Twin A blames Twin B, Twin B keeps quiet: Twin A goes free. Twin B goes to jail. Twin B blames Twin A, Twin A keeps quiet: Twin B goes free. Twin A goes to jail.
Wow. I didn't know our justice system worked like that. So someone accuses you, you invoke your 5th amendment right to remain silent, and you go to jail?
No they don't. This is Google News: https://news.google.com/ That's not giving away the content, in any case. Each teaser is shorter than a slashdot summary.
And you don't already have to know the news to search for it, you just go to news.google.com
Seriously, how can someone be so anxious to post bogus info as if they're "clarifying"?
Are you kidding me? Come on, be serious. How about this one, on Google News now:
Twitter: Hackers hit 250000 accounts USA TODAY - 5 minutes ago Twitter hacked on the heels of several high-profile cyberattacks on U.S. media giants. Twitter logo. TheTwitter logo is displayed at the entrance of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
Now that I know WHERE the twitter logo is displayed, what more could I possibly want out of the article?
Another thing that plays into it: are you in a major metro area, or more rural? Rural areas are always going to lag behind. The first player in can justify it because they get 100% of the market. After that, additional service providers will only see a fraction of that return, thus it's not worth it to start up there, and thus the first player gets to enjoy their monopoly for a long time (so no incentive to upgrade). So, yeah, they'll always stay behind, but in the context of this thread (whether there's a considerable benefit to replacing one codec with another and having to replace/retool all the hardware), those rural areas are insignificant, since stuff will mostly be designed around the majority of the population this lives around major cities and mostly will get upgraded service over the years.
Apparently you don't know what the word average means, or how significant digits are used. The thing being measured has no impact on the number of significant digits you can use. It's purely determined by the precision of your measurements.
Really? Must be your cable provider. In the last few years, my cable provider (WideOpenWest) has given a free upgrade from 8Mbps to 16Mbps (and in the 5 years before that we went from 4Mbps to 8Mpbs), and introduced new 30Mbps and 50Mbps plans. Comcast has introduced 100Mbps a plan in many areas. Google has their first Gigabit city. I've heard a number of stories of municipals setting up their own internet service with speeds between 20Mbps and 100Mbps. Verizon Fios has new plans of 50Mbs, 75 Mbps, 150Mbps, and 300Mbps.
It's happening. It won't be overnight, but eventually even your cable provider is gonna have to improve to keep up. If they don't, someone like Comcast or Verizon will be all to happy to move in and steal the market from under them.
Once a standard becomes good enough, people will hang on to it for a long long time. Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec? Apple has enough difficulties pushing aac through, and not many hardware producers are including vorbis support. I guess the same could be said for windows xp and desktop hardware.
MP3-files are small enough to be streamable perfectly well even on really slow connections, but video files ain't small. A 2-hour, 1080p video file with any kind of a remotely-acceptable quality will weigh in at 4GB+, and well, it sure ain't streamable over very slow connections. Not to mention the fact that bandwidth costs money. Ergo, any developments that result in higher quality at the same size or similar quality at a smaller size are certainly welcome, both for consumers and for content-producers.
As a thought-experiment, let's assume that this or that TV-series I was watching on Netflix weighed in at 1.5GB for a 1h episode, and I watched 15 episodes in a month. That'd be 22.5GB of data. Now, if the move to a new codec reduced filesizes by 5% we'd end up with ~21.4GB of data -- that's already one gigabyte in savings. Now, multiply this with e.g. 200 000 users, what do you see?
Apparently you don't remember it, but at one time, MP3 files weren't small either. I remember it taking about an hour to download a good quality MP3. And there was streaming, too. Things like Real Player provided lower quality, higher compressed versions that were more suitable for streaming. Then do you know what happened next? Did Real Player and stuff like it win out? Nope. I'll give you a hint...the MP3 files didn't get any smaller.
Connections got faster, and bandwidth got cheaper. Much like those days for MP3, today good quality h264 files are a bit cumbersome, but I can easily download them in an hour or 2 with a typical (not even high end) consumer level internet connection. And today there are ways to get lower quality, more highly compressed version that can stream a fairly good quality HD video in real time. Give it another 5 years and the problem will easily solve itself without replacing every single piece of hardware and re-encoding every existing file.
Or perhaps you quit reading after the first half of the article:
Nelson says that pregnancy is the most likely explanation for the presence of male DNA, but having an organ transplant or an older brother, for example, could also explain it. Unfortunately, the pregnancy history was unknown for most of the people in the study.
So they don't even know if they were ever pregnant and they are explaining it as being from pregnancy? I'm guessing they don't have a clue either about any of the other statuses either. Nor have they mentioned other possibilities like a vanishing twin. They've got a long way to go before making me a believer.
"Integrated GPS navigation with built-in maps, not relying on an (always brittle, often expensive) ongoing data connection, or relying on a 3rd-party app."
I would also add, full-time integrated access to the complete English language Wikipedia, without the hassle of relying on a data connection.
There's already an android app that halfway does this. Look in the Play store for "Wiki Encyclopedia Offline-Free". It says it includes the top 2 million English entries (wikipedia currently has 4.1 million: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia ). It takes 3.6GB of space
I actually did that. I've got offline cached maps that extend about 2 hours in all directions from my house. So the other day, I was 45 minutes from home (and WELL within the cached area). I bust out my tablet, start google maps, and......hmmmmmm.....nothing. I figure maybe the cache was invalidated/expired. Forgot all about it when I got home, but I just checked now, and it says it has all of those areas still cached. WTF?
For the last few years, I've been using Android tablets... I started out with a Motorola Xoom
How can you have been using something "for the last few years" when it's been out less than 2?
I'd personally consider 1 year and 10 months to be a "few years", and apparently so would merrian-webster, reference.com, and oxford. Even if "few" required it to be 2 (which is does not), I'd still consider that close enough to 2 to not get your panties in a bunch over it.
Indeed. But how many of the readers have their own laptop repair shops? A general source of such batteries is a requirement to get this project in the hands of the average tinkerer.
But that's exactly the point in picking something like this. You don't need your own repair shop. You're a million times more likely to find a cheap, generic dell-compatible laptop battery on ebay than you are to find any other sort of high capacity battery very cheap and widely available.
So I gather you don't know either what technologies he actually invented.
My god, you are a lazy, dumb shit. My sarcastic "nothing" edits aside, I led you right to the answers. All you had to do was look at his wiki page. Since you are apparently incapable of that:
"Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system—a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud."
So there's 2 inventions for you.
Myself, I was growing up and really into writing/performing music at the time the Kurzweil keyboards came out, and anyone who was into the same around that time can tell you just how incredible Kurzweil keyboards were back then. So that's 3 inventions, and all of them fairly significant. His latest hype about the singularity is way overblown in the media, but the guy has a very respectable portfolio of inventions...much better than most people accomplish.
Einstein came up with the photoelectric effect and the theories of special and general relativity.
Turing invented the Turing machine and the Turing test.
Codd invented the relational database model.
Alan Kay invented Smalltalk and object oriented progrmaming.
Kurzweil invented ______________
You are right. Kurzweil invented absolutely nothing. He invented so much "nothing" that he's received countless awards from it. This is from his wikipedia page:
Kurzweil has received many awards and honors, including:
First place in the 1965 International Science Fair[4] for inventing nothing.
The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The award is given annually to one "person who has done nothing" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize.[23] Kurzweil won it for his invention of nothing.[24]
The 1990 "Engineer of the Year" award from Design News.[25]
The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "done absolutely nothing." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners.[26]
The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[27]
The 1999 National Medal of Technology.[28] This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering nothing, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion.[29] Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of nothing.
The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.[30] Two other individuals also received the same honor that year. The award is presented yearly to people who "have done absolutely nothing."
The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help nobody and to enrich nothing.[31] Only one is meted out each year to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies the prize.[32]
Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing nothing[33] The organization "honors the women and men responsible for none of the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible."[34] Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year.[35]
The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2009 for lifetime achievement as an inventor of nothing and futurist in computer-based technologies.[36]
Kurzweil has received eighteen honorary doctorates.[37]
In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.[38]
Yep, this guy has received more awards and prizes for doing nothing than anybody else ever has.
If you're too lazy to check facts, don't challenge people who post them.
I disagree. Any troll can post false "fact" after false "fact" fast enough to overwhelm anyone else's ability to check and disprove them. Therefore the responsibility should be on the person presenting the fact to provide a valid citation (if not up front, then at least when asked for it).
No shit, and it is not a labyrinth either. It is just randomly printing forward slashes and backlashes.
"an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit."
it is that. it's just not very amazing at all if you describe it as printing \ and / randomly.
It's not difficult at all. In order to be difficult, I think there would have to be some decision making. The output from this program generate passageways that have absolutely no branching in them. You never have to make a single decision. They are all simply winding passageways that either 1) connect from one edge to another (or back to the same edge), 2) form a loop, or 3) form a small diamond shaped room.
Actually, many states have a reciprocal tax agreement that coordinates how taxes are handled when a new car is sold across state lines. I live in Michigan and bought my car in Illinois. Those 2 states have a reciprocal tax agreement. I was originally going to buy from Ohio, and those states also have the same reciprocal agreement.
A reciprocal tax agreement basically says when you live in state X and buy in state Y, you pay state Y the lesser of both state's sales tax. Then when you register it in state X, you pay state X's tax rate but get a credit for whatever you paid to state Y. So, here's 2 examples:
1) State X = 5%, State Y = 6% You buy in Y, and you pay Y 5% tax. When you register in state X, you've already paid 5% tax (to state Y) so you owe nothing to state X.
2) State X = 6%, State Y = 5% You buy in Y, and you pay Y 5% tax. When you register in state X, you owe 6% but get credit for the 5% already paid, so you only owe state X an additional 1%.
I see where you are trying to take it, but the proportional representation systems don't do as badly as you insist.
But then the point is, the 2 party system isn't the real problem. It's our system of voting that is wrong. So by focusing on breaking out of the 2 party system, we're focusing on the wrong problem (treating the symptoms rather than the disease).
The controller raises a lot of interesting possibilities
Just like the Wii! And the GameCube! And the N64! Yet, somehow, none of these "interesting possbilities" ever seem to pan out into a large library of games.
Really? I could swear there was a MASSIVE library of games out there that would be mostly unplayable without analog controls. Remember, that was the hallmark feature of the N64 controller. Yes they didn't invent it, but they sure started a trend that everyone else followed. Not sure what you are referring to on the GameCube. I don't remember any supposedly "killer" feature of that system's controller. As for the Wii, I think the jury is still out on that. You need to wait a generation or two to see what (if any) lasting effect it has on the industry. It certainly has had a short term effect on the industry, causing the competitors to throw out their own motion control systems (even if they didn't really quite figure out how to make good use of them, and almost no games are designed with it in mind).
Slashdot Mirror
Twin A blames Twin B, Twin B keeps quiet: Twin A goes free. Twin B goes to jail.
Twin B blames Twin A, Twin A keeps quiet: Twin B goes free. Twin A goes to jail.
Wow. I didn't know our justice system worked like that. So someone accuses you, you invoke your 5th amendment right to remain silent, and you go to jail?
No they don't. This is Google News:
https://news.google.com/
That's not giving away the content, in any case. Each teaser is shorter than a slashdot summary.
And you don't already have to know the news to search for it, you just go to news.google.com
Seriously, how can someone be so anxious to post bogus info as if they're "clarifying"?
Are you kidding me? Come on, be serious. How about this one, on Google News now:
Twitter: Hackers hit 250000 accounts
USA TODAY - 5 minutes ago
Twitter hacked on the heels of several high-profile cyberattacks on U.S. media giants. Twitter logo. TheTwitter logo is displayed at the entrance of Twitter headquarters in San Francisco.
Now that I know WHERE the twitter logo is displayed, what more could I possibly want out of the article?
Another thing that plays into it: are you in a major metro area, or more rural? Rural areas are always going to lag behind. The first player in can justify it because they get 100% of the market. After that, additional service providers will only see a fraction of that return, thus it's not worth it to start up there, and thus the first player gets to enjoy their monopoly for a long time (so no incentive to upgrade). So, yeah, they'll always stay behind, but in the context of this thread (whether there's a considerable benefit to replacing one codec with another and having to replace/retool all the hardware), those rural areas are insignificant, since stuff will mostly be designed around the majority of the population this lives around major cities and mostly will get upgraded service over the years.
Apparently you don't know what the word average means, or how significant digits are used. The thing being measured has no impact on the number of significant digits you can use. It's purely determined by the precision of your measurements.
Really? Must be your cable provider. In the last few years, my cable provider (WideOpenWest) has given a free upgrade from 8Mbps to 16Mbps (and in the 5 years before that we went from 4Mbps to 8Mpbs), and introduced new 30Mbps and 50Mbps plans. Comcast has introduced 100Mbps a plan in many areas. Google has their first Gigabit city. I've heard a number of stories of municipals setting up their own internet service with speeds between 20Mbps and 100Mbps. Verizon Fios has new plans of 50Mbs, 75 Mbps, 150Mbps, and 300Mbps.
It's happening. It won't be overnight, but eventually even your cable provider is gonna have to improve to keep up. If they don't, someone like Comcast or Verizon will be all to happy to move in and steal the market from under them.
H.265 is a very large improvement over H.264 (about 50% of the bit rate for equal quality)
According to wikipedia, it's 35.4% smaller
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Efficiency_Video_Coding#Coding_efficiency
Once a standard becomes good enough, people will hang on to it for a long long time. Why bother re-encoding a complete music library from mp3 even if vorbis/aac is clearly the superior codec? Apple has enough difficulties pushing aac through, and not many hardware producers are including vorbis support. I guess the same could be said for windows xp and desktop hardware.
MP3-files are small enough to be streamable perfectly well even on really slow connections, but video files ain't small. A 2-hour, 1080p video file with any kind of a remotely-acceptable quality will weigh in at 4GB+, and well, it sure ain't streamable over very slow connections. Not to mention the fact that bandwidth costs money. Ergo, any developments that result in higher quality at the same size or similar quality at a smaller size are certainly welcome, both for consumers and for content-producers.
As a thought-experiment, let's assume that this or that TV-series I was watching on Netflix weighed in at 1.5GB for a 1h episode, and I watched 15 episodes in a month. That'd be 22.5GB of data. Now, if the move to a new codec reduced filesizes by 5% we'd end up with ~21.4GB of data -- that's already one gigabyte in savings. Now, multiply this with e.g. 200 000 users, what do you see?
Apparently you don't remember it, but at one time, MP3 files weren't small either. I remember it taking about an hour to download a good quality MP3. And there was streaming, too. Things like Real Player provided lower quality, higher compressed versions that were more suitable for streaming. Then do you know what happened next? Did Real Player and stuff like it win out? Nope. I'll give you a hint...the MP3 files didn't get any smaller.
Connections got faster, and bandwidth got cheaper. Much like those days for MP3, today good quality h264 files are a bit cumbersome, but I can easily download them in an hour or 2 with a typical (not even high end) consumer level internet connection. And today there are ways to get lower quality, more highly compressed version that can stream a fairly good quality HD video in real time. Give it another 5 years and the problem will easily solve itself without replacing every single piece of hardware and re-encoding every existing file.
"amplified the DNA"
Sounds Legit.
It appears to be legit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction
Or perhaps you quit reading after the first half of the article:
Nelson says that pregnancy is the most likely explanation for the presence of male DNA, but having an organ transplant or an older brother, for example, could also explain it. Unfortunately, the pregnancy history was unknown for most of the people in the study.
So they don't even know if they were ever pregnant and they are explaining it as being from pregnancy? I'm guessing they don't have a clue either about any of the other statuses either. Nor have they mentioned other possibilities like a vanishing twin. They've got a long way to go before making me a believer.
I thought if you were supposed to call in sick if you had a bad code. :-)
*ducks*
I've tried that, but every time I call in, they make me return to work anyway.
makes sense, it also shows this in the also viewed category:
Sharp, Provolone Piccante Cheese (Whole Wheel) Approximately 60 Lbs
What better to cut a whole wheel of cheese with than a sword?
Ummm, how about a Powermatic 1792017K Model PM2000 10-Inch 5 HP 1-Phase Table Saw with 50-Inch Accu-Fence and Workbench?
Those who don't learn from the Simpsons are doomed to...relive their...zany antics. Or something like that.
I think the words you are looking for are "Simpsons did it".
"Integrated GPS navigation with built-in maps, not relying on an (always brittle, often expensive) ongoing data connection, or relying on a 3rd-party app."
I would also add, full-time integrated access to the complete English language Wikipedia, without the hassle of relying on a data connection.
There's already an android app that halfway does this. Look in the Play store for "Wiki Encyclopedia Offline-Free". It says it includes the top 2 million English entries (wikipedia currently has 4.1 million: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Size_of_Wikipedia ). It takes 3.6GB of space
Learn to use "make available offline"
I actually did that. I've got offline cached maps that extend about 2 hours in all directions from my house. So the other day, I was 45 minutes from home (and WELL within the cached area). I bust out my tablet, start google maps, and......hmmmmmm.....nothing. I figure maybe the cache was invalidated/expired. Forgot all about it when I got home, but I just checked now, and it says it has all of those areas still cached. WTF?
For the last few years, I've been using Android tablets ... I started out with a Motorola Xoom
How can you have been using something "for the last few years" when it's been out less than 2?
I'd personally consider 1 year and 10 months to be a "few years", and apparently so would merrian-webster, reference.com, and oxford. Even if "few" required it to be 2 (which is does not), I'd still consider that close enough to 2 to not get your panties in a bunch over it.
Indeed. But how many of the readers have their own laptop repair shops? A general source of such batteries is a requirement to get this project in the hands of the average tinkerer.
But that's exactly the point in picking something like this. You don't need your own repair shop. You're a million times more likely to find a cheap, generic dell-compatible laptop battery on ebay than you are to find any other sort of high capacity battery very cheap and widely available.
You're obviously a copyright thefting pirate if you need more than 256 GB storage on an SSD.
Or a parent with a camera that records video.
Ohhhhhhh, scarrrrrrrrrry. Targeted Ads.
So I gather you don't know either what technologies he actually invented.
My god, you are a lazy, dumb shit. My sarcastic "nothing" edits aside, I led you right to the answers. All you had to do was look at his wiki page. Since you are apparently incapable of that:
"Kurzweil started the company Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. and led development of the first omni-font optical character recognition system—a computer program capable of recognizing text written in any normal font. Before that time, scanners had only been able to read text written in a few fonts. He decided that the best application of this technology would be to create a reading machine, which would allow blind people to understand written text by having a computer read it to them aloud."
So there's 2 inventions for you.
Myself, I was growing up and really into writing/performing music at the time the Kurzweil keyboards came out, and anyone who was into the same around that time can tell you just how incredible Kurzweil keyboards were back then. So that's 3 inventions, and all of them fairly significant. His latest hype about the singularity is way overblown in the media, but the guy has a very respectable portfolio of inventions...much better than most people accomplish.
Let me help you here.
Einstein came up with the photoelectric effect and the theories of special and general relativity.
Turing invented the Turing machine and the Turing test.
Codd invented the relational database model.
Alan Kay invented Smalltalk and object oriented progrmaming.
Kurzweil invented ______________
You are right. Kurzweil invented absolutely nothing. He invented so much "nothing" that he's received countless awards from it. This is from his wikipedia page:
Kurzweil has received many awards and honors, including:
First place in the 1965 International Science Fair[4] for inventing nothing.
The 1978 Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery. The award is given annually to one "person who has done nothing" and is accompanied by a $35,000 prize.[23] Kurzweil won it for his invention of nothing.[24]
The 1990 "Engineer of the Year" award from Design News.[25]
The 1994 Dickson Prize in Science. One is awarded every year by Carnegie Mellon University to individuals who have "done absolutely nothing." Both a medal and a $50,000 prize are presented to winners.[26]
The 1998 "Inventor of the Year" award from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.[27]
The 1999 National Medal of Technology.[28] This is the highest award the President of the United States can bestow upon individuals and groups for pioneering nothing, and the President dispenses the award at his discretion.[29] Bill Clinton presented Kurzweil with the National Medal of Technology during a White House ceremony in recognition of Kurzweil's development of nothing.
The 2000 Telluride Tech Festival Award of Technology.[30] Two other individuals also received the same honor that year. The award is presented yearly to people who "have done absolutely nothing."
The 2001 Lemelson-MIT Prize for a lifetime of developing technologies to help nobody and to enrich nothing.[31] Only one is meted out each year to highly successful, mid-career inventors. A $500,000 award accompanies the prize.[32]
Kurzweil was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2002 for inventing nothing[33] The organization "honors the women and men responsible for none of the great technological advances that make human, social and economic progress possible."[34] Fifteen other people were inducted into the Hall of Fame the same year.[35]
The Arthur C. Clarke Lifetime Achievement Award on April 20, 2009 for lifetime achievement as an inventor of nothing and futurist in computer-based technologies.[36]
Kurzweil has received eighteen honorary doctorates.[37]
In 2011, Kurzweil was named a Senior Fellow of the Design Futures Council.[38]
Yep, this guy has received more awards and prizes for doing nothing than anybody else ever has.
If you're too lazy to check facts, don't challenge people who post them.
I disagree. Any troll can post false "fact" after false "fact" fast enough to overwhelm anyone else's ability to check and disprove them. Therefore the responsibility should be on the person presenting the fact to provide a valid citation (if not up front, then at least when asked for it).
No shit, and it is not a labyrinth either. It is just randomly printing forward slashes and backlashes.
"an intricate combination of paths or passages in which it is difficult to find one's way or to reach the exit."
it is that. it's just not very amazing at all if you describe it as printing \ and / randomly.
It's not difficult at all. In order to be difficult, I think there would have to be some decision making. The output from this program generate passageways that have absolutely no branching in them. You never have to make a single decision. They are all simply winding passageways that either
1) connect from one edge to another (or back to the same edge),
2) form a loop, or
3) form a small diamond shaped room.
There are no splits, and no dead ends.
Actually, many states have a reciprocal tax agreement that coordinates how taxes are handled when a new car is sold across state lines. I live in Michigan and bought my car in Illinois. Those 2 states have a reciprocal tax agreement. I was originally going to buy from Ohio, and those states also have the same reciprocal agreement.
A reciprocal tax agreement basically says when you live in state X and buy in state Y, you pay state Y the lesser of both state's sales tax. Then when you register it in state X, you pay state X's tax rate but get a credit for whatever you paid to state Y. So, here's 2 examples:
1) State X = 5%, State Y = 6%
You buy in Y, and you pay Y 5% tax. When you register in state X, you've already paid 5% tax (to state Y) so you owe nothing to state X.
2) State X = 6%, State Y = 5%
You buy in Y, and you pay Y 5% tax. When you register in state X, you owe 6% but get credit for the 5% already paid, so you only owe state X an additional 1%.
I see where you are trying to take it, but the proportional representation systems don't do as badly as you insist.
But then the point is, the 2 party system isn't the real problem. It's our system of voting that is wrong. So by focusing on breaking out of the 2 party system, we're focusing on the wrong problem (treating the symptoms rather than the disease).
Just like the Wii! And the GameCube! And the N64! Yet, somehow, none of these "interesting possbilities" ever seem to pan out into a large library of games.
Really? I could swear there was a MASSIVE library of games out there that would be mostly unplayable without analog controls. Remember, that was the hallmark feature of the N64 controller. Yes they didn't invent it, but they sure started a trend that everyone else followed. Not sure what you are referring to on the GameCube. I don't remember any supposedly "killer" feature of that system's controller. As for the Wii, I think the jury is still out on that. You need to wait a generation or two to see what (if any) lasting effect it has on the industry. It certainly has had a short term effect on the industry, causing the competitors to throw out their own motion control systems (even if they didn't really quite figure out how to make good use of them, and almost no games are designed with it in mind).