But to really be a theory, it needs to be testable and disprovable. Right now String Theory is not really testable, and it's difficult to disprove, because it morphs to accept whatever disprovations people come up with. Wikipedia actually sites it on the theory page as a more looser definition of theory than the traditional scientific usage of the term. (The term theory is occasionally stretched to refer to theoretical speculation that is currently unverifiable. Examples are string theory and various theories of everything. In common speech, theory has a far wider and less defined meaning than its use in the sciences.)
Hey, if these rich dudes get astronaut wings for flying into space, can I get some kind of special Pilot Wings for flying on United 852 to SFO from Narita? We were well above 38,000 feet at one point, previously territory only veered into by elite test pilots, and we actually crossed the Pacific in ONE HOP, ON INSTRUMENTS for most of the time. Both those things must have been records at one point...
(Quick, name the first guy brave enough to fly to Hawaii.)
What's wrong with expanding from an endless series of shooters into new genres? The Halo world (as fleshed out in the books by Eric Nylund) is an awesome Sci-Fi universe that certainly has a lot more to offer gamewise than just Bungie's stock-in-trade of shooters.
I think we can safely say "zero g" when the person is perceptually experiencing no or extremely low gravity. Obviously gravity doesn't cease working outside the atmosphere, but common, saying "perceived weightlessness" or something would get pretty lame.
that Google is really no longer a company that does no evil? Their business model is basically: "give us all your personal information and we'll store it on our servers. Nothing to worry about here! We're the company that does no evil...unless the Chinese goverment asks us to."
The "it's all for the greater good" line sure wouldn't feel nice if you were the person who ended up tortured in some Chinese prison because Google gave up the contents of your gmail, or spreadsheet.
Anyway, I realize this post is coming off trolling, and I apologize, but I'm sick of the double standard vis-a-vis google vs. any other large company. Judging them by their actions, not their words, they are not significantly different these days than Microsoft (these days -- not necessarily MS's historical actions).
OMFG, you clearly haven't been to Oakland lately! 900sq. foot houses in my working/middle class neighborhood go for $500K+. Anyway, my NEIGHBORHOOD is fine... we have an active neighborhood crime prevention council, we do weekly walks, we had a block party on National Night Out day, we report everything to the police at the drop of a hat, we let people know if someone suspicious is in teir yard, there's a Yahoo! list, my neighbors are all cool, etc.
The problem is that at the margins -- where kids would happily play if left outside on their own -- it's full of what are basically the dregs of society, and cars drive like a million miles an hour on the street. So you can't let your kids out for unsupervised play.
My point, (which I've harped on now about 20 times in this thread, and I promise to stop posting to... I just feel passionate about it, sorry) is that it's a complicated issue, and you can't say "anyone who lets their kids play games instead of playing outside is a troglodyte who should be shot," or whatever the open letter in TFA said.
I make games for a living, I monitor my kid's media intake extremely closely, but I also recognize that in his situation, which is increasingly common, a lot of his exploration play will have to be virtual for the time being. Blaming consumer electronics and games for this situation is like blaming the crack for the crackheads.
How remarkably sad. If I did not have a place to "free range" my kids I would reconsider my priorities regarding where I live.
Yes, it's a difficult issue -- do you move to the suburbs so your kids can play outside more freely, but you commute for two hours wasting gas (and time you can spend with your kids), contributing to exurban spawl and living somewhere that should be arable cropland or open space?
My point, really, was that this is a super complicated issue, and can't simply be blamed on consumer electronics!
Well, yes, I agree completely, and obviously I don't just sit around my house saying "woe is me... at least Zelda will keep my son safe!" My point is just that in unfafe environments (and while Oakland has crack-heads, many 'safer' neighborhoods have people who are just as predatory, such as pedophiles, etc.) running out to play unsupervised is not always an option.
Veering seriously OT, of course people need to work actively towards making their neighborhood more safe and less crack-addict infected. In Oakland, unfortunatley, the current political climate doesn't lend itself towards actually addressing the root causes or treating the symptoms (by like, arresting those people), and in fact I would argue that it works (unintentionally or otherwise) towards continuing the causes, so that the current power structure can stay in place.
Even worse, you get advice from police that basically says "stay inside, never confront anyone. By the way, if something bad happens, we won't show up, but by all means, never try to protect yourself." It's pretty much the definition of irrational.
Letting your kid outside to play with his friends is un-workable in dangerous, urban environments. I'd much rather my kid get the same kind of exploratory feelings I got from playing in the woods from playing Zelda, versus having him venture, unsupervised, into the dirty, polluted, woody ravines by our home in east Oakland, which are overrun with crack users, and prostitutes.
Henry Jerkins at MIT makes the excellent point that kids playing videogames are basically doing the same thing as kids playing cowboys and indians, and that videogames have become the virtual playspace for a new generation of kids who don't have the opportunity to roam in real environments. (He also makes the point that mom's are only freaked by games because they never saw what kinds of real and imagined violence went on when kids played outside.)
Finally, anyone who thinks kids today have been robbed of their imaginations should drop a box of legos in front of them.
AFAIK, the only benefit of HDMI over component cables is a) less things to plug in, and b) HDMI will work with DRMed BluRay content while standard component cables won't. Is there any qualitative difference to the HDMI signal over component?
You could stand behind the coffee table. Or put the bar away from the front of the TV. I suspect many games will have a calibration mode to aid in this.
Responding to the grandparent post: At E3, I had a slightly bad time controlling things with the Wiis on the floor where it was really crowded, but when I was able to get into Nintendo's sanctum sanctorium off the floor (where Wiis outnumbered people by 3 to 1), things were significantly easier. So, I don't think you can judge the experience from the showfloor demos.
Ok though, just for the record, no one doubted the intelligence at the time. I'm sure some republibot can provide links, but even Bill Clinton said there were WMDs in Iraq. Clinton even established the "regime change" policy. This is in no way a defense of the prosecution of the war, or me saying it was necessarily a good idea, but people on BOTH SIDES of the aisle said there were WMDs in Iraq (and there were -- more than 700 WMD bearing shells have been discovered), so it's hard for me to buy the notion that Bush influenced the intelligence (in a 'bush lied, people died' sense), since it was apparently saying the same thing to Bill Clinton, before GWB was in office.
Dude, they're in EUROPE. Someone just needs to head for the University, find the demo party, pry Dieter away from his Amiga and be like "oh qiuck, we need the data from these floppies... yes, if you want to make a mod so the data all prints out along a sin-wave line while the SID chip kicks out the collected works of David Hasselhof, that's fine... oh my, you can make the text appear on shiny spheres? So much the better!"
Given how few consumers have HDMI inputs on their TV, not including an HDMI cable doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Sony didn't include component cables with PS2 and no one really bitched (Nintendo and MS didn't either last generation). I believe 360 was the first system to include component outs in the box. This whole issue strikes me as FUD.
I like the T & R series of ThinkPads (recently upgraded from an R41 to a T60) as they have both. Of course, I typically disable the trackpad, which causes no end of sadness for guests using my computer, but the "pencil eraser" is clearly superior if you're not using a real mouse. For me, the deciding factor in a laptop is the keyboard. ThinkPad still has the best, but I fear this is a place Lenovo will skimp in the future.
Oh yeah, to be clear, I'm not complaining, and the save system (about which everyone complains) actually encourages you to restart occaisionally. You don't lose stats when you restart, either, and if you want to finish the game at level 50, you'll need to play through it more than once. My point was just that the game has flaws, and tons of people talk about them, but more important than that, tons of people are playing and enjoying the game. I have some quibbles, but I have put in more hours than with any other X360 game (except geometry wars)!
I'm actually surprised this was reviewed as a "B" game, because it feels AAA to me... It's pretty ambitious, and while there are some rough around the edges components, it's still totally awesome overall.
They have mercury in them, which actually makes them suck much worse if they do break. That said, they save a ton of energy, and while they don't work well (read: at all) with dimmers, good ones are intensely bright. I have them everypace in my house that they fit (maybe 50% of possible locations).
It's already closing in on a million units and rasing Capcom's stock price accordingly. Everyone bags on some element of the game (as Zonk did, appropriately), but EVERYONE is playing it, at least at my office...
Do you really think Sony *wants* to sell the PS3 for $600US? Do you think they were sitting around in a room and were like "gee, how can we soak the kids?" I mean, it's not like their going to be making a profit on the hardware. Sony is taking knocks for the price, and rightly so, but claiming that anyone at Sony is excited about the price is really adding insult to injury.
In a way, I feel sorry for Sony, esp. in regards to Bluray. Anytime they support a format, everyone is like "yeah but remeber Betamax!" and its like -- omfg, how many people who are posting that shit were even ALIVE when Beta came out. I know, minidisc was a flop, UMD hasn't taken off either, but there's nothing about Blu-Ray that's inherently worse than HD-DVD, except that Sony is behind it, as far as I can tell.*
Anyway, bottom line, bash the price all you want (god knows I am), but you don't necessarily have to ascribe malicious intent to it as well.
* -- I didn't mention memory stick, because really, there are so many retarded formats for tiny memory devices you can't really blame anyone there.
Most XBLA games have a free demo option, exactly so you can preview the game. This has saved me many hundreds of points on games which don't appeal to me, and also gotten me to try (and buy) games I otherwise wouldn't have considered.
I was all ready to make a reactionary, "why does MS keep screwing with what works" type post (as is my style), then I took a minute to reflect upon the fact that Word currently has THE WORST FUCKING USER INTERFACE IN HISTORY. Quick: how do you keep headers and footers from appearing on the first page of a document? If you know that it's buried in a sub-option of the page setup menu, sure, it's fine. But does it actually make sense to put it there? No way. There's no way a change in the Word UI could actually make the product worse than it is at the moment, (eg: the worst word processor I have ever used).
The Ribbon simply moves WORD closer to actually good applications, like QuarkXPress, InDesign, or WriteNow, a 68K Mac word processor from 1000 years ago, which basically had an early version of "the ribbon" and was actually easy to use and generate great documents from.
Slashdot Mirror
None of that means it isn't true, of course...
(Quick, name the first guy brave enough to fly to Hawaii .)
What's wrong with expanding from an endless series of shooters into new genres? The Halo world (as fleshed out in the books by Eric Nylund) is an awesome Sci-Fi universe that certainly has a lot more to offer gamewise than just Bungie's stock-in-trade of shooters.
They had OS2 for C64?
I think we can safely say "zero g" when the person is perceptually experiencing no or extremely low gravity. Obviously gravity doesn't cease working outside the atmosphere, but common, saying "perceived weightlessness" or something would get pretty lame.
The "it's all for the greater good" line sure wouldn't feel nice if you were the person who ended up tortured in some Chinese prison because Google gave up the contents of your gmail, or spreadsheet.
Anyway, I realize this post is coming off trolling, and I apologize, but I'm sick of the double standard vis-a-vis google vs. any other large company. Judging them by their actions, not their words, they are not significantly different these days than Microsoft (these days -- not necessarily MS's historical actions).
The problem is that at the margins -- where kids would happily play if left outside on their own -- it's full of what are basically the dregs of society, and cars drive like a million miles an hour on the street. So you can't let your kids out for unsupervised play.
My point, (which I've harped on now about 20 times in this thread, and I promise to stop posting to... I just feel passionate about it, sorry) is that it's a complicated issue, and you can't say "anyone who lets their kids play games instead of playing outside is a troglodyte who should be shot," or whatever the open letter in TFA said.
I make games for a living, I monitor my kid's media intake extremely closely, but I also recognize that in his situation, which is increasingly common, a lot of his exploration play will have to be virtual for the time being. Blaming consumer electronics and games for this situation is like blaming the crack for the crackheads.
Yes, it's a difficult issue -- do you move to the suburbs so your kids can play outside more freely, but you commute for two hours wasting gas (and time you can spend with your kids), contributing to exurban spawl and living somewhere that should be arable cropland or open space?
My point, really, was that this is a super complicated issue, and can't simply be blamed on consumer electronics!
Veering seriously OT, of course people need to work actively towards making their neighborhood more safe and less crack-addict infected. In Oakland, unfortunatley, the current political climate doesn't lend itself towards actually addressing the root causes or treating the symptoms (by like, arresting those people), and in fact I would argue that it works (unintentionally or otherwise) towards continuing the causes, so that the current power structure can stay in place.
Even worse, you get advice from police that basically says "stay inside, never confront anyone. By the way, if something bad happens, we won't show up, but by all means, never try to protect yourself." It's pretty much the definition of irrational.
Henry Jerkins at MIT makes the excellent point that kids playing videogames are basically doing the same thing as kids playing cowboys and indians, and that videogames have become the virtual playspace for a new generation of kids who don't have the opportunity to roam in real environments. (He also makes the point that mom's are only freaked by games because they never saw what kinds of real and imagined violence went on when kids played outside.)
Finally, anyone who thinks kids today have been robbed of their imaginations should drop a box of legos in front of them.
AFAIK, the only benefit of HDMI over component cables is a) less things to plug in, and b) HDMI will work with DRMed BluRay content while standard component cables won't. Is there any qualitative difference to the HDMI signal over component?
Responding to the grandparent post: At E3, I had a slightly bad time controlling things with the Wiis on the floor where it was really crowded, but when I was able to get into Nintendo's sanctum sanctorium off the floor (where Wiis outnumbered people by 3 to 1), things were significantly easier. So, I don't think you can judge the experience from the showfloor demos.
Ok though, just for the record, no one doubted the intelligence at the time. I'm sure some republibot can provide links, but even Bill Clinton said there were WMDs in Iraq. Clinton even established the "regime change" policy. This is in no way a defense of the prosecution of the war, or me saying it was necessarily a good idea, but people on BOTH SIDES of the aisle said there were WMDs in Iraq (and there were -- more than 700 WMD bearing shells have been discovered), so it's hard for me to buy the notion that Bush influenced the intelligence (in a 'bush lied, people died' sense), since it was apparently saying the same thing to Bill Clinton, before GWB was in office.
I liked disc swapping. It made you feel you were making progress... Insert disc THREE! Sweet!
When it comes to digging old computers, if you have to ask, you'll never understand.
Dude, they're in EUROPE. Someone just needs to head for the University, find the demo party, pry Dieter away from his Amiga and be like "oh qiuck, we need the data from these floppies... yes, if you want to make a mod so the data all prints out along a sin-wave line while the SID chip kicks out the collected works of David Hasselhof, that's fine... oh my, you can make the text appear on shiny spheres? So much the better!"
Given how few consumers have HDMI inputs on their TV, not including an HDMI cable doesn't seem like that big of a deal. Sony didn't include component cables with PS2 and no one really bitched (Nintendo and MS didn't either last generation). I believe 360 was the first system to include component outs in the box. This whole issue strikes me as FUD.
I like the T & R series of ThinkPads (recently upgraded from an R41 to a T60) as they have both. Of course, I typically disable the trackpad, which causes no end of sadness for guests using my computer, but the "pencil eraser" is clearly superior if you're not using a real mouse. For me, the deciding factor in a laptop is the keyboard. ThinkPad still has the best, but I fear this is a place Lenovo will skimp in the future.
I'm actually surprised this was reviewed as a "B" game, because it feels AAA to me... It's pretty ambitious, and while there are some rough around the edges components, it's still totally awesome overall.
They have mercury in them, which actually makes them suck much worse if they do break. That said, they save a ton of energy, and while they don't work well (read: at all) with dimmers, good ones are intensely bright. I have them everypace in my house that they fit (maybe 50% of possible locations).
It's already closing in on a million units and rasing Capcom's stock price accordingly. Everyone bags on some element of the game (as Zonk did, appropriately), but EVERYONE is playing it, at least at my office...
In a way, I feel sorry for Sony, esp. in regards to Bluray. Anytime they support a format, everyone is like "yeah but remeber Betamax!" and its like -- omfg, how many people who are posting that shit were even ALIVE when Beta came out. I know, minidisc was a flop, UMD hasn't taken off either, but there's nothing about Blu-Ray that's inherently worse than HD-DVD, except that Sony is behind it, as far as I can tell.*
Anyway, bottom line, bash the price all you want (god knows I am), but you don't necessarily have to ascribe malicious intent to it as well.
* -- I didn't mention memory stick, because really, there are so many retarded formats for tiny memory devices you can't really blame anyone there.
Doesn't MS sell points cards? I swear I've seen them at EB, although maybe I'm mistaken (maybe those were Live Gold prepayments?)
Most XBLA games have a free demo option, exactly so you can preview the game. This has saved me many hundreds of points on games which don't appeal to me, and also gotten me to try (and buy) games I otherwise wouldn't have considered.
The Ribbon simply moves WORD closer to actually good applications, like QuarkXPress, InDesign, or WriteNow, a 68K Mac word processor from 1000 years ago, which basically had an early version of "the ribbon" and was actually easy to use and generate great documents from.