if only in part of the empire.
The only benefit of this "stability" you tout is the fact that it's a known evil.
"it has one of the worlds longest running continuous governments in the world."
As did Rome.
Even of those original states that ratified the Constitution (as opposed to being added to the Union by way of Congressional fiat), very few of those still operate under the constitution they had in 1789. The continuance of the US constitution could be seen as a sign of its flexibility and open-endedness, allowing it to deal with modern issues. But it could just as easily be seen as a sign of its inability to change with the times, its long life bei
In other words, you were buying Zelda hoping that it'd be Gauntlet.
You're assuming she'd recognize what she was reaching into.
"so I still have something to do on a Friday night."
Your use of the word "still" suggests the imbalance in the dating world today. For most of the male readers here, plans for Friday nights involve network gaming. In this possible future, having a "flesh and blood" woman will probably be something of a status symbol (in other words, not that different from how things are today), and the only diference will be in the social lives of the guys you're already not dating.
Do I want yet another device with a web browser (sans keyboard), or do I want to keep playing Soul Blazer (which I legally own and dumped myself on my SWC) on my PSP?
Perhaps this wouldn't be an issue if we were talking about Square-Enix and not SQUARE-enix (forget Soul Blazer/Gaia/Terranigma, where are the DQ rehashes for GBA? You know, like the FF rehashses?), but as it stands, if the PSP is to replace a device I would have sitting near my TV, I'd rather have it replace my SNES instead of my DVD player or my laptop. The less space I have consumed by older hardware, the more I can devote to newer toys.
"I didn't mind the triforce hunt."
Neither did I, but the Triforce hunt that most of us outside Japan saw isn't the way it was in the Japanese version. I've heard that there were twenty-some-odd pieces to find before it was changed for the North American and subsequent versions.
"My own commentary below."
Why not post it as a comment, subject to the moderation mechanism, instead of editorializing as part of the article? After all, other than for reviews, you don't seem to allow article submitters to include such commentary.
"Exclusive" doesn't mean what it used to mean. Consider Resident Evil. I expect to be playing this on my magical purple lunchbox of joy within six months.
According to Sony's published specs, the PlayStation 3 will top that number easily!
" Yea, pretty much. But my wife's a poly sci student and I get yelled at a lot about this - so you're going to get it too."
At least she's not yelling at you for spelling "poli" wrong. Or is she really studyin multiple sciences?
I'll bet money the only reason Russia is included in that list is because the original language of the law says "Soviet Union."
Actually, it's very profitable. It's when the ability to disbelieve comes back that harms advertisers most.