The fact is that these days the Democratic party is both the fiscally and environmentally responsible party,
Which would end the moment they had full majority control AND the presidency - or did you miss the legislation that almost passed between '92 and '94?
I blame the Republicans for not scaling back wasteful government programs when they had the chance, but I hold no illusions about the "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrat party.
Now if you're willing to take your blinders off and have an informed conversation, we can do that. Otherwise, I can continue offering you rational discourse, and you can feel free to throw DailyKOS nonsensical talking points back at me.
Ram Doubler's primary techniques were to (a) more tightly define the memory space a given application was allocated and (b) adding virtual RAM functionality to the old Mac OS. It had some rudimentary compression techniques as well, but nothing formidable.
I'd actually like to see this work. Hell, it might even make the PSP usable for web browsing if they can get it right.
gleefully? hardly, that was a long battle. Incidentally, the intent of the DMCA is a good one.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the bones of those who were too enamored of their own good intentions to see the evil they were doing.
"Republicans and Democrats seem to hate that pesky "free speech" thing when their problems are being exposed."
Irrelevant. Which one passes laws to prevent it? why, it's republicans.
Funny - seems to be the Democrats being the ones trying to ramrod the old "fairness doctrine", which was one of the worst anti-1st-amendment bits of nonsense we ever had around on the books, back into law. And of course, it's the Democrats who are usually the ones trying to outlaw the free speech of anyone who opposes them as "racist" or "sexist."
No, McSame will be bad for this country. Very bad. He will be surrounded by many of the same people advising Bush now.
You still have yet to convince me that letting Obama (who will have advisers and policies the likes of Jimmy Carter's presidency) in the White House at the same time the Democrats hold the Congress, is a good idea.
Your only thing against Obama is that he is from Chicago, and the politics in Chicago are corrupt.
No, my "thing" against Obama is that I've personally witnessed his corruption.
My other "thing" is that I prefer not to let EITHER party control both the Congress and the Presidency. It's supposed to be "Checks and Balances" after all. I voted Bush in 1992 (because the Dems had Congress), but I voted Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, and Kerry in 2004 (pathetic as Gore and Kerry were) because the Republicans had control of Congress.
You let the Republicans have control of everything, they fuck the little guy over by letting abusive corporations run around with no restraint. You let the Democrats have control of everything, and they fuck the little guy over by taxing the so-called "rich" heavily and we watch all that cost get passed right down the chain. You make sure neither party has complete power, and we MIGHT just have a shot at turning things around - although it's been getting fuck-all harder to tell the two parties apart as the years have gone by.
DMCA 1.0 - Repub congress, Dem President (Clinton) signed on gleefully. DMCA provisions 2.0 (slipped in the various years), about evenly split between repub/dem congresses and repub/dem presidents.
Wiretapping indemnity? Just as much the fault of both sides of the aisle.
Running roughshod over the 1st amendment? Pretty much even. Republicans and Democrats seem to hate that pesky "free speech" thing when their problems are being exposed. "Middle of the Roaders" like Joe LIEberman are friends of censorship-mongers like the Parents' Television Council and Jack "About to lose his law license" Thompson. Democrat and Republican state legislatures and governors alike love to shove protesters into "free speech zones" where they can neither be seen nor heard.
Corruption? McCain takes lobbyist money, and I don't think anyone here doesn't have something to say about him. Obama takes lobbyist money. I lived in Chicago when Obama was connected to the Daly political machine, who make Louisiana corruption like William Jefferson look squeaky clean in comparison. Democrats run dirty tricks, Republicans run dirty tricks, and it doesn't really matter - both parties are dirty.
My question is: would Obama or Biden really be helpful to us? Are McCain and whoever he picks, either? And if not, why not? Because none of us are able to get in their faces and demand they actually represent the people.
But on the whole, I think I have a better shot at affecting the process with McCain in the WH and the Dem opposition in Congress. It beats the hell out of letting one party control all three sections - and that way, I'm reasonably sure at least one of them is working for me, or at least working against the other two that aren't working for me.
They settled because it was worth more to them to get the movie out on time than have to fight it out in court. MGM was trying to get a restraining order that would have screwed up their release date, and their financial obligations to distributors and theaters and everything else.
Remember, MGM deliberately waited until the very last minute to try this stunt. By that time, New Line had too much invested in Goldmember to risk its being delayed by a court order.
How so? Plenty of people are invested in the here-and-now - especially the FLDS-types who think they have a "right" to a harem of underage girls who know no better.
What stuck the show in my mind was that the 3 wives were the ones who actually brought in the fourth. The husband wasn't actually keen on the idea at first....it almost sounds as if he didn't want to go to heaven?
More likely, accepting the "used" widow would lessen the chance of his being "assigned" a nice, pliant, nubile 14-year-old sex slave by the FLDS "elders."
As for you arguments about wealth, please look up the meaning of the phrase "after adjusting for socioeconomic factors" - then write the definition 100 times in a post here on slashdot.
Definition: bullshit, impossible, and a lie. I could CTRL-C and then CTRL-V 99 times for you, but I hope you may get the point.
"Adjusting for socioeconomic factors" is poor guesswork at best, and nonsense at worst, especially when they're also dealing in incredibly poorly picked sample sets. In one sentence, they talk about "adjusting", and in the next, they've made the sample set "only those who live over 60" - which necessarily makes for a meaningless sample set, since they're analyzing based on an arbitrary line placed over two societies with very different age distributions.
Are you trying to imply that the polygamy is causing misogynistic tendencies? Because I think it's the other way around.
No, it's the other way around like you say - only a society which sees women as mere property could evolve to have polygyny without equal rights to polyandry, and NO society has ever evolved both. Every "polygamist" society has treated women as mere property.
For this to be consistent with the results of the study, the negative effect of such early deaths on average longevity must be smaller than the positive effect that the polygamists have on the same statistic.
Quite the reverse: they "controlled" the study by only studying men who had exceeded 60 years of age.
That biases your study sample. Kill the poor off young, and you won't see many poor men living only to 62-63 years.
This is what we would call either a "major exception" or one hell of a deception.
FLDS polygamy is "iron-fist male" rule, by every honest account that's come out of it. Even the idea of a woman in such a society becoming a paralegal is ridiculous.
Of course, I can 100% believe the brainwashed women "brought in" the 4th - because in the FLDS, it's that fourth wife gets the family into heaven. Only men with 4 or more wives get into heaven, and wives can only get in if their husband brings them along. I can also certainly believe the husband wasn't so keen on bringing in a widow - after all, if he'd waited a couple more years, he'd probably have been assigned a nice cute 14-year-old by the "church elders."
Consider the following: every culture that practices polygamy (actually polygyny, multiple wives, as opposed to polyandry, which would be multiple husbands) has to do something about the extra males. Each and every society like this, without exception, has been AMAZINGLY misogynistic - and that's continued today in the modern Muslim and Fundamentalist LDS "polygamist" cultures.
When you have a surplus of males, your option is pretty much either (a) kick them out into the world (what the FLDS do) or (b) get them killed off in warring, tribal or otherwise (which is what much of Africa and Middle Eastern muslim societies do).
If you get to be old in such cultures, you're wealthy. In fact, wealth is more an indicator of your life expectancy, in any culture.
However, now compare those cultures across the board. If you're in Europe or in America/Canada or another westernized nation, it's relatively easy to get past 60 - after all, you have the free health care systems and welfare setups to rely on.
On the flipside, look at the polygamist societies - in Middle Eastern/African muslim societies, those who aren't going to reach 60 (read: the poor) usually kill themselves off FAR faster in various tribal conflicts and wars. In the FLDS, tracking down their "lost boys" usually winds up giving you an example of kids who have the world yanked from under them and wind up becoming drug addicts and worse because they've been taught from day one that the "outside world" was out to kill them anyways for being FLDS.
What you have there isn't a real phenomenon. "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is a classic mistake that is made by this fatally flawed "study."
(which almost all judges aren't) he'd throw this out without delay.
It's not as if we haven't seen this many times. A rival studio will come up with any excuse, mostly to try to stick their hand in the pot. Remember the frivolous last-minute lawsuit by MGM against "Goldmember" merely for its title? Especially considering the OBVIOUS parody going on.
Score this down as just one more abuse of the legal system. The proper response from the Judge ought to have been a good belly laugh, followed by "now get the fuck out of my courtroom before I hold you in contempt."
Owning both, I'm really disappointed with the PS3 - mostly because the game library STILL sucks (well, that and the buy-online game selection has its issues).
I have my issues with the 360 as well, but I deal with it. A solid library of games, PLUS all my XBLA titles (including the fantastic original Prince of Persia release with the updated graphics), PLUS my Rock Band that works with the GH controllers... sorry, but Sony's PS3 sits there a fantastically overpriced upscaling DVD player and very little else.
I really do wish it weren't the case... but Sony dropped the ball with the PS3.
Now, if Sony would open up the Linux support so that they had 100% access to the video board and I could load on something like XBMC... then they might have something to get me to use it more. Till then, I have my recording box and XBMC on my old Xbox for viewing frontend (at least until the Win port of XBMC is finished and stable), and I have my 360/Wii for games, and my PS3 just sits there till I want to watch a DVD.
The problem is that in order to do this, you have to get through M$'s shyster squad.
Unless it were Sony somehow deciding to bankroll this type of challenge, there's no way. Nobody has the money to deal with all the tons of legal filings and paperwork M$ would throw at them. And the remaining companies (the ones who couldn't afford to pay the butt-ton of money to M$ to get in on the ground floor of the xbox$360) don't have that kind of cash.
Remember, X-Arcade are kind of a "little engine that could" company - those who know them, LOVE them, but they do have to be frugal on how they operate.
For a company that did that? SUICIDE. Micro$oft would blow them out of the water with lawsuits - and no, it doesn't matter whether they were "legal" to reverse engineer it (which is doubtful given the Digital Milloonium Crap Act and the fact that M$ lies about it being a "security" feature), it matters that M$ would tie up their business in the courts and bankrupt them in legal fees and lawyer costs.
For reasons completely unknown to me, the USB guitars from RB for the XBox don't even work with the USB hub that comes with RB on the Wii.
You can blame Micro$oft for that one - their "not-quite-USB" controllers utilize a so-called "security" signing system that prevents so-called "unauthorized" peripherals from working, and M$ are being assholes about letting any but a few companies that have paid a butt-ton for near-monopoly access to the platform make anything.
For another example: M$ completely refuses to allow X-Arcade sticks to work, despite numerous attempts by the makers to PAY for the privilege of making an adapter.
And that pisses me off. I'd LOVE to play certain Live Arcade titles with a real arcade stick, for crying out loud.
Most of the games I had were unplayable because things happened too quickly.
That was due to common (but lazy) coding - if you remember from that era, most games had a "speed adjustment" bar, which was a simple data value tied to an idle loop (basically, it would add on a meaningless but semi-processor-intensive command, to be repeated X times, for each time the game's master thread looped).
A lot of third-party programs to "slow down" faster computers for older games worked the same way, just in the background.
Properly coded games, of course, actually use the system clock to adjust the timing of the main thread and should work on any system.
If you want to run those older games today, of course, you're lucky that DosBox actually lets you adjust how fast its emulation runs. I still enjoy OMF2097 from time to time on DosBox.
I hate to support EA under any circumstances, but they've proven they know when to leave the hell alone - not like Activision, who get their hands on a franchise and pretty much universally ruin it.
Look at Guitar Hero. Harmonix's first two were awesome; 3 was passable. Then we were hit with "Rocks the 80s", and even worse, "Aerosmith edition" - I mean, what is this shit? Halfway through the 31 songs and I've barely played 5 actual Aerosmith songs? They taunt me with "The band covered X song on Y early tour date" info and that song's not even on the menu?
"Exclusivity" agreements explain why Rock Band's only Aerosmith song was the piece of junk "Train Kept a-Rollin" instead of a good one. They probably also explain why the "Best of the Who" download set included the crappiest cover I've ever heard of Amazing Journey, and left Sensation and Pinball Wizard completely out.
The less exclusives we see, the better. Unfortunately for Harmonix, you know for a fact Activision isn't going to play fair on this. They're desperate to get anything to get people to buy the next Guitar Hero after being 2 and a half times burned (one for 80s, one for Aerosmith, 1/2 for GH3 for the crappy boss battle setup).
If you limit yourself to the South you depress your own wages. Whatever your reason, if you stay where supply is high and demand is low, that is the barrier between yourself and better pay, not H1-B visas.
If I believed for a second that most of the nurses down here weren't on H1-B's, you'd be right. Having seen the numbers, you're dead wrong. Most of the nurses in our local hospital as well as my aunt's area in Dallas aren't native english-speakers, and very few are primary Spanish-speakers either.
The problem in the US is that we've devalued - by wage distortion - many professions. We get a decent number of doctors, and why not? The difference between a nursing degree and an MD is a couple years, and the wage disparity is huge. Going into nursing, quite frankly, has becone a losing monetary proposition.
Look at teaching, another great example. Grade/Middle/High-school teaching is a short flight to nowhere, economically, especially compared to college-level teaching. Wages there were depressed because of the immensely high number of women in the field whose income was the second income of the family. Of course, it also hurts that there are so many "hidden" costs to being a teacher, such as having to pay for classroom materials or teaching aids out of your own pocket with zero support/expense money from the schools. "Average" entry-level teacher wages hover around $30k/year, but that includes some of the private/expensive schools. If you're going into public education anywhere, expect it to be more around $26k/year - and remember, YOU have to absorb the cost of pretty much anything other than printed handouts in terms of classroom materials. And unless your significant other has a company plan, expect to be soaked for outrageous insurance rates, too.
Try looking around anywhere in the South. It's a different story here.
Of course, we have hospitals in the red left and right due to abuse by illegals, too. Parkland Memorial in Dallas is being abused, over 70% of their maternity-ward births to illegals now - and that doesn't even count the unpaid bills of all the OTHER abuse of the system.
The US has a "shortage" of trained nurses thanks to H1-B abuse for years. The hospitals (strained for money thanks to nonpayment by illegals who use the "emergency room" as standard care) looked for a way to cut wages, so now the average nurses' wage is around $20,000/year with a ton of imported nurses that barely speak the language and were trained in countries where the standard is lower. My aunt is a victim of this, she was forced out of her old job when the hospital she was had to close down due to illegal-alien abuse and then she had to settle for a job at $10k/year less due to the wage suppression effect of the H1-B visa abuse. She was told, point-blank, at three interviews that there was no way they'd pay more than 22k for someone with 15 years' experience and that was "generous" because they were hiring the H1-B's for 18k.
The disparity between skilled industries (and yes, I count health care as a skilled industry, a nursing degree is at least the equivalent of a Masters' degree in resources and time spent to attain it) in the US is staggering, and you can trace the wage depressed ones directly to abusive "outsourcing" setups - whether it's the H1-B or illegal immigrant abuse ("we can't find anyone for the job... at the slave wages we're offering") or the shipping of jobs to places where the incompetence factor is high, like India, and then sticking the paying customer with the nuisance of dealing with crap "customer service."
"Unlockable content" is code for "busy work." It's a primary tactic of game makers who are fearful that their product can't stand on its own.
And I'm sorry to say, no, the gameplay is not "rock-solid"; I regularly tried what should have been perfectly valid jump tricks (I can be hellish on flight times) only to have the game "explode" me for being off-track too long. And that's just ONE example of where F-Zero GX got it wrong. The poor multiplayer component hurt it immensely as well.
F-Zero X is where I want to be, and I'm very glad Nintendo finally got off their rears and offered it on Wii download. Put together a set of friends (assuming you can find some), four controllers, some pizza and beer, and let the Slot Wheel of Death roll!
Oh and FYI, I've also played all of those other games you mentioned. So:P to you too.
I miss the days when inventory management was a challenge, rather than being simplified away into nothingness. Developers need to learn that just because you can simplify a game mechanic into meaningless doesn't mean you should; do it too much and too often, and you get today's dumbed-down pile of shovelware games.
And yes, I had the same reaction to the dumbed-down "inventory" system of Deus Ex 2 as opposed to the elegant, tricky system in the original Deus Ex. When a RPG launcher takes up the same "space" in inventory as a handgun, something is off.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact is that these days the Democratic party is both the fiscally and environmentally responsible party,
Which would end the moment they had full majority control AND the presidency - or did you miss the legislation that almost passed between '92 and '94?
I blame the Republicans for not scaling back wasteful government programs when they had the chance, but I hold no illusions about the "fiscal responsibility" of the Democrat party.
Now if you're willing to take your blinders off and have an informed conversation, we can do that. Otherwise, I can continue offering you rational discourse, and you can feel free to throw DailyKOS nonsensical talking points back at me.
Ram Doubler's primary techniques were to (a) more tightly define the memory space a given application was allocated and (b) adding virtual RAM functionality to the old Mac OS. It had some rudimentary compression techniques as well, but nothing formidable.
I'd actually like to see this work. Hell, it might even make the PSP usable for web browsing if they can get it right.
gleefully? hardly, that was a long battle. Incidentally, the intent of the DMCA is a good one.
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. And the bones of those who were too enamored of their own good intentions to see the evil they were doing.
"Republicans and Democrats seem to hate that pesky "free speech" thing when their problems are being exposed."
Irrelevant. Which one passes laws to prevent it? why, it's republicans.
Funny - seems to be the Democrats being the ones trying to ramrod the old "fairness doctrine", which was one of the worst anti-1st-amendment bits of nonsense we ever had around on the books, back into law. And of course, it's the Democrats who are usually the ones trying to outlaw the free speech of anyone who opposes them as "racist" or "sexist."
No, McSame will be bad for this country. Very bad. He will be surrounded by many of the same people advising Bush now.
You still have yet to convince me that letting Obama (who will have advisers and policies the likes of Jimmy Carter's presidency) in the White House at the same time the Democrats hold the Congress, is a good idea.
Your only thing against Obama is that he is from Chicago, and the politics in Chicago are corrupt.
No, my "thing" against Obama is that I've personally witnessed his corruption.
My other "thing" is that I prefer not to let EITHER party control both the Congress and the Presidency. It's supposed to be "Checks and Balances" after all. I voted Bush in 1992 (because the Dems had Congress), but I voted Clinton in 1996, Gore in 2000, and Kerry in 2004 (pathetic as Gore and Kerry were) because the Republicans had control of Congress.
You let the Republicans have control of everything, they fuck the little guy over by letting abusive corporations run around with no restraint. You let the Democrats have control of everything, and they fuck the little guy over by taxing the so-called "rich" heavily and we watch all that cost get passed right down the chain. You make sure neither party has complete power, and we MIGHT just have a shot at turning things around - although it's been getting fuck-all harder to tell the two parties apart as the years have gone by.
Let's compare Democrats and Republicans.
DMCA 1.0 - Repub congress, Dem President (Clinton) signed on gleefully.
DMCA provisions 2.0 (slipped in the various years), about evenly split between repub/dem congresses and repub/dem presidents.
Wiretapping indemnity? Just as much the fault of both sides of the aisle.
Running roughshod over the 1st amendment? Pretty much even. Republicans and Democrats seem to hate that pesky "free speech" thing when their problems are being exposed. "Middle of the Roaders" like Joe LIEberman are friends of censorship-mongers like the Parents' Television Council and Jack "About to lose his law license" Thompson. Democrat and Republican state legislatures and governors alike love to shove protesters into "free speech zones" where they can neither be seen nor heard.
Corruption? McCain takes lobbyist money, and I don't think anyone here doesn't have something to say about him. Obama takes lobbyist money. I lived in Chicago when Obama was connected to the Daly political machine, who make Louisiana corruption like William Jefferson look squeaky clean in comparison. Democrats run dirty tricks, Republicans run dirty tricks, and it doesn't really matter - both parties are dirty.
My question is: would Obama or Biden really be helpful to us? Are McCain and whoever he picks, either? And if not, why not? Because none of us are able to get in their faces and demand they actually represent the people.
But on the whole, I think I have a better shot at affecting the process with McCain in the WH and the Dem opposition in Congress. It beats the hell out of letting one party control all three sections - and that way, I'm reasonably sure at least one of them is working for me, or at least working against the other two that aren't working for me.
Moronic.
They settled because it was worth more to them to get the movie out on time than have to fight it out in court. MGM was trying to get a restraining order that would have screwed up their release date, and their financial obligations to distributors and theaters and everything else.
Remember, MGM deliberately waited until the very last minute to try this stunt. By that time, New Line had too much invested in Goldmember to risk its being delayed by a court order.
How so? Plenty of people are invested in the here-and-now - especially the FLDS-types who think they have a "right" to a harem of underage girls who know no better.
What stuck the show in my mind was that the 3 wives were the ones who actually brought in the fourth. The husband wasn't actually keen on the idea at first. ...it almost sounds as if he didn't want to go to heaven?
More likely, accepting the "used" widow would lessen the chance of his being "assigned" a nice, pliant, nubile 14-year-old sex slave by the FLDS "elders."
As for you arguments about wealth, please look up the meaning of the phrase "after adjusting for socioeconomic factors" - then write the definition 100 times in a post here on slashdot.
Definition: bullshit, impossible, and a lie. I could CTRL-C and then CTRL-V 99 times for you, but I hope you may get the point.
"Adjusting for socioeconomic factors" is poor guesswork at best, and nonsense at worst, especially when they're also dealing in incredibly poorly picked sample sets. In one sentence, they talk about "adjusting", and in the next, they've made the sample set "only those who live over 60" - which necessarily makes for a meaningless sample set, since they're analyzing based on an arbitrary line placed over two societies with very different age distributions.
Are you trying to imply that the polygamy is causing misogynistic tendencies? Because I think it's the other way around.
No, it's the other way around like you say - only a society which sees women as mere property could evolve to have polygyny without equal rights to polyandry, and NO society has ever evolved both. Every "polygamist" society has treated women as mere property.
For this to be consistent with the results of the study, the negative effect of such early deaths on average longevity must be smaller than the positive effect that the polygamists have on the same statistic.
Quite the reverse: they "controlled" the study by only studying men who had exceeded 60 years of age.
That biases your study sample. Kill the poor off young, and you won't see many poor men living only to 62-63 years.
This is what we would call either a "major exception" or one hell of a deception.
FLDS polygamy is "iron-fist male" rule, by every honest account that's come out of it. Even the idea of a woman in such a society becoming a paralegal is ridiculous.
Of course, I can 100% believe the brainwashed women "brought in" the 4th - because in the FLDS, it's that fourth wife gets the family into heaven. Only men with 4 or more wives get into heaven, and wives can only get in if their husband brings them along. I can also certainly believe the husband wasn't so keen on bringing in a widow - after all, if he'd waited a couple more years, he'd probably have been assigned a nice cute 14-year-old by the "church elders."
Consider the following: every culture that practices polygamy (actually polygyny, multiple wives, as opposed to polyandry, which would be multiple husbands) has to do something about the extra males. Each and every society like this, without exception, has been AMAZINGLY misogynistic - and that's continued today in the modern Muslim and Fundamentalist LDS "polygamist" cultures.
When you have a surplus of males, your option is pretty much either (a) kick them out into the world (what the FLDS do) or (b) get them killed off in warring, tribal or otherwise (which is what much of Africa and Middle Eastern muslim societies do).
If you get to be old in such cultures, you're wealthy. In fact, wealth is more an indicator of your life expectancy, in any culture.
However, now compare those cultures across the board. If you're in Europe or in America/Canada or another westernized nation, it's relatively easy to get past 60 - after all, you have the free health care systems and welfare setups to rely on.
On the flipside, look at the polygamist societies - in Middle Eastern/African muslim societies, those who aren't going to reach 60 (read: the poor) usually kill themselves off FAR faster in various tribal conflicts and wars. In the FLDS, tracking down their "lost boys" usually winds up giving you an example of kids who have the world yanked from under them and wind up becoming drug addicts and worse because they've been taught from day one that the "outside world" was out to kill them anyways for being FLDS.
What you have there isn't a real phenomenon. "Post hoc, ergo propter hoc" is a classic mistake that is made by this fatally flawed "study."
(which almost all judges aren't)
he'd throw this out without delay.
It's not as if we haven't seen this many times. A rival studio will come up with any excuse, mostly to try to stick their hand in the pot. Remember the frivolous last-minute lawsuit by MGM against "Goldmember" merely for its title? Especially considering the OBVIOUS parody going on.
Score this down as just one more abuse of the legal system. The proper response from the Judge ought to have been a good belly laugh, followed by "now get the fuck out of my courtroom before I hold you in contempt."
Owning both, I'm really disappointed with the PS3 - mostly because the game library STILL sucks (well, that and the buy-online game selection has its issues).
I have my issues with the 360 as well, but I deal with it. A solid library of games, PLUS all my XBLA titles (including the fantastic original Prince of Persia release with the updated graphics), PLUS my Rock Band that works with the GH controllers... sorry, but Sony's PS3 sits there a fantastically overpriced upscaling DVD player and very little else.
I really do wish it weren't the case... but Sony dropped the ball with the PS3.
Now, if Sony would open up the Linux support so that they had 100% access to the video board and I could load on something like XBMC... then they might have something to get me to use it more. Till then, I have my recording box and XBMC on my old Xbox for viewing frontend (at least until the Win port of XBMC is finished and stable), and I have my 360/Wii for games, and my PS3 just sits there till I want to watch a DVD.
The problem is that in order to do this, you have to get through M$'s shyster squad.
Unless it were Sony somehow deciding to bankroll this type of challenge, there's no way. Nobody has the money to deal with all the tons of legal filings and paperwork M$ would throw at them. And the remaining companies (the ones who couldn't afford to pay the butt-ton of money to M$ to get in on the ground floor of the xbox$360) don't have that kind of cash.
Remember, X-Arcade are kind of a "little engine that could" company - those who know them, LOVE them, but they do have to be frugal on how they operate.
For a home-brew setup, it's possible.
For a company that did that? SUICIDE. Micro$oft would blow them out of the water with lawsuits - and no, it doesn't matter whether they were "legal" to reverse engineer it (which is doubtful given the Digital Milloonium Crap Act and the fact that M$ lies about it being a "security" feature), it matters that M$ would tie up their business in the courts and bankrupt them in legal fees and lawyer costs.
For reasons completely unknown to me, the USB guitars from RB for the XBox don't even work with the USB hub that comes with RB on the Wii.
You can blame Micro$oft for that one - their "not-quite-USB" controllers utilize a so-called "security" signing system that prevents so-called "unauthorized" peripherals from working, and M$ are being assholes about letting any but a few companies that have paid a butt-ton for near-monopoly access to the platform make anything.
For another example: M$ completely refuses to allow X-Arcade sticks to work, despite numerous attempts by the makers to PAY for the privilege of making an adapter.
And that pisses me off. I'd LOVE to play certain Live Arcade titles with a real arcade stick, for crying out loud.
Most of the games I had were unplayable because things happened too quickly.
That was due to common (but lazy) coding - if you remember from that era, most games had a "speed adjustment" bar, which was a simple data value tied to an idle loop (basically, it would add on a meaningless but semi-processor-intensive command, to be repeated X times, for each time the game's master thread looped).
A lot of third-party programs to "slow down" faster computers for older games worked the same way, just in the background.
Properly coded games, of course, actually use the system clock to adjust the timing of the main thread and should work on any system.
If you want to run those older games today, of course, you're lucky that DosBox actually lets you adjust how fast its emulation runs. I still enjoy OMF2097 from time to time on DosBox.
Nope.
Conservative libertarian, actually.
And shame on Activision.
I hate to support EA under any circumstances, but they've proven they know when to leave the hell alone - not like Activision, who get their hands on a franchise and pretty much universally ruin it.
Look at Guitar Hero. Harmonix's first two were awesome; 3 was passable. Then we were hit with "Rocks the 80s", and even worse, "Aerosmith edition" - I mean, what is this shit? Halfway through the 31 songs and I've barely played 5 actual Aerosmith songs? They taunt me with "The band covered X song on Y early tour date" info and that song's not even on the menu?
"Exclusivity" agreements explain why Rock Band's only Aerosmith song was the piece of junk "Train Kept a-Rollin" instead of a good one. They probably also explain why the "Best of the Who" download set included the crappiest cover I've ever heard of Amazing Journey, and left Sensation and Pinball Wizard completely out.
The less exclusives we see, the better. Unfortunately for Harmonix, you know for a fact Activision isn't going to play fair on this. They're desperate to get anything to get people to buy the next Guitar Hero after being 2 and a half times burned (one for 80s, one for Aerosmith, 1/2 for GH3 for the crappy boss battle setup).
If you limit yourself to the South you depress your own wages. Whatever your reason, if you stay where supply is high and demand is low, that is the barrier between yourself and better pay, not H1-B visas.
If I believed for a second that most of the nurses down here weren't on H1-B's, you'd be right. Having seen the numbers, you're dead wrong. Most of the nurses in our local hospital as well as my aunt's area in Dallas aren't native english-speakers, and very few are primary Spanish-speakers either.
The problem in the US is that we've devalued - by wage distortion - many professions. We get a decent number of doctors, and why not? The difference between a nursing degree and an MD is a couple years, and the wage disparity is huge. Going into nursing, quite frankly, has becone a losing monetary proposition.
Look at teaching, another great example. Grade/Middle/High-school teaching is a short flight to nowhere, economically, especially compared to college-level teaching. Wages there were depressed because of the immensely high number of women in the field whose income was the second income of the family. Of course, it also hurts that there are so many "hidden" costs to being a teacher, such as having to pay for classroom materials or teaching aids out of your own pocket with zero support/expense money from the schools. "Average" entry-level teacher wages hover around $30k/year, but that includes some of the private/expensive schools. If you're going into public education anywhere, expect it to be more around $26k/year - and remember, YOU have to absorb the cost of pretty much anything other than printed handouts in terms of classroom materials. And unless your significant other has a company plan, expect to be soaked for outrageous insurance rates, too.
Try looking around anywhere in the South. It's a different story here.
Of course, we have hospitals in the red left and right due to abuse by illegals, too. Parkland Memorial in Dallas is being abused, over 70% of their maternity-ward births to illegals now - and that doesn't even count the unpaid bills of all the OTHER abuse of the system.
The US has a "shortage" of trained nurses thanks to H1-B abuse for years. The hospitals (strained for money thanks to nonpayment by illegals who use the "emergency room" as standard care) looked for a way to cut wages, so now the average nurses' wage is around $20,000/year with a ton of imported nurses that barely speak the language and were trained in countries where the standard is lower. My aunt is a victim of this, she was forced out of her old job when the hospital she was had to close down due to illegal-alien abuse and then she had to settle for a job at $10k/year less due to the wage suppression effect of the H1-B visa abuse. She was told, point-blank, at three interviews that there was no way they'd pay more than 22k for someone with 15 years' experience and that was "generous" because they were hiring the H1-B's for 18k.
The disparity between skilled industries (and yes, I count health care as a skilled industry, a nursing degree is at least the equivalent of a Masters' degree in resources and time spent to attain it) in the US is staggering, and you can trace the wage depressed ones directly to abusive "outsourcing" setups - whether it's the H1-B or illegal immigrant abuse ("we can't find anyone for the job... at the slave wages we're offering") or the shipping of jobs to places where the incompetence factor is high, like India, and then sticking the paying customer with the nuisance of dealing with crap "customer service."
"Unlockable content" is code for "busy work." It's a primary tactic of game makers who are fearful that their product can't stand on its own.
And I'm sorry to say, no, the gameplay is not "rock-solid"; I regularly tried what should have been perfectly valid jump tricks (I can be hellish on flight times) only to have the game "explode" me for being off-track too long. And that's just ONE example of where F-Zero GX got it wrong. The poor multiplayer component hurt it immensely as well.
F-Zero X is where I want to be, and I'm very glad Nintendo finally got off their rears and offered it on Wii download. Put together a set of friends (assuming you can find some), four controllers, some pizza and beer, and let the Slot Wheel of Death roll!
Oh and FYI, I've also played all of those other games you mentioned. So :P to you too.
I miss the days when inventory management was a challenge, rather than being simplified away into nothingness. Developers need to learn that just because you can simplify a game mechanic into meaningless doesn't mean you should; do it too much and too often, and you get today's dumbed-down pile of shovelware games.
And yes, I had the same reaction to the dumbed-down "inventory" system of Deus Ex 2 as opposed to the elegant, tricky system in the original Deus Ex. When a RPG launcher takes up the same "space" in inventory as a handgun, something is off.