They're pretty good at determining if a year had motsly "good" weather or "bad" weather. If you know what kind of weather than tree prefered that can get you a lot of the way towards figuring out what the climate was like at the time.
Let's see, they're pulling data out of ice packs from tens of thousands of years back. Other geological data being gathered goes back millions of years. We've got a lot more than 30 years of data, and the amount and quality of the data is increasing all the time.
And it's _still_ possible that we're at risk for an ice age. It's even possible thatthe factors to start the next ice age have already occured and we haven't seen the results because of human induced global warming.
And even if that were the case that wouldn't necessarily mean global warming is all good. We might be overdoing the global warming bit so much that we get flooded anyway instead of getting covered with ice. The cities that end up under water won't care too much whether it ends up being of the liquid or solid variety.
If you mix the right proportions of chemicals you get gunpowder, screw up the proportions even a little and it can explode during the manufacturing process and kill you. Oxygen and sugar both damage living tissue over time, so if you don't breath and don't eat you'll live forever, right?
As much as the average person wants it to be, most things in the universe are not a simple yes or no proposition. If we decide not to bother with anything that doesn't have a simple answer than we might as well just go back to to hitting each other over the head with sticks and stones.
And if we always wait until the trends are so obvious that they can't be ignored, most of the time it will be too late to do anything about them.
Sure it did, that wasn't the part being disagreed with.
If you want to talk about damning paperwork, go ahead and talk about that. You should also mention the study at the University of Washington that found there was a possible risk of cancer from cellphones and then had their funding cut off as soon as they published their results. Guess which industry had been funding the research?
However when you throw in "I know two people who got cancer and they both use cell phones! What are the odds of that?" it doesn't really help your argument. In fact, because of that whole trying to put together patterns bit in the above mentioned article, people who know how meaningless that statement is tend to assume that you don't know what you're talking about and let that view flow over even into the reasonable evidence that you have presented.
If you ever find something that seems to be 100% sure proof of the existance of aliens, don't also announce at the same time that you've been abducted and probed by alien visitors to earth, even if you're sure it's true.
Yes, but the temperature is raised at night; airports have the same effect.
Refer back to "no one reads the article."
They determined this from the break in flights after 9/11. Note that although plane flights stopped, the airports themselves did not get torn down or anything like that, so this change is independent of the existance of airports.
The airports may have a _similar_ effect, but it is different from the one caused by the planes themselves.
The article mentions all the "miracle" stories of people who decided to come into work late or were absent for some other reason and thus "miraculously" escaped death.
I guess they though it was just too bloody obvious to point out how many people may have decided to go into work early because they had plans that evening or something similar and thus were "miraculously" killed. Of course we never heard from those guys telling us how unlucky they were.
True, the lack of certain stepping stones can severly limit a culture, but a culture's willingness to adapt is also an important element.
Back in the 18th and 19th century Japan had all the resoruces it needed to develop, it just didn't want to. The Tokugawa shogunate was conservative, and once they came to power they banned the production or use of firearms (which ironically they used to help gain power) and restricted all contact with the outside world. Because of this there was little to no advancement for a few hundred years. Then Perry forced Japan to open up, and once they did, they did so with a vengenance. Three or four decades after the Meiji revolution they'd gone from a technologically "backwards" country that no one really cared about, to a military world power.
Or for another example, North Korea and South Korea. To the best of my knowledge they were both hurting pretty bad after the "end" of the war. North Korea was run conservatively, and South Korea was much more open. South Korea is now doing much better economically than North Korea, and to the best of my knowledge is more technically advanced than North Korea.
This has been said by multiple people, but let's try to tie it all together. Trying to get Linux to run on a Xbox is an interesting technical challenge. But let's see what happens if a million people go out and buy an Xbox with the idea of hurting Bill in the pocket a little.
Let's go with something outrageous, and assume that Microsoft loses $200 a box. A million people go out and buy the Xbox, Microsoft increases production to meet this new demand, and loses $200 million. Microsoft already expects to lose _billions_ on the Xbox the first few years and _doesn't care_!
They don't even care if you don't buy any games for it. Why not? A week after this, all of the sudden newspapers and websites and tv stations are talking about the huge surge in Xbox demand, far surpassing Gamecube. Developers sit up and take note and start making more Xbox games. There are more games for those who buy them to spend money on, giving Microsoft money, the greater number of games and the percieved increase in popularity will encourage more people to buy Xboxes to play games on, more money for Microsoft.
Do you think most people will notice or care that some of the people with Xboxes aren't playing games on them? Especially when Microsoft is spending millions on advertising boasting about the increased sales and "popularity"? Do you really give that much credit to the intelligence of the average consumer or media conglomerate?
Every article I've seen about the Xbox the last few months has been talking about their dismal sales, with the possiblity of an increase down the road. The PR value of every Xbox bought is currently worth far more to Microsoft than any money they are losing on the system! And do you think Microsoft isn't paying attention to the people trying to port Linux to the system and adjusting their accounting appropriatly? They're probably laughing at everyone's naievety right now.
Probably the only reason Microsoft isn't giving XBox away is a: the laws against product dumping, and b: the marketing perception that if the price is being slashed then it must not be any good. How many people rush out to buy a game that ends up in the bargain bin the week after it's released?
That's mostly irrelevant to the issue being discussed above. We weren't talking about the actions the RIAA has taken or what the RIAA wants us to believe is illegal, we were talking about whether copying music from someone else is illegal.
The RIAA is starting from something that most people would agree is wrong, everyone listening to the work of an artist, but the artist getting zero compensation for it, and then blow it so far out of proportion and stretch it to cover so many things that no one would believe that one has anything to do with the other, except for the paid politicians of course.
Here's a cluehammer: he didn't say copying it for himself, he said copying it _from someone else._ Which as you yourself said, "copying something for someone else is illegal"
He then goes on at great length about how personal copies are perfectly legal and okay.
The best way to deal with the floating discs is do deny Yuri the time/resources to build them. A good way to do this is to attack his economy - harass his miners with one of the following...
1-2 sniper- or SEAL-IFVs;
pack of robot tanks backed up by rocketeers;
Desolators backed up by terror drones (Iraq only - deploy one so that he is out of range of the miner's (miners') guns yet covers the resources or exit ramp(s) with the radiation field... if you have to, use flak tracks - 2 TDs and a Desolator each - to rush them past the guns and into position)
infiltrate them (make Yuri's economy work for you) As for boomers... or floating discs, should these take to the air... Groups of deployed GGIs or (against discs)GGI-IFVs do wonders for defense; the robot tank/rocketeer combo mentioned above also helps nicely in pounding them once they're spotted. If you have no destroyers or dolphins, and a sub is pumping torpedoes into your naval yard, just force-fire on the point of origin until the offender comes up.
It's been about a year since i've played the game seriously, so i'm a little rusty, but the counter to the counters:
Although Yuri has a lot of other units that are much more powerfull, the Gattling tank is the most versatile defensive unit he's got. The first thing you should build is a gattling, and then after you've got a miner or two out the dor, another gattling or two. Gattling tanks eat TDs for breakfast. The Desolators can be neutralized by sending the miners after them (once any TDs are taken care of by the Gattlings.) Either the Desoaltor sits there and gets toasted by the miner, or he undeploys and the Gattling goes after him once the radiation clears. And of course gattling tanks can take care of SEAL IFVs all by themselves.
By the time robot tanks show up Yuri should have a force of gattling tanks and magnetrons ready. The magnetrons grab robot tanks. The gattlings (which ate the roceteers in no time at all =) can then chew up the robot tanks while they're in the air, and the gattling tanks plus the few light tanks that are probably around can finish them off pretty easily when they land.
As for the Guardian GIs. They were even more overpowered in the first version, they got toned down with the patches, but they still kick ass. (For awhile though they had the weakness that they couldn't hurt Rocketeers are all, is that still the case or did it get fixed in a patch?)
However in the case of boomers, Yuri shouldn't let the enemy know that he's building them till he has several available. That way one or two can attack the navel yard while the rest stay back and missile anything that stands still long enough to shoot at the first two boomers. If they've got a lot of rocketeers create a diversion elsewhere first, it doesn't take long for some boomers to wreak havoc on a base, especially if the conyard is within range of the sea.
Yuri actually used to be a lot more powerful, but he got toned down a little in the patches. And in the begining he totally dominated tournaments becuase the first two player torunament map was pretty much designed (completly by accident) to be perfect for Yuri. Cliffs in the center overlooking the enemy's base, perfect for positioning groups of gattlings and magnetrons on. An island map with pretty much the entire enemy side in range of boomers. Gem patches that Yuri could plop a miner down next to.
All in all everything has a counter, the secret is to have a wide variety of resources at your disposal and be able to quickly respond to anything the enemy does with the appropriate counter. If done well and you can react faster than them, it results in the enemy feeling like there isn't anything they can do. I _used_ to be a master at that, but i'm probably way out of practice now. Meanwhile while you're occupying the enemy's attention with this, you quietly build up a strike force to suprise them with. Sure there are counters to boomers and disks, but if six of them suddenly show up and start raining death down on your base, some significant damage will usually be done before they can mount a counter-offensive, which is normally enough to tip the game permenatly in your favor.
The rate at which the the cup heats is going to be the same no matter how much ice is in there. The cup has the same surface area no matter what's inside of it.
As long as there is some ice in the cub and reasonable convection then both the ice and the pop is going to be at zero degrees celsius. Each unit of energy that enters the cup in the form of heat is going to melt a certain amount of ice. If you have one ice cube in the cup it's going to melt some fraction of that cube. If you have 100 ice cubes in there it's going to melt about 1/100th of that amount from each cube.
The number of ice cubes doesn't affect the amount of meltwater over time, what it does effect is the amount of time until all the ice is melted and the pop starts heating up.
I'm not sure what's causing you to believe in the effect you describe. My best bet is that since more ice equals less pop, a cup that's half full of ice allows you to drink all the pop before too much meltwater is created.
Try this, take two cups of the same size, fill one half full with ice and the rest up with pop. Fill the other half up with pop and then put in two or three ice cubes. Wait five minutes and take a sip from both of them. Unless the two or three ice cubes have completly melted they should both be at the same temperature, and if either were to taste more watery it would be the one half full of ice (more total volume, so more surface area for heat to enter)
An equally large group of Apocs would have a chance I believe. More importantly even a group of heavy tanks can take them out with the help of an Iron Curtain. (Heavy tanks are better for this purpose because the Prisms can run from the Apocs) Or for that matter, a Nuke costs less than 20 Prisms if I remember correctly. A couple of Kirovs can also deal with the problem if the Allies don't have some rocketeers ready to handle them.
The Allies do admitedly have the upper hand in the late game, but the idea is that if you just sat around and let the Allies build up like that without having an adequate defense planed, you deserve to lose anyway. In all likelyhood you already effectively lost the game earlier on, and the Allies are just toying with you by building up a huge army.
As for Yuri, the Flying Disks will slaughter Prism tanks. In sufficient numbers they'll take out rocketeers too. The Flying disks are probably the most unbalanced units in Yuri's Revenge, contested only by Boomers, which can also probably deal with Prisms on a water map. If you can take advantage of terrain then a Magnetron at the top of a cliff can grab a Prism tank before it gets in range I think. And again, by the time the Allies have built that many Prism tanks Yuri should have a Mind Control ready.
The moral of the story is if you go all defensive, the enemy will build a huge army and crush you. Of course if you don't build any defenses the enemy will do a rush with a small force and wipe you out at the begining. The best games i've ever played involved medium sized groups of 8 - 10 units, and would often be decided when a single tank survived to get inside the enemies perimeters and start reaking havoc.
The real question is why do they insist on putting so much ice in? It's cold when they pour it in the cup, and unless you spend an hour finishing the drink off it's going to stay cold.
If you want it _really_ cold, five or six ice cubes will do the trick (again assuming that you're not going to spend all day drinking it)
So why does every fast food place in existance fill the cup half full of ice? Do they think they're saving money that way? Given electricity costs i wouldn't be suprised if the ice cost more per weight than the the pop mix.
Do they think the customer actually wants half a cup full of ice? Or is the average customer so stupid that they think that any pop that isn't directly touching the ice will somehow magically get warm.
Rather than deal with trying to get them to add an appropriate amount of ice i always just ask for my drinks without. That way i'm only getting screwed over by a facotor of 500% rather than 1000%:)
Since when have artists ever done anything just for the love of it? There have been some, but they're few and far between. They've also often ended up going insane or dying pennyless and in ill health at a relatively early age.
Back in the stone age do you think they did cave paintings for fun? The priests had a job to do, and if they didn't make those drawings then the hunt would fail (or so the tribe believed) and the priest wouldn't have had the level of respect that he did in the tribe. He might not even have gotten fed. (of course i am not a sociologist/archaeologist)
In the middle ages artists depended on support from the nobles. They didn't sell their paintings per se, but they depended on the continued production of art that the local noble aproved of in order to remain a part a of the court.
Anyone who thinks that artists have ever (as a rule) not been paid for their work, or thinks that there should ever be a time when they aren't is living in a dream world.
Note that this does _not_ indicate support for the RIAA. There's a difference between thinking that artists deserve compensation for their work, and approving of the way that the RIAA claims that as it's goal while keeping as much of the money to itself as is possible, with no regard to the well being of the artists who produce the stuff they're selling.
Let's see, the military is using what is essentially a big baloon in potentially hazardous situations.
Big ballon; meaning that if you can get to it, just about all you need if you're the enemy is a sharp stick, and it's fairly slow, so it can't run away or evade very well.
However along with the possiblity that they're already got some kind of stealth technology, the enemy is even more unlikely to be able to spot them if they don't know they're supposed to be looking for a (relatively) slow moving baloon rather than a fast moving airplane.
How does Nielson normally keep track of commercials in the families it moniters. I assume that there isn't a little camera or something keeping track of what you're doing at the time?
I keep hearing people bitching about commericals and talking abotu their desire to get rid of them all, but i don't really understand the motivation. No one is tying you down and actually _forcing_ you to watch the commercials.
I _am_ annoyed with the way that commericlas have expanded over time, taking up a larger and larger percentage of the total broadcast time, however although i don't approve of the time balance, in theory i don't have any problem with them.
If i'm watching a tv show when the commercials comes on i: get up and go to the bathroom; go to the kitchen and get a snack; read a few more pages of the book i've got sitting next to me; check IRC on my wireless laptop and catch up with the conversation; play a few more turns of Civ3; if i'm actually watching the show with anyone, turn to them and spend the time talking to them about what's going on in the show, or about anything else we feel like; and occasionally, if there is a commercial that is actually entertaining, i'll go ahead and watch it.
I don't know if the normal Nielson system has any way of measuring this, but i doubt it, and i doubt even more that they can monitor it with a piece of software in a tivo. Someone might let the tivo play through the entire commercial break, but not even be in the room to see it.
So although this will be great for keeping track of shows that people record to watch later, i don't think it will do much for helping advertisors to make more interesting and appropriate commercials the way some people have suggested.
For the most part, the copywrite is owned by the author for his lifespan plus another 70 years after his death. This guarantees that his heirs will also benefit from his work. After that period, the copywrited work is considered public domain.
Ok, i don't care what they told congress at the time, what the lifespan + 70 (or whatever it si now) guarantees is that Mickey Mouse doesn't fall into the public domain.
However, a publisher that wanted to stick it to a writer could stop publishing the book, wait a bit for it to fall into the public domain, then start publishing it again without having to pay royalties to the author.
Not that i necessarilly agree with the proposed solution, but i don't think that that would really benefit the publisher.
Look how many people swap media now even though it's technically illegal. You think people would keep buying it if all of the sudden it was perfectly legitimate to d/l a free copy?
Of course if i were going to write the law myself, i would put in a safeguard or two. After X amount of time goes by without the material being available all contracts regarding it would be nullified and control would revert to the author. After X + a year, the copyright would expire if the author hadn't made it available again.
Of course given what i've heard about the RIAA the first part of that would be a great idea even right now.
You're either for them or against them. There's no middle ground
Well thank you Mr. Dubya
As for the rest of what you had to say, you seem to be agreeing with the original analogy, as far as the analogy goes. You can't stand the smog (MPAA) but you can appreciate the sunsets it produces (the work of FX animators.)
The one difference between the analogy and reality being that it is theoretically possible to have the good animation without the MPAA around to produce it.
If you've got all the skills needed to make trailers, why aren't you making $500,000 or more per movie to do it?
Let's consider anime music videos, to bring up an example for which there is quite a large amateur base, unlike movie trailers. I've seen a lot of them that were put together by amateur video editors, and some of them are really good, and some of them are total crap. Despite the fact that the editor created neither the anime footage nor the music track, there is a great deal of skill involved in choosing which scenes and images to put with each bit of music.
Anime music video makers are trying to create a certain mood with a combination of audio and video. Movie trailer editors are trying to acomplish the same thing, but their job is simultaneously easier and more difficult. They have a much wider range of options in what audio components they can use since they aren't limited to just one song. However instead of being able to focus on just one or two emotions, they have to do their best to portray the entire movie, do so in a way that appeals to potential movie goers, and do it in a more limited time span.
Sure you could copy either example, but there is a world of difference between being able to copy something accuratly, and being able to create an original work on your own.
You could go ahead with your video editing skills to make either an anime music video or a movie trailer and come up with something that was technically just fine. However unless you've got both skill _and_ practice, what you come up with would most likely be crap as far as evoking the proper emotions goes.
Put two flopies together, and slide the cover things open so you can look through both disks at once. It reduces the sun to a dusky red color, but they shape is still really clear.
So Mr. Clark Gilbert of Harvard seems to think that the online newspapers aren't doing enough to collect email addresses and use them to generate extra revenue.
How hard is it to find out where a Harvard professor lives? But I could make a lot of money selling _that_ address!
I'm going to paraphrase a little bit, but he said early on that academia has essentially become dishonest because people are willing to take "justifiable" shortcuts in order to produce the results necessary to get the project done in time and get more funding. He makes this sound like a less than preferable state of affairs.
He then latter comes out against knowledge based systems, saying that if both projects started at the same time that he could get results sooner with a system like A.L.I.C.E.
Although the two cases aren't completly analagous, I'm not entirely sure why we should view his assertion that a database that can parrot back preprogramed answers without any real analysis behind it is a "valid" shortcut, but then turn around and accept his views that the shortcuts that other projects are taking aren't valid.
I agree completely. It's as if you could somehow issolate the lanaguage center of the human brain and ask it questions while it was cut off from everything else, and then declare that humans are unintelligent because the part that handles translating thought into words and back again can't think on it's own.
Slashdot Mirror
They're pretty good at determining if a year had motsly "good" weather or "bad" weather. If you know what kind of weather than tree prefered that can get you a lot of the way towards figuring out what the climate was like at the time.
And it's _still_ possible that we're at risk for an ice age. It's even possible thatthe factors to start the next ice age have already occured and we haven't seen the results because of human induced global warming.
And even if that were the case that wouldn't necessarily mean global warming is all good. We might be overdoing the global warming bit so much that we get flooded anyway instead of getting covered with ice. The cities that end up under water won't care too much whether it ends up being of the liquid or solid variety.
If you mix the right proportions of chemicals you get gunpowder, screw up the proportions even a little and it can explode during the manufacturing process and kill you. Oxygen and sugar both damage living tissue over time, so if you don't breath and don't eat you'll live forever, right?
As much as the average person wants it to be, most things in the universe are not a simple yes or no proposition. If we decide not to bother with anything that doesn't have a simple answer than we might as well just go back to to hitting each other over the head with sticks and stones.
And if we always wait until the trends are so obvious that they can't be ignored, most of the time it will be too late to do anything about them.
If you want to talk about damning paperwork, go ahead and talk about that. You should also mention the study at the University of Washington that found there was a possible risk of cancer from cellphones and then had their funding cut off as soon as they published their results. Guess which industry had been funding the research?
However when you throw in "I know two people who got cancer and they both use cell phones! What are the odds of that?" it doesn't really help your argument. In fact, because of that whole trying to put together patterns bit in the above mentioned article, people who know how meaningless that statement is tend to assume that you don't know what you're talking about and let that view flow over even into the reasonable evidence that you have presented.
If you ever find something that seems to be 100% sure proof of the existance of aliens, don't also announce at the same time that you've been abducted and probed by alien visitors to earth, even if you're sure it's true.
Refer back to "no one reads the article."
They determined this from the break in flights after 9/11. Note that although plane flights stopped, the airports themselves did not get torn down or anything like that, so this change is independent of the existance of airports.
The airports may have a _similar_ effect, but it is different from the one caused by the planes themselves.
I guess they though it was just too bloody obvious to point out how many people may have decided to go into work early because they had plans that evening or something similar and thus were "miraculously" killed. Of course we never heard from those guys telling us how unlucky they were.
Back in the 18th and 19th century Japan had all the resoruces it needed to develop, it just didn't want to. The Tokugawa shogunate was conservative, and once they came to power they banned the production or use of firearms (which ironically they used to help gain power) and restricted all contact with the outside world. Because of this there was little to no advancement for a few hundred years. Then Perry forced Japan to open up, and once they did, they did so with a vengenance. Three or four decades after the Meiji revolution they'd gone from a technologically "backwards" country that no one really cared about, to a military world power.
Or for another example, North Korea and South Korea. To the best of my knowledge they were both hurting pretty bad after the "end" of the war. North Korea was run conservatively, and South Korea was much more open. South Korea is now doing much better economically than North Korea, and to the best of my knowledge is more technically advanced than North Korea.
Let's go with something outrageous, and assume that Microsoft loses $200 a box. A million people go out and buy the Xbox, Microsoft increases production to meet this new demand, and loses $200 million. Microsoft already expects to lose _billions_ on the Xbox the first few years and _doesn't care_!
They don't even care if you don't buy any games for it. Why not? A week after this, all of the sudden newspapers and websites and tv stations are talking about the huge surge in Xbox demand, far surpassing Gamecube. Developers sit up and take note and start making more Xbox games. There are more games for those who buy them to spend money on, giving Microsoft money, the greater number of games and the percieved increase in popularity will encourage more people to buy Xboxes to play games on, more money for Microsoft.
Do you think most people will notice or care that some of the people with Xboxes aren't playing games on them? Especially when Microsoft is spending millions on advertising boasting about the increased sales and "popularity"? Do you really give that much credit to the intelligence of the average consumer or media conglomerate?
Every article I've seen about the Xbox the last few months has been talking about their dismal sales, with the possiblity of an increase down the road. The PR value of every Xbox bought is currently worth far more to Microsoft than any money they are losing on the system! And do you think Microsoft isn't paying attention to the people trying to port Linux to the system and adjusting their accounting appropriatly? They're probably laughing at everyone's naievety right now.
Probably the only reason Microsoft isn't giving XBox away is a: the laws against product dumping, and b: the marketing perception that if the price is being slashed then it must not be any good. How many people rush out to buy a game that ends up in the bargain bin the week after it's released?
The RIAA is starting from something that most people would agree is wrong, everyone listening to the work of an artist, but the artist getting zero compensation for it, and then blow it so far out of proportion and stretch it to cover so many things that no one would believe that one has anything to do with the other, except for the paid politicians of course.
He then goes on at great length about how personal copies are perfectly legal and okay.
1-2 sniper- or SEAL-IFVs;
pack of robot tanks backed up by rocketeers;
Desolators backed up by terror drones (Iraq only - deploy one so that he is out of range of the miner's (miners') guns yet covers the resources or exit ramp(s) with the radiation field... if you have to, use flak tracks - 2 TDs and a Desolator each - to rush them past the guns and into position)
infiltrate them (make Yuri's economy work for you) As for boomers... or floating discs, should these take to the air... Groups of deployed GGIs or (against discs)GGI-IFVs do wonders for defense; the robot tank/rocketeer combo mentioned above also helps nicely in pounding them once they're spotted. If you have no destroyers or dolphins, and a sub is pumping torpedoes into your naval yard, just force-fire on the point of origin until the offender comes up.
It's been about a year since i've played the game seriously, so i'm a little rusty, but the counter to the counters:
Although Yuri has a lot of other units that are much more powerfull, the Gattling tank is the most versatile defensive unit he's got. The first thing you should build is a gattling, and then after you've got a miner or two out the dor, another gattling or two. Gattling tanks eat TDs for breakfast. The Desolators can be neutralized by sending the miners after them (once any TDs are taken care of by the Gattlings.) Either the Desoaltor sits there and gets toasted by the miner, or he undeploys and the Gattling goes after him once the radiation clears. And of course gattling tanks can take care of SEAL IFVs all by themselves.
By the time robot tanks show up Yuri should have a force of gattling tanks and magnetrons ready. The magnetrons grab robot tanks. The gattlings (which ate the roceteers in no time at all =) can then chew up the robot tanks while they're in the air, and the gattling tanks plus the few light tanks that are probably around can finish them off pretty easily when they land.
As for the Guardian GIs. They were even more overpowered in the first version, they got toned down with the patches, but they still kick ass. (For awhile though they had the weakness that they couldn't hurt Rocketeers are all, is that still the case or did it get fixed in a patch?)
However in the case of boomers, Yuri shouldn't let the enemy know that he's building them till he has several available. That way one or two can attack the navel yard while the rest stay back and missile anything that stands still long enough to shoot at the first two boomers. If they've got a lot of rocketeers create a diversion elsewhere first, it doesn't take long for some boomers to wreak havoc on a base, especially if the conyard is within range of the sea.
Yuri actually used to be a lot more powerful, but he got toned down a little in the patches. And in the begining he totally dominated tournaments becuase the first two player torunament map was pretty much designed (completly by accident) to be perfect for Yuri. Cliffs in the center overlooking the enemy's base, perfect for positioning groups of gattlings and magnetrons on. An island map with pretty much the entire enemy side in range of boomers. Gem patches that Yuri could plop a miner down next to.
All in all everything has a counter, the secret is to have a wide variety of resources at your disposal and be able to quickly respond to anything the enemy does with the appropriate counter. If done well and you can react faster than them, it results in the enemy feeling like there isn't anything they can do. I _used_ to be a master at that, but i'm probably way out of practice now. Meanwhile while you're occupying the enemy's attention with this, you quietly build up a strike force to suprise them with. Sure there are counters to boomers and disks, but if six of them suddenly show up and start raining death down on your base, some significant damage will usually be done before they can mount a counter-offensive, which is normally enough to tip the game permenatly in your favor.
The rate at which the the cup heats is going to be the same no matter how much ice is in there. The cup has the same surface area no matter what's inside of it.
As long as there is some ice in the cub and reasonable convection then both the ice and the pop is going to be at zero degrees celsius. Each unit of energy that enters the cup in the form of heat is going to melt a certain amount of ice. If you have one ice cube in the cup it's going to melt some fraction of that cube. If you have 100 ice cubes in there it's going to melt about 1/100th of that amount from each cube.
The number of ice cubes doesn't affect the amount of meltwater over time, what it does effect is the amount of time until all the ice is melted and the pop starts heating up.
I'm not sure what's causing you to believe in the effect you describe. My best bet is that since more ice equals less pop, a cup that's half full of ice allows you to drink all the pop before too much meltwater is created.
Try this, take two cups of the same size, fill one half full with ice and the rest up with pop. Fill the other half up with pop and then put in two or three ice cubes. Wait five minutes and take a sip from both of them. Unless the two or three ice cubes have completly melted they should both be at the same temperature, and if either were to taste more watery it would be the one half full of ice (more total volume, so more surface area for heat to enter)
The Allies do admitedly have the upper hand in the late game, but the idea is that if you just sat around and let the Allies build up like that without having an adequate defense planed, you deserve to lose anyway. In all likelyhood you already effectively lost the game earlier on, and the Allies are just toying with you by building up a huge army.
As for Yuri, the Flying Disks will slaughter Prism tanks. In sufficient numbers they'll take out rocketeers too. The Flying disks are probably the most unbalanced units in Yuri's Revenge, contested only by Boomers, which can also probably deal with Prisms on a water map. If you can take advantage of terrain then a Magnetron at the top of a cliff can grab a Prism tank before it gets in range I think. And again, by the time the Allies have built that many Prism tanks Yuri should have a Mind Control ready.
The moral of the story is if you go all defensive, the enemy will build a huge army and crush you. Of course if you don't build any defenses the enemy will do a rush with a small force and wipe you out at the begining. The best games i've ever played involved medium sized groups of 8 - 10 units, and would often be decided when a single tank survived to get inside the enemies perimeters and start reaking havoc.
If you want it _really_ cold, five or six ice cubes will do the trick (again assuming that you're not going to spend all day drinking it)
So why does every fast food place in existance fill the cup half full of ice? Do they think they're saving money that way? Given electricity costs i wouldn't be suprised if the ice cost more per weight than the the pop mix.
Do they think the customer actually wants half a cup full of ice? Or is the average customer so stupid that they think that any pop that isn't directly touching the ice will somehow magically get warm.
Rather than deal with trying to get them to add an appropriate amount of ice i always just ask for my drinks without. That way i'm only getting screwed over by a facotor of 500% rather than 1000% :)
"If you went out into space, you would explode before you suffocated because there's no air pressure"
Hey, i can make up facts about the body too!
Did you know that if you unwound your brain it would reach halfway from the earth to the moon?
Well except for the brain of the person who compiled that list, his would be lucky to make it around the block.
Since when have artists ever done anything just for the love of it? There have been some, but they're few and far between. They've also often ended up going insane or dying pennyless and in ill health at a relatively early age.
Back in the stone age do you think they did cave paintings for fun? The priests had a job to do, and if they didn't make those drawings then the hunt would fail (or so the tribe believed) and the priest wouldn't have had the level of respect that he did in the tribe. He might not even have gotten fed. (of course i am not a sociologist/archaeologist)
In the middle ages artists depended on support from the nobles. They didn't sell their paintings per se, but they depended on the continued production of art that the local noble aproved of in order to remain a part a of the court.
Anyone who thinks that artists have ever (as a rule) not been paid for their work, or thinks that there should ever be a time when they aren't is living in a dream world.
Note that this does _not_ indicate support for the RIAA. There's a difference between thinking that artists deserve compensation for their work, and approving of the way that the RIAA claims that as it's goal while keeping as much of the money to itself as is possible, with no regard to the well being of the artists who produce the stuff they're selling.
Big ballon; meaning that if you can get to it, just about all you need if you're the enemy is a sharp stick, and it's fairly slow, so it can't run away or evade very well.
However along with the possiblity that they're already got some kind of stealth technology, the enemy is even more unlikely to be able to spot them if they don't know they're supposed to be looking for a (relatively) slow moving baloon rather than a fast moving airplane.
I keep hearing people bitching about commericals and talking abotu their desire to get rid of them all, but i don't really understand the motivation. No one is tying you down and actually _forcing_ you to watch the commercials.
I _am_ annoyed with the way that commericlas have expanded over time, taking up a larger and larger percentage of the total broadcast time, however although i don't approve of the time balance, in theory i don't have any problem with them.
If i'm watching a tv show when the commercials comes on i: get up and go to the bathroom; go to the kitchen and get a snack; read a few more pages of the book i've got sitting next to me; check IRC on my wireless laptop and catch up with the conversation; play a few more turns of Civ3; if i'm actually watching the show with anyone, turn to them and spend the time talking to them about what's going on in the show, or about anything else we feel like; and occasionally, if there is a commercial that is actually entertaining, i'll go ahead and watch it.
I don't know if the normal Nielson system has any way of measuring this, but i doubt it, and i doubt even more that they can monitor it with a piece of software in a tivo. Someone might let the tivo play through the entire commercial break, but not even be in the room to see it.
So although this will be great for keeping track of shows that people record to watch later, i don't think it will do much for helping advertisors to make more interesting and appropriate commercials the way some people have suggested.
Ok, i don't care what they told congress at the time, what the lifespan + 70 (or whatever it si now) guarantees is that Mickey Mouse doesn't fall into the public domain.
Not that i necessarilly agree with the proposed solution, but i don't think that that would really benefit the publisher.
Look how many people swap media now even though it's technically illegal. You think people would keep buying it if all of the sudden it was perfectly legitimate to d/l a free copy?
Of course if i were going to write the law myself, i would put in a safeguard or two. After X amount of time goes by without the material being available all contracts regarding it would be nullified and control would revert to the author. After X + a year, the copyright would expire if the author hadn't made it available again.
Of course given what i've heard about the RIAA the first part of that would be a great idea even right now.
Well thank you Mr. Dubya
As for the rest of what you had to say, you seem to be agreeing with the original analogy, as far as the analogy goes. You can't stand the smog (MPAA) but you can appreciate the sunsets it produces (the work of FX animators.)
The one difference between the analogy and reality being that it is theoretically possible to have the good animation without the MPAA around to produce it.
Let's consider anime music videos, to bring up an example for which there is quite a large amateur base, unlike movie trailers. I've seen a lot of them that were put together by amateur video editors, and some of them are really good, and some of them are total crap. Despite the fact that the editor created neither the anime footage nor the music track, there is a great deal of skill involved in choosing which scenes and images to put with each bit of music.
Anime music video makers are trying to create a certain mood with a combination of audio and video. Movie trailer editors are trying to acomplish the same thing, but their job is simultaneously easier and more difficult. They have a much wider range of options in what audio components they can use since they aren't limited to just one song. However instead of being able to focus on just one or two emotions, they have to do their best to portray the entire movie, do so in a way that appeals to potential movie goers, and do it in a more limited time span.
Sure you could copy either example, but there is a world of difference between being able to copy something accuratly, and being able to create an original work on your own.
You could go ahead with your video editing skills to make either an anime music video or a movie trailer and come up with something that was technically just fine. However unless you've got both skill _and_ practice, what you come up with would most likely be crap as far as evoking the proper emotions goes.
Put two flopies together, and slide the cover things open so you can look through both disks at once. It reduces the sun to a dusky red color, but they shape is still really clear.
How hard is it to find out where a Harvard professor lives? But I could make a lot of money selling _that_ address!
He then latter comes out against knowledge based systems, saying that if both projects started at the same time that he could get results sooner with a system like A.L.I.C.E.
Although the two cases aren't completly analagous, I'm not entirely sure why we should view his assertion that a database that can parrot back preprogramed answers without any real analysis behind it is a "valid" shortcut, but then turn around and accept his views that the shortcuts that other projects are taking aren't valid.
I agree completely. It's as if you could somehow issolate the lanaguage center of the human brain and ask it questions while it was cut off from everything else, and then declare that humans are unintelligent because the part that handles translating thought into words and back again can't think on it's own.