You mean the answer is flogging dead horses by using the same franchises over and over again.
These horses are far from dead.
The last Zelda and Mario games that came out, I bought both of 'em on launch day. New SMB I finished in a weekend, though it took me a long while to find every level and get the three-star save file. Twilight Princess - well, I'm at just over 30 hours since the UK launch on December 8th, and I just completed the Snowpeak quest. Died twice early on, only once been seriously threatened since then.
These games have been fairly easy, because I'm extremely good at them. For this I have to thank some 20 years of experience. But they're both of them excellent games, at least as good as anything else you'll find on the shelves. My experience of their forebears means I pick up the new game much more quickly, but it doesn't make it any less a great game.
A new Zelda or Mario isn't like a new Madden or even a new Championship Manager. It's not just a reissue of the same basic game with prettier graphics. It's the same underlying mechanism, sure, and with recurring characters, but it's always a new world to explore.
This is a very easy target if it is just floating out there with protection. I'm not sure they are including the cost of providing military security in their costs but they probably need to.
Any enemy capable of wholly destroying so large and diffuse a target just off the east coast of England, having got past the NATO forward radars, God knows how many sonar buoys, a large selection of allied nations, the Royal Navy, and the RAF, could probably just nuke the whole country flat anyway if they wanted to.
Vandalism or terrorism might be attempted, but these things are a fair distance apart. I doubt anything short of a major military strike, or a natural disaster, would be able to take out more than a few.
Therefore converting heat energy to electrical energy will cause a drop in the total heat energy of the system (Earth)
Alas, here we see how the ability to quote definitions does not a physicist make...
A solar cell does not convert heat to electricity. That would require a heatsink at lower than ambient surface temperature; look up the Carnot engine in your thermodynamics textbook. A solar cell converts light to electricity.
Now, the Earth at present is mostly blue and white, and quite reflective. Much of the sunlight falling upon the Earth is reflected away into space - I think it's something like 30%. Now, suppose we plate the Earth with solar panels. By design, these absorb as much light as possible. Now the Earth, covered in solar panels, is almost black, and almost all the sunlight falling upon it is absorbed. Do you still think it's a cooler planet?
Perhaps you do. Very well. Solar panels are very inefficient things; of the energy that falls upon them, only a fraction is converted to electricity, the rest becoming, you guessed it, heat. But let's allow that we have magnificently efficient photovoltaics and neglect this. So, the whole of this infalling sunlight is converted to electricity. A cold planet? Not a bit of it. Remember, the electrical energy does not leave the planet! Instead it is run through machines which do work, and all work produces waste heat. Every joule absorbed will, after some number of conversions, become heat. Unless the solar cells are supremely efficient and channel all that power to a massive laser of some kind to pump the sunlight back off the Earth, they'll heat the planet.
Far from cooling the area, if we put a whole lot of solar cells in the middle of the desert, they'll make it hotter.
Perhaps you should check the next chapter in the textbook you got that definition from. You'll learn about a second law of thermodynamics...
A favorite for a few of us is Monopoly. However, I've been in search of a game similar to this but more complex. The most important thing I'm looking for is the outcome of the game depending more on strategy and less on chance. Anyone know of any such board games?
Monopoly-by-the-book.
First and foremost, this means no money gets put in the middle for Free Parking, ever; it goes to the bank where it belongs. You CAN buy on your first time round. If you choose not to buy unowned property when you have the chance, the property goes up for auction, and you can bid for it even if you turned it down at the list price. There is no double salary for landing exactly on Go. If there are no houses left in the box and somebody wants to build, too bad, they can wait till some houses get freed up, and if some bastard hogs all the houses by refusing to upgrade to hotels, that's his right and he deserves everything he gets if he gets the Make General Repairs card.
Nobody plays Monopoly by the rules, but the Free Parking Jackpot kills the game stone dead, and auctions (a) get all the properties owned much more quickly and cheaply, and (b) raise the backstabbing factor by about a billion.
You're an idiot. Go to Europe, there are no bills for less than 5 euro. (Same in the UK, with pounds.) The 1 and 2 unit coins are infinitely more convenient than bills.
Whenever I've been into the eurozone I've been annoyed at the five-euro note. It's not worth enough, it gets passed around too much, and you end up with a wallet full of revolting little rags. Five euro should probably be a coin. Five pounds probably shouldn't, but give it a few years more of inflation and I'd say it should be.
That said, there's a certain amount of difference of opinion here. In England we're used to coins up to quite a high value, notes starting at £5, so when I encounter the 5 note I think it annoying to have such a low value be on paper. But apparently Italians have not taken too well the the euro, because they're used to thinking of coins as entirely worthless: all denominations of their currency that were worth having were on paper. Suddenly they have pockets full of 2 coins which are of substantial value!
Money coins that cost almost as much as the coin's face value - removes the desire to make fake money.
And introduces the desire to clip. Back when coins were made of silver and gold, people used to trim the edges of coins, keep the clippings and then pass the coin on at face value.
DECUS ET TUTAMEN is written around the milling on the edge of a pound coin. Decoration, and protection. The milling is there because, historically, it would have revealed that a coin had been clipped. But I imagine modern counterfeiters would be able to melt down a gold coin, extract a little profit margin, and then re-stamp it with the very same design but imperceptibly smaller. While you can embed a whole lot of clever printing tricks and watermarks in a paper note, there's a limit to how well you can stamp metal and not expect the fine details to wear away.
Laaaaaaame. But then, so is the Din's Fire technique I use to beat him in Ocarina, I suppose...
Back in the NES heyday I used to beat Shadow Link OK by just casting Shield and then taking him on fair and square in the middle of the screen. With a full magic meter you'd have enough left for two shots of Life, which normally was enough to survive.
What I never did manage was to beat the guy straight - I always let him win the first, so that I'd come back on my next life with full life and magic meters. I mean, you had to use Thunder just to be able to touch the previous boss, and that drains half your magic right off. To beat Shadow Link directly after having survived the other boss would be a hell of an achievement. Unless you use a lame trick, of course:-)
... You might want to rethink that. Last time around, it didn't go down too well. All the other 2-D Zeldas are top down.
Personally I loved Zelda II, but most people didn't. And even I would be loath to play another game like it. It was so utterly evil. Even many years later, playing through the Water Temple in Ocarina, it affected me badly. Shadow Link. Oh God. The memories are coming back! I was slashed to pieces repeatedly because I was simply too terrified to make a fight of it. Ended up tanking up on green potions and setting off Din's Fire whenever the bastard came anywhere near.
Twilight Princess suits me down to the ground. It's so easy. I've only been killed twice so far, and that was while working out the deal with those kill-all-three-at-once beasties right at the start.
In the future (if there is one once we get our act together soon enough), the "solution" has to be a combination of solutions. Wind, Geothermal, Tidal, Nuclear (yes, Nuclear - although it's gotten a bad rap, it's actually a pretty good source), and perhaps Fusion, in addition to Hydrogen.
You can't have a wind powered car. You can't have a geothermal car. You can't have a tidal powered car, and although in theory you could have a nuclear powered car I doubt it would ever be legal.
You can, however, have a hydrogen powered car, and all of the above power sources can be used to produce hydrogen. That's the point of the hydrogen economy. There's no hydrogen well, you have to manufactuer hydrogen at a substantial cost in energy. But the energy can come from anything, not just oil. If all our cars ran on hydrogen, we could power them by any of the means you describe, and leave the Middle East to its own devices. Imagine not having to care about that place and its people any more than you care about Africa and its people. That's the goal here.
I could have done with better AI in the combat (NEVER stand in front of a NPC with an autoshotgun).
Actually, Fallout 2 was better about this. In the original, sure, never ever give an NPC an automatic weapon. But in Fallout 2 you can give them an automatic and then order them to only use burst mode when they're certain they won't hit you. There was a quite sophisticated menu for tweaking their AI scripts.
I miss the days of long games.. i don't want something with 8-12 hours of game play.. i want stuff with alteast amonth..
I'm just over 22 hours into Twilight Princess, and I just got me the Master Sword. I have eight hearts, from a starting three, out of a total which is presumably 20.
I'd like to chime in about how appallingly short and lacking in storyline modern games are, but I'm busy right now. I'll get back to you in about a month, OK?
(and a seeming lack of strong QA KOTOR2 also had tons of bugs. I couldn't even finish the PC version because of a CTD, even on a clean Windows and driver install.)
It wasn't your fault. That wasn't a crash; it was the actual ending. No, I couldn't believe it either...
There's a project to restore some of the missing material, a lot of which was included in a Hot Coffee sort of way on the disks but not used in the actual game. They seem to be making steady progress, too.
The PS3 and Wii are vaporware at MSRP. I await proof to the contrary.
Well, going by the furious screams of agony I'm receiving from muscles and tendons that have spent the last decade in complete disuse, I'd say that Wii is pretty damn real...
It is meangingful to discuss an increase in gun-related crime rates in the U.K. If removing guns was effective at reducing crime, we should see a reduction in rates when guns are removed. Where we see an increase it indicates at best that removing guns was ineffective and at worst that removing the guns resulted in more crime.
You are clearly under a misapprehension here. You think that guns were removed. This is not the case; guns were banned. However, even before the ban was imposed, the number of people who actually owned guns was insignificant. Before the ban, vanishingly few people had guns. After the ban, vanishingly few people have guns. Very little removing was actually done, because there was almost nothing to remove.
The ban on handguns made no significant difference to the situation in the UK. Hardly anybody was even affected. It's not as if we had an American-style armed population, and then decided to ban handguns; we had a tiny number of people with legal guns, then one of them shot up a school, and so we banned them. The point wasn't to reduce crime, the point was for the government to be seen to be Doing Something in the face of a tabloid outcry over a whole bunch of dead children.
As it stands, the weapon of choice for the British rampaging psycho seems to be the katana; where an American would shoot up a crowded building with an assault rifle, our maniacs will take a samurai sword and start slashing. Street brawlers seem to go in for knives. A hardcore consisting mostly of drug traders does still carry firearms, and there seem to be a number of gunsmiths around who modify Brocock air-pistols to fire real ammunition, but as far as I'm aware this is still a niche market.
He is probably better known across the world than any American football player (I must admit, I can't name a single one).
Given a few minutes to rack my brain, I could probably come up with a few. They had a fairly decent run in the World Cup in the summer, after all, so I'd have heard quite a few names of American footballers over the course of the tournament...
I've been playing a video game all evening. And I still have a desire to violently knock down ten defenseless pins with a large heavy ball. Sometimes even as many as 91. Though I've successfully managed to restrain the urge to destroy video screens with small flying white objects.
Me, I just have this uncontrollable urge to find a bunch of bunnies and start disco dancing...
In terms of awesome eye candy this would make just above the coolest desktop widget (for MacOS, Vista, or Yahoo! Widget Engine or whatever). A view of the Earth from space that reflects continuous conditions as they're seen.
I always thought NASA should mount a camera on the underside of the ISS. A plain old webcam would do, but they could probably lay hands on some pretty decent imaging. They could put it out over a spare cable channel, just put some classical music on the soundtrack and let the world drift by below with no further commentary. Or stream it over the internet; I'd love to set that as my screensaver, for instance.
Slashdot Mirror
These horses are far from dead.
The last Zelda and Mario games that came out, I bought both of 'em on launch day. New SMB I finished in a weekend, though it took me a long while to find every level and get the three-star save file. Twilight Princess - well, I'm at just over 30 hours since the UK launch on December 8th, and I just completed the Snowpeak quest. Died twice early on, only once been seriously threatened since then.
These games have been fairly easy, because I'm extremely good at them. For this I have to thank some 20 years of experience. But they're both of them excellent games, at least as good as anything else you'll find on the shelves. My experience of their forebears means I pick up the new game much more quickly, but it doesn't make it any less a great game.
A new Zelda or Mario isn't like a new Madden or even a new Championship Manager. It's not just a reissue of the same basic game with prettier graphics. It's the same underlying mechanism, sure, and with recurring characters, but it's always a new world to explore.
Well, quite a lot of people do seem to be fumbling it lately...
Any enemy capable of wholly destroying so large and diffuse a target just off the east coast of England, having got past the NATO forward radars, God knows how many sonar buoys, a large selection of allied nations, the Royal Navy, and the RAF, could probably just nuke the whole country flat anyway if they wanted to.
Vandalism or terrorism might be attempted, but these things are a fair distance apart. I doubt anything short of a major military strike, or a natural disaster, would be able to take out more than a few.
A solar cell does not convert heat to electricity. That would require a heatsink at lower than ambient surface temperature; look up the Carnot engine in your thermodynamics textbook. A solar cell converts light to electricity.
Now, the Earth at present is mostly blue and white, and quite reflective. Much of the sunlight falling upon the Earth is reflected away into space - I think it's something like 30%. Now, suppose we plate the Earth with solar panels. By design, these absorb as much light as possible. Now the Earth, covered in solar panels, is almost black, and almost all the sunlight falling upon it is absorbed. Do you still think it's a cooler planet?
Perhaps you do. Very well. Solar panels are very inefficient things; of the energy that falls upon them, only a fraction is converted to electricity, the rest becoming, you guessed it, heat. But let's allow that we have magnificently efficient photovoltaics and neglect this. So, the whole of this infalling sunlight is converted to electricity. A cold planet? Not a bit of it. Remember, the electrical energy does not leave the planet! Instead it is run through machines which do work, and all work produces waste heat. Every joule absorbed will, after some number of conversions, become heat. Unless the solar cells are supremely efficient and channel all that power to a massive laser of some kind to pump the sunlight back off the Earth, they'll heat the planet.
Far from cooling the area, if we put a whole lot of solar cells in the middle of the desert, they'll make it hotter.
Perhaps you should check the next chapter in the textbook you got that definition from. You'll learn about a second law of thermodynamics...
Which country is this building a giant windfarm again?
Care to explain the thermodynamics here? Plating large parts of the earth's surface with materials designed to absorb sunlight would cool the planet?
Monopoly-by-the-book.
First and foremost, this means no money gets put in the middle for Free Parking, ever; it goes to the bank where it belongs. You CAN buy on your first time round. If you choose not to buy unowned property when you have the chance, the property goes up for auction, and you can bid for it even if you turned it down at the list price. There is no double salary for landing exactly on Go. If there are no houses left in the box and somebody wants to build, too bad, they can wait till some houses get freed up, and if some bastard hogs all the houses by refusing to upgrade to hotels, that's his right and he deserves everything he gets if he gets the Make General Repairs card.
Nobody plays Monopoly by the rules, but the Free Parking Jackpot kills the game stone dead, and auctions (a) get all the properties owned much more quickly and cheaply, and (b) raise the backstabbing factor by about a billion.
Huh? Are you saying that Wii graphics are worse than Gamecube?
Whenever I've been into the eurozone I've been annoyed at the five-euro note. It's not worth enough, it gets passed around too much, and you end up with a wallet full of revolting little rags. Five euro should probably be a coin. Five pounds probably shouldn't, but give it a few years more of inflation and I'd say it should be.
That said, there's a certain amount of difference of opinion here. In England we're used to coins up to quite a high value, notes starting at £5, so when I encounter the 5 note I think it annoying to have such a low value be on paper. But apparently Italians have not taken too well the the euro, because they're used to thinking of coins as entirely worthless: all denominations of their currency that were worth having were on paper. Suddenly they have pockets full of 2 coins which are of substantial value!
And introduces the desire to clip. Back when coins were made of silver and gold, people used to trim the edges of coins, keep the clippings and then pass the coin on at face value.
DECUS ET TUTAMEN is written around the milling on the edge of a pound coin. Decoration, and protection. The milling is there because, historically, it would have revealed that a coin had been clipped. But I imagine modern counterfeiters would be able to melt down a gold coin, extract a little profit margin, and then re-stamp it with the very same design but imperceptibly smaller. While you can embed a whole lot of clever printing tricks and watermarks in a paper note, there's a limit to how well you can stamp metal and not expect the fine details to wear away.
Back in the NES heyday I used to beat Shadow Link OK by just casting Shield and then taking him on fair and square in the middle of the screen. With a full magic meter you'd have enough left for two shots of Life, which normally was enough to survive.
What I never did manage was to beat the guy straight - I always let him win the first, so that I'd come back on my next life with full life and magic meters. I mean, you had to use Thunder just to be able to touch the previous boss, and that drains half your magic right off. To beat Shadow Link directly after having survived the other boss would be a hell of an achievement. Unless you use a lame trick, of course :-)
Personally I loved Zelda II, but most people didn't. And even I would be loath to play another game like it. It was so utterly evil. Even many years later, playing through the Water Temple in Ocarina, it affected me badly. Shadow Link. Oh God. The memories are coming back! I was slashed to pieces repeatedly because I was simply too terrified to make a fight of it. Ended up tanking up on green potions and setting off Din's Fire whenever the bastard came anywhere near.
Twilight Princess suits me down to the ground. It's so easy. I've only been killed twice so far, and that was while working out the deal with those kill-all-three-at-once beasties right at the start.
Play it in ScummVM and you can get them with nice antialiasing, too.
You can't have a wind powered car. You can't have a geothermal car. You can't have a tidal powered car, and although in theory you could have a nuclear powered car I doubt it would ever be legal.
You can, however, have a hydrogen powered car, and all of the above power sources can be used to produce hydrogen. That's the point of the hydrogen economy. There's no hydrogen well, you have to manufactuer hydrogen at a substantial cost in energy. But the energy can come from anything, not just oil. If all our cars ran on hydrogen, we could power them by any of the means you describe, and leave the Middle East to its own devices. Imagine not having to care about that place and its people any more than you care about Africa and its people. That's the goal here.
Actually, Fallout 2 was better about this. In the original, sure, never ever give an NPC an automatic weapon. But in Fallout 2 you can give them an automatic and then order them to only use burst mode when they're certain they won't hit you. There was a quite sophisticated menu for tweaking their AI scripts.
I'm just over 22 hours into Twilight Princess, and I just got me the Master Sword. I have eight hearts, from a starting three, out of a total which is presumably 20.
I'd like to chime in about how appallingly short and lacking in storyline modern games are, but I'm busy right now. I'll get back to you in about a month, OK?
It wasn't your fault. That wasn't a crash; it was the actual ending. No, I couldn't believe it either...
There's a project to restore some of the missing material, a lot of which was included in a Hot Coffee sort of way on the disks but not used in the actual game. They seem to be making steady progress, too.
It's completely different, because here it's the good guys doing it.
Well, going by the furious screams of agony I'm receiving from muscles and tendons that have spent the last decade in complete disuse, I'd say that Wii is pretty damn real...
You are clearly under a misapprehension here. You think that guns were removed. This is not the case; guns were banned. However, even before the ban was imposed, the number of people who actually owned guns was insignificant. Before the ban, vanishingly few people had guns. After the ban, vanishingly few people have guns. Very little removing was actually done, because there was almost nothing to remove.
The ban on handguns made no significant difference to the situation in the UK. Hardly anybody was even affected. It's not as if we had an American-style armed population, and then decided to ban handguns; we had a tiny number of people with legal guns, then one of them shot up a school, and so we banned them. The point wasn't to reduce crime, the point was for the government to be seen to be Doing Something in the face of a tabloid outcry over a whole bunch of dead children.
As it stands, the weapon of choice for the British rampaging psycho seems to be the katana; where an American would shoot up a crowded building with an assault rifle, our maniacs will take a samurai sword and start slashing. Street brawlers seem to go in for knives. A hardcore consisting mostly of drug traders does still carry firearms, and there seem to be a number of gunsmiths around who modify Brocock air-pistols to fire real ammunition, but as far as I'm aware this is still a niche market.
Given a few minutes to rack my brain, I could probably come up with a few. They had a fairly decent run in the World Cup in the summer, after all, so I'd have heard quite a few names of American footballers over the course of the tournament...
Me, I just have this uncontrollable urge to find a bunch of bunnies and start disco dancing...
I always thought NASA should mount a camera on the underside of the ISS. A plain old webcam would do, but they could probably lay hands on some pretty decent imaging. They could put it out over a spare cable channel, just put some classical music on the soundtrack and let the world drift by below with no further commentary. Or stream it over the internet; I'd love to set that as my screensaver, for instance.
If he didn't, I do. Hell yeah. I daresay you could recruit an entire colony's worth of volunteers from /. alone...
Friday is the launch day in the UK. I've had my Wii pre-ordered since September. If you're thinking I've got some secret supplier, sorry :-)