Because what's the point of flushing money down a hole to maintain a presence in Europe when the people will just by from NOA anyway? Especially when you have to deal with governments trying to ban all video games outright? Why should they instead try to pander to a market that has been at best apathetic towards them?
A new, smaller Xbox would mean that Microsoft's huge cache of unsold consoles won't take up quite as much space in the warehouse. At least until it goes all ET and ends up in a landfill..
"I wonder how the USPS deals with British postcodes that are in the format AB1 2CD"
First off, the ZIP codes aren't your new destination, it's simply the Postal Service's way to expedite putting the letter on the right plane/ship without having to read the whole destination address, maintain up-to-date post code databases for the rest of the world as well as their own, or simply send it all to the same point-of-entry and slow down its delivery even further. It's less them trying to do Royal Mail's job for them and more them trying to send the mail to the nearest point-of-entry.
Secondly, I imagine they'd do just fine since they already deal fine with Canadian post codes of the same format. While maintaining up-to-date code databases for the rest of the world isn't all that feasable, USPS systems recognize Canadian post codes and can route letters to the destination province/city before it leaves the US. You can just about get away with not writing "Canada" on the mailing label.
"USPS Move half of the worlds Snail mail when its only the third largest country in the world?"
Here's a paragraph you'll find repeated here and there on the USPS' website (such as here):
Since 1775, the U.S. Postal Service has connected friends, families, neighbors and businesses by mail. It is an independent federal agency that visits 137 million homes and businesses every day and is the only service provider to deliver to every address in the nation. The Postal Service receives no taxpayer dollars for routine operations, but derives its operating revenues solely from the sale of postage, products and services. With annual revenues of more than $65 billion, it is the world's leading provider of postal services, offering some of the most affordable postage rates in the world. The U.S. Postal Service delivers more than 46 percent of the world's mail volume-some 207 billion letters, advertisements, periodicals and packages a year-and serves 7 million customers each day at its 40,000 retail locations nationwide.
So, yes, I meant what I said. IIRC, Japan comes in second with ~6%.
"Will posters senders get "can't resolve address" return mails if their postcards isn't delivered in time ?"
What next, mailing out a stack of tracert postcards? If you can't figure out the address, do you want to send a DNS query letter to your local post office?
"Then they added Prime and Fusion. Oh, look, more Metroids secretly bred by the scientists. Oh, look, the Space Pirates have more metroids in between 1 and 2."
Actually, when you look at it, the two new games cover up a lot of plot holes and inconsistencies left in the first three games, the kind that most gamers are used to by now and don't even notice any more.
For example, how come in each new game you have to re-collect everything you collected in the previous game? Why do you need to get the Varia in each of the games? Didn't you already do that in the first game? The opening sequences to both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion explain in clear terms why Samus is starting from scratch yet again.
And let's look at the timeline you think you're able to take seriously. In the first game, Samus lays waste to everything she finds on Zebes and blows the whole thing sky high. You can see the destruction in Super Metroid. Good old-fashioned slash-and-burn. So where did the uber-fortress in Super Metroid come from? Didn't Samus essentially wipe out their main base? The only way the pirates would be able to rebuild that quickly and completely is if they, say, have a second base of operations elsewhere in the star system from which to rebuild.
And in Super Metroid, there are metroids all over the place again. But if Samus truly had the last metroid, that wouldn't be possible. The intro suggests that Samus was in hot pursuit of Ridley and his prize, and the back story is pretty clear that you need at least 24 hours for a metroid to reproduce. So either the pirates still have their own samples in their secondary base, or they still have information on how to speed up the process (something that simply wouldn't have survived Samus' gutting of the first Zebes base). Hell, the pirates even had some forays into metroid cloning, referred to as "mochtroids" (those cheesy metroid rip-offs near the boss of the water zone) in my Super Metroid guide book. If the sample Ridley stole was really all the pirates had on metroids, you'd have to say that they move pretty damned fast.
And how exactly was Ridley able to get that "last" metroid so easily, anyway? You'd figure that, other than Samus herself, only some Federation REMF higher-ups knew she was transporting the "last" metroid to a Feddie research base. So isn't it interesting the way that Ridley was able to attack exactly the right base at exactly the right time, right after Samus had left the base for points unknown? And in the Ceres base, it's interesting to note that the only room that actually looks like it saw action was the laboratory itself. It reeks of a surgical strike. Where exactly would Ridley get this kind of information if not from a Federation tip? Metroid Fusion has shown us that not everything is peachy-keen in the Federation heierarchy and I don't think we could put it beyond them to let the pirates capture this "last" metroid for ulterior motives (Why do your own research when you can just let the pirates do it and steal their information back? And wouldn't it be nice to still have a viable outside threat in order to keep the Federation unified?). But, of course, they wouldn't really let their absolute last metroid sample fall into pirate hands...
Metroid Prime was also kind enough to explain how critters like Ridley and Kraid could appear in Super Metroid after being gutted in the original game.
The games also go a long way into explaining just why Samus is able to do so many things that Federation forces can't (Chozo technology), why there are such an insidious creature like the metroid to begin with (a little too heinous to be able to explain away with evolution), and just what it is both sides (Federation/pirate) are after beyond just a trite good vs. evil fight.
Actually, that could spell problems for the military. Army/Fleet post office addresses are intentionally vague to keep people from knowing quite where the mail is going. No mention of destination city or even country, just a box number, a two-digit code for the branch of service instead of a state, and a ZIP code that has no real geographic definition. Changing the addresses to be geography-specific would both compromise some security and lessen service peronnel's access to the mail, because the military would be unhappy with giving out those addresses.
GPS only tells you where you're going, not how to get there. Latitude and longitude have little (if anything) to do with planning out carrier routes for mail collection and delivery. This is why your address is "123 Main Street" instad of "30 N, 90 W."
"But, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Postal Service likes its system just fine and will not change it to someone elses liking. Kinda like the metric system."
Metric is a bad analogy. The USPS has no reason to change to suit somebody else because they are the 500 lb. gorilla that literally moves half the world's letter mail. When you're that big, everybody else conforms to you.
(IIRC, the USPS is already starting to implement ZIP+4 codes for outbound international mail to speed up sorting in-country.)
"Even if the new system is better."
How exactly would it be better? And would it be better enough to overhaul all those OCR and barcode readers the USPS uses to sort the mail already? They already seem pretty efficient when it comes to drawing zone maps, what good could possibly come from changing their names?
So far, the only reason I see to sign on to this is the Ferret Effect. "It's new and shiney!"
"The same is true for the Royal Mail."
Aren't they out of business yet, what with their deregulation efforts?
"The move from ignoring Metroid for almost a decade to massive support of it on Nintendo's part is a strange one, particularly since Metroid Prime, though acclaimed,"
Metroid gets a luke-warm reception in Japan but is incredibly popular here in North America. If they learned nothing else with the N64, it's that the North American market is very important to Nintendo, enough even to keep the company's head above water in the worst of times. They're simply working to pander to us some more by giving us what we want (and giving it to us before it comes to anybody else at that).
"I do not want to play another platformer that looks/feels/plays like games from 10 years back."
RTFA. The only way it "looks/feels/plays" like the original game is a slight tip of the hat to the graphical style. Everything else is new and plays almost exactly like Metroid Fusion, a game less than a year old. New weapons, new abilities, new bad guys, and a new map to take into account both these new abilities and new baddies that have become "staples" in recent years. If it weren't using the same back-story, it'd be considered a completely new game.
"And yes, even if the graphics _are_ better, on that small screen it is kind of hard to distinguish between 256 or 16 Million colours."
Get out from under the rock you're living under and pre-order your Game Boy Player already.
"Come on now, use handhelds in combination with GPRS to make location based games,
What, was is the new GBA alone not expensive enough for you?
"make random interaction with other players part of the game,"
You mean like Pokemon?
And what about us people who don't know a bunch of other GBA owners to interact with? Zelda: Four Swords, looks pretty damned interesting (perhaps even "innovative"), but I'm not going to get it because I have nobody else to play it with.
Actually, a WWII-vintage carrier would probably do better against Exocets. The "modern" ships sunk by Exocets were built with the "speed uber alles" pilosophy and had paper-thin aluminum hulls. Anything with real armor wouldn't have been mission-kills. (The same could probably be said about the USS Cole.)
Q: What does the captain of an Iowa-class battleship do after his ship is hit with an Exocet missile?
A: He sends two ratings up on deck. One with a broom and a dustpan; the other with a can of gray paint and a brush.
Look on the bright side: At least you're not New Zealand! And when all is said and done, even the "lowly" RCN can still point and laugh at the People's Army-Navy.
And then there are the countries that have aircraft carriers and wish they didn't. I think the recent big push in the Fench navy for stealth is so that nobody will notice their CVN Charles de Gaulle.
"Harrier Jump Jets are reasonably modern as I recall."
Lovingly refered to as "Widowmakers." I'd rather take my chances on an F/A-18 and a Nimitz clas, thanks.
Besides, the AV8-B is more of a ground-support fighter and not all that good at air superiority or interdiction. If it weren't for British "jump carriers," their ony customers would be the RMC and the USMC.
"Do you know how to drive an aircraft carrier? I don't think it has merely a gas/brake/steering wheel."
No, it just has a "steering wheel" and a throttle (everything else is just bells and whistles). The hard parts are paralell parking (a/k/a "docking") and manning the engine room.
"Which country was going to let you bring that monstrosity into their port again...?"
Any, so long as you an afford the port charges.
"Don't these things require a crew of 1000's? Or at least 100 people I'd imagine, more if something goes wrong!"
This is why you should buy a modern ship instead. Unless you're also able to afford planes and their required crews (and/or intend to fill the CIC), automation can take care of most problems. Modern oil tankers (bigger than even modern US aircraft carriers) rarely need a crew of more than 30.
"It costs me $20 to fill my car up at the gas station...dear god, I don't even want to think of this!!!"
Aircraft carriers tend to carry more aircraft-grade kerosene more than fuel oil (I don't know what a gas-turbine carrier's fuel efficiency would look like, though). And fuel oil is cheap, even compared to gasoline and diesel fuel. You'll still need a little more than your average Suburban, but at least you'll be spending less than $1.00/gal.
Putting planes on it is even more expensive. Especially when you're talking about a flight deck dating from WWII. Unless you're planning to go back to piston-driven aircraft, this ship will more or less require either a major overhaul or a plane specifically built for it. Add in the cost for a shipload of AV8Bs and suddenly the price triples (at the very least).
"Consequently, three Falklands-vintage carriers will soon be on the market for any dictator on good enough terms with London..."
It's probably cheaper to buy Falklands-vintage Exocets.
"The gas bubbles resulted from underwater landslides releasing frozen methane gas which had built up over millennia."
The funny thing about liquids is that they propogate waves pretty well. Shouldn't this result in a tsunami? Or, at the very least, noticable seismic activity?
Slashdot Mirror
"Why does Nintendo even care about this?"
Because what's the point of flushing money down a hole to maintain a presence in Europe when the people will just by from NOA anyway? Especially when you have to deal with governments trying to ban all video games outright? Why should they instead try to pander to a market that has been at best apathetic towards them?
"I'm perplexed as to how he feels it is the same as OoT or MM"
Nobody's had the heart to tell the poor guy that what he's playing is the bonus disk.
No, no, the gold disk!
... he's just a little miffed about what happened to him at E3 '01.
A new, smaller Xbox would mean that Microsoft's huge cache of unsold consoles won't take up quite as much space in the warehouse. At least until it goes all ET and ends up in a landfill..
"I wonder how the USPS deals with British postcodes that are in the format AB1 2CD"
First off, the ZIP codes aren't your new destination, it's simply the Postal Service's way to expedite putting the letter on the right plane/ship without having to read the whole destination address, maintain up-to-date post code databases for the rest of the world as well as their own, or simply send it all to the same point-of-entry and slow down its delivery even further. It's less them trying to do Royal Mail's job for them and more them trying to send the mail to the nearest point-of-entry.
Secondly, I imagine they'd do just fine since they already deal fine with Canadian post codes of the same format. While maintaining up-to-date code databases for the rest of the world isn't all that feasable, USPS systems recognize Canadian post codes and can route letters to the destination province/city before it leaves the US. You can just about get away with not writing "Canada" on the mailing label.
Here's a paragraph you'll find repeated here and there on the USPS' website (such as here):So, yes, I meant what I said. IIRC, Japan comes in second with ~6%.
"Will posters senders get "can't resolve address" return mails if their postcards isn't delivered in time ?"
What next, mailing out a stack of tracert postcards? If you can't figure out the address, do you want to send a DNS query letter to your local post office?
First off, yes, I have no life.
"Then they added Prime and Fusion. Oh, look, more Metroids secretly bred by the scientists. Oh, look, the Space Pirates have more metroids in between 1 and 2."
Actually, when you look at it, the two new games cover up a lot of plot holes and inconsistencies left in the first three games, the kind that most gamers are used to by now and don't even notice any more.
For example, how come in each new game you have to re-collect everything you collected in the previous game? Why do you need to get the Varia in each of the games? Didn't you already do that in the first game? The opening sequences to both Metroid Prime and Metroid Fusion explain in clear terms why Samus is starting from scratch yet again.
And let's look at the timeline you think you're able to take seriously. In the first game, Samus lays waste to everything she finds on Zebes and blows the whole thing sky high. You can see the destruction in Super Metroid. Good old-fashioned slash-and-burn. So where did the uber-fortress in Super Metroid come from? Didn't Samus essentially wipe out their main base? The only way the pirates would be able to rebuild that quickly and completely is if they, say, have a second base of operations elsewhere in the star system from which to rebuild.
And in Super Metroid, there are metroids all over the place again. But if Samus truly had the last metroid, that wouldn't be possible. The intro suggests that Samus was in hot pursuit of Ridley and his prize, and the back story is pretty clear that you need at least 24 hours for a metroid to reproduce. So either the pirates still have their own samples in their secondary base, or they still have information on how to speed up the process (something that simply wouldn't have survived Samus' gutting of the first Zebes base). Hell, the pirates even had some forays into metroid cloning, referred to as "mochtroids" (those cheesy metroid rip-offs near the boss of the water zone) in my Super Metroid guide book. If the sample Ridley stole was really all the pirates had on metroids, you'd have to say that they move pretty damned fast.
And how exactly was Ridley able to get that "last" metroid so easily, anyway? You'd figure that, other than Samus herself, only some Federation REMF higher-ups knew she was transporting the "last" metroid to a Feddie research base. So isn't it interesting the way that Ridley was able to attack exactly the right base at exactly the right time, right after Samus had left the base for points unknown? And in the Ceres base, it's interesting to note that the only room that actually looks like it saw action was the laboratory itself. It reeks of a surgical strike. Where exactly would Ridley get this kind of information if not from a Federation tip? Metroid Fusion has shown us that not everything is peachy-keen in the Federation heierarchy and I don't think we could put it beyond them to let the pirates capture this "last" metroid for ulterior motives (Why do your own research when you can just let the pirates do it and steal their information back? And wouldn't it be nice to still have a viable outside threat in order to keep the Federation unified?). But, of course, they wouldn't really let their absolute last metroid sample fall into pirate hands...
Metroid Prime was also kind enough to explain how critters like Ridley and Kraid could appear in Super Metroid after being gutted in the original game.
The games also go a long way into explaining just why Samus is able to do so many things that Federation forces can't (Chozo technology), why there are such an insidious creature like the metroid to begin with (a little too heinous to be able to explain away with evolution), and just what it is both sides (Federation/pirate) are after beyond just a trite good vs. evil fight.
Actually, that could spell problems for the military. Army/Fleet post office addresses are intentionally vague to keep people from knowing quite where the mail is going. No mention of destination city or even country, just a box number, a two-digit code for the branch of service instead of a state, and a ZIP code that has no real geographic definition. Changing the addresses to be geography-specific would both compromise some security and lessen service peronnel's access to the mail, because the military would be unhappy with giving out those addresses.
GPS only tells you where you're going, not how to get there. Latitude and longitude have little (if anything) to do with planning out carrier routes for mail collection and delivery. This is why your address is "123 Main Street" instad of "30 N, 90 W."
"But, the fact of the matter is that the U.S. Postal Service likes its system just fine and will not change it to someone elses liking. Kinda like the metric system."
Metric is a bad analogy. The USPS has no reason to change to suit somebody else because they are the 500 lb. gorilla that literally moves half the world's letter mail. When you're that big, everybody else conforms to you.
(IIRC, the USPS is already starting to implement ZIP+4 codes for outbound international mail to speed up sorting in-country.)
"Even if the new system is better."
How exactly would it be better? And would it be better enough to overhaul all those OCR and barcode readers the USPS uses to sort the mail already? They already seem pretty efficient when it comes to drawing zone maps, what good could possibly come from changing their names?
So far, the only reason I see to sign on to this is the Ferret Effect. "It's new and shiney!"
"The same is true for the Royal Mail."
Aren't they out of business yet, what with their deregulation efforts?
You know that Link to the Past was originally released for the SNES, right?
"The move from ignoring Metroid for almost a decade to massive support of it on Nintendo's part is a strange one, particularly since Metroid Prime, though acclaimed,"
Metroid gets a luke-warm reception in Japan but is incredibly popular here in North America. If they learned nothing else with the N64, it's that the North American market is very important to Nintendo, enough even to keep the company's head above water in the worst of times. They're simply working to pander to us some more by giving us what we want (and giving it to us before it comes to anybody else at that).
"I do not want to play another platformer that looks/feels/plays like games from 10 years back."
RTFA. The only way it "looks/feels/plays" like the original game is a slight tip of the hat to the graphical style. Everything else is new and plays almost exactly like Metroid Fusion, a game less than a year old. New weapons, new abilities, new bad guys, and a new map to take into account both these new abilities and new baddies that have become "staples" in recent years. If it weren't using the same back-story, it'd be considered a completely new game.
"And yes, even if the graphics _are_ better, on that small screen it is kind of hard to distinguish between 256 or 16 Million colours."
Get out from under the rock you're living under and pre-order your Game Boy Player already.
"Come on now, use handhelds in combination with GPRS to make location based games,
What, was is the new GBA alone not expensive enough for you?
"make random interaction with other players part of the game,"
You mean like Pokemon?
And what about us people who don't know a bunch of other GBA owners to interact with? Zelda: Four Swords, looks pretty damned interesting (perhaps even "innovative"), but I'm not going to get it because I have nobody else to play it with.
Actually, a WWII-vintage carrier would probably do better against Exocets. The "modern" ships sunk by Exocets were built with the "speed uber alles" pilosophy and had paper-thin aluminum hulls. Anything with real armor wouldn't have been mission-kills. (The same could probably be said about the USS Cole.)
Q: What does the captain of an Iowa-class battleship do after his ship is hit with an Exocet missile?
A: He sends two ratings up on deck. One with a broom and a dustpan; the other with a can of gray paint and a brush.
Look on the bright side: At least you're not New Zealand! And when all is said and done, even the "lowly" RCN can still point and laugh at the People's Army-Navy.
And then there are the countries that have aircraft carriers and wish they didn't. I think the recent big push in the Fench navy for stealth is so that nobody will notice their CVN Charles de Gaulle.
"Range would not be a big problem for the typical user."
The big power hog in lawn mowers isn't moving the thing, it's actually mowing the grass.
"The engine is oil free by virtue of design"
*ahem*
"The fueling station appears to be some kind of electrolosys device connected to mains water and power"
Because we all know that electricity comes from the magic electron pixies living in our walls!
"(site says that solar power might have enough energy to do a good job too)"
Depends on weather and deed restricitions.
"I don't think pollution is a problem for hydrogen engines -- they don't burn hydrocarbons."
While the engine itself doesn't, as has been repeated on Slashdot ad nauseam, the power plants needed to crack water do.
Just remember to say "no" nuclear power! We like our air pollution!
"Harrier Jump Jets are reasonably modern as I recall."
Lovingly refered to as "Widowmakers." I'd rather take my chances on an F/A-18 and a Nimitz clas, thanks.
Besides, the AV8-B is more of a ground-support fighter and not all that good at air superiority or interdiction. If it weren't for British "jump carriers," their ony customers would be the RMC and the USMC.
"Do you know how to drive an aircraft carrier? I don't think it has merely a gas/brake/steering wheel."
No, it just has a "steering wheel" and a throttle (everything else is just bells and whistles). The hard parts are paralell parking (a/k/a "docking") and manning the engine room.
"Which country was going to let you bring that monstrosity into their port again...?"
Any, so long as you an afford the port charges.
"Don't these things require a crew of 1000's? Or at least 100 people I'd imagine, more if something goes wrong!"
This is why you should buy a modern ship instead. Unless you're also able to afford planes and their required crews (and/or intend to fill the CIC), automation can take care of most problems. Modern oil tankers (bigger than even modern US aircraft carriers) rarely need a crew of more than 30.
"It costs me $20 to fill my car up at the gas station...dear god, I don't even want to think of this!!!"
Aircraft carriers tend to carry more aircraft-grade kerosene more than fuel oil (I don't know what a gas-turbine carrier's fuel efficiency would look like, though). And fuel oil is cheap, even compared to gasoline and diesel fuel. You'll still need a little more than your average Suburban, but at least you'll be spending less than $1.00/gal.
Why buy an old aircraft carrier when Sadam already has a number of modern Assad-class corvettes?
Until you run into some pirates (and I mean real pirates) and the USCG smiles, waves, and says "Sorry, not our problem!"
"Building a carrier is bloody expensive,"
Putting planes on it is even more expensive. Especially when you're talking about a flight deck dating from WWII. Unless you're planning to go back to piston-driven aircraft, this ship will more or less require either a major overhaul or a plane specifically built for it. Add in the cost for a shipload of AV8Bs and suddenly the price triples (at the very least).
"Consequently, three Falklands-vintage carriers will soon be on the market for any dictator on good enough terms with London..."
It's probably cheaper to buy Falklands-vintage Exocets.
"The gas bubbles resulted from underwater landslides releasing frozen methane gas which had built up over millennia."
The funny thing about liquids is that they propogate waves pretty well. Shouldn't this result in a tsunami? Or, at the very least, noticable seismic activity?