The crime rate is only low because the police are there (if you took them away, crime would skyrocket). The reason is two-fold: one, you have a bunch of unruly teenagers who don't know each other, and have never had this much freedom. If you give them too much freedom, they will turn destructive (knew enough bored college kids who got away with quite a bit despite large security forces). Second: townies and college idiots don't mix nicely; townies tend to commit more crimes near campuses.
Since an area as large and densely-packed as most US state universities qualifies for a police substation anyway, you might as well mark it as "campus police."
When MOO2 was released, it was an excellent extension of the original MOO - they introduced a racial attribute system that allowed them to numerically to balance traits, and also allowed for custom races. The AI was significantly improved, to the point that they didn't all do the exact same thing over and over. the new battle engine made tactics more important than they were before, but you could still auto-battle if you were bored with the complexity. The ability to settle many planets within a system also made the large-scale tactics of a war more complex and interesting, as taking an entire system was harder than taking one planet.
It wasn't a perfect game, of course. One of the major complaints from players was, as the game progressed, the micro-management in the game became too much to deal with. And since you couldn't create build scripts or hand-over the basic colony maintenance to an AI, the endgame ground to a halt for larger galaxies.
So, we all got excited when they announced MOO3: perhaps this was the chance to perfect the game, and maybe upgrade to a new game engine. The following is a short-list that would have made any fan salivate:
* Fix the multi-player. * Add a new 3D starmap/graphics engine. * Make build lists longer and allow scripting, and possibly add an OPTIONAL AI colony governor you can research. * Add more tech and attributes and a new story, just to make the game "fresh."
Unfortunately, they broke far too many things and created a game that practically played itself. Instead of adding scripting and optional AI to avoid the late-game micromanagement overload, they got rid of it entirely. All of the improvements in the AI system in MOO2 were tossed for a convoluted and cryptic new system that left players uninformed about AI relations, and pissed just interacting with them. It was a horrible piece of gaming 'innovation,' and gamers gave it exactly the respect it deserved.
I'll give you two good reasons we're not ever going to see this.
1. Los Angeles has already tackled the concept of pumping-in water, but they have the advantage of only having to go 400 miles through uninhabited terrain, and downhill the whole way. If they ever use-up all the water in the Sierra Nevadas, the next step will be to build desalinization plants, which will be cheaper (and less legally-challenging) than piping water thousands of miles.
2. Aside from Los Angeles, NOTHING in the southwest is an important center for commerce. Los Angeles is a major port city, a major tourism destination, and a home for many large businesses. Phoenix? Can dry-up and wither in the desert heat, for all the world cares.
Right now, people flock to Arizona because it's cheap and warm. But if the price of water skyrockets, it will simply be warm, and people will find other places to go. When things get so bad that it's economical to pump water from the lakes into the Arizona area, people will simply move back to where the water is.
Don't over-glorify emulation on the DS, it's not nearly that good.
Let me make a short list:
The best emulated platform is NES, but the most-compatible emulator (NesDS) has a serious flaw: the touch interface to save games is confusing, and often it loses my save states after I turn the emulator off (and I'm not the only one seeing these problems). About the only thing I play emulated on my DS is NES games that use battery backup, because for some strange reason that isn't broken in NesDS. But the list of games with battery backup on NES is short, and limits what I can play.
The SNES emulator is solid for some games, but nothing, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING runs full-speed. You mention Chrono Trigger - fully-working, but not full-speed. Another game that runs, but not full-speed is F-Zero. Aside from that, I have a long list of games that have broken rendering issues that make them annoyingly and/or unplayable.
Genesis emulator? Yeah, there is one that actually delivers full-speed (jEnesis), but it only plays mainstream games, and lacks screen scaling (the Genesis has a higher-resolution than the DS, and you have to scroll the screen manually to see everything, which sucks for just about every fast-paced game).
I think I got one game to play correctly on the Sega Master System / Game Gear emulator (Defenders of Oasis), and even that had some graphical glitches.
The problem, as-stated, is that most of the projects are abandoned after they have partial support. This seems to be a problem with most open-source/free programs, especially on minority platforms - the developer gets bored/distracted, and the code gets abandoned. The DSi may be able to throw more processing power and memory at the emulation problem, but no amount of hardware can make up for the eventual disinterest of coders.
Really, the only haven for good emulation is the PC. I'm almost tempted to buy a cheap netbook to feed my emulation hunger, because I know every single emulated platform from the 1990s would work well.
Exactly. I found that absolutely NO OTC medication would relieve my "migraine-like" withdrawal headaches, not Tylenol or Ibuprofen (unless they cheated and included caffeine, like Excedrin, but that was just feeding the addiction). the best result I had was with aspirin, but that only dulled the pain. My head kept pounding until I slept-off the pain, night-after-night.
For those of you who claim I should have weaned myself off the stuff - if you suddenly understood why you were in pain for all those years, would you take your time, or just drop it right then and there? The pain wasn't a problem - I knew I could take it, because I already had for years.
The problem with caffeine is that it's in everything you love growing up, and you don't notice the effects until you're all grown-up and start to question your world. It was a real eye-opener reading about the withdrawal effects of caffeine, and a light bulb going-off like that. I decided I had had enough.
Some people are lucky enough for regular pain relievers to work. I am not one of those people.
I quit cold-turkey because I got migraine-like headaches every night, and NOTHING short of a night's rest would get rid of the pain. Tylenol and Ibuprofen did nothing, Aspirin dulled it but did not remove it.
As you might have surmised from this thread, caffeine withdrawal effects vary from person-to-person. DO NOT assume that everyone can get a quick fix for their symptoms just because it works for you.
That said, if Tylenol works for you, then consider yourself lucky, and enjoy your caffeine. I, in turn, am fortunate to find that I no-longer miss the caffination.
I used to be addicted to the high, but I couldn't stand the lows - migraine-like headache for hours (sensitivity to light, sound, etc.). I tried taking more caffeine to keep the lows away, but that ended the same - once I crashed, I got a migraine-like headache that wouldn't go away until I got a good-nights sleep. The worst part was, I would crash DURING THE WORKDAY, so my work performance was actually suffering.
Once I understood that the migraines were from withdrawal, I decided to quit cold-turkey - nothing but aspirin and lots of water. I took a long weekend over July 4th: the first day was pure anguish and pain, and the second day was worse. But the third day, I could function, and I was feeling pretty good by the fourth day when I went back to work.
After a week, I felt better than I had for years, and I was surprised to find I didn't have the cravings anymore. I also had more get-up-and-go in the mornings than I ever did on caffeine. And YES, I could code just as well without the boost.
If you've got even an ounce of willpower, you can quit too, but I would recommend taking a long weekend away from the world.
Exactly, tghese naysayers are comparing one insular, tiny nation with high population density to the gigantic, unpopulated North American areas.
I'm going to let the naysayers in on something here that nobody ever brings up: the cost of running fibre to your house is not the only cost involved in upgrading your internet connection. Your average large ISP has (or leases) a huge network backbone connecting all their major markets, and it is the backbone that is a huge cost. Sure, you might be in a major market with very high population density, but your internet connection is limited because it has to connect to the rest of this deserted country.
Since the population centers in the USA are spread far-apart, and in so many different directions, the ISPs are on the hook for much more infrastructure than it takes to connect the population centers in Japan. Not only does that mean you have to lay more cable, but it also means you have to make more branches (or users will complain of too much latency). Just take a look at this link: there are dozens of large US backbone providers, and Japan's largest provider is simple by-comparison (compare to PSINet or UUNET maps). Once it leaves the island, the Japanese networks don't care so much about performance, so the infrastructure is cheap.
Further, the concepts in Japan of NIMBY are much less powerful then they are in this country (not owning your own home and plot of land will do that to you). The people are used to doing what the government/businesses tell them is best, so there's little political impediment to progress. Here in the States, you have to grease every local and state board imaginable, and then HOAs take you to court whenever you want to expand services to an area. This is hardly an easy market to offer cutting-edge services at a low price.
Without an auto-eject feature, even auto-detect wouldn't have made floppies under Windows any more streamlined. You still had to push a button every time you ejected a disk.
The fact is, the CD-ROM standard was much better thought-out, and made it easy for Microsoft to implement autorun. The industry learns from it's mistakes (eventually).
Sun is like a mini-IBM: they have their own CPU architecture, their own UNIX, their own database software, etc. They both live and die on server sales and support. The major differences are, IBM is a much larger company, and IBM has already managed to build the services arm that Sun craves.
The problem is, no company (except IBM) wants to buy a mini-IBM, because it means a whole lot of effort to consolidate and streamline. So, if IBM won't buy Sun, Sun will have to slowly spin things off to make themselves attractive to a smaller buyer. The last time we saw this sort of thing happen, it was with the sale of DEC (another mini-IBM) in the 1990s. In the end, DEC had to be partitioned over several years - Oracle bought the database, Quantum bought the storage tech, and Compaq bought almost everything else. It was a mess, and very little of the old DEC survived the transistion intact.
Yeah, they missed some awesome opportunities. They created the amazing N64 hardware (33 million sold), then failed to turn it into a real consumer powerbase. Thus, several engineers left to form Nvidia, and Nintendo went to ArtX/IBM for their next console.
The capability of the N64 proves they could have created a competitive card the same year the Voodoo Graphics was released for PCs (1996). All they had to do was rip-out the MIPS processor and sound hardware, tack-on a PCI interface, and write some drivers.
Confusing, how? If they sound exactly the same, then in spoken word you have to derive the intended meaning from the context. What's the big deal if you do the same for the written word?
Be careful what you insinuate there. Immigrant households produce high-ranking offspring because many of these parents are driven themselves. It's only the parents with no drive that tend to produce worthless offspring.
You can get the same amount of drive in a non-immigrant household. I experienced this growing up as poor white trash - my mother was a single parent with a high school diploma. She went back part-time to get her degree over several years, and insisted on her children doing the same.
Today, she has her Master's and a teaching certificate, my sister has her JD, and I just got my Masters's in ECE (the whole family is highly-educated). My entire family only speaks english.
Drive is the most important thing you can give a child.
Okay, so we have a band name, and the first album title:
Star Division - No Joy
So, now we need some silly lyrics (that are on-topic).
I went to install my office suite today, It's the same old suite as yesterday, Slow as a blue whale beached by a spring tide's ebb, I'm a butterfly trapped in this spider's web.
But, it only goes back into recent history. Taco would have had to keep around a lot of useless data around for many years to give us all our real acheives.
I agree, the freedom to load and save whenever I want is why I play PC games. I can get immersed for hours, or duck-in for 20 minutes - either way, I'm under no pressure to reach a save point.
I make some exceptions for this: I recently bought HAWX, even though you can't save during a mission. But the missions are short, so I don't feel so bad if I have to quit. Still, in four days, I've already had two missions interrupted by real-life, and had to re-fly them; a single-use quick save/restore system would be prefect for this.
I don't understand why console game designers are so against the idea of a quicksave. When I first played Defenders of Oasis on my Game Gear in the early 90s, I was amazed to find that the game saved my progress constantly and automatically (a welcome feature, since it ate through batteries in 2 hours). I could put the game down anytime, and loved it, but this never made the transistion to regular consoles. Okay, so it makes the game less difficult - make it OPTIONAL, and only turn it off automatically if the user selects the highest difficulty level. What's so wrong with this?
Autosave/quicksave is the only way I can enjoy immersive titles these days; I'm not playing games for the difficulty/stress (I get enough of that in real-life), I'm playing for the STORY and FUN. Unfortunately, anything I play these days that has an immersive storyline, I need to be able to drop at a moment's notice.
Man, that makes me jealous. My OS X Mini with 1GB ram feels more like 512MB ram, because the OS is piss-poor at managing memory. I usually have to restart Firefox with just 8-10 tabs open, because I keep running out of memory (you know the signs - images/plugins won't load, and sometimes entire pages won't load). I can confirm this easily by looking at the Activity Monitor: almost no memory free.
The funny thing is, there's about 400MB of ram marked by the OS as "inactive," (no, not even Wired, INACTIVE), but Firefox can't seem to get a slice of it. My browser continues to run out of memory, while OSX continues to sit on ram. And YES, I have forced all applications on the dock to quit. That ram should be freed when you completely quit an application but even barring that, the OS should be able to swap-out Inactive ram.
My only solution is to restart the OS to clear things up. I guess a long-term solution would be a memory upgrade, but it's rather pathetic to think I need 2GB of ram just to surf the internet on OS X.
Agreed, I still cannot explain why all of the Star Wars movies except for Episode III are rated PG, despite depicting a war where thousands were killed (what, you think those Deathstars were empty when they exploded?). Yeah, there was no blood, and the lead role was fighting for good, but that doesen't make it any less meaningful.
Dark Knight pushed the PG-13 rating to an entirely new level that I've never seen before - it was almost as violent as Watchmen. If they're going to give movies like Dark Knight a pass for PG-13, then it's obvious to me where the R-rating for movies has gone. What's the point of getting an R-rating if it automatically removes half your audience, and doesn't add much intensity?
And what about the sex and nudity you get to sell with an R-rated movie? It's kinda worthless in the age of the internet. It's even more worthless when you produce a steaming pile of crap that was the Watchmen sex scene.
Slashdot Mirror
The crime rate is only low because the police are there (if you took them away, crime would skyrocket). The reason is two-fold: one, you have a bunch of unruly teenagers who don't know each other, and have never had this much freedom. If you give them too much freedom, they will turn destructive (knew enough bored college kids who got away with quite a bit despite large security forces). Second: townies and college idiots don't mix nicely; townies tend to commit more crimes near campuses.
Since an area as large and densely-packed as most US state universities qualifies for a police substation anyway, you might as well mark it as "campus police."
Yeah, it doesn't even support NTFS, and DirectX support is limited to whatever Wine has. By the time they're "done," they'll just be getting started :)
When MOO2 was released, it was an excellent extension of the original MOO - they introduced a racial attribute system that allowed them to numerically to balance traits, and also allowed for custom races. The AI was significantly improved, to the point that they didn't all do the exact same thing over and over. the new battle engine made tactics more important than they were before, but you could still auto-battle if you were bored with the complexity. The ability to settle many planets within a system also made the large-scale tactics of a war more complex and interesting, as taking an entire system was harder than taking one planet.
It wasn't a perfect game, of course. One of the major complaints from players was, as the game progressed, the micro-management in the game became too much to deal with. And since you couldn't create build scripts or hand-over the basic colony maintenance to an AI, the endgame ground to a halt for larger galaxies.
So, we all got excited when they announced MOO3: perhaps this was the chance to perfect the game, and maybe upgrade to a new game engine. The following is a short-list that would have made any fan salivate:
* Fix the multi-player.
* Add a new 3D starmap/graphics engine.
* Make build lists longer and allow scripting, and possibly add an OPTIONAL AI colony governor you can research.
* Add more tech and attributes and a new story, just to make the game "fresh."
Unfortunately, they broke far too many things and created a game that practically played itself. Instead of adding scripting and optional AI to avoid the late-game micromanagement overload, they got rid of it entirely. All of the improvements in the AI system in MOO2 were tossed for a convoluted and cryptic new system that left players uninformed about AI relations, and pissed just interacting with them. It was a horrible piece of gaming 'innovation,' and gamers gave it exactly the respect it deserved.
I'll give you two good reasons we're not ever going to see this.
1. Los Angeles has already tackled the concept of pumping-in water, but they have the advantage of only having to go 400 miles through uninhabited terrain, and downhill the whole way. If they ever use-up all the water in the Sierra Nevadas, the next step will be to build desalinization plants, which will be cheaper (and less legally-challenging) than piping water thousands of miles.
2. Aside from Los Angeles, NOTHING in the southwest is an important center for commerce. Los Angeles is a major port city, a major tourism destination, and a home for many large businesses. Phoenix? Can dry-up and wither in the desert heat, for all the world cares.
Right now, people flock to Arizona because it's cheap and warm. But if the price of water skyrockets, it will simply be warm, and people will find other places to go. When things get so bad that it's economical to pump water from the lakes into the Arizona area, people will simply move back to where the water is.
At least he won't be molesting young boys :)
Don't over-glorify emulation on the DS, it's not nearly that good.
Let me make a short list:
The best emulated platform is NES, but the most-compatible emulator (NesDS) has a serious flaw: the touch interface to save games is confusing, and often it loses my save states after I turn the emulator off (and I'm not the only one seeing these problems). About the only thing I play emulated on my DS is NES games that use battery backup, because for some strange reason that isn't broken in NesDS. But the list of games with battery backup on NES is short, and limits what I can play.
The SNES emulator is solid for some games, but nothing, and I mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING runs full-speed. You mention Chrono Trigger - fully-working, but not full-speed. Another game that runs, but not full-speed is F-Zero. Aside from that, I have a long list of games that have broken rendering issues that make them annoyingly and/or unplayable.
Genesis emulator? Yeah, there is one that actually delivers full-speed (jEnesis), but it only plays mainstream games, and lacks screen scaling (the Genesis has a higher-resolution than the DS, and you have to scroll the screen manually to see everything, which sucks for just about every fast-paced game).
I think I got one game to play correctly on the Sega Master System / Game Gear emulator (Defenders of Oasis), and even that had some graphical glitches.
The problem, as-stated, is that most of the projects are abandoned after they have partial support. This seems to be a problem with most open-source/free programs, especially on minority platforms - the developer gets bored/distracted, and the code gets abandoned. The DSi may be able to throw more processing power and memory at the emulation problem, but no amount of hardware can make up for the eventual disinterest of coders.
Really, the only haven for good emulation is the PC. I'm almost tempted to buy a cheap netbook to feed my emulation hunger, because I know every single emulated platform from the 1990s would work well.
Exactly. I found that absolutely NO OTC medication would relieve my "migraine-like" withdrawal headaches, not Tylenol or Ibuprofen (unless they cheated and included caffeine, like Excedrin, but that was just feeding the addiction). the best result I had was with aspirin, but that only dulled the pain. My head kept pounding until I slept-off the pain, night-after-night.
For those of you who claim I should have weaned myself off the stuff - if you suddenly understood why you were in pain for all those years, would you take your time, or just drop it right then and there? The pain wasn't a problem - I knew I could take it, because I already had for years.
The problem with caffeine is that it's in everything you love growing up, and you don't notice the effects until you're all grown-up and start to question your world. It was a real eye-opener reading about the withdrawal effects of caffeine, and a light bulb going-off like that. I decided I had had enough.
Too bad I already posted in the thread, or you'd have my mod points too.
Some people are lucky enough for regular pain relievers to work. I am not one of those people.
I quit cold-turkey because I got migraine-like headaches every night, and NOTHING short of a night's rest would get rid of the pain. Tylenol and Ibuprofen did nothing, Aspirin dulled it but did not remove it.
As you might have surmised from this thread, caffeine withdrawal effects vary from person-to-person. DO NOT assume that everyone can get a quick fix for their symptoms just because it works for you.
That said, if Tylenol works for you, then consider yourself lucky, and enjoy your caffeine. I, in turn, am fortunate to find that I no-longer miss the caffination.
I used to be addicted to the high, but I couldn't stand the lows - migraine-like headache for hours (sensitivity to light, sound, etc.). I tried taking more caffeine to keep the lows away, but that ended the same - once I crashed, I got a migraine-like headache that wouldn't go away until I got a good-nights sleep. The worst part was, I would crash DURING THE WORKDAY, so my work performance was actually suffering.
Once I understood that the migraines were from withdrawal, I decided to quit cold-turkey - nothing but aspirin and lots of water. I took a long weekend over July 4th: the first day was pure anguish and pain, and the second day was worse. But the third day, I could function, and I was feeling pretty good by the fourth day when I went back to work.
After a week, I felt better than I had for years, and I was surprised to find I didn't have the cravings anymore. I also had more get-up-and-go in the mornings than I ever did on caffeine. And YES, I could code just as well without the boost.
If you've got even an ounce of willpower, you can quit too, but I would recommend taking a long weekend away from the world.
Exactly, tghese naysayers are comparing one insular, tiny nation with high population density to the gigantic, unpopulated North American areas.
I'm going to let the naysayers in on something here that nobody ever brings up: the cost of running fibre to your house is not the only cost involved in upgrading your internet connection. Your average large ISP has (or leases) a huge network backbone connecting all their major markets, and it is the backbone that is a huge cost. Sure, you might be in a major market with very high population density, but your internet connection is limited because it has to connect to the rest of this deserted country.
Since the population centers in the USA are spread far-apart, and in so many different directions, the ISPs are on the hook for much more infrastructure than it takes to connect the population centers in Japan. Not only does that mean you have to lay more cable, but it also means you have to make more branches (or users will complain of too much latency). Just take a look at this link: there are dozens of large US backbone providers, and Japan's largest provider is simple by-comparison (compare to PSINet or UUNET maps). Once it leaves the island, the Japanese networks don't care so much about performance, so the infrastructure is cheap.
Further, the concepts in Japan of NIMBY are much less powerful then they are in this country (not owning your own home and plot of land will do that to you). The people are used to doing what the government/businesses tell them is best, so there's little political impediment to progress. Here in the States, you have to grease every local and state board imaginable, and then HOAs take you to court whenever you want to expand services to an area. This is hardly an easy market to offer cutting-edge services at a low price.
Without an auto-eject feature, even auto-detect wouldn't have made floppies under Windows any more streamlined. You still had to push a button every time you ejected a disk.
The fact is, the CD-ROM standard was much better thought-out, and made it easy for Microsoft to implement autorun. The industry learns from it's mistakes (eventually).
Sun is like a mini-IBM: they have their own CPU architecture, their own UNIX, their own database software, etc. They both live and die on server sales and support. The major differences are, IBM is a much larger company, and IBM has already managed to build the services arm that Sun craves.
The problem is, no company (except IBM) wants to buy a mini-IBM, because it means a whole lot of effort to consolidate and streamline. So, if IBM won't buy Sun, Sun will have to slowly spin things off to make themselves attractive to a smaller buyer. The last time we saw this sort of thing happen, it was with the sale of DEC (another mini-IBM) in the 1990s. In the end, DEC had to be partitioned over several years - Oracle bought the database, Quantum bought the storage tech, and Compaq bought almost everything else. It was a mess, and very little of the old DEC survived the transistion intact.
Yeah, they missed some awesome opportunities. They created the amazing N64 hardware (33 million sold), then failed to turn it into a real consumer powerbase. Thus, several engineers left to form Nvidia, and Nintendo went to ArtX/IBM for their next console.
The capability of the N64 proves they could have created a competitive card the same year the Voodoo Graphics was released for PCs (1996). All they had to do was rip-out the MIPS processor and sound hardware, tack-on a PCI interface, and write some drivers.
Yodelay...Yodelay...Yodelay-AHHHH
So? This isn't the first time that miscommunication produces a great album name.
Example:
ELO - No Answer.
I say we run with it, but rip-off a different band for each song. Then it will really feel like an open-source project!
Confusing, how? If they sound exactly the same, then in spoken word you have to derive the intended meaning from the context. What's the big deal if you do the same for the written word?
Be careful what you insinuate there. Immigrant households produce high-ranking offspring because many of these parents are driven themselves. It's only the parents with no drive that tend to produce worthless offspring.
You can get the same amount of drive in a non-immigrant household. I experienced this growing up as poor white trash - my mother was a single parent with a high school diploma. She went back part-time to get her degree over several years, and insisted on her children doing the same.
Today, she has her Master's and a teaching certificate, my sister has her JD, and I just got my Masters's in ECE (the whole family is highly-educated). My entire family only speaks english.
Drive is the most important thing you can give a child.
Okay, so we have a band name, and the first album title:
Star Division - No Joy
So, now we need some silly lyrics (that are on-topic).
I went to install my office suite today,
It's the same old suite as yesterday,
Slow as a blue whale beached by a spring tide's ebb,
I'm a butterfly trapped in this spider's web.
*Apologies to The Police
But, it only goes back into recent history. Taco would have had to keep around a lot of useless data around for many years to give us all our real acheives.
GIVE ME MAH ACHEVIES BABY!
This is the story about the hare who lost his specetacles!
I agree, the freedom to load and save whenever I want is why I play PC games. I can get immersed for hours, or duck-in for 20 minutes - either way, I'm under no pressure to reach a save point.
I make some exceptions for this: I recently bought HAWX, even though you can't save during a mission. But the missions are short, so I don't feel so bad if I have to quit. Still, in four days, I've already had two missions interrupted by real-life, and had to re-fly them; a single-use quick save/restore system would be prefect for this.
I don't understand why console game designers are so against the idea of a quicksave. When I first played Defenders of Oasis on my Game Gear in the early 90s, I was amazed to find that the game saved my progress constantly and automatically (a welcome feature, since it ate through batteries in 2 hours). I could put the game down anytime, and loved it, but this never made the transistion to regular consoles. Okay, so it makes the game less difficult - make it OPTIONAL, and only turn it off automatically if the user selects the highest difficulty level. What's so wrong with this?
Autosave/quicksave is the only way I can enjoy immersive titles these days; I'm not playing games for the difficulty/stress (I get enough of that in real-life), I'm playing for the STORY and FUN. Unfortunately, anything I play these days that has an immersive storyline, I need to be able to drop at a moment's notice.
Man, that makes me jealous. My OS X Mini with 1GB ram feels more like 512MB ram, because the OS is piss-poor at managing memory. I usually have to restart Firefox with just 8-10 tabs open, because I keep running out of memory (you know the signs - images/plugins won't load, and sometimes entire pages won't load). I can confirm this easily by looking at the Activity Monitor: almost no memory free.
The funny thing is, there's about 400MB of ram marked by the OS as "inactive," (no, not even Wired, INACTIVE), but Firefox can't seem to get a slice of it. My browser continues to run out of memory, while OSX continues to sit on ram. And YES, I have forced all applications on the dock to quit. That ram should be freed when you completely quit an application but even barring that, the OS should be able to swap-out Inactive ram.
My only solution is to restart the OS to clear things up. I guess a long-term solution would be a memory upgrade, but it's rather pathetic to think I need 2GB of ram just to surf the internet on OS X.
That Star Trek TNG episode was inspired by real-world events. In 1987, a bunch of ignorant Brazilians scavenged an old radiation source from an abandoned hospital, and proceeded to pass pieces of it around while killing themselves.
And you think writers make this stuff up!
Agreed, I still cannot explain why all of the Star Wars movies except for Episode III are rated PG, despite depicting a war where thousands were killed (what, you think those Deathstars were empty when they exploded?). Yeah, there was no blood, and the lead role was fighting for good, but that doesen't make it any less meaningful.
Dark Knight pushed the PG-13 rating to an entirely new level that I've never seen before - it was almost as violent as Watchmen. If they're going to give movies like Dark Knight a pass for PG-13, then it's obvious to me where the R-rating for movies has gone. What's the point of getting an R-rating if it automatically removes half your audience, and doesn't add much intensity?
And what about the sex and nudity you get to sell with an R-rated movie? It's kinda worthless in the age of the internet. It's even more worthless when you produce a steaming pile of crap that was the Watchmen sex scene.