"There are just so many better things I can do with $200+."
Absolutely. My problem is just that N has made something with the Revolution which just begs to be played around with asap. A couple of my friends will undoubtedly buy xbox' or PS3's, but I can already see them popping 'round just to play with that '3D remote thingy'.
A liberal education in the sciences is useless. You have to be able to do the work if one wants to be a scientist. Knowing what the grand theories of science mean doesn't allow you to do any work which furthers science (like hypothesise and test new theories), because you need the instruments of science (math) to do so. Knowledge without the means to act on it is useless.
"There are plenty of one dimensional people in the world and many have a primary and fairly exclusive interest in the sciences"
This is true...but there are many more scientists with broad interests than what americans call liberal arts types with bropad interests...which was my point.
"One, social sciences tend to use scientific techniques at higher levels."
No, although if you've never had to do real science, you might think so. I have rather broad interests, and thus quite an eclectic group of friends. Plus a family who, appart from my dad, are rather into the social/phsychological side of things. The actual scientific technique used in the 'higher levels' of those studies are rather pitifull compared to what a freshman scientists learns to use. A second years physicist knows more about statistics (due to experimental error and quantum mechanics) than any phsychologist will ever use, even when he is doing a large scale study.
"Don't judge a field based on your limited experience with it."
I'm not...I'm judging on the fact that I've talked extensively with people who do thos studies, and have seen thei textbooks (and they mine).
"he problem lies more with the way that curriculum is structured and the unnecessary elitism of the sciences."
No, the problem lies in the fact that much of the sciences are taught using the language of maths. If you don't know the language, it doesn't make sense. It's/neccessary/ elitism; speaking about the sciences in terms of 'broad generalities', 'integrated and approached as part of the liberal education' will make you usefull as a science reporter, but not as a scientist.
And that's the 'problem' with the sciences. To do anything usefull in them, one needs to know stuff, stuff which is hard to learn. Anyone can read Derrida and get what he's on about, or read a whole lot of greek books and become a grecan expert if he has a good memory. Math however must be understood, and without that understanding one can not be a scientist, as one cannot be a surgeon without a steady hand (despite what the ER soaps will lead you to believe).
Pretty much anyone who makes/designs something which quite a few others are going to use needs a knowledge of sines/co-sines (if he/she is going to do an/efficient/ job of it) uses sines/cosines.
From cups to engines, to bottles to (and here to a rmarkable deegree...you have no idea how technical this is) toiletpaper. Every bit of electronics, and every largescale plumbing/ventilation project.
Which does kind of prove your point; it's the few that create for the many...you don't need a large ration of techs to lawyers/philosophers to create a building for the liberal arts. But if no-one knew about sines/cosines you'd litterally be living in shit:) But as long as you're living in shit in style, it doesn't matter, I guess:)
No. Absolutely not. People need a basic understanding of this stuff, because it is sop important to the things which make modern society work. People need to know enough to be critical of obviously dumb assumptions, at the very least. You need to know that your contractor is screwing you over by quoting you for more than twice the square-footage than you actually have; and it's amazing how many people can't even handle Pythagoras.
As an aside: I'm always amazed how many people who do sciences and other technical stuff are always interested in many things, like music, politics, aesthetics, social structure...but hardly any political science or sociology student has even a passing interest in the sciences. I'm starting to believe that the latter are just to stupid to realise how much of an impact those things have on their life.
And that's the problem. You can't. You say you can; how? Really, how? By looking through a system where this information is logged...oh, waitaminute! That's the system being proposed!
I agree that this is not the best idea, and it is open to abuse. But so is the tax system. And it can allow people to litterally fall through the cracks: "what, no System ID Number? You don't exist."
I used to think that too, that building a simpel nuke was trivial. Then I did some mechanical engineering, and now I'm doing applied physics. Anyone saying that building a nuke is 'trivial' is deluding himself. And has no clue as to the actual process it takes to build one. Blueprints are well and all (and quite inaccurate, from the intarweb), but that's not even a quarter of the story.
It's not just the fact that you do have to do some pretty fiendish calculations (just figuring out which ones to do is far from trivial). It's not just the fact that you need some pretty ingenious engineering done to a high precision. All that is hard enough and time consuming enough in itself. It's that you need smart people to do it. And with a low budget and bad conditions, it's doubtfull that they will, because they know the process will kill them. Because that is one other part which is difficult; containment of the radioactive materials. And these are so 'hot' they can kill/incapacitate someone before he's done working with them...under sub-optimal conditions, youd need a stream of suicides who each do just a part of the work neccessary.
And before anyone spouts off about 'suicide bombers/the highjackers are smart'...no, they're not. Getting into a university is easy...finishing one isn't that much more difficult if you chooce the easy courses. Getting enough knowledge to be able to build a nuke requires smarts which no suicide bomber ever had (becuase they'd figure out there are better ways to spend their lives, be they more destructive or more creative).
"and the experimentation involved would immediately set off alarm bells all over the planet"
Oh?
"That is why we already know who has these types of bombs"
You forgot Israel. And you'll have to explain why we didn't know the Americans had them, or why we had to wait until north korea told us. We usually only know after someone tests a working nuke, because/that/ is something you can't hide.
" An indication of how many aborted and/or prevented attacks there actually were during those four years."
Which would be none. It would be much too good PR for Bush if he could point to idled plots, even if it was against national security interests to disclose it. The outing of Plame proves that.
"Any bets on how long it would take after nuking one of these countries before radiological materials "accidentally" fell into the hands of terrorists for use against the US?"
This is a huge strawman agrument. Have you not read the news the past decade? Hundreds of pounds of fissable material already HAVE found their way into 'terrorist hands' (nation and non-notion); ex-USSR and USA stockpiles are NOTORIOUSLY badly guarded and there are many documented cases of fissable material going missing. Fissable material has been turning up on the black markets for decades.
The 'problem' is that creating an actual nuke is incedibly difficult. So much so that nations need to spend billions over decades (or at least billions over 5 years:)) to get even one bomb. It's not something which terrorists can create. Which is why, even though many a terrorist would like to nuke the US, and the ease with which it can be done once one has a nuke, it hasn't happened yet.
But you're definitely right...it wouldn't take long before the US gets nuked by a/country/ if the US one day 'pre-emptively' nukes Syria or North Korea; the little guys will have to show that they have the answer to such power.
Anyway...sterilising a part of the earth is an insane thing to do. The still insane high cancer rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki tell us it's a bad idea, let alone Chernobyl.
More to the point, the only Nation I'm sure of which has them is the USA and the old USSR. Makes you think, 'eh? Why have a weapon (in weaponised form!, it's not just something to use in countermeasure-production) which you shouldn't use?
Still and all...at least biological weapons will just cleanse the world of human life; nukes make entire swatches of the earth uninhabitable for pretty much anything.
Except that is an assumption which many biological weapons experts disagree with. There isn't really an effective way of dispersing the agent, it seems (interesting case study being the american Ames strain of anthrax post 9/11).
Sure, the potential is there if one can design something which has a long shelf life and can be disperesed efficiently through an arial vector...but tets/studies show that initial infection is very hard to do. IIRC biological vs nuclear is the fdifference between a death toll of guaranteed hundreds of thousands and one of just hundreds.
Check the last link for a decent comprehensive list of salesfigures. But those numbers represent the fact that a n00b sold more than an established player; but what's your point? Stability? Yeah...
"As for "history", it shows that the industry is STABILIZING."
Sure...an entirely new gamesconsole maker entering the industry and selling enough games to be able to create a second generation of it's console. If you mean stable as in 'profitable', you're right, but if you mean 'makeup of the industry', you're wrong. Plus,m the games market is still growing, it's not stable yet (stable means no growth or maybe a steady rate of growth...neither of which has happened).
"You got your chronology mixed up."
True, (by a year, too). But then again "with a game library that was significantly different from Nintendo's or Sega's offerings" (which is the point you made earlier) isn't really correct. One might try to make the point that Sony had more mature games, but that's a rather magnified claim when one looks at the actual games for each system. I might add that (as with ANY console) the ps1 was rather expensive when it was released too (especially in that year of grey imports).
"What happened was that the kids who were buying videogames in the 80s grew older and STILL wanted to buy videogames,"
That's true in a very limited way, which ignoresss the distinction between the geek/hardcore gamer and the 'casual' gamer (the one which has driven the market the past 10 years). What you say is true for just that core market, but it doesn't begin to explain the growth of the games market. In the days of the NES/SNES/Mastersystem/Genesis, it was the hard-core, the gamers, who kept on playing games as they grew up. Not the masses, which reserved computergames for their youth and got social-pressured out of it as a hobby. In the UK and europe, it was very definitely Sony's adds which legitimised gaming and changed it from a geeks dirty little secret to something which could be done in high end nightclubs (at the time). There is a large amount of literature on this subject, because it/was/ such an import image change which allowed the market to (for better or worse...in many hard-core gamers minds most definitely worse) grow and expand it's market to the non-geek. This and only this is the reason why the games market is larger than the movie bussiness (or more propperly and less media hyped, only if one compares the US national movie business to the worldwide games business).
Your oh-so-wittilly-snarky comment on the end tells me you really don't get the shift this last point has created for the industry. All I can say is go google (and talk to industry people, read industry commentary...shit, go read financial investment firms' commentary, as this was something HUGELY important for them.).
I enjoy a good discussion, and actually appreciate being correctee on my points (which is a great way to learn more), but don't try and be a condescending asshole about it.
How little you seem to know of console history. Nintendo used to be the only game in town, just like Sony was with the PS1 (which took over from Sega...remember them?). Xbox, whilst still just second largest, has surpassed the 'Cube. History shows that the console world IS in constant turmoil, generation after generation.
MS's xbox (sad to say, really, for it's a totally un-inovative console) has sold rather well; beyond expectations, and well enough to make xbox360 a very viable platform. Sales figures of the PS2 vs the xbox show that the xbox is very compettitive in the US (worldwide not so, though, but beware: MS is working on that).
BTW: the first 3d console was the 3DO, followed by the N64. And it isn't for that reason why the PS1 did so well: it's not even the hardware, or even the software library (which was non-existant when it got released, because it was in the position the xbox was in when it got released: there was nothing to be backwards compatible/with/): the PS1 did so well well because of the advertising campaign, which legitimised gaming over a broad section of ages. More people thought that they could get away with having a console, and that they didn't have to 'grow out of it'. That's why the PS1 did so well...it actually expanded the market for consoles.
If that's all you need to run, why upgrade at all? WinXp is (the first) stable MS OS and it does everything you want. Why spend the money on new software/hardware at all?
I can only think of two reasons why I would 'upgrade' to the next windows; a 3d/cad program comes out with a killer feature (unlikely, although 3dsmax does have these incremental updates which makes it's tools easier to use) or games will only run on the new version (which is likely to happen; strangely enough, games devs have no reason to require anything else than winxp [as I said, it's finally a stable MS OS] and it will only cost them money to get a neat little SVG installer going and to rewrite for a new OS...yet I'll bet that all tyhe publishers will require their devellopers to migrate, creating instant demand for a revamped, not-needed 'new' MS OS).
Bigots against relgion? What, pointing out that most of the bible (and for that matter the koran, the baghadvadgita and the torah too) is filled with sex and violence? I have read these books in full (which is more than many a christian/jew/muslim can say). They might contain quite some 'moral guidance', but they sure as hell contain all that sex and violence.
There was no 'complaining about the intollerance of christians'...that is, until this post, railing against your intollerance (and apparent ignorance! Read your own fucking holy book, idiot! That's what the bookpress was invented for!). Heh...'turn the other cheek' indeed...much less 'respect your fellow man'.
"Should we now be teaching kids about sex/violence before we teach them how to read/write?"
WTF? Where do you get that from? The point was that if a game (meant for mature, 17+ year olds no less) could be and has been cencore4d for mature content, why not do so with a book? Why not do so with literature (which, I might remind you, any parent would be fucking THRILLED if their kid could read at that level, and would encourage them to read Steinbeck if they could). And if we do it with a book, why not do it to an 'ur-book' like the bible, which has a much larger share of sex and violence than many others (and if you dare refute that, go read the old testament, you ignorant hypocritical bigot). It a line of reasoning...maybe you've heard of it? It makes the case that if we cencor a videogame, why not cencor your religious book (which contains much more graphic sexual content [go read judges 19] and much worse graphic and psychological violence than any game and many books [and that actual doees include Marquis de Sade's book! And he's pretty bad!])?
And do you know whats funny? How the fuck is thyat last statement possible? A kid has to be able to read/write before he can read the bible or understand anything else which could impart any morality on him.
And getting back on topic...I'd rather that kids learn about sex than violence. Maybe you, as a god fearing christian, should understand that best of all.
Just wait until they do this with a book. What about re-writing Steinbeck without the sex and violence (oh, sorry...just without the sex then, 'cause violence is a-ok). Or James Joyce? Nah...no-one reads that shit anyway. I know....Grisham!
Better yet: take all the sex out of the bible! Slim that fucker half down back to a more kiddiefriendly, caryable size. Just don't take out the violence, or you'll have nothing left anymore.
The answer is quite simple; just throw up a 'can't save as [file.extension] because this format doesn't support [features]...would you like to save as [list of applicable formats]?'-error message.
You do this because a document is something which can be printed. If you want something with embedded audi/video/movinggraphs/3d, you basically want a multimedia-document, which is something else entirely. You must make the distinction, precicely because some things only work on an electronic machine, whilst others also work on plain paper. It's the reason we have multiple formats, and why Word and Excel have different formats.
You're right. And I knew you were right when I posted. Thing is, we're dealing with spin here, and it needs a simple answer. If I had remained factually correct on every point, I'd have to add caveats with every single sentence in my post. Sorry.
I know a lot of people were religious at the time. Pretty much impossible not to be (although I do suspect many of the founding fathers would have been athiests [who would have read the bible and the other 'great books'...yaddayadda] had they grown up in this time instead of then, but that's idle speculation).
As for the laws...same reason the USSR was a dictatorship even though it was based on Marx.
As for the Da Vinci Code...I revile it. But it must be said it's actually gotten quite a few people to go read actual good books on the subject, by actual historians who did actual validated research on the matter. I know where freemasonry comes from; the name is a dead giveaway (as is the symbolism) that they are descended from the cathedral builders (yeah, simplification...I'm writing a post on/., not a tract for my thesis).
So, I oversimplified. Fact is that an awfull lot of people have started believing in the past 5 to 8 years that the US was founded by a bunch of christians who wouldn't have minded the ten commandments hung up in courtroooms. For those people, oversimplification may be whats needed. Maybe not. I just don't know. Got any tips?
PS: I wasn't oversimplifying the 'just one refference to god' bit; it's right at the beginning, something about 'the year of our lord'...and thats it.
Well, untill they get some propper science background (calculations, simulations and predictions to back up the explanations), they'll remain crackpots.
Which makes me wonder why/. put this up; why are these people getting 'airtime' on (what used to be) a reputable techsite?
"Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD."
Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick. That neocon bollocks is really sinking in, isn't it?
THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE US WERE NOT CHRISTIANS! Read some history! The US was not founded on christian principles! The signers of the declaration of independance where mostly freemasons, and it is not a coincidence that there is only one reference to god in the constitution, one which is best attributed to 'habit' and 'the way things were done at the time' than any religious thought. Shit, even a cursory knowledge of history will show that the US was inhabited by people fleeing religious persicution in Europe and that they really, REALLY did NOT want a country founded on religious principles, but one where there was a seperation of church and state and where no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion.
The rest of your post is fine, but thgis one point has been spouted by the neo-con movemenet so often that now it looks like a lot of americanss actually are starting to really beleive it.
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
Yeah, I realise that. But that's rather irrelevant. If you had read the post I was replying to, you would have found the OP talking about the impossibility of sustaining viable living conditions on land under sea-level, which I was pointing out is bollocks.
Plus, if you really want to compare, you shouold compare the level of aid the EU is promising the US, not just NL (which would be comparable to the US' smallest state).
Slashdot Mirror
"There are just so many better things I can do with $200+."
Absolutely. My problem is just that N has made something with the Revolution which just begs to be played around with asap.
A couple of my friends will undoubtedly buy xbox' or PS3's, but I can already see them popping 'round just to play with that '3D remote thingy'.
"I want the PLUS option, something a little more. The Apple ][...not the Commodore 64"
Hell yeah!
"I'll take the $400 Xbox 360 over a $250 Revolution any day."
?????
So why are you taking a more expensive rehash over innovation?
Not exactly. GTAIII, VC and SA all run on whatever build of the middleware platform RenderWare that was out at the time of development.
"provide a liberal education in the sciences."
A liberal education in the sciences is useless. You have to be able to do the work if one wants to be a scientist. Knowing what the grand theories of science mean doesn't allow you to do any work which furthers science (like hypothesise and test new theories), because you need the instruments of science (math) to do so. Knowledge without the means to act on it is useless.
"There are plenty of one dimensional people in the world and many have a primary and fairly exclusive interest in the sciences"
/neccessary/ elitism; speaking about the sciences in terms of 'broad generalities', 'integrated and approached as part of the liberal education' will make you usefull as a science reporter, but not as a scientist.
This is true...but there are many more scientists with broad interests than what americans call liberal arts types with bropad interests...which was my point.
"One, social sciences tend to use scientific techniques at higher levels."
No, although if you've never had to do real science, you might think so. I have rather broad interests, and thus quite an eclectic group of friends. Plus a family who, appart from my dad, are rather into the social/phsychological side of things. The actual scientific technique used in the 'higher levels' of those studies are rather pitifull compared to what a freshman scientists learns to use. A second years physicist knows more about statistics (due to experimental error and quantum mechanics) than any phsychologist will ever use, even when he is doing a large scale study.
"Don't judge a field based on your limited experience with it."
I'm not...I'm judging on the fact that I've talked extensively with people who do thos studies, and have seen thei textbooks (and they mine).
"he problem lies more with the way that curriculum is structured and the unnecessary elitism of the sciences."
No, the problem lies in the fact that much of the sciences are taught using the language of maths. If you don't know the language, it doesn't make sense. It's
And that's the 'problem' with the sciences. To do anything usefull in them, one needs to know stuff, stuff which is hard to learn. Anyone can read Derrida and get what he's on about, or read a whole lot of greek books and become a grecan expert if he has a good memory. Math however must be understood, and without that understanding one can not be a scientist, as one cannot be a surgeon without a steady hand (despite what the ER soaps will lead you to believe).
"Sines and cosines?"
/efficient/ job of it) uses sines/cosines.
:) But as long as you're living in shit in style, it doesn't matter, I guess :)
Pretty much anyone who makes/designs something which quite a few others are going to use needs a knowledge of sines/co-sines (if he/she is going to do an
From cups to engines, to bottles to (and here to a rmarkable deegree...you have no idea how technical this is) toiletpaper. Every bit of electronics, and every largescale plumbing/ventilation project.
Which does kind of prove your point; it's the few that create for the many...you don't need a large ration of techs to lawyers/philosophers to create a building for the liberal arts. But if no-one knew about sines/cosines you'd litterally be living in shit
No. Absolutely not. People need a basic understanding of this stuff, because it is sop important to the things which make modern society work. People need to know enough to be critical of obviously dumb assumptions, at the very least. You need to know that your contractor is screwing you over by quoting you for more than twice the square-footage than you actually have; and it's amazing how many people can't even handle Pythagoras.
As an aside: I'm always amazed how many people who do sciences and other technical stuff are always interested in many things, like music, politics, aesthetics, social structure...but hardly any political science or sociology student has even a passing interest in the sciences. I'm starting to believe that the latter are just to stupid to realise how much of an impact those things have on their life.
Yup; basically, everyone who has to do something /usefull/ needs to be able to do trig :)
"you can find out about it beforehand"
And that's the problem. You can't. You say you can; how? Really, how? By looking through a system where this information is logged...oh, waitaminute! That's the system being proposed!
I agree that this is not the best idea, and it is open to abuse. But so is the tax system. And it can allow people to litterally fall through the cracks: "what, no System ID Number? You don't exist."
I used to think that too, that building a simpel nuke was trivial. Then I did some mechanical engineering, and now I'm doing applied physics. Anyone saying that building a nuke is 'trivial' is deluding himself. And has no clue as to the actual process it takes to build one. Blueprints are well and all (and quite inaccurate, from the intarweb), but that's not even a quarter of the story.
/that/ is something you can't hide.
It's not just the fact that you do have to do some pretty fiendish calculations (just figuring out which ones to do is far from trivial). It's not just the fact that you need some pretty ingenious engineering done to a high precision. All that is hard enough and time consuming enough in itself.
It's that you need smart people to do it. And with a low budget and bad conditions, it's doubtfull that they will, because they know the process will kill them. Because that is one other part which is difficult; containment of the radioactive materials. And these are so 'hot' they can kill/incapacitate someone before he's done working with them...under sub-optimal conditions, youd need a stream of suicides who each do just a part of the work neccessary.
And before anyone spouts off about 'suicide bombers/the highjackers are smart'...no, they're not. Getting into a university is easy...finishing one isn't that much more difficult if you chooce the easy courses. Getting enough knowledge to be able to build a nuke requires smarts which no suicide bomber ever had (becuase they'd figure out there are better ways to spend their lives, be they more destructive or more creative).
"and the experimentation involved would immediately set off alarm bells all over the planet"
Oh?
"That is why we already know who has these types of bombs"
You forgot Israel. And you'll have to explain why we didn't know the Americans had them, or why we had to wait until north korea told us. We usually only know after someone tests a working nuke, because
" An indication of how many aborted and/or prevented attacks there actually were during those four years."
Which would be none. It would be much too good PR for Bush if he could point to idled plots, even if it was against national security interests to disclose it. The outing of Plame proves that.
"Any bets on how long it would take after nuking one of these countries before radiological materials "accidentally" fell into the hands of terrorists for use against the US?"
:)) to get even one bomb. It's not something which terrorists can create. Which is why, even though many a terrorist would like to nuke the US, and the ease with which it can be done once one has a nuke, it hasn't happened yet.
/country/ if the US one day 'pre-emptively' nukes Syria or North Korea; the little guys will have to show that they have the answer to such power.
This is a huge strawman agrument. Have you not read the news the past decade? Hundreds of pounds of fissable material already HAVE found their way into 'terrorist hands' (nation and non-notion); ex-USSR and USA stockpiles are NOTORIOUSLY badly guarded and there are many documented cases of fissable material going missing. Fissable material has been turning up on the black markets for decades.
The 'problem' is that creating an actual nuke is incedibly difficult. So much so that nations need to spend billions over decades (or at least billions over 5 years
But you're definitely right...it wouldn't take long before the US gets nuked by a
Anyway...sterilising a part of the earth is an insane thing to do. The still insane high cancer rates in Hiroshima and Nagasaki tell us it's a bad idea, let alone Chernobyl.
More to the point, the only Nation I'm sure of which has them is the USA and the old USSR. Makes you think, 'eh? Why have a weapon (in weaponised form!, it's not just something to use in countermeasure-production) which you shouldn't use?
Still and all...at least biological weapons will just cleanse the world of human life; nukes make entire swatches of the earth uninhabitable for pretty much anything.
Except that is an assumption which many biological weapons experts disagree with. There isn't really an effective way of dispersing the agent, it seems (interesting case study being the american Ames strain of anthrax post 9/11).
Sure, the potential is there if one can design something which has a long shelf life and can be disperesed efficiently through an arial vector...but tets/studies show that initial infection is very hard to do. IIRC biological vs nuclear is the fdifference between a death toll of guaranteed hundreds of thousands and one of just hundreds.
"Wrong. Nintendo was splitting the market with Sega."
s _200401/ai_ziff117173
4 306&page=1
/was/ such an import image change which allowed the market to (for better or worse...in many hard-core gamers minds most definitely worse) grow and expand it's market to the non-geek. This and only this is the reason why the games market is larger than the movie bussiness (or more propperly and less media hyped, only if one compares the US national movie business to the worldwide games business).
Not really. Only the MegaDrive/Genesis ever competed with Nintendo. NES owned the market.
"The Xbox has BARELY surpassed the 'Cube,"
worldwide sales:
60 million PS2's (in 2003!...check the last link to see a rise to +_83 m. in 2005)
http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_zd1up/i
18.7 million Gamecubes
http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5553
20 million xbox'
http://forum.pcvsconsole.com/viewthread.php?tid=1
Check the last link for a decent comprehensive list of salesfigures. But those numbers represent the fact that a n00b sold more than an established player; but what's your point? Stability? Yeah...
"As for "history", it shows that the industry is STABILIZING."
Sure...an entirely new gamesconsole maker entering the industry and selling enough games to be able to create a second generation of it's console. If you mean stable as in 'profitable', you're right, but if you mean 'makeup of the industry', you're wrong. Plus,m the games market is still growing, it's not stable yet (stable means no growth or maybe a steady rate of growth...neither of which has happened).
"You got your chronology mixed up."
True, (by a year, too). But then again "with a game library that was significantly different from Nintendo's or Sega's offerings" (which is the point you made earlier) isn't really correct. One might try to make the point that Sony had more mature games, but that's a rather magnified claim when one looks at the actual games for each system. I might add that (as with ANY console) the ps1 was rather expensive when it was released too (especially in that year of grey imports).
"What happened was that the kids who were buying videogames in the 80s grew older and STILL wanted to buy videogames,"
That's true in a very limited way, which ignoresss the distinction between the geek/hardcore gamer and the 'casual' gamer (the one which has driven the market the past 10 years). What you say is true for just that core market, but it doesn't begin to explain the growth of the games market.
In the days of the NES/SNES/Mastersystem/Genesis, it was the hard-core, the gamers, who kept on playing games as they grew up. Not the masses, which reserved computergames for their youth and got social-pressured out of it as a hobby.
In the UK and europe, it was very definitely Sony's adds which legitimised gaming and changed it from a geeks dirty little secret to something which could be done in high end nightclubs (at the time). There is a large amount of literature on this subject, because it
Your oh-so-wittilly-snarky comment on the end tells me you really don't get the shift this last point has created for the industry. All I can say is go google (and talk to industry people, read industry commentary...shit, go read financial investment firms' commentary, as this was something HUGELY important for them.).
I enjoy a good discussion, and actually appreciate being correctee on my points (which is a great way to learn more), but don't try and be a condescending asshole about it.
True...but I was talking about industry expectations, not MS' (which due to stockholders expectations, are always overstated).
How little you seem to know of console history. Nintendo used to be the only game in town, just like Sony was with the PS1 (which took over from Sega...remember them?). Xbox, whilst still just second largest, has surpassed the 'Cube. History shows that the console world IS in constant turmoil, generation after generation.
/with/): the PS1 did so well well because of the advertising campaign, which legitimised gaming over a broad section of ages. More people thought that they could get away with having a console, and that they didn't have to 'grow out of it'. That's why the PS1 did so well...it actually expanded the market for consoles.
MS's xbox (sad to say, really, for it's a totally un-inovative console) has sold rather well; beyond expectations, and well enough to make xbox360 a very viable platform. Sales figures of the PS2 vs the xbox show that the xbox is very compettitive in the US (worldwide not so, though, but beware: MS is working on that).
BTW: the first 3d console was the 3DO, followed by the N64. And it isn't for that reason why the PS1 did so well: it's not even the hardware, or even the software library (which was non-existant when it got released, because it was in the position the xbox was in when it got released: there was nothing to be backwards compatible
If that's all you need to run, why upgrade at all? WinXp is (the first) stable MS OS and it does everything you want. Why spend the money on new software/hardware at all?
I can only think of two reasons why I would 'upgrade' to the next windows; a 3d/cad program comes out with a killer feature (unlikely, although 3dsmax does have these incremental updates which makes it's tools easier to use) or games will only run on the new version (which is likely to happen; strangely enough, games devs have no reason to require anything else than winxp [as I said, it's finally a stable MS OS] and it will only cost them money to get a neat little SVG installer going and to rewrite for a new OS...yet I'll bet that all tyhe publishers will require their devellopers to migrate, creating instant demand for a revamped, not-needed 'new' MS OS).
Bigots against relgion? What, pointing out that most of the bible (and for that matter the koran, the baghadvadgita and the torah too) is filled with sex and violence? I have read these books in full (which is more than many a christian/jew/muslim can say). They might contain quite some 'moral guidance', but they sure as hell contain all that sex and violence.
There was no 'complaining about the intollerance of christians'...that is, until this post, railing against your intollerance (and apparent ignorance! Read your own fucking holy book, idiot! That's what the bookpress was invented for!). Heh...'turn the other cheek' indeed...much less 'respect your fellow man'.
"Should we now be teaching kids about sex/violence before we teach them how to read/write?"
WTF? Where do you get that from? The point was that if a game (meant for mature, 17+ year olds no less) could be and has been cencore4d for mature content, why not do so with a book? Why not do so with literature (which, I might remind you, any parent would be fucking THRILLED if their kid could read at that level, and would encourage them to read Steinbeck if they could). And if we do it with a book, why not do it to an 'ur-book' like the bible, which has a much larger share of sex and violence than many others (and if you dare refute that, go read the old testament, you ignorant hypocritical bigot).
It a line of reasoning...maybe you've heard of it? It makes the case that if we cencor a videogame, why not cencor your religious book (which contains much more graphic sexual content [go read judges 19] and much worse graphic and psychological violence than any game and many books [and that actual doees include Marquis de Sade's book! And he's pretty bad!])?
And do you know whats funny? How the fuck is thyat last statement possible? A kid has to be able to read/write before he can read the bible or understand anything else which could impart any morality on him.
And getting back on topic...I'd rather that kids learn about sex than violence. Maybe you, as a god fearing christian, should understand that best of all.
You want controversy?
Just wait until they do this with a book. What about re-writing Steinbeck without the sex and violence (oh, sorry...just without the sex then, 'cause violence is a-ok). Or James Joyce? Nah...no-one reads that shit anyway. I know....Grisham!
Better yet: take all the sex out of the bible! Slim that fucker half down back to a more kiddiefriendly, caryable size. Just don't take out the violence, or you'll have nothing left anymore.
Contraversy assured.
The answer is quite simple; just throw up a 'can't save as [file.extension] because this format doesn't support [features]...would you like to save as [list of applicable formats]?'-error message.
You do this because a document is something which can be printed. If you want something with embedded audi/video/movinggraphs/3d, you basically want a multimedia-document, which is something else entirely. You must make the distinction, precicely because some things only work on an electronic machine, whilst others also work on plain paper. It's the reason we have multiple formats, and why Word and Excel have different formats.
You're right. And I knew you were right when I posted. Thing is, we're dealing with spin here, and it needs a simple answer. If I had remained factually correct on every point, I'd have to add caveats with every single sentence in my post. Sorry.
/., not a tract for my thesis).
I know a lot of people were religious at the time. Pretty much impossible not to be (although I do suspect many of the founding fathers would have been athiests [who would have read the bible and the other 'great books'...yaddayadda] had they grown up in this time instead of then, but that's idle speculation).
As for the laws...same reason the USSR was a dictatorship even though it was based on Marx.
As for the Da Vinci Code...I revile it. But it must be said it's actually gotten quite a few people to go read actual good books on the subject, by actual historians who did actual validated research on the matter. I know where freemasonry comes from; the name is a dead giveaway (as is the symbolism) that they are descended from the cathedral builders (yeah, simplification...I'm writing a post on
So, I oversimplified. Fact is that an awfull lot of people have started believing in the past 5 to 8 years that the US was founded by a bunch of christians who wouldn't have minded the ten commandments hung up in courtroooms. For those people, oversimplification may be whats needed. Maybe not. I just don't know. Got any tips?
PS: I wasn't oversimplifying the 'just one refference to god' bit; it's right at the beginning, something about 'the year of our lord'...and thats it.
Well, untill they get some propper science background (calculations, simulations and predictions to back up the explanations), they'll remain crackpots.
/. put this up; why are these people getting 'airtime' on (what used to be) a reputable techsite?
Which makes me wonder why
"Yet, they formed a country with great prosperity. And they believed in GOD."
Jesus H Christ on a pogo stick. That neocon bollocks is really sinking in, isn't it?
THE FOUNDING FATHERS OF THE US WERE NOT CHRISTIANS!
Read some history! The US was not founded on christian principles! The signers of the declaration of independance where mostly freemasons, and it is not a coincidence that there is only one reference to god in the constitution, one which is best attributed to 'habit' and 'the way things were done at the time' than any religious thought.
Shit, even a cursory knowledge of history will show that the US was inhabited by people fleeing religious persicution in Europe and that they really, REALLY did NOT want a country founded on religious principles, but one where there was a seperation of church and state and where no religion could gain so much power that it could encroach upon any other religion.
The rest of your post is fine, but thgis one point has been spouted by the neo-con movemenet so often that now it looks like a lot of americanss actually are starting to really beleive it.
Just like it was the americans who captured the first Enigma machine.
*grumble*historicalaccuracy*grumble*
Yeah, I realise that. But that's rather irrelevant. If you had read the post I was replying to, you would have found the OP talking about the impossibility of sustaining viable living conditions on land under sea-level, which I was pointing out is bollocks.
Plus, if you really want to compare, you shouold compare the level of aid the EU is promising the US, not just NL (which would be comparable to the US' smallest state).