The only income seems to be from the website subscriptions. OK. One guy takes out a subscription to EMIArtistSearch.com - he's a DJ in a popular club. He finds out what's new and what's cool. Downloads the files. Plays them that night. Everyone at the club hears the new tunes there. They go to Google and get the same files, this time for free.
The only reason I've got to subscribe to the website is if it's the only channel by which the company are publicising the band. It won't be. There'll be radio play, festival appearances, club nights, word of mouth.
What I'd do is distribute only the singles free. The singles chart is a write-off now anyway, nobody cares about it, and albums are bigger money. Take the porn site approach. Distribute the singles free on your high-capacity, high-reliability website, and people might well be persuaded to fork over some modest monthly subscription for access to the rest of the album - even if they could still get it via P2P, they'll pay for the convenience.
If my prediction is correct that a Transhuman requires nothing but energy, materials, nanomass, computing power and knowledgebases to exist, what need does a Transhuman have to reproduce or "colonize"?
Let us begin with two groups of transhumans. One has the urge to reproduce and colonise. The other does not. Wait a million years. What does the galaxy look like?
My guess is that it's full of transhumans who have the urge to reproduce and colonise, with those who do not have that urge still sitting perfectly still in the same place as before, a statistically insignificant fraction of the population.
The urge to reproduce and colonise is an enormous evolutionary advantage. Creatures without it will inevitably become sidelined into a vanishingly small fraction of the population by the compound increase in the numbers of those creatures which do have it. Therefore, any creature found in the universe is overwhelmingly likely to have this urge.
But explain to me: just how does an untrained, most likely unorganised public armed with hand-guns, rifles, shot-guns, a few machine guns and some gangsta rappers take on a government with an army and air-force and tanks and warplanes and rocket-launchers?
There are no written accounts, as far as I know, of a meteorite causing significant numbers of human casualties, either through an impact or through a tsunami induced by impact.
Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
In Zelda you don't have any "experience" nor "levels" to gain.
Some of us started out playing Zelda 2 on the NES, thankyouverymuch. They wisely dropped the experience points thing for all subsequent games. I still love that game, but it's very much an odd one out.
There are no strength, dexterity, or wisdom attributes for which you can boost with equipment.
None visible, anyway. Power Bracelet (or later, Gauntlets) for moving rocks? Great Fairy's Tears to boost damage? Blue or Red Ring to boost armour class?
You don't have to loot corpses for marginal equipment upgrades and you don't have time-sink kill quests to kill the same monsters over and over and over again.
The first item you find in the first Zelda game is the Boomerang, and you get it by killing off a bunch of Goriya in the first dungeon. A lot of dungeon doors throughout the whole saga won't open until you've exterminated all monsters in the previous room. Oh, and three words of pure hack-n-slash horror: Cave Of Ordeals.
You don't have 10 slots for armor and magical jewelery and it doesn't take 2 minutes to kill a group of monsters.
That at least depends on which monsters:-) As for equipment slots, recent games have had some of that element in them: the Master Sword, or the Biggoron's Sword? Regular outfit, Zora tunic, or magical rupee-draining armour?
All that said, what upset me the most about Twilight Princess is that now I have to find five Pieces of Heart for each new Heart Container. Five. That's just not fair at all...
Twilight Princess is an excellent game, though not having tried the GC version I can't really speak on it being more immersive than using a controller.
I assume the GC version handles much the same as Ocarina or Wind Waker. In which case I love the Wiimote for aiming - especially when Spider-Maning through the sky city with dual hookshots - and I could never go back to an analogue stick for that, but shaking the nunchuck for the spin attack, or shoving it for the shield charge, that doesn't quite work.
I think relative to the screen, and shove towards the screen or parallel to it when trying to carry out those moves. However, because I've been using the nunchuck just as a one-handed joystick for a long time in the game, I'm not pointing it at the screen, but at some random angle selected for arm comfort. So 'shove towards screen' to me = 'up and forwards at about 45 degrees' to the nunchuck, and the move only works about 50% of the time.
For Wii Sports, or Wario Ware, where you're standing up and focusing on hand movements, nunchuck motion control is great. For Zelda, which is more of a sofa game, it isn't so good.
...to receive a mark in their right hand, or in their foreheads...
Well, which one is it? Surely, an omniscient deity shouldn't have difficulty telling apart a hand and a forehead.
You're misreading it. Obviously the Antichrist gives people a choice of where they want the mark. Personally I'll go for the hand; it'll look a lot cooler there.
But since it is not 100% accurate, then its trash.
Well, I suppose you could measure the house to 100% accuracy... but then you'd have the problem that it would be moving at a totally unknown speed in a totally unknown direction, and you'd never find it again.
The Wii is kicking ass and taking names but it remains to be seen how long this will last. It's an amazing party machien and for non gamer it's the best thing since sliced bread. But the trade off is the games are mostly shallow (zelda exempted) and they need to broaden their genre choices.
True, I've got quite enough minigames now and I'll have Zelda finished as soon as I can work out how to hit back at Zant (I can dodge or block his feeble attack forever, though... don't tell me, I'll find out myself!) Some more substantial games would be nice.
I'm currently looking forward to Metroid, Mario Galaxy, and The Godfather, plus Dragonball when that finally gets to the UK. That said, the game I want most is yet another party game: DDR.
My house is on there bright and clear, and interestingly enough seems to be the definitive location for the suburb I'm in. The little red dot is right on the driveway.
There's no possible way that you could like something that was also made for girls? Are you that insecure that you can only like things that are made for men?
Well, I for one will have nothing to do with anything of the kind. Gaming is all about guns and robots and tanks and violence and stuff, that's proper, hardcore grown-up gaming for manly men.
(Now, if you'll excuse me for a moment I just need to check on the latest turnip prices...)
It actually doesn't give you exact orientation, you have to derive that from the accelerations, which only works as long as you don't move it, else acceleration and gravity will overlap and you will have a hard time telling which is gravity and which is movement of the Wiimote.
And by 'a hard time' we mean 'if you can do it you'll overturn general relativity and win a Nobel prize'.
For some time now, anyone arrested for any offence in the UK gets DNA samples taken and added to a national database. These samples are not destroyed nor are the records deleted even if you are released without charge, or found not guilty. There are now some 3.4 million samples on record, out of a country of some 60 million.
Of course, the innocent have nothing to fear from this. We Love Big Blair.
Strikingly well preserved mummies from the Takla Makan desert region have strongly European characterstics such as red hair and blue eyes dating from as far back as 3800 BP.
Yeah, but that proves little; Taklamakan is a Soft Place. Those guys could have wandered back from 6000 AD for all we know, stopping for a picnic with Fiddler's Green along the way.
Now, did you mean there are only 8 words in all the world's languages that end in "su" or just English? I can't believe that there aren't a few more out there in different languages...
And I'm not just saying that because I want Darl whacked by a sword.
Not fatally, mind. He'll be up against one of the Nazgul. They go in for Morgul-blades, slow poisoning leading to hideous wraithform undeath... wait, how would we know the difference?
Having played the SNES Starfox minigame on Wario Ware, I'd just like to say that if Nintendo would like to release a proper Wii Starfox then they will own the world.
You don't need a video to learn a new language, you just need to hear and read it. Even if (for whatever psychiatric reason) you're absolutely _only_ able to do it over the Internet, you don't absolutely need broadband for that: to learn to read you only need a freakin' ASCII file
Students of Russian, Japanese, and Arabic might suggest you try Unicode.
And to think I've been told, again and again, that the PS3 will sell "no matter what" in Japan, because it's made by Sony!
You know those comparison pics we keep seeing, of Wii boxes marked 'totally sold out' and PS3 boxes marked 'Please for the love of God take these things off our hands'? Where are the Xbox 360 boxes?
They're not there. Nobody in Japan wants them at all.
According to this article the PS3 has already sold more units in Japan than has the Xbox 360. Even though it's only been out a month.
The people telling you how the PS3 would surely sell in Japan were telling you that on the assumption that the contest was between Sony and Microsoft - in which case, Sony is a surefire winner. The whole Wii thing was unexpected - although given the enormous craze in Japan for the DS over the summer, perhaps it should not have been such a surprise.
I'm always curious though... DVD never really took off (it was popular, but not in-every-living-room popular) until CSS was cracked and people could copy their own DVDs (or rather buy copied DVD movies for $5 from the kid down the hall.) That was the real death knell for VHS.
I'd say DVD took off once the Playstation 2 came out. Before that, DVD players had been expensive and VHS was good enough for most. PS2 put millions of DVD players in people's living rooms as a side-effect of something they were going to buy anyway. Before PS2, DVDs were confined to a small slice of shelf space in video stores; once PS2 came out, they increased very rapidly indeed.
Things may have gone differently elsewhere, but in the UK the Playstation 2 was a major force behind mass-market acceptance of the DVD format.
I used to think that the Playstation 3 would have the same effect for Blu-Ray, but now I'm far from sure. Quite apart from the price, it's just too late; it's this generation's N64. In the NES and SNES days I was a total Nintendo fanboy, but if my parents hadn't had a fit of generosity and got a PC, I'd have given up waiting for N64 and bought a Playstation, and I'm sure many others did the same. How many people have already given up waiting for PS3 and gone out and bought a 360?
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The only income seems to be from the website subscriptions. OK. One guy takes out a subscription to EMIArtistSearch.com - he's a DJ in a popular club. He finds out what's new and what's cool. Downloads the files. Plays them that night. Everyone at the club hears the new tunes there. They go to Google and get the same files, this time for free.
The only reason I've got to subscribe to the website is if it's the only channel by which the company are publicising the band. It won't be. There'll be radio play, festival appearances, club nights, word of mouth.
What I'd do is distribute only the singles free. The singles chart is a write-off now anyway, nobody cares about it, and albums are bigger money. Take the porn site approach. Distribute the singles free on your high-capacity, high-reliability website, and people might well be persuaded to fork over some modest monthly subscription for access to the rest of the album - even if they could still get it via P2P, they'll pay for the convenience.
Let us begin with two groups of transhumans. One has the urge to reproduce and colonise. The other does not. Wait a million years. What does the galaxy look like?
My guess is that it's full of transhumans who have the urge to reproduce and colonise, with those who do not have that urge still sitting perfectly still in the same place as before, a statistically insignificant fraction of the population.
The urge to reproduce and colonise is an enormous evolutionary advantage. Creatures without it will inevitably become sidelined into a vanishingly small fraction of the population by the compound increase in the numbers of those creatures which do have it. Therefore, any creature found in the universe is overwhelmingly likely to have this urge.
Ask the Iraqi resistance, or the IRA.
Then the Lord rained upon Sodom and upon Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven; and he overthrew those cities, and all the plain, and all the inhabitants of the cities, and that which grew upon the ground.
Some of us started out playing Zelda 2 on the NES, thankyouverymuch. They wisely dropped the experience points thing for all subsequent games. I still love that game, but it's very much an odd one out.
There are no strength, dexterity, or wisdom attributes for which you can boost with equipment.
None visible, anyway. Power Bracelet (or later, Gauntlets) for moving rocks? Great Fairy's Tears to boost damage? Blue or Red Ring to boost armour class?
You don't have to loot corpses for marginal equipment upgrades and you don't have time-sink kill quests to kill the same monsters over and over and over again.
The first item you find in the first Zelda game is the Boomerang, and you get it by killing off a bunch of Goriya in the first dungeon. A lot of dungeon doors throughout the whole saga won't open until you've exterminated all monsters in the previous room. Oh, and three words of pure hack-n-slash horror: Cave Of Ordeals.
You don't have 10 slots for armor and magical jewelery and it doesn't take 2 minutes to kill a group of monsters.
That at least depends on which monsters :-) As for equipment slots, recent games have had some of that element in them: the Master Sword, or the Biggoron's Sword? Regular outfit, Zora tunic, or magical rupee-draining armour?
All that said, what upset me the most about Twilight Princess is that now I have to find five Pieces of Heart for each new Heart Container. Five. That's just not fair at all...
I assume the GC version handles much the same as Ocarina or Wind Waker. In which case I love the Wiimote for aiming - especially when Spider-Maning through the sky city with dual hookshots - and I could never go back to an analogue stick for that, but shaking the nunchuck for the spin attack, or shoving it for the shield charge, that doesn't quite work.
I think relative to the screen, and shove towards the screen or parallel to it when trying to carry out those moves. However, because I've been using the nunchuck just as a one-handed joystick for a long time in the game, I'm not pointing it at the screen, but at some random angle selected for arm comfort. So 'shove towards screen' to me = 'up and forwards at about 45 degrees' to the nunchuck, and the move only works about 50% of the time.
For Wii Sports, or Wario Ware, where you're standing up and focusing on hand movements, nunchuck motion control is great. For Zelda, which is more of a sofa game, it isn't so good.
Well, which one is it? Surely, an omniscient deity shouldn't have difficulty telling apart a hand and a forehead.
You're misreading it. Obviously the Antichrist gives people a choice of where they want the mark. Personally I'll go for the hand; it'll look a lot cooler there.
The title music from Mega Man 3 is going quite nicely in my head right now, for instance.
Please explain where that's Russia's problem.
Well, I suppose you could measure the house to 100% accuracy... but then you'd have the problem that it would be moving at a totally unknown speed in a totally unknown direction, and you'd never find it again.
True, I've got quite enough minigames now and I'll have Zelda finished as soon as I can work out how to hit back at Zant (I can dodge or block his feeble attack forever, though... don't tell me, I'll find out myself!) Some more substantial games would be nice.
I'm currently looking forward to Metroid, Mario Galaxy, and The Godfather, plus Dragonball when that finally gets to the UK. That said, the game I want most is yet another party game: DDR.
My house is on there bright and clear, and interestingly enough seems to be the definitive location for the suburb I'm in. The little red dot is right on the driveway.
Well, I for one will have nothing to do with anything of the kind. Gaming is all about guns and robots and tanks and violence and stuff, that's proper, hardcore grown-up gaming for manly men.
(Now, if you'll excuse me for a moment I just need to check on the latest turnip prices...)
And by 'a hard time' we mean 'if you can do it you'll overturn general relativity and win a Nobel prize'.
Of course, the innocent have nothing to fear from this. We Love Big Blair.
Yeah, but that proves little; Taklamakan is a Soft Place. Those guys could have wandered back from 6000 AD for all we know, stopping for a picnic with Fiddler's Green along the way.
Well, of course. Bunnies are fantastic dancers.
Yes, she is. Why else are all the Christians so scared of her books?
Hai, arimasu :-)
Not fatally, mind. He'll be up against one of the Nazgul. They go in for Morgul-blades, slow poisoning leading to hideous wraithform undeath... wait, how would we know the difference?
Having played the SNES Starfox minigame on Wario Ware, I'd just like to say that if Nintendo would like to release a proper Wii Starfox then they will own the world.
Students of Russian, Japanese, and Arabic might suggest you try Unicode.
You know those comparison pics we keep seeing, of Wii boxes marked 'totally sold out' and PS3 boxes marked 'Please for the love of God take these things off our hands'? Where are the Xbox 360 boxes?
They're not there. Nobody in Japan wants them at all.
According to this article the PS3 has already sold more units in Japan than has the Xbox 360. Even though it's only been out a month.
The people telling you how the PS3 would surely sell in Japan were telling you that on the assumption that the contest was between Sony and Microsoft - in which case, Sony is a surefire winner. The whole Wii thing was unexpected - although given the enormous craze in Japan for the DS over the summer, perhaps it should not have been such a surprise.
I'd say DVD took off once the Playstation 2 came out. Before that, DVD players had been expensive and VHS was good enough for most. PS2 put millions of DVD players in people's living rooms as a side-effect of something they were going to buy anyway. Before PS2, DVDs were confined to a small slice of shelf space in video stores; once PS2 came out, they increased very rapidly indeed.
Things may have gone differently elsewhere, but in the UK the Playstation 2 was a major force behind mass-market acceptance of the DVD format.
I used to think that the Playstation 3 would have the same effect for Blu-Ray, but now I'm far from sure. Quite apart from the price, it's just too late; it's this generation's N64. In the NES and SNES days I was a total Nintendo fanboy, but if my parents hadn't had a fit of generosity and got a PC, I'd have given up waiting for N64 and bought a Playstation, and I'm sure many others did the same. How many people have already given up waiting for PS3 and gone out and bought a 360?
Someone needs to read more Neal Stephenson.