Lemme guess - there was an "overwhelming consensus" that WIFI was gonna cook all of our children's brains
Actually, no. Quite the contrary; there's about a half-dozen cranks who say that, yet who get a quite astonishing amount of media attention for their pains. Analogies to other fields of research are left to the reader.
Based on the research of a Dr. Hubert Farnsworth, I have used it to create an engine that moves the entire universe around my car. This allows me to travel to any location in an instant. It has noticeably reduced my commute.
You think on a terribly small scale. Moving the universe - just this one? Based on the research of Dr. Grumman, and using a steampunk version of the HAARP array and a child sacrifice, a gateway to a parallel universe has been opened in the Arctic. And I'm hearing good things about Dr. Malone's work on a dark-matter powered psychic sentient oracular semi-divine computer. And we'd be getting clean away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids.
Surely there are Germans who can't speak English that wouldn't agree ?
Yes, there'll be plenty, but especially among the South Park target demographic the English language is widespread. Certainly enough for this service to have the potential to make a huge dent in DVD sales.
South Park is the worst fucking piece of shit out there. The only ones who watch it are the fucktarded sheeple who should be eliminated from the gene pool.
You forgot to say 'Screw you guys, I'm going home'.
Alice in Wonderland si probably still owned, at least in UK.
It was published in 1865 and entered the public domain in 1905. In the early twentieth century copyright terms were rather more reasonable than they are today. This allowed the wide variety of different publications of the text you will find today, and also allowed Disney to produce their movie adaptation without having to pay anybody for the rights; this movie was released in 1951, and really ought to be in the public domain itself by now, but for some strange reason Disney films receive far greater protection than the original works they copied.
The book you may be thinking of is Peter Pan, which enjoys a one-off perpetual copyright in the UK; the rights belong to Great Ormond Street childrens' hospital for as long as that institution exists.
Simon David 'Sick Boy' Williamson notoriously had three phones. One for men, one for women he was trying to have sex with, one for women he had already had sex with.
Sony etc. are still caught in the "better chip/video, at any cost" model. Nintendo got it right, the video is more than good enough at the low end. It will take another revolution in video quality to make the best chips worth it again. For now, better games and better controllers are where it is at.
I tend to agree about the video quality. Wii is good enough there - though that'll probably change once more people have HDTV and can get the full benefit of PS3 / 360.
What makes me doubt the long-term future of Wii is the CPU and memory capacity. That's not just graphics - more memory and a faster processor allow a more complex world, more detail, more objects, better physics, cleverer AI. Those are the kind of things that can make a good game great, and in time there'll be wonderful things done on PS3 and 360 that couldn't possibly be done on Wii, even if run at lower resolution.
Wii has succeeded in its primary aim: it's sold the world a new interface. I couldn't ever go back to aiming with an analogue stick now. But to do that it had to be cheap and cute and appealing to the masses, and this was done at the price of computational power.
My bet is that there'll be a Wii 2 coming out in... late '09, early '10? One with enough memory and a fast enough CPU to match or exceed the other machines' physics processing, married to the Wii control system.
Then again, I remember believing that the DS was just a stopgap put up to slow down the PSP, and that the real next-generation Gameboy was still under development. Whoops.
Actually since all three of the "trinity" are spirit in nature, wouldn't it just be the body that was sacrificed? "fear him who can kill body AND spirit?"
Yeah. Less like being killed, more like having your car torched. It's a nuisance, but you can get another one, and with good insurance you can have a courtesy car ready in as little as 36 hours...
Most (if not all) games based on the Source Engine run fine on 4-5-year-old hardware. That is especially true for Portal, since graphically it is a very simple game. It doesn't have any vast landscapes or huge explosions. Also, the number of characters on screen is very limited at any given time. I would definitely give it a try if I were you.
It works very nicely, as it turns out. Never got my cake though, just a lot of personal abuse:-(
if this is our best, lord help us. we should be building moonbase by now
What's wrong with a low orbit aluminium can? That's exactly what a space station should be. A moonbase would just be an aluminium can on the moon. Certainly we should have them by now, but at least we're back on the right track after the unfortunate spaceplane fad of the last 30-odd years.
The problem with building a moon base isn't the components. We know how to build those. NASA can build them, so can the Europeans and the Japanese and above all so can the Russians. Launching them is easy too. Once in orbit it wouldn't be hard to send them on to the Moon - rendezvous with a separately launched booster stage and off you go. Getting down in one piece would be an interesting challenge, though.
The big problem isn't so much in building a station as in maintaining one. ISS relies on frequent resupply rockets from Earth. That's Progress supply ships from Russia, small unmanned capsules crammed with equipment and consumables; these are soon to be replaced by European cargo ships of considerably greater capacity. There are plenty of rockets available to launch such large ships to ISS. There are no rockets available to launch them to the Moon.
This is where we're getting back on track. You'll have heard of the new Constellation project: NASA are going back to basics with capsules launched on big dumb boosters. Orion spacecraft, launched on two Ares rockets - one small rocket intended for launching manned spacecraft to LEO, one big rocket intended for launching cargo to LEO. That cargo can itself be a rocket; dock the manned ship with that rocket, and you're off to the Moon. This is a much better way of doing things. Even if the Moon project comes to nothing, you're not left with an expensive monster like the Saturn V with few no non-lunar applications - you have a perfectly good lightweight man-rated lifter, and also the mother of all cargo rockets. With something like Ares V, ISS could have been built in a lot less time with far fewer launches.
Just to comment, portal will probably run on your system if you have a decent budget card.
GeForce 7600GS, about as good as AGP cards get I think. Got it fairly cheap a while back, just after I bought my widescreen monitor and realised that while it's fair enough on a CRT, 800x600 looks really, really poor when your native resolution is 1440x900:-)
RAM doesn't affect just game loading, it affects all of your computing. Want those directories of fansubs to show up a bit faster? As cheap as RAM is nowadays, it's a sin to have less than a GB considering how much it improves even general computing over 512.
I was writing an explanation of why that doesn't much matter - I browse directories in a terminal window most of the time, that kind of thing - but you know what? Fine. You guys win. Because before I finished writing it Firefox blew up and everything slowed to a crawl.
You don't by any chance own stock in crucial.com or anything, do you?:-)
RAM is cheap. It goes in a PC you probably use every day for lots of things which might benefit from the extra memory. But don't let me stop you from spending nearly 10 times that money on a console for one game that you'll probably finish once and forget about.
For the likes of Bioshock, it wouldn't just be the RAM. It'd be a faster CPU and video card, too - which would mean a new motherboard - which would mean I'm basically looking at a whole new PC. At which point I'll compare the price to a 360, and the console might well win out.
A few quid to bring it up to a full gig might well perk things up a bit, and let me make my Civ 4 worlds a bit bigger, but it won't give me the latest games. And given my usage patterns, my best upgrade right now is the 500GB external drive I've recently ordered, which will in short order contain an awful lot of fansubs:-)
If I had a dime for everytime someone complained about their lowend PC being "too slow!" and then finding out it only has 512MB of RAM, I'd.. well, I would've earned a couple of bucks anyway.
My PC only has 512MB of RAM; built it in about February 2003. Runs Gutsy for most things, has a Windows disk in there for games too. The only RAM issue I've ever really had is that when a Civ 4 game on a big world gets into the modern era, everything slows down horribly - so very many cities and units around the place. I haven't tried to run Portal on this thing yet, though:-)
I might build a new one this year, but... really, this PC's just a net terminal most of the time, or a movie player. Neither task strains it at all. Yes, I'd like to play newer games, but I already have stacks of games I haven't finished that I've accumulated over the years, and if I do decide that I absolutely have to play Bioshock, a 360 is a hell of a lot cheaper than building the gaming box o' doom.
Really, it's a movie. These adults, and I use that term loosely, are getting worked up over a movie for CHILDREN. Do you think 10 year olds will be able to see the deep religious and philosophical undertones of this film?
Of this film? No, probably not. Of The Subtle Knife? Quite likely. Of The Amber Spyglass? Yes, definitely, unless they're sitting in the cinema blindfold and with their iPod on full volume. Throughout most of that one our heroes are travelling in the company of and with the aid of a pair of rebel angels. That's 'demons', in traditional mythology. Oh, and while we're discussing 'demons', there are a lot of them about too, and they're made synonymous with 'soul'. And the series ends with a back door being made by our heroes to allow an unofficial escape route from hell, and then the death of God. Presented as a good thing. Presented as a mercy killing.
Now, the other two films haven't been made yet. But if the first is a box-office success, the rest will surely be made and shown to children. That's what scares the hell out of these people.
When Yoda's midichlorian count was announced to be OVER 9000, it was basically just a glorified anime.
Please, go and watch some anime that isn't Dragonball Z. You might be surprised. A lot of it is a whole lot better than Episode I ever dreamed of being.
KOTOR 2 = unfinished. That is not the proper ending; it's a butchered mess because the game had to ship before it was properly finished.
However, the rest of the ending scenes were shipped on the disc in a mostly intact state, just not implemented in the game itself. So it's been possible to restore them. It's taken a long time, but release now looks to be just around the corner...
The rebellion blew up the first one too. It did not doom the Empire. It crumbles in VI because the Emperor dies... And that is not Han's or Lando's doings.
Vader killed the Emperor, but that whole scene was irrelevant on the larger scale. It took place on the Death Star, and the Death Star was blown up two minutes later.
Luke Skywalker could have stayed in bed for all the difference he made to the outcome of the Battle of Endor.
Arecibo Observatory Loses Funding - No, it was cut about 25%. If it lost funding, it would have zero funding.
So, if you were to go to your bank tomorrow to find one quarter of your savings had gone, you wouldn't say you had 'lost money', because if you had lost money you would have had zero money? The word you're looking for is 'all', as in 'loses all funding' - notice how it isn't there?
The Arecibo Observatory funding was slashed - No, it was cut about 25%, it's still at $8 million. I suppose next time I trip and fall I can describe it as me "plummeting towards the ground."
So, if a samurai were to come up to you tomorrow and cut off one quarter of your body mass, you wouldn't describe yourself as having been 'slashed'?
Slashdot Mirror
You'd prefer maybe your tumour to be hidden on the scan by JPEG artefacts?
Actually, no. Quite the contrary; there's about a half-dozen cranks who say that, yet who get a quite astonishing amount of media attention for their pains. Analogies to other fields of research are left to the reader.
You think on a terribly small scale. Moving the universe - just this one? Based on the research of Dr. Grumman, and using a steampunk version of the HAARP array and a child sacrifice, a gateway to a parallel universe has been opened in the Arctic. And I'm hearing good things about Dr. Malone's work on a dark-matter powered psychic sentient oracular semi-divine computer. And we'd be getting clean away with it too if it weren't for those meddling kids.
Dubbing of foreign language shows is definitely the best! Believe it!
(That... actually did hurt to write.)
Yes, there'll be plenty, but especially among the South Park target demographic the English language is widespread. Certainly enough for this service to have the potential to make a huge dent in DVD sales.
You forgot to say 'Screw you guys, I'm going home'.
It was published in 1865 and entered the public domain in 1905. In the early twentieth century copyright terms were rather more reasonable than they are today. This allowed the wide variety of different publications of the text you will find today, and also allowed Disney to produce their movie adaptation without having to pay anybody for the rights; this movie was released in 1951, and really ought to be in the public domain itself by now, but for some strange reason Disney films receive far greater protection than the original works they copied.
The book you may be thinking of is Peter Pan, which enjoys a one-off perpetual copyright in the UK; the rights belong to Great Ormond Street childrens' hospital for as long as that institution exists.
Simon David 'Sick Boy' Williamson notoriously had three phones. One for men, one for women he was trying to have sex with, one for women he had already had sex with.
I tend to agree about the video quality. Wii is good enough there - though that'll probably change once more people have HDTV and can get the full benefit of PS3 / 360.
What makes me doubt the long-term future of Wii is the CPU and memory capacity. That's not just graphics - more memory and a faster processor allow a more complex world, more detail, more objects, better physics, cleverer AI. Those are the kind of things that can make a good game great, and in time there'll be wonderful things done on PS3 and 360 that couldn't possibly be done on Wii, even if run at lower resolution.
Wii has succeeded in its primary aim: it's sold the world a new interface. I couldn't ever go back to aiming with an analogue stick now. But to do that it had to be cheap and cute and appealing to the masses, and this was done at the price of computational power.
My bet is that there'll be a Wii 2 coming out in... late '09, early '10? One with enough memory and a fast enough CPU to match or exceed the other machines' physics processing, married to the Wii control system.
Then again, I remember believing that the DS was just a stopgap put up to slow down the PSP, and that the real next-generation Gameboy was still under development. Whoops.
Yeah. Less like being killed, more like having your car torched. It's a nuisance, but you can get another one, and with good insurance you can have a courtesy car ready in as little as 36 hours...
It works very nicely, as it turns out. Never got my cake though, just a lot of personal abuse :-(
Are you kidding? Do you know what uranium weighs?
What's wrong with a low orbit aluminium can? That's exactly what a space station should be. A moonbase would just be an aluminium can on the moon. Certainly we should have them by now, but at least we're back on the right track after the unfortunate spaceplane fad of the last 30-odd years.
The problem with building a moon base isn't the components. We know how to build those. NASA can build them, so can the Europeans and the Japanese and above all so can the Russians. Launching them is easy too. Once in orbit it wouldn't be hard to send them on to the Moon - rendezvous with a separately launched booster stage and off you go. Getting down in one piece would be an interesting challenge, though.
The big problem isn't so much in building a station as in maintaining one. ISS relies on frequent resupply rockets from Earth. That's Progress supply ships from Russia, small unmanned capsules crammed with equipment and consumables; these are soon to be replaced by European cargo ships of considerably greater capacity. There are plenty of rockets available to launch such large ships to ISS. There are no rockets available to launch them to the Moon.
This is where we're getting back on track. You'll have heard of the new Constellation project: NASA are going back to basics with capsules launched on big dumb boosters. Orion spacecraft, launched on two Ares rockets - one small rocket intended for launching manned spacecraft to LEO, one big rocket intended for launching cargo to LEO. That cargo can itself be a rocket; dock the manned ship with that rocket, and you're off to the Moon. This is a much better way of doing things. Even if the Moon project comes to nothing, you're not left with an expensive monster like the Saturn V with few no non-lunar applications - you have a perfectly good lightweight man-rated lifter, and also the mother of all cargo rockets. With something like Ares V, ISS could have been built in a lot less time with far fewer launches.
GeForce 7600GS, about as good as AGP cards get I think. Got it fairly cheap a while back, just after I bought my widescreen monitor and realised that while it's fair enough on a CRT, 800x600 looks really, really poor when your native resolution is 1440x900 :-)
I was writing an explanation of why that doesn't much matter - I browse directories in a terminal window most of the time, that kind of thing - but you know what? Fine. You guys win. Because before I finished writing it Firefox blew up and everything slowed to a crawl.
You don't by any chance own stock in crucial.com or anything, do you? :-)
For the likes of Bioshock, it wouldn't just be the RAM. It'd be a faster CPU and video card, too - which would mean a new motherboard - which would mean I'm basically looking at a whole new PC. At which point I'll compare the price to a 360, and the console might well win out.
A few quid to bring it up to a full gig might well perk things up a bit, and let me make my Civ 4 worlds a bit bigger, but it won't give me the latest games. And given my usage patterns, my best upgrade right now is the 500GB external drive I've recently ordered, which will in short order contain an awful lot of fansubs :-)
My PC only has 512MB of RAM; built it in about February 2003. Runs Gutsy for most things, has a Windows disk in there for games too. The only RAM issue I've ever really had is that when a Civ 4 game on a big world gets into the modern era, everything slows down horribly - so very many cities and units around the place. I haven't tried to run Portal on this thing yet, though :-)
I might build a new one this year, but... really, this PC's just a net terminal most of the time, or a movie player. Neither task strains it at all. Yes, I'd like to play newer games, but I already have stacks of games I haven't finished that I've accumulated over the years, and if I do decide that I absolutely have to play Bioshock, a 360 is a hell of a lot cheaper than building the gaming box o' doom.
(I vaguely remember an episode where Gaius Cornelius's brother came around for a party and got pissed...)
It therefore surprises me that the following countries are not radioactive holes in the ground:
Croatia
Portugal (in 2004 and 2006)
Brazil
Romania
Argentina (1986 and 1998)
Germany (too many bloody times to bear thinking about)
We're exceptionally forbearing with the nukes, even when we do have a jolly good reason.
Of this film? No, probably not. Of The Subtle Knife? Quite likely. Of The Amber Spyglass? Yes, definitely, unless they're sitting in the cinema blindfold and with their iPod on full volume. Throughout most of that one our heroes are travelling in the company of and with the aid of a pair of rebel angels. That's 'demons', in traditional mythology. Oh, and while we're discussing 'demons', there are a lot of them about too, and they're made synonymous with 'soul'. And the series ends with a back door being made by our heroes to allow an unofficial escape route from hell, and then the death of God. Presented as a good thing. Presented as a mercy killing.
Now, the other two films haven't been made yet. But if the first is a box-office success, the rest will surely be made and shown to children. That's what scares the hell out of these people.
Please, go and watch some anime that isn't Dragonball Z. You might be surprised. A lot of it is a whole lot better than Episode I ever dreamed of being.
KOTOR 2 = unfinished. That is not the proper ending; it's a butchered mess because the game had to ship before it was properly finished.
However, the rest of the ending scenes were shipped on the disc in a mostly intact state, just not implemented in the game itself. So it's been possible to restore them. It's taken a long time, but release now looks to be just around the corner...
Vader killed the Emperor, but that whole scene was irrelevant on the larger scale. It took place on the Death Star, and the Death Star was blown up two minutes later.
Luke Skywalker could have stayed in bed for all the difference he made to the outcome of the Battle of Endor.
Monkey, yes. But I suspect this crowd will know the story better as Dragonball.
So, if you were to go to your bank tomorrow to find one quarter of your savings had gone, you wouldn't say you had 'lost money', because if you had lost money you would have had zero money? The word you're looking for is 'all', as in 'loses all funding' - notice how it isn't there?
The Arecibo Observatory funding was slashed - No, it was cut about 25%, it's still at $8 million. I suppose next time I trip and fall I can describe it as me "plummeting towards the ground."
So, if a samurai were to come up to you tomorrow and cut off one quarter of your body mass, you wouldn't describe yourself as having been 'slashed'?