I have a permit to carry a gun in Oklahoma... It's honestly our best means of protecting ourselves from thugs/terrorists/criminals.
Um... Where were you in 1995? I'm sorry, but everyone seems to forget that 'terrorist' is not a synonym for 'Middle Eastern'.
Now you can debate whether carrying guns is going to prevent you from getting mugged all you like, but there's really nothing you'd be able to do about a bombing with a gun. (To say nothing of issue of what happens when you suddenly depressurize a cabin at 40,000 feet.)
You've gotten your stereotypes wrong. For future reference, Apple geeks are the beret and turtleneck wearing, pretentious snobs, and it's actually the Linux geeks that are the ones that live in mum's basement and have poor personal hygiene.
It's already been answered a bunch of times - they're freakin' huge - but those answers left out one important detail. Telstra, who use the Big Pond (AKA big pwnd) brand for their ISP business, used to be the government monopoly, but have been sold off by the previous government. This has led to all sorts of craziness, since they own all of the infrastructure and have been forced to lease it to competing companies.
They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).
They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)
--"Math." This is a bit confusing, but I think the author is talking about thing like AI decision paths.
There's a bit more to this. Almost all games use math at some level as an abstraction. Sometimes it's obvious - the number of hitpoints your RPG character has, sometimes it's not - the amount of life left on your lifebar in Tekken, and sometimes it's completely hidden - the force required to trigger a crash rather than just a bump in Burnout.
Some players don't care about this stuff too much. They get a feel for the actions and just go with it. Others spend quite a bit of time reverse engineering these mechanics and working out the best way to manipulate these. I'm often one of the later.
I spent a couple of hours building spreadsheets that let me compare various bits of WoW gear and graphing the optimal moment to switch from +Int to mana/5 seconds to +Spirit gear. Why? Because a) I'm a massive fucking nerd, and b) because learning and using the math behind it was fun. A large part of the fun of WoW for me was working out the best systems to exploit the mathematics behind the game. Once I'd hit endgame and I'd unraveled the game systems, it held a lot less appeal, and I quit while my guild was still making good progress through MC.
I think this is part of the reason that Nethack remains so much fun for so many people. The math and systems behind the game are phenomenally complex and, while obfuscated, there is little else in the game to distract from them. Each game plays out in a slightly different way depending on how the various systems interact. (Although, for me that slightly different way seems to be Nethack finding a new way to have me kill myself.)
Why waste advertising money on something that is flying off the shelves? Once once sales start slowing down they can redouble their advertising efforts and get the "hype" machine moving again.
Disclaimer: I work in advertising. (You can save yourselves the Bill Hicks quote, I know it.)
I would suggest that the main reason to keep advertising when your product is doing well is to make sure that the 'hype machine' keeps moving. Hype/word-of-mouth/top-of-mind awareness/coolness is very difficult to get and even harder to keep. By the time you realize that people don't think you're awesome (which happens before sales slow), it's too late - you've been overtaken and someone else has taken the momentum in the eyes of the public.
Now, I would argue that Nintendo could afford to shift their spending somewhat, or possibly change the message that they're getting across, since they seem have managed to get the message that they are fun for everyone into the public perception extremely well. But cutting spending too much when a product is going well is a common mistake that leads to strong brands falling into irrelevance quite swiftly.
Hell, I live in NYC and I can't get it. Williamsburg, Brooklyn to be exact - home of the hipsters who couldn't go five minutes without checking their MySpace pages. It seems like the only option is... Comcast. Oh and it frequently dies for several minutes, killing all traffic in and out. (And by frequently I mean about every 20 mins.)
That said, I'm an Australian, and rather unclear on who offers which services here. In Australia everyone simply uses whirlpool.net.au to check what services are available where. (For those not familiar, it's an unbiased 3rd party that compares broadband services, shows which are available in your area and gives a tool to compare various plans.) Does anything like that exist for the US?
And 6/10 should be 'a bit above average'. *Bad* games should be getting 2s, 3s and 4s. What's the point of a 1-10 scale where half of it is effectively out-of-bounds?
While I see your point, I view game review scores as being similar to school grades. Just because 50% on a test is the middle of the range of possible scores doesn't mean that half of the students should score below that.
I would like to see more games receive a 'failing' grade, but I would view 6 out of 10 as a 'low pass'. It's not great, but has redeeming features for those that the type of game appeals to. (Note: This is not an assessment of game or review in question so much as a general attitude to game reviews.)
If X tells something is true and then offers an application that proves that what they say is true there are only two options:
1 - You trust X: No need to check for yourself.
2 - You don't trust X: Why would you believe X's software?
3 - You want to gather evidence proving you have personally been affected by that something in order to further your chances in a class action lawsuit.
It's not just cables that have oxygen in them. Many people don't realize that their listening rooms have oxygen making up a sizable fraction of the air. That oxygen is clearly ruining their listening experience.
I choose to listen to music in a specially-designed, oxygen-free space. You can really hear the increase in clarity and room dynamics. The mid-range sounds a lot brighter too.
Yeah I hate it when inaccurate information is taken off of websites to prevent confusion.
My point was there was no announcement that the date had changed, they simply took away the announcement. It would have been nice for there to some sort of acknowledgment that they've had to change the date.
I've found the complete opposite. Also, I blame the tipping culture for the abysmal retail service in the US. All the people who have even the slightest motivation go into bar/restaurant work and the idiots/jerks/etc all end up doing retail. In most of the rest of the world they're spread throughout the different work environments.
1) MRI is really hard to do. You can't just throw everyone into one, especially not at airports. It just takes one person forgetting to take off their metal bracers and you have one hell of a mess.
2) FMRI is really hard to do, and still not fine-grained enough to detect any of this.
3) Annoyance is not uncontrolled violence.
4) Last I checked, there's no 'anger' center of the brain, so much as there as section of the brain that controls affect - the prefrontal cortex may have some control over emotional reactions and social setting, but that's part of a greater notion of executive function.
5) Even if you had a way to measure annoyance, I think you'll find that anyone who's being held up at customs after a 20 hour flight so they can watch a video from inside a bizarre machine will be registering pretty highly on the annoy-o-meter no matter what you show them.
6) If you think that terrorists are thinking along the same political lines as we are, only somewhat more to the left, then you're seriously misguided and need to stop watching Fox. (You think that Muslim fundamentalists won't be annoyed by gay rights videos?)
7) If you think a right wing group hasn't already started blowing shit up, then I suggest you have a good think about what terrorist attacks have happened on US soil. The worst was 9/11, and the second was?
The overall idea of the thing is flawed. If my psych major in undergrad taught me one thing (other than statistics), it's that we're extremely complex creatures, with brains that are hard to understand. Political philosophies are some of the most complex systems of abstract thought that we come up with. Deducing them when the opponent is trying to give a different impression is going require something far in advance of the sort of tech we have now.
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Now you can debate whether carrying guns is going to prevent you from getting mugged all you like, but there's really nothing you'd be able to do about a bombing with a gun. (To say nothing of issue of what happens when you suddenly depressurize a cabin at 40,000 feet.)
Useful trivia: Magnetism is slightly harder than you think.
Still, thanks for playing.
Perhaps an oil company stooge trying to associate Al Gore and other anti-global warming folks with crazy people?
They've been complete pricks about the whole thing (selling bandwidth to individuals at a cheaper rate than claim that they are able to sell it to ISPs, creating crazy caps on bandwidth with massive fees for going over, deliberately holding back the rollout of ADSL 2+, etc).
They are widely despised by the Australian internet community. Oh for the days when natural monopolies were retained by the state and rented to companies/individuals at fair rates... (I know, I must be a socialist or something, right?)
Some players don't care about this stuff too much. They get a feel for the actions and just go with it. Others spend quite a bit of time reverse engineering these mechanics and working out the best way to manipulate these. I'm often one of the later.
I spent a couple of hours building spreadsheets that let me compare various bits of WoW gear and graphing the optimal moment to switch from +Int to mana/5 seconds to +Spirit gear. Why? Because a) I'm a massive fucking nerd, and b) because learning and using the math behind it was fun. A large part of the fun of WoW for me was working out the best systems to exploit the mathematics behind the game. Once I'd hit endgame and I'd unraveled the game systems, it held a lot less appeal, and I quit while my guild was still making good progress through MC.
I think this is part of the reason that Nethack remains so much fun for so many people. The math and systems behind the game are phenomenally complex and, while obfuscated, there is little else in the game to distract from them. Each game plays out in a slightly different way depending on how the various systems interact. (Although, for me that slightly different way seems to be Nethack finding a new way to have me kill myself.)
Actually the sooner we get to a Snow Crash-like existence, the better. (Though I'd still prefer the Diamond Age.)
That said, I'm an Australian, and rather unclear on who offers which services here. In Australia everyone simply uses whirlpool.net.au to check what services are available where. (For those not familiar, it's an unbiased 3rd party that compares broadband services, shows which are available in your area and gives a tool to compare various plans.) Does anything like that exist for the US?
I would like to see more games receive a 'failing' grade, but I would view 6 out of 10 as a 'low pass'. It's not great, but has redeeming features for those that the type of game appeals to. (Note: This is not an assessment of game or review in question so much as a general attitude to game reviews.)
Just a thought.
I choose to listen to music in a specially-designed, oxygen-free space. You can really hear the increase in clarity and room dynamics. The mid-range sounds a lot brighter too.
Also, I can't help but notice that the old release date announcement has been quietly taken off the official Smash Bros site.
I've found the complete opposite. Also, I blame the tipping culture for the abysmal retail service in the US. All the people who have even the slightest motivation go into bar/restaurant work and the idiots/jerks/etc all end up doing retail. In most of the rest of the world they're spread throughout the different work environments.
Except in the one where, by an unlikely spontaneous quantum event, the OP's head just exploded.
'Fled in fear' is just media-speak for left the place since it was closed and were somewhat troubled by the fact that they had just seen someone die.
1) MRI is really hard to do. You can't just throw everyone into one, especially not at airports. It just takes one person forgetting to take off their metal bracers and you have one hell of a mess.
2) FMRI is really hard to do, and still not fine-grained enough to detect any of this.
3) Annoyance is not uncontrolled violence.
4) Last I checked, there's no 'anger' center of the brain, so much as there as section of the brain that controls affect - the prefrontal cortex may have some control over emotional reactions and social setting, but that's part of a greater notion of executive function.
5) Even if you had a way to measure annoyance, I think you'll find that anyone who's being held up at customs after a 20 hour flight so they can watch a video from inside a bizarre machine will be registering pretty highly on the annoy-o-meter no matter what you show them.
6) If you think that terrorists are thinking along the same political lines as we are, only somewhat more to the left, then you're seriously misguided and need to stop watching Fox. (You think that Muslim fundamentalists won't be annoyed by gay rights videos?)
7) If you think a right wing group hasn't already started blowing shit up, then I suggest you have a good think about what terrorist attacks have happened on US soil. The worst was 9/11, and the second was?
The overall idea of the thing is flawed. If my psych major in undergrad taught me one thing (other than statistics), it's that we're extremely complex creatures, with brains that are hard to understand. Political philosophies are some of the most complex systems of abstract thought that we come up with. Deducing them when the opponent is trying to give a different impression is going require something far in advance of the sort of tech we have now.