"Nintendo gets millions more to buy still-uncolored Gameboy Pocket systems. They are graphically identical to the 1989 Gameboy"
Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but the GBP had a better display than the original GB. The display was more black/white instead of black/green, providing better contrast and the pixels in the GBP had a faster refresh time so the picture didn't blur as much.
At any rate, the original poster ignored Yokoi's earlier work with the Game & Watch handhelds.
According to Cambodia's own government, a country that still has to deal with an estimated 6 to 7 million unexploded mines, there is about one amputee for every 236 people. If my old high school was like that there would be 20 amputees roaming the halls, and there'd be about a 1 in 4 chance of sharing a bus with one. And where I grew up was nowhere near as densely populated as Cambodia.
Of course that 1:236 number is probably skewed towards adults. Children are far more likely to die of blood loss resulting from stepping on a mine.
"(-mod because I'm conservative)"
What does that have to do with anything here? Is Bush or the 108th Congress pushing to end the US' self-imposed moratorium on landmines? Their only real use on a modern battlefield is as temporary denial of territory, slowing an enemy down more than anything else. They're far more effective at killing civillians than enemy soldiers, much like chemical and biological weapons except that landmines don't dissipate.
Hell, I voted for Bush and will probably end up voting for him again this year (unless Hell freezes over and the Libertarians put foward a candidate that isn't rabidly anti-war and/or pro-isolationism) and I don't see the point in trying to continue using them. And I'm a psychotic bastard that doesn't have a problem with the controlled use of tactical nuclear weapons.
"The median standard of living in the EU is higher than in the US."
Out of curiousity, by who's standard?
"I think this is a major reason why Europeans view the US as "backwards"."
Is it well-deserved, or is it simply hearsay? From what I've read and heard recently, for example, it sounds like a lot of Europeans would be surprised to hear that the "backwards, conservative" US has the largest percentage of college-aged citizens enrolled in university (heard at end of link) and is on the verge of becoming the first country in history where the majority of adults have a college degree (heard elsewhere).
(By the way, a warning to fellow USA-ians: Be prepared to want to throttle any nearby Britons upon hearing the above radio article. Seriously.)
"Yes, both the US and the EU have economies that have solved the problems of food, shelter, and medicine."
Again, are citizens of EU members really better off in these areas, or are you basing this on comments made, for example, by politicians (US or EU) trying to paint a nightmare scenario in the US to justify their own positions?
"Things like social nets and environmental protections interfere with the ability of the (total) economy to grow at the fastest rate possible, so they must be inherently bad. This is the unifying economic philosophy of the conservative Republicans: government itself is inherently bad precisely because it siphons money (taxes) away from investment and consumption."
First off, you haven't been paying much attention to the Republicans in Washington in the past few months.
Secondly, there's a disconnect between these two sentences. You seem to automatically assume that "social safety net" = "government" by definition. Must altruism be government-mandated, where humans are so inherently selfish that they must be forced to help others? If so, how is a government that is "of the people, by the people, for the people" somehow better at being altruistic if those very same people that vote for them are so selfish? Divine right of Congress?
And, if so, why must it be the national government instead of state/provincial governments?
"But in the real world, it leads to a morally bankrupt society obsessed with money."
There's more to the US than Wall Street and Hollywood, though I can easily understand your confusion...
"When water freezes is extremely relevant in "the real world"."
But salting your roads throws the freezing point off, bringing the freezing point closer to 0 F than 0 C.
"Usually, one degree C is small enough to be sufficient in accuracy"
When predicting the weather perhaps, but anything that involves anything invented during or after the Nineteenth Century can be surprisingly picky.
"and having two points on a scale that sort of relates to the same thing (water, in this case) is pretty intuitive"
In Farenheit/Rankine, the boiling point of pure water is 180 degrees above the freezing point. This means that 180 is a signifigant number no matter what kind of "degrees" (temperature or angle) you're talking about. This is why SI dropped "degrees" outright and just says "Kelvin."
The "inernational inch" number of 2.54 was arrived at as a compromise between the relatively insignifigant discrepancies between inches as defined in the US, UK and Canada. For the record, 2.54 was first used by the Canadians, with the US version slightly bigger and the UK slightly smaller.
As far as surveying is concerned, instead of resurveying the third-biggest country on the planet the USGS still uses the older number of 1 inch = 10 000/3937 cm (i. e. 1 meter = 39.37 inches) that was chosen by Congress in the late Nineteenth Century. The US was the first inch-using (and English-speaking) country to agree upon the standards that are now known as SI. This is where "statute feet" and "statute miles" come from. True, these are the same number to five 9's, but people who worry about 1/12ths of inches (called a "line" and is abbreviated with three apostrophes to contrast with feet and inches) tend to be picky like that.
"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light,"
The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. The meter is currently defined as the distance EM moves in 1/299 792 458 second in a vacuum, which in turn defines c as exactly 299 792 458 m/s. The inch, like the centimeter, is also defined in relation to the meter, so you can express c exactly in US customary units as well.
The "frequency of light" you're talking about was an older definition.
"The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago,"
Not really. Every European country had it's own measurement system which were quite different from everybody else's (consider the French "toise" and "arpent," which the USGS still has to deal with in the Louisiana Purchase and Canada in Quebec). The only real standardization came in the Twentieth Century as other inch-using countries other than the US came into the SI fold.
The only real reason feet and pounds survive to this day is the Industrial Revolution. Reciprocating steam engines were developed and perfected by the British, who used their own measurement system at the time. They filled out their steam tables using feet, pounds and Farenheit/Rankine, which everybody else (read "the US") used to build their own reciprocating steam engines. This also gave us things like "BTUs" and "horsepower."
At any rate, These people are in charge of SI globally, these people are in charge of SI within the US, and they maintain a list of conversion factors to, from and within the US units here.
Take my word for it: Your reception with DSS in the middle of a tropical storm is far superior than your reception with cable when the idiot down the street decided not to call Miss Utility.
If the White House and Congress can talk about passing a constitutional amendment specifically banning gay marriage with a straight face, how much longer do you think it will be before the USA PATRIOT Act is made constitutional by altering the constitution itself?
99% is a pretty damned big majority to be up against...
"In other words, if Episode III is the Star Wars equivalent of Star Trek: Nemesis, then he loses the franchise."
Except that there's this little thing called "copyright laws." He owns it, his children will own it, his children's children will own it, and probably even his great-grandchildren if another Bono bill or three gets slipped in there.
The "limited time" bit in the constitution is more of a running gag than anything else. Kinda like the Twenty-Seventh Amendment
Spoken like someone who hasn't been to EB in a while.
"Games like Final Fantasy 4 (2 US) had what I still think is a great plot, but it suffered due to the poor translation and "Americanization" that Japanese video game makers thought we needed."
They re-vamped the English translation when FF IV was re-released for PSX as 1/2 of Final Fantasy Chronicles. They still kept certain flubs for nostalgia's sake ("You spoony bard!"), but we now have a game where Cecil and Rosa aren't afraid to do anything more than hold hands.
"Or maybe just great games that never made it over here. Things like Fire Emblem"
"Apparently, they didn't lose the signal from the rover all the way down like they did on Spirit."
I don't know the specifics, but I would imagine this would simply be because of where the earth was in the Martian sky where and when the two craft landed. If the earth was closer to the horizon for Opportunity than for Spirit., it amlost certainly wouldn't get obscured by the parachute.
Slashdot Mirror
" a 40-pound computer system tucked inside its body --"
You know it's got to be powerful when compute power is measured in pounds... "
No, that's mil-speak for "chimpanzee with a joystick locked inside of a box."
And who will they be playing? The Redskins or the Saints?
"If you're a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac."
Sure, right. That's what he wants you to think!
"Does a 20mhz processor really need 128mb of ram?"
That depends on how much of the RAM is still usable after years of exposure to hard radiation.
You're obviously not visiting the right kinds of porn sites, then.
"Nintendo gets millions more to buy still-uncolored Gameboy Pocket systems. They are graphically identical to the 1989 Gameboy"
Maybe I'm just speaking for myself, but the GBP had a better display than the original GB. The display was more black/white instead of black/green, providing better contrast and the pixels in the GBP had a faster refresh time so the picture didn't blur as much.
At any rate, the original poster ignored Yokoi's earlier work with the Game & Watch handhelds.
" they should display a giant banner proclaiming
"You are the victim of a shameless advertising experiment. "
Isn't that the web in general nowadays?
"for senseless, oft-repeated, sounds-good-but-no-facts-to-back-it-up propoganda."
WTF?
According to Cambodia's own government, a country that still has to deal with an estimated 6 to 7 million unexploded mines, there is about one amputee for every 236 people. If my old high school was like that there would be 20 amputees roaming the halls, and there'd be about a 1 in 4 chance of sharing a bus with one. And where I grew up was nowhere near as densely populated as Cambodia.
Of course that 1:236 number is probably skewed towards adults. Children are far more likely to die of blood loss resulting from stepping on a mine.
"(-mod because I'm conservative)"
What does that have to do with anything here? Is Bush or the 108th Congress pushing to end the US' self-imposed moratorium on landmines? Their only real use on a modern battlefield is as temporary denial of territory, slowing an enemy down more than anything else. They're far more effective at killing civillians than enemy soldiers, much like chemical and biological weapons except that landmines don't dissipate.
Hell, I voted for Bush and will probably end up voting for him again this year (unless Hell freezes over and the Libertarians put foward a candidate that isn't rabidly anti-war and/or pro-isolationism) and I don't see the point in trying to continue using them. And I'm a psychotic bastard that doesn't have a problem with the controlled use of tactical nuclear weapons.
"Any kid growing up in a country where landmines are a problem is probably very likely to listen to the nice soldiers"
Any kid growing up in a country where landmines are a problem probably has at least one friend their own age short a few limbs.
"The median standard of living in the EU is higher than in the US."
Out of curiousity, by who's standard?
"I think this is a major reason why Europeans view the US as "backwards"."
Is it well-deserved, or is it simply hearsay? From what I've read and heard recently, for example, it sounds like a lot of Europeans would be surprised to hear that the "backwards, conservative" US has the largest percentage of college-aged citizens enrolled in university (heard at end of link) and is on the verge of becoming the first country in history where the majority of adults have a college degree (heard elsewhere).
(By the way, a warning to fellow USA-ians: Be prepared to want to throttle any nearby Britons upon hearing the above radio article. Seriously.)
"Yes, both the US and the EU have economies that have solved the problems of food, shelter, and medicine."
Again, are citizens of EU members really better off in these areas, or are you basing this on comments made, for example, by politicians (US or EU) trying to paint a nightmare scenario in the US to justify their own positions?
"Things like social nets and environmental protections interfere with the ability of the (total) economy to grow at the fastest rate possible, so they must be inherently bad. This is the unifying economic philosophy of the conservative Republicans: government itself is inherently bad precisely because it siphons money (taxes) away from investment and consumption."
First off, you haven't been paying much attention to the Republicans in Washington in the past few months.
Secondly, there's a disconnect between these two sentences. You seem to automatically assume that "social safety net" = "government" by definition. Must altruism be government-mandated, where humans are so inherently selfish that they must be forced to help others? If so, how is a government that is "of the people, by the people, for the people" somehow better at being altruistic if those very same people that vote for them are so selfish? Divine right of Congress?
And, if so, why must it be the national government instead of state/provincial governments?
"But in the real world, it leads to a morally bankrupt society obsessed with money."
There's more to the US than Wall Street and Hollywood, though I can easily understand your confusion...
"When water freezes is extremely relevant in "the real world"."
But salting your roads throws the freezing point off, bringing the freezing point closer to 0 F than 0 C.
"Usually, one degree C is small enough to be sufficient in accuracy"
When predicting the weather perhaps, but anything that involves anything invented during or after the Nineteenth Century can be surprisingly picky.
"and having two points on a scale that sort of relates to the same thing (water, in this case) is pretty intuitive"
In Farenheit/Rankine, the boiling point of pure water is 180 degrees above the freezing point. This means that 180 is a signifigant number no matter what kind of "degrees" (temperature or angle) you're talking about. This is why SI dropped "degrees" outright and just says "Kelvin."
"Personally I think 2.54cm is pretty arbitrary."
The "inernational inch" number of 2.54 was arrived at as a compromise between the relatively insignifigant discrepancies between inches as defined in the US, UK and Canada. For the record, 2.54 was first used by the Canadians, with the US version slightly bigger and the UK slightly smaller.
As far as surveying is concerned, instead of resurveying the third-biggest country on the planet the USGS still uses the older number of 1 inch = 10 000/3937 cm (i. e. 1 meter = 39.37 inches) that was chosen by Congress in the late Nineteenth Century. The US was the first inch-using (and English-speaking) country to agree upon the standards that are now known as SI. This is where "statute feet" and "statute miles" come from. True, these are the same number to five 9's, but people who worry about 1/12ths of inches (called a "line" and is abbreviated with three apostrophes to contrast with feet and inches) tend to be picky like that.
"Then again, cm are based on a fraction of a wavelength of a certain coloured light,"
The centimeter is 1/100 of a meter. The meter is currently defined as the distance EM moves in 1/299 792 458 second in a vacuum, which in turn defines c as exactly 299 792 458 m/s. The inch, like the centimeter, is also defined in relation to the meter, so you can express c exactly in US customary units as well.
The "frequency of light" you're talking about was an older definition.
"The first attempts for standardising the inch were many hundreds of years ago,"
Not really. Every European country had it's own measurement system which were quite different from everybody else's (consider the French "toise" and "arpent," which the USGS still has to deal with in the Louisiana Purchase and Canada in Quebec). The only real standardization came in the Twentieth Century as other inch-using countries other than the US came into the SI fold.
The only real reason feet and pounds survive to this day is the Industrial Revolution. Reciprocating steam engines were developed and perfected by the British, who used their own measurement system at the time. They filled out their steam tables using feet, pounds and Farenheit/Rankine, which everybody else (read "the US") used to build their own reciprocating steam engines. This also gave us things like "BTUs" and "horsepower."
At any rate, These people are in charge of SI globally, these people are in charge of SI within the US, and they maintain a list of conversion factors to, from and within the US units here.
"Why do you call them 'English' units, when everyone else knows them as Imperial units?"
Because everybody knows that SI = French and we can't think of a better antonym.
"Total delay: 44/186 = 0.23 sec = 0.46 for response a two way conversation"
Except that VoIP isn't the number one use for broadband. Latency doesn't matter when all you're doing is downloading music/movies/porn/etc.
If you're so concerned about two-way conversations, get a cell phone.
Take my word for it: Your reception with DSS in the middle of a tropical storm is far superior than your reception with cable when the idiot down the street decided not to call Miss Utility.
"If you have the $$$ there is nothing stopping you from getting a T1."
/. subscriptions...
Yeah, and we all know Taco is rolling in it now thanks to all of the
If the White House and Congress can talk about passing a constitutional amendment specifically banning gay marriage with a straight face, how much longer do you think it will be before the USA PATRIOT Act is made constitutional by altering the constitution itself?
99% is a pretty damned big majority to be up against...
"We're about the last people who would be out writing Windows viruses."
Try reading at -1 every once in a while.
I would rather have fewer, better games than more games of average quality.
"In other words, if Episode III is the Star Wars equivalent of Star Trek: Nemesis, then he loses the franchise."
Except that there's this little thing called "copyright laws." He owns it, his children will own it, his children's children will own it, and probably even his great-grandchildren if another Bono bill or three gets slipped in there.
The "limited time" bit in the constitution is more of a running gag than anything else. Kinda like the Twenty-Seventh Amendment
It's only a spoiler if there's actually a plot to spoil.
Not dark as in "less light" but dark as in "shade closer to black."
Spoken like someone who hasn't been to EB in a while.
"Games like Final Fantasy 4 (2 US) had what I still think is a great plot, but it suffered due to the poor translation and "Americanization" that Japanese video game makers thought we needed."
They re-vamped the English translation when FF IV was re-released for PSX as 1/2 of Final Fantasy Chronicles. They still kept certain flubs for nostalgia's sake ("You spoony bard!"), but we now have a game where Cecil and Rosa aren't afraid to do anything more than hold hands.
"Or maybe just great games that never made it over here. Things like Fire Emblem"
Released for GBA a few months back.
Like this?
"Apparently, they didn't lose the signal from the rover all the way down like they did on Spirit."
I don't know the specifics, but I would imagine this would simply be because of where the earth was in the Martian sky where and when the two craft landed. If the earth was closer to the horizon for Opportunity than for Spirit., it amlost certainly wouldn't get obscured by the parachute.