And I don't think anyone can claim that in video game terms/technology lifespans the NES is not old school. Anyone who says it ain't has a date with me with a NES controller cord wrapped around my wrist in a dark alleyway.
The NES is the first of the modern machines, post-Crash of 1984. Before that were the Atari and Coleco and such in America, and the Spectrum and BBC Micros in the UK - a very different world.
And I have no fear of your NES controller cord. Nintendo have seen fit to provide me with a better weapon now, suitable for bludgeoning, strangling, or throwing straight through the TV screen...;-)
I guess i'm a hard core badass gamer. Apart from some games like the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles for NES, I beat a lot of games.
I got to near the end of the Technodrome; the message is 'PREPARE FOR THE FIGHT, SHREDDER IS NEAR' and all, but there were just too many laser-toting jetpack guys to get past.
But the games we're thinking of here are older even than that. Think Bubble Bobble for the kind of thing. These were games that you'd play for a high score, more than for completion, and which you'd go to with a big bag of 10p coins if you meant to seriously challenge for the ending. You were meant to die and have to CONTINUE; that was how the arcade owner made his money!
And now we are in the Middle East without a convincing and clear cut plan as to what we are doing, why we are there, what we hope to accomplish, and not enough people in the States give a shit. Perhaps in New York City, but no where else.
Why would people in NYC care more? What did the Iraqis ever do to them?
Russia has to defend itself from China nearby, as it is still growing. And they need land and resources.
You must be kidding. Saying that Russia is in need of land and resources is like saying that China is facing a manpower shortage.
It's an ambiguous construction, but I think the 'they' who need land and resources is China, which would give Russia good reason to want to defend itself.
Now that's impressive. I set up a feed-line about how a hero powered by the sun would never fly, I'm expecting to hear about Kal-El and Kryptonian physiology and Earth's yellow sun and so forth. My congratulations, then, for finding the truly geeky option:-)
I have not seen Swamp Thing, but it is entirely possible that light may not have been the creature's sole energy source.
The Swamp Thing was a plant elemental, it probably drew energy direct from the Green rather than relying on its own surface photosynthesis. That would allow it to tap energy from the whole plant life of the earth; easily enough for its purposes. Still, there is something faintly ridiculous about a hero powered by sunlight; such an idea would never fly.
It erased you, but the data in storage stayed in place. Your neurocircuitry rebooted and launched a new instance of the consciousness process, which loaded in the existing memories seamlessly. You just think you're the original you.
I don't know about consciousness, but in his novel Blue Mars (last book of the Mars trilogy), published a decade ago already, Kim Stanley Robinson made use of research that suggests that memory relies on a quantum effect.
Would that mean that attempts to upload human minds to computers would fall foul of the no-cloning theorem? Such constraints on the duplication of quantum information would have interesting effects on philosophical problems of identity.
Presumably you spelled it F@-lun in order to evade the Great Firewall... but then in the URL you link to it's there plain as day. I think some Chinese censorware admin needs to update a little:-)
Complete nonsense. You don't need near 100% efficiency, much lower efficiencies will do a perfectly good job reducing the temperature of the deserts. And you certainly don't need to absorb heat... The deserts get most of their heat from the sun hitting the ground, not from some magical source of "hot" in the atmosphere.
The albedo of the desert is some 40%, meaning that 40% of incoming sunlight is reflected back into space. In order to cool the desert, your solar cell needs to have greater than 40% efficiency, after transmission of electricity away from the desert is taken into account.
A realistic solar farm is not going to cool the desert. Quite the contrary; by plating large areas with black panelling, it will heat the place up quite substantially.
So, in this rambling, what I'm trying to say, is that not all bosses are assholes.. and maybe it becomes a learned trait. Maybe the system and society wear them down... maybe they become that way because that is what is expected or maybe they see those who are assholes really moving up the corporate ladder.
See The Godfather parts 1 and 2 for a fine illustration of this principle at work.
Without wishing to get involved in flame wars about whether the EU is a good thing or not, for the sort of on-line shopping I do membership of the EU is not really relevant.
If you buy CDs it is. The CD-WOW lawsuit established that they can't ship cheap CDs and DVDs here from Hong Kong like they used to, but they can from EU nations. The CD sold by the record cartel in Slovenia is identical to the one sold in England, but a whole lot cheaper.
From all I can see, you won't get a bit extra from the Wii's added power and it will be identical to just using a GameCube.
You're playing Day of the Tentacle on ScummVM, what do you care about the Wii's added power? Why not go play Asteroids on the PS3 and complain it doesn't use all fifty-seven CPUs?
Now, the fact that it won't use the Wiimote as a pointer, that's disappointing. Wii would be perfect for the old LucasArts adventures just because of that.
Prohibition - stop generating CO2 from alcohol production. Fermentation produces CO2 as well as ethanol.
That doesn't matter, though. The carbon released here is carbon that was absorbed when the hops and barley grew in a field. Net carbon released by beer production: nil. Apart from the harvesting machinery and the truck to bring the stuff to the brewery, of course.
The problem is that the carbon released when we burn coal or oil or gas is carbon that's been buried since the days when the world was all jungles and dinosaurs. That's causing a net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
I have a problem with anyone who says that there's no disagreement about an issue. If you're interested in why third-world countries aren't developing at all, and if you'd like to see a different perspective on the issue, I'd recommend The Great Global Warming Swindle.
Watched that? Good.
Now remember that MIT oceanographer? The one they've got on there to say that CO2 doesn't matter because it all comes out of the oceans really anyway?
He was substantially misrepresented, and he's not happy at all about it. I'm especially amused by the manner in which the film maker responds to criticism: 'Go and fuck yourself.'
In the 1970's, the worry was Global Cooling, because global temps were on a down swing, so we're all going to die.
Yes, a small number of cranks were pushing the global cooling story, while the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists was that it was not going to happen.
Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die.
See above, but vice-versa.
Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die.
Remember how we all stopped using chlorofluorocarbons?
The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it.
OK, that works for a few thousand cavemen. Now do it with a billion.
If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.
Not according to Carl Wunsch, the oceanographer featured prominently in that show, who says it misrepresented him completely.
Never mind that our ancestors migrated from one place to another because they couldn't stand the {political, environmental, social, etc.} conditions where _they_ were born. That was normal. It's _our_ changes that mean the end of the world.
There are six and a half billion people on the Earth now in vast settled communities. We're not a few thousand nomads who can just up sticks and hike across the hills to somewhere nicer. We're an entire global civilisation existing three meals from disaster. When Bangladesh floods, where should its population migrate to? Where's free? When the Midwest turns back into a dust bowl, and when China's rice fields dry out, how quickly can we identify alternative food sources and establish industrial-scale farming there? What happens in the meantime? How many millions starve? How many die in desperate wars for food and for water?
Whether we're causing climate change or not, we are facing disaster from it. Sure, it's happened before, and sure the Earth will recover in time, but that doesn't comfort me much. I for one would like to keep as many as possible of those six and a half billion alive through this.
Meanwhile we spend vast fortunes turning the Middle East upside down to hunt a guy who killed a few thousand people once. Priorities, eh?
The middle class and the rich by definition have something to loose. They are the last people to want any kind of uncertainty and change always brings uncertainty. The middle class and the rich would only throw their weight in to help the poor if they themselves had something to loose by not doing so.
"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
Maybe, but the leaders of the revolution are usually comfortable middle-class intellectuals and student cadres, people freed from the daily necessity of earning their bread and with the leisure time to, say, debate ideology and distribute progressive literature.
The workers do have a great deal to lose. The British miners in the 1980s were highly motivated, politically informed and highly idealistic, but enough of them were prepared to scab once they saw their families suffering because of the strike; in the end Thatcher won. A 25% drop in the rich man's pay means he drives a smaller car and goes on holiday only once a year, or only within his home continent. A 25% drop in the worker's pay means his children go hungry. Not to mention that the rich man's wealth gives him substantially greater resources which he can use to make a difference.
You haven't been looking hard enough. iRiver has been making OGG-compatible players for years (no, they don't require reflashing with RockBox for this).
It's still worth doing, though. My iHP-140 was good. With Rockbox, it's so much better.
The King of Thailand is the only exception, and I think you'll find that in any country who has a King or Queen.
Tell that to Brenda, and her husband who's a perpetual embarrassment to the nation for insulting pretty much everyone in the world by now, and her son who's known to talk to plants. Plants other than his relatives, I mean.
On Firefly/Serenity though, the heroes are definitely on the trailing edge of everything--their ship is an obsolete class, they can't afford energy hand weapons, their meals are usually bereft of real food like fruits and vegetables, and they're always just two steps ahead of running out of money for fuel and parts. An entire episode mid-series dealt with the disastrous consequences of a spare part they couldn't afford. Kaylee, the ship's mechanic, had complained about not having a spare in the very first episode.
If they could just get Faye to stop gambling away all their money as soon as they get any, they'd probably have a much smoother time of it:-)
The other statement he makes about motion-sensing controllers is that third party developers aren't embracing it. And honestly, that also seems like an accurate statement to me... so far all the 'killer apps' on the Wii are made by Nintendo.
Perhaps true, but then Nintendo did have a big head start on the rest. That said, the best use of the Wiimote I've seen was in The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, and I've been hearing good things about SSX Blur. Third-parties are definitely getting there now.
Slashdot Mirror
The NES is the first of the modern machines, post-Crash of 1984. Before that were the Atari and Coleco and such in America, and the Spectrum and BBC Micros in the UK - a very different world.
And I have no fear of your NES controller cord. Nintendo have seen fit to provide me with a better weapon now, suitable for bludgeoning, strangling, or throwing straight through the TV screen... ;-)
I got to near the end of the Technodrome; the message is 'PREPARE FOR THE FIGHT, SHREDDER IS NEAR' and all, but there were just too many laser-toting jetpack guys to get past.
But the games we're thinking of here are older even than that. Think Bubble Bobble for the kind of thing. These were games that you'd play for a high score, more than for completion, and which you'd go to with a big bag of 10p coins if you meant to seriously challenge for the ending. You were meant to die and have to CONTINUE; that was how the arcade owner made his money!
Substitution cipher != impenetrable. That's pretty poor security even for children in treehouses.
Why would people in NYC care more? What did the Iraqis ever do to them?
You must be kidding. Saying that Russia is in need of land and resources is like saying that China is facing a manpower shortage.
It's an ambiguous construction, but I think the 'they' who need land and resources is China, which would give Russia good reason to want to defend itself.
Now that's impressive. I set up a feed-line about how a hero powered by the sun would never fly, I'm expecting to hear about Kal-El and Kryptonian physiology and Earth's yellow sun and so forth. My congratulations, then, for finding the truly geeky option :-)
The Swamp Thing was a plant elemental, it probably drew energy direct from the Green rather than relying on its own surface photosynthesis. That would allow it to tap energy from the whole plant life of the earth; easily enough for its purposes. Still, there is something faintly ridiculous about a hero powered by sunlight; such an idea would never fly.
It erased you, but the data in storage stayed in place. Your neurocircuitry rebooted and launched a new instance of the consciousness process, which loaded in the existing memories seamlessly. You just think you're the original you.
Would that mean that attempts to upload human minds to computers would fall foul of the no-cloning theorem? Such constraints on the duplication of quantum information would have interesting effects on philosophical problems of identity.
Get on a train and say that.
Presumably you spelled it F@-lun in order to evade the Great Firewall... but then in the URL you link to it's there plain as day. I think some Chinese censorware admin needs to update a little :-)
The albedo of the desert is some 40%, meaning that 40% of incoming sunlight is reflected back into space. In order to cool the desert, your solar cell needs to have greater than 40% efficiency, after transmission of electricity away from the desert is taken into account.
A realistic solar farm is not going to cool the desert. Quite the contrary; by plating large areas with black panelling, it will heat the place up quite substantially.
Oh God... I hear it in my dreams to this day!
See The Godfather parts 1 and 2 for a fine illustration of this principle at work.
If you buy CDs it is. The CD-WOW lawsuit established that they can't ship cheap CDs and DVDs here from Hong Kong like they used to, but they can from EU nations. The CD sold by the record cartel in Slovenia is identical to the one sold in England, but a whole lot cheaper.
You're playing Day of the Tentacle on ScummVM, what do you care about the Wii's added power? Why not go play Asteroids on the PS3 and complain it doesn't use all fifty-seven CPUs?
Now, the fact that it won't use the Wiimote as a pointer, that's disappointing. Wii would be perfect for the old LucasArts adventures just because of that.
That doesn't matter, though. The carbon released here is carbon that was absorbed when the hops and barley grew in a field. Net carbon released by beer production: nil. Apart from the harvesting machinery and the truck to bring the stuff to the brewery, of course.
The problem is that the carbon released when we burn coal or oil or gas is carbon that's been buried since the days when the world was all jungles and dinosaurs. That's causing a net increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Watched that? Good.
Now remember that MIT oceanographer? The one they've got on there to say that CO2 doesn't matter because it all comes out of the oceans really anyway?
He was substantially misrepresented, and he's not happy at all about it. I'm especially amused by the manner in which the film maker responds to criticism: 'Go and fuck yourself.'
Yes, a small number of cranks were pushing the global cooling story, while the overwhelming consensus of climate scientists was that it was not going to happen.
Now they're tending upwards, so we're all going to die.
See above, but vice-versa.
Oh, and there was an Ozone Hole, so we're all going to die.
Remember how we all stopped using chlorofluorocarbons?
The ice age ended and the climate changed. Guess what -- animals and people moved along with it.
OK, that works for a few thousand cavemen. Now do it with a billion.
If you were able to watch UK Channel 4's "The Great Global Warming Swindle", it's been pulled from YouTube for copyright issues. Pity. It was spot on.
Not according to Carl Wunsch, the oceanographer featured prominently in that show, who says it misrepresented him completely.
There are six and a half billion people on the Earth now in vast settled communities. We're not a few thousand nomads who can just up sticks and hike across the hills to somewhere nicer. We're an entire global civilisation existing three meals from disaster. When Bangladesh floods, where should its population migrate to? Where's free? When the Midwest turns back into a dust bowl, and when China's rice fields dry out, how quickly can we identify alternative food sources and establish industrial-scale farming there? What happens in the meantime? How many millions starve? How many die in desperate wars for food and for water?
Whether we're causing climate change or not, we are facing disaster from it. Sure, it's happened before, and sure the Earth will recover in time, but that doesn't comfort me much. I for one would like to keep as many as possible of those six and a half billion alive through this.
Meanwhile we spend vast fortunes turning the Middle East upside down to hunt a guy who killed a few thousand people once. Priorities, eh?
"Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains!"
Maybe, but the leaders of the revolution are usually comfortable middle-class intellectuals and student cadres, people freed from the daily necessity of earning their bread and with the leisure time to, say, debate ideology and distribute progressive literature.
The workers do have a great deal to lose. The British miners in the 1980s were highly motivated, politically informed and highly idealistic, but enough of them were prepared to scab once they saw their families suffering because of the strike; in the end Thatcher won. A 25% drop in the rich man's pay means he drives a smaller car and goes on holiday only once a year, or only within his home continent. A 25% drop in the worker's pay means his children go hungry. Not to mention that the rich man's wealth gives him substantially greater resources which he can use to make a difference.
It's still worth doing, though. My iHP-140 was good. With Rockbox, it's so much better.
Tell that to Brenda, and her husband who's a perpetual embarrassment to the nation for insulting pretty much everyone in the world by now, and her son who's known to talk to plants. Plants other than his relatives, I mean.
If they could just get Faye to stop gambling away all their money as soon as they get any, they'd probably have a much smoother time of it :-)
Perhaps true, but then Nintendo did have a big head start on the rest. That said, the best use of the Wiimote I've seen was in The Godfather: Blackhand Edition, and I've been hearing good things about SSX Blur. Third-parties are definitely getting there now.