Buy one, play it. Then buy the other; it will probably drop in price after a while anyway.
That's the smart thing for the consumer to do. However you'll note that the end result is less money for Square Enix (it's still weird seeing/hearing that)
Ideally they want as many people as possible to buy the game in the first few weeks, before the price starts to drop. However they're now providing really good incentive to those with both systems to wait on one of the two purchases and get it for cheaper later.
The whole Matrix is a lie, there seemed to be a lot of lieing going on between the Merovingian(sp) and Persephone, although those might not have been direct lies.
The machines have shown just about every other human emotion and fallacy, i'd be really suprised if it turns out they can't tell a direct lie.
Perhaps the machines have been trying to develop telepathy among the humans. After all, the Oracle was created to "explore certain aspects of the human psyche".
I'm with you, the Matrix-within-a-Matrix idea would be interesting, but it seems too easy. However there was already _clear_ evidence beforehand that the reality of the Matrix (the movie, not the construct) supports psychic/mystical/unexplainable powers.
Neo can see the future. The Oracle confirms that he has become like here and can now see across the bounds of time. If that's possible, then a real world ability to control the machines isn't out of the question.
And as someone else mentioned, maybe this is something he picked up from his brief merging with Smith.
Which really begs the question, why did the Architect seem to be encouraging Neo to make the "wrong" choice?
He knew about Neo's feelings for Trinity, he knew how Neo would react if she was in danger, and _only_ he knew that Trinity was about to die. And yet he choose to tell Neo that Trinity was in danger, and tell him how to try and save her.
Yes, Neo needed to be offered a choice (at least going by the logic/theme of the movie) but the Architect didn't need to motivate him so much to make the "wrong" choice.
If i were the Architect, i would have told Neo that if he went through the door on the right, he could choose 23 people to restart Zion, including Trinity. Maybe they could actually have yanked her out before she was killed if he'd made that choice, but even if not, who cares if Neo is pissed afterwards cause Trinity turns out to be dead? He already made the choice they needed him to make.
So was the Architect prompted by some illogical sense of fair play? Or did he actually want Neo to make that choice and was just manipulating Neo into thinking that he was going against the Machines' wishes?
I'm glad it was clear to you, I guess. I've seen the movie four times, and that possibility didn't even occur to me until the third. (Part of the reason for this may be that I tend to be pretty suspicious of the whole "humans as batteries" idea in the first place, on thermodynamic grounds - plus, I don't think humans are all that efficient.)
If you're going to analyze a movie, at some level you need to accept the things purported as truth within that movie. I agree, thermodynamically the humans as batteries idea makes no sense. However for whatever reason, batteries, spare brain cycles, whatever, the Machines need Humans in order to maintain their quality of life. However they are willing to accept a lesser quality of life if there is a good enough reason to destroy all the humans.
The scare quotes you put around "designed" are important, though. Natural selection can't literally design anything. Saying that it does is a (potentially misleading) form of personification.
Yeah, the Architect is anthropomorphizing a bit, but the statement is still generally true. Our genes are a blueprint, a design. No one made it, but certain forces caused it to come about. The chemicals are performing the purpose the body's design calls for, therefore they are doing as they were designed. Our language is not built to support refering to such matters in both a convenient and a highly technical manner at the same time. The Architect could have said "Ah, the chemicals are overiding your intellect, as instructed for in your genes that were produced by evolution, which apparently adheres to Natural Selection, or the "Survival of the Fittest," which dictated that...." and so on. That wouldn't serve the audience of the movie very well, and it wouldn't server the Architect very well either. The colloquialism he used got his point across just fine.
That said, your idea is interesting, although I'm not sure that it's right. After all, since the Matrix is a created system, presumably they can choose to set it up with whatever equations they want. Why the "anomaly" would cause "fluctuations" in "even the most simplistic equations" is definitely not explained in the movie.
I think it is. The Architect said that the earliest, perfect versions of the Matrix were a failure. They set everything up the way they thought they should be, and made all the humans happy to boot, but lots of people rejected it.
In other words, they could make "whatever equations they want[ed]" but the "hardware" was buggy and wouldn't work with it.
Eventually the Oracle discovered that the humans had to be given a choice, even a subconscious choice to reject the program, in which case most of them would stay. Ironically offering them what the machines most wanted them _not_ to do was the best way of stopping them from doing it, but that's human nature for you.
However designing such a program, a program designed _not_ to be perfect, introudeced problems that needed to be dealt with. It's been awhile since i see the movie, but the impression i got was they decided to minimize the day to day problems as much as possible, but by doing so, by necessity at some point in the future all the "delayed" errors would finally end up coalesing in the form of the anomoly.
However although they couldn't _prevent_ the anomoly, they had some control over the way in which it would be expressed and what it would do, so they designed the secondary level of control by causing the anomoly to go to the Architect and restart a new Matrix, restarting the cycle until the creation of the next anomoly.
I posted earlier up about this, but i think you're partly right. I think they're both the "One," they're two sides of the same coin, Humand and Machine.
I'm not sure that Smith will necessarily end up helping humanity though. He seems to be fighting for an opposite goal as well. It's hard to say without seeing the third movie, but based on the glimpses we've seen, it seems that while Neo is trying to save humanity, Smith is trying to enslave the Machine world.
I'm not entirely sure, but it obviously has to do with the fact that Smith is the other side of the coin, after merging with Neo briefly he learned how to break the rules just like Neo, and became the machines' One to match humanity's One.
However while Neo was predicted by the machines and was "encouraged" to follow the path that would eventually lead him to the Architect, Smith was not predicted, or at least they're not acting like he was predicted, and he's acting as a free agent. Judging by the trailer at the end of Reloaded, it seems like his goal is to take over the Matrix and possibly the Machine world beyond.
As to why exactly he wants to kill Neo, i see two obvious possibilities. The most blatant one is that Neo seems like the only one who can stand in his way; so far the machines haven't been able to stop him. A more metaphysical idea is that he didn't get the full set of powers Neo has, and believes that by absorbing Neo he will gain those powers. (There can be only one One!)
Judging by the fight scene, Smith isn't as strong or as fast as Neo. That would imply either the Smith not getting the full powers idea, or that the power has a different effect based on who's using it. Would Neo be able to copy himself onto another person in the Matrix if he tried? Perhaps it is Neo's knowledge that the Matrix is not the real world for him that allows him to exceed reality, and Smith's knowledge that he is a program that allows him to copy himself, so neither will ever be able to duplicate the other's tricks. Or maybe they just haven't learned enough yet.
There is nothing wrong with holding a standard of decency. Are you going to yell at them for not selling porn too? Get off your crooked high horse and realize that some people LIKE it this way. I see nothing wrong with what they're doing. I wish MORE companies would stand up against the trash that gets marketed today.
Yeah, well i don't, and in some cases, Wakmart has made the original product _unavailable_ to me. They used marketing pressure to make Wizards of the Coast to change the art and text on several of their cards so they would be "appropriate" for Walmarts customers. Unfortunatly this was a globabl change, so the old art, which was far superior was no longer available to me.
lidays that were peculiarly Japanese, such as White Day on March 14 when Japanese girls give gifts to boys, were rooted out and American holidays were added, including Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July.
Even the furniture got a makeover. ``We had a series of furniture that resembled a Japanese farmhouse from the 1800s that we took out because no one in the U.S. would recognize it,'' said Bill Trinen, an associate producer at Nintendo. ``We also took out the public baths that you see in Japan but not here. But we added folding lawn chairs, inflatable wading pools, tiki torches and pink flamingos for the U.S. game.''
Damn it! They took out all the cool cultural reference stuff! Now i'm going to need to get a japanese copy of the game!
Nine out of the sixteen awards are for games i couldn't care less about. Realistic racing, skateboarding, and a ton of FPSs. I'm glad the show itself wasn't as boring as the awards.
The price has probably been going down, but they've also been forced into repeated price cuts in order to keep up with Sony. Is Sony's prices have gone down $100 since launch, it would be reasonable to assume the same of Microsoft to, in which case they'd still be losing $150 per console at the current price.
It's news because the reason they're doing going to such lenghts to do so at this particular time is the _huge_ losses they're taking, far in excess of what they predicted, and the shareholders, and therefore the higher-ups, are getting upset about it.
My conversations frequently run along the lines of,
Me: Did you hear that Powell is claiming that the American populace is "quite assured" about the reports on WMDs in Iraq and only the media is claiming they're "bogus"? I'm glad to know that i'm convinced, aren't you? =P
Them: Where did you see this?
Me: Front page of CNN
Them: Didn't he try the same thing with the UN a few months ago?
Me: Maybe, but this is the first time i've seen him quoted as saying he knows what i think, and i'm really pissed off.
Note that if Bush gets elected again, the above conversation might become illegal and be punishable by having my citizenship revoked or something, so encryption on chat programs would be a very good thing.
What's up with the obvious cutout lines in the Neptune picture on the front page? Looks like maybe they wanted to lighten the picture up a little, but in that case, why not lighten up the whole thing rather than just the cutout?
but to have to have refills?! Oh please - can the lot of them and send the guys back to the research lab until they can make them rechargeable.
You are obviously using a different definition of rechargeable than i am.
The battery has a source of energy, when it runs out, you can replace the fuel without getting an entirely new battery. It's rechargeable.
Perhaps you think something is only rechargeable if you can plug it into a wall? I don't know about you, but most people i know don't have hydrogen outlets in their houses, so the people in the research lab would be twidling their thumbs waiting for that development to occur before releasing the exact same product in order for it to fit in with that idea of rechargeable.
Little do we know that Nintendo was collaborating with Sony on a way to make a handheld capable of using DVD disks so GameCube games could be played on it. Nintendo decided the idea wasn't feasible and dropped it though, leaving Sony with the prototype hardware...
Basically, it boils down to this: They do not pay that much in taxes! To extend a "tax credit" to people that don't pay taxes is just another welfare program; it's not tax reform.
No, it boiled down to the choice was either between that, or reduce the capital gains tax cut some more. Guess which way the Republican majority voted?
And the people making 26k _do_ pay that much, it's a tax credit, i'm pretty sure that means money back on taxes they already paid. Even the original bill didn't extend the tax credit to people making less than 10k, because those people weren't paying tax in the first place, so your claim is completly unmerited.
When add up Fed tax, CA tax, SS, and all the other stuff, i lose about 32% of my paycheck. A little more than half of that is for federal tax, and i'm not complaining. And if i knew of a way to make more than $300,000 a _year_ i certainly wouldn't complain if 40% of it went to the feds. Seems fair enough to me.
These are cuts pretty mich across the board, so unless you already pay no taxes you'll benefit.
I'm curious to hear your explanation as to why in that case the Republican majority decided to eliminate the extra $400 child tax credit to families making less than $26,000 a year, and Democrats are currently trying to fight the Republicans, who are being obstinate about it, to extend the tax credit to the families who need it most, and would be most likely to go out and spend it. You know, in the manner the Republicans claim the original bill was supposed to help the economy?
Democrats Seek to Extend Child Tax Credit
It's also interesting to note that every tax bracket got a 2% cut, except for the highest, which got a 3.6% cut, which doesn't make sense any way you look at it except as bigger breaks to the rich, along with the capital gains cut.
Slashdot Mirror
That's the smart thing for the consumer to do. However you'll note that the end result is less money for Square Enix (it's still weird seeing/hearing that)
Ideally they want as many people as possible to buy the game in the first few weeks, before the price starts to drop. However they're now providing really good incentive to those with both systems to wait on one of the two purchases and get it for cheaper later.
Just shut up, you don't need to take such an extreme view of it. I think all you extremists ought to be dragged out into the street and shot! :)
The machines have shown just about every other human emotion and fallacy, i'd be really suprised if it turns out they can't tell a direct lie.
I'm with you, the Matrix-within-a-Matrix idea would be interesting, but it seems too easy. However there was already _clear_ evidence beforehand that the reality of the Matrix (the movie, not the construct) supports psychic/mystical/unexplainable powers.
Neo can see the future. The Oracle confirms that he has become like here and can now see across the bounds of time. If that's possible, then a real world ability to control the machines isn't out of the question.
And as someone else mentioned, maybe this is something he picked up from his brief merging with Smith.
He knew about Neo's feelings for Trinity, he knew how Neo would react if she was in danger, and _only_ he knew that Trinity was about to die. And yet he choose to tell Neo that Trinity was in danger, and tell him how to try and save her.
Yes, Neo needed to be offered a choice (at least going by the logic/theme of the movie) but the Architect didn't need to motivate him so much to make the "wrong" choice.
If i were the Architect, i would have told Neo that if he went through the door on the right, he could choose 23 people to restart Zion, including Trinity. Maybe they could actually have yanked her out before she was killed if he'd made that choice, but even if not, who cares if Neo is pissed afterwards cause Trinity turns out to be dead? He already made the choice they needed him to make.
So was the Architect prompted by some illogical sense of fair play? Or did he actually want Neo to make that choice and was just manipulating Neo into thinking that he was going against the Machines' wishes?
If you're going to analyze a movie, at some level you need to accept the things purported as truth within that movie. I agree, thermodynamically the humans as batteries idea makes no sense. However for whatever reason, batteries, spare brain cycles, whatever, the Machines need Humans in order to maintain their quality of life. However they are willing to accept a lesser quality of life if there is a good enough reason to destroy all the humans.
The scare quotes you put around "designed" are important, though. Natural selection can't literally design anything. Saying that it does is a (potentially misleading) form of personification.
Yeah, the Architect is anthropomorphizing a bit, but the statement is still generally true. Our genes are a blueprint, a design. No one made it, but certain forces caused it to come about. The chemicals are performing the purpose the body's design calls for, therefore they are doing as they were designed. Our language is not built to support refering to such matters in both a convenient and a highly technical manner at the same time. The Architect could have said "Ah, the chemicals are overiding your intellect, as instructed for in your genes that were produced by evolution, which apparently adheres to Natural Selection, or the "Survival of the Fittest," which dictated that...." and so on. That wouldn't serve the audience of the movie very well, and it wouldn't server the Architect very well either. The colloquialism he used got his point across just fine.
I think it is. The Architect said that the earliest, perfect versions of the Matrix were a failure. They set everything up the way they thought they should be, and made all the humans happy to boot, but lots of people rejected it.
In other words, they could make "whatever equations they want[ed]" but the "hardware" was buggy and wouldn't work with it.
Eventually the Oracle discovered that the humans had to be given a choice, even a subconscious choice to reject the program, in which case most of them would stay. Ironically offering them what the machines most wanted them _not_ to do was the best way of stopping them from doing it, but that's human nature for you.
However designing such a program, a program designed _not_ to be perfect, introudeced problems that needed to be dealt with. It's been awhile since i see the movie, but the impression i got was they decided to minimize the day to day problems as much as possible, but by doing so, by necessity at some point in the future all the "delayed" errors would finally end up coalesing in the form of the anomoly.
However although they couldn't _prevent_ the anomoly, they had some control over the way in which it would be expressed and what it would do, so they designed the secondary level of control by causing the anomoly to go to the Architect and restart a new Matrix, restarting the cycle until the creation of the next anomoly.
I'm not sure that Smith will necessarily end up helping humanity though. He seems to be fighting for an opposite goal as well. It's hard to say without seeing the third movie, but based on the glimpses we've seen, it seems that while Neo is trying to save humanity, Smith is trying to enslave the Machine world.
Agreed, i understood him clearly the first time i saw it, but noticed that the language was a bit obfuscated.
However while Neo was predicted by the machines and was "encouraged" to follow the path that would eventually lead him to the Architect, Smith was not predicted, or at least they're not acting like he was predicted, and he's acting as a free agent. Judging by the trailer at the end of Reloaded, it seems like his goal is to take over the Matrix and possibly the Machine world beyond.
As to why exactly he wants to kill Neo, i see two obvious possibilities. The most blatant one is that Neo seems like the only one who can stand in his way; so far the machines haven't been able to stop him. A more metaphysical idea is that he didn't get the full set of powers Neo has, and believes that by absorbing Neo he will gain those powers. (There can be only one One!)
Judging by the fight scene, Smith isn't as strong or as fast as Neo. That would imply either the Smith not getting the full powers idea, or that the power has a different effect based on who's using it. Would Neo be able to copy himself onto another person in the Matrix if he tried? Perhaps it is Neo's knowledge that the Matrix is not the real world for him that allows him to exceed reality, and Smith's knowledge that he is a program that allows him to copy himself, so neither will ever be able to duplicate the other's tricks. Or maybe they just haven't learned enough yet.
Shouldn't that be, "What good is a Ring of Power if... you don't have any fingers to put it on?"
Yeah, well i don't, and in some cases, Wakmart has made the original product _unavailable_ to me. They used marketing pressure to make Wizards of the Coast to change the art and text on several of their cards so they would be "appropriate" for Walmarts customers. Unfortunatly this was a globabl change, so the old art, which was far superior was no longer available to me.
Even the furniture got a makeover. ``We had a series of furniture that resembled a Japanese farmhouse from the 1800s that we took out because no one in the U.S. would recognize it,'' said Bill Trinen, an associate producer at Nintendo. ``We also took out the public baths that you see in Japan but not here. But we added folding lawn chairs, inflatable wading pools, tiki torches and pink flamingos for the U.S. game.''
Damn it! They took out all the cool cultural reference stuff! Now i'm going to need to get a japanese copy of the game!
So is the N64 sticking to cartridges going to show up later on the list? How about the poor support for 3rd party developers?
Yeah, you're totally right! No gamer one would ever want to hop around on a pad and get exercise!
Nine out of the sixteen awards are for games i couldn't care less about. Realistic racing, skateboarding, and a ton of FPSs. I'm glad the show itself wasn't as boring as the awards.
However all the students they've been suing have setled out of court, which i don't think counts as a legal precedent.
It's news because the reason they're doing going to such lenghts to do so at this particular time is the _huge_ losses they're taking, far in excess of what they predicted, and the shareholders, and therefore the higher-ups, are getting upset about it.
Me: Did you hear that Powell is claiming that the American populace is "quite assured" about the reports on WMDs in Iraq and only the media is claiming they're "bogus"? I'm glad to know that i'm convinced, aren't you? =P
Them: Where did you see this?
Me: Front page of CNN
Them: Didn't he try the same thing with the UN a few months ago?
Me: Maybe, but this is the first time i've seen him quoted as saying he knows what i think, and i'm really pissed off.
Note that if Bush gets elected again, the above conversation might become illegal and be punishable by having my citizenship revoked or something, so encryption on chat programs would be a very good thing.
What's up with the obvious cutout lines in the Neptune picture on the front page? Looks like maybe they wanted to lighten the picture up a little, but in that case, why not lighten up the whole thing rather than just the cutout?
You are obviously using a different definition of rechargeable than i am.
The battery has a source of energy, when it runs out, you can replace the fuel without getting an entirely new battery. It's rechargeable.
Perhaps you think something is only rechargeable if you can plug it into a wall? I don't know about you, but most people i know don't have hydrogen outlets in their houses, so the people in the research lab would be twidling their thumbs waiting for that development to occur before releasing the exact same product in order for it to fit in with that idea of rechargeable.
Little do we know that Nintendo was collaborating with Sony on a way to make a handheld capable of using DVD disks so GameCube games could be played on it. Nintendo decided the idea wasn't feasible and dropped it though, leaving Sony with the prototype hardware...
No, it boiled down to the choice was either between that, or reduce the capital gains tax cut some more. Guess which way the Republican majority voted?
And the people making 26k _do_ pay that much, it's a tax credit, i'm pretty sure that means money back on taxes they already paid. Even the original bill didn't extend the tax credit to people making less than 10k, because those people weren't paying tax in the first place, so your claim is completly unmerited.
When add up Fed tax, CA tax, SS, and all the other stuff, i lose about 32% of my paycheck. A little more than half of that is for federal tax, and i'm not complaining. And if i knew of a way to make more than $300,000 a _year_ i certainly wouldn't complain if 40% of it went to the feds. Seems fair enough to me.
I'm curious to hear your explanation as to why in that case the Republican majority decided to eliminate the extra $400 child tax credit to families making less than $26,000 a year, and Democrats are currently trying to fight the Republicans, who are being obstinate about it, to extend the tax credit to the families who need it most, and would be most likely to go out and spend it. You know, in the manner the Republicans claim the original bill was supposed to help the economy?
Democrats Seek to Extend Child Tax Credit
It's also interesting to note that every tax bracket got a 2% cut, except for the highest, which got a 3.6% cut, which doesn't make sense any way you look at it except as bigger breaks to the rich, along with the capital gains cut.