It's kind of like those rebate deals, except instead of taking the time to fill out a form and mail it in, you have to hire a lawyer instead. Reduces the number of people who actually apply to get their money back by a _lot_!
Maybe you should go back and pick up a Saturn too, as well as a PC-Engine and TurboDuo?
Toe Jam & Earl 3 just looks strange, not something i'd be inclined to pick up unless someone i knew recomended it to me and explained why. Gunvalkyrie looks potentially interesting. Something i'd possibly get if i bought the system, but not something that would make it worth buying the system on it's own. As for JSRF, i still haven't managed to find time to play JSR on my Dreamcast.
Which gets straight to the heart of the issue. I have limited resources that i can devote towards gaming. I've only got so much money, and i've only got so much time. As such, i need to make choices about which consoles i buy and which games i get for them. Ever since i got out of college i've been falling progressively farther and farther behind the point i'd like to be, and keep having to be more and more critical of which games i get.
I'll admit i have biases, especially where Microsoft is concerned. Back when i was a Nintendo fanboy (although you'll note that even then i had a Sega system, i just found about ten times as many Nintendo games as Sega games that interested me) i resisted getting a Playstation for quite awhile. Partly as a matter of loyalty, even more so as a matter of not having much spare cash. Eventually however Playstation started coming out with titles i couldn't resist, culminating in FF7, so i went ahead and found a used PSX and bought that.
Microsoft however is facing a tougher task. There are well defined and consistent reasons why i dislike them. For all that Sony and Nintendo have tried to form their own monopolies, Microsoft has been far more sucessful in doing so, and has affected my life far more negatively. Even so, if they came out with enough good games to justify an XBox purchase purely in terms of money and time investment, then i would face a moral quandry about whether my philisophical objections to Microsoft outweighed my desire to play good games, and if such an event occured, i'm not entirely sure what i would decide.
However i was talking to one of my coworkers yesterday about the XBox because he has one and has quite a collection of games, and he was having trouble coming up with any suggestions that would make buying an XBox worthwhile. He had a couple suggestions which i looked at the time, but they weren't that appealing. Not enough to force a moral quandry on me. The two that really stood out were Halo and Panzer Dragoon Sage.
My main interests are RPGs and strategy games, and adventure and puzzle games as they strike my interest. I'm really not enamoured of FPS games however. I picked up HalfLife beause of the SF theme but never finished it because i'm just not very into FPS games. Yes it's high quality, but as we've already established that there are more games than i have time to play, why not play the high quality games in the genre's that interest me most? And that is the biggest strike against Halo. Panzer Dragoon Orta along with a few other games i'm half interested in playing isn't going to make me compromise my morals.
Yes, the XBox has a few quality games on it, but not enough to make the purchase cost effective when you consider that i'd have to skip over an equal number of quality titles on GameCube and PS2 to play them and in doing so deal with a company whose buisness practices i disagree with.
You wouldn't be any different if you had grown up with PS and Sonic; you'd still like quality. Well, supposedly quality, you seem to be more of the 'quality-with-blinders' type.
I'm up to my ears in PS2 games, GameCube games, old PSX games i still need to finish (currently about halfway through FF_9_ for gods' sake) Gameboy Advance games, and i've got emulators for NES and SNES and roms of the better games from back in those days. (Most of which i own the original cartridges for or were never released in America, and the rest I'm buying as they get rereleased on GBA, so i don't feel particularly guilty about "pirating"
I remember my mom taking me to the store and letting me try out both systems, and trying to make the decision on which my parents would get me for christmas. (Funny, at the time i never realized there had been a crash in the video game market. I'd been happily playing games on my Colecovision which had an Atari 2600 adapter, and though the NES and Sega Master system were just the next step up instead of a revitalization of the entire industry)
The NES was demoing Super Mario Brothers, the Sega machine was demoing, um, a couple pieces of crap, there was maybe one of the games that interested me, but i forget which. The graphics seemed more impressive on the Sega, but Mario was more fun. I thought about it awhile, and got the NES, and didn't regret it.
A year or two later i got a Master System as well since they'd gotten cheap, and a few games for it as well. However every time i had the chance to get a new game, there was almost always something for the NES that outweighed anything i was contemplating for the Sega. The Master System ended up getting stuck in a corner and got pulled out for a brief period ever six months or so once it got moved into my bedroom.
I'm glad to say that for the most part i've managed to stick with making decisions based on the quality of the games (PS2, GameCube) rather than purportedly superior graphics but only one or two games worth playing (XBox, with Halo and Panzer Dragoon)
Although i wonder if i'd be any different today if i'd grown up with Phantasy Star and Sonic and um, wrestling games? rather than Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.
I'm always amused by the Microsoft loses money when you buy an XBox argument. Sure, they do lose money...but don't they lose more when you *don't* buy one?
Granted, this only applies to systems that are already manufactured.
What you're saying is mostly true, but falls back on the "are we talking a few people, or a lot of people" basis of the first argument.
If the number is small, you're actually helping them because you're just buying systems that Microsoft had already spent money on producing but were just sitting around in a store, so instead of being out $500 they're only out $200. However on the plus side the PR value from such a small set of sales is negligble.
On the other hand, if the number is large, it will trigger an extra production run at the factory, in which case Microsoft is out $200 instead of the $0 of never having made that unit in the first place. However Microsoft can now boast that instead of selling out n production runs, they've sold out n+1 production runs, and obviously Microsoft thinks it's worth $200 a unit to be able to make that claim.
So if there are only a few linux users out there buying XBoxes, they're just picking up some of the slack and helping Microsoft out, if there are a large number, they're causing some harm and some benefit, but in my opinion the benefit far outweighs the harm.
how the New York Times went from being an unbiast paper, the "paper of record", to a liberal cheerleader
If they're supposed to be such a liberal cheerleader, how is it that in 2000 they were so eager to repeat whatever slander the Republicans felt like making up about Gore? Ne researh or verification of the facts, just complete acceptance of invented misquotes.
That's more believeable that most of the virus attachment emails i've gotten so far. You obviously have a bright and shining career as a virus author ahead of you.
There must be some huge cultural factor that Microsoft neglected to consider.
Apparently that factor is making games that the Japanese want to play. As posted in a recent Slashdot article, Microsoft's response to that problem is to import even more American games. Good luck:)
15 million in 3 years. Not too shabby. I mean look at TiVo. They are going on 6 years and they have a measly 700,000 subs.
People, including developers deciding what console to make games for, look at numbers like these and are impressed (or at least Microsoft is hoping that they'll be impressed.) However Microsoft isn't saying and most people aren't asking how many of those projected 15 million units will be made into Linux boxes for which the owner isn't buying any games.
Even if we unreasonably assume that that number is one million, then by the worst-case analysis i've seen (or best-case, for the anti-Microsoft people) of $200 lost per console, Microsoft has lost $200 million from those sales and gained a million units sold to add to their figures. They spent over $500 million in advertising just for the launch, you think they'd complain about $200 million to increase their total units sold by 7%?
In order to have cut Microsoft's profits in half, just for this one year, 20,000,000 people would have to buy an XBox and not get any games for it, which would instantly catapult Microsoft into first place in the console race, at which point everyone and their brother would want to be making XBox games. Suddenly the XBox would have a ton of good games for it, and then a ton of people would buy the XBox in order to purchase and play those good games. (And how many of those tbeoretical original 20 million Linux users would resist the temptation to pick up a few of the really good games?)
That is why the idea of "buy an XBox but put Linux on it and screw Microsoft economically" is a joke. If you want to do it just to thumb your nose at Microsoft, go ahead, but if you think you're hurting them financially, you're just kidding yourself. You're only helping them less than the average purchaser.
Either so few people are buying XBoxes and no games that the financal cost to Microsoft is insignificant, or so many are doing so that it is a PR boon at an insignificant cost (for a company like Microsoft at least.)
The story goes that JFK left an executive order which still stands, stating that under no circumstances would America attempt to take part in a war of mutually assured destruction. He preferred leaving the planet to the Russkies than to the cockroaches.
True? Maybe. Maybe not. But worth thinking about.
I don't really agree with the idea of MAD. I think that restarting work on SDI is just about the only good thing Bush Jr. has done.
That being said however, if those in charge decide to go with MAD, i'd at least like it to work properly. You shouldn't advertise that the system your MAD strategy is dependent on will self-destruct and make counterattack impossible if it detects an intursion. Kind of a inverse-corolary to the Dr. Strangelove rule, "the whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret."
If missile control/defence networks operate through networks that could be attacked from China, then the US really does deserve the nuclear annihilation that would befall it. Systems that have absolutely horrific consequences associated with their failure should never be attached to generally accessible systems.
Who's to say they're attached to a generally accessible system? Maybe China has planted moles in the US's military departments who can access the military only networks the machines are on. Maybe there was a mistake made (or someone bribed) and there's a backdoor onto the system from the outside net. Who knows. And certainly a lot of the systems that the military needs to be concerned about by definition have to accept outside signals, telecomunication grids being only the first example. Assuming that the enemy can't do certain things will often lead to failure in the long run. The military needs to predict and plan for worst case scenarios.
In this case, based on the intensity of the **AA's prosecutions of persons using file sharing, the more draconian their suggested bills appear, the better chance they having of pleasing their constituents, and hence raising more funds and votes the next time they're up for election.
By your use of "constituents" in this context i can only presume you mean the people who really elect the politicians, the **AA and other lobyists, rather than the voters themselves, correct?
or, maybe the title has something to do with this book...
No, I'm sure you're right, they just picked a few random german-sounding words out of the air.
Beyond Good and Evil is a Nietzsche book as well. However the fact that they got the names from a specific source does not preclude the possibility that they decided to use German because it made the game sound cooler. They could have just translated the titles of the books to "The Will to Power" and "Beyond Good and Evil" if they choose the titles for thematic reasons and didn't care about the langauge.
Likewise if i decided i was going to make a Latin title because it would sound cool, i'd be sure to pick a Latin phrase that meant something interesting. I'd pick "Veni, Vidi, Vici" or "E Pluribus Unum" rather than "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur," because if i choose the former people would translate it and think the title meant something profound, whereas if they translated the later they'd think it was a joke or i was an idiot who just picked a latin phrase at random.
So either they picked titles off of Nietzsche and decided to leave them in German so they'd sound cool, or they decided to have a German subtitle first and then eventually setled on Nietzche's titles rather than some other German phrase because Nietzsche's stuff fit the best. In either case, the decision to have the title in a foreign langauge was independent of the decision to use Nietzche's titles.
And in case anyone wants to nitpick, it was not however independent of the choice of which langauge was used. Using Nietzche's titles and then choosing to translate them into Spanish or Latin would be pretty dumb, and if they'd originally decided to use Spanish or Latin they would have been examining a different set of stock quotes, and would have chosen something equally profound from that lanaguage set.
I can't speak for everyone, but everyone I know who is excited about NASCAR and Formula One racing, they only watch because they're hoping that there will be a crash...
You know, as cold hearted as that is, that might not be such a bad thing.
As things stand now, if an accident occurs during a space flight and people get killed it's a national tragedy and the entire space program shuts down for months or years. When Dale whosie got killed it was still a tragedy (although a lot more worked up than i thought it really deserved to be) but they didn't stop doing NASCAR or Formula One races for any significant period of time.
As someone else pointed out on the last spaceship related article, thousands of people get killed every year just commuting to work, but no one makes a big deal of it because it's part of our lives. Likewise worldwide there's probably at least one lost commuter jet a year, which gets more press than your average car accident since they're rarer and kill hundreds of people at once, but we don't stop using planes because of them.
Perhaps routine-as-in-sporting-event is a good first step towards routine-as-in-taking-a-commuter-jet.
This biological concept of security needs to use the full biological model of sacrifical guards. The body repels invaders by sacrificing cells to attack the invader. A computer that merrily allows an intruder to work its way back through the network until they can read everything is no use.
I don't think the idea is that the computers will just ignore intrusions. At the very least, they'll notify a human operator that an intrusion has taken place while trying to continue normal functioning. If possible it will probably try to elimiante the intrusion.
However the first priority is to continue it's primary functions. The military can't aford to have it's communication grid or it's airflight control or other items of such a crucial nature shut down in the middle of combat, not unless there's a backup ready to take over. (And do you trust a compromised machine to decide whether or not a backup system is available?)
So the system continues to do it's best to carry out it's tasks while a human operator decides when and if the machine can be shut down and another swaped in to take it's place, and coordinates any possible counter-hacking operations.
If you want to fall back to a cold war/MAD mentality, here's a worst case scenario for you. Say that twenty years from now China launches an unexpected nuclear ICBM assult against the US. At the same time Chinese hackers attempt to infiltrate every known computer in NORAD and any SDI systems. Would you want the computers to automatically destroy themselves, thereby eliminating any chance of a timely defense or counterattack, or assume that the hackers haven't got full access and keep the computers going as long as possible since the other alternative is death?
And if you're going for a MAD strategy, which of those two systems would you want your adversaries to know that you have?
Anyone know what the sales figures for Myth and Myth 2 are? It's sad that such a great developer got sucked into Microsoft. Maybe if they ever get around to releasing the game for PC i might be willing to give it a shot, given how much i enjoyed the Myth series.
Now let's get with the $5 DVD's and the $29 Photoshop people! Chop Chop!
I actually had the exact same experience with audiobooks. For the last month or two i've been considering buying audiobooks so i'd have something interesting to listen to during me 30+ minute commute. However if you go to Borders or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com they cost a bloody fortune. $30 is about as low as they get, and seeing prices up in the $70s and $80s is not uncommon.
I bought one cheap audiobook (A Wizard of Earthsea) and was impressed, but the price kept putting me off. I was seriously considering looking around on filesharing systems to see if i could grab mp3s of them from somewhere. Most of the tiles i want are books i already own anyways, so i wouldn't have felt too guilty about doing so.
Then i discovered that i could buy audio files of the same books from Audible.com. Theoretically they have the same list price as the tape version, which is insane, but just about all the files there are marked down to a reasonable price, and if you're willing to sign up for a monthly account you can get any two books a month for $20.
I signed up for the one year membership since after looking through their library i could find at least 24 books i wanted and that way i could get a free mp3 player. (Yeah, it's a piece of junk player, but if i'm going to sign up for a year anyways...)
So the book-on-CD people made $30 or $40 off of me once, and then scared me away with the horible prices and the lack of availability of the books i was interested in. Audible.com put things at a reasonable price and just made $250 off me. And i would have never taken the time to find Audible.com if the CD people were pricing things at a reasonable price of $20 or so per book. (About what i'm paying now when you consider the price of CDs.)
Could it be Nielsen doesn't have the best numbers?
So we have to decide between the opinion of those with less accurate information, and the opinion of those with a vested intrest in distorting the more accurate information which they have, not a great choice.
Well some of the games that qualify you for the contest are GameCube ones. In fact, one of them is Final Fantasy: Crystal Chonoicles, the buyers of which may need as many as four GBAs if they want all their friends to play.
Just out of curiosity, how many independents are there? As in people who don't consistently bote for the republicans, the democrats, the greens, the liberals, or any of the other minor third parties? I'd be suprised if it was a very large number.
Regardless, even if they're independent, they still don't need much help figure out who to vote for if they want to go for the right-wing, whereas if they feel like voting for a democratic candidate at this point there's a lot of choices, so i wouldn't be shocked if the test was more capable of figruring out fine distinctions between left-wing issues than right-wing issues.
The top ranking republican on my list, Pat Buchanan at 20%. I'd kill myself before I'd vote for him. I don't think the survey is very good at the low rankings.
I don't think it does a bad job, i think you're just misinterpreting what it does. It's comparing what views you support with what views the cadidate supports, and sees how much they overlap. Sure, you got a 20% match with Buchanan, but i'm not suprised that you'd kill yourself before voting for someone who would choose the opposite of what you want 80% of the time. I'd think a candidate would have to hit 50%, i.e. agree with you as much of the time or more as they disagree with you, before you'd even consider voting for them.
There are a very few issues that i agree with Bush on. The biggest ones i can think of off the top of my head are his claim of support for fuel cells/hydrogen economy (although i wonder how much of that is for real and how much is just disguised corporate welfare) and support for SDI. However given that i (according to the test) disagree with him on 88% of the issues means that it will be a cold day in hell before i'd vote for him.
Don't even try to convince me this is some kind of nonpartisan "let me help you decide who to vote for" public service.
How many right-wingers need help to decide who they're going to vote for? They're in even worse intelectual shape than i thought if they're having trouble picking which guy to pick from the lineup of one republicans.
The people who are strugling with who to support at this point are all democrats, greens, or other left-wingers. If you looked at the results people are posting you'd see that they're hitting all over the spectrum, so it doesn't seem to be supporting any candidate in particular, at least i wouldn't be willing to say so without getting a more systematic look at the results.
I got about the same, 99% Kucinich, 96% Dean, 12% Bush. Wow, you hate Bush even more than i do, i bow down before you;)
I want to vote for Dean, or maybe Kucinich now that i'm looking into him. However i have to acknowledge the critics who say that he has several points going against him if he were the one to run against Bush.
It's like when i made the decision between voting for Nader and voting for Gore in 2000, but much more so, because i feel a lot stronger about Gore than i did about Nader. If i knew which choice(s) would be most likely to win against Bush, i'd vote for one of them in an instant, unfortunatly i am not blessed with that foreknowledge.
Why not vote for someone who's views on issues are close to those of your own and not who has a better chance of winning the election?
Because if you actually care about the issues as you claim, you should really do your best to support those issues. The 3% or whatever of the vote the Green party got in 2000 has done far more to hurt the enviroment than it has to help it.
If you care about the enviroment, and Nader is 100% good for the enviroment, Gore is 50% good for the enviroment, and Bush is 0% good for the enviroment, you should only vote for Nader if you think he has a greater than 50% chance of winning in order to maximize the benefit to the issue you care about. Well, to be technical, you should only vote for Nader if the probability of his winning is twice the probability of Gore winning or more.
I hate Bush for many reasons, and the things he's done and is trying to do for the enviroment is one of them. However there is a small evil and vindictive side to me that can't help thinking "take _that_ Green party!" every time he pulls some new enviroment destroying stunt.
If the Green party wants to transform the state of presidential elections in the US to a greater than two party system, they need to accept that unless a splinter party splits off the Republican side that is equal in size to their own, there is a fair chance that they will be condeming the US to the enviromental policies of the Republicans for however many election cycles it takes until the mainstream realizes that their party is viable. It's apparent that that number is greater than one, and for all we know it may not be less than infinity. Is it worth getting a Green president if there is no enviroment left to protect by the time it happens?
If Nader were smart, he would have tryed to hack a Parlimentary System approach to the problem by making a deal with Gore a few weeks before the election, that if Gore would agree to support certain Green positions (in writing of course) then Nader would tell all his party members to vote for Gore in the election, but to tell the exit pollers that they voted for Nader.
Thus they would have insured that the elected president had at least some intrest in the enviroment, a well publisized promise that he would support some of their issues, and still be able to point to the exit polls as a sign of their strength as a voting block.
We've experienced the 'steep learning curve' that some games have, where the owner sudenly remembers something we should have done way back at the start, but the solution is to comprimise.
If the sudden inclusion of a rule allows somebody to win, we ignore it (for this game) and carry on play. We're playing for fun, not for prizes.
I've played Cosmic a lot online, but never actually used the board game i owned. However a friend of mine and her boyfriend wanted to play a board game last night, so we pulled it out. I did the tagline bit, but then had to resort to reading from the rulebook since i couldn't count on my memory to get everything right and wasn't sure what differences there might be between the online and print version. The game had been a last minute decision and i certainly hadn't had time to look over the rules first.
We played a turn or two, and then paused while i discussed the philosophy of deciding if you want to ally with someone, and which side you want to ally on. And there was more than one point where we eitehr came to a situation that i'd forgotten to explain earlier or that we couldn't find a clear example in the rules, and we voted on what to do in the case for that game.
At one point i suddenly realized that nobody had been taking a ship out of warp at the start of their turn. I'd mentioned the rule, and we did it the first two or three turns it was applicable, but then just forgot. So i just pointed out that we'd all been forgetting, and we decided it would be simplest to just have everyone take two ships out of warp and try to remember to do it right from then on.
Slashdot Mirror
It's kind of like those rebate deals, except instead of taking the time to fill out a form and mail it in, you have to hire a lawyer instead. Reduces the number of people who actually apply to get their money back by a _lot_!
Toe Jam & Earl 3 just looks strange, not something i'd be inclined to pick up unless someone i knew recomended it to me and explained why. Gunvalkyrie looks potentially interesting. Something i'd possibly get if i bought the system, but not something that would make it worth buying the system on it's own. As for JSRF, i still haven't managed to find time to play JSR on my Dreamcast.
Which gets straight to the heart of the issue. I have limited resources that i can devote towards gaming. I've only got so much money, and i've only got so much time. As such, i need to make choices about which consoles i buy and which games i get for them. Ever since i got out of college i've been falling progressively farther and farther behind the point i'd like to be, and keep having to be more and more critical of which games i get.
I'll admit i have biases, especially where Microsoft is concerned. Back when i was a Nintendo fanboy (although you'll note that even then i had a Sega system, i just found about ten times as many Nintendo games as Sega games that interested me) i resisted getting a Playstation for quite awhile. Partly as a matter of loyalty, even more so as a matter of not having much spare cash. Eventually however Playstation started coming out with titles i couldn't resist, culminating in FF7, so i went ahead and found a used PSX and bought that.
Microsoft however is facing a tougher task. There are well defined and consistent reasons why i dislike them. For all that Sony and Nintendo have tried to form their own monopolies, Microsoft has been far more sucessful in doing so, and has affected my life far more negatively. Even so, if they came out with enough good games to justify an XBox purchase purely in terms of money and time investment, then i would face a moral quandry about whether my philisophical objections to Microsoft outweighed my desire to play good games, and if such an event occured, i'm not entirely sure what i would decide.
However i was talking to one of my coworkers yesterday about the XBox because he has one and has quite a collection of games, and he was having trouble coming up with any suggestions that would make buying an XBox worthwhile. He had a couple suggestions which i looked at the time, but they weren't that appealing. Not enough to force a moral quandry on me. The two that really stood out were Halo and Panzer Dragoon Sage.
My main interests are RPGs and strategy games, and adventure and puzzle games as they strike my interest. I'm really not enamoured of FPS games however. I picked up HalfLife beause of the SF theme but never finished it because i'm just not very into FPS games. Yes it's high quality, but as we've already established that there are more games than i have time to play, why not play the high quality games in the genre's that interest me most? And that is the biggest strike against Halo. Panzer Dragoon Orta along with a few other games i'm half interested in playing isn't going to make me compromise my morals.
Yes, the XBox has a few quality games on it, but not enough to make the purchase cost effective when you consider that i'd have to skip over an equal number of quality titles on GameCube and PS2 to play them and in doing so deal with a company whose buisness practices i disagree with.
You wouldn't be any different if you had grown up with PS and Sonic; you'd still like quality. Well, supposedly quality, you seem to be more of the 'quality-with-blinders' type.
I'm up to my ears in PS2 games, GameCube games, old PSX games i still need to finish (currently about halfway through FF_9_ for gods' sake) Gameboy Advance games, and i've got emulators for NES and SNES and roms of the better games from back in those days. (Most of which i own the original cartridges for or were never released in America, and the rest I'm buying as they get rereleased on GBA, so i don't feel particularly guilty about "pirating"
The NES was demoing Super Mario Brothers, the Sega machine was demoing, um, a couple pieces of crap, there was maybe one of the games that interested me, but i forget which. The graphics seemed more impressive on the Sega, but Mario was more fun. I thought about it awhile, and got the NES, and didn't regret it.
A year or two later i got a Master System as well since they'd gotten cheap, and a few games for it as well. However every time i had the chance to get a new game, there was almost always something for the NES that outweighed anything i was contemplating for the Sega. The Master System ended up getting stuck in a corner and got pulled out for a brief period ever six months or so once it got moved into my bedroom.
I'm glad to say that for the most part i've managed to stick with making decisions based on the quality of the games (PS2, GameCube) rather than purportedly superior graphics but only one or two games worth playing (XBox, with Halo and Panzer Dragoon)
Although i wonder if i'd be any different today if i'd grown up with Phantasy Star and Sonic and um, wrestling games? rather than Mario, Zelda, Metroid, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior.
Granted, this only applies to systems that are already manufactured.
What you're saying is mostly true, but falls back on the "are we talking a few people, or a lot of people" basis of the first argument.
If the number is small, you're actually helping them because you're just buying systems that Microsoft had already spent money on producing but were just sitting around in a store, so instead of being out $500 they're only out $200. However on the plus side the PR value from such a small set of sales is negligble.
On the other hand, if the number is large, it will trigger an extra production run at the factory, in which case Microsoft is out $200 instead of the $0 of never having made that unit in the first place. However Microsoft can now boast that instead of selling out n production runs, they've sold out n+1 production runs, and obviously Microsoft thinks it's worth $200 a unit to be able to make that claim.
So if there are only a few linux users out there buying XBoxes, they're just picking up some of the slack and helping Microsoft out, if there are a large number, they're causing some harm and some benefit, but in my opinion the benefit far outweighs the harm.
If they're supposed to be such a liberal cheerleader, how is it that in 2000 they were so eager to repeat whatever slander the Republicans felt like making up about Gore? Ne researh or verification of the facts, just complete acceptance of invented misquotes.
That's more believeable that most of the virus attachment emails i've gotten so far. You obviously have a bright and shining career as a virus author ahead of you.
Apparently that factor is making games that the Japanese want to play. As posted in a recent Slashdot article, Microsoft's response to that problem is to import even more American games. Good luck :)
People, including developers deciding what console to make games for, look at numbers like these and are impressed (or at least Microsoft is hoping that they'll be impressed.) However Microsoft isn't saying and most people aren't asking how many of those projected 15 million units will be made into Linux boxes for which the owner isn't buying any games.
Even if we unreasonably assume that that number is one million, then by the worst-case analysis i've seen (or best-case, for the anti-Microsoft people) of $200 lost per console, Microsoft has lost $200 million from those sales and gained a million units sold to add to their figures. They spent over $500 million in advertising just for the launch, you think they'd complain about $200 million to increase their total units sold by 7%?
In order to have cut Microsoft's profits in half, just for this one year, 20,000,000 people would have to buy an XBox and not get any games for it, which would instantly catapult Microsoft into first place in the console race, at which point everyone and their brother would want to be making XBox games. Suddenly the XBox would have a ton of good games for it, and then a ton of people would buy the XBox in order to purchase and play those good games. (And how many of those tbeoretical original 20 million Linux users would resist the temptation to pick up a few of the really good games?)
That is why the idea of "buy an XBox but put Linux on it and screw Microsoft economically" is a joke. If you want to do it just to thumb your nose at Microsoft, go ahead, but if you think you're hurting them financially, you're just kidding yourself. You're only helping them less than the average purchaser.
Either so few people are buying XBoxes and no games that the financal cost to Microsoft is insignificant, or so many are doing so that it is a PR boon at an insignificant cost (for a company like Microsoft at least.)
So can we predict an upper limit to the number of Xenosaga games by how many Nietzche books there are to draw titles from? :)
Anyone happen to know offhand how many there are?
True? Maybe. Maybe not. But worth thinking about.
I don't really agree with the idea of MAD. I think that restarting work on SDI is just about the only good thing Bush Jr. has done.
That being said however, if those in charge decide to go with MAD, i'd at least like it to work properly. You shouldn't advertise that the system your MAD strategy is dependent on will self-destruct and make counterattack impossible if it detects an intursion. Kind of a inverse-corolary to the Dr. Strangelove rule, "the whole point of the Doomsday Machine is lost if you keep it a secret."
Who's to say they're attached to a generally accessible system? Maybe China has planted moles in the US's military departments who can access the military only networks the machines are on. Maybe there was a mistake made (or someone bribed) and there's a backdoor onto the system from the outside net. Who knows. And certainly a lot of the systems that the military needs to be concerned about by definition have to accept outside signals, telecomunication grids being only the first example. Assuming that the enemy can't do certain things will often lead to failure in the long run. The military needs to predict and plan for worst case scenarios.
By your use of "constituents" in this context i can only presume you mean the people who really elect the politicians, the **AA and other lobyists, rather than the voters themselves, correct?
No, I'm sure you're right, they just picked a few random german-sounding words out of the air.
Beyond Good and Evil is a Nietzsche book as well. However the fact that they got the names from a specific source does not preclude the possibility that they decided to use German because it made the game sound cooler. They could have just translated the titles of the books to "The Will to Power" and "Beyond Good and Evil" if they choose the titles for thematic reasons and didn't care about the langauge.
Likewise if i decided i was going to make a Latin title because it would sound cool, i'd be sure to pick a Latin phrase that meant something interesting. I'd pick "Veni, Vidi, Vici" or "E Pluribus Unum" rather than "Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur," because if i choose the former people would translate it and think the title meant something profound, whereas if they translated the later they'd think it was a joke or i was an idiot who just picked a latin phrase at random.
So either they picked titles off of Nietzsche and decided to leave them in German so they'd sound cool, or they decided to have a German subtitle first and then eventually setled on Nietzche's titles rather than some other German phrase because Nietzsche's stuff fit the best. In either case, the decision to have the title in a foreign langauge was independent of the decision to use Nietzche's titles.
And in case anyone wants to nitpick, it was not however independent of the choice of which langauge was used. Using Nietzche's titles and then choosing to translate them into Spanish or Latin would be pretty dumb, and if they'd originally decided to use Spanish or Latin they would have been examining a different set of stock quotes, and would have chosen something equally profound from that lanaguage set.
You know, as cold hearted as that is, that might not be such a bad thing.
As things stand now, if an accident occurs during a space flight and people get killed it's a national tragedy and the entire space program shuts down for months or years. When Dale whosie got killed it was still a tragedy (although a lot more worked up than i thought it really deserved to be) but they didn't stop doing NASCAR or Formula One races for any significant period of time.
As someone else pointed out on the last spaceship related article, thousands of people get killed every year just commuting to work, but no one makes a big deal of it because it's part of our lives. Likewise worldwide there's probably at least one lost commuter jet a year, which gets more press than your average car accident since they're rarer and kill hundreds of people at once, but we don't stop using planes because of them.
Perhaps routine-as-in-sporting-event is a good first step towards routine-as-in-taking-a-commuter-jet.
I don't think the idea is that the computers will just ignore intrusions. At the very least, they'll notify a human operator that an intrusion has taken place while trying to continue normal functioning. If possible it will probably try to elimiante the intrusion.
However the first priority is to continue it's primary functions. The military can't aford to have it's communication grid or it's airflight control or other items of such a crucial nature shut down in the middle of combat, not unless there's a backup ready to take over. (And do you trust a compromised machine to decide whether or not a backup system is available?)
So the system continues to do it's best to carry out it's tasks while a human operator decides when and if the machine can be shut down and another swaped in to take it's place, and coordinates any possible counter-hacking operations.
If you want to fall back to a cold war/MAD mentality, here's a worst case scenario for you. Say that twenty years from now China launches an unexpected nuclear ICBM assult against the US. At the same time Chinese hackers attempt to infiltrate every known computer in NORAD and any SDI systems. Would you want the computers to automatically destroy themselves, thereby eliminating any chance of a timely defense or counterattack, or assume that the hackers haven't got full access and keep the computers going as long as possible since the other alternative is death?
And if you're going for a MAD strategy, which of those two systems would you want your adversaries to know that you have?
Anyone know what the sales figures for Myth and Myth 2 are? It's sad that such a great developer got sucked into Microsoft. Maybe if they ever get around to releasing the game for PC i might be willing to give it a shot, given how much i enjoyed the Myth series.
I actually had the exact same experience with audiobooks. For the last month or two i've been considering buying audiobooks so i'd have something interesting to listen to during me 30+ minute commute. However if you go to Borders or Barnes and Noble or Amazon.com they cost a bloody fortune. $30 is about as low as they get, and seeing prices up in the $70s and $80s is not uncommon.
I bought one cheap audiobook (A Wizard of Earthsea) and was impressed, but the price kept putting me off. I was seriously considering looking around on filesharing systems to see if i could grab mp3s of them from somewhere. Most of the tiles i want are books i already own anyways, so i wouldn't have felt too guilty about doing so.
Then i discovered that i could buy audio files of the same books from Audible.com. Theoretically they have the same list price as the tape version, which is insane, but just about all the files there are marked down to a reasonable price, and if you're willing to sign up for a monthly account you can get any two books a month for $20.
I signed up for the one year membership since after looking through their library i could find at least 24 books i wanted and that way i could get a free mp3 player. (Yeah, it's a piece of junk player, but if i'm going to sign up for a year anyways...)
So the book-on-CD people made $30 or $40 off of me once, and then scared me away with the horible prices and the lack of availability of the books i was interested in. Audible.com put things at a reasonable price and just made $250 off me. And i would have never taken the time to find Audible.com if the CD people were pricing things at a reasonable price of $20 or so per book. (About what i'm paying now when you consider the price of CDs.)
So we have to decide between the opinion of those with less accurate information, and the opinion of those with a vested intrest in distorting the more accurate information which they have, not a great choice.
Well some of the games that qualify you for the contest are GameCube ones. In fact, one of them is Final Fantasy: Crystal Chonoicles, the buyers of which may need as many as four GBAs if they want all their friends to play.
Just out of curiosity, how many independents are there? As in people who don't consistently bote for the republicans, the democrats, the greens, the liberals, or any of the other minor third parties? I'd be suprised if it was a very large number.
Regardless, even if they're independent, they still don't need much help figure out who to vote for if they want to go for the right-wing, whereas if they feel like voting for a democratic candidate at this point there's a lot of choices, so i wouldn't be shocked if the test was more capable of figruring out fine distinctions between left-wing issues than right-wing issues.
I don't think it does a bad job, i think you're just misinterpreting what it does. It's comparing what views you support with what views the cadidate supports, and sees how much they overlap. Sure, you got a 20% match with Buchanan, but i'm not suprised that you'd kill yourself before voting for someone who would choose the opposite of what you want 80% of the time. I'd think a candidate would have to hit 50%, i.e. agree with you as much of the time or more as they disagree with you, before you'd even consider voting for them.
There are a very few issues that i agree with Bush on. The biggest ones i can think of off the top of my head are his claim of support for fuel cells/hydrogen economy (although i wonder how much of that is for real and how much is just disguised corporate welfare) and support for SDI. However given that i (according to the test) disagree with him on 88% of the issues means that it will be a cold day in hell before i'd vote for him.
Don't even try to convince me this is some kind of nonpartisan "let me help you decide who to vote for" public service.
How many right-wingers need help to decide who they're going to vote for? They're in even worse intelectual shape than i thought if they're having trouble picking which guy to pick from the lineup of one republicans.The people who are strugling with who to support at this point are all democrats, greens, or other left-wingers. If you looked at the results people are posting you'd see that they're hitting all over the spectrum, so it doesn't seem to be supporting any candidate in particular, at least i wouldn't be willing to say so without getting a more systematic look at the results.
I want to vote for Dean, or maybe Kucinich now that i'm looking into him. However i have to acknowledge the critics who say that he has several points going against him if he were the one to run against Bush.
It's like when i made the decision between voting for Nader and voting for Gore in 2000, but much more so, because i feel a lot stronger about Gore than i did about Nader. If i knew which choice(s) would be most likely to win against Bush, i'd vote for one of them in an instant, unfortunatly i am not blessed with that foreknowledge.
Because if you actually care about the issues as you claim, you should really do your best to support those issues. The 3% or whatever of the vote the Green party got in 2000 has done far more to hurt the enviroment than it has to help it.
If you care about the enviroment, and Nader is 100% good for the enviroment, Gore is 50% good for the enviroment, and Bush is 0% good for the enviroment, you should only vote for Nader if you think he has a greater than 50% chance of winning in order to maximize the benefit to the issue you care about. Well, to be technical, you should only vote for Nader if the probability of his winning is twice the probability of Gore winning or more.
I hate Bush for many reasons, and the things he's done and is trying to do for the enviroment is one of them. However there is a small evil and vindictive side to me that can't help thinking "take _that_ Green party!" every time he pulls some new enviroment destroying stunt.
If the Green party wants to transform the state of presidential elections in the US to a greater than two party system, they need to accept that unless a splinter party splits off the Republican side that is equal in size to their own, there is a fair chance that they will be condeming the US to the enviromental policies of the Republicans for however many election cycles it takes until the mainstream realizes that their party is viable. It's apparent that that number is greater than one, and for all we know it may not be less than infinity. Is it worth getting a Green president if there is no enviroment left to protect by the time it happens?
If Nader were smart, he would have tryed to hack a Parlimentary System approach to the problem by making a deal with Gore a few weeks before the election, that if Gore would agree to support certain Green positions (in writing of course) then Nader would tell all his party members to vote for Gore in the election, but to tell the exit pollers that they voted for Nader.
Thus they would have insured that the elected president had at least some intrest in the enviroment, a well publisized promise that he would support some of their issues, and still be able to point to the exit polls as a sign of their strength as a voting block.
I've played Cosmic a lot online, but never actually used the board game i owned. However a friend of mine and her boyfriend wanted to play a board game last night, so we pulled it out. I did the tagline bit, but then had to resort to reading from the rulebook since i couldn't count on my memory to get everything right and wasn't sure what differences there might be between the online and print version. The game had been a last minute decision and i certainly hadn't had time to look over the rules first.
We played a turn or two, and then paused while i discussed the philosophy of deciding if you want to ally with someone, and which side you want to ally on. And there was more than one point where we eitehr came to a situation that i'd forgotten to explain earlier or that we couldn't find a clear example in the rules, and we voted on what to do in the case for that game.
At one point i suddenly realized that nobody had been taking a ship out of warp at the start of their turn. I'd mentioned the rule, and we did it the first two or three turns it was applicable, but then just forgot. So i just pointed out that we'd all been forgetting, and we decided it would be simplest to just have everyone take two ships out of warp and try to remember to do it right from then on.