Everywhere but the US / UK? Nice way to set a precident - act as though people outside US/UK don't count.
Sounds like modern US foreign policy....
I'm sure that the Beastie Boys quitting EMI is slightly easier than a made man quitting the Mafia... but only slightly.
Oh! That reminds me of the Futurama episode, "Hell is Other Robots."
[Cut to: Robot Hell: Level 5. Bender lands in front of the Beastie Boys. The Robot Devil picks Bender up by the leg and shakes him. Hundred of CDs fall out of his chest cabinet.]
Robot Devil: (singing) Selling bootleg tapes is wrong,
Musicians need that income to survive.
Beastie Boys: (singing) Hey Bender gonna make some noise,
With your hard drive scratched by the Beastie Boys!
That's whatcha whatcha whatcha get on Level 5!
I don't think Microsoft is behaving differently than Sony in the console industry though.. and Nintendo was justly notorious back in the day. (Now it's like when Desslok was aiding the Star Blazers versus Bolar Federation even though he had previously been their big enemy.)
For all practical purposes, you have the right to bear arms provided that those arms will not seriously impede the government when they decide to get rid of you.
Note, this is not what the founders intended, but they didn't forsee a gargantuan standing army and our modern militarized police forces.
Please note, I am a firm believer in the right to bear arms, but unless you also have the small, weak government envisioned by the Founding Fathers it is not a useful check on tyranny. (As the modern United States of America should prove to any doubters.)
The trouble is that they had to come up with a lot of convoluted language because they felt that they couldn't outright say what they meant, which is "Marriage in the United States between members of the same sex is forbidden." So, you end up having to interpret this amendment with regards to all marriages.
Of course, if they were as specific as that, they'd have to deal with protesters complaining that they hadn't outlawed polygamy via federal law, which is considered worse than homosexual relationships by some people.
I think that that is a tautology, as neocons are simply imperialist leftists who find that the current Republican party is the most comfortable place to hang their hats. Remember, they started out as followers of Trotsky, and haven't significantly changed any of their ideas. (Later they were "Scoop" Jackson Democrats during the conflicts in Indochina.)
Remember, the "Overlords" quote is about spineless sucking up to whoever happens to be in power no matter how loathsome they may be. (See Deep Space Homer)
Actually, I think you are right and the language is vague enough that it could work for serial marriage. (ie. the marriage of John Smith and Sue Smith is valid, and the marriage of John Smith to Betty Smith is also valid.) I thought that the "Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups," was referring specifically to polygamous relationships.
I think that polygamous groups that currently exist would have to remarry (I.E. John Smith remarries Sue Smith in one ceremony and then Betty Smith in another ceremony) to get around this, and even then I think it might be up to the interpretation. (I'm not a lawyer, though.)
If not, then I hate to be the one to break the news. (I'm not being sarcastic. I remember how I heard, my modernist literature professor told our class.)
I think they would pretty much have to be. Of course I think Vonnegut, in Cat's Cradle wasn't as concerned with the science as he was with the story. A scientist creates the ultimate Doomsday weapon (a new kind of molecule that "teaches" water to form into a new kind of ice, Ice-9) as a joke and gives it to the U. S. military. Wackiness ensues. I was going to include a spoiler here, but instead I'll just remind everyone that it's a Kurt Vonnegut novel so they can guess what I mean by "wackiness."
In my opinion, it is a certainty that the military will create nano-weapons to deploy on the battlefields of tommorrow.
So, I'm less worried about accidental "Grey Goo," than I am about a Cat's Cradle type scenario, in which a Doomsday weapon is created on purpose.
Yeah, I know. Being an evil, multi-region gamer, I got the European version of Shenmue II when Microsoft decided to have SEGA cancel the U. S. Dreamcast release. It's one of my favorite Dreamcast games. It's an improvement on the original, which I liked, but not nearly as much as part II. I think people who found part I a little slow should give II a chance, it's a lot more fast moving.
Well, in this case, "amalgamate" means, "Place in a food processor and set to gooify." For usage, here's an example, "The Sammy executives amalgamated the hamsters. The hamsters screamed a lot at first, but soon they were a spreadable red paste."
Fist of all the economics of this article are nonsense. First point, a game can't exist in the used market unless it was:
1. Purchased new at one point.
2. Sold back to the store.
So, the game has to have been purchased new (note the article says nothing about clearance games) and the person who originally bought it had to tire of it and decide they didn't want it anymore or that it was mistake to buy in the first place. This should be obvious.
Now, if games were like the used car market, this might not be enough to destroy this argument. I drive a 1990 Honda Accord, and I'm not planning to upgrade anytime soon. It's still a solid car. So, at some point, with games, there might be enough floating around that no one would buy new games, in theory.
But this would ignore certain facts about games:
1. The console lifecycle: Used games for consoles that don't boast backwards compatibility have a fairly short effective lifespan. Basically, they have whatever time is left in the lifespan of the console to be a major threat, because when the next generation of consoles come out no one will want to buy them anymore unless they are too poor to upgrade or collectors. On the other hand, Playstation II and Gameboy Advance are backwards compatible because the positives (keeping control of their respective markets) outweight the negatives (that people will occaisionally choose cheap, old, graphically inferior used games over the latest offerings).
2. No marketing: Games are only marketted when they are new, and this include reviews except for the occaisianal "classic reviews" in magazines like Game Informer. This means that you have to already know that you want the used game and be able to research information about it before you decide to buy it. I recently decided I wanted to buy the game "Splatterhouse 3" for my Sega Genesis for nostalga purposes. Considering it is a rather average game it was fairly expensive and difficult to find. It isn't competition for the new Silent Hill game in any sense for anyone but monomaniacal game collectors like me.
Frankly, another thing that makes this silly is that isn't it just as damaging to creativity to buy games like Namco Museum for Playstation,Super Mario Bros III for Gameboy Advance or Megaman Anniversary Collection for GameCube Used or not? After all, none of those are anything but compilations of older, popular titles. Any money they make will be a sign to the game companies that people want rereleases of older titles and not new titles that "push the envelope." Actually, isn't it worse, since precious marketing and publishing funds are "wasted" on these rehashes which isn't the case for a mint copy of "Super Mario Brothers III" for NES.
Oh, and one last thing. I don't care if games are creative, I only care if they are good and entertaining for me. Maybe the author of the article wants to establish a NEA of games... that's his business.
When I got my B. A. in English the first place I applied (or one of the first) was TSR hobbies inc., creator of Dungeons and Dragons, but perhaps I'm atypical....
I have two degress, a B. A. in English and a B. S. in Computer Science. I made the Dean's list a few times at while pursuing my English degree, got some great reccomendations from professors, etc. I did well, in my Chaucer, Renaissance Literature and Shakespeare classes. I also took a lot of history for my history minor, and got high marks there as well.
The CS degree was much tougher for me, but I did well in some of the abstract math classes and some of the classes on algorithms and the like. However, I think I'm of fairly average intelligence, I just decided to have no life when I was working on my tough CS major. (You know the most difficult class? One of the accounting classes I decided to take as an elective.)
So, what do I like to say, watch on TV? Well, let's see. Outlaw Star, Inu Yasha, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Firefly, Lord of the Rings, Ranma 1/2, Memento, Angel, Resevoir Dogs, The Sopranos, Gargoyles etc... (list goes on and on but you get the idea). (Cue negative comments about the stuff I like having a definite bias toward "genre fiction" as well as often being considered a tad juvenile by people I know.)
What do I want in video games? Stuff like that. Games that look good to me, at least in concept? Ultima III: Exodus, Doom, Painkiller, Star Craft, Command and Conquer: Red Strike, Metroid Prime, MegaMan Collection, Astro-Boy, Vampire Chronicles (Capcom Darkstalkers Retrospective for Dreamcast), Samurai Spirits Collection, Ninja Gaiden, Prince of Persia, M. U. L. E., Metal Slug etc... (again, it's a much longer list than just what is listed here, but not many surprises...)
In fact, the only place that my tastes really veer sharply away from the mainstream is my fondness for "2D" sidescrollers and fighters and my hatred of the trend towards exclusively "3D" games (I still play them though, when they are done right). I like science fiction, fantasy, crime and horror.
So, I'm not sure what point Chris Crawford is trying to make....
Well, the money also comes from theft. Here's a good scam. You send out porn-site scam, and wait for a sucker to take the free sample, for which he must pust in his credit card info for "age verification purposes." Then you wait, patiently, until you build up a bank of credit card numbers. One day, you take that info and subscribe to multiple porn sites you run.
Later, when they call your contact number, they find it is a motel in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the desk guy has never heard of "Barely Legal Lolitas."
What do you care? You're living it up in Petrograd with your crew....
The other night a cop was chasing me after I had iced this stool pigeon with a chainsaw, so I turned the chainsaw on him.... then I was wasted, but I was in perfect health a few seconds later...
Basically, this same point is made by our loyal allies, the British:
Speaking from his base in southern Iraq, the officer said: "My view and the view of the British chain of command is that the Americans' use of violence is not proportionate and is over-responsive to the threat they are facing. They don't see the Iraqi people the way we see them. They view them as untermenschen. They are not concerned about the Iraqi loss of life in the way the British are."
The phrase untermenschen - literally "under-people" - was brought to prominence by Adolf Hitler in his book Mein Kampf, published in 1925. He used the term to describe those he regarded as racially inferior: Jews, Slavs and gypsies.
-- British commanders condemn US military tactics
This is an important factor in many parts of American history, from Jim Crow, Japanese internment, the war against the American Indian. People like to think that it has changed, but I don't really think it has...
I much prefer the message in Half-Life, plenty of Americans understand that their interests and the interests of government thugs do not coincide...
My wife is Thai, so I know a lot of Thai people even though I haven't yet made it over to Thailand. It seems to me from the Thai people I know that there tastes in video games are more like Korean, though, and less like Japanese. The two Thai guys I know who like video games were both big StarCraft/Command&Conquer fans, and of course Ragnarok is a Korean game. Now, the Thai women I know don't really like games, but if they are willing to even look at one it has to be Mario-esque. (I.E. Mario, Hermie Hopperhead, etc...)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure that the Beastie Boys quitting EMI is slightly easier than a made man quitting the Mafia... but only slightly.
Oh! That reminds me of the Futurama episode, "Hell is Other Robots."
--- 1.9: Hell Is Other Robots
I don't think Microsoft is behaving differently than Sony in the console industry though.. and Nintendo was justly notorious back in the day. (Now it's like when Desslok was aiding the Star Blazers versus Bolar Federation even though he had previously been their big enemy.)
For all practical purposes, you have the right to bear arms provided that those arms will not seriously impede the government when they decide to get rid of you.
Note, this is not what the founders intended, but they didn't forsee a gargantuan standing army and our modern militarized police forces.
Please note, I am a firm believer in the right to bear arms, but unless you also have the small, weak government envisioned by the Founding Fathers it is not a useful check on tyranny. (As the modern United States of America should prove to any doubters.)
Of course, if they were as specific as that, they'd have to deal with protesters complaining that they hadn't outlawed polygamy via federal law, which is considered worse than homosexual relationships by some people.
I think that that is a tautology, as neocons are simply imperialist leftists who find that the current Republican party is the most comfortable place to hang their hats. Remember, they started out as followers of Trotsky, and haven't significantly changed any of their ideas. (Later they were "Scoop" Jackson Democrats during the conflicts in Indochina.)
Remember, the "Overlords" quote is about spineless sucking up to whoever happens to be in power no matter how loathsome they may be. (See Deep Space Homer)
I think that polygamous groups that currently exist would have to remarry (I.E. John Smith remarries Sue Smith in one ceremony and then Betty Smith in another ceremony) to get around this, and even then I think it might be up to the interpretation. (I'm not a lawyer, though.)
So, the idea of "one game that breaks the curse" doesn't really work for me.
"SECTION 1. Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any State, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred upon unmarried couples or groups."
Hense, it bans polygyny and polyandry as well as homosexual unions.
Abbie Hoffman
If not, then I hate to be the one to break the news. (I'm not being sarcastic. I remember how I heard, my modernist literature professor told our class.)
I think they would pretty much have to be. Of course I think Vonnegut, in Cat's Cradle wasn't as concerned with the science as he was with the story. A scientist creates the ultimate Doomsday weapon (a new kind of molecule that "teaches" water to form into a new kind of ice, Ice-9) as a joke and gives it to the U. S. military. Wackiness ensues. I was going to include a spoiler here, but instead I'll just remind everyone that it's a Kurt Vonnegut novel so they can guess what I mean by "wackiness."
In my opinion, it is a certainty that the military will create nano-weapons to deploy on the battlefields of tommorrow.
So, I'm less worried about accidental "Grey Goo," than I am about a Cat's Cradle type scenario, in which a Doomsday weapon is created on purpose.
# Our Games
The next game out from them is Growlanser Generations due according to the schedule in Q1 2004
The last site update was April 2nd 2004...
Yeah, I know. Being an evil, multi-region gamer, I got the European version of Shenmue II when Microsoft decided to have SEGA cancel the U. S. Dreamcast release. It's one of my favorite Dreamcast games. It's an improvement on the original, which I liked, but not nearly as much as part II. I think people who found part I a little slow should give II a chance, it's a lot more fast moving.
Well, in this case, "amalgamate" means, "Place in a food processor and set to gooify." For usage, here's an example, "The Sammy executives amalgamated the hamsters. The hamsters screamed a lot at first, but soon they were a spreadable red paste."
Fish heads, fish heads, eat them up, yum
I took a fish head out to see a movie,
Didn't have to pay to get it in.
Fish Heads
1. Purchased new at one point. 2. Sold back to the store.
So, the game has to have been purchased new (note the article says nothing about clearance games) and the person who originally bought it had to tire of it and decide they didn't want it anymore or that it was mistake to buy in the first place. This should be obvious.
Now, if games were like the used car market, this might not be enough to destroy this argument. I drive a 1990 Honda Accord, and I'm not planning to upgrade anytime soon. It's still a solid car. So, at some point, with games, there might be enough floating around that no one would buy new games, in theory.
But this would ignore certain facts about games:
1. The console lifecycle: Used games for consoles that don't boast backwards compatibility have a fairly short effective lifespan. Basically, they have whatever time is left in the lifespan of the console to be a major threat, because when the next generation of consoles come out no one will want to buy them anymore unless they are too poor to upgrade or collectors. On the other hand, Playstation II and Gameboy Advance are backwards compatible because the positives (keeping control of their respective markets) outweight the negatives (that people will occaisionally choose cheap, old, graphically inferior used games over the latest offerings).
2. No marketing: Games are only marketted when they are new, and this include reviews except for the occaisianal "classic reviews" in magazines like Game Informer. This means that you have to already know that you want the used game and be able to research information about it before you decide to buy it. I recently decided I wanted to buy the game "Splatterhouse 3" for my Sega Genesis for nostalga purposes. Considering it is a rather average game it was fairly expensive and difficult to find. It isn't competition for the new Silent Hill game in any sense for anyone but monomaniacal game collectors like me.
Frankly, another thing that makes this silly is that isn't it just as damaging to creativity to buy games like Namco Museum for Playstation, Super Mario Bros III for Gameboy Advance or Megaman Anniversary Collection for GameCube Used or not? After all, none of those are anything but compilations of older, popular titles. Any money they make will be a sign to the game companies that people want rereleases of older titles and not new titles that "push the envelope." Actually, isn't it worse, since precious marketing and publishing funds are "wasted" on these rehashes which isn't the case for a mint copy of "Super Mario Brothers III" for NES.
Oh, and one last thing. I don't care if games are creative, I only care if they are good and entertaining for me. Maybe the author of the article wants to establish a NEA of games... that's his business.
When I got my B. A. in English the first place I applied (or one of the first) was TSR hobbies inc., creator of Dungeons and Dragons, but perhaps I'm atypical....
The CS degree was much tougher for me, but I did well in some of the abstract math classes and some of the classes on algorithms and the like. However, I think I'm of fairly average intelligence, I just decided to have no life when I was working on my tough CS major. (You know the most difficult class? One of the accounting classes I decided to take as an elective.)
So, what do I like to say, watch on TV? Well, let's see. Outlaw Star, Inu Yasha, Cowboy Bebop, Trigun, Firefly, Lord of the Rings, Ranma 1/2, Memento, Angel, Resevoir Dogs, The Sopranos, Gargoyles etc... (list goes on and on but you get the idea). (Cue negative comments about the stuff I like having a definite bias toward "genre fiction" as well as often being considered a tad juvenile by people I know.)
What do I want in video games? Stuff like that. Games that look good to me, at least in concept? Ultima III: Exodus, Doom, Painkiller, Star Craft, Command and Conquer: Red Strike, Metroid Prime, MegaMan Collection, Astro-Boy, Vampire Chronicles (Capcom Darkstalkers Retrospective for Dreamcast), Samurai Spirits Collection, Ninja Gaiden, Prince of Persia, M. U. L. E., Metal Slug etc... (again, it's a much longer list than just what is listed here, but not many surprises...)
In fact, the only place that my tastes really veer sharply away from the mainstream is my fondness for "2D" sidescrollers and fighters and my hatred of the trend towards exclusively "3D" games (I still play them though, when they are done right). I like science fiction, fantasy, crime and horror.
So, I'm not sure what point Chris Crawford is trying to make....
Later, when they call your contact number, they find it is a motel in Hoboken, New Jersey, and the desk guy has never heard of "Barely Legal Lolitas."
What do you care? You're living it up in Petrograd with your crew....
I mean in Vice City of course, not real life...
I much prefer the message in Half-Life, plenty of Americans understand that their interests and the interests of government thugs do not coincide...
I, for one, welcome my new demonic overlords....
My wife is Thai, so I know a lot of Thai people even though I haven't yet made it over to Thailand. It seems to me from the Thai people I know that there tastes in video games are more like Korean, though, and less like Japanese. The two Thai guys I know who like video games were both big StarCraft/Command&Conquer fans, and of course Ragnarok is a Korean game. Now, the Thai women I know don't really like games, but if they are willing to even look at one it has to be Mario-esque. (I.E. Mario, Hermie Hopperhead, etc...)